Days After Death

Dear Harry,

I don’t think I’ll be able to come over on Friday, or the day after, unfortunately. Granny Andy’s got a doctor’s appointment that I have to personally escort her to since it's out of state, and then Vic’s having an exhibition. The 25th is busy too– work’s having a thing where we have to bring our parents in (luckyyyy me). Here I thought that was just for kids! But I guess working in a kindergarten runs a bit differently and we have to lead by example or whatever rubbish they’re trying to justify it with. July’s actually pretty busy, now that I think about it, but I’ll swing by whenever I can!

Life has been busy– as mentioned– but busy in a nice, fulfilling sort of way, thanks for asking! Yes, I did have ‘The Talk’ with Vic. Yes, she was excited about the idea. No, we don’t have a plan of when everything is going to happen– which you didn’t ask about but I know you’re curious. I still wouldn’t tell you no matter the answer!

Things are well. Married life is well. Sometimes I think Vic and I are too perfect together (I am bragging, but you and Ginny have always shown the strength of a pairing I’ve consistently aspired to work towards, so I guess you have bragging rights too).

You asked me quite a few questions about me, but enough! How are you? I’m not as privy to what goes on in the Ministry (and the wizarding world in general) as I ought to be, considering my family. How’s work? How’s LILY at work? Is she just as chaotic as everyone expected her to be? And how are Jamie and Al? I haven’t seen them around the house as often when I come to visit– so I guess they’re probably busy.

Say hi to Ginny for me!

Ted.

Harry smiles fondly and folds the letter, making a note to reply to it later. He hadn’t ever written to Teddy so frequently and constantly before. He thinks deciding to build up their relationship is a good step in the right direction. Harry was young when he was donned the title of being Teddy’s godfather, and with youth came many mistakes and blurry priorities– but he knows better now. He’s glad Teddy didn’t shut him out when he could’ve.

Something good is being built from this, he thinks triumphantly.

There’s a soft knock before Nero comes barging in without permission, like they always do. Harry stifles a sigh at the intrusion.

“The Minister is ready to receive you now,” the assistant says breathlessly, like they’ve been rushing from one place to another.

Before Harry can say anything else, Nero hurries out the door, slamming it on their way out.

Harry gives a long look at the stack of paperwork lying on his desk, then swears softly, deciding to leave it before walking the familiar path to Hermione’s office.

Hermione isn’t in her office. Nero comes bustling in again to inform him that the Minister is on the roof. So to the roof he goes.

The Ministry building, from outside view, is usually magicked to look like the Whitehall in central London, but different places help different offices, and the Ministry would change on shifts. Such as important offices like the Minister’s (for safety reasons), and geographically diverse offices like the Muggles Liaison office (for convenience). They normally materialised as a few different sorts of unassuming office buildings with the occasional brick tenement.

Right now, the Minister’s office and the Muggle Liaisons are in the same place. It takes the form of a medium-sized stone business building with rustic railing overlooking the street. The first thing Harry hears when he shoots out from the Ministry is the sounds of loud cheers and the booming, magnified voice of Shane Kelsier. He feels his irritation flare exponentially.

Hermione is there, outlined against the pale, cloudy sky, bundled in cloaks and jackets of no particular ostentation, perhaps to hide her identity from the crowd down below. Harry has no doubt she’s cast a mystifying charm on herself to further deter recognition.

He walks up to her, making his footsteps loud enough so she doesn’t feel like she’s getting snuck up on. He puts his hands in his pocket as Hermione casts a mystifying charm over him too, and he looks out at the sea of protestors.

“I don’t know how they caught wind of where I or the Muggles Liaison was situated,” Hermione says quietly. “They seem to not know what building it is, but they have a pretty good guess either way.”

“You shouldn’t be watching this, or listening to what they say,” Harry says firmly and quickly when he comes. Hermione and him have been… weird since their argument. That doesn’t mean Harry forgoes any protectiveness he feels for her sake. “Why give them any of your attention? They’re losers. Stupid, bigoted, bored, hateful losers–”

“The Sight’s numbers have tripled since two months ago, following the attack ethromorphis has had on the Squib community. It feeds into this stereotype that Squibs are violent or useless to society. Shane Kelsier’s popularity has been on a steady upward incline since January and has peaked at the end of last month to now. He’s got enough followers that available higher positions in the Wizengamot have become potential promotions to him, and who knows after that? Maybe he’ll be Minister one day.”

“Don’t say that.” Harry’s equally quiet now. He doesn’t want to believe her– he wants to be optimistic about this issue, but he’s smart enough to know and be somewhat worried when Hermione is, even if she does have the capacity to overthink.

But now she looks downright depressed.

“Have we made nothing better?” Her expression shifts, and she seems properly pissed off. “I’ve given up years, decades, everything of my life to build on this world, and look at this shit, Harry. They’re calling for the eradication of Squib treatment at St Mungo’s! They barely even treat them in the first place! They’re mad!”

“They’re fools. You know that. We encountered so many like that in our youth.”

“So even you admit it! Nothing has changed!”

“Of course not– that’s not what I meant! Of course things have changed for the better, you’ve made sure of that. It’s just hard to see that now, with these people here.”

Hermione looks at him, forlorn.

“I thought I got rid of this sentiment,” she says. “I thought we had rooted it out.”

Harry shakes his head.

“It can’t be rooted out,” he says. “There will always be people like this. People who vie for more, who think they’re better than anyone different to them. There will always be hate and a lust for power. We just have to learn how to contain it.”

Hermione looks positively stricken at that, horrified.

“You can’t think that,” she mutters, shocked. “Harry, we have to believe this world can be better than that! That’s our job! Our duty! You saying that we can’t change it, that this is simply how it will always be– dismisses them. This hate– this discrimination– is not natural. So we have to look for better futures if not nothing will ever change.”

“Nothing has changed!” he explodes, because if anyone should know how ugly people really are it’s them. “You just said that! And you were very adamant about it too!”

She turns away, rubbing at her face. Fine. He tries a different approach, because he can’t be fucked arguing about human nature with Hermione at three o’clock on a weekday. Surprisingly enough, he had wanted to speak with her too.

“These people are idiots,” Harry tells her, determinedly. “They’re harmless. Forget about them. Cull the real aggressors.”

Hermione groans, “They aren’t Death Eaters, Harry.”

“You saw that tattoo.” Harry and his team had forced Civers down so they could properly snap a shot of her forearm. Andy had been the one to handle her. If he had tried, he would’ve been too rough.

“That tattoo is not a Dark Mark.”

“It’s close enough.”

“Are you being serious?”

“Listen, I’ve been in this line of work for decades now, Hermione. There are so many of Voldemort’s followers still out there. This has to be connected. You said you were stuck on finding a motive? Well, I’m telling you, this is it.”

She looks almost sad when she says, “Harry. You’re obsessed with Voldemort. You always have been and it’s messing with your objectivity—”

“And I have always been right!” He’s yelling again. “Time and time again, people don’t believe me. And yet I am always correct whenever I sniff the ghost of him out!”

Her irritation seems pointed at him now, and Harry can feel his defensiveness rise to meet her. She used to pull the same sort of pinched expression when she got annoyed at his and Ron’s lack of intelligence back in school.

“Never mind,” she says curtly, “I don’t want to argue with you.”

Now leaning against the rail, Hermione crosses her arms and pins him with a stern stare. She just transformed from his best friend into the steely Minister of Magic. So he shifts into the Head Auror.

“Rose has finished running tests on the ethromorphis drug,” she says. “She’s written up the report now. It might give you insight onto who may be under the influence, who to watch out for, what the drug looks like, where it can be kept.” She pauses here. “Rose told me first, but I think it’s best you hear it from her.”

Harry nods and feels like he should say something after. Hermione hadn’t been hostile to him recently, but she had been a little standoffish. They hadn’t talked about their argument since it happened, and already Harry misses their closeness. And Ron’s too. He’s been jovial but Harry’s sure he’s on Hermione’s side in all this.

Whatever. He guesses the issue will go away if he ignores it long enough. It’s not that big of a deal.

So with that, Harry Disapparates, leaving Hermione alone on the roof.

Harry has been down to the labs many times during his career and he still isn’t used to it. Sometimes it’s to collect evidence, or files on an autopsy. Sometimes it’s to collect Veritaserum, as ever since Hermione was elected Minister, she had banned outsourcing mind-altering potions within the Ministry. Everything was to be manufactured here with the oversight of Ministry officials. Drugs, poisons and other maladies technically fell within the jurisdiction of the scientists here.

Harry has always found the labs to be unnerving at best. It’s a maze of staunch, cool-toned tiled walls and white lights that make his eyes hurt. One wrong turn could either send him to the cafeteria or the mortuary. Every worker he found down there was clad in some form of protective clothing either against germs or curses. No one reacted to his presence, as if they had heavier things on their mind.

That being said, Harry has no idea why Hermione would actively encourage her daughter to work in such a dreary place. He tries to imagine his own children here, tries to imagine Teddy, and he simply can’t. They would all probably lose their minds. Well, all perhaps except for James.

He doesn’t know the labs well, but he has memorised Rose’s work office. Ron used to send him down there to brighten her during her shifts– he was so worried she’d ‘lose her flair’ working in such a place. Every time Harry visited her, however, she’d give him this very unimpressed look that reminded Harry of Albus. She’d ask why he’d come, he’d awkwardly tell her, and she’d dismiss him after a polite amount of time had gone past. But Harry had grown busier and the impromptu visits had stopped, slipping his mind.

Rose handles high-end stuff. She isn’t a superior officially– Hermione had always said she’d want Rose to work her way up on her own– but she knows how to do a shitful of odd yet helpful tasks. Because of this, Harry is never sure what to classify Rose as. She could identify the rarest of potions, extrapolate cures and poisons, configure diagrams of a component within a day, as well as examine bodies. Hermione’s seat as Minister had never been overthrown because she gave the most important jobs to people who could never betray her.

Hermione sending him to Rose in the first place was how Harry understood that she was taking this ethromorphis case very seriously. The drug ring seemed to be expanding geographically, and yet they had no solid leads. It’s a fucking mess, in other words.

He rounds the corner, eyeing a pair of identical shiny black doors that share the appearance of all the doors that came before and after it.

Harry knocks before he enters. Rose is already hunched over a desk of files, waiting for him.

“Hi, Uncle Harry,” she greets, giving him a pretty smile. Rose, despite her short fuse, is always verbally polite to her elders, even in the workplace. Her sass and irritation are mostly communicated through looks and scowls rather than anything untoward.

She crosses over the room and gives him a short but well-meaning hug, before stepping back.

“Rose, how are you?” Harry clears his throat awkwardly. Sometimes his niece makes him quite nervous. It must be how she reminds him so much of the fiercest parts of both Hermione and Ron, who are honestly two of the most intense people he knows. It also must be because he’s not exactly on the greatest of terms with either of them right now so he doesn’t know where he stands with Rose.

“Could be better,” she sniffs, putting her hands on her hips. She juts her head back towards the files, all very business-like. “Come take a look.”

They step towards her extremely cluttered desk– a desk Harry also knows to be meticulously organised, because Rose is one of those people who has a place for everything and knows where everything is.

Case in point, she digs out the beginnings of a debriefing file from under a stack of what seems to be an investigation into the components of Bulbadox juice, which has nothing to with this right now.

“The Minister said I should summarise to you again about what ethromorphis is,” Rose says. Her tone seems almost apologetic.

There’s no point arguing it, even though Harry feels more than slightly offended that Hermione thinks he needs a reminder of how the drug operates. Sometimes it’s like she completely forgets about what happened to Luna.

He gestures for Rose to go on, though. His battle isn’t with her.

“Ethromorphis is a drug that boosts serotonin, often prescribed in small doses amongst a wide timeframe at St Mungo’s to heavily traumatised people who need aid in regaining lost memories as result of trauma-induced amnesia. If overused at consistently upped doses, its effects are reversed and can cause the user serious memory deficiency. What makes ethromorphis so addictive, is that users can sometimes manipulate the drug with reinforcing selective memory patterns– thereby ‘deleting’ or ‘erasing’ memories that are particularly painful. Most of the time, this is done without the user’s consent and with the user’s ignorance of its effects.” Rose draws out a study performed on a blood sample taken from the Squib Harry had interrogated last month, Vallory Civers. She taps on a list of integrants that look like gibberish to Harry. “You see this part that says phenoxyethanol? And over here it says benzene? These are not just targeted towards wizards, but can have the same effect on Squibs and Muggles too– ethromorphis is simply made up of universal, basic chemical compounds. Hence why The Looking Owls seem so interested in exploiting that particular market. It’s hard enough for wizards and witches to get their hands on it– it’s expensive as hell and healers are hesitant to prescribe the drug to people as it is. It’s basically impossible for Squibs and Muggles to access it, and so their only means of purchasing it is–”

“–illegal dealing,” Harry finishes for her. He runs a stressed hand through his hair.

When they apprehended Civers, Andy had asked her what her family’s details were in case they needed an emergency contact. Civers had more than a hard time recollecting her sister’s name. And then there had been Luna…

Rose looks sorry to say it, but adds, “You know how bad the withdrawal is. You’ve seen it.”

“Yes.” By the time Luna and he had stopped being friends, she was a totally different person. Or, at least, acted as if he was.

“Subjects can begin to experience withdrawal symptoms within the first thirty hours of no dose. I would have to run a diagnostic test on Monrow’s blood sample and comb through his files– but there is a possibility the effects are felt to a larger degree with Muggles and Squibs.”

“Fuck.”

Civers had a history of mental instability, but she had been uncanny in that interrogation room. And what experience he had had with Luna– well, he had never even contemplated the idea that there was a worse.

“The Squib I apprehended a few weeks ago,” Harry says, “she was taken to St Mungo’s, even though the hospital is rarely used to treating non-magical peoples in the first place. She was heavily using by the time we arrested her. Will she be alright?”

“I don’t know, I have no contact with St Mungos outside of autopsies,” Rose furrows her brows, and Harry sighs. Maybe he’d be better just asking Lysander if he could remember to. “She mustn’t be dead, at least. The Minister would’ve sent her my way if she was.”

It disturbs Harry how nonchalantly Rose says it, how she’ll refer to him as ‘Uncle,’ but speak of her mother as ‘the Minister.’ But upon further observation, he can see her face is lined with shadows that Harry had assumed was exemplified by the general darkness of the laboratory. Now he’s not so sure. He remembers when she first started this job she would always elaborately braid or tie her bushy red hair back– now she clips a heap of it back from her face with a large butterfly clip.

He doesn’t know why, but he glances at her wrist. Nothing but her white, unstained long sleeves. But when he looks at her collar, resting gently on her clavicle, is a black metal chain, with a thin red thread and small pink beads spelled to it. It is the only pop of colour on her wear, something so childish standing out from the rest of her dark business attire, and Harry recognises it as the old matching bracelet she made for Ron when she was younger. He only knows this because Ron still wears it around everywhere to this day.

“How’s your dad?” Harry finds himself saying, and Rose blinks, surprised.

“Um,” she says. “He’s fine.”

“And your mum?”

She blinks again and her mouth twists just barely.

“She’s good too. Why do you ask?”

Right. Because Harry would usually just ask them.

“I just heard, you know, that they’re working through some stuff now.” Merlin, does he sound like he’s prying? Well, he is. But he doesn’t want to make that so apparent to the most judgemental niece he has.

“Yeah, they’re doing some couple’s counselling,” Rose says casually.

“Mum’s idea?” Because it definitely was not Ron’s.

“A mutual decision.” Rose thinks for a bit. “They’re private about it, though. And I’m not looking too hard at why they’re there in the first place.”

Okay, so she knows he’s prying.

Harry inhales deeply.

“Sorry,” he says, running an awkward hand through his already mussed hair. Lily sometimes snarks that he’ll go bald soon if he continues to use it as a stress reliever. “I always thought they were so perfect together. They’ve always just made sense.”

Rose snorts at that, her nose crinkling up in amusement. It doesn’t seem sarcastic or disingenuous, but it does sound a tad condescending.

“Nothing makes sense unless you make it make sense,” she says. “Dad and Mum work well together because they used to try a lot. But they haven’t tried for a while, so now they’re trying to try again.” Harry puzzles over the wording. “I wouldn’t sweat about it, though. I know I certainly am not.”

Really? Harry always had the impression that seeking therapy or counselling was to fix something— and how could you fix something that isn’t broken? What sort of happy, well-situated married couple would go to couple’s counselling just because?

Harry observes Rose— her prim stature and sharp ironed uniform a steel shield to the tiredness materialising as swathes of shadow under her eyes and the token of sentimentality wrapped around her necklace. He has so many nieces and nephews he finds it hard to keep up with all of them. He’s certainly not as close with them as he ought to be— but Rose has spent the most time around his direct family than anyone else. She’s the oldest child of his two best friends and she used to be Albus’ best friend too, before they went to school, that is.

He had never particularly pegged her as a personal sort of woman, but every time she had come back from Hogwarts over the break, she was a little different, and she had changed drastically in recent years too. Sort of like his kids. He could never keep up properly with them, so how was he expected to get a read on her? The wide-eyed, bossy girl that grew up to just past his knee and had an obsession with bats was no more.

Maybe she’s grown more secretive now. Maybe she’s telling the truth, though he finds it hard to believe that a child wouldn’t care so much about the welfare of their parents.

What does he know, though? He never had the nuclear family dynamic then as he does now. Every time his Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia used to fight (it was usually Vernon picking on his whimpering, weak wife), he would hide away in the broom closet he lived in and press his ear against the door like it was sweet music. Any time there was hostility between them meant less violence impressed on him, as long as Harry could keep out of sight and as long as they weren’t fighting about him in the first place.

Probably not the best thing to say aloud now, though.

“That’s good,” Harry says, knowing he sounds a little stumped for words even in his own ears. “You shouldn’t stress.”

Rose seems to be trying to repress a smile.

“I’m not stressing,” she says, looking him up and down. Ah, so she’s judging him now. That’s probably his cue, then.

“Right.” Harry gestures at her door. “Thanks for the briefing, but I should probably go check up on that suspect–”

“You thought we would just end on me briefing you?” Rose raises her brows and crosses her arms and Harry vaguely feels like he’s getting scolded. “Anyone could do that. But I need you to look at this.”

She jerks her head at one of the small coffee tables shoved up against the corner behind her desk. It’s so unassuming that Harry hadn’t paid it much mind. There’s a map with small red and blue pins stuck in it– Harry clocks what it is easily because he has an identical map in his office.

“You should probably know where they’re manufacturing their chemicals,” Rose says, “and where the hot spots for selling are, if you’re going to catch these greedy crims, right Uncle Harry?”

Once they get to work, the hours run away from him. He supposes it always happens down here in the labs.