𝐃𝐑𝐀𝐑𝐑𝐘 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐔𝐄 2008

Homecoming

Title: Homecoming
Team: Epilogue
Author: novembersnow
Prompt: Temperance
Wordcount: Approx. 27,000
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Infidelity, sort of (divorce in progress)
Summary: Harry thinks spending two weeks as a guest lecturer at Hogwarts will offer the perfect chance to get away from his troubles. Then he meets his assigned faculty guide: Potions Master Draco Malfoy.

Well, we all write our own endings
And we all have our own scars,
But tonight I think I see what it's all about.
—Vienna Teng

The whispers started in September.

It wasn't the first time, and Harry knew it almost certainly wouldn't be the last. Even nearly a quarter-century after the (final) fall of Voldemort, he knew all too well that British wizarding society still looked to him as something of a hero—and, worse, a celebrity. He declined requests for interviews or comments unless they were directly related to his work as Head Auror. And once photographers from Witch Weekly and other rags got a taste of Ginny's still world-class Bat Bogey Hexes, they'd stopped following his family around.

That didn't stop tongues from wagging, though.

Harry had noticed the pattern long ago: For a few days, low voices would come to a halt as soon as he entered a room, and those at fault would either grow red-faced in embarrassment at nearly being caught, or else look smug to be the possessors of secret, no doubt salacious, knowledge about the great Harry Potter. Within a week or two, the awkward silences and heightened awareness of his presence would taper off, and things would return to normal—until the next rumor caught fire.

Harry really didn't give a damn anymore. He'd long since got past allowing others to see him bothered by the stories idle wizards and witches dreamed up to entertain themselves about his supposed life outside of the spotlight. And certainly Kingsley and his superiors in the Auror Office hadn't let the rumor mill color their judgment of his performance, or prevent their eventual recommendation of his promotion to head up the entire Auror Office. It was precisely because he'd earned his colleagues' and most of the public's respect that the whispers remained just that.

This wasn't to say they weren't an annoyance—or that there wasn't occasionally a spark of truth to them. A rumor that Harry liked to dress up in women's clothing had kept Ginny in stitches for weeks (that one had started after a leaked report of a large-sized witch's robe having been delivered to the Potter home—it had been a birthday gift for Ginny's mother). Stories about how Ginny was a hermaphrodite or Harry kept a pleasure dungeon in the basement were shrugged off easily enough (although the insinuation that Auror Potter enjoyed the art of inflicting punishment just a bit too much had made for a handful of very interesting arrests in the weeks before that one finally died a merciful death). But when Lily came home from her first term at Hogwarts and asked what a "concubine" was and whether her mother really had been one to Voldemort when she was Lily's age, Ginny nearly had to physically restrain Harry from storming the gates at Hogwarts and demanding to know which children's wretched parents were filling their minds with such filth.

"I knew what I was getting into when I married you," she'd said that night in bed, her head tucked against his chest, her voice carrying a touch of weariness that made him wrap his arm more snugly around her, pull her closer. "It's no worse, really, than what people used to say when we were dating."

That she was a gold digger, a starfucker, a whore. Harry remembered. And he remembered the few stupid, supposedly well-meaning people who'd presented the lies to his face as fact—people whom he'd subsequently made a point of cutting from his social and professional circles.