Chapter Eighteen

Death loomed over the slumbering form of Albus Dumbledore, standing motionless as absinthe eyes contemplated the old mortal currently oblivious to his presence. His fingers twitched with the need to attackmaimdestroy, but he held himself back with the sort of iron will that had seen him through countless eons of existence. His shell had requested he do something discreet to the human, and despite how manic and spontaneous he generally appeared, he could be subtle when he wanted to.

It wasn't as if he could have led the squibs into revolution that one time when he was bored if he'd done it through showy examples of sheer power. He'd fixed everything afterwards, of course—leaving the Origin timeline so skewed would have been Very Bad Indeed. Knowing his luck, he could have accidentally written himself out of existence by preventing himself from being born or from gathering his Hallows.

Messing with the past had been fun for a while, but he always made sure that events leading up to his Ascension to Death were returned to Origin standards to avoid mistakes. Anything afterwards was free game, though. He couldn't care less what happened to the 'future,' and had amused himself for millennia by experimenting with what he could get away with before the world devolved into a dystopia of epic proportions.

No, if there was one thing Death knew how to do, it was clean up after himself.

Regardless, there were many things he wanted to do to this upstart mortal before him, but very few of them could be accurately described as 'subtle.' Death pondered his options for a nanosecond, ideas and plans being formed and discarded at beyond the speed of thought as he weighed the potential of several schemes against one another, searching for the one that would please his shell and simultaneously offer the most agony to this… this wizard.

Death glanced back at the mortal, idly pressing a miniscule fraction of his magic onto the man to keep him asleep, and slipped through his feeble mental barriers while he was at it. He shuffled through the human's memories, his dreams, his deepest fears, his every regret, and Death felt the hollow void that passed as his soul stirring with dawning glee.

This, Death knew, would be delicious.

He would have to handle this delicately; preying on this particular mortal's fears required the sort of masterful subtlety that he hadn't personally bothered exercising in over ten thousand years. He couldn't simply crush the mortal under his heel and grind him into dust. He had to utterly destroy him, and the only way to do that was to tear down everything he believed in, everything he had fought and bled for, and expose him to the world for what he really was.

A coward. A weak, desperate shell of a man so warped from his sister's death that he'd become someone the Albus Dumbledore of his childhood would have been disgusted by. Death grinned, running his tongue over his teeth as he reached out a pale hand and hovered it over the mortal's head, gathering insidious magic at his fingertips.

He had learned this spell in Ancient Egypt from the Avatar of Ma'at, and had rarely had a reason to put it to good use. What good was forcing his enemies to tell the truth when he could simply rip the knowledge from their very souls? But now, it would serve him perfectly.

The spell sank into the mortal's magical core, wrapping around it like the parasite it was, locking away the ability to lie, even to oneself. Death's grin widened. An Albus Dumbledore incapable of telling anything but the whole, unadulterated truth… Death bit back the urge to laugh hysterically. The best part as far as Death was concerned was the compulsion in the spell to ignore the fact that he was telling the truth in the first place. It would be no fun at all if his victim realized what was happening and simply stopped speaking aloud, after all.

He calmed himself quickly, stepping away from the bed as he turned his attention to the room around him, eyes peering past wards and masking magic as if they weren't even there, searching for anything incriminating. It wasn't enough to simply force him to tell the truth, after all; Death had much more to do before he could return to his shell and claim that vengeance had been met to his satisfaction.

His eyes alighted on a pensieve 'hidden' behind a false wall, and his grin returned. He stepped towards it, only to pause as a ball of fire materialized between him and his target, screeching in anger. Death did not react to the sound, despite knowing how agonizing anyone else would find it. The song of a phoenix—be it uplifting or terrifying—targets souls, and Death had no soul to target. He reached out lightning-quick and snatched the phoenix out of the air, listening as it squawked and burst into flames as soon as his fingers closed around its neck.

The pile of ashes in his hand lifted to reveal a tiny, bald head, before the baby phoenix cried out as it ignited again, being forced into another burning day seconds after it had been reborn. Death watched with a crooked smile as the phoenix was forced into rebirth over and over and over again, its cries growing more broken and jagged after each rebirth.

He remembered the first time he'd discovered what his Touch did to phoenixes. As True Immortals, phoenixes had enough of a grasp on the living plane to not have their souls removed through simple touch. Death could remove the soul of a phoenix, but he had to actively want to. Otherwise, the death magic in his fingers was enough to repeatedly force the phoenix through simultaneous burning days. The one he'd experimented with had lasted approximately forty burnings before its mind had broken under the pain, and it had not risen from the ashes afterwards.

At burning number twenty-four, Death tipped his hand forward and let the phoenix and its ashes fall to the ground, stepping over it as it whimpered and cried beneath him. That would teach the bird to not interfere with him again.

Death pulled the pensieve free of its cabinet and scanned the vials of memories lining the shelves. He ran his magic through them and studied their contents, pleased to find Dumbledore had stored a great deal of his more 'traumatic' memories here in an effort to blunt their effect on his conscious mind. This was the risk to using pensieves: you could store your memories in them to numb the emotions and sensations associated with them, but if you left them out of your mind long enough you eventually forgot them altogether. Judging by the stale magic surrounding a few of them, Death figured the mortal hadn't bothered replacing these memories in decades. Whether this was because he'd genuinely forgotten—he cackled at his own wit—about that little aspect of pensieves, or because the mortal thought himself above such mundane side effects, Death didn't care. There were a great deal of his interactions with Grindelwald, along with a few of the more 'shady' actions he'd taken along the road to his Greater Good.

Death could only grin at the thought of Dumbledore forgetting all of this. His holier-than-thou attitude would make much more sense if he legitimately didn't know about everything shifty he'd done in the name of the 'Light.' Not that Death pitied him. Or cared. Or was particularly compassionate about the mistake. It was the mortal's own fault, and Death had no tolerance for idiots.

With a flick of thought, Death banished all the vials and the pensieve to the Void where he could collect them later. His shell had needed a pensieve after all, and it wasn't as if Dumbledore needed this one now that he'd taken all the memories stored with it. In fact, Death was doing the mortal a favor by taking it with him. It wasn't healthy to use a pensieve like this, after all. The mortal should be thanking him, in all honesty. Maybe he could get the human to thank him publicly? It wouldn't be difficult to override the man's conscious mind and magic and simply take over for a while—he could make a grand spectacle out of it for his own entertainment.

That was what mortals were useful for: being entertaining. When they stopped entertaining him, he tended to lose interest. And when he lost interest in a mortal, he generally silenced them in some sort of permanent manner so that they didn't go around blabbing about how "He possessed me!" or "He made me slaughter an entire town using only my teeth!" Tattletales annoyed him. Things that annoyed him didn't tend to live very long lives.

A small, shivering trill drew his attention down to the little bald bird sitting in a pile of ashes. Death's face slowly stretched into a wide, fanged smile. He'd almost forgotten about the little chick that had foolishly tried to stand in his way. It wasn't as if the bird didn't know who—what—he was. Death was doing nothing to hide his magic or his presence; the bird would have had to be extremely ignorant to have not known what it was getting into. The phoenix on the ground choked out a sound somewhere between a protest and a plea, and Death crouched before it, grinning wide as he clucked his tongue at the shivering bird.

"Silly little bird," Death cooed, leaning closer and watching as the phoenix fell backwards with an alarmed squeak as he drew near. The bird was nervous, but not terrified. It seemed the chick had been so secure in its own invincibility that it had utterly ignored what its magic was telling it. How adorable. "Your vaunted immortality is nothing in the face of Death." He watched as the bird grew very still, tiny eyes widening as it realized what it had attacked in defense of its master. He reached out one long finger and prodded the bird on the head, watching as it burst into pained flames again and was reborn. "Your master has made an enemy of me, little firebird. Will you stand betwixt us and sacrifice your soul for such a meaningless insect?"

The little phoenix trembled as it stared at him, obviously weighing its options, before it lowered its head and closed its eyes in defeat. Death bared his teeth in a grin, straightening from his crouch and dusting his hands against each other to rid himself of the leftover ashes. He'd thought not. Phoenixes were very attached to their immortality, and he'd yet to meet one that was willing to accept True Death in defense of another. For such noble, Light creatures, phoenixes were just as inherently selfish as everything else in the face of death.

"I thought not…" Death murmured, eying the depressed little bird with a smirk. The chick was fortunate that Death had things to do and places to be, else he might have stuck around and played with it for a while longer. He was positive he could take the bird to rebirth forty-one before it broke, and it would have been interesting to see if he could somehow mutate the phoenix's magic away from its Light alignment—doing so would have set the bird's Dark magic and Light soul into conflict, which was always amusing to watch. The bird would have torn itself apart trying to fix itself, and watching a creature ignite its own magical core against its will provided a spectacular lightshow that would have entertained him for some time.

Making a mental note to come back for the phoenix at a later time—I wonder if my shell would be interested in my experiments?—Death took a step forward in the Headmaster's quarters at Hogwarts, and emerged inside his shell's room at Grimmauld Place with the sleeping form of his alternate self. Death smiled almost fondly at the boy, before grinning as he retrieved the pensieve he'd appropriated and set it against the wall. He'd be sure and draw his shell's attention to it when the boy woke; his shell had never used a pensieve before, and Death would be sure and explain all the upsides and downsides to using one. No point in letting his precious shell turn into an idiot.

Death turned on his heel and fell back into the ornate black chair that materialized in time to catch him, propping one ankle up on his opposite knee as he watched his shell sleep. He wasn't surprised that his shell was so tired; he had been given quite a shock at the bank earlier, and mortals didn't handle surprises very well. Death would admit to being rather curious about the memories his shell's father had left him—not his father, never his—and wondered if such a thing had existed in his own reality.

He supposed it didn't matter. He didn't really care either way, but it would have been interesting to know. If it had, that meant his Dumbledore had been successful in keeping it from him, which was irritating but not enough to really make him upset. It had been countless, countless eons since he'd last cared or thought about his human parents. But his shell was still young and was likely to care a great deal more about the whole ordeal than Death would have. He would have sent his magic through the memories like he had those of Dumbledore's, but Death rather thought he'd like to be surprised for once. He'd view them alongside his shell of course, and it would be more interesting to watch them for the first time then. It would be intriguing to not already know something ahead of time.

As he studied the unconscious form of his shell, Death ran the bare bones—he would get the mortals to appreciate his jokes eventually—of his plan through his mind. He supposed he could do everything all at once, expose all the secrets and all the lies simultaneously and maybe get a stroke or a heart attack out of it, but it would be more satisfying to spread it out. Plus, people would accept everything easier if it were spaced out in a believable fashion. Death had become old hand at manipulating the minds of weak little mortals, and he wasn't above nudging a few people into the right mindset if they weren't conforming to his desires. The die-hard Dumbledore fans, for one, were likely to take everything with a grain of salt.

This was unacceptable.

Death wanted the mortal universally loathed. He would not rest until every man woman and child equated the name Albus Dumbledore with the scum of the earth. Death wanted Dumbledore spat upon in the streets, kicked out of every storefront, snarled at by every dog, and hissed at by every cat. Death would hound the man until he either tried to take back his power by force, or he tried to kill himself out of sheer grief.

He wouldn't let him succeed in either of those, of course, but it would be amusing to watch him try.

The truth spell had been the first step. Death would not allow Dumbledore to die a martyr, not this time. He would use Magical Britain's fickle-mindedness to its fullest potential, turning Dumbledore's greatest strength into his biggest weakness. For a man who relied on the adoration and loyalty of the sheep of Britain, the sudden scorn and disgust would be crippling.

But Death did not aim to merely cripple the man. No, Death would not stop until the mortal's mind broke beneath the weight of his own deceptions. And once the man was helpless, defeated, isolated from everything and everyone… Death would stop being subtle.

Death stood from his chair and stepped up to his shell's bedside, absently running a hand through the boy's hair, unable to deny himself the urge to be in almost constant contact with the one human he could actually touch. He was still rather in awe of the fact that his shell allowed him to touch him in the first place. Death knew he was unnatural, knew he was frightening to look at and to be around, but his shell still permitted him this contact without judging him for it.

His shell doubted his ability to be discreet. Death knew and understood this. Running his tongue over his teeth, Death smiled; he couldn't wait to prove the boy wrong.