Chapter 64:
– Harry Sitri –
I leaned back in the hard wooden chair across from Professor Snape's desk, staring up at the low stone ceiling of his office in the dungeons. "You know, sir," I said, mostly to the ceiling, "it feels like I've lived a whole second lifetime in the past few months."
Snape did not respond.
"Like, genuinely. I think back to who I was on my nineteenth birthday, sitting at the Dursleys' table eating pancakes, and that guy feels like a stranger." I tipped my head forward and let my hands fall into my lap. "I'd never even heard of Hogwarts. I thought my mum was dead. I thought my dad was James Potter. I didn't know I didn't know what a Maou was, didn't know I had an aunt my own age who could freeze a man solid before he finished his sentence."
Snape did not respond.
"It's been amazing, sir. I mean it. Finding my mother, finding my true family, all of it. But it's been a lot. There are days where I sit down and just try to count how many people are depending on me now, and I lose track somewhere around the eighth or ninth name."
Snape did not respond.
"And the women, sir. Don't even get me started on the women…."
Snape did not respond.
"Having a girlfriend is awesome. Having a few girlfriends? Awesome." I held up my hand and started ticking off fingers, then stopped because I was going to run out before I got through the immediate names. "But I have, uh. More than a few. And it's getting harder to juggle them all. Lilja built me a literal scheduling system, sir. There's a calendar. There are color codes. Hermione made a spreadsheet. There's a spreadsheet, sir."
Snape did not respond.
"And then sometimes a few of them are mad at me at the same time, and they're not even mad at me for the same reason, so I can't just fix one thing and have it all sorted." I scrubbed a hand down my face. "I deserve it, mostly. I'm not pretending I don't. But what am I supposed to do about it? Like, practically? When three or four of them are giving me the silent treatment from different directions, what's the actual play to get back on their good side?"
I dropped my hands and looked across the desk, genuinely waiting for an answer.
Snape stared at me.
The silence stretched.
"Mr. Sitri," he said finally. "Why, on this dark and miserable earth, did you think it was a good idea to ask me about women?"
"Because you're older than me, you've got a stable job, and I'm sure you've got a lot of life experience, sir," I said honestly. "You've been around. You've seen things. You strike me as a man who's figured a few things out."
Snape's eyebrows climbed a fraction of an inch up his forehead. For a man whose default expression was carved out of granite, that was the equivalent of dropping his jaw.
From the long worktable along the side wall, a soft snicker cut through the quiet.
Lilja stood in front of a small brass cauldron, sleeves rolled to her elbows, her red hair pulled back in a loose tail. She was not brewing for any class. She just liked to brew her own potions from time to time down here and bug Snape.
"Oh Severus," she said, not looking up from her stirring rod. "You were never much of a ladies' man at Hogwarts. I wouldn't be surprised if you've never been in a relationship since."
Snape made a noise. It was something between a sputter, a wheeze, and the noise a kettle made right before it gave up on life. "I beg your pardon?" he managed, his head whipping toward her so fast I was genuinely worried for his neck.
Lilja tapped her stirring rod twice on the rim of her cauldron and finally looked up, her green eyes bright with mischief. "You heard me," she said. "I distinctly remember you spending sixth year mooning at a certain redhead in the library and never once managing to actually speak to her in a complete sentence. That redhead being me, in case you've forgotten."
"I have not forgotten," Snape said, in a voice that suggested he very much wished he had.
"And then you called her a Mudblood in front of half the castle, which I'd argue did not improve your romantic prospects."
"Lilja…."
"I'm just saying, Severus, your track record speaks for itself." She picked up a pinch of something silvery from a small dish and let it drift into the cauldron. The potion hissed and turned a faint pearl color. "Has there been anyone? Honestly. I've been back for months and I haven't heard you mention a single woman. Not one. Not even a bad date you could complain about."
Snape's lips thinned to the point of vanishing.
I leaned forward in my chair, elbows on my knees, suddenly far more invested in this conversation than I had been thirty seconds ago.
"Sir," I said carefully, "is she right?"
"Mr. Sitri."
"Because if she's right, that does sort of undercut my whole reason for coming to you."
"MR. SITRI!"
"I'm not judging, sir, I'm just recalibrating..."
Snape pressed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger and inhaled slowly through his teeth, the way a man did when he was actively choosing not to magically throw a teenager through a wall.
Lilja did not stop stirring. She just smiled down at her potion like she had not, in fact, set the entire room on fire with two sentences.
"For your information," he said, his voice clipped, "I am in a relationship. Currently. As of this moment."
Lilja's stirring rod paused mid-circle.
"I am dating Professor Babbling," Snape continued. "Neither of us are announcing it. We prefer our privacy, and I would prefer that this room remains the extent of that information's circulation."
Lilja set her stirring rod down on the rim of her cauldron. Her whole face broke into something warm and genuinely surprised, the kind of smile she usually reserved for Asia doing something brave or for Marlene walking into a room. "Severus," she said softly, "that's wonderful. I'm really, really happy for you."
Snape stared at her for a long moment, and something in his shoulders shifted. "Thank you," he muttered, looking sharply back down at his parchment as though he could not believe he had said it.
I grinned, leaning back in my chair and folding my arms behind my head. "See, sir?" I said. "Told you. Ladies' man. You know what's up!"
Snape snorted hard. "I certainly am not, Mr. Sitri," he said. "I have, by some merciful conspiracy of the fates, found one woman willing to tolerate my company."
"Still counts, sir."
He gave me a flat, deeply unamused look, but he did not actually disagree, which I chose to file under "victory."
"That said," he said slowly, "even I am not entirely useless on this particular subject. So I will tell you what I have learned, and you will take it for what little it is worth."
I sat up straighter. Behind him, Lilja did not even pretend to be working on her potion anymore. She had one hip propped against the worktable and her arms folded under her perky chest, watching us with open delight.
"When a woman is angry with you," Snape said, "particularly when she has reason to be, it almost always helps to bring her a gift. Not flowers stolen from the gardens either. Something that requires effort on your part. Something homemade is preferable. Something chocolate is generally better still." His mouth twitched at the corner, the closest he ever came to a smile. "Now then, Mr. Sitri," he said, "get out of my classroom..."
After leaving the dungeons, I spent some time in the Hogwarts kitchens. The house elves had practically been in tears, all of them clustering around me in their tea towels and pillowcases, wringing their tiny hands and begging to be allowed to help.
One of them had been so distraught at the idea of me chopping my own ingredients that she had pressed her face into a dish towel and let out a single squeaky sob.
But I had not budged.
Snape said homemade.
That meant I made it. I did, however, allow them to fetch ingredients, point me at the right cupboards, and stand in a worried little semicircle behind me offering quiet, panicked suggestions whenever I reached for the wrong bowl.
An hour later, I walked out of the kitchens, climbed many flights of stairs, and made my way through the upper corridors of the castle toward Ravenclaw Tower.
I climbed the last spiral of steps and came to a stop in front of the tall oak door at the top, the one with the bronze knocker shaped like an eagle's head.
I shifted the basket of cookies to my other arm and reached up to tap the knocker.
The eagle's bronze eyes blinked open. Its beak parted with a soft click. "I am taken before you have me, yet the moment you find me, you cannot keep me," it said, its voice smooth and faintly amused. "I am freely given, yet the more you spend, the more you may have. What am I?"
I stared at it. I have no fucking clue what it just asked. This is why I do not belong in Ravenclaw…
The eagle waited, patient and infuriating, its bronze head tilted at a slight, polite angle.
I opened my mouth. I closed it. I opened it again. "Taken before you have me?" I repeated slowly, as though saying it out loud would shake something loose. "Right. Okay. Sure. That's a thing."
The eagle's expression did not change.
"A breath?" I tried.
The eagle's silence had a distinct flavor of disappointment.
"A photograph?"
The silence deepened.
"A loan?"
Now it just looked tired.
Before I could throw out another doomed guess, the door swung open from the inside.
Luna stood in the doorway in her Ravenclaw uniform, her tie loose, her radish earrings swaying gently, and the brightest, dreamiest smile I had ever seen plastered across her face. "Harry," she said, like she had just spotted a sunbeam in the shape of a person.
She launched herself at me.
I barely had time to brace before she was in my arms, both of her legs hooking up around my hip, her cheek pressed to mine, her hair tickling my jaw. The basket swung wildly on my elbow and I tightened my hold on her on instinct, one arm sliding under her thighs to keep her up.
"You made us cookies," she said into my ear, her voice singing with delight.
"I— yeah, I did," I said, blinking down at the top of her head. "How did you, do I even ask?"
"You don't have to."
She leaned back just enough to find my mouth and kissed me. It was a soft, smiling kiss, warm and unhurried, her lips tasting faintly of pumpkin juice and something herbal I could never quite place. Her fingers slid up into the hair at the nape of my neck like she had every right to be there, which, fair enough, she did.
When she pulled back, her silvery eyes were bright and far too knowing.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," I said.
"You were doing very well with the riddle."
"I was losing horribly with the riddle."
"You were losing creatively." She kissed the tip of my nose, which somehow felt more intimate than the kiss on the mouth, and slid down out of my arms with a small, satisfied wiggle. "That counts for something." She reached up and lifted the basket neatly off my elbow, cradling it to her chest like I had just handed her a baby owl. The dreamy smile widened into something almost smug. "I'll take these," she said.
"Luna, those are actually for, ah—"
"I know who they're for." She tipped her head. "Sona, Daphne, Tracey, and Astoria. And me, because I answered the door. That's how doors work!"
I did not have a good response to that, so I just smiled at her, because honestly, she was difficult not to smile at. I knew she would deliver the cookies where they needed to go.
Daphne and Tracey were not happy with me for what amounted to a magical kidnapping. From their perspective, I had walked into the library, charmed them both into a sleep so deep they had not stirred until the next afternoon, hauled their unconscious bodies up to a fourth floor classroom, and signed them over to Sona's peerage without their conscious consent. The fact that I had done it to save them from being mind-wiped into baby-making husks by Yaxley, Nott Senior, and Macnair was not, apparently, the get-out-of-trouble card I had hoped it would be. They had appreciated the rescue. They did not appreciate the way it had been delivered.
Astoria did not actually seem angry. But she was sticking close to her older sister in pure, stubborn loyalty, and if Daphne was cold to me, then Astoria was politely chilly by default.
I respected it. I would have done the same for Sona.
And Sona, who was not actually angry with me at all, was somehow the worst one.
She had been avoiding me for the full week after I had returned from my latest adventure with a new custom made weapon.
I had jumped to Ultimate Class.
Sona was still High Class. It was the first time, in the entire stretch of our relationship, that I had been measurably stronger than she was. And to Sona, who had spent her whole life being the prodigy, the heiress, the perfect Sitri daughter who knew more than anyone in the room and worked harder than anyone in the room, that gap was unbearable.
Not because she resented me for it. She would never. It was worse than that. She had decided, somewhere in the careful labyrinth of her own head, that there was nothing left she could teach me. That she had been useful to me when I was a fumbling half-devil with no combat training, and now that I had outgrown her, she did not know what her place was supposed to be…
Which was, in my deeply biased opinion, a complete and utter load of shit. Sona had more to teach me about magical theory, strategy, politics, restraint, and pretty much every form of combat that did not involve me hitting something until it stopped moving, than I would absorb in the next ten years. She was the smartest person I knew who was not Hermione, and Hermione would have agreed with me.
Her place was supposed to be by my side because I loved her and knew she would inevitably catch up to me.
But Sona had decided she was disappointing herself, and Sona, when she decided something about Sona, was a difficult person to talk out of it…
And unfortunately, I couldn't just break into her room and fuck her doggy style again to snap her out of it. Not like I did last time she was avoiding me in Kuoh Town.
She put up a whole bunch of wards to keep me out…
Hence the chocolate chip cookies. Hence me standing in the doorway of Ravenclaw Tower with Luna already eating a cookie, half of which had vanished while I was lost in my own head, crumbs dotting the front of her uniform jumper.
Luna popped the rest of the cookie into her mouth, dusted her fingertips against her skirt, and rose up on her toes one more time to kiss me. It was a quick one, lips a little chocolatey, but no less sweet for it. "They won't be avoiding you much longer," she said, settling back onto her heels with a little hum. "Especially not with the Christmas holiday coming up. People remember they like each other during that time. And there's mistletoe, which is technically a parasite, but it does encourage helpful behaviors."
I huffed out a laugh. "I'll keep an eye out for parasites with romantic ambitions."
"You should. Some of them can even sing!"
"Of course they do."
The thought of devils celebrating Christmas of all things kept tugging at the back of my brain, and I let myself chuckle at it, picturing Serafall in a Levia-tan magical girl outfit that had been retrofitted with red velvet trim and a furry white hood. Sona pretending to be above it all and then quietly accepting every single gift with that small, soft smile she only ever gave to family. Lyra and Lyna in matching reindeer ears. The rest of my peerage and girls all dressed up in similar themed outfits…
Yeah. We were going to have a Christmas. If only for the slutty outfits.
"Goodnight, Harry," Luna said.
"Goodnight, Luna."
The door swung shut between us with a quiet, polished click. The torches on either side of the entrance flickered a friendly blue.
The bronze eagle's eyes opened up again. "Have you an answer for me, young man?"
I sighed up at the ceiling.
…The next few days before winter break passed peacefully, at least by my typical lunatic standards.
I spent every spare hour I had with my peerage, taking each of them on whatever they wanted to do, which turned out to be a remarkably accurate personality test if you ever felt like running one.
Fleur and Gabrielle wanted sex. A lot of sex. I had walked into my room one afternoon, expecting to grab a fresh shirt before Charms, and found the two of them already naked on my bed in a tangle of pale legs and silver hair, Gabrielle's head resting on her sister's stomach while Fleur read a fashion magazine. They had both looked up at me with identical innocent smiles and Fleur had said, very calmly, "We have been waiting. Lock the door." I had been twenty minutes late to Charms. Flitwick had pretended not to notice the lipstick on my collar. The Veela sisters had a system, I was discovering, and that system mostly involved making sure I did not leave their bed under my own power.
Tonks wanted to hang out and listen to music. That was it. She had brought a Muggle record player up to her quarters with Narcissa, plugged it into something Hermione had jury-rigged with a runic battery, and we had spent an entire evening sprawled on her rug in our socks, eating crisps out of the bag, while she made me listen to bands I had never heard of and got pink and excited every time she played one she really loved. Her hair had cycled through every color on the visible spectrum in the space of three hours.
Narcissa liked going shopping. Specifically, Narcissa liked going shopping with a very specific gleam in her eye that I had come to recognize as "I am about to spend a great deal of your money and I expect you to carry my bags." We had spent an entire Saturday wandering between boutiques, with her trying on robes I was not allowed to see until she stepped out of the dressing room, then turning slowly in front of me with the precise expression of a woman who knew exactly how she looked and wanted me to confirm it out loud. I had paid for everything. I had carried the bags. I had been rewarded, very thoroughly, behind a privacy ward in the back of a very discreet lingerie shop, and again later in her quarters, and I was not complaining.
Lyra and Lyna liked doing whatever I wanted to do with them. That was their entire personality on the subject. If I wanted to read, they curled up on either side of me with books they were not really reading. If I wanted to train, they sparred with me in their skimpy maid uniforms and made the entire training time a problem for my focus. If I wanted to nap, they napped. If I wanted them, they were already half undressed before I finished the sentence. They were the easiest dates on the schedule and also, somehow, the most exhausting.
Asia loved cuddling and watching movies. We had spent multiple evenings in a quiet alcove behind the Gryffindor common room, where Hermione had charmed a Muggle laptop into thinking it was at home, watching whatever Disney film Asia had decided was that night's pick. She always sat on my lap with her head tucked under my chin and her hand resting flat over my heart. Some of those cuddle sessions had, very gradually, edged into making out, soft and slow and shy, my hand cupping her face while she gathered her courage in small breathless increments. Once or twice that had drifted into very light petting, my palm sliding up under her cardigan to cup her over her bra, her tiny whimpered gasps against my mouth, before she would press her forehead to mine and ask, in a small voice, if we could just go back to the film. I always said yes. She always thanked me like I had done her a favor, which, somehow, made it harder to say no in the moment but easier to say no overall, because every time I did, she trusted me a fraction more.
Ginny loved flying. We had spent two of the cold mornings before break circling the Quidditch pitch. Now that she was a devil knight, she pulled off more and more daring maneuvers on her broom that she had never attempted before. A triple corkscrew did toss her off her broomstick though. Before her own wings could deploy, I flew up to catch her. She had landed in my arms, breathless and red-cheeked and grinning, and the kiss she had given me had tasted like wind and a small, sharp dare.
Lilja and Rossweisse both enjoyed training with me, which was a kind way of saying that they liked beating the shit out of me in increasingly creative ways. Both Valkyrie sisters wanted me to be as strong as possible as their king and never held back. Both of them kissed the bruises off me afterward. Lilja, in private. Rossweisse, when she thought no one was looking.
On top of all of that, I managed dates with Rias, Jasmine, and Luna.
Rias was easy in the way only Rias could be easy, which is to say not easy at all but constantly making it look that way. We had walked the lake at dusk one evening, her hand in mine, talking about everything and nothing. She had pressed me up against a tree halfway around the lake and kissed me until my brain forgot what we had been talking about, then pulled back with that wicked little smile and said, "Just a sample for what I'm going to give you on Christmas," before tugging me back into motion.
Jasmine had let me take her into Hogsmeade for an actual sit-down dinner. She had worn a dark green dress under her cloak, blushed every time I looked at her too long, and at the end of the night, on the path back to the castle, she had finally been the one to lean in first and kiss me properly, hands fisted nervously in the front of my coat. She had broken off and immediately apologized, and I had laughed and kissed her again until she stopped apologizing.
Luna had taken me on a walk through the greenhouses after curfew, no permission, and had introduced me by name to plants. By name. Six different plants. One of them, she insisted, had a crush on me. I was not going to argue with Luna about a plant's emotional state.
And every single day, without fail, I brought a new kind of sweet up to Ravenclaw Tower.
I handed every basket to Luna at the door.
The girls were not going to avoid me much longer. I could feel it.
I was right.
The morning before winter break was a quiet, half-empty kind of morning. There were no classes. Students were expected to spend the day packing and saying goodbyes to friends they would not see for weeks, and the Great Hall reflected it. The four house tables were patchy with empty stretches, the noise level was lower than usual, and the air was full of the soft scrape of cutlery, low conversation, and the occasional rustle of an owl arriving late with a forgotten letter.
I had just finished breakfast, a plate of bacon, eggs, and toast that Fleur had been picking from with her fingers despite the perfectly good cutlery sitting in front of her, when I sensed them coming before I saw them.
Two familiar magical signatures, side by side, threading their way down the aisle between the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw tables.
Daphne and Tracey stopped at the edge of our bench, both of them in fresh, neatly pressed Ravenclaw robes with blue and bronze trim. They formally switched houses the week they joined Sona's peerage. The official line, as best I could tell, was that the three Greengrass-Davis girls had requested a transfer following "significant changes in their family circumstances".
Most of the students were used to the new robes by now. A handful of the seventh year Slytherin boys still looked actively offended every time Daphne and Tracey walked into the Hall.
Daphne's hands were folded in front of her in the precise way she folded them when she was nervous and refusing to admit it. Tracey, two steps to her left. Astoria was nowhere in sight, which probably meant Luna or Tsubaki had her somewhere upstairs.
"Harry," Daphne said, in her best polished aristocratic voice. "May we have a word?"
Before I could answer, Fleur shifted against my side.
She had been draped across me for most of breakfast, half in her own seat and half in mine, her body soft and warm where she pressed against my ribs. Her silver-blonde hair was loose down her back, one of her thighs hooked over the bench between us, and she had a piece of my toast in her hand that she had not given back. She was every inch a Veela who had decided that her boyfriend was her property and the world could just deal with it.
She lifted her head off my shoulder and looked at the two girls in front of us with a slow, narrow-eyed assessment that I had only ever seen her aim at people she actively disliked.
Then she hissed.
"Salopes," she muttered, low enough that the Hufflepuffs at the next table did not hear it, but easily loud enough for the two girls standing in front of us. "Vous l'évitez depuis des jours, vous lui rendez la vie misérable, et maintenant vous venez ici avec vos petits sourires et vos petites robes pour réclamer son temps. Il vous a sauvées. Sauvées. De vieillards dégoûtants qui auraient utilisé vos ventres comme des incubateurs. Et vous, vous boudez comme des enfants gâtées."
"You've been avoiding him for days, and now you come here to demand his time. He saved you. From disgusting old men who would have used your bellies as incubators. And yet, you're sulking like spoiled children."
Across the table, Hermione very deliberately took a sip of her tea and did not look up from her book, which was Hermione's way of saying that she had heard every word and agreed with at least seventy percent of it.
Lilja, on my other side, raised her eyebrows in mild approval and went back to her porridge.
Daphne's cheeks went pink. Tracey's arms uncrossed and recrossed in a different configuration that I was choosing to interpret as her shifting from "annoyed" to "lightly skewered."
Neither of them said anything for a beat.
I rested my hand against the small of Fleur's back, my thumb stroking once over the fabric of her robes. "It's okay," I said quietly, in French, just for her. "Je m'en occupe."
She gave me a long look. Her blue eyes were a touch hotter than usual, the way they got when her Veela was riding closer to the surface than her manners. Then she huffed, a small, theatrically French sound, and let her head drop back to my shoulder, biting demonstratively into my stolen piece of toast. "Va, mon coeur," she murmured, eyes still on Daphne. "Mais sache que je te surveille."
I bit back a smile and looked up at the two new Ravenclaw devils.
Daphne had recovered her composure, mostly. Tracey looked like she wanted to say something cutting but had reconsidered her odds. Both of them, I noticed, looked sorry in the very specific way that proud people looked sorry when they had not actually said the word yet.
"I'll come," I said, swinging one leg over the bench and standing. I leaned down and pressed a kiss into Fleur's hair on the way up, just to settle her. "Lead on."
Daphne nodded once, very crisply, like she was glad I had not made her say "please."
I followed the two of them out of the Great Hall.
We slipped into an empty classroom on the second floor, one of the old Transfiguration rooms that had not been used in years.
Tracey shut the door behind us with a soft click. Daphne walked a few paces in and then stopped, her hands going back into their precise little fold in front of her. Tracey leaned a hip against one of the dusty desks, arms crossed again, but her shoulders had dropped about an inch since the Great Hall.
Neither of them seemed to know who was supposed to talk first.
I took pity on them. "You both look beautiful, by the way," I said.
Daphne went pink. She glanced sideways toward Tracey as if checking that someone else had heard it too, then looked at the floor.
"Not that you weren't before," I added, shoving my hands into my pockets. "Obviously you were. But becoming devils suits you. Both of you. You look, ah. Genuinely sinful is the word I'm going to use, and I am going to stand by it."
Tracey, predictably, recovered first. She pushed off the desk, walked the three steps over to me, and poked me directly in the center of the chest with one finger. "Honestly," she said, her mouth twitching despite herself. "Why did we think you would behave any differently than to shamelessly flirt with us the second the door closed?"
"Because you've been giving me the cold shoulder for a week and a half," I said. "And I'm a man of consistent character."
"You're a menace, that's what you are!"
"Same thing, isn't it?"
She rolled her eyes, but the corner of her mouth had gone soft in a way that told me she had needed the joke more than she was going to admit out loud.
Daphne finally lifted her head. Her blush was still high on her cheekbones, but her eyes were clear, and her hands had unfolded. "Harry," she said quietly. "Are you angry with us?"
I blinked.
"...For avoiding you," she went on. Her voice was steadier than her face. "For these past days. Fleur was right, you know. She was. We were acting like spoiled children. You saved us. You saved Astoria. We sat on our problem for two months because we were too proud to ask you, and when you finally took it out of our hands, we punished you for the way you did it." Her throat moved. "Which, in hindsight, was childish and unjust. So. I would like to know. Are you angry with us?"
Tracey did not look at me. She was suddenly very interested in a knot in the floorboards near her right shoe.
I exhaled through my nose and crossed the last bit of space between us. I stopped close enough that Daphne had to tip her chin up just a little to keep meeting my eyes.
"No," I said. "Of course I'm not. I was never angry, Daphne. Not for a second."
Her shoulders dropped half an inch. She had been holding them like a soldier at attention without realizing it.
"I was just glad you were alright," I said. "That's it. That's the whole of it. The rest is whatever you needed it to be, and I had no business rushing you out of it."
Tracey made a small, suspicious sound that might have been a sniff. She still did not look up.
I reached out, slow enough that either of them could have stepped back, and brushed my knuckles very lightly against Daphne's cheek. "You're both okay," I said. "Astoria's okay. Your contracts are gone. Your parents can't touch you." My thumb skimmed once along the line of her jaw before I dropped my hand. "Of course I'm not angry. I'm relieved."
Daphne's eyes had gone bright. She blinked twice, fast, like she was determined not to let it show. "That's annoying of you," she said, in a voice that almost held steady. "I was prepared to argue. I had things prepared."
"I figured you might."
Tracey laughed. Her eyes were not crying, but they had clearly considered it. "I hate that you're like this," she said. "You can't just say a nice thing. You have to put a flirt on it!"
"That's just the way I've always been," I told Tracey with a shrug. "Ask anyone who's known me longer than five minutes. Ask Hermione. Ask my mother. Actually, don't ask my mother, that's a trap."
"Noted," Tracey said dryly.
Yeah, she knows… Everyone knows.
I looked between the two of them, hands going back into my pockets, and the moment settled into something quieter and easier than it had been three minutes ago. "So," I said. "Are the two of you looking forward to coming home to Sitri Manor tomorrow?"
Daphne's smile turned wry at one corner. "Yes," she said. "I am, actually. More than I expected. The Greengrass manor hasn't felt like home in years. Not with my parents. Not with what they were always angling for, what they were always grooming us toward." Her mouth twisted. "I was thirteen when I first realized my mother spoke about my marriage prospects the way her steward spoke about livestock prices. By fifteen I had stopped flinching when she did it. By seventeen I had stopped expecting anything else. So. No. The thought of waking up in a place where no one is going to weigh my worth in galleons and bloodlines over breakfast is, in fact, a very welcome thought."
"Good," I said quietly.
Tracey gave a thin, theatrical sniff and lifted a hand. "It's worse for me, actually," she said.
Daphne's wry smile vanished into something gentler and a little pained.
"I wasn't their daughter," Tracey went on, addressing me. "I'm a half-blood. My father, charming bastard that he was, sold custodial rights to the Greengrasses when I was nine. Paperwork, signed in front of two solicitors and a bottle of mead. I was a half-blood ward of an ancient house. Useful for the optics, useful as a contractual chip when the right toad of an old man came along. I had a roof, I had food, I had Daphne and Astoria, and I had to be very careful not to ask too many questions about what I was actually for." She said it lightly. Tracey said most things lightly. But there was a brittle edge under it.
Daphne's hand twitched at her side like she wanted to reach for Tracey's and was making herself wait.
"I'm sorry, Tracey," Daphne said softly. "For my parents. For what they were going to do to you."
"Oh, stop." Tracey waved her off with one hand, but her voice had gone a little thicker. "Stop that. You did what you could. You and Astoria are the only reason I didn't crawl out a window at fourteen and join a Knockturn Alley travelling circus caravan." She made a face. "Although the caravan was, briefly, a real plan."
Daphne pressed her fingers against the bridge of her nose in a gesture I had seen Sona do at least six times a week, and I had to bite down on a smile.
Tracey turned back to me and the brittle edge in her face smoothed into something warmer. She tipped her head, her dark hair sliding over one shoulder, and the grin she gave me was the first really genuine one I had seen out of her in weeks. "Honestly though," she said, "we got a good deal out of it." Tracey turned that grin on me again. It softened, just a little, around the edges. "Thank you, Harry," she said.
"Don't have to thank me."
"I really, really do." Her eyes held mine.
"Same goes for me," Daphne said quietly.
I cleared my throat, suddenly very aware that the air in the room had warmed by several degrees.
"So," Tracey said, hands going to her hips. "Do we all fuck now or what?"
Daphne made a noise that should not have been physiologically possible. Her beautiful, severely composed, fifteen-generations-of-pureblood face went absolutely scandalized. "TRACEY!"
Tracey threw her head back and laughed. "Sorry, sorry," she said, holding up both hands like she was surrendering. "I was trying to do an impression of Assistant Professor Tonks. Have you heard her in the staff corridor when she thinks the students aren't around?"
Daphne let out a long, slow breath through her nose, and then, very deliberately, her eyes flicked back to me. She did not look away. "Noble ladies," she said, in a voice that had gone smooth and even, "do not fuck, Tracey. We make love. With our paramours. Like civilized women." The corner of her mouth lifted, just slightly. Just enough to let me know she was watching to see what I did with that.
The truthful answer was that I could probably have shagged both of them right there in that abandoned classroom if I had wanted to.
Tracey was already halfway there in spirit. Daphne, for all her aristocratic horror at her best friend's vocabulary, had a flush on her face that was not embarrassment anymore.
But it was not the right move. Not for them. Not for me.
They deserved to be courted. And I had liked them, both of them, back when we had only just started spending time together as friends in the autumn. I had liked Daphne's dry humor and her careful, watching intelligence. I had liked Tracey's grin and the way she looked at life in general.
I told them all of this out loud.
Tracey's face did something complicated. The grin stayed where it was, but it dimmed, just a touch, around the corners. Her eyes flicked down to my mouth, then back up, and the disappointment was real and unhidden, even if she was a fraction of a second from covering it up. "Oh," she said. "Well. That's. Romantic of you, you bastard."
"I have my moments..."
Daphne, on the other hand, did not move at all for a long beat. Then she let out a small breath, soft enough that I almost missed it, and dipped her chin in a single, considered nod. The faint smile she had been holding onto warmed by a measurable degree. "Yes," she said quietly. "I would like that."
I shifted the topic before Tracey could get herself into any more trouble.
"How's Sona been, by the way?" I asked. "These last few days. I know I haven't exactly been getting a clear read."
Daphne and Tracey exchanged a look, the kind of look that wasn't really a conversation so much as a quick consultation, and then Daphne tilted her head. "She's been, ah. Fine, I would say. As far as we have been able to tell." She lifted one slim shoulder in a small, hedged shrug. "The truth, Harry, is that we didn't really know her well before we joined the peerage. So I'm afraid we don't have a baseline to compare anything to.
"We don't know what 'tired Sona' looks like, or 'sad Sona,' or 'Sona pretending nothing is the matter.' We only know 'Sona, in front of us, in her usual robes, behaving like Sona.' Which she has been doing flawlessly," Tracey added. "Suspiciously flawlessly, in my professional opinion. But what would I know…?" she trailed off with a cheeky grin.
"I would appreciate," a familiar voice cut in from the doorway, dry as a stack of textbooks, "if there were no gossip behind my back. Especially not from my own peerage."
I straightened up off the desk I had been leaning against and turned.
Sona was standing in the open doorway with one hand still resting on the frame. There was no real anger in her voice. Just that dry, slightly weary tone she used when she was pretending to be put out and was actually pleased to have caught us.
I exhaled. "Sona," I said, and felt myself smile before I had decided to. "There you are. I missed seeing your beautiful face."
Daphne and Tracey, almost in unison, looked at each other.
"He's flirting again," Tracey muttered out of the corner of her mouth. "Already. So easily. Did you see that turnaround? Sona walks in and the flirt just slots back in like a charm."
"Mmhmm," Daphne murmured, and let out a soft, amused laugh.
Sona's gaze moved briefly to the two of them. "Daphne. Tracey. The two of you should go and finish packing. We leave on the train tomorrow morning." It was less of a suggestion and more of an order.
Tracey hooked her arm through Daphne's and steered her toward the door. The door drifted half closed behind them.
I looked across the room at Sona.
Sona looked across the room at me.
Sona's pink eyes shifted behind the lenses of her glasses, the light catching them at a strange angle, and for a second I could see how hard she was working to keep her face composed. "Harry," she said, voice quiet and even. "I owe you an apology."
"Sona..."
"Please. Let me say it."
I shut my mouth.
She took a small, careful breath. "I have been," she said, picking her words the way she picked moves on a chess board, "a jealous, petty, sulking bitch this past week and a half. Because you reached Ultimate Class. Because my sister bargained a legendary sword out of the Lady of the Lake on your behalf. While I, who am supposed to be your aunt, supposed to be your fiancée, supposed to be the one teaching you and supporting you and walking beside you, am still High Class. I sulked. I avoided you. I let you bake me sweets for a week and could not bring myself to come to the door to thank you properly because I was too busy hating myself in the privacy of my own quarters. I have been a bad aunt. A bad fiancée. A bad girlfriend. And you deserved better than that, especially from me."
"Sona," I said. "Don't. Don't call yourself any of that." I closed the gap between us by one step, because if she was going to talk to me like that I was at least going to be close enough that she could see my face when I argued. "You are not a bad anything. You are the person who gave up her entire peerage, her school, and her life in Japan because she decided I was worth starting over for. You are the reason I survived my first week in the Underworld without embarrassing the entire Sitri bloodline. To me, Sona, you are amazing. You always have been."
Her lips parted. "That is the kind of thing," she said slowly, "that I expected you to say."
"Because it's true."
"That, too, is the kind of thing I expected you to say." She closed her eyes for a long moment. When she opened them again, the careful composure was still there, but something underneath it had cracked open the smallest amount, and through it I could see her, the actual Sona, looking at me with the kind of quiet, careful affection that she only ever let out behind locked doors. She stepped closer. "Harry," she said.
"Yes?"
"May I be selfish? One more time? Before we leave for the Underworld tomorrow."
I did not even pretend to think about it. "Yes," I said immediately. "Be as selfish as you want, Sona. Whatever you want. I'm yours."
Her throat bobbed. "Good," she murmured. Her hand came up and she snapped her fingers with a sharp, clean click.
The Sitri magic teleportation circle bloomed beneath our feet.
A second later the light dropped away and I was standing in the middle of a clearing in the Forbidden Forest.
I knew the place at once. It was our clearing.
Sona looked down at her hands in front of her for a long moment. "I am prideful, Harry," she said quietly. "You know that. I do not think it is news to anyone. I have always wanted to reach Ultimate Class entirely on my own. Without my sister's name opening doors for me. Without favors. Without leveraging the Sitri vaults for some bespoke artifact. I wanted to do it the long way, on my own strength, so that I could look in the mirror and know that the title was mine. Earned. Uncontaminated."
None of that surprised me at all. That's just the kind of girl she was.
A small, self-aware breath left her. "And these last days, I have had a great deal of time alone, in my rooms, to sit with the fact that holding onto that pride while sulking at my future husband, who had just leapt past me through no fault of his own, was a uniquely stupid thing to do." Her mouth twitched, ironic and tired. "There are quite literally millions of devils in the Underworld who would sell organs for the position I am in. So I made a decision," she said.
She lifted her right hand.
A long, slender staff materialized in her grip with a soft, ringing chime. It was pale silver-blue, the haft inlaid with delicate streams of darker enamel that looked uncannily like flowing water beneath the surface. The wood, if it was wood, was carved into a series of interlocking spirals that seemed to move very slightly when I tried to look directly at them. At the top, where I half expected a crystal or a blade or some other appropriately serious Underworld implement of war, was a heart.
Behind her glasses, Sona's eyes flicked sideways and her cheeks went a faint, mortified pink. "I requested," she said with great dignity, "a simple, dignified focus. My sister, who delivered the weapon this morning, took certain liberties with the design."
I was about to say something terribly clever about the sparkly blue heart for a focus.
I forgot what it was.
Because the air around her changed.
Her eyes glowed behind her glasses, bright pink cutting through the blue light of her magic. I knew that pressure.
Sona's aura rose around her in a sudden, crushing wave of cold demonic pressure. The ground beneath her feet frosted white. The trees around us groaned as ice spread across their bark in branching patterns. Loose leaves lifted off the ground and spun around her in a slow spiral, caught in the pull of her magic.
The forest shook.
She had done it.
She had reached Ultimate Class.
The corner of Sona's mouth lifted just a sliver, watching my face. "Fight me, Harry," she said simply.
I did not have to think about it. A slow thrill ran down my spine. I lifted my hand. Viviane's sword answered before I fully called it. Silver-blue light spilled into my palm, water and ice twisting together until the blade formed in my grip. The longsword settled into my hand like it had always belonged there, its edge humming with quiet, eager power.
Sona's magic pressed against mine.
Mine rose to meet it.
I grinned at her across the clearing.
"Yeah," I said. "Let's fight."
– Roseweisse –
Rossweisse had never expected to spend the last day before winter break packing away cursed mirrors, vampire stakes, preserved samples, and a rack of enchanted practice blades in a Scottish castle.
Then again, Rossweisse had also never expected to resign from Odin's service by proxy, sleep with a half-devil prince, accept a place in his peerage, and become a Hogwarts student within the span of several days.
Life has become very strange lately. Disturbingly strange. Wonderful, but strange.
She stood in Narcissa Black's renovated Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom, carefully wrapping a silver-inlaid warding compass in protective cloth before placing it into one of the professor's enchanted trunks. The room looked half-disassembled already. The dueling platform had been folded down and shrunk, the enchanted vampire dummies had been stacked neatly against the far wall, and Tonks had apparently labeled three boxes "Things That Bite," "Things That Explode," and "Things Cissa Says Not To Touch."
Rossweisse had chosen not to touch any of them.
Lilja, naturally, had immediately opened the "Things That Bite" box and gotten nipped by a cursed amulet.
Narcissa had simply glanced over and said, "That one bites."
Lilja had sucked on her finger and muttered, "Thanks, I noticed…."
Rossweisse smiled despite herself as she tucked another artifact into the trunk.
Narcissa stood near her desk, sorting parchment into precise stacks. She wore deep green robes that made her pale hair look almost silver in the winter light spilling through the windows. She looked elegant, composed, and terrifyingly comfortable in a classroom full of dangerous objects.
Rossweisse envied that kind of effortless poise.
"So," Narcissa said, without looking up from the stack of papers in her hands, "how are you liking Hogwarts so far, Miss Nornas?"
Rossweisse blinked. "Oh. Um."
Lilja looked up immediately from where she was trying to determine whether a cursed pendant could still bite if she held it with tongs.
Narcissa smiled faintly. "You have not been here long, of course. Still, first impressions can be rather revealing."
Rossweisse folded the protective cloth over one more instrument, buying herself a moment.
"It is amazing," she said honestly. The word came out softer than expected. She cleared her throat and tried again. "It is amazing. Chaotic, dangerous, wildly inefficient in several administrative areas, and the staircases are a workplace hazard, but..." She smiled, and this time it came more easily. "I am happy."
Lilja's expression warmed.
Rossweisse looked down at the compass in her hands. "I am happy that I can just be a student again," she admitted. "Or perhaps for the first time properly. I can attend lessons, study new magical traditions, talk to people my own age, and not spend every waking hour serving some old fart who did not appreciate my work."
Silence.
Rossweisse froze. Then she realized what she had just said. Her face went hot. Very hot. "Oh no," she whispered.
Lilja clapped both hands over her mouth. Her shoulders shook. Narcissa's eyebrows rose with elegant amusement.
Rossweisse closed her eyes and felt her dignity quietly pack its own trunk and leave the room. "I did not mean..." she began. Then she stopped. Because she had meant it.
She had absolutely meant it.
How quickly and shamelessly she had turned on Odin. Her former lord. Her employer. Her commander. The All-Father himself.
A week ago, she would have felt sick with guilt. Now? Now she mostly remembered her unpaid overtime forms, the emergency summons on her days off, the divine errands, the drunken rambling, the fact that Odin had loaned out Harry's favor without even warning him properly, and the centuries of underappreciated Valkyrie labor sitting like a stone in her stomach.
Rossweisse opened her eyes again. "Actually," she said, a little stiffly, "I meant exactly that."
Lilja lost the battle and giggled. "That's the spirit, Rossie!"
Rossweisse huffed. "Do not encourage me."
"I am absolutely going to encourage you."
"You are a terrible sister."
"I am your favorite sister."
"You are my only sister."
"And therefore your favorite by default."
Narcissa smiled as she placed a stack of essays into a leather folder. "For what it is worth, the only old fart at this school is Dumbledore, and he is a very accommodating employer."
Rossweisse placed the wrapped compass in the trunk, then hesitated. There was something else she had wanted to ask. Something since Serafall performed the conversion ritual. It had been necessary. Narcissa had agreed without hesitation.
That did not mean Rossweisse had stopped feeling awkward about it. "Narcissa," she said carefully.
The older woman glanced toward her. "Yes?"
"Are you still certain you are all right with being a Pawn now?"
Narcissa's expression did not change much, but Lilja's attention sharpened immediately.
Rossweisse clasped her hands in front of herself. "I mean, since I took the Bishop position. You had it first. I do not want you to feel as if I displaced you."
Narcissa stared at her for a moment. Then she rolled her eyes. It was not a subtle roll either. It was a beautifully aristocratic, perfectly practiced roll of the eyes that somehow managed to communicate fondness, exasperation, and the idea that Rossweisse was being ridiculous. "I am more than happy," Narcissa said.
"But..."
"No." Narcissa lifted one finger. "None of that. I was never much of a fighter. I can defend myself, certainly, and I have no intention of becoming helpless decoration, but a Bishop piece was wasted on me."
Rossweisse frowned. "You are very magically skilled."
"Yes," Narcissa said. "In the way a wealthy, well-educated pureblood woman is expected to be skilled. Wards, curses, etiquette, dueling enough to avoid embarrassment, household management, and the sort of defensive magic one learns when married to a Death Eater who occasionally mistakes cruelty for conversation." Her voice remained smooth, but something cold passed behind her eyes. Then it was gone. Narcissa continued. "Hermione loves pursuing magic. She devours theory for pleasure. She would dissect an entire magical system with a quill in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. That girl was born to be a Bishop. Far more than me."
Rossweisse could not argue with that. Hermione Granger had already asked Rossweisse six separate questions about Asgardian runic arrays, three about Valkyrie soul mechanics, two about divine contract law, and one terrifyingly specific question about whether Odin's ravens counted as independent sapient messengers or extensions of his will for legal accountability.
Rossweisse suspected Hermione might someday conquer a government by accident.
"And you?" Narcissa said. "You are a proper magical combatant. Ultimate Class. A trained Valkyrie. A woman who can stand beside Harry in a battle and not need someone shielding her every three seconds. Of course you should be a Bishop."
Rossweisse's cheeks warmed. "I suppose."
"You suppose correctly."
Lilja leaned against a nearby desk and grinned. "Listen to Cissa. She is very good at knowing what people are useful for."
Narcissa smiled like a knife wrapped in silk. "Thank you, dear."
Rossweisse relaxed slightly. "Still, I did not want you to feel diminished."
Narcissa laughed softly. "Diminished? My dear, I am free, beautiful, wealthy, young again, and bound to a man who adores me." She folded another robe into the trunk with elegant satisfaction. "I am not a woman who lives for magical research. I enjoy money and means."
Lilja's grin turned wicked. "And sex."
Rossweisse made a strangled sound. "Lilja!"
"What?" Lilja asked innocently. "We all do! Female devils were designed to be shameless sluts. It's in our rewritten DNA."
Narcissa did not deny it. She simply gave Lilja a slow, amused look. "A lady does not need to announce every pleasure she enjoys."
Lilja snorted. "No, but it is much funnier when she does."
Rossweisse felt her face burning.
A sudden, crushing pulse of demonic power rolled through the castle like thunder beneath stone. Every ward in the classroom shimmered at once. The windowpanes rattled. A row of practice daggers clinked together on the wall. One of Tonks's badly labeled boxes gave a startled pop and began smoking.
Rossweisse froze.
Lilja's head snapped toward the windows.
Narcissa's hand tightened around the folded robe she had been holding.
A second aura rose a heartbeat later.
This one was familiar to Rossweisse. Harry. Her King. Her boyfriend. Her ridiculous, beautiful, reckless boyfriend who apparently could not go one week without causing, attracting, or cheerfully participating in some kind of supernatural event.
But the other aura...
Lilja's green eyes widened. "Sona Sitri has reached Ultimate Class?" The disbelief in her voice was genuine.
Rossweisse felt it too. Sona's power had changed completely. It was oppressive. The kind of power that made lesser beings instinctively remember they had errands somewhere else.
The castle shuddered again. Dust drifted from the ceiling.
Narcissa looked up with one elegant brow raised. "Their power is making the castle literally shake, and they are in the forest."
Rossweisse's training took over before her embarrassment could. "I will go put up a barrier around them," she said quickly. "If they are both fighting at Ultimate Class level near Hogwarts, the collateral damage could breach the outer ward layers, disturb the forest population, damage the repaired stadium, or cause panic among students still packing."
Narcissa smiled warmly and waved one hand toward the window. "See? You are already fulfilling your role perfectly."
Rossweisse blinked. Her role. Harry's Bishop. For years, her role had meant serving Odin. Filing reports. Running errands. Fixing other people's mistakes while being thanked with more work and no overtime. Now her role meant protecting Harry's world. His people. Their family.
She liked that far more than she was ready to say out loud. "Thank you," Rossweisse said, then vanished in a flash of blue teleportation light before Lilja could tease her into blushing harder.
The Forbidden Forest appeared beneath her.
Cold air rushed around her as she rematerialized twenty meters above the trees. Her new devil wings burst from her back on instinct, black and elegant, catching the air with a flex that still felt strange and wonderful.
She hovered above the treeline and looked down.
The clearing below had become a battlefield.
Harry stood on one side, Viviane's sword in his hand. The blade shone silver and blue, water and ice twisting along its edge like living magic. Every motion he made left trails of frost-bright light in the air. His black hair was windswept, his wings spread behind him, and he wore a grin so wild and delighted that Rossweisse's stomach fluttered.
Of course he was smiling.
Sona stood opposite him. Rossweisse had known Sona Sitri was beautiful. Everyone with functioning eyes knew that. But now, with power flooding around her, glasses gleaming, pink eyes alight, and her dark hair whipping in the magical wind, she looked less like a student and more like the heir of an ancient demonic house.
In her hand was a staff.
Rossweisse's gaze locked onto it.
The staff was gorgeous. It was also very powerful.
Rossweisse felt a sharp little pang of jealousy before she could stop it. Where could she get a staff like that?
She pushed the thought aside with great dignity, then immediately admitted to herself that she would be thinking about it later. She wondered how much sex she'd have to have with her new king before he spoiled her with a weapon like that too?
Below, Harry moved first. He lunged across the clearing with speed that would have turned most opponents into scattered limbs before they finished blinking. His sword swept upward, trailing a ribbon of water compressed so tightly it gleamed like glass.
Sona met him head-on. Her staff spun once in her hand, the heart focus flashing.
A crescent wall of ice erupted between them.
Harry's blade cleaved through it.
Ice shards exploded outward in every direction, slicing through trees, carving trenches into frozen earth, and whistling high enough that Rossweisse had to tilt one wing to avoid a piece the size of a spearhead.
"Right," she muttered. "Barrier first. Admiring Sona Sitri's staff later."
She raised both hands. Norse runes and Sitri demonic circles bloomed around her at once, silver and blue overlapping in complex layers. The old Valkyrie part of her shaped the structure, precise, geometric, disciplined. The new devil part of her fed it raw demonic power through Harry's peerage bond, warmer and deeper than anything she had cast before.
The result unfolded beautifully.
A vast translucent dome spread over the clearing, sinking between trees and anchoring into stone, root, and wardline. It formed in three layers. The innermost was flexible, meant to absorb shockwaves. The middle layer diffused stray elemental energy. The outer layer hid the worst of the pressure from the castle and redirected excess force harmlessly into the ground.
Rossweisse let out a slow breath.
Then Harry and Sona clashed again.
His water sword slammed against her staff with a ringing crack that sent ripples across the barrier. Blue sparks and shards of ice burst between them. Sona stepped in, not back, and twisted her staff under Harry's guard with flawless control. The heart-shaped focus struck his ribs with a blast of compressed cold.
Harry flew backward through three trees.
Rossweisse gasped.
Then he erupted from the splintered wood laughing.
Sona adjusted her glasses with one hand, breathing hard but smiling faintly.
Rossweisse stared down at them, wings beating slowly in the winter air.
She had joined a family of lunatics. Powerful, beautiful, emotionally complicated lunatics. And somehow, impossibly, she had never felt more at home.
– Lilja –
While Rossweisse handled the sensible work of making sure their King and his aunt did not accidentally crack Hogwarts in half, Lilja made her way down through the castle.
She felt the duel through the stones as she descended.
Harry's power was bright, wild, and joyful, like a storm laughing as it broke against a cliff.
Sona's was colder, sharper, and more disciplined, but now it carried a depth Lilja had not felt from her before. Ultimate Class suited her. It settled around Sona like a crown.
Lilja smiled to herself. Good. Harry had missed her. Sona had missed him. If the two of them needed to work through that with a fight intense enough to rattle every window in the school, then so be it.
Rossweisse would keep the castle standing. Probably.
Lilja reached the entrance hall and found Marlene McKinnon waiting near the great doors.
Marlene looked incredible, as always. The blonde witch wore a fitted winter cloak in deep burgundy over a black dress that hugged her curves in ways that would have made half the castle walk into walls. Her hair fell in glossy waves around her shoulders, her lips were painted dark red, and her blue eyes lit up the moment she saw Lilja.
Beautiful. Lilja had loved many strange things in two lives, but seeing Marlene alive and smiling still felt like a miracle with legs.
"Marley," Lilja said softly.
Marlene's teasing expression softened at once.
Lilja crossed the last few steps and pulled her into a hug. Marlene hugged her back hard.
For a moment, neither of them said anything. They simply held each other in the entrance hall of Hogwarts, surrounded by old stone, winter light, and twenty years of stolen time.
Then Lilja drew back just enough to kiss her.
Marlene made a pleased little sound against her mouth. "Mmh. Hello to you too, Lily."
Lilja should have corrected her. She usually did. Not this time. She let herself smile against Marlene's lips before pulling away.
Marlene's eyes flicked over her face, warm and amused. "So, why did you call me here and tell me to stop by before everyone vanishes for winter break?" Marlene's smile turned wicked. "Unless this is another invitation to a threesome, because I will happily accept."
Lilja snorted. The absurd thing was that Marlene sounded completely sincere. Just cheerfully ready to rearrange her day if sex with Harry and Lilja was on the schedule.
Lilja loved that about her. "Maybe later tonight," Lilja said. Marlene's eyebrows rose. "But that is not why I asked you here." Lilja's smirk faded a little. She stepped back, giving herself room to breathe, because this mattered. This was not a joke, not flirting, not one more messy indulgence in the wonderfully impossible life Harry had built around himself. This was family. "The peerage is going to the Underworld for winter break," Lilja said.
Marlene's expression shifted. "Oh?" Marlene looked down briefly, smoothing one hand over the front of her cloak. "That sounds lovely," she said.
"It will be," Lilja said, before continuing. "But humans cannot join us this time."
"How disappointing…" Marlene admitted with a grimace. "The vacation in Japan was the most fun me or my daughter had in years. I could do without the plane crash on the way back though…"
Lilja reached into the pocket of her robes. Her fingers closed around two small objects. When she pulled them free, Marlene blinked. Two pawn pieces rested in Lilja's hand. They were not ordinary chess pieces.
Marlene stared. Her lips parted. "Lilja… Are those what I think they are?"
"These are for you and Jasmine," Lilja said with a nod. This had been discussed with Harry and the rest of the peerage of course. "If you both accept…"
XXX