The Power of Seven

**The Power of Seven** is a non-crossover Harry Potter fanfic by VelvetInferno available at AO3. It is rated **Explicit**, contains slightly over 280 000 words spread over 81 chapters and was published between 2018 and 2021; it is set during the spring and summer of 1997 with an epilogue one year later.

## Plot summary

Already in the spring of sixth year, Harry realizes that he is a horcrux and that, therefore, he must die. He tells his friends, and Hermione puts everything else to the side to research alternatives. Eventually she comes up with a possible solution: a ritual by which two lovers can bond their souls together. Theoretically, doing this with seven different witches should overpower the horcrux. When presented with the idea, Ginny is not exactly pleased, but it certainly beats the alternative. She is the first to bond with Harry, Hermione and Luna offer to be the next in line (the ritual can only be performed on the new moon) and together they list possible candidates they wish to approach. Eventually, they end up recruiting Susan Bones, Demelza Robins and Katie Bell before the summer holiday starts; although only Ginny, Hermione and Luna have had the time to actually perform the ritual, all six have had sex with Harry in various combinations. Unfortunately, Dumbledore considers any kind of magic that changes one's soul as very dark, even when it is love-based, and absolutely does not want Harry to go through with the plan. They try to keep it secret, but when Lavender Brown breaks up with Ron he lets it slip that Harry is seeing others beside Ginny and soon everybody in the castle knows. Magical Britain being rather Victorian, most students shun Harry and his girlfriends, but Romilda Vane takes the opportunity to slip him a love potion and only the bond with Ginny and Hermione gives him the edge that lets him throw off its effect.

Meanwhile, Dumbledore hunts for horcruxes together with Bill Weasley, and they destroy the locket. He has also managed to remove the curse placed on Marvolo Gaunt's ring – meaning he isn't dying – and uses the Resurrection Stone to talk with his old lover Grindelwald. When he learns about Harry's extensive love life, and realizes that they plan to use the ritual after all, he explains to Bill about Harry being a horcrux and connected to Voldemort. Bill, suspecting that Voldemort – through Harry – once again has possessed Ginny, just like he did through the diary, has a great row with her just as she gets home for the summer, leaving the task of apparating Harry to Privet Drive to his fiancée Fleur Delacour. This gives her a chance to get to know him a bit more, and especially to learn about his history with the Dursleys. Determined to cheer him up, she suggests to Ginny that she could come along on one of her night shifts guarding him. Then Luna shows up at the same time, and she suddenly finds herself watching a threesome – a threesome that only her extreme self-discipline keeps from becoming a foursome. Afterward, she realizes she needs to talk to Bill about this, so Harry, Ginny and Luna make sure they tell her their story first.

After Bill and Fleur fight, she uses her Veela allure to convince him to reveal Dumbledore's plan: he's going to collapse the wards on Privet Drive in a way that will destroy Harry's sex drive, thereby stopping him from bonding with anybody else; once he does die, they expect the already made bonds to dissolve. Fleur knocks him out and takes Harry with her home to France using her emergency portkey. While there, both her sister Gabrielle and their mother Apolline come onto him, but he turns them down; he does, however, sleep with Fleur, who offers to be his seventh bonded witch. Apolline can't accept being turned down and tries to blackmail him, but the only result is that they leave, planning to take the Chunnel back to Britain to avoid the hassle surrounding international apparition. A crying Gabrielle manages to convince them to take her with them.

Hermione obliviates her parents and sends them off abroad. Susan, living all alone in the family manor after the death of her aunt, had already asked Katie to move in with her and now they all congregate there – except Demelza, whose parents still don't know anything about what's happening and want to keep her safe at home. Unfortunately, the Death Eaters are well aware of her connection to Potter and kidnap her her to act as bait. As Harry and his friends attack, Rodolphus Lestrange attempt to rape her; in desperation she manages to push her own magic into his wand, causing an explosion which kills him and wounds her in the shoulder. She manages to escape the dungeon together with Pansy Parkinson but runs straight into Voldemort playing with the dead bodies of her parents. Harry springs the trap and somehow is able to get everyone out, thanks to a special potion brewed by Hermione and the fact that the bond gives Ginny, Hermione and Luna the ability to lend him their magic. Some days later, Demelza bonds with Harry.

During the Vanishing Cabinet fight, Ron was bitten by Greyback. Luckily, it wasn't during the full moon, so he wasn't turned into a werewolf, but it did have a strong effect on his libido. Tonks and Remus, after testing exactly *how* strong the effect is, let him visit another student in his year who did get turned: Daphne Greengrass. They meet recurrently, which helps stave off Daphne's frustration over going stir crazy in her small apartment, and she also visits the Burrow with him from time to time.

On his seventeenth birthday Harry gives an official statement of support for and cooperation with Minister Rufus Scrimgeour, in return for a Fidelius charm on the manor; two days later they are ready to bring Pansy (who's been living at the Burrow since the escape) there. She wastes no time enchanting a parchment to communicate with the death eaters, unaware that Demelza is watching her from under Harry's invisibility cloak. They set a trap, with Ginny and Hermione going to Diagon Alley on their own as the bait, in order to capture death eaters to interrogate under veritaserum, but their planned auror backup did not anticipate the whole alley being covered in apparition wards, the floo network being locked down *and* the Leaky Cauldron entrance being charmed shut. While they make it out alive, mostly thanks to Fleur's veela battle form, and even manage to capture Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange, Tonks (who'd been on site disguised) ends up in St Mungo's with a stomach wound refusing to react to normal healing spells and potions.

The interrogations unfortunately yield little in terms of specific details, since neither Lucius nor Bellatrix (and certainly not Pansy) were involved in the planning of the coming Ministry coup, but it does reveal the presence of Hufflepuff's Cup in Bellatrix' Gringotts vault. Rather than planning a break-in, Susan digs up a clause in the treaty after the 1612 goblin rebellion that allows the Ministry to "confiscate property from wizards convicted of high crimes". However, when Harry is called in to identify the horcrux among the many dark artifacts found in the vault, an auror acting under the Imperious curse activates a portkey and brings him to Voldemort where he is quickly subdued. Voldemort, however, has learned of Harry being a horcrux, and so does not kill him; instead, he has Snape feed him a modified version of Draught of Living Death that will put him in a coma that cannot be dispelled, leaving him – and thus his horcrux – in suspended animation forever. Meanwhile, as the coup is set off, Kingsley Shacklebolt grabs Hermione and Susan and brings them to an old crawlspace that leads them to the Department of Mysteries.

Hermione finds herself drawn to the Love Room, which immediately opens for her; inside, she meets the inventor of the soul bond who notices that she has one and lends her a connection amplifier. With it, Ginny is able to break through to Harry's mind; he is stuck in a dream world where he lives a non-magical life with the Dursleys without any memories of Magical Britain. She tells him of his real life, planting a seed of rebellion against the dream, and makes love to him – as do Hermione, Luna and Demelza when they take their turns, and when all the bonds have been reestablished his full memory returns. As Harry forces the mental connections to his bondmates to open, he finally wakes up.

Meanwhile, Hermione has used her bond to locate his body in the former Greengrass family home and the Order is ready to attack. Through the reopened connection, she guides him through a double-sided assault on the wards until it snaps, and he can apparate out. The whole thing has been timed to coincide with the new moon, and with the help of a Time-turner Harry manages to perform the final three bonding rituals with Susan, Katie and Fleur in practically no time at all, from an outside perspective; with this done, he has no problem rooting out the intruding soul piece – while sending enough power through it to make Voldemort scream in pain. As the Order and the DA fight the death eaters, Harry and his bond-mates enter a sitting room converted into Voldemort's personal workshop, where they find his dead body – and Dumbledore, under the control of the soul fragment from Marvolo Gaunt's ring.

In the ensuing fight Nagini is killed, but even using the bonds to pool all their magic in Harry is not enough to defeat the Dark Lord, who gloats about how, after the fight, the Wizarding world will again heap praise upon the victorious Dumbledore until he actually takes up the position of Minister this time. And with all three Deathly Hallows, he will not even need horcruxes to cheat death... However, after Harry has fully exhausted himself, and Voldemort starts torturing Ginny, Hermione realizes that similar to Quirinius Quirrell, the possessed body of Dumbledore ought to be vulnerable to Harry's touch. Harry grasps him by the ankle, and indeed Voldemort breaks off his spell and starts screaming. Being aware, this tine, of what is happening, Harry manages to weave what little he has left of his own magic around his mother's and direct it to burn the horcrux while leaving Dumbledore's body and soul alive. However, when he finally wakes up he is starting to feel his age and retires from his many positions of power, leaving McGonagall as headmistress.

After the war, they return to school (except, of course, Katie and Fleur) but Harry feels there is little point to it; after Christmas break he drops out to stay at the *home* he finally has. Fleur became pregnant during the summer, probably during their stay in France, and their daughter Victoire is born in the spring. Katie manages to get a spot on the Appleby Arrows, and after graduation Hermione becomes an Unspeakable and Susan finds work in the DMLE. With rumours of their living arrangements already spreading, they announce their upcoming multiple wedding in the Daily Prophet on the anniversary of the final battle.

### Timeline calculations

The story starts in one of Harry's weekly meetings with Dumbledore. From then, it takes Hermione a week to reverse engineer the horcrux formula from first principles, "about a week" more to collect a list of possible rituals, and another week before she finds the one to try. The next day she tries to convince Dumbledore, then tells Ginny who tells Harry; this is "a little more than a week" before Ginny's ritual. The next day they tell Luna, then "several days" after that Harry and Hermione kiss for the first time; this is six days before the ritual and on a Saturday, while Harry's first meeting with Dumbledore after learning about the ritual is three days before. Assuming that the "weekly" meetings are held regularly every seven days, this suggests that the "several days" before the kiss are (at most) three, with Ginny telling Harry on the day of the previous meeting (but after it), and that "about a week" earlier is six days, placing the beginning of the story 31 days before Ginny's ritual.

The ritual is performed on the new moon, which for 1997 *should* mean the following dates:

* Ginny 7 April
* Hermione 7 May
* Luna 5 June
* Demelza 5 July
* Susan, Katie and Fleur 3 August

However, this would place Ginny's ritual on a Monday rather than the night between Friday and Saturday, and the triple ritual *before* the Diagon Alley ambush (which is about a week after Harry's birthday), so clearly the author has not checked the moon phases (at least not for 1997). Counting backwards instead, Demelza's ritual seems to be about a week before Harry's birthday (Fleur starts sleeping in the common bed the day after the ritual, then it takes a few days before she ends up next to Ginny and initiates their humiliation play, and there seems to be at least one day between that and the birthday), and subtracting 29-30 days per ritual from that puts Ginny's at the end of April; the night between Friday and Saturday suggests the early hours of 26 April, from which we can count forward again and get the following dates:

* Story starts 25 March
* Ginny 25/26 April
* Hermione 25/26 May (she has classes the next day, so it cannot be the 24/25)
* Luna 23/24 or 24/25 June
* End of term 1 or 2 July (a week and a night after Luna's ritual)
* Attack on the Greengrass family around 7-9 July (full moon)
* Demelza between 22/23 and 24/25 July
* Susan, Katie and Fleur between 20/21 and 23/24 August

This fits fairly well with canon, where the rest of the term is ended after Dumbledore's death on the 30 June, and they return on the Hogwarts Express after his funeral a few days later.

## Characters

### Main characters

* Harry Potter
* Ginny Weasley
* Hermione Granger
* Luna Lovegood
* Demelza Robins
* Susan Bones
* Katie Bell
* Fleur Delacour

### Other central characters

* Albus Dumbledore
* Daphne Greengrass
* Remus Lupin
* Nymphadora Tonks
* Ron Weasley
* Bill Weasley

### Non-canonical characters

* Emily
* Henri
* Julie
* Leo
* Mimsy
* Victoire
* Samantha
* Sarah
* Ryan Baldwin
* Kyle Clemons
* Conner Hays
* Julie Walker
* Michelle Wheeler
* Olivia Wright

## Further non-canonical world elements

### Books and magazines

* *In His Service*
* *The Lady's Lord*
* *Playwitch*
* *Professor's Pet*
* *Sex and the Soul*
* *The Sorcerer's Command*

### Lunacies

* Cragglemelon
* Humperdink
* Weaselwort
* Zimbeels

### Magical objects

* Alchemical scale
* Connection amplifier
* Fey flame
* Goop bomb

### Places

* Bones Manor
* Delacour family beach house
* Hogwarts library study lounge
* Katie Bell's flat
* Ministry of Magic crawlspace

### Potions

* Headache-clearing potion
* Hermione's lust potion
* Morning-after potion
* Sensory Solution

### Spells

* Anti-copying charm
* Exui vestes
* Fertilis praesidium
* Liber stipare
* Measurement charm
* Potio revelio
* Preservation charm
* Prope vulnere
* Soul bond ritual
* Vestimenta pertransibo
* Virilem protego

## Pairings

As the story progresses, all the eight main characters join together in a poly relationship. Beyond this, we see the canonical Ron/Lavender, Bill/Fleur and Remus/Tonks, and the semicanonical Neville/Hannah, although the first two break up during the story; it is implied that Ron ends up with Daphne Greengrass instead, and Lavender with Seamus Finnigan, while Bill seems be single at the end of the story. Pansy Parkinson is dating Draco Malfoy, but not out of any feelings beyond self-interest, and any feelings he may have had probably didn't survive Bellatrix Lestrange ordering her to kill him. It is further hinted that Angelina Johnson and Alicia Spinnet are "sharing" Fred and George Weasley, although no details are given.

## References

1. ↑ Chapter 1
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Chapter 2
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Chapter 3
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Chapter 8
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Chapter 26 (last scene of the chapter)
6. ↑ Chapter 20 (last scene of the chapter)
7. ↑ Chapter 29
8. ↑ Chapter 46
9. ↑ Chapter 47
10. ↑ Chapter 48
11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Chapter 50
12. ↑ Chapter 51
13. ↑ Chapter 52
14. ↑ Chapter 53
15. ↑ Chapter 54
16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Chapter 58
17. ↑ Chapter 34
18. ↑ Chapter 56
19. ↑ Chapter 57
20. ↑ Chapter 65
21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Chapter 68
22. ↑ Chapter 62
23. ↑ Chapter 64
24. ↑ Chapter 66
25. ↑ Chapter 69
26. ↑ Chapter 70
27. ↑ Chapter 72
28. ↑ Chapter 73
29. ↑ Chapter 74
30. ↑ Chapter 75
31. ↑ Chapter 76
32. ↑ Chapter 77
33. ↑ Chapter 78
34. ↑ Chapter 79
35. ↑ Chapter 80
36. ↑ Chapter 81
37. ↑ Chapter 4
38. ↑ Chapter 5
39. ↑ Chapter 7
40. ↑ Stardate.com Moon Phase Calculator
41. ↑ Chapter 32
42. ↑ Chapter 45
43. ↑ Chapter 28