A/N: My entry for the Hogwarts Games' Triathlon, where the prompts were the word "evolution", the quote "I will grow old or die trying" and the genre "mystery", in which we watch Harry grow from a bright-eyed little boy to a war-hardened hero who may or may not have gone mad along the way.

When he is six years old he takes it for granted that the world is one day going to be brighter and shinier, and just nicer to him.

He pictures a future where he can watch what he wants on the telly, and play on his own computer, and visit the park and the zoo and the countryside whenever he wants. There will be no Dursleys and no Mrs. Figg and certainly no cupboard under the stairs. He'll live in a big house and maybe have his own family, with his own pretty wife and his own children, and they will have their own rooms and their own toys and they will be happy.

When he is six years old, Harry Potter does not doubt the possibility of his future.

When he is eleven years old, everything changes. There is a man with no body who is coming to make sure that Harry leaves his, and he is suddenly on edge and afraid and yet so very defiant and, of course, amazingly lucky.

He wins, by chance. He stumbles into the final room, alone, and looks in the mirror and feels the dead weight of triumph in his pocket. The Stone is hot against his skin.

He watches the turban unfurl and fall to the floor, and he looks at the man with two faces and forgets how to move his feet. He is shaking and choking and he tries not to let his hand twitch towards his pocket but it does anyway.

He looks at the creature latched onto Quirrell's head.

In the back of his mind he knows that he has to keep winning. And it becomes an incentive for him, a way of fighting on, to think of the future he once imagined he'd have and to believe that he'll either grow old or die trying.

When Quirrell lunges for him, Harry burns him with his touch.

(He wonders if maybe it is one last gift from his mother.

When the whisper of I love you reverberates through his mind, Harry thinks that he is going mad. But he sort of likes it because her voice makes him want to smile and cry and the same time and he is sure then that she loves him.)

He doesn't understand it, and maybe he isn't supposed to, but he has lost count of the numbers of times that he has walked the threshold of consciousness and heard his parents whisper goodnight.

At first it worried him. You're mad, Potter, he thought, you can't be hearing your parents. They're dead. But he sees now that maybe going insane isn't as bad as they make it out to be. Maybe being a little bit crazy can be good for you; maybe it's a good thing.

Or maybe thinking that being mad is good is, well, mad.

When he is seventeen, he finds himself in an empty tent with a lot of time on his hands, and he spends it thinking.

At some point in his journey, Harry stopped dreaming of the future, stopped thinking of growing old with a certain red-haired beauty on his arm. Instead, he thought of ways to destroy Voldemort and ways to save the world and never did it occur to him that there might be more after this. He wonders, sometimes, what it would be like to hold his firstborn in his arms, or give his daughter away on her wedding day, or become Head of the Auror Office, but these are simple fantasies of a better world, a world that wasn't made for Harry James Potter.

Then the voices whisper to him, telling him that the braver he fights, the more he'll see. It doesn't disturb him anymore, that he hears his parents whisper to him long after they have gone. It's not as if everything in his life this far has been entirely normal, and maybe he's not mad, maybe they do talk to him.

Keep your head up, they say, the end is near.

And there are two ways he could take that, but Harry, being Harry, thinks that the voices wants him to know how little time he has left and to make good use of it.

But then again, the voice could want him to know that his life won't end in tragedy and he won't be a victim of a war that never should have started.

But Harry, being Harry, blinks these thoughts away and tries to put himself in the mind of the enemy that will surely kill him. There are Horcruxes to hunt, after all.

When he is still seventeen (seventeen again, some might say) he is carried from the forest in the arms of a man whose tears fall like rainwater and whose sobs echo through the trees. Harry's heart burns with the need to open his eyes and prove he is alive so that Hagrid can stop mourning, stop crying, stop breaking to pieces in front of the enemy. He knows they must love this.

He uses it to his advantage though. With Hagrid's chest wracking with those breath-stealing sobs and his arms shaking with defeat, with grief, with heartache, Harry can afford to sneak slow, deep breaths.

The forest air is alive with the scent of war; fire, blood, death.

And as Hagrid carries him out of the forest, it occurs to Harry that he has made it this far. He died, he actually died, and here he is, breathing and thinking and quietly planning.

When Hagrid lays him on the ground and Voldemort begins to speak like he has won, Harry stills his chest as much as he can and listens behind that cold, cruel voice. He listens to the gasps of shock, the quiet sobs, and the muted sounds of fear. He hears the sound of pure terror ripple among the Order, among the students, among his companions. He wonders whether they would feel as broken if they knew that this was supposed to happen, that Harry was never meant to live. He wonders if they would miss him as much if they knew he was mad.

And it occurs to Harry that even if he loses everything, it doesn't matter because he has lived a good and meaningful life with these people.

Flashes of a sea of ginger hair and bushy brown plaits, and rough broom handles and cakes and special jumpers, and nights by the fire and Nargles and the Room of Requirement, and so many things that aren't to do with war and loss and death, flit through his mind and Harry knows that he has one chance left to secure himself a future.

And he finds that if it doesn't come, he won't mind all that much. Because he'll have spent his life making sure that everyone around him lives to be old and grey and happy, and even if he never sees his red-haired, green eyed son tumble through the grass with Ron's brown-haired blue eyed daughter, he knows that life goes on.

He leaps to his feet.

There is a one last battle.

This time, there are no shaking hands or spluttering words. He's still afraid, and rightfully so, but this war is bigger than him and being brave doesn't mean you're not afraid; it means being afraid and doing what you need to do anyway.

Harry stands straight backed and sure, watching those red eyes narrow in contempt, and his words are as steady as he offers a young boy called Tom one last chance at remorse. But the man called Voldemort answers with a curse, and so Harry fights back.

Voldemort thuds to the floor.

(Somewhere that's not quite pretend and yet not quite real, Lily Potter curls up and watches her son's life unfold. She wraps her arms around her knees and bites her nails and weeps because this is not what she wanted for her Harry and also because she couldn't be prouder of how amazing and brave and perfect he is.

Harry. Her Harry.

So she whispers to him. She watches him sit alone and she hopes that, somehow, he will hear her.

"We're watching you, sweetheart," she says. "Keep your head up. The end is near. We believe in you."

It's true, every word, and Lily hugs her legs tighter and cries into the soft cotton of her sundress when she watches Harry find out that he needs to be killed.

She knows that he's thinking of her, and James, and Dumbledore and Sirius and Remus and Tonks and Fred and everyone else he's lost. She knows that Harry takes those shaky steps onwards because he believes that his family and friends wait in a different, kinder world with open arms and endless gratitude.

And then the world around her shimmers and Lily finds herself in a forest.)

(James sits with his legs crossed and his wife's head in his lap. They watch their son win the war that they should have ended, and James wipes the tears from Lily's cheeks because he doesn't like to see her cry.

"Happy tears, James, these are happy tears," she says, and leans up to kiss him.

(And somewhere far away, Harry hears familiar voices in his mind that say I knew you could do it and go on, son! and thank you and we love you and even a proud and strong we knew it all along.)

It hits James that all these years (but not years, because what is time anymore?) that they have spent watching Harry, they have seen a scared little boy grow into a brave, kind-hearted man, and that they will get to see him grow old and grow up and live the life that they've always wanted for him.

The life that they couldn't give him; a happy one.

And they will sit here all the while, limbs tangles together and hands entwined, with Sirius on one side and Remus on the other, and they will watch their Harry live a longer life than any of them had a chance to.

And he knows that their lives were worth giving if it meant that Harry got to live his.)

As his life goes on, Harry hears the whispers less frequently. Only when something important happens, like James' birth (Well done, son!) or Lily's wedding (She's beautiful, Harry. You should be so proud!) or the birth of Albus' sons (Twins! Oh, dear!) do those familiar voices make an appearance.

And maybe he's not mad. Maybe they do speak to him.

(But then again, maybe they don't.)