Prologue: Ready or not, the history marches on
Disclaimer: Not mine and I make no profit.
My beta is Mystic 777.
No tyranny has ever succeeded in creating a political system that lasts. It may last the lifetime of man, even several lifetimes, but eventually the time is up for all tyrannical regimes because eventually people have had it with oppression, eventually such regime is no longer able to exercise sovereignty over people without the recourse to violence and that is the beginning of the end.
For a long time the United Earth Sphere Alliance, and the Romefeller Foundation that backed it up, had practiced the tactics of divide and conquer. Enough of its citizens had been well off enough that no global movement for freedom had been formed. But even the politically savviest will make a misstep eventually and now UESA (and Romefeller Foundation with its less than sensible execution of Mathilda Sisulu and incarceration of her disciples) had driven the Colonies, Brazilia and sizable chunks of South Africa Federation and Russia to revolt at the same time. And Sanq, while not fighting, was providing covert humanitarian aid to the rebels.
In an Umoja camp in an Ugandan jungle a woman named Hallow Nguen was sitting on a computer writing a new entry. She had become a war correspondent, writing a blog of the war as she saw it to be uploaded once the net was safe and usable again. She wondered, as she drank a glass of water and wiped sweat off her forehead with a handkerchief, how she had out of blue become what she would call a respectable journalist. Space babies and crop circles were a thing of past and she happily funded the organization. By her side were Matthew Sisulu and Esther Corel.
"The Black family dominates industrial diamond manufacturing sector," Esther told Hallow, looking over her shoulder. "They have been breaking the Quillan act for over twenty years; it's an UESA law that attempts to prevent the artificial raising of prices by restriction of trade or supply. In other words, monopoly by merit is legal, but acts by a monopolist to artificially preserve his status, or nefarious dealings to create a monopoly, are not. Walburga Black unlawfully monopolized the supply of diamonds and conspired to fix, raise and control diamond prices."
"Doesn't the Black Corporation support Oz financially?" Matthew asked.
"Yes," answered Esther. And Hallow let her fingers dance over the keyboard.
As below, so above. In colonies L2 and L4 two scientists were reading highly curious reports from their champions. The civil war in Uganda had spread over to Kenya and Sudan over the course of few hours and their sources on Earth were already reporting withdrawal of resources meant for fight against the colonies; they were needed more acutely in Africa now.
"Hedgehog!" declared a fat man with a receding hairline and a thin, dark moustache he waxed to stand straight out at each end. He sounded rather offended. His assistant, a red-haired woman with a stern face murmured her agreement for all she had no idea what she was agreeing with.
"Gogol's machines? Hmm?" muttered a man with very long nose and a long scar on his cheek. "Why not?" He truly was that eccentric.
And at the heart of this all were two children who claimed to be magical.
Harry Potter-Dursley was an unusual boy. He had lived two lives, that of the Boy Who Lived in another dimension and an ordinary middle class boy in this one. He had saved a real Philosopher's Stone from his undead nemesis and fought a basilisk. He had also helped a Gundam pilot to liberate six people from Oz custody on two different continents. He was aware that many people probably dreamed of life so extraordinary, but, he thought, those people hadn't tried living this kind of life. It was frankly tiring.
It was the way he wasn't allowed to catch his breath and rest at all. The winter of the Great Sirius Black Scare and the Great Pettigrew Reveal, followed immediately by dimensional displacement, then the adventure here that he hadn't minded, honestly, because he had been able to help Luna and Sirius and Quatre and it had kept his mind off things. But now, just when he had returned home and anticipated some peace and downtime he had been yanked into the next misadventure, into more uncertainly and peril and Harry felt like biting his tongue off, that was how annoyed he was at everything.
Fine, so far this new peril hadn't been terribly peril-like. Harry stood in a large room furnished with heavy, dark-coloured, old furniture and stared at the clothes laid out on the bed: a white button-down shirt and a reddish-brown tweed vest, complete with navy blue pinstripe trousers. So those clothes were better than his school uniform, by a small margin – tweed vest! – but he had to admit to being confused. This was the first time the people who had grabbed him had insisted playing dress-up with him and he wasn't entirely sure if he was kidnapped or what.
At least he wasn't arrested. That was good.
He sighed and begun to change. Wearing the silly orange-maroon uniform had done a lot to wean him off of embarrassment and when Harry turned to look at himself from the mirror with gilded frames – it couldn't be real gold, surely – that reached from the floor to the ceiling he felt only mild disconnect. It didn't look a lot like him at all, the boy in the mirror. It was like some other boy, someone who went to Eton or a famous school like that, someone who shot animals from horse's back and knew how to dance with real step patterns. He waved his hand and the boy in the mirror obediently waved back. He was concentrated in the mirror he almost didn't hear when there was a knock on the door. It was two shorts raps, clear, but not too loud.
"Come in," Harry said. The door was pushed open and a black man in a suit stepped in. He looked over Harry from head to toe and nodded.
"Dame Black will meet you now," he said.
"Dame Black owes me an explanation," Harry snarled and pushed behind the man, only then realising that the very satisfying stomping on his way wasn't going to happen because he had no clue where to go. And so he followed the man, glaring daggers at his back the whole way.
Who was this Dame Black? She was related to Sirius, somehow, but Harry had never asked anything about his family in either world. He had thought that he didn't have any, in fact. He hadn't ever thought of Sirius as particularly rich, but when he looked at the place it screamed Old Money loud and clear. The mansion, for it was a mansion, was the same Neo-Gothic style Smeltings was, a graceful blend of stone and metal and glittering glass, of towers and Roman windows and stained glass and sharply defined lines with flat roofs, whole walls of glass. Inside it couldn't have been more different, however. Smeltings was a sunny, modern, light place whereas this Black mansion was very dark with heavy wine red and golden curtains that seemed to overshadow the rooms ever when they were pulled to the side, heavy dark wood furniture with curvy legs and heavy-looking, dark wallpapers. Everything was so clean Harry would have eaten off the floor and everything seemed terribly expensive to him, yet the place seemed also somehow shabby, almost like a haunted house. The frowning paintings of men and women in dark clothes glared at him from the walls and Harry wouldn't have wanted to walk under their gaze in the dark.
But while Harry was nervous and annoyed he was nowhere near as scared and angry as he would have been had the soldiers dragged him off into the car on someone else's orders. This woman had raised Sirius so she might be a bit high-handed and snobby and, apparently, gloomy, but she couldn't be all bad, right?
The room the butler led him to was two stories high and it resembled Harry a bit of Hogwarts' Great Hall, though it was of course a lot smaller and the roof had no sky painted on it. A wide marble stairway led to a gallery circling the room and there were two potter palm trees at the bottom of it, but other than those there was only a long table with so pristine white tablecloth it was almost blinding after all the dimness and the chairs around it. At the head of the table sat a woman, Dame Black. The Butler gave him a polite push to the back and exited the room as Harry walked closer, loath to seem hesitant now.
Dame Black was an elderly woman. Her hair was still long and such shining black Harry though she probably dyed it. Other than two deep wrinkles above her nose her pale face kind of flat and smooth the same way the pictures of models in magazines were smooth after two hours of applying make up and one hour of photoshopping and it looked out of place next to her wrinkled neck. She was a small, frail-looking woman, yet intimidating in that smoothness.
A coat of arms hung on the wall above her back. It was a dark and gloomy thing, with three crows, an arm holding a sword and a skull above it all, and under it read a motto Tojours Pur.
"You, young man, are a descendant of the proud Black line through my aunt Dorea Black who married Charlus Potter," she declared in lieu of greeting. Harry's heart jumped at this and the happiness at these news briefly overcame his anxiety. He was actually related to Sirius too? That was great! But the woman wasn't done yet.
"I am Dame Walburga Black, the head of the family and last living person to carry its name."
"But what about Sirius?" Harry asked, frowning. Now he was sure as sure can be that something wasn't right. And Walburga Black's face distorted into ugly, angry grimace.
"Do not mention that blood traitor in my house! My son has disgraced us all!" Then she inhaled deeply and her face settled back into its neutral mask like a window with shutters on the inside had been closed. Harry bristled inside at her words; they reminded him way too much of the wicked Dursleys. "Please sit down and eat. We have a lot to talk about," she continued like nothing had happened at all.
"Yes, we do. Why did you send your men to grab me like that? I only just returned home after being kidnapped, I missed my family and they missed me," he said loud and clear, making Black smile wryly.
"You appear to have inherited the strong Black spirit. That is good," she commended him and Harry realised that hadn't sounded terribly traumatised. He wondered if it was too late to try shedding a few tears and decided it probably was. So he sat down opposite to Walburga Black, happy it was the seat furthest away from her.
Like there had been a signal – maybe Black had pressed some button – servants came in carrying food trays. The setting in front of Harry was complicated, with two plates on top of each other, folded napkin on top of them and a series of forks on the left side of his plates and a series of spoons and knives on his right. The women in black and white clothes served them appetizers, some kind of bread with walnut-cheese topping and green leaves arranged artistically around them. He picked a random knife and fork from the setting, but at least Black wasn't glaring at him for it.
"Thank you," he told the mousy woman. He was the last person in the world, er, two worlds to be impolite to the people doing the real house work.
"It is important that you understand the role the Ancient and Noble Family of Black plays in the great scheme of things and your place in it," Black started with cold, sharp voice. What I should do, Harry wondered. What would Quatre do?
Quatre would nod and smile and collect information to use later. He would find out what kind of threat this is. Too bad he would also know what order to use the utensils in and I have no clue.
"Shoot," he said and felt a twitch of belligerent satisfaction when Dame Black's mouth twisted into disapproving pout.
"All humans are defined before their birth by the genetic makeup of their parents," she begun and cut a piece of her bread entrée with a delicate flick of wrist. "Some receive good genes, some do not. It is not fair, it is not unfair, it simply is a truth of life."
"And if you happen to get bad luck in the lottery, what then?" Harry asked and his knife cut through the piece of bred under it and scraped against the porcelain with a screech.
"For some to be excellent, many must be undistinguished or even unworthy. Material success and wealth is a sign that you have good genes. We are the Elect who must defend society against the ignorant and the radical rabble."
Harry continued to mechanically put the little bread things to his mouth as he stared at the old woman with something akin to horror. Walburga Black preached of the natural order of rights and distribution of riches and it all came down to Blood; he could practically hear the reverently spoken capital letter. If a family was successful generation after generation, she spoke thus with cultured voice and accent, it was surely a sign of good genetics which became apparent as greater intelligence and initiative than average which allowed those family lines to retain their wealth, and she spouted heaps upon heaps of pseudoscientific notions of familial supremacy and purity. Was this woman actually related to Sirius? She had to be, considering her genetic fanaticism, but if there ever was a mother-son pair that made you suspect adoption… or proved that genetics were much overrated.
Harry was a budding scientist and the shadow of ugly, ugly words hung over the long table, Harry and Walburga much further apart than merely meters, and those words were scientific racism.
"I have no sons left, my sisters both have only one son each and can not spare them. Sirius named you his heir, as much as it pains me to admit this he had the right to do so and you are our Blood. This is why I have decided to adopt you and raise you to become the family heir."
"I already have mum and dad, I don't need and can't be adopted! And I wouldn't want to be adopted by you if I was living in a cupboard under stairs!" So much for nodding and smiling, but seriously, the woman was too much to bear.
"More is at stake here than your childish tantrum, young man, and you would do well to not mouth off at your elders. A Romefeller family is in need of an heir and the position is one such as you should be grateful for. And you will be my son and heir, whether you want or not," she stated primly and what objections Harry had fled his mind when the words Romefeller family sunk into his mind. Romefeller? The same Romefeller that had Corel arrested? Corel had said he had been Black employee, how could Harry have been stupid enough to forget?
And now he was kidnapped by a fascist who believed in domestic eugenics and was part of a group hell bent on world domination. Harry Potter-Dursley was an unusual boy and sadly this was the kind of day that tended to happen to him.
A day had gone by, followed by a serene night. The time was right and she was right.
Harry had called her. He'd had a phone good for two more days and Luna's number, and Luna could speak to Duo. What Harry didn't have was a place to go to. He could have escaped anytime he wanted, wished himself away, but where could he have gone that he wouldn't have been found? Harry had a need for help.
Luna Lovegood was Loony Lovegood, the girl no one had wanted to be friends with because she was too strange even in a society that thrived on strange and mystical. She was also Luna Lovegood whose grandmother didn't need to work for the people who had imprisoned her family anymore because they had been saved by Harry. Right now she was also mildly exasperated at Harry as she wrote with a pen on a green post-it note; he really couldn't stay out of trouble even for a day, could he?
It was an astronaut pen, one of those neat pens you could write with on anything at any angle. Her father had bought her one for her birthday a few years back and she had tested ii upside down, against the ceiling of her room when standing on a chair (success), underwater in the bathtub (success) and on butter (success, though her mother had been mad). Luna wondered what had happened to her pen. She would have liked taking this one, but it would have been mean and she didn't like being mean. People had been mean enough to her after all.
She was still onboard Anna the Atrocious Appaloosa, but it was nearing the port of Marsa Matrouh where a contact of Duo's was supposed to take her to the local Sweeper base, from where she would be relocated to L4 at the first chance. But Luna's work wasn't done yet and so she wrote an explanation.
I am sorry, but Harry is in trouble and needs me. Tell mum and dad and grandmum to not worry too much, I will come home after I have saved Harry. Lots of love and oceans of kisses, Luna L. She had wanted to sign it with her magical girl name, but no secret identity would remain secret for long if revealed so whimsically.
She had been given a back bag, a huge, army green thing one of the Sweepers had donated, and she had packed cup noodles, hard bread and canned fruits, without forgetting the can opener. She would have liked to take some mincemeat for Edgar, but it wouldn't age well in the heat so he would have to do with bread for a little while. Her meager change of clothes, tooth brush, comb and a bar of soap went in next and then she lifted the bag to her back, brushing her hair from obfuscating her vision. The sun was setting fast under the horizon as a fiery red sunfall, painting the sea and the sky as bloody-fiery-rosy as yesterday morning had been, and the whole world was at her feet. The ship was about to dock and Luna climbed to the railing, spreading her arms.
It was a state of mind, like all she did. She could not force, could not bulldoze through things like distance and gravity and a gram of fine bone china in her hand, not like Harry could, but when the moment was right and she was right she could make wonders happen. She filled her lungs with air that smelled like sea and smoke and hot sand and freedom. Like a nightingale, like an oriole, like a child sprinkled with pixie dust (not real pixie, no, but the pixie dust from the book) Luna flew away, just like she had promised Harry she could for him, she would for him.
Luna Lovegood was an unusual girl. For one she was magical girl Final Nargle Invoker Luna and with Edgar the Magical Hedgehog she was on her first mission; to rescue Harry Potter-Dursley!
AN: And so begins Black Magic. You can choose your friends, but Blood you are stuck with as Harry is about to discover.
If someone would be willing to beta my work I would be very grateful; my English is quite fluent, but I am NOT a native speaker.