Ride or Die

Where There's Smoke

Chapter 24: Where There's Smoke

"Hey," Daphne murmured, slipping her arms around Harry's neck from behind as he clicked through the records in the police department's database. "You're up early. Did you sleep?"

Harry grimaced, tearing his gaze from the screen to face her. "Not really," he admitted, rubbing bleariness from his eyes and giving her something of an apologetic smile. "Did I wake you?"

"No," she assured him, and then paused. "Well, yes," she amended, touching his cheek, "but only because I now find it consummately unnerving when there's not someone trying to steal my pillow while I sleep."

Harry chuckled at that, shaking his head. "That was one time - "

"Hardly," she sniffed, turning his chair and slipping around it to settle herself lightly in his lap. "You're an incurable pillow thief, Officer," she informed him. "To think they put a badge on you," she lamented at a murmur, tutting softly as she kissed his temple.

Harry tried to laugh, but the sound stuck in his throat; he coughed instead, shaking it free, and she gave him a knowing look, her eyes flooding with something just coaxing enough that he eventually let out a slow, reluctant breath, permitting it to turn hopeful when it met the space between them.

"Tell me," she invited softly, and he gave her a grim smile.

"Ever since Slughorn gave me that file," he admitted slowly, "I've felt this sense of something being just out of reach. Something I should know," he clarified, the pained smile slipping to a frown, "or that I should be able to see, but can't."

Daphne leaned in, resting her cheek against his forehead. "Like?"

Harry tightened his arms around her, feeling a renewed rush of shame as he spoke.

"I feel like I did them a disservice," he murmured, wincing at the memory of their names in the police file; James and Lily Potter, the victims, who had lived in an address - just down the main drag, a couple streets over - that he'd never known, or bothered to seek. "That I never asked the right questions, I mean. That I came back, but I never really came back," he confessed painfully. "I treated it like a new city, a new job - when the whole time there are glimpses of them everywhere, and I barely stopped to look."

Harry paused, summoning his voice. "Maybe they shopped in the same grocery store I do now," he told her, and Daphne's hazel eyes turned sad at that, molten and wistful and gold. "You know? Maybe they got coffee at the Leaky, and got drinks at Rosmerta's. Maybe I'm living the life they could have had," he said bitterly, and abruptly corrected himself. "That they were supposed to have - "

"That's not fair," Daphne told him, shaking her head and pressing her forehead to his as she cut him off, her nails biting insistently into the back of his neck. "You can't hold yourself responsible for that, Harry."

I know, he wanted to say; wanted to believe. I know I can't, but if I can't blame me -

The end of that thought was pitiful.

- who can I blame?

"Malfoy said they were kill shots," he muttered, his mouth souring around the words. "This whole time I thought their death was some kind of accident - some unfortunate circumstance or something - but if he's right - " Harry faltered again, pained. "If he's right, they could have been someone's target, and I - I never even thought to look - "

"You were a child," Daphne reminded him. "You were told the case was cold."

"Yes," Harry sighed, "but - "