"I fear that I am dreaming or that someone is dreaming me. My boggart is me and yet I am also my boggart's boggart."

Walking in the desert tundra, read frozen earth beneath his feet, he closed his eyes and saw light.

It wasn't until he left Earth that he started dreaming.

He suspected it was the mindset, it always boiled more or less down to psychology. On Earth, even immortal and yet changing, eyes gaining perfect vision becoming impervious to things like heat or cold or physical fatigue he still felt human. He'd think every once in a while that he wasn't, rage about it silently in his head, curse his fate and attempt to forget it all in the same instant but some part of him still gripped the dream that was Harry Potter very tightly.

He drifted from humanity in the way that Tom Riddle had once drifted from his humanity; they were still derivatives of that higher equation called man.

In leaving Earth he left multiple things that he hadn't realized he had been clinging to.

One was the wizards themselves; he had left wizarding society even before the death of his own children, certainly by the death of their few children. The Potter clan, wherever they were, most likely would not recognize his face if he wandered into their home; he didn't know if he resented that fact or not. Certainly in Britain he had not been welcome having been proclaimed first a terrorist and fugitive by the government for arson and an attempted coup (they always thought up the wrong reasons for his actions) and then later being proclaimed dead when he could not be found and too much time had passed for even the once-messiah to be alive.

He had still been there, on the edges, in the crowds, on the fringes looking in. He walked in robes bought in stores and held his holly wand in his left hand though increasingly he found he didn't really need it. He thought about places like Hogwarts and things like quidditch and found that they weren't alien to him.

He supposed it began to unravel when the statute of secrecy fell apart. In hindsight it was inevitable, they were extremely lucky it had lasted even as long as it did. Magic, it turned out, was not solely the tool of wizards. With great advances in technology the muggles reached a point where to a muggle-born child approached by a wizard there seemed to be no difference between magic and physics. It wasn't a careless accident on the part of a wizard, or botched obliviation that revealed them as everyone had thought but instead a failure to consider that their cousins who had discovered electricity and nuclear reactions without magic would be able to find their secrets in a similar manner. Magic was the universe, it didn't rely on words or images, and they had forgotten that and in their hubris they had assumed that the true world belonged to them and them alone. What fools they had all been.

(When they had first stared each other in the face, close enough to see the whites of each other's eyes, he had thought of stepping to the front again until he'd had the alarming thought, "Which side should I stand on?"

Because he played at being wizard as he had once played at being Harry Potter, he walked in wizard's robes and talked about their sports and culture, but he was no longer a wizard. The wand was superfluous and he had burnt down their government; it was no longer so clear what he was supposed to be. It was no longer clear who the victims were in the equation and what side a hero inherently belonged to if he was able to play the hero at all anymore.)

They tolerated each other at first, but then of course the young and stupid, wizard and muggle alike grew tired of the tolerance and started killing each other.

Some would say it escalated into killing, that it had been stupid violence and name calling at first, but to him it had all been so terribly fast that name calling and death were almost the same thing.

There was murder, mayhem, death, and revolution for a few bloody decades; more terrible than anything Voldemort could have concocted leaving him to wonder how he could have been so stupid and naïve to believe that Tom Riddle was the height of horror and wretchedness.

They would leave the corpses of women in the streets as they tore their magical born children from them and next to them there would be the corpses of the magical born children who were culled before the wizards found them. And he had stood, still and stiff, in the center of it all feeling as if he was drowning in all the pointless death.

He didn't like to think on the details.

Things settled, this sort of violence had always been on the fringes among the extremists and never in the general public, for the most part it was a quiet sort of tolerance that only raged and shouted on the edges; there was never anything that could be called a war. The muggles had had their foot out of the door before the wizarding fiasco, they were already preparing to leave. Slowly but surely the great cities emptied and desperate magicless people left attempting to find freedom and space among the stars.

The wizards stayed. Their art, their magic, everything was based on the familiar things they knew; trees, magical creatures, astrology, everything for them rooted them to the Earth so that it was inconceivable that magic could exist anywhere else. Perhaps they meant to reclaim the Earth now that the muggles had finally left, to finally cleanse the land of both muggles and muggle-born children, but whatever their intentions that was more or less the result.

Looking into the heavens, at the pale blue eye that was Earth, he wondered what meaning the centaurs would find in it. It shone far too brightly, too cold, for it to be anything called hope.

He'd waited a long time, through the first wave to settle the moon and then the subsequent waves that would urbanize it and make it glitter in the dark, it was in the settlement of the cold red eye of Mars that he left.

The legends of Harry Potter had faded in the bloodshed that was the end of the statute of secrecy, messiahs came when they were called, and he didn't so therefore he had never existed in the first place.

So he had stepped onto a small, overcrowded, transport to Mars his holly wand still in his hand, as if he needed it, and that had been the end of it.

So there he was, a stranger in a strange land, only not quite because he had always been alien so only in the alien landscape could he truly belong. Wizardry dripped from him, pooling over in his footsteps, and he walked forward shedding his past behind him. He rode into the desert on a horse with no name and in his head that distant almost forgotten song played as red sand gathered beneath pale feet.

In the dream he was barefoot, his clothes made of starlight, cold and ephemeral against his pale skin. He was still in human form but he recognized that it was only form, transmutable, changeable and constantly in flux as any form was. He maintained it with a distant thought, almost apathetic, as if it was only a shell of himself and walking forward he felt his mind spread and reach the most distant corners of the galaxy.

It was a place where language was only crude drawings of the higher ideas that existed within him and humanity was a sweet and bitter thing that he held so closely to himself.

Before language, before thought, before sentience, before time, before magic there was the idea.

Within each and every being he both stood and passed through, green the color of grass and all growing things, and everywhere light smiling back even as their eyes fell silent to the sight that was the true unguarded world.

I am the instant, the frozen frame forever caught, as well as the great river reaching outwards rushing past with only change to define my existence. I am the shadow and the light, all possibilities endless, I am that I am.

But that was language caught in his head and translating for the human form he wore.

There was only the idea, the eternal wordless idea, stretching forever beyond both space and time and all other binding dimensions.

"And what, exactly, Azrael was that supposed to be?" The young and eager Harry Potter had transformed into Tom Riddle sometime during the memory. Not transformation, that implied a gradual visible change, it was instantaneous as if he had truly been Tom all along.

(Perhaps they were, Dumbledore had always implied that Harry Potter and Tom Riddle were somehow, in some inexplicable manner, two sides of the same coin. That's what destiny was after all, the great mirror, in the end both were more ideas than they were human.)

This was not the flat Tom from Dumbledore's perspective but rather the one that he had come to know in the past few years. He almost seemed to glow, in whatever room he wandered into he drew attention to himself and thus to his surroundings, everything gained focus in his presence.

It was Tom as he currently was, not quite a young man but not quite a boy either, steadily reaching a height over six foot with long limbs that did not seem lanky and pale skin that did not seem sickly. Those eyes, that pale burning blue, stared at him with an expression that was at once fond, exasperated, curious, and also a trifle dangerous as if he knew that something lurked within his friend only just beneath the surface. (Azrael, he called him it so easily, but the way he said it made it seem as if it carried so many shadows). It didn't seem to matter that he wore the second hand, ill-fitting, underclothes that he slept in; he radiated confidence in a manner that belonged to gods and not to men.

Tom Riddle would have made a better Harry Potter than he had, prophecy was written all over his face; that was the truth of it.

A quicksilver smile flashed on those lips, "I had always assumed you had a tendency for poetics; I had not realized you were literally describing the madness that you perceived."

"I dream, sometimes." He said sitting himself down onto the floor of the red desert they still occupied, Tom followed suit crossing his legs seemingly without concern for the red dirt that stained his clothing.

It wasn't the real Tom, as Tom was sometimes real when distressed enough to find his way into his head, that phantom limb of the horcrux still twitched sometimes and it must been that way for Tom as well. No, this was only the image of Tom as he had once been the image of Harry Potter, a foil for his thoughts. Still, dreaming as he was it seemed best to play along with the idea of Tom.

"You dream, sometimes." Tom repeated with raised eyebrows nodding his head towards the formless, shapeless, light that danced around them as if that could not be the explanation.

"I dream of what I used to be, before Harry Potter came into existence, before I claimed sentience for myself. It's rarely comprehensible, and always difficult to grasp afterwards, but the longer I remain in the universe the closer I come to it."

"You used to be a bad trip?" Tom inferred again with those raised eyebrows that expressed so much doubt. Those words were a bit unlike Tom, the term trip hadn't come about until heavy use of drugs and was a bit out of Tom's timeframe, it revealed him as a cheap imitation still he answered the image of Tom Riddle all the same. Talking to oneself was a habit he hadn't quite managed to remove after becoming Azrael.

"I used to be an idea, I still am, I have only fashioned myself into an avatar so that I might touch the brilliance that is humanity. I still feel it, lurking inside me all the time, the way I used to be always reaching outwards and so terribly fascinated in spite of everything. I… There are flashes, sometimes, the Peverells, a red headed woman… Flashes of thought that came long before 1980."

Tom considered him in the starlight, his face so still in the half light, and leaning forward towards him with that almost smile he liked to wear he said, "So then, you don't really know, you infer."

He shrugged, "I inferred in the way we all infer, how do you know you are human Tom?"

"Naturally, I don't."

No, he thought, Tom had always been in a similar situation to him. It was strange though, for all of Tom's doubt Tom Riddle had in many ways come to represent humanity itself to him. He was both the darkest and the brightest aspects of human nature, constantly in conflict with himself, as he tore through and murdered and built and created wonders all in the same instant. Tom burned so brightly, so swiftly, that he could not help but be more than he was.

These were not words even the image of Tom desired to hear though, so he continued.

"Fine, how do most people know that they are human? They are told and told again, they accept the facts they are given. I accepted a fact as I was given it and when that facts failed to provide I searched within myself for evidence, perhaps I am not Death, but I am not human and I have always been an idea. Perhaps Death is the wrong word; it always comes back to words in the end, language fallible and so very limited. Death is the word I chose and was chosen for me but I am so much more than simple Death, I only hope that the word I am searching for is not God."

His taking the name of Death for himself was not nearly so dramatic as it could have been. He did not stand before the masses, a column of fire behind him, and declare, "I am become Death Destroyer of Worlds."

The first time he used it there was only an audience of one, a little girl with pale hair and too much magic in her blood, and she would stare at him with the raised eyebrows of the disbelieving.

Standing on the edge of a dust wracked farm, a tool in her calloused hands, and him standing in the worn cloak of a traveler outside her gate she had asked him in a casual tone that was not all that curious, "What's your name stranger?"

"Death." He'd responded and she had only looked at him with narrowed eyes.

"That's not a name, stranger."

The idea of Death as his identity had always been on the fringes of his thoughts, perhaps had he not encountered the hallows, had he not been told a tale of three brothers and a bridge he would have claimed some other title. As it was though he had destroyed the hallows and for a single moment had been recognized as the Master of Death.

He didn't believe in the Master of Death though, he never really had, even on returning from the station between life and death he had always been more than a little dubious about the title. It hadn't really mattered, to him, in forsaking the hallows he had forsaken the title. It only became relevant when Harry Potter stopped aging and close friends started gossping about things gone wrong and consequences of rising from the dead too many times.

Ginny had been the first to call him that, in spite of being his wife and someone he considered the love of his life for so very long, she had been the most insensitive of all of them. Her temper got the better of her, as Ron's did occasionally, but she had the insight that Ron sometimes lacked and where Hermione stayed silent she spat the words out like fiery sparks.

"People don't marry the Boy Who Lived or the Master of Death, Harry!"

It'd been after some pointless argument, in the middle of their marriage when they were still trying, she had been complaining about the press and he had been as well but in a different manner. He had long since grown to expect it but she hadn't, not for her or for their children, and so they had ended up screaming at each other and she had brought up that even though she had married Harry James Potter she hadn't intended to marry him.

He was more than Harry, even then, he was Harry with epithets included.

Leaving Earth as his dreams and sometimes even his waking moments became steadily more surreal, as languages became sensations like stepping onto different paths with bare feet, and his understanding of magic became more and more intuitive he still doubted that things like the Master of Death existed. He believed in Death though, he had always believed in Death.

The world continued to change, the colonies grew crowded and memories drifted from Earth, sometimes he wondered what had happened to those wizards but something in him stopped him from checking. They moved outwards, beyond the grey moon and the red eye of Mars, past the solar system even to other suns with more earth-like planets than before.

As a nameless vagrant he went with them wearing the faces of the homeless man, the fortune teller, the handy man, and the ronin with a kind of realism that came with too many years and too much use. They appreciated the fortune teller the most, he thought, perhaps even more than the ronin who occasionally would solve disputes in townships. It was always the fortune teller they were most willing to believe, reading the tea that was their future with a distant smile, this is what might be, this is possibility, he breathed.

He always found that funny, divination was one thing he still didn't excel at, the future was as unknown as it was infinite and he never knew what time would bring him. Time was weird, that's what he had decided, looking at time everything was always fuzzy somewhat blurred until it was hard to tell anything from anything else. It was cluttered, crowded, and everything Trelawny had ever said about it was clearly complete bullshit.

People did like their prophecies though.

He had decided to be the fortune teller that day on the newest colonized world Ianus, a place that was still more desert than tree, that took water pumped into it but did not necessarily appreciate the gesture. The role did not require a change in costume but more demeanor, a distant confidence, certain gestures of the hands. Perhaps it was simply that the role of the prophet, the prescient, came the most naturally to him now.

It was like this that he had found the girl and her farm, parents out of sight most likely in the meager market place he had just passed through and she had asked his name and as if he had not thought of anything else he had given her the one that was always on the edge of his mind.

Her name was Fu, Chinese and English had slowly morphed together until names of Chinese descent were just as common to Harry as names like Emily and Jessica had once been. She'd taken the stranger named Death into her house, Sǐwáng as she said; death, doom, the destruction of things, the harsher death that came with war and violence and disease rather than the softer Chángmián, an omen of ill fortune which he supposed he was and had always been.

She ushered him into the house made of stone, strangely primitive and technologically advance all at once, as communications systems were embedded into the walls but a barely functioning stove top rested near the window. She was small, as Lily Luna had once been, a small delicate thing set to the farm when no son showed up to replace her.

She did not ask him to tell her fortune though he offered when she passed him a cup of tea, instead she began, "You are like me, I didn't think there were any like me."

She gave no demonstration of her powers and did not ask for any such demonstration from him but he knew the word she was looking for all the same, magic, he wondered how long ago it was that he had used it blatantly in front of others, for effect rather than necessity. Fortune telling wasn't magic, no the true magic was still on Earth, the most he ever gave people for free were parlor tricks. Wizards still did not have the best reputations even with the increase of years and distance between them.

"There are others. They chose not to journey from Earth, but that was centuries ago and longer with fast travel, I don't know how they are faring. As far as I know I am the only one to have journeyed to the stars." These future languages, the ones that didn't belong to Earth, were always a little odd to him. He spoke them fluently enough, and in some ways they were more intuitive even than his native English, but speaking them always made him regretfully think back to Earth and all he had seen and done there and eventually left behind. It was a blend of English and Chinese, words thrown in here and there from a hodge podge of languages and the grammar blending together, it was a language made of pebbles until it formed a shore line with the waves of time beating against it and smoothing it out.

She was not one for small talk and although she dreamed she was very practical, "You are a master?"

"Some might call me that, I have been practicing a very long time, longer than anyone else." He said, for while magic had not been his passion as it had been Hermione's through living and enduring he had come to understand it more deeply than she ever could in her limited life time.

"Teach me."

It was then, with that single direct demand, that he took on his first student. She stayed with her parents for the first few years, meeting him between work at night, practicing in every spare moment. But soon enough her parents looked for her to be married and she wandered off with him for a while. It was nice, companionship, a soft thing that reminded him and made him forget about Ginny and the few others who had touched him all at once. For a long time he did not dream of any of their faces.

She was not as powerful as him but more so than any other student her age would have been, and she understood, the wordless and complex energy that drifted through the universe. She understood that magic was not magic that it was not móshù or anything as cheap as that but closer to shén; divinity. She had no misconceptions about wands or words or muggle born or science or anything that had always plagued him on Earth. Fu was fresh and new and she understood because he told her what he saw was truth.

This is light, the young Death said, this is the world and all we are.

She was not as powerful as him and she was not half as immortal, so when they went into town one day on the far side of the world Ianus walking on foot rather than spaceship or hovercraft to better see the stars and mountains she travelled without him and decided to play the role of the ronin in a Clint Eastwood film.

They were just a bit faster than her thoughts had been.

"I buried her beneath the mountains and left the planet the next day." He explained to Tom as they took in the image of the young Death so quiet in mourning over the grave of a girl who may or may not come to exist in a thousand years on a planet so very far from Earth.

Tom said, merely regarded the scene with a solemnity that wasn't quite like him, perhaps he was reminded of his own precious mortal state that he fought so desperately. Or perhaps he was wondering why they had met her at all, this tiny flicker of existence, of promise only to be dashed out against the rocks. But that's what life is, he wanted to shout, this is all life is the particle and the wave in the same moment always continuing and singular until we wonder why we give distinction at all.

He still held his holly wand after her death, still wandered the planets and lost stars in darker peasant's clothing, still called himself Death and walked in and out of legend while dreaming universes in his head.

What is the significance of anything, of young girls called Fu, of young almost men named Harry Potter? What are we, flickering momentary lights that we are, at the end of things in the story without end?

But then, that was why Tom sought eternity, so perhaps he was at least partially aware. Death named Azrael continued looking beyond the death of his first apprentice and into the mist.

"There were good moments, like Fu, and there were bad moments, like her death. With an identity I didn't drift quite as blatantly, I didn't have purpose per se, but I was aware of my own existence. There was innovation but there were also terrible wars and humanity stretched itself thin between the stars, I could feel it when the last people died out on Earth, in the end I didn't even need to return I felt it in my very soul. It was like this for thousands of more years, I flickered in and out of existence, Death who took the form of a man. I was rarely taken seriously and then, one day, I was."

He turned to Tom, there was so much he could show him, so many years they could travel. They could see the great cities of Guāng the planet called light, they could see the moments of magic he allowed himself, of natural disasters averted and armies stopped, they could watch the legends of him rise and fade waxing with the moons of different planets, they could see C-beams glitter in the dark off the Tannhäuser Gate, but those moments were not for Tom or even the young Harry James Potter.

These moments were overwritten, washed out, existing only in memories. They no longer mattered; nothing more than dreams.

"In the end there was only one barren planet left and on it one mad king."

He hadn't realized anyone was looking for him but he supposed with a name like Death it would be tempting for any mad man to seek him out. Occasionally he'd find the odd person who'd heard of him, who stabbed him through the heart with a knife, or else ask that he stab someone else for them. He always was disappointing to these people more or less.

Perhaps it was in some way his fault that he had let it come so far as a single planet dwindling in the sky. He had felt the soul of Earth burn out housing the last of the wizards with it, he had felt the end of the moon, of Mars, of planets further and further from their origin until this single desolate planet remained drifting in space.

He was not God though, he had accustomed himself to that fact, he was very wary of Deus ex Machina. Every time he moved, touched, or brushed something he was reminded that he was no longer one of these people and thus could not act for them. They must act, work, destroy, and live for themselves and he could not do it for them no matter how painful it was to watch. So he watched and he wondered and he let humanity drift until there was only one planet left.

The first time the man confronted him he was very young, a band of rogues and thieves behind him, not yet a king or even a general but frothing at the mouth with the desire for power none the less. They said Death who took the form of a man had once taught a girl named Fu to perform miracles with only her hands and had the power to destroy nations and kingdoms with a single glance.

The man asked him for a holy war, he had proudly stood to face the man in black with green eyes and pale skin wearing the clothes of a peasant, and in his eyes there had been smoke and fire and anarchy.

Of course he had said no.

"Holy wars are hardly my business, I'm afraid the jihad is entirely a human affair."

He had stepped out of that world for a few years but things change quickly and the man had a sort of charisma, even in his madness, that presented him with followers. In the end he had not needed Death on his side, he had only needed guns, and after he was done disease and famine took care of the rest.

And then, somehow, there was only him and the universe staring back.

Somehow he had continued to exist past the end and then once the end was reached there was everything stretching out before him and nothing.

Letting go of himself, of the now empty world, and finding himself in a replication of King's Cross Station had almost been like coming home.

At the end of the things it was a train to Somewhere.

Stepping on he had found himself an empty compartment, had waited for the train to roll out of the station and on towards Scotland, and before him there had been nothing and nothing only the bitter end to everything that he had failed to alter.

And then there had been light, "My name is Tom Riddle, yours?"

Author's Note: So consider this the highlights of Harry/Azrael/Death's adventures pre-October canon, other adventures happened, but this is what we get in this fic. Anyway so I think most of the questions asked were at least vaguely answered, mostly because our protagonist isn't entirely sure of the answers himself and is afraid to find out, but hopefully this clarified things a little. The main fic will also brush a bit on Azrael's past so we aren't entirely done here even if other side fics don't cover this information. Thank you for reading and reviewing, reviews are much appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter