Chapter Two
”Missing you comes in waves. Tonight, I’m drowning.”
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When she turns eight years old, her mother lights the candle on her birthday cake. Lycoris is smiling and she is happy and she is so so bright.
Poppy can’t help but love her. Love the flyaway hairs on her head, the hitch in her voice when she sings Happy Birthday. She can’t keep the tears from her eyes as she watches her mother, breathing and alive, smile at her.
[Sometimes, he wishes he had gotten to know Lily Potter like this. Sometimes, deep with them him, he wishes for his first mother.]
It had been like this for every birthday Poppy has ever had. And she always makes the same wish.
When she blows out her candles, all eight flickering things, this is her wish; I wish…to witness my mother’s hair going grey, to see laugh lines run rampant over her face, for her to grow old.
Then she blows them out with a laugh from her throat, watching the smoke dance from the black wicks. She keeps laughing and grabs the lighter from her mothers hand and says watch. And then lets the fire catch on the smoke.
The candle flares back to life.
Perhaps this was why her wish was not granted. Perhaps she was asking for too much. Perhaps candles on birthday cakes really don’t mean anything.
Perhaps she doomed her mother for wishing to see her live.
[She’ll always wonder this. And it thought will stick with her for the rest of her life.]
•
That night, just before time comes for another day, with her father softly and roughly singing to her in a language that comes too easy, she asks her father this;
“What are you?”
“It’s not time yet, my poppy. But I will tell you one day,” Her father smiles like he has always smiles when he says these same words to her every year and swipes a hand through her hair. “Now what do we say before going to sleep?”
“Let ύπνος* take us gently, and όνειρο* to treat us kindly.”
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When she is still eight years old, her mother dies.
It is fast and sudden and oh so quick. Her mother dies. And that is it.
It is in the middle of autumn, when death is running rampant all throughout her half of the world. Death sticks to trees and flowers and grass and people and ideas and love.
[He is the death of all things. She can sense the death of all things.]
Her mother dies, and death only clings to her for a second before she is gone. His fingers dig into her mother shoulder’s, chains rattling from around his neck to pool at his feet, his icy breath wafting over her skin and fogging the air.
[She can sense the death coming for all things. She did not sense it for her mother, not until she was already dead.]
[He is the death of all things. He did not see it for his lover until she was already dead.]
The cars screech and groan and crash and skid, the horns honk and blare, the monsters that wrecked their car roars. People are screaming, her mother is dying, and her father’s empty and fathomless eyes are looking only at her.
[She can sense the death of all things. She can not sense the dead. She can’t save them, she can’t talk to them, she can’t control them. And neither can he.
He is the Personification of Death. Not the God of The Dead.]
Her mother dies in mere seconds, the bodies of the monsters crashes into their speeding car. The turn and tumble and flip. The world goes still and her mother draws in her last breath.
The glass is imbedded in her chest and her ribs rattle around in her lungs.
Death permeates her limp and bleeding body.
Her heart is crushed in an instant, makes one last pump of blood around the glass and then stops.
Her mother is no more.
And then her father’s form burns.
The monsters roar and roar and roar again. Then it charges again, giant and covered in mist as it was. Nothing computes, her mother is dead and blood is gushing from the gashes in every inch of her skin.
Her mother is dead.
The car goes careening off the bridge. Poppy doesn’t even notice.
And then she is burning from the inside out, her father’s hands are not wrapped in mortal safe skin, he is not hiding a single drop of his divinity.
Death itself rips through her as his hands envelope her entire midsection. Her skin burns and blackens.
[He is a personification, he is not meant to touch mortal skin so freely.]
The car is still falling. Her mother is still dead.
He rips her from her seat just as the water rushes in. The car sinks, and glass from the windshield shatters again as he throws her through it.
Harry has been surrounded by death since his soul had been birthed. This is not her first time facing death, isn’t her first time being burned by the being, isn’t the first time she has lost someone she holds dear to the being.
But it is the first time she has lost someone so precious in this life.
She has been surrounded with death since she was born again, but this is the first time it is so…personal.
She is still eight years old, and they tell her it is a miracle the she survived the crash, that she survived the fall, that she survived the freezing water for as long as she did. That she survived at all.
She shouldn’t be alive.
But she is.
•
{Harry Potter has always survived, it is one thing he has always hated.}
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When they pull her from the Potomac, it feels like it’s already been hours and she has long learnt what it meant to drown.
She is not awake when they pull her from the river, they don’t tell her that she hadn’t been breathing.
They don’t need too. Poppy had already known.
•
When they pull her from the river, cold and deadly with undercurrents that had pulled her on for what feels like days, her mother’s body has already sunk all the way to the bottom. The car had pulled her down and down and down again.
Her mother is dead.
And she is alive. And her father is no where to be seen.
The divers pull up both the car and her mother’s body only minutes after they find her. Swept away nearly a mile from the sight of the crash. And for a minute there, she wished she too had to be pulled up with it.
•
She wakes many days later, too many days later, and she is still wracked with hypothermia and her throat feels like it has been torn to shreds.
They ask her a thousand different questions. One of them is this; was your father in the car?
And Poppy knows that Tamas Kimura had been in the car. Her father, who was decidedly not human, had been in the car. Until he wasn’t.
She tells them no. And goes back to sleep.
•
Her father misses her mother’s funeral.
[Poppies were- had been- are her mother’s favorite flowers. All her grievers come with them in hand. They wilt and crumple before the day has even ended.]
[He watches her from above, from under, he watches her always, he will not leave her alone again.]
She will sit in her black clothes and endure their whispering. None of her mother’s family stays long enough to see her ashes scattered, but they do not leave her to pick out her bones alone.
Her grandmother’s hand shake as she puts the lid on her mothers urn. And Poppy can’t keep the tears from spilling down her face when the women turns to her, auburn eyes just a beautiful as her mother’s.
The police car takes her and her assigned nurse back to the hospital.
[The hospital that she grew up in, where her mother had worked with all those experiencing death, where Penelopeia had been born.]
•
He looks the same as he has all of her life when she sees him next, curled bronze hair against dark skin and baby-faced and beautiful, almost too young to have a child but not young enough that it is impossible.
They share the same too-dark eyes that seem like they have no pupil. Their smiles are the same, too wide and too sharp with too many teeth to seem comfortable. They grin with their whole face.
They’re not smiling now. She feels like she will never smile again.
Her olive colored skin, her pin straight hair, and her nose are the only things she inherited from her mother. Not the color of her eyes or hair, not the slope of her eyebrows or the sharpness of her cheekbones.
She’s always looked more like her fathers.
He holds her as she cries, even as silent as she is. He holds her, arms void of divinity but still so so warm.
She misses her mother like she misses her magic.
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She turns nine years old. There is no birthday cake, there are no candles. There will never be another wish, there will never been another badly sung Happy Birthday song.
There will never be another smile from her mother’s soft lips, no more flyaway hairs after a busy day helping those lost in their grief. There will be no more of her mother’s love, no more of her mother’s tight hugs, no more of her mother’s bright auburn eyes laughing, no more of her mother’s gentle words.
No more of her mother, no new memories, no new stories, no pictures or songs or sought after Greek texts her mother would give her.
Nothing. No more. Nothing.
Her mother is dead when she turns nine years old. It has been two long torturous months.
It has only been two months.
[Poppy thought by now she would have run out of tears to cry. But she knows why she continues to cry.
Harry Potter had never known Lily Potter. He had never know anything beside the pleading of her voice and the screaming of her death and the final desperate determined words she whispered to her son.
Harry Potter had never known Lily Potter.
Penelopeia Kimura had always known her mother. Poppy has always loved her mother. Had always had her mother. Could recite you her favorite quote, could tell you how she drinks her coffee and her favorite color and the smell of her favorite shampoo. She could tell you the songs her mother liked to sing in the shower and in the car and in the small room they used as a garden.
She knows why she continues to cry.]
Poppy just wants to go back to sleep, and so she does under the watchful eyes of her father and the ghost empty touch of a mother that is no longer there.
•
Poppy misses her mother so much that her heart feels like it is no longer beating and her skin has begun to fall apart in long rotted pieces.
She feels like her lungs are slowly filling with blood that weighs her down like a dozen cement blocks, making her sink so deep down that she has become familiar with the floor of the sea not yet discovered.
She feels like she is back in that train station, soul disconnected from her body, emotions torn from her mind, she had felt nothing and everything and she had known that her end had come.
Is that all that’s left now? Dying?
Poppy wants to go back to sleep, and so she does.
•
[and maybe there is one last wish. One that is this; Poppy wants to go back to sleep, and she never wants to wake again.]
•
Perhaps it is a mercy that she sleeps away her grief.
She can’t stand the bought of their apartment, laughter filled and so so bright, empty of that thing of which they both revolved.
Her mother is dead.
She had never feared death, because death takes all, because death is inevitable.
She had never hated it either.
Until now.
•
That night, before the clock to turn to another grief stricken day, Poppy lays awake in her fathers warm arms. The bed has already lost the scent of her mother. Her father is not singing, his hand is still soothing through her hair. She asks him this, but it is more of a plead then a question, more of a sob then a plead;
“What are you?” She whispered against the pulse in his neck.
He does not smile, nor does he laugh, nor does he say it is not time.
She asks, “What are you?” and he tells her this, “…Death.”
And then he tells her the rest.
•
In the Wixen communities of Harry Potter’s life, their had been many many different pagan religions celebrated all around the earth, Celtic and Norse and Welsh, Greek and Roman and Finnic.
Harry had only heard of those gods. He had only worshiped these, though perhaps worshiped was the wrong word, because Harry Potter would bow to no one. Harry had only believed in these;
Death. It had no name, it had no face nor temple or children or myths. He believed in one inevitable thing.
Fate. It had no name, it had no face or temple or worship place. He believed in this one thing that can be written and rewritten. He did not believe Fate was inevitable, he believed in it anyways.
They had no names and they were not human. They were not even gods. They were not titans or giants or primordials. They were not beings but one inevitable thing that you can not escape from and one thing that only you have the power to change.
He believed that Death will take all, and Fate is something that humans control.
He did not stand against Voldemort because of a prophecy, nor was it because he believed it was his fate or his destiny. He fought because he loved.
And if he had not loved them, if hadn’t have had people he cared about, if he hadn’t have had people that were his, then he would have left them to their fate. He would have left them to the choices that led to Tom Riddle being made.
He would have let Voldemort go, had he not loved.
[It is not that love conquers hate, because there is no conquering when it comes to emotions because humans feel more than one thing.
It is because Harry Potter loved more than he hated. Loved Hermione and Ron more than he hated Voldemort, loved the Weasley’s more than he hated slipping down that sewer pipe, loved his slow forming family, family not of any blood but chosen, more than he hated Remus Lupin’s absence.
Loved enough to die for, but also loved more than enough to kill for. He had know the second he met Teddy Lupin’s eyes that he would tear himself apart with a thousand murders before he let that boy come to harm, before he let anyone else die for him.
Harry Potter had known he wasn’t a hero. That he would never be a hero. Dumbledore was right to compare Tom Riddle and Harry Potter. They were too similar for it to be anything but two sides of one coin.
He had no gods, only himself, his mind, his choices, his behavior and his beliefs.
He believes everything and all things are fated to die. That is inevitable.
•
Perhaps now she should believe in Reincarnation. In rebirth.
She hopes her mother gets the best of her next life.
She hopes her mother is worshiped and loved and cared for. She hopes her mother lives a happy long life.
[Perhaps there is just one more wish, and it is this; Poppy wishes her mother’s next life will be everything she had ever wanted. Poppy wishes her mother’s next life will be the best life she could ever live.]
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“Can you see her?” She asks in her mother’s native tongue, in what should have been hers. Her voice trembles and shakes. She is not afraid, but desperate.
“…no.” He whispered back. Mortal voice cracking and eyes puffy and red. “It is not my domain, and not even the gods like Death. They will not grant me a single thing.”
They are both crying, mortal and god alike.
Perhaps The King of The Gods thinks losing their divinity is the worst that they can imagine. Perhaps he thinks stripping death of his power and his domains is the ultimate punishment.
He is wrong.
And for Death, for Thanatos and Mors, it is just a blessing in disguise. He gets to spend an undetermined amount of time with his daughter now.
Even if they will both mourn for the rest of their existences.
•
Her father is punished by the gods. Stood before the Olympian Council and condemned for his actions and his interference and his love.
Her father is cast down to the mortal world. Her father is stripped of his divinity like a child would be stripped of mud under the shower spray.
Then her life is voted on as well.
First living child of death that she is.
[She is an unknown, Athena says, the only child of Thanatos to survive birth. We should kill her before it is too late.
Family should not kill family for what they could do, Hestia says from her place at the hearth, eyes so so far away. She was the first born after all. She was the first eaten, after all. She was the first to experience the fear of death too. The one to live with it longest. The fates said our father would be slain by our hands. And that only happened because he tried to destroy us so he wouldn’t be.
You are right, Apollo says, god of Prophecy that he is, She is the only surviving child of death. If she wasn’t meant to be alive, then she wouldn’t be. That makes her worth watching, makes her worth keeping around.]
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They spend the rest of her school year in the apartment. Six months in the place she and her mother had made home. Five months after she turned nine in December.
Three months after what should have been her mother’s 33rd birthday in march.
Two months before she leaves fourth grade, her father tells her they need to start packing up the apartment. That night, Sleep does not take her gently, Dreams do not treat her kindly. They have not since her mother died.
She packs up the apartment anyways, because if she wants to survive this life of Demigods and Divinity then she’ll have to learn how to kill the monster’s that have now starting stalking her down.
She graduates fourth grade, her father registers her for online school, the summer starts.
Her father hands her a a chain weighted by two sharp arrowheads, it is celestial bronze and it gleams against her olive skin.
•
They lock the apartment and he pockets the keys. Their things are packed away in a storage unit and the new family renting from them is only a few hours away from moving in.
They walk down the stairs and Poppy pulls the sticker with her mother’s name off the buzzer. She has only a duffel bag and backpack filled with the things she wished to take on this road trip.
Her father says renting is a good source of income for her for when he goes back to Olympus, that they will start saving now so she has something to fall back on in an emergency.
[Her Father had told her he thought that this would be his punishment should he ever be caught ‘interfering’ in his child’s life.
He has long since prepared for it.]
The door closes behind them, and her father walks them to the car.
It is only hours later that they stop, empty high surrounded by hills, he hands her a phone and tells her to call her mother’s mother.
Then the monsters come.
•
The first monster she strangles with her chain is a Basilisk. Or what her father calls a Basilisk, but it nothing like the one Harry had faced at twelve years old.
She kills it a lot easier than she did the sixty foot snake in the Chamber.
She wraps the thin chain around it neck, once, twice, three times and pulls until the snake crumbles beneath her. She shakes off the golden dust and goes for the next one.
Her father stands vigil.
•
It has been two months, and they have yet to leave Maryland. From June to September.
Her mother had been dead for one year.
She cries over her mothers gravestone and clutches the necklace made of her ashes and bones.
That river will not be her final resting place, her soul will not ever have to remember the terror of the bridge nor the Potomac as she sunk too deep for the sunlight to reach. She will not have to remember the pressure of rushing water and the feel of glass embedded in stuttering lungs.
She places the wreath of poppies on the stone, and sings her mother’s favorite song.
Her father’s hand is warm on her shoulder. He is still void of his divinity.
It has been a year.
•
It’s been four months since she graduated the fourth grade and they are now in Virginia. West Virginia and Maryland long since left behind in the rearview mirror.
It is like learning to use a rope dart, except the rope part is a chain with sharpened edges that will cut her if she takes off her gloves and the dart is a knife the severs monster’s souls from their bodies.
She stabs the arrowhead into the nape of a Hellhound that night, and wraps the chains around its neck as it tries to buck her off.
Then she pulls, drops her weight to the floor and buried the knife into the ground. The hellhound strangles itself trying to get free.
Sometimes she slits their throats and moves on. Sometimes she feels like wrapping the chain and pulling with her own hands until it crumpled beneath her.
And sometimes she like setting these traps and making them be the cause their own deaths.
[Harry Potter had known he would never be a hero. And he had been completely and wholly human, ready to tear apart the world in the name of love. He had been his mother’s child. The mother who defied death with her last breath.
Poppy knows that she will never be a hero, because she feels nothing for the monsters that had caused her mother’s death. Even if Hellhounds are not Colchis Bulls.
She wants each and every one of them to suffer like her mother had. She will teach these monsters regret.
Poppy is her father’s child and his is not human. Poppy is her father’s child, and he is Death itself.]
Everytime, they are but golden dust and the last thing they see are her too-dark eyes staring them down as they die.
•
It’s been six months since they left behind Lycoris Kimura’s apartment.
They have left behind the Virginias, the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio.
Poppy turns ten years old in a Dairy Queen as they pass through Indiana. Her father buys a candle in a Chevron gas station, and they stick it in her ice cream. Her father sings her Happy Birthday and Poppy does not make a wish. She blows out the candle anyways and makes a prayer to her uncles Sleep and Dream. Most days, sleep does not take her gently and dreams are nightmares more often than not. She can only hope that it will get better.
[She knows it will be a long time until then.]
Her father slides a small wooden box across the table and says “This is your first present, commissioned by your mother when you were about seven.”
Inside the box is charm bracket, made of gleaming celestial bronze. There are five charms hanging from it, and all of them are her father’s symbols of divinity. A Greek Theta, an oval split by a line. An inverted torch with dying flames. A butterfly with purple jewels, a sword and a poppy in pink.
Two hours later, they stand in an abandoned field that is growing wild wheat. Her father pulls out a small flashlight and twists the settings dial.
Almost too fast for her eyes to track, it shifts into a sword.
“This is a Spartan Sword, or sometimes called an Xiphos. This is the weapon I’ll be teaching you to use alongside your chains.”
“Does it have a name?” She asks as she grips the hilt against her palm. Her father shakes his head and pulls another sword from the trunk.
“You’ll have to give it one. Now let’s get started.”
•
She has no question to ask her father now. It has been a year since she got her answer. Since she learned just what her father was, just what she is.
She wanted, she wanted, she wanted so many more years of asking that stupid question. She wants a hundred more with her mother, with her father’s it is not times, with her mother’s unconditional love.
Oh how she wanted. Because she dares not wish.
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Most days she is stashed away in a RV park while her father goes off to do the tasks Zeus had told him to do while he was mortal. Or she assumes so.
Her father refuses to tell her what it, or they, actually are. So most days, she is stashed away in their RV doing school work or sharpening their weapons.
Sometimes, Poppy makes friends with other children traveling with their families.
There is Lila, who likes to hunt for flowers and has two little brothers that she never stops complaining about. She meets her in West Virginia.
There is Taylor, who likes to read and climbs on the RV to stargaze with her. He liked hearing the Greek stories for them. She met him in Ohio.
There is Lauren and Brooks, twins traveling with their aunt and uncle through South Carolina, who liked to go exploring and hiking through the woods. She teaches them to catching fireflies, and how to let them go.
[There is Joshua, a little boy of eight from Tennessee who is blind. He has uncanny aim for someone who can’t see. He likes to sing, play the guitar and bask in the sun. He is blonde haired and blue eyed and sometimes he just seems to glow when the sun hits him just right.
She thinks he is a son of Apollo. Later, her father’s conversation with Joshua’s father only confirms it. She prays to Hermes and Apollo for his safe travel to Camp Half-Blood.]
There is Betty and Eric and Clara in Kentucky. There is Sarah and Charles and Daniel In Missouri. There is William and Emma and Olivia in Illinois. There are dozens of children, dozens of lives that she dips and dives out of as they drive through the country. She wonders if any of them will remember her.
They just make her ache. Makes her memories of Hermione and Ron pulse alongside her heartbeat like an open wound and more painful than Bellatrix’s Crucio could ever hope to be. The lose of her friends, her family, feels as if she had lost her limbs, or her lungs, or the very heart the beats in her chest.
•
Most days Poppy is alone in an RV park, with her father who knows where. Sometimes she makes friends with the children that are there. They do not make her feel any less lonely and they will never be Ron and Hermione. They will never be Ginny and Luna and Neville, they will never be Katie or Fred or George, but they are friends, not matter how fleeting. She tries to enjoy it.
[But sometimes that makes her miss them even more than she did before.]
Most days, she is alone in an RV park with children who she can’t relate with and she can’t really get to know.
Poppy is beginning to hate traveling. She has never liked being alone, she has never liked being left alone in her own head.
•
[Harry Potter has never really gotten what he wanted, has he? He didn’t get peace, he didn’t get freedom, he didn’t even get death.
Maybe he is being punished for Tom Riddle’s numerous and uncountable sins. Maybe he is being punished for his audacity in thinking he get out of the war without consequence, getting away from Voldemort without consequences.
Is this his hell? His purgatory? His comeuppance? Is he doomed to live and love and ultimately lose?
Death is a mercy after all, and Harry can’t think of a better punishment for someone who welcomes Death like they are old friends.]
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She graduates from elementary school only a few months before she is supposed to turn eleven. With average grades and with nothing more than she was required to do. She’ll never be good in school, no matter what life. She wasn’t meant for desks and whiteboards and worksheets.
[Her soul has always been a little too ancient for the modern world.]
She graduates elementary school three months before the two year anniversary of her mother’s death.
They are in Florida when she does, having passed through Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama in the months since December.
She graduates elementary school without her mother.
•
They make their way back up to Maryland after June, but they don’t go as quickly as they had been for the last year and a half. They stop to admire the view instead of hunting monsters that hunt demigods and seeking things her father had been told to seek.
They take a few days through Disney Land while in Florida. Some through SeaWorld, Busch Gardens, and Universal Studios.
They visit Fort Pulaski National Monument and Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park in Georgia. Museums and Aquariums and National Parks through the Carolinas. Caves, Caverns and Waterparks in Virginia.
They take a tour of the White House when passing through D.C.
They makes some good memories. Her father, mortal and man, has had to learn a lot of things as they went. How to cook something other then simple breakfast foods, how to use the self check out at grocery stores, how to change flat tires.
Poppy loves her father. Poppy still loves her mother.
[And sometimes she can’t help but think her father is doing these things because he is already mourning her. That he is doing this before it’s too late.
Sometimes, she thinks the only thing he sees when he is looking at her is just her fragile aging morality. Sometimes she thinks he just sees her death.]
•
By the time they make it back to Maryland, her weight chain has been changed out and traded. Her father calls the weapon a Kusarigama, but the blade is longer than others of its kind, double edged and deadlier. Like a miniature war scythe. The arrowhead at the other end of the chain has a sharp bullet point, that expands to the base and littered with barbs that dig into the skin. It can not be pulled out once it is in.
He tells her it too deserves a name.
“It is forged of Stygian Iron, after all. Crafted from your mother’s heritage, and made with mine. Two half’s of one whole to make something new.” Her father says as he attaches her older weighted chain to the end of her spartan sword. When it forms back to a flashlight, a drawstring hangs from it.
“Your-… mother had given me the idea when you were around six and I was thinking of weapons to gift you. The Kusarigama is a Japanese weapon, and the Stygian Iron can only be wielded by children of the Underworld.”
“My Scythe, my Symbol of Power, is forged of Stygian Iron. My mother νύχτα, Nyx, gifted it to me a very long time ago.” He will tell her later, when he tells her the added dangers of wielding Stygian Iron. “It is what I use to sever souls from the bodies of those that deserve the Fields of Punishment. So they can not try to run before I or Hades sends them there.”
She nods, and takes the weapon with reverent hands.
They do not shake.
•
By the time they make it back to Maryland, it is September.
It has been two years since her mother had died.
[She knows why she continues to cry.]