Sober

Harry lifted his hand when it was his turn and kept his voice low. “My name is James and I’m an addict.”

The circle echoed the same welcome they gave everyone and waited for Harry to elaborate as the others before him had.

“I’ve been sober for eight months, three weeks, two days, and…” Harry checked the time on his phone, “And six hours. But who’s counting?” There was an encouraging chuckle that always gave Harry the push to elaborate a little bit.

“Before I was sober I was addicted to Xanax, coke, alcohol, and reckless living,” Harry admitted, secure in sharing a bit of his story as he hid behind his glasses and blended in with the anonymity that was given every member of these meetings. “If I hadn’t quit when I did, I would be dead,” he said bluntly.

And, as always, that was as much as Harry was able to share before his throat closed and his memories tried to overtake him.

“Welcome, James,” the group leader, an older woman with kind hazel eyes who introduced herself as Minnie, said before turning to the next person.

Harry listened as the next woman, a pretty and thin girl named Jenny introduced herself and briefly mentioned her addiction.

Nymphomania.

Interesting.

It was always a mixed bag of addictions at these late night meetings.

You had your classic hardcore drug addicts, as the scrawny and scarred members proved.

A few alcoholics, always.

Harry had met a couple of members once who were addicted to gambling and slept on the streets because they’d pissed away their money and drove their families away.

He wrote them a check and never cared to follow up with them. Either they used it on a place to stay or a place where they could chase their rush— he didn’t much care either way.

Harry had only met someone who claimed to be addicted to sex once before; he’d been a street worker and had tattoos covering nearly every part of his body.

A fact that Harry knew damn good and well as he’d went straight from that meeting in L.A. to a nearby motel with the guy whose name he never bothered to learn.

Just because Harry had to have sobriety didn’t mean he gave a damn about anyone else’s. If he had to resist temptation- then perhaps they should as well.

Harry checked the woman out beside him and resisted the urge to smirk as he caught her checking him out as well. She wasn’t unattractive; she had a pretty face, a smattering of freckles to give her some color, and dark red hair to distract you from the dull shade of brown in her hollow eyes. He never went to these meetings with the intent to pull, but far be it from him to satisfy an urge for someone else.

Harry was so caught up in his elaborate fantasy of offering to walk the woman home and fucking her halfway between here and there that he nearly missed the soft voice of the man speaking until his attention was captured immediately by the word ‘pills’.

“…addicted to pills,” the man said. He had dark blonde that covered his forehead and Harry could imagine yanking on. Well, he could, until the man lifted his face and Harry got a peek of sallow skin and empty eyes. The guy lifted his head, his gaze trained stubbornly on the floor and Harry could see a weak jaw, a straight nose, and a scar just below his eye socket. “I don’t even know what I took the first time I got high, I just knew that I loved it and wanted to feel that way forever. It started slow, just getting some from a friend to let loose on the weekends. Then I started buying for real- just to get through this work week, just to deal with my girlfriend, just to get through the games, just ‘to insert excuse here’.”

There were a few laughs from members who weren’t Harry, because Harry was caught up in remembering the first time he found solace in a script bottle.

“Harry, darling, you’re sweating,” Pansy grimaced as they waited outside the office of the manager for the first studio to ever offer Harry a contract. “You’ve got to calm down.”

Harry had been eighteen. He’d been singing for years, performing in bars and other little venues that paid him in meals and tips.

It had been a stroke of what he thought was unimaginable luck to have Pansy meet him and agree to manage him for a cut of what she assured him would be ‘inevitable riches’.

“I’m going to throw up,” Harry said. His knee was bouncing and he could feel his spit pooling in his mouth as he waited to find out if someone would actually offer him money to record an album that he wrote.

“If you throw up then this will never work,” Pansy hissed. She snapped open her black handbag and dug through it before pulling out a little orange pill bottle. “Here,” she poured one of the white rectangle pills in Harry’s hand and closed his fingers over it. “Take it, it helps with nerves.”

Harry looked at the pill and debated for only a moment.

Pansy hadn’t steered him wrong before.

So Harry swallowed the pill and waited for it to kick in and cure him of his nerves.

Harry and Pansy were called in the office and Harry signed his first contract with a studio before the pill ever kicked in. But when he left the building- he was so alive. It was like he wasn’t even Harry Potter anymore.

Harry had been chasing that moment for the last seven years, but no high is ever as good as your first.

“….been sober for five years and eight days now.”

Harry didn’t scoff, but the guy lost his attention then and there.

Harry hoped and prayed to God that he didn’t need meetings after five fucking years of sobriety. At some point, everyone had to man up and deal with this shit on their own.

The rest of the meeting went as it always did:

Discussions of identifying triggers and how to handle them.

Everything and avoidance.

Talk about social support.

Ron and Luna.

Mention of sponsors.

Harry would never trust some fucking stranger to keep him on track. He would do it alone, as he always did.

Minnie handed out new chips.

Harry couldn’t wait to get that one year chip.

Draco would laugh himself sick if he knew how badly Harry wanted that fucking chip.

‘NA is for quitters,’ he’d smirk. ‘Are you a quitter, Potter?’

Fuck you, Draco, Harry thought bitterly even as he smiled to imagine the conversation.

They ended the meeting with the Serenity Prayer and, as always, Harry swore that one day he’d find a program that didn’t force its religious propaganda on members.

If God had to help them stay clean, then why did God let them become addicts in the first place? If Harry could place his sobriety in God’s hands, why couldn’t he pin all his other problems on him as well?

‘Accountability’, apparently.

It was why Harry was still stuck on step one, admitting he was just as powerless against his addiction as he’d been in every other part of his life and saw that his life had become unmanageable.

Literally.

Fred said he couldn’t manage Harry when he’d been in the darkest part of his addiction.

As soon as the meeting was over, the sexy little redhead stood up and pulled a cheap faux-leather jacket over her short black dress and smiled up at Harry.

“Want to get a coffee?” she murmured, her pupils dilating as she obviously looked Harry over. “We can talk about sponsoring each other,” she fluttered her lashes at Harry.

Members weren’t supposed to have any sort of personal relationship outside of the meetings. Sponsors couldn’t even be the opposite gender, which was fucking stupid because Harry would bend a guy over just as quickly as he would a chick.

“Hell yes,” Harry breathed.

Her sobriety wasn’t his problem any more than his was hers.

They never made it to the twenty-four hour café that was a mere five blocks down the road.

The whole time Harry was buried in her— her arms around his neck, her fingernails in his skin, his sweat clinging to her— he pictured light blonde hair and smooth pale skin.

It made him sick when Draco’s name was on his tongue while the woman cried out Harry’s middle name.

Afterwards, he offered her a cigarette and she offered him her number.

They both turned the other one down.

Harry offered her a last smile before he adjusted himself and finished the stroll to the café and slid in a booth by himself.

Jenny was a distraction, and a pretty one at that, but at the end of the night, Harry was alone.

Always alone.

Fuck you, Draco.