Chapter Text
After everything is done, the lights go home. They pack their thick, leather suitcases and bind them with even thicker straps. They wade through starved cubicles and leave with the tide, where they are lapped up by waxed floors.
Then emerges the Darkness— young rags that swish their dresses and reveal sparkling floors, stubborn wrenches that march in circles around even stubborner leaks.
They are Dark because they are Invisible. They hound your doorstep with the necessity of existence, clothes wrinkled with the flood of age. They are Dark because they are the people that everyone knows to walk faster by— what honey-fingered kids are told to smile at but also never be.
A little bit of Darkness folds itself in, rolled so tight that it unfurls as soon as Ron Weasley answers the door. He is trembling. He fears something that all Dark people are born to fear.
A man with dark circles and darker eyes blinks, as if his eyes could not see past the Darkness, as if Light could not pass vivid, emerald eyes.
“Ron,” he breathes. “Please, Ron. I have nowhere else to go.”
***
Kingsley’s waiting room is awful, and Harry is tired.
Harry is bored.
Why shouldn’t he be? 18 and effortlessly decorating the Auror’s office, 20 and still eager, but now they’ve run out of people to catch, awards to give. His most exciting days are when he gets to knock over a candle meant for some vaguely Dark ritual, or even better, preventing some petty theft in Knockturn Alley. Merlin, even thinking about it– it was pathetic.
To everyone else, perhaps two years felt like two months. There was almost no witch or wizard who wasn’t scarred from the war, and half the country sat around in the stools and played the waiting game– knitting in hospitals, staying in safehouses, peacefully waiting for people who they would eventually realise had long disappeared.
But Harry had nobody to wait for, and he agonisingly kept track of each and every second that slipped through his fingers. Because, if he was honest with himself, the only things that waited for him were the things that lurked before his eyes as he tried to fall asleep. They weren’t dreams. But they weren’t nightmares. They were so much more peculiar in nature. Working in Muggle shops. Chopping down trees. Grocery shopping at stores he had never even heard of before. It was so oddly mundane– yet, the trees looked too tall, the sky too blue, the life too cheerful that it frightened him, although it really did pain him to admit it.
He fiddled with his badge. He was bored. Harry was exasperated with the fact that even enough he didn’t even bother wearing his badge, half the time, it somehow always managed to tear or rip or have something catastrophic happen to it. Maybe he would just stop wearing it at all. It’s not like anyone wanted to see it. The receptionist certainly didn’t need to see it– not with how many times he had pulled overtime, not with how many times he had stayed here.
Maybe he would have worked long hours, regardless of what kept him up at night, and maybe he might have even liked working– he certainly did like his job, once upon a time, loved the chase and the exhilaration of really, truly, catching someone, catching the evil that haunted the wizarding world. Once, every person he put behind bars made a real difference. Now, try as he might, he just couldn’t get himself to admit that slogging through paperwork day after day, tirelessly defending the rich and insulting the poor, was really the difference that he had once been chasing for.
“Har-Mr. Potter? The Minister requests to see you.”
Harry willed himself not to sigh as he tucked in his badge and walked down a long, winding hallway, stained with stale Ministry grey. How many times had he seen that colour? It was on the walls, on people’s robes, concealed among every wixen’s folders and desks.
Harry had a strange and rather sudden realisation that he had already knocked. Tall, burgundy doors opened into a large room, sleekly lined with shelves upon shelves of artifacts from across the world.
He blinked. The disorientation never got easier. As the charmed window slowly let in light from above, Harry could better make Kingsley out– at least, who he thought was Kingsley. The man’s face was worn with wrinkles, and his robes looked like they had been on the edge of too many Scourgifies. Harry wondered if he ever stopped working. He was always in the office when Harry was. Even now, he stood at his desk, furiously talking to his Dicta-Ink Quill.
“As per my last reply, I strongly disapprove of the increased spending that Brandon has decided to implement this year…”
Harry wondered if he should interrupt. It seemed like it would be rude. But it was ruder, in his opinion, to call someone to an office, after making them wait for an hour, and then proceed to make them wait even more. He’d rather be in the waiting room with the free coffee, thank you very much.
“Minister.”
Kingsley jerked, cursing, spinning around before realising it was Harry. “Harry,” he said. “As you can see” – he gestured around at the stacks of paperwork that clogged the once picturesque office–”you’ve caught me at quite a bad time.”
There never seemed to be a good time with Kingsley. Just the same, Harry had patience, and did not tell him that he couldn't care less. “Minister,” he said. “Actually– no, Kingsley. What’s wrong? I have something after this.”
He’s sure Ron would understand if he told him it was Kingsley who had kept him, but he had barely seen him ever since he and Hermione had Rose. Actually, he hadn’t really ever seen them both, ever since Auror training– unless you counted seeing them as seeing their names hidden at the end of verbose documents.
Kingsley looked mildly offended at his comment–Harry wished he had been more gentle, but he also wanted to put Kingsley next to a screaming Teddy and ask him how that felt–nonetheless, he smoothed his face almost immediately and got right to business.
“Accio!” A thin manila-coloured folder flew into his hands. “I think you’d like to take a look at this, Harry.”
Harry carefully took the folder from his extended hand. His eyes immediately shot up. Staring at him in bright, red ink, was a number that was at least a good quarter of the Galleons currently in his bank account.
Kingsley winced. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t spread the word around…and this wasn’t my decision, in any case.”
Harry stared at him. He barely managed to restrain the second thought he had coming out his tongue– unfortunately, this time, that meant that he had no time to catch the first. “Kingsley, aren’t you Minister? Or do you have some other, special, secret job that needs you to sit in the Minister’s office all day?”
“Harry.”
“When we first met, you said you appreciated my honesty,” Harry sniped, although he had started shuffling back and forth.
Kingsley turned to face the window. “Someday Harry, when you grow a bit older, you’ll understand that to be Minister is to hardly be anything.”
Harry quietly thought that was a load of complete and utter bullshit. He had heard that from plenty of other people, not just Kingsley, and almost all of the time they were just as corrupt and as spiteful as Fudge, quietly toddling around until a family pushed a little gold into their coffers before they would finally walk.
“It’s kind of inevitable– it’s the Ministry, Harry, not some utopia,” Ron had whispered to him, a long time ago, when Hermione wasn’t looking. Harry wasn’t entirely convinced. This was one thing that Hermione and him fully agreed on, and they had made dozens of changes to the Ministry over the years, trying their best to clear out all the old air.
In spite of that, despite the dubious ethics of this file– it was interesting. More interesting than he’d had in ages. It looked so run-of-the-mill– random guy messing with Muggle guns, suspicions of him using Dark magic– but there was such a high price, and such stringent requirements, that Harry couldn’t help but understand that it was more than it seemed.
This, it seemed, was the miracle case. The case almost too good to be true. The case along the likes of Lucius Malfoy, of Rabastian Lestrange– true work, work that needed doing.
“I’m not doing it.”
Kingsley immediately turned around. Harry wondered if that was getting tyring for him.
“Harry, I know you know it’s an important case, I know that look in your eyes– Merlin, I’m asking this as a favour of you, not just as part of your job.” Harry must have looked sceptical, because he continued, with somewhat more force than before. “And, between you and me, your performance here could be heavily valued when considering you for promotion.”
Harry rubbed his eyes. He didn’t care about the promotion. He didn’t even care about the money from this case, either– he had more than enough money in his coffers.
So he turned around. And then as soon as he was about to pass those doors– he felt it. He felt it ever since he broke all those records, felt it ever since he picked up that stone, felt it ever since he killed Voldemort and leaned over his dead body and wondered if, in death, his train station looked the same as Harry’s own. He felt tired. He felt exhausted– so like clockwork, he felt the mist seeping into his vision, he felt that distinct sense of wrongness permeate his being.
He wasn’t supposed to feel it. Or if he did feel it– he was supposed to be excited by it, be angry at it, feel something other than fear when confronted by it. But then again, his life was an aberration in the storeys that used to muffle through the cupboard at night.
People like Harry weren’t supposed to live like this. They were supposed to die in glory, not get withered by fame. Somewhere, very deep inside him, he asked if he himself was an aberration. That if he, the so-proclaimed child of prophecy, was too ethereal, too tragic, too perfect to ever stay.
…But he couldn’t. But Teddy. Who would take care of Teddy?
“Andromeda,” his inner-Harry whispered. “Andromeda, who has done this before, who has none of your short temper and all experience and love and time in the world for him.”
He felt it. But not the mist, this time. It was an emotion, thick and heavy, sitting right in his stomach. He needed this, he told himself. He needed to sleep. He needed to stop feeling like the war had ever ended– playing the waiting game, sitting in his office, waiting for the day like he felt like himself again. Because he wasn’t himself– as long as he was off the field.
He would see him again in a few months, he reassured himself. Babies were young. And who remembered anything as a child, anyway?