Disclaimer: If I owned even a tenth of the veritable gold mine that is Harry Potter, I would at least make the slightest effort to explain why Harry and company, during the seventh book, never thought to use the taboo on Voldemort's name to their own advantage. For example, by hiding two of them under the Invisibility Cloak, having another say the name, then ambushing anyone who showed up.
Chapter Three
Standing alone in the train station at the end of the next day, Daphne adjusted her internal question from 'how bad could they be' to 'do they even exist?'. The train had arrived and let them off almost thirty minutes earlier, and her-or rather, Harry's friends had drifted off with their own families after transitioning from Platform Nine and Three Quarters to the muggle train station. A couple of halfhearted offers had been made to stick around until these 'Dursleys' showed up, but 'Harry' had waved them off.
She had thought that the delay would give her just enough time to check her face in the restroom. The burn ointment was doing its job well, and her skin would be back to normal, save for the scar she had made, within the next day. Already, people had commented that 'Harry's' skin seemed much healthier and softer than it had been. Thankfully, they were content to assume it was the burn cream's doing.
With any luck, Harry's muggle family wouldn't notice after not seeing him for nine months, and by the time she went back to school in the fall, people would accept that 'he' had simply changed in that time as well.
But now that this area of the station was empty save for a single muggle man with a broom, the nonflying variety, she assumed, sweeping up the trash in one corner. Daphne was suddenly worried that Harry had been planning on getting home on his own. What if he was supposed to use one of the muggle transportations, like a bus? She knew about the Knight Bus, but had never actually seen it. Her family were strictly and proudly wizards, without any love for most of the muggle-inspired technologies. Her grandfather had even frowned at the idea of the Hogwarts Express rather than thestral-drawn carriages taking them the whole way. She did know that the second through seventh years rode thestral-drawn carriages from Hogsmeade to the castle itself, in recognition of that time before the train.
If Harry had had any other plans for how he was getting home other than 'wait on the Platform', Daphne was rather buggered.
While she waited and debated with herself, Daphne drummed her fingers along the top of Harry's owl's cage, itself attached to the top of the luggage. She had used her own non-traced wand to charm the owl to sleep through the trip, repeating it a couple of times rather than risk the animal causing a fuss every time it woke up. Clearly Hedwig knew that she wasn't really Harry Potter, and Daphne had not yet decided what she could do about that.
"You, boy!" The harsh voice brought Daphne's gaze up to see who was being shouted at. It took a moment for her brain to orient that she was the target. Right, 'boy'. Finally, she looked toward the voice.
A large, ruddy-faced man was stomping her way. Spittle flew from his mouth as Daphne watched in a mixture of fascination and disgust. "What the bloody hell do you think you're doing, boy?!" His meaty hand lashed out and caught hold of Daphne's arm so tightly that she gasped in pain, before he began to drag her back to the entrance. She was barely able to hold onto Harry's luggage and drag it behind in her other hand.
The whole way off the platform, the man was muttering to himself. "Stupid boy, ungrateful abnormal snot." His hand squeezed even tighter, and Daphne was certain he was bruising her now. "Told you sixteen times, meet us outside the station. We didn't want to see any more of your freak types. Sixteen times we said it, sixteen! Meet us outside on the street. Is that too much to get through your thick skull, boy?"
Daphne was so confused and take aback by the treatment that she forgot to be indignant for a moment. "You're hurting me." She pointed out, her matter-of-fact voice more a product of her own surprise than any real self-control.
"Hurting you?" The man turned his eyes to her and glared so hatefully that Daphne would have taken a step back if he hadn't been holding her arm so tightly. "You want to see hurt, you selfish boy? I'll show you hurt if you don't be quiet!"
By that point, they had reached the street. Daphne came up short, staring with wide eyes. There were loud muggle contraptions-cars she reminded herself, sort of like small versions of the 'bus'. Everywhere she looked there were cars, flashing lights and signs, and muggles of every shape and size wearing positively scandalous clothing.
She had known there were a lot of muggles, but had all of them chosen to be on this street at the same time for some national holiday?
Finding himself yanked off balance as 'Harry' abruptly stopped short and planted 'his' feet, the Dursley man turned back with a newly furious look. "Boy!" He hissed as though afraid of anyone overhearing. "I swear, if you don't come with me this instant and get in this car, you'll be scrubbing every inch of the house with your toothbrush. Inside and out!"
"With my wha-" Daphne reflexively began to ask, just before the man yanked her arm so hard it seemed to almost come out of its socket. Yanking open the rear door of the nearest muggle car, he shoved her inside and then slammed the door so quickly that he nearly caught her hand in it. Then he snatched up the luggage and moved to throw it into a compartment in the back, slumbering owl and all.
She wrinkled her nose a little at the strange smell inside the vehicle, using one hand to adjust the glasses that kept slipping on her face. She had already popped the lenses out and replaced them with regular glass that she had transfigured into the right shape and size so she could see properly through them, but she hadn't quite finished fixing the rims to fit right.
"Mummy!" The sudden shout startled Daphne so much that her hand flew to her pocket where her wand was, even as she whipped around to stare at the boy sitting to the right of her. She hadn't noticed him at first, though in hindsight it was hard to say how she'd missed him. He wasn't exactly small, and she was fairly certain the strange smell was coming from him. There was also a massive ice cream cone that the boy was clearly enjoying (that is, if any had reached his mouth rather than just being smeared across his face, hands, and shirt) clutched in one pudgy hand.
"Mummy! Harry's not wearing his seatbelt!"
Again, Daphne started to ask, "My wh-"
She was interrupted by a thin, vulture-faced woman turning around from the passenger seat in front of Daphne. Her eyes were not quite as furious as the man's had been, but they weren't kind either. They seemed more ashamed than angry, as though she was afraid of being seen in this place. "Put your seat belt on, now." She hissed.
The other front door opened and then the large man all but hurled himself in before slamming the door. "The stupid boy was just standing there." He began to complain as the engine of the vehicle started with a sudden roar that made Daphne jump. "Just standing there! Like he expected us to come get him! How many times did we tell him, Petunia?"
"Sixteen, dad!" The pudgy boy piped up unhelpfully. "And Harry still ain't put his seat belt on!" A dollop of the ice cream fell onto his leg. The boy shoved his thick fingers through it and then pushed them into his mouth with a triumphant look at her.
Both the man and the woman screeched demands that 'he' put on this seat belt, whatever it was, so Daphne turned her attention toward figuring out what they were talking about. A look toward the disgusting boy with the ice cream showed the strap across his lap, and she saw the big man in front pull a similar strap over himself, though that one crossed his chest as well as his lap.
Further investigation to her own side of the vehicle revealed the belt itself, which she pulled across her lap and dropped on the other side before frowning uncertainly when the belt failed to tighten or secure itself.
Those beady, angry eyes were staring at her in the mirror that hung in the front of the vehicle. "You, boy, have just bought yourself the weekend cleaning out the rain gutters. Now stop being a muppet and put your ruddy seat belt on!"
Looking at the ugly boy's belt once more, Daphne finally saw the other end of the belt, where it was apparently supposed to go. Finding the matching part of her own belt, she compared the two and then pushed them together until they clicked.
Finally satisfied, the Dursleys pulled away from the curb. The man, whose name she was still not certain of, ranting the whole way. "I told you, Petunia. I told you they'd spoil the good-for-nothing boy. Those freaks of his, those abnormals, they've already got him going around thinking he's better than good, decent people. Thinking he can ignore us, us! We took him in out of the goodness of our hearts, and what do we get in return? Spite. Hateful spite."
"Well I'll not put up with it, boy!" The man's attention was on her again, so Daphne met his gaze. "I'll not have it, I tell you. I simply will not have it!" He bellowed, raising one hand to point at her while he kept the other on the wheel that apparently served to steer the vehicle. "I will have respect, I will have order, I will have-"
"Vernon, the road!" The vulture-woman cried out, as a very large muggle vehicle pulled across the road in front of them.
The big man, Vernon apparently, turned back around and gasped. The muggle carriage shrieked to a stop just before it would have hit the other vehicle, and Daphne was quite glad that she had worked out the so-called seat belt beforehand, as the momentum jerked it taut across her lap and she barely prevented her face from rebounding off the seat ahead of her.
No wonder Potter had been so at home in dangerous situations. Muggle vehicles were clearly utter death traps. If he had grown up with these things, the Forbidden Forest must have seemed positively tame.
As she recovered, Daphne saw the boy turn his ice cream cone over and let it go. Smirking at 'him', the boy whined. "Muuuuummy, I dropped my ice cream! It's Harry's fault, he made Dad almost crash and then I dropped it!"
The woman turned around in her seat, shot a hateful stare at 'Harry', and then focused on the boy. "Oh my poor ickle Diddykins! Don't worry, Mummy will get you a new, better ice cream. Vernon, stop by the store on the way home."
"And Harry doesn't get one?" The boy asked with a pout, as though if Harry had gotten one, it would ruin the one that he himself had.
"Of course not, Diddykins." The boy's mother soothed him reassuringly. "Ice cream is for brave, strong, smart boys."
Diddykins, Daphne thought to herself. Diddykins Dursley. Muggles had such strange names.
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Throughout that evening, Daphne remained quiet and watchful. She said nothing when Diddykins positively glorified in shoving his ice cream close to her face and then licked it noisily. His ice cream that was. If he'd licked her face, she would have been sent straight to Azkaban for what she would've done to him.
Even when they returned to the Dursley... abode, and Daphne found herself unceremoniously shoved into what amounted to a broom closet under the stairs, with Harry's luggage tossed in after her, she still said nothing. She didn't rant and rage against the unfairness. Partly because Harry himself, saint that he clearly was, had apparently put up with it for so long. But mostly because that wasn't how she operated. Maybe real Gryffindors would attack a problem head-on, with lots of bluster and defiance. But she wasn't really a lion. She was a snake, and that was how she fought: sneakily and only when she knew she had the advantage.
Honestly, she had no idea how the real Harry Potter could stand these people. They were demanding, selfish, ignorant, and so utterly, pathetically mundane. They were rude and their precious Diddykins was worse than any of the boys at Hogwarts. Even Draco Malfoy, spoiled snot that he was, could at least do a few things himself. This particular fat, useless lump did less physical labor than pure-blood wizard students!
She worked through the evening in those cramped quarters, carefully preparing everything that she could for her- and Harry's- payback. Only in the middle of the night did she carefully emerge and quietly sneak through the house to find the kitchen. For the rest of her plan, she needed fire to cook with. An actual potions lab would be ideal, but she could work with what was available.
It was an adventure and a half figuring out how to use the muggle stove. There were so many knobs and buttons that Daphne finally just twisted all of them and waited until the surface was hot enough to put her prepared cauldron on. Then she worked out which knobs made that part of the surface hotter through trial and error. The rest were switched off.
She was just glad that the revenge that she had in mind didn't call for extremely specific temperatures. All she needed was a boil, and the muggle contraption could at least manage that much.
That was the funny thing about the statute that restricted underage magic. In addition to not applying to students who lived only with other wizards (since the whole point was to stop kids from doing things that muggles would notice), it also didn't apply to potions. Or, more to the point, potions couldn't be restricted the way that spells could. So while Daphne couldn't openly use her magic inside the house (every muggle raised student's muggle house was monitored as well as their wand), she could use potions.
It was a loophole that she planned to take thorough advantage of.
Once the potion was ready, Daphne opened the nearest window to let it air out while she ladled it into the vial that she had prepared. Then she shut down the muggle stove and made her way back to the tiny cupboard masquerading as Harry's room.
The owl was awake when she opened the door, its cage crammed into one corner. When she saw who had come in, the bird made a sharp noise of anger and drew back, puffing up all of her feathers.
"Right." Daphne sighed. "Okay, listen. Listen to me, bird." Taking Harry's glasses off, she set them aside and then crouched in front of the owl's cage. "Listen, I am not trying to hurt you, or Harry. I'm-" The owl nipped at her finger when she put her hand near the cage, making her yelp and draw her hand back before hissing, "Knock it off, would you? Harry- Harry's gone. He's gone, but I'm going to try to bring him back. That's why I'm doing this. That's why I can't let other people know he's dead. Because if they did, there might not be a wizarding world for him to come back to."
Hedwig continued to gaze at her reproachfully, but this time she didn't peck at Daphne's fingers when they came back near the cage. "I'm going to take care of you until he comes back. I know I'm not him, but I have to pretend until I find a way to get the real thing back. But I can't do that if you go on acting like I'm a demon." Carefully, she let her fingers enter the cage. "Can we get along until I get him back?"
The owl stared at her for another moment, then leaned in and gave her fingers a nudge with its beak. It wasn't quite a nuzzle, but it wasn't a bite either. Daphne was taking that for a win.
One problem down. And in the morning, she'd take care of the one labeled 'muggle blowhards'.
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A harsh banging on the low ceiling of the room that morning had alerted Daphne that it was time to set the the next part of her plan into motion. She had already been told the night before that breakfast would be her responsibility, which was exactly what she was now counting on.
Emerging from the cupboard, she was just in time to hear Diddykins whining about how hungry he was, while Vernon bellowed his own demands. The woman, Petunia, she had found at some point the day before, shoved a pan and a spatula into her hands and ordered 'Harry' to make bacon and eggs.
Right, bacon and eggs. Luckily, Daphne did actually know how to do that, unlike most witches her age, from a family like hers. In the years after she had escaped from her abductors, it had been very hard for her to sleep the whole night through. She had begun wandering through the large mansion in the middle of the night. Hungry and bored, her nine year old self had attempted to make her own breakfast.
The resulting mess had alerted the family house-elf, Lanky, who had quickly cleaned up the mess before preparing food for Daphne himself. Over the next few weeks, Daphne regularly made her way downstairs in the middle of the night and found Lanky ready to make whatever she wanted. Having little else to do, she had taken to watching the house-elf prepare the food, and eventually graduated to making it herself while Lanky looked anxiously on and occasionally smacked his head with the spatula while lamenting that he was being a bad elf by making Miss Greengrass work.
Still, it meant that she could make the food, and add her own special ingredient to one of the plates when no one was looking. Which was pretty much any time, since Vernon had his head buried in the muggle newspaper, while Petunia incessantly praised ickle Diddykins for... Daphne was going to guess existing, because he certainly hadn't done anything else unless gaseous bodily functions and whining were accolade-worthy achievements. Okay, to be fair, the sheer amount of said functions might have been commendable. Perhaps the fact that no one had yet killed the little snot was the source of the acclaim.
Once the breakfast was ready, she carefully set the plates out, giving Diddykins his first, then Vernon, then Petunia. When she went to set the fourth plate down, she found everyone staring at her.
"What do you think you're doing, boy?" Vernon tapped a thick finger impatiently against the table.
Was this a trick question? "Putting my food down?"
"Your food?!" The ugly, hateful muggle man thundered. "One year at that freak school and you think you can take food out of our mouths?"
The response came before she could stop it. "Well no, I wouldn't dare try to snatch food out of your mouths. I value my fingers attached where they are."
Three identical looks of utter shock met that comment, and a second later the plate full of food that she was holding went flying as Vernon slapped it out of her hand. "Get back to your room!" He shouted, face reddening from his rage. "And don't ever talk back to me again, you ungrateful little brat!"
Diddykins, meanwhile, had begun shoveling food into his mouth with a rapidity that would have convinced Daphne that the boy had been starved for days or even weeks had she not borne witness to his frantic eating the night before.
Rather than flee back to the hole that they called Harry's room, she simply stood still and watched Vernon evenly.
"That is it." The man threw down his napkin and stood from his chair so violently that it was flung back to the floor behind him. He reached for 'Harry', but a sudden shriek from Petunia interrupted him.
"VERNON! Look at my poor Diddykins! Look what he did to him!"
Where the fat boy had been sitting, there was now a squat brown pig that made a oink of distress before slipping off the chair and running to butt his head against his mother's leg. The sight made Daphne smile faintly. The potion she had laced the boy's breakfast with had done its job.
A second later, Daphne found herself lifted off the ground by both shoulders as Vernon hauled her up and shoved her against the wall with nearly enough force to take her breath away. "You little freak!" He shouted, showering her face with his angry spittle. "You will change my boy back this instant!"
Daphne looked back at him calmly, her answer a single word. "No."
Again, he shoved her back against the wall, harder this time. "What did you say?!"
She didn't break his gaze. "I said no." Her shoulders raised as much as they were able. "What are you going to do, exactly, if I don't? Let me run you through it. I do nothing, he's a pig. You hurt me, I continue to do nothing, he's a pig. If I never change him back, what can you do to fix him? Can your muggle medicine fix it?"
Vernon turned to look at where Petunia was hugging the pig to her chest and sobbing. Now that his initial rage had failed to gain the result he wanted, he seemed to be at a loss.
"I will change him back." Daphne continued, drawing both adults attention back to her. "On my terms. First, put me down."
The man glowered, and looked as if he might still break 'Harry' out of spite. Only a desperate plea from his wife made him relent and drop the 'boy'.
Rubbing her shoulders, Daphne nodded. "Now, I will change him back to normal... at the end of the summer." That announcement was met with a wail from Petunia and a bellow from Vernon, but she simply held up her hand and continued. "IF you leave me alone until then. I will sleep here, in a real bedroom, I might add. And I will eat here. I will do no chores, nor will I prepare any more meals for any of you. That you can do yourself. I have things to do this summer that do not include impersonating a house elf for your amusement. If you leave me alone for the summer, and make no more nasty remarks about me, my school, or anything else involving my world, then I will change Diddykins back to normal."
The impotent rage on the nasty man's face very nearly boiled over into physical violence, the man clenching his fists repeatedly. Finally, he spat a single word. "Why?"
"Why would I do this?" Daphne let her head tilt as she gave the man a look over the top of Harry's glasses. "Because you are a putrid, nasty, angry little man who deserves to find out that for all your bellowing and bluster, you are pathetic. You mean less than nothing to me, to be frank, I can't believe that Ha- I put up with any of you for five minutes, let alone an entire childhood. Now feed your pig while I find a better place to store my belongings."
She started to step away, only to hear Petunia whine, "What are we supposed to tell our friends about where our boy is?"
Daphne shrugged at that and kept walking. "Tell them he went on vacation, or a school trip. Tell them whatever you want, I don't particularly care. But give me a reason not to fix him, and you'll be making excuses for why he never came back, not why he left."
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That night, after moving Harry's belongings into what she had found out was Diddykins second bedroom, Daphne let Hedwig out to stretch her wings and hunt, and began to explore the neighborhood that she was now living in for herself.
She had the Riddle journal that she'd taken out of Quirrel's office with her. She wanted to study the thing again. Not that there was much to see. There was no writing in the book, and she wasn't stupid enough to start writing in what could very well be a cursed object. For all she knew, the book had a twin and anything she wrote would end up in the other book. Or perhaps it would compel her to keep writing and never stop. Or even remove any knowledge that she wrote down from her head entirely.
With magic, one could never be too careful. Only idiots picked up strange objects and started messing with them without any idea of where they had come from or what they did.
Eventually, Daphne found her way to a muggle park. It was... boring compared to the parks she had grown up with. The swings were actually physically attached to the bars with a length of chain, for crying out loud.
Still, she was tired of walking, so she sat down on the swing. Bringing the journal out, she turned it over in her hands, studying it.
"Hello."
The voice startled Daphne into a yelp, especially when she looked up to find herself face-to-upside down face with someone else. "What- how-" She stood quickly, wondering how she could have missed someone so close and in plain sight.
It was another girl, who was hanging upside down from the top of the swing set by her knees. Her long, dirty blonde hair nearly touched the ground below her, and she wore what looked like enormous orange and blue goggles that covered most of her face, along with a pair of overalls and thick work gloves.
"Where did you come from?" Daphne demanded, confused and apprehensive.
The girl continued to hang upside down, seeming to consider the question. When she answered, her voice was pure innocence, without a hint of sarcasm. There was also a vaguely distracted, airy tone to it, as though the girl was almost dreaming as she spoke. "One night when my father and my mother were celebrating another successful spell trial, they became entirely too-"
"Okay, okay." Daphne interrupted quickly. "I don't mean how were you born. I mean how did you get right there? You weren't there when I sat down."
In answer, the girl swung herself back and forth a few times, then heaved herself upwards. As soon as she cleared the top of the bar, she vanished from sight. As Daphne gaped, the girl reappeared, hanging upside down again. "It's okay." She said, pointing with one gloved hand at the spot on the swing set next to her. "You can climb up. Nothing up here will bite you." Her head tilted consideringly. "Unless the Blibbering Humdingers show up."
"The... the what?" Daphne asked in confusion. Curious, she reached a hand up and began to climb the side of the swing set until she could haul herself up. As soon as she was seated on the top bar, she felt a tingle flow through her from head to toe.
The other girl swung herself back up to sit next to her. Daphne estimated her age as perhaps ten. "Conditional disillusionment spell." She announced while lifting the goggles off her face to reveal silvery-grey eyes that were rather wide, as if the other girl was as surprised by Daphne as the other way around.
"A what?" Daphne had never heard of such a thing.
"Conditional disillusionment spell." The strange girl repeated. "My mother invented it. I can't cast it yet, because I don't have a wand. But my father can. It makes an object project an area effect of invisibility when you fulfill the condition. My father's condition in this case was to sit on top of it. The swing set."
"Your mother invented a new type of invisibility spell?" Daphne stared at the girl. "That's amazing. She must be rich."
The girl's head shook as she bunched the goggles up in her hands. "Oh no. My father and I never sell mother's spells. That wouldn't be right."
"Huh?" Daphne frowned at that. "What about your mother? What does she have to say about it?"
She was met with a shrug and a vaguely dreamy look to accompany her drifting voice. "Nothing now. She died a couple of years ago."
Well now Daphne felt like dung. "I'm sorry." She said automatically.
"Me too." The other girl looked down at the goggles in her lap. "But someday father and I will find them. Then it'll be okay."
"You'll find... what?" Daphne was feeling rather as though she had been left behind in the conversational carriage ride, and was now jogging alongside to catch up.
"The creatures that my mother was looking for." The girl responded. "She was fired from her job because her employer didn't believe they existed. That's why she had to make spells at home. It's why she didn't have all of the safety measures she would have at her job."
"And that's how she died?" Daphne asked tentatively.
Nodding, the blonde girl turned those wide eyes to her. "That's why we have to find them. It's why we won't stop searching. We have to prove mother right."
For a long moment, Daphne wasn't sure what to say to that. Finally, she settled on, "Who are you?"
"My name is Luna." The girl answered promptly. "Luna Lovegood. And you're Harry Potter."
"How did you know that?" Daphne asked carefully.
"Father thinks that the Humdingers will show up around very heroic people." Luna explained. "That's what you are. A heroic person."
That made Daphne's head shake. "No I'm not."
"Okay." Luna replied agreeably. "Right now you don't have to be."
The two of them sat in silence for a moment, before Luna offered the goggles to 'him'. "Would you like to help look for the Blibbering Humdingers anyway? Maybe they haven't gotten the message that you're not a hero yet, so they'll still show up."
Daphne remained quiet as she watched the other girl's earnest, open expression. Then she gave the faintest of smiles and took the offered goggles.
"Yeah, all right. Just for a minute."