Harry fell in love while sitting in a dark bar in a country where he knew exactly no one.
He was never going to tell Ron. Or Draco. Hermione wouldn't be surprised.
Harry knew he got attached quickly. It was a thing. He'd never looked back once he'd claimed Ron over shared lunch and Hermione over shared trauma. Even Draco had been claimed pretty instantly when Harry had caught the Slytherin crying in the bathroom.
So no. It wasn't surprising that Harry fell so quickly. It was embarrassing, however, that Harry fell so quickly without even talking to the person. Or seeing him.
Harry's head hit the slightly sticky table in front of him with a quiet thump as he brought his arms up to cover his eyes. That lasted all of thirty seconds, which was the amount of time it took for Harry to realize that the fabric of his jacket sleeves (green, because Draco had taken hold of his wardrobe with a vengeance) was blocking the Man's voice.
The voice was low and slightly gravelly, changing pitch depending on how intently he was speaking. The voice was lovely and surprisingly articulate considering they were in a bar and the Man had definitely been drinking.
The voice also didn't matter at all, not really. What mattered was the rant the Man was giving, ardent hand gestures and all.
The rant was about child soldiers. He was talking about children training to be heroes and the expectations of society. He was talking about actual training that factored in their development while providing them actually useful skills. He was talking about therapy and support and strong foundations. He was talking about the government and the hero commission and how they could fuck right off if they saw the heroes before the children.
He said that child soldiers weren't okay.
Harry knew child soldiers weren't okay, of course. He'd gone to his mind healers like a good boy (because Hermione had cried and he would always do literally anything to stop Hermione crying). He understood that while the Dursleys and Dumbledore weren't the same, none of what they'd done to him had been okay.
Harry had just never heard someone say it like that before. So outright. So uncaring of mitigating factors. So fucking vehemently.
As Harry listened (he was a practised eavesdropper and certainly wasn't about to stop now), he stopped seeing his own gaunt face in pools of frigid water outside a tent, and started seeing other, more precious faces. The Creevey brothers, one frozen in death and the other in grief. Lavender, claw marks tracing her skin that would never have the chance to become scars. Draco, terrified of what he was being forced to do and become. Ginny, Neville, and Luna, leading a rebellion while facing literal torture.
Ron, anger slipping into determination when he realized he could use the twins's radio program and their own travels to orchestrate effective escape routes and found himself responsible for hundreds of lives. Hermione, determination slipping into ferocity when she sat unmoving on the cold ground with scorched eyebrows and crafted spell after charm after rune circle to keep her people safe.
Harry jolted his head up, forcibly changing his focus from his own ghosts to the Man's two friends. Harry could easily study them under his hair from their position at the booth right next to Harry's. He might only be able to see the Man's back and long black hair, but the two friends were facing Harry and directly under the light.
One friend was striking. She was beautiful, yes, but it was tempered with a deliberate sauciness and a lurking bad-assery of the kind that Hermione tucked into her pockets and Ginny wore on her sleeves.
The other friend was bright. His hair was sleek, his gestures bubbly, and his face laughing. He was also loud, loud enough that Harry knew volume must be related to his quirk. While the sudden sounds were occasionally jarring, they were always happy, to the point that Harry felt like liquid joy was being injected into the room at semi-regular intervals.
They both also looked ridiculously fond of Harry's sudden object of affection. They even traded soft eye rolls and light agreements that made it very clear this was a regular rant. As in, Harry's Man had talked about child soldiers and ways to protect children more than once. Possibly even frequently.
Harry let his head drop down to his arms again with what he would forever deny was a sigh. He lasted about five minutes in the safety of his sleeves this time before slowly raising his head in confusion; the voice had dropped to a mutter. Harry couldn't hear the Man's words anymore and that was problematic.
The two friends were gone. The intimidating woman was flirting with a man at the bar and the blond had gone across the room to loudly greet a group of people he clearly knew.
Harry's Man was sitting alone at the next booth over.
In a move that was less Gryffindor bravery and more Potter impulsiveness, Harry slipped from his seat and settled himself on the leather bench across from the Man and his voice.
"Hi." Harry was pretty sure he squeaked, but ended up being too busy studying his new seating partner to pay much attention. A fact for which he felt no guilt whatsoever, since the Man was obviously studying Harry as well.
The first thing Harry noticed was the scar below one eye. The mark was rough and very close to almost having caused permanent damage. There were other scars, too, fainter ones tracing over his hands and poking out of his collar. Harry was oddly settled by seeing them; they were both fighters. Harry knew how to talk to fighters.
"I'm sorry," The Man said, lowly.
Harry startled out of his staring, somehow clearly having missed the Man finishing his own appraisal. "What?"
The Man tapped long fingers against his mostly empty glass. "You were sitting behind us? Must have gotten an earful from both Hizashi and me. Most people come to bars alone to drink away their problems, not listen to some stranger rant for forty minutes on theirs."
Harry tilted his head, surprised at the apology. He was also oddly certain, maybe from the way that the Man wound his left hand in the long, thin scarf about his neck, that if Harry started complaining in earnest he would get a lecture on the fact that there were other tables and Harry had chosen not to move.
Harry, however, had no complaints whatsoever. "No!" Harry immediately blushed and sat on his hands at The Man's raised eyebrow. "I mean, well, yes, I was absolutely planning on drinking away my problems, but, the ranting was nice? I, shit. Look, I kinda wanted to ask you to go back about ten minutes and talk about standardized testing in terms of practical experience or, maybe required therapy and situational check ups. That was also pretty interesting?"
The Man stared. Harry tried not to fidget. "Why?"
Well. That was a fair question.
"Because I was a child soldier." That was an honest answer. That was also not the answer Harry had been expecting to give. He felt his back straighten and his hands still, head angling up just a bit as he stared the taller man in the eyes.
People didn't react well to obvious signs of violence, and Harry carried those with him always. He could disguise his habit of checking all the exits, could cover up some of his more obvious scars (though never the first), could keep his posture soft and voice low, but it was never enough. Something always slipped through. And when it did, well, even those who knew he'd been in a war that started when he was a school boy started acting warily. Like Harry was an explosive device constantly armed.
Which he wasn't. You didn't survive a war, much less as one of it's leaders, without learning to control your own Merlin-damned temper.
The Man just leaned back. "I was betting hero."
Harry let a small, tentative smile slip across his face and forcibly relaxed his shoulder. "That, too." Because apparently Aurors being jointly listed as heroes had been a thing, and Harry had jumped right on that. He'd grabbed his people and used his still shiny and new popularity as The-Man- Who-Conquered to establish a specialized team with joint hero licences. Thus getting them the fuck out of full Ministry control.
Oh, they were still connected, still took on missions for the Ministry, but Harry had gotten them a small degree of autonomy by using the muggle hero system to set them apart. Harry was desperate and Ron was devious and Hermione was ruthless and Draco was surprisingly good at paperwork. The Ministry and the English Hero Commission hadn't stood a chance.
"Aizawa Shouta." The Man gave an unfairly attractive smirk. "Potter Harry." Harry returned the grin.
And then Aizawa began to talk. He apparently had a lot more to say about therapy and counselling but had held back because his friends, Nemuri Kayama and Yamada Hizashi, had heard that particular rant many times before.
Harry was fascinated. And, perhaps more surprisingly, engaged. Harry found himself adding bits about his time with a mind healer, about what actually helped and what made him nearly punch several medical professionals. He found himself talking about Madam Pomfrey and his hours in the hospital wing not just for healing but for healing instruction, because it was stupid to be fighting without knowing the basics of how to put yourself back together. Or your friends back together.
They talked and Harry got to watch the occasional hand gesture, got to watch the strands of hair
slipping from their haphazard half-bun, got to see glinting eyes over dark shadows.
Each word seemed to slip underneath Harry's skin and wrap around his bones. They were validation and comfort all at once, settling something in the framework of himself that he hadn't even noticed was crooked.
They stopped only when Aizawa's phone buzzed and he immediately took it out to check, stopping mid-sentence. He quickly read the message, shoulders relaxing, and snorted.
"Apparently Hizashi got swept away by some friends from the station to another bar and just remembered me."
"Ah," Harry said, mildly terrified Aizawa was going to leave to go get his friend. "Nemuri left a while ago, I believe."
Aizawa typed a quick message back before placing the phone face down on the table. "That's not unusual for her. It's Hizashi that normally gets to babysit me when they drag me out; only way to make sure I don't disappear when they're not looking."
Harry gave a lopsided grin. "Don't get out much, then?" "No."
Harry laughed before leaning forward and admitting, "I'm not sure any of my friends would believe me if I told them I spent the night in a bar. Particularly if I told them I was actually having a conversation with a real person."
Aizawa opened he mouth to reply, but was interrupted by another soft beep. His expression softened as he responded, and Harry felt his heart give a little tug. "Yamada again?"
Aizawa shook his head while typing, then glanced up at Harry with dark eyes. "My daughter."
Harry leaned back, his head hitting the back of the booth as he let out a soft huff of air that didn't really count as a sound.
With narrowing eyes, Aizawa frowned. "Is there where you leave?"
Harry shook his own head, letting his twitching hand finish it's movement to his own pocket and pull out his (heavily warded with Hermione's genius) phone. He quickly opened it and pulled up a picture of a small, blue-haired boy playing with a wolf plushie.
"This is where, hopefully, I get to gush about my cute godson and we show off pictures and embarrassing stories. I'm told this is a thing that happens with parents but all my friends actually know Teddy and Draco threatened to take a vacation and leave me all his paperwork if I tried to show him more pictures of events he'd seen in person. Ron actually agreed, too, so I know things were serious."
Harry didn't pout, but he wanted to.
Aizawa blinked, slowly, before a large, toothy grin broke across his face. "I think I'm drunk enough for that."
Harry slanted his eyes to the still unfinished glass that Aizawa had been nursing for at least the hour Harry had been sitting there. He then thought back to the completely untouched glass that was potentially still sitting in the booth behind Aizawa, because Harry hadn't wanted to risk forgetting
a single word of a stranger's rant.
Harry was in no place to call out anyone, but particularly this man, on his little white lies.
Instead, Harry took the moment Aizawa was using to search through his phone pictures to slide across into the seat next to him. Purely for a better picture-viewing, child-gushing experience.
With a pleased noise, Aizawa leaned into Harry's space and showed him the most adorable picture of a beaming pale-haired girl with a tiny horn and beautiful smile as she held up a very lopsided cake. Harry cooed.
"Eri."
The next picture was of the same girl on the shoulders of a green-haired teenager, both laughing as they chased a yellow-haired teenager.
"Who're the boys?" He didn't think Aizawa was old enough to be their father, though if he adopted them it could be entirely reasonable.
"My students."
Harry inhaled sharply. "You're a teacher?"
"Heroics. Didn't we cover that?"
No. No they had not covered that. Harry would remember if they'd covered that.
Aizawa was, apparently, against child soldiers, sought to teach children how to fight properly in contexts that included mental health care and first aid training, and practiced what he preached. He also had a daughter whom he clearly adored and a class that kept showing up in his pictures. And his bragging.
Harry fought the urge to drop his head to the table again, or worse, Aizawa's shoulder. Harry was in trouble. So much trouble.