Survivor

Harry sat in his room, parchment in hand, staring intensely at the blank sheet he held. This was the pinnacle moment of the entire month he'd spent working on this project. If he could do this right, then he was set to go. If he couldn’t, then he would be wasting an entire two weeks while he spent the time at Iris’s home instead of prowling around the castle in an attempt to find a way into that damned third-floor room. 

“Keep in mind the intentions you want to represent with your drawings. If you lose your intent through your frustration, the drawing will be little more than the doodles of a child.”

Yes, he knew very well by now. He’d only spent four weeks working on a single rune. Predictably, the subject was not so simple that he could apply it after a week of learning. It was an absolute slog to get through all of those books on theory even with the stranger helping him at every turn. It would’ve been amusing, really, that runes managed to get so complex by changing a single aspect of spellwork if it wasn’t himself struggling to use the subject for his own purposes. 

Runes were different from spoken spells in only one way: the expression of intent. Spells used verbal incantations while runes used carvings or drawn commands. That one change, though, managed to make an entire subject worth of nuances and specificities. The biggest one for Harry was that so much more could be expressed by drawings than words. 

Words, no matter how vague the usage was, had very specific meanings. If he said “up”, there wasn’t much chance that he could somehow be interpreting that word as meaning “down”, “left”, or “right”. Sure, some would say it was simple enough to write a command using a variety of defined symbols or even by spelling out a word, and they'd be right; the stranger even said that it was possible to simply write down an incantation if he wanted.  

One might wonder, then, why Harry was struggling so much. People seemed to consider him a rather talented student when it came to magic. Even as a first-year, he was quickly becoming McGonagall's favorite student through his magical prowess alone. In this case, the problem was that written commands did very little for him when he needed something so complicated. 

Spells worked with incantations as a physical expression because they were straightforward in their effects. 

Levitate, push, pull, light.

Speaking one word was simple, and attaching that to a specific effect was easy. Notice, however, that each word could only really do one thing. Sure, one could change exactly how that thing happened, but there was little extra application for each spell, and the ones that were more vague were known as the harder spells to master. 

Expecto Patronum, for example, was a spoken spell with a lot of room for interpretation. Roughly speaking, “I expect a guardian” could mean a lot of things. One had to speak that incantation while specifically limiting their connotations for the command into an immaterial guardian forged of happiness itself. That spell was one of the hardest to master in the wizarding world, and it was because the person had to take the time to limit their understanding of the command, which was extremely vague due to the complicated nature of its intended effect, into something that meant what they wanted to accomplish.

To do so with a rune required much the same thing. If Harry wanted to accomplish what he desired, he had to create a drawing that personified his intentions. He wanted to listen in on the things happening around his rune, but that required so much to happen. For one, it wouldn’t work if the audio was transmitted to him immediately. It had to be contained within the rune and played back to him at a later date. If audio was constantly flowing into his mind as the rune experienced it, he would go insane before he could get back to the castle and destroy the damn thing. 

The question he spent a good bit of time pondering was exactly what he should draw to personify his intent to record audio, hold it, and play it back at his convenience. His first thought, actually, was to find the latin verb “to listen” and write that, but, as he just said, his understanding of the word “listen” didn’t exactly connect with his desires. The stranger laughed at him as he wrote down “audire” only to get a headache immediately due to the fact that he was receiving the sound around him twice because “to listen” intrinsically meant receiving audio in real time to a person who was used to hearing things with his ears. 

That was when the most brilliant idea came to him, and the stranger agreed. He couldn’t think of a single command that could personify the entirety of his desires alone, but he did know of an existing electronic device that could. An answering machine was something he had a lot of familiarity with, and it was absolutely perfect. It recorded audio, stored it on the device, and played it back later. By drawing that, it was theoretically possible to imbue his drawing with the expectations of the device’s qualities and power it with his magic in order to create a runic version of the muggle appliance he knew so well.

With that, he realized why people generally didn’t bother with complicated runic schemes. He had his drawing of an answering machine as he remembered it, and he soon figured out that it wasn’t quite there. Certainly, it could record audio and play it back, but how was he to communicate to the rune that he wished for it to play back the audio? By the very concept of the item he drew, it was capable of playing it back, but there was no button to signify the start of its job as there was with the muggle version of it, so he had to design the activation sequence into the rune himself.

Fucking fantastic. It only took him an extra week and a half to work that kink out of his design. As it turned out, his original idea was exactly the answer to his problem. “Dicis”, the Latin verb meant “to say”. He placed that on one of the buttons on the machine, and he used that written verb to represent his desire for the runic scheme to release the audio it collected in chronological order. Unfortunately, he then discovered that everything it recorded came out without a way to pause it if it was simply a one off command. There was no way in hell he was listening to all of it at once, so he made the command like that of a broom’s movement options: it only worked so long as he pumped magic into it. 

It was terribly inefficient, but it worked. As he pumped magic into the rune, it would play back the audio, and it would stop when he stopped the flow of magic. When he started it again, it would resume. As far as he was able to tell, there was no way to replay audio once it'd already passed because his command was only attached to his desire for him to play the audio in chronological order. It was unfortunate, but he was confident that he could make it work. 

THEN, fucking kill him, he found out that his answering machine rune began recording the second he powered it up because there wasn’t a trigger built into the rune that told it to wait for some kind of activation condition. THAT meant he couldn’t charge it properly because the rune was in a perpetual state of use so long as it had enough energy to run. He could pump all of his magic into it, but that meant nothing if it continued to drain the whole damn time. Harry needed it to have enough power to last an entire two weeks, and that was impossible for him to do with his current level of magical power unless he could stockpile it for a while. 

SO!!!

He included another Latin verb into the machine roughly translating to, “To start”, and used that to signify his intent to begin recording only once he put power into the command. Once that was completed, he could begin filling up the rune with magic, and it wouldn’t immediately begin wasting it all by recording his dorm room’s audio while he slept. The stranger found it all very amusing, but Harry was at his wits end.

That, though, introduced yet ANOTHER problem because he figured out that it was impossible to skip things when he designed the machine to record audio and play it directly back. It recorded everything, and it played it all back in order. That meant his stupid rune was going to record three hundred and thirty-six hours of audio, and he was going to have to listen to every single second of it until he might get to something juicy. 

No, NO! FUCK IT! He was going with it. 

So, on his bed he sat, paper in his trembling hand, sanity hanging on by a thread, as he pleaded and prayed for his broken fucking rune to please, God, just work. He pumped his magic into the rune, and he looked at it with desperation metaphorically - and that adjective was not up for dispute - pouring from his eyes as he watched it glow before slowly simmering down into nothingness. He watched it with baited breath, half ready to tear the damn thing to pieces as he activated the “start” function of his rune. 

“Is it good?” he asked the stranger.

“It seems to be slowly using your power, yes,” the stranger answered with a laughing smirk plastered on his face.

“Okay!” Harry exclaimed to his empty room and glared at his answering machine rune with eyes promising a painful death. “Now, we are going to replay the audio, and it is going to work!”

He hovered his finger over the “dicis” command and began to pump his magic into it. For a few seconds, he sat there and pleaded with any of the nonexistent Gods he’d heard of in the muggle world that they would forgive him for his insolence and allow his rune to work in exchange for a lifetime of his undying devotion. When the fourth second came and went, he was sure he would fail. Then came the fifth, and it crackled to life. 

“Okay!” he heard a slightly unhinged version of himself shout to an empty room. “Now, we are going to replay the audio, and it is going to work!”

On his bed, he sat, a lethal smile on his face as he gazed down at his absolutely busted, Frankenstein rune forged of a loose conglomeration of commands and drawings that barely worked at all and immediately denounced whatever God he was begging to at the moment of his success because this shit was all him and Zeus was honestly rather dull if he thought Harry was about to give his life up to the Sky God. His rune was completely inefficient, was going to be a pain in the arse to actually use once it did its job, and took an inordinate amount of time to create; but it was his, and it worked. 

Sobering slowly, very slowly, from the high of success and victory, he put his rune to the side and slowly pushed as much magic as he could into it. The thing was going to have to work for two weeks, and he only had a few more days to charge it. Luckily, Daphne still owed him that potion, and he knew exactly what he was going to ask for. A batch of pepper-up should work masterfully for his little plan. The extra rejuvenation was going to make his task of filling the rune up at least plausibly accomplishable over the next few days. 

Standing around the first floor, Harry awaited the announcement of the Hogwarts Express boarding process along with most of the other Slytherins. They still had an hour or two left to waste, but where else were they supposed to go? Staying inside of their rooms until their departure seemed dreadfully dull, but wandering away from the group seemed silly when their heads would be collecting them all as a group, not individually. 

Harry couldn’t say that he enjoyed being stuck with so many of his admittedly unsavory housemates for a potentially lengthy amount of time, but it could’ve been worse. For example, those dung bombs that went off practically right next to him made things much worse. Daphne, thankfully, had to use the lady’s room at the time. He would’ve never heard the end of it if she were there. 

Smelling like… well… dung, he and the group of students who happened to be around him slinked off to the dungeons and knocked on Professor Snape’s door. The man opened the entrance to his office, obviously irked by the disturbance, and immediately scrunched his nose in disgust upon being introduced to their group’s particular brand of stench. With a small sigh, Harry’s head of house decided that it was time to perform the job he was appointed to do.

“What happened?” he asked, trying valiantly to keep annoyance from coloring his voice.

“Someone set a dung bomb to go off on us!” a second-year whom Harry didn’t recognize exclaimed with a proper amount of indignation. 

Harry decided to throw his two pence in with his usual apathetic aloofness. “I’m pretty sure I saw a certain set of Gryffindors before the bombs went off. I should’ve expected it. We were about due for another one of their brilliant pranks.”

“Weasleys,” the potions master growled under his breath with squinted eyes before closing the door with a bang and prowling away as he tended to do when properly miffed, probably hoping to catch the twins before McGonagall started bringing them to the train.

The rest of his classmates brightened at the knowledge that their Head of House was on it and went to take showers to scrub the offensive liquid from their bodies. That was an expected move from a selection of students who were rather low in the years and pureblood to boot, but, once they were all gone, Harry decided to cast a scouring charm instead. Expensive dung bombs were, of course, designed to resist cleaning charms to a degree that students were likely incapable of overcoming; that was the entire point of them. The cheaper versions, though, were cheaper for a reason. The purebloods were simply of the opinion that the Weasleys would never lower themselves to the level of purchasing cheap prank products, even if their family was dirt poor. 

A devilish grin replaced the disappointed, bored expression he wore mere moments before. 

He felt almost bad that the Weasleys would get pinned for this considering they were either unwilling to draw Ginevra’s ire by pranking him or uninterested in pranking a person their little sister considered likable. Then again, perhaps the very fact that they would’ve pranked him by now if he hadn’t been Ginevra’s friend was reason enough to pin it on them; and, make no mistake, they would get pinned for it. They were the most likely suspects, and who else could’ve done it? 

Themselves?

No one pranked themselves, especially Slytherins, right?

“Is the door warded?” he asked the stranger.

“Not right now, at least” the stranger said, sounding almost impressed by his partner’s ingenuity. “Teachers can’t just ward students out when their attention might be needed, and there's no real reason to protect an office anyway. If they have important or personal stuff in here, it's probably under a second and much more troublesome defense than they could throw up in a rush anyway.”

Harry’s smile only grew, and he pushed the door open, making sure to keep his robe sleeve between his fingers and the knob just in case spells existed to pull fingerprints or something. An elf would've cleaned it off soon enough, but one could never be too careful. It wouldn't do if Snape found his little bug only to immediately find the culprit with some basic detective work.

He even had a nice alibi set up. Oh, he would be taking that shower in just a moment, even though he didn't need to. It would’ve been pretty hard for him to do this if he was already dealing with the horrible mess created by those dung bombs. Honestly, it was an even better alibi in reality than most would think because the zouwu’s nose made those disgusting bombs many times worse.  Luckily for him, very simple charms existed to keep dung bombs and the like from sticking if they were used before the incident. They were mostly useless because it'd require the user to know about the attack beforehand, but it worked surprisingly well if the plan was to bomb himself.

Walking into his head of house’s office, he approached the chair that students normally sat in and laid against the floor to look underneath it. Seeing the bottom of the chair, he took out his piece of parchment and a roll of tape he'd bought with Iris in the muggle world before coming to school. It was ingenious, really. Sticking charms and the like were easily detectable, and people who lived in the wizarding world hardly knew the wonders of tape because they never needed it in the first place. 

He took off a few strips, stuck the runed paper to the bottom of the chair, and pumped just a bit of magic into the start rune. The verb glowed blue for a moment before fizzling out into nothing, but Harry still waited a few seconds more before asking the big question.

“Is it good?”

The stranger took a few more to answer. “I believe so. If I focus on it explicitly, then I can tell there's magic in operation, but runes like this are practically self-contained. Unlike spells, runes don’t leak unnecessary magic, and the less a rune affects the world around it, the harder it is to detect its presence. A rune that merely records things will be almost impossible to detect unless someone is really looking for it.”

That was exactly why the stranger recommended that he put the rune in Snape’s office instead of in the third-floor corridor. Dumbledore would be thoroughly sweeping the entrance from top to bottom often. It was Quirrell's prime target, so constant upkeep was only sensible. 

The office of a random professor though? Would they think to check it thoroughly enough to find such an inconspicuous rune? The only conversations that would occur here would be random and unpredictable, so bugging it was so inefficient that it bordered on stupidity, and Quirrell had his every move placed under a microscope. With so little time to act without some kind of observation, opportunity cost was bound to be a huge factor. There was less than no point in wasting his nonexistent free time bugging a room that probably wouldn't house any useful information in the first place, so there was also little point in keeping it protected when gigantic schemes like a castle-wide attack and basilisk siege monsters were on the table.

That was exactly why it had a chance of working.

With so much going on around the third floor and all of the complicated schemes flying around, who would possibly suspect a tiny, inconsequential bug in an office? And when there was almost no chance of being heard, barriers came down… something valuable might just happen to slip.

Who knew? 

Closing the door gently behind him, his robe sleeve covering his fingers, Harry walked into the Slytherin common room and hopped into the shower. Snape probably managed to find wherever the twins were by then, so he would return a bit later to collect all of the students and return to his office, unaware of the little ear listening in on everything he said. 

He could hardly wait to hear what his professor had to say.

The train ride back to the station was actually more exciting for Harry than leaving for Hogwarts was, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Hogwarts was great and all, but it was a means to an end, little more. He wanted to learn magic, and they were offering. What he was going to do now was many times more momentous.

It was Christmas break, and he actually wanted to go back.

Time off school while he was with the Dursleys felt more like a metaphorical knife was looming over his back all year, slowly descending as the days went by. School used to be his break. Having that situation reversed to its “natural” order was jarring for him, and he couldn’t even begin to express how relieving the lack of apprehension and approaching doom felt. It was also hard to express how much anxiety he felt that all of it might suddenly disappear.

Harry was comfortably sprawled across the bench on his side of the compartment while Daphne sat on her side while pretending to be annoyed at his uncouth manner of relaxing. 

He knew better by now.

“Hey, Daphne,” Harry said to the only other person in his compartment. “What does your family do for Christmas?”

The face she made at his question was telling. He was almost intimidated enough to backtrack, but he ended up standing his ground. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to take back his question, Daphne’s face gradually went back to neutral, and a small sigh left her mouth.

“I don’t know why, but I always seem to forget that a Potter was somehow raised to be so… muggle.”

“Hey!” he exclaimed teasingly, even though he was actually still very angry about the whole situation. “You think you’re upset!? Don’t blame me for where your people decided to chuck me!”

“My people didn’t send you anywhere, Harry. Your parents were both magical. You were sent wherever they wanted you to. If you went anywhere else, it was because they sent you there or the guardian they appointed you decided to do the same.”

Harry was very aware of that; he just had no clue what to do with it. Were his parents responsible for where he went? Was it truly so simple? It was a reasonable thing to believe from the outside, but he couldn’t bring himself to accept it. 

“Yeah, what a brilliant decision."

“Well, they were your mother’s family, right? Where else was she going to send you to live?”

The vivid image of Vernon standing over his cowering form, a face red with fury and veins bulging from his neck flashed through his mind. No, there was simply no way his parents would’ve sent him to live there. They had to have known what kind of people they were. She grew up with her sister and saw the kind of evil and rot that grew within Petunia and everyone she loved. He saw it himself when he forced his way into her mind with the help of the stranger. He refused to believe that she would send him there. 

“I don’t know…” was what he eventually went with, and, seeing his subdued reaction, she decided to move past the subject 

“Whatever the case, we don’t celebrate Christmas. If you weren’t aware, magic and Christianity don’t get along very well.”

Oh, yeah, the witch burnings would do that, wouldn’t they.

“So what do you do for the break, then?”

“It varies between families. There’s a communal party thrown in Hogsmeade that we normally go to. They have a lot of food and competitions. Your guardian probably went there a few times when she first started her career to put her work in the art festival they run. My family usually has a small dinner and gift exchange. Then, everyone adds power to our manor’s ward scheme at the turn of the year.”

It sounded nice. Christmas for Harry’s relatives, himself aside, was mainly about giving as many expensive presents to as many people as possible and appeasing their spoiled son. It was all disgustingly superficial. Compared to that, he thought the activities of Daphne’s family felt much more meaningful. It was nice to know that not every rich family was as dull and uncaring as his own.

“What did you do with your muggle family?”

His mind froze at the question, but his body didn’t. A practiced smile worked its way onto his face, and he couldn’t have looked an ounce happier if he tried. “The usual for muggles. We went to the early morning church service, got lunch out together, and exchanged gifts.”

It sounded nice, just as pleasant as Daphne’s family. It wasn’t hard for him to say it, not when he used to wish so dearly that his family would spontaneously decide to do exactly that one Christmas day. He came up with a lot of things that he wished would happen while sitting in his cupboard. Sure, almost every single one of them never came true, but it was hard to feel bitter about it when the one wish that really mattered did. 

Daphne seemed to accept his answer easily, and he wasn’t surprised. There were exactly two people who'd managed to see through him when it came to that, and one of them had direct access to his entire mind. That the other was a quintessential Hufflepuff was both amusing and frustrating at the same time. 

When the train finally pulled into the station, Harry was yet again wondering why they couldn’t just set up a floo connection for the kids who wanted to go home without sitting on a train for a quarter of the entire day. The stranger seemed to believe that it was done on purpose just to make the students suffer. That they opened up a designated apparition point for quidditch should’ve said enough about whether or not they had the capability to set up convenient travel routes to and from the castle. 

Oh well, it wasn’t as if he didn’t have a million better things to do than lay across a bench for so long. Either way, they arrived, and he left the train. Daphne told him that he was pretty much obligated to meet her parents due to the fact that Daphne resorted to dropping the Greengrass name to keep Snape from questioning her too much about his whereabouts on Halloween. He was warned that propriety was to be expected, but Harry knew that neither he nor his friend truly expected him to abide by traditions he didn’t care for. 

Once they exited the train, shrunken trunks sitting in their pockets, Harry waited for Daphne to spot her family and reluctantly followed her over. He could spot her father through the crowd the second she pointed him out. He was a very tall, lean man. He had black, wavy hair even more extreme than Daphne’s, but it only came down to drape over the top of his shoulders instead of going all the way down to his mid-back like his eldest daughter’s. He had a neatly kept mustache and a bit of hair on the bottom of his chin that gave him a sort of regal, dignified appearance that matched the noble look of Lucius Malfoy. 

Unlike the blond man, however, Daphne’s father somehow managed to keep the look of an aristocrat while simultaneously keeping that rough, overtly intimidating aura that most of them tended to lack. Malfoy was dangerous and intimidating, but it was subtle and hidden beneath the surface that was his upper-class appearance. This man’s danger wasn’t hidden in the slightest. It seemed to pour from him in waves, and Harry was hardly the only one to notice. It was as if he split the crowd where he stood, no one quite willing to brush against him as they might’ve with anyone else in the crowd. 

Walking over to them while standing unflinchingly beside Daphne, he watched the man pick him apart with his eyes relentlessly and without apology. Harry felt immensely uncomfortable, not necessarily because of Daphne’s father, but because of the way the man’s glare made him feel. It reminded him so much of Vernon that they were practically inseparable in his mind. Both of them looked at him as if they knew they held all of the power, as if they were intimately aware that he only stood so long as they wanted him to. 

The difference was that Daphne’s father was probably like that with everyone because he had real power. A member of the sacred 28, a respected and revered member of the Wizengamot, a decorated dueling record, and a reputation for general ruthlessness. The man was a powerhouse politically, physically, magically, and intellectually. 

“Do not show weakness. The man is intimidating only because you let him be. If you were to transform, he would seem puny in comparison.”

That was very true, and the knowledge that he was no longer helpless before a stare so startlingly like his uncle’s made his lips twitch slightly into a smirk before he could shove it down. The man caught his subtle expression, and it spurred the man into speaking. 

“So you are the boy my daughter decided was worthy of the protection my name affords…” he said with a gruff, deep, imposing voice. “For your sake, I hope you’re worth her effort.”

Harry refused to look away from the man as he glanced toward his daughter.

“Come, Daphne,” the man said without any room for argument, and Daphne obeyed.

The two of them walked away from him, and Harry was left to his own devices. He really wasn't sure how to feel about Daphne's father, and the way his Uncle used to make him feel was similar enough to the vibe he got from the guy that he could practically feel his own bias taking over his opinions. Shoving it from his mind and refusing to worry about such unimportant things, he decided to look for Iris. He ended up finding her next to the floo system, and a smile worked its way onto his face despite the quickly approaching need for him to use floo travel. 

"Hey, Kiddo," Iris said kindly as she wrapped the boy in a hug. "We've got lots of work if we want to get the house ready for Christmas, and I expect you to help with all of it!"

A pleasant feeling warmed his chest even as he outwardly rolled his eyes at her exuberance. If she wanted her house decked out for Christmas, he was damn well going to give her one. He was expecting to spend Christmas alone in the dungeons just before the start of his semester. Getting to spend it was Iris and the excitement that came with the idea of it had already made his break infinitely better than his ones spent with the Dursleys, and it was sure it would only get better from there. 

Harry stumbled through the fireplace right after Iris, and he was lucky as to the order of their arrival because he ended up needing Iris to catch him lest he fall flat onto his face. He scoffed under his breath at himself and supposed that it was always a good thing to have something there to humble him. It was hard to get too big for his britches when he couldn’t walk through the floo network without tripping over his own feet. The fact that he had a cat animagus only made it more embarrassing.

Once he was stabilized, he took a look around the not so familiar house and simply had to smile. There were already sparkling streamers of red and green hung around the top edge of the walls and a gigantic tree sitting in the corner of the house under the overhang where her current piece of art always sat. Harry’s eyes, though, were drawn to the bottom of the walls. There was a very tiny, extremely detailed train running along a set of tracks, and they seemed to travel the entire way around the house. Walking over to the train, he realized that it wasn’t an actual train; no, it was painted onto the wall. 

“Just how much more could you possibly do, Iris?” he said with barely concealed exasperation and just a tiny bit of awe. 

There was just something about the way she used magic to create such stunning visuals that always inspired that feeling within him. It, to Harry, exemplified the whimsy and beauty of what magic was supposed to be. So many people fell into mundanity when it came to magic and started treating the ancient power that deemed them worthy as a personal companion like some kind of chore. Iris, though, did it justice every single time.

“I told you that Christmas with an artist is something you won’t be able to go back from,” she said with a proud smirk before it softened into something more serious and less playful. “Do you like it?”

Did he like it?

An image flashed through his head of what Christmas used to be like. He could still see the dark walls of the cupboard that concealed the scuttling of the spiders that generally shared the room with him. He could still feel the painful grumbling of his stomach and the cold anger he still held at his relatives. Harry knew what it felt like to have a truly terrible Christmas, and he was looking at what was very possibly the best one possible while the creator of it was worried that it wasn’t enough. He was tempted to laugh at the absurdity of it. 

A nod and an unusually soft smile was his response, and that was more than enough for Iris. Harry was drawn into the preparations only seconds later, and Iris was apparently dead set on filling that tree with as many ornaments as possible. Of course, as an artist, she was rather opposed to using those unoriginal, mass-produced ornaments she could get at some muggle shop or even the magical ones sold in Diagon. No, they had to be completely original, and she was equally determined to have an entire box of ornaments made personally by him. 

One of the weirdest parts of living with Iris, and one of his personal favorites, was how absolutely impulsive the design of her house was. Her entire life was art, and that meant her house was more of a creative sandbox than a stable, consistent place of living. Furniture was often rearranged by the week to accommodate whatever she was feeling at the moment, and he didn’t even want to start talking about how often the walls were painted and repainted. Harry had once gone to sleep with the house painted a calm blue only to wake up the next day to walls painted a striking, exciting mix of different gradients between orange and yellow as if Iris was attempting to make her house mimic the colors of a particularly majestic sunset.

Magic only made it easier for Iris to make the house match what she wanted, and that was why he was completely unsurprised when she told him of her plans for them to paint more stuff behind the running train. Harry had a feeling it was going to look almost like they’d created an entirely new Christmas environment out of the walls before the end of it, and it would undoubtedly get completely nixed a day after Christmas to make room for whatever thing she decided to do next. It was a very chaotic way to live, but he loved it.

“By the way,” Harry said while he used his wand to collect paint into a small ball at the tip of his wand like Iris taught him, hoping to make something that wouldn’t completely embarrass him when it was put next to something Iris made herself. “Ginevra said her family is having a Pre-Christmas dinner a week before Christmas, and she invited us to it.”

Iris, predictably, couldn’t be more down for it, and she agreed on the spot. “That’s fine. A few days after that, my parents want to come over for a couple days.”

Harry did his best to keep himself neutral, but he was shocked to find himself actually anxious. Iris was more his family than his own family ever was, and that brilliant fact managed to overshadow the knowledge that she probably had her own family outside of him as well. Of course, she had parents, and they probably knew about him too.

What if they didn’t like him?

No, no, why the fuck would he care if they liked him or not? He didn’t choose them; he chose Iris. Their opinions didn’t matter. He had Daphne, Ginevra, and Iris. He cared what they thought, but Iris’s parents were a non-consequence.

Except for the fact that they weren’t. 

What if Iris cared about their opinion of him?

“You don’t look very happy about that,” Harry said instead, observing her somewhat sour expression while pushing down his own emotions. 

“My parents and I,” Iris said with a sigh. “Never really saw eye to eye. We learned to agree to disagree and went on with our lives. I don’t dislike them, but they don’t fit in with the life I made for myself. They’re still family, though, and spending a few days together before Christmas is tradition. They’ll be gone a day or two before Christmas. That’ll be just us.”

Harry refused to look away as he asked his next question. “Do I need to keep Jason in my room for it?”

Iris saw the hardened look in his eyes, and she knew that this was a much bigger question than he was making it out to be. He seemed to be genuinely asking what she wanted, and she suspected that he was equally willing to hide who and what he was if she asked him to. He would play the part of the perfect, normal kid if she truly requested it, and it would make her time with her parents much easier...

But she knew it wouldn’t be the same after that.

He would do it, but the household they ended up making together would’ve been ruined. She had her second and last chance when he forgave her for her reaction to his parselmouth. He trusted her enough to be open with his unique abilities and quirks. She cared about him a lot, and he obviously cared enough to once again stow away the secrets he used to keep.

But not in this house, he wouldn’t. 

“No, this is your house too. You don’t have to change anything to belong here.”

The change was so subtle that almost no one would notice it. The way he nodded made it seem as though her statement was like any other. She noticed it though. She could see the slight gleam in his eyes, and she could tell that his shoulders relaxed just a smidge more than before. Iris most definitely said the right thing, and she refused to regret it in the slightest.