For over two weeks, Harry's routine was exactly the same. He would wake up, make himself a quick breakfast and then walk back down the hill to Hogwarts. Once he was there, he would head straight for McGonagall's office to pick up his reading before heading to an empty classroom that he had been allowed to use. He would read until lunch, which he would get directly from the kitchen, before heading back up to his reading. From there, he would read until the sun drifted over the horizon. Then, he would return his books to the Headmaster's Office before dragging himself back up the hill where he would collapse onto his bed, only to do it again the next day.
During that time, Harry had learned a great deal about the origins of magical Britain. He learned how almost every expedition from the continent to Britain was headed by magical people, using Muggles as the bulk of their fighting force, which didn't come as too much of a surprise to Harry. However, it was amazing how many historical figures, people like Charlemagne and King Henry IV, were in fact wizards. Of course, considering the Statute of Secrecy had not yet been put in place, that shouldn't have been a huge surprise.
Still, Harry didn't seem to find anything in particular that led him to where Legion came from. At first, Harry had believed that Legion had originally been from Rome or Greece, simply based on that fact that there were a number of gods in their mythologies that had the ability to control the minds of mortals or change their shape. But after the first week of research, Harry had ruled those places out. The boat that Harry saw in Legion's mind, the only real clue about where he came from, didn't match any of the pictures of the kind of ships they used for travel on the open seas.
That had pushed Harry towards the strong likelihood that Legion had come from somewhere in central or northern Europe. However, in the last week of research, Harry had still been unable to locate anything that gave him any further hint about Legion may have originated from.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the only bad news for Harry in the last two weeks. In that time, public opinion about Harry and Hermione's relationship had turned from one of morbid curiosity to public outrage. First, it had been the fact that they had started sleeping together before Ron and Hermione had broken up. Then, it was the nature of their work relationship and the fact that they had not disclosed this relationship to the Minister of Magic when they were both simultaneously promoted to their new positions. Next, people had been outraged to learn that not only had they been sleeping together before Ron and Hermione's relationship had ended, but that no one else knew about the relationship, not even their closest friends.
All told, the general public had made their current opinion of the two of them known and it was not pleasant. Harry, who usually hated reading, was glad to have research to do because it meant that he wasn't forced to go out in public.
Of course, there was no one to go out in public with at the moment. Harry, who usually received an owl a day from one of his closest friends, hadn't received a scrap of mail from anyone since the news had gotten out. It was clear that most of their friends shared the public's opinion on Harry and Hermione's decision to lie to them all for the better part of a decade.
It had gotten so bad that Kingsley had been forced to step in. Just a few days after the details of their relationship had hit the newspaper, Kingsley had been forced to make a public statement. He used this statement to assure everyone that he still had complete faith in Harry and Hermione, despite their serious lack of judgement. Kingsley also publicly stated that the Ministry did not believe that Harry had killed Dudley Dursley and his family.
But Kingsley had also announced that Harry would be suspended indefinitely, pending the results of an inquiry into his conduct as Head Auror regarding irregularities around the Helen Greene murder investigation. Said inquiry would be run by the Wizengamot, instead of the DMLE as usual, ensuring that Hermione would have no part in the investigation or its findings.
And yet, somehow that wasn't the worst of it. The relationship drama was annoying, but Harry knew that, eventually, it would blow over. Harry and Hermione would both make very public and embarrassing apologies to everyone and then they would disappear from the spotlight for a bit. Soon enough, things would return to normal.
But there was a large subsection of people out in the world that still earnestly believed that Harry had killed his cousin. While the Ministry had yet to inform the public of the existence of Legion, they had given them a version of the truth by saying that someone had murdered Dudley while using Polyjuice Potion to look like Harry. Even that hadn't been enough to convince some people that Harry hadn't tortured and then murdered the Dursleys, which meant only one thing.
Even after everything, there were some people that didn't trust Harry. There were some that never trusted people in a position of power, a position that Harry had held since he could barely stand, let alone walk or run. Harry would never blame anyone for a healthy sense of suspicion.
Hell, paranoia was what had kept him alive for the better part of seventeen years.
No, the people that truly bothered Harry were the ones who clearly believed that Harry was some kind of monster. While they had lied about the nature of the culprit, they had done nothing to hide the nature of the crime. That meant that there were people out there who believed that Harry had taken hours to torture an eight-year-old girl in front of her mother and father before killing both of them.
Those were the kind of people who had believed everything that Rita Skeeter, long may she rot in Azkaban, had ever written about him. These were the people who believed that he was crazy during his fifth year, those who believed that he lied about Voldemort's return. Now, they believed that he was a homicidal madman.
And it pissed him off. While Harry had not received any mail from his friends, he had received pounds of hate mail, mostly Howlers that Harry simply threw in his fireplace all at once. Then, he would walk into his bedroom and close the door before charming the door. Harry never heard those letters and he never wanted to.
After over two weeks of constant studying, Harry was about ready to give in. He had found nothing in all of the time that he had spent poring over the massive volumes that McGonagall pulled from the library, reading for hours with barely a break to discover nothing new.
That was until Harry opened a book called The Languages of The Nordic Invasions. The book was a telling of the variety of magical languages and runic styles that had come into favor during the period of time when the Viking invaders from Scandinavia had come to Britain. It was not a particularly exciting read, but it was also not the worst that Harry had read over the last two and a half weeks.
Harry was reading about a series of Nordic invasions during the middle of the Tenth Century when he noticed something in one of the drawings on the page. The drawing was of one of the landing sites near Dublin where the Nordic raiders first landed. On the staff of the man in the center of the photo appeared to be a series of lines. At first, Harry thought they were nonsense until he remembered that he had those symbols seen before.
They were the same symbols that surrounded the Arch.
Frantically, Harry began turning pages, hoping that someone would address the markings on the staff of the invader. The closest that he got was that the Nordics had been responsible for the creation of several early forms of the Irish language, of which the markings on the staff were a crude translation.
For nearly an hour, Harry scanned the pages of the book and found nothing. In frustration, Harry tossed the book onto the floor before turning and pacing the room. This was beyond him. Harry knew almost nothing about runes and he knew absolutely nothing about ancient languages. Even in a book about ancient languages, the author of the book, Connor Macafee, hadn't named the language.
Harry needed to talk to Hermione. Even if she didn't have the answers, she would know where to look. Unfortunately, he couldn't talk to her at the moment. This was mostly due to the fact that it was the middle of the day and she was at work. It was also due to the fact that Hermione had been moved to a safe house after Kingsley had learned of Legion's existence. In the last few weeks, Hermione had gone from work to the safe house and back with no other excursions.
Thankfully, the mail still worked, which meant that Harry would be able to send her an update on his discovery via owl post. Still, that did nothing to address the fact that Harry had the first potential lead on either the origin of Legion or how to fix The Arch and he could do nothing about it.
Then, it hit him. Hermione hadn't been working alone on the Arch project. During her time down in the Department of Mysteries, she had been working side-by-side with Draco Malfoy and Bill Weasley. While Malfoy would also be at the Ministry and currently unavailable, Bill worked at Gringotts as their chief curse breaker, the highest position a non-goblin had ever reached in the history of the bank.
Of course, Bill might not be all that pleased to see him, considering the news that had just come out about Harry and Hermione. At the moment, Harry couldn't be bothered to worry about that. Bill would have to look at the information that Harry brought him.
If he threw Harry out of the bank on his ass afterwards, then so be it.
Harry raced back up to the Headmaster's Office where he explained that he needed to take one of the books with him. McGonagall pushed back for a moment before she realized that Harry would likely take the book anyway. She quickly told Harry that he had twenty-four hours to return the book before Harry raced out of the castle and back up the hill.
As part of his initial training to become an Auror, Harry had taken several courses on the art of disguise, both magical and practical. With only a few vanity spells and a fake beard, Harry looked like an entirely different person when he Apparated directly into the main hub of Diagon Alley.
Quickly, Harry looked left and right, gauging whether people suspected that the man under the beard was Harry Potter. Thankfully, the disguise seemed to pay off as no one bothered giving him a second glance. Harry took the book under his arm and almost ran towards Gringotts. Once he was inside, Harry raced up the stairs to the third floor and then navigated the labyrinth of desks and offices until he came to the Chief Curse Breaker's office.
Looking around to ensure that no one was around, Harry took off the beard and removed his vanity spells before knocking on the door.
"Just a minute!" came the muffled voice of Bill Weasley from the other side of the door. In an instant, Harry was suddenly nervous. Of all the Weasleys, Bill had always been the most relaxed. Over the years, Harry had seen all the Weasleys blow up in some fashion or another, all of them except Bill, who, above all else, remained unflappable. Now, Harry could only hope that Bill would remain as calm as ever, even in the face of the man who had slept with his brother's girlfriend.
As he pulled the door open, Bill stood behind it with a smile, clearly ready to help solve whatever problem needed addressing. Then, he looked down and saw Harry and in a flash, his smile vanished. He didn't shout or scream, but in that moment, the look of disdain and disappointment on Bill's face was bad enough.
"Harry."
Never before had Bill sounded so cold and distant. With just a single word, Bill told Harry everything that he needed to know about how Harry would be received today and it wasn't going to be particularly pleasant.
"Bill, I…"
How could Harry word such a thing? He needed help from Bill, that much was clear. How do you ask someone for help that has every reason in the world to deny you?
"What do you need?" Bill asked calmly, although it was clear that his patience was already at its end. "I'm very busy today and if you've come here to waste my time-"
"I promise it's not a waste of time!" Harry said, his voice rising. "I need you to look at something."
Bill was clearly frustrated, but he was also one of the best men that Harry had ever had the pleasure of meeting. With a huff, he opened the door further.
"Come in."
Harry darted inside the room before Bill could change his mind. In the aftermath of the war, Bill had become one of the goblin's staunchest allies. For centuries, the goblins had fought with wizards over their rights to become full citizens of the wizarding world. Of course, the Ministry had always responded with force in the past, putting down any semblance of rebellion and threatening to remove them from control of Gringotts if they pushed too hard.
But Bill Weasley, along with Minister Shacklebolt, changed all of that. He encouraged the goblins to petition the Wizengamot rather than revolt openly. Bill had been key in reminding the goblins that they couldn't expect wizards to welcome them with open arms if wizards believed that the only reason goblins wanted to join the Ministry was to rule it.
At Bill's urging, a few influential goblins created the Goblin Integration Force (GIF as they preferred to be called), an organization dedicated to pursuing peaceful ways of joining the Ministry. As of yet, they had not been completely successful in their pursuit of absolute equality, but advances had been made. Goblins were given limited rights to use wands through an application process at the Ministry that ensure that only those goblins that didn't wish to revolt against the Ministry were given wands.
However, they had not gained the right to attend Hogwarts, one of their chief desires, and they had been forced to allow ten wizards to train in goblin metallurgy. Still, it was the first real progress between goblins and wizards in nearly three hundred years.
For his work, Bill Weasley was the favorite wizard in every goblin household. He had quickly been promoted through the curse breaker ranks until, nine months earlier, when he had been named Chief Curse Breaker, the highest rank any human had ever achieved within the bank and the first time a human had been named to a position on the operating board.
Relations with goblins and humans still weren't great. But they were better than they had ever been and that was largely due to William Weasley.
Harry had never been inside Bill's office before. In fact, the only other time he had been in this section of Gringotts was when he had decided to sell Grimmauld Place. Bill's office was a small, cramped room that still somehow had the sensation of being underground despite the window that looked out on the main stretch of Diagon Alley. In the center of the small room was a desk with piles of parchment haphazardly strewn across it with several ink wells interspersed between them. Behind the desk was a bookshelf that lined the back wall, filled from floor to almost the ceiling with books, books whose titles Harry couldn't read, either because they had faded away into nothing or because they were likely written in Gobbledigook, a language that few humans knew how to speak.
Another reason why the goblins liked Bill Weasley.
The top shelf of the bookshelf, however, did not have books, but pictures. Pictures of Fleur and his children mostly, but even from a distance, Harry could recognize his own image in at least two of them.
In both pictures, Harry stood between Ron and Hermione. Harry couldn't help but notice the irony in that.
Once they were both inside the room, Harry turned back to Bill and opened the book. Harry opened his mouth to speak but before he could utter a word, Bill raised a single finger to his mouth, indicating that Harry needed to be quiet. Then, Bill took out his wand and gave it a wave.
"Now you can talk," Bill said as he collapsed on the tattered armchair in the corner of the room, the only other seat besides the one behind his desk.
"I want to make something perfectly clear, Harry: I know what you are working on. Hermione told me about it last week. That's the only reason I let you in."
"I understand," Harry said. It had been a long time since Harry had been truly scolded. He never would have expected that to come from Bill Weasley of all people.
"So, what can I help you with?"
"This," Harry said before turning the book around and placing it in Bill's lap. "Do you recognize those markings?"
The look on Bill's face as he lifted the book told Harry everything. Quickly, Bill began to scan the book much like Harry had.
"There's nothing else there," Harry said as Bill frantically flipped between pages. "Just a mention on how it was an early form of Irish."
"You mean Gaelic," Bill replied.
"That's not what the book said. It said Irish," Harry said as he pointed at the text in question. Immediately, Bill's eyes lit up.
"It's Old Irish," he murmured to himself before almost leaping across the small office to a bookshelf behind Harry where he pulled out a book almost the same size as the one Harry had brought. As Bill spoke, he rifled through the pages, stopping every so often to read a passage before moving on.
Even though Harry was not Bill's favorite person at the moment, Harry had brought him the one thing that could override that feeling: a puzzle. Much like Harry himself, puzzles were a passion of Bill's. While Harry looked for those puzzles in the form of clues in an investigation, Bill's work meant that he spent most of his time attempting to undo curses, checking objects for clues as to what exact curse had been placed on it so that he could administer the proper counter-curse.
"This is a catalog of old runic languages. They were the earliest forms of written languages and for years, we used them as runes. Most of them have fallen out of favor for one reason or another. The issue is that almost all runes are designed around the language of the person who performs the spell or ritual. At first, I assumed that meant that it had to be English. Then, you thought it was Nordic before it became Legion, so I started looking into those."
"You never thought to look in Irish?" Harry asked.
"You have to understand that Irish isn't a spoken language. Hasn't been for a thousand years. Gaelic is rare but it's still spoken, but Old Irish, its precursor, is almost entirely dead. Even if I had started to look into Old Irish, there are dozens of versions of it and almost as many alphabets to boot. It would have taken me months to narrow this down."
Suddenly, Bill turned the book around to Harry, pointing at a page with a series of symbols that looked almost identical to the ones inscribed on the staff.
"This is Ogham. It is an old writing system for Old Irish, originating sometime around the fifth century."
"Then why is it on the staff of someone from Scandinavia?"
"Because this picture doesn't show a Scandinavian, Harry," Bill replied. "Most of the Irish settlements that we know today, they were originally settled by Nordic invaders. There was a period of time when Irish meant Nordic. This picture is more likely of an early Irishman."
"The language on the Arch. It's Irish?"
"In a roundabout way, yes," Bill replied. "According to this, Ogham was frequently used by Nordic invaders after they came to present day Ireland."
For the first time in weeks, they had something to go on. It was small and it would likely take a lot more work before they could even use this information, but Merlin, it was something.
"So we know that the Arch had to have been created sometime after the fifth century. Do we know anything else?"
"At the moment, no. But, I will get Malfoy an Ogham key and get him to work on the translation. It's going to take awhile. The language isn't a pure translation to Old Irish and even then, we've got to get it translated into Gaelic and then into English."
"The sooner we can get those runes transcribed, the sooner we know what the hell we're dealing with."
"Agreed," Bill said and then a rather sudden and uncomfortable silence washed over the room as they both remembered that they weren't really on good terms at the moment. Silently, Harry took the book back from Bill and put it under his arm.
He made to move to the door when Bill called out to him.
"Sit down," Bill said, pointing at the same chair that vacated just moments earlier. For most people, Harry worried that Bill was going to hex him once he sat down. But the look on Bill's face told Harry that he genuinely wanted to talk.
So Harry sat.
At the same time, Bill restored the book that he had removed from his own bookshelf before taking his chair from his desk and setting it across from Harry. When Bill sat, he intentionally looked away from Harry as he thought of what he wanted to say.
"I'm...well, I have to admit that I'm feeling a lot of things, Harry."
He certainly wasn't the only one, but Harry could empathize with the fact that Bill had a lot of thoughts going on in his mind about this particular situation.
"You've always been one of us. I didn't even meet you until you were almost fourteen, but trust me, I feel like I knew you already. Every single letter that Ron sent had your name in it. Hell, it wasn't long before every letter that Mum sent had your name in it."
"You were one of us and it wasn't just because you were an orphan. Before the war, Weasley wasn't a respected name in our world. We were poor, plentiful, and, for those that cared about that sort of thing, blood traitors. Yet here was Harry Potter, only the most famous person in our world, sitting at our kitchen table and marveling at the home that had been mocked by other less famous people for years. You accepted us as who we were and in turn, we did the same for you."
Bill leaned back into his chair, his voice breaking a bit as he continued.
"That's why all of this hurts as much as it does, Harry. Let me be the first in my family to say that it has absolutely nothing to do with your relationship with Hermione. However that ends up for the both of you, I honestly hope that both of you are nothing but happy with whatever you choose."
Harry knew that the hammer was coming. He just didn't know quite how hard it was going to hit or how much it was going to hurt.
"This is about Ron and the rest of the family. You lied to him, you lied to all of us. For years, you lied over and over again. Now, I blame Hermione equally for this. Between the two of you, one of you should have had the brains to simply come clean. More than any of that, I can't believe that you would do that to Ron and to our family. Ron isn't perfect. Trust me, I know. But he has been your oldest friend. He's your brother, just like I am."
"I know," Harry whispered, shame washing over him. If he had thought he had been scolded before, he couldn't even begin to come up with a word for this.
"Do you? Do you honestly understand, Harry? On the night that Fred was killed, I sat with the rest of my family in the Great Hall and I watched my family do everything it could to hold itself together. We could have just gone to pieces and it would have been well within our rights to do so. Why didn't we?"
"Because the fight wasn't over."
"Because the fight wasn't over," Bill echoed. "We knew that we were still needed. But when we saw Hagrid carrying you out of the woods, that was it. I don't know about the rest of my family, but I was done. I may have said that I was fighting to save the world, but in all honesty, I was fighting for my family. And if fighting for my family just meant that I got the privilege to watch them die one at a time, then I was going to take my family and run."
Harry honestly didn't know what to say. What could he say in response to something like that? Thankfully, Bill didn't ask him to respond.
"That's why this hurt so much. You are a Weasley and you always will be. It just hurts to know that you kept something like this from Ron for so long."
"I wish I hadn't," Harry replied in frustration. "Both of us do. For years, we alternated between wanting to tell him and not. For me, after years of working with Dumbledore and after the Horcrux Hunt and the Aurors, secrets became my life."
Harry chuckled to himself darkly at the thought that secrets had somehow become the basis of his life.
"I hated secrets growing up," Harry said, more to himself than to Bill. "I hated them more than anything. I remember how mad I was when Dumbledore told me about the prophecy or when I finally found out about Sirius. Of course, Sirius was innocent, but the point remains that I hated that they thought that I wasn't mature enough to deal with the truth."
"Somewhere along the way, that anger disappeared. As I got older and I saw more of the world and what it was really like, I began to understand why people keep secrets. For Dumbledore, secrets meant that he stayed ahead of the enemy. Secrets kept us alive during the Horcrux hunt. Aurors say that secrets protect people. In the end, the less information that is out there, the less harm can be done with that information."
Harry finally dared to look at Bill, who stared at him skeptically.
"I know that it isn't a good excuse," Harry admitted. "It's not even an excuse. It's an explanation, I guess. Not a very good one, I suppose."
Harry leaned back in his chair, doing his best to collect his thoughts. This was the first time he had been able to articulate his thoughts on this horrible business out loud to someone other than Hermione. But it was especially important that Harry said what he truly meant to Bill, because he knew that Bill would likely repeat everything that he said to the rest of his family.
Outside of Ron, of course.
Normally, Harry would have been upset at the idea of Bill sharing this conversation with others. But given the current circumstances, he could understand that he didn't have a leg to stand on when it came to speak to others confidentially. None of the Weasleys trusted Harry right now and he couldn't blame them.
But if they knew just how terribly he felt about the whole thing, even if it came from Bill first, that might be the first step in trying to fix this whole thing, something that Harry wanted more than anything in the world right now.
"None of this was fair to Ron, I know. We should have told him at least. We didn't and that's not fair to him or to you or to any of the rest of you. You trusted me and you trusted Hermione and we took that trust and lied to you. There's no way to justify that and if I was given the opportunity to do it over again, I would."
"Life doesn't work that way."
Despite the fact that Bill was justifiably upset at Harry, Harry couldn't help but take offense at the idea that Harry wasn't distinctly aware that there were no "do-overs" in life.
"Bill, I honestly don't need a reminder of that. I have a lifetime of memories that prove exactly that," Harry said firmly. "The only thing I can say in my defense is that I honestly thought that I was lying to Ron to protect him."
"How could you possibly think that?" Bill scoffed. "How could you possibly believe that keeping him in the dark about the real reason that Hermione broke things off with him was going to protect him?"
"Hermione and I never intended our relationship to be anything more than friends."
"What does that have to do with anything?" Bill asked.
"We never intended to date. We never thought that we would get married or have kids or do anything like that. The truth was that we were as close as any two people could be and we were under a great deal of stress. Neither of us found anyone else and so we decided to find a way to relieve that stress."
"That's honestly all you thought this was?"
"In the beginning that is exactly what it was. Obviously, things have changed since then but in either case, we didn't figure that it would become a thing. We always assumed that one of us would find someone else, the physical part of our relationship would end and that would be that."
Bill was clearly not impressed with that answer.
"And Ron would never be any the wiser?"
"Ron would never need to know. Before Ron knew about this, he said a thousand different times how he knew that his relationship with Hermione wasn't going to work."
"A viewpoint he might have only had because you and Hermione ended his relationship."
"Hermione ended the relationship. I had nothing to do with that."
Bill actually laughed at that.
"Harry, you were in the middle of that relationship from the beginning. You were their best friend and the one person that Ron honestly felt threatened by when it came to Hermione's feelings."
"He had no reason for that."
"Didn't he? Didn't Hermione stay with you when Ron left? Didn't you end up sleeping with Hermione and breaking up her relationship with Ron in the process?"
"I-yes, those things did happen."
"Listen, Harry, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I'm perfect. I'm not. And I'm certainly not going to sit here and tell you that Ron is perfect because I can barely get that sentence out with a straight face. But I am here to tell you that you need to accept the part that you played in Ron and Hermione's relationship. Ron is furious that you lied to him. He's also justifiably pissed off about the fact that he feels like he will never know what his relationship with Hermione would have actually been like if you had not intervened."
"Maybe they would have gotten married? Maybe they would have still broken up but it would have been mutual this time? That night changed everything for the three of you and the sooner you accept your part in that, the sooner you can start down the path of fixing that."
"Fixing that? How the fucking hell can I fix it?" Harry barked. "I lied to Ron and the rest of your family for eight years."
"Yes, you did. Most of us are pretty upset about it. But you know the one thing that you have working in your favor?"
"What's that?" Harry scoffed.
"You're Harry Potter," Bill said casually. "And I'm not talking about the fairy tale version. I'm talking about you. We know you and we know who you are. We know that you don't want to hurt the people that you care about. We know that you are incredibly human and capable of making mistakes, large and small."
"You are going to have to work to get back into our good graces, both of you will. But the same things that I said about you can apply to Hermione as well. At heart, you are good people who made a stupid mistake and then, rather than owning up to it, you made another mistake by not telling anyone about it. I've done it, Ron has done it, we have all done it."
Bill leaned forward in his chair, a strange smile on his face.
"Here's the deal: you need to talk to Ron. He will take some convincing. At the moment, I think he actually wants to kill you. But eventually, he'll come around. When he does, you tell him what you told me today. You tell him that you know that it was stupid and cowardly to keep this secret from him."
"Why would he listen to me?"
"Because more than any of us, he knows Harry Potter, too, and regardless of whether or not he will admit this to anyone else, he already misses his best friend."
"I miss him, too," Harry admitted. "I'll do my best."
"It would be nice to see that, Harry. I would hazard a guess to say that it's been quite awhile since we've truly seen the best out of Harry Potter or Hermione Granger."
That comment hit Harry hard. It hurt, not because it was false, but because it was true. He had just needed someone to point it out. He had inspired dozens of people to fight a war that they saw no way out of. Those same people had fought a battle that they believed they could win, only because Harry said so.
Those people had believed in Harry for a reason. Over the last decade, Harry had become a shell of the man that he was at seventeen. Certainly, he was more powerful and more gifted, but that meant nothing because Harry was only using that power for his job.
Sometime over the last decade, he had lost sight of the importance of doing what he could for others. It had been his giving nature that had inspired the wizarding world to stand up to Riddle. If something like that happened again, would they still do the same? When Harry had been at Hogwarts, there were nearly two dozen students that Harry could have called a friend. After the events of the last week, Hermione was the only person that he knew would still stand by him.
Hell, he lived in a shack in the woods, quite literally hidden away from the rest of the world.
Harry didn't know everything, but he knew that the seventeen-year-old version of him would look at the man he was today and he would be disappointed.
"You're right, Bill," Harry said, the crushing weight of realization falling on him all at once. "I want to do better."
"Then do better," Bill replied. "You are Harry Potter, after all. If there's anyone that is capable of it, it's you."
