Harry rolls over with a groan, burying his face in the pillow to escape the grey light coming in through the window. He forgot to pull the curtains when he got back yesterday and collapsed into bed, and when he turns his head and squints an eye open, he realises it's not the only thing he forgot. His glasses are digging into his temple and he's still dressed in his Auror robes, one boot still on his foot while the other is on the floor by the side of the bed. He finds his wand poking him in the side and fumbles out a sloppy Tempus. It's not even five in the morning yet.
Something bangs downstairs, and Harry pushes himself up with a sigh. There's gravel rolling around in his head and his tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth. Righting his glasses, he sits at the edge of the bed and laces up his second boot while trying to blink the bedroom into focus. He sees he didn't even close the door properly, and now there's light coming in from the hallway, lights he didn't turn on. A second bang sounds, and Harry identifies it as a kitchen cabinet slamming shut.
He staggers out of the bedroom and down the stairs, holding on to the railing with one hand as he tries to push his hair out of his face with the other. A green and yellow quidditch robe has been thrown over the cloak stand by the door and in the kitchen he finds Ginny. She's sitting by the table with her hands around a mug and the steam rising from it smells like a sobering potion. Her red hair is a wild mess, most of it escaped from her long braid, and her cheeks are flushed but her eyes are clear and pin Harry as soon as he steps in through the door.
"Hey, Gin," he croaks and goes to rummage through the potions drawer for something against his hangover. "How did the match go?"
"Great," she bites out.
Harry freezes, his shoulders locking up in tension. He turns around to face her and now her eyes are blazing.
"Okay…" he says slowly, a familiar pressure at his temple making itself known. "So did you win?"
Ginny slaps a copy of the Daily Prophet onto the table, then leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. Harry glances from her to the paper and back, then shuffles over to the table to take it. There's a large picture of Ginny and her team clustered together, jumping and hugging in the middle of the pitch, green and yellow banners filling the stands and confetti raining down over them.
HARPIES OUTCLASS CANNONS cries the headline.
"That's great, Gin!" he says with as much enthusiasm as he can muster at the moment. "Shouldn't you be at the afterparty?"
Ginny says nothing, just stabs her finger at a much smaller article squeezed in at the bottom of the page. Harry frowns and leans in to get a closer look at the picture. It's from the gala yesterday and shows him standing stiffly beside Shacklebolt.
DATELESS POTTER AT MINISTRY GALA
Harry Potter was seen looking distinctly unhappy yesterday at the annual Ministry celebration of the victory at Hogwarts on the 2nd of May. Abandoned by his wife-to-be, Ginevra Weasley, who was away-
"Is that all I am now?" Ginny snaps. "Your wife-to-be? Should I just dress up and be your date for galas and then stay in the house and wait for you to come home?"
"What?" Harry gapes at her, the gravel in his head trying to catch up. "No, of course not-"
"Then what? Should I just ignore it, let them write whatever they want? This isn't the first time but it clearly hasn't bothered you!"
"Wait… this isn't the first time?" Harry asks and immediately realises it's the wrong thing to say.
"Every single time they write about me there's always something about how I should stop playing Quidditch to be your wife or I'm away too much or our relationship must be over because they don't think we're affectionate enough in public! How have you not noticed it?! Do you even care?!"
"Of course I care, Ginny! I just… I didn't know…"
"NO? Well now you do!"
"Yes… yes, so…" Harry rubs his hands over his face and the pressure in his head turns to an ache. "What do you want me to do about it?"
The kitchen falls deadly quiet. When he lowers his hands, Ginny is gaping at him and the flames in her eyes seem to have been compressed into something cold and hard.
"Maybe you could act like it's not just my problem."
Harry opens his mouth to answer, but winces instead when his headache spikes. Squeezing his eyes shut, he drops his head to the side and presses the heel of his hand to his temple. With one eye barely open, he makes it back to the open drawer, hearing Ginny's chair scrape against the floor behind him. He finds a bottle of snot-yellow potion and uncorks it, downing the contents at the same time as he hears the front door being thrown open followed by Ron's startled voice.
"Oh, hi Ginny! I didn't know you're home. How was the match? Ginny? Ginny!"
The door slams closed followed by Ron's mutter of "What's wrong with her?"
Leaning over the kitchen counter, Harry takes a few deep breaths, waiting for the potion to kick in. He hears Ron move about the hallway before coming down the stairs to the kitchen.
"There you are, mate. I saw Ginny leave, what- Hey, are you okay?"
Letting out a breath slowly, Harry nods and pushes away from the counter to turn to his partner and friend. "I will be in a moment. What's wrong?"
Ron's expression darkens. "We have another body."
"Ernest Hawkworth," says Alena Savage, her face pale with a green tinge but the sleeves of her red Auror robes rolled up and her voice unwavering. "Found about an hour ago by his wife, Ruth Hawkworth. Says she was away visiting their son and when she came home, she found Mr Hawkworth like this."
Like the others, Mr Hawkworth has been stripped. He's strung up, half sitting against the wall with his arms tied with ropes to a mounted hippogriff head. Judging from the blood on the walnut panelling, his head has been bashed against the wall, but Harry can't tell if it happened before or after his genitalia was cut off.
"Fractured skull?" he asks and Auror Savage nods even as Harry swipes his wand for the standard diagnostic and detective spells himself.
"And the wife?" asks Ron.
Savage jerks her head towards a pair of glazed double doors leading to the next sitting room. "She's with Proudfoot."
"I'll go talk with her," Ron volunteers and pats Harry on the shoulder.
Harry nods. "No magical signature, no immediate residue of potion use and no sign of resistance," he mutters, rattling off the results of his spells. "His wand?"
"His wife found it in their bedroom upstairs," Savage says. "You think it's the same killer?"
"Seems like it."
Crouching down on the outskirts of the pool of blood, he sighs at the open gash between the dead man's legs. It's not a clean cut - Hawkworth's bits had been hacked away. It's all too easy to imagine the killer screaming and raging, red-faced with exertion as they hack away at Hawkworth, knife in hand. Did they do it after Hawkworth died, or did the blood spray them with each slash?
When did Harry stop feeling nauseous by grisly crime scenes like this one? He doesn't remember the last time he had to vanish his own sick from behind a victim's bush. All that's left now is a deep weariness and the hot pressure in his head.
"There's no slashes or stabs…" he mumbles to himself before turning his head slightly in Savage's direction, keeping his eyes on the body. "Have you turned him over?"
"We wanted to wait for you to get here before touching the body."
Harry nods and pushes himself back up with his hands on his knees. "And you've taken pictures? Okay, let's take him down."
With a bit of finicky spellwork, they manage to untie the rope and shift the body, Harry angling his wand to tilt the body forwards - and sighs when he sees the back littered in cuts.
"We're definitely dealing with the same murderer."
They're moving the body to a conjured stretcher when Ron comes back, his face set in a grim scowl.
"Robarts is not going to be happy," he grumbles. "Mr Hawkworth over there? He's a senior member of the Wizengamot."
"I'm adding Savage and Proudfoot to your team," Robarts says when they're back at the department. "We've managed to keep the case relatively quiet so far, but with a Wizengamot member involved the media is going to be all over it."
"That's what matters to you?" Harry asks, grinding the heel of his hand into his temple. "We've got four people dead and a murderer on the loose and you care about what the media's going to say?"
"Watch your tone, Potter. Your case isn't the only one we've got - everyone is busy."
"Yes, sir," Harry presses out through gritted teeth and feels Ron's hand land on his shoulder.
"What have you got so far? Weasley?"
"Mr Hawkworth is the fourth victim of what we believe to be a serial killer. Our first victim is Paul Cresswell, found on the 21st of February, followed by Robert Midgen on the 27th of Marsh and then Wilkie Twycross who was killed on the 14th of April and found a couple of days later by his muggle boyfriend. All the victims are men. Their genitalia has been cut off and their bodies stabbed and cut. Analysis from the earlier victims have shown that the wounds have been inflicted with a knife rather than spells. No traces of potions have been found."
"Any connections?" asks Proudfoot and Ron shakes his head.
"Their ages range from 39 to 61 years old. They have no common acquaintances or other social connections that we've found. Cresswell, Twycross and now Hawkworth all have connections to the Ministry, Cresswell through his brother who was the head of the Goblin Liaison Office and Twycross as an apparition instructor for the Department of Magical Transportation, but we've found no reason to suspect that they had any further connections."
"Could it be a cover up?" Savage suggests, thumbing through their files on the victims. "Maybe Hawkworth, as a member of the Wizengamot, was the actual target and the others were just… practice? Or red herrings to throw us off the scent?"
"The killings are too emotional for that," Harry says, shaking his head. "The stabbings and cuts? Whoever the killer is, they really wanted to hurt these people. They were all bound in different manners, too, so the killer sees them as individuals. No, the killer knows these people and whatever their motive is, it's personal."
"Revenge?"
"Could be," Ron agrees. "But for what?"
"Alright, time to get to it," Robarts says, clapping his hands together. "Weasley, I want you to talk with the rest of the family. Known enemies, strange behavior lately, you know the drill. Savage and Proudfoot, familiarise yourselves with the files and look into possible connections, see if you can unearth anything new now that we've got a fourth victim. Also, look into Hawkworth's work in the Wizengamot, voting record and political allies and so on. Potter, I need you to shave and shower and change into clean robes. You're coming with me to the press conference at three. We need to tell the reporters what we want them to say before they start making up their own stories."
The cameras are flashing and quills scratch madly over parchment and notebooks. Robarts is standing at the front of the podium, a Sonorus carrying his words over the crowd as he lays out the basics of the case and assures everyone that he has put together a special team of the best Aurors in the department to solve it.
Harry is standing a few steps back with his hands clutched behind him and his gaze up over the heads of the reporters and away from the worst of the flashes from their cameras.
He can't decide what he hates more, press briefings or Ministry galas. On one hand, the briefings have the benefit of being comparatively short and usually for a limited amount of time. On the other hand, they force him to stand in the limelight, elevated on a podium so that all eyes are on him. Still, he knows that Robarts has him attend press briefings for the same reason Shacklebolt makes him come to Ministry events; when the public isn't gossiping about his private life, they seem to think he's some kind of super Auror who can solve any case single handedly before teatime.
"And now Auror Potter will take your questions," Robarts says and steps aside.
Harry sighs and steps up, looking away for a moment when the cameras flash and the reporters start to shout their questions. Many of them are questions they should know he can't answer, but he doesn't roll his eyes at them because Robarts would have his head if he did.
"Susan Hopps, the WWN. What's linking the murders?"
"Tina Chen, the Daily Prophet. How does the killer choose his victims?"
"Sean Murphy, Witch Weekly. Do you have any suspects?"
Casting the Sonorus charm and putting the tip of his wand against his own throat, Harry raises his free hand to make the reporters quiet down and goes about answering the questions he can. By the time the questions finally start to slow, his head is throbbing again he has locked every muscle in his body to stop himself from flinching from the light whenever a flash goes off.
"Thank you," Robarts says, smoothly stepping in and taking over. "If that was all the questions for today-"
"Mr Potter, is the case making you delay your marriage with Ms Weasley?"
Harry narrows his eyes and scans the crowd. There, in the midst of reporters, stands the one who followed him into the toilet yesterday. Caterwauler.
"I must ask that questions stay on topic," Robarts warns.
"Your relationship seems to be suffering and you didn't look very well yesterday!" Caterwauler presses on, now elbowing his way closer to the platform. "Are you considering breaking up with Ms Weasley?"
"This briefing is over!" Robarts declares, cancelling his Sonorus charm and turning to leave.
Harry throws Caterwauler a filthy look, then goes to follow Robarts off the podium.
"Is it because you've found someone else?"
Harry whips around and doesn't need a charm to make himself heard when he shouts "I would never cheat on Ginny!"
"Potter!" Roberts steps in front of him, grabbing his outreached wand arm and pushing him backwards. "You cannot curse civilians," he hisses through clenched teeth.
Harry glares at him for a long moment, snarls and rips his arm free. Turning, he storms off the stage to the smatter of flashing cameras.