Chapter Text
For an eternity, he drifted in an endless void.
A bottomless abyss of pure silence where identity meant nothing. He knew not who, what, or where he was—only that he was unmoored, light as a stray thought, and finally… at peace.
There was only the quiet, and the comforting inevitability of true non-existence.
Then, the universe remembered him.
The silence of the Void collapsed. His eternal drift was violently yanked into a furious descent as gravity roared back to life with predatory claws—dragging him down, down, down into the heart of the unknown.
His peace evaporated, surrendering to a sickening sense of dread that carved through his chest, claiming a cage of ribs that felt like foreign architecture—the brittle remains of a creature long lost to a former life.
It was as if an iron collar had snapped shut around his very soul, jerking the chain tight and pulling him back from the lip of Oblivion with a brutal, systematic efficiency, denying him the mercy he was owed: the end.
He thrashed against the pull, his mind a fragile bird battering itself bloody against the bars of a reawakening self.
As the first thought jolted to life, a sudden, terrifying clarity seized him: he had no desire to be.
Not again.
He tried to scream, but the air was stolen by the speed of his fall. Then, just as the dread reached its peak, the descent ended—not with a crash, but a suffocating constriction. Reality simply… snapped.
In a heartbeat, the ‘nothing’ was gone, replaced by a weight so heavy it felt like a premature burial. The Void’s unfeeling absence was traded for the burn of coarse, moth-eaten cloth and the chemical sting of lemon-scented bleach.
He forced his eyes open, their depths glowing a sickly, balefire-green that cast a spectral glare into the shadows. Darkness didn't just surround him; it smothered him. He saw no room, only shifting shapes lost to the gloom that pressed heavily against his skin.
A tremor shook his hand, and as he reached out, every synapse felt like a wire being stripped bare—nerves unaccustomed to the burden of existing. He recoiled, the movement stalling as his fingertips barely grazed the low, unyielding ceiling of grain that hemmed him in.
Long, twisted shadows crawled over the spiders and grime, stretched thin by the ominous luminescence of his own eyes. A solitary pulse in the cramped dark that beat in time with the wet, invasive cadence of a heart that should have remained still.
Harry Potter, pierced the wreckage of his mind as he tried to force the shards of his identity back into place. The name felt like a brand—a searing heat pressed against a brain that had finally, blissfully, forgotten its own shape.
Now, where the bloody hell am I?
As if the universe weren't mocking him enough, a cloud of dust rushed his senses—stinging his eyes and coating his tongue with the taste of silt and dry rot. He gagged, his throat convulsing as he clamped his lids shut, the world plunging back into a heavy, airless black.
Above him, the timber groaned, then quaked.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
Deafening footsteps struck overhead, each one a mortar shell that vibrated through the boards and into his very teeth. Another layer of plaster shook free, burying him in a grey shroud that made every breath feel like a mouthful of swallowed glass.
Am I in a cellar? He wondered, his heart hammering against his ribs—a frantic, trapped thing, protesting against its very function.
What kind of lunatic leaves a corpse in a cellar like some discarded baggage?
Harry might have been offended by the lack of decorum if he weren't so disorientated by the cosmic vertigo of his own rebirth.
He scoured his mind for any explanation, only to stumble blindly into the recollection of his own death—the memory detonating behind his eyes with all the subtlety of a collapsing roof.
He felt it again: that sickly green flash that had turned the Forbidden Forest into a neon graveyard. It wasn’t a ‘painless transition’. It had been a soul-shredding eviction that ripped through his nerves like jagged lightning, leaving a phantom fire searing in its wake.
Whoever claimed the killing curse was a mercy was a liar, and one Harry intended to hunt down for gross misinformation.
His chest convulsed from the flashback, the agony still echoing within his marrow—a residual hum of magic that felt like it was trying to boil him from the inside out. Regardless of whether it had been minutes or even years since the world had last ceased to exist.
He reached for the aftermath. There was none. The memory hit a wall of absolute nothing. The Forbidden Forest was the end of the line, followed only by a sweet, silent vacuum he longed to return to.
Brilliant.
He rubbed his face aggressively, already done with the first five minutes of his renewed warranty on life he had never bloody signed up for.
But there was no escaping the air. It was beginning to smother him, thick with the scent of mildew, old leather, and the metallic tang of a child’s fear that had soaked itself into the very floorboards.
The recognition hit him like a stray bludger to the gut.
A nauseating wave of déjà vu crawled up his spine and forced his reawakened lungs to remember how to hyperventilate, twisting them into a cold, airless knot. Before he could even process the horror of it, a shock like a thunderclap reverberated through his skull.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The door beside him shuddered on its hinges as a heavy fist slammed against the panels, sending a fresh jolt through his rigid frame.
Silence followed, growing hands that wrapped around his throat until the unmistakable clack of a sliding bolt resonated through him like a skeleton key, unlocking a decade of buried flinches and quietened breaths.
The lock had barely settled before a shrill voice knifed through the grain, collapsing Harry’s world with a pulse-stuttering terror that the Dark Lord’s fury could never hope to mimic.
But one word from her was enough.
Goosebumps erupted across his skin as a visceral chill coursed through his veins. Harry knew that voice. He knew the precise, jagged pitch of that woman's spite.
“Up! Get up! Breakfast, now!”
The words were a leash, snapping tight around a neck that had just tasted the freedom of the infinite.
His hands shot out, the movement spearing white-hot agony through his body.
He ignored it, striking both his palms onto a low, splintered step mere inches above his head.
No. No. No. No. No.
A wave of despair crashed through him, hot tears blurring the balefire in his eyes.
This was no tomb. No cellar. No dream.
Harry was right back where it all started.
The cupboard under the stairs.
At that realisation, the fragile architecture of his sanity buckled under the weight of two lifetimes' worth of starvation of every kind.
In its place, a roar of silence lunged forward—a vacuum that didn’t just hate the world, but sought to unmake it. Darkness consumed the cupboard, causing the wooden stairs overhead to groan and splinter as the space collapsed into an inky void.
The last thing Harry felt was a surge of absolute, freezing hunger—a possessive dark that swallowed him whole to keep the universe at bay.
Reality exploded into black static, and the boy knew no more.