- Fuck, - his voice cracked. It was even more tired than himself. Harry spent hours checkin on lates documents, trying to figure out where he made a mistake that pissed off his superiors, but he missed the main one - the mistake was to stay far past 10pm to finish all the work. Cold coffee seemed to give him no help.

Nothing gave him the help he really needed.

He crossed Hermione in the hallway, running through people with eyes filled with panic. 'They postponed the meeting about the new law on  improving life for house-elves and their ilk' she said quickly taping on his shoulder. Always busy with her high goals - Hermione felt like Harry's antonym - he felt his life going slow, like frost growing on the window. Too slow.

The time is still the same - running so fast, curling, jumping, but Harry - no, no, no ; he moves slower, he thinks slower, he makes decisions slower, until the cheif says to take their wands and go outside, giving them the address and the goal. Harry doesn't know how to live this life - there were no instructions after Hogwarts, - but he knows how to fight it. And since aurors give him the best space for it - he stays in silence surrounded by his ghosts that are less polite than Hogwart's ones.

His anxiety became a friend - the one that is here when you feel bad. And makes you feel even worse. But still - it's here. And it starts to feel like home, to smell and taste like home - Harry uses his mental health as a shield to avoid other problems. When you have enough of them, there is no enough space for the rest. And he knows it's wrong - he learnt it from over-caring Ginny's looks that she shared with him, - but he doesn't know how to do otherwise.

Students at Defense Against the Dark Arts lectures still look at him as a hero who has just destroyed a universal evil ; inspired journalists are preparing their columns for May 2 to commemorate the Battle of Hogwarts - everyone strives to interview him. Harry agrees because he wants - wants people to remember the sacrifices they had to make to win. The newspapers chant defyrambs in honor of his victory, forgetting everything he desperately said. Once he was seeking for this glory - now he is spitting it in Ministry's toilets, afraid to look at himself in the mirror and face someone who he barely knows.

The War is left in the history books and in quick silent glances of people who have seen it - especially those, who have touched it. Their hands are harsh, but much more eager to help others, because they know what means to think of the last sunrise that they have seen. Those who thought like that - those who are like Harry, - are mostly to be lost in their life after this war ; after all, when you know that you are ready to die, life seems like something foreign. And when you get it, you don't know what exactly to do with it.

Harry seeks some sense in his actual living and finds himself catching too many useless things.
That's why the chief said to abandon these stupid rumours about The Elder Wand - a prick on the streets of London is demanding for a duel, shouting in every corner about his magic wand that is invincible. And that's why Harry is not abandoning them at all, finding himself writing reports with his left hand and planing how he can get to this duelist with his right one.

But then he stops. He stops, because his thirst for action collides with the wall of a painful past, sending flashes of memory to his brain, which he has already tried - hundreds of times - to break inside himself. He stops, because he knows -

- Hey, Ron, - he knocks, - I need your help with the case that we discussed lately.

The lifebuoy inside this endless chess game, where he doesn't know the right rules, is the fact that Harry is not alone. He never was - maybe until his first letter in Hogwarts. He is the part of the Gold Trio - not the Gold Trio is the part of him. And even if Hermione is busy trying to make the lives of the disadvantaged to be respected, Harry knows - there is someone else, who shares the same look. Ron might have other fears crawling inside of him, but fear is fear. Past is past.

Ron is Harry's reflection. But another one - one that Harry is not afraid to look into. [nick]Harry Potter[/nick][icon]https://forumupload.ru/uploads/0019/e7/78/888/788759.png[/icon][fandom]Wizarding world[/fandom][char]гарри поттер[/char][lz]The war lasted for a long time - a very long time. I don't remember the sky, birds, or flowers. They were there, of course, but I don't remember them.[/lz]

Отредактировано Satan (2020-12-16 01:40:28)

It's stuffy. Harry feels tied up in the cashmere sweater he got from Ginny as a present - without noticing it, she got some of her mother's habits. And definitely, with no offense, missis Weasley, a better taste. Is it his body that radiates the heat or the Ministry itself - he doesn't know. He feels uncomfortable and gladly accepts a talk during the walk. Moving helps to clear his mind, as if he is incapable to think standing or sitting in one place - that's why his studying talents were never discovered in school ; of course it's not because every year some sort of cursed luck tried to kill him or others - of course not.

"This is weird," confirms Harry with a sigh. "But this supports my theory that the duelist is young and.. stupid ? I don't think people of our age.. people, who saw what we saw - I mean the Battle, everything, - would act like this"

Harry wants to break out of this stuffiness, not to be flesh, not even to be a soul, but to be anything, just not this - just to be away from the terrible act of inaction.

He looks at Ron, trying to find any sign of their similarity. Ron is unlucky to face more people with war-touched faces - his family was never the same after all, - Harry, on the other side, has a chance to find only Ginny in their warm bed where they have a diplomatic pact of not discussing themes that may hurt their mechanisms of living through hard things. Knowing how easily Molly Weasly can hide in her infinity words, every time Harry wishes th family meeting to be ended as fast as possible, sometimes he even gives himself a permission to lie and say that he is too sick or tired to visit them all.

Ron has to face them. Has to see them living through.
The door is always welcoming and open, but no one would voluntarily jump into this despair. Family bounds make you do things without your own will, even if they hurt you.

"I though you deleted the word nonsense from your vocabulary, Ron," Harry cracks a faint smile, slightly remembering that once he had already said something like this. For him everything in the wizarding world is some sort of nonsense and will be forever - he still shudders when hears the Apparition, he still stays too long next to Wiseacre's Wizarding Equipment looking at magical hourglasses. He still believes in magic, even if he uses it on a common basis.

And also he still knows that his intuition most of the time appears to be true. This duelist has the Elder Wand, even if Harry thought that he had already destroyed it. The question is how to prove this fact when intuition seems not to be enought for the proof ? Jump straight forward or sit and wait ? Harry knows that he could make Ron go with him, using terrible words, pressing terrible buttons, acting like he probably would act when they were children - play on a sense of responsibility for other people's lives, talk about lives destroyed by the Elder Wand. But this pain would be mutual.

"I feel it," Ron is probably the only one who can believe in Harry's feelings about this case, if he wants to. But nowdays Harry became older and more careful - he knows his responsibilities, because they are not as they used to be - he is not here to save the world anymore. The goal is less clear as it was. It is covered with aurors procedures, papers, rapports ; they are not children who can say that they don't know how the big world works.

This feeling alone was something real in the whole world.

[nick]Harry Potter[/nick][icon]https://forumupload.ru/uploads/0019/e7/78/888/788759.png[/icon][fandom]Wizarding world[/fandom][char]гарри поттер[/char][lz]The war lasted for a long time — a very long time. I don't remember the sky, birds, or flowers. They were there, of course, but I don't remember them.[/lz]

Отредактировано Satan (2020-12-22 13:27:53)