Chapter Text
Everybody knows
It hurts to grow up
But everybody does
So weird to be back here
Let me tell you what
The years go on and
We're still fighting and we're still fighting it
And you're so much like me
I'm sorry
Still Fighting It / Ben Folds
Harry pulled his battered leather satchel over his shoulder and clicked off the desk light. For the first time all week, he was leaving before it was fully dark outside. Tomorrow was Saturday, and even better, it was the start of a rare weekend in which Harry had nothing work related to do. And thank Merlin. He was absolutely shattered.
It was silent in the Guildhall crypts, where the Wixen Annex was located. Years ago, Hermione led the charge to integrate the Ministry of Magic with Muggle government, and the annex was the result. The office suite for Wixen Family Services was located at the end of the annex hallway (all of it glamoured to be invisible to Muggles who weren't in the know), and it was quiet most of the time, even in the middle of the day. Harry, Mandy Brocklehurst, and Millicent Bullstrode were the only full-time employees, and they were usually out in the field. Harry hadn't gotten in until four that afternoon, actually, having spent much of the day in back-to-back meetings and supervised visits and home checks.
They were critically understaffed and overworked. But what else was new?
Harry couldn’t complain too much, though. He wouldn’t trade this job for the world. In his younger years, he’d always envisioned himself as an Auror, or some debonair secret agent who fucked off to exotic locales across the globe (while heroically fighting crime, of course). And he had joined the Aurors after the war, just as he’d always imagined. It had been fine, if not as exciting as he’d hoped.
But when Hermione told him about the creation of Wixen Family Services, Harry knew he had to become involved. Initially, he thought he’d only be involved in planning and setup. But he soon realized it was going to be more than that, that he’d found his calling. Ultimately, he had no choice but to stay. To prepare himself for the role, he'd assisted in the city’s Child Protection office while taking university courses at night. A few years later, he had a social work graduate degree and a fledgling department of his own, with a case list that hadn’t stopped growing since day one.
It was quite anxiety producing if he let himself think about it too much, if he focused on how much they needed to accomplish with so few resources and a bare-bones staff. So, he didn’t think about it until thinking about it became absolutely necessary (like during their yearly budget planning sessions, emergency cases, and the holidays, because the holidays were absolute hell for at-risk youth). Instead, he tried to focus on his own caseload, his own list of kids. Because that was the point of it, after all, and that was where the difference could be made.
He was waiting for the lift that would take him up to the main floor of Guildhall. But when the doors dinged open, Lisa Wright stepped out with a look on her face that meant trouble. Lisa was his mentor, back when he was getting started, and one of the few people Harry knew in their line of work who refused to give up or even let up after decades of struggling within the system. She was grey-haired and dark-eyed and no-nonsense to the point of rudeness, but she had an unparalleled passion for the work. Harry adored her. “Potter!” she exclaimed upon seeing him. “Just the man I was hoping to see. You weren’t going home, were you?”
She knew damn well that was exactly what he was doing. It was a quarter till eight on Friday night, for fuck’s sake. Everyone else had gone home at five. "Apparently not," he replied, sliding his satchel off his shoulder and setting it on the floor next to his foot. "What’s up?”
“New case your lot need to look at. Kid’s caused quite a stir with his latest fosters. He’s definitely one of yours.” She handed Harry a file.
“Can this wait until Monday?” He had little to no hope of this, but he had to ask.
“Not really,” Lisa said. “Bit of an emergency. Little man blasted the roof off the foster family’s house today. They’re all getting wiped as we speak. Well, them and the rest of the residents on their block.”
“They're getting obliviated. We obliviate them,” Harry corrected her (because ‘wiped’ sounded rather scary, like some sort of Cold War espionage tactic). He thumbed through the file. “He’s eleven? Pretty old for this to be the first time we’re looking into him.”
Kids that age always got to Harry, for reasons that he both understood and didn’t. Of course, eleven was when his own life had changed forever, so the age was particularly memorable to him. But that didn’t really explain why children that age made him feel so frantic. It could simply be that they were on the cusp of becoming teenagers, that Wixen Family Services was almost too late by then.
“It is,” Lisa agreed. “Don’t know how he escaped our notice until now. He’s definitely got magic juice. It’s been popping up for years from the look of it.”
The file contained a whole stack of incident reports from various schools and foster homes, behavior that had been labelled as violent or pyromaniacal, but had probably been errant magic. The kid had clearly slipped through the cracks. “Seems like it, yeah.” He glanced up at Lisa. “They want him out tonight?”
“Yes,” Lisa said. She looked almost sorry. “He can't stay with his current fosters, whether or not their memories are wiped. Something isn't right there. And the boy is giving the Aurors a lot of trouble. If you don't take him, they're probably going to stick him in a holding cell. Which obviously isn’t great.”
Harry made a face. “We can't put him in bloody jail. Jesus.”
Lisa shrugged. “Well, he can’t go to any of our fosters cause of the magic stuff.”
“Right,” Harry said. Once a kid had learned to rein in their magic, they could be placed with Muggle fosters, but a rogue one like this was a different story. The foster databank among wixen was criminally small—as in, Harry could count the wizarding families who were willing to take kids (and had gone through the required background checks) on his fingers. He also happened to know that almost all of them were full or unable to take new kids at that moment. “And I suppose emergency centers are out of the question?” Some of the city’s juvenile detention centers let Family Services keep kids overnight in emergencies, as did a handful of fire stations and hospitals.
“Yeah, sorry mate, but no. Can’t have our man blowing up all the fire trucks.”
“Who cares about a few fire trucks in the grand scheme of things?” Harry flipped to the front of the file. “Ben Healy, eh?” There was a picture of him stapled to the back of the front cover. He was pale as hell—translucent, almost—with inky black hair. His eyes were very light but not quite as pale as his face. He looked a little underfed.
This was going to be a tough one. Harry could feel it in his bones.
“Yup. Ben Healy. Eleven years old, lifetime in the system, of fucking course. Mum originally left him out front of a police station—guessing she was strung out or something,” Lisa said. “She’s long gone at any rate. He’s got no family of record. Anyway, we good?”
“I’m going to have to take him for a while, aren’t I?” Which was not unheard of—Harry had two spare rooms at his house fitted out just for this kind of thing. But it didn’t happen all that often, which he preferred. Sometimes, a few quiet, solitary hours were necessary to keep functioning in his chosen vocation. But even that was often impossible when he was housing a kid.
“Probably,” Lisa said. “Yeah. Unless you’ve got someone.”
“I don’t,” Harry said. He’d make the calls, but nobody was going to want to take an eleven-year-old who had been bouncing around in the Muggle foster system all his life and might have violent tendencies. Harry would need to find out whether the incidents in the file had been rogue magic, or whether they’d been done on purpose. If it was rogue magic. maybe Nev and Hannah would take him—they had the patience of saints and were good at introducing Muggleborn children to magic. If not, there was always Hogwarts, but the boy would need to be prepped and trained a bit before Minerva would admit him.
“I wish I had more options for you,” Lisa said.
“It’s fine.” It wasn’t like Harry had all that much going on anyway. He’d entertained vague notions about a night out tomorrow, once he’d caught up on sleep. It was a thing he did much too rarely, though he craved it on occasion. It’d been at least two months since the last time he’d brought anyone home, and he’d been feeling the itch again lately.
But this kid needed a place to stay, and Harry always prioritized the kids.
“We’ll touch base on Monday, yeah? After you’ve had a chance to evaluate him,” Lisa said.
“Sounds good,” Harry replied vaguely, still looking through Ben’s file.
He felt Lisa’s hand on his shoulder. “Thanks, Potter. Seriously.”
“Course,” Harry said. He looked at her face. She seemed as exhausted as he probably did. And god, she was getting up there in years. Had to be pushing sixty. He didn’t know what he’d do when they brought in some idiot to replace her, some arsehole just looking to climb the ladder to a cushy admin job, somebody who didn’t care half as much as Lisa did. “Happy to do it, Lis. I’ll see you Monday.”
***
Ben Healy was in Crawley, one of Harry’s least favorite places. It was dark when he Apparated to a quiet residential street not far from one of the concrete-laden commercial hubs. The terrace houses that lined the street were decidedly utilitarian, little thought given to anything but economy and speed of construction, all decked out in white aluminum siding interspersed with swaths of brownish bricks. It was a mixed bag in terms of upkeep: some lawns had gone weedy and overgrown, but some were neat and tidy with flowerpots on the front steps. Harry’d seen much worse than this neighborhood in his day. Still, the place made him feel claustrophobic. It was the sameness of everything, maybe, the seemingly endless, monotonous rows of houses, and the total disregard of aesthetics. The lack of landscaping and tall trees, the grid-like roads.
His footsteps cut through the quiet as he made his way down the street. There were no crickets chirruping or people out and about. Harry knew the Aurors were here, scattered throughout these houses, wiping residents’ memories clean.
Obliviating, not wiping. Damn it, Lisa. Now she had him saying it.
He reached the house at the end of the row and stared at it. It had a roof now, and there was no indication that only a couple of hours ago, that roof had been missing, blown to Merlin-only-knew-where. Everything looked normal. No flowers on this stoop, though.
He knocked. A young Auror—Hutchins? Hotchkiss?—answered the door and ushered him in. “I’m here for the kid,” Harry said.
“Hey, come on in. Head Auror Weasley told us you’d be stopping by. Nice to see you, Mr. Potter, Sir. I’m Auror Humphreys. We met at the Christmas Gala last year.” He offered his hand.
Harry shook it, feeling grateful for the Sir in a way that depressed him. Once, everyone knew his name and respected it. He hadn’t liked the celebrity—at all—but he had enjoyed the weight it carried, the notion that his opinions mattered. Twenty years in a tucked-away social welfare office had all but eroded whatever power he’d once had. These days, it was easy to walk through Diagon Alley without being recognized by many people, which was nice, but there was a distinct lack of professional respect that Harry didn’t enjoy quite so much.
“How’s he doing?”
“The kid?”
Harry nodded.
“Ah, he’s okay. Gone quiet. He was yelling his head off when we first put him in the bind.”
With the rogue magic cases, these were necessary, since there was no wand to seize. Half the time, the kids had no idea how they were doing magic, or even that it was them doing it. But it was an unpleasant feeling, being bound. Harry could attest to this, since he’d been a guinea pig for the spell ages ago. He’d been one of the only reliable test subjects, since he was one of the few wizards who could go entirely wandless with ease. “He’s in the cellar?” Harry asked.
The Auror nodded. “Foster parents and siblings are upstairs. We Obliviated them and put them to bed. They won’t wake until 6 in the morning no matter how loud you get, so no worries there.”
“Great. Thanks, Humphreys,” Harry said.
"Not a problem, Sir."
The door to the cellar was off the kitchen and had been sealed with magic. Harry glanced around the kitchen, at the general untidiness, the sticky countertops, the crumbs scattered across the scuffed floor. He took in the overflowing garbage can. He wondered how many foster kids lived here; Humphreys had mentioned siblings. The open cupboards were lined with enormous boxes of off-brand cereal and econo-size crates of pot noodles. There were empty Diet Coke and Irn Bru bottles scattered all over the counters. Not a health-food-haven, sure, but they weren’t starving them, at least. Harry had been in plenty of houses with nothing in the cupboards at all.
Harry cast at the door to unlock it. “Hello?” he yelled down into the cellar. There was a light on at the bottom, but the stairs were shrouded in darkness. He gripped the handrail and started down. “Ben?”
“Take this off, you bastard!” came a voice from the right end of the cellar “You fucking pig! Whatever you did to me, undo it!”
“I’m not police,” Harry said, stepping onto the concrete floor. He rounded the corner and came face-to-face with Ben.
The boy was tall for eleven and too skinny, and just as pale as he’d looked in his photo, like he lived down here in the cellar all the time. Instead of black, his hair was a dingy, dark green, like he’d experimented with a bunch of different colors, and this is what he’d ended up with. His eyes were light blue and and he'd drawn a heavy line around them in black, and just now, they were narrowed into angry slits. He was in a dark purple hoodie and tattered, faded black jeans. None of it looked very clean.
For all his fuck-off-decoration, though, Ben was still just a kid. A baby, really. You could see it in the softness of his features and the narrowness of his shoulders and in the slight tremble of his chin. “Hi,” Harry said. “I’m not police, okay?”
“Then who the fuck are you?”
“I’m with Family Services.”
The kid’s shoulders relaxed and he laughed. “Oh, fucking fantastic. You gonna move me in with a different asshole now? Or do I get to go back to the group home?”
“Neither,” Harry said. The kid was way too twitchy to take the bind off, but Harry could feel it, could feel the way it was making the kid’s magic circulate through his body instead of outward. It had to be terribly uncomfortable.
“Juvie, then?” the boy asked, some of his bravado failing him.
“Nah. Not juvie.” There were two metal folding chairs against the wall. Harry opened one and then the other, then arranged them so they were facing one another. The kid stared at him in disbelief all the while. He sat down and gestured to the empty chair. “Sit.”
The kid shook his head. “Tell me what’s going to happen to me.”
“What can you tell me about the roof?”
“No. Nuh-uh. I’m not out here making bombs and shit. I don’t even fucking know how. That had nothing to do with me, bruv. Could’ve been the neighbors. They’re the type, you know? Muslim, whatever. I dunno. Wasn’t me, though.”
Lovely. The boy was a burgeoning racist already. Harry resisted the urge to roll his eyes or correct him. Kids didn't talk that way unless the adults around them were talking that way, generally speaking. “I know you’re not making bombs. Okay? But I think you know you did that to the roof. I think you can do things like that without making bombs or setting fires, or whatever.” He paused, letting this sink in. “Am I right?”
The kid’s eyes narrowed further, and he finally plopped down onto the chair. “What are you on about?”
“You can do things. With your mind, like.”
The kid crossed his arms over his chest and laughed. It was so bitter. He was too young for it to be so bitter. “I wish. I fucking wish. Wouldn’t that be nice? If I could do that, I wouldn’t be in this shithole, now would I?”
“Ben. Listen to me. I know you can do things like that. You know how I know?”
Ben said nothing, just stared at Harry with those unnerving pale blue eyes.
Harry leaned forward. “Because I can do them too.”
The kid’s mouth twitched. “Bullshit.”
Harry gestured towards a dusty, old armoire in the corner and murmured a spell. He didn’t use his wand because the kid wouldn’t know what it was. The armoire came rushing towards them, stopping only when Harry raised a hand to it and ended the spell.
The kid looked back and forth between Harry and the armoire, his mouth agape. “What—what the fuck—”
“Do you believe me now? Do you believe me when I say I know what you’re capable of?”
The kid sat back again. He nodded.
“Right. So, I’m going to blow your mind a little. This is going to maybe fuck you up, at least at first, but it’ll really help you in the long run. You ready?”
Another nod. Ben was utterly silent now, processing, his sharp gaze trained on Harry’s face.
“There are a lot of people who can do the type of things we can do. There’s no easy way to say this, but these people are called wizards, okay? Yeah, it’s cliched, but whatever. That’s what they’re called. And they inhabit a world that’s a little separate from this one. Adjacent, but separate.”
The kid snorted, looking down at his hands. His nails were painted a dark, silvery blue, chipped at the edges. He mumbled something.
“What was that?” Harry asked.
“I said, you’re full of shit.”
“I don’t think you believe that. I think you know I'm telling the truth. I think there’s something inside you that’s always known this, somehow. Or, at least, that’s how I felt when someone told me about it for the first time.”
“That’s a fucking fairy tale.” Ben’s chin was trembling again. His hands slid from his lap to his knees and he rubbed at the black fabric absently. “Shit like that—” he sniffed. “Shit like that is Disney, like. Nuh uh.” He shook his head, faster now, angry. “You’re lying. You’re probably trying to sniff me out, yeah? Catch me? Gonna lock me up in some—” he bolted up out of the chair.
“Ben—”
“Like some freakshow. Put me in a fucking asylum or something, yeah?” He was backing up, towards the stairs.
Harry got up out of his own chair slowly. “I’m going to lock the door, man. Not even a question. We need to get through this little chat before I let you go anywhere.”
The kid bolted anyway. Harry waved a hand to close and lock the cellar door. The kid started pounding and yelling. Harry sat back down in his chair and waited.
After a few minutes of this, Ben quieted. “Can we finish this conversation?” Harry called.
“No!”
Harry closed his eyes. He was so fucking tired. Goddamnit. He knew it was a lot, all this new information, all this drama. The poor kid was probably terrified. And Harry knew this, and he was trying so hard to be empathetic, but fuck this on a fucking Friday night.
“Are you sleeping?”
Harry opened his eyes and found Ben standing right in front of him. He was close enough that Harry noticed a very light smattering of almost invisible freckles across the bridge of his nose. “No. I’m not sleeping. I'm waiting for you to sit back down.”
Ben sat down in a huff. “Okay. So, if—if—this is true, why am I only finding out about it now?”
“Because you were lost in the system. And because probably, you were Muggle born. It happens.”
“Muggle born?”
“Born to non-magic parents. They wouldn’t have known to put you in the wixen system, since they didn’t know you were a wizard.”
“That happens? Magic kids from non-magic parents?”
“Yup. And since you haven’t been in one place for very long, it took a while for us to put the pieces together.”
“And you…you work for the Wiggen—the Wig—”
“Wixen.”
“Yeah. You work for them?”
Harry nodded.
“What’re you going to do with me?”
“Short term? You’re going to stay with me. I’m a certified foster carer for children like you. With magic, I mean. In addition to being a case worker. Long term, we’re going to find a magical family to place you with. Ideally, we’d place you somewhere you can stay until you graduate. I think you’ve moved around enough.”
“Nobody’s going to want me long term. I’m too old.”
“Not true.” It might be true. “We’ll find someone. And then we can teach you how to control your abilities.”
The kid’s head lifted.
“You’d like that, huh? Yeah, it really sucks to be at the mercy of your magic. I know it does. It’s not supposed to be like that, you know. Magic is supposed to be something you can wield and control rather precisely. You just need to be taught how to do that.” Harry paused, giving Ben a moment to consider this. “There’s a school, actually. For wizarding children. Once we get you placed, you could go there.”
“A school?”
Harry nodded. “Yup. Hogwarts. My alma mater. It’s a great place. You learn magic, you learn magical history, you play magical sports—”
“Magical sports.” The kid raised an eyebrow. His eyebrows were almost comically dark in his pale face—another bad dye job, no doubt—and sharply angled.
“Yup. Magical sports. Quidditch being the main one. But you have lots of time to learn about that. For now, we should get you back to my place so you can get some rest. It’s late.”
Ben frowned. “Yeah. About that.” He tilted his head, narrowing his eyes at Harry once more. “I’m gonna need to see some ID. I don’t know you from Adam, guy. And I’m supposed to just…let you take me? When you might be some pervert child-toucher or some shit? Yeah. I don’t think so. ID or I’m not going.”
###
When Ben was finally satisfied that Harry was legit and not ‘some pervert child-toucher’, Harry Apparated them to his house. It was a small place and nothing fancy, but it was always clean and stocked up on food, just in case. He watched as Ben looked around, taking everything in. “Smells good in here,” Ben said.
“I made cinnamon rolls last night. I bake when I can’t sleep,” Harry said. He let out an enormous yawn. It was nearly midnight. He knew he should ask Ben if he was hungry, but he didn’t want to deal with it if the answer was yes. That was how tired he was.
Ben didn’t ask for food, either. Maybe he was that tired, too.
Harry showed Ben to the spare room across the hall from his own bedroom. It had an attached bathroom and some spare clothes in the drawers. Harry dug around and pulled out some mesh shorts and a plain grey T-shirt that looked like they’d fit and set them on the neatly-made bed. “There’s shampoo and soap in the shower if you want to clean up. Towels under the sink. Otherwise, just brush your teeth before you go to bed. Spare toothbrushes and toothpaste in the top right-hand drawer.”
Ben nodded. He rubbed at one eye, looking sleepy.
“Get some rest, okay? We can talk more in the morning,” Harry said. He paused, then added: “And you can’t run away, just so you know. You’re kind of stuck in the house until I take down the wards.”
Ben stared at him. He looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn't.
“Just wanted to save you the trouble,” Harry explained. “Not trying to be an asshole.”
Ben huffed and looked away. “Can you at least take this thing off me? Whatever it is?” He gestured at himself, at the invisible bind on his magic.
Harry wanted to. He doubted the kid knew how to control his magic well enough to get through wards, or even well enough to cause any real damage. But still, he didn’t know what the boy was capable of. He needed to do a full assessment before he removed the bind. “Not tonight. I’m sorry, man. Tomorrow.”
Ben pointed at the door. “Fine. Leave me alone, then, please.”
Harry nodded and stepped into the hallway. “Listen, I’m sorry. I know it feels weird. I’ll take it off tomorrow, I promise—”
“Fuck off,” Ben said, and slammed the door in Harry’s face.
“I’m right across the hall!” Harry called. “Let me know if you need anything! Breakfast is at seven-thirty!”
“Fuck off!” Ben yelled.
Harry let his head drop, his forehead against the door. He closed his eyes.
This was going to be such fun.