...Immortal to Boot (Part 1 of 2)
This chapter is actually over 10k long, but I've split it in two for posting so you guys don't have to wait so long. I'll hopefully have the other half edited and posted tomorrow (which includes Fury and Loki)!
MABalas
Posted: 08/17/2017
Chapter: 4-A/7
It took Harry a little over a year after he accepted the Hallows to catch on to the extent of Death's changes.
The physical changes had been easy. The others...not so much.
After Harry woke up and managed to move his aching body-after they killed Voldemort once and for all and Harry walked through the cursed, dying, and dead with healers too magically exhausted to help-he had the chance to take stock of his own injuries.
He found the tribal tattoos in the skin over his heart and on the inside of each forearm from just below his elbow to mid-arm. The lines were thick and unnaturally dark against his skin, red and angry as if they had been tattooed only hours ago. They depicted an upright triangle with a circle inside, divided in half by a straight line. The Hallows.
It wasn't until a week later that Hermione sat Harry down in the Burrow, alone in Ron's old room. Hermione wanted to sleep there as a way to say goodbye after a somber day mourning for their lost ones.
Ron, Remus, and others were remembered in words and silence, tears and pain as they stayed together in the Weasley's home. All of them were too exhausted trying to outrun the memories to face empty flats or homes all alone.
Hermione transfigured a hand mirror for Harry from a nearby hairbrush. Harry honestly couldn't remember the last time he cared to look at the exhaustion carved into his face even through the glamour, but Hermione insisted.
Death had mentioned a trade in their deal. Like for like. Harry's scar, the bloody damned lightning bolt that had defined his life, was next to gone. It was no longer the angry red of a recent wound-a definition of his future. It was so pale it was barely discernible on his skin. It was truly something in his past; a visual reminder his task was done.
The raw, red wound on his chest where the second Avada Kedavra hit had been covered by Death's Hallow tattoo over his heart. Two lives for two Hallows.
Neither Harry or Hermione, the only person who knew enough about his Gift, magic, and death to try to make any sense of it all, could figure out what had been traded for the third Hallow.
Harry knew instinctively something had been given.
The three tattoos ached like brands beneath his long sleeved shirt. There was always an equal price to pay-in magic, in life, and with Death.
More changes came after the tattoos had healed-shackles Harry only shared with Hermione.
Neville didn't need another item to worry about as he finished Hogwarts and managed a lordship.
The twins were mourning their brother and swamped with people looking for jokes and happiness after the war, not to mention the fact he couldn't risk being physically near them.
Luna was busy finishing Hogwarts as well as traveling the world. She did look oddly at Harry at times, as if she could see through the cotton of his shirt to the markings beneath.
Maybe she could. You never knew what Luna saw.
Harry's already pale skin grew paler and the deep, sleepless bags he'd always had grew more pronounced.
He was hardly ever hungry-he barely ate, in fact. He lost what little fat he carried. He impossibly put on lean muscle over the months, throwing his strength out of proportion to his frame. Harry had to carefully relearn how to pick up glasses and mugs without shattering them or ripping doors off the hinges when he opened them.
It was all disconcerting, not to mention unprecedented. Hermione was at a loss for how the physical changes were possible. Harry's body was operating at an efficiency far beyond human level and only becoming more efficient as the weeks went on.
Harry didn't gain much height throughout the process, maybe only an inch or two in an oddly delayed and prolonged growth spurt throughout the year.
His arms and legs grew and lengthened into something not quite human, too long for his height with wrists and knees and elbows and fingers too bony to look natural. Harry stopped looking once he adjusted to the new proportions and stopped knocking glasses and mugs over his table or desk every time he reached for them.
His nails grew and became inhumanly hard and sharp. The last Harry let Hermione test them he could gouge long lines into stone. He didn't want to know how much more damage he could do now.
His hair grew longer and thicker, moving with a life of its own and darkening to a deeper black that absorbed the light around him much as the tattoos in his skin seemed to do. He aged while maintaining his youth; no longer a teenager but not an adult, something androgynous and ageless.
He became something different from Harry James Potter and much more like the embodiment of Death.
Harry took to casting a glamour in the morning before he left for work and releasing it when he came back to his flat at night. Some nights he couldn't bear to stare at the thing he had become and he would raise the glamour again. Those nights came more often than not until the glamour became a permanent fixture in his life.
It was almost too easy to hold the glamour while sleeping and waking until it was as autonomous as breathing.
His magic, always straining at its leash, came too happily to his call after the Hallows fused with him. The glamour was no known spell, it wasn't a transfiguration or potion; it was intent brought to life in the way Harry had always used intent. Harry wished to blend in and appear human so his magic wrapped him in his human appearance.
It was only an appearance; Harry had the sinking feeling the changes were more than skin deep.
He wasn't human anymore.
His eyes were the last to change. As he watched the vibrant green, his mother's eyes, bleed away to black, Harry had to accept there was no going back. He made his choice the day he died, and this was the price he paid.
The black bled and broke and shattered then flecked and faded into red. The white disappeared completely.
Harry stared at a stranger in the mirror every day. The stranger stared back with black diamond and spilt-blood eyes.
Death's eyes.
He could no longer see colors, could no longer see the subtle shades and intricacies of life. It was an insidious bleeding, all of the colors drained away until the network of auras became a gray monotone he had to learn to navigate all over again.
When the last of the color was gone he knew he wasn't Harry anymore.
In that same year after the war Harry was the posterboy for the British Ministry. A puppet they paraded out for the political song and dance.
Harry made public appearances. He danced pureblooded biddies and their spawn around at fundraising balls and listened to the Ministry tout his name as he hid his physical changes day after day. He offered speeches. He filled out paperwork and made the rounds encouraging the masses to take heart after all of the losses. Seeing him around the Ministry and in his office there was enough for most of the British Wizarding world.
Harry would say he hated it all, but hate would require some level of care. Harry ghosted through all the right actions and words with apathy during the day and stared hopelessly at a monster in the mirror at night.
After his short six months of Auror field work, after the Death Eater trials, Harry didn't care about much at all.
The trials were a joke. Once again too many Death Eaters went free because of the corruption and blood politics. The loss of hundreds if not thousands of Muggle and Wizarding lives had been for nothing.
Harry had forced his way into being a field Auror when he couldn't stand the politics anymore, when he couldn't watch guilty people set free to start the cycle again, when he couldn't look at himself in the mirror without the glamour anymore.
The Ministry tried to stop him. Shacklebolt learned quickly Harry was no longer the Order's tool. When they couldn't change his mind or force his hand they decided to hide Harry behind the ranks so that their precious savior couldn't be hurt.
At least, they tried.
Every report from the field stated Harry's increasingly reckless actions on routine missions. The reports grew more and more far-fetched even for the wizarding world, to the point that Shacklebolt took to having pensieves handy in his office for the actual memories of the events.
If anything, most of the reports were under-hyped according to his usual rants at Harry afterwards.
Apparently the Ministry wanted their savior alive and well to exploit. Harry's cavalier actions were frowned upon by Shacklebolt and the Wizangamot as unhealthy and dangerous.
It wasn't enough that Harry had already given his childhood and his life for them; they wanted their political doll as well.
Everyone in the Ministry learned to either fear Harry, avoid him, or try to use him for their own gains-or all of the above.
They all agreed Harry was on par with Dumbledore's magical strength, maybe stronger. They feared his power as much as they glorified it. Hermione took to monitoring Harry with the tools afforded to her as a full-fledged Unspeakable. She didn't tell anyone Harry was much stronger than Dumbledore or Voldemort. He didn't even register on the machines and only Harry and Hermione knew why.
Harry caved to his Auror retirement after a raid on a group of magical beast traffickers went awry. It left Harry bonded permanently to a baby occamy of all things.
It was a familiar bond in the most historical sense of the word and Harry wouldn't risk her being hurt in the field when they couldn't be more than a few feet apart right now. Hermione theorized the distance would lengthen as the bond settled.
Harry despised the connotations of the bond as much as he had come to love the feathery little fiend, even if some days it hurt too much when she used a particular chirp or tilt of her head or affectionate nip on his fingers.
Hermione had a theory on the shield he used to block the spell getting twisted with his Gift from the emotional environment. It turned the esoteric curse (poorly cast no less-they had been dabbling in Ancient Egyptian magical tome trafficking as well) into a familiar bond instead. The most receptive animal happened to be the magical, newly hatched occamy.
Harry named her Ajah.
It was after the assassination attempt, walking home from the Ministry in a depressive fit, that Harry learned the trade off for the third of Death's Hallows.
The spell blazed silently out of the darkness of an alley next to the dark street. He was too lost in thought, idly scratching Ajah under the chin where she had taken to curling around his neck, to have actively been tracking his surroundings.
Mad Eye's voice rang mockingly in his head of constant vigilance. Harry almost wanted to laugh. That kind of vigilance meant you cared to keep living.
It was too many years of battle honed instinct that made him duck and roll to avoid the blast, pressing a hand hard against Ajah to keep her from flying down the sidewalk at the sudden movement. It wasn't fast enough. He caught the edge of the curse with a hoarse shout.
His shirt and side were ripped open. Blood spattered the street in a spray as pain lit up his stomach and chest.
Ajah swarmed up to curl protectively over his neck and head as if she could possibly fend off an attacker at only a month old.
It wasn't Harry's choice to have his magic spark and spin in a visibly angry arc at his attacker. There was a darker edge to the glow of it, black tinging the gold as it swirled harmlessly over Ajah and into the alley.
Intent.
Harry felt whoever's soul it was blink out of existence. Dead instantly at his magic's touch.
His magic returned and hovered protectively over his body in a show of possessive gold sparks as it curled over the wound and through Ajah's growing feathers.
Harry laid there in his own pooling blood on the dirty street staring at the beauty of something that could be so deadly and the worried amber eyes of a tiny creature he considered his closest companion now.
He was losing too much blood, too fast. He was deliriously sentimental.
The night sky and golden glow began to blur together.
He wasn't sure how many minutes he laid there before his side started to burn again, this time from the inside out. He hissed and pressed a hand to the wound, expecting to feel flesh and organs spilling out. It should have cut deep into his abdomen. He knew it had.
But it wasn't. It moved unnaturally under his hand, alternately icy cold and lukewarm as it jerked and shifted under his hand.
He bit out a curse as he forced himself to sit up and look down at his side. Ajah chirped and scurried into his lap to watch.
He had enough time to see the red layers of muscle knit closed by what looked like living shadow. It darted to and fro inside his body closing the wound. Death's living shadow-or Harry's own version of it.
The skin followed right after the muscle until there was only the faintest scar left of the wound that had opened him from navel to ribs diagonally up his side.
The three Deathly Hallows tattoos seemed suddenly heavy on his chest and arms.
His soul for the horcrux. His hands in service for his new body and health.
The Hallows for his humanity.
He stood in a daze. He cast a quick cleanup on the thick pool of tacky blood with a wave of his hand. He banished the would-be (successful?) assassin's body to ash. A flick of his finger's had it blowing away in the evening breeze. He didn't bother trying to identify who it may have been. It didn't really matter, after all.
It was too easy to see now.
The Elder wand was a part of his magical core; it had changed something intrinsic, opened a link to Death Harry was barely dipping a finger into.
He knew without looking the exact moment the assassin's life ended; he knew the soul was gone from one breath to the next. It was second nature thanks to the Stone that had been absorbed.
The cloak was more difficult even though it had been the first to reveal itself. Harry realized the glamour he wore like a second skin was the cloak at work-the power and knowledge of Death wrapped in the trappings of humanity.
The truth scared Harry more than anything else.
He never told anyone what happened that night. He pulled away from his friends. He isolated himself from any further political machinations. He excised himself from the Ministry and became a recluse in his office. He came to work to have a presence because that was all he was: an empty figurehead. They only needed to see him walk through the front door in the morning and out again at night.
Harry understood the cost of the power he had been given. He understood his infamously short temper he had mostly learned to manage would be far more dangerous than he had ever dreamed. He was, for all intents and purposes, Death. Or a vassal of Death. Or some strange experiment Death saw fit to create.
Harry wouldn't endanger anyone else.
Hermione wondered and worried. Harry thought she might have an idea of what had happened if her soft questions and sad patience were any indicator. Hermione had given him everything he had needed after he woke a second time from the killing curse. After he became the people's Savior.
She knew the price he had paid, first his life and then his humanity. Hermione was the only one he had trusted to know about the Hallows and Death. Hermione was the only one who had an idea of what was happening to Harry, and even she didn't understand it all.
Harry gently turned her away each time and eventually Hermione stopped pushing. She didn't give up, because it wasn't in her to quit. But she stepped back to let him think.
She wouldn't stop caring; that wasn't Hermione's way. She gave Harry the space he needed and he loved her all the more for it.
Luna popped in and out of the Ministry as she pleased. Harry thought she might be an Unspeakable of some caliber but he had no idea what her specialty might be.
It was a good arrangement for him, though. He got to see his friend, someone who had quite literally saved his sanity before he even knew it needed to be saved. He would always owe Luna for her wisdom, odd as it might have been, over the breakfast table that morning years ago.
Luna seemed to always find him in the Ministry no matter where he chose to hole up that day. He had no idea how. He usually had enough wards and charms on his chosen hiding spot to turn away and fool even top Aurors and Hit Wizards.
Luna would pause outside them, observing for a minute or two, before knocking politely to be let in. Harry always obliged her.
She told him every time she found him that he had to wait a little longer. Just a little longer and then it would be time to start.
"It'll be soon, Harry," she would always say before she left. "You've waited so long."
Harry had no idea what he was supposed to be waiting for.
Fred and George sent him a bi-weekly shipment of all of their newest inventions as well as Harry's favorite sweets.
They did not visit. It wasn't even because of the booming business after the war, although they were making galleons hand over fist.
Too many days Harry would find himself hovering in his living room, the urge to apparate straight to them almost too strong.
Too many days he had to pull himself back from that edge.
He wouldn't permanently bond the only Sentinels who had ever respected him to the monster he had become.
Fred and George knew what Harry had done in that moment of weakness before he faced Voldemort in the Forbidden Forest. They knew the cost when Harry had taken them all into his shields. It had only meant a fleeting sense of comfort to Hermione, Luna, and Neville with no Gift of their own to connect.
It was much more than that for Fred and George.
They were Gifted in their way, like Harry but not. A single Gifted soul split in two, a mirror image that made a whole, each with their own magical core to match the Gift.
They were the only two Sentinels Harry had ever met in his life that soothed both his Gift and magic. It was why every other Sentinel sent his Gift into a frenzy-Harry needed the magic as much as the Gift to be compatible. The problem was Fred and George were too compatible. They were Platonic Bond matches, a non-romantic life partner for Harry's Run.
If Harry was ever physically near Fred and George again after he had already opened his shields to them the full bond would snap into place without anyone's direct input or a by your leave.
Harry thought the Gift was odd. He had fought off much stronger Sentinels his entire life. Fred and George had too weak of a Gift to ever be able to force a bond with Harry. Harry had always been drawn to them, but he would have never known their complete compatibility without first opening his shields willingly to them to form the Initiate Bond.
They would be the first of Harry's Run if he let them; it would be psychically and physically damaging to remove the psychic anchor they had now. It had been too long and they fit too well with Harry's Gift.
The bond had weakened substantially when he died, of course, but as he didn't stay dead and Fred and George were never physically near-either when he created the Bond or afterwards-it stayed active but tenuous enough that they were not really his Run but had a foothold in his mind. Another anomaly in his Gift.
Maybe the ICG had it right by Classing the Gifted and only allowing same-Classed Runs in their service. If every Gifted created an Initiate Bond on instinct as Harry had done with Fred and George there would be no way to keep the gene pool active enough to prevent the Gift from dying out completely. The Gifted were already less than 5% of the worldwide population. A Guide would only ever feel comfortable settling down for a family with the Sentinels in their Run.
Harry didn't see the twins as anything but brothers, the same as he saw Hermione as a sister. Platonic Bonds were the most common full bond in Runs anyway. Non-Gifted didn't always understand due to the tactile nature of the bond for most.
Fred and George wouldn't trap Harry even in a Platonic Bond, though. They knew what it was for people to force you to be someone you weren't, to try to make you fit their mold by taking choices out of your hands or forcing you to give more than you were comfortable giving.
So they sent practical jokes and candies and stories of their latest invention mishaps with the unspoken invitation that Harry could always come to them if he was ever ready to do so.
They had always been his favorite Weasleys.
Tonks and Andromeda brought Teddy to visit Harry at home whenever they could. It brightened all of their days after Remus' loss.
The little boy was a joy, and Harry was honored to be called his godfather. He never turned them away from his home, but neither did Harry ever offer to meet them at Andromeda's home where they had moved in with Teddy's grandmother. It was a careful balance all of them acknowledged and never pushed too far.
Tonks was an animagus. She was a master of disguise, subterfuge, and trickery. She had taken hiding in plain sight as a personal challenge in life.
She couldn't miss the heavy, unnatural glamor Harry wore over his form. Not another animagus, not a transfiguration or potion or charm.
The glamour grew thicker and more potent every day.
Neville kept up with Harry by regular owl as he traveled remote regions of the world looking for rare and unknown plant species after graduating Hogwarts. Apparently he and Luna were hitting it off strong, meeting up every few weeks in far off places.
That would at least explain Luna's odd schedule for her visits to the Ministry.
Harry was happy for them. They deserved every moment of life they could get.
Harry's existence was good, for the most part. Routine. Safe.
Harry was losing his mind, and that wasn't an exaggeration.
The potion Dumbledore mentioned during his death had indeed been perfected by Snape. Hermione was working to authorize it for mainstream healers with Harry as the main test subject. It stabilized the magical core, suppressing the Gift, until the child was old enough to build shields of their own around the normal Gifted age of 7 years. It wasn't perfect, that only gave the child more time to find another Gifted to permanently bond with, but it was better than a 100% mortality rate.
The problem for Harry was his age. The potion was losing its potency. It had been meant for children still growing into their core and Gift, not an adult wizard already stabilized in both.
The potion came too late for Harry.
That was why his Gift had spiked that day, in the battle that left him bonded with Ajah. Lack of sleep, weakening potion, and the high-stress environment.
Ever the freak, Harry's Gift was stronger than anyone would have ever thought possible in a magical being. Granted, there was very little research into the topic, but what Harry and Hermione had found was enough.
Harry's magic was equally as strong as the Gift. If the Gift was Harry's mind then his magic was his heart. Both sought to rule his body.
The result was akin to World War 3, invisible to everyone but Harry himself. He was a nuke waiting to land and he didn't have a choice in the target.
This was worse than the nightmares and migraines that had left him an angry, brooding insomniac for most of his teenage years. This war left him curled up in bed or on his couch or splayed on his floor more times than he cared to think about, always clutching his head as if he could physically block out the psychic backlash of his magic and Gift. He tried to physically block out the wash of psychic emotion from thousands of people in the city as his shields rose and fell in his warded flat.
His magic had been growing exponentially since he absorbed the Hallows. There was a vortex in his magical core where the Elder wand lived, a direct link to Death's power. It grew, fusing insidiously with Harry's own magical core. He couldn't separate one from the other. His naturally gold magic was tainted purple-black with the edges of Death, and Harry had no idea how far it would go.
He spent more and more evenings secluded in meditation, fighting a losing battle to shore up his Guide shields and unravel Death's claim on his core.
He finally tried apparating to a remote corner of the earth to get away from it all.
He encountered the unexpected and obviously undocumented side effects of being a magical Guide.
The lack of human contact was worse than too much. When his Gift wasn't instinctively pulling in Sentinels and parsing them for compatibility, checking for a full bond match that would never exist outside the Platonic Bond he had with Fred and George, it left the Gift to focus everything on pushing out Harry's magic. Magic that was innate to Harry and flavored by Death.
Harry was barely able to disapparate back to Hermione's flat, shattering her wards and alerting her to the emergency, before he went into a magical coma.
He died shortly after, though he only remembered tumbling face down into her leather couch.
Death was there. Her living-shadow body was writhing around her. There was no female form this time, only the writhing mass of angry darkness, flashes of decayed flesh, teeth, and claws eerily similar to Harry's own.
It reminded Harry of an enraged predator.
Harry absently noted he could already feel the pull back to the living as he stared down the entity.
Death didn't bother mincing words.
"A broken mind of whispered things and lost thought dreams is better than the broken core and Death displeased when Master his own life ends for ease."
Harry couldn't even protest as he was sucked back to a pounding head and aching chest. He made a move to sit up and was shoved back into the couch cushions by a head of curly hair.
Harry had to calm down a red-faced, tear-stained Hermione after that. Her chest crushing hug and angry rant was a small price to pay.
All Harry could think to say at the time was, "Sorry. I think I'm immortal. Death keeps calling me Master."
Hermione choked on a snot-filled laugh. She wasn't a pretty crier.
"Only you, Harry."
Eventually Hermione calmed down enough to focus on the facts as she told him Ajah went into an odd stasis during the time Harry was gone. She couldn't bring herself to say dead, and Harry understood.
While Ajah was in the stasis Hermione hadn't been able to touch the occamy where she was curled on Harry's chest. There had been some sort of magical shield protecting her. Ajah woke shortly after Harry, as if nothing had happened.
Hermione started expounding on the theories and possibilities of a soul anchor if Harry really couldn't die and Ajah was pulling on his magic for the stasis and the potential for the grounding points to keep a chunk of his magic tied to Ajah, and the...He lost track pretty quickly after that and simply nodded along as he cuddled Ajah on his lap and nursed a mug of hot tea Hermione had made them both.
Hermione covered up Harry's Lazarus act. They both knew it could be a disaster if anyone found out what Harry could do. There was enough dissatisfaction with his power and influence in the Ministry and the magical world in general as it was.
It would not go over well to find out he was immortal to boot.