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Chapter Text

The office they’re in is cramped. Harry and the Headmaster sit in chairs sized appropriately to them, but everything else in the room — including the room itself — is goblin sized. Even the door had been smaller than he’s used to, and though he had only to duck, poor Professor Dumbledore had to stoop nearly to the floor to fit through it. Even now, in his chair, the Headmaster’s mane of silvery hair brushes the uneven, cave-like roof of the place. Harry’s feet butt up against the floor of the goblin’s desk. It makes for a very uncomfortable aura in which to conduct business.

Something Harry thinks is probably intentional, if the sharp toothed grin on the goblin’s face is anything to go by.

His name is Kazzakka. He had given it to Harry and Professor Dumbledore when they’d arrived in the Gringotts atrium half an hour ago. Kazzakka had said nothing else since then, save for biting directions of where to step on their way into the bowels of the bank, where the corridors got tighter, the doors smaller, and this office had awaited. Now, they sit together in a room Harry still doesn’t know his reason for being in. Professor Dumbledore looks serene. The goblin looks studious. Behind his desk, he’s donned a pair of spectacles and is rifling through a great many pieces of paper, sorting them into pre-prepared stacks. Three of them.

Harry had tried to interrupt him some ten minutes ago or so, to ask what’s going on and why they’re there. Kazzakka had paused in his rifling, glaring at him over the leaflets of paper in his hands, and Professor Dumbledore had laid a hand on his shoulder, shaking his head when Harry had met his eyes. Harry had not tried to interrupt again.

Now, at last, the goblin runs out of paper with which to occupy his hands, placing the final of his documents into the middle pile. Folding his hands on the edge of his desk, he looks across at them over the stacks of paper. The leftmost stack is by far the largest, easily thrice as large as the one in the middle. The rightmost stack has only one piece of paper in it.

“Mr. Potter,” Kazzakka says without preamble. “Happy birthday.”

Harry blinks. His birthday was two days ago. In part, it’s what started the whole mess he’s in now. He’d received banal, lifeless letters and a box of Honeydukes from Ron and Hermione and similarly uninspired well-wishes from Hagrid, the Weasley twins, and Professor Lupin. They’d contained only terse birthday wishes, hopes he was doing alright, and encouragements to hang in there through the rest of the summer. No mention of the war, of Voldemort’s doings, of what was happening in the wider world. No explanations for why the Prophet came to him with his face and name plastered across it, calling him and Professor Dumbledore frauds, nutters, conspiracists, and glory hounds. Harry had ignored them all, not bothering to write back. He’d thrown the Honeydukes away in a fit of anger. 

Only two letters that had arrived that day had been at all worth his time to read. One had been from Sirius, and though it too contained no mention of the war or what was happening, it had been more genuine by far in its well wishes and contained an apology for Harry’s isolationism as well as a promise that he was trying to end it. The other had been delivered by a golden owl, feathers shimmering metallically in the dim light of his bedside lamp, bearing a similarly golden envelope with a silver seal it took him a second to recognize. Gringotts. He had read it, thinking only after the fact that it had probably been a bad idea to open a letter of unknown provenance with Voldemort back, but it had turned out fine. The letter had been from the goblin across from him now, identifying himself as the account manager for the Potter vaults and inviting him to the bank for a discussion on the status of his finances and family assets.

Harry, not entirely stupid despite what Hermione might say to the contrary sometimes, had immediately forwarded the letter to Professor Dumbledore via Hedwig with an accompanying note in his own hand that contained only three question marks. Hedwig had returned the next day, bearing again the Gringotts letter and a note from Professor Dumbledore. I will arrive to take you to Gringotts tomorrow at ten in the morning.

So, here they were.

“Thank you,” he replies slowly. 

The goblin nods and pushes his spectacles further up his nose. “Thank you for attending to this matter so promptly.” He seems to genuinely mean this, his voice more sincere than Harry has yet heard from him. He wonders if goblins have a particular penchant for punctuality. “Meetings such as these are an opportunity for the heir to a Noble and Most Ancient House to be familiarized with the ongoings of his family’s finances. Customarily, you would attend with the reigning Lord or Lady of the House to guide you through any questions you have. Alas, House Potter has been bereft of such a figure for fourteen years.”

Harry’s face darkens, teeth gritted against the blasé way in which the goblin recites the greatest tragedy of his life.

“To that end, the finer details of your family’s holdings will wait to be discussed upon the occasion of your seventeenth birthday,” Kazzakka continues, irreverent to Harry’s frustrations, “when you might employ the use of legal counsel and other advisors who can assist you in your duties as Lord Potter.”

Harry doesn’t know what to say to any of that, having only kind of understood half of it to begin with. He had read and internalized enough of the magical world to know that the Potter family was important. He had seen his vault and the wealth within. But he hadn’t known anything about a Lordship.

“If that is the case, Kazzakka,” Professor Dumbledore says politely, “why are we here?”

Professor Dumbledore had been remarkably quiet and withdrawn for the duration of their time together today. He had appeared promptly at ten, as he had said, and apparated them to Diagon Alley; Harry’s first experience with such travel. But beyond offering him a few words of comfort in the aftermath of his having vomited when they arrived, he’d kept his eyes ahead and responded to Harry’s questions only in single word sentences.

“ You are here,” Kazzakka emphasizes, “because you are the boy’s default magical guardian, given his status as muggle-raised and in the absence of better candidates. Mr. Potter, you are here, to be given information pertinent to the wellbeing of the House of Potter as well as to yourself.”

Silence hangs heavy on the room like a winter coat left on the rack in summer. Harry clears his throat. “Er,” he says, “like what?”

Kazzakka lays a gnarled hand on the first and largest stack. “These are summary reports of the investments of the Potter family these last fourteen years.” Harry’s eyes widen at them, and Kazzakka waves a dismissive hand at his expression. “Suffice it to say, they are doing well. Almost all of them generate yearly profits.”

He moves on, hand resting now on the second, middle stack. “These are a list of Potter family assets. Real estate, mostly. The cottage in Godric’s Hollow. Potter Manor, still regrettably unplottable until your majority. A selection of House Elves we believe await you at Potter Manor. An invisibility cloak, currently unaccounted for. Several magical artifacts of historical note, including goblin forged items the bank may wish to discuss repossession of in time. And a notable stake in Puddlemere United.”

The information presented by the stack is a deluge of new discoveries. The idea of a Potter Manor is new, as is any thought he’d ever really had about the house in Godric’s Hollow in which his parents had died. He thinks, quickly, that Hermione can never be informed he owns House Elves and resolves to free them at the earliest opportunity. Yet, it is the last bit which causes him to blurt, “I own a quidditch team!?”

Kazzakka looks no more excited to have been interrupted now than he was the first time. He glares imperiously, saying, “You are on the board of investors of a quidditch team, Mr. Potter. Your stake is equal to that of six others.”

“Oh,” Harry says, embarrassed. “Sorry.”

Kazzakka sighs. “And this stack,” he slaps the single piece of paper on the table in emphasis, “represents the outstanding contacts to which the Potter family is bound.”

In the corner of his eye, Harry sees Professor Dumbledore sit further upright, his head now touching the ceiling. “What is the nature of the contract?” he asks sharply.

Kazzakka bares his teeth in what might be a smile or a threat. “It is a marriage contract.”

Harry thinks there might be a buzzing in his ears. “What?”

Kazzakka picks up the piece of paper. “To be precise, it is a marriage contract agreed upon by the parties of Lord Halstead Potter some four hundred and fifteen years ago with one Lady Portentous Greengrass, ensuring the union of their lines at such a time that one eligible male of the Potter family and one eligible female of the Greengrass family are of an age no more than five years apart.”

The buzzing is growing louder. “What?”

Kazzakka sighs. “You are engaged, Mr. Potter,” he says plainly. “To one Daphne Greengrass.”

Daphne Greengrass. He latches to the idea of her like a man to a rock in a storm. He knows nothing of marriage and contracts and marriage contracts. Nothing of Lordship and Manors and house elves and account managers. Daphne Greengrass, though, is a girl, like any other. A frame of reference through which to see the rest of the chaos thrown suddenly into his life.

She’s a Slytherin in his year. He knows very little else about her. In the four years of his time at Hogwarts, he thinks he’s spoken as many words to her. Passing greetings, requests to pass him a potion supply in the closet of Snape’s classroom, and little else. He recalls her as a quiet, serious young woman, often in the back of classes, scrawling tidy notes into her notebooks. He recalls as well that she has consistently been the only person in their year to score higher than Hermione in potions, and despite Ron and Harry’s claims to the contrary, Hermione is entirely convinced that it is through no fault of Snape’s favoritism.

She is also, Harry reflects, quite pretty.

His fiancée is quite pretty. That’s a good thing. It’s good to have a pretty fiancée. When they’re married, she’ll be a pretty wife, and isn’t that what most people want? Harry’s wife will be pretty.

She’s pretty.

Merlin, he thinks he’s having a panic attack. “How do I break it?” Harry asks desperately.

“Harry,” Professor Dumbledore says, his voice heavy with a warning Harry can’t care to hear.

Kazzakka holds up a placating hand at the Headmaster, face a mask of serenity; as close as a goblin gets, at any rate. “No offense taken, Headmaster. It’s a question we get often.” So said, he opens the top rightmost drawer of his desk and withdraws from it a long and beautifully wrought dagger, wider than normal at the base and tapering to a razor point in its gilded sheath. Harry looks at it confused for a moment, and Kazzakka explains with a shrug, “Oh, the only way to break the contract is death. Either yours or the girl’s. Your choice.”

Harry blinks at the knife and then at Kazzakka. “Is that supposed to be funny?” he demands.

The goblin smiles another one of those maybe-threats.

Harry rubs his forehead, feeling a headache coming on like the whistle of a bludger about to strike. “Does she know?” he wonders, half to himself. 

Kazzakka nods, however. “She was informed, as you were, on her fifteenth birthday.”

Harry chews his bottom lip. “How’d she take it?” Again, he’s quiet, not really asking the goblin.

Kazzakka takes it at face value, though, shrugging. “I am not the Greengrass account manager.”

Harry hangs his head. He feels like he might faint. “Professor Dumbledore.” It is neither a question nor a statement but a request, whiny even to his ears. 

Silence meets him for a moment, till he hears the Professor’s voluminous robes rustle in his seat. “May I?” he asks the goblin.

Kazzakka hands him the slip of paper silently. Harry watches it, eyes following the parchment like it’s a bomb about to explode. It looks in remarkably good condition for being four and a half centuries old. Professor Dumbledore adjusts his half-moon glasses, peering over the words on the damningly simple slip of paper. He reads it and reads it again. The only noise in the office is Harry’s uneven breathing, and the scratching of Kazzakka’s quill on paperwork, which he sets to after a few minutes when it becomes clear that the Headmaster is going to make a real study of it.

Finally, some twenty or so minutes later, he returns the paper to Kazzakka’s desk, brow heavy and mouth turned down. “I am sorry, my boy,” he says, and Harry’s heart sinks. “The terms are quite simple and, thus, quite absolute.”

“There’s…” he wanders somewhere far away, distant and less frightening than this damningly small office. “There’s nothing?”

“I’m afraid not,” the Headmaster responds. His eyes are full of pity, the most he has looked at Harry since that day in Gryffindor Tower on the last day of term.

“What about divorce?” Harry seizes on the idea, suddenly frantic. “We could get married and then get divorced, right?”

Professor Dumbledore nods, but it is Kazzakka who answers. “There are provisions,” he tells Harry. “Infidelity. Spousal abuse. The Chudley Cannons winning the league.”

Harry no longer has the energy to discern what may or may not qualify as a joke to this strange goblin. He takes the news at face value, sinking even further into hopelessness. Infidelity. Not something he liked the taste of, nevermind it means having to find someone else to love in the first place. Spousal abuse, the idea of which turns his stomach more than any forced marriage could. And the Cannons, despite what Ron may say to the contrary each and every year, will never win the league.

“Wh-when?” he stutters, breathing a little heavily. The world is spinning.

Kazzakka shrugs. “You could do it today, if you saw fit. But the contract stipulates that you must be married no later than one year after the younger party’s seventeenth birthday.” He pauses for a beat and then adds, “That would be you.”

Three years. A long time and yet, not so long at all. Harry thinks he should be grateful for the breathing room, the time to think it all through and consider the breadth of his options. Three years is more than time enough to think through this new problem. Somehow, though, it doesn’t help him. He has a firm date, now, and that just seems to make it all the more real.

Harry clears his throat, recognizing with shameful familiarity the lump of tears in the back of it. He’s done a lot of crying since Cedric died, and he doesn’t want to do it now, in front of a goblin and his Headmaster. “Is there anything else I need to know?” He is proud that his voice only barely breaks. 

Kazzakka folds his hands again, looking at him shrewdly. “Only that you should work, as quickly as you can, to come to terms with this, Mr. Potter.” The goblin’s dark eyes flick rapidly up and down the length of him. “Do not do anything rash. I have managed the accounts of your family for four generations now, Mr. Potter. I should hate to lose the chance to manage a fifth.”

They conclude their business. Upon Harry’s request, Kazzakka generates a copy of the contract for him to return home with. Harry doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to ‘come to terms’ with it, but he resolves, at least, to educate himself on the parameters of what will be the rest of his life. His fingers crease the paper where they hold to it like a lifeline. Kazzakka wishes him well, informs him that, having reached the age of fifteen, he is entitled now to request a meeting with his account manager at any time he wishes, and escorts him and Professor Dumbledore back to the atrium.

The hustle and bustle of the crowd is tempered only by the surprised and varied glances the two of them receive. Some look at them with abject curiosity. Others with thinly veiled disgust and other, darker emotions. “Professor Dumbledore,” Harry asks quietly, wondering if the Headmaster will even hear him over the din in the atrium. “The Greengrass family…”

The Headmaster’s hand on his shoulder quiets him, and he looks down in surprise at the slip of paper Professor Dumbledore hands him. He opens it, and in the Professor’s archaic, looping hand, is written the words ‘ Number 12 Grimmauld Place can be found in London between Numbers 11 and 13 ’. He looks up in confusion, but the Headmaster only pats him twice on the shoulder.

“Deep breath, Harry,” he advises.

They apparate directly out of the bank.

Chapter Text

Grimmauld Place is like nowhere he’s ever seen before. It is hard for Harry, these days, to pull himself from the undercurrent of rage, pain, and misery that have so defined the months since the Third Task and Cedric’s death. He lacks the wonder of the boy who had wandered into a tent bigger on the inside and proclaimed his love of magic. Still, it manages to amaze him how different this world he lives in is. Every new place he sees conveys a new aura, a new mindset.

The Blacks had clearly thought very highly of themselves. 

He is introduced to the existence of the Order of the Phoenix. He is mothered by Mrs. Weasley, welcomed by the twins and Professors Lupin and Moody, and hugged by Sirius. He meets Tonks, who he thinks is delightful, and Kingsley who he thinks is surprisingly funny. He says goodbye to Professor Dumbledore, who does not return the sentiment but to shortly explain that Moody and Tonks had collected his things from Privet Drive and that he would spend the remainder of the summer holidays here. He hears a report from Mrs. Fig, of all people, that dementors had been spotted in Privet Drive earlier that same night and thinks himself lucky to have been at Gringotts. He gets into a spectacular argument with Ron and Hermione about how absent they’ve been, how they’ve told him nothing, how they’ve shut him out. They tell him that Professor Dumbledore instructed them to do so, and he wants to claw through the Floo to demand the Headmaster tell him why.

Then, at last, alone in the room he will share with Ron for the rest of the summer, he lays out the marriage contract and explains what happened to him to Ron and Hermione.

Hermione shuts up like a clam, contract in hand, reading it like a holy text. Ron has more to say. “Bloody hell,” he exclaims. And then, again, “Bloody hell.”

He says it a lot, sometimes quietly and in disbelief, sometimes loudly and with as much fervor as a Quidditch match.

“Bloody hell,” he says finally. “That’s mental.”

It’s so succinct a description of the events of the last twenty-four hours that Harry can only smile and agree. 

Hermione, at last, puts down the paper and, in much the same way that Professor Dumbledore had earlier today, looks at him with pitying eyes. “I’m so sorry, Harry,” she says. Her fists shake with rage, and she looks close to crying hot, angry tears. “I can’t believe this is legal. That they’re enforcing it! It’s completely barbaric!”

“In fairness, it is four hundred years old, Hermione,” Ron says quietly.

Hermione throws her hands. “Well, it isn’t four hundred years ago anymore, Ronald!”

Ron rebuts with his traditional demand that she not call him that. “Could be worse, though, mate,” he tells Harry encouragingly. “Greengrass, she’s a looker at least.”

Hermione slaps Ron on the shoulder. “Honestly!” she hisses. “As if Harry should feel better at having the rest of his life dictated to him because she’s attractive! ”

“Ow!” Ron complains, rubbing the spot on his arm. “It helps! Wouldn’t do him any more good to be married to Eloise Midgen, would it?”

“Ronald!”

Harry smiles despite himself. Despite the situation. He agrees with both of them. Hermione has more of the right of it, though. All his life, he’s lacked control over so much as what he wears. He couldn’t control where he slept as a child or his Uncle’s moods. He couldn’t control that his parents were dead, and he can’t control that Voldemort is back now and surely wants to kill him. Now, he can’t even control who the girl he’s going to marry is. It’s sobering and angering and utterly unfair.

But, he will concede, she is quite pretty.

He shakes himself before falling down that rabbit hole again. “You don’t think she’s a death eater, do you?” he asks quickly, trying to steer his thoughts to more productive places. It had, perhaps, not been the best choice. The thought has weighed on him since he’d heard her name. Confronting it makes it all the harder to hide from the panic, though. 

Hermione frowns. “Not all Slytherins are death eaters, Harry,” she says, though even she doesn’t sound entirely convinced.

“Yeah, but most of them are,” Ron retorts. He matches Hermione’s glare. “‘S a fair question, is all. He needs to know.”

“I tried to ask Professor Dumbledore,” he tells them quietly. Another of the anxieties he has been trying to hide from all day, rearing its head and forcing its way into the conversation. “Before we got here. But he didn’t say anything.”

Both Ron and Hermione frown. For once, neither try to assuage his concern with an empty platitude. The Headmaster’s reticence concerns them all.

“They can’t be all bad,” Ron ventures, “if the Potters were willing to make a contract with them in the first place.”

It’s a warm thought, and Harry huddles around it like a winter hearth. He doesn’t know anything about his family, really, but everything he’s ever heard tells him they’ve been champions of the light. Of honesty and hard work and all that tripe. Maybe it’s overly optimistic to think they've always been like that, and he knows it’s ridiculous to think the Greengrasses might not have changed in the four hundred years since this contract was signed. But it gives him a kind of hope. 

He’s been sorely lacking in hope lately.

“What do you know about them?” Hermione asks of Ron. “Marriage contracts, I mean. Not the Greengrasses.”

Ron shrugs, as uncomfortable as ever to be on the receiving end of one of Hermione’s inquisitions; always afraid to fall short of her mark. “Not much,” he admits. He scratches behind his ear. “People don’t really do them anymore. Rich purebloods like the Malfoys or whatever will make agreements, sometimes. But they aren’t magically binding, anymore, not like this.”

“Lucky me,” Harry mutters.

Hermione and Ron share a glance and both determine in tandem not to share their pity with Harry. They can still see his fuse, short and frayed as it is, and don’t wish to upset him any further.

“I’ll tell you what, though,” Ron says quietly. They both turn to look at him. “You can bet Greengrass isn’t any happier about this than you are.”

~•~

Daphne Greengrass isn’t happy. Really, she hasn’t been happy since that fateful day in the parlor, sat down by her mother and father to be informed of the direction of the rest of her life. That had been two months ago. Nine and a half weeks ago. Sixty-six days ago. One thousand, five hundred and eighty-four hours ago.

Not that she’d been counting.

The initial rage had been the most potent. Daphne isn’t a violent woman by nature, nor is she prone to outbursts or yelling. She had run the gauntlet on all three, however, ninety-five thousand and forty minutes ago when her father had dropped his bomb into her life. She had thrown things, cursed, bemoaned, and cried.

“Why didn’t you tell me before!?” she demanded.

“I didn’t know,” her father explained.

It took time for her to reflect on the conversation with a clear enough head to recognize the genuine remorse that had played across her father’s face. In the moment, she had only raged further. It makes sense, though. The contract had sat for four centuries, somehow never finding two people to match the parameters laid out by Portentous and Halstead. Until now. Until her.

Until Harry Potter.

His face swims across the front page of the Prophet, floating as tantalizingly in black and white ink on the table before her as it does in her mind. His likeness on the paper is much clearer than the one in her head. She has little to think about the boy with whom she’s barely spoken. He is soft and quiet, dressed only in his school robes or the rags he calls clothes. He speaks to two people ever, with the exception of when he is playing or practicing for Quidditch. He is one of the best flyers in the school and has been since the first time he put a broom between his legs and made a fool of Draco with that stupid remembrall.

He is…passably handsome. She supposes.

Potter: Protege or Puppet? the Prophet wonders. She snorts. They’ve been having fun with the alliteration lately. It’s meaningless fearmongering and fluff, appealing to the frightened masses. She has no question of the nature of Potter and Dumbledore’s relationship. It’s his relationship to her which drags out her fears and anxieties, and to that end, she prefers yesterday’s headline.

Dark or dangerous? Potter can’t be said to be dark; not on his worst day. But dangerous? Daphne doesn’t need the Prophet to answer that question. Every year another crisis, and Potter right at its center. This year is certain to be no different. Indeed, she can only imagine it will be all the worse. The Dark Lord is back, whatever the Prophet wants to say to the contrary, and Daphne and the Greengrasses besides have had their wagons hitched to his biggest enemy. Where does it leave her, she wonders, in the days to come? Will she end up in the thick of it with her betrothed?

Daphne grimaces. She’s been practicing, trying to find the right word for it all. Fiancée had sounded trite, but betrothed…no, it won’t do either.

It would be easier, she knows, if her consort (yes, that might be fun, she thinks) were here to give his opinion himself. If she could ask him about the nature of his ridiculous misadventures and how likely she is to be needed for them. Though, that, of course, contributes to the anger simmering beneath her cool facade. Five million, seven hundred and two thousand, four hundred seconds ago, her father had thrown her into a fury from which she had not emerged. But two days ago, it reached a new peak, and Daphne struggles to imagine how she’s going to come back down

Two days ago had been Potter’s fifteenth birthday. The day on which he was to be informed of their new status, which she had been waiting for these past two months, eager to hear from him at last and take the measure of her intended.

Yes, she likes that one.

Yet, she had been met with silence from him. And, yes, alright, perhaps he had not had the time to be taken to Gringotts on the particular day. Or, perhaps, he had and was taking the day to process. Then the next day had come, and still, she’d heard nothing. No letter, no floo call, no visit. She supposes she can’t really hold the last one against him. He doesn’t know where she lives or how to get there.

Perhaps there were concerns, she concedes, of her family’s allegiance to the Dark Lord. Balderdash, of course, but Potter is eminently Gryffindor and a boy besides, so he may be forgiven for being somewhat stupid. She would expect Granger to set him right, and so she waited patiently at her window for the inevitable owl.

Nothing. 

Now, August second has passed her by, and still, no communication. Potter is as silent as the grave.

She’s furious. Apoplectically so, and she doesn’t know what to do with it. She is not used to this kind of anger, unsure what to do with it or herself. Her initial bout of impudent rage had cost the family a rather lovely crystal vase, and Daphne had felt guilty enough about it that she had resolved to stop throwing things. She had tried shouting, but after two days of screaming at most of the things and people around her, she’d gone hoarse for the next three and given up on that as well. At last, her mother had taken her to the kitchen, provided her with a ball of dough on which to project her frustrations and let her be.

Daphne has gotten quite good at bread making. She kneads her dough very well.

Soft knocks sound from her bedroom door. Daphne recognizes the rhythm of Astoria’s fist, always to the beat of the song she’s most recently obsessed with. Today it’s Barbara Ann by The Beach Boys, which Tracey had introduced her to on their most recent visit to the Davis house. Daphne bids her to come in as quickly as she can, lest the song get stuck in her head again. 

Astoria flounces inside in a pretty blue dress the color of the ocean at night. She is smiling when she enters but, used to the glum way with which Daphne has taken to sitting by the window waiting for an owl that won’t come, stops and frowns when she sees her. “Still no letter?” she asks delicately.

Daphne tilts her head back against the wall, groaning.

Astoria smiles sympathetically, crossing the rest of the room to sit on the edge of the window nook near Daphne’s feet. She puts her hand on her sister’s leg. “You could write him, you know,” Astoria suggests evenhandedly. “I never understood why you didn’t in the first place.”

Daphne shrugs and leaves her shoulders by her ears defensively. “It didn’t feel right,” she defends. “We’ve never even spoken. Why would he believe me?”

“He’ll believe you now.”

Daphne makes a face. She hopes Astoria will leave it at that, but her sister knows her too well and is a remarkably insightful thirteen year old besides. “Daphne,” Astoria says flatly. “Are you seriously sitting here, angry and sulking and not writing him because he’s the boy? ”

“It’s tradition!” Daphne insists, fisting the soft cushions of the nook. “Honestly! No courting, no proposal, no nothing! The least he could do is write me first!”

Astoria laughs, just once. Daphne’s furious glare is enough to make her choke the rest of them down. “You’re not wrong ,” she concedes. “But, honestly, Daphne, what if he never does? He’s a boy. He’s dumb. And he’s got a lot going on.” She gestures at his portrait under the Prophet’s latest libelous lie. “Is the plan to just sit around waiting for him to catch a hint?”

It is, actually. Daphne is nothing if not stubborn and a wee bit traditionalist. She will sit and wait for her intended (she really is beginning to like it) to make the first move. 

It will take her a month and a half to break. Six weeks. Forty-two days. One thousand and eight hours. Sixty thousand, four hundred and eighty minutes. Three million, six hundred and twenty-eight thousand, eight hundred seconds.

Not that she’ll be counting.

Chapter Text

Tracey rather laughs herself silly about the whole thing. When term starts, another month has passed, and still, Daphne has heard nothing from Potter. Like Astoria, Tracey cottons on to the nature of Daphne’s obstinance rather quickly, but unlike Astoria, she is not cowed by Daphne’s furious glares. She mocks her endlessly. Which isn’t to say that she doesn’t have sympathy for Daphne’s plight. She agrees that Potter’s being rather rude about the whole thing, not reaching out to her even once term begins and they’re in the same building again. She just doesn’t hesitate to render the same judgment on Daphne.

At first, Daphne tries to convince herself that Potter has just been waiting for the right opportunity. It’s a monumental thing to talk about, after all, and she wonders if she would even be able to put it into a letter if she tried. Can she fault Potter for feeling the same? She tells herself he’ll find her on the train, and they’ll finally talk. He never shows up, though, and neither Astoria nor Tracey make any comment about her going to seek him out instead. 

She defers, thinking that the train is probably too crowded. He’ll want something more private, and, really, she does too. Potter’s being very thoughtful, she decides, and when he finds her in the next few days, she’ll thank him for his discretion. Daphne thinks she might be beginning to sound a bit manic, going by the looks Tracey and Astoria give her, but she isn’t deterred. She waits patiently for a boy that never shows up.

After three days of yet further silence from her intended, she marches through the portrait of the fruit bowl into the kitchens, demanding of the first, poor house elf she sees to be given dough and an oven. They protest, unwilling to forgo the labor themselves until she bursts into tears, blubbering about boys and betrothals and stupid, stupid, contracts. The elves don’t know what to do with her, so they give her, her dough and let her knead her frustrations into a loaf of sweetbread.

She’s in the kitchen three times a week making bread now. Still no Potter. 

It comes to a head one innocuous Thursday afternoon in the short window between transfiguration and history of magic. Daphne, well and truly fed up with the silence which has greeted her in response to the most upsetting news of her entire life, practically throws her school supplies into her bag, stomping out of the class after the golden trio. She spies them turning a corner to the left of McGonagall’s classroom, talking quietly amongst themselves as they so often do. Potter is in the middle; something she’s noticed has become the norm lately. Like Granger and Weasley have taken up postings as his bodyguards.

She’s had a lot of time to notice things like in the two weeks since the term began. While Potter hasn’t spoken to her. Daphne grinds her teeth and hastens after them. They make remarkable time, and Daphne thinks that Granger must have trained the boys over the years to match the near marching pace she sets between her classes. Daphne’s bag bounces uncomfortably against her hip, the irregular edges of the books and inkwells within digging into her where they land as she runs after them. 

She thinks she’s probably making an absurd amount of noise and knows she looks out of place sprinting down the hall. She wonders if anyone in the school has ever seen her run before. She rarely has a good reason to. None of the trio ahead of her take any notice, though, perhaps used to such antics amongst themselves or Gryffindor. Daphne has to force her way into their awareness.

“Potter!” Her voice is as demanding as her grip, which she latches onto his bicep, stumbling over herself in her haste to catch up to them. 

No sooner has she done so than she is hauled off him, an iron hard hand gripping her shoulder, leveraging her into the wall. Ron Weasley levels his wand in her face, the look in his eyes as unyielding as the brick he presses her into. “Don’t touch him,” he says.

Potter is there an instant later, pulling Weasley’s wand arm down and telling him insistently, “Let her go, Ron.” Quieter, so much so that Daphne barely hears it, he hisses, “She didn’t mean anything by it.”

Potter tells his attack dog to let her go again, and at last he does. Weasley steps away, but Daphne stays draped against the wall, breathing unevenly through her teeth and trying to look like she isn’t. Potter appraises her. “Are you okay?” he asks carefully.

Daphne straightens her robes, and says, “Yes,” evenly, not betraying the unease that roils in her chest. Pain radiates, aching, from her shoulder. Weasley is…very strong. She struggles to regain her footing in the conversation she had wanted to initiate. “We need to talk.”

Potter looks like he’s swallowed a lemon. But he nods, saying, “Yeah,” like a sigh. Turning, he addresses his friends. “Guys, can you…?”

Granger shakes her head. “We aren’t leaving you alone with her, Harry.”

Daphne sneers, but Potter gives another of those full body sighs, rubbing his arm agitatedly where she’d grabbed him. “Yeah,” he says again. His eyes catch on a door to the right of them; some unused classroom. “Okay. Then wait outside the door.”

He directs Daphne towards it, walking ahead to open it for her. She graciously accepts his gentlemanly act.

“Harry,” Granger says, wanting to protest. Weasley is glaring from behind her. 

“Guys!” Potter snaps, again reaching volumes Daphne doesn’t expect. His exclamation hangs between them all for a moment, his face taut with frustration and anger. Then, his friends nod their assent, and he closes the door on them.

It is just the two of them now. Daphne has gotten what she wanted. She admits she doesn’t quite know what to do now that she has.

The room they are in is a carefully cluttered mess. A multitude of desks are arranged precariously on the wall, arranged there by magic and an overactive imagination. A slate chalkboard rests, clean and spotless beside a heavy, wooden pulpit at the front of the room. Old and out of fashion, not used for many years if Daphne had to guess. But no dust. Even in this abandoned little corner of the castle, the house elves would never allow it.

Daphne approaches the pulpit, more for something to do than anything else. For an anchor, upon which to hang her nerves. Something more than the empty space of the classroom and the empty words of their conversation. “Protective, aren’t they?” she asks idly, for want of a better way to broach the subject they both need to.

It is, perhaps, not the way to start. His face darkens. “Well. Voldemort’s back. So.” That proclamation of his, spewed so recklessly across the school, the country, the world. He waits, agitated. “Not going to deny it? Call me a nutter?”

She scoffs. Her fingers trace the grains of the pulpit’s woodwork. “I’m in Slytherin, Potter.” She looks up into his eyes. “We all know he’s back.”

She watches him absorb the strangely discomforting information that the only people willing to believe him about the Dark Lord are the ones who follow the Dark Lord. Or, at least, in his eyes. Eyes which alight suddenly on the way her sleeves fall, caressing her wrists where she runs her fingers across the pulpit. “Show me your arms,” he commands.

She arches an eyebrow at him. “You think the Dark Lord is recruiting fifteen year olds?” 

He slips his wand from his back pocket, holding it loosely. It’s the one thing, she notices, he doesn’t fidget with. His feet dance a tiny, nervous little jig. The fingers of his free hand rap a rhythm on his hip. He grinds his teeth and flicks his eyes this way and that. But the wand, he holds steady. “Just do it.”

She considers refusing on principle. She’s already given a great deal of ground in a conversation she’d intended to lead. But, she concedes, it isn’t really an unreasonable request. And, anyway, it may finally calm him down. She unbuttons her sleeve cuffs and rolls them up to her elbows.

“Satisfied?” she asks, holding flat her arms for him to see. Clear, unblemished, alabaster skin shines in the pale light that filters through the window. He looks hard at them, as if expecting a dark mark to slither out from beneath her skin and hiss at him. Finally, he nods, stowing his wand. Daphne begins to roll her sleeves back down, shaking her head. “Thought you’d at least wait till the wedding night to undress me, Potter.”

“That’s not-“ he reddens. “I’m sorry.”

Daphne snorts. “It was a joke, Potter,” she assures him.

“Not for that,” Potter says, then stammers, “I mean yes. Yes for that. But more than that. I’m sorry for everything. This contract. The bullshit.”

She pauses in the process of her sleeves. Blinks. Swallows all the things she’s afraid to feel, let alone say. “Me too,” she tells him quietly and finishes, buttoning her sleeves again. “But you didn’t do it.”

It’s been brought up now. The elephant in the room, as the muggles say. They stare at one another, tension mounting.

“Why haven’t you spoken to me?” Daphne demands suddenly. “You haven’t even tried.”

Potter chews his lip, looking anywhere but at her. “Well,” he says, in much the same tone as before, “Voldemort’s back. So. I’m a little distracted.”

Daphne leans her weight back on her hip, arms folded beneath her breasts, eyebrow quirked. “Reasonable,” she concedes. “But, really, Potter? Not even a letter?”

He looks a little embarrassed. “It could have been intercepted,” he mumbles.

“Clever,” she compliments him. She is genuinely pleased. She’s heard a lot about Potter, albeit mostly from Draco. Clever hadn’t ever been included in the descriptors, and she’d worried Granger was doing all the work for him. “It’s not why you didn’t write me, though.”

He rolls his eyes, sick, perhaps, of clever witches and their ability to catch him out. “No,” he bites.

Daphne purses her lips. “Then, why-“

“Greengrass!” Potter snaps. She jumps, startled by his volume. “The only way out of the contract is dying, right?” He pauses. Like he’s expecting an answer. She nods slowly. “What are the odds, do you think, that I’m gonna be alive in three years to marry you?” Harry snorts, shaking his head in a darkly deep rage. “I didn’t write you because it doesn’t matter, this stupid contract. I really wouldn’t worry about it.”

He shoulders his bag, brushing past her towards the door. She is knocked off balance by the bluntness of his words. His hand is on the doorknob by the time she recovers enough to shout after him. “That’s not how I’d prefer to think about it!”

He pauses long enough to glance back at her, face unreadable. His hand stills on the doorknob. He worries over something with his teeth, moving his jaw back and forth. Daphne finds that she is breathing heavily. She doesn’t know if it’s from her earlier run, her disconcerting impression of Weasley, or the heightened emotions of the conversation she’s just had. Probably, it’s all three. Potter seems to be doing the same.

“How many people have you told?” he asks her intently.

Daphne looks at him. It isn’t what she expected him to say. “Four,” she says. “My sister, Astoria. Tracey Davis. My parents. Well, my parents told me, but…”

Potter nods. “Only Ron and Hermione,” he responds. Then, grimacing, he adds, “And Professor Dumbledore.”

She furrows her brow at that, wondering how and under what circumstances Albus Dumbledore had learned about it. “Okay,” she responds, for want of anything else to say. She fiddles with the strap of her bag, uncomfortable beneath the heavy weight of his gaze.

His hand is still on the doorknob. “Don’t tell anyone else,” he commands. “I’m serious, Greengrass. Don’t worry too much about it. But don’t tell anyone. It wouldn’t be safe.” 

He departs, all but slamming the door behind him. 

~•~

Outside, he rushes away, Hermione and Ron scrabbling to catch up with him, not expecting so sudden an exit. A few corridors down, he finally pauses to lean against a pillar and breathe. 

Ron and Hermione share an unseen glance. “How’d it go?” Hermione ventures.

Harry swallows the putrid cocktail of stress, fear, rage, and anxiety that brews constantly in the back of his throat these days. “Could have been worse,” he says levelly. Then, in a considering tone. “She didn’t flinch.”

Hermione, being Hermione, cottons on immediately and looks suitably impressed. Ron, of course, does not. “What?” he asks.

“Voldemort,” Harry responds and smiles when Ron reacts with his whole body. “She didn’t flinch.”

Chapter Text

Ron and Hermione both make token efforts to convince him to reach out to her again. Hermione, especially, makes note of the fact that Greengrass had taken the first step and that it would be rude not to at least try and reciprocate. He does not share with them the same opinion that he shared with his fiancée; that Voldemort will kill him long before any obligation to Greengrass will need to be seen through. Harry wishes, in fact, that he hadn't said it to Greengrass. He doesn't know her or who she speaks to or what she's liable to say to her Housemates. She doesn't have the Mark, so she's unlikely to carry the news directly back to Voldemort. It doesn't mean, though, that she won't let slip the news of Harry Potter's debased morale to Pansy Parkinson or, worse, Draco Malfoy, both of whom most certainly will carry the information back to Riddle.

Nonetheless, he keeps mum about it all. Ron and Hermione won't let it slide if he mentions it, and they're mothering him enough as it is. He hides behind his very real anger about the situation and makes surly comments about not caring if he's rude or not. He isn't lying when he says it.

Eventually, Ron shrugs his shoulders and gives up on mentioning Greengrass around him. Harry knows it isn’t the last he’ll hear of it from the redhead, but he also knows that Ron will give him the space to make his own way in the situation he’s found himself in. Hermione is a different story. She tapers her comments like the slow turning of a faucet, such that many days will go by without his fiancée being mentioned between the two of them. And then, much like a knife stuck between the ribs, she’ll poke him with her name out of nowhere, looking at him like she’s cataloguing the metrics of his reactions. Harry doesn’t know what she finds in his expressions, in his grumbles, but whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to satisfy her. She keeps doing it.

Granted, she’s been distracted of late with an entirely different way to annoy him.

Harry nurses the ache in his hand with a rag damp with murtlap and curses, far from the first time, Dolores Umbridge. He’s taken to carrying the bottle of stuff that Hermione had given him everywhere he goes, so bad are the open wounds on his hand. Harry isn’t a genius when it comes to taking care of himself, but he’s been in the Hospital Wing enough to get the gist of infections. Whenever he has a free moment, he shakes out the rag, dabs more of the essence of murtlap onto it and holds it to the back of his hand. It’s been almost a month. He’s nearly out of the stuff.

His detentions with Umbridge have gotten no better. Though, he supposes, they also haven’t gotten worse. In truth, the detentions aren’t the thing that bothers him. He remains confident that he can handle them, whatever Hermione’s protestations may be. He has suffered under Voldemort’s own cruciatus . He can handle Dolores bloody Umbridge and her simpering little smile. More frustrating, by far, is the woman’s class.

Defense Against the Dark Arts had been his favorite class since the first time he stumbled into Quirrell’s garlic scented menagerie of strange creatures. The last time Harry had felt so despondent about Defense had been Lockhart, but even that fop is preferable to the toad. Nevermind that it’s their O.W.L. year, and the grades they fail to get because of her will dictate the course of the rest of their life. The far more pressing issue is the purpose of the class itself. Whatever Umbridge wants to say, whatever the Prophet wants to spit, and however much the school wants to stick their heads in the sand, Harry knows the truth.

Voldemort is back. And everyone, every single person in the castle and beyond, is in very real danger. If they continue to be denied the skills and knowledge necessary to defend themselves….well. Harry is more than familiar with the consequences of what war with Voldemort looks like.

Hermione, of course, is just as aware as he is. Albeit, he thinks she’s underplaying exactly how much of her concern actually is about her grades. Whatever her reasons, though, she’s latched on to a new idea; the defense club. She assures him, time and again, that they’ll come up with a better name. As if that’s the thing that annoys him.

Hermione wants him to lead it, as if anyone would follow him. To teach people, as if he knows anything worth teaching. Hermione doesn’t understand — or more likely pretends not to — that the idea is ridiculous, right down to its foundation. As if Harry, by dint of the fact that he isn’t dead, has any reason to teach people how to stay alive. He doesn’t know. Time after time, he’s proven it, rushing headlong into danger without any thought to the consequences. He drags his friends and the people he loves with him, and she wants him to what? Add to the number of people he endangers, the deaths of whom can weigh even heavier upon his conscience? Widen the circle of his associates, that he might drive himself even more into despair worrying about them? As if Ron and Hermione and Sirius and all the Weasleys and Remus and Daphne aren’t enough?

Harry sighs, gritting his teeth. It isn’t that he cares about her, really. He doesn’t even know her. Yet, despite that and despite anything he might choose to the contrary, he’s become responsible to her. His name is an axe hanging above her head, even if she doesn’t realize it. He wishes he’d kept his cool better in their talk those weeks ago. If only to better impress upon her the need to keep their relationship secret, contractually obligated as it is. He doesn’t want her name on his conscience. Doesn’t want to wake up screaming it like he does Cedric’s.

Voldemort won’t care, after all, what Harry’s feelings are about the situation. She’s his fiancée. He’ll kill her just to drive the plot.

And the defense club (name pending)? Just a way to make the list of plot developments longer. He tells Hermione no. And no. And no.

She keeps at it, just the same as his engagement.

“You could make a difference, Harry.”

“They’ll trust you, you’re the only one.”

“You have experience none of the rest of us have.”

“You really should try to talk to her.”

“What happened to your hand?”

The last of these thoughts is so in line with the wheedling, demanding tone by which Hermione has pressed him that it takes him a moment to realize that it isn’t a thought. Someone is speaking to him, voice stilted by frustration and impatience. He looks up to see that Daphne Greengrass had found him amidst his solitude in the library. Harry grimaces, not really at her but certainly in her direction, and places his hand below the table, careful not to remove the rag that covers the bloody promise he makes to Umbridge three times a week until after she can no longer see it. “Nothing,” he says.

Greengrass scoffs. “Still sullen and miserable, then?” 

It’s a rhetorical question. Because he thinks it will annoy her, he responds to it, rolling his eyes and asking, “What do you want, Greengrass?”

She sneers well enough to put Snape to shame. “To give you a chance at a second impression,” she responds. Mockingly, she continues, “Doing great, by the way.”

“Thanks,” he bites. And, turning away from her, he adds dismissively, “If that’s all.”

Harry doesn’t know that he’s ever heard the like of the animalistic noise that comes out of her throat, at the crossroads of a choked sob, a hysterical laugh, and a furious growl. Greengrass throws herself into the seat across from him, splaying her fingers out as if to make her green nails flex like the claws of a lioness. She probably wouldn’t appreciate the comparison to something so Gryffindorish, and so Harry is about to make it when she cuts him off.

“You’re unbelievable, Potter, you really are.”

Harry grits his teeth. “This is the library,” he says, like that might somehow help his case. He can’t really puzzle out how it will so says instead, “I’m busy.”

“With what?” she mocks. Greengrass gestures with her head at his right arm, still hiding below the table. Harry flexes his fist there, feels the barely healed skin stretch taut. “The hand that isn’t hurt? Planning how to piss Umbridge off next? Why bother, Potter? The Dark Lord’s going to kill you anyway, right?”

“Don’t call him that!” he snaps and then, with effort, lowers his voice so as not to call down all the undeniable discipline of the library upon them. “His name is Voldemort. You know that.”

Greengrass shrugs, so languidly that he thinks she has to be mocking him. “Names are nothing,” she responds. “Titles are earned.”

Harry scowls. “What the hell has he done to earn anything?”

Greengrass glares at him disdainfully. “From where I’m sitting? He’s the most powerful Dark Lord in the last three centuries, brought the Wizarding World to its knees, and came back from the dead.” She tilts her head, like she’s twisting the knife of her words. “I’d say he’s earned my respect.”

Rage stokes the coals in his face, and Harry feels the taut skin on his hand break and bleed where he flexes it again and again into a fist that feels tighter every time. “I have nothing, ” he hisses, “to say to anyone who respects that monster.” He slings his bag wildly over his shoulder, not even bothering to close it; not caring if he sends his supplies flying across the library.

“Too bad!” she snaps, and she’s grabbing him again.

Her hand, surprisingly tight despite how lithe and thin it is, latches onto his arm. Her manicured nails pinch his skin in her grip, tight and unyielding and shrill, like Aunt Petunia used to grab him. Harry throws his arm violently, shaking her off in a motion that wrenches his shoulder too far in the other direction and makes him grunt in pain.

Greengrass hesitates, daunted, not for the first time, by his anger. Harry thinks sourly that she might see less of it if she would stop grabbing him. “Merlin, Potter,” she grouses. “I’m not going to curse you. I have things I need to say. Sit down.”

Mulishly, Harry shakes his head. “No.” He slides his bag further up his shoulder, wincing at the growing ache. He hasn’t thrown it completely out, but he knows an overextension when he feels one.

Greengrass rolls her eyes. “Do I have to cite marital obligation to you? Sit down!”

He sits, despite himself. He can’t even really say why. Perhaps she just sounds too much like Hermione in the moment, and Harry is well used to obeying that voice.

Across from him, Greengrass seems to make an effort to collect herself. He wonders if it’s just him and his moods and the ridiculousness of their situation that so unseat her. As far as he’s ever heard, Greengrass has always had a reputation as a cool, calm, and controlled young woman. That isn’t the impression he’s gotten from her these last two meetings, however. She’s been as quick to anger and frustration as any Gryffindor. A thought Harry is just wise enough to keep to himself.

“I don’t know about you, Potter,” she says at last, and her voice is level again, “but I had a lot of things to say when my parents told me about the contract.”

Harry grimaces. “The goblins told me.”

“It’s actually my turn to speak right now,” she snaps. Harry feels his face cloud, but he chokes down the acerbic response that comes naturally to him in response. Greengrass takes another deep breath. “I felt so many things, Potter. I was so angry. And scared. Bitter and sad and miserable. I felt betrayed, which is stupid, because nothing my parents have done has anything to do with this. I felt powerless.”

Harry takes an interest in a particularly gnarled knot in the wood of the table they’re sitting at. He recognizes the feelings she’s describing well enough. He’s felt them himself and for longer than that day in Gringotts. Harry thinks he may have felt those things all his life, but when he looks back to reflect on it, all he can see is the graveyard.

“But none of those things had anything to do with you. ” He looks up at her, surprised. There’s emotion shining in her gray eyes, catching the light of the lamps on either end of the table. Harry feels sick to see it. The familiar claws of a deep shame that’s nestled so comfortably in his gut scrape against the inside of his stomach. “I wasn’t angry at you. I wasn’t sad to think I’d have to marry you. All I could think about — the only thing — was that you had a day coming too, where you’d feel just the same as I did. And I waited. For you. For that day. Waited for you to reach out to me, to talk to me, so that we could figure this out together, like the partners we’re supposed to be now. ”

She’s crying now. Tears have slipped free from her eyelids and run tracks down her cheek. They fall from her chin like a hesitant rain and splash against the table. Harry looks away from her, unable to handle it, unsure of how to help. Certain that his help isn’t wanted.

“But you never wrote,” she shudders. He can tell by the way her face pinches how hard she’s trying to keep her voice level despite the tears. She isn’t succeeding, and it only serves to sharpen the edge of the words she cuts him with. “And then, when term started, you never even spoke to me. I had to chase you down, get threatened by your watchdog! Only to be told what? That the man I’m supposed to marry’s going to die, so why bother caring? Really!?” Her voice rises sharply in pitch on the last word, and Harry winces.

“I-”

“Shut up!” Greengrass howls. Harry looks around wildly for Madame Pince, certain she’ll descend on them from the rafters if they don’t quiet down. “I’m not done! I wasn’t angry or bitter or any of that shit with you, Potter, but you’re the one who disappointed me.” She scoffs wetly, rubbing furiously at her eyes with the heel of her hand. She succeeds only in irritating them further. “You know, I’ve heard a lot about you over the years, Potter. Most of it sounds like bullshit. But I never, not once, ever thought you were the kind of person to just… give up. ”

Harry sits on his bench, thunderstruck. His mouth opens and closes like the nutcrackers Aunt Petunia used to put out at Christmas, but it’s as ineffectual as they were. He can’t find the words. Doesn’t know what to say to so clear a denunciation. Tosser. Glory hound. Heir of Slytherin. Cheat. He’s been called them all and worse but…a disappointment? 

It’s a new low, Harry thinks.

Perhaps finally done with her tirade, Greengrass stands, clinging to the strap of her bag like a lifeline at sea. The tears are still falling across her face, but there’s rage there simmering beneath the sea of her emotions, threatening to roil over into a storm he isn’t sure he’ll survive. “I expected more,” she huffs. “I deserve better. And if you aren’t going to even try and give it to me? If you’re so bloody sure the Dark Lord’s going to kill you? Then, stop wasting everyone’s time and go die.”

She rushes away from the table well before Harry can even begin to find the words to respond.

Really, he thinks, he probably never will.

~•~

Daphne makes it only as far as the first bookshelf — perhaps half a dozen feet from his table — before she fails to stem the flow of tears that have been threatening to break her for the entire conversation. They flow freely from her eyes in a torrent, though she manages to keep the sobs from heaving her shoulders for a few feet more, when she is out of his sight and won’t be shamed to have her weakness witnessed by the boy that has inspired it. She hurries through the library, nearly running, holding the strap of her bag and hiding her face behind the curtain of her hair. There’s a bathroom only a little ways down the hall from the library, where she can duck inside and collect herself away from where Potter may see her.

She doesn’t make it, though. In the yawning doorway of the library, she nearly bowls into Granger, who turns the corner just rapidly enough that Daphne can’t just avoid her. She pauses, brought up short, trying not to look at the muggleborn. She mumbles something nearly incoherent in the kind of choked voice that any girl can recognize as one in the midst of a breakdown. Most girls, Daphne knows, would step kindly aside with a gracious expression and a soft commiseration.

Granger grabs Daphne roughly by her shoulders, half shaking her. “What did he do?” she asks urgently. “Daphne, I’m so sorry! I’ll talk to him. I swear, he isn’t usually this bad. He’s been absolutely awful to everybody.”

The absurdity of Potter’s best friend standing in front of her, mortally offended by his supposed wrongdoing causes Daphne to let loose a burbly little laugh. “Oh no,” Daphne says, sniffing mightily. “This time, it was all me.”

Granger frowns, not sure what to make of that, and Daphne brushes past her, not rudely. Her face is as red as a Weasley, and her nose is stoppered, and her eyes burning. She wants to get to the restroom and fix herself up, and then she wants to get to her dorm and collapse into her pillow and cry all over again. 

Daphne pauses, though, just on the edge of the library’s threshold, and turns back around. Granger looks at her curiously, worry plain on her face. “You’re a good friend, Granger. Better than he deserves.” Silently, and without preamble, Daphne pulls a loaf of bread from her bag and hands it to her. “Thanks.”

“Oh!” Granger cries, hastening to take it from her. She holds it out from her, entirely uncertain what to do. “Er, thanks. I mean? You’re welcome?”

Daphne smiles at her and leaves.

Chapter Text

Daphne throws herself headlong into her studies. Marriage contracts and martyr complexes and stupid, stupid boys be damned, it is still her O.W.L. year. The end of year exams loom on the horizon like the hangman’s noose. Umbridge’s lessons may be worth less than the Ministry approved paper they’re printed on, but none of the rest of her Professors are slackers. If anything, they seem to be making up for her lack. Snape and McGonagall especially run tighter ships than ever they have before, making use of every minute. Snape even forgoes the customary denouncement of Gryffindor efforts, not wanting to waste the time on it, and, in fact, had even scolded Draco for trying to do so himself. It’s a busy two weeks that passes between that horrid argument in the library and now. Daphne keeps her nose in her books and does her level best to put Harry Potter out of her mind.

Which isn’t to say, of course, that she succeeds. The whole school is talking about him. Umbridge hands him detentions like candy. The Prophet has his name in it at least three times a week. She shares classes with him, passes him in the halls, and spies him in large gatherings during Hogsmeade weekends. Gatherings that she isn’t a part of — which makes her angrier and more sullen than she prefers. Harry Potter is everywhere she looks. 

Daphne wonders if it had been this way before the contract. Is it the awareness of him and his existence, so prevalent in her mind, that has caused her to tune herself to the frequency with which he is mentioned in the halls of Hogwarts? Probably. His name had been everywhere and on every lip last year as well, but Daphne can’t recall losing any sleep over it.

She’s losing sleep now, though. In her bed at night with the curtains drawn is the one place she can’t run away from the thoughts that plague her. The thoughts of marriage and Potter and the cold, empty life she may have to suffer through if he never pulls his head out of his ass. During the day, she can hide in books, essays, and homework. In the routine of classes. In hanging out with Tracey and Astoria. In her experiments with bread making with the house elves (her mother had sent her a sourdough starter last week). But at night, all she can think of is him. It robs her of sleep for hours at a time as she replays their conversations, painting him with wide brushstrokes as the villain and victim of her emotions in equal measures. Daphne thinks of what she could have said differently; indeed, what she should have said differently. Telling him how she respects the mass murdering megalomaniac who had taken his parents from him had probably not won her any points in the long term. 

Round and round it goes, a spiral of dark thoughts that carry her into the deepest recesses of her heart and mind, where nothing makes sense. She feels guilty for the things she’s said to him, and then angry that she feels guilty, feeling that she is entirely in the right, and then guilty all over again for feeling like that . It’s a vicious cycle. She tries to shut it out by humming tunes to herself or mentally reciting recipes for focaccia that she wants to try, but more often than not, she gives up and turns back to the only thing that distracts her. She’s gotten good at dimming her wandlight enough to read her textbooks by without disturbing her roommates. 

Tonight, Daphne spends the better part of the night reading about abstract theories of mass distortion in high level transfiguration until she falls asleep into the book somewhere around two am. When she wakes up, she’s uncomfortable. Her position is awkward; in her sleep, she’d accommodated the bulk of her textbook and twists irregularly around it, searching for what comfort she can find. Blinking awake, she groans, rubbing at her stiff neck.

Her eyes catch on a folded piece of paper on her nightstand. Daphne frowns, wondering if she had offended one of her dormmates with her late night studying, but she doubts it. Pansy would make snide remarks at the bathroom counter the next morning, Millicent would avoid the confrontation entirely, and Tracey would throw a pillow at her, cursing. Daphne reaches for the paper and unfolds it in the thin rays of murky, lake light spilling through her drapes.

Fourth floor, he’s written in a tremendously messy hand. Tonight, after dinner. The room we met before. Please.

“Huh,” Daphne says succinctly. She puts the note back on her nightstand, pushes her textbook to the floor and goes back to sleep.

Later, at an hour more reasonable to being awake, Daphne reads the note again, confirming that it hadn’t been a dream. She mulls it over, tapping the folded paper against the palm of her hand rhythmically. Getting out of bed, she makes sure that Pansy and Millicent are away on their own adventures and then calls Astoria and Tracey together to show them what she’d found.

“Ooooh,” Tracey says, smiling salaciously. “Secret note. That’s sexy.”

“Tracey!” Daphne admonishes her, gesturing towards Astoria.

Astoria looks around, like Daphne may be speaking about someone else. “I’m thirteen!” she protests.

“Exactly,” Daphne grouses.

Astoria rolls her eyes, looking rather exactly like Daphne when she does, and Tracey laughs. 

“How’d he get it in here?” Astoria wonders.

It’s a good question. Daphne doesn’t know. She shares a dorm with Tracey, Millicent, and Pansy. The latter two aren’t likely to do Potter any favors, and while Daphne can believe that Tracey would do so, she seems as genuinely puzzled by the note’s appearance as Daphne does. The timing of its appearance is conspicuous, as well. It hadn’t been there when she’d finally fallen asleep. Someone had been in her room overnight.

It discomforts her. But to Astoria, she only shrugs, acting blasé. “Guess I’ll ask him tonight.”

Tracey fixes her with a serious look. “You want me to come with you?”

Daphne snorts. “It’s Potter. He’s not going to hurt me.” Tracey frowns at her, no doubt remembering how hurt she had come back from her last interaction with her intended. Daphne understands, and she appreciates the sentiment. Somehow, though, she doesn’t expect that witnesses will do her relationship with the Boy-Who-Lived any favors. “I’ll be fine.”

Tracey doesn’t look like she entirely believes her, but she lets it lie.

“What about me?” Astoria pipes up. “I wanna meet my future brother-in-law.”

We might kill each other before you get the chance to, Daphne thinks sourly, but she keeps the thought to herself. Daphne’s kept the details of her and Potter’s meetings between herself and Tracey, wanting to spare Astoria any ill impression of Potter. Because, whatever the boy wants to say to the contrary about dying and how she shouldn’t worry about it, they are going to be married in no more than three years. It ticks closer every day. 

She and Potter will spend the rest of their lives together. She doesn’t want to curdle his relationship with her little sister before it even begins. Astoria tends to hold grudges.

“Probably best I go alone,” she defers, smirking at her and booping her on the nose. “Little sisters tend to spoil the mood.”

“Hey!” Astoria complains, rubbing at her nose. 

“Boy, do they,” Tracey smiles smugly. Daphne glares at her, but it only sends her into peals of laughter again, Astoria with her.

Daphne smiles despite herself.

~•~

‘After dinner’ is a vague and nascent time by which to plan a meeting, and Daphne considers punishing him for it. Ultimately, though, she determines to eat her dinner quickly and make her way to the fourth floor whilst the majority of the rest of the school is still in the Great Hall. Purposefully, she doesn’t check the Gryffindor table to see whether or not Potter is still there when she leaves. It feels in the spirit of his clandestine note to play up the secrecy of it all. And, anyway, Daphne thinks it rather fun.

The stairs are kind to her and without any delays, she makes it to the fourth floor rather quickly. Daphne finds the door to the classroom they’d had the first of their unpleasant interactions in, slips inside and closes it behind her. The room is as she remembers, cluttered and unusually clean. Someone’s been in here since last they were here, though. Probably the Weasley Twins, if she is to judge by the immature joke scribbled in messy handwriting on the slate chalkboard.

Daphne puts her bag down by the door and wanders over to the pulpit she’d distracted herself with before.

“Thanks for coming.”

Daphne screams. It’s a proper, full throated one, and she raises her hand to her heart like a grandma’am. She is breathing heavily all of the sudden, heart rate spiking and eyes darting. She looks around the room wildly. At first there is nothing, and then there is Potter.

“Bloody hell, ” she complains.

In the rich burgundy of a velvet cloak, he winces. Whether in embarrassment or at the still heightened pitch of her voice, she cannot tell. “Sorry.” 

“How-” she begins and then gives up. “Where did you come from!?” The room had been empty when she’d arrived. She’s certain of it.

He smiles. Really smiles, in a way that belies the mischief she’s heard so many stories about. Grasping the hood of his cloak, he throws it over his head, and in the course of the same motion, vanishes entirely. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says from nowhere. There’s humor in his voice, at which she cuts her eyes, but the sentiment seems genuine.

Daphne gapes. An invisibility cloak? Rare. Exceedingly expensive. Heavily regulated. “Where did you get that?” she demands. 

Potter reappears, and she’s oddly thankful that he’s in the same place he’d vanished from. He is still smiling. “Family heirloom,” he explains. “My father left it to me.”

Impossible, she wants to say. Invisibility cloaks have a lifespan of two years. Three, if they’re exceptionally well made. To have one that still functions after fifteen years? Yet, there he stands, here one moment and gone the next, beneath the veil of his father’s cloak. Incredible.

A little infuriating. “That’s how you got the note into my room,” she realizes in a flash. Another realization comes just after it. “Wait, you were in my room!?”

Her tone is sharp, accusatory, and mildly violated. He blanches. “Er,” he responds dumbly. His hands twitch, like he’s fighting the reflex to hold them up in surrender. “Just for a minute. Just to give you the note!”

Daphne considers him with a harsh glare, judging the fifteen year old boy in front of her for all the imagined offenses he may commit, safe behind the shroud of total invisibility. He holds her gaze, though, and while he looks embarrassed, he doesn’t look ashamed. She nods once, sharply. “Okay. Fine. Just don’t,” Daphne holds the word, shivering a little, “do that again.”

He nods rapidly, over and over. “Yeah. Sorry. Er, again.”

Daphne shakes herself free from the unpleasant suppositions as to Potter’s perversion. “Why all the secrecy, anyway?”

Her question pours over the room like a bucket of ice water, sobering her intended in an instant. Potter sighs. “I wasn’t wrong, Greengrass. About keeping things quiet. Being around me is dangerous. People get hurt.” He works his jaw, his eyes seeming to sink into his face beneath the weight of things only he can see. “People die.”

She gets a flash of a memory she doesn’t think she’ll ever forget. Potter, beaten and bloody in his Triwizard jersey, sobbing and clinging like an infant to the limp body of his competitor. She frowns and makes a conscious choice to stow away some of the obstinate anger on her face. She thinks that, perhaps, she should try to remember that the contract is far from the only thing on Potter’s mind these days. “Yeah,” she says, in lieu of anything else to respond with. “Okay. You wanted to keep things quiet, then. Just between us.”

Half his mouth manages to tilt up in a smile that makes lighter the weight of his expression. “The cloak’s handy for that,” he tells her, like he’s confiding something she couldn’t have known. Or guessed. Daphne watches him wrestle with something, briefly. She finds it a little fascinating the way his jaw firms just a second before he speaks; his decision made. “If you ever want to, er, borrow it. The cloak, I mean. You just have to ask.”

Daphne raises both her eyebrows, too shocked by half to maintain the composure of her stern expression. 

He shrugs. “It’ll be your family too. One day.”

Daphne ducks her head to hide her smile, not certain yet whether or not he deserves it. It’s the first time since it all began that he’s acknowledged the inevitability of their partnership. Despite the bad blood, Daphne thinks that, that feels very good.

“Okay,” she says, when she’s wrested control of her face back. “Thanks.” Certainly, she can think of an opportunity or two to take him up on that offer.

“Thank you,” he insists. Red dusts his cheeks like the harbinger of a sunrise. “For coming, I mean.”

Daphne shrugs. “It’s the first time you’ve reached out to me. ” She can’t resist cutting him, a little, for his actions. She is pleased to see the way he takes it in stride, swallowing a lump of shame and nodding.

“I wanted to apologize.”

Perhaps Daphne had hoped for such a thing when first she’d read the note and throughout the day, in anticipation of this meeting. Idly and without real thought. Potter has, bluntly, been absolutely awful. Daphne deserves this apology and more, and she’s happy to have had her tiny little fancy confirmed. She wants to gloat a little bit. Stick her nose in the air and glare at him and make bitchy ‘ go on ’ motions with her hand.

Instead, she hears herself say, “Yeah, me too.”

Potter seems surprised at her interjection, stumbling over what is probably the beginning of a nicely rehearsed apology. “Oh,” he says, and then rallies in his purpose. “Er, you were right. I was a git. I should have talked to you. Or tried.”

“Yeah,” she nods. Daphne hugs herself, finding it suddenly difficult to look at him. Why had yelling been easier? “And I shouldn’t have said some of the things I said before.” She takes a deep breath and manages to find his eyes. “It was cruel.”

He nods, expression a little tighter than before. Probably remembering the cruel things in question. But his voice is soft and meaningful when he asks her, “Can we start over, do you think?”

Does she? She doesn’t know. A lot’s been said and even more felt. Daphne’s had months to nurture a bitterness for his inaction, and then weeks to stew in the unpleasant aftermath of their tumultuous interactions. Can she put it behind her as if it never happened? Probably not, she determines. But probably, it isn’t about whether or not she can. It’s about whether or not she will.

“Yeah,” she nods, and the grin that breaks across his face is as radiant as the sun. Quite against her will, she feels herself grinning back.

“Great!” he cries breathlessly. “I’m Harry!”

She snorts. “Daphne,” she says, like he doesn’t know.

“It’s nice to meet you.” He pulls a folded slip of paper from his pocket. “Do you wanna join a club?”

It’s so jarring a non-sequitur that it takes her a minute to catch up. “What?” she says stupidly, the word cottoned by laughter.

Potter looks sheepish, running a hand through his already wild hair. “Don’t tell Hermione, but you’re kind of the reason it exists.” He hands her the paper. “I wasn’t going to do it. But that thing you said. About me giving up.” He shrugs, embarrassed. “It reminded me that I shouldn’t.”

Daphne feels remarkably touched by that. She isn’t sure exactly what he means, but it’s touching, nonetheless. She unfolds the paper, reads over it in a few short seconds and then favors him with a lightly ridiculing expression. “Seriously?” She turns the paper around to show him, as if he might not be familiar with the words written upon it. “ Dumbledore’s Army? ”

Potter looks at her innocently. “What?”

She rolls her eyes. “What is this, Potter?”

“A defense club,” he explains. His face darkens a little as he continues. “Umbridge is rubbish. Worse than. Hermione and me, we started it to teach the things that she won’t teach us. Practical magic. Defensive magic. To help people with their exams. And to teach them how to defend themselves.”

Daphne nods her way through his explanation. “Who’s teaching it, then? You?” She doesn’t really mean it to come out as mocking as it does. She’s fortunate, though, that Potter only seems to find it amusing.

“So Hermione says.” He shrugs. “Really, I think we’ll mostly all be teaching each other.”

“Why me?” She thinks she knows, but she’s curious what he’ll say.

He proves her right. “You’re my fiancée,” he tells her. “You should be able to defend yourself.”

“Who says I can’t?”

Potter shrugs and, surprisingly quick on his feet, tells her, “If you can, you should help to show other people how to.” The genuineness with which he says it, as if it’s the obvious thing to do, makes her a little wary. She should remember, probably, how much of a Gryffindor her intended has proven to be. “Will you join?”

Daphne considers the paper, chewing her lip. “Is it true you can cast the Patronus charm?”

Harry ducks his head, laughing. “Luna asked the same thing.” He shakes his head. “What is it about that one?”

She cocks her hip, arching an eyebrow at him. “Do you have any idea how difficult that charm is?”

She sees it, the way the denial rises reflexively up his throat. He’s about to defer, about to say some tripe about how it’s nothing really. She watches, too, as he meets her eye and swallows the reflex. “Yeah,” he says, instead.

Daphne almost smiles. But she holds back. Instead, she keeps her face fixed into a carefully doubtful expression and nods at him. “Go on, then.”

He sighs. “Really?”

She holds up the slip. “You want me to join this?” She waits, and he nods. Daphne gestures at him again. “Expecto Patronum.”

He shakes his head again but takes his wand out obligingly. Only, when it’s in his hand and the incantation is on his lips, he hesitates. A frown creases his whole face, pinching his brow, and pulling at his lips.

Daphne tilts her head. “What is it?”

He looks at her quickly, shuffling. He looks embarrassed. “I haven’t,” he says falteringly. “I haven’t cast it since…Cedric. I don’t- I’m not sure I still can.”

Her heart aches a little to hear the quiet desperation in his voice. The pain of a wound that isn’t even really scabbed over. She wants, for a moment, to lay a hand on him in support. Daphne doesn’t think they’re there yet, though. Probably, they should get through the conversation without yelling at each other before she makes any such grand gestures. Instead, she tells him, “You won’t know until you try.”

Potter looks at her, perhaps waiting for a better piece of encouragement. She only looks at him expectantly, though, and after a moment he nods to himself. He sweeps his arm in a wide arc that gestures to the whole room and says confidently, “ Expecto Patronum. ”

Silvery blue threads, like water following in the wake of his wand, spill through the air. A torrent of light that floods the room, brightening it to that of day until, loosed by the flick of his wrist at the apex of his cast, they tumble down like fast falling snow, coalescing into a form larger than either of them. Sinewy legs support a muscled frame and the oblong head of a gorgeous stag, the tips of its many pointed antlers brushing the low ceiling of the classroom and leaving eddies of that same light in the stone. It takes Daphne’s breath away. More beautiful than ever she imagined, and tremendously more impressive than she had given it credit, even in her mind.

Her father can cast the Patronus charm, and her mother too. But theirs aren’t corporeal like Harry’s. They aren’t this beautiful, beautiful thing of wonder.

The stag throws its head, the light of its existence splashing against the ceiling, only to coalesce back into the proper shape when it gives her a polite bow. Daphne hears herself giggle.

“Prongs,” Harry tells her.

“Prongs,” she echoes. And, as if it were a real animal, she holds out her hand in offering. “Hi, Prongs.”

The stag moves right by her hand, though, in favor of her cheek, which he nuzzles with the round of his nose. Where the light touches her, she feels a fuzzy kind of warmth, like the way her skin buzzes after an afternoon in the summer sun. She lifts her fingers to touch her cheek where the Patronus has blessed her.

Harry flicks his wand again, and the stag fades slowly from the world. She is sad to see it go.

“That was beautiful,” she tells him.

“Will you join?” he asks.

“Yes.”

Another grin splits his face. It makes her feel, for a moment, just as warm as the Patronus had. “Excellent!” he exclaims. “Thank you!”

She nods. Daphne still feels giddy from the experience, but she’s coming back to herself. Potter’s mood is a little infectious, though. She lets it buoy her. “Can I bring others?”

He nods. “Yeah, of course.” He gestures at the slip in her hand. “They’ll need to sign the paper, though. Hermione’s charmed it so no one can give up what we’re doing to Umbridge. Who did you want to bring?”

Daphne considers pausing on the matter of how, exactly, Granger had charmed the paper. But his question is more important. “My sister, Astoria, if you’re accepting third years. And Tracey Davis.”

He nods, eyes tightening as he tries to put faces to their names. “Of course. Everyone’s welcome. Davis…” He says her name like he’s trying to summon her. Or the image of her. Daphne isn’t surprised. As little interaction as she and Potter have had, he’s had even less with Tracey. 

She explains. “She’s in our year. My best friend.” Daphne hesitates. But, well, it will be his family too one day. “And my sister.”

He looks at her quickly, surprise etched across his face.

“My half-sister,” Daphne says.

“She’s a half-blood.”

“So are you.”

“Yeah, but,” he trails off. “Er, I mean, how did that happen?”

She smirks. “Well, when a man and a woman love each other very much-”

“Greengrass!” Potter complains.

She laughs. “Truth is, love had nothing to do with it. Just my father being a man.” Potter seems to take a second-hand offense to the insinuation. “He became enamored with a muggle woman early in his marriage. It never really meant anything. He liked her well enough, but didn’t love her. He loves Tracey, though. As much as me or Astoria. She’s my older sister. By two months.”

“Yikes,” Potter says succinctly, and Daphne snorts.

“Yeah.” Daphne rubs her arm, suddenly anxious for having told him anything at all. It’s a big thing she’s just said; more than just her secret. Not really hers at all, even. Maybe it was his willingness to share his family cloak. Maybe it was the Patronus. Probably, it was the Patronus. “Don’t tell anyone, please. Not even Granger or Weasley. It’d be…embarrassing. As far as anyone else knows, she’s just my friend. A half-blood the Greengrasses sponsor for charity points.”

He shakes his head. “I won’t,” he promises. “Tracey, though, does she get on with your family? Your mother?” He sounds oddly worried about it.

Daphne nods assuringly. “My mother loves her. Not at first, I’m told. But after it became clear that the affair was over and that dad just wanted to take care of his daughters — both of them — she treated Tracey just like one of her own. She and Evelyn — Tracey’s mom — are best friends.”

“That’s,” he says slowly, “an interesting dynamic.”

Daphne shrugs. “Family,” she says, like it explains everything.

She thinks it rather does.

They stand there together, the conversation lulling. It’s the first time such a silence hasn’t felt strained, and Daphne enjoys it. Enjoys too that Potter hadn’t thought to render any judgment on her father’s infidelity. Or the secrecy with which it had been shrouded. His only response had been to commiserate. 

Hope for him yet, she thinks.

“You know,” Potter says slowly, hesitantly catching her eye and giving her a small smile. “I won’t ever do that to you. When it’s us, it’s us.”

Daphne smiles and for the first time tonight, lets him see it unencumbered. It’s an easy thing to say, she knows, at fifteen in an empty classroom when it’s just the two of them and they haven’t so much as held hands. But it’s still nice. The nicest thing he’s said so far.

“Well, of course not,” she tells him, manhandling her grin into a smirk more appropriate to their burgeoning dynamic. She finds his eye and watches it reflect the glint in her own. “That’d be grounds for divorce.”

He laughs. She thinks it’s a nice sound.

Chapter Text

The first meeting that Daphne attends, Tracey and Astoria in tow, ends up being the second meeting of the DA. (The acronym is the most she can stomach. She refuses to even think a name so embarrassing as Dumbledore's Army ). She doesn't know if Potter had wanted to iron out the kinks in his plan before inviting her to join or if he wanted to try his hand at teaching so that he wouldn't embarrass himself in front of her. Maybe neither of these. Maybe he just needed more time to work up the courage to apologize to her.

The DA is...nice. In all the ways she can mean. It's nice to watch Potter in his element. She would never have pegged him as a teacher, but with only a little corrective guidance from Granger and the imminently vocal feedback of the Weasleys, he flourishes under the attention of his class. Whatever he had tried to say to her in their classroom a few nights ago, he is the one doing the teaching. It's nice to spend time with so large a group of people. Slytherin House is insular by nature, and Daphne rarely speaks to anyone other than Tracey, Astoria, and her roommates when the need demands it. The other members of the DA are painfully nice, such that she has to resist glaring and rolling her eyes at them on more than one occasion. She and her sisters are the only Slytherins present, and it's patently obvious that the amalgamated group of Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs, and Ravenclaws don't quite know how to act around them.

Or, at least, around her. Tracey and Astoria seem to flourish the larger the crowd gets. Astoria makes fast friends with the Weaslette, and Tracey with just about everyone she opens her mouth to. They rather leave Daphne behind, in truth. She is forced to smile tightly and make awkward small talk with people she doesn't know, not even half as good at making friends as her two sisters are. It's a little annoying, actually.

Potter is there, though. For someone who claims to want to keep their relationship a secret, he always seems to find a reason to be near her during meetings. Whether just to stand nearby while assisting another of his students or to pay her an inordinately large amount of attention. More than once, she watches Granger course correct him, steering him towards one of the younger years with a whispered word that only he can hear. Weasley covers for him, too, telling his brothers loud and often enough so that people will overhear that he’s just trying to make sure the Slytherins feel welcome.

It’s oddly touching, watching the three of them work together like the well oiled machine the stories say they are. It had been a major point of drama last year, their breakup. Everyone had been convinced, herself included, that Potter and Weasley had called it quits. There’s no evidence of that divide here, though. They laugh easily with one another, and always seem to know what the other needs. Potter and Granger are inseparable; practically joined at the hip. Daphne would think that she needs to be worried if it weren’t obvious how patently platonic the two are. Like siblings. Never mind the shy glances she catches Granger throwing at Weasley when she thinks that no one will notice.

Daphne supposes that she and Tracey are the same. They’ve known each other since birth, and share a camaraderie that most will never have. Still, it’s different for Potter and his friends. She’s certain of it. The Golden Trio seem motivated by a purpose. Something drew them together ahead of their time, something palpable and powerful. If she lets it, it makes her feel like a bit of an outsider. But that’s an unfair way to think about her relationship with a boy she’s only really spoken to three times.

Granger and Weasley make time for her as well, albeit not as obviously as Potter. The DA meets once or twice a week. Attendance isn’t mandatory, and people often drop in and out according to their own availability. But Daphne has been to every meeting, and Potter’s friends use the opportunity to get to know her where such a thing won’t be questioned by the wrong people. Whether or not they agree with Potter’s read on the whole ‘safety’ situation, they’re going along with it.

Granger, especially, makes a point of partnering with her whenever she gets the chance. Daphne is grateful for that. Tracey is often busy making friends and finding new people to flirt with. (She’s become particularly fond of seeing if she can get Fred Weasley’s face to match his hair.) Granger is an excellent dueling partner, more knowledgeable than Potter in the theory and a glad hand at the practical besides. When Potter is lecturing on any given spell he wants them to practice, she’ll often lean in to slyly whisper an embarrassing story about him and the spell in question. Like the time he kept smacking himself in the face by accioing books. Daphne laughs and not just at the stories but the situation.

The Greengrasses aren’t blood purists — Tracey is proof enough of that. But they certainly don’t discourage the idea that they are. Tracey’s connection to the family is a carefully cultivated one, meant to inculcate Lord Greengrass to the light and make him seem like he’s getting one over on them at the same time. What might the likes of Draco and Pansy think to see her sharing a private joke with a Muggleborn? Daphne snorts. If they even think at all.

Weasley is there too, though her interactions with him are notably different than with the other two. Where Potter and Granger have been more than willing to begin to let down their walls and invite her in, Weasley keeps his firmly up. She’d called him a watchdog before, mostly as a way to get under Potter’s skin, but she sees now that she hadn’t been wrong. He is fiercely protective, and frequently asks her pointed questions about Potter and about the Dark Lord. He asks about blood purity and Slytherin House. When it’s quiet enough that no one will hear, he asks about the contract. Weasley is gauging her loyalties and not being remotely subtle about doing so.

Daphne answers him honestly, which he seems to appreciate, even if her answers aren’t always what he wants to hear.

He isn’t rude about it. Quite to the contrary, he’s unbearably nice. Pureblood etiquette pours out of his mouth as well or better than any of the families she had grown up attending parties and balls with. It is easy to forget, sometimes, that the Weasleys are members of the Sacred Twenty-Eight as well. He is especially kind to Astoria, whom he takes a fast liking to and who likes him in kind. He laughs easily at her jokes, far more so than he does either hers or Tracey’s, and Daphne thinks that he often forgets entirely that Astoria is a Slytherin.

Once, in the quiet hours after a meeting when those who wished to stay behind in the Room of Requirements simply to hang out, Weasley had asked Daphne to play a game of chess. She had been thoroughly trounced. Then, Astoria had flounced into her seat and demanded the same. She had been beaten too, but afterwards, he’d asked her to play again. Another loss for Astoria, though not nearly so total a loss as Daphne had suffered. Weasley had smiled and complimented her and told her to play him again in the future. Then, he’d gotten up, clapped Potter on the shoulder and asked him, so softly that Daphne had barely managed to hear, “Sure you’re marrying the right one?”

Potter had shoved him, and Daphne had smiled.

~•~

Harry feels fulfilled in a way that he rarely ever has. In all his life, the satisfaction of a job well done has only ever really been something he ascribes to Quidditch. There are odd exceptions. He had felt accomplished when he’d protected the Philosopher’s Stone. Accomplished when he saved Ginny from the Basilisk and Riddle. Accomplished when he cast his first Patronus charm and accomplished when he outflew the dragon. But those were isolated, one-off moments of no real merit by which to look for true satisfaction. Only the sweat and toil of a long practice on the pitch or the bruises and sore muscles of a hard fought chase for the snitch has ever left him feeling like he does now.

Now, he leaves every DA meeting feeling that way. It’s heady and unfamiliar; so much so that at first he doesn’t trust it. He’s been terribly miserable since Cedric’s death. For a while, the happiness he feels at the end of a meeting feels almost like a betrayal. Harry does manage to shake it off, though, with consistent effort and Ron and Hermione’s encouragement.

Harry enjoys the DA more than ever he thought he would. He apologizes to Hermione profusely for his obstinance in starting it, which she accepts graciously and with a smile. It isn’t just the rebelliousness of the whole affair or the spiteful way he’s always loved to get one over on the cruel and powerful. He likes it for more than just the big reasons. The little things are even better, really. He likes talking to people. It’s news to him. All his life, it’s just been him, Ron, and Hermione.

But the DA is a group two dozens strong. He knows all their names, how they talk and what kind of jokes they make. Who is liable to cause trouble and who’s just as likely to put a stop to it without his or Hermione or Ron’s interference. He knows who’s going to be too shy to ask their question when he’s giving the initial lecture. He knows how long it’s going to take for them to master a new spell and how to encourage them to keep trying when they don’t. It takes Harry three weeks and a dedicated conversation with Hermione to really get it. 

He likes teaching.

It’s a surprising revelation. Harry has never considered teaching. When he thinks of his future, he’s always envisioned himself as an Auror. It has only ever made sense, though he struggles to figure why now. Perhaps it’s just the lifetime of dark wizards dogging his every step that led him to believe that fighting dark wizards is all he could ever be good at.

But he’s good at teaching. Hermione tells him so, and if there’s anything she wouldn’t lie about, it’s this. The amazing thing, though, is that Harry doesn’t even need her to tell him. He knows he’s good. He can see and feel it in the way the DA responds to him, in how they learn and grow and better themselves. In how they come to master new things better, one skill building on another. Harry is good at teaching, and the thought scares him a little because he doesn’t know what to do with it. Auror had been easy. Graduate, join the Ministry, fight dark wizards until one of them kills him. Probably Voldemort.

He hadn’t thought of that vision of his future darkly. It had simply been the natural progression of his life, as far as he could tell. Things are different now, though. Teaching is fun and, the odd magical mishap aside, quite safe. He thinks quietly to himself that he may want to do it one day. In earnest. Harry doesn’t know what that means, really. He doesn’t know what grades he needs or where in Britain there is to teach other than Hogwarts. He doesn’t know if Hogwarts is hiring or what they’d ask him to teach if they were. But it’s a future. A real one. And Harry’s been thinking about his future a lot lately.

“I deserve better,” she’d said. He thinks about it almost every day. It’s odd feeling so obligated to a person he barely knows. Probably, if he were normal, there would be steps to take in between having their first pleasant conversation and figuring out how to bring home the bacon. But he isn’t normal, and neither is their situation. They’re going to be married. No question marks about it. So, taking that at face value, the next question is what that’s going to be like.

Harry has only a vague understanding of marriage. He’s only really had three examples. One is a fairy tale, told to him often and with varying embellishments by the people who knew his parents. That they had been so, so in love. That they had never fought. That there had never been a bad day. He doesn’t know if he believes it. Another is his Aunt and Uncle’s relationship. It’s…real, if nothing else. They’re horrid people and awful to even imagine modeling something after, but they do love another. How could they not? Harry doesn’t know how their marriage works, exactly, but he’s certain he wants his to work differently. The last is Arthur and Molly Weasley’s. It’s by far his best and certainly the most realistic example. They love each other dearly — certainly, with seven children, they must — and play off one another brilliantly. They cover for one another’s faults, help each other and shine a light on the other’s best features. And though there’s arguments and disagreements, they always seem to come back to one another just as in love and just as happy. Harry thinks he could enjoy a marriage like that.

Though, he thinks slyly, Greengrass probably wouldn’t like being compared to Mrs. Weasley.

He’s been watching her a lot lately. Too much, according to Hermione, but he can’t really help it. Part of the reason he’d invited her to the DA had been to spend time with her. Or at least around her. He’s doing better than he was before, thanks to her heavy handed encouragement and the real joy that the DA brings him. It puts him in a better, more productive mindset about the whole situation, and the thought he keeps coming back to is that he wants to know what his fiancée is like. So he watches her. Talks to her when he can. Pokes her sisters for the details he can get away with asking for in public. Asks Ron and Hermione to report on her like some kind of megalomaniacal spymaster. It’s a little embarrassing, honestly, but by the parameters of his own rules, he can’t approach her too overtly. They don’t have the space to date. Harry isn’t wrong. Voldemort and his followers present too great a danger to her for that. He settles, instead, for what he can learn from observation and second hand knowledge.

He learns that her favorite color is teal. He learns that she’s more than just good at potions, she’s bloody amazing at it. He learns that she likes terribly written action thrillers that she buys at muggle convenience stores, and that, thanks to Tracey, she has a great appreciation for the musical stylings of Billy Joel. He learns that the bread she makes is apparently delicious and that he should never turn down an opportunity to eat some. He learns that he’s being weird and that, really, he should just ask her these things. Or, so Astoria says.

She’s right, of course. And it bothers him that he can’t do just that. Maybe he’s being obstinate or stubborn or stupid. Ron and Hermione certainly seem to think so, judging by the raised eyebrows and the heavy glances they trade. Harry doesn’t know. He thinks he’s in the right. She sleeps in a dorm with the likes of Draco Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson. Crabbe and Goyle. The Carrow twins. People whose parents had been in the graveyard. People who didn’t just dislike or hate him because of his muggleborn mother.

People who wanted to hurt him. To kill him. People who wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to the ones he cares about.

And he does care about Daphne. It doesn’t take him any longer than a few days after he stops pretending otherwise for him to realize it. He’d started caring for her the moment the goblin had told him she was his fiancée. For Harry, it really is as simple as all that. Whether now or in three years, she’s going to be family. And if she’s going to be, then she is. Like Sirius, his opinion of whom had changed in the course of an hour. Like the DA, who had wormed their way into his heart just like he knew they would.

He hopes that one day, he’ll have all the opportunities he wants to approach her safely. To ask her on a date and make a real go at a relationship and a marriage. She deserves that, and so does he. A family, after all, is all Harry has ever wanted. This is sure to be an unconventional one. But it doesn’t have to be any less real. The thought makes him smile and gives him the courage and the strength he needs to wait. Wait for that opportunity to come. Wait for the world to be safer. Wait, as the DA and their life at Hogwarts and their kindly meddling friends draw them closer and closer together.

It will all be worth it. Of that, at least, he’s fairly sure.

Chapter Text

Every day, Daphne tells herself that Hogwarts cannot possibly get any colder, and every day it does. Time waddles on, and Daphne waddles with it in a burgundy parka with a thick, fur collar that all but buries her face in fluff when the hood is up. October surrenders to November. The winter holidays approach, and it’s all anyone can think of. Daphne walks between her classes with her mittened hands in her pockets, muttering darkly and missing home.

The Glade — the ancestral home of the Greengrasses — inhabits a tiny patch of land, enchanted to hell and back by generations of witches and wizards who understand the necessity of comfort. It maintains an agreeable, temperate climate year round, fluctuating in the hottest and coldest months to ‘uncomfortable’ at the very worst. The wards can even be fiddled with, just enough to let in a little aesthetic snow. Contemporaries have called the Greengrasses control freaks. Daphne rather likes to think they’re just correct.

Hogwarts has no such protections, though. At least, the grounds and the vast majority of the hallways and classrooms don’t. Really, only the common rooms and dorms as far as she’s aware. Year after year, Daphne never fails to feel a little miserable about it. November is her least favorite month — the long, exhausting inhale before the well-earned sigh of relief that is the winter holidays and her return to the Glade. 

She can be grateful for the Common Room, at least. And is, frequently. “Distilled vigor,” she tells the innocuous wall in the dungeons. She wonders how much work the prefects put in every year to finding new and creative ways to make “pureblood” the password to their Common Room. She doesn’t look forward at all to when Draco and Pansy are the seventh year prefects and choosing the passwords. Probably, she’ll have to stomach saying ‘mudblood’ just to open the damn door.

She steps through and feels instantaneously stifled in her heavy jacket. It feels wonderful. She sheds the heavy garment on the many hooked coat rack next to the Common Room door. It bulges with jackets and scarves and coats but always seems to have room for one more.

The Common Room is quiet, but for the gathered masses of fifth and seventh years, huddling together for academic warmth. November at Hogwarts is usually characterized by a gestalt apathy towards schoolwork, all eyes looking forward to the winter holidays with giddy excitement. It is the same this year, but neither the fifth years (who will be sitting for their O.W.L.s at the end of the year) nor the seventh years (who will be sitting for their N.E.W.T.s) have the luxury of paying even a little less attention to their studies. She spies most of her yearmates around the room in varying degrees of studiousness. Draco and most of his entourage are huddled around the notice board, muttering excitedly about something. Probably Quidditch. Blase Zabini and Theodore Nott are playing a makeshift game of wizard’s chess, wherein rather than being destroyed, the pieces  have been coached to ask them an exam question when taken. Tracey, on one of the couches near the fire, has given up on her Charms essay in favor of trying to balance her quill on her nose. Daphne heads over to her.

“Look!” Tracey cries excitedly, pointing with both fingers at the quill wobbling uncertainly on her face. “Look, look, look!”

Daphne swipes it off her with the back of her hand.

“ Ah! ” Tracey cries and then sits up with a surly expression on her face. “Bitch.”

Daphne smiles at her sweetly.

They settle quickly into the flow of independent study shared with a friend. Tracey returns to her Charms essay with apologies to it, as if she may have offended it with her antics. Daphne draws up all of the resources she needs for her potions assignments. It isn’t the class that needs the majority of her attention, but it is the class she loves and cares about most.

They quietly scribble together, sighing through their noses at the esotery on the pages of their textbooks for perhaps twenty or so minutes. Then, they’re interrupted.

“Greengrass!” Draco saunters over, bereft for once of his hangers-on. He’s wearing a real smile — not one of the simpering ones he puts on when he’s pretending he’s half as frightening as his father is — and so she is inclined to give him a few minutes of conversation. “Did you see? The new Decree?”

The tink, tink, tink of Filch’s hammer into the increasingly porous mortar of the Entrance Hall has become so much white noise. Daphne hardly notices it anymore, but to pause occasionally and wonder at what trivial annoyance Umbridge has ‘outlawed’ now. Perhaps whistling in the halls or ties that are too wide? Whatever it is, the Weasley twins will have already found a way to turn it into a new brand of rebellious prank to play upon the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor.

Daphne shakes her head. “No.” She finishes a thought in her notes on the practical applications of the essence of wormwood. “What is it this time?”

“She finally get around to banning everyone from having the orgasms no one will give her?” Tracey mutters into her essay, low enough that Draco doesn’t hear. Daphne stomps on her foot beneath the coffee table. She cries, “ Eep! ”

Draco seems not to notice or doesn’t care to. It’s the way with him and Tracey. As a halfblood, he only tolerates her at best. He shoves a slip of paper under Daphne’s nose, close enough that she jerks her head back in response. She takes it from him, having little other choice, perusing its contents. There’s the title, of course, in the frills she’s come to expect of Umbridge’s particularly pink brand of fascism. A short summary of what the contents will come to represent. And a series of lines upon which to write in the requested information. Her name, her age, her House, whether she is a dog person or a cat person, and what her blood status is.

Umbridge doesn’t quite ask it so directly, but there isn’t really any other way in which to interpret the question ‘What did your grandparents do for employment?’ No one ever accused the Senior Undersecretary to the Minister of being subtle.

“The Inquisitorial Squad,” she reads dryly. The name is unfortunate. Too much grandstanding, like Umbridge herself. It could have just been ‘the Inquisition’ and commanded more respect. Or, at least, fear.

“Will you join?”

Daphne experiences, briefly, a tremendous sense of Deja vu. Here’s another boy, one of the faces of the school, standing across from her with an eager expression, asking her to join his club. It’s almost funny, really. 

Draco has expressed his interest in her once or twice, just subtly enough that he could deny it to Pansy if Daphne had said no. Which she had. She isn’t particularly fond of Draco; thinks him a bit dim, in truth.The blisteringly blonde children she imagines do his case no favors either. And he’d only really started showing interest last year, when she’d developed breasts. Far from a great basis upon which to start a relationship.

Not like a marriage contract, she thinks ill-humoredly. Daphne hopes this isn’t another such attempt. It would…complicate things. She doesn’t want to think about what Potter might do if he hears that Draco is trying to court her. 

Then again, maybe she does.

“No,” she responds succinctly, trying to hand him back the paper.

Draco blinks, staring rather stupidly at it and not taking it from her. He seems genuinely taken aback at her response. Certainly in how direct it is. “Greengrass, come on.” He gestures at the paper. “Real power. To clean up this school! I’ve already signed up. We all have.” He gestures behind him to Crabbe, Goyle, Pansy, and Millicent.

“Real power?” Tracey echoes. “Draco, you’re a prefect.”

He sniffs. “ Dumbledore’s prefect,” he derides. “None of the authority to clean up the real messes.”

Those being muggleborns, of course. And halfbloods. And blood traitors. Potter and anyone who associates with him. And anyone not particularly impressed by his father. 

“I don’t have the time, Draco.” She hands him back the slip, almost as forcefully as he had handed it to her. “It’s O.W.L. year. I’ve exams. And studying for said exams. And brief, short lived comas from said studying for said exams.” And the DA, of course.

Draco scoffs. “With your family name, you-”

“Some of us,” she cuts him off darkly, “would like to earn a place in the world on our own merits. And not on daddy’s name.”

Draco reddens, mouth pinched into a tight little point of fury. He wheels away in a pale imitation of Snape’s fearsome billows, stomping back to the safety and security of his yes men. Daphne sighs.

“Maybe a little too hard there, Daphne,” Tracey comments quietly.

Daphne drops her face into her hands, groaning. “Too many Gryffindors,” she mutters. Potter must be rubbing off on her.

Tracey pats her comfortingly on the back. “Well, some good news, at least.” Daphne peers at her and dislikes the lecherous grin that splits her face. “Harry’s gonna love hearing about this.”

~•~

“The Inquisitorial Squad?” Weasley makes a noise like he’s going to retch.

Granger smiles, not the least bit amused. “It is a rather unfortunate name.”

“We knew this was going to happen,” Potter reminds them. “I’m surprised it took this long.”

Granger nods sagely. “‘Henceforth, all student gatherings are banned’,” she air quotes and then snorts. “Honestly.”

“We’ll need to start posting lookouts,” Weasley advises. He shakes the paper, as if in emphasis. “Don’t want them finding the room, and you know they’ll be looking.”

“They don’t know where to look,” Granger reminds him.

Potter shakes his head. “It won’t be hard to figure it out. We’re as quiet as we can be, but two dozen people make too much noise. Everyone knows what we’re doing.”

Granger chews her lip. “Lookouts might not be necessary. We could just post someone to the map.”

“Do you think that Dobby-” Weasley starts to say.

Daphne trades a look with Tracey. It is mildly amused (Tracey) and tremendously exasperated (Daphne). The five of them are in her and Potter’s classroom. She had requested they meet as soon as possible, to hand off one of the applications for the Inquisitorial Squad to them and do her best to pass on the warning. They had taken it and run off into the wildlands of their quick and quiet little camaraderie. Daphne raises a fist to her mouth and loudly clears her throat.

The Golden Trio turn in unison towards her. It’s a little creepy, actually. They trade their own looks, appropriately chagrined. “Sorry,” Potter mutters. He gestures to the paper in Weasley’s hand. “Thanks for getting this to us.”

She shrugs, deferring. “You would have learned about it soon enough.”

“Probably not, actually,” Granger argues. “At least, not until they were already on the hunt. There aren’t any such applications in Gryffindor.”

“Not with the Puffs either, I’d bet,” Weasley mutters. “Maybe Ravenclaw. Lot of old blood there.”

“It isn’t pureblood only,” Tracey hedges. Daphne and the three Gryffindors all give her the same look . She raises her hands in surrender. “Fine, alright. Merlin, try to be an optimist.”

“You didn’t want to join?” Potter asks, hesitant, like he’s worried about Daphne’s answer.

She supposes she understands why. Daphne shrugs languidly. “I’m already busy with an extracurricular.”

Potter smiles widely with his whole face.

“How much trouble do you think it’s going to be?” Tracey asks. Daphne recognizes the look in her eye. Calculating.

Potter shrugs. “No more than normal,” he says. “Like I said, everybody already knows what we’re doing. This is just Umbridge trying to tighten the noose.”

“Harry,” Granger says softly. He turns to look at her. “Worth noting that our ‘normal’ isn’t necessarily theirs.”

“What?” Potter asks smartly.

“She’s wondering if she should keep coming to meetings, mate,” Weasley explains.

“What?” Potter asks again, a bit more frantically. He looks at Tracey. “Why?”

Tracey shrugs, looking mildly embarrassed as she does. “I’m a halfblood,” she responds. “In Slytherin. I’ll run out of rope to hang myself with before Daphne and Astoria do.”

Daphne looks at her a little sadly and lays a comforting hand on her shoulder. Tracey spares her a quick smile, enough to say, ‘Stop it, you know it isn’t your fault’ .

“You’ll be fine,” Potter tells her. “I promise.”

Tracey smiles coyly and bats her eyes at him. “Do you promise to protect me, Potter?”

Potter, predictably, turns as red as a tomato and starts to stutter about what he did and did not mean.

Daphne smacks her on the shoulder. “ Oi! ” she snaps. “ My intended!”

“What?” Tracey laughs, rubbing at her shoulder. “Oh please, as if he’ll have eyes for anyone else when he hears what you pulled with Malfoy.”

Daphne narrows her eyes at her sister. She is the only one, she thinks, to catch the mischievous glint that darts across Tracey’s eyes. The lightning quick smirk. Bitch, Daphne thinks, almost certain this is revenge for the quill earlier. She’d set the whole damn conversation up, just to put her here.

“What?” Potter says, mastering the warmth in his face enough to have cooled into a less ostentatious cherry. He looks between her and Tracey. “What’d you do?”

Tracey explains with a little embellishment.

Weasley cracks up, and Granger hides her smile behind her hand. Potter looks a little awed. “You didn’t?”

Daphne passes Tracey a final, half-hearted glare and then, a little self-consciously, says, “I did.”

The look Potter gives her is full of mirth and joy and something else. Something that darkens his eyes. Something that makes her feel warmer than any Hogwarts cold could ever hope to touch.

Chapter Text

It is the second meeting of Dumbledore’s Army of the week and the last that will be held until after the Christmas holidays. Harry had been mildly nervous going into it, concerned that the extended break may lead to losing members or interest. Nevermind that he had planned for nothing exciting or memorable with which to keep them hooked. Many of them have been demanding he teach them the Patronus charm, but his heart tells him that they aren’t ready for it. So, the last meeting of the year had been a review, interlaced with a carefree vibe of freeform study and instruction. He had encouraged the DA to come to him with questions regarding any of the content of their study so far where they felt that they were lacking. As such, his time for the duration of the meeting — which had pushed nearly two and a half hours in the midst of everyone’s reluctance to leave — had been considerably monopolized.

Ron and Hermione, too, had been put through the wringer, bouncing from student to student in an effort to cover those Harry couldn’t immediately reach. He helps Cho with the wand movement of her protego and Ginny with the necessary footwork with which to increase the power of her reducto — something he mildly regrets when she reduces one of the training dummies to its base molecular state. He encourages Fred and George to partner separately, lest their continued reliance on their knowledge of one another lead to bad habits, corrects Luna’s pronunciation of impendimenta , and helps Astoria with the flourish necessary to a successful cast of levicorpus . He studiously stays away from Daphne, conscious of the excess attention on him in a meeting like this and listens to Hermione help her with her aim.

At the end of the meeting, he congratulates the whole DA on the progress they’ve made since October, offers a few pre-prepared words of encouragement on end of term exams, reminds the O.W.L. students not to neglect the theory (that he, himself, is currently neglecting), and sets the date for the DA’s return in January. He is enthused by the excited response he gets to the last, eager to see them all again. Afterwards, the DA files slowly out, most of them swinging by his place near the notice board to thank him for his efforts and encourage him to keep it going for as long as he can. The twins share their latest devilish plan to harangue Umbridge with, and he loans them the map for it with his blessings to ruin as much of her day as they can. Her week, if they can manage it. Cho hangs around for far longer than normal, even after pausing to thank him as the rest had. He isn’t sure why, but he’s busy cleaning off the chalkboard and sharing encouragement with some of the younger years that are too shy, initially, to approach him. Eventually, she wanders off awkwardly.

Ron and Hermione bid him a good night earlier than they usually do. Often, they’ll leave with him to assist in making sure the halls hadn’t been under any surveillance and to watch the Room vanish. Nevermind that there’s a war on, and even the halls of Hogwarts don’t feel entirely safe. They like to walk him everywhere now. But not tonight. Tonight, they leave with smiles and waves and quiet chuckles that he doesn’t understand until, turning around, he spies Daphne in one of the chairs in the corner of the room. 

The shadows make a question of her, such that he has to do a double take to confirm what he’d seen. Probably her intention. Harry looks around, as if he might find some other person or people hiding in the dark. He worries who may have noticed her lagging behind. Hermione’s sign up sheet offers protection against the intentional divulgence of information related to the DA, but there are plenty of loopholes in that. “Daphne,” he says, surprised.

It’s been easier, lately, to say her name. It comes to his lips more smoothly than ‘Greengrass’ and he thinks it very pretty. Hermione had explained, a little, about the Greek myth from which her name is derived. A nymph of abounding beauty who had fled the god Apollo and been turned into a tree to escape him. Harry doesn’t really get Greek myths, but he still thinks it’s a pretty name.

“What are you doing?” Harry asks her.

Daphne stands, sauntering over. She’s hugging herself, always cold despite the relative warmth of the DA’s enormous fireplace. A little closer, she shrugs. “Wanted to talk.” She smirks. “Didn’t think sneaking into your dorm to leave a note was the best way to do it.”

“I told you, you could borrow the cloak whenever you want.” He says it completely seriously and only breaks when her own smile starts to creep up the side of her face. They both laugh together. After, he presses, “What about? Are you alright?”

Daphne snorts. “I’m fine, Potter. Cool it on the savior complex.” He looks away, appropriately chagrined and a little disappointed. Not that there isn’t anything to save, but that she’s still calling him ‘Potter’. It’s been…frustrating him a little lately, for reasons he can’t entirely explain. “It’s nothing…well, it is important. I just wanted to tell you how good you’ve been at this.”

Harry’s grin hurts a little bit. “Yeah?”

She nods, her own smile tremendously more subdued. “Yeah. When we first met,” they both wince a little in the shared pain of how their first weeks of ill-fated communication had gone, “you were pretty miserable. All the time. You still are. But not in here. Here, you seem really happy.”

“I am happy,” Harry tells her, almost surprised to find that he means it. “Here, at least. I’m…working on everything else.”

Daphne raises an eyebrow. She’s gotten a little closer now. He isn’t sure when that happened. “How’s that going?”

Harry’s face falls into a frown. Promise me, Harry, Cedric shouts at him, as often he does in the quiet moments when Harry has nothing else to think about. There are other refrains. Crucio features often, and the sliding of the basilisk’s scales across the pipes of the Chamber of Secrets. Even Quirrell, lately, and his disintegrating face. And that door. The door that never leaves him. The door that’s so familiar. Harry has plenty of nightmares. Nevermind the horrors of being awake, he thinks, flexing his perpetually sore hand. 

He shakes himself. “Not great,” he admits with a tight smile. Daphne favors him with a sympathetic frown, worry writ plain across her face. “But I’m trying.”

Daphne nods. “I guess that’s the important thing.”

“The DA helps,” he says. “You’re right, I am happier here. Maybe I’m just happy to be doing something. Makes it easier. Being around everybody is great, though. I’m glad you’re here.” He says the last haltingly, a warmth suffusing his cheeks as he does.

She finds it suddenly difficult to keep eye contact. “Yeah,” she says again. “Me too.”

They both stand there together, imminently conscious of how close they are. No more than hand’s breadth away from touching, the flush of each other’s cheeks and the warm puffs of their breath enough to raise the temperature of the room. Why else does he feel so warm? He feels his eyes drawn upward by a quiet rustle, like wind through the trees, and the creaking of a wood reaching for the sun. A flowering bunch of green leaves curl delicately through the air above them, their white petals like points of snow on the fresh green of new growth.

“Oh,” he says, for want of anything else to say.

“Mistletoe,” Daphne says, in much the same tone.

They look down towards each other again, green eyes dancing with grey. He looks briefly toward her lips. There is a moment of such supreme anticipation, Harry feels that he might scream.

Daphne steps away. The charge that had so immobilized him vanishes, leaving him jittery, cold, and hot all at the same time. Harry doesn’t know which he feels more palpably; his regret or his relief.

Daphne clears her throat. “What’s with that picture, anyway?” Her voice is a little strained as she points to the picture he’d stuck in the corner of the notice board. It’s a blatant and terribly blunt attempt at changing the subject. Harry runs as quickly after it as Daphne had.

“It’s, er, ” he clears his throat. “It’s the original Order of the Phoenix. It was a group Dumbledore founded. To fight Voldemort.” He points, showing her various members and telling her their names. “My parents. Dumbledore and McGonagall. The Weasleys. That’s Professor Lupin. Sirius, er Black.” He stumbles over the name, too familiar at first and then trying too hard to sound angry with it. Daphne, of course, doesn’t know about Sirius.

“Brave,” she says when he’s listed all the people he knows the names of. Less than he’d like. “Very brave. Those are the Longbottoms, did you know? And that’s Handsome Bones — terrible, name, I know. And the Prewitt twins.”

Harry nods, working hard to remember them. He feels bad that Susan and Neville are in the DA every week, seeing this picture and making no comment as to the people they’ve lost. “Did your family know them?”

“Of them,” Daphne responds. 

“They weren’t in the Order.” It isn’t a question, but almost unintentionally, he makes it sound like one.

Daphne snorts. “No.”

It hangs between them a moment, as awkward as the mistletoe. Harry resolves not to back away from this one. “Why?”

Daphne turns, looking at him as if she’s entirely surprised he would ask. “Not really the way of it, with my family.”

“What do you mean?” Harry thinks he might sound a bit manic. He licks suddenly dry lips and asks, hesitantly, “Your parents, they weren’t…they weren’t on Voldemort’s side?”

Daphne's mouth presses into a flat line. She isn’t pleased with the question. “They weren’t Death Eaters, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“But they weren’t members of the Order.”

Daphne sighs, shaking her head. Her eyebrows arch in the way they had during their first arguments, indicative, he thinks, of how utterly unimpressed with him she is right now. “There is more to life than Death Eaters and phoenixes, Potter. Did you know?”

Probably, he should let this go. He doesn’t. “What about now?”

“What about now?” she bites.

“Who’s side are they on?”

Daphne glares, drawing further away from him and the notice board and the picture thereupon it. Harry wonders if he’s imagining the awkward glances the people in the photograph are giving him. “Who’s side am I on, you mean.”

“I-” Harry draws back, surprised. He really hadn’t. “What? No. You’re…aren’t you?”

Daphne rolls her eyes. “Potter, I like this place.” She gestures around her at the Room and its training dummies. “It’s fun. You’re a good teacher, really. But I’m not a soldier in anyone’s army.”

“That’s not-”

“Potter!” Daphne snaps, cutting him off. “You aren’t teaching them to pass their exams, and you know it.”

Harry feels his jaw tighten. There’s a pressure behind his eyes. “It’s important,” he insists. “They need to know how to defend themselves.”

“I don’t disagree.”

“But you’re not on our side!?” he demands.

Daphne shakes her head. “I’m not on anyone’s side, Potter.” She says it plainly, like it’s not the craziest thing he’s ever heard. “I’m just trying to pass my exams and make a couple friends. Get to know the man I’m going to marry.”

“Okay,” Harry says, though it isn’t at all. “And what about later? Because he’s back, Daphne, and he isn’t going to stay quiet forever. People are going to die!”

“I know that.”

“And you’re okay with that!”

Daphne throws her hands into the air. “Of course I’m not okay with that!” she exclaims. “That’s the whole bloody point, Potter. People are going to die! I’d rather they not be me! Not be Astoria! Or Tracey!”

“But you won’t protect them,” he accuses.

Daphne’s face darkens like the fast fading light of dusk. “I am protecting them,” she insists. “Maybe not the way you want me to, but I am. There are other ways to do it, you know.”

“What about me?” Harry insists.

Daphne frowns. “I don’t want you to die either.”

Harry presses her, stepping into her space. She backs away from him, wary. “What if I do?” he persists. “What if Dumbledore dies? What then? Who’s side are you on then?”

“No one’s,” Daphne says again. “We keep our heads down. Stay quiet and out of the way. Don’t look at me like that!” Her sudden yell shocks him. He must have been wearing his disgust more plainly on his face than he’d meant to. “Like I’m the freak. Merlin, Potter! Not everyone’s as comfortable with dying as you! Most of us just want to live! To be left alone! I’m doing what everyone else in their right mind does! I’m protecting what’s mine! Nevermind, by the way, that it costs me a bit more than it costs you to stand up and make a fool of myself telling everyone where to stick it. Purebloods have long memories. Nevermind that I’m a woman! That Astoria’s just a girl!”

Harry looks at her, face twisted in confusion. He isn’t sure what that has to do with anything.

Daphne rolls her eyes. “Idiot,” she complains. She gestures to her whole body. “They’ll do rather worse things to me than they’ll do to you, Potter.”

He cottons on, feels ashamed for having dismissed the point and then angry all over again. “Isn’t that just another reason to fight!?” he demands. “So that, that doesn’t happen!? To you or anyone else! The people you care about!”

Daphne looks at him piteously. Like a naive child. “It happens, Potter,” she tells him. “Whether we want it to or not. That’s the point . Those people in that happy little picture you’ve got hanging in front of us all? How many of them are still alive? Hm? Your parents? Pettigrew? I’ll bet you the Longbottoms wish they weren’t. When they can wish for anything at all. Handsome? Don’t ask me to tell you what they did to his wife before locking him in their home and burning it down. Lucky — just lucky — that Susan wasn’t there last night.”

He glares. “And do you think they’d be impressed, all those poor people, with a witch who doesn’t even have the guts to say which side she supports?”

Daphne bears her teeth. “I’m not trying to impress anyone. ” By her emphasis, there can be no mistaking who she means.

“Oh, well. Don’t worry,” he assures her, turning to stomp from the room. “You haven’t.”

Harry will think later that if he had known it would be the last conversation they would have until the holidays were over, he probably would have tried to end on a better note.

Chapter Text

The day after their argument in the Room of Requirements, Potter disappears. Not that he avoids her or refuses to show his face outside the Gryffindor Common Room. He simply vanishes off the face of the earth, there one day and gone the next. The Weasleys vanish with him. At the staff table, everyone looks serene except for Umbridge, who looks apoplectic and Snape who’s wearing the look of a man who’s smelled something particularly bad.

As usual with Potter, no one knows anything. Leastwise, no one is saying anything. The school speculates at large as to what hairbrained nonsense he and his favorite brood of redheads are getting up to now. The DA speculates as to what this may or may not have to do with the Dark Lord. And the Slytherins speculate the same thing, though in the opposite direction, of course.

Daphne wonders, at first, if it is because of their argument that he had vanished. Were it not for the similar disappearance of the Weasleys, she thinks she might almost believe it. It seems in line with Potter, during one of his sullen fits of immaturity, to simply give up and go hide from the problem he himself created. But clearly something had happened. There’s a haze on the castle, like everyone knows that somewhere out in the world, something’s gone wrong. The Prophet is quiet about any potential tragedies, and Umbridge buttons the lips — once very literally — of anyone she catches suggesting any such thing in the halls.

Daphne frets and worries and wonders and wishes that Potter hadn’t made so great a fool of himself in the Room. Even had he made a better attempt to leave the conversation with dignity, rather than stomping off like an infant, she would feel more inclined to reach out to him now with her questions. Wherever he is, his owl is still roosting in the owlery, and she’s confident that the snowy bird can find him. But Daphne is rather done with chasing after Harry Potter. She’s made too much of a fool of herself to countenance doing it again. Impending marriage or not, she will not be the one to bridge the cavernous gap he has yet again created between them.

Honestly, things had been going so well. Not great but certainly well. They were getting to know one another, even at a distance, and she was finding it easier and easier every day for her thoughts of him to be, if not pleasant, then at least neutral. A great improvement over the consistently bruised way she had thought of him and their conversations before. Now, the stupid boy has backpedaled all the progress they’ve made over an argument almost too stupid to put into words.

She had tried with Tracey and Astoria. Astoria hadn’t really gotten it, but to say that he sounded rude and to apologize for how she was treated. A good sister, but perhaps still a little too young to wrap her head around the complexities of the situation. Tracey had offered her smiles and condolences and, as is her wont, advice she hadn’t asked for. “You can’t really blame him,” she’d said and then held her hands up in surrender beneath her glare. “I’m not saying he went about it the right way. Potter’s a pillock. But think about it from his perspective.”

Daphne has. She still finds it wanting. Daphne understands that Potter has lived a hard life, losing his parents to the terror of the Dark Lord in the first war and suffering personally under his hand at the end of the Triwizard Tournament last year. She understands and empathizes with what must be an incredibly difficult situation, being so darkly desired by a man as powerful and viciously ruthless as the Dark Lord. She understands why Potter feels the need to stand up and fight for a future he won’t otherwise have. She just doesn’t understand why he so insistently demands that everyone else do the same as well.

Honestly, it’s like he expects everyone around him to have the same death wish he does. It’s ridiculous. Daphne doesn’t have any need to fight. Not in the literal sense. She need not pick up her wand and get to casting. Really, what difference would she make anyway? She’s one woman. A girl, really, just fifteen. She isn’t a particularly adept duelist. She knows only the spells taught to her by lackluster defense professors and Harry himself. What does he expect? That she can fight the Dark Lord? That she can make a difference in the war against him?

She can’t. Daphne knows she can’t. So she does the smart thing that normal people who like to keep breathing do. She keeps her head down, looks out for her sisters, and waits to see where the dice will fall. She hopes they fall in Potter’s favor. Nevermind that he’s to be her husband and there’s a degree to which her loyalty is expected there. She also finds the results of his victory the far more favorable one.

Probably, that’s why she’s been chewing her lip all morning, wondering where he and the Weasleys have gone. She can’t think of why else the pit of noxious worry and anxiety has settled into her stomach.

There is, thankfully, one person she can ask.

She finds Granger rather swiftly when she puts her mind to it. They share a few classes together and in the absence of her two boys, Granger stands out like a sore thumb wandering lonely through the corridors. Daphne, subtler and still conscious of the consequences of visibly associating with a muggleborn in a way that doesn’t include the word ‘mudblood’, makes deniable gestures at her until she gets the point. Granger ducks into a quiet hallway and tucks herself between two suits of armor Daphne knows to be discreet. Daphne folds herself into the space, almost as close to Granger today as she was to Potter last night. She looks up for any mistletoe.

Granger opens succinctly and directly, her tone brooking no argument. “I really can’t say anything.”

Daphne frowns. “Something bad happened, though?”

Granger hesitates and then nods slowly. “Yes.”

Daphne worries her lower lip. It’s getting to be a bad habit. “Is anyone…” Dead. It’s a harsh word, and Daphne trails off, uncertain how to even say it.

Granger, though, bless her, gets her meaning immediately. She wrings her hands and says, anxiously, “That remains to be seen.”

Daphne nods. Not the worst case scenario, then. Not yet. “How’s Harry?”

Granger shrugs. “Not very good.” Granger pauses, as someone does before a fence, uncertain if stepping over it will be a trespass. “I offered to pass you a message if he wanted. He didn’t. Seemed rather put off by the idea actually.”

Daphne avoids her eye. Somehow, she thinks, Granger will look in them and see all the details, all the worrisome, embarrassing emotions and the things she probably shouldn’t have said. See the mistletoe. She doesn’t know why it’s that one that worries her the most. “We had a fight,” she responds simply.

“ Mm, ” Granger hums. “Bad?”

“Yeah.”

“How bad?”

Daphne smirks. “Remains to be seen.”

Granger sighs. “Okay. You’d better tell me. I can’t promise when I’ll have the chance, but I'll talk to him.”

Daphne looks at her for a long moment. “You really are better than he deserves.”

“I’d like you to stop saying that.” Granger says it gently but firmly. “Harry deserves more and better than I or anyone else can give him.”

Daphne nods, apologizing with her eyes. She knows that Granger will hear it. “What about better than I deserve?”

Granger sniffs. “Well,” she says, going for imperious and condescending and failing utterly. “That remains to be seen, doesn’t it?”

~•~

Daphne wanders through the rest of the day, somehow just as worried and less so than before. She likes the comfort of knowing, at least in a distant way, what is happening. Potter and the Weasleys had been taken from the school according to some terrible happenings. Probably, someone is hurt. Badly enough that they aren’t sure yet whether they’re going to make it or not. A Weasley, most likely. There are enough of them that, statistically, something bad happening in Britain is most likely to happen to a Weasley. It explains the redheads’ absences, though Daphne still doesn’t quite get what it has to do with Potter.

That, she thinks, is what continues to gnaw at her ribs and coldly claw her heart.

She glides through the rest of the day’s classes, as apathetic as the rest of the school. More than. Still unbearably cold and desperately looking forward to the Glade’s carefully controlled warmth, she sits by the fire in the Common Room later that night, trying and failing to read a book. Her eyes pass over the same paragraph again and again, never registering more than one word.

Where is he, she wonders. What is he doing? Why do I care?

“Greengrass!” Draco, again, voice acerbic and cutting. He still hasn’t forgiven her for her comment about his father.

She looks up, not bothering to respond with words.

“Snape wants to see you.” He jerks his thumb at the door. “His office.” Saying nothing else, he trods away towards his dorm.

Daphne looks around curiously, like the walls or the logs of the fire might have something to say about what Snape could want with her. She hasn’t lost any points of late, and her grades are sailing high above the rest of the year in most classes. She wonders if it’s to do with the DA and her involvement. Daphne won’t put it past Snape to have found out, nor does she doubt that he’d prefer the Slytherins not be involved. But probably, if that were the case, he’d be asking for all three of them.

Daphne closes her book, resolved to the fact that she won’t know until she goes. Anyway, Snape hates to be kept waiting.

The Head of Slytherin’s office is a short walk down the hall from the Common Room, that he might be reached in emergencies or else descend upon them like a dark storm when necessary. It is a nondescript, wooden door, as dank as the rest in the dungeons and notable only for the name plaque attached to it that says ‘Severus Snape, Potions Master’. Woe betide the man or woman who does not afford Snape the proper respect for his position as a master. Daphne knocks once, as he prefers, and the door opens with a low, ominous creak.

Daphne knows for a fact that the house elves oil the hinges in Hogwarts once a week, save for those they are specifically requested to leave alone, for dramatic flair. “Enter,” she hears from within, just as dramatic as the door.

Daphne does, closing the door softly behind her and walks quickly to his desk, which she stands across from. “Good evening, Professor.” She bobs her head in respect and greeting.

“Take a seat, Miss Greengrass.” Snape doesn’t look up from his work grading essays as he says it.

Daphne frowns. Meetings with Snape run, on average, a minute and a half long. He detests prolonged conversations with ‘pubescent dunderheads’ and prefers to get straight to the point, delivering his instructions with the expectation that they will be followed to the letter and then dismissing them. He reserves seated conversations for those of the most supreme importance.

Daphne sits and then asks, “Have I done something wrong, sir?”

He looks up, considering her with his dark eyes, made hooded by the low light of his office. After a long moment, he shakes his head.

“Is everything alright at home, then?” Perhaps it is just a day for worry. Her brain seizes suddenly on the idea that one of her parents had written to Snape, explaining some tragedy that had befallen the other. Why would Astoria not be here, though? Is she expected to break the news to her?

Snape shakes his head again, though. “I have heard nothing from the Lord and Lady Greengrass.”

“Oh,” Daphne says. She knows that asking why she is here a third time will only infuriate the man and so, despite her anxiety, resolves to wait quietly until he determines to tell her.

Snape finishes grading the essay that he is currently reading, marks it with a flourishing ‘A’, and sets it aside into the stack of already graded papers he has finished with. Then, he picks his wand up off the desk and waves it twice at the door, locking it with a noticeable click and then silencing the room.

Any young woman may feel disquieted by the idea of being locked into a silenced room with an older, male professor. Daphne doesn’t think it of Snape, but she palms her wand into her hand, nonetheless, reciting the list of combat spells drilled into her by Potter, Weasley, and Granger as she does.

Snape rather cuts her train of thought off at the knees with what he says next. “I am aware of the outstanding engagement between you and Potter.”

Daphne blinks, mind blank for a few seconds as surprise crowds out the ability to think anything else. “He told you? ” She doesn’t mean it to sound as offended as she does, but that’s how it comes out. Really, what had Potter been thinking and under what possible circumstances had he seen fit to inform one of the men he hates most in the school?

“No.” It is a day for Snape dismissing her assumptions. He steeples his hands. “I have been tasked by the Headmaster to teach Potter occlumency.”

“Why?” Snape arches an eyebrow at her, and she looks appropriately chagrined. “Right, okay. Stupid question. You saw it in his mind, then?”

Snape sneers. “Potter’s mind is more easily read than a first year’s charms essay.” He looks her up and down. “He thinks of you…often.”

Daphne dislikes the blush that sidles up her face, coloring her in front of her Head of House. “Okay,” she says, looking around for something else to talk about. “Er, what does that have to do with me, exactly? I mean, I understand the engagement has to do with me. But why am I here?”

Snape does not break his gaze, holding her captive in the pools of his eyes. At length, he sighs. “I had hoped that you might have some rudimentary understanding of occlumency, yourself.” He shakes his head. “Very well. I shall have to be more circumspect, then.”

“Circumspect, sir?”

“There are things I cannot tell you, Miss Greengrass,” her Head of House explains. “Things you cannot know. Some things that you must.”

“Why?” she asks again.

“You are a remarkable young woman, Miss Greengrass,” he compliments her. She blinks, unused to such blatant praise from the man. He usually couches it in an insult. “Driven, intelligent, capable. I do not wish to see you dead.”

The worry knotting her stomach cools into an acidic dread that seeps into the rest of her gut like a poison. “Is that,” she licks suddenly dry lips, “a worry, sir?”

“ Mmm, ” Snape hums noncommittedly. “I will speak plainly, Miss Greengrass. You are walking a delicate tightrope. You are not the first to walk it. You will not be the last. On either side of it, are the two halves of this war.”

 Snape looks away from her, grimacing. “Take it from me, Miss Greengrass. You can walk that rope for only so long. I loved someone once. I thought that I could do so and walk that line at the same time. I could not. I suggest that you think hard about what side of it you want to fall on.”

For some reason, all Daphne can think to say to that is, “I don’t love Potter.”

Snape sneers. “I really do not care about the insipid emotions of fifteen year olds, girl. Whether or not you love him is immaterial. You are his betrothed. He is yours. It comes with…baggage.”

“I understand.”

“You don’t.”

Daphne blinks. “What?”

“Miss Greengrass.” Snape leans across the table at her. “ Why am I teaching Potter Occlumency?”

To protect him, she thinks but does not say. To keep the Dark Lord out of his head.

Oh.

“Oh,” she says.

Snape looks at her. In a different man, she might think it pity on his face. “The rope, Miss Greengrass. It’s not going to hold you up much longer. Figure out where you’re going to land.”

Chapter Text

Mr. Weasley is going to live. Harry repeats it like a mantra. It may be the most comforting thing that he has ever had the privilege to hear. Long days of convalescence and treatment had left himself and the Weasley family on a tightrope of anxiety and darkness. Harry, himself, had weathered it mostly alone, save for Sirius' calm, quiet comfort. He hadn't felt right trying to share in the Weasleys' grief. Nevermind that it isn't his father in the hospital, but there had been the dream as well.

The door, again, haunting him. And through it, the snake. And behind it, Mr. Weasley.

Harry shudders.

Hermione had arrived a few days ago. Harry isn’t sure by what metric she had managed to convince her parents to let her spend Christmas at a house they’ve never visited and can’t know the location of. Certainly, it hadn’t been the truth. It has been easier since she arrived. Hermione falls quickly into the comfortable role of mediator, bridging him and Ron back together where stress and fear had pulled them away again.

She keeps him company in Grimmauld Place when she isn’t offering the same to Ginny and Ron. But they have each other and the rest of their family besides, almost all of which have returned to see him in St. Mungo’s. When the Weasleys beg forgiveness that not everyone can see their patriarch, Hermione takes his hand and guides him through the hospital, in search of nothing but a way to kill the time.

It isn’t a particularly pleasant walk. Hospitals rarely are. Especially at Christmas. Somehow, it’s still worse than he expects. Lockhart is bad enough, and Harry feels the guilt swell up in him to see the man so debased. He knows it isn’t really his fault, that Lockhart had brought it on himself. But somehow, he still feels guilty.

The Longbottoms are even worse. Harry doesn’t feel any guilt with them — only a deep and weary sadness. Watching Neville hold his father’s unresponsive hand and take the empty candy wrappers from his mother, telling them about his friends and school and the DA is perhaps the most horrible thing that Harry has ever witnessed. Not because it isn’t beautiful, but because it is. Harry has spent his life believing himself to be amongst the worst of the victims of the last war, his parents taken from him before he could even begin to know them. But in that hospital room, in that empty place with those empty people, Harry thinks for the first time that he’s glad his parents are dead. 

It can be so much worse.

Later, in the safety and dank quiet of Grimmauld Place, it gets him thinking about Daphne. Given the terror of the last week, it’s been easy to put his fiancée out of his mind, even given how angry he is with her. He has been too distracted by the nightmares, the snake, Mr. Weasley. Never mind his dreadful occlumency session with Snape after the fact. Still in a cold sweat, he’d been drug to the dungeons and there had his mind plumbed of all its contents. It had taken Snape less than ten seconds to learn about his marriage contract to Daphne, a fact which fills him with shame and regret.

All his puffed up pontification about keeping things secret, and in less time than it took to say so, he’d handed all of their secrets to Snape.

Including their most recent argument, brought to light again by the Longbottoms convalescing in their beds. Daphne had called out the Longbottoms in her tirade. “When they can wish for anything at all,” she’d said. Harry hadn’t understood what she meant until he’d seen them there in their hospital beds. And the reality has served only to make him angrier.

Harry simply doesn’t understand her or where she’s coming from or how she can think the way she does. She talks about tragedies like Handsome Bones and his muggle wife. Like Pettigrew’s immolation, even if she’d been entirely wrong about it. Like the Longbottoms. And in the same breath, she uses them to excuse inaction? As if the very notion of these things happening at all isn’t cause enough to fight and bleed and die to make sure they never happen again.

He has no doubt that Neville will. There’s a steel rod in the spine of the baby-faced Gryffindor they’ve all, in their time, made fun of. In this he won’t bend. Not an inch. Harry won’t either. If his wand can keep the world from another orphan, he’ll do whatever it takes. He thinks that Ron and Hermione are the same. He knows that Sirius and Lupin are. That Professor Dumbledore is.

He remembers the way she’d talked of expectation. Well, he expects more of his fiancée. More than banal inaction and apathy. More than sticking her head in the sand and hiding. More than…just more.

Someone knocks lightly at the door. “Harry, can I come in?” Hermione. Perhaps the only person in the house who actually knocks and waits to be invited inside. He calls to her that she can, and she slips inside, shutting the door softly behind her. “How are you doing?”

He shrugs. “Hard day.” Harry tries for a smile. “I’m glad Mr. Weasley’s going to be alright though. I was scared.”

She nods. “We all were.” Then, sighing, she sidles to the bed and mostly collapses onto it. “We all are.”

Harry looks at her oddly. “You don’t seem scared.”

“Harry, I’m terrified. So’s Ron. So are you.”

“I’m not-”

“Harry,” she says archly, raising an eyebrow at him.

He looks away sheepishly.

The doorknob rattles. With much less grace and much more noise, Ron almost falls inside the room. He closes it behind him, rubbing agitated eyes. He is still flushed and his eyes are still red. The Weasleys have been doing a lot of crying today. Ron blinks at them both and then asks Hermione, “Time?”

Sprawled on the bed, Hermione shrugs. “If you’re up to it.”

“Eh?” Harry asks but is ignored.

“I’m up to it,” Ron tells her seriously. He walks shortly across the room, pushing Hermione’s feet out of the way and climbing onto the bed himself. It’s quite cramped with the three of them, it being a bed made to hold a single person.

“What’s going on?” Harry asks warily. They’ve been doing this a lot lately, planning things to do with him behind his back. Harry musters a habitual anger for it on occasion, but today he’s too tired.

“We wanted to talk to you about Daphne.” Hermione starts her sentence trying for delicate but settles quickly into blunt and to the point.

Harry shores up his face. “What about her?”

Ron reaches over Hermione and flicks him on the nose.

“Oi!” he complains.

“For one, you make a face like you’ve swallowed a bogey bean every time someone mentions her name,” Ron tells him succinctly.

Hermione reaches above her to lay a hand on Ron’s arm. “Maybe a little less violence,” she suggests.

Ron shrugs, like he’s not entirely committed to the idea.

“We had a fight,” Harry explains. He tucks his ears into his shoulders, finding the claustrophobia of the too small bed suddenly much less bearable.

Hermione nods. “We know. She told me.”

“She told me,” Ron says, indicating to Hermione.

Harry looks at her sharply. "Why'd you go and do that for!?" he demands, unsure if he's upset at the violation of his privacy or at her having worried Ron with his pointless melodrama while his dad was in hospital.

“Oi!” Ron shouts, loud enough that Harry jumps. “Don’t go being a pillock to her now cause Greengrass isn’t here to pout at. Don’t think I didn’t see you sulking around the place this last week, anyway. Didn’t need her to tell me, did I?”

Harry grimaces. He’d hoped his sulking had been taken exclusively for concern about Mr. Weasley. “Didn’t want to worry you,” he mumbles.

“Too bad!” Ron snaps. “I’m allowed to worry about more than one person at a time. Hermione, would you?” He makes a jerking motion with his hand, as if passing Harry off like a troublesome child.

“Yeah.” Hermione picks up the ball with ease. Harry doesn't quite know how he feels about being so obviously handled. He's rather certain he doesn't like it though. “Harry, Daphne told me what happened, but I’d like to hear it from you.”

He tells them, haltingly at first and then with increasing passion. It feels good, at last, to talk about it. Harry hadn’t realized the extent to which it had been weighing on him. Of course he hadn’t and doesn’t want to take away from the very real anxiety of what has happened to Mr. Weasley with his banal teenage drama. But, well, he had been asked.

When at last he finished his recounting of events within the Room of Requirements — having carefully excused any mention of the mistletoe — he waits. Ron and Hermione look at him with varying degrees of understanding, albeit tinged with what might be impatience. “Is that what she told you?” he asks eventually, disliking the silence.

Hermione shrugs languidly. “There were some embellishments,” she admits. “But that was the gist, yes.”

He isn't sure he wants to know what 'embellishments' Daphne had made. A beat follows in which his friends do not jump to the raucous position of righteous anger he expects and wants them to. He grinds his teeth.

“You’re upset,” Hermione says at last. 

“Yes!” he cries. He throws his hands with the word.

"Why?" Hermione asks.

It's a very simply question. So simple that it stumps him. He is expecting something grander; a proclamation of agreement if he is being honest or a disappointed denunciation if he's being pragmatic. Usually, people tend to throw whatever it is they're feeling in his face. Ron has an unpleasant habit of it (though he's been better this year). The twins, of course, with their endless and sometimes frustrating good humor. Ginny with all those emotions he can't really bear to think about right now. His schoolmates and Malfoy and Snape and even McGonagall. Certainly Daphne.

Why is he angry? "I don't know," he admits after trying and failing a few times to come up with an excuse. "She just…maybe it seemed like she didn't care?"

"About what?"

Again, Hermione trips him up with a simple question. Again, he answers, "I don't know. The war? Or maybe Cedric. She mentioned the Longbottoms, did I say?" Hermione nods to confirm he had. "Used them as some example for why people shouldn't fight."

"Do you think that Daphne doesn't care that about what happened to the Longbottoms?"

His gut instinct is to snap. He's feeling a little condescended to, and it isn't pleasant. 'Yes!' he wants to cry because that's the answer that will win him a point. But Hermione has never given out points for being wrong. "No," he says. "No, her whole point was that what happened was awful."

Hermione nods. "It was." She's choked a little, as she has been every time they've come up since St. Mungo's.

It reminds Harry a little of his anger, even if the reason for it remains a little elusive. "Isn't that why people should fight, though!?" he demands. Hermione winces at his tone.

"Yes," she agrees, Ron nodding behind her.

Harry pauses, breathing a little heavily. "Okay."

"We don't disagree with you, mate," Ron tells him.

"Thank you," Harry responds, calming a little.

"Of course people should fight, Harry," Hermione continues. "We aren't hear to harangue you about that."

"Then what is this?" he demands snappishly.

"Harry, none of us are soldiers." Hermione takes his head gently in her hands, her touch light enough to tell him he can escape if he wants to. He doesn't. "We didn't choose to fight in this war, we were drafted into it. Me because of my blood, Ron because of his family, you because…well, I don't really know why. It's how we were raised. It's because we love you, we want to protect you. You're our brother. You're family. Daphne isn't."

"She's my fiancée! She is family! Or will be!" he demands and does break away from her, tossing his head like an angry bull. "She just gets a free pass?"

"No," Ron and Hermione insist together. Ron continues. "Of course she's gonna have to pick a side, mate. We all know that. She doesn't. How can she? She's never lost anything. No family members, no job offers, no money. She's a perfect Pureblood. Not a blood traitor. Not a muggleborn. Not even a half-blood." Harry thinks darkly of Tracey and wonders even more how Daphne can be so blind. "She's got no reason to be scared. Not yet. You-Know-Who isn't even back, publically."

"Harry, the only thing between you two right now is a contract that neither of you signed!" Hermione tells him levelly. "You barely even speak to her. You make a conscious effort to ignore her. You spend weeks and months avoiding her, and then suddenly you're in her face and demanding she pick a side!"

"Are you honestly taking her side right now?" Harry demands. He stands, darkly glaring at the two of them on the bed, voice shaking. "With Mr. Weasley in the hospital right now, with what we saw with the Longbottoms, you're going to say that she's right!?"

"When did we say that!?" Hermione snaps. "No! We are not taking her side! She's wrong. It's horrible and stupid and short sighted! People are dying even if no one sees it, and it's only going to get worse, and of course she's wrong!"

"Then, what is the problem!?" Harry demands.

"I want her on our side!" Hermione is red faced and close to tears, she looks so angry. "Honestly! Harry! She's going to be your wife! And If you don't start treating her like that, then we're going to reach a point where we can't trust her."

Harry blinks. "What?"

Ron sighs. "Harry, you aren't the only person telling her she needs to pick a side, mate. That's only gonna get worse when the truth about your contract gets out. She'd be the best spy they have. Or worse. We don't get her on our side now…we'll never be sure she is."

"But that's what I'm trying to do!" Harry insists.

"How?" Hermione demands. "By yelling at her? Screaming? Demanding? Why would we she respond to that?"

A beat. A pause. He flushes. "Oh." Harry flexes his fist, feeling the pull of Umbridge's scar. "Shit."

The tension slides out of the room like air from a balloon, and Hermione and Ron heave tandem sighs of relief.

"I've been a real git, haven't I?"

Through a film of tears, Hermione chuckles wetly. "A bit," she says.

"Can I fix it?" He actually doesn't know.

Hermione arches an eyebrow at him. "What do we do when we've been a git?" she asks, condescending again but somehow Harry just finds it funny, if not entirely pleasant.

He smiles crookedly. "Apologize?"

"And then?" Her tone is still teasing, but there's real weight to the question. It matters to her.

"Do better," he answers and by her smile, knows he has answered correctly. "I still don't want anyone knowing about the contract." That doesn't know already. He thinks sourly of Snape. "It is dangerous. But I'll do better. I'll talk to her."

A beat.

"Maybe we can be friends."

Chapter Text

The Hogwarts Express gleams shiny and promising in the hazy morning light of January, waiting to shepherd them all back towards the school, and Harry has a girl to find. He's been here before, some months ago, chewing over the nauseous anxiety of it all, unhappy both to ignore her and to speak to her. Harry still feels a little nauseous this time, but he's persevering. Daphne is on the train, his fiancée, waiting to hear from him. It feels a little like a do-over, which isn't the least bit true, but Harry lets himself believe. This time, he isn't going to run away from her.

Harry wastes no time in finding her.

These days, his compartment on the Hogwarts Express is remarkably crowded, between himself, Ron, Hermione, Neville, Luna, and Ginny. Imminently claustrophobic, he isn't exactly sad to take the excuse to free himself from the press of bodies in the tiny train car. Neville, Luna, and Ginny are curious when he gets up and says he has someone he needs to speak to — understandable, given that the vast majority of the people he ever speaks to are in the room — but Ron and Hermione don't so much as bat an eye. The newer members of their circles take their cues from them and shrug at him to go.

Luna is elected to bodyguard him. Harry doesn't know why it surprises him. None of his friends let him go anywhere without at least one of them to watch his back, given Umbridge, Voldemort, Malfoy, and whoever else wants him dead these days. Luna is at least a palatable choice, given his business on the Express today. He shudders to think what Ginny might have to say to the whole affair. They trot off down the train together, Luna skipping lightly beside him, a pleasant smile on her face.

Harry likes Luna. She hums quietly to herself and it's usually the only noise she feels is necessary between two friends.

Like most Slytherins, Daphne and her sisters congregate towards the back of the Express. Harry feels like he wades through a see of green-trimmed faces on his way to the back, peering into each compartment as he goes. He hopes she's not in one of the ones with the curtains drawn, as there isn't any way to confirm if she is other than knocking. But in the third to last train car, tucked into the back left corner, a compartment welcomes them with the image of three girls in Slytherin green; Daphne, Tracey, and Astoria.

They all blink at him when he knocks, and it takes them a long moment to do so much as wave him inside. Luna gets, perhaps, even stranger glances.

"Can I sit?" Harry asks hesitantly, looking briefly at each of them. Astoria looks vaguely giddy to see him, Tracey indulgently amused, and Daphne icy and withdrawn. It's Tracey who gestures languidly at the empty section of Daphne's bench, and Harry doesn't wait to hear her corrected by his betrothed.

Luna sits beside Astoria without bothering to ask, smiles directly at each of the three girls, and then stares into space, humming a tune and bobbing her feet back and forth.

There's a beat. Harry tries to find the words he's been reciting to himself over and over again these last few days. Tracey asks, "Is that Bowie?"

It takes him a dumbfounded moment to realize that she's speaking to Luna.

Luna stops her humming and widens her smile at Tracey. "Oh, yes!" she responds, enthused. Then, very seriously, "Did you know he's actually a vampire?"

Another beat. Tracey glances at Harry. Harry shakes his head. She smiles. "No, I didn't, that's fascinating!"

They're rather off to the races on that side of the compartment after that, discussing the various magical provenances of popular muggle musicians, Astoria sandwiched between them and uncertain how to find her footing in the strange conversation. Harry doesn't miss the veil of separation that falls across the space between the compartment's two benches, nor Tracey's half-smile to him as she responds to Luna's latest prediction. He'll have to remember to thank her later.

"I wanted to talk," he tells Daphne quietly.

She stares back at him, arching a manicured eyebrow.

He clears his throat. "Can we talk?" he tries again.

Daphne nods. "Yes, of course." The words are friendly, but the voice is cool. "How was your break?"

It's a strange non-sequitur — not at all what he wants to speak to her about — and it takes him a moment to realize the small talk she's playing at. "Er, fine," he responds rotely. Then, correcting himself, he says, "Actually, no, it was pretty awful…what about you?"

Daphne shrugs casually. "Well, no one called me a coward for the duration. So there's that."

"That was-" Harry sighs. "Look, I want to apologize, but it'll be easier if I'm not doing it from an itemized list."

Her other eyebrow rises. "Very well."

Across the compartment, Tracey laughs at Luna's insistence that the Beatles are, in fact, the genetically identical, single-celled product of John Lennon's cellular mitosis.

"I was a git," Harry says. He shakes his head. "I was rude and I yelled at you and I was unfair."

Daphne sits her chin on her hand, lips playing at a smirk. "Do tell."

He glares at her. "I'm trying here," he insists.

"You're doing very well," Daphne assures him.

Harry groans. "Look, I just…I wasn't wrong, okay?" If perhaps his voice is a little sharper, he doesn't really blame himself. He sees Daphne's face closing like a heavy door and rushes forward, sticking his proverbial foot across the threshold. "I wasn't! But talking to you the way I did. Or not talking to you the way I did or…really, just every way I've approached you up to this point. That was wrong."

Daphne narrows her eyes. "This is a confused apology," she says after a moment.

Harry sighs. "I know. I'm sorry. I'm trying." He takes a breath and clears his throat. "I want to try again. From the beginning."

Daphne sighs, leaning back in her seat. "Try what, Potter?"

"Exactly," he responds, smiling a little crookedly as he does. "We haven't really tried anything, have we? I want to be friends. Get to know you. Really, actually, know you. Not just ask Astoria what your favorite color is."

"I told you, you were being weird!" Astoria insists.

It dawns on him that the previously boisterous conversation which had so taken up the other side of the compartment has fallen silent, and Harry blushes beet red to find the undivided attention of the three other girls in the room also falling on him. Astoria is smiling, bouncing much in time with the way Luna has returned to kicking her feet, and Tracey looks like the cat that caught the canary.

"What are you smiling at?" Daphne demands narrowly, catching the same look in her sister's eye that Harry had.

Tracey shrugs. "You two are cute."

It is Daphne's turn to blush. Harry takes the time to catalogue it, having never seen her do so before. Not like she does now, all flushed like the warm haze of a long day in the sun. It sets off brightly against her blonde hair, creeping up the forehead and into the roots of her scalp. She huddles in on herself a little bit, not much unlike a turtle. "Shut up!" she hisses, and Harry thinks it only makes her cuter.

He chuckles, not even meaning to, and the glare she sends his way is made only amusing by the blush still clouding her face. He tries and fails to resist the true laugh that bubbles up his throat, emboldened by the way that Tracey and Astoria laugh with him.

Luna hums Starman.

"Fine," Daphne hisses, struggling to cover her embarrassment and looking anywhere other than the three of them — namely, the ceiling. "Fine, we can start again, Potter. Be a little more polite this time, eh?"

He raises an eyebrow at her that she doesn't see. "Maybe don't go on about respecting Voldemort this time. Eh?"

She purses her lips. "Point," she bites, conceding.

There are more lighthearted chuckles passed around the room in a rotation. Even Daphne joins in. They say their goodbyes with promises to meet in a few days when the term is more properly underway. He wants to make a better go of it with Daphne, but the train ride is a long one. He thinks it's more likely to just be awkward and a little unpleasant if he were to just remain. Nevermind that he wants to spend the train ride with his own friends, who will certainly grow worried for him if he is away much longer. He and Luna leave, Luna waving delightedly at them from behind Harry as he slides the compartment closed, smiling in goodbye.

It hadn't been bad, Harry thinks. Nice, even, if one discounts the teasing. Though, from his limited interactions with her, Harry is like to believe that, that is a foundational aspect of Daphne's character. Tracey and Astoria's too, now that he thinks about it. He wonders if it's something found in all the Greengrasses and if he and Daphne's children will be the same.

"That was a lovely thought," Luna comments.

Harry blinks. "What?" Had she read his mind? "How do you know?"

"Your face," Luna smiles at him. "You smiled rather beautifully. What were you thinking about?"

He blushes. "Nothing," he insists.

"Was it Daphne?"

"Er," he says. "Yeah."

"Do you fancy her?"

His knee-jerk reaction is to be defensive, even snappish. But there isn't judgment or teasing in Luna's tone. Only an open kind of curiosity. "That's," he says consideringly, "a complicated question."

Luna shrugs. "It doesn't seem complicated." She looks back down the hall, some two train cars away where they had left her. "She's very pretty." Luna tells him like she thinks he might not know.

Harry laughs. "Yeah, she is," he agrees quietly.

She smiles at him. "You do fancy her."

Harry smiles back. "Maybe one day."

Luna nods, like this is a normal thing to say and very wise besides.