For the first few years of his life, Harry Potter dreams. And he always forgets, come morning. It is perhaps for the best. His young mind would break if he remembered.
They all start the same way. Flashes of green light. A flying motorbike. Warmth. Before he is plunged, into a deep, dark nothingness, where all he can hear is a woman crying. He feels, rather than sees, them floating.
The dreams fade away, and then stop entirely, as he grows.
He dreams again, once, a few weeks before he turns eleven. The woman’s long, red hair falls over her face like a curtain, as she sobs. And them, something he isn’t able to put to words, all around him, everywhere and nowhere at once.
The woman stops crying, and looks up.
“Harry,” her voice echoes. Her eyes are —
As Uncle Vernon drives them to the zoo, squished between Dudley and Piers, all he remembers is a flying motorbike, and a sense of unease.
Over the next few years, his dreams are replaced by basilisks and quidditch, homicidal professors, friends, Voldemort. Cedric. Sirius. Grief, and fear, and hope. Ginny’s hair. Snape’s wrath. Laughing with Ron and Hermione. The wide spectrum of emotions only a teenage boy could feel.
They are all so tangible and vivid, full of life.
They cremate Voldemort’s body the very night of the Battle of Hogwarts. And they head off, to the dorms, for some well deserved rest.
Ron and Hermione both have trouble sleeping. They are no stranger to nightmares. Fred’s glassy eyes haunt Ron. Hermione often wakes up screaming, forgetting she isn’t in the cellars of Malfoy Manor, under Bellatrix’s Cruciatus.
The first time Harry sees, he’s at Tesco’s buying milk. One moment, he’s standing in line, scanning the covers of muggle magazines.
And he sees them.
He sees through all the people, the store, everything solid. It was all a flimsy curtain, and overlapped through the slips he could see in glimpses.
Entities, taking the form of shapes that didn’t make sense. Colours that should have never been. The screams he could barely hear. They were all that existed. They were the only beings that existed.
Harry, They say, in union.
A hair breadth away from him, ready to rip him away from this weak illusion.
Then they vanished, as if they’d never existed to begin with.
“Are you alright, love?” a woman asks. “You’ve gone all pale. Why don’t you sit down for a bit?”
He does. For the first time, Harry remembers the dreams.
They are everywhere.
Harry, They whisper. They scream.
In his dreams. In his life. There is only one answer, one solution.
He tries everything. Drowning himself. Slit his wrists. Overdose on potions and muggle pills alike.
Death does not touch him.
Harry sneaks into Dumbledore’s tomb, and, as Voldemort once did, he pries the Elder Wand away from the old man’s body.
“Avada Kedavra,” he says, determined, wand pointed against his throat.
He is once again at King’s Cross. He sees a woman with long red hair sitting on the bench, and he knows to recognise her, unlike all those times when he was a child.
“Mum?”
The woman rises, turning to meet his eyes.
The spitting image of Lily Evans, save for the eyes. Dark, grotesque eyes. Something that should have never been on a human’s face.
“Hello, Harry. I’m not who you want me to be,” this thing - creature, smiles. “But then again, we’re not strangers, are we?”
And Harry knows. How could he not?
He tried to escape death for most of his life, after all.
“I know what you want to ask of me,” Death says, gently. “But I’m afraid the answer is not something you will ever be ready to hear.”
“Why can’t I die?” Harry asks. “Is it because of the Hallows? If I weren’t the Master of Death, would I pass over?”
Death smiles at him again, this time with pity.
“Oh, Harry. Don’t you see? You can never die, because you already did. That night in Godric’s hollow. The minute Voldemort turned his wand on you.”
Harry stares, numb. “I don’t understand.”
“You are a paradox, Harry Potter. There is a reason no one has ever survived the killing curse.”
“No,” he whispers, the horror dawning upon him.
“Death cannot take what was already given once.”
Panic bubbles inside him. “No, but there must be - you can’t leave me to them! For all of eternity!”
Death says nothing, and Harry realises with crystal clarity that he will never escape them. He doesn’t know when he starts sobbing, or when Death’s arms wrap around him, in a cruel mimicry of a mother’s embrace.
“I am sorry,” Death whispers.
Neither Voldemort nor Dumbledore were right about death. Death wasn’t an all powerful enemy to be vanquished, or conquered. Death wasn’t the next great adventure.
Death was an escape, from a vast and terrifying cosmos, which lay between life and death. That horrible existence, with all its wrongness, never meant to be seen by a mortal.
If only Voldemort had known the cost of evading death. In the end, even Voldemort had succumbed to death’s escape.
And Harry was glad he did. He wouldn’t have wished this existence on anyone, not even his greatest enemy.
Harry sees the future play out in front of him. Decades, centuries, millennia. All gone in a speck of dust. Everyone he loved dead, and safe. They were what remained. They awaited him at the end of it all.
The bags under his eyes are hidden by glamours. He doesn’t sleep anymore, taking potions to stay awake for years now. Harry cannot bear to sleep; he’s scared he’ll never return.
“Daddy, watch me fly!” Lily squeals, zooming around on her toy broom. Harry smiles at his youngest.
He can see them, right through Lily, somewhere beyond. They are always there, in his sight. Glimpses.
They wait.