It really hadn't been a good day.

Guildford in January was cold and wet and dark. Sleet ran icy fingers down the windowpane as Harry Potter flung himself down on the sofa, holding a handful of mail that he didn't particularly want to read. He was twenty two years old, hadn't had time to buy any decent food this week, was working a case – another case, five years since Voldemort's fall and the newly beefed up Aurors' Office was still working full tilt to sort the innocent from the guilty and clean up the mess he'd left behind – that made his head hurt and he was starting to realise that he wasn't really a fan of living alone after all. He'd never lived alone before. First the Dursleys, who wouldn't have dared leave him alone in the house if he'd paid them. Then Hogwarts, the five beds in Gryffindor Tower. Even in that final year, living in a tent…even there he'd still had the comforting rush of Hermione's breathing, and the uneven rhythm of Ron's snores. He'd always assumed he'd enjoy finally having somewhere that was his alone, but so far it hadn't happened that way.

"Mmmrrrp!"

Well. Maybe he wasn't completely alone. Ginny had left him Arnold. Plus Arnold's basket, Arnold's supply of cat food and vegetable peelings, and a long list of instructions pinned up safely in his kitchen. He didn't think an elderly Pygmy Puff could be that much trouble, but he still kept the note. It spoke in her voice whenever he opened the fridge, and both he and Arnold seemed to agree that this was a good thing.

Harry scratched idly at the greying purple fur where Arnold's ears might have been if he'd had any. Maybe he did – never having had a really good look at a full-sized Puffskein, Harry wasn't certain – maybe he didn't. Either way, Harry had never been able to find them. The Puff let out a low crooning "Mmmmmmmm..." of pleasure.

At least one of them was happy then.

Harry couldn't have said why he was so out of sorts. If Ginny had been there, he might have tried anyway, and then she'd have told him to stop being stupid, stop moping and complain to Ron about it until he felt better...but she was away with the Harpies. She'd be on a training camp in Snowdonia for at least a month, completely out of touch – coach's orders - except for emergencies on the scale of Diagon Alley popping out of existence. Until she got back all he'd have was Arnold and a talking fridge door.

Part of it was Rita Skeeter's fault. Almost before the round of funerals had ended, she'd started digging up all the muck she could find. She'd put out a book about Snape. She'd written articles about the Battle of Hogwarts that had honestly made Harry feel as though he'd bathed in Flobberworm slime, and might have worked them into a full book if Kingsley hadn't sat the full power of his Ministerial veto on her efforts. Since she couldn't dig through the rubble of Hogwarts, she'd contented herself with putting out a book about Harry himself, with his address in it. Shortly afterwards, the letters had begun to arrive. Every time her book got reprinted – about every four months, and somehow his address was updated each time – a new flood of letters would start.

This was what he was holding now. Arnold "hmmmm?"-ed again, licking the corner of the largest envelope with a long pink tongue like a bootlace.

"Okay Arnold. Here we go..."

Fanmail. A lot of fanmail. Mostly harmless, except for the few where witches kept putting photos of themselves in the envelope. This time, the woman in question was wrapped in a large and fluffy towel that had been carefully embroidered with a large lightning bolt (was that supposed to be his scar?) and the words NOTHING COMES BETWEEN ME AND HARRY POTTER.

Ginny wasn't really a fan of those ones. Some of the witches were very good looking, but still. Better not keep them.

Oh God. Oh wow. There was a marriage proposal in the next envelope he opened. A very...um...explicit one. Harry's face grew hot just reading the first three lines. This was saying a lot, since the letter was seven pages long, and (Harry checked just to be sure) written in miniscule, cramped, fussy little writing on both sides of each page! Someone named Tabitha Sparley had been reading far, far too many terrible romance novels. She'd used the word "ravishment" as though she meant it.

No. Thank you, I'm honoured, but NO.

The next one...Howler. Anonymous, as the Howlers usually were. The first few words – before he managed to fire off a hasty Muffling Charm – were distorted beyond all recognition. Harry could hardly tell whether it was a man or a woman speaking. It didn't really matter. Man or woman, anyone who'd send him an anonymous Howler usually started off down the same track anyway – he was a Muggle-loving, deceiving little so and so, he would get what was coming to him eventually! Just wait and see! Ahahaha! AhahahahaHAHAHAHA!

And so on.

Once the Howler had thrashed itself out, he carefully scraped up the ashes of the envelope and closed them away in a sealed Evidence Enclosure Bubble, one of the neat little tricks that life in the Auror Office had taught him. Howlers were basically harmless, but since it was him...the Investigation Department would break those ashes down as far as they could magically be made to go and strip away every hint of spellwork to find out who was responsible. The EEB – glowing faintly orange, and making the hair on his arms stand on end when he got too close – shrank away to nothing, then disappeared with a noise like a bicycle bell. A neatly written receipt fell out of the air to land where it had been on his coffee table.

Harry sighed.

Part of his mood was Rita Skeeter's fault. The other half...

Harry knew for a fact he wasn't the only one in a slump. Hermione seemed all right most of the time…except for the part where she'd gone to Australia, been there for six weeks already and not worked up the nerve yet to actually approach her parents at all. The letters he got from her came attached to the leg of a black and white bird with a vicious beak that he hadn't let within ten feet of Arnold, and tended to swing wildly between cheerfully determined and outright panicky. Sometimes she managed both in the space of half a page. Ron spent half his time talking to George at the joke shop these days, instead of working on cases. Half the cases he did work on felt like his heart wasn't in it. Neville...Neville was incredible in the field, but Harry didn't think he'd ever truly wanted to be an Auror at all; good as he was, Neville seemed more like he'd fallen into it by mistake. He wasn't completely sure where Luna was right now, except to narrow it down to somewhere in Iceland where she was very excited at the prospect of mind controlling vapours coming from the hot springs. It wasn't entirely clear to Harry what this had to do with Snorkacks, which Luna had also mentioned, but it seemed to make sense to Luna.

It had seemed like a great idea at the time. You survived the Battle of Hogwarts? Congratulations, come work for the Aurors Office! Uncle Kingsley wants YOU! At the beginning, Harry had been sure that – short of life as an international Quidditch star, which didn't seem likely – being an Auror was what he was meant to do. It felt like much, much longer ago than the calendar told him it was, but hadn't he said as much in his Careers Advice meeting?

It didn't feel like that now. They seemed to spend their time chasing rumours and mistakes. He personally wasn't allowed to do very much at all. Junior Aurors – even the accelerated ones – spent half their lives making tea and nipping around to the Indian takeaway around the corner for more pappadums. At least another quarter seemed to be pure paperwork. Harry was almost certain he'd done more writing at work than at Hogwarts. Even when there was a raid...Harry had a sneaking suspicion that Kingsley had told his boss to be careful of him. It would be terrible to have the man who defeated the worst Dark wizard of his age taken out by a comparatively straightforward Blood Freezing Hex and spend two months in St Mungo's with acute hypothermia!

He wasn't sure what he'd expected life as an Auror to be like, but surely not like felt petty and political and slow. It felt small.

...But what else was he supposed to do with his life?

This would be so much easier to figure out if Ginny were here.

Arnold pushed his...head? His body? His...whatever it was that Pygmy Puffs had against Harry's palm with a loud chirp. The bootlace tongue was out again, lapping around each of his fingers in turn.

"Sorry Arnold. You're right. Let's keep going."

Brilliant. He was talking to a (more or less) sentient fluffball. It was basically a replacement for his girlfriend. If Rita Skeeter ever got hold of this – Harry found himself searching the room for stray beetles, just in case – she'd have a field day. It might make her year.

HARRY POTTER FINALLY GOES POTTY. That was a Golden Quill winning headline if ever he'd heard one.

Next in the pile was a Christmas card. An ordinary Muggle Christmas card, in an ordinary white Muggle envelope with a stamp. When he opened the card, there was a robin on it, and a few awkward words in his cousin's careful, blocky handwriting.

To Harry

Happy Christmas. We are all well. Hoping you are too.

From Dudley

Dudley would...never be his friend, but they were working on a sort of truce. Slowly. Cards were part of that truce, and they definitely beat some of the other things Dudley had tried to give him for Christmas. A few years ago, the best he'd have hoped for would have been a black eye. A Christmas card (even if, as he suspected, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia didn't know about it) was a step up by any measure. Now he thought about it, Harry could almost imagine Dudley sitting down to fill out the card, concentrating so hard on getting his words right that his tongue poked out between his teeth.

He was almost to the bottom of the pile now. There was just one letter left.

This was a strange one. It had definitely come by owl post – there was no stamp, and he could see the telltale rips in the top of the envelope where the owl's talons had torn it – but where the others had all been on parchment, and clearly written by quill, this one was on cheap lined paper of the sort that might be torn from an exercise book, and it was written in blue biro.

Harry passed his wand over it experimentally, murmuring another one of the Auror Office Specials. If the letter had a curse on it, if it had been dipped in poison, if anything had been done to it at all, he would know, and then he could get into more specific protective charms once he knew there was something to look for.

But none of this had happened. There was no response. The letter lay there completely undisturbed.

Harry picked it up.

Dear Harry,

I suspect you get a lot of mail these days, and I'm sorry to have to add to your sorting!

Your mother left some things with me before she died. None of them have any monetary value, they're mostly photographs and such, but I thought that you might like to know. I've held on to them for a long time, but they're not my things to keep. They should be yours now.

It's up to you. If you want to have a look, come to the Lock and Key in Butetown, Cardiff. I'll know you when I see you.

T. Morgan