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SIYE Time:20:28 on 28th March 2024
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The Space Between
By YelloWitchGrl

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Category: Post-Hogwarts, Post-DH/AB, Post-DH/PM
Characters:All
Genres: Action/Adventure, Drama, Fluff, General, Humor, Tragedy
Warnings: Dark Fiction, Death, Disturbing Imagery, Extreme Language, Intimate Sexual Situations, Mental Abuse, Mild Language, Mild Sexual Situations, Negative Alcohol Use, Rape, Sexual Situations, Spouse/Adult/Child Abuse, Violence, Violence/Physical Abuse
Rating: R
Reviews: 559
Summary: Harry and Ginny's lives have finally evened out. They've faced trauma, and loss, more than most have, but they've fought hard to find a normal.

If only things could stay that way... Old enemies find new ways to seek revenge.

This story is the sequel to Bound. It would be extremely helpful if you read that first.

Warnings are to be safe. It's probably overkill. Please message me if you have any questions or concerns.
Hitcount: Story Total: 352177; Chapter Total: 4357
Awards: View Trophy Room




Author's Notes:
Sorry for the long delay!

Please search "Sarah Jaune" on amazon and go buy my books! My latest book just came out, called The Four Corners" This writing is free of charge, just a labor of love, but paying bills is also awesome, and you can pay me for my time by buying my other books.

Thanks Arnel for beta'ing.




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StoryPrinter


In the end, Harry didn’t use Nat to separate the bodies. He just couldn’t do that to her. He called in her father, Curtis, and hired him to do the job for them. He had been on an assignment, but it was for the British Muggle government, so Hermione had been able to pull the strings needed to make it understood that this was a priority. Even after all Curtis had seen in his line of work, he came out of the morgue each day pale and shaken. Harry made him take the two days off to be with Nat and his wife, Julienne, at the beach house, but it hardly felt like it was enough. Curtis finally finished sorting the bodies the day before the children were set to go back to school, and it was with a relief that Harry sent him off with a fat paycheck and his deepest apologies. No one should have to see what they saw. Several of the Aurors and MLE personal were traumatized by what they’d seen.

They didn’t have enough to go on, but they could tell they’d been experimented on magically and with a potion. That hadn’t answered anything because it was not a potion that they could recover. It left all of the great potions masters that Harry trusted enough to call upon stumped. There was no trace left of the potion in the system of the victims. Either it had been gone long enough, or it disappeared as soon as it had taken effect. Everyone agreed that making the potion do that would be damned tricky and probably made the potion unstable. If Crabbe was continuing to experiment, it might be because that failsafe to keep it anonymous was also making it ineffective.

Whatever the reason, Harry didn’t want be circling around the problem for the next forty years as he tried to catch the woman. He had to put a stop to it, which was why the note in front of him didn’t make a lot of sense. He’d been receiving notes from Crabbe throughout the years, but they’d always said, ‘I know your secret,’ and frankly he’d never understood what secret she might be referring to. The only secret he had that wasn’t widely known was about his daughter, Hope, and her conception. Ginny had been magically impregnated, while she’d been unconscious, using Harry as the father. It was a sick, sick game that Crabbe had played. She’d poisoned Ginny so that she could take Harry’s wife and child at the same time, but thankfully his sister-in-law, Audrey, had discovered the poison and had cured Ginny. The baby, baby Hope, hadn’t made it. She’d died while Ginny had still been pregnant with her. It was all he could do not to cry about it, now, even though it was well over twenty years before. The pain was not raw or intense like it once was, but he knew at a bone-deep level just what had been lost when his daughter had been murdered.

Still, the new note was almost a taunt, a tease, a trick to say there was no way that Harry would ever get to the bottom of what she was doing. He stared at the scrawled words and wondered, yet again, what she meant by ‘Time’s ticking gone.’

“Maybe there is an end game,” Teddy mused as he lounged back in his seat in Harry’s office. He’d been in for a quarterly review when the note had arrived, and Harry had showed it to him. Teddy was very quickly proving to be the same sort of star Auror that his mother had been, and Harry could easily see his godson taking his place when it came time for Harry to finally retire. The other Aurors liked him tremendously, and even for as young as he was, he was respected.

Still, he was brand new at this, and yet… Harry nodded slowly. “Explain what you mean.”

“Well,” Teddy said slowly as he tipped his seat up and held out his hand for the note. “She’s trying to accomplish something, and there’s a buildup. There has to be a grand finale, of sorts, don’t you think? She’s saying, here, that time is moving on in it.”

“But does that mean now or in ten years?”

He shrugged and shook his head. “This game has been going on since I was born, so I would say that if she thinks it’s coming to end, that might still mean a few years are left in play. We know it has something to do with mothers and babies.”

That was the only solid thing that they did know, and it fit in with what Crabbe had done to Ginny. She’d magically impregnated her, and poisoned her. “But there is no poison, not the poison she used on Ginny.”

“No, but there is something,” Teddy pointed out reasonably, his expression looking so much like Remus’ from old photos that it caused a dull ache to thud in Harry’s chest. “We know that there is a potion, and that she’s actively working on it. I would assume from the state of the chaos that you walked into in that warehouse that it’s not complete yet.”

“We don’t know that for certain,” Harry pointed out. “She could be done, now.”

“If she’s done, then the plan needs to be enacted soon,” his godson told him.

Harry shook his head, unsure of what was nagging at him. “There must be something.”

“There must, but–” Teddy froze at an urgent knock on the door.

“Sir!” Daniel, Harry’s personal assistant, sounded harried. Without waiting, the handsome, young man pushed the door open, his face flushed. He was staring at Teddy. “I’ve just had word that your wife is in labor! Mrs. Potter says it’s going fast and you’re to get home immediately.”

Harry watched his godson go sheet white, but when Teddy stood, he was grinning and his gate was steady. “I guess I’m off for the rest of the week, then,” he told Harry.

“Make that two,” he told Daniel. “I’ll be out until further notice. If something comes up, you can reach me, Daniel.”

“Yes, sir,” Daniel said as he stood aside for the two men.

They arrived at Teddy’s house to gentle music playing and Bill pacing back and forth through the living room. “Oh, thank Merlin,” he said to Harry as Teddy dashed by him and up the steps. His brother-in-law looked frankly terrible. “I don’t know what I’m doing here!”

Harry couldn’t help but laugh, but at the sour expression on Bill’s scarred face, he fought back his amusement. He supposed it wouldn’t be quite as funny if it were Lily giving birth. It was, after all, Bill’s baby who was in pain upstairs. “Has she taken anything for it?”

Bill shook his head in disgust. “Every few minutes she lets out these long, keening wails, and I just want to tear someone’s head off.”

“That wouldn’t be advisable,” Harry assured him as he pushed Bill into a chair and went to fetch some Firewhiskey from the cabinet. He forced a large tumbler on the older man and sat next to him, nursing his own while Bill took a healthy swallow.

He heard the moan, then, and it brought him straight back to all of Ginny’s births, including Hope’s, when the pain had been so terrible for all that it wasn’t physical. They’d known that Hope wasn’t going to live, and it had hurt to the bottom of his very soul. But this time was different. There would be life. The baby was fine, or they would know by now.

“What happened?” Harry asked after Bill had drained his glass.

“Victoire thought she might be in labor,” Bill explained on a shaking breath, staring unseeing into his empty glass. “She called over and, as it happened, Ginny was at our place planning out a party for the baby. It’s to be a surprise, or something.”

It was definitely a surprise because Ginny hadn’t even told him she was planning something. “Go on.”

“So they came here, and then almost immediately Fleur is telling me to come, and I barely beat the midwife here.”

“Who’s the midwife?” Harry questioned. Martha, who had delivered him, was retired from this sort of thing, but she still taught at St. Mungo’s.

“Abigail, I think was her name,” Bill replied absently.

There was no Abigail, but there was an Alberta. However, Harry thought it wouldn’t much matter to Bill what the woman’s name was. “Then Ginny called to get us.”

“It’s going by fast,” Bill said as Victoire’s cries died out. “We’ve not even been here for fifteen minutes. Can’t they force her to take something for the pain?!” he demanded of Harry, who silently took the tumbler and refilled it half again with whiskey.

Twenty minutes later, and excited Ginny came tumbling down the stairs towards them, her radiant face flushed with joy. “It’s a girl!” she exclaimed as she threw herself into Harry’s arms as her ecstatic excitement overflowing onto him as he grinned like a loon.

A girl.

It took much, much too long before Harry and Bill were allowed up to their bedroom, although in reality it was less than ten minutes before Victoire was cleaned up, dressed, and settled in the bed, holding her beautiful daughter. When Harry walked in, the picture of them struck him so forcefully that he knew he’d remember that moment for the rest of his life. Victoire lay in the bed, on her side, the baby towards her breast, while Teddy spooned up behind her, his big hand resting gently on the baby’s back. Both of them were so fixated on the child that they had eyes for no one else.

Bill walked silently to his daughter and knelt, placing a gentle kiss on her brow as she smiled for her father, then watched as Bill kissed the tiny child’s forehead.

Victoire’s tired gaze met his. “We’ve named her Emma.”

“It’s a beautiful name,” Harry assured her as he came over to meet his granddaughter. “Budge over and share,” he told Bill, who growled good-naturedly.

His first kiss to the new baby was magical smells and undying love. It was an experience he was never to forget, and hopefully to repeat many times over. Molly and Arthur would be by later, to greet their first great-grandchild, but he understood viscerally the absolute love that Molly had explained to him. It’s like that for your child, but on a whole other level.

Ginny came in, carrying a glass of juice and set it by the bed. “Back off, you two, give them space.”

Harry did rise, but not before kissing Victoire’s cheek and telling them how proud he was of her. He felt a prickling behind his eyes and quickly turned away to see his wife studying him with a knowing smile. She didn’t look all that steady, either.

Fleur sat gently on the end of the bed, rubbing her hand along Victoire’s covered foot. “She was wonderful.”

“She did very well,” Alberta, the midwife, told them. Harry hadn’t even seen that she was there, working in the corner on a parchment. In a bowl next to her was a blob of red blood, and he noticed a pair of discarded gloves.

For the briefest moment he was brought back, horribly, to the warehouse and all of the things that he’d seen, but then Ginny’s hand was in his and he let it go. It wasn’t the same situation… but there had been women there, women giving birth, women and babies who didn’t live, or were murdered. It was a combination of the two. Some had died from childbirth injuries, something that was practically unheard of in the magical community, and others had been murdered. None of the babies had been allowed to live. Because none of the mothers had been English, their babies hadn’t shown up on the registry with the British Ministry. It was a stupid technicality, one that should have been easy to overlook. British babies born to Muggles showed up on the registry, so why couldn’t foreign babies? He’d yet to receive a satisfying answer from the Hall of Records.

“Harry?” Ginny took his hand as she quietly whispered his name. “Let’s let them get some sleep. We’ll be downstairs,” she told the room at large.

He followed her numbly, giving in to the pressure of her small hand in his, as he’d always done with her, and let her lead him down to the couch, where she sat him. She sat next to him, holding his hand and studying him closely. “Maybe it’s time to see a therapist.”

“Might be a good idea, yeah,” Harry agreed without really thinking through what she’d suggested.

His brain was too full of dead babies and possibilities to take in much more.

~*~

Teddy studied his sleeping wife and child as the silent room around him went dark with the fading light. He brushed a finger gently over Emma’s sleeping face and watched her sigh and shift a bit in Victoire’s arms. He knew that he should sleep while he could, that the night would bring many waking hours with this little being demanding to be fed and changed, but he couldn’t force himself to stop looking at her. She was Victoire in miniature. He remembered Victoire as a baby. He’d seen her a few days after her birth, and it was his first memory. He loved that it was his first memory. He’d been so young, but he remembered seeing her and thinking that there was nothing better than this baby. He’d wanted to hold her, and amazingly he’d been allowed to do that. They had a picture of him beaming at the camera then staring down in awe at baby Victoire, while Fleur knelt next to him, ready to catch the infant should he let her drop. Teddy hadn’t let her fall. He’d never let her fall, not then, and not now.

When he’d accepted the money from Harry and Ginny it had felt like he was letting them down. It had felt like he was giving up on the chance to be independent, but looking at Emma he knew he’d do it over again in a heartbeat. Harry had said it best when he’d explained that Teddy would want to enjoy this time with his child, not be at work all the time and stressed about money. He’d been right on that. Teddy could take days off, weeks if Victoire needed it, and they wouldn’t starve. The bills were all paid, there was food in the larder, and he could enjoy his baby and his wife. There were too many people who would never have that luxury and he had no intention of taking it for granted.

Emma didn’t have much hair, but what she did have was blonde and curling a bit around the crown of her head. She was dressed in a green sleeper and her tiny, perfect fingers curled around the edge of the sleeve, holding tight to it. He brushed at her fingers which flexed open, and he let her grab his finger, to hold fast to it with her miniscule, impossibly perfect fingernails just a little too long, so that he knew they’d need to be trimmed or she’d scratch herself. Al had scratched himself all up. Teddy could still remember the calamity of watching Ginny and Harry attempt to trim his nails while James attempted to scale the walls. Literally. They’d waited until Teddy was over to visit so he could watch James, but it hadn’t done much good. Harry had had to use magic to get the spider-monkey off the ceiling.

He really, really hoped his daughter took after Lily and not James, or he’d have to be changing his hair color constantly to hide the gray.

Emma’s mouth formed almost a bow shaped pout and for a second he thought she would wake, but she slept on, the sleep of the newly born. She’d earned it. Victoire had earned it. Labor was bad enough when it took hours to come, but it was almost like his wife’s body had forced the baby out. By the time he’d arrived she was nearly ready to push and the screaming from her had broken his heart. He hated to see her in pain, but he was so proud of her for enduring it that he could have burst from it. He knew he couldn’t have done it. He’d have taken the potion to stop the pain.

Emma squirmed again, squeezing his finger, and then he felt, more than heard, the rumble that meant a nappy change was in his future. Victoire didn’t even stir as he picked Emma up, easily able to hold her tiny form in his two hands, and carried her over to the changing table they had set up in the corner. Emma’s first squawk of real protest came when he unfastened her snaps and the cool air hit her stomach.

“What?” Victoire asked, startling out of her sleep.

“Nappy,” Teddy assured her, as he kept a hand on Emma’s belly and glanced over to his wife. “She’ll likely want to eat after this.”

They’d tried to get Emma to nurse before their nap, but to no avail. She’d been too worn out from being born to even attempt it.

Nursing, it turned out, wasn’t as simple as Ginny made it seem. It took the midwife, Ginny, and Fleur to get Emma latched and from the look on Victoire’s face, it was much more painful than the actual act of giving birth. Not only that, but Emma kept breaking off and screaming her head off, turning bright red in the process.

“Wait,” Alberta muttered as she looked into Emma’s mouth. “Aw, poor mite has a full tongue and lip tie. No wonder she can’t nurse. Let’s call in a Healer for this one.”

Teddy opened his mouth to ask what that was, but Ginny was already in motion to get in touch with Aunt Audrey. “Why can’t you do it?” Victoire asked Alberta as she tried to sooth the upset baby, but looked to be on the point of tears herself.

Teddy moved to her and gently took the baby from her, rocking her and soothing her until Emma started to calm. Victoire burst into tears.

It was all chaos.

“It’s not you, sweetheart,” Ginny soothed her as both mothers surrounded her. “Teddy doesn’t smell like milk, so she isn’t being reminded that she can’t eat at the moment.”

“I have only seen a tie that severe removed once,” Alberta explained with a smile, reminding Teddy that they had other problems. “I’m not going to experiment on a baby who is only three hours old.”

Thankfully, although it felt like it took Audrey ten hours to get there rather than ten minutes, the tie was fixed. Audrey made it look simple, even explaining to both Victoire and Alberta how it was done painlessly for the baby. “She might sleep through this,” Audrey explained as she passed Victoire the baby, “but then again, she might not. Let’s see if she’ll eat.”

She did.

“You can’t leave,” Victoire told her mother, and Ginny, very seriously just as soon as Emma was suckling away. “You two have to stay.”

“We’ll stay, my luv,” Fleur promised as she soothed back her hair. “When you’re ready for us to go, we will go.”

Teddy lounged back on the bed and watched his baby eat and thought that maybe, just maybe, they’d survive her first twenty-four hours of life, but it would be a close thing.

~*~

“It’s a girl!” Lily winked at Nat, who grinned knowingly as she read through the letter from Ginny about Emma’s birth.

“A girl,” Al mused as he munched on bacon at breakfast. It was the middle of January and the castle was currently under assault by a massive blizzard. The only warm places in the castle were the common rooms. Nat thought he looked a little horrified by that. “I dunno about girls.”

“What’s there to know about girls?” Rose demanded with a scowl. “She’ll be great because girls are great.”

“Yeah, but,” Al went on slowly, “she’ll look like Victoire and that won’t be good.”

“Is Victoire suddenly hideous?” Lily wondered with a grin.

Al scowled at his sister and shook his head, pointing at her with his bacon. “It’s just as bad with you, you know! You being all pretty and everything. I don’t like it.”

“It’s that Uncle Ron’s line?” Lily asked as she rolled her eyes, but Nat could see her smile.

Nat studied Al as he struggled, mightily, to come to terms with what his sister had said. “I hate that you’re right, you know,” he told Lily with a sigh, his mouth twisted in a grimace. “I feel honor bound to protect you.”

“Well, of course you’re going to protect me!” Lily huffed out with a giggle. “That is your job, Albus, and I will happily let you intervene any time, day or night, when I need it. If a duel needs to be fought in my honor, I assure you I’m going to stand back and let you take all the curses.”

Scorpius choked on his pumpkin juice and waved Rose off as she pounded on his back.

Lily ignored them, and went on, having finally made her big brother smile. “I can’t help what I look like, you know. If I were ugly, that wouldn’t solve your problem, though. I’m so precocious that I’d still have all the boys lined up.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” Al muttered, but he took the letter from home and read on. “It sounds like everything went well.”

“I love babies,” Lily sighed happily as she scooped picked at her bacon. “I can’t wait to meet Emma!”

Nat really wanted to meet Emma, as well, but she didn’t say anything as they finished breakfast and headed off to Potions. Babies were a complicated business in Nat’s mind.

She really liked babies. She thought she might want a baby someday, but she’d also identified dead babies, so there were a lot of things that were convoluted in that scenario. It also didn’t help that she was neither pretty, nor precocious, so finding a guy to have a baby with might end up being more of an ordeal that she would have liked.

They were in their fourth year, and things were starting to pick up towards selecting a career, but Nat was totally unable to settle on anything. She knew that Al wanted to be an Auror. She knew that as surely as she knew her own name, but she also knew he wasn’t yet ready to admit it to anyone. He hadn’t even told her, but she could tell from the way he talked about his dad’s work.

Rose was trickier, but at the moment she thought Rose was probably going to go into Potions. When they were younger, and the potions easier, Rose had taken it for granted and hadn’t been the best at putting her all into it. Now that the potions were getting trickier, and the work harder, she was really getting into the minutia of potions, and her passion for it was growing. That was all to the good, as far as Nat was concerned. She’d heard Mr. Potter complain about their lack of potions masters, especially ones he could trust, and Rose would fit both of those. It would take her a lot time and effort to reach the master level, but Nat had no doubt that she would.

Scorpius had said, with a roll of his eyes, that he was expected to take over for his father just like every other male in his family, but she thought he might like to work for Gringotts. He’d spoken to Bill Weasley about it at Christmas, asking him about his job working at the bank. It was a possibility, but she could also see him studying the law and working with Rose’s mum at the Ministry. Those were her guesses, at any rate.

Nat could easily walk into any Muggle police station and secure a job for herself. She could work with the MLE on a consultant basis, much like she did now. But she didn’t want to. She didn’t mind being helpful, certainly she had a gift and she wanted to use it, and she wouldn’t mind doing that for the rest of her life, but she didn’t want it to be the rest of her life. It was a hard and fast distinction.

She rather thought, horribly fascinated by her own hubris, that she wanted to be a mum as her fulltime job. She’d hardly had her mum, just a string of nannies throughout the world, and the thought of being in one place, or all time, with the same set of people sounded absolutely marvelous to her. She could be just like Gran Weasley, and that sounded so unbelievably amazing to her… except that she wasn’t pretty, and she wasn’t precocious, and she was half in love with Al, already, who was extremely handsome. She didn’t stand a chance with him, which was fine because Nat was nothing if not practical. He’d find whomever he was supposed to be with, and he’d marry, and she’d get over her feelings for him because in the wizarding world marriage was for life. There was no divorce, so there would be no chance.

Hope was a painful, evil little devil. Her heart wanted to hope that Al would love her, but of course he wasn’t going to. He was going to pick someone beautiful, like Mrs. Potter was beautiful, but still she longed to hope. Maybe it was time to find Al a girlfriend to help speed that process along.

Besides, people didn’t stay with their first love. That wasn’t how love worked.

“Leah!”

Nat stumbled and would have fallen if Al hadn’t caught her arm. She stared around blankly and realized that she’d completely missed their potions class and was heading off down a deserted corridor.

“What?”

“You’re daydreaming,” Al laughed as he took her hand and tugged her back towards the correct dungeon. “Come on.”

Yeah, it was definitely time to find him a girlfriend. Thankfully, it shouldn’t be too difficult.

~*~

“It’s weird that you’re a grandfather,” Ron mused as they lounged on Harry’s couch while the women did whatever it was that they were doing in the kitchen. Harry had offered to help, but he’d been handed the baby and told to sit down and don’t move.

He could absolutely manage that, even onehanded. Emma was so tiny, all wrapped up in her blanket, that he didn’t need a second arm. He grinned down at her pink, cherubic face and fell in love all over again. “It’s the best thing, Ron,” Harry assured him, totally unaware of how he sounded until Ron let out a snort. “Alright, I know you think there are better things, but there aren’t. Holding your child’s child is the real magic.”

Ron pointed at him with his beer. “You sound like the women.” He glanced over towards the kitchen, but they hadn’t looked around at his comment. “Why are we at the baby shower, again?”

“We don’t have to stay,” he assured Ron, and didn’t bother to utter, ‘Thank Merlin,’ out loud, because that was implied and understood. Not that he didn’t enjoy this one-on-one time with Emma, especially since Bill would have fought him over the baby if he’d been around, but he absolutely did not want to be here while they opened baby gifts. That sounded dreadful. He hadn’t even wanted to be at James’ baby shower, but he’d been obligated into that one.

Ron had laughed at him and mocked him then, until it was his turn. Hermione, however, was more practical than Ginny, or quite possibly not as sadistic, and she’d let Ron out of Rose’s shower. They’d gone out to a pub with all the other men and had toasted and jeered at Ron for several long, happy, hours, thankful to be men and excused from the festivities.

“Where is Bill, anyway?” Ron wondered.

“He claimed an emergency meeting at the bank,” Harry explained with a chuckle, “but really we’re meeting him at The Leaky Cauldron in a bit.”

Emma stretched in his arms and he set his beer down to shift his stance on the tiny mite. She was going to be so much fun once she was older. Harry hadn’t forgotten just how much he enjoyed two- and three-year-olds, and their antics. Right now she would sleep all the time, and he’d enjoy that for the brief time it lasted, but then it would be all play, all the time, and that was truly the thing he liked the best. Lily was now twelve, and there were still sweet times with her, but not the same kind of play with the wild, abandoned laughter and the joy that were the hallmarks of toddlers.

Soon, though, much too soon, she would be there, and then she’d be beyond. He raised the baby up and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “It’s not weird that Teddy and Victoire have a child, that’s expected at their age. It will be weird when it’s Lily’s turn. Or maybe not,” he considered. At that point, he’d likely have grandchildren from all three of the boys, or at least they’d be ready to have them. Unless he missed the mark, James was going to try to win Caroline’s hand. He didn’t know if his son would stick with it, but from all he’d heard, his James was the spitting image of his grandfather, his namesake, so it was possible that once and done for love and romance. It was basically what happened to Harry, too. He couldn’t even remember why he’d liked Cho, now, and it didn’t matter. She was still single, last he’d heard. She never married, and she seemed fine with it.

But it wasn’t the life for him, not that he’d had much say in it. He could have run from Ginny when she’d been impregnated, but that wasn’t the kind of man that he was, and besides that he’d always wanted to marry Ginny. That had been his secret plan, even up to his dying breath at the hands of Voldemort.

“I dunno about Rose’s boyfriend,” Ron told him quietly, and not for the first time.

“He’s the son of a duke, Ron,” Harry reminded him in exasperation. “Hermione explained to you what that means in the Muggle world. It’s a big deal.” Ron opened his mouth to object, but Harry beat him to it. “Besides, you said yourself that you really liked the kid, and that he was very respectful. He’s a smart, nice young man, and he seems to adore Rose. What more could you want for her?”

Ron tapped his finger on the neck of his beer and stared thoughtfully across the room towards his wife. “I want her to have all the time she needs to grow up.”

Harry blinked, more than a little surprised. “She will have that.”

“You know what I mean,” Ron said quietly, shifting to stare off into the lit fireplace as a light snow began to fall outside the bay windows. “We were so young when we got together, married. We were too young to really know who we’d be when we were forty. I want Rose to have a chance to know.”

“You knew, even then,” Harry told him but hesitated a bit, because he wasn’t sure what Ron was saying.

“No,” Ron shook his head and a wry smile twisted his lips. “You always knew, and Ginny always knew, but Hermione and I didn’t have a clue. It’s worked out, because we’ve made it work, but it wasn’t an automatic thing for us. If we’d had the option to divorce, I bet she’d have left me a long time ago. She didn’t really know what she wanted. Once I’d made up my mind, I stick even if it doesn’t make any sense–”

“Like the Cannons,” Harry commented with a smirk.

Ron scowled at him, “Bugger off about the Cannons. They had a good year last year.”

They hadn’t. They just hadn’t finished out at the bottom, like they typically did. Harry didn’t point that out.

“But not our Hermione,” Ron went on. “She wasn’t really ready to get married, and I think she did because she was still so traumatized by the war and all we’d been through. I think if she’d been thinking clearly, she might not have picked me. I’m glad she did, for my sake, but I love her so I would want her to have the time to really make the right choice.”

It was possibly the most articulate thing Ron had ever said in his life. Harry studied his best friend, his brother, for a long moment. “We’re not going to war. We’re not going to let that happen, so Rose will have the time to know all she needs to know who she is.”

Ron didn’t look convinced, but then again it was difficult to say with Ron. Some of his waters ran deep, and others, as Hermione once said, were as shallow as a teaspoon. But whatever it was, he knew that he’d never have a more loyal friend or brother.

They left for the pub ten minutes later, having been chivvied from the house by Ginny, who had mercifully decided it was not his grandfatherly duty to stick it out. Of course, with him out of the way, she only had to fight Fleur for time with Emma.

Bill was waiting for them at a back corner table as soon with George and Percy already seated. “Is Dad coming?” Ron asked as he hung his cloak over the back of his chair and took a seat.

“I don’t think so,” Bill told him. “I asked if he wanted to, but he said he thought he might go with Mum to the shower, something about better food.”

They all scowled at the menu, which had changed in the last year to reflect the new head chef, a man who didn’t have any taste buds at all. “Why did we want to meet here, again?” George moaned as he set his menu down. “We could have gone anywhere in London and had better food.”

“There’s a curry place just down the block on the Muggle side that I enjoy,” Bill offered.

Percy shook his head and doggedly studied his menu. “Only Ron and Harry are dressed for Muggle London.”

“We could all pop home and be back in a trice,” George said resolutely as he stood up, settling the matter.

Percy sighed and managed not to roll his eyes.

“Are you leaving so soon?” Old Tom called out to them.

“You need a new chef, Tom,” George informed him dryly.

Ron and Harry walked down to the curry place in a light snow, following Bill’s directions, and secured a table. Not even five minutes later all of the brothers were assembled again, this time with much greater enthusiasm for the menu.

“How is the investigation going?” Bill asked Harry after they’d placed their order.

“I have no idea,” Harry admitted reluctantly as his brothers studied him. “I haven’t made any progress, to be honest. We know it’s a potion that she’s trying to perfect, but she’s arguably the greatest potions master alive, or she would have been if she’d been formally trained. I spoke to Slughorn about it, and he had a go at formulating an opinion, but it didn’t pan out. He ended up saying that whatever she’d started with was too badly degraded to find the ingredients and that we should expect it to be powerful magic. He said it almost seemed like a magical hole.”

“Really,” Bill whistled.

“I’m impressed the old man is still kicking,” George mused as he nursed his beer. “He has to be closing in on two hundred years old now.

“I don’t think he’s quite that old,” Harry laughed and thanked the waitress as she brought over their food. She shot him a confused smile, and hurried away quickly. “Thankfully, she didn’t take you seriously,” he told George, who shrugged, clearly unconcerned what the Muggle woman thought.

“Do you think she’s trying to cause a natural disaster?” Percy questioned as he took a careful bite of his food.

Harry shrugged helplessly. “I honestly have no idea. She’s experimenting on women, though, and we can assume it has something to do with women. I don’t know if she’s encouraging them to get pregnant or if she’s just letting her goons have free reign on these powerless women, but I think she wants them pregnant, for whatever reason. If she didn’t care about that, she could just take English women.”

“Not entirely true,” Ron reminded him. “If she doesn’t want to be tracked by those babies, then still needs foreign women.”

“I think a safer assumption is that the birth control potion, which we know she can make,” Percy commented, “would interfere with whatever potion she’s trying to create. Whether she’s keeping her men happy or not, I do not know. They can’t be English, either, though. I checked into that and if they were, their children would come up in the registry.”

“So she’s using all foreigners,” George summed up with a shake of his head. “Why doesn’t she just leave the country to do whatever she’s doing?”

“I think she has,” Harry explained quietly. “I received a letter, and unlike most letters she’s sent me before, she addressed it as having come from Hungary. I spoke with their government, of course, but she was already gone from the location by the time they checked.”

“I don’t want her gone from the country,” Ron told him glumly. “That means you won’t catch her.”

“I’m not likely to catch her, now,” Harry pointed out bluntly. “It’s been decades and I haven’t been able to nab her. Granted, much of that time I thought she was dead, but it’s still a hell of a long time to be on the run.”

“It’s longer than Voldemort,” Bill mused thoughtfully. “It’s a damn long time.”

“Let’s get off the shop talk,” George suggested as he held up his beer and everyone clinked bottles, all except Percy who always ordered wine, “to escaping the baby shower without any hysterics!”

“Here, here!” they all agreed wholeheartedly.

Harry ate his curry, laughed with his brothers, and thought about Isabella Crabbe. If it was true that she was gone from the country, it meant breathing room for him, and while he liked that, he agreed with Ron. He didn’t want to foist England’s problems off on another country. She was their insane villain, and Harry had every intention of being the one to bring her down.

But first he had to figure out just what the hell she was up to, and that was not going to be easy.

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