Everything was white.

Harry barely remembered falling to the ground and everything going dark. Or maybe he'd just imagined that as the natural consequence of the curse that killed him instantly where he'd stood. But seemingly moments later, he'd opened his eyes (or the closest thing he still had to them) and found himself in an endless sea of white.

He wasn't completely sure why he thought that it was an empty space rather than that he was having a bright light shined in his eyes. But somehow, he knew that it was a large, possibly endless expanse. Maybe it was the vague blurring of volumetric fog keeping him from actually being able to see infinitely far into the distance. Maybe it was because the perfectly flat ground had a slightly-different reflectivity from the light than everything else. Not that there was any clue where the light was coming from.

He kept his body when he died, so that was interesting. Nothing hurt, and he only seemed nominally beholden to gravity, but the slightest sense of pressure from the floor on his feet was another clue he wasn't just a consciousness floating in a bright void. He could even look down and see his body. A comfortable set of white linen robes popped onto him as soon as he realized he was totally naked. He didn't have his glasses on, but he could see.

The weirdest thing was the lack of the user interface. He'd gotten so used to having stuff around the edges of his vision at all times that the total lack of it was confusing. He tried to bring it back up, but none of his usual commands worked.

And why was the only noise here a small, foreboding struggling behind him?

"Hello?" he checked, then slowly turned to try to orient on the sound when his question made a noise of his own but didn't get a response.

Maybe his UI wasn't completely gone after all. Floating atop the shriveled, mutilated infant (that looked very much like the homunculus that had been Voldemort earlier that evening) was the usual information that he'd grown accustomed to over everyone's heads.

SOUL FRAGMENT
Horcrux (Destroyed)
[TOM RIDDLE]

"At least he got you, too," Harry said, not really even liking to look at the thing. "Am I stuck here with you forever, though?" It was starting to sink in that he'd died. But other than the creepy baby monster, which fortunately didn't seem inclined to attack him, it really wasn't all that bad. He still existed, didn't hurt, and was in a reality of some kind. Things could probably have been much worse.

He didn't yet have the religious introspection to wonder if this was just a hallucination as his brain finished dying, or a short stop on the way to something terrible. Dying young let you avoid the real quandaries.

"Maybe I just start walking in a direction and I'll find stuff?" he shrugged, that plan mostly informed by a desire to get away from the horcrux. One foot in front of the other, he started to stride into the white void.

He didn't get very far, just enough to let the soul fragment disappear into the mist behind him, before his intention to get on with it caused something to happen. Not so much emerging from the fog as fading into view in the air in front of him, a menu appeared.

SPECTATOR MODE
PLAY AGAIN
EXIT

As he considered each of the three options, a description floated next to it. Spectator Mode meant, "Return to the world as a ghost." Play Again said, "Be reborn in the world without your memories." And Exit stated, "Continue to the afterlife."

Before he could even think about that hard choice, as if almost an afterthought, three letters appeared beneath those other options.

A
I
O

They failed to yield the same summaries of what they were for if he chose them. "Why only those three?" he wondered, even his primary school education before Hogwarts having instilled in him that it seemed to be missing E, U, and sometimes Y. "Is Aio some kind of vowel-only name?"

It was pretty weird how fast you started talking to yourself when stuck alone in a void.

"Is it a puzzle?" he assumed, the return of UI elements familiar ground in the unfamiliar limbo around him. The font was even the same as the interface he was used to. Which meant it was somewhat limited in what symbols it used. In quests, the O was frequently just a circle to be filled in. Maybe instead of an I, it was meant to be a vertical line. And the A could be… a triangle maybe?

Why did that collection of shapes sound so familiar?

Somehow it made sense to try to visualize them together. And then he remembered: the glyph on the ring. As soon as he realized that, he felt a slight weight on his left hand, and there was the stone from the ring they'd found in the Gaunt shack, in a much simpler silver setting and resting on his left index finger like it had always been there.

As he considered it, the O lit up on the menu in front of him.

"Well if the O is the stone," he mused, "does that mean that I is the wand and the A is the cloak?" As he said it, the Elder Wand appeared in his right hand and the Cloak of Invisibility settled into place over his shoulders. Raising the wand caused the I to light, and grasping the cloak likewise highlighted the A. But not simultaneously: it looked like he was able to choose an option based on any one of the Hallows.

They'd read the Tale of the Three Brothers a lot since the Deathly Hallows were on the quest log, so Harry started thinking about what those options might mean. Would he have had the cloak option if he'd died earlier in the year, before he got the wand and stone? Or were all three options only because he'd gotten the full set bonus? Maybe having extra options here was the set bonus that he'd never figured out before dying.

"The cloak lets you hide from Death… but also that brother greeted him like an old friend when it was his time. And everyone with the wand pretty much gets killed because of the wand, but maybe it's about fighting? The stone pretty much tricks you into dying… huh, but it's a Death thing and all three brothers died eventually, so maybe it's what you do with it before you die… I wish I had Hermione to discuss this with. Or anyone really. But I don't… wait."

Squinting suspiciously at the ring, Harry nonetheless lifted his left hand and willed option O to trigger.

A
I
C(O)NFER

"Very sneaky," Harry groused, realizing that each of the letters would probably be worked into whatever command it kicked off.

But he didn't have much time to be annoyed at the game's puzzle, because at the edge of his peripheral vision two human shapes were emerging from the fog behind him, opposite the menu text, just silhouettes against the white. If they had names and tags over their heads, they were fully hidden by the fog. He turned to regard them straight on, and they seemed to be wearing the same robes he was, but one was obviously a man with dark hair, and the other a woman whose red hair glowed against the infinite light.

Heartbreakingly, they stopped a few yards away, forms still obscured by the fog, but he recognized those silhouettes from the Mirror of Erised and the scrapbook Hagrid had given him. "Mum? Dad?"

"Yes, baby, it's us," his mother said, voice unmistakable despite how far away his memories were of it. He gasped and started to move forward to close the distance between them, but they stayed just as far from him, pushed back into the mist no matter how many yards he covered. He never got close enough for their faces to become clear, much less to touch them. "I'm sorry, Harry. We can't truly come to where you are. You're in between."

"But I can come to you?" he asked, catching that she hadn't said the opposite.

"We're supposed to encourage you to," his father scoffed, that voice not as well remembered but still distantly familiar. "Because you're using that stone to talk to us. But screw those bloody rules!"

"James!"

"He's thirteen. I'm sure he knows worse swears!"

"I don't understand," Harry interrupted their argument. It was kind of weird to notice how young they sounded. They had barely been adults when they'd been killed. Somehow, he'd pictured them in their thirties like Remus and Sirius, but, of course, they wouldn't be… "You don't want me to come to the same afterlife as you? I don't know if I want to be a ghost or reincarnate."

"Harry. Baby…" Lily told him, hope and sadness mixed in her voice. "I don't think you're dead. Not fully. We never came to this room."

"But Voldemort hit me with the killing curse! I let him, so his horcrux would die too."

James joked, "So you're saying he's oh and two on successfully getting you with it? You can thank your mother."

Lily nodded, and he could almost make out those green eyes that everyone said were so like his own through the fog. "We don't know everything that's been going on. But I felt him interfering with my spell, just a little while ago."

"He used my blood to resurrect himself," Harry explained. "He said your magic couldn't protect me anymore because he took it."

"It wasn't for him," she said, fiercely. "You can't steal that kind of magic. I'd bet all he did was anchor you to life by that same spell. And it probably doesn't hurt that you have the Hallows."

"Way to go on that, by the way," James encouraged him. "I wonder if things would have been different if I'd realized the old family cloak was so special earlier. Maybe I could have found the other ones?"

"Well Voldemort had the stone turned into a horcrux and in a deathtrap, and Dumbledore had the wand," Harry explained. "So it would have been tough."

"And I'm sure earning their allegiance wasn't simple, either," Lily admonished James. "Just be happy that our boy accomplished it."

"The game system helped," Harry shrugged, glowing at the praise. "I guess you wouldn't know anything about video games, or why I'm basically in one."

"I played Pong a few times in the summers home from school," she explained, at least recognizing the term.

James added, "I remember Pong. We went to an arcade the summer before Harry was born! I liked pinball."

Lily continued, "As to why, I don't know. Maybe it's just because Death loves a game… if you told me all about it, maybe I could think of something…"

Harry began to explain, "Well it all started on my birthday last year. I found Dudley's old computer–"

"I don't think there's time, baby," she interrupted him, eyes narrowing in anger at the reminder he'd been stuck with her sister. "I'm so sorry. The longer you're here, the closer you come to this side. Didn't you notice you're already a few steps closer than you were when we started?"

He glanced back and was, indeed, no longer an armspan from the menu text, his choices beginning to recede into the mists.

"That's how he gets you," James grumbled. "Son, we'd love to hear everything from you. And tell you all about ourselves. Someday you'll have all the time in the world, and a whole life to tell us about. But you can't stay here now."

The worst thing about his pain-free body was that he wanted to cry and couldn't. "It's not fair!" he said, instead. "And I'm not even sure what to pick. What gets me back to the world? Wand or cloak?"

"Death loves a game," Lily figured, the most brilliant mind of her generation furiously thinking. "And so many cultures have a story about being able to challenge him to return to life… and about how he always wins. Even with his own wand, I doubt you'd beat him in a duel."

James argued, "But every member of our family with the cloak has died, anyway."

"Maybe only when they were ready to greet him as an old friend," Harry realized, a few moments before his mother.

"That's my smart boy," she beamed.

"According to the game system, I'm actually a little below average on Intelligence," he admitted.

She scoffed, "IQ tests aren't really a very good measure of how bright you are, overall. And I bet you're going to shine."

"Your mother just admitted book smarts aren't everything," James chuckled, getting an elbow from his wife. "Oh, and tell everyone we love them. Miss them. Especially Padfoot and Moony."

"And Sev. Tell him I forgive him," his mother added, mysteriously.

"Fine, as long as Snape is still on the right side," his father rolled his eyes, the expression visible since Harry was so close to them in the fog. "You'd better go, son. And don't come back for at least, what, eighty years?"

"A hundred," Lily countered. "I bet he can beat Albus' record if he tries. Harry, we love you, and we'll be here waiting. Take your time."

Harry took one long look at both of them, inevitably drifting closer, almost able to see them through the fog. "I love you, too," he finally managed, turning his head toward the menu that was now yards away and about to drift into the mist. Sheathing the wand and clutching the cloak, not sure how long he was hoping it would be before he'd finally get to see his parents again, he made his decision.

W(A)KE