So I accidentally a hiatus. Step one: go take a quick refresher course by rereading all of the story and leaving comments (on anon if you've already left them) and telling me how much of a dick I am for having a career.

Chapter 022. 2,000 words.
Theme Ninety-Six. In the Storm.

Harry grimaced at the unpleasantness before him: a drooling former Death Eater sprawled in a merciless metal chair that was bolted to the floor of a cell that smelled rankly of dried piss and despair. Between him and the erstwhile Death Eater, a young deputy Auror, just out of training, chest heaving, looking scarcely more rational that the criminal. It was a sad tableau of justice; a defenseless criminal, insensate with pain, bound and receiving repeated and increasingly desperate forms of torture; a young servant of the Law, teeth bared in a snarl as a more tenured Auror threw questions towards the interrogated like darts towards a bullseye; yet never quite hitting the centre.

The criminal's name was Dolwood, and he had been the late Antonin Dolohov's cellmate at Azkaban.

This was by no means the first time he was being questioned.

"You can't expect us to believe," Auror Silva said, voice lush with a lazy Spanish drawl that made Harry's toes curl. "That you have given us all the information you have about the... situation."

"I don't know what else you want from me. If you're looking for an excuse to kill me, you have everything you will ever receive, so just kill me and claim it was another accident." Dolwood was only a little older than Harry. That meant, of course, that he was a bit past forty, and so really he hadn't age to claim as a sympathetic point, but unlike Harry, who had walked away from the war and made a life and gone on to worry about other things, even if those other things were his wife dying and being left with three children and-

No. He wouldn't bring his family here. Those thoughts belonged at home, in the office, with friends, or sometimes, the darkest times, behind closed doors; alone. Not here. Not when he was torturing a man out of his sanity. His children would have no part in that. He'd spent the last two decades making sure of that.

The fact remained. Harry had gotten to move on. This man, who had only been a boy at the time, really, only nineteen; had gotten swept up with youthful vigour in the name of a cause his parents told him was just; had paid for it these twenty years since.

He'd never grown up. He was still nineteen, because he'd never gotten a chance to learn not to be. That was Harry's fault.

There had been ideas of amnesty for the second wave of the Death Eater cult, as so many people had become subject to their rule, and so many would have to pay penance in some format. But after the first War, there had been a lot of forgiveness. Thirteen criminals and an innocent man locked away forever, and how many Lucius Malfoys had been left to walk the streets? Harry had been sensitive to the scale which Voldemort had influenced daily life, but he also recognised that Dumbledore's goodwill and belief in second chances had made it all the easier for Voldemort's resurgence. He'd had to make difficult decisions, back then; barely a man, not fully emotionally developed, certainly. Argued with the Wizengamot for days about what was the line- what was just survival, and what was cruel to the extent that it could not be seen fit to let that sort of inhumanity still roam free, without consequence. And every time they'd come to a conclusion, there would be another wizard who had had to torture a Muggle family because not doing so would result in the execution of his own, or a witch who had used the Killing Curse on her own half-blood daughter rather than let the Death Eaters rape her until they killed her themselves. Trying to publish a law against these barbarians was fruitless. In the end, cases were judged on their own, based on what evidence could be provided, and in some form corroborated. Precedents were established on what had taken place five minutes ago in the last trial as an endless, endless weeks were spent judging people who did not deserve to be judged or that did, and with no way of delineating between the two. Countless gallons of truth serum was commissioned those months; an entire task force of Potions Masters working day and night. But truth serums have antidotes or individuals natural tolerances, and everyone knew it was par for the course that Death Eater inductees from day one of initiation began building tolerance by taking and resisting controlled dosages.

For all it had plagued him as a teenager, being taken seriously quickly lost its novelty. It had been Hell to decide right from wrong almost arbitrarily, as bad as the war, and Harry would never have gotten through without Ginny.

No, not here.

Harry had been part of the council that made final decisions on punishments for war crimes. The youngest Wizengamot seat holder since the 1500s. He'd told himself at the beginning that he'd never forget the name of a man he'd condemned to prison for life. He'd accept responsibility. Thirty such decisions later, he started writing them down. Sixty, he stopped When he'd come back to Azkaban to meet Dolwood the first time, he had read his case file to prepare for the interrogation. He'd remembered nothing. Not one detail stood out. He could have been one of hundreds of people Harry had locked away, signifcant only because he was alphabetically the prisoner next in line after Dolohov. And Harry had put him there. And if he were any other prisoner, or in any other wing, he'd be exercising his right to stare at the ceiling for hours on in. Not comfortable, maybe. But also not half-dead, covered in his own mingled blood and vomit.

"Put him back," Harry said tiredly, as Auror Long pulled his wand arm up, as though through liquid, to begin another round of the Cruciatus curse. "Put him back in his cell."

"Sir, I think we're close to a breakthrough," Silva turned to him eagerly, his eyes glinting with something malicious that used to make Harry throw people in prison even if their story sounded legitimate.

"I said put him back. We're done for today."

"Don't have pity on me, just kill-" Dolwood began at the same time as Aurors Silva and Long began voiing their objections.

"He said it was fucking over; you are seriously overstepping your bounds, Auror Long, and Auror Silva, you are setting a prime fucking example for insubordination. You do what Auror Potter says when he says it." Auror Weasley growled. Ron had developed a finely-tuned sense of authority over the years; a necessity, when Harry wouldn't take anyone else as his second-in-command, nor no as an answer.

"Get him back to his cell, get back to HQ for the after-action review, and then go relieve yourselves for the evening, both of you." Harry said calmly. The younger Aurors didn't look at each other as they said the incantations to release Dolwood from his bonds and half-carry him from the room.

"You all right?" Ron asked once they had left.

"I was wondering if Ginny would be proud of me," Harry shrugged, turning towards him, but not making eye contact. Which was not easy. The room was hard to look at. Concrete everything, and deep shadow blue in its highlights. It was dismal.

"I don't have to answer that. You already know she would." Ron put a light, anchoring hand on Harry's shoulder.

"I feel like I'm injuring a child every time we interrogate that man," Harry said bitterly.

"You're not. He choked supporters of Dumbledore with their own severed arms. He was a feind."

"He was. Who's to say he wouldn't have turned out all right, if we had tried to rehabilitate him?"

"Who's to say he didn't kill Dolohov?"

"Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing, either."

"You don't believe that." Harry didn't say anything, and Ron narrowed his eyes. "You don't."

"Dolohov killed Remus."

"But you didn't believe back then that we should kill him. Others were in favour of the death penalty. You weren't. You may have put away some people, but it was for the good of our society. Do you want that fucker in Diagon Alley when Lily is getting her schoolbooks next year?"

Which did help to put things in perspective, somewhat. "It's not right, all the way around, is all I'm saying."

"Ginny was proud of you," Ron repeated. "I'm proud of you. Hermione is proud of you. Your children all worship you."

But I don't deserve it, Harry thought. I may not have killed anyone, but I've ruined near as many lives as Voldemort ever did.

"I think you should go home, too, Harry," Ron said, removing his hand from Harry's shoulder. "I can debrief them. Go home. Isn't Remus off today?"

"You don't mind?"

"I wouldn't have offered if I did." Which was patently untrue, but Harry nodded and left the cell, aiming for the fireplace in the Warden's office.

Harry got home within thirty minutes, after stopping by the office to grab some paperwork to finish that night. He was startled to find it was still daylight hours. In the storm of his consciousness, tearing itself to shreds on little reminders of all he had done and lost, all was dark and wet and up-ended and broken.

"You're home early," Remus smiled when Harry came in the kitchen.

It was such a cliché of the greeting a homemaking wife would give the breadwinning husband that Harry had to chuckle. "It doesn't feel like it."

"Long day, I take it?" Remus was up from the table and at the cabinet for the teapot, and any moment the coziness would give way, and it would just be strange, Harry knew, because good things didn't just happen to him.

"Incredibly."

"Are you back for lunch or are you staying?"

"Staying, with any luck." He sat down at the kitchen table and let Remus make him tea, just this once, without commenting on not needing to be take care of.

"Well, good," Rermus said, still smiling in that gentle way. Ginny had never really smiled like that until she became a mother. In her youth she had been fireworks; endless fireworks, and Harry had loved her so, so much; it was always New Years with Ginny, always summer Quidditch Tournaments, and always everything in between. Harry had loved her most as a mother, though. There was something Mullins would have a lot of interest in, he was sure. But when she had their son and began mimicking her mother's speech patterns and setting coupons to cut themselves from magazines even though Harry was rich and baking, which she was always awful at, they both were, but he could make pasta and she could make breakfast so between them they had most of the day covered...

Harry wasn't aware he was crying until he simultaneously became aware that Remus had his arms around Harry's shoulders from behind and he was kissing Harry's hair and murmuring some soothing things.

"I don't want you to be disappointed in me. And I don't want to kill you." Harry said hoarsely, nonsensically, still crying, and it should have startled Remus, but it didn't.

"I'm not, love. You won't. Don't worry."

And Harry cried like he never had before.
;

A/N: Hooboy. I feel like I owe you an explanation, but it's really all very uninteresting and work-related, so just know how sorry I am that I wandered off for so long! Thanks to all my returning readers, and welcome to anyone new! If you've anything you'd like to contribute to this 'verse, feel free to play in the sandbox. I still need a book cover, guys!

-D