Through the Veil

Harry had been expecting many things when he fell into the veil of death.

One of which was not to be falling for what felt like forever. He did expect the pitch-black abyss that seemed to both surround him and find a home in the depths of his soul, and he wasn't sure whether he expected an afterlife, or even wanted one after having lived for long enough already.

However, there is one other thing he had most definitely been at least hoping for, and that was to die.

Not to wake up again with absolutely no forewarning.

Therefore, he thought it was quite safe to say that Death was not what he had expected, and he rates it a solid five out of ten. Not too great, with the forever falling and all, but not exactly bad. He supposed that there were worse ways he could have gone.

(He's glad that Sirius went painlessly)

To summarise, Harry Potter falls through the Veil of Death; he does not expect to live.

Another thing he didn't think would happen is to wake up as a bloody girl.

Abruptly, he felt a drop in his stomach and a sinking feeling weighed him down. He harshly tore off the covers, breaths coming in short and quick pants. The world around her was blurred, faces he both knew and didn’t crowding his vision until all he could do was close his eyes. Pleas and cries assaulted her ears, her hands barely muffling the voices from where they were held up to save her hearing from the onslaught. He felt like screaming, but her throat was raw from the sobs threatening to choke him. It was getting harder to breathe - the walls were closing in on him and he felt so trapped, caged, like a wild animal as he grit her teeth until there was a dull ache in her jaw and curled further in on himself. It was so loud, and he couldn’t breathe—

He didn’t realise he was slipping back into unconsciousness until he felt the welcoming embrace of the darkness.

The next time he woke up went considerably easier.

The heart rate monitor was loud and shrill, but it provided some sort of consistency that Harry could use to get his bearings. He must be in a hospital, he knew, or at least some form of infirmery, and stretching out his awareness revealed no one else in the room. Bare feet - slimmer than before, the toenails pained a soft pink - padded softly on the cold stone floor as he searched the room for anything useful, his mind ignoring storing information not pertinent to his task. Nothing could be used as a weapon immediately, and he was hesitant to use magic when someone could be watching. Too many times had he almost revealed the existence of magic to muggles in his years, and he would never allow himself to do so just because he was a little disorientated, especially after he'd made it through a World War without.

The clicking of heels in the hallway alerted him to someone’s presence, and he was quick to slip through an ajar door just opposite the small cot he’d awoke in. The door closed behind him without a sound, voices filtering through that he could just make out with a silent charm.

“Sh-she must be in the bathroom, Healer Potter. The guards would have notified us if she tried to escape.” He’d become accustomed to ignoring the coincidence of the name by now - it had become quite common after a few generations, and he didn’t falter at the sound of it like he used to. The voice sounded young, male, and he’d guess him to be an intern or apprentice from the way he could practically feel the nerves. Or maybe this doctor was just that scary. He felt somewhat sorry for the girl they were looking for if that was the case.

Wait.

He whirled around in a panic, desperately searching for a mirror in the cramped bathroom, and made eye contact with his own killing-curse-green eyes - the only thing his own. A girl stared back at him, wide-eyed and scared and all wrong. This was wrong - where even was he? No hospital used the machines he had seen in his room. The bed had been uncomfortable, lacking a cushioning charm, or a heating one, or any charm at all. No magic surrounded him that he’d recognise. It all felt wild, unknown; different. Everything was wrong. This wasn’t his body, this wasn’t right. He had to get out, he had to fix this, he couldn’t be here—

An insistent knocking on the bathroom door jolted him from his racing mind, snapping him back to the present. “Alexandra, dear? Are you alright?” It was a woman’s voice this time, stern but uncomfortably soft. She clearly knew this girl; must have held some sort of strong attachment, but she was gone. No other soul inhabited the body, only the lingering remnants of a joyous smile and heart-wrenching sobs clung to the edges of his senses. It had been gone for some time now and had passed on just as he had been thrust into the body in her place. Memories that were not his own flickered across his vision, familiar like the hazy summer days in the garden spent with Luna and the children as Ginny and Hermione lounged on the porch. Just as unattainable, too.

“I’m fine, Auntie!” He choked out the words, not entirely his own, “Just a little dazed. I’ll be out in a moment, okay?” She hummed on the other side of the door, and he could hear them have their own hushed conversation. He turned back to the mirror, praying and begging in vain for his own reflection to be staring back at him this time. The girl he’d become was taller than he had been by a few inches, her skin just a few shades darker, and he took a moment to marvel at how familiar it was. Her thick hair, curly and untameable; even her straight and small nose. It was almost uncanny. He took a deep breath, watching as the girl’s chest seamlessly rose and fell in time with his own, and shook off his anxiousness. It could wait until he wouldn’t have an audience; when he wouldn’t need to pretend to be a dead girl.

The door creaked as he slowly pushed it open, hiding behind it until he was forced to take the step into the room and brave what he might find. A middle-aged woman with a heavy gaze stared at him, deep brown eyes cutting through his barely-there mask of confidence. She had the same olive skin as the boy next to her, who stood small and timid next to her strong stance. Her dark hair was pulled into a ruthless bun at the back of her head, entirely smoothed in a way that made an unfamiliar coil of jealousy streak through him. Her eyes seemed to soften at whatever she saw when looking at his new face, for she gasped and her cheeks began to dampen with her tears. “Oh, my poor girl, look at you!” Suddenly she was pulled into the doctor’s embrace, a softness even in all her hard edges. She buried a hand in his hair, now down to his waist, and clamped the other on his shoulder, resting her thin lips on his forehead in a tender kiss. “We thought we’d lost you- we did lose you. And you’re eyes, and all those scars, I can’t- oh, I can’t believe it.” Harry struggled to keep up as she continued to babble incomprehensibly, held tight in her grip. “Auntie?” he tried, and she paused her rambling. “Auntie, what happened to me?”

The boy to his right stared at him in shock, as though the question was both the most unexpected yet likely one he could have asked. The woman holding him only grew more distressed though, the muttering starting up again even faster than it had been. Instead, he turned his attention back to the boy, who took a moment to understand that the question was now aimed at him.

“Oh, uh— well, it seems you were… struck by lightning? That was after the multiple stab wounds, of course, and the— the… you know…” he trailed off uncertainly, eyes nervously flickering to rest everywhere but on Harry.

“No, I don’t know.” The demand was obvious in his tone - softer than it had been, the words almost flowing from his lips, but still the same accent, different to the one that the two in the room with him shared - and the boy took a moment to compose himself to fulfill it, gulping at the way Harry’s eyes almost glowed in the dim lighting of the late afternoon.

“You were held hostage by some rebels for just under a week. They broke into the villa in an attempt to kill either your father or mother, but you were the only one at home.” The woman had begun to glare at the boy, no doubt sure the news would only distress Harry. It wouldn’t; he needed to know what the girl had been put through before her death. He muttered a soft ‘go on’ to urge the boy to continue, and he did. “Three were taken into custody, and they believe they wanted to take you as a way to… appease the Gods into taking action against your father.”

“I’m sorry, the King?” There hadn’t been a king in England in a couple of centuries, Harry was sure of it. Then again, they weren’t speaking English. How hadn’t he noticed? “Where am I? Who am I?”

The woman began to cry again.

The eyes are the window to the soul.

It was a common saying in the earlier years of his life, though it began to die out sometime in the second century of his immortal life. Nevertheless, it still rang true, especially to wizards. When one’s soul has been warped and shaped by the killing curse as much as Harry Potter’s had, it was no wonder they reflected it back even after death, even in a new life. Looking at the photo of the girl he had become, he knew her eyes were beautiful, but they were not the unnatural hue of green he had come to know as his alone. Now, they reflected the same eery toxic glow, and he thought back to the saying he had previously discarded. The eyes are the window to the soul, and his eyes were the window to a killing curse green. What did that say about him? That one curse had influenced his soul so much that something as simple as his eye colour was affected. He had his mother’s eyes, they had said. A green so bright they could enchant anyone, he was told. These were not the eyes of a mother he had never known. No, they were the eyes of his infected soul, still aching with a gaping wound, bleeding out in despair. These were the eyes of the soul in the girl’s body, but they were not her own. They were his eyes, old and tired, not hers; not young and so alive, with so much to see. Her soul was gone too soon. His had stayed too long.

He turned his attention to his new body instead, now taking the time to take in the scars that littered his figure; his own original lightning bold on his forehead, one part bisecting through his eyebrow and another trailing off down his temple before ending just next to the eye. Another stood out on his upper right arm, twisting to follow the veins down to his wrist, and the last was on his left thigh, spreading from the outside of his hip to the knee. Where the curse scars had never truly healed in his past life, now they were little more than raised, gold lines across his body. The only times he had ever died, even if only for a moment, save for the only one that was permanent and holds no bearing on this new body, and now they were reduced to mere discoloration. More littered his skin, only the slightest of them visible; like the line on his forearm, or the slice across his neck, indiscernible to most. He supposed it made sense - Pomfrey had always made sure he was aware of the consequences of curse scars, that he knew they could never truly heal to the point of being unseen. They held too much magic, she had said, and it would latch on like a harmless leach. His own magical core remained mostly unaffected, but his body would forever hold the remainder of them, even in Death, it seemed.

Turning to look at his back, he was surprised to see one of his tattoos had remained: a magical one, taking the image of a Hungarian Horntail and charmed to act in tune with his emotions. It stretched along his spine in gold ink, with the head often coming to lie at the base of his neck when passive and the whole body entangled with lily flowers, and the sight of it brought some level of comfort to him in this new body. Well, her body, Harry supposed.

A knock on the door pulls Harry from his— her thoughts, and she hurried to change into the clothes the doctor had provided. She warred with herself on her next moves as she pulled the blouse on. Part of her longed to stay, to get answers for both herself and the girl she was now imposing as, but the other side, the paranoid one who’d acted as a guide throughout the war, told her to leave, to get to safety and take stock. It told her to run and not look back until she knew it was the safest option.

She follows that voice.

Another knock sounded just as she tugged on the shoes, and she knew she had run out of time. So, without much thought, she opened the window, and she jumped. Yeah, not her brightest idea, but she’d certainly done worse. With a sloppy roll, she took off running into the streets surrounding the hospital. They wouldn’t find her, she knew, and with that in mind, she disappeared.

The Asset had a ghost in his head. It took the form of a strange girl with intricate scars that looked like lightning in an impossible golden color, and she spoke with an English accent in the English language to match. She spoke proper, the Queen’s English so most likely from Southern England and well-educated, but she swore worse than the soldiers that danced in the periphery of his mind ever seemed to. He did not know when she first appeared, and he refused to look at her for fear of what the men watching him may do - not to her, they don’t see the girl, can’t with the way they move through her sometimes in the cramped space of his cell sleeping quarters - but he heard the whispers of a possible new asset. A girl, one of the men had said, with strange scars, bright eyes, and power beyond their imaginations. Another had scoffed at the first, obviously senior in ranking with the way he looked down his nose at the man and his ranked uniform in disdain, but clearly not high enough to dismiss casual conversation entirely, and his words were equally as harsh as his glare. She does not wake, was his retort, what use could she possibly be to the cause if the girl cannot even open her eyes?

(The girl had been stood to the left of his cot and had scoffed at the men, muttering under her breath increasingly creative curses involving their mothers and something about a broomstick that he had not quite caught. It had amused him, if only because the second man had taken the food from one of the prepared houses on his last long mission and told the Asset to deal with it. If she saw the twitch of his lips, she was too busy moving on to planning some new inventive methods of punishment for the man to say anything about it.)

The first time he looked at her, from what little he could remember, he was in the chair and all he could feel was pain, but she was there, stroking his damp hair from his face and crying with him. He looked into her eyes then, into that impossible green, sunk into their depths, and he felt safe. No one in the room noticed, too busy with the flickering lights.

When he finally spoke to her, it had been years since he took notice of her presence. The technology in the base was new and capable of so much more than before and one of the younger recruits - expendable, young - took some time to explain the newer communications device and everything else that had changed since he went away, into the cold slumber he dreaded. He did not know how long, exactly, it had been, but it didn’t really matter, because the moment she laid eyes on him again she had launched into summarising everything that had happened between then and now. He did not know how she was always with him but never there, or why his ghost was his at all, but it helped that she was. She told him that his old handler had died (he was old, she admitted, and it had been enough years between this assignment and the last that he had finally passed. That was all she had said on the matter, and later he hadn’t asked her to say more) when he had taken a moment to wonder who the fresh-faced recruit who was barking orders in his face was failing to command. How she knew he could see her was one of the questions always swirling through his thoughts before he slept, even when it was cold enough it took him years to wake.

He was on his first mission since waking that it happened. He did not know much about his target, only that we always went to one specific cafe downtown in Brooklyn at exactly 7:30 every morning and left a swift half-hour later He had set himself up early on a rooftop that would give him view of both the seat the man would take in the cafe and the ally he would take to meet his first client. He waited, blending in with the darkness of the winter morning for hours and easily going unnoticed. Easy only in theory, he amended. His ghost was there, talking away at him about the agent his handler had been failing to ‘chat up for a quick shag’, as well as anything else she could find about some of the new recruits.

“Shut up,” he had said. “I do not care.”

His sentiments were in Russian, but she must have been picking up the language (of course, how else was she to understand the latest gossip of the innermost workings of those at their station?) if the overdramatic gasp she let out was any indication.

“I fucking knew it!” she shrieked from behind him, and he had never been so happy to have had an assignment without comms, only a radio, lest his superiors have heard him speak to no one and the quiet curses that followed. He had no doubts that they were somehow watching him, but with his head angled the way it was to look down the scope of his weapon, they couldn’t have possibly seen his mouth move. He was free to talk to her, more so mumble responses to her chatter, but it was the most freedom he’d had to make a choice for himself and follow it through, even if it was only talking to a ghost.

(He ignored the flash of blonde hair and shoes stuffed with the last week's papers at the thought of fighting back, taking his freedom. Hydra would not like it, so he could not either.)

He goes to say something to her again, something about how there's nothing to know, when she opens her mouth again. “Do you even know how long I’ve been waiting for someone to talk to? Talking at some random guy is drastically different from a conversation, you know. And it’s been, like, literal decades since I had a decent conversation— actually, no, more like a century at this rate, and don’t even get me started on what they’ve been feeding my poor body! Seriously, who do I have to kill to just get a decent drink when I wake up? Fuck that, it doesn't even need to be decent, I’d even accept the blasphemous way those bloody Americans make a tea-” He quickly put to work his long-curated skill of tuning out his ghost, subtly rolling his eyes, even though his mind wirls through the implications that she hadn't known he could see her, that she had followed him, that she had spoken to him like he could respond despite thinking he couldn't even hear her. “Merlin, the astral realm sucks, I hate it here-”

He noted that her Russian was basically fluent, only the barest hints of her original accent shining through, and he almost lost himself in the thoughts of how long she must have gone without him to have picked up an entire language with no guidance before he came back. It was not enough, however, to truly distract him from the odd phrase that slipped from her mouth. “Merlin?” he asked, not voicing how some of her speech was odd, slang and terms he had never heard of, even from the British. He had thought she hadn’t left the main base they were both stationed at, but maybe she had? He could hardly imagine a ghost traveling to England, even if she seemed to defy the laws of physics by floating at his side and cartwheeling in boredom.

She looked thoroughly chastised by the question though, and took a moment to gather herself. “Well,” she began, “once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there lived the greatest sorcerer known to man, who made his way to Camalot, where he acted as the manservant to the Great King Auther Pendragon-” She proceeded to recite the long tale of some show about the man, including every detail, of every episode - with her own personal commentary, of course.

Good lord, he had never in his life wanted to throw something at someone as much as he did at that moment, and he really wanted to throw a moving helicopter at his new handler the moment he laid eyes on him and his puce face in the hopes of decapitation at least.

She then moved on to earnestly recount stories and tales of Merlin from the folklore of various origins, of which she was sure to note the source, even he had never heard of them and most likely never would again.

8:00 arrived, and his target stood from the booth in the back and made his way into the ally the next block over.

The soldier took his shot.

The ghost went quiet.

It took him a while to notice, between assignments and the gaps where everything was so cold, but when he did it became laughably obvious. It did not matter how long he stayed away, or how painful the chair was, or how quickly he submitted to the words, he began to remember. It had started with smaller things, like the dates he would go away again, the names of the recruits who would drop off his meals, or even the addresses of safehouses he had overheard. Then, what had once been phantoms of figures on the cusp of his awareness were now hazy memories haunting his sleep. He supposed it was the ghost’s doing, but when he had asked about it in the darkness of his room cell, she hadn’t said anything. Instead, she had simply stroked his hair until the drowsiness of sleep claimed him. He wouldn’t have even been sure he had asked had it not been for the way her hand had momentarily stilled, just enough for the Soldier to pick up.

early the next morning, she told him she had found his file, deep in some archives. He did not ask how.

She told him his name was James Buchanan ‘Bucky’ Barnes. She told him about the cryo chamber.

The next time he woke from it, he remembered.

But she was gone.

Harry wakes from her dream simultaneously breathless and heaving. If the panic hadn’t been gripping so tightly to her heart that she feared it’d burst, she may have found the contradiction somewhat funny. As it is, she gulps in the stale air around her and ignores the metallic taste in her mouth until it threatens to make her taste her measly dinner form the night before for a second time, this one much less appetising than the last..

Not exactly the best wake-up for such an important day, she thinks.

Looking to her bedside, she catches a glimpse of the flashing ‘4:07’ of the clock and barely stifles the groan pushing up her throat. Nevermind, she tells herself - it only gives her more time to ready herself for the day ahead.

(She pointedly ignores the voice that whispers about how it's just more time to wallow in anxiety)

She nods, determined, and drags herself from the bed into the shower.

The flat she’s chosen to rent isn’t great, not by a long shot, but the area’s cheap for what it offers because of the damages from the invasion, and she doesn’t exactly need a palace. Of course, any of the houses that had been brought with her would have been better, and she really fancies staying in the small cottage she’d stored for the extra lonely times— no, it doesn’t matter. SHIELD may have fallen, but they're not the only people that could find her out. So, maybe going to work for the man that very much could is just a tad stupid, but Harry never claimed to be the best at planning in advance. The decision to respond to the advert had been impulsive at best, and her team had called her so foolish that she was brilliant.

She takes the compliment and ignores the rest.

Now, though, she really wishes some forethought had gone into this plan, because ‘do what you can without being found out’ isn’t exactly the most reassuring. Of course, had there been a detailed itinerary, she either wouldn’t be the person completing the assignment or it would be thrown out the window the second she was in the building.

She takes a moment to stare into the eyes reflecting back at her after the shower, breathing deeply like Trist had shown her a dozen times before.

In

She could do this

Out

She’s done the same a million times

In

It’ll all be fine

Merlin, she hopes so