There were hands on his body, caressing his chest. This was the first thing that Harry's addled mind realized as he came to. He must have drifted off into a nap. As he blinked, his bleary eyes caught a flash of red, red hair.

The entirely unexpected colour startled him. The hands that had been rubbing his chest drifted up his shoulders, along his neck and covered his eyes.

"Guess who," he heard the distinctly feminine voice say. Was there a charm on her voice to keep him from recognizing it? Or, perhaps it was the grogginess, his ears still being half asleep, keeping him from placing it.

"Susan?" He guessed, all the while knowing the fleeting glimpse of hair had the wrong shade for it to be her.

"Nooooo, try again," Harry heard the same female voice again, ratcheting up his worry.

His mind whirled as he tried to come up with another name. There was only one family who had that hair colour, one he did not want to be in this situation with.

Oh please, not Ginny or one of the twins, Harry thought. While rubbing his chest might be generously considered as an uncomfortable maneuver, at least, if it was one of the twins, it would be a simple joke to laugh off. If this was his Chaser teammate, however….

He knew the most probable answer his mind could supply was Ginny but he didn't want to say her name. He'd thought it might be her, then considered it. Now, if he spoke it, it would be the third iteration, and, as if by magic, she would, for sure, be the person behind him.

But was that just delaying the inevitable? Was there only a fool's hope that this wasn't the littlest Weasley?

It wasn't like he actually knew any others with a reddish long hair, the pickings were mighty slim. Susan was one of his girlfriend's best friends but her hair was more auburn. How he wished it was her, for if she was the one messing with him, this would have been something to laugh about later.

Sadly though, it wasn't Miss Bones.

Harry internally debated on how to respond now. Should he make it awkward and say his own mother's name? While being utterly impossible, that it was his mum, it would be far more pleasant than the other scenarios running through his head.

Did Ginny hope to get with him? There were rumors abounding that he was going to propose to Daphne soon. Was Ginny trying to worm her way into his heart before he made his relationship with the Greengrass Heiress permanent?

He knew there were some who wished he would reenact his parents. Harry had always heard how much he looked like his father, 'but with your mother's eyes', and being with a girl that reminded people of her, 'but with his father's eyes', what more could they want?

No. Never. That was totally messed up; and, never, ever, happening. Besides, he was deliriously happy with his current blonde girlfriend, hopefully his soon to be fiancé.

Harry groaned in annoyance, this would be far more pleasant if it was Daphne that had snuck up on him.

But, alas, red hair was not blonde hair.

This left him, now, with very limited options, the only two he would have been happy to have behind him, covering his eyes, were already ruled out, Susan Bones and Lily Potter. He wished his next guess was correct but had a sinking feeling that it was going to be their younger sister.

"Fred? George's female impressions are a bit higher pitched normally, yeah?" He tried to play off the joke but he had no confidence it was one of them, he'd have a dung bomb exploded on him or some sweet snuck in his mouth if it had been this long. There was no way one of the twins wouldn't have pranked him by now.

His poor guess didn't do him any favors as the fingers tightened around his eyes, the non-audible reply was the only one so far. Harry's stomach felt like there was a deep pit trying to open up within him, an endless trench filled with despair and an impending supply of ginger babies.

Please don't be Ginny, he thought with ever growing desperation.

While he had become friends with the youngest Weasley, over time, namely through being teammates, he didn't want his future wife to eventually end up looking like Molly. He loved how hospitable the elder Weasley female was...but Harry knew he'd not make fifty if he was married to a shrew like her.

Ginny, like most all of his friends, had an open invitation to drop in on him, however, this wasn't the sort of thing he welcomed. Popping in to say hello was fine. Waking him up by rubbing his upper body, not so much.

Hadn't she gotten over that silly crush yet?

Harry couldn't help but grimace as he felt the person moving around, from behind him to in front of him. A single hand was now covering his face, and when her hair touched his shoulder, as she moved around him, Harry couldn't help but recoil from it's tainted touch.

He couldn't help but wonder why they were keeping this up.

"No," the voice sounded irritated now.

He couldn't see what she was doing but it felt like she was about to climb on top of him.

While normally the proposition of a girl straddling his lap was one he would relish…this...this situation was different.

The position should have been sexy, his hands should be running up and down her back by now, but, when this wasn't his girlfriend, all he could feel was guilt and discomfort.

The red haired female, clearly, leaned forward, he could feel her breath on his face now, "Third time's lucky?" the whispered question was spoken sultrily, the final word carrying more innuendo than he cared to hear in this situation.

The words had come out as a question but they had felt like a command. Whomever this was, please don't be Ginny, they were getting annoyed now, if they weren't past that point already.

Harry immediately debated just not answering. He was familiar with the Weasley temper but was willing to risk its ire. He was not going to tempt fate and say 'Ginny', lest she magically appear, no matter how remote the chance it was now that it wasn't her.

The names of females he knew with red hair was depleted. Not Susan, not Lily, definitely not Molly, and that only left Ginny.

Harry was berating himself. Why was this one of the few times he did not actually have his wand on him? He should've been safe here, but he hadn't considered 'ginger haired women sneaking up on him' as a possible life-altering threat.

But, what about wandless magic? If a patronus could drive away a dementor, what could drive away a ginger?

He could generate patronus mist without a wand; so, surely, if he could figure out the correct emotion, he should be able to get the red-haired virago off himself, right?

Mentally, Harry pulled himself away from that line of thought, doubting, knowing, he'd not come up with something in time for it to be useful. Academics and spell theory were not his forte.

Yet, this whole situation bothered him; the young Potter just didn't get it. He and Ginny had danced around each other, awkwardly, when the youngest Weasley had first joined the quidditch team. The dark haired seeker had known that she liked him and she had known that he knew and was not interested. Things had been weird for the first few practices but they had gotten through it, even to a rather comfortable state.

Was he wrong about that? Had he deluded himself to thinking Ginny was okay being just friends?

Introspection and debating how things had devolved into a mess like this was all well and good; but, finding a way out of this mess would be far better.

Trying and failing to rapidly plan your own escape was bothersome enough, but having the person awaiting your answer sitting on you, thoroughly annoyed, armed and with a rapidly fraying grip on their temper, wasn't helping matters either.

Nevertheless, Harry's captor didn't appear to care about his dire situation as he felt nails dig into his skin and the poking of a thin piece of wood into his nether region.

This was not a good development. They were playing for keeps.

Though his prayer could only be inefficacious, he still prayed it anyway: please don't be Ginny!

"Are you going to answer?" He heard the unidentified female ask far too sweetly, the wand, thankfully, was no longer aimed at his balls, though pushing into his neck, to the point of discomfort, wasn't exactly an improvement.

His mind began to torture him now, images of seven little gingers 'with their grandmum's eyes' running around causing mayhem, mayhem that only an unholy mixture of children spawned with the genetics of a marauder and the Weasley twins could ever dare to create.

This wasn't in his plans, being a part of the Weasley clan, with too many ginger headed children of his own, wasn't something he aspired to achieve. Frankly, it was a nightmare and Harry couldn't help but gag as his mind continued to betray him, flashing all manners of ghastly images through his brain.

Note to self: gagging with a wand pressed into your throat...not pleasant.

As he coughed, it dawned on him that there was only one person he could rely on to find a way out of this situation. If Daphne walked in on this, he was a dead man. And, Ginny, she'd be eviscerated, exenterated, extirpated. Their family clock would have to gain a new category, obliterated.

Yes, this was definitely a situation that he needed to get out of. Calculating which would be the least troublesome answer, between repeating an earlier one and going with the only other option, were his choices. Until reality socked him in the kisser, or he was hexed into oblivion, he wasn't going to utter the name of the only candidate left.

Preparing himself, and after letting out a deep breath, he went for it, "Are you sure you're not Susan?"

Harry had antagonized them once more. He hadn't missed hearing the huff of annoyance of whomever had him at their mercy, their breath loudly exhaled out their nose, blowing across hot air on his face.

His plan was just kicking off now.

Whomever was in his lap might have gotten the drop on Harry but, like everyone, or anything, else, that had tried to destroy his life, they would find him an uncooperative prey, one not willing to go along with their nefarious plans for him.

The distraction of giving an answer they were not pleased with previously had been the first part. The swift motion that he used to disarm whomever it was, of their wand, by smashing their wrist and forcing the wand to drop, was the second.

Quickly, Harry rocketed out of his seat; whereby, unceremoniously removing the female from his lap and dropping the red head onto her arse, eliciting a squawk of joint outrage and surprise was the third.

As he was standing up, the green eyed seeker simultaneously snatched the wand out of midair, the fourth part. Aiming the wand atperson that had accosted him, he completed the fifth and final step as he quickly backed away, creating some distance between them, keeping the wand trained on the witch.

But, like many brilliant strategies, something he hadn't predicted didn't go as he'd planned, not from the very second he was armed and ready to engage his foe.

As, all at once, his eyes focused and took in the sight of the woman before him, the one who was getting back on her feet, while his fingers felt the wooden wand between them. Accompanied by a sinking feeling, that this might now be worse than Ginny sneaking up on him, his magic recognized how familiar the feel of the wand was just as his eyes recognized the eyes and facial features of the witch in front of him.

Harry knew exactly who this was and just how badly the tables had turned on him. The phrase, out of the frying pan and into the fire, immediately sprung to mind.

Because, standing in front of him, was his thoroughly enraged girlfriend, an incensed, Daphne Greengrass.

Merlin, he was an idiot.

Daphne was the only person who was supposed to be meeting him here today. He had known that.

Yet, his mind was stuck. The sole fact that it had previously processed came back to the forefront of his brain: his girlfriend didn't have red hair.

Red hair, not blonde hair, and with that, it shouldn't have mattered that it was only Daphne that should have been in the selection criteria! The person that had groped him out of his nap did. Thus, his girlfriend wasn't an eligible candidate in the first place!

Red hair, not blond hair!

His brain processed these facts again, it was stuck covering the same fact over and over again. Daphne did not have red-hair, well, she hadn't had red hair, before, ostensibly, now.

That should absolve him of any fault here, right?

While his brain answered logically, that he was definitely correct, he already knew she wasn't going to agree.

In Harry's experience, women and logic got on like Cornish Pixies and Defense Professors. By all rights and reasonings, it should be fine, it should work. But, somehow, it wouldn't. Lockhart's mind boggling display of incompetence perplexed him as much as women ignoring sound reasoning does.

But, logic aside, why was he even dealing with an angry red-head? Hadn't he made the smart decision to not date a red-haired witch? All of the ones he knew of had tempers. Susan, Molly and Ginny provided ample evidence of this!

He'd seen the writing on the wall and had deliberately not gotten involved with one.

Why, oh why, did women have to be so difficult? He'd dated a blonde and she had tricked him by becoming a redhead.

Through all of this, somehow, against all rational thought, would be his fault, Harry just didn't know why it was his fault, yet.

But the young wizard was ready for it, Harry was braced for the verbal tongue lashing he was about to get, and was he ever, ever, ever so thankful that, Morgana be blessed, he was the one who was holding the only wand in the immediately available area.

Daphne was pissed; failing to guess her name hadn't started things off well. Deliberately answering in a way that was only going to annoy whomever was asking the questions appeared to have been less than stellar of a tactic, in hindsight. But, attacking her, dropping her on her derrière, that was the most imbecilic thing he had done; intentional or not, that had been the cherry that topped it all off.

"What the bloody hell, Harry?!" The red-haired Daphne screeched as she held the wrist that he had forced, not so gently, to give up her wand.

Maybe it was a continuation of his addled decision making, but Harry couldn't help but consider that this, this right here, was why a man would ever put up with a redhead. Even furious, especially when furious, they were alluring, unbelievably so.

Was it some sort of natural multiplication multiplier? The more irate, the more red their skin became, the closer it matched their hair, the sexier the woman became? That didn't really make any sort of reasonable sense. But that was okay, women never made a damn lick of sense anyways. So this odd, ridiculous, discovery might just be accurate.

He blinked himself back to reality as his eyes looked at her wrist; it was going to bruise. And, by this point, Harry was willing to concede a single solitary point. She could be angry with him, for that, but only a sole point's worth of anger was justifiable.

Harry's feet propelled him away from her, back pedalling was a good thing. She had somehow used a combo point system to amplify the single point into a dozen, if not more. Her face was expeditiously gaining a hue to match her new hair color and this was not a good sign.

"Susan or a Weasley?!" She growled at him, continuing to stalk toward him as she still rubbed her now sore wrist, "Do I look like a man to you?" she spat, her eyes narrowed and flashing with fury.

Harry replied in the negative but this was quickly becoming a futile situation.

She was entering rant mode.

A mode that defied all man-logic and increased illogical arguments to maximum efficiency, well, inefficiency really, but you had to use sound reasoning to understand that, something rant-mode did not excel at.

Obviously, and logically, she could have taken his comments more...optimistically.

After all, Susan was a gorgeous young woman and if the twins decided to swap genders Harry had no doubts that they would transform themselves into nothing less than drop-dead gorgeous bombshells.

But, why would she focus on that? Why would she ever take his words in the best possible light, as complimentary comparisons?

As his eyes flicked back to Daphne's face, the green eyed wizard knew there was as much chance of convincing her as there would be getting Hagrid to admit that hatching and raising a dragon in a wooden hut was a foolish endeavor. It worked once, so, why wouldn't it every time?

"Don't you...ever...listen...to me?" When his girlfriend was punctuating words like this, it was never a good thing for Harry. It was always a clear sign that she was properly upset.

"I told you, I was getting my hair done today!" She seethingly informed him, well, re-informed him apparently, not stopping her movement to try and get a hold of him.

Bollocks! Was this the truth?

Harry wracked his brain in a concerted effort to recall. His feet stalled their backward movement as all processing power went to figure out if that had been a correct statement. The worst part was that he knew Daphne didn't normally make that sort of accusation without being right.

Horror overcame him. She had. She had, indeed, told him.

This wasn't a good development; Harry needed to figure out a way out of this rapidly deteriorating situation, and fast! With his backward momentum stopped, Daphne was closing the gap between them while Harry worked with this new information, trying to deduce a logical solution.

Unsurprisingly, he quickly found a fault with her woman anti-logic. Daphne had told him she was getting her hair done. That was it! She had said nothing about dyeing her hair.

Why would he have assumed that? The answer, to that rhetorical question, was obvious: he wouldn't have.

When had she ever said she planned to have red hair? That was the sort of thing he'd actually pay attention to! An extra bounce in her blonde hair, a bit of layering, whatever that was, or if she'd slightly, unnoticeably, made her hair wavier, those were the things he couldn't spot without her first telling him, often he had to ask Susan, Hannah or Tracey for help.

Almost always, the type of change was so negligible that he couldn't immediately tell on his own. He wasn't some hair guru. All Harry knew was that his girlfriend always looked amazing and made it a point to regularly tell her so. Straight, curled, pinned up, pony tail, pigtails, braided or any other manner of doing her hair, they all looked great on her.

Daphne was beautiful and the rest was just semantics, as far as he was concerned. Even this drastic change didn't detract from her at all. This was still his gorgeous girlfriend and blonde hair or red hair, it didn't actually matter.

But this was all besides the point, it had never been this drastic of a change. Her statement had been true, Daphne had told him she was getting her hair done, but it was only partly correct, a half truth, according to his calculations.

Harry was willing to concede another two full points to her. One for failing to remember what she had told him and a second for not utilizing available information to answer that it was her who had woken him up. Still, now, Daphne only had three, legitimate, points to fuel her anger. A dire situation, for sure, but nothing he hadn't been able to deal with before.

This was still salvageable. He might have missed on the first, second, and even the third opportunities, but he could recover!

He was Harry effing Potter.

If getting out of tight situations wasn't his specialty, he didn't know what was! Born out of countless situations, where it was do or die, literally, in many cases, a plan quickly formed in his mind.

He took a half step back, making it appear like he was going to keep moving backwards. The first step having the intended effect, Harry just barely danced out of her grasp, just as she was getting to him, reaching for him.

He had learned quickly, in dating relationships, that females were emotional. They seemed to feel more strongly about everything than him. It was this piece of knowledge, this data point, that made his plan perfect, foolproof.

Instead of continuing on, to a second step backward, he planted his back foot, letting the hand that was trying to grasp him push past his side. He took hold of her other wrist, the same one that he had hurt, and wandlessly healed it.

One point, fueling her anger, absolved.

With his weight still anchored on his back foot, he now shot forward, immediately closing the distance between them. He moved forward now, into her personal space, and quickly hugged his body to her, using his only free hand to gently caress her face, just how he knew she loved it.

Another point abated.

"Sorry Daphne, you're a vision, no witch has ever worn that color so well."

He let his heartfelt words sink in, surprise dwelled on her face, for a mere second, before Harry crashed his lips into hers. His hand slipped from her cheek to thread through her hair. The young man knew she'd melt as soon as he ran his fingers through her lustrous hair while kissing her, Daphne always did.

The third, and final, point of anger was pacified.

Confirmation came immediately. Daphne began to respond, kissing him back, and he knew an impending crisis had been averted. Although things had started off rough, with her new hair color, he felt he'd received redemption from the red head.

"You're gorgeous no matter the hair color," he whispered when their lips broke apart. "I love you as a blonde, brunette, as a redhead," he pulled a lock of her hair in front of his eyes for good measure, taking a moment to gaze at it, for effect.

"And Daphne," Harry waited until her eyes met his, "I'll still love you when your hair turns grey," he planted a kiss on her forehead and hugged her to him. Giving genuine whispered words, like this, he knew, would tip her into the warm loving mood.

He shut his eyes and enjoyed the contact of their two bodies. He felt her smile into his chest, radiating happiness, and Harry couldn't help but be affected by it.

Not only had the potentially disastrous situation been dealt with, he now had the makings of a rather pleasant start for their time together tonight. He could feel her body relax into his and her arms snake around his body. The sigh of contentment was just the cherry on top.

Red-haired or not, he had his loving girlfriend in his arms and all was well. They could forget about this mishap and get on with their plans for this weekend, whatever they were.

Or, at least, that was until Daphne spoke again, her blue eyes shining with love and filled with warmth, "So, where did you plan for us to go tonight, for our anniversary?"

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

AN:

Thanks to Nauze & Triage for the beta work. This came from discussing suggestions for who Daphne, Fleur & Natalia would be cast as in ITT. There were a bunch of suggestions and discussions on the ITT discord server.

After that, Triage, in our little three person discord chat, was pushing for a red headed Daphne. Somehow (Nauze: cuz we didn't want to fix continuity issues, the lazy bums we are) that spawned an idea for my muse; the first draft was written out in our little three person discord chat.

Just a bit of fun and a little one-shot. Thanks for reading.