Work Text:
2002
The Portkey dropped them out of the sky and into a wall of heat.
Harry's stomach turned over, his feet struck something soft, and then he was flat on his back in long grass with the breath driven out of him and the whole world ringing green. Palm fronds the length of broom handles hung over him against a sky so blue it looked enamelled. Somewhere very close an animal was making a noise like a chainsaw being throttled, and the air smelled of wet earth and flowers and something sweetly rotten underneath it all.
"We're alive," said Ginny, from somewhere on his left. "I think. Harry?"
"Here," he managed.
She was on her knees a few feet off, her plait half undone, one trainer snared in a loop of vine. Between them lay the dented copper kettle that had carried them four thousand miles, steaming gently and looking deeply ashamed of itself. Ginny took in the kettle, then the dripping forest, then Harry sprawled in the grass with a beetle the size of a plum walking up his arm, and the corner of her mouth went up.
"Dad chose the Portkey," she said.
"I'd worked that out."
"He spent twenty minutes at the Travel Office explaining that it was a genuine Muggle artefact. The man behind the desk thought he wanted to make tea." She got up, hauled her trainer free of the vine, and put out a hand. "He's written KETTLE on the bottom in his own writing. In case we forgot."
Harry flicked the beetle gently into the undergrowth and took her hand and was on his feet before he registered that hers was the only cool thing within a hundred miles. There was a ring on it now that hadn't been there a week ago, plain and gold, and he caught himself looking at it the way you look at something you're half afraid will turn out to be a dream.
"Are you in pain?" asked Ginny.
"No?" said Harry.
"Really, cause you look like someone insulted me or something."
"Nah, I just still hate portkeys, honestly."
A path led away from the clearing, beaten earth between walls of green, and a wooden sign at the head of it had been carved with a single word and an arrow. They followed the arrow. The forest pressed close on both sides and the chainsaw animal turned out to be three of them, then five, somewhere up in the canopy, roaring like the engine of Sirius's old motorbike on a cold morning. Harry kept one hand near his pocket out of pure habit and then made himself stop, because there was nothing here to fight, and that was rather the point.
They had been walking ten minutes, both of them soaked through their shirts, when the trees opened and the sea was simply there. It came at them all at once — a long curve of pale sand, water the colour of bottle glass, a wooden lodge built up on stilts in the shade of the palms with a hammock strung across its veranda and smoke rising lazily from somewhere round the back. A broad brown woman of about sixty, grey threaded through her hair and a pencil tucked behind one ear, stood on the veranda with her back half to them, looking out at the empty bay as though she were waiting for something to come across it.
It was their feet on the sand that turned her round. She looked at them — soaked, sun-shocked, Harry with a leaf in his hair and Ginny holding a dented copper kettle to her chest — and then she looked, for a long moment, at the wall of forest they had just stepped out of, and a small line came and went between her brows.
"You came down the forest path," she said.
"We did," said Harry.
"The boat comes round the point. I've been watching the point all morning." She nodded out to where the headland ran down into the sea, where there was plainly no boat and never had been. "Nobody comes down the forest path. There's no road that side. There's the river, there's the forest, and then there's more forest." She looked from them to the trees and back. "So where did you two walk from?"
There was a silence in which neither Potter managed to produce a single place that a person could plausibly have walked from, and somewhere far back in the trees a howler monkey roared once and left it hanging.
"We came the back way," Harry offered, which was true of nowhere and helped no one.
"It's a bit of a long story," said Ginny, standing more or less on his foot.
Marisol looked at the kettle, and at the leaf in Harry's hair, and at the two of them standing on her beach with the particular stillness of people who have just been asked a question they would much rather not answer — and then, by degrees, she appeared to decide that she didn't need the answer after all, and spread her hands, and let the whole thing go. "You're here. You found it. The ones who try coming overland, mostly they end up in the river — it's two miles that way — so you've already done better than most." She looked them over from the rail. "I'm Marisol. You're the Potters."
The word went through Harry like a small electric shock and he heard Ginny make a sound beside him that might have been a laugh.
"We are," said Ginny. "We're the Potters."
"I've got you for two weeks." Marisol came down the steps, moving without hurry, and looked them both up and down with the frank assessment of a woman who had welcomed a great many honeymooners and could tell at a glance which ones would survive the fortnight. Whatever she saw seemed to satisfy her. "You're too pale and you've brought too much. Come up, come up. Leave the bags." She said something over her shoulder in Spanish, and a boy of about fifteen appeared from round the side of the lodge, gathered up their cases, and carried them up the steps. "First you'll have a drink. Then we talk about what you want to do, and then I tell you what you'll actually do, because they're not the same thing." She smiled at them over her shoulder. "Pura vida."
"Sorry?" said Harry.
"Pura vida. Pure life. It means hello, it means goodbye, it means don't worry, it's all fine." She gestured them up onto the veranda, into the green shade and the sea-cooled air. "Here it means all three. You'll get used to it."
The drink, when it came, was clear as water in a short glass with a wedge of lime floating in it.
"Guaro," said Marisol, setting two of them on the rail and one for herself. "From the sugar cane. We make it here. You won't get this at home." She raised her glass. "To the married."
Harry drank. It tasted of nothing very much — a little sweet, a little of the lime, gone almost before he'd swallowed it, leaving a warmth at the back of his throat that spread pleasantly down into his chest.
"That's nice," said Ginny, surprised. "It's like — it's barely there."
"Mm," said Marisol, which Harry would later understand had been a warning, and at the time took for agreement.
They sat. The sea did what the sea does. Out across the bay a brown bird with a beak like a banana flapped heavily from one tree to another, and Marisol told them what there was — the volcano two valleys north, smoking gently, with hot water at the foot of it that came up from the deep places of the earth; the cloud forest where you could ride a rope from treetop to treetop; the river that would carry you down through the white water faster than any broom; the beach an hour south where the waves came in clean off the open ocean and a person could learn to stand on a board upon them, which she said with a glance at Harry that he didn't entirely care for. And the creatures. There were monkeys, she said, and he should mind his pockets. There were the sloths, who minded nothing at all. There were frogs the colour of jewels that would kill you if you licked them, which Ginny said sounded like several of her relatives, and there were turtles older than the lodge who came up out of the sea on certain nights to lay their eggs in the sand, and that, said Marisol, they would save for last.
"My father-in-law made notes," said Ginny, and went to dig in her bag. She came back with a battered Muggle paperback, its spine broken, sprouting torn bits of parchment from between the pages like a hedgehog. "He found this in a second-hand shop in London and read the whole thing twice and then went through it with a quill. Look — every page." She opened it at random. In the margin, in Arthur Weasley's small excited hand, someone had written: A "zip-line" is a length of metal cord. They have NO engine. The traveller is propelled by gravity ALONE — extraordinary — Molly thinks I am making it up. And lower down the same page, underlined twice: The "capuchin" monkey is highly intelligent and is known to STEAL small objects. Keep your wand SECURE at all times. Harry — this means you.
Marisol turned the book over in her hands with great respect. "Your father is a wise man."
"My father thinks plug sockets are the height of human achievement," said Ginny, "but yes."
Harry took the book from Marisol and turned the pages and found Sirius's handwriting too, bigger and blacker, scrawled across the bottom of a page about the volcano: DON'T fall in. There's a good lad. And under it, in a neater hand he knew as well as his own — Remus, who had clearly got hold of the thing at some point during the chaos of the week before the wedding — a single dry line: He means this sincerely. Please don't fall in the volcano.
He sat with the book open on his knee for a moment longer than he needed to.
The wedding was four days gone and he kept coming on bits of it without warning, the way you find sand in your shoes for weeks after the beach. Sirius getting to his feet to speak and not getting any further than Harry's name before having to stop and start again, twice, in front of two hundred people, with Marlene's hand flat on his back the whole while. Molly weeping into Arthur's good robes from the moment the music began. Lilah, his sister, dancing with him for the brother-and-sister dance that wasn't a tradition anywhere except that she'd decided it was, while her husband — Ginny's brother, which still tied Harry's head in knots if he thought about it too hard — sent something up into the dark over the marquee that exploded into a galloping silver stag and then, when everyone had gone quiet, into a doe beside it, which George swore afterwards he'd had nothing to do with and which had made Sirius leave the tent for ten minutes. Estelle catching the flowers. The baby asleep through all of it against Marlene's shoulder, Altair, three months old and the only person at his own family's wedding who'd had the sense to sleep.
"You've gone somewhere," said Ginny.
"Just thinking we got off lightly," said Harry. "Could've been raining."
Their room was at the end of the lodge, up under the thatch, with a bed swallowed in white netting and shutters that folded right back so that the wall on the seaward side was simply gone and there was nothing between them and the bay but warm air and the sound of the water. Their bags had been carried up ahead of them and now stood in a tidy row, which Ginny took one look at before tipping the contents of hers across the floor in search of something, restoring the universe to its proper state.
"There's no glass in the windows," said Harry.
"No."
"Anything could get in."
"Such as?"
"I don't know. The chainsaw things."
"They're monkeys, Harry. They're up trees. They're not going to climb through the window and murder us on our honeymoon." She found whatever she'd been after, sat back on her heels among the wreckage of her own luggage, and looked at him standing uncertainly in the middle of the room with his hands not knowing what to do with themselves. Her expression changed. "You don't have to keep checking the exits, you know. There's nothing here. That's the whole point of here."
"I'm not checking the exits."
"You've looked at the door twice and the window three times since we came in. I count. It's a habit, I know where it comes from, I'm not having a go." She stood and crossed to him over the scattered clothes and put both hands flat on his chest, and tilted her head back to look up at him in the last of the light coming sideways off the sea. "But it's just us. For two weeks. No Ministry, no training, no owls if I have anything to say about it. Nobody's going to come through that door."
"I know."
"Say it like you mean it."
"Nobody's going to come through that door," said Harry, and meant about half of it, which she seemed to recognise as a fair start.
She was on her toes and he was already bending down and the kiss landed somewhere in the middle, and the netting got involved, and they ended up sitting down hard on the edge of the bed in a tangle of it, laughing, with the gauze coming down around them in a slow white cloud. Outside, the light went out of the sky the way it does near the equator, all at once, like a hand over a lamp, and the bay turned to a sheet of darkness with one long silver crack in it where the moon was, and the monkeys finally, mercifully, shut up.
"Mrs Potter," said Harry, into her hair, trying the word out for the size of it.
"Don't," said Ginny.
"Why not?"
"Because if you start I'll start, and then we'll both be insufferable, and I've got a reputation to think of." She pulled back far enough to look at him through the wreckage of the netting. There was sand in her hair and a smear of something green up one forearm from the forest and her plait had given up entirely, and Harry looked at her and forgot, for a second, what either of them had been saying. "Right," she said, reading his face again, "you've gone soft, I can see it setting in. We're going to need rules. Rule one. No looking at me like that in public, you'll frighten the locals."
"Rule two?"
"There's only the one rule. I'll think of more." She reached up and started picking the gauze out of his hair, frowning at it with great concentration. "We did it, though. Didn't we."
"We did it."
"All of it. The whole — everything." She wasn't laughing now. "I half thought we wouldn't get to."
He didn't say anything to that, because there wasn't anything to say that they both didn't already know, and because saying it out loud felt like a way of letting it back in, and he wasn't going to let anything back in tonight. He took her hand instead, the one with the new ring on it, and turned it over, and pressed his mouth to the inside of her wrist where the pulse was, and felt it going, steady, under his lips. Somewhere far off down the beach something splashed once and was quiet.
"Pura vida," said Ginny against his shoulder, and he could hear that she was smiling.
The cloud forest was a different country.
They drove up the next morning — two hours of switchbacks in a battered jeep that Marisol arranged, with a driver who took the bends like a man nursing a personal grievance against them — and climbed out at the top, stiff-legged and glad to be still, on a high ridge so wrapped in mist that the earth below was nowhere to be seen. The trees went up and up out of the white and disappeared, hung with moss and ferns and orchids that grew straight out of the bark, and the air was cool for the first time since they'd arrived, cool and wet and full of birdsong that came from everywhere and nowhere. A man in a green shirt was waiting for them, a young guide with a clipboard and a great quantity of equipment, who took one look at the pair of them and said the words "first time?" with the cheerful condescension of a man who had said them several thousand times.
"For this, yes," said Ginny.
The equipment, when it had all been buckled and clipped and tugged tight, made Harry feel like a Christmas goose. There was a harness round his legs and his waist, and a strap over each shoulder, and a thick leather glove on his right hand, and a contraption of metal wheels and hooks that the guide attached to a steel cable strung out from the platform into the mist, where it sagged and then vanished, going down and away to another platform on a far tree that Harry could not see and was beginning to suspect did not exist.
"So you hold here," said the guide, demonstrating, "and you keep your hand behind you, never in front — the glove's your brake. You lift your feet, gravity does the rest. You go, then your wife goes. Yes? Easy."
"How fast," said Harry.
"Fast." The guide grinned. "Is the best part."
Harry looked at the cable. He looked down at where the ground ought to be and saw only white. He had flown a broom since he was eleven years old. He had flown through a thunderstorm with lightning splitting the air to his left. He had flown at a fully grown Hungarian Horntail and out the other side of it with his eyebrows scorched. He gripped the cable in his gloved hand and found that none of it was the slightest use to him whatsoever, because every one of those times he had been holding the broom, and the broom had done what he told it, and this — this was a clothesline, and it was going to do exactly as it pleased.
"You've gone grey," Ginny observed.
"I'm fine."
"You've gone the colour of the mist. You're camouflaged. Harry — you fight Dark wizards for a living."
"On a broom," said Harry. "With a brake I can actually reach. This is a — it's a washing line, Ginny, it's a washing line over a cliff."
"It's brilliant," said Ginny, "is what it is, and you're holding up the queue." There was no queue. "Go on. Or I'm going first."
He should have known better than to leave that hanging. She was past him before he could answer, unclipping his hook and clipping in her own with a competence that suggested she'd watched the guide rather more closely than Harry had, and she stepped off the edge of the platform backwards, on purpose, with both hands off the cable and her arms flung wide, and dropped into the white with a whoop that came back off the unseen trees and went on echoing for a long time after she'd vanished.
"She's good," said the guide, with feeling.
"She plays Quidditch," said Harry, before he could think better of it.
The guide blinked. "She plays what?"
"Hockey," said Harry. "Sort of. Field hockey."
The guide nodded slowly, in the manner of a man who has just been handed a story he fully intends to tell other people.
Far below, very small, drifting up through the mist, came Ginny's voice. "HARRY. IT'S BRILLIANT. LET GO WITH ONE HAND."
"I AM NOT LETTING GO WITH ONE HAND," Harry shouted back, into the fog, to a wife he could no longer see.
There was nothing else for it. The guide clipped him in, checked it twice, slapped him on the shoulder, and Harry shut his eyes and lifted his feet, and the platform dropped away from under him.
For the first second he was certain he was dying. For the second he was certain of it again. Then the wind tore his eyes open whether he wanted them open or not, and the mist was streaming past him, and the trees came rushing up out of the white on either side close enough to touch, hung with moss and dripping, and there was nothing under his feet and nothing in his hands but the cable singing through the glove, and somewhere along the way the noise that was coming out of him stopped being a yell of terror and turned, without his permission, into something a good deal more like a laugh.
He came in fast to the far platform and the guide there caught him neatly by the harness and set him on his feet, and Ginny was waiting, flushed and bright-eyed and grinning at him, and she didn't say anything at all, just raised one eyebrow, and Harry took his hand off the cable and found it was shaking and discovered that he didn't mind.
"Don't," he said.
"I haven't said anything."
"You're about to."
"I'm only going to say," said Ginny, "that for a man who fights Dark wizards for a living, you scream remarkably like my Aunt Muriel."
"Aunt Muriel," said Harry, "has never once been thrown off a cliff on a washing line."
"She'd have managed it with more dignity."
They did six more after that, swinging out one platform to the next, deeper and higher into the forest, until Harry had stopped shutting his eyes and started keeping them open on purpose, and on the last and longest one — a great swooping span across an open gorge with a river roaring white at the bottom of it, a thousand feet down through air gone suddenly clear — he let go with one hand, just for a moment, just to be able to say he had, and heard Ginny laughing somewhere ahead of him in the bright air.
It was on the final platform, while they were being unbuckled, that it happened.
Harry had, against every instinct and every lesson he had ever been taught, put his wand in the back pocket of his shorts that morning, because the shorts had only the two pockets and the other one had his glasses-cloth in it, and the first thing they tell you in Auror training, the very first day, before they teach you a single spell, is that a wizard who keeps his wand in his back pocket is a wizard who is going to blow a buttock off — and Harry had thought of this, and put it there anyway, because they were on holiday and nothing was going to happen.
Something dropped out of the canopy onto the platform rail.
It was about the size of a cat, white-faced and black-bodied, with hands like a very small old man and eyes that took in the whole situation — the harnesses, the equipment, the two distracted humans — in a single round comprehending glance. It looked at Harry. It looked, specifically and with terrible intelligence, at Harry's back pocket. And before Harry had fully turned, before the guide had even opened his mouth to say capuchin, the monkey had reached out one neat black hand, plucked the wand clean out of his pocket, and was gone, straight up the trunk of the nearest tree with eleven inches of holly and phoenix feather held aloft like a trophy.
There was a silence.
"Did that monkey," said Ginny, very slowly, "just steal your wand."
"Yes," said Harry.
"Your actual wand."
"Yes, Ginny."
She made a sound. She tried to stop it. She put the back of her hand against her mouth and her shoulders started going and the sound got out anyway, and within about four seconds Ginny Potter was bent double on a wooden platform a hundred feet up a tree in a Costa Rican cloud forest, helpless, useless, crying with laughter, while her husband of five days stood beside her watching a wild animal carry off the most important object he owned into a forest the size of Wales, and was unable to so much as say Accio because the Muggle guide was standing eighteen inches away, peering up into the canopy with the weary recognition of a man greeting an old enemy. "Ah. That one. We call him Diablo." He cupped his hands and shouted something up into the leaves that did not sound like a compliment. "He's taken three sunglasses this month, one camera, and a gentleman's hat. He'll bring it back. Usually. He only wants the shiny."
"It's not shiny," said Harry, through his teeth. "It's a wand."
"He doesn't know that," wept Ginny. "He thinks he's mugged a stick off a tourist. Oh — oh, your face —"
It was Ginny, in the end, who fixed it, once she'd recovered enough to stand upright and wipe her eyes on Harry's sleeve.
"Move," she said, and crouched, and went rummaging in her bag, and came up with a small flat box that Harry recognised with a sinking feeling. She tore the corner off it, glanced at the guide, who had wandered to the far rail to coil a rope, and held the gleam of the foil up over her head so it caught the light coming down through the leaves. The monkey, fifteen feet up the trunk, went still. Its head turned. Its small black eyes fixed on the bright thing in Ginny's hand with naked greed.
"He likes the shiny," she said sweetly. "You said. Go on then." And she lobbed it underarm up into the branches.
The monkey caught it one-handed, a clean catch, dropped Harry's wand without a second thought to clutch its prize in both hands — and the Chocolate Frog, freed from its foil and seeing daylight for the first time in months, gathered itself and leapt.
What followed Harry watched with the wand back in his hand and a deep and growing sense of unease. The monkey, betrayed, scandalised, gave a shriek of pure outrage and went after the frog. The frog went up. The monkey went up after it. Three other monkeys, who had been watching from a discreet distance, decided that whatever the first monkey had was worth having, and the whole pack of them went crashing away through the high canopy in a screaming green riot after a single panicking confection, and the noise of it rolled away across the forest and set off the howlers two valleys over, until the entire cloud forest was bellowing.
"Right," said the guide, returning, looking up at the chaos with the resigned air of a man whose afternoon has been decided for him. "We go down now, I think."
"What was that?" said Harry, as they queued for the last cable, very quietly.
"Chocolate Frog. Bertie's never miss a meeting, but I keep one for emergencies." Ginny clipped herself in, entirely unbothered. "Mum packed me a box. Said you never know."
"Your father," said Harry, "wrote a note in that book about the monkeys. About keeping my wand secure. There was a line in it that said, in actual words, Harry, this means you."
"Did there."
"He was four thousand miles away in London and he knew exactly which of us was going to have his wand stolen by a monkey."
"He's not always wrong," said Ginny. "That's the frightening thing about Dad."
"Your mother packed you Chocolate Frogs for our honeymoon."
"My mother packed me three jumpers, a tin of fudge, a bottle of something for upset stomachs, a book about Costa Rica that Dad had finished with, and a box of Chocolate Frogs," said Ginny. "She's never been further than Egypt and she's convinced the tropics are out to get us. There's a note as well. I haven't dared read it." She stepped off the platform backwards again, arms wide, and dropped laughing into the green, and Harry, with his wand zipped this time into the front pocket where it should have been all along, went after her.
They went to the volcano on the fourth evening, when the heat had gone out of the day.
Marisol walked them up herself, along a path that climbed gently through the trees with the great black cone of the mountain ahead of them, smoking against a sky going from gold to rose to a deep bruised purple. Halfway up she stopped and put a hand on Harry's arm and pointed, and it took him a long moment to find what she was pointing at, because it was not doing anything at all. High in the fork of a bare tree, hanging upside down with its grey fur and its long curved arms and a face set in an expression of vast and changeless contentment, was a sloth.
They watched it for a while. It moved one arm perhaps four inches, reaching for a leaf, and appeared to lose interest in the project halfway through, and stopped, with the arm still out, and hung there.
"Reminds me of someone," said Ginny.
"Don't."
"Sunday mornings. You. Trying to get out of bed when it's your day off." She tilted her head, considering the sloth, then him, then the sloth again. "Exactly that face."
"He's got the right idea," said Harry, which made Marisol laugh, a great warm laugh that went rolling off down the hill, and the sloth, far above, turned its head with infinite slowness to see what the fuss was, and then turned it slowly back again, having decided the fuss was none of its concern.
The hot springs were past the next rise, where the path gave out and a stream came down off the mountain warm as a bath, broadening into a string of pools among the rocks, each one a little hotter than the last, with steam rising off the surface into the cooling dark and the smell of warm minerals coming up off the water. She left them there. The pools were theirs for the evening; she'd see to it nobody else came up; and they were to be back before the moon was over the shoulder of the mountain, and not, she added over her shoulder as she went, to do anything in the water that she would rather not have to imagine afterwards.
It went dark while they were getting in, the way it always did, all at once.
The water came up to Harry's chest where he sat on a smooth shelf of rock, hot enough to turn him heavy and slow and stupid in the best way, with the cool night air on his face and his shoulders and the steam drifting up past him into a sky that had filled, while he wasn't looking, with more stars than he had ever seen in his life. There was no moon yet. The volcano stood over them, black against the stars, and along its summit, when the wind moved the smoke aside, came a faint sullen red glow from somewhere deep inside it, brightening and fading, brightening and fading, like something enormous breathing in its sleep.
Ginny waded across and settled against him, her back to his chest, and he put his arms round her under the water and she laid her own arms over his, and for a long time neither of them said anything at all. The stream chuckled over the rocks. Far off, the night birds had started.
"We could just stay," said Ginny eventually. "Here. Never go back. I'll learn to make the sugar drink. You can wrestle the monkeys."
"Marisol would have us mucking out the place by Thursday."
"I'd muck out. I'm not proud." She turned her head against his shoulder and he felt her go quiet in a different way, the way she went quiet before she said something she actually meant. "I keep waiting for it to feel normal. Being married. I thought it would feel different and it doesn't, it just feels like — us, only somebody official's written it down. Is that bad?"
"No."
"It's meant to be a great change, isn't it. Whole new chapter. And it just feels like more of the best thing."
Harry tightened his arms. Above them the volcano breathed its slow red breath and let it out.
"I used to think about it," he said, to the top of her head, because it was easier in the dark with the water holding them both and her face turned away. "During. The bad part. Not — anything specific. Just, after. If there was an after. I used to think, if we get out the other side of this, I'm going to do every ordinary thing there is. Get a job nobody's heard of. Have a Sunday lie-in. Take somebody on a holiday and do nothing on it." He stopped. "I didn't always think there'd be the somebody. That bit's new."
Ginny didn't say anything for a moment. Then she lifted his hand out of the water and pressed it flat against her cheek, and held it there, and he felt her turn her head just far enough to put her mouth against his palm.
"You got the somebody," she said.
The moon came up over the shoulder of the mountain a long while later and found them still there, gone soft and pink and ridiculous in the hot water, arguing in low voices about whether sloths could swim, and they only climbed out when the cold came down off the mountain at last and drove them up out of the water and into their clothes.
The surfing was where it all went wrong, and it went wrong because of Quidditch.
The beach Marisol sent them to was an hour down the coast, a long open sweep of pale sand with the Pacific rolling in off the edge of the world in clean grey-green lines, each wave standing up taller than a man before it toppled and came roaring up the sand in a rush of white. There was a Muggle who taught it, a sun-bleached man of indeterminate age with a board under each arm, who lay them down flat on the sand first and made them practise the standing-up part on dry land a dozen times — lie flat, hands here, push up, feet under you, all in one movement, rise — until he was satisfied, and then sent them out into the water to drown.
Harry drowned. Repeatedly. He paddled out, turned the board, felt the wave lift him, scrambled, and was flung head over heels into the churning water with the board tombstoning up beside him on its leash, and he came up spluttering and spitting saltwater and climbed back on and did it again, and again, and got a faceful of sand and a noseful of ocean and his glasses knocked clean off — saved only by a Sticking Charm he'd had the foresight to put on them — and the whole grey weight of the sea came down on him like a collapsing wardrobe, over and over, while the sun climbed and his shoulders went pink.
Ginny stood up on the third wave.
She stood up on the third wave, and the fifth, and after that she stopped falling off altogether. She was a Chaser. She had spent her whole life reading the air, judging a thing coming at her fast and putting her body in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment, and a wave, it turned out, was only a Bludger made of water, and she had been dodging Bludgers since she was six years old. By midday she was riding the long ones the whole way in, crouched low with her arms out and her wet hair streaming and her teeth bared in a grin that was half a snarl, carving up the wave and coming off the back of it at the last second with a flick of her hips, while the instructor stood in the shallows and applauded and Harry, fifty feet out, got hit by another wall of water and went under for the eleventh time.
He came up. He pushed his stuck-on glasses up his nose. He looked at his wife riding the ocean like she'd been born in it, and he looked at the next wave coming, and Harry Potter made a decision that he knew, even as he made it, was beneath him.
He waited for the wave. He felt it lift the tail of the board. He pushed up — and as his feet came under him he muttered, fast, under his breath, with one hand flat on the deck, a Sticking Charm of his own.
It was glorious. His feet locked to the board as though they'd grown there. The wave reared up under him and he rode it, upright, magnificent, the wind and the spray in his face, the whole long green wall of water sliding by beneath his feet, and he heard himself give a yell of triumph, and somewhere ahead Ginny's head whipped round —
— and Ginny, who had grown up in a house with Fred and George Weasley, who could spot a cheat at forty paces and at a dead sprint, took one look at Harry standing rock-steady on a board through a wave that should by every law of nature have flung him into next week, and her eyes narrowed.
"You did NOT," she shouted, across the water.
"Did what?" Harry shouted back, riding serenely past her.
"You stuck your feet down! You absolute — that's CHEATING, Harry —"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Harry called, sailing toward the beach with enormous dignity, and that was the precise moment that the wave, perhaps offended on Ginny's behalf, closed out all at once and broke directly on top of him.
The trouble with a Sticking Charm is that it sticks. Harry's feet stayed welded to the board. The rest of Harry did not. He went over backwards with his feet still fixed in place and was driven down into the sand by half the Pacific Ocean, folded up like a deckchair, and held there, churning, while the leash wrapped itself twice round his legs and the board he was stuck to tried to surface without him. He surfaced eventually, mostly by accident, coughing up the sea, his glasses full of sand, his feet still firmly attached to a surfboard that now stuck straight up out of the water behind him like a headstone, and found Ginny paddling toward him on her own board, helpless with laughter for the second time that week.
Up on the sand the instructor had stopped clapping. He was looking at the surfboard standing straight up out of the sea with nobody on it, and then down at his own two hands, and then back at the board, and he went on doing this for some while.
"That's what you get," she gasped, "oh, that's PERFECT, that's — say the counter-charm, you berk, you're going to drown attached to a plank —"
"I can't reach my wand," said Harry, with as much composure as a man can manage while bolted to a surfboard in four feet of water, "it's in the bag, on the beach, because SOMEBODY made a rule about not bringing it surfing."
"That somebody," said Ginny, wiping her eyes, "was you."
That night, sunburnt and salt-stiff and aching in places they hadn't known they had, they went into the little town along the coast to find their dinner, and that was where the guaro caught up with them at last.
The town was one sandy street of low buildings strung with coloured lights, and the place they ended up was a cantina open to the beach on one side, with a roof of palm thatch and a floor of packed sand and a man in the corner playing a guitar and not minding much whether anyone listened. They ate casado off tin plates — rice and black beans and fried plantain and a piece of fish, simple and enormous and exactly right — and a girl came round with a tray, and Ginny, feeling expansive, ordered them each a guaro sour, which was the clear stuff Marisol had given them that first afternoon, with lime and sugar and crushed ice, and tasted, as Harry remarked, like a particularly good limeade.
"It is basically limeade," agreed Ginny, who was wrong, and had two more.
Harry, who was matching her, would not afterwards be able to identify the moment it happened. There was no moment. There was simply a point at which he became aware that the cantina had grown brighter and warmer and considerably funnier than it had been when they came in, that the man with the guitar was the finest musician he had ever heard, that his own face had gone pleasantly numb, and that Ginny was telling him a story about her brother Bill and a Gringotts goblin and a misunderstanding involving a wedding cake, a story he was fairly sure he'd heard before but which now struck him as the single most hilarious sequence of events in human history, so that he had to put his glass down to laugh and missed the table and put it down on the sand instead.
"— and Bill says, he says, with a completely straight face," Ginny was wheezing, gripping his arm, "he says, that's not a curse, that's just GRAVITY —"
"Stop," begged Harry. "Stop, I can't —"
"— and the goblin, Harry, the goblin's face —"
They were, by any reasonable measure, extremely drunk, and it had happened with the speed and the totality of a trapdoor opening, and neither of them had the slightest idea that they were until it was much too late to do anything sensible about it.
"I love you," Harry announced, "so much. Have I said?"
"Once or twice."
"You rode the sea today. On a plank. You were — Ginny, you were like a — what's the thing —"
"A surfer?"
"A GODDESS," said Harry, with enormous conviction, and turned to the table behind them, where two sunburnt backpackers were quietly eating their dinner, and informed them, "This is my wife. She's the best Chaser in Britain. She's going to play for Holyhead. The Harpies. She just got signed, she —" He stopped, struck. "Am I allowed to tell them that?"
"Tell them what?" said one of the backpackers, alarmed.
"Nothing," said Ginny, hauling him back round by his shirt. "He means hockey. Field hockey. He's had a few." She fixed Harry with a look that even three guaro sours deep he recognised as serious. "Harry. Statute. We don't tell the nice Australians about the Harpies."
"Right," said Harry, nodding very deliberately. "Right. Sorry. Secret." He leaned in and whispered, with the volume of a man who believes he is whispering, "But she IS the best one."
"I know I am," said Ginny. "Drink your limeade."
The trouble with drink, for a wizard, is that it loosens more than the tongue.
It began with the candle on their table, which flared up suddenly to a foot tall when Harry laughed at it, and which Ginny patted back down to size with the unconcern of long practice. Then it was the empty glasses, which Harry kept glaring at, and which kept, when he glared, refilling themselves quietly to the brim, so that the two of them had drunk a good deal more than they'd ordered before either of them noticed the cause. Then Harry, reaching the punchline of a story about an Auror training exercise involving a Boggart and a senior instructor's worst fear turning out to be his own mother-in-law, leaned back to enjoy the effect of it and rose, gently, four inches off his stool, and hung there in the air, gesturing, entirely unaware, until Ginny reached over and pressed him back down onto the seat by his shoulder.
"You're floating," she informed him.
"I'm not."
"You floated. Harry, you've got to stop doing magic, there are Muggles, we're going to be in the Prophet, ANOTHER Potter Statute breach —"
"They didn't see."
"The Australians SAW —"
"They think it's the limeade."
It was at this point that the woman who had been bringing the drinks set down her tray, pulled out the empty chair at their table, sat down in it backwards with her arms folded along the back, and regarded the pair of them with the wide white grin of someone who had been waiting all evening for exactly this.
"You two," she said, in unaccented English, "are the worst-hidden witch and wizard I've seen in nine years of this job, and that's saying a lot." She put out a hand. "Lucía. I run the back room. Come on. You're frightening the tourists, and you're wasting good guaro on a Muggle bar." She stood, and jerked her head toward a beaded curtain at the rear that Harry was almost certain hadn't been there a moment ago, behind which now came, distinctly, the sound of music that no Muggle band had ever played and the bright clink of glasses and a roar of voices in three languages. "There's a party. There's always a party. And nobody back there cares how high your husband floats."
The two Australian backpackers watched the three of them get up, cross to a patch of bare plaster wall where no door was, and step through it one after another and vanish. There was a pause. One of the Australians set down his fork, considered his half-finished guaro sour for a long moment, and pushed it gently away from himself across the table.
The back room was bigger than the building that held it, which Harry registered with the dim approval of a man too far gone to be surprised by anything. It was packed — wizards and witches from half the world over, leaning at a long bar that ran with a dozen things that glowed, dancing on a floor that lit up under their feet, while overhead a charmed sky showed the same impossible stars as outside and a band played on a low stage with a drummer who had four arms and was using all of them. Lucía put fresh drinks into their hands, something amber that tasted of fire and fruit, and was gone into the crowd, and Harry turned to tell Ginny, who he felt very strongly ought to know, that the drummer had four arms — and found that Ginny had vanished.
He located her, after a frightening interval, at the far end of the bar, where a tall young wizard with a great deal of confidence and a drinking horn the size of a boot was apparently issuing some sort of challenge, and where Ginny Potter, three guaro sours and a glass of liquid fire to the good, was rolling up her sleeves.
"Ginny," said Harry, arriving, "what are we doing."
"He says," said Ginny, with the dangerous dignity of the very drunk, "that nobody can drink the Dragon's Draught and stay standing. He says it like it's a fact. He's looking at me like I can't do it." She picked up the horn. "I'm a Weasley, Harry. I've got six brothers. I learned to drink before I learned to fly."
"That's all true," Harry told the tall wizard, "and you've made a terrible mistake."
Ginny drank the Dragon's Draught.
She drank the whole horn, all of it, in one long pull, while the bar counted and stamped and the four-armed drummer beat time, and she set the empty horn down on the bar upside down and stood there, swaying very slightly, her eyes streaming and a thin curl of actual smoke rising from each nostril, and said, in a voice gone two octaves deeper, "Right. What's next." The tall confident wizard, who had matched her horn for horn, got halfway through saying something about how that was nothing, took one step, and folded up gracefully onto the lit floor, where he lay smiling at the charmed stars and did not get up. The bar went up like the Quidditch World Cup. Somebody bought Ginny another drink. Somebody tried to lift her onto their shoulders and she wouldn't let go of Harry, so they got lifted up together, the pair of them swaying above the crowd with their drinks held high, and Harry looked down at all those upturned cheering faces and felt, in the depths of his soul, that he had never been anywhere finer in his life.
That was about when it stopped being possible to keep track of the order of things.
There was a friend of the tall wizard who took the defeat personally, and said something to Ginny that Harry didn't catch but that made her go very still, and then very bright, and she drew her wand with the loose dangerous grace of a woman who has had precisely enough, and cast the Bat-Bogey Hex she had been famous for since she was fifteen — except that her aim, three sours and a horn of Dragon's Draught into the evening, was not what it had been. The hex sailed wide of the rude wizard entirely, struck the great papier-mâché piñata of a jaguar that hung over the bar, and brought the thing horribly to life: it burst, and out of it poured not sweets but a swarm of enormous glistening green bats with the unmistakable faces of bogeys, which rose up shrieking into the charmed sky and began dive-bombing the dance floor while the crowd roared and ducked.
"That," said Ginny, watching her handiwork flap overhead, deeply satisfied, "is not what I aimed at, but I'll take it."
Harry, by this stage, had had an idea, and the idea was George.
George had pressed a small box on him at the wedding, last thing, with a wink, and said for emergencies, and Harry had stuffed it in his jacket and forgotten it until this exact glorious moment, and he dug it out now, and read the label — WWW PORTABLE SUNSHINE, NOT FOR INDOOR USE — and, being a married man of the world and entirely beyond the reach of warning labels, set it off indoors. It was the finest thing that had ever happened. The box leapt out of his hand and burst against the charmed ceiling and out of it unrolled a whole sky's worth of fireworks, dragons of red and gold that chased each other round the rafters, Catherine wheels that spun and threw off sparks shaped like tiny galloping horses, a great green serpent of light that wound itself three times round the four-armed drummer and dissolved into a shower of stars, and the whole back room roared and surged and threw their drinks in the air, and Lucía appeared out of the chaos at Harry's elbow and shouted, into his ear, with tears of laughter on her face, that he was banned, that they were both banned, that they were the best customers she'd had in a year and they were absolutely banned, and bought them another round.
And then, in the middle of all of it — the bats and the fireworks and the dragons of light and the snoring wizard on the floor — the band slid, the way good bands do, into something slow.
Harry put down his drink. He didn't decide to. He found Ginny's hand in the crowd and pulled her in against him, both of them swaying and unsteady and barely upright, and she came, and put her arms up round his neck, and they turned in slow drunken circles in the middle of the bright impossible chaos while sparks rained down around them and a green bat got tangled briefly in Ginny's hair and she didn't even notice.
"I can't believe they let me marry you," said Harry, into her hair. "Somebody made a mistake. Somewhere there's a — a form, that didn't get filled in right."
"Shut up."
"You're the best one. Out of everyone. Out of the whole — out of all of them." He'd lost most of his words and was working with what was left. "I'd do it again tomorrow. The whole thing. The two hundred people. Sirius crying. Your mum crying. I'd do all of it again right now."
Ginny pulled back and looked at him, the firelight going over her face, a green bat circling her head like a deranged halo, and whatever she saw made her stop swaying for a second and just hold on to the front of his shirt with both fists.
"You're so drunk," she said, unsteadily.
"That's not — those are two different things, that's both true at once —"
"I know," said Ginny. "I know it is." And she pulled his head down and kissed him, in the middle of the dance floor, under the falling fire, and a cheer went up somewhere that neither of them paid the slightest attention to.
They left, eventually, because Lucía poured them out into the night with a firm hand and a great deal of laughter and the strong recommendation that they walk home, advice which Harry, a fully qualified or very nearly fully qualified Auror who had passed his Apparition test on the first attempt, dismissed at once.
"I can Apparate us," he told Ginny, on the sandy street under the coloured lights, with enormous confidence and only one eye fully open. "It's quicker. I do it all the time. Hold on."
"Harry," said Ginny, with the last surviving scrap of sense between the two of them, "you can't even see straight. The Department says never to Apparate when you've been — when you're —"
"Drunk?"
"When you're DRUNK, yes —"
"I'm barely," said Harry, and took hold of her, and the rule about not Apparating while intoxicated, which exists for excellent reasons and is written in large letters in every Apparition manual ever printed, demonstrated those reasons immediately and at first hand.
The world clamped down, squeezed, and let go, and they did not arrive in their room. They arrived, with a double crack and a great splash, up to their waists in the warm black sea, a good half-mile down the beach from the lodge, in the dark, with the moon laying its long silver road across the water and the waves slopping gently round their middles. For a moment neither of them spoke. The water was, at least, pleasantly warm.
"That," said Harry, with dignity, "is roughly where I was aiming."
"You aimed for the SEA?"
"I aimed for the LODGE. The lodge is just there. We're very close to the lodge." He looked at the lodge, which was a small dark shape a long way off down the beach. "We're in the right area."
Ginny started to laugh, the deep helpless way she'd laughed at the monkey, and tried to stand up properly, and discovered something. "Harry. Harry, where's my shoe."
"What?"
"My shoe. I had two. I've got one." She lifted a dripping bare foot out of the water, then the other, still in its sandal, and stared at them both with profound concentration. "I've left a shoe. Somewhere between the bar and the sea, in another — Harry, did I leave my shoe in the FABRIC OF SPACE —"
"You splinched a shoe," said Harry, awed.
"I SPLINCHED A SHOE —"
"That's — Ginny, that's brilliant, that's the least dangerous splinch in the history of —"
They waded out of the sea together, soaked to the chest, Ginny with one shoe, Harry with his glasses miraculously still stuck to his face, and they did not try to Apparate again. They walked. They walked the whole half-mile back along the beach in the moonlight, dripping and barefoot and useless, leaning on each other and stopping every few yards because one of them had said something that set the other one off, the warm sea hissing up the sand beside them and the great wheel of stars turning overhead, brighter out here away from the lights than anything Harry had ever seen, and somewhere out in the dark the night birds called and a single shooting star went down the sky toward the black line of the sea, and Ginny saw it and gripped his arm and said, "Make a wish," and Harry looked at her, soaked through and one-shoed and laughing in the starlight, and said he didn't have anything left to wish for, which made her hit him, and made her go quiet, both at once.
They reached the lodge. They climbed the steps on the fourth attempt. They fell through the netting onto the bed in their wet clothes and the world spun gently, kindly, around them, and the last thing Harry knew before sleep took him like a Stunner to the back of the head was Ginny's voice somewhere against his shoulder, fading, saying that they were absolutely not telling her mother about any of this, and his own voice agreeing, and then nothing at all.
Harry woke because the howler monkeys had decided to end the world.
They started somewhere before dawn, all of them at once, roaring out of the trees behind the lodge with a volume and a malice that he had not previously believed them capable of, and each roar went into his skull like a hot skewer and out the other side, and he lay very still under the netting with his eyes shut and his mouth tasting of the bottom of a pond and tried to work out whether he was dying, and concluded that he was, and rather hoped it would be quick.
"If you move," said Ginny, from beside him, without opening her eyes, in the cracked whisper of a woman speaking from beyond the grave, "I will divorce you. We've been married six days. Don't test me."
"My head."
"I know."
"Did I — Ginny, did I set off George's fireworks. Indoors."
"You set off George's fireworks indoors."
"And you —" It was coming back to him in terrible bright pieces. "You drank a horn of dragon something. There was smoke. Coming out of your —"
"Don't."
"And we got banned. From a bar. On a different continent."
"We got banned from a bar on a different continent," confirmed Ginny, "and I splinched a shoe, and you tried to Apparate us home and put us in the sea, and there's a green bat from a jaguar somewhere in my hair, I can feel it, it's still there. Stop talking. Every word you say has a smell."
They might have lain there until they actually died, had Marisol not come up the steps an hour later, taken one look at the pair of grey-faced wretches tangled in the netting in their salt-stiff clothes, and let out a bark of laughter that they both felt physically.
"So," she said. "You found the guaro."
"Please," whispered Harry. "Whatever you want. The lodge. Take the lodge. Just make it stop."
Marisol made it stop. What she made it stop with was a tall glass of something thick and yellow-green and faintly heaving, which she set on the table with great ceremony and which contained, she explained cheerfully, a raw egg, the juice of four limes, a great deal of salt, and a herb that grew only on the south face of the volcano and that the women of the town had sworn by since long before anyone could remember why. Harry drank his because he would, at that point, have drunk anything. It went down like a living thing. For one endless moment he was certain it was going to come straight back up and take his stomach with it — and then it hit, and his head, which had felt scrubbed and skinned and trodden on, went suddenly and miraculously clear, scoured clean, as though someone had taken a Scourgify to the inside of his skull, leaving behind only a faint pleasant emptiness and the strong conviction that he was never, as long as he lived, going to drink guaro again.
"Oh," he said, sitting up. "Oh, that's — Ginny, drink it, it's horrible, it's a miracle —"
Ginny drank hers, made a noise like a dying Hippogriff, and then sat up too, blinking, the colour coming back into her face.
"Right," she said, her voice her own again. "We're never speaking of last night."
"Agreed."
"To anyone. Especially not George. He'll put PORTABLE SUNSHINE: NOW HONEYMOON-TESTED on the box."
"He absolutely will."
"And not Mum."
"Definitely not your mum."
"Or Sirius."
"Sirius would be proud of us," said Harry. "That's worse."
Marisol, gathering the empty glasses, paused in the doorway and looked back at the two of them sitting up in the wrecked bed, restored to the living, already starting to laugh again despite themselves at the wreckage of the night, and the white grin spread slowly across her face.
"Pura vida," she said, and left them to it.
Once the sound of her had gone all the way down the steps, Ginny reached up into her hair and drew out the small and thoroughly deceased green bat she had been able to feel there since dawn, examined it without comment, and set it on the bedside table.
The owl found them on the last evening of all, which was a small miracle in itself.
It came in low over the bay at dusk, a brown barn owl half dead with the crossing, and dropped onto the veranda rail and sat there swaying with its eyes half shut while Harry relieved it of its burden and Ginny fetched it water and a piece of the fish, which it ate without enthusiasm and then put its head under its wing and refused to discuss the matter further. There were three letters. One was from Lilah, his sister, two lines long — Hope you're not dead. Fred says hello. Don't come back too tanned, it's unbecoming. There was a single short note in a large black scrawl that Harry knew before he'd unfolded it, that said only: Glad you're happy. You earned it. Don't fall in the volcano — and was signed with a paw print, because Sirius had never in his life been able to write down a thing he actually meant. And there was Molly's note, the one Ginny had packed and never dared to open, which she opened now, and read, and went quiet over, and passed to Harry without a word.
It was three pages. It was full of worry and capitals and instructions about the fudge and a long passage about not trusting foreign water and a reminder that the jumpers were for the evenings because the tropics turned cold at night, which they did not. And at the very bottom, after all of it, under the last of the worrying, in a smaller hand, as though she'd added it when she'd run out of things to fuss about and could no longer avoid the thing she'd actually sat down to say, Molly had written: We are so happy for you both. You take care of each other now. That's the whole of it, in the end. That's everything.
Harry folded the note up carefully and gave it back, and Ginny put it away somewhere safe, and neither of them said anything for a little while, which was all right, because Marisol came up the steps just then to tell them it was time.
She had saved the turtles for last.
She took them along the beach in the dark, the three of them, with no light but the moon, to a stretch of sand below the dunes where she told them to sit very still and wait, and they sat, and waited, and the warm sea came in and went out, in and out, and the great stars wheeled, and Harry had nearly decided that nothing was going to happen when Ginny's hand closed hard on his arm.
Out of the black water, where the moonlight lay across it, something was coming. A dark shape, then another, then more of them, heaving themselves up out of the sea and onto the sand — turtles, enormous, ancient, the size of cartwheels, dragging their great bulk up the beach with a slow terrible patience, leaving wide trails behind them in the wet sand. They came up past where Harry and Ginny sat, close enough to hear them breathing, close enough to see the salt water running off the old armoured shells, and each one chose her place high on the beach and began, with her back flippers, to dig. Marisol whispered that they were older than the lodge, older than the town, that they had been coming up onto this same beach for longer than there had been people to watch them, that the small ones who hatched here would swim out into the whole wide dark ocean and cross half the world and come back, every one of them, after thirty years, to this exact beach to do the same thing again. The family came back, she said. It always came back. That was the whole of what a turtle knew, and it was enough to be going on with.
Harry sat in the sand with his arm round his wife in the dark and watched the old turtles laying down the next lot of life above the tide line, and didn't say any of the enormous things that were going through him, because there weren't words that would carry the weight and Ginny wouldn't have thanked him for trying. He found her hand instead, the one with the ring on it, and held it, and felt her fingers close round his.
"We're going to be all right, aren't we," she said, very quietly, to the dark and the sea and the slow patient turtles. "All of it. The whole rest of it."
"Yeah," said Harry. "We are."
The moon laid its long road across the water, all the way to the edge of the world, and out past the breakers something rose and rolled and went down again, and behind them up the dark beach the turtles dug on, unhurried, certain, doing the oldest thing there was, and far away, very faint, almost gone, the last of the night birds was still calling across the water as the two of them got up at last and walked back along the sand toward the lights of the lodge, and home, and everything that came next.
Pura vida.