An: Recommended listening: Sis puella magica!, and Conturbatio from Madoka Magica.
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The rock won't stop after it starts to roll. Until the end of the road.
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He felt sluggish, had he been... sleeping?
As light and colour bleed into existence he recalled with a detached realization what had happened.
Was this death?
Harry had no illusions about death. He hadn't been expecting much of an afterlife, even if he'd had cause to wonder about it. The ability to talk to ghosts did raise a few interesting questions about what exactly happened when you died though.
Constantly facing death made you think on it too.
He didn't know what he'd been expecting, perhaps an eternity watching over those he loved with his parents until they too joined them, whatever it was it wasn't this.
There wasn't anyone passing judgment on him, no one directing him to a light, there wasn't even hell fire and flames waiting to roast him while pitchfork wielding demons poked at him.
Instead he found himself seated amidst a beautiful field of white flowers; the sky too was devoid of colour, as was the chair he sat upon.
He didn't know how long he sat there unmoving.
Somehow he knew here in this place time was meaningless.
Amidst the timeless eternity he felt another presence join him.
Unmoving he merely continued to gaze out at the sea of white before him as the other person came to stand beside him, standing just out of his sight.
"With kindness comes naïveté. Courage becomes foolhardiness. And dedication has no reward, only suffering."
"Don't you agree, ne Harry-san?"
Wordlessly he turned his head to look at the one who had spoken.
He didn't know who he'd thought would greet him, Sirius, his parents, even Dumbledore perhaps, but not the woman now standing across from him.
Staring at her he watched as, she nudged a single diseased looking flower that he had not noticed until now with her foot.
"Ugly isn't it?"
He nodded not knowing what else to say, it was ugly.
"Whose fault is it that things ended up like this I wonder? Coincidence? An accident? Fate? There's no such thing as fate. It's simply a combination of one circumstance and the next. And who is it that creates those circumstances? Who is it? It's you."
"People like you should just die don't you think?"
She stepped on it, crushing it under her foot.
Turning back to him she smiled.
"You're the women from Kaneki's boggart."
An uncomfortable feeling rose is in his stomach, "Where is this place?"
She tilted her head as is pondering his question. "Ara, I wonder."
"Ne, Harry-san, I wonder do you know the meaning of a wilting flower?"
"When a child is born a red lotus blooms and the white flower of their life is born, that's true even for us who look down upon humans as we devour you."
Great chrysanthemum bursts of iridescent colour and shape burst forth from her as she spoke, and even as the abstract constructs that seemed made of strange ever shifting collages torn from places and times he had never seen spread as wings a stain of blood spread across her clothes.
"Whether we have everything or we have nothing, we are all faced with the same obstacles: sadness, illness, loss."
A sudden pain tore through him and he found himself unable to move.
"To preserve his life that man so desperately sort to find a way to overcome his own mortality by splitting himself apart. But something so frail when split apart, parts may fall away even if the person doesn't want them to."
"Ne, Harry-san, it looks like another lotus is blooming."
Gently she tilted his head with her hand; everywhere the white flowers were twisting in on themselves and turning red.
"Just like the lotus we too have the ability to rise from the mud, bloom out of the darkness and radiate into the world. But you know Harry-san, Kaneki-kun, and I, we who from the moment of birth, continue to take; food, connections, even fellow blood. Living to the utmost, continuing to slaughter, kill, take."
"Those pure white flowers that were stained with blood from birth became instead not a lotus but a lily."
"You who was covered by blood not your own, I wonder when yours became such a flower."
Still unable to move he watched paralysed as one by one the once white field unfurled in bursts of red unlike anything he had ever seen.
As the rising pain reached a crescendo he felt himself, as if being torn through a howling tunnel of shadow, torn apart and reborn.
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An: The 'wings' mentioned are the ones from the first anime's opening, they serve as a sort of metaphor for her Kagune. The diseased flower, was the form Voldermort's fragment took in the different setting. Also – an interesting titbit, a spider lily stands for reincarnation. They're often associated with death and departing lovers. The story goes that red spider lilies bloom along the paths of departing lovers. Companions who for one reason or another are destined to never meet again. While not lovers, an equally intimate connection between Harry and the shard of soul within him could be said to be ending. In Tokyo Ghoul they were more symbolic of Rize and her connection with Kaneki.