Chapter Text
Monday in the Ministry had a particular light to it: sallow from the enchanted globes, jaundiced by paperwork, saved only by the clean gold of the Floo. The Auror Office canteen pulsed with it: the churn of urns, the metallic clink of cutlery, chairs scraping stone, a queue that behaved like a docile snake until someone cut in and it hissed. Notices pinned themselves over the serving counter and unpinned again: BRIEFING 3C MOVED ; NEW REPORTING FORM FOR CURSED OBJECTS ; PLEASE RETURN SPOON CHARMED INTO A FERRET.
Harry shouldered through on muscle memory alone. Badge clipped to his belt, coat slung over one arm, he took a tray he didn’t need and loaded it with things he wouldn’t taste. There was tea, porridge that had gone thick at the edges, and toast with butter that never melted properly. His hands felt a fraction slow, like spells cast underwater. His body carried yesterday .
Theo Nott had staked out a corner table that somehow never attracted a draft. He sat with one ankle hooked over his knee, Ministry-issue quill hovering obediently over a slim folder. His robe sleeves pushed back to reveal cuffs so crisp they might have cut if one looked too long.
Harry dropped into the chair opposite with less grace than gravity, the tray thudding down. Steam fingered up from the mug. He didn’t touch it.
Theo finished his sentence, dotting an i with sharp precision, and closed the folder. Only then, did he look up. His gaze did that Slytherin thing — a cool sweep and a small, private verdict.
“You look,” he said, mild as milk, “as though you’ve been interrogated by a staircase.”
Harry made a noise that might have been a laugh or a groan. “Morning.”
“Is it?” Theo’s eyebrow tilted by a dangerous degree. “Your tie disagrees.”
Harry glanced down. The knot sat a fraction off-centre, the silk creased as if someone’s fist had been in it. He tugged it straight with a knuckle and went at the porridge for form’s sake.
The canteen hummed around them. Proudfoot was holding court three tables over, explaining loudly why he’d hexed a filing cabinet. A junior from Forensics drifted past with a tray of something purple. The lifts chimed far down the corridor, bing, bing , a polite insistence.
It was all solid, ordinary, undeniably Monday.
Harry’s shoulders did not believe in ordinary. They held themselves an inch higher than necessary, a set born more from memory than of muscle. His jaw had the faint ache of an argument that had ended decisively, if not verbally. Not that he was bruised where anyone could point. And yet he felt marked .
“You’re holding your spoon like it owes you money,” Theo observed, reaching for his tea. He stirred clockwise, then anticlockwise, purely to watch it swirl. “I would ask if you slept, but your face has already confessed.”
Harry swallowed a mouthful that tasted mostly of heat. “Big weekend.”
“So the rumour department suggested.” Theo sipped, his eyes not leaving Harry’s. “You were on-call? No. Robards would be frowning in this direction, and he is not. You’re not late to a debrief, so it’s not fieldwork. And yet your entire posture reads: something detonated and I stood rather close to it .”
“Your bedside manner, as ever, is a comfort.”
“Mm.” Theo glanced at the urns. “Mercy isn’t why they keep me here.”
Officially, Nott was Intelligence, the kind you hired for quiet corridors and impossible riddles. Strings on maps, patterns inside patterns, a fondness for the word correlation used as a veiled insult. Unofficially, he collected secrets the way other people collected library fines and never forgot to return them.
Across the room, a memo folded itself into a paper bird and alighted on Harry’s tray. MEETING WITH COMPLIANCE MOVED TO WEDNESDAY, it announced in officious capitals. PLEASE ADJUST YOUR OUTRAGE ACCORDINGLY.
Harry snorted despite himself. The sound came out hoarse. He took a proper drink of tea at last, feeling the liquid travel down his throat before it slowly bloomed behind his ribs. The cup’s rim knocked lightly against his tooth on the way down; his hands were steadier than they had been last night, which was not saying much.
Theo watched the way Harry swallowed. “You know,” he said conversationally, “there are easier ways to ruin a Sunday.”
“I’ve tried them. It didn’t take.”
“So I see.” Theo leaned back, and the robe pulled neatly over his shoulders. “Before you ask: no, your hair does not look worse than usual. Yes, your tie is an improvement. No, I will not recommend a potion that will make people stop staring at your mouth when you’re not speaking. It’s a lost cause.”
Harry grinned despite the ache in him. “They don’t stare at my mouth.”
“They do,” Theo said, almost kindly. “Especially when you walk in looking like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’ve been doing practicals you weren’t assigned.” A pause. “Advanced ones.”
Harry shoved the toast into his mouth because it occupied his face, and because the alternative option was to answer, and because Theo did not require the truth to smell it. The butter tasted like nothing, while the bread rasped his palate. He chewed, and the motion grounded him: bite, breathe, swallow, lift the cup again. The steam clouded his glasses; he took them off — when had he even put them on? — then remembered he didn’t wear glasses anymore and shook himself. The lack of sleep had begun to invent details.
Theo’s gaze flicked to Harry’s left hand where the skin showed the faintest trace of red under the shirt cuff. It wasn’t a mark one would notice unless they’d been trained to look for bindings and the ways people hid them. Theo was trained for a great many things.
“New training module?” he asked, in a faux-naïf manner. “The Auror Office never tells me anything fun.”
Harry set his cup down with real care this time. “It wasn’t… official.”
“Of course it wasn’t.” Theo’s mouth made a small, amused shape. “The official ones don’t work half as well.”
The unnerving grace of him. Gryffindors asked because they needed to know. Whereas Slytherins created a space where one would have to decide whether to fill the silence.
Harry let it hang, and the canteen’s noise rose to occupy it. Chairs dragged, the urn hissed, someone swore softly at a scone that had turned into a hedgehog.
“You’re still on the Lethifold case?” Theo asked after a moment, as if changing lanes. “The Nocturnal incident reports came across my desk.”
“Finished it on Friday.” Harry lifted a shoulder and let it drop. His body wanted to wince; he told it no. “False alarm. Old carpet, nasty enchantment, too much sherry.”
“Tragic,” Theo said. “For the carpet.”
A memo whirred past their table, making a noise like a reproach. Harry’s focus snagged on the motion and slowly drifted. Shadows in the corners of his vision still belonged to yesterday. He breathed through it, counted four in , six out , just as Robards had taught the rookies to do back then, after rough jobs. It seemed that this specific trick worked on more than just the rough jobs.
Theo saw him count; but didn’t comment. He folded his hands, fingers long and still, and watched Harry with that unblinking patience that made people confess things just to put an end to it.
“You’re an Auror,” he said softly. “You are not a trainee, nor a candidate, or anyone’s schoolboy. You wear the badge. You bring people home. You file reports with verbs. Keep that somewhere accessible.”
Harry huffed a breath that, in a different life, might have been gratitude.
“I do,” he said. “Most of the time.”
“Good.”
Theo reached for his tea again, and the cup made a sound against the saucer like a measure being kept.
“Because if you start confusing your life with your… extracurriculars, I will be forced to acquire a sense of moral outrage, and it won’t suit me.”
“Don’t,” Harry said, and found a smile that felt like it belonged to his face. “You’d hate it.”
“I would.” Theo’s eyes cooled into humour. “Still, I am available for discreet interventions. For a fee.”
“What do you charge?”
“Information. Or entertainment.” His gaze flicked once to Harry’s throat — a glance so quick a less paranoid man would have missed it — and returned to his eyes. “And you, Potter, are deeply entertaining on a Monday.”
Harry shook his head, feeling a sense of warmth lick along his ribs again — tea, memory, both. He reached for the toast this time, before discovering that he’d finished it without registering a single bite, and stared blankly at the empty plate as though it had performed a trick.
Across the table, Theo opened his folder again, although he didn’t look at it. He… lingered. And waited , with that very Slytherin steadiness that made his chair feel like a choice.
Harry took one more drink, set the cup down properly, and drew in breath to speak.
Which was when Theo, as if suddenly remembering a detail misfiled, slipped a hand inside his robe and drew out a single, folded sheet of parchment.
The seal was broken. The crease down the middle was a little too sharp, looking like someone had read through it twice, then decided that pretending otherwise would be vulgar.
Harry recognised his own handwriting before his brain allowed him to recognise what it was. His name did that small, traitorous jerk it saved for very specific shocks.
“Before you incriminate yourself,” Theo said gently, “perhaps we should talk about your correspondence.”
The word sat between them like something placed on a plinth: ordinary parchment, extraordinary gravity.
Harry’s first and thoroughly Gryffindor instinct was to snatch the sheet. His second, worse option, was to feign indifference. He managed neither. He just stared as though the thing might do him a favor and vanish.
“How,” he asked flatly at last, “did you get that?”
“From an interdepartmental owl that could not tell the difference between Professor and Processor ,” Theo said. “Compliance routed it to Intelligence for ‘tone assessment.’” He imitated the title-case with two small, lethal crooks of his fingers. “I told them it was a personal letter, not a threat. Then I sat on it until Monday, because I am, at heart, a dramatist.”
Harry let out a breath that rucked the surface of his tea. “You read it.”
“ Twice .” Theo’s mouth did not quite smile. “I should charge admission. It was, as the Muggles would say, a ride.”
Harry reached, slower than his pride would like, and unfolded the sheet. His own handwriting came up at him, impatient and too dark, the ink bitten into the fibres. He didn’t have to read it to remember it, but the eyes betrayed him. They scanned the contents anyway.
Professor Snape,
Since we’re pretending the last war taught us nothing about honesty, let me be brief. You wrote an O on my exam parchment last year without so much as making me raise a shield. I don’t want your charity, and I don’t intend to wear an Auror badge I haven’t earned. If you won’t test me in front of a class, test me where I can’t hide behind one. Off the record. Properly. And if you think I’ll crack, let me crack in front of you and not in front of a suspect with a wand to my throat.
You don’t have to like me, sir. But you could at least take me seriously.
HP
He’d forgotten he’d written sir . He tasted the word now, sharp as a cut on his tongue.
Theo watched him with that cool concern he reserved for delicate artefacts and friends who treated themselves like one.
“You were very angry,” he observed.
“I was,” Harry said. He folded the letter back on the crease. “He gave me the O. He drew it, Theo. Didn’t even make me stand up. Everyone else had to duel him, and he — he put a mark on the parchment and told me to leave.”
“So you decided,” Theo said, “to resit the exam alone, a year later, for five days in a row.”
Harry’s laugh came out thin. “When you say it like that it does sound unhinged.”
“It is unhinged,” Theo said, with the pleasant, almost affectionate frankness of a man calling a cat ‘murderer’ while scratching its ear. “But it’s also very you .”
Harry slid the letter back across. Theo didn’t take it. The parchment laid there, its edges crisp.
“I didn’t want an O because he… because of who I am,” Harry said, keeping his voice even. “Or because he… felt anything, either way. I wanted him to do it properly.”
“And did he?”
Harry took a long drink of tea to give himself the space to answer. The warmth went down, steadied his hands, and loosened the tight band around his chest. The Ministerial din blurred into one sensible hum.
“Yes,” he said. “And no. It wasn’t… standard.”
“I should hope not,” Theo murmured. “Rules are for classrooms. Power plays by its own accord.”
Harry’s mouth tilted. “You are insufferable.”
“Only before nine.” Theo tapped the parchment with a neatly kept nail. “You wrote: If I crack, let me crack in front of you. That’s not anger, Potter. That’s trust.”
Harry looked at him.
Theo didn’t blink.
“And trust,” he went on, softer now, “is something you place. You chose him. That’s its own kind of strength.”
Harry let the words find their place. Something in his shoulders eased a fraction, as if named things weighed less.
Across the canteen, the door sighed. Harry did not need to look to know who had come in; the air behind his ribs told him, as accurately as any map.
He looked anyway.
Snape did not suit Ministry light. He repelled it and cast his own. He wore robes black enough to murder shadow, while his hair was tied back with a severity that made lesser men apologise to their mirrors. He crossed to the urn with that soundless, subtractive grace that made people step aside without deciding to. He poured tea as if it were a potion worth not ruining, stirred once, precisely, and did not waste the spoon again.
He didn’t spare a glance at the queue. People arranged themselves around him because physics adores a constant.
“See,” Theo said under his breath, “this is why I like Mondays.”
Harry’s palms went pointless with heat. He set the cup down before he dropped it. The letter shone at the edge of his vision like a thing that might burst into flames if looked at directly.
Snape turned. For a moment — two heartbeats, or three — the canteen had squared itself to silence. Harry could hear the soft clack of Theo’s folder as he closed it.
Snape’s eyes were not kind, or warm, nor anything as stupid as gentle. They were a contained night, and somewhere inside it, a latitude. Something in Harry that had struggled all morning simply stopped.
Theo, who had watched duels from gallery seats and Parliament from darker ones, had the manners to examine the rim of his cup.
“I am going to remember to breathe,” he murmured, almost to himself. “And you are going to remember you’re at work.”
Snape broke the line of sight first. He did it like a man putting away a weapon he fully intended to take out again. He moved to a table two rows over, set his tea down, and opened a slim black notebook that seemed to be more interesting to him than anything else in the room.
Harry exhaled.
“Good boy,” Theo said absently, then, with a twitch of his mouth at his own choice of words, added, “professionally speaking.”
Harry made the face that phrase deserved. It didn’t stick. His mouth was already doing something embarrassingly softer.
Theo reached and, at last, took the letter. He folded it once, twice, into a smaller, blunter shape, then slid it back across with the casual delicacy of a pickpocket returning a watch. “Burn this,” he said. “Or frame it. There is no sensible middle.”
Harry palmed it and tucked it into the inner pocket of his coat. The weight of it there felt right: not a threat, not a warning, just a record of a choice.
“Was it worth it?” Theo asked, not looking at him now, the question placed like a pebble on a cairn.
Harry didn’t need to think. “Yes.”
“Excellent.” Theo’s tone turned brisk, as if they had just settled minutes for a meeting. “In that case, a few practicalities. You have a briefing at ten with Compliance about your report-writing verbs; try not to call anything ‘bloody.’ I need your notes on the Lethifold carpet before lunch. And, tangentially—” He lifted his cup, hiding his mouth in the steam. “If you insist on taking further unassigned practicals, you might want to consider acquiring a safer method of requesting them rather than sending incendiary letters through the Ministry post.”
Harry groaned into his hands. “I wrote that at two in the morning.”
“Yes,” Theo said. “The adverbs gave you away.”
Harry risked a glance to the side. Snape sat with one long finger marking a place in his notebook, his profile carved out by firelight. He looked, Harry thought with a lurch that had nothing to do with caffeine, exactly as he had in the worst and best moments of Harry’s life: like a test there was no rubric for.
“Why didn’t you hand it in?” Harry asked quietly. “The letter.”
Theo turned the cup in his hands as if listening to what the porcelain knew.
“Because I am not an idiot,” he said. “Because I like my job. Because you are not a case file. And because—” he glanced sideways, the smile a bare movement, “—I wanted to see what you’d do next.”
Harry huffed. “That’s manipulative.”
“It is.”
Theo rose, smoothing his robe so it fell in that infuriatingly perfect line. He gathered his folder, slid his quill behind his ear, and looked down at Harry with the tolerant fondness of a man who had accepted a lost cause and intended to keep it.
“Finish your tea. Then come be an Auror for an hour. After that—” a fractional flick of his eyes towards the black figure two tables over “—do whatever unwise thing you were going to do anyway. But do it on purpose.”
He tapped the tray with two fingers — a benediction, or a warning — and drifted away, his figure gradually vanishing into the canteen’s Monday hum.
Harry sat still a moment longer. The tea had cooled, but it was still drinkable; he swallowed the rest and felt it settle. He straightened his tie, smoothed his cuffs and put his tray into the slot where trays go like a proper functioning adult.
Then, with the letter settled against his breastbone, he stood, crossed the room, and stopped at the edge of Snape’s table.
“Professor,” he said, low enough so that it wouldn’t carry, yet level enough that it would.
Snape did not look up at once. But when he did, the unreadable midnight in his eyes admitted one more star. He closed his notebook on a ribbon, placed the cup precisely to its saucer’s ring, and inclined his head slightly.
“Potter,” he said. “Have you come to complain about my marking?”
Harry’s mouth found the right shape.
“On the contrary,” he said. “I came to thank you for the resit.”
There was a pause, taut and entirely private.
“Then,” Snape said, as though discussing timetables, “you’ll report to Classroom Seven at nineteen hundred.”
Harry nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Snape’s gaze flicked once from Harry’s left cuff, to the skin high on the wrist where a red line had almost faded, then back to his eyes.
“Do try,” he said softly, “to eat lunch.”
He turned a page in the notebook that was not a notebook at all, and Harry, impossible as it was, laughed. He felt, for the first time all morning, correctly assembled.
He left the canteen with the letter over his heart, the taste of tea in his mouth, and a clear understanding that there are exams you sit in rooms, and exams you sit in people. Both counted. Only one, in the end, would ever matter.