The Master of Death
A/N: This story arc won't leave me alone. This is intended to be Tragedy/Humour and a series of one-shots like 'Adorable Violence'. I'm posting it as a one-shot, but if people like it enough, I will expand it. There's no point in writing stories if they are unpalatable and uninteresting to start with. This won't be Harmony or Harry/anyone for that matter during the course of the story. It does break He-Ron and Hinny apart (no potions and stuff), however, and is set in the cliché post-War times when Death comes to meet him. The-op-Who-scoused.
The war was over. Lord Voldemort, the one with the Horcruxes, had been destroyed. In the process, in a final confrontation that paled to the status of a damp squib as compared to all their previous face-offs, the victor, Harry Potter, had died, come back to life by what seemed to be a technical error on the soul level, and then had gone on to retrieve the Elder Wand as its rightful owner from the thief and Death Cheater.
Now in the possession of the Elder Wand, the Resurrection Stone and the True Cloak of Invisibility, Harry Potter had become the Master of Death.
The Master of Death was, on the fine – well, not so fine in retrospect, given the deaths and all that had occurred during the battle – morning, still out cold, catching up on some well deserved sleep that he had missed out on during the long, lonely months out in the middle of nowhere. For a victor of so big a war, and for a person who had recently ascended to a very important, mythical, and therefore completely ignored position, he was sleeping in a thoroughly undignified position as he drooled and dozed away.
Of course, he shouldn't have abandoned vigilance. He was fates', destiny's and death's (and of whatever other entity was at the moment interested) plaything. Harry Potter was shaken out of his slumber, quite literally, by his own shivers, as the cold which had frozen his drool started pervading everything.
Fearing he was about to be the victim of a stray Dementor, Harry grabbed the Elder Wand, which was lying close to his pillow and summoning his stock memories to mind, summoned the Patronus. The stag lit the dark room and then sat down obediently on the floor, doing nothing to the entity that looked like a Dementor, caused all the cold like a Dementor, but didn't feel like a Dementor. The figure was absently twirling the Resurrection Stone (hadn't he dropped it in the forest?) between its decidedly neat and un-scabbed, un-gnarled and un-rotting hands.
"So you are up," the figure said in absolute boredom.
"I am. I hope I can expect some explanation for the dramatics, and an introduction while you are at it?"
"You aren't scared that I might kill you?"
"Not particularly," replied Harry. "I've been there and done that."
"So you have, haven't you?" the figure mused, before it added in wry amusement, and with a mocking inflection, "Master."
"Ah...nice joke you are trying there, whoever you are. It's falling flat though."
"I would have said that you aren't the first to react that way...but I can't. You are my first Master, after all."
Harry opened his mouth to speak once, twice, thrice, before deciding he couldn't think of anything appropriate enough. So he resorted to closing his eyes and sighing. He stopped at once. That was a very Dumbledore-ish action, and at the moment he wasn't feeling charitable about the man.
"What is your objective here?" Bluntness saved time and got the matter across effectively.
"I am here to tell you about your duties."
"My duties," was the Saharan retort.
"Yes."
"Please go on."
"Thank you Master." The figure emerged from the darkness, and transformed into a human form. She walked towards Harry rather...seductively.
"Really?" remarked Harry. "Of all the women you could choose to impersonate, you choose Bellatrix Lestrange, someone I'd kill on sight?"
"My other option was Lavender," 'Death' remarked. "Or Tonks," she added. "They died in battle. I am sure you wouldn't care for either of those two calling you Master." 'Her' voice was like a whisper, assumed to ensnare Harry's senses.
"And I would prefer a Bellatrix impersonation treating me like she treated Voldemort? Stay away, damn it!" 'Death' had crept close to Harry and the Master was not amused.
"Alright!" retorted Death. "Be like that!" The form remained the same.
"Why do you have a female form?"
"The most capricious entities have always been treated as female."
There were definite signs of an impending headache. "Please tell me what I have to do..."
"...and be gone?" completed Death. "So be it. The Master of Death became a position when your ancestors tricked me. But I didn't let them get one over me completely. The Master of Death will be a person who shall straddle both realms. It was why you still lived after you came into mine. You will be the equivalent of a bidirectional Veil of Death."
"I am not letting Voldemort through!"
"You can choose, you idiot! I don't like him any more than you do!"
"And what happened to what the souls felt with the damn Stone?"
"They had no body! Honestly, can't you think?" It was said so bossily, that Harry was reminded of Hermione, instead of her torturer whose body Death had assumed. Hermione calling him 'Master'...and behaving as Death was...that was a pleasurable thought. He stamped down on it ruthlessly.
"I can't take her form. And wasn't she like a sister?" Death asked far too innocently for it to be true.
Harry chose not to dignify that with an answer. "So they will what, possess me?"
"Sort of," answered Death. "You will see them around you always, and will channel them around their near and dear ones. It is rather opportune. You can more than just console them. When they need it, and if you decide that the need is great enough, you can allow the soul of the person they need to meet to come to the fore."
Immediately images flew before Harry's eyes. Fred and George indulging in twin talk, Moony and Tonks being able to meet their son and Andromeda Tonks every so often, Colin Creevey meeting his family... It brought tears to his eyes.
"And what about those who have nobody but me on this side?" he demanded.
"I did say that you can straddle both sides, didn't I, you twit? You can crossover and not be really dead unless you wish to be either even when it may seem otherwise if you are killed or something."
"And do the people have to be strictly magical?"
"I don't discriminate upon those grounds."
For the first time since the battle, Harry smiled. This wasn't as bad as it seemed when Death spoke of duties. "I am ready."
"Are you?"
"Yes. These don't seem to be onerous duties."
"If you are sure..." Death transfigured the cloak, stone and wand into a locket, and it was fairly benign unlike the neckweight of Slytherin.
"Go on then, Master..."
Harry wore the necklace and was hard pressed to not gasp. The words, "Those who love us never truly leave us," became all the more clearer, and not just in a philosophical sense. For the Master of death it was visually as well, as he stood on the precipice between the two worlds.
Harry's outlook changed as he realised the extent to which things would now change for him. All around him, interspersed with the plane of the living, was the plane of the dead.
"Dumbledore truly didn't understand you, did he?" he asked his...slave.
"What did he ever understand, really?"
The two shared a silent snort.
And then there was one of those people he truly wanted to see. The man grinned at him and called him over. Harry smiled, but it was apologetic. He was very new to all this. His sense of duty was tingling. Yet just a few words wouldn't hurt, would they?
Harry approached the man. His feelings must have shown on his face, for the man asked a question: "Why so Sirius, Harry?"
The Master of Death groaned. Some people should have been kept where they were.
Early at breakfast the following morning, a very calm, almost happy Harry descended onto the Great Hall. Naturally he first gravitated towards the Weasleys and the Order which had gathered around in a group. They were keeping Fred's body wrapped. It was time for his duties. Harry Potter receded and Fred Weasley came to the fore. He uttered famous first words.
"Good heavens! Harry is too bloody short!"
That garnered some attention. George looked at him with a completely lot expression.
Fred/Harry chuckled. "'Lo Gred," he called out. "You look like shit."
George harrumphed as he responded automatically to the appellation. "You are shit, Forge."
"No Gred. You look like Holey Shit. Holey...get it?"
"Holey Shit..." George sat ramrod straight. "Fred?" he gasped.
"It seems so."
"Are you saying...?"
"...that I am currently possessing Harry?"Fred completed automatically. "Yes."
"This is a terrible joke..."
"...but not as bad as the Giants' Amortentia we developed three weeks ago..."
"How do you know...?" demanded George.
"As I said, it is me, Fred. I am not sure I understand it all that well."
At this point, Hermione, Ron and Ginny, as well as most of the Order that was sleeping on the tables woke up. Ginny was the first to react.
"Harry!" she squealed tearfully, and leapt onto him before kissing him passionately.
George froze for a second, as did Fred/Harry. Then the girl was pushed away rather forcibly as a truly terrorised expression took hold of the face that Fred was wearing.
"Yuck! Yuck! Yuck!" he hollered as he jumped about retching and turned decidedly green. Ginny was extremely offended, naturally. Everyone else was looking at him bewildered.
"I think, Harry, Forge, you might need to explain," George prompted to his recently un-dead twin and their silent business partner.
"It's about me becoming the Master of Death," Harry, who had come to the fore.
"Ginny kissed me," he said as he turned green and Fred came to the fore.
"I am always going to be something between dead and alive..."
"My little sister kissed me," Fred sobbed.
"And if I feel it necessary, I can channel people in the other place..."
"Ickle Gin-Gin tongue kissed me..." Fred bawled.
Ginny was not satisfied. "Is this a way to break up with me completely?" she asked testily. On one hand her brother wasn't as dead as it seemed. On the other he possessed the boy whom she had just kissed. Or so it seemed in both cases.
"No. But this is awkward..." Harry admitted.
"MY SISTER SNOGGED ME!"
George blasted Harry/Fred with an overenthusiastic 'Aguamenti' charm.