Chapter 6 - Aftermath, Part 1

Harry was awakened in less than an hour by Pomfrey. She fussed over him until he convinced her that he really didn't need anything but sleep. When the door closed again, Harry tugged the gap in the heavy drapes closed completely and hoped that was the last interruption.

"Mr. Potter?" a familiar voice woke him. Harry leaned over and pulled the drapes aside. The sun was low in the sky now. Professor McGonagall stood between his bed and Ron's, her head cocked to the side.

"Professor," Harry said a little sleepily.

In a teasing voice she said, "We cannot start the party without you."

"What time is it?"

"Six-thirty."

Shocked at how long he had slept, Harry swung his legs off the bed and stood up. He looked himself over and shook the worst of the wrinkles out of his robe.

"Uh ah. Dress robes, my dear," McGonagall said kindly.

Harry's foggy brain sharpened up at that. "Why?"

"There may be one or two photographers," she said casually.

Harry scratched his head and went to his trunk. He pulled out his black dress robe with the satin collar and cuffs and his toiletry kit. His body was moving on automatic. At the door to the dormitory, he turned suddenly. Rubbing his eyes, he asked, "Voldemort is gone, right? I didn't just dream that?" He readjusted his glasses as he peered up at her.

"Yes, Mr. Potter," she replied. Harry could hear a smile in her voice.

Harry cleared his throat. "Good." He opened the door and headed down.

McGonagall waited in the corridor outside the boy's toilet while Harry freshened up and changed. Dampening his hair, he tried to comb it into something presentable. Finally with a shrug, he gave up, put the comb back in his kit, and stared at himself in the mirror. He didn't look like someone who had defeated Voldemort. He sighed as he met his own green eyes. They looked less than victorious, more burned out. He wished with an acute stab that his parents could see him now. They would be proud, he was certain, or at least very relieved. He sighed again and swallowed hard. All of that emotion from the battle was still very much at the surface.

McGonagall was waiting. If she hadn't been, he might have spent the rest of the evening alone in the boy's toilet rather than face everyone.

"All right, my boy?" his professor asked kindly when he stepped out.

"Yes, ma'am," Harry replied quietly.

She stopped and put a hand on his shoulder. "Harry, are you up for this? You certainly don't have to do anything you don't want to," she added in a light tone. "I think you could ask just about anything from us, in fact. Frankly, we've been feeling badly, having the party without you. You missed the last one as well and that was your doing as well," she added easily.

Harry gave her a small smile. "I wouldn't want to miss it, Professor."

She hooked an arm around him, ostensibly to lead him down the corridor. She gave him a half-hug first, however, and pushed his hair back. Harry looked up at her in surprise. McGonagall was usually much more restrained than that.

"Ma'am?"

"We're so proud of you, Harry," she said and pulled him against her side again.

Harry dropped his gaze. "Thank you, ma'am."

They started down the corridor. "You aren't insufferable at all," she said, half to herself. "Why does Severus keep insisting that you are?"

Harry gave her a worried look then got distracted by having to keep up with her much longer pace.

In the Entrance Hall, Harry could hear the murmur and clink of a party going on beyond the doors. His professor steered him away from the first door, which he usually used since it was closest to the Gryffindor table. At the center doors, she gave him an affectionate smile, pulled open the large carved door, and gestured for him to lead.

Harry glanced into the hall as he followed her gesture and hesitated on the threshold. The Great Hall had been arranged similarly to the way it had for the Tri-Wizard Tournament Ball, with large round tables, each with their own cluster of floating candles. Four tables sat on the raised platform at the end, with chairs only facing forward or sideways. Double the number of people were there than the normal students.

Conversation died away as Harry took in the room. Heads turned to him. Chairs shifted. One of the head tables captured Harry's attention as Dumbledore stood up, his flowing baby-blue robe sparkling in the candlelight. Fudge moved to stand as well. They started clapping. The rest of the room picked it up immediately.

Stunned, Harry required a nudge from behind to get moving again. He walked dazedly along a narrow aisle up the middle, through the sea of now standing and clapping witches and wizards, up to the platform. Dumbledore met him at the edge and shook his hand.

"Come on up here, Harry," the old wizard invited.

Working hard to take in what was happening around him, Harry took a seat beside Fudge, facing the rest of the hall. The clapping faded and a commotion from a table to the left caught his attention. Harry stiffened a little when he saw Fred and George leading the rest of the Weasleys in holding up their cups. "To Harry!" the twins roared. The rest of their table and a scattering of others around the room joined in, echoing it as well as the following hip-hip-hooray! Harry smiled lightly at their antics. The state of the Weasleys and the cups made Harry suspicious about whether that explained McGonagall's more outgoing behavior as well.

Dumbledore, still standing beside his chair, put a hand on Harry's shoulder. "Thank you all for coming. Especially on such short notice," he added congenially. "I thought it only fair that we make up two rounds of parties to Harry, who wasn't exactly cognizant of the last festivities the wizarding world held to celebrate Voldemort's demise."

Harry was glad to see no one hissed this time. Someone shouted, "Here, here." It sounded like Hagrid. Harry looked around to try to find him, figuring that should be easy. A sea of ecstatically happy faces met Harry's own as he scanned the crowd. At a table on the right, Hagrid sat talking with Mundungus. He winked at Harry when their eyes met.

"Harry?" Dumbledore was saying to him. Harry's head snapped up at that. "Would you care to give us a few words on this historic occasion?" Harry blanched, but the old wizard had his arm out to invite him to stand. Dumbledore leaned close as he guided Harry out from behind the table. "This could end up in a future History of Magic textbook, my boy," he winked.

Harry cleared his throat; his eyes took in the rest of their table as he stalled. Professors Sprout and Snape were there as well as someone who appeared to be the Bulgarian Minister of Magic. "Well," Harry began slowly, "the first thing that comes to mind is: good riddance." The room laughed lightly and murmured conversation broke out for a moment.

He took a deep breath and assembled his scattered thoughts. "We all have lives to go back to," he said, thinking, I have a life that starts right now, forget going back. Bolstered by that, he thought about the frantic lives of the teachers who were also Order members, and went on. "Everyone needs to try to remember what was important to them before this all started, because those things are what really matter. Not the things you do because you have to." A few sounds of agreement came from the tables.

Harry wanted to say something about those who didn't make it to see this day, but just considering it made the frail foundation he stood on tilt crazily. Far too many eyes were upon him to risk anything like that. He had been silent too long—the shifting feet around the room told him so. Mentally backing frantically away from unsettling thoughts, Harry said lightly, "Myself, I am looking forward to a lifting of the ban on Quidditch." The room laughed more this time.

"That will be arranged, Harry, I assure you," Dumbledore said.

Ron's shout of joy made Harry grin as he looked over at the Weasley table. Harry scanned the full set of redheads. Even Percy was there although, as usual, he looked like he disapproved of something. "It is good to see so many here," he said without thinking.

"Yes, Harry, it is," Dumbledore said, patting Harry on the shoulder. "And we have you to thank for that." As though he realized the unstable ground Harry had tread onto unthinkingly, Dumbledore went on, "Please, everyone, enjoy your dinner. Dedalus Diggle has promised us a fireworks show from Hogsmeade at ten o'clock." With cheerful conversations roaring back to life around them, Dumbledore led Harry back to his seat and took his own beside him.

"Well spoken," McGonagall leaned over to say from beside the headmaster.

"No one warned me," Harry said with a hint of accusation.

"Impromptu speeches are always better," she said as though it were perfectly obvious. She toasted him with her cup and drank a large gulp, confirming Harry's suspicions. Harry suspected he would find butterbeer in his own chalice. It had mulled mead instead, to his amazement. It burned his throat even with just a sip; he took another gulp anyway.

Plates of roast mutton and goose appeared on the table, dressed with vegetables. Suddenly incredibly famished, Harry served himself from the closest plate and waited impatiently for others to serve themselves so he could start. The Bulgarian Minister smiled broadly at him when Harry looked his way.

"I do not know if you remember me," the wizard said.

"I think so," Harry said. "From the World Cup."

The wizard smiled more. "Yes. I am most flattered. But we were not properly introduced," he said in his slavic accent as he stood and held his hand out across the table. "Gorazd Obolensky."

Harry leaned forward for a quick handshake. "Good to you again, sir."

As Obolensky sat back down, straightening his stiff dress robes as he did so, he said, "I think I was wery lucky on the drawing of tables tonight." He grinned at Dumbledore and stabbed his fork into his meat.

Harry took this cue and started devouring his plate.

"Do they not feed you here?" Obolensky asked, seeing this.

After swallowing, Harry said, "Yes, sir. It's just that I slept through lunch."

"Ah, yes, the appetite of a—what are you, sixteen?"

"Yes, sir."

"Ehem," Fudge cleared his throat making Harry wonder whether maybe he shouldn't be talking around his own Minister. "Have any future plans, Harry?"

Harry almost rose to the question, but held back on instinct. "Still considering things, sir." In his peripheral vision, he saw all four teachers at the table pause a moment as he said this. He glanced at McGonagall, who gave him a disapproving look, then rolled her eyes as though she were giving up on him.

"Well, young man, be sure and let us know what you decide, hm?" Fudge said, sounding the doting uncle.

Harry silently congratulated himself for keeping mum. He didn't want to get into the very competitive Aurors program that way.

"Things are going to get much easier," Fudge went on. "We'll have to relearn what it is like to worry about something as trivial as cauldron bottoms." He chuckled to himself.

Harry made it through the meal, although it seemed to stretch on a little long. Fudge pushed his chair back and said, "Have to make the rounds." He tossed his bundled serviette onto his bone-strewn plate and bowed to the table before moving off. The plates soon cleared themselves and the next course appeared. Harry took a rice pudding from the serving tray that circled slowly above the center of the table before vanishing again a minute later.

Obolensky shifted down a seat, bringing his own slice of chocolate cake with him. "Do you mind?" he asked. Harry shook his head between bites. Obolensky made a noise of pleasure at his first bite. "Very good. My compliments to the chefs," he said to Dumbledore.

Dumbledore nodded acceptance of the compliment as he poured tea for himself and McGonagall beside him. "Things in Bulgaria will settle down quickly, I assume?" the headmaster asked.

"I expect. We have lost all of our Dementors and wampires but presumably some will try to return. How we will handle them then . . . we shall see." He smiled at Harry as he took another large bite of cake. "Such minor problems," he said a little dreamily. He shook his dark head. "I heard rumors last year about you, Mr. Potter, how you were expected somehow to do what you did before. And I remembered the boy from the top box at the World Cup and I thought, he has not a chance."

Harry laughed. "Did you put money on that?"

Obolensky started to answer then looked taken aback. "Of course not."

"Well, that's all right, then," Harry said amiably.

The Bulgarian Minister pulled himself together. He seemed to find Harry's attitude a little worrisome. "I hope to be as flippant as you are about this someday, Mr. Potter. Or perhaps it is the mead that is the explanation?"

Harry shrugged. The other extreme was less sustainable, but he wasn't going to try to explain that.

Obolensky picked up his serviette and shook it out with a spell that flattened it neatly. He arranged it with the Hogwarts seal on the top left and leaned in close while he fished in his pocket. "Would you mind, terribly?" he asked as he pulled out a never-out quill. He shook the quill and incanted something that made the nib into a little hard sponge that filled with black ink from the never-out charm of the quill.

"What was that charm?" Harry asked, distracted from what he should have seen coming.

Obolensky smiled widely. "I can teach a spell to the famous Harry Potter," he murmured with a hint of reverence. He shook the quill back to normal with a canceling spell. "The spell is Znakpisatel. Here," he repeated it, canceled it and handed the quill to Harry.

It took three corrections of his pronunciation, but finally, Harry made what was essentially a Muggle marker pen out of the quill. Harry had been missing marker pens in his wizard life and thought this a clever spell. "Cool," Harry said happily.

"Would you mind?" Obolensky repeated, shifting the serviette over a little closer. "I promised Victor I would return with your autograph for him."

Harry blinked at him in surprise. "Victor?"

McGonagall cleared her throat. Harry glanced at his teachers, who gave him looks of mixed amusement. Snape rolled his eyes.

"Victor Krum?" Harry asked the minister in disbelief.

"Yes. I know you have met, correct?"

"Yeah," Harry confirmed. He looked down at the cloth before him, a bit dazed. "What would you like it to say?" Harry asked slowly, thinking of how fun it was going to be to tell Ron about this.

Obolensky murmured something in Bulgarian as if trying it out for sound.

"You'll have to spell that out," Harry said, amused.

"To my dear friend, Victor," Obolensky suggested.

Harry took a deep breath and in his best hand, wrote that out and signed below it. There was a lot of blank space at the bottom. He thought a moment and then added, Voldemort Demise Party, May 1997, along the bottom edge.

"Ah, very nice," Obolensky said, admiring it. He folded it carefully and put it in his pocket. Harry gave him the quill back as well.