Chapter One
“Some people are just born to fight, I think.”
{|}{|}{|}
Voldemort’s voice reverberated from the walls and floor, and Harry realized that he was talking to Hogwarts and to all the surrounding area, that the residents of Hogsmeade and all those still fighting in the castle would hear him as clearly as if he stood beside them, his breath on the back of their necks, a deathblow away.
“You have fought,” said the high, cold voice, “valiantly. Lord Voldemort knows how to value bravery.
“Yet you have sustained heavy losses. If you continue to resist me, you will all die, one by one. I do not wish this to happen. Every drop of magical blood spilled is a loss and a waste.
“Lord Voldemort is merciful. I command my forces to retreat immediately. “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 to 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.”
One Hour.
•
•
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.
Along the way, he was to dispose of Voldemort’s remaining links to life, so that when at last he flung himself across Voldemort’s path, and did not raise a wand to defend himself, the end would be clean, and the job that ought to have been done in Godric’s Hollow would be finished.
Neither would live, neither could survive.
He felt his heart pounding fiercely in his chest. How strange that in his dread of death, it pumped all the harder, valiantly keeping him alive.
But it would have to stop, and soon. Its beats were numbered. How many would there be time for, as he rose and walked through the castle for the last time, out into the grounds and into the forest?
Terror washed over him as he lay on the floor, with that funeral drum pounding inside him.
Would it hurt to die? All those times he had thought that it was about to happen and escaped, he had never really thought of the thing itself: His will to live had always been so much stronger than his fear of death. Yet it did not occur to him now to try to escape, to outrun Voldemort.
It was over, he knew it, and all that was left was the thing itself: dying.
•
Slowly, very slowly, he sat up, and as he did so he felt more alive and more aware of his own living body than ever before.
Why had he never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart? It would all be gone…or at least, he would be gone from it.
His breath came slow and deep, and his mouth and throat were completely dry, but so were his eyes.
Dumbledore’s betrayal was almost nothing. Of course there had been a bigger plan: Harry had simply been too foolish to see it, he realized that now. He had never questioned his own assumption that Dumbledore wanted him alive. Now he saw that his life span had always been determined by how long it took to eliminate all the Horcruxes.
Dumbledore had passed the job of destroying them to him, and obediently he had continued to chip away at the bonds tying not only Voldemort, but himself, to life!
How neat, how elegant, not to waste any more lives, but to give the dangerous task to the boy who had already been marked for slaughter, and whose death would not be a calamity, but another blow against Voldemort.
And Dumbledore had known that Harry would not duck out, that he would keep going to the end, even though it was his end, because he had taken trouble to get to know him, hadn’t he?
Dumbledore knew, as Voldemort knew, that Harry would not let anyone else die for him now that he had discovered it was in his power to stop it.
The images of Fred, Lupin, and Tonks lying dead in the Great Hall forced their way back into his mind’s eye, and for a moment he could hardly breathe.
Death was impatient…
•
Like rain on a cold window, these thoughts pattered against the hard surface of the incontrovertible truth, which was that he must die.
I must die.
It must end.
•
He could no longer control his own trembling.
It was not, after all, so easy to die.
Every second he breathed, the smell of the grass, the cool air on his face, was so precious: To think that people had years and years, time to waste, so much time it dragged, and he was clinging to each second.
At the same time he thought that he would not be able to go on, and knew that he must. The long game was ended, the Snitch had been caught, it was time to leave the air…
The Snitch.
His nerveless fingers fumbled for a moment with the pouch at his neck and he pulled it out.
I open at the close.
Breathing fast and hard, he stared down at it. Now that he wanted time to move as slowly as possible, he seemed to have sped up, and understanding was coming so fast it seemed to have bypassed thought.
This was the close. This was the moment.
He pressed the golden metal to his lips and whispered,
“I am about to die.”
•
“Does it hurt?”
The childish question had fallen from Harry’s lips before he could stop it.
“Dying? Not at all,” said Sirius. “Quicker and easier than falling asleep.”
•
He saw the mouth move and a flash of green light, and everything was gone.
•
•
Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the snakelike face vacant and unknowing.
Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse, and Harry stood with two wands in his hand, staring down at his enemy’s shell.
{|}{|}{|}
Harry Potter dies an hour later. One full hour after Harry Potter fulfilled his prophecy. One hour after he fulfilled his fate.
Like a puppet with their strings cut, he falls. There is, seemingly, no cause for it. Not one that anyone but the boy himself would know about.
His heart stops for the second time that day, and this time, it does not start again.
Master of Death; there is no such title. And Harry Potter was always meant to welcome death like they are old friends.
His friends find the vials in the headmaster’s office. They find the letters tied to the vials. They find the memories filling those vials.
Hundreds mourn his death. Hundreds celebrate Voldemort’s.
His parents had died so Voldemort would die. He died so Voldemort would die.
Some say it was fate.
And maybe it was.
He has always been tied with fate, tangled and twisted up inside its strings and weavings and tapestries.
Fate has always known his soul, his soul has always known fate.
It is but one story ending so another can begin.
{|}{|}{|}
She falls in love with the god when she is twenty-three years old.
He is everything she wished for her partner to ever be, knowledgeable, content in the quiet, calm and steady to her sporadic and restless personality.
He is the person her mother always told her she would need. Off in the cloud and away from people as she was. He was the rock to her balloon, the island in the middle of her sea, the calm to her crazy.
He is everything she has ever wanted and when she finds out who, or what, he is; it only makes him more.
Lycoris Kimura has always been fascinated with death. She’s always been captivated by the mystery, the questions, the unknown. She has wanted to pick it apart and examine all the pieces since she was old enough to gaze at the pinned butterflies on her mother’s wall and think; why?
That is why she moves across the country at only nineteen years old, to study Thanatology and all its vast and wide fields of science. To make Death her profession, her obsession, her life’s work.
This sets the scene for the rest of her life.
It is what led her to this moment, laid out underneath his dark bottomless eyes and too warm hands that leave hot-and-cold pulses in their wake.
She is not afraid.
She is twenty-three years old when she falls in love with the personification of Death. With his rough, rarely used voice, with the chains wrapped around his wrists and neck, with the dark eyes that seem like they have no pupil. With the feeling of his fingers on her skin, with the face he makes when she meets his eyes without a tremble or a shake. When she falls into him as easily as breathing without a single quake.
Lycoris has always been fascinated with death, but she has never been afraid. He is a god, but he is gentle and kind and oh so easy to love.
It is what led her to this moment, laid out in the hospital bed, his hand held between her own, with screams making their way past her throat. What led them here, as the baby’s first cries reverberate through the room.
She is twenty-five years old when she falls in love with her daughter, with her olive skin, and Tamas’ bronze hair and too-dark eyes.
•
“Penelopeia,” Lycoris whispers to him just minutes after she is born, “Is what we will call her.”
He smiles at her, lips peeling open so widely it must hurt, and somewhere deep in his eyes something flashes gold.
“Penelopeia,” he breaths in awe, eyes watching his only child take her first breaths. “My Poppy,”
Lycoris can’t take her eyes off of her daughter, so small and fragile as she is, smushed and quiet and so so alive that she is. She can’t tear her eyes away as her tiny chest rises and falls.
“Little Poppy,” she whispers in her mother’s tongue. Tasting the name like she had tasted the name Thanatos all those months ago.
They know only happiness and peace in that hospital room, only love.
[It is sad, don’t you think?
That Harry Potter’s soul has always known Fate, that Fate has only known Harry Potter’s soul.
It is a tragedy.]
[The Greeks do so love their tragedies, don’t they?]
{|}{|}{|}
Poppy Kimura grows up in nursing homes and hospital halls. She is cooed over by doctors and nurses and patients alike.
She grows up with a frequently traveling father and a doting but busy mother, she is loved and she is cared for.
Poppy is a bright girl but quiet girl, who likes to watch the simplest things for hours and hours on end, who loves to be wrapped in her mother’s warm arms, who adores writing letters to her father and getting to curl in his lap when he finally finally comes home.
She loves to draw, to paint out pictures of magic and dragons and castle grounds. The grannies chitter and chat as they watch over her for her mother.
“You have a vivid imagination,” They tell her, and only get that mischievous smile back in return.
Poppy is a girl that loves to hear stories. Any stories. She’ll listen to old men talk of war, of old women talk of human right’s marches and day long parades. She’ll listen to the gossip of the nurses and the too big words from the doctors.
But most of all, she loves her father’s stories. Of times long past, of times thought myths. Of gods and monsters and heroes. Of tragedy and strife, of arrogance and pettiness, of love and fascination. She is her father’s little girl, her mother’s little girl, and she will always listen and wonder and ask why?
No one knows that Poppy hasn’t always been a little girl.
{|}{|}{|}
Harry can remember warmth and safety and sleep.
But only for a second before he is screaming and cold and awake.
He can remember whispers and voices and power and love.
He goes back to sleep.
•
Harry can remember standing over Dumbledore’s dead body. Can remember standing over Dobby’s, over Snape’s.
Over Voldemort’s.
That is all he needs to remember.
He goes back to sleep.
•
Harry can remember the look of his mother’s eyes as she absorbed the look of him.
He can remember doing the same.
He wishes he could see her green eyes again.
•
He is in pain.
The world is fuzzy and hazy and he can’t see.
It is nothing new.
•
He can hear voices in his ears. A familiar pair of voices he hasn’t known before.
He feels loved. He doesn’t know why.
They talk to him sometimes, they sing in others. They whisper and wrap and wonder.
He doesn’t understand the words just yet. But he knows the voices.
He goes back to sleep.
•
Consciousness comes in waves. He can tell what it is now.
He does not remember a lot.
He does not know who he is. He does not know what he is. He does not know where he is.
That is okay. He can remember standing over Tom Riddle’s dead body, devoid of life and magic as it was, and that is enough.
That is enough but he can’t help but wonder.
He goes back to sleep.
•
Sometimes, he remembers other things. Other horrible terrible things.
The high voice of his fate. The feeling of blood slipping between his fingers, the screams tearing both his mind and throat apart. The feeling of cold bodies and dropping the stone.
Of his mother’s voice.
Of green light and no more.
They do not stick with him for long. But it is long enough.
•
Sometimes, he remembers other things. Other wonderful and loving things.
They stick with him longer.
Voices and smiles and fleeting names he can grip onto for long.
Sometimes, he remembers freckles on pale skin, caramel curls springing from tight braids, blonde hair and dirt covered hands, platinum and silver eyes.
Of white feathers and golden eyes.
Of flying.
They stick with him for longer. But not long enough.
•
He can feel…
Pain.
Painpainpainpainpainpain.
Grief.
GriefGriefGriefGriefGriefGriefGriefGriefGrief.
Sorrow.
SorrowSorrowSorrowSorrowSorrowSorrowSorrowSorrowSorrowSorrowSorrowSorrowSorrowSorrow.
Pain, Grief, Sorrow, and everything inbetween.
It all comes rushing in, during those moments when he can’t help but wonder. It comes rushing the moment of such sharp clarity that he feels like peeling open his own chest and watching as his heart slowly stops beating.
He can feel…everything.
•
He sleeps for a long long time, dozing and drifting and dreaming.
Harry knows he sleeps for a long long time.
Too long.
He doesn’t know how he knows that, doesn’t even know what knowing is.
But he does.
And still he sleeps.
•
Perhaps it is a mercy.
That he sleeps.
{|}{|}{|}
Harry Potter comes back to himself when he is about a year old.
The time between womb and birth and existence, are a blur of things he’s not sure he ever wants to remember.
The time between death and reincarnation and womb, are a static screen of things he isn’t allowed to remember.
He’s sure that he isn’t even supposed to remember the gap of death and inbetween and rebirth, but Harry Potter does a lot of things he’s not supposed to. It seems this is just another thing to add onto the ever growing list.
Knowing he is a baby and not fighting it comes with a lot of time lost to sleeping. But he doesn’t lose himself like he did for all those months and months his body was growing around his soul.
He figures it’s time to come back to himself.
He’s spent long enough running away from himself and everything that it entails remembering.
•
He comes to learn his new name when he is around two years old. Or what he thinks is two years old, it hasn’t exactly gotten easier to keep track of time. But he has gotten more…coherent.
So yes, he is around two years old when he learns his name.
And everything that comes with it.
The person he thinks is his father calls him Poppy. The person he thinks is his mother calls him Penelope.
He is no longer Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived. He doubts he is a boy at all.
He doesn’t really panic at that realization. It’s not bad in the least. The best people he had ever known had been female, had been girls and women.
•
His father is, decidedly, something other than human.
Harry -Poppy- can tell the difference between his mother and his father.
He can tell the difference between his mother and himself -Herself.
He -she- just doesn’t know what makes his father different yet. Well Hermione always said he was too nosy for his own good. Too curious to just let a mystery sit instead of chasing after it with everything he was.
Harry has never doubted Hermione.
•
He is around three or four years old when he really comes back to himself. When all his memories and feelings are slotted back in place, when he can remember everything without hazy gaps his mind wasn’t ready for.
Harry Potter is now Penelopeia, with a, decidedly not normal, father who calls her his little poppy and a mother who sings to her in swathes Greek and Japanese when she is cranky and can’t get the images of before out of her head.
He’s still not sure about what to feel.
She’s not sure what to feel in face of this…situation he’s has found herself in.
{|}{|}{|}
When they were still seventeen years old, well when he was still seventeen years old and Hermione was already eighteen.
When they were alone in the tent for all those weeks, they got to talking about things they have never talked about before.
Hermione tells him this only once.
“I was a girl who never felt comfortable in her own body. And people would always tell me that I was a boy, that I was Hermes not Hermione. That I was a boy. That I wasn’t a girl. But I am.”
Hermione had been a girl who grew up feeling like her body wasn’t her own, she grew up feeling like she was being punished by her own body for things she didn’t know about.
She felt like she would always be alone.
Then magic came around, and if it was one good thing she got out of being a muggleborn, out of being a mudblood, out of being a witch; it was this.
For the first time in her life, her body was finally her own.
Her voice had been faint as she told him, her eyes red and her hands shaky. And Hermione feared what he would say. He could see it on her face like you could see the blue of the sky.
Harry says, “If you say you are a girl, then that is what you are. I’ll love you for you no matter what body you are in.”
Perhaps this is why it is easy for Harry Potter, son of Lily and James, to become Penelopeia Kimura, daughter of Lycoris and Tamas.
He knows, she knows that Hermione would love her for her too. That makes it a bit easier.
[In those letters, Harry said and gave a lot of things. His letter to Hermione was longest not because he wrote a lot of words but because he wrote his will and left it to her to distribute.
She had said she wanted to make it so others like her got the chance to live in a body that was truly theirs.
He hopes all that he left her would help her achieve it.]
{|}{|}{|}
Poppy has never been able to let things go, to not look at something and ask why? Her motto should be Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
And so she is five years old when she asks her father, “What are you?”
Her father looks at her with dark bottomless eyes that only she and her mother seem to see and smiles. And somewhere deep in those eyes, something flashes gold.
{or maybe it is her own that flashes and his that mimic.}
{back and forth and back again.}
{They are father and daughter, after all.}
[This soul has always known death. Death has always known this soul. They have always been old friends.]
“I can not tell you yet, my Poppy,” he says as he soothes a warm hand through her hair. “But one day, I will.”
She takes the answer for what it is and lets it go. Until she is six years old and she asks again. His answer is the same. Until she is seven years old and asks again and his answer is the same. Until she is eight years old and his answer is the same.
{|}{|}{|}
If Poppy came face to face with Voldemort again, her words would be this:
“For you, Death was fear so incomprehensible that you ran from your real fate. For you, that prophecy toyed with you like you were a plaything. To the fates, you were but a game to watch, you were but a tiny insubstantial entertainment. To them, you were a fleeting fancy.”
Poppy would laugh and it would not be a happy sound. She would always see pieces of herself in Tom Riddle. But she would laugh, and it would not be a nice sound.
“Your ending, our ending was but an intrusive thought. We were but; what would happen if I did this thing? Like those of what would happen if I just pushed that person off the bridge, what would happen if I really spoke the words in my head? What would it feel like if I really did twist that knife? What happens when you die? Our fate was just a channel they flicked past when surfing the television.”
She would say one thing.
“In the end, death was a mercy. Because I fear what we would have done if they had kept playing our doomed game.”
She would ask these things.
“Do you wonder what we could’ve been without that prophecy?”
“Do you wonder what you would have been if you had been born just twenty years later?”
“Do you wonder what we could have been if you had never found that book? If you had never discovered Horcruxes? If you hadn’t feared as much as you did.”
She would say and ask and talk until her voice was hoarse.
But she would tell him this one thing.
“You had no reason to be afraid of death,” and she would smile, soft and gentle, she is her father’s daughter, after all, “It is but the next chapter in your soul’s book.”
But she wouldn’t see Tom Riddle again, she wouldn’t meet him face to face again. Because she is no longer Harry James Potter and he will never be Tom Marvolo Riddle again.
She wouldn’t see him ever again, and for that she is glad.
[If she ever came face to face with Harry Potter, these are the words she would say;
“For us, death was a thing so engraved that we knew it would always be our fate. For us, the prophecy toyed with us because we were a plaything. For us, fate was something so tangled and twisted in our being that we have never belonged to anything more than we did them. To them, we are a constant thing that they have always has a hand so woven in that it feels like cutting your own heart out of your chest when you fight them.”
She wouldn’t laugh. She would be silent like she learned to be in the cupboard. She learned a lot of things in that cupboard. She learned that she wasn’t normal, that she was a freak, that she wasn’t allowed to hate, she wasn’t allowed to feel bitter or spiteful.
She wouldn’t laugh, because sometimes Harry would forget how to laugh. He had forgotten for so long what it felt like to have happiness in her bones. Sometimes she would even forget how to smile.
“Our ending, my ending, was but an inevitable thing that has always existed. We had been written for far longer than we had even been alive. Just a fated life waiting in the world for our tortured soul; a death that was, and always had been, certain. We were not an intrusive thought but an inexorable happenstance that would always occur, something that was around always. A thought that sticks with you, that makes you doubt the meaning of coincidences and accidents.”
She wouldn’t ask anything from Harry. Because he could not see what came after their death. But she would ask their loved ones these things.
“Did you ever wonder what your lives would be like if I simply hadn’t been born? How much easier would they be? How much more gentle it would have been to you, if you weren’t tangled in my fate like you were?”
“Did you regret coming to sit with me on that train when we were eleven years old and oh so tiny? Do you regret listening to your mother all those years ago, when she said I looked like I needed a friend? Did you regret our time spent together?”
“Can you tell me how big Teddy has grown? Can you tell me his favorite color and the things he likes to learn about? Can you tell him that I loved him more than life itself and sacrifices have to stay dead so blessings can stay in effect.”
“Did you know that I have never and will never regret giving my life so all of you can live?”
She would tell him one thing.
“We have never feared death,” she would say soft and sweet like all things death has been to them, “even if you never remembered who came before Harry.”
But she is Harry Potter, she is who he was, had ever been, and ever would be. She has already said these things.
She just wished she could get the answers to the questions that have plagued her since her heart stopped on that bridge, since she snapped that wand and lost all tethers holding her to that mortal plain.]
{|}{|}{|}
Penelopeia Kimura grows up in the white halls of numerous hospitals and the long halls and small rooms of countless nursing homes. She grows up struggling to read and struggling to sit still. She loves to smile but loves to make others smile more. She has never once been locked away or hit or had food kept from her.
She still remembers though.
She is a quiet girl who is doted upon by her traveling father and her busy mother.
And she has been surrounded with Death since before she was even conceived.
She does not need to ask her father what are you? Because his little Poppy has always known.
She grows up in a little apartment in Maryland, with paint stained fingers and where laughter was so common that quiet makes her feel like she should crawl out of her skin.
She is content with her happiness, content with her new life. Finally content with leaving behind all those she loved in her past life.
[Even if it means acting as if the memories of her precious Ginny don’t plague her nights. With her crimson hair and sweet brown eyes.
Even if sometimes she misses Hermione so much that is hard to even breath, so hard that her vision gets spotty and her heart beats far to fast to be healthy. Even if sometimes she turns to her left and expects to see red hair and bright blue eyes that look at her and still smile even after all the fights that they have had.
Even if sometimes she thinks she misses them more than she loves her new mother. Even when that thought makes her sick to her stomach.
Even if she doesn’t know what she would choose if given the choice to go back or to stay.]
She grows up with a father who is decidedly not human but she loves him all the same. And Harry Potter’s love, Penelopeia Kimura’s love, has always been a ferocious thing, a terrifying thing, and it should always be something that everyone should look at and think beware.
And Poppy has always known she didn’t win because love conquers hate but because love gives you something to fight for, something to die for, something to kill for. To torture for, to slaughter for, to see death and think mercy for.
And her soul has always known death, and she doesn’t need to wonder why.
She knows, just as Harry had known, just as all those ones that came before had known.
Their love makes them human, and humans are truly terrifying things.
[They are the only reason things like gods even exist, don’t you remember?
We are all stories in a book somewhere to be read. We are all beings of thoughts and those thoughts just manifested.
Humans wield greater power, don’t you remember?
They exist only because we exist. Their ichor is our belief and their being is our worship.
Even gods can die, we’ve thought it up before. We’ve made it happen before, we’ve made them fallible before.]
[Don’t you remember?]