On the Wings of Death

Look There's A Baby On The Front Porch

The early morning of November 1st was a chilly one, cold winds sweeping throughout Surrey. A slightly-older-than-one-year-old Harry Potter shivered in the cold, its biting fingers digging into his skin.

His sleep had faded long ago, having been riddled with strange images of green light and chilling laughter. Only now, a numbness was creeping into his body. Harry shivered again, that strange numb feeling growing. A leadenness was in his body, and darkness crawled along the edges of his vision, and it was cold, so, so cold...

The darkness swept in.

Oddly, before the baby's vision faded, he caught a glimpse of something with tousled red-black hair.

~OoOoOoO~

Yveltal wandered aimlessly along the street, not even sure why he was here. He had had an argument with Xerneas earlier, he remembered, and his brother was being an annoying brat as always. The details were slightly hazy, clouded with anger, but he remembered a baby-pink light, slipping into a portal, and then waking up in an alleyway in his human form.

His dark hair, with just the slightest touch of blood red – Yveltal was quite proud of himself for managing to slip that sheen in without Arceus noticing – shifted in the wind, and he scowled. Why was it so cold?

Of course, he didn't know where he was, either. Since he had slipped through a portal – or at least he could remember doing that – he was probably in an alternate universe. Yveltal didn't know – or particularly care – about the various multiverses Palkia sometimes rambled about, usually when she was downing large amounts of alcohol in an attempt to forget arguments with Dialga. Arceus, those two argued a lot. More than him and Xerneas, definitely. There was a point she had mentioned once though. Something about... ah. There were no Pokémon in most of her multiverses. There were supposed to be some, in a fossil dimension or whatever she had called it, but Yveltal had honestly been too trashed that night to remember.

Still, because there were obviously no Hoothoot in sight – or even in hearing – and because his own senses couldn't detect anything that felt remotely like a Pokémon's aura, Yveltal guessed that he was in one of the No-Pokémon universes. Considering he was a Pokémon, that probably wasn't great news.

On the other hand, here there was no Xerneas to bother him. A wonderful thing, in his opinion. And there was the sensation of life, all around him. Another beautiful thing. He might have been the Legendary of Destruction – death was more or less tacked on to the end of that title – but it didn't mean that he couldn't appreciate the simple beauty of life, even if it was his brother's domain.

Until the life form died, of course. Then it got ugly.

Yveltal glanced at the signpost – Magnolia Crescent, it read – and then breathed in, deeply. He ignored the biting wind, focusing instead on the land, the world around him.

Life was present here, in the soft but brittle grass, in the whisper of the leaves, in the quiet cry of a bird that wasn't a Pokémon. It was there in the rattling cry of the wind, the movements of a tail, the faltering energy of a baby left on a doorstep –

Wait.

Yveltal spun, closing his eyes and focusing. There – the slowly dying aura of a child no older than two. What would a child – more like a baby – be doing on a doorstep? It was freezing, for the love of Arceus!

He sprinted towards the aura, faint alarm and curiosity tingling through him. Yveltal wasn't a general fan of humans. On the other hand, anybody who could leave a baby in the cold deserved to be paid a visit.

He skidded to a stop outside one of the houses, eyes falling on a basket with a baby boy wrapped securely inside. The tiny fingers, he noted idly, were clutching a letter written with emerald green ink. The baby's eyes were open, but they were closing fast.