Persistent Illusion

Sable Xane

Rated M, please use good sense as I did this for a reason

Disclaimer: I do not recognize anything you may own. Wait a minute…

Warnings: Slash, het, sexual situations, slash, violence, yaoi/shonin ai, AU/AR situations, SLASH, adult themes, possibly infrequent updates, male on male relationships, vulgar language, anything else I happen to come up with, and SLASH!

You can't say you were not warned.

Summery: Harry Potter's death was the source for great grief amongst those who knew and loved him, but he wasn't quite as dead as they thought. Countless years later an archeological team uncover a crypt and make a most unusual discovery.

A/N: Thanks for the positive first reviews. It is nice to know that I haven't completely lost my touch. I don't like to leave prologues hanging very long, but please do not think that you will be getting daily updates. Even if I manage to update frequently, my life simply will not let that happen. As for the story cover, it is by the wonderful ShiroiChou. She does have a page here, but her story is inactive. You will find her artwork at deviantArt under that name as well.

Oh, and please for give the OC's that the beginning of this chapter, they were a necessary Evil.

Chapter 01

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
-John Lennon

23rd September, εуλ 1959

Doctor Erik Etgar sat at his desk, grumbling about his favorite subject. Faremis Gast was his rival in just about every way imaginable. Erik thought it was monumentally unfair that Gast had so much handed to him. In Erik's opinion, the man had no real talent or intelligence. The man hadn't done any research to back his hunch that there might be something of interest at the Northern Crater, yet he had a full expedition team headed there in just a few weeks based on a hunch.

It was that type of thing that kept the governments unstable. Next thing you knew and world would end up with a "corporate sponsor". Erik chuckled under his breath at his own cleaver, yet utterly ridiculous, thought.

Erik, on the other hand, had been working with survey teams for years trying to locate the lost relics of their ancestors. Even then he had a small team checking a claim about a small group of ruins on a small island off the southeastern in the Mideel chain. Chances were that it would end up as nothing more than another group of stone huts, but it was always worth a look.

He continued to grumble as he did his work and lost himself to his thoughts. So, he did not notice when his assistant/daughter entered his office. Jocea had to clear her throat several times to get his attention. He looked up with a cloudy expression that cleared only slightly when he saw who it was.

"We just got the preliminary report back from the Mideel site. You'll never guess," she said with obviously suppressed mirth.

"Stone huts?"

The effort it was taking to contain her grin grew by visible proportions. "Oh, a little more than that."

"Stone village?"

She couldn't help it, Jocea burst out laughing. She held out the report in her hand to her father. "See for yourself."

He huffed, but took the sheaf of paper. "Stone structure… high possibility for underground network… preliminary findings indicate…" He stopped reading and started over. "That can't be right." He looked up at Jocea's smiling face. "They need to run it again. The field equipment isn't that reliable and that is just not possible."

"They ran it four times and I ran it when the first samples came in. Radiometric dating puts the ruins firmly Pre-Shift."

Erik dropped the report to his desk. "Bu… how… not possi…" He felt decidedly light headed.

"I had the same reaction."

He looked again at his daughter. She was a beautiful woman, just like her mother had been. Rich, dark brown hair and eyes with a creamy skin tone. He'd had to run off workers on more than one expedition. His little girl was far too good for those rock hounds.

He shook his thoughts back to reality and forced his disbelief to take a hike. "I want to be on site in three days."

"Work order is already on the director's desk. We'll be there in two, with a full crew."

XXX

29th September, εуλ 1959

The first few days had been a tedium of digging, but Erik really couldn't be surprised over that. Anything that had managed to survive the Sift would have had to have been buried under quite a bit of earth and rock to come out even remotely intact. After all, cataclysmic continental realignment wasn't exactly a gentle affair. They knew that more than ninety percent of the world's population had been lost when the planet decided to rearrange itself almost over night. What survived of the Pre-Shift civilization had almost completely vanished in the more than six thousand years since. The period was a virtual unknown. The accuracy of what was known was highly debatable. After all, most of the scientific community insisted that any civilization capable of even half of the rumors, space exploration and such, would have been able to predict the Shift, and thus weather it far more intact.

His thoughts were interrupted by one of the workers shouting. He was out of his tent and across the site in a matter of seconds, quite a feat for his old bones. He didn't even have to ask what the call had been about when he got there. Most of what they had found thus far had been a rather disappointing collection of coins and other uninformative (boring) artifacts. He'd really been hoping for something, anything that might tell them more about the Pre-Shift world. At last, his hopes had been answered.

Within the rather large chamber was a sight beyond his wildest dreams. The room was completely intact. Artifacts even still stood on shelves. He sent the workers back out and called for Jocea and his other assistants to come down. He was hesitant to enter the space, because there were obviously objects of organic nature. Taking into account the potential age of these objects, even the slightest wrong move could cause them to crumble. Jocea came up behind him and her ragged intake of breath pulled him back into the moment.

"Electric lights only. Jocea and myself will enter first. I want a camera and gloves. You three get the workers to the next dig site and you four keep everyone else out, but be ready to help us if we need you." His calm and structured orders belied the nervousness that was trying to show itself.

When the others started to move and he had his requested items he took the first few halting steps into the chamber. Other than a scattering of small rubble that had not been cleared from the entrance, the room was merely a little dusty, but otherwise seemed to be untouched by time. Like the other chambers they'd found the door was on the adjacent wall and looked to be sealed from the outside. The first camera flashes reminded him to move forward so that Jocea could enter the room as well.

Jocea moved closely behind him, photographing everything as they inched forward. Fortunately, it appeared as though the wall they had broken through had been devoid of artifacts. The table just in front of them was another matter. It was stacked high with books, rolls of paper or perhaps parchment, and various other objects. What he noticed was lacking in the room were the excess of coins he'd been expecting. In fact, there were very few of them at all. He turned away from the table and scanned the room again.

Erik thought his heart had stopped for a moment. He'd not been able to see it from the hole in the wall, but on the far side of the chamber was a stone chest. He'd thought it was another draped table, but could see it was solid. If it was what he thought it was. "I think these were tombs."

Jocea's head snapped around when her father finally broke the silence. "What?" She followed his finger as he pointed off to the far wall. When they'd opened the previous chambers, they had initially dismissed the possibility of burial sites. They'd found no bones, monuments, markers, or any other indication of burial. If her father was right, then…

"We have to open it."

Erik went stiff. Since they'd arrived everything about this site had him shaking. It wasn't a feeling of ill omen or foreboding, but he was frightened. He was afraid that something would go wrong. This was more than he could have ever hopped for, and to find an intact sarcophagus as well… his hands began to tremble, but Jocea was right.

"Fulke, you and Aran get in here for a moment."

The two younger men came in with extreme care. A few quick instructions and Aran was gone and back again with hammer and chisel. The stone lid lifted up more easily than they had anticipated and Erik was left staring at a white linen shroud. It was totally unstained, which was odd beyond anything he had ever seen. His hopes dropped at the sight of it. There was no way that a body left to decay for that long had gone without staining the shroud.

After Jocea had taken several pictures he slowly lifted the cloth back and nearly fainted. It has to be an artificial figure, he thought to calm himself, because what was revealed was a face that could have been merely sleeping. Numerous objects had been tucked in around the form, he noted idly, but he was drawn again to that serene face. He let his fingers brush against a cheek and snatched his hand away. The skin had been pliant under his fingers. He pressed against the cheek again and it moved like flesh under his touch. Jocea was a deathly kind of silent behind him.

XXX

27th October, εуλ 1959

Word had come in from the Northern Crater that Gast had found the remains of an Ancient woman incased in mako crystal. Erik was not nearly as jealous as he might once have been over the upstart's find.

Erik had been back in his lab for almost two weeks, along with most of the contents of the excavation site. He'd left one of his lead assistants, Fulke, supervising the rest of the clean up work, with orders to notify him if they found anything else of significance. Not that he expected them to. They'd hit ground water and most of what was left of the ruins that deep was only semi regular blocks of stone and a few more of the strange coins.

Indeed, the Sleeper's chamber, as they had come to call it, was the only one that had contained more than those coins and worn metal artifacts. It was almost as if someone had stopped time within that one chamber and never restarted it. The paper and wooden objects had been far more intact than he might have first thought. Not that he could read any of it. The language was unlike anything he had ever seen. In fact, he wouldn't be surprised if it was more than one as some of the books appeared different than others. He'd put Jocea in charge of the relics though.

He spent every spare moment studying the Sleeper. Medical examinations had shown that he was, in fact, human. The organs and other tissues were still moist even if cellular activity had ceased. It was as if the body had been put into a state of perfect suspended animation a mere second before death. He knew that the Sleeper hadn't had an easy life. The body was littered with scars and skeletal fractures, both healed and not.

It left him with an insane urge to pull out a Phoenix Down and pour it down the boy's throat, and once the thought occurred to him, he couldn't shake it. Expensive and sometimes hard to come by, the potion could pull anyone back from the brink of the death. Archeology in the field was not exactly the safest of occupations. Monsters, raiders, and unstable structures were just some of the things to be faced. It was how he'd lost his wife. Ever since he'd suffered the expense and kept a few on hand, unwilling to risk his daughter's life as well.

As he reentered the room he couldn't help but think how cold it was. They had taken extra pains to sterilize the room. The body was the only thing they kept there, most of the boy's naked form kept covered by a simple white sheet.

"If it works…" He mumbled to himself and then stopped hesitating. To him it seemed more than worth the chance. He tipped the small bottle up into the boy's mouth. The liquid met not resistance as it trickled down the lax throat.

A large part of him whispered that he was a fool and that it had been a waist of Gil, but there was still that small voice in the back of his mind that said maybe. As the second ticked by that voice grew weaker and weaker until…

"Huhh..hu…" the ragged sound of breathing rattled in his ears and Erik was certain that his heart had suddenly forgotten to beat.

The body was trembling fiercely with his efforts to draw breath after Gaia only knew how long without it. Eventually the chest settled into an even rhythm and a pair of the absolutely greenest eyes Erik had ever seen opened.

XXX

TBC