As promised, this is the coda. It's pretty cosmic / psyche / meta.

This coda happens hella years (you chose how many) after the previous chapter. It's more or less like a bonus.

The world of dead souls (October 17 20xx)
Coda: Within reach of particles

Harry did not need to open his eyes to know that he was, many years after May 2d, 1998, back in limbo. Yet he was not lying on the smooth, cool surface of King's Cross. He was curled up into a ball on a damp, grainy soil smelling like dirt and stagnant water. The setting reminded him less of London station than of the Amazonian rainforest.

But the sultry air and the tropical substrate did not deceive him. Harry coul recognize limbo's eerie and dreamlike atmosphere with his eyes tightly closed.

After long seconds, the wizard finally unglued his eyelids from one another and took a look around him. Everything was as in his memories. Water was stagnating in a basin, just a few inches from his face. A thick bare branch was suspended above his head. And to his right an immense window covered with fingerprints reflected his stupefied look.

Limbo had nothing to do with King's Cross anymore. They were still as white, still as ethereal, but now it looked like a vivarium.

A very banal vivarium, moreover, just worthy of a communal zoo, but a vivarium Harry knew well and that he carried in his heart, even if he had only seen it once in his life, It was so long ago ...

It was in front of this very glass cage that he had discovered he could talk to snakes. It was in this Surrey zoo on Dudley's birthday that he really became aware he was not an ordinary boy.

King's Cross ... King's Cross, this gigantic and turbulent station, how much he had loved it! It would always be the gateway to the magical world, the place where, for the first time, a sense of belonging had burst in his chest. According to him, the railway station was the ultimate turnaround place.

The fact Limbo appeared to him as a white King's Cross had never surprised Harry, quite the contrary. After all, Limbo was nothing but a mental in-between, it takes the form of one's conception of the 'intermediary'. What other place than the London's station to represent the passage from one world to another?

But it was clear that Limbo had drastically changed. It was still so pure, but it was more humble. The ceiling height was ridiculous compared to the previous limbo's and let's not even talk about the decoration. However, this modest glass box was perfect for Harry.

For now Harry was older, the small unnamed zoo located a few miles from Little Whinging was a more important place for him than the imposing King's Cross. It was there that his life had taken an irreversible turn, more than a month before Hagrid told him he was a wizard, more than a month before he took the secret passage to Platfom 9 3/4 for the first time.

It was at the zoo that his entire existence had been turned upside down, although he only understood that years later. But it was obvious now. How could he have stayed the same, after his human tongue had become forked, after he had suspected there was a snake in him?

In summary, the wizard liked vivarium Limbo a lot, although he felt no pain at the thought of leaving.

xXx

Harry stood up and noticed that, while he was daydreaming, the vivarium's glass had disappeared. It was so simple, the window to the other world was wide open ... He did not have to wait for a train, he just had to step forward. And that's what he did.

As soon as his left toes were on the other side of the vivarium, they began to disintegrate like the end of a cigarette that had just been lit. It was pretty, in truth. There was at the end of his foot a delicate golden halo, composed of tiny fragments of soul seeking to disperse in the air. It waved like the round smoke which escapes from a pipe and it was attracted by the rest of the world.

Before this unusual sight, Harry was not disturbed. Indeed, he did not suffer at all from this dissolution. On the contrary, he craved to let himself be dispersed, he dreamed of disappearing like this, like a weary vampire touched by the sun's blessed rays.

It would have been so easy for him to leave his dust-body in the hands of the flow! All struggle seemed absurd; what was the point of delaying the most tender end? Why be afraid, why refuse to get lost in the Universal Soul? Was he not returning to the Mother he would return whatever happened?

But even though the urge was strong, Harry resisted. He had one last thing left to do.

So the wizard collected all his strength, recalled to him the aura of particles coming from his toes and continued to move forward. Soon his whole foot, then his leg, and even a piece of his right hand were going up in smoke, and Harry, in spite of himself, with shame, enjoyed this impression of lightness.

This did not prevent him from doing all he could to reincoporate the runaway particles. He silently ordered his body to remain united; he begged the dust to stick to his skin.

But many were the particles which were too far away to hear him calling or which were too small to go against the flow. Wandering, unconscious, they no longer belonged to his soul ... Harry let them go without shuddering. He did not have time to weep over their disappearance. He focussed all his attention on the still salvable pieces of his being. There were few, but he did not need much of them, to fulfill his last will.

When Harry was entirely on the other side of the vivarium, he no longer was made of matter. What had once been his body was now nothing more than a cluster of barely interconnected microscopic elements, a vague form, less precise than a phantom.

But although there were very few fragments left, the pain was as acute as when he was a living being. And it did hurt to fight against the flow! Each of his particles was itching, eager to join the rest of the universal soul, extending all around him.

For, having taken a step forward, Harry had definitely left Limbo. He had cross over into the world of souls, or rather, into the world of the Universal Soul, the soul from which all souls are born and the one to which all return, after the death of the body.

The Universal Soul was at once a sky and an ocean. It was a flow and a wind, it was blue and green, it was water and night. It was One and Multiple, for all the dead souls' particles it ingested, it immediately digested them.

It was an infinite and vibrant stretch of universe, nervous and rumbling, opaque as an altostratus opacus and translucent as an altostratus translucidus, and it reclaimed its own. Was it singing a lullaby or a siren song? Harry did not know. On the other hand, he did not doubt he would soon succumb to the maternal voice. But not yet.

He struggled to navigate the waters of the endless Mother, swimming with difficulty, with a mixture of respect and apprehension, in the Being which had been his cradle and was about to become his coffin.

But not yet, he repeated. Before giving back his soul to the world, he had to find someone ...

It was not his parents. Although very weak, Harry was even less deluded than in his lifetime. His parents, but also Sirius, Lupin, Tonks and even Snape, all the people he would have liked to meet on the other side of the veil were already lost forever in the universal soul. If the persons he loved had waited for him, he would have felt their reassuring presence at the very moment he had set foot outside the vivarium.

Harry could not blame them. The idea of releasing the tension he excerted to keep his elements in place seduced him as a love promise and, had it not been for Tom, he would also have run straight into the arms of the Mother Soul.

The powerful flow echoed around him like an Imperius or a Felix Felicis order, telling him to join the harmony. Yes, that was it, going against the flow in the Universal Soul's sky was like going against Felix. It was dumb, but Harry still was a bit dumb, for even though he was dead and disembodied, he was still a bit human.

xXx

As a result, Harry did his best not to lose focus and he continued to explore the Mother Universe, looking for another individual soul which was like him, struggling to stay in one piece or so.

It took him more time than he wished. He lost several of his elements, but after drifting for a long time he finally met the Horcrux.

He recognized him as one recognizes his own reflection in a distorting mirror, without a doubt, without a second thought. That thing floating in the Universal Soul, gasping like a Japanese carp, it was Tom, it was the Dark Lord's accidental Horcrux, it was a fragment of soul which had not been nor quite Tom Riddle's, nor quite Harry Potter's. Well, that was what was left of it.

The Horcrux, which already was only a piece of soul when it had joined the world of dead souls on the day of the Battle of Hogwarts, was now only a crumb. It had been confronting the flow during all those years, grabbing itself, like a pathetic shrimp with broken legs clinging on a rock, and the terrible flow had carried away most of its carapace, leaving it every time more naked, more vulnerable.

Its particles did not shine like Harry's, with a lively and joyful glow. They crackled faintly and looked like a very old Christmas garland, its few remaining bulbs busting a gut working, in a pitiful effort.

Yet, when Harry found the Horcrux in this saddening state, he felt no pity. If destiny had decided otherwise, their places could have been reversed, and if it had been him, Harry, who had had to pass into this world first, he too would have waited for his Other self to join him for ages, he would have relentlessly fought the flow, till Tom would find him or till his exhausted soul would completely crumble apart.

He had not considered for a moment that the Horcrux could have done things differently. And Tom had not disappointed him. He was there, blunted and shattered, yeah, shining with great difficulty, but within reach of particles. Harry was not thankful. That was how things were to happen. But if he still needed one, he had before him the proof his mental adventure with the accidental Horcrux had not been a dream. Despite his lies, despite his dark status, Tom had loved him.

Harry came a little closer. Their respective particles were so close ... if one of the two souls was to slightly release the tension, they would inextricably get mixed up. By mutual agreement, Tom and Harry were postponing the fateful moment.

They began to wiggle awkwardly against each other, holding their breath, holding back their dust, celebrating in their own way their first encounter or their last reunion. It lasted only a short time, truth to tell, just enough time to murmur an oath without echo in the world of the dead. And they felt like algae a fish's tail would have accidentally stirred or like the tentacles of a jellyfish, lovingly entangled.

When they had had enough of pretending to be alive and in the flesh, their individual souls finally blended together, in a rush as tender as an elusive sigh. Those who had once had a body allowed themselves to be dispersed, and their dust amalgamated, attracting one another, for they were saturated with static electricity.

Nothing painful or harrowing, in this. No tearing or bursting, nothing oppressive; simply a dual soul giving itself over to the elementary unity. And at last they found themselves intimately mixed, and it was impossible to guess that they had ever been anything but a single ray of dust.

Nobody was there to laugh at the absurdity of their story, for they had long wanted to separate their two souls and, in the end, they had only managed to confused themselves even more. No one was there either to laugh at the irony of their destiny, at the fact their only way to become One had been to become crumbs.

No, their audience, the Universal Mother, did not laugh. It was a delight for her to see her two children annihilate themselves one into the other, collapsing on themselves after such a long separation. It waited patiently for their emulsion to be complete before recalling them, so they would drown for good in the simplest and largest unit.

When nothing remained of them but a sand lump, which quartz grains could not be distinguished from its shellfish remnants, the Soul among souls made its waves rumble. The flow quickly swep away the small pile of dust.

xXx

It would be wrong, however, to say that Harry's and Tom's souls had disappeared. For every particles of every individual souls, after having slided for some time in unison, into the waters and the tumultuous skies of their mother, end up sinking, falling upon the world of the living.

And they feed a river, and they cause a storm, and they make a child teething. Splinters of Harry and Tom were falling on Earth and in every being and every thing they touched, they created a spark of magic.

THE END FOR GOOD

When I talk about 'Dust', I'm refering to Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials is the best saga ever, I'm sorry Harry Potter).

When I talk about Individuals and Universal Souls, I'm refering to Plotinus, a neoplatonist. The Enneads is terribly difficult to read though.
You're free to imagine Harry's life and death as you want.

This story is finally over! Thank you everyone for having read this monster. Do not hesitate to leave a comment on Ao3 or on , it was a pleasure to translate my fav work.