Chapter Text
PART I
The transition from beyond the Veil to consciousness was not a gentle awakening, but a violent collision with the physical world.
Harry was lying on a rigid, freezing slab of galvanized steel, his skin drawn so tight over his frame it felt less like flesh and more like a fragile membrane stretched across bone.
Every inch of him burned with a hollow cold – an invasive chill that did not merely touch the surface, but leeched inward, as though something had crawled through his veins and replaced what once lived there with liquid ice.
He felt… empty.
Not the clean emptiness of exhaustion.
Not even the familiar hollowness of grief.
This was a deeper absence. A sensation like being scooped out from the inside, like whatever crimson warmth had once moved beneath his skin had been drained away and substituted with something thin, acrid, and wrong.
It stung with a slow, caustic bite, as though his blood had been transmuted into frost laced with poison.
His body did not ache.
It did not throb.
It simply existed in a state of unnatural preservation, suspended between rot and ruin.
Harry’s first instinct was to scream.
The command formed in his mind, reflexive and desperate, but it died before it ever reached his throat.
His jaw was locked in a horrific, static, minuscule grin – teeth bared just enough to feel wrong – bound tight by a linen chin-strap that cut into the back of his skull like a hangman’s noose worn sideways.
The fabric was stiff, crusted with something dry and flaky that cracked faintly when he tried to move.
He attempted to swallow. Nothing happened.
His tongue felt thick and swollen. Foreign in his mouth.
Harry forced himself to draw breath.
Air scraped down his throat like it had to fight its way past layers of unseen resistance, filling lungs that felt stiff, reluctant, and faintly waterlogged. Each inhale carried a sour, medicinal tang that clung to the back of his mouth, bitter and suffocating.
No heartbeat thundered in his ears, and no rush of blood followed his strained actions.
Only the same deadened cold.
He tried again.
And again.
Still nothing.
Something inside him twisted as a distant, detached recognition filled him.
This body is wrong.
Harry braced himself and pushed. The movement felt blasphemous.
His jaw resisted, tendons stretched to a trembling limit, muscles protesting as though they had forgotten their purpose. Then–
Crack.
A loud, internal snap reverberated through his skull.
Harry forced his mouth open, tearing through the dried sinew of his own forced silence. The linen strap gave way with a soft, ripping sound, peeling from his skin like something reluctantly relinquishing its claim.
A broken sound crawled out of his throat.
It wasn’t a scream. Wasn’t even a word. Just a ruined exhale, ragged and animal.
His lips trembled.
He tasted copper. Not fresh. But old, and stale. Like rust scraped from the inside of a coffin.
Harry lay there, mouth hanging open, staring sightlessly into the dark, feeling more like a poorly assembled imitation of a corpse than anything that had ever truly lived.
And somewhere, far beneath the numbness, something stirred.
Not alarmed. Not surprised.
Merely… awake.
***
Harry dragged in another shuddering breath that delivered nothing but more foulness and forced his trembling hands to move. His fingers felt heavy, sluggish, as though carved from stone and only pretending to obey him.
When they reached his face, he expected softness.
He found hardness.
Small, round shapes rested against his closed eyes, cold and unyielding, pressing faintly into the delicate flesh of his lids. Confusion stirred first, followed slowly by a creeping revulsion that slid down his spine like cold water.
He tried to hook his fingers beneath his eyelids to scrape and was met with a slight resistance.
Two small discs peeled free with a faint, sticky pull and dropped to the sides of his head and onto the table he was laying on with soft metallic clinks.
Old pennies. Dull with age.
His eyes burned as they opened, but the world that greeted him offered no clarity.
Everything swam behind a greasy, translucent veil, as though he were looking through cloudy glass pulled from the depths of stagnant water.
Shapes bled into one another. Edges refused to stay sharp. The overhead light buzzed weakly, its glow sickly and yellowed, casting long, warped shadows that clung to the corners of the room.
Steel tables stood in silent rows.
Tall cabinets lined the walls, their narrow doors suggesting long, coffin-like compartments stacked one atop another.
The air was heavy with antiseptic and something more rancid beneath it.
Decay, carefully disguised.
As Harry continued to lay there, blinking and gasping for air, his lungs did not draw in anything that resembled a proper breath.
Instead, something thick and foul poured down his throat in a burning rush, a greasy, acrid flood that scalded its way into his chest and filled him with a sensation so profoundly wrong that it eclipsed panic entirely.
It was not air. It did not cool, did not soothe, did not expand him with life.
It coated him from the inside, heavy and sluggish, as though he were being filled with spoiled oil rather than sustaining breath.
The taste of it continued to cling to the back of his tongue – bitter and nauseatingly sweet all at once – and every attempt to inhale only dragged more of it deeper, until his body reacted with blind, instinctive rejection.
He rolled off the table in a clumsy, uncontrolled sprawl, limbs failing to coordinate, striking the floor with a loud, smacking thud of dead weight.
The impact barely registered as pain. It was distant, muted, as though occurring to someone else.
His torso seized, ribs jerking inward and outward in violent spasms as he convulsed, throat wrenching itself open in a desperate effort to purge what did not belong.
Pale liquid surged from his mouth in viscous streams, cloudy and slightly yellowed, splattering against the linoleum and spreading outward in sluggish rivulets.
It did not look like vomit.
A thin, unnatural hiss rose where it struck the floor, and the smell – chemical, cloying, and aggressively sterile – burned into his senses, coating the inside of his skull.
Darkness crowded in around him, not like sleep, but like suffocation. It pressed against his vision, against his thoughts, against the fragile thread of awareness keeping him tethered to the physical world.
For a moment, it seemed easier to let it take him. For a moment, the Veil called with familiar indifference.
Something inside him refused, however.
Harry pushed himself upright with slow effort.
His joints protested, not with pain, but with a stiff, grinding reluctance, as though they had been left unused for far too long.
When he stood, it felt less like rising and more like assembling himself around a shape he didn’t know how to steer. His balance wavered but did not fail.
The body seemed to know how to remain upright even if it knew little else.
He looked down at himself.
Bare feet on cold tile. Skin pale to the point of translucence, faintly bluish in places, marbled with darker shadows trapped beneath the surface.
No pulse fluttered at his wrist. No warmth radiated from his flesh.
Harry raised his hand to his throat.
His fingers encountered a wound.
A puncture.
Jagged around the edges, no doubt rimmed with angry red and bruised purple, as though something thick and blunt had been driven deep into his neck and violently torn free.
The flesh around it felt sunken, collapsed inward, and when he pressed gently, his fingers sank farther than they should have, meeting only hollow space.
There was a channel inside him.
An empty passage descending into the depths of his body. A place where fullness once existed.
The realization did not horrify him. Nor did it shock him. It simply settled into place with a cold, distant acceptance.
This body had been opened. Drained. Refilled with something unnatural.
Harry straightened slowly, pale eyes lifting to the dim reflection cast back at him from the metal side of the nearest table.
A corpse stared back.
Its eyes moved.
A faint curl tugged at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile and not quite a grimace.
So.
This was the vessel.
***
Harry moved through the room slowly – his gait belonging to someone who was relearning the mechanics of a body – though in truth, he felt no urgency to master it.
His limbs responded with a faint lag, as if the nerves had been rewired by an inattentive hand.
The air still clung to him in a damp, metallic haze, thick with the residue of chemicals and the lingering sweetness of decay that no amount of scrubbing could ever quite banish.
The mortuary had the peculiar stillness of a place that existed outside the rhythm of ordinary life, a chamber where time pooled in stagnant corners and the living only entered out of necessity.
The overhead bulb flickered again, casting the room into a momentary sepia gloom before sputtering back to life, its glow painting his borrowed skin in sickly tones.
He felt the light more than he saw it – an intrusive warmth on flesh that no longer remembered how to absorb heat.
He drifted past the embalming machine, its brass fittings dulled by years of use, the glass reservoir still swirling faintly – undisturbed by his presence.
The rose-tinted fluid inside caught the light making him stop and admire its sluggish dance for a moment.
The instruments on the trolley gleamed with a cold, utilitarian pride, each one designed for a task that required precision and a certain indifference to the human form.
Harry stared at them for a long time.
There was no revulsion, no fear – only the distant recognition that these objects had been used on him, that they had shaped the body he now inhabited into something presentable for the living to mourn.
The thought stirred nothing in him.
He steadied himself against the tiled wall, his fingers brushing the porcelain jars lined up with almost ceremonial care. Their labels – Arsenic Compound, Phenol, Spirit of Camphor – were written in a meticulous hand, each letter a quiet testament to the mortician’s devotion to order.
The jars were cool beneath his touch, their contents sloshing faintly as he nudged them one by one, idly testing their weight.
The impulse to send them crashing to the floor flickered through him, and finding no reason to resist it, he gave one a slightly harder push.
It toppled, shattered on impact, and burst into a constellation of glittering shards. The liquid spread across the tiles in a thin, gleaming sheet, the crack of breaking porcelain slicing through the stillness like a sudden intake of breath.
When the noise faded, the room seemed to settle around him once more, exhaling the hum of machinery and the distant, muffled rumble of the world overhead.
Somewhere above, a lorry rattled past, its engine coughing loudly; somewhere else, a door slammed, followed by hurried footsteps – life continuing in its frantic, oblivious way.
Harry’s gaze drifted to the central drain, where a thin mixture of diluted blood and embalming residue trickled in a steady rhythm, the sound oddly soothing in its monotony.
It reminded him of rainwater slipping through gutters, of the slow, inevitable pull of gravity on all things.
He watched the liquid spiral downward for a long moment, feeling neither disgust nor fascination – only a quiet acknowledgment of the cycle he had stepped outside of long ago.
The body he wore felt like an afterthought, a container hastily assembled for his return, and he moved within it with the calm certainty of someone who had outgrown the need for comfort or familiarity.
***
The door groaned as it opened, admitting a narrow wedge of wan corridor light and the clean, medicinal fragrance of lavender-water that clashed rather uncomfortably with the heavier odours rotting inside the room.
A man stepped across the threshold, tall and narrow-shouldered, dressed in a stiff black wool suit that hung from him with funerary severity, a charcoal tie knotted at his throat.
He carried a fresh linen shroud draped over one arm and a shaving kit in the other, ready to complete the final touches on the “dearly departed.”
There was nothing hurried about his movements. Nothing uncertain. He had entered expecting routine.
He did not see Harry.
At first, he saw only absence.
The cooling table stood bare.
The copper coins lay scattered across the floor like offerings rejected.
A cloudy pool of pale, chemical fluid spread sluggishly across the tiles, releasing faint, corrosive vapours that curled upward in lazy threads.
The muggle frowned.
Then his eyes drifted toward the far corner.
Harry sat atop a stack of empty wooden coffins, slouched forward slightly, long limbs arranged with careless disregard.
His skin bore the dull pallor of sun-bleached bone. The wound in his neck gaped openly, its edges dark and uneven, resembling a second, useless mouth frozen mid-syllable.
His jaw hung at an unnatural angle, no longer quite aligned, lending his face a subtly wrong geometry that resisted casual comprehension.
He watched the mortician with a flat, unwavering stare.
There was no malice in it.
Yet the muggle’s reaction unfolded in a predictable cascade.
The shaving kit slipped from his fingers and struck the floor, bursting open. Straight razors skidded across the tiles with melodic, metallic whispers. Soap brushes rolled, their pale bristles splaying. The shroud slid from his arm and pooled at his feet.
A sound escaped him.
Not exactly a scream – not yet at least.
This was a thin, strangled whimper that crawled itself out of his throat, high and strained, as though his voice were attempting to retreat back into his lungs. The colour was draining from his face rapidly.
He took a step backward.
Then another.
His heel struck something unseen, and he windmilled clumsily, nearly falling, one hand flailing behind him in blind search of the door handle that now seemed impossibly far away.
His eyes never left Harry.
They bulged slightly in their sockets, glassy and wet, fixed on the crooked angle of Harry’s jaw, the hollow stillness of his posture, the open wound in his throat that stubbornly refused to bleed.
Harry continued to watch him with the same attention one might give to a moth beating itself senseless against a windowpane.
The man’s terror barely registered; it was a distant, flickering disturbance, no more significant than the dust motes drifting lazily through the jaundiced light.
What mattered was the simple fact that Harry’s body – this borrowed, imperfect vessel – was failing him.
It needed something to anchor it, something to pull it fully back into the world.
And the mortician, trembling and pale and very much alive, was the only source of warmth in the room.
Convenient, really.
Harry slid off the coffins with a slow, unhurried motion, his feet touching the tiles with a muted thud.
The mortician froze, his hand still fumbling at the door, his breath caught somewhere between a gasp and a prayer.
Harry felt none of the urgency that electrified the man’s limbs; he moved with the calm inevitability of a tide rolling in, indifferent to whatever it swept away.
The room seemed to contract around them, the air thickening with the quiet hum of the overhead bulb and the faint, rhythmic drip of fluid into the central drain.
He took a step forward, then another, finally beginning to feel the faint tug of necessity start to bubble up inside him – an old, familiar hunger that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with his continued existence.
The closer Harry drew, the more detail resolved itself in the man’s face.
He saw the beads of sweat gathering along the mortician’s heavy brows and tracking slowly down the furrows at his temples.
He saw the web of fine lines around eyes that had spent decades squinting under poor lighting and even poorer air. He saw the colour of them, too – dark brown, wide and shaking, reflecting the dim room like twin pools of muddy water.
The man’s hands were clenched into rigid fists at his sides, knuckles blanched, fingers trembling with such force that Harry could imagine the crescents being carved into soft flesh beneath the nails.
Harry’s gaze drifted briefly to the scattered contents of the shaving kit on the floor, the polished metal tools glinting under the flickering bulb. One handle bore an engraving: Harlow & Sons, Undertakers.
Harry lifted his eyes back to the man.
Then he lowered himself into a crouch directly in front of him.
At this proximity, the mortician’s terror became almost tangible, radiating off him in damp, feverish waves.
Harry tilted his head slightly to one side, the ruined flesh of his neck stretching and parting.
A thin, wet whisper of air slid through torn passages that were never meant to carry voice, producing a low, sibilant rasp, like wind slipping through a cracked reed.
Each attempt at forming words came accompanied by a faint gurgling undertone, a hollow, bubbling cadence that seemed to originate from inside his chest rather than his mouth.
His tongue felt uncooperative and his jaw clicked softly with every movement, bone shifting against bone.
“Mr… Harlow,” Harry murmured.
The name leaked out in warped fragments, consonants slurred into liquid shapes, vowels stretched thin and empty.
“Is it?”
The muggle could not speak.
He could barely breathe.
All he managed was a small, jerking nod, his eyes never blinking, his face locked in an expression so utterly overwhelmed that it bordered on collapse.
Harry regarded him with an almost courteous detachment, as though acknowledging a formality.
“Pardon me, then.”
The words slid free in a whispering hiss that carried the faint stench of preservatives and rot.
He leaned forward.
His hands rose and came to rest on either side of Harlow’s face – framing it with a strange, terrifying tenderness.
His hands were cold, he knew.
Not with the fleeting chill of winter skin.
Not with the numbing cold of poor circulation either.
But with a deeper, heavier cold, like stone that had never known warmth.
His thumbs pressed lightly into the man’s cheeks.
As their lips met, it quickly became clear that this was not a kiss of affection, but an act of parasitism.
Harry inhaled, and the room seemed to dim as if the light itself were being swallowed.
Something luminous began to bleed out of Harlow.
A thin, wavering radiance seeped from the space between them, pale gold threaded with silvery undertones, trembling as it was drawn inexorably toward Harry’s mouth.
It poured from Harlow in unsteady surges, like heat shimmering above scorched ground, like steam rising from a body freshly pulled from boiling water.
Harlow convulsed.
His back arched.
A sound tried to claw its way out of his throat and died halfway, collapsing into a wet, strangled whimper.
His skin began to change.
Colour drained unevenly, leaving behind a mottled, ashen pallor.
The fullness of his face diminished, flesh pulling inward as though shrinking away from the bone beneath. Lines deepened, then collapsed, then smoothed into something that no longer resembled age so much as abandonment.
Harry drank slowly.
The effect was immediate.
Warmth spread through the corpse he wore in steady waves, seeping into tissues that had been stiff and uncooperative only moments before.
The grey translucence of his skin flushed faintly with life’s imitation.
The gaping wound in his neck drew itself closed, the edges knitting together with a sound of tearing silk, as though invisible hands were sewing flesh with threads pulled from inside his own body.
His broken jaw clicked back into place, the bone mending itself in a symphony of sickening snaps.
Harry pulled away, leaving Harlow a hollowed-out husk – a dry, empty shell of a man who slumped against the wall, eyes vacant and soul-scoured.
Whatever had animated him was gone.
What remained was packaging.
Harry stood, his movements now fluid.
He looked down at his own nakedness with a sudden, detached curiosity, then began to prowl the room.
On a mahogany dressing table, he found the garments intended for the cooling table’s previous occupant: a stiff, three-piece charcoal suit, a crisp white shirt, and a silk tie.
He dressed with careful precision, the fabric rasping against his newly mended skin.
Once the last button was fastened, he paused to brush a stray speck of dust from his lapel – a gesture of chillingly normal vanity.
Without a backward glance, he stepped over the discarded remains of Mr. Harlow and pushed through the heavy doors, slipping into the corridor beyond – leaving behind only the faint echo of his presence and the lingering sense that something wholly unnatural had passed through the room.
***
Harry stepped into the hallway, and the silence of the mortuary was obliterated in an instant by a thunderous, bone-jarring detonation that seemed to tear upward and rise from the earth itself.
The sound was not merely heard; it was felt, a concussive force that slammed into him with enough violence to send his shoulder crashing into the whitewashed brick.
The structure groaned in protest, and he felt the wall tremble under his palm as a fine rain of powdered plaster cascaded from the ceiling, drifting down in pale clouds that coated his hair, his lashes, and the dark wool of his borrowed suit in ashen grit.
The corridor lights spasmed wildly, bathing the narrow passage in erratic pulses of sickly yellow. Cracks raced along the walls in branching veins, splitting mortar with dry, snapping sounds before the nearest bulb burst in a shower of glass.
The mortuary behind him rattled like a cage being kicked by a giant.
Harry shook the dust from his shoulders and pushed through the heavy street-level doors, stepping out into a world of violent contrast.
It was nighttime, yet the sky was a bruised, angry orange. The roar of fire dominated the air, a furious crackle coming from the skeletal remains of a building directly across the street.
Smoke rolled in thick, grey waves, carrying with it the bitter stench of burning timber and scorched masonry.
A crowd of silhouettes – wardens in tin hats and neighbours with soot-smeared faces clustered in stunned knots, clutching children, blankets, and salvaged bundles of belongings – had already gathered, their faces flickering in the light of glowing embers and sparks that danced on the wind, drifting lazily upward before vanishing into the choked sky.
The wail of the air-raid sirens rose and fell in a mournful, mechanical dirge.
Harry’s gaze drifted to the corner of the scorched building beside him, where faded white letters clung stubbornly to blistered brick.
FORE STREET.
As he stepped onto the uneven cobblestones, a sudden gust of heated wind sent debris skittering across the ground.
A loose sheet of newspaper tore free from somewhere unseen and slapped wetly against his trouser leg, clinging there as though deliberately seeking him out.
He bent, peeling it away with fingers that moved easily now, the joints supple and obedient.
The newsprint was unpleasantly cold, slightly damp and smudged with soot along one edge.
He held it up toward the glow of the burning building, eyes scanning automatically until they found the date printed beneath the masthead.
25 August 1940.
A thin, dark smile touched his lips.
His voice, now a smooth, rich baritone devoid of the previous whistling dissonance, carried easily through the turmoil of the Blitz’s first accidental overture.
"Ah," he murmured, his tone almost melodic against the backdrop of distant cries.
"It seems I’ve arrived just in time."
