Chapter Text
The year was 2221.
Harry James Potter, looking scandalously like someone who’d only just graduated Hogwarts, sat at the kitchen table of a vine-draped cottage on the edge of the Forbidden Forest, scribbling edits into a manuscript titled Hags: Misunderstood, Misquoted, and Mostly Not Carnivorous.
“Luna, darling,” he called, “did you mean to write ‘hag seduction rituals’ or ‘hag reduction rituals’? Because I think we might be on two very different publishing tracks here.”
There was a rustling from the sunroom, followed by an enormous squawk and the sound of something either combusting or very enthusiastically mating. “Seduction,” Luna called cheerfully. “Though the difference is mostly how much rosemary you use.”
Harry stared down at the page for a long moment before sighing and making a note in the margin: DO NOT let Rose read this one.
They had stopped aging around the year 2020. After the day of their wedding most likely.
The realization had come gradually, like noticing a favorite sweater no longer needed washing because it simply never got dirty—it was off without being alarming, until it was.
Harry had still been Head Auror then. He was thirty-nine, neck-deep in paperwork, and chasing a rogue werewolf across a Muggle amusement park dressed like an enchanted hedge when he noticed something peculiar in a mirror. Not a wrinkle. Not a shadow of grey. And the same bloody scar still refusing to fade. He’d been too busy trying not to accidentally terrify the local children to dwell on it then.
But Luna had noticed too. She always noticed first.
They had been married for nearly a decade at that point. Not in the traditional wizarding way—oh no. Luna had insisted on something older, deeper, “before wands and Ministry forms ruined everything.” The Soulbind Ceremony of the Third Veil, as she’d found it in a book bound in moonbeast hide and sealed in starlight. It had required blood, breath, and memory. They'd performed it in the shadow of Stonehenge, with stars above and no one else around but a niffler with strong opinions.
It was beautiful. It was terrifying. It worked.
They were bound. Not just legally, but magically. Cosmically.
And when you're tied to the Master of Death, things happen.
“I think,” Luna said one morning, sipping tea made of something she refused to name, “that we may have become unkillable.”
Harry blinked blearily from behind the Daily Prophet. “Pardon?”
“Well, not truly unkillable. But more… unstuck. Like ghost light or a stubborn bit of toast. We’re not dying, Harry.”
They didn’t, either. Not for lack of trying. They dueled dark wizards, climbed mountains, went on creature rescues in subterranean troll nests. Luna got bit by something the size of a cottage once. Harry got hit by a curse so old it spoke in tongues. And they just… healed.
Slower than a phoenix. Quicker than they should.
The magical community called it “anomalous magic retention.”
Luna called it “very handy.”
Harry called it “a bloody nuisance,” mostly when his friends started to wrinkle and he didn’t.
They started wearing glamour rings when they turned 50 and still got carded at pubs.
They had several, enchanted by George before he passed the shop to his granddaughter. “To keep you fashionable and properly ancient,” he’d said, slipping Harry a ring that added dignified laugh lines and the slight slump of a man who no longer cared about posture.
They wore the glamours everywhere. At Hogwarts. At Ministry events. At birthdays where their own former foster children handed them cakes and didn’t question why their parents hadn’t aged a day since they were six.
Well. Most didn’t question.
One, Mira, the dragon handler, had figured it out. She’d cornered Harry at age nineteen and bluntly said, “You’re immortal, aren’t you?”
Harry had blinked and said, “Please don’t tell your siblings. They’ll try to test it.”
She’d nodded. And never told.
She sent a Christmas card every year, addressed to My Favorite Undead Father Figure.
After Harry left the Ministry—publicly, explosively, and with a final speech that included the phrase “bureaucracy is the real dark lord”—he and Luna had retreated from public life.
For about six months.
Then Luna announced they were fostering.
Twenty years. They took in seventeen children, one magical creature (legally a child, don’t ask), and a temporarily cursed portrait who now lived in their guest room and gave unsolicited life advice.
The house was never quiet. There were screaming teapots, banshee sleepovers, and once a sentient broomstick that tried to elope with the neighbor’s fire poker. But there was love. Endless, infinite, anchoring love.
When their youngest moved out, the silence rang.
And Harry—restless, nostalgic, aching for purpose—returned to Hogwarts. First as Defense professor. Then, reluctantly, as Headmaster.
Luna, never one to be left behind, followed him there, teaching Magical Creature Conservation in a series of wildly popular guest lectures that involved live wrackspurts and at least one minor evacuation.
They had lived. Lived, in the truest sense. Loudly, tenderly, with aching joy and the quiet sorrow that came from watching too many people they loved grow old while they stayed the same.
Now, in 2221, their world had grown still again.
And the silence… was stretching.