There was something to be said about Londoner taxi drivers, — Harry thought — they were at it for so long that they didn't give a flying fuck about their passengers. Shady men in black suits carrying square suitcases? No problem. Strange women in tatters running away from somewhere or someone? If they have money, let them be. Strange unchaperoned boy with a wooden trunk and an owl inside a cage? Ask him to show coin first, then you go. The only thing in the whole ordeal that irked the man was trying to find a parking spot near King's Cross on Sunday. Harry offered to pay him a little bit extra for it, and the man loaded the boy's trunk in a trolley. Harry perched Hedwig's cage on it, shook his hand, and bid goodbye to his muggle life, at least for ten months.
It was early, but Harry wanted to take his time. He parked the trolley near a small café inside the station and got rid of his last muggle pounds for a coffee and a croissant. Not the usual British fare, but he was kind of getting sick of it after a whole month eating at the Cauldron. Even good things can become too much after a while. As he was early and happy, Harry granted himself a moment of vanity, inspecting his face on the back of his spoon.
The black shaggy bangs were gone. He had found a small barber shop crammed between two stores in Diagon Alley, where he got a better cut. While his hair would forever be a mop that refused to lay flat, there were better ways to keep it. It had been one of his girls that designed this cut, a lifetime before, so he instructed the barber how to do it, hoping to surprise her. He also got some potions to mix with his shampoo, so the hair would be easier to manage in the mornings. Pure vanity, he knew, but he also had hard lessons about how far first impressions can help a man.
He also had got rid of the glasses. Not only they were badly taped together, but also were the wrong prescription, the field of vision too narrow and he was useless without them. Finding the eyewear shop was difficult (in fact, it was in a small room above the apothecary), and convincing the wizard he was not crazy after explaining what he wanted was even more difficult. But after some haggling, some explaining and a lot of assuring, Harry Potter became the proud owner of the first pair of wizarding contact lenses. At first, he had pitied the man, trying for days to shrink glasses without making them unusable, and then inventing spells to maintain them and to prevent those same spells to interact badly with other magic. But when the tiny pieces of glass had stuck firmly in his eyes, when the world shifted into focus without frames limiting his vision, the man whooped in joy in unison with the boy. By the look on his face, Harry wouldn't be the sole owner of a pair for long. If nothing else, coming back in time had at least help to revolutionise the magical eyewear industry.
The boy swirled his coffee, surprised by how better he felt after just a short month of intense maintenance. He was not surprised by how quickly his body had responded to the nutritive potions (an excellent exercise in brewing for him, even if it irked him to only use a single cauldron at a time, and being unable to adjust the flames with his traced wand), children's bodies were remarkably easy to fix magically. And Harry had a very fast metabolism, his personal theory was his body had learned to extract every single nutrient from any food he ate, as meals were sparse, with long periods between them. He had spent the first week carefully buying the nutritive ingredients from the apothecary, mixed between other goods. While that kind of potion wasn't forbidden per se, most nutritive potions were highly addictive, and too much of them lead to poisoning. Harry had brewed a very small batch of it, some bone-knitting potion, some stamina enhancing potions (while most wizards used them to solve erectile dysfunction, it could be also used as a supplement after strenuous exercise), lots of pain relieving concoctions and a vial of stomach ache relief. After years of almost starvation, Tom's food dropped like bombs inside him. Also, he had chewed raw moonroot, to help with his treatment, which was highly acidic, so the vial was a necessity.
His stay in Diagon Alley was one of the best times of his life, it would only be better if he had his girls with him and a fully capable body. As all teenagers around the world in every single timeline, Harry quickly realised that puberty sucked. His body responded at the most random moments, his emotions were starting to fight his grasp and he had been looking at the waitress' rump for a tad bit more than the socially accepted. She winked at him, and he very quickly lost his battle against a blush.
All in all, not every plan of his had ended like Harry wanted. The Goblins wouldn't accept to leave him alone in his vault, and they charged mighty for the hour spent there watching him work. Also, no wizard magic was allowed inside Gringotts, so Harry had to explore his vault using his own hands. He had bought some boxes and lots of leather pouches, had sat on the top of his fortune, and started counting it. Filling the pouches with exactly one hundred galleons each was a very long and very boring task, and by the end of the summer, he barely had dented the pile. He had found some things under the coins, although: a wooden sealed box small measured, and two trunks, shrunk to matchbox size. The sealed box held papers, carefully laid inside to avoid deterioration by humidity or time. The boy had paid ten galleons for a blind copy of the entire content of the box. He had to request for a blind one so the goblins wouldn't know what was written in the papers and paid ten times more for it. As the galleon was exchanged for fifty muggle pounds, that had been his highest investment yet. All for nothing, as the papers were written in code and he still hadn't been able to get head or tails of them.
The trunks he let be, at least until the next summer. Goblins would charge him to unshrink them, he would need to lunge them to the Cauldron, and risk them to be robbed or, worse yet, would need to answer questions about them. Also, no matter what they would say about his family in that world, Harry still had a lifetime of prejudice rained upon him for who his parents were, and nothing in the world would make him trust the trunks to be devoid of dark magic. Once he had tried to open a satchel from his mother's secret stash, in his last life, and had been cursed by it. Harry knew wasn't patient enough to wait until he was seventeen again to open those trunks, but he would leave them in the vault for some time.
His brand new wristwatch told him he still had an entire hour before the train would depart, but he wanted to get on the move sooner than later. Pushing the trolley before him, Harry avoided the masses of muggles scrambling to and from their platforms, sidestepping busy men in suits, posh women in elaborate dresses and whiny kids refusing to listen to reason. Hedwig was sleeping soundly inside her cage, nonetheless, but Harry couldn't blame her. He had been running the poor bird ragged, flying to and from Hermione's house, exchanging vital information about this new world and double-entendre filled letters, totally inappropriate for their ages. Well, their bodies still had some years to catch up before they could do half of those things, but putting Hermione's knickers in a twist was one of his favourites pastimes. He would deny loudly if asked, but in truth, he was missing badly all his girls.
The boy with the owl stepped in front of column dividing platforms 9 and 10. The red brick pillar seemed sturdy enough to support the ceiling for a century or so more. Harry had heard young students would run towards it, their eyes closed, to get rid of their fear of collision. He always had wondered how muggles wouldn't notice a bunch of weirdly dressed kids running blind into a solid wall. So, as he had time and as a first, he was alone at the platform, Harry closed his eyes, extended his magic, and subtly touched the magical barrier.
It was one of the most incredible pieces of magic he had even seen. The boy would be hard pressed to describe it, and he felt he had been unfair when he complained about the lack of information on the platform in his books. He could feel a perfectly circular barrier around the pillar, the taste of magic telling him it was a muggle distracting ward. He had seen others like this before, and magic was new, so probably some Ministry employee had come to the platform the previous night or very early that same day to ward the place against muggle eyes. Anything strange would be ignored by non-magical folk, and they would even sidestep the barrier, giving the families some space around the entrance. A fine piece of magic, but one which paled in front of the barrier itself.
Hermione was a specialist in folded wizardspace. She even had a four-dimensional full-fledged room inside a handbag to prove it. At least, she had had it, a lifetime before. Wizardspace had been one of her fascinations, the ability to create space. She had proved it arithmantically, when she was 18, earning her a master's degree in Arithmancy in Genevra, the youngest witch to ever do so. Her theory, if Harry remembered it well, proposed that wizardspace started as a dent in the space-time fabric, slowly pushed downwards, creating a sac-like deformation, inside which natural life could exist, live and age. As Hermione had proved it, the space around the sac isn't stretched out, as if one were simply moving it around to create wizardspace, but everything was kept the way it is, that proved wizards could conjure extra space-time, and the excess of it would create the wizardspace. She had been working hard on proving that a ball-like space was the natural form of wizardspace, with possible implications that the entire universe was ball-shaped when she was captured and locked in Azkaban. Harry really wished she would remember to take a look magically at the platform.
It was the biggest wizardspace he had ever seen. The barrier, hidden behind an illusion complementing the pillar face, looked like a round mouth, leading to an incredibly deformed wizardspace. Harry mentally calculated the platform was cone-shaped instead of round, holding the entire stone platform, two food stands, a huge train and probably a quarter of the entire wizarding populace in Britain. In fact, it would explain why it was forbidden to apparate directly to the platform, as apparating inside wizardspace was one of the most dangerous feats of magic. The annual crossing through the muggle station just to get to Platform 9 3/4 wasn't just a tradition or a misguided attempt at integration, but a real necessity. And the tracks! They simply went outside the wizardspace, bursting the sideways cone, as if trying to get out of the tip of it. Harry always had supposed the station was, in fact, in another place altogether, and the barrier on the pillar simply transported them there. But somehow the platform was inside the pillar, and the train could move magically from inside to the outside of wizardspace.
The station hadn't been there for more than a century. Before that, the trip to Hogwarts was done from other station, and before that it was done on carriages. The train which had become the symbol of the school, used three times to get students to other countries for the Triwizard Tournament, was barely a hundred years old. It was mind-blowing to know the knowledge and magical power to create something like Platform 9 3/4 had been lost forever in less than a century, even with the Flamels themselves been older than that. In that new world, where wizarding lives were barely longer than a hundred years, it probably had been lost in a handful of years. If that wasn't a sure sign of the decay of wizarding lifestyle, Harry didn't know what else could be.
"Packed with muggles, of course," said someone near him, and he almost jumped out of his skin. He glanced quickly at his watch and was surprised he had past almost an entire hour admiring an invisible piece of magic embedded in the wall. "Now, which's the platform number, Ron dear?".
"Yes, Ronnikins, which is the platform number?"
"Enlighten us with your knowledge, Ronny-bear".
"Oi, shut up you two!"
Harry looked behind and felt her heart pounce in his chest. They were different, that's for sure, and so, so young. First the older woman, proud and plump, red hair fanning around her head and a gentle smile on her face. She was trying valiantly to hold a boy's hand, while he kept dodging her. Tall for his age, long-nosed and made entirely of knees and elbows, he slouched as if trying to avert the attention his family was showering him with. At his side, two older boys, identical to the last freckle, grinning wickedly at their younger brother. To the other side of the woman, a taller, older boy, preening like a peacock, almost strutting while he pushed his trolley, a badge pinned to the front of his clothes shining almost loudly. Harry knew it to be an attention-grabbing spell.
"Oh, dear, are you a first year? Are you lost?"
"Yes," answered Harry, fighting to keep his eyes on her face, for else they would wander around, searching… "Do I need to just walk into the pillar?"
"Yes, you can run if you are nervous. It's Ronald's first year too. Percy, show him how to do it".
Percy was in his element there, all eyes on him. He gave Harry a proud nod, swagged towards the pillar, stopped, and ran a little bit, the front of his trolley touching the red bricks and being swallowed by them as if the redhead boy were getting under a waterfall. Harry blinked, and the boy was gone.
"Want to try it?" said the woman, gently. Harry shrugged, nodded and walked into the pillar.
The barrier felt cold to his touch as if he really were crossing water. He kept his pace steady, getting away from the entrance to avoid been run over by the next person to cross. He glanced back, to the brick wall the same colour as the pillar at the other side. There was a stone arch framing it, just to signal the right stop to cross. Harry had once heard about a distracted boy who tried to cross back to the station at the wrong wall and had broken his nose. Deepbottom something. It was long before his time, anyway.
The twins crossed one after the other, then the younger boy, his ears red from embarrassment and a smudge on his nose. Harry noticed their ragged trunks, second-hand robes, and a single owl, owned by the older boy. He waited, waited with all his heart, almost praying.
The next to cross wasn't a plump woman in a patched blue dress. It was a small girl. She raised her eyes, and he felt his heart stop.
"So, what's your name, dear?"
"I'm Harry Potter, ma'am", answered Harry, prying his eyes from the lithe form. Her hair was longer than he remembered by then. Her face smoother. Her eyes browner. Hedwig hooted, wrenched from her slumber by all the noise at the station. The scarlet red locomotive blowing white smoke rings from its chimney. It whistled loudly. Time to embark.
"The Harry Potter?", asked Percy, seeing him as if under a brand new light. Harry tried hard not to grimace. "It's an honour—"
"Yes! An honour indeed, Mr. Potter,"
"Such a pleasure, I can't even,"
"Delightful,"
"There are no words to—"
"Enough! Fred, George, help Ron get his trunk on the train. And this year, please do behave. If I get another owl from Prof. McGonagall for something like you two blowing a Hogwarts' toilet…"
"We've never blown a toilet, mom,"
"But thanks for the idea".
"I am warning you. Take care. And Percy, keep an eye on them for me."
"Don't you worry, mother, it's even part of my Prefect duties, now."
"Wow, Perce, you are a Prefect, huh. I think you mentioned it this summer."
"Once—"
"Twice—"
"One day—"
"The whole summer—"
The voices faded towards the train. Ron shuffled under his mother watchful gaze, she latched on him with a spat-on handkerchief, trying to clean his smudge. Harry was silent, nailed to the ground by the weight of all the words he wanted to say but couldn't. He had a plan, he needed to stick to it. He so wanted to not have it anymore.
"I'm Ginny Weasley," said her, in a quiet, steady voice, taking his hand in hers, her tiny, warm fingers wrapping around his in a vice-like grip. "I've heard a lot about you, Harry."
"Good things, I hope… Ginny."
"Mostly."
He laughed out, she blushed a little, he asked her if she was going to Hogwarts soon. He didn't want to release her hand. She smiled at him, her brown eyes dancing to their own secret tune.
"Goodbye then, thank you for your help, Mrs. Weasley. See you next year, Ms. Weasley."
"You bet, Mr. Potter", then she lunged, taking him by surprise, kissing softly his cheek. Her entire face got red as a tomato, her head dropped so her hair could hide her face, and she stepped behind her mother.
"Take care", she muttered, but he heard. His heart ached, her mother looked at them bewildered, he gave them a half-hearted wave, and got into the train, lugging a trunk and an owl with him.
.TFE.
He didn't need to walk much before finding Hermione. Her compartment was near the front of the train, where the lower years congregated. She was alone, reading a book, her feet propped on the seat in front of her. She was so small once again that she needed to sit all crooked, her butt almost falling from her seat, for her legs to reach the front bench. He tapped the glass and she almost fell. Her smile and her blush could almost heal his torn heart. Not for the first time in his life, he wished Ginny to swap birthdays with Ron. Her seventh year had been the worst one in their lives, she been stuck at Hogwarts, all alone, while they struggled to plan and to achieve without her presence. Hermione had even shrunk the bed once, trying to curb the lingering absence Ginny had left behind.
It hadn't work then. It wouldn't work, once more.
"Why are you late? It thought you'd have come early."
"I kinda lost the sense of time admiring the platform. Did you know—?"
"That we are in a cone-shaped wizardspace, inside a trans-space scarlet train? Yes. I've been working on it in my free time. But I think I won't be able to understand it better until I can do magic outside school. You look good, by the way."
Her blush told him much more than her words. Harry smiled, reached with his arms and hugged her. She smelled good, her head tucked under his chin. He thanked whoever had invented nutrient potions and potion-induced growth spurts. Something felt different, he slid his arms a little bit lower and crushed her on his chest. She yelped.
"You got tits?"
He regretted it almost immediately. He also would sport a red handprint on his cheek for most of the trip. It wasn't the first time Hermione informed him in no short words how he could be very crass when he wasn't watching himself.
"Close the curtains, Harry", she ordered, fumbling inside her handbag. Harry slid his trunk on the overhead rack, seated Hedwig's cage on the floor, just under the window and closed the curtains over it, doing the same with the small glass on the door. He heard some rustle behind him and turned to look.
She was naked, and a very tiny part of his mind wondered if what he felt then should be considered an unhealthy desire for a pre-teen girl. But as he was a pre-teen himself, the biggest, more focused part of his mind told the other to shut up and drink the view. So he did. Hermione slipped some knickers on, fastened a white bra around herself and rotated her shoulders to fill it better.
"Hermione Granger using potions for breast gain? One can wonder—"
"I think you are the last person who can talk about potion-induced growth. And let me remind you that, exactly like your new contact lenses, I'm doing it because I won't be implanted with fragments tonight to enhance my magic and correct all my body flaws."
"There sure isn't much to correct."
"Cute. But you aren't out of the doghouse for being vulgar, mister."
"You slap me for saying 'tits' and then get naked in front of me?"
"Yes. Now hold this for me, steady."
Harry fumbled to open the compact mirror and hold it in front of her face. She made a face, curling her upper lip, pointed her own wand at her mouth. There was the rush of a spell, and her upper teeth started to shrink, very slowly. She used her left indicator to hold her lip up, carefully opened her mouth and closed it again. The spell ended, and she gifted him with a perfect smile.
"I see you're going full out about it, Hermione."
"Of course, I'm very serious about punishment, master."
She got fully dressed in her uniform, touched her hair with her wand and fastened golden loops through her ears. After spraying a little bit of perfume and applying her makeup, she showed herself to him, giving a little loop in her place.
"So, do I look like a strumpet?"
For the first in a long time, Harry had no words to offer. The small girl smiled at him not as a pre-teen, but as a young teenager, and if 'cute' could describe her before, Harry quickly found the word couldn't do justice to her. Hermione was wearing a very short standard black skirt, her legs seeming longer, his eyes sliding over them until arriving at her Mary Janes and dark grey socks. The white Polo shirt showed the visible curve of her small breasts, her dark grey tie hanging loose, the knot almost an inch under the unbuttoned shirt. She wore her black robes open, showing the uniform under it, and the golden earrings made a nice touch, glinting through her now curly and tall hair. Down to the minute details, Hermione had painted her lips with a glossy pale pink lipstick, keeping them discreet but moist-looking, dusted her eyelids to show a little bit darker and her naturally long eyelashes were more evident. Her faint perfume of lilac wrapped around his mind.
He was kissing her. There was no movement, no instant in time between her proud smile over her new appearance and her being pressed against the door, his lips devouring her, tasting the sweet strawberry flavour of the gloss, ruining her carefully applied lipstick, tangling fingers in her hair, making her earrings dangle madly. Her black-painted nails were on his skin, under the back of his shirt, and in the next moment on his hair, his nape, her hands around his face, her small tongue against his, his knee pressing between her legs, parting then, feeling the pleated skirt flare open around her thighs, his hands pulling the shirt from under it, invading it, circling her belly with his warm fingers, drinking the heat of her skin.
Her hands pushed him away, just before he could bite her neck. The daze seemed to lift a little, but still held, and he tried to suck her shivering skin in his mouth, but she was strong for her age, and could push him more. He sighed, withdrew his hands from under her shirt and trapped her head between his arms, his hands resting against the cold wood of the door. She rested her small, fire-hot hand on his leg, and he removed his knee from between hers, letting the skirt flow down once again, even if not by much. It really was short, and he wanted to touch her smooth thighs, but he held.
"If you kiss me like that, it will be hard for people to believe we're just kids, Harry."
"I'm wholly inclined to toss the plan in the fire."
She laughed.
"I'm flattened. Really. But there are things more important than snogging wildly."
"Are there?"
She laughed again.
"Get your head out the gutter, mister. We have much to discuss. But… Off the record, I'm inclined to throw everything away and snog you, too."
Harry closed his eyes, but the perfume seemed to get stronger if he did that, so he let his arms fall limply to his sides. Her chocolate coloured eyes were darker, fiercer. There was once a time when she couldn't look people in the eyes, except for when she was passionately defending her ideals or sprouting random facts about the wizarding world. Harry and his other girls had to teach her to be more confident in herself, had to make her feel beautiful and powerful before she would look people in the eyes all the time. A whole lot of new problems showed up then, as Hermione's eyes could be fierce and sharp as a wild lioness. Some thought she was challenging them, others could swear she was a legillimens. Draco Malfoy had been a steady supporter of that theory until the very day of his death.
"When did you got your ears pierced? You weren't wearing earrings before."
"Two weeks ago. I had to beg my mother for it. It's… It's so different now. We talk, we do talk now. And they… They are so interested in my world. More than once I caught them reading my school texts. If I weren't very strict with them, my father would try to brew potions using our stove."
"You seem happy."
Her eyes were shining.
"I am. You know how much I missed my family. Of course, things can be difficult now that they aren't afraid to death of me, like getting my ears pierced, but it's so much better having them in my life again. I so hope I don't need to kill them this time."
"I promise you to do my best so you don't have to."
"Thank you, Harry. No, really. Thank you. If not by you, I'd have given up by now, died alone in that cell. You were the one who wanted us to travel between worlds if we ever got caught. And you were the one who ordered me to include time travel in the ritual, even after I said it was impossible. Your plan not only saved us all but gave us another chance. A fresh start."
Harry let the praise wash over him, happily. He tried his best not to get cocky, not to get prideful. Flamel had died because of his pride. But when a pretty girl praised you, it's hard to hold your humility intact. And Hermione was beautiful. Harry had known it for such a long time, but she had spent years not believing it, to the point they had to force her to say she was pretty. Building her self-confidence had been Harry's life-long project before, but to the last day of their former lifetime, she still had doubts. Because she had spent her muggle childhood feeling ugly, being called ugly, beaver face, bad hair. Because she had gone to Hogwarts and spent half a year with mutations caused by the fragments altering her body, unleashing her dormant genes, giving her a body she couldn't think as her own, an ugly duckling mind occupying a swan's body. And when she finally grew comfortable in her bones, there was a war to wage, and people would admire her by her brain, by her power, by her ruthless and never by her beauty.
Never more. Even without the fragments to buff her appearance, her own nutrient potions, and enhancement concoctions had already made her a gorgeous girl. Her bushy hair converted into a mass of honey coloured curls already guaranteed eyes would follow her everywhere. Her straight, white teeth made her smile even prettier, and her new clothes and attitude paired with her incredible intellect would make people pause. She would never be called names again, he would make sure of it. She would be a leader, a true Queen since her rebirth, she would be one of the most important parts of his plan. And his plan was everything, they needed to treat carefully, to stitch their stories together to the point they would believe it true themselves. They needed to be, in a single word, discreet.
Harry got his mind thread interrupted by the door crashing open violently. Blonde hair on a pale face, silk robes, and Pureblood airs. He felt his heart drop in his chest.
"I AM FRIGID. MY MOTHER'S PRUDE. I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE!"
Harry pinched the bridge of his nose, pressing his eyes closed. He felt a migraine growing like the weeds in Aunt Petunia's garden, fast and steady. His plans crashed and burned around him, like the enemies of the mighty phoenix, like scraps of thoughts before the unstoppable force of Daphne Greengrass. He got an unshaken impression he should drop all his machinations and start growing crops. Or raising cattle. At the top of some distant mountain. Alone.
"Daphne, you are not frigid," said Hermione, stifling a laugh. "You are eleven."
"Why are you dressed like a midget whore? Is your family different in this reality too? Are you a chav now?"
"How do you know what a ch—? Forget it, I don't want to know. And stop talking about different worlds, Harry wants us to lay low with this. Come on, sit here by my side. I'm dressed like this because I'm being punished."
"And you are going to be punished too, Ms. Greengrass," barked Harry, his headache breaking all his stops. "What did we agreed on before coming here? To who else did you shout about different realities? Do you want us to BE LOCKED IN AZKABAN AGAIN?"
Instead of responding, the blond burst into tears. It was so undaphne to cry that it gave him pause. That, and the very stink eye Hermione made at him. She wrapped the taller girl in her arms, muttering something in her ear. Tears streamed down her porcelain face, her nose getting redder and redder, her pristine silk robes getting all wrinkly. The young boy felt a bad taste in his mouth, so he abandoned his seat to kneel next to the crying girl, sliding his hands over her lap, taking her own cold fingers in his, kissing her knuckles quietly.
"Come on, Daph, I'm sorry for shouting at you," begged him. She shook her head, stifling a sob.
"It's not your fault. I'm… I am feeling strange. Everything is strange. I'm not myself anymore. I'm… frigid."
"Daphne, I know you had a very… demanding drive before we came back, but it's normal for a pre-teen girl not to have a sex drive."
"You don't understand, Hermione," Daphne used a hanky to wipe her face. She looked cute with her small nose so red, Harry really needed to put some rein in his freshly started puberty. "When I travelled to Hogwarts the first time I had to take at least three bathroom breaks. And my mother… The day I came back, I tried to talk to her while she was bathing, and she shouted at me as if I was committing some kind of crime. And Astoria was crying all day for a toy she wanted, and it was a real, stuffed bear toy, instead of the… other kind. And mother and father are happily married, monogamously married. Believe me, I even searched for Cap. Roberts in my mother's dresser, tried even to accio it, and nothing. She wears strange clothes, all stuffed up, she talks about proper behaviour. She's a prude, and I don't even get wet thinking about my own punishment. What is wrong with me?"
"Cap. Roberts?"
"My mother's plastic helper. What is wrong with me?"
"How do wizards know about plas—?"
"Hermione, you are missing the point. Daphne, what do you know about this world?"
"Well. Uh, I read some, even if I was scared by my lack of… enthusiasm for life. No Flamel Experiments? Seems quite nice, I think. You don't think they did something to my family, do you? Some kind of Greengrass frigifyer—"
"For God's sake, Daphne—"
"For Merlin's,"
"Shut up, Harry. For Merlin's sake, Daphne, there is nothing wrong with you or your family, and in fact, I think I have a theory why you are… a normal, healthy young girl instead of a sex-obsessed tramp. And it's nothing they did to you, much to the contrary…"
"What are you talking about?"
"You always boasted that you have Veela blood in your line. That's how you are pretty, sexy, desirable, whatnot. Well, I think that just like Harry and I, you are suffering from the lack of fragments. Without them to fix our birth defects and activate our genes, your Veela blood remains inactive."
"But I was different even before the Ceremony."
"Yes, probably because your mother had the fragments and the active Veela blood. Exposure to her aura could semi-activate your inner Veela. Astoria's too. At least in theory. So your lack of sex drive can be easily fixed by our very own Ceremony."
"And my mother's too? If your theory is right, exposure to my aura would activate her blood, wouldn't it?"
"Probably. She will never be the woman you knew in your former life, but she would be more… active. Your sister's too, I think. She is younger, probably the blood would be more intense for her, and when she comes to Hogwarts exposure will be higher. Or we can simply put some fragments in her too…?"
"No fragments distribution for now. We still need to put our hands on the Stone, so, Daphne, I think we'll need to wait for puberty to strike you, as everybody else does."
"Not fun, not fun at all. Well, don't look at me like that, Hermione. My sex drive is important to me, it defines my character, just like you bossy bitchiness does to you."
"What? I am not—"
"Stop it, both of you!" Harry rubbed his eyes, carefully not to knock his lenses to the back of his head. The man guaranteed magical fixture for a year, but he didn't want to bet on it and need to go to Madam Pomfrey to extract magical glass from his brain. If Madam Pomfrey even existed in that world, that is. So many things to check. "I'm sure your drive will be back on track in no time. What we need to discuss now is which house we'll be in, and how did we have met, because you had to barge in our compartment without a cover up story."
"Oh, put a sock on it, Potter. Nobody cares what a firstie says or does, not even other firsties and you know it. We simply met on the train and got along. We all meet at Gryffindor or Slytherin? Hermione could probably pass as a foreign Pureblood this time, and red clash horribly with my skin tone, so…"
"How do you know I need to be a Pureblood to be accepted in this Slytherin house?"
"My father never shuts up about Purebloods, in this world. He complains all the time about how muggles and their muggle way are destroying our world. And it looks like Mother actually eats that crap, as she nods and complains about muggle women and their nasty, whorish ways. Remind me to introduce you to her on our Yule break."
"Can the whore jokes, I know this isn't my usual dress style but you don't need to make such a fuss about it. I'll be twelve in a month, I look older than that if I can say so myself, and I've seen younger girls dressed more revealing than that."
"If my mother's view about dress codes is the standard here, boys will throw knuts at you when you pass by, Hermione."
"What! Shut up, Daph," Hermione crossed her arms over her chest, frowning. "I worth much more than that. Galleons."
"You worth more than any other girl in that school, Hermione, and if anyone tries to take what's mine there will be blood."
"Hey, you should do this bad guy impersonation again. I think I got a little wet."
Hermione caught Daphne by the back of her robe before she could attack Harry. By the flush on her cheeks, she also liked his tone of voice. Harry thanked Merlin for the blessing of his voice not cracking up in the middle of it.
"We really need to decide our houses before the snogfest. Harry, I don't think we should be all together. I know, Daph, I really don't want to go through more seven years of sleeping in different beds and sneaking around, but we must think about the plan. This world is different from ours, we don't have the Stone, our powers are very limited and we need to spread out the most we can if we want to build another Court here. I think I want to be a Ravenclaw this time."
"You just want to read all the books in their secret room. And can you be intelligent in this world? I thought Harry was punishing you."
"I'm playing the intelligent bimbo character. Probably will throw most people off, and keep them on their toes when handling me. You could try it too, Daphne, even if I have no idea how you could fake intelligence."
Daphne slid over Hermione's lap, her smaller chest glued to the older girl's, their lips with barely some distance between them. Harry adjusted himself in his seat.
"Well," purred the blonde. "You could teach me, Miss Smartypants, we could make some girl on girl time."
They are eleven-year-olds, they are eleven-year-olds, they are eleven-year-olds, chanted Harry in his mind.
"For a frigid girl, you look very frisky, blondie. Are you sure you want me to teach you, Daphie? I can be very strict."
"FOR MERLIN'S SAKE THEY'RE ELEVEN YEAR OLDS!"
"Harry?"
"Sorry. Did I said it out loud? Sorry. Uh. Let's talk about houses, how about it? I agree with Hermione, we shouldn't be all together, and she should be in Ravenclaw. You should be a Slytherin, Daphne, because, really, you couldn't be something else. If my history lessons serve me right, and if this Hogwarts is like the one we read about in school, Hufflepuff is a bunch of pussies and Gryffindor is the party house with a big mouth. People expect me to be a Gryff, so I won't be one. Slytherin would be nice, but we don't know much about this Voldemort character and if his followers were just goons or dangerous people. Most of them got scot-free after I defeated the nosy guy, so their children are bound to be there. And really, Hermione told me people actually like my mother in this world, so I won't be in the only place they probably hate her. I'll be a Claw too."
"And Ginny?"
"She can be a Gryff, that way we'll cover three houses. I'll put a mole in Hufflepuff, maybe they hide some kind of talent there. We need to scout out people for our new Court and start to groom them into our ideals. This power vacuum they've been through since Voldemort's downfall probably let most of these people aimless and with broken ideas, we need to unite them under our banner before we can start making changes. Also, by my calculations, there should be less than four hundred students at Hogwarts today."
"Just that? What happened to this world?"
"We never truly solved our birth-rate problem, Daphne. Witches are at their peak of fertility around seventeen and we decline fast, becoming barren by our thirties. Only some avoid that fate, the Weasley clan comes to mind, and probably because some ancestor of them made a deal with some entity for it. We know the Blacks did. The Stone fragments would keep us fertile, even if each pregnancy was more and more difficult, but if they never used the Stone here…"
"So most of the people we know are either dead or never have been born?"
"Yes."
"Good. Most were pricks anyway. So there's what? Around ten children per house/year? The dorms will be more silent, that's for sure."
"So we agree on Slytherin for Daphne and Ravenclaw for Harry and me? Great. The cover story, as Daphne pointed out, is unnecessary, so we can move on to the next subject."
"Snogfest?"
Hermione gave them a very predatory smile.
"Why, Daphne, you took the words from my mouth."
Harry's last thought before the warm lilac haze dawned on him was he really needed to put some reign on that puberty thing. Sometime.
And here we are with another chapter of The Flamel Experiments! First of all, I want to thank you all for the reviews, PMs, followers and favorites!
So, we finally met all our protagonists, even if just briefly. Also, we saw some about Hermione's punishment and how different this Daphne Greengrass will be. And we finally met Ginny, but unfortunately she was born a little late for our First Year, so we'll only see more about her sometime down the road. I intend to publish the entire story in this single work, so she will appear in some next chapter.
That's it, thanks for reading and hope you have enjoyed it! All reviews are gladly accepted and (hopefully) swiftly answered. See you guys next chapter!
EDIT: Some reviewers pointed the horrible grammar and spelling mistakes in this chapter. I did some polishing and corrected (hopefully) all the typos. Sorry for the bumpy ride this chapter was and hope it reads better now.