Typically, Harry slept in the middle. It made sneaking out of bed in the wee hours somewhat difficult but Harry had plenty of practice and Grimmauld Place grew more attuned to his wishes with every month he spent living within its walls. The canopy sprouted a rope that helpfully allowed him to lever himself up without making much noise, and the floors stayed obligingly silent as he padded barefoot down the hall to his study.
Kreacher had anticipated him: a glass of firewhiskey with fresh ice cubes waited at the small wet bar built into the bookcases along one wall. Harry picked it up and went to the bay window with its padded bench. A pleasant ache made itself known as he sat down, making him smile faintly as he raised the glass to his lips with memories from just a few hours before.
The firewhiskey was a whole other kind of burn as it traced its way down his throat and its warmth spread through Harry’s abdomen. He took another sip, reveling in the bite before its fire broke against the water in his body, ever-flowing and constant.
Then Harry closed his eyes and concentrated.
When he opened them, he was no longer alone.
Master.
“So you’re Death, then,” Harry said, watching with slitted eyes as the… entity moved across the room to stand by the opposite side of the window bench. It had the vague silhouette of a person in a hooded cloak, and yet was distinctly non-corporeal. In Harry’s peripheral vision it lost even the approximation of human form and became something… else.
I am. And you are the one who has mastered my Hallows.
“Do you want them back?” Harry said. “I’ve no intention of using the Stone, and I have little need of either Cloak or Wand, really.”
You are not a slave to temptation or power. Only one who unites the Hallows and resists their allure may find themselves the master of Death.
Harry sipped his firewhiskey and waited for the burn to fade before asking, “What does that mean, then?”
You will not die until you wish it. Nor will those bound to you in magic.
Which, to the best of Harry’s knowledge, included a magically binding handfasting. How convenient. Barty and Theo, if they wished it, would live on with him.
That was easier to wrap his mind around than his apparent immortality at three in the morning.
You may also ask me to take others before their time.
Slowly, Harry smiled. “Does that include someone who has made a horcrux?”
Death made a displeased—well, it wasn’t a sound. His voice rang in Harry’s head and yet seemed entirely independent of things like sound waves carried through physical matter. That creature you call your Lord has dabbled in perverse and unnatural powers. A soul is not meant to be so maligned. It is an insult to the gift of Life.
That thoroughly derailed Harry’s train of thought. “Wait, Life is an… entity like you?”
Not like me, and yet very like.
Okay, super unhelpful answer, but Harry decided one inhuman all-powerful eldritch horror was enough to deal with in one day, and didn’t ask anything more.
I will gladly take the remains of Tom Riddle from this plane whenever you so desire, Death went on.
“Mmm. Not yet.” Harry swirled his drink and listened to the faint tink of ice cubes against glass. “But someday, yes. No one should live forever. He serves a purpose, for now, but eventually, he will be a force of stagnation instead of one for change.”
Death seemed vaguely disappointed, but not in a way that felt dangerous. Your will be done.
“I don’t want to keep you,” Harry said. “I just… had a few questions. Are you sure you don’t want to take the Hallows back?”
Despite not having anything even approximating a face, Death managed to smile, which made Harry’s brain hurt, so he took a long drink to distract himself. They will pass to me upon your death and no sooner, but your consideration speaks well of you.
It was gone in the next instant, there and then not-there. Harry strongly suspected his brain had just skipped over the actual moment of Death’s departure. “Kreacher,” he called.
The elf appeared with a pop, another decanter in hand, and refilled Harry’s glass without being asked. “Master is summoning strange magics,” he said in his croaking bullfrog voice.
“Trust me,” Harry said with a faint grimace, “I won’t be doing that again anytime soon.”
It was, however, a relief to know that he wouldn’t have to go on some idiotic treasure hunt when Voldemort outlived his utility. Harry sank back into the bench seat and peered out the window at the sky. It was enchanted to show the stars as they were, without respect for weather or light pollution. The Milky Way spilled across the heavens in a great sprawl of light. Canis Major had only recently sunk below the horizon and would not return to the northern hemisphere until December, but Harry could see it clearly in his mind’s eye, with the Sirius system gleaming brightly at its heart.
The Blacks were iron and fire like the stars for which they were named. I hope you are proud of me, Harry thought to the ancestors of the family that had adopted him. I hope you watch me and approve.
If he used the Stone, he could talk to them. But he would not. It was, as Death said of horcruxes, perverse. On Samhain, when the veils thinned, Harry would feel them again, and until he himself moved on, that was as close as he would come to the souls on the other side.
I love you, Sirius. I hope you can see me.
Please forgive me what I've done.
<>
September 2nd, 2023
The stately three-bedroom house was beautiful, airy and full of natural light that gleamed on its warm honey-gold floors. Every comfort Jules thought to want just seemed to appear: all the latest in artefice from Archimedes Industries, squashy unpretentious furniture, books, comics, games. Two house-elves watched over him and the house and its thirty acres of surrounding land, which contained a forest, a stream deep enough for fishing, a swimming hole, a lawn, a small stable for the Abraxan mare and five mooncalves who kept her company, a gazebo, and sprawling gardens so bursting with life that Jules could get lost in them for hours on end.
All the luxury in the world couldn’t distract him from the fact that this was a cage.
He wanted to hate it. And he had. Jules tried never to think back on those first two years or so, when he had raged around, smashed dishes and done everything he could to escape. The brooms in the shed were bound to the wards but Jules had still flown at the ward line, again and again, and he’d just reach it when there’d be a tug on his magic, and then the broom would stop dead and leave him hanging uselessly in the sky.
Those were the terms of the contract: Jules couldn’t leave this place, unless Harry gave him permission, which Harry never once had, probably because Jules had never and would never ask. Jules would rather die than ask anything of Harry. On the rare occasion that Harry visited, their conversations were stilted and short, buzzing with the knowledge that Jules would kill Harry if he could, and that if he tried Harry wouldn’t have to put him on the ground; the contract would take care of that.
Mostly it was others who came. Parvati, often—Jules had learned to swallow the bitter taste of betrayal for the sake of having company. Seamus and Dean dropped by sometimes too, and George, although Fred flat-out refused for reasons George would never explain. Obviously Harry would never let Ethan or Andi or Remus within fifty miles of this place. Jules wasn’t even sure if they were still alive—George had said something, last time he visited, about Ethan, and then cut himself off, and Jules couldn’t help wondering, bitterly, what else Harry had done.
Who else he’d killed.
Jules couldn’t avoid seeing Harry’s face; the Prophet came every morning, and Harry was featured in it with some regularity, for pushing some new bill, pioneering yet another breakthrough in potions, or just being spotted in one of the enclaves with his family. Jules had thrown up the day the society pages ran photographs of the triad handfasting between Harry, Barty Crouch, and Theo Nott. Death Eaters all.
They could go to hell.
Today, though, Jules was eager to see the paper, even though Harry would certainly be in it.
He waited at the breakfast table with anxiously tapping fingers. The morning’s tea steamed gently at his elbow, ignored; Delly, the house-elf who did most of the cooking, puttered around giving him pointed glares, which Jules ignored.
Finally the owl portal snapped open. Jules jumped several inches in the air. A tawny owl soared through and dropped the paper on the table in front of him. Jules opened it to the society pages with shaking fingers.
Harry had changed and yet he hadn’t. The hair was the same, and his eyes—Jules shuddered, reminded of the dream that had haunted him for years, of Harry’s death-green ocean-deep eyes lancing into him as Jules fell endlessly through the dark. Harry had filled out some, though. And his fake expression, the one he wore to keep anyone from seeing the monster he really was, had changed from cool unreadability to something relaxed, self-assured, even mildly amused. I know something you don’t, his face seemed to say, but it’s alright, you can trust me with your secrets.
Merlin, Jules fucking hated him.
Jules tore his eyes away from Harry and drank in the rest of the photograph. Nott and Crouch stood at his sides, flanking him like they always seemed to; there was another set of monsters playing at humanity, Jules thought bitterly, though Nott hid it better. Crouch always had something manic about his eyes and in the twist of his smiles. Like he was always wondering what you’d look like on a dissection table.
Hermione was there, too, though she had changed to the point of being nearly unrecognizable. Gone were the jumpers and sensible skirts she used to wear, and gone was the wild hair. Now she favored well-tailored businesslike robes, elaborate braided hairstyles, and heels, though she stuck to practical low pumps instead of the towering stabby things Greengrass and Parkinson liked. Malfoy, who she’d married only a few years after the war, stood with her; in the picture, he put a hand on the shoulder of each of their twins. The girl had soft curls as pale as Malfoy’s and the boy close-cropped sandy blonde hair.
Minister Granger-Malfoy and Lord Black, two of wizarding Britain’s most prominent figures, send their eldest children to Hogwarts, the article began. Hermione’s twins’ names, Jules knew, were Scorpius and Serafina. And he knew Harry’s daughter’s name, too, even though it was right there in stark ink. Lyra Adalyn Black. Poor kid. Although it wasn’t as bad as Scorpius.
There she was—Lyra, with thick, dark, lively hair, half-contained in a pair of braids that ran along her scalp and then hung down her back, tied with bright yellow ribbons. The figure of the girl in the photo hugged her father and then Nott and Crouch. How that family worked, Jules had no idea, especially this: The Black heiress’ older sister, Calliope Freyja Nott, returns to Hogwarts for her third year. Nott had adopted her ages ago and somehow she’d gone to Hufflepuff. Some part of Jules would’ve expected her parents to hate her, but no, there she was with Crouch’s arm around her shoulders, already proudly wearing a Hufflepuff uniform and laughing as Nott ruffled Lyra’s hair. Their younger brother, Dagan Sirius Crouch-Black, was likewise pressed into Harry’s side. He wouldn’t be starting at Hogwarts for a few years yet.
Jules couldn’t put it off any longer. He looked—and there she was.
Brigit Iolanthe Lily Potter.
Her hair was as red as a flame and left loose, as wild as Jules’ had ever been. She had Jules’ nose and eyes, and in all the pictures he’d ever seen, there was a bright and irrepressible streak of mischief that reminded him so much of Dad it was like getting stabbed in the gut.
Harry had invoked that clause of the contract the same year, Jules later learned, that Harry had arranged to have a child with a witch whose name had never been released to the press, although rumour had it she was someone close to the Blacks. Jules didn’t know who had been his daughter’s mother, either: the contract compelled him to provide his seed, as humiliating as that had been, and then he heard no more of it until a curt letter, ten months later, informed him that there was an heiress to the House of Potter.
The letter hadn’t been necessary. Jules had felt it in the Potter family magic the moment she took her first breath.
She’d never met him. She never would. Jules had to hand it to Harry: he’d come up with a torture worse than any dementor-infested hellhole.
Raised by the Black family, the Potter heiress is as close as a sister with Lyra Black, who was born mere weeks earlier. “We’re so proud of our girls,” Lord Black said in a statement, “and any Hogwarts House would be lucky to have them.”
Jules closed his eyes. Then he opened them again because not looking was, impossibly, worse. Brigit—his daughter—was arm-in-arm with Lyra and grinning up at Harry with such uncomplicated love that it broke Jules’ heart.
It was so wrong but Jules couldn’t help but be grateful Harry allowed him even this much of his daughter.
A cage was a cage, but oh, this one’s bars were gilded.
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