Chapter Text
Harry was supposed to be turning a tortoiseshell comb into a tortoise. The theory was that objects with an etymological link to their target form were easier to transfigure, something about sympathetic resonance that Hermione had explained three times and that Harry had understood approximately once.
His tortoise was not going well. It had four legs and a shell, which was promising, but it also still had teeth. Fine for a comb but something which tortoises famously do not. It sat on his desk, looking confused and faintly menacing.
Ron’s tortoise was worse. It had the shell and the general shape, but it was still made of tortoiseshell (the material, not the animal), and it moved with the stiff gait of something that was technically alive but deeply unhappy about it.
“Mine still looks like a comb that’s gained sentience,” Ron muttered, poking it with his wand. The tortoise-brooch snapped at him. “Yours has got fangs. We’re a disaster.”
“At least yours has the right number of legs,” Harry said. He prodded his creation and one of the fangs fell out onto the desk. “Progress.”
They were sat at the back of the classroom, which was where Harry and Ron always ended up during practicals. They found it to be far enough from McGonagall’s prowling that they could work at their own pace, but close enough to Hermione’s desk that they could steal glances at her technique when they got stuck. Today, Hermione was three rows ahead, her tortoise already complete and apparently napping. She hadn’t looked at Harry once.
The argument from the common room was four days old. They hadn’t discussed it. They’d been polite, but the easy warmth between them had cooled to a careful, brittle courtesy. It was awful. Harry hated it. He also didn’t know how to fix it without conceding points he wasn’t ready to.
Ron tapped his tortoiseshell creature again, muttering the incantation under his breath. The shell rippled, turned briefly green, then snapped back to glossy brown. He sighed.
“Harry,” Ron said, not looking up from his failed tortoise. His voice was casual. Too casual. The studied nonchalance of someone who’d been rehearsing an opening line.
“Yeah?”
“You missed breakfast again this morning.”
Harry’s wand hand stilled. “I wasn’t hungry.”
“You weren’t there yesterday either. Or Monday.” Ron was still fiddling with his tortoise, but his ears had gone slightly pink. “Neville said you were still in bed when he left the dormitory. He said your curtains were drawn.”
“Since when does Neville report to you on my sleeping habits?”
“Since I asked him to,” Ron said simply.
Harry looked at him. Ron met his eyes, and for once there was no joke waiting behind them. Just concern, with all the awkwardness of a boy who would rather face a Hungarian Horntail than have a sincere conversation about feelings.
“I’m fine, Ron.”
“Yeah, you keep saying that. And you keep missing breakfast. Those two things aren’t adding up mate.”
Harry turned back to his tortoise. He jabbed it with his wand. A fifth leg sprouted from its side. He swore under his breath and vanished it.
“The scar’s been bad at night,” Harry admitted, keeping his voice low. “I’m not sleeping well. By the time morning comes round, I just… can’t face the noise of the Hall.”
“But you’re sleeping better when you’re with her,” Ron said. “Daphne.”
Harry didn’t answer, which was answer enough.
Ron was quiet for a moment. He attempted another transfiguration on his brooch-tortoise. It grew a tail, which was an improvement, but the tail was made of pearl inlay.
“Look,” Ron said. “I’m not Hermione. I’m not going to give you a lecture about dependency or whatever she called it. I know you two had a row.”
“She told you?”
“She didn’t have to. You’re not talking to each other, and she’s been reading books with titles longer than a Falcon’s match, which is what we all know she does when she’s upset.” Ron shrugged. “I’ve known her for six years. I can read the signs.”
He set his wand down and turned to face Harry properly, keeping his voice low enough that the nearest students, Seamus and Dean, couldn’t hear.
“Here’s what I think,” Ron said. “And I’m only going to say this once because it’s uncomfortable and I’d rather be talking about Quidditch. I think Greengrass is good for you. I’ve seen the difference. You smile more. You’re calmer. You laugh like you used to, before everything got so messed up. I’m happy about that, Harry. Properly happy. You’re my best mate and you’ve been miserable, and now you’re not, and that matters to me.”
He paused. His ears growing even more pink.
“But I also think you’re disappearing a bit. You don’t hang around the common room anymore. You barely come to Quidditch practice, and when you do, you’re miles away. Last week I made a cracking joke about Malfoy and you didn’t even hear me. You just walked past like I wasn’t there.”
Harry felt a stab of guilt. He remembered the moment. He’d been heading to the greenhouses to meet Daphne and Ron had been standing by the portrait hole, saying something, and Harry had just… not registered it.
“I’m not saying you have to choose,” Ron continued quickly. “That’s not what this is. You can have a girlfriend and have friends. Normal people manage it. Even Seamus manages it, and Seamus can barely manage trousers.”
“Oi!” Seamus called from across the room, though he couldn’t possibly have heard properly.
“I just miss you, is all,” Ron said. He said it simply, without drama, the way he said most important things. “I miss messing about. Playing chess. Being bored together. I know the war’s happening and everything’s terrifying and you’ve got the weight of the world on you. I just don’t want to find out one day that we stopped being friends while I wasn’t paying attention.”
Harry stared at his five-legged, fanged tortoise. He felt the guilt sit heavy in his stomach, right next to the cold knot of the link that was always there, always buzzing.
“You won’t,” Harry said. His voice was rough. “Ron. You won’t lose me. I’ve been a crap friend lately. I know that.”
“Bit crap,” Ron agreed. “Not fully crap. Maybe seventy percent crap.”
Harry managed a smile. “I’ll work on bringing it down to fifty.”
“Forty and we’ve got a deal.” Ron picked up his wand again and pointed it at the brooch-tortoise, which had started trying to eat Harry’s five-legged monstrosity. “Wednesday nights. Chess. Non-negotiable. You can bring her if you want, but I should warn you, I’m very attractive when I’m winning and she might fall in love with me.”
“I’ll risk it,” Harry said.
“Your funeral.” Ron separated the two tortoises, which were now locked in a slow-motion battle that looked more like a very aggressive waltz. “Now help me figure out why mine is made of jewellery. McGonagall’s going to have my head.”
They worked in companionable silence for a few minutes. It wasn’t fixed — not completely. You couldn’t undo weeks of drift with one conversation. But the ice had cracked, and underneath it, the friendship was still there. Solid. Warm.
The bell rang. Students began packing up, vanishing their failed experiments.
“Mr. Potter.”
McGonagall’s voice cut through the noise of scraping chairs and slamming bags. She was standing at the front of the room, her hands clasped behind her back, watching the class file out with the patient stillness of a hawk on a fencepost.
“A word, please. The rest of you, out.”
Ron shot Harry a look, part sympathy, part amusement. “Want me to wait?”
“No, it’s fine. I’m meeting Daphne for a walk before dinner. Tell her I’ll be five minutes, will you? She’s probably already outside the common room.”
Ron blinked. “You want me to go chat to the Ice Queen? Alone? Without a handler?”
“You’ll be fine. Just don’t mention Quidditch. She doesn’t get it, she calls it organised falling.”
“Organised—” Ron sputtered. “Right. Fine.”
He grabbed his bag and left, muttering something about hazard pay.
The classroom emptied. The door swung shut. The sudden silence was thick, disturbed only by the faint scuttling of abandoned tortoises making their escape across desktops.
McGonagall looked at Harry. She didn’t speak immediately. She let the silence sit, which was a McGonagall technique that Harry had never learned to defend against. Dumbledore used silence as an invitation. McGonagall used it as a lever.
“Sit down, Mr Potter,” she said. Not unkindly.
Harry sat at the nearest desk. McGonagall remained standing, which meant he had to look up at her.
“You’ve missed breakfast three times this week,” she said.
Harry opened his mouth.
“That was not a question,” McGonagall said. “I’m informing you of a fact. Three times. Monday, Wednesday, and today. On Tuesday, you attended but ate nothing. You rearranged your scrambled eggs for twenty minutes and then left.”
“I didn’t realise you were watching me eat, Professor.”
“I am the Head of Gryffindor House, Mr. Potter. Making sure my students eat is approximately forty percent of the role.” A flicker of something, not quite amusement, crossed her face. “The rest is confiscating Weasley products and writing letters to parents I’d rather not speak to in person.”
Harry looked at his hands. “The connection to… to Voldemort. It’s worse at night. I’m not sleeping well. By morning, the Great Hall is just… too much.”
McGonagall’s expression tightened, with the controlled concern of a woman who had been watching Harry Potter absorb damage for six years and had never quite found the right moment to say something about it.
“Professor Snape’s Occlumency lessons,” she said carefully. “I understand they were… discontinued.”
“That’s one word for it.”
“Have you considered resuming them? Perhaps with a different instructor?”
“I’d rather just try harder to eat the scrambled eggs.”
McGonagall studied him for a long moment. Then she moved around her desk and sat down. She was no longer looming. She was level with him. Eye to eye.
“Harry,” she said. Her voice had shifted. It was still Professor McGonagall — still precise and clipped — but there was a warmth underneath that he rarely heard. The same warmth she’d had in his first year, when she’d watched him fly for the first time and seen something worth protecting.
“I am not going to pretend I don’t know what’s happening in your personal life,” she said. “This is a castle full of teenagers. Secrets have a half-life of approximately six hours.”
Harry felt his face heat.
“You and Miss Greengrass,” McGonagall continued. “I have been informed.”
“By who?”
“By the entire school, Mr. Potter. You are not subtle.” She paused. “But also by her grandmother. Eudora Greengrass. We have been friends for near enough fifty years. We were in the same year at Hogwarts, though she was Slytherin and I was — well. You can imagine the rivalry.”
Harry could not, actually, imagine McGonagall having a friend who was a Slytherin.
“Eudora wrote to me last month,” McGonagall said. “She told me that her granddaughter — a student I have taught for six years, a student I have watched struggle in my classroom — was, for the first time, plainly happy.”
“She told me that this happiness was, in some significant part, connected to you.”
Harry didn’t know what to say. He looked at the desk.
“I won’t pretend to understand the specifics of the Greengrass situation,” McGonagall said. “Eudora has been… circumspect. But I have eyes, Potter. I have watched that girl sit in my classroom for six years. I have watched her struggle with concepts that require abstraction and imagination. I have watched her crack teacups and shatter goblets and I’m sure you remember the time when she turned a hedgehog inside out.”
Despite everything, Harry’s mouth twitched.
“And I have watched her walk through this school with a mask so perfect that most of the staff believe she is simply cold,” McGonagall continued. “I know better. Eudora made sure of that, when Daphne was eleven and the silence first began to settle.”
Harry looked up sharply. “You’ve known? Since first year?”
“I have known that there is a condition,” McGonagall said carefully. “I have not been told the details. Eudora asked me to do one thing and one thing only: to teach her granddaughter as I would teach any other student. No special treatment. No lowered expectations. No pity.”
“But Professor… Transfiguration is torture for her. The Vanishing Spell, the abstraction, the–”
“I know,” McGonagall said quietly. “Do you think I enjoy watching her fail? Do you think I don’t see the panic in her eyes when I ask her to visualise the transformation?”
She took off her glasses and cleaned them on her sleeve. Without them, she looked older, and tired, and unexpectedly human.
“I promised Eudora,” McGonagall said. “I promised that I would not make her granddaughter less by treating her as less. The world will not make accommodations for her, Harry. The Death Eaters will not lower their wands because she processes magic differently. If I soften my classroom, I weaken her. And I will not do that.”
She replaced her glasses. The hawk was back.
“But I will also tell you this,” she said. “Sprout tells me that Daphne has been attending Thursday afternoon sessions in Greenhouse Four. She says the girl has a gift she’s never seen before. She says the plants listen to her.”
“They do,” Harry said.
“Then perhaps my classroom is not where her talents lie,” McGonagall said. “And perhaps that is perfectly acceptable. Not every witch needs to vanish a teacup to be extraordinary.”
She stood up, signalling that the conversation was nearing its end.
“Take care of yourself, Harry. Eat breakfast. Sleep. If the connection is worsening, come to me, not as your Transfiguration Professor, but as your Head of House. There are resources I can arrange. Discreetly.”
“Yes, Professor.”
“And take care of her,” McGonagall added. She paused by the window, her profile sharp against the grey light. “Eudora lost a daughter to that curse, Daphne’s aunt, years ago. She will not lose a granddaughter. Not on my watch.”
The words landed in Harry’s chest like a stone. He hadn’t known about the aunt.
“I’ll take care of her,” Harry said.
“See that you do.” McGonagall turned back to him, and for one unguarded second, her expression was purely, fiercely fond. Then the mask clicked back into place and she was Professor McGonagall again, terrifying and immaculate.
“Now get out of my classroom, Potter. And for heaven’s sake, eat something. You look bonier than a Thestral.”
Ron was in trouble.
Not danger-trouble. Not hexes-flying, wands-drawn trouble. This was worse. This was social trouble. This was standing-in-a-corridor-with-a-beautiful-girl-who-didn’t-seem-to-understand-how-conversations-worked trouble.
Daphne Greengrass was leaning against the stone wall opposite the Fat Lady’s portrait, her arms folded across her chest, her school bag at her feet. She was wearing her standard uniform, pressed to razor-sharp perfection, her blonde hair in its usual severe knot. She looked like a marble statue that had been placed in a corridor as a warning to lesser mortals.
She had acknowledged Ron’s existence with a single word, “Weasley”, and then gone silent.
Ron stood approximately four feet away, hands in his pockets, bouncing slightly on his heels. The Fat Lady was watching them with undisguised interest from her frame.
“So,” Ron said. “Harry’s been held back by McGonagall. Shouldn’t be long.”
“You have communicated this information,” Daphne observed. “You are still here.”
“Yeah, well. Thought I’d keep you company. Seemed rude to just leave you standing in the corridor by yourself.”
Daphne considered this. “Corridors are functional spaces. They do not require company.”
“Right. No. Course not.” Ron rocked on his heels. “Nice weather.”
Daphne glanced at the nearest window. Rain was hammering the glass with the enthusiasm of someone who had a personal grudge against Scotland.
“The weather is aggressive,” Daphne said.
“Yeah, it’s a bit grim,” Ron agreed. “Scottish rain. It doesn’t just rain, it pours down on ya. My mum says the rain up here has intent to harm.”
Daphne tilted her head. “Rain cannot have intent. It is precipitation.”
“Tell that to the rain at the moment, seems pretty motivated to me.”
A pause. The Fat Lady coughed theatrically. Ron ignored her.
“So,” Ron tried again. “Do you, uh… do you follow Quidditch at all?”
“I have observed it,” Daphne said.
“And?”
“It is organised falling,” she stated. “With occasional catching.”
Ron stared at her. “Organised falling, huh. That’s.. that’s one way of putting it.”
“The brooms are at an unstable altitude,” Daphne explained. “The players lack harnesses. The projectiles are designed to cause injury. Two of the balls actively try to kill people. It is falling with extra steps.”
“The Bludgers don’t try to kill people,” Ron protested. “They just… aggressively redirect them.”
“Toward the ground. At speed.”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“Falling,” Daphne concluded.
Ron opened and closed his mouth. He looked at the Fat Lady for support. She shrugged.
“Okay,” Ron said slowly. “New topic. Harry said you’re good with plants.”
Daphne’s posture changed, a slight lowering of her shoulders, a softening around her jaw. Ron wouldn’t have noticed a week ago, but he’d been paying attention lately. Watching Harry watch Daphne had taught him a few things.
“Plants are honest,” Daphne said. “They don’t pretend. If a plant is dying, it shows you. If it’s healthy, it shows you. People hide their roots. Plants can’t.”
“I reckon my mum’s garden gnomes would disagree,” Ron said. “They’re proper sneaky. One of them bit my dad last summer and then hid in the begonias looking innocent.”
“Gnomes are not plants.”
“No, but they live in the plants. So the plants are harbouring criminals. That’s not very honest, is it?”
Daphne frowned. She appeared to be genuinely troubled by this logical challenge. “The plants did not choose the gnomes. The gnomes chose the plants. The plants are victims of circumstance.”
“My mum’s hydrangeas are accessories to gnome violence. I’m going to tell her. She’ll be devastated.”
Daphne looked at him. Her expression was still blank, still polished, but something had shifted behind her eyes. Ron wasn’t sure, but he thought it might be the beginning stages of amusement, like a small creature cautiously emerging from a burrow.
“You are strange,” Daphne informed him.
“Yeah, I get that a lot. Chocolate Frog?”
He fished a slightly battered box from his pocket and held it out. It was crushed on one side and the foil was torn, but the frog inside was still intact, pressing its tiny chocolate face against the window of the box.
Daphne looked at the box in the way she looked at most things — with an intensity that suggested she was cataloguing its molecular structure.
She took it. She opened the box with precise, careful movements, peeling back the foil slowly. The frog made a break for it, leaping out of the box, but Daphne’s hand snapped out and caught it with reflexes that made Ron’s Quidditch instincts sit up and take notice.
She held the struggling chocolate frog in her fist. She looked at it.
Then she bit its head off.
It was not a dainty bite. It was a clean, decisive decapitation. She chewed, her eyes closing slightly.
“The ears are the best part,” she said. “They’re thicker. More cocoa density.”
“I’m a legs man myself,” Ron said. “The belly’s too sweet.”
Daphne opened her eyes. She looked at Ron with something approaching respect. “You have opinions about chocolate frog anatomy.”
“I’ve eaten roughly ten thousand of them. I’ve developed theories.” He leaned against the opposite wall, matching her posture. “The spring-loaded ones from Honeydukes are better than the boxed ones. The chocolate is darker. More snap.”
“Snap is important,” Daphne agreed. She ate the rest of the frog methodically — legs, then body, then tail. She pocketed the collector’s card without looking at it.
“You don’t collect them?” Ron asked.
“No. But the foil—” She ran her thumb over the crumpled gold wrapper. “The texture is satisfying. It holds the shape of my fingers.”
She demonstrated, pressing the foil between her thumb and forefinger, moulding it into a tiny, abstract shape. She held it up to the torchlight, turning it, examining the way the light caught the crinkled surface.
Ron watched her. He thought about Harry, reading that leather notebook by firelight. He thought about the way Daphne said “texture” with the same reverence most people reserved for “magic” or “love.”
“Can I ask you something?” Ron said.
Daphne lowered the foil. “You may ask. I may not answer.”
“Fair enough.” Ron hesitated, then plunged ahead. “Harry’s been different since you two got together. Better. Like, properly better. Calmer. He laughs more. He’s — he’s more like the Harry I remember from before everything went mental.”
He scratched the back of his neck. “I just want to know — is it real? Not the relationship. Obviously that’s real. I mean the calm. Is it going to last? Or is it one of those things where it’s brilliant for a bit and then it all crashes?”
Daphne was quiet for a long moment. She turned the piece of foil over in her fingers.
“I don’t know what ‘crash’ means in this context,” she said slowly. “If you are asking whether I will stop making him quiet, I don’t control it. It happens. When we touch, his bees go away. I don’t know why.”
“Bees?”
“The buzzing. In his head. He vibrates. When I am near, the vibration has somewhere to go.” She looked at Ron with a directness that was almost uncomfortable. “I don’t understand why. I only know that when he holds my hand, the bees pour into me and I stop floating and he stops shaking. It is a transaction that benefits both parties.”
Ron stared at her. He processed this.
“Bees,” he repeated. “You call it bees.”
“It sounds like bees.”
“And when you’re together, the bees go away.”
“They go somewhere quieter.”
Ron let out a breath. He nodded slowly. “Right. Bees. Okay. I’ll take it.”
He pushed off the wall and stood up straight. He fished another Chocolate Frog from his pocket — he always had at least two — and held it out to her.
“Welcome to the group,” Ron said. “Unofficially. Harry’s friends are a small, weird club, and the entry requirements are basically just putting up with him when he’s being an idiot. Which is often.”
Daphne took the frog. She looked at it, then at Ron.
“You are less loud than I expected,” she said. “Harry described you as chaotic.”
“Chaotic?” Ron looked wounded. “I’m delightful. I’m a joy. Did he actually say chaotic?”
“He said ‘brilliant but mental.’ I interpreted ‘mental’ as chaotic. Was that inaccurate?”
Ron’s face split into a grin. “Brilliant but mental. I’ll take brilliant but mental. That’s going on my tombstone.”
The sound of footsteps echoed down the corridor. Harry appeared around the corner, slightly out of breath, his bag swinging.
He stopped when he saw them. Ron was leaning against one wall, grinning. Daphne was leaning against the other, eating a Chocolate Frog with mechanical precision. Between them, on the floor, sat a small pile of gold foil that Daphne had apparently been sculpting into tiny shapes.
“Should I be worried?” Harry asked.
“I just confirmed that your girlfriend thinks Quidditch is organised falling,” Ron said. “We need to have a serious conversation about this, Harry. This is a values issue.”
“She’s not wrong,” Harry said.
“She is absolutely wrong and you are dead to me.” Ron scooped up his bag. “Right. I’m off. You two enjoy your walk. Daphne, same time next week. We’re resolving the Quidditch issue. I’m bringing visual aids.”
“I am unconvinced that visual aids will help,” Daphne said.
“They’re very persuasive visual aids.”
Ron clapped Harry on the shoulder as he passed. He paused, leaning in close enough that only Harry could hear.
“She’s mental,” Ron whispered. “But good mental. I get it now.”
He straightened up, gave them both a cheerful salute, and disappeared through the portrait hole.
Harry turned to Daphne. She was finishing the last of the second Chocolate Frog, carefully folding the foil into a small, precise star.
“What do you think of Ron?”
“He is warm,” Daphne said. She held up the foil star, turning it in the torchlight. “He talks a lot, but the words are soft. They don’t have edges.”
She tucked the foil star into her pocket and picked up her bag.
“Walk?” she asked, offering her arm in the formal, stiff way she always did — as though courtship were a series of architectural manoeuvres.
Harry took it. She leaned into him immediately, putting her weight against his side.
“McGonagall knows about us,” Harry said as they walked. “And about you. Sort of. Your grandmother told her.”
Daphne nodded, unsurprised. “Grandmother tells Professor McGonagall everything. They write letters every week. Grandmother says McGonagall is the only honest person in the castle.”
“She told me she promised your grandmother to teach you like any other student. No special treatment.”
Daphne was quiet for a moment. They turned a corner, heading toward the courtyard doors.
“That is why I am still failing Transfiguration,” Daphne said thoughtfully. “She is keeping her promise.”
“Does that bother you?”
Daphne considered. “No. The teacup deserves to be treated as real, whether or not I can vanish it. McGonagall treats me as real too. The alternative would be worse.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“Pity,” Daphne said. “Pity is lightweight. It floats. I hate floating.”
They pushed through the courtyard doors and into the cold, damp air. The rain had eased to a fine mist that settled on their hair and shoulders like a veil.
Daphne lifted her face to it. Her eyes closed. She breathed.
“The rain has intent,” she murmured. “I like Ron. He has good opinions about Chocolate Frogs.”
“High praise.”
“The highest,” Daphne confirmed.
They walked into the mist, her weight against his arm, his warmth against her side, the castle rising behind them like a promise that some things, despite everything, would hold.