young gods

disclaimer : i do not own harry potter. i do not own the images used in the moodboards.

Harry Potter was tired of living with ghosts.

Sometimes he had random bouts of hope. Warm and fresh and curling around him like the flowers from Aunt Petunia's garden. He hoped to go back to the world of freckled faces and red hair, to the tight hugs and warm brown eyes. To the world where they were just children and not soldiers. But that also meant that he would have to go back to the world of deaths and nightmares.

He had been raised like a pig for slaughter.

All to defeat one of the greatest darkest wizards ever seen by the Wizarding World.

His parents had died so he could live, and he had lived so he could die. He had come to terms with that a long time ago, surrounded by darkness and by light in a forbidden forest. If you asked Harry, he would tell you that dying in that clearing had been quick and refreshing. Not unlike a strong gust of wind.

But coming back to life had felt like his soul was being torn apart by the hands of Death itself. He had suppressed the pain at the time because the only thought that was in his head was about the war, and the people, his friends - and oh dear Merlin, it hurt so much.

And when it was over, he had felt nothing but an all-encompassing numbness. He had felt like someone had hollowed him from the inside out and had left him begging for the pain to come back. He had gone to his dorm feeling like he only had half a soul.

And as it turned out, he did.

The small, minuscule part of Voldemort's soul in him wasn't small at all. It had stuck to him, had begun to spread inside him the moment it was put there. Like a parasite, it had spread and twisted in his soul to the extent that when it was torn apart, a big part of Harry had been torn apart with it.

It wasn't Hermione that had told him, wasn't something Snape's memories had told him. It was Death that had told him that his soul was just as torn as Voldemort's once was. The stone came, the wand appeared in his bedside table and he never had the nerve to do any harm to his father's cloak. And Harry Potter became the Master of Death.

Wasn't it ironic? He was the same as the man he had spent his whole life trying to kill. He might have gone a little mad, he might have done something he would deeply regret, and he might have destroyed the world—if Death hadn't given him a chance.

Death—with his cold presence and rattling breath—had said, "Do not be saddened, Master, for you have suffered enough. I would help you regain your soul. You will be sent back to the body that received a part of his soul and to the time he was first brought into the world of the living. You two must live a different life. You must live, my Master. For neither can live while the other survives."

And with a snap of Death's bony fingers, Harry James Potter was sent back. Back to where it all started.

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