Disclaimer: I do not own the original canon nor am I making any profit from writing this piece. All works are accredited to their original authors, performers, and producers while this piece is mine. No copyright infringement is intended. I acknowledge that all views and opinions expressed herein are merely my interpretations of the characters and situations found within the original canon and may not reflect the views and opinions of the original author(s), producer(s), and/or other people.

Warnings: This story may contain material that is not suitable for all audiences and may offend some readers. This story features the death of a secondary canon character along with the off-screen violent murder of an original character who is a child. This death is due to physical abuse from a custodial parent, who used a legal loophole to get away with it. Please take personal sensitivities into consideration before and while reading.

Summary (Through the Storm): Harry had just went along with things all his life. What those in authority over him had wanted had always been his first consideration. This is how he went about discovering his own authority. He just had to fall to pieces first.

Song Recommendation(s): "Falling Apart" by Michael Schulte

Author's Note (01): This story is firmly in the "Epilogue? What Epilogue?" category. I would also like to remind people that I do not consider Cursed Child any sort of Harry Potter canon, so if you are expecting things to be as they were in Thorne's play, then you will be sorely disappointed.

Author's Note (02): This piece was written for a challenge in the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry (Challenges & Assignments) on the FFN forum. It was also written for Round 05 of the Houses Competition on the FFN forums.
The Challenge Information:
Hogwarts House: Gryffindor
Houses House: Hufflepuff
Hogwarts Subject [Task]: Charms [Prominent Use of 7]
Houses Category: Themed [Discovery]
Houses Prompt[s]: New Career/Job
Word Count: 2673

-= LP =-

Through the Storm

-= LP =-

We were running in the dark
We were following our hearts
And we would fall down
We would slowly fall apart
We would slowly fall into the dark.
It is hard to let it all go
let the past just disappear
Try to run time from an old life
But it always drags me down.
– Michael Schulte, "Falling Apart"

-= LP =-

The first time Harry questioned an order from his training supervisor he accepted that maybe he had missed something. In the barely seven weeks since he had become an auror trainee, there had been so many things which he had never heard discussed within Hogwarts. Listening to the lectures of the trainers made his conscious nag at him. Talks of the need to pay closer scrutiny to certain groups only made him remember Remus with his patched clothes and general air of hopelessness. Unable to understand the contradiction, Harry had thrown himself into the physical and magical training, accepting the orders and explanations like he had once followed Dumbledore's.

They wanted a soldier, someone fully trained for combat and warfare, a sword to be pointed at their enemies. They expected him to always be there as a protector and servant of the magical world, a shield against harm.

He didn't question that he could do what was expected of him.

He didn't question that he would, and if he was a little more vicious in sparring against the most bigoted of his colleagues, trainee and trainer alike, then no one called him on it.

It was one of the few times that he was thankful for being Harry Potter.

-= LP =-

The wizarding world had its expectations for him, and for the most part, Harry was willing to go along with it. He helped rebuild Hogwarts. It had been his first real home and working every day on the old castle had given him a chance to acclimatize to the idea of still being alive. Then he had joined the Auror Corps when Shacklebolt had made the offer. He was good at only two things, after all: quidditch and fighting dark wizards.

He knew people expected him to get back with Ginny.

Maybe he would have thought about it, but it hadn't been long after the Battle of Hogwarts (only seven months, in fact, not that he was constantly and painfully aware of how long it had been) that she met up with Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnegan for a night out that had somehow evolved into hitchhiking across Europe. No one seemed to mention what Harry thought was obvious, that the three of them seemed to be close in a way that was probably not just friendship. None of the Weasleys mentioned the possibility of it, at least.

Harry didn't want to question the reprieve too much.

If he questioned it, they may realize that Harry Potter was not one of the members of his age group who were pairing off like it was going out of fashion. Hermione and Ron had been together (more or less—that really depended upon whether they had just had one of their numerous spats recently). Katie, indomitable and ruthless as she had been as a chaser, had clearly set her eye upon Alicia. Neville was stumbling his way through dates with Hannah. Even Lee Jordan had bucked up the courage to finally ask Angelina out.

Harry quietly slipped into the role of providing companionship to George. It wasn't expected of him—he was Ron's friend, of all the Weasleys. But George was broken and put back together wrong and Harry understood what that felt like. Not a day went by that Harry wasn't aware that there are some things a body didn't recover from—like willingly letting a madman kill you without fighting to save yourself, or losing the other half of yourself. Mostly they played chess in the flat above the shop. Sometimes, they would tinker with things—potions that could be made quickly and without the fuss of a cauldron or pre-made rune tiles that made ward assembly something even a layperson could do.

Harry didn't question how George had been slowly fading in the months since the Battle. He noticed how his freckly skin had been turning a disturbing tallow color and how the ginger hair had been growing brittle. His smile never reached his brown eyes, but it had been there, like the sun peeking out from behind the last clouds of a major storm. It had been understandable—Fred hadn't just been a brother. He was George's twin—and they had been so closely bonded on so many levels.

They had made plans to meet early on what would have been the twins' twenty-first birthday. They had a whole day planned with all sort of touristy stuff in muggle London. It would have ended at the special dinner that Molly was preparing at the Burrow.

When Harry arrived at seven o'clock that morning, it was already too late to save George. The investigating agent from Department of Magical Law Enforcement had insisted on the possibility of suicide, including a great deal of disrespect for the very idea, until the attending Healer had declared that George has been dying for months of bond rupture. Harry wanted to believe that an auror would have done a better job of not jumping to conclusions. He just knew it would have been a lie.

No one blamed Harry for not noticing what he had no idea to look for in the first place.

He took to studying everything he could anyway.

It may be too little, too late for George, but he might need the information again and he needed to be prepared. Harry Potter saved people. It was what he did. It was what he was training to do better.

For the first time, Harry seriously questioned his choice of career.

Harry Potter had no choice, but he was more than just the Boy-Who-Lived.

-= LP =-

Harry finally conceded defeat a couple weeks before his nineteenth birthday. Specifically, it was July 14, and he was starting to notice the sheer plethora of sevens around the dates which change his life. The event which made him leave also involved a seven—specifically the alleged kidnapping of a seven-year-old. The kid had actually run away from her abusive father. She was still covered in bruises from his handling. She wasn't in any danger, having made it safely to her mother's care.

It had seemed to be cut and dry to Harry. The girl wasn't safe with her father; she was with her mother. He would have worshiped the person who would have offered him such a deal as a kid. He had balked at the order to arrest the mother and return the girl to her father. He had argued and fought against it.

In the end, he had played his part, taking the mother into custody while the auror he had been shadowing took the girl back to her father. Harry arranged the quickest hearing he could for her—and the best barrister he could buy. Using the Black fortune to pay the legal fees of a muggleborn witch in a custody suit against a pureblood wizard seemed incredibly apropos and he was certain that Sirius was cheering him on in the afterlife. It may be the way the law read currently, but Hermione was already pushing for different measures from her position on the Wizengamot, just as unable to let things stand as Harry was.

They were too late.

All their measures and legal maneuvering ended up being too late. For a society that had such difficulties producing children, they had failed irreparably at saving this one child who had needed them. The father, being an even bigger dick than Vernon Dursley could ever aspire to be, had announced the death by dumping the body on the mother's doorstep. Harry would have gladly taken in the bastard, except as the head of the family, he was apparently within his rights to do it.

Harry paid for the funeral and the little headstone that just bore the dates of her short life and her first name. The image of white letters against the polished black marble was burned into his mind, a memory as unfading as her name had promised she would be. That was her mother's wish when she chose the name Amara and the lie of it now hurt even more than knowing he had failed again to save someone.

He couldn't do it again.

He couldn't stay.

Harry resigned from the corps the day he turned nineteen.

He left the wizarding world the next day.

-= LP =-

Attending university was probably the craziest thing Harry had ever done, especially the way he went about it. He really only knew one way to bury the hurt and pain, and that was by filling every moment with something. He had always read things quickly, had to if he was going to read anything before he was caught by one of the Dursleys, and he had a decent memory for it all. He had never gotten into the habit of writing notes, not even after six years hanging around Hermione, but that only meant that he had a lot of practice writing things from memory.

He threw himself into getting his A-Levels for everything on the list, not aware that the list was never meant to be completely taken. It was just a matter of months before he found himself applying for a position in Cambridge's Psychology and Behavioral Sciences program. He didn't sleep longer than a few hours, before jerking awake with the dreams of Amara's broken body, so he found himself pushing through his reading assignments with desperate fervor. He tested out of far more courses than he took those first few years, but he didn't keep track, not like Hermione would have.

Weddings were popular that second year after the War. So were babies for some of the more established couples. It seemed like everyone was getting married or having their first child. Harry attended some of the weddings, but for the most part he stayed away. Hermione visited him in his little flat just off campus but Ron hadn't been comfortable in the obviously muggle space where the only magical thing was the wards and the dozens of different teas mimicking potions. Neither pressured him to come back to the wizarding world, even if neither could understand his new life. Thankfully none of the times they had dragged him out for a change of scenery had included an attempt to set him up with someone, but it did mean that he was stuck feeling like a third wheel when it was the three of them.

Ginny arrived back in Britain with all the suddenness which she had left. It was completely scandalous and utterly hilarious to discover that he had been right about the little triad. Everyone had tried to be sensitive about telling him about the pregnancy and Ginny's uncertainty over which of her men were the father. Harry didn't have the heart to tell any of them that he had already known about it all, having ran into the triad on his way from the university shortly before Ginny announced her presence in the country.

Ginny's smile had been watery when he threatened both men with his worst if they hurt her, so he didn't question why his chest ached to watch her leave. She was happy and that is what mattered.

Harry had spent his entire life following instructions given to him by various people, fulfilling whatever expectations he could to the best of his ability. He thought nothing of it when his advisor told him to report for various tests. He took the tests and did his best. He understood they were intelligence tests and various aptitude tests (he was in the psychology department; how could he not?) but the results didn't matter to him, even if they made his professors blink and stare. They did stop asking questions when he requested to test out of yet another course.

He didn't really notice when he started helping out in the main library on campus. He was just there all the time (because the more he read the more he found himself enjoying reading and there was no way even the quite sizable inheritance from his parents and godfather would be able to keep up with how fast he could go through books), and it seemed like the thing to do. When the head librarian suggested he could help more if he took some courses in the Library Science field, Harry didn't think anything of adding the courses to his list to check out. The research methodologies really did make everything easier, because he could organize things better. He also decided to keep an annotated bibliography of his reading when asked. Harry never planned to show it to anyone but occasionally, the head librarian would ask to see it.

He fell into a pattern of behavior. He studied and he read. He would attend classes and do whatever work and tests was required. Occasionally, he would test out of a course, but as the years went by, he found himself less able to do that. If his advisor asked him to fill out something or take on a specific research project, Harry did so. They weren't orders, but they were something he could do without worry. He didn't have to worry about the ethicalness of those expectations, not like he had with the Auror Department, or even with Dumbledore before that, if he was being honest.

Harry almost didn't manage to make the ceremony held for the seventh anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts. He was defending his dissertation that day. Well, one of them anyway. He had not needed to defend his dissertation for Library Science. He finished early with the defense, and while he didn't want to go through the whole nightmare of a public appearance in the world he had left behind, he had promised Hermione that he would show up if he could manage it.

It went as badly as he had imagined it going.

Then it had gotten worse when Amara's father had dared to offer a warm welcome to the prodigal hero.

Hermione maintained her mask of sternness for the need to bail Harry out for punching him until they had returned to her and Ron's little cottage in Ottery St. Catchpole. Ron had meet them with flutes of champagne, ready to toast having gotten a measure of revenge against the murdering bastard. Harry could definitely see why Hermione had left him at home with little Rose and Hugo.

Somewhere in the middle of all that drama, Harry had been struck by the realization that he really couldn't stay in Britain any longer. There were too many memories—too many reminders of his failures, of the people he had lost along the way. With two doctorates, he could do anything he wanted, and go anywhere. He had known for the last year or so that he was finishing what could be excused as legitimate education. Any more coursework would be questioned by his friends and even he would be forced to acknowledge how unhealthy a coping mechanism it could easily become.

Harry thought about the quiet peace of the library at Cambridge, where the only interruptions were students needing help. There was an order to a library but also a rhythm and a life. There was always a need for librarians, especially at a college or university, where they had higher standards and the applicants were scarcer. He could see himself doing it: being an actual fixture in an academic library, helping people with their research, and doing his own in the odd moments between shelving and organizing materials. It was what he had already been doing.

It had been a long journey, and not terribly pleasant at parts, but as July dawned that year, Harry could say that he had somehow weathered the storm that had been his life, and had made it through the darkness of it. He could finally say that the only expectations he had to fulfill were his own.

And maybe those of Georgetown University, if his interview for their open librarian position later that day went well.