My name is Alexander Potter and I have a problem – multiple problems, actually.
You see, I wasn't always Alex Potter. I wasn't always a pureblooded wizard with loose black curls and a bespectacled twin. In fact, I wasn't even a boy.
Sounds crazy right? It gets worse.
The world I live in and the people I consider family in this lifetime were all fictional in my first life. My twin, James, was the deceased father of the protagonist. His son, a boy named Harry James Potter, was the orphaned boy who saved the wizarding world.
And me, I was just a regular girl. Like thousands of others I'd read the books and seen the movies. I enjoyed the concept of magic and triumphing over evil. And then, at seventeen, I died.
I don't actually remember how it happened, though I suspect an accident of some sort. I only know that I died through some strange instinct. Well, that and the fact that I was reborn sort of implies I had to die somewhere along the way.
Fortunately for my fragile psyche, I don't remember much of my early years. I can only assume that my mind wasn't developed enough to handle an adult's memories and thought processes. This of course, led to a merging of personalities and opinions as soon as I had developed enough for my memories to make sense.
Infancy and the years following are formative years – don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise. By the time I'd realized I'd been reincarnated into a fictional world, I'd already developed deep bonds with my family and come to accept magic as something inherent in my new life. This most likely made my transition into this world a lot smoother than it could have been – though I still suffered chronic headaches and a minor identity crisis all before the age of six.
Either due to my own mental fortitude or some higher power I made it through the merging of minds mostly unscathed. Of course, this didn't solve the issue of whether or not I should act on what I remembered from my previous life.
On one hand, I didn't even know if my knowledge was accurate. My presence alone was enough to throw everything I thought I knew about my new world into doubt. On the other hand, what kind of person stands by and does nothing while others suffer?
Fortunately for me, I didn't have to make a decision right away. I was born before the threat revealed itself, so I had time to plan. I couldn't do anything before then. After all, at that point I was still a child and not likely to be taken seriously.
The great thing about being unusually self-aware at the age of nine is that I didn't take my childhood for granted. I played for hours on end and took full advantage of the lack of responsibilities. It might have been a little boring if I still had the mentality of a seventeen year old, but I had regressed, or rather, I was a child given excessive life experience for my age, but still an actual child deep down.
A kid can be more mature than an adult, especially if the kid's had a more difficult life, but that doesn't make them older, just wiser. Understanding my mortality so early on made me strive to be a better person. I wanted to be remembered fondly when I died and trying to be a good person in my first life had only made things better. I wanted to impact my new world more than I had my old one, but not at the loss of my life.
So I did silly, pointless kid things with James while also avoiding the bigger mistakes of my first childhood. I already knew that trying to change myself to make friends or please others was pointless and would only make me miserable in the long run; I already knew not to judge others right away because some of my best friends had started out as people I thought were weird or uncool; I already knew that sometimes no matter how good your intentions were you could end up hurting the ones you loved; I already knew that if someone genuinely showed regret it was best to forgive them - no one wants to die without ever having made up with a close friend.
Basically, my second childhood was a lot happier and much less embarrassing than the first.