— I'm sorry!.. Oh, I'm sorry, please… Let me pass... just a minute... come in, ma'am... ah!
The guy rubbed his elbow dejectedly, throbbing with dull pain after meeting with the door jamb. It was necessary to manage to knock his hand on the closing door, which he had just held for one pretty girl. Which now, by the way, trying to hide a smile, hopelessly choked with laughter and, having thanked him in a crumpled way, got lost in the crowd.
"Yeah, Potter, you're in your repertoire," the guy thought, shaking his head, with a barely noticeable smile on his lips. And then his gaze accidentally caught on his wristwatch.
— Ah! I'm late! — this cry attracted the puzzled looks of passers-by to the green-eyed guy, but by and large he didn't care about them.
But there was something to look at: some short, ungainly young man in business square glasses, which, no doubt, with the calmness of their owner, add to his attractiveness, but now only brought some youthful flippancy to his appearance, jumped up on the spot as if stung, almost dropping a stack of papers. A4, and torpedoed down the street, hitting passers-by and immediately apologizing to them on the fly.
A quarter of an hour later, when the wristwatch mockingly indicated a delay of twenty-three minutes, a brunette with disheveled hair, exactly repeating the picture of local armageddon, breathing heavily, carefully piled sheets of paper on the table to a disgruntled elderly woman. The thin old woman, pursing her lips in disgust, looked at the young man standing in front of her from head to toe, and then lowered her gaze to the passport in her hands. "Jasper Oliver Moore... Gender: male... Date of birth: December 30, 1988… Not married..."
— I assume that you are the same young man looking for a job that called me three days ago?.. Mr. Moore, employees are not allowed to be late in our library, so you should know. But for the first time, I forgive you. Our working day is from ten in the morning to eleven at night. Your task for today is to study the catalog, learn how to navigate in the library and sort out that stack of newspapers by dates. You can proceed.
— Thanks for the explanation, ma'am. And, perhaps, I'll get to work, — the guy shook his head and trudged to a long cabinet, near which there was a pedestal with a weighty volume, in which, apparently, all the books that were in the city library of New York for all the years of the existence of this notebook were recorded, back feeling the tenacious gaze of an old woman, whose whole appearance just screamed: "I'm watching you. Just try to throw something out!"
Picking up a decrepit volume, which weighed, by the way, not a little, Harry, more precisely, Jasper Moore went to the reading room.
Turning over the pages every minute, the magician ran over the ink lines with his eyes and memorized them. More precisely, his consciousness remembered, but his thoughts were about something else entirely. "I've been in this world for two years now..." — Harry glanced at his watch. — "In a few minutes I will be exactly like two years." Bending over the catalog, the part-time librarian smiled gently, remembering how long it took him to adapt to the new rhythm of life, how long he adapted to the new world, trying to forget a lot, because he had a chance to start literally from scratch. And what he did at first, realizing that this world was not much different from his, except for the magical society (although there were very specific analogues), was to make documents for himself and conjure official records of his birth and studies with a wand in a remote town — he did not need problems with the local Muggle laws.
Then he bought an inexpensive land in the mountains — some descendant of people who fell ill with the famous gold rush, happily parted with an unnecessary plot for a relatively low price. Where did Harry get the money from? It's very simple — I just wandered around various ancient ruins, invoking the accio spell every five minutes and naming gold and jewelry, and then handed over all this stuff — under the spell of glamour, of course — to various jewelry stores and shops of dubious legality, subjugating some little things with a reparo spell. A simple and uncomplicated job for a wizard, which brought a lot of money.
No, of course, it was possible to just transfigure the pebbles into dollars, but the spell will come to naught sooner or later, well, by that time the money may already be with completely different people and ... in general, his Gryffindor nobility played in Harry. I didn't want to cheat for no reason. Well, as it is... in a lonely walk among the fragments of someone else's past, you can think well about your life. There, Harry went through all five stages of acceptance. And if he had already experienced denial in his own world, then the old ruins suffered significantly from unrestrained elemental magic (uncontrolled due to the rage of the magician). However, the ruins as they were, so they remained - that was their convenience. Bargaining and depression merged into one — Potter wandered for hours through the fields, mountain slopes, forest oaks, sat near the sea, looking aimlessly into the distance and said… he recited everything that had accumulated over seventeen years of life completely spoiled by lies, betrayal and his own naivety. Sometimes he even talked so much that he caught himself just admiring his voice, the way it sounds, completely without delving into the meaning of the words spoken. Such moral tossing lasted for a whole year and a half. But then, returning to the woodcutters' shack — a house on the purchased land — Potter was calm. Not to say that he completely let go of everything that was and still languished in his soul like hot coals, but he was calm.
So he lived as a hermit for another four months, studying the new world (fortunately, no one forbade him to apparate to different parts of the world and borrow newspapers, watch news and analyze unnoticed) and doing animagia. By the fifth month, the sociopathic being realized with all his being that he wanted to live somewhere among people. And not just in some God-forsaken settlement, and not even in a small town: Little Winging is still etched with its unnatural ideal beauty into the inflamed memory. He wanted to go to a real Big city. It was with a capital letter, because, as a very boy, Harry dreamed that someone kind and good would come and take him away from the evil Dursleys to the Big City - this was the biggest and most significant childhood dream-hope. At least until the letter came from Hogwarts.
So the Boy-Who-Hated-His-Nickname started a selection of cities. Due to the fact that the young magician had completely abandoned Muggle school, therefore, he knew only three languages: English, a little Latin and oral parseltongue — whether Moore could read it he did not know, because he had not yet met him in writing. Countries where the last two languages were spoken either never existed, or they have already gone down in history. Having eliminated other options (Oceania islands and small countries did not suit him), the wizard stared at the remaining few countries: England, India and the USA.
Something inside him was painfully scratching at the slightest mention of his Homeland, so Potter crossed out England with a heavy heart. India was not attracted by its climate: it was too hot, and it stood out against the background of the locals very much. However, he left a peaceful country "just in case": it is not known what life is preparing, so it will not hurt to prepare waste routes.
Smiling contentedly, he focused on the major cities and megacities of the USA. And there were a lot of them: Washington, Austin, New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago. Such a large selection made one's eyes run away, and the last city reminded one of Trelawney, a divination teacher who could only predict a painful death, slurp a disgusting brew of her own cooking and rant for hours about the beautiful Capital of the Winds. One memory led to another — once Trelawney, clearly withdrawn into herself, told them about the real, albeit forbidden fortune-telling for the move. It was forbidden because it included blood magic; very primitive, but still forbidden, as Dark Arts.
Apparently, then the Gryffindor's great past began to play in one place and he drew a clumsily oblique hexagonal star on the floor without any fear - well, what he could do! — at each end of the star, he wrote the name of the city and already dropped four drops of his blood on it, and then put an elder wand in the center of a kind of pentagram and whispered, quietly and clearly: "Point it out." The first Gift of Death spun counterclockwise for a long time, spitting hot sparks (Harry even jumped away, keeping his distance), then darted from Austin to Houston, and then suddenly stopped at New York.