Chapter Text
It starts slowly, the steady disconnect between who he is and who he should be. The man in the mirror becomes a stranger to him; he looks into the glass and wonders how everything became so distorted and backward and...wrong. He notices in bursts: when Teddy grows taller than him, when he’s kissing Ginny on her lips and looking at the subtle smile lines she’s starting to develop around her plush mouth. She’s got the cutest crinkles by her eyes.
His face is smooth as it was when he was seventeen. Which was 18 years ago. He hasn’t aged a day.
When Ron and Hermione start going grey, he invests in a cauldron and learns how to brew a potion that gives him the appearance of aging. He pretends not to notice the collective sigh of relief from all his friends.
George throws an arm around his shoulder during a Sunday brunch and jokes, “was worried you’d been bitten by a vamp, for a sec there. You just had damn good genes.”
Harry forces a smile. “Must be my Potter luck.”
Ron guffaws and raises a glass. “To the Potter luck. Here’s a toast for shit childhoods and smoking hot adulthood.”
Luna, curled around Neville’s arm, gazes dreamily around the room. “Aging is the process of dying slowly. Those who don’t age die in a flash. It takes one minute and they go from living to dead -- they don’t spend much time at all fading away.”
Hermione coughs uncomfortably. “That’s a bit dark, isn’t it?”
Luna looks confused. “No, not at all.” She winks at Harry, “Sometimes it means you get more time.”
Neville looks at Harry then, too. “So you decided to get some wrinkles like the rest of us mortals, hmm?”
Everyone else is still chatting and laughing at Harry’s new selection of wrinkles. Something about the couple at the end of the table, the rugged herbology professor and his ethereal researching wife, niggles a piece at the back of Harry’s mind. You decided to get wrinkles like the rest of us mortals ... It was presented like a conscious choice.
Sometimes it means you get more time.
His three children graduate Hogwarts and he embarrasses them terribly. Ginny laughs beside him, face red as her hair used to be, eyes pleased and fond.
He tells her she’s still beautiful when her breasts sag and her face is decorated in miniature soft folds. Her breaths come shorter, her runs have turned to walks, her hips ache something fierce most nights. He studies potion books and notes from Severus Snape to make the aging potion more potent, starts drinking more of it, grits his teeth against the foul taste -- all to look the right age.
He carries Ginny up the stairs in their home when her knees start to go. She laughs and calls him a romantic. “You can just levitate me, you know.”
He kisses her forehead. “I’ll remind you that I’m a romantic who was raised by muggles, my beloved pureblood princess.”
She swats his arm. “Stop that. I’m a blood-traitor.”
Their children find them hysterical when they come and visit. Albus curls a hand around Scorpius’s waist and whispers, “We’ll be just like them when we’re older.”
When he lays Ginny down in her grave, he feels a piece of himself go under the soft earth with her.
Luna lays a withered hand on his shoulder. “It’ll get easier with time. She’ll always be a part of you, but there will be others.”
Harry, tears streaming down his face, turns to gaze into her anguished blue eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She gives him a sad smile. “This is nowhere near your ending. You smell like crickets and withered asphodel. You’ve been trying so hard to look like an old man, haven’t you? But you’ve still many years yet. You’ll bury me soon, too.”
Harry stares out at the graveyard where his children all stand holding one another. Hermione and Ron lie two graves down, tombstones filled with poetry of their love to each other, their children, and Harry. He's brought flowers to them every day for the past two years.
“You’re getting less cryptic with age.”
“It’s taken me a bit to comprehend the speech patterns of those who stumble blindly in the world.”
He lays a bouquet of yarrow over Ginny’s grave with the tenderness he used to use when curling a lock of red hair behind her ear and kissing her nose just to see it crinkle. “Is that so? Then can I ask you something candidly now?”
"I’m quite certain you know that I was a Ravenclaw. I breathe for the opportunity to answer life’s biggest questions.”
He stands. “Well then, will I ever die?”
Luna bends slowly over Ginny's tomb and lays down a bunch of alstroemeria. She runs her hand through the blossoms. “Oh Harry, everything dies. That’s the whole point.”
He does bury Luna. He leaves her no flowers. He gives her instead a pair of his shoes, a bottle-cap necklace and a note: “to keep you safe from the Nargles.”
The first Christmas he looks around at his children and realizes that they too are starting to look old, he decides he’s had enough. He wants to go before he buries his babies next to his wife and best friends.
He takes enough Angel’s trumpet to kill a troll and banishes the bottle. He closes his eyes in his overly large and empty bed. When his children find him in the morning, it will look like he passed peacefully in the night. He thinks, “I guess I’ll meet death like an old friend, walk with him into the world beyond.”
OH, BUT IT’S NOT YOUR TIME YET, MY DEAR. NOT YET. NOT NEARLY YET.