Put Your Curse In Reverse [Part 2]

Chapter 1 - Dragons

"You're joking!" he exclaimed, torn between relief and outrage. He gently pulled the tiny, yellow eel eye from her fingers. "I've been looking for that for nearly an hour!"

His relief won out. He took her into his arms and pulled her to his chest. If she minded the eel goo or sweat, it didn't show; she wrapped her arms around his torso and hugged him back even tighter. He pressed a kiss to her hair, his affection nearly choking.

"You smell horrendous," she whispered, her breath cooling his damp neck. "You're going to need two showers."

"Fine, sure. Mine and yours." He gently moved her forward so he could examine her face. "How did you find this so quickly?"

"About thirty minutes ago I went to Diagon Alley and bought one of every variety. Harry, you do remember that we're wealthy, right? I know Isometimes forget, but I have a legitimate reason for that. You didn't have to use the eel eyes Neville pawned off on us."

"Honestly, Gin, had I known it would be such an issue, I would've bought my own. But then it became personal."

"Of course. Harry Potter versus the eel eyes. Unlikely romance wrought with tension and fury. Bit of garden fi—"

He cut her off with a finger to her lips. "Wait."

She looked behind her. "What? Is there a kid lurking behind me? Whoever it is—for the last time—no! I will not put that evil device back into the house! It was a horrid mistake and I've had words with Dudley!"

Harry followed the beetle with his eyes. He glanced distractedly to his left, quickly grabbing his nearly-empty glass. He gulped the rest down, his eyes never leaving the insect, and then lurched forward with a battle cry. He stabbed the rim of glass down into the earth, trapping the beetle.

"That's why!" he said.

Ginny immediately dropped down onto her stomach in the dirt. She furrowed her brow and pressed her nose to the glass, staring intently at the insect.

"Is it...? Oh, please let this be the awful hag..." she squinted harder. She sighed. "No. It doesn't have the glasses markings. You've just traumatized an innocent beetle."

Harry shot a glowering look at the tiny holes lining the leaves of his spring cabbages.

"No beetles are innocent."

"Shall I kill it?" Ginny asked. She inflated her eyes like Lily did whenever she was appealing to Harry. "But what if it has a family somewhere?"

He snorted, amused. He reached over and wormed his hand beneath the hem of her T-shirt, his palm warming against her lower back.

"I don't care what you do with it—as long as it's away from my innocent plants."

The damp earth had almost certainly soaked through her shirt and bra by now (that was a nice thought...) but she remained in place, most likely content to allow his hand to continue caressing her back. She was still squinting at the beetle.

"If it'd been Rita," she began, her voice dark, "I would've stomped her. No. I would've sprayed her with that awful bug spray that smells like cat pee."

Harry was inclined to agree with his wife's murderous thoughts. Rita Skeeter had run three stories about their family in the past two weeks. About things she had no logical way of knowing, unless she was creeping around their home and garden. They'd been hyper-alert for days, their eyes trained in on any small, scuttling movements, hands quick to swipe crawling bugs off of plants, the ground, anywhere. Their most memorable (and paranoid) catch had been at the Burrow last Saturday. They'd both spotted the beetle along the grass, they'd both dove headlong towards the ground for it, knocked heads hard enough to give Harry a lump the size of a bird egg and actually break skin on Ginny's, grappled and wrestled for the beetle for a good minute, and then they carried it around in a jar for the rest of the night, suspiciously staring at its every movement. Hermione had repeatedly done the revealing spell, and had assured them that it was definitely not Skeeter, but they'd remained unconvinced. And that's how they came to have a pet beetle living on the windowsill in their bedroom, where they could keep eyes on it at all times. Lily named "her" Wanda.