Nothing is mine.

I know what everyone's waiting for... for Katie to learn how to make pebbles turn different colours!

The Secret Garden

The breeze rustled through the long grass and the spring flowers, sending the bright patches of colour swaying among the rippling waves of green, and somewhere beyond the cherry blossom, peals of his daughter's laughter rang out.

A fierce, soft whisper of yearning tugged at Harry's heart through pangs of hunger gnawing at his stomach.

You can't. You'll ruin everything. He cocked his head, scanning the shifting blooms with one eye as they stirred and shifted in the wind, swallowing the swell of the storm. But there's no way out, not if my sisters make me. I can't even die again to disappear, because if I do, I'll come back here, and Fleur will know.

A flash of silver and blue caught his eye, and a stab of panic tore through him; he hunched down among the long green leaves, tucking his head into his wing.

Katie skipped down along the river bank in a short sapphire dress, a huge bright smile upon her face and her green eyes sparkling.

Harry's heart melted. Baby bird, you grew up so beautifully.

She bounced to a stop beneath the willow and glanced back over her shoulder. 'Papa,' she hissed. 'Papa.'

He spread his wings and drifted down, alighting atop her head and tugging at her little braid with his talons.

'No, bad papa.' Katie giggled. 'Not my hair.'

Harry bent over her forehead and poked her with the tip of his beak. Je t'aime, little chick.

'I spoke to maman how you said I should and asked again—' his daughter reached up and lifted him off her head, setting him down on the white pebbles '—and she said yes!'

He shifted out of the form of the raven and offered a small fond smile as she hopped about, beaming. 'You're going to Beauxbatons, then?'

Katie nodded her head. 'Merci, merci, merci.' She buried her face in his stomach and wrapped her arms around his waist. 'Maman would never have said yes if you'd not explained it to me.'

'She would have eventually,' Harry murmured, holding her close. 'You would have just had to figure it out yourself before you convinced her.'

His daughter wriggled free. 'I'm going to get a wand soon! And meet my godmothers for the first time ever!'

Harry's blood ran cold.

'You're going to see them in Paris?'

Katie shook her head. 'I think they're coming here. Maman said they were visiting.'

He smothered a cold tight fist of dread. 'Excited?'

'I've wanted to meet them forever!' She bounced on the spot, wobbling as the pebbles shifted under her feet. 'And maman knew I secretly had your wand and the painting of you and her, but she wasn't angry with me at all, even when I accidentally levitated the whole bed instead of just socks.'

'Your maman loves you more than you can imagine; you don't need to keep any secrets from her,' Harry promised. 'I'm sure she's very very proud of her beautiful baby bird.'

'Papa,' his daughter whined, her lower lip creeping out into a delicate pout. 'I'm not a baby.'

He chuckled. 'You're still pretty small compared to me.'

'But not a baby,' she mumbled, shooting a small scowl at him. 'I'm going to go to school and learn loads of magic with my own brand new wand, and nobody will call me a baby, or a chick, or anything baby-ish.'

'You'll always be my little chick,' Harry murmured. 'And your maman's, too. Nothing will ever change that. We love you much too much.'

Katie turned her nose up at him. 'But not an actual baby.'

'No—' he reached out and gave her little braid a gentle tug '—when you were an actual baby, you used to crawl around the château and try and put everything you could find in your mouth. Usually things that didn't taste as great as you expected they would.

The tips of his daughter's ears turned pink. 'I didn't!'

'You did.' Harry grinned. 'I still remember the first time you had cake on your first birthday. You stuffed a whole little fistful of it in your mouth and decided it was so good you should dive face first into the rest of the cake.'

'Papa,' Katie grumbled. 'Stop teasing me.'

'Never.' He sat down on the pebbles with a laugh and scratched at his beard. 'Do you know when you're getting your new wand?'

'I think soon.' She perked up. 'But if I'm going to have my own wand, you can have yours back.'

'No, little chick.' Harry shook his head. 'Your maman will want to make sure you keep it safe or give it back to her. If it disappears, she might get suspicious.'

'Do you have another wand then?' Katie asked. 'A new one?'

A small sad smile tugged at the corner of Harry's mouth. 'No. I was always very afraid that if I went off to get a wand, I might not be able to see you again for some reason. And I don't really need a wand, so…' His heart dipped, hanging by a thread above the numb emptiness as the eye of the storm. 'It never seemed worth the risk.'

His daughter's green eyes softened, brimming with tears. 'Papa…' she whispered. 'Why can't you just come home? You said I shouldn't be scared to tell maman things, and she wasn't angry when I did; you were right!'

'It's not quite the same,' Harry murmured. 'I know it probably doesn't make sense to you—'

'Maman is right there!' Katie scrunched her face up into a small frown. 'And you're right here!'

'If I come back home, it will all be ruined, baby bird.' He swallowed a bitter knot of guilt. 'You're happy, your maman's happy, that's perfect enough for me.'

His daughter shook her head, the bright green in her eyes darkening to pine.

Harry's heart lurched. 'You're just like your maman, mon petit ange—' he blinked back the heat of tears and offered her a small smile '—she always used to pout at me until she got her way, or get all feathery and cross if that didn't work.'

'Papa,' Katie pleaded, stomping her bare feet on the stones.

'Don't hurt yourself, baby bird,' he murmured.

She glowered at him, her irises bleeding black. 'Then—' his daughter opened and closed her mouth a few times '—explain why. Like you did with maman not letting me go to Beauxbatons.'

I suppose I should. No more secrets, right?

'Come and sit then.' Harry sighed and patted the white pebbles next to him. 'I'll tell you a little more.'

Katie plopped down beside him. 'I'm sitting.'

'When you were very little, the château was attacked.' A soft pang knifed through his ribs at her widening green eyes. 'You were cursed very very badly, your grand-mère and grand-père were killed, and your Auntie Gabby sacrificed all the time she had left to slow down the curse on you.'

'Auntie Gabby,' his daughter whispered. 'Maman took me to where she's buried last year for her birthday. Did she — did she really die because of me?'

'No.' Harry wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close. 'Whoever attacked us, they would have killed her anyway, and she knew that, so she chose to protect you for as long as she could. They were just lucky. Your maman and I were away in Paris when they came; if we hadn't been… But sometimes things are just like that, you know, baby bird: you get unlucky or lucky, you can't control everything.'

'What happened to them?'

'The people who attacked us?' Harry watched slim shadows of the fish dart beneath the ripples of the river, but Ginny's still, pale corpse lay in the light of the setting sun before his mind's eye. 'Nothing nice.'

'Good.' Little white tufts prickled through her skin and she balled her small fists against the sapphire cotton across her lap.

'Forget about them,' he murmured. 'They can't hurt you or anyone else. They're not important.'

'But—'

'They're gone, little chick. And the things that made them into who they were and made them think they had to do what they did, they're gone too. You won't ever have to worry about that the way your maman and I did.'

I made sure of it. You'll grow up in a better world.

Katie squirmed. 'Am I still cursed?'

'No.' Harry gave her a gentle squeeze. 'We… we couldn't undo the curse. Or stop it. The only way we could save you was a piece of magic we called La Victoire Finale, and it would make sure that when you died from the curse, you would come back.'

All the darkness drained from her eyes and they widened. 'You brought me back from the dead, like Aimée's vampire friend?'

A snort of laughter escaped him. 'I really need to read those books.' Harry shook his head. 'No. Not like that. You're not a vampire, or an inferius, or anything like that. You came back exactly how you're supposed to be, but… it's not the sort of magic you can do by just waving your wand, baby bird; it has a price. And the price for saving you, which would have kept your maman, you, and me together forever, was for us to be apart forever. It has to be balanced, you see.' He pointed at the white stones beyond Katie's toes. 'Your Auntie Gabby and maman made a pensieve, something to view memories in, and kept it right here. It was a really fancy brilliant, cheating bird-girl magic pensieve, and I trapped myself in it—'

Katie tensed against his side.

'It was the only way,' he whispered. 'I had to be apart from you forever before you could be saved, so I trapped myself in an instant of time away from you and your maman.'

'But you're not trapped,' his daughter said. 'You're here.'

'Somehow, I escaped. I still don't really know for sure how.' Harry weighed his next words upon the tip of his tongue. 'But someone had to have paid the price, or you wouldn't be here. And it can't be your maman, because you and her are together, like we always dreamt of.'

Which means it must be me. And maybe that's why I ruined it all; I wasn't apart from them, so to pay that price, I turned our dream to dust. A niggle of doubt wormed through his heart. But it doesn't work like that; the price has to be paid before the magic. You can't cast a spell because you'll strongly intend it to have happened in the future.

'If I come back, it will all be ruined,' he said. 'That's just how it is, I'm afraid, little chick. But it's not so bad. I get to see you—' Harry pressed a kiss to the top of her head '—and that's more than I ever hoped for after I stepped into that pensieve.'

Katie buried her face in his ribs and wrapped his arm around her. 'But…'

'Don't fret about it, baby bird,' he murmured. 'It doesn't help, je te le promets. You're going to Beauxbatons and you're getting a new wand and you're meeting your godmothers; you've got lots more exciting stuff to think about.'

His daughter pulled his arm tighter about her shoulders. 'Will you show me more magic?'

'What would you like to learn?' Harry asked. 'As long as it's not dangerous, I'll teach you anything you want.'

'I want to make things pretty colours like maman does.' Katie waved his wand at the chateau, spurting silver sparks over Harry's legs. 'She made me pencils that can be any colour I imagine when I draw with them, and she can change all the colours of my dresses and my socks!'

'Charms,' he said. 'Those are charms. Your maman is very very good at them and enchanting, because, like you, she has cheating sneaky bird-girl magic.'

'It's not cheating.' She turned her small nose up at him. 'It's just good magic.'

Harry laughed and mussed her hair up with his hand.

'Papa,' she moaned. 'Not my pretty hair. Tell me more about charms.'

'Charms are… they don't last forever, not like conjuring or transfiguring. They're wonderful, but they don't last.' Harry bit back a soft pang. 'Like sunsets and the summer.'

'But how—' Katie waved his ebony wand, sputtering a shower of bright silver sparks onto his knee '—how do I do them?'

'Well, there are lots of different types, but let's start with colour charms, so you can change the colours of things for a short while.' Harry reached out and wrapped his hand around hers, tapping the tip of his wand on the small stone between her feet. 'We're going to turn this stone blue. A beautiful summer sky blue.'

His daughter prodded it with the wand, but the stone sat there, white as lily petals. 'Oh.'

'You have to layer your magic over it. Imagine it like painting, you take your brush, your wand, and paint the colour you want, your magic, over the canvas.' Harry gave her hand a little waggle. 'Ready to try? Or does none of that make sense?'

'I get it.' Katie swished his wand at the stone and a big stripe of bright blue appeared across it. 'Awww, it didn't all change.'

Harry swept his hair back off his forehead and studied the stripe of azure. 'Did you imagine the brush in your head?'

She nodded.

'Try imagining the finished result, after you've painted the whole stone, not just one brushstroke.'

Katie swiped his wand at the pebble and it turned the same soft, bright warm blue as Fleur's eyes.

'Good choice of colour, little chick,' Harry whispered.

'I did it?' She reached out and picked the blue stone up, turning it over in her small fingers. 'How do I turn it back?'

'You've layered your magic over the stone, so either just leave it for the charm to wear off, or poke your magic into it to disrupt it and say finite incantatem, which literally means end enchantment.'

'Like bursting a bubble in the bath?' Katie asked.

'Exactly.'

She beamed, jabbing the stone with his wand. 'Finite incantatem.'

The blue vanished.

'I got it!' Katie cheered and bounced on her butt on the pebbles. 'It worked the first time!'

'Well done, little chick.' Harry dodged the wave of the wand and the gush of silver sparks, kissing her on the top of the head. 'I think this is the sort of magic you're going to be a lot better at than your papa, especially when you have your own wand.'

'That helps?'

'Yes.' He tapped the tip of his wand with a finger. 'This wand was made for me, to work best with my magic. I don't know much about wand crafting, but I know that your wand will be made for you and your magic. And while our magic is probably a little similar, because you're my daughter, your own wand will still work better with your magic than mine does.'

AN: Follow the linktree for more! All the rest of this story and about 16 chapters of the next are already available for those supporting me, and then there's about a million words of my original stuff too, of course.

linktr . ee / mjbradley