(X) - 'The Wheel of Fortune'

"Where to begin," Darcy mused. Harry sat in the centre of his couch, suppressing his slight unease at the unfamiliarity of the situation. He had offered Darcy a cup of tea upon arriving in the apartment and she had refused – logical, since she was insisting on keeping their meeting short – but that had denied him the pretext of pouring himself a cup, so he had nothing in front of him to occupy his hands with. He made them lay still on his knees while he watched Darcy sort through her papers.

"As I said, I work in Research and Development for the Ministry. Specifically, in the creation of potions. In the summer of 1979, I was in contract with the Ministry, although I still considered myself a freelance developer."

"Like George," Harry said automatically. He knew George had sold a number of prototype devices to the Ministry that had made him a large sum of money. George had approached Harry and made it clear to him he planned to donate the money to the Auror Department. Harry had been very close to asking him what prompted him to do so when he saw that the humour that was almost ever-present in George's face was missing that day, and he stopped himself. In the documentation for that particular donation (although George never knew it), it was recorded as coming from 'George (and Fred) Weasley'.

"George Weasley," she replied, her eyes looking off to some far-off corner of the roof in thought, "owner and proprietor of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, whom I believe still has three months on his development contract with the Ministry with the option to renew. Yes, something much like that.

"I developed a potion," she said, picking up her previous train of thought, "that bestows incredible and unlikely good fortune on the user. I believe you have had some experience with the Felix Felicis potion, in..." She looked through her papers. "…1996. Potions Master of Hogwarts Horace Slughorn applies for and is granted issue to brew a one-tenth dose for demonstration purposes to his NEWTs level students. From an interview with him, he disclosed that you were the winner of the potion in a contest he held within that class. Correct?"

"It is," Harry said. The feeling of an outsider telling parts of his life back to him was slightly unreal.

"What was it you used the potion for?" Darcy asked. Her tone shifted in a way that Harry was unable to place.

"I didn't, really," Harry replied almost at once. "Most of it went to my friends."

"Hm." She paused. "I hadn't expected that." Harry was about to ask why, but she quickly moved on. "We can talk about it later. In 1979, Felix Felicis was in the final stages of testing. Five subjects, all of whom have regular exposure to hazardous situations, were given regular supply of the potion and asked to report back on its effects. This..." She separated some papers from her stack, held together with a paperclip, and placed them on the coffee table in front of Harry. "...is the reports from two of the subjects, released from confidentiality after a period of twenty years following their deaths."

Harry had planned to glance though the papers, when he saw a name, printed in neat little letters, at the head of the form on the first page: Lily Potter.

"My mother was one of the subjects?" he asked.

"Your father, also. James Potter's documentation is in the second half." Harry skimmed through the pages while Darcy continued to talk, but he didn't take in any of what he was reading beside the odd phrase, meaningless outside of context. "They were not Ministry employees, which is a tad unusual but not unheard of. There's a letter of recommendation within the file that praises your mother's ability to evaluate the potion quite vehemently."

Harry looked up at her, and she told him, "It's the last attached page." Harry jumped to the final page and started to read through the letter, then skimmed past the dry official tone that most communication to the Ministry had, and finally skipped straight to the signature at the end. He was unprepared for the name scratched down by a hurried hand; he felt a strange sense of being transported to a point far back in the past, similar to the vision he'd experienced in Tom Riddle's diary. The letter had been written by Severus Snape.

Darcy, meanwhile, continued with the recount of her timeline. "There's four months of statements and evaluations of Felix Felicis there from the Potters, from August of 1979 to November. The trial was meant to have lasted half a year. As far as official records of the trials go, a month's worth of the potion is unaccounted for in the possession of the Potters, and the final month's dosage was never delivered."

"How come?" Harry asked, but he thought he knew the answer.

"During the year of 1980, the Ministry had other concerns beyond completing results of potion trials, even for one that might be incredibly important in the months to come. Even though the trials were technically incomplete, the Ministry approved Felix Felicis for use, with the explicit instructions it was to be used sparingly and within the wizard's better judgement. What Lily and James Potter did with their sample batch was unimportant, compared to getting enough of the potion ready in time for what seemed like an inevitable civil war." Her voice rose a little on the last, like she didn't quite believe this statement fully.

"Against the Death Eaters, you mean," Harry said. "Against Tom Riddle."

"Yes, that," she agreed, seeming as if she wanted to gloss over the subject of the Dark Lord. "There were those in the Ministry that felt it was dangerous to have the potion available at all – what if too much of it went to rogues within the Ministry, could the Death Eaters reverse-engineer the recipe - the typical worry that came with the paranoia at that time. It was still distributed, but that's the unimportant part."

"So what's the important part?" asked Harry, his mind still stuck on Snape's signature.

"The missing test batch. It was during this time James and Lily Potter disappear from all official records – aren't even on the map, so to speak – and only reappear on October 31st, 1981, following the night at Godric's Hollow. I have some statements I'd like to read you, if you don't mind." Harry gestured for her to continue, and she sorted through her papers again. When she read from them, her voice was in the monotone of someone reading aloud, yet it held a strange conviction to it.

"'I was never Chosen, is the biggest misconception. I think I'm pretty ordinary, honestly. Ordinary and lucky.' You said this in an interview with The Truth, an independent publication produced by a Luna Lovegood, in the fourth issue, published in April of 2002. From the Daily Prophet in 1998, following the defeat of Tom Riddle, multiple eyewitness accounts have you seemingly returning from the dead. The article proclaims you as the 'luckiest wizard alive'. From a character interview I conducted in February of this year with a Zacharias Smith, former student of Hogwarts and former member of Dumbledore's Army, 'He said himself it was luck the Dark Lord didn't kill him. Not skill. Luck.' He was referring to an incident-"

"I know what he was referring to," Harry said, cutting her off, "But I don't see what-"

"My theory is, Harry, that your mother used one or both of the remaining doses of Felix Felicis at some point during the period of October of 1979 and July of 1980, and the effects of the potion have remained with her child through his life."

Harry searched for the words to refute this and couldn't find them. It had a compelling logic to it – how many times had he been in the right place at the right time? How many things that could have gone wrong, and left him injured or dead or worse, had not? The Tri-Wizard Tournament... passing the defences guarding the Philosopher's Stone... Draco accidentally mastering the Elder Wand... just how blessed had his whole life been?

Darcy sat in one of the chairs that faced the couch, tucked her papers into the leather folder, and took her glasses off and held them in one hand. "Do you know why Felix Felicis is a restricted substance, Harry?" she asked.

"Overdoses are dangerous," he said by rote, remembering how Professor Slughorn had described the potion. "Too much of it makes you reckless."

"That's an adequate answer, but not an entirely complete one. Prolonged use of the potion can induce recklessness and poor judgement, yes, but it's also more likely to attract bad luck to the user. The potion tries to maintain some manner of equilibrium by bringing about misfortunes to be avoided with the good luck it grants. It's like being cursed. There were many cases of it after Felix Felicis was approved in 1980, but it was never viewed as a serious flaw in the potion since the nature of the problem was self-correcting."

"Self-correcting? You mean the good luck and bad luck would just... run out eventually?"

"In a manner of speaking," Darcy said, and she would not meet Harry's eyes. "The good luck would run out, anyway. All the wizards that overdosed on the potion died in incredibly unlucky circumstances. After that, the Ministry's limitations on the use of the potion were taken quite seriously." She put her glasses back on, and her expression was unreadable when she spoke again. "So what would it be like, to be in that overdosed state?"

"Like the world was trying to kill you, but you'd just manage to escape every time," Harry said. "It would be like..." He trailed off as he realised he was describing a large portion of his own life. Darcy looked at him like she could read his mind.

"I have another theory," she said after a moment's pause, "and it relates to the possibility that this state can be overcome if a catalyst of some epic proportion is introduced. Theoretically, if this catalyst fails to kill one who has overdosed on Felix Felicis, they may be free of the negative side-effects."

"You're talking about Voldemort," Harry said, and she nodded curtly.

"I would like to try some tests on you; some that were used in the testing phase of the potion and a couple that are of my own design. I'm unsure of the relationship between the overdose state and the catalyst, or even if there is one at all. It could be that you still have the potential for uncommon luck with you, and that it's lying dormant, or it could have faded completely after overcoming a sufficiently dangerous and persistent threat. It could even be that the catalyst is something caused by the overdose itself." This last statement sounded slightly ominous to Harry, and Darcy added after a brief pause of consideration, "But this part of the theory isn't terribly likely. I would like to administer these tests as soon as possible. Do you have anything pressing happening tomorrow evening?"

Harry replied that he did not, and they arranged to meet here after he was through with work the following day. Harry Apparated back to the Burrow into a much calmer atmosphere than it had been in when he left, and while that went a long way to relax him, it couldn't completely shake from his mind the idea that Severus Snape might have tried to protect his mother with the Felix Felicis potion, and that this one action may have guided his whole life.