"You what?"

Harry thought he was being perfectly reasonable in his shocked disbelief. By the look of confusion on Death's face, the entity did not entirely agree. Harry took a steadying breath as he reminded himself—again—that Death was not human, did not adhere to human morals, and that attempting to hold him to human standards was pointless. It didn't help much.

"Let me get this straight." Harry was remarkably proud of his even, non-confrontational tone. "Last night, while I was sleeping off my emotional and mental exhaustion, you went several hours back in time," here Harry glanced at Death for clarification, and was answered with a grinning nod, "spent three hours and twenty-seven minutes," another glance at Death, this time wondering why the being had bothered specifying that exact amount of time, "creeping out Aunt Petunia by stalking her from the kitchen window, then you…" Harry trailed off, wondering how to word this next part properly. "Then you removed Aunt Petunia's soul, proceeded to break it in half and eat part of it, repeated the process with Uncle Vernon, and then shuffled my relatives' souls around like a deck of cards?"

"That is an accurate summary of events, yes," Death admitted, unashamed.

Not that Harry had really expected him to feel ashamed, but maybe some sort of guilt or vague disquiet would have been nice. This was quite a bit different than terrorizing the goblins, or ambushing Voldemort in his office for the express purpose of effectively obliterating him from existence. This had been done with deliberate intent to harm, and he didn't have the ready-made excuse of the target being evil to counterbalance it.

Don't get him wrong, Harry was all for Dursley-Vengeance, but whenever he entertained fantasies about such a thing it had usually included behavioral-modification potions, semi-permanent human-to-animal transfigurations, and possibly convincing Aunt Marge's dogs that they were actually rabid squirrels. Nothing Harry could have ever come up with quite measured up to mutilating their souls and putting them back in the wrong bodies.

Harry's mouth opened and closed a few times as he tried to think of something appropriate to say. What was there to say, really? Good job? Don't do it again? Can I have a memory of it so I can watch?

"Ah, I see you are speechless with gratitude," Death announced into the silence, grinning like he'd just won a prize. "There is no need to thank me, my shell," Death proclaimed magnanimously. "It was my greatest pleasure to punish the slovenly mortals for their past transgressions against you."

Harry huffed a disbelieving laugh. He couldn't really bring himself to be too upset about the fate of the Dursleys, all things considered. They'd treated him like a personal slave since he was tall enough to reach the stove with the help of a footstool, forced him to live in a tiny spider-infested cupboard for ten years of his life, and pretty much did everything short of punching him in the face to force him to obey their whims.

Maybe if Death had done this to some other family who Harry didn't loathe with a fiery passion, he would be more worked up about it. Like, say, if Death had done this to the Weasleys, or to the Grangers, there would have been a lot more shouting involved in this conversation.

Plus, Harry considered, perking up, there was absolutely no way for Dumbledore to try and force him to go back to them now. Petunia—err, Dudley? Vernon? Wow, that was a bizarre thought. Harry carefully did not consider it further—would never let him back in the house after this had happened.

"Yeah, thanks," Harry finally managed, voice cracking slightly. "Just… maybe next time talk to me first? You know… in case I have any suggestions or anything."

Death was quiet a moment as he contemplated this compromise. Harry held his breath, hoping the entity would acquiesce. He had absolutely zero commanding power over Death, but so far the being had been agreeable enough to his opinions and Harry hoped this trend would continue for the foreseeable future.

"I understand," Death said gravely after a few moments of thought, his expression somber. "I should have consulted you beforehand, on the assumption that you would like to be present and enact your own revenge."

That… wasn't quite what Harry had meant, exactly, but it was definitely close enough. He'd take it.

Death's face took on a very strange expression then. Harry wasn't entirely sure how to describe it. It was an odd mixture of glee, resignation, disgruntlement, and anticipation. That expression boded nothing well for anyone, Harry was sure. It didn't last long though, before the familiar grin was cracking his face in half as a folded newspaper appeared in his hands as if it had always been there.

"In the interest of fairness," Death began slyly, "I should inform you that I have begun our vengeance on the elderly mortal. If you have suggestions or improvements, make them now."

And then the newspaper was thrust into his hands with a loud, rasping cackle that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

With great trepidation, Harry glanced down at the paper in his hands.

DUMBLEDORE: DARK PAST REVEALED shouted the headline in excessively huge font. In comparison, the tiny By Rita Skeeter underneath it was positively miniscule. The article was surprisingly long—or, maybe, not so surprisingly—and seemed like it encompassed over half the entire edition.

Harry grew increasingly fascinated as he read, much in the fashion one is unable to look away from an oncoming train wreck. It went into very explicit detail about just about every single questionable decision Dumbledore had ever made in his entire life, even the seemingly harmless ones that he'd done during childhood like stealing sweets (lemon drops, naturally) from stores. Harry was especially interested—horrifyingly so—in the section (an entire six paragraphs) dedicated to Dumbledore's incredibly sketchy relationship with Gellert Grindelwald. It read like a gossip column, but there were snippets of actual memories inserted right into the page to make it legitimate.

Now, Harry personally had nothing against the idea of two men being together, but Dumbledore was so old that the idea of him being intimate with anyone was nauseating. Logically Harry knew the man had been young once, and hadn't always had a Merlin-esque beard and hairstyle, but the only image of Dumbledore Harry had ever had and would ever have is of him as he is now—ancient and frail.

The memories accompanying this particular part of the article were… explicit, to say the least. A tiny sentence in almost unreadable font under the memory itself assured the readers that it was charmed to not play for anyone under sixteen. How fortunate for Harry that he just met that age restriction, then.

Eyes burning with a combination of revulsion and disgusted fascination, Harry forced himself to move on.

Directly after that particular section came the part that immediately erased any thoughts of the previous display. There, embedded next to a still-shot of Dumbledore and a young blond man (Grindelwald, he presumed) was a word-by-word account of the two's plans to dominate the muggles for the Greater Good.

Harry stared at that sentence for what seemed like forever. "…and this has been published? It's public?"

He couldn't see it, but he could practically feel Death's fanged grin. "It should be delivered to every subscribing household in Europe within three hours."

Harry looked up and met void-black eyes. "There is absolutely no way for him to talk his way out of this one, is there?"

There was something suspiciously smug about Death's grin now. "No, my shell. I have encouraged the mortal to speak only the truth in all things. It will be impossible to salvage his reputation from this when he is unable to refute it."

He looked back at the paper and its most condemning sentence. For the Greater Good. Everyone who'd ever spoken with Dumbledore for more than five seconds knew that was his signature phrase. To have it so blatantly connected to Grindelwald and an actual, legitimate plan for muggle domination… well, it would do more than simply cast aspersions on the Headmaster as all previous attempts at defamation had done.

Underneath the shock and still-lingering exhaustion, Harry felt a spark of grim triumph. This wasn't quite the ruining he wanted for the Headmaster, but it was a bloody good start.

"It's perfect," Harry finally said, handing the paper back to Death, where it obligingly dissolved into ashes when he touched it. "I wouldn't change a thing."

Death grinned. "This is merely the beginning, my shell. The beginning of something great." His grin widened several notches. "Terrible, yes… but great."

Death stood behind his excited mortal shell as he sat as nonchalantly as he could manage in the dining room. Initially all of the pathetic mortals had attempted to bombard his shell with questions, but a quick pulse of irritatedimpatientangry magic and they'd all quickly remembered other, more pressing things to be doing.

He, himself, was almost quivering with anticipation. Of course he wasn't actually quivering, because he had more self-control than that (as much as it might surprise the mortals he associated with, he did actually possess self-control; he simply didn't see the point in exercising it much) and because he was about eighty-four percent certain that if he were to make any sort of movement at all, half of the mortals currently fixated on his figure out of sheer horror would suffer spontaneous heart attacks and likely die.

That wouldn't ordinarily bother him—in fact, normally he'd find it quite funny—but he wanted them to be both breathing and relatively conscious for when the elderly mortal finally showed his worthless hide and had today's Daily Prophet shoved into his twinkling face.

His shell was holding up under the secondhand scrutiny admirably, only twitching uncomfortably every fifteen seconds or so when someone glanced a little too much in his direction. Death made sure to smile at everyone who so much as thought about looking at his precious shell, remembering how very much the mortals seemed to be unnerved by his attempts at politeness.

So far, it was working remarkably well, and there had been no repeat offenders.

At least the mortals were quick learners.

The fireplace flared green as a figure emerged in an unflattering fwoosh of flames and soot, and a room full of eager bodies which had leaned forward in anticipation leaned backwards again in disappointment as the surly figure of the dark mortal his shell held a particular distaste for was revealed.

Death studied the mortal curiously, remembering him faintly—very faintly—from his own human life, and knowing that this was the only mortal besides his shell who had not desired to pull him into this reality seemingly against his will.

The mortal couldn't have known that Death had followed the pull because he'd felt like it at the time, but the idea of his protesting the 'mistreatment' was vaguely pleasing. From what he recalled of this mortal, and from what his shell's thoughts and memories showed, Death had expected him to be openly antagonistic and rude to his shell. This would, of course, have been the very last thing the mortal ever did with its insignificant life, but the fact that—as far as Death could tell—the mortal hadn't actually said or done much of anything towards either of them was… fascinating.

Death drifted away from his shell to approach the dark mortal, vaguely registering the stiffening of the mortal's posture and the idle worryconcerncuriosity coming from his shell and flicked his long fingers reassuringly in his shell's direction. He wasn't going to do anything to the mortal. Maybe. Possibly. Unless he felt like it.

Death grinned. It was probably a good thing that his shell lacked the ability to see into his mind like Death did into his. He got the impression his shell might not entirely approve of a great deal of his thoughts nowadays.

Impressively, the mortal did not recoil away from him shrieking or gibbering in fear like the rest of them were doing as he approached. Mentally, Death elevated his estimation of the mortal from useless pustule of flesh and bone to insignificant insect struggling in a pool of its own filth. It was more of a jump in status than most mortals ever achieved in their entire lives.

"You fascinate me," Death told the dark mortal upfront, having heard somewhere that humans appreciated honesty and wanting to make a relatively good impression on the mortal who didn't seem to be mindlessly terrified of him yet.

Oddly, this did not seem to reassure the mortal of his intentions in quite the way he'd wanted. The dark mortal paled starkly, his expression not betraying much except for a faint narrowing of pupils which Death idly diagnosed as a symptom of shock.

"How fortuitous for you, then," the dark mortal drawled in a steady voice, "that I am so innately fascinating."

Death got the impression that the dark mortal was mocking him, but more out of a sense of habit than any real malicious intent. He decided not to rip off his arms and beat his lifeless corpse with them in acknowledgement of this fact. The mortal also appeared quite pained, as if he dearly wished he could take back that sentence and try again.

"Yes," he replied instead, not letting up on his grin, not quite as dedicated to appearing sociable or harmless anymore in the face of the dark mortal's less-than-polite response. "I find myself fascinated with what flavor would lurk within your soul should I rip it from your chest and sever it with my teeth."

Death wasn't actually giving that any more or less thought than he gave the flavor of everyone else's soul, but he'd just about run out of social niceties for the millennium and figured he'd just say it for the sake of freaking the mortal out.

The only reason he could tell it worked was the slight, almost infinitesimal step away the mortal took, his face still remarkably blank of all expression. This was a mortal with excellent control of his own face, but his feet had betrayed him that time.

He heard his shell clearing his throat meaningfully back at the table, and Death acknowledged the unvoiced request with a tilt of the head as he grinned wider at the blank-faced mortal before abruptly blinking out of existence and reappearing behind his shell's chair as if he'd never left.

The rest of the mortals jumped at his sudden movement, one or two of them even shrieking aloud a little. Death frowned at them in consternation. They barely whimpered or backed away when he was baring teeth and asking people about the flavor of their souls, but a little step between reality had them shrieking?

"Mortals are strange," Death confided to his shell, not really bothering to lower his voice any but bending down a bit to give the impression that his words were meant for his shell alone.

"So I've gathered," came his shell's bland response as he eyed the trembling mortals he was unfortunate enough to call kin. "Do you suppose Dumbledore plans on actually showing his face tonight?"

Death glanced to the left as he peered through Time as if it were merely a bothersome pane of glass. Frowning in discontent—the old mortal actually didn't plan on coming, too busy fighting off the legion of howlers assaulting his office—Death decided to Do Something about it. Reaching out with a fraction of power he rewrote reality to suit his whims. When the future-Dumbledore "made" the decision to come "reassure" the Order of his "innocence," Death blinked away from the future-that-might-be and refocused on the time-that-is and his impatiently waiting shell.

"Yes," Death replied without pause. He decided not to mention how he'd had to encourage the mortal to show up—the point was that the human was coming, and the "why" didn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. "He shall be arriving momentarily."

Death kept an eye on the future-that-might-be just in case, and was vindicated when he had to further coax the elderly mortal to Grimmauld Place four more times. Either the mortal's desire to not confront the Order about this was greater than approximately one one-millionth of Death's power (unlikely), or Death was getting soft in his old age (possible, yet doubtful).

Just to be sure, Death forwent subtlety altogether and implanted a compulsion directly in the man's mind (ignoring the pitiful barriers the mortal had created) to get his arse over here ten minutes ago.

The elderly mortal arrived in the center of the room with a deafening crack, as his Death-driven urgency hijacked his usual sense of propriety and common sense and had him barging directly through the wards around the property in a way that was both incredibly painful and immensely stupid.

The Black Family wards were almost seven hundred years old, and mildly sentient to boot. To Death, this meant the wards were about as threatening as a mote of dust lightly landing on his outstretched finger. To an aging human to whom the concepts of "restraint" and "humility" were foreign in the extreme, the wards likely seemed equally as harmless. It was not surprising, therefore, that in the man's haste to answer his magic's sudden demand that he get to the Order meeting immediately he chose to believe in his own omnipotence and pretend that the wards would yield to him like any of his sycophantic followers would have.

This was not what actually happened.

Death watched, gleefully surprised, as his "love-tap" on the man's mind resulted in the one-hundred and fifteen year-old mortal crashing through the wards with impressive speed and landing ingloriously on top of the dining room table, face-down in a bowl of pudding.

There was approximately four seconds of total silence, before the Black Family wards reacted to this intrusion with extreme prejudice.

Having been shattered irrevocably upon the old man's physical and magical collision with—and through—all thirteen layers of wards, the tattered remnants lacked the power or wherewithal to do anything truly harmful to the intruder. They did, however, have enough magic left to strip the invading mortal of all magical artifacts (this included a short cherry-wood wand, one pair of heavily-enchanted half-moon spectacles, a bottomless pouch of calming-drought laced lemon drops, one set of robes charmed to brighten in response to present ambient magic, and two-and-a-half feet of beard which had been turned into an emergency portkey at some point in the past and then forgotten about) and to activate the "Marauder failsafe" that Sirius Black had snuck into the wards during his Hogwarts years and never told anyone about.

Dumbledore, magically exhausted, confused, blinded, dressed in nothing but his pants and shoes, covered in pudding and missing a great deal of facial hair, was promptly turned fluorescent orange with neon green polka dots and transfigured into a goat.

Death listened to the grave silence (he would get them to appreciate his jokes one day) with a growing grin. He couldn't have made this happen any better if he'd actively tried. It was actually even better since it was genuinely an accident. He hadn't thought the mortal would be foolish enough to break through the wards instead of using the floo like any reasonably sane person, but this was just so much better.

He snuck a peek at his shell and saw him staring wide-eyed at the colorful goat laying dazed in the dinner pudding.

"Albus, this is not the time to be fooling around!" an irate older witch shouted, hair coming loose from its bun in her flustered rage. She brandished her wand and with a swish and a flick, there was a mostly-naked elderly mortal where the goat had been. He was still orange and green and still had pudding on his face, but at least he was now capable of speech. "What were you thinking, Albus?! Apparating straight through the wards! Honestly!"

"Now now, Minerva," the elderly mortal began, pausing to cough out some pudding and brush ineffectually at his ragged, shorn beard. "I was in far too much of a hurry to let something as insignificant as mere wards stop me."

The old witch stared at him for a moment, and Death watched with increasing glee. She shook her head sharply and thrust a newspaper at the dazed mortal's face. "Never mind, Albus. Look at this! That Skeeter woman has gone too far this time, mark my words. The public will be up in arms about this nonsense!"

His shell stood then, stepping forward and meeting the elderly human's unfocused, twinkling eyes. "Is it all true, Headmaster? Did you really conspire with Grindelwald for the domination of all muggles?"

Death was so proud of his shell for remembering that the foolish mortal could only speak the truth and for cutting so quickly to the heart of the matter.

Before the Order had a chance to puff up in outrage, the old mortal reached out a wrinkled hand and tried to pat his shell on the head. Death reached out and latched onto the back of his shell's robes with one hand and yanked, adroitly pulling him out of the man's range. Pretending that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, the elderly mortal twinkled in the general direction of his shell (apparently the glasses had been for more than simply seeing through disillusionment charms) and spread his hands benevolently.

"Of course it is, dear boy. No one was meant to know, obviously, as such things would ruin my reputation and tarnish my image." The old man beamed at them genially, oblivious to the looks of horror aimed at him from all directions. "I shall have to work quickly to uncover whomever leaked such confidential information about my past and silence them in some manner; perhaps I should confound the Minister again, or have another 'meeting' with Miss Skeeter…" the mortal trailed off, lost in thought, as the Order fell into another lingering, dead silence.

"My work here is done," Death announced into the quiet, immensely pleased with himself. This was an excellent start on the road to the mortal's utter annihilation, Death thought. Now he simply had to get the human and his penchant for the truth in front of a much more public gathering…

Death stepped back with a sharp smile and began to plot.

A/N: Why yes, I have in fact been sitting on this for like two years! In my defense... well, ok, I don't really have a defense other than I kept putting it off. And off. And off. Forever. I also got sucked into the Avengers fandom from whence there is no return, and uncovered within me a deep well of fangirlism for the Winter Soldier which has pretty much subsumed all my other spare brain cells.

In OTHER NEWS, though, I have finally graduated college for realzies and am now actively seeking employment in order to become a functioning member of society. Don't expect super-rapid updates (in case the massive year-long break between 23 and 24 didn't clue you in), but at least you now know for certain that I Am Not Dead.

I don't have any chocolate to offer you, though, because I am a broke art alumni, but I do have cheerios and string cheese?