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lomonaaerenTitle: Not Resigned
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Ron/Hermione
Rating: R
Content Notes: Angst, ignores the epilogue, Dark Harry, Master of Death Harry, non-linear narrative, tense changes (present tense in present-time narrative, past tense in flashbacks)
Wordcount: 5000
Summary: Rumors are spreading in the wake of the war that Harry Potter has gone Dark. Hermione and Ron are the only ones who know the truth—he has, and they’re going to follow him regardless. Their paths will always lie together.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This prompt is from PizzaCanBePoetsToo, who asked for a Harry/Ron/Hermione story where people suspect Harry of going dark (either in school or after the war) and Ron and Hermione supporting him regardless. The title comes from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Dirge Without Music,” quoted below.
Not Resigned
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Hermione—The Intelligent, The Witty, The Brave
BOY-WHO-LIVED SACKED FROM THE AUTORS?
Hermione rolls her eyes as she puts the paper down. “How can they sack you when you were only in Auror training, not an actual employee of the Ministry?” she mutters.
Harry gives her a fleeting smile across the table. “Most people will probably know what they mean,” he says, and wandlessly Summons his cup of tea from across the kitchen. “I’m more surprised that they put the question mark after it. They have to know it’s true.”
“Show-off,” Ron mutters, half-dozing in the chair halfway between Harry and Hermione.
Hermione shakes her head at him. Ron was probably referring to Harry’s magic, not the article. It always takes him a little while to catch up on the subjects of conversation on mornings when they have to get up early.
“I can Summon yours, too,” Harry points out.
Ron gives a wordless grumble, so Harry does, and sets the cup down in front of Ron with a wicked grin. Ron leans forwards to grab it, and Harry grabs his hand in turn, drawing Ron across the table to kiss him so hard that Ron gives a little squeak. When Ron sits back and manages to cradle the cup between his hands, he’s looking considerably more awake.
Hermione smiles at them, and then stands up and walks around the table to kiss Harry, because she kissed Ron thoroughly that morning before they came down from the master bedroom at Grimmauld Place. “We all deserve something nice for not going to set the Prophet offices on fire,” she murmurs.
Harry surges up to meet her halfway down, and Hermione loses herself happily in one reminder of why they’re doing this.
*
The first time she and Ron found Harry practicing Dark magic in Ron’s room at the Burrow, he flinched and hunched in on himself. Then he took a deep breath and faced them, ready—Hermione realized now—to explain himself, but to have them walk away after that.
She and Ron stared in silence at the reanimated bat that was flapping slowly around the room, a skeleton with flickers of dark-blue lightning dancing over it in place of flesh.
“Magic’s building up inside me,” Harry said quietly. “I can’t control it well. And when I don’t cast spells, I get nightmares. I’ve tried with regular spells, small things, charms and shit like that. I cast the Patronus over sixty times the other day. But it doesn’t work. It has to be Dark spells, or necromancy, to really get rid of it. Like that.” He nodded at the bat.
“Does this have something to do with the Deathly Hallows?” Hermione asked. It was the logical conclusion, but she knew almost nothing about necromancy, and she wanted to clarify matters.
Harry nodded. “They—aren’t here, but they’re connected to me. My holly wand casts far more powerful and destructive spells than I could ever manage before, easily, and it casts like the Elder Wand felt the one time I used it. I can sense the spirits of the dead wherever I go, and I know I could summon them if I wanted. And all it takes for me to be invisible is to will myself that way.” He gave them a fleeting grin. “When Kingsley came the other day and wanted to talk to me, and he couldn’t find me? I was still right in the gardens. I just didn’t want to be found.”
“Blimey, mate,” Ron said, and walked over to sit down on the bed. Harry stared at him. Ron ignored the way that the bat had settled onto Harry’s shoulder, although Hermione saw him give a shiver of discomfort. “Why didn’t you say?”
“What was there to say?” Harry’s voice was light, his eyes hard. “Hi, you lot, I’m using Dark Arts now and I don’t think I can stop unless I want magic to leak out of my skin and make the room explode, I expect our friendship to end any day now.”
“Berk,” Ron said without heat. “Of course it’s not going to end.”’
“Didn’t you hear me?” Harry’s voice rose a little, and Hermione came a step nearer, too, making sure to shut the door behind her. “I can’t stop it. I’ve tried. That’s what happened the night I accidentally set my bed on fire, Ron. I woke up and there was—it was fucking Fiendfyre—”
“How easy is it for you to cast something non-destructive?” Hermione asked.
Harry shot her a sidelong glance. “I told you about the Patronus.”
“So it’s the power level, not the nature of the magic?”
“Yeah. I can’t…it’s hard to cast a charm that just cleans up a small mess now. It has to be huge, or it doesn’t work. Making it wandless does help, a little.”
Hermione nodded, her mind busy with the implications. “So what we need is to make sure that you have enough outlet in your day-to-day life so you don’t have to worry about things like setting your bed on fire when you go to sleep.”
Harry’s eyes flashed. “No, what we have to make sure of is that you’re well away from me when the whispers about how I’m going Dark start.”
Hermione fixed him with a withering glare, and was pleased to see that at least that still worked. Harry half-flopped back on the bed and winced. “You managed to control the Fiendfyre,” Hermione said. “Yes, setting fires in your sleep is hardly ideal.”
Ron snorted.
Hermione reached out to swat him without looking away from Harry. “But we’ll take precautions to make sure that you know and understand the nature of all the spells you cast, and it should be fine.”
“It’s not fine.”
“It’s not ideal,” Hermione repeated firmly. “Harry. Why did you think we would stop being your friends over this? Haven’t we proven that no matter what, you can trust us? That we’ll walk at your side?”
Despite herself, hurt crept into her voice. Harry’s eyes softened, and he reached out and took one of her hands. “Of course. But you know what people say about Dark Arts. And necromancy? That’s the worst thing of all. There’s a reason Voldemort was looking for the Elder Wand and Dumbledore wanted to keep it from ever being used. I don’t ever want to become the kind of person who hurts you. That really would kill me.”
Hermione shook her head. “We won’t let that happen to you.”
Harry laughed hollowly. “How can you stop it? The Deathly Hallows are more powerful than you.”
Ron hissed softly and shook his head when Harry turned to him in bewilderment. “Bad move, mate,” he said. “Really bad move.”
Hermione didn’t explode into a lecture the way she wanted to, but only because she worked hard at keeping her temper under control. She did narrow her eyes and say, “Harry James Potter, if you don’t think that we can find a way to temper the influence of the Deathly Hallows when we destroyed Horcruxes, traveled in time, flew on thestrals, and got rid of Umbridge, you are dead wrong.”
*
“We’ll probably have to take care of her.”
Hermione sighs and nods in response to Ron’s comment, eyeing the article that came out this morning. The one yesterday about Harry being “sacked from the Aurors” was one thing, but this one implies that Harry is response for a string of accidental deaths that are supposedly really murders, and he should be arrested or at least questioned.
Harry had nothing to do with those deaths—Hermione and Ron should know—but too much Auror investigation will reveal the Dark Arts that Grimmauld Place is crawling with.
Skeeter actually did register as an Animagus right after the war, so that line of controlling her is out. But Hermione smiles as she thinks of a contract she once had the members of the Defense Association sign, and what kind of eagerness Skeeter might show to sign one that would promise her exclusive interviews with Harry Potter.
There’s never any question that she’d break it. And then suffer the consequences.
“You have your plotting face on, love.”
Hermione tilts her head back and smiles at Ron. She loves him more every day, something she once believed wasn’t possible. But then again, there was no Harry in the picture then as other than their best mate. Hermione thinks she and Ron would have had a happy marriage, but not a joyful one.
Now, they do, even if no one else in magical Britain recognizes the vows they swore to each other in the shelter of a circle of standing stones. Hermione has made a point all her life of accepting and recognizing what’s important to her, like freeing house-elves, whether or not other people believed in it.
They have Harry and each other, and that’s all that matters.
“Want to watch me draw up the contract that’s going to entrap Skeeter and curse the shit out of her the minute she breaks it?”
“Actually curse the shit out of her? George was talking about inventing something that could do that once…”
Hermione laughs, and Harry, who’s across the library researching one of his weird projects that takes in half a dozen books and sixteen kinds of sideways thought, looks up and smiles at them. Hermione turns back to her work with a will.
There are lots of things she regrets, but being with Harry Potter and Ron Weasley will never be one of them.
Ron—The Beautiful, The Tender, The Kind
“Come on, Ron. You can tell me. Is Harry Dark?”
Ron looks steadily over his mug of Firewhisky into Bill’s eyes. Fleur had Baby Dominique just a few days ago, and Ron and Hermione and Harry, along with other family members, have taken turns rotating in and out of the cottage so Bill and Fleur can both get some sleep and the house doesn’t turn into a dust museum. (And also so Mum doesn’t spend all her time there trying to simultaneously hold the baby and cook everything in existence).
“Why are you asking?”
Bill flinches, just a little. Ron nods. “Yeah, I do need a reason.”
“It’s just...the goblins…” Bill trails off.
“The goblins who didn’t accept Harry’s formal apology for breaking into the bank or the huge fine he paid them when he moved his Galleons and still want to behead him? Yeah, Bill, don’t give me that bollocks. I get that it’s your job, but there’s no way I’m helping lure my best mate to his death just so that you can keep your job.”
Best mate, and husband. Ron’s really glad that no one in his family is a Legilimens, even if living with Mum sometimes felt like it, and won’t understand the smug feeling he has right now as he thinks of the morning that started with fucking Harry into the mattress.
“If we knew if the rumors were true or not, then I think they probably would accept the apology and the fine. They just want to know if he’s a Dark Lord and is going to bring fire and ruin down on their bank.”
“They can decide without knowing that. Harry wouldn’t do that anyway. And there’s a big difference between going Dark and being a Dark Lord.”
“Not really,” Bill begins, pedantic as always. He was interested in History in school, and now he goes off, telling Ron how Dark wizards are always aiming at Dark Lordship—or Dark witches at Dark Ladyship—and how assuming anything else is the goal is just naïve.
Ron sits there and pretends to be fascinated. It’s not something he gets away with anymore when Hermione does the lecturing, so this is a good chance to test some skills that might otherwise wither.
And he thinks about the moment when Harry really realized that they were all in this together.
*
By now, Harry didn’t have to speak to summon Fiendfyre. It was the sort of Dark spell that spilled a lot of energy and was better for him to exercise during the day and when he was awake, to prevent repetitions of the bed-burning incident.
Ron and Hermione stood with hands clasped just outside the stone ring whose location they’d found on a map in the Black family library. The map had simply appeared one day, not long after Harry had started researching what it really meant to be the Master of Death. On it were stone circles, rivers that contained Dark magic, Unplottable locations perhaps only a few meters in diameter that could be used as hiding places, and old caches of Galleons, Potions ingredients, and the like.
Hermione had said it was probably because Harry had fully accepted that he was Dark now. Ron said it was because the Blacks were a lot of arseholes, and took joy in the way Harry’s eyes lit up with laughter then.
And in the middle of this stone circle, the most powerfully protected of all, they watched Harry pace around the fire he’d summoned. It swayed in front of him, forming eyes and legs and talons and tentacles, but not taking the form of any one beast just yet.
Watching him.
Ron watched Harry dip his head and extend his hands. He was aware that his breath was coming short and sweat soaked down his face. Hermione gave him a concerned look, leaning nearer and murmuring, “We talked about the theory and practiced the motions over and over again. It’s going to be okay.”
Ron nodded. That was right. That was true. He didn’t think he could explain that, right now, only a little bit of what he was feeling was natural fear for Harry.
The rest was because, well.
Harry was fucking arousing like this.
Head tossed back, eyes shining like a great cat’s in the light of the fire, arms crossed, Harry looked as if he could take on the Fiendfyre singlehandedly without a wand and never lose. And when he bowed his head a little further to the fire, it seemed that it had finally chosen the course they’d hoped it would take. It bowed back.
And Harry and the Fiendfyre began to dance.
It was a subtle pattern at first, the fire spinning out long tendrils that grew so thin they didn’t set Harry alight when they brushed against his arms, and Harry shuffling his feet in small motions. But it grew wilder and wilder, broader and broader. Soon Harry was dancing so fast that long trails of sweat soaked his shirt, and he pulled it off and threw it away.
Ron and Hermione both stared at his chest. Ron knew it, and although Hermione blushed and probably would have denied it if anyone had asked her, she knew it, too.
The fire spread out and burned the ground inside the ring of stones, and finally reared up in a great basilisk, swaying back and forth as if to the pipe of a snake-charmer. Harry spun and dipped, and the basilisk turned backwards, forming and reforming in the flames so that it pointed the opposite way.
Harry, face blazing with delight, turned on his foot and threw himself forwards into the Fiendfyre’s embrace.
Hermione choked on a scream. Ron grabbed her hand, and she grabbed his back hard enough to split the skin.
This was the part that had only been theory until now, of necessity. They couldn’t test it with a smaller fire or a less extreme move because the theory required that Harry show absolute trust in the Fiendfyre, and playing it safe wouldn’t work.
But if worked…
Ron let out a whoop of relief as he saw the fire recede from its center and the rising platform of red and gold flames there, cradling Harry, who tossed his head back in exhaustion and contentment.
And exultation. There could be no doubt of that. Harry had embraced the Fiendfyre, and it would help him control his tendency for his magic to build up unless it found release in powerful spells, and wield his necromancy instead of it wielding him.
Next to Ron, Hermione was crying. Ron wrapped an arm around her, and then that didn’t seem good enough, so he turned and kissed her fiercely, backing her up to one of the standing stones and winding his fingers in her hair.
“Ron!” she protested through her tears, but she was laughing, too. And a second later, she wrapped her hand around the back of his neck and gave as good as she got.
They both looked up as the fire died out and Harry paced slowly towards them, crossing the line of stones a minute later. His eyes still burned; Ron wasn’t surprised to see a small, dancing flame in the center of them. And he was looking at them as if they were the ones who had performed some impossible feat.
“What?” Ron asked, and realized how much he wanted to kiss Harry.
It must have showed on his face, or something, because Harry said in a low voice, “You—you stayed with me, even through all that. You watched me jump into a fire and you accepted that I had to do it. And now, you want to stay at my side even though—even though…”
Ron remembered that he was a Gryffindor and decided that hesitation was for other people. He reached out, without letting go of Hermione’s hand, and grabbed Harry’s trousers, dragging him close enough to kiss.
Harry gasped, then went along with it. His lips were burning, burning hot, the tongue he swept out to meet Ron’s as sharp-prickled as lightning. Hermione came up on the other side, and Ron turned his head to kiss her, and then stopped back and watched his girlfriend and his best mate snog like the world was dying.
It was really fucking good.
Harry swallowed and stepped back and said, “To the end, then.”
“To the end,” Hermione said, eyes brilliant.
“To the end,” Ron echoed, but had to add, “You really thought you were going to scare us off with a little fire? Honestly, mate. We lived in the same dormitory as Seamus Finnigan for six years, remember?”
And Harry laughed, a booming sound, full and free, and if it had the crackle of fire along its edges, well, that just made Ron want to hear what other sounds would be like now that Harry had been through the fire.
*
“So the goblins might be interested in capturing me somewhere, or taking me down if they think I’m on the path to becoming a Dark Lord.”
Harry’s voice is resonant and low. Then again, Ron is lying with his cheek on Harry’s chest while he says it, so that makes sense.
Hermione looks up from the book that she’s reading on the other side of their enormous bed. “That means that you need to reach out to the werewolves sooner rather than later.”
“I mean, I was already going to do that to offer them Wolfsbane, Hermione.”
Ron shakes his head a little. One thing he will never get used to is the fact that Harry is actually competent in Potions now.
“I know. But now you can trade that for bodyguard duties. You know how some of the packs are. A mutual exchange will go over much better with them than the idea that they’re accepting charity.”
Harry sighs, long and low, making Ron’s head bounce and his sore arse ache deliciously. “So then Bill and other people will think that I am becoming a Dark Lord because I’m courting the werewolves.”
“You can’t control what they think,” Ron says firmly, a moment before he knows Hermione would have said the same thing. “Yeah, maybe they’ll decide that. And maybe some other people will think they should stalk you or ambush you, and we’ll take care of them like we took care of Skeeter.”
Hermione chuckles a little. Sure enough, they offered Skeeter a contract for “exclusive interviews” based on the idea that she would stick to the truth, and she broke it. Now her body is so stricken with arthritis that she can’t get out of bed. Which is no one’s fault but her own, and can’t be blamed on them, since breaking the contract also laid a spell of silence on her.
“That was kind of extreme,” Harry mutters.
“So was that article she penned about you ‘stealing’ me from Ron just because we all live together.”
Harry finally laughs at that, and Ron curls closer to him. Harry reaches down and strokes his hair.
This, Ron thinks, is what happiness feels like, Dark Arts and all.
Harry—Not Resigned
Harry wakes up in the early morning, blinking a little. They were up late last night revising the contract for the werewolf negotiations, and he doesn’t actually remember falling asleep.
But everyone somehow drifted into their accustomed positions anyway. Hermione is lying with her head on most of the pillows, most of the blankets tucked around her, snoring away. Ron is flopped over so that he faces the left side of the bed, his arm dangling in midair in a way that would wake Harry up with pain in seconds, his eyes firmly closed and his face wedged under one pillow.
And Harry is between them, cradled by Hermione’s back and Ron’s, the way it always ends up.
The way they’ve been supporting him since they became friends, really.
Harry leans back, one hand resting on each of them, and thinks about the moment when they acknowledged what else had grown between them.
*
The standing stones where Harry had danced with Fiendfyre looked different on this bright spring evening. Grass had grown back, and rustled softly in the breeze. Here and there, snowdrops peeped out, and Harry saw brighter flowers he didn’t know the names of, small yellow and purple ones. Random light from the moon glinted and caught on the ancient inscriptions in the stones.
He entered through two of them, and Ron entered from another point roughly a third of the way around the circle, and Hermione from between another two roughly a third of the way down from that.
She wore flowing blue robes that were edged with silver, and her hair hung past her shoulders. She kept threatening to cut it, but hadn’t yet. She carried a white lacquer box with their three rings in it, and smiled so hard that Harry was afraid her face was going to start hurting.
Ron wore red-gold robes, because of course he would, and carried the first food they would eat together after they were married, a plate of steaming cakes with honey baked in the middle. He’d tried to make them first, then Hermione, but in the end, it was Harry’s cooking skills they’d had to call on.
And Harry wore black robes with an edging of red, and carried the wand that would bind them.
It was enough.
When they met in the middle of the circle, Ron laid the plate down carefully off the side and cast a charm that would keep ants and flying bugs away. Hermione opened the box with the rings. Harry held out the wand and met his friends’, his lovers’, eyes wordlessly. If they wanted—
“Stop telling us with eye-language to abandon you, mate,” Ron said. “It’s not going to work.”
Hermione just narrowed her eyes at him, which was a way of saying the same thing. Harry snorted, took one of the rings out, and drew the wand, elder under its veneer of holly, through the air. A streak of golden fire followed it, and he took a deep breath.
“Hermione Jean Granger,” he said softly, “Ron Bilius Weasley, I would bind myself to you for this night and all the nights to come, until all three of us pass from this earth. I would offer my heart, my body, my magic to the protection and cherishing of you. I would stand between you and any danger that threatens. I would hold you lightly, leaving you free to come and go when you wished, and hold you strongly, so that you would never doubt you were loved. It would be my great honor if you made these vows with me.”
When he finished speaking and slipped the ring onto Ron’s left ring finger, both of them were blinking back tears. Hermione cleared her throat and took the second of the rings from the box, handing it to Ron, then reached for the wand. Harry relinquished it to her, and she repeated the motion that he had. This time, a streak of blue fire joined the hovering golden one.
“Ron Bilius Weasley, Harry James Potter,” she murmured. “I would bind myself to you for this day and all the days to come, until all three of us pass from this earth. I would offer my heart, my body, my magic to the protection and cherishing of you. I would speak words that would save us, no matter what they were. I would hold you gently, so that you would never doubt you were loved, and I would hold you powerfully, so that nothing could take you away. It would be my great honor to answer the first vow and to make way for the third.”
She held out her hand, fingers spread, and Ron slid the ring onto the fourth finger of her right hand. Hermione blinked and blinked, and then turned and offered the wand to Ron, too.
Ron bowed his head and smiled at both of them, spinning the wand with a little extra flourish. The streak that joined their fire in the air was red.
“Harry James Potter, Hermione Jean Granger, I would bind myself to you for this twilight and all the twilights to come.” Ron’s voice was steady and deep. “Until all three of us pass from this earth. I would offer my heart, my body, my magic to the protection and cherishing of you. I would go with you into the darkness, no matter where it leads us. I would hold you happily, so that you would be able to share my joy, and I would hold you mournfully, so that your sadness might be reduced. It would be my great honor to finish these vows and bind us, all three.”
Hermione plucked the third ring from the box and slid it onto the index finger of Harry’s right hand.
The air in the circle abruptly tightened around them, humming, and Harry thought he could hear an immense voice singing far away. It had the voice of Fiendfyre, but most music did, to him, since the dance. He held out his hands, and Ron and Hermione moved in, each taking one.
Light flashed around their circle, in all three of the colors they had summoned, gold and blue and red, and settled into the middle, appearing as a bright burst of fire for a moment. Then it fled, and Harry closed his eyes. He could feel light, pulsing bonds connecting him to Ron and Hermione, both of them filled with indistinguishable joy.
They wouldn’t always be able to feel those bonds, he knew, more was the pity. They would only show up at moments of heightened emotion.
But for now, as Ron reached down and picked up the plate to hand around the honeycakes they would break and feed to each other, it was enough.
*
“Oh, come on.”
“Yeah, I wish she would,” Ron agrees over his shoulder.
Hermione opens her mouth to continue her lecture about why it would benefit Harry to reach out to the vampires as well as the werewolves, but Harry’s heard enough. They’re supposed to be having sex, not thinking about potential Dark Lord moves twenty-four-seven. He leans over and licks Hermione’s clit with a thoroughly dirty slurping sound.
Hermione shrieks, and her spread legs spasm. Harry tucks his hands beneath them to keep them in place—he loves being held by Hermione, but not when she’s trying to squash his ears with her thighs—and settles into the serious business of making her come with his mouth.
It never takes long when he’s this determined and when Hermione is finally paying attention, and in short order, she’s a trembling mess in the middle of the bed, gasping and groping for one of them or the other with shaking hands. Unfortunately for her, Harry, the closest one, has already come and isn’t much good to her, but Ron hasn’t and is more than willing to slip inside her and help her along to a second climax.
Harry watches them, warmth filling him, and not just because it’s bloody sexy to watch them go at it. He has his best friends, his husband and wife, by his side, forever, and nothing he can do will drive them away.
Even if he ends up a Dark Lord, which at the moment doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility.
Less politics, Harry scolds himself when Ron reaches out, and Harry grasps his hand and holds on through the cursing and the calling and the coming.
They have their whole lives for politics, but they only have one now.
And Harry intends for all three of them to make the most of it.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Ron/Hermione
Rating: R
Content Notes: Angst, ignores the epilogue, Dark Harry, Master of Death Harry, non-linear narrative, tense changes (present tense in present-time narrative, past tense in flashbacks)
Wordcount: 5000
Summary: Rumors are spreading in the wake of the war that Harry Potter has gone Dark. Hermione and Ron are the only ones who know the truth—he has, and they’re going to follow him regardless. Their paths will always lie together.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This prompt is from PizzaCanBePoetsToo, who asked for a Harry/Ron/Hermione story where people suspect Harry of going dark (either in school or after the war) and Ron and Hermione supporting him regardless. The title comes from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Dirge Without Music,” quoted below.
Not Resigned
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Hermione—The Intelligent, The Witty, The Brave
BOY-WHO-LIVED SACKED FROM THE AUTORS?
Hermione rolls her eyes as she puts the paper down. “How can they sack you when you were only in Auror training, not an actual employee of the Ministry?” she mutters.
Harry gives her a fleeting smile across the table. “Most people will probably know what they mean,” he says, and wandlessly Summons his cup of tea from across the kitchen. “I’m more surprised that they put the question mark after it. They have to know it’s true.”
“Show-off,” Ron mutters, half-dozing in the chair halfway between Harry and Hermione.
Hermione shakes her head at him. Ron was probably referring to Harry’s magic, not the article. It always takes him a little while to catch up on the subjects of conversation on mornings when they have to get up early.
“I can Summon yours, too,” Harry points out.
Ron gives a wordless grumble, so Harry does, and sets the cup down in front of Ron with a wicked grin. Ron leans forwards to grab it, and Harry grabs his hand in turn, drawing Ron across the table to kiss him so hard that Ron gives a little squeak. When Ron sits back and manages to cradle the cup between his hands, he’s looking considerably more awake.
Hermione smiles at them, and then stands up and walks around the table to kiss Harry, because she kissed Ron thoroughly that morning before they came down from the master bedroom at Grimmauld Place. “We all deserve something nice for not going to set the Prophet offices on fire,” she murmurs.
Harry surges up to meet her halfway down, and Hermione loses herself happily in one reminder of why they’re doing this.
*
The first time she and Ron found Harry practicing Dark magic in Ron’s room at the Burrow, he flinched and hunched in on himself. Then he took a deep breath and faced them, ready—Hermione realized now—to explain himself, but to have them walk away after that.
She and Ron stared in silence at the reanimated bat that was flapping slowly around the room, a skeleton with flickers of dark-blue lightning dancing over it in place of flesh.
“Magic’s building up inside me,” Harry said quietly. “I can’t control it well. And when I don’t cast spells, I get nightmares. I’ve tried with regular spells, small things, charms and shit like that. I cast the Patronus over sixty times the other day. But it doesn’t work. It has to be Dark spells, or necromancy, to really get rid of it. Like that.” He nodded at the bat.
“Does this have something to do with the Deathly Hallows?” Hermione asked. It was the logical conclusion, but she knew almost nothing about necromancy, and she wanted to clarify matters.
Harry nodded. “They—aren’t here, but they’re connected to me. My holly wand casts far more powerful and destructive spells than I could ever manage before, easily, and it casts like the Elder Wand felt the one time I used it. I can sense the spirits of the dead wherever I go, and I know I could summon them if I wanted. And all it takes for me to be invisible is to will myself that way.” He gave them a fleeting grin. “When Kingsley came the other day and wanted to talk to me, and he couldn’t find me? I was still right in the gardens. I just didn’t want to be found.”
“Blimey, mate,” Ron said, and walked over to sit down on the bed. Harry stared at him. Ron ignored the way that the bat had settled onto Harry’s shoulder, although Hermione saw him give a shiver of discomfort. “Why didn’t you say?”
“What was there to say?” Harry’s voice was light, his eyes hard. “Hi, you lot, I’m using Dark Arts now and I don’t think I can stop unless I want magic to leak out of my skin and make the room explode, I expect our friendship to end any day now.”
“Berk,” Ron said without heat. “Of course it’s not going to end.”’
“Didn’t you hear me?” Harry’s voice rose a little, and Hermione came a step nearer, too, making sure to shut the door behind her. “I can’t stop it. I’ve tried. That’s what happened the night I accidentally set my bed on fire, Ron. I woke up and there was—it was fucking Fiendfyre—”
“How easy is it for you to cast something non-destructive?” Hermione asked.
Harry shot her a sidelong glance. “I told you about the Patronus.”
“So it’s the power level, not the nature of the magic?”
“Yeah. I can’t…it’s hard to cast a charm that just cleans up a small mess now. It has to be huge, or it doesn’t work. Making it wandless does help, a little.”
Hermione nodded, her mind busy with the implications. “So what we need is to make sure that you have enough outlet in your day-to-day life so you don’t have to worry about things like setting your bed on fire when you go to sleep.”
Harry’s eyes flashed. “No, what we have to make sure of is that you’re well away from me when the whispers about how I’m going Dark start.”
Hermione fixed him with a withering glare, and was pleased to see that at least that still worked. Harry half-flopped back on the bed and winced. “You managed to control the Fiendfyre,” Hermione said. “Yes, setting fires in your sleep is hardly ideal.”
Ron snorted.
Hermione reached out to swat him without looking away from Harry. “But we’ll take precautions to make sure that you know and understand the nature of all the spells you cast, and it should be fine.”
“It’s not fine.”
“It’s not ideal,” Hermione repeated firmly. “Harry. Why did you think we would stop being your friends over this? Haven’t we proven that no matter what, you can trust us? That we’ll walk at your side?”
Despite herself, hurt crept into her voice. Harry’s eyes softened, and he reached out and took one of her hands. “Of course. But you know what people say about Dark Arts. And necromancy? That’s the worst thing of all. There’s a reason Voldemort was looking for the Elder Wand and Dumbledore wanted to keep it from ever being used. I don’t ever want to become the kind of person who hurts you. That really would kill me.”
Hermione shook her head. “We won’t let that happen to you.”
Harry laughed hollowly. “How can you stop it? The Deathly Hallows are more powerful than you.”
Ron hissed softly and shook his head when Harry turned to him in bewilderment. “Bad move, mate,” he said. “Really bad move.”
Hermione didn’t explode into a lecture the way she wanted to, but only because she worked hard at keeping her temper under control. She did narrow her eyes and say, “Harry James Potter, if you don’t think that we can find a way to temper the influence of the Deathly Hallows when we destroyed Horcruxes, traveled in time, flew on thestrals, and got rid of Umbridge, you are dead wrong.”
*
“We’ll probably have to take care of her.”
Hermione sighs and nods in response to Ron’s comment, eyeing the article that came out this morning. The one yesterday about Harry being “sacked from the Aurors” was one thing, but this one implies that Harry is response for a string of accidental deaths that are supposedly really murders, and he should be arrested or at least questioned.
Harry had nothing to do with those deaths—Hermione and Ron should know—but too much Auror investigation will reveal the Dark Arts that Grimmauld Place is crawling with.
Skeeter actually did register as an Animagus right after the war, so that line of controlling her is out. But Hermione smiles as she thinks of a contract she once had the members of the Defense Association sign, and what kind of eagerness Skeeter might show to sign one that would promise her exclusive interviews with Harry Potter.
There’s never any question that she’d break it. And then suffer the consequences.
“You have your plotting face on, love.”
Hermione tilts her head back and smiles at Ron. She loves him more every day, something she once believed wasn’t possible. But then again, there was no Harry in the picture then as other than their best mate. Hermione thinks she and Ron would have had a happy marriage, but not a joyful one.
Now, they do, even if no one else in magical Britain recognizes the vows they swore to each other in the shelter of a circle of standing stones. Hermione has made a point all her life of accepting and recognizing what’s important to her, like freeing house-elves, whether or not other people believed in it.
They have Harry and each other, and that’s all that matters.
“Want to watch me draw up the contract that’s going to entrap Skeeter and curse the shit out of her the minute she breaks it?”
“Actually curse the shit out of her? George was talking about inventing something that could do that once…”
Hermione laughs, and Harry, who’s across the library researching one of his weird projects that takes in half a dozen books and sixteen kinds of sideways thought, looks up and smiles at them. Hermione turns back to her work with a will.
There are lots of things she regrets, but being with Harry Potter and Ron Weasley will never be one of them.
Ron—The Beautiful, The Tender, The Kind
“Come on, Ron. You can tell me. Is Harry Dark?”
Ron looks steadily over his mug of Firewhisky into Bill’s eyes. Fleur had Baby Dominique just a few days ago, and Ron and Hermione and Harry, along with other family members, have taken turns rotating in and out of the cottage so Bill and Fleur can both get some sleep and the house doesn’t turn into a dust museum. (And also so Mum doesn’t spend all her time there trying to simultaneously hold the baby and cook everything in existence).
“Why are you asking?”
Bill flinches, just a little. Ron nods. “Yeah, I do need a reason.”
“It’s just...the goblins…” Bill trails off.
“The goblins who didn’t accept Harry’s formal apology for breaking into the bank or the huge fine he paid them when he moved his Galleons and still want to behead him? Yeah, Bill, don’t give me that bollocks. I get that it’s your job, but there’s no way I’m helping lure my best mate to his death just so that you can keep your job.”
Best mate, and husband. Ron’s really glad that no one in his family is a Legilimens, even if living with Mum sometimes felt like it, and won’t understand the smug feeling he has right now as he thinks of the morning that started with fucking Harry into the mattress.
“If we knew if the rumors were true or not, then I think they probably would accept the apology and the fine. They just want to know if he’s a Dark Lord and is going to bring fire and ruin down on their bank.”
“They can decide without knowing that. Harry wouldn’t do that anyway. And there’s a big difference between going Dark and being a Dark Lord.”
“Not really,” Bill begins, pedantic as always. He was interested in History in school, and now he goes off, telling Ron how Dark wizards are always aiming at Dark Lordship—or Dark witches at Dark Ladyship—and how assuming anything else is the goal is just naïve.
Ron sits there and pretends to be fascinated. It’s not something he gets away with anymore when Hermione does the lecturing, so this is a good chance to test some skills that might otherwise wither.
And he thinks about the moment when Harry really realized that they were all in this together.
*
By now, Harry didn’t have to speak to summon Fiendfyre. It was the sort of Dark spell that spilled a lot of energy and was better for him to exercise during the day and when he was awake, to prevent repetitions of the bed-burning incident.
Ron and Hermione stood with hands clasped just outside the stone ring whose location they’d found on a map in the Black family library. The map had simply appeared one day, not long after Harry had started researching what it really meant to be the Master of Death. On it were stone circles, rivers that contained Dark magic, Unplottable locations perhaps only a few meters in diameter that could be used as hiding places, and old caches of Galleons, Potions ingredients, and the like.
Hermione had said it was probably because Harry had fully accepted that he was Dark now. Ron said it was because the Blacks were a lot of arseholes, and took joy in the way Harry’s eyes lit up with laughter then.
And in the middle of this stone circle, the most powerfully protected of all, they watched Harry pace around the fire he’d summoned. It swayed in front of him, forming eyes and legs and talons and tentacles, but not taking the form of any one beast just yet.
Watching him.
Ron watched Harry dip his head and extend his hands. He was aware that his breath was coming short and sweat soaked down his face. Hermione gave him a concerned look, leaning nearer and murmuring, “We talked about the theory and practiced the motions over and over again. It’s going to be okay.”
Ron nodded. That was right. That was true. He didn’t think he could explain that, right now, only a little bit of what he was feeling was natural fear for Harry.
The rest was because, well.
Harry was fucking arousing like this.
Head tossed back, eyes shining like a great cat’s in the light of the fire, arms crossed, Harry looked as if he could take on the Fiendfyre singlehandedly without a wand and never lose. And when he bowed his head a little further to the fire, it seemed that it had finally chosen the course they’d hoped it would take. It bowed back.
And Harry and the Fiendfyre began to dance.
It was a subtle pattern at first, the fire spinning out long tendrils that grew so thin they didn’t set Harry alight when they brushed against his arms, and Harry shuffling his feet in small motions. But it grew wilder and wilder, broader and broader. Soon Harry was dancing so fast that long trails of sweat soaked his shirt, and he pulled it off and threw it away.
Ron and Hermione both stared at his chest. Ron knew it, and although Hermione blushed and probably would have denied it if anyone had asked her, she knew it, too.
The fire spread out and burned the ground inside the ring of stones, and finally reared up in a great basilisk, swaying back and forth as if to the pipe of a snake-charmer. Harry spun and dipped, and the basilisk turned backwards, forming and reforming in the flames so that it pointed the opposite way.
Harry, face blazing with delight, turned on his foot and threw himself forwards into the Fiendfyre’s embrace.
Hermione choked on a scream. Ron grabbed her hand, and she grabbed his back hard enough to split the skin.
This was the part that had only been theory until now, of necessity. They couldn’t test it with a smaller fire or a less extreme move because the theory required that Harry show absolute trust in the Fiendfyre, and playing it safe wouldn’t work.
But if worked…
Ron let out a whoop of relief as he saw the fire recede from its center and the rising platform of red and gold flames there, cradling Harry, who tossed his head back in exhaustion and contentment.
And exultation. There could be no doubt of that. Harry had embraced the Fiendfyre, and it would help him control his tendency for his magic to build up unless it found release in powerful spells, and wield his necromancy instead of it wielding him.
Next to Ron, Hermione was crying. Ron wrapped an arm around her, and then that didn’t seem good enough, so he turned and kissed her fiercely, backing her up to one of the standing stones and winding his fingers in her hair.
“Ron!” she protested through her tears, but she was laughing, too. And a second later, she wrapped her hand around the back of his neck and gave as good as she got.
They both looked up as the fire died out and Harry paced slowly towards them, crossing the line of stones a minute later. His eyes still burned; Ron wasn’t surprised to see a small, dancing flame in the center of them. And he was looking at them as if they were the ones who had performed some impossible feat.
“What?” Ron asked, and realized how much he wanted to kiss Harry.
It must have showed on his face, or something, because Harry said in a low voice, “You—you stayed with me, even through all that. You watched me jump into a fire and you accepted that I had to do it. And now, you want to stay at my side even though—even though…”
Ron remembered that he was a Gryffindor and decided that hesitation was for other people. He reached out, without letting go of Hermione’s hand, and grabbed Harry’s trousers, dragging him close enough to kiss.
Harry gasped, then went along with it. His lips were burning, burning hot, the tongue he swept out to meet Ron’s as sharp-prickled as lightning. Hermione came up on the other side, and Ron turned his head to kiss her, and then stopped back and watched his girlfriend and his best mate snog like the world was dying.
It was really fucking good.
Harry swallowed and stepped back and said, “To the end, then.”
“To the end,” Hermione said, eyes brilliant.
“To the end,” Ron echoed, but had to add, “You really thought you were going to scare us off with a little fire? Honestly, mate. We lived in the same dormitory as Seamus Finnigan for six years, remember?”
And Harry laughed, a booming sound, full and free, and if it had the crackle of fire along its edges, well, that just made Ron want to hear what other sounds would be like now that Harry had been through the fire.
*
“So the goblins might be interested in capturing me somewhere, or taking me down if they think I’m on the path to becoming a Dark Lord.”
Harry’s voice is resonant and low. Then again, Ron is lying with his cheek on Harry’s chest while he says it, so that makes sense.
Hermione looks up from the book that she’s reading on the other side of their enormous bed. “That means that you need to reach out to the werewolves sooner rather than later.”
“I mean, I was already going to do that to offer them Wolfsbane, Hermione.”
Ron shakes his head a little. One thing he will never get used to is the fact that Harry is actually competent in Potions now.
“I know. But now you can trade that for bodyguard duties. You know how some of the packs are. A mutual exchange will go over much better with them than the idea that they’re accepting charity.”
Harry sighs, long and low, making Ron’s head bounce and his sore arse ache deliciously. “So then Bill and other people will think that I am becoming a Dark Lord because I’m courting the werewolves.”
“You can’t control what they think,” Ron says firmly, a moment before he knows Hermione would have said the same thing. “Yeah, maybe they’ll decide that. And maybe some other people will think they should stalk you or ambush you, and we’ll take care of them like we took care of Skeeter.”
Hermione chuckles a little. Sure enough, they offered Skeeter a contract for “exclusive interviews” based on the idea that she would stick to the truth, and she broke it. Now her body is so stricken with arthritis that she can’t get out of bed. Which is no one’s fault but her own, and can’t be blamed on them, since breaking the contract also laid a spell of silence on her.
“That was kind of extreme,” Harry mutters.
“So was that article she penned about you ‘stealing’ me from Ron just because we all live together.”
Harry finally laughs at that, and Ron curls closer to him. Harry reaches down and strokes his hair.
This, Ron thinks, is what happiness feels like, Dark Arts and all.
Harry—Not Resigned
Harry wakes up in the early morning, blinking a little. They were up late last night revising the contract for the werewolf negotiations, and he doesn’t actually remember falling asleep.
But everyone somehow drifted into their accustomed positions anyway. Hermione is lying with her head on most of the pillows, most of the blankets tucked around her, snoring away. Ron is flopped over so that he faces the left side of the bed, his arm dangling in midair in a way that would wake Harry up with pain in seconds, his eyes firmly closed and his face wedged under one pillow.
And Harry is between them, cradled by Hermione’s back and Ron’s, the way it always ends up.
The way they’ve been supporting him since they became friends, really.
Harry leans back, one hand resting on each of them, and thinks about the moment when they acknowledged what else had grown between them.
*
The standing stones where Harry had danced with Fiendfyre looked different on this bright spring evening. Grass had grown back, and rustled softly in the breeze. Here and there, snowdrops peeped out, and Harry saw brighter flowers he didn’t know the names of, small yellow and purple ones. Random light from the moon glinted and caught on the ancient inscriptions in the stones.
He entered through two of them, and Ron entered from another point roughly a third of the way around the circle, and Hermione from between another two roughly a third of the way down from that.
She wore flowing blue robes that were edged with silver, and her hair hung past her shoulders. She kept threatening to cut it, but hadn’t yet. She carried a white lacquer box with their three rings in it, and smiled so hard that Harry was afraid her face was going to start hurting.
Ron wore red-gold robes, because of course he would, and carried the first food they would eat together after they were married, a plate of steaming cakes with honey baked in the middle. He’d tried to make them first, then Hermione, but in the end, it was Harry’s cooking skills they’d had to call on.
And Harry wore black robes with an edging of red, and carried the wand that would bind them.
It was enough.
When they met in the middle of the circle, Ron laid the plate down carefully off the side and cast a charm that would keep ants and flying bugs away. Hermione opened the box with the rings. Harry held out the wand and met his friends’, his lovers’, eyes wordlessly. If they wanted—
“Stop telling us with eye-language to abandon you, mate,” Ron said. “It’s not going to work.”
Hermione just narrowed her eyes at him, which was a way of saying the same thing. Harry snorted, took one of the rings out, and drew the wand, elder under its veneer of holly, through the air. A streak of golden fire followed it, and he took a deep breath.
“Hermione Jean Granger,” he said softly, “Ron Bilius Weasley, I would bind myself to you for this night and all the nights to come, until all three of us pass from this earth. I would offer my heart, my body, my magic to the protection and cherishing of you. I would stand between you and any danger that threatens. I would hold you lightly, leaving you free to come and go when you wished, and hold you strongly, so that you would never doubt you were loved. It would be my great honor if you made these vows with me.”
When he finished speaking and slipped the ring onto Ron’s left ring finger, both of them were blinking back tears. Hermione cleared her throat and took the second of the rings from the box, handing it to Ron, then reached for the wand. Harry relinquished it to her, and she repeated the motion that he had. This time, a streak of blue fire joined the hovering golden one.
“Ron Bilius Weasley, Harry James Potter,” she murmured. “I would bind myself to you for this day and all the days to come, until all three of us pass from this earth. I would offer my heart, my body, my magic to the protection and cherishing of you. I would speak words that would save us, no matter what they were. I would hold you gently, so that you would never doubt you were loved, and I would hold you powerfully, so that nothing could take you away. It would be my great honor to answer the first vow and to make way for the third.”
She held out her hand, fingers spread, and Ron slid the ring onto the fourth finger of her right hand. Hermione blinked and blinked, and then turned and offered the wand to Ron, too.
Ron bowed his head and smiled at both of them, spinning the wand with a little extra flourish. The streak that joined their fire in the air was red.
“Harry James Potter, Hermione Jean Granger, I would bind myself to you for this twilight and all the twilights to come.” Ron’s voice was steady and deep. “Until all three of us pass from this earth. I would offer my heart, my body, my magic to the protection and cherishing of you. I would go with you into the darkness, no matter where it leads us. I would hold you happily, so that you would be able to share my joy, and I would hold you mournfully, so that your sadness might be reduced. It would be my great honor to finish these vows and bind us, all three.”
Hermione plucked the third ring from the box and slid it onto the index finger of Harry’s right hand.
The air in the circle abruptly tightened around them, humming, and Harry thought he could hear an immense voice singing far away. It had the voice of Fiendfyre, but most music did, to him, since the dance. He held out his hands, and Ron and Hermione moved in, each taking one.
Light flashed around their circle, in all three of the colors they had summoned, gold and blue and red, and settled into the middle, appearing as a bright burst of fire for a moment. Then it fled, and Harry closed his eyes. He could feel light, pulsing bonds connecting him to Ron and Hermione, both of them filled with indistinguishable joy.
They wouldn’t always be able to feel those bonds, he knew, more was the pity. They would only show up at moments of heightened emotion.
But for now, as Ron reached down and picked up the plate to hand around the honeycakes they would break and feed to each other, it was enough.
*
“Oh, come on.”
“Yeah, I wish she would,” Ron agrees over his shoulder.
Hermione opens her mouth to continue her lecture about why it would benefit Harry to reach out to the vampires as well as the werewolves, but Harry’s heard enough. They’re supposed to be having sex, not thinking about potential Dark Lord moves twenty-four-seven. He leans over and licks Hermione’s clit with a thoroughly dirty slurping sound.
Hermione shrieks, and her spread legs spasm. Harry tucks his hands beneath them to keep them in place—he loves being held by Hermione, but not when she’s trying to squash his ears with her thighs—and settles into the serious business of making her come with his mouth.
It never takes long when he’s this determined and when Hermione is finally paying attention, and in short order, she’s a trembling mess in the middle of the bed, gasping and groping for one of them or the other with shaking hands. Unfortunately for her, Harry, the closest one, has already come and isn’t much good to her, but Ron hasn’t and is more than willing to slip inside her and help her along to a second climax.
Harry watches them, warmth filling him, and not just because it’s bloody sexy to watch them go at it. He has his best friends, his husband and wife, by his side, forever, and nothing he can do will drive them away.
Even if he ends up a Dark Lord, which at the moment doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility.
Less politics, Harry scolds himself when Ron reaches out, and Harry grasps his hand and holds on through the cursing and the calling and the coming.
They have their whole lives for politics, but they only have one now.
And Harry intends for all three of them to make the most of it.
The End.
