"Th-this—is this... f-for me?"
A few simple words, but it seemed to take Ron some half a lifetime to get them out.
Bryan drained the last of his sherry and had already turned his attention toward his lunch.
"That's right. Actually, I've had both badges in hand for a week now—Professor Dumbledore included them in his letter to me, along with several other matters that needed sorting before term."
Ron's hand trembled as he reached for the badge sitting on the table before him. The small thing seemed extraordinarily heavy—it took him several separate attempts before he finally managed to close his hand around it and lift it free of the table.
There was no mistake. It really was a Prefect's badge.
The same badge Percy had worn with such insufferable pride.
Ron ran his thumb slowly over the badge's cold surface, his breath grew heavier with each pass.
Then, all at once, something seemed to occur to him and his eyes lifted, finding Harry's.
"Congratulations, Ron—"
Harry had been staring at the badge in Ron's hand the whole time too. When he saw Ron's gaze swing toward him, he hurried to cover his disappointment had briefly flickered across his own face with a clumsy smile.
There was nothing to fault about Hermione winning a Prefect's badge of her own. But Ron—
'What are you thinking, Harry!'
He caught the thought before it could fully form and warned himself against it, silently.
As Ron's best friend as someone who had spent six years watching Ron exist in the considerable shadow cast by Percy's badges and Bill's curse-breaking glamour and Charlie's dragons and the twins' effortless brilliance—Harry knew better than almost anyone alive that Ron only looked clumsy from the outside.
He was, beneath the surface that so easily got overlooked, considerably better than most people gave him credit for. Smarter in the ways that mattered when it counted.
He had no business envying Ron this badge, any more than he had any business having envied Hermione when she'd become a Triwizard champion.
With that settled thought, his smile turned genuine.
"Oh—thanks."
Ron hesitated for a moment, processing the warmth in Harry's voice, and then smiled back. He turned to Hermione next, who quickly composed her own lingering surprise—as she had not, evidently, expected to share this particular honour with Ron specifically, of all the people at the table and offered her congratulations as well.
"You're so handsome, Ron!"
When it was Lavender's turn to offer congratulations, the girl made no attempt at restraint. She leaned in with eager enthusiasm and, despite Ron's visible, flailing struggle, cupped his face firmly between both hands and planted a delighted kiss.
Luna offered her congratulations to Hermione and Ron as well, of course, though judging by her expression, she couldn't have cared less about Prefect badges as a category of achievement.
"Well, then."
Amid the slightly subdued, still-processing atmosphere that had settled over the table, Bryan calmly finished the last of his lunch, wiped the corners of his mouth clean with the small linen napkin Tom had provided, and rose to his feet.
"Until next time, Hogwarts—"
The group scrambled to their feet at once, gathering themselves with considerably less dignity than Bryan's own departure, and accompanied him toward the door.
"Oh, right—"
Bryan paused at the threshold, as though something had only just occurred to him. He turned and looked at Harry.
"Ever since you made that show of force at the Battle of Diagon Alley, Amelia's held the opinion that the Ministry ought to step up its protection arrangements of you. I told her there was no need to be so anxious about it.
But given that there's been another terrorist incident today, and you've found yourself caught up in the middle of it once again—I expect Amelia will raise the matter with me once more, and rather more insistently this time."
"What does the Ministry want to do?" Harry asked, a faint wariness was creeping into his voice.
"Probably send a few people to guard you on your journey to Hogwarts. Nothing especially intrusive, I'd imagine."
Bryan said it lightly, already turning, already walking off into the bright afternoon light spilling through the open door, leaving the small group standing in the doorway of the Leaky Cauldron.
…..
For a wizard like Bryan, there was never enough time.
Handing certain Ministry matters over to Amelia had eaten up most of the last week of August already. But handing things off, of course, didn't mean he could simply stop minding them. It never did.
Streamlining and upgrading the Ministry's extensive collection of departments. The reconstruction of Diagon Alley, now formally underway, with all its attendant logistics and labour and decades-long projections.
Industrial reform across the wizarding world's commercial backbone—the very arrangement he had just signed into existence at the Plaza Accord, which would now require careful, ongoing attention to ensure it actually functioned as designed rather than collapsing under its own ambition.
The maintenance of public order in a country still recovering from open war. Counter-infiltration efforts against the dark forces that remained, however weakened, still capable of producing afternoons like the one that had just concluded.
On all these fronts and more, he still had to stand behind Amelia, or none of it would move forward at all. The structure he had built depended on his continued presence even where his name didn't appear on the paperwork.
An utterly unremarkable night fell, just as it had for hundreds of millions of years before this one and would for hundreds of millions after entirely indifferent to anything that had happened in Diagon Alley that day.
Bryan with a travelling suitcase in hand, stood beside the red telephone booth that marked the Ministry's visitor entrance, the London streets were quiet around him in the hush that fell over this city at the edge of evening.
He watched the owl carrying his letter wing northward into the darkness until it vanished into the boundless dark beyond the city's last scattered lights.
He exhaled.
Bryan tightened the collar of his increasingly worn dark-green wizard's robes and, with an expression of weary reluctance, drew his wand and pointed it up at a slant toward the night sky.
Bang!
And so, after more than an hour of thoroughly miserable travel of jolting, bowling, and accompanied by the Knight Bus's usual chaotic disregard for anything resembling a smooth journey—Bryan stepped down off the bus onto solid ground at last, clutching a large bag of chocolate that the conductor had enthusiastically pressed on him.
His gaze swept the surroundings.
A village, ringed by nothing but a scattering of dim, isolated lights with a handful of windows still lit at this hour.
Look in any direction beyond those few lights and there was only boundless darkness. This little village, tucked away in the wilds, sat as cut off from the wider world as an island stranded in an endless, featureless sea.
Bryan found himself standing in an abandoned square at the heart of this forgotten place.
Behind him was a war memorial shaped, at some point in its history, like a sword driven point-first into a stone base had crumbled badly with age and neglect, its surface was flaking away in broken patches, the original design was scarcely recognisable beneath decades of weather and indifference.
After a moment of quiet, contemplative stillness, he drew his wand and gave it a single, light flick.
The weeds ringing the memorial's base withered away in an instant, and in their place, blossom after vivid blossom sprang up from the cracked, neglected earth.
The flowers swayed gently in the night breeze warming the desolate square.
"Much better."
Bryan smiled and looked around once more. The gaze in his deep-violet eyes had sharpened looking far more purposeful.
A moment later, he had located his destination.
He passed an empty little pub and a row of shuttered houses standing in their own private silence. Then he paused, briefly, to admire a small two-storey chapel at the village's centre.
A few crows took flight from the roof of a post office that might, or might not, still be operating. Along the lane leading toward the most respectable-looking house remaining in the village, two rows of yellowing plane-tree leaves rustled in the evening wind.
The moment Bryan set foot on that particular lane, the faint, half-heard strains of a piano cut off abruptly in the darkness ahead, the silence that replaced it was sudden and overall.
A second later, the wind carried back the panicked crash of furniture toppling over, along with a confused tumble of other noise—something shattering, something heavy striking a wall.
"Heh."
Bryan gave a soft laugh, but didn't slow his pace.
He stopped at the white picket fence ringing the garden and gazed for a long moment at the house, dim and faintly tinged with the smell of blood.
Bryan set his suitcase down on the gravel path and tapped it once with the tip of his wand. The dark-gold clasps sprang open immediately, and an elegantly wrapped box leapt out of the case's interior, landing precisely in his open, waiting palm.
He tucked the chocolate the conductor had pressed on him into the now-open suitcase and closed the case slowly.
The garden gate stood open, swinging very slightly on its hinges in the breeze. Bryan walked straight through it and up the short path to the front door.
Knock, knock, knock—
The sound of his knuckles against the wood gave off an eerie, hollow echo that seemed to travel further into the house.
No one answered.
Whoever was inside seemed dead set on playing dead all the way to the very end of this performance.
A flicker of amusement crossed Bryan's eyes.
The harsh creak of hinges turning tore through the night's stillness as the door swung slowly open on its own. A cold, murky breath of air came pouring out of the hallway beyond, leading toward a sitting room somewhere further inside. Bryan's eyes narrowed slightly as the air reached him.
"Hoh—"
Bryan let out a small sound of appreciation.
He made his way down the narrow corridor and stepped into the sitting room and what greeted him there drew another soft, admiring tsk from somewhere in the back of his throat.
The sitting room was an absolute wreck.
A grandfather clock lay shattered at his feet, its wooden face was split clean across, its pendulum had flung some distance away, lying discarded on the floor like a dropped sword after a duel that had gone badly for someone.
A piano, the source, presumably, of the music that had cut off so abruptly had been knocked onto its side, its keys were scattered across the floorboards in a chaotic arc of black and white.
Nearby, a chandelier lay smashed into a thousand individual pieces, its glass shards caught what murky starlight made it through the room's grimy windows and threw it back in scattered, glittering fragments.
Cushions had been flung in every conceivable direction, and the feathers that had once filled them now drifted and settled into every corner of the room, coating the wreckage in a thin, almost decorative layer of white down.
"How dreadful."
Bryan surveyed the scene with evident, genuine interest then stepped neatly back to one side, avoiding a thick, scarlet liquid that had begun dripping steadily from a point on the ceiling directly above where he'd been standing.
"It seems I've come at rather a bad time."
He sighed with what sounded like real regret, said this quietly to the empty, wrecked room, and then, without any further ceremony, turned and left the sitting room entirely—his footsteps were creaking slowly across the damaged floorboards as he made his way back toward the front door, apparently entirely prepared to simply leave.
"Wait!"
Just as Bryan was about to step back outside, a shout rang out from the sitting room he had only just left—calling urgently for him to stop, the voice sounded flustered, and breathless.
The corner of Bryan's mouth twitched, fighting down a smile.
Obligingly, he came to a stop. He turned slowly smiling and looked back toward the sitting room with an expression of polite, patient anticipation.
After a flurry of noise and the crunch of footsteps grinding over broken glass, a bald, portly old man came darting out of the wrecked sitting room and skidded to a halt at the far end of the hallway glaring at Bryan, out of breath.
"Oh, I take it you must be Professor Slughorn?"
Bryan's smile widened.
"What a relief—I was half afraid you'd been murdered! The scene in there is really quite convincing."
"Oh, spare me!" The stout old man huffed, still catching his breath. "You knew perfectly well I was in the house the entire time, didn't you? Hah—and come to think of it, how did you even know I was living here? I am quite certain I never told Dumbledore I'd moved."
"Oh, quite true—"
Under Slughorn's wary, sideways glare, Bryan ambled back inside through the front door, still smiling pleasantly, entirely unbothered by the hostility being thrown at him.
"But you did mention it to your favourite pupil over at the Ministry—Mr. Creswell, was it? I got your new address out of him over a perfectly pleasant cup of tea."
Bryan said, holding out the crystallized pineapple he'd been carrying toward the stout old man.
"Mr. Creswell was also kind enough to mention that you're rather partial to crystallized fruit of every variety."
Slughorn's gaze dropped to the crystallized fruit being offered, and a flicker of temptation passed across his pale grey-green eyes. Still, he made no move to take it, holding onto the last visible traces of his hostility.
"Just like Dumbledore—you do love toying with people, don't you?" He folded his arms.
"You knew I was here the entire time and said nothing, just let me carry on, and made me waste an entire bottle of dragon's blood for absolutely nothing in the process. Oh, and you know what the market's like these days—a bottle of dragon's blood doesn't come cheap!"
"Oh, but you didn't exactly give me the opportunity to speak, did you, Professor Slughorn?"
Bryan said it with a faint, knowing smile, watching the stout old man's small eyes flash with rapid, shrewd calculation even as he maintained his composure.
"Of course, I'd be more than happy to make up for your loss in full. As for the dragon's blood, as it happens, I've got quite a stock of it on hand."
Slughorn kept his face set, his small eyes were fixed on Bryan, who maintained his perfectly courteous smile throughout.
Then, all at once, Slughorn broke into a smooth, ingratiating smile.
"No wonder you came out of Slytherin—a cut above the rest, clearly. Far more likeable than Dumbledore, I must say, and I mean that as the highest compliment I'm capable of giving."
He stepped back gesturing broadly toward the wrecked interior of his own house with.
"Do come in, then!"
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