Harry knew that no one would believe him if he told them what happened that Tuesday morning. Every bit of understanding he had about life, the wizarding world, and even basic human biology told him there was no way anyone would believe what happened could have been an accident, but he would go to his grave swearing on his parents' lives that it was.
Everything that happened after…well, that was a different story.
He arrived back at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place around nine in the morning after two grueling weeks tracking Death Eaters through the Amazon rainforest. The mission had been brutal, trekking through mud up to his knees, sleeping in hammocks strung between trees, and living on nothing but preserved rations that tasted like cardboard. The portkey had dropped him in London at dawn, and he'd apparated straight home, exhausted, filthy, and desperate for his own bed.
And a proper shower. Merlin, he'd been fantasizing about hot water and soap for the last three days.
But first, he checked the library for Hermione. She'd fallen asleep at her desk, surrounded by a fortress of books. Her bushy hair was even more chaotic than usual, escaping from a messy bun in all directions. Ink stained her fingers. Dark circles under her eyes looked like bruises. A half-empty cup of cold tea sat at her elbow, and the candles she'd been using had burned down to stubs.
She'd been at it again. Her relentless research into memory modification reversal that had consumed her life since the war ended. Trying to fix what she'd done to her parents. Trying to undo the unfixable.
He understood that kind of single-minded determination better than most. It was the same drive that had him volunteering for every dangerous mission the Auror office threw his way, the same need to do something instead of sitting still with his thoughts.
"Come on, Hermione," he muttered, carefully moving aside a particularly ancient-looking tome before sliding his arms under her. She barely stirred as he lifted her, just made a small sound of protest before her head lolled against his shoulder.
This wasn't the first time he'd carried her to bed, and it probably wouldn't be the last. It was just the two of them most days now. Ron was off living it up with the Chudley Cannons, playing professional Quidditch even if it was for the most hopeless team in the league. The Cannons traveled constantly. Matches across Britain and Ireland meant Ron was hardly ever in London anymore.
Harry couldn't blame his best mate for chasing his dream, especially after everything they'd been through. Fred's death had hit the entire Weasley family hard, , and Quidditch seemed to be Ron's way of dealing with the grief that still hung over them all like a fog.
Ron and Hermione had only just started dating after the battle, but between his demanding schedule and her desperate need to find a fix for what she'd done to her parents, their new relationship was spent more apart than together. They'd agreed on weekly meetups every Tuesday, where Hermione would travel to whatever godforsaken town the Cannons were playing in that week. It wasn't ideal, but they were making it work.
When she asked about looking through the Black Library for her research, Harry had handed over the keys to Grimmauld Place without a second thought. so she didn't have to worry about coming or going, or what times she could use the library. She could live with him and research whenever she wanted.
Harry understood that kind of single-minded determination better than most. Things with Ginny had become complicated. Mrs. Weasley, bless her interfering soul, had started making pointed comments about marriage and grandchildren whenever Harry showed his face at the Burrow. Ginny would go rigid every time her mum brought it up, and Harry wasn't any better. The thing was, Ginny had her own plans. She'd been offered a spot with the Holyhead Harpies and was training like her life depended on it. The last thing she needed was pressure to settle down and start popping out little Potters.
And the last thing Harry needed was that kind of pressure either, if he was being honest. His entire life up to this point had been built around one thing: not getting murdered by Voldemort. Now that the Dark Lord was well and truly dead, he'd found his groove as an Auror. The work was brutal, dangerous, and exactly what his adrenaline-addicted arse needed. Two years of hunting down the remaining Death Eaters who'd legged it after the Battle of Hogwarts had taken him across Europe and beyond.
He'd just returned from tracking the last known members of Dolohov's inner circle through the bloody Amazon rainforest and it should have been a perfectly boring Tuesday morning, except Harry made one seemingly harmless decision that would lead to complete disaster: he decided to have a shower.
In some Muggle book Dudley had been forced to read for school, an author had written about how massive cock-ups happen. Rather than one catastrophic error, these disasters were caused by a series of smaller mistakes. What happened to Harry that morning was a textbook example of that theory in action.
The first mistake was that, despite the fact that it was already late morning with weak London sunlight streaming through the window, Harry was still half-asleep and paying about as much attention to his surroundings as a concussed Niffler. He didn't notice the complete lack of clean towels hanging in the bathroom.
Too distracted by his reflection as he looked at his naked body in the mirror as it fogged up. His face had lost the last traces of boyhood, sharpening into angular planes that made him look older than his twenty-one years. His jaw was stronger now, covered with a day's worth of dark stubble that made him look dangerous. His perpetually messy black hair looked even worse, but somehow it worked on him now in a way it never had as a teenager. And the physical demands of Auror work had transformed Harry's body completely. Gone was the scrawny teenager who'd defeated Voldemort. Harry's shoulders had broadened into a powerful well-muscled frame that filled out his Auror robes in ways that made witches stop and stare on the street. A particularly vicious scar ran from his left shoulder blade down across his ribs, the remnant of a Sectumsempra that had nearly gutted him during a raid in Prague. Burn marks decorated his right arm where dragon fire had caught him during a creature relocation gone wrong. Dozens of smaller marks peppered his torso and limbs, each one a reminder of how close he'd come to not making it home.
But it wasn't just the muscle and scars that had Harry feeling particularly chuffed with his reflection that morning. His cock, already a respectable size in school, had grown into something truly spectacular. A few inches shy of the Elder Wand and after nearly three weeks of enforced celibacy in the middle of bloody nowhere, even completely soft it hung thick and heavy between his muscled thighs.
After working shampoo through his hair and taking a razor to his scraggly jungle beard, he worked up a proper lather with the expensive soap he'd nicked from a posh hotel in Rio. Because he was a twenty-year-old bloke who'd been stuck in the arse-end of nowhere for three weeks without so much as a quick wank, his body was responding to even the slightest stimulation like he was fifteen again.
Harry wrapped his large hand around his shaft and gave it a few slow, deliberate strokes, watching it swell and harden under his touch. Within moments, it had grown to its full, intimidating size, a full-wand length of swollen, veined meat jutted proudly from his body. He braced one hand against the shower wall, the hot water cascading over his shoulders as his other hand wrapped around his impressive length. His body was wound tight as a spring, and it felt bloody brilliant to finally have some privacy and hot water. He closed his eyes and let himself enjoy the sensation, working his fist slowly up and down his shaft. God, he'd missed this. Two weeks of sleeping rough in the jungle with other Aurors meant no privacy for anything, and his body was making up for lost time.
He was getting close, his breathing getting heavier as he worked himself faster, when shouting erupted from somewhere down the hall.
"DISGRACEFUL! ABSOLUTELY DISGRACEFUL!" came the shrieking voice of one of the Black family portraits.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," Harry muttered, his arousal deflating slightly at the interruption. He'd been so bloody close.
Then a wicked grin spread across his face. The portraits were already having conniptions, but he could give them a right proper shock if he paraded around naked. Nothing like a fully erect, massively endowed wizard to horrify some pure-blood bigots.