Chapter Text
The thing about wanting something you've decided you can't have is that it doesn't go away just because you've decided.
Harry had learned this at sixteen. He was learning it again now, at nineteen, standing in the corridor outside the Auror training room with a cup of tea going cold in his hand, watching Ginny Weasley argue with Ron through the glass partition that separated the Auror offices from the main Ministry atrium.
She was gesturing. She always gestured when she argued — her whole body got involved, hands and shoulders and the tilt of her head, and her hair was down today, loose around her shoulders because it was a Saturday and she'd come straight from Harpies practice, still in her training kit, mud on her boots and a bruise along her jaw from what he suspected was a Bludger that had gotten too close.
She was magnificent in the way she had always been magnificent. Completely and without trying and entirely unfair.
Ron, on the other side of the glass, made the face he made when he knew he was losing an argument. Harry watched him cross his arms, which was a tactical error — Ginny's eyes went to it immediately, the way a Chaser's eyes go to movement, and she said something that made Ron's ears go red.
Harry looked down at his tea.
He was very good at looking away. He'd had years of practice.
It had started in sixth year.
He couldn't point to a single moment. It hadn't been like that — not one blinding instant but something slower, quieter, more insidious. An accumulation. A Tuesday in October when she said something at breakfast that made him laugh so hard he'd nearly choked, and he'd glanced over at her and found himself not looking away for a beat too long.
A Saturday afternoon when she'd walked past the common room fireplace with her Quidditch kit over one shoulder, not looking at him at all, and he'd lost the thread of whatever Hermione had been saying entirely.
Small things. The specific way she held her wand when she was concentrating. The way she could silence a room with just an eyebrow. The fact that she never, ever said the expected thing.
He'd noticed all of it. Privately. Carefully. And said nothing.
Because there was a prophecy.
Because Voldemort was coming and Harry Potter was the only one who could stop him, which meant Harry Potter was also the only one who might not survive it. Because there was a war coming and he had no business starting something he might not be alive to finish.
So he'd watched and wanted and told himself it was fine, that it would pass.
It had not passed.
He'd gone into the war carrying it. Just another weight. One more thing he couldn't put down.
Ron came out of the atrium looking like a man who had narrowly survived something.
"She's insufferable," he said, appearing at Harry's elbow and stealing the cold tea without asking.
"She has a point though," Harry said.
Ron turned to stare at him. "You didn't even hear the argument."
"She wants to come to the Muldoon briefing."
"How did you —"
"Because she's right." Harry nodded through the glass, where Ginny was now talking to Neville with the focused energy of someone who had won and moved on. "If they're targeting Quidditch venues, the Harpies should be briefed."
Ron opened his mouth. Closed it. Drank the tea, grimaced at the temperature. "You always take her side."
"I take the side that makes sense."
"Uh huh." Ron gave him a look that Harry didn't examine too closely. "Mum's Sunday dinner. You're coming?"
"Yeah."
"Good." Ron looked through the glass for a moment, watching Neville nod along to whatever Ginny was explaining.
"She's been on about the security briefings for weeks. The Harpies have been given nothing. She's right to be annoyed."
"You could tell Robards that."
"I did."
"What did he say?"
"That they'd be briefed at the appropriate time." Ron handed the empty cup back. "Which means never, or when it's too late."
Harry said nothing. Through the glass, Ginny had pulled out a piece of parchment and was drawing something for Neville — a diagram, her hand moving quickly. Neville leaned in to look at it.
"The Monday briefing," Harry said, turning away. "What time?"
"Nine sharp." Ron paused. "New intelligence came in this morning. More sightings near sporting venues. Robards thinks they're escalating."
"Towards what?"
"That," Ron said, "is what Monday's for."
Sunday dinner at the Burrow.
Loud and warm and chaotic, three conversations happening simultaneously, Molly moving between the kitchen and dining room with practiced efficiency. Roast chicken. Four side dishes. Two puddings. Arthur describing a Muggle documentary he'd watched with the intensity of academic research. Percy attempting to explain Ministry restructuring to anyone who would listen.
Harry sat at his usual seat — across from Ron and two down from Ginny — and ate and talked and felt the familiar complicated warmth of it. The belonging that still surprised him, two years on. The guilt that came with the belonging, quieter now than it used to be but still there, a low note under everything.
Ron, beside him, was being questioned by Molly about whether he was sleeping enough. George, across the table, caught Harry's eye and made a face that said: same conversation, every Sunday, world without end.
Harry smiled despite himself.
Two seats down, Ginny was talking to Neville — he'd been coming to Sunday dinners more often lately, Molly acting as if she'd simply always planned to set that place — and Harry was not listening to their conversation. He was not watching the way she used her hands when she talked, or the way she'd tip her head when she was making a point. He was engaged in a completely normal conversation with George about the shop's new product development.
"Revised Fainting Fancies," George said. "Last four hours now instead of two."
"That seems like it creates problems."
"That's the point. Problems are funny." George stole a potato from the serving dish without looking at it, eyes still on Harry with an expression Harry had learned to distrust. "You're doing the thing."
Harry looked at him. "What thing."
"The thing where you look very engaged in this conversation while actually being somewhere else entirely."
"I'm here. I'm talking to you."
"Mm." George tilted his head slightly, just enough to indicate a direction. Downward along the table. "Sixth year?" he said, quietly enough that it didn't carry.
Harry went still.
"I'm observant," George said, without any particular emphasis. "People forget."
A pause. Harry looked at his plate. "Sixth year," he said, just as quietly.
George nodded once. He didn't push, didn't tease, which was somehow worse — it meant he understood there was nothing to tease about. "And you're not —"
"No."
"Because —"
"It's complicated."
George was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again it was careful, the way he was careful sometimes when Fred came up obliquely in conversation, the way he'd learned to carry weight and still keep moving. "Don't let complicated be permanent, Harry. That's all I'm saying."
Harry didn't answer.
Two seats down, Ginny laughed — bright and unself-conscious, the same as it had always been — and Harry moved a piece of chicken around his plate and did not look up.
Monday briefing. Conference room B, seventh floor.
Robards at the front. Map on the wall. Harry looked at the pattern of red markings and felt the low unease he'd been carrying for weeks take on a sharper shape.
He sat between Ron and Neville. Ron had his quill out. Neville was very still in the way he got when something mattered.
"Sporting venues," Robards said, pointing to the cluster. "Three confirmed sightings in the past month, all near Quidditch facilities. We believe they want spectacle. A public target. Something that makes a statement."
Ron's quill slowed slightly. Harry saw it.
He saw it because he knew Ron's tells — nine years of them, a full catalogue. The almost-imperceptible changes. The quill slowing meant Ron's mind had just gone somewhere he didn't want it to go.
Neither of them said anything.
After the briefing, walking back to their desks, Ron said: "Montrose was on the map."
"Yeah."
"The Harpies train there Saturdays."
"I know."
Ron looked at him sidelong. "You already knew."
"I pulled their schedule Friday. When the new sightings came in." Harry sat down. "I talked to Robards. He says they'll have surveillance."
"Two Aurors," Ron said flatly.
"Yes."
A silence. "She's going to be there Saturday. Full squad session, all the trainees." He looked at his hands. "I told her to be careful."
"What did she say?"
The corner of Ron's mouth moved. "That I was being a mother hen and she'd been handling herself since before I could tie my own shoes."
Harry could hear it exactly. The tone, the timing.
"She's right," Ron said. "She can handle herself." He said it the way you say something you need to be true.
"She can," Harry agreed.
Neither of them said the rest of it.
Harry pulled up the property files and started reading, and didn't stop until he'd gone through every page three times.
Saturday.
He went to Montrose without telling Ron. He told himself Ron didn't need to worry more than he already was, which was true. He didn't examine the other reasons.
The surveillance team was already there — he clocked them immediately, third row of the stands, civilian clothes, sightlines clear. He sat five rows behind them and opened his notebook.
Cold morning. Flat grey sky. Twelve figures in green robes rising from the pitch in formation.
He found her immediately. He always did.
Watching her fly was something Harry had no intellectual defence against. The easy authority of it. Reading the air, reading her teammates, the Quaffle barely seeming to leave her hands before it was through the posts. She'd been good at fifteen. She was something else entirely at eighteen.
He looked at his notebook. He wrote nothing.
An hour in, she was setting up for a complicated play — a feint left, sharp cut right, she'd been running it all morning with increasing precision — when the air changed.
He felt it before he understood it. The way magic gathered before it was used badly. He was on his feet before the first spell fired.
Six figures. Dark robes. Apparating directly onto the pitch.
Harry vaulted the railing and hit the grass at a dead run.
The surveillance Aurors were moving but they were positioned wrong — too far right — and there were too many, and they weren't going for the players, they were sealing the exits, cutting off the air above the pitch, and three Harpies were already Stunned and falling — Harry caught one on a Summoning charm without stopping, fired two Stunners at the nearest attacker, kept moving —
Ginny.
Still up. Higher than the others, smart — she'd gone up instead of down, buying herself space. Wand out. Already casting.
Three of them converged on her.
She hit two hexes before they got her wand arm. She fought with her whole body, twisting on the broom, refusing to go still — and Harry was twenty feet away, fifteen, wand up — and there was a hand on her arm and another on her broom and—
The crack of Disapparition was the loudest sound he had ever heard.
The sky where she'd been was empty.
He didn't remember the next twenty minutes clearly. He knew he'd taken down two of the remaining attackers. He knew he'd taken a Stinging hex to the shoulder that he didn't feel until later. He knew the surveillance Aurors had restrained the others, and someone had sent a Patronus to the Ministry.
He knew he'd stood in the middle of the pitch for some amount of time, looking at the empty air.
Then he found the message. Burned into the wood of the announcer's booth in letters a foot high, still smoking:
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. YOU KNOW WHAT WE WANT. THEY WON'T ENJOY WAITING.
He photographed it. He read it twice. He went to the Apparition point and left.
The emergency response room was already filling up when he arrived. Robards in the centre of it, two senior Aurors pulling files, someone on the Floo to the Department of Magical Games and Sports. Harry went straight to the intelligence wall and started pulling property files.
He was deep in the Welsh safe house records when the door opened and Ron came in.
Harry knew, without looking, that someone had told him. There was a quality to the silence Ron brought with him — held and pressurised, the specific weight of news that takes the floor out from under you.
He made himself look.
Ron's face was the colour of old parchment. His jaw was set in the way Harry had seen before — Bill, at Shell Cottage. Arthur, at St Mungo's. The expression that meant I am not going to fall apart because I cannot afford to.
His ears weren't red. When Ron was truly frightened, he went pale all the way to the tips of them.
He crossed the room and stopped beside Harry and looked at the intelligence wall — the maps, the photographs, the list of properties — and didn't say anything for a long moment.
Then: "How many did we get."
"Three in custody. The other three Disapparated with her and two of the trainees."
Ron nodded. Very carefully, like he was moving something fragile. "The message said twenty-four hours."
"Yes."
"Somewhere prepared then. They wouldn't have moved without it." His hands were in his pockets. Harry suspected they weren't steady. "That narrows it."
"Disapparition from Montrose — Wales, the borders, possibly southwest Scotland. I've been pulling everything in that radius."
Ron stood beside him and looked at the map. His breathing was deliberate. In, out. The controlled breath of someone applying technique to emotion because technique was all that was left.
"Okay," he said. "What do you need."
Harry looked at him. Properly, for a moment. Ron's eyes were very bright in the way eyes get when they're holding something back by force of will.
"Cross reference the property list with the sighting reports. Two or more sightings in the last month — that's where they've been preparing."
Ron pulled out the nearest chair, sat down, reached for the files. His movements were precise in the way of someone who has decided what they are going to do with themselves for the next several hours.
Harry turned back to the map.
Later — after the room had filled and the operation formally started and Robards had stopped arguing with Harry about the scope of the search — Ron came to stand beside him again and said, very quietly: "You were there."
Harry said nothing.
"At Montrose. You went." A pause. "I didn't know."
"No."
"Did you see it? When they —"
"Yes."
Silence. Ron looked at the map. "Good," he said. It wasn't a strange thing to say. Harry understood exactly what he meant — not glad it happened, just: I'm glad someone was there. I'm glad she wasn't alone. I'm glad you saw it and not a report on a desk.
"We're going to find her," Harry said.
Ron looked at him. Something in Harry's face made him look a moment longer than usual — a searching look, the look of someone trying to name something just outside their reach.
He didn't say what he was thinking.
"Yeah," Ron said. "We are."
Harry turned back to the files. The map. The narrowing list of places she might be.
He thought about one thing.
Find her.
Everything else could wait.