He did not know, for the longest time, what had happened.
The catalyst was Voldemort, and the moment was his collapsing to the ground with mortal finality. Harry had watched him die with a hollow satisfaction and a stolen wand in his hand, and did not know what he had done.
He had left that awful battlefield, left behind the pain and suffering and death, and he had married Ginny Weasley, and they had raised children together. He went to work, he came home, he doted over his wife, he wrote letters to his children at Hogwarts, and then he went to sleep and it began once more, over again.
It took him until James' graduation from Hogwarts to notice. The leaves budded early that year on the branches.
Ginny, so beautiful, refined and sharp, had begun to go grey- she had been saying 'beginning to go grey' for many years now. Harry had smiled, had pushed back her lighter strawberry blonde, had kissed her temples in quiet reassurance.
And he had pulled back, and she had said, "God, Harry, but you look so young."
He had smiled, shaken his head nobly, then glanced hastily in the mirror behind her. It was true his hair had not greyed since an early salt-and-pepper on his temples; his skin still bore very few wrinkles. If he smiled brightly, dyed his hair, he could pass for thirty without much trouble.
He supposes, as he glances in the mirror around Ginny, that he had never thought about it before.
The first funeral is Minerva McGonagall's, only a few years after James leaves Hogwarts. The mourners arrive in their black, Ginny and Harry arm-in-arm and looking unusually different for two people of roughly similar age.
Although an objective bystander might sympathetically point to Ginny's red eyes and tear-blotched face as the reason for the percieved difference of age, the truth is that Ginny's hair is now naturally shot with grey, while Harry's remains almost entirely black; her face is marked with the natural lines of age, while his remains the smooth picture of a man in his early thirties.
They look, in short, odd to those who know Harry is older, but this is a time for sorrow and not speculation, and for a reason Harry can't place he is relieved that nobody brings it up.
They embrace while at the service, drink heavily at the wake, and stumble into a Muggle hotel late at night. Ginny squints at him in the low light of the hotel lift, her tone slurred with alcohol and vague, unplaceable sadness.
"God, Harry; you look so young."
Harry does nothing but embrace her in the lift, trying to ignore the mirrored surfaces on three sides of him. The lift doors open and Ginny steps through. Harry stands behind a moment, staring at himself in the mirrored lift
God, he thinks, but I do.
It's a nice day outside, spring blossoms melting into puddles of petals on the ground. Harry is outside with Albus, helping him with Quidditch practice; he has started to discreetly charm his hair grey, but still looks young in face; he goes outside a lot less than before.
Harry is throwing up a snitch for Albus in his emerald robes to chase, when something clicks in the back of his mind, watching the shimmer of light on wings, fragile and strong.
The next day, he calls in a favour from high places, makes a discreet visit to the Hall of Prophecy. The message he's searching for no longer exists, but he is coming more in order to regain a feeling from his last visit. That old scent, fifth-year scent, of adrenaline, of fear; the cold wind on ice of trying to discern a prophecy, echoing inside your skull. He hears it again as he stands with unaching limbs in the center of the Hall.
He stands there, looking up at the hall as high as a cathedral, stacked from floor to ceiling with glassy, glittering orbs. He is almost ready to give up his whim of coming here, ready to go home and charm a few more hairs grey, but the echo of a long-ago spoken prophecy comes to mind, ringing in his skull.
And either must die at the hand of the other.
He looked down at his hands, his hands that were still smooth-skinned. The scar on his forehead does not sting, but his scarred hand itches and burns.
For neither can live while the other survives.
He looks around at the glass reflecting his face back at him; he looks properly into his youthful face, if distorted by the sphere, for the first time in years. The glinting of dull blue fate, all around him, shimmered and flared against his glasses.
On a whim, on a hellish whim he knows is right, he raises up his right hand and looks at it.
The scars of Umbridge's punishment remain,the same as Hermione's scars from Bellatrix Lestrange; but he had seen Hermione's scars, when she did not hide them beneath layers of clothes. Her skin had extended and shrunk and changed, and stretched the word 'Mudblood' on her skin almost to a point of illegability; but the words on his hand were perfectly legible. In fact, they were as clear as they had been half a lifetime ago.
Words start echoing in his brain, the husky, otherworldy voice of Trelawney's prophecy; the weight of the words became too heavy for him.
He walks out of the Hall of Prophecy without a sound, whispers trailing after him.
It takes him a long time to catch the swirling words in his mind and thread them into a sentence; and by that time, the sentence is almost not needed. Another decade has passed and Ginny is still, in her words, only just beginning to go grey- but now her strawberry hair is silver, and her husband is still young. Maybe, in the sunlight, Harry betrays his age in his tired eyes, but she is old and he is not, and the disparity is no longer natural.
She confronts him one night, a night when the leaves are falling too fast for September. She seems to have taken as long to thread her words together as he has taken to try and thread his, and she says them with tears in her eyes.
"God, Harry, but you look so young," she says softly, and Harry by this point can only say the prophecy's words itself, over and over, until it too clicks in Ginny's mind, and then he falls into her suddenly pliant arms and closes his eyes as she gasps in shock and terrible knowing, and he wills himself an older man.
A younger man he stays.
Another funeral comes, Molly's, and Harry wears to it a Victoriana suit that makes him look older than he is. He sits at the back, and afterwards, bolstered with firewhisky and courage, he approaches Ron and Hermione.
Hermione is at first fiercely in disbelief, even in the sight of Harry's still-young and earnest face, but Ron takes one look at his friend and knows.
"It's just prophecy," Hermione blusters after a long and painful talk between the three. "How can prophecy alter fate? It only predicts it, and only then rarely."
Harry looks across the church grounds at the earth Molly Weasley had been interred into only minutes before. Ginny is there still, crying; Ron stands with Hermione, his face tear-streaked but determined.
"I don't know," Harry answers softly.
"We'll figure it out, mate," Ron says shakily, but with the devoted, stubborn certainty of the friend. "Hermione's Minister now; if anyone can get something done, she can."
Harry stays staring at the last burial place of Molly Weasley and says nothing.
Hermione, true to Ron's word, gets something done; she assigns endless Unspeakables to the task, a curse-breaking team of unimaginable prowess. Harry is poked, prodded, interviewed and cast upon with experimental spells more times than he can count; but nothing has ever been seen like this, nothing. Harry holds Hermione close when eventually, impotent and angry for it, she hurls a prophecy orb in the Hall to the ground, crushing the glass strands beneath her shoe in infuriation. Whispers echo from the glass and she screams at them in the same inaudible way they speak; Hermione has never been a Seer, but she holds knowledge in her third eye instead of the future, and she knows that she has been bested by a magic she never believed in.
Harry tries to comfort her, but he knows that he cannot; he can't be consoled himself. Eventually, he stands back and lets Hermione smash a few more prophecies, lets her try and fight fate until she can no longer tussle with the inevitable.
They go and join Ron, and drink that night in nigh-silence. If occasionally Harry looks up at them and silently sheds a tear, they would not admit they had noticed.
Albus is the first he speaks to when he decides that the family must be told. It is a long time before he can muster up the courage to speak to anyone; by the time he tells Albus, he's now sixty-five and looks thirty years younger than it, and he and his son look like brothers. If Albus did not know, he had certainly guessed.
"Can you die?" Albus asks first of all, and Harry clicks his jaw shut in frustration at the impossible question.
"I don't know," he admits, and looks down at his hands.
"Then- if that's what you want-"
"What?" He says, voice harsh.
Albus continues. "If you want to be with Mum- when she- if she- y'know- then shouldn't you try something new?"
Harry looks up, and Albus stares unremittingly in his eyes.
"Wait. Wait until she is. And then join her."
Harry blinks.
Ginny's funeral is the worst yet, and it seems he has attended far too many funerals in recent years. He never appears directly at them anymore; he waits until all are at the wake, and pays his respects privately.
He clutched at Ginny's cold hand and remembered Albus' cold but clever words.
Try something new.
He looks down at his youthful hands and knows what he must do.
He leaves everything behind in pursuit of it. He does not go to the funerals of Ron nor Hermione; he does not go to the funerals of their children, nor his own. He has stopped caring about attending to the dead now he is trying so hard to become them.
He has been walking, without food or water, for decades; maybe longer than that. He thought that maybe, eventually age would catch up with him; or if not age, starvation. But neither has. The only thing that has degraded is his mind, filled beyond capacity. His body refuses to die, but his mind was only ever built for a century of memories at most, not more than that- he can barely remember anything most days but the urge to continue.
So he continues.
He is master of death, living in an eternal present, dimensionless. He cannot percieve anything that has passed or will pass, except for stray thoughts caught like fur caught in wire; blowing in the wind and then away again.
One such thought crosses his mind as he stands in his prison of youth on the top of a mountain, idly considering the sting of the wind that cannot kill him. He looks up, snapped to attention by the sudden strangeness of thoughts of the past; is this what Voldemort had wanted to be? Eternal and alone, king of isolation and horrifying immortality? Is death so terrifying that a worse fate must be shouldered to avoid it?
Now grasping onto introspection, he clung onto it as hard as he could, an anchor in the overflowing pool of his mind. Voldemort made horcruxes to prolong his natural life; he had wanted to protect against everything, not just the Killing Curse but any potential mishaps.
Harry felt a stronger lifeline of thought and clung onto that instead. This thought glistened with fascinating potential.
If the Killing Curse didn't work, if natural ageing didn't work; what of other causes? He didn't have anything to fear of either success or failure.
Harry considered this venture a moment.
And then, with the reckless abandon of the immortal, he took to work.
He jumps off the mountain first of all, and is injured but wakes up still clinging to hellish life. He cannot move for his injuries but is not concerned; he lives in eternity, and does not concern himself anymore with the matters of mortals. His world is internalised, him and his memories of a beautiful grey-and-strawberry woman that had been his wife.
He sits there, marinates in memories, and waits. Time blurs and shakes in front of him, and now he is colder but healed, and he pulls himself up and staggers on into eternity and hell.
But now, finally, he has an agenda.
A thousand deaths that would have been inflicted on anyone else merely result in time he has to wait to heal before he can try again. He has forgotten who he is, or why he tries to die, but he continues unendingly; the pursuit gives his mind something to do other than degrade further, and he desperately wants to cling onto some memories. A grey-and strawberry woman who he loved, although he does not remember her name. A child's face, although he recalls vaguely that there was more than one. A shower of sparks from a wand. Voices, faint but there, telling him they loved him, although he wasn't sure if he had only imagined them. They were his lifelines, all that was left for him to cling onto and pursue his goal- to return to them.
He flings himself head-first into the ravine.
Hundreds of years and a million million deaths, and there is nothing left for him to understand with. He has not wasted a day in body, but his mind is broken with the effort of grief and death and undeath.
But, as if driven by something within it, he walks, to a place called 'Godric's Hollow', and here he finds a child.
The child looks up at this unaging man without fear, even though he is wild-eyed and confused. The child recognises, somewhere in the primitive part of its mind, the true heir of the gift it has been given, given from parent to child for generations. It holds out the cloak to Harry, who feels the familiar cloth and is shaken back into semi-consciousness.
He takes the cloth, wraps himself around it and disappears, prophecy mixing with ancient magic and spiriting the image of his body and the image of his mind into places unknown.
Ignotius Peverell's cloak was his protector from death, but Harry wears it now as a means of finding it.
He stands on King's Cross, waiting for a train that will never come. It is white, blindingly white, white walls and white floors and white train tracks, immaculate. His station has never seen any train. It never will.
He closes his eyes and rests his aching head against the tile, knelt on the ground in worthless supplication. His mind is too full, full of data and emotions and memories of things he can no longer place; he sometimes loses track of whole swathes of memory, only to regain them with the awful feeling something has been lost forever in the transition.
This is more than mere physical death, as once he considered it to be; this is decommissioning his station. For whatever reason, however it was done- and Harry had long since given up wondering about how- he could not pass over, not ever, even as he stands on the very edge of the platform.
And either must die at the hand of the other. He knows this was how it must be; to stop the unstoppable tyrant, he had been forced to sacrifice himself. On and on the two of them had spun in fate, connected by a phoenix feather and a prophecy; a bond that, when severed, had sent them spinning away with the force of their spirals, away from each other's destiny. One to death, one to life; it was what the stars had destined of them. For neither can live while the other survives.
Uncaring stars, staring down with impunity at the single immortal that stares up. They have decided his fate, but do not care what becomes of him.
The boy who lived; and lived on. The Mirror of Erised looms in his fragmented memory, the smiles of his parents that he will never come to see, not even in the aether.
It is the sacrifice impossible to bear.
He sits in King's Cross and waits for a train that will not come.
He waits.