Soooooo….Harry-Is-Skull Fics.
They….kind of…attacked me. And I have always LOVED KHR/HP crossovers, as well as Skull and I have no words for these fics and the lovely authors that have inspired me with their takes on this. The one to inspire THIS though is Northpeach. Well done darling.
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"What would they think of me?"
It was something Skull thought to himself many, many times.
He was part of the Strongest Seven, had been for decades now. Decades they had believed they knew him.
Weak, they called him. Pathetic. Fool. Lackey. Stupid.
The irony.
Skull scoffed to himself, his face twisted into something part mocking, part anger, part hurt, part sadness and he was so tired.
They had looked to him from almost the moment he was born, had called on him as Their 'knight' the 'fix-all' solution to Their problems. He had needed to be strong, to stand at the front, to lead and protect and be Their knight for all things.
He had left.
It was too much, much too soon.
He had won Their war, and they wanted so much more from him, wanted and wanted and wanted.
Skull had had enough. He had left it all behind him.
It was time for him to live for himself.
He had wanted to be someone else.
Someone Not Harry.
So he had been and still was Skull De Mort- chosen as a reminder of what he had walked away from and his victory against Tom Riddle- Voldemort.
He had stumbled upon Stunt Riding by accident. A Stunt Show had come to the town he had been in.
Skull still remembered sitting in the crowd, his heart in his mouth, watching as the rider rode a motorcycle up a ramp while in a handstand- one hand on the seat the other gripping the handlebars- and the jump. Skull remembered the seemingly endless moment the rider was in the air, the moment Skull had thought for an instant- He's not going to make it- remembered holding his breath and then he remembered the landing and the great exhale he had released with the crowd.
Skull had been so…
He didn't really have words for it. The War had hardened him. He had…too many scars, then all the pressure from Them, the expectations that he needed to just keep going, that expectation meaning he was never truly given an opportunity to heal as he should have…
Skull was a soldier. He was a soldier who had staggered through the aftermath of a war with other soldiers all the while still being expected to be General even long after he should have been done.
Leaving had helped.
A little.
When he had found it the stunt show had been a distraction. A passing thing, something that had reminded him of happier times- when Sirius had been alive and the two of them had slipped away with no one the wiser an Sirius had taught him to ride motorcycles- something to look at and move on.
He hadn't expected to feel a small spark of interest- the first spark of genuine interest he had felt in years that didn't involve the need to survive.
Skull had pursued it and that spark slowly grew.
He went from waking up in the morning with images and memories of the war, of screams in his ears, of pleas he hadn't been able to answer echoing in his mind, of the raging agony of the torture he had lived through throbbing like a phantom pain all the time to waking up still suffering from these things, but he had something to look forward too now. It wasn't all consuming.
There was light in his darkness for the first time.
Skull wondered sometimes if that had something to do with his love for being a Stuntman.
It could have been anything.
Whatever had sparked that interest that day, whatever had shown him a flicker of light in shadows and pain.
But it had been a Stuntman to offer him the glimpse of light.
And so Skull De Mort the Immortal Stuntman was born.
New to the world and learning still, not yet the best, not yet aware of what he would one day awaken, and in awakening it what he would one day walk into. Not yet.
Skull watched the Arcobaleno walking ahead of him, beginning to grow again, and he wondered…if they knew what he had done, what he had lived through….
"What would they think of me?"