his whole situation is just so bizarre.

Anyway. Now you know.

Harry goes into his meeting with Horace Slughorn torn between feeling irritated, insulted, amused, and entertained, which, while a mixed bag of emotions, is at least one he’s getting used to.

He leaves feeling mostly slimy.

It’s not that Slughorn’s a bad guy, exactly. Harry doesn’t think he means anybody any harm. He’s just…obsequious, in that way Harry hates dealing with, that way that makes him feel, afterwards, as though he’s in need of several very hot showers. It’s all, “Oh, Harry, my boy, you are looking well,” and, “My goodness, I just find all you’ve done so inspiring,” and endless discussion of Gwenog Jones, who, Harry knows, doesn’t even play for the Holyhead Harpies anymore. The only useful thing Slughorn has to offer in the entire meeting is the suggestion that maybe all the objects that were taken had some kind of significance or importance to Malfoy, that the ultimate target was some variation of sentimentality magic, and Harry would havee to that theory on his own in any case. Or Ron would have. Or… someone, anyway, would have thought of it.

He looks at Malfoy’s letter again to cleanse himself of the experience, because there’s nothing that clears the scent of sycophantry out of your nostrils quite like someone calling you an imbecile twice in one paragraph. Then he writes I ordered you eight boxes of Coconut Blizzards, will that be enough? on a slip of parchment and sends it off with Mathilda, and catches himself humming a jaunty little tune every few minutes for the rest of the afternoon.

Just before he leaves for the day, Malfoy’s eagle owl returns, and Harry reaches out, mouth already quirking at the corners, to take the letter. Before he can, though, the huge bloody bird leans over and bites his hand, hard.

“Fucking hell,” Harry snaps, after he’s made sure he’s not going to bleed on anything, and unrolls Malfoy’s note. It reads:

I told him to do that. DLM.

Harry looks at the piece of paper for a long time and then laughs, loud and long, a little rueful. He chucks the piece of parchment into his top desk drawer and goes home.

On Thursday, Head Auror Erhard calls Harry and Ron into her office. She’s a strange woman, Erhard, an American with little diplomacy and less patience and a head of hair that makes her look a lot like Hermione, for all Erhard’s a good deal older and has much lighter skin. Harry likes her a lot, actually, except that she’s his boss and he most often talks to her in the aftermath of having done something that reflects poorly on the department. That aspect of their relationship is, admittedly, not ideal.

“How’s it going on the Malfoy case?” she asks, looking back and forth between them. “Progress? Changes? Have you caught the rapscallions responsible?”

Ron and Harry exchange a look; nothing goodes of an interested Erhard. Then Ron, the selfish bastard, says, “Harry’s been taking the lead on that case, ma’am.”

“Have you?” says Erhard sweetly.

“Er,” says Harry, who knows a trap when he sees one but can’t ever quite seem to keep from helplessly falling in anyway. “Well—”

“Oh, I don’t really care, Auror Potter,” she snaps. Harry shuts his mouth. “Here’s what I do care about: it’s been a week, and we’ve still got an Auror posted there on protective duty around the clock. You do understand the department only has so much funding? And that we like to make sure that some if not most of that funding goes to actively fighting crime?”

Ron is giving Harry a very pointed look. Harry’s not actually looking at him, but he can feel it burning into the side of his cheek. He ignores it.

“Er,” he says again.

“Do you believe Mr. Malfoy’s life is in clear and present danger?” Erhard says, getting down to the brass tacks of the thing.

Harry looks her dead in the eye and says, honestly, “I’m not sure. I believe that it could be. I don’t want to take the chance.”

She gives him a long, measuring look and then nods sharply, just once. “Three more days, and then I pull the plug. That’s as long as a damn attempted murder would get, so don’t try to fight me on it. And one of the Junior Aurors called off sick today, so we’re a man short. If you want someone out there tonight, it’s your happy task to assign the shift.”

Harry groans—softly, but, unfortunately, not softly enough. Under the cover of the desk, Ron kicks him.

“I’m sorry, Auror Potter, was there something more?” Erhard’s voice is stone cold. “Did you perhaps want to try to argue down my insanely generous offer? Do you want to bite the very, very permissive hand that feeds you? Go ahead. Now’s the time.”

“No, ma’am,” Harry mutters, even though a tiny part of him is yelling Do it! Bite the hand! Fight! Fight! Fight! “Sorry, ma’am.”

“Oh, stop apologizing and get the hell out of my office,” Erhard says. Harry and Ron both move to get up, and she snaps her fingers. “Just Potter. Weasley, you stay.”

Ron looks like he just swallowed a frog, and Harry beats a hasty retreat before he bes part of whatever Ron’s done wrong. After all, Ron can afford a black mark or two on his record—Harry, at this point, really cannot. His own record is more black mark than anything else.

He walks over to the bulletin board of Junior Aurors, the rosters of active surveillance and guard details, and spends a half-hearted minute or two trying to find some poor bastard to stick with the empty shift.

Then he gives up, and does what he was probably always going to do anyway: he grabs his cloak, and goes to Malfoy’s himself.

It’s pissing down when Harry gets to Grimmauld Place, an icy late February sleet. Trent, the Junior Auror who was ording to rumor nearly shitting himself over pixies a week ago, is sitting on the front stoop, trembling a little. Harry wants to roll his eyes—Trent is clearly not equipped to live with the crushing daily misery of Auror work—but he doesn’t.

Instead he says, “An Impervious Charm can work wonders in times like these,” and attempts to clap Trent on the shoulder. He means it to be a reassuring gesture, but Trent shies away from him like a wounded animal, which is both discouraging on a professional level and disheartening on a personal one.

Harry puts his stupid awkward hands in his pockets, because that is where they belong. This is what he gets for trying to mollycoddle the Junior Aurors, anyway; clearly his more typical approach is best.

“I’ll take it from here,” Harry says. And then, when Trent just stares at him, eyes big: “Look, just—leave. Now. Please.”

The kid’s off like a shot, Apparating before he even gets halfway to the gate. Yeah: he’s definitely not going to make it through training. When Harry was a Junior Auror…well, actually, Harry doesn’t remember that much about being a Junior Auror. It’d been during that period right after the war where he was a bit…just…not quite all there, somehow. It’s all a bit of a blur.

Still, he’d…well, no. He’d hated these jobs, too, the scutwork and endless nights on sentry duty or patrol, but it wasn’t because he was scared. It was because he was bored, and sure he could be doing something more, and terrified of missing an opportunity to help someone, and really, really bored.

It took a long time for Harry to learn the hard truth of this work: that this is the work, more than anything else is. asionally in Auroring there’s a bright, shining moment, a bust, a rescue, a takedown that makes Harry feel alive and valuable, living up to his purpose —but mostly there’s not. Mostly there’s just the endless, unyielding grind, day after unchanging day. Mostly there’s just wanting to help people, and failing, and hating yourself for failing, and making yourself get up and try again the next day anyway. The cases change, but the stories are all the same, and they’re mostly brutal, difficult stories, stories that make a shiver run down your spine.

In some ways Harry has been standing in this rain for nearly ten years.

He casts an Impervious Charm of his own, and takes up a post next to Malfoy’s front stoop.

It’s half an hour before he notices someone standing on the sidewalk in front of the house. It’s a little guy, glasses, weird purple fedora hat—unfamiliar in one sense, but all too familiar in another. He’s got a camera in his hands; Harry closes his eyes briefly, pulls his coat in a little tighter in against the wind, and ignores him.

Another half hour passes, and there are three new people on the sidewalk, all with either a notebook or a camera, all staring at him hungrily. By the two hour mark, Harry’s Impervious Charm is starting to give up the ghost and there are thirteen people watching him through the bars like a zoo animal; a whole baker’s dozen, Harry thinks, not without a little hysteria. They’re all shouting questions to him asionally, like maybe if they keep trying they’ll wear him down into answering one. Harry tries thinking about the guards at Buckingham Palace, how stiff and immovably placid they’d been when he took Ginny to see them years before. There’s freezing rain running down the back of his neck, though, so it’s not working all that well.

He is, horribly enough, considering walking up to the gates and begging them to fuck off when Malfoy’s front door opens.

“What in unholy hell is going on out—” Malfoy stops, stares out at the crowd, and seems to follow their gaze back to where Harry is leaning up against the house, trying to stay out of the wind. Then he contents himself with just staring at Harry, hands at his sides, mouth slightly open, for what feels like a long time.

“Er,” says Harry. “Hi?”

Malfoy’s eyes narrow, and he throws his hands in the air, says, “They’re as low as they’ll go, I don’t understand,” before he wheels back into the house and shuts the door.

He’s back before Harry can even process his leaving, and with a cloak on this time. He storms down the stairs, grabs a fistful of Harry’s sodden robes and says, e on, Potter.” Harry thinks, for a hopeful moment, that Malfoy is going to her

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