# Chapter 66
"I'm the uncatchable Joe! And why uncatchable? Because nobody wants to catch me anyway."
That, more or less, was the motto under which my peaceful days unfolded after the Yule Ball and the Christmas holidays. During those holidays, I had managed to entertain myself and endure a fair amount of stress — getting somewhat better acquainted with Luna's father and Ginny's parents, and then introducing the girls to Mrs. Greengrass, which was especially awkward and difficult from a moral standpoint.
The more so because I hadn't planned any of it. But after returning for the holidays to Sirius and spending a few days with him, I found myself placed before an accomplished fact in a way I still couldn't entirely explain — an exciting trip to a ski resort apparently awaited me. At the invitation of Agatha Greengrass, the parents of my friends had all been brought along, and I ended up in a situation that was delicate, strange, and yet — surprisingly calm.
The adults seemed to have already sorted most things out between themselves, dragging us and the girls along for a shared holiday purely to confirm certain conclusions they'd already reached. No particularly pointed questions came my way. Molly Weasley, naturally, wanted to grumble and rail at me about something, but her husband kept her impulses carefully in check, while the twins went so far as to tease me and their younger sister with every sign of wholehearted approval.
Only Ronicus took a good long while to grasp what was happening and why someone had paid for a not-at-all-bad winter holiday for his entire family. But that was all. The boy honestly couldn't have cared less about his younger sister's adventures, and Arthur Weasley and the twins watched him closely enough regardless.
Xenophilius Lovegood turned out to be a peculiar man — but on the whole, gentle and agreeable enough. He chatted easily with Lady Greengrass, shared some private laugh with Sirius about something, and seemed entirely untroubled by the company his daughter was keeping.
In that light, the person feeling the most acute discomfort at this nearly-familial holiday gathering was, perhaps, me. Though my friends weren't spared either — especially from Astoria, who shamelessly fed the adults a steady trickle of harmless but pointed information about our group, and from Sirius, who was thoroughly delighted with me, proud in a way that was frankly excessive, and therefore absolutely unbearable in his jokes and needling.
In short — I suffered. I endured. And I came to the awkward realization that I apparently stood to acquire two mothers-in-law and three fathers-in-law in the future.
Meanwhile, Agatha Greengrass seemed prepared to accept the situation without holding my technical breach of our agreement against me. And I say "technical" because, strictly speaking, I hadn't breached it at all. Under the terms of our arrangement, kisses with other girls — or boys, depending on which party had supposedly strayed — didn't constitute genuine infidelity, though they could serve as grounds for a mutual dissolution of the contract at one party's initiative, with modest penalties to follow.
Only no one was rushing to initiate any dissolution. On that subject, the mentor herself had let slip only that she had her own reasons for tolerating Ginny Weasley's presence in my company — and that Luna, and I quote, was a good girl who understood things clearly.
In short, something about the whole situation was still slipping past my notice. And my friends didn't know the full picture either, admitting only that they had coordinated everything between themselves long before the Yule Ball.
After which they had gone to confess to their parents.
Because yes — in the wizarding world, some things were very traditional and conservative in specific ways. In the sense that a respectable girl was simply expected to inform her parents about the beginning of a relationship with a boy, and ideally to obtain their blessing before anything began.
And no, this wasn't medieval in the way one might assume. Even three hundred years ago, at least in Britain, things among wizards had been nothing like the situation for ordinary people. A witch hadn't been treated as living property in the Middle Ages either.
Among wizards, in certain respects, there had long been quite a remarkable degree of equality. Which was hardly surprising, given that some witches were perfectly capable of burying a husband — and his entire bloodline — in concrete, metaphorically speaking. Sometimes literally. Precedents existed.
Which meant that if a young wizard or witch had no engagement arranged by their parents — which was essentially permission to build their own romantic life — no one would or could forbid them from doing so. But telling one's parents about the arrival of a significant other was important, proper, and simply what decent people did.
Not always immediately, perhaps — but letting things progress all the way to intimacy and only then introducing one's partner to the family was simply not done in polite society. It wasn't a purely puritanical attitude, and there were plenty who ignored the tradition entirely — but those were mostly concentrated in Gryffindor, and polite society didn't speak of them. Which was something of a joke, in truth. But the greatest number of that particular sort of free spirit was indeed found on the scarlet-and-gold side, even if they never accounted for more than a third even there, and tended to exist in their own separate circle.
But all of that was atmosphere and idle musing.
The essential fact was that I had somehow survived the winter holidays and had even — ahem — officially acquired a harem. Which was unexpected, strange, awkward, and wrong, and yet I was forced to admit that I had walked straight toward it myself. The older generation of wizards had simply read the situation at the right moment and sorted out the arrangement among themselves. What unsettled me now were certain remarks Agatha Greengrass had made, and a vague feeling that something was brewing around me.
Only I couldn't do anything about it, and I didn't even know where the potential threat was coming from — or whether any threat existed at all. My paranoia insisted it did, that there was an intrigue here and something wasn't clean, and that the adults simply didn't want to drag children into their quarrels — children who had quite enough foolishness to occupy them already. But in every other respect, nothing out of the ordinary was happening around me or my circle.
We returned to Hogwarts, studied quietly, pushed ourselves hard in training, kept releasing tension during our dance sessions, and gradually — one kiss here, one kiss there — added a little warmth to the grey weekday routine, to the occasional envy of Astoria and the Patil twins whenever they happened to walk in on us.
*Speaking of which — what exactly am I supposed to do about the twins? I mean — they're not actually planning to join my harem, are they?*
I winced internally, then immediately added that I probably ought to find out whether Daphna was planning to conscript every witch in my vicinity into our household.
Because Ginny had already told me that the serious conversation between them had been started by Daphna herself. While the youngest Weasley had done little more than blush and fidget, Luna and Daphna had conducted what sounded like genuinely formal negotiations, confirming conclusions that Heiress Greengrass had apparently already reached on her own. After which, according to Ginny, Daphna herself had been the one to push her younger friends into cementing their arrangement with kisses after the Yule Ball.
*And all that time I had no idea any of it was happening, as usual — leaving the women's business to the women, even if those women were rather young ones.*
I smiled to myself, feeling not quite that my approach had been wrong, but that I should probably keep a closer eye on Daphna's industrious nature going forward. I understood her principle of *if you can't stop it, lead it* — even approved of it. And her role as first wife — that particular phrasing had come up directly in the conversations of the older wizards I'd half-overheard — was something I was fully at peace with and had no objection to.
But for my mind, and my habitual moral framework, the whole situation and all its details remained a considerable blow. I'd grown too rigid in this regard. It was simply difficult to have lived an entire previous life with firm conviction, and practical evidence, that monogamy was the only conceivable form of relationship — and then to discover that your fiancée had been, behind your back, formally establishing your de facto partners in the arrangement. Simultaneously calling upon them and in some fashion requiring of them something that resembled personal vassalage, or some other concept I didn't quite have a word for.
My brain had honestly been spinning its wheels on this point for a while. But I wasn't prepared to be cowardly about it again — to wave it all away as the doing of fate and of friends far more accustomed to local society than I was.
Even if I still hadn't discussed certain things with Daphna. For now I was giving myself a little more time to think it through properly, to process it, to let myself simply accept the situation and come to inhabit it fully.
After all — objectively, I had no complaints about what had happened. Quite the opposite. Something almost like exhilaration was welling up in me.
Which I partly attributed to my thoroughly unruly hormones and the girls who were increasingly apt to make themselves comfortable near me. But yes — I needed time to collect my thoughts and take a small step back from certain facts of my new reality.
I had no shortage of ways to do that. My training schedule hadn't been canceled by anyone, and I had absolutely no intention of slowing down despite the thoroughly peaceful atmosphere of recent months. The second task of the Triwizard Tournament had somehow slipped past me almost entirely without notice. I'd simply been too busy with my own practice and the gradual, careful work of building something within my thoroughly feminine circle of company.
Yes — the fact that the girls, their parents, and that thoroughly overgrown delinquent Sirius had somehow managed to negotiate an arrangement between themselves continued to hurt something in my understanding of the world. And the age of my friends remained a genuinely difficult subject, one that made me feel honestly guilty before my own conscience even for something as simple as kissing peers of this body's age. But I was not going to let the situation drift on its own any further.
Which had led, on one side, to a series of serious conversations with the girls themselves — one of which was where Ginny had told me about the pointed diplomatic negotiations between Daphna and Luna. And on the other side — to the girls discovering the full extent of my tyranny and ruthlessness. Because my desire not to ease off on training and to spend more time with my near-official harem had, in fairly obvious fashion, resolved itself into additional training sessions for the trio of witches.
Which, in turn, had produced a small complication — because the ones who had fallen under my training regime weren't only Daphna, Luna, and Ginny, who hadn't had much choice in the matter — I could be extremely persistent and persuasive when I put my mind to it — but also a pair of Indian girls who hadn't retreated in time, accompanied by an Astoria who had apparently signed herself on to the whole enterprise with her mother's blessing.
I had nothing against Astoria. Not even her sharp, interested little looks bothered me, or made me feel self-conscious — not even during my kisses with her older sister and their mutual friends.
But the Patil twins were a different matter, and they required separate consideration. Partly because of my earlier thoughts about their possible entry into my harem — God, it still sounded absurd every time — and partly because of a genuine uncertainty about what my fiancée was planning.
Because Daphna was quite consciously not shooing those two away from my person. She was openly displaying something that looked very much like encouragement of their efforts in training — and approval of the evaluating looks I occasionally directed at two genuinely beautiful young women. No offense to the cast of films I'd known in my previous life, but in real life, wizards and witches tended to be considerably more attractive. Magic was remarkably kind to the body. And an entire library of cosmetic charms, potions, and even rituals did their part as well.
So — I needed to have a thorough conversation with Daphna and sort all of this out. As soon as possible. Or at least before this industrious little schemer found someone else to marry me off to without my knowledge. Because I now knew she was perfectly capable of it. And she'd bring her mother in on it too, with whatever goals and motivations that woman was quietly harboring.
And yes — I couldn't quite believe I was asking this myself — but where had this girl's jealousy gone? She certainly hadn't been so relaxed about everything before.
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