Lia had been having a rather eventful month.
First, it had been that curious incident at the zoo, in which she had found out that by some strange miracle, she and Harry could somehow communicate with snakes. It was an incident that still left her dumbstruck with shock, pondering whether or not her life was simply an enormous dream. Or maybe she was going crazy. Madness was in her genes, after all. Petunia always said Lily was a crazy old bat.
She'd thought that her questionable sanity might have derived from the lack of interaction she had with anyone whose last name wasn't Potter or Dursley.
Her aunt and uncle's unwavering dislike of Harry and her, limited the amount of friends that she was able to make. For instance, the kids at school were typically split into two groups. They either ignored the Potter twins as if they were invisible, or they were awful bullies with harassing the two. She wasn't sure which was worse, for Lia hated getting the cold-shoulder.
She supposed that she couldn't really blame any of them.
Lia was a bit of a peculiar girl - and try as she might, she wasn't exactly the friendliest person in the world. As Piers put it, she had a strong case of 'resting bitch face'. She tried to be nice. She tried to be kind. But her mouth was always getting her into trouble, and sometimes she couldn't hold back the witty retorts.
She didn't think she was that bad.
For, she only hated a limited number of people, just four: Piers Polkiss, Dennis, Malcom and Gordon.
They all went to St. Gorgory's; a primary school that Lia attended with her cousin, Dudley. To be honest, she didn't even hate Dudley. Of course, he was a fat, ugly and spoiled brat. She had called him that once to his face. It had been immensely satisfying, even though she was locked in her laundry room turned bedroom for a week.
No … Dudley was a product of his parent's incessant pampering and reluctance to give the boy any form of actual discipline. God. He could really use a smack to the bum sometimes.
She didn't even hate her aunt and uncle.
Sure, they mistreated her. They mistreated Harry. But she had never felt truly threatened there. I mean, she supposed she could say that they were emotionally and verbally abused, but they had never raised a hand to them. They fed her. Clothed her. And well … that was about it.
Sometimes, she thought that they had to hate her, with the disdain that they treated her with, but then she'd catch her aunt looking at Harry with an odd sort of expression - jealously mixed in with some look of nostalgic reminiscing. Perhaps about their mother. She'd heard Petunia say once that Harry had Lily Evan's green eyes.
She hadn't meant it as a compliment, in her mind she and Harry were certainly not deserving of any sort of praise, but her brother had walked around with a ridiculous grin on his face for a whole month, and wouldn't stop checking himself out whenever he saw his reflection in the mirror.
It had been disturbing.
When she was younger, she had asked her aunt about who she looked more like: her father or her mother. To which Petunia had turned an unappealing shade of bleach white, seemed to shiver, even though it was hot out, and her eyes had taken on a faraway look, as if she were recollecting a memory.
"Neither," she'd responded curtly. "You look more like the devil, if you ask me. The devil. Not right you are … abnormal … just like your parents were." Her words had lacked their usual conviction and scorn though.
Sometimes she caught her aunt looking at her with a fearful expression. As if she were scared that Lia might blow up, and slaughter her whole family in the blast.
She didn't know why.
Lia was relatively nonviolent. Harry's temper was much worse.
But Petunia and Vernon had always been less intense with their bullying towards her than they were to Harry. They seemed unwilling to face what would happen if they pushed her too far. But really? How dumb and pathetic would they have to be, to be scared of a ten-year-old girl? She was wilted and scrawny from the lack of nutrients they gave her. She couldn't imagine being able to inflict any damage on them.
Well, that might have been a lie. There had been that time of course.
Remember those four people Lia hated?
Well, one day in March they'd all thought that it would be 'funny' if they went ahead and played a joke on her and Harry. A dangerous one. Where they'd gone and thrown rocks at her brother, until his skin blossomed with purple bruises. And the names they called him.
She didn't mind too much what they said to her. She was fine with it all. She knew she was smarter than them anyway, and destined for better things then that bag of plump cowardly tyrants - they'd were so dim that they'd probably end up begging on the streets.
But no one messed with Harry.
Her brother did annoy her. They had always been quite different. He was impulsive, she schemed; he was kind, she was venomous to those who irked her; he liked blue, she always loved silver; his eyes were bright green, hers were a gold, that turned molten when passionate; he had a lightning scar on his forehead, she had a curling mark in the shape of an 'S' on her upper arm; he hated reading, she adored losing herself in books.
He resembled their parents. She didn't.
It used to bother her, how different she looked from them. When she was younger, Petunia told her they'd picked her out of a garbage bin. She'd believed it for a week until she realised that her clean, snobbish aunt would never stick her hand somewhere so gross. She'd much rather leave a baby out on the streets to die.
If she was telling the truth, she'd never really felt close to her deceased mother and father. At least, not in the same way Harry had.
When they'd first seen a photo of them both, Harry had clung onto the picture, gazing at it with a tear-jerking amalgam of longing and love for hours. Through which, Lia had sat there, urging herself to feel something. Anything. Something other than the quiet detachment and small ounce of regret that she felt, knowing that those two happy looking people were now dead.
Maybe she was adopted?
But then, if she was, her aunt and uncle would never have taken her in. Not when they already talked so fervently about how they should have given Harry off to an orphanage.
It didn't matter anyway. They were siblings, through thick and thin. They both were ferociously protective of the ones they loved. And as Lia only truly loved Harry, and Harry only truly loved Lia, they were in it together.
It was because of that protective bond between them that Lia hated Piers, Dennis, Malcom and Gordon. They were always tormenting Harry, along with her wimp of a cousin, Dudley. Harry didn't really make it any better though. He was a stupid git too sometimes, with his silly conscience and even sillier sense of honour. What did he think he was doing, standing up to Dudley and Co. when they harassed the younger students, knowing perfectly well that he himself wasn't exactly the most popular kid in the school either?
That was another difference between the twins. Lia was a lot more self-preserving. It could be called selfish. But self-preserving sounded a lot better to her. Besides, she knew it was a cruel world out there. If you didn't stop to think about yourself first, you'd get taken advantage of - and she was no doorsill, waiting to get stepped all over. She wanted to survive, she wanted to be able to live happily.
Of course there was an exception.
An unfortunate exception. And that exception came in the form of her dumb reckless brother who was always getting himself in trouble. It was like he loved beaten up, that or he really liked it when Lia came and had to clean him up.
It was because of Lia's sisterly love for Harry that the animosity between the seven had been solidified on that day in March, when the rocks had been thrown. It had ended with Harry mysteriously appearing on the top of the roof; Dudley half sunk in mud, with a strange substance (Lia suspected it was dog poo) on his face; and the other four bullies screaming with broken bones.
It was only because Dudley was actually alright to Lia, on the days when they were at home in private, that he hadn't been injured too. One time, he had given her a cup of tea.
Lia too had screamed when she realised what had she'd done. She'd quivered in fear at the thought that she might be sent to juvie for physical assault.
She knew now that would never have happened though. Firstly, because there had been other witnesses, and no one had seen Lia even place a finger on those boys, not even when she was bellowing at them to stop. Secondly, because when her hands touched each the skin of the three shrieking children, their injuries had remarkably healed.
When the teacher finally came, there was not even a single swelling on the boys, and nothing to implicate Lia to the crime, except for the teary-eyed terrified youths that were bawling their eyes out. Deep down in her heart though, Lia knew that it had been her.
She had done it.
There was definitely a hidden side to her. A darker side. She tried to keep it suppressed. But sometimes it came lashing out. And people got hurt. It scared her. She always felt sorry after, but no matter how hard she tried, she could never remember what had happened, only a foggy blur of colour and sound, just a deep ceaseless abyss of anger and hatred that grew in heart, until it whipped out - like a cobra striking its victim.
But usually she was cheerful and optimistic. It was one of her most happy days during that eventful month, that she met Hagrid.
During the previous week, letters for her and Harry had been pouring through the house. So badly, and so incessantly, that it had incensed her uncle to the point of madness, so much so that he felt the need to relocate the family onto an awfully tiny shack on a rock in the middle of nowhere. Lia wasn't even exaggerating. It was surrounded by water, so when Petunia wanted to buy groceries, she'd had to row out for miles to the shore. It was sad to note that Lia would actually have preferred her leaky laundry room in Pivet Drive.
Hagrid had arrived on the night of her and Harry's eleventh birthdays. It had been a quiet affair.
They'd gotten up at midnight to draw themselves a pathetic looking birthday cake in the dirt, and they had exchanged the meagre gifts they could get their hands on. Harry had given her two novels. He must have noticed how she'd been eyeing them from the window display of the local bookstore. Lia gifted Harry with a shiny red bouncy ball. Her brother wasn't extremely sporty - he was too scrawny for things like rugby, and too unfit for soccer - but he did have amazing reflexes. She'd also given him a bunch of junk food from the local supermarkets. He needed to fatten up, he was too skinny as it was.
Lia had worried about how she would afford it at first.
Asking the Dursleys for money was an inconceivable idea. It was on one of those afternoons when she was contemplating this, wondering if she would actually be forced to give away her pride and dignity in order to beg for cash, that she saw it. She could have sworn that the money had been a rock at first, but in an instant, as she blinked, it had turned into a crisp twenty dollar note before her very eyes. It seemed too good to be true.
The best present though, had to have been when Hagrid burst in and told them that they were wizards.
Well, Harry was a wizard. She was obviously a witch. But a witch! Wasn't it amazing? And it explained quite a bit. Why she could do the things she did. Why she always felt different. Why she'd had a nagging suspicion in the back of her mind that she was missing something, something important ever since she was a young.
But magic! It seemed surreal.
How could magic possibly exist? And what was it Hagrid had said? In the mix of elation and excitement that had followed, she'd thought that he'd told her she'd be getting a wand. A wand! Just like the witches she'd read about in the story books! It felt like a dream. Like she was seeing the world, but through someone else's eyes. She closed her eyes and shook her head. How could it be happening to her? Nothing special ever happened. Not when you lived with aunts and uncles, as stringent and 'upstanding', as the Dursleys.
A witch! A witch! She really hoped that she wouldn't end up sprouting warts, or gaining an unattractively long hooked nose though. She wondered what she would be studying, the spells that she would learn. She made a mental note to start early, for one of her mottos was 'the early bird catches the worm'.
But then, would she have money for books? Well, she'd buy them anyway, even if she had to beg on the streets for it. She could busk, she supposed. Try some singing. Or she wouldn't really mind that much if she went and stole some notes off a wealthy fellow's wallet. She just couldn't tell Harry about it though, he was much too noble for something like petty theft.
What would the other children at Hogwarts be like? If they were all witches and wizards, people that had magic like her, people that were abnormal like her, perhaps she would finally be able to make some friends, that weren't pitifully her own brother.
She could barely sleep at night, the thoughts jumbling in her mind, whilst she waited in anticipation for the day when she would first step foot into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
A/N:
Hey everyone!
Thank you for clicking through my work :) Hope you liked it, and if you find any problems, pleaseeee review, so that I can make it more enjoyable for everyone! Constructive criticism is welcome.
I just wanted to put in this note, because I realised how long the story drags out for. Word of warning, I've held back a bit on the Draco and Lia romance at the start, so that he doesn't act OOC and it's more believable.
Hope you enjoy! Thanks lovely readers xxxxxx I adore you all.
- Annie
P.s. Just as a side-note, if anyone wants to read something with Lily and James Potter in it, I have a new one-shot put up about the night that they sacrificed themselves for Harry. The website won't let me put in a hyperlink, but if you're interested you're more than welcome to click the link on my profile :) It's called 'The Last Stand'.
