ripped at every edge (but you're a masterpiece) (Hp x Mcu) by Lissy

Chapter 15: this is brave, this is bruised

She doesn't give him a break, keeps chucking tennis ball after tennis ball. Tony dodges as many as he can, jumping this way and tumbling that way.

"I used to do this with the new recruits," Hari tells him after a tennis ball makes contact with his right ass cheek. "There's no way to block the Killing Curse, you know. If that spell hits you, you drop dead. No second chances. Just a flash of green light and it's all over."

"You survived," Tony gasps out, rolls away as two more tennis balls come flying at him. And hadn't that been a surprise. He remembers reading The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts and coming across her name. Tact kept him quiet, because being the sole survivor of an attack that killed your parents isn't something you bring up over tea, but if she's going to talk about it, he's more than willing to listen.

"Not by anything I personally did," she says quietly. "If it weren't for my mum trading her life for mine, I wouldn't be here right now."

Tony sucks in deep breaths, studies her face. "I'm sorry," he says. Because he knows what it's like to be alive due to someone else's sacrifice (thinking about Yinsen still hurts) and Tony can conclude with a thousand percent certainty that it fucking sucks. "We don't have to talk about his if you don't want to."

Hari sighs, puts the tennis balls down. "It was a long time ago," she says. "And I shouldn't be this upset about it still, but I am. Halloween became a celebration in the Wizarding world, you know. Thousands of people celebrating the first fall of Voldemort. There were fireworks, feasts, parties. When I re-entered the Wizarding world, I was expected to celebrate my triumphant victory. But you know what? My parents' bodies weren't even cold before I was dropped on my relatives' doorstep. While everyone was nursing hangovers because Voldemort's reign of terror was finally over, my parents were being put in the ground, our house was being turned into a monument, and I was left with those people."

Tony listens raptly. She's glaring at nothing by the time she's done talking, angry tears at the corners of her eyes. He stands up, walks to her, and wraps his arms around her. It's not the best hug; they're both disgustingly sweaty, and their skin makes an unpleasant squelch when they make contact, but she needs this right now.

"It's okay to not be okay," he tells her quietly. That's still something he's trying to accept himself, because he is the poster boy for denial, but it feels right to say this to her. "And it doesn't matter if it happened weeks ago or decades ago. They were your parents. You can mourn them."

She sniffles. "My parents will have been dead for thirty-two years in just a few days," she says sadly. "It didn't bother me when I was a kid, but that's because my aunt told me they'd died in a car crash, and she never told me when. And now that I'm older, now that I have kids, I just... they won't see my children grow up."

Tony rubs soothing circles on her back. "I don't know your aunt, but do you think she told you they'd died in a car crash because she felt you were too young?"

Hari scoffs, shakes her head. "No, she would never do something so kind. Not for me." She says it with such conviction that Tony's heart starts to ache. "My aunt spent years being jealous because my mum had magic, and when she found out she'd never have it, that jealousy turned to hatred, which transferred to me." Her lips thin. "They used to tell me I was so lucky they'd taken me in out of the goodness of their hearts, despite how much of a burden I was. Despite how much of a freak I was. My uncle's sister liked to compare us to bulldogs. If there's something wrong with the bitch, then there's something wrong with the pup."

The anger that settles in his stomach is wild, vicious, and he grits his teeth. The thought of a younger Hari, small and innocent, being degraded in such a manner seems like one of the biggest injustices he's ever heard of, and he almost wants to find out where these people live just so he can go curse them out in person, put the fear of a God he doesn't even believe in into these sorry wastes of space.