Cross
Pain.
Excruciating, overwhelming pain.
Harry could feel it crushing him, the jagged pieces like fissures across smooth glass as he tried to gather himself together. He didn’t know where he started and where he ended. He didn’t know how he even got here.
Harry just knew black, and agony. The jolt ripping through his spine like paper as he curled into himself, unable to hold himself together when he was being torn in two.
Why?
Harry shouted the question in his mind, the darkness making his vision twist as he tried to make sense of it all. He remembered coming home that afternoon. He remembered falling asleep in his makeshift bed, fully-clothed with his glasses pressed on his face.
He remembered it all with startling clarity.
But how he ended up here, in absolute nothingness…Harry did not know.
Harry could not make sense of it, and even contemplating such a thing became more and more difficult as the seconds passed. As the pain began to build like water flooding a sunken ship, the ripples twisting and turning his insides.
Please make it stop.
He begged, but the words did not leave his lips. His mouth hung open with his screams, but no words could pass through when they were twisted into pained groans.
It was absolute gibberish. It was madness.
And Harry wanted nothing more than for it all to stop.
Please, I would do anything…
And he would. Even if it meant dying. Anything was better than this.
“Anything?”
Harry almost missed the soft hiss, the voice weightless as it danced between the heightening octaves of his screams.
Yes.
Harry thought, almost instantly. The word shouted so loudly in his mind that he could hear the word ring in the back of his eyelids like droplets of water rippling a calm lake.
And then the pain stopped. The scream tearing through his vocal chords halted mid-shout. As if not mere moments earlier, he had not been undergoing the most painful experience of his life.
Harry felt his limbs collapse, boneless and weightless as if he were a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Harry could only focus on the relief that this brought, on the calm and the peace that now overtook the chaotic ramble of his thoughts.
He could have cried from being released from the agony.
Thank God…
“Your gratitude is misplaced.”
Harry did not have the energy to react. He knew deep in the pit of his stomach that he should be wary, that the presence of another in this black void he’d been thrust into should make him nervous. But he wasn’t.
What point was there in feeling alarmed? The voice had relieved him of his pain. Even if it was suspicious timing.
If the thing had wanted to hurt him, Harry was convinced it would have. It would have simply left him suffering as he had mere seconds before if that was its intention.
“W-who a-are you?” Harry managed to say, his throat hoarse as he tried to string the words together. It was strange to hear himself after he’d spent God knows how long screaming. It was almost as if Harry were hearing someone else, as if a perfect stranger had spoken rather than himself. But Harry knew that it was his lips that had moved, his tongue that twisted to shape the syllabus to communicate with this unseen person.
Or whatever it was.
“Tom Riddle, your guide into the otherworld. The line between the spaces of life and death. You have called, your cries like the melodies of the sirens dancing along the minds of unlearned men.”
Harry blinked, but did not move. His limbs were like dead weights, and he was certain that if he even tried to stand that he’d collapse like a useless heap of limbs. His muscles were weaker than he ever recalled them being, the power he had worked into each tendon and flap of skin lost in this world of nothing.
Here, he was not Harry Potter, star football player. Here, he was just Harry.
Though, that certainly didn’t mean he wouldn’t strive to understand what it was that had happened. His body was useless, but that didn’t mean he couldn;t work his mouth around to speak and figure out just what this all even bloody meant.
“O-otherworld? Are you saying I died? In my sleep?” Harry asked, his mind sluggishly piecing together the meanings and the implications hidden between the stranger’s voice.
“Correct. Your heart was failing on you, an untraceable illness you nor any of the healers of your time could possibly have mended.”
Harry swallowed audibly in surprise, the voice now sounding much closer. It sounded cleaner somehow, the hissing less pronounced and the pitch of the voice like a blade cutting through a thick flap of meat.
“So you must be the grim reaper.”
Harry knew then, deep in the marrow of his bones that this is what the voice was. That the end of his agony was likely the moment he had given in to death. That could only mean that the pain had to have been life trying to force him back to his body.
It had to be that. Harry couldn’t think of any other reason for his suffering. It certainly certainly explained why so few persons right at the precipice fell rather than stepped back, hands gripping onto life with deft fingers.
“I am known by many names. That is but one,” the voice said, the sound much closer now. So close that Harry was certain he could hear the soft sound of breaths from right above his head. “Shinigami...psychopomp...grim reaper...they are all a means to an end. An explanation strung together by intelligent and ignorant minds, alike.”
Harry’s breath hitched as he listened, the voice like water as it danced along his senses. It was like listening to music, the way the voice spoke was almost ethereal. Enticing as it was haunting in its cadence.
“You have chosen death in spite of your strong desire to live. In spite of the future I am certain you’ve strived your short life to reach.”
Harry sighed when he felt something cool press against his cheek. It felt like a finger, with the way soft little hairs teased along his cheekbones, the soft digit tracing down until it clasped just beneath his chin.
It was an oddly tender gesture, one that Harry had not expected at all.
“You have chosen to give up your soul. I did not expect that from you, Harry James Potter.”
Harry wasn’t sure what shocked him most, then. The sound of his name or the sudden flood of light that nearly blinded him in that exact instance.
The darkness flickered away, like a mischievous child playing with the light switch in his mum’s bedroom as she slept. Harry blinked furiously to stop his vision from dancing, to erase the black spots that made keeping his eyes open difficult.
It was several seconds before he could make sense of the world he was in, and Harry felt his heart (was it his heart?) race. The world around him was white, like water frozen at the corners of his freezer.
There was no color. It was almost as terrible as the blackness he had been swallowed by.
It made it quite easy for him to notice the single figure in the room with him. The only speck of color in an otherwise colorless world.
Tom Riddle, the Grim Reaper.
He was possibly the most beautiful person Harry had ever seen. It was almost unreal, and Harry couldn’t stop himself from taking in the sight of a young boy, perhaps a few years younger than himself, lightly touching his chin.
“Oh.”
Harry had no words, and gauging from the slowly rising smile on the boy’s face, Harry was sure that the grim reaper knew that as well.
It couldn’t have been more obvious.
“I expected that you would fight me. That you would claw and bite as you have in your many lives before. You are life itself. The essence of joy and light, and yet…”
The grim reaper paused, and Harry took in the way the boy’s hair lay neatly on his head. It was completely unlike the mess on Harry’s head, even the way the single curl on boy’s forehead fell on that smooth, pale skin looked perfectly elegant. It screamed of control and vanity.
It shouted hours of standing behind a mirror and tons of hair pomade in the mornings.
It made the boy look handsome, and Harry wondered why he even made this assessment at all.
This was death incarnate. He could possibly make himself look like anything he wanted. He could be anyone he wanted to be. Anything that could make the deceased possibly comfortable. Harry was sure of this.
But how had the grim reaper known him? He spoke as if he had met Harry before. As if Harry had been an acquaintance, a friend. Or perhaps, an enemy of sorts?
It made no sense.
“I-I don’t understand…”
The boy froze for a moment, the grim reaper’s dark eyes flashing with some unnamed emotion before smiling at him. It was an overtly friendly expression.
It made Harry nervous. The expression looked strange on the pretty boy’s face,as if he were caught between being fond and predatory all at once.
“Your soul is older than the stars in your world. Always dancing along my fingertips, but never quite within my grasp.”
Harry’s brows furrowed in confusion, and he made to speak once more, to ask just what the bloody hell was going on, before the boy interrupted him.
“You die, but never for long. Something always pulled you back...duty...friendship...loyalty,” the grim reaper continued, his fingers tightening on his chin before relaxing when Harry winced.
“I have waited for you for...a millenia.”
Harry felt his face heat when the boy’s voice dropped low, noticing the way the grim reaper’s eyes darkened and stared fixedly into his face.
“And now, you are mine.”
Harry gasped when the grim reaper’s fingers suddenly dug into his shoulder and hauled him to his feet, the movement making his vision swim and his body scream in protest.
Harry wasn’t ready. His body felt like it would break, like his bones were brittle with old age and his muscles had atrophied in the time that he had relaxed onto the ground.
But the boy hefted him up with an ease surprising in someone several inches shorter than himself.
Harry had always imagined that the grim reaper would be tall. A towering figure that would overwhelm all that had the misfortune of being in his presence.
...but this was certainly not what he’d thought. Tom Riddle was a good head shorter than he was.
“Yours? I don’t understand what you--”
“You gave into death. You begged for relief, and I have freed you from the suffering of living. You promised me anything in exchange for deliverance.”
Harry’s body shook within the boy’s arms, his eyes staring disbelievingly at the capricious gleam in the reaper’s eyes. Harry did not understand what this ancient creature could possibly want with him. What use could Harry be? He was just...Harry.
“But why? None of this makes sense. You say you know me but I don’t remember you. What use to you am I? I should be just another plain soul like--!”
“You will never be just a soul,” the reaper interrupted smoothly. Harry felt the boy’s grip tighten around him, and he tried hard not to cry out from the pressure tugging at his bones.
“You exist to counterbalance the darkness, to fight and steer me away from a path wrought with suffering and pain. You were the only one that understood and truly saw me for the monster that I was.”
Harry’s breath caught, and he noted then how the black in the boy’s eyes began to melt away into a bright, vibrant red. The obsession in the orbs enough to choke Harry as he strained to make his limbs move, to force them to jerk and twist.
But Harry’s body only trembled, the weakness in the limbs keeping him pinned within the arms of the reaper.
“Your memory loss is certainly a shame...but I suppose you would never have given in if you had remembered just who waited on the other side.”
Harry couldn’t look away from the blinding red, watching the round pupil shrink into thin slits. It was almost like that of a serpent’s with the way it thinned.
Harry felt like he would be violently ill.
“Your soul will never cross. It never had. And now, it never will.”