27 - Outside
With the Prince of Portland seated silently across from him, his inborn curiosity lifted its head again - but nowadays it was at least somewhat tempered by the wariness he had gained during the rest of his life.
"Would you care for a drink, captain?" Harry finally asked.
"Just a coffee," the man replied evenly.
Their polite words and careful movements were almost like a dance and for a fleeting moment Harry regretted never having learned any diplomacy or etiquette, despite being heir to both the Potter and Black families.
The Dursley's had only 'taught' him to act like a servant. Perhaps Sirius could have taught him, but after many years in Azkaban and being on the run, well, there had been other things to worry about and Harry imagined that etiquette and diplomacy, despite the fact that Sirius Black must have learned these things at some point, had been very low on his godfathers priority list.
So, there had really only been Lockheart as a teacher in this field – who had used Harry's unavoidable detentions to try and 'teach' him how to 'handle his fame'. And something told Harry that he was better of banning those supposed lessons from his mind altogether.
So instead he served the police captain his coffee, put down a cup of tea for himself and carefully sat down across from the Prince of Portland.
Then he waited for the other man to make the first move in what he was starting to suspect was a complicated chess match – one that he hadn't known that he was even playing.
Or, the thought struck him, perhaps he was not even one of those playing at all – maybe Harry was just one of the pieces being moved around the board.
'In that case,' the wizard thought almost harshly, with memories of both red and twinkling eyes surfacing in his mind, 'I'll make sure that the players find that I'm no longer a pawn in another man's war.'
He looked up at the man with fiercer eyes than might be considered polite – ready for anything.
Captain Renard sipped his coffee, undeterred by Harry's strange shift in body language, though the observant man must have quietly made note of it. Then he deliberately put the cup down and looked him straight in the eyes, a powerful gaze from which Harry couldn't look away.
"I'm grateful for your help." The proud man admitted, with an easy voice, "But whatever it was you did shouldn't have worked."
Harry's body tensed and relaxed, much as it would have if he was prepared for a fight in a dark alley but ended up facing only an innocent looking cat. This was not what he'd expected.
And he admitted to himself that he'd been wrong about his earlier assessment - when he thought this man would never want to discuss anything related to his earlier… affliction.
The Prince may be powerful, and even proud. But not blindly so – not foolishly. This was a man who could and would admit some amount of weakness, if only by acknowledging one that had already past.
"You're welcome," Harry replied – and couldn't think of anything else to say.
The man raised an eyebrow and let the silence stretch on, waiting him out. And the wizard told himself that he wasn't falling for it and oh-so-subtly turned his eyes away from those piercing ones until they rested casually on the ceiling.
The Prince cleared his throat and when Harry looked back he could have sworn he saw a small, amused smile on the man's face.
Harry opened his mouth, hesitated, closed it again and then told the man just about the same simple truth as he had before, when he came to him for help.
"I didn't know if it would work. I just tried, like you asked me. Considering that you wouldn't tell me the cause of… the situation… it was about all that I could do."
The wizard paused for a moment and couldn't help but smile ruefully, "Did I break another unwritten rule?"
Harry had a habit of doing that, and it seemed it was one that stuck with him even as the owner of a bakery in an entirely different world.
The police captain nodded; "You seem to be outside of the rules. Outside of the known."
For a moment, it looked like he wanted to say more. But instead he quietly finished the coffee, nodded at him and left.
Harry Potter remained seated at the table, drinking his tea. If he were to hazard a guess, he would bet that one day this thing with the Prince would bring him a great big heap of trouble.
Not that it changed anything – knowingly walking into trouble… well, that was just another one of those habits.
Word Count: 800
