Harry Potter sat in the debris of what had once been the kitchen of Grimmauld Place. Dust motes danced in the afternoon light that filtered through cracked windows. The wallpaper hung in strips, and the floorboards groaned under his weight. He hadn't bothered to repair anything in months.
The silence was suffocating against his ears. He'd grown to prefer it over the whispers that followed him everywhere else.
A sparrow landed on the windowsill outside. Harry's eyes focused, and the world shifted. Golden threads stretched from the small bird in every direction—some thick as rope, others thin as acromantula silk. The thread connecting to its nest pulsed with warm light. Another, darker strand led toward the street where a cat waited keenly.
Harry closed his eyes. The threads vanished.
"Fascinating, isn't it?" A foreboding voice, disembodied and yet carrying some structure drifted from the corner where shadows gathered despite the sunlight. "Seeing the web that connects all things."
"I didn't ask for your commentary." Harry's voice came out rougher than he intended.
"You never ask. You never have to." Death moved closer, though Harry kept his eyes shut. "Ten years since the abomination fell. Ten years since you became my Master. How does it feel?"
"Like drowning in slow motion."
Death laughed, a sound like wind howling through empty houses. Terrifying. "Eloquent as always."
The Elder Wand hummed against Harry's thigh where it rested in his pocket. It had been doing that more often lately—responding to his emotions before he even recognized them himself. Power flowed through the ancient wood, seeking release, seeking purpose.
Harry pulled the wand free and stared at its pale surface. "Do you remember when I thought this would solve everything?"
"I remember when you broke it."
"I remember when it came back." Harry turned the wand over in his hands. "Three days later. Right there on my nightstand, whole again. Like it had never been touched."
"Some bonds cannot be severed, Harry Potter."
"Some bonds shouldn't exist."
The sparrow outside took flight. Harry watched it disappear beyond the rooftops, carrying its threads of fate with it. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell chimed three times.
Inadvertently, his mind traveled back to the conversation that had take place roughly six months ago, in a land far, far away.
The café in Perth was almost empty. Harry sat across from Hermione, watching her stir sugar into her coffee with the same precision that had been the norm throughout their Hogwarts years. She'd aged in the years since they'd last met. Lines creased the corners of her eyes, and her hair had a couple silver threads that caught the morning light. Twenty-nine, but she looked older. Older than she should.
"You look tired," she said without looking up.
"I don't sleep much anymore."
"The nightmares?"
"The opposite." Harry leaned back in his chair. "I don't dream at all. Haven't in years."
Hermione finally met his eyes. "That's not normal, Harry."
"Nothing about me is normal, Hermione. We established that a long time ago."
She flinched. "I didn't mean—"
"Yes, you did." Harry's voice stayed level. "It's fine, Hermione. I know what I am."
The silence stretched between them. Outside, Perth's morning traffic moved in predictable patterns. Harry could see the threads if he wanted to—every collision avoided, every light change, every decision that would ripple outward through the day.
"The Ministry's been asking about you," Hermione said.
"They always ask about me."
"This is different. There are rumors—"
"There are always rumors."
"Harry." She reached across the table but stopped short of touching his hand. "People are scared."
"Good. Fear keeps them alive."
Hermione's face crumpled. "What happened to you?"
Harry stood, leaving money on the table. "I became what the war needed me to become. I just forgot to stop."
"Where will you go now?"
"Home." Harry paused at the café door. "Give my regards to Ron and the children."
"They ask about you."
"Tell them Uncle Harry is busy saving the world."
"Are you?"
Harry looked back at her. Hermione sat small and alone at their table, surrounded by the warm chatter of normal lives continuing their normal courses.
"Every day," he said, and walked out into the Perth sunshine.
Harry blinked, returning to the ruins of Grimmauld Place. The memory tasted bitter. Hermione's letters had stopped coming after that meeting. He couldn't blame her.
"She was trying to help," Death observed.
"She was trying to fix me. There's a difference."
"And can you be fixed?"
Harry stood, brushing dust from his jeans. "That's the wrong question."
"What's the right one?"
"Whether fixing me would fix anything else."
xXx
Several editions of the Daily Prophet lay scattered across the weathered surface of the kitchen table, their headlines screaming Harry's name in various fonts and colors.
POTTER PREVENTS DRAGON DISASTER IN ROMANIA.
THE BOY WHO LIVED SAVES MAGICAL COMMUNITY AGAIN.
POTTER: HERO OR HARBINGER?
Harry picked up the last paper. A photo of him from two months ago filled the front page. He stood in the aftermath of what should have been a catastrophic curse breaking accident, the Elder Wand still smoking in his hand. Three hundred people had lived because Harry Potter had been there at the right moment with the right power.
In the photo, his face showed nothing. No satisfaction, no relief, no joy. Just the flat exhaustion of a man going through motions he'd performed too many times to count.
The article quoted witnesses. "He appeared from nowhere, like Death himself." "The power that came off him—it wasn't natural." "We're grateful, of course, but the way he looked at us afterward..."
Harry crumpled the paper and tossed it aside. They were right to be unsettled. He'd looked at them the way a shepherd might look at sheep—necessary to protect, impossible to connect with.
His reflection caught his eye in the cracked mirror above the sink. Twenty-eight years old, but his face hadn't changed since he was twenty-one. The Hallows' power flowed through him like a river, preserving what it deemed essential while everything else around him aged and died and moved beyond his reach.
He touched the glass. The young man looking back at him had Harry's features but Death's eyes—ancient and weary and far too knowing.
"Do you know what they call you now?" Death asked.
"I try not to listen."
"The Deathless. The Eternal Guardian. The Man Who Cannot Fall."
"Catchy."
"They build shrines to you in remote villages. Light candles and pray for your intervention."
Harry's laugh held no humor. "I'm not a god."
"No. You're something rarer. A mortal who I cannot touch. Who has defied me time and again. It terrifies them."
"It should terrify me too."
"Does it?"
Harry considered the question, and the answer came naturally.
"No. That's what terrifies me."
The Elder Wand pulsed against his leg, responding to the spike of emotion. Power crackled through the air, making the dust motes dance in impossible spirals. The broken clock on the wall ticked once, then fell silent again.
Death materialized fully now, taking the shape it preferred when speaking with Harry—tall, draped in shadows that moved independently of any light source, with eyes like starless nights.
"You've been thinking," Death observed.
"I've been planning."
"There's a difference?"
"Thinking is passive. Planning requires action."
Death moved to the window, looking out at the London street beyond. Even in broad daylight, shadows seemed to gather around its form.
"The Department of Mysteries," Death said. "You mean to go there."
"I mean to end this."
"This?"
Harry gestured at himself, at the room, and at the world beyond the walls. "All of it. The endless cycle. The isolation. The power without purpose."
"You have purpose. You save lives."
"I preserve lives. There's a difference." Harry joined Death at the window. "I prevent deaths that would happen anyway, just later. I delay the inevitable. I don't create anything. I don't build anything. I just... maintain."
"Maintenance has value."
"For whom? The people I save fear me. My friends can't relate to me. My enemies are all dead." Harry's reflection overlapped with Death's in the dirty glass. "I exist in the spaces between living and dying, and I'm tired of existing."
"You wish to die?"
"I wish to live. Really live. Or really die. This halfway state isn't either."
Death was quiet for a long moment. "The Veil of Death. You think it holds answers."
"I think it holds change. One way or another."
"The Department of Mysteries guards it well."
"The Department of Mysteries fears me more than they guard anything." Harry turned from the window. "They'll let me pass. They always do."
"And if you're wrong? If the Veil offers only oblivion?"
Harry smiled for the first time in months. It felt strange on his face. "Then I'll finally get some sleep."
Death laughed, the sound akin to wind howling through graveyards. Perhaps it sensed what was coming, or perhaps be was being too poetic about things. Harry shook his head, a sigh escaping his lips.
"Ten years ago, you were a boy trying to save the world. Now you're a man trying to leave it."
"Maybe that's growth."
"Maybe it's surrender."
"Maybe it's wisdom."
xXx
Harry walked through the ruined house, passing memories embedded in every shadow. The drawing room where Sirius had died in his mind a thousand times. The stairs where he'd first understood what it meant to carry the weight of other people's lives. The bedroom where he'd learned that some choices echoed through eternity.
In what had once been his bedroom, Harry opened a trunk that had survived every catastrophe that had befallen the house. Inside, wrapped in silk that had never aged, lay the Resurrection Stone. It pulsed with dark light, calling to the part of him that had always been more comfortable with the dead than the living.
He picked it up. The world shifted, and suddenly the room filled with ghosts. His parents stood by the window. Sirius lounged against the doorframe. Remus and Tonks whispered together in the corner. Dozens of others—faces from the war, faces from the years since, all those he'd failed to save despite his power.
"Harry," his mother said, her voice like an echo of warmth.
"Mum." Harry's voice broke on the word.
"You're thinking of joining us," James observed. His father looked young and earnest, frozen at the age he'd died.
"I'm thinking of choosing. For once in my life, I want to choose my own path."
"Death isn't a path," Sirius said, moving closer. "It's a destination."
"So is this." Harry gestured at himself. "Eternal preservation. Always watching, always separate."
"The living world needs you," Remus said gently.
"The living world fears me. There's a difference."
Lily moved to stand before her son. "You were always meant for great things, Harry. But greatness doesn't require suffering."
"Doesn't it?" Harry met her eyes. "Name one great wizard who wasn't defined by their pain."
The ghosts exchanged glances. None of them answered.
"The Department of Mysteries," Tonks said finally. "You think the Veil will give you answers?"
"I think the Veil will give me change. That's all I want anymore. Change."
"And if it destroys you?"
"Then I'll finally be at peace."
Harry closed his fist around the Resurrection Stone. The ghosts faded, but their expressions lingered in his memory—sad, understanding, and somehow proud.
Back in the kitchen, Harry stood before the cracked mirror again. His reflection stared back with eyes that had seen too much and felt too little. The young man in the glass looked like a stranger wearing Harry Potter's face.
"Twenty-eight years old," he said to his reflection. "And I feel like I've lived a thousand."
"Perhaps you have," Death replied from the shadows.
"In Romania, when I saved those people from the curse—do you know what I felt?"
"Tell me."
"Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I saw the curse forming, I calculated the counter-measures, I executed the solution. Like solving a mathematical equation." Harry touched his reflection's cheek. "I used to feel everything so intensely. Love, hate, fear, joy—they consumed me. Now I feel like I'm watching life through thick glass."
"Power has a price."
"Everything has a price. The question is whether what you buy is worth what you pay."
Harry pulled the Elder Wand from his pocket and held it up to catch the light. The pale wood seemed to glow with inner fire.
"Ten years I've carried this. Ten years I've been the most powerful wizard alive. Do you know what I've accomplished with all that power?"
"You've saved thousands of lives."
"I've prevented thousands of deaths. It's not the same thing." Harry lowered the wand. "Voldemort wanted to conquer death. I conquered it. And now I understand why he was so miserable."
"You think the Veil will break that conquest?"
"I think the Veil is the only thing in this world that might surprise me."
Harry closed his eyes and spoke to the silence that had become his constant companion. "It's time."
The words echoed in the air like a declaration of war against his own existence. When he opened his eyes, his reflection looked different—not younger or older, but more real somehow. More present.
"The Department of Mysteries," he said to Death.
"The Department of Mysteries," Death agreed.
Harry stood, pocketing both wands—the Elder Wand and his original holly and phoenix feather wand that he'd repaired years ago. The Resurrection Stone he left on the table. Whatever happened next, he wouldn't need to speak to the dead anymore.
He walked to the front door of Grimmauld Place and paused with his hand on the handle. Behind him lay ten years of isolation, power, and the slow erosion of everything that had once made him human. Ahead lay the unknown—perhaps death, perhaps transformation, perhaps something else entirely.
For the first time in years, Harry Potter smiled with genuine anticipation.
He opened the door and stepped into the London afternoon, leaving the ruins of his old life behind him. The Ministry of Magic awaited, and with it, the Department of Mysteries and the Veil that might finally offer him what power never could—the chance to choose his own ending.
Death followed him out into the sunlight, a shadow that no light could dispel, whispering questions that Harry no longer needed to answer. The time for questions had passed.
The time for action had begun.
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