Chapter Text
It was a god-awful morning.
Diagon Alley was muggy and dark in the predawn, the cobbled street lit only by a diffuse glow spilling from the shops preparing to open - through gaps in closed iron shutters, panes of ancient, warped glass and between the quaint and outdated painted wooden frames. Despite these sources, it was still a time of shadows, the sun not yet having penetrated the humid morning mist. There was something in the scene, Harry thought, that felt tainted. Like something awful had happened here, leaving a lingering evil in its wake.
To be fair, Gringotts had been robbed - which meant Harry was forced from bed at four o’ clock in the morning, a mere two hours after he’d finally managed to drink himself to sleep. That was something bloody awful in his book. A refreshing spell meant he didn’t smell of beer at least, but he felt both heavy and light on his feet at the same time, and not at all in the mood for field work.
Auror Zantia stepped quickly into beat with him as he hobbled and grimaced his way up the unevenly paved street, and passed him a spelled-hot coffee and a page of notes. He sipped the former as he pretended to read the latter. Words swam on the page. Probably still a little bit drunk, then. “Perp was seen, sort of,” she said. Sort of? She ignored his raised brow, the same way she ignored all of his sarcastic habits. “Shadow sweeping across the wall in the corner of his eye, could have been anything if you ask me. He didn’t think nothing of it either, until alarms went off a minute later. Dowell is on interview.” The last was a warning.
Harry scowled. How exactly had Alisdair Dowell managed to get hold of the key witness, when there were numerous more experienced aurors available? No, scrap that, how had he managed to pass even the most basic of requirements for becoming an auror in the first place? He was an incompetent fool on the level of Inspector Clouseau, though hopefully he didn’t have the same ability to drive his boss to insanity. He’d only been under Harry’s command for a few months and he suspected the worst in that regard. It was only a matter of time until he tried to kill the man for his incredible stupidity.
“First on the scene,” Zantia answered, not waiting for him to ask the question aloud. Of course he bloody was. The one thing Alisdair had going for him was how desperately keen he was to be useful. He was the first on every bloody scene, like he had a sixth sense for where the next crime might be committed. It helped that he was an insomniac, and barely slept - although Harry wasn’t an easy sleeper either, and he was never the first to anything if he could help it. He knew logically that Dowell’s ardency was a gift to the team, but he couldn’t force himself to feel anything but disgust over the young auror’s naive optimism.
“Only a fool judges actions taken in the past based on the knowledge of today,” a goblin was saying reproachfully as Harry climbed the last steps to the bank entrance, gritting his teeth at the pain in his leg. Opaque magical barriers were being erected around the site, blocking off the front of the bank from view. To one side, a group of disgruntled goblins argued with two aurors that they couldn’t possibly do anything so rash as close the bank . Not for a single minute. There were witches and wizards out there waiting to put money in their vaults!
It was going to be a long one. Or more probably, a very short one with no results. Just one more fuck-up to put on the Potter list, not that the press needed an excuse to talk about how much of a failure he was in every fucking aspect of his life.
“Would you take over?” He asked Zantia in a mutter, knowing her superior hearing would pick up his words. Everyone knew his history with Gringotts, so she was a better choice for interviewing. That, and he was in desperate need of a sobering potion. They didn’t make it in time to prevent Dowell from opening his big idiotic mouth.
“Well maybe if you had, we might have the thief in our hands at this very moment.”
He clapped a hand on Dowell’s shoulder with a forced smile, trying not to think about how little sense the young auror’s comment made. “Thank you, Auror Dowell. I can see you’re doing splendid work here, but would you mind giving Mosser a hand inside?” He didn’t look pleased at Harry’s interruption - he was an imbecile, but not quite enough of one to miss when he was being looked down on - so Harry added: “And I’d like your personal report on my desk by lunchtime. As first on the scene, your insights will be invaluable.”
That bolstered the man’s spirits, though Harry wondered if it was a good thing to be feeding Dowell’s ego. He wished he could keep the man off field work altogether, but he’d need to prove reasonable grounds - a measure Harry himself had put in place, back in the golden days - and he couldn’t gather evidence for said grounds unless he let the junior auror first attempt to do his job, fucking up their chances of solving a single damn thing in the mean time.
He left the goblin in Zantia’s capable hands, but knew there was little hope of salvaging the situation, and spent the next half hour trying to stop the creatures from contaminating his crime scene. It got so bad that goblins began “accidentally” touching, moving and knocking over objects in any room or hall forensics tried to set up in. They had to physically force their way into the vault where the theft had occurred, for which Harry received many threats, both physical and legal. He laughed those off hollowly. As if there’s anything left of me to be taken.
He stood guard outside while forensics did their work, which meant he couldn’t get an eye in of his own. He’d have to trust their photographs and reports later. Regardless, it was less than an hour before some snubby little shit sent a jinx at his leg, sending him gasping and gripping a ledge on the nearest wall.
Fucking sneaky bastards . He should have known by the way they’d been congregating and whispering. It took every particle of his self-control - a scarce resource of late - not to take out his wand. He gripped his leg with a grimace, wishing he could straighten up and pretend the pain wasn’t there as goblins streamed past him to force out his team. Damn bloody papers, reporting every tiny fucking thing about his life. There wasn’t a wizard or witch in Britain who didn’t know about his injury, or the dodgy experimental healing that had left him with a never-closing wound - and admittedly, the use of a limb he would have lost otherwise.
He was the last to leave after they were forced out, standing under the torrent of complaints from the head clerk about the three quarters of an hour of lost earnings. Harry suspected he had been the jinx-ee, and imagined sending him sprawling with a spell, an indignant and shocked expression on his horrible pinched little face. The thought got him through.
When he stepped outside, his day got no better. It was raining, which he could have coped with if it had deterred the bloody press; a gang of them half-blocked the steps, under a roof of black umbrellas protecting jackets and dictaquills from the miserable downpour. They didn’t extend him the courtesy.
Harry’s shirt was soaked through before he had taken two steps out the door, too exhausted and uncaring to spell himself a bit of cover. He was going to look like a drowned rat on the front page this afternoon. The journalists streamed forwards, questions tumbling over one another in a torrent so thick he couldn’t have heard one to answer even if he had more to say than “The investigation is ongoing, we will be making an official statement once we have more than preliminary findings to present.”
Ron was waiting at the bottom of the stairs and could have come up to save him, but he stared up and grinned instead, raindrops curving down his cheeks. He wasn’t part of Harry’s squad so had no obligation whatsoever to help out. The bastard, he’d better be buying at The Hare tonight.
Then Harry saw him.
The man - just a man, he reminded himself - appeared first as a silhouette through the grey cover of rain. A highly recognisable silhouette, and its owner’s identity was confirmed as it solidified into three dimensional human features. Mostly nose. He stopped dead at the bottom step to the bank. A spell stopped the rain in a precise square above his head, evaporating the water away into white steam. Then, with a twist of a hand and a murmured incantation, he began slowly to climb one step at a time. At each step he hesitated just a moment, but didn’t fumble or trip. Harry watched, transfixed despite the clamouring journalists. The man had not been seen in public in months.
He realised suddenly that the gaggle of reporters facing him were fully blocking the stairs, having spread out so everyone could be in the ‘front row’. Harry turned a scowl on them and wrapped up his non-statement, before trying to shoo them all to one side. The man stood patiently a step below, waiting for the obstacle to move.
When they too saw who it was, they started swarming the other way with a whole new set of questions. Harry fought to push them back, and even Ron joined in with a put-upon roll of the eyes. They cleared a path, Harry not-quite pushing the last (Witch Weekly) out of the way with a cry of “For Merlin’s sake, don’t you know a hero when you see one?”
Of course, that’s not what they saw at all.
With the way clear, the man began his slow climb again. It was only ten steps in total from bottom to top, but the few that took him past Harry felt like a thousand.
He neither turned nor reacted, simply stared straight ahead with those night-black eyes. He didn’t see Harry, didn’t see the reporters or even the bank itself. He didn’t see anything at all - because Severus Snape was blind.