Prologue: The Girl Who Lived
That the Ministry had changed in the years since one Mr. Harry Potter had taken up working within its halls was evident, but there persisted certain aspects of its chilling non euclidean architecture that gave even Mr. Potter's office an unnerving aura during the evenings. Photographs of his wife and children,strategically strewn across the room, and a roaring fire did their best to alter this and make his office feel a little like a home. Yet, the slightly acute angles where the walls met the floor and the apparent stretching of the room as one walked from one corner to another were enough to get to even Mr. Potter in the hours of the late evening.
Since becoming the head of the Auror Office, Mr. Potter's late evenings became ever more common. No longer was he a cog, albeit an important cog, in a machine. Now, many lives were at stake with each mission he planned. Teams of wizards worked under him, executed the orders given by him, and lived and died by the operations planned by him..
Where once Mr. Potter had hated typing up every minor detail in his mission reports, now he found every report submitted by his subordinates an invaluable tool in planning the next operation. If reading over those documents meant that even one life could be saved with better planning in the next operation, then he felt his long evenings would be worth it.
This evening, sitting in the glow of the orange fireplace, Mr. Potter had no mission reports to read. Instead, he waited for the return of a team he had sent to secure a wizard who had been in hiding for some time.
The wait felt like hours, and the youthful wizard wished that he could be taking part in the capture of the hiding Death Eater.
What had Rabastan Lestrange been up too since escaping at the climax of the Battle of Hogwarts?
By all reports he had been living the distinctly non-magical life of a Scottish fisherman. Yet, the evil of the man's past deeds made the notion that he could simply give up on all that and establish a family, with a muggle woman no less, seem impossible. It seemed antithetical to the path that most of the escaped Death Eaters had taken.
Unlike after Voldemort's first fall, there were no pretensions that their dark lord would ever return. Many of those that escaped held up in holes plotting their revenge or attempted to go out in a blaze of glory that cost the lives of a great many good wizards and witches.
But here was Rabastan, living a life that seemed to have no relation to his old one. He was Albert Florence, owner of a small fleet of three fishing boats, a husband, and a father. The idea of it made Mr. Potter anxious, suspicious, and altogether unnerved.
How could a monster so committed to his master's cause that he would take part in the brutal torture of Alice and Frank Longbottom, establish a life without magic?
As Mr. Potter tried to put together a narrative for Rabastan's life in hiding, the lopsided, but semi-frantic clap of shoes against the the stone floor in the hallway just outside of his office, alerted Mr. Potter to the return of the wizard he had tasked to head the operation.
Thud! Thud! Came a powerful knocking at Mr. Potter's door which confirmed what he had already guessed.
"Come in."
Slowly the great oaken door creaked open and Neville Longbottom entered the room, his robes tattered and dirtied, fresh cuts littered his arms and cheeks, and a hole near is calf revealed a great deal of crusted blood on his leg.
"Are you-" Mr. Potter started before being cut off by Neville raising his hand.
"I'll live. Leg's a bit banged up, but it's not serious."Neville said with a huff.
"And the rest of the team?"
"Sally's got pretty bad burns all along her right arm, and Bernard lost a finger, but the rest of us are only dealing with superficial wounds."
"And Lestrange?" Mr. Potter asked as he leaned forward in his rocking chair.
Whatever sense of relief over having survived the ordeal appeared to vanish from Neville's face.
"He refused to surrender. Said he wouldn't go back. In the battle his house caught on fire." He paused and looked down before continuing," He... He and his wife were trapped in the blaze."
"So he's dead."
Neville's face contorted with criticality as he looked upon Mr. Potter's face, illuminated only by the flickering of the firelight.
"He's dead, his wife is dead, and my leg is in the state it is because I ran into that building when I heard his little girl crying."
"I'm sorry about your leg, but-" Mr. Potter started before again being cut off by Neville.
"I'm not asking for your sympathy. I'm wondering why news of the death of his wife and the traumatizing of a five year old girl isn't showing up on your face? Harry, we're doing this because we're supposed to be making the world a better place, but what I saw tonight and what I'm seeing from you, makes me wonder if that's still the case."
"It's a tragedy, what happened tonight, Neville. You can be sure of that, but Rabastan was a monster. When we found out his location something had to be done."
"Did it?" Neville challenged.
"How can you ask that after everything he's put you through?" came an indignant reply that Mr. Potter regretted almost immediately.
"This isn't about me Harry. This isn't about revenge. I thought you knew that, but I guess I thought wrong. This is about the five year old girl sitting in the hallway, so traumatized by what she saw tonight that she's not even crying!" Neville bellowed. It had been a long time since Mr. Potter had seen his old friend get so worked up and angry at him.
"All those reports about Lestrange's secret basement that he'd built. Do you know what we found after we cleared away the rubble and ash to examine it?"
Mr. Potter couldn't reply, Neville's force and presence in the room seemed to have sucked out all the oxygen in it.
"We found cured fish, Harry. The basement was where he was curing fish."
"What were we supposed to do, Neville? Ignore him, let a Death Eater responsible for numerous acts of murder, torture, and terrorism go because he decided to play house? He was a monster and as tragic as it is that this led to the death of his wife we had to do something."
"But did we have to do this?" came a biting response from Neville.
Shaking his head, Neville took a deep breath before speaking again.
"I'd like to tender my resignation, Harry."
"What?" the suddenness of it catching Mr. Potter off guard.
"This isn't me, Harry. I'm not a dark wizard hunter, and I never really have been. So this is me doing something I need to do. If I was a courageous man I'd take that little girl with me and try and help her make something of this tattered life of hers. But I'm not."- Neville brushed his eyes with his tattered sleeves to fight back tears.- "I'm a coward, Harry, and I'm absolutely terrified of going back out there and seeing that girl even just one more time. I'm terrified of being that girl's Barty Crouch or Rabastan Lestrange. If by some miracle I'm neither of those things to that girl, then I'll count myself lucky and be incredibly thankful for getting out before I became those things for someone."
With that Neville placed his documentation as an Auror on Mr. Potter's desk and made his way to the door.
"I'm gonna send that girl in here after me, Harry. I'm gonna do it because even after all of this, I still believe in Harry Potter and I believe that you're courageous."
With that, Neville left Mr. Potter's office one final time and after a brief exchange in the hallway a small girl entered the dimly lit room.
The grime of ash was incredibly noticeable against her pale skin, her long wavy reddish-blonde locks were a mess that smelled of burnt hair, and the original color of her nightgown was impossible to know at this point. She was, to put it into words, a mess.
Despite her exterior, she was calm and quiet and simply looked up at Mr. Potter with her deep green eyes.
"Are you alright?" he asked, not sure if he expected a response.
"Could I read one of your books?" the girl replied, a dirty outstretched finger pointing past Mr. Potter towards his large collection of writings on tactical magical operations, histories of dark wizards, and the criminal underground.
Mr. Potter glanced at the shelf and then glanced back at the girl before nodding in agreement.
"We'll have to clean up those hands, but then yes. You may read a book"
Mr. Potter wasn't about to give the girl a 500 page book on the histories of dark wizards, but he was a father and as luck would have it he had a story filled with fables that he'd picked up recently with the intent of giving it to his eldest boy.
Save for the the dropping off of several mission reports on the occurrences at the Lestrange residence, the remainder of the evening was almost silent. Only the turning of pages as the young girl read and the scribbling of Mr. Potter's pen as he wrote his own report to be sent farther up the chain of command kept to room from falling into total silence.
As the hour stuck twelve, Mr. Potter looked to the little girl who would be in his care until a proper foster family could be secured for her. She had finally stopped reading ,and now her cheek rested against the pages of the large story book.
Mr. Potter's arrival at his home with the small girl at his side went unnoticed as it appeared that his family was asleep; as they normally were when he arrived in the dead of night.
Looking down at the little girl, Mr. Potter spoke in a hushed but reassuring voice.
"We've got the be quiet. Don't want to wake anyone."
The girl nodded in agreement, but said nothing.
"Come along, I've got a bed in my study you can use."
Mr. Potter's late night arrivals had become so common that the bed in his study had been an addition made to keep him from waking his wife up in the early hours of the morning.
Navigating the corridors of the house in the dark was a difficult task, made all the more tough by the presence of James' toys strewn across the floor.
When the two arrived at the door to his study, Mr. Potter found the light on and the door slightly ajar. Sleeping in his father's reading chair, with a book on the founders of the great houses of Hogwarts resting on his lap was Albus Potter.
The creaking of the door did not awaken the sleeping boy, and Mr. Potter had hoped to keep from stirring him from his slumber, but before he could do anything, the young girl made her way from Mr. Potter's side to the boy in the chair and took the big book from his lap.
The removal of the book brought the groggy Albus back to the waking world and suddenly seeing a girl he'd never met before sent his half closed eyes wide with inquisitiveness and excitement.
"Who are you?!" he asked in a voice that wasn't yet a yell, but was certainly too loud to be using at 1:30 in the morning.
The small girl brought her index finger up to her lips and in a hushed voice responded, " My name's Delphi, what's your's?"
...
Delphini's stay at 12 Grimmauld Place had turned from a planned couple of days to a week, to two, and then in the blink of an eye a month and a half had passed. The task of finding a foster family for the daughter of a notorious Death Eater had proved to be an unrewarding and difficult one. It didn't matter that the girl was five and had no idea what or who her father used to be. When families heard the name Lestrange tagged on at the end they suddenly found themselves unable to take in a child. If a proper foster family was not found soon the Ministry would take the girl and she would be placed in an orphanage as a ward of the state.
In the month following Neville's resignation from his post, Mr. Potter had been forced to examine himself in a way he hadn't done in some time. After the Battle of Hogwarts the war hadn't ended and people kept dying, and they kept dying, in part, because of him. People had died because he'd been too cavalier, people had died because he wasn't cavalier enough, people had died because he sent them into situations he didn't fully understand, and now people had died because he didn't want anymore of his people to die.
His people.
How could he have allowed himself to start thinking in such an us versus them mentality? When did his office in the Ministry become a fortress under siege?
The murmurs of children brought Mr. Potter out of his head and back to his study.
The library in Mr. Potter's study had been a place of solitude for some time. James was fond of the stories in the books, but the six year old wasn't particularly adept at reading them and showed little interest in trying to, but Albus, despite being largely unable to read anything more than the most rudimentary of sentences had started to find himself in the library more and more often. Generally the 4 year old boy just looked at the moving pictures in the books and asked his father or mother about them. That was before the girl had arrived though.
Now, whenever Mr. Potter was in his study, Albus and Delphini were there as well. The girl threw herself into reading, something that Mr. Potter, as an orphan himself, understood all too well and a factor that only caused him to feel the shame and regret of his decision more everyday.
Gazing up from the Daily Prophet he looked at the pair that had become fast friends. Albus tugged at the older girl's sleeve and asked what a word was and Delphini tried to the best of her ability to describe it.
The girl didn't know that Mr. Potter was the man responsible for the death of her family, for her being an orphan, or for the cutting of her long strawberry blonde hair to remove the burnt edges. He stared at the girl intently and wondered whether he should tell her. He'd asked her if she understood what had happened to her parents, and she had responded.
"Papa started a fire again, but this time the firemen didn't arrive in time to put it out."
Mr. Potter had come to learn that Rabastan had not fully adjusted to his life in hiding and had slipped into alcoholism and was prone to fits of rage, or as the girl had put it, "Papa got mad a lot".
There was no solace for Mr. Potter in finding out that Rabanstan was a drunk with anger issues. His prior misdeeds and his alcoholism were neither his wife's crimes nor were they his daughter's and if anything this new information cast them as victims of Rabastan.
The two children read and talked and read and talked, and Mr. Potter watched and began to ask himself, "What would I have done for a friend like that?"
Would life under the stair have been more bearable if Dudley had truly been his friend from the start?
Perhaps 12 Grimmauld Place was the home the girl needed. He'd have to discuss it with Ginny, but they could take the girl in and give her a home. Harry could take a step towards trying to make up for the mistake he had made.
A delicate knocking came from the door and Ginny popped her head into the room.
"Harry, Eustace from the office is here. I told him about the study, so he's waiting by the fire place to speak with you."
Eustace McDermott was a gangly wizard in his mid forties, who, according to office gossip had started to lose his hair when he was a only few year younger than Mr. Potter.
Eustace stood anxiously by the mouth of the fireplace, dusting off left over floo powder from his tweed jacket. When Mr. Potter reached out to greet him, Eustace furiously shook his hand. With a nervous smile on his face, Eustace began to speak.
"I'm so sorry it took me so long, Mr. Potter, sir, but I've finally done it."
"Done what?"
"Why find a place for the Lestrange girl, of course."
"Oh" responded Mr. Potter with a great deal of uncertainty in his voice.
"Are you sure? Do they know who her father is?"
"They know and they don't care." Eustace excitedly replied.
"They are a pair of muggle born's who recently had their only child graduate from Hogwarts. The combination of empty nest syndrome and their desire to help someone in their time of need makes them perfect."
"But do they know how to raise a child?"
"I could have sworn I said that they just had a child graduate from Hogwarts?"
"Well yes, you did, but I mean, do they know how to deal with a child who has faced trauma."
"Does anyone really know, sir? Mr. Potter, I'm telling yeh, these folks are the best bet we've got of givin' this girl a real life. It's either them or the Ministry puts her in an orphanage."
"Ginny and I could take her." Mr. Potter blurted out.
"Bless your heart, sir. Honestly, bless your heart. But what happens when she find out? I mean, I think what was done was what needed to be done, but that girl will find out that it was the Ministry that done her Pa in and accidentally done her Ma in. I can't imagine what it'll mean to a girl to find out she's livin' in the house of the man that signed the order. No offence meant, sir."
Eustace was right. Or at least Mr. Potter thought he was right. He didn't want him to be right, but he remembered his own rage towards Sirus when he'd thought that he betrayed his parents and he came to the conclusion that Delphi would be better off far away from the man who murdered her family.
With a sigh, Mr. Potter finally spoke, "Thank you Eustace. I know this must have meant a lot of overtime for you. I'll get everything with Delphi in order and take her to her new family."
"Alrighty, sir. Here's their name and address, sir. Best of luck to you, sir."
And with that the gangly middle aged man stepped into the empty fire place and vanished in green fire, leaving Harry alone.
...
First, Last, and Only author's notes: Okay, let's get this over with. I don't own the setting or the characters. I loved the original Harry Potter series as a kid and I liked some ideas in Cursed Child, but I disliked a great deal of the finished product. This isn't me pretending that I can do better than two real writers with a great deal of accomplishments behind their names, this is me having fun in the sandbox that J.K. Rowling created because I'm a hack who can't create my own setting and is forced to use existing settings from writers who are far better than I will ever be. Warning for anyone who just wants to read about the original trio, there presence is minimal in the story. Instead you will be suffering through lot's of OC and OOC in regards to the characters heavily featured in Cursed Child. Beispielsweise, my version of Delphini is only tangentially connected to Tom Riddle. If she's going to be the next great Dark Wizard (which I'm not saying she will be) I want her to stand on her own, I want her to be as independent of Riddle as Riddle was of Grindelwald.