Chapter Text
“Tell me it’s a terrible idea, Ron,” Harry says, tipping his head over the armrest of the worn plaid couch to look at Ron through the doorway.
Ron is in the kitchen wearing his awful apron again, chewing on a piece of bacon as he finishes scrambling eggs in a pan. Fresh toast pops from the toaster and flies to a plate on its own. It is instantly lathered in butter by a free-floating knife.
“I dunno, mate,” Ron replies with a shrug, not turning to look at Harry. “Seems like an alright idea to me.”
Rose runs across the lounge room with her teddy in hand and leaps onto Harry. Her knee digs into his stomach and knocks the wind from his lungs. Harry struggles to drag a breath in and groans, catching her as she flops backwards, almost toppling off him and onto the floor.
“C’mon Rosie, that hurt,” he grumbles.
“Look, look Unc’ Harry!” She holds the teddy up which seems to have changed colours since last time he visited. “Mum make her purple!”
“Oh, wow!” Harry grins and plucks the teddy from her hands, inspecting it closely. “She looks so cool!”
“I mean, he’s immortal, right?” Ron continues from the kitchen, spinning to plop a plate of fresh eggs on the island. “Isn’t that, like, perfect for you? Rose baby, come on, breakfast is ready!”
“Yay!” She scrambles off Harry, snatching her beloved teddy back as she runs to the kitchen. Harry rolls himself from the couch and follows her with a frown.
“Weren’t you the one telling me last time to be careful with these vampires? That I couldn’t trust them?”
“That was before,” Ron says, waving his spatula. “Mione has researched them now. You know they’re like those wolves? They got that nature magic in ‘em.”
“No, I don’t know. Hermione hasn’t told me anything.”
“Well, she will. She’s at the office picking up her notes. You know how she is.” Ron dishes up Rose’s plate and pours juice into her kiddie cup. “She worked late yesterday and then forgot all her notes, so she headed off to get them before you came. Anyways, I’m just saying it might not be the worst thing to get to know them a bit more. Especially this Edward bloke. He seems alright, from what you’ve said.”
Harry isn’t one to tell his friends about his romantic endeavours. Not normally, anyway. But he had two revelations whilst trying to sleep last night, when he was tossing and turning all night over his horrible decision to agree to a date with Edward. The first, is that this could impact The Timeline, so he should ask for advice. The second, is that his friends will be dead one day and he won’t be able to talk to them about his problems then. A depressing thought, but a motivating one. It makes him much less likely to keep information from them just because he has some aversion to discussing his romances. Although, no one really wants to discuss one-night stands with friends who have no experience participating in them. This is more up Ron and Hermione’s alley, what with it being an actual relationship type thing.
“You’re meant to be telling me it’s a bad idea.”
Ron dumps a plate in front of him and Harry thanks him sulkily.
“You’re right, Harry. It’s a terrible idea to give yourself the chance to date a muggle immortal whom you have an interest in,” Ron says, face straight and voice monotone.
“He’s a vampire!” Harry says, stabbing a fork roughly into some scrambled eggs. They crumble under the force.
“So what? Didn’t you date a werewolf like four years ago? What about that girl with the Veela inheritance you were with for, like, eight months? You can’t suddenly act like you’re against creatures.”
“I didn’t date them.” Harry pours himself a tea and spins honey into it angrily. “They were just fu—” Harry shuts his mouth and looks at Rose, whose eyes dart between Ron and him as she listens in. “Friends,” he finishes.
“Like Teddy!” Rose says around a mouthful of egg. “Teddy is wolf too!”
“Yes, like Teddy, baby.” Ron digs into his own meal and points his fork at Harry. “You’re acting like a dunce.”
“Who’s a dunce?” Hermione says, striding into the kitchen with her arms full of files. “Oh, Harry, you’re here already.” She kisses Rose on the head, whispering a good morning.
“Uncle Harry!” Rose says happily at the same time Ron says, “Harry is.”
Ron pushes a mug of tea under stasis charm over to Hermione. She dumps her files on the kitchen island and smiles at him gratefully, slipping into the seat next to Harry and stealing a slice of bacon from his plate. She sips her tea, eyeing Harry over the rim.
“Why? What’s he done now?”
“Unca’ Harry hates creatures,” Rose whispers conspiratorially.
“No, I don’t!” Harry cries.
“He wants to flake on a date. With his vampire,” Ron says.
“Oh, you have a date?” Hermione asks, her face lighting up. “You asked him out?”
“What? No, he asked m—that doesn’t matter!” Harry splutters, his face reddening.
“Harry wants us to tell him it’s a bad idea,” Ron continues, not even looking at Harry when he shoots a glare his way.
“That’s not exactly—” Harry says.
“It’s a great idea. You like him, right? Plus, he’s immortal. Sounds ideal to me.”
Hermione sips on her tea and Harry groans, thumping his head on the table next to his plate. He should have known he wasn’t going to get support from his friends when they’re such bulldozers. He can’t say either of them are wrong, but they aren’t saying what he hoped they would, and that means it feels wrong. Why can’t Ron be suspicious like he was last time he mentioned these vampires? Back then, Harry was the one saying the vampires were fine and it wasn’t a big deal to get to know them more. Now it’s the opposite and Harry doesn’t like feeling as though his avoidant tendencies are being blatantly called out to his face.
“You’re just scared,” Ron says, stabbing Harry where it hurts. “But it’s a good thing.”
“Yes, it is. Ron was the same when we started dating, you know. Don’t you remember? He was constantly coming to you for advice and whining about whether it was going to be a mistake or not for us to date.” Hermione sips her tea and takes a triangle of toast from Ron’s plate as he glares at her. “Gosh, it took him a whole year to even get the courage to ask me out on a date, even though we’d already kissed!”
“Ew,” Rose mutters and Harry nods with her, pulling a grossed-out face.
“It’s normal to be scared,” Ron says, pointedly ignoring Hermione’s comment. “Especially for you. You’re so used to pushing everyone away. Maybe you should just let this one in.”
“Ugh.”
The thought is terrifying, even if he already has let Edward in more than he is used to. Harry pushes his eggs around on his plate and frowns at the toast growing soggier with each minute.
“Ron’s right, Harry,” Hermione says. “What’s the worst that can happen?”
Coming from Hermione, who has definitely thought about the worst things that could happen, the comment gives Harry little relief. He’s sure there is a lot that could go wrong. Even if it’s as simple as Edward realising he doesn’t like Harry as much as he thinks he does. Maybe Edward is attracted to the mystery. Harry’s not sure he could find it within himself to continue with this tiresome life if he learnt to love Edward, only for him to lose interest. Not that Harry can die permanently. Not yet anyway. Maybe he could fandangle a way to do it—weigh himself down to the bottom of the ocean and drown perpetually or find someone to chop him into pieces and see what happens.
“Seems like a lot,” Harry mutters.
“But you still agreed to go on a date,” Ron says around a mouthful of egg and toast. “That seems like a good first step. Just see what happens, you know? Maybe this vamp will be cool.”
“Cool,” Harry repeats, almost rolling his eyes at his plate.
“Technically, he is already rather cool,” Hermione says, and Harry pre-emptively cuts off the information dump he can feel brewing on the complexities of half-muggle vampire anatomy and their body temperature.
“Speaking of—Ron said they’re nature magic? What’s that about?”
Luckily, Hermione takes the bait. Harry’s glad because he wants to know how the vampires came to exist and if it involves some lost squib like the wolves. The only other thought he had was that maybe in the past some crazy muggle was on a rabid cannibalistic rampage, killed a wizard, and ingested enough of them to soak up some remnant magic, which then mutated in their body to make something half-magic and vampiric. It seems unlikely, and he hasn’t shared the theory with Hermione because he knows she will look at him like he’s a lunatic for even considering such a thing since there is absolutely no scientific basis to assume magic can be attained by digesting the meat of someone with magic.
“Oh! It’s so fascinating!” She jumps up and shuffles through one of her files, pulling some pages out and coming back to sit even closer to Harry than before, enthusiastically pushing his plate aside to make room for the papers. “As you know, the earliest recording of magic is in Egypt. That’s where wizarding society really began way back when.”
“I should know that?” Harry asks, sipping his tea.
“Oh, come on, Harry!” She cries. Harry is vividly transported back to third year, when Hermione said the same words in that same exasperated tone when he told her he’d signed up for divination as an elective. “We took History of Magic for five years!” Ron snorts and whispers something to Rose conspiratorially, and they both laugh.
Sure, Harry might have been enrolled in the class for five years and he probably even sat there and listened to Professor Binns every now and then, when he wasn’t on some long-winded tangent or being bullied by Draco and his goons. But he knows without a doubt that the information he deemed relevant and remembered from that class and what Hermione deemed important are vastly different. Hermione, for example, deemed the origin of magic important information. On the other hand, Harry vividly remembers a rather long lecture on the effectiveness of wearing socks inside-out to ward off evil spirits in the medieval period and how some protection ward spells still require clothing items to be turned inside-out to increase their effectiveness.
“Egypt, as you’d imagine, has a long and rich history with all types of magic, some that are even lost to us today. This includes nature magic.” Harry nods his head to show he’s keeping up. “Well, the first recording of these vampires is also from Egypt! Look!” She points to a haphazardly highlighted line on a shoddily photocopied, blurred sheet. He squints at the words a bit to try and read them.
“Oh, sorry,” Hermione says when he gives her a deadpan look. “I forgot the translation spell.”
She whips her wand out and taps it on the paper, forcing the curled words into the rigid letters of English. Harry reads it now—an entry from an early wizard describing an odd creature he met at a magical oasis in the desert, so far lost in the dunes that muggles don’t venture there.
“So, there was a vampire in the desert?” Harry asks, pushing the paper back to Hermione.
“Yes! Fascinating stuff, isn’t it? I’d really like to know where the oasis was, but I haven’t been able to track it down yet.” She steals another piece of bacon, this time from Ron’s plate. Her face lights up as she shows Harry a crude, hand-drawn map, which only the original creator would have any chance of understanding because the landmarks are rather odd descriptors like “pointed rock”, and magical ley lines that no longer exist in the modern world. “I can only imagine what type of magic existed there! And what if other creatures also evolved at—"
“Love,” Ron says, cutting her off. “Tell him the important part.”
Rose laughs as Hermione blushes slightly, turning back to Harry with a sheepish look.
“Right, well. Anyway. The important part is that—according to these unfinished journal notes—this vampire was a muggle! The wizard theorises that the muggle got lost during their travels and found themselves at the oasis, but the vampire’s memories of the ordeal were rather patchy so they couldn’t figure much else out. Which makes me wonder on the efficacy of legilimency back then. Our understanding on how the brain processes and stores memories has improved tenfold over the centuries, I can’t imagine it was as effective compared to now.”
“So, a muggle stumbles onto some magical oasis in the desert and then...turns into a vampire?” Harry asks.
Rose pushes her plate aside and clambers over an empty chair to make her way to Harry, plopping herself into his lap. He ruffles her hair and shuffles her over slightly so he can still see the papers in front of him. His breakfast is growing cold, forgotten to the side.
“Yes, well. I’m not sure how they came to be, but obviously something at the oasis changed him. I’ve theorised it’s the nature magic—he would have needed to eat and drink, after all. There’s no mention on what exactly the oasis had available, but it seems possible the magic built up within him and forced some change, like the wolves.”
“But why a vampire?” Harry asks and Hermione furrows her brows. “Why not a wolf?”
“I’m not sure...maybe it has to do with the human itself,” she says, looking back to her notes.
“Didn’t you say the wolves were descended from the Blacks?” Ron asks. “What if that muggle was descended from a vampire? A muggle born from a squib whose ancestors had mingled with a vampire?”
“That’s actually a strong possibility.” Hermione pats Ron’s hand on the table with a soft smile.
“Was that common? To mix with creatures?” Harry asks.
The purebloods he knows would never want to mix their bloodline with creatures. Well, they’re not as bad now. Pureblood rhetoric has lessened dramatically in the last decade in a direct response to Voldemort’s teachings, particularly by younger purebloods who saw the horrors of the war first-hand. Still, he’s unsure how many of them would want to mix their lineage with a creature rather than a muggle-born.
“Oh, it would have been common back then,” Hermione says. “Pureblood rhetoric didn’t start until many generations later and, even then, Egypt has rarely beholden to such strict rules on bloodlines. Wizarding families there were mostly all related. So, the wizarding population was much too small back then to not mingle with humans and creatures to lower the risk of inbreeding. It did happen, of course.”
“A muggle descendent of a squib with a vampire ancestor finds himself at a magical oasis, overloads on nature magic and awakens into a vampire,” Harry muses, waving his knee side to side so Rose feels like she’s on a ride, giggling to herself and flopping left and right. “I suppose when they bite another, or they don’t drain them to death, then they’re injecting their mutated nature magic into someone and thus forcing a transformation?”
“Do all muggles survive the transformation? Or only some?” Hermione questions.
“I’m not sure. I’d have to ask.”
“If all survive, then it’s likely that. If only some do, then it could be that whatever reaction occurs when they bite another reacts to dormant magic within a muggle, like that of a muggle with magical ancestors, and awakens the magic to begin a transformation.”
“I see.” Harry taps his fingers on the table a few times. “What about the vampires with abilities? Only some of them seem to awaken these secondary powers.”
“If all muggles turn when bitten, maybe those are the muggles with magical ancestors,” Ron shares. “The change could awaken something more in them, different to those without magical ancestors.”
“The truth is, we really can’t know. It’s all speculation—but I am trying to convince the Department to provide a budget for me to research unclassified magical creatures. I’ll have to work on a few others first, but I’ll eventually be able to research these muggle creatures by explaining I found these records by chance.”
“That would be good,” Harry says, nodding her head and looking at his friend’s excited eyes. He shuffles Rose to his opposite knee and digs into his now cold breakfast. It still tastes good. Everything Ron makes tastes great. Must be Molly’s genes.
At least it’s nice that Hermione has found something to reignite her research passion. He knows she was feeling a bit trapped these last few years in the DRCMC after she got the final bill from the “ten bills that must be passed for magical creatures rights” list she wrote in eighth year. He can’t imagine she will want to stay there much longer. It’s about time she moves up in the Department if she wants to stick to her plan on becoming Minister for Magic before she is thirty-five.
“I managed to get us an appointment with Griphook on Thursday,” she says, brushing her hair behind an ear and shuffling her papers back into their file. “He’s been dodging me for weeks! I think he knows we are onto him.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. He seems to know everything,” Harry grumbles. “What time?”
“Not until late. I forced him to accept a late appointment since I will be sitting in on a Wizengamot meeting that day and he refuses to meet on a weekend.”
Harry can’t stop the snort escaping as he imagines Griphook’s unimpressed face at being asked to stay for a late appointment. Every time they met, Harry was always forced to Gringott’s at the crack of dawn. He’ll enjoy turning up with an evil grin. He stands up, scooping Rose up under one arm and grabbing his plate with the other, zooming her around like she’s on a broom as he flies her to the kitchen. She squeals and giggles, kicking her legs as though she’s swimming, not flying.
“Thanks for breakfast, Ron. And for researching all that for me, Hermione,” he says, spinning back around, making sure to turn an extra couple of times for Rose.
“Anytime, mate,” Ron replies, scooping up the last of his eggs and drinking down his orange juice like Seamus is there to steal it from him
“You’re going to see Teddy?” Hermione asks, catching Rose when Harry flies her over and hovers her above Hermione’s head before gently dropping her into Hermione’s arms.
“Yeah, I promised Andy I’d watch him until eleven thirty. She’s going to the hospital.”
“Again?” Hermione curls Rose into her arms, eyes scrunched at the edges in worry. “Who’s going with her?”
“Narcissa, I think. They’re getting some test results.”
Harry tries not to ask too much about Andy’s sickness for a few reasons. The main one being that Andy is much too proud to let Harry know what’s truly going on and she likely won’t share until she’s on her death bed. The other reason he doesn’t ask is because he would rather not ask too much and risk thinking of how long she has left, because Death is more than happy to tell him who is expected to die and when. Which is information Harry’s adamant he shouldn’t be privy to, especially since he doesn’t have the ability to delay or change their fate. Imagine seeing a clock ticking down on someone you care for. Harry would rather not experience such a thing. Death is hard enough to cope with as is.
“Will you come for dinner Thursday?” Ron asks. “After your meeting.”
“Sure,” Harry agrees easily, ruffling Rose’s hair once more and kissing Hermione on the forehead as he walks past.
“You should bring your vampire too!” Ron yells after him. “I can get Charlie to send some dragon blood over!”
“Not gonna happen!” Harry yells back, scooping some floo powder from the old cookie jar on the mantle.
Based on Edward’s reaction to erumpent blood pops, Harry’s quite sure Edward would combust if he tried fresh dragon blood. Plus, he just doesn’t want his new life to overlap with this life—his real one, filled with his long-term friends and family, with those who know who he is and who have been beside him for the best and worst moments in his life. He can’t even imagine Edward sitting beside his best friends or next to Rose as they eat and he drinks down a fresh glass of blood. The thought alone sends a shiver of unease down Harry’s spine. No. These two lives are best left separate. Perhaps that’s an odd thought to have, when all he seems to be doing is letting Edward in each time they meet, closer and closer to this real life.
Harry steps inside the floo and calls out for Andromeda’s house, dashing the powder into the hearth and watching as green flames burst into life.
“See, mummy? Unca’ Harry hates creatures,” he hears Rose say, loud enough he feels she did it on purpose.
Ron and Hermione’s laughter follows him as he spins away.