The Master of Death
It had started seven years after the war. Harry didn't know why he bothered to remember, but every now and then, the memories would come back.
Like ghosts
6 years earlier:
Harry watched his friends rejoice with their families, standing in the background, staring at them like he was watching it on a movie screen.
He watched everyone cry for the people whom they had lost, and he stood back, not having any more tears to shed. He watched everyone celebrate the life they could now live, but he only sat and watched, not even raising his glass when Hermione purposed a toast just for him. Everybody else raised their glasses, all of them looking at him with joy and gratitude. He could see it, their gratitude, their reverence.
It made him.......sick.
He didn't visit his family. He no longer had any family to visit. He didn't cry for the people that he had lost. He had not enough tears to shed for them all.
Sirius fell through a veil, a ticket to the other side. His godfather would never come back to him, never prank Remus or the Weasley family again. Between his own fortune and his godfather's, he could have probably bought out the Ministry. The greedy bastards would have taken all they could get.
Remus laid still, holding hands with his best friend, and the mother of his child. He left his child in the care of his mother-in-law, a renegade with Black Magic still running through her veins. He had cried for these people many times already, but he no longer had tears to shed or have grief to brave.
The thoughts rolled through his head like a roaring tidal wave, constantly crashing against the shores of his consciousness that barely held back any emotions that came with them.
The days went by. Everyone was moving on, coping with the guilt of murder by having children and staying faithful to their spouses. The heavy burden that was put upon them when that green light left their wand and hit their enemy never seemed to penetrate through the false sense of love, peace, and harmony that everyone had trapped themselves in.
Harry knew better. He watched as the life he knew crumbled into tiny pieces. The Earth Mother, once so vibrant and full of life, was dying. At first, he could barely feel it. It was a small, distant hum in the back of his mind. The subdued stench of decay clung faintly to the trees and grass surrounding Potter Manor, and it mixed with the smell of sulfur coming from the muggle factory not too far away from his home. The stench made him retch every time he stepped outside, and the animals around his manor continued to die out in places that Harry couldn't help but find whenever he did leave his big, empty house.
For years, he could feel the decay and death get worse. After the war, Harry had become accustomed to being around death, having experienced it himself. However, he could practically feel the death of his mother planet, and he knew that there was nothing that he could do to stop it.
Eventually, he could no longer feel Gaia's energy through his shoes. He had taken to walking everywhere barefoot, when he left that is, ignoring all of the weird looks no matter where he was, whether it be in the Muggle town a few miles away, or Diagon Ally.
The trees around his home withered. Their once prosperous, green-leaved branches only held shriveled husks of beauty. The menial, every-season task of raking leaves was no longer needed because alas, there were no longer any more leaves to rake.
Harry watched helplessly as his home died, feeling like it had taken his own life, his passion, with it.
The Mother was dying. Maybe Voldemort was right. Muggles are a blight on life, a disease that spread through every belief, every hate-filled child that was given life.
Days turned into months, and months turned into years.
Harry watched his great-great-grandchild hold her baby boy through the window of her hospital room under an invisibility spell. His body, somehow, still looked twenty-two. No, it wasn't a question of somehow, because Harry knew why. Had known why ever since he held the wand and the stone in his hand while the cloak rested on his shoulders.
He had just turned 174 two days previously. He spent his birthday drowning himself in Scotch and Bacardi, but his system worked overtime, and the liquor was filtered before it could intoxicate him.
Later, he would visit his best friends, laid next to each other in eternal rest.
In a place, he knew he would never belong.
__________
In the year 2138, Harry watched his brother-in-arms lose feeling in his legs.
Harry had met Jake Sully while stationed in Bangladesh. Jake was an impressive soldier. He was able to adapt to conditions that seemed blasphemous to many others. He was fast, agile, and was a good shot with a gun. It wasn't long before they had become friends. Jake seemed to fill up a hole inside of Harry that had been left empty since Hermione had finally passed away many years before. They talked together, they laughed together.
They fought together. It was the first time in a long time that Harry felt connected with anyone since Gaia's presence had finally faded from the back of his mind.
__________
When Harry first met Tom, he could not help but break down in laughter. The twins sure looked the same, and idiotic, when standing right next to each other. Jake had come in the door, immediately slung his arm around his older brother and started to holler about 'some girl from Ecuador that you would not believe, Tommy'. Jake was bigger than Tom, his military workout regimen had made him fill out and leave his science-oriented brother in the dust.
Jake and Tom were vastly different. Tom could talk for hours and hours on the latest and greatest biochemically engineered project that his coworkers and he had started on. It was almost comical, really. Jake's nose would scrunch up when Tom started to go on a ramble, eventually shouting "Tommy! Shut the hell up already!" To shut him up so that they could eat in peace.
Harry enjoyed the brotherly relationship that he shared with Tom and Jake. For the first time in over fifty years, he had family bonds again.
He was finally feeling again.
___________
In the year 2151, Tom and Harry were recruited into the AVATAR program. An international space program only fit for the strongest in mind and body. Tom was recruited for his Ph.D. in Biochemists. Harry was invited for his extensive military training.
Plus, in Grace Augustine's very words, "It would be great to have a Military General who isn't a pain in my ass.''
Harry was nervous. Tom and he were getting ready to break the news to Jake, who had taken a leave for a week to celebrate Harry's birthday. He twiddled his thumbs together during dinner as he tried not to bounce his leg.
"Harry, what wrong? You haven't touched your casserole." Jake asked his friend, watching him freeze in place. Out of the corner of his eye, Jake noticed Tom try not to bash his face into the table.
"Um......um...." Harry didn't have a clue where all of these nerves came from. He was one hundred and seventy-four years old for Gaia's sake. He should not be nervous to tell his twenty-seven-year-old best friend that he was recruited to go on a six-year journey to a planet that is 4.4 light-years away.
Or, on second thought, maybe he should.
Harry looked over towards Tom, pleading for his help with the situation, to say something. Tom looked amused, and Harry swore that he was going to prank the ever-living hell out of the muggle, marauder style.
"What Harry is trying to say, Jake is that he and I have been chosen to travel to a planet far away from Earth. He has been really nervous to tell you, but since we start training in September, he wanted to tell you now." Tom sounded so calm. Harry waited for what seemed like forever, running through scenarios of what could happen now. Jake could get super mad and leave, tell him to never talk to him again. He could storm out right--Wait. Why on Earth is he laughing?
Jake was holding his stomach, laughter making his hunched shoulders quake. Harry stared at his friend in shock because clearly, he had lost his mind. Or maybe his hearing. Too many grenades in close proximity will do that to you.
"Your," Jake tried to compose himself. "Your face Harry." He broke down again, this time Tom joining in.
"I tried to tell him not to worry," Tom said between peels of laughter.
"Oh Harry, don't give me that face. I don't care that you are doing this. I already knew that being the 'Army Dog' wasn't what you wanted to do, or who you wanted to be known as. This is an opportunity for you. Plus, it's better than a genius bastard like you be chosen, then one of the dumbshits in your division." Jake said, finally calming down enough to talk without breaking down again.
"Yeah, you are right. However, I want you to know that I take so much offense to that! I trained those soldiers myself, you dumb shit. They are like my children. Frankly, children that I trained to shoot guns and throw grenades the right way, but Children, nonetheless.''
_________
Against his wishes, they ended up not teaching Jake Na'vi.
Jake wasn't in the program, nor did he want to be, so Harry and Tom found it unnecessary and a waste of time to teach Jake an entirely new language.
It amused both Tom and Harry to no end though, because it wasn't a rare occurrence for Toma and Harry to break out into Na'vi in an effort to fuck with the people around them. Harry couldn't help but liken it to the way that the people in Bangladesh would break into Bengali around his platoon. Jake, the poor bastard, always ended up apologizing for his 'Obviously mentally ill brothers. I am so sorry for their behavior, ma'am' wherever they went, which always, without a doubt, would send Harry and Tom into absolute hysterics as Jake bodily pushed them away from the pitied looks.
__________
Jake, with his current funds, would never be able to walk again. A well-placed bullet after a skirmish in Venezuela lodged itself in his spine, leaving him incapacitated and vulnerable in a back alleyway.
Harry found him during his second week in some hospital in Rio, cursing out one of the nurses while she tried to change the bandages on his arm where a stray bullet had grazed through the soft tissue. He didn't know how he had gotten shot again when he had been in like three different hospitals in two fucking weeks.
''Jake, I know that trouble seems to follow you everywhere, but really? Venezuela?'' Harry shook his head. ''It is alright now miss, you can go. Just leave the supplies.'' Harry smiled at the nurse. After giving him a narrow-eyed look that practically screamed suspicion, Harry sighed before getting out his wallet to show her his license. ''See? I'm licensed.''
''Sorry for dragging you all the way down here, Harry. At least you got to come to Rio.'' Jake said after the nurse left the room, seeming to feel a little bit better about not having to deal with the Marine laying in the bed.
''You're lucky that it was me to pick up the phone and not Tommy,'' Harry said, getting to work on the wound.
Harry watched Jake flinch, and he really didn't care if it was because of a particularly hard tug on his wound, or the implication that Tom could have picked up the phone before Harry.
Probably a little of both, to be honest.
__________
Only three months later, Harry and Jake watch the cremation of Tomas Sullivan.
Harry had felt it when the bullet entered the older Sullivan. He had felt the pain of having the piece of lead smash his brain to mush. It was the first time in his life he regretted his position as Master of Death, but it had been fifty years ever since he had been connected enough to someone to feel their death.
Jake watched his brother's body burn while sitting in his wheelchair. With Harry next to him, he felt better. However, Tom wasn't just his brother. Harry's overly tight grip on his shoulder wouldn't let him even think of forgetting that.
Tom was Harry's brother too.
"Your brother, he was in a program." The lawyer that stood with the two men said. Harry growled lowly, his eyes narrowing at the man the longer he spoke and the implications of what his words meant. "Your genes are an exact replica of his." Even Jake, who had always been slower on the uptake, knew where this was going.
Harry couldn't help but regret not teaching Jake Na'vi, but he knew that hindsight would always be twenty-twenty.
__________
"I will not see you for another five years, Jake," Harry said quietly, watching his best friend get put under cryo-sleep. Alas, he knew immediately that the cryo-sleep would not take to his body. His magic would disrupt the drugs, filtering the anesthetics before they could take root in his brain.
He, however, didn't expect to be put in a meditative state for the five-year trip.
Half-starved and bored out of his mind, Harry thought of the long-dead planet that he was voluntarily leaving behind. A planet that he could feel withering away into nothing for hundreds of years now. Honestly, he didn't even recognize the barren planet for what it was when he was born.
There was almost no green anymore. Technology, overpopulation, and habitual loss had taken care of that.
He felt a pang of guilt. After living in pain for over one hundred years, along with putting almost an equal amount of those years trying to find a cure for his planet, he was ready to just leave.
He didn't know if he should feel bad. It wasn't his fault.
Not really.