Professor Burbage and the Great Do-Over

Disclaimer: I do not own the Harry Potter series, the characters of the series... or anything really.

What Manner of Afterlife Was This?

As the flash of green light, the Killing Curse, burned itself into her retinas, her body seized up, and then she knew no more.

Amid pin drop silence, the broken body of the Muggle Studies professor fell.

"Charity… Charity… Wake up, Charity!"

Professor Burbage's eyes snapped open. "Wha- what?!" she blearily stared around the compartment. The gentle vibration of the moving train seemed to lull her back to sleep. Then her eyes landed on a young girl wearing threadbare but clean deep blue robes seated across from her. She seemed terribly familiar but Charity for the life of her couldn't place her. Light brown skin and chin length blonde hair was all she could make out, as the girl was engrossed in pulling out a long black material from a battered trunk and her hair obscured her face. With a triumphant "hah!" she managed to free the material, and upon unfurling it Charity saw it was a Hogwarts robe, complete with green Slytherin badge. The robe was lowered and Charity finally saw the face of her companion.

Charity's chest grew tight, the oxygen refusing to enter her lungs no matter how hard she panted. "Fi – Fideline?" she gasped, almost scaring herself with how high her voice went.

Charity is dead… isn't she? The green light of the Aveda Kadevra was not something she was likely to forget. But if she was dead, why was she here? Why was her sister here?

And where is here?

"Where are we?" she asked Fideline, and winced somewhat as the older girl grimaced as if her question was the stupidest thing she had ever heard.

"We're on the Hogwarts Express!" her sister exclaimed, waving a hand around the compartment. At Charity's bewildered expression she added, "The train to Hogwarts? You know, for your first year sorting and all?" Charity blinked. To the extent of her knowledge, which was becoming more and more unsure each second, Fideline had disowned her for wanting to continue her studies in the Muggle world and they had remained estranged for eighteen years. The rumors about what her sister got up to within the magical high society had been all Charity had to go on. She knew her sister had a son but they had never really met – he didn't seem the Muggle tolerant sort.

The girl looked up with the exasperated expression Charity knew so well and hadn't seen for years. "Come on Charity, what's wrong with you?"

Well, for starters, she had just been murdered and her older sister right now looked no older than thirteen or fourteen years old! And she was younger, did that make Charity… ?

She slowly turned and for the first time took a close look at her reflection in the window.

Her jaw dropped. The reflection gaping back at her was definitely of her as an eleven year old.

Her black hair, unruly as Devil's Snare, stood up on end, making up for her short height, and she almost shuddered at the large circle shaped wire framed spectacles perched on her nose. The light brown skin and the chubby cheeks that for the longest time she had disliked while surrounded by the fairer waif-like girls in class. As an adult she had finally got around to buying a potion to fix her shortsightedness – only that potion had been – will be – invented sometime after 1985. Slowly, she looked down herself and saw she was wearing the old light red robes that used to belong to her mother, then to Fideline, and now finally to Charity. She remembered feeling so embarrassed wearing this the first time around… No way… Charity was reeling at the implications – she really was in the past?

Sweet Merlin, what manner of afterlife was this?!

A/N

I have always wanted to write a Harry Potter fanfic and now I finally did it! Charity Burbage had a very short scene in Deathly Hallows and there was virtually no information on what house she may have been in, what year she attended Hogwarts or even family (at least none that I've been able to find). So she's really the perfect character to create an entire backstory for. And hers is going to bend canon into a pretzel.