Scars and Souvenirs

by VaingloriousHound

It took six Aurors, three medics and all eight nurses on the shift to restrain the trashing, bleeding Harry Potter until Daphne got close enough to cast a counter-curse. Daphne earned the Weasley's eternal gratitude and Harry the suspicious ire of the public when pictures of the carnage were in every paper the following day.

Harry limped through the hallway, grimacing as he downplayed how useless his left leg had become and awkwardly jerked his hip to at least make it seem like his knee still worked. The cane they had given him, crafted out of light silver metal, cracked loudly against the smooth stone as he caught his weight with it again and again. He avoided the Unspeakables on his way and tried to hide how his right arm hung limp in his open coat that he couldn't button up with only one hand. His fingers were blackened, so he had chosen to wear a glove that had taken considerable effort to pull over his dead hand. It also helped with the chill that had lived in his bones ever since they had been frozen to the breaking point. And though the curse had been lifted, the cold never truly disappeared.

But then again, the chill was far more welcome compared to the agony of his bones turning to ash, and that had only been last week, and he still didn't quite understand how he survived that with his insides more or less intact.

He rounded a corner and limped right through a group of Unspeakable. They scrambled out of his way, whispering.

"He's back," one said.

"Probably with another failing organ," another said.

Harry grimaced. They were only half right. He reached his destination, the office of the Head Unspeakable, and entered without knocking. Unexpectedly, she wasn't alone, and Harry stopped two limps into the office.

"Your efforts are not enough," a man said. He didn't notice Harry entering as he paced in front of the cluttered desk laden with a towering stack of books and a single empty coffee cup, endlessly self-refilling, Harry knew. "The remnants must be dealt with. Yesterday!"

"Shouting," the woman behind the desk said calmly, though Harry could hear quiet anger in her voice, "will not magically undo dozens of curses. Keep your voice down, Mister Brooks, or I will have you removed."

"Have me-?" Brooks—Harry knew him all too well—stopped and turned around. He had noticed Harry standing there, leaning heavily, exhaustedly, on his cane. He laughed. "And who will remove me? Potter?"

Harry itched to reach for his wand, but his right arm was useless. He was useless. He tapped the ground with his cane in a gesture of impatience. "Don't count on me not trying, Brooks."

Brooks scoffed.

Harry never liked the man. He was a genius (according to Kingsley and Hermione at least), and he worked in the Department of Invention and Innovation—new and shiny and the greatest star in the reformed Ministry. Brooks reminded Harry of a particularly unfriendly goblin with his bald head and oversized glasses. Those beady eyes didn't help, and neither did his horrible attitude.

"You go and rest on your laurels, Potter," Brooks said, voice snide. "And you!" He pointed at the woman sitting behind the desk. "Do your damn job!"

He stomped out of the office. Harry was sure Brooks would have shouldered him aside, but a glare made him back down. For all his obvious physical deficiencies, everyone still knew not to cross the Harry Potter.

Harry shook his head as the door closed. Genius or not, the man was an arsehole.

"You should have gone to St. Mungos with that."

Harry tried to pull his hand deeper into his coat, but no strength was left in the limb. He turned his left side towards her instead. "You say that every time, and we both know it's just another curse." He couldn't keep the bitterness out of his voice.

"We are not healers," she said, sounding tired.

Harry's jaw clenched. "I wouldn't need your help if this had been stopped from the beginning," he snapped.

Sitting behind the desk, Daphne Greengrass bowed her head, and Harry immediately regretted his words. She was not to blame for this any more than he was. But what little pride he had left and all the anger and pain did not let him apologise. He set his jaw and stared.

She looked him over with her dark blue eyes glinting in the candlelight. The fact that there were bags half a finger wide under her eyes quelled Harry's irritation. "Decay?" she asked.

"Rot," Harry said gruffly. He had learned to spot the difference between them just last year, when his gut had fouled from the inside out.

"At St. Mungos—"

"There are no Cursebreakers at St. Mungos!" He almost shouted but reigned himself in with effort. His leg ached, but he refused to sit in the chair before him. "Please, Miss Greengrass. Daphne." He took a deep breath. "I can't go anywhere else without being swarmed." Without being dissected by their eyes.

Harry had earnestly tried, once, not to bother Daphne with this, but the last time he had been forced to sit in St. Mungo's emergency reception, he had coughed up his guts onto a little girl. He still remembered how they all stared at him, with eyes full of pitiable horror.

Daphne cast a weary glance at the many papers strewn all over her desk, then sighed. "Take a seat," she said, getting up. She wore robes over a formfitting black vest and a knee-length dress. Not exactly the dress code of the Unspeakables, but as their Head, Daphne had her freedoms.

Freedoms that Harry, much to his shame, had abused frequently for years now.

Harry limped over to the chair and all but fell into it. His leg ached something fierce, and he couldn't feel his arm. Not a good sign. He shrugged out of his blazer with difficulty. Once the shirt collar had loosened, it revealed blackened skin all the way up to the top of his shoulder, crawling up the side of his neck like ivy on brick.

Daphne sucked in a sharp breath and drew her wand. She vanished his shirt and the glove on his hand without a word, and Harry did not say anything. The procedure was familiar; they had done this a dozen times before, yet an argument always led to this.

"You didn't come here immediately," she observed quietly, tracing his ruined arm with the tip of her grey wand.

Harry pursued his lips. Moments before, she had bemoaned that he had come at all. He said nothing.

"Can you move it at all?" she asked.

Harry shook his head, eyes on his fingers as they refused to obey his command.

"Pain?"

He shook his head again. "Not anymore," he said.

She looked at him disapprovingly, not happy with that answer. With her wand, Daphne prodded the blackened skin. It flaked and broke away. She nodded, whispered a spell under her breath and drew a line with her wand from the centre of his palm along the arm up to his shoulder, leaving silver where she traced his skin. Branches grew from the line as it thickened to the width of Harry's thumb and spread outward, wrapping around his blackened arm. It was like a tree had grown from his hand and enveloped his limb.

With a sharp jolt of pain, awareness returned to his arm. Burning, like the bite of freezing ice. Harry gasped, watching as the silver burnt away the black skin, leaving raw, pink skin behind. Flakes of blackened something fell off him like rust and dissipated beyond visibility before they could hit the ground. After a minute of the chilling burn, his arm was returned to him. The silver glow stopped, but the tree-like spell remained burnt into his skin, a dull silver scar.

Harry experimentally flexed his hand. It was stiff but better than nothing. "Thanks…"

Daphne's eyes were unfocused, and her wand slipped from her fingers. It clattered to the ground, startling Harry.

He yelped and shot out of the chair in alarm. His left knee screamed in protest as he bent it, but he caught Daphne before she hit the floor. Sweat glistened on her brow, and she had grown even paler than she already was.

Her short black hair slowly began to stand on end as though she had been shocked by lightning—the backlash of greatly and rapidly overextending her power.

This was his fault.

With gritted teeth and a heave that almost returned his meagre breakfast, Harry hauled Daphne into a chair. He looked at her, leaning heavily onto his cane. She was out cold and twitched ever so slightly. Though the charge of her spell was already receding, she remained unconscious even as her hair flattened.

Harry frowned. He glanced at her desk. The amount of work sitting there was staggering. Once, before the war, there used to be multiple department heads within the Department of Mysteries. Now, most of the work six people used to do ended up on Daphne's shoulders.

And Harry added his own deadweight to it regularly.

He sighed and put his blazer back on, not yet trusting his magic to be stable enough to summon a shirt—experience told him it would likely summon a flash of fire.

Even a decade after the war, he could still not bring himself to be the selfish asshole he so desperately wanted to be. And so he sat down in Daphne's uncomfortable chair and got to work.

XXXX

Daphne awoke to the sound of a quill scratching over parchment.

"Never liked parchment. Doesn't take ink all that well."

She blinked with heavy eyelids and sat up in the chair she rested in. A coat that wasn't hers slipped off her shoulder. "What…?"

"You snore. Did you know that?"

She sat up further, eyes wide. Had she fallen unconscious? She looked around. And there, sitting in her chair behind her desk, was Harry Potter. With his glasses down his nose, he filled out forms as though he had never done anything else a day in his life.

"What are you doing?" she asked. She tried to rise from the chair but found her legs too weak. She had expended too much magic, and her skin still tingled uncomfortably.

"Paying you back," he said absently. "Do requisition requests for dangerous artefacts go through the requisitioning office or the dark artefact one?"

Daphne blinked blearily. "... if it's for an artefact labelled above A in terms of danger, it's for the Artefact Bureau. Anything else is normally requisitioned."

Harry nodded. He reached for a stack of sheets and began sorting through them. One of her ledgers sat open next to him. He was referencing the danger labels.

Daphne stared at him. Was he doing her work?

He pushed his glasses up his nose and put away the papers, most of them into the cache for the Dark Artefact Bureau. She absently noted to reprimand the others on the far too casual requesting of dangerous tools.

"You don't have a calendar," he said, rising out of the chair. "You'll have to make your appointments yourself. Letters with those are on the right. Tell Kingsley and Hermione I said Hello. Don't let Hermione wait too long; she is short on time."

"I… Uhm." Daphne's tongue felt too heavy in her mouth, her teeth ached. She couldn't focus enough to formulate the words.

"Goodbye." He headed for the door and pulled it open. And before he left, he looked back. "And thank you." Harry closed the door behind him and was gone.

XXXX

When Harry saw Daphne again, she leaned over him as he came to, and the cold fingers of unconsciousness slipped from his mind. He couldn't recall what happened; his memory was hazy and his mind numb. All he knew was that his chest ached, and his limbs tingled uncomfortably.

"What…?" he said. His voice was hoarse, and his throat felt raw, as if he had screamed his heart out.

"You had an attack," Daphne said, speaking softly. She was holding onto his arm with one hand, and Harry noticed that he was tightly holding on to her other hand. He let go immediately.

Harry felt sick, eyes widening. "Where?"

Daphne's eyes were mournful. "In the Atrium."

And it was then that Harry became aware of the whispers. He was lying on the marble floor in front of the many elevators in the Ministry's Atrium. A crowd had gathered around them. He cast his heavy eyes over them. He was met with pity and the ever-present fear.

"How bad was it?" he asked, voice small. "Did I…?"

Daphne squeezed his arm. "No one was hurt," she said. "Let's get you down into the—"

"Harry!"

Hermione's voice broke through the crowd. His friend shoved her way through the assembled passersby with her elbows and fright written all over her face.

Harry sat up, straining against aching muscles and struggled to keep a breath in. "I'm fine," he said, left hand blindly searching for his cane as he struggled not to choke. Daphne pushed it into his grasp. He nodded his thanks and rose to his feet. His body screamed at him, but he stood as tall as he could. He was already weak enough. He needn't look the part.

Hermione came to his side and barely stopped herself from reaching out to touch him. Previous occasions had provided ample cause to refrain from touching him when he had an attack. Judging from how she hid one hand in her sleeve, the one Harry remembered clasping, Daphne seemed to have done so anyway.

His debt to her grew once more.

"Is he alright?" Hermione didn't trust him to be honest.

"Nothing I couldn't fix," Daphne said quietly. She leaned in to whisper to Hermione. "Heartburn Curse."

Hermione gasped softly. "That…" She trailed off.

That was lethal if left unattended for even minutes. He touched his aching, too-warm chest. He could have died today. Shocking but not surprising. He glanced at Daphne. She just kept saving his life almost every week.

"And the attack?" Hermione asked.

"Manageble," Daphne replied. "I was leaving for lunch when it happened."

XXXX

She saw him march haltingly toward an elevator on the far side of the atrium. Daphne had her bag pinned under one arm and a scroll in the other from which she had been reading all the inane requests Brooks was making of the Unspeakables.

What did he even need so much Gillyweed for?

Daphne stopped two steps out of the elevator to watch Harry limp for another step, then he went still.

She was reminded of the first time she had reversed a curse on Harry. It was late at night at St. Mungos, not ten minutes after Daphne had been treated for almost splinching her finger off running from her home. She hadn't been Head Unspeakable then. Merlin, she hadn't been an Unspeakable at all. She had been eighteen and essentially homeless.

Harry came flying out of a nearby floo access point screaming. He landed somewhere behind her just as she'd raised a hand to the door to leave the building.

Like most everyone else, Daphne was startled. She watched as Harry writhed on the white tile floor, smearing it with blood and some horrible green substance that sizzled his skin.

Daphne recognised the curse when she smelt his skin dissolving. A dark curse that the Greeks thought was appropriate to use on "unfaithful" women centuries ago. The smell was very particular and very vile. She was two steps toward him when Harry suddenly went still. Daphne feared he had died. Then the Weasleys poured through the floo, looking frazzled.

She saw Ron and Ginny at the forefront of the family. Ron had blood all over his hands and had apparently pushed Harry into the floor flame. Ginny, Harry's girlfriend, was shouting for a medic with tears in her eyes.

When they crowded around him, and nurses came rushing out of the reception booth, Daphne figured she could turn and leave. He was being taken care of, the poor sod.

But then Harry screamed. He screamed like they were pulling his spine out through his nose, and a powerful push of magic threw everyone nearby to the ground. The wave of power reached Daphne all the twenty feet away and slammed her into the door.

Then Harry Potter rose to his feet, looking like a terrible revenant, covered in blood and terrible acid. His eyes were dead, bloodshot and unseeing. Daphne had never seen anything like it. He looked more like a creature than a man.

Then he screamed again and lashed out.

A nurse who had gotten to her feet received an inhumanly strong backhand that threw her back into the reception booth. Wood splintered, and people screamed. This horrible version of Harry began flinging magic around himself, mad with pain and agony. Blood splattered across white tiles with every wild wing of his arms, accompanied by a boom of magic that tore away benches, potted plants and censers hanging from the walls.

Daphne dove out of the way of a waiting bench that smashed through the front door just as Harry struck the light fixtures overhead, casting the horrible scene into half-light.

It took six Aurors, three medics and all eight nurses on the shift to restrain the trashing, bleeding Harry Potter until Daphne got close enough to cast a counter-curse.

Daphne earned the Weasley's eternal gratitude and Harry the suspicious ire of the public when pictures of the carnage were in every paper the following day. It was downplayed, a possession and a powerful curse that no one could have resisted. They blamed a Death Eater who was later jailed for things a hundred times worse than shooting an obscure spell at Harry Potter.

But Daphne knew better.

So when she saw Harry stagger and go still, Daphne dropped everything she held and sprinted toward him with wild abandon.

XXXX

Hermione sighed in relief. "Oh, thank god…."

"That doesn't change what they saw," Harry whispered, chin held high but eyes downcast. He knew, no matter how quickly Daphne had reversed the curse, he had probably frothed at the mouth like a rabid dog the whole time.

He had managed to keep the constant onslaught of curses a secret so far. His physical degradation was a matter of public knowledge and, more so, daily discussion. Every curse triggering seemed to try and cripple him more, even if it couldn't kill him.

Surprisingly, this one didn't seem to have any lasting effects, unlike the Bone Shatter Curse that had obliterated most of his leg and now refused to heal. His knee was no longer aligned, and his shin had a noticeable bend.

The whispers seemed to grow louder. Harry felt the many eyes in the crowd dig into him. More specifically, he felt them stare at his discoloured arm, weak leg, and silver cane, with which he barely held himself upright.

Harry felt his stomach drop. "L-Let's get out of here," he said shakily.

Surprisingly, Daphne, not Hermione, grabbed his arm and pulled him into a lift. Hermione blinked after them but then turned to the crowd, expression stormy.

"Back to work!" he heard Hermione bark at them. "Or have you lot nothing better to do than gawk? Off with you!"

He found himself smiling despite himself. Hermoine hadn't changed one bit.

"How are you feeling?" Daphne asked. She lifted a hand to his forehead. She flinched, likely shocked by how cool it was.

"No worse than usual," he replied, taking steadying breaths. He glanced at her. She was unusually concerned. Not to say she hadn't been before, but she had been reluctant, with a sort of professional distance.

Daphne withdrew but did not step far. She shot him glances, nervous and indecisive. Unusual, for it was her decisive actions that had made her head of the Unspeakables.

"What is it?" he asked, grunting as he shifted his weight off his bad leg. "You want to say something. Out with it."

She sighed. "And here I thought your eyes were going bad…"

"I'm blind on the left," he said calmly. "So? What is it?"

Surprise hushed across her face, but she moved on. "Do you… do anything? For work, I mean?"

Harry frowned. Something indignant coiled in his stomach. "I am a full-time cripple if that's what you mean."

Daphne slapped his arm, her timid approach discarded. "You know I didn't."

He smiled wryly. "No," he said. "I have no work. I… I mostly deal with myself and all that comes with it."

Daphne nodded. The elevator arrived on the bottom floor, and the doors slid open. The hallway was empty. "Then… would you like to work for me?"

Harry paused. He turned to her. "What?" he said.

She met his eyes. "I asked if you would work for me. I have too much to deal with, too many tasks and not enough hands. And you sorted through my papers as though you had done it many times before."

He frowned. "It's not like that's hard."

Daphne went on. "You have the time. And if another curse triggers, I can take care of it before it causes too much damage."

"I still don't get it," Harry said, limping out of the elevator. "What in the world do you get from this? Aren't there dozens of people wanting to work with you?"

"Four dozen at the moment," she said, walking with him, mindful of his slow speed. Not even Hermione did that because she thought he would be insulted if she did. "None of them I think I can work with."

They rounded a corner into the hallway that led to Daphne's office. Harry could see someone standing in front of the door. It was Brooks.

He heard Daphne groan softly. "I hate that man," she said.

"If only he weren't so bloody useful," Harry agreed.

They pulled up, and both silently decided to ignore the man as they entered her office. Daphne was about to close the door behind them when Brooks pushed his bald head in.

"Miss Greengrass!" He looked more stressed than usual. "I need to know if we have the go-ahead for the artefacts! And I need to know it now!"

Daphne sighed. "You request time turners so old they barely hold together with rust and mana. I cannot give them to you."

Brooks forced his way into the office, and Daphne reluctantly stepped away from the door, arms crossed.

"This is not a simple matter up for—" His eyes found Harry and, for the first time, seemed to realise he was there. "What is he doing here? Is St. Mungos out of beds?"

Harry clenched his jaw, barely fighting down a growl.

"He's my new assistant," Daphne said smoothly and without pause. "Anything else? You won't get the time turners, and I won't suddenly find myself persuaded."

Brooks forgot all about the time turners and instead focused on Harry. "Assistant? Potter?"

"Are you hard of hearing?" Harry asked, growling. "And here I thought I was the ailing one."

"I was merely—"

"You were on your way out," Daphne said, stepping in. "Good day, Mister Brooks. Your request is denied."

Brooks looked from Daphne to Harry, then sniffed derisively and left.

Daphne threw the door shut, then smiled at him. "Well, now that you're my assistant, you can help me find out why he even needed the time turners."

"You mean you didn't know?" Harry asked.

She shrugged. "Whatever it was, it can't be worth risking the collapse of the space-time continuum."

"And you keep those in the same building as Hermione?"

She laughed. It was the first time Harry had heard her laugh. It made him smile, filled him with an odd sense of pride. It passed quickly as his arm stung.

"Well," he said, straightening his back and rolling his aching shoulder, "I guess I'm your assistant now." Everything was better than staring at the walls at Grimmauld Place and wondering what part of him would explode next, which was almost as bad as the skele-gro he had to drink in the aftermath.

XXXX

While she couldn't describe what had driven her to make Harry her assistant, Daphne did not regret it. He was quiet and efficient. He learned quickly and dealt with Brooks much quicker than she had ever been able to.

That, and the company was nice when dealing with curse incidents and the tragedy attached to them. That was usually not the job of the Department of Mysteries, but the Unspeakables were the ones best equipped to deal with these incidents without a dedicated squad of Curse Breakers.

The Goblin Rebellion had been unexpected, and all but a few Curse Breakers in their service had gotten away with their lives.

"I didn't know you still studied the Veil," Harry said one evening.

She had set up a desk for him on the left of the office in front of the sofa Daphne had fallen asleep on too many times. It happened only once in Harry's presence, and she vowed not to repeat that embarrassment.

Daphne looked up, eyes tired. He looked so old in the low light of the desk lamp. As old as Daphne felt, though she was only a month or two older than Harry. "We still don't quite know where it leads," she said and returned to her work. "Although inanimate objects always come back out. Unless they were attached to a living being, of course."

Harry hummed lowly. Paper rustled. Then, the sound abruptly stopped. Daphne looked over and found Harry staring at his right hand. It was shaking.

"How long do you think I have left?" he asked.

She frowned. "What—"

"It's obvious this is killing me. Bit by bit." He looked over at her. She noticed his left eye had taken on a paler, less vibrant shade of green. More jade. "How long before I can no longer walk? No longer see? No longer breathe?"

Daphne shook her head. "You are quite a bit harder to kill," she said. "Still not sure how you didn't die the day all these curses hit you."

He didn't respond immediately. "It was just one," he said after a moment of deliberation. "A single, absolute curse. The last gasp, I call it. Hurt a lot more than the Killing Curse."

Daphne scoffed quietly. Only he could talk about the way the Killing Curse felt.

"You didn't answer my question."

She sighed. "No matter the spell, we can't tell whatever curses are still placed on you. We can only deal with them as they come."

"Mhm." He continued shuffling papers. "Anything deadly left from all the curses I already survived?"

Too many. Daphne remained silent and was all too aware of how Harry bowed his head and his shoulders sunk. He knew.

XXXX

Harry stood with Daphne in front of the Veil. Despite being magically heated, the chamber was always cold enough for Daphne to see her breath puff into clouds.

It also made Harry's irregular breathing quite obvious. He would exhale normally for a time, then suddenly huff a few breaths and stop entirely for a moment before his regular breathing resumed. Daphne hadn't been the one to break whatever curse had hit his lungs, but she could clearly see the aftermath here.

One of the younger Unspeakables ran up to her, face red. The girl was relatively new and mostly did busy work for now.

"The Dementor is ready, Head Unspeakable Greengrass!" the girl said. She sounded a tad too excited for having checked in on a Dementor. Daphne assumed she had taken one of the new potions Brooks had concocted.

She begrudgingly acknowledged how well they worked to combat the effects of a Dementor's presence.

"Good," Daphne said. "Go see Unspeakable Lorn. He will need help with the other test objects."

But the girl didn't listen. She was staring at Harry with wide eyes.

Daphne glanced at him.

Despite his physical degradation, Harry was one of the tallest men around. He stood with a certain poise that made him seem taller than he already was. He carried himself with this unyielding stance, a gleam in his eyes and surety in his gait, uneven as it may be. He made it look as though none of the curses that had broken bits off him were even a bother.

In short, he looked powerful and commanded respect.

Well, at least down here, he did. In the privacy of her—their office, she knew him to slouch and look tired.

Daphne bit her lip and looked away. He didn't deserve to have all these people look down on him. She returned her eyes to the young Unspeakable, who was still staring, awestruck.

It took Daphne a moment to recall the girl's name. "Miss Roberts," she said. "Unspeakable Lorn is waiting."

Elaine Roberts blushed and hurried away.

Harry, who had been conversing with Edgar—the man in charge of conducting tests on the veil—returned the clipboard with today's tests. Edgar bowed his head and hurried away toward the prepared Dementor.

Since today's experiment involved said Dementor, and Harry was much more familiar with dark creatures than anyone else, Daphne had asked him to attend. Despite his usual eagerness to work, he had seemed apprehensive at first but agreed before she had to start begging.

Daphne eyed him. "Are you alright?"

Harry glared mildly at her. "You keep asking me that. What is it? Do I look especially pathetic today?"

Daphne slapped his arm. "Stop being such an ass. What is it?"

He frowned at her. She noticed his white-knuckle grip on the head of his cane. "I'm okay. Leg's acting up, is all."

Daphne did not believe him, but he didn't want to discuss it. So she turned away and waved to the Unspeakable posted by the far-left door. The woman, in turn, opened the door and called out to Edgar.

Time to start the experiment.

A half dozen Unspeakables, headed by Edgar, walked backwards out the door. They guided a single Dementor into the room with the telltale silvery mist of a Patronus. Another half dozen followed the creature.

"Not half bad," she heard Harry mutter.

She turned to him. "You taught half of these how to do that. Don't act so surprised."

He grunted, but Daphne could tell by how he pulled his shoulders back that he was proud of them.

They watched silently as the Dementor was brought close to the Veil in the chamber's centre. A dozen more Unspeakables stood all around the structure, observing and recording anything they could, be it visual, auditory or magical.

But then one of the Unspeakables guiding the Dementor faltered, and the ring around the creature wavered. Panic swelled in Daphne's heart. She drew her wand as the Dementor let out a muted howl and thrashed against the silver wall surrounding him.

Before Daphne could send her own Patronus, a burst of silver light shot past her and at the Dementor. The light was so bright she had trouble seeing what had happened.

It was all over before it could begin.

The Dementor, dazed, floated in the centre of a brilliant silver bubble, its bright light almost white. None of the dozen escorts was still holding up their spells, and Daphne turned to the side to see Harry with his wand drawn, eyes alight with quiet power.

Daphne recovered. "Back into position!" she shouted at them.

The Unspeakables scrambled back into position. Once they had resumed their duty, Harry released the spell, and the silver bubble puffed away into mist. The Dementor remained dazed and had to be prodded forward with a push of the Patronus' mist.

"Thank you," she said to Harry.

He grunted and put his wand away. Daphne saw him lean heavily onto his cane, so she stepped closer. Daphne offered her shoulder wordlessly, and he put his other hand onto it, steadying himself.

His hand was trembling.

Edgar mostly took over from here. She watched as they put the Dementor and the Veil through various tests. They were arbitrary and had been done before, but Daphne felt they were getting close to something. The Dementors' connection to the Veil was beyond doubt, and now she just had to figure out why that was.

She noticed Harry staring intently at the Veil, but he said nothing.

The experiment ended otherwise uneventfully.

XXXX

Though it had been a while since a new curse hit Harry, he knew it wouldn't last.

Fortunately, it next happened in Daphne's office, likely the only thing preventing permanent damage.

Unexpectantly, while taking notes as Daphne dictated Brooks's latest outrageous request to him, Harry felt a sudden spike of pain from his head. And then he went blind.

Harry, accustomed to the sudden failure of many body functions, was not overly surprised. He was, however, taken aback when the pain in his head transferred to his eyes, and he felt hot liquid spill down his cheeks.

He couldn't help it. He screamed.

Everything after that was a blur until he regained consciousness and opened his eyes to see Daphne hover over him.

She was beautiful.

Perhaps not the most opportune of times to notice that, but it was true nonetheless. He sat up, feeling unexpectedly well-rested. He reached up to touch his face. Nothing seemed amiss.

"What was it?" he asked.

"Eye-liquifying curse," she said quietly. She sounded exhausted, and Harry felt guilty again.

"And I'm… okay?"

Daphne patted his arm and let her hand rest there. "Harry, I have said this too often: I am no doctor. I can break curses and reverse their effects. I'm not equipped to say if that leaves any medical damage."

"But I'm okay," he asked.

She sighed. "Yes, you are."

He managed a smile, and Daphne sat back with a huff. Harry noticed they were on the ground in front of his desk. There was a mess of blood all over the carpet, not to mention Daphne's toppled-over chair, and the papers she had dropped lay strewn about the room.

Harry got up and began to collect them.

"Harry—"

"No," he said. "Let me."

He collected the strewn-about papers, put her chair back into place and then drew his wand to vanish the blood he had spilt.

His arm trembled, and he gritted his teeth. Dammit.

"Help me up." Daphne waved her hand at him.

Leaning on his cane, he pulled Daphne to her feet. She vanished the blood before he could and shut down his complaint with a glare.

"I think this is enough for today," Daphne said with an air of finality. Then she slouched, stifling a yawn, and the commanding air left her at once.

Harry glanced at the clock. It was almost midnight. The last time he had looked at the clock, it had been half past seven.

Oh, how he hated himself right now.

But Daphne gave him no time to be angry with himself. She snatched his arm and linked it with hers. Harry raised an eyebrow, but Daphne just nodded at the door.

And so, with Daphne on his arm, they strode out of the Ministry. This late in the night, they only encountered a few guards who patrolled the hallways. All the guards pretended not to see them once they were recognised, but Harry could still hear them whispering once they thought Daphne and him were out of earshot.

"Those two, huh? Never would have figured that," one guard said.

"I don't know if Greengrass is setting the bar very high or unspeakably low," a second replied.

Harry almost laughed at that before the annoyance set in. Rumours. Again. He just couldn't escape them.

"Relax," Daphne said softly. "Don't listen to them. Let them talk."

"I won't," Harry said, angry. "I'll shut them and their baseless rumours up tomorrow."

"Baseless?" Daphne asked. Harry thought she sounded amused.

He shot her a glare, and Daphne offered a shrug.

"We have been spending long hours alone in my office," she said. "That and at least four other Unspeakables and two guards have run into us just as you put your shirt back on as I lay exhausted in a chair."

Harry opened his mouth only to close it again. Fine, not baseless. "I'd still rather they didn't drag you into this."

"I chose to help you," she said. They reached the elevators, and Harry pulled the door aside for them to enter. "And I would choose so again; rumours be damned."

"Rumours and lies have almost destroyed me," Harry whispered, leaning against the elevator's wall. Daphne pushed the button for the Atrium.

"But they didn't, and they will find that I am ill-pleased should they choose to annoy me over this." Daphne stuck close to him even now, but Harry couldn't find it within himself to be bothered by her proximity.

"You make it sound so easy," Harry said, watching the floors zoom by.

Daphne yawned and leaned heavily into his side. She must be beyond exhausted. Harry was not as well versed in healing as he thought he should be, but even he knew how hard it was to reverse curse effects.

"Your shoulder isn't as cold as everyone says," Daphne whispered, yawning again.

Harry snorted, smiling despite himself. "Glad we could disprove that one."

Daphne grinned up at him, eyes drooping. "I've disproven a good dozen already."

"Yeah?" he asked.

"They say you have no heart, but I've put yours back together thrice. And even if that so obviously was a metaphor, I know you keep some of the younger Unspeakables' slipups to yourself and fix them when you think I'm not looking."

Harry started. He never knew she noticed that.

"Not to mention the lunch you share with the folk from the Alley that come for the free meals," Daphne said, going on without pause. "The children sure like you. Which brings me to the next one."

She jabbed a finger into his side, and he almost jumped out of his skin.

"What?" he asked.

"They say you're scary." She scoffed at that, and Harry felt somehow insulted. "They are wrong," she said, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

"Oh yeah?"

The elevator finally arrived in the atrium, and they made their way toward the apparation point. They passed two more guards. Those two, however, saluted as Harry passed them.

While that was better than hearing them whisper behind his back, it was only marginally so. He cringed but nodded back at them.

"You need to rest," Daphne told him, but her voice was barely a whisper.

Harry frowned at her. "I've been asleep for hours. You, on the other hand, look like you can barely even apparate."

Daphne frowned at him but didn't refute his words. She continued frowning until they reached the apparation point. Harry let go of her, but she took his hand before he could.

"I… think you might be right," she admitted. "I don't think I can apparate."

"Oh."

"Very eloquent of you," Daphne said with a tired smile. "Would you mind helping me out? I'd rather not sleep in the break room."

Again. He'd caught her leaving the cramped room one morning. How she could sleep on that awful couch was beyond him.

"Uhm, sure." Harry offered her his arm again. "Whenever you're ready."

Daphne nodded. She placed her hand firmly on his forearm and paused. When, after a moment, she squeezed his arm, Harry whisked them away.

XXXX

Daphne's home was an apartment in London's Northside. They appeared on the rooftop, and Harry's knee gave out as they came out of the spin. He cursed and almost fell, but Daphne held him by the arm. He took a second to steady himself. Daphne didn't say a word and dragged him towards the rooftop door.

He walked with her for a moment. Then he frowned. "I should—"

"Come," she said softly, taking his hand. "You could use some coffee."

Harry wanted to protest. He wanted to tell her that he couldn't. That he had something to do. But he didn't.

Maybe… just this once.

He was tired and cold. Daphne's hand in his was warm and soft. Harry felt ashamed for holding on. But the shame was a distant thing, and he let himself hold onto Daphne's hand more tightly, let himself enjoy the feeling.

He followed her down a flight of stairs and let Daphne lead him into the topmost apartment.

Daphne smiled at him, and suddenly, Harry didn't feel like he had to leave. He helped Daphne out of her coat and quietly closed the door behind them.

XXXX

There was something special about waking up next to someone. It was a feeling Daphne had all but forgotten since she threw herself into her work. There had been no time. Now she laguished in the warmth of another warming her bed, warm skin against hers.

She could tell that Harry was awake. After seeing him unconscious so often, she knew exactly what it looked like when he merely laid back with his eyes closed.

"I'm not sure what to say," he said, not opening his eyes.

"You could ask for coffee," Daphne suggested.

She rolled toward him and draped her arm over his bare chest. He stiffened but relaxed after a moment. His heartbeat thumped steadily against her skin.

"I don't drink coffee," he said.

Daphne poked him in the ribs. "You followed me in when I offered you coffee."

"We both knew there would be no coffee."

Daphne huffed and rested her head on his chest. His heartbeat was strong, even stronger than she thought it would be. Sometimes, she wondered how his body recovered so well from all these curses.

"I have coffee," she said, "and I will brew you some so I don't become a liar."

Harry's eyes opened. It was sad to see the brilliant green fade from one of them, but the other took her in with the same intense gaze he always bore. He took her hand into his. The silver lines of her counter curse were still embedded into the skin. He could have had them removed but hadn't. The silver wasn't harmful but had served its cleansing purpose and wouldn't do the same twice.

"Did I ever tell you how utterly beautiful you are?" Harry asked, tracing an invisible line in the palm of her hand with his thumb.

Daphne raised an eyebrow. She suspected she looked awful. Her eyeliner was certainly smeared, seeing how she hadn't bothered removing it, and her hair was a mess. And the bags under her eyes would only make her look even worse. She was scrawny and could probably do with a few pounds more to her ribs so that a least she couldn't see them as clearly anymore. And unlike her sister, Daphne's figure never had been anything special. She supposed she had the stature for it, but with barely any meat on her bones, there just wasn't much-

Harry leaned forward and kissed her.

"You are beautiful," he said, and Daphne could do nothing but believe him.

XXXX

Harry accepted the ledger Daphne handed him. He also managed not to flinch in surprise when she put a kiss on his cheek. He smiled despite himself. His knee hurt something fierce and the puncture curse from this morning still made his stomach feel queasy, but he all but forgot about it when Daphne pulled back and winked.

Standing in the doorway as he waited for their approval of some forms he had brought, Brooks stared at them in confusion.

"We can spare a dozen," Daphne said as Harry searched the ledger for the relevant pages. "But these are rare, Brooks. If you break one, you will have to reimburse the department."

Harry found the page that marked the amount of Unicorn horns they had. Those were willingly given and, for that reason, exceedingly rare. They currently had only twenty horns and that was the entire registered stock in all of Britain.

He noted down the storage room and signed off on the release waiver. He handed it to Daphne.

Daphne took it and smiled. She looked radiant, and she handed it to Brooks and shoved him out of the door as he still stared at them, trying to figure out what he just saw.

"Think he'll gossip?" Harry asked.

"That's why I called him here," Daphne said, returning to her desk. "If he talks, no one will believe him. But there will be rumours, so no one will be surprised."

"Devious," Harry said, putting the ledger away. "I should have known."

Daphne smiled. "You'll learn. We have a lot of time to."

Harry nodded, feeling himself smile as well. He opened his mouth to respond, but no sound came out. He frowned. What-?

Daphne jumped out of her chair, eyes wide. And before Harry could figure out what had happened, the world tilted sharply, and he blacked out before he hit the ground.

XXXX

When Harry awoke in St. Mungos, he knew it was bad. He couldn't move, not even his head. All he could do was stare at the white ceiling and try and figure out how long he had been out and how bad a shape he was in.

"You're alright, relax." Daphne's voice. It came from the left, but Harry couldn't strain his eyes far enough to see her. "A nasty curse, that one. I got it countered immediately, but the damage was already done."

Harry tried to speak and felt he could move his lips, but no sound left his dry mouth. He barely managed a wheeze.

Daphne's hand pressed comfortingly into his chest, and she moved into his field of vision. Her eyes were red, the bags under her eyes even worse than when he had first collapsed in her office.

"You can't speak," she said, looking morose, and Harry knew she blamed herself for that. He strained his body and shakily moved his own hand to rest atop Daphne's on his chest. She smiled weakly. "It was an old thing, this curse. A soul-rending one."

Harry frowned. How was he not dead? Or insane? While not lethal like the Killing Curse, a soul-rending curse was a bolt of magic that invaded the victim's body and tried to shred their soul to pieces. In basically all cases, that caused either death or madness but could be counteracted. But all that usually did was let the victim die comfortably or retain enough of their mind to at least be cared for by their family.

But Harry felt fine. Tired, aching, but fine. He wasn't dying.

"Your soul," Daphne said as she sat down at his bedside, "is quite strange. It didn't break. Doctor Fallow, the one treating you, says your soul dodged the blow. It wound out of the way. That's unheard of, but you somehow did it. In the process, your soul detached from your body, which made you collapse. It also left your body largely dead."

Harry saw tears well up in Daphne's eyes, but she looked away and blotted them with her sleeve. The grey fabric was wet already.

"You'll recover before long," Daphne said, voice shaky.

I'm sorry, he wanted to say, but he could hardly take a deep enough breath to wheeze. Instead, he gripped her hand as tightly as he could.

Daphne's lips quivered. She threw herself at him and put her ear to his chest. Listening to his heartbeat, he realised.

"I still remember hearing nothing," she whispered. She pulled away, teary-eyed. "Try not to do that again."

"I… will," he croaked out. "I… promise."

She shook her head. Her hand was warm against his cheek. "Don't make promises you can't keep. No one knows what more your victory will cost you."

It will not cost me you, he thought.

Daphne left him with a kiss and a promise to return later.

XXXX

Four weeks later, Harry could walk again. He had been hit with two more curses while he recovered, both relatively minor, but he ended up vomiting blood all over Daphne's arm, and he couldn't rid himself of her horrified and terrified expression.

He hated it more than the curses themselves.

She walked with him as he worked his weak legs. Oddly, his knee didn't seem as weak as before, and while he would still use a cane, it was hardly as much of an inconvenience as it had been before. Same with his arm. The tremors were gone. And, though he might have imagined it, he felt like his left eye could sometimes make out light.

"I want to find a way," Harry said between puffs of exertion, "to get rid of these curses altogether."

Walking was terribly hard after his soul almost left his body. Not to mention the five weeks of bed rest.

Daphne nodded absently. She looked too gaunt, too tired. In some way, she looked worse than he did.

Harry clenched his teeth and stood up straighter. "I will get rid of them." He stopped walking, and Daphne took two more steps before she realised. "I promise."

"Don't-"

"I promise," he stressed. "I won't let this kill me. I refuse."

Daphne stared at him. Her mouth opened a tiny bit and then stretched into a small, genuine smile. "Then we have some work to do, don't you think?"

Her eyes looked brighter, and Harry felt himself breathe easier.

XXXX

It was as if the declaration of not letting the many hundred curses kill him had magically incentivised the lot remaining to go off in quick succession.

But unlike previous curses, the ones that hit him almost twice a day were just banal by comparison. What was a simple bonebreaker to his little finger going to do? Harry hadn't even realised the finger was broken until Daphne took him by the hand that morning. Cutting curses barely strong enough to break his skin, Bludgeoning Curses that hardly left a bruise.

And while Harry was far from complaining about not dying almost every time a curse hit him, he was far too paranoid to relax. Something was afoot here, and it was trying to kill him as it had been in the past.

"You look like I spit into your coffee."

Harry looked up and set down his mug. Daphne stood before him, her short hair captured in a ponytail barely long enough to justify its existence.

She took a seat across from him with her own, steaming mug and stared at him.

Daphne's apartment was small, the kitchen also including the living space and barely enough room for the big L-shaped couch behind Harry's back. So that it would fit, the kitchen table was only just so big enough for the two of them to sit at it, knees touching.

The door to the bedroom was behind Daphne's back, right next to the entrance. It stood ajar and Harry could see the unmade bed taunting him. He never could stand leaving it like that and he knew Daphne didn't either, so her mind was obviously on other things.

He had been silent for too long. He sighed. "I'm worried," he said. "The curses have been laughable at best and-"

"Please," Daphne said with a frown, cutting him off, "don't call a skin-flaying curse laughable. I thought I'd skinned you."

"Your nails could hardly-"

She kicked his shin. "You know what I mean."

"I guess," he said with a sigh. "Sorry. It's just-" He shrugged helplessly. "I'm just waiting for the next big blow."

"Maybe it won't come," Daphne said. "Maybe it'll come by the time you finish your coffee. It doesn't matter in the end. We've got to find out how all these curses stay attached to you. Maybe what triggers them."

"And how to get rid of them," Harry mumbled into his mug, taking a sip.

Daphne nodded encouragingly. She smiled, and the sight evaporated the dark cloud of thoughts around his head. He shook himself. It shouldn't be this easy to think positively, but here Daphne was, turning his life around and away from the brink and she didn't even know.

He stood up. "I'll talk to Bill again. There has to be some sort of historical record of something similar. There is no way Tom came up with all of this while he unexpectedly got hit by his own Killing Curse."

Daphne raised an eyebrow and lounged back in her chair. "You didn't explore that possibility before?"

"I was… not thinking about that," Harry admitted. "I was too busy with moping and hurting."

And wondering if I should just end it myself and be done with it.

Today, Harry was glad for his stubborn defiance.

"Well?" Daphne asked. "What are you waiting for then?"

"Probably a goodbye kiss," Harry said seriously, frowning contemplatively for show.

Daphne rolled her eyes and stood from her chair with a dramatic heave. "The things you make me do," she complained, rounding the table.

Harry limped out of the apartment half an hour later with a spring in his step, and he wondered why he had ever considered giving up on life.

XXXX

Harry was gone for a long while, letting her know he and Bill were onto something. Daphne found her apartment to be dreadfully empty then. So much so that she couldn't lie in her own cold bed anymore and decided to return home for a time.

She arrived at her family's home two days after Harry had left, and she would only find out a day after her arrival that he was no longer in England. Apparently, Bill Weasley, together with his wife and his youngest brother, was out of the country. Though she had given him leave from his work, the thought of Harry travelling all the way down to Egypt without anyone there to make sure he didn't randomly lose a limb halfway through the journey almost drove her to tears, but Daphne had work to do and could not simply disappear.

It startled her how attached she had grown in only a few months time. Though, of course, she had cared for him for years before this impromptu relationship began.

It was strangely soothing to see her little sister again despite their petty grievances. They'd not parted on good terms. Astoria had always been the brighter one. Despite being two years younger, she was taller now and still so startlingly beautiful that Daphne felt ashamed of looking in the mirror. As the one to inherit her father's business, she was also the one to have received most of his attention.

It was perhaps the oldest wound Daphne carried around with her.

And then Astoria had the gall to act as though nothing ever happened.

"Daphne!"

Astoria was dressed immaculately as she came down the steps. The dress she wore probably cost as much money as Daphne's apartment and all its contents together. And despite that, the onyx-encrusted, gold embroidered, and likely fiercely enchanted dress still seemed to be enhanced by Astoria wearing it and not the other way around.

The haughty side of her wanted to turn away. To glare balefully at the girl that had driven her out of the family. But she was tired and emotionally drained. So when Astoria slung her arms around her, Daphne did the only thing she felt capable of and broke down crying.

XXXX

Daphne didn't manage to explain why she had come back, or why she looked like she'd been through four divorces and an eating disorder.

(Only the latter was somewhat true, much to her shame.)

It took her two days, and a message from Harry that he had arrived without major incidents—Daphne's heart hurt reading those lines—in Egypt. She'd spent the whole time in bed and, infuriatingly, Astoria hovered around her almost all hours of the day. By the third day, she looked like she wasn't sleeping at all and Daphne, more infuriatingly, started to feel bad for her.

"It's not as bad as you think it is," Daphne said as Astoria tried to feed her soup. Though Daphne wanted to bat away the spoon as viciously as she would have done seven years ago, she didn't find the fury burning as hot as she thought it should have. "I'm fine. Just… very exhausted."

Astoria looked startled. Understandable, seeing how these had been the first words Daphne had said to her since she arrived. "What happened?" Astoria asked, putting the spoon down.

Daphne thought for a moment. Then, despite herself, she smiled. "I fell in love," she whispered. "And it hurts a lot more than I thought it would."

XXXX

Harry found himself tied to an altar, his bare back pressed into the ancient stone, and he stared up at a distant light a good hundred feet up above. They were far underground in an old ritual site, and Harry could not believe how desperate he was to be rid of his curses to partake in this madness. Love did strange things to him, and that it was love in the first place had taken a while to admit.

"You alright?"

Ron stood at the foot of the raised altar. Harry couldn't see him but knew he was there.

"I guess," Harry said. "Am I supposed to feel anything yet?"

"No," another voice said from the other side. Bill stood at the top of some stairs that climbed to the level of the altar. There he was, tracing runes into a dusty stone raised on a sort of podium. "But you will once I finish."

"And this will work?" Harry asked, experimentally tugging on his restraints. He could not budge them. "Or will this just kill me?"

"Don't go saying stuff like that," Ron chided. His hand came up to slap Harry's forearm. "This has been done before."

"You said it's been done before on one curse," Harry said, craning his head around in an attempt to glare at Ron. "Not a hundred."

"This chamber," Bill said, "was created to strip the bodies of rulers and emperors of all the evils that had befallen them in life. This giant cleansing chamber is powered by magic older than the pyramid itself."

It was used on the dead, not the living. Harry understood that much. It was a desperate measure because, in the least twenty-four hours, he had almost died four times. He would be dead already without Fleur, who was almost as capable of reversing curses as Daphne.

The harder and darker curses seemed to come and hit him more frequently now, which meant Harry interpreted as his time running out.

"Desperate times, desperate measures," Harry said quietly.

"You were never willing to go this far before," Ron said. He sounded solemn. And worried. "What is…?"

"I'm an idiot," Harry said stubbornly. "And I refuse to die as one."

The altar began to vibrate before Ron could reply. "We are about to start!" Bill called, and Harry turned his head to see the slab of stone he had been writing on glow with a faint green light. "Get back, Ron!"

With one last slap to the arm, Ron jumped away from the altar.

"Brace yourself!" Bill shouted, and the chamber began to hum. The vibration of the stone beneath him became too powerful, it felt as though it was pushing him up toward the light. Runes came to life on the chamber walls. A dozen of them, all glowing with the same green light and blinding in their intensity.

Harry's heart hammered in his chest. This had better work!

With a flash, the light went out, and all was silent. Harry, anticipating some sort of pain to strike him, was confused. He was about to ask what had happened when suddenly a rune exploded from its place in the wall, streaked through the chamber like a shooting star, and slammed into him.

It burned. He could feel it push through his skin, not only where it had struck his side but all over. It entered him, pierced him like a million sharp needles. He screamed, but it was over in a second, and he was left gasping and trembling on the stone.

Was that it? Did it-?

"One of twelve!" he heard Bill shout, and Harry's heart sank.

He braced himself a second too late, and the second rune struck his chest.

XXXX

Daphne had to wave away a few of her mother's attempts to send her to a doctor. She was fine. In fact, she was so much better than she had been before meeting Harry. She was just much more of an emotional wreck.

It annoyed her that Astoria was the one to understand that. They hadn't seen each other in years. Astoria was supposed to have become a spoiled brat, not… mature.

So she sat in a chair by the window and watched her sister shoo their mother away.

"Leave her be, mother," Astoria said. "She will be fine."

Their mother had always been beautiful, and it was from her that Astoria had inherited her beauty. The straight black hair, the big, blue eyes and the full lips. That delicate nose and the same soft jawline. They were so similar. Daphne, with her dark eyes, thin lips and gangly limbs, had taken after their father.

But their mother looked too haggard to Daphne's eyes. The grey streaks in her black hair were clearly visible. Daphne had thought that would never happen.

"But she—"

"She will be fine, I promise." Astoria gently pushed their mother out of the room, and Daphne felt like she was looking at an entirely different person. Both in her mother and her sister.

Gods, what had happened since she had left?

Astoria closed the door and turned around with a sad smile. "She will understand eventually," she said. "Give her time."

Daphne didn't want to say that she hoped to leave very soon. So she just nodded and turned away.

Nowadays, Astoria seemed to be above such things as an awkward silence and didn't even let it settle. "We missed you," she said. "Even if you don't want to believe it."

Daphne grimaced, decidedly not looking at her sister. "I'm sure you did," she said scathingly. "You, of all people, must have been so sad to see me go."

"I wasn't," Astoria said. "I was happy even. But I was also rather an idiot all these years ago."

Daphne was stupefied. When had her little, bratty sister become so mature? Was this some sort of cruel joke?

"Please, Daphne," Astoria said, heedless of her sister's silence, "you left us. Father did not push you on your refusal. Mother did not reprimand you. And I… I no longer begrudge you for running away."

Daphne turned around. "Begrudge?" she asked. "You me?"

Astoria smiled. "My life was rather easy before you left. I only realised that after the fact, of course. I'm sorry for that, for what it's worth."

"How can you… apologise?" Daphne asked. "How… why?"

Her sister hummed and walked over to her side. "I'm not sure," she said, putting soft hands on Daphne's shoulders. "I think one day I just realised that there was no way I could hate you for leaving."

Daphne turned her head around, disbelieving at her own unwillingness to remove her sister's hands. "I always knew you would take everything I was meant to hold," she whispered. "She's the one, father would always say. Oh, how he threw me away once you were born!"

"And he isn't the slightest bit sorry to date," Astoria said. "But I am. For acting the way I did. For doing what I did."

Daphne looked down, unable to meet her sister's eyes. "I…"

Astoria leaned in and hugged her. "Mother, too," she said quietly. "She's been so worried, so ashamed."

"I'm sorry, too," Daphne whispered. "For leaving." She cracked a bitter smile. "Not so much for locking father in his room."

Astoria laughed softly. "That was funny."

"How long did it take him to get out?"

"The whole day."

Daphne smiled. "He was never much good with a wand," she said, almost fondly.

"That's why you are the Head Unspeakable, and he is an industry magnate."

"And a dick."

Astoria laughed, and it vibrated against Daphne's back. "Yes, that too."

Daphne sighed. "Tell me," she said, reaching up and grasping Astoria's and on her chest. "How have you been?"

XXXX

It was cold when Harry regained consciousness. Very cold. He felt like he had been dropped into the Black Lake's icy water. But why? Why was he freezing? The last thing he remembered was-

What was it again?

"What-?"

Harry noticed he couldn't see. Either it was too dark or he had been blinded by something, likely a curse. Or the thing that had been supposed to remove all the curses.

It came back to him in a rush. The chamber, the altar and the twelve runes. The twelve painful runes.

Something rustled nearby, and a gust of warm air hit his skin. Oddly enough, the warmth was painful, not comforting. He realised that the freezing cold didn't feel uncomfortable at all.

"Are you coming to?" someone asked. A woman.

"Fleur?" Harry asked into the dark.

"Oui," she said. "How are you feeling?"

"Cold," Harry said, "And I can't see anything."

"Can you move?" she asked.

Harry was baffled that he would forget to check that. He started by wiggling his toes and went upwards. He could move without any pain. Well, aside from his bad knee and the messed up arm.

"Yes," he whispered, sitting up. He noticed that the air before him was warm, but the cold clung to him and continued to chill him oddly pleasantly. "Why am I so cold?"

Fleur touched his arm. The heat of her skin made him cry out in surprise. "That's why," she said. Fleur sighed and moved away. The cloth rustling made Harry think they were back in the tent outside the pyramid. "Bill almost boiled you alive."

"He what?"

"I did no such thing," Bill's voice called out, followed by more rustling cloth. "How the hell was I supposed to know the chamber would do that?"

"The scorch marks might have been an indication," Fleur grumbled.

"Those were—!" Bill began, but he cut off and grumbled instead. "Fine. Sure. How is he?"

"Alive," Harry said. "And still on ice, I think."

"The heat has not yet abated," Fleur said. "And it seems his vision has gone out."

"Side effect of the cryo potion," Ron said from somewhere. It was oddly difficult to pinpoint his position. "It also does away with your sense of smell."

Harry inhaled and noticed that, indeed, he couldn't smell anything. "Well," he said. "How long will this last?"

"We'll have to give it to you until the rune stops working," Bill said. "It's still trying to boil you. I don't know what kind of curse would be cleansed by that, but it sure tried."

Harry nodded. He moved slowly and felt around to lie down. He was fine but drained. "And did it work?" he asked, wincing as the cloth touched his skin. "Did it remove the curses?"

Silence.

Harry groaned. "What did it do?" he asked.

"It removed… a few," Bill said. "A few nasty ones. But not all of them."

"The bones in your right arm turned into some sort of metal shortly after the ritual finished," Ron said. "We didn't notice until you showed signs of poisoning."

"And the fact that your skin turned grey," Bill added. "Rest, we'll look into something else we can do."

Harry sighed. "And what would that be?"

He could all but see Ron smirk. "Throwing you down an infinite hole."

XXXX

Daphne hadn't sat with her family at the same table since the night she had left them. This casual way of sitting and eating dinner with them was bewildering. Looking at her mother's pinched lips and her father's confused frown told Daphne that she was not alone in feeling that way.

Meanwhile, Astoria shovelled food into her mouth as though nothing was wrong.

And maybe it isn't, Daphne thought. Maybe all it needs is… an apology.

But Daphne was still hurt. Hurt by her father's neglect and by her mother's expectations. Yet the anger that had driven her to pack her bags and leave in the middle of the night had long since faded. After all, she had come here when she felt she could no longer be alone.

She glanced at Astoria. Sweet, kind Astoria. She had apologised, and in hindsight, Daphne knew that she had hurt her sister more by running away.

Daphne took a deep breath, and as though she had called for silence, her parents stopped eating and looked at her.

"I… wish to apologise," she said, eyes fixated on her plate. She wrung with the words for a moment. "I am sorry for running away so suddenly."

Her father opened his mouth, as Daphne knew he would, so she shushed him with a gesture.

"I am not sorry," she said, voice hard, "for running. I am sorry for leaving and not telling you. I am sorry for not telling you where I went and if I was okay. And I'm sorry for ignoring your attempts to contact me."

She looked up and saw her father pursue his lips, frowning. Her mother, on the other hand, smiled a watery smile.

"We are sorry too," she said with a quiver in her voice. "Even if your father is too proud to say it. We missed you, Daphne."

Daphne felt herself waver. She wasn't sorry for running. But she was disappointed it had destroyed her relationship with her family, even if it had never been perfect. There had been good times, after all. Up until she graduated, when she was already 18, Daphne hadn't even considered running away.

XXXX

Four days after receiving her diploma from Headmistress McGonagall, Daphne stood in her father's study and waited. He always made her wait. It was his way to show her he was displeased that she hadn't done as well as Astoria.

She scowled at the desk but clenched her jaw and remained standing in the middle of the room, arms at her side.

"I graduated with honours," she muttered. "What more could he want?"

The door swung open, but Daphne didn't need to turn around to know who had entered. Her father strode past her without a passing glance and seated himself behind his desk.

He was dressed in richly embroidered robes, and he wore his wappenrock emblazoned with the Greengrass Eagle on his chest. Daphne wrinkled her nose at his choice of dress. It was a warrior's garb, and Daphne hated how pretentious it made her fat, balding father look.

"Daphne," he said, pulling on his thin, too-long moustache. "Have you considered what you want to do, now that you have graduated?"

Daphne almost sneered at him. Obviously, she wasn't going to take over the family business.

"I haven't… considered yet," she said stiffly.

Her father nodded. He pulled something from one of his drawers. A small silver flask. He took a sip and put it away.

Daphne braced herself. He always took a drink to steel his nerves.

"Daphne," he said, "I have arranged with your mother for you to become a socialite in the family's circle."

Daphne's mouth fell open. She stared at her father in disbelief. A socialite? A puppet? "You cannot be serious!" she said, barely keeping herself from shouting.

Her father pursued his lips and leaned back. He laced his fingers in front of him and stared at her. "Daphne," he said, and he sounded so patronising she wanted to claw her eyes out. "Once Astoria steps up—"

But Daphne was having none of it. Not anymore. She turned on her heel even as her father explained his ridiculous plans to imprison her in this house.

He shouted after her, but she was out the door before she lost her patience and magically locked it shut.

She stormed past her mother, almost shouldered Astoria out of her way on the staircase and locked herself in her room.

Enough was enough, she decided, tears in her eyes. Within minutes, her bags were packed, and all her jewellery she dumped into a handbag. It would last her a while.

Her room was on the ground floor, so Daphne slipped out of the window, walked to the edge of the property and apparated to London.

XXXX

The memory was crystal clear in Harry's mind. He had examined this moment dozens of times before and dreamt of it almost every night. That one moment of triumph haunted him years after, and Harry thought it would never stop.

Harry had stood twenty feet from Voldemort, his Death Eaters surrounded them. Bellatrix stood directly behind Harry like a prowling animal, cackling and hissing while Hagrid, chained to a thick tree, cried and thrashed against his bindings. Behind Voldemort was Draco with his father and Mcnair to their left.

He only met Draco's eye briefly. There was fear and regret in them. It eased Harry's mind a bit.

"Today," Voldemort said, "is the day Harry Potter dies." He sounded deceptively solemn, but the sneer on his face made his true emotions very obvious.

"Today," Harry said as he drew his wand, "is the day Tom Marvolo Riddle dies."

Voldemort's sneer turned into a hateful scowl. He whipped his wand out and fired the first curse.

Harry knew that he had nothing on Tom in terms of duelling. There was only one thing he could do to win.

And oddly enough, that one thing was to die.

As expected, Voldemort opened with the Killing Curse, and Harry made no move to avoid it. It struck his chest, green filling Harry's vision. It enveloped him like the grasp of a cold hand. There was hardly any force behind it, no more than a gentle push, and Harry realised that was because this spell did not target the flesh but the soul.

But in Harry's case, nothing happened. The grasp of the cold slipped off him like a drop of water off a pane of glass. He let the minuscule push topple him over and was glad that the leaf-strewn forest floor was not hiding any stones on which he could bust his head open.

Then he waited.

He let Hagrid pick him up, let Voldemort parade his body to the students in the courtyard and waited for his moment.

Even in his dreams, he drew grim satisfaction from the way Tom gaped at him as he sprang out of Hagrid's arms.

"Impossible!" he had cried.

And in that moment of Tom's rage, Harry lashed out. The way the cutting curse cleaved into Tom's side was even better than the disbelieving face he made.

And when he hit the ground, eyes wide and blood spraying from his side, black like tar, Harry made the mistake of approaching.

He remembered the way Voldemort's red eyes shone brightly, the cruel smile that pulled on his blackened lips. For some reason, he couldn't remember the words Tom uttered that moment, for a bolt of blackness struck him in the next. He had gotten so close that he had no way of avoiding it.

It didn't do anything then. It just made Harry stumble back. It was enough time for Voldemort to climb to his feet and send another Killing Curse at him.

Harry countered with the first spell that came to mind. "Expelliarmus!"

XXXX

"And what is this hole exactly?" Harry asked.

He stood at the edge of the "infinite hole" Ron had mentioned and looked down into the inky blackness. There did indeed not seem to be a bottom in sight. It was enclosed in an old Greek Temple, surrounded by tall marble pillars, which made it look even more ominous.

"Well," Bill said, leaning against the railing, "this is something of a living metaphor."

"Living?" Harry asked, glancing at where Fleur was conjuring lengths of rope. "What do you mean by that?"

Ron ambled up to his side and clapped Harry on the shoulder. "This," he said, "is a, uh, manifestation, let's say, of Tartaros."

"The Underworld?" Harry asked. "This hole?"

"Yes and no," Ron said. "It's not actually Tartaros, but some crazy wizard back in 400 B.C. thought it would be funny to mess with the muggles. So he made this hole and told them it was "a mouth" of Tartaros."

Harry frowned. "That's messed up."

"Yeah," Bill agreed. "Lots of people killed themselves here, seeking a direct way into the afterlife. Fact is, you do fall for nine days straight if you jump."

"Another fact," Fleur said, coming over, "and the reason why we are here, is that over the centuries, many saints and heroes have come here. However fake this hole once was, it has been touched by some of the most powerful healing magicks in the world. If you get deep enough, even a Killing Curse could not kill you."

"Uhm…"

"Oh shush," Fleur said, "We know you are an exception here. But the fact is, deep down in his hole, there is a mass of magic Curse Breakers have classified as beyond pure."

"Meaning," Bill cut in, "that it will literally purge the curses right out of you."

Harry glanced from Fleur to Bill and then at the small mountain of rope that Fleur had conjured at the edge of the hole. "What's the drawback here?" he asked.

Ron clapped his shoulder again. "Well, for one, we have to get your ass down there."

"Which takes nine days in free fall," Bill said.

"And," Ron said, "the beyond pure magic-" He made quotation marks with his fingers. "-is liable to just, uh, erase you in case of prolonged exposure."

Of course it would. Harry sighed. "How did you plan on getting me up here again? If I fall for nine days straight, I might as well arrive and be unconscious or dead by one of the curses."

"That's easy," Ron said. "We are coming with you." And then he started to conjure his own length of rope.

Harry blinked. "What?"

"Of course." Bill followed Ron's example and began conjuring rope. "You didn't think we were just going to drop you in there and camp out here for nine days, did you?"

"We are going with you," Fleur said," and once we are deep enough, we will apparte back up. Simple enough."

"But… you said this could erase me. It could erase you!"

Fleur sighed and took his hand. "Harry," she said softly. "If not for you, my dear Bill would be dead. I would be, too. You have suffered for a decade now, and I think it's time we change that."

"And free falling for a few days is hardly comparable to having your heart boil in your chest," Bill added.

"Exactly," Fleur said. She fondly put a hand on his cheek. "Now go on and start conjuring rope. You are going to need a lot."

Harry was left speechless. He felt his heart swell. They were willing to risk his life for his well-being. The thought made him think of Daphne and how much he missed her.

He penned a letter to her and sent it away with Ron's owl before beginning to conjure as much rope as he could.

XXXX

"How do you think he's doing?" Daphne didn't turn to face her sister, who was brushing her hair as they sat by the window in Daphne's room.

Astoria sighed, but never ceased her brushing. Daphne thought it meaningless. Her hair was so short. "You keep asking me that, but I don't even know who you're so hopelessly in love with," she said.

Daphne remained silent, as she had before whenever Astoria had wanted to know about Harry. It didn't feel right to talk about him. Not when he was fighting for his life.

"I'm sure he's perfectly fine," Astoria said when Daphne remained silent, but she tugged harder on the brush in annoyance. "After all, he had the resilience to bed you. He may as well be Harry Potter himself."

Daphne almost laughed. Harry Potter himself, she thought. She smiled at her sister. "You're right. Thank you." It was even funnier because Daphne had been the one to make the first move.

"I'm sure." Astoria cast a doubtful glance at her in the mirror. "Then why do you still look like you're about to up and leave?"

"Because I think I should have left with him to begin with," she sighed. "I let him go because I thought I couldn't stand to watch him struggle."

But you always have, a part of her whispered. But now that Harry's wormed his way into your heart, you chose to turn away.

Daphne frowned. She hated thinking like that. But she knew it was true.

Astoria put a hand on her shoulder. She squeezed firmly. "You know, I think you should go. Go and follow that mysterious man who can twist you around his finger so much you told me about him."

That stung. They had never talked much, more because Daphne couldn't stand the sight of Astoria than her sister's unwillingness. In fact, Daphne remembered a much younger Astoria trying many times at talking to her.

She always ignored her.

Daphne shrugged off the thought. She was doing better now. Somewhat. Being with Harry had kind of fixed her eating habits and, when he had pulled her to bed, she'd actually had a semblance of a sleeping schedule. Not that Harry did much sleeping with the random curses that woke them and his nightmares.

"I miss him," she whispered, "and I let him go alone because I was afraid to lose him."

"I hope you realise now how stupid that sounds."

Daphne glared at her sister, but that beatific smile of hers quelled Daphne's anger. "Shut up," she said sullenly. "And curse you for being right."

"You should take my relationship advice to heart. I know what I'm talking about."

"How would you-?"

"I'm engaged."

Daphne felt her stomach drop, and she twisted around in the hair, surprised. "You- What?"

"I'm engaged," Astoria repeated, a wan smile on her lips. "I'm sorry, I couldn't think of a better way to tell you."

Baffled, Daphne rose from the chair and faced her sister. "I… Congratulations…?"

Astoria laughed. "Why did that sound like a question?"

"I'm just… surprised," Daphne said. In fact, she was utterly floored. Shocked to the core. Her little sister? Engaged? Who? She shook herself. "Who?" she asked.

Astoria's smile became strained. "Draco."

Daphne almost stumbled as she took a step back. "Malfoy?" she hissed. "Him? After all that he did to us?"

"He never hurt me," Astoria said stiffly, and for the first time since returning home, Daphne saw the tension in Astoria's beautiful features. She had worried about this.

Daphne took a deep breath. She was the older sister. She could at least try to act like she was much more mature than her little sister, as she always thought herself to be. "Okay," she said, "How did that happen? If I remember correctly, he almost killed us all."

And there, she already failed at the maturity part. Astoria frowned deeply. "He did not," she said fiercely. "He was forced to do the Dark Lord's bidding, just like the rest of us!"

Daphne cringed at the memories of those months. There had been no hero to come stop the Carrows. Not for the Slytherins, who everyone assumed were gleefully torturing children for sport. But there was anger deep in her heart when she thought of Draco abandoning them for the Death Eaters to toy with.

If Harry hadn't arrived at the school just then-

She refused to remember.

"He's a coward!" she hissed venomously.

Astoria rose, face severe. "At least he had stood up to his father when it mattered!"

Daphne felt as though she had been slapped. She stumbled back into the vanity, eyes wide.

"You never did," Astoria said quietly, yet no less fiercely. "All you did was bow your head until you found that you could just run away and abandon me."

Then her sister spun on her heel and stalked out of the room, leaving the shell-shocked Daphne behind.

XXXX

Free-falling was oddly pleasant after a while. Harry could not tell which way was up and which way was down, and it made for a very interesting scene as he fell alongside the upside-down, sleeping Ron. It was an utterly surreal image, yet Harry would have been surprised to see him doing anything else. The only reason Harry knew up from down at all was the long rope extending behind Ron into the dark above.

"I don't know how he does it." Fleur's voice carried easily across to him as they kept on falling. "He didn't even need a sleeping draught."

"He's been able to sleep everywhere and anywhere for as long as I've known him," Harry said, and he did not have to shout for Fleur to hear him. Her charms had made short work of the problem of the rushing wind around them.

Bill, falling with his hands behind his head, slowly drifted over to them with ease as though he had done falls like this a dozen times before. And, seeing how prepared they were for this, Harry thought that this assumption might very well be true.

"You should have seen him when he fell asleep in the bathtub with Ginny when they were still little," Bill said. "Poor Gin thought he'd drowned."

Harry would have liked to respond, but he found that he couldn't open his mouth. He was paralysed, he realised. It took a moment before Bill noticed. He quickly waved his wand, and Harry could breathe again.

"Thanks," he said. "A body bind?"

Fleur shook her head. "A powerful paralysing curse. I am unsure why you did not black out immediately, as your heart would have stopped beating after only a moment, but you seem to have grown increasingly resilient to them."

"And it was surprisingly easy to break," Bill added as he put his wand away. "That usually takes two attempts and a shock to restart the heart."

"Finally, some good news," Harry sighed. He rolled his stiff shoulders and twisted around to look down. The pitch-black abyss stared back.

"At this rate," Fleur said, and Harry turned to see her look at her watch, "we might be back before Christmas."

Harry nodded. "That would be… nice." He should probably get a gift for Daphne.

"You'll be over at the Burrow, right?" Bill asked.

Harry paused. He hadn't gone last year. "I… Do you think your mother would mind if I brought someone?"

Bill blinked, surprised. Fleur answered instead. "You meant to ask, would Ginny mind if you brought someone."

Harry cringed. "I guess."

"You really ought to revise your opinion of my sister, mate," Bill said, sounding annoyed. "She's not as spiteful as you think."

Fleur shot her husband a dry look. "Remind me, dear William, how long it took your sister to stop calling me Phlegm?"

Bill made a face. "That…" He shook his head. "Listen, Harry, I'm not saying she'll welcome you and whomever you'd think to bring with open arms, but she won't curse you either."

Not that Ginny's curses could hold a candle to the ones he experienced on a daily basis. Actually, they would not affect him unless she chose to delve into dark arts.

"I guess," Harry sighed. "And I owe her an apology either way. We didn't part with kind words."

Bill sighed. "You were literally on fire when that happened. Please, remind me how you are to blame for cussing while your bones were turning to ash."

Harry opened his mouth only to close it wordlessly. He… didn't fully remember that day. Many years ago, when he hadn't been as resistant to these curses, much was hazy. Like fever dreams.

"You had an attack," Fleur said. She somehow manoeuvred closer and put a hand on his shoulder. "That's why you lashed out. No one was hurt but you."

"And maybe Ginny's feelings," Ron, who seemed to have woken up, said followed by a yawn. "But mate, she's fine you know?"

Harry nodded. An immolation curse that set his bones on fire. It triggered an attack, and he trashed a section of the Burrow with some curses of his own. And then…

And then he was rushed off to St. Mungos, where he ended up being treated not by the medics, but by Daphne, who had been there that day.

She had treated him ever since.

"I'll come," Harry said softly. "And I'll bring… my girlfriend."

Ron lost his balance in shock and began spiralling through the air until Bill caught him by the leg and pulled him back into their group.

"Your what? Really?" Ron paddled ungracefully through the air to grab Harry by the shoulders. "Who? Cho!?"

Harry pulled a face, bewildered. "What? No! It's Daphne!"

Ron frowned. The name didn't seem to mean anything to him until his eyes widened a moment later. "Wait, wait, wait, Daphne Greengrass? The Head Unspeakable!?"

Harry nodded. "Yeah, her."

"How?" Ron asked, incredulous.

Harry smiled, fond of the memory despite the fact that a lot of them involved terrible curses. "Well, it's actually quite the short story."

"Yeah?" Ron let go of his shoulders and put a hand to his chin, thinking. "You better tell me all about it once we got your ass curse free and in working condition back on the surface." He nodded seriously. "So I'll go back to sleep and you lot wake me when we get close, yeah?"

And with that, he crossed his arms and almost immediately fell asleep.

Fleur sighed. "I would really like to know how he does it." She pulled a small vial out of her satchel. "But he is right. Sleep does sound good."

"Yeah," Harry said, feeling the fatigue deep in his bones. "It does."

"Well, go on then," Bill said, "I'll stop you from dying in your sleep." He winked.

Harry rolled his eyes but eventually closed them. At the bottom of this seemingly unending hole, he would find himself a step closer to a cure. But for now, all he could do was wait.

XXXX

Daphne would leave her family again. Run away again.

No.

She would leave. She'd run away once before, but this house was no longer her home. But this time, she intended to leave a note at least. A solemn thank you. Maybe… an apology to Astoria.

Daphne slipped out of her room and tried not to look like she was fleeing. She had the small knapsack she'd arrived with slung over her shoulder and closed the door quietly behind herself. This time, she would walk out the front door.

The halls of her family home were eerie at night. They always had been, every time when she'd come back home from Hogwarts during the holidays. It had been especially bad after her third year, when all the Dementors had been at the school. Though she had never been very close to her parents—not after she was told Astoria would take over everything one day, and Daphne would be left with nothing—her mother had consoled her in the nights when she could not find sleep without nightmares.

She felt like a child again, walking these halls in the dark. Even younger and more powerless than she had been when running away as the rebellious young woman. As though she were making her way to her mother's room to be consoled.

And that was precisely where she ended up. Not by unconscious choice, but for the fact that, to leave the house, Daphne had to walk past her mother's room.

Daphne hesitated only briefly. It was as though knocking and entering was the only thing she could possibly do. She pushed the door open and entered.

Her mother sat in a rocking chair under the lamplight of an ornate reading lamp that stood on a small side table. She was reading, wrapped in thick blankets. Daphne noted, upon taking a step into the room, that it was rather chilly.

"Mother," she said, surprising herself with the firmness of her voice. "I'm leaving."

Her mother, Joanna Greengrass, closed her book and raised sad eyes to meet Daphne's. "I knew you would," she said quietly. She blinked away tears. "I'm just glad you chose to tell me this time."

Daphne fidgeted, half a mind to turn around and walk out, but she couldn't. "I'll… visit," she promised on a whim. "Perhaps for New Years?"

Her mother's eyes brightened. "That would be wonderful."

Daphne nodded and turned around. She hesitated. "I don't know what's been happening since I've gone. I expect not much, I rather think father was glad to be rid of me."

She heard her mother wince.

"I don't know why you would let Astoria marry Malfoy of all people, but I get the feeling that it was her choice rather than his."

Her mother sniffed, and Daphne turned her head just enough to see her dab at her eyes with a handkerchief. "That girl," she said sternly, though with fondness. "She's not forgiven your father for driving you away. I thought it was an act of rebellion at first. But alas."

Daphne took a step but decided to ask one last question. "... When's the wedding?"

"The 29th," her mother said. "Just before the year closes."

Daphne nodded. "I… am going to try to be there. Goodbye."

She hurried out of the room, unwilling to look back, down the hall and the stairs. She stormed past the backlit door of the sitting room where she knew her father to be and pushed open the front doors.

The cool air hit her, and Daphne gasped as it stung her face. But she kept going, down the steps, along the gravel path, and toward the gate. At the wrought iron gate, adorned with the Greengrass Eagle, she was met by Astoria.

Her sister stood in front of the gate, wrapped in an oversized coat, waiting for her.

Daphne slowed but did not stop until they were face to face.

They stared at each other in silence, only briefly interrupted by cold gusts of wind.

"You're leaving," Astoria said, her voice almost inaudible over the wind.

"Yes," Daphne said. "But…" She reached into her coat and pulled out a sheet of paper. She'd left a letter in Astoria's room, and with it there was a slip of paper like this. With her wand, Daphne wrote her floo address onto it. "You can visit me, if you'd like."

She held out the slip of paper for Astoria. Her sister hesitated but took the paper. "I… will," she said.

Daphne deliberated over her next words. "I'm… sorry," she said quietly. "For the way I spoke about Draco." She frowned, shame bubbling in her chest. "I've been gone for years. So long, I didn't even know you were engaged at all. I haven't even seen Draco once since his father's trial." She met her sister's eyes. "I don't trust him, but I trust you to make the right choice. You always were the brighter one."

Astoria stepped closer. Daphne half expected to be slapped, but instead, her sister drew her into a hug. "You need to stop belittling yourself," she whispered, pulling her close. "I will visit. And I expect you to come to my wedding—and in the company of your mysterious boyfriend."

Daphne nodded into Astoria's hair, trying her hardest not to cry. "I will," she promised.

"Good." Astoria stepped back and turned. She pushed the gate open. "Now go, before father catches us out here."

Daphne frowned. "If he does anything to you, I-"

Astoria raised a hand. "I think you underestimate Mother and me. Father may once have been imposing, but when you left, even he knew he had done something wrong. Not that he will ever admit it. But it whittled him down nonetheless."

Daphne sighed. "Still. Break one of his favourite tea cups for me."

Astoria smiled mischievously. "I already broke them all long ago."

And with that, Astoria walked back to the house.

So Daphne, standing in the cold winds, realised that she did not truly know her sister. She'd thought her so obedient in the palm of their father's hand.

Maybe she had been wrong. And Daphne apparated away, her heart a little lighter than before.

XXXX

Harry climbed out of the hellhole, his face smeared with blood. He was angry. He tore the rope from his belt, both more magic than fabric at this point, and stormed out of the site and into the cold.

"Harry," Fleur said, calling after him. "We can-"

"I don't want to hear it!" he yelled. His skin crackled, and for lack of self-control, a pillar of the entrance gate cracked loudly as he walked past.

The biting cold was bliss to his burning skin. There was a blizzard. Snow blew into Harry's face like thousands of tiny, stinging hexes. They felt so much better than the curse that had almost peeled his skin off entirely.

He stalked into the deep snow until it was too much effort to take another step. Buffeted by the wind and knee-deep in snow, Harry stared into the sky. He could not see it, just like there was no end in sight for the curses levelled against him. Like the millions of snowflakes before the open sky, there were millions of curses to haunt him before he could achieve freedom.

The bottom of the endless hellhole had not brought the salvation he sought. Like the ritual underneath the pyramid, it had taken a swath of curses and torn them from his body—curse by agonising curse.

Much like the blizzard, even if Harry set the firmament ablaze with all his power, there was always more snow to come.

How many more rituals or artefacts would it take? Was it possible to achieve in his lifetime? Or before a curse finally did him in?

"Harry."

Bill had followed him. Harry turned and saw Ron not far behind.

"I can feel it, you know?" Harry turned back into the wind and closed his eyes. "Not always. But when the curses are split from me, I can kind of feel what is left. I didn't want to believe it the first time. Thought I was just in too much pain. But it's clear now. There are nigh infinite curses on me. Hundreds, if not thousands, of variations of the same awful magic."

"This was just our second try, Harry," Ron called. He had to shout over the blizzard.

"And I can tell you that these first two tries did nothing to diminish the sheer number of curses." Harry turned around and almost stumbled as the wind picked up. "How many more sites or rituals are there that do the specific thing we need it to do?"

Bill gave him a flat look and reached into his coat. He pulled a binder from within and let it fall open. An impossibly long set of pages unfolded, blowing in the wind like a scarf.

"Eight-hundred and forty-three," he said flatly. "And now I cross out number two, which leaves us with eight hundred and-"

"He gets it." Ron slapped Bill's arm, who, with a snap of his finger, rolled up the pages again and put the binder away. "Listen," Ron said. "We knew this wasn't going to be easy, so we are doing this twofold."

Bill continued. "While we are getting as many curses off of you, we are also looking into whatever this godawful magic spawned from to begin with. So either we get rid of the curses one by one or find a way to end it at once on the way."

Harry frowned at them. "You think it's that easy?"

"It is," Ron said. "Listen, it's simple: We do this, or you die. I'll let you guess what we've chosen."

Taken aback, Harry stared at them for a moment. Fleur joined them and waved her wand at him. A putrid gash on his arm resealed itself. Harry hadn't even noticed it happening.

"Well?" Fleur asked. "When are we leaving for the next site? One of the portkeys I booked goes off in an hour."

Harry swallowed heavily. It took a moment to steady himself and find his centre. And as he stood there, freezing wind billowing about him, he noticed how little pain he was in. He wasn't numb from the cold or ignoring his aches as he usually did. It was simply that none of the old wounds and scars hurt as much as they used to.

Could this be because of just two rituals?

Harry flexed his right arm. The silver branches of Daphne's spell stretched over his fingers, and though the limb was still essentially numb, the prickling pain of the once-rotting flesh was absent.

Maybe this was just fanciful thinking, but at this moment, Harry chose to believe.

"Alright," he said. "Let's go then."

XXXX

Daphne found Harry a few days later, in the middle of November. He was chained to a massive stone totem and stabbed with as many knives as his body could fit. All of them glowed, and all of them caused a sort of ichor to leak from the wounds. The dark mass of magic and evil vaporised almost as soon as the knives pulled it out, billowing upwards into the dark cloud that had led Daphne to this place.

It wasn't the scene that made Daphne's heart hurt—she had seen Harry with his bones melting, with his heart burning, with his guts boiling—it was the screaming that twisted her insides.

Around the totem, Bill and Fleur were casting a flurry of spells to contain what was happening and keep Harry alive through the ceremony. Ron—Daphne had barely recognised him with the way his face was set into a fierce grimace—was pushing a single knife into a stone altar. It seemed to refuse him so far that it had begun searing the skin of his hands.

Daphne needn't think long. She sprinted across the ancient stone towards Ron. Just as he was bodily flung from the altar, Daphne reached him and took his place.

"Go!" she shouted at him. "Help them!"

Though Ron looked dizzy and hurt, he barely took two seconds to obey. He fumbled for his wand, staggering and swearing as he joined Bill and Fleur.

The knife seared her skin and burned her hands to the bone in a moment, but Daphne refused to let go. With effort, she drove the knife back into the blackened altar. Harry's screaming reached a feverish height. Fleur began cursing, Bill was shouting, but Daphne squeezed her eyes shut and kept holding on.

She lost track of time. At some point, Harry stopped screaming, but Daphne held on. She held on, like Harry did. And she kept holding on until someone pried the knife from her numb fingers.

Daphne fell back, disoriented. Bill stood over her, sweaty and dirty, but he was smiling.

"I would offer you a hand," he said, "but I don't think you'll have much luck grasping it."

Daphne blinked at him, then at her hands. She felt sick and ignored it for the moment. "Harry," she said, voice so hoarse she barely got his name out. Had she been screaming?

"I'm alive," Harry's voice croaked from somewhere behind Bill.

"Obviously," Bill said, turning around. "Couldn't be out here bleeding all over the place if you weren't."

Daphne stumbled to her feet and pushed past Bill.

Harry knelt next to Fleur, covered in blood and still-vaporizing black ichor. Fleur was pulling knives out of him, haplessly discarding them in a pile of all too many knives on the cold stone ground.

Ron sat slumped next to them, flexing his hands. Daphne sank to her knees next to them and reached for her wand. Only then did she notice that her hands did not obey.

"Relax," Bill said, crouching next to her. "It's under control. Let me heal those hands of yours."

Daphne let him, numb to the burning sensation, as Bill dumped some potion over her mangled hands. "Harry," she said, voice cracking with the pain, "I'm here."

He laughed, coughed, then laughed again. "I noticed." A smile pulled on his lips. "Came to save the day, did you?"

Ron sniffed. "I had it under control," he said.

"Sure you had." Bill vanished the bottle of whatever potions he had doused Daphne's hands with and handed one of the same to Ron. Then he nodded at her. "There, that should be good enough."

Daphne's fingers felt tingly and raw as she drew her wand. She watched as Fleur pulled out the last of the knives and then kindly moved out of the way.

"Weirdly, this isn't the worst state you've ever been in," she murmured, scooching closer to Harry's prone body.

Harry took her free hand in his, smearing it with whatever he was currently covered in.

"Like what?" he asked quietly.

Daphne hummed, closing the wound the last knife had left. "Do you remember the week of Christmas three years ago?"

Harry nodded. "Bone Breaker."

"A lot of Bone Breakers. All to your chest. You looked like—" She grimaced. "Horrible," she said instead.

"Can't say I was conscious for that part."

"We had four healers work on you for an hour."

Harry shifted and began to stand up. Re-knit muscle and sinew popped and cracked as it jumped with his motions. He pulled her up with him.

"Well." He looked over at Bill, who was vanishing the mess they had made. "What's next?"

Bill rolled his eyes and unfurled a binder of indefinite length. "Cleansing springs, four possible starting points."

"That doesn't sound too bad," Harry mused. He accepted the shirt Ron conjured for him.

"One of them is an acid bath," Bill said flatly.

"Way to nip my hope in the bud," Harry muttered. He glanced at Daphne. "Are you… coming with us?"

She stabbed him with the tip of her wand. "I didn't come all the way out here just to let you leave again. I took leave. Brooks will have to survive with all his requests being denied until we finish this."

Harry smiled at her, eyes glimmering. "Well, then we better hurry, there are… How many more sites to visit?"

Bill, who had just finished rolling up the binder, sighed. "I'm not counting it again. Eight hundred and then some."

"Before we are whisked away by the next portkey, I suggest we rest." Fleur said. "I don't know if I can reassemble you faster than acid can take you apart if I don't sleep tonight."

"Can we eat back in that village we came through?" Ron asked. "They've got to have some killer lamb."

Harry moved from her side, and Daphne noticed he was no longer limping as badly.

"Your leg is better?" she asked.

Harry nodded. "Still can't heal it, but the pain is all but gone. Now it's just the awkward range of the joint." He tapped his head. "Still dark in one eye, though."

"We'll fix that," Daphne said confidently. She took his hand in hers, warmer than ever.

"Not if we don't eat soon," Ron moaned.

"You'll live," Harry laughed.

Harry flinched and raised his arm. Something sizzled on his skin but was gone instantly without leaving a mark. "Huh."

Daphne waved her wand over his arm. "That was… a boiling curse?"

Harry frowned. "Barely even felt that."

"Let's just be glad that your resistance to healing has not risen like your resistance to curses, yes?" Fleur said sweetly, though she looked annoyed.

"Right." Harry started them down the muddy path out of the clearing. "I heard we could get some nice lamb around here."

"Finally," Ron grumbled and pulled ahead of them. "Last one has to pay!"

Bill looked after him with a furrowed brow. "He's not going to bankrupt me here, is he?"

Harry shrugged, smiling easily. "Probably not."

"Probably?"

XXXX

"Do I even want to dip my toe into that?"

Daphne raised an eyebrow at him and tossed a pebble into the unnaturally still, clear pool of liquid. As soon as it made contact with the still surface, the entire pool turned a vivid blue, and the rock started to dissolve. It was gone in seconds.

"Ah." Harry glanced back at Bill and Fleur, who were excavating some sort of small obelisk at the eastern rise of the dell. "At this point, I think they're just trying to violently take the curses out of me. How is dissolving myself in acid going to help with a curse on my very soul?"

Daphne rolled her eyes as though he had asked a particularly stupid question. Then she leaned down and dipped her finger in the pool before Harry had the chance to stop her.

"Daphne!" He pulled her back by the shoulder, and stared at her, aghast. "What are you doing?!"

She showed him her pointer finger. It was whole, surprisingly, but… white. Devoid of all colour.

"See?" she said, and poked him in the nose. "This isn't just a pool of acid. Bill said it was a pool of the acid found in dragon's blood that was somehow naturally separated from its other components. Dragon's blood has a powerful immunity to toxins and curses alike, all because of this acidic substance."

"Huh."

"Alright!" Bill came up to them and clapped his hands. "Let's do this!"

Harry nodded. "Okay, let me just—"

The world tilted suddenly, and at first, Harry thought some curse had triggered. But then he realised Bill had simply pushed him into the pool.

As Harry hit the surface, he made sure to give Bill his nastiest glare before spending the next three hours magically boiling curses out of himself.

XXXX

The crux of Harry's predicament seemed to be the very base layer of the curse upon him, namely the twisted ancient protection curse that thankfully triggered less and less with every measure they took against it. Bill found references to these violent guarding curses in many tombs, but it was the ones that reanimated corpses as protection that caught his eye.

"We looked at all the curses we recorded that triggered you to lash out," Bill explained, a thick tome floating before him. "Basically, they all more or less killed you and stopped your heart. Shorted your brain. Minor problems with magic involved, but you were technically dead for a moment."

Harry rubbed uncomfortably at his chest. He didn't like to think about how many times he had been dead in the last ten years. But going by the amount of times he had lashed out like a maniac, at least fifty times. A harrowing thought.

"We think," Fleu went on, an oblong shard of obsidian floating before her as she engraved something into it with her wand, "the curse Voldemort placed on you was twofold, though we can't say why he layered such an inordinate amount of non-lethal curses into it. It seems he wanted for a curse to kill you in case he couldn't in your final confrontation."

"Well, yeah." Harry shrugged. "What else would he want?"

"Ah, but he wanted more!" Bill flipped the book and showed Harry a faded picture of a pyramid surrounded by oddly posturing humanoid shapes. "He wanted you to die and rise again! Turn you into an inferi, almost."

"You're just very hard to kill," Ron added.

Ron sat with Daphne at the far wall of the sanctum, putting pieces of obsidian Fleur had previously carved into the dozen evenly spaced slots on the wall. Daphne turned as though she had noticed him look over and smiled.

He smiled back.

"So what we are going to do next," Bill said, "is kill you."

The smile slipped. "Huh?"

XXXX

To get at the very base of the curse, Harry needed to be dead, they figured. And to kill someone as seemingly unkillable as Harry, the team had sought out number four-hundred-twenty-three on the list of things to torture poor Harry with: An ancient sanctum in Albaina that ancient wizards used to embalm their fallen warriors.

And cremate them.

The sanctum was fairly large, with a slope downwards away from the entrance. Where the slope hit the far wall, there was a groove cut into the smooth black wall. To either side of it, there were the slots for the many obsidian pieces Ron and Daphne had put into place, carefully adjusted by Fleur so as not to actually destory Harry's body.

They hoped.

The groove was just wide enough for Harry to step into it, and it angled into the wall, so he could lean in and hopefully not fall out once… he was dead.

He stood before it, staring into the blackened hollow, not looking at anything in particular.

"It will work," Daphne said, placing a hand on his forearm.

Harry tore his eyes from the wall and looked at her. "I know. I just… don't want to hurt you when I lash out."

"You won't, I promise."

He huffed. "I've grown scarily resistant to magic in general. I just hope this works at all."

"It will," Daphne said confidently, and she smiled at him.

"Yes," Harry agreed. "It will."

And so he stepped up into the groove, laid his head back against the smooth stone, and closed his eyes.

XXXX

Harry kept his eyes shut. He licked his lips and shifted a bit to better accommodate his bad leg—curse the damn thing!

"It's going to be okay," Ron said, pulling on his shirt front and squeezing what little composure Harry had gathered right out of him.

"I feel like I got hit by a heart-burn curse," Harry said, forcing himself to breathe.

Ron huffed. "You don't get those anymore, so no excuses."

Harry opened his eyes and faced his mirror image over Ron's head, as his friend tried to fix his skewed cravat.

He looked… normal. True, one of his eyes had gone blind and whatever all the procedures to remove the curses did to alleviate his bad leg left him, so Harry had to rely on a cane again, but other than that, he looked normal.

Other than the fact that he had never imagined himself in a suit like this.

"Draco really embraced muggle fashion, didn't he?" Harry muttered, eyeing the maroon tie as Ron stepped aside to marvel at his admittedly fine knot.

"Hell yeah," Ron agreed. "Those pants are so comfortable! No more windy robes!"

Harry raised an eyebrow at his friend. "No one was stopping you from wearing slacks under them, you know?"

Ron just shrugged. "Well?" he asked. "Ready?"

"Godsdammit, Ron, stop acting like this is my wedding! You're freaking me out!"

Ron rolled his eyes and reached into his pocket. "I got the ring, by the way."

"Oh, yes, thanks…" Harry took the offered box, then glared at Ron as he smirked. "Shut up."

Ron raised his hands but kept smiling. "Oi, I didn't say anything."

Harry grumbled at him and headed for the door.

As opposed to Malfoy Manor, the Greengrass Estate had a massive garden, which was perfect for Draco's wedding to Astoria, Daphne's younger sister.

Four entire acres of ground offered more than enough space for an ostentatious wedding, eight pavilions the size of small houses and the ridiculous water fountain that looked like Daphne's father had snatched it right out of Rome, though even for that it bore too many nude depictions of Venus and alerted Harry to the odd taste of the Greengrasses of old.

Harry, two of Daphne's cousins and the rest of the Weasley brothers were given a guest room to prepare in while the guests less close to the family arrived. Now, only Ron and Harry remained there. Surely, Bill had already found Fleur and Ginny, who had not ripped Harry to shreds when he haltingly introduced Daphne to them just days ago.

At least not yet.

"If you're thinking about Ginny hexing you again," Ron said, "I will do it instead. Get over yourself. You have bigger things to worry about."

Harry felt his bad knee go weak. "Oh Merlin…"

Ron slapped him on the back. "Oh suck it up, mate. Like she'll say no. After all that happened, I'm surprised she didn't propose to you yet."

Harry stuffed the box with the ring into the inside of his jacket. "I can do this," he said, more to himself than Ron. "I died twice for this."

"Three times if you count us stopping your heart to get it going," Ron said. He pushed Harry toward the door. "Now get a move on, or we'll miss the damn wedding!"

Harry let Ron steer him out into the corridor of the second floor of the Greengrass Estate, where they almost immediately ran into Hermione.

"There you are!" She rolled up to them like a storm, and Harry almost jumped out of his skin at the speed with which she patted down his suit and adjusted his lapels. "Good! Finally!" Then she looked at Ron. "The ring?"

"Sheesh, 'Mione, we got it. Safely delivered." Ron put a hand on her shoulder. "Now we just need to deliver Harry before he freaks out and keels over all on his own."

Harry gave Ron a dirty look and only had moments to breathe before Hermione started fussing over him.

By the time they made it to the garden, Harry's tie had gone through three different knots, the fit of his dress shirt was adjusted twice, and when they ran into Bill and Fleur, he got his hair magically affixed into place with spells Harry had never even heard of.

"Magnifique!" Fleur declared. Then they all suddenly abandoned him on the snow-covered lawn, and Harry stood there numbly like a lost sheep, his gloved hand constantly fingering the box in his pocket, the other firmly wrapped around his cane.

Alright, Harry thought to himself, just like in the forest. Walk up and take it head-on, unflinching.

Harry flinched when Daphne appeared at his side and almost dropped his cane.

"Harry!" Daphne beamed at him, with her black hair all pinned back and up into a braid Harry hadn't thought she had long enough hair for. The gleaming silver studs in her ears paled in comparison to the shine in her dark eyes and the radiance of her smile. Whoever had put Daphne into this form-fitting, dark blue and shoulder-less dress that exposed her back almost all the way down to her hips was absolutely out to kill Harry, no doubt about it. Tiny stones were set into the fabric of her ankle-length skirt and sparkled like the night sky when they caught the light.

"Harry?"

For some reason, his mouth felt heavy, as though he had entirely dislocated his jaw and only with supreme effort did he manage to pick it up from the floor.

"You looked wonderful," he said, taking her hand.

Daphne twirled for him and laughed. "I haven't dressed up like this since the Yule Ball!"

"Neither have I," Harry said. Many years ago, all that.

"Well, it was about time. You strike quite the figure in these suits!" Daphne pulled him toward the crowd. "Come, come, have you met Pansy since the war ended?"

Harry couldn't remember ever seeing Daphne this lively. She'd told him of her relationship with her sister, and patching it up seemed to have lifted a massive weight off her shoulders. More so after Harry told her what Draco had been up to these past few years.

And so Harry let Daphne lead him around, introduced him with pride that made his heart swell to old friends of hers and some distant cousins who were all flabbergasted to hear their cousin was enga— in a relationship with the somehow-not-dead Harry Potter.

When the ceremony was about to begin, all of the guests were guided to a large tent set up for the occasion, which would shield them from the steadily falling snow. It was then that Harry realised just how many people had been invited. Well over two hundred people fit comfortably into the expanded tent. Richly decorated with gold and white and accents of green, a set of marble steps that were probably a fixture of the gardens led up to a golden rose arch filled with blooming white roses.

Draco stood up there, still as a statue, sweat beading on his brow. Harry felt a deep sort of sympathy for him but couldn't offer more than a solemn nod before he took his seat at the end of the front row next to Daphne—a seating arrangement that mother and daughter had insisted on to keep Harry away from Daphne's father, who sat on the other side of the row by the aisle.

Harry tried to nod at his soon-to-be father-in-law, but the man rose abruptly, likely to go and meet Astoria in the partitioned-off portion of the tent, and left without even glancing at Harry.

He sighed.

Daphne soothingly patted his hand. "He'll come around," she said. "Not that I care if he will, but I know it will happen eventually. Just know that he is literally the last person you need to worry about."

Harry shifted in his seat. "Right, well, I'd still like to try. No sense in antagonising your father."

"I'd find it very liberating if you did, actually," Daphne said with a shrug.

"I can always hex him later," Harry suggested.

"Ehem!"

Harry flinched away from Daphne's mother's sharp side-eye.

"Uhm, yes…" Worse than most curses, that glare.

The ceremony started before he could put his foot in his mouth any more than he already had. Harry pulled his mind from the box in his pocket and focused on the wedding.

Astoria, much like her sister, was beautiful. She wore white, with wondrous circular patterns woven into the bodice of the voluminous dress. She dragged a long, cloud-like skirt through the aisle with her father at her side, enchanted to hover an inch above the carpet.

Up on the dais, Draco looked like he was about to faint. That, at least, was amusing because watching Draco squirm had the primary benefit of making Harry feel better about himself all on its own.

Harry glanced at Daphne, who beamed at her sister with tears in her eyes, and he wondered if she would choose a similar dress. Now that he thought about it, Harry wondered if Daphne would want a wedding like this at all.

Everything after that was a mixture of fantasy and fancy. He imagined Daphne and him up there speaking vows and tying knots, and he imagined him kissing Daphne to the roaring applause of assembled friends and family. But then he blinked, and it was Astoria, not Daphne, throwing her bouquet into the crowd.

And it was precisely Daphne who caught it.

Harry scoffed aloud. That was the best opportunity that was ever going to present itself and it felt so dramatic and theatrically staged that walking over to Daphne felt like dreaming.

"Well," he said to her, smiling as Daphne taunted one Tracey Davis with her catch, "you know what they say."

Daphne turned to him with the most mischievous of smiles, flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes. "Who says what, oh dearest?" She brandished the bouquet of white roses, poppies and amaryllis at him like a wand, shaking loose petals that fell between them. "You mean this?"

And just as Harry drew back to go on one knee, Daphne mirrored his actions almost exactly.

They stared at each other.

The guests surrounding them went from cooing and squealing to giggling and laughing.

Harry huffed a laugh, awkwardly balancing himself halfway down to one knee. "Okay," he said to Daphne, whose stunned expression turned into a radiant smile. "We can't both be on one knee here."

"Ladies first," Daphne said with a breathy laugh. She wobbled in her heels, and he reached out to steady her.

"You'll ruin your dress," Harry said.

"You," Daphne said, raising an imperious eyebrow that had no effect sitting above her giddy smile, "are going to hurt your knee."

Harry huffed. "It's already ruined. Besides, you got to catch the bouquet."

"But my dress can be cleaned," Daphne insisted. She wobbled as the strain of the awkward posturing got to her.

"And my knee will heal all the faster if you can just let me do this."

"It won't have to heal if you just get back up and let me give you the ring."

"My ring is black gold."

"Mine is white obsidian! And I'll have you know—"

Someone shouldered their way into the ring the crowd had formed around them. Ron and Hermione appeared next to Harry and Daphne, pulling them both to their feet. Harry tried not to sigh once his knee stopped aching.

"Sorry," Ron said with a grin. "But this was getting out of hand."

Hermoine nodded. "How about," she said in a conspiratorial whisper, "you just exchange rings, and no one kneels or tries to goad the other into not kneeling, hm?"

Harry looked at Daphne, who was still clutching the bouquet. "Sounds like a compromise to me."

"Sounds," Daphne said, and her smile grew wide as she reached into a fold of her dress, "like a marriage proposal to me." She withdrew a small silver box and held it out to him.

Harry pulled his box from his pocket. "I dare say it is," he said.

With abandon, Daphne flung the flowers over her shoulder. A dozen women lunged after it, but Harry only had eyes for Daphne.

Harry had to stifle a giggle. He felt like his heart was about to break through his ribcage with how wildly it was beating. "I figured I would propose after the wedding, you know?" he said lowly.

Daphne smirked, cheeks red as the ripest apples. "Ah, I had always intended to catch the bouquet, so I get to go first."

Before Harry could devise a clever protest, Daphne opened her box and presented a ring of white obsidian to him. Despite its name, it wasn't white but a misty silver that reminded Harry of a patronus. A black gem was set into it, which was probably obsidian.

Harry chuckled. "You would think we coordinated this," he said and presented the ring he had gotten to Daphne.

It was the exact opposite of Daphne's. As the name suggested, black gold was indeed black, and a pearlescent—almost white—gem was set into the glossy metal.

Daphne snorted. "Well?" she asked.

"Well, what?" Harry asked dumbly, mystified by the moment.

Daphne laughed. "Are you going to marry me, you dolt?"

"Hey! I was about to ask that!"

"Ladies first!"

"That is not—!"

Ron groaned loudly. "Morgana's teets, will you just kiss already!?"

Hermione gasped in outrage and slapped Ron's arm. "Ronald Bilius Weasley!"

The entire ensemble descended into laughter then. Astoria finally caught sight of the spectacle and laughed. Daphne's mother beamed at them, and her father scowled at them. Malfoy looked confused, too caught up in Astoria's eyes, and only gave Harry a befuddled nod.

Then, the music picked up around them. As the attention shifted to the bride and groom once more, and people danced all around them, Harry pulled Daphne close, each bearing the ring of the other.

"I've been meaning to ask you that same question for nearly three months now, so you can probably imagine my answer," he whispered into her ear.

Daphne kicked his shin. "That's not an answer, you prick."

"Yes," he said. "I would be overjoyed to marry you."

"Good," Daphne said, smiling at him. "Because it would be pretty embarrassing if you said No now."

Harry huffed as they began to sway to the music. "Do I still get to ask?"

"Yes," Daphne said, fondly rolling her eyes. "I want to marry you."

Harry sighed dramatically. "And you deny me even this!"

XXXX

Aside from not dying to random curses ever so often, Harry's life only changed marginally.

If one could call marriage a marginal change to one's life.

Either way, after the most gossipped about proposal in wizarding history and the struggle of buying a house under a false name, Harry and Daphne did manage to settle into a home outside of London.

But aside from that, nothing much changed. They still worked in the Department of Mystery, denied eighty percent of Brook's ever-more outrageous requests, and discovered that certain gems could travel through the Veil unharmed.

Harry managed to recover from many of his curse injuries, but the light never did return to his eye, and the leg only ever got so much better, but Harry was far from complaining.

Daphne did get angry with him when he went down on one knee to put the ring on her finger during the wedding, but that was about the worst that came of it.

Once free of his curse, Harry began letting old friends back into his life. Ron put his foot in the door first, of course. He managed to become the liaison of the DMLE when it came to weird artefacts that needed inspecting. As such, Ron was down in Harry's and Daphne's office almost every day. Neville made the rounds whenever he and Luna returned from their travels and told stories of fantastically strange creatures, plants and places.

All in all, everything was better than Harry had dared to dream before Daphne un-cursed his life.

XXXX

"You know," Daphne said, a ledger of venerable age dusting her table with every gingerly turned page, "I think I'm pregnant."

The quill with which Harry had been noting down Runes so old Hermione didn't know about them punched straight through the parchment. He raised his head to stare at Daphne, but she continued reading as though she hadn't said anything.

"What?" he asked at length. "Are you… sure?"

Without taking her eyes off the tome, she raised a bauble that twinkled a soft green. Harry knew what the contraption was—he had learned about it from Daphne, the disk with the gem, the many gears and a small phial for fluid—and dropped the quill for good.

"Oh wow." He stood up, unsure what to do with his hands, but settled for grabbing his cane.

Daphne glanced at him. "Where are you going?" An amused smile pulled on her lips.

Harry shrugged helplessly. "I have no idea!" He walked around the table to Daphne, whose chair he turned so she would face him. "You're pregnant!"

Daphne gave a laugh, eyes full of mirth she could no longer contain. "That's what I said!"

Harry sunk to his knees in front of her. "Holy shit!"

Daphne laughed. She cradled his face with her hands. They smelled of old book and faintly of the apple she had had minutes ago. "You're going to be a dad," she said. "Don't be surprised now, you fiend! This is your fault!"

For some reason beyond him, Harry felt his face heat up terribly. "W-Well…" His head felt like someone had stuffed it with cotton again, like one of those confounding curses had struck him square in the language centre. Still, he managed a few words. "You're going to be a mother!"

Daphne nodded. "I am," she said, delight dancing in her eyes.

"Since when do you know?" Harry asked, resting his hands on Daphne's knees, squeezing lightly.

Daphne shrugged. "I've had a feeling since last week, but the test was only positive this morning."

Harry huffed a laugh. "You… you tested on the bathroom down the hall?"

Now, Daphne's cheeks flushed slightly. "I wanted to know," she said with only a hint of indignance. "The spells aren't as accurate as Venistrite!"

Right, the gem on the disk.

Harry sank back on his heels and barely noticed how his knee audibly clicked in protest. "Wow…" He stared at Daphne's abdomen. Obviously, there was nothing to see if she only just found out, but…

Daphne took his hand and guided it to rest against her stomach. "There's nothing to feel yet," she said softly. "But… it's there."

"Yeah," Harry whispered. "Now… what?"

Daphne rolled her eyes. "Get off your knee, you dolt. I won't be icing it if you inflame it now."

Harry let himself be pushed to his feet. He felt oddly unstead, even with his cane.

"Now," Daphne said, turning back to the tome, "we'll finish translating that inscription. Then I—or we, if you want—will head to St. Mungo's for some preliminary examinations. That's not going to do anything other than tell me again that, yes, I'm pregnant, but I figure you'll feel better about it."

Harry opened his mouth only to close it again. Damn. She was right.

She smiled knowingly at him. "Go on, sit back down, we are only halfway done."

XXXX

Harry still felt unsteady when he sat with Ron in the Leaky Cauldron the next day.

Ron clapped him hard on the shoulder. "'Grats, mate. Thought of a name yet?"

Harry exhaled. "I barely comprehend what the hell this means, and you think I came up with a name?"

Ron raised an eyebrow. "Did you?"

Harry glowered at his beer. "James for a boy, Lily for a girl."

Ron nodded. "Solid choices. Daphne's picks?"

"She hasn't said anything."

Ron elbowed him. "You can guess."

After a sip from his too-warm beer and a grimace, he said, "Probably Andrew for a boy, after her favourite uncle, and Eliza for a girl, after her grandmother."

"Not bad," Ron mused. "At least you lot aren't cursing your brood with a horrid name. Heard Malfoy wants to name his kid Scorpio."

Harry chortled into his glass. "Merlin help that kid!"

Ron raised his glass for a toast. "Aye to that."

XXXX

Every once in a while, Harry would still joke about the curses that once befell him. Then, it became a bedtime story for his daughter, Lily, and later, his son, James. Daphne never stopped rolling her eyes at those. She would pinch him in passing whenever he made a joke about bones vanishing or, and Harry was especially fond of that retelling, that one time his eyebrows caught fire.

Both tended to keep stories about the more morbid curses to themselves.

Bedtime stories about falling for days on end, of rituals under ancient pyramids and "bubble" baths from hell served Harry for years. It fell to Daphne to inject how irresponsible it was to tie yourself to a slab of tone and pray to Merlin that the runic arrays wouldn't simply turn you to dust, but the children loved those stories anyway.

Astoria was named godmother of their third child, seeing how Ron and Hermione were godparents to the oldest and middle child, respectively. It was a boy Daphne named after her favourite uncle, Andrew.

Harry somewhat begrudgingly handed Ron two Galleons that day.

After Neville and Luna's second child, a girl with startlingly pale hair they named Pandora, the family gatherings at the Burrow became quite cramped. Three Potter children, two Lovegoods, one Malfoy (unsurprisingly named Scorpius), three of the new Weasley generation (split between Ron's, Bill's and Charlie's brood) and, depending on availability, Ginny and her husband (famous Quidditch players both) would also be there, which brought the total headcount of children oversaturated with sugar from Mrs Weasley's pies to a staggering ten.

Harry had rarely seen Arthur Weasley more flustered than when he was beleaguered by children and made to tell them stories about their parents. He was, of course, all too happy to do that until Ginny would eventually stop him before he could reveal too much of their bad habits.

Much to Ginny's chagrin, the children loved hearing about her elbow in the butter dish.