I don't own Harry Potter; this is the final chapter of this story, and I hope you have enjoyed it; please let me know what you think, and Merry Christmas.
The Patil Triplets.
If someone had told her that she was not born a boy, that her interest and fascination and understanding of Indian culture and civilisation, and that she was born a witch and had lived a lie for so many years perpetrated by a wizard with delusions of grandeur, Pavini would have said they were lying or worse. But it was all the truth.
But now, nearing her 16th birthday while she and her sisters attended one of India's best magical schools after finishing up with their case to make Dumbledore pay for what he had done, Pavini spent every single day idly reflecting for a few moments how quickly she had just settled down as if she had lived with Parvati and Padma all along; the magic used by her real parents and the goblins had made it easier to break whatever disgusting enchantments Dumbledore had imposed on her when he and his associates wanted to turn her into Harry Potter, and now Pavini was freely herself, and while she had never forgotten her past and the kidnapping, she had sometimes caught herself seeing her sister's childhoods from their point of view as she had always been there.
In the five years since discovering her true identity, Pavini Patil often reflected on what had happened and what had changed.
There was nothing that could be done, but Pavini had long since accepted it. She had no choice. Dumbledore and his group who were involved had robbed her of the chance to know her parents and be raised with love that was unbridled.
Shortly after they had discovered what had happened to her, her parents had secretly begun alerting the magical authorities, and before Dumbledore and the Ministry of Magic had even known what was happening, they found themselves dealing with a lawsuit from hell. After some consultation and a few thought experiments about what could and would likely happen, the Patils and their legal representatives worked out something important; there was simply no chance they could hide the fact Dumbledore had kidnapped their child, as much as they had hoped before making their final decisions, and magically changed her appearance and put her with another family to be turned into a piece of bait for a terrifyingly dangerous and savage wizard. That was bad enough. But what Dumbledore had tried to do to the sibling bond was a crime that could and should never be hidden.
Both Rajal and Shehani wanted justice for their daughter and what she had gone through. They spent enough time with her, gently goading her into revealing what the Dursleys had done, and so they used their muggle contacts to arrange for the Dursleys to be punished. Pavini did reveal she had tried alerting people to the Dursleys' crimes before, but nothing happened; policemen and teachers would apologise to the Dursleys over the misunderstanding and go off on their merry way while treating her as if she were a criminal. That factor was one of the reasons why Pavini had come to despise authority figures, and why she didn't trust them.
The implication had hit her parents like a hammer smashing through glass. Dumbledore or some of his lackeys involved had used magic on muggles. That was a crime worthy of prison.
After withdrawing their children from Hogwarts, because there was no way they wanted Parvati, Padma, and Pavini to have anything to do with any place tainted by Dumbledore, the Patils got to work.
Suddenly the wizarding world woke up to the knowledge that Harry Potter, the real Harry Potter, had never existed. The child had died young, and somebody had kidnapped another magical child, forcibly changing their identity right down to their gender and attributes while trying to destroy a sibling bond, before shamelessly using that child as bait. The Patils didn't have a problem coming forward and giving proof that it was their child; they were simply too angry to care.
The kidnapping of Pavini Patil had been one of the most complicated cases in the DMLE's cold case archive. Until that point, it had never been solved, and the reason for the kidnapping of one of the little girls was strange in itself; if the kidnappers had wanted to just take children, why not simply take all of the sisters together? How had they gotten in? There had simply been nothing for the DMLE investigators to work with, and while someone did wonder if the Patils had somehow staged the whole thing for some reason, the idea held no water, but now the reasoning came out, the truth was more horrifying than they had originally expected.
Dumbledore's actions forced the ICW to sack him and begin investigating him themselves, and they found Dumbledore had gotten several illegal potions and rituals to change Pavini into a boy, turn her into Harry Potter, and try to break the sibling bond.
And they discovered he hadn't done it alone; that wasn't entirely a surprise, while Dumbledore was a master of Transfiguration Alchemy, and potions, there was only so much he could do by himself, so he had enlisted help from several people. When they were questioned, it became obvious that some of those people had been press-ganged by Dumbledore, and didn't have a true idea of what the old wizard was doing, and those who did he had simply brainwashed with his typical methods of persuasion he was acting in the name of the Greater Good; that phrase itself caused Dumbledore a lot of trouble later on.
Even now, most of those people still held on true to Dumbledore's claims that he was acting in the best interests of the wizarding world. They didn't seem interested or bothered that they had worked with an evil wizard to destroy a family and pervert one of the most sacred bonds in the wizarding world's culture.
The news Dumbledore had tried committing such an act of line theft and tried severing a sibling bond while sacrificing a child to a Dark Lord after altering her appearance and using a phoenix to actually help him kidnap said the child was shocking, as was the revelation Harry Potter truly did not exist.
But once one skeleton in the closet was unveiled, there was a flood to discover what other misdemeanours Dumbledore was responsible for. And the ICW and the lawyers of the Patil's and with the pressure of the Indian magical community and so many others who were outraged by Dumbledore's acts in kidnap and fraud, child abuse because of muggles, and line theft and trying to break sacred bonds made sure Dumbledore lost virtually every protection he had.
Dumbledore was stripped of his protections - magical and political, and his phoenix, which was discovered as being bound to him by various illegal methods, which showed the old wizard's corruption had been there for a long time, was released and it disappeared - and he was questioned thoroughly under veritaserum, a very powerful truth potion; Pavini and her family had met with Amelia Bones, the DMLE head, who had questioned her, and several of their lawyers, so then she could offer them some questions for Dumbledore while raising some points; Pavini and her family had talked at length about what she had gone through, and as they talked, they came up with a number of extremely trying and difficult points that needed to be addressed.
The first, was the Potters; did Lily and James even know what Dumbledore had done?
The answer was, fortunately, no. The Potters hadn't known what Dumbledore had done, because the old wizard had modified their memories, as well as the memories of the Healers who had helped Lily give birth, but otherwise, they hadn't known the truth. This truth was further emphasised when the goblins helped the Patils discover a portrait of Lily and James, who shared many of the memories of their originals and were horrified when they discovered that their real child had died, and Dumbledore had stolen another child to act as a substitute because he wanted bait for a trap.
Why did Dumbledore even need to set bait in the first place? Why use a family?
The answer was a prophecy that Dumbledore had received thanks to Sybil Trelawney, a prospective applicant to the Divination teaching position at Hogwarts. Trelawney had been long regarded as a fake, but according to investigations that were more in-depth, it was discovered that Trelawney had a spark of being a true seer; she had prophesied that a child would be born to end Lord Voldemort after being marked as an equal by the Dark Lord, but Dumbledore had wilfully dismissed part of the prophecy in order to kidnap Pavini, and while her parents had defied Voldemort by refusing to join him and his sick cause, Dumbledore was discovered as wanting more than one child who could be the choice, so if anything did happen to one child, he would have others to choose from showing he didn't care as long as he received his victory.
Dumbledore's tactic's for warfare, while effective from a certain point of view…were condemned by many wizards and witches; Britain had never been popular since the Voldemort war because Dumbledore and Bagnold refused to let anybody into the country to prevent the Statute from being endangered; they kept saying everything was under control, although it was a total lie.
The plan Dumbledore had come up with had made many wizards and witches who had military experience, and were responsible for putting down dark wizards in their own countries, or were hired as bounty hunters, mortified by Dumbledore's scheme to use a child instead of dealing with the situation properly. The discovery of the Horcruxes, while they complicated the matter, could have been solved; once the truth of Voldemort's immortality came out, and how Dumbledore had known one of his own Hogwarts colleagues had told the nascent Voldemort about how Horcruxes worked, anybody else would have worked hard to get the memory of the whole conversation Horace Slughorn had with Voldemort instead of just standing back for the insane reason he had wanted to give Slughorn the chance to come to him; but when Voldemort had attacked the Potters, he had changed his plans, and decided to eventually use it as a test for the prophecy child.
Albus Dumbledore's plan to subject the prophecy child to one dangerous test after another at school - beginning with Nicholas Flamel's legendary Philosopher's Stone, which would be used as bait, followed later by the Triwizard Tournament, which he would ensure the child was put into it, and would then lie to the masses at large that they had entered, in the long-term plan to teach them to learn how to forgive since he believed the power the Dark Lord knew not was love, while ensuring the child was an average student, through the use of spells and potions.
But the truth was horrifying.
When pressed, Dumbledore was revealed to have honestly no idea how the power of love would be used; since he had no faith the child could actually kill Voldemort, he would manipulate the child into sacrificing themselves after being forced to hunt down the Horcruxes by themselves or in the company of students Dumbledore had ensured would be the child's friends; when the prophecy was made, he had genuinely believed that no child could defeat Voldemort, and because prophecies tended to be vague anyway, he had come up with a plan to just weaken Voldemort, so then the Dark Lord could be killed or imprisoned.
The chosen one would die, forgotten and barely mentioned, while Albus Dumbledore would be heralded as the defeater of two Dark Lords.
Why should he care about a child who wasn't even meant to be involved?
In Pavini's mind, every aspect of Dumbledore's plan was one of pure hubris; what worried her the most was that virtually every aspect of the plan was badly thought out; what chilled her the most was what if she hadn't confronted the goblins and asked for help, she could very well have spent her Hogwarts years as a lackey of the old fool. It was the idea Dumbledore planned on keeping her down mentally that horrified her, and at the same time, it made sense to her. What good was a tool if it was smart and could think for itself?
The trial of Albus Dumbledore became a worldwide sensation. The old wizard discovered that there were many who had long memories of how he had refused to properly fight Grindelwald, and when it was revealed how close the two men were, it became worse for him. The depths the old wizard had lowered himself to had horrified so many people, and the crimes he had perpetrated had slowly destroyed his image.
To make things worse, when Dumbledore's first day in court came, he had come in his finest (in his mind) robes, fully expecting to be supported and that he could make some excuse with his usual pseudo-wisdom, but it hadn't worked; a few weeks later, he had left the court, dejected and broken as he was sent off with the charges ringing in his mind and the minds of everyone; murder, theft, fraud, kidnapping, line theft, trying to break a sibling bond, conspiracy to rebuild the magical government worldwide (the discovery that Grindelwald and Dumbledore had plans to remake the magical and muggle worlds was met with horror since they both planned to do away with many magical traditions and force the magical community into a caste system, where everyone would be expected to fulfil a specific role regardless of talent or ability).
Oh, Dumbledore had tried to talk his way out of it, but the amount of proof dropped and the questions that were asked and the answers received shattered what faith his supporters had for him.
The questions regarding the prophecy had been mind-shattering.
It turned out Dumbledore had loved the attention and accolades that came with defeating one Dark Lord, and so when Voldemort appeared he jumped at the chance to gain more influence and power. But Voldemort was nothing like Grindelwald, and so Dumbledore was forced to flounder; the judge had said it best; Dumbledore was a scholar primarily, not a fighter despite his skill and prowess. But he still felt he was best qualified to fight Voldemort. When the prophecy dropped into his life, he decided he would work around it. When Harry Potter died, Dumbledore worked around it again and found Pavini Patil. The fact he was kidnapping a child, subjecting her to hell and manipulating the minds of muggles meant nothing to him.
Pavini had been disgusted by the old man's selfish motives - if he had just wanted to save the wizarding world, she could excuse it and make sense of it, but he wasn't. In the end, Albus Dumbledore was just out for himself.
When the Patils left Britain, the myth of Harry Potter was shattered for good. But before the Patils left, they were confronted by Sirius Black, formerly Harry's godfather, who had been accused of betraying the Potters. Pavini still remembered the way the mentally twisted man who had spent a decade under the Dementors getting his brain mushed up, screaming at her for being a line thief, who wanted the Potter inheritance and he had twisted things around to make it seem like they had kidnapped Harry, and turned him into a girl instead of it being the other way around; when it was proven to him after the Aurors gave him to St Mungo's to be checked out and get his mind healed, that Harry Potter was in fact dead and Pavini had been kidnapped, he had tried to find Pavini, to apologise to her, but she wasn't interested. She refused to listen to him and she had told him she wanted nothing to do with a stranger who would accuse her of something she hadn't done.
By the time she had come to India, Pavini had thankfully mastered the language and understood the culture, so by the time Sirius had come for her, she had learnt how to fluently speak Indian like a native.
She was now in her later education at school, along with her sisters, specialising in Ancient Runes, Charms, Transfiguration, Alchemy, Potions, and DADA. As for her later life, well Pavini planned to gain apprenticeships and gain a better idea of what she wanted to do, although she wanted to become a charms mistress and a potions mistress before she felt it was time to get herself a family.
And it only came about because she had known something was off about herself.