The Dissonant Heart

The Auror office was quiet on a Tuesday morning. The air tasted of old parchment and the weak, stewed tea someone kept perpetually brewing in the corner kitchenette. I liked the quiet. It was predictable. I would sit at my desk, which was identical to the twenty other desks in the open-plan room, and I would fill out forms. Apprehension Report, Form 7B. Dark Artefact Seizure and Cataloguing, Form 11C. Use of Force Justification, Form 3A. The neat black lines and designated boxes gave the preceding chaos a sense of order. They were proof that something had been done, and that it was now finished.

I hadn't been to the Burrow in six months. Molly still sent owls, of course. They would arrive with the morning post, their feathers slightly rumpled, carrying parcels of treacle tart or hand-knitted jumpers that were always the right size. I would send back a short, polite note of thanks. Ron and I still got a pint sometimes, but the conversation felt constructed, full of careful omissions. We talked about Quidditch and Ministry policy. We did not talk about his sister.

The memory of it was not a grand, cinematic thing. It was small and sharp, like a shard of glass under the skin. A conversation in the garden of Grimmauld Place two years ago, the sky a flat, indifferent grey. Her saying my name, not in anger, but with a kind of finality that had hollowed out my insides. I had agreed with everything she said. It was easier than arguing. It was easier than admitting that I had no idea who I was supposed to be when I was not actively trying to stay alive, and that I was making her miserable. So I let her go. I let the Weasleys become a place I used to visit. The silence that followed was a relief, and then it was just a fact of my life.

My teacup was cold. I was reading a preliminary report on a string of Boggart infestations in Muggle community centres when a memo zipped onto my desk and unfolded itself.

Potter. My office. Now. Robards.

I pushed my chair back and walked the length of the room. Gawain Robards, Head of the Auror Office, did not believe in wasting time or ink. His office was spare, overlooking the grey courtyard of the Ministry Atrium. He was standing by the window when I entered, his back to me.

"Shut the door," he said, without turning.

I did. He gestured to the large magical map of Great Britain that covered one wall. Three locations were glowing with a faint, sickly purple light. One in the Scottish Highlands, one on the coast of Pembrokeshire, and another deep in the Kielder Forest.

"Three attacks in the last two weeks," Robards said. He finally turned to face me, his expression grim. "Different locations, different times of day. But the magical signature is the same. So is the result."

He tossed a thin file onto his desk. I picked it up. Inside were photographs. They were not pleasant. Farmhouses torn apart, the wood splintered as if by a giant beast. Livestock, or what was left of it. The reports from the local magical law enforcement patrols were brief and panicked. They described creatures that were fast, reptilian, and moved in packs. They left behind a residue of dark magic that was difficult to analyze and resisted standard containment spells.

"They're coordinated," I said, looking at the map. The locations were not random. They were isolated, difficult to reach quickly, and sparsely populated. "There’s a strategy here."

"My thoughts exactly," Robards said. "This isn't just a pack of overgrown Kneazles that have gone feral. This is intelligent. Directed." He leaned forward, his hands flat on the desk. "The Minister wants it handled. Quietly and quickly. It's your case."

I felt a familiar sensation settle in my stomach. It was not excitement, not exactly. It was purpose. A clear objective. A problem to be solved with spells, not words. Something to point my wand at. I nodded. "I'll put a team together. We can leave within the hour."

"No," Robards said, his voice flat. It was the voice he used when a decision was final. "Not a team. The Ministry wants this contained, not advertised. It'll be a two-person unit. You, and a specialist from the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures."

The words landed in the quiet office like stones in a pond. A specialist. I pictured someone old, with ink stains on their fingers and a nervous cough. Someone who would want to take notes from a safe distance while I did the actual work.

"Sir," I started, trying to keep the impatience out of my voice. "With respect, what we need out there is tactical experience. We don't know what these things are capable of. I need Aurors who can handle themselves in a fight, not someone who's going to quote from a textbook."

"That's precisely the point, Potter," Robards said, his gaze sharp. "You don't know what you're walking into. Neither do I. The preliminary magical forensics are a mess. The creatures don't react to standard containment charms, and they seem resistant to most low-level hexes. Running in with Blasting Curses is a good way to get your team killed and destroy any evidence we might need to track the source."

He picked up the file again, tapping the corner of a particularly grim photograph. "This isn't a duel. It's an investigation. The DRCMC has jurisdiction when an unknown species is involved. They're assigning their best analyst. Your job is to provide security and tactical support. Their job is to identify what the hell we're fighting so we can stop it permanently, not just chase it from one county to the next. You'll listen to their assessment."

The finality in his tone was absolute. I felt a familiar frustration building in my chest. This was the Ministry I hated. The bureaucracy, the jurisdictional squabbles that got in the way of getting things done. I had faced down Voldemort, I had fought in a war. I knew how to handle dark creatures. I knew that hesitation was what killed you. This felt like being saddled with a liability, someone I would have to babysit while also trying to keep myself alive.

"I understand," I said. The words tasted like ash. It was a lie. I didn't understand why my experience was being subordinated to some academic's theories.

"Good," Robards said, apparently satisfied. "The specialist is on their way to your office now. They have the complete file. Brief them on your operational plan, get whatever you need from the supply stores. I want you in the field by tomorrow morning."

He turned back to the window, a clear dismissal. I walked out of his office, the door clicking shut behind me, the sound unnaturally loud in the silent corridor. Back in the main office, the gentle scratching of quills on parchment seemed absurd. People were filling out forms while somewhere in Kielder Forest, things with claws were tearing the world apart. I sat down at my desk, the cold ceramic of my teacup a solid thing under my hand. I stared at the blank wall of my cubicle and prepared myself for the arrival of some fussy, tweed-wearing magizoologist who was about to make my job infinitely more complicated.

I heard footsteps approaching my cubicle, firm and measured on the worn stone floor. A woman’s shoes, I thought vaguely. Probably some secretary with another memo. I didn’t look up from the grain of the wood on my desk.

The footsteps stopped. There was a pause, a pocket of silence that felt different from the ambient quiet of the office. Then, a soft knock on the partition wall of my cubicle.

"Potter," Robards’ voice said again. It was closer now, just outside my space.

I finally looked up, my prepared excuse for being uncooperative dying on my tongue. Robards stood there, holding the flimsy partition wall as if it were a door. And next to him, holding a thick file identical to the one on his desk, was Ginny.

It was not a feeling I could have prepared for. It was like the floor dropping out from under me, a physical lurch in my gut. Every ounce of air seemed to rush out of my small cubicle, pulled into the space she occupied. She was taller than I remembered, or maybe it was just the way she held herself. Her hair was shorter, pulled back in a severe, practical knot at the nape of her neck. A few strands had escaped, the familiar fiery red a stark contrast to the drab grey of the Ministry walls. She wore dark, tailored robes that were clearly for work, not for show. They were simple, functional, and on her they looked more intimidating than any Auror uniform.

This was not the girl who had screamed my name from the Quidditch stands, whose laughter had echoed through the Burrow’s orchard. This was a woman, and a stranger. Her face was thinner, the angles of her jaw and cheekbones sharper. The scattering of freckles across her nose was the same, but her expression was one I had never seen before. It was a cool, appraising neutrality. Her eyes, the same brilliant brown, met mine for a fraction of a second, and there was nothing in them. No anger, no sadness, no flicker of shared memory. It was the look one gives a piece of unfamiliar furniture.

"Potter," Robards said, oblivious to the sudden, suffocating pressure in the air. "This is your specialist. Ginny Weasley."

The name sounded foreign in his mouth. Hearing it spoken aloud, here, in the context of my job, made it brutally real. This was happening. This was not some bizarre anxiety dream.

"She’s our foremost expert on behavioural patterns in magically-influenced fauna," Robards continued, his voice a dull drone in the background. "Her research is groundbreaking. You'll give her your full cooperation."

Ginny’s gaze shifted from my face to a point just over my shoulder. She gave a short, almost imperceptible nod. "Robards," she said. Her voice. It was lower than I remembered, smoother. Stripped of the warmth I had once known so well.

She looked at me again, her expression unchanged. "Potter," she said, and it was a statement, not a greeting. A simple acknowledgement of my existence in the room.

I couldn’t speak. My throat felt tight, constricted. I was aware of my own breathing, how loud it seemed in the small space. I could smell the faint, clean scent of her soap, something with lavender in it. I could see the fine lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there two years ago. I felt a surge of something hot and unfamiliar in my chest. It was fury, I decided. It had to be. Fury at Robards, at the Ministry, at the sheer, cosmic unfairness of this. Of her. Standing in my office, looking at me like she’d never known the taste of my mouth.

I managed to force my jaw to work. "Weasley," I said. The name felt wrong, like a key in the wrong lock. It was too formal, too distant for the history it contained.

"Excellent," Robards said, clapping his hands together once, a loud, jarring sound. "You two know each other, then. That should streamline things."

The ignorance of the statement was so profound it was almost funny. I watched him, waiting for him to register the absolute stillness in the air, the way neither of us had moved, the way the space between us felt like a vacuum. He registered nothing. He was a man who saw personnel files, not people.

"Right, well. I'll leave you to it," he said, already turning away. "Get it done, Potter."

He nodded at us both and walked away, his footsteps receding down the corridor until they were gone. He left behind a silence that was heavier than any noise. It was just the two of us, enclosed in the three flimsy walls of my cubicle. I could hear the scratching of a quill from the next desk over. I could feel the blood pulsing in my own ears.

Ginny moved then. She stepped fully into the cubicle, and the space, which had always felt adequate, suddenly felt impossibly small. She placed her file on my desk, setting it down with a soft, definitive thud on top of a stack of my unfinished reports. She didn't look at me. She looked at the wall, at the organizational chart I had pinned there months ago and never looked at since.

"This is a mistake," I said. The words came out low and tight.

Her eyes finally moved from the chart to my face. The neutrality was still there, but now it felt like a shield. "The attacks?" she asked, her voice even. "Or my being assigned to this case?"

"You know what I mean."

A flicker of something passed through her eyes then. It was too fast to name. Annoyance, maybe. Or perhaps just weariness. "What I know is that there's an unknown species of dark creature being directed by an unknown entity, and it's escalating," she said. Her tone was that of a professor lecturing a slow student. "What I know is that my job is to figure out what they are and how to stop them. Your job, as I understand it, is to keep me from getting killed while I do that. Is there any part of that you feel you're professionally incapable of handling?"

The question was a slap. It was clinical, precise, and it left no room for the mess of what was actually happening between us. She was drawing a line, not in sand, but in granite. On one side was the mission. On the other was everything else, a history she was treating as irrelevant. The fury in my chest coiled tighter. She was making this easy for me, in a way. She was making it a fight.

"I work better alone," I said. It sounded childish even to my own ears.

"That's unfortunate," she said, without a trace of sympathy. She tapped the file. "I've read the preliminary reports. Your approach is to hit things with powerful spells until they stop moving. That won't work here. You'll just scatter them, and whatever is controlling them will learn from it. We need to understand them first."

She finally pushed herself away from the desk, crossing her arms over her chest. It was a defensive posture, but on her it looked like a statement of fact. Her chin was lifted slightly. I remembered that look. It was the same one she’d had before flying a full-speed feint at a Slytherin chaser.

"So," she said, her voice dropping a little, losing its formal edge and gaining a sharper one. "You can either see this as a 'personal complication,' or you can see me as the person who's going to keep your brute-force tactics from making this situation a hundred times worse. The choice is yours. But I am on this case. So I suggest you start dealing with it."

She held my gaze, and for the first time, I saw the resolve Robards had mentioned. It was hard and bright and absolute. She was not here to reminisce. She was not here to fight about the past. She was here to do a job, and she was daring me to get in her way. It was clear that, to her, I was just another obstacle to be managed.