Harry Potter is a fighter.
Born to a war and struck down from the cradle, his spirit is a fist and "saviour" is his label. He's fought the war and won and now he's hunting down the stragglers, like an avenging angel righting wrongs he plunges into the darkest corners of a human made hell to bring the devil back in chains.
And all the while, Fleur Potter sat at home alone.
Harry Potter didn't have a loving family. He was taught to live his life on a transactional basis, "I spend every minute I'm awake working to please you, and you give me the leftovers once dinner is finished." Once he got to Hogwarts things changed, he got friends and they did things differently. They gave without expecting anything in return, and they never demanded anything of him. But then Voldemort came back and while Harry had learned how to recieve and give, he never learned how to live.
"Business is like a battle", Vernon would say as he narrated his masterstroke of getting an up and coming progressive coworker fired before he could threaten Vernon's position with new ideas and technologies. Business was a transaction, and business was a battle. Harry had been fighting since he could remember, in one way or another. First for, "little things," before Hogwarts, then for survival, and now he fought to make sure no one would ever have to fight again. But he was running out of people to chase.
The Dark Wizards got better at hiding, and Harry had to spend more and more time hunting them. He passed up on promotions out of the field and on dinner at home in equal measure.
Peace is a foreign concept to the orphans of war. He was a fighter, the savior, a messiah for fools. He knew how to give, to give and give and give until there was nothing left of him at all. And the world knew how to take. It knew how to take and take and take until you had nothing left, and how to ask for still more.
When Harry ran out of himself, he started giving his wife. His marriage was sacrificed on the altar of the greater good, and day by day the woman he'd married became a silent, cold stranger.
A beauty austere.
He'd spent the last three days and nights in the auror office. It was all hands on deck, the biggest case of the past ten years. There was pressure from the public, from the minister, from the wizengamot, everyone was clamoring for this case to be solved. Augustus Rookwood, the last Death Eater, had finally made a mistake. They caught him, the people celebrated, and Harry breathed a sigh of mind numbing relief as he stumbled onto the Knight Bus, too exhausted to apparate home. He arrived on the threshold to find the door hanging open. The wind was cold, and the night breathed its chill through the cold halls of his home.
He found his wife in the parlour, dressed in a sheer gown with a goblet of bloody red in a lofty hand. She was pale, uncaring of the cold that had turned her skin to ice. Uncaring, or accepting from long familiarity.
He stared at her, mouth open in shock and something that felt like grief, and as the universe whirled to bring here eyes in line with his, he found that knew not what to say.
"Who am I, Harry?"
Names and memories from years ago, all failed.
"Who are you?"
A lifetime lived for others, not a second for himself.
"Who are we?"
"Husband and wife," he croaked, voice returned at last.
She frowned, mulling over the words as the crystal goblet swirled, slowly sipping from the bitter cup.
"If that's true, then why don't I know who you are?"
A lifetime lived for others, all except the one that mattered most. The look in her eyes not grief, not despair, but a detached clarity brought on by the wine that stripped away her power of self deception. The look of one seeing the mirror and contemplating a stranger, a monument to his sins.
"Because I've left you to live our life together alone," he whispered, remorse untainted carrying forth the words.
Her eyes focused suddenly, and she blinked in the realization of truth.
"You have, haven't you," she murmured, "you've left me all alone."
Her brows knit together and shoulders shuddered, tears gathering as her breathing faltered and heaved in time with the rhythm of the spasms of a dying thing.
"I- You-"
The bitter cup slipped, to the very tips of her fingers as they slackened, the bloody red about to spill when Harry took her pale hand in his. He set the cup aside, all too heavy and unforgotten as he knelt before her with tears of anguish streaming down his cheeks as he comforted the sobbing stranger, both grieving for the loss of someone that it now felt like they had never known.
She clutched at him tightly, right hand wrapped in both of his and the left seizing upon them both with a desperate strength, the ring upon her finger digging painfully into his skin. They stayed like that until the cold had numbed him to the bone and her hand no longer felt like ice in his. Their tears had long since dried before she spoke, voice hollow.
"This is it, I suppose."
The whisper was a javelin, struck down from Olympus to punish him for his crimes and all too willing to drag her into his demise. It rang with an inescapable truth, and he felt in his bones that acceptance was the only way. But Harry Potter was a fighter, and he didn't have the faintest idea how to give up.
He smiled up at her, bittersweet and tainted with memories, but filled with an unearned hope as well. He turned the stranger's hand in his, clasping it in a sign of greeting.
"It is. Hi, my name is Harry," he said, voice on the verge of shattering, "and I'd like to get to know you."
She stared at him in confusion, his heart pounding so hard he was sure she could hear it as he waited for her response. Then her eyes grew wide, she let out a quavering, strangled laugh, as she shook it.
"Hello Harry, my name is Fleur P-Potter, and I'd like to get to know you as well."
She smiled, hope unfamiliar shining forth, and it was beautiful even through the tears. He had lost her, and the bond they once had was gone forever, but new bonds can always be made.
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On April 13th, 2009, one day after the capture of Augustus Rookwood, last of the Death Eaters, Head Auror Harry James Potter resigned. His wife, Fleur Potter, met him in the lobby of the ministry of magic and they were seen an hour later in Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour, holding hands and telling stories as the befuddled proprietor looked on at the pair of them acting like teenagers out on their first date, but glad all the same to see them looking happier than they had in years.