Harry's nostrils flared as he stepped through the fireplace and into Diagon Alley once more. Beneath the familiar scent of the place, he caught something else—a faint, scorched undercurrent, like the ghost of a war.
He stepped aside to let the others through and stood for a moment between Fred, George, and Ron, all of them having arrived just ahead of him, all of them studying the fireplace they had just stepped out of.
It was built into a long wall, much like the twin fireplaces lining the reception hall of the Ministry of Magic. The Ministry had erected a barrier here at the edge of what had once been the shopping district—half a mile long, ten feet high with a row of fireplaces fitted into its face, each one serving as a portal back into Diagon Alley.
Harry stepped further aside to make room for Hermione, Ginny, and Mrs. Weasley, who came tumbling out behind him one after another onto the platform.
Then he looked properly at the ground beneath his feet. It was nothing like the cobblestones he remembered—those charming irregular stones that had always given Diagon Alley its particular character. This was no concrete replacement.
It was simply rubble, pounded flat. The remnants of walls and shop fronts and street furniture compressed into a rough, grey surface that bore the scars of what had been broken and not yet rebuilt.
The Ministry, clearly, had no time or resources to level every inch of the destroyed alley. The compacted earth extended only as far as the arrival platform and along a single straight road cut through the devastation toward the open ground where the tent city of replacement shops had been established.
Beyond that narrow corridor of cleared ground, the ruins remained entirely untouched, preserved in their destruction. Broken walls jutted up at abrupt, jagged angles.
Collapsed facades lay where they had fallen, the fronts of buildings were peeled away like the faces of dolls, exposing their interiors to the sky. Beams that had once held up floors now reached up at wild angles as if still trying to perform their function for buildings that no longer existed around them.
Shattered support columns—some of them unmistakably from Gringotts, given their scale and the quality of their marble protruded from the crushed earth at angles that spoke of tremendous force applied suddenly.
They bore silent, inarguable witness to the ferocity and cruelty of what had happened here. A battle in the real sense, where the environment itself became a casualty.
"Diagon Alley," Ginny whispered.
The Weasleys and Hermione fell into the same stunned stillness around her.
The photographs in the Daily Prophet had shown damage, certainly. But a photograph cannot give you the smell of scorched stone. Cannot convey the way ruin extends in three dimensions. Cannot make you feel, in your chest, the absence of things that should be there—the sounds and smells and visual noise of a special place that has existed your entire life, reduced to this.
Nothing could have prepared them for this.
Only Harry, who had stood on battlefields before found himself drifting rather than frozen.
"Move along, please! Others need to come through—keep moving, keep the platform clear!"
A wizard wearing a bright green armband pushed through the gathered crowd toward them, projecting his voice above the noise of new arrivals who were backing up at the fireplaces behind.
Harry saw the armband as the man drew closer—silver lettering on green fabric with two words: Public Order.
A Ministry-appointed warden. One of presumably many deployed to manage the flow of people into this complicated, damaged space.
"Oh—sorry—" Harry stepped back and to the side, nodding an apology, and his eyes went to the ruins on side of the cleared main road.
There were figures there—a dozen or perhaps more moving through the wreckage, climbing over fallen stonework, using their wands to cut at sections of glassy stone where the heat of magical combat had melted materials together.
"Excuse me—are those people the owners of the shops that were here?"
"Oh—" The young warden glanced in the direction Harry indicated, and something in his expression showed his answer.
He had short brown hair and a scattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose that matched Ron's in density if not in colour. "A few of them are, maybe. Hard to tell. But most are just scavengers, hoping to find something worth taking from the rubble. We keep clearing them out and they keep coming back."
"Scavengers?" Ron squinted at the figures picking their way through the ruins, taking in the quality of their robes which appeared not ragged. A number of them were, if anything, rather well turned out.
"They're better dressed than I am, Harry. Those aren't desperate people—" He studied them a moment longer. His expression shifted from puzzlement to excitement with rapid transition.
"Maybe we should have a look as well! There could be all sorts of things buried under there—"
"I don't think there would be much point, Ron," Harry said softly, his voice remained even and certain.
Ron turned to look at him, the excitement was faltering slightly.
"If you'd stood where I was standing when Professor Watson and Voldemort fought—you'd understand. There isn't nothing left, exactly. But there's nothing intact left. Whatever was worth finding, it's unrecognizable now."
The warden had heard this kind of exchange enough times over the past days to have stopped finding it interesting.
He had spent the better part of a week fielding gawkers and commentators and theorists, people who wanted to take photographs and people who wanted to take rubble and people who simply wanted to stand in the middle of the ruins and feel something about it.
He herded them all through the funnelled exit between two rows of barriers.
The chatter of the people arriving and departing swelled around them as they cleared the entry barriers in a low, continuous hum like a disturbed hive.
People exchanged views on the battle, on the war's broader shape, on what it meant that the commercial heart of Magical Great Britain now lay in ruins.
Harry and his companions spread their attention across the murmuring crowd, listening.
What they heard surprised them—or rather, the predominant register of what they heard surprised them. Surprisingly—or perhaps not, when you thought about it, most of what drifted toward them leaned toward the optimistic.
Perhaps it was the Ministry's uncompromising public stance. Perhaps it was the Daily Prophet, which had run story after story in recent weeks lauding the victory. Whatever the source, people seemed to have arrived at a shared belief: that with Bryan Watson and Albus Dumbledore behind it, the Ministry had, in some broader sense, got the situation in hand.
"You know, darling, thank goodness for him—"
A witch in a round hat decorated with several vividly colourful feathers made no effort to lower her voice, sharing her views freely with her companion as they walked.
"I'd actually started making plans to leave London for a while, you know. But after this battle, I find I'm not nearly as worried as I was. A friend of mine who writes for the Prophet—he was hiding in one of those farm fields just up ahead during the entire thing. He watched it from beginning to end."
She lowered her voice to what she clearly considered a confidential tone, which was around the same volume.
"He told me that You-Know-Who never really got the upper hand over him. They were evenly matched at worst—and Dumbledore hadn't even stepped in yet."
Harry, Ron, and Hermione exchanged glances. Followed by small silent smiles.
They all knew perfectly well who the "him" in that conversation referred to.
Some of the other remarks about Diagon Alley itself surprised Harry more than the political ones.
"Honestly, nothing here had changed since I was born," an elderly woman was telling her equally elderly companion as they made their careful way along the cleared road. She tapped along with a walking stick, her white hair was pinned up in a bun not unlike Professor McGonagall's, Harry noticed.
"Since my mother was born, if I'm honest. And she had some opinions about it by the end. This is actually rather fresh, isn't it!"
Harry grinned. He couldn't entirely help it.
"Does she actually like what it looks like now?" he asked, pitching his voice low so it carried only to his companions.
"Oh, of course not—she can't possibly like a building site," Hermione said briskly not convinced by the old woman's breezy attitude.
Her own eyes were wide, however, as they fixed on a particular object embedded in the earth nearby—a marble column was lying at a sharp diagonal, its base was a good four or five feet in diameter while its surface still had the detail of Gringotts' official architectural style.
It lay there like a fallen giant, strangely intact given the chaos around it. Gringotts was several hundred feet behind them. This column had probably been blown here by the force of the combat.
"The reason people can manage to stay optimistic," Hermione continued, "is that they know the Ministry can't simply leave Diagon Alley in this state. The economic case alone makes rebuilding inevitable, regardless of politics. And almost everyone knows this well."
Harry nodded. She was right as usual.
"Hey—it's you lot!" They had barely cleared the arrival platform barriers and taken their first proper steps into what remained of Diagon Alley when someone on the cleared road ahead began waving enthusiastically at them.
"Harry! Ron! Hermione!"
Heads turned all around them—the side effect of having a name that attracted attention even from strangers who weren't looking for you specifically.
Harry immediately ducked his head in an automatic reflex.
"Ernie?" Ron, entirely unbothered by the attention as ever, waved back cheerfully at their Hogwarts classmate. He had clearly identified the waving figure without Harry's help.
"You're here for the shopping too?"
"Of course!" Ernie MacMillan jogged over, slightly out of breath, and greeted everyone in a hearty, genuine way.
"I'm here with Mum—she's getting my robes fitted just over there. The queue was taking forever and I got bored waiting, so I came out for a wander around."
He pointed at the expanse of ruins stretching away from them, barely containing his excitement.
"Incredible, isn't it? Professor Watson did all this. It's a shame, though—our PE lessons are ending next term, and we're still not old enough to take PE classes at NEWT level!"
Before any of them could respond, he was already moving on.
"Anyway—I'm just so glad Hogwarts is starting back up. We'll finally have a proper Quidditch season again! Hufflepuff's got a few open spots this year. I'm going to try and convince Mum to buy me a broomstick so I can try out.
Harry—you're obviously still Gryffindor's Seeker—and Fred and George aren't going anywhere, those two will be playing until they're thirty—so, Ron. What about you? Any plans for Quidditch this year?"
Ron's expression changed.
"Wood's graduated, hasn't he," he murmured, his expression was suddenly charged with longing.
"Yes, he graduated at the end of last year," Harry confirmed. He could see where this was going. "I'd expect Angelina to take over as captain now that Wood's gone. Which means Gryffindor needs a new Keeper."
Ron turned slowly to look at Mrs. Weasley. His eyes full of hope said everything the words hadn't yet said.
A broomstick. A decent racing broom cost a small fortune by almost any reasonable definition. The family's financial position had improved. But improved did not yet mean easy.
Mrs. Weasley's brow creased automatically.
"Just a Cleansweep, Mum," Ron said quickly. "Nothing remotely fancy. A basic, working broom. I'm not expecting a Nimbus or Firebolt. Just something that can keep up in the air."
Mrs. Weasley looked at Ron's face—at the woeful expression he was wearing and laughed despite herself.
"Well—I don't see why not, really. It would be coming out of your own money, after all. Go and pick something out."
Ron let out a whoop of joy that he hadn't managed once all summer.
Ernie had to get back to the fitting tent before his mother noticed his absence, but he and Ron made enthusiastic plans to meet later at Quality Quidditch Supplies to look at available models together.
Then the Harry and Weasley party set off toward Gringotts to withdraw funds for the day's shopping.
They stepped properly into the post-war Diagon Alley.
Along both sides of the Ministry-cleared road, shopkeepers had erected magical tents of every variety. To help customers know what they were selling, each tent bore an oversized banner across its peak bearing the name of the original shop.
They were relieved to find that nearly all the familiar businesses appeared to be operating again.
They strolled down the street, taking in the patchwork of tents in every shape and colour on both side, and Harry was struck by an odd sense of familiarity.
"It reminds me of the campsite at the Quidditch World Cup," he said finally.
"I was thinking exactly the same thing," Ginny said, falling easily into step beside him. She looked around with appreciation.
"You know—I think it would actually be rather nice to keep a little bit of this character, after Diagon Alley is rebuilt."
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