I sat in front of my kids, watching them as they finished lunch. The oldest one, wiping his fingers on his paper napkin, gestured towards me with a look.

"Hey dad, what's the story for today?"

We've been doing this thing where every weekend I'd give them a story of the times before they were born. It started out with my school days, and all the war stuff that went on then, and recently we moved past those. If I was right, which I rarely am, we were at about when their mom and I got together.

"You guys want to hear about when I saved your mom from a dragon?"

A chorus of disbelief emerged from the table. "What!?" "That didn't happen!" "Mom wouldn't be caught by a dragon!" "Yeah, I bet she saved you from a dragon!"

"Hey guys, do you want to hear the story or not?" And the kids quieted down, grumbling all the way. "It all started about two years after graduation . . ."

I was, as you know, a pretty famous quidditch player at the time. I had just gotten traded up to the Bats, and they were playing that season super rough. I was up at practice by 6 am every day, and I would normally leave just to get home and crash. I only really had free time on the weekends, and to everyone's surprise, I spent it flying. It was around this time that Ginny left me, she was either concerned that I was wasting my life or jealous that I got more solace from flying than I was getting from her. But that was on me. I was restless.

Another thing she didn't understand is that my weekday flying and my weekend flying were different. My weekday flying was more about the drills, the constant repetition that would make every move I do exactly the the end of my career, I had all my movements down to the centimeter. My weekend flying was just me and the broom. There were no numbers, no drills, nothing that made this flying any less than what a bird does. Except I was better of course.

My weekend flights brought me all over the community. When I had time, I would pop in on Uncle Fred and Uncle George and their shop, or Uncle Cedric and Aunt Cho just to gab. If Ginny was out, I would knock on the Burrow door for tea time. And I would always try to catch Aunt Andromeda to see Teddy. But most of the time I was just in the Forest, dodging trees and yelling at the monkeys.

"There aren't any monkeys in the forest!" the youngest smirked, glad he had caught me in what he thought was a lie. It was annoying, 4 year olds usually are, but it was nice to know that he was paying attention. Last week, Remus had fallen asleep at the table, and I only noticed when he managed to fall straight into his porridge.

"Not anymore," I said, "and I'll let you know why next week."

"When does mom show up?" this comment was from the middle child. She was always direct and to the point, a far cry from her mother.

"I'll let you know when we get there, I'm setting the scene right now."

So anyway, I was in the forest a lot. And sometimes I would see something that would make me land. Aragog's children were often out and about, causing havoc or getting run over by cars. Sometimes there were dangers that only the centaurs would see, and they would sometimes seek me out to tell them to me. I felt like the protector of the forest sometimes, and I took that relatively seriously.

That weekend, I had just come back from Aunt Andromeda's and I spotted some smoke rising up from the forest. Now back in those days, smoke was an unusual sight to see from the forest.

"Smoke's still unusual to see in the forest," Ayla piped up.

"I thought you wanted me to rush to the mom part," I countered.

So the smoke was rising, and I decided it was my civic duty to stop and check it out. I circled around the spot, casting a few Aguamentis and Ventuses to try to stop the fire enough so I could see what was going on, but the smoke never cleared. So I landed anyway (I'm so smart) and walked my way over to the disturbance. Surprise among surprise, I found a young-looking green dragon and a very pretty witch.

"Oh, hey Harry," she called out, in her normal half-asleep but somehow way-too-awake voice. "What are you doing here?"

"I was just going for a flight, how about you?"

"I was just helping my new friend, you see? He has the sniffles."

Here's when I realized what had happened. She obviously went to the forest to find some sort of beastie, and managed to find a young dragon who probably couldn't control his flames yet. If that dragon had gotten dragonpox or something, their sneezes would probably accidentally shoot fire, which is where all the smoke was coming from. When I was firing spells at the dragon, they couldn't stop the magically resistant fire, of course, so no one even noticed. Luckily, I was there now, so she wouldn't get herself killed.

"Do you have anything to protect you from the flames?" I asked her.

"Oh, it'll be fine, there's no way my new friend would hurt me. We have a connection."

Oh god, she was going to die.

"There's no way Mom would be like that!" "Yeah, she doesn't even leave the house without a dragon-proof cloak"

"First of all, the cloak is dragon-resistant, not dragon-proof. Do you have any idea what I would give for a dragon-proof cloak? Those things would be thousands of Galleons and I'd be able to go toe to toe with a dragon. Probably any human too. What do you think the world is? What do you think dragons are?" I went off, because seriously? These kids think dragons are nothing. "Have you ever seen a dragon? I did. When I was 14, I was as close to a dragon as you are to me right now -"

"We know, we know, we've heard this all before. And you said first of all? What's second of all?"

I took a breath. "Second of all, your mom only wears that cloak because of this time. Why do you think I got it for her?"

There she was, just standing feet away from an uncontrollable dragon, without a care in the world. She reached up to stroke the dragon on the underside of its neck, and it purred, letting smoke drift gently out of its nose. She tickled it a bit more, and it began to make the Ah - Ah - Ahhhhh sounds that typically precede a sneeze.

Ahhhhh, the dragon went, and I tensed up.

Ahhhhhhhhhh, it went again. Should I move, I thought to myself, and risk the dragon being startled? What if I just did nothing and the dragon blasted my friend anyway.

The moment right before I went full panic and unleashed a sneeze that would have blown a crater into the ground, Luna took the dragon's head in her hands and pushed it into the sky.

ACHOOOOO! And a gout of flame exploded into the sky, passing close by some branches and setting them alight.

"Aguamentis," Luna called out, but it didn't do much other than make the leaves wet.

"So how's it been?" Now that I was more calm, I decided to try to catch up.

"I've been bored out of my mind," she said, with a cheery half-grin. "It's no fun anymore without the excitement of almost dying every year."

"Oh, so you've been courting death yourself by sneaking up on sick dragons?"

"He's not going to hurt me, he's a sweetie." She tickled his neck again for emphasis. On the inside, I was tenser than a tightrope. One of these days she was going to jump into a mess that she couldn't escape from.

"How did you even find this dragon?"

"I was wandering Hogwarts, and he was just floating around, making these ill noises. HE gave all my students such a shock!"

"You have students?" Luna was a year behind me, which means she had only been out of school for about a year, maybe 2 if she didn't repeat her sixth form.

"Well, they're mine too!" she teased at me "I won them fair and square from McGonagall after I tricked her fortune teller!"

That just meant that she had probably gotten some professor's assistant job or maybe like a junior professor's appointment. No one really knows-

"Why don't you know, Dad?" my oldest asked.

"Your mom thinks it's funny when I have no idea what's going on. To be fair, I'm not sure if she even remembers. All I know is that it was either Charms or Transfiguration. Or Astronomy. I think."

"Well I think you should know."

"That's nice, Remy, anyway . . . "

So there we were, shooting the breeze. She heard all about my exploits with the Tornados and then the Bats, and I learned all about her kids, some of which were only a couple years younger than us at the time. We gradually transitioned from our standstill into a more comfortable position, both of us sitting down and the dragon looming over us. She finally asked the question that I dreaded from so many people.

"So, how are you and Ginny doing?"

It was always awkward talking about her. I didn't think we had ended things too poorly, but there was still that awkwardness. It's why I would never go to the Burrow if I thought she was there. She was cool and I really liked her, I just - she just - we wouldn't have worked out in the future. And it was sometimes really uncomfortable working out in the present.

"We aren't together anymore. Nothing bad, it just . . . didn't."

Her expression didn't change, which was the best response I've gotten yet. She was still sitting down, still half-smiling, still a thousand miles away.

"Oh, I knew. How are you two doing though?"

I laughed. I loved the question. I had no idea if she was serious about knowing, and I knew that I never would know. But it wasn't important. Right then it was just her and me, and the dragon. And speaking of the dragon . . .

Ah. My ears perked up. Luna kept talking, talking about how she and Neville had "taken two different paths that had been in the same direction for a while" and now he was off in the Amazon learning new tricks from some Brazillian tribe. I was proud of that kid, he had grown a lot.

Ahhhh. There it was again. The dragon was closing its eyes and flaring its nostrils. My wand was in my hand and I readied myself to shout a warning out to Luna.

AHHHHH. No time anymore. I started weaving spells together. My holly wand in my right, for the precision spells, and Dumbledore's old wand in my left, slower to work with but providing more power.

"Ventus. Flickum Bickus. Diffindo. Rictusempra. Deprimo. Expulso, Descendo! Impedimenta, REDUCTO, GEMINIO, EVANESCO, REDUCIO-PROTEGO-IMPERVIUS!" My mind was as clear as it possibly could have been at that moment, my blood frozen with adrenaline. I had managed to redirect the fire into a different place, a place where I had already cleared out all the oxygen and mana for the fire to feast on. Then, just to be safe, I guarded Luna with everything I could.

AHHHHH-CHOOOOOO! Multiple things happened at once. The dragon's head snapped up, and multiple explosions of different types appeared right above his head. He snorted some fire into that space, which was mimicking a blue sheen of hazy air. Luna was pushed back a bit, and her voice cut out as a soundproof (and probably heatproof) barrier was put around her. She never even stopped talking.

"- and now I'm just here helping instruct. They say I'll get a full-time position once one opens up, but I feel like that'll be defence, and I was never that good at defence. You were always pretty good at defence. Like that thing you did just now with the dragon, that was incredible! I didn't even hear half the spells! Two wands at the same time! Very nice," She didn't even take a pause for breath as she spoke.

"There's a defence position open soon? How do you figure?" I was catching my breath a bit, but if she seemed unperturbed, so was I. I still had to add, "Can we move somewhere else? Maybe get some tea?"

"Oh yeah, of course. You want to come to the suite they've got me up in?" Her smile this time was a full smile, and she seemed only a couple feet away, not a thousand miles.

"Sure, maybe we'll bump into McGonagall or something"

"I think I can get her to offer you a job, if you're looking," and she looked directly into my eyes for this one. "I'm sure we can let you fly on the weekends, if you're looking for that."

"And that's how you got the job?"

"That's how I saved your mom from the dragon," I corrected. "The job story is for a different day. Probably. Now go do . . . whatever it is you guys are supposed to be doing. Remy? Are you asleep again?"

"I'm not asleep! I'm awake! I don't need to take a nap!" He jolted up.

"You already took a nap, bud, you probably don't need to take another. Now go and finish your dinner so your mom doesn't get mad at me again."

And off they went.