Chapter Text
Death watched.
He’d watched for centuries, but he’d watched especially close to this time line when a boy with raven hair and eyes of the killing curse closed his hands around a cloak of ethereal silver. It wasn’t supposed to be especially interesting, the Potter’s had custody of one of his Hallows for years. This Potter didn’t even get to keep the cloak as his birthright, the right being taken by his brother. The child raised by the Potter Lord. Yet, it was those eyes, bright green. And the fact that the boy reeked of Death already.
It made him pay attention.
Years, he watched the boy taste death. At the hands of manipulations, venom, the meaty fists of the guardians meant to be the ones to love him. Abandoned by the parent meant to love him. Hated by his other half. Blood wards that bound him like chains, rather than swaddling him in safety as they should have. Fight to survive, fight to live, even when he knew, in the boy’s heart, he’d much rather be dead and loved perhaps by the mother who died to save him. Then alive and reviled by those who condemned him to suffering.
For the first time in centuries, Death longed to touch without killing. Wanted to feel warm skin against his chest and feel the breath of the innocent slow and safe in his grasp. It was with longing that he held one soul in his hands many times, and let it slip away back into the earth as Fate dictated. The boy was not his.
He hadn’t known why, however. The eyes and taste of death should not have been enough to keep his attentions for so long. Much less years. Until the night on the Astronomy Tower. The manipulator faked his death, and in the duels and throes of the night where one didn’t have time to think, to breath, to comprehend. Death watched as a second Hallow swore loyalty to those death green eyes.
And he understood.
Harry would one day be his.
Not in the way everyone eventually was either.
Still, Death was content to watch and wait. Mourning his suffering and preparing for a long and happy life after the battle was done. When the prophecy was fulfilled either by his little one or the other twin. The disgusting sack of humanity and entitlement he was. Soon it would be when his Harry was ready to simply rest and exist peacefully for the rest of time. Following whims, finding purpose, perhaps finding pieces of the childhood he never got to live. Leave behind the ones who left him and find Life.
But no.
The second. The very second, Harry became his. His soul gave up. The struggles being too much and too much thought of others and not enough on his own well-being. The soul that should have survived and burned like a glorious inferno for ages to come was sputtering in his grasp and Harry was not fighting.
He was letting go.
No.
No, this wasn’t happening.
Not to Harry.
This time he didn’t have to listen to anyone. The second Harry’s hand even brushed the third and final gift to mortals he’d fallen directly into Death’s domain. Fate had no more custody, no more than she had over any other human, perhaps even less.
With a desperation that Death hadn’t known he could possess he grabbed that slowly dying light and threw himself as far backwards as he could. Years melting and reversing before his eyes until he was forced to stop. He wanted to go to the beginning, but he couldn’t, Harry was too fragile to survive going back that far. Death would be unable to spare him all his suffering.
However, Master of Death was a title that stuck to the soul. Harry in this timeline was now forever his Master. Heir to his mortal throne in the Peverell family. It would not belong to another sickening Potter from whence on. Past, present, or future. Softly, he let Harry’s soul slip back into the world.
He would not remember the future, not consciously. Though nightmares maybe a problem for years to come, but those were already going to be a battle for an abused child. It would be something they tackled together.
Now, he would get what he’d always wanted.
Fate, the manipulator, and the rest of the world be damned.