Disclaimer: Harry Potter © JK Rowling
A/N: Started as an angst gushing piss fic and then turned into something... bigger. It's basically an exploration of the title trope + poetic shite / refs.
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And I Must Scream
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Within the white walls of Limbo, Harry Potter stands, calling after Albus Dumbledore for the last time. Harry is about to ask "Is this all real?" when another theory push that aside, inducing a deep, deep pressure inside: "If I choose to return... Can I ever come back here?"
Dumbledore pauses. Moves his head. Parts his lips. And then he disappears without a word.
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"Avada kedavra!"
"Expelliarmus!"
Someone falls, and someone stands, among dust and dirt and dead bodies.
Something rustled as it left. Lord Voldemort is dead before he hit the ground. An age of darkness was prevented. However, Harry Potter, the winner of the wizarding duel, feels an intense pressure in his chest, like a dysfunction in his machinery. The orchestra of joyous yells from—classmates and teachers and aurors alike—become muted, their movements slowed. All Harry can hear was the damned, damned rustling, and the pain (as if someone had laid a hand around his heart and squeezed) in his chest. Then the world becomes normal again.
And among hugs and congratulations by breathing friends, he forgets all about it.
It is the beginning of an end.
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i: love is the illusion
30 years pass before the truth comes forth: Harry does not age.
At first he'd blamed good genes or even magic, but it becomes painstakingly clear when Ginny's hands goes from soft and delicate—a young woman's hands—to wrinkled and lever spotted. He visits specialists, magical and muggle, but no one can give him an explanation. "You have the body of a nineteen year old. Not an hour older."
Ginny dies at 82, surrounded by her family and friends. Hermione, Ron, both of them with grey in their hair. Even their children are older than Harry. Ginny's last words to Harry were that she wasn't worried for herself, since she'd had a good life. She was worried for him. Because he, too, feels tired of life.
He buries her on a small hill beside the Burrow.
Harry becomes more and more of an alien. Watching him becomes a testimony of one's own age, one own upcoming death. For others he's a testimony of the War.
"You are lucky," someone tells him. "You don't need dread death."
"I have begun to dread life," Harry replies.
Later, he buries his own son, in the same hill behind the Burrow. When he buries his second, it's the last time he cries. He follows their sons—but it is not the same. After each generation of Potter, he becomes more and more distant. He can't connect with them, and so, starts slipping.
The hill behind the Burrow has become a little churchyard. He tends tenderly to each grave. After the Potter name run out in the sand (he saw one marry a Malfoy, which made him smile, briefly), he has nothing left.
His first suicide takes place in an anonymous hotel in London, where Harry tries to shoot his brains out. He survives. The brain juice slurps back in and there is a bullet hole in the wall behind him.
Harry decides to shred his identity and travel.
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ii: holy holy holy
Now without bonds or love, Harry can do whatever he wishes to.
Learn ancient magic. Visit secret places. He even robs a bank, because he can. He takes many names and identities during his travels. He spends a few decades being rich, others as a piss poor artist of some kind, who eventually disappears without a trace (or commits suicide—which he has become very good at during drunken hazes. He spends years as an alcoholic as well, until it becomes repetitive, too).
Ministries and governments try to contact or capture him, to no avail. He tried helping at first, but humans are humans, and therefore problems keep popping up. After a few hundred years, it all becomes repetitive.
He's the most powerful person on the planet and he's bored beyond his mind.
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iii: The Gordian knot of gold
It takes a while before he starts noticing the real problems. By that time, it's too late.
Earth is going insane, pumped full of chemicals. War breaks out between the wizarding community and muggles, and research is pointed towards killing each other instead of fixing the screaming Earth.
Civilization starts curling together into one lump, survivors scarred and nervous.
Harry moves with the pink, sweaty lump, but mentally, he is elsewhere. In a void. Lost.
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iv: memory
The day he couldn't remember Ginny's face was the worst day of his life, because after all, he could still remember her wrinkled old hands. He'd vomited in a public bathroom and the magical explosion had caused an earthquake. But that was then.
He is not only forgetting—he's starting to not care.
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v: to watch a dog devour one's hand
The sun is growing hotter.
Water is becoming sparse. Soon, there'll be none left. Harry has lost his taste for food and water, and although there is thirst and hunger, he's gotten used to pain. His rib cage cave inwards like a starved dog. There are circles under his eyes, bones sharp against his flesh.
And then suddenly humanity stands together again; a smaller, but more focused lump. They use the last of their strength to build a spaceship, combining technology and magic. Harry joins them. Leaves Earth.
He feels nothing. Petty things like home, love, and kinship has lost their meaning.
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vi: I'm sorry, Dave
The spaceship can only last for so long. First, they land on Mars, and then the moon Europa. The sun swallows one planet at the day, and when its explosion is finished, it will morph back into a cool white dwarf.
They'll need to find a new solar system. New creatures. A new sun. Until that one too, gets swallowed up.
Age gets humanity again.
Harry becomes the new captain. The last dying human is a woman, aged 135, eating pills like candy and peppered with more spells than Harry can recite in one sitting. She tells she isn't jealous of his fate—and for the first time, Harry sees that humans can possess a deep insight.
He jumps from one solar system to the next, but after a while the spaceship gets ruined, and he doesn't bother fixing it.
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vii: the big rip
Atoms are expanding.
The universe is dying.
He... remains. He doesn't have a physical body anymore—and therefore is not, technically, a he—but refers to himself as it still, because he looks at it as his last connection to Earth. The idea of a consciousness.
And when the universe finally does die, a small part of him hopes that he dies with it.
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viii: you have not felt true loneliness
Of course he doesn't.
He drifts, aimlessly, in space.
And then there is a new Big Bang.
There'll be new creatures. New materials. He doesn't belong, and so, continues to drift. If there'll be new intelligent life, they'll only recognize him as a monster.
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ix: the secret
(He wonders—or does something akin to the concept of thinking—if the fearful Unknown, the unexplainable, the darkness, that scared humanity so, are just entities like him.)