Chapter Text
Daphne Greengrass, witch, singer, expert gobstones player, eyed her reflection in the school bathroom mirror doubtfully. The boil cure ointment was working, but the spot on the side of her nose was still… well it was disfiguring. Curse puberty. She patted on some concealer stick, put her things away in her book-bag, and braved the hallways of Hogwarts.
Well, for a while. Crowds gave her a feeling that she just wanted to move… to be elsewhere. To go riding, if she was at home.
Instead, she found herself propelled by the Tuesday afternoon tides of students, as she generally did, back to Transfiguration with Professor McGonagall. Daphne tried to be brave, but she was a Slytherin for a reason.
She sat nervously next to Lily, who was reading a magazine under her desk.
The lesson on switching charms was certainly educational, but a little grotesque. The rabbit ears on the cacti were… well it just wasn’t normal. And spiny lobes on cute fluffy white bunnies was dreadful. McGonagall was a scary, mean old witch.
After class, Daphne went to music on the fifth floor, and had a nice relaxing hour and a half with the choir and their toads. There was music, and everything was normal, and the knot in her back she hadn’t noticed undid itself. The light of the day was fading, and Daphne went up to the seventh floor, to see the sunset out the long mullioned windows of the pointless hallway that went basically nowhere. Only the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy teaching trolls how to dance en-pointe broke up the windows. She supposed it had been a gallery once; it was fairly wide, for a hallway.
The sun set over the Scottish hills, and Daphne walked back towards the farthest tip of the grand staircase, wishing something exciting would happen in her life. In novels, the heroine discovered secret rooms and mysterious inheritances, and in the er… more dodgy novels Pansy and Millicent swiped from their mums, there was a bit of bodice ripping by handsome, yet tormented heroes. The Slytherin common room only offered creeps, hangers-on, and morons. And the only two good-looking boys in her year in Slytherin both knew it. Blaise was a sarcastic jerk, and Draco… well he was a villain in the making.
Daphne was nearly past the tapestry, when she heard a sound. A squeak, like… a rat. Daphne shuddered and looked around, backing away from the noise. There was no sign of a rat, and Daphne calmed herself, and walked past the tapestry again, only once again to hear a squeak. She still had nightmares about turning rats into goblets. What if the goblet you were drinking from had been a rat.
Daphne backed up and cast a simple detect-hidden-things spell. Nothing lit up.
She walked past the tapestry a third time, idly wondering if this counted as an adventure, and wishing it was better, when she realised something dreadful. The noise was … a broken quill stuck to her shoe with gum. And people could see it. Not only did she have a spot on her nose, she had junk stuck to the sole of her shoe. She sighed. Another day of being an utter nobody.
Beside her, the blank stone wall opposite the tapestry creaked and shuddered and reformed into a wooden door.
Daphne turned just her eyes. There was a single door on the wall that had been blank. A secret door had just … revealed itself. To her. This practically made her a heroine already. Buoyed with the heady thought of all the heroic, fantastic things she would achieve, she opened the door.
To find a small stone room lit by a brass lamp hanging from the ceiling, with a rustic wooden table, and seven paperback books piled on it. Thick books mostly, with colourful covers. Not exactly a mysterious ancient tomes, but … something different.
Daphne wandered over, and looked at the top book. ‘Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone.’
Daphne sighed, and balanced against the table and picked the quill and gum of her school shoe. It must be another one of those ridiculous money-grubbing books about Potter. He’d been living with muggles, as everyone knew, and wasn’t tall, didn’t have glinting eyes; he wore wonky looking glasses, and hung around with the two weirdest Gryffindors of their year. And his health made her sisters look robust. Not a year had gone by without Harry Potter ending up in the hospital wing at least once. For days even. He was more pathetic than amazing, really, except for being a very good Quidditch Seeker. Well, for school sports anyway. Professional Quidditch was miles faster than school Quidditch.
Daphne turned the book over and read the back.
‘Harry Potter is a very ordinary boy who discovers that he is a wizard, and is to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and wizardry. Join Harry as he begins to learn magic, explore they mysterious Hogwarts castle, and perhaps find more adventure than he expected.’
Daphne frowned. Someone had decided to write a book cashing on in Potter’s immense fame, and write about Potters’ terrible first year. How mortifying that must be. To be displayed in a book, like a butterfly under glass.
Daphne looked over at the pile ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,’ Her eyes bulged. Whoever this JK Rowling was, they’d cheekily written two fictionalised Harry Potter stories.
Daphne lifted the book. Underneath was ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.’
Daphne’s blood ran cold. She’d read of the phenomenon, of one’s blood running cold, but the memory of the Dementors, the fear of Sirius Black… the memory of that year of terror filled her veins with icy fear. She pushed the book to one side, and it fell off the stack.
‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,’ Wow, that Rowling person liked flirting with a lawsuit from Potter’s guardians, thought Daphne.
There were three more books. The Tri-Wizard tournament had been last year. Fourth year.
Daphne hesitantly lifted the book and looked underneath it.
‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’ was the title, and there was ridiculously cartoonish caricature of Potter on the cover. On all the covers, really.
Daphne dropped ‘Goblet of Fire’ with a thud, and examined the back of ‘Order of the Phoenix.’
Potter’s friends weren’t writing to him over summer? What the hell? J.K. Rowling must be begging for a good hexing. ‘Gripping and electrifying indeed.’
The book below was titled ‘Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince’ and that sounded rather ominous.
Daphne checked the back. ‘When you have the last piece of the jigsaw, everything will, I hope, be clear’ – Albus Dumbledore.
‘The war against Voldemort is not going well – ‘
Daphne stopped reading. Nobody would dare write a novel that said that. The Ministry would … well they’d destroy the books for starters.
‘– of the boy who became lord Voldemort, hoping to find his only vulnerability.’
And… wow, whoever wrote this, thought Daphne, this J.K. Rowling was not interested in living a long or happy life.
Daphne glanced at the last thick book of the pile: ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’
She couldn’t help whistling. Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows all in one book. She thought she’d personally prefer ‘Harry Potter and Babbitty Rabbity’, less murder, necromancy and suicide.
Daphne looked at the back of the last book. ‘Give me Harry Potter,’ said Voldemorts voice, ‘and none shall be harmed. Give me Harry Potter and I will leave the school untouched. Give me Harry Potter and you will be rewarded.’
J.K. Rowling was suicidal, Daphne realised. The old guard wouldn’t appreciate a novel about Potter and Voldemort. Who was, after all, dead.
‘– must find and destroy the Horcruxes.The final battle must begin – Harry must face his enemy –’
Daphne blinked at the last line of the back cover. Turgid stuff. Not that Horcruxes was even a real word.
She opened the last book, found the last page and read : ‘All was well.’
She skimmed backwards through the book. Battles, giants, deaths, spiders. Ew.
She snorted, Harry Potter defeating Voldemort a second… well, he’d somehow done it as a baby. Daddy had said once that it was probably his parents, setting up some sort of magical protection. Mummy had then said that she was fairly sure that it was a life-sacrifice by Potter’s muggleborn mother. Which was a bit absurd. Muggleborns wouldn’t have access to the sort of spellbooks that had sacrificial magic. And if Lily Potter had used sacrificial magic, surely someone could have said something. It was illegal, for starters, to use a human life. Mummy had said about it being sacrificial magic, and Daddy had looked at her very crossly and told Mummy “Erzabet, don’t talk about that sort of stuff. Here in England one doesn’t simply do a spot of sacrificial magic.”
Then Mummy had pouted at daddy and called him Cyrus… and she and Astoria been sent to bed early by Knipett, the house elf. Daphne had the distinct, uncomfortable suspicion that her parents… probably snogged. They’d had two children, so they’d clearly done more than snog once. And when Mummy pouted or called Daddy 'Cyrus', or more suggestively, 'Cryus Dahlink', they’d be sent to bed, to eat supper in their rooms. Based on some things Pansy talked about, Daphne suspected her parents were… actually still doing it, even though they were both over thirty. And not just to make babies, as Daphne clearly didn’t have a third sibling. Or, as she got older, and her suspicions grew more gross and horrible, as she saw the looks mother and father gave one another when they thought Daphne wasn't looking, a ten-thousandth. It was quite basic arithmancy to multiply twenty years by three hundred-odd days, after all.
Pansy had confided that she was pretty sure her mum slept with her dad, in the same actual bed every night. Well, almost every night. And claimed that her mum had told her some secret witches stuff about … snogging and stuff. Mummy, who definitely slept in the same bed as Daddy except when she was being cross, had given Daphne a book, entitled: ‘Your magical body’ about getting older. The back half of the book wouldn’t open, and Mummy has said it was charmed shut till Daphne was fifteen. And that Daphne was not to do more than snog till then, and go see Madam Pomfrey if she changed her mind. Mummy could be awfully continental, and not just on days she decided to speak only French or German. Hungarian didn’t count; that just happened when Grandmama visited. Daddy tended to go out a lot when that happened. Grandmama was terribly old-fashioned about things, insisted on formal robes for all meals and only spoke Hungarian. Which was always a bit of a struggle, especially plurals, honestly. And as Grandmama and Grandpapa read the Prophet, and Grandpapa’s letters were in English, normally, it was clearly just part of Grandmama being… Grandmama. Daphne sighed; wishing didn’t make your Grandmama less of an old-school bigot. Even if she claimed to be a countess. A nearly broke countess. Her birthday presents from them were generally quite cheap, though cousin Felicia had got a tiara for her seventeenth birthday. But Felecia was the oldest grandchild, so Daphne rather suspected she, as nowhere near eldest grand-daughter, wasn’t getting one. And that went double for Astoria, though considering her affliction, possibly her sister might get something precious.
Daphne looked at the books about Potter. They did look sort-of-interesting. Unsafe to read in dorms obviously, but Daphne waved her wand, quite capable of silent colour-change charm, like any civilised witch, and colour-changed the covers to plain orange with no words. She opened the ‘Deathly Hallows’ one, now blank, to the frontispiece.
‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Bloomsbury Copyright 2007 J K Rowling. First UK printing.’
Daphne blinked. This was a muggle book. A muggle book… copyright in the future.
A quick look into ‘Harry Potter and the Philosophers stone’ gave a copyright date of 1997.
Two years in the future. Her hands started to sweat. Daphne conjured up a carrier bag and took these seven blank looking orange books back to her trunk. She was going to read ‘Order of the Phoenix’ and see if it was a work of fiction, or… the books were from the future. Prophetic texts had happened before. Not on this sort of scale, obviously.
If nothing else, seeing Potter’s year might be funny.
Daphne started reading ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’ that night, and immediately discovered two things. Firstly, that it was not a funny book in the slightest. And it was hard to put down. If Potter lived like that, locked in by muggles he’d be utterly insane, and he was only something of a grouch, so the book must be fiction.
She checked the index, what a weird thing that was in a book, let alone a novel, and … ‘Dudley demented?’ A ghastly business. Something jumped out of the list of chapters. ‘The Noble and most Ancient house of Black.’ She blinked. That was not a name you saw every day. And Sirius Black, the madman had been tying to kill Harry Potter.
‘The Hearing’ looked ominous.
‘The Hogwarts High inquisitor’ sounded… well ridiculous. She looked back up the list ‘Detention with Dolores’. Potter had already had detention… with Professor Dolores Umbridge. Daddy had warned Daphne by return post on the second day of school not to antagonise the Senior Under-secretary.
The last chapter was titled: ‘The second war begins.’ And Daphne wasn’t happy about how that read at all. She felt hot all over, and her shirt was getting sweaty just thinking about it.