Harry was useless at work. Sleep had eluded him until early morning as his thoughts chased round his head. The couple hours he finally managed just weren't enough to keep him going. He wasn't 17 anymore, able to run around Hogwarts all night then jump out of bed in time for classes.
He spent the morning fiddling with his quill and doodling on scraps of parchment so he appeared to be working on the upcoming Auror Graduation ceremony if anyone poked a head in his office. He then cleverly delegated the precious few time sensitive tasks to a very keen intern that reminded him with a nostalgic pain of Colin Creevy and dismissed the young man with a wave.
He'd been putting the finishing touches on his sketch—a Norwegian Ridgeback in mid-flight—when someone knocked at his door.
"Come in," Harry called to the door while he hastily shoved his sketch under other, more official looking papers.
Harry felt his jaw drop when none other than Oliver Wood walked into his office with a grin. He jumped up and gave the man a thumping hug then shut the door and invited Wood to sit down, eager to catch up with his old friend.
"So how'd suspension treat you?" Harry asked with a grin.
"Hell," Wood replied simply, "utter hell. I wanted to jump off a bridge every time I listened to one of Puddlemere's games." Harry winced as he remembered Puddlemere United's poor record. He knew that Wood had not mellowed with age and was still every bit as fanatical about winning as he had been over 20 years ago.
"Well at least you know you still got a coaching spot," Harry said, "even despite your, um, colorful behavior."
"I still maintain the referee was asking for it," Wood stated evenly.
"Usually when someone says 'just go ahead and hex me then' they're not actually asking to be hexed," Harry replied. "She had to be in isolation at St. Mungo's for two weeks projectile vomiting frogs and this was after they got everything reattached." Wood cringed.
"I did write her a card," he admitted with a casual shrug. Harry stared for a moment then burst out laughing, knowing that the card had probably managed to insult both the referee's eyesight and mental faculties while still sounding politely apologetic as only Oliver Wood could.
Oliver had apparently spent his suspended season traveling to watch International Quidditch games—attendance at the games of British and Irish teams violated the terms of his suspension—so the two of them had no shortage of things to catch up on. Oliver Wood had become, surprisingly enough, a good friend of the family's over the years. He was invited over for supper at least once a month, usually when Ginny wanted an exclusive for the Daily Prophet, and often slipped them game tickets and locker room passes in return. The kids loved him, especially James, who thought it was "wicked cool" to have the infamous "Demon Coach" sitting at the dinning room table.
It was nearly forty minutes later when the real reason for the visit came up.
"Well," said Wood, his cheeks coloring, "I mentioned to my sister that I was planning on visiting you soon and she made me promise to put in a good word for Sue, my niece that is, Suzanne Wood-McFee. She just put in for Auror training and she's got her heart set on it, so..."
Harry nodded and assured Wood she was already on the short list and things were looking pretty good for her. Wood thumped Harry's back vigorously in gratitude and Harry invited him over to dinner next week to celebrate his homecoming. Oliver Wood excused himself, reminding Harry that his suspension officially ended at midnight and he had some prep work to do before the overnight conditioning marathon was ready for his players. Harry just shook his head.
He spent the later part of the morning organizing his already clean desk. He didn't keep it nearly as cluttered as most of the others in the department. One of the first things Harry did as head of the Auror Office was to add three yearly awards to recognize the contributions that everyone made to the department. At least half of the department had at least one award sitting on their desks and shelves and some were covering nearly every spare surface of their offices.
Harry didn't put out awards; through he'd received enough, a few of them he even felt he actually deserved. He'd never managed to be completely comfortable with the acclaim. At least, he thought, his celebrity had finally waned. It was hard to make a hero out of someone with a desk job and the public didn't have to know about some of the decidedly non-desk related activities his job called upon him to do from time to time.
He did have a picture of his appointment as department head. He picked up the plain wooden frame and watched himself shake hands with Kingsley Shaklebolt as he was awarded the department key. He set it back down with a sigh between the picture of him with Ron and Hermione at their wedding and the photo that he'd snapped of Ginny and the kids in their garden last summer.
Harry frowned as he thought of Ginny's reaction last night and picked up the photo. He couldn't believe that the face of the woman he loved more than anything in the world, the woman who was smiling in the picture as she played with their children, had been twisted with such contempt last night. By the time he'd finished lunch, which he'd topped off with a pepper-up potion, he'd nearly convinced himself that he'd mistaken Ginny's reaction completely. Maybe she'd thought he was accusing her of infidelity with another woman, or that he was preparing to confess to infidelity himself with another man.
Yes, by the time his ears had stopped smoking he'd convinced himself that was a perfectly reasonable explanation. All of this tension he was feeling was clearly brought on by a certain curly-haired busybody, who couldn't keep herself from blowing things out of proportion. So he couldn't force himself to feel guilty when he seriously considered telling Hermione to step-off when she knocked on his office door. He thought better of it though and let her in. She'd probably spell his door permanently open or something like that. He was sure she had an encyclopedic knowledge of spells ranging from common office annoyances to milder forms of torture.
"Hi Harry," she said in a small voice. Her eyes looked a little red and puffy and Harry felt his anger at her fading away.
He nodded in acknowledgement of her presence but said nothing as she sat down in the chair opposite of him and tossed a thick, leather-bound tome carelessly onto the desk in a decidedly un-Hermione-like way. The book yelped and at that point Harry realized that a face had been transfigured into the leather cover. The face was old-looking, fantastically old looking, with the dust and cobwebs settled in the line about the eyes and mouth. Harry wondered if it had been originally transfigured to look that way or if the leather itself had wrinkled as it aged.
"That hurt," the book cried in a thin, wheezy voice, a puff of gray dust punctuating each word.
"Oh, will you shut up!" Hermione snapped back. Harry's eyes went wide. Hermione never talked to books like that. "Just show him the part you showed me." She sounded worried and that made something in Harry's gut twist in pain.
The book sighed and flipped itself open and a section halfway down the page was glowing with a faint blue light. Harry read.
Wizards and Witches found to be in violation of section 2 of the Wizarding code of sexual decency (regarding sexual acts between two or more witches or two or more wizards) in a court of law will have their wand broken and be sentenced to exile from the Wizarding World. Additionally, up to 25 years in Azkaban can be leveled against the guilty party as befitting the severity of the crime.
Witches and Wizards with unnatural sexual tendencies who demonstrate remorse for their condition by preemptively turning themselves into the authorities will be allowed to stay in the Wizarding World provided they undergo a permanent Frigus Curse preformed by a Ministry sanctioned MediWitch. Those who fail to consent to the procedure will have their wands broken and be exiled from the Wizarding World.
Further procedures regarding trial procedures and jury quotas for sexual decency charges can be found in Section 3.7 of the Wizarding Law Codebo...
Harry slammed the book shut barely hearing its whine of protest. He swallowed a lump in his throat. He looked at Hermione across the desk meeting her sympathetic eyes.
"Please tell me that these law aren't enforced," he asked, "like the ban on flying carpets or the use of blue mandrakes?"
Hermione simply pulled out a roll of parchment, far less dusty than the book and held it out to Harry. His fingers shook as he unrolled it and found a list of names. He swallowed back a lump in his throat.
"What am I looking at, Hermione?" he asked in a tiny voice.
"Everyone who has been tried and convicted under that bloody law between 1900 and 1999," Hermione told him, her voice shaking with fury.
Harry's head spun. There were hundreds of names listed, each followed by a couple sentences of dense legalese. He recognized a lot of the surnames, Longbottom, Malfoy, Black. He even saw a Potter listed just a couple years before he was born and felt his stomach drop before he forced the thought out of his head. He skimmed back even further and felt a sick lurch.
"Madam Hooch?" Harry asked, quiet despite the anger he was feeling.
"I looked up her case file when I saw that. She had the Frigus Curse placed on her permanently in '67 by the Ministry. Dumbledore hired her straight away after that and was nearly dismissed as Headmaster for doing it, before they realized that they didn't have any laws in place that he was breaking, though they did try with a loophole in..."
"What is the Frigus Curse?" Harry asked, cutting her off. Harry recognized her habit of rambling nervously and knew the only way to stop her from giving you every scrap of information rattling around in her head was to ask a direct question.
"It's like magical castration," she replied. "It removes the libido entirely and leaves its victim, well, frigid." Harry winced at the thought.
"But there are hundreds of names here," Harry exclaimed, his voice rising sharply. "How could we not have heard of this at all?"
"All court cases on sexual deviancy are kept strictly secret," she replied. "The outcomes are all matter of public record, but it's all but impossible to find something in the court archives. More importantly, no one wants to know so no one talks about it and it's like it never even happened."
"Why," Harry asked.
"I don't know" was all Hermione said.
They sat in silence for a long time, both trying to take it in and finding they were only growing sick to their stomachs. The roll of parchment sat on the desk between them, each name listed a tiny tragedy they were too late to stop. Harry felt the moment he stopped feeling, when his emotions just shut down rather then acknowledge any more.
"I think you'd better leave for now, Hermione," Harry said. She started to say something, but Harry kept talking. "I've just have to think about all this, okay?"
"Okay," she replied as she picked up the book, which swore at her. She smothered it with her sleeve in retaliation as she left Harry's office.
He studied the list of names for the rest of the afternoon, feeling increasingly numb to it all with each passing minute. By the time he left his office he was wondering if he should grab a potion before he left of slip out to a pub for something a bit stronger. He wasn't looking where he was going when he was flagged down by Ron.
"Oi, Harry," he called out, "wanna grab a quick drink?"
"I can't," he replied and then quickly continued. "I've got a lot to do at home before the boys come back."
"That's tough, mate," Ron said. His face scrunching up in sympathy, knowing firsthand what kind of taskmaster his sister could be when she set her mind to it.
"Right then," Ron continued, "see you tomorrow." He started to leave, then froze and turned like he's just remembered something he'd forgotten. Harry held his breath.
"You wouldn't have happened to talk with 'Mione today," Ron asked. His drawn and suspicious expression was almost copy of Ginny's last night. Harry remembered Hermione's account of Ron's reaction to his daughter's letter.
"She came to see me a bit earlier so I could clarify the department's position on the employment of magical beings and sentient magical creatures," he lied smoothly. "Was something wrong?" Ron's shoulders visibly relaxed.
"Nah," he replied, "It wasn't anything. See ya, Harry!"
"Bye, Ron," Harry called back as Ron disappeared around the corner.
Harry sighed and debated how much firewhisky he could drink without Ginny noticing. He'd just lied to both his wife and his best friend in less then twenty-four hours. He was going to need some liquid fortification if he was going to get through supper without looking guilty. Because guilt was all he could let himself feel right now.