CharlsieStark3000
When Harry Potter vanishes without a trace, the wizarding world does what it has always done in the face of the unthinkable.
It negotiates.
The truce between Voldemort's forces and the Order of the Phoenix is sealed the only way truces between enemies ever truly are - with something neither side is entirely willing to give. For the Order, it is Serena Black: Sirius's daughter, raised in the Marauder Household, trained to fight a war she has been preparing for since she was old enough to understand what war was.
For Voldemort, it is his younger son: Mattheo Riddle, who has spent his entire life becoming exactly what his father required and has never once been asked what he wanted to be instead.
The arrangement is simple. The marriage is political. The terms are clear.
None of it goes according to plan.
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The Price of Peace is the story of two people who were handed to each other by a war and chose to stay - told across stolen kitchens and Italian gardens and nursery floors, across three years of learning what it meant to build something real inside something designed to be temporary.
It is also the story of everything it costs.
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Some debts are paid in blood. Some in grief. Some in the specific quiet of being the last one standing in a house that used to be full.
And some - the ones that matter most - are paid in the decision to stay.
PS. This is my first time writing a fic, and also English is not my first language.