Edit 6/19/18: I needed to make some edits to this because a headcanon became freaking canon and it now makes SO much more sense to everyone else.

Harry blinked at Charlie. Married? He closed his eyes. His fingers curled to dig into his palms. It was just another example of 'let's leave Harry out of the loop,' he tried to reason, but for some reason, this one had sliced somewhere deep in the pit of his stomach. He was used to everyone just assuming he knew the Wizarding World's twisted ins and outs. He'd even resigned himself to the whole universe clamming up the second he might learn something useful about the madman hellbent on killing him. This was inane in comparison to that, but this…this was family.

"Which brother?" he asked in a chirp he couldn't quite control.

It was Charlie's turn to blink. "Bill, the lucky sod. You'd remember Fleur Delacour, of course."

Harry smiled. The mug sitting on the table before him rattled for a bare fraction of a second before he slammed a hand down to keep it still. He doubted anyone had noticed; he'd gotten quite good that summer at hiding the odd magical shakes around the Dursleys. "Fleur. Of course," he replied evenly. Only the girl he'd shared three harrowing, deadly experiences with; that was all. It would have been best to leave it there, but he couldn't stop himself. "I don't know much about Wizarding weddings, actually. The Muggle ones have all these rules and traditions. Do Witches go insane over the details, too?"

There was some groaning from the males for an answer, while Ginny's response more closely resembled a low hiss.

"It's not just the dress and the flowers, either. You wouldn't believe how much paper Muggles go through getting ready for wedding."

"Paper?" Fred repeated in mystification.

Something almost like hope unfurled in Harry chest. "You know," he said lightly. "Engagement announcements, wedding announcements, save the date cards, wedding invitations and wedding reception invitations…do Wizards not bother with all that?"

George grimaced. "If only. The happy couple showed at the start of the hols. Fleur had him locked up for days working on the announcement list. If the Statute of Secrecy didn't exist, they'd have told half the world."

Harry looked down at the mug. It was buzzing in his palm, the tremors riding up past his elbow. "…I see. Would you excuse me?" He lurched to his feet and walked out of the kitchen with the mug in a death grip. The buzzing rolled into his shoulders and the back of his throat. Ginny punched George's shoulder as he passed. The redhead broke into familiar bickering at his back. He swallowed, forcing the dark roiling thing in his throat down into the pit of his stomach.

He didn't have a name for it, this dark feeling that ate at him sometimes. He just knew it would be very, very bad to let out. Worse than catflap bad. Worse than the graveyard. Worse than the veil. Harry put one foot in front of the other, intent on making it to the upstairs room. If he could get there, he could sit quietly in the dark and pretend he didn't exist. He put the other foot in front of the first. His world boiled down to the shifting of feet and keeping the glazed ceramic in his hand from shattering. Then his feet stopped, and he blinked at the sight of the door of a cupboard under the stairs.

The mug didn't shatter. It burst apart into dust and vicious, twisting darkness with a roar of violence given sound. Harry realized he was screaming, and the air was screaming with him. It writhed and shrilled. It had teeth, and he wasn't sure whether he wanted it to devour him or the world.

At the edge of the darkness, he could hear shouting.

"...No..."

"Obscurial..."

"Harry..."

"...Kill..."

The darkness whipped around at the last. Everything was fear. Everything was rage. He reached out towards the voice to rend it apart.

Suddenly, there was light. An electric jolt ran up from his soles and seized his entire body. Every muscle contracted, he toppled to the ground, all of the air forced out of his lungs. On impact with the electrified floor, his thoughts white outed, forcibly expelled from his brain. The darkness snapped inside of Harry, gone just as fast as it had come. It fled into the deepest part of him, past the scar, into his heart. The world wen silent all at once as he lay there, convulsing.

The shock ended, and he went limp. His eyes slid open. Charlie Weasley was crouched low in the hallway, his face stricken but his eyes watchful and the tip of his wand pressed firmly into the floor. Behind him, three red heads peered cautiously out of the kitchen doorway. There was a door slam and a skid of feet, and then a fourth head—Ron's—joined them.

Harry's own head lolled. His glasses were miraculously still half on his face. He could see up the Burrow's haphazard set of stairs with one eye; the rest was fuzz. That was Hermione in the distance, the token brunette. Closer, there was a blonde. It was Fleur Delacour, eyes wide, an arm and a hip thrust forward to shield Bill Weasley, who, despite the circumstances, Harry still thought was the coolest looking man on the planet. The closest person was Molly Weasley. She stood frozen on the foot of the stair, mere feet from where he lay. Her hair was blown over her face and her lip was trembling.

The shouting from before played back in Harry's head. It made sense now in a way he couldn't manage before. Not the Obscurial part, that was nonsense, but "Please no," Molly Weasley had said. "Harry, stop. Please, Harry. You have to stop. It will kill you. Baby, please!"

Harry blanched. The darkness had almost... He had nearly... Mrs. Weasley's outstretched hand shook before stretching another inch towards him. He thought of the last time he had been pulled into an embrace. He thought of the last time he had let darkness swallow someone whole. Harry recoiled.

The front door was closest. He bolted. The winding road towards Muggle civilization beckoned, but he faltered mid-sprint. Dumbledore had said that it wasn't safe, that nothing could be trusted. So he banked hard to the left instead, around the house and into the shelter of the orchard. He ran until he tripped over the branch of a fallen tree. He went down knees first, breathless and hollow. He buried his face in the long grass and sobbed. He curled into a ball, feeling the darkness twitch inside him. It had never come out before. Why now? Why did he have to always ruin everything?

"Well, that was bracing," a panting voice said seconds later. Harry looked sideways in time to see Bill Weasley. The redhead he only knew vaguely from two years earlier dropped down to perch on the log beside him. The man stuck out a tanned hand to help him up. "You do realize you could probably beat mum's howlers for sheer volume if you really put your mind to it? Bit of an amazing feat, that, really. You were with Ron for the Ford Angelina Incident, so I imagine you've heard her at her best."

With the adrenaline in him used up, Harry found himself blushing furiously and shying away from the proffered hand. "Sorry about…" he mumbled before trailing off, unable to name his behavior without making himself sound like a short-fused toddler.

Bill only shrugged. "No apologies necessary. We all need a release valve—don't tell Dad I know what that is! Mine is my matryoshka."

Harry had to blink at that. "I'm sorry. Your what?" he asked. Then he thought better of it. "Never mind. I don't want to know. Just...just go away. Before I hurt you!" The darkness unfurled in the pit of his stomach.

Bill reached into his robes and removed a wrapped bundle. Completely ignoring Harry, he said, "Here. Catch." Harry plucked it neatly from the air as it came at him thanks to his honed reflexes. Then he fumbled and dropped it with a gasp as it seemed to slither right out of his hand.

"Sorry!" Harry cried out, suddenly mortified. The dark went quiet. He hurriedly reached to pick up the small, surprisingly heavy object. He couldn't think of anything but the desperate need to make sure he hadn't broken it. The bundle slipped from his frantic fingers like soap twice more before he managed to secure it in his grasp. Then he gasped, realizing Bill had seen the whole thing. "I'm not usually this butter-fingered," Gryffindor's seeker said feebly. "Honest." The ground could swallow him whole right then if it wanted, he decided; he wouldn't struggle.

Bill just smiled at him warmly. "I'm pretty impressed you managed to snag it this quickly. The cloth's cursed, sort of a tactile notice-me-not mixed with a compulsion spell. Fingers slide right over it. The more you miss, the more you need to catch it." His voice lowered conspiratorially. "I used to lay that little whammy on Charlie's practice snitch when the prat got too uppity about being the great quidditch prodigy of all Hogwarts History. …Well, go on. You can unwrap it now that you've got it. I can tell you want to."

Harry paused for a moment and stared at Bill. There was something about Bill's voice, something that rang bells that sounded like Dudley Dursely and traps.

"It's all right," said Bill.

Harry did as he was bidden and soon had a small Russian nesting doll lying in his hand. A matryoshka, he realized. The doll had a redheaded figure handpainted on the wooden shell. It wore the costume and wide grin of a jester. Spotting a bit of detail on the underside, Harry turned it over and found another near-identical jester. He was reminded immediately of Fred and George. "Did you…make this?" he asked. He brushed a hand over one figure's checkered tunic.

He tore his gaze away from the doll to look back at Bill. The doll was warm and smooth under his hands. "It's beautiful."

Bill smiled at him. "It's how I keep sane. Open it."

There was something far too sharp about those blue eyes, but they were also kind. Dubious, curious, wanting, Harry obeyed. Immediately and without knowing why, he broke into gales of laughter. The twins' wooden shells and the next doll waiting inside fell from his hands as he keeled over, clutching at his stomach. Bill caught him as he tipped. His robes were soft, which Harry found hilarious. The sound of his own giggling was funny. The shapes of the clouds in the sky, the log he was pulled up to sit on, being abandoned for a sword stuck in a rock, Voldemort…Sirius. It all was suddenly hysterical.

He could have laughed for five minutes or an hour before he burst into tears, and it felt like years before he dissolved into hiccups that in the end were silenced by warm hands rubbing circles in his sternum. He felt wonderfully light and hollow inside, rather like a matryoshka himself, when he asked quietly, "What was that?" to Bill at last.

"Another curse," he was told. "Though it's rather soft, as curses go. The next doll petrifies you as you open it if you don't figure out its trick first, and the ones after that get decidedly more nasty. I carve the dolls when I'm brooding and curse them when it all gets a bit much. I'm licensed to work all but the blackest of the black. Can't be a proper curse breaker unless I know how they're put together, after all. Haven't you got something you can do? Besides shouting until everyone goes deaf and the roof nearly caves in and your magic nearly eats us all, of course."

Harry blinked slowly. The wind was blowing through the grass and laden apple trees of the field beyond in mysterious patterns, and it transfixed him. He was feeling so terribly, incredibly mellow. The world was tinged a perfectly reasonable blue. "That wasn't just a laughing curse, was it?" he asked.

Bill chuckled. "Ah, you're a sharp one. Aurors have a drop of that curse on shackles for when they make arrests. It's much easier to handle a murderous wizard that can kill you with a snatched wand and a stray thought this way. It's so much better when he comes along giggling and wakes up in his cell as docile as a baby lambkin. Now, will you answer my question?"

Harry frowned. "I'm supposed to be offended by that. I think. And flying. I like flying."

"Flying can be a good stress reliever," Bill said mildly.

"Yes, but…"

"Yes, Harry?" asked Bill.

Harry took a breath. His voice was calm and measured, barely hitching at all as he explained, "But Umbridge stuck me with that lifetime flying ban, and Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia live in the middle of the Muggle suburbs, and even if there was a field or clearing close enough to hike to so the Ministry doesn't expel me for breaking the Statue of Secrecy because they hate me, Voldemort's out there looking and Dumbledore all but wrote that I'd die if I went outside of their house, and I can't even fly here because Sirius gave me my broom, and he's dead, and it's my fault, and nobody even remembers him because they're all in love with their stupid sword. God, why am I saying this? I barely even know you."

Harry knew, somewhere inside, that he never would have said most of that if not for the curse. He would have choked on the words. Violently. Now here merely blinked slowly, all his words run out. Bill was silent for a beat longer than was comfortable. "That's quite a list," the curse-breaker said. "Tell you what: how about I lend you my broom and you go up with my gaggle of sibs after your limbs are done being jelly?"

Harry frowned. "That would be like forgetting him. I can't forget him, too."

"Not even for a second?"

This answer he managed not to give. "Can I stay like this, just for a while?" he hedged instead, angling his body away, avoiding eye contact but simultaneously leaning more heavily on the man. It felt almost like Mrs. Weasley's gentle warmth and almost like Sirius's few manic crushing hugs, so he could pretend for just a minute that Bill was his godfather the way he'd hoped the man would be and not the confused, half-cracked wizard he'd been given and lost instead. The pessimist in him spoke up, as always, trying to send him back to reality, but the wonderful fuzz in his head smothered that voice and told him everything was fine. "I don't want to be a bother," he said.

A rumble of laughter came from the chest beneath him. "We can stay as long as you like, Harry. This is saving me from planning my wedding." Harry frowned. That didn't sound quite like Sirius, though he supposed that a godmother would be nice. "It's rather like planning your own execution, so I recommend running to the hills whenever you can."

"You're good at hiding. In the hills."

Another rumble. "I'm crafty like that. Harry, you do know you gave everyone a fright, right? Magic cracking open like that...it's not safe. I know the impossible is your thing, but a mostly trained wizard still almost turning Obscurial? It's more than a bit not good, mate."

Harry's face morphed into a slight frown. "I don't want to talk 'bout it."

"All right, but you should know that they are worried. They do care, Harry."

"They don't understand."

"Maybe not, but they'd like to."

"Shh, Siri. Wanna sleep."

And that's exactly what Harry proceeded to do as Bill sighed at the silent orchard, his tanned fingers itching to carve another, smaller matryoshka. To still them, the Weasley son curled his hand around a sturdy branch of the fallen log. Eyes narrowing, he turned to look at it properly and decided that, yes, it was just about the right size for the design that was coming together in his mind in time to Harry Potter's breathing.

to be continued...

I take a certain sadistic pleasure in cracking open characters like walnuts. This was also critique to the start of book 6. Harry's last remaining shot at a real family fell through a billowing black hole of death. Then he's immediately left with the most unsympathetic people on the planet for months. I don't buy mellow, let-me-help Harry at the beginning of book 6, no matter how many lemon drops Dumbledore gives him. The book 5 Harry volcano was much more realistic, thanks.