Month had passed since she had been enrolled in her new school and her life had changed dramatically as she had found a temporary home in the house of the Dursley's. Although she had spent most of the time in the school until very late in the evening she had also loved to get back to them. A few times she had been so engrossed in a book in the library, while working on a science project in the laboratory or debating in the debate club, that she had missed the last bus back to Surrey and her uncle had to drive all the way to her school to pick her up. He had only grumbled a few times, but when she had apologized half a dozen times in the car and helped making breakfast in the morning, he forgave her.

When Dudley had a question in one of his subjects, but mostly calculation, he often sneaked into her room with his homework and she helped and sometimes tutored him. He had actually developed a bit of an ambition of staying on top of the class. Much to the astonishment of his teacher. Petunia had once caught them, but when she had realized that they were learning she had been stunned, but it had also explained why her son had suddenly become an A student too.

But there was also a downside to it. Dudley's supposed friends, which Harriet couldn't stand one bit were now quite jealous of her cousin. Their grades had not gotten better, even though Dudley had tried to help them. They had also started learning Karate after Dudley had told them about it, they had also not progressed, while Dudley was now quite close to receiving his first belt. Harriet felt sorry for her cousin who lamented that he quarreled a lot with his friends now and she also felt a bit guilty as she had gained, for the first time of her life friends of her own: Reynold and Anthony. They were both three years older than her, but like her, they had jumped classes. It seems that their school was collecting intelligent children. Both shared her love for science, but she was enrolled into more optional subjects than them as the other two because they new exactly what they wanted to do later. But Harriet could not decide and with each new subject her options became wider. She had even enrolled into music class, which the school offered, and she loved it as the school's approach was quite unique. Each student enrolled in the music class had to learn the basics of at least two instruments, which could be expanded in later classes.

"Are you planning to grow roots?" she heard behind her and turned around to the lanky brown-haired boy, which was about an inch taller than her. His infectious sunny smile and his mischievous brown eyes made her mirror his smile. It could not be helped.

"Come on! We finally have summer holidays. The best thing about school anyway." He happily jumped around her imitating the Macarena Dance.

"You'll get bored after a day." Harriet reminded him laughingly while wiggling her finger. "and only god knows what you'll come up with, MacGyver."

"Nah, don't worry, I'll behave." He winked. "Besides, we have plenty of homework anyway. I'll just need one week off to soak in a decent pool of H2O in the warm Mediterranean sun, with tons of cold chocolate ice cream, fizzy drinks, fresh orange juice…" he trailed off with a dreamy look in his eyes.

"My, Tony. Why am I not surprised, that your thoughts went into that direction again? All you can think about is eating? Seriously, he thinks about eating, and I get fatter." Another voice joined them jokingly. Reynold wasn't chubby, but he was a bit on the heavy side.

"You are not fat, you're fluffy." Harriet said hugging both tightly. How she would miss her two friends during the long summer holidays and she worried what Anthony would come up with in his boredom. His parents were in for some dangerous weeks. She would have preferred the school to go on during the summer holidays and she had already compiled an entire reading list, of what she was going to read. Or maybe she could prank her family. That would certainly be funny. Apparently, an evil smirk escaped her because Reynold commented.

"Oh…oh. Whoever is on the receiving end of that smirk should better make himself rare."

She just nodded. Oh, yes. Her two friends had certainly helped her getting a huge repertoire of possible pranks and should her family dare to make her summer hell again, then she would certainly not hesitate to retaliate.

"Seems like we have a bad influence on her." Anthony responded. "Can't you stay with the Dursley's during the summer holidays?"

Harriet bit her lower lip and shook her head. "No, the deal with my parents was that I can stay with the Dursley's during school time and I have already spent all the other holidays with them. Not that my parents noticed, but still. They are going on holiday for three weeks on Usedom and unfortunately all the rooms in the hotel are already booked out, so that they couldn't squeeze me in or put another bed in the booked room. I heard them trying to change the reservation, but it's high season. After that uncle Vernon is away on behalf of his company, while auntie Petunia is on an all-girls trip with her book club and Dudley is on summer camp. The earliest I can come back to them is mid-august." She told them with a heavy heart.

"You could always come and visit me." Anthony suggested. "and protect me from blowing up, my dad's summer house."

"Pretty sure it's already too late for that." She remarked grinning and caused Reynold to burst into laughter and besides as I'm still a minor I need a legal adult to accompany me through security and the permission of my legal guardians, which unfortunately are still my parents. But thanks anyway."

"Well, I'm a bit more grounded than our flyboy, here. So, when things get tough you could come to stay with me in Cardiff for a while. My parents surely wouldn't mind and who knows. You might stumble into a blue police box, discover that the rift is real and travelling through time is actually possible." He now whispered imitating his favourite doctor.

Her grin spread. He had just given her a marvellous idea as she knew that her parents did not know about Dr. who. Well, her mother perhaps, but she doubted it. Ah! Her birthday would finally be fun, and her brother was in for a surprise. Maybe she could nick one of her family's wand for a brief time. It would certainly ease the preparation.

"Oh, now! Ray, look what you have done!" Anthony murmured. "She looks dangerous. Now we need to worry about her house."

"No need to worry." She assured them. "I will certainly take your offer into consideration, Ray, but the only person who needs to worry is my brother. I'm pretty sure that he won't be able to look at any angel statue without peeing his pants after his birthday."

Another month had passed, and their fleet commander had caught a few pirate ships, and apparently let them go afterwards, which seemed to not please the High Command, which had hoped for a faster result. She finally had developed a daily routine.

She stood up about two hours before her shift began, would go down to the commissary, to the hairdresser to cut her hair, take a short shower in the shared sonic refresher, went to the cantina, where she could be sure that Longbottom would pester her with countless questions, then she would go to her shift on the bridge.

She had kept up coming earlier to her shift as it gave her the opportunity to advise the crewmen, who had made small errors the day before, how to correct it. One of the joys of her new rank. She hated it. Afterwards she would need to write daily reports for her ensigns about her shift and the performance of her fellow crewmen. She would have rather preferred to not call out their errors, but tell them personally, but unfortunately, she could not escape this. Once she had tried to make it seem as if she had missed some minor errors and had been reprimanded harshly for it by her new ensign, which she found to be just as unpleasant as the former. How that woman, who she found quite dull, yet better qualified than her predecessor, had found out that she had not missed those errors was beyond her.

The other crewmen, who she knew to be conscripts as well, were evading her as they had heard about her promotion and had no idea how to deal with her. She sensed that some of those serving with her saw her as a traitor to them. But all she had done was preventing the infiltration of their destroyer. Thrawn had been the one to promote her. She had not asked for it and didn't want to call out their errors.

Then she would get something from the cantina, dodging Longbottom again and train in on the training deck until she would be completely exhausted and drag herself back to the vibro-shower. She would then end her day with developing her language skills as she had already worked through most of units and files found on her datapad, but so far nobody had controlled her level. She knew how the language worked in theory, but unfortunately there were very few sound files on the pad, which made it difficult to learn the pronunciation. She could know effortlessly read the script, type and write it, but only theoretically speak it. She had even dabbed into some other language files, which could be found in the imperial databases, but all those files had no phonetic script, which would have eased her pronunciation training.

And her datapad seemed to have a malfunction or the person owning before her had seemingly used it for playing a specific strategy game. Usually, when she was lying on her cot while learning Sy Bisti, as she had been ordered, a message would pop up inviting her to play that game, but she always turned it down as it would only distract her and besides gaming was not allowed officially, even though everyone knew about the unofficial card games between troopers and fleet personnel. But she had dared to look it up and had found out that it was quite a difficult one and was mostly played in the Outer Rim territories, so it wasn't particular popular in the core worlds.

But even though she technically had a bit more time, she gradually became more exhausted and she credited it to the fact that she had not been able to recharge herself as she had no opportunity to just be for herself. Her cot was one among hundreds on this deck. There was no privacy. Back on earth she had not exactly been a recluse, but she had needed phases where she had just been for herself. Phases where she just spent some time alone doing things which she enjoyed. She had emerged recharged and enthusiastic and had been able to stay productive for a long time. But the service in the empire was poison for introverts like her.

After finding out what had happened to the crewman working the shift before her, she also kept a close look at her other colleagues. She had been unable to prevent this young man's suicide, but she would give her best trying to prevent another one. Slicing the ships log she had detected that the suicide rate among the conscripts was vastly higher, then the that of officers. When she had dared to ask one of the physicians in the medical bay about what was being done about it, she had received another shock. Nothing. The suicidals were considered traitors. Earth may have been primitive technologically, but at least they had tried to prevent those needless deaths. She felt that she had to do something about it.

As she stepped into the turbo lift after the two storm troopers who just had been relieved from their duty she sighed tipping her notes into the data pad. She was still missing her notebooks and dared not to get new ones out of her miniarized suitcase. Besides, she had no idea who had them. They had most likely been destroyed and she felt a slight pang at that.

"Tiring shift?" one of the troopers behind her and she groaned. He didn't know when to give up, didn't he? He had been an annoying pest during his Hogwarts years and she didn't want to be reminded of them. And he was constantly triggering her memory.

"Longbottom, I swear if you are stalking me I can't be held responsible for anything that I will do to you if you keep that up." She told him in basic.

"Is that a promise?" the other stormtrooper asked in English as the door closed. "That's something I would like to see. Sounds fun." Harry rolled her eyes and turned around only to look at the emotionless helmet. "And you are?"

"Colin Creevy." He chirped. "You saved my life during the battle of Hogwarts."

"Great another bloody Gryffindor. I'm already regretting saving you." She noted dryly turning back around. "Weren't you that annoying little fanboy following my brother around everywhere?" she asked.

"Yes, I was." He answered. "But it was worth it." Harry huffed and just wanted to get out of the turbo lift to get away from the two before they were triggering more unpleasant memories.

"Besides, what Neville is trying to tell you all this time is that he has been able to establish contact with your extended family through magical hand mirrors and his grandma. But you just rudely ignored the poor man." Colin told her, and she spun around. Was he telling the truth? She tried to calm her raising heartbeat and closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on her feeling, but it seemed that Colin had spoken the truth.

"How are they?" she asked addressing Longbottom. "Are they alright? When are you going to contact Augusta again?"

"They're fine. Just worrying about you. I'll talk to grams in a week again. I'll let you now when." He told her and she nodded a thanks.

The turbo lift stopped and indicated that somebody would join them. On the one hand Harry just wanted out of the lift as the air felt stifling, but on the other hand she wanted to talk about it a bit more. Fate seriously had a sick kind of humour. The boy who had been her worst nightmare beside her brother at Hogwarts was now the only means to secretly contact her family.

The doors opened, and she spotted a familiar face and put her heels together and straightened her back to stand attention and put her hands behind her back with the datapad in one hand. Ruffling behind her indicated, that the other two also did the same.

"Sawubona (=Greetings), Midshipman Potter, At ease." Thrawn's aide greeted tipping something on his datapad.

"Sawubona, Mnumzane." (=Greetings, Sir) she struggled to pronounce it.

"Very good, Midshipman." He nodded enquiring "How far along are you with your units?"

"On Unit 149, Level 5." She answered and Vanto turned towards her in surprise. "That's fast. Only 51 Units to go. Any difficulties?"

"Yes, Sir. The language is very different from those I have learned on my home planet. While I can read and write it proficiently, I still have trouble pronouncing it as there is no phonetic alphabet which could aide me with it and I doubt that I could fully understand it as there are hardly any sound files among the data."

"Ah, I see your dilemma, but that's no problem, we can't fix. He checked his chronometer. Report to my office at 19:00."

"Yes, Sir." She answered mentally cursing as he stepped out of the lift again. She had less then forty-five minutes for her dinner at the cantina and she had no idea how long she would be at that office. And he would probably assess her, and she was not prepared to be assessed.

"What language is that?" Longbottom asked. "And why are you learning it?"

"That's Sy Bisti. A trade language of Wild Space and the unknown regions." She told them. "Thrawn and his aide are the only to people on the ship who can speak it and as the imperial translator droids don't know it, I was ordered to learn it to redeem myself because of my misbehaviour. Additionally, it is possible that this fleet operates primarily at the edges of the empire where knowing this language might be useful."

"Sounds … challenging." Colin commented. "I already struggled with basic."

She nodded and told Longbottom stepping out of the turbo lift: "Let me know when you're contacting Augusta and I'll be there." But unfortunately, the conversation seemed like it was not over yet.

"Hold on, you know, we are adults now and we are all conscripts. So maybe you could just stop holding old grudges and forget everything that has happened. You know. Start anew." Longbottom suggested.

Harry huffed and shook her head. "That might be possible for other people, but not for me. Your memories fade with time, but I don't forget. Ever."

It was dinner time and he knew that he was running late, but unfortunately the meeting at the ministry had taken longer than anticipated. The new law separating the muggle and the wizarding world would take effect in less than two months and he had enquired if he would now become the magical guardian of Harriet Thea Potter, but had been turned down. He had not even known that he had competition on that front.

"You are late." His father, sitting at the head of the three-meter-long dark table admonished him. Sitting on his right was his mother Narcissa who smiled at him. On the other side Astoria was sitting with their son, who happily beamed at him as he took his seat.

"I apologize. The meeting turned out longer than expected." He apologized ruffling his sons unruly, curly blond hair, which seemed to have a life of its own as it was quite untameable. Not even the hair gel, which he used helped. Apart from that the young boy was the very image of Draco as he had the same pale complexion and his grey eyes. The young boy was also quite smart for his age and he was already able to speak like an older child and was also able to read. Draco had initially just shown him the Alphabet as a joke and had been surprised when the boy had slowly tried to read words. But he was only three. Narcissa and Lucius had immediately called for a tutor and now the young boy was forced to learn at his tender age. Nobody in the Malfoy line or Greengrass line had started this young, but Lucius was convinced that he had made the right decision by forcing their marriage. Especially when Draco had found out that he had knocked her up by accident.

Well, Astoria had been an accident. The other girl hadn't been as he had tried to force her hand, but it had severely backfired and he regretted that he had not spoken to her after it. He had been so angry at her and after telling her that he never wanted to see her again because of what she had done, he had married Astoria ignoring the other girl's letters that she desperately needed to talk to him. Well, his son could have a half brother if she had not done that, even though it was so entirely out of character for her. Now that he did have some distance to what had happened back then, his concerns that there had been more that he had been unaware of grew. What if he had judged the situation completely wrong?

"Your long face seems to indicate that you have not received her magical guardianship?" his father fished for information omitting the name as everybody knew who they were talking about.

"No, I didn't. Augusta Longbottom did." He told them and saw his mother frowning.

"But why? How does Mrs. Longbottom know her? Wasn't he a friend of her brother?" she asked.

"Yes, but apparently Neville Longbottom was conscripted as well and serves on the same… what do they call these things…. ahm. Star Destroyer as she does, and he has a two-way-mirror which enables them to communicate without the empire's knowledge.

The concept that there was indeed life outside of their planet was still hard to accept for him and he knew that the others in the room had the same difficulties, but it seemed that his favourite Ravenclaw had been right in the Astronomy classes.

"What in Merlin's name is a Star Destroyer?" Astoria asked looking quite lost and shrieked when Scorpius splashed his spoon in his soup, jumped up from his seat and dashed out of the room before any of the adults could stop him.

"I don't know." Draco said. "The second reason why I'm banned from being her magical guardian is because the Dursley's have told me that they will not accept me as hers and that I'm banned from their house."

"That's ridiculous." Astoria commented. "But it's probably for the best. Merlin knows what you could have gotten in the Muggle world. And it would be way to dangerous, anyway."

Lucius nodded in agreement, but Draco didn't as he knew his wife's distaste for the Muggle world, but thanks to his favourite Ravenclaw, which was unfortunately now missing, he knew that the Muggle world wasn't as bad as he had been taught. In fact, many things had been ingenious, and he could now understand it's fascination with it. He had grudgingly admitted that Arthur Weasley had not been wrong about it. They were amazing, but he could never tell his family that.

A second later Scorpius rushed back into the room with a large sheet of paper and draped it over the dishes, spilling yet more food.

"Scorpius, now is hardly the time for that nonsense." Lucius admonished him with strict voice, but the little boy ignored him.

"See, that is a Star Destroyer. They are huge." He told them pointing at his picture. Astoria and Draco edged closer to peek at the painting of their son.

Draco spotted a green and blue planet in the background, which clearly wasn't earth and around it three dagger shaped ships hovering around it. The little boy pointed at the middle one which was clearly distinguished from the others by some sort of large drawing on its underside.

"See, that's where Harry is"

Draco gulped. He had not mentioned that name in front of his son. How did he know who they were talking about? And how did he now how Star Destroyers looked. Draco only knew because Augusta had explained it to him using a copy of a picture of the official communication channel of the empire.

You can now find me on TWITTER (just remove the spaces between the letters and add the at sign before) ElenaPadme.

I'm the one in Star Wars rebel pilot gear with Yoda in the background.