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Entry tags:
Liminality: Chapter 1 [HP]
Title: Liminality
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing/Characters: Tomarry, brief!Harry/Ginny, Harry & Ginny, Ginny & Tom, Harry & Hermione & Ron, Hermione/Ron, Severus Snape & Harry
Rating: M
Chapter Word Count: 4,076
Chapter Count: 1 / 6
Summary: AU: EWE; MoD!Harry. Harry Potter, saviour of magical Britain, has proved himself to be great at dying and coming back again. He’s just not as good at the bits in between coming back and dying again.
Notes:
It’s dead easy to die. It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard. --- Robert Service, “The Quitter”
Harry James Potter is twenty-three years old, and he's doing alright.
He has a job that he doesn't love but doesn't hate, and he has a girlfriend who he likewise doesn't love but doesn't hate, which he figures is pretty great after five consecutive years of dating plus that bit during sixth year. In comparison, Ron and Hermione have had about a million explosive fights including seven break up scares in the same amount of time, and Harry never knows if this break up will be the last one. Harry does hate the fighting, and he does hate the idea of a permanent rift separating his first two friends. He lies awake some nights, nearly feverish with fear at the thought of having to choose between one friend or the other, or even losing them both.
He has started to wonder whether maybe his and Ginny's success means that he should be ring shopping. He thinks he'd like that. Or the idea of it, anyway. At the very least, he wouldn't hate it.
Ginny stands in the entrance of Grimmauld Place, her hair long and heavy, darkened and weighed down by the rainwater dripping from its tips. In the candlelight, its strands alternate between flickering red shadows and glowing copper, creating an illusion of flames dancing around her head. He thinks she has never been more beautiful than she is now, in this moment, but there is no molten heat rising within him, his heart skips no beats. Old age, he suspects, and raises his eyebrows at his guest.
She looks up at him, her eyes laughing, and she wrinkles her freckled nose at him. "I think," she says solemnly, "that I might be in need of a towel."
Harry shakes his head in mock disappointment. "So demanding," he sighs. He summons a towel with a lethargic wave of his wand and flicks it straight into her face, and he grins when she shrieks.
Dinner with Ginny is nice, as it always is, and she leaves after helping him clean up, as she often does. She has an early morning tomorrow, and he had an early morning today, and they're both ready for the evening to be over by the time the last dish is dried and levitated into the cupboard. The nice thing about this calm state after love, Harry thinks, is that they needn't follow the standard script of a night of wild sex after the date is over, not when neither of them is really interested.
He kisses her on the cheek and closes the door behind her. This was the first time he'd seen Ginny in three weeks. He wonders how many weeks will go by before he sees her next.
At least they're not fighting.
---
Harry wanders into his office in the Auror Department of the Ministry of Magic the next morning and begins his work day with neither resentment nor enthusiasm.
It only takes ten minutes before there’s a queue of junior aurors in front of his door.
“Potter, I was hoping for some advice on this case,” says Junior Auror Everett.
Harry looks down at the casefile and then looks back up at Everett blankly. The case is of a lost kneazle.
Harry should not be a senior auror. He knows this, and probably everyone who’s sane knows this. Harry isn’t particularly knowledgeable, or particularly clever, or particularly experienced. He is, admittedly, very nearly unparalleled when it comes to magical fighting and duels, but outside of covert operations against rising Dark Lords, auror work contains much less fighting and many more visitations to elderly witches than most of the public would likely suspect. At twenty-three years old, he should, at most, be a full auror, and probably not even that. But so many aurors died in the past war, fighting for one side or another, and most of the aurors who survived and didn’t take early retirement were promoted to other areas of the ministry.
This means that Harry is not only a senior auror, he is in fact one of the ten oldest active aurors, and it’s never more obvious that this is the case than when he’s advising a junior auror on how to handle searching for a missing pet.
Harry looks out at the queue at his office door. “How many of you have lost-pet cases?”
A disturbingly high number of hands go up.
“Alright, I want you eight to head down to Storeroom 7.” Harry digs around in his desk drawer and snags a room-requisition form. He taps his wand against the form to duplicate it, and then he scribbles in the necessary information. “Share your case details and brainstorm different approaches. I’ll check in with you in a bit.” He hands the completed form to Everett.
Harry looks to the next person in the dwindling queue. “And what’s your case on?”
“Missing jewelry,” comes the glum response.
“Cursed?” asks Harry hopefully.
The junior auror shakes his head. “Not according to the statement.”
Harry sighs. “Everyone with missing items, down to Storeroom 13!” he calls, and fills out another form. Eleven more junior aurors vanish from his queue.
“Who’s next?”
There is no head of the DMLE. No one has the skills and experience to be the department head, and so instead there is a very small oligarchy of senior aurors who run the department together until Kingsley settles on a replacement. It’s been five years, now, so Harry isn’t optimistic that this will happen any time soon. Recruiting has taken a priority.
The Auror Department now, finally, boasts as many aurors as it had before the war: just over fifty. However, where the department seniority used to be distributed along a bell-shaped curve, with most members being full aurors, the department now consists overwhelmingly of junior aurors and trainees.
The postbellum magical world has been peaceful enough that the fifteen full aurors—mostly Harry’s age—are able to handle most of the dangerous criminal activity, leaving the endless ocean of misdemeanors and suspicious artifacts investigations to teams of junior aurors. Harry and the other three senior aurors have been primarily relegated to overseeing the junior aurors.
When the last of the junior aurors have been sorted and sent off, Harry leans back in his chair, closes his eyes, and clears his mind. He’s found it’s easier to do when he’s trying to stave off a headache than it was when he was trying to defend his mind against professors and dark lords.
Harry is mostly content with his routine these days, and when he feels as though he’s drowning under the weight of expectations, he can usually settle himself by disappearing under his cloak and finding a quiet room to sit in for an hour or two.
It had taken him a long time to get to that point. Just after the war, he had been desperate for a place where he could duck his head and fade away. Somewhere without owls popping in all the time with letters, and a constantly active Floo. Somewhere that no one could find him to bother him.
So, he’d disguised himself and bought a flat through a muggle agency under a muggle alias, and for some time, it had been his oasis. He’d lived there secretly for months, not even telling Ron and Hermione any more than that he needed to ‘get away.’ Eventually, he reached the point where he would leave to visit his friends, and then he began training and working for the auror department. As he began to settle into his new life, and as the magical world began to calm down about him a little, he found himself needing his safe house less and less often.
Three years ago, he’d moved into Grimmauld Place full time. He brought Ginny to see the old flat he’d lived in as a sort of milestone for himself. He didn’t need it anymore, and he wanted someone to see how far he’d come.
He didn’t entirely expect Ginny to understand, but she’d smiled at him warmly, held his hand, and told him she was proud of him.
---
He already has rings on his mind when Ron and Hermione show up to lunch. He's been waiting for some time, stroking his fingers absently over the raised scars on the back of his hand, and wondering what sort of rings Ginny would like. Something plain, he suspects, and she wouldn't wear it most days anyway, because of work.
Ron and Hermione arrive already bickering, and Harry's stomach twists unpleasantly, so that it takes him a moment to notice what's different.
"Rings?" he asks, not bothering to hide his surprise.
Hermione laughs at him. "I wondered when you'd notice! I thought it would take longer, honestly."
"You owe me a sickle, 'Mione," says Ron smugly.
"Er," says Harry. "Er. Congratulations?"
Both Ron and Hermione frown at him. "Is everything alright, Harry?" she asks, suddenly uncertain. "This can't be much of a shocker. I mean, we've been dating for so long."
"But you're always fighting," Harry bursts out. "Constantly!"
They laugh, seeming to relax. Harry's not sure why, since if anything, he feels more tense.
Hermione, of course, notices, and hurries to reassure him. "That's just the sort of couple we are, Harry. I think we'd get bored if we were always having calm, civil conversations like you and Ginny."
Ron grins. "And wasn't that the real surprise! Knowing how you two get on your own, I'd never have guessed you two would be so mellow when you're put together."
"...Right," says Harry. "Well, if this makes you two happy, then it makes me happy, too. Bit early for drinks-on-me, though."
They smile at him, happy and pleased. "No worries, mate," says Ron. "We'll remember you owe us one tonight."
---
Harry is twenty-three, and he's confused.
If this is a midlife crisis, that doesn't bode well for his longevity.
---
Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had rarely fought with one another. They’d been so close in all things, so content in their separate familial duties, so unified in their goals, that it often seemed to Harry that he was raised by a single, two-headed, four-armed adult with the curious ability to appear in two places at once. The closest his aunt and uncle ever seemed to come was a sort of mutual fury over the same third party—usually Harry—that left them spluttering and ranting madly at one another, agreeing on all points, until they came to a solution together.
For Harry, these pseudo-arguments always promised pain.
Harry watches Hermione and Ron closely over drinks that night. He tries to imagine them sinking into one-another the way Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had seemed to, becoming a single entity with a single purpose.
It’s impossible.
Every movement between them is out of sync, every conversation and shared look discordant. Nothing about them fits with the other. They’re just so different in every imaginable way.
Is this really what love looks like?
Harry almost asks them if they’re really sure this is what they want, but manages to bite back the question with the help of a long swig of butterbeer. What does he know of love, compared to them, who’d both been raised steeped in it? Harry’s only knowledge of love comes from what he’s seen between others and the fading residue left behind by a woman’s screaming voice and a flash of green light.
Ginny, Luna, and Neville all arrive at the pub at the same time from different directions. Neville trips trying to sit down, Luna floats into her seat as though she’s weightless, and Ginny slides fluidly into the booth next to Harry with a peck to his cheek. Everyone is so different from one another.
Hermione and Ron accept the group’s congratulations perfunctually before Hermione turns to Luna and asks, “Oh, could Rolf not make it? Busy at work?” in a polite tone that she probably thinks masks her relief. Rolf is too much like Luna for Hermione to be able to tolerate for long stretches of time. There is a true affection between Luna and Hermione born of shared struggles—a warrior bond, maybe—but in the cold light of their day jobs, the two have very little in common. Without that shared history, Rolf and Hermione are growing very near an all-out blood feud.
Luna’s responding smile—like most of Luna’s smiles—is just a little bit off, as though she were participating in the conversation through a long-distance Floo call. “No, he wasn’t busy at all,” she says unashamedly. “He just doesn’t like all the fighting. He wishes the two of you great happiness in your mating bond, though.”
Hermione grimaces at the phrasing, and Ron laughs. “He’s not the only one.” He nudges his new fiancee and earns himself a scowl in response. “Mum nearly cried when we told her, and not with happiness. She wants us to be all calm and sweet like Harry and Ginny.”
Ginny stiffens beside him, and Harry feels his smile freeze up on his face.
“All relationships are different,” says Luna noncommittally. Luna and Rolf are beautiful together. They’re so precisely in sync that it’s like watching a choreographed dance, like striking a perfect chord. “If you two were like Harry and Ginny, you wouldn’t be like you.”
“Yeah, sure,” says Ron peaceably as Hermione rolls her eyes, mouthing ‘Obviously’.
The conversation moves forward, but neither Harry nor Ginny join it. A suspicion has been rising, poisonous, within him since lunch, and he fears that he has just received confirmation of it.
He leans into Ginny and lifts an arm around her shoulder, companionable rather than romantic. He whispers to her, “So what do you think? Rolf and Luna, or Ron and Hermione?”
“Ron and Hermione,” Ginny whispers back instantly, not even having to think about it. She smiles at him sadly. “And Rolf and Luna, for you.”
“Yeah,” he sighs. “Ron and Hermione baffle me, honestly.”
Ginny’s lips twitch into a more honest smile for a moment. “They baffle everyone, I suspect. It’s just that some of us enjoy being baffled.” She hesitates, then adds, “Harry… we’ve both been trying, but I don’t think this Luna and Rolf thing is working for me.”
Harry lets his eyes flicker over their laughing friends. George and Angelina have joined the party with a literal bang, and no one seems to have noticed Ginny and Harry’s removal from the conversation other than Luna, who is very carefully not looking at them even as her eyes rotate between every other memory of their group for a calculatedly equal amount of time.
Harry takes another swig of butterbeer. “We’re not really imitating them very well, anyway. They’re both calm people who are calmer together, and we’re both volatile people who cancel one another out. We’re not peaceful together, we’re…”
“Empty,” says Ginny, rueful. She looks at him for a long moment, her familiar face so close to his own. “I remember, sort of, First Year in the Chamber of Secrets. Or maybe I remember being told about it; I’m not sure. I dream about it, sometimes. You, standing there with the Sword of Gryffindor, dead basilisk behind you. You seemed like an adventure, back then.”
“One student’s adventure is another student’s nightmare,” Harry responds dryly.
Ginny shakes her head, slowly. “In my dream, you’re glowing with life, with passion. But you’re not looking at me.”
Harry narrows his eyes at her.
“You’re looking at To—Voldemort. You’re always looking at him.”
“You’d better not be suggesting—”
“No!” Ginny laughs, but Harry isn’t convinced. “No, I’m not suggesting that you’ve been nursing a crush on You Know Who for all this time. But, like you said—we cancel each other out. But you and he didn’t. You didn’t clash, exactly, either. Even when you were fighting, it was like you were moving together, not against one another. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Harry admits grudgingly. He looks away. “It doesn’t really help me understand what I should be looking for, though.”
Ginny nudges him with her shoulder. “I’m not sure any of us know. Not really.” She eyes him for a moment. “I really liked him, you know. Tom.”
Harry glances at her. “So did I.”
Her lips twitch. “I know,” she says, and with that, she returns her attention to their friends, easy as anything.
---
“Unless your intent is to explode the entire ministry, Potter, I suggest you do not add the crushed scales to that cauldron. I, of course, do not care either way.”
Harry blinks at the ingredients in his hands and then winces and carefully sets them aside. “I thought they went in next?”
“After the pixie blood has been fully immersed into the potion, idiot boy.”
“Right. So I just wait, then?” He receives a very unimpressed look for that question. Harry shrugs and sits down at his stool. “You know, I like you a lot more dead than I did when you were alive.”
Snape’s shade sneers at him, and Harry smiles.
He had hidden the Resurrection Stone, as he had promised himself and his friends that he would. And then, after barely a year had passed, he’d hunted it down again, and now it was masked in a plain setting that he wore on a chain around his neck, pressed to his skin.
It seems that he’s more like Cadmus than Ignotus after all. He thinks he might meet the same end, as well, but cautionary tales are only effective when the punishment is worse than the prize, and he fears neither death nor the draw of death. It seems almost romantic to him, to find death early to reunite with loved ones.
He wonders if it was selfish of him, to mourn Sirius with such fury despite his certainty that Sirius was happy to die. He hasn’t been brave enough to ask Sirius for his opinion on the matter, yet.
“Potter, it’s time for the scales.”
Harry shakes his head to clear it. “Right, thanks.” He adds the crushed salamander scales and then stirs to Snape’s direction.
“Good,” says Snape. “Now remove it from the heat and allow it to steep for twelve hours.”
Harry does as he’s told and watches with satisfaction as the potion settles into the exact hue it’s meant to. “Brilliant.” He looks up to the shade of his old professor and smiles crookedly. “Thanks. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
Snape looks down his long nose at him. “There’s very little you can do without help, Potter. I am constantly amazed that you are able to walk unassisted.”
Harry mock-scowls at him. “You’re hilarious.” He reaches for the Stone around his neck. “Say ‘hi’ to everyone for me, will you?”
Snape nods, and with a brush of Harry’s magic, his shade returns to its place beyond the Veil.
Harry stretches and yawns, and then he heads out of his make-shift lab, locking the door carefully behind him.
As expected, he barely makes it halfway down the hall before someone calling his name stops him.
He sighs and turns around. “What’s up?” he asks, forcing a smile.
A posse of junior aurors jog up to him. “Finally!” says Junior Auror Jakobs. “Where have you been? We’ve been looking everywhere for you!”
Harry’s eyebrows shoot up. “Oh?”
Jakobs passes Harry a missive bound by Kingsley’s ministerial seal. “We were responding to a standard domestic disturbance complaint when the situation got a little tense and Auror Burnes ended up being thrown clean through the wall into the neighbouring flat.”
“Sure,” says Harry. “‘Tense.’”
Jakobs grins at him. “Anyway, we’re all panicking, because this other flat is listed as belonging to a muggle, right? But as we’re trying to get the hole in the wall fixed A.S.A.P., what do we notice but a shelf of wizarding books centred on the Dark Arts?”
Harry whistles.
“Right? So the minister wants you in that flat yesterday, basically.” Jakobs juts her chin toward Kingsley’s missive. “Read that and meet me at the Floo?”
Harry agrees and jogs toward his office to grab his things, skimming the note quickly and dismissively. He knows why Kingsley wants him on this without needing to read the note, and indeed it contains no surprises. Harry isn’t an expert on Dark artifacts, curse detection, or curse breaking. He has no business being assigned the head of this investigation at all, but the simple word “Dark” has the power to cause a mass panic, these days, and nothing calms the wizarding public like knowing that Harry Potter is on the case.
Those idiots.
Harry smiles at his coworkers as he passes them in the halls. The advantage of running is that everyone knows that he’s on his way to something important, so no one tries to stop him for conversation. Harry wonders if maybe he should always run everywhere he goes.
He skids to a stop before the Floo and follows Jakobs through, stumbling on the other side as he always does. The other aurors don’t even bother to laugh at him, all focussed on the trove of books and other artifacts they’ve unearthed while the couple whose argument had raised the domestic disturbance complaint watch from the corner, wide-eyed.
Harry walks through the hole in the wall and walks around the mystery flat, trying his best to look sharp and observant. The truth is, he hardly needs to look around at all. The flat is entirely unwarded and uncursed, which doesn’t surprise him, because the flat is also his.
His safehouse, his escape from the demands of a world obsessed with their Chosen One. Harry hasn’t been back here in years.
But someone has, because there are signs of habitation, recent habitation. And Harry certainly doesn’t own all those books on—what is that? Necromancy? Charming.
Really, Harry’s the last person who’d need or want to squirrel away Dark Arts books. He has the entire Black library at his disposal, accessible only to him and Kreacher. And anyway, he’s picked up a fair amount of necromancy incidentally, just in fiddling with the Resurrection Stone, but there’s really no need for him to go about hiding illegal books on any topic when he can simply activate the Stone and get his information from a primary source.
He’s not concerned about being linked to the flat or the books—he’d covered his tracks completely by magical standards, and magical folk were absolute rot at tracking muggle paperwork. He’d paid for the flat and his anonymity in cash, anyway.
He is, however, concerned that someone else apparently knows about his hideaway.
He’d never even told Ron and Hermione about this flat. Only one person other than Harry should know about this place.
He looks down at the increasing pile of Dark Arts nonsense and closes his eyes against his growing headache.
---
The dead must answer the call of the Resurrection Stone. They are compelled to, regardless of personal wishes.
Harry has called many people to him over the years. People he loved, people he hated, people who hated him. Everyone answers. Everyone must answer.
When the investigation team finally calls it a day, having made great progress in cataloguing their new collection of contraband but no progress at all in tracking it to its source, Harry heads straight home.
As soon as the door shuts and locks behind him, he reaches for the Stone and calls.
Only silence greets him.
Fuck.
He turns his attention to another target and calls again.
“That’s a family heirloom, thief,” a voice says. Harry opens his eyes and the sad visage of Merope Gaunt stares back at him coldly. “You shouldn’t have it. It should be with my son.”
“Your son,” says Harry. “Your son who isn’t dead.”
Merope glares at him and remains stubbornly silent.
Harry sighs. “I’m sorry, Ms Gaunt,” he tries. “It wasn’t my intention to steal anything. I really thought your son—the heir—was dead.”
“He isn’t here.”
Harry nods and pinches the bridge of his nose. He’s not sure what he’d been hoping to learn from her. “Thank you, Ms Gaunt,” he says, smiling at her before releasing her back to the other plane.
He stares in front of him, unseeing. How exactly is he meant to deal with this?
He enjoys—or at least he feels content in—his quiet, passive existence. It’s been such a relief after the suffering, fighting, madness that had been his status quo for most of the first seventeen years of his life. And now, he feels that gentle, sweet contentment fading away. He feels lost, and confused, and—
And more alive than he’s felt since he was seventeen.
Dammit, Ginny.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing/Characters: Tomarry, brief!Harry/Ginny, Harry & Ginny, Ginny & Tom, Harry & Hermione & Ron, Hermione/Ron, Severus Snape & Harry
Rating: M
Chapter Word Count: 4,076
Chapter Count: 1 / 6
Summary: AU: EWE; MoD!Harry. Harry Potter, saviour of magical Britain, has proved himself to be great at dying and coming back again. He’s just not as good at the bits in between coming back and dying again.
Notes:
Harry James Potter is twenty-three years old, and he's doing alright.
He has a job that he doesn't love but doesn't hate, and he has a girlfriend who he likewise doesn't love but doesn't hate, which he figures is pretty great after five consecutive years of dating plus that bit during sixth year. In comparison, Ron and Hermione have had about a million explosive fights including seven break up scares in the same amount of time, and Harry never knows if this break up will be the last one. Harry does hate the fighting, and he does hate the idea of a permanent rift separating his first two friends. He lies awake some nights, nearly feverish with fear at the thought of having to choose between one friend or the other, or even losing them both.
He has started to wonder whether maybe his and Ginny's success means that he should be ring shopping. He thinks he'd like that. Or the idea of it, anyway. At the very least, he wouldn't hate it.
Ginny stands in the entrance of Grimmauld Place, her hair long and heavy, darkened and weighed down by the rainwater dripping from its tips. In the candlelight, its strands alternate between flickering red shadows and glowing copper, creating an illusion of flames dancing around her head. He thinks she has never been more beautiful than she is now, in this moment, but there is no molten heat rising within him, his heart skips no beats. Old age, he suspects, and raises his eyebrows at his guest.
She looks up at him, her eyes laughing, and she wrinkles her freckled nose at him. "I think," she says solemnly, "that I might be in need of a towel."
Harry shakes his head in mock disappointment. "So demanding," he sighs. He summons a towel with a lethargic wave of his wand and flicks it straight into her face, and he grins when she shrieks.
Dinner with Ginny is nice, as it always is, and she leaves after helping him clean up, as she often does. She has an early morning tomorrow, and he had an early morning today, and they're both ready for the evening to be over by the time the last dish is dried and levitated into the cupboard. The nice thing about this calm state after love, Harry thinks, is that they needn't follow the standard script of a night of wild sex after the date is over, not when neither of them is really interested.
He kisses her on the cheek and closes the door behind her. This was the first time he'd seen Ginny in three weeks. He wonders how many weeks will go by before he sees her next.
At least they're not fighting.
Harry wanders into his office in the Auror Department of the Ministry of Magic the next morning and begins his work day with neither resentment nor enthusiasm.
It only takes ten minutes before there’s a queue of junior aurors in front of his door.
“Potter, I was hoping for some advice on this case,” says Junior Auror Everett.
Harry looks down at the casefile and then looks back up at Everett blankly. The case is of a lost kneazle.
Harry should not be a senior auror. He knows this, and probably everyone who’s sane knows this. Harry isn’t particularly knowledgeable, or particularly clever, or particularly experienced. He is, admittedly, very nearly unparalleled when it comes to magical fighting and duels, but outside of covert operations against rising Dark Lords, auror work contains much less fighting and many more visitations to elderly witches than most of the public would likely suspect. At twenty-three years old, he should, at most, be a full auror, and probably not even that. But so many aurors died in the past war, fighting for one side or another, and most of the aurors who survived and didn’t take early retirement were promoted to other areas of the ministry.
This means that Harry is not only a senior auror, he is in fact one of the ten oldest active aurors, and it’s never more obvious that this is the case than when he’s advising a junior auror on how to handle searching for a missing pet.
Harry looks out at the queue at his office door. “How many of you have lost-pet cases?”
A disturbingly high number of hands go up.
“Alright, I want you eight to head down to Storeroom 7.” Harry digs around in his desk drawer and snags a room-requisition form. He taps his wand against the form to duplicate it, and then he scribbles in the necessary information. “Share your case details and brainstorm different approaches. I’ll check in with you in a bit.” He hands the completed form to Everett.
Harry looks to the next person in the dwindling queue. “And what’s your case on?”
“Missing jewelry,” comes the glum response.
“Cursed?” asks Harry hopefully.
The junior auror shakes his head. “Not according to the statement.”
Harry sighs. “Everyone with missing items, down to Storeroom 13!” he calls, and fills out another form. Eleven more junior aurors vanish from his queue.
“Who’s next?”
There is no head of the DMLE. No one has the skills and experience to be the department head, and so instead there is a very small oligarchy of senior aurors who run the department together until Kingsley settles on a replacement. It’s been five years, now, so Harry isn’t optimistic that this will happen any time soon. Recruiting has taken a priority.
The Auror Department now, finally, boasts as many aurors as it had before the war: just over fifty. However, where the department seniority used to be distributed along a bell-shaped curve, with most members being full aurors, the department now consists overwhelmingly of junior aurors and trainees.
The postbellum magical world has been peaceful enough that the fifteen full aurors—mostly Harry’s age—are able to handle most of the dangerous criminal activity, leaving the endless ocean of misdemeanors and suspicious artifacts investigations to teams of junior aurors. Harry and the other three senior aurors have been primarily relegated to overseeing the junior aurors.
When the last of the junior aurors have been sorted and sent off, Harry leans back in his chair, closes his eyes, and clears his mind. He’s found it’s easier to do when he’s trying to stave off a headache than it was when he was trying to defend his mind against professors and dark lords.
Harry is mostly content with his routine these days, and when he feels as though he’s drowning under the weight of expectations, he can usually settle himself by disappearing under his cloak and finding a quiet room to sit in for an hour or two.
It had taken him a long time to get to that point. Just after the war, he had been desperate for a place where he could duck his head and fade away. Somewhere without owls popping in all the time with letters, and a constantly active Floo. Somewhere that no one could find him to bother him.
So, he’d disguised himself and bought a flat through a muggle agency under a muggle alias, and for some time, it had been his oasis. He’d lived there secretly for months, not even telling Ron and Hermione any more than that he needed to ‘get away.’ Eventually, he reached the point where he would leave to visit his friends, and then he began training and working for the auror department. As he began to settle into his new life, and as the magical world began to calm down about him a little, he found himself needing his safe house less and less often.
Three years ago, he’d moved into Grimmauld Place full time. He brought Ginny to see the old flat he’d lived in as a sort of milestone for himself. He didn’t need it anymore, and he wanted someone to see how far he’d come.
He didn’t entirely expect Ginny to understand, but she’d smiled at him warmly, held his hand, and told him she was proud of him.
He already has rings on his mind when Ron and Hermione show up to lunch. He's been waiting for some time, stroking his fingers absently over the raised scars on the back of his hand, and wondering what sort of rings Ginny would like. Something plain, he suspects, and she wouldn't wear it most days anyway, because of work.
Ron and Hermione arrive already bickering, and Harry's stomach twists unpleasantly, so that it takes him a moment to notice what's different.
"Rings?" he asks, not bothering to hide his surprise.
Hermione laughs at him. "I wondered when you'd notice! I thought it would take longer, honestly."
"You owe me a sickle, 'Mione," says Ron smugly.
"Er," says Harry. "Er. Congratulations?"
Both Ron and Hermione frown at him. "Is everything alright, Harry?" she asks, suddenly uncertain. "This can't be much of a shocker. I mean, we've been dating for so long."
"But you're always fighting," Harry bursts out. "Constantly!"
They laugh, seeming to relax. Harry's not sure why, since if anything, he feels more tense.
Hermione, of course, notices, and hurries to reassure him. "That's just the sort of couple we are, Harry. I think we'd get bored if we were always having calm, civil conversations like you and Ginny."
Ron grins. "And wasn't that the real surprise! Knowing how you two get on your own, I'd never have guessed you two would be so mellow when you're put together."
"...Right," says Harry. "Well, if this makes you two happy, then it makes me happy, too. Bit early for drinks-on-me, though."
They smile at him, happy and pleased. "No worries, mate," says Ron. "We'll remember you owe us one tonight."
Harry is twenty-three, and he's confused.
If this is a midlife crisis, that doesn't bode well for his longevity.
Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had rarely fought with one another. They’d been so close in all things, so content in their separate familial duties, so unified in their goals, that it often seemed to Harry that he was raised by a single, two-headed, four-armed adult with the curious ability to appear in two places at once. The closest his aunt and uncle ever seemed to come was a sort of mutual fury over the same third party—usually Harry—that left them spluttering and ranting madly at one another, agreeing on all points, until they came to a solution together.
For Harry, these pseudo-arguments always promised pain.
Harry watches Hermione and Ron closely over drinks that night. He tries to imagine them sinking into one-another the way Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had seemed to, becoming a single entity with a single purpose.
It’s impossible.
Every movement between them is out of sync, every conversation and shared look discordant. Nothing about them fits with the other. They’re just so different in every imaginable way.
Is this really what love looks like?
Harry almost asks them if they’re really sure this is what they want, but manages to bite back the question with the help of a long swig of butterbeer. What does he know of love, compared to them, who’d both been raised steeped in it? Harry’s only knowledge of love comes from what he’s seen between others and the fading residue left behind by a woman’s screaming voice and a flash of green light.
Ginny, Luna, and Neville all arrive at the pub at the same time from different directions. Neville trips trying to sit down, Luna floats into her seat as though she’s weightless, and Ginny slides fluidly into the booth next to Harry with a peck to his cheek. Everyone is so different from one another.
Hermione and Ron accept the group’s congratulations perfunctually before Hermione turns to Luna and asks, “Oh, could Rolf not make it? Busy at work?” in a polite tone that she probably thinks masks her relief. Rolf is too much like Luna for Hermione to be able to tolerate for long stretches of time. There is a true affection between Luna and Hermione born of shared struggles—a warrior bond, maybe—but in the cold light of their day jobs, the two have very little in common. Without that shared history, Rolf and Hermione are growing very near an all-out blood feud.
Luna’s responding smile—like most of Luna’s smiles—is just a little bit off, as though she were participating in the conversation through a long-distance Floo call. “No, he wasn’t busy at all,” she says unashamedly. “He just doesn’t like all the fighting. He wishes the two of you great happiness in your mating bond, though.”
Hermione grimaces at the phrasing, and Ron laughs. “He’s not the only one.” He nudges his new fiancee and earns himself a scowl in response. “Mum nearly cried when we told her, and not with happiness. She wants us to be all calm and sweet like Harry and Ginny.”
Ginny stiffens beside him, and Harry feels his smile freeze up on his face.
“All relationships are different,” says Luna noncommittally. Luna and Rolf are beautiful together. They’re so precisely in sync that it’s like watching a choreographed dance, like striking a perfect chord. “If you two were like Harry and Ginny, you wouldn’t be like you.”
“Yeah, sure,” says Ron peaceably as Hermione rolls her eyes, mouthing ‘Obviously’.
The conversation moves forward, but neither Harry nor Ginny join it. A suspicion has been rising, poisonous, within him since lunch, and he fears that he has just received confirmation of it.
He leans into Ginny and lifts an arm around her shoulder, companionable rather than romantic. He whispers to her, “So what do you think? Rolf and Luna, or Ron and Hermione?”
“Ron and Hermione,” Ginny whispers back instantly, not even having to think about it. She smiles at him sadly. “And Rolf and Luna, for you.”
“Yeah,” he sighs. “Ron and Hermione baffle me, honestly.”
Ginny’s lips twitch into a more honest smile for a moment. “They baffle everyone, I suspect. It’s just that some of us enjoy being baffled.” She hesitates, then adds, “Harry… we’ve both been trying, but I don’t think this Luna and Rolf thing is working for me.”
Harry lets his eyes flicker over their laughing friends. George and Angelina have joined the party with a literal bang, and no one seems to have noticed Ginny and Harry’s removal from the conversation other than Luna, who is very carefully not looking at them even as her eyes rotate between every other memory of their group for a calculatedly equal amount of time.
Harry takes another swig of butterbeer. “We’re not really imitating them very well, anyway. They’re both calm people who are calmer together, and we’re both volatile people who cancel one another out. We’re not peaceful together, we’re…”
“Empty,” says Ginny, rueful. She looks at him for a long moment, her familiar face so close to his own. “I remember, sort of, First Year in the Chamber of Secrets. Or maybe I remember being told about it; I’m not sure. I dream about it, sometimes. You, standing there with the Sword of Gryffindor, dead basilisk behind you. You seemed like an adventure, back then.”
“One student’s adventure is another student’s nightmare,” Harry responds dryly.
Ginny shakes her head, slowly. “In my dream, you’re glowing with life, with passion. But you’re not looking at me.”
Harry narrows his eyes at her.
“You’re looking at To—Voldemort. You’re always looking at him.”
“You’d better not be suggesting—”
“No!” Ginny laughs, but Harry isn’t convinced. “No, I’m not suggesting that you’ve been nursing a crush on You Know Who for all this time. But, like you said—we cancel each other out. But you and he didn’t. You didn’t clash, exactly, either. Even when you were fighting, it was like you were moving together, not against one another. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Harry admits grudgingly. He looks away. “It doesn’t really help me understand what I should be looking for, though.”
Ginny nudges him with her shoulder. “I’m not sure any of us know. Not really.” She eyes him for a moment. “I really liked him, you know. Tom.”
Harry glances at her. “So did I.”
Her lips twitch. “I know,” she says, and with that, she returns her attention to their friends, easy as anything.
“Unless your intent is to explode the entire ministry, Potter, I suggest you do not add the crushed scales to that cauldron. I, of course, do not care either way.”
Harry blinks at the ingredients in his hands and then winces and carefully sets them aside. “I thought they went in next?”
“After the pixie blood has been fully immersed into the potion, idiot boy.”
“Right. So I just wait, then?” He receives a very unimpressed look for that question. Harry shrugs and sits down at his stool. “You know, I like you a lot more dead than I did when you were alive.”
Snape’s shade sneers at him, and Harry smiles.
He had hidden the Resurrection Stone, as he had promised himself and his friends that he would. And then, after barely a year had passed, he’d hunted it down again, and now it was masked in a plain setting that he wore on a chain around his neck, pressed to his skin.
It seems that he’s more like Cadmus than Ignotus after all. He thinks he might meet the same end, as well, but cautionary tales are only effective when the punishment is worse than the prize, and he fears neither death nor the draw of death. It seems almost romantic to him, to find death early to reunite with loved ones.
He wonders if it was selfish of him, to mourn Sirius with such fury despite his certainty that Sirius was happy to die. He hasn’t been brave enough to ask Sirius for his opinion on the matter, yet.
“Potter, it’s time for the scales.”
Harry shakes his head to clear it. “Right, thanks.” He adds the crushed salamander scales and then stirs to Snape’s direction.
“Good,” says Snape. “Now remove it from the heat and allow it to steep for twelve hours.”
Harry does as he’s told and watches with satisfaction as the potion settles into the exact hue it’s meant to. “Brilliant.” He looks up to the shade of his old professor and smiles crookedly. “Thanks. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
Snape looks down his long nose at him. “There’s very little you can do without help, Potter. I am constantly amazed that you are able to walk unassisted.”
Harry mock-scowls at him. “You’re hilarious.” He reaches for the Stone around his neck. “Say ‘hi’ to everyone for me, will you?”
Snape nods, and with a brush of Harry’s magic, his shade returns to its place beyond the Veil.
Harry stretches and yawns, and then he heads out of his make-shift lab, locking the door carefully behind him.
As expected, he barely makes it halfway down the hall before someone calling his name stops him.
He sighs and turns around. “What’s up?” he asks, forcing a smile.
A posse of junior aurors jog up to him. “Finally!” says Junior Auror Jakobs. “Where have you been? We’ve been looking everywhere for you!”
Harry’s eyebrows shoot up. “Oh?”
Jakobs passes Harry a missive bound by Kingsley’s ministerial seal. “We were responding to a standard domestic disturbance complaint when the situation got a little tense and Auror Burnes ended up being thrown clean through the wall into the neighbouring flat.”
“Sure,” says Harry. “‘Tense.’”
Jakobs grins at him. “Anyway, we’re all panicking, because this other flat is listed as belonging to a muggle, right? But as we’re trying to get the hole in the wall fixed A.S.A.P., what do we notice but a shelf of wizarding books centred on the Dark Arts?”
Harry whistles.
“Right? So the minister wants you in that flat yesterday, basically.” Jakobs juts her chin toward Kingsley’s missive. “Read that and meet me at the Floo?”
Harry agrees and jogs toward his office to grab his things, skimming the note quickly and dismissively. He knows why Kingsley wants him on this without needing to read the note, and indeed it contains no surprises. Harry isn’t an expert on Dark artifacts, curse detection, or curse breaking. He has no business being assigned the head of this investigation at all, but the simple word “Dark” has the power to cause a mass panic, these days, and nothing calms the wizarding public like knowing that Harry Potter is on the case.
Those idiots.
Harry smiles at his coworkers as he passes them in the halls. The advantage of running is that everyone knows that he’s on his way to something important, so no one tries to stop him for conversation. Harry wonders if maybe he should always run everywhere he goes.
He skids to a stop before the Floo and follows Jakobs through, stumbling on the other side as he always does. The other aurors don’t even bother to laugh at him, all focussed on the trove of books and other artifacts they’ve unearthed while the couple whose argument had raised the domestic disturbance complaint watch from the corner, wide-eyed.
Harry walks through the hole in the wall and walks around the mystery flat, trying his best to look sharp and observant. The truth is, he hardly needs to look around at all. The flat is entirely unwarded and uncursed, which doesn’t surprise him, because the flat is also his.
His safehouse, his escape from the demands of a world obsessed with their Chosen One. Harry hasn’t been back here in years.
But someone has, because there are signs of habitation, recent habitation. And Harry certainly doesn’t own all those books on—what is that? Necromancy? Charming.
Really, Harry’s the last person who’d need or want to squirrel away Dark Arts books. He has the entire Black library at his disposal, accessible only to him and Kreacher. And anyway, he’s picked up a fair amount of necromancy incidentally, just in fiddling with the Resurrection Stone, but there’s really no need for him to go about hiding illegal books on any topic when he can simply activate the Stone and get his information from a primary source.
He’s not concerned about being linked to the flat or the books—he’d covered his tracks completely by magical standards, and magical folk were absolute rot at tracking muggle paperwork. He’d paid for the flat and his anonymity in cash, anyway.
He is, however, concerned that someone else apparently knows about his hideaway.
He’d never even told Ron and Hermione about this flat. Only one person other than Harry should know about this place.
He looks down at the increasing pile of Dark Arts nonsense and closes his eyes against his growing headache.
The dead must answer the call of the Resurrection Stone. They are compelled to, regardless of personal wishes.
Harry has called many people to him over the years. People he loved, people he hated, people who hated him. Everyone answers. Everyone must answer.
When the investigation team finally calls it a day, having made great progress in cataloguing their new collection of contraband but no progress at all in tracking it to its source, Harry heads straight home.
As soon as the door shuts and locks behind him, he reaches for the Stone and calls.
Only silence greets him.
Fuck.
He turns his attention to another target and calls again.
“That’s a family heirloom, thief,” a voice says. Harry opens his eyes and the sad visage of Merope Gaunt stares back at him coldly. “You shouldn’t have it. It should be with my son.”
“Your son,” says Harry. “Your son who isn’t dead.”
Merope glares at him and remains stubbornly silent.
Harry sighs. “I’m sorry, Ms Gaunt,” he tries. “It wasn’t my intention to steal anything. I really thought your son—the heir—was dead.”
“He isn’t here.”
Harry nods and pinches the bridge of his nose. He’s not sure what he’d been hoping to learn from her. “Thank you, Ms Gaunt,” he says, smiling at her before releasing her back to the other plane.
He stares in front of him, unseeing. How exactly is he meant to deal with this?
He enjoys—or at least he feels content in—his quiet, passive existence. It’s been such a relief after the suffering, fighting, madness that had been his status quo for most of the first seventeen years of his life. And now, he feels that gentle, sweet contentment fading away. He feels lost, and confused, and—
And more alive than he’s felt since he was seventeen.
Dammit, Ginny.