Harry knew, a long time ago, that he would never die.
He had quite gotten used to the idea, and in all honestly, he was rather bored with it.
Where was the excitement, the danger, the will to live? How could anyone want to live when they had no other choice? It was the same concept with breathing, people never really wanted to breathe, not especially, until they had the option of not doing so, in which case breathing became pretty damn enjoyable.
If Harry was to express his opinion on living, he could honestly say he thought nothing much of it. Maybe he was even a bit tired of it. Living was a habit, either way. A habit that was, for him, impossible to break.
Well, if you were to be technical about the whole thing, it wasn't that Harry couldn't die, it was that he couldn't pass on. An important difference to make.
Each and every time his mortal shell reached its endurance limits, his soul, rather than going wherever any other normal person on the planet went, somehow flew back in time just as he was being hit by the killing curse for the first time.
Which…
Was annoying if you really thought about it.
All that progress, wasted, deleted, having to be rewritten, and it was almost completely impossible to do anything EXACTLY the same as last time because a hundred little things that you didn't realise you had, in some small way, indirectly affected, didn't happen, or happened differently, because of some small thing that you forgot to do.
Like sneeze.
Harry just felt sorry for all those poor butterflies. How terrible it must be to be burdened with the knowledge that every time the flap their wings, they are inadvertently creating some form of natural disaster on the other side of the world.
Ever since Harry had read that theory somewhere, he was always left with the odd notion that whenever a hurricane or a tsunami hit, a couple of sadistic butterflies where gathered somewhere on the other side of the world, reading the news and laughing.
He has been slightly afraid of butterflies ever since.
But I digress.
Being reborn again as a baby (or toddler) also meant that he had to put up with the extremely tedious process of growing up. Sure, he could remember how to do all the things generally associated with such perfectly. Teaching his body how to improve, or get, fine muscle control was a different matter altogether. Many times he had thanked whoever had put him through this torment of reliving *Emotional shudder* puberty again had, at least, made sure that he had been potty trained before he was attempted murdered.
And there was also the fact that all the relationships he had cultivated, the loves he had had, the children he had spawned; they were all erased. Never to have existed except in his memories.
That was pretty depressing.
Especially the first few times he remembered dying.
He killed himself a lot after that. Not eating, or crawling in front of a fast moving vehicle, or into a pond, e.t.c.
That got tedious rather quickly, as it meant he had set himself back a few weeks on the growing up timeline, when he had accepted again that he was not to see them in the next life.
Professor Dumbledore, Harry would remember, (not fondly, because after all this time, the good and the bad, it was hard to have an opinion at all on many things), used to, or will, or does, say that "death is but the next great adventure". Harry rather thought that death must be fun, then, for everybody else if they actually got to have another adventure, rather than reliving the same one over and over again.
Still, he tries to make the most of life as he can.
Like that film, Groundhog Day, only infinitesimally more complicated.
Our story begins in the ministry of magic. Harry Potter, defeater of Voldemort, retired head Auror, father of three and husband to whom he would call "a pretty decent wife, yeah" was just popping in on a consulting case. It seemed that after all these years, his opinion was still valid and sought after. That was nice, considering he remembered many times in which he was particularly hated.
Building that reputation as a wise and generally nice guy in any situation really did wonders for his later life.
He shall have to remember that.
It was this contemplation that caused his foot to slip as he was walking down the four steps in the ministry atrium. In his later age, he couldn't quite re-balance himself and smashed the back of his head against the corner of a stair.
This, whilst not killing him on the spot, did cause a massive amount of blood loss.
That did kill him whilst he was being flooed to St. Mungo's.
On October 31st 1981, Harry Potter stared at the green light flashing towards him and sighed.
Bugger.