Chapter Text
The whole ordeal began with the sound of packing tape and the smell of old dust as her parents, Oliver and Amelia, prepared to move to France. Duque, with her shock of black curls and piercing blue eyes, felt like a displaced plant in her own hallway while her seventy-year-old parents bickered over where to put the grandmother’s porcelain. Her mother used to call her a "little sunflower," telling her to always turn toward the good things, but looking at her bare bedroom walls, Duque felt more like a weed that had outgrown its pot. She boarded the Hogwarts Express feeling ancient for her age, a sentiment that only worsened when she realised she could no longer stand the vapid chatter of Lavender Brown. Lavender was busy swooning over a talking French mirror that vomited compliments, while Duque was contemplating jumping off the train if she heard one more word about "emotional flowering." However, the teenage drama was cut short when Dementors boarded the train, leaving Duque paralysed by a cold that felt like it was born inside her own chest—an absence of memory that tasted like a premonition.
Once back at Hogwarts, Duque embraced a surgical sort of detachment. She became part of the Gryffindor furniture, present but distant, while Lavender and Parvati chattered about the "tragic melancholy" in the eyes of the new Defence teacher, Remus Lupin. Duque, of course, found this pathetic, noting that Lupin looked more like a man who needed a proper sandwich and a nap than a cheap romance novel hero. The rift with her roommates became an abyss, but Duque didn't particularly care to build a bridge. Her Saturday took a turn for the better when she realised she’d lost her Hogsmeade permission form in the move—typical Delaire luck—and ended up as an involuntary companion to Harry Potter, who was busy dodging his own professional stalker, Colin Creevey. They ended up in Lupin’s office, a sanctuary that smelled of raspberry leaves and old wood. Lupin revealed he’d known Duque’s parents and her uncle, Alastor Moody, claiming they were the fairest people he’d ever worked with. For the first time in weeks, the day felt less like a sentence and more like a gift.
The real obsession, however, started in the chaos of the twins' dormitory. Hidden under Fred’s bed, amidst gunpowder and enchanted socks, Duque found an old, grimy notebook. The twins dismissed it as "too poetic," but to Duque, the handwriting of "Moony" was electric. She became a voyeur of the 1970s, reading about a group of boys—Moony, Prongs, Padfoot, and Wormtail. She recognised herself in Moony’s tired lucidity and his terror of being seen as a monster. By the time December rolled around, Duque found Lupin decorating trees in the Great Hall and accepted a cup of tea. That’s when she saw it: the handwriting on his desk was an exact match for the diary. Remus Lupin was Moony. The professor was the werewolf, and she was sitting across from him carrying his most intimate secrets against her ribs.
And by the end she gets couth while partying, just like she read in those journal pages, in the common room, by Minerva.
***
The next term began with a deceptive warmth. Duque returned to Hogwarts feeling a sense of belonging she hadn't felt in France, eager to see her uncle, Alastor Moody, who had been appointed the new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor. To the world, he was a scarred legend, but to her, he was the man who once patched up her gnome-bitten finger with surprising gentleness. However, the man who limped into the Great Hall—wooden leg clunking and magical eye whirring—was a stranger wearing her uncle’s skin. He ignored her wave, treated her with a mask of cold indifference, and snapped at her to "avoid drawing attention".
As the Triwizard Tournament turned the school into a cauldron of hysteria, Duque found herself alienated by the fake Moody’s psychological torture. He humoured the class by making spiders tap dance under the Imperius Curse, only to scuttle them onto her desk in a silent act of intimidation. Amidst this, Harry Potter’s name was spat out by the Goblet of Fire. While the rest of Gryffindor erupted in a mix of celebration and suspicion, Duque saw only the sheer terror in Harry's eyes. She became his only ally in a sea of "Potter Stinks" badges, marching to his isolated library table and offering a comfortable silence that no one else would give him.
Normality peaked briefly at the Yule Ball. After a series of "desensitisation" dance lessons in McGonagall’s office—where Harry looked terrified to touch her—Duque attended the ball in an olive-green dress made by her mother. The night was a blur of waltzes, David Bowie vinyls, and a secret after-party in an unused classroom with Weasley Twins's smuggled gin. It ended in the Gryffindor Common Room with a kiss that time-blurred between thirty seconds and seven minutes, leaving them both stunned and breathless.
But the fourth year at Hogwarts earned its tense tragedy after Dominique's 15th anniversary. McGonagall woke Duque at dawn and dragged her to Dumbledore’s office. Her parents had been poisoned in France. She was rushed to Saint-Célestin Hospital in Paris, where she watched her father, Oliver, die moments before she could say goodbye. Her mother, Amelia, lingered in a catatonic state, trapped in a "magical stasis" of animal panic until she, too, succumbed in late May. Duque was left an orphan at fifteen, granted partial autonomy by the Ministry and installed in a solitary London studio near St Mungo’s.
The final reveal was a masterpiece of cruelty. After the Third Task—where Harry emerged from the maze clutching Cedric Diggory’s corpse—Dumbledore summoned Duque. The "uncle" who had humiliated her all year was Barty Crouch Jr., a Death Eater who had swapped his dying mother for himself in Azkaban. Dumbledore confirmed the unthinkable: the poisoning of her parents wasn't an accident. Crouch Jr. had murdered them simply to remove Duque from the board, knowing her proximity and suspicion were the weak points in Voldemort’s grand plan.
Duque ended the year sitting in a London flat, sharing cigarettes and joints on the roof with her neighbour and only remaining anchor, Remus Lupin. She had traded her velvet skirts for combat boots and band T-shirts, learning that freedom often smells like dust and cold coffee. The world had officially begun its descent into war, and Dominique Delaire was no longer a student, she was a survivor waiting for the next strike.
***
The summer began in the suffocating heat of July, where Duque’s routine of visiting her uncle, the real Alastor Moody, at St Mungo's shifted from interrogation to evaluation. Moody, finally free from his year-long imprisonment in a trunk, advocated for a brutal strategy: information is protection. He decided that Duque was an "asset" who had been marked by the enemy the moment they murdered her parents. In a clandestine meeting at Remus Lupin’s flat, Moody and Sirius Black decided her fate: she was to leave her solitary London studio and move into the Order’s headquarters at Number 12, Grimmauld Place. There, she was officially integrated as an auxiliary member of the Order of the Phoenix, tasked with analyzing reports of disappearances while living amidst the ghosts and dust of Sirius’s ancestral home.
Life at Grimmauld Place was a lesson in isolation. When the Weasleys and Hermione arrived, the chasm between Duque and her friends became an abyss. Forbidden from sharing secrets to protect their innocence, she pushed the twins away, leading to a bitter confrontation over Doxies in the drawing room. The tension only broke when Harry was attacked by Dementors and the Order scrambled for a rescue mission. Sirius, distrusting the unreliable Mundungus Fletcher, made the shocking proposal that Duque—informed, loyal, and skilled on a broom—should replace him in the Advance Guard. She flew over Muggle London, cold to the bone but determined, officially demoted from "orphan" to "soldier" in training.
Hogwarts offered no sanctuary. Dolores Umbridge arrived in a cloud of pink poison, bringing the Ministry’s denial into the classroom. While Harry exploded in fury, Duque chose a sharper weapon: logic. She used Umbridge’s own theoretical curriculum to expose its uselessness, earning herself a week of detentions with the illegal Black Quill. This shared trauma birthed Dumbledore's Army. Duque was the architect of its secrecy, finding the Room of Requirement on the seventh floor, though she refused to sign her name to the official list to protect the Order’s security.
Amidst the tyranny, Duque and the twins launched "Operation Pink Toad"—a campaign of organized sabotage involving word-switching curses that made Umbridge croak like a bullfrog. Between the pranks and the DA meetings, Duque and Harry found a silent rhythm, sharing hugs and David Bowie records in the common room. Their "almost" relationship was finally named during a Christmas confrontation fueled by stolen gin, culminating in a kiss that Remus Lupin unfortunately witnessed.
The year reached its tragic climax in the Department of Mysteries. During the battle against the Death Eaters, Duque saw Bellatrix Lestrange fire a killing curse at Sirius. In a split second, Duque pushed him out of the way; the curse missed, but the momentum sent Sirius falling through the ancient tattered Veil. While the world mourned, Duque refused to accept his death. She discovered an enchanted quartz lens in a high observation deck that proved the Veil was a dimensional window. She saw Sirius’s shadow pushing back from the other side.
In the aftermath, she forced an exhausted Dumbledore to attempt a rescue. Using ancient magic and the fire of Fawkes the phoenix, Dumbledore turned an oil painting into a portal. Duque acted as the anchor, holding Dumbledore's hand and pulling Sirius Black back from the void. Sirius returned, alive but shattered, just as the Ministry finally acknowledged Voldemort’s return. The year ended with Sirius cleared of all charges and living in a London flat with Remus, while Duque prepared for a summer helping the twins at their new shop, carrying the weight of a war that had only just begun.