Chapter Text
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
You die for the wizarding world. You kill the Dark Lord. You win the war. You get the reward.
The hero gets the girl. They get married. They have babies. They live happily ever after.
That’s how it works. That’s what all the stories said would happen.
But when you spend your early childhood locked in a cupboard and denied love, and your adolescence training as a child soldier, managing to have a functional adult relationship is actually quite difficult.
Ginny did try, she did. Harry will give her that. In the end, when she left, neither of them were crying. Harry thinks they were both secretly relieved. But it meant going to The Burrow was awkward, so Harry went less and less. Now it’s not something he feels comfortable doing anymore.
Even Ron and Hermione didn’t get their happily ever after.
Turns out when you’re both waking up with night terrors almost every night, nobody gets any sleep. When nobody’s sleeping through the night and you’re both working government jobs during the day, sleep deprivation and tempers rise.
When tempers rise, especially in two people with strong personalities who have known each other since the age of eleven and know exactly what to say to make it hurt, arguments spiral out of control. Nobody can compromise and in the end it just gets too hard, and how did we end up here?
Then Hermione went to visit her parents in Australia, because of course they ended up staying there, of course. She said it was only going to be a visit. That she would be back. A few weeks turned into a couple of months. A couple of months turned into six months. Six months turned into a year. Then Sydney had this fascinating program on Bowtruckles, or something or other.
It’s been three years and Harry doesn’t think she’s ever coming back.
He’s pretty sure the program has nothing to do with Bowtruckles but honestly he can’t for the life of him remember what she said. He knows he needs to write her a letter, but it’s all just so much. So he doesn’t. And she doesn’t. And…
Some small part of him tells himself she’s relieved. He shouldn’t push it. She needed this. All that talk of burnout before she left… He’s probably just a burden so he shouldn’t bother.
He had Ron for a while anyway, so it was fine.
Then Ron went to visit Charlie. Since when did Ron even like dragons? It probably had nothing to do with the dragons and everything to do with Ana, one of the trainers that works with Charlie. She wasn’t broken by a war, because she was living in Romania the whole time. So she didn’t wake up in the middle of the night screaming… That probably had a lot to do with it, actually.
So Ron stayed. Harry’s pretty sure the last letter he got implied they’re expecting a baby now. He’s not certain because by the time he got ‘round to reading it, he’d had a few. The lines were pretty blurry and Ron’s writing was never that neat to begin with. Now that he thinks about it, it’s been a few weeks and he should probably find that letter and reply to it. If it did say what he thinks it said, and he doesn’t reply, then Ron might get mad…
When did everything just get so hard?
That’s another thing now; is that Harry’s finding he’s drinking earlier and earlier in the day. To the point where it’s 9 AM on a Tuesday and he’s already having whisky. Not firewhisky, but normal muggle whisky. He knew if he kept going to the wix store he would get recognised and then it would end up in the papers. He couldn’t have that, so he started buying from the muggle store. It’s cheap and horrible and he doesn’t even care.
It probably doesn’t matter either way because he noticed over the last few months the papers don’t seem to care about him anymore either.
Not that he reads the papers anyway. But he never sees his face in them when he happens upon one anymore. Nobody’s been camping out the front garden recently either – not that they’re supposed to do that since it’s a muggle building, yet it never stopped them before. He also doesn’t get random people coming up to him when he’s in Diagon Alley.
He’s wondering if the magical world has finally realised what a disaster he actually is, and has finally left him alone.
He’d gone to visit Teddy and Andromeda one time after he’d been drinking. Maybe he’d said something. Or maybe she had smelled it. He wasn’t sure. But she got all cold and said maybe he should leave. Maybe he shouldn’t visit again for a while, you know, for Teddy’s sake. He couldn’t be like that around Teddy. You understand, of course. And he did, of course.
She said if he ever wanted to talk, she was just a Floo call away. Harry had left, red with embarrassment, and obviously never went back. He also never called, because how could he possibly face her after that?
So that was another connection he lost along the way.
Maybe none of this would have happened if he’d gotten a proper job after the war. He’d just never really gotten around to it.
First there were all the trials, and he had to testify. Then they had him do all these speeches and talks. He was invited to galas and events and whatever else they could parade him around at and say; here look, here’s the saviour of the magical world, look at our pretty puppet. He’d go and smile and nod and shake hands and kiss babies and drink and go home and not have a clue what he’d done all day.
Companies would send him their merchandise and throw money at him for their sponsorships. He hadn’t needed a proper job. So he just hadn’t bothered to get one. Then eventually all the events had slowly petered out. He had less and less to do and more time to sit around and remember. That obviously got you nowhere, so that’s where the whisky came in. Now that seems to take up most of his day.
He can’t even feel proper guilty and maudlin about it in Grimmauld Place, sitting around Sirius’ old room, because he sold that first chance he got. He couldn’t bear living in a house that hated him. It let him know every day that it didn’t tolerate him. It wasn’t interested in the fact that he was the rightful Black heir. Godson inheritance laws didn’t apply to it, thank you very much.
So now he’s in a shitty flat in muggle London; a four-storey walk-up. Somehow that’s just so much more depressing than living in that big, old, claustrophobic house.
Most nights when he’s really deep into the whisky he regrets the decision to sell. He wonders what the hell possessed him and if he can possibly buy it back. But he’s usually passed out before he can make any attempt at finding a real estate agent to talk to. By the morning he’s forgotten again.
If it feels like he’s just living the same day over and over… Well, that’s probably because he is, really.
Everyone else he went to school with seems to have figured out how to adult and is moving on with their lives. That just makes him so angry. Why do they get to be so well adjusted? They’re all engaged or married, and having children with proper jobs and proper homes and all the rest.
Harry can’t even revive his favourite old-school hobby of obsessing over Malfoy. He went missing over six months ago and nobody knows where he is. People have all sorts of theories; from dead to living undercover as an Unspeakable. Although everyone agrees he probably just moved to France and is living in some Malfoy summer villa and having a grand old time. How dare he? thinks Harry, because that’s probably exactly where he is. How does he get to come out of all this peachy keen while Harry is just a downright mess?
Whenever he sees Narcissa Malfoy out and about, which admittedly isn’t very often, his heart just stops. He doesn’t want to think about that too hard, so he doesn’t.
He sometimes wonders if it all went wrong because he’d kept the Resurrection Stone.
He should have just thrown it away in the Forbidden Forest. But he hadn’t. He’d hung onto it and then later, after he’d taken the Elder Wand from Voldemort, he’d looked at his chest and found a tattoo; an ouroboros over his heart.
Harry has no idea what it means or why it was there or what being Master of Death truly entails. But he’s certain everything fell apart after that moment. He needs something to blame, so he chooses that. It’s easiest. It feels the most like something that isn’t really his fault.
More destiny that just fell into his lap after it hit him over the head with a shovel.
He threw the stone into the sea and placed the wand in Dumbledore’s tomb. All that did was fade the tattoo until it looked like a birthmark. It never truly went away. He still doesn’t know what it’s all about.
He tries to pretend it isn’t there.
He fails.
So instead he finds himself dreaming of King’s Cross Station more and more and wondering why he came back. Thinking he probably should have just stayed there and let someone else deal with all the fallout. That probably would have been the best decision. But it’s too late now. He can’t change it.
The more he thinks about it, though, he realises he can go back. If he really wants to.
Once the idea is in his head, it won’t leave. He comes back to it day after day. He obsesses about it. With a decision reached, his only real question becomes how? He’s not sure you can aim an Unforgivable at yourself. Since he’s survived the green one twice, he’s not confident it would work on him anyway.
After seeing Malfoy post-Sectumsempra he’s not sure he’s game enough to try that one on himself either. So then he’s wondering if maybe the muggle way is the best method to go about it. There’s so many options in that regard, though. He spends several days thinking about that too.
For some reason, every time he thinks of death, he thinks of blood and water on a bathroom floor.
His brain cannot erase that image. He thinks there’s something quite circular about that and he feels at peace with it.
So in the end, he decides on a bathtub and a blade.
He thinks that’s the best of both worlds, and he feels at peace with that too.
Maybe if he hadn’t had that fifth tumbler of liquid courage before he started he would have remembered to turn off the water. It would have been a perfect circular moment.
He would have found his peace at King’s Cross Station and his story would have ended there.