MONDAY, 29 JUNE

Harry sat back behind the till with a foot propped on the counter, flipping through a Quidditch supply catalog someone had left on a table at a teashop down the street that morning. Summer had arrived in earnest and the simmering heat seemed to slow the pace of life to something like dripping treacle.

He'd just cast yet more cooling charms over the joke sweets in the window display to keep them from melting. The canary creams were particularly bad about turning into an amorphous, sludgy mass within their wrappers under the midday sun, which resulted in their effect becoming more gruesome than amusing, and an enormous, half-squashed canary head was not something he really wanted to see again. But business was slow at the moment which left him with little to pass the time. Ron and George had left to meet with a potential wholesaler somewhere in Muggle London and Harry had volunteered to keep watch over the shop in their absence.

Occasionally a child would come barreling through the door, dragging reticent parents behind. Harry did his best to direct the youngest customers away from from the more... specialist... items that were piled up on the back shelves, keeping them in the sunnier parts of the shop near the front, where there was plenty of mischief but little real danger to be found. It wasn't how George ran things, but while Harry was in charge, he'd do it his own way.

The current trio, two older teenage girls and boy who looked to be about seven or eight years of age, were wandering through the aisles without purpose or aim. Over the last month, Harry had learned to tell actual customers from idle browsers, and this trio was definitely the latter. If they had any money, they did not seem in a hurry to be parted from it. At least only a few people seemed to recognize him on sight these days, despite his picture turning up in the Daily Prophet gossip column with some regularity, generally pasted next to vague speculation about his career plans or love life.

He knew Rita Skeeter was still out there, plying her trade, but she'd moved on to hounding members of the Ministry of Magic and other poor souls who crossed her path that she could tar with accusations of colluding with the Death Eaters before Voldemort's fall. Most of her victims were, at worst, people who had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that never stopped her, of course. Shacklebolt had seen to cleaning out the Ministry within weeks of the battle at Hogwarts, and if any of Voldemort's sympathizers still remained, they had enough sense to keep shut up about their involvement and out of the way.

The heatwave-induced lassitude of the season seemed to subdue most potential trouble-makers among the wizards and witches of Britain, and that had to stick in Skeeter's craw. For his part, Harry thought that no news was very good news indeed.

Everything in the shop had been put under anti-theft charms before they'd reopened, so Harry went back to flipping through pages of broomstick polish and repair kits. He was starting to miss his Firebolt, and Quidditch. Tossing the dented quaffle around on an antiquated Shooting Star in the Weasleys' back garden simply wasn't the same as being high above a real pitch, waiting for that flash of gold.

Harry scratched at his neck as drying sweat made him itch, even with his long hair tied back. He really needed to see about getting it cut, as it was nearly past his shoulders at this point, but every time he thought about it, memories rose up of his Aunt Petunia practically sitting on him while she hacked his hair down to the scalp with blunt scissors dug out of some drawer, sometimes to the point of leaving him scratched and bleeding, while he cried and begged for her to stop. He tried not to think about the fact that it probably greatly increased his resemblance to Snape, but as long as he continued to wash it every morning to keep it from getting greasy, it couldn't be too bad, could it? At least the insane rate of its growth seemed to finally have slowed down to something within the realm of normal , having finished rebounding against whatever his mother's charm had done.

He'd sent cooling charms in nearly every direction of the shop at least once in the last hour, but nothing seemed to put too much of a dent in the cloying heat that had descended over the whole of London. At least he'd finally managed to shoot down the fly that had been buzzing in the windows for over an hour.

Mr Weasley was probably getting fed up with him forever asking after the Auror training program. He'd yet to get a straight answer. They'd be taking applicants in August but Harry had no idea if there would be any point in trying, yet. He'd either have to apply to the program, or return to Hogwarts.

If he could return to Hogwarts. Did they let students return after a whole missed year? It would feel strange being in the same year as Ginny, he thought, but he certainly wouldn't mind being in classes with her. What other option would he have, though? He didn't mind sitting behind a shop till for a few weeks to tide over the summer, but he couldn't spend the rest of his life doing this.

If he couldn't get into the Auror training program immediately, then he needed to get his N.E.W.T.s and apply next year, there was no viable third option he could see.

Harry tossed the catalog aside and watched the trio file back out the door without making any purchase (as he'd predicted), the brass bell above the door ringing tinnily. Another opportunistic fly buzzed in before the door shut behind them, making a circle around his head before repeatedly bouncing itself against the windows.

MONDAY, 13 JULY

He'd fallen into a sort of habit, now, rising not long after dawn and sitting with a pot of tea in the dilapidated kitchen while staring out of the window at nothing until the pot was empty.

Cokeworth had never been an exciting place, after all. It had been a dingy working-class mill town in his youth and its fortunes had diminished even further in the intervening years. The textile mills and warehouses along the oily, foul-smelling river had been shuttered, their windows broken out or boarded up. Their cement-gray and brick-red edifices were covered in artless graffiti and the surroundings strewn with broken glass and litter by the comings and goings of local Muggle youths and vagrants. A few were mere brick or cinder block shells, having burned out (not always entirely accidentally) and been left to ruin by absent owners and apathetic civic officials.

The local primary school he had attended himself as a child along with the offspring of many of his father's mill coworkers stood a few blocks away, but had been sitting empty for years now. Its grounds and play yard were overgrown with weeds and those few children still living in the vicinity were bussed across town following consolidation some time in the mid-80's. It was the kind of place that did not need dementors to deprive it of a sense of hope; a shifting economy under the pressure of increasing globalization and cheaper overseas manufacturing had sucked the life and soul out of the community as assuredly as any abomination that wizards might have dreamed up.

He remembered the neighborhood of his youth well enough. Among the Muggles, those who could survive long enough to scrape through a few exams and get out left for Birmingham or London, or literally anywhere else at the first opportunity and few ever returned. The few children he'd grown up in the company of had either moved on or been pulled under by an unforgiving life. Many were probably in prison, or worse. Those who remained were mostly living on the dole and the rest of the neighborhood were pensioners, quietly living out the gray monotony of their twilight years on fixed incomes in the same post-war homes they had lived in for fifty or sixty years, holding their breath waiting on the next appearance of grown children and grandchildren who rarely visited.

The entire place reeked of rooted poverty and a society's collective forgetfulness. It was exactly the sort of forgotten corner were one could quietly throw oneself away unnoticed. A fitting enough resting place for him, he thought; after all, wasn't there an old adage that you ended where you began? It had a certain poetic justice to it, perhaps.

He spent his days lost amongst his cramped bookshelves, trying to keep his mind and his unsteady hands occupied, lest they tear him apart completely. His own thoughts and memories surrounded him in the silence of the home on Spinner's End like a dense flock of angry crows, picking at the vestiges of his sanity and dignity.

Some part of him had died on the floor of the shack in Hogsmeade that night. He should have died. He had long ago resigned himself to the knowledge that he would not survive the war. It was right that he should not outlive the Dark Lord and his assigned task. He knew his own sins. He had played his role as the spy, walking the high wire strung over the abyss between Voldemort and Albus Dumbledore. All knowing full well that it would be his final act in this life, he had sought only to put his heel into the head of the serpent, though it cost him his last breath. It would quite possibly be the only, solitary thing of worth he would ever accomplish in his life, and he now had nothing left to give.

The Dark Lord Voldemort. What would his life have been if that accursed being had never been born? For all his dabbling in hexes, he would not have been drawn into the world of the Death Eater. There would have been no prophecy. Lily would live still.

He wasn't a complete fool – she never would have loved him. Not like that, no matter what regrettable moment of weakness she might have had one night, so many years ago. There was a chance, though, that they might have remained friends.

Harry would have had a real family, and Severus and the rest of the world would never have known him to be anything but James Potter's spoiled son.

He dropped his book onto the water-ringed wood of the spindly side table, an old potions supply catalog propping up the short leg to stop it wobbling.

He couldn't properly brew, any longer, his recent abortive attempts had proved that beyond a doubt. His hands still shook too badly to handle the preparation of ingredients properly and he grew tired if he stood too long. At this point, Longbottom could produce better work, he thought bitterly.

Most disturbingly, he found his memory growing foggy at moments, his mind slipping. Had he just put in the lacewing flies or not? Entire minutes fled like morning dew in afternoon sunlight. Long-brew potions like Wolfsbane were absolutely out of the question. A missed ingredient or preparation step would result in something useless at best, and poisonous at worst. The mortgage was long since paid off, but his savings would not last forever, and what he would do with himself when they came to their end, he could not fathom.

At least he ate very little these days, as his appetite had not really recovered since the attack. Nothing smelled or tasted quite right anymore, either. Everything seemed to have a weirdly metallic tang to it, as though every mouthful were tainted with blood. He hadn't really noticed before, but without the distractions of Hogwarts, the changes in his body, both gross and subtle, where plain to him. On top of it all, he ached when the weather changed.

He was thirty-eight years old. He felt like an old man.

It was unconscionable. Her dearest Anthony, her son, her baby, the light of her life and the breath of her soul, was dead. He was still alive. It didn't matter that he'd left, apparently. He was still out there somewhere, his heart beating away when it had no right. Once a Death Eater, always a Death Eater, no matter what he'd somehow convinced the Ministry or the newspapers of. There was no returning from that. And he must be made to know this.

The days bled from one into the other with little contrast between them. He helped mind the shop. He pestered Mr Weasley about the Ministry. He mucked about on broomsticks with Ron and George and Ginny. De-gnomed the garden and watched them file back in. He helped Mrs Weasley with chores about the house.

He'd taken to bringing back a bit of shopping as well. He made nothing of it, simply putting things into the cupboards without comment. He knew the Weasleys didn't resent him, but he couldn't stop feeling like a freeloader, and on people who could ill afford the extra mouth to feed, even with George once again bringing in a little bit from Wheezes. Business was slow, though. It would pick up at the end of August as returning students stocked up to cart their wares back to Hogwarts and make Filch's life more interesting. At that point, George would probably move out and into a flat somewhere in London.

Harry was stuck in some sort of holding pattern. He was bored , and as such, he was starting to brood over, well, everything . There wasn't enough to keep his mind busy and directed, and so it occupied itself by obsessing, apparently, over every bloody stupid thing he'd ever done.

And, worse, every bloody stupid thing he'd left un done. Of which there were many. Unfinished business chewed at the back of his mind like an industrious beaver.

He'd written a few letters, trying out his barn owl, who still did not have a proper name, writing letters to friends and old classmates. He'd sent Professor McGonagall a rather rambling, pointless thing the week before, thanking her for everything she'd done for him and asking, in a somewhat roundabout way, if there was any chance at all that he'd be allowed back in September. He didn't want to just ask directly, in case she'd expect his return, as it was really just a contingency plan. He'd sort of made it sound like he was asking for Hermione, though, which was at least believable, as he knew she really did want to finish properly.

He hadn't gotten an answer yet, so perhaps he'd been too vague about it. Or maybe she'd just sent her reply to Hermione directly.

Hagrid had gotten a letter as well, although it was a very short thing, and rather casual, full of trivialities about his summer. He'd received an invitation to drop by for tea sometime in reply and Harry didn't have the heart to tell him that he'd been banned from the grounds at Hogwarts, and had not sent another letter yet.

He'd thought about sending a letter to Hermione, who was still in Australia, but thought that might kill his new owl, or at the very least leave him deprived her services for weeks. Magic or not, it was still just a bird, and not a wandering albatross at that. He kept meaning to drop by the owl post in Diagon Alley and ask how long-distance letters were actually handled, but hadn't gotten around to it.

And then there was the last letter he'd written, then thrown out, then re-written and re-written. It was still half-finished and laying on his bed at the Burrow.

Maybe he should just go and face him like a man. McGonagall probably knew where he lived. She'd been pretty adamant about him talking to Snape, at least before they'd finally done it and Snape decided to start a shouting match with him instead of actually discussing anything.

If nothing else, he had questions he wanted answered, and Snape was the last one alive who could tell him many things.

He was being followed, he was certain. He had not seen nor heard anything, precisely, but he had not been a spy all those years for nothing.

He'd left the house mid-morning and walked several blocks down to a small grocery, as he usually did once or twice a week, and had picked up an unwelcome shadow on the walk home.

By the time he made his way back to his door, he was growing truly paranoid. This was a thoroughly Muggle neighborhood and rarely had any wizard other than himself ever set foot there, save Narcissa Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange on that one fateful visit, or that blasted Pettigrew, whom Voldemort had sent to serve on him.

Excepting Malfoy, all of them were dead.

He wouldn't put it past some Muggle youth to have a go at him, looking, perhaps, for an easy mark. His gait was somewhat unsteady these days, and while he kept his shaking hands thrust into his pockets as much as possible, he did occasionally have to venture out into the company of other human beings for the necessities of life.

Rarely was any Muggle capable of escaping his sight so thoroughly, though. It was as though this shadow of his were under an invisibility cloak.

Potter.

Did the brat never give up? He pulled open the door at Spinner's End and slammed it shut behind him. It only took him two tries with his shaking wand to accomplish the locking charm.

Annoyed, he shoved everything in the cabinets without paying much mind. How dare that whelp come here! And sneak around under that bloody cloak of James Potter's. So like him, really.

The hair suddenly stood at the back of his neck and he whipped around, his wand out in a flash as he caught the barest hint of movement in his peripheral vision. He could not hold the blackthorn wand steady, he knew, but he'd be damned if he just stood there and let the brat go unchallenged.

"Potter! If you have managed to get into this house by some miraculous bit of dumb luck, I would implore you to show yourself now, before I am forced to—"

"Crucio!"

Pain encompassed his entire consciousness and being as he fell with all the grace of a sack of hammers to the kitchen floor. Some detached part of his brain that still functioned noted the voice that had spoken the Cruciatus curse was most certainly not Harry's.