"I am like Orpheus: I play death on the strings of life, and to the loveliness of this earth, and to your eyes, which rule the heavens, I can only speak of dark things."*
The two speeding cars swerved to avoid hitting each other head-on, but it was already too late. The opposing headlights blinded him, they were approaching at the same speed as two monstrous snidgets that could only grow in his field of vision. The rain pounded the car's bodies, drowned the road, and he lost control of his trajectory when he felt his tyres slip. A crash. The engines had smashed against each other with a noise that matched the thunder of lightning overhead...
Speaking of heads, he had felt his hit the steering wheel hard and was still resting on it as he gasped for breath, still in shock from the impact. In a vague moment of lucidity, he knew that the liquid dripping from his forehead was not the rain that was now seeping through the shattered windscreen. The lucidity of the moment continued as he felt his body weaken and blackness creep into the corners of his eyes.
He laughed hoarsely. It was true that the situation he was in was tragic, but it was also very ironic.
His past relatives would have been ecstatic: his first aunt, his mother's sister, had never allowed him to ask questions when he was younger, but in a fit of courage—or stupidity—he had asked about the origin of the scar on his forehead. "In the car accident that killed your parents," she had said, her eyes narrowed and full of disdain. "And don't ask questions," she'd repeated harshly before grabbing his wrist to turn him back to face the cooker, so he could resume his task of watching the indecent amount of bacon and keeping it from charring.
He imagined that his Aunt Petunia would have been pleased to learn that her abnormal nephew had just suffered the same fate she had created to conceal the true cause of the disappearances of her witch sister and the Potter husband she had found in that freakish school.
A sigh escaped painfully from his crushed lungs to conclude this brief memory. The time spent in his thoughts had been enough for blackness to obscure almost all of his vision. Anyone at that moment could have guessed what this foreshadowed, yet he didn't panic, rather irritation made him itch.
He really hated this part. Dying was easy, but the last few moments before were always a nightmare—or agony, more accurately. He didn't feel his pain eased by the fact that he'd devoted his last coherent thoughts to his first aunt, but it wasn't as if the life he was about to leave had offered him anything exceptional to hold on to…
His hands had already dropped from the steering wheel, the energy that usually animated his limbs had left them, they were no longer responsive. It took him a few seconds to find where his hands were as they rested limply on his thighs. The nerves in his legs were inert and unable to detect any new sensation.
Around him he could fathom screams, but all he could hear was the faint, hieratic pulse of his heart echoing through his numb body.
The door of his car flew open, revealing faces drowned in the deluge and the dark landscape of the countryside. He slowly turned his head towards them, smiled faintly, and then closed his eyes when he felt an unearthly chill coil over him. His old friend was there.
"Again, " he whispered to them secretly.
Limbo was a familiar place that Harry liked, but where he never stayed long. Not because it was unwelcoming - especially in the guise of King's Cross Station, which it mimicked to remind him of its main function: a transitional stage - but because it evoked too many memories that he preferred to flee. He was content to pass through and catch a new train each time that would take him to another quiet life, always a little further away from the first.
The unmistakable whistle of an old departing locomotive caught his attention just in time for him to see a spectrally white copy of the Hogwarts Express shudder and slowly leave the station.
On the platform, a towering figure was also watching the train depart. Shrouded in black, the being stood motionless and contrasted in the colourless space. Harry approached to stand beside them. He gazed into the distance, where the souls who had been able to board the train were disappearing to begin their new journey into the land of the living.
For what seemed like an eternity there was only silence, the two immortals stood still, neither of them interested in disturbing this moment. They remained like this for perhaps a minute, an hour, a decade, or perhaps even a century, but it did not matter. Time did not matter to the dead. It was just a question of opportunity.
The high ceilings of the pale King Cross station amplified the whistle of a new train, it seemed to echo through the infinite plane of limbo to announce its fresh arrival. The station was filling up in a morbid imitation of the first day of school at Hogwarts, except that the panicked, ecstatic cries of children and the reassuring words of worried parents were replaced by distant whispers.
Around him, Harry let his gaze trail over the stream of souls, some undecided about finally boarding, others rushing into the carriages without a second thought.
Delicately, an intense coldness grazed the back of his neck.
A fingertip touch that preceded Death's voice, which sounded like a distant whisper from beyond the grave, "You should leave," they advised cautiously. "It is impossible to find what you ask in my realm. What awaits you there is quite the opposite even."
"It has been a long time since I asked you to give me peaceful lives. You kept your promise, but I don't know if I want to go back to another cycle just yet... I've always liked being here more than living."
Death's long, skeletal fingers lingered on Harry's coppery, immaterial skin. "Have you asked yourself why?"
Harry shook his head, he preferred not to look for the answer. Sometimes settling for blissful ignorance was the easiest thing to do.
"If you're going to continue to bury your head in the sand, then you're still not ready." The chill nestled at the base of Harry's neck slowly disappeared as Death withdrew their hand. They resumed, a teasing undertone in their whisper, "I'm still torn as to what will devour your soul first, my friend. Will it be your boredom or your regret?" And without waiting for an answer, Death slowly walked away.
The souls on the platform quickly moved away from their wake—even though they were already dead, the shadow of Death looming over them aroused a fierce instinct of self-preservation, dictating that they stay as far away from the being as possible.
Harry, for his part, remained petrified, his gaze glued to his old friend's back. Death's last words had seemed to take his breath away as suddenly as the car accident that had just taken his life.
He suddenly cried out, "Neither of them!"
He dashed after Death, who continued to advance without looking back. When he finally caught up with them, he grasped the shroud that seemed to be woven of pure darkness with the force of an anger he had not suspected until then.
"Neither," Harry repeated, his voice weaker, uncertain. His expression was troubled by the sudden anger he did not know he possessed.
All around them, everything seemed to have come to a halt. The souls in transit stood still, clearly nervous of the reaction of the being who ruled this realm.
With the characteristic slowness of those for whom time is meaningless, Death turned to Harry. The tug that Harry held on the cloth stretched it, revealing the sharp, angular lines of Death's skeletal body. The large hood that covered their face fell back.
"There are only two forces capable of destroying a soul..."
Harry looked up from where his hand remained clenched to drown his gaze in Death's empty sockets. They bent their long figure with a terrifying clank and crack of bone to bring their faces closer to Harry's. The endless darkness in their sockets was like an abyss just about to swallow him.
"I have never yet resolved to destroy one, but some have already been lost forever. Gone and consumed by themselves."
Harry blinked, his thoughts racing as he tried to grasp the implication of Death's words. Did they think he was about to self-destruct? Would the sudden anger he had felt be the first warning? An alarm to remind him that he would be consumed by his own feelings if he continued to ignore that little voice that kept asking him for a second chance?
When he reached his conclusion, the shock left him colder than his friend's touch and caused the shroud to slip from his hand. "What am I to admit then? Obviously you know better than me what I want."
"You already know the answer... but let me help you." Death brought their face a little closer to Harry's, their hand sliding a finger under his chin so that his gaze wouldn't waver when the truth would be spoken. "Be honest with yourself. Tell me, what was the last thing on your mind when you felt your end was near?"
"Petunia," he blurted out.
Death's quiet but shrill chuckle made Harry wince.
He immediately tried to explain himself to clear up the misunderstanding, "I didn't like her! The car accident reminded me—" He paused.
Now he was sure where this conversation was going.
He let out a long, infuriated sigh as he pulled his chin out of Death's grip. "That's it? You want me to say I miss it? Then yes, of course. I mean, I loved it! Even though it was a crappy life, I had people there that I loved."
Memories of his friends and the precious years of his youth flashed quickly through his mind and tightened his throat with emotion, preventing him from speaking for a few seconds.
Harry ran a hand through his hair, shaking his head to chase away his rush of nostalgia. "I miss it, but that's not what I want, Death. Even if it were possible, I wouldn't want to go through that again. You saw what I did after it was over! I don't want to go through that loop again... " Harry's shoulders and eyes dropped, his voice breaking in his last words, filled with the bitterness and shame that haunted the memories of his second life.
This second life marked by violence was a pure product of the infernal spiral that had been the first, so one did not exist without the other. Harry saw them as a play in two acts, "The Saviour: The Rise & The Fall.
At the height of the 'Rise', and by the end of the Second Wizarding War, a general fear had spread rapidly through the British wizarding world. Everyone feared that Voldemort would return... Again. He had become an agonising nightmare that clouded the minds of every wizard.
Shortly after Voldemort's body had been moved to a room adjacent to the Great Hall, Hermione had quietly taken Harry aside, offered him her beaded bag and advised him to flee the country for a few years. "Only until everything is sorted out," she had clarified. What a fool he had been to convince her that everything would be fine now that Voldemort was dead! It had been naive of him to believe that all the dangers would disappear with the end of the reign of his fated enemy.
It was only after his rushed and unfair trial that he understood what had led to his imprisonment...
The Ministry, the unmarked and surviving Death Eaters, the press: everyone had called for his head. All those who had caused the unstable general state of magical Britain were dead, and he had been the only one left to bear the consequences. The bloody 'Boy Who Lived'.
He had become the person responsible for the instability of the Ministry, the target to be aimed at to avenge the dark side, the last face and embodiment of a long era of fear. Even the small circle of people who knew about the horcruxes had feared him and his scar. They saw it as just another way for Voldemort to make his return.
Harry had almost wished it was true! That there was still a microscopic part of Voldemort's soul in him, so that he could resurrect the noseless bastard and deliver him to the post-war wizarding world.
The sentence that had slightly appeased the crowd, and that he had heard at the end of his trial: Azkaban.
It was only as he left the room to go to prison that he had heard those present at the trial whispering to each other. No one had been content enough with the sentence, all had called for his death... But no one had dared.
The executioners had all refused, fearing that the killing curse would rebound on them too - if not on all the spells intended to kill him. The Ministry already had no control over the Dementors, so even the Kiss had not been an option. So they simply put Harry in a cage and took great care to lose the key forever.
All this time, he had hoped that things would sort themselves out as Hermione had told him, but nothing changed. He stayed in his cell, waiting for someone to open the door and tell him that his sentence had been revoked. That his trial had been a mistake and that he hadn't deserved the authorities' relentlessness or to have been made the scapegoat for all the disasters that had happened...
"What you did?" Death echoed, interrupting Harry's memories maelstrom in the process.
A long limb of decaying flesh and bone stretched out of the shroud that clothed Death's slender figure, their hand came to rest on Harry's shoulder. The Hogwarts Express whistled furiously to announce its imminent departure and the landscape around them snapped.
In a whirlwind of grey mist, Death and Harry were projected onto another landscape. A memory. Not exactly like in a pensieve, with blurred edges, but rather the opposite. It was almost too real. Harry could smell the peculiar odour granted by the dampness of his cell and feel the cold, rusty iron shackles sinking into his wrists. He was chained to the exact spot he had occupied during so many decades.
Death faced him, impenetrable in the darkness of the prison. Harry's cage. "Let me tell you what I saw back then: a mere babe. A shattered toddler raised by wars. An exhausted child used to my company. A fearless boy trained to fight. You were not their saviour, but their warrior. They expected you to comply without resistance, they pushed you again and again to the front line of the battlefield... And then, when they won the fight, they pushed you one more time. Except this time, that last push was to throw you off the cliff." At this point, Death's usual whispering voice had become a distant, high-pitched howl. "So tell me my friend, why do you regret taking the lives of those who imprisoned you there?"
Being here was like rubbing salt on Harry's wounds. Every corner reminded him of his worst moments at Azkaban. With a sharp, ferocious tug he pulled on the chains that bound his handles. They gave way and fell with a clank of metal to the floor of the cell.
"The real problem, Death, is that I regret a lot of things, but certainly not this," Harry explained, controlling his voice to keep it calm. Out of habit, he kneaded his wrists as if trying to chase away the sharp coldness of the metal that seemed to cling desperately to the core of his soul. "What I did was wrong and I'm ashamed of it, but I can't regret getting my revenge. It was the only way I could mourn what I had lost… No, what I regret is that I tied this madness to the loop of my first life."
The 'Fall' began when Death had come to him at the end of his first life and asked him what he wanted—he had seized the opportunity without thinking of the consequences. He was still ashamed that he had allowed himself to be blinded by his rage and had followed Talion's law. To this day, he clearly remembers that his request had felt like a prayer, he had pleaded for a rebirth dedicated to destruction.
An outlet. A simple and unique opportunity to ruin the chessboard by being the grey bishop who spares no side and takes orders from no one. The exaltation of freedom had gone straight to his head to the point where he had forgotten his own morals... He had forgotten himself. All this time he had been like someone else. A vengeful spirit.
'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,' had been his mantra throughout this second life. It was only when he took his last breath that he felt the wizarding world had paid its debt to him and he finally promised that he would try to forgive them—
But now, the memories were coming back with more and more strenght and the anger Harry had felt was bubbling up inside him again.
He understood then, why this feeling had felt so strange, it was because he had not felt it—not with the same intensity—since the wizarding world had betrayed him. An old fury, dustier than the corpses buried in its intangible graveyard of traitors.
He remembered how sudden everything had been. He recalled as if it were yesterday the farce that had been his trial.
For a brief moment he had felt like he was in Sirius' shoes when James and Lily had been murdered. His godfather must have felt the same way as Harry did when he had seen the court full of wizards glaring at him, damning him to all the misery in their world.
Harry remembered the shock that had led to his acceptance. He had agreed to die for them. Why refuse if he could continue to protect them and ease tensions by staying locked up for a while? It seemed sensible at the time. Stupid boy, that was before you found out they wanted to put you down like a rabid dog...
Harry had relied on his friends to clear his name and explain the misunderstanding - because it was only a misunderstanding, he had thought at the time.
Harry Potter had been the name that no one had ever dared to say again. The Boy Who Lived became the Man Who Waited. He had waited for a plea, an apology, a place in the world he had fought for. He waited, but nothing happened. The wait buried his name deeper and deeper under new piles of files on a minister's desk.
They fed the lion of darkness with the promise that the light he hoped for would come. Tied a chain around his neck and whispered that it was an important necklace. Locked him up by telling him it was to protect others. Muffled his roars by shouting at him that he was scaring the children. And finally, the lion's mane lost its golden sheen, his shoulders hunched, he had turned more times in his cage than the earth turned on itself and his silent throat became a bottomless pit leading to his broken heart.
There was no more lion when Death entered the cage. Under the chains and behind the bars, there was also nothing left of the boy who had become their master. It was a horrible, enraged creature that accepted their embrace, and its last breath became its first. The creature that had been the lion-boy no longer wanted the light, nor even the sun, it wanted everything and fell so low as to become the Monster-Who-Wants. The one who wanted revenge, who wanted to be remembered, who wanted to claim the price of his sacrifices. The monster roared. The world trembled at the sight of what they had created...
With a thought, Harry's prison was transformed into another memory: the Forbidden Forest. There was no one there, except the two immortals.
"Perhaps you are more ready than I thought..." Death muttered to themselves as they walked away from Harry towards a treeless area. When they stopped, they glanced over their shoulder. "Do you feel ready?"
"Ready for what?!" Harry exclaimed, his long-suppressed anger as hot as the fiery breath of a Hungarian horntail. "To set Limbo on fire and turn it into the Infernal City? If that's the case, yeah! I'm fucking ready!"
Around them the ground rumbled, shaking the gloomy trees of the Forbidden Forest from root to leaf. By the time Death turned around, the rumbling had increased in intensity and without further ado, the first tree crashed to the ground with a deafening thud, its trunk snapped in two. Harry's fists were trembling as he stood at the epicentre of the chaos he was creating in the forest.
Death's attention scanned the surroundings, unfazed, before focusing their empty sockets on Harry again. "No. I'm asking if you're finally ready to give up those boring lives I've given you since you returned from your fantastic mayhem."
"I give them up and what? I sit here, twiddling my thumbs and going bonkers?"
The ground rumbled from the bowels of the earth, the dry earth cracked and more trees fell to the ground, some carrying others in their fall and creating a gigantic cascade of leaves and branches with a noise that would deafen mortals. The wind picked up with the storm in the background, almost loud enough to rival the noise rumbling beneath the earth.
"Because that's what's going to happen, Death! If I don't do something, I'll only think about my first life and nothing else!"
"These lives are just a way for you to numb yourself. You bury yourself in boredom to avoid facing your problem."
"I've already dealt with the problem!" Harry shouted. The fallen trees around them burst into flames. "I have taken my revenge! Now I can move on!"
Death let out a sharp, mocking laugh. "You want more. More than quiet lives and blood." They advanced through the flames. Their shroud swept away by the storm wind that blew the foliage of the surviving and still standing trees. "You will not rest until you find it again. Do you not feel its absence digging into your heart? Have you not felt empty all these millennia?"
The storm broke. A bolt of lightning struck the ground, only a few feet away from Death.
"Say it! " Harry shouted, his voice surreal with the elements raging around him.
"What you really want, Harry, is not just to get your first life back," Death stated in a soothing voice as they crossed the last few yards between them. "You want to be able to live it again to change it."
Harry felt as if he were about to explode. Lightning rained down in a cataclysmic pattern that leveled what was left of the forest.
"And you know that's impossible!" Harry shouted, in a cry full of anger and grief. "I can't get my life back, I can't change it!" A broken sob escaped him. "Even if you could give it back to me, I would inevitably follow the same path that led me to my second life! I would have no free will! Fate would always put me back on the path she had planned for me! I don't want to go through that again..."
As Harry's voice died on his lips, all the elements subsided. The storm left behind the rain. The flames curled up on their burning coals. The wind no longer howled and sang only an unnoticeable lullaby.
He dropped to a stump behind him with a long sigh. His anger was suddenly gone, totally consumed by the exhaustion that now gripped him. He removed his glasses and massaged his eyelids. This conversation had gone nowhere, except to exhaust him and rehash what was most painful to him.
What forced him to open his eyes again was the sound of cracking and clicking bones that announced Death's movements. Even kneeling before him, Death was much taller than he was. Although they only had a face of bone and therefore no expression, Harry was sure that his old friend seemed delighted.
"If you could change the course of events, you would want to go back, wouldn't you?"
Harry's head nodded without him even being aware of it. He was too busy fighting the hope that was blooming in the pit of his stomach. He couldn't allow himself to hope for anything. Especially what Death seemed to be suggesting.
He knew two inescapable facts: he was Fate's favourite chew toy and she hated to lose him.
In short, even if Harry could relive his first life, he couldn't change it. Fate would always come back to interrupt his free will and redirect him to the right path. Inevitably, if he lived that first life again, he would also repeat the second. Taking a step in this loop was just an endless circle of violence that he had managed to get out of and that he did not want to repeat... But what if he could really intervene and change things?
"Let me ask you again: are you ready to leave your boring lives behind and listen to what I have to offer?"
