Legal Disclaimer: I own my stuff, but not the original source material. That belongs to whoever. Also, the opinions and interpretations I use here may not reflect the same in said whoever that owns the source material. Look, I'm just a poor college librarian. Suing me isn't going to get you anything but tears.

Warning: This work may be offensive to some readers. There are also several references to canon-typical child abuse. This abuse is a motivating factor for the narrating character. Feel free to back out if need be.

Author's Note: This is a companion piece to Found Wanting, but it can be read alone just like that fic can. And to head off any complaints, it is not bashing to reference a character's canon actions. If you feel otherwise, there's always the back button.

Submitting Info:
Stacked with: Hogwarts (Term 14); MC4A
Individual Challenges: Beauty of the Abstract; Inevitable; Shades of Green; Hijabs and Janamaz; Shadow HP Bribery (Y); Granny's Recipe; Pink & Orange; Gryffindor MC; Slytherin MC (x3) (Y x3); Neurodivergent (x3); Rian-Russo Inversion (x2); Ethnic & Present (x2); Tiny Terror; The 3rd Rule; Lovely Triangle; Ship Sails; Hold the Mayo; Lunar Era; Old Shoes (Y); Short Jog; Bucket Listing (Y); Two Cakes (Y); Eating Cake (Y); Green Ribbon
House: Slytherin
Assignment No.: Term 14 – Assignment 02
Subject (Task No.): Cryptology (Task#3: Write about someone unable to understand something or struggling to do so.)
Other Hogwarts Challenges: Fantastic Beasts [43](Someone "Gobby"); 365 Prompts [277](Exactly 2021 Words); Scavenger Hunt [38](3rd Person); Days of the Year [Mar 15th](Getting Something Wrong); Black History Month [18](Appearances that can be deceiving); National Weddings Month [07](Veil); Crochet Week [07](MC under 11yo); Penguin Awareness [09](Ruby Necklace); Colours [14](Teal); Flowers [10]("is this real?"); Locations [12](4 Privet Drive); Crystals & Gemstones [02](Lustrous); Tarot Reading [02](Someone eager to begin something); Slytherin Characters [37](Daphne Greengrass); Sytherin OTPs [24](Harry/Luna); But Can You Spell It? [T](Trio Era); Trope Zone [Bodyswap](Anxious); New Year's Kiss [Harry Potter](4 Privet Drive)
Other MC4A Challenges: FaB [3E](Frost); Set [5E](Small Town/Village); WiB [4C](Ribbon); Vocab [3C](Yard); Ship (Heroic Shadow)[Fa Med 1](Bodyswap); Fire [Hard](Education); Chim [Karma](Copper); Hangman [04](Neurodivergent); Hunt [Fa WD](Muslim)/[Wi Set](Hometown)/[Fa Item](Knife)/[Wi Item](Decoration); Garden [Chore List](Drawing/Painting)/[Bed Types](Small Town/Village)/[Word Song](Woo-Hoo)/[So Many Fandoms](Harry Potter); Prompt Harvest [Actions & Behaviors](Shaking Hands)/[Settings](In the Street)/[Settings](Small Town/Village)/[Items](Necklace)/[Tropes](Body Swap);
Representation(s): Desi & Autistic Harry Potter/Luna Lovegood/Blaise Zabini; Black & Autistic Tracey Davis/Daphne Greengrass; Soulmates Bi-Annual Body Swap AU
Primary & Secondary Bonus Challenges: Civil Disobedience; Easy Zephyr; Lettuce Hold Hands; Sailor Take Warning; Second Verse (Ladylike; Not a Lamp; Persistence Still; Found Family; Nontraditional; Zucchini Bread; Mother Hen; Spinning Plates; Unwanted Advice; Clio's Conclusion; Three's Company; Lovely Coconuts; Lyre Liar; Muck & Slime; Rock of Ages; Corvid Brain; Hot Apple; Snow Lemon; Bad Beans; Under the Bridge; Esbat; Triton's Domain); Chorus (Odd Feathers; Pear-Shaped; Wabi Sabi; Bee Haven; Machismo; Peddling Pots; Mouth of Babes; Tomorrow's Shade; A Long Dog; Larger than Life; Unicorn; Abandoned Ship; Surprise!; Turtle-Duck; Forked Path; Sitting Hummingbird; Some Beach; Getting On; Hot Stuff); Demo 1 (n/a); Demo 2 (Gingersnap; Misshapen Pods)
Tertiary & Generic Bonus Challenges: T3(Thimble); SN(Rail; Spare); LiCK(Poppy; Tansy; Yarrow); FR(Liberation); O3(Orator; Ox); HoSE(Schooner; Obscure); SS(Schooner; Shadow); SHoE (Oblique); Measure (Zymurgy; Ennui; Rampant); DP (Yearn); Share (Dragoman; Augur)
Word Count: 2021 words

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Found in Darkness
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Harry had the best dreams sometimes. He would dream that he was a different child, in a different house, with different guardians. He knew that magic wasn't really real, but in those dreams, it was. When he dreamed that he was a blond girl as pale as moonlight, his mother brewed potions while his father was obsessed with magical creatures. When he was a boy even darker than he was in real life, he had a mother as beautiful as she was fierce and who could do anything with nothing more than a wave of her pale white wand. Just as magical as the feats they displayed, all of those parents loved him when he was in those forms. For just a few hours every summer, he was someone else and he was free and it was the best feeling in the entire world, even if it just a dream.

Then he realized that he wasn't dreaming, in the most horrible way that he had never even imagined possible.

He woken up from a dream about having a wonderful tea as the girl where he had eaten so many chocolate-covered blackberry jammy dodgers. He hadn't even realized that he had fallen asleep while raking the yard. The pain that greeted him was frighteningly familiar. It wasn't the first time his arm had been broken or his neck bruised from being throttled, despite how he wasn't even seven years old yet. Usually, he remembered it happening, though, instead of just waking up in his cupboard with the injuries.

It was days before Aunt Petunia had let him out, but it was her comments that had made his blood run cold with fear.

He had been punished for asking questions and spouting nonsense about being someone other than who he actually was. He had called himself Luna, which was the same name that his dream parents called him when he was the pale girl, and had been talking about switching bodies with his soulmate. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had been forced to punish him so severely because he wouldn't stop despite being warned.

The people he was in his dreams were real.

They were real. They were supposed to be his soulmates, matched with him by Fate.

And they were vulnerable to being hurt by the Dursleys because of him.

It was one thing when the Dursleys punished him. Harry knew that he deserved it all for being a freak. Sometimes he even did odd things for that couldn't possibly be magic (because magic wasn't real—except that if the dreams were real, that couldn't be true, could it?) because he wouldn't control himself around good, normal people. That was all one thing.

It was another thing entirely to have the ones who were supposed to love him forever be hurt because of him. He had to protect them. He couldn't let either of them be hurt again. If he achieved nothing else, then he had to find some way of keeping them safe and away from the Dursleys.

Harry had seen his mother (but she wasn't really, was she? She was Blaise's mother) create something called wards by carefully etching symbols into various things. He didn't have access to the fancy stones that Claudia had always used, and the library in Little Whinging didn't have a lot of books on runes and sigils, but he made due with what he did have. He traced the letters and words for what he wanted on the scraps of paper that the library provided for people writing down the shelf addresses from the card catalog.

Then he stole one of the knives from the Dursleys' fancy cutlery set that was pure silver. It wasn't easy carving the symbols into the cupboard walls without more light than what a dying torch offered. He managed. Of course he did. The alternative was not acceptable.

He couldn't let them be harmed, not when he was already tainting them by his very existence. Keeping them safe was the only goal worth pursuing and no ambition would ever exceed it.

He ignored the notes that both his soulmates started leaving for him when he greedily stole hours of their lives like the no-good thief he was. He ignored the questioning looks their parents sometimes gave him when he wasn't doing a good enough job pretending to be whichever soulmate he was currently swapped into. No matter how well his warding seemed to hold up, he always breathed a little easier whenever he got back to his body without new injuries. Only then would he know for certain that his soulmates hadn't been hurt by the Dursleys.

When the first letter from Hogwarts had arrived, Harry had tried to reply that he didn't want to attend. After so many times switching bodies with two people who lived in magical households, Harry wasn't surprised to find an owl willing to carry his answer when he stepped out into the back garden. But rejecting the invitation to attend hadn't been the end of it. The letters had kept coming, and in increasingly strange ways as Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had tried to first ignore them and then to stop them. Not even leaving the perfectly normal house in their perfectly normal little village had worked, as the letters just followed them.

When Hagrid had broken down the crooked door to the dreadful shack in the middle of the North Sea that they had ended up with, it had become clear that Hogwarts would not accept a negative answer. Harry had felt more than a little sick at he watched Hagrid curse Dudley for something that Uncle Vernon had said. And that had been after Hagrid proved how physically strong he was by destroying with his bare hands the rifle that Uncle Vernon had just bought.

God, how was he supposed to protect his soulmates from someone like that? He could barely protect them from the non-magical threat of the Dursleys. All throughout the trip to and through London, Harry contemplated if maybe the only way to achieve his ambitious goal was to end things entirely. He couldn't bring harm to his soulmates if he wasn't around to do it, could he?

Coming out of the seamstress' shop (after having the most uncomfortable one-sided conversation ever), Harry had accidentally bumped into a girl in lustrous teal robes with her white-blond hair pulled away from her face with copper hair combs studded with deeply colored blue-green jewels that matched her eyes. Attached to the hair combs was a translucent veil that matched her robes and was edged in a ribbon of darker teal. She was beautiful in the same icy way that a newly flipped iceberg was. He felt frozen as her gaze swept over him and then flicked briefly to Hagrid who was continuing to walk down the cobblestone street.

For a long moment, he had been certain that she might stab him or something equally violent—or even worse: that Hagrid might take offense at something and attack her like he had Dudley. Then he would be responsible for yet another person getting hurt, just like he had gotten Luna hurt before and how he had just learned that he had gotten his parents killed. The girl's expressionless face hardened just slightly before she released a long sigh.

"Woo-hoo, you found him," another girl announced as she approached from the opposite direction that Hagrid had steered them after they had left the robe shop. This girl had a complexion that was only a few shades darker than his sienna skin. Her curls were tight ringlets that sprung out in all directions from her head. Her eyes were the color of the expensive brandy that Uncle Vernon only drank when he had work guests over for dinner or when Aunt Marge visited. On a chain around her neck was a flat ruby that had a complicated runic array carved into it. After so many years of working with runic abjuration, Harry could practically feel the magic coursing through the necklace. She stuck her hand out towards Harry like she wanted him to shake it, but it was too high, like the gesture was a foreign custom that she had heard about but had never performed. It was also her left hand, not her right. "I dreamed that you needed friends. So here we are. I'm Tracey, and this is my soulmate Daphne."

Harry hesitantly reached out and grasped the girl's hand. Without saying anything, he moved their joined hands down to the correct level before giving three quick motions. He dropped her hand as soon as it would have not been an insult. Nerves twisted his guts as he glanced at Daphne who was hovering next to Tracey and watching the exchange without any more expression than she had had so far. He hesitantly offered his hand to her as well.

"Oh, she doesn't do that," Tracey said, placing her hand over his and pushing it down. "Daphne's sensitive. A lot of wixen are, but Daph's, like, really sensitive." Tracey's grin was still welcoming as the crowd continued to flow around them. "In my dreams, you are as well, but I still wanted to greet you like a proper Muggle."

"I…I don't understand," Harry admitted. He glanced up to see that Hagrid had now noticed that Harry wasn't beside him anymore and was looking around for him. He swallowed hard before daring to ask something that he normally wouldn't. "Is this… is this real?"

"Oh, definitely," Tracey rushed to confirm. She rocked up on her toes and then back again. "We're going to be the best of friends once we get to Hogwarts! And then Daphne is going to help you protect your soulmates just like she protects me!"

"She is?" Harry asked before he could stop himself. He found himself looking Daphne in the eye as desperation clawed at his chest. "Is that even possible?"

Daphne nodded once just as Hagrid came back to usher Harry away from the girls to continue the supply shopping. Harry couldn't stop thinking about the pair anymore than he could stop worrying about his soulmates. He was so distracted that he barely managed to talk Hagrid out of getting him a pet of any kind, but especially not something as odd as an owl.

At the end of month, when he found himself struggling to find the oddly numbered platform listed on his ticket, he was just considering that it had all been a cruel joke when the pair appeared again. Tracey immediately hugged him and began chatting up a storm without seeming to care about the lack of verbal input from her companions. Daphne stayed near Tracey at all times, a silent guardian who might as well be carved from ice.

Harry had never argued harder than when the Sorting Hat suggested that Harry might be Sorted anywhere besides Slytherin. Both girls had already been placed there, and he had already figured out that associating with people outside one's House wasn't the done thing. Besides the promise to help protect his soulmates, Harry also thought that they might actually become the friends that Tracey had promised.

Maybe he didn't really need to understand how people worked to deserve that. Maybe he didn't need to understand anything beyond what was needed for whatever ambition he was seeking at the moment and how that goal would combine with the ever present need to protect the two (now four) most important people in the entire world to him.

After all, Tracey and Daphne now needed just as much protection against the vile taint which came with being his friends as Luna and Blaise did due to being cursed to have Harry as their soulmate. And despite Tracey's insistent advice to meet with his soulmates, Harry knew better than to bother them with the knowledge. Just because Tracey and Daphne tolerated him, it didn't mean that Harry deserved to burden either of his soulmates. He brought nothing but danger and pain to them.

Things were better this way.