A/N: Alright! So I hate how cringey Harry got last chapter. I am going to elaborate that this is NOT going to be some happy go lucky everyone-gets-a-happy-ending-and-dances-off-into-the-sunset kind of story. There are going to be tears and blood, so for those of you who are afraid im trying to put Undertaker into some sort of rom-com situation: No. Fear not, dear readers, that is not what this is going to be. HOWEVER, this chapter is going to be relationship building so take the light chapter for what it is because the dark and tragic stuff is going to be beginning just around the corner.
Disclaimer: As always, I own nothing.
Chapter Three: The Lies We Told So We Could Sleep
I couldn't in good conscience allow a man that badly injured to go back out to die in the street. Especially when I knew he would refuse to go to hospital. So the Undertaker took up residence in my flat for a time.
One day turned into a week. Slowly, we began to forge a sort of connection. He never lost his chilly, dark demeanor. No, I came to realize that that was just his personality. But inch by brutal inch, his eyes began to lose the lethal distrust each time they alighted on me.
"So why 'Undertaker'?" I queried one day over breakfast.
He was a strange sight, sitting at my tiny kitchen table, eating a plate of marmite on toast. Any moment now, I expected the man to take a bit out of the actual plate. What the devil did they feed him across the pond to make him the size of a bloody elephant? Watching him devour a third helping of toast and a bowl of Shreddies, I was betting they fed him a small farm. Definitely a farm.
Undertaker paused in his perusal of the paper's entertainment section, seeming to think about my odd question. I suppose it must be strange to ask why you carried the name you did. Was 'Undertaker' even his real name? Unsurprisingly, I had yet to muster the courage to ask.
"We are given names fitting to our purpose in these realms. I was named for my unique purpose as all things are." Was what he said finally.
He was named The Undertaker because that was his purpose? So...his purpose was to care for the dead? To bury or cremate bodies? Come to think of it, I realized how little I actually knew about what an undertaker did.
The smell of wet dirt and burning bodies.
Rain on my face. Smoke in the air as we tried to dispose of the countless dead quickly. Before they could rise and be used as weapons against us...
No. I shoved the memories back, back into the box they belonged in.
Goddess, I needed serious professional help. Who could I go to though? I couldn't exactly go to any old muggle therapist and the Wizarding World's mind healers, well...That just wasn't an option anymore.
Realizing that my scattered mind had gone off topic, my brain had to reprocess Undertaker's response. Suddenly realizing what he had said, I snorted into my cereal and milk, having to grab for my napkin to avoid a rather embarrassing spill.
The man across the table- Merlin, the man was the size of the table- tightened his massive hands into deadly fists, cerulean eyes darkening with defensive anger. He thought I was mocking him. I waved off his anger, mopping up the milk on my mouth.
"I'm not taking the mickey, Undertaker. I was just having a go at myself really. After all, what kind of purpose does a stupid name like 'Harry' give me?" The words were chuckled out but inside, the cage in my mind rattled ominously, threatening to leak blood and whispers all over me.
Undertaker's gaze had eased but he watched me still, an almost knowing glint in his eyes.
"I don't know. What kind of purpose does a wizard named Harry Potter have?" He asked at last, lightly closing the day's paper as if his words had been as meaningless as a dust mote to a mountain.
All humor bled out of my spirit like water down a drain. My fingers spasmed around my spoon. In the metal reflecting back at me, I caught a distorted glimpse of the scar on my forehead. One of many that now littered my skin, unseen beneath long sleeves and trousers.
"What happens…" The words were breathed out, barely having any life to them. Lifeless as the eyes that followed my steps outside of my warded home, my only safe haven in the world. "-when we no longer have a purpose? When our purpose is finished?"
What was I supposed to do now? Where was I meant to go from here? Was I just another forgotten soldier, an obsolete relic from a war since past? What did one do when you lived, breathed, and were raised for war, only for that war to end? The rest of the world moved on without me and I had been left behind. Trapped in a static state, isolated and alone.
Undertaker leaned forward ever so slightly, just enough to draw my eyes into the unfathomable depths of his own. There was a deep understanding etched in the look he gave me. One that left a sort of fondness behind that I couldn't shake. A magnetism.
"I think that is when our purpose is really just beginning."
Goddess.
A week turned into a month. The flowers in the window box below began to bloom.
Undertaker was doing a sort of impromptu workout with whatever he could find on hand, everything from my sofa to the shower curtain rod with two buckets hanging on either side. The buckets had been filled with anything and everything my apartment boasted with any sort of weight to it, including the man's enormous boots. Watching him do some sort of squatting exercise from my connected kitchenette had proven to be...distracting.
Sweat glistened on his back and up the sides of his neck. Hair plastered to the side of his face. He looked like some sort of death demon sex god come to life.
Even though my living room had started smelling perpetually like a gym, I couldn't help but find that the view more than made up for it. My proper pancakes however? They were a little worse for wear because of that same view.
The man that had become the center of my attention wiped the beading moisture from his face and threw the plain blue towel onto my small couch that had become his bed these past weeks. His blue eyes caught my gaze and a bolt of what I could only understand as amusement passed through the cerulean orbs.
"The food is burning." The tone in his voice could have meant so many things. English words just no longer made it through the daze I seemed to fall into every time I caught myself staring at him.
"What?" I breathed, unable to register anything except the slowly approaching pillar of rippling muscle.
Undertaker stepped close, close enough that we were nigh on chest to chest. A large hand surrounded mine, warm and strong, lifting my hand and the spatula held loosely, forgotten, within.
"The food, Harry. It's...burning."
Holy hell, could he make anything sound like it vibrated my very bones? My stuttering brain finally caught on and my attention turned back to the flat baking griddle just in time to see the man reach past me and flip the now dark and unappealing pancake onto its back.
Bugger all. Another perfectly proper pancake ruined. That made three now…
Sighing, I passed him a plate of unburned lunch and the lemon marmalade. I would give him one thing. Undertaker was taking to proper English food like a phoenix to the air. As if it had never happened, my companion eased away with only a breath of air. The only indication that it hadn't all been a dream was the feeling of his cool power peeling reticently from my skin like the adhesive of a child's plaster.
Undertaker sat at my tiny flat's kitchen nook table looking awkward and brilliantly out of place. Why had he not tried to contact anyone for help or aid in the time he had been here? There was a cellular that I'd seen in his overlarge duster but after a month it hadn't a charge. But why not in the beginning? When he had initially been hurt? Did he have no one? No one to call on when he needed them?
It took me a few days to muster up that old Gryffindor courage to ask.
Gryffindor. The very word sat heavily on my heart. I was so far removed from that life and that time that I could have been a different creature entirely. I didn't know if I was even still human, let alone the old Harry Potter that once had walked Hogwarts halls in childish ignorance.
"So…Do you have anyone waiting on you to come back?" He looked up at me curiously, his eyes blanking of any other decipherable emotion. Maybe he thought that I was beginning to think of him as a burden. Despite his hippogriffs appetite, he was certainly no hardship. In fact, he made me feel...human again.
"Not that I'm not glad to have you here. Goddess knows, you're a better conversationalist than the dogs. But don't you have someone worrying about you? No family or...Or anything?"
He chewed a bite of marmalade covered pancake, almost thoughtfully. While I awaited his answer, the coffee pot called me over with the smell of sweet dark brazilian brew.
"I have a brother. Kane." A brother, eh? What did someone related to a man like the Undertaker look like? Smiling, blonde and 5'3? The very image was enough to make me have to hide a smile behind my cup. "He was my enemy though when last we saw each other. He was severely burned in a childhood fire that I started and he's only recently begun to get past it." A childhood fire? I could only picture young boys playing with camp fires or fire crackers. Somehow, the unsettling doubt that prodded me in my stomach doubted that it was truly anything so innocent though.
"Wow." I breathed out lightly over my black coffee, coming to sit back at the table across from Undertaker, "I blew up my aunt like a balloon once. Oh, and my cousin ended up with a literal pigs tail attached to his arse. That one wasn't me specifically but I still feel kind of responsible for it."
The look of sudden surprise on his face was enough to shock me into a full peal of warm laughter, my earlier uncertainty forgotten.
"So no on the family waiting around. No friends?" He gave me a frown as if suddenly questioning my intelligence, "Okay, no. Girlfriend? Boyfriend?"
He gave a derisive grunt, dismissing the query entirely in favor of the flat, lemon-covered heaven on his plate.
"The people in the organization are normally too terrified to be in my presence longer than strictly required, let alone comfortable enough to find me sexually attractive."
"That's the dog's, mate. People were like that with me too, back...well, back where I came from." Understatement of the century, yeah? If they weren't swooning with hero worship, they were forcing me to win their battles or claiming me the next dark lord.
"As for those nutters at your bonkers organization, well...I do. Find you attractive. I mean…anyone with half a brain and a pair of eyes would have to." Gryffindor courage? More like Gryffindor stupidity. What was I thinking saying something so rat-arsed stupid?
"I noticed. It's a little hard not to when you keep getting distracted, Harry." My companion chuffed, already eyeing the coffee by the cupboard himself.
Oh Merlin, he was right. How humiliating. Undertaker was sure to leave now and I'd be left to the silence again. Silence and the sound of blood in my ears. Blood, red and sticky and stinking of copper-
"But...If you promise to stop burning the food, I can be alright with that."
My breath stuttered in my throat to the unfortunate detriment of my lungs. I choked on the scalding coffee, much to the silent amusement of my newly found compatriot.
One month became three and then four.
It wasn't until this fourth month that I saw the powers of the Undertaker for the very first time.
Oh, there had been hints. Whispers. Always the whispers…
The dead seemed to press close to him, crave the magic that flowed around him. He was like a black hole that dragged on their spirits, a silent stalking thing that trailed through the night.
There had been clues too. Things that I could never be sure of. Lights dimming and dying in the sitting room even though I knew him to be six feet away on the sofa. The way his eyes would sometimes gloss over, taking on a white and milky sheen and he would seem to be listening to something only he could hear.
The second time I noticed this was when he began to obsessively watch that barbaric wrestling program on the telly. 'Watching out for anyone who may call me out. Studying the enemy,' He had said. 'Preparing for my return.' His eyes had gained that glassy, almost reflective quality then and a small frown would appear on his oh-so-kissable mouth as if he had gotten some unfortunate news.
But in the fourth month, a sweaty June evening, I saw these powers in truth.
The windows were open all across the flat, begging for a breeze, and outside the crickets were chirping. We sat in the midst of an unseasonal heatwave and I had stripped down to a pair of shorts and an undershirt. Occasionally throwing a glare at a the bloodless visage of Adrian Pucey who stared out at me from the reflective window pane, I worked at scrubbing out my cauldron after a rather disastrous potion mishap.
When had Pucey's mauled, bloody mess of a throat stopped making my throat clench? When had I stopped being bothered by the sight of his grisly demise? He had been a victim of a werewolf's rabid lust for blood when killing light siders had stopped satisfying his thirst for carnage. Mid-battle, Greyback's pack had stopped caring who was friend or foe. Voldemort had learned that releasing flesh hungry werewolves into battle on the full moon was never a good idea. Pucey had been a Death Eater. Greyback hadn't cared. The monster had eaten a quarter of his fellow Death Eater before a well aimed cutting curse had ended the alpha's reign for good.
The sight of the ripped open throat had once sickened me. When had it stopped?
I knew. It was really quite obvious, when you looked at it.
I heard the Undertaker stand from what had come to be his preferred spot on the couch, the springs groaning in relief of their burden.
He had changed things. Undertaker made me feel...secure. Safe. It was foolish, I knew. It wasn't as if he were going to stay, after all. At some point, probably soon, he would go back to the States and I would return to my silent existence with only my dogs for companionship. The idea unsettled me more than I was comfortable with.
I was scrubbing furiously at the ruddy cauldron, trying desperately to purge my mind of the treacherous feeling. Pucey stared on, unimpressed. The whispers of his spirit grated on my nerves with a renewed vexation. The heat was getting to me.
Why did the whispers seem more heightened than usual? Was it the heat?
Goddess, what I wouldn't give for just a breeze…
Just then, I felt it. A stirring.
Suddenly, the room went from feeling like an oven to a freezer. There was a strange sensation in the center of my being. A tugging like a gentle magnetism. It pulled on my magic and the power of the Hallows answered in kind.
A wave of curling darkness reached out from the sitting room, teasing and wrapping around my own.
From his place in the sitting room, I could feel him reaching out. Not to me necessarily but nonetheless, the effect was all encompassing. I was caught in that inescapable black hole, being drawn in more and more…
In more ways than one.
Slowly, my feet began to move of their own accord. Step by step that power drew me closer to its master and when at last I came to the open doorway between the living room and kitchen, he was there. In the center of the room where he had slept and read books on my sofa, seeming so familiar a part of my life now, Undertaker stood in the center of a cold maelstrom of magic.
He was...frightening. Marvelous. Terrifying and captivating all at once.
Eyes had turned completely white, any color that had been leached away. Any hues that had once been in his hair were smothered out by shadow until it looked as if he were in black and white greyscale. His large hand was outstretched and facing downward as if he would command the dead to rise up from the floor right there. A swirling vortex of power curled and snaked around his large form. The lights dimmed and died until the only light came from the vortex itself, a sickly pale, purplish hue that illuminated little and cast what it did in an eerie glow.
Rising from the floor at his command was a shadow. A slithering thing that took on form before my very eyes. Two small clawed hands like some sort of large bird of prey's jutted out without warning from the shade, grabbing hold of the edge of the Undertaker's boots in supplication.
I near jumped out of my bleeding skin. Slapping a hand over my mouth was the only way to keep myself from crying out in alarm.
Quickly, as if the darkness were melting down around the creature, a black almost feline body emerged. It was pure sable with an arching back like an enraged cat if a cat could be the size of a labrador. Multifaceted eyes glittered, gemstones watching out in the ochre as it bowed before its...creator? Master? Summoner? What was this thing anyways?
"Go, Gelkinda. You know what I wish of you." The man commanded, his bass of a voice rumbling with an earthquake pitch across the room, sending vibration through my body and black magic rolling with a near sensuality down my spine.
Gods, what would that voice be like moaning in delight?
Merlin, did I really need to get out more. This could not be healthy.
The thing, Gelkinda?, released a grating, chittering screech and without warning, dove into the nearest shadow, disappearing into it like a doorway. Undertaker gave a tug on his power, inhaling it back into himself like a drag on a cigarette, dark blackness invading the lungs and settling there with an almost pleasurable burn. His eyes began to lose their eerie paleness and his pupils reemerged to focus in on me with a heavy intent.
They were guarded, chastening, daring.
He was looking for rebuke, for disgust and suspicion.
Instead, he only got-
"How do you feel about Chinese? I could go for a spot of supper."
After all, I had seen far more frightening things in my life than one minor shade summoning.