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"A single lifetime, Meredith Potter. That is all I can give you."
Those words echoed through her sleep-deprived mind. The specter in the train station had promised her a single lifetime before she would have to take on her duties as the Master of Death, whatever that entailed. It hadn't been too terribly clear on what exactly that meant.
Meredith wasn't certain what to do with the lifetime she had been given, however. Her life was a mess, and frankly, she frequently found herself wishing that it had just done whatever it was that it was planning on doing to her after her lifetime was up. It would certainly be less chaotic.
She stared unseeing at the ceiling, having long since given up on actually sleeping. Her brain moved in sluggish circles, jumping from one thought to another while her body felt like lead. She craved a dreamless sleep potion, but there was none to be found in her house, and even if there were, she couldn't quite bring herself to get up and get one.
Sleep was always slow in coming these days, particularly since she had stopped taking the addictive potion, but also because she dreaded sleeping. Memories had a habit of becoming nightmares; things had ended badly with the war, but her unconscious mind had a tendency of making them even worse.
If not for the fact that she had already gone two sleepless nights and could feel exhaustion dragging on bones, she probably would have given up already. But there was still the vague hope of falling asleep.
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The residents largely left her alone, although they gossiped terribly about her when they thought she wasn't listening. Most had figured out she was running from something, obvious given her haggard and unkempt appearance and her jumpiness, but the reasons why tended to range from the somewhat plausible to the downright ridiculous.
For her part, Meredith wasn't bothered by it too much. There wasn't any malice to it as far as she could see, just general small-town curiosity and nosiness. It was a far cry from the cruelty that she had experienced in the wizarding world, where every word was meant to bite.
Even so, she was in no hurry to explain anything to them, not that she could, given the statute of secrecy. The last thing she wanted them to know was that she had been involved in a war.
Perhaps not a war, looking back at it. More like an insurrection, really.
She had fought for herself and for her friends, for the innocents that were coming into the wizarding world unaware that the circumstances of their birth made them inferior in the eyes of many. She had fought for their right to live and learn.
They just hadn't wanted her around afterwards once they had started to realize what a mess they had left their hero in.
Apparently she could only be their savior as long as she was strong and brave, not addicted to various potions to keep her going, not suffering from nightmares and terrors, or the after-effects of repeated Cruciatus curses or suffering from a general state of paranoia that would have made Alastor Moody proud. No, in their eyes she had been nothing more than a symbol, and she couldn't very well be a broken one.
She had tried to live up to their expectations, but in the end she had failed at that too. It had taken months for her hands to stop shaking from the sheer need for another felix felicis, or for a night without nightmares of her friends dying around her.
In the end, she had lost everyone dear to her. The worst part was that not all of them had died during the war.
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Jonathan Quill was a strange one. She didn't think he was interested in her sexually, but he had a tendency of coming around to her house every couple of days. He never stayed long, but he usually brought a dish. Sometimes it was meatloaf or pork roast, and other times it was dishes that he had clearly tried to make just for her. The shepard's pie didn't quite taste right, but it reminded her enough of home that she spent a good ten minutes crying while she was eating it.
It was several months before she felt comfortable enough inviting him into her home for supper. He was a world war II veteran. He recognized the signs of someone trying to put the pieces of their lives back together after seeing something truly horrific.
He never asked questions and she was grateful for that.
Slowly but surely, she began to heal in a little town in Iowa.
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Meeting Ego was like waking up from a good dream. Everything was hazy and comfortable, and there was always the possibility of going back to sleep. He made her feel again, something she hadn't quite been convinced was even possible given that in the three years since she had fled England she still felt like she was walking around wrapped up inside of a cotton.
She still had nightmares and dreams about the people that she had lost. She still had terrible cravings for Dreamless Sleep, and she still found herself examining exits everywhere she went, particularly when other people were around.
Ego made her feel like a person again, like she could exist without the horrors of the wizarding war weighing her down.
She fell hard and fast for him and barely even batted an eye when he told her that he wasn't from earth. She had seen weirder, after all.
It broke her when he left, although his parting gift more than made up for it. She hadn't thought it possible to love someone as much as she had Ego until she was holding her newborn son in her arms.
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A scream of rage tore its way out of her throat as the distant sounds of the jeep had died away. Without even thinking of it, she picked up a vase full of roses that she had picked from her garden earlier and hurled it against the wall. The sound of glass shattering was satisfying, and before she knew it, there was a small sea of glass scattered around her.
Her scream eventually turned to sobs as she sank down, wrapping her arms around her knees in the middle of the destruction that she had made of her living room.
Had she not given enough? Meredith had only just started to put the pieces of her life back together, and now it was being stripped away from her all over again. There was a tightness in her chest as she thought about what her doctor had told her yesterday.
Stage four. Too many and too small to try to remove. There were options, but she had read between the lines. They didn't think there was much they could do for her and for this there was nothing that her training as a healer could do to help. The wizarding world had no experience with treating cancer in any form.
Her treatment would have to be purely muggle, and they didn't think there was anything that could be done for her.
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It was several days later as she was explaining to her son what was going on that she had a sudden spark of realization.
There was a reason that wizard healers had no experience treating cancer. It was because wizards simply didn't get foreign growths like that. Some of the more radical healers were more aware of muggle diseases and illnesses and there had been studies on some of them.
In fact, most muggle diseases and illnesses didn't affect them because magic had a way of fighting off non-magical foreign bodies. It was why the diseases that they did suffer from had a tendency of being weird and unusual - they had to be of a magical nature to affect them at all.
The realization was of a depressing nature - it meant that something had caused them to grow in her, something powerful enough to overpower her body's natural defenses against such an occurrence. It meant that there was a good chance that it wasn't magical at all but much much stranger.
Something like an alien that didn't hail from earth at all.
Meredith hoped that wasn't the case, she hoped with every part of her being that she was wrong and that it was just old suspicions and paranoia of other people coming into play. She couldn't quite convince herself that she was mistaken, however.
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Her illness had taken its toll, and the treatment even more so. Her body felt frail and old, in spite of the fact that she was only now hitting thirty. Meredith felt like she had aged centuries over the past three years. She knew that it wouldn't be long now. She saw the specter more and more, although it had never outright approached her.
She never talked about it, but she could tell that her son at least could sense its presence, even if he didn't know what it was.
He always clung to her when he could sense its presence, as if he knew that it was there to take his mother away. She could do nothing but hold him close, running her fingers through his hair and whispering reassurances into his ears.
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The specter was standing quietly in the corner. It made no move to approach her, but with each passing hour it seemed to grow more real, more there than anything else in the room. Meredith knew what that meant. Her time had come, and it was all she could do not to cry as she reached for her son and he fled.
There was a moment of vertigo, as if she had stood up too quickly, and then she was staring down at her body. The heart monitor was screaming shrilly, alerting the hospital staff that she had passed.
"Your time has passed." The specter murmured behind her. Its voice was thin and raspy, as if it weren't used to speaking.
"I know." She answered, reaching out for Jonathan only to pause mere centimeters from his shoulder. "Why? Why did it have to end this way?" She asked, turning to stare at it.
It was tall and thin, skeletally so, in fact. Dressed in a black suit, it could pass for an undertaker if not for the bones visible underneath paper-thin skin. Idly she wondered if that was what she looked like now.
It regarded her for a long moment, the seconds seeming to stretch on unbearably. "I had nothing to do with your death." It finally told her. "It is as I promised - a human lifespan."
"What now?" She finally asked quietly.
"We become one." It was the only warning she had before something crashed through her like a freight train. It was similar to how apparition had felt, only it felt like something massively huge was trying to squeeze under her skin at the same time.
She couldn't even draw enough air to scream as every part of her was overwhelmed by sensation.
Just as quickly as it had hit, it seemed to settled under her skin.
"What?" She asked blankly, once she had control over her motor functions.
Immediately the answer came to her - she had merged with the specter, became one with it. She was not the Master of Death, as the wizards had foolishly believed would happen. She was death, as much as death was her. She was a cosmic entity, could feel every life shining before her like a candle. Meredith couldn't even begin to count how many she could feel, there were so many. They flickered and died all around her, sometimes going out by the hundreds, others individually.
Meredith had no idea how long she stood there, trying to come to grips with what she had become, what she could now sense. When she finally became aware of her surroundings again - in a physical sense - she realized that she was standing alone in an empty room. Not even her body remained; everyone had left while she had been distracted.
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Days had passed unnoticed by her. Her son had been missing for days and she hadn't even noticed. Guilt ate away at her as she stared up at the sky.
She knew she could travel far beyond the stars in the same way that she knew how long a person had to live and that touching others would hasten their personal ends. It was a huge step away from everything she had ever known and she struggled to wrap her mind around it sometimes, that the universe teemed with life and those of earth remained blissfully unaware.
In the end, it was for her son that she left earth.
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Something tugged at her awareness. Meredith pulled her attention away from the planet that was experiencing massive earthquakes to examine the strange feeling. It took only moments for her to realize that something terrible was happening. Despite being in space, she had no problem turning on her heel and apparating to the source of the strange occurrence, only to realize that there were others, many of them, and she could sense them better now that she was amongst them.
A curious rock formation had sprang up seemingly out of nowhere in front of her. From the reactions, she was guessing that the formation was extremely recent and unprecedented. That didn't spell anything good. After checking many of the other sites, she realized that it was the same thing happening.
Meredith pressed a hand against the formation and closed her eyes, feeling the ebb and flow of power coursing through it. It was mostly dormant at the moment, but Meredith rather suspected that it would not remain in that state.
She quested along it, searching for the source of the power. It did not feel like a natural occurrence which meant something was causing it. It took her several moments to realize that she could feel the other formations, despite the distance between them. Whatever was controlling this was powerful enough that their reach could span entire planets.
That did not bode well for any of them.
And then suddenly there was another surge of power, and she could feel herself being crushed by the formation as it expanded outwards. Rather than dying, she could feel herself being absorbed by it. With only a moment's warning, she pulled her power as deep within herself as she could manage. With the way they were connected, she could all too easily imagine accidentally poisoning entire planets.
Being absorbed allowed her to trace the power back to the source, and Meredith abruptly found herself in a spacious hall facing a very familiar man, one that she had not seen in years.
He was just as she remembered him being and for a moment all she could do was stare. Her heart skipped a beat and it took her several moments to remember that he had likely orchestrated her demise and her son's kidnapping. Meredith did not think that the two occurring within minutes of each other was at all accidental. Incidental, perhaps, but not accidental.
The second man caught her eye then, and she briefly berated herself for not noticing him earlier since he was clearly in pain. He was having difficulty catching his breath, and the energy coursing through him was destroying his nerves faster than his advanced healing could fix the damage.
Meredith laid a hand against his brow and nearly fell over in shock. He was masked by the power coursing through him from the celestial, but under his skin was the unmistakable thrum of death. Her own identity coursed through his veins and Meredith stared at him under a new light, hungrily drinking in his features.
He looked so much like his father that it hurt.
Ego remained unaware of her presence, but something drew Peter's eyes open. His eyes slowly moved, taking in everything around him as if he were in a daze or was having difficulty focusing.
Then they settled on her and a look of confusion crossed his face.
"Mom?" The word rasped out as he stared back at her.
"Meredith is dead, Peter." Ego sighed, "Your insistence on clinging to her memory is becoming troublesome."
Peter ignored him in favor of staring at her. "Am I dying?"
She shook her head. "Not yet, Peter. You still have too much to live for." She murmured, her fingers curled into the power that surged through his chest and she pushed her own through it. Neither of them noticed when Ego abruptly stiffened, his hand briefly going to his chest.
Peter gasped, his body arching upwards, as darkness snaked through the energy that Ego was pumping through him.
Her power fought against Ego's for several moments, caught in battle with Peter as the battlefield, before Ego's retreated. Not even a celestial could fight death.
Only when the energy receded from his body did she let go, pulling her own back into herself. She planted a kiss on her son's forehead and murmured a sleeping spell. "I'll be here when you wake up."
While Ego disappeared, presumably to try to figure out what exactly had driven him from their son, she settled in beside Peter to keep watch. She would not allow Ego to hurt him, not again. He had already destroyed the life Peter should have had, he would not destroy the one that he had built for himself.
They were not alone for long before a strange group came crashing in.
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Miraculously, they seemed to have a plan for defeating the celestial. Meredith took a step back and settled in to watch. As much as she wanted to join the fray herself, to punish Ego for what he had done to her, and more importantly, to Peter, she could not.
Technically she could; he was already slated to die. It would scarcely matter if he died at her hands or whatever mad scheme that they had concocted. But looking at Peter, she could see that he needed this. Even as a child, he had longed for a father, and to discover what sort of man he really was...
It was just as devastating for Peter as it had been for her when she had realized.
The difference was that she had had several decades to come to terms with it. Decades and a job that had a habit of putting most things in perspective.
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Meredith lightly pressed her fingers against his forehead and set to work trying to keep him alive. She would never forgive him for taking her son from her, but it was clear that Peter cared about him and he was willing to sacrifice himself to keep her son alive. She would spare him as best as she could.
The words passed her lips, lost in the void of space, but their effects were visible on the centaurion. "Death does not come for you yet. Stay alive, for Peter's sake." She murmured into his ear, her words just barely audible for the mortal before pushing away from them. Much as she would like to stay, there was a celestial dying that she was very much interested in having some final words with.