Amortentia (OC / Draco / Fred Weasley Love Triangle) (A HP Francise Fan Fic)

Chapter Twenty-Three: Pile of Presents

The car ride home was silent. Gwen and Freya were sitting in the backseat with their owl, Tillie, who hooted occasionally at the birds outside the window. Gwen watched the night sky fall over London as they drove closer to the suburbs. The way the sunset hit the tall buildings and reflected brightly into her eyes made the world seem perfectly normal.

Except now the world wasn't perfectly normal. Her mother, Pearl, anxiously peered at her daughters in the backseat looking for the right words to say, and never found any. Her father, Henry, was lucky he had the road to focus on instead of trying to make conversation.

Gwen's family hadn't mourned the death of a loved one since the fall of Voldemort almost fourteen years ago, and now it seemed that the cycle would start all over again.

Pearl had been lucky at the start of the war, in that her family was essentially pureblood. She had been able to avoid being a target of the Death Eaters due to this, though she did show her resistance in smaller ways. She had just started her healer training and decided she would use what she was learning to sneak into muggle hospitals and reverse hexes and curses that were placed onto muggles to torture them, or in some cases just for the amusement of dark wizards. Pearl had told her family it was to learn both Muggle and Wizard cures, but it was really to protect as many people as she could.

Pearl had never anticipated that while she was working at these hospitals that she would meet a muggle man and fall in love. At first she did everything to reject Henry's advances, she even tried to obliviate herself from his memory, but to no avail. He came in the next day and was swept off his feet once again by her. A few months after purposefully ignoring him she finally agreed to go on a date with him, and a year later the two were married. Word quickly got around that the two had been wed and they spent the first years of their relationship moving frequently to avoid being captured. The first six years of their marriage they would travel to areas with high muggle populations to look for any suspicious behavior, but that changed when their family expanded. The pair had to move permanently into hiding when their son, Duncan, was born. They spent the next five years in the countryside of Ireland under a multitude of protection spells, and added Freya and Gwen to their family.

Hearing about Cedric made Pearl and Henry feel like they were back in the same place as when they were in their 20's. Pearl had watched Voldemort's rise to power her whole life and she truly thought it was over. Henry hadn't known anything about wizards let alone the war happening right under his nose, but the years he spent involved with it shaped him more than any other event in his life. As the couple looked back on their daughters in the backseat they remembered the dread and fear they felt everyday, and wanted to absolve it from them so desperately, they were their babies, and now they would have to grow up faster than they ever wanted them to.

When they reached their house Duncan went out to greet them. He looked the shabbiest Gwen had ever seen him. His stubble was patchy and had gone unshaved for days, and his shirt was creased like it had been worn for multiple days in a row. The bags under his eyes were deep purple, but when he saw his sisters his face lit up.

"I'm so glad to see you." Duncan said as he embraced both of his sisters tightly. Normally Freya would have objected to such a long and tight hug from her siblings, but everything was different now. After what felt like five minutes they released their grip on one another. "Do you need help with the bags, Dad?"

"I've got 'em, Dunc. You and the girls should go inside and eat." Henry smiled, and continued to unload all the bags from the car.

Gwen walked inside her house and took a deep breath in. She smelt the nothingness that only your own home can have. The pictures of her family lined the front entrance as she slipped off her shoes. Duncan led the two girls into the kitchen where a few boxes of pizza were stacked.