"Thought you were running late," Ginny remarks, breathless, as they're having sex in Harry's shower.
He groans, reminding himself once again that this is the last time he's let himself get carried away, the last blissful, rushed morning after the last blissful, drawn-out night of lingering touches and swapping sleep for - Harry doesn't really know what for.
Lust? Pleasure? Need? Raw, unbridled hunger?
The joy of feeling understood, a meddlesome voice murmurs in his ear.
So Harry ignores it and thrusts harder, his thighs rubbing against the wet back of hers as he presses Ginny into the shower wall, water dripping from his hair, into his eyes, pooling over patches of flesh where their bodies connect.
If it's the last time, he might as well enjoy it, fuck all else. He'll deal with Robards later.
Angry, murderous eyes glare at him from the tens of posters, mugshots and newspaper clippings he'd plastered on every wall inside his cubicle; Death Eaters, murderers, cold hearted criminals in their black and white, paper form hurling abuse at Harry the second he walks in, every day of every single week. He'd silenced them from the very start, but he won't get rid of the posters, no. He needs to remember why he's doing this for.
Harry flips them, bored, and turns his back; obsessively, his tired brain keeps replaying the conversation he'd had with his boss.
Robards had pressed him for an assessment, for some form of guess, for a suspect they can point their fingers at. The press is at my heels, Potter, he'd said. Give me a name by Sunday or I'll send them your way, he'd then added with a menacing growl and Harry believed him.
It isn't the press that bothers Harry, not really. He's grown accustomed to their vicious grilling, to the lies and name trashing he'd gotten over the years.
What truly bothers him - and he knows it to be true when he searches in his heart of hearts, is the faintest, slimmest possibility that someone in the Ministry might release the list of suspects. It isn't unheard of, after all, and they'd done it before when the case was grisly enough and the press became too much, there was always someone who talked. Off the record, yet somehow it still ended up in print.
Only that this time - this time, the list isn't extensive at all. In fact, it is quite lamely comprised of just one name: Ginny Weasley. And it's all because of him.
Maybe if he'd actually concentrated on the case instead of -
Knock knock on the thin cubicle wall.
"Harry! Hey, Harry, you there?"
"Here, Nev," Harry calls back, waves his hand high over the separating wall, really rather happy to have someone interrupt his wandering inside that particular rabbit hole.
"Brilliant! This flew in."
There's some hasty crumpling of paper before a memo zooms dangerously close to Harry's left eye. There are some benefits to wearing glasses, Harry figures and catches the paper plane between his index and middle finger.
"Bloody buggering - won't take a break," he grumbles between two very long yawns. Maybe Robards' right. Maybe he's too old for white nights or simply for fucking about (no pun intended) while a murderer's on the loose. "Come on, Nev, there's a crime scene waiting for us."
"Ron's not coming?" Neville's blond head bobs from his cubicle, ear clamped by the crimson Auror robe he'd been fighting.
"Robe still trying to throttle you?"
"Yeah, mind. Hasn't been the same since that luxury brands smuggler we've dealt with, you know?"
"Pay a visit to old Magda downstairs, she'll sort you out," Harry replies sagely, flicking his wand in a loose circle. The robe immediately calms down.
"Thanks. So, Ron?"
Harry pockets his wand, combs a hand through his hair. He'd forgotten to do so before he left, but then he'd definitely left in a hurry. And after that Robards gave him an earful and, well, between a suspect who refuses to behave like one and a perpetually melting pot type of boss, there's really not much time left for vanity.
"Still can't bring him into the case, what's with Ginny and - you know. He's lumped with Williamson anyway."
"Oh, poor soul," Neville shakes his head as they make their way to the Apparition point.
Turning on their heels, the two men Disapparate with a loud pop.
Harry grips a mildly shaken Neville when they step inside the Ministry some hours later. He takes in the yellowish hue and sickly glow of his friend and thinks it's all to be expected. Neville had been good friends with Mary Tart.
Well, Harry had known her too, but - but he's rarely shaken. He rarely reacts.
Or rarely processes his feelings. But that's a thought he'd very much not like to have.
"Sure you're alright talking to old Francis Tart by yourself, Harry? He tends to be a lot."
Harry eyes Neville's glazed look again, the slight tremble of his hands before he answers, grinning.
"Fairly. You go lie down, Nev. I'll tell Robards you're off drafting the report."
"Oh, cheers, mate. I owe you one."
He watches Neville wobble to the elevator, slightly bent over.
"Right," Harry exhales, low. He doesn't have much hope for the conversation he's about to have, but he needs to do it anyway. Following protocol, being professional and all that.
With a quick nod of his head to the caretaker mopping his way behind him, Harry sends a note to Agnes, the Department secretary, and heads to the interrogation room to wait for the cheerful Mr Tart.
"She deserved it," Francis Tart of the Department of International Magical Cooperation croaks in his usual sour tone not one hour later.
"That's lovely of you," Harry bites back, quill scribbling furiously to his right.
Mr Tart makes a noise as though he'd had to swallow down something particularly revolting.
"I don't need your judgement, boy! Look at him, still wet behind his ears but has the nerve to call me to this bloody room and tell me how to talk about my own daughter. She was a slut, she was!"
"A reminder that everything you say is and will be recorded," Harry replies coolly.
Mr Tart blows out a ringing cackle, his beady, black eyes squinted. "You can quote me on this, you buggering - she deserved it. Told her, always told her she'd end up dead, with all the boyfriends she changed more often than she changed her own panties. Ha!"
He seems to enjoy his own joke and Harry very patiently allows him enough space to finish laughing. Then, with a loud clap on the table, Mr Tart continues. "Yeah, I told her, alright. I said 'you go find yourself a decent man who treats you right'. What kind of father would I be if I didn't tell her that? But I did. And what did she do? She went around fucking everyone. She was a slut," he finishes in a tone that clearly says there's nothing else to add.
Harry clears his throat. "Are you aware that you're legally allowed the week off when your next of kin has passed?"
At this, Mr Tart looks thoroughly insulted.
"What about it? I don't need no time off. I had nothing to do with this. She deserved it. Write that down, boy: she deserved it," he bellows, droplets of spit landing on Harry's face.
A large pint - or a bucket would probably be needed to wash away this particular interview, Harry thinks as he slowly wipes his face with the edge of a sleeve.
The glimpse of red hair he catches the moment he walks through the door has Harry's heart plummeting to his stomach. Images of poor Mary bombard him, crash fiercely into his skull.
One of the first people he'd met in the Ministry now with her head poised high up on a pub's wall, antlers growing out of two holes cracked into the ginger crown of her head, blood oozing violently, dripping down her red, tarnished hair.
One of the first people in the Ministry that treated him kindly now with her head hung on the pub's wall like a trophy, like a hunter's trophy for everyone to see what they'd brought home.
And her body, stripped naked and beaten, displayed on the bartop, bare legs spread wide, her palms covering her pubic region in what Harry thought to be a foul attempt at ridicule. In fact, what sickened him the most was that, aside from the cut that severed her head from her body, which showed all the proper signs of magic, the rest of the damage had been inflicted on her in a brutal, Muggle way.
The small drops of blood peppering her face looked so much like freckles…
"Back already?"
Harry's eyes drop to the pitch black outside, his lips form a thin line.
"I'd stop to thank you for the cheerful welcome, but what the fuck? Really, Ginny?" Harry drawls, thumping off his boots and rumbling towards the bathroom. There's a lot of blood under his nails he's eager to scrape off. Hell, he'd do the same to his brain if he could after this bad joke of a day. "You know I was alright with you staying here for a bit this morning so that we're not caught together."
"That's charming, thanks," she volleys back, her words clipped. Harry still can't see her, but his mind is quick to conjure an image of her pouting face, that one freckle lingering above her upper lip as she lazes in his bed.
He flicks water into his eyes and sighs. Why does he keep stalling? Why can't he just go ahead and deal with this? He'd never had trouble brushing off women and he'd never mixed work with sex before.
You'd also never quite had a relationship before. You'd never let anyone in, have you, the same stupid voice goads him viciously.
"This is dangerous, Ginny," he argues, firmly ignoring his own train of thought, tone dead serious as he stops in front of his bedroom. Indeed, his mind had not led him astray as she is very much pouting, lazing in his bed, still wearing his clothes.
"You're not exactly harbouring a fugitive," she rolls her eyes. "I'm still here because your stupid Auror Department said I can't go back. I'll miss the entire summer season if I'm not back on the training pitch soon," Ginny adds petulantly, her heel landing onto the mattress with a thump.
Harry draws in a breath, the bed creaking lightly under him as he claims the other side of it, the edges of his Auror's robes dusting the floor. Not too near, but not far enough either.
"Ginny - it's nothing personal, there's this case related information I can't bring home to look through if you're here -"
"You think I'd read through your files?!"
Her tone is shrill, red hair falling on her cheeks and Harry chooses to ignore it. Women are being killed and he'd so far done nothing about it.
"Doesn't matter what I think. You, Ginny, are connected to this case, whether you want it or not. You were there when the first reported murder happened. I can't - no, I won't take any chances and that means I can't share information with you exactly as I can't share information with Ron, who, by the way, is worried about you."
"That'd be a first," she says sourly and Harry is genuinely taken aback. Vividly, he remembers all her brothers scared to death as news of Ginny Weasley's body lying in the Chamber is passed from one trembling, frightened student to the next.
"Don't you think you're being too hard on them?"
"No."
There's a long silence between them, Ginny with a pillow clutched to her chest, Harry with the weight of the past days pressing harshly on his shoulders.
His fingers slant over the old scar before they disappear in the black chaos of his hair.
"What about Hermione? What if you stayed with her for a bit?"
Ginny scoffs. "I barely remember her, do I? Would be a bit awkward popping up at her door."
"You have to go somewhere, Ginny," Harry tries to emphasise, "this could end up very badly. What will you say when they'll question you again? Do you even have an alibi? Can you convincingly explain where you've been at the time of each crime?"
"Scared for your job, Auror Potter?" she asks waspishly.
"No," he answers and he's fully honest.
What he is afraid of, though, is that this is fastly getting out of control. But this, Harry doesn't say; he simply lets the heavy silence stretch between them.
It always gets 'em talking.
"Look, I'm not used to begging," Ginny starts, on queue. "I genuinely have nowhere to go. I keep ambling through the same streets and then I'm tired of all the memories this bloody place stirs. Thought I'd never come back, I'd firmly left Britain behind," she continues, exactly as he'd expected.
What he didn't expect, though, is for her lip to wobble, and her eyes to well, and for Ginny to display vulnerability in a way he'd stopped being accustomed to. In a way so foreign and alien to this new version of Ginny he'd held in his arms for the past nights.
His windpipe constricts painfully.
"Sorry, I - sorry," Harry hears himself say. "Stay here tonight, we'll talk about it tomorrow."
His hand reaches for her, in a weak attempt at comfort. He'd always been very bad at comforting other people, ending up saying the wrong thing or simply finding himself unable to offer that physical comfort he'd noticed people often crave.
His hand lands on her shoulder for a moment and instantly fears she'll bat him away.
Instead, she tugs him over her, her mouth quickly, hungrily on his. The salt in her tears mingles with their kiss and Harry stops fighting it. They'll talk about it in the morning, when he's better rested, when he can think straight.
They'll talk about it in the morning, when there'll be no frustration in the way.
Yeah, they'll talk about it in the morning.
Because right now it's easier to enjoy her, the softness of her thighs as his mouth brushes over them, the sweet taste of her flesh as he lets his teeth sink lightly into a particular spot at the back of her right thigh. It's easier to do all this and simply forget the events of the day, the heaviness of all those years after the war, the pain of all the years until that.
It's easier with her in ways it shouldn't be.
Her knickers drop to the floor, next to the scarlet set of robes, and his tongue brushes over her.
Harry slowly drags his tongue over her centre, spreading her open with two of his fingers. He sticks his tongue inside and tastes her, rolling it over her walls, her clit, pleasuring her.
"Oh, Harry, fuck."
His scalp prickles faintly as Ginny pulls his hair. He wraps his arms around her thighs and dives in deeper.