PROLOGUE
Harry Potter did not know how long he had been falling for.
Truthfully, he had not expected death to be like this; a vast abyss of pure nothing and yet everything all at once, like a swirly mass of magic and space and time engulfing him, his entire soul, born and bred to act as the very definition of a paradox. He had most definitely not expected Death to take so bloody long.
Then again, he mused, had he really been expecting Death to come at all? It hadn’t for the centuries he had been walking the Earth, bound to a body that did not truly feel his. How could it? His mind had long surpassed seventeen, and yet only his eyes reflected that.
Earlier that very year had been his birthday. Every year it came and went, fading into just another date that once held vague significance in his youth. Every year it arrived, even after he had long stopped celebrating - somewhere around the time he had no one to celebrate with, or maybe before, he had long ago lost interest in remembering something so trivial. No, he had little care for dates like that. Only their deaths were marked on his non-existent calendar - what was the point in having one when he had little to look forward to and too many years ahead? He would still visit the graves, even if the visits had been only growing rarer as decades passed, unlike the world he had once thought of as home. He did not enter the wizarding world after the death of his children for long.
Being there had been hard - inexplicably so - even when limiting his interactions. Feeling the magic settling around him, foreign yet oh-so-familiar, burying deep under his skin, was hard. No one could remember him, no one that knew him. The children knew of the Boy-Who-Lived, Man-Who-Conquered, but none knew Harry Potter. They could not boast to their parents about their defense Against the Dark Arts professor, and parents could not tell wild bedtime stories about his adventures whilst they had gone to Hogwarts as his schoolmates. It was sad, being reduced to a story and having lost all connections to humanity. No one knew him, and no one could make him stay.
He thought that his friends would have been disappointed in him, perhaps even pity the man he had become - not a boy, he never really was - or even the situation he had found himself in as of the present, but it didn’t matter anyway, he reasoned. He hadn’t exactly planned a quick little trip through the Veil of Death
(It took his godfather from him, and for that, he had always held a small amount of resentment for the thing, despite the stupidity of it.)
Rather, he had just been passing through— as ridiculous as it sounds.
The Ministry was an old, derelict thing now, nothing but ruins really. The wizards truly had no qualms about leaving it to rot, surprisingly, considering that they had refused to change for centuries when what the muggles had done within a few short years. But the end of the war brought along a force of mass change all over the world. The statute was changed, new laws were made and old ones were destroyed in a burst of flames (literally, because wizards were dramatic like that, turns out), the system improved and evolved every moment of the day with the guiding hand of one Hermione Granger. She had stormed her way to the top in a maelstrom of pure spite and resilience, getting her sticky fingers in every department she could reach and then pushing them all forward in a way that was so Hermione that they really should have expected it. He had, and he loved her for it.
She was the brightest witch of her age after all, and it was a title she had taken as her own to embody and outshine in a way he never truly could - with pride, bursting the restraints of the expectations placed upon her through sheer willpower alone.
At this moment, he wanted to think of what she would say if she could see him, but it was already painful to think of her and only lead his mind to everyone else he had dared to love, everyone he lost to the sands of time.
He pulled his focus away from them, but he could still feel the pressing memories just around the corner. He turned back to the circumstances that had led to this unfortunate situation - or maybe it was for the best, he didn’t know. A small reflection of the past served to distract his mind from the now, at least.
He thought back to the ruins of the ministry. The wizards would have been perfectly fine to abandon it, but there was one department they couldn’t just leave defenseless. The Department of Mysteries was, obviously, full of mysteries, and that had not changed in the centuries he had overseen their progress (he was the biggest mystery of all, so it had only been fitting). The rest of the department had relocated over time, but the Veil was old, far older than they could even comprehend, and had been there long before wizards had claimed the land as their own. Not many knew that everything had been built around the Veil, the first mystery they had ever encountered. They did not know where it came from, nor if it would change in the future, and it had stayed that way as long as Harry had known about it. While the department had crumbled, the Veil remained standing, aura as eery and oppressing as the day it had taken Sirius.
Collecting the Hallows and fulfilling yet another fucking prophecy - although this one admittedly had mostly been a consequence of the first - had led to some unforeseen… effects, as Hermione had put it, most of which he did not tend to count as benefits, to say the least. One such had been his stupid aging problem - not stopped, just extremely slowed, thank Merlin - and another was equally as stupid; some sort of connection with the damned Veil. Subconsciously, he felt something for it, be it a strange sense of kinship embedded in his soul or just a kind of psychic tug on his magical core. Either way, it was weird, unwanted, and wouldn’t go away; just like him, if he was honest with himself.
He wondered if this was a part of Death, to think back on your life and make up new regrets or wallow in pity as you observe your worst moments through the insufferable lens of hindsight. If it was, he resolved to have words with it, because this was taking so fucking long.
He regretted turning up to his annual, one-sided meeting with the Veil (at least, he thought they were annual, but he didn’t really know because it could get so hard to keep track sometimes. The years just… blur after a while, and oh it’s been more than a while) as had become customary when life (but this wasn’t a life, some part of him countered) had simply grown to boring. They were both on this Earth indefinitely, after all, so maybe there was some sort of subconscious meaning there. Truly, he was a psychologist's wet dream - or nightmare. Nightmare sounded about right.
He regretted that he had grown so accustomed to being infinite that he had come to expect it. Before, every year he had thought that would be it - some greater being would take pity on his sorry soul and finally claim him. He’d always been prepared for it, having left his possessions, both new and old, somewhere to be discovered, or dropping off the most important things in the main family vault, and his houses we prepared to pop up all around the world, ready to be used for a charitable cause. He regretted that he had taken everything with him just for it to be lost in the bloody Veil of Death, that no part of him would go on after his death to become something great, as though that would have made his entire existence mean something. The charities and foundations had done well, but there’s only so long you can lead something so public before people ask too many questions, like ‘Why does your great-grandfather look like he’s younger than you?’ So they had continued on, and he had disappeared. He regretted that he had come to always be with his possessions; he would pack everything he owned, which had amassed to quite a large amount, he must admit, through endless shrinking and featherweight charms (most of which had been placed on his houses, because he had been rather fond of a few of them and had quickly grown tired of constantly unpacking furniture despite easily doing so with magic) into an even-more endless and featherweight, nondescript duffel bag. He regretted that this time had been no different.
But this time, it was different.
Who'd have known that the thing to finally kill the-boy-who-lived-twice-but-technically-forever (he gave up working on the name some hundred years ago), also known as the Master of Death (but no one really knew that because they were dead) would be some scared ministry intern doing their routine annual check-up? Well, he certainly didn't know, but he had an inkling that some higher being did and was having a jolly good time laughing his arse off at him. The poor boy had seemed no older than a fresh Hogwarts graduate and had only been able to stutter out some poorly executed stunning spell, but even that had been enough to send him falling backward into the Veil because reflexes had only brought him to face the intruder at the crack! of apparition behind him, not to actually do anything about it. The whole situation felt like some sick parody of Sirius’s death, but where Sirius had let his guard down for a second in battle, Harry had been complacent from the start.
Some part of him, deep down and sounding suspiciously like Ginny, told him ‘You wanted it. You wanted to die, and so you stood to meet eyes with your executioner without raising a fight and welcomed the arms of Death.’
Well, Ginny's dead.
So it didn't matter that she was right.