Harry had memories of a life past lived, a life in which he was called Sunny by those close to him. A life that was full of experiences, both tender and terrible. He was born at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in a country that was neither too advanced nor too backward. It was a place that stood somewhere in the middle of the global ladder—ambitious but restrained, hopeful yet flawed.
The world was becoming faster and more foreign every day. New inventions, clothing styles, slang, ideologies and status symbols were accepted and discarded, often within a week. One day everyone was obsessed with one brand of phone, the next day it was already obsolete. Trends rose and fell like tides, and people rode them as if afraid of drowning in irrelevance.
It was a turbulent time where society was changing constantly and the world was changing with it. The internet was shrinking distances. Opinions were louder than facts. Everyone had a voice and most used it to shout.
Sunny had a rather average life at the beginning, and perhaps it was that averageness that made it so cherishable.
He had a loving family that raised him to the best of their abilities. Their house was modest, painted in a shade of cream that peeled at the corners. The ceiling fan creaked in summer. The kitchen always smelled faintly of spices and engine oil because his father often walked in straight from the yard without washing properly.
His father was his superhero, a giant of a man with wide shoulders and an even wider smile. He owned a small scrap metal business and didn't shy away from swinging a hammer all day long if need be. His palms were permanently calloused and his fingernails permanently dirty, but Sunny had never seen cleaner hands in his life.
The man was also an amateur bodybuilder and often took a young Sunny to the gym. He remembered his pride as he looked at his father with wild gaping eyes while he lifted enormous weights over his head. The gym was a temple of iron and sweat. The smell of rubber mats and metal plates was oddly comforting. Old fans buzzed overhead and mirrors lined the walls, reflecting ambition in every direction.
His old man would call him over to hand him a dumbbell and laugh boisterously when he couldn't even lift the damn thing, but instead rolled it over with enormous difficulty. He would ruffle Sunny's hair and say, "One day, you'll lift more than me. Just eat your meat and stop whining."
That man was a character larger than life and shaped the man Sunny would eventually become.
Sunny remembered posing in front of those giant gym mirrors with his little kiddie muscles looking utterly ridiculous, while imagining himself as well-built as his heroes were. He flexed his nonexistent biceps and sucked in his stomach, convinced that greatness was just around the corner. Those were certainly fun times in his hazy memories.
Introduction to the gym at a pre-teen age made him familiar with the idea of 'beefcake' or 'swol' at a very young age. He remembered obsessing over posters of legends, the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and dreaming of a day when he could follow in their footsteps. He memorized workout routines he found online. He argued on forums about protein intake as if it were a matter of national importance.
Unfortunately, the dreams of being a professional bodybuilder remained unfulfilled, mainly due to his utter refusal to take any supplements, always treating pharma products with disdain—something he inherited from his old man. "If you can't build it with food and grit, you don't deserve it," his father would say.
It also didn't help that he was a middle-class man, meaning no extra pocket change for specialized diets or trainers.
But that didn't stop him from spending a large part of his late teens and early twenties in his weight-lifting temple. He woke before dawn to jog through quiet streets. He learned the discipline of repetition, the quiet satisfaction of incremental progress. He eventually managed to achieve his goal of enormous biceps and well-defined packs. Those remained his pride until the very end.
He wasn't a genius. He wasn't particularly charismatic. He wasn't destined for headlines. And he was satisfied with it.
In time, he managed to somehow complete a diploma as a civil engineer and joined his father in the scrap business. He wasn't passionate about it, but he respected it. His father would often say, "Metal is the foundation of a civilization.", while swinging his hammer.
He settled down into an average life with an average income, average wife, and average children.
And he loved it.
His wife had a laugh that started as a snort and ended in musical giggles. He used to tease her mercilessly for it until she threatened to withhold dessert. They argued about small things—like whose turn it was to wash dishes—but they never slept angry. Not once.
His daughter inherited his stubborn chin. His son inherited his wife's eyes.
The best part was that he was content with what he had.
He never desired enormous wealth or fame, realizing very early in his life that having a good home and health were things to be thankful for. He learnt this lesson early—that he just wasn't made to be some clever person who could dazzle the world and earn both money and influence. He was a family guy through and through who cherished the small things.
He cherished Sunday breakfasts where pancakes came out burnt but edible. He cherished bedtime stories where he flexed theatrically and claimed monsters would run away from his muscles. He cherished the way his daughter clung to his leg when he pretended to leave for the gym forever.
From the outset, it looked like he would be following in his father's footsteps, by being almost a copy-paste of his sire's life.
All was good and well.
Until it wasn't.
A new war began almost a century after the last global one ended. Smaller conflicts had never truly stopped, but a worldwide war had been a forgotten concept in his time. People had believed themselves too civilized for it.
They were wrong.
It was a war over dwindling resources and differences of ideals, just like most other wars in history. But the scale was different. Technology had evolved. Weapons were no longer meant to be displayed in exhibitions. They were no longer made for the bragging rights. They had become tools of destruction; they were instruments of annihilation.
It was a war that nearly shattered the world.
Sunny saw a world that wasn't so sunny anymore.
He remembered the rallies. The speeches. The swelling music. Politicians speaking of honor, of necessity, of sacrifice. He remembered nodding along. He remembered anger rising in his chest when news channels replayed images of border skirmishes.
Getting caught up in the populist agenda, embracing the 'us-versus-them' mentality, he too wanted to do his part.
Sunny signed up as a soldier in defense of his country, his children. He left a worried wife, a four-year-old daughter, and a gurgling newborn son behind to do his duty.
He still remembered the weight of his daughter in his arms at the train station. She asked if he would bring her a souvenir. He told her he would bring her the moon.
The war was brutal and horrific in its scope.
The first time he saw combat, he nearly vomited inside his helmet. Explosions did not look heroic. They looked chaotic and indiscriminate. Gunfire did not sound dramatic. It sounded like the sky tearing itself apart.
He saw men reduced to pieces. He saw comrades scream for mothers who would never hear them. He saw cities crumble like sandcastles under tidal waves of fire.
Drones darkened the skies. Missiles streaked like artificial comets. Entire regions vanished from maps overnight.
By the end, no one was left a winner.
It was a war that broke the world.
The skies and the land broke alike. Hundreds of millions died in direct attacks, but billions perished in the aftermath. Water, food, and air—everything became poisoned.
Rivers ran black. Crops withered into grey husks. The air tasted metallic and wrong.
Even the world itself turned against humanity. Constant storms, shifting tectonics, and the onset of a new ice age worked hand in hand to remove the cancerous stain of mankind from the canvas of the earth.
Sunny remembered cursing the enemy, the politicians, the gods, even himself when news reached him of his city being hit with a nuke.
He lost everything he had, except a small, scarred and scared little girl who was away from the city at that accursed time.
His wife. His son. Gone in a flash brighter than the sun.
He did try to do something foolish. For three days he fought like a madman, charging positions recklessly, daring bullets to take him. He fired until his rifle overheated. He laughed once—wild and broken—when an explosion hurled him into a crater but left him alive.
He would have probably tried to do something even more foolish, like pulling a poorly executed rendition of Rambo on the enemy, firing a constant stream of bullets while running towards the foe with no cover and screaming at the top of his lungs.
He would have been easily gunned down far from enemy trenches, because he was no cinematic hero, despite having the body of one, but lacking in plot armor.
It was only the survival of his daughter that let him maintain a modicum of sanity.
When the dust settled, all that remained were a few isolated communities living in far-flung areas where fallout had yet to reach. The population was reduced to a mere fraction of a fraction.
He was enormously lucky to find himself a member of one such community.
Originally, it was supposed to be a bunker for the elite—a hidden enclave of accumulated technology, knowledge and resources built deep beneath a mountain range. It had hydroponic farms, water purification systems, and archives of human knowledge.
Unfortunately, none of those elites survived the war.
Instead, soldiers, scientists, farmers, mechanics, and children inherited the earth's basement.
They lived in the mountains with caves dug deep and waited for the world to stop howling with fury.
Life underground was bleak but stubborn.
Artificial lights simulated day and night. Crops grew in stacked trays under humming lamps. Water dripped rhythmically through filtration pipes. Air recyclers groaned constantly.
He became a scavenger and builder. He ventured out in protective gear to salvage metal, machinery, books—anything usable. Radiation storms sometimes forced him to shelter under collapsed highways. He saw cities buried under snow and ash.
But there were moments of laughter even there.
Once, during a rare community gathering, someone found an old karaoke machine in storage. The power flickered, but it worked. Sunny, built like a tank and scarred like one too, sang an old pop song terribly off-key. The bunker echoed with laughter. His daughter laughed the loudest.
Another time, a group of children painted a mural on the bunker wall—a clumsy, colorful depiction of a blue sky and green fields. The proportions were wrong. The sun looked like a fried egg. But everyone stood silently before it as if it were a masterpiece.
His daughter eventually learned to smile again, though her smiles were softer. She forgot what the world was like before the Breaking. Everyone did.
Decades passed.
The ice age above stabilized into something survivable. Storms grew less frequent. Scouts reported patches of green returning to valleys.
Sunny aged. His muscles softened but never vanished entirely. His hair turned grey. His hands trembled sometimes.
He died with a peaceful smile on his face, surrounded by his daughter and two little grandkids who had never seen the world outside the bunker. He died with hope that perhaps one day his little family would find its way to the surface again and recreate the paradise he had lost.
Upon waking up in a cupboard under the stairs, he remembered everything as if he had seen it and lived it yesterday.
The memories of a beautiful family, a terrible war, and decades spent underneath the earth like a rat.
He was simply grateful that the Dursleys left him more or less alone after the near-murder attempt. Perhaps it made them realize that he too could break.
This time allowed him to come to terms with his previous ending.
He had stopped believing in gods when the world shattered and they did nothing to stop it. But he knew enough about science fiction to realize what it meant to wake up again after death, especially in the body of a small malnourished child decades in the past.
He discarded the idea of hallucination. Everything was too detailed. Too consistent. His brain had never been clever enough to fabricate such complexity.
He thought up a dozen scenarios and discarded them just as quickly.
Reincarnation. Divine prank. Random cosmic glitch.
In the end, he concluded that the reason didn't matter.
He had always been a doer, not a thinker.
For just the privilege of looking at a clear blue sky, he would accept all the ridiculousness in the world.
He sat in a nearby park one afternoon, thin legs dangling from a bench, and simply stared upward. The sky was vast and unmarred by ash. Clouds drifted lazily. Birds argued in trees. A squirrel played with a walnut. A bee buzzed nearby.
He listened to the rustle of leaves and realized how much he had taken for granted in his previous life.
Decades living in an underground bunker gave him a new appreciation for every single thing.
It was the dew on blades of grass. The flutter of leaves in the morning breeze. The warmth of sunlight that did not come from artificial lamps. The sheer brightness of colors that convinced him that he would accept his new reality a thousand times over with no questions asked.
He watched butterflies and felt absurdly emotional.
He pressed his palm against the trunk of a tree and marveled at its solidity. At its quiet strength. Trees had vanished near the bunker. Seeing one now felt like witnessing a miracle.
He chose acceptance because he understood scarcity.
He chose gratitude because he had known deprivation.
He chose this new reality because he had buried a whole world once and would never again squander the gift of life.
Sunny was dead.
But Harry lived.
He would forever cherish the wonderful memories that made him smile and dread the awful ones that made him cry tears of blood.
The past was the past, and Sunny was a chapter closed with love and grief alike.
He was Harry now.
And this time, he would not merely survive the world.
He would protect it.