KBEL-TV

That was a new one on him, but he suspected it was true. Maybe. His gaze flickered for a moment then he raised his chin. 

“I am not! It’s called being…”

He searched for the word, frantically. 

“Diplomatic! Hah.”

It was true. Nezumi lied about most things, but not when it came to his insults of Ben. Those were all entirely truthful. Ben was a weak, submissive little boy, and Nezumi would stomp all over him because it was fun.

Diplomatic?

Nezumi stared at him hard, cold steel eyes. 

Then he released the largest raspberry likely to ever be issued within these official walls.

It was like the right ingredient to a powerful potion. 

…Or just the right words, finally. Something falling into place. Delphi could see it in his eyes, that he was already making up his mind. She herself had her own….dreams of their future before this urge grew under her skin and hatched in her mind. She had a naive belief that her father would have accepted her. She knew in fact it was a risk but the faith sustained her. 

Vic was thinking of the present and the outside enemies, and sometimes she wondered how her children would be and if they would be loved as parents. She couldn’t say, she hadn’t ever expected this. And she felt badly and stepped forward, taking her face in his hands. 

“I am,” she said, “but there’s a way to stop it. I believe there is. I need to get close to that registry…but there’s more, there’s one thing I’d have to do while I was in the Ministry.”

Her gaze searched his, a question in her eyes. 

He leaned into her touch, a slight comfort through it all.

“I’ll get you to the registry,” he promised, meeting her hand with his. 

But there was an underlying gravity to her words. She was building up to something, and there was a reason she wasn’t telling him exactly what it was they needed to do. She was working up to a revelation. Vic could feel it. He’d known her long enough. 

Breha’s smile widened. It had always been winning battle, but she was pleased to have him on board, even if he was making death threats.

“I won’t risk your wrath, Kuroh.”

She turned, laughing and walking ahead. She’d been very convincing to the ship’s pilot. A simple wave of the hand and a few choice words had him handing over the keys in no time.

They walked past him and she gave him another wave as they walked up the ramp.

“See? No problem. Take a seat. Strap in.”

Breha moved through the controls with ease and just a tad bit of flair.

“Definitely, strap in.”

Despite her response there remained a lingering feeling that she wasn’t taking him seriously. The man by the craft, the original pilot, Kuroh assumed, did nothing to stop them as they boarded...

In fact he didn’t say a single word. 

He was already strapped in and jerked forward by their take off when it him. 

“You hypnotized him!” 

But it was too late, they were already breaking through the atmosphere, the port far beneath them on the ground.

Delphi raised an eyebrow. 

She was amused, a little, because that was how it was. She had stayed long enough to establish a pattern. It was never a good thing before now, Rowle learning her, and her in turn learning Potter. Learning everything there was to know. 

She was good at it, and she knew something about Vic. 

What she was about to say wasn’t a lie. She had to remember that, artful as she was and as casual as she pretended to be–they were both world-weary. She had always had a hint of the truth mixed in, and it didn’t help that she had had ….

“Time. It was like I blinked and I was spinning a time-turner,” she said, “but no, it was real life. That never happened to me before Vic.”

 Time stood still for her forever, and she always kept in mind that things weren’t permanent around her. Just herself and the goal. Until Vic. She drummed her fingertips against her arm, knowing she had to tell the truth to make him see. Just the truth about this one part of her past. 

“I had nightmares about my father’s enemy as a kid,” she said, simply. “I always was told if they discovered who I was, I’d suffer. Maybe they wouldn’t hurt me. Maybe they would. Rowle sent me out one day on the anniversary of the…great battle of Hogwarts. I heard enough. The rumors of a child, and what they would like to do, I heard enough.”

She gestured towards the children’s bedroom. Their children, yes, but hers in that she had doomed them. She could believe …

Potter wouldn’t, no.

Someone else…

Then again, he had sympathized with her and still left her to rot in Azkaban. Was that not worse?

“They’re two now. Soon they will be eleven. Every magical child at age eleven gets a letter. No matter where they are.”

She let that sink in. 

In a city known for its crime, they’d somehow built a bubble of safety. They were unchallengeable together, and despite the literal shit hole that was Hub City, Vic didn’t doubt their safety. 

He’d been reckless to forget about the entire secret world Delphi had emerged from. She’d been running when they met, then they’d started running together. There was a darkness in Delphi’s history, they didn’t deny this to each other. 

Her world believed her to be some unfathomable danger.

“You’re saying the boys are in danger?”

He wouldn’t write it off. His heart clenched. There was a time in his past when he’d failed a child, and she lost her life because of it. In many ways she’d almost been his own. He’d killed to protect her, but in the end it was for nothing. An enormous loss.

Breha suppressed a grin. She knew Kuroh well enough to anticipate his answer at the term borrow, and sure she played it up, but she wasn’t planning anything unruly.

For the most part.

“I’m not a thief.”

She turned to him, feigning disbelief as she stared back.

“I talked to the captain. He said it was fine.”

She lifted a hand between them before he could question the definition of ‘fine.’

“Don’t you want to see the view from up there? I promised I’d take you.”

The question on his lips was cut short with the swing of her hand. His previously judging expression morphed into one of moderate irritation.

He paused.

They’d dreamed about it as children, to see the stars together. In the gap of their acquaintance, Kuroh had made it up to the skies to leave from his home planet, but somehow he’d been so hell-bent on his duties he’d forgotten to stop and admire the view.

She felt her teeth grind against her lip, an old nervous tick. 

Delphi was no child anymore–if she had ever been. His defiance should have angered her but living with someone, being with someone–having children with them–had changed her. But she knew deep down it was only different with them, this strange little family. 

Hidden away. 

Not forever. She had done the work, had made certain that her sons’ names were not on that legendary list. Her father had done it, to a far more skilled extent, but she had long ago crept into the Ministry to isolate her own bloodline, wiping off her family’s existence. It should have worked….

But did it?

She opened the door, staring at a very stubborn idiot, but he was never one to get on the bad side of….she understood that, as powerful as she was, and besides he held a power over her. Tonight was going to be a bad night since she could see he had guessed already. 

She leaned against the door frame, crossing her arms (a stance she had learned from him).

“You never make things easy.” She half smiled. “I’d put a galleon on you in a fight. If I had any left. So. Do you want to start or should I?”

Start the long fight forward with a word. Magic. 

The door opened, and the validation that she was still there washed over him along with relief. It was wild. Also, pointless to attempt to pinpoint the exact moment when his mental stability became so reliant on her presence, but it was also pointless to resist the simple fact...

He needed her near. He wanted to touch her, but he didn’t. Not yet. Instead, he mirrored her stance, that part came naturally. As she’d given him the opportunity, Vic began.

“You start, I’ll finish. Isn’t that how it goes?”

Whatever they were starting, whatever she was leading to, he would help her. Although, the word help did not always have the most straight forward meaning. They had complicated pasts, both of them, and he was certain there were things still that he didn’t know about her, just as he’d kept his own secrets.

But they worked, and he wasn’t going to let that slip away. 

Potter didn’t know this face. 

Of this, Delphi was positive. She studied her real reflection in the mirror, trying to place getting used to her appearance. Delphi had gone years wearing another face, one much more suited to the Black family. The ….Riddle side taking root and defeating years of magical bloodline in his hair would only have angered her father….

When she finally met him. 

She slipped down the scant nightgown covering her, and saw that her tattoo seemed to be burning blacker than usual. Modeled after the Dark Mark, it was meant to show if she was any closer to bringing him back. It’d burn, like a scar. That, and if Potter was close. That night in the graveyard had involved blood, after all, and she imagined she was related in a way to Harry Potter. The theory had proven right. 

Her back would burn if he was close. Naturally, she had sometimes imagined it burning. Happened a week ago, but she believed it to be a false alarm, or something far deeper. She was jerked out of her thoughts at the knock on the door, and her heart bloomed a sort of pain but it had never made her feel weak. 

But tonight she was afraid. 

“Go back to bed, Vic. Sleep,” she called through the door. 

It was a plea. 

He was too aware of the woman on the other side of the door. She wielded an energy that he could never quite ignore, and as she told him to go away, it cemented his growing fears.

Something was wrong.

The pit in his stomach dropped, and he pursed his lips, doing his best to ignore long-lasting insecurities. She was a taste of something he’d never had before. She was family, as were the two boys sleeping soundly in the other room. Of course, the idea of a family was too good to be true. 

He wanted to joke with her, to say something witty, and smart to calm them both. To remind them of the good times. To convince her to come back to bed.

His humor escaped him. 

“No,” he said instead. Shortly and stubbornly. Stupidly.