A man after midnight
Gimme Gimme Gimme chapter two
Harry left Daphne Greengrass's flat convinced that firstly – her sister was a nutter, and secondly that Daphne Greengrass, while cute in the right light, was a spoon-wielding maniac. A man's ribs were his… not spoon-zone, that was for sure.
He settled in to a nice boring night in the Auror office.
And was jolted out of a cuppa by the alarm bell, and his badge squealing. The fireplace lit up "BRIGHTON-ALL HANDS" shouted Dawlish.
Harry ran to the fire, winced , tucked ducked and rolled.
The floo network hated him as much as usual, and ejected him in mid-air.
Harry landed on a carpet, and stood up in a cottage.
"Oh we're in luck then" said Dawlish "The great Harry Potter. We've got a problem with a load of inferi attacking the village."
Harry tried not to shiver. "Inferri? What do we know?"
"Well – the local's are barricaded in their houses, but the walking dead aren't exactly common here." said Dawlish.
"Is it a statute breach?" asked Harry.
"So far we're charming uniforms into Police wet-weather gear, so it's just supernatural so far" said the Dawlish – charming Harry's robes into a long black raincoat.
"Wet-weather?" asked Harry.
"Well there's a bloody great storm, and then Mrs Artwright flooed us sayin' it aint the wind and rain, it's a dead man."
"Inferi in a storm. Shit" said Harry "Fire is about all that works well."
"Well you'll have to break out your world-famous basting curses eh?" asked the Dawlish snidely.
A minute later Harry looked like he was in a big black raincoat and wellies.
They stepped outside, wrestling the door, into the teeth of a gale.
Wind and lashing rain – and the smell of salt.
"WHERE ARE WE?" yelled Harry.
"Brighton– by the sea IT'S A TOURIST ATTRACTION THE CLIFFS"
Harry cast lumos-solem, and wand held high, walked into the gale. He soon came to a clifftop, looking down on the sea, which was churning and bashing high up the cliffs. Familiar looking cliffs.
Oh no, thought Harry.
He apparated to the rock pillar he'd first apparated from, and it was a tiny jump; but the wind nearly had him in the water. He peered through the murk, and lifted his wand, casting another lumos-solem.
The cliff holding the cave had collapsed. A deep fissure in the rock led from the sea-cave all the way up to the clifftop.
Harry apparated back to where he'd just left.
"Where'd you go?" asked Dawlish.
"I know what's going on. This is an old cache of Inferri of Voldemorts'. The cave – he had them in a cave and the storm's broken the side out." said Harry.
"How many?" asked Dawlish.
"Lots. A hundred, maybe more"
Dawlish looked at Harry "A hundred? You're sure about that?"
"I wasn't exactly hanging around to count them" said Harry.
Dawlish used his badge to call the Oblivaitors and Catastrophes, and Harry trudged off into the storm, water getting all over his face, – looking for inferi.
The first one he found was battering at a shuttered window. There was no chance of a fire spell in the torrential rain, and a blasting curse would probably damage the house, so he levitated the inferi, lofted it high, and blasting-cursed it –hopefully to offal – as it fell. The wind made his inferi drift, and he missed, the inferi landing on the roof of the house. Harry, in disgust- hit it with a bolt of lightning, and it slid, smoking and still off the slate roof. One down he thought to himself.
He lost count about the time he couldn't feel his face or hands.
But as the sun rose, the wind had dropped, the area was swarming with obliviators, and other ministry staff, clearing up the inferi.
Some woman looking wide-awake and not soaked handed Harry a paper cup of tea, and he drank it greedily.
He was very tired, he knew, but there were inferi – he yawned and walked back towards the clifftop tracks, closer to the cave.
A police tape was set up, which looked convincing, but behind it the witches and wizards wearing grey robes, taking samples from inferi, and one was throwing a line down the cliff with something on the end.
"Oy!" said Harry tiredly "Disguise yourselves a bit!" he said in their general direction.
One left the inferi, and walked over to the tape, and. Harry couldn't see their face. They had their hood up and the hood must be charmed or something.
A buzzy parody of a human voice said "This area is a designated catastrophe. All muggles will be obliviated after we're done investigating."
"Oh" said Harry "You know that's the hard way in, the entrance was via a sea-cave down the bottom. There's a um. Blood locked wall, then a crystal cave and a lake. The inferi were in the lake – Voldemort had left them to defend the island on the lake."
Whoever they were, put their hands on their hips "And why does Harry Potter know?"
"I came here before the war with Professor Dumbledore" said Harry "This was one of Voldemort's secret caches. Don't drink the potion in the pillar if it's still there."
"What was in this secret cache?" asked the grey-robed person.
"Can't tell you – secret defeating dark lords business" said Harry "You could ask Kingsley – If you really need to know, he can tell you."
"That is a prudent control" said the ministry staffer "Thank you Auror Potter."
"So, seen any live inferi?" asked Harry.
"If you find one, can you immobilise it, we would like a sample" said the staffer.
Harry rolled his eyes – he was so tired he could barely stop one at all. "I'll remember you asked" said Harry.
By noon there were definitely not any roaming inferi, and Dawlish told him to go back to the office.
Harry fell asleep on his desk trying to write a report about the whole mess.
Ron woke him up, and gave him a corned-beef sandwich, and a cup of hot builders tea.
"You look knackered" said Ron, who looked like he'd got some sleep.
"Tired" said Harry.
"Well yeah – Daphne Greengrass every night for a week'd do that" said Ron sarcastically.
Harry glared ineffectively at Ron, ate the sandwich, drank the last of the tea, and headed home.
The bed was so soft he fell asleep face-down without taking his issue boots off.
Harry woke up to his alarm clock. He hit it, and dragged himself into the bathroom.
Harry got to work a bit late, finding a paper plane circling his desk from Dawlish, reminding him to finish the reports, and he had lots of time to finish his report.
It was a quiet night.
The next night Harry was merely tired, but the fireplace went off halfway through a cup of tea, and Harry stumbled to the fire.
"Aurors!" called a woman's voice.
Harry shove his head in and said "Auror office. Duty Auror?"
"Something in my roof – it's black and making a strange sound. It might be a small lethifold"
Harry thought he recognised the voice.
"Greengrass?"
"Potter?" asked Daphne Greengrass.
Harry limbered up "Coming through – stand aside" he said. And by jumping and rolling – he landed with a bump and rolled, but it was better than tripping.
Harry had barely stood up when from upstairs, he heard a coughing noise. Harry looked over at Greengrass –who was looking lined and tense. Tenser than usual.
"Think it's a setup?" asked Harry.
She shook her head. "It's in the attic!" she said.
Harry conjured up a ladder, and a shield, and went up. The intermittent coughing, wheezing sound was coming from above him.
Harry was grateful when Greengrass dispelled the locking charms on the trapdoor, and a little grateful when she opened it with a pushback spell.
The noise happened again. Much louder. Definitely coming from up there.
Harry charmed the shield to glow, and peeked over it into the attic space. Which was quite dark.
The noise happened again, and something dark moved towards him.
Harry fired a knock-back jinx on reflex, and the dark something shot away from him, giving a cat-like yowl of outrage, and then there was a grisly crunch.
Harry made more light, and on the far side of the attic, there was a furry black something oozing red blood.
He climbed up, conjured some planks to walk on, and wand out, advanced on the thing.
The cat. The black cat. The … quite badly injured black cat. With a little red collar.
Harry twisted the collar around " Theo " The cat was, well it was dying. Harry cast the best healing spell he knew, and the cuts stopped bleeding on the third repartition of Vulnera Sanentur. Harry bit his lip, and cast the diagnostic spells he'd had to learn in Auror training, and clearly- there were lots of broken bones. He slowly healed them – and the diagnostic charm he could do suggested the cat merely had blood-loss. And maybe spinal problems, but he could hardly feed it Skelegrow, could he.
Harry concentrated hard and cast another stronger bone-healing charm, he'd picked up somewhere or other, and the cat's back clicked; it's back legs now in line with its front. Probably okay.
Harry cast a cleaning charm on the cat, and got the blood off. He picked up the scrawny thing and carried it back to the ladder. He peeked over the edge of the trapdoor.
Greengrass was looking up at him.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
"It was a cat" said Harry.
"Oh" said Greengrass, "did you scare it off?"
Harry looked down at the cat cradled in his left arm "Not, exactly" said Harry. He turned around, stowed his wand and carefully climbed down one-handed.
"Oh merlin you've got it" said Greengrass as Harry descended. She peered through the ladder "Is it all right?"
"Um" said Harry, and he climbed down.
"Oh, it's a lot smaller than I expected" said Greengrass.
Harry was tempted to suggest 'she said that often,' and resisted.
"So a stray cat in the ceiling" said Greengrass. Harry got down to the floor, and vanished the ladder.
"Not… exactly" said Harry awkwardly.
"It's a pet? It looks like a discarded dust-mop." said Greengrass.
Harry turned the collar around "He's called Theo" said Harry.
Greengrass bent down close to Harry, and she smelled of… disinfectant or bleach or something. Strong cleaning products anyway.
"Is it dead?" asked Greengrass.
"I think being knock-back jinxed wasn't good for him" said Harry "I've healed up the obvious stuff, but there's no way I can feed it skelegrow or blood replenisher."
Greengrass crossed her arms "And you did Care of magical creatures" she scoffed "Obviously too busy joy-riding on hippogriffs." And Greengrass took the limp cat and carried it downstairs.
When Harry got there, she had a big syringe and was dribbling potion into the cat's unresisting mouth.
"It's not dead" she said. "What did you do?"
"Oh the usual, bone-knitters, Vulnera Sanentur, you know" said Harry "And um, the other bone spell – the one that goes esse totum."
"Esse totum?" asked Greengrass, lifting an eyebrow "Never heard of it."
Harry shrugged. He had read loads of spell-books looking for counters to dark spells.
Greengrass seemed content to, er, take care of the cat, and Harry left. He washed his hands once he got back to the ministry loos.
There was always paperwork from the inferi to do. Some twat had left piles of grey memos requesting additional information about the cave, about Dumbledore. Harry was quite prepared to ignore that till Kingsley made him do it. The less people that knew about the whole Voldemort thing the better. And telling Ginny had gone really badly. The last thing he needed was some stupid ministry pencil-pusher thinking he was some possessed puppet of Tom.
Daylight and sleep came, Evening and work rolled along.
It was nearly one in the morning when the fireplace went green, and an increasingly familiar woman's voice called out "AURORS! EMERGENCY!"
Harry ducked his head into the fireplace. "Duty Auror" he said.
"Potter! You … imbecile! The sodding cat's possessed!"
Harry jumped and rolled, landing in Greengrass's kitchen. Where, he realised suddenly, he spent more time than in his own one. She had bleeding scratches on her hands, and was still wearing a shirt and a skirt. Harry finely tuned law-enforcement skills told him she hadn't gone to bed then.
The tiny downstairs sitting room had one comfy looking chair, and an elderly couch with grey, shiny fabric that looked worn out – and atop that, on a pullover, sat the black cat, hissing. And it had red eyes, and that was a little suggestive.
"Have the eyes been red for long?" asked Harry.
"It only woke up a little while ago" said Daphne. That was a maybe then. Harry pondered that.
"What did you do!" asked Daphne.
Harry fired a stunner at the cat, which leapt onto the back of the couch.
With two people firing stunners, they hit it soon enough – not that a stunner did anything.
Harry resorted to erm, blasting cursing the cat into a red and black splatter.
"That better not have marked the wall!" said Daphne. "I'm renting!"
Harry vanished the bloodstains – you learnt useful on-the-job-skills in the Aurors, and was going to vanish the cat, when Daphne dashed off to the kitchen and came back with a stock-pot, which she levitated the cat into, and then sealed the lid onto.
"You're not planning on cooking it, are you?" asked Harry. Bloody hell!
"I'm not risking a possessed cat" said Daphne "It won't be able to get out of that even if it comes back to life again."
"The odds of that are slim" said Harry. "Cats aren't actually –"
"Shut it" said Daphne Greengrass "You've cleaned up the mess, good. It's all your fault. She picked up the pullover, which was shredded. "This is ruined" she said.
All that remained was scattered, useless threads.
Harry scarpered – tea did not look like it was in the offing. He parked himself at the ready desk, and considered Ron's joke. As bloody if.
Though, having somehow screwed up and made a cat inferius, was a pretty awful stuff-up. Specially as it'd attacked Greengrass after she'd tried to help the cat. Harry decided he was going to send her something. To apologise. Even if he'd done that to Malfoy, he'd have apologised. He vaguely remembered the social club had a 'resource kit' for that.
Harry went to the social club fundraising table, and found the ledger . In the back were brochures for chippies, takeaway curry and in front of that, a brochure for a florist, one for a bakery, and another for a birthday party company that did clowns, princesses, and musicians. Everything a troubled Auror could need to smooth over life's problems. Harry took the one for the florist. Borrowed it.
He copied out the address, filled in a very short letter
Dear Hortense's Herbarium,
I'd like to order a bouquet for Daphne Greengrass – Floo address Green Flat One, Royston Veysey. Card to say...sorry about the cat. And your jumper.
Sincerely,
Harry Potter.
The brochure said bouquets were 8 sickles, so Harry bunged in a galleon, and called it done.
He folded up the sheet, stuck it shut with issue wax, and bunged it in the outbound mail-box. It had some sort of connection to the ministry owlery. Mafalda Hopkirks' office doubtless used one just like it.
Harry "neglected" to document that call-out, and went back to doing paperwork for the all-hands call-out. Dawlish wanted blow-by-blow accounts of every fight with every inferius.
Morning came, and Harry went home to bed.
Ron, bless him, had left chips and gravy from the chippie on the kitchen table. Kreacher wouldn't touch it.
Harry woke up uncomfortably early, to Ron poking him. The sun had hardly even set yet.
"Wha?" asked Harry eloquently, groping for his glasses.
"You've got a visitor." said Ron "I put her in the parlour. You might want to get dressed – or not."
"Her?" asked Harry, finding his glasses and stumbling towards his dresser, and clothes.
"Daphne Greengrass" said Ron, and he leaned against the door-frame "Mind telling your best mate, like before the official gossip scoop?"
"What's she doing here?" asked Harry, pulling on a shirt and looking for his work trousers in the pile on the floor.
"Coming to see you. Honestly, it's either some wanky pureblood, acting disinterested thing, or she's not actually here to lick your tonsils," said Ron.
"The what?" asked Harry -who in his defence hadn't had tea yet, and had been woken hours earlier than usual.
"She seems hacked off" said Ron. "Maybe clean your teeth -you never know your luck, I mean you've been to her place every day for weeks"
Harry wasn't going to give Ron the joy of an explanation.
He staggered into the parlour, where Daphne Greengrass was perched on one of the chairs in a quite stuffy work robe, sitting rather straight backed.
She looked at him. "Twit" she said.
Harry waited, and tottered to a comfy chair and collapsed into it.
"Kreacher!" he called out, and Kreacher appeared with a pop.
"Kreacher, tea" said Harry. Kreacher turned his head and eyed Greengrass, sitting ramrod-straight, then turned back to Harry,
"As master requests" said Kreacher, and he vanished with a soft pop.
A little bit later, a silver tray with the silver tea-service appeared, with two of the fancy cups that actually matched, and a plate of funny looking biscuits.
Harry groaned, all he wanted was a cup of brain-lube, not a bloody performance.
"Hnh!" Greengrass snorted "I came home to a kitchen full of sodding flowers. Where was I supposed to put three huge bouquets?"
"I only tried to send some flowers to say sorry about … the cat thing" said Harry.
"The inferius" said Greengrass.
"Did it um… come back?" asked Harry.
"An expert stopped it" said Greengrass. "How the hell you made a bally inferius in a minute and a half – ."
"Accident" Harry interjected.
"And a spell that goes… esse totum" said Greengrass "Is part of a dark arts ritual for making Inferi."
"Oops" said Harry. "I um, might have looked at a fairly dark spell-book at some point for counters and um… misread it."
"Fairly dark?" asked Greengrass "Damn near Secrets of the Darkest Arts! And there's apparently no way that one spell could have made an inferi. The expert was very interested. Does your family have, um, a predilection for making undead?"
'Not that I would ever admit to,' thought Harry.
"You met an expert on dark arts, at your job… at a shop?" asked Harry.
Greengrass sighed. "I um… work at the ministry. Not a shop. But people judge one so."
"Where?" asked Harry.
"Central Records Office" said Greengrass, and her ears went a bit pink.
Harry wondered about that for a second "Aren't you, like, a hundred years too young for a job in the C.R.O." (n.e. never verbalised.)
"Everyone has to start somewhere" said Greengrass. "And it beats adding up tenant accounts for daddy."
"Oh" said Harry. 'Independent (but a bit clueless) young witch strikes out from boring family business,' he thought quietly. That explained rather a lot about her. Well, that and Hogwart's almost never having a Decent Defence Against The Dark Arts course.
Harry ignored the letter in his desk drawer he'd got from McGonagall, asking if he'd take over the course. He was an Auror, and he did important… and boring stuff, and inferi. Some of which, he hadn't made.
"Is it true that you never reply to memos from the Department of Mysteries?" asked Greengrass. "The grey ones" she added.
"Um" said Harry, and he wondered about what you said. Did you admit to ignoring most memos? If it was urgent, people could come see him.
"Did you really trash the entire Department after exams in fifth year?" she asked.
"That was… the Death Eaters" said Harry. They could take the blame – she would be grilled at work by the scary old ladies of the C.R.O., and Harry wasn't admitting anything. Some of them, when Harry went to get records, looked so old, that surely dark magic was extending their life-spans.
"Mrs Prince says that the Death Eaters claimed your friends were the ones that destroyed the hall of prophecies, and all their time-turners" said Greengrass.
"Mrs Prince?" asked Harry. Sheesh, Snape's Gran, or great-aunt. Or worse.
"She's quite old" said Greengrass diplomatically. Great-great-grandmother, or Great-great-aunt, thought Harry.
"Why did you send so many bloody flowers?" asked Greengrass "If My sister finds out she'll be convinced you've fallen in love with me, of course."
"Well, vanish all but one bunch" said Harry quickly. "I found the shop in the, um Auror office resource pack, and sent a galleon, I didn't have sickles."
"Oh god you're just… a bumbler!" she said.
"Oh … just a quidditch player and some dark lord" quipped Harry. "He was pretty rubbish if I beat him aged fifteen months though."
"One presumes your mother did that" said Greengrass.
Harry nodded "One can presume all one likes. I'm not telling anyone." he said "Simple old sacrificial magic. Bloody Voldemort worked it out in the end."
"Sacrifice… your parents?"
"Mum" said Harry, and he felt the crushing weight of responsibility again – mum would expect him to be doing better at stuff. She'd been dead clever, after all.
"Merlin, and her a Muggleborn." said Greengrass – who suddenly sounded a bit of a politcial.
"People learn magic to the limits of the books they can find, mostly" said Harry. "Ninety-nine out of a hundred purebloods wouldn't know how to do it, which is stupid really, as it's dead easy. Anyone can work it out."
Greengrass narrowed her eyes at him, clearly identifying the not-so veiled snub on Purebloods.
Harry leaned forward and poured some tea into the cup.
"Are you going to offer me tea?" asked Greengrass.
"I literally just woke up, thee hours early for the midnight shift – There's plenty in the pot of you want some." said Harry.
"I have work tomorrow- I'd have to have stayed up long past my bedtime to call you at work, and that seems like a waste of an emergency call, and we're on long shifts right now" said Greengrass.
"Filing emergency huh" said Harry.
"The reports from that… incident with the large number of inferi, actually" said Greengrass. "And accessions for so many missing person reports."
And she smells of bleach, said Harry's suspicious, untrusting, Auror's mind. But her hair was showing brown roots, so … maybe that was all it was.
But the tea was unexpectedly good, and Greengrass looked up from the cup she'd massacred with milk and three sugar-cubes. "Oh dear" she said "I've rather swamped your quite good oolong." Which was some posh word for tea, Harry assumed, and he ate a biscuit – which was almond flavoured and oval and had a crunchy outer and a spongy inner. And was better than he ever got from Kreacher. What was the weird old thing up to?
"Are the madeleines good?" asked Greengrass.
Harry made an effort not to spit out crumbs, swallowed, and said "Yes. Try one." in as droll a drawl as he could manage. Greengrass's eyebrows danced – probably a grumpy thing, and she tried one, and her mouth froze. She swallowed, and blinked "That was, is, rather superior. How are you not fat?"
"Auror, lots of running to avoid dying" said Harry, and he yawned. Greengrass's neck twitched.
Tea drunk, two madeleines scoffed, Greengrass (who'd only had one, then spent ages staring at the plate of them) stood up and said "Well, Auror Potter, I should leave you to get to the office and … what was it you said you did? Play with your balls?"
And Harry blushed as she left. She left a faint perfume behind.
Harry eyed the madeleines. Where had Kreacher got those from?
But the chair was sucking him down into a little nap.
Kreacher appeared with a pop a bit later, and Harry opened his eyes. "Kreacher." he said.
"Did Master's guest appreciate the tea and madeleines?" asked Kreacher, stroking one hand with his other.
"I believe she did, yes" said Harry "Where'd you get madeleines from?"
"Kreacher has always had madeleines to hand, in case Mistress wanted tea and madeleines" said Kreacher. Oh, so he took time out to make madeleines at all times, in case Mrs Black, who'd been dead for most of Harry's life, wanted some. Bloody brilliant. But, also… call for Madeleines.