Ch 9 A Little This and That

Again thank you for my Beta Deb, who frequently challenges me on something I write.


Sunday November eleventh, two-thousand and eighteen, the family gathered for Sunday breakfast. Molly looked distracted. Harry and Ginny had attended the funeral for Aunt Muriel earlier in the week, so Ginny asked her mother, "Are you still grieving the death of Aunt Muriel?"

"She was close to one-hundred and fifty," Molly noted with a sigh. "It was really her time. It is not her death that is bothering me."

"What is?" Ginny inquired, sensing that there was more to the story. The family stayed around the table wondering what they could do to help.

"Muriel left me the tiara," Molly explained with a grimace. "Not only is it charmed to stay on until a marriage is consummated, but it will not stay on unless a couple will have children. There are spells on the tiara to insure at least some fertility. Aunt Muriel was a Weasley before she married, and I think the tiara is one reason the Weasley family has usually had more children than the average family of Magi."

"That's not a bad thing, is it?" Ginny asked.

"Not usually," Molly admitted, "but there are Weasley families that have not been very successful, generations of poor people with children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren that have struggled. Not all branches of the family have been as successful as you and your brothers. It is not just financial success. The Weasley clan is no stranger to unhappy marriages, or other problems."

"Solon, my head Elf, and the beings working for him have done everything they could to make Dad's older brothers Anthony and Adrian, successful," Harry lamented. "It didn't work. It was like they were cursed to fail."

Bill Weasley grumbled, "I finally had to repossess their land and turn them into employees. Both of them had big families. They are hard enough workers, but not smart enough. They are thick headed, set in their ways."

"So what happens if the tiara does not stay on when you try to put it on?" Ginny had to ask.

"Family drama like you would not believe, and the person who owns the tiara is right in the middle of it," Molly complained. "Once in a while I think having that tiara is a curse."

"Do you have to keep the tiara, Mum?" Ginny asked.

"I think I do, Ginny," Molly sighed. "There are family spells and such on it, and prophesies, and I don't feel I can just sell it or even get rid of it. I did sell those stupid desert plates with the flying cupids and some of the other floozy things Aunt Muriel left to me. Other more distant relatives of ours received the bulk of the inheritance."

Bill wondered if he should carefully scan the tiara to see what curses and spells had been place on it and see if he would be able to break them. He would have to do it after he talked to his mother and Fleur as he didn't want the curses to backfire on them either.


Mapping was more successful with four people, so some Saturday afternoons Albus and Cleo, Rose and Scorpius would spend some time re-mapping Hogwarts castle. They paid special attention to areas not on the original Marauders Map, especially the lower levels. It was frustrating, however, not only to Albus and his friends, but also to the Elves.

"When we make a map it looks like that there is nothing in that direction," Albus pointed out a spot on the map to Plato, the Elf he was working with, as they examined the latest map. "We know you want to expand the Elf area in that direction, but something is keeping us from mapping that area or expanding into it."

"Could the Chamber of Secrets be there?" Rose asked, noticing that the area in question was around the Slytherin dormitory and close to the lake. "Why don't you just excavate that area?"

"Something seems to be keeping us from excavating in that direction," one of the Elves complained. "We are afraid that the basilisk is in that direction as well."

"Basilisk can kill Elves as well as Magi," Plato noted. "We are not eager to be the first to find that cursed place."

"You have heard the rumors of basilisk as well?" asked Albus.

A glum looking Plato nodded 'yes.'

"Dad is going to supply glasses that protect you from the stare of the basilisk," Albus told Plato. "I'm going to insist that all of the MELL students wear them or have their glasses treated. We can get glasses for the Elves as well."

"That is over one-hundred and fifty glasses!" Plato exclaimed, shocked that anyone would do this for Elves.

"If that is how many you need, that is how many you should have," Albus stressed. He called his father later that day, to talk to his father about getting glasses for the Hogwarts Elves. Harry agreed, thinking Angelina was going to have to procure a large number of the special glasses.


Harry woke up Thursday, the last day in November, in Switzerland. A storm was coming, and he was not talking about the weather. Harry could see it as well as anyone. All the prophets could see little bits of what was coming. All the undercover operations of the International Conference of Witches and Wizards could see it coming. But the when and how were unknown. Two days of working with the Chrystal Ball and the prophets and Harry was getting more insight into what was happening, but no insight into how to make things come out properly.

Who was becoming clearer, and that was the scariest thing of all. Albus and Cleopatra were right in the middle of many of the prophesies. Edward Remus Lupin was also involved, and the omens for Teddy were both dire and hopeful. Harry remembered occasions when the weather forecasters could see that a Hurricane or Typhon was forming, and that it would probably be a large one, but there was no way to predict if it would be a category two or three or four or even five storm, no way of telling if it would make landfall or where.

Before he left Switzerland he was going to be meeting with Al VanLente and his son Dan. They were in charge of some top secret undercover work, and Harry was one of fewer than a dozen Magi in the world who knew about it. Ginny knew he was privy to top secret information, but he didn't even share it with her. It bothered Harry to have secrets from Ginny, but there wasn't any choice in the matter.

"Edwardo Wolfman has passed his first tests," Al told Harry, using Teddy's alias, when they met. "By the first of the year he should be living on the Island."

"Is that why I see evidence that Teddy has had sexual intercourse with more than one woman, without any love?" Harry fumed. Harry was not happy with what he was seeing happening to Teddy in the Chrystal Ball. He knew that if Teddy fathered children they would show up on the Tapestry, which is why anything but Teddy's name was hidden. Harry was worried about Teddy, but also about Victoire. How would she handle a Teddy wounded body and soul, and any children Teddy fathered. If he lived.

"Yes, unfortunately, that's one of the tests," Al confirmed. "Having all the people on the island engage in depraved behavior is one way Jezebel judges people, and keeps them tied to her. I just hate sending anyone to that island. If she was not kidnapping and killing over four-hundred innocent people a year, sacrificing them with that cursed knife of the Aztec, I could almost ignore that island and let them wallow in their depravity. That is just one of the evil things that happens because of her.

"Harry, we need maps of the island, maps like your father and his friends developed with the Marauders Map. You and your son Albus are the best Magi in the world in making those maps, and you have done an excellent job teaching Teddy. If Teddy can get us those maps it will be worth it."

"Worth having Teddy die," Harry snapped. "Worth having him come back damaged body and soul?"

Al looked back at Harry with tears in his eyes, and a hopeless expression on his face. Al had spent years trying to confine the evil emanating from that island, from that evil person. There was no good answer to Harry's questions, none at all.

"Teddy should be able to meet up with Annatole and Orwant Smith, Cleopatra's parents, sometime over the next couple of months," Dan explained. "Jezebel Nukpana suspects her granddaughter and son-in-law, but they are powerful Magi, and there is only so much Jezebel can do to control Annatole and Orwant. Her only heir, besides Cleo, is Natasha, their other daughter, and if anything happens to Cleo, Jezebel needs a spare. The magic demands that Jezebel has an heir.

"Jezebel was planning on having Draco and Astoria raise Cleopatra to be like Lucius, and instead Narcissa has raised two good children. You know the prophesies, Harry. We may actually rid the earth of that evil. It is just not going to be risk free. One of my classmates escaped from that island. She left behind two children who were killed by Jezebel, their beating hearts publicly cut out in one of Jezebel's cursed ceremonies. She is in a hospital consumed by guilt, all too sane but not functioning."

Harry spent the morning going over the undercover operation, and the afternoon on some of the few duties being Regent of the Swiss Valley entailed, before taking the International Floo back to the Ministry and then a Magical Closet home.


Ginny took the Floo to the office of Weasley's Wizard Wheezes. There was a private staircase from there to the upstairs apartment of George and Angelina. Ginny though that George was probably never going to move to a house. Despite the Wheezes having offices in one of the buildings on Joy Street, right off Diagon Alley, and a manufacturing plant in Devon close to Ottery St. Catchpole, George was enough of a shopkeeper that he needed to live above the main store. When they purchased the store building next door they expanded the apartment, but they often used the living and dining rooms for business meetings.

Ron led her upstairs to the dining room. Angelina had filled the dining room with the latest editions of Ginny Potter's Heroes of Hogwarts Action Figures and Ginny Potter's Quidditch Action Figures. Harry did not want his name associated with this type of merchandise. The idea of Harry Potter merchandise embarrassed him, and with his position in the Ministry and in the wider world of the Magi he did not think it was proper for him to license the Harry Potter name. Ginny had been involved with merchandising, however, ever since she had signed with the Harpies, and had become quite good at it.

The figures had not changed, but it had been more than twenty years since The Battle of Hogwarts, and fifteen years since Ginny was a Harpy, and the brief piece of paper that had been included with the original figures had expanded to a small booklet explaining who each person was and what they had done. Ginny was not only a good sports reporter, but had written a biography of each person.

Once they were finished, Ginny contemplated the two Ginny figures. The first, the Ginny Weasley figure, showed her at her best. She was the shortest of the figures, but it showed a very cute figure, with a bust that was neither too big nor too small, a narrow waist, and ample hips. The three and six inch figures did not show freckles, but the freckles on the twelve inch figure were much prettier than her face really was. Photographs showed her with freckles that really were blotchy instead of light and cute, and they had not become any smaller, lighter or prettier as she had aged. The Ginny Potter Quidditch figure was noticeably thinner, but even her bony figure, when she was too thin to have a period or become pregnant, showed some bust and thinner but ample hips. None of the figures showed her scars, the ones from before the Battle, inflicted by the Carrows, nor the badly mangled knee that could only be repaired with a Muggle metal knee. The knee surgery left a big scar, and she never wore short dresses or anything that exposed that knee. The ugly scar on her arm, from learning to heal sectumsempra cuts, was also missing from the figures, a reason she usually wore long sleeves. Not much was hidden when she wore a bathing costume, but Harry wasn't much better, with lightning shaped scars on his forehead and chest, and other scars on his body.

Her head injury that had ended her Quidditch career was invisible, but her inability to exercise as much as she would like, plus four children, and she was way heavier than when she was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. She shouldn't really complain. Despite her injuries and scars, despite her weight, her life was usually very happy, with the best, most faithful husband a woman could have, four healthy children, and a wider family that could not be much better. Her Quidditch column was well received, and her professional life was satisfying as well. Life was good.

Ginny looked at the figures of the other women of the DA. Luna was still about the same, her face older because of exposure to the sun, but still a thin, slight figure. The Lavender Brown figure was busty and hippy, not exactly thin in the middle but the just a little heavy. All the extra weight went into the right places, giving her a figure that guys who wanted a curvy girl liked. The current Lavender was well over twice as heavy, with huge hips and breasts, and a mammoth stomach. Ginny knew she was heavy, but not as heavy as Lavender. The Hanna Abbott figure was shaped like a shorter Lavender. The current Hanna was heavier, looking like a well filled out proprietor of a pub, but she was not near as heavy as Lavender. Ginny thought she and Hanna were probably about the same, fat but not obese like Lavender.

Hermione and Angelina, her sisters-in-law, were heavier mostly in the hips, with modest stomachs, looking very much like middle-aged women. The Patil twins were the same, middle-aged heavier but not fat.

Susan Bones was still fit. Cho Chang was still fit, still looked very much like her action figure, although her black hair was beginning to show a little gray. Ginny regretted not befriending Cho earlier. As you aged you saw, at least if you paid attention, that other people had their problems and troubles. After two young men kissed her and then were killed, Cho had panicked at the thought of marrying anyone in the Ministry. Her wizard husband and his family were landlords, and Cho would joke that the only thing Ed Koizumi, her husband, fought was balky drains. Their oldest daughter was in the process of becoming a boy, something that Cho only reluctantly accepted.

Charlie was gay, and living with his partner until Stribog Romanoff was killed by a dragon. Magi were usually more accepting of non-traditional sexual orientation, but not always. Cho was handling Chloe becoming Charles, but it was not easy for her.

Harry counted on Cho leading raids, something she had done successfully for years, mostly because she was a terrified Ravenclaw that went over every detail of every potential risk in every raid. It worried both Harry and Cho, however, that there would come a time when their luck would run out and someone would be seriously hurt or killed. Since becoming more friendly with Cho, the danger in Cho's job worried Ginny as well.

Marietta Edgecombe did not have an action figure, and Ginny had no idea where she was. Ginny was glad that Marietta had disappeared. She had not used her Bat Bogey Hex in years, but Ginny knew that she was not as nice as Harry, and didn't forgive as easily. If she had to write something about Marietta, Ginny would probably write a Howler.

Ginny sighed. It wasn't just the females that looked older. Harry was beginning to get a little gray around the temples. His Auror training kept him fit and thin, but seeing him in a bathing costume, or naked, and his scars were obvious. The lightning shaped scar on his chest was large, and the absence of any chest hair on that wide jagged line made the scar even more noticeable.

Actually, right after the battle Harry, Ron and Hermione were thinner and more, Ginny did not know how to put it, but drawn out, used up, frazzled more than the figures showed. Fleur had let Ginny know that when she first saw Harry, Ron and Hermione, when Dobby brought them to Shell Cottage, they were not just thin but emaciated.

Ron had a pot belly now, and had to watch what he ate. Poetic justice for scarfing up all the leftovers when they were growing up. He also had a small bald spot, although he wore his hair long and it was seldom noticeable.

Neville's figure did not show all his scars either. He had significantly more scars than she did, including noticeable scars on his face and arms. Ginny knew that the students at Hogwarts talked about Neville being a hero, and he was often called The Snakeslayer. He wasn't obese like old Professor Slughorn, or even as heavy as young Professor Slughorn, but he was a long way from being thin.

Dean Thomas was middle age heavy. Actually, Ginny thought, a lot of middle aged Wizards put on weight around the middle, unlike the women who seemed to put on weight on their hips. Men with little hips and big bellies looked, she thought, silly. Ernie Macmillan was heavy as well, although he wore expensive clothes that hid at least some of the extra weight.

Lee Jordan was one of those annoying people who never seemed to gain weight. He was usually traveling for Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, and Ginny felt sorry for his wife.

Seamus Finnigan was still an Auror, and because of the exercise program that Aurors were expected to follow, he was still thin and in good physical condition.

Ginny had not seen Terry Boot or Zacharias Smith recently. She tried to remember if she saw either of them at the twentieth anniversary of The Battle of Hogwarts. She thought she might have, but she could not remember what they looked like.

Well, Ginny thought, we are all getting older. And she laughed to herself, 'well we did run up and down stairs every day all day at Hogwarts, of course we would have been in better shape.' Besides, hadn't Harry affirmed that he loved her now the way she was. She shook her head as she remembered. She had been looking at herself in the mirror, being critical of course when Harry had come up behind her and began nibbling on… well needless to say, Harry was a bit late to work this morning.


"Mistress Ginny will be home in about an hour," Mabel, the house elf, stated, as Harry came through the Closet. Magical Closets were gradually replacing the Floo network, using the same green powder but a much cleaner and more automated type of magic. Harry had them install a closet in between twelve and thirteen Grimmauld Place, with a door to Ron and Hermione's house and another that opened to his house. Charlie could not take his wheelchair through the Floo, but he could take it through the Closet Network, so when Charlie was badly injured in the accident that killed his partner, they installed a Magical Closet in the New Burrow, and several other places besides. The Closet Network was not interconnected to the Floo network, but the Closet network was gradually expanding.

"Hello, Mabel," Harry sprightly greeted their house elf. "Where are Ginny and Minerva?"

Mable replied, "Mistress Ginny is working. She told me she should be finished by six. Mistress Minerva is with her grandmum."

"Thank you, Mabel," Harry responded. "Will you text Ginny, please, and tell her that I will pick up Minerva?"

Harry waited for an answer, so Mabel replied, "Yes, Master Harry. Mabel always does as she is told." Harry took the closet to The New Burrow.


'Will you, please,' Mabel fumed to herself. One was not to ask a house elf. One were charmed to obey. It was an insult asking, implying that maybe she could and would disobey.

Mabel gingerly removed the hated instrument out of the pocket in her rented dress where she was required to carry it. She placed the despised mobile on the table, scowling at it. She gingerly pushed a couple of buttons on the terrible Muggle contraption, waiting for it to zap her. "Text Mistress Ginny Potter," she told the dastardly device. It answered back in a horrible mechanical voice, "Text Mistress Ginny Potter." The mechanical voice caused her to wince, it hurt her ears.

The text screen came up, along with a lock plank, or was it a lock board, or something with letters in little boxes. Mabel could scream. Praise Merlin they had not made her learn that quirky lock board thing. "Master Harry Potter is picking up Mistress Minerva Potter," Mabel declared slowly and loudly. The awful thing answered, "Master Harry Potter is picking up Mistress Minerva Potter."

"Send," Mabel yelled. "Sending the text message," the ghastly gadget intoned.

Mabel picked up the perverted puck between two fingers and put it back into the pocket of the rented dress, the stupid dress she was required to wear as a condition of EMPLOYMENT. Mabel was NOT employed. She was an honest house elf. No subversive pay for her. While the clothes were more comfortable and practical, it wasn't traditional.

Not much in the Potter house was traditional. The kitchen was filled with Appliances. APPLIANCES! At least most of them were Whirlpool for Wizards appliances, but they worked with electric sisity as well as magic. The ice maker was a MUGGLE gadget! The whole house was filled with mixed Muggle and magical things.

Her own grandson Dobedo was PAID. She was so ashamed. He had even qualified as an Auror. At least he was Harry's Elf, the youngsters were too arrogant to call themselves house elves. His mate was the worst. Harriet Tubman, a name the Chinese Elf chose herself, was the manager of the Sentient Beings and Non-traditional Relationships division of the Ministry. Technically she was acting manager at two-thirds pay, but since Hermione had become Assistant Minister of Magic Harriet was running the department. No house elf should have witches and wizards and other beings working for them.

Boggarts. This was not the way things were supposed to be.

Even worse, she was proud of Dobedo, and Harriet, and their children. She knew that being proud of them was subversive and wrong, and she should punish herself for being proud of them. Harry had strictly forbad any of the Potter/Weasley house elves, or Elves, from punishing themselves. Kreacher, before he died, had formalized the rules against self-punishment, proclaiming it in Elfish as well as in English. Boggarts.

Mabel waved her hands and clothes moved out of the stupid Whirlpool for Wizards clothes dryer and folded themselves. She waved her hands again moving another load of clothes from the washer to the dryer. She levitated the folded clothes upstairs to their proper rooms and put them away.

Humpf, Mabel thought as she started on dinner, using the Whirlpool for Wizard appliances in the kitchen. She turned the gas past the nasty electric sisity starter that went SNAP SNAP SNAP. She started the fire with magic, like any self-respecting house elf.

Boggarts. She was not raised to be this way.

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