A/N: Written for the Ring of Fire/King's Cup Challenge, card 51 – ace of diamonds. Exactly 400 words.

Paying Attention to Home

He was so busy trying to catch all the evil in the rest of the world that he'd stopped paying attention to what was going on at home. He'd become too swept up in his ideal: that image of the perfect world he sought to obtain, to create.

His home had been perfect the last time he'd payed close attention to it…but now that he saw it in shambles, he realised that was a long time ago. People didn't gain looks like that overnight: the look his son had had when he'd stared up from that chair, wrapped in chains.

He hadn't seen it coming. He hadn't seen it coming, because he'd been too busy trying to make the rest of the world a perfect place, he'd taken his once perfect home for granted. And when he looked closer, after that shock, he saw the shambles it was really in. He saw how sick his wife had become when he hadn't looking, and how slow his son's descent into the dark arts had been, all those opportunities where he could still have been stopped except he hadn't, because he hadn't been looking –

But now it was too late for all of that, too late for anything except watch his son be carted off into Azkaban and his wife's health fail even more – fail beyond the point where he could heal her, where anyone could heal her.

And now that he sees all this, he's swept up by it, swept up by all the things he'd been blinded to, and his hope and drive for a perfect world dissipates into the air. It's all over anyway. He knows the backlash from this will ruin his career, and even if he doesn't he'll step away from it. Because he's just proven he'll fail. He's not fit to be the Minister of Magic, to look after the entire wizarding population. He wasn't even fit to be a father and his son's arrest and sentence and his dying wife were all too strong testaments of that.

His suddenly cold and empty house was testament of that. Or not suddenly cold and empty; cold and empty yes, but not sudden. It had been a long time in coming. He'd just been blind. Distracted. But those were just excuses. Just his excuses.

He'd sacrificed something not worth sacrificing for a goal he could now never reach.