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lomonaaerenTitle: Darkness Over Valhalla
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: Angst, established relationship, ignores the epilogue, present tense, past character death, murder, gore, Master of Death Harry Potter, Dark Harry, Dark Theo
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Theo has rejoiced in the killing at Valhalla since he arrived there, but in this moment, something is different. In this moment, there is a moving darkness.
Author’s Notes: This is part of my “More Theo/Harry in the World Project.” Note that it is a fairly dark story.
Darkness Over Valhalla
They come pouring over the top of the hill.
Theo laughs aloud as he plunges in among them. He’s riding a beautiful white horse, the one that’s been his since he arrived here. The horse has wings and horns at need, but at the moment, he’s simply using his weight and the sharp edges of his hooves to cleave a path through the robed figures, straight towards the one standing at the center.
That one starts to raise his hands as if he’s going to cast a curse at Theo without a wand, but Theo is already there. His axe whirls above his head and then lashes forwards, buried in the skull of the wizard before he can gasp.
Theo laughs again as he watches that skull crack open and the flying rain of blood and brains.
The rest of the enemy scatter, their purple robes flapping. Theo tightens his heels on his horse’s flanks, and he leaps, storm-grey wings opening out of his sides, so that they might more efficiently chase down and kill their prey.
Theo lands atop a figure who screams in anguish and simply dissolves into smoke. That’s good enough, but not the most satisfying kill. Theo’s horse leaps again, responsive to his deepest desires, and comes down on a pair from above, caving in the back of one with a sharp kick while leaving the other for Theo’s axe.
Theo kills, and rejoices.
*
“The victor of the hour!”
Theo smiles and lifts his hand as he walks into one of the great halls of Valhalla. The place is so vast that there is no way to number or name all of the great longhouses that blaze with fire and magic of all kinds.
This one, which Theo most often frequents, has the biggest fireplace of all the ones Theo likes, and it sends sparks leaping into the middle of the hall from the force of the burning. The people lined up along the tables, from grey-haired warriors to those who died in the prime of their youth like Theo, roar and bang their mugs on the tables.
Here, it doesn’t matter which way Theo’s achieved his victories, through an axe or a wand like the one he used in life. What matters is that they lie behind him, and he has won, and victors are honored here.
Theo takes up a mug that a white-haired witch named Gloria tosses him, and uses it to toast the warriors all around him. “To death and what lies beyond it!”
A chorus answers him, so deep that it makes the hall tremble with the force of the noise. The mead in the mug flows sweet and welcome down Theo’s throat. He leads them in a song that he crafted about one of his battles nights and nights ago and likes enough to repurpose now and then. There’s laughter, heckling from people who think that someone should craft a new song every day.
It doesn’t matter. Theo is more alive than he was during life, and he leans backwards and watches a duel between two of those who only use wands with perfect contentment.
This is all he wants from the life beyond life.
*
One of the timeless mornings after that, Theo notices a darkness.
It hovers as a cloud over the battlefield where he is currently fighting, decapitating a giant who refuses to die while his horse stabs and gores with his current single horn. Theo ignores the cloud, assuming that perhaps one of the enemy sorcerers cast it before they died.
But the cloud follows him back to the hall when he inevitably wins, and sits outside. When Theo steps outside, head reeling with drink and song and good fellowship, the darkness surges towards him.
Theo freezes in place, his eyes locked on the cloud. It stops moving when he looks at it, and then eddies back and forth as though waiting for him to do something.
“I don’t know what you are,” Theo whispers. “But I don’t want you here. I have everything I want already. Leave.”
He doesn’t think it can actually be something that an enemy on the battlefield created to pursue him. He has never seen one of those effects that persists outside the field. So this must be something else, something that was born of Theo’s own desires.
Or thinks it was. Theo’s desires are simple: to fight, to kill, to win. To drink and eat and sing. That is all that matters.
The darkness doesn’t seem to think so, however. It remains, crawling along the ground, as Theo walks to his own small longhouse to sleep. And it surges up to dance along the windows while Theo is trying to see the stars, which he has been able to see every night that he’s been here.
He only sleeps in the first place to have dreams of victory, and the missed night’s slumber doesn’t hurt him when he stands and goes to fetch his horse. But it makes him uneasy, especially when the darkness follows him from field to field that day.
And the day after, and the day after.
*
“What are you talking about?”
Theo sighs. He should have known that the darkness’s magical effect would hide itself from everyone else, even his best friend in this particular life beyond life, Blaise Zabini.
“Never mind,” Theo says, and leans forwards to knock his mug against Blaise’s. “Tell me what kind of duel you can have with a giant spider.”
Blaise laughs and obliges. Theo listens with a faint smile. He sometimes has the impression that he knew Blaise in a life before this life, when he was a wizard with a wand. He remembers nothing else, but he thinks he remembers Blaise.
Of course, that makes him all the more uneasy when the darkness hovers over his longhouse that night, and Theo shakes his fist and his wand at it, and tries to banish it, and doesn’t succeed.
Was this darkness something else he knew in the life before life?
He doesn’t know, but he hopes not, because the lack of memory means that he doesn’t know how to fight it, either.
*
“Theo.”
The darkness speaks his name as Theo dismounts from his horse, blood-splattered and sore and aching. The opponents he’s fought today are humans of a type that Theo thinks has long since disappeared from most history, although he doesn’t know why he has that impression. They have horns and long spines covered with a swaying mane of blue fur.
Theo swings around and glares at the darkness. “I don’t know who you are, but I don’t want you,” he says, as clearly as he knows how. “Leave me be.”
“You do not remember me.”
“No. I don’t.” Theo takes a jagged breath. “If you’re something from the time I was alive, then I don’t want to remember. I don’t know how I ended, but I know it wasn’t beautiful, like the battles I fight here. And I know that I have everything I want in this life beyond life. Leave me be.”
There’s a long enough pause that Theo thinks the darkness might be ready to fulfill his wish, but instead, it simply roils some more, and then settles down to watch him with an unsettling sense of invisible eyes.
Theo spits at it, and goes to spend the evening with his fellow warriors. But even then, the sensation of eyes travels through the longhouse wall, and sours the taste of the mead in his throat and the sound of the songs in his ears.
He can feel it.
Waiting.
*
This time, the darkness coils around Theo when he emerges from his longhouse in the morning to attend to his horse. The dawn is perfect and beautiful around him, blue and golden like all the mornings have been, but Theo’s sight is obscured by the sudden rushing cloud, and he gasps as it grabs him by the throat.
“Remember.”
But the command is useless. Theo has never been able to remember, and he doesn’t now, although the cloud dances in frustration around him. A second later, it breaks away from him and races towards the northwest.
It’s the first time the cloud has left him since it first showed up on the edges of his life a—time ago. Theo shakes his head and watches it go warily, and then goes to attend to his horse, who is bugling impatiently for him.
He would give much to be free of the cloud, but not his horse, not his life, not his wonder.
*
“I’ve only heard of people hearing from those in the life before life when they’ve been chosen to be reborn for a higher calling. Then someone from that life might speak to them to bring them back and prepare them.”
Theo watches Blaise’s face as they sit in the shifting shadows of firelight. Blaise’s longhouse is bigger than Theo’s and darker, as well. Blaise likes the shadows, and fights most of his battles in them as well, concocting poisons and sorceries that he can use without his wand. Theo hoped that coming into an environment slightly unfamiliar to him might give him some insights into the nature of the darkness.
But it doesn’t seem to be working out that way.
Theo leans back and sips from the mug of mead in his hand again. “It definitely seems to be a person. It was speaking to me about remembering it—the person on the other side of the cloud, I mean.”
Blaise nods. At least he takes Theo seriously when it comes to how much the cloud disturbs him, and doesn’t mock his fear the way that some of the other warriors would. But he has to shake his head when Theo stares at him. “I’m sorry. I’ve only heard of the rebirth option that I told you about, and that would be much clearer. You would have to be prepared for your task. You wouldn’t venture back to the life before life without it.”
“And I could choose not to undertake the task?”
“Most of the time, the task is a matter of glory. Most wouldn’t refuse.”
“I would,” Theo whispers. He doesn’t want anything to change, the way the cloud threatens him with. He wants the world to go on around him, this life beyond life, singing and battling and feeling the blood roar through him.
Blaise nods very slowly. “Then I suppose that you would refuse the call, if it came.”
“Yes, I would,” Theo says, and relief burns through him when Blaise looks at him without judgment.
“I hope that you will be able to refuse.”
Theo hopes so, too.
*
“Theo.”
The darkness has come back, but this time, it has taken the form of a shadowy figure who stands in the grass in front of Theo’s longhouse and stares at him with invisible eyes. Theo grips his axe and wipes away the temptation to swing it through the cloud. He already knows, without knowing how he knows, that it would do no good.
“I refuse the call. I refuse whatever burden of duty or glory you’ve come to place upon me.” Theo lets his voice rise and ring through the air stained with sunset. He is overdue at the longhouse to sing and rejoice in his latest victory. “You may want me to be reborn, but I have no desire to. And my friend says that no one who refuses the task may be asked to undertake it.”
There’s silence for long enough that Theo thinks the shadowy figure will give up. But instead, it waves a hand in the vicinity of its face, and the shadows melt away. Theo is staring at a face as pale as a skull, with deep green eyes in it, crowned by dark hair.
“You do not know me,” says a normal voice, like the voices that Theo hears raised in songs and shouting all the days of his life.
Theo shakes his head at once. “No. I don’t know what you’re doing here, and I don’t know what you want. But I know that I don’t want to come back.”
The figure stands there as if thinking about that. Then it fades into a cloud again and rises, moving away from Theo and blending in seconds into the shadows stretching away from the lowering sun.
Theo bows his head and takes a deep breath. He thinks the man might come back again, but he hopes it won’t be soon.
*
It is not.
Long afternoons pass in battle. Long evenings pass in roaring and storytelling and dueling and wrestling contests. Theo loses track of his fights and the mead he drinks, of the days he spends laughing with Blaise, of the opponents he defeats, of the times that he goes to sleep and rises healed of his wounds.
All is as it should be.
*
The figure returns when Theo has almost forgotten his face, walking light-footed through the grass in front of Theo’s longhouse on a morning when winter has chosen to grace Theo. Most of the time, the life beyond life is locked in high summer, the finest conditions for battle, but there are rainy days and ones like this, full of snow.
Theo turns around with his breath fanning in front of his face, and frowns mightily when he sees the man standing there. “What do you want?”
Green eyes stare at him, ones that are filled with an emotion beyond the rage Theo is so familiar with. Theo cocks his head. He thinks he almost recognizes this feeling. He prods his memory, and the name falls out like a golden apple.
Grief.
“I have come to offer you a life that you might want to come back to,” the man says abruptly. “It is a life of more battle than you will ever have here, with an opponent who is immortal, who will not lie down and die.”
Interest pricks the back of Theo’s mind. In a way, all of them are immortal, everyone here. Any of his companions who die of their wounds return with the morning’s dawn. And he knows that he’s fought some of the same enemies before, that they spring up and march against him when he finds a battle particularly satisfying and wants another one like it in the future.
But true immortality?
If anyone here is truly immortal, so that they do not die even temporarily, Theo does not know about it.
“Why is this life yours to offer?” Theo asks.
The figure steps closer to him, and some of the shadows seem to pull back from his face even more. He is solemn, pale, tall. Or he looks tall, Theo thinks. He somehow has the impression that the man is not truly tall.
Why does he think that? He does not know the man.
“Because I am the one who was tasked with defeating this opponent,” the man says. “I thought I succeeded, but I did not. And I am the one who can call on a fellow warrior, and offer that life to you if you come back.” He extends his hand, flat, in front of him, palm up. “Will you come with me?”
“I need other information.”
The man takes what sounds like an impatient breath, but then he trails off, not huffing out. He nods, eyes on Theo’s face.
“Will I come back as a babe? That was what Blaise told me about the others who were reborn into the life before life, and I do not want that. It would mean that I would have many years before I could fight and defeat this enemy.”
The man smiles, glittering light like blades moving in his eyes. “No. You would come back to your adult self—or, rather, the age you were when you died.”
“I do not remember dying.”
“How do you think you came here?”
Theo nods. In truth, he knew that, and he also knows that he could not die here if he did already have one death behind him. Nor could he have come to the life beyond life.
Although it does bother him, a little, that he doesn’t remember it.
“What kind of warrior would I be? Would I fight with this axe, or would I fight in other ways?”
“With wand and chisel.”
“Chisel?”
“You were a runecrafter before you died.”
Theo catches his breath. He still doesn’t remember the man in front of him, or his death, but he does remember, suddenly, the weight of a chisel in his hand, how he carved runes, how he made them sparkle with silver and gold.
It hurts, to know that he forgot it and has spent—however much time has passed in Valhalla without remembering that he once wove magic with runes. That he has fought so many battles without using what he knows instinctively was one of his best weapons against his enemies.
The man moves closer, watching him.
“How can you come here?” Theo asks. “How can you offer this? I might not remember much about who I was, but I know that a life like this wouldn’t come cheap.”
The man extends his hand again. Theo still doesn’t clasp it, but he comes close enough to see what the man wanted him to see. There’s a symbol traced in the middle of his palm: a circle enclosing a triangle, bisected with a line. All of it shimmers with a deep gold that Theo is used to seeing only in the sunsets.
That symbol isn’t one Theo knows, not one he remembers. But it jolts him so badly that he drops his axe, narrowly missing his foot.
“You’re the Master of Death,” he breathes, and then wonders why the words came so naturally to him, why he knew that. It’s not a knowing like knowing that he might want to go back with this man, or like the memory of being a runecrafter. It goes deep, so deep that it’s like Theo’s knowledge of how to breathe.
“Yes. I used to consider it a burden, but it’s the only reason I could come to Valhalla at all, the only reason I can offer you a life again in your adult body.” The man closes his hand over the symbol, and Theo almost wants to open his fingers and see it again. “I had to search so many afterlives to find you, you had no idea.”
“But I love to fight. Of course it makes sense that I would come to Valhalla.”
The man sighs a little. “I knew that you loved to fight, but I didn’t think it was the deepest desire of your heart and soul. I hoped that was—” He stops.
Theo lifts his head and stares into the green eyes. He can feel the darkness gathering around them again, cutting off the sunlight, but this time, he doesn’t fear it. He knows already that he’ll accept the Master’s hand and come back with him. He’s close to the edge of the life before the life beyond.
“You. You hoped it was you.”
“Yes,” the Master says, inclining his head. “I hoped you would be waiting for me in King’s Cross.”
“What?”
But even as Theo speaks the word, the memory comes flooding back, piercing and cold. Cold white light, cold shifting white walls. He took one look at them and refused the life beyond life that was trying to offer itself to him.
He has never remembered that before. All his memories have been of Valhalla for however long he has been here.
Theo was content with that. He had companions. He had opponents. He had his horse, and his axe. He had the songs and the mead and the constant battles that his heart craves.
But now, he has to remember what he forgot. And if the contentment he’s experienced in Valhalla has destroyed some things that he might have wanted to retain.
He turns to the Master of Death and those wild green eyes that are watching him. Theo draws in a breath and speaks a name he hasn’t spoken in days, in years, in centuries of Valhalla passing him by.
“Harry.”
Harry’s smile breaks across his face like sunrise, and the darkness around Theo seems to become light. “Yes.”
“You’re talking about an immortal enemy,” Theo says slowly. “Voldemort was your immortal enemy, but you defeated him. Are you talking about—you? You think that I would want to kill my lover?”
“No.” Harry swallows. “I’ve had this talk with you before, Theo. You don’t remember it. You refused to leave Valhalla then without a battle worthy of you. And so I went to another dimension, found a Voldemort there who hadn’t died, and brought him back to our world. So you could fight him.”
Theo feels his eyes widen to the point that it feels like they’re going to take over his face. He sways on his feet a little. He thinks of all the people who died in the first war with their Dark Lord, and how much Harry gave up.
He looks at Harry now, and remembers what it was like to love him to madness, and think that Harry would never return his feelings that deeply, because he was too good a person.
Now Theo knows better.
“You did this for me,” he whispers.
“I walked afterlives searching for you. I brought Voldemort back. I’ve let people die at his hands.” Harry leans towards him, his eyes afire with a light that would make Theo glad to fight side by side with him in Valhalla. “Yes, I love you. Yes, I will stand beside you no matter what comes, and you don’t need to fear my morals or my friends coming between us again.”
“They did the first time.”
“Yes.”
“I—died. I dashed into a duel with a Dark wizard and I didn’t try to defend myself well enough, because I thought I would rather die than live with you always wavering on the brink of leaving me.”
Theo reaches out and catches Harry’s hands hard enough to hurt. Harry isn’t moving, though, his eyes locked on Theo. He only squeezes back and whispers, “I never would have done that. I didn’t know you were so afraid of it, until I went to King’s Cross and the message of your rejection of that afterlife was ringing from the walls.”
Theo leans forwards and, for the first time in far too long, kisses Harry Potter.
Harry kisses him back, his hands digging into Theo’s shoulders, his lips wide and opening beneath his, and Theo—
Theo says Yes with all his soul.
*
Theo wakes screaming.
He’s heaving and bouncing and twisting in the middle of what he knows must be a stone altar, surrounded by the frantic chant of Harry’s voice. There’s mist shifting back and forth in front of his eyes, and for a moment, Theo fears that he might have come back to life blind or with clouded vision—
And then it snaps into place, and he feels the true weight of a body, and true hunger and thirst, that he never did in Valhalla.
Theo turns to Harry, breathing harshly. They’re on the crown of a hill that’s surrounded by standing stones with runes glowing and shifting on them. Theo knows at a glance that they’re his own work, and blinks as he looks up at Harry, because he has the memories of his life again, but he can’t remember carving anything like this.
“I used your hand to manipulate the chisel, and funneled my own magic through your body,” Harry breathes, and leans in to kiss him.
Theo lifts his hands and clenches Harry’s shoulders, dragging him in. Because what Harry did is mad by any measure, straining beyond limits, and Theo cannot do anything but honor that.
Because he is back, and alive again, and together, they will fight and defeat Voldemort.
Because he can have everything that he did in Valhalla and everything he wants from life, as long as he stands at the side of the madman who loves him, whom he loves.
The End.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: Angst, established relationship, ignores the epilogue, present tense, past character death, murder, gore, Master of Death Harry Potter, Dark Harry, Dark Theo
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Theo has rejoiced in the killing at Valhalla since he arrived there, but in this moment, something is different. In this moment, there is a moving darkness.
Author’s Notes: This is part of my “More Theo/Harry in the World Project.” Note that it is a fairly dark story.
Darkness Over Valhalla
They come pouring over the top of the hill.
Theo laughs aloud as he plunges in among them. He’s riding a beautiful white horse, the one that’s been his since he arrived here. The horse has wings and horns at need, but at the moment, he’s simply using his weight and the sharp edges of his hooves to cleave a path through the robed figures, straight towards the one standing at the center.
That one starts to raise his hands as if he’s going to cast a curse at Theo without a wand, but Theo is already there. His axe whirls above his head and then lashes forwards, buried in the skull of the wizard before he can gasp.
Theo laughs again as he watches that skull crack open and the flying rain of blood and brains.
The rest of the enemy scatter, their purple robes flapping. Theo tightens his heels on his horse’s flanks, and he leaps, storm-grey wings opening out of his sides, so that they might more efficiently chase down and kill their prey.
Theo lands atop a figure who screams in anguish and simply dissolves into smoke. That’s good enough, but not the most satisfying kill. Theo’s horse leaps again, responsive to his deepest desires, and comes down on a pair from above, caving in the back of one with a sharp kick while leaving the other for Theo’s axe.
Theo kills, and rejoices.
*
“The victor of the hour!”
Theo smiles and lifts his hand as he walks into one of the great halls of Valhalla. The place is so vast that there is no way to number or name all of the great longhouses that blaze with fire and magic of all kinds.
This one, which Theo most often frequents, has the biggest fireplace of all the ones Theo likes, and it sends sparks leaping into the middle of the hall from the force of the burning. The people lined up along the tables, from grey-haired warriors to those who died in the prime of their youth like Theo, roar and bang their mugs on the tables.
Here, it doesn’t matter which way Theo’s achieved his victories, through an axe or a wand like the one he used in life. What matters is that they lie behind him, and he has won, and victors are honored here.
Theo takes up a mug that a white-haired witch named Gloria tosses him, and uses it to toast the warriors all around him. “To death and what lies beyond it!”
A chorus answers him, so deep that it makes the hall tremble with the force of the noise. The mead in the mug flows sweet and welcome down Theo’s throat. He leads them in a song that he crafted about one of his battles nights and nights ago and likes enough to repurpose now and then. There’s laughter, heckling from people who think that someone should craft a new song every day.
It doesn’t matter. Theo is more alive than he was during life, and he leans backwards and watches a duel between two of those who only use wands with perfect contentment.
This is all he wants from the life beyond life.
*
One of the timeless mornings after that, Theo notices a darkness.
It hovers as a cloud over the battlefield where he is currently fighting, decapitating a giant who refuses to die while his horse stabs and gores with his current single horn. Theo ignores the cloud, assuming that perhaps one of the enemy sorcerers cast it before they died.
But the cloud follows him back to the hall when he inevitably wins, and sits outside. When Theo steps outside, head reeling with drink and song and good fellowship, the darkness surges towards him.
Theo freezes in place, his eyes locked on the cloud. It stops moving when he looks at it, and then eddies back and forth as though waiting for him to do something.
“I don’t know what you are,” Theo whispers. “But I don’t want you here. I have everything I want already. Leave.”
He doesn’t think it can actually be something that an enemy on the battlefield created to pursue him. He has never seen one of those effects that persists outside the field. So this must be something else, something that was born of Theo’s own desires.
Or thinks it was. Theo’s desires are simple: to fight, to kill, to win. To drink and eat and sing. That is all that matters.
The darkness doesn’t seem to think so, however. It remains, crawling along the ground, as Theo walks to his own small longhouse to sleep. And it surges up to dance along the windows while Theo is trying to see the stars, which he has been able to see every night that he’s been here.
He only sleeps in the first place to have dreams of victory, and the missed night’s slumber doesn’t hurt him when he stands and goes to fetch his horse. But it makes him uneasy, especially when the darkness follows him from field to field that day.
And the day after, and the day after.
*
“What are you talking about?”
Theo sighs. He should have known that the darkness’s magical effect would hide itself from everyone else, even his best friend in this particular life beyond life, Blaise Zabini.
“Never mind,” Theo says, and leans forwards to knock his mug against Blaise’s. “Tell me what kind of duel you can have with a giant spider.”
Blaise laughs and obliges. Theo listens with a faint smile. He sometimes has the impression that he knew Blaise in a life before this life, when he was a wizard with a wand. He remembers nothing else, but he thinks he remembers Blaise.
Of course, that makes him all the more uneasy when the darkness hovers over his longhouse that night, and Theo shakes his fist and his wand at it, and tries to banish it, and doesn’t succeed.
Was this darkness something else he knew in the life before life?
He doesn’t know, but he hopes not, because the lack of memory means that he doesn’t know how to fight it, either.
*
“Theo.”
The darkness speaks his name as Theo dismounts from his horse, blood-splattered and sore and aching. The opponents he’s fought today are humans of a type that Theo thinks has long since disappeared from most history, although he doesn’t know why he has that impression. They have horns and long spines covered with a swaying mane of blue fur.
Theo swings around and glares at the darkness. “I don’t know who you are, but I don’t want you,” he says, as clearly as he knows how. “Leave me be.”
“You do not remember me.”
“No. I don’t.” Theo takes a jagged breath. “If you’re something from the time I was alive, then I don’t want to remember. I don’t know how I ended, but I know it wasn’t beautiful, like the battles I fight here. And I know that I have everything I want in this life beyond life. Leave me be.”
There’s a long enough pause that Theo thinks the darkness might be ready to fulfill his wish, but instead, it simply roils some more, and then settles down to watch him with an unsettling sense of invisible eyes.
Theo spits at it, and goes to spend the evening with his fellow warriors. But even then, the sensation of eyes travels through the longhouse wall, and sours the taste of the mead in his throat and the sound of the songs in his ears.
He can feel it.
Waiting.
*
This time, the darkness coils around Theo when he emerges from his longhouse in the morning to attend to his horse. The dawn is perfect and beautiful around him, blue and golden like all the mornings have been, but Theo’s sight is obscured by the sudden rushing cloud, and he gasps as it grabs him by the throat.
“Remember.”
But the command is useless. Theo has never been able to remember, and he doesn’t now, although the cloud dances in frustration around him. A second later, it breaks away from him and races towards the northwest.
It’s the first time the cloud has left him since it first showed up on the edges of his life a—time ago. Theo shakes his head and watches it go warily, and then goes to attend to his horse, who is bugling impatiently for him.
He would give much to be free of the cloud, but not his horse, not his life, not his wonder.
*
“I’ve only heard of people hearing from those in the life before life when they’ve been chosen to be reborn for a higher calling. Then someone from that life might speak to them to bring them back and prepare them.”
Theo watches Blaise’s face as they sit in the shifting shadows of firelight. Blaise’s longhouse is bigger than Theo’s and darker, as well. Blaise likes the shadows, and fights most of his battles in them as well, concocting poisons and sorceries that he can use without his wand. Theo hoped that coming into an environment slightly unfamiliar to him might give him some insights into the nature of the darkness.
But it doesn’t seem to be working out that way.
Theo leans back and sips from the mug of mead in his hand again. “It definitely seems to be a person. It was speaking to me about remembering it—the person on the other side of the cloud, I mean.”
Blaise nods. At least he takes Theo seriously when it comes to how much the cloud disturbs him, and doesn’t mock his fear the way that some of the other warriors would. But he has to shake his head when Theo stares at him. “I’m sorry. I’ve only heard of the rebirth option that I told you about, and that would be much clearer. You would have to be prepared for your task. You wouldn’t venture back to the life before life without it.”
“And I could choose not to undertake the task?”
“Most of the time, the task is a matter of glory. Most wouldn’t refuse.”
“I would,” Theo whispers. He doesn’t want anything to change, the way the cloud threatens him with. He wants the world to go on around him, this life beyond life, singing and battling and feeling the blood roar through him.
Blaise nods very slowly. “Then I suppose that you would refuse the call, if it came.”
“Yes, I would,” Theo says, and relief burns through him when Blaise looks at him without judgment.
“I hope that you will be able to refuse.”
Theo hopes so, too.
*
“Theo.”
The darkness has come back, but this time, it has taken the form of a shadowy figure who stands in the grass in front of Theo’s longhouse and stares at him with invisible eyes. Theo grips his axe and wipes away the temptation to swing it through the cloud. He already knows, without knowing how he knows, that it would do no good.
“I refuse the call. I refuse whatever burden of duty or glory you’ve come to place upon me.” Theo lets his voice rise and ring through the air stained with sunset. He is overdue at the longhouse to sing and rejoice in his latest victory. “You may want me to be reborn, but I have no desire to. And my friend says that no one who refuses the task may be asked to undertake it.”
There’s silence for long enough that Theo thinks the shadowy figure will give up. But instead, it waves a hand in the vicinity of its face, and the shadows melt away. Theo is staring at a face as pale as a skull, with deep green eyes in it, crowned by dark hair.
“You do not know me,” says a normal voice, like the voices that Theo hears raised in songs and shouting all the days of his life.
Theo shakes his head at once. “No. I don’t know what you’re doing here, and I don’t know what you want. But I know that I don’t want to come back.”
The figure stands there as if thinking about that. Then it fades into a cloud again and rises, moving away from Theo and blending in seconds into the shadows stretching away from the lowering sun.
Theo bows his head and takes a deep breath. He thinks the man might come back again, but he hopes it won’t be soon.
*
It is not.
Long afternoons pass in battle. Long evenings pass in roaring and storytelling and dueling and wrestling contests. Theo loses track of his fights and the mead he drinks, of the days he spends laughing with Blaise, of the opponents he defeats, of the times that he goes to sleep and rises healed of his wounds.
All is as it should be.
*
The figure returns when Theo has almost forgotten his face, walking light-footed through the grass in front of Theo’s longhouse on a morning when winter has chosen to grace Theo. Most of the time, the life beyond life is locked in high summer, the finest conditions for battle, but there are rainy days and ones like this, full of snow.
Theo turns around with his breath fanning in front of his face, and frowns mightily when he sees the man standing there. “What do you want?”
Green eyes stare at him, ones that are filled with an emotion beyond the rage Theo is so familiar with. Theo cocks his head. He thinks he almost recognizes this feeling. He prods his memory, and the name falls out like a golden apple.
Grief.
“I have come to offer you a life that you might want to come back to,” the man says abruptly. “It is a life of more battle than you will ever have here, with an opponent who is immortal, who will not lie down and die.”
Interest pricks the back of Theo’s mind. In a way, all of them are immortal, everyone here. Any of his companions who die of their wounds return with the morning’s dawn. And he knows that he’s fought some of the same enemies before, that they spring up and march against him when he finds a battle particularly satisfying and wants another one like it in the future.
But true immortality?
If anyone here is truly immortal, so that they do not die even temporarily, Theo does not know about it.
“Why is this life yours to offer?” Theo asks.
The figure steps closer to him, and some of the shadows seem to pull back from his face even more. He is solemn, pale, tall. Or he looks tall, Theo thinks. He somehow has the impression that the man is not truly tall.
Why does he think that? He does not know the man.
“Because I am the one who was tasked with defeating this opponent,” the man says. “I thought I succeeded, but I did not. And I am the one who can call on a fellow warrior, and offer that life to you if you come back.” He extends his hand, flat, in front of him, palm up. “Will you come with me?”
“I need other information.”
The man takes what sounds like an impatient breath, but then he trails off, not huffing out. He nods, eyes on Theo’s face.
“Will I come back as a babe? That was what Blaise told me about the others who were reborn into the life before life, and I do not want that. It would mean that I would have many years before I could fight and defeat this enemy.”
The man smiles, glittering light like blades moving in his eyes. “No. You would come back to your adult self—or, rather, the age you were when you died.”
“I do not remember dying.”
“How do you think you came here?”
Theo nods. In truth, he knew that, and he also knows that he could not die here if he did already have one death behind him. Nor could he have come to the life beyond life.
Although it does bother him, a little, that he doesn’t remember it.
“What kind of warrior would I be? Would I fight with this axe, or would I fight in other ways?”
“With wand and chisel.”
“Chisel?”
“You were a runecrafter before you died.”
Theo catches his breath. He still doesn’t remember the man in front of him, or his death, but he does remember, suddenly, the weight of a chisel in his hand, how he carved runes, how he made them sparkle with silver and gold.
It hurts, to know that he forgot it and has spent—however much time has passed in Valhalla without remembering that he once wove magic with runes. That he has fought so many battles without using what he knows instinctively was one of his best weapons against his enemies.
The man moves closer, watching him.
“How can you come here?” Theo asks. “How can you offer this? I might not remember much about who I was, but I know that a life like this wouldn’t come cheap.”
The man extends his hand again. Theo still doesn’t clasp it, but he comes close enough to see what the man wanted him to see. There’s a symbol traced in the middle of his palm: a circle enclosing a triangle, bisected with a line. All of it shimmers with a deep gold that Theo is used to seeing only in the sunsets.
That symbol isn’t one Theo knows, not one he remembers. But it jolts him so badly that he drops his axe, narrowly missing his foot.
“You’re the Master of Death,” he breathes, and then wonders why the words came so naturally to him, why he knew that. It’s not a knowing like knowing that he might want to go back with this man, or like the memory of being a runecrafter. It goes deep, so deep that it’s like Theo’s knowledge of how to breathe.
“Yes. I used to consider it a burden, but it’s the only reason I could come to Valhalla at all, the only reason I can offer you a life again in your adult body.” The man closes his hand over the symbol, and Theo almost wants to open his fingers and see it again. “I had to search so many afterlives to find you, you had no idea.”
“But I love to fight. Of course it makes sense that I would come to Valhalla.”
The man sighs a little. “I knew that you loved to fight, but I didn’t think it was the deepest desire of your heart and soul. I hoped that was—” He stops.
Theo lifts his head and stares into the green eyes. He can feel the darkness gathering around them again, cutting off the sunlight, but this time, he doesn’t fear it. He knows already that he’ll accept the Master’s hand and come back with him. He’s close to the edge of the life before the life beyond.
“You. You hoped it was you.”
“Yes,” the Master says, inclining his head. “I hoped you would be waiting for me in King’s Cross.”
“What?”
But even as Theo speaks the word, the memory comes flooding back, piercing and cold. Cold white light, cold shifting white walls. He took one look at them and refused the life beyond life that was trying to offer itself to him.
He has never remembered that before. All his memories have been of Valhalla for however long he has been here.
Theo was content with that. He had companions. He had opponents. He had his horse, and his axe. He had the songs and the mead and the constant battles that his heart craves.
But now, he has to remember what he forgot. And if the contentment he’s experienced in Valhalla has destroyed some things that he might have wanted to retain.
He turns to the Master of Death and those wild green eyes that are watching him. Theo draws in a breath and speaks a name he hasn’t spoken in days, in years, in centuries of Valhalla passing him by.
“Harry.”
Harry’s smile breaks across his face like sunrise, and the darkness around Theo seems to become light. “Yes.”
“You’re talking about an immortal enemy,” Theo says slowly. “Voldemort was your immortal enemy, but you defeated him. Are you talking about—you? You think that I would want to kill my lover?”
“No.” Harry swallows. “I’ve had this talk with you before, Theo. You don’t remember it. You refused to leave Valhalla then without a battle worthy of you. And so I went to another dimension, found a Voldemort there who hadn’t died, and brought him back to our world. So you could fight him.”
Theo feels his eyes widen to the point that it feels like they’re going to take over his face. He sways on his feet a little. He thinks of all the people who died in the first war with their Dark Lord, and how much Harry gave up.
He looks at Harry now, and remembers what it was like to love him to madness, and think that Harry would never return his feelings that deeply, because he was too good a person.
Now Theo knows better.
“You did this for me,” he whispers.
“I walked afterlives searching for you. I brought Voldemort back. I’ve let people die at his hands.” Harry leans towards him, his eyes afire with a light that would make Theo glad to fight side by side with him in Valhalla. “Yes, I love you. Yes, I will stand beside you no matter what comes, and you don’t need to fear my morals or my friends coming between us again.”
“They did the first time.”
“Yes.”
“I—died. I dashed into a duel with a Dark wizard and I didn’t try to defend myself well enough, because I thought I would rather die than live with you always wavering on the brink of leaving me.”
Theo reaches out and catches Harry’s hands hard enough to hurt. Harry isn’t moving, though, his eyes locked on Theo. He only squeezes back and whispers, “I never would have done that. I didn’t know you were so afraid of it, until I went to King’s Cross and the message of your rejection of that afterlife was ringing from the walls.”
Theo leans forwards and, for the first time in far too long, kisses Harry Potter.
Harry kisses him back, his hands digging into Theo’s shoulders, his lips wide and opening beneath his, and Theo—
Theo says Yes with all his soul.
*
Theo wakes screaming.
He’s heaving and bouncing and twisting in the middle of what he knows must be a stone altar, surrounded by the frantic chant of Harry’s voice. There’s mist shifting back and forth in front of his eyes, and for a moment, Theo fears that he might have come back to life blind or with clouded vision—
And then it snaps into place, and he feels the true weight of a body, and true hunger and thirst, that he never did in Valhalla.
Theo turns to Harry, breathing harshly. They’re on the crown of a hill that’s surrounded by standing stones with runes glowing and shifting on them. Theo knows at a glance that they’re his own work, and blinks as he looks up at Harry, because he has the memories of his life again, but he can’t remember carving anything like this.
“I used your hand to manipulate the chisel, and funneled my own magic through your body,” Harry breathes, and leans in to kiss him.
Theo lifts his hands and clenches Harry’s shoulders, dragging him in. Because what Harry did is mad by any measure, straining beyond limits, and Theo cannot do anything but honor that.
Because he is back, and alive again, and together, they will fight and defeat Voldemort.
Because he can have everything that he did in Valhalla and everything he wants from life, as long as he stands at the side of the madman who loves him, whom he loves.
The End.
