Chapter Text
Unseeing green eyes stared blankly at the many scattered papers across the coffee table.
"What am I going to do?"
Long, slim fingers reached out and plucked the empty wine glass from his clenched hands.
"Not drink all of my imported french wine in the effort of getting drunk, for one."
Finally, a spark of life returned to his green eyes as he glared harshly at the other man perched pompously on the edge of his ridiculously soft and expensive chair.
"Draco I came to you for emotional support," he more or less whined pitifully, earning a giggle from the third occupant of the room.
The Malfoy Lord glared unrepentantly back at him before replying with the barest drawl, "Yes, exactly. Not to get drunk. Just one of these bottles costs a small fortune. Have some courtesy, Potter."
After a prissy sniff at the end of his words, Draco began to look a bit more awkward with the situation. Despite being close friends for nearly a decade, he still wasn't comfortable for the more emotional sides of friendship with Harry.
"Besides," he added stiltedly, "It's not that bad. You got custody of the brats, right?"
And that was the heart of the matter. In truth, the divorce with Ginny was a long time coming and the only thing the split filled him with is relief. But his kids. His kids were the most important thing in his life and he would die for them and kill for them and steal the very moon and stars in the sky for them if they wished it.
Luckily old pro-pureblood laws stated that no child of a noble British pureblood family Head can be taken from their custody unless the child in question has been disinherited. By the same vein, however, those same old laws state that a first born son and daughter cannot be taken out of a pureblood woman's custody and into the custody of a non-pureblood unless the children have similarly been disinherited or the mother imprisoned.
So now Harry had full custody of Teddy and Al, and shared custody with his newly ex-wife of Jamie and Lils.
Teddy was still at Hogwarts for his first year. (Harry had been so proud when he sent a letter home on the second of September telling him Teddy was now a badger.) Al, his utterly adorable five year old son, on the other hand, was currently playing with Scorpius and the twins somewhere in Malfoy Manor while Harry sought help and advice from one of their parents.
Jamie and Lils were with their mother at the house at Godric's Hollow that Harry bought as an engagement present. The fact that his parents' graves and old home were only down the street had been a definite plus.
Now, of course, the house was in Ginny's name, along with a good pile of gold from his vaults. He didn't really mind, as she did have custody of two of his kids and he didn't want them ever to grow up with even the faintest of likeness to his own childhood. Money and material possessions should never be an issue for them.
A small, dainty hand grabbed his and squeezed lightly as it's owner promised, "Everything will be fine, Harry. This was supposed to happen. From here, your life is only going to get better and better."
Harry's spirits slowly lifted from the gloomy fog they had been in for days. When Luna said something, it was truth. So if she said it would be fine, by Merlin, it would be fine.
With a relieved sigh, Harry relaxed into his chair from his tensed position, his hands idly stacking up the papers he had previously thrown down. Now the only thing left to do was figure out how he would fare as a single father of four children with his job. Sure, Teddy was at Hogwarts for most of the year so he didn't really have to worry about what to do with him, but Jamie and Lils were only nine and seven respectively and he would have them for half the year. And he now had a five year old he had to raise completely by himself.
Sure, as his own boss he could technically bring Al with him to work, but he didn't feel comfortable at all with the danger he could be inadvertently bringing his youngest son to.
After the war, everyone and their mother expected Harry Potter, the Man-Who-Conquered, to join the Aurors. He didn't. Nor did he return to Hogwarts as many did to redo their seventh year or even to return as a Professor. Nor did he become a Hitwizard or a Ministry employee or a politician or anything of the sort. In fact, at first, Harry didn't do anything except read.
Voldemort left a mark on him in more than just the lightning bolt scar. A piece of his soul had lived in Harry for over sixteen years. The little soul piece had carved a spot for itself in his own soul, the very center of his being and all that he is. And when it was gone after the final battle, it was like a piece of his own heart was missing. The yearning for a phantom limb he hadn't even known existed.
And then there were the other new senses of Harry's after the battle. He knew the feeling of magic intimately after having gone most of his life in absence of it. No, what he could sense now was something completely different. The only likeness he could recall were to his invisibility cloak, the Headmaster's old wand, and the stone from the Gaunt ring.
Thus began Harry's research into souls, death, and magic and the ways they interconnect after the final battle. His fervor in the subject as he scoured Grimmauld Place's library and then the Black and Potter Manors' libraries and the collection of books in his many vaults at Gringotts (which he had to pay a fortune in reparations to get fair service after the break-in and break-out-on-a-dragon fiasco), was, funnily enough, like a man possessed.
His research revealed many things. First, that for every twenty 'facts' Harry could find about these subjects, only one was likely to be true. No one really knew what they were writing about. So it took a lot of reading and cross referencing and experimentation that would have had Hermione nagging at him about unnecessary risk if she knew about it beforehand.
Something he learned that strangely comforted him, was that by no human means were souls able to be created or destroyed. So even though Harry destroyed Voldemort's horcruxes, the soul pieces within them were not similarly destroyed. They merely left the containers that had anchored them to the Living Plane.
Souls were also incredibly stubborn. It is very hard for anything to harm a soul. Even intense trauma and torture will barely fray a soul's edges. The fact that a horcrux actually severs a piece of a soul, the most resilient part of a being, is why it's such strong, insidious, and forbidden piece of magic, as well as why it takes such a large sacrifice as it does to make it work. Even Dementors aren't able to hurt the souls they swallow. The souls within a Dementor merely are in a limbo on the Living Plane until the Dementor dies and the souls are released.
His research also showed him that his long held beliefs about magic that he had picked up here and there throughout his years in Hogwarts and during the war were frankly wrong. Dark and Light magic were more like flavors of magic than moral imperatives. Light magical cores were generally born into families with with histories of Light magical cores and the same with Dark magical cores. A child born with a different core than their parents is uncommon but is no more rare than a child born with the eye or hair color of a relative further up the family line.
Muggleborn magical cores, on the other hand, are born Neutral. If Dark and Light are flavors of magic, Neutral is flavorless. The type of magic they practice before their magical majority then determines whether their core is Light or Dark.
Someone born with a Light or Dark core, however, is significantly less likely to have a shift in core type at magical majority. No such instances had been recorded, but it was theoretically possible, just highly unlikely. It would only be possible to occur if the child had never cast a single magic of their core type in their adolescence (including accidental magic) and performed a copious amount of magic on the opposite side of the magical spectrum.
Magical education geared towards only the Light or the Dark upsets the magical balance of the world. Harry wasn't happy when he learned both sides of the war were as bigoted as they claimed their opponents were. He was more unhappy when the Ministry tried to make the Light faction of the war by outlawing more branches of magic and getting harsher in their treatment of Dark magical creatures and wizards. Harry, only barely eighteen at the time, made sure to throw his new (and not so new) political power around to stop those new laws and some of the old in the name of a 'new age of magical equality, acceptance, and innovation.'
But the thing he learned that changed his world completely was what he learned of death.
Master of Death is not some superfluous title, he soon found out.
Everyone lives on the appropriately named Living Plane. The Master of Death can not only see and interact with the Living Plane, but the Spirit Plane as well. Death, unlike the story of the Three Brothers Peverell, was not a being in any sense but the Great Spirit that controls the Spirit Plane. All that is in the Spirit Plane is at its command and under its rule. And that all-powerful Spirit is completely under Harry's command.
It speaks in feelings instead of words and was rather lacking in terms of strong personalities, but Death was sure to give the sense that it was completely subservient and eager to listen to any of Harry's requests. The problem with that, back then, was that Harry had no requests to ask of Death, as it could only affect the Spirit Plane.
That changed one day in early December when Harry had caved and come out of semi-isolation in the name of research to visit the Burrow. When he had sat awkwardly in the kitchen as Mrs. Weasley bustled around making a large lunch, a large banging and muffled screaming had harshly startled him. It was when Mrs. Weasley had muttered under her breath about the ghoul in the attic messing around again that Harry had an idea. The teen had quickly excuses himself up to the attic as he used his new ability to see past the Living Plane to see the ghoul as it truly existed.
The ghoul had been a large mass of negative spiritual energy only vaguely in the shape of a human. It wasn't to the point where it would be harmful but it was malicious in nature. Harry, out of morbid curiosity more than anything, had reached out and grabbed the approximation of an arm. Just as the theories and stories had stated, he was able to physically interact with the Spirit Plane.
When the ghoul noticed this, however, it's energies immediately became excited and agitated and it retaliated by reaching out for him with its other arm. It was then that he learned that just as he could physically impact the members of the Spirit Plane, they could impact him just as easily without wasting energy going through the veil between planes.
Being a member of two Planes of Existence suddenly became a lot more dangerous.
It was with no small amount of panic, pain, and desperation that the teen had called upon the Spirit of Death for help. Like a loyal and eager attack dog, the great spirit had surged around him in protection and shredded the ghoul into unconnected negative spirit energy and then quickly dispersed it so it wouldn't reconnect.
Mrs. Weasley had been overjoyed when he told her he got rid of the ghoul and offered to help again if it ever came back (though it was highly unlikely with how thoroughly Death had dispersed it). She hadn't even been bothered in the slightest that he hadn't said anything about how he did it.
The rest of the month was filled with even more research, excitement, and a multitude of forms and paperwork to start a business.
On the last day of the year of 1998, December thirty-first, New Years Eve, the anniversary of the birth of Tom Riddle, Potter Spiritual Investigations was officially approved and open for business. It was also that night that he, quite a bit drunk off of alcohol and conflicting emotions of intense loneliness and happiness, that he had accepted Ginny's proposal of something a bit more involved and physical than a simple kiss to start off the New Year and followed her up to her room in the Burrow.
That night was the reason he and Ginny had a rushed wedding as soon as she graduated from Hogwarts even though he wasn't ready for such a strong commitment and why James Sirius Potter was born on September the seventh of 1999.
Not that he regretted it exactly. After Andromeda had passed in May, almost a year exactly to the day of her daughter's death, Harry had been in charge of his Godson, Edward Remus Lupin. So he knew how to take care of an infant, and his dream had always been to have his own family. And he loved Jamie from the moment he first laid eyes on his red and wrinkly body, wailing his little head off.
He had just kind of always wished he could marry for love instead of obligation. Sure, he and Ginny made it work, at first. She loved him and he did care for her. She tried to give him his space that she thought he needed after the trauma of the war. She, after all, knew quite well the feeling of Tom Riddle's soul influencing her own.
She tried to be supportive of his occupation too, though her unimpressed thoughts on it bled through every now and then, along with her disapproval of the people he specifically chose as his coworkers, Draco and Luna. A Dark wizard and a little girl with her head in the clouds. The slight resentment was probably exacerbated by the fact that being a mother meant she couldn't follow her dream of being a professional quidditch player.
While they both tried to make it work over the years, for the kids if nothing else, the longer the marriage dragged on, the worse the discontent between them got. It had gotten to the point that within the past few years, Harry had to regularly disperse negative energy from their home that had gravitated towards the familial dysfunction.
So the divorce was definitely a long time coming, arguably something that was fated to happen before it even started, but Harry would do anything to keep his children happy and safe and now he was facing a dilemna.
The twenty eight year old looked at his two blond friends, green eyes flicking from the silver set to light blue. His friends really could pass as siblings.
"What am I supposed to do with Al while we're on a job?" he asked before shooting a quick glare at the Malfoy Lord and scathingly added, "I will not leave my five year old son alone at home with some house elves as his caretakers."
Draco gave a show of being harshly offended by the comment, before replying himself.
"I'm sure Astoria won't mind if he stays here with Scorpius every now and then. He is the most well behaved of your spawns and Scorpius adores the mini Potter for reasons I can't comprehend."
It was true, both five year olds were on the quiet and calm side and preferred each others company over others who were more rambunctious (especially with all the Weasley children in the mix).
"Rolf won't mind watching Al sometimes too," Luna piped in, swirling her own wine glass, "Lysander and Lorcan need to spend more time with other kids anyways."
That was true as well. Like most magical identical twins, Lysander and Lorcan tend to gravitate towards each other, as their souls naturally meld together. This can be a very bad thing if they are forcefully separated (Harry can still remember curling around George on the couch in his flat above the shop as he went between a catatonic state and heart-wrenching sobs) and they tend to be dangerously co-dependent (the most well adjusted pair Harry knew were the Patil twins who flourished in two different Hogwarts houses but still moved as if they were in sync when they were together). But this was actually a pretty good thing in the case of the Scamander twins. Lorcan was like his mother in the fact that he can see partially between different planes. Unlike Luna who had to grow up alone, ridiculed, and isolated, Lorcan would always have his twin who could keep him at least partly grounded on Living Plane.
The twins were the same age as his daughter and thus got along with her the best, but they also liked his sons and would no doubt accept Al in their home when he needs it.
"And if we have to we can just take the spawn with us on the job," Draco drawled before quickly intervening when he saw Harry opening his mouth to argue, "We all know you wouldn't let a hair on your son's head get hurt no matter what we're facing."
Harry scowled at his two friends before raking a hand angrily through his hair. There's no point arguing this point with these two. Ron and Hermione can't watch Al because they barely have time with their own kids with their busy jobs. Mrs. Weasley is almost always watching some of her many grandchildren so she would accept Al with open arms but Harry would feel incredibly guilty. So Al tagging along on a job of Potter Spiritual Investigations would probably happen at least once (and probably many more) in the future of his single parenthood, but he'd be damned if he didn't try to put it off for as long as he can.
He picked up the filed divorce papers and stuffed them in an expandable pocket of his day robe as he stood up on slightly unsteady feet.
"I'm going to go get Al. It's about time that we go home," he sighed as he thought about the renovation he's going to have put Potter Manor through before it can be properly called home.
Draco just waved him off as Luna nodded dreamily at him before looking intently at the other blond and beginning to tell him about some concerning creatures only she could see that are taking residence in his second floor curtains. Harry quickly leaves the room pointedly ignoring the long-suffering and pleading look of his friend as he snickers under his breath. Even when he's at his worst emotionally, Luna always knows how to cheer him up.
Up two sets of stairs and down a number of hallways later, Harry arrives at the Malfoy heir's playroom. Standing in the doorway, Harry can't help the smile stretching across his tired face. His son stood out among the four boy's sitting together over a magical puzzle by the dark color of his hair. Draco's mini-me, Scorpius noticed him first, large quicksilver eyes pinning him where he stood. Unlike Draco, however, the five year old didn't hide his emotions behind arrogance and thus when he saw him, a large happy grin crossed his face as he greeted, "Uncle Harry!"
Though Draco may act like he hates Harry with every fiber of his being and only puts up with him because he's his boss, the fact that his son and heir calls him uncle speaks volumes about how he really feels for him.
At the call, three more sets of eyes turn towards Harry. Two identical pairs and the eerie jade green pair of eyes he was searching for.
"Dad," his son breathes, jade eyes glowing happily as he gets up from his kneeling position and scurries over to bury himself in his side. Harry ruffles Al's hair, messing it up enough to make it resemble the signature Potter hair (Ginny had been so happy to know at least one of the children had tame hair, so Harry went out of his way to mess it up to bug her).
The pair of seven year olds also stood, light purple eyes staring at his son's form.
"Wrackspurts have been keeping Al from sleeping, Uncle Death," the dreamy tone of Lorcan was so reminiscent of a younger Luna that Harry manages to not flinch at the nickname he had assigned him when he was a toddler who barely understood English and refuses to change it no matter how much Harry begs.
Lysander tugs on a blond curl of his twin as he tells him, "Uncle Harry will take care of Al, Lor, don't worry."
Harry nodded in thanks to the twins before lifting his small son into his arms.
"Thank you all for playing inside with Al today, I'm sure he appreciated it, but it's time for us to go home. Goodbye."
The three kids echoed the goodbye while Scorpius and Lysander both wore looks that Harry could translate from raising four kids which said 'Adults are so weird.'
As Harry began walking towards the apparating chamber in the Manor, the five year old in his arms trained serious jade eyes on his face before quietly asking, "Home?"
Harry mentally cringed as he sent an apologizing look at his son's blank face.
"Potter Manor," he acquiesced.
The boy visibly deflated before burying his face in Harry's neck. The man sighed as he ran his free hand through his son's hair comfortingly as he reached the apparating chamber.
"Don't worry bud, we're going to have a great and happy life there together someday," he promised before he apparated to the lonely, empty Manor which was now their home.