Harry awoke first and awoke early. His eyes faced the world and his back faced Tonks. He could not feel her touch at all, though he could recall it perfectly.

The first beams of morning light broke through the slight partition of the curtains on the windows. The youth of the day was such that, as he stood, the blue sky was writ pale and milky. A watercolour canvas with only the most initial of brush strokes laid upon it, clear and without detail.

The sight made Harry want to go flying.

During the seemingly endless days of his summers at the Dursley's, when Harry's Aunt and Uncle didn't care where he was as long as it was not with or anywhere near them, flying had been all he could think about, his mind filled with such dreams under the broad daylight.

He would fly up, up, and away. Above Little Whinging and London, and England, and everything, until the details below faded from view and the blue sky was all that he could see well enough to notice. And he'd stay there. Stay until the blues faded darker and darker, until they mottled themselves black. And then he'd drop down and dream that same dream anew from his bed.

He hadn't owned a broom for five years.

Following the war's end, and a great deal of Harry's personal life becoming general knowledge, Nimbus had gifted him another Firebolt for his efforts, though he'd not used it a great deal. Then, while working a case with the Aurors, there had been a Death Eater, who in an effort to conjure Voldemort's likeness and the fear it still held, had attacked their victims whilst flying unassisted. Harry had caught them, chasing through the skies for an hour or more, but he'd lost the broom in the process.

It hadn't felt like a loss at the time. Yet then, under the pale blue sky, it did.

Harry smiled to himself.

It seemed that Tonks was right. About shapeshifting, at the very least.

He turned away from the window and the dawning day and instead looked into the darkness of the room to Tonks, who still slept soundly, her rest seemingly unbreakable. Even as light crept along the bedcovers, she did not rise, her only motion the soft rising and falling of her breathing.

Or so it seemed, at first glance.

Yet, as he stood in the light of the burgeoning morning, he found that she was not still at all. Even slumbering, her hair shifted upon her pillow, at times lengthening and shortening, though often moving and nothing more. It swirled in colour too, though far slower than it would in wakefulness. Where awake, she would burst through the shades, then her path from russet to violet to bronze to powder blue was slow and careful. Each moment was little different from the last yet over minutes, her hair passed through prisms and kaleidoscopes, traversing the fullest of rainbows.

And, if she would move in her sleep, her features would move too. Her magic, the most direct extension of herself.

Harry realised then that she would spend the coming days utterly static, outside the realms of wizards and witches. That then, behind the locked door of their room, was the only time that she was free.

He reached over to close the blinds over the windows completely until the room was again plunged into night. The other guests were not due for a few hours yet.

But, even under the darkness, Harry could still see her shifting; the changes were minute but there to see. And he couldn't seem to do anything but notice them.

They'd likely happened for as long as Harry had known Tonks, yet they'd completely evaded his notice. But the moment he had noticed, he couldn't look away.

He wondered if she followed patterns with the motion; whether there was some golden ratio hidden among the oft-golden hues of her. He wondered whether her dreams shaped their design, just as her wakeful thoughts always did, or whether it was some other, higher force entirely.

He wondered whether her hair was as soft as it looked.

He knew it was.

But he still did wonder.

The morning was much too hot to be wearing a suit jacket, but that was what Harry found himself wearing, amongst a sea of similarly dressed Englishman, all seemingly sharing his thoughts, too.

It was astounding what one would do out of obligation.

Even shaving his just-passed stubble hadn't cooled him nearly enough, Harry found, as he sat in a secluded corner of the hotel's restaurant, his eyes scanning over the slow procession of wedding guests that dripped through the entranceway. Despite the age of the couple getting married, there did not seem to be many guests who were in their twenties; most were closer in age to the groom's father than the groom himself.

Due to the small size of the wizarding population, every Death Eater above the age of forty had been accounted for, and either imprisoned or pardoned, which limited the number of possible culprits, and immediately removed the possibility of it being any of the faces that he'd seen so far.

Yet polyjuice, while easily detected, still was possibly being used, and so the pad of his index finger did not shift from the edge of his wand. The incantation of the Wizard Detection spell still often passed through his thoughts, though nothing came of it.

There was an easy comfort in their demeanour, Harry noticed. They did not find the grandeur of their surroundings overbearing. Their eyes did not linger on the artwork or the accoutrements, yet nor did they ignore them either. They offered the staff warm smiles, and the staff smiled back just as warmly.

Harry frowned into his tea. The breakfast bar offered no other tea but Earl Grey, and he hadn't quite aged enough to learn to enjoy it. He had half a thought to spill the remainder of his cup to get rid of it, yet he would likely stain his trousers in the process. They were cream, and Tonks had insisted, of all the things he'd brought, they were the only things that would allow him to fit in.

She was right. The dress code, he'd learned, was 'smart casual', though what Harry would've far preferred described as 'things I would never willingly wear ever, ever'. In practice, this became blazers with horrid, beige chinos and long jumpers paired with despicably bright shorts.

Yet, after losing what had literally been a game of rock, paper, scissors (best of five, three-one the score, eight ties. It was their preferred method of solving disputes, and over time they'd learned one another's tendencies. Tonks preferred rock, Harry preferred paper. Somehow, Tonks still often won) Tonks had been the one allowed to climb to the roof of the Lansbury Hotel and erect the temporary wards, leaving Harry to survey those that arrived while she did.

Given they had neither the time nor talent to erect the all-encompassing enchantments of those found in magical buildings like Hogwarts, Tonks was only charged with casting anti-transport and magical-detection wards, so that no-one, other than themselves, could apparate in or out. And, should a witch or wizard enter by mundane means, they would still be detected.

Even if they were an animagus, hiding in plain sight.

However, Harry had felt the magic sweep over the hotel some time ago, and so, short of anything truly interesting to look at, his eyes couldn't help but dart to the stairwell that he hoped would deliver Tonks soon.

He'd not truly been undercover very many times before by virtue of his unfortunate fame, but he had been treated to numerous debriefs of Tonks' cases, and she'd managed to truly impress upon him just how dull they tended to be.

Well, she had said that James Bond was a 'lying arsehole.'

Once, after a particularly aggravating week spent inside what she'd initially suspected was a Death Eater terror cell, but had actually come to nothing, she'd attempted to sue Sean Connery for false advertising. Harry and Kingsley had had to restrain her inside the Hog's Head to stop her from apparating to the actor's house.

Tonks appeared then, much to Harry's relief. First, her dress and then her head falling into view. Her eyes, even distantly, seemed to glow with dissatisfaction. She was stunning then.

Before Harry moved to greet Tonks, he retrieved he and her a coffee and poured away the cold remnants of his tea, timing the act so that he did not need to interact with the waiter as the waiter had gone on his only break of the morning.

Harry didn't like coffee either, but the beverage was fundamental to Tonks' constitution, and he knew it was more than likely that she would drink his too.

She smiled as they neared one another, her hands greedy as she swiped her mug from his hands, just as she would whenever he'd bring her coffee.

Yet, to his surprise, she reached over to kiss his cheek. Harry could feel his skin warm at the contact.

"Morning, beloved," she said, smiling through her words. Thankfully, it was her smile. He adored it, he always had, as it never failed to make the dullest rooms brighter. Her eyes looked down to her mug. "You're just so sweet to me."

"Anything for you, luv," he said. Her smile dropped into a frown. Harry rolled his eyes. "Love."

"Better."

Harry returned to his seat with Tonks. She pulled the chair that sat opposite from him at their bistro table and moved it so that they could sit side by side, her exposed knee pressed against his leg.

Given the muffling charm only lowered the volume of the sounds that it worked over, it would look unnatural for the two of them to be sat apart and yet no sound be heard, so Harry told himself.

"Seen anything noteworthy?" Tonks asked, her pink hair laying over his shoulder as she spoke. Unlike in the early morning, it held no motion nor shift. Despite its colour, it was seemingly as inert as everyone else's.

"Not unless you count the sweatiest collection of people you've ever seen as noteworthy," Harry said. "Haven't seen any of the MPs that were said to be coming. Just about a million people that're fully intent on making the most of the golf course."

Of the few that had arrived, all had brought their golf clubs. Without fail.

"Maybe they got cold feet," Tonks said. "Seeing Sumner get attacked probably shat them up."

"It's early too," Harry said. "Maybe they want to arrive fashionably late."

"Don't think their politicians care that much about fashion." A couple walked into the restaurant then, and Tonks leaned yet closer, her chin nearly resting on his shoulder. "Sumner's paying half the fees for the guest's rooms, and there's an open bar all three nights."

Harry's brow furrowed. "That was in the brief?"

"No," Tonks said. "I got chatting with one of the waiters. He liked to gossip."

"We better find the culprit soon then." He grinned. "I want to make use of the hospitality."

Tonks grinned back, though her voice was halted by the shadow that passed over the table, the newly arrived couple looming large.

Yet more oddly, their eyes never left Harry.

Harry checked.

No magic.

"Sorry for being so forward, but I can't help but feel that you look familiar," said the gentlemen, as Tonks had pulled down the muffling charm. The gentleman was just beyond middle-aged, with light hair that'd managed most of the transition to fully grey, and a moustache that still retained its reddish colouring. And, much to Harry's worry, he appeared fixated on Harry's scar. "You wouldn't happen to be friends of Hughie, would you?"

Harry shook his head. "I'm afraid not, no," he said, his lips pressed tight together in the roughest approximation of a smile. To his irritation, the couple thought it cause enough to take two nearby chairs and sit at Harry and Tonks' table. "I'm an old friend of Sally-Anne's."

"That's wonderful," said the lady. She had long, black hair and a warm smile. Her husband, as their matching wedding bands dictated, gave her a questioning look. "She's from such a small family, isn't she, so it's good that she's got good friends around." She extended her hand to Harry. "Margery."

"Hadley," Harry said back. He placed his hand over the top of Tonks', as it held her coffee in a vice grip. "This is my partner, Taylor."

"Pleasure to meet you, Taylor," the gentleman said, shaking her hand. "I'm Richard." He dropped her hand quickly to study Harry once more. "I must say, dear boy, you do look very familiar."

"Would you happen to live in Islington?" Harry asked. "We might've passed each other on the street."

Richard leaned back, chortling quietly. "Oh, heavens no," he said, "We haven't lived in London for twenty years or more. We live in Surrey these days, just a bit north of Guildford."

Harry frowned.

"So how do you know the couple?" Tonks asked, her voice bright, her hand not leaving her mug, nor moving from Harry's touch.

"We're just friends of the family, really," Margery said. She gestured to the space in between her and her husband. "We all read History together, us and Hugh's father, Stephen. Richard and Stephen were at Trinity together."

"We were," said Richard, mostly for his own amusement.

Margery gasped. "It's awful, isn't it?" she said. "What happened to Stephen." Her eyes fell to look at her lap. "You just can't imagine it ever happening. That's just not what happens to people."

"He's on the mend though, isn't he, dear?" Richard said, his voice brought soft. Harry and Tonks spared one another a glance, already lifting themselves from their chairs. "He was discharged yesterday."

"He probably paid the doctors to let him go early, the fool," Margery said. She looked at Harry and Tonks; they sat back down at once. "He's just such a loving man, he loves his son more than anything. If he missed this week, he'd never be able to live it down."

"That's a relief," said Harry, "that Sally is joining such a loving family."

Richard stood, bringing his wife with him. He smiled warmly.

"I think we'd better get moving, darling. There are a few faces we simply must see," he said. "When you get to be our age, you find that weddings like these are the only occasions you see your very oldest and best friends." He waved his hand at Harry. "If you can conjure the circumstance that I'm sure caused us to meet before, I'd be delighted to hear it."

They disappeared back into the hotel foyer, but not without a cup of tea and pocketing two or three scones.

Harry gave one final check as they departed.

Still no magic.

"What an odd couple," Tonks said, after a while of studious silence. Her magic wrapped around the table and their words muffled once more. "Who on Earth would sit with complete strangers like that?"

"I don't know," Harry said. "I don't even think I'd do that to people I knew. Me and Neville have been at the same party, and seen each other, and not spoken because we'd not mentioned we'd both be there beforehand."

During the war, with Voldemort in power, most countries and indeed all of the active members of the ICW had placed embargoes on any trade with Britain, in an effort both to ensure that they played no part in his regime and to ensure that they did not lose either wizards or their goods in their dealings.

In the aftermath, it'd been Neville, with his newfound confidence and old family name, that'd brokered the uplifting of the ban. Harry had been part of such meetings too, though under a different cause. Yet still, even then, in the highest theatre of power in the magical world, whenever they looked at one another, Harry felt little more than an eleven-year-old.

Harry suspected Neville felt the same.

He was not long for the role, either, as he'd left it by the age of twenty, gained his Herbology mastery at twenty-one, and was a Hogwarts Professor, working alongside Professor Sprout, by twenty-two.

"So weird," Harry muttered. "Margery and Stephen definitely had a thing, by the way."

"Oh, absolutely."

"Right?"

"See how quickly they left, after coming up to us?" Tonks pointed out. "Old Dick basically dragged her away." Tonks finished the rest of her coffee and stared at Harry's, without even asking, "and with how bothered she was about Stephen. So much more than him."

"He didn't give a surname either," Harry said. "And he seemed to know me."

"Could be a squib," Tonks said without a great deal of conviction. "But why would a squib be working with Death Eaters?"

Harry grumbled. "I suppose."

"Well, nothing came up on your wand or my wards, right?" Harry nodded. "Then it's not our official business." She drank her coffee. "It is fun to guess, though."

"I just don't trust people with moustaches," Harry said. "They have to know that they look awful, right?"

Tonks grinned. "I don't know, beloved," she said. "I think you'd look rather fetching with a 'tash."

"You're not allowed to say fetching," said Harry, bluntly. "In fact, no one should be able to."

Tonks leaned yet closer still. She stroked her thumb against his upper lip, and then his cheek, the skin smooth and sensitive after his morning shave. Her hand still stayed close to him after too, resting on the arms of his suit.

"I think you'd pull it off," Tonks said, giving him a fond look. Harry smiled. "I can't wait for this job to be over. Feels so weird seeing you all neatly groomed. It's like it's not even you. Well, not my you, you know?" Tonks looked at her mug. "You don't look any younger, either, which is just weird."

"Well, if it's any consolation, this—" Harry pointed at his face; moreover, its lack of decoration, "—is never happening again. Takes too bloody long."

"It ruins the vibe, too," Tonks said. "There's too much of a schism between your lack of beard and the rest of your face. It's like your eyes are mourning the loss."

Harry grinned. "You keep mentioning my eyes."

Tonks met his eyes. She stared at them. Not at him, but at them.

Harry stared back. She'd decided that hers were to be brown for the mission. But then, only for a moment, they shifted slightly, swirling themselves into a shade of green lighter than his own, but not by much.

If Harry's were shaded, solemn, and dark, then hers were bright, glistening under the rays of the sun.

Harry's smile only grew.

"They're just so big, aren't they?" Tonks said. "It's very difficult to look anywhere else."

"I know what you mean."

It felt dangerous to hold her eyes as he did then. The looks that floated through them made his mind disappear into darker waters. Ones filled with only her. And her lips, and their hands disappearing elsewhere, onto the parts of her that he did not trust himself enough to look at in the nighttime.

Harry looked down at their hands, still holding one another. Tonks' mug was empty. "You want another?" he asked.

"Sure," Tonks said. She pulled her hand away from his, holding out the mug for him to take. "If you want to bring two back, they wouldn't go amiss. But don't feel obliged."

"Wouldn't dream of it," Harry said, standing. Then, for no reason in particular, he kissed her cheek as he left her side, just as she had to him.

Breakfast, as it was then scheduled, was nearly coming to a close, though a great deal of what was prepared was still untouched, though that was largely because the banquet of food was so enormous that the guests, few as they then were, wouldn't have a hope of finishing it.

The stream of arriving guests had begun to gain some haste, with what were great gaps in between the parties shortening until a crowd had started to grow around the front desk. Indignation grew amongst them like a weed, some tutting so loudly in their brief wait to be allowed to check-in that Harry could hear them from fifty yards away.

Harry met the eyes of the waiter that manned the breakfast bar.

"Could I have two more cups of black coffee, please?" he asked, his eyes drifting along the table of food. "And two croissants, please, if that's okay."

"Of course, Sir," said the waiter, his head bobbing just slightly. "Just one moment."

"Thank you," Harry said again, fighting the urge to clear his throat.

As the waiter rushed to fire up the coffee machine, Harry held his breath. And then, slowly, allowed his consciousness to stretch, and allowed the magic that flowed through his body so easily, and so naturally, to flow through chest and lungs, and toward his mind.

Passive Legilimency, as he then walked through its first steps, was neither foreign nor transitive, but utterly innate and perplexingly human. It was not to enact one's own will or shift another's will to your ends, but instead to do the most natural act a person could do.

To connect.

Therein lay the difficulty of the act, too. For the human mind readily accepted magic's ability to make them special, to warp the world. Yet, to just be, in the face of magic, was another gift entirely. To not ask to be any greater, but instead to be comfortable with one's own position.

Most that practised Legilimency never attempted what Harry did then; Voldemort certainly didn't. Dumbledore had attempted the art but soon left it in favour of more direct means. However, his skill was such that his magic's intrusion was equally contactless.

There was no great boon in doing so, from a purely quantitative end. It neither improved a wizard's magical ability nor granted any wondrous insight. Yet, it did, as Harry proved then, allow one of the truest forms of empathy, and of understanding, that magic could offer.

His waiter, Joshua, his mind whispered, was rather bored. Apparently, he wasn't due to work that day, but had been called in as his colleague Samantha couldn't find a babysitter. All he wanted was to go home and play on his Xbox.

And, according to him, the croissants were better yesterday.

"Been busy?" Harry asked, quietly. He could feel the eye roll that Joshua was too professional to show.

"Not too busy, Sir," Joshua said, placing Harry's plate and two croissants on the counter, his words accompanied by the coffee percolating behind him. "Have you enjoyed your stay so far?"

Joshua didn't even have to think the words to say them, so ingrained were they.

"It's been brilliant," Harry replied. He leaned in a little; just a fraction. Just enough for Joshua to notice. "It feels weird being on this side of things, though." Harry sighed as believably as he could manage. "I work at a café on Oxford Street, and God, seeing all this—" Harry pointed behind himself, to the assembling crowd, "—I'm sorry you're stuck with it."

And there it was.

Connection.

"I wasn't even supposed to be working today," Joshua whispered, leaning in today. "Working nine hours on my day off."

"I'm so sorry, mate."

"Can't even go for a smoke break here because it looks 'unprofessional'," Joshua muttered. The coffee machine stopped, the drinks ready, but he did move to bring them. "Just because on one hole of the golf course, you might be able to see where we go if you bring your binoculars."

Harry nodded behind himself. "This crowd too," he said. "I get a load of them where I work, and they're always the worst to deal with." Harry thought of his numerous dealings with the Nott family, and their loud insistence that Theodore had gotten the dark mark as an 'accident'. He shook his head. "The things you see first thing in the morning when you're the one thing between them and their coffee."

Joshua stood, stock still, and then turned to pull the two mugs of coffee from the machine. He placed them beside the croissants and pushed the tray toward Harry's hand.

"They think they can go wherever they like." That supply closet on the second floor. "Just wandering around as if they own the place."

Harry smiled.

"Anyway, my partner wants to play golf," Harry said, shaking his head. "I hope your day goes by easy."

Joshua laughed. "They never do."

Harry nearly ran to Tonks, coffee spilling out of the mugs as he did. But not before he turned back around to address his waiter one final time.

"Thanks, Joshua."

Harry and Tonks had already left the restaurant before either party had realised Joshua had never given Harry his name.

The trouble with passive Legilimency was that it was, by its nature, unspecific. There were a great many supply closets on the second floor, and there did not exist a single one that Harry could quickly identify as that one.

Furthermore, both he and Tonks had been 'lost' on the second floor yesterday. Several times, in fact.

Yet still, it was the only lead they had gotten in their many hours of searching, and so it was the second floor they then paced. There was a supply closet between every ten pairs of bedrooms, and there was God-knows how many bedrooms.

And, without anything else to go by, they were opening each one, one by one. Hand-in-hand, as ever, their rhythm maintained them.

They found a new rhythm in their inspections, too. Walk, stop, open a closet, inspect the linens, find nothing. Repeat.

"So what do you think was going on with Richard and Margery?" asked Tonks as they walked. "Because it's a full-blown inevitability that they've banged at least once."

Harry squinted, his whole face pinching together. "Not a thought I ever wanted."

Tonks swung their connected hands in a full arch as they walked. By Harry's imagination, it looked like she was attempting to throw the two of them into the sky. "But, it's a thought you have, so get over it," she said. "Now, you're a detective. What did you detect?"

Harry ran his hand through his hair. He'd combed it, as well as it was possible to, but even still his hand's path could not manufacture any more of a mess than was already there.

"I don't think it's an affair," he said, eventually. "Margery said he was a family man, which could be an overcompensation to hide the truth, but she seemed very earnest."

"She also said he was a loving man," Tonks said, her voice slowing as she said 'loving man'. It made Harry's stomach move oddly. "There's only one way she came by that knowledge, and that's first hand."

"It would've been a while ago," Harry decided. "Long enough for whatever bitterness over the breakup to have left, so all she probably remembers is the good memories."

"Or maybe the split was amicable?" Tonks suggested, her arm swinger yet more excitably, "and that's why Richard is angry about it?" Her eyes widened. "Yes, that's it! Because why would you want your wife's ex hanging around your relationship?"

"That still doesn't explain why he seemed to know me."

Their conversation was paused, as a noise in the near distance claimed their attention. The slight murmurings of a hushed argument, Harry began to hypothesise, as they moved toward it.

Voices, and then, suddenly, glass smashing.

Tonks dispelled their muffling charm, and Harry's hand fell to his wand.

Beside their rushing forms, the rooms climbed along with the noise of the argument. It was not inside a hotel room either, they knew instinctively, as the walls and doors were much too thick to allow the sound to travel outside; a perk of the aggressively rich.

That, they knew, meant that the noise was coming from a supply closet.

That supply closet.

As the sound reached its zenith, outside of one such closet, Harry and Tonks stopped in place, their eyes meeting instinctively. It was not along the main corridor, but neatly hidden in an alcove; perfectly obscured from most.

They shared a look. They nodded.

Harry held his wand tightly, intent to cast at a moment's notice, and reached for the door. Tonks stood behind him, waiting for his signal. Harry took a deep breath, allowing his eyes to dip closed.

One. Two. Three.

His hand turned the door handle, and finally, the ensuing argument stopped, the room falling silent.

Unlike the other closets, the walls were not stacked with linens, towels, and bedclothes; they had all been thrown away, it seemed. The other closets had automatic lights that popped on whenever the door was opened, though they'd been either disabled or removed, the room too dark to know for sure.

Most pressingly, however, was that Harry and Tonks were face to face with the two causes of the argument. Two gentlemen, one older and one younger, who, at the intrusion, sprang up, their arms spread widely, forming a human shield in front of whatever it was that they housed behind them. They had forgettable faces, though they shared the same set eyes; small and slightly too high on their faces.

Harry checked.

No magic.

"Er, why are you two here?" asked the younger one. His accent was posh enough for any question of him being a guest or not to disappear completely. The room was cold, and yet beads of sweat sprang from his skin profusely. "Guests aren't supposed to be here."

"No," said Tonks, folding her arms, "they're not."

"Well, you two aren't staff, either," he said. "So you better leave."

"Or," Tonks said, sauntering into the room. She came upon a wayward towel left on the floor and had enough grace to avoid it. "You tell us what you're hiding, and we don't grass you up to the hotel."

"We're...lost?" offered the younger one. Neither Harry nor Tonks dignified that with a response. "Our room is across the hall, and we went the wrong way?"

"And stayed here?" Harry asked.

The older one, however, just laughed.

"The hotel won't care we're here," he said, though he did not move to break their guard. "They'd sooner kick you out than us." He smiled, smug. "I went to school with the manager, Charlie. Well, I'm sure he prefers Charles these days."

Harry met Tonks' gaze then, a question passing along the look. Tonks flashed him a smile; one he could discern the meaning of easily.

Play along.

"So not the hotel then," Harry said after only a brief hesitation, joining Tonks inside the room, and allowing the door to click shut behind him, bringing the room yet darker still. The only light source being a small torch laying behind the two miscreants. "But I'm sure there's a reason you're hiding from everyone else, isn't there?"

"Who's to say that we're hiding?" the younger postulated.

His bluster died when Harry and Tonks remained unmoved, completely unconvinced.

"So, if I were to tell Sally-Anne and Hugh that you were in here, with whatever it is that's behind you," began Harry, taking another step closer, until only an arm's length separated himself and the two of them, "you'd be delighted, would you?"

The older gentleman threw his hands down.

"Oh, you imbeciles," he said, his neck straining as he spoke. "This isn't some…sinister attempt to ruin this whole wedding. This is a gift, actually, and one you're threatening to ruin. You're the ones in the wrong here, not us."

"Yeah," said the younger one.

"I don't believe you for a second," Tonks said, the dark hiding her smirk. "Prove it, or we ring Hughie."

"You wouldn't," gasped the younger.

"Try us," Tonks said. "Now move, or we do."

The older gentleman sighed. "Son," he said, "get the torch."

His son did so obediently, his arms at last dropping so that he could fall to the floor and pick up the battery-powered torch from the ground. He was still slow to shine the light at what was behind him but was eventually moved by the glare that Tonks gave him.

As it turned out, they weren't lying at all. Behind them was a gift, and what a gift at that.

A crate of whisky, half as tall as Harry, but twice as wide as he and Tonks wrapped together.

"I bet you two feel like a pair of berks right now," said the son, smiling. "This is going to be our family's wedding gift."

"What were you even arguing about?" Tonks asked.

"We weren't arguing," said the Father. He frowned at his son. "I was gently reminding James here that, when things are gifts, we don't sample them ourselves. Especially when said gifts are five-thousand pound-a-bottle whisky!"

"I had one sip, Dad!" exclaimed James, though neither Harry nor Tonks were paying much attention. Instead, their eyes dropped to the crate at their feet, the cogs of their minds slowly turning as they hazily calculated. "Do you really think they're going to notice that one bottle out of God knows how many is uncorked?"

"It's a question of respect, James," said the father. His voice dropped, but by no means did it hide his words. "Mr Sumner is a colleague. One that I respect highly. One that I would prefer not to offend, if I could help it, and you've gone and ruined that. We're going to have to throw it out."

What was most odd, however, was that James was unaffected by his father's entire tirade. By contrast, it seemed as though he was fighting the urge to laugh at his father's words, to his father's surprise.

"You're his colleague?" Tonks asked. She pointed her finger at the father, and then the son. "So this conversation is not one you'd like being made public." She smiled. "I can just imagine the headlines now. 'MP snubs Education Minister at his son's wedding'. I'm sure that's the publicity you'd like, especially with by-elections this year. And, of course, so soon after he'd left the hospital."

"But we're not cruel," Harry added quickly. "We're willing to let this go forgotten."

The politician sighed.

"I suppose blackmail is coming now, isn't it?" he asked, rhetorically. "A crime, by the way."

"I'm sure you'd know all about that, wouldn't you?" Tonks said. "But we'd prefer to think of it as a business transaction." She pointed at the pallet. "Whisky for information. We'll even be generous enough to take the bottle your son besmirched off your hands."

The politician laughed. "You're more easily bought than most, I grant you," he said. "One bottle and this never happened?"

"Just one," said Tonks, looking at James. She too had caught his expression. "Your son doesn't deserve any more punishment than that."

James scampered to the floor, only to thrust the bottle at Harry and Tonks a moment later. Harry took it in hand.

To his eyes, it was as if it hadn't been touched.

"Here you go," said James. He was smiling then; Harry couldn't place why. "Pleasure doing business."

Tonks took Harry's hand, guiding them to the door. "I hope our paths cross again someday soon," she said.

Harry didn't let them be quite yet, however.

"Wait," he said, turning back to face the other two. "We heard a glass smash earlier. What was it?"

"A glass didn't break," said the politician, much too quickly. "You're imagining things, I'm sure."

"Are we imagining things, James?" Tonks asked. "Because I don't think we are."

"Oh," said James. "Well, I'm sure there are plenty of things that sound like glass breaking."

"No, no there isn't," Harry said. "It's very distinctive. So, what was it?"

"We don't have to tell you anything," the politician said. "You've taken what you're owed. That's fair, I grant you. Now bugger off."

Tonks pointed at the ground. "I suppose that towel hasn't gotten anything underneath it, then, now has it?" she asked.

"And what if it does?"

James, however, could bear the argument no longer.

"Father broke a tumbler," he blurted. Oddly, he still had a smile on his face as he spoke. "When he found out about the whisky, he broke the tumbler. They were engraved for the couple."

"Why on Earth would you tell them that?" the politician asked James, his voice nearing a growl. "Do you ever think?"

Harry opened the closet door.

"We'll let you go," he said, his focus still fixated on the grin that James seemed incapable of removing. "Make sure you clean that glass up."

Harry made it as far as twenty feet from the closet before he asked the only question that his mind held.

"What was going on back there?"

Tonks looked at him oddly. "Do you not know who that was?" she asked. Harry shook his head. "That was Elliot Powell, the Shadow Education Minister. Mr Sumner's direct opposite number."

"I thought he was lying about being an MP," said Harry. "And that name wasn't on the guest list."

"No, it wasn't," Tonks said. "I wanted to keep him talking, see why the fuck he was here, see if he was polyjuiced." She shook her head and sighed. "They were too fight-or-flight to get Legilimency working."

It was one of the main failings of that specific form of the mind art. As it was based on connection, panic completely overwhelmed its capabilities.

"Well, they definitely weren't under the Imperius curse," Harry said. "They didn't have that look in their eyes."

"But you saw that smile of James', right?" Tonks asked. Harry nodded quickly. "At first I thought he was just a nervous laugher, you know?" She shrugged. "But it couldn't be that."

Harry had an idea, however.

"You think it's the Confundus?" Harry asked.

It wasn't common, but during mission training, he'd seen one or two Auror recruits smile whenever they attempted to fight through a Confounding charm. It was very rarely used by the dark wizards they fought against as it held too much ambiguity. The subject could fight against it more easily than the Imperius, and often the magic was so flimsy that any instructions that were implanted would miss the subject completely.

Yet, it held the one, single trait of being mostly undetectable. At the end of the war, Hermione had realised that, since the Imperius curse held its victim in pure euphoria, that in the weeks after the spell was broken, their body would be depleted of serotonin; which was testable through medical charms.

It was one of the crueller aspects of the Imperius curse. That after a victim came back into the real world, and recalled the awful things their body had been forced to enact, their mind was also robbed of any possibility of happiness, any positive emotion, for days, and sometimes weeks, afterwards.

"But it doesn't make any sense," Tonks said. "Why would whoever's behind this confound his political rival, only to bring a gift?"

Harry watched the realisation dawn in her eyes, her gaze soon dropping to the bottle of whisky in his hands.

"Unless…" she trailed off, gripping her wand through her pocket.

Harry could feel magic sizzle through the air, and onto the bottle.

Unless the whisky was poisoned.

They met eyes, their pupils widening as they looked at one another.

"James," they both said, and set off running in the direction they'd just come from.

Harry felt the world slow. Even as they ran at their fullest, it felt like their legs were passing through treacle.

It took what felt like hours to reach that supply closet again.

He wrenched open the door, nearly pulling it off its hinges.

And, collapsed on the floor, was James.

Suffocating.

His hands clawed at his neck, as he fought desperately to draw even a single breath. His father clutched his head, paralysed by terror.

Harry ran to their side and took their hands in his, thought of St Mungo's, and disappeared from the Lansbury Hotel.