Speaking Plainly

A/N: I cannot remember what the rest of the plot of this was meant to be. It was intricate, and I remember researching . . . I will write more if you give suggestions as to how this goes. Think of it as that thing you had to do in English age 8 where you stopped in the middle of the book to write the bit of your book report where you guess what's going to happen next. Except this time, you're going to be right!

Prologue

The glasses clinked as they were set down on the table in front of them. Two lagers and a coke, because Harry drank nothing but spirits, disliking the taste of alcohol and the feeling of tipsiness. Far easier to hold his nose and down half a bottle of thirty percent vodka when he wanted to get drunk.

"Ah, only a term to go," grinned Ron.

"Yeah, only a term before all semblance of structure or continuity in life is tugged out from under our feet," grumbled Harry, only half jokingly.

Hermione nudged Harry's leg under the table, "Oi, you sound like five years in Uni and two more in work experience is a better thing to have to do than your measly two years. You're about to get money!"

Ron snorted at Harry's scrunched up face response.

"Like anyone will actually want to work with me once they stop to think about hiring me."

Ron sobered, but didn't let up his positive attitude, "Don't be daft, you're good at auroring. You'll get offers."

Harry shrugged and then laughed as Hermione, who had nodded into her larger, accidentally spilled her drink over the table.

The problem, of course, was that having defeated Voldemort, the auror training college did not lower their intake, believing, rightly, that aurors were still needed to round up the death eaters. But what they didn't factor in was that auror training takes two years, so this clean up job was done primarily by aurors who had already completed their training before the end of the war, and aurors who graduated very quickly after the end of the war. And now the ministry no longer felt the need to hire twenty new aurors a year, because only so many were retiring and fewer were freshly dead. Other jobs were opening, new ideas for the application of auror skills, but it wasn't happening fast enough.

"Anyway," Ron stretched out under the table, "it's the holidays now, so shut up."

Harry stuck his tongue out with a petulance he tried to make seem joking but wasn't entirely.

"Hey, at least those awful aptitude tests are over." Ron shuddered.

"These individuals may be feared, hated, or revered"

Vincenso Fornicola, University of Piza,

On evidence of human sacrifice around ancient Europe

Harry kicked out in a whip-like movement that he was meant to have trained himself out of. It should be more controlled, but going all in was all Harry really knew how to do, and it worked better than any of his instructors ever acknowledged. Draco staggered back with the impact, and Harry took a few wobbles between the ball and heel of the foot he was standing on; a by-product of not really focusing on limiting the amount of energy he was using. Draco, the precision machine that he was, leant back on one leg and push back to punch Harry in the face. Harry hit Draco in the stomach before reeling back and having Draco kick up into his chest so he fell backwards onto the elasticised floor. He bounced almost all the way back up, but the claxon had sounded; Draco had won.

"Next pair!" called the ref, as a woman in plain grey button down robes approached. Draco pulled Harry up by a too-tight grip on his wrist and smiled without his eyes and with thin lips. "Good fight."

"You too," Harry said guardedly. The man and woman stepping past him on the steps down to the fight mat followed him with their eyes, and Harry had to force himself not to hold their gazes, not to turn and peer back at them, not to ask them what they were looking at.

"Would you two come with me?" the woman asked as she reached only two metres distance between them. She made eye contact and nodded to their instructor, who nodded curtly back and put his attention back on the fight in front of him.

Harry let out a half sigh and said "sure" as Draco replied "of course."

A/N I remember doing a lot of research on human sacrifice, I think based around the idea that Harry could have been raised as a human sacrifice either a) because he is still about to be sacrificed and has been given an ideal life of childhood fantasy adventure or b) because they thought they'd need to sacrifice him to win the war in the way druids apparently did, but then they won the war before getting around to the human sacrifice and now he flounders . . .