Greeting Death
Hadrian watched too many people die.
His mother, Cedric, Sirius.
People he loved deeply.
But somehow, watching Severus Snape die was the worst of them all.
He did not know why he was doing it, why he was approaching the dying man: He did not know what he felt as he saw Snape’s white face, and the fingers trying to staunch the bloody wound at his neck. Harry took off the Invisibility Cloak and looked down upon the man he hated, whose widening black eyes found Harry as he tried to speak. Harry bent over him, and Snape seized the front of his robes and pulled him close.
A terrible rasping, gurgling noise issued from Snape’s throat.
“Take … it … Take … it…”
Something more than blood was leaking from Snape. Silvery blue, neither gas nor liquid, it gushed from his mouth and his ears and his eyes, and Harry knew what it was, but did not know what to do –
A flask, conjured from thin air, was thrust into his shaking hands by Hermione. Harry lifted the silvery substance into it with his wand. When the flask was full to the brim, and Snape looked as though there was no blood left in him, his grip on Harry’s robes slackened.
“Look … at … me …” he whispered.
The green eyes found the black, but after a second, something in the depths of the dark pair seemed to vanish, leaving them fixed, blank, and empty. The hand holding Harry thudded to the floor, and Snape moved no more.
Hadrian was getting rather sick of watching eyes go empty. There was something in him that could sense when a soul left a body. He wasn’t sure if it was something everyone could feel, he’d been too afraid to ask, too afraid to find out that it was just something else about him that was strange.
Then Voldemort’s voice spoke;
“You have one hour. Dispose of your dead with dignity. Treat your injured.
“I speak now, Harry Potter, directly to you. You have permitted your friends to die for you rather than face me yourself. I shall wait for one hour in the Forbidden Forest. If, at the end of that hour, you have not come ot me, have not given yourself up, then battle recommences. This time, I shall enter the fray myself, Harry Potter, and I shall find you, and I shall punish every last man, woman, and child who has tried to conceal you from me. One hour.”
Ron and Hermione were shaking their heads frantically, begging Hadrian not to go. But Death knew, and Hadrian knew, that soon, they would meet as friends.
The Castle was silent.
The trio entered the Great Hall.
The survivors stood in groups, the injured lined the walls, and the dead lay in a row in the middle of the Hall.
A crowd of Weasleys was gathered around a cot where someone was working furiously. Fred, so injured they’d thought he was dead until George had convinced them that he could still feel the bond. His twin was alive, and someone had better keep him that way.
But there, in the row of bodies, lay Remus and Tonks.
Hadrian ran.
Through the too quiet halls in the damaged school that had welcomed him home, time and time again. Clutching the flask with Snape’s last thoughts, he didn’t slow until he reached the gargoyle.
All Hadrian wanted was to speak to Dumbledore, but he wasn’t there. Every portrait had fled. He stared hopelessly at Dumbledore’s deserted frame, then he turned his back to it and approached the Pensieve.
Hadrian found himself thinking that he’d welcome the chance to escape into someone else’s head, believing that nothing Snape could’ve left him would be worse than his own thoughts.
“I have spied for you and lied for you, put myself in mortal danger for you. Everything was supposed to be to keep Lily Potter’s son safe. Now you tell me you have been raising him like a pig for slaughter -”
Well, it wasn’t the first time Hadrian had been laughably wrong.
Hadrian watched as a silver doe burst forth from Snape’s wand, as Dumbledore asked, “after all this time?” and Snape responded, “Always.”
And, really, Hadrian didn’t have the time to unpack that.
Finally, the truth. Lying with his face pressed into the dusty carpet of the office where he had once thought he was learning the secrets of victory, Harry understood at last that he was not supposed to survive. His job was to walk calmly into Death’s welcoming arms..
And he would. Strangely enough, the knowledge that he was walking to his death settled something in Hadrian’s soul, slowed the rapid beating of his anxious heart.
Slowly, he made his way through the halls and toward the forest.
He was waylaid briefly by Ron and Hermione, “I’ll go with you,” Hermione had cried. At least he’d been blessed with incredible friends in this life.
Then he saw his brother, walking with Oliver Wood, carrying the body of Colin Creevey.
Hadrian waited until Neville was leaning over another body before he approached.
“Neville.”
“Blimey, Harry, you nearly gave me heart failure!”
He pulled off the Cloak.
“Where are you going, alone?” Neville asked suspiciously.
“It’s all part of the plan,” said Harry. “There’s something I’ve got to do. Listen – Neville -”
“Harry!” Neville looked suddenly scared. “Harry, you’re not thinking of handing yourself over?”
“No,” Harry lied easily. “’Course not .. this is something else. But I might be out of sight for a while. You know Voldemort’s sake, Neville? He’s got a huge snake … Calls it Nagini …”
“I’ve heard, yeah … What about it?”
“It’s got to be killed. Ron and Hermione know that, but just in case they -”
The awfulness of that possibility smothered him for a moment, made it impossible to keep talking. But he pulled himself together again: This was crucial, he must be like Dumbledore, keep a cool head, make sure there were backups, others to carry on. Dumbledore had died knowing that three people still knew about the Horcruxes; now Neville would take Harry’s place: There would still be three in the secret.
“Just in case they’re – busy – and you get the chance -”
“Kill the snake?”
“Kill the snake,” Harry repeated.
“All right, Harry. You’re okay, are you?”
“I’m fine. Thanks, Neville.”
But Neville seized his wrist as Harry made to move on.
“We’re all going to keep fighting, Harry. You know that?”
“Yeah, I -”
Then Hadrian swung Death’s Cloak back over his shoulders and walked on. Leaving the only family he’d ever known in his wake.
He approached the forest, memories of this home washing over him like a tide washing back to sea.
I open at the close.
This was the close. This was the moment.
He pressed the golden metal to his lips and whispered, “I am about to die.”
The metal shell broke open. He lowered his shaking hand, raised Draco’s wand beneath the Cloak, and murmured, “Lumos.”
The black stone with its jagged crack running down the center sat in the two halves of the Snitch. The Resurrection Stone had cracked down the vertical line representing the Elder Wand. The triangle and circle representing the Cloak and the Stone were still discernible.
And Harry understood without having to think. It did not matter about bringing them back, for he was about to join them. He was not really fetching them: They were fetching him.
He closed his eyes and turned the stone over in his hand three times.
He knew it had happened, because he heard slight movements around him that suggested frail bodies shifting their footing on the earthy, twig-strewn ground that marked the outer edge of the forest. He opened his eyes and looked around.
They were neither ghost nor truly flesh, he could see that. They resembled most closely the Riddle that had escaped from the diary so long ago, and he had been memory made nearly solid. Less substantial than living bodies, but much more than ghosts, they moved toward him, and on each face, there was the same loving smile.
James was exactly the same height as Harry. He was wearing the clothes in which he had died, and his hair was untidy and ruffled, and his glasses were a little lopsided, like Mr. Weasley’s.
Sirius was tall and handsome, and younger by far than Harry had seen him in life. He loped with an easy grace, his hands in his pockets and a grin on his face.
Lupin was younger too, and much less shabby, and his hair was thicker and darker. He looked happy to be back in this familiar place, scene of so many adolescent wanderings.
Lily’s smile was widest of all. She pushed her long hair back as she drew close to him, and her green eyes, so like his, searched his face hungrily, as though she would never be able to look at him enough.
“You’ve been so brave.”
And they answered his questions, and they stayed;
“You’ll stay with me?”
“Until the very end,” said James.
He continued his march through the forest, the presence of four guardians acting as a Patronus against the guard of dementors, their presence was his courage, and the reason he was able to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
When Hadrian finally came upon the gathering of Death Eaters, his eyes fell on Narcissa Malfoy, whose eyes were sunken and full of apprehension.
Voldemort believed he hadn’t come. He’d truly believed young Hadrian would show, “I was, it seems … mistaken,” said Voldemort.
“You weren’t.”
Harry said it as loudly as he could, with all the force he could muster: He did not want to sound afraid. The Resurrection Stone slipped from between his numb fingers, and out of the corner of his eyes, he saw his parents, Sirius, and Lupin vanish as he stepped forward into the firelight. At that moment he felt that nobody mattered but Voldemort. It was just the two of them.
Just as it had been all those years earlier; Death’s Enemy and Death’s Chosen.
“Harry Potter,” he said very softly. His voice might have been part of the spitting fire. “The Boy Who Lived.”
There were so many thoughts racing through Hadrian’s mind at that moment, but then he saw the wand raise, the mouth move, and a flash of green light, and everything was gone.
Death watched on as the last of his line fell. His Chosen Child, his Champion.
He watched as the leach of Tom Riddle detached itself from Hadrian’s soul and he watched as Hadrian entered Limbo, which was a rather interesting development. He’d thought that he would be claiming this soul as his own, it seems he was mistaken.
A minute passed and Hadrian’s body remained still on the floor of the forest.
Just as the one who calls himself Flight from Death asked one of his followers to check if the boy was truly dead, Death felt as Hadrian’s soul escaped. He watched the boy conceal a wince as his soul snapped back to the mortal plain and his skin sparked with a second bolt of lightning.
And then Narcissa Malfoy said “dead.” and Death knew that this day would end in victory.
His Chosen had fallen and come back, he’d mastered Cloak, Wand, and Stone and greeted Death as a friend.
It was time.
The Master of Death had arrived.