A/N: This took an incredibly long time to update, but no, I haven't forgotten about this story! In fact, I have so many directions for the plot; it has been taking a while to sort through them all. So let's keep going, ne? I would apologize to you guys out there who are offended by slash fics, but the slashyness is really necessary for my plot, and not simply because of fangirl pleasure. So it stays.

Please read and review! I accept and welcome all suggestions, comments, etc. So don't be shy!

Chapter Two

"Six years back, Hermione and I were given our first assignment on the job as Aurors, you remember, cleaning up the mess You-Know…" Ron shook his head, "Voldemort had left behind.

"It was pretty exciting at first, the assignment. We had to return to the headquarters of the Death Eaters and see if there were any traces of bad spells still hanging around. They wanted that house Voldemort had been staying in to be able to be occupied again by muggles."

Harry nodded, remembering the Riddle house as he had last seen it; the day he killed Lord Voldemort. It was vaguely ironic that Voldemort had been killed in the same house Voldemort had poisoned his own father; but as a result of all the deaths that had occurred in the single location, the Riddle house would have been quite a task to clean up – both the physical and metaphysical sense – so that it could be made habitable for muggles. Malevolent spirits often haunted places where much blood had been shed, and the motivation for all that split blood only made the spirits harder to remove. The purifying of that house must have been an incredibly long and difficult task, not to mention dangerous. 'What a bludger of a first assignment.' Harry thought sympathetically.

"So while we were, well, cleaning up," here Ron swallowed audibly. Hermione squeezed his hand. "This thing came out of nowhere and attacked us."

"We believe it may have been some sort of ghoul, possibly a banshee – nothing too unusual." Hermione clarified in a relatively calm voice; however, she seemed as frightened at the memory as her husband. Her hands trembled in her husband's grip, and her expression had turned to one of distant fear. Harry frowned; what about this "normal" ghoul could have made his two best friends so spooked that six years down the road they still had trouble talking about it?

"The creature was bloody powerful. We hacked at it with spell after spell and nothing seemed to work. Still it came squealing after us." Ron made hand motions in conjunction to his explanation.

"Finally we managed to trick the ghoul into leaving this plane of existence." Hermione continued for Ron as he got caught up in the battle with the banshee. "I found an existing altercation between the space-time and magical continuums, and weaved a simple dimension relegation sequence – you know, the one all Aurors should keep handy – and extradited it from the physical visual periphery." She looked at Harry for acknowledgement.

To his credit, Harry nodded, but the description was still floating in his mind. What exactly did she do to the thing?

"Bloody hell woman, couldn't you have just said you got rid of it?" Draco muttered.

"Oh, is that what happened?" Harry murmured back, eyebrow raised.

"In five words, yes." Draco smirked. "You always do get lost on the terminology."

Harry opened his mouth to protest: that other occasion had been the only time he'd ever had such a problem, and why couldn't he live it down; however, Hermione proceeded to continue the explanation. She was content, to her knowledge, that Harry understood exactly what she had meant about the ghoul's fate.

"So even though Hermy kicked the ghoul's ass into the next dimension, it still left a rather nasty present back for us."

"Actually, I wasn't able to exorcise it completely; the ghoul seemed to have self-destructed before my spell was complete."

"And as part of that self-destruct mode, it put a final curse on us." Ron finished, his mood moving quickly from excited to bleak.

"What sort of curse is this?" Draco asked, actually interested for once. It had appeared to him that finally the pair had stuck their noses into something even they could not bluff their way out of. 'Maybe because Harry isn't there to save them anymore.' He mused to himself.

"It's a curse of infertility, as far as we can tell from the message and the signs afterward." Ron shifted in his seat: he leaned to one side, then the other, checking his pockets.

At last, after a long pause, he found a worn slip of paper. "We copied down the riddle on a scrap of paper; the original message was made up out of green smoke that appeared when the ghoul disappeared.

"May I?" Harry held out a hand to take the paper. Ron nodded and handed it to him. Draco leaned closer to his partner, reading the short message on the slip of paper.

Two is a pair and three is a crowd;

Four is enough to make everyone loud.

But what will you do, o, what can you do?

Now you must borrow; it can never be new.

"It sounds more like fortune-telling to me." Draco said dubiously as he finished reading.

Both Hermione and Ron shook their heads. Hermione sighed and replied, "I was not going to mention this at first; but when we were first given the assignment, I was six weeks pregnant. A few days after reading that riddle, my child…died."

"We couldn't understand it at first." Ron embraced his wife consolingly. "Hermione would get pregnant and all would seem fine until the second month, then the baby would just die."

"It went on like that for the past five years or so. Then Ron and I started to think about the situation from a different light. What if the mission at the Riddle house and all the miscarriages were related? I thought I was grasping at straws, but we've tried every other diagnostic possible. Muggle doctors don't see anything wrong biologically; yet everything from natural conception to in-vitro fertilization fails after a certain period. Our healers think that it's simply coincidence because nothing's wrong magically; however, all their fertility spells, potions, and charms just fail the same way muggle methods do."

"Why do I have the feeling this is where I come in?" Harry asked suspiciously.

"It's more than a feeling; it should be a dead giveaway." Draco commented.

"This is our last hope for a child of our own blood." Hermione pleaded.

"All right, let's hear it." Harry closed his eyes. Somehow, he had the feeling that his life, if it hadn't already, was about to become far more complicated.

Yay! Second chapter done! Hopefully I'll be able to get them up at least once a week, but the weekends are really the only time I get to work on writing…so bear with me please! I promise I'll make it worth your while! and as always, don't forget to review!