01
Night was absolutely not Harry’s favorite time.
It never had been, not even when he was young.
Their adventures had mostly begun at night, and danger and pain had always followed.
Later, the mental link between him and Voldemort made everything worse.
Every night before he fell asleep, he worried about whether he would become Nagini again, his mouth flooding with Arthur Weasley’s blood.
Or worse: killing someone else the way he had gotten Sirius Black killed.
Night was when his emotions lost all control.
Without the busyness of the day, he couldn’t stop himself from drifting back into memory.
Occasionally he would land on something happy, Quidditch, his godfather, the Burrow.
But every one of those happy memories was threaded through with pain.
He could never possess them without condition.
If grief and self-blame were the price of holding on to those happy memories forever, he would pay it willingly.
He lived on those things, on duty, on the unwillingness to let go, and on the memories themselves.
He lived on the half-letter from Lily Potter he had found at Grimmauld Place.
On the torn photograph.
On the Two-way Mirror that was no longer whole.
During the years of exile and school, Harry had no secrets from Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley.
Even when he tried to hide something, the two of them would see right through him.
But after joining the Ministry of Magic and beginning to live alone at 12 Grimmauld Place, keeping secrets became easy.
Harry took a cigarette from a wooden box sealed beneath layers of protective charms.
He had no choice but to do it this way, hide the alcohol and the tobacco perfectly out of sight.
Teddy Lupin occasionally spent the night at 12 Grimmauld Place.
Having these things in the house was already proof enough that he was an irresponsible godfather.
No need to let a curious child root them out and hold them up with an innocent “what’s this?”
Harry leaned on tobacco sometimes.
Charlie Weasley had been the one to tell him about it, that the stuff could take a real edge off the pressure.
Harry figured it was probably because, while you were enjoying the burning nicotine, you had no choice but to take a few deep breaths.
But he still couldn’t give it up entirely.
He usually didn’t finish a whole cigarette.
When it had burned down halfway, he would stop.
He would hold the half-smoked stub up in front of him, the ember still occasionally flickering, and watch in silence as it consumed itself, inch by inch.
He was struggling.
And he was waiting.
He craved pain with a morbid hunger.
Every inch of skin pulled taut and unbearable, as though braced for the moment suffering would arrive and then spread outward along his nerves and through his veins.
The pain would stay, and he would already be praying for the next wave to come.
It was unhealthy.
Harry knew that.
So it remained his secret.
His rational mind told him to fight the compulsion, like right now, staring expressionlessly at the cigarette shortening before him while his thoughts ran through the same image, over and over: pressing it hard into his own skin.
But every time, in the end, he only watched.
He waited for the tobacco to burn completely down, until the high-temperature ember kissed his fingers with a small, scorching wound.
The craving inside him was left unsatisfied, and yet not quite.
It was probably that he didn’t actually crave the temperature of fire that much. Get faster updates on novelping.com.
The roaring blaze had never taken up too significant a place in his memory.
Flame was not one of his painful memories.
Harry let out a slow breath and began to stare at the scar on his hand.
“I must not tell lies.”
Harry thought that his fifth-year self hadn’t needed that vicious quill.
The version of him sitting here now did.
He needed that quill.
To cross out that absurd, laughable line and replace it with a new truth.
“I must tell lies forever.”
02
Harry’s emotions collapsed completely on Saturday.
He finally understood what he had spent the entire sleepless night waiting for, the Daily Prophet.
Mrs. Avery had made the front page, and she had used it to launch a scathing attack on the Ministry of Magic.
On Harry, primarily.
She painted him as a scheming, power-abusing, ruthlessly ambitious hypocrite who smiled to your face while plotting behind your back, speculating that he had inflated Robards Avery’s charges to cement his own reputation as the Savior, and declaring that the entire Ministry of Magic was in his grip.
When Harry saw the familiar ghostwritten byline — Rita Skeeter, the piece stopped surprising him.
The rhetoric was very familiar.
After the war, Rita Skeeter had been pushed to the margins.
But Rita Skeeter was still the kind of petty opportunist who would never pass up a chance to grab attention.
Not long after Harry finished reading the Daily Prophet, there was a knock at the door.
“I want to throw that filthy beetle Rita Skeeter into Azkaban! No — I want Neville’s toad to eat Rita Skeeter!” Hermione Granger stormed in, so furious it seemed even her hair had been set alight by the anger.
“We should have done it years ago — why didn’t you just let Rita Skeeter starve in that jar!” Ron Weasley followed, face dark.
“Why get so angry about it?” Harry said, a smile at the corner of his mouth.
He poured them both a cup of tea and settled himself casually on the sofa.
“You alright, mate?” Ron Weasley looked at him with concern, clearly puzzled by the reaction.
“What’s there to worry about? This isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.” Harry crossed his arms over his chest, using them to hide his hands, which had started to tremble.
At some point, he had stopped letting himself get angry in front of Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley.
Because it seemed to accomplish nothing except make them worry and feel helpless.
And he had started to feel ashamed of showing them his own helplessness and hurt.
“The Ministry of Magic will hold a public review of the proceedings and the full case.” Hermione Granger said, biting her lip.
Her gaze stayed fixed on Harry the whole time.
Harry was a little worried she would notice something was off.
“Go home and enjoy the weekend.” Harry smiled and let out a breath.
“Even if everything is made public, the people who want to attack me will just say it’s fabricated — that I’ve got the entire Ministry of Magic in my hand. Or they’ll simply ignore the truth altogether.”
“Honestly, there’s no point working overtime for something like this. We just treat it as a false rumor and leave it alone. No explanations. No more attention.”
Hermione Granger knew Harry was right, of course, professionally speaking, it was even the most correct way to handle it.
Because Avery was a Death Eater, the family had already been branded with the mark of evil.
This front-page story wasn’t going to convince many people.
But she hated it.
It was asking Harry to swallow an injustice, and she hated watching her friend do that.
“It maximizes the outcome, doesn’t it?” Harry tilted his head and looked at Hermione Granger.
He knew what she was thinking.
“For the greater good.”
“Besides, Robards Avery is legally a minor. Under the law, we can’t make the evidence public until coming of age.” Get faster updates on g.com.
Hermione Granger was persuaded by Harry against every instinct she had.
Ron Weasley still disagreed, but couldn’t hold out against the two of them.
“For the greater good…” Harry sat on the sofa and repeated the words quietly to himself.
After Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley left, the collapsing emotions broke through the mask of cheerfulness he had been wearing and covered his mouth and nose like a rising tide.
Since becoming an Auror, he had finally come to understand Dumbledore, truly understand him.
It was true.
People ought to give things up for the greater good, even if what they gave up was themselves.
The faint resentment he had once felt at being kept in the dark and used seemed to dissolve along with that thought.
But the loss remained.
He understood every bit of the logic.
If it had been his choice to make, he would have made the same one.
And still his heart was broken.
Why him?
Why, no matter how hard he tried, was it still him?
Why, no matter how blameless he was, did it still fall on him?
Harry stumbled into the bathroom and reached up, trembling, to pull a box from the hidden compartment in the ceiling.
That was where the Two-way Mirror fragments were kept.
The ones Sirius Black had given him.
Before the flight from Hogwarts, his hand had once been cut by those fragments, and through them he had seen Aberforth’s eyes looking back.
Harry picked up a sharp fragment and, with longing, almost impatient, drove it into his own arm.
The jagged glass pierced soft skin without resistance.
Bright red blood began to well up.
At first it fell in drops onto the floor, blooming like vivid flowers.
Then it became a stream, running down his arm, soaking into the floorboards, staining his white socks red.
Harry sank to the floor, leaning back against the bathtub behind him.
How pitiful.
Happy memories brought nothing but pain, yet a wound that should have been agony gave him a feeling of relief.
The rapid loss of blood left his mind clouded.
The suffering could no longer be called to mind.
“This feels so good…”
Harry let out a quiet sigh.
For a little while, he had escaped the boundless pain.
➤ Next: Merlin’s Punishment
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