The time between Boxing Day and New Year's turned out to be rather dull for Harry. His slowly dwindling supply of money served as a good motivation to go job hunting, but as he was now painfully aware, very few places were in the mood to go through the process of hiring someone new over the holidays. There had been one offer, made by the manager of Eyelop's Owl Emporium, but Harry had decided that cleaning out pet cages wasn't really something he wanted to be doing for the foreseeable future. It did make him realize, however, that he probably should be figuring out what kind of job exactly he was looking for, rather than aimlessly replying to every ad in the Prophet .
After thinking about it for a few days and mulling over his qualifications-or lack thereof, Harry came to the inescapable conclusion that he was well and truly screwed. His education at Hogwarts had been thorough, that was true, but he found that other than DADA, he hadn't really enjoyed any other subject enough to develop more than a passing familiarity with it. He also didn't really want to be a teacher, not at Hogwarts, at least. He was sure Dumbledore was already curious, and he was on Moody's radar. There was no need to announce himself by waltzing into the castle and asking for a position as the next DADA teacher. Private tutoring might have been an option, but that idea died a swift death when he remembered that the semester would be starting in a few days, and therefore deprive him of his clientele until the summer.
Before the war had gotten too bad, he'd aspired to become an auror-but that was also out of the question. He would rather not test out his forged documentation by having them scrutinized by the Ministry in detail. Besides, that move would likely also draw attention from people he really didn't need any from at this point. So, it was either wait and see, or keep hunting in the hopes that something that he wouldn't mind doing for the next few months cropped up.
He almost didn't want to head over to the forger's place to pick up his license, knowing full well that he would have to drop his remaining two thousand galleons owed for the apparition license there, but after nearly a week, he couldn't put it off anymore. He would need that license eventually, even if the pile of gold he kept separate from the two thousand kept getting smaller with every meal he ate and every night he spent at the Leaky Cauldron.
Harry stood in front of the door. By now it was cold enough that his breath was visible in the frigid air, and he was glad for the warming charm that kept him and his clothes at a cozy temperature. It certainly explained why wizards only ever wore the same robes no matter what the weather was like. He opened the door without bothering to knock, and walked all the way into the back of the building to the shop. It was empty, but Sabine soon stepped out from the back room, she having been alerted to Harry's presence by the creaking of the front door.
"Harry!" she greeted him warmly. "It's good to see you."
"Good to see you, too," Harry replied politely, though not as warmly as she might have expected. Harry had initially found her personality quite attractive, but in the past weeks, he had realized that encouraging anything more than an acquaintance with the forger's daughter was unwise and perhaps even unfair.
"You've come at just the right time," she told him eagerly. "We just got word from our contact at the Ministry that your license has been registered. It's as real as real can be, and you didn't even have to take the test! When your renewal is due, go in on a busy day, pay the fee, and you'll be bona fide."
"That's great," Harry replied, though not with nearly as much excitement.
"You do know how to apparate, right?" she asked him teasingly.
"Of course." It was the truth. He'd just never gotten around to getting his license in his time, and by the end, there hadn't been anyone around to care that he didn't have one.
"Good. Unless you splinch yourself and let everyone know that you couldn't have passed the test in the first place, no one should be able to tell that it's illegal."
"Unless you tell them," Harry commented, his voice dry enough to convey humor instead of offense.
"Of course not! It wouldn't be good to sell out our own customers, would it?" she replied seriously. There was a slight hesitation and she spoke again."Look, why don't you stay the evening and have dinner with me and my father?"
Harry weighed his options for a moment and then spoke resignedly. "Things could go sour," he told her quietly, bending the truth a little bit. "I'm afraid it might be best for you and your father if we didn't see too much of each other too soon." He almost relented at the brief expression of hurt that flitted across her pretty face, but it vanished almost instantly.
"Of course," she told him neutrally and sadly, though Harry thought he detected a note of understanding in her voice.
"I'm sorry, really I am…" Harry began, only to be interrupted by a nonchalant wave of her hand.
"It's perfectly all right. Let me just get your license."
Harry sighed and nodded as she disappeared through the door again. Sabine returned a minute later, handing him a rolled-up piece of parchment. "There you go. Does that look real enough to you?"
"Sure." Harry glanced down at the item in his hands, not really caring that he couldn't tell if it was a fake or genuine because he'd never seen a real reached into his robes and withdrew a sack of gold.
The forger's daughter took it forlornly, stowing the money underneath the counter. They stood looking at each other, Harry trying to think of something to say to soften the hurt she must be feeling.
"Did your other papers pass muster?" she asked after a few moments of awkward silence.
"Sorry?"
"When all the aurors showed up after you beat that group of snots into a pulp," she reminded him. "If old Moody was there like the paper said he was, I bet you had to show him every document you had on you to avoid getting arrested."
"I got away with showing only the passport," he replied. "Why the curiosity?"
"It's good to know that our work has passed the real test."
"The real test?" Harry asked. It seemed to him that the folks who would order forged documents the most often were the sort that would have run-ins with the law on a regular basis, hence the need for clean forged documents.
Sabine smirked. "It does no good to make an alternate identity for yourself if everyone already knows who you are. Thus, our products aren't really put to the test because it's so obvious that they can't be genuine."
"I guess so," Harry admitted slowly.
Sabine arched an eyebrow. "If there are wanted posters of you all over the place, even the best forged documentation is not going to convince anyone looking at your face that you're someone else."
"Right." Harry suppressed a shudder. By the end there had been wanted posters of him all over Britain. Voldemort had wanted him, really wanted him dead. Even more so than Dumbledore, which was saying something. The Order had thought to create an alternate identity for him at one point, but nothing had come out of it. Harry idly wondered if they would have gone to Sabine and her father for the false documents had they ever had decided to go forward with that plan.
She noticed his brief hesitation. "Are there wanted posters of you posted somewhere?" she asked him suspiciously.
His lack of response caused her to narrow her eyes at him. "Harry?" she asked, a little more harshly than before.
....
Join my P@treon and get 60+ advanced chapters.
Link: p*atreon.com/0LordSilvere0 (Remove the *)
Free members get 2 chapters free.
Join Right Now