Chapter Text
Harry Potter had come to hate expectations. Sometimes he thought even more than he hated Voldemort. He sat in the perpetually dark kitchen of number twelve with a cup of tea, flipping through the folder Hermione insisted that he take when he went round for dinner at her and Ron's flat last Thursday.
He sighed, rubbing his eyes. Since the war had ended, he hadn't done much. Mostly he'd locked himself in Grimmauld place under the guise of "remodeling." He hadn't really made any progress at all. The entirety of the upstairs was in various stages of demolition, and he had been sleeping on the big squishy sofa in the sitting room for months.
He'd jumped from project to project, bobbing along to whatever record he felt like blasting from the old magically modified record player he'd unearthed from under Sirius's bed. He felt like he was almost happy most days. Ripping the house apart was cathartic. He was never bored. There was always something he needed to be doing.
But then Hemione would come round, her lips pulling tight, while she'd look at him like he was somehow failing not only himself but also everyone else simultaneously. Just existing was not good enough for Harry Potter. He was supposed to be successful!
Harry thought he was successful. After all, he was alive, had somewhere to live, and had plenty of money from his parent's vaults. Still, whenever he went to dinner at the Burrow on Sunday, someone would look at him with concerned eyes and ask, "What are you going to do, Harry? Haven't you joined the Aurors yet?"
"Why don't you have a girlfriend?"
"Harry, when was the last time you left the house?"
So slowly, he'd just stopped going. He hadn't meant to. Only he kept finding himself standing in front of the door just as he was due to leave, coming up with all these excuses for why he should just stay home. As time passed, it got easier and easier just not to go.
For a while, it worked. He stopped getting bemused looks and prying questions. He stopped being stopped in the street every time he went to get broom polish- mostly because he'd stopped going to get broom polish. Instead, he started going into the muggle neighborhood around the house. There was a coffee shop less than a block away, a record store, a small market that sold artisan cheese, and a vintage shop over a nail salon.
Harry liked going into town. He liked talking to Tessa, the barista at the coffee shop, and Keltie, who worked at the vintage shop. They never asked him what he was going to do with his life. Rather, they asked how his latest project on the house was going or if he liked the record he'd picked up the week before.
It was nice being just Harry.
At least for a little while. He missed his friends. He missed talking to people who knew him. Knew what he'd done, where he'd been, all the things he'd seen. And he missed magic. He'd dithered about whether he should contact Ron and Hermione for over a month before Hermione wrote to him first and invited him over for dinner.
In the end, he was glad she'd owled him instead. He really hadn't wanted to invite her and Ron over until he'd made some kind of tangible progress on the house. They didn't understand why he bothered with it, "why don't you just get a flat," said Ron, "this place is so depressing; Sirius wouldn't want you to be locked up in here all the time."
Harry didn't have an answer because he wasn't entirely sure why he bothered with Grimmauld place. All he knew was he'd never had anything that was just his before. He wasn't going to just walk away from it because it was a bit dingy and needed a lot of work.
The problem was he wasn't sure how to say that. He wasn't sure how to say a lot of things. So many that, at some point, he'd stopped trying. It was far easier to smile and nod. To pretend he agreed, then to try to explain that no, really, he really was fine.
By the time the rest of the week had passed, and it was time for him to leave for dinner at Ron and Hermione's, he was looking forward to it. He was humming to himself while he got ready, he'd bought a new shirt from the vintage shop that Keltie had picked out for him, and he's even made sure to wash all the plaster dust out of his hair.
Only it turned out to be less of a dinner invitation and rather more of an intervention. Harry was crushed. He'd been so excited. He'd told Tessa about seeing his friends when he'd picked up his coffee that morning, leaning on the end of the counter and chatting with her while she made lattes.
He'd told her how much he'd missed them and how he wanted to tell them all about the house. He'd finished a project! After three failed attempts earlier that summer, he'd finally successfully laid the new floor in one of the upstairs bedrooms.
Part of the problem with renovating number twelve was that it was so old and full of magic that he was stuck doing all the repairs the muggle way to avoid messing with the many, many layers of overlapping wards.
Since Harry didn't know how to fix anything the muggle way, it would take him ages to get anything done because he was trying to learn on the fly, and even in the best circumstances, he wasn't the best student. Most of the time, he thought it was quite good fun. The rest of the time, he'd shout curses at the wall and set small piles of discarded plaster on fire. Nobody needed to know about that part, though.
Harry didn't get to talk about the house. Actually, he didn't get to say much at all. It didn't take him long to realize this wasn't about having dinner once he'd arrived. Instead, he sat at the table and tried not to curl in on himself while Hemione very kindly explained that they were worried about him, while Ron sat next to her, looking distinctly uncomfortable.
She had a folder in front of her, her hands folded over the top. She told Harry that in the folder was an application for the Aurors. The next training period started in three weeks, and she'd already talked to Kingsley, and Harry would most certainly be accepted if he applied.
"I want you to look at this and seriously consider filling it out," she said, pushing the folder toward him, "you can't stay locked up in the house forever, Harry; the longer you wait, the harder it will be to come out again."
Harry had nodded numbly, took the folder, and left. They didn't have dinner. Harry didn't trust himself to apparate home, it wasn't his strong suit on a good day, and being this unfocused, he was just going to be asking to splinch himself.
He took the night bus instead. It was awful. He knew going out in public in the Wizarding world never went well. But since he never actually did it, he'd forgotten how it felt to have eyes tracking his every move, how it felt like being slowly smothered. Didn't they know he could hear them when they whispered like that?
They must know. Surely they didn't think he wouldn't notice?
He stumbled off the night bus a few blocks away from home. He liked to walk, and honestly, he didn't want anyone to get any ideas. It had been a long time since he'd found a group of wizards and witches camped out in front of his door, but he didn't feel like pushing his luck. Not after the night, he'd had.
Halfway home, he heard someone shout his name, "OY, HARRY!"
Tessa stood in the open window of a bar across the street. She leaned over the counter, halfway out the window, waving enthusiastically. He waved back, jogging across the street. He stopped outside the window.
Grinned at him, holding her margarita in one hand, she leaned further out the window. "How was your dinner? How are your friends? Are you having a good Friday night?" she asked cheerfully.
Harry grimaced and ducked his head; he wasn't sure if he could explain what had happened.
"Oh, no lovey, that bad?" she asked, cooing at him, her perfectly lined lips turning down at the corners, "you just hold on, right there. I've got just the thing to fix you up. You just wait right there."
She disappeared from the window, leaving Harry standing awkwardly on the sidewalk. She was only gone a moment. Then she was back, leaning towards him, holding on to the counter so she wouldn't topple out the window into the street.
She passed him a big white paper bag and winked, "Got a bunch of day-olds in there, even some of those cinnamon scones you like so much. Chin up, love. It'll be alright, and if it isn't. Fuck 'em."
Harry took the bag, thanked her, and awkwardly shuffled home, feeling very much like a gigantic loser.
While Harry had ignored the folder, Hermione had given him for over a week. He didn't ignore the scones. Those had only lasted about two days. Harry was positive that the world would be a better place if everyone ate a cinnamon scone with every meal.
The folder sat at the end of the table in the kitchen. Every time he came into the room, he could feel its presence haunting him from the far end of the table. Finally, he sat down and opened it. He leafed through the application spreading it on the table in front of him.
He picked up an old, slightly bent quill, flipping to the first page. Name. That was easy enough. Harry J Potter.
He scowled down at his chicken scratch; his handwriting had certainly not improved since school. It took him over an hour to get all twelve pages filled out. He flipped through the pages of parchment, doubling, checking he hadn't missed anything important. Not that he thought it would matter.
This was inevitable. He couldn't dodge the wizard's world's expectations forever. He wasn't sure why he'd even tried. Maybe he shouldn't have tried. Maybe everything would have been easier. Maybe he wouldn't be so tired or lonely. Maybe he was doing the right thing.
Harry didn't want to be an Auror. He rolled up his application and returned it via the floo network.
He sat in his dark kitchen and thought about just going to bed. He didn't see the point in starting on the house tonight. He wasn't going to have time to work on it anymore. Maybe Ron was right; he should get a flat. Get a flat in Diagon Alley, and then he could come and work on the house on his off days, and then one day, years from now, when it was all done, he could move back in. It wasn't abandoning the house; it was just being practical.
He was going to have to stop thinking about himself and just be practical, wasn't he?