He wandered for days.

It was not for lack of purpose. He was going to kill himself, and anyone can die anytime and anywhere.

He did not fear leaving this mortal plane. His body had only ever caused him torment and Dudley had rejected him, making it clear to the deer that while the world might smile upon some souls, such as the wretched Dudley, others would forever be cast in shadow, slotted in to form rows and rows of an army of the damned. Yes, that was one of the ways he saw life now: if God was real, and decided who would be blessed and who would have to earn every scrap of affection and respect they could get, then the Jobs of the universe were indeed as faceless and disposable as soldiers in an army.

But there were other ways to see life.

Death was his chance for deliverance, he had fallen just a little bit in love with it already (and wasn't that a great loud warning bell? Had he not given his love once already, and had that not cost him his will to live?), and amidst his many conflicting thoughts and emotions a tiny spark of hope dared to burn somewhere deep within, for he had the fledgling hope that maybe, just maybe, death might grant him his happy ending.

Whatever that might be.

And yet, paradoxically, the more he thought about it, the more he dreaded death.

When he had first killed himself he had made what at the time had been the very logical assumption that death would mean dying. The existence of an afterlife had been irrelevant, for he had wanted first and foremost to escape, and both oblivion and an afterlife would grant him that. He would not even have minded hell. Now, unfortunately, he knew that it might not be so. He might get resurrected again, never given the chance to open his eyes and look upon God, and then where would he be?

How could he possibly be saved?

It was in times such as these that he wished he had been born in the wild, for even if he had still had his intellect, he might still have known companionship. He would have had a mother, and even if she did not understand him she would still be his designated guardian figure, his mentor figure. He would have had someone to go to.

(Why, oh why had he been assigned to the Dursleys? It could not be random, yet there seemed to be no point to it at all. Perhaps that was the point?)

And so he wandered, pondering, as his mind became clouded with uncertainty and doubts, until one morning he found himself on a meadow. It was lovely: the early rays of sunshine shone gently on the lingering mist, giving it an otherworldly appearance, and yet it was nothing out of the ordinary, for the forest was full of meadows, the sun always shone pale in the morning and there was mist after every night. He was aware of and appreciated its radiance, but with each passing day he appreciated these beautiful sights less.

Still, he let his gaze glide across that meadow, not for interest but in a bid to stall, to fill five seconds of his existence, to take the briefest of breaks from his troubles - and then he found himself looking straight into another pair of eyes.

There, just beyond where the tree line began, sat a huntsman. He had been almost perfectly hidden, but Harry had seen him, and now his eyes widened.

For a few seconds, there was no telling which one of the two was tenser. Harry was safe at the moment, for a tall rock stood between them at an angle that shielded him beautifully. The hunter did not look to be sure quite what to think: he had probably expected Harry to run the second they made eye contact, but now that Harry was standing so very still, simply looking at him, he likely believed his prey was trying to ascertain whether there was any danger or not. His best shot (in every sense of the term) would be when Harry finally moved, if he was quick enough.

The man was hardly breathing, and yet he slowly, ever so slowly, turned the mouth of his rifle so that it was pointed straight at Harry, whose limbs were burning with the instinctual desire to run.

And yet… wasn't this the chance he had been waiting for? The second he was dead, that hunter would burst forth like a beggar to a dime on the ground to gut him. Surviving death itself might be one thing, but this hunter might abuse his body too much for life ever to return to it. This hunter could be his best chance of dying, and it would happen someplace infinitely more beautiful than any asphalted highway could ever hope to be.

The huntsman was a godsend, come to grant Harry's truest desire.

And there is only one way to repay such courtesy.

He stepped out from behind the stone, and then the world disappeared before he even heard the gunshot.

Harry woke.

For a moment, that was all there was to it. Like with his previous resurrection he had one moment of pure awareness, one moment of simply existing. Perhaps this was the moment his brain kicked into gear: perhaps the sights around him did not register as separate objects because his brain had yet to compose itself enough to inform his conscious mind of what it was seeing. Or perhaps he was in shock.

Either way he sprang up the very next movement, as the truth of his situation dawned upon him. His worst fears had been confirmed.

He, Harry the too-clever deer, was immortal.

His killer screamed and ran for the door. Harry realised that they were inside a shed, and that he stood upon a table made slippery with blood. His blood.

Pieces of his fur lay in strips on the floor – so he was not to be a pelt, then. Otherwise, flesh lay neatly arranged on one side of the table. It appeared his killer was quite methodical: a hunter by habit. Harry doubted he would be hunting much more after this, however.

He wondered if his killer would try to tell anyone about what had happened, and if anyone would believe it. That was unlikely. Had Harry, in his eagerness to die, ruined the life of another, then? The man would have a terrible choice to make when it came to dealing with what had just happened, and Harry felt a most unexpected bout of kinship. Their situations might be vastly different, but they had both had their lives ruined by knowledge they were never meant to have, by unnatural things.

He stepped out of the shed, and looked at the man whose hands were shaking too badly to unlock the door to his car. He bowed his head in a repentant, unseen acknowledgement of the pain he had caused: this had never been his intention.

Then, quiet as only a sixty-pound animal can be, he stole away into the forest.

He resumed his wandering. (What else could he do?)

Immortality loomed over him, but not as heavily as it should. He could not quite get himself to believe that this was truly his lot in life: surely, he wondered in spite of himself, there had to be something more to existence? Surely there had to be something he was missing, some vital piece of information that would make everything make sense?

In the face of eternity he found himself regressing. He became childlike and stupid in his unwillingness to face the harsh truth of his fate, and that in turn made him feel strangely bloated, as though the clarity of his mind had become clouded with fat, cloying sentiment. He could not help himself, for it was basic self-preservation: never before had he stood quite so plainly upon the precipice of the madness and greatness once thought reserved for gods and heroes, and he found it to be too much.

How could anyone with human thoughts and human desires, with a mundane form requiring constant maintenance and vigilance to survive and to not be in pain, possibly endure eternity?

He closed his eyes, as if that would make this chasm that lay before him go away.

He tried to reason with himself. Was accepting what appeared to be his own nature really the way to go? He did not see what that could possibly bring him, but then, he did not see what else there was to do, considering how meaningless his life was, and how indubitable his immortality seemed. Still, though, accepting it would mean resigning himself to an eternity of nothing, and he owed it to himself to at least try to deduce his way to some other conclusion, to some better truth.

It wasn't as though he wouldn't have eternity if his failed.

And so, under the guise of being thorough, he started walking down the dark path of denial, and he began it with a question.

What, exactly, was he losing in acknowledging his fate?

His humanity, his mind answered him readily.

That might not be such a bad thing. His existence was not a happy one, but centuries and an attitude change might change that. Perhaps his unhappiness, which he had thought was rooted in his form as a deer, was instead rooted in some innate knowledge that he was- whatever he was. Perhaps he would have been just as lost as a human.

But then, what was the point of being a deer?

And here something struck him, for there was no reason there should be a sentient, immortal and in all ways impossible deer. Would it not be more logical, then, to assume he was in fact not a deer?

He lay very still, not daring to move for fear of letting the idea (or the escape) slip away.

What, exactly, constitutes a deer? What, for that matter, constitutes a human?

It was like a coup d'état, this moment. He had had epiphanies before, so he knew the feeling of them well, this feeling of everything shifting just slightly to make for a new way of seeing the world.

He was not a deer, and reality was not what he thought it was.

If it could be twisted so to allow him his existence – or if God had twisted it, for that matter – what did any of it mean? … come to think of it, this all but proved God's existence. There must be intent for such a thing to happen. Unless there were a lot more twists (he had no better word for it) such as him running about. How would he know? Could it even be a regular occurrence? The world he had seen from the Dursleys' garden was only on its shallowest plane, and it could even be the exception that proved the rule. He wondered if he, now that he was free of them might be able to find these twists, other unnatural things. Was there a physical place he could go? Logic told him no, although he had not seen much of the world. And he had only the words of others to prove that what he thought he knew was indeed so: what, exactly, had he actually been seeing with his own eyes? The Dursleys' belief that he was a normal deer was proof in itself that we make false assumptions unthinkingly.

He looked at the tree before him. Was it really a tree, or could it be sentient like he? Had it spent its entire life in this exact spot, from the day a seed found itself burrowing into the earth, or had it simply popped into existence one day? Had it existed prior to Harry's visit? If Dudley were to look at it too, would he see the exact same tree?

And yet he did not think the world was simple enough to allow him to simply walk into another plane of reality, or dimension, or wherever he was headed where he would be happy. He did not know the way, for one thing, but greater still was the problem that he couldn't quite sell himself on the idea that the world was somehow a fey land where those who walked far enough would wander into alternate realities. His existence was a bit too tangible for that to feel truly possible.

There was also the problem of an alternate reality where he was not a deer necessitated that he did not have a material form, which would make physically walking there very hard to put into real life.

The more he thought about it, the more it became clear to him that there was only one way he could be sure to leave this plane of reality, and it was the only way he wanted. His goal was to free himself from his deer form, and was not death the separation of soul and body? Would not that unlock his true self's potential someplace it would be appreciated?

Unfortunately, this great new idea had one logical breach: his whole predicament was that he couldn't die.

Or could he?

What was his immortality but bouncing straight back into his deer form like a jo-jo? Was it, assuming now that his form was a unique twist in reality that shouldn't be, possible that humans, whose forms were the default hosts for souls, were interchangeable, meaning that death for them was simply a change of body? Were they like a toddler's wooden shape sorting game, in that every human form was a square and there were billions of squares but Harry was the sole triangle, leaving his triangle soul with no place to go but back into its old slot?

Could this mean that he was alone in being impossible after all?

That could explain the time lapse between the time he died and the time he woke up.

And yet, it raised the question of why his soul was a triangle, why he should not only return to the same host, but wake up with all his memories intact too. This went beyond being unable to possess any host but his own: this was unkillability. What was he?

Perhaps he did not have a soul.

Perhaps this form was the only place in which he could exist. Or if he was in some other way tied intrinsically to his form, and for this reason unable to leave it, and reality… and there it was, that feeling of dread. Could it really be that he was damned to spend all of eternity stuck as a deer? …. damnit. His mind was like a boomerang, spinning far away towards the sky only to come crashing straight down to the wretched ground from whence it came. He tried to trace his thoughts back to where they had taken a turn, so to say, so that he might change direction and continue flying.

For if he was not a deer, and if this dimension was not the only one, then that did not necessarily mean that his soul was spending hours flitting about trying to escape only to return with its figurative tail between its legs and resigning itself to another while in his unworthy form each time he died. At this point it was as possible as anything else, but he did not want to believe the implications of it, and so he found this theory more and more ludicrous. He divorced himself from it.

It was dumb anyway.

No, his best clues were that he was unlikely to be an actual grass-eating deer, and that he spent his sweet time being dead before resurrecting. He was losing faith in the world's ability to make sense – why should it when he himself did not make any? – but he was not about to abandon reason and deduction. That way lay madness. No, he would be logical about this.

The leaves and the grass around him tasted sweet, the unseen wind ruffled his hairs and a constant pull kept him and everything else grounded to the world. This was a world of sensations, of matter, and in it he was a deer. Whatever he truly was had to be beyond it. And in death the interval between his last and first heartbeat had to be when he was not in this world. In death he existed on another dimension.

This was a fact. It was the only thing that made sense. Or so he really hoped.

(Sense and deduction had led him straight into the Dudley Disaster. He should be careful- but careful is for the afraid, for craven beings that would gladly spend their lives waiting to be reaped like corn)

Why, then, could he not remember it?

Were these dimensions somehow incompatible, forcing him to block out any memory he might have of another? If so, did he exist in the other dimension in a state of confusion, knowing nothing of his earthly life and deer form? Were thoughts and impressions from the other dimension so fundamentally alien that they could not be translated to something his brain could comprehend when he wasn't there?

This might actually make sense. Thoughts are electricity, and Harry doubted electricity existed in this other world, this world of souls. Perhaps thoughts, then, did not exist at all, not as we know them. But this was quickly getting depressing again, for his thoughts were the very thing that made him intelligent, that made him a not-deer.

(He wondered briefly if he, by that logic, would be a deer in death.)

There was, he realized, only one way to find out for sure. Reason and deduction was only going to get him so far: if he wanted to know what lay beyond death, he needed to die again.

And this time he would be strategic about it.

After trotting in what he hoped was a straight line for a surprisingly long time, he finally found a lake that looked deep enough.

His previous two deaths had been sudden and at the hands of others, even if he did consent to them. (Not that they had. That Peugeot driver he could only assume had had no intention of ramming down any sentient deer when he got into his car to drive to wherever that morning, and the huntsman had not known what he was getting involved in. Harry had been so consumed by his own thoughts and feelings that he never once stopped to think about others, and now he had no way of making it up to them. This he regretted.) He had been full of life in one second, dead the other, and violently so.

He wasn't sure that dying a slow, natural death was really the key to accessing – or remembering – this other reality, but it was worth a shot.

And so he wandered, then swam, into the lake, until he couldn't, and drowned.

Harry woke, but didn't make it back to the surface and drowned again.

It took him a full six attempts to get back to the shore, for deer legs are thin, hooves do little to propel a body forwards and his anatomy did not allow for dogpaddling. His onterment might still have been more due to the current than his abilities as a swimmer, however.

But that mattered little.

He felt cold, colder even than the water still covering him. Algae and dirt had gotten into his fur, but it somehow felt appropriate, as if marking him as an undead creature. No deer can go to bottom of a lake and live to tell the tale, after all. He would be a paradox to any who saw him.

Not that he was likely to run into anyone sentient this deep into the woods.

Not that it would matter.

Harry had drowned, several times now, and each time had been slow enough for him to feel death as a physical thing, as a numbness that consumed his body and was excruciating at the same time. He had felt every second of dying, and he had felt it again and again.

And still he had seen nothing but mud and the distorted rays of unreachable sunlight. There could be no more denying.

Harry the deer was, unmistakably and irrevocably, deathless.

He could no more die than he could reach the end of the rainbow.

Stumbling, unseeing, he walked forwards, but with no destination in mind. Where could he possibly go? He had no end. How could he have a beginning, or a between? His life was without purpose.

He found himself unable to care about anything. What could possibly be the point, when he was damned anyway? God, other realities, it all lay beyond him, stuck as he was on this cruel mortal coil. He had no will to even try and summon the anger of the slighted, for that, too, would fade in time, never having amounted to anything.

What can you do, what can you think and what can you even feel when you are not just eternal but eternally nothing?

An eternal human could exhaust the world's amusements and depravities, he could observe mankind's development, start a religion, have children and do social experiments on them for generations, do every drug in existence, and when he had had enough he could board a spaceship and see if he couldn't reach the end of the Universe. He could do anything.

Harry could eat grass.

These were the thoughts he had been trying to avoid, for they were too terrifying. In acknowledging his immortality and all of its implications, he relinquished his ability to live. How could he possibly take joy in anything now?

He was not ready for any of this. He doubted anyone could ever be, but it felt just a little bit harder for him.

He stopped walking, and sank into the ground. If he would lose interest in mortal pursuits soon enough, why not now? Succumbing then and there would not spare him his gruesome fate, but he would save himself from living a farce. His hopes, his deaths and the whole Dudley misadventure had been embarrassments enough as it was.

The only thing that came close to immortality in terms of filling him with bitterness was the knowledge that his every thought and every pursuit had, in the end, been in vain.

Strength faded from his limbs like smoke, and his head dumped unceremoniously down as if by its own accord. He could not think of a reason to raise it, so he let it lie there in the moss, unmoving.

There he lay, powerless, hopeless, thoughtless, miserable on the forest floor that should have been his grave. And he would gladly have done so for as long as the ground beneath him persevered, but the sound of a loud crack, followed by approaching footsteps, willed otherwise.

A/N: You, my much cherished readers and reviewers (I have no idea why anyone would put up with this nonsense but am glad some apparently do), have no idea how close I came to ending it here. In the end, wanting to torture Harry some more won out, but... yes. This is the story that, unlike Harry's existence, keeps trying to end itself.