The Moment Before and the Beginning of After
There was a time when Harry Potter had been human. He remembered it in pieces—like echoes of a life lived by someone else.
A boy who laughed. A boy who cried. A boy who felt.
That boy was fading.
It was not sudden. There was no great realization, no shattering moment of understanding. It was a slow, creeping thing. A gentle erosion.
One day, he woke up and realized he had not felt hunger in weeks.
Another, he found himself watching a student cry in the corridor and felt nothing. Not pity. Not concern. Not even curiosity.
He understood that he should. He remembered that he once had. But the feeling did not come.
The world was growing distant.
Sound was duller, muted. Conversations blurred together. He spoke, he taught, he walked the halls of Hogwarts as he always had—but it was all becoming mechanical.
The pretense of humanity.
And the worst part was—he could not bring himself to care.
He understood emotion in an academic sense. He knew what should be felt, how to mimic it, how to play the role expected of him. He smiled when needed. He frowned when required. He was perfectly polite, perfectly composed.
But there was no fire behind it.
Only stillness.
Only emptiness.
He had become something else, and he was still becoming.
The castle whispered to him now. Not in words, not in thoughts, but in knowing. He did not need to open doors—they knew to move before him. He did not need to seek knowledge—it came when called.
He saw patterns where none should exist. He felt threads of time woven through the world.
And he was beginning to pull at them.
He had not meant to, not at first. But one moment stretched too long, and he realized he had lingered outside of time itself.
A misplaced step sent him forward—not along the corridor, but through it.
He was forgetting how to be limited.
How to be bound.
How to be human.
And yet—
Something tethered him still.
A sliver of something—something quiet, something fragile.
Not resistance. Not regret.
Just the faintest whisper of remembrance.
There had been a boy once. A boy who had lived.
That Boy is gone.