Chapter Text
So old friend, do tell me what is better: Death, endured once or a zillion times?
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The promise of being reduced to nothingness is a freeing one.
Honestly, a part of Harry's been looking forward to it for a while now— the permanent embrace of death that ensures not only the safety of his friends, but a relief from all his heavy, heavy burdens. There’s nothing morbid or cynical about such a desire, he does not think; simply borne from years of running and stumbling and enduring an exhausting, never-ending fight for survival. Almost akin to a stray dog who bites and barks in a rabid, desperate fever until it has to be put down.
Would that make Voldemort his pound-keeper?
Perhaps that’s too close to the truth.
With that amusing thought, Harry boldly walks into the circle of Death Eaters with far less fear than anyone could have ever expected, standing wandless before his greatest enemy. He’s practically begging for it— an ultimatum in the form of two simple words, his life in exchange for everyone else's. What better outcome could there be for this endless war?
As he looks the Dark Lord in the eye, there’s only one thought on Harry’s mind:
If he's been raised to die, then he’s going to do a bloody good job at it.
But then he goes ahead and fucks even that up.
Avada Kedavra!
A crying infant (lonely and loveless), a train station of cotton and ivory.
A pair of twinkling blue eyes (open and raw), a man who sought to create a martyr.
A boy who is seventeen (so desperately wants to be loved).
A hero who has bested the greatest evil (a child rejected even by the afterlife).
A Master of Death newly formed (unwilling and tired and cold).
Magic is a wonderful, miraculous thing. But it’s also so goddamn confounding. Who would’ve thought that a stick, a stone, and a tattered cloak could have enough power to change the trajectory of the world?
And so Harry walks On, and without any fanfare, Death returns him to life with the casualness of someone placing a book back on a shelf: neatly, efficiently, and with absolutely no regard for Harry’s personal comfort. The battle that follows is almost theatrical in its finality— green clashes with red, prophecy and destiny tangling in one last violent collision. Voldemort falls. The war ends. People scream his name. Arms wrap around him. And from the outside, it probably looks like victory.
But inside, Harry tries very hard not to linger on the brief moment before Death had pulled him back— when the void had embraced him like an old friend, and everything just went… silent. Weightless. Like a promise that the exhaustion gnawing at his soul would finally stop.
Harry tries to love being alive even as he feels half-dead.
He buries his nose in Hermione’s sweat-matted curls, grounding himself in her familiar scent of parchment and lavender soap. He cups Ron’s freckled cheek, thumb brushing over a childhood’s worth of sunspots. He leans into Ginny’s trembling kiss, her lips chapped from wind and worry, her hands clutching him as if she expects him to fade like smoke. Over her shoulder, he exchanges a small, grateful look with Draco who stands in the back with his mother.
He focuses on the warmth of those still alive, the quietly murmured ‘Thank you’s and ‘I’m sorry’s. And most importantly, he revels in the sure, yet still incredulous knowledge that the freak who grew up in a cupboard under the stairs has somehow managed to make it this far.
Life is not as it was, and perhaps it never truly will be.
But it still has to carry on.
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Repairs drag deep into the following year. Broken stone weaves itself back into arches, staircases reknit their stubborn joints, and the enchanted ceiling of the Great Hall constantly flickers through half-formed skies, still trying to find its footing. Yet, Hogwarts opens her doors all the same. And Professor McGonagall, now Headmistress, refuses to let war steal that from her students as well.
“Normality is not a luxury,” she insists. “It’s a lifeline that every single one of my students deserve.”
Harry tries not to laugh when she says it on their first day back. Normal. As though slaying Voldemort didn’t immediately disqualify him from anything resembling normality. But Hogwarts has always been the first place where he felt wanted, the first place that called him home. He can’t possibly walk away from her. Not when she’s trying so hard to stand again.
And so he returns. Nearly all of them do— too-young survivors filtering back through enchanted gates, clutching textbooks and lingering grief in equal measure. The logistics are… entertaining, to put it mildly. With Hufflepuff dorms partially submerged, Gryffindor’s tower compromised, and Ravenclaw’s staircases temporarily cursed to lecture at anyone who climbs them, nearly fifty students end up packed into Slytherin’s dungeons.
And somehow, it’s… harmonious.
The Slytherin common room becomes a patchwork of mismatched blankets and borrowed pillows, soft blue lanterns shared between houses, and tiny charms scrawled on bedposts to ward off nightmares. And though very few Slytherins choose to return (for obvious reasons), the space they left behind grows into something unexpected.
Perhaps it’s the way everyone has grown up too quickly, their innocence scorched at the edges. Perhaps it’s that they all finally understand the price of cruelty, and the weight of what they survived. Whatever the reason, Hogwarts gently shifts, allowing strange new bonds to take root.
Harry finds himself with Draco more often than not— bickering, studying, feigning annoyance when Draco steals his quill, only to offer him a nicer one. There’s a strange tenderness in their rivalry now, a mutual understanding forged in the fire neither of them wanted. Zabini and Nott adopt Harry in their own sly way, inviting him into whispered jokes, smuggling pastries from the kitchens, and turning gobstones tournaments into something dangerously competitive. Goyle, unexpectedly, becomes Harry’s favoured opponent. He’s brilliant at the game, and more importantly, he laughs. Really laughs. And the sound is healing.
Outside the dungeons, other connections continue to weave quietly.
Harry walks the forest line with Luna sometimes, tracing constellations through the treetops and gossiping about who has the most Wrackspurts floating around them (it’s always Draco). Other evenings find him shoulder-to-shoulder with Neville, salvaging half-buried plants from collapsed greenhouses, marvelling at how calm and confident Neville has become when coaxing new life from devastation.
But most nights end the same: Harry curled in a tangle with Ron and Hermione on an overstuffed sofa in the Slytherin common room, their limbs a warm, familiar heap, chatting about everything and nothing until their voices drift off. Sometimes they just fall asleep like that. Sometimes they don’t dare to.
Life is much too gentle for a while. Harry can’t help but wonder if this peace is what the last seven years were meant to be before fate had him sharpened into a weapon.
Soon enough, graduation arrives— mostly a blur of sobbing families and trembling hands that Harry takes an embarrassingly long time to get over. He clings to his friends, to the castle walls, to every moment. He doesn’t want to let any of it go. But life moves on, and everyone eagerly steps into adulthood, racing to outrun the trauma of their childhood.
Engagements bloom like fireworks, weddings stack up every few months, and Harry follows the tide without thinking. He marries Ginny, moves into Grimmauld Place, and they have three bright, brilliant children who he knows will never stay out of trouble. And of course, he also has Teddy— precious little doe-eyed Teddy who he visits at Andromeda’s place every week.
And for a while, it works. For a while, the noise of family life is loud enough to drown out the memories. He builds routines, burying the past under bottles and nappies and Auror reports. He learns to smile through the exhaustion. He becomes very good at locking things away. He doesn’t think about Fred or Snape or Dumbledore or Sirius or Remus or Tonks or Dobby or that first year’s tiny, broken body dangling out the castle window—
Stop. Lock it in a box.
Breathe in, breathe out, focus on the present. That’s what the therapist said to do.
Harry Potter is a war hero.
Harry Potter is the head Auror and a husband and a father.
Harry Potter is tired, but he has to carry on.
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As is the case with all child soldiers, Harry Potter has his battles— brutal, intimate ones that make the past feel cartoonish by comparison. They have absolutely nothing to do with murderous teachers, giant basilisks, or even fascist regimes led by genocidal maniacs.
No, the true war is the one still raging behind his ribs: an unending series of tides, fury and sorrow crashing unpredictably through the hollow of his chest. Some weeks it is a storm every morning; some months it is a quiet, merciless undertow. Every wave leaves Harry in pieces, and he spends every waking hour quietly gathering the shards, just enough to mould a smile for his family that doesn’t look like it hurts.
All the while, Harry tries very hard not to notice that his appearance has hardly changed since the day he died.
He tries not to think about the harrowing reality that he is barely ageing while everyone he loves clearly is. He grows a beard, builds muscle, stands taller. But the ache still hits him when Ron complains about the crow’s feet starting at the corners of his eyes. Ron is ageing. Ron is allowed to. Harry… isn’t.
And of course, he tries to ignore the Elder Wand’s sudden reappearance in his pocket, like a lingering taunt from the past. Surely it means nothing. Absolutely nothing.
But the one thing he can’t ignore is the ache in his chest, hollowing him out more every day. He’s rotting, slowly and steadily.
And he knows, with grim certainty, that he'll one day be consumed.
The years pass by at a sickeningly slow pace after that— for Harry, at least. The kids are all grown and long gone to Hogwarts, and in their absence, the cracks in his carefully constructed facade have begun to appear.
Harry drinks. Harry smokes. Harry withdraws.
He barely keeps in touch with his friends, always finding some excuse not to attend gatherings, even when they ask again and again. He doesn’t talk to Ron or Hermione much anymore, because he knows that if he lets himself speak freely, all he’ll do is bitch and complain about things that don’t fucking matter. They have their own children, their own responsibilities, their own beautiful, ordinary lives. He refuses to infect them with the rot festering in him.
Back then, he could have given a good estimate of how many freckles they each had on their cheeks. Now, terrifyingly, he can barely recall the shade of their eyes (brown and blue, brown and blue—).
Meanwhile, Auror missions become an excuse to unleash violence, to be ruthless in ways he never allowed himself to be in his youth. The rookies fear him, won’t even meet his eyes if they can help it. Some dark, cynical part of him snarls, good, better fear than worship, because he’d rather that than the simpering, fawning devotees he still gets accosted by even now. The pride of heroism has soured into a cynicism seeped so deep into his bones, he gets more satisfaction out of a risky fight than any pretty award hanging from his office walls ever could.
So when Ginny brings up the idea of separation, Harry is far from surprised. Rather, he’s long expected it— how long has it been since they’d slept beside one another without the gulf of silence between them? When was the last time they’d kissed each other without it feeling like a formality?
“It’s like I don’t even know you anymore,” she’d said that night, quiet yet firm. “And sometimes, I think I never actually did.”
“Perhaps so,” was all he could offer. “I’m sorry.”
Harry Potter is a shadow of his former self. He’s quiet, brooding and prefers the company of a cigarette and good glass of firewhiskey to actual people. And that is not what Ginevra Weasley had signed up for. The man she’d loved and married was a beacon of golden light in the darkness, a hero she looked up to as a role model. That was a man who had once been her paladin, her prince, her striking beau ideal— not this mangled mess of a human she has no idea how to untangle, much less stand to watch spiral deeper and deeper into… whatever the hell Harry was becoming.
And so she goes, taking custody of James, Albus and Lily because her ex-husband clearly isn’t in the right state to care for others. She’s a world-famous Quidditch player, after all. She’s got more than enough means to support herself and her kids, not to mention a huge extended family who will welcome them with open arms.
Harry does not try to stop her.
Word spreads quickly. People who have not yet forgotten him pay a few visits— Ron, Hermoine, and Teddy, who always come bearing gifts and hopeful, gentle words. Harry pushes them away too. Better they focus on themselves than a rotting husk of a man.
And finally, once again, Harry is utterly alone.
He’s ten years old and back in the cupboard under the stairs, wondering if anyone will ever come save him.
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At the ripe age of forty-five, Harry Potter comes to the realisation that he wants to die.
Though that, of course, is a lie. It isn’t a revelation at all.
It’s been an idea that has been festering at the back of his mind for years, maybe decades. Perhaps even as early as fifth year, when he first learned what it meant to be both hunted and haunted. Suicide has always lingered at the edge of his thoughts: a passing shadow, an enticing suggestion, a bone-deep fatigue whispering rest. Nothing more.
But lately, it’s begun to feel like the only reasonable answer.
Especially now, when age refuses to catch him. When the mirror shows him the same face he wore at seventeen— older in the eyes, perhaps, but unchanged in all the ways that matter. How many decades or centuries will he walk through? How many times will he watch people that he once loved grow and die around him? How long will it be until he is the last remnant of a world that no longer remembers the war, or the boy who died and kept living anyway?
Harry just wants to sleep.
Sleep has always, always been the worst part of the night for him. It traps him in spirals of terror and grief, drags him down into midnight screaming fits that leave him clutching sweaty sheets and gasping for breath. He would give anything for one good night’s rest… though truthfully, what he truly wants is simpler: to go to sleep and never wake.
Right now, he’s just a furious, rabid old mutt who only hurts himself and everyone around him. It’s about time he got put down for good.
On the thirty-first of July, Harry does not buy himself a cake, nor does he prepare for any visitors. He hasn’t done so in years.
But what he does do is pry himself out of his armchair for the first time in weeks and visits the physician. The doctor gives him a bulk order of Dreamless Sleep— about twenty or so bottles, all neatly wrapped in brown paper as though they’re a birthday present. Harry beams, the widest smile he’s mustered in years, and jokes about finally getting some proper rest. The doctor laughs. He laughs too.
Then Harry goes home and sits at the kitchen counter— the same counter where he once helped Ginny chop carrots for dinner, where Lily did her homework, where Albus stole biscuits, where James once set a stack of Fanged Frisbees on fire.
Slowly, he begins to drink. One bottle. Two. Three.
The cool purple liquid slides down his throat. The soft aroma of lavender curls faintly in the air. In the background, a record spins— some upbeat Muggle pop album he heard on the radio as a child, which he then bought on a whim ten years ago during a trip to America. The needle crackles softly. Harry taps his foot, humming under his breath.
It’s been so very long since the house felt this gentle. The last time he remembers truly relaxing, he’d been sprawled across a sofa with Ginny, firewhiskey on the table, children shrieking with laughter in the background— sticky hands tugging his hair, little feet jumping on his stomach, warm voices begging, “Daddy, play with us!”
I need to laugh, and when the sun is out
I've got something I can laugh about
I feel good, in a special way
I'm in love and it's a sunny day
“Good day sunshine, good day sunshine,” Harry softly sings.
He used to call James sunshine, back when his son was a just tiny babe in the crib— swathed in a pale yellow blanket and showing off that bright gummy smile for anyone and everyone to see, giggling and kicking about like nobody’s business every single time Harry flashed him a funny face. Then it was what he'd called Albus. Then Lily.
And then we lie, beneath a shady tree
I love her and she's loving me
She feels good, she knows she's looking fine
I'm so proud to know that she is mine
He hopes Ginny and the kids are doing well.
The edges of his vision blur. Grey creeps inward. His eyelids droop.
“Good morning sunshine,” he mutters to no one, and lets his eyes drift shut.
On the eighteenth bottle, Harry slips off the stool and collapses onto the floor.
A cold numbness seeps deep into his bones, and Harry can’t feel the wooden floorboards beneath his body, can’t smell the lavender, can’t even hear the music anymore. He’s sinking into the darkness; that comforting, eternal void that he’d met all those years ago, now welcoming him back with open arms.
Harry Potter, a raspy purr beckons in his memory. Come to die.
His soul does not resist as death devours him whole. Like he’s a nobody, like he doesn’t have the weight of the world on his shoulders. Like he’s a speck of sand floating through the ocean, waiting to disappear into the endless abyss as a negligible, minuscule little thing. It both terrifies and relieves him.
But then, impossibly, he hears something where there should be nothing— a low, rumbling staccato that rocks through his entire being in waves of vibration. Almost like… a chuckle. Before Harry can even register it, the world before him is enveloped in a familiar flash of pure, bright white. The darkness recedes, relief disintegrates, and he feels more than sees the impression of a sharp, knowing grin.
Let’s try this one more time, why don’t we?
Oh, bloody fucking hell.