Obligatory disclaimer: It's all JK Rowling's, or maybe a little bit whatever WB rolls up to these days. It doesn't belong to me!
In a strange, tower-like house in Devon, a tiny girl's silvery eyes were the font of more tears than she had cried in her life. Her mother's funeral had been that day, and she thought she'd never be happy again.
Huddled in a cupboard under the stairs of an aggressively normal house in Surrey, an underfed boy with striking green eyes was desperately trying to hold in his own tears. The bullying that day had been especially bad, and he couldn't think of a future worth living if this was all his world was to be.
Close enough to the same time, their hearts both made a wish that they couldn't even put into words: for a better life, a different life, anyone else's life, any life but this one.
And their magic answered.
Consider the Fidelius charm. It doesn't just make a space impossible to perceive by those not allowed to know the secret. It doesn't just make it impossible to share the secret for all but one keeper. It strips the knowledge of the location from the minds of all those that knew it before it became a secret, wherever they may be.
Imagine the difficulty of trying to obliviate every mind in the world of the location of a place. If it's a place that many people know of, the expenditure to affect them all at once would be beyond nearly any wizard. And that's if they were in the same location and had no training in defending their minds against hostile magic, or were not behind strong wards.
So convenient, then, that what this charm does is not make people forget a location. It makes the knowledge of that location a secret. Wherever that information is, now it is protected by the spell. Minds cannot fathom it. Written descriptions are blank. Photographs of it show nothing.
This all works because information is something that magic can affect directly. It's easy to think of knowledge as just letters arbitrarily strung end to end, only meaning anything when placed into human minds designed to interpret them. But facts have their own existence, as far as magic is concerned, and can be affected no matter where they're recorded.
And the identity of the child of James and Lily Potter, though stored in the minds of countless witches and wizards and written about in a popular series of fanciful books, as well as a number of authoritative historical tomes, was just one more fact.
If two children wished hard enough and accidentally made magic to change that fact, the difficulty was no more than hiding the secret of the house where James and Lily had lived when that child was an infant.
Magic isn't perfect, of course.
It was now a fact that Luna Potter was the daughter of James and Lily Potter. Neither was likely to have a daughter with straw-blond hair, so her hair was red like her mother's, and other aspects of her face were close enough to have a family resemblance. A blood test, muggle or wizard, would declare her the Potter heir. But she still had gray eyes, maybe because eyes are the windows to the soul.
And, somehow, she did not have the distinctive, lightning-shaped scar that had once appeared in all the stories. Some things are too powerful to be affected by changes to facts.
It was also true that changing one fact could only ripple so far. Luna, if asked, would tell you that she had lived in this muggle home with her aunt, uncle, and cousin for as long as she could remember. But it was strange how she couldn't tell you many details about her life there, seemed slightly surprised at every piece of muggle technology she encountered until it was explained to her, and had an inexplicable intuition about a magical world that she'd never heard of that would serve her well when she would eventually receive a letter to invite her to attend a strange boarding school.
Similarly, her relatives knew that they hated the child of Petunia Dursley's sister, with nearly a decade of built-up slights and justifications for deprivation and punishment. But somehow the small, spacey girl that they found in the cupboard that morning didn't quite fit the framework of excuses they'd built over the years to support their mistreatment. At the very least, the patriarchal assumption of discipline and bullying one could impose upon a little boy seemed somehow even more monstrous if done to a little girl.
And, though she knew that her parents had died long before she could remember, Luna woke that morning with a deep, yawning chasm of pain for the deceased Lily Potter. Petunia Dursley was not prepared for the long-buried flood of her own emotions, having to suddenly comfort a wailing child that looked, surprisingly, like her sister had before things had gone wrong between them.
Luna was moved to her cousin Dudley's second bedroom by the end of the day and many relationships began to change at Number 4, Privet Drive.
Meanwhile, things were also strange in the Rookery, on the edges of Ottery-St.-Catchpole. Harry Lovegood woke in a nice bed, in a room with blue carpet, its wall paintings so abstract and strange that it would be hard to tell whether a boy or girl called it home. A picture of Pandora Lovegood and Harry hugging sat next to the bed. Both of them had straw-colored hair, because one couldn't inherit black hair from two blond parents, though his striking green eyes were an anomaly. Looking at the photo, Harry knew the fact that she had just died. But the loss already felt old, like it had happened years before. Maybe this was just another stage of grief?
His father, though, was a broken man. Harry had a deep feeling like he'd work hard to help those who didn't care for him, so he needed to do everything he could to help his father as best he could. That started with trying to bring some normalcy to the house, despite the void left by his mother. For some reason, the magical kitchen appliances didn't make much sense to him, but cooking was cooking and he figured it out.
Xenophilius Lovegood saw his son working so hard, making a breakfast so good that he, himself, couldn't have managed anything half as delicious, and doing his best to survive. And, if his son could do it, maybe he could too.
Rather than allowing grief to send them deeper and deeper into the fanciful world of wizarding conspiracies, the Lovegood boys both resolved that they'd come through this, stronger.
It helped that Harry, despite everything his father could remember, seemed to be very conservative about "freakish" things, and didn't egg Xenophilius along the way it seemed his child ought.
The next year was an interesting one for all involved.
In Surrey...
Petunia Dursley had a lot of feelings. For some reason, she felt like she'd been trapped in a house full of boys for a decade, and having another girl in her home completely changed the dynamic. She chalked it up to how children can sometimes flip personality drastically going into adolescence. That was when she and Lily had grown apart so quickly. Maybe it was a gift from above that this little girl, who reminded Petunia so much of Lily, was becoming more someone she could love. And if Petunia was unconsciously on the lookout for scrawny, dark haired, freakish boys that might ruin her relationship again, that had to be all down to the Snape kid and not anyone else.
It was good that Petunia was ready to attribute any changes in Luna to growing up, because they were many and drastic. In particular, the girl seemed to be erratic in school, doing far better than her report cards said she had before in some subjects, and much worse in others. Fortunately, the primary school curriculum is not difficult, and Luna was a bright and eager-to-learn girl who picked her grades up immensely throughout the year. Since the Dursleys tried not to think about all the years they'd forced the girl to cook and work in the garden, it was easier for them to ignore that she seemed to have no idea how to do either of those chores anymore either.
Dudley's life slowly became very difficult. With the well-behaved—if somewhat erratic—girl to use as a reference, Petunia started to wonder if it was normal for her son to throw tantrums when he didn't get his way. After all, who was she punishing by allowing this behavior other than herself? Her husband, Vernon, took a while to be persuaded, but he eventually was. And the Dursleys learned to use discipline as well as bribes to control their boy.
Dudley very much wanted to take it out on someone, but couldn't figure out how his vague memories of beating up Luna could be true. Beating up boys was okay, but beating up girls was not allowed—even he knew that much. The cognitive dissonance whipped through his whole group of friends, and Piers Polkiss quickly became convinced that their habit of "Luna Hunting" must have been trying to find Luna so they could ask her to go with them. They were still ten, and didn't know what they'd do if a girl did want to go with them, but dating was a thing that men did, and they were precisely the kind of boys that wanted to become men as soon as possible.
Vernon was the slowest to change. While Luna wasn't exactly a freak in the way that his vague memories insisted, she was a very strange child. She'd drift around, interested in the most mundane of details but too deep in her daydreams to stay out of the street when a car was coming (and that had been a scary day for him, having to save the girl). She had very odd ideas about people, coming up with strange theories that she didn't seem to have the words for until she somehow got hold of some new age nonsense books and started talking about auras and chakras. Vernon put a stop to that right away: she was not to talk about things that only she could see, because it was upsetting to people.
Luna had never realized that other people couldn't see these things, or might be upset by her pointing them out. But she did quickly figure out that her uncle had the most chaotic aura of anyone else she saw, like little bugs fluttering around his head at all times. Other than occasionally leaving around crystals that were supposed to be good for that kind of thing, she didn't push the large, angry man.
But on the whole, the year was very good for the inhabitants of Number 4 Privet Drive. As Luna's eleventh birthday got closer and closer, Petunia began to fear what was coming, the letter that would take her niece away from her just as it had her sister. In some ways, it was like she'd finally gotten Lily back.
Meanwhile, in Devon…
While Harry was having the best year in his memory, the Weasley family was perhaps having an even better one. Ginny remembered that she and the only neighbor her age had been drifting apart recently, and she couldn't figure out why. Similarly, Ron had always thought his little sister's friend was too weird to stand, but Harry wasn't like that at all. The neighbor boy stabilized their sibling dynamic, and both of them quickly came to think of Harry as their best friend. They were sometimes guilty that they figured it took the shock of his mother dying for him to want to be a normal, playful child with them.
For her part, out of sympathy for the boy, Mrs. Weasley had been more than happy to offer homeschooling and help out the grieving Mr. Lovegood. Harry was oddly distrustful of adults to start, and almost too well behaved, and she barely noticed the holes in his knowledge of wizarding subjects over getting him to come out of his shell and trust. She was so pleased to see him bloom over the year, and started to think of him as the eighth Weasley child.
Even Mr. Weasley, who was usually at work while Harry was over, took to the boy the few times they got to interact. It seemed the young pureblood had something of an intuitive understanding of muggle technology, and was quite helpful as a sounding board for problems of understanding he was facing in the office. Harry even seemed much more interested in the shed full of muggle appliances than any of his own children ever had been.
Eventually learning from Harry that his father was coping poorly, the Weasley parents worked harder to reach out to the grief-stricken widower, despite how odd he was. As he was able, Xenophilius tried to pull his own weight since he understood how much the neighbors were doing to educate and care for his boy. Always keen to go into the wilderness to research stories for his paper, he became in charge of field trips for the children, who were thrilled with all the adventures they were having.
As summer approached, Ron started to realize that Harry wouldn't be going off to Hogwarts with him, and was sad he'd be without his best friend for a year. Ginny, on the other hand, was thrilled that she wasn't going to be alone while she waited for her own first year at school.
Of course, at the school, it had been a strange year for Albus Dumbledore. Plans for the first year of the Girl-Who-Lived were seeming to overlap with rumors he'd been hearing about threats to his friend, Nicholas Flamel's, philosopher's stone. It seemed likely to the headmaster that Voldemort would make his move to try to coincide with the return of young Luna to wizarding society. Which was why it was all the more troubling that the many devices he had in his office to monitor her well-being had been acting up more and more over the year. He'd even made extra meetings with Mrs. Figg, who served as his eyes on Privet Drive, to make sure the girl was safe.
What he didn't understand was that there were some magics, like the scar, that were too powerful for a simple exchange of facts to alter, and one of those was a protection fueled by a mother's love. Fortunately, charged as they were by years of constant proximity, Luna would be off to Hogwarts before the blood wards guarding Number 4 Privet Drive failed due to the true anchor of their power no longer being in residence.
This story currently has six chapters in the can, and will go into hiatus once those are posted. I plan to finish writing Year 4 of my Dresden Files/Harry Potter crossover, Born in Fiendfyre, and then see which of my side projects has the most interest to become my next main project. So, basically: fair warning that this isn't guaranteed before you start reading. If you do read the whole thing and want more, please follow and review to let my muse know that this is the story you'd like to see more of.
