The F Words:

A Harry Potter Fanfiction Cycle

by

Antosha

With thanks
to my betas aberforths_rug and Sherylyn,
to the Peons at PFW,
and to all of folks who've read and reviewed these fics!

Contents

The F Words

Friends

Fame

The F Word

Family

First

Forever

Folly

Fortune

Fireworks

F Words Addenda

Fidelias

Fortnight

Two Incomplete Fics

The F Words

This series of fics was written immediately following the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Some of them were responses to challenges from LiveJournal communities catchmysnitch and takingitinturns, but all of them flowed out of the unanswered questions with which the book left me.

The first group of stories—from "Friends" to "Folly" are set during the year immediately following chapter 36 of Deathly Hallows, "A Flaw in the Plan." The last two fics, "Fortune" and "Fireworks", take place about ten years after the epilogue, "Nineteen Years Later."

At the end of the ebook, you'll find a section of "addenda"—fics that weren't originally part of the series, but which I set in the same ficverse.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or comments—about the stories or about this ebook—feel free to email me at anthoshachekhonte@gmail.com.

Antosha
March 6, 2012

Friends

Remus and Tonks’s was the worst. Not that the others hadn’t been dreadful—Colin’s, which was just unreal, Dennis pale and unblinking by the grave with their Muggle parents; Mrs. Weasley wailing at Fred’s, gathering her remaining children to her expansive bosom so that all that Harry could see was a forest of red hair and blotchy faces. And one bright, brown eye, locked on his.

He hadn’t been able to find an opportunity to talk to Ginny; it hadn’t seemed right, when there was so much else to deal with, when there were things that needed to be acknowledged first. And there was so much that the two of them needed to talk about. At the reception after Fred’s, he had so wanted to sneak her away, but anywhere that Harry went there was a press of people—friends, well-wishers, reporters. Romilda Vane had shown up in a set of black robes that looked much better suited to a nightclub than a memorial and had sniffled and rubbed as close to Harry as she could until he had hissed, “You’re sixteen, for God’s sake! Did your mother let you leave the house in that outfit?”

Romilda had burst into tears in earnest, and had fled; Ginny shot him a blotchy smirk and then went back to consoling her mother.

Tonks and Remus, though…

There were very few mourners—even after all that had happened, few mourned the death of a werewolf; and Tonks was tarred as a half-breed blood-traitor by one group, a Black by another, a renegade by many in the MLES, and the degenerate who married and coupled with a murderous creature by most of the rest.

Most of the surviving members of the Order were there, but only Charlie represented the Weasleys. Bill was at Shell Cottage with Fleur, who was feeling ill, Percy was back in hospital—though the Healers were very pleased with his progress—and George was in no condition to attend a second funeral the morning after his twin’s, nor were their parents—the Healers had apparently given them enough Dreamless Sleep Potion to keep them out through the afternoon. Ron had left with Hermione immediately after Fred’s service to collect her parents from Australia. Charlie mumbled glumly to Harry that he and Ginny had drawn straws to see who would represent the family at the Tonks’s service, and who would keep picking up the pieces at home. “I won,” Charlie said.

“Lucky you,” grunted Harry, wishing more than anything that that long straw could have ended up in a smaller, softer, less burn-marked hand.

“Funny,” Charlie said, though his smile was somber. “She said exactly the same thing.”

As the small group congregated by the dual gravesite, Harry saw Andromeda Tonks standing beside the wizard with the tufty hair who had presided over Dumbledore’s funeral and Bill and Fleur’s wedding. Her face was as pale as Harry remembered her sister Bellatrix’s being, but the deep sorrow that etched it was an expression that Harry couldn’t imagine Mrs. Lestrange ever wearing. In her arms a tiny baby blew bubbles and tried to eat the hair that seemed to have much more grey in it than Harry remembered seeing on his one meeting with Tonks’s mother the year before.

Teddy.

Harry’s godson.

Behind them Harry spied a head of wild, dirty blonde hair. Standing slightly apart from the other mourners, Luna swayed, tree-like, in a white dress that looked quite lovely on her, but which would have been far more appropriate if she had been getting married than attending a burial. As she leaned gently from side to side, her lips moved, and Harry was seized with the sudden certainty that she was reciting her own eccentric farewell to the dead. As the lovely sing-song voice of the presiding wizard droned on, Harry wished that he could hear whatever it was that she was saying or singing; he was sure that he would find far more comfort in her odd words than in any platitudes the nice old gent might spout.

There came the now-familiar burst of flame, and the two corpses were encased in a block of granite.

It was finished.

A line quickly formed to offer Mrs. Tonks condolences; Harry made sure that he was last. He noticed that Luna had wandered off among the other gravestones and seemed to be talking to them.

“I’m really sorry for your loss, Mrs. Tonks,” Harry murmured when he finally reached the front of the line.

She favored him with a sad smile that immediately brought to mind her daughter’s, and Harry found himself truly crying for the first time. “You know you must be in bad shape,” she said, handing him one of the conjured handkerchiefs that she was holding in her free hand, “when Harry Potter can find your lot tragic.”

He took the handkerchief and returned her smile. “Tonks… Nymphadora was… the best. She was just… And Remus. I…”

“I know, Harry,” she answered, and the tears were flowing down her aristocratic cheeks again. She rocked little Teddy, who was fast asleep. “They were very proud to be counted your friends.”

Harry started to say he regretted it, that he wished that they hadn’t been his friends—that they might have survived—but he couldn’t. He knew that it wasn’t true. “Sorry about your husband, too,” he sniffled, and she nodded.

They stood there, weeping, for a good long time. When he finally felt as if he could talk, Harry said, “I know there wasn’t a ceremony or anything, but Remus asked me to be Teddy’s godfather. If you need—”

“Teddy will stay with me,” Andromeda said, and for the first time since they had actually been introduced, Harry saw some of the Black fierceness in her eyes.

“Of course!” Harry agreed, relieved. He had considered the possibility that Mrs. Tonks might wish to be rid of a constant reminder of her loss, but the idea of raising a baby, when he was only seventeen himself… “But please—if there’s anything that I can do. Any time that I can help... Money—I’ve got more than I can use, including some that you and he are more entitled to than I am…!”

At this Andromeda laughed moistly. “Merlin!” she said. “Can you imagine what old Aunt Walpurga would say if Teddy or I were to step into that house? The blood-traitor and her half-breed grandson?” Again, her smile had a Tonks-like air of mischief to it. “Well, I turned my back on the Black family long ago, Harry, and I want none of what was theirs. But thank you. I think we will be fine—but I can’t say that a helping hand would be unappreciated. Raising babies is hard work.” Leaning forward and kissing him on the cheek, she added, “And a child needs a man around sometimes, Harry. I couldn’t be prouder than if my Teddy had you for a role model.”

Blushing and continuing to cry, Harry thanked her and they parted with a commitment from Harry to spend at least two afternoons every week with his godson. Harry had wanted to promise more—to come every day—but Andromeda had insisted. “You’ve a life to live, Harry. There are other worthy demands on your time and heart than this one, I think.”

Harry approached the tombstone: though it was grey, the stone was shot through with veins of purple that Harry felt sure that both Remus and Tonks would have approved of. He began tracing the two names with his fingers.

“Can’t believe it,” sighed a gruff voice—Charlie. “She was my best mate at Hogwarts, Tonks. Potions partners for seven years. First Hogsmeade date. First kiss. I mean, not like we were aflame with passion, or whatever it is that silly Days of Destiny program that Mum listens to is always on about. It’s just hard to think…” He shook his head; the hair seemed finally to have grown out from the wedding the previous summer.

“Yeah,” Harry muttered. “And Remus…”

“If ever a bloke deserved happiness… Well, I guess they had it, even if it wasn’t for very long.” Charlie’s bluff gaze found Teddy and his grandmother, who were thanking the wizard who had presided over the funeral. “Oi,” said Charlie with a start. “Speaking of blokes who deserve some happiness. My little squirt of a sister wanted me to tell you that she has the rest of your birthday present, and maybe you can come by this Saturday to collect it. That this Saturday happens to be a day when Mum and Dad are going over to Shell Cottage to spend some time with the eldest and his lovely lady, and that Ginny’s arranged for me to take George back to his shop for the first time…. Well, that’s probably just a coincidence.”

“Probably,” Harry said, very aware that not only could he not stop crying, but he couldn’t keep his cheeks from reddening either.

“Listen, Harry,” said Charlie, an atypical seriousness in his tone, “our Ginny is as tough as nails. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t treat her right. She’s more than capable of making your life miserable if you don’t—and six… And five brothers will back that up.”

“I won’t,” Harry answered fervently. “I could never hurt her. I promise.”

“I think that’s a promise you’ve already broken, Harry.” Harry was suddenly very aware that Charlie’s shoulders were nearly twice the width of his own. “It’s only because Ginny herself made it… painfully clear that she knew you never meant to hurt her that you haven’t had a visit from the lot of us who are still standing. So I’m just saying—”

“There’s only one person in the world whose needs I care about anywhere near as much as I do Ginny’s,” Harry said, looking into Charlie’s deep blue eyes, “and that’s my godson’s.”

Charlie frowned at him for a moment and then nodded. “Okay.” Charlie started to walk away, but turned back. “Oi, Harry?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“Dunno what gift it is that Ginny’s got in mind for you, and I really don’t want to. But whatever it is, take it from me—birds love to be thanked properly. So do it right.”

Thinking that this was probably yet another tidbit from the book he’d never had a chance to read—Twelve Failsafe Ways to Charm Witches—he smiled. “Right,” he said as Charlie grinned, waved and departed. “Absolutely.”

Harry turned back to the tomb, his mind filled with images of bright eyes and soft, flower-scented hair and… So many things to say. To talk about. Hell, Remus, he thought, wish I could have asked you for some advice. And then he considered the two who lay beneath the stone, and realized that Remus was even more useless with the whole romance thing than Harry was himself. And Tonks probably would have been much more helpful, but her advice would almost certainly have been humiliatingly practical.

He found himself laughing as he cried; he removed his glasses, which were useless at this point, and laid both hands on the stone, which was warming in the late spring sun.

“Laughing at funerals is a good sign,” said an airy voice not far from him. “It keeps the Nargles from running wild.”

Barely startled—as if he had been expecting just such a statement—Harry laughed. “We wouldn’t want that,” he said.

“Oh, no,” said Luna, and then did something that she had never done: she circled her arms around his chest and lay her head on his shoulder. Harry found the gesture comforting, but at the same time it was so out of the usual sort of thing that passed between them that he stood stiffly in her hug for a moment before patting her back awkwardly. “Oh, Ginny was right,” Luna murmured into his neck. “Your shoulders are very nice.”

“Nicer than Dean’s?” he asked, his laugh thinner than normal.

“His are lovely, but yours truly are nice, Harry.” She snuggled in and sighed. “She talked all last autumn about how she missed them, and now I see why.”

“She missed… my shoulders?”

“Well, she missed other parts as well,” Luna answered. “Your eyes and your neck. Your lips. Your chest—”

“Right,” Harry said briskly. “That’s good to know.” Harry’s mind, which he had spent a year disciplining not to think of her at all (except perhaps as a moving dot on a map) suddenly began cataloguing all of the very various parts of Ginny, seen and unseen, visible and ethereal, that it had missed. There were many. “So! You and Dean!”

“Do you think so?” Luna asked, slowly releasing him.

“Sure,” he said. He hadn’t really thought about it much—just noticed the time they spent together at Shell Cottage, and a couple of times holding hands. Now that he thought about it, Harry thought it was lovely—Luna deserved to have someone great, and aside from Neville, who seemed to feel about Luna the way that Harry did about Hermione, Dean was one of the few boys that he could think of who really deserved her. It was easy to admit it, now that Dean was no longer a rival for Ginny’s affections: he was a good bloke. “Yeah. I think so.”

“How nice,” Luna said. “His shoulders may not be as pleasant as yours, but I’m rather fond of his sternum, and he kisses rather well. Also, he is very kind to my father without being at all condescending, and not many people are.”

“Luna,” Harry said, and after months of not even thinking of it, the image of Xenophilius Lovegood’s fear-twisted face suddenly filled Harry’s mind, “is your dad okay?”

“I think he’s rather wonderful,” answered Luna, who was now trailing a finger along the edge of the tombstone.

“Yeah,” mumbled Harry. “But… When… after… We were here—”

“When he tried to turn you over to the Ministry Death Eaters, you mean,” Luna said, and her voice had an unusually hard edge to it. “I was very angry with Daddy about that. You could have been hurt, and then you wouldn’t have been able to help rescue me and Mr. Ollivander and the rest. Daddy is wonderful, but he is sometimes a bit lacking in vision.”

“But they didn’t hurt him?”

“Oh, no,” answered Luna, her tone tranquil once again. “Hermione’s stratagem worked. They were very pleased with my father for being so cooperative. They didn’t beat him or curse him at all.”

“Good,” Harry said. As Luna smiled back at him, another memory came back. “Oh! Luna! I’m so sorry! Your room! We ruined it.”

“Oh, Harry,” said Luna, her fingers touching his left shoulder lightly, “it was only the floor and my bed. The part of my room that I truly cared about is perfectly fine.” She gave him a sunny smile, and instantly an image of five beaming faces came to him, bound together by chains of friendship.

“Do you think you’ll be adding Dean up on your ceiling?” he asked.

She stared at him placidly for a moment. “I don’t know. That would be nice. But Harry, even if I never find another friend to add to my ceiling, the five of you will always be there, and that will always be enough.”

“Oh,” he said, and, “thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Harry.” Luna smiled again and then leaned down and whispered to the tombstone. “Do not worry about young Theodore. Your mother will take very good care of him, Nymphadora, I am sure, and Harry will help her. And we will help him.” And then, lifting the train of her white, lacy robes with one hand, she waved goodbye to Harry with the other and disappeared with a pop so quiet that he could have almost convinced himself that it wasn’t there.

Only he knew that it was.

Fame

Sitting in his best black robes, which Kreacher had pressed and brushed until they positively glistened, listening to one speaker after another describe a person that he wouldn’t in a million years recognize, Harry decided that he would rather have been back at one of the funerals.

True, Fred had been, as Mr. Diggory said, “warm and generous to a fault,” but glancing down the length of the head table at a line of grave faces beneath bright red hair, Harry knew that they were thinking, as he was, that Fred would have hated this. Hadn’t he said…?

But that had been about his wedding—the wedding Fred would never have. In a way, Harry thought, Fred had got his wish: he’d never had to bother with all of the fuss of getting married. Harry glanced down the table again, spying Ginny, who was looking out into the packed atrium of the Ministry with bright eyes and her chin held high as if daring anyone to try to make her start to cry.

What would she look like in white, rather than black? What would it feel like to stand, holding those small, strong hands, staring into those same bright eyes?

Would she still be interested? Perhaps someone else…

But she wanted to give him the rest of his birthday present. Whatever that meant.

For a moment, that morning in her room so long ago pushed the present away and he could feel the slide of her lips against his, her hips against his, her unique, floral scent and the warmth of her hair between his fingers…

Then the audience clapped politely, and the present pushed its way back into his awareness.

Beside Harry, Hermione sniffled; Ron, who was looking thoroughly bored, nonetheless squeezed her hand.

The rest of his birthday present. What did that mean?

Professor Flitwick began to rhapsodize about Fred’s imagination and his innate skill with Charms—and the ways in which those skills had saved lives during the past, dark year. This Fred, at least, was one that Harry could recognize.

Looking out into the first row, Harry found the Grangers, newly returned from Australia, looking happy and tan, beaming up at their daughter. The last year—the war, the terror, the deaths—hadn’t happened for them, and Harry couldn’t help but envy them.

Beside them sat two families who looked as if they would rather eat ground glass than hear about Fred Weasley’s virtues: the Malfoys, who were still looking much the worse for wear, and a trio that could only be the Parkinsons. Draco looked supremely uninterested, and Pansy kept swatting his hand from off of her knee. Of the six, only Narcissa Malfoy seemed to be able to maintain an expression of polite interest.

It was possible, Harry thought, that he felt more warmly and more forgiving of her than towards any of the rest because he owed her his life.

Three rows behind Pansy, Harry spotted another head of black hair that he could have done without having seen: Romilda Vane, who was wearing the same ridiculous set of robes that she’d worn to Fred’s funeral. Her face was turned towards the podium with an expression of studied fascination that Harry didn’t buy for a minute, in part because she had her torso faced towards him, her arms pressing together a cleavage that had never held any interest for Harry, but certainly not at a ceremony such as this.

Finally Kingsley got up and made the actual presentation—Order of Merlin, Second Class. George got up and accepted it, speechless for once, the huge audience applauded and Harry’s sense of ill ease quadrupled. Like the crowd, who began to lean forward, he knew what was coming next.

Thankfully, there would be only one testimonial: Professor McGonagall. Standing tall and ramrod-straight as ever, she strode to the podium, touched her wand to her throat and began to speak. “Over the course of nearly fifty years as a professor at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, it has been my pleasure,” she said, her voice echoing in the huge space now unencumbered by any monumental statue, “it has been my pleasure to teach students who were great scholars and taught me more than a thing or two about my own subject; great citizens, who re-imagined the social structure of Hogwarts and of our society; outstanding theorists and spell-weavers whose imagination and skill when it came to magic knew no bounds.”

Peering out into the crowd. McGonagall closed her mouth in its familiar straight, thin-lipped line before the edges twitched up, cat-like. “Harry Potter was never one of those students.”

The audience gave a quiet collective gasp; Hermione let out a huff of surprise. Then, at the other end of the table, Ginny snorted and Harry couldn’t hold it in any longer—he had to laugh, and his laughter set off a long rolling wave of tittering that broke across the hall.

When the crowd had finally quieted again, Professor McGonagall continued, “Please don’t misunderstand me—Mr. Potter was a more than passable student. I am given to understand that when it came to Defense, he was first in his class, topping even the indomitable Miss Hermione Granger. And he was, of course, an excellent Seeker. Yet he was not what we usually think of at Hogwarts as a student leader.” She leaned forward on the podium, something that Harry had seen her do to great effect a thousand times in the classroom—but never from the side. “Yet, as we have all discovered, Harry Potter is truly the best kind of leader—one who leads not by speeches or by force of will, but simply by example. From the time that I met him, Mr. Potter’s senses of justice and of duty and his utter lack of a sense of self-preservation were so close to the core of who he was that scarcely a year went by while he was at school in which I did not fear quite seriously for his life at least twice. Against his own stated intentions, he became the conscience of the school in the fight against the hatred and bigotry represented by the so-called Lord Voldemort, when, during the two most shameful periods in which it was my duty to serve as a teacher at Hogwarts, an underground group of students known as Dumbledore’s Army chose him as their teacher and—whether he acknowledged it or not—as their role model. Throughout the year in which Dolores Umbridge terrorized students and faculty, attempting to turn the night of the Dark Lord’s return into the balmy day of denial, and during this past year, when Hogwarts became as much a prison as a place of learning, Harry Potter’s steadfastness, his courage and his unwillingness to settle for what many of us heard Albus Dumbledore refer to as that which was easy, as opposed to that which was right—all of these served as beacons to the community at Hogwarts and throughout wizarding Britain. For we all knew that while the Death Eaters and their friends continued the attempt to throttle the best of what we have to offer, yet while there was breath in Harry Potter’s body, he would not rest, would not submit, would not stop fighting until justice truly was served and the Side of Light truly victorious.”

Bright-faced, McGonagall paused to catch her breath, and Harry found that he too was breathless—he did not think that he had ever heard his one-time Head of House speak so forcefully at such great length. She continued again, her expression more somber. “Many followed Harry’s example over the past year, fighting on when all seemed hopeless. Some paid grievously for doing so. Some died. And yet we fought on because we knew and trusted that Harry himself would do no less. Nor did he. In spite of his tender years and of the great risk to his own person, he waged the campaign that eventually made it possible to vanquish the dark shadow that lay across our bright land. He delivered himself up to Voldemort to save those of us who were fighting at the castle, and through that act, he protected us more potently than even he could have known. He delivered himself up in the sure knowledge that he was walking to his death, and yet when that long night at last gave way to dawn, it was Voldemort who lay there dead in the Great Hall of Hogwarts, his army defeated, and not this young man. It is my honor, my privilege and my pleasure to present to you this young leader—this young hero. Harry. James. Potter.”

If Harry had thought that he was breathless before, it was nothing to what he felt now as the entire throng let out a roar such as Harry had never heard. He felt as if he were Apparating, squeezed under the weight of the tumult. Astonished, he sat there, mouth agape, as the cataract of sound rolled over him, until Ron and Hermione began pushing him up and towards the podium. He stumbled, blinking, to where Professor McGonagall stood, smiling broadly, and he was so overwhelmed by a feeling of warmth for this stern Scot that he did something he could never in a million years have imagined himself doing: he threw his arms around her and embraced her.

“Oh, my!” Professor McGonagall stiffened in Harry’s arms—it shocked him to realize how much taller than her he now was—before patting his back with a fluttering hand. “That will do, Potter,” she said in what was no doubt meant to be a stern tone, and Harry released her. She was standing imperiously again, but her cheeks sported vivid red circles as she strode back to her chair, and Harry smiled as the ovation washed on.

“Not going to hug me too, are you?” rumbled a low, unmistakable voice in Harry’s ear, and Harry was suddenly reminded of what was about to happen. Turning, he saw that Kingsley Shacklebolt was grinning, but apprehensive.

“Think you’re safe,” Harry mumbled, and Kingsley smiled, casting a Sonorus as he turned to the crowd.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the acting Minister for Magic, his bass tones rattling the glass windows that overlooked the atrium and quieting the last cheers, “there is very little for me to say. All of you know Harry Potter, or at least believe that you do. All of you know what he did to end the war and to sweep away the corruption that had attempted to choke our society at its source. When the Wizengamot passed the act founding the Order of Merlin over four hundred years ago, the virtues that were to qualify one for membership were enumerated as follows: valor, charity of spirit, honor and humility. I have known Mr. Potter for the better part of three years, and in that time have personally seen him embody each and every one of those virtues not once, but on numerous occasions. It is with a great sense of honor—and perhaps a little humility on my own part—that I present to Harry James Potter the Order of Merlin, First Class.”

Harry bowed his head as he had been told to do at this point, and he could feel the lump in his throat growing as Kingsley slipped the ribbon on which the heavy medal hung around his neck.

As Harry straightened, about to thank the Minister formally, he was knocked breathless as Kingsley’s arms crushed him.

“Didn’t say I wouldn’t hug you,” Kingsley laughed in his ear.

“Thanks a lot!” Harry laughed, rubbing his ribs only partly for effect. The Ministry officials on one side didn’t seem to know what to do with all of these displays of affection, but beyond them, Harry could see the entire Weasley clan laughing. All but Fred. And of course Ron, who was on the other side, his own brand-new Order of Merlin bouncing on his chest in time with Hermione’s matching medal as they both cheered and laughed.

There was another loud ovation, this one less deafening than the first, but no less lengthy. Harry looked out into the audience, looking for and finding familiar faces. There were no frowns now. Even the Malfoys were smiling, though Harry didn’t blame them for smiling less than warmly. He wasn’t sure that they were even capable.

Kingsley touched his wand to his own neck and then to Harry’s before stepping back from the podium, leaving Harry entirely alone.

Again the multitude fell silent, and again, Harry felt the weight of their anticipation press down on him.

Taking a glass of water and draining it without feeling any less dry, Harry looked around the audience, knowing how to start but not sure that he could. He hated speaking to groups, and here a thousand witches and wizards were waiting to hear what he had to say—more, he realized, remembering at last that the Wizarding Wireless Network was carrying this event live.

At one of the tables towards the back set up for the members of the press, Harry saw Luna Lovegood’s unmistakable mop of dirty blonde hair. She seemed to be smiling as calmly as ever, and seeing her seemed to fill him with some of that same calm; when at last he began to speak, it was to her moon-like face. “Minister Shacklebolt, members of the Wizengamot, ladies and gentlemen…” He took a deep breath and found that he felt less nervous with every word. “Thank you. Thank you. I am overwhelmed that you have given someone as young as I am so great and so heavy an honor. Seven years ago, I didn’t even know the magical world existed, and yet here I am, singled out to accept its most prestigious medal, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that, in addition to gratitude, I felt more than a little humbled.”

There was a round of quiet applause. The glass of water on the podium had magically refilled itself, and so he paused and sipped from it.

In the first row, the Grangers beamed up at him. Draco Malfoy was peering up at the ceiling while his father scowled down at the floor. Pansy simply scowled.

Good.

They were listening.

“As Professor McGonagall said, I’m not much for speaking, but I do want to say this: I’ve been singled out a lot over the years—some of it good, and some of it not. Some of it was because of things I did, and a lot of it wasn’t. The first day I came back into the wizarding community, I was swarmed by dozens of people who treated me like a celebrity because I was the Boy Who Lived, because of something that I didn’t even know about that my mum had done; she sacrificed herself for me in a way that protected me from Voldemort.” Harry paused, grinning grimly at the inevitable group shudder at the taboo name. Luna continued to smile at him serenely. “I’ve realized since then that it didn’t matter whether I was the one who vanquished the Dark Lord or was telling lies about the Ministry—people needed to believe that someone was doing those things, and I was there for the job. I’m proud of what I’ve done over the past seven years—learning magic, making friends, starting the DA, helping to fight against all of the injustice that Voldemort”—he didn’t bother to pause this time; let them get used to it—“and his supporters in the Ministry were trying to inflict on our community. I fought him, and I’m proud of that; in the end, he’s gone and I’m here, and I’m proud of that. I’m proud of the things that Professor McGonagall and Minister Shacklebolt said about me, not least because I respect their opinions a lot. But everything that I’ve done, everything that this medal symbolizes, was done with others. The price for the battle against Voldemort”—this time there was hardly a ripple, though the Malfoys flinched—“was paid by many, many people, fighting for themselves, fighting for each other: purebloods, half-bloods; and many, many Muggleborns, but even Muggles themselves. It was even paid by beings we don’t even think of as being our equals: werewolves, centaurs, goblins, giants, and house-elves. They all fought—all—every bit as much as me or anyone else up here carrying one of these wonderful medals. They fought, and like Professor McGonagall said, some of them died so that all of us could live in a better world.” Pausing for breath again, Harry realized that the table where Luna was sitting, still smiling beatifically, was immediately in front of the Floo where the Cattermoles had made their escape. He wondered briefly if they were okay. He’d have to ask.

Shaking his head, he continued, “I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m proud of this medal, proud that you’ve seen fit to give it to me. But everything that I did to come anywhere close to deserving this, I did with others.”

Again, Luna nodded; Draco Malfoy seemed to be rolling his eyes but his mother was gazing up shrewdly, a thin finger over arched lips.

As Harry was about to go on, Hagrid’s dulcet Dorset tones boomed out from somewhere near the main entrance. “Ya didn’t have no one with yer when ya walked into Old Snake Face’s camp and let him take a shot at yer!”

A murmur of agreement swept across the hall. Harry blinked.

The scene had been described in detail in both The Quibbler and the Prophet’s accounts of the battle; Xenophilius had got the story from Luna, who had got if from Harry himself, but where Rita Skeeter had scavenged it out, Harry could only guess. Hagrid perhaps, or the Malfoys.

“No one was with you then, Harry!” shouted a woman whom Harry did not recognize, and a number of voices joined hers.

People need to believe, Harry thought, blinking again, though his mind focused on the memory of that moment, of watching the green light of the Killing Curse burst from Voldemort’s wand, and he found himself turning to look at the face that had filled his thoughts then. Not blazing now, but bright and no less fierce, and open.

Without turning from her, Harry said, “I was never alone. Never.”

: :

As the applause rolled on once again, Harry stood in the midst of a crowd who were pressing up to congratulate him. Some of the faces surrounding him were full of an adulation that rather turned his stomach; he had to remind himself to be polite.

People want to believe.

Others had rather more thoughtful looks on their faces.

Chuckling into Harry’s ear, Kingsley murmured, “Werewolves! Goblins! House-elves! I hope you know that you put the boot to everything that most wizards hold dear—not just the pureblood fanatics, but the everyday witch and wizard as well!”

“He knows!” squealed Hermione—who had helped him write his speech—and hugged him nearly as hard as Kingsley himself had earlier.

As Harry thanked the members of the crowd who were thronging up to him—he recognized Doris Crockford from that first day at the Leaky Cauldron so many years before; she broke into tears when he remembered her name—he kept looking for Ginny and her family, but they had withdrawn to a corner behind the stage, waiting for Harry to finish.

Andromeda Tonks, who had left Teddy with Molly Weasley’s old Aunt Muriel in order to accept a medal for her daughter, happened to walk up just as her sister pressed in from the other side. The two Blacks, their features giving witness to what everything else in their lives had denied, stared at each other stonily and Harry felt a dull ache shoot through his gut; he couldn’t stay silent. “Thank you, Mrs. Malfoy.” Turning to Mrs. Tonks, he said, “Your sister saved my life, that night in the forest. If she’d wanted to, she could have exposed me to Voldemort, but she didn’t.”

Mrs. Tonks pursed her lips, but looked her sister in the eye for the first time.

Through the throng behind Narcissa Malfoy, Harry could see her husband and son skulking, looking clearly ill at ease.

“I’m glad you found Draco,” Harry said to Narcissa. “I’m glad you found your family.”

The sisters flashed identical grey gazes at him and then at each other. “I was sorry to hear of your loss, Andie,” said Narcissa, not terribly convincingly—though at least she said it—and extended her hand.

“Thank you,” curtly answered Andromeda, pausing a moment, and taking it.

: :

The last group to surround Harry were the members of the press—the Wizarding Wireless Network News, the Prophet (“When did you know that you were the Chosen One, Harry?”), Witch Weekly and Teen Witch Weekly (“What’s your favorite dessert, Harry?”), La Presse Magique (“Ees eet true, ‘Arry, zat you ‘ave spent much time weeth ze younger daughter of Jean-August and Apolline Delacour?”), The Salem Gazette (“When are you coming to the States, Harry?”) and of course, The Quibbler, represented both by Luna and by her father, who looked much more like the blithe wizard who had attended Bill and Fleur’s wedding than the nervous wreck whom Harry, Ron and Hermione had visited the previous winter.

As the last of the other reporters wandered away, taking loud bets over whose article would garner the largest headline, Mr. Lovegood ambled forward, Luna at his side, and extended his hand. “You are looking very well, young man!”

“Thanks, Mr. Lovegood. You too.”

“Do you mean,” Luna asked, “for a man who spent much of the past few months in Azkaban, or compared to the way he looked the day he tried to turn you over to the Death Eaters?”

Mr. Lovegood stared down at his feet like a chastened schoolboy, but Luna continued to smile at him.

“Both, I suppose,” Harry muttered.

“I am terribly sorry about that,” said Xenophilius, his smooth brow bent.

Before Harry could answer, Luna said, “It’s all right, Daddy. Harry understands that you only did it for me. Though it was a rather silly thing to do.”

Her father nodded thoughtfully and gazed at Harry.

“Yeah,” agreed Harry, thankful not to have to manage this conversation on his own.

“Well,” said Mr. Lovegood, glancing around to make sure that no one was terribly close by, “I must admit, I learned that I am, perhaps, not as worthy of Questing for the Hallows as I had hoped. You on the other hand, my boy…!” He beamed at Harry. “Definitely the epitome of a worthy Quester! Wouldn’t you say, Luna, my love?”

“Oh, yes, Daddy,” agreed Luna, smiling at Harry.

“Tell me,” whispered Xenophilius, “is that wand that you took from You-Know-Who really the Elder Wand?”

Harry tried to think how to answer this and decided that—since so many people had heard him talking about it during that last battle—the truth would have to suffice. “Yes, sir.”

“Wonderful,” sighed Xenophilius, an expression of transported rapture on his face that bore a striking resemblance to his daughter’s. “May I… see it?”

“Not at the moment, sir,” Harry said. “It’s hidden away, and I would be very happy for it to stay that way.”

“Ah, yes, yes,” murmured Luna’s father, nodding sagely but sadly. Then his expression turned shrewd, and he whispered, waggling his eyebrows significantly, “Are you perhaps hiding it under that rather remarkable Invisibility Cloak that Luna has told me of?”

“Er,” muttered Harry, peering at Luna, who seemed to be turning slowly in place, staring up at the ceiling. “Not at the moment.”

“I don’t suppose there is any hope of finding the Resurrection Stone as well… do you?” Xenophilius Lovegood looked at the moment like nothing more than a very old, very excited child.

Before Harry could answer, Luna took her father’s arm. “Of course not, Daddy. Now come along. We need to get the story finished so that we can get the special edition out to your subscribers in the morning.”

Harry gaped. Luna knew about the Stone—he had spoken with her about it at Shell Cottage. Yet clearly she chose not to reveal the full truth to her father. She led Mr. Lovegood away towards the bank of Floos on the far wall; just as they were about to step into the flames, she turned toward Harry and winked.

Winked! With eyes the size of Luna’s it was hard to miss, but nonetheless more than a bit shocking.

The custodial staff were beginning to clear away benches and clean up.

Harry shook his head.

A crowd stood near the lifts: eight heads of red hair. Harry strode toward them, his eyes focused on the smallest of them, who seemed to be looking determinedly Not At Him.

“Finished with your adoring public?” joked Ron.

“Oh, stuff it, Won-won,” teased George, though by his expression, his heart wasn’t in it. “If I had to watch another bird bat her eyes at you tonight, I’d have puked.”

Bill grinned a bit more fully. “Mostly I noticed a lot of older witches fussing over your hair, Ronnie. That Skeeter woman looked ready to eat you for afters, you rascal.”

“Well, you know Rita,” said Percy, lips pursed. “Anything for a story.”

“Percy!” gasped their mother, “How can you even think of making such a joke!”

“Hey,” laughed Charlie, “who knew that he could joke at all?”

“I am perfectly capable of delivering a witticism,” Percy muttered.

“Yeah, right,” snorted George.

“All right, George,” Percy said stiffly. “Say Knock, knock.”

With a bewildered snort, George took up the challenge. “Okay. Fine. Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?” answered Percy, looking quite pleased with himself.

“Who…?” George gaped at his brother, his face contorted first in confusion, and then in laughter—low and groaning at first, but then full and loud and infectious. The whole family was roaring within seconds, and Harry couldn’t help but join in. It felt as if it had been far to long since he had truly laughed, and to see the Weasleys, who had been through so much…

When Ginny’s eyes, bright with amusement, at last met his once again, he thought perhaps that he had never felt quite so good. The applause was lovely, but this—

“Coming by the Burrow tomorrow, are you, Mr. Order of Merlin, First Class?” wheezed George as the laughter finally began to fade—though it echoed on through the huge, now-empty hall.

“Oh, yeah,” answered Charlie before Harry could respond. “He’s got to collect the rest of his present from Ginny, of course.”

Ginny’s gaze dropped to the floor; her skin, which had been mottled red by laughter, now flushed an even, deep crimson.

“Right, the one that we’re all supposed to be out of the house for,” said Ron. He crossed his arms over his be-medaled chest. “This wouldn’t be the birthday present that I interrupted last year, now would it?”

Ginny leveled a look at him that could have stripped paint, but Ron didn’t flinch.

Mr. Weasley attempted as always to keep the peace. “I’m sure that whatever it is that Ginny wishes to give Harry, it is perfectly appropriate.”

“Yeah,” snorted Charlie, “perfectly.”

“Perfectly appropriate,” Ron added, “for a girl to give her ex-boyfriend.”

“Who she’s hardly seen in a year,” said Bill, still smirking.

“In her bedroom,” said George, his missing ear giving his grin a particularly grim look.

“While her family is out of the house,” concluded Percy with a tut.

“Of course anything that your sister and a good boy like Harry could get up to will be perfectly respectable!” scolded Mrs. Weasley. “Honestly, boys, I can’t believe that you could imagine anything else!”

The brothers gave a chorus of nos and of course nots but Harry could tell that they weren’t buying it for a minute. “We were simply winding them up, Mother,” said Percy, but even he seemed to have an evil twinkle in his eye.

The horrible thing was that, in fact, there was nothing at all appropriate or respectable about what Harry hoped Ginny might be giving him the next day; ever since Charlie had passed her invitation along at Remus and Tonks’s funeral, he had been trying to shove down inappropriate, disreputable images and impulses that flooded his brain as he attempted to work on the speech that he’d delivered tonight. As the image of Ginny’s face, of the sunlight tangled with his fingers in her hair, her scent, the feel of her lips, of freckles dancing on pale skin, her fingers on his neck…

The speech was done. There was nothing holding back those images now.

Harry glanced back at Ginny, his mouth open, but he found that her gaze now was shut to him, though her eyes met his. What was she thinking? What did she want? What had she planned?

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Harry,” she said, in a low voice, and when a couple of her brothers snorted, she shot them a look that silenced even Bill.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Ginny,” Harry answered. “Will one o’clock be all right?”

She nodded.

“And feel free to stay for dinner, Harry,” Molly added, as she began to bustle her children towards the Floos.

“Goodbye,” Harry called, and they all answered in kind, even Ginny, though she did not look back before disappearing into the green flame.

Once they were gone, and Harry was alone, he plopped down on one of the last remaining benches.

“Er, sir,” said a mild voice. Turning, Harry almost expected to find a house-elf, but instead looked up into the oddly familiar, meek face of a wizard in the blue robes of the Ministry’s custodial staff. “Need to clear that away, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh!” said Harry, springing to his feet—suddenly aware of just how much he wanted to sit. “Sorry!”

“No problem, Mr. Potter, sir,” said the man with a self-deprecating smile and Harry suddenly gasped.

“You’re… Reg Cattermole!”

The man blinked—he wasn’t as short as Harry remembered; when Ron had taken on his persona, Harry himself had been Polyjuiced into the body of the much taller Runcorn. “I… You… Remember me?” Reg stuttered.

“Of course!” Harry answered excitedly. “How are… I hope your wife and family—?”

“Oh! Mr. Potter! Thank you,” Cattermole blurted. “You remembered! I didn’t think… They’re fine. We’re fine—my wife, you see, has some cousins in Toronto, so we visited there, and when you got rid of You-Know-Who—the very next day, mind!—I got an owl from the Ministry saying that all staff were needed, and that I was to report back at once, and all charges…” He began to tear up. “You… You saved my Mary, Mr. Potter. She’d have been in Azkaban if it weren’t for you, and Merlin knows if she’d’ve survived that, and our kids… Thank you. Thank you!” He was blubbering now.

“You’re… Anyone…” Harry held out his hand, not knowing what else to do, and Reg Cattermole grasped it, and began pumping it energetically. “I… It was the least I could do.”

“But you was the one what did it,” Reg said, still shaking Harry’s hand, still crying. “Oh, Mr. Potter. Anything I can ever do for you, ever… Here!” He let go of Harry’s hand and plucked a rumpled program of the evening’s events from the bag of rubbish that he’d been collecting. “D’you think you could sign this for my wife and the kids? They’ll never believe I actually talked with you. You’re the kids’ hero, Mr. Potter, that’s a fact. They think the world of you.”

“Er… Fine,” Harry said, feeling more and more embarrassed. He began to pat his robe pockets for a quill; Reg plucked a bent self-inking one from the rubbish as well—one of the reporters’ probably—and Harry signed the program, To the Cattermoles—I’m so pleased that you came through together. Yours, Harry Potter.

Reg beamed down at the piece of parchment. “Thanks, Mr. Potter. Thanks. It’ll mean the world.”

“Any time.”

The older man laughed. “Run into my share of famous folk, working here at the Ministry, but none so regular as you. Don’t change, Mr. Potter. Don’t let fame change you.”

Shaking his head and smiling, thinking of Rita Skeeter and of a cupboard under the stairs, Harry answered, “I’ll try.”

Reg pumped his hand once more, carefully tucked the program away, waved and moved on to clearing away the last remaining signs of the presentation.

Walking across the barren hall towards the Floos, fingering the medal at his chest, Harry found his thoughts circling around the idea of fame, and family, and of the bright-eyed face that always seemed to occupy a still place at the center of his mind.

The F Word

It was unseasonably warm in Devon—much warmer than London—but a cool shard in Harry’s chest kept him from appreciating it. As he walked towards the Burrow, the splinter twisted. What would she be wearing? Would she be—? Would the Weasleys really leave them alone in the house?

The rest of your birthday present...

What did she mean?

Harry knew what he thought Ginny meant when she’d told Charlie to let him know that she wanted to give Harry the rest of his birthday present. Hadn’t he spent months daydreaming about what might have happened if Ron hadn’t interrupted last summer?

He’d done more than daydream.

But she couldn’t really mean that, could she?

What did she mean?

It was clear that Ginny’s brothers had the same expectation that his own desires kept forcing on his imagination—and Harry was quite certain that the fact that they were thinking along the same less than exactly honorable lines as he was only increased his discomfort.

The closest thing to a real home that Harry had ever known loomed ahead, even more ramshackle than he remembered. Boards covered several of the windows, the upper floors seemed to list at an even more improbable angle, and someone looked to have tried unsuccessfully to Scourgify off the remains of a graffiti war: Blod Traitors and a crude drawing that suggested that the Weasleys were an even closer family than they appeared overlapped POTTER LIVES! and Save a cockroach, kick a Death Eater.

In one of the upper, unboarded windows, there was a glint of copper. Looking up, Harry saw Ginny flash a nervous smile and gesture for him to come in.

With a deep breath, Harry entered.

Inside, the Burrow seemed to have been returned to something like normal. Clean and cluttered, the kitchen exuded contentment and the scent of lavender soap. The hands of the family clock, which for the past two years had all pointed resolutely at Mortal Peril, were now scattered around the dial: Traveling, Work, Visiting… All except one, which simply pointed to Gone.

And of course Ginny’s, which rested firmly at Home.

“Up here!” Ginny’s voice echoed down from the third floor, and, with a deep breath, Harry turned and climbed the long, uneven staircase.

The climb had never felt longer.

The house had never been so quiet.

She was waiting for him in her doorway off the third landing. He remembered glimpsing her bright eyes through that door the day he had first visited the house. She did not snap the door shut this time, but stood there, eyes every bit as bright, hair around her shoulders, wearing…

She was wearing jeans and a green top with a pattern of what Harry knew to be tiny flowers. They were the clothes that she had been wearing the last time they had been alone.

“Hi,” he said, a little shakily.

“Hi,” she answered, and Harry was relieved that her voice sounded as strained as his. She gave him an off-center smile. “Happy birthday, ten months later.”

He stepped towards her; she did not retreat. “Hey, we can decide you’re early for my eighteenth.”

“Okay,” she snorted; her eyes crinkled into little half-moons. “So, you ever meet up with any of those Veela?”

“Nope. Must’ve missed them.” His shoe touched hers. “Wasn’t looking. Didn’t want to.”

Her eyes rounded open again; her mouth too opened wide, and she flushed, apparently triumphant. He stared down at her, at the blazing look that had kept him company even through their long, dark separation.

“Good,” she answered, her hand finding his shoulder.

It felt as if Harry were falling into her, though neither of them had moved. “Your hair. Was in a ponytail. Last time.”

“Not by the time Ron stomped in.” Her other hand touched his cheek; his own hands slid around her, one at her waist, the other past her shoulder and into her hair; and they were kissing again.

It felt… It was as natural as breathing—as if nothing had ever interrupted this kiss, that everything that had happened in the last ten months had been nothing more than a troubling dream. This was real.

Harry knew that there were things that he needed to say to her: Missed you, and sorry, and even, Merlin, love you. But he didn’t think that he was capable of saying those things out loud yet, and so those feelings poured into the kiss for now.

She seemed to hear him—seemed to be sending back the same message.

He had forgot how small she was. Had forgot, too, how warm her lips could be, and how the light could somehow be even brighter when it was filtered through her hair.

Thinking back, later, he didn’t remember their feet moving, nor his own hands. Her hands he was exquisitely aware of—of the way her fingers twisted the fabric of his shirt against his back and his hair against his scalp—but until they stumbled against her bed and fell onto it, he had been totally unconscious of the fact that his right hand had found its way under her top and up the smooth skin of her back so that his thumb was tucked under the clasp of her bra.

They didn’t stop kissing as they fell, though Ginny gave a quick grunt of surprise when his weight pressed down on her.

They had done some things during the amazing twenty-seven days between their first kiss and Dumbledore’s funeral. All of them had been accomplished while fully clothed. Harry hadn’t felt ready to go any further than that, and Ginny had seemed comfortable too—in retrospect, they had probably both known that that month was just an interlude, the calm before the proverbial storm.

But now, pressed together on her bed, her heavy breathing matching his own, the war over, her family having explicitly given what amounted to their blessing, nothing seemed to be in the way, and so for the first time Harry felt beyond ready; he felt all of the need and hunger that had built up over the long year and all of the years before roaring within him, as if the monster that he had come to know so well during sixth year had at last burst free of its shell, its cage, and left hand joined right beneath her top, and his body howled at the smooth heat of her, and she…

And Ginny…

Ginny was rigid against him. Around him—her legs clenched around his waist, her fingers clenched in hair, in shirt. Lips tight around his tongue.

Rigid, but vibrating.

Harry blinked. Pulled his tongue from her mouth. “Ginny?”

“C’mon,” she panted. Her eyes were squeezed tight, her cheeks were pale, and she looked more as if she were steeling herself to have a tooth pulled than aflame with passion. “G’wan.”

“Ginny?”

“G’wan!” she said through clenched teeth. She pressed up against him, and he realized that his right hand had slid around so that it was cupping her breast. Shivering again, he began to withdraw his fingers. “NO!” she cried, her eyes flying open.

“Ginny...”

“Don’t you want to?” she growled, pushing up so that his fingers were trapped between them.

He blinked down at her. It wasn’t that the creature inside of him had gone away; it was more as if, looking at her face, feeling her tensing beneath him, it had transformed into something... Something larger. Larger and calmer—though no less insistent. “Yeah,” he murmured. “Yeah, more than anything, only...”

“What?” she said, eyes and nostrils contracting in a manner that Harry knew well enough to be a sign of real danger.

Harry did what came naturally with Ginny. He spoke the truth. “You’re upset.”

Her eyes flew wide again, though her nostrils remained slitted.

“You’re... angry.”

“Angry?” Her belly hardened against his own and her eyes narrowed once again. “Angry?” The word erupted from between her teeth. “Yeah, I’m bloody angry! I’m angry with my bloody Troll-brained brothers for taking something bloody personal and bloody important and turning it into some sort of stupid bloody joke. I’m angry that after everything, my bloody parents still somehow think I’m too young and you’re too bloody nice actually to get up to anything inappropriate even though Mum was pregnant with Bill before she was too much bloody older than you, and I can feel just how bloody nice you are, Potter... MERLIN!” Tears were beginning to dribble down along either of Ginny’s temples; she blinked furiously. “I’m bloody upset because I’ve wanted to be alone with you for a bloody year, and I know you’ve wanted to, I’ve wanted to, and now here we are, and all I can bloody think about is how bloody angry I bloody well am because I want to, but I don’t think I bloody can, but you’re a boy and you’re not supposed to notice things like that only, of course, you’re noble—”

“It’s okay,” muttered Harry, not at all sure that it was.

Ginny punched Harry’s shoulder. Evidently, she was just as ambivalent. “And you! I’m bloody furious with you! A bloody YEAR. And I knew it, I know why, but I’m still just... Not even a note, not even once we were both stuck after Easter. And then I finally see you again, and the first bloody thing you ask me to do is stay in the Room of BLOODY Requirement! And I know WHY, Harry, and I understand, but it still made me want to bloody scream, and then you go off into the bloody night, without even bloody saying GOODBYE, and then the next BLOODY time I see you, you’re bloody DEAD and I wanted to die too, oh, Merlin, Harry!” She was weeping without restraint, face blotchy and wet and beautiful, and Harry tried to wipe away her tears, but she swatted his hand away, and so he rolled them over instead, so that she was resting on him. His hands were on her back once again. He held her as she heaved.

When her breathing finally steadied, she laid her head on his chest and whispered, “Angry with Fred for dying. And George for living. Angry with Percy for taking so bloody long. Angry with Charlie for not being here more. With Bill for not taking me to you.” She sniffed, wiped her nose on the shoulder of his shirt and nuzzled under his ear. “Angry with Ron for getting to see you every day. Angry with myself, mostly myself. Because I knew why, Harry, I really did, and I agreed with you—I knew if I gave in and talked Bill into sharing the Secret, if I went to Shell Cottage, I’d have never been able to leave, and I couldn’t do that to you, it was such a small sacrifice if it meant that you could kill the bastard. But then, seeing you dead, and I wanted to die too, I did, because the last thing I’d ever done was run away from you—I was so happy that I’d finally been let out of the Room, but all through that awful night, I kept looking for you, I kept feeling you, but you weren’t there, and I was such a bloody pillock, all caught up in my family and my b-boyfriend and it was all so bloody petty.”

“It wasn’t petty,” Harry whispered back, and she blinked at him. “And you did feel me.”

She pushed up slightly and stared down at him. “When I was with Regina.”

“Regina?”

“Regina Stoops. Colin’s girlfriend. We were both there when he died. And I was just trying to get her inside, and then I suddenly felt...” Her nostrils flared in memory. “It was like I could smell you there. You were under the bloody Invisibility Cloak!”

He nodded. “I... I wanted to stay with you. I wanted to stay so badly, but I didn’t know...” He shook his head. “I did know. I knew if I stopped and talked to you I’d never be able to leave, and then you’d die too, and then—”

“Stop, Harry, stop,” spluttered Ginny. “Don’t—”

“I had to, I know... I’m so sorry, I know, but I swear—”

Her fingers stilled his mouth. “No, Harry, I know.” Her eyes were round and full and dark; her hair hung down on either side of his face. She bit her lip and frowned. “I know.”

He nodded.

“Harry,” she whispered, “at the award ceremony, you said... What did you mean?” She leaned closer until her nose was almost touching his. “That you were never alone...”

“When he was about to kill me, when I knew he was going to cast the Killing Curse on me, and I knew it would make him mortal, I wasn’t thinking about him. I wasn’t...” All that Harry was aware of in that moment, laying there on Ginny’s bed, was the wide circle of her eyes and the uneven splash of her breath across his own lips. Their world was bounded by the curtain of her hair. And yet the image that had filled his mind in that awful moment was just as clear as her eyes, her breath, her hair. It was as if the image of her face as she ran across the common room, the first touch of her lips on his, were superimposed across her very immediate presence. “All I was thinking about was you. About the look you give me sometimes that’s like the sun coming up and then everything’s good. You were everything that mattered, and remembering that look made it all okay.”

For a moment, the blazing look in his memory and the blazing look above him merged, and Harry truly felt as if he were staring into the sun, so that his eyes ran, but he did not care.

Then she began to frown again, and the looks diverged. “No, Harry, it didn’t make anything okay; I mean, I’m glad you were able to do what needed to be done, though I don’t understand exactly why it had to be done, why you had to bloody... but—shut up, it’s my turn to talk—I know you’re going to bloody well tell me, because I want to know, and you bloody well owe me that much, do you hear me? I want to know what in Merlin’s name made it necessary for you to bloody die, okay? I mean, we all knew we might, it’s the only thing about Fred that makes it bearable, knowing that he knew like we all did what might happen, but none of us had to bloody walk into it with our bloody arms open, so I want to know what the hell you were thinking, okay? Shut up, it’s my turn. Because, yeah, I want to know, but I swear, Harry, I’ve seen you dead once now, and I don’t ever, ever want to see that again, do you hear me? So don’t you ever even begin to think about running off and sacrificing your bony arse without me, Harry Potter, because watching it once nearly killed me, when that Lestrange woman attacked Luna, I thought, I’m going to go with Harry, so next time, no more going on your own, you hear? Do you...?” She sat back, scowling, and the sunlight from the window caught her face, so that even though she was clearly still upset, she was beautiful, and Harry couldn’t help but grin. “WHAT? What’s so bloody funny, Potter, I’m absolutely serious, do you hear me?”

“Yes!” he said, but he was giggling.

Her eyes narrowed; she looked more wary than angry, yet Harry knew that her temper could be provoked again easily; even so, he couldn’t help but snort. “If you tell me I’m beautiful when I’m angry, I’ll kill you, Harry, I swear. I’m absolutely serious about all of this.”

“I KNOW!” he said and let loose a roar of laughter.

“Don’t make me hex you,” she snapped, leaning back down. It was meant as a threat this time—Harry respected the threat—but her hair fell back down and cut off the outside world again, and he couldn’t help but laugh on. Looking by parts bemused, perplexed and annoyed, she tried to wait him out, but he couldn’t seem to stop. “Harry.”

“Sorry,” he said, and his hands, still beneath her top, grasped at her shoulder blades, as if by holding on to her he could take control of himself once again. It didn’t quite work, but the feeling of her skin beneath his hands was wonderful, even if he could feel her shoulders tensing. “Sorry,” he repeated, and tried to take a deep breath once again. His diaphragm continued to flutter, but he was able to calm himself somewhat.

When he was breathing somewhat regularly, Ginny said, her voice very, very even, “So. What was so funny?”

“Um.” Harry tried to gather his thoughts. “Beautiful. Even when you’re not angry.”

“Thank you. And?”

“Um.” Her face was masklike, still, as it so infrequently was. Harry took another breath and went on. “First time I was here, that summer... before your first year. I never heard your voice, really, not till you threatened Malfoy at Flourish and Blotts, and Ron said how weird that was, because... normally you never shut up.”

Her expression softened somewhat, though it seemed more a shy echo of the face she had used to wear around him so often than the warm face he had come to know so well. “Yeah. Funny.”

“I love to hear you talk. I love to see your face. I love holding you and kissing you, and God, even when you’re angry, I love it, I promise, I swear, I never want to be apart from you, not ever, I can’t promise I won’t try to protect you because I always will, but I promise, I won’t ever run away from you to do it, I—”

They were kissing again. Harry continued to promise silently, continued to stitch himself closer to her, cell by cell and thought by thought, and she was making promises back, he knew.

“I think that’s the one thing I’m angriest about, Harry,” Ginny said huskily some time later. She was still above him, poised like a lioness atop her prey. “That you walked away from me over and over and... I know it was what we’d agreed, but... That morning, Luna told me you’d gone off with Ron and Hermione and all I wanted was to cry and to hold you and...”

“I... Sorry,” Harry said again, and he knew he’d be saying that a lot more, though it probably wasn’t truly necessary. “You... Your family. Your mum needed you.”

“She needed Ron too,” Ginny murmured, looking dangerously close to tears again. “She needed you. I needed you.”

“You have me now.”

She smiled, still a bit moistly. “True enough.”

“You always will,” he continued, and he found that, sad as she was, he was giddy again. “Always. Happily ever after. Ginny, we have the whole future ahead of us. It’s ours. I’m yours.”

Again they kissed. It wasn’t frantic, now, and it wasn’t timid either; hands began to move again, and bodies, but just at the point where Harry could feel his old friend beginning to howl once more, Ginny stiffened against him again, and he stopped.

“Sorry,” she said.

“No problem,” he whispered into her ear. “We have all the time in the world. The whole future.”

She smiled at him, a look like wonder blossoming across her face. “You’re using the F Word.”

He blinked at her. “The...?”

“You never...” She blinked back and shook her head, so that her hair tickled his cheeks. “Last summer, before the wedding, I was talking with Hermione, and she was complaining about Ron and how he never talked about feelings and I said you never did that much either, but that was okay, I usually knew what you were feeling, the thing that bothered me most was that you never talked about the future. At all. As if—”

“As if I didn’t plan on living.” Suddenly, he didn’t feel like laughing at all.

“Yeah.” She stroked his chin. “Yeah. And she said that was it. That you had all of these hopes and dreams inside, but you couldn’t let them out, that the Dursleys taught you not to do that, and then always having Tom after you made you never let yourself think too much about after.”

“Smart girl, that Hermione.”

“So you’ve said.” She kissed him gently. “So. Those hopes and dreams. They can come out and play now?”

He pulled her down to him and murmured into her lips, “Oh, yes. Yes. Yes.”

Family

The Weasleys gathered outside the Burrow and, as a group, peered up at the third floor.

"Reckon it's safe to go in?" Ron asked Charlie. Charlie simply shrugged.

"Well," murmured George, "can't have lasted long."

Charlie wrinkled his nose. "Not the first time, at any rate."

"Oh, dear," sighed Percy, "there is that."

Fleur giggled, wan as she was, and Bill joined her, while Ron's face contorted in disgust. "Merlin," he groaned, "how many times d'you think—?"

"Boys!" barked their father, "How can you possibly imagine…?"

Molly turned what she thought of as her dragon's eye on her children and then upon her husband. "I don't notice you being in a hurry to burst in there, Arthur Weasley."

They all shrank from the door.

With a snort she turned from them and walked into her kitchen.

: :

If Harry was touching Ginny a bit more than was strictly necessary in order to put the kettle on, he could be forgiven, perhaps, for jumping when the front door burst open and Molly Weasley swept in, looking very much as she had the first time he visited the Burrow. He had seen what she was capable of with a wand all too recently, and so it wasn't unnatural for him to note her resemblance to a large, protective beast of prey.

"Hey, Mum!" Ginny chirped. "We've just started tea."

Mrs. Weasley froze in the doorway, and for a moment Harry's heart was in his throat. Then she blinked, smiled and strode into the room. "Tea would be lovely, dear," she said, a little higher than usual, perhaps, as she hung her summer cloak on the hook just inside the door, and sat at the table.

Harry turned to Ginny, about to ask what he should or shouldn't do, but Ginny just winked, which left Harry rather speechless.

In all honesty, all that Harry could think about in that moment was her face. Her smile. The smell of her hair. The feel of her skin beneath his fingers. Hopes and dreams…

There was a quiet scuffle at the front door as all of the Weasley men—and Fleur—shuffled in, each seeming to want to be the last to enter. Somehow, by dint of lack of seniority perhaps, Ron ended up in front. "Hey, Ginny. Hey, Harry. Nice weather, i'n'it?"

"Yup," said Harry. He turned to Mr. Weasley. "Nice at Shell Cottage?"

"Oh, yes," said Arthur. "Very lovely."

"London, too," coughed Charlie, and all of the Weasley men coughed in agreement. Fleur giggled again, and Harry could feel Ginny's back vibrating against his.

"Shall we have a seat, gentlemen, Fleur?" asked Percy, even more stiffly than usual, but rather than take the mickey out of him, his brothers all nodded solemnly and arranged themselves at the table, staring down at their hands.

"Oh, Harry," Ginny said, her voice low in a way that Harry had never heard it except under very private circumstances, "maybe we should have cleaned the table. After, you know—"

"Ginny!" squealed Harry, as all of the members of her family—even Fleur and Mrs. Weasley—leapt to their feet with looks of horror on their faces.

Ginny snorted, threw her arms around Harry's shoulders from behind, snorted again, and finally burst out into loud trumpet peels of laughter. "YOUR FACES!" she howled. "Merlin, your faces, it's just priceless!"

The assembled Weasleys stared at her, and then at Harry, and he felt more than a bit of a threat behind their blank expressions. "Ginny," Harry whispered with growing desperation.

"And you, Mum!" snorted Ginny into Harry's shoulder. "'How can you even think that a good boy like Harry would get up to anything disrespectful—' HA!"

"Ginevra—" began Mrs. Weasley in a low voice.

"W-we just t-talked," Harry spluttered, "really."

Before her mother could answer, Ginny crowed, "And snogged a good bit!" As her family's faces all began to turn white, she added, "No more than I've seen every single one of you lot do—even you, Mum!"

And they all turned red.

The kettle began to whistle the tune to "A Cauldron Full of Hot Strong Love," but no one thought to remove it from the flame for what felt to Harry like an entire lifetime. Finally, Molly Weasley sat once again in her chair, the one closest to the stove. Without turning back to Harry and her daughter, she said, with something of her usual cheerful authority, "PG Tips, dears, in the cupboard to the right of the sink. Third shelf from the top."

Ginny prepared the tea, and Harry Levitated cups and saucers to everyone. Ron, who refused to look Harry in the face, the hypocrite, followed his preternatural sixth sense to where a stash of freshly bake scones were hidden. Charlie Summoned a pot of lemon curd from the fridge, and, as Ginny poured out, Harry watched as the color in everyone's face returned to normal.

Their expressions ranged from mortified—Percy—to bemused—Bill and George—to perplexed—Charlie and Mr. Weasley—to positively flummoxed. Ron, of course.

Mrs. Weasley looked as if nothing more or less were happening than a family tea, while Ginny looked happier than Harry had ever seen her, and as she finally sat beside him, a wave of affection overcame his sense of self-preservation; he grasped her hand right there in plain view. For a man who had felt very close to dying for the second time in a month, Harry was feeling quite wonderful.

Ron, of course, was distracted by food and by his thoughts, whatever they might be. As the youngest Weasley brother dug into his third scone, Harry broke the silence. "Blimey, Ron. You ought to be careful, turning that color! I haven't seen anyone go quite that shade of magenta since…"

As Ron blinked at him, chewing on, Harry suddenly realized that there was something that he had forgot. "Mr. Weasley?"

"Er, yes, Harry?" Arthur Weasley peered at Harry over the top of his cup with trepidation.

"How are my relatives?"

"Your—?" Mr. Weasley's anxiety melted into sheer confusion.

"Aunt Petunia, Dudley, Uncle…" Harry pointed at Ron, who had stopped mid-chew, but was still blinking. "Mr. Diggle and Hestia Jones took them off someplace safe, but, I mean…" Harry was suddenly aware that the entire table was staring at him. "Are they…? Well, I mean, do they even know the war is over?"

"Bugger," hissed Bill, earning slaps on the back of either hand from his wife and his mother. Ignoring their rebukes, Bill muttered, "Mad-Eye was their main contact. And Remus was the backup. I don't know that anyone even knows where they are."

"Well," Ron said, swallowing at last, "it's not like you care, is it, Harry?"

Looking around at them, at the sea of freckled faces that were more his family than the Dursleys had ever been, he surprised himself as much as them by answering, "Yeah. Yeah, I think I do."

: :

As it turned out, Kingsley knew exactly where they were, since Remus had decided that, Moody being dead, he himself needed a backup. The interim Minister insisted—despite protests from half a dozen secretaries (Percy among them)—on accompanying Harry to the Dursleys' safe haven on the Channel Islands.

Ginny insisted on coming along, but it was generally decided, much to Ron's chagrin, that the sight of any of the other Weasleys was more likely to put the Dursleys on guard than at ease. Ginny made very sympathetic comments to her brother about how difficult it must be to be left behind, which made George laugh and Hermione titter. Ron wisely shut up, for which Hermione kissed him.

This kiss was the main topic of conversation at the Burrow for the next two days.

Of course, it did ease Ron's disappointment that Kingsley's schedule forced the party to leave at just after dawn. Ron decided that, all things being equal, a lie-in might be a better choice than visiting Harry's relatives after all.

As they strode out the Weasleys' front door, Kingsley wasted no time turning to Harry and asking, "So, Harry, what are your plans?"

Ginny bristled, stepping protectively between Kingsley and her boyfriend, but Harry just laughed. "You're the third Minister for Magic to ask me that."

"Well, it's a real question," Kingsley said with a sad smirk. "I may not be as desperate for your help as my predecessors were, but there's no question that everyone—inside the Ministry and out—is curious about where you're headed."

"Mr. Shacklebolt…"

"Come on, Harry. Kingsley, please."

Harry shook his head and placed his hands on Ginny's square shoulders. "Kingsley. I like you a lot more than I did Minister Scrimgeour, but I'll say the same to you as I did to him. I don't want to be anyone's poster boy."

"Who said anything about a poster boy?" Kingsley chortled. "You're a celebrity, it's true, but you're also a bloody talented wizard, and we could use you in any number of places. The Ministry is desperately short-handed these days; between the casualties from the war and sweeping out some of the trash, there's not a department that couldn't use you."

"I…" Harry blinked, and pulled Ginny closer to him. "I was thinking of going back to Hogwarts."

"Huh," grunted Kingsley. "I suppose I can't blame you." He winked at Ginny, but his expression remained thoughtful as they started walking towards the Burrow's boundaries once again.

Harry and Ginny's hands swung between them. He felt suddenly, blissfully free.

They had nearly reached the paddock when Ginny suddenly squeezed Harry's hand and stopped. "Mi—Kingsley?"

"Yes?"

Ginny looked back at Harry, a funny expression on her face that put him in mind, for some reason, of Lupin. "If Harry'd said yes, what would you have asked him to do?"

Kingsley peered at the two of them. "Minerva tells me you wanted to be an Auror, Harry. Is that true?"

Harry had so many things running through his head in that instant that he couldn't even begin to think what to say beyond, "Yeah."

"Still considering it?" Kingsley's eyes narrowed slightly, and Harry was suddenly aware that dark circles showed through the dark skin beneath them.

Harry peered down at Ginny, whose face was now gathered in exactly the same thoughtful, sad smile she had given him at Dumbledore's funeral so long ago. "I… I hadn't really thought about it. I've been a bit… distracted."

Kingsley smiled. "I can't think why. Well, the Auror department was decimated; we haven't had a new trainee since Tonks's class anyway—constant cutbacks shut down the academy. There were casualties during the war, and I'm sad to say that some of us turned out to be… unfit. Fully staffed, the department is meant to have thirty-six Aurors in the field, plus another fifty or so support staff. I can field a dozen now, and most of them are reaching an age where de-gnoming the garden sounds a lot more attractive than facing some madman spitting curses. We need new blood badly, and I won't deny having Harry Potter join the department would make people feel a lot safer, not to mention making the Wizengamot more willing to open up the purse a bit."

"Thought you didn't want a poster boy," grumbled Harry.

"I don't. I've seen you fight, son, and I know your character. You'd do the Aurors proud. But politics is also politics, and sadly I'm the one stuck with the job of running this mess until we can get a proper election organized and I can go back to having fun on the job, dodging hexes." Kingsley laughed, rumbling, contagious, like a very tall, very dark-skinned Father Christmas. Ginny joined him, and even Harry couldn't help but smile. "So, what do you think?"

Harry shrugged again and looked down at Ginny.

Again she gave him that bemused look, though there was more of a smile there this time. "He's got a people-saving thing," she said to Kingsley.

"Thank Merlin for that!" Kingsley chuckled. Then he peered at the couple a bit shrewdly. "I'll need to open up the academy again, and the old building's so thoroughly cursed we'll have to pull it down and rebuild. And we're too short-handed to maintain much of an Auror presence up at Hogwarts, despite the fact that the school's boundary spells were compromised during the battle, and they'll need even more help this year." He smiled. "I don't suppose Minerva and the governors would mind if I were to run the Auror academy out of the school for a year or two, do you?"

Ginny's smile brightened, and Harry could feel himself begin to grin too. "No, sir. I don't."

"I think my brother Ron would be interested in joining as well," Ginny added. "And a few of the other members of the DA—Susan Bones, for sure, and Terry Boot."

"Wonderful," said Kingsley. "The more the merrier—you trained those DA tykes well, Harry, and any Bones is always welcome in MLE." He extended his hand. "So, are we on?"

After another look at Ginny, who nodded, Harry took it. "Yeah," he said. "Absolutely."

"Welcome to the family!" boomed Kingsley, pumping Harry's hand, and they all laughed.

: :

They arrived on Fee Sark a few moments later, where the sun was shining and the coast of Normandy glimmered on the horizon.

"Nice weather," said Kingsley, and seemed more than a bit put off when Harry and Ginny began to giggle. Stiffening to his full, imposing height, he muttered, "Well, you don't always get that on the Channel."

"Never been, sir," Harry managed to say before he and Ginny both burst into guffaws.

Shaking his head, Kingsley led them across the tiny island towards a low, lone house that stood near the eastern cliffs. As they approached, Harry began to feel nervous; the house seemed to be missing parts of two walls and there didn't seem to be any signs of life. "Kingsley? It… It looks deserted."

"Ah!" said Kingsley, knocking a fist against his own forehead. "Sorry, I forgot. Look at me, both of you, please." When they had complied, he looked around for a moment and then whispered, "The Dursleys are concealed at Siren Farm."

Harry was confused—why bother to tell them that? But when he turned back to their destination, he understood. What had looked like a single, abandoned farmhouse was a small collection of buildings: a house, a garage—though where one would drive to, Harry had no idea—and several smaller outbuildings, including what looked to Harry to be a broom shed. All where brightly painted, sparkling in the early morning sunshine.

At the front of the house, a figure knelt, working on a flowerbed, and Harry knew even from this distance that it was Aunt Petunia, even as he knew without being able to say why that something was wrong. Different.

"Is that your aunt?" Ginny whispered as the trail they were walking brought them to the end of a fallow field and up to the garden gate.

"Yeah," Harry murmured, though he felt as if he almost couldn't recognize her; something about her posture…

"She doesn't look so bad," Ginny murmured.

Harry was about to answer—how, he wasn't sure—when Aunt Petunia looked up. She gave a startled smile and stood.

As Kingsley opened the gate, three more figures appeared. Dedalus Diggle, wearing a bright purple dressing gown not terribly different from his usual robes, stepped out of the house, wand drawn in one hand, a tray with two steaming mugs in the other, while the door to the small building that Harry had thought was a broom shed burst open, revealing Hestia Jones and a shirtless, sweaty person who Harry could only assume was Dudley.

"That's your fat cousin?" muttered Ginny under her breath.

The blond hair was right. The height was right. Even the red face looked very Dursley-ish. But this boy was chiseled, muscular and lean as some marble sculpture, and he stood in front of Hestia, a metal bar grasped threateningly before him.

"Blimey," Harry gasped, "Big D, you look good."

Dudley—for Dudley it had to be—frowned, but before he could respond, Dedalus barked, "Where did Harry Potter and I first meet?"

Harry blinked. It was amazing how in just a few short weeks the habits of suspicion and distrust had been forgotten. "Uh. At the Leaky Cauldron, I think. Hagrid was bringing me to buy my wand."

Dedalus nodded, and when he lowered his wand, Hestia and Dudley stood down as well.

Suddenly, Harry was wrapped in a set of thin arms that had never held him so tenderly before. Aunt Petunia sobbed as she grasped him. "Oh! I'm so glad that you're all right!"

Harry had no idea how to answer this—it was even more alien to his expectations than a fit Dudley or an aggressive Dedalus Diggle. He patted her back and stared, first at Ginny, who gazed back at him with her jaw open, and then at Dedalus, at Hestia and at Dudley.

"Been right worried about you, Harry," Dudley said, standing at ease, though his biceps still bulged.

"You have?" Harry said, stunned.

Hestia chuckled. "Of course we all have. You're our hope. Is everything all right? We haven't heard a thing all these months."

"Did have a spot of bother just after Easter," chirped Dedalus, much more his cheerful self. "Death Eaters attacked Hestia and Dudley while they were out on a training run."

"Dudley took out the first," added Hestia, looking proud. "Roundhouse kick nearly knocked the stupid git's head off. Served him right. I got the other two while they were gaping."

"Always said you'd have made a good Auror, Hestia," laughed Kingsley.

"And spend all that time writing reports and drinking bad tea? Not on your life." The three older wizards all chuckled. Petunia continued to sniffle into Harry's shirt.

"Where's… Uncle Vernon?" Harry asked. It wasn't that he wanted to see his uncle, certainly, but there was something odd going on, and Harry still couldn't put his finger on it.

"Ah," said Dedalus Diggle, sober again.

"Er," mumbled Dudley.

"He passed away," Aunt Petunia said. "Heart failure."

It shouldn't have made Harry sad. Merlin, the obvious humor of it should have made him want to laugh. And yet he found himself saying, "Oh, I'm so sorry," and meaning it.

"Thank you," Petunia said. She still had not released Harry. Looking up at him, she said, "I realize that there was not much love lost between you, but he always did try to do what we thought was best for you. And those last months here, well…" Unaccountably, Aunt Petunia began to pinken. "Not having work to go to, not having all of our responsibilities… His last few months really were like a second honeymoon for us. It was like spending time with the Vernon I fell in love with all those years ago all over again." She beamed up at Harry.

"Er," he began.

"Not a bad way to go, either, lucky old bastard," snorted Hestia.

Beside him, Dudley hissed, "Hessie!"

Harry had no idea what they were talking about—the idea of a happy Vernon Dursley, a Vernon Dursley content with something other than yelling at people, was so far beyond his understanding that whatever it was that Hestia was trying to say about the way he died…

Harry looked at Ginny, who seemed as perplexed as he was; Kinglsey was sniggering. Aunt Petunia…

Aunt Petunia was blushing like a schoolgirl, and suddenly Harry felt certain he knew just what Hestia had been talking about. Looking at the gruff witch standing with her elbow on his cousin's shoulder, Harry spluttered, "You mean, Uncle Vernon died…?"

"With his boots on," snorted Hestia.

Dedalus Diggle tittered. Dudley winced, and Harry couldn't help but join him.

Aunt Petunia recovered her speech first. "I will always know that he went… happy."

Ginny was looking dangerously close to laughter, which Harry implored her silently to hold in. "Well, that's good, then," he said. "Still, I'm sorry."

"Thank you, Harry," Petunia said. Then she straightened up, releasing him at last. With four crisp swipes of her fingers, she erased any evidence that she had been doing anything but gardening for the past half-hour. "Now, are things going well?"

"Is You-Know-Who still in control of the Ministry?" Dedalus piped up.

Dudley added, "Those masked bastards made it sound like hell out there."

"They were quite happy to tell us you were dead, Harry," Hestia spat, "though none of us believed them. When I Obliviated them, I made sure to add a memory in of running into you and a small army over in Brittany. Hopefully that confused the bastards a bit."

Again Kingsley laughed. Harry looked down at his aunt. "It's over," he said. "I killed Voldemort. We won."

"You… killed him?" Petunia's eyes grew wide.

Harry nodded. "Well, he killed himself, really."

"Way to go, Harry!" said Dudley.

"He was brilliant," said Ginny, grinning.

Petunia turned, noticing Ginny apparently for the first time. "Oh!" She stepped back, hand to her chest, looking much more like the Aunt Petunia that Harry knew.

"Um, Aunt Petunia, Dudley," Harry said stepping over to Ginny and taking her hand, "this is Ginny, Ginny Weasley. She's…" He looked down at her. What was she? Anything that he could call her seemed either too enormous or too small.

"I'm Harry's girlfriend," Ginny supplied. Smiling brightly with the morning sun blazing in her face.

"Of course you are," Petunia said, still looking shocked. "It's just…"

"I look like Harry's mum?"

"Not… Not really. You don't look terribly like Lily at all. But when I first saw you, there is something, yes, it was quite uncanny."

Harry looked down at Ginny. His clearest images of his mother were all from her girlhood. From Severus Snape's memories. The girl in those memories was taller than Ginny, clear-skinned and auburn-haired, with the green, almond-shaped eyes that greeted Harry every time he looked into a mirror. She looked nothing like Ginny.

But there was something, Aunt Petunia was right. A fire. Something.

There was, too—it made Harry's heart hurt to realize—the fact that Snape's memories of Lily Evans were colored with the same desperate combination of admiration and desire that Harry himself felt for Ginny. The main difference there was that Snape had spoiled any chance he might have had with Lily. Harry—through luck and his girlfriend's apparently bottomless capacity to forgive—had managed to see things through to the other side.

"In any case," Harry said, finally, to his relatives and their minders, "it's over. You're all free to return." Four blank faces greeted his gaze. "You needn't stay here."

"Well," burbled Dedalus, "that's wonderful news about You-Know-Who's defeat, at any rate!"

"Here, here," agreed Hestia, who was frowning at Dudley.

"We… We can go home?" Petunia asked, though she did not look terribly excited at the prospect.

"Well," Kingsley said with a cough, "I'm afraid that the night the charm broke… The Death Eaters destroyed your house in Little Whinging."

"Oh," said Petunia, as if he had told her that a television program would be delayed because of a news bulletin. Harry was astonished that his relatives' house had been destroyed, but flabbergasted that his aunt barely seemed concerned.

"I have breakfast ready," Dedalus said, "or rather, Bunty has. She always makes too much, so I'm sure there's more than enough for the three of you—kippers, tomatoes, bubble-and-squeak, eggs, chipolatas—Bunty does make the most marvelous chipolatas. Everybody, do come in and let us continue our conversation over a lovely meal." He handed one of the still-steaming mugs in his hand to Harry's aunt, and the two of them turned and strode towards the house.

Hestia threw Dudley a t-shirt and followed the other two. Kingsley and Ginny were looking at Harry as if he understood what was going on, which he didn't. As Dudley pulled his shirt on, Harry asked, "Uh, Dudley?"

"Yeah, Harry?" The shirts sleeves stained to contain Dudley's arms.

There seemed to be so many things to ask. "Bunty? Who's Bunty?"

Dudley, who had been starting to follow his mother and the others, stopped in his tracks. "You…? You don't know Bunty?"

Harry gaped at Ginny and Kingsley, looking for some sort of help. They had none to give.

"She knows you!" Dudley chuckled. "Goes on about you all the bloody time. Your biggest bloody fan. C'mon," he added. "Dedders's not kidding, she puts out a great spread for breakfast. You don't want to miss it. Hell, just thinking about it, I'm starving." With another low chuckle, Dudley strode towards the house.

Harry looked back at Kingsley once again, but the Minister for Magic was looking rather sheepish. "Can you handle a side-along back to Devon, Harry?"

"Of course he can," Ginny piped in, her lips pursed in what Harry assumed was either disapproval or curiosity; he felt both.

"Banquets and parties every night for the past fortnight," said Kingsley, shrugging his large shoulders. "Mrs. Shacklebolt has me on a strict diet, and a second, full breakfast definitely isn't on the menu. Besides, I hadn't planned on staying, didn't think there'd be anything to do but deliver the message and send them on their way. I really do need to get back to the Ministry; we've got Thicknesse's trial this morning, and I can't be late for that."

"Of course not," Harry conceded. He might have felt more anxiety had Ginny not been there with him. He extended his hand. "Thanks for getting us here."

"My pleasure!" Kingsley answered, smiling broadly as his enormous fingers closed around Harry's. "Old Talionis Fairbanks is taking care of running Magical Law Enforcement at the moment. I'll have him get in touch, shall I?"

"Yeah!" Harry agreed, surprised at his own enthusiasm.

"And have the others owl him too!" Kingsley called. When they waved in acknowledgement, he grinned, leapt the gate, and disappeared.

Ginny took his hand, and Harry felt, once again, supremely, idiotically happy. "Head in for some kippers and sausages, shall we?"

"Sure," Harry said. "But first—"

They hadn't had an opportunity for a good snog since his first day back at the Burrow. They quickly remedied that situation, and then strode into the farmhouse hand in hand.

: :

Harry somehow ended up separated from Ginny at breakfast. He was seated between his cousin and aunt, while she sat across from him, between Dedalus and Hestia. Her foot, however, had managed to find his beneath the table. At least, he hoped it was Ginny's foot.

The table was piled high with food—enough, Harry thought, to feed most of Gryffindor and possible some of Hufflepuff. Dudley ate like a man who hadn't seen food in weeks; this wasn't a surprise, as he'd always had what Aunt Petunia had insisted on calling a healthy appetite. What shocked Harry, however, was the fact that his cousin seemed to eat the vegetables and fresh fruit with the same gusto as what Harry had to agree was the first-rate fry-up.

"So, Bunty cooked all of this?" Harry asked his aunt. It was odd to be sitting beside her during a meal; odd to have her pass him the tray of sausages or the tea.

"Yes," Aunt Petunia said, her face set in a kind of rapture that Harry had only ever seen when she had persuaded Uncle Vernon to buy a gleaming, self-cleaning oven for her kitchen when Harry was seven. "She's quite marvelous."

"Um, so is this her house?" Ginny asked, clearly seeing that Harry was confused.

"Her…?" Aunt Petunia's eyebrows shot up, making her face look even longer than normal.

"No, Harry," chuckled Dedalus, "this is your house. One of four, as I understand it, including the old Headquarters."

"Four?" Harry goggled. Across the table from him, Ginny shrugged, eyes wide.

"Well, there's this one, it was your grandparents' summer home; as everyone knows, there's the one in Godric's Hollow, though, sadly, that's obviously not… Well, then, of course there's the Blacks' old home on Grimmauld Place, and the cottage in Hogsmeade."

"Though that one's got a reputation for being haunted," said Hestia, neatly filleting a kipper with her wand.

"Haunted?" said Dudley, stopping his remarkable demonstration of food consumption for the first time since Harry and Ginny had sat.

"Well, it's only in the last quarter-century or so," Dedalus answered. "When I went to school with Carlus—your grandfather, Harry, you look so much like him, same knobby knees—he would take me there on Hogsmeade weekends and we'd visit his parents. Your great-grandmother, Harry, was a Prewett, and Miss Weasley here can tell you what wonderful bakers Prewetts are wont to be." He sighed happily. "Alas, when last I visited Hogsmeade, the house was quite shut up. As Hestia says, it had got a reputation as—"

"The most haunted house in Britain," Harry gasped. "The…" Again he looked at Ginny. Again she shrugged, though she was smiling now. "My family owned the Shrieking Shack?"

"Owns it still, as I understand it," said Hestia.

"Oi, Harry," snorted Dudley around a slice of orange, "must be rough knowing where to go to bed at night!"

"I didn't know," Harry said, and then turned to his aunt and repeated, "I didn't. Honest."

"No," said Petunia. Her face remained relaxed, but she seemed to be thinking something through.

"Ghosts, though," said Dudley with an exaggerated shudder.

"Nah," Harry said, his head swirling, "that was just a story Dumbledore put about so Lupin could have a place to hide during the full moon. My dad, they were friends, it must have been my dad's… Lupin's…. He was a werewolf." A wave of sorrow—never far away these days—began to wash over him; Ginny reached between a tray of chipolatas and a basket of bananas and squeezed his hand.

"Werewolf?" said Dudley.

"Remus?" gasped Dedalus and Petunia, together.

"You say 'was', Harry?" gasped Hestia.

"He died," Harry whispered. "In the last battle, at Hogwarts." Everyone at the table nodded. Harry and Ginny had given them a very quick summary of the events of the past year, but they hadn't spelled out the full cost of the war. "He and Tonks, both."

"Oh, damn." Hestia, whom Harry had never seen who any emotion aside from good humor and—once—rage, began to cry. "Oh. Poor… Is Andie all right? That must have hit her something awful."

"Yeah," Harry said. "I mean, she's okay. But yeah. She's raising Tonks and Remus's son, Teddy, my godson, he's great, and… I think she and her sister Narcissa have kind of patched things up a bit, which is nice."

"Never could stand Cissy," sighed Hestia. "Empty-headed bint. But life's too short, and family is family."

Inexplicably, Aunt Petunia patted Harry's hand—which was still covered by Ginny's—and smiled.

"Yeah." He shook his head. "So, um, this Bunty? Is she… a cousin of mine or something?"

Again, the Siren Farm inhabitants looked both amused and perplexed by his question.

"Harry," said Ginny, voice and face warm, "I think she's got to be a house-elf."

"Oh." Harry felt incredibly stupid. Of course, meals like the one before him, and a cook hidden away, serving the house… Then a cold weight settled on him. "Oh. Merlin. She belongs to me too, is that it?"

"Well," said Dedalus brightly, "she is bound to the house, and the house is yours, so yes, I suppose that she does!"

"Oh," Harry said. He didn't want another elf, another creature bound to him, for which he was responsible—

"Dobby wasn't your elf, Harry," Ginny said quietly from across the room. "He was your friend. That's what he told everyone who would listen."

"Yeah," Harry conceded. Knowing that Dobby had died by his own choice relieved Harry's sense of guilt in some ways, but deepened it in others. He took a deep breath and nodded. "Yeah. So, um… Bunty?" he called.

There was a crack, and a round head appeared immediately behind Ginny's shoulder. "Yes, M-master?" came a squeaky voice.

Harry stood and walked around the table. Bunty was short, even for an elf, and prodigiously plump; clearly where years alone had left Kreacher half mad, they had given Bunty a chance to sample her own wares. Harry had heard Ron joke that you should never trust a skinny cook; if so, Bunty clearly was to be trusted. Kneeling down so that they were the same height, Harry said, "It's, uh, nice to meet you."

"Oh!" Bunty cried, tears beginning to run along her wide nose. "Master Harry is already meeting Bunty, but Master Harry was only a baby when he is meeting Bunty, perhaps Master Harry does not remember—?"

"No, no," Harry said. Elves' emotional outbursts were no longer new to Harry, but they continued to overwhelm him. "I… I'm sorry that I haven't visited—"

"Oh!" cried Bunty again, "But Master Harry is here now! If Bunty had only known that Master Harry would be coming back to Siren Farm, Bunty would not have prepared such a poor breakfast for his welcome—!"

"It's wonderful," Harry blurted. "Wonderful meal, isn't it, everyone?"

All of the people at the table agreed loudly that it was.

"Master Harry is too kind to say so!" Bunty blubbered. "Oh, it has been so lovely these last ten months, serving guests and family of the Potters once again."

"And you have done very well, Bunty," said Aunt Petunia, with a great, happy show of noblesse oblige.

"Master Harry's aunt is very kind," Bunty sniffled. "Master Harry's aunt is always very kind to Bunty."

Harry looked from Petunia to the elf and back. "That's… good."

Petunia smiled that new-oven smile again, and Harry could see it: the one creature in the whole magical world of which his aunt would not disapprove, that would, in fact, make his aunt's every dream come true. A house-elf.

"Aunt Petunia, Dudley, I'm really sorry that your home… That the Death Eaters destroyed the house on Privet Drive looking for me."

Petunia frowned slightly; Dudley shrugged.

"Would you like to stay here?"

Now Petunia's face became radiant. "Oh, Harry. I… That would be lovely."

"Would that be all right, Bunty?"

The house-elf dissolved into tears, throwing her chubby arms around Harry's shoulders.

Harry patted her on the back, gently detaching her. "I'll take that as a yes. What about you, Big D?"

Dudley chewed on one chiseled cheek and looked at Hestia; for a moment, Harry was worried—Hestia Jones was not an unhandsome witch, by any stretch of the imagination, but she was easily twenty-five years Dudley's senior…

Hestia patted Harry's cousin on the shoulder in a manner that smacked more of comradeship than romance, and Harry felt relieved. "He's got something he wants to do," she said.

"Do?"

"Er," grunted Dudley awkwardly, shoulder muscles bunching under his shirt. "Yeah." He glanced at his mother, who nodded, misty-eyed as she often was around her son. "Gonna join the army," Dudley said at last.

"The army?"

Dudley nodded. "It's because of you, see?" When Harry shook his head, Dudley plowed on. "When we first got here, nothing to do, Hestia here started training me, just to keep me from going off my nut with boredom, you know? And so's I wouldn't be useless if it came to a fight. And we talked about you, and the Order, and how you lot were all risking your lives to help people, to save people, and I thought, right, here's the one thing I know I'm good at, only I want to do it for good reasons, you know, instead of…"

Instead of beating up ten-year-olds in the park, Harry thought. "Yeah."

"Couldn't join the Order, though, could you?" joked Hestia.

"Nah," answered Dudley with a smile. "Then after Dad… er. Yeah. Well, I was kind of angry, and nothing else to do but train and fight, and then those masked bastards showed up, and we showed them what for, me and Hessie, and I thought, right. Going to join the army when this is over. SAS eventually. If they'll have me."

Hestia grunted, "They'll have you."

"Wow," said Harry.

"Yeah," said Dudley.

"Oh, Dudley," gushed Aunt Petunia as she had done so often, "I'm so proud of you."

And for once, Harry could not disagree with her.

: :

When Ginny and Harry finally waddled out the front door, the inhabitants of Siren Farm—Harry's summer home—waved warmly in farewell. Aside from Dudley, none of them would be leaving any time soon. Dedalus's house too had been destroyed, though he seemed even less concerned than the Dursleys, and Hestia lived with her sister, Gwenog, who would be deep in training for the upcoming Quidditch season and would, Hestia said with a laugh, "be a right bint for the next two months."

"Thanks for coming," Harry said, squeezing Ginny's hand.

"Are you joking?" she laughed, "I got to meet the famous Dursleys—two of them, any way—see yet another of your houses, and talk to Gwenog Jones's sister!" Ginny and Hestia had talked about the Holyhead Harpies for a while, quite losing the Dursleys, though Harry and Dedalus tried to explain the ins and outs of Quidditch to them. Mostly, Harry watched Ginny, who seemed positively giddy once she realized that she was talking to her idol's sister; seeing her beaming left Harry feeling quite giddy himself.

Family.

As they hopped the fence—which was a lot harder for them than the much taller Kingsley—Harry asked, "So, um, do you think your parents would mind if we stopped off someplace on the way back?"

"Oh?" said Ginny with a grin that was more than a little wicked, "Going to show me yet another of your houses, are you?" When he didn't answer, but merely stood there, mouth open, she laughed. "Mum always promised to bring me to Godric's Hollow when I was little, to see the statue and the house. Somehow, she never did. And of course…" She stopped short, suddenly looking up at him more timidly than she had done in years.

"Of course?"

"Merlin, Harry, I'm sorry, I just thought…" She shook her head. "I mean, it wouldn't be the same for you. I'm sorry, never mind."

"No, what?"

"Well," she said, blushing, "there's a rose garden there, at the back of the house. It's supposed to be, you know, one of the most romantic spots in Britain."

Grinning, he kissed her, and was pleased when she abandoned her embarrassment and kissed him back. "That sounds great," Harry said. "Definitely. We can stop there second."

"Second?"

"I… I was thinking maybe we could drop in at Mrs. Tonks's and see Teddy. I haven't seen him this week. Do you think she'd mind?"

"'Course not," answered Ginny; her lips found his again, and he could feel them smile against his own. "Family's always welcome."

Family. "Okay," Harry said, taking her hand and turning.

: :

Fume (Epilogue Drabble)

As Harry made faces, Teddy giggled brightly.

Ginny didn't notice that Andromeda had sat beside her until the older woman whispered, "He'll make a good father some day."

"Don't," Ginny said.

"What?" Andromeda chuckled, "Too much like your mum?"

Ginny answered slowly, "That…."

"And?" Andromeda waited, her gaze palpable. "Don't try telling me you don't love him."

"Not that."

"A fool could see he loves you."

The boys laughed, oblivious. Teddy mirrored Harry's coloration; they laughed again.

"Nervous?"

"No." Ginny barely spoke. "Angry. Because he left. Because…"

"Ah. He knows?"

"Yes."

Harry looked up, grinning.

"You'll be fine," sighed Andromeda.

First

“It seems odd, doesn’t it?” Hermione said wistfully. She leaned back against Ron’s shoulder and picked at a bit of paint that was sticking to her hair. “Not to be on the Hogwarts Express today?”

We weren’t on it last year either, thought Harry, but he knew what she was getting at.

Dean laughed; Ron shook his head, pulling her closer, and chuckled, “Come on, Hermione, we’re a five-minute walk from the front gates. Once our slave-driver here”—he thrust a thumb towards his sister—“tells us we’re done for the day, we’ll be up at the school hours before the rest of the students arrive. Since when have you ever complained about getting to school early?”

“Ginny’s not the slave-driver,” Luna pointed out. “This is Harry’s house. Ginny’s merely the foreman.”

Wiping multi-colored paint splatters from her wand, Ginny laughed, “Thanks, Loony!”

“You’re welcome,” said Luna with a smile. “Are we done, by the way?”

“Yup!” Ginny said, patting a freshly painted wall. “This Shack Shrieks no more!”

They all laughed, and Harry grinned at them. Ron, leaning back against a drop-cloth-covered bed, his arms around Hermione as if they had always belonged there; Hermione finally looking as if she weren’t surprised to be so close to him. Luna, her eyes closed–had Harry ever seen her with her eyes shut?—her white smock decorated with splattered paint and doodles of fanciful creatures that Dean, his head in her lap, was continuing to draw; Dean, finally looking as if he had filled some of the emptiness in his soul, painting .

Ginny, looking at him.

“Thanks guys. I really appreciate all of the work.”

“Well,” chuckled Dean, putting a last crumpled horn on a Snorkack, “it’s not as if we weren’t already up here most of the summer rebuilding and cleaning and painting the castle. And you feed us better than McGonagall did!”

“Hear, hear!” chortled Ron as Hermione swatted him, muttering, “It’s not Professor McGonagall’s fault that they only got the kitchens up and running again last week!”

“Oy, Kreacher,” Harry shouted down the stairs, “did you hear what Dean just said?”

“Yes, Master!” called the house-elf, who had catered lunches to Harry’s work crew throughout August. “Kreacher is most gratified to have his service please Master’s guests. Is Master’s party ready for luncheon?”

“Don’t have to ask twice!” hooted Ron, leaping to his feet, pulling an astonished Hermione with him.

“Come along, Dean,” Luna said, standing and peering down with apparent wonder at her smock. “Perhaps Kreacher has made us Plimpy soup.”

“Uh, don’t think you find Gulping Plimpies this far north,” Harry suggested.

Luna’s face fell, but not too far. “Perhaps it will be French onion, then,” she sighed. “I love French onion soup.”

As he followed Luna out the door, Dean smiled, winked, and was gone.

He was about to follow them down to the kitchen, but a small, familiar hand found his. He turned to Ginny; the whole of what would be his bedroom was white, excepting the pale green trim on the window sills and door frames, and her hair flamed all the brighter, even with a fleck or two of white still scattered here or there among the copper strands. “Coming down to lunch?” he asked, finding his voice.

“In a minute,” she said, stepping closer. She smiled. “Haven’t had you alone in a bedroom in a while.”

He met her halfway. “Last time, I seem to remember a lot of crying and yelling.”

“Quite a lot of snogging, as well.”

“True.” They kissed, and as always it left Harry breathless—no longer like something from someone else’s life, but miraculous nonetheless.

After a moment, Harry stepped back. “So. Are you still, you know…?”

“Angry?”

Harry shrugged. “Yeah.”

Ginny started to say something, but then closed her mouth. Eyebrows pursed, she started to speak again when a bellow wafted up the stairs: “Oi! Potter! Kreacher won’t serve out till you’re down here!”

Harry reached out and squeezed Ginny’s hand. “Come on. We should have known not to keep your brother waiting for food.”

Smirking, she led him towards the door. “Meet you back up here after lunch?”

“I’ll have to ask the owner of the house.”

“You do that, Harry.” Hand in hand, giggling like school children, they went down for lunch.

: :

By the end of lunch—which had in fact featured French onion soup—they were all happily arrayed around the table that they had discovered to be still intact in the cellar and that Dean and Luna had returned to gleaming condition. Dean and Hermione were discussing the legislation that Kingsley Shacklebolt had proposed to guarantee Muggle-borns’ rights in the future; Dean actually seemed to be even more adamant than Hermione that it could have gone farther. Luna was regaling Harry and Ginny with a story about Hagrid’s shock when she had shown him a Humdinger living in one of the oaks of the Forbidden Forest—a Common Humdinger, not a Blibbering one, but a Humdinger nonetheless. Ron surprised everyone by getting up from the table first.

“You feeling ill, Ron?” Ginny asked.

“No, no, just, you know, wanted to help get Hermione moved in.”

Hermione stood, very demurely, looking at a spot on the floor six feet ahead of her—looking, in fact, anywhere but at the four remaining at the table or at Ron.

Ginny started to speak again, but Harry beat her to it. “Ron? You do know that the house-elves will already have moved everything up?”

“I simply wanted to show him a few things in the Head Girl’s quarters,” Hermione said, and immediately started to blush, before Dean had even managed to snort, “I bet you did!”

Harry leaned forward and said, “So, Ron, your room'll be ready for you after the feast.”

“Oh, right.” Ron's ears reddened. Clearly, he'd forgot that, unlike Hermione, he was a cadet Auror now, not a Hogwarts student; the other three cadets had chosen to Apparate in every day, but Ron and Harry had good reasons to want to stay as close to school as possible. Glowering at his sister, Ron muttered. “And you'll be staying up at the school.”

“Perhaps.” Ginny grinned cheekily at Harry and then up at Ron. “In any case, if you and Hermione would like an hour or two... to yourselves, now would be the time.”

Ron looked about to say something he'd regret when Hermione took his hand. “Come on, Ron,” she said primly. “Good bye, Dean. Good luck at the Ministry tomorrow. See you up at the school, Harry, Ginny. Luna.” Ron's mouth snapped shut, and he and Hermione left with as much dignity as they could manage, but the others didn’t even wait for the front door to close before they all started to laugh.
“Going to be hard for them, not having all those dark, empty corners to sneak off to in the castle!” chuckled Dean.

“Yes,” mused Luna, “that will rather diminish the extent and frequency of their sexual activities.”

“Sexual…?” asked Harry, caught a bit off guard; he’d supposed that his friends had simply been sneaking off at every opportunity just as he and Ginny had to kiss and to talk. “You mean they…?”

Dean blinked, Luna stared and Ginny gawked. “Merlin, Harry,” she said, “don’t you and Ron talk about anything?”

“Well,” he spluttered, looking down into his empty bowl, “not about that. I mean, think about it…” He looked at her pleadingly.

“Oh. I suppose. But that didn’t stop Hermione from telling me everything, even if it was about my brother.”

“I should hope not,” Luna added, in what was for her a very firm tone. “Speaking of which, Dean, now would be a good time for us to go back to your room at the Three Broomsticks. It is a shame that you have decided not to come back to school, but that being the case, it seems as if we should take advantage of this opportunity to have as much sex as we can before I have to be back up at the castle.”

Dean was not as dark-skinned as Lee or Angelina—or even the Patils—and so it was always rather entertaining to watch him flush. It certainly couldn’t be called a blush, but it was close enough, in Harry’s mind. As he stood, mouth open, he seemed to be looking at the same spot on the floor that had so fascinated Hermione.

Luna linked her arm in his. “Thank you for the lovely lunch, Harry,” she said. “I’m glad we could help get your house ready. I’ll see you both up at the school.”

Harry and Ginny waved goodbye as they left, and then looked at each other. Ginny looked as if she were about to ask something when Kreacher appeared between them with a loud crack. “Is Master finished? May Kreacher clear away?”

“Of course,” Harry said.

“Great lunch, Kreacher,” Ginny said.

“Mistress is too kind.”

Harry stared down at the elf, who was giving them a particularly disturbing smile. “Er, thanks, Kreacher. Listen, you’re done for the afternoon, okay?”

The toothy, ragged smile grew. “Of course, Master. Once Kreacher has finished cleaning up, Kreacher shall return to Grimmauld Place.”

“Great, Kreacher.” Harry had realized, with some regret, that though Kreacher belonged to him, he was bound to the House of Black; sending him to work at Hogwarts for a year had been expedient, but had been very difficult on the elf. They had come to an agreement that Kreacher might come and assist Harry at his new home, which Kreacher saw as purely a temporary abode, but that the elf would remain at the home to which he was bound. “Thanks.”

“Kreacher lives to serve.” As he began to Levitate the dirty dishes, the elf added, with what looked distinctly like a smirk, “Kreacher took the opportunity to prepare Master’s bed. For the night.” He bowed low, hands raised to keep the china in the air. “Master. Mistress.” With another crack, he and the dishes disappeared.

Harry looked at Ginny, who was blushing and frowning. “Does… Does he call lots of witches… that?”

“No,” Harry said. Hermione had always been ‘Master’s friend’—at least, once she had ceased to be ‘the Mudblood’—while Luna was usually ‘Master’s unusual friend.’ Harry had heard Kreacher call Ginny ‘Master’s lady friend,’ and, long ago, ‘Blood Traitor spawn,’ but never— “No.”

“Oh.” She pursed her lips for a moment and then cocked an eyebrow at him. “So, shall we inspect his work upstairs?”

“Uh,” Harry said. “Yes.”

: :

Harry’s room, which they had left covered in drop cloths, was sparkling. Sunlight poured through the window, Harry’s robes were all hanging in the closet, and the bed…

The old four-poster was made up, the silk coverings a deep, lustrous green, turned down…

A red rose in a bud vase stood on the nightstand.

“Wow,” Ginny said. “Kreacher works fast.”

Harry nodded. Not for the first time, Harry felt a pang of regret at reclaiming his great-grandparents’ house. At claiming this room. The bed, at least, was the same one on which he had seen Sirius sit, the night they had met. The night that Harry had learned the truth.

Harry took a deep breath and let it out.

Ginny’s arms lifted, open. “Come here,” she said.

Harry stepped into her arms, and it was sunlight, and timeless. They had kissed dozens of times since the end of the war, and every time seemed like the first, and every time seemed unique, and now seemed perfect. They melted together and there was no tension now, no sense that this was the first or would be the last, and then they found themselves once again on a bed—not falling this time, but there nonetheless—and clothes began to disappear, and flesh presented itself to lips and fingers, and all seemed just as it should be. The only moment when they stopped was just at the point where they were about to cross into truly new territory. They leaned back from each other, each breathless, each looking for an assurance from the other that was evident without any need to search. Ginny nodded, and Harry plucked his wand from the pocket of his discarded jeans, casting for the first time a spell that had never been part of any Hogwarts lesson, but that every male student over second year learned and practiced. Then the wand was gone, and the wait was over.

: :

When he found himself staring up into her face again, sunlight spilling through her hair again, two thoughts managed to occupy his brain at the same time: one was that, really, nothing had changed; the other was that it felt as if a massive Invisibility Cloak had been pulled from the world and everything seemed different....

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.” He ran his fingers through her hair, which had somehow managed to become tangled all to one side. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, smiling, leaning her cheek into his wrist. “You?”

“Yeah.”

She lay down against him, and the feeling of her, of all that mysterious flesh that had seemed so frighteningly tantalizing now felt simply natural, and in some way that felt quite marvelous.

Still…

“Sorry.”

She pushed back up and peered down at him as if to check whether he had gone mad. “For what?”

Suddenly, he felt as if he were looking into the sun, but he didn’t feel as if he could tear his eyes from hers. “Sorry… I wanted… You didn’t…”

Her eyebrows bunched, and then she kissed his nose. “We’re not going for perfection or anything. Don’t worry.” Her lips met his cheek. “Next time, okay?”

“Okay.” He raised his mouth to hers.

: :

Some time later, he was catching his breath again, running a finger along one high clavicle. “Ginny?”

“Yeah?” Her eyes were closed, her hair wild on the silk around her face. Sweat brightened the bridge of her nose, and her cheeks, and a sudden rush of some feeling seemed to grip Harry's chest, as if Grawp's hand were squeezing him.

“Are you... Are you still angry with me?” he gasped.

Her mouth became very small and her eyes flashed open, very large; she looked once again like the girl who had awoken in the Chamber of Secrets all those years ago, awaiting his judgment. “Harry.” She looked up at him for a moment, shook her head minutely, then nodded and sighed. “I feel all kinds of things about you, Harry. I love you, and I’m proud. Proud of you. Proud that you love me. You make me happy, and sad, too, sometimes, because of all of the things that have happened to you, to us.” He started to answer her, but she ran a finger across his lips. “Mostly happy. And yeah, I still do feel all of those things I was yelling about the last time we were lying on a bed together, and I probably will be for a while, but honestly, Harry, you’ll know if it’s a problem. It’s not what I’m feeling most of all. Just something that’s there, that we’ve talked about, that I know will get better.”

He sighed and kissed her finger. “Don’t know how you do it. I can only usually figure out one thing that I’m feeling at a time. If that.”

She grinned up at him. “Such a boy sometimes. Not that I’m complaining. So. What one thing are you feeling just now?”

“Happy, believe me. But I guess also…” He looked away from her.

“Also?”

“Afraid?”

She sat up, so that they were facing each other once again. “Afraid?”

He tried to elaborate, but found that he couldn’t, and so he simply nodded.

She pulled him close, winding herself around him until there was no space between them. “Never known you to be afraid of anything before,” she whispered.

Never had anything I couldn’t stand to lose, he thought. Holding her tight, he whispered back. “First time for everything, I suppose.”

Forever

“So,” Harry said, glancing down at Fabian Prewett’s watch for a moment before staring across Professor Slughorn’s crowded room at Ginny, “I’m sorry Dean couldn’t be here.”

“Hmmm,” hummed Luna. It was difficult to guess what she was staring at, though she was staring at something. “I’m sorry that Hermione and Ronald couldn’t be here.”

“Oh,” said Harry, watching Ginny listen to a very animated Gwenog Jones, “that’s okay.” Ron wasn’t a huge fan of Professor Slughorn’s anyway; as it was, he’d injured his back during a Stealth and Concealment drill that day, and Hermione had stayed back at the Shrieking Shack to nurse him. Harry hoped that whatever nursing went on didn’t injure Ron any further. “Did Dean do anything for St. Valentine’s?”

“No,” said Luna, with no apparent concern. “When is St. Valentine’s?”

“Um. Today?” Harry looked back at his friend; he knew that she was capable of joking, but she was usually fairly obvious about it. She seemed perfectly serious, insofar as Luna was ever serious. He gestured at the red and pink streamers floating in heart shapes around the room. “That’s why Slughorn threw the party?”

“Oh,” Luna stared up at one of the hearts, which was hovering directly above them. “Well, at least we don’t need to worry about Nargles.”

“Yeah,” agreed Harry with a laugh.

Sanguini the vampire pushed between them, carrying a goblet of what Harry hoped was wine. Though he looked as bored as he had the last time that Harry had seen him, he had a large red heart pinned festively to his lapel.

“So,” Luna said, peering at Harry with a look of wide-eyed curiosity, “did you do anything for Ginny?”

A tremor of anticipation thrilled through Harry’s chest. He looked down at his watch once more. “Not yet. Stick around, and you’ll see.”

“Oh. How nice. It must not be anything sexual then, because I know you are very shy about that.” As Harry struggled to answer, Luna gazed over at where Ginny was standing, looking as stunned as Harry was feeling while Gwenog Jones talked on, gesturing with her hands. On Ginny the astonishment looked adorable; Harry simply felt an idiot. “Ginny played very well today,” Luna continued. “It looks as if Gwenog Jones must have watched the game.”

Harry recognized the motion of Gwenog’s hands; she was demonstrating one of Ginny’s maneuvers from the game. “Yeah. She and Hestia sat just behind us cadets.” It was odd watching the match from the stands set up for guests and teachers—adults. Susan Bones had been even more uncomfortable, since Gryffindor had trounced her Hufflepuffs.

“Ginny executed the Yarmouth Yoyo to perfection several times,” Luna sighed.

Harry blinked. She had perfectly identified the very challenging evasive maneuver that Gwenog was demonstrating with her hands. “How…? Since when were you such a fan of Quidditch?”

“Oh, my father and I haven’t missed a Harpies match since I was—”

Neville bustled up, holding two glasses. “Hey, guys. Um. Have you seen Hannah?”

“No,” Harry said. “I thought you came with—?”

“Susan, yeah.” Neville ducked his head. “But, erm, see, Hannah asked me too, so…”

“You came with both?”

“Uh. Yeah?”

“Oh, how lovely,” sighed Luna.

Harry laughed. “Are they aware that you’re here with both of them?”

“Um, well,” Neville answered, looking more and more sheepish, “not exactly.”

“Look, Neville,” said Luna, “there they are. Oh, they’re waving.” She wiggled her fingers vaguely towards the door that led to the back of the flat, to the little sitting room where Ron had once almost died; Hannah Abbott and Susan Bones were standing together, glaring at Neville, their hands raised in a manner that could barely be considered a greeting.

“Erm… See you guys,” Neville spluttered as he stumbled towards the two friends.

Luna waved at Neville’s retreating back and smiled.

A mixed group of younger students—mostly girls—swarmed around Neville and his two dates, obscuring them from view.

“That’s not going to end well,” Harry muttered.

Luna cocked her head and stared at Harry.

“Well, going with two girls to a party…”

Her thin eyebrows twisting, Luna said, “You brought me and Ginny.”

“But that’s different!” Harry muttered. “You’re… Professor Slughorn invited you. And then Dean couldn’t come and Ginny and I just thought you wouldn’t have as much fun coming alone, so we brought you—”

“—as friends, yes.” Luna smiled brilliantly, and Harry couldn’t help smiling himself.

“So,” he said, “missing Dean’s sternum?”

Luna’s smile faded away. “A little, yes.”

Harry put his hand on Luna’s shoulder. “I figured.”

“Actually,” she said, thoughtfully, her eyes becoming even more unfocused than usual, “his sternum has got rather hard lately. Much less pleasant. Not that I’ve had much opportunity to check it lately.”

“Oh,” Harry muttered, “yeah. Well, he’s been so busy down at the Ministry with the whole Muggle-born Rights thing…”

“Hmmm,” Luna agreed. She was smiling but looked quite sad in spite of it.

Blaise Zabini and Zacharias Smith pushed between them, sidling furtively toward the front door.

Harry glanced at his watch. Half nine.

“Dean seems to have become rather obsessed with the commission, which makes perfect sense,” sighed Luna. “But he doesn’t seem to be terribly interested in anything else. Not sex or Snorkacks even.”

Harry was about to try to say something even vaguely comforting when a head of hair like wild straw appeared above Luna’s. “Sex and Snorkacks?” piped a high, wobbly voice. “Two of my favorite subjects!”

Luna stepped back and turned, revealing a gangly, tall man with a face that seemed to have been made from odds and ends, like a scarecrow’s. For the first time that Harry could remember, Luna looked utterly taken aback. “They’re… oviparous.”

“Yes!” crowed the man. “There aren’t many people who know a thing about Snorkacks at all, let alone that they’re egg-layers! Goodness, how wonderful to meet someone so well-informed!”

Luna’s eye’s got very wide—a remarkable sight indeed. As the gangly man grinned down at her, she held out a trembling hand. “I’m Luna Lovegood. I’ve got a boyfriend.”

“Lucky for him!” laughed the man, whose varicolored eyes sparkled with either good humor or madness. He took her hand and shook it. “Are you related to old Xeno Lovegood?”

“He’s my father,” said Luna, so breathily that Harry could barely believe that she had managed to produce any sound.

“Of course!” said the man. “A lot prettier than the old man, luckily! Utterly lost when it comes to cryptozoology, begging your pardon, but one of the expedition’s most valued patrons, nonetheless!”

Harry cleared his throat and Luna and her new companion looked at him, startled. “Expedition?” he asked.

The man shook his wild mop of hair and laughed. “I’m sorry, of course, shouldn’t presume. The Scamander Arctic Thaumazoological Survey. My father and I, we’ve worked our way from Lapland to Svaalbard over the past few years, tracking Snorkacks and Bildicoots—all part of preparing a new edition of The Book, you know.”

“The book?” asked Harry, feeling a bit lost.

Luna’s voice was still barely there, but seemed to go up a full octave. “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.”

“Yes! Bit of a family tradition,” said the man, and held his hand out to Harry. “Rolf Scamander.”

Harry took the proffered hand happily. Loony as he seemed, it was still hard not to like him. “Harry Potter.”

The man blinked. “Harry…?” He looked to Luna and back. “I’m sorry. That sounds very familiar, and I know, this is one of Slughorn’s do’s, so I probably should know, but…”

“Harry is the one who defeated Voldemort,” said Luna, her voice returning to something more like its usual airy tone. She smiled that same brilliant smile at Harry. “Several times.”

The man’s eyes widened and he shook Harry’s hand. “Oh. Oh! Of course, I am so sorry—we have been out of the country for the past few years, only just got back… Well, it is lovely to meet you. You are, I suppose, this lovely lady’s lucky boyfriend?”

“No, his girlfriend is Ginny Weasley,” said Luna.

“Weasley? Related to Charlie? One of my very best friends! May I ask—?”

“I’m thirsty,” Luna said. “Mr. Scamander, perhaps you would escort me to the punch?” She turned back to Harry. “I am certain that we won’t miss whatever it is you have planned for Ginny.”

“No.”

Turning back to her newfound friend, Luna said, “Now, tell me, were you able to find Crumple-horned Snorkacks on Svaalbard?”

“Alas, no!” laughed Rolf. “Crumple-horned Snorkacks seem to be a myth. But the Great-horned variety…”

As they were swallowed by the crowd, Harry turned back to find Ginny and the Joneses pushing towards him through the throng. Ginny was marble-faced.

“Sorry to keep you two lovebirds apart on St. Valentine’s,” chuckled Hestia, “but once you get my sister here talking Quidditch, you can’t get her to shut up!”

Gwenog laughed, showing off her famously missing teeth. “Hard not to get excited when you’ve had a chance to watch a young talent like this one!”

Hestia laughed and clouted her sister on the shoulder. The Joneses headed off in the same direction as Luna and Rolf Scamander, though Harry felt sure they were thirsty for something harder than punch.

Perfect timing.

Harry slipped his arm around Ginny’s waist and pulled her closer. Though she didn’t resist, she didn’t exactly play along.

“Thank you, Harry. That was very nice.”

“Nice?”

Her face remained expressionless. “Getting Gwenog to compliment me. To… ask me to try out for the Harpies. That was a very lovely present for St. Valentine’s. Thank you.”

Harry gaped down at her. “Gwenog asked you to try out? That’s great!”

Ginny’s eyes narrowed. “Come on, Harry. Don’t try one on with a Weasley. It’s not like anyone in the family would think to do that. It’s not like anyone else we know has an in with Gwenog bloody Jones.”

“Ginny—!”

He hadn’t seen her like this—talk like this—since that day at the Burrow the previous summer. She’d used the word bloody more times in one breath that afternoon than Harry thought he’d heard in the rest of his life.

Her pupils vibrated. “Come off it, Harry. It was very sweet. If that wasn’t your bloody present… I mean, come on, even you can’t have totally bloody forgotten, please! I knew something was up—no flowers, no card, no—”

“F-five minutes,” Harry stammered, holding up his battered watch.

“What?” She blinked.

“Your p-present will be here in five minutes.”

“It… will?”

He nodded.

“So… You didn’t put her up to that?” He shook his head, and her skin began to color, her eyes to widen. “You didn’t ask her tell me I was… g-good? That I should try out for the Harpies?”

“Nope.” He pulled her closer; she was much less resistant. “You made that happen all on your own.”

She stared up at him, her mouth very small and her eyes very, very large. “Harry?”

“Yes, love?”

“I think I might need to sit down.”

Before he could find her a chair, however, Harry felt a tug at his elbow. Twisting his head around, he saw a dwarf dressed extravagantly (if unconvincingly) as a cupid smirking up at him. “This her, boss?” the little man croaked.

Harry nodded.

“Looks familiar, at least!” The dwarf cleared his throat loudly and twanged his harp. The entire room fell silent, and suddenly what had seemed like a marvelous idea seemed… less so. “I got a musical message for…” He scowled, first at his paper, then at Harry, then at the paper again. “For Gin-EEV-ra Weasley.” Plucking his harp atonally once more for good measure, he launched wobblingly into the song that Harry had written:

Your eyes are as bright as a thousand wand spell,

As a Chaser you are the best, easily.

You're simply divine,

Oh, will you be mine

Now and forever, Ginny Weasley?

Harry, who had been staring up at the ceiling, finally ventured to peer down at Ginny, who was staring up at him with her mouth hanging open. He smiled feebly. “Happy St. Valentine’s?”

And suddenly she launched herself up at him, kissing him so hard that she seemed to be removing all of the air from his lungs, but he didn’t care. He was vaguely aware of the crowd cheering, but his consciousness was entirely monopolized by her lips, her hands, her body…

Eventually, they broke from the kiss, gasping, and the others all laughed, clapped some more, and began to crowd around the couple. Harry felt as if he had drunk a whole bottle of firewhisky, and he would have been happy to go back for more. He began to lean into Ginny once again, but she was looking down. “Thanks, Tim,” she said.

“No problem,” grunted the dwarf. “He pays well, even if he don’t write any better, but at least this time I didn’t have to tackle no one!”

“Yeah,” Harry burbled. “Sorry about that.”

Tim smirked up at him. “No problem. Think they got any firewhisky back there? Singin’s dry work, it is.”

Ginny giggled against Harry’s chest.

Professor Slughorn clapped the dwarf on the back. “I am certain that the house elves have opened some of my finest whisky, my good fellow. Come with me!” The Slytherin head winked hugely at Harry and walked off with Tim towards the drinks.

“That was quite lovely!” called Luna from somewhere at the back of the crowd. Hannah and Susan pushed closer, dragging a chastened-looking Neville between them, and giggled briefly with Ginny.

“Well done, Harry!” Neville said, before the two girls dragged him away again—no doubt to continue telling him just how well he himself had not done.

As the party dissolved again into laughter and chatter, Harry felt Ginny lift up on her toes and turned just in time to find her mouth reaching his.

“Thank you, Harry,” Ginny said. “That was just perfect.”

“It wasn’t too… silly?”

“Just silly enough, I think,” she said, and they both snorted. “But Harry?”

“Yeah?” Well-being coursed through his body like flame.

“If you’re going to start throwing around words like forever,” she whispered, and she didn’t seem to be laughing any more, “you had better bloody well mean them.”

“I do,” he whispered back. “I do.”

Folly, Act I

Harry stumbled back into the Shack, limbs trembling, but relieved. He’d lasted another term without dying, and without Talionis or Robards booting him from the program. And they had got Easter holiday week, in spite of Robards’s obscenity-larded grumbling. Talionis had given them a sort of ceremonial tongue-lashing by way of celebrating the day and told them all he was sick of their pasty faces, that it was just as well he’d be spared the displeasure of having to look at them for a week, and they’d better be ready to work hard for a change once their holiday was done. Harry’d never been so happy to be insulted.

Party tonight at The Burrow.

Week with Ginny, without having to sneak back and forth… quite as far.

Flying. Helping her get ready for the Harpies tryouts.

Talking to the Weasleys.

That thought dropped a heavy weight in Harry’s stomach, even as it set his fingers tingling.

Leaving his kit by the front door—he’d be taking it soon enough—he wandered into the kitchen. As he had hoped and prayed, Kreacher greeted him there, a chilled glass full of butterbeer on a tiny silver tray. “Thanks, Kreacher. Robards was off his nut today. You’re a life-saver.”

“Master is too kind.” Kreacher waited, tray and eyebrows raised, while Harry quaffed off the first half of the drink. When Harry lowered the glass, he was still standing, expectant.

“Yeah, Kreacher?” Harry asked; he had grown used to the house-elf’s passive intrusions. “What’s up?”

“Master has a visitor.” The thought that this statement brought to Harry’s mind—Ginny!—evidently made itself clear on his face, as Kreacher continued, “A wizard visitor. I have put him in Master’s study.”

“Thanks, Kreacher.” Couldn’t be Ron; Kreacher wouldn’t have called Ron a visitor, since Ron spent most nights at the Shack—the ones when he hadn’t sneaked up to the castle to spend the night in the Head Girl’s quarters, or kipped down in George’s flat after helping out at Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes. The elf would have said Master’s friend or, more recently, Mistress’s brother.

After polishing off the rest of the butterbeer in a single pull, Harry deposited the glass on the tray, wiped his mouth obediently with the napkin that Kreacher pulled out of the air, watched the elf make his customary disappearance back to Grimmauld Place, and made his way across the front hall to the room that Kreacher insisted—rather more optimistically than accurately, Harry thought—on calling the Study, which was furnished with a few empty bookshelves, a bare table, two chairs, and one Neville Longbottom.

“Hey, Neville!” Harry extended his hand and was surprised that his friend’s grip, which had grown enthusiastic if not bone-crushing over the past year, was soft, almost timid. “What brings you here? Susan still threatening to skin you alive?”

After the debacle at Professor Slughorn’s at St. Valentine’s, where Neville had inadvertently found himself escorting both Susan Bones and Hannah Abbott, Neville had been very quick to make his own preference between the two best friends—Hannah—clear. Though Susan had accepted the choice graciously, she had made a point of not telling Neville this; she’d been shooting venomous glances at her friend’s boyfriend from the new Auror table in the Great Hall. When the other cadet from the DA, Terry Boot, had asked her why, she’d given them a hard grin. Don’t want him to forget never to mess with a Hufflepuff.

“No, no,” Neville said, but his eyes seemed focused on Harry’s belt buckle. “Susan’s told me I’ll live, but…” Neville’s eyes flicked up, and Harry caught a sudden glimpse of the determination that had made Neville one of the leaders of Dumbledore’s Army the previous year, and had, coincidentally, made him quite popular with the girls ever since. “It’s made me think, Harry.”

“Think?” Harry tried to guess where Neville was going with this, but couldn’t. Collapsing into one of the chairs, he shrugged at Neville, encouraging him to continue.

Neville sat opposite, eyes still locked on Harry’s. It was a full ten seconds, however, before he took Harry’s cue. “It’s about Ginny.”

Ginny. Tonight. The Weasleys. “Ginny?”

Neville nodded.

“What about Ginny?”

Sitting straight as a broomstick, Neville started to speak, but then paused, his expression frozen between that newly familiar air of grim resolve and the terrified look he had worn so often in years past, especially in Snape’s presence.

“Neville?” Harry prompted. “What about Ginny?”

“Kissed her,” Neville said in a kind of strangled whisper.

Harry understood the words, but they made no sense. He sat there, blinking at his friend. “Kissed—?”

“Ginny,” said Neville, nodding minutely. “Twice. Last year.” His eyes widened. “She didn’t, you know, kiss me, mind, I just want to point that out, but yeah, Harry, I kissed her, on the lips and all, and I feel really rotten, I wanted to say something, but it never seemed like the right time—”

Harry held up his hands and the torrent stopped. Neville’s face was flushed and his eyes bright; burnished red crescents appeared on his cheeks. He sat, lips pursed, still very straight, but blessedly silent.

They’d kissed? What the hell did that mean? And why hadn’t Ginny ever mentioned anything? Probably because it wasn’t worth mentioning. Or maybe… “Neville,” Harry said, holding back the urgency he was feeling with his tongue as if he were tamping down the urge to vomit, “when?”

The flood began again. “Last winter. After Luna was taken on the train back, it was awful, you know, everyone was so terrified, but Ginny, she… Well, she and I decided that the DA needed to continue, that it was all the more important, with The Quibbler silenced, we needed to keep the fight going, you know?”

Harry nodded numbly but Neville had already moved on. “Spent a lot of time together, planning, you know? And you were gone, and Hannah’s a Muggleborn, so she wasn’t here, obviously, and Susan was, but she and Anthony….” Neville paused for a moment, either because Harry’s expression was beginning to make him anxious, or because he was surprised by the volume of prattle he was pouring forth.

Harry sat and breathed.

“Well, anyway,” Neville continued, eying Harry nervously, “lot of time together, since, basically, we were the leaders, but Snape and the Carrows were watching us like hawks, so we couldn’t get out much—not until we figured out how to keep the Room of Requirement open to the three common rooms, anyway—wouldn’t half have given an arm for your Cloak and that map she said you had—and she and, yeah, well…”

Harry un-ground his teeth and gave Neville what was meant to be an encouraging nod.

Neville gulped audibly. “Yeah. Well. She’s, you know… Amazing. And…. And…. And smells so nice, like freesia, only not so cloying, and we were in the common room late one night, we’d just pulled off a raid on Mr. Potatohead’s classroom—that’s Amycus—and she’d been brilliant as usual, Stunned a couple of Slytherin Prefects before any of the rest of us even knew they were there, and we sent the others up to bed and talked the raid through, a debriefing, sort of, and she was sitting there in front of the fire, her face all glowy the way it gets, you know?”

“I know.”

“Bloody hell.” Neville took another deep breath, not holding it this time. “She was right there, and I didn’t even think about it, I just sort of leaned forward and kissed… And she didn’t back, I swear, it was me, she was totally gobsmacked, we sat there after for like five minutes and she didn’t say a word—hadn’t seen her that quiet since she first came to Hogwarts and then only when you…. And I wanted to die, but I didn’t… I just… And finally she just sort of started talking to me, looking into the fire. About you. And Hannah. And Susan. And Dean. And Luna, even, how hard it was, not knowing where she was, Ginny said she would have loved to talk to her just then… How worried she was, and how we were, you know, friends and all, and that that was the most important thing, coming through together.” Neville sighed in relief, having placed the load squarely on Harry’s shoulders.

“Thanks, Neville.” Not the whole load, however. “And the second time? You said…”

“Yeah,” said Neville. He was looking down at the floor now, but his gaze was far away. “Same, basically. Few weeks later, just before she didn’t come back from Easter … She… One of the Ravenclaws in her year, Siobhan, a girl who’d been really awful to Luna, actually, got caught by Alecto—Mrs. Potatohead—putting Support Potter and Lovegood Lives on the wall right opposite the Muggle Studies room, and that cow was cursing Siobhan something horrible. We all thought she might kill Siobhan, actually. And Ginny—we couldn’t intervene any more, because they’d figured out that having the students curse each other wasn’t a very effective punishment, so it was the Carrows who’d have done it, and they’d have bloody well killed Ginny for sure, they’d come close before…” Neville shuddered, and Harry felt a spear of cold pass through him, realizing that as much as he and Ginny had talked, there were things beyond a pair of kisses that she hadn’t told him about the previous year.

“Anyway,” continued Neville, “Ginny’s right behind the old cow, casts the slickest Confundus you’ve ever seen. One moment Carrow is cursing that girl something awful, the next, she’s blinking at all of us, asking what we’re doing blocking up the hallways. That corridor emptied in about two seconds flat, and if Hermione hadn’t told me a thousand times that you couldn’t Apparate inside of Hogwarts, I’d have said it’d have had to been by magic.” Neville shook his head. “So I walked back with Ginny, and she went through this tapestry, a shortcut up—”

Harry willed his bruised hands to relax. “I know it.”

Now Neville nodded. “Yeah. So I followed her, and she…” Neville’s hands, green-stained and calloused, clenched together between his knees. “She was… Crying.”

Harry blinked. “Crying?”

Neville nodded. “Hadn’t seen her cry like that, ever. I mean, we all cried at the headmaster’s funeral, but… Sitting on the ground. Just… Crying.” He looked up, then down again. “Then. Um. Then. Kissed her again.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Dunno why. Just…”

The front door to the Shrieking Shack burst open, and Hermione’s voice rang through the house. “Harry? HARRY?”

In spite of himself—in spite of wanting to hear the rest of what Neville had to say—Harry stood and called out, “In the study, Hermione!” He’d got too well attuned to that panicked tone over the past eight years not to respond immediately.

Neville too stood, eyes narrowed, face suddenly regaining its hard edges.

Hermione ran into the room, her hair wild, her eyes wide, her hands wringing tightly before her. “Oh, Harry—”

Chest pounding, jaw tight, Harry asked, “Is it Ginny?”

Hermione froze for a moment and frowned. “Ginny? No. No!”

One nightmare gave way to the next. “Where’s Ron?”

Now Hermione simply looked uncomfortable. “Ron? He’s fine. Fine. He… He just had to talk to the Head Auror.”

After the brutal dismissal they’d all just received from Talionis, Harry was shocked that Ron would willingly seek him out. “You’re kidding!”

“No,” she moaned, wringing her hands twice as hard now. “He… Ron will tell you all about it later.”

Harry stared at her, shifting his head as if trying to get a clearer view.

“What is it, Hermione?” asked Neville, voice low and urgent, his earlier nervousness evaporated.

“Yes!” Hermione gasped, nodding as if he had just asked a particularly brilliant question. “It’s Luna!”

“Luna?” said Harry and Neville in unison; Harry guessed from the tone that Neville was just as bewildered as he was. Harry reached out and stilled Hermione’s wildly wringing hands. “Was she taken again?”

“No!” Hermione gasped. “No, no, she’s still… She hasn’t left yet, she hasn’t been…” Her face contorted. “She… I think… I think she’s lost her mind.”

Harry backed up, trying and failing to keep a dubious expression from his face.

Apparently, Neville didn’t even try. He simply laughed. “Hermione, on good days—”

“Luna is highly eccentric,” Hermione said, her face suddenly very still. “But she always behaves according to her own kind of logic. She… I’m worried about her. She’s acting oddly—even for her.”

“Is this about that letter this morning?” Neville asked. Harry vaguely remembered a Ministry owl depositing a Muggle-style envelope on the plate next to Ginny’s; he’d been focused entirely on watching the spectacle of his girlfriend eating her oatmeal—very, very slowly…

“Yes!” Hermione cried. “It was Dean, he sent her a letter breaking it off.”

Harry looked at her, waiting for more. Luna had talked to Harry for months about her relationship with Dean being strained. Hermione looked at him, eyebrows raised as if she’d made her point.

“Hermione,” muttered Neville, apparently as dubious as Harry, “you heard her. She told us all it was a relief, and how nice it was to have that settled. She looked totally fine—well, as far as Luna ever looks fine.”

“That’s the point!” Hermione said. “She looked totally unconcerned. Blythe as ever, but we all know she cared for him. And then, after Ancient Runes, she went on about what a nice day it was even though it was pouring this morning, but then she started to babble on about snow and ice, and then at lunch she was talking to Ginny all about Snorkacks and polar bears, and I was starting to be nervous—after all, she hasn’t mentioned Crumple-horned Snorkacks in months…”

“Hermione,” asked Harry, “was it Crumple-horned Snorkacks she mentioned, or Great-horned?”

“What DIFFERENCE does it make, Harry? She came down just now carrying skis, for heaven’s sake! SKIS. In APRIL! You must see, she’s clearly decompensating!” Tears were beginning to brighten her eyelashes. “Her mental state has always been precarious, and after being trapped in the Malfoys’ cellar for six months, it’s amazing that she’s been as resilient as she has, but…” Hermione swiped the back of her thumb across her eyes to clear them. What she saw clearly didn’t please her. “And you two can smirk all you want—Ron was the same. How can you stand there…? Don’t you care for her at all?”

Neville spoke up, which relieved Harry enormously. “We love her, Hermione, come on. But this is Luna we’re talking about. Don’t you think you’re overdoing it a bit? I mean, there’s probably some perfectly logical… Well, fairly logical explanation.”

Hermione let out an exasperated growl and wound her arms together more tightly than Harry had seen her do since Ron’s return the previous year. He stepped forward, trying to think of a way to calm his best friend, when the front door banged open, letting in a blast of damp spring air, and the voice Harry had been longing to hear all day called out, “Hullo! Loverboy! Your mistress is here!”

“In here!” Harry called back. Though his head and heart still felt overburdened by his friends’ revelations and his body ached from the punishment doled out by his teachers, Harry couldn’t help but grin to see her sprint into the room, flaming hair and black robes flying behind her. She let go of her trunk, which floated in mid-air, and leapt into his arms, wrapping her legs around his waist and her lips around his in a manner that drove anything else quite out of his mind for the moment.

Once they’d snogged away for a bit, Ginny mumbled against his lips, “Hey, Neville. Hey, Hermione.”

“Hey, Ginny,” Neville wheezed as if he’d been hit in the stomach.

“Mistress, Ginny?” sniffed Hermione.

“Oh, yeah,” Ginny answered, and Harry could feel her lips grinning against his own.

Harry backed his face away from hers and stared into her brown eyes. “Only temporarily.”

Ginny squawked in mock indignation, gave him a gentle bite on the ear and then lowered herself.

“I mean,” he said, feeling the blood in his body try to flow in two totally different directions, “legally, you brat. You’ll always be the mistress of my heart, and all that, and I want—”

She kissed him silent once again, less emphatically this time, but no less effectively. When they parted, she was grinning, and Harry knew that he must look as if he’d had a Cheering and a Confundus Charm placed on him simultaneously. Ginny turned to Hermione, who was standing next to Neville, her arms still crossed. Both were staring at their shoes. “It’s because Kreacher started calling me Mistress, that’s all. The batty old elf never called me anything nicer, that’s for sure.”

“Ah,” Hermione said.

“So, you joining us for George’s birthday, Neville?” Ginny asked. “We’d love to have you there.”

Neville blushed and stared at Harry. “Erm, no, no, thanks, I’d love to but I’m going to meet Hannah once she gets off her shift. I’m, um, bringing her for dinner to Gran’s.”

“That’s wonderful!” Ginny bounded over to Neville and wrapped him in a hug that made Harry’s heart lurch; he couldn’t think why until he saw the panicked expression on Neville’s face and remembered what Neville had wanted to tell Harry earlier. Ginny kissed Neville on the cheek; he turned as red as Tentacula flowers. “Hannah’s wonderful, your Gran will love her! And she’s a lucky girl, Neville, don’t forget that.” She gave his cheek another gentle buss.

“Erm, yeah,” said Neville, his voice sounding quite choked. Harry somehow couldn’t break eye contact.

“And you, Hermione? You ready to go?” Ginny continued, clearly unaware of the discomfort she’d sown in her wake. “Where’s my lazy-arse brother?”

“Ah,” said Hermione, biting her lip, “he… He and I will join you at the Burrow. He had to talk to the Head Auror.”

“To old Dragonbreath?” said Ginny, bemusement warping her smile. “Why on earth—?”

“Just some details Ron wanted to discuss,” Hermione said, her face once again set stiffly. “Now, Ginny, perhaps you can explain to these two boys why Luna’s behavior is so worrisome?”

“Luna?” Ginny said, eyebrows arching.

Hermione let out a gasp. “Surely you’ve noticed how… extreme her behavior has been all day—since Dean’s letter arrived. Having your first real boyfriend reject you—by letter no less—it’s no surprise that she’s taken it hard, but I’m terrified that she—”

Ginny shook her head as if to clear it. “Taken it hard? She’s fine, Hermione!”

“Fine? Fine!” Hermione said. “She’s running around talking about Snorkacks and polar bears, attacking everyone with skis. For heaven’s sake, you are her best friend, aren’t you worried about her at all?”

Ginny blinked at Hermione. “Come on, Hermione—”

“Ginny!” snapped Hermione, her face looking positively thunderous. “You’re all just like Ron, all of you, you don’t care at all about another person’s suffering!” Spit sprayed from her mouth as she leaned forward, poking a rigid finger toward each of them.

“Hermione—” started Neville, backing away with his hands held up.

“LUNA IS LOSING HER MIND!” howled Hermione, tears flowing, her face twisted in a manner that made Harry wonder about his friend’s own sanity.

Once again a blast of April wind passed through the room and announced the opening of the front door. A misty voice called out, “Do you think so? Oh, that would be a shame, since I have such lovely plans for this week.”

Luna sounded so much like herself, and her response seemed, in fact, so rational that Harry felt whatever anxiety Hermione had managed to instill fade. It came rushing back, however, as soon as Luna entered the room.

Luna was dressed in fur from head to foot—what animal could have provided the fur, Harry could not even begin to guess, since it was mostly a shade of purple that Harry had only ever seen on Tonks’s head interspersed with small stripes of green. Over one shoulder she was carrying, as Hermione had said, an enormous pair of skis, and in the opposite hand she held a large canvas duffle. Her wild hair tumbled out from under her fur cap, and it was the most normal thing about her appearance, since her face seemed to have been covered with some sort of yellowish salve, and over each eye she seemed to be wearing some sort of seashell. Harry stood, mouth open but unable to speak. Judging by the silence, Ginny, Neville and Hermione had been struck just as dumb.

“Oh, how nice,” Luna sighed, “here you all are.”

“Luna?” whispered Ginny, though it seemed clear to Harry that the apparition before them was their unusual friend.

“Has he come yet?” Luna asked, her smile showing brilliantly against the tallow-like unguent on her skin.

“He?” Hermione croaked. “Oh, Luna, you know Dean—”

The figure in fur cocked her head and seemed about to speak when she was interrupted by the characteristic splutter and flare of the Floo connection in the kitchen opening. “Hello? Hello?” came a reedy voice.

“Oh!” said Luna, turning quickly so that Ginny and Harry had to duck to avoid being hit by her skis. “Hello!” She ran back to the door much more agilely than Harry would have expected her to be able to.

Harry looked around at his friends. They were all shaking their heads. With a laugh, Harry took Ginny’s hand and followed Luna across the hall; he could hear Hermione and Neville trailing behind.

When they reached the kitchen, they discovered Luna speaking to a tall figure in an almost identical outfit. Harry found himself wondering if it weren’t some elaborate April Fool’s joke.

The taller figure piped, “So wonderful that you’ll be able to join us, Miss Lovegood!”

“Join you?” asked Hermione, her voice low and dubious.

Two heads clad in purple and green fur hats turned towards them. “I’m joining the expedition for a week,” Luna squeaked, bouncing on the soles of her feet.

“That’s wonderful, Luna!” said Ginny.

“Hello, Mr. Potter!” said Rolf Scamander—for that was who this new arrival had to be. “Luna here told me that this was the most convenient Floo connection to the school—I hope you don’t mind!”

“No, not at all!”

“Expedition?” asked Hermione.

“Oh, yes,” said Luna, still bouncing. “Mr. Scamander and his father invited me earlier, you see, but I’d been planning to spend the holiday in Hammersmith. However, when I received that letter this morning, I knew that I could go after all! I’m joining the expedition in Svaalbard for the next week.”

Hermione’s face was slack; she seemed to have lost even her skepticism. “Scamander?”

Harry grinned. “Hermione Granger, let me introduce Rolf Scamander. He and his father are researching a new edition of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.”

Hermione’s eyes grew to saucer-like, Luna-like enormity.

“Indeed!” crowed Rolf. “And as luck would have it we’ve just come across a nesting ground for Great-horned Snorkacks.” Hermione’s jaw dropped, but Rolf continued. “Miss Lovegood, your timing is excellent, and I’m overjoyed that you were able to equip yourself so well on such short notice!”

Beneath the goop on her cheeks, it looked as if Luna might be blushing. “I had prepared myself. Just in case.”

“How fortunate!” said Rolf, clapping two fur-mittened hands together. “Well, we should be off. We’ve got to Floo to Scapa, then Hexenhavn, then Longyearbyen, then we Apparate—”

“Mr. Scamander?” interrupted Luna, who never interrupted anyone.

“Yes?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend at the moment.”

“Oh,” answered Rolf, standing suddenly much straighter. “How nice.”

“Hmmm,” agreed Luna.

Cocking his head and peering at her through the shell-like objects that Harry assumed were some sort of goggles, Rolf Scamander trilled a long series of warbling notes.

In response, Luna turned away from him, her skin clearly pinkening beneath her sunscreen, then cast her gaze back over her shoulder; she responded with three throaty hoots that made her sound like a rather excited mourning dove.

“Bandicoot mating ritual,” whispered Ginny.

“Ah,” responded Harry.

“Goodbye, everyone!” gushed a grinning Luna, placing a mittened hand in one of Rolf’s. “See you all in a week!” And with a flash of green, the mad pair were gone.

“Wow,” said Neville.

“Yeah,” agreed Harry.

Harry looked down at Ginny, who was smiling, but whose eyes were moist. When she saw Harry looking at her, she shrugged. “Happy for her.”

Harry pulled her closer and nodded into her hair.

“Well,” said Neville, eyes averted, “I’m off. Got to get down to the station before the train leaves.” He waved and strode toward the door.

“You could Floo from here!” called Harry, but the closing door announced Neville’s departure.

“I should be getting back up to the castle as well,” Hermione said quietly. “Ron and I will see you at the Burrow.” Hands folded crisply before her, she too left.

“Well,” said Ginny, a smile brightening her whole face for what felt like the first time in weeks, “that was fun!”

“Yeah,” Harry agreed, lost in contemplation of her face. Her face all glowy the way it gets, Neville had said, and Harry had known just what he’d meant—was seeing it before him.

Neville kissing Ginny. Ginny kissing…?

No.

A pair of lips softened Harry’s. “Hi,” Ginny said.

“Hi.”

She nipped at his lower lip. “You’re all gloomy.”

“Not really,” he said. “Just, you know, thinking.”

“’Bout what?”

“If I could answer that question simply, I wouldn’t have to think.” He placed his hands on her ribs, where he could feel her breathing, could feel her heart beating.

“You sound like Luna,” she teased, threading her arms around his neck.

“But not as warmly dressed,” he said, which caused her to snort. “You’re in a good mood,” he added. It was true: between NEWTs and the tryouts for the Harpies next weekend, Ginny had been very subdued for the previous month, but now she looked very much herself.

“I’m done thinking,” she murmured, pressing herself against him in ways that left them both much less interested in talking for some time.

Folly, Act ll

When Harry finally found his body, mouth and mind no longer otherwise occupied, he and Ginny were lying on the kitchen table side by side, staring up at the ceiling, which was, he realized for the first time, decorated with the flitting figures of bas-relief griffons. “Mistress finds Master very agreeable,” she said, voice low and breathy.

“Master agrees,” panted Harry, which made her chuckle. Harry turned toward her and kissed the corner of her jaw. An image of her family standing white-faced around the Burrow’s kitchen table flashed through his mind. “Maybe we should have everyone over here for the party.”

Instead of laughing, as he expected, Ginny sat up. All of the exposed bits of her turned pink. He could only see the side of one cheek. “Harry?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“Are you sorry we did this so soon?”

“What?” asked Harry, sitting up; her face was still turned away from him. “On the table?”

“No,” she answered, finally looking at him again, the corners of her eyes and mouth turned down. She pressed her chest, still largely bare, against his naked arm. “This.”

“Oh.” A storm of thoughts and feelings exploded within his own chest — not a single monster, now, but a whole stampede of them — and he wondered again at girls’, at Ginny’s ability to observe and discuss this roiling pack of invisible things as if they were real and concrete. “I — dunno. Are you? Sorry?”

“I don’t know.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “I love being so close to you. And I love how you make me feel. But sometimes it feels like —” He felt her arms tighten around his waist. “When Ron and I were little, we found where Mum hid the Christmas presents.  George and Fred had been trying for years, but Ron and I were the ones who found the hiding spot, behind the chimney in the attic. And it was really thrilling, knowing they were there, and we’d sit and look at them and try not to open them, but then we’d get all excited, and sneak peeks and that was wonderful — like this, you know? Wonderful but naughty, and that sort of added to the thrill. But then Christmas would come, and it would be kind of… disappointing. And we’d feel guilty, both of us, but we couldn’t say anything.”

Staring at the kitchen, Harry pulled Ginny closer. “I never had any presents to sneak peeks at.”

“Oh, Merlin,” Ginny gasped, her back arching against the inside of his elbow. “Oh, Harry, I’m so sorry.”

He looked down into her raised face — into the wide whites of her bright eyes — and smiled, trying to let her know that he’d only been trying to lighten the mood.

Her eyes immediately narrowed to crescent slits. “Prat,” she said, though her lips flared up slightly at the corners.

“Ginny,” he said, before she could start yelling at him, “I guess I get what you’re saying, but… Should we not be doing this?”

She huffed, sending a strand of her hair that had worked its way free from her schoolgirl plaits floating upward. “Mum certainly talked about women’s virtue and all that often enough.  I heard her drilling that rot into every one of my brothers’ heads: Don’t treat nice girls like scarlet women. What am I, then?” Her pupils darted left and right, as if she were searching out some answer to her question in the kitchen floor.

“Come on, Ginny. You’re not a…” He leaned down, but still she did not look at him. “Come on!”

“Are you so sure?”

He blinked, and sat up, then reached out and lifted her chin so that she was looking at him. “The only scarlet women my aunt ever talked about were the film stars she’d read about in the Sunday papers, and you’re definitely nothing like any of them, Ginny, please.” She started to turn away again, but he held her face fast. “Please. If this didn’t mean anything, what we’re doing, I guess I could think that we were being, I don’t know, bad or unvirtuous or whatever, but don’t you feel like it does mean something? Doesn’t it feel right to you?”

“Yeah,” she answered, but she didn’t seem to be at all cheered by the thought.

“Bloody hell,” Harry grunted. “Here you were in such a good mood. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, Harry, this is just… It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, that’s all, I don’t know why it’s suddenly come up. And I’m still pleased about the decision I made, I just…” She shrugged.

“Decision…?”

She shrugged again.

Harry couldn’t help but think about his own plans for the evening, and the thought that perhaps Ginny had changed some of his assumptions made his tongue go dry. “Was it… about me? The decision?”

Ginny’s eyebrows arched. “No. Not really, no.” She reached up and put her hand over his. “No, Harry. I just… I’ll tell you later, okay?”

“Okay.” Now he felt himself teetering on a narrow precipice between two pits of dread. “Ginny?”

“Yeah?”

“Would it help?” he asked. “Would it help if you knew for certain that this, you know, meant something?”

“What? I guess.” She was looking at him closely now, her face as still as he could ever remember seeing it. “Harry…?”

He stood, pulling up his trousers and rummaging through the pockets, finding what he was looking for. As Ginny continued to stare, he knelt to one knee on the floor, his heart pounding in his throat. “Ginny...”

She stared.

“I...” Harry seemed to have lost the power of speech. It was as if the question that he wanted to ask were too large to pass through his mouth. Verbal constipation... He lifted up the small box in his hand, but noticed that it was closed. He raised his other hand to open it — surely she would understand when she saw the ring — but his clumsy finger knocked the box bouncing to the floor. Now flaming panic warred with leaden dread; he scrambled to pick up the box again, aware that he not only couldn’t talk, but that sweat was oozing from every pore in his body.

Words. He knew that there were words.

Ginny stared. Her eyes were wide. Her skin was so white that the freckles looked as if they’d been picked out in pen.

He reached up to open the box again, but his fingers were slick with sweat, and he once again dropped it.

He started to reach down for it again, but Ginny slid from the table to kneel before him — she on both knees, he on one. “Harry...”

“W...?”

“Your shoelace is untied.”

They blinked at each other, and then both bent down, their foreheads colliding. Both of them fell to the floor.

Once again they lay on their backs, staring up; this time it was at the underside of the kitchen table, which Dean seemed to have decorated with Snorkacks. They seemed to be engaged in some sort of mating behavior. “I guess that’s why he and Luna took so long to refinish this table,” Ginny mumbled.

Harry looked over at her. She had a small bump just below her hairline. Her eyes caught his.

They both began to laugh. Uproariously. Breathlessly. Unceasingly.

Some long time later, the laughter had subsided to giggles, and they began to kiss, to caress, to intermingle. They made love again, and it was slow and quiet and quite, quite lovely.

Eventually, they were still again at last. Neither looked up. Their gazes were locked, and Harry was uncertain what he saw, but he couldn’t have looked away for all the world. “Ginny,” he said, at last, “will…?”

Smiling, she placed her fingers over his lips. “Shhh. I want you to ask, Harry. But I want it to be because you want to, not because you’re feeling guilty or sad or embarrassed.”

“Oh.”

She pulled him close. “Harry. You needn’t worry about the answer, I promise.”

“Okay.”

Moving slowly, not wanting to lose the feeling, not wanting to lose the moment — not wanting to bump their heads on the underside of the table — they slid apart and dressed again.

Wordlessly, they gathered up their baggage and shuffled to the Floo. Harry picked up his Firebolt, and then peered over at Ginny, whose trunk floated behind her once again. “Ginny?” he asked. “Where’s your broom? We have to get you ready for the try-outs.”

“Oh,” she said, looking down for a moment before raising her gaze to his once more. “That was the decision I was talking about, Harry.”

“Decision?” He couldn’t think what she meant, but given the tumult of the last few hours, perhaps that wasn’t so very surprising.

“Yes,” she said, smiling — though the smile looked far from her usual bright grin. “I’ve decided not to try out for the Harpies after all.”

And with that, she tossed the Floo Powder into the hearth, called out, “The Burrow!” and stepped through, leaving Harry shocked and — once again — speechless.

Folly, Act III

Harry stumbled through the Floo after Ginny, dropping his own broom and the beat-up rucksack that had served him for luggage since he, Ron and Hermione were on the run. “Ginny, what the hell do you mean, you’re not going to—?”

She gave him a warning flick of the chin that said clearly, Look around.

With a blink, Harry took in his surroundings. Ron and Hermione were staring owlishly at Harry and Ginny from The Burrow’s battered oak kitchen table. Mr. and Mrs. Weasley were standing by the sink. Mrs. Weasley was trying to smile at the new arrivals, but she was wringing her hands, which was never a good sign. Mr. Weasley had his hands on her shoulders; it looked very much as if he were trying to keep her from launching herself through the ceiling. “Hello, Ginny, Harry, dear. How lovely that you’ve come. Now we’re almost all here and we can have a lovely birthday party for... for George.”

“We wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” said Harry.

“‘Course we’re here, Mum,” Ginny murmured, giving her mother a kiss on the cheek. Mrs. Weasley’s fingers never stopped working at each other.

Concerned, Harry took a step forward. “Uh, Mrs. Weasley—?”

Arthur Weasley gave a small, firm shake of the head, and Harry felt his mouth close. “Molly, dear,” Mr. Weasley said quietly into his wife’s ear, “there’s plenty for us to do before Lee and Angelina and the others get here—Ginny, will your little friend Luna be joining us?”

“No,” answered Ginny and Harry. Hermione gave a sort of strangled laugh. Harry felt obligated to elaborate. “She’s gone hunting… er… Snorkacks. Great-horned Snorkacks.”

“Ah, what a shame,” said Mr. Weasley, though he looked more relieved than disappointed. “So, children, perhaps you could go up and get the birthday boy... ready. For the party.”

Before Ron could ask whatever it was that he was about to ask, Ginny answered, “Sure, Dad. C’mon, Harry.”

He followed her dutifully, trying not to take too much notice as Mrs. Weasley turned to her husband and began to sniffle. As he reached the first landing, he heard Hermione pushing Ron up the stairs behind him. He took Ginny’s hand. “Ginny—”

“What the hell was that all about?” hissed Ron as he reached the landing.

“Honestly, Ron,” Hermione tutted.

Ginny answered her brother, her eyes on Harry’s, her hand still in his. “Fred’s... death. The idea of going up to the twins’ room must be too much for her. Even at Christmas she never went in there without crying.”

“Really?” asked Ron. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I ever forget, but... It’s been almost a year.”

Hermione tapped her boyfriend on the arm. “But this is the first birthday since. Anniversaries and firsts are hard. Isn’t that so, Harry?”

“Uh, yeah. I suppose.” He tried to think of anything like it—the first Christmas after Sirius’ death, perhaps. But all that Harry could remember thinking of at the time was the glow of Ginny’s face as she decorated the tree or picked maggots out of his hair. “I guess.”

Ginny scanned his face. “Harry...”

“What do you mean, you’re not trying out for the Harpies?” Harry blurted.

She stared at his chest. “Harry...”

“Harry?” asked Hermione.

Ron’s jaw dropped. “You’re not...?”

Ginny’s eyes flashed up. “No. I’m not.”

Harry squeezed her hand. “But...?”

She pulled her hand free and looked back at his chest. “I can’t. Ever since the last match. Everyone thinks I’m a sure thing, but I know I’m not, and I can’t go back to school and tell everyone I tried out but didn’t get it. I can’t.”

“Ginny?” Harry reached for Ginny’s hands again, but she held them at her shoulders. “Come on. That’s just—”

Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t say it, Harry.”

“But—?”

Hermione intervened. “Harry, it is, after all, Ginny’s decision.”

He tried to grasp Ginny’s hands again, but she threw them behind her back. Harry grabbed her shoulders instead. “You can’t just... not try. That’s not like you at all!”

Ginny’s nostrils thinned and her jaw jutted out. Harry knew that if he let her grab her wand from her pocket, he’d be at the receiving end of a world-class Bat-Bogey Hex, something he’d managed to avoid to this point and very much hoped never to experience. “It is your choice, Ginny, honest, but I don’t understand—”

“Ta,” growled Ginny.

“Uh, Harry, Ginny, just, you know...” Ron said, and Harry turned to him, blinking. When did Ron ever actually act the peacemaker? “Just don’t, you know, be hasty.”

“Yes, o wise one,” snapped Ginny.

“It’s just...” Ron seemed to be trying to hide behind Hermione’s hair. “It’s just, I know, you know, that there are times, you know...”

“Ron,” Harry asked, “what the bloody hell are you on about?”

Ron stood to his full height; Hermione took his hand and gazed up at him. “Just, sometimes, it’s a good idea when you realize you’ve made the wrong choice.”

Harry could feel Ginny turning, felt her at his shoulder, knew that she was looking at her brother with an expression of bewilderment as complete as his own. “Thanks, Ron.”

Hermione squeezed Ron’s hand. “Tell them, Ron.”

Ron looked down at his feet, took a deep breath and looked right at Harry. “Talked to Talionis today. I quit.”

Harry looked at Ron.

“It’s just… I know we said we’d do it together, and I know it’s really important—the Ministry needs Aurors, and the wizarding world needs Aurors. I just… It’s you, Harry. It’s what you want to do, what you’re good at. The bloody best. It’s like Susan—she’s got it in her blood. Or Terry, he’s nails in all the MLE statutes and regs and stuff, he loves it all. But me? I’m only there because…” Ron stopped, blinked miserably at Harry, and then looked down, pleading, at Hermione.

Squeezing his hand again and smiling, she stepped in. “Ron’s realized that he wasn’t very happy these past few months. He’s been miserable these last few months.”

“I know,” Harry sighed.

Ron snorted. “Wasn’t just about being happy, ‘cause, come on, since when has being a miserable git stopped me doing anything? It’s that I’m terrible at it—at most of the work of actually being an Auror. You know?”

“Ron—” Harry began.

“No, come on—I’m absolute pants at it. Pursuit? Statutes? Stealth? Hell, old Dragonbreath told me I made Tonks look like a bloody Lethifold. Okay, the actual combat spells—the things you taught us fifth year—those I was good at. And strategy. Not that the next Voldemort is going to sit down and settle things over a game of chess. But the rest? Pants.”

Ginny asked, “And you’re not… disappointed?” When her brother shook his head, she turned to glare at Harry.

For the first time, Ron looked Harry straight in the eye. “Well, I loved being with you, Harry, and Susan—even if she did seem to enjoy kicking my arse way too much—and Boot and Emery and the rest. And Hermione’s going to be at the Ministry next year. But…”

“I understand,” Harry said, and put a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“I…” Ron began to look down, but stood his ground. “I didn’t want you to think that I was running away again. Like, you know, last year.”

“Daft git.” Harry pulled Ron into a hug. “Told you last year: you didn’t run away. Well, okay, you stomped off in a fit of Horcrux-inspired pique. And you spent the better part of the next two months trying to run back.” He patted Ron’s back brusquely, leaned back and looked up. “Of course I understand!”

A grin like daybreak broke out on Ron’s face, and Harry suddenly realized just how long it had been since he had seen Ron truly smile. “Wicked! Thanks.”

Harry started to step back but Hermione, who was quickly boiling over from sniffling to blubbering, pulled him back in to a three-way hug. Between his friends, Harry saw Ginny staring at them, her eyes and nostrils slits. “Come on,” he said, not certain why she was angry, but recognizing the signs all too clearly and desperate to escape an explosion, ”let’s fetch the birthday boy.”

The four of them clomped up the stairs to the second landing. Ron, who was clearly feeling giddy, hammered on the door whose sign still read, Fred and George’s Room: Enter at Your Own Risk. “Oi! Old man! Come on down to the party before the prune juice is all gone!”

They stood there, awaiting whatever rejoinder George might send back, but were met with nothing but silence—a sound foreign to The Burrow.

“George?” called Harry. “Your mum wants you downstairs.…”

More silence.

Hermione, who had already had one full-blown panic attack earlier that day over Luna’s odd behavior, looked as if she were well on the way to another: chewing her lip, wringing her hands, her eyes growing round and wide as Luna’s herself.

“George?” Ginny said. Whatever signs of anger she had been displaying moments before were replaced by signs of worry. Putting her hand carefully on the knob—touching anything anywhere near the twins’ room was always an iffy proposition—she cracked open the door and led the group in.

The room, which had been essentially a storeroom when Harry had last seen it, was neat as a pin and devoid of any sign that Fred and George had lived there for seventeen years. The walls were beige and bare. The two desks were utterly uncluttered. The bedspreads, which Harry remembered as being two violently clashing shades of purple, were a matching pale yellow.

On what had been Fred’s bed, the surviving member of the Terrible Weasley Twins lay on his side, curled into a tight ball. His knees were pulled so tightly in front of his face that Harry could only see George’s broad forehead; the long nose, the mischievous eyes—even the missing ear was hidden from view.

Harry started to rush to George, the first responder training he’d been getting over the past few months clicking in. Ron was right beside him and just a step behind. Ginny, however, managed to reach her brother faster than any of them. She touched George’s neck with those thin, clever fingers—taking a pulse, Harry realized—and then let out a breath and held her hand up, as if to say, Give us some room. She knelt. “It’s awful,” she said to George. No Don’t worry or It’ll be okay—just it’s awful. She wrapped her arms around George, hugging him gently.

An odd, vibrating sound seemed to bubble up from George’s middle. At first, Harry hoped that it was a laugh—that George was about to shout April Fool! and tease them all for falling for his trick. But quickly Harry realized that the sound was neither more nor less than a year’s suppressed sobbing. George twisted in his sister’s arms, throwing one brawny arm around her waist, and began to bawl.

Ginny—tiny Ginny—held him and rocked him, there in the middle of what had been Fred’s bed. After a while, Ron sat at the end of the bed, and Hermione sat tentatively beside him, both facing Ginny and George. Uncertain, wishing that there was anything that he could do to help, Harry sat by the pillows and watched as George slowly cried himself out.

Ginny, too, was weeping. Ron was looking away, but Hermione kept dabbing, first at her own eyes, and then at his.

Harry didn’t feel like drying the tears coursing down his cheeks.

When at last he had subsided, and Ginny looked as if she were about to let him go, George pulled her hard against him. “D’you know?” he moaned. “Do you know what today is?”

Ginny looked up at them, speechless, blank-faced.

“‘Course we know,” said Ron. “‘S not bloody fair that he never made twenty-one.”

George laughed now, but it wasn’t at all reassuring. “Not just that. Not just. Not just that we’ll never be the same age ever again. But he was... He and Angie...” George curled himself up against Ginny again, dissolving once more into tears.

As George began to run out of steam again, Percy’s clipped, worn voice broke in. “Fred and Miss Johnson were going to get married today. She’s just come; I’m afraid she’s rather poorly as well.”

For the first time, George looked up, his face blotchy and wet.

Tentatively, Percy continued, “She said that... that Fred...”

“Fred thought it’d be a great joke,” spat George. “Married on April Fool’s.”

“Hmm,” coughed Percy. With an uncharacteristic smirk in his voice, he continued. “I suppose it was so he’d never forget his anniversary.”

George’s jaw dropped, and Harry felt his own follow suit. Harry was about to kick Percy in the shins—when he heard that choked, vibrating sound again. He turned, expecting to see George consumed once more with tears. Instead, George was laughing. Red-faced and choking. But laughing.

Ginny, who was still hugging her brother, looked shocked, but quickly began to giggle herself. Contagious, the laughter spread to Ron and to Harry. Even Hermione seemed to be tittering behind her handkerchief.

Again, the cycle worked its way through. Wiping his eyes on Ginny’s jumper—the jumper Harry had taken such pleasure in removing just an hour before—George snorted, “You’re dangerous, you are, Perce!”

“Thank you,” answered Percy, looking rather pleased with himself.

“Come on, George,” Ron said. “Sounds like Angelina could use your help.”

Nodding and giving Ginny a squeeze, George stood. “Let’s get the party started, eh?” He began to walk unsteadily towards the door.

Ron stood and took George’s arm over his own shoulder. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk with you about, George,” he said, and they walked past Percy and out the door, Hermione trailing behind them, her handkerchief in shreds.

Harry began to follow, but Percy stopped him. “Actually, Harry, Father said that he received your owl this morning, and that he and our mother would be waiting for you in their bedroom.”

Harry thought at first that Percy must be joking again—but then he remembered that he had in fact contacted the elder Weasleys. And then he remembered why. “Uh. Great. Thanks.”

“Harry?” Ginny was peering at him, arms crossed.

Harry felt as if he jumped back into the frozen pond in the Forest of Dean. Ron was nowhere nearby, and Ginny didn’t look at all in the mood to jump in and pull him out. “Uh, you go ahead, Ginny, help out with George and all. I’ll be right down.”

Her eyes narrowed for a moment, but then widened. “O... kay. See you at the party.” She turned on her heels and flounced down the stairs, clearly Not Happy with Harry.

As he heard them descending the stairs to the ground floor, he followed, turning left on first landing to enter the senior Weasleys’ bedroom for the first time.

Mrs. Weasley was sitting, facing away from Harry with her head against her husband’s chest. They were at the end of their bed—which bore a bedspread that was as extravagantly floral as those in the twins’ old room was plain. Mr. Weasley blinked at Harry. “Ah, yes. Harry. I think we—”

“Did you know that Ginny’s decided not to try out for the Harpies?” Harry blurted; he’d had no idea that the words were going to leave his mouth—they certainly weren’t the words he’d practiced over the past few weeks.

“Uh, no, no, we didn’t,” Mr. Weasley said.

“We oughtn’t to let her, ought we?” The fear that had frozen his mind just moments before had given way to nervous heat. “She’s got to try out, hasn’t she?”

“Ah,” said Mr. Weasley, and stroked his wife’s head. “Harry, in my experience with women in general—and with Ginny in particular—it isn’t a matter of letting. They’re going to do what they want anyway, and if you try to stop them, you’re going to find yourself paying for it for quite a long time to come.”

“But—!”

“Which doesn’t mean that you can’t encourage her to see things from a broader point of view. So long as you’re willing to listen—truly listen.”

“But—!” Harry was about to tell the Weasleys all of the reasons that it would be disastrous for Ginny to give up on her dream at this point, but as he marshaled his arguments, he saw the wisdom in what Mr. Weasley was saying. “Oh.”

Mr. Weasley nodded, but then cocked his head—a very Ginny-like gesture. “Now. Was that the reason that you wanted to speak with us?”

“Uh, no.” Harry took a breath and tried to gather the threads of his much-practiced argument back together in his mind. In his jeans pocket, his hand found the ring case. “I... That is... Ginny... Can...? Will...? May...?” There he ran out of steam.

Mr. Weasley simply smiled blandly at him and continued to stroke his wife’s hair.

After a moment during which Harry found himself feeling more and more incapable of saying anything further, Mrs. Weasley batted at her husband’s hand. “For goodness’ sake, Arthur.” She turned around to face Harry, her eyes red as Harry had not seen them since Fred’s funeral. “Of course you have our blessing to ask her, Harry. I hope you would never question that you are the only boy we’d ever even consider good enough for Ginny.”

“The only boy stubborn enough,” Mr. Weasley said with a mild smirk.

Mrs. Weasley batted at her husband again, this time with more force. “And I hope, Harry, that you know better than to question Ginny’s own views in the matter.”

“Uh, thanks,” Harry answered, once his throat allowed the passage of air.

“Now,” said Mrs. Weasley, standing and clapping her hands together, “we need to finish getting the tables set. All the guests arrived and nothing for them to eat?” With that, she strode past Harry out of the room and down the stairs. Mr. Weasley stared after her for a moment, his mouth open, and then followed her, leaving Harry alone.

“Okay, then,” he said, and went to join the party.

: :

In the coming years, Harry was able to remember that afternoon with crystal clarity: Neville’s secret, Hermione’s panic, Luna’s wild appearance, the sweet lovemaking session beneath the table in the Shack, Ginny’s angry exit, George’s catatonia, the Weasleys... What he could scarcely remember, however, was the party itself. The events that followed it, and those that preceded it, sure. But of the actual party? Scarcely a thing.

One memory that he would retain was of sitting on the Weasleys’ lumpy sofa, watching George and Ginny dance with a kind of wild abandon that Harry could only envy in the moment. Angelina, who had been all but silent all evening, was leaning her elbow lightly on Harry’s shoulder and watching along. “Nice to see some fun,” she sighed.

“Yeah.” Harry turned toward her, taking in the dark circles on her dark cheeks. “I’m so sorry about Fred, Angelina.”

“Thanks,” she said, and then turned to him. “Can I tell you a joke?”

“Uh, sure.”

“I loved Fred, don’t get me wrong. But George was always the one I fancied.”

“Really? But, I thought...”

She snorted and turned back to watching the manic brother-and-sister dance that was taking up more and more of the sitting room. “Everyone thought. Hell, I guess I thought. I mean, I only started seeing Fred because I thought it was George who’d asked me to the bloody Yule Ball sixth year. Should’ve known. I mean, they were both bloody fools, but George was actually the thoughtful one. In comparison. He’d’ve never just popped out and asked me as soon as the ball was announced like that. Should’ve known. Had to have been Fred.”

“Yeah.” Harry watched her; a smile was beginning to push its way up through her features. “And now?”

“Now?” The smile disappeared. “Doesn’t matter, does it? All either of us can think about when we see each other is Fred. I doubt either of us is going to be looking for company any time soon.” Her low nostrils flared in a snort. “Bloody fools.”

If Harry had answered her, he could never remember. And he’d ask himself more than once whether the fools she was talking about in the end were just the twins.

But that conversation would be one that Harry would happily recall over the years—at Angelina and George’s wedding, at the births of their children, and even when he and Ginny Floo’d over to their flat one night for dinner to find the two of them trading hexes and screaming at each other, blaming each other for the burnt lamb roast.

Love is like the grass pushing up through the cracks in a city street; people can try to pretend that they can conquer it, or that it isn’t there, but it always comes back.

: :

The next thing that Harry could remember in later years was following Ginny out of the full-to-bursting Burrow into the chill of the April night. She led him out toward the paddock, steam flowing back over the silver-washed red of her hair and giving her an even more fearsome appearance.

Harry nearly had to sprint to keep up with her.

Just as he thought that she might be trying to lose him—that she might run into the wood nearby—she grabbed onto one of the worn posts that marked the paddock’s perimeter and turned on him. “I’m furious with you.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Do you know why?”

He was about to answer as truthfully as he could—that he thought she hadn’t liked the idea of him telling her what she should and shouldn’t do—but what Mr. Weasley had said earlier flashed through his mind and he thought that, perhaps, this might be one of those times when shutting up and listening was called for. “I’m not sure.”

She stared at him for a moment and then threw her hands up in the air. “Neither am I!” Looking down at Harry’s shoes, she leaned back the fence, her arms crossed. “I mean, I know what you bloody said that set me off. No one likes to make a bloody decision and then be told it was the wrong bloody one. I wanted to bite your bloody head off. And then, of course, it was all okay for Ron to bloody quit.... But the thing is, I know you were bloody right.”

“You... You do?”

“Of course I bloody do!” Again she flung her hands up. “I’ve been sneaking out here to fly since I was tall enough to open the latch on the broom shed! I love flying, I love playing Quidditch. It’s me. It’s who I am. A chance to play for the bloody Harpies is a bloody dream come true.” She was breathing hard, gouts of steam streaming from her nostrils.

“So...?”

“So I know I should try out. I know... I know I bloody have to.” She crossed her arms again, but instead of looking fierce, she looked lost. Her eyes were still downcast and her chin was beginning to tremble. “But I can’t. I can’t... I can’t stand the idea of bloody failing, Harry. Of everyone looking at me I feel as if there’s so bloody little I’ve accomplished on my own—compared to you, say, or Hermione or my git of a brother or... or Neville.”

Neville. Neville kissing her... “You’ve—”

“Shut up. I know you’re going to say I have, or that you love me no matter what, or something else just as lovely, but Harry, there are three bloody things in my whole life that that I’ve ever been truly proud of. One was the DA last year, and hey! When the DA joined the battle last year, where did I start the night, Harry? Another was Gwenog bloody Jones asking me to try out. And the other was you. You saying, you know...”

“I love you.”

She flashed him a pained grimace of a smile. “Well, yeah. Not that those aren’t wonderful, really bloody wonderful things, but Merlin, I feel like such a whinging, bloody, foolish girl, but if I lost either of those things, I couldn’t stand to lose—”

“Will you marry me?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered, and stood there blinking.

“Till death do us part?”

“Yes.”

He walked toward her, holding out a hand that, somehow, held the ring box that he’d dropped so often in his kitchen. He opened the box, took out the ring that he’d found in his vault, took her hand and slipped the ring on. “Me too,” he said.

They both looked down at Ginny’s hand, and then up at each other. Her face, which had been pale, was in full bloom. She frowned. “But—”

“You’ll be brilliant. And even if you don’t end up making the team this time no one’ll think any less of you. Definitely not me. I’m not going anywhere.”

She folded herself beneath his chin. “Mph.”

“Also?”

“Mph?”

“Morrison retired at the end of last season, you know that, and Susan just told me that her cousin—whose wife is the Harpies’ team Healer—told her that McKerrigan’s pregnant with her third, and isn’t likely to be flying next season at all. That’s two-thirds of their starting Chaser line. And they carry a full reserve squad. Gwenog might pick up one from another team, but she’s going to want at least one younger player to train up. So you going to tell me that there are two Chasers your age who’re better than you?”

She peered up at him; now her eyes went from rounded to narrowed—though unlike earlier, there was a glint of humor there as well. “Are you saying my making the club won’t be a big deal?”

“Never.”

Smiling, she pushed up on her toes and kissed him, and it felt very right.

Some time later, they were lying on the damp April grass; he had conjured a pair of blankets, one for them both to lie on, and one to throw over themselves. They were still dressed, but the night was cool and evening mist was beginning to close away the world.

“Harry?”

“Mmm.”

“You meant it, right? Getting married.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She shifted in his arms. “Was that what had you so jumpy today?”

“A bit. Knowing that I was going to talk to your parents. But also...”

Pushing up, she rolled and looked down at him. Her moon-chased hair streamed down either side of his face. “Also?”

“Neville.”

“Neville?”

“He came, because... He wanted to talk. To tell me.”

She looked down—no fear there, no artifice, just curiosity.

“He kissed you.”

“He—?” Her face twisted, but then relaxed. “Oh. Yeah. Twice. I... forgot.”

He grinned. “Lucky me.”

“You want to get lucky, do you, Harry?” Her eyes were dark with promise.

He began to pull her toward him, but she slipped out of his grasp. When he groaned in surprise and disappointment, she laughed and skipped away from him. He sprinted after her, but six older brothers and years of training on a broom had taught her how to stay just out of his reach. They sprinted around the paddock, Ginny just ahead, zigging and zagging, both of them laughing.

I get to do this for the rest of my life, he thought as they completed the circuit.

Suddenly, she turned and stopped, standing back on the blankets. Harry slammed into her and they tumbled to the ground, still laughing, but kissing now, as if each were trying to erase any separation from the other.

As their embrace passed from snog to something more, Ginny groaned and pulled Harry tight. “April Fool,” she sighed.

April Fool, he thought, and released himself utterly to the moment, and to folly.

Fortune

“Well,” sighed Harry, rubbing his face in both hands, “how about... I don’t know.... How about we sell the rights to another bloody biography?”

Ginny’s eyebrow barely lifted.

Roger shook his distinguished head. “I’m afraid not, Harry. The market’s there, but the contract on the Skeeter woman’s calls for another ten years as the exclusive authorized biography. It’d cost as much to buy her out as you’d be likely to make.”

Ginny patted Harry’s shoulder; she had to know even suggesting such a step was a sign of how desperate he was. “I could see if any of the teams want to have me.”

He looked at her; she seemed deadly serious. Things were bad. “You haven’t flown competitively since you were pregnant with Albus, love. I mean, they’d be lucky to have you, but...”

Her shoulders slumped.

Roger cleared his throat. “Besides that, it would force you to leave the Prophet, which is, at the moment, your steadiest income stream.”

Both Potters groaned. “Bloody hell,” Harry said, “who knew weddings could cost such a bloody fortune?” When Roger Davies looked as if he might point out that, indeed, he had suggested as their solicitor and financial adviser that holding the wedding for Lily and Lysander at Stonehenge on Midsummer’s Night would, in fact, be rather extravagant, Harry just shrugged. “Whatever.”

He wanted the best for his daughter. He wanted her to have the wedding of her dreams—he knew that, once the Scamander boy had taken Lily’s hand from his, she would be Harry’s little girl no more. So never mind that Stonehenge hadn’t been the kids’ idea, but Harry’s—he wanted the best.

Cost a fortune? He was supposed to have the bloody fortune to spend! He was the Boy Who bloody Lived, wasn’t he? Well, long past being a boy, of course, but he was a national hero and the youngest department head in the history of the Aurors. Of course, when he’d signed up, no one had told him that being an Auror—even Head Auror—wasn’t exactly highly remunerative work.

Not that he and Ginny were poverty-stricken. It was just that, between his less-than-high-paying job and the fact that his wife had left playing Quidditch to become a journalist—if anything, a career that paid even worse—on top of the costs of raising three kids and sending them to Hogwarts and maintaining three—no, four—houses, they weren’t exactly rolling in Galleons. The vault at Gringotts was a shadow of its former glory.

Ron and Hermione were in better financial position than they were at the moment. Bloody hell.

“I could sell my share of Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes.”

“To who?” Ginny asked. “George and Ron would hate having to answer to someone outside of the family, and while they’d be happy to help, I’m sure, that new Russian joke chain means they’re not a whole lot more flush than we are.”

Roger cleared his throat mildly once more. “Yes. I did broach the subject with Angelina. She said that under normal circumstances the company would be more than happy to buy the shares, or even to advance a loan, but...”

“But the cash isn’t there,” Harry grumbled.

Ginny patted the back of his hand.

“So we’re back to selling off one of the pieces of property.”

Roger tsked, and Ginny let off an exasperated hiss of frustration. They’d circled this more than once. “Which?” she asked, not for the first time. “The Shrieking Shack is Lily and Lysander’s present—that seems a bloody stupid thing to sell to finance their wedding. I suppose we could find a smaller house than Grimmauld Place for ourselves, but with all the work the house needs, and with the mortgage, I doubt we’d clear enough even to pay for the wedding. The farm on Fee Sark... Well, we’d have to ask your cousin and Parvati to move, which we could certainly do, but it seems a nasty trick.”

“And of course, they can’t afford to pay for it,” Harry sighed. Dudley, one-legged, on an Army pension. Parvati, spell-blind, her Ministry diplomatic career gone. No, forcing them to move wasn’t an option. “That leaves... That leaves Godric’s Hollow.”

“Harry.” Ginny peered at him, her brows bowed in concern.

“No, you know it’s the only thing we have to sell at the moment. It’s a pretty good piece of property. I’m sure... I’m sure someone will want it.”

“It just doesn’t seem right,” said Ginny, though it wasn’t with much conviction.

“It’s just a house,” answered Harry, though he didn’t feel any more certain of what he was saying than she had sounded. “What do you think, Roger?”

His face a mask of studied neutrality, their solicitor held his hands out towards them. “It is, of course, your choice. You would need to move quickly, nonetheless.”

“Of course,” Harry and Ginny answered together, utterly devoid of enthusiasm.

Tilting his head, Roger conceded, “But a little time wouldn’t make any difference. May I suggest that you take a day to talk it over? I can delay filing the use permits and such with the Ministry for another day, I am sure.”

Harry nodded, relieved to have another day before the decision had to be made; a part of him wanted to get it over with, but on the whole, he wasn’t ready to put his parents’ house up for sale. Not yet.

Ginny kissed him on the cheek. “We could visit the place. What do you think?”

“Sure,” Harry said, grasping her hand. “Roger, if you could have all of the paperwork ready to sign, we’ll be by at lunchtime, okay?”

Roger smiled his solicitor’s smile. “The paperwork is already ready. And I will look forward to seeing you both tomorrow.”

Harry shook Roger’s hand. “Thanks. And sorry about all of this bollocks.”

Roger’s laugh welled up, warm and genuine—not his office laugh but his after-hours laugh. “Harry, my friend, I’ve been your solicitor for more than twenty years and this is the stickiest problem you’ve ever handed me. May that always be the case!” He took Ginny’s hand and kissed it, and Harry remembered for a flash why he had disliked Roger when they were young. Roger chuckled again, and it was quickly forgotten. “Besides, I get to see your lovely wife twice in a week—more than recompense enough.”

“Lovely, right,” said Ginny, who did indeed look lovely. “Give my love to Lisa.”

“Of course,” Roger said, and walked them to the door.

: :

Ginny’s arm circled Harry’s waist as they walked down Diagon Alley towards the Apparition point near Gringotts. “Sickle for your thoughts?”

“Not thinking,” grunted Harry, staring up into the dim, silvery sky as they moved. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“Harry...” She gave a long sigh as they arrived outside the enormous white marble façade of the bank. “Come on. Let’s go.”

They unsqueezed into the West Country landscape, behind a copse of trees just off of the lane where Bathilda Bagshot had attempted to lure Harry and Hermione to their doom, and Harry blinked his eyes. Not only was the sky here clear and bright, but they had traveled over two hundred miles to the west; the sun still hadn’t set. A lark, startled by their Apparition, no doubt, began to sing in the tree above them.

“I forget how beautiful it is here,” murmured Harry.

Ginny, the country girl born and raised, breathed in deeply. “That’s because you never come during the spring or summer—Halloween and Christmas, and then just to see your parents.”

“True enough,” Harry conceded, breathing in himself, smelling the rich scent of just-mown hay and of lavender. As they stepped out into the lane, he could see lupines bursting from the tufts of grass on either side of the road. He knew that if he walked down the lane and through the square, he would come to the little churchyard where his parents were buried. A jolt of guilt ran through him; how could he sell this house?

But Lily was getting married. Their youngest. Their last. Albus had been, to his own great pride, the first, and in spite of Ginny’s worries that Al had been far too young to be getting married—he had been a year older than Harry and Ginny had—he seemed genuinely, ecstatically happy. Young Ceci seemed even now thoroughly smitten with him.

Merlin. Soon enough the two would probably make him and Ginny grandparents. There was a thought.

James... Well, Harry still couldn’t say that he understood. He didn’t even know whether it was the fact that Scorpius was a man or that he was a Malfoy that made him uncomfortable. But, as Ginny pointed out at every opportunity, their eldest too had never been happier. And Scorpius had turned out to be much more pleasant company than his father, who seemed, it pleased Harry to think, even more uncomfortable with the whole arrangement than Harry himself.

Also, Scorpius was a huge, life-long Harpies fan, which made him all but family anyway.

The fact of the matter was that Harry wasn’t ready for Lily to marry. She was twenty-one, an auburn-haired chip off of her mother’s fiercely independent block—of her namesake grandmother’s as well, when it came to that. And Luna and Rolf’s boy had been her best friend since their first day at Hogwarts together. She was marrying him because she wanted to.

And Lysander loved Lily. Harry could see the look in his eyes, and remembered the feeling behind that look. When the two children had first become romantically involved during the summer after their sixth year, everyone had expected Harry to become insanely jealous and protective. But he had known that Lily was capable of taking care of herself—not that his heart hadn’t nearly broken for her during her occasional break-ups with the boy. No, the one Harry had worried about was Lysander, who was as dreamy as his mother and more determined than either of his parents.

Lysander Scamander. The name still made Harry chuckle.

Lily Scamander.

No, Lily was ready. It was Harry who couldn’t get himself reconciled to the idea.

And so he had thrown himself into the preparations for their wedding—just two months away now—with more energy than he had expended on anything in years. Caterers. Florists. The band—Harry had wanted to talk to the Wyrd Sisters, who hadn’t played together in a few years, but Lily had shot down that idea; still, Roger had negotiated with the agent for Lily’s favorite group, The Crypt-Kicker Five, and it looked as if the hottest band in the wizarding world would be available that night. Harry had convinced Kingsley himself, recently retired, to officiate. The marquee company had to be hired—Wiltshire could get drizzly; no matter what the Wizarding Weather Bureau said, they had to plan on rain. And of course there would have to be a team of wizards retained to cast Muggle-repelling charms. A full security detail was essential—times were relatively safe, but old Moody’s cry of Constant vigilance! had saved Harry’s bacon more than once.

Lupines. Would Lily and Lysander want lupines? Buckets of them around the dance floor. Or on the tables perhaps. The star-gazer lilies, of course; those were a given, but—

“You’re thinking about the wedding again, aren’t you?” Ginny was smirking up at him. The late-afternoon sun shone golden on her high, freckled cheeks and set her flame and ash hair ablaze.

“Uh, yeah.” Harry looked around. They were standing in front of the remains of his parents’ house—or what seemed to be the remains of the house. The whole of the ruin seemed to be encased in a living blanket of green, spangled with red and yellow. Nature was reclaiming the Potter home. Harry put his hand on the gate, and the familiar sign rose out of the bank of purple-tufted thistle: On this spot, on the night of 31 October, 1981... “A bit overrun. We’ll have to clear things a bit, if we want to sell it.”

“A bit,” laughed Ginny. She pushed open the gate—not easily—and pulled him through. Using her wand to clear their path, she walked him towards the house. “When was the last time you actually came in here? I haven’t been since that first summer.”

“When you wanted me to show you the rose garden.” He couldn’t help but grin at the memory: Ginny had wanted him to bring her to what was reputed to be one of the most romantic spots in Britain, but they hadn’t got much further than the side of the house before sinking into the grass and flowers and snogging each other silly. “Neither have I, really. Not much. Not recently.”

He always meant to come, of course, but there never seemed to be time. And Harry never really felt the urge to revisit the place where Voldemort had killed his parents.

Johnny Abbott, Hannah’s nephew and one of Teddy’s friends, lived in Godric’s Hollow and kept an eye on the property—both the house and the thirty acres of meadow and woodland behind it—but Johnny had a family of his own, these days, and so Harry hadn’t heard much from him recently. Harry knew that, for a time, Johnny had tried to keep the weeds and such to a minimum, but obviously the plants had won. Even standing ten feet from the old house, you could barely tell that people had ever lived there. It looked more like a hillock of wild roses and thistle, mixed in with spring wildflowers that Aunt Petunia would never have allowed in her garden, but that Ginny had taught him to recognize, back in the days when they’d gone hiking and snogging on the moors after her quicker Quidditch matches: coltsfoot and scarlet pimpernel, euphrasy and rue. Through the greenery, here and there, a blackened doorknob or the corner of a peeling blue shutter peeked out. Otherwise, there was no sign of the house in which Harry had been born, and in which his parents had died.

Harry was surprised to find this reassuring.

“Come on, Harry. I never did get to see the rose garden.” She led him through the weeds and flowers, which reached above her waist. They waded around to the side of the house, where the view of the dale and of the woods beyond opened up before them. No wonder they hadn’t got any further than this all of those years ago. He stopped, tugging his wife back towards him. Together they gazed out, watching the sun start its last slide towards the horizon. Kissing Ginny’s ear, he felt the urge to emulate it, and began to push her down into the high grass.

“Oh, no!” giggled Ginny. “That’s what stopped us before! I want to see the rose garden!” Tickling him so that he broke his grasp, she ran down the shallow incline, laughing as she went.

Harry gave a roar and charged after her—not an easy feat, with all those weeds to fight through. Really, she was much shorter than he was; shouldn’t it have been even harder for her? Instead she flitted just beyond his grasp, like a bloody Snitch.

Suddenly she squawked and stopped. Before she could get away again, he barreled into her, grabbed her in his arms and kissed her.

The air here. It smelled like Ginny. Like the scent that had haunted him for most of his sixth year before he had figured out what it was that he was smelling: her. This.

Her fingers were tangled in his hair, her tongue tangled in his. One of his hands found its way inside of her Sensible Journalist robes and was pulling the tail of her blouse from her Sensible Journalist.

“Fence,” hissed Ginny as his fingers began to play an old, familiar song upon her flesh. “Roses.”

“Huh,” grunted Harry, and lifted her; she wrapped her legs around his hips. Too many bloody clothes. Got to find somewhere we can take these off.

He tried to walk forwards, but something was blocking the way. Fence. Right. Not a high fence though; without disengaging from kissing Ginny, he managed to step over the obstruction, and walk towards the low, dark berm that he could just make out through the strands of Ginny’s hair. Woods? A strong floral breeze wafted in the scant spaces between him and her, and it was that same Ginny scent...

Roses. Ah.

He strode forwards: she’d see her roses, by Merlin—they’d make love amidst the bloody roses. It had been weeks since they’d had the time—the wedding and work had been swallowing whatever time or energy they had. Well, they had the time now. And they both seemed to have the energy. Without breaking the kiss, he tried to find a path into the garden, but it seemed to be a solid wall of flower-bedecked thorns, like something out of Sleeping Beauty or The Fountain of Fair Fortune....

The Fountain of Fair Fortune.

Harry disengaged his lips from his wife’s, who moaned at the unwelcome interruption. “Let us in,” he said.

To his surprise, a gap opened in the wall of roses, forming an arched entryway.

His wife still wrapped around him, his lips back where they both wanted them to be, Harry strode forwards into the roses. Well, at least it wasn’t creepers pulling us through.

Once Harry and Ginny had passed through the wall, they stopped kissing. They both knew that there would be time for that later—plenty of time for that.

Harry had expected the interior of the rose garden to be as wild as the outside; he hadn’t really thought that there would be an interior—just a nice, private place for him and his wife to get up to the kinds of things that husbands and wives enjoy getting up to.

Instead, the garden looked...

It looked magnificent.

There were hundreds of rose bushes in full bloom, no two seeming to be the same variety. Pink roses, red roses, white roses—damask, orange, lavender, silver, blue, even black. Each seemed to have been perfectly pruned to show off its distinctive glory. A manicured lawn filled the enormous central area, which was easily the size of a regulation Quidditch pitch.

At the opposite end of the green, directly below the almost-setting sun, bubbled a fountain, tall and alabaster, the clear water sparkling in the sunlight.

Ginny unwrapped her legs and stood beside him. “Wow.”

Harry couldn’t help but agree. “Wow.”

Hand in hand they strode towards the fountain. The burbling song of the water seemed the perfect compliment the heady scent of the flowers all around them. The fountain itself was carved with the figure of a goddess, scattering seeds.

Ginny peered at the fountain, her eyes wide, reached out, and then pulled back her hand. “Do you suppose...?”

“I think...” Harry said, looking at the fountain, which for all that it was obviously very old, was bright white. “I think that either they created this because of the story—the Peverells, the Potters, whoever—or, maybe, Beedle based the story on this. Like the Cloak.”

“Right.” She started to reach out again to drink from the fountain, but stopped. “Hey,” she said. “Those aren’t roses.”

Growing to just behind the fountain was a clump of lilies—star-gazers, and like every other flower in the garden, in full bloom.

The hair on the back of Harry’s neck lifted. He had spent far too long looking at specimens of this flower recently. He knew: these were perfect.

Walking towards them, he knelt down. At their base was a plaque: With these flowers (lilium ‘stargazer’), in this place, on this day, 19 June, 1979, James Charlus Potter was wed to Lily Elizabeth Evans

Harry felt as if the air had been expelled from his lungs. He reached out and touched the pollen-soaked pistil of the closest flower. The pollen came off on his finger.

“Harry.” Ginny was kneeling beside him in front of beautiful blue flower that had been blocked from their sight by the fountain. She read the plaque at its base: “With these flowers (calydorea amabilis), in this place, on this day, 2 September, 1939, Charlus Harold Potter was wed to Dorea Andromeda Black.”

“Wow.” He looked past her; there were more. “Do you think...?”

Crawling, they made their way to the next plaque—Charlus’s sister, Damascena Victoria Potter. Harry’s great-aunt. Married to Hieronymus Abbott in 1935. Perhaps he and Hannah were cousins?

Before that... Harry’s great-grandparents. Married in 1913. Dumbledore might have been living in Godric’s Hollow then, Harry found himself thinking. Wonder if he attended?

The plaques stretched on and on, rounding the corner. Behind each bloomed a gorgeous, perfect specimen of the flower with which a couple had been married. Perhaps the flowers themselves.

The names shifted. They ran across an occasional Weasley and Prewett—no Malfoys, however. Potters disappeared; Harry found when a William Potter had married a Floribunda Wright in 1687. Then the Wrights too disappeared—there was Bowman Wright marrying Iris Peverell in 1518. The Peverells too had married here for several generations. The last plaque they came across was that marking the marriage of Ignotus Peverell to Rose Black in 1400. The beautiful rose bush behind the plaque bore blossoms that matched her family’s name.

This was Harry’s family tree. His family garden.

Harry sat back in the lush grass, stunned. Ginny curled herself into his lap and peered at him. Her face was slack.

“Did you know?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Mum had always talked about this place, about how it was... magical.”

Harry nodded. “I can’t wait to show this to her. She’ll be in heaven. And Neville!”

Before he could get any further carried away, she kissed him.

They made love there in the grass; it was sweet and unhurried and when they were done, they lay side by side on his Ministry-issue robes. The sun was setting, burnishing Ginny’s skin so that it matched her hair. Harry played his favorite game: connecting her freckles with her sweat.

Harry tried not to think about it, but felt sure that hundreds of Potters and Wrights and Peverells had made love here. Had pledged their love here. He smiled.

“So,” Ginny said, smiling in return, “still want to sell this place?”

“No.”

“Still think we need to hold Lily and Lysander’s wedding at Stonehenge?”

“No.”

She favored him with her most feral grin. “Care to have another go?”

He didn’t say anything at first, but merely entangled himself once again in the gold and flame of her. “What did I do,” he asked breathlessly, “to deserve such... fortune?”

Her answer came without words. And it was utterly, completely satisfying.

Fireworks

As Harry sat there, waiting for the fireworks, Ron paced around the garden bench, scarcely pausing for breath. “Can’t believe you’re sitting there like it’s just another bloody Saturday, like we’re waiting for the Quidditch match to come on the wireless. This is a huge change!”

“Of course it is.” Harry looked up at his friend, who had pulled and poked at his dress robes until they were rumpled and askew. “Come on, Ron: you and Hermione got on well enough.”

Ron stopped in his steady transit around the bench long enough to snort. “Like that one gave anyone a blood choice. She had everything timed and tied up in bloody bows before we had anything to do with it.”

Looking down so that Ron wouldn’t see him smile, Harry shrugged. “There you are. It’s not like there’s anything to worry about.”

Ron’s long feet, clad in shoes that shone like black flame, crunched to a halt directly in front of Harry. “Not anything to...? Are you off your bloody nut? This is a wedding! Of course there’s stuff to bloody worry about!”

Before Harry could answer him, another, lighter set of footsteps announced a new arrival behind Harry. Luna had entered their tiny nook in the garden, and Harry’s heart suddenly filled: she looked spectacular, her dress robes flowing, her hair done up in an elaborate style what appeared to show scenes from the Battle of Hogwarts. “Luna.” He reached out his hand.

She took it in hers. “Hullo, Harry. Ron. I hope that you don’t think that it’s bad luck that I see you before the wedding, Harry.”

Ron coughed. “Bad...?”

“Er, no, Luna, no,” said Harry, “I’m sure it will be fine.”

“How nice.” She smiled broadly. “It is terribly pleasant that we’ll be married.”

“Er, yeah.” Harry glanced at Ron, whose face was darkening. “So, is everything ready?”

“Hmm?” Luna cocked her head.

As Ron let out a grunt of strangled exasperation, Harry pressed on. “The guests. Minister Guy?”

“Oh!” Luna said, her face brightening in recognition. “Yes, that’s why I’ve come. Ginny told me to tell you that Lily is waiting for you at the garden entrance. She really does look quite lovely. I think Lysander may faint when you bring her down the aisle.”

Ron snorted again. “If he does, he wouldn’t be the first. This git here nearly keeled over when he and Ginny tied the knot.”

Letting go of Harry’s hand, Luna threaded her silk-clad arm through Ron’s. “I really am glad that our families are getting married, Ron. My family has always been so small, you see. I’ve always wanted to be a part of yours.”

“Luna,” said Harry, standing and taking Luna’s other arm, “you’ve always been part of our family. Now, let’s go and get our kids hitched.”

: :

Standing at the back of the Rose Garden while young Fred and Choi’s daughter Mary scattered flower petals, Harry stared at his daughter’s face. It was set in the same fierce mask of determination that he remembered from her childhood—from Ginny’s childhood: fine chin out, mouth small, brows bowed. “You don’t have to go through with this if you’re feeling nervous,” he said, his own stomach suddenly exploding as it had used to before Quidditch matches or his early Auror missions. “You don’t have to do this if you aren’t ready.”

Lily’s brilliant blue eyes flashed wide, and then she smiled. “You just try to stop me.”

“I know better than that.” He kissed her cheek, and then lowered her veil. “Come on. Let’s go.”

As they strode down toward where Lysander—who really did look as if he might fall over at any moment—was waiting with Lorcan, James and Al by the minister near the fountain at the top of the garden, Harry felt the pyrotechnics in his middle spread through his body. Rolf, his face buried in Luna’s neck. All of their children. All of their friends. Scorpius, his face wet and transported in an expression of wonder that made him look more like a Lovegood than a Malfoy. All of those red heads—so many now. And there, weeping combustibly in the front row: Ginny. Ginny.

Harry and Lily reached the front. Lysander was still upright. Releasing his daughter into her new husband’s care, Harry stepped back toward his own wife, and let the flame consume him.

: :

After the ceremony the two families—now one; married, as Luna had said—gathered above the fountain.

The newlyweds knelt on a mat and, with silver trowels that were a lot nicer than the ones Harry remembered from Professor Sprout’s lessons, planted the spectacular lily that Neville had bred for them—each petal flashed sparks of red and purple that seemed to explode, fade and rise again. As the last bit of dirt was pressed down, the minister waved her wand, and the bronze plaque appeared: With these flowers (lilium ‘fireworks’), in this place, on this day, 19 June, 2029, Lysander Xenophilius Scamander was wed to Lily Luna Potter

The crowd burst into applause. As the families—family—began to press around the couple, Harry pulled his own wife just to the side. She kissed him soundly on the cheek and whispered, “We did it.”

He smiled, his vision still sparkling. “Not much for us to do.”

She squeezed his hand. “Having her. Raising her.”

“Ah.” He looked down at the plaque at his feet: With this plant (ginevra longbottomii), in this place, on this day, 1 June, 2029, Harry James Potter re-pled his troth to Ginevra Molly Weasley Potter. “So... that’s it? We’re done?”

Grinning, she kissed him again—on the lips, this time. “Well, we could always start over again, you know.”

He grinned in spite of himself.

“And then,” she went on, her gaze softening, “there’s always grandchildren.”

“Merlin.” Harry suddenly wasn’t sure that he was ready for all of this. For any of it.

“Come on, Harry. Enjoy it. This is what we fought for. What they all fought for.”

Simultaneous sensations of weight and weightlessness swirled through him. He looked up. There was Teddy, hair a bright turquoise, holding a squealing Lily in the air, while her brothers and Lorcan took turns pounding the grinning groom on the back. George was laughing, talking with an absolutely unstrung Rolf Scamander, while Angie hugged Fred and Choi and little Mary. Rose and her husband. Weasleys and Potters and Scamanders and Malfoys and...

Luna, her black robes resplendent—for all that they looked as if they’d be more appropriate for a funeral than a wedding—was wandering down the rows of flowers, talking to them—to Harry’s ancestors. Welcoming them into her family, perhaps.

“Yeah,” he said, and kissed her back. This is what we fought for. This is what life is. “Come on. We don’t want to miss all the fireworks.”

F Words Addenda

The following fics were written after the rest of the series, so they're not part of the "official" F Words cycle. However, they're set in the same ficverse—and their titles begin with the same letter—so I thought I'd gather them here as well.

Fidelias

Chapter 1

A/N: This was originally written for the takingitinturns community on LiveJournal. It takes place a couple of months after "Folly."

"And what do you have planned for the night, Ginny?" burbled Luna as we slipped down past the roots of the Whomping Willow and into the passage to Harry's house.

"Don't know." I shivered; it was cool in the tunnel, but the place also gave me the collywobbles.

"Oh, how nice," sighed Luna, lighting her wand. "That probably means lots of sex."

I smiled, because that was Luna, but it was mostly habit. Yeah, sex was probably on the menu, and that was sure to be nice. But what else? What was Harry up to? In the two months since we'd got engaged, it was almost as if we'd spent less time together, instead of more. A lot of that was my NEWTs, of course, and try-outs for the Harpies, which had been amazing.

But now I only had my end-of-year exams, which were always a joke for seventh-years. On Friday, I'd be boarding the Hogwarts Express for the very last time. I was due to start with the Harpies the following Monday—and with the on-going threats by the remnants of the blood-purity fanatics against teams that allowed Muggle-born players (like Harpies legend Gwenog Jones), the Ministry had insisted that all of the training camps be closed, and under tight security. Harry and I weren't going to be seeing much of each other for the next few months. I would have thought that he'd have been as desperate to spend time with me as I was with him. But no: most nights for the previous two weeks, he'd begged off, telling me not to come out to the Shrieking Shack, where we'd been happily shagging in every renovated room in the place for months.

Not that night, though. At dinner that night, as I'd made my way out of the Great Hall past the Auror Cadet table that had been set up by the door, I'd leaned down to kiss him, as I did most meals. Only I may have whispered in his ear several really intriguing things that I wanted to try with him that night, and I might have told him that rope was involved, and I may very well have suggested that if he weren't there when I arrived, he was the one who was going to spend the whole night trussed up like a Christmas goose. He'd shivered and spluttered that that sounded lovely, and that he had something that he needed to finish that night, but he thought he'd be able to be at the Shack by no later than nine that evening.

It was only just gone eight as Luna and I climbed up into the basement of the no-longer Shrieking Shack. Breathing more freely now that we'd cleared the tunnel—I always hated being underground; can you blame me?—I climbed the stairs up to the butler's pantry. "Yeah. Sex. If he's a good boy, I'm going to let him tie me up."

"Oh?" Luna was beaming as we entered the kitchen. "Rolf likes that too. Or rather, he likes to tie me up. I don't know whether he would enjoy tying you up. I shall have to ask him."

I laughed. "You do that!"

"And if Harry is not a good boy?"

"Ah," I answered with a grin, "then I'll have to tie him up."

"Yes. I suppose so." Luna cocked her head. "I must say, however, that Rolf likes that even more than when he gets to tie me up. He is rather fond of being spanked, too, especially if I'm—"

"Luna!" Even in my state of preoccupation, I found myself blushing and laughing. "What happened to my innocent friend!"

She considered very seriously before answering, "I did a lot of research." Then she flashed a blissful smile. "Have fun with the bondage! Oh, and cast Glissare on the ropes. It is just as much fun but does not chafe anywhere nearly as much."

I smiled back, even as my mind continued to worry at Harry's evasions and disappearances. "I'll keep that in mind. Have fun with Rolf." He was waiting for her at the Three Broomsticks. "And be here before six; we don't want to get caught sneaking back in."

"No. It helps that I won't be sleeping at all." She spun and skipped toward the front door and then stopped, plucking something from the door handle. "Acromantula web. How interesting. I wonder what Harry has been doing in the forest."

"Me too," I muttered. The forest?

"No doubt he will explain when he meets you. Have fun!" Luna flitted through the door, leaving the shred of spider silk to waft slowly to the floor.

"No doubt." Luna was already gone. I walked over and picked up the sticky silk; it was matted with dust and leaves. What the hell? Shrugging off my rucksack, I looked about, trying to see any other signs of where Harry might be, of what he might be up to.

Another girl—of course that had been the first thought that my treacherous mind had offered up when he started begging off. Someone less scrawny, maybe, with a more even temper. Bigger tits. Susan? No. Like Harry, she was too busy training to be an Auror, and besides, she was chasing after Terry Boot. Certainly not Hermione, who was down in London quietly cohabiting with my brother (or at least, secretly cohabiting—I couldn't imagine those two doing anything quietly). If it were Luna, he'd have been here by now, and besides, Luna would have told me. She told me everything. Whether I wanted to hear it or not.

Maybe Romilda Vane had got up to her old tricks again. Only I knew for a fact that Harry never ate or drank anything that she'd so much as glanced at without testing it first for traces of magic.

I dropped the spider silk into the rubbish, cast a nostalgic glance at the table, on and under which we had had such fun in days gone by, grabbed my rucksack and stomped up the stairs toward the bedroom. If we were going to play games, I needed to get myself into a better mood, and putting on pretty silken underthings always helped my mood tremendously.

They usually helped put Harry to rights too, for that matter.

I usually have a sense of a room before I enter it. Mum calls it my knack—I call it a survival skill learned from growing up with way too many brothers in way too small a house. I'd always been able to get a feel for what was on the other side of any door.

Not pausing at the door, I entered the master bedroom—I thought of it, very quietly, as our bedroom, though I still spent more nights in my four-poster up in Gryffindor Tower, especially during the previous two weeks. It was empty and quiet, but I knew without knowing why that there was something off as soon as I set foot in the room. I dropped my rucksack to the floor, silky underthings forgotten, and looked about, trying to see what it was that had my pulse racing.

Everything was as neat as a pin—Kreacher always came up from Grimmauld Place to neaten up on school days. The bed was perfectly made, with a white rose in a bud vase on the nightstand. Turning to the wardrobe, I opened the door: Harry's robes were hanging just where they should; the few extras that I'd stowed there were demurely tucked at the back, away from the prying eyes of visiting mothers and headmistresses. Harry's heavy boots were in their place; a tuft of Acromantula silk glimmered on one of the laces.

Chewing on my lip, I meandered around the room. What had set my whiskers vibrating? I walked over to the bed and sat, trying to see what it was that had set me off.

Shaking my head, I started to undo my tie. Clearly I had let my imagination run away with me. Time to get into my silkies in order to be ready for Harry—whether as his defenseless maiden or as his all-powerful mistress remained to be seen.

I undid the top few buttons of my school shirt and threw my tie around the corner post at the head of the bed…

That's when I noticed: the secret compartment in the post was open. I felt inside, and was annoyed to find that it was empty.

Bugger, I thought.

That compartment was one that Harry had shown me once—only once. The afternoon when we first made love, right there on that bed. We'd both been lying there—clinging to each other, to be honest—and he'd asked, "Can I show you something?"

I said something stupid along the lines of, "I thought you already had."

He grinned and we snogged for a bit, and then he said, "You remember the… the wand?"

"The wand?"

"The, you know, the Elder Wand."

For a moment I thought that we were talking "The Tale of the Three Brothers," but then I remembered standing in that circle, the morning of the battle, my heart in my mouth, clutching Luna's hand, listening to Harry talk about Voldemort's wand—Dumbledore's wand. Harry's wand. I nodded.

"Well," he said, "I haven't figured out what to do with it yet—how to hide it so that it can't ever hurt anyone again."

I knew that Ron had tried to talk him out of hiding it or destroying it, but I understood why Harry would want to make sure that the Death Stick would never tempt another Dark Lord.

"So," he said, "I've hidden it here." He tapped the corner post three times with his own holly wand and the door had sprung open, revealing the long, pale wand that had caused so much trouble over the centuries. "I… I just thought I should tell you. I haven't told anyone else—not even Ron or Hermione. But someone else should know, in case something happens…."

"Nothing's going to happen, Harry," I said, slamming the little door shut and wrapping myself around him. "That's all done with. No more."

And we'd made love again, and I hadn't given the Elder Wand another thought.

Now it was missing.

What had happened? Had Harry taken it out to the woods to bury it? Had someone broken into the Shrieking Shack and stolen it?

I found that I was standing, my wand in my hand, with no idea how I'd got there.

Where can he be? I thought, looking about frantically. I pulled open the nightstand drawer.

Empty. The Marauder's Map was gone.

Bugger. Bugger. Bugger.

I started to stride toward the door—I figured that if he had the Map, he must be at Hogwarts—when a bright apparition blocked my way: Harry's Patronus, its antlers seeming to fill that whole side of the room. "I need help, Ginny," it said in Harry's voice. "I'm in the Chamber."

I ran through the stag and was back in the tunnel before it occurred to me to think that the Chamber of Secrets was the last place in the world that I ever wanted to be again.

Harry was in danger. He had asked for my help.

I was going to bloody well give it to him.

Chapter 2

The Chamber of Secrets. It’s always lived up it to its name—for me, at least.

There are things that I remember about the Chamber that I’ve never told anybody—not even Harry.

Nothing important—at least, that’s what I’ve always told myself. What was important about what had happened to me down there Harry knew better than anyone: my mind had been taken away from me. I had been violated.

Most of the time that I spent in the Chamber, I was fully possessed, and I couldn’t remember what I’d done—how I’d got myself covered in blood and chicken feathers, or why my robes were wet, or why I woke to myself once in the Gryffindor common room with the scent of Penelope Clearwater’s perfume in my nostrils.

But bits and pieces have come to me in dreams over the years. The glint of the mirror that Hermione and Penelope were peering through when I set the Basilisk on them. The flash of Colin’s camera as he tried to record for everyone just what the monster was that was haunting the school. That dream woke me up screaming more than once in the months after Colin’s death.

The sound of my mouth speaking in Parseltongue to the Basilisk, or ordering the doors of the Chamber to open. The sound of the huge serpent speaking to me.

The sound of Tom’s voice, so warm at first, asking me about the things that I cared about. Leading my mind to places it would never have gone.

Taunting me, as he became more and more real, and I faded more and more—my attempts to resist him increasingly desperate, but increasingly feeble.

I can only be thankful that the sick bugger had no interest of his own in sex. As it is, it’s a miracle that losing myself in someone—even someone who cares for me as obviously as Harry does—doesn’t make me want to run howling into the night.

Sometimes, when I wake from a dream, hearing that voice whispering in my head (“Why would a boy like that love a scrawny little girl like you?”), it does.

Except during the nights that I wake to find Harry curled up beside me. Then I just lie there, my heart pounding. clenching my teeth to keep the sound of my sobbing from waking him.

I flew through the halls of the school, hoping that I would see someone that I could send for help, but of course, the place was empty; the dueling club finals were that night, so everyone would be down in the Great Hall.

As I reached Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom, I stopped short. That knack of mine was suddenly screaming at me: there was something on the other side of the door that I knew I didn’t want to face.

But Harry needed me. And the only way down to the Chamber was through that bathroom. Pulling my wand from my rucksack (When did I pick that up again?), I kicked open the door and peered in.

There was a dim spectral shape crouched at the base of the sink that served as the entrance to the tunnel that led Chamber. A thick, greasy, malevolent feeling rolled off of it, like the worst Dungbomb imaginable.

Whatever the thing was, it wasn’t Myrtle. She was wailing from her toilet. “Make it go away! I don’t want it here!”

“What is it?” I muttered, doing my best just to stay in the room.

“Dunno. Don’t want to know,” howled Myrtle.

“Some Ravenclaw you are,” I muttered, wand raised, forcing one foot forward and then another. “Go on,” I shouted at the thing. “Get out of here!”

The thing didn’t move, but it hissed at me, and the hiss sounded nauseatingly familiar.

“Go,” I answered in Parseltongue—the first part of the command that brought so many of my nightmares to their gut-twisting conclusion. I managed to hold back the second part of the order, though: attack.

The thing slithered away: not as shiny as most ghosts, small, vaguely human, deformed. A child. It snarled at me from the corner but it kept its distance as I approached the sink.

I was about to tell Myrtle to fetch Professor McGonagall when I heard the toilet flush. Thanks a lot, Myrtle, I thought.

Keeping the corner of an eye on the grotesque abortion of a ghost, I walked up to the sink with the serpent mark scratched into it and hissed, “Open.”

The sink slid aside, revealing a black pit that even my nightmares apparently hadn’t done justice to. I couldn’t remember how I’d got down before, but the idea of just jumping…

Don’t get me wrong: put me up in the air and I’ll do anything I have to. Ron swears I had to play for the Harpies, because I was already half madwoman and half bird to begin with.

But underground? I hate being underground. Can you blame me?

“Lumos,” I cried, and stared into the hole. The bottom was still black. What I wouldn’t give for a length of…

With a laugh of annoyance at myself, I dropped my rucksack, opened it and pulled out the coil of thick, red satin cord that I’d bought with a bit of my signing bonus. Holds anything—or anyone—for as long as they want to be held! claimed the adverts for Madam Coraline’s Restraints for Romantics. Well, I thought, we’re about to find out just how good your charms are, Coraline, luv.

Wrapping one end of the rope around the iron column of the sink next to the one that usually covered the hole, I touched it and said, “Lashio.” As when I’d practiced, the rope promptly tied itself into a very imposing, sturdy-looking knot.

The rest of the rope began to slither its way around my wrist, but I slapped at it—“Stop that!”—and it sloughed away. I dropped the rope down into the hole and was relieved to hear what sound like the rope hitting stones at the bottom.

I pulled at the rope with all of my strength. The knot held.

As I dropped over the edge, my lit wand clutched in my mouth, climbing my way down through the dank darkness, I thought, Right, Potter. When I find you and get you out of this, I’m going to tie you up for real. No more of these fun and games!

I knew better though: I was the idiot who’d fallen in love with Harry Potter. Whatever his strengths as a man, as a boyfriend—as, Merlin help us, a future husband—leading a boring, stay-at-home life wasn’t likely to be one of them.

I reached the end, and a vague memory resurfaced: bones. Rat bones. Mice. Moles. Badgers. Snakes. Staring up, I decided to let the rope stay where it was; no hope of Fawkes flying us up again this time. I tried not to look too closely at the floor as I crunched my way toward where I knew without knowing that the Chamber of Secrets lay.

Behind me, I felt the rotting, noisome presence of the ghost-child moving behind me, staying just out of my wand’s light.

Nearly sprinting down the tunnel, I saw an enormous snakeskin glittering in my wandlight, and for the first time a memory came to me that wasn’t washed in the garish colors of nightmares. I remembered Harry and me finding Ron here with that oblivious prat, Professor Lockhart. Around the next turn, a wall of rock showed where the backfire from Ron’s wand had collapsed the tunnel but there, up at the top, was the narrow passage that my brother had cleared for us to get through.

Have I said that I hate being underground? Yeah. Well, I really hate enclosed spaces. Tight, enclosed spaces.

But Harry…

Biting my lip and gripping my wand, I climbed up the face of the rockslide and entered the narrow channel that Ron had opened up—and that he must have widened to get back in and out when he and Hermione went hunting for the Basilisk’s fangs just before the battle. If Ron could do it—hell, if Hermione could do it, I could bloody well get through.

I may have been determined, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t have to stop once I’d climbed through and sit, gasping for air in the relatively open space of the tunnel beyond.

The thing was gibbering up in the passage, just out of sight.

Harry. Right.

I got up and started to run again, but didn’t have far to go. There stood an enormous pair of doors with a pair of intricate stone snakes carved on the front. Raising my wand once again, I hissed, “Open!” and sprinted back into the Chamber of Secrets for the first time since Harry had helped me free myself from Tom.

I asked Luna once how she had managed to stay sane—well, as sane as Luna could ever have claimed to have been—during those long months as Voldemort’s captive in the Malfoys’ cellar. She’d smiled her Luna smile, reminded me that she’d had Mr. Ollivander to talk to, told me that she’d spent much of the time considering possible locations where they might track down the Snorkack herds at last (as, of course, she had helped Rolf do just that, this past  spring). “But,” she said, “mostly I thought of you lying alone in the Chamber of Secrets, fighting off Tom Riddle’s attempts to possess you.”

When I told her that seemed like an awful thing to be thinking about—I certainly thought about it as little as I could—she said, “Oh, but I found it a very hopeful image. You fought for so long. And after all, Harry did come for you.”

As he had come for her, even… As I was coming for him.

“Open!” I ran into the place where I had failed so badly in so many ways all of those years ago.

Another monstrous snakeskin lay at the far end of the Chamber, its jewel-colored shape bulky and battered: the Basilisk’s corpse.

In front of it, a figure in dark robes lay on the ground, a bright light flaring near the end of its outstretched hand.

“Harry! Oh, Merlin,” I gasped, falling to my knees beside his motionless form. He held a wand in either hand; his holly wand dangled from the limp fingers of his left, while his right seemed to thrust the Elder Wand into the heart of a blindingly bright rip in space. “Harry! Don’t be… Oh, please don’t be…!”

“He is still alive, Miss Weasley,” said a low, sneering voice that I had never thought to hear again. I blinked up in surprise. At the edge of the circle of blazing light cast by the Elder Wand stood the shockingly solid, shockingly young figure of Severus Snape. “But only just.”

Chapter 3

“All right, you son of a bitch,” I snarled, my wand pointed straight at where Snape had supposedly once had a heart, “tell me where the bloody Horcrux is, and I won’t shove it up your arse before I destroy it with one of that Basilisk’s fangs.”

The late headbastard’s eyebrows arched, but before he could answer there was a laugh behind me that sent me spinning. “Bloody hell, Ginny! He’s already dead—what’re you going to do, kill him again?” Fred stood there, big as life, smirking like the bugger he always was.

“Can’t blame a girl for trying though, can you, Forge?” Tonks leaned her elbow up on his shoulder; the last time I’d seen her, she’d been beautifully enormous, but now she looked the way she had the summer I’d met her: lean, grinning, and with hair that clashed painfully with Fred’s dragonhide coat. “Wotcher, Gin.”

“Well,” said Colin, who was standing at Fred’s other elbow, “if anyone could manage it, it would be Ginny.” He flashed a bright smile that hit me like a kick in the stomach.

“Believe me,” groaned Snape behind me, “she did her best to kill me all of last year. You made my already thoroughly unpleasant life an utter hell.”

“What...?” I spluttered, straining to pull together a coherent thought. Grabbing the hem of Harry’s robes, I turned back to Fred. “What are you doing here?”

Fred gave his Fred shrug—the one that always let me know he wasn’t George. “Oh, Harry-arse there wanted a palaver with us.”

“And with Professor Moody too,” added Colin.

Tonks snorted, “Yeah. But Mad-Eye wouldn’t stay if that prat there—” She flicked her chin at Snape. “—was here. So he scarpered off.”

“H... Harry? Summoned you?”

“Yes, Miss Weasley,” said Snape, with his usual, aggrieved air of having to explain the obvious to someone really dim—as if anyone could have swallowed what was going on there better than I was doing. “Rather than simply complete the task that he’d set for himself, the Boy Who Couldn’t Manage to Die Properly decided in a typical fit of Potter sentiment that he had to speak to each of us—or rather, all of us. It was bad enough to have my afterlife disturbed; but to be pulled back into this vale of dreariness in the company these... Gryffindors.”

“Oi!” barked Tonks, waving one hand. “Hufflepuff, thank you very much!”

“Hat wanted to put me in Ravenclaw,” Fred said to Colin. “Didn’t seem like enough of a challenge, though.” They both nodded solemnly.

“What...?” I could feel what little grip I still had rapidly slipping. I looked down at Harry, the Elder Wand in his hand jammed into that blinding light. Tucked between his palm and the wand’s handle was a small, black stone.

I could just see the silvery not-there-ness of that ever-so-useful Invisibility Cloak, shoved with the Marauder’s Map into his bag. And the wand. And...

I said some words my mother wouldn’t have stood for, even under extreme circumstances. Looking down at my fiancé’s slack face, I gasped, “He’s the Master of Death.”

“Fairytale nonsense,” spat Snape.

“Well, Professor,” pointed out Colin cheerfully, “he did call all of us back from the Other Side. You have to admit, that is pretty impressive.”

I’d never heard a sniff as dismissive as the one Snape answered with.

“Yeah, Severus, my old lad?” said Fred. “Got somewhere you’d rather be?”

“Anywhere,” muttered Snape, but not before Tonks had whispered loudly, “Lily still won’t talk to him.”

“Serves you right,” I growled at the late headmaster’s shade. “Between the way you treated her and the way you treated her son, I shouldn’t think you’d see her good side any time this century. And yeah, Harry and I don’t have secrets.” Which wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. “I know you helped him. Didn’t stop you from making his life hell.”

It was a kind of a nostalgic treat to see Snape reduced to scowling.

I touched my fingers to Harry’s throat. He was breathing, and his heart was beating. That was something, anyway. I looked back up at the solitary figure on the edge of the bright, magical light emanating from the tip of Harry’s wand. “You said he hadn’t finished what he was here to do. What? What’s happened to him?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because if you do, that century might not last so long, but if you don’t, I’m going to see just how much damage I can actually do to a conjured spirit.” I had my wand once again pointed at the middle of his chest.

“Hmm. A very Gryffindor approach.” Snape didn’t look particularly worried, but his eyes never left my wand. “I once thought you capable of more subtlety.”

“Believe me,” barked Fred from behind me, “she can be plenty subtle. Right up to the point where she hits you between the eyes like a Bludger.”

Tonks snorted. Colin said, “Harry was casting a Fidelius Charm.”

“A…?”

Bloody hell, I thought. Suddenly it all made sense: the evasiveness, the exhaustion: this was something he’d had to do alone: to hide the Elder Wand. To hide the Deathly Hallows. In the one place that just about no one could ever get into. Bloody hell.

“So much,” said Snape, “for not having any secrets.”

“Yeah,” I muttered, “but this is one I understand. I don’t like it, but I sure as hell understand it.” I looked down at Harry. Here we should have been up in our bedroom, playing with rope, and poor Harry was down here trying to save the world again. “What happened?”

“Your boyfriend there rushed in as always where he had no business treading. The Fidelius Charm is a notoriously difficult spell.”

I was going to bark at the bastard, but Tonks beat me to it. “Come on, Severus. He’d done a great job on it. You said so yourself, before—”

Snape crossed his arms tightly. “Before he bumbled into the most elementary error that can be made with the Fidelius Charm. If he hadn’t thought that the laws of magic didn’t apply to such a Chosen One as he, he would have realized that there was a reason that the caster of the charm can never be the Secret Keeper.”

“What?”

Now Snape smiled—that smug, condescending smirk that he’d been torturing Weasleys with for at least the previous decade and a half. “It is one of the basic prohibitions involved in casting a Fidelius. As Potter ought to have known if he had done the research required actually to cast the spell.”

I ran my fingertips along Harry's chin. “I bet he was trying to make sure that if someone killed him to become the wand’s master, the secret died with him.”

“Nonetheless,” sniffed Snape, “a typically arrogant, typically sloppy mistake.”

I started to reach for the Elder Wand, to pull it out of that blinding, dimensionless point of brilliance. Why? I can’t tell you. Maybe I thought if I dispelled that light—

“Don’t.” Snape and Fred said it together. I stopped. Fred continued, unusually serious: “He created a paradox; when he started to cast the last bits of the Charm to place the Chamber under the Fidelius, it started to rip itself out of the real world. Harry was only able to stop it by jamming the wand in there.”

Colin chuckled. “Like the Dutch boy sticking his finger in the dyke.”

I had long ago got used to him and Dean and Hermione—and Harry—saying things that made absolutely no sense unless you’d been told some Muggle story as a kid.

Tonks peered at my brother. “How d’you know so much about the bloody Fidelius? It’s beyond the level of most of the Aurors I ever knew. Remus understood the theory, but he never felt he could manage the actual spell, more’s the pity.”

When Fred shrugged, I answered for him. “Fred was always good at charms. So… he’s holding the Chamber in the real world?”

Fred shrugged again, but nodded.

“And is that why he’s… passed out?”

“Yeah,” said Tonks. “He was able to get the Patronus off; he knew you were the only one with a chance of getting down here. But then he fainted.”

“Be that as it may,” said Snape, “unless he can awake, he cannot complete the spell. And if he does not wake soon, the effort of holding the fissure together will claim him. A ridiculous waste of his own life. As I said: sloppy and arrogant.”

I looked down at Harry; he was pale and clammy, and it felt as if each heartbeat was fainter than the last. Bloody hell, Harry, I found myself thinking, can’t you go even one year without almost dying? Of course, in that moment, I wasn’t at all certain that there was any almost in the offing.

I shivered, and it was a moment before I realized that it wasn’t because of the cool air or the prospect of Harry dying—again. The deformed ghost-child was standing just inside of the entrance to the Chamber, snarling at us like a rabid dog.

“Shut up, Tom,” said Fred.

I blinked. “Tom?”

“Yeah,” said Tonks. “he doesn’t like us invading his lurk.”

Tom. I remembered the story that Harry had told me of his conversation with Dumbledore in the ghostly railway station. The gibbering thing… “Stay,” I hissed. “We will go.”

The thing slinked into the shadows.

“Ginny could finish it,” Fred murmured, his voice still low and serious as I had so rarely heard it in life. “She could be the Secret Keeper.”

I waited for a sneer or a comment from Snape, but none came. When I looked up at him, he was standing, a finger to his lips, considering. “She could detach the fool boy’s hand from the wand, leaving it in place. Take him outside. Complete the spell. Yes. That might work.”

“Once the stone was out of his hand, we’d have to go,” pointed out Tonks.

“At last,” said Snape with a sigh, “a silver lining.”

“What’s the spell?” I asked as I once again began to reach toward Harry’s wand hand.

“Simple,” Fred said. “The wand movement’s just a Caracker loop, just like—”

“—the Shield Charm,” Tonks, Colin and I said together. It had been one of the first things that Harry had taught the DA.

“And the incantation,” added Snape, “is Fidelias occultis. You must concentrate—and this is essential—on hiding the Chamber of Secrets. Do not forget this.’”

“Right,” I said. “Got it.” I wrapped my fingers around Harry’s.

“Good luck, Ginny,” said Colin, clearly saying goodbye.

“Give Teddy a hug for me,” said Tonks, her voice warm and sad.

In spite of the urgency of the moment, I felt myself start to tear up. “S-so sorry, Tonks.”

“Don’t be. I’ve seen you and Harry and my mum with him. He’s a lucky boy to have you lot.”

I just nodded and started to pry Harry’s hand away from the wand and the stone. Snape was standing there, a nostril raised in eloquent disgust. “Professor,” I said, because I knew I needed to, “you were a right bastard and a terrible teacher. But I know you weren’t as hard on us as you might have been last year, and I know you helped Harry. So thank you for that.”

“Just promise me,” he said, turning away and beginning to disappear as Harry’s grip loosened, “that you won’t name any children after me.”

“Professor, I swear that no child of mine shall ever, ever have the given name Severus.”

He gave a grunt in acknowledgment, and then he was gone.

I gently twisted Harry’s hand and it released the wand, which remained hanging in mid-air from the rift.

The Resurrection Stone slipped from his palm; I caught it before it hit the ground.

“Bye, Ginny,” said Tonks and Colin. Like Snape, they turned and faded like shadows in a dream.

Fred stood there still, smiling again. “You didn’t say anything about middle names, now did you?”

“Funny,” I said, smiling as I stood and cast a quick Mobilicorpus on Harry, “it must have slipped my mind.”

“That’s my sister,” he chuckled, and it’s funny: the chuckle was more devastating than anything else he could have done. “Listen, Ginny: tell George to have a good time, okay?”

“Okay.” I checked Harry’s pulse at his throat again; it was already stronger.

“And tell the Boy Who Bonked here not to have too good a time, thank you very much.”

“Nope.” I looked over at the wand, suspended six inches in the air in a seam of starburst. “I won’t be telling him any such thing. Prat.”

“Well, all I can say is I don’t want little Albus Severus showing up any time soon, you know?”

“Albus Severus?” I looked at him again, and I couldn’t help it: we both started to laugh. “Merlin! They’d both be… I mean, imagine their faces!”

We both howled some more.

Then the light at the tip of the wand flared and the floor beneath me shook.

“Go, Gin,” said Fred.

“We miss you.”

“I’m always right here.” He smiled.

I nodded and put down the Stone. He faded away as if he’d never been there at all.

As I Levitated Harry out the door, the noxious presence was suddenly nearby again. As soon as we were back in the tunnel, Tom Riddle’s ghost—or I guess, what was left of Tom Riddle’s ghost—was in the door, doing its best to hiss menacingly at us. It was pathetic. If ever anyone was too scared to go on to the Other Side, it was you, I thought, but I simply hissed the order, “Stay!” and then “Close!”

The shade of what had once been the greatest Dark Lord in centuries looked relieved as the doors swung shut between us. The Chamber of Secrets was sealed.

I lowered Harry to the floor, thinking through the steps of the spell that I needed to perform.

The walls rumbled again; sparks of that bright netherlight where flaring from the edges of the doors.

I stood, my wand raised, and visualized Harry’s Invisibility Cloak covering the whole of the Chamber—of the whole structure disappearing entirely. When the image was clear in my mind, I performed the wand movement that I’d learned from Harry a lifetime before, and spoke: “Fidelias occultis.”

I looked up, expecting the doors to have disappeared. But of course, they were still there—they would be, since I was the Secret Keeper. Even so, the sparks of light and rumbling had stopped.

I turned my wand on Harry. “Renervate.”

He groaned once, and then his eyes flew open. “Ginny!” He sat up and clutched his head. “Bloody hell. Must have… Must have… hit my head.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” I said, kneeling down to him.

“Thank god you came,” he said, his hand cupping my cheek. “I was trying to hide…” He frowned and then started to look around. “The Elder Wand. The Resurrection Stone. What happened to them?”

To test the spell, and out of sheer curiosity, I pointed at the carved doors of the Chamber. “They’re right over there.”

“There?” He scowled in the direction of the doors, and then blinked up at me again. “That’s… There’s nothing but rock there, Ginny.”

It worked. “Cave-in. That’s how you hit your head. I got you out just in time.” Which was, in a way, close enough to the truth.

“Wow.” He stared at where I could plainly see the intricate stonework serpents guarding the Chamber that would finally be truly Secret. “Thank you, Ginny. I… I could have died.”

“No, you couldn’t have,” I said. “Because then I would have to kill you.”

He grinned at me, and pulled me into a kiss.

Just at the point where the snogging was starting to get interesting, he stopped. “We should get out of here. In case of another cave-in.”

“I suppose.”

“Besides,” he said, pulling me to my feet, “I seem to remember some sort of promise about tying up…?”

“Ah,” I said, “well, I had to use the rope to get down here, so I suppose we do need to head back up after all if I’m going to administer your punishment for being a naughty boy.”

“Naughty? Me?” The poor boy actually had the decency to look ashamed.

“You’ve been keeping things from me, Harry. For that, you get punished. Mind, I don’t think you’ll mind this punishment too much.”

“I bet not.” He grinned sheepishly. Adorably. “I… I’m sorry, Ginny. I needed to hide the Wand and the Stone.”

I nodded, but there couldn’t keep the annoyance out of my voice as I said, “But I’m leaving on Friday. And the Harpies camp is going to be shut up as tight as…” As the Chamber of Secrets. “We aren’t going to be able to see each other for months. Didn’t that matter to you at all?”

“Ah,” he said, once again looking like a boy who’s been caught sneaking sweets. “See, I got my first assignment. It starts Monday.”

“So you thought, since we’d both be busy, it didn’t matter if we didn’t spend these last few weeks together?” In spite of my relief that he was okay—in spite of everything—I felt my anger rising.

“See…” He stopped. “Erm… See, I was going to have kind of a surprise for you.”

Oh. “Well, that’s very nice, Harry. But I was getting worried. Thought you might be off snogging Romilda. Or Myrtle.”

“No one but you,” he said, taking both of my hands in his.

My fury melted away, but I wasn’t willing to give up entirely. “Fine. What about this surprise, then?”

“Well, see… My first assignment?”

“Yeah?”

“Susan and I… We’re the security detail for the Harpies’ training camp.” He peered at me, fidgeting.

“You mean… You’re going to be making sure no one else gets in?”

“Yup.” Now he was starting to smile again.

I was too. “And you’re going to be stationed in Holyhead?”

“Yup. Twenty-four, seven. Housed in the training facility.” He bounced his eyebrows. “I’m going to be the only wizard in the whole compound.”

“And how many witches will be under your special protection, Potter?”

Now he was grinning. “Just one. She’s more than enough for me.”

“Glad to hear it!”

We snogged again for a bit. But honestly, tunnels aren’t my favorite places when it comes to romance. Well, when it comes to anything. "Come on," I said. "Let's go."

Soon enough we were back at the bottom of Madam Coraline’s satin rope. “Very nice,” said Harry.

“Thank you. I hope you’ll enjoy it even more later.”

“I’m sure I will.” He squeezed my hand. “I’m sorry, Ginny. No more secrets.”

I nodded, looking back down the tunnel. “No more secrets.”

And then we climbed.

~FIN~

Fortnight

A/N: This was written after the rest of the series, so it's not an "official" F Words story, but it's in the same ficverse. It takes place, as will become clear, about a decade after "Folly" and a couple of decades before "Fortune."

Once Ginny Levitated the last of the nappies onto the line, she listened reflexively.

No sound from the cot. No sound from either of the boys’ rooms.

No pop at the front door. No creaking steps.

No Harry.

Ah, well. He’s coming all of the way from Mumbai. And Hermione is sure to have made him write everything up before letting him come home.

Though Hermione would certainly have headed home with little Hugo long ago.

Ah, well.

It was funny. Not so very long ago, Ginny would have been desperate for him to return for very different reasons. She’d have greeted him in the front hall wearing nothing but a smile. They probably wouldn’t have bothered to make it upstairs; they’d have shagged right there on the carpet. On the stairs. On each landing. Over and over.

Now…

Now, Ginny just needed him here. The last thing in the world she wanted was for him to see her body, which hardly felt like hers. The next to last thing was him—or anyone—touching her. She’d had Lily pulling and chewing on her all day, and one or both of the boys tugging at her legs.

All day, every day, for the last two weeks.

When Hermione had asked Harry to go, two months ago, his being gone a fortnight hadn’t seemed undoable. After all, Ginny’s mum had offered to help, and Audrey had said she’d be happy to take the boys for at least four or five afternoons. There’d been no way of knowing that two days after Harry left, Audrey—Muggleborn that she was—would come down with Dragon Pox, and certainly no way of knowing that Audrey would not only be laid up at St. Mungo’s, but that Mum would end up up to her ears in grandchildren, since once she’d agreed to take little Molly, Bill’s and George’s kids had to come too, hoping to be exposed.

James and Albus had already been exposed, oh, yes, and Lily was too young, and so all of Ginny’s relief was wiped out in one fell swoop. And Harry, of course, had offered to come home, but really? Ginny hadn’t wanted him to. She could remember very well how exhausting international Portkeys were, and could hear how the idea of turning around and leaving the conference overwhelmed him. And of course, he was supposed to be presenting the keynote address.

Besides. Ginny’s mum had hardly had any help other than occasional visits from Mary Lovegood, and she had had seven. Dealing with two little boys and a baby hardly seemed a challenge in comparison.

Bloody hell, Ginny groaned, flicking her wand to light the fire under the kettle. How did my mum survive? How did we survive? It’s a wonder she didn’t kill off the lot of us.

Harry…

Harry really was good with the kids—amazing, given that the Dursleys certainly hadn’t taught him a bloody thing about parenting. And with the boys, they’d split most of the duty pretty evenly—but that was before Harry was made head of the Aurors, before Ginny retired, before Kreacher took to his nest—and before Rose and Hugo and little Molly and the rest had made Molly Weasley’s Drop-in Kidlet Minding Service much less available. And before Lily.

And so, for the last six months, Harry had been going off to work and Ginny had been staying home. The only reminder of her former life was an occasional bit of fan mail (Ginny always seemed to have a huge fan-base of eleven-year-old girls and fifteen-year-old boys; somehow, they never got any older) and the rapidly diminishing monthly royalty statement from the sales of pics and gear with her name or image on them.

Would any of her fans want a picture of her as she looked now? Passing out in the kitchen, wild-haired and grumpy in a bathrobe that had once been Charlie’s? Not bloody likely.

The water began to boil. After a moment of staring at it dejectedly, Ginny started, leapt up and plucked the kettle from the hob. Stupid. Don’t let it wake the baby.

Never wake the baby: rule one.

But Lily wasn’t moving.

Breathing. But not moving.

Ginny filled the pot and watched the steam swirl up like memories from the spout as she sat in the battered old wingback where she’d breastfed all three children. Silence. Still silence.

She had wanted to have sex the night before he left. He had certainly wanted to—had been very vocal, for Harry. They’d made a date. And then her monthlies had come. And he’d been very understanding. But when he’d left the next morning, he hadn’t been able to keep from looking disappointed.

A long bath. Maybe they could take a long bath. Together. Touch and be touched… But, a long bath…

Letting the tea steep, she let her head fall back and closed her eyes and let cool, dark—

: :

A hand touched Ginny’s cheek, pulling her out of the cool, dark… “Go ‘sleep,” she murmured.

“I want to,” said Harry. “More than anything. But if I let you sleep here, you’ll have a terrible neck ache in the morning.”

Ginny blinked open her eyes. Harry had stepped over to the cot and picked up Lily’s limp form; the baby’s shock of auburn locks seemed to blaze on his shoulder. Ginny blinked again. “You’re home.”

“Yup.”

“Welcome home.” She stood up to give him a kiss, but he was already levitating his bag out the door.

“Thanks,” he said. “Come on, let’s all get up to bed.”

A long bath…

Rubbing the sleep from her eyes and the fog from her head, Ginny followed him up the stairs. Somewhere around the time that they reached their landing and deposited Lily in the nursery, Ginny finally felt something like awake. Together, she and Harry walked quietly across the hallway to the bedroom they shared. Without even thinking about it, Ginny cast the Silencing and Monitor Charms they always used on those nights when they wanted a little adult time together. She turned back to Harry, about to suggest that they adjourn to the bathroom.

He had already begun to unpack.

“Stop,” muttered Ginny. “Come here.” She opened her arms and he stepped into them, kissed her lightly, and then sighed, leaning his head against her shoulder. What? “So. How was the conference?”

“Great,” said Harry, unmoving.

“Uh-huh. Travel tough? International Portkeys are exhausting.”

“Yeah. Not too bad.”

“Uh-huh.” Not too bad, my arse. “And they liked your speech, your owl said?”

“Yeah. At least, no one seemed to fall asleep.”

“Uh-huh.” She leaned back and looked at him. He seemed to be gazing at their carpet, which had been here since the Blacks, and which Harry had never noticed before. “Harry?”

“Yeah?” Still he didn’t meet her eyes.

“Who the hell is she?”

He blinked and gaped, looked down and spluttered. “I… It isn’t… There…”

Ginny had watched herself get angry many times over the years—she knew that her temper was a problem; she had worked hard to get it under control. Now, however, she gloried in feeling the flame burst through her. She pushed him with both hands so that he tripped over his bag and had to sit awkwardly to keep from falling. “Who the bloody hell is she?!”

He opened and closed his mouth, but no sound came out.

Ginny threw her arms around herself, trying to keep herself from howling, from kicking him.

Finally, looking down again, he managed a croak. “I didn’t. Nothing happened.”

“Oh? Really? Who. Is. She?”

He curled into himself, disappearing into his black robes so that only his nose and eyes were visible. “Ginny, I swear…”

She tried to hold in a scream—thought she had, but he flinched as if she hadn’t, so she couldn’t tell.

“I was going to tell you, I promise, I just… You see too much for your own damned good.”

“Could you actually say something here? Because whatever the bloody hell it was that you swear you were going to tell me can’t possibly be any worse than what I’m imagining just now but you’re taking so BLOODY long to tell me that what I’m imagining is getting pretty BLOODY bad. Now, what the hell has got you acting like one of the bloody boys who’s been caught sneaking bloody biscuits—and if you do anything now other than just tell me about it, Harry, I swear I’ll bloody kill you and then call bloody Hermione and tell her you splinched yourself to death on the way home. Now tell me what the hell this is all about?”

“I didn’t…” he began, but something in Ginny’s expression must have terrified him because he looked down again. “In all the years we’ve been together,” he whispered, “I’ve never touched another woman. I’ve never kissed, or slept with—”

“Harry,” growled Ginny.

“This last fortnight, all I could think about was you, and it’s awful, but all I could think about was making love to you — at dinners, or in meetings at the Indian ministry. Surrounded by all these people from around the world, and all I could think of was you, that last night…”

That last night. Him standing there, pouting like she’d taken away his favourite toy.

Harry sighed. “The night I gave the speech, there I was, spouting all of Hermione’s rubbish about ethics and Legilimency and all I could think about was you...”

“If you think you’re making this better by telling me you were thinking of me while you shagged some—”

“I didn’t shag... anyone.”

“Harry.” Ginny stood there, focusing on breathing, the sharp sting of her nails digging into her biceps almost a relief. “Spill it. Now.”

He shifted, sitting there on the ground, pulling his legs off his bag and into his chest. “Our... My hosts.”

Ginny blinked. “Padma and Parvati’s aunt and uncle?”

“Yes.” He stared down at his knees. “But... Mr. Kamananda, he’s much older, over a hundred, and he left in January. He’s been on retreat, up in the mountains. Seeking... something or other.”

“Yeah?” Ginny wasn’t sure where the hell he was headed with this, but if he didn’t get there soon, she’d slice his bloody bollocks off.

He nodded, as if he’d said something sensible. “Mrs. Kamananda...” He looked up at her, green eyes dark and sad. “Mrs. Kamananda.”

“Mrs...?” She gawked at him. “Are you trying to say...? You were having it on with the Patils’s aged bloody aunt?”

“Told you,” he said through gritted teeth, “wasn’t having it on—!”

“You got a thing for old women, Harry?” She gawked down at her husband, who was staring obstinately away from her. “An old crush on McGonagall? What in Merlin’s name—?”

“She’s thirty-two. Her mum was the Patils’s granddad’s third wife.”

Ginny sank to her knees. Now the image in her head was of a woman with Padma and Parvati’s dark beauty—slim and sensual, exotic... Everything that Ginny emphatically was not. “Oh.”

Now Harry looked up, and he had the bloody brass to be crying. “She... reminded me of you.”

“Of me?”

“I...” His eyes dropped back to the floor. “Yeah. Of you. Not looks or anything. She’s... Um. Rounder. But...” He grimaced, and a tear leaked out along the bottom rim of his glasses. “She’s the head of India’s Aurors. And we’d got to know each other pretty well, planning for this event. I’d always thought she was much older too, so I’d got really comfortable with her, telling her all about you and the kids, and—and...” He shook his head and looked up.

Ginny could only barely manage simply to stare back.

He shook his head again. “She’d insisted I stay at their house—she didn’t know her husband would be gone. And then, when he left, she owled and said that I’d still be welcome, but that she’d be happy to put me up at a local hotel, which seemed, I don’t know, silly, so...”

Ginny had heard some of this during the weeks leading up to the fortnight; she’d been so focused on trying to make sure that all of her ducks were in a row—how pathetic—that she’d barely listened. If she’d thought about her at all, she’d visualized Harry’s hostess as a slightly darker version of her own mother. Maybe a bit older. Certainly not... Rounder?

“So I stayed with her. And she was very... welcoming, very cordial, when I showed up. She’s never had any kids of her own, so the first day I was there, all she wanted to hear about was you and the babies. When Audrey got sick, she immediately suggested I go back, and I would have, but you said I shouldn’t, and...”

“Yeah.”

He shrugged. “The conference... It was bloody boring. All of those MLE types from around the world, most of them boring as hell, most of them desk beaters, never actually using their wands for anything other than filing. Shakti, though—Mrs. Kamananda—she... She’s like me, come up from the ranks, a Hit Wizard before she became an Auror, and every night, we’d head home—back to her house—and talk about what we’d heard, and laugh about all of the stuffed shirts and... She made me laugh, Gin. No one but you and George and maybe Ron has made laugh like that in...”

Laughter. Ginny had been too bloody tired for any laughter lately. Certainly not in the past fortnight.

“And... I don’t know. I found myself thinking, Here, she looks nothing like Ginny—different shape, different colouring, different, well, everything—but here’s someone I could have...”

“Could have what?” Ginny willed the edge out of her voice, but it wanted to be there. “Could have snogged in front of all of the Gryffindors? Could have got a leg over on? Could have shagged in every room of the house?”

He answered slowly, quietly, “Could have had a life with. Could have loved. Yeah.” Again he looked up, but now there was a familiar kind of determined fire in his eyes. “Last night, when I’d finished my speech, and was feeling so bloody relieved, and people seemed to have liked it, what I found myself most caring about was... she liked it. We went home and I sat there while she talked on about how hard it is to walk the line between respecting people’s innate rights—to their own minds, to their own thoughts—and trying to protect the rights of the people you know these Dark bloody bastards are trying to hurt, and it was like... Like you, when you’re excited or hacked off. It was... beautiful, and I took her hand, and I... she looked up at me, her face all dark, and... I came this close, Ginny. And I know, she had to have been—she’d told me, when I asked... It’s been hard for her, having a husband so much older, and now he’s not even there, and I know she had to have been thinking about it, just like I was. Fuck. I’m so bloody sorry.” He reached out and grabbed Ginny’s hand.

She shivered. But she didn’t pull away. “And?”

“And?”

“What happened?”

“What—?” He blinked at her, more tears splattering the insides of his glasses. “That’s it. We looked at each other. And then she started to talk about how important it is for an Auror to know himself. Herself. And to know where the lines are. And always to be careful never to cross them. She was talking about Legilimency. And the Unforgivables, and all that. But she wasn’t. We both knew she wasn’t.”

“Okay.”

“And that was it. We went to bed. To our separate rooms. Not that I slept. Today, we went to the last few panels—we spoke on one of them together—and then she brought me to the Portkey Terminal in Mumbai, and....” He held up his free hand as if to say, Here I am.

Ginny looked at him. At the guilt warping his face. And she began to laugh. For the first time in weeks.

Harry goggled at her. “What...? What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” she snorted. “Merlin, Harry. You... All of this because you thought about another woman?”

He ducked down his head, looking exactly like three-year-old James when he’d been caught getting into the sweets. “Isn’t that enough?”

Ginny’s laugh deepened to a kind of sob. “Oh, yeah, I guess.” She held out her arms to him. “C’mere, you bloody idiot.”

He slid across the floor into her embrace, his legs sliding beneath hers. He moved to kiss her, but no—not yet.

“Harry,” Ginny said, “do you honestly think that I never thought about anyone else when I was touring with the Harpies? Do you honestly think that there was never a time when we’d fought, or when I’d been on the road for a bloody month, or when you were on some bloody assignment and we hadn’t seen each other in what felt like forever, and some pair of twinkling eyes wouldn’t make me think about what it would be like? And yeah, I know, it’s not just snogging or sex, yeah, I get it. But, Harry—I never did anything about any of those times. Any more than you. And believe me, a lot of the chances I had, they’d have been a lot less careful about toeing the line than Mrs. Kam-bloody-ananda. I could have had a different man—or woman—in my bed every night if I’d wanted to, and I’d have had to be a bloody statue not to think about it. But I had you. And I knew none of them could ever be that.” Now she kissed him, and he sobbed. “And I also knew that you’d never mess about on me. And I was right, wasn’t I?”

“Yeah.” He pulled himself even tighter to her, weeping into her neck. “Oh, yeah.”

“Fidelity... isn’t about feelings, or about thoughts, love. It’s about what you do with them.” She kissed him again, and he kissed her back, and to her astonishment, she found that they were both really, really right there—kids asleep, imagined lovers more or less forgot—and she began to unbutton his robes. “There’s a reason Aurors aren’t supposed to use Legilimency, after all,” she murmured into his lips. “Sorry I lost it. Sorry I pushed you, even though you deserved it, you git.”

He laughed, hands finding their way beneath her second-hand bathrobe, and Ginny decided that, after she’d killed the Kamananda woman, perhaps she’d have to thank her.

Yes, perhaps she’d have to do that.

Another time.

Not. Just. Then.

Two Unfinished F Words-verse Fics

You know how sometimes you have a GREAT idea for a fic? You're reading something, or talking to a friend, or someone leaves a comment on one of your fics, and you think Aha! That would be so COOL! And you write a few notes--or maybe a few pages--and then something else intervenes: another fic, a meme, real life....

And the Aha! fic gets shelved. And when you come back to it, it still seems like a great idea. But somehow, the impetus to write it is just gone.

Here are two such Ahas that I've now given up as dead, and so share with you, incomplete (decomposed?) as they are as Tales from the Crypt. The first was a fic that I thought of a couple of years back; the plot-bunny even gets a mention in the next-to-last F Words fic, Fortune:

Fight

Coming in from the east, most of the women wore full chadurs, which gave them a bit of mystery, maybe, but mostly struck Dudley as scary—he’d had a woman walk up to his post, her whole veiled body covered in C4.

The explosives hadn’t gone off, which had left the woman spluttering in Farsi, of which Dudley hadn’t only managed to learn a dozen or so useful phrases along the lines of May I see your papers? Where are you traveling to? And of course, Take one more step and my friends and I will happily send you packing to Allah. None of which were useful in that situation.

This bird was barefaced, and Dudley thanked his stars that it was so, because she was bloody gorgeous. He was about to ask her for her papers—Arabic first, then Farsi—and take a really good look at where she lived (was she married?) when the car bomb went off across the square.

Time slowed for Dudley as it always did when he came under attack. He heard bits of the car whizzing by, heard a high-pitched shriek that had to be someone getting hit. As he was about to scan the square for threats with his gun, he saw the dark-skinned beauty pull a long, slender stick from her bag, and the muzzle of his rifle came to rest against her wrist. “Drop the wand or I’ll blow your hand off.”

Threats always seemed to translate.

The woman didn’t blink. “I’m British,” she hissed. “Born in Derby.”

He held her stare. “Drop the wand.”

“I’m… I work for the Ministry. I can help.” When Dudley didn’t back off, she sighed, “Look, Sergeant… Dursley?”

Still, Dudley didn’t move.

“Harry’s cousin.” She nodded. “He’s talked about you.”

Surprised but still a soldier, Dudley withdrew his gun from her wrist, but kept it aimed at her heart. “You… you an Auror?”

“No, I’m in a different department, but my sister and I were in the DA.” When Dudley didn’t react, she continued. “The… resistance group Harry led at Hogwarts. Your family lived in Little Whinging, and then, after your house got blown up by Death Eaters, you moved out to Harry’s farm near Guernsey.”

Dudley scowled. He wanted to believe her, wanted to secure the square, but the threat of a wand was one he’d never learned to ignore. “You could still be on the other side.”

“Please,” she said, “believe me—we’re on the same side, here. There’s a woman and a child behind you that were hit; if you let me, I can save them.”

For a second Dudley held her pleading glare, then backed off and gestured with his rifle for her to proceed.

:  :

After she had in fact healed the woman and the little boy—healed them and then done something with her wand that made them both go slack-faced, as if they’d totally forgot everything, which Dudley almost envied them for—and Dudley and the six men under him had secured the square (four dead, eight wounded, no sign of hostiles), Dudley escorted the witch back to her car. “Thanks,” he said.

“No problem,” she sighed, her enormous eyes still on truck that was taking the dead away to the Basra morgue. “Listen. Dudley, is that right?”

“Yeah.”

She nodded, though not at his name, Dudley thought. “I could use… a favor.”

He cocked his head. He wasn’t sure that any favor anyone with a wand would need to ask him would be anything good, but he felt he owed her at least a listen.

Glancing around, she cast a spell that Dudley had heard Harry use once—Muffliato—and then said, “I need to send something back to the Ministry. It’s urgent.”

“Can’t you send an owl or something?”

She laughed grimly. “Owls have a way of getting intercepted. I need this to get through quickly and safely, and no one is going to think to look for a magical parcel in the British Army post.”

“Is this thing… dangerous?”

“No, but if I can get it back to Percy—”

“Percy… Weasley? Ginger bloke with glasses?”

“Yes!” She laid one elegant, mocha hand on his wrist. “He’s my boss. I need to get this… object back to him. If I can, I think we can avoid a war.”

“Bit late for that,” Dudley grumbled.

She nodded, a bit sadly. “True. I meant a war between Persia and Assyria.”

“Persia…?” Dudley shook his head. “You mean Iran?”

She laughed, brilliant white teeth showing. “Not exactly. Wizarding boundaries… don’t always follow Muggle ones.”

“Oh.” He looked at her. In all honesty, he was having a hard time listening to her, and he didn’t think it was the spell she’d cast. “Er, so, you got this thing on you?”

“No,” she said, biting her lip. “It’s back at my hotel.” Peering up at him, she asked, “When do you get off duty?”

Without smiling, he muttered, “June.”

She did break a smile. “No, I meant is there I time when I can meet you later today?”

[...]

So, the idea here? If you aren't big on Hindu religion, Parvati is a goddess—the shakti or female aspect of Shiva, the god of death, yoga and truth.

So. Here's the way the story played out in my head: Parvati is trying to get a sacred McGuffin (a vajra) away from Persian extremists who are trying to spark a war. She asks Dudley to her hotel in the magical district of Basra so that he can ship the item back to the UK through British Army post, which the extremists won't be checking. The two start to talk, start to flirt, and (surprise!) fall into bed.

Afterward, Parvati starts to laugh and call Dudley Shiva. Then (surprise!) wizards break in, coming after the vajra, which is hidden. Knowing Dudley's a Muggle, they focus on Parvati, blinding her. Of course, Dudley, being both an army commando and the cousin of a wizard, isn't quite as harmless as the wizards think. He kills them with his hands—but not before one of them removes one of his legs with a desperate Cutting Curse...

Which leaves Dudley and Parvati both pensioned off and living on Harry's Fee Sark farm.

This next bit was supposed to be a sequel to another quasi-F Words fic, Fortnight, in which Harry returns from a conference wracked with guilt for having considered considering thinking about a woman other than his wife.

Face to Face

Ginny had just put Lily down for her afternoon nap—one the newly walking toddler had taken very unwillingly—and the laundry was washing itself. With a sigh that almost amounted to pleasure, she sat at the old desk that she and Harry had tucked into the small room across from the nursery and began to write up her interview of the Arrows’ latest star Beater from her notes.

Ballestra Spinks holds her post-practice bottle of water lightly in both hands—lightly, and yet so poised that she seems to be ready to make any stray Bludger that might dare to enter her vicinity regret the choice.

Ginny smiled. When the Prophet had first approached her about writing Quidditch features, she’d thought of taking quill to paper as a school chore—something to get through as quickly as possible. But she found now that she enjoyed painting pictures with words. Luna had always said that every sentence was an act of creation, which had always made Ginny laugh, but now she could feel it—it was the same thrill she used to get when she and her fellow Chasers managed a five-touch exchange leading to a score.

Not quite as much adrenaline behind it, maybe, but still...

There was a tap at the window.

Instantly, Ginny felt panic flow through her—as always. Even though she knew that Mum would have Floo’d if there had been anything wrong with the boys, and the Aurors always sent a courier to bring a spouse to St. Mungo’s—or, she had been told, to the mortuary. Owls could only mean mundane news, but their appearance always made Ginny jump anyway.

Taking a breath, she let the bird in. It dutifully stuck out its leg, while Ginny rummaged through her desk and found a couple of owl treats before taking the letter. The owl swallowed the treats and settled down for a nap.

Addressed to Mrs. Ginny Potter. Odd. Not on Prophet stationary, nor Ministry. The letterhead was from the Lady Altheda Inn in Miss Tick Alley—one of the nicer wizarding-only hotels in London and a favorite for international visitors.

Foreign player looking for an interview? Ginny mused—but all around the world the leagues were in full swing, so that didn’t seem likely.

The handwriting on the address was energetic yet flowing; it looked remarkably, in fact, like Ginny’s own.

Curiosity piqued, Ginny opened the letter, causing the owl to shuffle its feet, ruffle its feathers and give a grumpy hoot.

“Shh,” Ginny whispered. “Don’t wake the baby!” Rule number one: never wake the baby.

Not a baby for much longer.

October 27, 2009

Dear Mrs. Potter,

I hope that you will forgive me for being so forward as to write you without being formally introduced. However, I have heard so much about you from your husband, and I know that he has at least mentioned me, and so I hoped that you would not mind if I dispensed somewhat with formalities.

I had the good fortune of hosting your husband last winter during the IMLE conference in Mumbai. As you may remember, I had the honor and the pleasure of offering him my home. I enjoyed the opportunity to get to know a man as remarkable as Harry Potter. I enjoyed too, as I said, the pleasure of hearing him speak of you, and of your children. While I hope that I will get the opportunity to meet all of you, I would not presume to invite myself into your home.

I would, however, very much like to have the opportunity to meet you personally. As it happens, an investigation has brought me to England for the next few days. I should very much like to get to know the woman whom my friend and colleague described in such glowing terms. There are also some matters that I should very much like to discuss with you face to face.

May I invite to you join me this afternoon for tea? I would understand if you were not available at such short notice, but would be honored were you to find yourself able to join me at my hotel at 4.30.

I cannot presume to sign myself my friend, though I very much hope to earn your friendship. I will then simply sign myself,

Yours,

Shakti P. Kamananda.

Ginny stared down at the letter, stifling the urge to rip it up and set the pieces on fire. She wasn’t sure whether it was the incredibly formal prose, the fact that the letter came from a woman whom her husband had, six months before, said that, under other circumstances, he might have fallen for, or the terrifying matters that the bint wanted to discuss face to face, but Ginny found herself at a rare crisis of nerve. Snub the woman? Why? Go?

What if Harry hadn’t told Ginny the whole truth about what had happened in Mumbai?

No. She trusted Harry—he’d been such a mess at the thought of the thought of betraying her that Ginny couldn’t imagine that he’d actually kept anything back.

Besides... She wanted to get a look at this woman. Size up the competition—after the match was over.

Nodding to herself, crisis of nerve gone, Ginny took a blank piece of parchment and began to reply.

She probably wants a peek at me for the same reason, Ginny thought. Well, let her look.

: :

At half four that afternoon, Ginny tottered up Miss Tick Alley, the short spur that ran off of Diagon Alley near Gringott’s, feeling a lot less sure of herself.

She had dropped Lily off at the Burrow and got herself up in what she thought of, not altogether euphemistically, as her battle gear—her finest business robes, the sapphire broach that had belonged to Harry’s mother, and a pair of ridiculously expensive high-heeled shoes that Demelza had talked Ginny into buying one day last year when she’d found out she was pregnant again and had been feeling sorry for herself. She’d even applied some cosmetic charms, something she’d hardly ever been fussed to do except for a photo shoot, and certainly had never had the energy for since Lily’s birth.

What am I doing here? she thought as she tried to keep from breaking an ankle on the cobblestones. Shakti Kamanda was sure to be coffee skinned, curvy and lithe, like her nieces, the Patils. If her letter was any indication, she was going to be the kind of well-bred, refined witch who’d always made Ginny feel like the absolute bumpkin she was. What am I doing here?

Yet here she was. The bluff, sandstone walls of the Lady Altheda rose before her.

Well, thought Ginny, if worse comes to worse, I can always stab her with one of my heels.

She entered the hotel and was directed to the tea room. At the glass-paned doors, a house elf bowed stiffly to her. “Is madam wanting to be seated?”

“I... Mrs. Kamananda is expecting me, I think.”

“Yes, madam. Follow Boffo please, madam.”

Ginny blinked at the creature and then did follow, barely holding in nervous laughter. Boffo? The poor thing!

She had just managed to take a breath when they reached a table in a quiet corner of the tea room where a black-robed, black-skinned woman sat. Merlin, Ginny thought, you’ve got a darker complexion than Parvati—darker than Dean or Angelina!

The woman stood, eyes wide. She extended her hand and said, her voice low, “You must be Mrs. Potter.”

Ginny took the offered hand; the grip was firm and bore callouses that Ginny knew well from Harry’s hands—the callouses that came from hours of dueling and hand-to-hand combat drills. “Ginny, please. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Kamanda.”

“Thank you. I hope you will call me Shakti.” The woman’s face split into a brilliantly white smile. “I would have known you anywhere.”

They stood there  a bit awkwardly for a moment, before the house elf bowed and promised to return to take their order momentarily.

“Please,” Shakti said, still smiling broadly, “have a seat.”

Once they were both off their feet—Ginny very thankfully so, since her heels were close to killing her—Shakti shook her head and laughed. “He said how beautiful you were, but I’m sorry to say that he barely did you justice.”

“Sorry?”

She shrugged and looked down for a moment. Her face was rounder than her nieces’, but when she looked back up, there was a glint of humor that felt very familiar to Ginny. “I say I’m sorry because... I suppose in my least generous moments I hoped you would be frumpy and plain.” Again she smiled.

Oh, bugger, thought Ginny, I can see why Harry thought I’d like you. Bugger and blast. He’s going to be right, isn’t he? “I could say the same of you.”

Shakti smiled and then preened. “Do you mean to say that you do not find me to be plain and frumpy, Ginny?”

“Hardly, Shakti.” Ginny looked at her erstwhile adversary. Shakti Kamanda looked nothing like the Patil twins; rather, she was what the books that Ginny’s mother loved would have called ample—a chest the strained at the fabric of her robes, curvy hips... Harry had called her rounder, and Ginny could see why. Shakti seemed to stand, if anything, a little shorter than Ginny, though it was hard to tell: when they’d stood together it had seemed so, and Shakti seemed to be wearing heels just as murderous as Ginny’s. “I can’t say that I didn’t hope I would, but no.”

They sat there for a moment, smiling at each other. In spite of finding that she liked the other woman, however, Ginny found that she was still profoundly uncomfortable. She could only hope that the tension in Shakti’s grin meant that she was equally ill at ease. Not that she wished this feeling on her host—this mixture of embarrassment, anger and sheer confusion.

As they sat there, smiling and squirming in silence, however, Ginny decided that if you were going to feel this way, you might as well have company.

Just at the point where the silence was beginning to become truly unbearable, Boffo the elf came up, his nose bobbing just above the table’s edge. “Will the missuses be wanting some tea?”

“Ceylon,” said Shakti, looking relieved.  “Please. And... Would you like some cakes, Ginny? They have a wonderful baker.”

“Oh, well, I suppose—”

“Good,” said Shakti, her smile flashing a bit more naturally. “I hate to say that I’ve got the world’s most awful sweet tooth, I ate a whole basket of sweet buns the first morning that I arrived, and I’ve had to be quite disciplined for the past few days not to order everything they had.”

Ginny  laughed. “Well, I suppose if we’re both working on them, it won’t be too bad.”

The elf bowed, disappearing below the table briefly. “Boffo will bring the full assortment.” And with that he sidled off, leaving the women alone again.

“Yum,” Ginny found herself saying. “Cakes.”

“Yes,” answered Shakti.

“So what brings you to London? Your letter said something about an investigation?”

“Yes,” Shakti said. “It’s one that I’ve been working on from the other end for months, and I wanted to see it wrapped up here.”

“Do you mind my asking—?”

Shakti seemed about to shake her head, but then peered at Ginny. “I suppose it doesn’t matter; we arrested the last of the ring yesterday. And you’re certainly used to hearing about investigations, I’m sure.”

Ginny nodded.

Shakti paused for a moment, pursing her lips; Ginny could see her pupils moving as if she were reading scrolls of case notes. She’d seen Harry do the same thing dozens of times, trying to decide what would be interesting, and what needed to be kept confidential. Black eyes met Ginny’s. “All right. It’s dragons.”

“Dragons?”

Nodding, Shakti began to smooth out a crease in the tablecloth with her forefinger. “There was a ring smuggling them into India.”

Ginny stared, her jaw suddenly slack. “Why on earth...?”

Shakti chuckled again, but this time  it didn’t sound at all happy. “Good question. Good for guarding caves, obviously. And for scaring off some of the larger magical predators. We don’t have any native dragon species, you see, nothing larger than the Naga Raja, which even with seven heads isn’t that much bigger than a tiger, so even a small dragon like a Welsh Green can have a huge impact. And we had to move fast—if they’d started to breed in India, it could have meant the end of dozens of endangered magical species.”

“Wow. Welsh Greens?” Ginny was about to ask whether Shakti had worked with her brother when a more urgent question raised itself. She worked very hard to keep her tone and face as neutral as she could. “And has Harry been working with you on this case?” Would the woman lie? Would Ginny be able to tell if she did? Was there any reason not to trust her at this point?

Shakti shrugged sheepishly, which assured Ginny that some of the same thoughts were playing through Shakti Kamananda’s mind. “As it happens, no. He knows about the operation, but no, I wasn’t working with the British Aurors on this case—it was some wizards from the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.”

“I see,” said Ginny. “And you’ve rounded up the lot?”

“Oh, yes.” Shakti’s fingers returned to tracing the lines on the tablecloth, but she gave a rather satisfied grin. “It’s one of the largest international sting operations the Indian MLES has ever carried out.

[...]

Aaand... I kind of ran out of steam here. Basically, I just liked the idea of Ginny facing this imagined seductress and discovering someone she actually likes. I think Shakti was going to make sure that Harry had told Ginny what had happened--or rather, not happened in Mumbai. Mr. Kamananda was going to be dead—playing Quidditch with monks in the Himalyas. Oh. And I was going to have Shakti call Ginny "Mrs. Potter," Ginny was going to point out that she'd kept her maiden name, Weasley... And Shakti was going to respond in surprise that the reason that she was still in England was that she had a date... with Charlie. :-)