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Harry was old in soul, if young in body. He had watched planets burn, watched everything be destroyed. He watched the universe fall to darkness, and then life began again.
He was there when the first human child of magic was born, watched them grow and find others of magicks creation. Watched the Founders of Hogwarts meet and begin Hogwarts. Saw Merlin and the rise and fall of Camelot. Watched Grinderwalds and Voldemorts rise to power, and he saw their reasoning. Muggles could not learn of them.
Through the ages, the witch hunts and attacks hurt those whom he had been close with. The Muggles were dangerous, and needed to be dealt with. But he couldn’t do it alone, and certantly not as a ten year old under the stairs at his childhood home, though he hadn’t been there for some time.
Being reborn was not uncommon as the Master of Death, but it was certantly something to be reborn as oneself. Having lived mulitple lives in history, his magic was already completely his to control, though that may have also been from Death’s intervention.
Death... that was a figure that had definitelly shocked Harry when he had finally passed. The first meeting with the cloaked figure had terrified him to the bone, and left him in a state of shock, before taking up his role as the Master of Death. Never being able to die was somewhat shocking.
Multiple stab wounds? Death comes and fixes them right up. Losing a head? Death comes and stiches it back to the body. Jump into an active volcano? Well, aparently Death has a spare body on hand. No matter what, Death refused to let him die.
Harry laid in the cupboard beneath the stairs, eagerly awaiting the next day, as that was the day his first Hogwarts Letter appeared. The day that changed his life, and would soon set him on the path to finish his plans.
He remembered the last time he was Harry Potter. How he died stupidly and slowly, but with those he was closest too during his life. Out of all his deaths, it was a good one.
It was 2057, Harry smiled as he lay on his deathbed. Ron was sitting beside him with Hermione, both trying to keep him in high spirits, but it wasn’t as if he was scared to die. Death was inevitable, it came for everything.
“Ron?” Harry asked, cutting off Hermione’s speech about hope.
“Yea, mate?”
“Take care, hey?”
“‘Course I will.” The youngest Weasley sibling rested a hand on Harry’s shoulder. They had survived alot since the war that took his sister. He wished for a moment things had been different a thousand different ways.
“Good. Make sure ‘Mione doesn’t stay up late.” Harry closed his eyes.
Ron began to respond, but the words were lost in a commotion of sounds to Harry.
The last thing he heard was someone yelling for a healer.
Of course he also remembered his first meeting with Death and really, that didn’t go as well as it could.
Gasping awake, and realizing he was sitting in a chair was something that Harry did not expect was going to happen after being in the Hospital for three months.
“Breathing again I see.” A voice said to the left of him.
Harry turned towards the voice to see a cloaked figure, “W-Who...”
“Do you really want to know?”
“I don’t know.” Harry’s brow furrowed.
A skeletal hand reached forward causing Harry to jerk backwards in shock, causing the chair to topple dangerously. The figure moved quickly and steadied the chair. Harry’s face was suddenly next to the figure's skeletal one, deep black holes as eyes.
“You.... you’re Death.” Harry gulped, Or some creepy moving skeleton but I’m going with death.
“An obvious deduction, Mr. Potter. How clever of you.” The figure deadpanned
Harry figured that if the figure had actual eyes, it would be rolling them, “Why am I here?”
“Because.” Death turned away, tilting their skeletal head.
“Because?” Harry asked, trying to stand, but was suddenly pushed back into the chair by an unseen force.
“You are the Master of Death.”
Harry blinked twice to process those words. “Yeah, ok, sure. What the fuck does that mean?”
“Simply? You will never die. I can not take my master.”
“Okay. How do I stop being the Master of Death?”
“You do not.”
Harry blinked twice before exhaling a stream of swears that somehow worked together.
Death seemed to smile, before asking “So, when do you wish to begin?”
Harry met the skeletal face, his eyes darkening with anger.
He went back to living and saw it all. A life of a thousand lives is what he lived. But he started with the end. As the best things all do; open at the close.
The muggles discovered the Wizarding world in 2123, and the world turned against itself. Harry stood by and watched the wars begin. It was the Salem Witch Trials to an extreme, with nuclear weapons. It didn’t take long for the world to die with the radioactivity that the muggles unleashed.
Death reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder, “Master?”
“That was the last of the magicals.” He commented, gesturing towards the woman who had been shot in the shoulder, and was bleeding to death. “They never stood a chance.”
“That is the way of the world. They live, they die, they repeat.”
“Repeat?” Harry asked, looking towards his skeletal guardian.
“You will see... In time.” With a toothy grin he vanished into the nothingness that was a portal.
Harry watched the muggles running by before following Death into one of his many portals.
It didn’t take much longer for the world to fall into darkness. Once the witches and wizards fell, the rest of the creatures fell in a domino effect. Soon, it was obvious that Magic kept the balance of the earth. Mass panic spread, and Death took more souls he had taken in one year.
And once the world died, Death and his Master were back in what Harry was calling Limbo.
“Well, now that that’s over, we need to talk about your future choices.”
“What future? The world is over. Gone. Dead.” How naive he had been, thinking it was that simple.
“Does that stop things from existing?” Death asked their head tilting.
“Well, obviously not, we are still here. Wherever here is.”
“You have three choices, My Lord. One, to be reborn, with or without these memories. Two, stay as you are for eternity. Three, immortality.”
“Really? Those choices are shit.”
Death seemed to smile before gesturing in front of him to nothing. “That may be so, but you do need to choose.”
“If I choose being reborn, will I still be the Master of Death?”
“You will always be my Master.”
Harry swore under his breath. “Reborn then. I’d go mad if I stayed here, or if I never changed.”
Death tilted his head to the left, and Harry thought if they had a face, it would be smiling. He should have known better. Should have set better rules, vague as they were.
Because, being born before regular schooling had been made, before Merlin, and before any regulated systems were in place was very odd and not what he had been expecting. Everything he did in the new world was for the benefit of the people. As he grew with those around him in the cradle of civilization, he learned how to hunt with the men, how to gather food, and how to plainly survive the harsh heat, and the bitter cold.
And he lived. And lived. And lived, until he was back under the stairs in the Dursley house. And oh, he had so many plans for those who he had once known.