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Chapter 13

Harry

Percy’s got a project.

He tells it to them over a drink at the Hog’s Head, standing in front of the room with his eyes shining, glistening over with tears. Glistening with the ghosts of his pasts, Rita had wrote once, and now looking at Percy he had an idea of what that was supposed to look like.

“This was a horrible, horrible thing. The war.” Percy swallowed hard, and Harry drank the rest of his beer just to give himself something to do. Beside him, Draco’s hand found his way onto Harry’s leg underneath the table, forcing it to stay still and then let go. “But it was history in the making. And someone has to tell it, to make sure the people who come after us know how it started, so they can see the next Voldemort for what he is—just a man.”

The sentence was almost a mirror image of the thing that Harry had been trying to convince himself of since the final battle. How in the end Tom Riddle was only Tom, and when he died he did not go out in a blaze of glory or for a cause, he only fell hard and final on the cold ground, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Like he really was only a man.

“There were a lot of people who did good things during that time. And there were people who did bad things. When he first rose to power and seemed to have been defeated, we tried to shove all the memories under the rug, and none of us knew anything about it. But this time we’re not making mistakes. There were heroes in this war, some of them in this very room.” He raises his glass in a semblance of a toast, and the people around Harry were nodding. George pounded his glass down on the wooden table, and there was a answering cheer as they looked around at each other. Everyone in this room had fought, everyone was forced to grieve. “We should know their names.”

Harry knew that all of them had gotten a little obsessed with something after the war. For Percy, it was recollection, of hearing all the stories and getting them down as fast as he could, the right way, with the biases. He didn’t want anyone who died for the cause to be given over to oblivion, their names erased and with no one to remember them. And he didn’t want anyone to forget the sins of those who fought on the wrong side.

“I don’t want another group of kids to grow up like we did.” The moment, with Percy standing in front of them, reminds Harry fiercely of the time when Hermione stood in front of them all and tried to start Dumbledore’s Army. It makes a lump rise in his throat and he swallows it down. “We don’t need another fight like this. So please, help me?”

There is silence, where Percy looks unsure for the first time during this whole speech. And then, just as Harry knew he would be, he makes himself be the first one to stand.

His chair scrapes on the stone, making everyone wince, but he worms his way through the jumble of legs and chairs and tables to the front of the room. Percy smiles and claps him on the back, like he had done something special. Harry smiles back. “Where do I sign?”

In the end, his name is first on the list.

Draco’s is second.

It starts immediately.

Percy has schedule drawn up for them, and they all take slots. Harry, Ron, and Hermione would have to do an interview together. “We can just have you meet at the burrow.” He looks excited, but also pale and drawn. “It’ll be a long night.”

Harry doesn’t want to talk about it. If he talks about it, he might have to talk about how it started, with his parents. He’ll take about basilisk fang in his arm and the burn of phoenix tears, about a man who lived as a rat for thirteen years and was killed by a molten hand because he made the mistake of mercy, about Dobby, about Sirius disappearing into a veil, about what happened in that forest. He doesn’t want to think about it, so he pushes the prospect of the interview away and lets it form a knot in his stomach, and when Draco asks him if he’s alright he always says yes, no matter how tense and defensive it may sound.

He goes to meet Ron at a muggle pub. They always meet at muggle places now, both so they are not recognized and because Ron has developed a taste for everything fried. It works, to be able to sit and pretend to be normal.

“I still can’t believe we’re doing this,” Harry says, talking about the next day, how they will let everyone pry into to what they never talked about.