Author's Note: A note to those who are about to read this fic that this is a side fic to the heavily AU Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus without reading that fic many of the details and references made in this fic would not be clear. Or maybe you could make inferences but I suggest reading that or having some familiarity with the universe before reading this.

"The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door"

- Frank Herbert, Dune

There were times when Lily's presence was little more than a whisper in the station between life and death. Time moved oddly in this place, it relied on perception on the viewer, and on many intricately woven illusions. There were days when time hardly seemed to exist at all, when the train station seemed to pause, trapped in a single instant with that Hogwarts train just waiting in the station. This was one of those timeless moments, where it was only him and the idea of King's Cross.

The only thing that hinted that there was something that existed beyond Death and the station was the glittering broken glass and burned remains of several empty boutiques, courtesy of Lily's friend the horcrux Lenin. He was more than certain that Tom Riddle had not been considering anything beyond his own rage and mounting frustration when he had laid waste to Death's King Cross and yet he did feel more than slightly grateful for the horcrux's actions because in some ways it had proved that there was something real and changeable after all.

So he left the shattered glass and charred bricks where they were and watched as the light reflected through the shards in a myriad of colors.

These moments without Lily always seemed so thin, stretched almost, and sometimes it seemed as if they didn't exist at all but his expecting her impending arrival, the bright grin and flying red hair, only worked to slow the metaphorical clock.

He didn't know what he had imagined in taking the train in that other universe, with one last look into the black void he had known that it was time, he had put it off for millennia but there was no reason left to exist anymore. He had not been expecting King's Cross, so outdated and pristine and young to him, to be waiting as if nothing had occurred since that final conversation with Albus Dumbledore's shade.

If Lily had not appeared before him, green eyes sparkling, a confident cheerful voice asking after him, he was not certain what he would have done.

He didn't have to stay here though, there were other worlds to explore, surely the train station didn't extend forever. There must be something in beyond the entrance but still in the world between worlds, even if it was only his own thoughts pictured there it would do him some good to explore.

Usually he tried not to be so introspective, there were monsters lurking in his thoughts and it was best not to disturb them, but he'd felt relatively at peace recently more so than most times in his own universe. In light of his mood his mind did not seem like such a terrible thing anymore.

"The next great adventure was supposed to be an adventure after all." He said to himself with a small smile before moving past the shops and the train and off into the horizon where new visions waited. At first it seemed that the train station stretched on forever, that the horizon was only comprised of empty shops, and the Hogwarts train forever glistening in the sunlight that simply wasn't there.

He walked miles and miles, never faltering, eyes forward moving with a determination he himself couldn't explain.

Like a mirage flashes of his memory broke the horizon before him, the red desert of Mars when it had first been colonized and had still been so terribly alien, the darkened metal hallways of a metal carrier ship he had once lived in, a small village set against a blazing star that was not the sun. They all flickered in the distance, fighting against the omnipresent King's Cross, growing more familiar and tangible with each step.

He was feeling restless, that was the best word for it, Lily delayed the feeling somehow made it feel less oppressing but it was there never the less. He'd been too shocked at first, and then there had always been Lily, bright little Lily who was so unlike any little girl he'd ever known but with the silence of his own thoughts there was that need to get out to see the universe spread his wings and just go.

He could never sit still, and that was why he had taken the train, because somewhere in some universe he needed life to exist.

He suspected it was a thought along those lines that had caused Harry Potter's existence in the first place.

In front of him the station finally faded from view and was replaced with a revised version of Dumbledore's old tale. A wide, fierce river, three young bearded men of pure blood, an elder tree, and the presence of something old watching through the eyes of the black birds.

There were once three brothers who built a bridge with little more than a wave of a hand and a few muttered words to cross a raging river. Upon reaching the other side they spotted a stranger in black who seemed rather foreign, he stood awkwardly as if unused to himself, but even so there was a grace and power to him that was not to be trifled with. The pale stranger in black introduced himself with a smile that attempted to be human as Death.

The brothers, naturally, claimed that with the aid of their magic they owed him nothing as they had bested the river and thus Death himself. Death disagreed with a slight shake of his head, but no bitterness, "I'm afraid eternity is longer than you think it is. There is always another wider river in the world."

However they were not particularly inclined to listen, instead they said having beaten Death himself they deserved some reward. The man named Death watched them out of eyes as green as grass and finally consented, but only if they offered something in return, "Not your son, or your son's son, but many children from now one of your descendants will be bequeathed to me in return for this favor."

With a small amount of thought they eventually agreed, after all, children were not immune to death and with the three of them their line was hardly likely to die out. For who else could say that they had made a deal with Death himself for crossing a bridge.

And so they bargained at the edge of that river, trading a river stone, a branch of elder, and a worn cloak for a child who had yet to exist.

The incarnation of Death that he saw in that image only vaguely resembled Harry Potter, he had not yet fashioned the human nature of his features, he lacked the ability to observe the finer details. His face had an inhuman symmetry to it, his hair seemed formed from the feathers of blackbirds, his skin from alabaster, and his eyes were the green and growing things in bloom all around them. As a prototype it was little more than a work of art, an ode to all the wonder that life and humanity had to offer, the light in the universe that burned so brightly.

He had no true memory of these events, as far as he was concerned his sentience and memory began in July of 1980 with the birth of Harry James Potter. Still, sometimes there were feelings, flashes of intuition of half remembered dreams.

He suspected Persephone had possessed red hair, that it had been the color of spider lilies, and that when she had smiled it had seemed as if the sun was shining behind her bright eyes.

He sighed and wandered over the bridge himself and past the three men and Death struggling to retain the idea of a human form, there were other things to see, places to be that did not bring up so many of the angrier memories of Harry Potter.

Such betrayal he had felt, at the world, at Dumbledore at everything that had been cast upon him and somehow all those feelings still ached. A tale of three brothers, what a human thing it was to be upset by something so small and trifling as that.

The scenery changed with him, transforming into something else, something new but familiar all in the same moment. Moving on towards eternity, always, never stopping for time marched on forever more and he must keep up momentum for fear of apathy.

His surroundings settled into the cavernous room carved from blue and black stone, a single dark chair stood at the end of the hall illuminated by bright floating lights drifting along a single walk way. A great window opened itself to constellations that could not be seen from Earth's solar system, so that he could stare out and see that city that sprawled beneath, a clean shining place made of white stone that seemed almost to glow in the starlight reflected upon the surface of the two moons. Everything had an elegance and a cleanliness that he had rarely known on Earth and its first few colonies, it made it seem distant somehow, as if the room itself were alien and untouchable.

"I should have known I'd somehow end up here." The room was empty, the city looked empty as well, so he could only really say it for himself and the empty room.

Sighing he made his way over to that familiar, stark, chair and sat in it before surveying the room. How long ago had this been, he wondered, that he had sat on the throne that the godhead had thrust upon him? How long had that particular eternity stretched? He could no longer quite remember, he only knew that this era had been engraved in his mind just as clearly as Harry Potter's had, and in the center of it all this dark chair.

He had always hated these things with a bitterness even he himself couldn't explain, it was not the expectation, or even the responsibility, but the weight and the devotion in the eyes of thousands that always crushed him.

So far from Earth, from England, from everything he had ever known this was the age he felt began his walk into eternity.

There was no reason to stay there, he'd felt that at the time as well, and that was why when everything had crumbled he had not tried to hold it together. That period of his existence had ended with him in the hull of an old metallic freighter heading off to some foreign world looking back at the ruins of what had once been a great city. Great, that word again, why were terrible things always great?

But it didn't fade, it sat firmly in his mind, as most things he wished to disappear did. It was as if he had lost some battle of wills with himself and was now witnessing the consequences, looking back at old uncomfortable truths, that he had once willingly played the role of God Emperor and the worlds had burned for it.

"Oh, it doesn't look that bad."

At first he thought it was Lily in the room with him, appearing out of nowhere into the context as if she belonged there, but even after staring at her she lacked her usual depth. This was only an image of the pale red-headed girl, she wore the mannerisms like a cheap unpracticed actor, and her smile seemed a little stretched.

"Now why would I summon you here to a place like this?" He asked himself but the girl shrugged as if in response.

"Don't ask me, I'm just the hallucination. You know, I wonder if Hamlet ever asked his ghost dad that? Before the whole raging, vengeance, I must go crazy and kill uncle Claudius thing he had going on. I mean it's not every day you get to talk to your hallucinations or your dead father, so either way it must have been a good learning experience, I'd think so at any rate." She walked closer to the throne her feet echoing across the chamber, she stopped in front of one of the floating lights poked it and watched it wobble about her finger, and then continued until she plopped down on the armrest.

"I can give you a guesstimation, if you're so inclined." She said as she began to swing her legs back and forth off the enormous chair.

"Alright."

For a moment she looked more than a little like Tom Riddle, even though her eyes were the wrong color and she was much too young there was something dangerous lurking in her features, something that grinned like a wolf, "Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds. That's what you said when you first saw me, not quoting the Bhagavad Gita but quoting Oppenheimer instead, you think this is my destiny."

She held up a hand as if to halt his protests before they began, "Destiny is such a human mechanism, that's what you say. Prophecy is simply the art of rhyming well in such a dramatic tone that you convince the audience that the universe is written in some predetermined format. But we aren't human, a very good attempt at being human, but not quite there at the end of the day. You're worried that all roads lead to Rome because one day eons from now you see me in this room just as well as you see yourself."

The shadows seemed to fade from her then, as if they had never been there in the first place, and that flat and unconvincing shadow of Lily remained.

"Is that so?" He asked his voice colder than even he expected it to be.

"Now don't shoot the messenger from your subconscious." She said in a tone that could almost be described as chiding, "It's hardly my fault you're bored, depressed, anxious, and worried all in the same instant. If you don't deal with your issues they deal with you, just ask Hamlet."

He supposed that was true, even before he had left his own universe he had been haunted by shades of his past. They would appear on some unconscious whims of his, all manner of people, and slowly over time they would fade until they would be replaced by new shades. He had many a talk with the shade of Hermione Granger, somehow he had found her to be the most willing to understand and the one whose view he cherished the most.

He would have expected to have this talk with Hermione, he had initially after his term as God Emperor had ended she had appeared pale and transparent before him but with a smile that said he did his best even when he felt the world was falling apart. Perhaps Hermione, Ron, Ginny, and all those others were no longer accessible to him. He had stepped out of the frame, out of his role and into the shoes of the stranger in a strange land; you could not carry your ties with you on such an exodus. So instead his mind had conjured this image of Lily, the only real connection he had on this plane, and it was comforting, pitiful, and horrifying all at once what his mind had done to her.

"I think I'd handle it better than you would though, or Lily would, the real Lily not the fake brain-Lily you've concocted." She mused with a distant expression, taking in the distant starlight as well as the shadows of the room, "Things like responsibility and honor, well I don't really even know what they are, you see there are all these things spinning in my head and some concepts are clearer than others. So they could put me on a throne and worship the greatness that is me and I don't know if I'd like it or dislike it, because they are glitches and fundamentally wrong in a way I can't describe, so of course they're irrational."

"Hopefully she'll never find out." He said softly suddenly too tired to fight himself.

His holiday was at an end, short-lived as it had been, as he had expected before he even reached the first layer of the labyrinth he had encountered one of the many minotaurs that waited inside. The train station, in its own way, was soft like a nursery where one is kept confined but safe from their own devices and the outside world. It was unchanging, nostalgic, and right next to him the train was always waiting for a rider like the promise of a very old friend.

"Oh it'll be fine, everything works out in the end. That's what I think anyway…or she thinks, can we stop this conversation already I'm getting confused."

He smiled and ruffled the mass of red curls, "Yeah, we can stop."

So they sat there instead, him feeling strangely better even though it was only an illusion leaning against him staring through the open window to where the world waited. The scenery dripped from view slowly but surely, taking Lily with it, and leaving Death staring blankly ahead at the broken Kings Cross station.

"Ah, home at last."

So here he was again, back where he started, his feet itching to move somewhere and see something beyond himself. Still, the station was filled with broken glass, so something beyond him must exist. He stretched and leaned back in the chair, the Lily in his head had been right, things surely weren't as bad as they seemed.

And soon enough the real Lily was there pulling her captive horcrux behind her, "Uncle Death we've got trouble, big trouble! I think Mrs. Figg's cats are spies for the government. I mean the they government, it would explain everything, because even Lenin agrees that cats don't form rooftop patrols. Big Brother's on the loose again and I don't know if they're after Lenin, me pretending to be a drug lord, or something even bigger than all of that combined!"

"I said the cats were odd, I did not say they were government spies, or KGB, or whatever the hell you're calling it these days."

And just as usual he couldn't quite help himself, "Ah, but comrade Riddle, Mrs. Figg's cats are quite notorious for their espionage."