The day of Harry’s return did not remain as relaxed as it had begun. After spending a blissful lunchtime with Ginny, Harry was sent a message from Professor McGonagall for him to go to her office immediately, and he found himself knocking on the Headmistress’s door once more.
“Come in,” came McGonagall’s clipped tones from the other side. “Ah, Potter.”
Harry sat down opposite her and waited for her to speak. She flicked her wand and a tin of biscuits appeared, and she took one before continuing.
“I’m sorry to have to do this to you so soon,” she said, offering the tin to Harry, who took a Ginger Newt and began to munch it slowly. “You’ve probably realised what must happen next, but I daresay you won’t find it a problem. You see, whilst the Ministry and the Order are working together to quash any signs of a backlash after the fall of Voldemort, the rest of the wizarding world are still in the dark about exactly what is going on. I’ve spoken to the Minister, and he agrees that it is only fitting that the person to confirm what has happened should be you “ the person who made it happen. Do you see?”
Harry nodded as he finished crunching his biscuit.
“Have another one,” said McGonagall, and she thrust the tin towards him.
“Thanks,” mumbled Harry.
“So, I’ve taken the liberty to arrange a little interview, of sorts, for this afternoon. I hope that this will be practical for you.” Harry nodded again. “I’m aware of how quickly this is all happening, but I believe that the public has a right to know as soon as possible, and it’s the end of term tomorrow, so I thought we ought to get it out of the way; are we agreed?”
“Yes, er, thanks,” said Harry, trying to imagine what he might say to an interviewer about the events of the day before.
“You’re quite welcome,” replied McGonagall, looking at her pocket-watch. “They should be here any minute. Would you like a drink?”
“Um, yes please,” muttered Harry, and a cup of tea appeared on the desk in front of him.
Harry took it, but he had hardly raised the mug to take a sip when there was a loud knock on the door. McGonagall stood up and went to open it, shaking hands with the man on the other side as he entered the office.
“Good afternoon, Mr Picket,” she said, conjuring up a chair next to Harry’s. “Please do sit down.”
“Thank you, Headmistress,” replied Mr Picket, taking a seat and turning to Harry. “Blimey, it’s really you.”
Mr Picket was a middle-aged man, slightly balding but with his hair combed over to cover the bare patch on the top of his head. He was holding a tatty leather holdall in one hand and a chewed biro in the other, which he stuck in his mouth before extending his arm to shake Harry’s hand.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr Potter,” he said, the biro splitting up its side as he did so, “or should I be calling you the Chosen One?”
Harry strained his face into a smile before a grimace could form and forced a laugh. He thought he saw McGonagall give him an apologetic look as she sat back down in her chair. Mr Picket grinned widely at Harry, his eyes glancing up at his forehead and lingering there a moment before he took the pen out of his mouth and a notebook from his bag.
“Just got a few quick questions to ask ya,” he said, as if he was going to ask Harry his opinion of last night’s Quidditch game. “Shouldn’t take long. Then again, if you’re as quiet as you ‘ave bin so far, it might take a little longer than I’d anticipa’ed.”
Harry tried to smile again, but didn’t say anything.
“Righ’,” muttered Mr Picket, “so, we might as well start off with the burning question! I think ya’ know what’s comin’! Did you or did you not kill You-Know-Who last night?”
Harry faltered a little at this direct and rather flippant approach to such a life-altering question.
“Erm …” he started, looking away from Mr Picket’s concentrated gaze and glancing at McGonagall, who gave him a little nod. “I “ I suppose so, but I don’t know whether you could really say “ um “ killed “ because, well, I don’t know …”
Mr Picket’s face turned from eager to slightly perplexed at this rather anti-climactic answer.
“I think what Potter is trying to say,” said McGonagall, “is that it wasn’t just a simple Killing Curse that destroyed Voldemort.” Mr Picket winced slightly at the use of the name. “It took a great amount of time, gumption and courage.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say I was “ I mean “” started Harry, but the Headmistress cut him off.
“Oh, for goodness sake, Potter,” she snapped, “stop being so bloody proud; of course it did.”
Harry fell silent and avoided her gaze as Mr Picket scribbled in his notebook.
“Ok,” he said when he had finished, “so, the next imminent question is how exactly you did it.”
This time Harry looked to McGonagall, and he thought he saw her roll her eyes at Mr Picket’s question, before giving Harry a less enthusiastic nod, which he took to mean ‘I suppose you’d better tell him’.
“Er, well “” began Harry, but he was cut off again, this time by Mr Picket.
“You haven’t been at school this year, is that right?”
“Yes, I had to “ to find these, um “”
“Horcruxes,” said McGonagall sharply.
“Horcruxes?” replied Mr Picket, as though the Headmistress had lost her marbles.
“Yeah, Horcruxes,” said Harry, and the interviewer scribbled down the word in his book. “Voldemort split his soul into seven parts, called Horcruxes. I tracked down the ones that were left and destroyed them.”
“That’s what you’ve been doing all year?” asked Mr Picket, looking astounded. “We thought you’d been trying to find You-Know-Who!”
“No,” said Harry, “that was the easy part.”
Mr Picket looked happier now, and was jotting down his notes with more enthusiasm than before.
“You said ‘the ones that were left’; what happened to the others?”
“They had already been destroyed,” replied Harry.
“By who? When?”
Harry glanced at the portrait of Dumbledore on the wall and saw the old Headmaster sleeping soundlessly.
“One was a ring,” said Harry, “and it was destroyed by Albus Dumbledore, last year.”
Mr Picket nodded and wrote down this new information, then looked back to Harry expectantly.
“And the other?”
“Um, Tom Riddle’s diary,” muttered Harry, remembering for half a second the emaciated form of Ginny’s body lying at the foot of the statue of Salazar Slytherin, but pushing it to the back of his mind. “That was destroyed in my second year when “ when someone was tricked by Voldemort into using it to open the Chamber of Secrets.”
“I see …” mumbled Mr Picket, as he scribbled energetically. “Yes, how intriguing … and the other Horcruxes? What were they?”
Harry counted them off.
“Voldemort’s snake, Slytherin’s locket, Hufflepuff’s cup and Ravenclaw’s brooch.”
Mr Picket frowned.
“Interesting … nothing of Gryffindor’s?”
“No,” said Harry simply.
Mr Picket wrote down what Harry had told him, then stared at Harry with a gaze that seemed to be trying to reach friendliness, but failing.
“And how do you feel now?” he asked, in what he must have thought was a comforting tone.
“Different,” answered Harry.
“You must be relieved,” said Mr Picket.
“I suppose so,” said Harry.
There was a short pause as the journalist wrote down Harry’s reply.
“Surely you’re over the moon! I know I would be!” Mr Picket said happily, looking back to Harry.
“Well of course it’s a good thing,” muttered Harry, beginning to get slightly annoyed with Mr Picket assuming that he knew how he must feel. “I just think that this war might be over, but it could easily happen again. I mean, Tom Riddle was just one person; there are plenty of other dark wizards out there just waiting to turn into another Voldemort “ all we can do is try and make sure they don’t get so powerful that they destroy as many lives as he did.”
Mr Picket watched Harry closely for a moment, and then began to scribble again.
“Yes, yes,” he mumbled, “that’s a fair point …”
McGonagall stood up abruptly, making both Harry and Mr Picket start.
“Perhaps you have enough to be going on with,” she said to Mr Picket, standing over him so that he looked so small, he stood up, too.
“Er, right, yeah,” he muttered, apparently not expecting to be sent away so soon. “I’d like to talk with you again some time, Harry, if you’re not too busy.”
“We’ll check the diary,” Harry heard McGonagall say dryly, so that Mr Picket couldn’t hear.
The interviewer stashed his notebook in his holdall and put the biro in his mouth again to shake Harry’s hand.
“I’ll be in touch,” he said, smiling uncertainly as he was followed to the door by Professor McGonagall.
“Thank you, Mr Picket,” said the Headmistress, opening the door and ushering him out, then shutting it behind him. “I don’t know about you, Potter,” she said, as she went back to her desk, “but I was beginning to find him rather irritating.”
The next morning, Harry went down to the Common Room to find “ if it was at all possible “ that even more people were staring at him than the previous morning. He went over to the armchair beside the fireplace and picked up a copy of the Daily Prophet that someone had left behind.
‘RUMOURS CONFIRMED: the ‘Boy Who Lived’ tells all,’ read the headline.
Harry tossed the newspaper onto the coffee table in front of him and sunk into the armchair. He could tell that it was going to be a hard day.
“All getting a bit much for the ‘Chosen One’, is it?” said Ginny, appearing from behind him and sitting on the table to face him.
“Don’t start,” muttered Harry, rubbing his face with his hands.
Ginny put her hands on his knees and leant towards him, trying to look through his fingers to his eyes.
“It’ll all pass soon enough,” she told him softly. “Give it a week or so.”
“A week?” replied Harry, taking his hands away from his face and staring at her. “Try eighteen years; not to say that they’ve got over that yet.”
Ginny rolled her eyes and looked away, glaring at some second-years who were lingering nearby, watching the couple closely.
“Problem?” she snapped, and they hurried away looking alarmed. “Look, Harry,” she said, her voice lowered, “they’re only interested because they admire you for what you’ve done, and they want to thank you. I think you’ve got to accept that everyone’s just found out that you destroyed the most feared dark wizard in the world a couple of days ago, and people are going to be talking about it.”
Harry sighed and watched her as she gazed at him, her brown eyes deep with sincerity. After a moment, he nodded and opened his arms to her, and she got up and sat down in his lap. Harry wrapped his arms around her and hid his face in all her red hair.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
“Don’t be,” she replied, interlocking her fingers with his. “You’re not a world hero to me, but you can be mine.”
Harry laughed and squeezed her tighter.
“That I don’t mind,” he muttered in her ear.
“Get a room.”
Ron and Hermione had just appeared from the boys’ staircase and Ron was watching his sister and Harry warily. Ginny scowled.
“Get over it,” she replied, getting up and stealing one last kiss from Harry. “Let’s go and get some breakfast.”
The four of them made their way down to the Great Hall where most of the students were eating early in order to save time for all the packing they had left until the last minute. Some friends called Ginny over and she went to sit with them, leaving Harry, Ron and Hermione to eat their breakfast together.
Although Harry could hardly have said that he had been a student at Hogwarts for their seventh year, it didn’t stop a twinge of sadness in his chest as he realised that this would be their last meal together at the Gryffindor table. As he ate his cereal he became aware that this thought seemed to have dawned on his two friends as well, as they were sitting rather quietly on either side of him; Ron was chomping his bacon and eggs with less vigour than normal, and Hermione hardly appeared to notice when the person next to her knocked their orange juice into her lap.
“Scourgify,” she mumbled, pointing her wand at her robes and watching as the orange stain faded a little but continued to linger.
Harry choked on his cereal, partly because he hadn’t been concentrating on swallowing properly and partly in complete shock at Hermione’s half-hearted and not awfully successful wand-waving.
“Why don’t we go for a fly?” he asked them when he had recovered. “It’s … sunny …”
Ron grunted in assent and Hermione shrugged, and they followed him out of the hall. They strode out into the grounds several minutes later, Harry and Ron with their brooms overs their shoulders and Hermione carrying a fat book.
“What are you reading again?” Ron asked her, taking the book. “Further Wizarding Education at the Liverwort Academy of Advanced Magical Studies: remind me what this place is?”
Hermione took the book back and sat down with it as they reached the Quidditch pitch and the two boys mounted their brooms.
“It’s where I’m going next year!” she said, and Harry suspected that she’d already told Ron five times. “To do the course in teaching Transfiguration!”
“Oh, yeah, that one,” muttered Ron. “I still think you should get a job, or you might never leave full-time education …”
Hermione scowled as Harry and Ron kicked off and soared into the air high above her. The familiar sensation in Harry’s stomach was exactly as it had always been when he pushed off from the ground ever since the very first time he’d flown a broom all those years ago. He ascended steeply, then tipped his Firebolt towards the earth and plummeted fifty feet until he had to pull up to avoid collision, his toes sweeping the grass for a few seconds before he began to gain height again. He and Ron looped and wheeled through the air for a while, until Harry started to feel guilty for leaving Hermione alone and signalled to Ron for them to return to the ground.
“How was the … air?” she asked as they sat down beside her.
Ron laughed and put his arm around her shoulders, taking the book from her and putting it on the grass.
“Good, actually,” said Harry.
“I never thought I’d say this,” said Ron, looking up at the castle, “but I’m going to miss this place.”
Harry nodded; he had been thinking the same thing, although he had always known that it would be one of the most difficult things that he would ever have to do when it came to leaving Hogwarts.
“I think we’ve made our mark,” said Hermione, a faint smile playing across her lips. “In fact, I’m not sure what they’re going to do without us, the amount of times we’ve saved the school: they should take us on full-time!”
“I’d do it,” said Harry, remembering all of their adventures at the school. “What’s life without a little danger?”
“I doubt we’ll ever know,” muttered Ron, “but as you say, maybe it’s for the best.”
Harry grinned and stood up, slinging his broom over his shoulder.
“Come on,” he said, “I bet you haven’t packed yet.”
“I have,” said Hermione, getting up and pulling Ron after her.
“Yeah,” muttered Harry, “I meant Ron.”
Ron shoved him, but then said: “Yeah, I haven’t…”
An hour later the entire school was piled on the platform in Hogsmeade, and Harry and Ron were attempting to haul their luggage onto the Hogwarts Express.
“Ron, be careful!” scolded Hermione. “You just knocked Crookshanks’ cage!”
Ron rolled his eyes but carefully lifted the cage over the other luggage and gave it to Hermione, who was watching from inside the train with Ginny. Harry lifted the last of the trunks aboard and followed the others as they searched for an empty compartment until they found one in the third carriage along.
“I suppose you two have Prefect Duty, don’t you?” said Harry to Ron and Hermione once they had stashed all their trunks in the luggage shelves.
“Yes, we do,” replied Hermione, “but only for an hour or so. We’ll see you around lunchtime.”
They went back out into the corridor, shutting the compartment door and leaving Harry and Ginny alone.
“So,” said Harry, sitting down next to her, “do you still want to … you know … ask me anything?”
“Do you want me to?” she replied, leaning her head on his shoulder.
“I don’t know,” said Harry, “I suppose I just feel as if you’ve missed out on this big part of my life and maybe you feel “ I don’t know “ left out.”
“Well, yes, Harry,” said Ginny, sitting up straight and turning to look at him, “I did miss out on this big part of your life because you thought it would be best not to tell me anything!”
Harry stared at her, completely taken-aback by this reaction.
“You said you were okay with it!” he cried. “You said you understood!”
“Of course I did!” said Ginny, her voice rising to a dangerous level. “I had to, didn’t I? You were leaving me for an indefinite amount of time “ months, years even! How could I possibly let you leave thinking that I was mad that I wasn’t going with you, that I didn’t even know where you were going or why? I’ve spent the last year listening to everyone I know discussing their theories of what you were doing, asking me if you’d let anything on “ I’ve had bloody Romilda Vane and the rest of her insufferable little crew harping on at me about when you would be back, and did I think we’d get back together or would you have found love elsewhere? “ and there’s me all the while spending every minute of every day and night trying to convince myself that you would come back, that you would be okay, and trying desperately hard not to turn into Romilda Vane myself as I tried to get answers from Ron and Hermione, in the hope of any kind of consolation or comfort that I might get “ but I got none, Harry! And I knew inside that I had to try and understand why you couldn’t tell me anything, but when I felt so miserable I just couldn’t, Harry, I couldn’t, and it made me so angry sometimes when I thought of how suddenly you’d left with no explanation, and it still does, Harry, it still does.”
She was standing up now and breathing heavily.
“I “ I had no idea you “” Harry stuttered, but she cut him off.
“No, Harry, you didn’t, did you?” she snapped, tucking the hair that had come out of its ponytail behind her ear as if it had done something to offend her.
Harry gaped at her uselessy, desperate to think of something to say that might make her forgive him, but there was a part of him fighting against his struggle to console her, a part that was saying it wasn’t your fault, you made a promise to Dumbledore, you were only trying to protect her, but he knew that these words would only infuriate her further and the other side of him couldn’t think of anything worse than that in this moment.
Ginny’s face fell a little as she realised that he had nothing to say to her, and she flung open the door so that it crashed loudly into its frame, tucking her hair back behind her ear as she stormed out of sight. Harry, caught between wanting to yell at her with all the rage that was threatening to surface in him and wanting to run after her to beg for forgiveness, merely remained speechless. He hated himself for making her so upset but couldn’t help but feel as though he should have retaliated with his side of the story; after all, who was she to say that he should have told her everything before he left, after she had told him quite sincerely “ or so he had thought “ that she knew he must have good reason and that she’d wait for him, however long he was away for? Had it really been so unreasonable for him to believe her?
He stood up abruptly, thought about it, then sat down again. There was no point trying to talk to her now “ she would be all riled up and he didn’t even know what he wanted to say, so it would probably end up with the situation getting worse, rather than better, which, although part of him was mad at her, he would prefer to being on the receiving end of one of her hexes. So he sat alone for an hour until Ron and Hermione returned from patrolling the train and asked why Ginny was playing Exploding Snap with her friends at the other end of the carriage while he sat there alone.
“We had a fight,” grumbled Harry, not ceasing in his activity for the past hour: staring out of the window.
“What about?” asked Ron, slumping down beside Harry and pulling a Chocolate Frog from his pocket.
“She’s mad at me for leaving last year,” said Harry, “which is really fair.”
“Well it sort of is,” said Hermione, sitting down opposite Harry.
Her comment made Harry’s gaze snap away from the passing countryside fix his glare on her.
“What?”
“Well, think about it,” Hermione continued, “you got back together, then the next day you tell her you’re not going back to Hogwarts, and the day after that you leave “ she doesn’t know where you’re going, or why, or when you’ll be back “ then you suddenly turn up after a year expecting everything to go back to normal! I think she’s right to be a bit annoyed.”
Harry could hardly get his words out.
“But I “ I WAS DESTROYING VOLDEMORT!” he cried, standing up involuntarily.
“I know you were, Harry,” said Hermione quietly, “and I realise that there wasn’t exactly anything you could do about what you had to do “ and Ginny probably does too, if she really stops to think about it “ but that doesn’t necessarily stop her feeling a bit of resentment towards you for it.”
“But that’s completely stupid!” said Harry, realising he was standing up and sitting back down again. “If she knows there was nothing I could do then why did she have a go at me for it?”
Hermione seemed to be trying hard to prevent herself from rolling her eyes.
“Because,” she said, apparently trying to be patient, “this last year has been really hard on her, Harry “ on all of us, in fact “ and it will take us all a while to recover from it. You turning up out of the blue like that has probably turned Ginny’s emotions upside-down and it’s going to take her a while to get used to having you around again.”
Harry leant his forehead against the window-pane and watched as a bird-of-prey circled high above them. If Hermione was right “ and she probably was “ at least it meant that Ginny wasn’t really as mad as he had thought she was, and perhaps a bit of time and space would be all she needed to work that out.
“Hermione’s right, Harry,” said Ron thickly through a mouthful of chocolate, “Ginny’s not exactly one to think things through very thoroughly before she let’s them out of her mouth. She’ll get over it. Fancy a game of chess?”
A/N: Mr Picket's name comes from the name of the road where me and Liv's good friends live, which also happens to be the road used as Privet Drive in the HP films ...