Archive of Our Own

2002

Ginny was about up to her limits of patience. Lilah stood with her makeup half done and her quill going faster than Rita Skeeter could ever wish. Perhaps she should've pursued a career in journalism. Hermione was bent over Ginny’s left sleeve, wand between her teeth for a moment while she separated two threads of charm work that twisted Ginny's lace sleeve into hearts. Accidentally, of course.

“Hold still,” Hermione said, taking the wand from her mouth and narrowing her eyes at the lace. “I've no idea how this is bloody possible."

Ginny, perched on the edge of the chair in her slip and half-fastened dress, bit down a smile. Years being with Ron had opened Hermione's palette into the more profane category. “You were supposed to know how to do this, Hermione. I just wanted it to lay flush, not create mini love confessions... I guess today's a perfect day for that.”

“Ginny, that isn't funny. I can't believe I failed so spectacularly. I've been practicing!”

“Hermione, it's alright.”

"Maybe I can use a reverse charm and loosen it. Yes, let's do that."

Ginny sighed.

Across the room, Fleur made a quiet sound through her nose. She had a row of pearl pins between her fingers and a calm face that made Lilah glance at the schedule again, “Ginny, breathe normally. Hermione, if you pull zat thread any tighter, she will not be able to throw a bouquet. Tonks, stop touching your hair, it'z beautiful.”

Tonks snatched both hands away from her head. Her hair was flashing all colours of the rainbow. "I don't know what happening. Usually, I can control it, but it has its own mind today."

“Didn't Remuz zay that nerves could trigger zome - eh - side effects,” Fleur said, stepping behind Ginny and smoothing a hand over the veil. “So, perhaps, take za moment and breath calmly. It seems to help.”

“Brilliant,” Tonks said drily. “Never thought of that. Appreciate the stellar advice.”

Luna, who had been crouched by the hem of the veil with her head tipped sideways, lifted one pale eyebrow. "Daddy always use to say anxiety were just Wrackspurts hiding in one's ears. Perhaps I could take a look for you.”

Lilah’s quill froze in midair. Hermione paused with her wand a hair’s breadth from Ginny’s sleeve. Ginny met Luna’s eyes in the mirror and, for the first time that morning, laughed hard enough that Hermione had to catch the fabric before it shifted.

“Eh - no thanks, Luna." said Tonks.

“Such a shame. I'd love to start a collection of one ”

Hermione'd been around Luna long enough to not even glance up at that comment. Luna was - well, Luna. No amount of words could ever properly describe or give her exitance justice. 

Fleur’s mouth curved. “Okay.”

"I give up with this bloody schedule." said Lilah in frustration. Throwing the quill and parchment on the bed. Her wand gave a flick and it disappeared. "Er - sorry. Ignore me."

But her words were lost in an unholy shriek that penetrated the walls.

The shouting was not, in fact, one of the adults having a mental breakdown. The door burst open before anyone could answer, and Teddy Lupin stumbled in with his face red, his curls a furious red, and tears already sliding down his cheeks. “He stole them,” Teddy announced to the whole room, devastated. “Altair stole my snacks.”

Tonks dropped the little pot of powder Fleur had just handed her. It bounced once on the rug, puffing a cloud of pale gold into the air. “Oh, Teddy, sweetheart—come here. What happened?” She scooped him up before Fleur could warn her about the makeup, settling him against one hip with the practiced speed. 

Fleur closed her eyes for one pained second. “Nymphadora, your cheek.”

“I know, I know.” Tonks turned her face away from Teddy’s wet hair and tried to pat his back without moving much.  “Darling, breathe. Tell me exactly what happened. Be careful with Mummy's face, please."

Teddy sniffed, offended by the entire world. “I had shortbread. For after ring bearing. Uncle Sirius said I could. Altair said he was checking for poison, but he ate it. He's too little for it anyways!”

From the corridor came a boy’s voice, high with 'innocence'. “No! Dada said me! He lyin'.”

Hermione lifted her head. “Altair, you should know better than taking someone's food.”

Altair appeared in the doorway with crumbs on his robes and a look of deep moral suffering. Behind him, Estelle leaned around the frame, tidy and composed, looking like a mini-Andromeda. Her resemblance to the elder Black family members was as stunning as it was unsettling. Her grey eyes flicked to the crumbs, then to Teddy, then to the adults.

“I was there, saw it myself,” she said.

Altair rounded on her. “Stella!”

“Mummy says you shouldn't lie, Altair. Even if the reward is yummy.”

Ginny pressed her lips together, shoulders shaking. Hermione made a strangled noise.  Lilah looked between the protestor and the defendant and couldn't decide whether she wanted to laugh or cry. Teddy buried his face in Tonks’s shoulder with a muffled sob that sounded more angry than heartbroken now.

Tonks shifted him higher. “Right. Remus!” Her voice cracked down the corridor sharp enough to startle a portrait into muttering. “If you’re not already stopping something from catching fire, I need you!”

Remus appeared moments later, coat half-buttoned, hair clean and combed and a raised eyebrow. He took in the sight before him and gave out a long sigh. He beckoned Dora to hand their son over and she did so. He settled Teddy on his hip.

"So, what caused the tears this time, Ted?"

Teddy went to him at once, still hiccuping. “Altair ate my shortbread.”

Remus kissed Teddy’s temple, then looked over the boy’s head at Altair. “Quite an accusation there. Nothing more severe than a pastry theft.”

Estelle raised her hand. “He did, I saw it!"”

“I'm sure you did,” Remus said gravely. “We'll convene on this issue later. Right now, children, I shall return you to your parents. No need for more crocodile tears on a day like today.”

“Uncle Sirius is there?” Teddy asked.

“Yes, along with Auntie Marlene, Gran and Grandad Weasley and a million other people. Harry needs his ring bearers to be in tip-top shape at the alter. I surmise we can do that for him, eh?.”

Altair brightened at the mention of Harry. Remus caught the look and smiled slightly, wiping the residual tears out of Teddy's eyes. “Out. All of you. Come on now.”

Tonks watched them go with a hand pressed to her cheek, then turned carefully toward Fleur. “How bad is it?”

Fleur studied the damage with pitiless grace. “There'z a bit zof smudging, but fixable. Come on, we'll uze za bathroom.”

Ginny’s laughter softened as the door shut. In the quieter room left behind, she stared at her reflection. The form-fitting, lacey wedding dress her mother made, apparently Molly Weasley was an expert tailor, who knew. Intricate beads showered along the front design and the neckline cut down to a tasteful V in the middle of her chest. The lace sleeves were beautifully designed down her arms to her wrist. She'd fallen in love upon her mum revealing it. 

Hermione finished the sleeve charm with a precise flick and exhaled. “There. Try moving.”

Ginny lifted her arm, rolled her shoulder, and grinned. “I could throw a Quaffle in this.”

“Nope, not happening,” Lilah said, though a smile had crept into her voice. “Molly would kill you, and probably me by proxy. Luna, can you make sure her veil hangs properly?"

Luna drifted back to the veil and adjusted the repaired weight. “It’s hanging better now. The wrackspurts have lost interest.”

“Excellent,” Ginny said. “That’s the blessing I was hoping for.”

Downstairs, away from the crowded brightness of the bridal room, Harry stood in the small parlour off the garden doors and tried not to touch his tie again. Someone had opened the windows, and the noise from the orchard came in broken pieces: chairs scraping, low laughter, Mrs Weasley giving instructionsy, and a burst of young voices and clattering that caused the adults to groan. Beyond the glass, white ribbons moved in the apple trees.

Sirius leaned in the doorway behind him. “Your tie looks like it's plotting another war,” he said, and crossed the room before Harry could answer. He reached for the knot, fixing it with ease.

“Hermione tied it,” Harry said, letting him.

“That girl has plenty of ambition, but her execution needs work.” Sirius tugged once, gentle but decisive, and stepped back to inspect him. “There. You look almost respectable. James would be furious.”

The joke should have landed cleanly. For a moment it did; Harry huffed a laugh and looked down at his shoes. 

Harry kept his gaze on the window. “Yeah?”

Sirius shoved his hands into his pockets. “Yeah. He’d have been unbearable today. Truly. He'd've been so bloody proud, I think his head would've exploded..”

That got a real laugh out of Harry, rough around the edges. “Really?”

“He and Lily got married hastily after Hogwarts, only eighteen. A quick, small wedding with just a few of our closest friends,” Sirius’s smile flickered, held, and then steadied through sheer effort. “Lily was happy with the small, intimate party, but I think it hurt James a bit. He always wanted a couple hundred people to marvel at the fact he actually married Lily Evans.”

Harry swallowed. The orchard blurred a little, so he looked at the latch on the window instead. “I just wish they were both here today.”

Sirius looked out past him, toward the rows of chairs and the arch waiting under the trees. “Prongslet, I wish more than anything they could be.” His voice roughened, not dramatically, just enough to hurt. “But I know that they wouldn't have been more happy and proud of you. Be proud son, you're marrying a woman just like your mum.”

Harry breathed out through his nose, but it caught halfway. “She would’ve liked her.”

“Lily would've adored her. But one thing I know, treasure her, son. You've a exceptional one there.”

“Ginny completes me. Insane to think that I didn't even give her a second glance, like a complete dolt for the longest time. She was always Ron's younger sister, you know. I told myself I had to be an elder brother, but it came to a point I couldn't ignore it anymore.”

“One thing I've acquired,” Sirius turned then, facing Harry properly. "Potter men fall deep and fast. Then, they overthink it to the point it drives everyone else batty.”

"You've done well dealing with it, Uncle Siri." Harry added jokingly.

“For what it’s worth,” Sirius said, quieter, "you have been the most incredible godson I could've had. You were a handful and a terror, and god, you put yourself in so many precarious situations. But you have empathy and your love, I've never been more proud of anyone than I have you. I know it doesn't replace the fact that your parents should -”

Harry pushed his glasses up and looked away fast. “They'll never be forgotten, Lils and I are keen on that. But you and Marlene are the only parents I've ever known.”

Sirius looked at him for a moment. "Yeah." He swallowed. "Let's not fixate on that today. S'posed to be the best day of your life, let's focus on the more positives, eh?”

“Sounds good to me.”

Lilah found them there two minutes later, already moving as she spoke. “Harry, you’re needed. Uncle Siri, can you please help finish the tables?”

Sirius placed a hand over his heart. “Moi?”

“Yes,” Lilah replied, and pointed toward the garden. “Move.”

The procession began with the sort of fragile order everyone knew better than to trust. Teddy, washed and solemn again, carried the ring cushion as though the future of the entire wizarding world rested on not dropping it. Remus had secured his cooperation with a whispered promise involving the first untouched plate of biscuits after the ceremony. Altair walked two paces behind him, freshly brushed and dangerously innocent, while Estelle carried her flowers with grave precision and the alertness of a witness still willing to testify.

Only once did Teddy stumble. Altair’s elbow had been near him, but not near enough for any adult to prove anything. He could be rather cunning for a two year old, and Estelle’s sharp sideways glare did more to restore order than all of Remus’s whispered warnings. Teddy recovered, lifted his chin, and continued down the aisle with wounded dignity.

Guests softened as the children passed. Laughter rippled through the chairs, low and fond, and even Mrs Weasley managed to cry and smile at the same time without losing track of whether Arthur had remembered the handkerchiefs. The orchard behind the Burrow had never looked so deliberately tidy. Garlands looped between the trees, candles floated in glass globes despite the daylight, and the aisle had been charmed so fallen petals moved aside beneath everyone’s feet instead of being crushed.

Harry stood at the front with Sirius beside him and Ron on the other side, both of them unusually still. A breeze moved through the leaves, carrying the scent of grass, warm wood, and flowers from somewhere beyond the arch. Harry had faced crowds before. He had faced silence, expectation, fear, and the awful pause before a curse. None of it had prepared him for waiting in front of everyone he loved while the music changed.

Hermione came first from the house, her dress shifting with each careful step, her face composed until she saw Ron. His ears went red at once. Fleur followed with Gabrielle near the front row watching her as if she had hung the sun, and Luna drifted after them with her bouquet held slightly crooked because, she later explained, the flowers preferred it. Tonks slipped into her place with her hair finally pink, though a stubborn streak of gold remained at her temple.

Then Ginny appeared.

For half a second Harry simply forgot what his face was meant to do. The orchard, the guests, the music, even the nervous weight in his own chest fell back from him. Ginny walked with her head high, her veil catching light at the edges, her dress moving around her like it had been waiting all morning to behave. She was not floating or trembling or any of the ridiculous things people said brides did. She was walking toward him, sure-footed and bright-eyed, and when she saw his expression her mouth tucked into the smallest smile.

Ron made a sound beside him, suspiciously like he was trying not to sniff. Sirius looked away for Harry’s sake, though his own eyes were wet. At the front, Teddy gripped the cushion with both hands and stared at Ginny as if even he understood that the snack theft had been demoted in importance.

Ginny reached Harry and took his hand. Her fingers were warm. That, more than anything, steadied him.

“All right?” she murmured.

Harry looked at her, helpless and honest. “Not even slightly.”

Her smile widened. “Good.”

The officiant began, and the ceremony settled around them. There were words about witness and choice, about magic binding only what the heart had already offered. For once, no one interrupted. No one shouted from the back. No curse cracked through the air, no wards flared, no emergency sent half the guests reaching for wands. The children stayed in place. The rings remained on the cushion. Somewhere in the third row, George whispered something that made Charlie cough into his fist, but even that passed quickly under Mrs Weasley’s glare.

When it came time for the vows, Ginny turned fully toward Harry. Her grip tightened, not nervously, but as if she wanted him listening with every part of himself.

“Harry,” she said, and the orchard quieted until even the leaves seemed to pause. “I’m not going to promise you a quiet life. You’d be dreadful at it, and I’d be bored inside a week. I promise you a real one. I promise arguments when you shut me out, laughter when the timing is terrible, Quidditch boots in places they absolutely should not be, and a home you don’t have to earn.”

Harry’s throat moved. Ginny’s eyes shone, but her voice stayed steady.

“I promise to fight beside you when we have to,” she continued. “More than that, I promise to live with you when we don’t. I’ll make you come to dinner. I’ll tell you when you’re being noble and stupid. I’ll love you loudly, because subtle has never worked on you. And I choose you, Harry. Not the story, not the scar, not what everyone thinks you are. You.”

Harry stared at her for a moment too long, and a few people in the rows nearest them smiled through tears. Ginny squeezed his fingers once, almost teasing, and that brought him back.

He had not written much down. Hermione had tried to make him prepare more, Ron had advised him not to “say anything mental,” and Sirius had offered three separate openings that could never be repeated in polite company. In the end, Harry had folded the parchment away that morning because every version sounded like someone else.

“Ginny,” he began, and his voice came out rougher than he expected. He cleared his throat, but she only looked at him with that fierce, patient expression that had undone him for years. “I used to think staying was something other people knew how to do. Homes, families, all of it. I didn’t really trust anything that could be taken away.”

Molly pressed a handkerchief to her mouth. Arthur put an arm around her without looking away.

“Then you kept showing up,” Harry said. “Not carefully. Not quietly. Usually with a hex, or an opinion, or both.” A laugh moved through the guests, and Ginny’s eyes warmed. “You made it impossible to disappear properly. I love you for that. I love you for seeing me when I’m making it difficult. I love you for knowing when to push and when to wait, even though waiting annoys you.”

“It does,” Ginny whispered, and that made him smile.

“I promise to stay,” Harry said. “Not because I have nowhere else to go, but because this is where I want to be. I choose you. I’ll choose you when it’s easy, and when it’s loud, and when everything feels impossible. I’ll come back from every stupid errand I convince myself has to be done alone. I’ll build a life with you, not just around you. And I’ll keep choosing you, Ginny, as long as you’ll have me.”

Her hand tightened hard around his. “That’ll be a while, then.”

The rings came next. Teddy approached with intense concentration, lips pressed together, while Altair watched the cushion with an interest that made Remus subtly shift closer. Estelle saw the movement and narrowed her eyes. Nothing happened. No ring vanished, no child tripped, no family member fainted; Teddy delivered the cushion and received Harry’s quiet “Well done” with a proud, watery smile.

Ginny slid the ring onto Harry’s finger first. His hand shook, and she noticed. Of course she noticed. Her thumb brushed over his knuckle before she let go, quick enough not to make a spectacle of it. When Harry placed her ring, he fumbled once, and Ginny laughed under her breath.

“Seeker reflexes failing you?”

“Only under pressure.”

“You’ve had worse.”

“Not really.”

The officiant’s mouth twitched, but he finished the words with proper solemnity. The final charm rose around them as a faint warmth, nothing dramatic, just a shimmer across their joined hands and the rings newly settled there. It sank into the air and was gone.

“I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

For one clean breath, the whole orchard held still.

Then Harry kissed Ginny, and the world came roaring back.

The cheer that rose from the chairs was not elegant. It was too loud, too relieved, too full of Weasleys. Mrs Weasley sobbed outright into Arthur’s shoulder. Ron clapped so hard Hermione winced and then kissed his cheek, which made him stop functioning for several seconds. Sirius whooped, Tonks’s hair flashed electric blue, and Teddy shouted, “They did it!” as though he had personally overseen a risky operation.

Ginny laughed against Harry’s mouth before pulling back. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed, and she looked so alive that Harry had to take another second just to look at her.

Ginny glanced past him, where one of her great-aunts looked dangerously overcome but still upright. “Give it time.”

Harry laughed, and this time it came easily. Around them people stood, clapped, cried, reached for one another. The aisle filled with petals lifting gently in the breeze, the children broke formation at last, and somewhere behind the chairs Altair began negotiating the return of Teddy’s shortbread with Estelle acting as counsel for the prosecution.

For that stretch of afternoon, nothing broke through. The war did not sit among the guests, did not whisper from the edges, did not steal the light from the orchard. There was only Ginny’s hand in Harry’s, Sirius wiping his face and pretending he had not, Remus gathering Teddy before he could launch himself at the cake, Hermione laughing with tears on her cheeks, and the Burrow standing bright behind them.

Harry looked down at his wife, and Ginny looked back as if to say, Well? Here we are.

***

The reception began respectably enough.  Under the white canvas of the marquee, the tables were set with a quiet granger that was beautifully remarkable. Garlands of late-summer flowers looped from pole to pole, tiny lights drifted above the guests like patient fireflies, and the long boards were crowded with food that had drawn even the most argumentative Weasleys into temporary goodwill. Roast chicken, glazed carrots, potatoes crisped at the edges, bowls of berries, towers of little iced cakes, and enough bread to feed a Quidditch team twice over kept appearing whenever Molly glanced anxiously toward the kitchen tents.

She was still fussing over the seating chart despite the fact that everyone had been seated for nearly twenty minutes. Every so often she swept past a table, adjusted the silverware a bit, moved a cousin three inches to the left, and told George not to look so pleased with himself when he had not yet done anything she could prove. Arthur, meanwhile, kept looking across the marquee at Ginny with such open pride that she had already mouthed, Dad stop, so she wouldn't burst into tears. 

He only smiled harder.

Harry sat beside Ginny at the top table with his hand wrapped around a glass he had not drunk from. He had survived the ceremony, the photographs, Molly smothering him, and one from Hagrid that had nearly ended the marriage by crushing his windpipe. The music was gentle, the weather held, nobody was screaming, all seemed to be going well.

Ginny leaned close enough that her veil brushed his sleeve. "Alright there, Potter.”

“Yeah, just,” Harry said, then looked at the far opening where Charlie was carrying two plates and Bill was talking to Fleur’s father. “Can't believe this is happening. We're married.”

“I realize. My ten year old self's heart be still..”

“Fred and George haven't set off any fireworks. That strange isn't it? Everything's gone right.”

Ginny’s mouth twitched. “You ever think we might possibly have a very decent and normal wedding?”

Harry glanced at the dessert table. “Not in the slightest.”

“Let's just count our blessings, alright?” She reached under the table and squeezed his hand, her thumb warm over the new ring. “Relax for five minutes. If the marquee attacks, I’ll handle the left side.”

That startled a laugh out of him, low and real. Across the room, Sirius noticed and lifted his glass with theatrical perfection, as though personally responsible for Harry’s continued ability to breathe. Marlene, sitting beside him, said something dry out of the corner of her mouth, and Sirius’s grin widened.

Lilah rose before dessert, tapping her spoon lightly against her glass. The sound carried through the marquee with a charm Hermione put in place, and the conversations settled into expectant murmurs.  She held her champagne , her expression softening as she looked at Ginny.

“I’ll keep this brief,” she said, and several people laughed at once. Lilah tilted her head. “If that is possible.”

Ginny sat back with a grin, already bracing herself.

“So without sounding like a total knob head, I wanted to surmise the incredible person that my dear brother is marrying.” Lilah glanced toward the far table, where several of Ginny’s old teammates cheered. “Ginny, I don't know my brother landed you to be frank. He is a kindhearted, loving and sweet man who I suppose would be attractive if we weren't related by DNA. But the surliness and constant run-ins with death would chase any redeeming qualities down the metaphorical toilet. He's quick tempered, brash, and a bit of a plank when it comes to realizing when someone has been attracted to him for several years.”

Ginny’s smile widened, the teasing edge never leaving her. Harry laughed as his cheeks reddened, only slightly. 

“To be frank, Ginny probably isn't much better. She has the temper of a barracuda, the spitfire of fiend fyre and the vengence to all those who wronged her,” Lilah went on. “But Ginny is also the most loyal and supportive person. She will defend you, fight for you but also hold you accountable. That's a rare gift nowadays.”

A ripple of laughter moved through the marquee. Harry ducked his head as Ron muttered, "Bloody hell."

Lilah turned her glass toward him. “Now, Harry has many fine qualities, contrary to what myself as his sister is capable of admitting. His Bravery, loyalty, kindness, an absolutely maddening need to handle things alone, and the survival instincts of a concussed garden gnome.”

The laughter came louder this time. Sirius slapped the table once, Remus covered his mouth with his hand, and Ginny looked delighted enough that Harry decided she had lost all right to complain about anyone embarrassing her.

“I say that with love,” Lilah continued, which did not reassure him. “But also as his sister, I get the right to complain in front of all our family members and esteemed guests, I see more of this plonker in the hospital. His fantastic career choice makes it to where I see him more so bleeding out in my ward, than at the Burrow every Sunday. So, Gin, good luck with that. Happy I'm not the only one who suffers a small heart attack every time I see him.  He is proof that courage and common sense are not always on speaking terms. But who knew that getting yourself killed. But of course, Harry is an exceptional human being.  He is one of the finest men I know.”

Harry rubbed the back of his neck. 

“Though,” Lilah said pleasantly. “Don't worry, I won't be caught dead saying that at the next bloody ministry function.”

Ginny laughed into her champagne, and Hermione pressed her napkin to her mouth as though that might hide her face. Even McGonagall, seated near Arthur, allowed herself the smallest, sharpest smile.

Lilah’s words softened. “I think that everyone here knows our life story. Our family has been tapered by tragedy and being a founded family. In the process, we met the most incredible, supportive people we could ever be so blessed to have. He has been loved here, shouted at here, overfed here, and occasionally threatened here.  Ginny is probably the only person alive who could marry Harry Potter and make him seem like the lucky one.”

Arthur wiped at his eyes. Molly did not bother pretending she wasn’t crying.

“So,” Lilah said, lifting her glass higher, “to Ginny and Harry. May your life be full, honest, noisy, and entirely yours. May you argue fairly, laugh often, and never let him leave the house for a dangerous errand without at least a couple of wards protecting him.”

“To Ginny and Harry,” the marquee echoed, glasses lifting in a bright wave.

Harry drank because everyone else did, and because Ginny nudged him until he did. His face had gone warm Beside him, Ginny leaned in and murmured, “Concussed garden gnome might be generous.”

“I'm only now starting to realize what I got myself into.”

“Deal with it, Potter. This is forever.”

Before Harry could answer, Ron stood up with a folded piece of parchment in one hand and a nervous expression on his face.. Hermione looked up at him with encouragement, her hand placed neatly near his side. Ron cleared his throat, glanced at the parchment, turned it sideways, and frowned.

“Right,” he said. “So before I make a fool of myself by totally spluttering through this. Thank you Lilah for setting such high expectations.”

“Your welcome,” Lilah said.

Ron smirked behind the paper. “Ginny deserves the best.”

He paused, looked at Harry, and let the silence stretch.

“After a long family discussion,” Ron said, “we’ve decided that perhaps Harry is a good enough bloke.”

The marquee erupted. Ginny laughed so hard she had to put her glass down, and Harry closed his eyes for a moment, shoulders shaking despite the heat climbing up his face. Molly made a strangled sound that might have been Ron’s name, but she was laughing too much to put any force behind it.

Ron looked pleased with himself. “I’m joking. Mostly. Harry’s all right. He’s got money, a pretty good smile, and he’s very good at standing in front of things trying to kill us, which is a skill that came in handy more often than Mum would’ve liked.”

“Ron,” Molly warned.

“I’m getting to the nice bit,” Ron promised. “Eventually.”

Hermione closed her eyes but she was smiling..

“Harry has a few habits we should address before Ginny finds out she’s legally stuck with them,” Ron continued. "But in all honesty, Harry has been the greatest friend I could've ever asked for. We've been best mates for as long as I can remember, and as his best man, it's my blessed gift to finally air out some grievances I have. Growing up with a famous best friend had its advantages for sure, but bloody hell, it was exhausting. Now, add that with him having a saving-people fetish. Luckily, we had our best friend and my beautiful finance, to thank for our survival.”

A few people laughed and some jeered at Harry, who was actively laughing himself. Others awed at Hermione, who blushed.

Ron lifted his glass toward her. “But in admittance, I had to remind Hermione here that she was indeed a witch and could ignite a fire without kindling wood.”

Luna, seated beside Neville, nodded thoughtfully. “Plants are a very finite defensive system.”

Nobody knew what to do with that for half a second. Then Neville laughed, and the rest of the table followed.

Ron glanced back down at his parchment, then abandoned it completely. “Right, yes, thanks Luna. Sixth year for all of us was truly awful. A lot of pain and loss, and me trying to figure out why Harry couldn't look me in the eye for six months. Apparently, he was too terrified of my reaction of his feelings towards my sister, until he did it the only way he possibly could. Kiss her in front of the entire common room right after I'd won us the bloody Quidditch House Cup.”

Everyone burst out laughing.

Ron grinned. He looked at the parchment again, thumb rubbing the crease, and when he spoke next his voice had roughened just enough to quiet the room. Harry looked down at the tablecloth.

“He’s been doing that ever since,” Ron said. “Sneaking off with my sister on any occasion he can get his paws on her. When we were fortunate enough to go on a completely illegal crusade with the most wanted criminal, I spent evenings seeing his sad face as he was staring forlorn at that bloody parchment. I always was appreciative I wasn't good at occlumency or I'd be scarred for life.”

“Plenty of time for that, eh?” George called.

Ron said without looking. “Thanks, George.”

George sat back, satisfied.

Ron drew a breath. “Everybody in our world sees him as this incredible war hero, but to us, he's just Harry. Annoying, brave, impossibly kind. He’s my brother in every way that matters. And now that he's finally stuck with us forever, you'll forever hold that title..”

The room held still around the words. Hermione’s face softened; Molly pressed her handkerchief to her mouth again, and Arthur put his hand over hers on the table. Sirius stopped laughing, a bit. He watched Harry with wet eyes and a crooked smile.

Ron looked at Ginny then. “And Ginny, you’re my sister, my little sister. I'll forever be protective of you. But you’ve never needed me to scare anyone off. You’ve always been better at that yourself, even scared me occasionally.”

“Yup,” Ginny said, though her voice was not quite steady.

“So just… look after each other,” Ron finished. “Harry, good luck. You married a firecracker, though you knew what you were signing up for.”

Harry laughed then. Ron lifted his glass, awkward and sincere.

“To my sister and my brother,” he said. “Try to not make us regret being around you too in public.”

The toast rose around them, loud enough to shake the little lights overhead. Ginny got to her feet long enough to hug Ron fiercely, and Ron endured it with red ears and one arm clamped around her shoulders. When Harry stood, Ron gave him a quick, hard hug.

The tenderness lasted for perhaps thirty seconds.

George rose with his glass already in the air. “Question for the room.”

Molly’s head snapped up. “George.”

“I haven’t asked it yet.”

“That has never stopped you before.”

George placed a hand over his heart, deeply wounded. “I only want clarification. Is anyone else allowed to bring up the dragon escape, or has Ron claimed all near-death material for himself?”

Molly pointed at him. “Don't start/”

Fred stood immediately. “Since George has opened the floor, I second the motion.”

“Fred!”

“I’m respecting proper procedure, Mum.” Fred turned to the guests with the solemnity of a Wizengamot elder. “For those of you from our respectable side of the family, my dear relatives, the groom once escaped a bank on the back of a dragon.”

Harry covered his face with one hand. Ginny looked as if someone had handed her a priceless gift.

George nodded gravely. “Most couples leave Gringotts with a withdrawal slip. Harry leaves with property damage and a creature large enough to flatten Surrey. So well done, mate”

“To be fair,” Ron called, sitting down again, “we were there too.”

“Yes,” Fred said. “But this is Harry’s wedding, and therefore all idiocy must be arranged around him.”

Hermione leaned forward, eyes narrowed. “You two once tried to post yourselves to Harry in a box to 'surprise' him for his nineteenth birthday.”

George lifted a finger. “That was proper planning, Ms. Granger-Soon-To-Be-Weasley.”

“It had air holes,” Fred added. “And Lilah on standby for medical interference.”

Charlie, who had been laughing into his drink, raised his glass toward Harry. “I’d like to point out that riding a dragon without training is dangerous, illegal, and very badly planned.”

Bill looked at him. “You sound impressed.”

“I’m furious I didn't get to ride it, more like.”

Fleur smiled serenely. “Zimagine, you on za dragon, Bill. Very ez-zil-lerating.”

“Thank you,” Ginny said, turning to Harry with shining eyes. “See? Exhilerating.”

Harry lowered his hand. “Appreciate the familial support.”

“Always,” George said. “A simple but frequently challenging thing for you to accept.”

Sirius gave up trying to contain himself. He had been laughing in bursts through the dragon discussion, but George’s last remark finished him; he bent over the table, shoulders shaking, champagne sloshing dangerously in his glass. Marlene reached across without ceremony and took it from him.

“Hand it over, Black,” she said. “You’re not baptising yourself in champagne before cake.”

Sirius wiped at his face with the heel of his hand. “I’m perfectly dignified.”

“Bloody hell.”

Remus, seated nearby with Teddy half-asleep against his side, looked over. Andromeda with Hope snuggled in her lap “Coordination has always been an ambitious goal for him.”

Sirius pointed at Remus, still breathless. “You’re supposed to be on my side.”

“Nope, sorry Padfoot.”

Tonks’s hair flashed from pink to bright violet as she laughed, which made Teddy lift his head blearily. “Did Uncle Harry really  ride a dragon?”

Harry opened his mouth, but Ginny got there first. “Yes.”

Teddy’s eyes widened. “Can I?”

“No,” said every adult within hearing distance.

Altair, at the children’s table, leaned toward Estelle with wild enthusiasm.  Estelle gave him a look that suggested she was trying to figure out how to answer his question.  Teddy accepted the answer with disappointment, then noticed a plate of iced biscuits near Remus’s elbow and redirected his attention toward a more achievable crime.

Fred, not finished, raised his glass again. “Of course, the dragon is only one entry in a long and distinguished record. There was the flying car, the troll, the basilisk, the Department of Mysteries, the time he broke into the Ministry—”

“Technically,” Harry said, “that was more than once.”

Ginny turned to him, delighted and appalled. “Quite a criminal record, Potter.”

George beamed. “Married half an hour and already learning.”

Molly stood, which immediately reduced Fred and George’s posture by several inches. “That is enough near-death material for one toast.”

Fred considered this. “Are we saving the rest for the anniversary?”

“No,” Molly said.

Arthur, who had been laughing quietly through most of it, raised his glass from beside her. “Perhaps we might simply say we’re very grateful they survived all of it.”

That sobered the room into playful jeers.   Harry looked at Arthur and found the older man watching him with the same proud, embarrassing tenderness he had been directing at Ginny all afternoon.

Arthur smiled. “To all  of them.”

Ginny’s hand found Harry’s again beneath the table. Her fingers slid between his, ring cool against his skin, and Harry held on with the same quiet force he had used at the altar. He was still red from the roasting, still half-braced for whatever Fred and George had hidden in the cake, but the tightness in his chest had loosened.

The marquee had not attacked. No curse had cut through the canvas. Nobody had vanished, collapsed, or shouted a warning from the orchard. There were only people he loved making merciless fun of him because they could, because he was there to hear it, because the worst thing waiting for him at that moment was another toast.

Ginny leaned close, her smile brushing his ear. “Still can believe it?”

Harry looked around the room: Ron with Hermione’s hand on his sleeve, Molly scolding Fred while trying not to laugh, Sirius stealing his champagne back from Marlene and failing, Remus shifting Teddy carefully against his shoulder, Lilah watching everyone slowly losing their footing on reality, George already whispering something that made Charlie choke on his drink.

“No,” Harry said, and turned back to his wife. “I’m good.”

Ginny studied him for a second, then nodded as if she accepted the answer. “Good. Because I think Fred’s about to mention the Hungarian Horntail.”

Across the marquee, Fred rose again with a fresh glass and a bright, dangerous smile.

Harry sighed. Ginny laughed, unrepentant and radiant beside him. 

***

The music softened after the last of the toasts. For a few seconds the marquee almost behaved itself — plates clearing with little clinks, glasses drifting out of reach before Fred could "help," the tables scraping back to open up a space in the middle. The lanterns dimmed to a warmer gold and settled over the guests and the garlands and Ginny's dress, until even George went quiet long enough to look pleased.

Harry stood up when he was meant to, which felt like an achievement on its own. He held his hand out the way he'd once gone up to a temperamental Hippogriff, and Ginny took it and gave him a look he didn't entirely trust.

"Try not to look as though you're being marched in front of the Wizengamot," she said as they stepped onto the floor. Her fingers closed round his, the edge of her ring cool against his knuckle.

"I'm trying to remember which foot goes first." He looked down. The hem of her dress had drifted near his shoes. "Your dress is trying to kill me."

"It's got good instincts. Left, Potter. Yours."

"That was my left."

"That was you apologising to it." She moved him through the turn before he could argue. "Relax. I've watched you dodge Bludgers."

"Bludgers don't have lace."

"More's the pity."

The first proper turn came out badly enough that Ron's face did something complicated at the top table, caught between sympathy and the urge to laugh. Hermione elbowed him. Her own mouth wasn't quite steady either. Molly had a handkerchief out already; Arthur was beaming so openly that Ginny gave him a warning look over Harry's shoulder; and Sirius sat with both hands round his glass like someone had taken it off him before and might again.

Ginny had stopped behaving like a delicate bride somewhere around the time Teddy made off with the shortbread. Her shoes were on, technically. But her heels had slipped out of them, so whenever the dress covered her feet she was just standing on the soles. Harry worked it out on the second slow turn.

"Are you barefoot?"

"Not officially. If Fleur asks, my shoes are doing exactly what shoes do."

"They're not on your feet."

"They're near my feet. Don't be difficult." She nudged him round before he could step on the train. "I wasn't spending my own wedding crippled by a pair of shoes designed by some man who's never once had to stand up in them."

"That might be the most romantic thing you've said to me today."

"I can do better. You're still looking at the floor."

He looked up — more because of the way she said it than what she said. Her eyes were bright with champagne and laughing and the long strange day, but she still looked like herself. Not smoothed into somebody's idea of a bride. Not done up past recognition. A strand of hair had come loose and brushed her cheek every time they turned, and he kept forgetting to keep moving.

It hit him again, the way it had been hitting him all day, that this had actually happened. That she was his wife. The word still felt too big to say out loud.

"That's worse," Ginny said, quieter now. "You look like you've been Stunned."

"Bit late to warn me."

"Good. I hate wasting spells."

Everyone was watching the way people do at weddings when they ought to know better. Charlie had his chair tipped back and his arms folded, grinning, like Harry losing a fight with his own feet was the best thing he'd seen in months. Bill said something to Fleur, who smiled without taking her eyes off Ginny. Luna had her head on one side as if she could hear a different song, and next to her Neville was blinking hard and looking very closely at his champagne.

For a minute, maybe two, it all settled. Harry stopped counting under his breath. Ginny stopped steering him quite so obviously. The music caught up with them, or they caught up with it, and the circle they were making went looser. His hand found her waist properly. Hers eased on his shoulder. When he pulled her in a bit closer she came without a word, only a small laugh against his jacket.

"There," she said. "You're not hopeless."

"High praise from my wife."

"I'm saving the good praise." Her eyes went past his shoulder and narrowed, though she was still smiling. "Something small and determined's coming this way."

Harry turned enough to see Teddy Lupin making his way along the edge of the floor. With Teddy, sneaking meant both arms already up toward Harry, his curls going from a sleepy blue to a bright turquoise, and the face of a kid who'd made up his mind and wasn't going to be talked out of it. He'd got past Remus's knee, past Tonks's grab, past what looked like two separate napkins.

"Teddy," Harry said, already laughing.

Teddy broke into a run. "Harry!"

Ginny made a happy noise into Harry's shoulder as Teddy reached them and stretched up. Harry bent without quite stopping, got an arm under him and swung him up onto his hip while the turn carried the three of them round in a wobbly circle.

"Joining in, are you?" His voice was shaking. Teddy had grabbed his collar and very nearly his tie.

"I was waiting." Teddy sounded genuinely hurt about it. He got a foot against Harry's ribs and started climbing him like there were footholds. "Nobody came and got me."

"Bad oversight, that," Ginny said, still laughing as Teddy's knee found somewhere no dance had accounted for. "We'll complain to the ring-bearer department."

"I'm the ring bearer." Teddy, halfway up Harry's front now and pleased to have it confirmed, went a triumphant violet. "I did it properly."

"You did." Harry hauled him higher before the shoe could do any more. "Best part of the day."

"I knew it."

Across the marquee Remus had gone completely still with one hand half up, his face doing its best impression of calm. Beside him Tonks — hair flicking pink, then gold, then a startled blue — had both hands over her mouth and was shaking. Sirius was worse. He'd tipped so far sideways into Marlene that she had to put a hand on his shoulder to keep him upright.

Remus shut his eyes for a second. "That's our son," he said, low, but loud enough for the four of them, "on the groom."

"He's showing initiative." Tonks's eyes were wet. She wasn't getting up. "Important, in a ring bearer."

"He's climbing Harry."

"Harry's had worse."

Sirius brought his hand down on the table. "Moony. I'll pay you to put that in a letter to Andromeda."

"You won't." Remus had gone a bit pink. "You'll sit there and act like you know how to behave at a wedding."

"I never said I did."

Before Remus could do anything about it, Estelle turned up at the other side of the floor, considerably more composed. She didn't run. She walked over, bouquet held the right way, chin level, dress somehow still neat after whatever had gone on at the children's table, and put her free hand out to Ginny like a small visiting diplomat.

"I thought you might need help," she said. She looked at Teddy, draped round Harry's neck now. "He's made the dancing uneven."

Ginny took her hand. "That's very thoughtful."

"Uncle Harry's steps were already small," Estelle added. "I didn't like to say."

"Everyone's a critic," said Harry.

"It's my dress." Ginny had started turning with Estelle now, still holding Harry's other hand. "She's looking after it."

Marlene had a hand over her mouth across the way. When Ginny caught her eye she mouthed sorry, with the strained look of someone watching a child wander into the middle of a tradition in front of half the country. Ginny just shook her head — she was laughing too hard to say anything — and gave Estelle a little twirl instead. The girl's face cracked into a grin and then went serious again, like she'd caught herself.

Remus got halfway up and stopped. Teddy had put his cheek down on Harry's collar and looked enormously pleased with himself, which made any quick rescue tricky. Tonks pulled Remus back down by the sleeve.

"Leave him," she said. "Look at Harry."

Remus looked. Most of the horror went out of his face. Harry was red and laughing, one arm locked round Teddy, still holding Ginny's hand while she danced with Estelle. The first dance had been hijacked, but it hadn't been ruined. It had just turned into something else — loud round the edges, soft in the middle.

"I suppose," Remus said slowly, "it could've been Altair."

Over at the children's table, Altair had one hand suspiciously near a dish of sugared almonds and the other up in a show of innocence nobody had asked for. George caught his eye and raised his glass. Without missing a step, Estelle turned her head and gave Altair a look that put his hand straight back in his lap.

"Merlin help us," Remus muttered.

The music came to its proper end, even if the dance had stopped being proper a while back. Harry made the last turn with Teddy hanging on and Ginny beside him, Estelle's hand still in hers. When the last note went, the marquee broke into applause that sounded more like laughing than anything. Teddy lifted his head, worked out what applause meant, and bowed from Harry's arms with no shame at all.

"I helped," he announced.

"You did." Harry kissed the top of his head and handed him back to Remus, who'd come over looking ready to apologise on behalf of the whole family. "Couldn't have managed without you."

Remus took him. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be." Harry pulled his collar straight, though Teddy had wrecked it past fixing. "He made it better."

"He did not make your tie better." Teddy patted Harry's shoulder goodbye, not sorry in the slightest.

Marlene reached Ginny at the same time, scooping Estelle in with one arm and still looking mortified. "Ginny, I'm so sorry. She was right next to me and then she was offering you legal advice."

Ginny caught her wrist before she could disappear into it. "Don't. That's the only bit of dancing Harry's enjoyed all night."

"I was enjoying the start," Harry said.

"You looked like Snape had set you partner work."

"That's not the same as not enjoying it."

She leaned in, dropping her voice so the nearest guests only saw the smile. "You were doing fine."

Harry glanced down at her feet — shoes gone entirely now, under the hem. "You're completely barefoot."

"Then watch where you put your feet."

He laughed, and then the next dance got announced, and the laugh went out of him when he saw Marlene already waiting at the edge of the floor. The mother–son dance. That was what Lilah had called it earlier, fast, not giving him room to panic about it. He still didn't know what to do with the name of it. He still didn't, really. But Marlene put her hand out like there'd never been a question.

"Come on, Potter," she said. Her voice was light. Her eyes weren't. "Before Sirius decides he's the nearest thing to a mother in the room and shoves me out of the way."

From the table Sirius put both hands up. "I'd be a wonderful mother."

"You'd leave the baby in a pub," Marlene called back, to general laughter.

"A reputable pub."

"Sit down, Black."

Harry got to her before Sirius could make it worse. She took his hand, put his other one at her back, kind and businesslike, and gave him one straight look that made him feel about fourteen and also fully grown. The music came in softer this time, slower, and the room settled with it.

"All right?" she asked, moving him into the first step. She didn't make it a big question, which helped.

"Yeah." He could see Ginny over her shoulder, waiting with Arthur. "I think so."

"Convincing."

"It's been a long day."

"It has. You've only looked like you might bolt twice. Better than Sirius managed at James's stag night."

That got a surprised laugh out of him. "What happened at Dad's stag night?"

"Ask Remus when he's had a couple of glasses and lost the will to lie." She turned him, easier than he'd braced for. "I'm not using this dance to explain how your father ended up on a roof with a goat."

"A goat."

"It wasn't invited."

He was still smiling when he noticed her face change — like the smile had been the whole point, and the goat hadn't really come into it. Her hand was steady in his. He knew her shoulder under his palm. She'd cleaned up his cuts and nagged him into eating and told him off when he went too quiet, and she'd sat with him through the kind of silences other people backed away from. Dancing with her now didn't fill the space where his mum should have been. It wasn't supposed to. It just meant he wasn't standing in it on his own.

"You've gone serious again," Marlene said, dry, before he could go down too far. "I thought we agreed to keep that face for Ministry hearings and Sirius's cooking."

"Sirius cooks?"

"He calls it cooking. The rest of us call it smoke with ambition."

That got a quieter laugh. "I'm glad it's you."

Her fingers tightened on his. She didn't say anything for a few steps, and he was more grateful for that than he could've explained. The music took them past Molly, crying openly now, and past Sirius, who'd stopped joking and had his mouth set in a crooked line.

"I'm proud of you," Marlene said, quiet enough to stay between them. "Not for surviving. Not because everyone's got a story about you. Because you chose this. A life. Her. All of it."

Harry looked down, but not at his feet this time. His hand tightened at her back. Swallowing hurt, and he didn't answer right off, because anything quick would've come out thin.

She waited him out. She'd done it before.

"Thanks," he said in the end. It came out rough.

"That'll do." Her smile came back, softer. "Any more and you'll set Sirius off, and then we'll never hear the end of the dust in his eyes."

"He already did that during the vows."

"He gets it seasonally."

Harry shook his head, smiling properly now. The room had gone soft again the way it kept doing, but this dance didn't feel like being watched. Marlene kept him steady — teasing when his face went tight, letting the quiet sit when it needed to — and when the music finished she pulled him into a hug before he could step back. Quick enough not to make a thing of it. Hard enough to mean it.

"You did beautifully," she said into his shoulder.

"So did you." He meant more than the dance.

She kissed his cheek and turned him round by the shoulders toward Ginny. "Go on. Your wife's about to cry at her dad and I want a good view."

Ginny wasn't crying, as it turned out. She was standing in the middle of the floor with Arthur, already wearing a fond sort of warning. He held her hand as carefully as if she were still the baby he used to carry down the garden to look at the chickens, and he was trying so hard not to cry that his glasses had fogged at the edges.

"Dad," she said before the music had really got going, "if you start, Mum starts, and then the whole marquee goes under."

"I am not starting." His voice was thick; he cleared it and stared down at their feet. "I'm concentrating on not standing on you."

"You've danced with Mum for years."

"Yes, but your mother tells me where to put my feet. Usually before I put them somewhere stupid."

"I can do that. Left. Other left."

"Ah. That one."

Harry had come back round to Ginny's side but didn't sit. He stood by Molly, who dabbed her eyes and gave him a wet smile without once looking away from her daughter. Sirius came and stood at his other shoulder and, for once, didn't say anything clever.

Arthur got almost halfway through before his face started to go. He kept smiling at Ginny like he was trying to memorise her and not managing to hide it.

"You're making the face," she told him, gently.

"What face?"

"The one you made when I left for Hogwarts."

"I did not make a face when you left for Hogwarts." He turned her, looking wounded. "I was perfectly composed."

"Mum found you in the shed holding my old toy broom."

"I was putting it away."

"You were talking to it."

Arthur thought about denying it and then seemed to decide his dignity was already gone. "It had been a difficult morning."

Ginny laughed, and he laughed too, glad of the let-off. The next step went wrong straight away — his shoe caught the edge of her dress and he froze like he'd stepped on a curse.

"Oh — Ginny, sorry, did I tear it?" He bent down at once and nearly headbutted her. "Molly! I think I've —"

"Dad." She grabbed his sleeve and pulled him up before the whole thing came apart. "It's fine."

"I felt it pull."

"It's a dress, not a Mandrake. It'll survive a foot."

He looked so wretched that she rolled her eyes and kissed his cheek, which finished him off more thoroughly than any amount of talking. He blinked a few times and looked up at the lanterns like they needed checking.

"You were very small once," he said, getting a smile back as they started moving again. "Loud. But small."

"I had six brothers. Volume was self-defence."

"You made Percy cry when you were two."

"He was in my chair."

"I believe it was everyone's chair."

"Not after I'd sat in it."

Arthur chuckled, then his eyes went to Harry over her shoulder. "He looked happy today."

"He is," Ginny said.

"Good." He nodded, more to himself. "That matters."

Something in her face shifted. "He'll be all right with us."

"With you, yes." His hand tightened on hers. "With all of us, I hope. Though your mother might finish him off with leftovers by Tuesday."

"She's already packed him three meals for after the reception."

"Only three?" Arthur sounded honestly worried. "I'll have a word."

The music ended before she could answer. He drew her in, one arm round her shoulders, and she hugged him hard enough to crease his robes. Next to Harry, Molly made a small noise and then pretended to be looking for something in her handbag. Harry looked away to give her a minute and caught Sirius doing exactly the same thing.

The formal dances were supposed to settle into one tidy family dance. Lilah had said so, and Lilah had been right about nearly everything except how much you could rely on a ring bearer. The band went into something livelier, fiddle into accordion, and the plan lasted about eight seconds.

Sirius — who'd found champagne again somewhere during Arthur's dance — swept Marlene out before anyone had properly started. "Second circle!" he announced, waving his glass around until Marlene took it off him and handed it to Remus without looking.

"There is no second circle," Lilah called from near the top table, one hand up like she could still keep hold of the evening by sheer will.

"Then we're making history," said Sirius, and caught Marlene round the waist and spun her into the gap beside Ginny and Arthur.

Marlene laughed before she could stop it and grabbed his shoulder. "Drop me and I'll hex your boots to chase you for a week."

"Worth it."

"You only say that because you don't think ahead."

"I'm fond of you. Thinking ahead's never done a thing for me."

She tried to look unimpressed. But Sirius was grinning at her like he'd forgotten how to be careful, and she gave up trying to look stern. They turned too fast, clipped Charlie, and got back into their own rhythm like they'd planned it.

Tonks came up behind Remus and hooked both hands round his arm. "Come on, then."

He looked round for Teddy straight away. "I should check he hasn't climbed the cake."

"He's with Molly. No child alive is safer or more overfed."

"That reassures me less than you'd think."

"You're dancing anyway." She dragged him a couple of steps before he gave in and came properly. Her hair went pink, then violet, then a sudden green as she nearly tripped on her own hem. "See? We're marvellous."

"You've stepped on my foot."

"That was affection."

"I was hoping affection might limp a bit less."

She laughed and leaned into him, and the exasperation went soft on his face even with one eye still on the boy. Teddy was wedged between Molly and Andromeda now with a piece of cake he definitely hadn't been given, sugar on his lip, beaming. Remus sighed like the world had just confirmed everything he was afraid of.

Fred got to Lilah before she could retreat into the schedule. "You look like you're about to start timing people."

"I was thinking about it." She had what was left of her dignity in one hand and the seating notes in the other. "There's meant to be one circle, Fred."

"Bit lonely, one circle."

"It's a dance, not a form of government."

"Exactly." He twitched the papers out of her hand, passed them to George going past, and took her fingers. "Nobody ever fell in love over good minute-taking."

"Someone's definitely ended an engagement over bad."

"Not tonight." He pulled her onto the floor and laughed when she half-protested and then gave up. "There. Knew you had it in you."

"I'm dancing with you where your mother can see. That's not a reckless streak. That's a lapse in judgement."

George, who'd taken Lilah's notes with no plan to give them back, folded them into his pocket and held a hand out to Angelina. "Help me lower the tone?"

She looked him up and down. "Are you going to behave?"

"Define behave."

"No."

"Then no."

She took his hand anyway and pointed a finger at him as they joined in. "Spin me into your Aunt Muriel and I'm telling your mum you charmed the pudding table."

He looked honestly alarmed. "That's cruel."

"It's accurate."

Ron came over to Hermione with the stiff determination of a man who'd decided to do a romantic thing and forgotten every step in between. He stuck his hand out. "Come on, then."

She looked at him over her glass. "Ronald."

"What?"

"The phrase is, 'Would you like to dance?'"

His ears went red. "We're already standing up."

"That's not the point."

"Right." He cleared his throat and put his hand out again, with ceremony and obvious pain. "Would you like to dance, Hermione?"

She smiled before she could stop herself. "Yes, Ron. Thank you."

"Great." He pulled her in, relieved, and looked down. "Er — which foot?"

"Yours."

"Narrows it down by half."

"You were very brave during the toasts," she said, teasing now rather than telling him off. "Try being brave here."

"I'd rather face the dragon."

"You would not."

"No," he admitted, and spun her too suddenly. She caught herself on his shoulder, laughing. "Sorry. That was supposed to be smooth."

"It had ambition."

"I'll take ambition."

Within a few minutes there was nothing left of Lilah's plan at all. One circle had become two, then three, then the circles fell apart into pairs and clumps and wandering lines and one confused tangle near the band where Charlie and George and a couple of cousins were arguing about whether a reel had rules. Bill and Fleur moved through the whole thing without touching anyone, dodging every elbow. Gabrielle had latched onto Luna, who was leading her through some sequence nobody recognised and seemed perfectly happy about.

Arthur, set on making up for the dress, took Molly out with enormous care. "I've got this completely under control," he told her as a cousin shot past too close.

"Arthur, your hand's on my sleeve."

"Is it. I did wonder why the beads were sharp."

"That's my cuff."

"Then it's a very good cuff."

Molly laughed properly and tried to cover it by fixing his collar. "Mind my hem. If you stand on me you can explain to Fleur's mother why I'm limping."

"I wouldn't dare." He managed a careful step, then another, then had to swerve as Sirius and Marlene went past with no thought for anyone. "Goodness. Sirius has found a turn of speed."

"Sirius has found champagne," said Molly, dark but smiling.

Harry watched it from the edge for a minute, Ginny next to him, the two of them free for the moment. It had got too loud in there now for anyone's careful feelings to stay put. Laughter coming off the canvas, robes brushing the floor, chairs shoved back by people who'd sworn they weren't dancing and then changed their minds at the first tune they knew. Teddy was clapping with both sticky hands. Estelle had made herself in charge of everyone under five, which mostly meant telling Altair to stop trying to crawl under the cake table.

Ginny leaned into his side. "Still waiting for the marquee to attack?"

"No." Sirius nearly took Remus out across the floor, both of them laughing while Tonks shouted something about reckless endangerment. "I think it's on our side."

"That's only because Fred hasn't got to the fireworks yet."

Harry looked at her. "There are fireworks?"

She looked far too innocent. "I'm sure I wouldn't know."

"You know."

"I'm the bride. People tell me things."

"Ginny."

"Harry."

He sighed; she laughed, very pleased with herself; and before he could ask whether anyone not called Weasley had checked the fireworks, she took his hand and pulled him back toward the floor.

"I thought the formal dancing was finished."

"It is." She glanced round at all the spinning and shouting. "This is family dancing. Different rules."

"What rules?"

"Try not to injure anyone you're not related to."

"Comforting."

"You'll get the hang of it."

They got swallowed up almost straight away. Fred took Lilah past, her hair coming down out of its pins while she laughed and threatened to rewrite the whole evening in detail. George and Angelina cut hard round a chair that had wandered too far onto the floor — Angelina looked ready to hex the chair, George, or both. Ron and Hermione had found a rhythm that worked as long as neither of them talked, which held right up until Ron tried to lead and Hermione said "Not that way," still smiling.

At some point Harry ended up dancing with Hermione, after Ron — done in by George's running commentary — more or less pushed her at him and said he needed water before he died. She laughed, then told Harry he'd got much better. He said Ginny had threatened him. She said she'd guessed as much. Ron came back halfway through trying not to look jealous, didn't manage it, and got rescued when Ginny grabbed him for a brother-sister turn that left him red and laughing by the end.

Marlene danced with Arthur, then Remus, then got pulled back to Sirius, who seemed set on making up for every year nobody had danced at all. Hagrid, crying happily into a handkerchief the size of a tablecloth, had a go at dancing with Charlie and cleared a respectful ring of empty floor doing it; Charlie patted him on the back and told him not to step backward unless he fancied flattening three cousins and a chair.

The band sped up and the whole marquee went with it — feet stamping harder, hands clapping along, the lanterns bobbing overhead like they were in on it. Molly gave up telling people to be careful and went into a faster turn with Arthur, her hem just clearing his shoes. Remus stopped looking for the exit when Tonks reached up and kissed him by the band, and Sirius cheered so loudly that Marlene smacked his arm, laughing.

That was when Teddy got away from Molly again, a biscuit in one fist, and bolted for the floor. Remus saw him and moved to head him off, but Sirius stepped neatly into the way, grinning.

"Let the boy live, Moony."

"Let the boy finish chewing before he's trampled."

Teddy sorted it out by running straight at Harry and Ginny. Harry bent down on instinct, but Ginny got there first, scooping him up with a grunt and a surprised laugh. Teddy held the biscuit out to her like it was treasure.

"For you."

She took it solemnly. "That's very generous."

"It's got icing on the other side."

"So it has."

Harry leaned in to look. "Did Molly give you that?"

Teddy glanced at the table, where Molly was scanning the floor with narrowing eyes. "No."

"Convincing." Ginny passed it to Harry. "Hide the evidence."

"I'm not eating a stolen biscuit at my own wedding."

"You've done riskier things."

He took one bite, because Teddy was watching him with enormous hope. Teddy beamed, vindicated, and Ginny laughed so hard she had to put him down before she dropped him. Remus turned up a second later, out of breath, apologising again.

"I'm starting to think he's got Tonks's sense of timing."

"And your knack for looking innocent," Harry said.

Remus gave him a tired look. "I was hoping you'd be too happy to be rude."

"No chance," said Ginny, slipping her arm through Harry's. "I married him for his bluntness."

"Odd thing to marry someone for." But his mouth twitched. He picked Teddy up, who was already pointing at the cake again. "Say goodnight to Uncle Harry and Aunt Ginny's dance floor."

"Night." Teddy twisted round in his arms and shouted back, "I danced best!"

"You did," Ginny called after him. "Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

One song ran into the next. By the time the band started up a tune everyone seemed to know except Harry, the floor was just one moving, laughing tangle — shoulders knocking, robes underfoot, apologies thrown out that nobody meant, names shouted over the music. Arthur finally did stand on Molly's hem, but he caught her before she went over and looked so horrified that she kissed him in front of everyone, which set Fred off shouting something that got him told off by three women at once.

Harry found Ginny again near the edge. Her hair was all the way down now, her cheeks flushed, her shoes gone completely. She had one hand full of skirt to keep from tripping and the other free for him.

"Lost something?" He looked at her bare feet.

"Freedom doesn't count as lost." She took his hand and pulled him in without waiting for the beat. "Anyway, Luna says the shoes were attracting resentful floor-sprites."

"Were they?"

"No idea. Sounded useful."

He looked past her round the room. Sirius laughing with Marlene in the second circle he'd invented. Tonks tucked into Remus. Molly and Arthur slower now but still going. Ron and Hermione arguing about steps and not letting go of each other. Fred and George turning the dance into a public hazard. Teddy finally asleep on Remus's shoulder while Estelle guarded a plate from Altair like a Ministry official.

Ginny followed his eyes. "All right?"

He looked back at her. It came easily this time — maybe because the room was too loud for any of the fear to get hold of him. "Yeah."

"Good." Her fingers slid in between his, ring against ring. "This is what you signed up for. Loud and impossible."

"I remember."

"Still choosing it?"

He pulled her in as the music came up, close enough that her laugh broke against his cheek. "Ask me tomorrow."

Her eyebrows went up. "Harry."

"I'll say yes tomorrow too."

"That's better."

The family turned round them in circles that had nothing to do with the music anymore and didn't need to. Respectability had lasted about as long as you could fairly expect at a Weasley wedding. Harry stepped wrong; Ginny stood on his foot on purpose; and the two of them were still laughing while the whole loud, bright marquee spun on around them.

***

The cake had been standing at the far end of the marquee all evening like a problem nobody wanted to be first to touch.

Harry had been keeping half an eye on it since the speeches. Partly because it was enormous, and partly because he'd twice caught Fred looking at it the way most people looked at a locked door they'd already decided to open. So when the band wound down and somebody — Lilah, probably, still gamely waving her schedule at a room that had long since stopped reading it — called for the cake, Harry felt something tighten in his chest that hadn't tightened since the war.

He needn't have worried. Ginny got there first.

She stepped in before either twin could so much as drift toward the table, wand already in her hand, her face set in the particular calm he'd seen clear out a training room before now. Whatever Fred had been planning died somewhere behind his teeth.

"If either of you so much as think about turning this into a spectacle," she said, pleasantly, "I'll hex your eyebrows into next week."

Fred put a hand over his heart. "Ginny. I would never—"

"Finish that sentence and I'll start with your teeth."

George leaned in toward Harry. "She's enjoying this."

"She's terrifying," Harry said, but there was nothing behind it. If anything he felt better than he had all day — the way you might feel watching a controlled explosion from behind the proper screen, knowing someone competent had a hand on it.

Ginny ignored the pair of them and looked the cake over properly.

It was tall. Layered, gold-detailed, scattered with little sugar flowers that looked as though they'd been argued into existence by someone who had lost a long fight with their own good taste. The top tier sat up there like it knew exactly how much it had cost.

"It's structurally unsound," Ginny said.

"It's emotional," said George.

"It's cake," said Harry.

Ginny tilted her wand. "Step back."

They stepped back. Not because they wanted to — Fred clearly didn't — but because she'd said it the way she said most things, like the outcome had already been decided and they were only just being let in on it.

She gave one small, neat flick. The knife lifted off the table and hung there, waiting. She brought it down through the top tier in a single clean cut. No wobble. No slide. No glorious avalanche of icing onto the grass.

Fred made a small, wounded noise. "That was clinical."

"That was survival," Ginny said.

Teddy, who had been asleep on Remus's shoulder roughly ninety seconds earlier, was now awake, upright, and being held in place by one of Andromeda's arms across his middle like a safety bar. The word cake had reached him in whatever dream he'd been having and dragged him straight back into the world.

"Is it time," he asked the room in general.

"Nearly," Ginny told him.

"Is there icing."

"There's a frankly unreasonable amount of icing."

Teddy settled, more or less, into a state of vibrating patience.

Harry took the slice Ginny pointed him to as though he expected it to go off. His hand had a faint tremor in it — too much of the day, too many eyes on him — and he watched it steady itself just before he held the cake out to her.

"Right," he said quietly. "No smashing."

Ginny looked up at him.

There was a pause. It went on just long enough for Harry to review every decision he'd made since breakfast.

"You were thinking about it," she said.

"I wasn't."

"You were absolutely thinking about it."

His mouth twitched. "Half a second."

"That's generous."

"I value my life."

"That's new," Ginny said, but she was smiling now, properly, the sharp edge gone out of it.

He fed her the bite carefully. No smear, no mess, none of the theatrical nonsense the twins had plainly been hoping for. Just cake, done properly, the way you'd close a negotiation that had ended in mutual respect rather than bloodshed.

Ginny chewed. Considered. Nodded once. "Acceptable."

"That's it?"

"Don't push your luck, Potter."

For a second, in the middle of all of it, he wasn't aware of anyone else at all — not the crowd, not the twins, not Lilah's schedule. Just Ginny, barefoot on the grass with icing on her lip and her hair coming down, looking at him like the whole loud impossible day had been worth getting through to reach this exact and slightly ridiculous moment. He'd have stayed there. He nearly said so.

He didn't get the chance.

Across the table, Ron leaned toward Hermione. "Is that it? That's the whole romance thing. Cake."

Hermione didn't take her eyes off the couple. "If you're lucky, yes."

Ron frowned. "Seems like a lot of pressure to put on cake."

"It's not about the cake."

"What's it about, then?"

She sighed. "Ron, if I explain it, you'll try to diagram it."

"I would not—"

"You would. You'd go and find parchment."

He opened his mouth, looked briefly like a man checking his own pockets for parchment, and shut it again.

Harry had just opened his own mouth to say something to Ginny — something that would have been mildly sensible and immediately forgotten — when Fred and George exchanged a look.

It was the look of two men who had behaved themselves for precisely twelve minutes and considered the debt paid in full.

George cleared his throat. "Before anyone assumes we've been good—"

"—we'd like to present," said Fred, with a flourish that nearly took out a passing waiter, "the actual point of this confection."

Ginny's eyes narrowed. "What did you do."

"We enhanced it," said George.

Harry set his plate down, slowly. "That's not reassuring."

"It is," said Fred, "if you appreciate art."

The top tier of the cake shifted.

Not a slide. Not a collapse. Nothing that suggested it was about to come down. It simply — reacted, the way a pond reacts when something underneath it moves. The icing caught the lantern-light and shimmered. Then it split, neatly, down the middle.

And something climbed out.

Harry's first thought was that a charm had gone wrong. His second, half a beat later, was that nothing about this had gone wrong at all, and that was so much worse.

A miniature version of himself was standing on the top tier of the cake. Six inches tall, give or take, and entirely absorbed in straightening its tiny tie. Across from it, arms already folded, a miniature Ginny resolved out of the icing — small enough to fit in a teacup, and recognisable, somehow, from clear across a battlefield.

There was a beat of silence while the whole table leaned in.

Then mini-Ginny elbowed mini-Harry hard enough to send him over backwards into the icing.

"Ah," said George, delighted. "Good start."

The real Ginny turned her head, very slowly. "Why is that on my cake."

"It's a narrative reconstruction," Fred said, proud as anything.

Harry watched the tiny version of himself haul itself back upright, wipe icing off its tiny face, and immediately get flicked in the forehead by tiny Ginny.

"That's not a reconstruction," he said faintly. "That's assault."

A mini-Ron appeared next, as if summoned by sheer moral obligation. It pointed at the cake-Harry, shouted something nobody could hear, and tried to hex him. The little jet of light bounced off the icing and hit mini-Ron instead, spinning him neatly backwards into a sugar flower.

The real Ron made a strangled sound. "That is not accurate."

Hermione didn't even look at him. "You did try to hex Harry in sixth year."

"I had context."

"You had jealousy."

"I had— that's not— there were circumstances—"

A mini-Hermione appeared at the cake's edge, took mini-Ron by the collar, and dragged him off backwards with the expression of someone who'd run out of patience with the entire arrangement several years ago.

The real Hermione put her face in her hands. "Oh, Merlin."

Ginny, on the other hand, had begun to laugh. Properly. The kind she didn't bother dressing up.

"That," she said, pointing at mini-Ginny shoving mini-Harry into a fresh icing disaster, "is exactly how it started."

Harry blinked. "It did not start with me being repeatedly assaulted by a pastry version of myself."

"It sort of did."

"It really didn't."

"It's got the spirit of it," Ginny said, wiping her eyes.

By now the whole table had given up any pretence of dignity and crowded in. Charlie had got out of his seat to see better. Bill watched with the resigned amusement of a man who'd grown up with these two and survived. Fleur said something quietly that made Bill choke on his drink. Luna had her chin in both hands and was studying the cake with the same serene interest she might have given a particularly rare bird.

"They've made you very small," she told Harry kindly. "It suits you."

"Thanks, Luna."

"You seem less worried, at this size."

Neville, beside her, had given up entirely and was laughing into his sleeve.

Teddy, meanwhile, had nearly escaped Andromeda twice. He had no interest in the icing flowers, the gold detailing, or the structural integrity of anything. He wanted the tiny people. "Can I hold them," he said, with the absolute confidence of a child who had not yet been told no. "I'll be careful. I'm always careful."

"You are never careful," said Remus, from somewhere behind a hand. "Sit down. Please. We are not eating Harry."

Estelle, who had drawn her chair right up to the table and was watching the cake with a frown of professional concern, said, "They're going to ruin the icing." She did not sound as though she disapproved. She sounded as though she was taking notes.

A mini-Draco Malfoy appeared at the edge of the cake.

There was a pause. Even Fred and George looked briefly cautious, as though the cake had introduced a guest they couldn't quite remember inviting and weren't sure was on the list.

Mini-Draco looked around. Smoothed his tiny hair.

The real Ginny set down her plate.

On the cake, mini-Ginny crossed the icing in three businesslike strides, took mini-Draco by the front of his robes, and pushed him clean off the edge. He didn't reappear.

George frowned. "We didn't script that bit."

"I did," Ginny said brightly.

Harry stared at her. "You put Malfoy on the cake?"

"I didn't put him on it," she said. "I corrected it."

Ron gave a sharp bark of laughter. "That's the most Ginny thing I've ever seen, and I grew up with her."

Hermione was still watching mini-Ron, who had been hauled offstage twice now and somehow still managed to look personally wronged about it. "I hate this cake."

"You love this cake," said Fred.

"I hate that I understand it," she said.

Across the marquee, Sirius had slid so far down in his chair that he was in genuine danger of going under the table altogether. Marlene had a hand flat on his shoulder, holding him up, and was doing a poor job of not laughing herself.

"That is—" Sirius wheezed, pointing, "that is exactly— Moony, look. Look at your tiny son being dragged off by the collar—"

Remus had the expression of a man calculating how far the nearest exit was and whether he could reach it unseen. "I would prefer not to."

Tonks leaned across him, grinning, hair flickering from pink to a gleeful gold. "It's accurate, though."

"It is not accurate."

On the cake, mini-Ron picked himself up, set his tiny jaw, and tried to hex mini-Harry for what was now the third time. The spell rebounded. Mini-Ron went into the icing.

Remus closed his eyes. "Unfortunately," he amended, "it may be slightly accurate."

Marlene caught Harry's eye over the top of Sirius's head and shook her own, slowly, the way she did when something was funny and also entirely beyond saving. Harry grinned back at her. Some part of him — the part that still half expected every good thing to be snatched away before he'd finished enjoying it — was quietly astonished that he was allowed to find this funny. That nobody was going to die. That the worst thing happening tonight was a sugar effigy of Ron falling repeatedly into a cake.

"I didn't agree to a historical reenactment," Harry managed, once he'd got his breath back.

"You didn't have to," said Fred, comfortably. "It's wedding tradition."

"It is not wedding tradition," Hermione said.

"It is now," said George.

"That's not how traditions—"

"It's how ours work," Fred said, and on the cake the tiny figures, as though they'd heard him and approved, slowed, froze mid-chaos, and sank gently back into the icing — mini-Harry still flat on his back, mini-Ginny standing over him with her arms folded, the pair of them disappearing under the white like a moment somebody had decided to keep.

Ginny leaned into Harry's side. "I liked it."

"You would."

"You got shoved into a cake several times. It was honest."

"I did not get shoved into a cake."

"You did," said Ron, flatly. "Repeatedly. I watched."

Harry looked at him, betrayed. "You're enjoying this far too much."

Ron spread his hands. "It's accurate."

Sirius finally hauled himself upright, wiping his eyes. "I move that we play it again."

Remus stood up so fast his chair scraped. "Absolutely not."

And that, somehow, was the signal.

Because after that, nobody tried to impose order on anything ever again.

The whole reception loosened all at once, the way a knot does when you finally stop pulling against it. The band found a faster tune. Chairs went back without apology. Ties came off, sleeves went up, shoes vanished under tables, and somebody — Harry suspected Lee Jordan before he so much as turned round — had set up a running commentary from near the bandstand, glass in one hand, the other cupped to his mouth like he was at a match.

"And now we see Granger attempting diplomacy with Weasley," Lee announced, to the room at large. "No clear result as yet, but emotional damage is being scored generously."

"I am not a Quidditch match," Hermione said.

"You absolutely are," Ron muttered, and then visibly regretted it.

Ginny slipped her shoes the rest of the way off and stepped fully onto the grass under the marquee, toes spreading into it like she'd been waiting all night for permission.

"That's better," she said.

Harry glanced down. "You're going to step on broken glass."

"I'm going to step on Fred, if he gets ideas."

Fred raised both hands from across the floor. "I'm innocent."

"We're never innocent," George said, beside him.

"Good," said Ginny, pointing at the two of them. "Stay alert."

Harry tugged his own tie loose at last and let himself just watch it for a moment — the whole room tipping over from something careful into something far better. It didn't feel like things falling apart. It felt like permission. Like the spell everyone had been politely holding their breath under had finally been allowed to lift.

Lee's voice rose again. "We are now entering what I believe is called the everyone-ignores-structural-boundaries phase of the evening."

"Is that a real phase?" someone called.

"No idea," Lee said happily. "But it's happening."

Over by the drinks, a knot of people had started a game without quite agreeing on its rules. Glasses went up; someone produced an old Hogwarts scandal; and the rest of the table had to rule on whether or not it counted. The argument got loud almost instantly.

"That was nowhere near an expulsion," Percy said, from somewhere in the middle of it, with the exhausted authority of a man who had read the school bylaws for pleasure.

"It was emotionally adjacent to one," George argued.

"That is not a category, George."

"It is tonight."

"You cannot simply invent categories—"

"Watch me," said George, and invented two more.

Angelina passed behind him without slowing down and said, to the back of his head, "I've known you too long to trust your face."

George turned. "That's rude."

"It's accurate," she said, and was gone before he could decide whether to be offended.

A little way off, Ron and Hermione had stopped arguing and started actually dancing, which mostly meant Hermione was correcting his posture while they did it. Ron looked half-affronted and half-relieved, like a man who didn't enjoy being told what to do but found instructions a comfort all the same.

"You're leaning," she said.

"I'm not leaning."

"You are. You lean when you concentrate."

"I feel completely upright."

"That," she said, "is what worries me."

At the edge of the floor, Arthur watched the lot of it with the resigned fondness of a man who'd long ago made his peace with the people he'd helped raise. Molly stood beside him with her arms folded, pretending she wasn't tracking Fred and George across the room like a hawk keeping two unusually dangerous birds in sight.

"I raised them better than this," she said.

Arthur considered the claim seriously. "Did you?"

"I believe I did."

He watched George trip over a chair, recover by spinning straight into Angelina's path, get his ear very nearly boxed, and laugh. "They seem… functional."

"That is not the word I'd choose."

"Resilient?"

Molly sighed. "Yes. Unfortunately, yes."

Arthur put an arm round her without taking his eyes off his sons, and Molly let him, and for a moment the two of them just stood there watching the chaos they'd made and let loose on the world.

And then the fireworks started.

No warning. No build-up. No tactful word from the band. Just a sharp crack overhead that snapped half the guests' heads back at once.

Fred froze.

George froze.

Then, in perfect unison, both of them said, "It wasn't us."

Ginny turned her head. "It was you."

"It wasn't!"

Harry squinted up at the canvas. "It really looks like you."

"It's us-adjacent," George admitted. "At most."

The first burst opened over the marquee in a great spray of gold, hanging there a second before it sighed down toward the tents. The crowd made the noise crowds make.

And then came a stag.

A huge one, glowing, built out of light, antlers bright as something that had swallowed the sun, arcing the whole width of the sky above the dance floor. It landed — touched down, somehow, on nothing at all — over the heads of the guests, lowered its head, and bowed.

Harry forgot, for a second, how to breathe.

He knew that shape. He'd known it since he was thirteen and half-dead on a frozen lakeshore, watching it gallop across the water and thinking, with his whole chest, that his father had come back for him. He'd carried it ever since — across the grounds, through the dark of that last year, out the other side of a war. It was his. It had been his father's first.

He didn't have time to fall into it. The stag burst, the way fireworks do, into a fine gold dust that came down over the crowd like sparks, and the marquee erupted, and the moment was carried off on a wave of noise before it could pull him under.

"That one's Potter!" Lee bellowed instantly. "Clear points for the dramatic entrance!"

"I did not authorise that," Harry called up, on instinct.

"Too late!" Fred shouted back, somewhere in the dark.

But Harry had felt it land, and he caught Ginny watching him — not laughing now, just watching, the way she did when she'd seen the thing under the thing — and she slid her hand into his and said nothing about it, which was exactly right.

More came after it, the twins clearly emptying months of work into the sky.

A phoenix went up next, wings blazing red and gold, sweeping low enough over the tables that people ducked and then laughed at themselves for ducking, before it folded into a drift of ash-light that hung shimmering above the cake. Hagrid let out a sob of pure happiness roughly the size of a small avalanche and had to be patted by three separate people.

A dragon came after the phoenix, all wings and bad temper, and dived at the drinks table close enough that Charlie shot to his feet to get a better look and cheered it like an old friend. "That's a Hungarian Horntail," he told no one in particular, thrilled. "Look at the tail on it—"

"Charlie, sit down," said Molly.

"It's a beautiful Horntail—"

Then a whole cluster of small golden birds, chasing each other in loops over the dance floor, scattering sparks into people's hair and robes, which they batted away still laughing. Luna held both hands up to them as though she hoped one might land. One nearly did.

Molly jabbed a finger up at the sky. "Fred Weasley."

"It wasn't me!" Fred shouted, laughing far too hard to be believed by anyone.

Arthur tilted his head back, squinting. "That one's rather good, actually."

"That is not the point, Arthur."

"It might be a little the point."

Then came the one that quieted the whole tent.

A firework went up in the shape of a woman. Unmistakable Weasley hair, arms folded, a face built entirely out of disapproval and several decades of maternal authority. It hung there over the marquee, looking down at all of them at once.

The crowd went very still.

Then the firework Molly opened its mouth.

"IF YOU DON'T BEHAVE—"

It never got to the rest. It detonated on the threat, and the explosion shook a laugh out of every corner of the tent at once — even from the people who'd thought themselves too dignified for it, even from Percy, who tried to disguise his as a cough and failed.

The real Molly stood very still on the grass.

Arthur studied the fading shape above them with great care, like a man defusing something. "It does have your eyes," he offered.

Molly did not respond.

He let a beat go by. Then, gently: "And your… presence."

She turned her head toward him, slowly.

"I mean that," he said, at once, "in an entirely positive sense."

There was a long pause, during which the surrounding area held its breath on Arthur's behalf.

Then Molly let out a sharp breath through her nose — the breath of a woman deciding that staying angry would cost more effort than the number of people currently laughing was worth.

"Well," she said, stiffly. "At least they got the hair right."

Arthur smiled like he'd just pulled off something enormous, risked putting his arm back round her, and lived.

Above them the fireworks kept going, gold and red and a blue that turned the whole inside of the marquee to deep water for a second at a time. Harry stood in the middle of it with Ginny's hand in his and let it wash over him. He'd stopped flinching at the cracks somewhere around the dragon. It was, he thought, possibly the loudest he had ever been happy.

And then the sky over the dance floor went quiet.

The twins' fireworks didn't do quiet. They did loud, and louder, and one more after that for luck. So when a single shape began to gather over the floor — slowly, with none of the showmanship, building itself out of the dark the way breath fogs a window — Harry felt the back of his neck go cold before he understood why.

It was a stag.

Another one. But nothing like the first. The first had been a Weasley firework, all flourish and arrival and points for style. This one came together slowly, almost carefully, like whoever was making it didn't want to get a single line of it wrong. There was no hurry in it at all.

Harry looked for the twins. He found them at once — and they were staring up like everyone else, Fred's mouth actually open, George with his head tilted to one side, both of them as taken aback as anybody in the tent. They hadn't made this one.

So he looked again, properly, across the marquee, the way you do when you already half-know what you'll find.

Sirius and Remus were standing together near the edge of the floor.

Their wands were up. Not waved, not flourished — held, steady, the two of them working at it side by side with their heads bent close, the same way Harry imagined they'd once worked at things that earned them detentions a year at a time. There was nothing clever on either of their faces. Sirius wasn't grinning. Remus had stopped looking for the exit. They were just two men drawing a stag in the air over the son of the friend they had lost, and Harry understood, all at once and completely, what he was looking at.

Prongs.

James's shape, made by the two people left alive who'd run with him as something other than men. The Marauders, minus the ones who weren't there, giving the one who'd never got to come back the only thing they had left to give: his own form, over his son's wedding, in the place where he should have been standing.

The stag finished. It turned its great head, unhurried, and looked down at Harry.

Then it looked at Ginny.

Harry's throat did something he had no intention of letting his face do in front of three hundred people. Beside him he felt Ginny go still, and then her hand tightened around his, ring against ring, and held on.

He found Sirius's eyes across the floor. Sirius didn't make a joke of it. He just gave Harry one small nod — yes, we know, we miss him too, here — and lowered his wand. Remus lowered his beside him. And Harry, who was very bad at this and always had been, nodded back, which was all he had and somehow seemed to be enough.

A hand settled lightly against his back. He didn't need to look to know it was Marlene. She didn't say anything either. None of them did. That was the kindest thing about all of them, in the end — they knew exactly when to let a thing be loud, and exactly when to let it be quiet.

The stag bowed.

Lower than the first one, and slower, the way you'd bow to someone you respected rather than someone you were performing for. It held there a moment, antlers full of light. Then it came undone — gently, this time, not a burst but an unmaking — into a slow gold rain that drifted down over Harry and Ginny and the floor and everyone on it, settling in hair and on shoulders and across the grass.

Harry tipped his head back into it. He let himself feel all of it at once — the great gaping shape of the people who weren't there, and the impossible crowded warmth of the ones who were — and for once the two things didn't fight each other. They came down side by side. He wasn't standing in the gap on his own. He never had been. He just hadn't always let himself see who else was standing in it with him.

Ginny leaned her head against his shoulder, gold catching in her loose hair.

"All right?" she said, quietly, under the noise.

It was the same question she'd asked him on the dance floor. He gave her the same answer, and this time there was nothing underneath it he was keeping back.

"Yeah," he said. "Really."

"Good." Her fingers stayed laced through his. "Because your godfather and your honorary mother are crying into the same handkerchief, and someone needs to tell them they're being conspicuous."

Harry laughed — wetly, helplessly — and the last of the gold came down over the both of them, and across the marquee Sirius was indeed, loudly, blaming his eyes on the smoke.

The fireworks gave one last go after that — a final spray of gold over the tents, the twins refusing to let anything end on a quiet note if they could help it — and then the band struck up again, and the floor filled, and the evening folded back into noise and movement and Lee Jordan scoring the dancing out of ten.

Teddy, who had slept through none of it and was now thoroughly overtired, demanded to be lifted so he could check whether any more stags were coming. Harry took him, because Harry always took him, and held him up against his shoulder while the boy scanned the empty sky with deep suspicion.

"All gone," Teddy informed him eventually, disappointed.

"All gone," Harry agreed.

"That one was the best one." Teddy pointed vaguely upward, at the place the last stag had been. "The slow one."

Harry held him a little tighter. "Yeah," he said. "That one was the best one."

And Ginny found his free hand again in the dark, barefoot in the grass with gold dust still in her hair, and the marquee turned loud and bright and impossible around the three of them, exactly the way she'd promised it would.

***

By midnight the marquee had stopped being respectable.

It was still standing, which Percy kept describing as "stable under controlled conditions," in the tone of a man who had stopped believing his own report somewhere around the tenth time he'd given it. The lanterns had burned down to a low amber. Half the chairs had migrated to places no chair had any business being. There was cake on the canvas roof, and nobody had yet worked out how it had got there or what it meant.

A table near the centre sagged hard on one side.

"I can fix that," Percy said tightly, wand up.

George leaned over his shoulder. "You've been fixing it for forty minutes."

"It is temporarily stable."

"That's what you said about me in third year," Fred called, from somewhere in the wreckage of the cake table.

"It is not the same situation."

"It really is," George said.

Percy did not stop. He never did, was the thing — that was how you knew where you stood with him. Other people loved you by saying so, or by feeding you, or by setting you alight in front of three hundred witnesses. Percy loved you by mending the furniture you'd broken without being asked, lips pressed thin, fully aware everyone was laughing at him, and doing it anyway. Harry had only properly understood that about him after the war, when Percy had come back to the family with no idea how to apologise and had simply started showing up and being useful instead. Tonight he had repaired the same table six times. He would repair it a seventh. It was, in its way, the most Weasley thing in the tent.

Fred wandered over, surveyed the table, and gave it a small, considered kick. It held.

"There," Fred said. "Sorted."

"That is not—" Percy began.

"It's stable under controlled conditions," Fred said, and clapped him on the shoulder, and Percy, against every instinct he owned, very nearly smiled.

Ron was asleep on a bench near Hermione, slumped sideways with his head heavy on her shoulder. His hand still loosely held a glass that Hermione had tried, at some point, to remove from him and had eventually given up on. He made a small noise in his sleep and shifted.

Hermione didn't look down. "If anyone asks, he's resting."

Harry sat on the bench's other end. "He's been resting since the fireworks."

"He's been recovering emotionally since the first toast," Hermione corrected. "He cried during your speech and then pretended it was hay fever. There's no hay in here. It's a marquee."

"I noticed."

"He noticed too. He just committed to it." She moved her shoulder a careful inch; Ron made an indignant sound and burrowed in deeper. She let him. "We are not waking him. He gave that toast, and he held it together for nearly the whole thing, and that took everything he had. He's allowed to be unconscious now."

Harry looked at the two of them — Ron drooling faintly into the shoulder of the woman who'd spent half her school years pretending not to be in love with him, Hermione absently smoothing a piece of his hair flat without seeming aware she was doing it — and felt the particular ache of having known people for a very long time. There had been a tent before this one. A different sort of tent, on the run, the three of them frightened and snapping at each other in the dark, no idea whether any of them would see the other side of it. He had not let himself think, then, about weddings.

"We didn't always end up in nice tents," he said.

Hermione's hand went still in Ron's hair. For a moment neither of them said anything, and the noise of the party went on around the quiet of it.

"No," she agreed. "We didn't." She looked at him, and her eyes were suspiciously bright, and she dealt with it the way she dealt with most things, which was briskly. "This one's much better. Better catering. Fewer Snatchers." She tipped her head at the cake on the roof. "Comparable structural concerns."

"Comparable," Harry agreed, and they sat with it, and it was enough.

Fred's voice drifted over from the ruin of the cake. "I think the cake's still alive."

"It is not alive," Lilah said. She had given up her clipboard hours ago and was sitting on an upturned crate with her shoes off and her hair down, watching her carefully planned evening burn in a manner she had clearly come to find restful.

"It's moving."

"That is sugar reacting to charm residue."

"That's what you said about the duck," George said.

"The duck," Lilah said, with feeling, "was a separate matter, and I would thank you never to mention it again."

Tonks went past wearing Remus's jacket. The sleeves came down past her hands; she'd shoved them up to her elbows and they kept sliding down again. Her hair couldn't settle on a colour — it ran through pink and a tired violet and a soft brown that Harry suspected was the one underneath all the others, the one she landed on when she was too happy and too worn out to keep changing it.

Remus followed at a measured distance, Teddy asleep against his chest at last, a small fist closed in his shirt.

"You can't just take my jacket," Remus said, without much hope.

"I didn't take it," Tonks said brightly. "It followed me."

"It walked into your arms."

"It clearly prefers me." She turned, walking backwards now so she could grin at him, and nearly went over a rogue chair, and recovered, and pretended she hadn't. "Don't take it personally. Inanimate objects have always liked me better than you. It's a documented Auror skill."

"It is not a documented anything."

"It's in my file."

"It is not in your file, Dora."

"It's in the spirit of my file."

Sirius was already on top of a chair again. He'd been getting on and off chairs all night, as though the floor were merely one option among several and he intended to try all of them. He pointed at the pair of them with the solemnity of a man delivering important news. "Moony's been replaced."

"I have not been replaced," Remus said.

"You've been upgraded." Sirius nodded gravely. "It's very modern. Happens to the best of us. The jacket's moved on. You have to respect its choices."

Marlene passed behind his chair and said, under her breath, "Don't encourage him."

"I'm not encouraging," Sirius said. "I'm observing history."

But Harry had come to a stop in front of the three of them, and Teddy was asleep, and the thing about Teddy being asleep was that it took the performance out of everyone for a minute. Remus shifted the boy's weight without thinking, one large hand spread flat against the small back, and looked up at Harry with the worn, glad expression of a man who had not, for most of his life, expected to be allowed any of this — a wife, a son, a friend's wedding to fall asleep at — and was still, quietly, every day, a little stunned to find it true.

"Sit down a minute," Remus said. "You've been on your feet since this morning. You're allowed."

Harry sat. Sirius, after a moment, got down off his chair and sat too, which from Sirius was a kind of confession.

For a while none of them said much. The party carried on a few feet away and felt, for that minute, like weather happening to someone else.

"He'd have been insufferable tonight, you know," Remus said eventually. He said it lightly, looking at the dance floor and not at Harry. "Your father. Completely insufferable. He'd have given a speech, and it would have gone on far too long, and he'd have made it about himself somehow — he had a gift for that — and then he'd have cried into Sirius's collar afterwards and denied it for a week." A pause. "He'd have loved every second of it."

"He'd have set something on fire," Sirius said.

"He would have set something on fire," Remus agreed. "On purpose. To prove a point no one had asked him to prove."

Harry kept very still, the way he always did when somebody handed him a piece of his parents, because the pieces came rarely and he had learned a long time ago to hold them carefully and not let on how much he wanted them, in case the wanting stopped them coming.

"And your mum—" Remus turned, finally, and looked at him properly, and there was something careful in it. "Your mother used to stand at the edge of a party exactly like that. Exactly. Off to one side, with a drink she wasn't drinking, watching everyone. Lily was the most alive person in any room and she'd spend half a party standing at the wall, just — taking it in. Like she was committing it to memory. Like she thought she might need it later." He held Harry's eyes. "You've done it three times tonight that I've counted. I doubt you've noticed you do it at all."

Harry's throat tightened. He had not known that. He had a hundred things people had told him about his mother — that she was kind, that she was clever, that she was brave, that she'd had his eyes, or rather he'd had hers, everyone always got around to the eyes — but he had never had this one, this small ordinary true thing, the habit he hadn't known he'd inherited from a woman he couldn't remember. It was worth more than the eyes. The eyes were just colour. This was hers.

"I didn't know that," he managed.

"No," Remus said gently. "I thought you might not."

Sirius cleared his throat. He'd gone quiet through all of it — Sirius, who could not normally be quiet to save his life — and when he spoke his voice had lost its swagger entirely, which was worse, somehow, than any joke.

"I didn't let myself imagine this," he said. He was looking at his own hands. "In there. Azkaban. You don't — you can't picture good things, in a place like that, because the picturing's the thing that breaks you, in the end. So I didn't. Twelve years I didn't let myself imagine a single good thing past the next day." He looked up, and his eyes were wet, and he made no move to do anything about it. "And now I'm at James's son's wedding. With cake on the ceiling. Telling Moony his jacket's left him." His mouth crooked. "I'd have called you a liar. If you'd told me, in there. I'd have laughed in your face."

The party roared on. Somebody dropped a tray.

"Right," Sirius said abruptly, and stood, and got back up onto the chair, because that was how Sirius survived a feeling — he climbed up out of its reach. "That's quite enough of that. Where's my drink. Moony, your son's asleep on you, you've gone soft, it's tragic, somebody fetch a band—"

"Sit down, Padfoot," Remus said, with enormous fondness, and didn't make him.

Harry didn't say anything. He wasn't good at this and never had been; words arrived too late or not at all. So he just reached up and gripped Sirius's forearm for a second, hard, where it dangled off the chair — there, that's it, I heard you, thank you, I miss him too — and Sirius's hand came down and gripped his back, just as hard, and then let go, and the moment was allowed to pass into the noise, which was where it belonged.

Marlene, a few feet off, had watched the whole of it without appearing to. When Harry glanced at her she only raised her glass an inch — to all of it, to him — and let him be.

He got up before any of them could turn it into something. There was a whole tent full of people he loved making fools of themselves, and the night was running out, and he found he wanted to see all of it before it ended.

Molly and Arthur were near the edge of the floor. Molly had a drink in her hand — Arthur's, refilled — and was watching the room with the expression of a general surveying a battlefield she had personally lost.

"You're enjoying this," she said, as Arthur came up beside her.

Arthur considered the room. "It's a wedding."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got."

Molly exhaled through her nose. "Fred is going to get himself arrested."

"Not tonight," Arthur said mildly. "Kingsley's here."

"That makes it worse."

She caught sight of Harry then, and her whole face changed — the general went out of it, and something far less composed came in. She set the drink down. For a second Harry thought she might just fuss at his collar, the way she did, smooth him down, tell him he wasn't eating enough; she got as far as reaching out and putting his collar straight, which had come undone hours ago and would not stay.

"There," she said, and then her voice did something, and she pressed on through it the way her daughter would have. "You looked very smart today. Before all this." She gestured at the wreckage of the evening. "You did. You looked—" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. Started again, lower. "I set a place for you. Years ago. The very first summer you came to us, I laid an extra place at the table without thinking about it, and I never stopped, and Arthur said— well." She blinked hard. "I'm being silly."

"You're not," Harry said.

"I am. It's late and I've had Arthur's wine." But she took his face in both her hands, briefly, the way you would a child's, and Harry — who had spent eleven years in a cupboard being touched by no one who loved him — stood very still and let her, because he had learned, slowly, over many years and at her kitchen table, that this was what it felt like to be somebody's. "You've been ours a long time, Harry," Molly said. "The paperwork's only just caught up."

Then she let go and stepped back and busied herself with the abandoned drink, mortified at herself, and Arthur put an arm round her, and over the top of her head he gave Harry a look — fond, watery, entirely unsurprised by anything his wife had just said because he had been laying that extra place beside her for years.

"She means," Arthur said gently, "welcome to the family. Officially. Although I should warn you, the meetings are very disorganised and the catering, as you can see, is a hazard."

Harry laughed, mostly to keep from doing the other thing. "I noticed."

Across the marquee, George had somehow cornered Kingsley Shacklebolt against a tent pole. Kingsley was the Minister for Magic. He had led half a war. He stood like a man who had faced down considerably worse than George Weasley and was reserving judgement on whether this was, in fact, worse.

"It's good morale," George was saying, with great earnestness. "Look at it. Everyone's fine."

Kingsley looked. He took in Ron, unconscious, with Hermione stroking his hair. He took in Sirius, on a chair, singing something that was definitely banned in at least three countries. He took in Fred, locked in serious negotiation with a piece of cake. He took in someone in the far corner cheering at nothing in particular.

"This," Kingsley said, in the deep unhurried voice that had calmed panicking crowds and ended duels, "is your definition of fine."

"It's post-war bonding."

"That is not a recognised category."

"It should be," George said. "I'd fill in the form. I'd fill in several forms. I love a form when it's pointing the right direction."

Percy materialised at Kingsley's elbow with the speed of a man who had been waiting his whole life for exactly this conversation. "It absolutely should not be a recognised category. There are no recognised categories invented after eleven o'clock at a wedding. That is — that is the entire point of categories—"

"See?" George said to Kingsley, gesturing at his brother. "Bureaucracy's the only opposition. The people are with me."

Kingsley's mouth twitched, very slightly, which on Kingsley was the equivalent of falling off his chair. "I will admit," he said, "that it has been effective."

George looked as though he'd been handed a knighthood. "That's all I needed."

"Did I hear 'effective'?" Fred called, abandoning the cake mid-argument. "That sounds like approval. Kingsley, that's approval, you've gone on record—"

"It is not approval," Percy snapped.

"It felt like approval."

"Minister," Percy said, turning, appalled, "with respect, please do not feel things at them, they take it as a mandate—"

Harry caught Kingsley's eye, and the Minister gave him a small nod — one soldier to another, across the noise. They had stood in the same fights. There was a great deal that didn't need saying between people who had stood in the same fights. "Good wedding, Potter," was all Kingsley said, and meant the whole of it, and Harry nodded back and meant the whole of it too.

As Harry moved on, George fell into step beside him for a moment, the salesman's grin sliding off into something quieter and quicker, there and gone.

"You know none of this exists without you," George said. He said it lightly, the way the twins said everything, but his eyes weren't light at all. "The shop. The fireworks. Any of it. You handed two seventeen-year-old idiots a thousand galleons and said go and be ridiculous, and we did, and—" He shrugged, and the grin came back like a door closing. "Just saying. Terrible financial decision. Best one anyone ever made. Don't tell Fred I said it, he'll want it embroidered."

He was gone before Harry could answer, which was how the twins preferred to do their feeling — at speed, and from a distance, and never twice.

Hagrid was sitting near the edge of it all on a bench built for ordinary people, which meant his knees had ended up somewhere around his ears and a handkerchief the size of a pillowcase was balled in one fist. He'd been crying happily, on and off, since the ceremony, and had reached the stage of the night where he'd stopped bothering to deny it.

"Look at yeh," he said thickly, as Harry passed, and reached out and engulfed his entire shoulder in one hand. "Married. I remember yeh this big." He held a thumb and forefinger about a foot apart, which was both wildly inaccurate and somehow exactly right. "Knew yeh'd be all righ' in the end. Always said it, didn' I. Didn' I always say it?"

"You always said it, Hagrid."

"I did." Hagrid blew his nose with a noise like a foghorn. Three people across the tent turned round. "Don' mind me. Yeh get on, go on. Big day." He patted Harry once on the back — gently, for Hagrid, which still rearranged several vertebrae — and went back to weeping into his pillowcase with the deep contentment of a man whose every prediction had come good at last.

Near the garden flap, Luna was sitting with Fleur, carefully tipping flecks of golden firework ash off the tablecloth into a small glass jar.

"What's that for?" Harry asked.

"It might be useful later," Luna said.

"For what?"

"I'm not sure yet." She held the jar up to the lantern light, and the gold inside it turned slowly. "I don't always know what a thing is for when I keep it. Sometimes you only find out afterwards, and then you're glad you've got it." She looked at him, mild and clear. "I've kept all sorts of things I didn't understand. They've nearly all come good."

Fleur, beside her, glanced at the jar. Harry braced, a little, for her to say something cool and perfect and dismissive, because that was the Fleur most people met — the one they decided about within five minutes and never bothered to revise. He'd been guilty of it himself, once.

"It is ash," Fleur said.

"Yes," Luna agreed serenely. "But it remembers being fire."

Harry waited for Fleur to roll her eyes.

She didn't. She looked at the jar for a long moment instead, and something in her face went somewhere far off and rather old. "My grand-mère," she said, "she is Veela. The fire, it comes from her when she is angry — real fire, from the hands." She turned one slim hand over, considering it. "She told me once, when I was small: the fire is never gone. It only waits. It is in the blood, and the blood remembers, even when the woman is being very calm and very polite at a dinner and everyone thinks she is only a pretty face who will say nothing clever." A small, sharp smile, entirely unlike the one she gave at parties. "So." She nodded at Luna's jar. "She is right, your friend. The ash remembers. I would not keep it on a high shelf, if I were you."

Luna beamed. "I knew you'd understand."

"I am underestimated also," Fleur said, perfectly pleasant, and finished her wine. "It is very useful. People tell you everything when they think you are not listening."

Harry left the two of them to the jar, with the distinct sense that he had just watched two people the rest of the room had written off entirely turn out to be the only ones in it who had the night exactly right.

Ginny was at the edge of the garden when he found her.

She was just past where the marquee light gave out, where the warm amber thinned into the dark and the grass went cool. Barefoot. The hem of her dress was rumpled and grass-stained, her hair fully down now and loose over her shoulders, and she stood with her face tipped up at a sky that out here, away from the lanterns, had got its stars back. She looked like she'd escaped the reception rather than left it.

Harry stopped.

Ginny didn't turn round. "You're doing the thing again."

"What thing?"

"Standing there looking at me like you're checking I'm still there."

He came up beside her. The noise of the tent dropped a register, became something he could hear around rather than over. "Bit hard not to."

She took his hand then, without looking, the way she'd done all day — like it was the most obvious thing in the world, like there'd never been any question of whose hand it was. "I'm still here."

"I know."

"You don't, though. Not all the way." She said it without any heat, which was how he knew she'd been thinking about it. Ginny didn't get soft about things; she got accurate. "You keep waiting for the catch. You've done it since I've known you. Something good turns up and there's a part of you stood off to the side with its arms folded, going, right, and what's this one going to cost." She finally turned and looked at him. "I'm not going to tell you there's no catch."

"No," Harry said. "I didn't think you would."

"Because that'd be a lie, and you'd know it, and then you'd trust me less, not more." She shrugged, her shoulder warm against his arm. "I've been to the same war you have. I know what it costs and I know it isn't finished costing, not ever, not really. People we love are going to get ill and old and unbearable and some of them are going to die before we're ready, because that's the deal, that's the whole deal, that's what you sign for." Her hand tightened on his. "What I'll tell you is you're not going to be standing off to the side on your own when the bill comes. That's it. That's the entire offer. Same as everything else — we'll deal with it, and we'll be rude to each other about it, and we'll be all right." A beat. "Take it or leave it, Potter."

Harry looked at her — barefoot in the dark with the stars behind her, refusing, even now, even tonight, to dress anything up softer than it was — and understood that this was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to him, and that it would have embarrassed her enormously to be told so.

"I'll take it," he said.

"Thought you might."

Behind them, the marquee gave a sudden roar — laughter, and a crash of music, and somebody, certainly Sirius, holding a note far past the point of decency, and Molly's voice rising over the top of it telling someone, fondly, to sit down.

Harry glanced back at the light.

"You could go back in," Ginny said.

He watched Sirius, through the open flap, climb onto yet another chair. "I could."

"But?"

He looked back at her. "We could also not."

A beat.

Ginny nodded once. "Good answer."

He gave a short laugh. "That felt like a test."

"It was," she said simply.

"We pass?"

"For now."

Behind them, something inside the tent shattered — glass, probably, or a moral boundary; it was past midnight and either was equally likely. No one reacted. The music didn't even falter.

"Are we meant to stop that?" Harry asked.

Ginny considered it with the gravity it deserved. "No."

"Good."

They stood a moment longer, letting all of it exist without them in the middle of it. It was a strange and wonderful thing, Harry thought, to be able to stand at the edge of a room full of people you'd have died for — had nearly died for — and not have to hold any of it together. To let it be loud and ridiculous and somebody else's responsibility for one night. He'd spent so long being the one the noise depended on. He hadn't known, until exactly now, how good it would feel to let the noise carry on perfectly well without him.

Then Ginny tugged his hand. "Come on."

"Where?"

"Anywhere quieter than Fred Weasley near fireworks."

Harry looked once more through the flap, taking it in the way he did, the way his mother apparently had — keeping it, in case he needed it later. Sirius on the chair, conducting the chaos like an orchestra that had stopped following him hours ago and that he was choosing not to notice. Ron still dead to the world on Hermione's shoulder, Hermione's hand still in his hair, the two of them an island in the storm. Fred and George re-litigating something with Kingsley while Percy tried to read them the rules. Molly laughing now, openly, the general well and truly defeated. Arthur watching his wife laugh and looking, for all the world, like a man who had everything he'd ever wanted and knew it. Marlene catching Harry's eye one last time across the wreckage and, very deliberately, turning away — go on, then. We've got it from here.

He turned back to Ginny.

"Yeah," he said. "Anywhere."

They didn't announce it. There would have been speeches, otherwise, and Sirius would have wanted to make one, and it would have taken an hour and ended in tears and at least one small fire. They just stepped back, together, out past the last of the light.

They didn't look back again, either.

The noise stayed where it belonged — inside the light, inside the mess, inside the people who would sort it all out tomorrow without ever fully agreeing on whose fault any of it had been, who would argue about the cake on the ceiling for years, who would tell the story of the duck at every gathering until none of them could remember what had actually happened and all of them swore they did. It would keep. It would all keep until morning.

Harry and Ginny walked away from it hand in hand, barefoot and rumpled and married, until the marquee was only a glow at their backs and the music had thinned to the idea of music, and the loudest thing left in the world was the grass under their feet.

Out here the day finally caught up with him. Not the fear, for once, and not the grief — just the sheer enormous weight of having got married, of being a person who was married now, a thing he kept turning over in his head like a stone he'd picked up and couldn't quite put down. He let out a long breath he felt like he'd been holding since breakfast.

Ginny heard it. "There he is," she said.

"There who is?"

"You. The actual one. You've been about ninety per cent here all day. The other ten was off somewhere keeping an eye on the exits." She stopped walking, so he stopped too, and she turned to face him in the dark. "Took you long enough."

"It was a big day."

"It was an enormous day. You did very well. You only looked like you wanted to flee the country twice, and one of those was during my brother's toast, which doesn't count, because everyone wanted to flee the country during that." She reached up and gave his ruined collar one more entirely pointless tug — exactly the way her mother had an hour before — and Harry decided, on balance, not to mention the resemblance, because he valued his life. "Don't tell anyone I said you did well. I've got a reputation to protect."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

She didn't step back. She stayed close, one hand flat against his chest where his heart was still going faster than the quiet warranted, and for a moment she didn't say anything sharp at all. That was the thing about Ginny that almost no one ever got to see — that she kept her softness the way you'd keep something valuable, out of sight, for the people who'd earned the right to it, and that out here in the dark, where there was no one to perform for, she'd let it show for a minute. It was, in the end, how he knew exactly how much she meant all of it.

"All right?" she said, very quietly. The same question she'd asked him on the dance floor, and under the fireworks, and at the edge of the light. The last time tonight.

"Yeah," Harry said. And this time it wasn't even hard. "Yeah. All right."

Then she took his hand again, and they walked on into the dark garden beyond, where it was quiet, and the grass was cool, and the stars had come back out over the both of them — and somewhere behind them, settling on the grass at the very edge of the light, the last of the gold ash came gently down, still, in its own way, remembering it had been fire.