Harry Potter

[thebattlecontinuesafterwarisover]

#SinsOfTrust

Daphne Greengrass. She had always been beautiful and even smart, but as a member of Pansy Parkinson’s group of mean girls, I had steered well clear of her throughout our years at Hogwarts.

But things change once you’re out in the real world. People change. And somehow those social lines that divide people become less important. We come to realize that we have a lot more in common than ways in which we differ.

But maybe I’m just speaking for myself.

I spend my entire adolescence working under the assumption that the only bad wizards were Slytherin, and that no one good could possibly come from that house. Those illusions were shattered when I learned the truth about Severus, and I came to have empathy and compassion for a lot of the Slytherin house members when I realized that many of them were acting under orders from their parents, thinking they were doing what they had to in order to fit in or to please their families. And I also saw that people from other houses could be corrupted as well. Percy Weasley, for example, came from my own house, but he turned into a sycophant for the Ministry. Whatever his reasons, I learned that those stark lines of good and evil weren’t so clearly defined after all. Even Malfoy, who had been my enemy all through school turned out to be someone I could understand, and while we would probably never be good friends, I could see he wasn’t the villain I had always taken him for. He’d been a frightened boy, abused by his father, and looking back, I wondered if things could have been different for him if only on that first day I had become his friend rather than pushing him away, if he hadn’t felt so isolated and alone.

That’s why I had made a point of trying to reach out to former Slytherins, trying to integrate them back into the rest of the wizarding community. If we were ever going to learn and grow from our past mistakes and move forward into a united future for all wizardkind, then we needed to be reaching out with forgiveness and understanding, not blaming one another. Some people didn’t want that, however. They wanted to keep people isolated into partisan camps, deepening the divide and pointing fingers.

In that spirit of reconciliation, I met with Daphne Greengrass for tea. I had been interviewing young people whose parents had sided with Voldemort, reaching out to them to see if they could be brought to see that those prejudices needed to be overcome.

She had been quiet. Contrite, even. Clasping her hands in her lap nervously and frightened of looking me in the eye.

“I’m not here to punish you, Daphne. I know your parents were loyal to Voldemort, and we might have been on opposite sides of what happened, but I also know we didn’t all feel like we had choices either. I didn’t. I suspect you didn’t either. We were placed into our houses and divided by the prejudices of the past, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. There’s no reason we can’t set all that aside and get to know one another without all that baggage.”

At that, she had looked up with wide eyes through long lashes, and her cheeks had flushed a little as I saw the first genuine smile on her face I think I’d ever witnessed.

“I’d like that,” she’d said simply, and reached out a hand to take mine across the table. “I’d like that very much.”

From that point on, she and I had been open and honest with one another, and it was refreshing. She was charming, even shy at first though as we talked I could see her bloom right before my eyes. Soon we were talking as though we were old friends, laughing together in a way Ginny and I never did. Though I couldn’t help feeling guilty about it, I’d always thought Daphne was attractive, but she’d always been in a different sphere from mine, and I had fully expected never to actually know her. It turned out, she’d felt the same way about me, and we had a good laugh about that too.

People make excuses when they have an affair. They tend to use phrases like “It just happened” as though somehow they are absolved of responsibility for having chosen to cheat.

What happened between Daphne and I didn’t “just happen.” We both chose it. Looking into one another’s eyes, we admitted to having felt an interest and an attraction. A spark. There was something there. Something undeniable. Could we have chosen to ignore it? Of course. But the truth is neither of us wanted to.

Ginny had been the second girl I ever kissed. She had been my best friend’s little sister. She had a hero complex about me that stemmed from childhood and had only intensified after the incident with the Chamber of Secrets. We had fought together and from that had formed an attachment. But I found that in many ways, she didn’t really know me. She loved the idea of me, the image of me she’d held since she was little, but once our lives were settled and the wizarding world was more at peace, once we didn’t have a common enemy to focus on and were left with one another in the day to day of a marriage, there wasn’t really a center to what was holding us together. We didn’t have a core friendship to give us strength. I could never measure up to her ideals of what it would mean to be the wife of “The Boy Who Lived.” The truth was that I was just me, with failings just like everyone else. But Ginny couldn’t bear to reconcile those two ideas, and so I came to feel I could never measure up to her expectations.

Daphne never made me feel that way. She took me as I was, as an equal, with all my flaws and foibles. And I felt like she truly saw me for /me/, not as some ideal and not colored with fantasies of what I ought to be like. It was freeing, not having that sort of pressure. I could relax around her. I didn’t have to be perfect.

Perhaps that is what she felt about me too. I saw her in her own right, not as a projection of her parents’ expectations.

Starting the affair with her felt natural. I make no excuses. I have none to give. Moreover, I didn’t want to. The time I spent with Daphne made me happy. Neither of us were prepared to break with our spouses. We both liked the secretive, private  nature of our relationship. We didn’t need it to be anything more or different. We talked once about me leaving Ginny and the two of us running off together, but in the end we agreed neither of us truly wanted that. Daphne didn’t want to be the subject of gossip any more than I did, and there was no situation in which being with me could ever be completely without scrutiny, no matter what. My every move would always be watched by the paparazzi, as my relationship with Ginny showed. When she and I went to dinner, the event was front page news. Imagine the field day the papers would have if I left Ginny. Daphne didn’t want to be the wife, or even the mistress, of someone famous. She just wanted to be with me, Harry. To her, I wasn’t “The Boy Who Lived” but the man she loved, and that was a huge difference to both of us. I couldn’t force her to be in my world, and I didn’t wish that on her. She was too reserved a person to handle that kind of invasion of privacy.

I’d be lying if I said Daphne was the first woman I had strayed with. There were others. Women who had made a point of throwing themselves at me because of who I was. It was as though in sleeping with me, they were able to touch a piece of history. And my young ego had been flattered. At least until I realized they didn’t see me. I was a persona to them, not a person. A name and an ideal and an image based on things they’d heard about me. They were satisfying a curiosity.

Not so with Daphne, however, and once our affair had begun, I stopped seeing any of the others.

Daphne was my passion. Because of her, I was willing to reach out to other former Slytherins. People who had been Voldemort’s acolytes. She convinced me there was a chance to bring us all together, that I was the one who could do it, and I wanted to prove her right. I wanted to show her that the trust she had in me was warranted. She gave me a sense of purpose again, and one that I’d felt I was sorely missing.║

[thebattlecontinuesafterwarisover]

#SinsOfTrust @NegligentChaos @AnguisMalificus @MythicalBelle @FacundMinister @PestilentGinger||

Whispers. That was how it had begun. Like a rustling of leaves, at first, easily missed.

There were those in the Ministry who had become convinced that we had entered a golden age of the wizarding world and that the time for fear and suspicion was past. Many had become complacent, believing that those battles would never again recur.

Perhaps my childhood had been too dark to let me relax into such comfortable assumptions. Certainly, many of my fellow Aurors regarded me as a war hawk. Some thought me overly suspicious and too quick to assume the worst motives in others.

After the things I had survived, how could I ever hope to live an ordinary life? That kind of trauma leaves a mark, not as visible as the scar I would always bear, but internal and far deeper, cutting into the heart of me. All that fear and loss and struggle...not to mention the pressure that being “The Chosen One” placed on me...there were echoes of that darkness that haunted me all the time. Anniversaries of harrowing events I had survived made the pain resurface, though I tried my best to hide it.

People need their heroes. They want them to be larger than life. Perfect. Flawless. Something more than human. It's a responsibility that is hard to bear, and I'd been doing so ever since I had clambered onto the Hogwarts Express the first time. That burden only grew heavier as the years passed.

I had thought that once Voldemort was defeated, I could set that burden down. But being a hero doesn't work like that. You can't stop people's expectations, no matter how you try. It follows you everywhere you go, and some days, I wished I could just hide somewhere and forget that magic ever existed. But then it wasn’t in my nature to quit when things were hard.

“The Boy Who Lived.” As a child, that moniker seemed like such a ridiculous title. It sounded so easy. What was there to be proud of in that? Simply not dying? But I came to realize that I’d misunderstood it’s meaning entirely. It wasn’t simple at all. I’d believed that my surviving was a passive act, but it truly wasn’t. Time and again, I was given a choice to give in, to die, to let Voldemort triumph, and each time I actively chose to fight for life.

As an adult, however, I knew the gravity of that choice, and there were consequences to my survival I hadn’t forseen. As an Auror, it was my job to bear the burden of that struggle for survival for others. They depended on me.

Some people believed that once Voldemort was defeated, the struggle would all be over. I often felt a collective sigh of relief each time I entered a room most of the time. I was living proof that the danger was past. Except that evil doesn’t reside in one person, and it doesn’t just disappear because of one person either. Good and evil, also, were more of a sliding scale than an either/or choice, and sometimes it’s difficult to pin down where people fall. Even me.

The darkness I had lived through was still there inside me, and sometimes I wondered whether having harbored a horcrux in my mind all those years had altered me in ways I didn’t yet understand. There was no precedent for what I’d lived through. No test case. And whether I could maintain my sanity was still an unknown.

_________________________________

Regular letters between myself and the Knights passed back and forth on a time schedule.

I felt the thrill of excitement I had thought lost back in my youth. The knife edge of danger was both frightening and invigorating. Almost addictive.

Each letter I received back made my heart race. I knew who I was conversing with. I had no illusions about it. Barty Crouch Jr.

For all the evil he’d done, I couldn’t help remembering how much I had learned from him when he had masqueraded as Mad Eye Moody. I had learned more in that year under his tutelage than nearly any other Defense Against the Dark Arts professor I’d ever had, including Remus Lupin. Looking back, I never truly knew Moody at all. The man I had known was really Crouch, and he had been an inspiring teacher.

It was hard not to admire the man. It was even harder not to recognize the debt I owed him. He showed me what tenacity and devotion to purpose looked like. And where his father had been weak, he was strong. A powerful and skilled wizard with a will to match. There was much about him that was worthy of respect.