AN: It's my birthday! so I'm posting three fics to celebrate. Check my profile for the others. a quick note, this fic is not a Harry/oc fic, or a love triangle, if you look at the pairing tag, but I do have Plans. Any romance in the future is going to be buried under several layers of slowburn, stupidity and humor, but it'll be there, eventually. Let's just see how far this goes, shall we?

Word count: 4,136

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Chapter One - The Queen Of France Does Not Get Beheaded

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On days like Dudley's birthday, Harry was given a list of things to do and what not to do; told very clearly by the Dursleys that if he broke one of those rules, or interrupted Dudley's big day with any funny business, he would pay for it dearly.

And of course that meant anything and everything to do with the many unexplained and numerous things that happened around Harry James Potter.

It wasn't a really complicated list—and it wasn't anything different from any of the other rules the Dursleys gave him, no less arbitrary or confusing than any other day of the week. It was the expectation on that particular day that meant Harry had to follow along, otherwise he'd be shut in the cupboard under the stairs and left to suffer the sounds of an obnoxiously loud birthday party while he sat in the dark, alone.

If it weren't for the fact that aunt Petunia watched him like a hawk, and uncle Vernon's temper was on a hare trigger today, he could probably get away with a couple moments to himself. As it was, he had been woken up early in the morning and was cooking them breakfast, two hours before Dudders would probably even roll out of bed.

Today was a special occasion though, even more special than last year or the year before (or so aunt Petunia had said, many times, and would say many more). Today was Dudley's tenth birthday, which apparently meant a great deal to them, and also meant unlawful suffering for Harry the entire month as the date grew closer.

"The eggs better not be black when I dig into them, boy," Vernon warned, eyeing Harry as he set down his plate.

Harry padded back to the kitchen before he'd get yelled at for loitering, another few eggs still cooking on the burner. He stifled a yawn as he picked up the spatula, and rubbed his eyes. It far too early in the morning for this.

For a moment, the room was quiet, other than the sounds of Vernon digging into his food and the general russleing from his morning paper, but as Petunia came downstairs and the TV switched on, that silence was broken. Vernon grunted loudly. "I'm missing something."

"Right, sorry." Harry reached up into the top cabinet to grab a cup for his coffee. The top shelf was pretty high up there, and is arms were just a tad too short, but Harry was sure that if he reached hard enough…

The nearest cup wobbled towards on its own, nearing his fingers, ever so close...

"What did we tell you?!"

Petunia pinched his ear and yanked, catching him just before he managed to grasp the cup, and it fell to the floor in pieces. She took a swift step back, dragging Harry with him, and ignored the popping bacon on the stove and Vernon's angry rumbles in favor of chewing Harry out.

"Of all the days today, you had to pick this one to be a nuisance? We can't ask for a single day without you and your—your—" she spluttered, letting go of Harry's ear as if he burned her. Her expression was pinched, and her eyes narrowed into slits. She gestured to the floor. "Pick it up before you break something else!"

"Yes aunt Petunia." He watched her stride into the dining room as he picked up the broken china, and tried to drown out the sound of uncle Vernon calling him a no-good freakish nightmare, in favor of doing what they wanted so he could get out of there sooner rather than later.

"—and watch the stove, boy!"

Vernon's face was quickly approaching a shade of light purple as the eggs sizzled, and the air smells slightly of burnt plastic. Harry stood up with a jolt, only to be pushed aside by Petunia after she had dubbed him too much of a liability to cook anymore.

"If our Dudley's day is ruined, after all those days of planning and organizing… you'll be paying for it dearly." Petunia warned, spatula in hand as she viciously unstuck the bacon seared to the metal.

Petunia passed Vernon a fresh mug and filled it coffee as they decided what to do with him. "The party's at noon, we cant put him in the cupboard, what will the other parents think? What if he makes a noise? No, there's got to be something—"

"He wouldn't dare make a fuss," Vernon threatened, eyes boring into his. "Isn't that right?"

"Right," Harry repeated, if only to end this interaction and hopefully minimize whatever it was they were planning for him. Really, Harry would take anything other than being here, in this moment, with the shards of a broken mug still in his hands, painting him like the degenerate, no good in-law he seemed to be.

Petunia flipped a fat piece of bacon, and it popped in the grease and oil. "There's always the sitter…"

Harry repressed a shudder at the thought of being left at the neighbors if he was also facing the prospect of solitary confinement, being tended to by one of the old women down the street, with too many cats and a just as equally bizarre mannerisms as the Dursleys, was something to be desired. No, cupboard time was much preferred.

"Mummy!" Cried Dudley's voice from upstairs, prompting Petunia to abandon her breakfast in favor of soothing the birthday boy, who had been woken up by all the shouting.

Harry dumped the broken pieces of the mug into the trash and moved to turn down the stove so the house didn't burn down. Truthfully, it would have saved him quite the hassle, but Harry knew somehow that it'd be blamed on him, and he didn't want to think about whatever punishment the Dursleys would come up with if that was the case. Though, from the look on uncle Vernon's face as he watched Harry from the dining room table, whatever was going on in his head wasn't pretty, and all he had done so far was break a mug and forget his coffee.

Somehow, he should have expected his newest task to be weeding the garden, in the rain, while they set up party decorations, but Harry was beyond being surprised by this point and rolled with it. At the very least, it meant he had a moment to himself, and wouldn't have to be in the same room as them.

But then again, it was raining, and Petunia was very particular about the state of her garden, and the last time she had instructed him to look after her rose bushes, he hadn't gotten dinner for a week because he accidentally taken off a bit too much off the top. This time however, he was intent on doing the bare minimum, a passing grade, just barely enough so that he wouldn't end up starving into nothingness like last time.

The awning provided little protection against the rain, and he heard the first partygoers pull up on the other side of the house. Harry wondered if this was just going to be is life now, until forever. Surely until he hit eighteen, and was an adult himself, but the idea of living under the Dursleys rule for so long sent a shiver through Harry's frame, that no rain or cold could beat.

He shook it off, however, and burned his hands in the dirt, picking away weeds and tossing them to the side. There were a dozen other garden pots littered throughout the backyard, and the job seemed endless, stretching into a miserable, sodden infinity, until his fingers came in contact of some lump in the ground, and he dug it up without a word.

It seemed like a rock at first—hard in some places, soft in others-but eventually some of the earth fell away and Harry found himself looking at a small brown band. Upon closer inspection, he wiped away the dirt on the side of his pants and found himself holding a small gold wedding band, which looked a bit worse for wear. It was well-worn in places and on the inside had some sort of inscription, but it was too caked with dirt to tell.

Aunt Petunia hardly seemed the type to go around burying long-forgotten jewelry, although he hardly had any other explanation as to why it'd be there. Just as he picked away at some of the grime coating the inside of the ring, the back door slid open, and he hastily slipped it into his pocket.

"Hey, did you know they're setting up a pinata in the living room? Seems like someone's asking for a hole in the wall if you asked me."

A girl stood in the doorway, dressed in a knitted purple sweater and finley pressed pants. Harry didn't recognize her from any of the kids he and Dudley went to school with, and he hadn't expected anyone other than one fo the Dursleys to find him outside, so he stood there awkwardly and stared at her, not quite knowing what to say or do.

"Uhhhh…." Besides tending to the garden, his only other job had been to stay out of sight. Failing that, he could at least try and convince her to go back to the party, in case they noticed somone missing. "Can I help you?"

"I think the question is, can I help you?" the girl said in a huff, worriedly looking over her shoulder to the party going on inside. "I hope you know a good repairman, because that many kids with sticks is a recipe for disaster. I think Isaw a real wooden bat in there... I hope Mrs. Dunkle knows what she's doing."

Harry's face twitched for a moment. "Excuse me?"

"Mrs Dumpley? Sorry, I'm not very good with names." She confessed, before sitting down on the backyard steps. She put both elbows on her knees and stared at him like he was the most interesting person in the world. "Though, I'll have you know, more often than not they don't even really matter. I mean, who gives a shit in the long run? It's all irrelevant. We're all just specks of dust in the grand scheme of things, on a marble hurtling through space at hundreds of miles an hour. You don't see trees getting pissed off by getting called the wrong name, do you?"

Harry supposed she made a point, sort of. Then she pointed at one of the nearby trees in the garden.

"That one's a spruce. The one next to it is a pear tree, but of course that's not its whole name, just what people decided to call it. There's thirty different species of pear in the world, but people use pear as a blanket term for all of them, because language is exhausting and remembering all thirty different Latin names is pointless in the end, because one pear tree to another pear tree is just another pear tree, in a long line of pear trees in someone's lifetime. Names are just things." She paused for a moment, before snapping her fingers. "It was Dirkless, right? They seem like a Dirk kind of family."

He took a second look at her, trying to make sense of the reason why she was out here talking to him, instead of doing… anything at all, really. "Are you one of Dudley's friends?"

She certainly didn't look like it. Her face was round and soft looking, and her dark brown hair gently curled around her face in soft waves, that seemed more like it had been styled or set, with far more energy put into her appearance than any of the public school kids Harry of Dudley knew. She was around the right age, but her slate grey eyes had a spark of intelligence to them that seemed to reek of a private school upbringing, or… something else entirely.

"Who?" She blinked at him, and Harry wondered if she was just a stranger who wandered from the street.

Stepping a little closer, because the rain was starting to soak through his clothes and his glasses were starting to fog up, he shuffled under the awning and closer to the girl sitting in front of him. Harry glanced into the house when the sound of cheering met his ears. Someone had broken open the pinata.

He decided to throw her a bone. "He's the one having the party, and the one with the bat."

"Oh! Party boy, yeah, yeah okay." The girl looked over her shoulder again as the rest of the kids pounced on the candy spilling out onto the floor, stuffing their face with sweet piñata innards and laughing to themselves. She looked back at Harry and seemed to weigh the pros and cons to admitting how out of place she was, before confessing; "I have no idea who any of these people are."

He looked at her with a confused expression. "Then what are you doing here at the party?"

If it were up to him, Harry would be halfway to hawaii or literally anywhere else. He didn't understand why anyone would come if they knew what the durseleys were really like, instead of the performative, perfect neighbor persona they used whenever Harry wasn't the topic of conversation. Maybe her parents had dragged her over? If that was the case, Harry felt a deep sense of sympathy towards the girl. Being forced to do things he had no interest in was basically the sum of his nine years on planet earth.

"I dunno, I guess it just seemed like the place to be," she said, shrugging. Behind her, two children fought over the shredded remains of the paper pony, while another screamed and chanted, his face full of chocolate 'I've got his leg! I've got his leg!'

"Who are you…. again?" He ignored the sound of the party inside, shoving both hands into his pockets. One hand brushed the side of the ring in his pocket, and he turned it over in his fingers as he waited for a reply.

The girl seemed to struggle for a moment, her grey eyes blinking up to him, before she shrugged and got up from the stairs. "I'm anyone I need to be."

"Right…"

As if that wasn't weird or mysterious or anything.

She turned and padded into the kitchen, with Harry following close behind. The rest of the children and adults were distracted by the sound of Dudley and some other kid fighting over which one of them got to keep the decapitated pony head (obviously, such treasures belonged to the birthday boy).

Harry watched her as she started looking for something in the fridge. Worrying that he'd end up getting in trouble in case anything went missing, or broke, he tried to intervene. "Okay, uh do you need help with something? Because if aunt Petunia comes in here and finds that you've been—and you know, I'm sure there's going to be cake at some point, you could always go join them…"

"Oh shit I forgot about desert," she said, and promptly shut the fridge behind her. In her arms, however, was a large can of whipped cream that she seemed to shake ominously. She looked at him with an approving gaze. "Do you want a big piece or a little piece? I mean, I'm probably going to have to rip the cake out of the pudgy guy's hands before he can properly eat it all, but like, it's not like its his birthday or anything."

He blinked at her, for a second, before putting together what she just said. He winced, and scratched the back of his head with one dirty hand. "Um, I'm probably not allowed to have any cake."

"What? Why not?" And then Harry regretted his words, because it was as if some great injustice had been done, and the girl looked at him and then over to his relatives with a thunderous expression. "Who says you can't have any cake?"

"Well, uh, my Aunt and Uncle…" Harry turned back to the party, slightly surprised that nobody had seen them yet, or had yelled at them not-so-secretly to get out of the house with his muddy shoes on.

The girl shook her whipped cream can vigorously, and sprayed a small portion into her mouth as she narrowed her eyes, somehow making the action seem rather threatening.

"What the hell kind of people keep cake like that to themselves? No, this is a crime. An injustice most foul. Harry—" She turned to him with a fire in her eyes, and it was enough to make him forget the fact that he hadn't actually given her his name. "I have seen all, I have heard all, and I have forgotten all, but this such acts as this cannot go unpunished."

Now he was completely lost. Was she quoting someone? He took a step between her and the party going on, praying that they'd stay unnoticed, and somehow escape punishment, as if this strange girl would absolutely make things worse for him.

"Please, don't, you really don't have to do anything. Cake isn't even my thing anyway," he lied, panic rising in his chest. "Besides, I don't even know who you are."

"Call me Marie Antoinette, kid," she said, rolling up her sleeves as she stepped around him too fast for him to follow. Aunt Petunia had taken out the dessert knife and was passing out the plates as uncle Vernon brought out the ice cream, and for a moment, Harry's heart stopped, as the bubbling fear that something was about to go horribly, horribly wrong. The girl turned back at him and winked. "And you shall have your cake."

And then she chucked her full can of whipped cream into the chandelier above them, and it exploded in a shower of sparks and dairy.

Aunt Petunia screamed, Dudley reared back in his chair. A chorus of high pitched wails echoed through the house from the collection of kids and adults who had no idea going on. The walls were coated in frothy white cream, and the can itself broke on impact and shattered.

Harry was left standing in shock as the perpetrator walked up in the middle of the chaos, while everyone wiped at their eyes and sobbed in confusion. She grabbed herself a slice of cake, wrapped it in a paper towel, and tucked it into her pocket.

Marie Antoinette, with her wordly grace and power, grinned at him from the table, unnoticed despite the ugly chaos surrounding her revolutionary form.

"See? Easy."

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Harry was shoved roughly into the cupboard by a very purple looking Vernon, spitting profanities and covered in whipped cream. The moment the door slammed behind him and the lock slid into place, Harry sat in a moment of dumbfounded shock, trying to piece together what just happened.

He could still hear shuffling of some of the children and adults as they collected themselves and made their trips to the sink and the bathrooms to clean themselves up, and while a couple people laughed to try and ease the tension, absolutely none of them would be able to forget what just happened. Dudley's birthday wasn't just ruined, it had been assassinated.

He heard someone approach his cupboard door, and he braced himself for another slew of insults and threats he very much knew his relatives meant, now that the absolute worst had happened, but instead they never came.

The door opened just a tad but faltered when the lock kept it from opening further. The girl from before peered into the dark, spotting Harry as he sat in shock on his mattress on the floor. "So, are you like, hiding now?"

"What? No!" he hissed, crawling over to the door. How was it that she didn't even have any whipped cream on her? She was right in the middle of ground zero when it happened! "They think I'm the one who did it! Why did you even throw the entire can?!"

"I told you, some crimes cannot go unpunished," she sniffed, seeming to take his anger to heart. "Besides, anyone in the company of royalty deserves respect. Their behavior was completely unacceptable."

"Royalty?" Harry scoffed, looking at her. "You're out of your mind."

"It's true," she urged, not at all put off by his tone. "I told you I was Marie Antoinette, I even got your cake for you and everything."

And with that, she took the slightly crumpled cake out of her pocket and jammed it through the crack in the cupboard. It fell into his hands with a wet plop, slightly dripping with melted whipping cream and icing. Harry didn't know what to say.

"You're welcome," she said smugly, seeming quite proud of herself. She looked down the hallway as someone raised their voice and then started crying. "Well, in the grand scheme of things, it sure could have been worse."

In the darkness of his cupboard, Harry looked up at her dubiously. "How…?"

"Well, I could have gotten decapitated, for one." She drew a finger across her throat for good measure, seeming oddly cheerful about it. "That's what they did to the other Marie Antoinette, you know? Though her mistakes were less whipped cream related and more to do with the fact that the French revolutionaries wanted a scapegoat and she was the perfect example of the corrupt bourgeoisie ruling-class, in her fine clothes and expensive dresses, lording over the humble proletariat in a time of economic disaster."

"What."

Marie shrugged and hardly seemed bothered by his lack of response. "It's a fitting cautionary tale. Then again, we've already had first blood spilled and a beheading in the form of the pinata so I guess that'll do for now."

Harry opened his mouth to answer that, somehow. What remained of Dudley's cake dripping onto his pants and onto the floor. "Um—"

And in a moment, she was gone, replaced only with the thudding, heavy steps of uncle Vernon approaching, and the cupboard door falling back into place. With a start, Harry froze, realizing that getting caught with cake in his hands would definitely not do him any favors, so he did the first thing that came to mind, and turned around and shoved it into his pillowcase.

"Out!" uncle Vernon ordered, and a second later the door swung open. Harry stumbled out into the hallway, to face the remainder of the party people as they stood in various states of sticky and or wet. The vein on uncle Vernon's throat seems to jump under his skin, and he seemed like he was barely keeping himself together in front of all the people. He turned to Harry, and his eyes were like molten suns. "Apologize. Now."

Robotically, Harry turned to the people by the door, and (with Vernon's hand on his back, forcing him) he inclined his head, and said with as much earnestness as an innocent person could muster when threatened with a penalty of terrible suffering and death, apologized. "I'm very sorry I ruined everything today. I don't know what I was thinking."

Uncle Vernon hardly seemed pleased, but he couldn't exactly bring out his most severe planned punishments with twelve witnesses standing by. By the way, Aunt Petunia was nervously, yet angrily hovering nearby, it looked like she was counting down the seconds in which the guests left so they could deal with their little problem themselves.

In the pit of his stomach, Harry knew with a sinking feeling he wasn't going to live this one down for a while.

As the rest of the guests turned to leave and gave their shakey goodbyes to the Dursleys and Dudley, who still seemed rather shocked by the whole event, Harry watched with an iron grip on his arm as every last one possible witness to his inevitable demise walked out the door.

(And among them, not once did he see a trace of that strange girl.)

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