Harry felt under the weather. There was no other way he could describe it, although he didn’t much like the muggle phrase.
He wiped a hand over his forehead, which was coated in a sheen of sweat despite the frost outside. His head throbbed and the edges of his vision blurred as he bent down to lift a juvenile mandrake in its heavy pot.
He couldn’t get it off the floor.
He swore softly and slumped against the glass of the greenhouse wall, swiping uselessly at his forehead again.
“Wotcher,” his boss said from outside the open window, and he jumped.
“Tonks,” he said with as much irritation as he could muster. “You scared me!”
“You scared me, and all,” she answered, raising an eyebrow sardonically. “The way you hissed that curse out, I thought it was Parseltongue.” She squinted, and her face took on a sickly grey pallor that was only highlighted by her bubblegum pink hair. “You look like shit,” she added.
“Yeah, feel like it,” Harry muttered.
“Go home,” she answered, but Harry shook his head. “It wasn’t a suggestion,” she added sternly. “I can manage.”
“Not a great start to a trial,” Harry murmured, mopping his brow with a fraying sleeve.
“You’re half way through your trial, and you’ve been great so far,” Tonks told him honestly. “Now scram. It’ll be worse if you give me whatever you’ve got. I’m a terrible patient.”
“Now that I can believe,” Harry said with the ghost of a smile as his pulse pounded in his ears. He slipped out of the greenhouse and tucked his wand out of sight, stepping through the shop to rejoin the London street beyond. “Thanks,” he added to Tonks, whose face was now a normal colour again.
Fred arrived at Herbivicus five minutes before opening time. The colourful storefront settled neatly between a chintzy cafe and an indie bookshop, with hundreds of muggle blooms on display in the window. It gave no indication of the wizarding shop hidden within, nor of the greenhouses and garden tucked impossibly behind.
Tonks was behind the counter, sketching something obnoxiously tropical-looking. The rasp of her pencil was the only sound besides his quiet footsteps.
“Wotcher,” Tonks said without looking up.
“What is that monstrosity?” Fred asked in greeting, staring at the sketch.
“Rude,” she answered, pouting. Her spiky hair wilted and turned a mousy brown.
“I didn’t say I didn’t like it. There’s a time and a place for a monstrosity,” Fred said, winking roguishly. “It’s not subtle, but it would certainly give a message.”
Tonks chuckled. “It’s my newest design,” she said. “So it doesn’t exist yet.”
Fred raised an eyebrow. “Oh? And what is going on in your life, Nymphadora, that would require such a bold statement?”
Tonks winced dramatically and drew herself up. “That is none of your business, Mister Weasley,” she proclaimed with as much dignity as she could muster, although she couldn’t stop the corners of her mouth twitching.
Fred had worked with Tonks long enough to know that she would tell him eventually. “Fine, keep your secrets,” he pouted. “Come on then, what have you broken this morning that you need fixing?”
Tonks’s Auror training had exposed her to much danger as the war hurtled headlong to its conclusion. She had decided with Voldemort’s downfall that she’d seen enough bloodshed to last a lifetime, and devoted herself instead to the herbology of Defense Against the Dark Arts - the development of plants and potion ingredients that could help anyone caught up in such a war in future. Her training had given her plenty of ideas on where to start - and the first thing she had done was advertise for an assistant who was as proficient at undoing the results of her clumsiness as they were in herbology and invention. Fred, happily, fitted the bill tenfold, and had a sense of humour to boot. Tonks knew she was lucky to have him.
“Actually,” she said proudly, “I haven’t damaged anything today.”
“I don’t believe you,” Fred replied. “I’ll just check with Harry.”
Their newest member of staff had been taken on trial three weeks ago because the shop was doing so well, not just in contracts with Defense companies and the Ministry but, to Tonks’s surprise and secret pleasure, in muggle London, in part due to the list of flowers and their meanings carefully etched into the window by Fred. Muggles, it seemed, loved symbolism, and Tonks’s obsession with the language of flowers - and the hours she’d spent teaching it to Fred - was paying off. If she had a Sickle for every time she’d been asked for a “break-up bouquet” or an “apology flower”, she’d be a rich witch.
“Harry’s sick,” Tonks said. “Looked like hell when he arrived, and weak as a kitten. Couldn’t lift a mandrake off the floor. I sent him home.”
Fred paused on his way out of the back of the shop. “That doesn’t seem like him,” he said thoughtfully. “He’s been a hard worker, if a bit quiet so far.”
Tonks shrugged. “He sounded ill, too. Must have a sore throat or something. He swore, and it sounded like he was just hissing. I told him it sounded like Parseltongue.”
“Harry’s not a Parselmouth,” Fred said. “At least, I don’t think he is.”
“Yeah, well, no matter what he said... unless your brothers have provided him with a Fever Fudge, he wasn’t faking,” Tonks shrugged.
“George wouldn’t,” Fred defended his twin immediately. “He - well, he quite likes Harry, you know. He wouldn’t let Ron give him any either, he’s not got the sales pitch down yet so George keeps him out the way, learning inventory and stuff. Just until he’s found his feet a bit, you know.”
Tonks chuckled at the thought of gangly Ron, whose schooling, nor his friendship with Harry, had managed to teach him a great deal of common sense or life skills. “Oh, I know,” she agreed. “Well, if George likes Harry so much, maybe he should go check on him later. Someone ought to take him some soup, or something.”
There was a glint in her eye that Fred caught, and liked immediately. He felt an answering smile grow across his face. “Oh, I’m sure that can be arranged,” he said gleefully. “I’ll send George a message when his shop closes.”
“Did you say Harry was in the greenhouse with the mandrakes?” Fred asked suddenly.
“Yeah, I asked him to organise them into the ones that need repotting and the ones that are okay for another few weeks. He nearly finished yesterday, he only had a few more to move. Why?”
“Because I think I know why he’s unwell and hissing slightly,” Fred informed her, grinning. “Sansevieria trifasciata.”
“The snake plant,” Tonks said. “But why would that have affected him?”
“Did you know that Harry is an animagus?”
“No. He’s young to have mastered that skill,” Tonks said, surprised. “So what?”
“So, the snake plant has saponins in it that are mildly toxic to most animals, in the muggle and wizarding worlds.” He paused, but ploughed on. “And it’s used in rituals in South Africa to ward off the evil eye. By muggles.”
“You’re telling me that this African muggle weed has magical properties and considers animagi to be evil?”
“There’s got to be a reason that it’s called the snake plant other than ‘it looks like one’,” Fred reasoned. “Especially since it looks nothing like one.”
Tonks had to admit he had a point there.
It took them the rest of the morning to dig out previous wizarding world research on the unexceptional-looking plant. There was a scant amount, but what little there was confirmed their hypothesis.
A muggle account from fifty years before recorded the appearance of a lioness in South Africa that joined a local pride, but over time lost her ability to roar. She was observed alone more and more often - and, eventually, surrounded by snakes. She became almost tame, and whenever a local came across a cobra, the lioness would appear, and the snake would simply slither away. Cobra bites in the local area fell to just four in five years. Wizards had investigated, but could not capture the lioness, and the matter had been dropped.
A Potions Master had been admitted to the long-term ward of St. Mungo’s, reduced to hissing and spitting, after a flu-like illness which began while he was studying the possibility of sansevieria trifasciata as an ingredient in Polyjuice Potion, reducing its brew time by half. An Unspeakable had taken on the work and proven that the plant was useless in Polyjuice brewing, but could reverse Polyjuice transformations without needing to be made into a potion at all.
During the Wizarding War in Burundi in 1968, neighbours had turned on neighbours as a disease known as the “Serpentes Sickness” spread through the population. With no understanding of how the disease spread, executions began as soon as fevers started; after the fever came the demented hissing speech. No cure was ever found. The magical population of Burundi was almost entirely eradicated, and survivors moved away from where the sickness started, afraid that it was in the very soil.
During Voldemort’s first rise to power, the plant was sold illicitly to ward off evil, fashioned into crystal pendants. The black market was closely monitored and stamped out wherever possible to prevent the undercurrents of panic. A Ministry report detailed the confiscation of such pendants from many witches and wizards who were later tried as Death Eaters and sent to Azkaban.
“I don’t love where this is going,” Tonks said slowly.
“No, neither do I,” Fred replied. “None of these are major when you look at them all separately, but taken together… well, that’s a lot of death and imprisonment, isn’t it? I thought it might have caused Harry’s symptoms, but this is way beyond…”
“Yeah. And there’s nothing in here to say how it can be reversed,” Tonks said dejectedly. “This plant has caused chaos for at least the last century and no one has noticed. How are we going to help Harry?”
Luckily, the answer came that afternoon as they continued to dig furiously through various muggle and wizarding research on the innocuous plant.
“Too much water is the plant’s weakness,” Fred read from a muggle plant care book. “Surely it can’t be that simple?”
“Probably not,” Tonks said. “But it’s worth a try. I’ll go, you keep looking, just in case.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, but turned on the spot, and disappeared. She reappeared with a pop in Harry’s living room, which she had visited once before, when she and her husband had helped Harry move in the week after he graduated from Hogwarts, and the week before he started working at her florist.
He was lying on the sofa, eyes closed, and seemed entirely unaware that she was there. He was still wearing his Herbivicus uniform, and there was soil tracking from the door to where he was now slumped, boots still on.
The skin on his forehead was peeling. His arms looked shiny and diamond-printed.
Tonks took in everything she could of the scene, and then hesitated before she stepped forward to shake his shoulder.
“Harry,” she said. “Harry!”
He woke with a hiss of surprise, and then clamped his mouth shut, frowning. He pushed himself upright and clutched at his head, which was spinning.
“Tonks?” He asked. The word stuck in his throat. Tonks heard a hoarse sound that was absolutely not her name.
“It’s okay, Harry,” she said. “Fred and I have worked out what’s wrong. I didn’t know you were an Animagus by the way, that’s amazing. We think there’s a plant that affects witches and wizards who are Animagi, but not those who aren’t, and we might have a cure as well. Can I try it? I haven’t heard Parseltongue since the war, but I’m sure that’s temporary, okay?” She was rambling, but she was also nervous. They came together.
Harry’s head was pounding, and she kept fading in and out of focus. But he nodded tiredly, unable to argue, or to ask why her hair was a dull shade of blonde-brown.
“Look, the only thing we know for sure is that you need water, so… so let’s get you into a bath, shall we, and get you drinking plenty too.” Tonks knew how ridiculous it sounded, but she tried to stay cheery anyway, even if it sounded somewhat false. “Do you remember the succulents in the mandrake greenhouse? Do you remember touching them?”
Harry stumbled to his feet as she chivvied him in the direction of his bathroom. He raised his eyes to her face and lifted his left arm - the one which he had brushed against a tall, pointed plant the day before, knocking it to the floor. He’d picked it up again and returned it to its shelf, no worse for wear.
That was the arm that was now shining with scales.
It took nearly forty minutes to get Harry stripped to his underwear and into a warm bath, on account of his movements being sluggish and his balance being poor. Tonks didn’t risk adding anything but heat to the water. She sat on the toilet lid, refilling a glass every time Harry emptied it, until he’d drunk nearly six pints and his eyes had become a little less filmy.
He cleared his throat carefully. “I- I can sssee.” He said. He lisped the ‘s’ a little, but it was an improvement - at least it was English. Tonks’s relief was overwhelming.
“Good,” she said, trying not to caper around the tiny room in celebration. Her hair lightened several shades. “That arm looks more normal, too, and your forehead isn’t peeling either now.”
Harry, who had noticed neither of these irregularities, let alone their healing, blinked. He smiled an exhausted smile. “So have you jussst made a disss- a discovery, then? A new illnesssss?”
Tonks smiled grimly. “Not a new disease, no. But a new cure.” She handed him a seventh glass of water and stood up. “I’ll just update Fred, and I need to send word to the Ministry. I’ll be right back.”
She stepped out, and sent a Patronus to the florist’s for Fred. Then she Conjured some bottles and extracted her memories of the day, and entrusted them to Hedwig for the attention of the Ministry of Magic’s Department of Magical Plants and their Properties, with an urgent message for the Department’s head. Call her a cynic, but after her time with the Aurors, she had learned not to trust the Unspeakables. She had to wonder whether the discovery would ever be made public, if she sent the information to the Department of Mysteries.
Then she spent a moment leaning on the wall in the hallway, breathing deeply and with relief.
By the time she got back into the bathroom, she was platinum blonde, and Harry had lost the lisp and had drunk two more pints of water. The skin on his fingers was wrinkled with submersion, but there wasn’t a scale in sight.
George started when his twin’s crow-shaped patronus landed on the counter and preened. The war had been over for years, but it still took him a moment to remember that whenever a patronus messenger arrived. He surrounded himself with the fun of the joke shop, and was jovial to family and customers alike, but underneath it, he knew the trauma of the final battle would stay with him for years to come. That Fred’s patronus, like his, had changed from a magpie to a crow proved that his twin felt similarly. It made him feel less alone.
Fred’s voice issued from the silvery creature - quiet and confidential, not like his usual cheerful edicts.
“Got a bit of a mission for you, Forge. Our newest recruit needs you.”
The crow dissolved. George raised an eyebrow. The message was vague at best, but he knew Harry worked with Fred and Tonks now. He’d missed Fred in the shop the last couple of years, but he understood Fred’s need for something more than Skiving Snackboxes and Wildfire Whizzbangs. It didn’t surprise him that his youngest brother had asked to join him in the shop in Fred’s place any more than Harry’s interest in Tonks’s florist had - even if he did wish the opposite were true.
He called to Ron that he needed to run an errand, and apparated without waiting for a reply, landing squarely in Tonks’s newest flower bed.
“I can’t believe you,” Tonks said, wordlessly casting and recasting the spell for which the shop was named to plump up the orchids George had unceremoniously flattened.
“In my defence, this was a patio last week,” George pointed out as he siphoned soil off his shoes. Then he turned to face the devastation with her. “Herbivicus,” he said calmly, and directed the greenish haze pouring from his wand over the worst of the damage.
Tonks softened. “I suppose it was,” she agreed grudgingly, and said no more until they had, between them, returned the orchids to their former glory. Then she turned and led George inside, knocking a spade into his path on the way. Unsure whether it was deliberate or simply another example of her clumsiness, George chose not to comment, just catching it and leaning it back up against the wall as he passed.
When they arrived in the shop, Fred brandished a beautiful sunny bouquet and pushed it into George’s hands.
“You need to visit Harry,” he said without preamble.
“Hello to you too, Gred. Nice to see you,” George said sarcastically.
“Yeah, yeah, good to see you,” Fred said, waving a hand. “Harry’s ill. Well, he’s not, he’s recovering from an illness that we’ve only just identified. But anyway. He’s had a really rough day and he needs you to take him these and some soup and cheer him up.”
George blinked at the bouquet, which was absolutely enormous and held shades of yellow, orange, and red. “So he’s… already better?”
“Yours truly worked out a cure for a brand new disease and Tonks went and fixed him right up,” Fred said, twirling his arms as he fell in a ridiculous curtsey. “You’re welcome. So go, tell him how much you like him, because if we hadn’t done some serious digging today you’d have lost him.”
A chill passed over George, and the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stood on end. “I don’t -” he protested weakly.
“Shut up,” Tonks told him. “And get out. Without destroying any more of my stock.” She didn’t look up from her sketchbook, and George swallowed. Fred chuckled lightly and slapped him on the shoulder, and then strode away into the yard.
“Right, well. I’ll be going then,” George said, hefting the bouquet. “Er, how much-?”
“Nothing,” Tonks said. “Just go, for Merlin’s sake. That boy needs a distraction from today’s events, the sooner the better.”
George murmured his thanks and left the shop through the front door, walking aimlessly into muggle London to think through what he was going to do next. Tonks watched him go, a fond smile on her face and her hair, once more, bubblegum pink.
Harry, who felt - and sounded - entirely normal now except for an overwhelming lethargy, dragged himself to his front door, wondering who could possibly be knocking so delicately. Most of his friends apparated right past it, anyway.
He pulled the door open and was met with a wall of flowers wearing a ginger wig.
“Fred?” He asked.
A face almost identical to Fred’s, but leaner and slightly less freckled, with eyes a shade darker, popped up behind the blooms.
“Oh, George,” Harry corrected himself. “Hi. Er, come in.” He stepped back, blushing furiously, and let the quieter twin follow him over the threshold.
For all his merriment and tom-foolery, George was less boisterous than Fred when the joke shop closed and no-one was watching. Harry didn’t know whether this came from being the second twin, the one who finished Fred’s sentences and followed his lead, or whether it was simply that the two of them were halves of a whole, and his half was the quieter one. It didn’t matter. George’s serious side was attractive, and complemented Harry’s nature; and his fun-loving side came out often enough that Harry could imagine life with him would never be dull.
Not that he’d thought about it too much, of course.
He hovered awkwardly in the hall. “Er, d’you want a drink?” He asked.
“No, Harry, I don’t. Come and sit,” George said, smiling softly. “I hear you’ve had a rough day, so I brought dinner. Just soup, mum’s best, and my homemade bread. If you want anything to eat?”
Harry smiled. “That sounds amazing,” he admitted. “I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
After a meal of hearty tomato soup and still-warm sourdough bread, which in Harry’s case was accompanied with more water, because he wasn’t taking any chances of a relapse, they moved to the living room.
The evening passed with general chit-chat, companionable silence, and occasional laughter as they swapped stories of their respective jobs and reminisced about their years at Hogwarts. George felt a profound peace settle over him - like he could remember Hogwarts fondly, after all, without the battle scenes overlaying every memory; like he could spend his evenings relaxing, rather than chipping away at his latest invention, if he was with Harry.
It wasn’t until late that Harry finally voiced his thoughts about the flowers.
“Did… did you pick these?” He asked gently.
“No,” George admitted. “But I couldn’t have picked better. They’re amazing.”
Harry swallowed, hard. “They are,” he agreed. “Do you know what they mean?”
George shook his head. “Floriography,” he murmured. “Fred used to recite flowers and meanings, when he was trying to remember them in the early days of working with Tonks. I never took enough notice. Even if I had, I don’t know what most of these are.”
Harry sank back against the sofa cushions, eyes blazing as he met George’s gaze. He cleared his throat. “Daisies,” he said quietly. “Hope and new beginnings. Yellow chrysanthemums, for joy, happiness, and love. Lady’s Mantle, showing that you are there for the receiver. A sunflower, for loyalty and adoration. These are yellow carnations, and they represent protection, healing, and strength. Orange gerberas mean loyalty and purity, and dahlias are for commitment.” He paused, meeting George’s eyes again. “Then there are the reds,” he said quietly. “The red carnations symbolise affection and deep love. Six red roses mean infatuation... and red tulips are for true love. A lifetime of happiness; soulmates.”
George swallowed, unable to tear his eyes from Harry’s green gaze. “Wow,” he whispered. “Yeah, that’s…pretty powerful.”
“Still think you couldn’t have picked better?” Harry challenged.
“I don’t think,” George said, his voice shaking. “I know.”
Harry’s answering smile outshone the bouquet.