Chapter Fifty-Five
Any Colour You Like
Do you know why I stopped being Delight, my brother? I do. There are things not in your book. There are paths outside this garden. You would do well to remember that.
Delirum to Destiny in Brief Lives
The young woman before Harry was Del, he knew it in his heart and in his mind. Every inch of him recognized her as the odd girl from his childhood, although difficult to understand and unstable. But she looked nothing like he had seen before. She was clean and whole, and beautiful. Del had been a fourteen-year-old on the other side of the door, and now here was a young woman in her twenties smiling back at him.
"I’m not usually like this,” she said as her fingers came up to twirl a rose colored lock of her hair. "I’m surprised you recognized me."
"You look nice." Harry muttered in embarrassment, finding himself unreal and awkward under the perfection she exuded. “I like your hair.” He walked forward and stood in front of the gramophone where the record was still playing its song.
She giggled and slid off the table that she sat upon. Delight pressed down at the nonexistent wrinkles on her dress. "Thank you, Harry. My name is Delight.”
"I thought you were Delirium."
"I was like this before. A long time ago." Her eyes turned misty, an expression that Harry recognized from Luna's own behavior. "But then I changed and now I'm not. At least, not out there in the real world. This place doesn’t count."
"But why?" Harry couldn't understand what had caused Delight to change into Delirium. There was a terrible pain in her other form that he couldn't see anyone choosing freely.
Delight bit her lip, causing a small dot of blood to form. "I was engaged once and he was wonderful and I knew that everything, absolutely everything would be perfect. And then he..." Delight drifted off as a shuttered expression crossed her face, her eyes changing from blue to the familiar mismatch pair. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“Change or die,” she said in a stiff voice. When she opened her eyes again, they were blue again and the painful expression had vanished.
Harry dropped the subject. "What am I doing here?"
"You have to make a choice. I told you before that you needed to be careful with your choices when I let you see the colors in your eyes." She pulled back a section of pink hair and pinned it back with a passing butterfly. “I was trying to help you and I gave you all sorts of clues. I’m sorry if you didn’t understand it. It’s very hard for me to think straight when I’m in my other form and sometimes it gets a bit… muddled.”
"Yeah, but..." Harry looked at his surroundings. The room was enormous beyond comprehension and he felt the familiar power of his stomach twist. "I don't know how."
She took his hand and led him down the aisles, passing toy trucks and racks of boomerangs. "Everything here is a choice. A cheese sandwich or a peanut butter one. The time that you woke up in the morning and which way you took to work. Go up or turn left. When a choice is made, it becomes a new world. Most of them are tiny things.” Del dipped her hands into a large tub of rubber balls. “But some choices are the difference between entire worlds. On the other side of the door is the real world that you know, and the choices that were never picked go into hiding here. This room is the other side of the coin, the path not chosen-"
"The Dark Side of the Moon," Harry said as gradual understanding filled his mind, listening to the record that played behind him.
"Yes. Nothing in here is real, but everything could be.” She gave his belly a poke and Harry drew back as the energy inside him reacted with enough force to make him dizzy. “Make your choice and all of the power in you from us will be let go in one action. You can change the world into whatever you want."
"Anything?" Harry trembled with the responsibility.
Delight walked over to a chest of drawers and opened it up. It was filled with thousands of marbles, the twisting swirls of color that shone through transparent glass. "Try it," she said as she held out a marble for him.
Harry plucked the marble from her hand and his hand tightened around the glass. "What do I-"
The words were cut off as he his world twisted and spun like the coral hue trapped in the toy in his hand and he was a somewhere else entirely and he was watching; he was being...
He was a seventh year student of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry straightened out the Head Boy badge on his chest; determine to keep it pinned properly. He saw Ron Weasley frown at him from the corner of his eye, but he didn't care. He knew Weasley was incredibly envious of him. His family was poor, but for the most part they remained popular by having a steady stream of characters in their family. But genetics had failed the sixth boy of the family, because there was nothing remarkable about him at all.
Ginny on the other hand…
The marble slipped through Harry's fingers and clattered to the floor. Harry blinked as he withdrew from the strange world before him, a place where he was besotted with Ginny. He remembered vaguely of a time where she blushed before him, her face turning unusually pink. And he remembered Delight’s confession that her helpful clues sometimes came out ‘a bit muddled.’
Talk about an understatement.
He reached for a rubber ball in the next container, anxious to see what this world held….
The worn surface of the handle in his hands was smooth against his fingertips. Harry knew nothing of love, of tender hearts and windswept kisses. However, if he was asked, Harry would have thought love was like the sturdy handle in his hands, and the weight of the hammer that swung with force.
Love was violent battlefield, in which male and female fought opposing struggles. It was only by moving swiftly, acting quickly, and destroying the enemy would there be a victor. And if successful, Harry would be able to pillage at anytime.
It would be even better if Harry had an enemy whom he could decapitate at anytime.
Again… Viking Harry knew nothing of love.
Snorting, Harry placed down the rubber ball and made his way to a set of jacks.
The staff at Hogwarts was looking at him at awe. Dumbledore clapped his hands in front of him and beamed. "Harry, my boy! That is such remarkable skill for someone your age. Why in just a few short years you have managed to master all of your ninja arts, getting a reputation among skilled ninja, and killed a whole army of people. These are the makings of a leader."
Harry Potter, member of the most powerful clan in Lightening Country, nodded. "I know am exceptionally talented. People have remarked on it all the time. I think that I am doing well enough on my own and I don't need to attend this Hogwarts."
Dumbledore shook his head. "I beg to differ, dear Harry. Even though you have mastered your secret bloodline, and have challenged the most feared of ninjas, you are still eleven years old and therefore a child. Here is your wand. Now follow Professor McGonagall, she will take you to class where you will learn how to turn a match into a needle."
Harry snorted. "I already know how to do that." He clasped his hands in front of him, and they folded into the appropriate hand signal. The match turned into a needle with a poof of smoke. "See?"
"Very clever Harry.” Dumbledore’s exceptionally bright eyes twinkled back at him. “However, you don't know how to do that with a wand."
Harry withdrew from the world with a confused expression on his face and glanced at Delight. "Ninja?"
She smiled to him. “Anything is possible. You might want to try a different area if this one is a little stranger than you would like.”
Harry plunked the jack down into the pile and made his way down the selves. There a section that was filled with rubber toys and Harry climbed up the mountain of rubber snakes to pluck the one that was resting at the very top. The snake wobbled in Harry’s hand and as the fangs were revealed as he gave it a squeeze and…
"But why? Why are you doing this to me?" Harry muttered as he hugged the ratty blanket in his hands, the same one that he had been using all of his life. "I thought that you loved me."
"Love you?" Lily Potter spat in his face. "Why would we love you? You may have been born the same day as your bother, and I nearly died to save the both of you, and you are my son, but we don't love you." She sniffed as she threw away the small art craft he made in class.
"You aren’t the Boy-Who-Lived and we have no use for you and just take time away from your brother. Honestly, it would be better off if you died that night."
Harry dropped the rubber snake from his hand and began his clumsy decent back down. He had little opinion of his parents, but his present belief that they were kind people who occasionally got into mischief suited him quite well. The suggestion that they were abusive left him uncomfortable.
He made a left and headed into a different area, finding a giant pool of inflated balloons. Harry bent down to pluck one out and gave it an experimental squeeze. He could see his reflection staring back at him from the surface of the balloon and…
The reflection in front of him morphed. The effects of the spell had worn off and now Harry was faced with the secret that had been hiding for sixteen years. His mother had lied to everyone she had ever met, including her husband.
"I'm sorry,” said Dumbledore morosely as McGonagall looked at him in horror. “I did not know."
Harry ran a hand through his locks of hair. "I'm... a Snape."
The balloon popped out of his hand and floated lazily onto the floor. "NO!" Harry gave it a distrustful look. "No, No. NO!"
"Is something wrong, Harry?" Delight glided over to him, a wreath of plastic flowers in her hair.
"That!" He pointed to the innocent looking balloon the floor. "That thing said I was a Snape." A series of epithets was at the tip of his tongue, but it seemed wrong to utter them in front of Delight.
She giggled and picked up the balloon. "So? You act that something is wrong with it."
"But I'm not... Snape, he.... I hate him! He's churlish, and crude, and selfish. The only thing I've seen him smile at was when something bad happened to another person. So where did this come from?"
Delight tilted her head and looked at him with amusement. "It came from nowhere. It is nowhere and nothing and never was. You are mad at something that's not real. Now who's the crazy one?"
Harry felt himself flush in embarrassment, but refused to let it go. "So it's not real? Not even a little?"
"Nope. It's a fake as anything can be. But it's as real as you want it to be. For some people it might be real."
"I don't want it to be real." Harry ran his hand through his hair, double-checking that it had not turned greasy and lank.
"Then it's not." She squeezed the balloon in her hands and it gave a satisfying pop and the rubber shell fell to the ground. "Of course, it's just an idea. And ideas are hard to get rid of. Follow me; I think you will like some of the things over here more." Del pulled at his hand and led him away. Still perturbed, Harry turned around to look at the balloon, which had begun to fill with air once more.
Delight gave his hand a squeeze to get his attention. "You know, you really should be more relaxed. I'm quite certain there are worlds in which you are never born and there are worlds in which you are born too early, and where you were born too late, and worlds in which you are actually the Antichrist who was lost by some nuns who talked too much and named Adam."
"My name's not Adam."
"Sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s Brian, and sometimes it's Jack, and it’s Leonard, and sometimes it’s Harold." She stopped and let go of his hand. "Here we are; you should take a peek at this area."
"Okay." Harry lifted up one of the plastic pails hesitantly and lifted it to his eye level.
He was running across a graveyard.
"Accio," he said as he summoned the trophy into his hands and grabbed the hand of Cedric's corpse.
He landed with a ungraceful thump onto the Quidditch Pitch and could hear the orchestra burst out in song as the school cheered on their champions. The adrenalin was still rushing in Harry's veins and he could barely think because of it. All he knew was that Voldemort was back and it was because of this that Cedric was dead, and it was because of this that he was bleeding from his side and it hurt to breath. He saw Mad-Eye Moody standing off to the side and charged at him. "You brought him back you psychopath!"
Moody was surprised by the blatant attack and they tumbled across the field. Harry was a blur of anger and rage. He forgot about magic, and he was not aware of the shrieks as others discovered Cedric's death, and he forgot the wound in his side that was leaving a smudged trail of blood across the field. He was only aware of the injustice of it all, that the man he trusted had ultimately betrayed him.
Harry pulled away from the vision of this world and gave a ragged breath. This world was intense. The other worlds he had visited before were cartoonish and amusing in their own right. But this wasn't filled with oddities, it was a world that held traces of something bitter and familiar. He placed down the plastic pail and moved on.
To his left he a small chess set and picked up one of the pieces.
A serene voice called out from the knocker on the wooden door. “Which came first, the phoenix or the flame?”
“Hmm… what do you think, Harry?” said Luna, looking thoughtful.
He looked at her in surprise. “What? Isn’t there just a password?”
“Oh no, you’ve got to answer the question,” said Luna.
“What if you get it wrong?”
“Well, you have to wait for someone who gets it right,” said Luna. “That way you learn, you see?”
“Yeah. Trouble is, we can’t really afford to wait for anyone else, Luna.” Harry looked over his shoulder, trying to see if Snape was making his way up to the Ravenclaw entrance. He needed to see what the diadem looked like.
“No, I see what you mean,” said Luna seriously. “Well then, I think the answer is that a circle has no beginning.”
“Well reasoned,” said the voice and the door swung open.
Harry withdrew from the world and scrutinized the chess piece. It was worn and chipped on the bottom, as if it had been passed down a considerable amount of times. He wasn’t certain how to feel about it, there was no obvious event that brought bile to his stomach like the other worlds. Luna’s appearance was a welcome change too. He placed the piece in his pocket; perhaps he would take another look at it later.
He moved on to another world and another and another and something became explicitly clear. The worlds were painful. Something happened in each one that made him unhappy, that gave his life challenge and made him worry and brought him back in conflict with The Dark Lord. He picked up another object, and then another, and then another. And when he took a break to observe all of the worlds he examined, a thought floated in his mind. Harry could do anything. The appearance of an abusive Lilly Potter showed he could make it so his parents never died. The sky was the limit.
And why stop there? Harry could make it so Voldemort never existed. A shiver of anticipation spiraled in Harry's body.
And why stop there? Perhaps he could make it so Slytherin never came into power. Without someone to champion those ideas, perhaps there was a chance that the belief of blood supremacy never took hold.
Harry began the shake as he looked at the massive warehouse before him. How far back should he go? And what would that mean for the world when he returned?
Harry eagerly made his way through stranger possibilities, tasting each world for brief moments and casting them aside when they did not fulfill his desire. The further back in time he traveled, the more dissatisfied he grew. It some places, Harry didn’t recognize himself at all, and was flung into arbitrary widows of time watching people he did not recognize.
He would have to choose something more in his time.
Through it all, Harry was mindful of the small wooden chess piece in his pocket; a place that where he recognized himself quite easily, as if it were his mirror self he was watching. However, he was still fighting Voldemort in that world. But the importance of his choice was starting to weigh on him, and he was beginning to feel sick.
Voldemort was a part of Harry’s life and his very essence was tied in their final battle. Harry had balked at the connection before, and struggled against his destiny. But here, where Harry could see all of the examples splayed out in front of him in a clean pallet, he was faced with the truth.
He liked who he was.
He didn't want to be a Snape. He didn't want to be a ninja. He didn't want to have family.
The extenuating circumstances of his childhood had made him clever, and resilient, and it made him actively work to make the world someplace were acceptance could be found. World peace was a lofty and elusive goal, but now Harry was willing to settle for something smaller, his own personal peace. The Harry in the chess piece seemed to have a bit of that.
He heard Delight give a cry of joy behind him. "Oh, here it is! I wonder how it got here?" She lifted a chain in her hand and tied it around her neck.
Harry walked over her. “I think this will do,” he said as he lifted up the chess piece in his hand to show it to Delight.
“Are you certain?” she asked. Her hand was wrapped around a small gold coin that hung from her neck. It spun in her hand, the light catching on its surface from an unknown light source.
Harry paused. Her earnest expression carried a weight that he had not seen before, one more suited to her alter ego of Delirium. And then he noticed that the coin she had in her had was the same one he had given her. The golden DA coin.
He thought of other coins too, the one that fell from Draco’s hands as he begged Harry for forgiveness for killing Sirius. He thought of the coin he had given Lucius Malfoy in an attempt of blackmail, and he thought of another Endless. He thought of Destruction, and the lesson he had imparted to Harry one Hogsmeade weekend: there is no such thing as a one-sided coin.
He closed his hand around the worn chess piece. “No, I think I’ve changed my mind.” He walked over to the old fashioned gramophone and watched the old record spin. Harry had been given a lot of advice over the years, some freely, some bitterly, and some were lessons learned by his own experience.
There are ways around everything, but perhaps not in the way you desire.
Want. Take. Own.
Death is the force of equality, look into its eyes and stand proud.
Never underestimate the power of a good duck.
There is beauty in despair.
There is truth in even the most fantastic of tales.
There is no right and wrong. There is only power and those too weak to see it.
To know yourself, is to be powerful. To know others, is to be wise. To know both is to be a gift.
Things change.
These were lessons from the Endless, lessons imparted to him specifically for this moment. He thought of the minuscule world in his hands, a place that he had tasted for seconds. He had little knowledge of its history, and in that world he had yet to get rid of the Horcruxes, because the Dark Lord was a part of his life. The music stopped playing, the record coming to a stop so he could read the name Pink Floyd. The last words of the song lingered in his head.
"There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact, it's all dark."
“I need more time,” he told Delight, tossing the bishop on the table.
“Take as much as you need," she said.
Harry traveled down the aisles, mindful of the steady clunking of the ramps and pulleys above him which were adding more choices to the list. Sweat was beginning to form along his brow and the feeling of nausea intensified. But he couldn’t leave until he made his choice, and Harry was becoming increasingly aware how much he didn’t care for it.
This room was nothing but a place of wish fulfillment, where one would look back at the past. He could make the world into anything he saw fit. But Prez had told him that happiness only came to him when he let others make their own choices. The Fourth member of Endless had been happy as well, leaving the universe to take control of its own destruction. The one time when Harry tried to control everything, was the time when his actions had led to Sirius’ death.
Things change, and Harry needed to accept it instead of dwelling in the past. He wanted to get out of the giant warehouse, to return to his world where things were real. Finally, he found an old rubber duck, beaten and worn. Harry turned it over in his hands, relishing in the familiarity.
Never underestimate the power of a good duck.
“This one,” he said, a smile coming to his lips. “It’s just what I needed.” He gave it a squeeze and the duck uttered a squawk. He felt the energy inside him ease and the rubber duck began to melt in his hands like taffy before vanishing. He blinked in surprise, and he looked up to see that Delight had faded away into Delirium. She was gazing up at him, young again, with a troubled expression.
“Harry,” she whimpered, “you have to make certain that you turn left or you won’t make it.”
It was then Harry noticed the giant warehouse was gone and was in the plain room with Death once more. She was beaming at him, the ferocious lion hat atop her head once more.
"Oh, I’m so glad that you picked the one of the right choices,” she said.
“There was a wrong one?”
“Yes,” Death said firmly. “You could have changed the past.”
Harry stilled. “And what would be wrong with that?”
“I told you, we shape the universe. If you were to change the past in any point in time, you would have rendered our actions obsolete, killing half of the family.” Her face turned serious once more. “I would have made it, Delirium travels those paths every day, and Destruction would not have been directly effected since he walked away, but the others would not have made it. The consequences of killing one of us is unsightly, I can’t even fathomed what would happen if half of them were replaced.”
“You would have wished you were in Hell,” Delirium said with a solemn expression. “You would have wished you knew what Hell was.”
Harry looked at them aghast. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”
Death shook her head. “It was a choice that you had to make Harry. That was one of the unbreakable rules; everyone is allowed to make their own decisions.”
“Hurry up please, it's time,” said Delirium in a sing-song voice.
Death approached Harry, placing a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll have to forgive me; I don’t do this very often.”
She pressed her lips on his; gently prodding them open with a flick of her tongue. Caught off guard, he followed her lead and she breathed into him.
Harry had heard the cliché tales from his roommates, a cross-reference of dirty thoughts, personal experiences, and shameless boasting that often was more tale than truth. He had never deigned to participate in the talk, finding very little attraction to anyone in a more personal level. Draco, in particular, had been particularly mouthy, describing his dalliances with Pansy with effusive detail. He spoke of her kisses in many ways. "Hot" and "hard" were two of his favorite words.
Death's kiss was nothing like their descriptions.
It was cool to the touch, as if Harry was breathing in the winter air that froze his lungs. But her tongue was hot and gentle, and god... it was getting difficult to think. Her hand slid further down his back and the sensation carried down his body, from his chest and his stomach and his legs and his toes and the tips of his ears and...
He could kiss her forever.
And then her arms wrapped around Harry fully and he smelled her, and felt her and for one peaceful moment, he felt vindicated in his acceptance of her. He doubted there would ever be anyone who understood him or accepted him more than she, the gentle woman who stood on the field of a war zone and by the bedside of an old man. She removed her hands but the icy sensation continued, and suddenly it felt warm and soft but there was something pressing into his ribs. He moved his arm to bat it away, but it was difficult to move and he squirmed and he was trapped!
Harry's eyes opened to see nothing but darkness, and the dirt was pressing all around him. He squeezed them back shut and he began to flail his arms, finding it difficult to move at the site of his grave. But where to go?
Delirium's whisper echoed in his mind. Turn left.
So he moved to the left, clawing his away amid the sod and the branches that were poking at his ribs. He grabbed one the nearest one at his side, using the extra length to stir the packed mud around him so he could climb. He felt a hand make connection with the surface, the tantalizing sensation of freedom at his fingertips. The icy sensation of Death's kiss was beginning to fade and with it came the need to breathe in. Another hand broke through, and he kicked and scrambled and air hit his face and he gasped with relief. The soil was begin to sink back down and pulled him with it. An elbow, an arm, his waist... never had his body seemed like such a distance.
Harry slammed the stick he had used to dig himself out in front of him in order to catch his breath. The bottom half of his body was still in the soil, but it would be easy enough to get out of. He closed his eyes, and pressed his forehead against the damp earth. When he felt at ease, he opened his eyes and gasped in horror at the thin object in front of him.
He had used a human bone to crawl out.
The bone still had bits of rotted flesh to it, the decaying process stunted by the early winter. Harry moaned when he remembered the family that had died before him. A young son, a sobbing mother, a helpless father, and of the small girl that had been so brave despite her inevitable fate. They had done nothing more but be present from Voldemort came to kill Harry. He had been able to overlook their deaths in October, the knowledge of something greater keeping him focused on his task. But those sorts of thoughts had disappeared along with the power had had stolen from the Endless, making him more human than ever.
"Fuck."
Harry gagged as he flung the bone away from him, the satisfaction of Death and her kiss was gone in the presence of something so visceral. He had lain in the earth, his body frozen in time as those unfortunate souls with poor luck rotted beneath him. His body was convulsing back to normal, limbs twitching as blood rushed through his veins once again. Harry kicked himself out of the ground, sobbing with great uneven gasps. He was acutely aware of his loss of power and of his near death as he stared at the tender green leaves in the trees.
Time had surged forward without him.
Oh cruel April