I Hope You Dance
Challenge Eleven: Amortentia and Chocolate
Title: I Hope You Dance
Author: minisinoo
Main wizard: Cedric Diggory
Other Characters: Gwynn Diggory, Hermione Granger-Diggory
Rating/Warnings: G/PG
Genre: romance/whimsy
Word count: 984
Summary: Gwynn Diggory gives his parents a special Valentine's present in the year of their 50th Wedding anniversary. (This is set in the Finding Himself universe, but should be comprehensible without having read the novel.)





The British Department of International Magical Co-operation's ambassador to Canada had not walked without aid in 52 years. He hadn't walked at all, in fact, in 36, all due to a rare and debilitating curse cast on him during the final task of the last Triwizard Tournament. The megalomaniacal Lord Voldemort had disrupted events in order to kidnap a 14-year-old Harry Potter, accidentally taking along 17-year-old Cedric Diggory for the ride. Diggory came back permanently crippled, doomed to see his independent mobility vanish completely before his 35th birthday. Perhaps being confined to a wheelchair so young had driven him to stand -- at least figuratively -- head and shoulders above his colleagues in the diplomatic corps. But whatever the case, he was made an ambassador at the tender age (for a wizard) of 45, a post he continued to hold for the next 25 years.

And given this constant childhood exposure to his father's deteriorating physical condition, it was perhaps predictable that the ambassador's eldest son might be drawn to a career in Healing, even go on to become a Potions Master and Head of St. Mungo's Apothecary Research Division. With parents like his, intelligence and industriousness were a birthright. Finding a cure for his father's condition wasn't so predictable, however. Medical research -- even magical medical research -- was expensive, and sometimes as much about luck as trial and error.

Thus it was luck and a lark that made Gwynn Diggory try a bit of Amortentia in his father's original Restituo potion. It really shouldn't have worked. The world's strongest love potion and a nerve regenerator? On the surface, the one had nothing to do with the other. But with Muggle grandparents on his mother's side, Gwynn had never limited himself to only Wizarding medicine. As a boy, he'd sat at the knee of his father's Ojibway friends, learning their traditions, and as a young man he'd gone to Muggle university to read in biochemistry. He'd also pursued advanced Potions back in England. And in all this study and searching, he'd finally discovered the world's preeminent healing power.

Love.

Of course, that was hardly a revelation. It was so commonplace, in fact, it was trite.

Love and a sense of purpose could hold the dying to life long past a point that healers or doctors thought survival possible. And the loss of love could result in the untimely death of an otherwise healthy survivor -- not always from self-neglect or suicide. Bereaved spouses were more likely to catch infectious diseases; Gwynn had read the Muggle literature that proved it. And certainly, everyone magical knew the story of how Harry Potter had defeated Voldemort not by a hex or curse, but by love. What not everyone knew was how Gwynn's own father had once saved his mother's life with love. And what Gwynn himself knew was how much the love of his own life had made him who he was. Without Julie, he wouldn't have got through Healer's academy, and not because she'd cooked his dinner and kept house for him. Julie had been his classmate. They'd fallen in love over cadavers, gruelling rounds, pots of coffee, and a shared copy of Magellian's Potions. Like his mother's parents, Gwynn's wife was also his partner in practice.

So love as an antidote to life's ills was far from a poet's conceit to Gwynn Diggory. Yet like his mother, he had a scientist's mind and wanted to know the why behind it. What chemical reaction in the human body did love produce that made it so powerful, and could that be replicated in potions to help the ill?

Could he even find, at last, the magical formula that would let him heal his father?

It turned out to be a much easier question to frame than to answer. Love was complicated, and there was more than one type, even when it came to romantic passion. Gwynn didn't love Julie the way he had when they'd been young and on fire, yet if he lost her, he had no doubt he'd prefer to die. And he'd seen how his parents were virtually grafted together after fifty years. They could communicate by just a nod or a pursing of lips. For them, two had most certainly become one flesh, and not only in the act that had created him. In fact, Gwynn doubted his parents had engaged in coitus for longer than he'd been married, even if any specific mental image of them doing that gave him a bad case of the 'eew's despite being a professional healer. He just knew, medically, what his father's condition prevented.

Yet it wasn't the physical that mattered in love, even if the emotional did impact the body.

Gwynn spent the next several years trying to work backwards from the biochemical reactions love caused. He used elevated heart rate, breathing, even the neurological chemicals released and the electrical brain patterns found -- the latter of which had required him to borrow a Muggle MRI machine. When all that failed, he tried going forward, dissecting various love potions and adding this or that ingredient to previous medical potion formulae.

All to no avail.

One afternoon in his lab, frustrated by yet another series of failures, he decided to try the simple solution. Fetching a vial of fully brewed Amortentia, he mixed it with Restituo in differing amounts in differing beakers. Restituo was a chocolate-black color, while Amortentia glistened mother-of-pearl white. When put together in most beakers, it produced a murky gray soup or a thickened black liquid. But in one, the potion turned a brilliant sky blue and smelled like spring rain.

Gwynn didn't run to his father with it immediately. He was a scientist, after all, and tested it properly first. Yet after a month, he was satisfied that at least it wouldn't kill Ambassador Diggory. Whether or not it would heal him remained to be seen.


...the rest of the story

Because I am an idiot and can't seem to read the directions clearly (g), I accidentally took the maximum wordcount as the minimum, and the story was thus too long for the challenge. It really wouldn't work to shorten it, so I've moved the last two scenes to my own LJ, where you can find the conclusion. Once again, my apologies for the confusion.