Harry was old. He stood at the edge of life and death and stirred the potion one final time. It had taken years, lifetimes in fact, and the final product of the centuries spent underneath of his Invisibility cloak stood, slowly swirling, inside of a pitted and rusted iron cauldron.
The Invisibility cloak hid him from Death, and he knew with grim certainty that Death had been after him for a very long time. One does not survive killing curses with impunity, and since Death had been unable to claim Harry as her prize she had vindictively destroyed everyone he had ever loved.
However, Harry had a plan. A wonderful, terrible, secret plan. This potion would allow him to go back to a period of time in his own life and start again, to reset the clock in a manner of speaking. He could change things so that he didn't have to resort to such drastic measures. It was a dangerous, insane plot, and it may not even work, but desperation had dulled to patience, and patience had ripened into purpose, and that purpose had evolved into the sort of drive that built empires and performed impossible feats.
One final time, he checked his notes and compared the potion to them. He knew both by heart, the last three centuries had been spent in constant consultation between these two objects, his magic sustaining him beyond any wizarding sense of normalcy. He had always been a freak, an outcast, and the rules simply didn't apply to him, and that's why Harry thought that this would work. With no further ceremony, he quaffed the potion and felt his soul hurtle backwards through time...
… before immediately being snatched up by Death.
"Oh, Harry," she crooned lovingly with a soft laugh, "you silly man."
"How...?" he trailed off.
"Harry, you're not under my cloak any more."
Harry Potter's soul twisted in a manner reminiscent of someone slapping their hand against their own forehead.
"I'm not your enemy, Harry," Death continued, "and I assure you, there is nothing here for your to fear. Your family awaits, your friends, all of your loved ones are here and waiting for you. They've waited much longer than they thought that they would since you hid away under that cloak and toiled on a way to change things." With an efficient, caressing sort of motion, Death sent Harry Potter on to his eternal reward.
"Still," she mused to herself as she examined the latticework of energy and intent that made up the ritual crafted by the Boy-Who-Lived, "this is an extraordinary creation..." Several moments passed. "Well, there's no avoiding it, it seems. Magic is due a soul."
Magic was one of Death's many siblings. They had a cordial working relationship and tried not to step on the other's toes. Some friction was inevitable, of course, but generally they got along well enough in a "favor for favor" sort of way. Magic had helped Death create the Hallows (the necessity of whose creation being a result of a very long night of ill-advised drinking on Death's part and an even more ill-advised bet), and Death sent souls (usually animal) to Magic for the purposes of animating teapots and whatever else she needed them for. This ritual required a human soul.
It was tricky. Human souls couldn't really come back from Death's realms, not readily and certainly not without the proper authorizations, permits, and sanctions. Leaving aside for the moment the sheer volume of paperwork involved in an actual soul retrieval, there was the logistics side to consider. Souls needed a physical vessel to inhabit, whether natural or artificial, and human souls in particular were mulishly set on only existing in their own body. Tom Riddle's success at inhabiting a homonculus body was vexing for Death at the time (horcruxes, while a distasteful compromise between Death and Magic, had procedures in place. Riddle's unprecedented multiple-horcrux survival scheme exploited a previously unknown flaw in those procedures. In the end, Magic and Death had both needed to petition Fate for assistance in resolving the Riddle Conundrum and settle for fixing the multiple-horcrux exploit on a proactive rather than retroactive basis). It was vexing, but it also won her grudging respect. Riddle was a powerful soul to be able to survive as he had after creating so many horcruxes.
"Still," she repeated as she continued to think on how best to handle things. She made a motion with her hand, a casual gesture like that of a stage magician and when she looked down she was holding a phone. It wasn't really a phone, of course, any more than Death actually had hands, or was female. However, this was the manner in which the unknowable truths of the Multiverse had currently chosen to manifest. Metaphor piled on metaphor.
Quickly, she checked her calendar for the day. There were a few million souls across the Multiverse that were scheduled to cross over within the next couple of minutes. That was good- it gave her options. She swiftly switched to another app and began to sort the inbound souls and filter them by various criteria: male, human, Earth, Prime-equivalent timeframe, fate-touched, NOT fate-bound, and a few others for flavor. Then, with a thoughtful hum and a wicked grin, she plugged in two more flags, chose a soul at random, and set it to redirect into the ritual matrix rather than cross over. With a whistle, Death went back to the novel she had been reading before Potter slipped back into her grasp.
If the soul never crossed over, there was no paperwork to do. It was a simple debt transfer. Life owed a soul to Death, so she would send it on to Magic to complete the spell. Easy as pie.
What could possibly go wrong?
In the last few moments of my life, I thought that I wasn't really ready to go.
It had less to do with unfinished business and more to do with mindset. I was comfortable with living and had intended, for all intents and purposes, to continue doing so forever. Naturally I had expected to fail, but I thought I'd get a fair sight closer to forever than I had. Between the terror and the pain and the bizarre sensation of my lifeblood alternately melting and being frozen by the snowbank I had landed in, I felt a vague sense of embarrassment at my early exit from the mortal coil.
Then, I felt nothing at all.
I think I may have dreamed. I don't remember dreaming, but I feel like I did, the same sort of elusive non-memories that you feel upon waking after a long and much-needed rest. I became aware slowly, gently drifting across the boundary between waking and sleeping as my senses came online.
First was smell. The air was warm, but it had that quality that cold air had when it had been warmed rather than naturally warm air. It carried with it the scent of astringency and a scent to cover the astringency, something reminiscent of cloves and mint and lilac while being none of them. There was no underlying stench of death or lingering illness. Less a hospital smell and more of a doctor's office smell, I thought muzzily.
Hearing and touch returned more or less simultaneously. The bed beneath me was softer than expected, the sheets and blankets less scratchy and not crinkling as expected from a hospital bed. There was a shuffling presence at my side and another farther off, perhaps in an adjacent room. Otherwise it was silent, truly silent, lacking the hums and whirrs and whinings of mechanical conveniences that made up the background of modern living. There was no fan from a heater, no beeping from an EKG monitor, no buzz from fluorescent lighting, no rumble from far-off heavy machinery or automobiles, just unusual and true silence. The rustling at my side had a cloth-y quality, that from the other room more akin to footsteps. A visitor and an employee, perhaps.
There was no need for mystery. I opened my eyes.
Sight, apparently, had not quite returned yet. Everything was fuzzy and blurred, not so bad that I couldn't identify objects, but enough so that the edges were indistinct. Items lacked definition. There was an elderly man wearing a bathrobe and nightcap sitting in the chair next to me. A pile of candy with unfamiliar labels sat on the nightstand. The walls appeared to be stone, and...
My vision tracked back to the elderly man. He was, near as I could tell, smiling genially at me. "How are you feeling, Harry?"
I drew a blank before images assaulted me, flipping across the surface of my mind like a kaleidoscope made from someone's childhood. Harry was a small boy, messy hair, black, green eyes, glasses, a scar on the forehead, lived with his aunt (mother's sister) and uncle and cousin and they didn't much care for him and his best friend was named Ron Weasley and his other best friend was Hermione Granger and they were magic he was awizardandmagicwasrealandtherewasanundeadhomocidalmaniactryingtokillhimandheDIEDhewasDEADandtherewasFIREand-
Mercifully, I blacked out.
It felt like no time at all before I awoke again. This time there was nobody around, and I had, apparently, been moved to a private room. I felt strange, but largely well, and set about examining myself to ensure tha-
I was small. Far too small, and incredibly skinny as well. On the bedside there was a pair of glasses. I stared at their blurred image for a moment as a creeping sensation frissioned up my spine before I reached out and set them on my face. My vision snapped instantly to clarity.
How long had I been ill? I had clearly wasted away, and my vision had been harmed in the crash. I searched the room for a mirror and came up with nothing, although there was a stick laying on the table, unnoticed, beside where the glasses had been. I picked it up and felt a sharp heat in my hand, like being poked with a red-hot needle. I dropped it with a hiss and decided to leave well-enough alone.
Just as I was resolving to get out of bed and go searching for answers, the door to the room opened and matronly woman bustled in. Floating behind her was a silver tray with several vials and bottled filled with colored liquids in them. I stared, looking in vain for the wires that supported the tray.
"Awake at last, are we Mr. Potter?" he woman stated as she noticed my wide-eyed stare. She pulled another stick from the pocket of her apron and flicked it in a precise pattern at the tray behind her (Wingardium Leviosa, floated up from the stygian depths of my mind) before pointing it at me and doing the same. Colored streamers of light wrapped around me and danced as directed by the woman as I sat as still as I possibly could and concentrated on not hyperventilating or pissing myself in existential terror. The moment passed almost too quick to notice before a blanket of icy calm descended upon me.
"Excuse me," I started, folding my hands in front of me, "but who are you?"
The woman paused before leaning closer to me and squinting, as though she was examining something which a moment ago she was sure had been something else. She leaned back and adopted a worried look before saying, "My name is Madame Pomfrey. I'm the nurse here at Hogwarts, Mr. Potter."
Both the elderly man and this Madame Pomfrey spoke with an accent, British if I was to guess. I was becoming more uneasy. "I think there's been some mistake," I said, my American accent distinct and contrasting to her own, and I ignored viciously the fact that the voice itself was an octave or two higher than I remembered my own voice being, "my name isn't Harry, Potter or otherwise."
"Oh Merlin," Pomfrey muttered with eyes wide. "I need to contact the Headmaster, Mr. Potter, please stay where you are and I'll be back in a moment." Nodding in agreement, I leaned back to allow the images summoned by our conversation to float across my mind.
Hogwarts, a castle/school with numerous towers and hallways, rooms upon rooms and twisting subterranean passages. Pomfrey, mediwitch/nurse at Hogwarts. Headmaster Dumbledore, the elderly gentleman from before. The associations and knowledge flowed but didn't flood. There was undeniably something very odd going on, but it no longer seemed debilitating. In fact, it felt more like memories that had been forgotten and then remembered than anything foreign to my own mind.
Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. I had never in my life been to Europe, I had never stepped foot inside of a castle, and I most certainly had never bought a stick and waved it around and in doing so given physics the finger. Although, if there was a rational explanation for all of this, it admittedly escaped me.
Several more moments passed before I heaved a sigh and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. I stretched, luxuriating in the feeling before placing my feet on the floor. Contrary to my expectations, my feet were not assaulted with the sensation of freezing stone but instead felt slightly warmed by the stones. I gingerly placed weight on them, unsure of the length of my convalescence and determined to not fall flat on my face due to atrophied muscles. My legs held me easily, and I felt lighter on my feet than I remembered. Seeing a mirror hanging on one wall above a chest of drawers, I made my way over to it before stopping in shock.
Denial can only hold for so long. The thing about the truth is that it's like a fire- it wants to spread, and grow, and illuminate everything around it. Dampen the coals as long as you can, the embers will still attempt to flare up and catch hold to burn bright once more. The death of truth is an illusion- truth only ever slumbers, and denial is a blanket keeping it safe, not a bulwark keeping it hidden.
I stared into a face that was not my own. Messy black hair, vibrant green eyes, a pale white scar, all set into a face years younger than my own, a scrawny boy who I'd never seen before. "Who the hell...?" I mumbled breathlessly.
"Language, sir!" said a voice that appeared to emanate from the mirror itself. Eyes wide, I turned away from the mirror just as the door to the room opened, revealing Pomfrey, Dumbledore, and another man with lank hair, sallow skin, and a prominent nose. Helplessly, I spread my hands before me and blurted the question that had been percolating through my consciousness since I had first woken up.
"What the actual fuck is going on here?"