"What was that?"

Harry glanced past Nikolay at the gash that was carved into the stone wall.

"Cutting curse," he replied.

"It looks different to any cutting curse I know of," Nikolay said interestedly, "and it shouldn't have gone through that shield."

"I modified it. I can show you the notes if you want."

"Please."

With that, Nikolay returned to fixing the few injuries that he had picked up during their duelling practice. He wasn't the only one injured, and Harry looked away from the squirming white that peeked out from his leg back to the gash in the wall. That was his most recent work, and having spent the week of enforced rest since the task finishing it off he was glad to see that the extra flick or two in the wand movements didn't impact the casting speed too much.

Combat magic was like an arms race. A slow arms race, yes, but it was still an arms race. A new curse would be developed and then, assuming it became even moderately well used, people would start trying to identify ways to stop it. Anything that could be stopped by any magical shield could be redirected, but that was an advanced technique that even professional duellists struggled to master, and that left just shields. So people would start testing to find, modify or create effective shield spells. Once an effective shield spell was found then people would start trying to modify the curse to get through that shield, and then a new shield would be found and the curse would be modified a little bit more, and on and on it would go. That was why the magical world had so many shield spells, and why there was so many different curses that seemed to do the same thing.

All he had done was take a nasty little cutting curse and change it just enough that it would pass through the shield most commonly used against it. Of course, the spell had to be common enough to have a 'usual' countermeasure. Any duellist worth their salt would recognise that spell and know exactly the shield charm to use; he had just taken advantage of that.

Tom was insistent they do the same to blasting, piercing, and even stunning charms too. 'You never knew when you'd need to keep someone alive,' he'd said, and Harry was a little disturbed by how upset he had seemed about that.

"Talked to your lady friend yet?" Nikolay asked with a smirk.

Harry resisted the urge to… well, he couldn't decide whether to sigh or blush. Of course Sirius had told him. He'd probably told everyone. He didn't regret talking to Sirius about it – it had certainly helped him clear it up in his head, and Sirius had plenty of ideas of how to tell her from his school days – but it would be nice if they wouldn't tease him about it.

"Not yet," he said eventually. "I think I'm going to wait a little bit and do something nice. Sirius said that it would be good to do something rather than just blurt it out."

He could have tried to play oblivious, but then Nikolay would have said it. That he liked her. Liked liked her.

Harry felt a traitorous smile trying to worm its way onto his face, only for it to be immediately wiped away by Nikolay's next words.

"I know; Sirius showed us the memory."

That bastard. Harry cringed as he remembered one particularly uncomfortable bit of that very uncomfortable conversation.

"What do you mean you don't know if you like her?" Sirius laughed. "Alright, answer this: have you thought about her naked?"

Harry blushed; he had done that.

"Didn't you say that teenage boys imagine every girl they know naked?" he protested.

Sirius frowned slightly as he turned his mind back to the day he had given Harry The Talk.

"I did say that didn't I. But do you? Imagine every girl you know naked?"

"I don't know any other girls."

"You've spent the last few months at Hogwarts, a school filled with girls. Of course you know other girls."

"Yeah but I don't actually know them."

Sirius scoffed.

"Knowing them never stopped me when I was your age. You're not imagining their intellectual attributes or whether their voice sounds nice on a Friday afternoon. You're imagining them naked, Harry."

Even now Harry could feel the heat slinking up his neck regardless of the scathing, even outright angry mutters Tom had been and still was spitting.

"He's just very proud of you Harry," Nikolay said.

Again, Harry felt himself smile, and again Tom started muttering. Somehow he continued to get ever more scathing but Harry ignored it with the ease of very consistent practice; Tom had no say when it came to Daphne and he knew it.

Thankfully, Nikolay didn't ask anything more about it for the remainder of their lesson. They delved a little into ritualistic theory and why the practice had been largely banned, even the good ones, and finished off with a little accuracy practice. He didn't hit as many of the little whizzing targets as he would have liked, but in his defence they weren't that big.

'Smaller than someone's head,' Tom pointed out, as if that was all that mattered. It kind of was.

Days passed quicker now. Time with Daphne passed quicker, and yet it still passed ever so slowly when he stopped to think about feelings and emotions and the future past his year at Hogwarts. Even study sessions with Blaise, Tracey and Astoria became more enjoyable as he learnt their rules; Blaise was quiet and more than happy to stay on academics and well away from anything personal, particularly his mother. Tracey was the exact opposite, and Astoria was somewhere in between while maintaining her favourite pastime of annoying her sister. They were… nice.

His magical studies continued. More potions, more curses, more shields, more experimentation. His tutors threw him even more work, seemingly trying to keep him tied to a desk ever since the second task. He received thank you letters from every member of the Delacour family and the French Minister of Magic himself, and even though they didn't really mean anything they were tucked safely in his bedside drawer. Sirius insisted on visiting once a week and Dumbledore scheduled even more meetings, and he found himself enjoying both.

And, as a result, he and Tom were arguing more. About wasting time and about how pointless and replaceable people ultimately were, but no matter how much he shouted and raged and swore it was always Tom who lost those arguments. Harry was the one who held the trump card: it was his body. He did what he wanted.

Those outbursts were no louder than when he spent evenings planning how he was going to tell Daphne he liked her, but for every bit of insistence Tom possessed Harry had more stubbornness. Tom had no say. That was that.

It went without saying that he was going to do some magic, and that made it the first time his magical creations had taken him outside academics or curses. Eventually he had decided that he was going to make a spell that would display the picture that he had seen on her bedside table of her, Astoria and their father. It must be a favourite of hers if it was on display, and he would just mysteriously wave away any questions about how he knew like Sirius had told him always worked. If not then he would have to hope Astoria was willing to say she told him; Sirius had advised him not tell Daphne he had broken into her room before they met, and definitely not that he'd done it a second time to get a copy of the photo.

It meant playing around with light and illusion spells for the first time, which at the very least was interesting enough to appease Tom slightly if not silence him. It had taken a promise to use what they learned they for a more useful spell as well to get that.

One of Sirius's many suggestions had been to do it just before Easter, giving him both time to plan and the opportunity to deal with the fallout if it went badly. But, as the Easter holidays approached Daphne seemed to become more and more… distracted? He wasn't quite sure. She wasn't sad. Maybe angry? Whatever it was it wasn't directed at him, but nonetheless he was wary of it.

A part of him hoped it was because she would miss him while she was home for the holidays. He would miss her. Hell, he'd even miss Astoria and Tracey and Blaise. Somehow going back to his solitary existence, however briefly, did not appeal nearly as much now as it always had done before. Maybe he should go home too? It would be nice to see everyone properly. Sirius had already tried and failed to remain nonchalant while suggesting it.

This would be one of their last study sessions before the break and they had chosen to focus on transfiguration. Apparently McGonagall had set a horrible essay for over the holidays and they wanted to get as much done while they had him as a resource.

"But I don't understand why," Tracey said for what must have been the fifth time, and for the fifth time Harry pushed back his frustration. He was getting used to it now; if anything, Daphne always said, it was a compliment that these intelligent people struggled with things he found relatively simple.

'Idiot girl.'

And in their defence, he thought, they didn't have a Tom to help them.

"During the switching process-"

"Yeah no I get that," she interrupted, "but I still don't understand why."

Harry managed to still the retort that appeared on his tongue. Astoria didn't bother.

"Clearly you don't get it," she said with a limp smile, "otherwise you wouldn't need to ask."

Normally even Tracey would get a bit annoyed by that, but this time the expression barely flickered on her face before her expression softened, even sticking her tongue out at the younger girl before returning to pestering him. Astoria's smile gained a little strength, and from her place beside him Daphne smiled at the two of them.

The whole interaction confused Harry somewhat; it didn't follow the rules he had painstakingly learnt over the past months, and the lack of reaction from Blaise seemed to imply this was normal. If it was normal why had he not seen it before? Tracey never took perceived insults well and would always snap back with something jokey but nonetheless sharp. Why not this time? Was it because Astoria had been down lately? Well, at the very least she'd been quieter, and that tended to be a good indicator. If people seemed upset were they allowed to get away with things? It seemed a good strategy to get what you wanted.

Reluctantly he put it from his mind. He didn't like not knowing things, but in the grand scheme of social interaction it wasn't that pressing. He'd figure it out eventually; the most annoying thing about learning this stuff was that it took so much time, and there were no books to read that helped.

"Okay," he said under Tracey's expectant gaze, her foot seeming to tap impatiently beneath the table if the shaking was anything to go by, "lets start with the why and get to the what. The wand movements don't appear like they contain any runes or symbols, but that's because the switching spell was first created in the sixth century. The wand movements have been massively simplified from that base casting."

Tracey nodded and Harry sucked in a breath. Right. That bit was done. He could skip over the specifics of how that simplification happened via a combination of runic dialects and just sheer belief. She didn't need to know that; she'd ask too many questions.

"Daph…" a feeble voice stuttered, and Harry didn't match the voice to the person until Daphne flung herself into action.

In a second she was next to Astoria, rifling through her bag with well-practised urgency. Even Tracey and Blaise seemed to have their roles, each taking hold of one of Astoria's wrists as she shook ever more violently. Ink pooled below his sleeve as he sat there, gormlessly watching Astoria's eyes roll back in her head and spit drip from the bottom of her chin. Her entire body jerked and tensed at random, straining at Tracey and Blaise's grips, and Harry didn't know why they didn't use magic but didn't dare intervene.

Finally Daphne pulled a vial of sparkling blue from the bag, and by unspoken agreement Blaise grabbed Astoria's other wrist as Tracey let go and grabbed hold of Astoria's head, pulling it back as Daphne poured the potion down her sister's throat. She continued to thrash for long seconds until she suddenly fell limp, and only then did Tracey and Blaise let go and fall back into their seats.

"That was the worst one I've seen," Blaise said, the concern in his tone so different to his voice's usual smoothness.

Daphne shrugged, and that seemed to be all the answer that she was willing to give. Tracey and Blaise glanced at each other and then at him, and then without a sound Tracey conjured a stretcher that gently slid under Astoria's limp form. They looked at Daphne once and then turned from the table, guiding the stretcher from the library and leaving a silence that Harry didn't know how to break.

A flick of Daphne's wand yanked her now ink-stained parchments into her waiting bag and a second cleared the table, and then without so much as looking at him she stood and walked stiffly towards the exit. Harry felt hurt flare in his stomach; why were they just dismissing him like this? Why was he not allowed to know?

Before he knew it he was storming after her, seeing her robes flick around the corner as he hurried through the corridors. He caught up with her just as the door of their room clicked closed, and he barged through it without even pausing.

"Leave it Harry," she said without looking at him.

"What was that?" he asked anyway.

"I said leave it."

"We can't just leave it after that."

"Sure we can," she said, "look, watch."

She sat down, her back determinedly towards him, and Harry felt the hurt flare.

'Why can they know but not us?' Tom whispered, and even though Harry knew he was deliberately fanning the flames he couldn't help but let them grow.

"What's wrong with Astoria?"

"Nothing's wrong. Leave it Harry."

"No," he said, "I'm not going to leave it. I can't help if I don't know what it is."

"You can't help anyway!" she snapped as she whirled around to glare at him with darkened eyes, and Harry noticed the angry tears burning down her cheeks. "You can't help! What, you think just because you're Harry Potter you can wave your wand and fix everything? Because you're so clever? Because you're so talented and special? It can't be fixed."

Fury dripped from her tone, but something in his face made hers soften just slightly.

"You are all those things, Harry," she said softly, "but you can't fix this. We've looked and looked and looked and found nothing. Tori is stuck like that, getting worse and worse and worse for the rest of her life. Just because you can heal from anything doesn't mean you can do it to other people."

"Not yet," Harry said stubbornly, "but we can figure out a way. Is it congenital? A curse? It looks like its something in the nervous system."

Daphne spent several seconds looking at him before she sighed.

"Yes, it is in the nervous system. Nerve damage. And it wasn't caused by a single curse so we can't just cast it on you to see how you heal. Our other tests have been helpful, but they can't just tell us how to do it."

Nerve damage that had been caused over time, probably through repeated exposure to a curse. It didn't paint a pretty picture, and the one that it did paint made fury spark in his throat.

"Your mother used pain curses on her."

To his surprise, Daphne laughed. Not the laugh he had come to love deep in his soul, but a cold, spiteful one that to his ears felt totally dead.

"You're ever so clever Harry," she said eventually, "but your mind does tend to go to extremes. No, mother never went that far. That would be too risky. It could ruin her reputation!"

She tutted mockingly, her fists clenching around the arm of her chair.

"Mother isn't a cruel woman. Not physically, anyway. She will say cruel things but she will never do them. Nothing that would ever leave a mark. No, Tori isn't hurt because of mother's cruelty; she is hurt because mother just didn't care."

Harry couldn't bring himself to speak past the cold rage that was stuck in his throat, unsurprised by the fact that child abuse struck a sore spot for him, especially when Daphne was involved. She didn't even look at him before she continued in a flat voice.

"Mother wanted to have a son to carry on the Greengrass name, but problems in Tori's birth meant that will not be possible. That means I as the heiress will likely have to marry the second son of a family of lower standing like she did with my dad if the Greengrass name is to continue, lowering ourselves further and further down the pecking order."

Daphne scoffed as if she could think of nothing more pathetic.

"Mother sees it like a failure to her family line and she blames Tori for it. She never really cared about her; she was just a reminder of her own perceived failure. So, when baby Tori cried and wailed, instead of comforting her Mother would just hit her with a stunning spell. The spell forces the nervous system to shut down completely and that causes damage even in adults; people have ended up in the Janus Thickey ward from repeated stunning spells, never mind babies. Everyone raised with magic knows not to do it and knows the damage it can cause, but she just did it anyway. Once dad found out he didn't let Tori out of his sight, but by then it was too late."

"There are spells and potions-"

"I know Harry," she said sharply before she sucked in a breath with an apology in her eyes, "of course I know that. I used to help dad brew them. We've tried everything and it hasn't worked. Everything. Tori is just going to have to suffer the consequences of mother's apathy, and me and dad will have to watch it get worse and worse."

Harry hated the almost offhand way she said it but forced the cold rage in his throat aside. That woman would get what was coming to her eventually, but for now he would focus on the problem.

"And because the damage was cumulative we can't just do it on me – I'd heal before I got to the stage Astoria is in."

Daphne's nodded despondently, as if every ounce of life and hope had been sucked from her. Harry hated it, and he was quite willing to do anything for it to never happen again.

"So then we make a curse that immediately simulates Astoria's exact condition."

Daphne's expression brightened as faint hope sparked in her eyes.

"You can do that?"

"Nikolay and I together can."

Hopefully. He didn't see why not. It would mean revealing his experiments, but as Daphne's façade melted away entirely and trickled down her cheeks Harry decided he'd volunteer as the Unspeakables' lab rat if that's what it took to cure her sister. For her, he thought, he'd do anything.


Astoria was in the hospital wing for the next three days. It always flared up around the holidays – stress, Daphne said – and it was getting worse with every attack anyway. Privately Harry wondered how long she would have left if he and Daphne couldn't heal her, and somehow he knew that Daphne wondered the same. So the moment Daphne gave him Astoria's scans he flung himself into it, trying to figure out a suitable base for a spell to replicate it. Try as he might he could only come up with a few ideas, and even Tom could offer little more insight once he had been sufficiently bribed.

So, he forced himself to put it on the backburner until he went home for Easter and instead concentrated on his… proposal? That sounded a bit too much, but confession sounded a bit negative. At the very least he hoped that being told he liked her wouldn't be a bad thing. Announcement, he decided. His announcement.

Sirius had delighted in helping him, and despite how uncomfortable it made him Harry could admit that it was certainly worth the discomfort. Sirius may have been a bit promiscuous in his school days, but he certainly seemed to know what he was doing.

"What does the spell actually do Harry?" Daphne asked when her little ball of light flickered out yet again.

"You'll see."

"Well I won't see, actually," she said, "if I don't manage to cast it. Don't you always say that visualisation is important? How can I visualise it without knowing what it is?"

"I made it so that visualisation isn't necessary," Harry said, and hadn't that been difficult, "so that it stays a surprise."

"What sort of spell needs to be a surprise?"

"Just cast the spell, Daphne."

She grinned the impish grin that made his stomach twirl before she concentrated once more. Carefully she traced her wand through the wand movements and murmured the incantation, and this time the ball of light exploded.

"That's me," she said dumbly, staring at the familiar photo with the quidditch players whizzing through the air. "This is my favourite photo in the world. How did you know?"

Just like he'd practised, Harry shrugged with the apparently secretive smile Sirius had taught him. Daphne's face flickered with suspicion before her eyes returned to the picture, staring at it like she'd never seen it before.

"Thank you," she said with glistening eyes.

"You're welcome. I made another version that will let you project any image you can think of as well but that requires visualisation of the image so I couldn't just teach you it first. You know, just in case you don't like this one. You do like it don't you? It's okay if you don't. I can just teach you the other spell and then you-"

His rambling was cut off by Daphne's arms wrapping around him and her laughter tinkling in his ear. He felt breathless – surely because she was squeezing him quite tightly – and he felt himself flush in embarrassment, but yet his face still curled into a smile.

"I love it," she said as she pulled back, smiling fondly at him as if he hadn't just embarrassed himself.

"I did something else too."

"Oh?"

The grin on her face was almost knowing, burning with curiosity and excitement, and Harry felt himself smile back before he flicked his wand like a conductor to trigger all his pre-cast spells. The sofa, desks and chairs slid silently into the walls and disappeared as the torches dimmed in their sconces, sending dancing light across the room. The stone in the centre of the room rippled as a chandelier dropped from the ceiling and an elegantly carved table and chairs rose from the floor, covered in fine plates of Daphne's favourite foods and gently flickering candles.

A part of him said that this was too much, but the other part said that there was never too much. How could you show someone too much care? How could you try too hard to treat them? He wondered if Daphne agreed, but he couldn't tell from her expression. She looked like she was about to cry, and Harry briefly wondered whether he'd done something wrong before he was yanked into a hug more fierce and more wonderful than any he'd had before.

"So this is why you made us meet during dinner," she smiled.

Harry shrugged and pulled out her chair just as Sirius had instructed, feeling his nervousness ebb away at her glowing smile. They filled their plates and ate in comfortable silence. Daphne couldn't seem to stop smiling nor look away from him, and Harry wasn't inclined to either. With every bite they seemed to share a little grin or catch the other staring. He didn't think he'd ever seen her smile like this.

By the end of their meal, however, she was eying his now mostly empty plate with suspicion.

"When was the last time you ate?"

Harry shrugged guiltily.

"A few days ago."

Daphne continued to look at him expectantly.

"Okay it was eleven days ago-"

"Eleven?" Daphne cried.

"But I really wanted to eat with you!"

She tried to be reproachful, but the effect was rather ruined by the smile that she couldn't stop from shining through.

"Okay Harry," she said, "what's going on? What's this all about?"

In all his hours of planning, he had never managed to work out this bit.

"Well, um," he said haltingly, "we're friends right? We like each other?"

Daphne nodded with that strange smile on her face, as if she knew exactly what he was getting at but was enjoying making him try to explain it.

"You know that I've never really had friends before, so it was a bit confusing for me. Especially because I'm friends with Tracey and Blaise and Astoria–" he paused, unsure, and Daphne smiled and nodded, and he felt that warm feeling in his stomach again – "but its different with you to how it is for them. So I spoke to Sirius about it, and he helped clear it up for me. He asked me things, like what it feels like when we touch and whether I've ever thought about you na-"

His mouth snapped shut as a brilliant blush blossomed on his cheeks and a matching one appeared on Daphne's, but yet the grin on her face couldn't have been brighter.

"Anyway," he coughed, "Sirius kind of cleared up a few things."

"And what were those?"

This was the worst bit, Harry thought, and he couldn't look at her and Tom was stewing silently in his disgust and every one of Sirius's suggestions suddenly vanished from his mind and he had no idea and-

"He told me," he said eventually, "that there are different kinds of friends. Lots of different kinds. And that some of them are more than just friends. That sometimes friendship can grow until it becomes more than that. He said how special it was and how it felt and…"

He looked up, and she was smiling that wonderful smile that had made him realise and he felt his jittering heart settle just slightly. It was going to be fine. How could it not when it was the two of them?

His eyes reluctantly fell back to the table; he couldn't look at her for this bit.

"Are… are we that type of friend?"

"Yes Harry," he heard her say, "we are."

He couldn't say who moved first, but then they were squeezing each other so tight that he was surprised they weren't merging together and wouldn't that be wonderful, if her head was forever leant on his shoulder and her breath was forever on his neck. But still she wasn't close enough so he squeezed, and he felt pleased laughter caress his skin.

"What's funny?" he asked.

"I'm just really, really happy," she replied, and Harry nodded because he was too.

Reluctantly he pulled back so he could look at her, and he'd never seen a smile so wide nor eyes so bright and she was perfect, just perfect. There wasn't a thing he would ever want to change because they already fit, he just felt it, and somehow he couldn't ever imagine being without her.

The realisation terrified him, but when he looked back on all those exciting yet structured, separate, safe years spent in the Black library obsessing over magic he began to wonder: what was the point of life, he asked himself, without a little terror?

"Does this mean we're..." He paused, his mouth suddenly dry, "you know...?"

"Dating?"

Mutely he nodded.

"If you'd like to be," she said, teasing and smiling without a hint of doubt because she knew him and-

"Yes please," he said.

Daphne failed to stifle her laugh.


He missed her already. By God it had barely been a matter of hours since he stepped off the train but he missed her, and the worst part was that he wasn't even upset about it. He had realised at the start of the year when he left for Hogwarts that the sensation of missing home and those who lived there was almost pleasant, but this was different to that. It was more than that, like a speck of agony cocooned in so much affection.

"How lucky I am," he murmured to himself, reminded of a book he had once read at school while hiding from Dudley, "to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."

Ever since that night they had hardly been apart beyond the hours spent sleeping, earning eye rolls and teasing remarks from Tracey that glanced off his happiness like a stone off a lake. They would meet in the hall early, and then Harry would sit beside her in all her classes and work on the projects he had before been doing in his room, and Daphne would cast the spell he'd made her for the tenth time that day and they would go to their room and just be.

They hadn't done an experiment in almost two weeks, instead spending the time talking or reading or practising. Charms, transfiguration, rituals and basic alchemy. Daphne's fiction novels that she would blush and hide from his curious eyes and the tomes that Harry took from the restricted section. They would talk about potions and paintings, their pasts and their ideas for the future. About Daphne's well-hidden love of quidditch and the muggle sports that Harry had been made to do over the years.

She asked him if he was looking forwards to getting to go back to Jiu-Jitsu over the holidays. He had missed it, he admitted, and a part of him wondered whether he would like speaking to them this time. He thought maybe he would.

As expected, Sirius had been gleeful when he told him how his announcement had gone. He had insisted to every one of his other tutors and anyone else who would listen that it was all thanks to his help, even going so far as conjuring a badge with 'World's Best Dogfather' emblazoned on the front in flashing letters. It was only after he and everyone else decided that Harry had blushed enough that Sirius had quietened and turned to him with fond tears welling in his eyes.

"Your parents would be so proud of you, Harry."

As always, the mention of his parents didn't matter to him. He had never met them. But what went unsaid – that Sirius was proud of him – meant an awful lot more than he had expected.

But that was earlier, and now he had something important he needed to do.

'I can't believe that you're going to spend the week where we have free access to the Black library and tutors working to create a useless spell,' Tom sneered.

'It's not useless,' Harry snarled back, mildly surprised by the sheer amount of anger that ripped through him. 'This is for Astoria. She is suffering and I can fix it. That is more important than learning a few more spells just for the sake of it.'

Wisely, Tom stayed silent as Harry knocked on the door of Nikolay's 'office' at Grimmauld Place.

"Harry," the man said in surprise when the door swung open, "what can I do for you?"

"I need your help to make a curse."

Nikolay rolled his eyes fondly and waved him in, shutting the door behind him. Harry settled into the familiar armchair that he had spent so many countless hours in over the years and Nikolay leaned easily back into the one opposite.

"Any particular type of curse?"

Wordlessly Harry pulled Astoria's scans from his bag and handed them over. Nikolay frowned when he looked at them, and the frown deepened as he flicked through each one.

"You want to emulate this?" he asked, looking up briefly to see Harry nod before his gaze dropped back down. "I'm no physician but I don't think this damage is even truly debilitating. Not lethal and certainly not beneficial either. Why do you want to emulate it?"

"Those scans are of Daphne's sister, Astoria. The condition is degenerative and they can't find a cure, but if we make a curse that emulates the damage and cast it on me then we can find out how my body heals it. From there we just need to make a spell or a potion that copies that magic."

Nikolay spent several seconds staring at him before he placed Astoria's scans softly on the table.

"Harry," he began cautiously, "I really do admire what you're trying to do. You're trying to save someone else and that's no small thing, especially with the amount of effort the whole process would take. But we don't know enough about your ability to heal to know if you would heal from it. I'm sorry, but I can't be a part of something that could very easily curse you with the very same degenerative condition that you're trying to cure."

Harry sucked in a breath and reached into his bag. Last chance to turn back…

And then he remembered the hope in Daphne's eyes and the thought vanished as quickly as it had come.

"Yes we do," Harry said as he opened his results book and slid it across the coffee table.

The expression on Nikolay's face became heavy as he looked at him. Harry stared back, and after a few seconds Nikolay sighed and allowed his eyes to fall to the book. He flicked through it in silence, his face getting paler with each neatly drawn column, and when he had said nothing for several minutes Harry broke the uncomfortable silence.

"My ability allows me to heal from every non-magical injury we've tried. Blood loss, organ damage or outright loss, burns, cuts to flesh, impalement and even the re-joining of severed limbs. Crucially, I am able to recover quickly from nerve damage brought about via non-magical means or through simple effect spells like the bludgeoning hex. I am also—" he snatched the book back from Nikolay's unprotesting fingers "—able to heal from magical curses, albeit over a longer time frame. We haven't tried too many so far but I've recovered from each of them with no ill effects, including a minor nerve withering curse."

He paused, waiting for Nikolay to say something. Anything. But he didn't. Just continued to stare with so much emotion in his gaze that Harry couldn't hope to decipher it. Horror, certainly, and anger too and maybe a bit of fascination, but they dipped and rolled with each passing second so that Harry had no idea which emotion was strongest.

"My healing is adaptive," he continued as he did his best to hide his awkwardness. He flicked to his pages on the blood-boiling curse and slid the book across the desk, watching as Nikolay's eyes bugged out. "The first time I'm exposed to a magical injury it takes a while to heal. Most of that time has very little progress, and then at the end everything kind of happens at once. Subsequent exposures remove that initial period of wasted time prior to healing, and healing even becomes more efficient with each exposure."

He pointed to one particular column.

"The first exposure took 6 days, with only four hours and three minutes of that active. The second exposure took three hours and thirty-seven minutes. After five exposures the damage was gone in under eleven minutes. Other curses seem to follow the same pattern, but the blood-boiling curse is the only one we have such extensive data for. It would be advisable to complete more exposures using the nerve withering curse, I suppose, but there is plenty of time for that while we create the curse to simulate Astoria's injuries."

Nikolay continued to stare at the page with his fingers ghosting absently over the diagrams.

"You're doing this with or without me aren't you."

It wasn't a question, but Harry nodded all the same.

"I'll help you then," he said. "I would much rather be part of it than in the dark. I have conditions, though."

"Name them."

For just a second something like happiness quirked on Nikolay's lips.

"Once we have made the curse, we will conduct animal testing before it is cast on you."

Harry nodded immediately.

"I will also be telling the others, including both Sirius and Albus."

This time his nod was a little more hesitant. He'd expected this, but that didn't mean he was pleased. If anyone was going to overreact it was going to be Sirius.

"Can you at least wait until I'm back at Hogwarts?" he asked. "I want to have a nice break without anyone being overprotective."

Nikolay let out a disbelieving snort at the word overprotective but, after a few seconds of thought, he inclined his head in agreement.

"Our secret project for now then," he said. "It will take time though, which I'm sure you've already worked out. There aren't any spells we can easily use as a base; this damage is very specific and not really desirable in any context,, so there is unlikely to be anything close that we can adapt."

"I was thinking we could use a more damaging curse as the base and alter it to lessen the damage, and then from there try to play with it to make it more like Astoria's."

Nikolay shook his head, and from there they spent the rest of the day trying to find a way to do it. It was enjoyable for Harry, despite the stakes and the time pressure and the muttering in the back of his head. Only a few times before had he and Nikolay worked so equally on a project. Nikolay was his tutor after all; it made sense that usually he took the lead. But here, after all the time he had spent trying to work it out already and the knowledge that Daphne had given him on the medical aspects of curses, Harry found himself almost leading.

Everyone was there at dinner that night. All his tutors and even Dumbledore, all crowded around the table in Grimmauld Place. There was much interest in their secret project, of course, but Nikolay was true to his word. All of Sirius's questions were waved away, which wasn't difficult because all Sirius – and anyone else for that matter – wanted to talk about was Daphne. Words of wisdom and embarrassing stories flowed easily around him and teasing flowed even easier. He blushed and it was awkward and embarrassing and a bit annoying but, somehow, he still felt himself smiling.

He'd get an earful about his experiments eventually, but for now he was just happy to be home.