(Every character depicted in the story below is a consenting legal adult over the age of 18)
A/N: Morning after~
-x-X-x-
Ginevra Weasley wakes up slowly, a soft warm body pressed up against her side and the smell of breakfast filling her nostrils. She blinks open her eyes, struggling to remember everything that had happened the previous night to lead to this moment.
Once she’s done so, a slight smirk spreads across her face. She might not have been able to beat Hallows in any of their Seeker Duels, but she’d bagged him and his date for the evening, snagging them out from under an entire mansion full of hungry bitches who all wished they could have done the same.
Even Gwenog would probably have tried to get in Hallows’ pants before much longer, but Ginevra had beaten her rival to it… just like she beat the older Quidditch Player at so much else.
Of course, the body pressed against her doesn’t belong to Harry Hallows. Too soft by far. Instead, when Ginevra turns her head its to find the peaceful sleeping features of one Padma Patil. The slightly older witch had always been the bookish sort back at Hogwarts from what she recalled. Not the type to be very adventurous. And yet… well, they did say not to judge a book by its cover, didn’t they?
Padma had been fun last night. Both on the Quidditch Pitch and in Ginevra’s bed. She wouldn’t have pegged Padma for a lesbian without Hallows’ help, especially since they’d literally been on a date together, but… it wasn’t like Ginevra minded.
She’d always been a very physical type of woman. And while she preferred men, there were a lot of witches just like her who preferred men yet found comfort in other women following all of the deaths.
When the Chudley Cannons went abroad for International Matches, Ginevra made sure to have some fun with a foreign wizard here and there, but those chances were few and far inbetween and from what she’d heard, they might not last much longer either. Not if the ICW decided to quarantine Magical Britain like they kept talking about doing.
All that said, Ginevra had often had some fun with her fellow witches here at home. Both on her team and off of it… hell, she and Gwenog had even given it a try once or twice. Alas, they were both way too domineering for sex to be very fun for either of them… neither wanted to give up any ground to the other.
Harry… had been fun too. Easily led, Ginevra felt. All she’d had to do was get on her hands and knees and shake her ass at him and he’d understood the assignment. Which was good, because it had been months since her last real dick.
That said… the smell of breakfast was starting to get overwhelming. Ginevra carefully extracts herself from Padma’s grasp, replacing her body with a pillow for the naked Indian Witch to hold. Then, she rises to her feet and pads out of the bedroom and down the hall to the kitchen.
She doesn’t bother putting anything on, so as she arrives at her kitchen, she’s naked as the day she was born. Harry, meanwhile, is wearing a conjured robe as he slaves over the barely used stove, having clearly been making a mountain of breakfast food for quite some time.
He does a double take when he finally notices her presence and Ginevra smirks, arching her back and stretching her arms high over her head to show off all of her assets~
“… Good morning. Sleep well?”
Chuckling at his mellow greeting, Ginevra stalks forward.
“Just fine, thank you. Though it seems I lost one of my pillows in the night.”
Her teasing tone prompts a wry grin from Harry, who gestures with the spatula she’s never used before at the food.
“Figured you might enjoy a spot of breakfast. Padma looked like she had the cuddling part down pat last I saw.”
Ginevra snorts derisively.
“Yes, she’s certainly a bit grabby. And the food does look good, I suppose.”
It looks better than good, but Ginevra doesn’t want to praise Hallows too much. She still remembers the sting of her string of defeats to him the day before. Not to mention the way he’d acted in the stands when she’d been a hair’s breadth from taking his head off.
Obviously she never would have actually hit him… probably. Admittedly, she did get a little caught up in the moment, seeing her path to victory over Gwenog once again right in front of her. She honestly hadn’t realized there was a person on the other side of the Snitch until after her fingers had closed around it and she’d been staring directly into Harry Hallows’ bright green eyes.
Those same bright green eyes crinkle at the corners now as he smiles at her freely.
“Well, hopefully it tastes even better. Have a seat and I’ll get Padma up so we can all eat together.”
Ginevra grunts and goes to do as he suggests. However, as she moves to do so, she also does a casual check of her wards, making sure everything is fine. It’s routine, something she ‘checks’ mentally every morning really, just to keep an eye on things.
But there’s nothing routine this morning. Ginevra stops dead in her tracks at what she feels, her brow furrowing in consternation.
“Hold on.”
Harry, who had been heading for the hallway to get Padma, pauses and looks at her curiously. Ginevra doesn’t immediately elaborate with words. Instead she lifts her hand and casts a silent, wandless accio… that drags her wand from the bedroom all the way to her palm, letting it slap against her flesh.
Instantly, Ginevra flicks her wand at empty air, bringing more of her wards up so she can look them over more closely. What she finds as Hallows looks on, makes her nose wrinkle in disbelief. It doesn’t make any sense… and yet…
“Did you… do something to my wards, Hallows?”
Tilting his head to the side, Harry arches a brow.
“What makes you think that? Are they damaged in some way?”
No. They weren’t. In fact…
“No, not damaged… they’ve been iterated upon though. Enhanced. Improved. By someone who wasn’t me.”
Ginevra glares at Harry Hallows, who looks back at her rather mildly in turn. Finally, he shrugs.
“I might have added a little bit here and there. I woke up early this morning and warding is one of my special interests so I found myself checking the state of yours and finding it… lacking.”
That… Ginevra feels a bit of fury well up inside of her at that. Lacking?! Her wards were just fine!
“My wards were just fine!”
But Harry just tilts his head to the side.
“Are they not better now though? I suppose I can reverse the changes if you prefer…”
He sounds so casual about it. And the worst part is, he’s right. Ginevra might be feeling incensed, but the truth is still the truth. The wards are stronger now. And yet… they’re not her wards anymore. Who knows what he might have done to them? He could have put in a backdoor along with the improvements.
… But making a big deal about it was perhaps a bit silly of her. Nothing she’d heard about Harry Hallows, or seen so far, made it seem like he had any poor intentions. He really was an odd duck though, wasn’t he? The things he did, the way he acted… he was incredible, but also seemed quite socially inept.
“You should have asked first. But I can’t deny that you’ve… improved them. How long have you been working on wards, exactly?”
Smiling, the Wizard Lord shrugs.
“For a while now. Sometimes it feels like a lifetime.”
That was frustratingly vague, but Ginevra decided she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of reacting too strongly. Instead, she sits her naked ass down at the table and gestures with her empty hand.
“Go get Patil and let’s eat.”
Inclining his head, Harry leaves to do exactly that. Ginevra watches him go with narrowed eyes, tempted to start going over her wards with a fine tooth comb right then and there. But she’s smart enough to know he’ll only be a few minutes and just a glance tells her that what he’s done is not the kind of thing she can go over in just a few minutes.
Instead, Ginevra sits and waits and once Harry and Padma have arrived, they all settle in to eat the food the Wizard Lord has made for them. It’s a quiet morning with good food and admittedly good company… but Ginevra can’t help but be a little suspicious of Harry Hallows all the while. There’s something up with him… something she can’t quite put her finger on.
… Maybe she’ll keep an eye on him going forward, just to see what he does next.
-x-X-x-
Eventually, they all get dressed and go their separate ways. Harry and Padma leave Ginevra’s place together but split up almost immediately, with Padma planting a kiss on Harry’s cheek and thanking him for everything. Harry accepted her gratitude with good grace, while at the same time not telling her a thing about the promise he’d made to Lavender and what he might wind up doing with Padma’s twin. Padma… didn’t need to know that part, he figured.
Meanwhile, Harry himself is left more than a little adrift by the night’s later events. Even now, hours later, he still can’t quite wrap his mind around it. Bellatrix Lestrange had tried to kill him. Had she been the one to kill him the previous times as well? Was she behind all of the Wizard deaths over the past eight years?
Arriving back at his own not-so-humble abode, Harry is greeted at the door by Fleur.
“Did you have a good night, milord?”
Glancing at her, sensing her slight jealousy, Harry snorts.
“It was fine. Thanks for holding down the fort here with Dee while I was out, Fleur.”
“Of course, Lord Hallows. It is my duty, after all.”
Yes but she obviously hadn’t enjoyed letting him go off with other women while she was forced to stay behind. Not necessarily because Fleur was the possessive sort, but rather… Harry grins and pulls out his wand, pressing it against his forehead while at the same time conjuring up a vial in his other hand.
Fleur watches on in confusion as Harry pulls out the memory of the night’s sexual escapades and slides it into the vial before capping it and holding it out to her.
“Here, Fleur. For your viewing pleasure.”
Understanding dawns on the part veela, who goes wide eyed and bright red for a moment before hesitantly reaching out and taking it from him.
“Ah… thank you Lord Hallows. I will cherish this gift.”
Harry just snorts in amusement. His personal assistant was a horrible voyeur… but he loved that about her all the same. Meanwhile…
“Do you happen to know where Dee is right now, Fleur?”
Looking up from her studying of the vial, Fleur shakes her head slowly.
“No… would you not know better, Lord Hallows? She is your familiar, after all.”
Heh, fair point. Harry waves Fleur off and heads deeper into the mansion. Technically he didn’t know where Death was at all times. He didn’t need to know. After all, he could just snap his fingers and…
“Yes Master?”
Death appears at his side in an instant, still wearing the voluptuous pale form of one Morticia Addams. Harry was starting to suspect she wouldn’t be switching her appearance in this world; she seemed very attached to Morticia’s body. Not that Harry was complaining, it was a body that was quite easy to get attached to.
That said, he focuses on the matters at hand for the moment.
“Death. You told me I didn’t have to worry about Voldemort coming back in this world because someone else was already in the process taking care of him.”
Smiling, Death tilts her head to the side, watching Harry with dark eyes.
“… Except Bellatrix Lestrange tried to kill me last night. So what exactly am I supposed to believe here? Is this universe’s Bellatrix some insane misandrist who decided all men must die? Did she take care of Voldemort and then decide to ‘take care’ of the rest of the wizards as well?”
Except no… that doesn’t make sense. Bellatrix was still in Azkaban when the deaths started. She and Sirius died at the same time, according to official reports. Harry was fairly confident that the Bellatrix he faced last night was the real Bellatrix, so obviously reports of her death were exaggerated, but for her to get out early… well, someone would have had to pull a Barty Crouch Jr. on her. And Bellatrix didn’t have anyone who loved her enough to do that.
More than that though, the methods of death didn’t make sense. Harry could believe that Bellatrix might have been behind his first death, the one that relied upon a dark ritual connected to an image of him. However, the death in the Wizengamot… that was something he would not expect a pureblood like Bellatrix Lestrange to ever think of.
Maybe… Maybe Bellatrix wasn’t working alone? Maybe she had an ally… someone who had pulled her out of Azkaban and set her to work. Someone opposed to Voldemort, who had usurped Bellatrix’s loyalty in some way. The real culprit behind all of this.
Harry had wondered briefly if Ginevra might have been involved in some way. Bellatrix being able to apparate right out of the house through her wards had been strange, but when Harry had looked, he’d been able to find the loophole that Bellatrix would have used. It was actually a pretty common mistake, and judging by the way Ginevra had acted the next morning, he didn’t honestly think she was involved.
And yet… and yet…
“Do you really want me to answer those questions, Master?”
Death’s amused voice pulls Harry out of his musings, leading him to glance over at her as she smiles knowingly at him.
“I’m surprised you let her get away. That’s not like you.”
No, it wasn’t. Harry was… unacceptably rusty. That was the only conclusion he could come to. He hadn’t had to do much fighting of the kind he and Bellatrix had engaged in… in far too many years. His shameful performance, the fact that Bellatrix had gotten away from him… Harry was going to need to find a way to sharpen his skills in preparation for their next encounter.
At the same time, Death’s question still lingers in the air. Obviously when he’d first asked those questions of her, he was mostly ranting. He hadn’t expected her to answer him… nor had he wanted her to answer him. It ran the risk of ruining the mystery, after all.
Now though, he finds himself briefly considering the idea of getting some information out of Death. A moment of weakness, if you will…
-x-X-x-
A/N: Remember to Vote, leave a Like, and let me know what you think!
-x-X-x-
Google Doc Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g4kFFa8R5g_kuPH8Rt8YBo-My0Nuj-RV6OFJNkdBnF8/edit?tab=t.0