Between Thought and Reality

Chapter 1

Harry hated his life.

Funny how that worked. Here he was, 25 years old, an Auror like he’d wanted to be since he was 14 years old, and Voldemort was dead in the ground for almost 8 years now.

Everything was exactly as Harry once hoped his future would be, and yet Harry hated his fucking life.

“Let me get that cut,” Jordy Michaels said, pulling up the sleeve of Harry’s red Auror robes to heal the small wound that had stopped bleeding at least half an hour ago. Jordy was a fellow Auror, a half-blood like Harry but ten years older and a bit of an older brother figure for Harry throughout his career so far.

“We’d best get to the King’s Head within the next fifteen minutes or else I’m going to curse someone. Anyone,” Sonia Wainwright said with a huge, dark scowl on her face. She was older even than Jordy but looked younger than him. Harry had never personally checked what she kept in her trousers, but he was absolutely convinced that she had bigger balls than him and Jordy combined. Sonia was a muggleborn with something to prove and that showed in her actions. She was possibly even more reckless than Harry, and that was saying something.

“Yeah,” Harry sighed in agreement while Jordy finished patching him up. Harry got up from his chair, looked around his messy desk if there wasn’t anything that needed his immediate attention and then followed Sonia and Jordy out of the Auror department and through the bowels of the Ministry of Magic.

Harry hated his fucking life.

It had become a mantra over the years that got stuck in his head sometimes, especially after the kind of day he’d had.

For the umpteenth time Mulciber the elder had escaped before they could arrest him. Mulciber the younger had died during the final battle at Hogwarts, but his father, Konrad Mulciber, a contemporary of Tom Riddle during his Hogwarts years, was still at large. The man was old but that didn’t stop him from being slick as a weasel when it came to staying out of the Ministry’s hands.

The problem was that he had help from the inside. The even bigger problem was that they weren’t sure where that help was coming from exactly, so every time they had a lead on Mulciber, the man was either waiting for them with an array of creative but deadly traps at the ready, or he was long gone already. Either way, Mulciber had been at large since the final battle and Harry would really, really like to arrest the fucker someday soon before the Death Eater managed to die a natural death from old age. Mulciber was a known rapist and murderer and deserved to pay for what he’d done.

But he had help, and Harry and his colleagues didn’t have a clue who was feeding him vital information and thus for years they tried but failed to arrest him.

Harry hated his fucking life because nothing had fucking changed.

Oh, sure, Voldemort was dead and they’d won the war against that madman, but ultimately, everything had gone back to the way things had been before the second wizarding war. The Ministry of Magic still ran on nepotism, as did most of the wizarding world. Muggleborns had a hard time getting employment because the wizarding world was a small place and not many jobs opened up at any given time, and when they did people had a tendency to give those jobs to those they knew best, mostly through family connections.

There was a reason Sonia was as reckless and competitive as she was. She’d had to work five times as hard to get where she was compared to the average pureblood. Hermione complained about it all the time as well, how despite her obvious intellect she wasn’t getting the promotions she deserved in the Department of Law enforcement while other, far less talented but better connected colleagues of hers advanced in their careers without any effort.