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Ashborn	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Threesomes/Moresomes Views: 36149 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 3
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Chapter Twenty-Five—Letters Across the Separation

            The owl landed in the middle of the table at dinner, of course, smashing into the plate of potatoes that Mrs. Weasley was trying to hand across to Harry and sending bits of food flying everywhere. Ron swore as he got a faceful, and then shut up with a suddenness that made Harry suspect either Hermione or his mum had glared at him. Ginny brushed them out of her hair. Arthur ducked, and as a result, Angelina had to start hunting for napkins.

            The owl, being Snape’s owl, didn’t look around to see the destruction it had caused, instead holding out its leg insistently. Harry picked up the letter bound to it and picked up the last slice of beef lying uneaten on his plate, too, tossing it high. The owl snapped it out of the air and spread its wings, soaring up. Harry tracked it with his eyes, wondering why Snape didn’t seem to want an answer, but then saw that the owl had simply retreated to the windowsill to eat its prize. He smiled a little and unsealed the letter.

            “Must you read that at dinner, dear?” Mrs. Weasley had Vanished the flying potatoes, cast a Cleaning Charm on Angelina, quelled Ron with a glance, and now leaned over towards Harry with a plate of what looked like broccoli, giving him a measured glance. It was the one that suggested how much better it was for all adults to pay as much attention to dinner as if it was a play.

            “Yes, I have to,” Harry said, and stood up from the table, moving towards the stairs as he pried the seal up. Of course Snape had sealed it. The seal bore the dark, rising bird of the Ashborn, and Harry hated the way his fingers caressed it for a moment, but at least he could acknowledge that they did.

            “Oh,” Mrs. Weasley said behind him, and there was a momentary, uncertain pause before she returned to handing dinner around. Harry could feel more than one person glaring at his back, but he couldn’t help that any more than he could keep his fingers from stroking the seal. He at least went outside, and made sure not to bang the door behind him, so he wouldn’t disturb the meal.

            “You don’t want to eat?”

            Harry looked up. Corners liked the Burrow’s garden, and Harry had left his cup outside, confident nothing could harm him. Corners loomed now, wavering gently back and forth, his tongue darting out to point towards the kitchen window.

            Harry shrugged. “I have a—a message from the ones we lived with at first,” he said. Snakes didn’t have much conception of letters, but the Water People understood messages, Corners had told him, singing them across the oceans and sometimes sending out drifting particles of the water that made their bodies up, to tell something especially important, urgent, or complicated.

            “Strange to interrupt a meal for them,” Corners said, and lowered himself until his chin rested on the edge of the cup.

            “Maybe,” Harry said, and cracked the seal. He felt as if he had been waiting for a glass of water—real water, not living water like Corners, part of his mind added—that had taken forever to cross the room to him. He touched his throat, which felt unexpectedly dry, and pulled the crackling letter out.

            Dear Harry, it began, and Harry had to pause and close his eyes when he saw that. That Snape had chosen that name for him meant a lot, and although Corners hissed a confused bubble of a question at him, Harry had to lean against a tree before he could continue.

            It shouldn’t have affected him so strongly. Harry had to think that it wouldn’t if he and Snape had had a better relationship before he went to the Ashborn, or if he had loved Ginny and been happily preparing for his wedding with her. But there was the weakness in his legs anyway, and that dryness in his throat and lips and hands and even his tongue that resembled what he had felt the first time he kissed Ginny.

            Dear Harry.

            I have freed Hilda Incognita. I believe she will accept the situation and continue to stay with the Ashborn, as so far she has few other places to go.

            Harry snorted in spite of himself. “You arranged it that way,” he said, and some of the trembling in his knees stopped. “Did she think of that? Or are you reporting half her words faithfully, you old bastard?”

            Corners flicked his tongue at Harry and laid his chin on the cup again, watching him so intently that Harry turned back to the letter to escape that gaze.

            She has few other choices than the Ashborn. She has my Mark, and she was a Death Eater, and there will be those in the Ministry who remember her and might rouse their power enough to punish her. But she will not be my mindless servant anymore, and that ought to make you happy.

            Harry paused, tracing the letters with one finger. Well, yes, it did. He had wanted free will restored to the Ashborn, and this was the first step, the one he never could have managed himself, pants at Legilimency as he was.

            But…

            But it meant more to him, still, that Snape had not waited to do it. The Vow he swore had not insisted he do it within the first two days after Harry’s departure. In fact, it seemed more likely that he would have waited, letting himself recover his mental balance from the strange conversations with Harry and his new Vows, as well as the truths that Harry had discovered when he ventured into his mind.

            But he had gone ahead immediately. Harry glanced at his name at the top of the letter again, and shook his head. Had Snape done that for him? Or simply to fulfill the Vow? He’d had little choice about the last, after all.

            And did it matter? Ron would probably say it did, but Harry was starting to think it didn’t, not if he didn’t want it to.

            He returned to the letter.

            When you return for your visit in a month’s time, we will speak more about this, and about the future that Incognita may expect among us.

            Severus.

            Harry traced Snape’s first name, too, before he thought about what he was doing. He thought the flush actually hurt his face, this time, when he snatched his hand back. He coughed, and looked around, but no one had followed him out here. Harry sank back against the nearest tree and contemplated the letter for a moment.

            Us, Snape had said, as if he thought that Harry counted himself among the Ashborn, or ought to. Harry would have bristled at the suggestion a week ago. A month ago. A year ago.

            But he waited for the bristling now, and it didn’t come.

            In fact, what came before anything else, even hunger because of his interrupted meal, was the desire to write back to Snape. He might not expect an owl so soon, but Harry could read—as if it shone like a light in the middle of those forceful letters, the long strokes of the f’s and the dots of the i’s, even the way he’d signed his name at the end—the longing to have one back.

            A week ago, I would have laughed at the thought of doing something because Snape wanted me to.

            Harry shrugged and hitched one shoulder up so that he could shrug the thought from his head. So that had been him then, and this was him now. He could do it if he wanted to. No one would object. This was between him and the parchment, and his own thoughts, and Snape.

            And Draco. He’ll want a letter, too. You might send him one that’s different from the one you send to Snape telling him that you’re pleased he freed Incognita already.

            The more Harry thought about that, the better an idea it seemed. Draco was the one who had volunteered as Bonder when Hermione wouldn’t. He was the one who had kissed Harry, who had explained the lust he and Snape seemed to feel when Snape would have stumbled on the words, and the one Harry had woken from a dream of last night. He had lain in the dark, the bed seeming to shake with the thunder of his blood, and stared at the ceiling, intensely glad that he no longer shared a room with Ron.

            Recklessness shone in him like an ember, and Harry felt a smile burn its way across his face as he climbed to his feet.

            Why shouldn’t he do what made him happy, with no care for whether it always would? Right now, he wanted to write to Snape and Malfoy, and then go down and be with his friends. Hermione might warn him that he couldn’t have both worlds. Ron might worry that Snape and Malfoy were only playing with him.

            But Harry had learned to live in the now during the war, and he was determined that that experience would not make a waste of his life, that some things he had learned during it would come in useful.

*

            He wrote back.

            You knew he would.

            Severus dismissed the thought that struck him and opened the letter. His hands did not tremble. He had waited until they would not, and risen from the table when he received Potter’s owl. Incognita, the only other one in the dining hall at the moment who had free will, had looked up at him with raised eyebrows, but turned back to her food when Severus motioned her to do so. Draco was spending the evening in a tub of hot water, recruiting from muscles strained during a Potions explosion earlier.

            That meant Severus could carry the letter to his rooms and enjoy it in peace.

            He will have nothing important to say to you. You know that. He will acknowledge what you said, and nothing else. Why should he wish to do anything else? He is with his friends, and free from the hostage situation that you enforced on him. In the world beyond the fortress’s walls, he will find wider expanses, other people, other gifts worthy of taking in, other things to spend his time on.

            But Severus knew that voice of old. It spoke with his father’s words, nagging, despising, disputing. It spoke in his mother’s high-pitched, weary whimper, near the end of life and hating what her choices had brought her to. It had some of Black’s tones, and something of Potter’s. James Potter’s, that was, not the tones of his son. Potter had whined in his time, it was true, but not about choices that Severus made.

            Unless they directly concerned him.

            Severus glanced down at the writing, and fount two sheets. He blinked. That—seemed an odd length to write in return for the bare news that Incognita was free. Severus knew he had included Potter’s first name in his letter, and a few other notes, but that was not enough to produce this–feast—in return.

            Is it not, with someone with a temperament as generous as Potter’s? He gave his freedom up, or thought he did, forever when he joined the Ashborn. He risked his life during the war. He fought the Dark Lord several times while he was at Hogwarts. He is not the typical boy you thought him. He is something greater, something more.

            As he should be, Severus added, to finish off the thoughts. Or I would have to fault my own plebian taste in wanting him.

            The letter began with his first name, and Severus lingered there for a moment before moving on. No one was here to see him, and he had wards on the lab now so that Incognita could not approach without his being aware of her. He was as well-protected as he could be when one of his former servants had her own mind back.

            He could permit himself to enjoy this.

            Dear Severus,

            Thank you for freeing Incognita right away. I know you didn’t have to, and so you must have chosen to. That’s another gift, right there. If you want to know what you can give me that won’t be a bribe like the clothes and will mean something to me, that’s the answer.

            I find being back here strangely odd. I thought I would fit right back in with my friends and continue to do the same things I did before the war. But we’re not in Hogwarts anymore. They don’t even know when they’ll reopen Hogwarts, it was damaged so much, and there are so many people who went there dead or missing. And the Ministry is pulling itself back together, but it’s its own priority. So there’s no help for Hogwarts coming out of that group of people, either.

            I don’t really know what to do with the Ministry, to tell you the truth. I got an invitation from them the day after I came to the Burrow—

            (Severus was more pleased than he should be that Potter had chosen to call the Burrow by its name instead of “home.”)

            And they wanted me to speak with the leaders and aid in the restoration of peace. I’m quoting the letter, now, because I wouldn’t be able to put words together like that. I keep looking at it and thinking that they wouldn’t ask my input, they wouldn’t care, if I hadn’t defeated You-Know-Who.

            I mean, that’s kind of obvious in a way. Who would I be if I wasn’t their precious Chosen One? Just someone ordinary, someone who wouldn’t have made the sacrifices and taken the risks I have. They wouldn’t have any reason to pay attention to me if things were completely different. So to resent them for reaching out to me when I’m the Boy-Who-Lived is completely ridiculous. Of course they’ll do what they need to do to maintain their position in politics, and I never expected any better of the Ministry, anyway. I don’t know why I stare at the letter and feel this sinking sensation in my chest.

            Maybe some of it has to do with Hermione. She’s still not happy about that second set of Vows you swore, the one that ties you to me. I think she was prepared to see me swear, because she thinks of me as self-sacrificing—too much for my own good, sometimes. But you aren’t supposed to be self-sacrificing. You’re just supposed to be some bastard of a Slytherin, someone who’s going to wiggle out of everything he can whether it would benefit him or not, because you hate obligations more than anything else.

            And I can’t fault her. It wasn’t long ago that I used to think like that.

            You haven’t really been kind to me, she could argue. I could argue. I was the one who was in the Ashborn and saw the way you treated me at first. But even if it was only because you want to learn how not to be a master or a servant from me, you treat me better now.

            That’s not the way it works, right? The evil hostage-taker doesn’t get taught better by the hostage, except in fairy tales and the kind of rubbish articles the Daily Prophet prints. And Hermione is sensible, and she knows the way the world works. She doesn’t like the world working in a different way, which seems to be the case when you have something like this. And she knows you, too.

            Or she thought she did. I thought I did.

            I don’t understand all the reasons that things changed. I do know that I don’t want to go back to being the perfect icon and hero the way I thought I would become after I left you. I don’t fit absolutely perfectly with my friends anymore. I don’t want to participate in the way that the Ministry runs the wizarding world. I want to help people, sure, but not that way. I want to make sure they have enough to eat, and ease people’s pain, and help them get their free will back. Maybe I want to help the centaurs resist the Ministry when it tries to take things from them they don’t want to give. But I’m so sick of politics.

            (Severus muffled a snort into his hand. Potter’s past and status would ensure that he was always a player in the game, whether or not he wanted to be. The sooner he could accept that and start using the fame for his advantage instead of being taken advantage of, the happier he would be).

            I’ve babbled to you too much, I think. Thanks for listening, and I look forward to your owl.

            At the bottom was Potter’s name, his first name only. Severus folded his fingers over it as though he could hear the anxious voice speaking in his head, see the troubled green eyes staring into his. A tap and a flourish of his finger on the parchment, and he might feel the sweaty, smooth skin.

            It was—

            It was enough, to have this letter. Enough return for what Severus had done in freeing Incognita, enough return for letting Potter into his mind, enough repayment of the debts that might lie between them from Hogwarts, if anything did.

Potter had defeated the Dark Lord, and Severus had once thought that would pay the debts, because with the Dark Lord gone, he would not have to spy as he did, and he could have a normal life. But his resentment towards Potter had lingered unchanged afterwards.

He understood now. Potter had defeated the Dark Lord for the world as a whole. But what he did now, he did for Severus alone.

*

Draco had to admit, the last thing he had expected to receive was an owl from Potter. It seemed that Severus was the one who wrote to him, and the one who had a better claim than Draco did to his time and attention.

But you were the one who kissed him before he went away. Severus never has.

That was true, and it made Draco open the letter faster than he would have otherwise, curious instead of suspicious.

Dear Draco,

Being back at the Burrow isn’t like I thought it would be. And I know that you probably don’t know what it used to be like for me, and you don’t care, but I want to write to someone, and you’re the only one I feel comfortable complaining about some of this stuff to.

            Draco raised his eyebrows. “Well, Potter,” he told the parchment, “I did try to tell you what the Weasels were like. Not my problem that you’re only finding out how reliable my advice was now, years after the fact.”

            It occurred to him that prim and proper pure-bloods, of the sort that he’d warned Potter on the Hogwarts Express to choose as friends, probably didn’t speak aloud to letters, either. He waited a moment for the blush to fade, and continued reading.

            I can’t be with Ginny. I suspected it before I went back, based on some of the things that happened after the war, but I really didn’t have very long between the time You-Know-Who died and the time that Snape made the claim.

            Draco rolled his eyes. Now he was making Severus sound like some sort of predator.

            Then Draco paused and thought about the way Severus’s eyes had sometimes looked when he spoke of Potter. It had taken him years to classify the emotions, but if he could blame Potter for not following good advice in childhood, Draco could surely blame himself for failing to realize what those emotions were at the time.

            That’s a good description of him, and of some of the things that he’d like to do to Potter. If Potter knows that already, then we might avoid some of the tiresome denial that he’d otherwise come up with when it’s time for us to become lovers.

            And when had that become the goal, anyway, instead of Potter’s friendship? Draco sprawled back on his bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to think about that, but could only come up with the kiss, the moment after Potter had told Draco that he knew they both wanted him.

            Draco smiled. The feeling that settled into his stomach now was like the one that he got after eating a full meal, complete with sweets and butter and rich cheeses and all the things he liked best and wasn’t supposed to have often.

            This is coming. It’s really going to happen.

            He shook his head, with a faint grin, and went back to the letter.

            Ginny accused me of never opening up around her. She said I didn’t discuss my childhood or what happened to me during the war with her despite the fact that I needed to. I tried to say that I hadn’t opened up around you, either, and it’s true that I let Snape into my mind under protest. But that still counts as an opening-up of sorts, doesn’t it?

            “Yes, of course, Potter, you fool,” Draco said, and shook his head. He wondered if Potter didn’t see when he needed help, or saw it and put it aside, or had become so accustomed to looking out for others during the years of the war that he thought his own needs were unimportant. But Draco had only seen him reach for his wand once in a harmless situation, not witnessed the nightmares and tremors and breakdowns that his friends must have, and he knew it. If Potter’s girlfriend had been patiently waiting for him to discuss it with her, telling herself he only needed time, and then seen him come back from his imprisonment with the enemy more relaxed than he had ever been with her…

            Draco could almost find it within himself to feel sorry for a Weasley. Except for the part where he smugly awaited the moment Potter would return, so Draco could show him everything he had figured out.

            Please write to me. I look around, and I notice all the ways that I’m different from them, now. Ron and Hermione talk about going back to Hogwarts like it’s absolutely going to happen, and even Ginny mentions it now and then. They talk about NEWTS and jobs and putting the world back on track, but they don’t think of themselves as participants in that kind of thing. They’ve done their duty, and now it’s done. I hate the Ministry, but I could never sit back and pretend to an ordinary kind of life. Not now. I think life among the Ashborn suited me better because at least there was no way I could ever pretend it was normal.

            What about you?

            Harry.

            Draco spent a few moments tapping the letter against his lips before he took out the materials that would let him compose a reply, but only a few.

*

            Dear Harry,

            Of course you needed help from someone else and you don’t feel at ease among them anymore, you idiot. Weasley and Granger were right there with you during the war, and they helped you a great deal, I’m sure. But they didn’t carry the burden that you did, of making sure the Dark Lord died.

            Severus and I had similar burdens. His spying and killing Dumbledore, my mission to kill Dumbledore and let Death Eaters into the school, and then thinking that I had to somehow keep my parents from dying, or make up for letting them die—as though it was something I ever had a choice in—and then both of us living with the aftermath. I won’t say we suffered as much as you did, but we both had that conviction that we were in the center of something huge and important, that other people were relying on us for their lives, that you did.

            Harry smiled, but shook his head. Of course Draco would need to say something comforting while at the same time also reaching out to touch old grudges.

            But he hadn’t done as much touching on them as he could have. Harry had to admit that. He leaned back in his chair and lowered his eyes to the rest of the letter, ignoring the shrieks coming from below. Bill and Fleur’s daughter Dominique was over visiting, and from the sound of it, had three adults fully occupied. Harry didn’t think she needed a fourth.

            And I think it’s time I thanked you for that, the way Severus may have done by letting you look into his mind. Would you like to do the same thing with me?

            Harry blinked. That had honestly never occurred to him. Snape was the one he distrusted, not Draco. Draco wore his emotions too honestly on the surface of his mind, without bothering to disguise when he hated Harry or felt annoyed by him.

            Or when he felt lust for me.

            Harry licked his lips and took a moment to find his place in the letter again.

            But you don’t really need to, because I can tell you what I feel from here.

            I don’t think you can go back to an ordinary life, but of course you’ll need some way of going on, of being with people from day to day and doing things that let you survive. You can’t save the world and defeat Dark Lords all the time. But I think I can come up with a list of things for you to do, if you’re interested.

            Concentrate on freeing the Ashborn, and persuading Severus to do so. He doesn’t need to rule over people the way he’s been doing. It’ll be the ruin of him as a person. He was intended to be a Potions master, not any other kind of master, and I think he’s finally realizing it. But if you don’t keep after him, then it’s possible he’ll sink back into his sludge of inertia again, and for some reason my arguments aren’t as convincing to him as yours are.

            Harry snorted and rolled his eyes. “Could that be because you never learned to persuade, just command?” he muttered. “You commanded me to be your friend, even, when I would have thought you’d learned better.”

            And teach me to have what Severus calls the appropriate sort of pride, if you would. I still think of myself as a Malfoy before anything else, but that’s sort of silly, isn’t it, when I’ve spent the last few weeks negotiating with werewolves and centaurs and fighting your mind free of vampires and dreaming about you. A Malfoy would never do any of those things. Magical creatures were too far beneath my father, and he would have considered that someone with a Muggleborn mother deserved it if he had a mind full of vampires.

            Harry blew out his breath, a little abashed. At least Draco knew that he wasn’t always the nicest person around, then.

            And can you let us like you? Perhaps that isn’t the right word for what I mean, but I don’t think any other conveys it, either. I think you would mock me if I said that I was in love with you, and in truth, I don’t think it’s got that far yet. But if you would let us touch you, kiss you sometimes, teach you anything you wanted to know about sex, and talk to you and learn you and know you better, that would be—a gift.

            Harry cleared his throat and glanced around the room, despite the fact that he knew no one else was in here with him, and in fact that he’d locked the door of the twins’ bedroom for a reason. Merlin. Just when he thought Draco and Snape hadn’t really changed at all, then they would bring out something like this.

            Of course, maybe it was easier in a letter. Maybe, when he went back, they would be as distant and aloof as ever. They had only been apart for five days now. It was easy to keep a dream alive that long, harder for a whole month. Harry, who had spent a whole month hunting for the hiding place of the diadem Horcrux and had nearly given up and pursued another clue when he was close to the goal, knew that very well.

            They might convince themselves they wanted him, and then see the reality again and be disappointed with his messy hair, or the abrasive tone in his voice, or the way that his robes hung on him…

            “And maybe I can stop that right now,” Harry said aloud, leaning back and speaking to the ceiling. “Maybe I can stop thinking that other people will always find me ugly and stupid and let go for once.”

            He hadn’t realized until he started pinning thoughts like that down how often he thought about himself with disdain. It was weird, and it was stupid, and it was time to remember that he had killed bloody Voldemort and had done all the duty he needed to to the world. Ron was right about how much Harry was sacrificing himself, at least. If he was going to help people, it should be because he had made a conscious, willing decision, not because he thought he was a horrible person if he didn’t help.

            There was only one more bit of the letter, and Harry skimmed it twice before he made himself read it, and end the letter. He did have one from Snape waiting, after all, even though it probably wouldn’t be as nice.

            Could you let us do that?

            I await your reply.

            Yours,

            Draco.

            Harry licked his lips, and then carefully folded up the letter and put it back in its envelope. This wasn’t exactly the kind of thing that he wanted to leave lying around for Ron and Hermione to find.

            He still had the letter from Snape to read. Or should he call him Severus now, since Draco did and Harry had already started calling Draco by his first name?

            Harry paused, then shook his head. He really couldn’t, not right now. For him, Snape was the man who had made his life a living hell in school and let Harry look into his mind and freed Incognita as promised, but Severus wasn’t anyone at all. Harry would have to learn to know him more slowly than that.

            He opened the letter and shook his head when he felt a little catch in his throat. So the letter was only one piece of paper instead of the two that he had sent to Snape. So what? That didn’t mean that Snape valued Harry less than Harry valued him. And Harry had rather rambled in his last letter, anyway. Snape could do as he had to and still write a shorter letter.

            Dear Harry,

            You know yourself better than I had thought you could. You will never be ordinary—and that is something you may have yet to acknowledge—but your desires are strongly and clearly expressed, and we will help you achieve them.

            Harry blinked. Okay, that was a better opener than he would have expected from someone who was going to scold him for a rambling letter that exposed too many of his personal concerns. Which meant Snape probably wasn’t heading in that direction, after all. He began to grin despite himself, and leaned back in his chair.

            The Ministry most likely will not leave you alone, which means you must become more forceful in refusing them. Find criticisms you can make that they will not want to see aired in public, and you will become more trouble to court than you are worth. I would stop short of actually publishing them, however, unless the Ministry descends to harassing you and asking why you have not tried to control the wizarding world, or implies that something is wrong with you for refusing such control. The weapons that you have at your fingertips are double-edged.

            Harry nodded. That was a good idea, and not one that would have necessarily occurred to him. It seemed to him that he could only help the Ministry and end up doing things he despised, or refuse and look like an idiot.

            Well, trust Snape to come up with blackmail.

            Harry rolled his eyes a moment later. He hadn’t reacted with horror to the idea. That meant he shared at least some of Snape’s lack of moral scruples.

            He read on.

            The Ministry might always think of you as the Chosen One, but you have those around you who will not. Your friends will come to accept and understand you better. If you wish to hear my speculation after looking into your mind, I believe the war changed you and set you flowing in a new direction. Your friends did not have time to watch you settle and adopt that new shape before you had the challenge of the Ashborn to confront. When they come to realize how much is due to the war instead of being with us, they may be more at ease with it.

            And we will help you with whatever you may wish, Harry. Draco and I. I know that you may be more comfortable with him, more settled in friendship, while you and I have daggers between us and may always do so.

            But if listening to you will help, I will do it. If talking with me face-to-face will help, we may do that by Floo before you return to the Ashborn. If you need someone to convince you that you are not only a weapon or a leftover of the man who killed the Dark Lord, but that you are more important than that and always have been, I will do that. If you need someone to look into your mind and help you drain the poison from your memories, then I will do that.

            I am not yet willing to say all the reasons why. You are more than my hostage and more than the man who has promised to show me the road out of service and mastery, but you knew that already. I do not think we are friends. Circumstances prevent us from being something other than friends. I do not yet know the name for this, for all the immense history that lies between us and that must be conquered.

            But we will conquer it, if we will ourselves to do so. That, I do not doubt.

            Yours,

            Severus.

            Harry put the letter down and sat in silence for a long time, feeling as though the light from an imagined sun warmed his skin.

            It was…

            There were no words for the possibilities spiraling through him, for the pleasant dreams, that he might be more than the leftover weapon, that the greatest days of Harry Potter might not be in the past.

*

            AlterEquis: Oh, don’t worry, they will have some more conflicts. But most of them won’t be quite as bitter as they were at first.

            Hermione is going to appear in the next chapter. But Harry is basically right about what her objections are.
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Ashborn