The Cuckening (Ch. 1) (Patreon)

AN - Inspired by Werewolf Warrior’s A Big Happy Weasley Family

The Cuckening

Chapter 1

Arthur Weasley checked his watch. ‘The dang International Portkey Agent is running late,’ he thought as it was five past three in the afternoon. ‘Oh well,’ he told himself. There was nothing to be done about it but just patiently wait. While waiting, he looked around at his family with pride. His loving wife, Molly, was by his side as always. On his other side was his daughter, Ginny, who had blossomed into a woman over the last few years.

Across from him was his son, Percy. Thankfully, Percy had gotten over his issues and was a real member of the family again. He was doing very well in the Ministry, and Arthur wouldn’t be surprised if he became Minister of Magic sometime in the distant future. To Percy’s right was his eldest, Bill, whose face had been savaged by Greyback the werewolf. His handsome face had been slashed and torn, though thankfully, Greyback hadn’t been transformed at the time. But still, the wounds were tainted and cursed, and his face was deeply scarred and forever would be. On Bill’s other side was his faithful wife, Fleur Delacour … now Fleur Weasley. She turned her head and looked at her husband with nothing but love. Arthur thought the world of Fleur and knew she would remain a wonderful wife to his son. Beside Fleur were Hermione and Ron who were on a fast track to marriage … at least according to Molly. They had very different personalities, so Arthur wasn’t so sure. One thing was obvious, however. They both loved each other, and that was all that mattered. To Percy’s left was George. Seeing George always sent a terrible pang through his heart. The loss of Fred had been a terrible blow to the family, but none more so than his twin. It had taken a long time for George to get back to his old self, but even so, he still wasn’t the same. He had matured quickly, throwing himself into his work. Weasleys’ Wizarding Wheezes was incredibly successful thanks to George’s determination. Arthur thought George was working so hard to be successful as a way to keep a part of Fred alive.

On Molly’s other side were Fleur’s mother and father who very much enjoyed spending time with the Weasley clan. They were both quite eager to go and see the dragons in Romania. Their youngest daughter, Gabrielle, unfortunately, couldn’t come on the trip as she was attending Beauxbatons at the time.

There were two other members missing. Charlie was in Romania, waiting for them to arrive. The family was going to spend a couple of weeks there to visit Charlie and, of course, take in the sights. It was the first real break that the family had since the Battle of Hogwarts. They had either been grieving or trying to fix the mess the country was in after Voldemort’s takeover of the government. Both had been long and difficult processes, but Arthur was glad to say that his family was once again happy and that magical Britain was flourishing.

The other missing member of their group was, of course, Harry Potter. Arthur found it very amusing to watch his daughter, Ginny, stick to him like glue. Since the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry’s fame had skyrocketed in the wider magical world. Being the only known person to survive the Killing Curse, destroy Voldemort as a baby, survive the Killing Curse again, and then defeat Voldemort again as an adult was something to write about. After everything was said and done, the offers had come pouring in. Harry had taken some big-time sponsorships after being offered some serious gold. He was now the official brand ambassador for Nimbus’ latest model of racing broom, Goldklinks dueling gear, XingPo brand dragonhide clothing and accessories, Honeydukes Incorporated (who had just opened up dozens of shops in France and Germany), Spindleman’s Wizard Chess, and probably several dozen more. Arthur knew that he was very big in the Chinese market. Harry would never admit how much he was being paid for all of that, but he did admit that he would never have to work again if he didn’t want to. Considering the fact that he had a lot of gold before the sponsorships, Arthur was inclined to believe him. At first, the Goblins had raised a fuss because of his breaking into Gringotts, but they quickly backed down when Harry threatened to reveal the fact that they had been guarding one of Voldemort’s Horcruxes in their vaults. Such a thing could get them banned from banking in the majority of the magical world. Since then, Harry and the Goblins had entered into some kind of truce. Arthur guessed that concessions were made on the Goblins’ part and that Harry had forked over a decent sum of gold to cover the repairs and loss of one of their dragons. Arthur was very thankful that Harry had made sure that Ron and Hermione were protected from retribution in his truce. The story of him successfully breaking into Gringotts and escaping on the back of a dragon was, of course, headline news, however, Harry did give an interview telling everyone that the break-in was necessary for the destruction of Voldemort, and it couldn’t have been done without the help of Gringotts Goblins who were loyal to him. It was likely one of Harry's concessions to help the Goblins save face in public opinion. Even so, the wild story only added to Harry’s fame.

With that amount of fame came women … lots of women. Young, old, it didn’t matter. There were so many women constantly hovering around him waiting for a shot of getting Harry into bed, and Arthur found this hilarious. Ginny, not so much. As much as Ginny worried about “those trollops” as she called them, Arthur wasn’t worried. Harry was as loyal as they come, and it was easy to see that he loved Ginny very much.

Arthur checked his watch again and sighed. The agent was surely taking his sweet time. As he checked his watch, he barely paid any attention to the homeless-looking bloke walking in his direction.

The Cuckening

“All of that seems fine. I’ll be back from my vacation in a couple of weeks. We can meet up again after that,” Harry told the solicitor of the Quidditch gear company that wanted him to promote their products.

“That would be perfect. It’ll take at least a few weeks to get everything in order,” the solicitor said, tapping the stack of papers against his desk to even them out. A few minutes later, Harry left the meeting and returned to the Portkey office. He didn’t have to wait long for his Portkey home. After arriving at the drop-off point, Harry apparated to the small flat in Hogsmeade that he had been renting for the past year. Harry stretched and dropped down on the sofa.

He didn’t like doing all of these sponsorships, but he had to admit, the money was great. He figured he might as well cash in on his fame while it lasted. Once the hype had died down, he would look for a real job. Harry looked at the clock on the wall. The Weasleys should be leaving right around then. He wished he could be with them instead of having to sit through multiple boring meetings, but that was life. He had another meeting in a few hours with one of his existing sponsors. Apparently, they were coming out with a new product, and they wanted him to promote it. If the product was good and the money was good, then Harry was willing. He would be glad when the day was over. The following morning, he would take a Portkey to Romania and join the rest of the Weasleys. While he still had a few hours of free time, Harry decided to be productive.

Going into the back room, Harry closed the door behind him and looked at his gym equipment. He had gotten into working out over the last year, and he was glad he did. Ginny even more so. Harry unbuttoned his shirt and placed it aside. Stepping in front of a wall-mounted mirror, Harry flexed his muscles. Where there had once been a short, skinny boy with spectacles, there now stood a hulking man of six and a half feet with biceps as hard as rocks. His shoulders and chest were broad, and his thighs were like muscled tree trunks. His muscled pecs were huge, and Harry found it amusing to make them bounce up and down in front of his girlfriend. Often she would watch, mesmerized by his dancing pecs. His eight-pack abs were Ginny’s favorite feature, but she also liked smacking his ass, calling it hard as steel. Thankfully, he had gotten rid of his glasses when new magical contacts came on the market.

He went over to a corner of the room and pressed his palm against a certain portion of the wall. He waited five seconds until that small piece of wall disappeared, revealing a hidden storage space. Inside of that storage space were dozens of small vials filled with an amber-colored liquid. Harry plucked one from the collection and waved his wand. The wall went back to looking normal. Shaking the vial, he then held it up to the light to check for impurities. It was perfect, just as all the other ones had been.

Most guys he knew had asked him how he had gotten so fit in just a year’s time. Harry always answered the same … hard work and determination. That was part of the true answer, but not the whole truth. The small vial of liquid in his hand was the key to his rapid transformation. It was a secret mixture of Erumpent musk, Yeti testosterone, and some other ingredients that he couldn’t remember. He received it when he did a Meet and Greet with the Magical Society of Bodybuilders in Germany. From what little he knew, the MSB was the premiere bodybuilder club that every up-and-coming bodybuilder wanted to join. Sadly for them, the MSB was very exclusive about their membership. Apparently, the potion was a highly guarded secret in their club. As a token of their appreciation for his contributions to the magical world, they had voted to give Harry a full treatment of the magical supplement. However, they made Harry take a magical vow not to share their secret with anyone.

At first, Harry was just planning on accepting the gift to be nice, but he had no intention of actually taking it. However, when they began teaching him a few proper techniques for weightlifting, Harry found that he enjoyed working out. Since his defeat of Voldemort, Harry could feel his magic swirling inside his body, looking for a way to escape. He found that working out was a good way to help release that extra energy inside of him. It made him happier and helped him sleep better. When they gave him the supplement, they explained a few things to him. They explained that the potion had no negative side effects to his overall health and mental well-being. They also explained that the effects would be permanent as long as he completed the entire four hundred and twenty-one day potion regime.

One bonus was the fact that it made him grow eight inches in height in just a few months. Everyone chalked it up to one final late growth spurt. Supposedly, Bill had grown three inches the summer after graduating from school, so it wasn’t out of the ordinary. There was one effect that, while it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t exactly good either. They explained that the Erumpent musk would make his sex drive increase by magnitudes. They weren’t lying. Before taking the potion, Harry and Ginny would have sex five or six times a week. After taking it, he would fuck her five or six times a day. She would often outright deny him because she was way too sore. He would normally feel bad for the girl, but Ginny didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she seemed to love it, and if she wasn’t going to complain, neither was he.

Harry popped the cork and swallowed it down. He grimaced at the foul taste before vanishing the evidence. As the potion traveled into his belly, he could feel it heating his insides, similar to the effects of the Pepper-Up Potion. He sat down on the bench press and laid back on it. Sliding under the bar, Harry gripped it and lifted the four hundred-plus pounds of weight. Thirty seconds in, he had already completed his first rep of ten. Placing the bar back on the rack, he sat up and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Harry grabbed a bottle of water and drank it down. The potion always dehydrated him a bit. After a minute of rest, he laid back and slammed out nineteen more reps before moving on to working his legs.

The Cuckening

Crabbe Sr. snarled as he noticed the Weasley family sitting happily in the large and expansive Portkey Depot. The depot was a new building built after the Death Eaters' downfall. The building itself was beautiful, reminiscent of a muggle airport, but to Crabbe, it was like a slap in the face. Blood traitors like the Weasleys were now in charge at the Ministry, and they were going all out to modernize magical Britain. In doing so, they sacrificed all the beliefs that Crabbe held dear. All of his friends were gone … either dead or in prison. Even his beloved son, Vincent, was gone. His wife was in prison as she had been unable to escape the Auror raid on their hideout weeks after the final battle was over. Alone and hunted with no friends, no gold, and no chance of starting over, Crabbe stared at the Weasleys with utmost hatred. He reached into his back pocket and wrapped his dirty fingers around the handle of his wand. Slowly pulling it out, his first instinct was to start hurling Killing Curses at them. There was a problem with that, however. Looking from side to side, he could see at least five officers of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement standing around to keep the peace. He was grateful that they paid him no mind. His hair was long and matted, and his face was covered in a bushy beard. He doubted his own wife would be able to recognize him in his current state.

At that point in his life, he no longer cared about his safety and survival. His drinking had gotten out of hand, and he had been making dumber and riskier decisions over the last few months. His time was short, he knew that. Every second he could feel the Aurors getting closer to catching him. Sure, he could walk away and go back into hiding. He might survive a few more months … perhaps even a year, but what would be the point? It would just be more months of suffering, and he was tired of living this way. No … Crabbe had a better plan in mind. He much preferred to go out with a bang. He reached into his right, front pocket and pulled out a circular-shaped, glass potion bottle. Inside that bottle was a swirling silver liquid. The top was capped with a cork stopper and sealed with a thick layer of wax to prevent leakage. He kept this bottle with him at all times. If he was ever cornered by the Aurors, he could toss it in their direction and hopefully escape during the blast. The only problem was the yield was small. There was no way it would kill all of the Weasleys, but killing a couple would be enough for him.

Standing there contemplating his upcoming attack, a wicked smile formed on his crusty face. He couldn’t kill all of those blood traitors, but at least he could leave the survivors with a little surprise that would hopefully make their married life miserable. He remembered an old family curse that was supposedly created by his great-grandfather. As the story goes, his great-grandfather was friends with a young wizard in his youth, and both were going after the same girl. When his friend had won the girl’s heart, his great-grandfather didn’t take defeat with grace and dignity. Instead, he invented a curse to humiliate that young man. Crabbe couldn’t exactly remember what the curse did to the young man, but thankfully, he could remember how to perform it due to its simplicity. Crabbe’s father had been a stickler when it came to teaching his children the family spells.

Making up his mind to act now before he could chicken out, he began walking in their direction. Arthur Weasley looked at him momentarily but didn’t recognize him. Crabbe’s hand gripped his wand tighter. Once he was a safe distance away, he called out to them. “Go to hell, you filthy blood traitors!”

Crabbe yelled out the incantation and waved his wand in a horizontal arch. Green mist erupted from the tip of his wand, enveloping the Weasley family and several other innocent bystanders in a thick cloud of semi-transparent fog. He heard them coughing and retching from the foul cloud. All around him, terrified screams cut through the air. It was music to his ears and reminded him of the good, old days when he and his mates would go out for a little destructive fun. Behind him, the DMLE officers were yelling out commands, but Crabbe paid them little attention. The green cloud was beginning to thin out. With only seconds left to act, he tossed the silver, glass ball right into the middle of the Weasley pack. What he wasn’t expecting was for one of the blood traitor’s sons to flick his wand in his direction. Crabbe watched the twirling glass ball soar through the air before suddenly changing directions. It spun back through the air in the direction that it had originally come from. That meant …

“Oh, bugger,” he was just able to mutter before the glass shattered at his feet. The explosion was blinding and deafening. Crabbe didn’t know where he was. His ears were ringing, and his body was numb. When the smoke cleared and he was able to start thinking properly, a shooting pain could be felt in his legs. He pushed his upper half up with his forearms to try and see the damage. His legs were completely gone, and a thick pool of blood was rapidly widening around the stumps of his thighs. Crabbe screamed in pain and shock as he fell onto his back again. Within seconds, the DMLE had surrounded him. It didn’t matter though. Crabbe quickly bled out and joined his fallen brethren.

The Cuckening

It was only after he came back from his meeting that he was told about the incident at the Portkey Depot. Harry rushed over to St. Mungos where one of the Healers took him to the correct ward. When he slipped through the door, the first person to call out for him was his girlfriend, Ginny.

“Harry!” she called out, waving her hand at him. Harry rushed over to her, checking her for injuries.

“I’m fine,” she assured him, though she very much liked the attention she was receiving from him.

“What happened?” he asked, standing up after making sure she wasn’t hurt.

“Crabbe Sr.,” Arthur snarled as he lay on the hospital bed. It appeared that he wasn’t hurt either. In fact, none of the Weasleys, Hermione, or the Delacours looked injured. “He ambushed us while we were waiting for our Portkey,” Harry was informed.

“Is there something I don’t know?” Harry asked, confused. “Everyone looks fine.”

“Crabbe hit us with some unknown curse. It was a cloud of green mist. Physically we’re all fine, and we feel fine. But the Healers are sure that we’ve been cursed, though they can’t figure out which one it was,” Bill, who was also in a bed, told him. Harry ground his teeth together.

“Just give me five minutes alone with Crabbe, and I’ll figure out what the curse was,” Harry promised, smashing his fist into his other palm with a loud smack. The thick corded muscles in his forearm flexed menacingly.

“That’s not an option, unfortunately. Crabbe was killed with his own attack. Percy’s quick wand work saved us from any real harm,” Arthur praised his son’s quick thinking. Harry looked over at Percy who was blushing slightly.

“You’re a Cursebreaker, Bill. You don’t have any clue what the curse could have been?” Harry asked him, worried about the curse’s effect. The Crabbe family was obviously full of idiots, but it wasn’t likely that Crabbe Sr. would botch a curse. Eventually, the curse’s effects would make themselves known. Bill shook his head.

“No, but that isn’t surprising. Many old families have access to secret curses and spells that they never share with anyone. The Head Healer thinks this might be one of them,” Bill told him.

“So what do we do?” Harry asked incredulously. “Just wait until something bad starts happening?” This question made them uncomfortable. They were clearly worried about it.

“Harry, dear, for the time being, there’s nothing we CAN do,” Molly told him from the bed next to Arthur’s. “St. Mungos’ curse specialists are looking into it. We’re going to have to stay here for a few days for monitoring,” she explained. “If the effects start showing themselves, then hopefully they can be countered.

“Pardon me,” came a feminine voice from behind. Harry turned and accidentally bumped into a middle-aged witch in a white uniform. “Oh! Excuse me, Mr. Potter,” she said in what was supposed to be a sensual voice. As he bumped into her, she “accidentally” pressed her breasts against his arm and grabbed onto his bulging bicep.

“My fault,” Harry replied, which made her giggle. She held onto his arm for just a couple of seconds longer than necessary. He even felt her give it a squeeze. Behind them, Ginny was glaring at the daring witch. She was getting really tired of every witch that he encountered flirting with him. They didn’t even care if she was with him! They would simply ignore her and bat their eyes at him. It was infuriating.

“It’s time for their next round of potions,” she told him with a smile. Another Healer came in carrying a tray of medium-sized vials filled with orange-colored liquid. She went from bed to bed handing them out.

Harry stayed with them for as long as he could before the horny Healer came back in and told him that visiting hours were over. He left with a promise that he would return the following morning. Of course, he was bombarded with requests. He first needed to visit the Burrow and grab a few things for Molly. Hermione wanted him to pick up a giant stack of books so she would have something to read during her stay. Ron asked him to pick up the latest issue of Quidditch Quarterly. Bill wanted him to stop by Shell Cottage and get his books, A Compendium of Curses: Volumes 1 through 5, so he could try and find the curse that was used on them. While there, Fleur wanted him to pick up some of her more comfortable clothing. Everyone had a request. Harry didn’t mind at all. They had done so much for him in the past, he was glad to pay them back.