Daphne Greengrass wasn't invited to Order meetings. Daphne Greengrass didn't fight in the First Hogsmeade Raid, as it would be called later. Daphne Greengrass, in fact, was barely tolerated.
They sneered at her in the Hogwarts hallways, those laughing Gryffindors. The Hufflepuffs avoided her and pretended they were on that particular moving staircase by accident, and not because they'd rather be late to class than be within five feet of her. The Ravenclaws, at least, weren't as bad, but nobody likes the moderates anyway.
Daphne wondered if Albus Dumbledore, that shining beacon of the light, noticed when Padma Patil was ignored by her sister for months straight because she read about Dark magic in a book she picked in the common room. She wondered if he saw Michael Corner slumped in the shadowy corners of the school with his nose bleeding and an angry, helpless glint in his eye. She wondered if he realized that everyone, not just his useless Order, was suffering.
She still remembered the night her father had pushed her into the Floo to Hogwarts. "Take care of your sister!" he had shouted, wand brandished in his right hand and the Greengrass sword in his left. She, herself, clutched his note in her right hand and Astoria's small fist in her left. The Ministry had fallen to Voldemort and that monster would not stand for the neutrality that her family had held up for generations. They were centrists, first and foremost, skirting the fringes of the traditionally Darker families, and had barely escaped Voldemort's wrath the first go-round.
So when the wards had registered the first spells being fired, Hyperion and Gisela Greengrass had roused their daughters from bed and Summoned their trunks. One hastily-written note later and the two of them were in Hogwarts, cut off from their family and trapped, effectively, in the lion's den. But Hyperion Greengrass knew as well as anyone that Albus Dumbledore, flaws aside, would die for his students. "It may come to that, too," she remembered him saying to her mother in hushed undertones.
With her chin held high and her back held straight—Show them no weaknesses, Daphne, her mother told her, tilting her chin up and pushing her shoulders back—she marched up to Albus Dumbledore at the head table with all of the grace of eleven years of dancing lessons, smiled with all the sweetness of a girl born and bred to become a political viper like Narcissa Malfoy, and handed him the crumpled note in her dainty hand.
Bemused, the man opened the note and read it swiftly. "The entirety of the Slytherin dorms are open to you and your sister, Miss Greengrass," he said with a strange, solemn note in his voice. "I'm sorry to say you are one of the few from your House who came back after the summer holidays."
"Thank you very much for your hospitality, Headmaster," Daphne said, the beatific, polite smile etched upon her porcelain-doll face, and marched right back down to the nearly empty table. Astoria was sniffling, but no tears fell. They didn't fall until hours later, when the two of them were alone in the sixth-year dorm. "Will they be okay?" Astoria asked between sobs. Daphne could only hold her tight. "I don't know," she admitted, the honesty cutting through her cool facade. "I just don't know."
When classes started the Monday after, as everyone tried to maintain a semblance of normalcy with Hogwarts turning into a refuge more day by day with families streaming in through the front gates and secret passageways, Daphne was loath to leave her sister to the tender mercies of her classmates. "I'll be fine, Daph," Astoria told her, all bluster and a devil-may-care smile stretching her lips. "I'll be fine."
But Astoria was not fine. The purple bruises on her arm where someone had grabbed her stood out starkly against her pale skin. "Who did this," Daphne bit out, more of a command than a question.
But spines of steel ran in the Greengrass women, and Astoria was no exception. "I handled him," she insisted.
"How?" Daphne asked.
"Cursed him until his knees were so wobbly he needed help to get to the Hospital Wing, which was rather difficult for him to get, seeing as how I put him under a silencing charm."
Daphne raised an eyebrow. Silencing charms were difficult, OWL-level magic. "You've been practicing," she said, in the grand tradition of compliments framed as admonishments.
Astoria smiled wanly back at her. "Whenever I get the chance," she confirmed. Daphne only drew her into a hug in reply.
On Saturdays, when the sun was just barely peeking over the horizon, Daphne would hunt for abandoned classrooms. Hogwarts had many but they shifted location often, and sometimes were occupied. Daphne cringed at the thought of the couple she had once stumbled in on, half-naked and too distracted by the other to notice her quickly backtracking out the door. Once she had found one, which could take from minutes to an entire hour, once, she'd Transfigure the old furniture into things resembling targets. The crude shapes of people, mostly, but even a werewolf once. And then she'd whirl about the room, her feet finding well-trod dueling patterns in her mind's eye. That was her warmup.
Then she'd trace the same patterns around her opponents, bobbing and weaving and ducking around them, while firing different colored balls of paint at them. Red for a Stunner, blue for a cutting curse. If she were feeling particularly bold, she'd fire a green one or two. But most days, only red and blue ran together to form purple drips all over the Transfigured targets. She'd Vanish the mess, then, and head back to the dorm room she shared with her sister to wash up and go to breakfast.
She saw Pansy Parkinson sitting alone every day and wondered if she should sit with her, just once, to see if the caustic, sharp-tongued, and unfortunately asinine witch had changed at all. But the warm presence of her sister by her side reminded Daphne that she had a job to do, and she wouldn't endanger herself or Astoria to pander to a witch that had hated her on principle for years.
No, she'd just sit at the Slytherin table and look the Headmaster straight in his twinkly blue eyes as if daring him to try and invade her mind. She had Occlumency shields, of course, as did her sister. The thought that Gisela Greengrass nee Burke would send her daughters off to a school at which two known Legilimens taught, without any training in the Mind Arts, was laughable.
The world outside the walls of Hogwarts was getting darker. From what she could glean from now-contraband Daily Prophet issues backdated several weeks and even Quibblers, the tabloid now manned from a secret location by Xenophilius Lovegood, it seemed that night was falling upon Wizarding Britain. On nights when she had finished her homework and put her sister to bed, she pieced together a timeline from these scraps of information and whispered gossip in the halls.
On June 18, 1996, the Order along with the DA clashed with the Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries. Before this, Voldemort's existence had not been openly acknowledged by anybody save for the headmaster and Harry Potter, who somehow died that night along with the youngest Weasley boy and the mudblood Hermione Granger. That, thought Daphne, was when everything went wrong.
A week later on June 25th, someone leaked a fragment of a prophecy to the Daily Prophet. Daphne remembered that day well, because her father had been drinking orange juice at the table and his glass had shattered on the hardwood floor. The Wizarding World, shocked and scared, had bemoaned the premature loss of their "Chosen One", which was only slightly less presumptuous than "Dark Lord" in Daphne's opinion.
By June 30th, the Ministry had finally mobilized the Auror Corps. Being so small, Wizarding Britain lacked a functional military and instead relied heavily on their Hit-Wizards for the day-to-day minutiae of policing the streets. The Aurors were reserved for larger threats and dark wizards, and Voldemort counted as both. Daphne had seen the parchments lying haphazardly in her father's office, seen the numbers and blanched. There were 30,000 magicals living in Britain, and only 80 Aurors in fighting shape. She had heard that they were fast-tracking trainees through the Academy, but there were less than 100 Aurors. Add that to the twenty-something Order members and the prospects of the Light were looking very bleak indeed.
July 12th was the first real battle since the skirmish a month earlier. Death Eaters and Ministry personnel fought somewhere south of London, resulting in heavy Auror casualties. Sometime in the following weeks, Voldemort would rebrand the outer fringes of his Death Eaters as the Knights of Walpurgis and send them on raids to fight in minor battles. Hyperion Greengrass had pushed his daughters through the Floo on the 3rd of September, the day Voldemort announced his takeover of the Ministry. It was now mid-October, and Voldemort was systematically crushing every village and town that did not cave to his demands. Daphne knew them, too. In her delicate, aristocratic voice, her mother had outlined each of his demands and explained in meticulous detail why Voldemort, this decade's Hitler, could not be allowed to continue.
"He wants us to mark the mudbloods," said Gisela Greengrass, her pretty mouth twisted into a moue of distaste. "Segregate them from us proper folk."
Astoria had taken a moment to grasp why, exactly, this was abhorrent. "If we're proper folk, Mother, why…?" she tried asking.
"Why are we against this?" Gisela asked, one eyebrow raised. Astoria nodded.
Instead of giving her daughter a direct answer, she had risen from her chair in a swish of robes and walked to the bookcase. She threw up a silencing ward Daphne had never heard before, and was so strong that she could feel the magic buzzing on her skin.
Delicate pianist fingers danced over the spines of the books before her mother pulled out a slim volume, decidedly newer-looking. She handed it to her youngest daughter. "This," Gisela said, "is a book on the connection between Grindelwald's war and the what the muggles call World War Two. Read it, my darling, because when a man like this rises to power, it means terrible things."
Astoria left the book closed as Daphne watched silently from the corner. "But they're mudbloods," she said. "Why does it matter what happens to them?"
Gisela Greengrass took Astoria's small hands in her own, gripping them firmly. "Because though they may be an unfortunate accident of birth, they are not the magic-stealing demons the Dark Lord pretends they are. And though they are ignorant of our traditions, they are not savages for loving their own. And most of all, Astoria, the muggleborns—"
Daphne had sucked in a sharp breath. That was the first time she had ever heard her mother refer to them without the slur.
"—did not choose their parents," she said fiercely. "Read the book, Astoria, and it will become clear to you why V-V-Voldemort," she paused to collect herself, "must be stopped. Why we must not cave to the demands of a tyrant and a genocidal maniac."
She glanced at her oldest daughter. "Do not speak a word of this to your father," she warned. "Hyperion has always been neutral, but he will not stand for the things I have said today."
Daphne nodded curtly, nd watched as Astoria fled the library with the book gripped tightly. Gisela looked at her, searching her face, before leaving too.
As she felt the silencing ward collapse some minutes later, Daphne sank to the floor.
Then, she had felt only crushing despair and the knowledge that her parents would not survive the war. Because this was shaping up to be a war, no matter how the parents used to paint the issue of Voldemort as merely domestic terrorism. No, this would be a civil war, with all of the blood such a title required.
It had frightened Daphne, that she thought such things. And she could not confide in Astoria and worry her younger sister more.
But now, alone and surrounded by what, by any definition of the word, were her enemies, Daphne only felt anger. Anger that her parents had not followed them through the Floo. Angry at the ineffectual headmaster for allowing his school to become a war base for the rapidly dwindling Light. Angry that the people around her couldn't see past their petty House rivalries and family grudges to realize that Daphne and Astoria Greengrass were only trying their best to survive. It sickened her, their bias and prejudice. She wanted to tell them that she was not her parents, who still looked down on muggleborns for all their talk of neutrality. She wanted to tell them she was more than her last name.
And it had occurred to her on multiple occasions the irony that the Light could not look past her family, her blood, while fighting for muggleborn rights and freedoms.
Sometimes Daphne wondered if she had joined the right side. Sometimes she wondered if her parents had thrown their lot in with the Light only to die as martyrs, or, even worse, as unnamed corpses on a battlefield. She'd reassure herself that Albus Dumbledore, with all of his faults and foibles, was no Voldemort. He would not torture or kill people for the fun of it, or because he had a bad day and needed to blow off some steam.
Still, Daphne was tired of her life being decided for her by powerful men.
In her abandoned classroom, she stood from where she had rested in a Transfigured chair. "What right do they have?" she snarled at the stone walls.
That was the question, wasn't it?
So when she heard stirrings of an Order meeting, Daphne Greengrass scanned the Great Hall. She saw Nymphadora Tonks, who was her second cousin several times removed, get up quickly at the prompting of one Kingsley Shacklebolt, accomplished Auror and Dumbledore's left-hand man. Aurors will notice me, she determined, and looked around once more. Then she saw one of the Weasleys—the twin?—leaving. She hopped off her seat. "Go to your dorms," she said in a low voice. "Follow Pansy Pansy Parkinson straight there and lock the door. I'll be back when I can."
Astoria nodded sharply as Daphne tailed the shock of bright red hair bobbing through the crowd. She followed him up several flights of stairs to a door she had never seen before in a hallway she had passed through on multiple occasions. When she heard the tell-tale thunk of Alastor Moody's peg-leg, she winced and swore silently. That man could see through Disillusionment charms.
So she cast the charm but did not enter the room, crouching instead right outside the door. Black nearly bowled into her after several minutes of straining her ears, trying to catch snippets of the conversations. A little later, she heard Moody's gruff voice.
"I'll get Black."
With a barely-squashed eep! Daphne scrambled away from the door, undoing the charm as she did so. She scrambled to the stairs and turned, pretending she had been coming up them all along. Moody didn't even acknowledge her, pulling a worn-piece of parchment from his pocket and tapping it with his wand, mumbling under his breath.
Daphne decided she'd better cut her losses now than risk getting caught and Obliviated—she shivered at the thought of someone rummaging around in her head—and turned left down the corridor.
She was so caught up in a whirling mess of discoveries and half-heard words that she didn't realize her feet had taken her nearly to Gryffindor Tower. With a huff, she turned, nearly crashing into the Weasley she had followed to the Order meeting. He didn't seem to notice her, thank heavens, and passed by in a cloud of misery.
She glanced after him for a long moment before traveling back to the dungeons. She had a lot to think about.
A/N The population of Wizarding Britain seems to be one of the numerous numerical inconsistencies of the books. I took the population from www dot seven-fifty dot net slash wizpop dot htm. A quick Google search told me that there are about 20 police officers per 10k people, so I extrapolated and added a few more, since, as Daphne tells us, this is wartime. Rowling also never specifies the exact purpose of the Hitwizards, so I'm thinking they're kind of like the everyday law-enforcer type rather than specialized Dark Wizard hunters. Anybody catch the reference? Hint: "notoriously complex magic system".