Her eyelids cover her big, curious brown eyes.
Her gorgeous, shining pigtails match her gorgeous silk nightgown.
Her porcelain skin softens the harsh image that surrounds her.
She is a perfect replica of a baby doll,
Encircled in a perfect replica of chaos.
Perfect Little Girl – thecantervilleghost (fictionpress)
"She'll have lovely red hair, just like her mother's," the midwife tells Lily Potter.
"Auburn," Lily croaks, croaks because she's too tired to speak. But she's happy, blissfully happy, as she lies in bed, with parched throat, screaming muscles and soul still taut and on hair-trigger edge even hours after the ordeal. She lets Sirius do the talking, bright, bouncing-on-his-feet Sirius. And Peter, the harried expression he's come to wear almost permanently, melting into one of his old, goofy grins as he coos over the baby – my baby, Lily thinks in incredulity and something akin to pleased bewilderment. Even Remus chuckles and cracks a dry joke over too over her little bald head – "It'll be a miracle if she has hair of any sort, let alone auburn". James is just beyond words.
Later when the boys have all left – boys, they're still boys to her –, with her friends' bouquets of glacial-white and coral-pink roses and pink-and-gold balloons to keep her company, Lily ponders the mystery of life. New life. With Dorea's birth – Dorea, they'd decided if it was a girl, after James' mother, killed only a few brief months ago – she feels like she's been reborn.
The baby mewls in the nighttime, like a little kitten and Lily switches on the lights in her solitary hospital room to take her from the bassinet. It's as she's nursing her, with her own long auburn hair falling over the baby's soft, dimpled, wrinkled pink skin that she notices her eyes. She rather wonders that she hadn't taken a better look at them before.
They're beautiful eyes, so large, starred with such long, feathery black lashes. Hazel eyes, with a golden glow that reminds Lily uncannily of Felix Felicis. Just like her father's.
"You'll be my lucky charm, won't you?" Lily whispers to Dorea. "Just like your daddy."
000
It's not to be. With the greatest irony in the world, Dorea Potter brings everyone in the world luck – except those who really matter.
Hagrid cries, big, fat tears, as big as his heart, oozing over his grizzled cheeks, as he scoops the frail, pink-clad little doll out of her upturned crib. She's crying too, howling for the mother that she'll never see again, for the father who was conjuring colored balls of light for her just five minutes ago.
"Hush little baby, don't say a word…"
He warbles a lullaby in his cracking voice. Borne on its silken wings, she falls asleep, a pink-cheeked, hazel-eyed morsel of a thing in his great hands. He puts her down, on Dumbledore's sadly-sighed murmurs (sad, jubilant, it's hard to tell, it's so mixed up), on the stone doorstep of the pretty, picture-perfect stone-and-wood house. Her silken lashes rest on her satin-soft cheeks and he stands simply, for a moment, to watch her.
Little Dorea.
He remembers her grandmother, Dorea Black, slim and stately as a willow tree. Long lashes, as black as the smooth blue-black tresses of hair curling about her pretty, piquant little face, always fluttering, always beckoning. Even at inconsequential little Gryffindor first-years.
"Don't laugh at them, Druella, they're not all of them so small – just look at this one. Hello there, dearie, what's your name?"
"Rubeus, ma'am."
"A fine name! There, don't look so nervous, you'll get used to this maze of a school. Transfiguration? You needn't hurry, Professor Dumbledore is the kindest soul, he'll understand that you're new… just go that way. Yes, yes, I know, you're welcome."
He shakes his head and the lovely Black Princess with the enchanting eyes dissolves into the green haze of the serpentine constellation hanging over the Potter's house and then again into the pink-clad baby on the Dursley's doorstep.
"Be safe," he says, crossing his fingers in the old gesture, and for a moment he doesn't know who he's saying it for. Dorea Black, so vivid in life that it's hardly possible that she's dead now, just dead, or her granddaughter, the doll on the doorstep.
"Be safe," he repeats and vanishes into the night.
000
Petunia finds her the next morning, and lets out an ear-splitting scream. The milk bottle drops out of her hand, clanging violently on the doorstep before shattering into a million glittering glass shards on the newly-moved grass. The eyelashes flutter open and Petunia looks down into wide hazel eyes. Even in the cold, grey November dawn-light, the warm, golden undertones in those eyes glow.
She remembers chocolate bars given on birthdays and Christmas, wrapped between thin layers of glinting gold tinsel-foil. Lights flashing off her long golden earrings as she dances the night away with Vernon. Her mother's wedding ring, the true gold shining bright and clear even as she fades away.
She bends down to pick up the note attached to the baby's bassinet. But before she reads it, she scoops up the child, knowing, knowing from the face – not the eyes, but every feature is strikingly like Lily's, like Dorea's other grandmother Iris's – who it is. "Lets get you out of the cold," she mutters and marches upstairs, to put Dorea in the cradle, next to Dudley.
000
She looks nothing like the grandmother she's named for, and everything like the one she isn't. Iris Brownstone, Iris Evans. A lovely, laughing, lilting young thing in old sepia-tinted photographs. Long, flowing golden-red hair.
Petunia loves brushing Dorea's hair. When the little girl closes her eyes and curls up on her aunt's lap, Petunia can almost imagine that it's Lily, little, baby Lily come back. The Lily who turned her back for all time when she was eleven. Petunia doesn't miss the green-eyed girl whom everyone called 'spunky' – and Petunia called 'audacious'. She misses the kid with the determinedly red hair – not auburn – who'd creep up to her sister's bed in the night during thunderstorms.
She likes to think that Dorea is her daughter, and it's an easy enough fiction to manage. Dorea has the same long neck, the same slender figure. As for the hair… well, after all Petunia's own mother was a redhead. Mr and Mrs Dursley and their two beautiful children, Dudley and Dorea.
That's how they pose in photographs – Vernon, his beefy chest thrust forwards, his arm around his wife's stylishly stole-draped shoulders, Dudley in his cute little pin-striped suit, Dorea in her frilly pink frock. What a delightfully average family.
Dudley never sees any competition in Dorea, in his tiny, doll-like little sister, and perhaps that's why he takes so kindly to her. She's his princess and he's the fierce dragon protecting her from unworthy knights. It starts from preschool, when he punches Piers Polkiss who runs up to Dorea at break to offer her a daisy (later of course, Piers wins Dudley's approval when he socks Dudley as hard as he can, instead of crying for the teacher).
But that's what big brothers do. Bully their sisters, harass other boys… and be harassed by their sisters in return.
Yes, what a delightfully average family. Baking cupcakes and cookies, playing dress-up and hosting tea parties with the neighborhood girls, putting on nail-polish and feeling oh-so grown-up when Auntie gets ready for a party (Auntie, it's more like Mummy for Dorea)… Dorea really is part of the family.
Watching her racing across the lawn with Dudley – Vernon purposefully lagging a few steps behind them –, insisting that they hang lace curtains up in the treehouse, it's easy for Petunia to imagine that it's her daughter, part of her. It's easy, until Dorea's long red hair begins to darken, to acquire that familiar auburn tinge…
There are incidents, little ones that hardly stick out in anyone's memory but sharp-eyed Petunia's. Barbies, their sleek blond hair metamorphosing into unruly turquoise curls to match their miniskirts, nails streaked with rainbow patterns even before she's had time to apply nail-polish on Dorea, Dudley managing, almost impossibly, to shot every goal during the second-graders' basketball game.
Petunia really, really doesn't like the color auburn.
000
They tell her nothing, show her nothing, reveal nothing. All that Dorea knows of her parents is of a pair of pretty, slightly dim 'young people' – 'hooligans', Vernon always manages to mutter out of the corner of his mouth whenever the story comes up – who were killed in a tragic car accident. Tragic but timely.
Petunia makes sure that it's inscribed into her niece's head that it was better that they died at twenty-one – "Your father, darling," she coos softly, brushing Dorea's shining hair at night, "was, I am sorry to say unemployed. Intoxicated, quite frequently. Lily was… well, a lovely girl, but she was so young, didn't know how to make the right choices… for your sake, dear, I hope you'll make the right choices in life. Know who your true friends are."
"Of course I do," Dorea says, with a sleepy smile.
She's eleven when it comes out, with the first letter on the doorstep. Anger shimmers under her veins as she waves the cream-colored envelope under her uncle's nose and asks, with deadly calm, what it is. Petunia has expected the day, prepared for it. She sits Dorea down and quietly, gravely, in words simple enough for an eleven-year-old to comprehend, explains everything. About wizards and witches and their bad, scary world, about torture devices secreted within the bowels of medieval castles (she embellishes when she has to), about the hatred borne by those of 'pure-blood' for 'Muggle-borns' and 'half-bloods' (she thanks God that she still remembers Lily's words). A world of black fantasy, which, beyond the nose-biting teacups and the cute wands, was a masquerade of horrors.
Vernon, listening at the keyhole, silently commends his wife yet again, and thinks how lucky he is to have married a woman like her. No, not a woman like her, just her and her alone.
"Know who your friends are," Petunia says, low and stern, at the end.
Dorea is intimidated by the voice and the steel-chip blue eyes – as it was intended for her to be – but there's still a spark of Lily's spunk left in her. "I thought I knew!" she says hotly, raising her chin.
Petunia sighs and turns her head away. "Then perhaps it's time to show you those people whom you think are friends." And she writes her letter to Dumbledore, requesting the presence of a 'representative of your race' at her house, to teach 'my understandably bewildered and distressed niece'.
On a tepid August night, he arrives in a swirl of plum velvet robes, and is ushered into the living room by a red-faced Vernon. Dorea, sitting pretty and prim, takes in his extravagant attire, the broken nose and the blue eyes, twinkling with almost sinister benignity behind the half-moon spectacles. Petunia's hard eyes bore holes into her back and she's uncomfortably aware of the fact that she's standing at the crossroads of life.
Perhaps it's too much for an eleven-year-old to take.
"I think that you might care to begin at the beginning, Mr Dumbledore," Petunia says, her long fingernails digging into the carved armrests of Dorea's chair. She leans slightly over her niece, omniscient, intimidating. "About how her parents were murdered, perhaps?"
Don't they ever stop twinkling? Dorea wonders as he turns with a kindly smile towards her. She squirms, uncomfortable under the gaze of those electric-blue eyes. He looks like he can see right through me. It's not a very nice feeling. On the one side she can feel her aunt's eyes, on the other the odd Dumbledore-man's. He paints a world, black, white and grey, for her but to her, unacquainted with reality, it's frighteningly grim. She'd rather have the rainbow-spangled childhood that she thinks is the whole world, than the razor-edged truth.
"Know who your true friends are."
"Of course I do," Dorea says, with a sleepy smile.
She does, and in the end Dumbledore rises, a smile – perhaps slightly disappointed, but benign and kind all the same – on his face and says, "Well if that's the way you feel, Miss Potter."
"It is," she croaks out, uncertain whether she's made the right decision. Later, when Petunia crushes her into the hug of a lifetime and Dudley generously gives her his share of pie at dessert – monumental act of self-sacrifice – she's sure she has.
000
Seasons pass, birthdays go by and Dorea almost – almost, but not quite – forgets the curious incident of the professor in the nighttime. She shoots up and curves out like any other girl. She dyes her long, silky hair blond – "It's so hard to believe that Mrs Dursley's your aunt and not your mum, Dory," "Yeah, sometimes I forget, myself!" – and learns the power of her stunning hazel eyes. Granted, she doesn't meet any boys at St. Anne's – the sister boarding school of Smeltings, where Petunia was educated many years before – but during the holidays…
With Vernon and Dudley's express approval, she begins dating Piers Polkiss. She thinks he looks awfully like a rat, but he's rich and likeable – really a lot like Dudley, whom she adores in typical little-sister way. Petunia beams with pride and remembers her own girlhood when Dorea and Piers stand together in the living room, false smiles in place, she pretty in her peacock-blue dress, he almost good-looking in his tuxedo, being photographed by Vernon.
They'll make such a sweet couple, she thinks fondly, already preparing the guest list for the wedding in her mind. Just like Vernon and me.
She was a nice girl, a likeable girl inspite of all her little vices. The type of girl who you sat up with late at night, painting eachother's toenails and whispering secrets to. The type of girl who's legs the boys loved and you envied. Spunky, lazy, impetuous, not always very polite, sweet and charming only in front of those who counted… she was better and worse than you expected. Just normal, just another pretty teenage girl.
She was sixteen, when Lord Voldemort rose again, and the world began to slide into chaos. She was sixteen and no one in her world knew or cared.
She was seventeen, a brittle, butterfly-bright seventeen, when the blood protection lifted. Dorea Potter, who sixteen years before had defeated the Dark Lord.
Pfft, Draco Malfoy thought succinctly as he watched the slim, pretty blond girl swinging in the sunny garden. What a laugh…
A jet of green light shot from the tip of the hawthorn wand and before the girl had toppled over, he'd disappeared with a crack as silent as a faded autumn leaf slipping to the ground.
A/N: I suppose I could have written more about this, but meh, I'm lazy. And yes I do love the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.