Harry didn't realize that the stone was the Resurrection Stone, or that he was a Horcrux, so there was no self-sacrifice: just one big ass battle in front of Hogwarts. Now Death is giving him another chance...whether he wants it or not. Sense he's stuck reliving his life, he might as well have a bit of fun with it :D

Crossover: Harry Potter & Sandman
Pairing: Harry Potter & Death the Endless

Entry 3: Death Becomes Him

It was over. The Horcruxes were destroyed, the Death Eaters were dead or captured, and Voldemort was finally -definitely- dead.

Harry sighed as he leaned back in Dumbledore's very comfy chair in the deceased headmaster's old office. Though he supposed that now he'd have to get used to calling it the headmistress's office, as soon as Professor McGonagall officially accepted the promotion.

He took another sip from the glass of firewhiskey he'd been nursing for the past half hour, ever since he'd managed to get away from the impromptu infirmary that had been set up for survivors of the battle in the Great Hall. He'd been one of the lucky ones, only suffering from exhaustion. His mind, his body, his magic: you name it, he'd exhausted it. Others hadn't been so lucky. Fred had lost an ear, Ron had been Crucio'd into unconsciousness, Hermione took a blasting curse to the chest from Bellatrix, Ginny and Luna got hit with shrapnel from another curse, Hagrid was in critical condition after being bitten by Nagini in her death throws, Cho lost an eye to Rookwood...almost everyone he knew had been injured while he had been busy fighting Voldemort. The lucky ones would see the new day rise with scars and stories to tell their kids and grandkids...the unlucky ones would never know a world without Voldemort's shadow.

George, Tonks, Remus, Professor Sprout, Snape, Crabbe, Goyle, Colin, Ernie, and others he didn't know who'd come to fight anyway, had all given everything they had to bring an end to the dark times. Their sacrifices would be remembered; there were already talks of statues and Order of Merlins.

Harry drained his glass to drive their faces from his mind. He leaned forward to refill it when he felt something poke him in the thigh. He pulled the offending object from his pocket as he poured, only to find the stone Dumbledore had willed to him. He'd forgotten all about it in the chaos of the past few days. He sat back in the chair with his now full glass of firewhisky, absently rolling the stone around in his hand. Now that he had the time, he wondered again what the old man had intended when he gave him the stone. He wished he could ask him if he'd gotten everything right, if there hadn't been another way. He'd hoped to quiz the former headmaster's portrait, but it had been vacant since his arrival, just like all the others. He supposed that the former heads of Hogwarts were giving him some much needed time to pick himself up after the day he'd had. "Well, it's not like I can't ask him later," he thought as he took another sip of his drink-

"Hello Harry."

-only to spit the amber liquid over the old mahogany desk. He looked up into the twinkling eyes of the closest thing he'd ever had to a grandfather. Well, his ghost anyway.

"I didn't take you for the drinking type, Harry," the ghost of Dumbledore said conversationally.

"I'm not. I heard it was supposed to take the edge off. I've had a very...busy day." He knew it was a lame answer, but he was tired and just drunk enough to not care.

"Yes, I had heard something about that on the other side. Bits and pieces mostly. It can take some time for the recently departed to get their facts straight."

"Oh, really? You learn something new every day. But speaking of the departed, what brings you here? And why not a few hours ago when I could have used your help piecing your plan together?" Harry asked, taking another sip of his whiskey. He supposed he could have put a bit more emotion and less sarcasm into his questions, but the firewhiskey was leaving him with a relaxing warmth that made everything seem less horrible, and he really didn't want to ruin that.

"I suppose some explanations are in order," Dumbledore said. He sat in a chair across from Harry and sank halfway through the seat before correcting himself. Harry grinned at the discomfort on the ghosts face. Apparently 'always in control Dumbledore' had yet to get the hang of his ghostly body. Dumbledore acted like nothing had happened and started his explanation. "The reason I am here now is because of that stone in your hand." Harry started and held up the stone he hadn't realized he was still holding on to. "Yes, that's the one. I had hoped you would determine the use of the stone earlier, or that Miss Granger would have made the connection between it and her book." He paused to see if Harry had managed to connect the dots yet, but the boy-who-lived was perfectly content to listen for now and sip his whiskey. Dumbledore didn't leave him waiting for long. "That stone is the fabled Resurrection Stone, one of the Deathly Hollows; the companion to the Elder Wand I once held and your own Invisibility Cloak," he said with a nod to the items lying on the side of the desk where Harry had left them when he'd walked in, along with his own broken wand, its brother he had taken from Voldemort's remains, and the wand he'd won from Draco months ago. Harry wondered when he'd become such a collector, and absently mused about mounting some of them later on.

The ghostly headmaster wasn't done. "Though I would like to congratulate you on accomplishing the task I had spent much of my life trying to realize, I'm afraid that there is still work to be done."

Dumbledore's tone brought Harry's drink-addled mind back on task. "What do you mean, Sir? Voldemort's dead, the horcruxes are all destroyed, and the Death Eaters are all dead or in chains. We won. It's over."

"I'm afraid you are only mostly right, Harry. Voldemort is not yet dead."

Harry felt all the blood drain from his head down to somewhere around his ankles. He would have dropped his glass of whiskey if it hadn't been sitting on the arm rest already. He croaked out the only word his suddenly dry throat could manage. "No."

"I am afraid so, Harry. Tom had one final horcrux that you failed to identify. He still lives: a fraction of a fraction of himself and almost completely inhuman, but still alive in some way."

Harry felt the blood return to his face with a surge of anger and determination. "So he's got one piece left? Fine. I'll destroy it like I did all the others. I've got the Sword of Gryffindor back and more Basilisk venom than I can ever use. All I need to know is the where and what so I can end it for good."

"I fear it will not be as simple as you think-"

"I have gone through too much, lost too many people to give that bastard even a fraction of a chance to come back again," Harry cut him off angrily, with steel in his voice and fire in his eyes. "The hardest part of horcrux hunting is finding and identifying the horcrux, and I'm certain you already know where to find it and what it looks like, otherwise you wouldn't be telling me this. No more games and no more riddles. Just tell me what I need to know so I can finish this."

Harry could see the headmaster's ghostly eyes age indescribably as he said what Harry had demanded of him. "You will not have far to look. The 'where' is this very office. And the 'what'...is you."

Harry could feel his blood drain down to his toes once more as cold sweat beaded across his body. He was suddenly very sober. He wanted to believe it was all a lie, but it all made sense now. This was the piece of the puzzle he had been missing earlier. This was the answer to all his questions. This was the proof that he'd gotten everything wrong. And he knew what he had to do to make it right.

"I have to die." Harry said it as barely a whisper, but the certainty of it was clear as day.

"I'm sorry Harry. I am so very sorry. But for Voldemort to cease to be, sacrifices must be made-"

"Sacrifices have been made!" Harry roared. "Remus, Tonks, Sirius, my parents! Almost everyone I've ever loved has died because of that monster!" he raged, flinging his glass of whiskey across the room to shatter against a bookcase.

The only sound in the room was Harry's heavy breathing, but that was quickly quieting down. Even the various gadgets lining the walls had stilled.

Harry slumped bodily into his chair and let the silence wash over him for a few minutes. Finally, when the silence started to feel deafening, he looked up into Dumbledore's eyes and with great resignation said, "for the greater good, right?"

He reached for his wand on instinct, before remembering to go for Malfoy's wand. Looking over his wand collection, his eyes settled on the Elder Wand and his mind flashed to all the trouble he went through to get it away from Voldemort...only to tell everyone on the battlefield that he was the true master of the most sought after wand in history.

Somehow it seemed fitting to end the cycle of killing with his own death.

Before his nerve cold fail him, he picked up the Elder Wand and cast the one spell he never thought he would, least of all on himself. "Avada Kedavra."

The green flash was so bright that he instinctively closed his eyes. When he opened them again he was quite surprised. Apparently the afterlife looked exactly like the Headmaster's office, complete with a gaping now-in-color headmaster and a fuming pale girl with raven locks wearing black punk clothes and a silver necklace with some kind of cross on it.

"What the hell were you thinking, Wonderboy?!" she demanded angrily.

"Er, excuse me?" Harry asked, not as suprised by the unexpected verbal assault as he should be due to long practice. He looked to Dumbledore for help, but he didn't seem to be coming out of his gaping fit anytime soon. Harry turned back to the girl and asked, "Who are you, exactly?"

Her response was as sudden and blunt as her entrance. "Death."

Harry blinked in surprise. He took a closer look at her this time. She was petit, shorter than him even, with longish ebony hair in a weird spiky up do, wearing skinny black jeans, black boots, a black strap tee with a band name he vaguely recognized, and enough fine silver jewelry on her arms and ears to rent a small flat. Her eyes were almost the same shade of killing-curse green as his own, and filled with a depth of knowledge and wisdom that exceeded what he had ever seen in his own headmasters eyes. Her glare seemed to notch up a few points at his scrutiny. "Sorry, but, you're not what I was expecting."

"And what were you expecting?" she asked sarcastically. "A skeleton in a robe maybe? With fiery red eyes and lugging a great big scythe?" As she spoke, she started to morph into what she described: her flesh paled until it seemed transparent over the bones within, her tight shirt shook in an invisible wind and billowed out into a voluminous robe, and her eyes lit up with a red light. "Maybe you'd prefer the reaper," she hissed through her transparent lips.

When an ethereal scythe started to manifest in her nearly transparent hand, Harry cracked. "Wait! The cute moody girl look is perfectly fine with me!"

The transformation stopped abruptly. Death flickered back and forth between reaper and Goth girl a few times before settling on her original form, except now she sported a smug grin instead of the piercing glare from before.

Harry sighed in relief as the mood lightened. Then he remembered what he was doing and the tension returned. "So. I'm dead?" he asked carefully.

"Nope," she said, her grin faling to a serious line.

"Huh? But I just cast the killing curse-"

"No, you just tried to cast the killing curse with the Elder Wand," she cut him off. "In case you hadn't realized yet, that wand is not normal. It's one of my artifacts, and thus incredibly powerful compared to most wands-especially in the hands of its true master. And with that master also in command of both of its sibling artifacts, it's never been stronger. It wasn't about to give that up, nor would it willingly harm its master, so instead of knocking just your soul into the astral plane like you wanted it to, it instead sent your body along with it. Or hadn't you noticed that you still had a body?"

Harry started in surprise. He looked from the floor below him to the chair behind him. She was right, there was no body in sight. And he was pretty sure ghosts didn't get pounding headaches like the one he felt coming on. He reached for the nearest headache aid, namely the still half-full bottle of firewhiskey, only for his hand to pass right through it. He stared at his hand for a moment in surprise, then he sighed in exasperation. "Of course. Only I could screw up killing myself this badly," he grumbled. He turned back to the straight-faced embodiment of Death and just-recovering Dumbledore. "So how do I get back?"

"I can send you back," she said, making Harry hope. "But I won't."

Harry scowled, but remembering who he was dealing with let him rein in his anger. Barely. "Why not?!"

"Because you'd just try to kill yourself again, for all the good it wouldn't do," she said matter-of-factly.

"What do you mean? I have to die so Voldemort can't return!" he nearly screamed. Harry's head was pounding and his breath was heavy. He couldn't take much more of this. It was supposed to be over! But then Dumbledore had to show up and tell him it wasn't, and he had to kill himself and fail, and now Death herself was saying she could help him but wouldn't, and-

"Except that you're already too late."

Harry's train of thought stopped as abruptly as his panic attack. "What?" he whispered with what little air he could force out of his lungs.

"Tommy boy has already found a new host, so he'll be back eventually. And this time he'll make sure you're unable to stop him."

Harry collapsed bonelessly into his chair. "It's hopeless."

"I wouldn't say that." She waited until Harry locked his blank eyes on to hers before finishing. "I want him dead too. And I'm willing to help make sure that happens."

"Might I ask why?" Dumbledore asked, having finally recovered from his earlier surprise.

"He has defiled life and death to escape me, and I cannot allow that to go on. It disturbs the balance too much. So I'm going to help you."

"Then, you will send Harry back to fulfill the prophecy?"

"No. It's already too late for that. The prophecy is already completed, and not in Harry's favor. Sending him back out there now won't do any good."

"But then how do you plan to help him, exactly?"

"I'm going to send him back to the beginning to try again."

"The beginning?" he asked. His sharp mind quickly deduced her meaning. "You intend to send him back in time?"

"Yep."

"Wait, what?" Harry interrupted. "You've gotta be kidding. How is sending me back in time going to fix anything? I've time traveled before, and in the one day I went back I nearly died another half dozen times! It only worked because I had Hermione covering me and I got stupidly lucky. Sending me back would just get me killed sooner. So thanks, but no thanks."

Death frown at him. "You don't actually have a choice."

"But what about the time stream, and the butterfly effect, and- and-!" Harry tried to recall anything else Hermione had ranted about in third year when explaining the dangers of time travel to him.

Death shrugged his concerns away. "Eh, all of that stuff works itself out eventually. Time is a lot less breakable than mortals give it credit for," she said. "Now you might feel a slight pinch and some queasiness, but that'll go away eventually." With a snap of her fingers, Harry's world faded to black.

When he opened his eyes, Harry didn't know where he was. He immediately ticked off the places he usually woke up: not enough white for the Hospital Wing, too big for Ron's room, too dirty for Privett Drive, too cold for his dorm, not cluttered enough for the tent, and not Grimmauld Place. Dirty and cold as is was, this place didn't have the same tinge of evil in the air. So where was he?

He sat up from where he'd been sleeping on the floor and looked around. The house was old, made of worn wood that creaked loudly as the storm raged outside. It was more of a shack than a house now that he thought about it. The room was undecorated except for a cold fireplace and a battered couch. There was a bulbous lump snoring on the couch that looked vaguely familiar. It kind of reminded him of his cousin Dudley when...he...was... "Oh shit."

He looked down at the new watch on his cousins arm that was hanging off the couch. It read 11:59 and counting.

Harry remembered this. He remembered this place, this situation, this time.

The watch beeped 12. It was midnight June 31, 1991, and he was now 11 years old. He knew what was going to happened next.

"No."

KNOCK

He was on a rock in the middle of the sea about to find out he was a wizard for the second time. He'd have to go through everything he'd ever been through just like he had before.

"No no no."

KNOCK

Harry almost cried. Why couldn't Voldemort have ever gotten killing him right, just once, and spared him the torture he was about to go through?

"No no no no no!"

With one final echoing KNOCK the door of the shack fell off its hinges and a giant of a man stooped to fit through the opening. "Happy Birthday Harry!" Ruebeus Hagrid shouting happily, even as his Aunt and Uncle stumbled out of there room and leveled frightened looks and a shotgun at the man.

Harry Potter was going back to school.

I know it's an Ahnk. You know it's an Ahnk. But Harry doesn't even know what an Ahnk is.

I know it says this is supposed to be humorous, and it is. I just had to get the dark stuff out of the way first so I could move on to the funny stuff.