Chapter One

I'm Who?

They say that when a person laid at death's door, their life would flash before their eyes. They would think of all the ugly and wonderful things that led them to the present, and with one final sigh, then they would depart the world, moving on to the great unknown.

Whoever started that nonsense deserved a nice, hard shove off a cliff.

This was Taylor's first thought as she finally came to, the memory of her death burning sharply in her mind. A Saturday evening, a bombing incident, an impromptu burial courtesy of fallen debris… pffft. No. There was definitely nothing poetic about the whole thing.

It couldn't be, when even her final moments were spent flitting from one unintelligible thought to another, not going through a lifetime's amount of flashbacks that could out-cliche the biggest of cliches—

Wait.

Wait.

Here she was, going off on a tangent about the inaccuracies of death, and she didn't even consider how she was still around to do exactly that. Weren't dead people supposed to be more interested in pearly gates, long queues, and bearded men who stood ready to judge them? Where was her pearly gate, long queue, and bearded man?

Something's wrong. She let her scattered thoughts settle further. Until she became whole, until her sense of self truly returned.

…

Okay, perhaps that sounded too dramatic, but she did feel better in the end.

Anyway.

Judging from the way she wasn't choking from the air she breathed and the way she was able to shift her limbs without resistance, she was no longer trapped underneath several pieces of broken concrete. Let alone impaled. The numbness that she'd become intimately familiar with was also gone, if that brief flare of pain from pinching her stomach was of any indication (ouch), and... yes. She was back to being a functioning, rational human being instead of a gibbering lunatic in her death throes.

(God. Never again.)

However, despite the overwhelming relief of no longer being in danger, she had to wonder:

Did any of it happen at all?

Hm. Hmm. Well, she'd died, or at least she thought she had until she was suddenly breathing again, so—yes. Probably? That didn't really explain the inky black surroundings, though. Was this limbo, then? The In-Between, purgatory, whatever people these days fancied calling it? Strange that she'd be stuck there, lying down.

Oh. Wait. Never mind. She was just experiencing the sort of blackness that came with shut eyelids. Thank goodness for fingers. And the sense of touch. Not so much for the brain that was still playing catch up, though.

Anyway, speaking of which.

She opened her eyes. She blinked, adjusting to the blinding, wince-inducing light. She…

Was pretty sure her world—and her stomach—had now performed a flip so ungraceful that gymnasts everywhere would double over in laughter. If they didn't cry first.

Pastel-coloured walls. Toys of all shapes and sizes, warring for space atop floating shelves, tables, cabinets, and the floor. Long, white bars that partially obscured her vision and surrounded her like jail cells, and overhead, a mobile that swayed gently against the breeze that blew from the only window in the room.

That's funny; this place looked less a hospital room and more like a nursery. In fact, taking into account where she laid and what was around her, which included a very comfortable blanket draped over her waist, she could almost swear up and down that she was…

She was…

Uh-oh.

Eyes widening like the china she'd sent spinning into the air a lifetime ago (for the hell of it and, okay, she was pissed at the time), she sat up with a jolt.

Well, not really. Her head weighed like a sack of wet cotton for some reason. She'd instead ended up lifting her body an inch before crashing down in exhaustion… which wouldn't do. Damn. Next best thing then.

She proceeded to wave a hand in front of her eyes—while wondering why her arm felt like it was made of jelly—

And let out what sounded like a cross between a squeaky toy and a choked hen.

Her hand. Her hand. It was small and chubby and pale. Not tan, not bony, and most especially not the size of a tarantula. Roughly speaking. And adding that discovery to the strange equation that she'd been computing since her regained consciousness…

Oh, God. It was all starting to make sense now.

Her breaths now came in quick huffs. Suddenly, being a teenager trapped underneath a collapsed building and waiting for a rescue team became a more appealing alternative. Never mind if the debris pierced through her and rendered her paralyzed from the waist down. It still wouldn't be as horrific as discovering herself as a baby with all the traumatising things that came with the package.

However, just as she was about to wish with all her might that this was just a really, really nasty dream, that this was not her current reality and she was instead being rushed to a hospital somewhere as we speak, the door opened with a faint click.

The next thing she knew, a blond, smiling woman was peering over the edge of her crib.

That was to say, a woman who should not be thin yet ten times her size. Or sport a smile so wide that Taylor's own cheeks hurt. Her eyes might as well pop out of their sockets at this point, too.

The woman bent down and reached for her, and her eyes grew even wider.

You know what? Forget it. Every limb in her body should pop off like a mangled doll right now. Because if the way the woman cradled her—and another baby that lay at the other end of the crib, apparently—with zero effort didn't undo her very being, her next words did.

"It's amazing how quickly times flies, isn't it? My sweet, sweet Dudders and Daisykins, both turning one in two months' time—"

She stopped paying the woman any further attention after that, and she didn't just do so purely out of disgust at the awful nicknames. Instead, she converted all the shock and awe brimming inside of her into something not quite tangible, but certainly more pronounceable. Something that only a person in her unique situation could portray.

Something that proved to be quite the stress-reliever, if only because she passed out soon after.

She threw the biggest tantrum in the history of humankind.

Well, sort of. She was pretty sure something cracked in the process, though.

Taylor, dubbed Daisy now and forevermore, amen, wasn't quite sure if the seven stages of grief also applied to reincarnated teenagers. Six months seemed too quick a time to cycle through all of them, and, well, technically speaking, she didn't lose anyone but her past self (her foster family—Fifth? …Sixth?—could go screw themselves, and what little friends she had were pricks whose antics she went along with for diplomacy's sake).

She'd gone through the motions, though, so perhaps they did? That roller coaster of emotions was no lie.

Hm.

Shock or disbelief: see experience above of waking up as a baby.

Denial: spending days pinching herself in the hopes that she'd wake up in a hospital room with a vase of flowers on the bedside table, preferably sent by her crush from History class. Also, just in case Option A was too mild, making an attempt or two of dropping herself on the head.

Said attempt was put to a quick halt after she was caught in the act, though. By the next day, the entire floor of the nursery became cushioned with pillows.

Damn it.

Anger: tantrums, and quite a lot of them. Anger at herself for frolicking on a Saturday evening instead of grinning and bearing her suffocating family, anger at the madman who decided to bomb the only decent mall in town that didn't choke shoppers with absurd prices, and anger at the world for being cruel enough to allow all of these to happen.

There might have been a broken vase or a window involved; who'd have thought that she had quite the throwing arm?

Bargaining: a sudden belief of a Benevolent Being, hoping day and night that said B.B. would return things to normal in exchange for her being less of a brat and more of a functioning member of society. And maybe being a nicer adopted daughter to her family, if—and only if—they stopped treating her like a sheep constantly lost from the flock.

If she heard any comments about her "lack of direction" one more time…

Aw, darn. She just ruined the bargain, didn't she?

Guilt and depression: skip. No one had time for angst.

…Oh, fine. If she must.

Picture a fourteen-month-old baby being unresponsive to the point that her mum and dad rushed her to the hospital, only to be sent back home because the doctors (whom the parents engaged in an argument so great that history books saw it fit to never mention) found nothing life-threatening. Picture said baby then doing a complete one-eighty in personality out of fear of what other dastardly deeds her parents might resort to.

(Unrelated: her twin brother seemed to have got the idea that she was doing all of this for attention and decided to throw the same tantrums that she'd been throwing. Guess who came out of it spoilt rotten.)

And lastly, acceptance: throwing in the towel because no amount of chaos and self-harm resulted to her world magically reverting to the one that she was used to.

Let's face it. Fighting reality was tiring. It was a waste of time, it was emotionally draining, and quite frankly, she'd rather her second childhood to not be described as a veritable nightmare because that would make for awkward conversations during family reunions. Never underestimate the power of relatives to make a child want the earth to swallow them whole until everything blew over.

Not that it stopped her family from embarrassing her to hell and back.

Huh. It seemed that reincarnated teenagers could, in fact, go through the several stages of grief after all.

Of course, by then, one would wonder what was next for one-year-old Daisy. If the ranting and raving about what-could-have-beens was well and truly over, what now? What would a person such as herself fill her time with?

Knowledge about her new life, that's what. Starting with the name of her parents, and once that's done, the location of the humble abode she now inhabited.

Up next would be the current timeline she was on, because wow the songs on the radio lacked the fast beats that she was used to, and then the appearance that everyone would associate "Daisy" with, and lastly… the identity that she was to develop in this lifetime.

Yup, that sounded about right.

Moping forever didn't seem like the ideal way to live a second life, after all. Best she poured all those extra energy into integrating herself into the society she now lived in instead. Which was exactly what she did as the days and weeks flew past her.

Almost.

But then, the more she managed to learn, the more she wondered about the extent of her situation's oddity. Think about it: it was one thing to have died and be reborn. To suddenly find one's self whisked away from the world, only to be shoved back into it with a new body and a new life.

But to realise that the world she lived in might not be as similar to the one she had a lifetime ago?

To put it most eloquently: ugh.

For example, during the day the family of her father's side came to visit, Daisy had learnt that her parents were named Vernon Dursley and Petunia Dursley.

Yes. Exactly. Dursley.

Imagine the look on her face when she'd realised that her parents—and her brother, by association—were named exactly after several characters from a piece of literature she'd read ages ago. It led to some quiet moments that nearly triggered her parents overprotective tendencies that bordered on hysterical, but she'd quickly recovered and decided not to read too much into it.

There was a reason why authors explicitly stated that any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, were purely coincidental, right?

…Right?

Except that it seemed too coincidental that said Dursleys were also living in the exact location stated in the book: Number 4 Privet Drive. Her eyes had nearly bulged out of their sockets when the large sign with larger black letters came into her periphery during a car trip to London. The bloody thing had taunted her by the swiftness of its passing, and it was only on the return trip that she'd managed to confirm her discovery.

She was pretty sure that the sound she'd heard during that time was that of her suspension of disbelief dying a slow, painful death.

And it only grew worse from there.

First, there was the company her father was a director of, shown to her as a picture of the man himself standing in front of the building, the word "Grunnings" painted in large, yellow letters on the brick wall. Then there was her family's apparent obsession with normality ("Flying cars? What rubbish!"), the way her mother's demeanour grew ice cold upon any mentions of her side of the family, not to mention the way her twin brother grew rounder and rounder by the day…

And then there was…

Oh, good grief.

And then there was the day that cheerfully tipped everything over the edge. Flocks of owls found flying in broad daylight, shooting stars, men and women in cloaks, the one-two punch that left her gasping for air.

At that point, she might as well go through all the seven stages of grief again.

Right as she heard her mother shrieking at the front door below on one November morning, having discovered not an empty doorstep to place her empty milk bottles on, but the baby of the woman whose existence she'd refused to acknowledge. Until today.

Harry James Potter.

The Boy Who Lived.

…

Damn it.

Daisy Dursley, of Number 4 Privet Drive, decided that if anyone needed a proper strangling right this moment, it was the person responsible for the mess that she was thrown into.

A/N: Alright, that was fun. I haven't written anything in a long while, so this was definitely a good way to get things rolling again. This is an SI/OC, as it says on the tin, but I'm looking to at least avoid the usual pitfalls that fics of these sort tend to fall into. Try to, anyway - I doubt I'm that good.

In general, I'm just looking to write something fun that hopefully any random readers would enjoy, too, so please don't hesitate to leave a review/follow/favorite if you liked the story! It definitely helps with the self-esteem. :D