August 17th, 2002
He knows he fucked up as soon as he sees Andy dragging a reluctant Teddy, who still looks very much like his kid. Shit, he didn't even ask how he wanted to present to muggles, who, after seeing him once, will have to keep seeing him in the same form. He just sprang it on him. Idiot.
"He's going to be fine," Andy whispers to him while Teddy sulks a few meters away. "He just felt purple this morning, and it took a while to explain why he can't. He knows they're muggles," she stresses right away, dropping her voice. "But you know, kids. Stubborn." Harry nods heavily, still mentally kicking himself.
Together they enter Teddy's first acrobatics class. Initially, Harry was a little afraid of the reaction—Andy tends to turn out surprisingly conservative when he least expects it—but she loved the idea. She must have noticed Teddy's penchant for twirling, bouncing, and doing crazy stunts like putting his ankles behind his head as well. Her muggle pose is superb too; she's in a very elegant and mostly modern dress that doesn't resemble a robe in the slightest. She's also clearly in her element when she smiles warmly at Jill, who approaches to greet them.
While they talk, Harry observes Teddy. He's always been an outgoing kid, as he is now. He brings other children together, chattering cheerfully about one thing or another. He already has fans; a blonde girl and a chubby boy hang upon his every word. At some point Teddy says something before indicating Harry, and both kids look at him with wide eyes, amazed. Harry hopes it's not a 'That's my godfather; he has an Invisibility Cloak and defeated a dark wizard' kind of thing that he tells them. But it would probably be okay for a four-year-old to say; he's sure muggle kids make up even weirder stuff.
It's kind of painful, though—seeing a little Harry Potter copycat, being in the centre of attention, and engaging others so confidently. Harry never looked like that. Not even once.
"...when Harry told me, I knew it was exactly what we needed." Hearing his name snaps him out of gloomy thoughts, so he focusses back on Andy and Jill.
"It's great to see when the family takes notice of what the child actually enjoys instead of trying to force activities they like on them," Jill says, sending Harry a sunny smile. "It happens far too often."
Andy agrees, and they sit on plastic chairs along the wall while Jill organises the kids. She's not the one teaching the class; there's another woman here who introduces herself as Meghan. Jill assists her, and they start with a long talk about safety and the importance of stretching before moving on to some warming up squats and jumps, so Harry kind of tunes out. He reaches into his pocket, feels around for a small book, and wonders if it would be too rude to pull it out as long as Teddy isn't actually doing anything interesting.
When Kreacher woke him up this morning, there was a very formal-looking letter from the Department of Mysteries waiting for him, inviting him to a meeting in a 'we will be honoured to have you, but you better be there or else' tone, and the Saturday edition of the Prophet with Harry's silhouette leaving the ministry on the cover and a charming headline, 'Did Potter join the muggle mania?' At least it means that they had almost two whole weeks of more interesting topics to write about before they had resorted to dragging up his ties to the muggle world.
He decided that he would like to be able to actually tell the Unspeakables what it is that he's trying to accomplish—or purposefully not tell them, but even to do that, he needs to know in the first place—so right after breakfast he went book shopping, assuming that not everything can be found on the internet. The shop assistant looked like he was about to fall asleep and wasn't very helpful. He brought him to the aisle labelled 'Science & Technology' and left him adrift. Harry didn't even know where to start and was kicking himself for doing this without Hermione. It wasn't long before he was joined by two bickering boys looking about sixteen.
"But if it expanded into a void, that would mean there's an edge and a central point it expands from. But the cosmic microwave background radiation went in all directions."
"You will never get a girlfriend if you keep this up," the other mocked.
"Oi! Chicks dig this!"
"Excuse me," Harry cut in, deciding that looking like a dolt in front of them won't do any harm. 'You're a muggle,' he told himself inwardly. 'You're just a muggle whose level of comprehension of the world is a joke because he's lazy.' It wasn't that far from the truth. "If you were to learn physics and chemistry completely from scratch, where would you start?"
The boys looked at him incredulously, like they couldn't believe that a random adult was speaking to them. The one who questioned the other's ability to get a girlfriend seemed kind of distrustful, but the smart one decided to take pity. "How's your math?"
"Non-existent," Harry answered sheepishly.
The boy snorted and spent a moment scanning the shelves before finding what he was looking for. "Start here then," he said, passing him a book. Harry glanced at the title, 'Algebra I for Dummies', and wanted to bristle, but the kid continued, "Chemistry is basically fuzzy algebra. Stoichiometry? Algebra. Equilibrium expressions? Algebra. Gas laws? Algebra. It's your best friend from now on, mate."
Yeah, maybe 'for dummies' was right. Harry wondered if chemistry being basically algebra is worse than if it would be basically potions.
"So, what are you into? What kind of physics? Mechanics? Electrodynamics? You're going to need calculus. You know, differential equations and all that jazz." 'Calculus for Dummies' landed in Harry's hands next.
"Erm... atoms? And stuff smaller than atoms?" Hermione mentioned something about magic possibly affecting things on a subatomic level, which is apparently still nothing more than a theory.
"Quantum physics!" the kid exclaimed before looking at his friend. "This guy is mad! What got you into it? You got stoned, started to wonder about the multiverse, and fell down the rabbit hole? I feel you. I can't sleep at night thinking about this shit." Harry wasn't sure he wanted to know what a multiverse is. "Start smaller, mate. Start with Newton." Hey, Harry knew that name.
"Fuck Newton," the other boy spoke up. "If he didn't invent gravitation, we would all be flying."
The corners of Harry's mouth twitched.
"Yeah, and what were the odds that he would be the one to discover Newton's law of motion?" the helpful one quipped. Harry felt like he wasn't in on a joke. "Here," he added, passing another book to Harry. 'The Character of Physical Law' by Richard Feynman. Harry added it to his pile.
"What about... changing one thing into another?" he dared to ask, pretending to be just curious. This whole endeavour wasn't really about the properties of substances and had little to do with magical plasma. It was about how magic could fit with what those muggles thought they knew about the world.
The boy scoffed. "On molecular level? That's just regular chemistry, mate. If you mean changing the atom itself, that's nuclear chemistry. Sorry to disappoint you, but making gold isn't really cost-effective. Glenn Seaborg already did that in 1980, using a particle accelerator. You need a fuck tonne of energy. Besides, it already happens all the time."
The kid clearly wanted to show off in front of a stranger, but it made Harry pause. He didn't have any intention to create gold, but when he thought about it, it kind of checked. Muggles had done it, but they needed a fuck tonne of energy. Flamel had done it too, probably having a fuck tonne of energy at his disposal—or much less, because he'd been working with a different kind of energy. And different particles. Had the process been similar, though? "How so?" he asked to cover his internal freak out.
"Supernovas, mate. How do you think gold ended up on Earth in the first place?" Harry didn't know and, upon reflection, didn't really care. Supernovas sounded super unhelpful. Meanwhile, the boy started to browse the shelves again and came back with another book. Harry's heart skipped a beat when he saw a familiar word—transmutation—surrounded by foreign ones—cold fusion. "It's not really feasible, but it has potential helping with nuclear waste."
"Yeah, we wouldn't want to waste that," Harry mumbled gingerly. Apparently his random comment made no sense, because the boy gave him a pitying smile and kept searching, adding more and more books to Harry's pile. "Take this as an incentive. But no touching it before you comprehend linear algebra and get through Feynman lectures. You won't understand a word anyway."
Harry kind of wanted to tell him that he could turn him into a bug if he so wished, but the kid had a point. Harry could turn the kid into a bug, but he would have no idea how he accomplished that. The kid couldn't turn him into a bug, but when faced with the possibility, he would probably have some better theories on how such a thing even worked.
This brought a thought that has followed him through the day and is still in front of his mind now that he's sitting on a plastic chair in a dance studio, staring at 'The Character of Physical Law' without even reading it. What is it about them that makes them so attuned to this mysterious energy that they can manipulate it so easily? Asking himself that is like asking a person how they learnt to speak; they just did. He remembers his first classes at Hogwarts, where they taught him how to focus magic, then channel it with a thought, a twitch of the wrist, and a word. It was as natural as breathing. But apart from his incident with magical plasma, he's only ever replicated, and he's never made something by knowing how it's made. Do those who create spells even know what exactly needs to happen, or do they do it instinctively as well, and the only limit is imagination? Since people aren't creating new spells left and right, and according to Hermione it requires math, he gathers that at least the changes to the physical world should be first defined in physical terms in order to occur.
What about, for instance, legilimency? Are thoughts even physical? And what about Taboo? How can someone fuel energy into something as intangible as a word? He feels a headache coming.
Still, either every magical, including kids, has an incredible inner knowledge built in on how to make magic work as intended—as a sort of safety net—or spells are indeed designed to be easy, ready-for-use products, and anything innovative happens exclusively during experimentation. Spells creation has been described to him as dangerous multiple times. Luna's mom died trying to make one work. So it makes sense that it's the part that requires actual understanding of how stuff works. It doesn't become a spell if it makes things explode, and Harry has a feeling there's a huge potential for explosion when it comes to freely rearranging minuscule elements of matter using the energy that tends to be rather fickle.
"Looks like someone would like to help with the demonstration." Harry snaps out of his reverie when Andy elbows him subtly. He blinks and realises he completely missed forward and back rolls, and now they're talking handstands.
Andy is grinning at him evilly. "Oh, he'd love to."
"How about it, Harry?" Jill asks. Harry shakes his head frantically and hastily hides the book, but she already saw the cover, and now she's laughing at him along with Andy. Harry sighs inwardly, and she must see in his expression that he's going to go along with it because she raises her voice, "What do you think, guys? Should we let Mr. Harry demonstrate a perfect cartwheel?"
The kids cheer, Teddy being the loudest, and Harry knows he's a goner. He stands slowly, takes off his glasses, and walks toward the centre of the room.
"Shoes," Meghan warns, so Harry gets rid of his shoes as well, revealing two different socks—one red and one grey in little yellow bananas. The latter is from the pair Ginny made him get, so he blames her fully for his current misfortune. The class hoots joyfully.
Jill walks him through the theory of accomplishing a perfect cartwheel before doing one herself, and it would be a good motivation if he didn't know that he's not going to look even half as graceful. "Come on. It's just physics," she eggs him on, smiling beatifically, and he glares playfully. Great, now she thinks he's a nerd.
He's learnt so many new words lately.
His cartwheel might not be the most elegant—his legs are slightly bent, and he staggers a bit during landing—but he does one, and everyone claps and cheers. Jill even whistles, so he winks at her, and she blushes.
"Thanks," she whispers to him when walking him back to his chair.
"Anytime," he whispers back. There's not much he wouldn't do for Teddy.
There's also not much he wouldn't do for kind, pretty girls who make kids happy.
It also pays off because by the time the class ends—and Teddy is a force to be reckoned with, scrambling to be the first one to try everything, performing even difficult stunts with unbelievable poise for a four-year-old, and having so much fun it's a joy to look at him, which makes him and Andy beam at him like proud parents for the whole hour—Jill asks very casually if he would like to grab a drink, and Harry covertly waits until Andy leaves with Teddy before firmly saying yes.
August 18th, 2002
His head is killing him. He doesn't understand why he has a headache again. They didn't drink all that much. It's like he wakes up hungover in the mornings out of habit now.
Jill takes up more than eighty percent of his bed, and he's curled up near the edge. Fucking gymnasts. It was worth it, though, and Harry wants to find that kid from the bookshop to tell him to keep it up, because chics do dig physics.
He gets up reluctantly and goes to the kitchen to prepare the coffee before she wakes up, because he's a gentleman. His coffee table is flipped, and the floor in the living room is all scattered with peanuts that used to sit in a bowl. Kreacher shows up and gives him a very unimpressed look. They have a whispered shouting match until they hear a movement upstairs and Kreacher pops out.
"What...?" Jill starts in surprise after taking a look around. "Right. We were doing cartwheels."
"No, you were. I attempted to," Harry corrects her, because he distinctly remembers falling down once or twice.
At least things are not awkward in the slightest—she was wonderfully straightforward last night, when they both hesitated after leaving the pub, trying to subtly feel out if the other wanted to have sex. She's Teddy's dance teacher. It's a one-time thing. She had a bad breakup, and a night with a nice, normal guy would do wonders for her spirits and self-esteem. Harry's kind of floored that he's the nice, normal guy in this scenario.
"I'll walk you down?"
"You don't have to," Jill says, putting a jacket on.
"I want to," he protests. She gives him a dubious look. "Okay, I need cigarettes."
She snorts. "That's a really bad habit," she points out.
"Don't tell me how to live my life," he grouses, grabbing the keys from their place on the fridge.
"Thanks. I had a great time." They're already downstairs; she opens the front door, and Harry says he did too, so she turns and kisses him softly in the corner of the mouth, and for once in his life, he feels content for being normal, for giving something and getting something in return in the simplest way possible.
Then she almost gets tripped by a large beast crashing inside. A very familiar beast who goes straight for Harry, wagging his tail and sniffing with interest. Harry pets him distractedly and feels his heart skip a beat when predictably Ben follows closely after Ziggy.
"Hi!" Harry exclaims brightly. Jill pets the dog as well, grinning, and takes a step back.
"Hi," Ben says, looking like he wants to drag Ziggy away, but clearly decides it's a wasted effort because instead he puts his hands into his pockets, like he doesn't know what to do with them.
Harry looks between him and Jill, feeling kind of light-headed and undesisive, and completely forgetting what he was supposed to be doing, so he just keeps playing with the dog.
"I'm going," Jill announces with another quick smile. "You don't need to walk me out. You look busy enough." She laughs quietly. "Tell him not to smoke," she addresses Ben randomly, clearly assuming he's a friend, even though he's not. Right! Harry was supposed to go buy cigarettes.
But Ben grimaces and says very seriously, "Don't smoke," because apparently Zoe's hot brother hates everything about him. Jill walks out, and suddenly they're alone, with only Ziggy as a welcome distraction.
Harry pets him mechanically, hastily looking in his head for a conversation topic, and Ben says, "Come on, buddy," clearly wanting to get out of here as fast as he can. But then Ziggy yanks from Harry's hands to follow his owner and makes him lose his balance a bit, so Ben takes a step forward and grasps his forearm to keep him steady, and Harry must have a bruise because he hisses. "Sorry. Are you... oh, shit, did you hit your head?"
Harry doesn't know what he's talking about, but he indicates towards his forehead, so he automatically raises his hand to fix his fringe, as he always does when someone is staring at his scar. But his fingers find something else closer to his temple, and he realises that isn't what Ben meant at all.
"Oh. Yeah." It feels dried up, but he must have bled a little last night. Maybe that's where the headache comes from. "I was doing cartwheels," he adds as an explanation.
Ben stares at him. "Right," he finally says, as if that's a perfectly logical reason to smash your head. "You should have had your girlfriend clean it up for you."
"Oh, she's not my girlfriend!" Harry announces, because this he knows for sure at least. "She's just my son's dance teacher. Godson's," he changes his mind immediately, wanting to kick himself.
"Right," Ben repeats, more bewildered by the second. "Are you sure you're okay? You look kind of dizzy." 'I'm dizzy because you're standing way too close to me,' Harry thinks desperately. He doesn't understand why he's so unable to talk to this guy. He has game these days. He should be charming his pants off. "You might have a concussion. It can be dangerous."
That would be a joke of the century if, after everything, it was a concussion from failing at doing a cartwheel that did him in. He snickers, and Ben's face kind of closes off. Right, his sister hit her head and almost died from brain damage. Idiot.
"I'm fine," he says, dropping the fake casual pose that hasn't been working anyway. Ben clearly hates him and is only still standing here because his dog seems to love him for some reason, so Harry should do everyone a favour and let him go. "I'm going to the store," he adds inanely.
Ben nods and grasps Ziggy's collar to pull him off. "Come over if you need anything," he mumbles, indicating Zoe's place upstairs. It's obvious he's just trying to be polite, and now Harry feels like some sort of charity case. The only thing he needs right now is cigarettes.
Ben fusses over his dog instead of looking at him, so Harry turns and leaves, but when he's already outside and glances over his shoulder, there are dark eyes following him.
"So let me get this straight. You're into this guy, but every time you talk to him, you put a foot into your mouth? Well, I hate to break it to you, honey, but it's a tale as old as time."
Harry doesn't even know why he's talking about it. It's hardly the worst thing that's ever happened to him, and this stranger seems to listen to him and laugh at him in equal measure.
He does it with a lot of flair, though, and he's not really a stranger. Harry didn't find Ash in their regular place—if you can call it regular when they met there once—but he found his friend Ollie, who dragged him to his table and has been bombarding him with questions ever since. He must be pretty good at extracting information, because Harry already told him all about his neighbour's hot brother and the night with his godson's dance teacher.
"When did you say Ash is going to be here?" He kind of misses him. Ash doesn't ask people questions simply because he doesn't care for their answers.
"Ouch. That hurt," Ollie grouses. "He might have been weirded out that you'd had sex with a girl," he points out, still examininging Ben's behaviour.
"He didn't know that I... why would he be weirded out by that?" Harry asks in disbelief.
Ollie scoffs. "It's not that hard to figure out. Many people are weirded out by bi people. They want you to pick a side."
Pick a side? Wasn't queer all about everyone being allowed to like what they like? "He wasn't weirded out by me being bi. He was weirded out by me being socially inept."
"That's another explanation," Ollie agrees easily. He couldn't be more unhelpful if he tried. "Oi! Ash! How would you pick up a guy who is a health freak and possibly biphobic?"
Ash just approached their table with two other guys in tow. "I wouldn't."
"He's not biphobic," Harry sighs, feeling obligated to protect Ben's good name.
"Hey. We thought you'd never show up again," Ash says when he recognises Harry, scanning him up and down and smirking.
Harry flushes from a sudden flashback of everything they did to each other not that long ago. "I've been busy," he says casually.
"Busy sleeping with girls and giving his crush a wrong impression," Ollie elaborates pointedly.
"To each their own, I guess." Ash shrugs and looks like he wants to say something else, but Ollie suddenly shouts excitedly, "Well? Did you get it?"
Harry realises that he's not talking to either of them and looks at two strangers. One of them is rather unassuming, in glasses and a flannel shirt. The other one, tall and wiry with a shaved head, silently rolls up his right sleeve. Ollie makes a loud, impressed whistle. "Did it hurt?"
"He cried like a little girl," Ash snorts.
"I did not," the stranger bristles. "It only hurt a bit here and here." He indicates the parts of the tattoo that are completely black.
Harry keeps staring. "What is it?"
"It's a character from a comic book." Oh. He looks just like a guy Harry once saw in St Mungo's, the one who wanted to make his eyesight more sharp and ended up with teeth in his eye sockets.
He's always associated tattoos with the Death Eaters, although the Dark Mark isn't really a tattoo. It's a brand. This one is kind of pretty though, apart from the whole teeth in the eye sockets part. Expressive.
"You want one?" the stranger asks. Harry kind of does. He saw magical tattoos before, although they're not very popular—the moving, colour-changing ones. But there's no reason not to get a muggle one and then charm the ink if he wants to.
"A friend of mine did it. She's still in town. I can hook you up," Ash offers, and this is really bad news for Harry's impulsivity. He bites his lip, and Ash leans in to look deeply into his eyes. Harry feels himself getting a little warm around the collar. "Yeah, you want one," Ash says knowingly, and Harry suddenly remembers that he has a tattoo as well, a small chilli pepper just under his left butt cheek—when Harry asked about it, he said that he agreed to be a guinea pig when his friend was learning how to tattoo people—and he flushes even brighter at the mere fact that he knows this. "Do you know what you want to get?"
Harry thinks very hard about what is important to him, what would be a powerful symbol or just a quirky cue for those in-the-know, and goes from phoenixes through Grims to Marauders and Invisibility Cloaks, but it all feels kind of rudimentary, until he suddenly remembers what Lydia Travers called him just yesterday that seemed to fully capture who he is. "Well, I have a... concept. But not a picture."
"You can give her a concept. She'll draw it, and you'll see if you like it or not." Ash is already texting someone.
"Wait, now?"
"When, then?" The challenge in his voice when he eggs him on to get a tattoo is the same as when he egged him on to blow him. Ash should come with a warning label.
"I guess now," Harry agrees, kind of dazed, while Ollie hoots excitedly, and Ash says that it's just around the corner, on Denmark Street. The two strangers—who look and behave like a couple—apparently see no reason not to escort a guy they've met five minutes ago to get his first tattoo. Muggles are mad.
The tattoo artist, Val, talks really fast and is far from happy when they get there. "You realise that this is way past my office hours? How good of a friend is he?"
"I had sex with him once," Ash says blandly, and her face darkens. "But it's a cool idea! You want to do it!"
"Do I?" She sounds doubtful before focussing on Harry. "Okay, hit me."
She makes many contemplating sounds during his explanation and already starts to doodle on a piece of paper. Finally, she assesses, "Difficult. I'm gonna have a field day with this one. Let's get on with it, then. We might not make it today. I'll squeeze you in. Check these out," she orders, shoving an album into his hands. "One question: tea or coffee?"
"Coffee," Harry answers dutifully before getting dragged to the couch. Ollie, Ash, Jared—the one with a new tattoo—and Andrew—the one in glasses—sit around him to admire the pictures of Val's little works of art on people's skin, and Harry has to admit that she's really good.
"You're sure you want to do this?" Ash whispers, making Harry shiver. He gives him a pointed look; never before has Harry backed down from a challenge.
Ollie brings beer, but Val breaks away from her drawing to tell him not to drink just in case they end up doing it tonight. Harry's perfectly capable of not drinking, but it's still annoying that he can't, and he needs to bite his lip hard to not just give up on the whole idea.
"So who's the guy you're into?" He really wishes that Ash stopped whispering into his ear with that scratchy voice of his. It's giving him a hard-on. "Ollie said he's a gym bunny?"
"He's what?" Harry asks so loudly that Ollie, Jared, and Andrew stop their conversation.
"Is he ripped?" Ash clarifies patiently. Harry doesn't know what kind of face he pulls that makes him add, "You're so fucking green, it's cute."
Harry glares at him. "He's... substantial," he says diplomatically.
Ash snorts. "He's probably as thick as two short planks."
"He's a lawyer!" Harry protests.
"Damn." Ash whistles softly. "What's wrong with him, then? He's a tinfoil hatter?"
It's amazing that these people seem to speak a completely different language than Harry. "I don't know," he grumbles. "I literally spoke to him twice. He's vegetarian," he suddenly remembers.
"Ha! Never trust a guy who doesn't like meat!"
"Ah, life lessons from Ash Larsson, don't we all love them?" Val states flatly, approaching them with a bunch of sketches. "Tell me what you think, and be honest."
"Oh, wow," he breathes out, staring at the drawings. "Wait, are we doing it in colour?"
"Ignore this one. I've been dabbling in watercolour lately," she says, but Harry can't ignore it now that he's looking at it, mostly because it's very pretty but also because he realises that another lightning bolt on his body is the last thing he wants. One is enough.
Her depictions of a storm in a teacup are amazing. Every cup is tiny, cracked in several places from what rages inside it, looking ready to burst. Only the storm represented by a bunch of lightning bolts brings some nasty connotations. He looks back at the last design. "What is it?" he asks with wonder.
"You know... space," she explains awkwardly.
"Space," Harry echoes unwittingly. "Where in space is stuff like that?"
She blinks at him, lost for words, and he realises she has no idea.
"It's a nebulae," Andrew chimes in, sounding bored.
Harry looks at him so fast he almost gets a whiplash. "What's that?"
He shrugs. "It's basically star guts." He laughs when he sees Harry's face. "It's a big cloud of gas and cosmic dust that are either remnants of some stellar event like a supernova explosion or just a giant molecular cloud hanging there until it's disturbed by such an event to the point it gets ionised and starts to glow. It might also get dense and hot enough for gravity to take over and form a new star inside, and the nuclear fusion reactions within it produce ultraviolet that ionises the surrounding cloud. Either way, it glows."
If Harry believed in signs, he would assume that a second person in the same day talking to him about supernovas must be one. "Are they made of plasma?" he asks hesitantly.
Andrew looks unimpressed by his vast knowledge. "That's what ionised gas is."
"Alright," Ash says, sounding lost. "You can take the boy out of the lab, but you can't take the lab out of the boy." Then he adds to Harry, "He graduated in astrophysics."
"I don't do that anymore," Andrew grumbles. "I rebranded."
"Why?" Harry frowns.
"I learnt how much this idiot makes by selling useless shit to stupid people." He points to Ash, who grins smugly before asking, "Now the question is, do you want to have glowing cosmic dirt etched into your skin forever?"
Harry thinks about it. He sort of does. It feels like a good reminder to not settle, to keep learning about the world, to not forget that despite all the good and bad—mostly bad—that have already touched him directly, there's way more out there that he's never even dreamed of—hopefully not only bad. Also, it looks a bit like his blob. So it's more of a magical storm in a cup of coffee than a regular storm. Which is wicked.
He will have to give up on the notion that it's a representation of him, because calling yourself a whole universe in a really small container sounds pretty big-headed.
"Yeah, I really do," he decides.
Ash shakes his head. "You're so weird."
Val draws it again and again, without colours, making the contours and internal lines more pronounced, then checks the time. It's only five thirty. "You've got any plans?" she asks, and he shakes his head nervously. "You're going to work tomorrow?" He nods. "Where do you do?"
Fuck. "Law enforcement," he repeats the standard cover story. Ash spits out his beer.
Val raises her eyebrows. "Are you sure they won't have an issue with that?"
Harry pictures Robards sacking the Boy Who Lived for getting a picture painted on his skin. In any case, he's pretty sure he can figure out how to get rid of this thing with magic if needed. "It's fine," he assures.
She doesn't look convinced, but apparently decides it's not her problem. "You'll need to take it easier tomorrow. It takes a couple of weeks for the skin to heal on the surface and a couple of months to heal fully." To Harry, it sounds like some Essence of Dittany should fix it right up. "How's your pain threshold?" Probably off the scale. "Are you well rested? Have you eaten?" He says that he had breakfast and doesn't mention that he might have had a concussion last night. "Let's order this guy a pizza!"
They consider placement. She inspects both his arms, points out moles and other skin marks, and mentions something about cancer. He can't exactly tell her that he doesn't need to worry about cancer, so he lets her bypass them all, and the design ends up on his left forearm, not far from where Nagini bit him once, but judging by his continued existence didn't mean for it to be lethal. It didn't even scar.
The guys eat most of his pizza and are getting louder the more beer they drink, especially when Harry finally gets seated, lights up a cigarette after Val graciously allows it, and asks timidly, "Hey, Andrew, can I get your phone number?" Everyone explodes in noise, and Jared shouts, "Oi!" "To talk physics!" Harry clarifies immediately, not wanting to give anyone a wrong idea.
By then Ash is practically curled up on the floor, crying, "So that's what it's called these days!" and Harry feels himself flushing red, but Andrew only says, "Sure thing, kid."
But the second the needle first touches Harry's skin, he forgets all about it.
August 23rd, 2002
"...and it's already fully healed, see?" Harry pulls up his sleeve. "I also found out that the University College London offers plenty of short courses on multiple interesting subjects, even on basic levels, and if you pay them, they don't even care that you finished your formal education at eleven. There are also some summer courses, but it's a little too late for that—"
"Harry." Diane raises her hand to interrupt his word vomit. "I'm really glad that you're finding so many things to engage you. Even if it's a form of escapism—or a reversed escapism, as it might seem—it is by no means an unhealthy way to deal with problems. But I'm concerned that you're going from one extreme to another and taking on too much. I don't think your current animation is necessarily hypomanic, but it exhibits some sighs. Once your enthusiasm dampens, the drop might be too abrupt and painful for you not to immediately fall back into depression. I'm not saying that's going to happen," she stresses. "But that's why moderation is generally more recommended."
Harry's face falls. Is that what this sudden need to learn and discover everything is? Just an attempt to escape here and now? Find some significance within banality? And if so, is it really that bad?
"I haven't touched alcohol in almost a week," he points out, trying to prove how well he's doing.
"I thought you said you already cut the drinking down," she reminds him knowingly.
Harry bites his lip. "I hadn't. Before," he clarifies. But he has now, so does it matter?
Diane sighs. "And that's the issue here, Harry. You use alcohol as both a coping mechanism and an answer for your need for stimuli. You're quick to drop what you don't find stimulating but tend to fixate on what you do—that's how your brain works, which is normal for ADHD patients. Now, engaging in activities and subjects that are interesting enough to keep your attention is very welcome, but keeping alcohol as a lifeline for when there's nothing exciting for you to focus on is not an efficient way to deal with an alcohol problem."
Harry feels like a scolded child. Diane must see it, because she adds softly, "Don't get me wrong, Harry, and think that I discourage your academic aspirations. It's remarkable how far you're willing to go to better understand what's around you. The mere broadening of horizons is undoubtedly going to have a very positive impact, not to mention what you might discover. But you basically exchanged one bad habit for another. You feel that you don't need alcohol anymore because you found a better coping mechanism, but overworking can be just as unhealthy a coping mechanism as alcohol abuse is. You admitted that you haven't slept for more than several hours over the last couple of days. Despite the symptoms—lack of sleep, hyperactivity, impulsivity—I don't think you're going through a hypomanic episode." Harry wants to sniff at the notion that getting a tattoo was an impulsive decision. He thought it through extremely carefully, thank you very much. "I think you just found a new passion and, as you tend to do, put everything else on the back burner. Just don't lose sight of your recovery as a whole by putting too much weight on just one thing. Exploring your chosen fields is important. But your work as an auror is also important now that you've committed to it. Just as important as nurturing your relationships and taking good care of yourself."
She's such a spoilsport. Harry should talk to her less.
He's fine. He is neither drinking nor sleeping with random people. He's already read so much in between doing nothing at work that his head is close to exploding. The biggest thing he learnt is how much he doesn't know. He doesn't feel he's doing too much; he feels he's not doing enough. He's only reading, and befriending new muggles, and smoking a lot, and wearing his tattoo proudly, and not sleeping much, and searching for a lab space and materials to make more plasma, and corresponding with the Alchemist Society—after the Department of Mysteries basically treated him like a child with a toy wand and preached at him to be cautious with the Statute of Secrecy—and with the American witch who calls herself a technomancer that the Alchemy Society hooked him up with, and drinking a lot of coffee, and checking courses, and classes, and books, and specialists, and reading more online in the meantime, and...
He's fine.