Chapter 6

"Harry, wake up love."

Harry was gently roused from sleep by a soft voice and gentle nudges. He groggily opened his eyes and saw his wife's smiling face in front of him.

"Delphini? Is she okay?" His morning voice was gruff from sleep. The first thing to cross his mind that day was the well being of his new daughter, and he was relieved when Emily nodded.

"Normally I'd have let you sleep longer, but I do want to get an early start on this."

Harry shifted about, before raising himself to a sitting position. "Right, the memory."

He blinked a few times gathering his wits. "Did everything go alright, with the time travel?"

He watched her nod, but her smile was now forced, he could see her muscles straining. "What did you find out?"

She dropped the forced happy grin and only gave him a lopsided smirk. "It seems you were right about the future. When I traveled backwards, I interfered more than I had expected, but at the same time, just enough to keep things the same. Tell me, Harry, what do you think would have happened should I have forced a change? Say if I had stormed in here while we were having sex last night in a jealous fit?"

"Er, well probably a really awkward fight... or an even more awkward threesome."

She narrowed her eyes at him and all he did was shrug his shoulders. He had no idea what she would have done in all honesty, though he did find it funny she was jealous of herself.

"You are such a male."

Harry gave a bark of laughter. "Coming from you, the horn-dog who wanted to seduce me when I was fourteen. Forgive me if I fail to take your insult to heart."

He finally succeeded in getting a laugh out of her. She looked at him still smiling, "In all seriousness, however, who is to say what is impossible or otherwise? I could have very easily changed things last night should I have decided to. Wouldn't this prove your theory wrong? Things remained the same, not for some higher power, but because of my choice."

Harry was quiet at this. Of course, he was only seventeen. He didn't have much information on time travel. Surely, if one wanted to change the timeline, no force could stop sheer will power. If Emily had been bound and determined, she could have very easily changed last night. But if she had, then it would stand to reason that he would've remembered it and time wouldn't really have changed at all.

"Emily, I don't think its a matter of changing time like that. If you were to decide to make a change, then you would make it in the present."

She scoffed at him. "Of course, I would."

"Er, I don't think you understood. I mean if you were to time travel tomorrow, back to today, and change something, we would see it today. Keeping the timeline intact."

"And what if I resolved to not travel to the past tomorrow to make my appearance today after I have already shown up? If I chose last night not to travel to the past, what would have happened?"

Harry sighed in frustration, "Emily, you're five decades my senior and you have just as much experience with time travel as I do. Which, might I remind you, is a single trip. Stop asking a teenager for answers to questions no one knows."

Emily pouted, but sighed deeply. "You're right. Of course you are."

Harry watched as she got up to leave before he was hit with an epiphany. "Wait!"

She turned to face him, with an eyebrow quirked, "Yes?"

"If you decided to change the past, you would have done it through the present. I know you would have. We'd have remembered... which means... there was a reason you had to disappear."

She gave him an odd look, "I don't quite follow."

"Simple, the only thing we can change is the present and future. If you had made changes to fix things, then you or I would have already done so in Delphini's past and we wouldn't be figuring out this mess now. That means that your disappearance... needed to happen."

Harry saw Emily purse her lips, "I suppose, if we are taking your theory as gospel, anyway, that you're correct." They both stayed silent for a while, before Emily spoke again, "Further speculation is pointless. Let's see this memory and we'll know if you are right or not."

Harry just nodded and got out of bed as she left the room. She was right, she normally was. As long as she was being rational anyway. He made his way downstairs after a hot shower and a change of clothes to see his daughter and wife already seated at the table, eating breakfast.

"You cook?" He asked this question to Delphini, already knowing that Emily had little skill in the area.

"You taught me yourself. First criteria of being self sufficient, you always said, was being able to feed yourself." Delphini spoke proudly, and Harry couldn't help looking at Emily. It was a forgone argument that they had gone through in the past when she constantly asked Harry to cook for her, and he mentioned that one day she should return the favor. The next day she had taken him to a rather fancy magical restaurant, commenting that he should appreciate her attempts in feeding him. He asked her if she'd be happy if he started taking her out to eat, and when she replied that she liked it when he cooked for her physically, she came to the realization what he had actually meant.

Needless to say, she told him it would never happen. "If you want me to feed you, I will take you out."

"I'm starting to feel under appreciated here."

She gave him a cool look. "Nonsense, you know I appreciate you more than anyone else alive."

"You wouldn't even make me a sandwich, would you?"

Emily shrugged her shoulders, "If it was something like that, I wouldn't even have to leave the living room. I could use magic from the sofa and have in front of you in seconds."

Harry had given up on the argument soon after. Some things weren't worth the time. It was good to know that his daughter knew at least a few basic life skills.

Harry ate the food that was laid out for him and as a group they made their way to the makeshift pensieve Emily had constructed the day before. The alcohol in the bowl was gone, and Harry replicated the remaining bottles to refill it. In the meantime, Emily extracted the memory from the locket and held it from the tip of her wand.

"Well then, lets find out what you have found out, Harry." Emily said. "And if I find that you have let yourself go in the future I will be very cross with you. I have no intention of being married to a slob."

Harry looked at her, mouth gaping. "Where did that even come from?"

Emily leveled him a look, "Does it matter? I'm telling you now, before we see the memory, before the so-called 'present' is set in stone, to make sure it doesn't happen."

"Er, okay."

Emily grabbed onto his hand, only giving him a split second to latch onto Delphini's as she plunged her wand into the bowl and they were lurched forward.

"Wow, it feels so weird, talking to myself. A talk I've already seen, already memorized. Doing it again, so I can fix what went wrong. I'll give you all a couple moments to get your bearings, I remember we needed a second to orient ourselves."

Emily, Harry and Delphini all paused awkwardly, as they were in the exact same room that they had left. Eventually they all turned around to see a second Harry.

"Oh no, Harry." Emily whispered.

The years hadn't been kind to Harry Potter. His face was drawn and the bags under his eyes were very pronounced and dark. He looked about a stone lighter than he did now. He was sickly and frail looking, and that was looking at him in a positive light.

"Sorry, love, about my appearance. But, on the bright side, I didn't become a slob, right?" The older Harry gave a soft chuckle. Indeed, he was impeccably dressed and well groomed, it was only the fact that he seemed terminally ill that ruined his look.

"Don't worry about me. Once we get you back, I'll pull it together, I promise. I have missed you... so much." A single tear made its way down the memory Harry's cheek and he choked on his words, only once.

"Turns out, I was right, by the way. You had to vanish. It turns out, that our happiness came with a price."

None of them viewing the memory said a word, listening intently to the man telling them about the future.

"We had everything. But we wanted more. And how could we not, when we had already seen how incredible more could be. We wanted you, Delphini." As if the man knew exactly where they were he locked his eyes onto his daughter. "I've been very busy, working on this. For almost a decade, I've toiled onwards with the Department of Mysteries for a cure. For a way to bring us back together again."

"Emily," Once again the memory locked his eyes onto the new person it addressed. "Turns out that you made a mistake. Your magical body, as magnificent as it is, can't produce a child with me. Because you used my aunt's flesh to remake your body, our DNA, produced complications with each pregnancy causing them to fail very early. Of course, we already knew that would happen, thanks to this memory. but we decided not to have children until the Voldemort issue settled down."

"You don't really know much about muggle science, but when DNA gets muddled together, things stop working properly, as far as reproduction goes. That and your body's general resilience, which didn't foster a good environment for pregnancy, meant we found out we couldn't have children together, which meant, we couldn't have Delphini. At first you wanted to change your body's make up, but it failed. Turns out, after you stabilized your new body with only pieces of you, myself, and our families your body's composition lost its flexibility. Turns out the key to your ability to change it was the diversity of it's make-up, and with our connection, you lost it."

"So you started looking for another way. And you found one, though you never told me what it was. I didn't ask, because you said I wouldn't want to know. I was willing to remain ignorant as long as we could finally conceive. Bear in mind, we still did all of this knowing what the end result would be. We were willing to pay that price. You were finally able to carry Delphini full term, but she was stillborn. We knew we had done it right, she had little tufts of silver hair after all. And you wasted no time in being the incredible woman you are, when you tore apart your final horcrux and used the small piece of soul inside of it to bring her back. Like I said, I don't know how you did it, but it worked. Delphini took her first breath of air."

"Of course, we knew it was only a temporary measure, a stopgap. We knew about your disappearance, and thanks to the memory we are in now, we knew about the danger Delphini was in. We knew that her soul would start to fracture, start to break apart. Her body would weaken, and she would start to die. We had already seen it in Delphini's memory years ago, when she ran into my arms in Malfoy Manor. She kept falling as she ran, barely able to make it to me, even though I had just finished doing what I needed to do to keep her alive. After that day at the Manor, I put my wedding ring inside her locket. The ring that now held my wife's entire soul, not just her horcrux."

The memory Harry sat down into an armchair now. "I still don't know the particulars of everything. You're understanding of soul magic has always outstripped mine. You performed some kind of magic on that ring to stabilize her soul as long as she kept it near her, and as long as you've rested inside it, Delphini has been fine. She's grown up into an incredible girl. But I can't say I was as capable."

His eye's finally made there way to where Harry stood. "She left me alone, she left us alone, for a decade. I know why, and if I had been able to, I'd have made the sacrifice all the same. But it's been so hard, confronting everything without her. To confront my own daughter, with her suspicions that I killed her mother. But what could I say to a seven year old? What could I say to a teenager? When I don't even know if the plan I've made will even work. If all the work I've done these past years ends up failing. Its a kind of fear that can not be eased away."

They watched as the memory sighed deeply. "Delphini's soul should permanently settle when she is of age, seventeen. However, her mother is stuck in that infernal ring for eternity, because the only one who can reverse the charm that put her there, is the one who placed it. I was just the delivery boy that night, Emily. You did the magic. And seeing as you are gone, you can't release yourself. Which is why I'm going to let Delphini go to you in the past. The spell that myself and the department have come up with, that we think will do the trick is 'Privo' and there are no special wand movements. You know better than I that its the intent that will get it done. You'll need to do same ritual the first time you came back to create her a body. Seeing as you've wiped most everyone's memories, the enemy you'll have to use should probably be Ginny Weasley. If your right and she's actually been in love with me for as long as you say she has, then she's probably still your enemy."

"I've caught you up to date on pretty much everything. Bring back Delphini's mother. Bring back my wife. Please, I've lasted so long on just this brittle hope. But even the smallest chance is a guarantee for Emily to succeed. I know that better than anyone else. After all," At this moment, as everything started to fade the memory Harry raised his head to the ceiling with a smile on his face, "She did make me fall in love with her."

A/N: Not really a murder mystery after all, I guess. But then again, I don't think anyone really thought it was going to be. We're over half way there, now.