Chapter Text
Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived a wonderfully ordinary life. He grew up blessed with two living, breathing parents and a godfather who possessed the marvellous ability to transform into a large dog—a great beast that doubled quite nicely as a mighty steed whenever the young boy wished to act out his favourite passages from his fairy-tale books and play the prince.
Life was good, and life was easy. Life was full of laughter and joy.
There weren’t many Dark Lords around during his childhood—the number could be rounded down to zero, in fact—but the boy had always dreamed of becoming an Auror. He dreamed of donning the iconic scarlet cape that would billow in the wind as he swooped in to save innocent lives like the heroes from the bedtime stories.
And so, he became one. After two years of hard work at the Auror Academy, Harry Potter finally earned his badge. People cheered and cameras flashed, and his mum cried a little as he received his diploma and bowed to the crowd in his beautiful red uniform.
Unfortunately, the job itself was not quite what the pamphlets at the Hogwarts Career Day had promised. At only twenty-two years of age, the young Auror was already starting to lose his enthusiasm.
Due to the distinct lack of powerful dark wizards, the work was dull and dreary. His days were spent chasing after small-time scoundrels, dark magic hobbyists, and false alarms. Even the cloak rather sucked. He was always accidentally sitting on it, and whenever he tried to adjust his position, the fabric would catch and attempt to strangle him.
Had it succeeded, it would have been the most lethal case the office had seen in months. Yet it would not have been the most peculiar one, for one fateful day, Head Auror Robards had something far stranger to present.
“There’s a new case for you, Potter,” he said as he handed it to his subordinate.
Auror Harry Potter adjusted his round glasses, yanked his stupid cloak out from under his arse, and took the pile of parchment to read through the brief.
“A princess? What princess?” he asked sceptically after reading the first paragraph, which described a massive hedge of thorns surrounding an old castle that apparently held a young, beautiful princess hostage.
“The Princess of Wiltshire.”
“There is no Princess of Wiltshire,” Harry argued, glancing around for the colleagues he assumed were waiting to burst out laughing at him. Surely it was a prank. Office life was so terribly boring that they often had to invent their own amusement.
But nobody laughed. Nobody was giggling behind the cubicle dividers.
“Wiltshire is not a kingdom,” Harry rationalised out loud, determined to let the room know he had not fallen for it. “It is not even a country!”
No reaction from anybody. Except for Robards, who gritted his teeth.
“Of course there is a Princess of Wiltshire,” he replied, looking at Harry as though it were he who was wasting precious taxpayer Galleons on ridiculous notions.
Then again, Harry didn’t know much about royal families. Was there a wizarding royalty in Britain that he had somehow missed? History of Magic had never been his favourite subject, and the school curriculum didn’t exactly place much value on passing down useful information about contemporary culture or politics.
Or anything one could use in real life, really.
“But it says here that it’s a curse,” Harry pointed out, pursing his lips. “I’m not a Curse-Breaker.”
“Your job is to rescue the princess, Potter, not to break the curse. You know we don’t have the funding to send the Curse-Breakers to deal with every little thing.”
If it’s a little thing, can’t the MLEPs do it? was Harry’s next thought, but the Head Auror’s face was already beginning to redden the way it usually did moments before he exploded, so Harry kept his mouth shut for once. He gave a swift nod and hurried back to his desk, clutching the most ridiculous brief he had ever encountered during his two years at the office.
*
Aurors rarely worked alone, but Harry had not been assigned a new partner after his last one had chosen to abruptly retire after a mere four and a half months of service. Reckless and difficult to work with, the reports had allegedly stated, and they were not referring to the retiree.
Harry did not agree. His methods were perfectly fine, so long as everything went as it was supposed to go. The results were always fine, even when things went a bit sideways. He might have detested his boring job a little, but his success rate sat comfortably over ninety-eight per cent—nearly twenty per cent higher than the next best pair of Aurors. He was far too valuable an asset to lose, so when Harry had pleaded to return to the field alone to escape the dreadful paperwork, the Head Auror had begrudgingly agreed.
But now, as Harry stood in front of a two-hundred-foot wall of thorns, he rather wished he had someone with him—if only to tell him that attempting to climb it would be fucking stupid.
It was a beautiful, sunny day, yet a single dark storm cloud gathered directly above the high tower that reached up from the hidden castle behind the thick, intertwined branches. It made the whole structure look even more out of place than an enormous, thorn-covered fortress in the middle of Wiltshire’s sheep pastures would under normal conditions.
Ancient castles were not exactly unheard of in England, considering the nation's lengthy history had seen more kings than Harry could ever hope to name, but there was something profoundly off about this one. Something more than merely the curse that kept growing unnaturally thick and large thorns along the stone walls.
Harry took a closer look and prodded one of the brown spikes, which looked more like a deadly dragon’s tooth than part of a harmless plant. He pricked his finger upon it, and his investigation soon revealed that attempting to climb the thing would not only be fucking stupid, but also likely impossible.
A broom would have been useful, Harry quickly deduced. Perhaps, if he possessed one, he could simply fly in through the tower window. He could see the tower’s pointy roof from here, and the thorn bushes did not seem to reach quite high enough to cover the very peak.
Unfortunately, he did not carry one around.
Harry sighed. There seemed to be a heavy protective ward around the castle that kept him from Disapparating anywhere within its vicinity, so he jogged for a few minutes to get out of its reach and then headed home to Godric's Hollow.
*
“Mum?! Where’s my broom?” Harry shouted from his room upstairs after thirty minutes of searching had borne no fruit.
He hadn’t touched it since his Quidditch days at Hogwarts. He had sworn back then that he would never give up his hobbies, but the intense years at the Auror Academy had left him little time for sports outside the mandatory fitness classes. Besides, Apparation was a much more practical method of transport, especially since for him it had never seemed quite as difficult as people made it out to be. It was quick, effortless, and didn’t require carrying a massive wooden stick around.
“Your broom?” his mother Lily asked, sticking her red head into the room. “What do you need it for? Aren't you supposed to be at work?”
“I am at work, Mum,” Harry sighed, running a hand through his already messy hair. “I need to save the princess.”
“A princess?”
“The Princess. Of Wiltshire.”
“Why on earth would there be a princess in Wiltshire?”
“I don’t know!” Harry replied, gesturing wildly. Talking about it out loud made the whole thing seem rather insane. “There’s a castle. And a curse. I don’t know, Mum, I’m just trying to do my stupid job.”
“Your job is not stupid, dear. I’m very proud of you,” Lily said as she stepped into the room, letting her hand brush Harry’s shoulder as she walked by. “I didn’t know there was royalty in Wiltshire.”
Harry suddenly felt much better. Partially from the warmth of his mum’s touch, and partially because, at least, he wasn’t the only uncultured idiot in the family.
“I saw the castle. It was huge. But there’s an anti-Apparation ward around it, so I need my broom.”
Lily furrowed her brows. “The castle is magical?”
Harry shrugged and watched quietly as his mum walked to the other side of the room, pulled open one of the closets, and magically procured a broom from it, even though Harry had already looked in there twice.
“Yeah. I didn’t know there was wizarding royalty,” Harry confessed as Lily handed him the broom.
“There is no wizarding royalty in Britain, silly. The last ones were beheaded in the 1700s. I told you you should have paid more attention in school.“
“But it says here I’m supposed to save the princess!” Harry said, fishing the classified parchment roll out of his pocket. “Who the fuck is it then?”
“Language, Harry!” Lily snapped automatically, giving him a stern, warning look. “Don’t say fuck to your mother. Someone might think I didn’t raise you right.”
“Sorry,” Harry replied meekly, fiddling with the worn handle of his broom that was badly in need of some love and polish.
He never raised his voice at his mum. It was just that this strange case had set him on edge. He had become oddly obsessed with it in a matter of hours.
“Do you know anything about wizards in Wiltshire?” he asked. “The only living beings I saw there were sheep.”
Lily pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Your father spent some time in Wiltshire when he was young. There was a rich and influential family back there in those days. They held lavish balls in their manor.”
“Where was the manor?”
“I don’t know,” Lily replied with a small, joyless smile. “I wasn’t… exactly the sort that got invited.”
Harry made a face. “What happened to them?”
“They vanished when the war ended. When the Dark Lord Voldemort was vanquished once and for all. When you were just a tiny little babe,” her tone devolved into baby-talk as she fondly squeezed Harry’s cheek.
Harry had heard the tales of the Order of the Phoenix and how his parents had bravely risked their lives fighting in the war when they were barely out of school. It was one of the reasons Harry had desired to become an Auror—aside from the cloak and the honour, what he truly wanted was to be just like his parents.
“Are you sure it was a manor and not… a castle?” he asked, rubbing his cheek to remove the mark his mum’s fingers had surely just left.
“Wizards only live in castles and towers in those fairy tales you read, dear.”
“I haven’t read them in at least ten years. God, Mum, I’m twenty-two years old,” Harry protested. “Where’s Dad?”
“You will always be my little boy,” Lily said with a dreamy smile. “James had to go to Romania. He won’t be back until tomorrow.”
Harry sighed. Of course, his dad would not be here. Because if James were here instead of fighting dragons in Romania, he would have been able to tell Harry if that stupid fucking pure-blood supremacist manor happened to stand in the exact same spot where the castle currently stood, and there would be one less mystery to solve.
“Right,” Harry said, heading for the door. “I’m off, then.”
“Do you have time to stay for lunch? You need to eat—”
“I can take care of myself, Mum!” Harry shouted as he hopped down the stairs, his broom tucked under his arm.
*
When Harry returned to the wall of thorns, the storm cloud was still hovering threateningly over the building. It was like an enormous parasol, blocking the sunshine only in the immediate vicinity of the mysterious castle.
Harry mounted the broom and looked up. Despite the cloud, it seemed like decent flying weather. The winds were weak and scarce, and at least the looming darkness kept the sun from shining right into his eyes as he kicked off the ground and let the exhilaration of flight take over.
Everything was fine for the first few seconds. He rose in a steady forty-five-degree ascent, banking along the edge of the thorny hedge, until something strange happened. His broom stopped mid-air, as though an invisible hand had suddenly grabbed the handle and locked it in place. Harry yelped and clenched his arse as his hands slid against the wood, but with some infamous Potter luck, he managed to stay on.
But the broom didn’t only stop. Before Harry could even catch his breath, it suddenly shot off as though it had been yeeted by a catapult, and Harry went flying with it. He hurtled through the air without even a hint of control, clutching onto his broom in the desperate hope that the situation would miraculously fix itself before he hit the ground. When the miracle didn’t seem to manifest the way it so often did, Harry tried to Disapparate, but the wards around the castle were simply too comprehensive and strong. There was nothing he could do.
In the end, his journey concluded with him crashing headfirst into a large bush.
Leaves rustled, and twigs snapped, and a flock of birds took flight to escape the sudden attack.
Fortunately, it was summer, and the bush was blooming with large purple flowers that, along with the silky leaves, cushioned Harry’s fall and prevented his untimely demise.
“Fuck,” he breathed, trying to push himself up from the shrubbery. His cape kept getting caught on the broken branches beneath him and pulling him back, but eventually, he managed to roll out and tumble onto the damp grass.
After picking off a majority of the leaves and twigs sticking to his hair, he grabbed his scratched broom and limped back to his starting point by the castle.
Now, some Aurors would have probably returned to headquarters at this point to request assistance, or perhaps ask for more information about the case. But Harry wasn’t just any Auror—he was an Auror with a ninety-eight per cent success rate. He knew how to do his job on his own, and this stupid joke of a case wasn’t going to be the first to send him back with his tail between his legs, begging for help against some fucking inanimate plant and the curse that seemed adamant about protecting it.
Harry took out his wand, which in hindsight was probably something he should have started with, and tried to cast a blasting curse on the thorns blocking what must have been the main gate. But the ward wasn’t merely there to keep people from Apparating in or out—it seemed to suppress all magic.
“Figures,” he muttered under his breath and tucked the wand back into the small pocket inside his sleeve.
Then he gathered his bearings and jogged off once more.
*
“Mum, do we have a sword?” Harry shouted as he slammed open the door into his childhood home.
“A sword? Why on earth would we have a sword?” his mum yelled from the kitchen.
“I don’t know, you and dad fought in a war.”
“It was the eighties, Harry,” Lily replied dryly, crossing her arms as she appeared in the doorframe. “If we’d had a period-accurate weapon, it would have been a shoulder pad, not a broadsword. What happened to your face?”
“Nothing,” Harry said, wiping his face clean of whatever evidence remained of his failure. “Can I borrow a knife, then?”
He pushed past his mum into the warmly coloured kitchen, where a pot was bubbling away merrily on the stove. The utensils clattered together as he pulled open an overflowing drawer, where the family stored all the dull, useless knives that someone was totally going to sharpen one day.
“If you stay for lunch. It’s split pea and ham,” Lily said, pointing at the pot.
“I’m on the clock,” Harry protested, even though the aroma of his favourite soup attempted to seduce his nostrils. “Someone could be in serious danger.”
He took the largest kitchen knife he could find and set it on the table. Then he pulled out his wand, and after a few Transfiguration attempts, a long, shiny sword lay in its place.
Lily looked at the sword and cocked her thin, reddish brow.
“The only one who's going to be in serious danger is you,” she said, though her voice was more amused than worried. “Are you sure you know how to use it?”
Harry picked up the sword. “It can’t be that hard,” he said as he headed out.
*
Wielding a sword was not child's play, as it turned out. Harry kept swinging the long steel blade at the chaotic tangle of branches, but the stubborn thorns did not seem to mind the assault. The weapon was heavy and unbalanced, and his technique was far from ideal. Or perhaps it simply was not the correct tool for the job.
Harry had grown up in the magical community, yet he had once seen one of his neighbours cutting the hedges around her yard with a roaring Muggle device—a saw with chains spinning so fast it decimated everything it touched. It had seemed incredibly effective, but it also required electricity. The sheep of Wiltshire probably had no need for power outlets, which would have rendered the machine useless even if Mrs McKinnon had agreed to loan her power tools to Harry.
Using an ordinary saw to fell all the branches manually did not seem plausible either, so Harry kept whacking the thorns with the sword until blisters began to form on his palms and his uniform was dripping with sweat.
“Goddammit,” he swore to himself, chucking the sword onto the grass and tearing his damp shirt off.
The storm cloud still swirled above, looking cold and threatening, yet refusing to let a single drop of refreshing rain fall. Harry checked his watch, which informed him it was not even noon. He still had four hours of his shift left, even if he possessed the energy for absolutely none of it.
He deeply regretted turning down his mum’s perfect split pea soup.
Would the princess mind waiting until tomorrow? It could not have been a real emergency if Harry were the only soul sent on the rescue mission. The whole thing still felt like the world’s shittiest prank. Surely there were cameras hidden somewhere, sending real-time footage of his embarrassing fumbles straight to headquarters.
Pursing his lips, he looked down at the top part of his uniform that now lay upon the grass. It gave him an idea.
The Auror capes were not merely epic decorations, even if the masses were made to believe so. They were enchanted with almost every protective charm known to wizardkind: electrical insulation, curse dampening, impact absorption, thermal resistance, and even slash protection. It was the whole reason the uniform had a cape—putting all that magic into a single garment made it uncomfortable and itchy, so the enchantments were woven into the cape that didn't make skin contact.
The razor-sharp thorns would likely be unable to penetrate the magically enhanced fabric.
Harry pushed himself up with renewed vigour and grabbed the sword and the cloak. He started skirting the wall, looking for the place where the overgrown hedge was at its lowest. When he found it, he used his uniform’s drawstrings to tie the sword to his back, and then he spread the thick cloak over the brambles to shield himself from the thorns.
He took a breath of courage and began to climb.
It was rather easy once he got the rhythm going. He’d run through the obstacle course almost every day during Auror training, and this wasn’t much different. He took hold of the thickest branches through the cloak’s corners, letting the rest of it hang under his body as he rose slowly towards the gloomy clouds.
He huffed and puffed and cursed, but eventually, he pulled himself onto the stone wall that surrounded the castle courtyard. There was no sign of movement, but the courtyard was littered with dead white birds that looked like peacocks in monochrome.
It wasn’t a very good sign. But since Harry was already here, there was no point turning around. Besides, he wasn’t even sure if he could go back down the way he came from without tearing his intestines out on the thorns. He wasn’t sure how exactly he was ever going to get the princess out, but it seemed like a problem for the future Harry, if he ever even got that far.
Scaling the inner wall was much easier. There were no deadly plants, and the stones were so uneven that they provided very nice footholds. In no time, his feet touched the grass.
The ground really was littered with white birds. Harry wrinkled his nose and nudged one of them with the toe of his boot. The bird toppled over, and it was only then that Harry noticed they weren’t dead—they were simply sleeping.
There was a large canopy on one edge of the courtyard, and under it stood a stone throne in the shape of a serpent. It was surrounded by long tables and benches, all completely deserted. Harry crept closer, carefully skirting the birds' long white tails, and when he reached the tables, he noticed dark shapes beneath them.
He bent down to look, and on one of the hunched forms, he caught sight of a human face.
His heart jumped. All the shapes were humans. Dead humans?
Harry crouched down to take a closer look. The face looked ragged but peaceful. It was a dark-haired woman, and she seemed to be sleeping like the birds. Harry pushed the bench away to make space for his rescue operation and dragged her out in the hopes of waking her up, but nothing seemed to work.
It must have been the curse. Robards was very clear—Harry wasn’t here to break the curse. For some reason, rescuing the princess was a higher priority.
Was this woman a princess? Harry studied and assessed her face and messy hair, wondering how one would identify a royal. She didn’t look royal, but then again, Harry had seen some British monarchs who clearly did not benefit from centuries of selective inbreeding, so beauty was perhaps not a factor in real life.
But she was wearing the same black robes as the other slumps under the tables, and that was probably a sign of her less important status.
She didn’t seem to be in any more danger than anyone else, including Harry himself, so Harry let her continue her dreams in peace and decided to keep searching. After all, the princess was supposed to be in the castle anyway, not sleeping outdoors like a drunken hobo.
The main building’s entrance was shielded by a wide portico supported by large, engraved pillars. Harry tried to pull the wooden double doors open, but they didn’t even budge. He tried kicking them, but his foot throbbed painfully long before the heavy timber showed any sign of giving way.
Noticing a narrow gap between the doors, he pressed his face against the weather-worn wood to peek inside. On the other side lay a dark, silent entrance hall, with no obvious alternative way in. After spotting the small, badly rusted latch that kept the doors barred, he decided to rely on brute force. He jammed the sword into the gap and began to wrench the doors open.
It worked, but as with everything else in life, success came at a cost. The latch gave way when the steel blade was wedged behind it, but it wasn’t the only thing to give in—the transfigured blade snapped in half, and the tip of the sword clattered to the ground.
Harry sighed and tossed the useless half away before slipping inside.
The entrance hall was a large and lifeless space. The stale air and the looming darkness made it rather dreadful, and the way Harry’s steps echoed in the silence did not help. He crept towards the grand staircase that led up to the first floor, but paused at the foot of the steps and took out the crumpled parchment to go over the details once more.
The princess was supposed to be locked away in the tallest tower, bound by the power of the curse. It was oddly specific, and it wasn’t the first time Harry wondered where exactly Robards had gotten all this information, but he also knew the Aurors had access to the most peculiar magical widgets and contacts among the various creatures. It wasn’t the first time the information was almost creepily detailed, so there was no reason not to trust it.
Loose sand crunched beneath his feet as he made his way higher, into a long corridor illuminated only by narrow shafts of light piercing through thin arrow slits carved into the stone. Along the wall stood several black doors that reeked of tar, and Harry tried the first handle in reach.
The door creaked open, and Harry peered inside. He quickly scanned the room and froze.
It was a bedchamber—exactly the kind one would expect to see in a castle like this—but what one often did not expect was a young platinum-blonde man, around Harry’s age, lying upon the floor. He wore what appeared to be a broom-patterned onesie with… thick nappies stuffed beneath the fabric. He was snoring softly, blissfully sucking his thumb, utterly unaware of the world around him.
Harry wrinkled his nose at the sight and slowly shut the door. He decided he didn’t want to know what horrors the other doors hid behind them, so he focused on finding a way to the tower.
There was a steep spiral staircase at the far end of the corridor, and he began to climb. The stairs went on and on, and after he tripped on the uneven stone for the third time, Harry really hoped he could access magic soon. After what felt like an eternity, the stairs finally led to a small landing, with only a single door ahead.
Harry pushed it open and found himself standing in a round, lavishly decorated tower room draped in luxurious, white silk curtains. Magical lanterns danced in the air, bathing the space in warm light. The center of the room was dominated by a grand bed where, nestled amidst dozens of powder pink pillows, lay the princess, still as a marble statue.
Except, it was no princess. Or at least, not the kind of princess Harry had assumed he had been sent to rescue.