Chapter Text

The Three Sisters

The sound of the front door slamming rang through the mess that was the Dursley living room as Petunia, Dudley and Vernon stood, somewhat shell-shocked while Holly tried, as best as she could to curb the way the grimace on her face trying to morph into a smug smile that threatened to overtake her features as the Dursley family attempted to wrap their heads around the news they’d just received. 

War in the horizon.

The words had been somberly uttered by a soft-spoken Hestia Jones, who’d taken on the unfortunate task of notifying the Dursleys that they needed to be taken into protective custody lest the dark forces under Voldemort’s command try to attack them too the minute Holly turned seventeen. Aunt Petunia looked nearly transparent when Hestia Jones told them that the terrible accidents that had been all over the evening news were the not accidents but the result of Death Eaters rampaging against muggles. Uncle Vernon’s moustache was still quivering and his thick neck pink from trying to shout his disdain for Holly’s ‘lot’. Hestia had Silenced him rather judiciously the minute he started trying to talk over her and the spell hadn’t quite worn off yet. Dudley was looking up the stairs, where Holly stood, watching as the Weasley twins, who’d thought it’d be a huge laugh to accompany Hestia, wreaked a bit of havoc through Aunt Petunia’s perfectly ordered, neat living room. The teapot on the coffee table was still belching out rudely and the clock on the mantle had been turned to a bright yellow canary that was still squawking the six o’clock chime even after they were long gone.

“You, girl!” Aunt Petunia shrieked as she spotted Holly. “You put what those… those freaks did back to what they are!”

Holly raised her hands in surrender. “Sorry, Aunt Petunia, I can’t. Not allowed to do magic until I’m seventeen, aren’t I?”

The teapot gurgled something obscene, and Uncle Vernon’s beady eyes bulged angrily. Dudley stared up at Holly, who shrugged and started to turn.

“I’d suggest you started packing. I can’t imagine the Order would wait much time for you to finish packing up the china when they arrive tomorrow morning.”

“You—!”

Holly didn’t find out what Aunt Petunia was going to screech after her though because Uncle Vernon had charged up the stairs and grabbed Holly by the shoulders, whipping her back against the stair bannisters.

“This is your fault, girl!” Uncle Vernon shouted, his face an unnatural shade of puce as his huge, fat, pink hands shook Holly as if she were a rag doll. Evidently, Hestia’s Silencing Spell had worn off.

“I had nothing to do with it!” Holly shouted back, struggling, her thin arms coming up to try to break through Uncle Vernon’s grip, but he had at least ten stone on her and she’d never been able to defend herself much against the abuse her uncle heaped upon her on the best of times. Half-starved as she usually was in the summers that she had to spend with the Dursleys, she wasn’t going to succeed now, even though she was no longer the abused little girl beaten black and blue whenever her accidental magic reared to defend herself from Dudley’s bullying when they’d been small children.

“NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!” Uncle Vernon bellowed. “IT’S YOUR LOT THAT’S DOING THIS TO US! THIS MUST BE A PLOT! A PLOT FOR YOU TO GET US OUT OF THE HOUSE SO YOU CAN TAKE OVER IT FOR YOUR FREAKS!”

“What the hell are you talking about? Why would I even want your stupid house?” Holly cried. 

“I DON’T KNOW BUT YOU MUST BE PLANNING SOMETHING WITH THESE FREAKS!”

“Vernon,” Aunt Petunia said, her voice tremulous as Uncle Vernon shook Holly until her teeth rattled. “Maybe that… that witch—“

“THAT FREAK MUST BE IN CAHOOTS WITH THIS ONE!” 

A massive hand reared back and struck Holly’s cheek, the slap heavy and resounding and filled with such forceful malice, it sent Holly’s head rebounding back. She hadn’t been expecting the hit. Uncle Vernon hadn’t really hit her since that letter Dumbledore had sent to Aunt Petunia back when Holly had been thirteen. Pain blossomed across her face where she’d bitten the inside of her cheek with the force of the hit. 

The iron tang of blood bloomed on her tongue, and Holly grimaced, as blow after blow started raining down on her, and she could only ineffectually protect her face with her hands. It figured, Voldemort probably didn’t even need to try to get around the blood protection to get to Holly to kill her; Uncle Vernon was already doing a bang-up job of getting that done.

“Dad!” Dudley was yelling. “Dad, stop! You’re going to—“

“I’LL SHOW THESE FREAKS THEY CAN’T BE ORDERING US AROUND!”

“Vernon—!” Aunt Petunia started to cry out but Uncle Vernon wasn’t listening, and Holly was too out of it trying to ward of the blows that she didn’t realize it had stopped and Uncle Vernon had picked her up instead and started to drag her down the stairs by the low ponytail at her nape.

“There’ll be no more talk of these freaks taking my family out of my home,” Uncle Vernon fumed as he dragged Holly down through the living room, through the hall. He threw the front door open, his hold over Holly absolute and unyielding.

“Dad, stop!” Dudley cried, grabbing him by the arm as Holly tried to twist her way out of his grasp, kicking and screaming. They were making a right ruckus, but Holly was oblivious to the way the neighbors’ porch lights came on, and old Mr and Mrs Buckle two doors down had emerged to their front step to watch the family drama unfolding in the Dursleys’ manicured front yard, or how the frilly curtains to Mrs Gainsley’s living room window fluttered as she watched unabashedly as Vernon Dursley dragged his niece through the yard, Dudley shouting after him, and Petunia running out with wide, teary eyes.

Holly only had a moment of horrified realization that Uncle Vernon was taking her out of the bounds of the Dursley house before the popping sounds of Apparition filled the air, and the sight of black-robed figures in silver masks filled her blood with ice and she renewed her struggles.

“Uncle Vernon, no! Please! They’re here! They’re here to kill us all!”

Uncle Vernon wasn’t listening as he hurled her away from him, making Holly stumble backward, onto her arse on the pavement, right at the foot of a greasy-haired masked Death Eater who could only be Snape.

“Ah, it seems our job’s made simple for us all,” said one of the robed figures, and Holly instantly recognized Lucius Malfoy’s posh voice as he drew his wand out. “Gibbon, the Anti-Apparition wards. Rabastan, kill the muggles. Bellatrix—“

“You don’t give orders here, Malfoy,” Bellatrix drawled as she bent to grab Holly by the neck of her t-shirt. “What do we have here? Seems ickle Potter’s having a bit of family trouble.”

“Holly!” Aunt Petunia screeched, running out of the house to grab Dudley, who was wide-eyed and pale at the sight of the gathered Death Eaters.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Uncle Vernon growled as more Death Eaters Apparated onto the street, their wands brandished towards Holly as she struggled against Bellatrix and managed to kick her hard enough in the stomach for her to let her go.

“Aunt Petunia, take Dudley into the house!” she shouted as she scrambled away from Bellatrix and Snape. “The Order—“

“Will not be coming, Ms Potter,” Snape finished silkily for her.

“Fuck you!” she seethed, thrashing desperately to get away. Her wand... she had her wand in her pocket...

“You will cease your struggling, Potter and come with us without any trouble and we will not kill your muggle family,” Snape told her.

Uncle Vernon glowered at the gathered intruders on their street. “There’ll be no killing in front of my house—!”

“Avada Kedavra,” Snape said, almost lazily, and the flash of green light streaked from his wand and hit Uncle Vernon straight on the chest. He dropped to the grass, his massive body trampling Aunt Petunia’s neat row of rose bushes that were only just starting to bloom.

“Vernon!” Aunt Petunia screamed.

“Mum, no!” Dudley yelled and tried pull his mother back into the house, but Aunt Petunia would not leave the yard.

One of the Death Eaters hurled a Reductor Curse towards them, but the wards, which held still for as long as Holly was underage, held, the curse dissolving into a flash and shiver of white light just as Aunt Petunia ran up to the pavement.

“No! Get back into the house!” Holly cried, hurling herself bodily to Aunt Petunia just as another flash of green streaked through the night air where Aunt Petunia had been standing. They huddled together on the ground, next to Uncle Vernon’s inanimate body as ten or so Death Eaters converged in front of them, their wands trained and ready to kill.

Aunt Petunia’s hands were like talons as they dug around Holly’s arms as she shielded her with her body. “P-Please—! Don’t hurt her!”

“Ah, what’s this?” Bellatrix laughed madly. “A Muggle begging for the life of a witch? Unhand her, you useless creature. Or perhaps—“ she cut herself off and pointed her wand straight at Aunt Petunia’s face. “Crucio!”

Holly had seen wizards subjected to the Cruciatus Curse. She’d seen Voldemort subject his Death Eaters to it when he first regained his body in that graveyard in Little Hangleton. She’d seen the way that spider that the fake Moody had used to demonstrate the curse writhe in unimaginable pain. She’d even tried casting it before when her rage at Bellatrix Lestrange had nearly overwhelmed her in the Battle of the Department of Mysteries, when Bellatrix had killed her godfather.

She had never seen it administered on someone she knew, someone who held her now in her arms. Aunt Petunia gurgled and whimpered as the torture curse rippled and curdled unimaginable pain under her skin, making her writhe against Holly, her face twisting, her watery blue eyes going glassy and dark as she moaned in excruciating agony.

“Stop it!” Holly cried, holding her aunt close. “Stop it, please!”

Bellatrix cackled and merely twisted her wand as if the motion would intensify the hatred that fueled her curse and make the pain even more intense, unimaginable.

“Quit playing with food, Bellatrix,” Fenrir Greyback sneered and even above Aunt Petunia’s pitiful cries, Holly could her the undercurrent of menace in his gravely voice.

“Wouldn’t you like to eat the muggle filth, Greyback,” Bellatrix laughed as she cut the curse and Aunt Petunia’s body slumped against Holly’s, limp and sweat-damp, her eyes rolling back.

“Kill the muggle, Bella, and we should be getting back,” Lucius Malfoy said. “The Aurors—“

“Pah, Aurors,” Bellatrix scoffed.

Aunt Petunia gasped her pain out against Holly’s clammy neck even as she turned, her head lolling, to glare hatefully at Bellatrix. “You will not take her. My sister—“

“—is long dead, little muggle,” said Bellatrix. “As will you if you do not give us Potter.”

Holly’s heart constricted for the space of half a heartbeat. Aunt Petunia did not want her. She’d gotten Uncle Vernon killed. She’d brought the war to their doorstep. She’d—

“Over my dead body, you stupid witch!” Aunt Petunia gasped, her arms convulsively twitching around Holly’s shoulders, her nails digging into her skin. “You’ve killed my sister, my husband… I—I won’t let you kill my niece too!”

Bellatrix laughed loudly, a loud maniacal cackle that seemed to fill Holly’s world with fire and brimstone. “On your head be it. Avada Kedavra!”

“No!” Holly cried as she struggled around Aunt Petunia, the two of them tangled on the pavement, as the spell streaked unerring and true, and she closed her eyes as her world exploded in a flash of green, her magic, rippling and raw and sparking with the smell of ozone that accompanied the Killing Curse, erupted out of her skin, filling her senses with bright white light, writhing and crawling from under her skin until it exploded out of her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her very pores, a kaleidoscope of all colors and none.

Distantly, she thought she heard the anti-Apparition wards fall and the pops of Apparation resound, but the sound of her magic pouring forth drowned everything out in a resounding sonic boom that washed her world silver and then grey, and then finally, black.

And then, nothing.

“Mum! Mum, come quick!”

Holly moaned as the childish voice echoed loudly in her ears. Her body hurt all over, like she’d been run over by the Hogwarts Express and then back. She opened her eyes and everything was blurry and hazy, like her head was stuffed with cotton and she groaned as she tried to push herself up into a sitting position only to realize that she could feel nothing, like she was floating on air, except she couldn’t be because she could also feel hard packed ground on her back and the rasp of dry leaves rustling in the hot summer air against her arms.

“Lily!” another shrill childish voice cried in an admonishing tone. “Don’t touch her! She could be hurt!”

Holly groaned some more and reached up, pushing her glasses up, which were askew awkwardly on her nose and rubbed the cobwebs in her eyes. Her head hurt like a mother and it felt like all her limbs were utterly leaden, but finally, her vision settled and she righted her glasses and stared—into a pair of wide, bright green eyes.

“Hi!”

The little girl attached to the bright eyes was impossibly freckled, with a small button nose that was just slightly upturned, bow lips that curved into a wide smile, and a shock of dark red hair trapped in a messy ponytail. A slim headband with a blue fabric flower that looked just this side of bedraggled pulled her bangs from her face as she grinned impishly at Holly.

“I’m Lily, and this is my sister, Petunia,” said the little girl. “What’s your name, and is that your mum?”

Holly’s eyes widened as she stared for a long moment. Lily… and Petunia… She followed where the little girl was pointing and there, lying on the yellowing grass was Aunt Petunia, her blond hair tangled and messy over her face as she lay in heap on the ground. Holly scrambled up to her feet, only now realizing that the impossibly loose jeans she’d been wearing, a hand-me-down from Dudley, which was ridiculous since Dudley was about the size of a small whale and a boy besides, but Aunt Petunia had hardly cared because she wasn’t going to spend any money getting clothes for Holly, was even looser, even bigger than she remembered. She was swimming in the massive t-shirt and the jeans were at least a foot too long. Even the trainers on her feet felt like they were the shoes of a giant when she'd been certain before the previous term ended that her toes were going to shrivel up and die from how tight they were becoming.

Fuck, what in the world was going on?

Pushing the thought aside, she heaved her body towards where Aunt Petunia lay, crouching over her and feeling for the pulse in her neck. There was nothing. Aunt Petunia’s skin was already going cold, her long face lax, but the flesh under the skin was hard, like her body was already going into rigor mortis.

Holly sat back on her haunches and blinked back tears. Aunt Petunia hadn’t loved her all her life, but where it counted… where it counted, she’d protected Holly with her life. And now she was dead.

“Is she—is she dead?” one of the girls asked, her voice tremulous as the two of them timidly approached Holly, who up to that moment, had been somewhat managing the well of grief in her chest fairly admirably, was now suddenly unable to bite back her tears as they pricked through her eyelids and ran unchecked down pale, wan cheeks. “Oh, I’m so sorry!”

“Are you hurt?” the red-haired girl asked. Holly stared at her through her tears. She’d said her name was Lily, and the other taller blond girl beside her, Petunia, but… it couldn’t be… could it?

“I—I’m not—“ she stopped when she heard her own voice. She sounded just as tiny, just as shrill, just as childish as the two girls, and she looked down at her hands. She didn’t have very big hands, but she liked to think that as she grew into adulthood, her hands had grown with her. What she held in front of her though were tiny little child hands, just this side of chubby.

Fuck. Fuck, this couldn’t be happening…

“Lily, Petunia, what are you two girls up to now?”

Holly looked up. A worn-looking woman with reddish brown hair and wearing the dark green scrubs of what she was certain was a nurse, emerged from a cluster of dead-looking trees.

“Oh my!” the woman cried as she saw Holly, dirt-streaked and pale, and Aunt Petunia, dead and unmoving, on the ground. “Mike! Michael, come quickly, someone’s hurt!”

It was perhaps two hours later that Holly found herself sitting in a hard plastic chair in a cramped police precinct. Holly had never been to a police station in her life, but she sat there now, her eyes empty of tears, her mind numb, as a tall policeman in blue uniform turned away from the red-haired woman who’d found her with the two girls. The woman had introduced herself as Flora Evans and had immediately gone towards Aunt Petunia’s body, checked and ascertained that she was, in fact, dead, before grabbing the three girls and ushering them away from the body, while her husband, Michael Evans, a thin man with a long, bony face and blond hair that was greying at the temples, went to try to find a telephone to call the police.

It had taken an over hour for the local police to arrive and cordon off the area. Mrs Evans had held on to her two girls, relinquishing her hold over Holly when another policeman came to get her name.

“Holly,” she whispered, her tears drying on her pale, bruised cheeks where Uncle Vernon had hit her repeatedly. “Holly Potter.”

Now, she sat in the precinct and stared at the messy desk of the police officer who had taken her and the Evanses to the precinct. There was a small calendar at the corner of the desk that told Holly the date was July 30, 1971. She shuddered. It was the summer before her mother, Lily Evans, would go to Hogwarts. She didn’t know entirely what had happened, but it seemed she’d been propelled into the past completely.

The same policeman had just finished interviewing Mrs Evans over what she had seen, before he turned to regard Holly. The man was thin and grey, like Mr Evans, with broad features and a sun-weathered face, but the smile on his face was kind as he looked at Holly. The worn name plate affixed to the left breast of his uniform identified him as Officer Grant.

“I’m very sorry, Holly,” he said quietly. “Your mum didn’t make it. She was dead when Mrs Evans found her. Can you tell me what happened? How the two of you came to be in the forest?”

Holly stared, unseeing, at the tiny hands on her lap. She didn’t know what to tell the officer because she didn’t quite understand what had happened to her either. One minute, there’d been Death Eaters in front of the Dursley house on Privet Drive, and then the next, Bellatrix Lestrange had killed Aunt Petunia and then that flash of unexplainable magic… Had that been her? Had she caused this… this strange jump backwards in time? And had she caused herself to regress back into her eleven year old body?

“I don’t remember, sir,” she said quietly. Her voice was ragged from crying and she felt utterly wrung out. “My—she’s not my mum. She’s my aunt.”

Officer Grant gave her a kind smile before he looked askance at his partner and shook his head. “Well, I’m sorry to tell you that your aunt didn’t make it, Holly. Now, you’ve got all these bruises on your face. Can you tell me what happened?”

In her mind’s eye, she saw flashes of the apoplectic rage that had overtaken Uncle Vernon over the news that the Dursleys would have to leave Privet Drive in order to be protected from any backlash from Voldemort and his Death Eaters. She saw fists raining down on her, and shuddered. Uncle Vernon hadn’t been the nicest person, but he’d never actually hit Holly quite the way he’d slapped her down and dragged her out of the house to throw her out before.

She shook her head. She’d just look crazy if she told the policeman that her uncle, who was nowhere to be found, probably not even a full grown adult at this time, had beaten her up right before some crazy robed and masked figure wielding a magic stick had killed him using magic. “I don’t remember.”

Officer Grant smiled sadly and shook his head. “Never you mind, lass. We’ll try to find your family then so someone can pick you up before sundown.”

Holly fidgeted as she stared at where Mr and Mrs Evans and their two children were still talking to the other police officer. “I don’t have any other family, sir. My Aunt was the one who raised me.”

The policeman clucked and gave her that “you poor little thing” sort of face that people always gave Holly whenever they found out that she was an orphan. “Well, that makes things a mite bit complicated then. There isn’t an orphanage in a hundred miles, not until you get to Nottingham at least.”

Holly stared at the policeman for a moment as he turned away to confer with his partner. It didn’t really matter that there was no one to get her. She knew she looked eleven physically, but her mind was that of a seventeen year old. She had her wand in the pocket of the massive hand-me-down trousers she wore, and she knew how to Apparate. She could just… do what she’d done back when she’d run away from home when she was thirteen—or, well thirteen in her timeline since she was apparently eleven again now—and Apparate or take the Knight Bus to Diagon Alley, where she could stay at the Leaky Cauldron.

Something drew her attention though, and she looked up and found herself staring at little Lily Evans. Her mother, at eleven, was even tinier than her. She wore a blue floral frock that looked like it had seen better days, but it appeared meticulously clean. Her skin was fair, though dotted with freckles, and she had a healthy flush to her cheeks, brought on by the summer sun. Although she didn’t appear affluent, there was no mistaking that this little girl belonged to a loving family and Holly suddenly felt a lump in her throat as she realized there was no way she would belong with the family that Lily Evans had now, not with her sitting here alone in a police precinct, and she didn’t know whether she had it within her to approach this child version of her mum, not when they were worlds apart in life experiences.

Lily, apparently, had no such reservations as she broke away from the hold her mother had on her and scampered towards Holly.

“I saw you earlier,” Lily said, her voice hushed. “You were doing magic before you woke up.”

Holly blinked. 

“You were floating, just a couple feet above the ground,” Lily said matter-of-factly. “And you have a wand in your pocket. I don’t have one yet, but Mum says I’m going to have to go to that magic place in London to get one in preparation for school.”

Holly’s eyes widened as she instinctively stuck her hand in the pocket of her jeans to feel for her wand. It was there, the holly wood warm and comforting to her touch.

“I’m going to ask Mum if you can come home with us,” Lily told her. And with that, she hurried back to her mother’s side, tugging insistently at Mrs Evans’ scrubs and then whispering furiously into her ear. Mrs Evans nodded at whatever it was Lily said, before she glanced back, that pitying look in the green eyes that Lily inherited from her, the same probably that Holly herself inherited, and said a quiet word to Mr Evans, before she marched up to the two policemen.

“Officer Grant? I understand this little girl doesn’t have any family and it would take time for you to arrange for her to be taken to the orphanages in Nottingham. My husband and I wouldn’t mind taking her home with us in the meantime. It’s getting dark and young children shouldn’t have to be left here in the precinct without a chaperone.”

The two policemen looked for a moment to be utterly stumped before Officer Grant gave a rueful smile and scratched the back of his head sheepishly. Evidently, that hadn’t been what he and his partner were conferring about; they hadn’t even thought of what to do with Holly the entire time they’d been discussing her appearance.

“You’ve a heart of gold, Mrs Evans,” the policeman said with a wide smile as he pulled up some form from the mess of papers on his desk and started writing up a release of custody to the Evanses. “Now, Holly, Mr and Mrs Evans here have very kindly agreed to take you in for the evening, while we try to sort out what happened with your aunt. Officer Collins and I will release you to Mrs Evans until we’ve sorted out what we can do for you, but in the meantime, we’d like for you to go with Mrs Evans here and be a good girl, all right?”

Holly stared incredulously at the policeman, boggled for a moment as to why an adult man was speaking to her as if she were a dunce before she remembered that to them, she looked eleven. She may as well have been a dunce, at least where a home situation was concerned for the moment, and she nodded, a touch warily, as Mr and Mrs Evans signed the forms.

Mrs Evans smiled, rather sweetly, at Holly as she bent down a little and offered her hand. “Come on, I think you’ve had enough of a terrible day today and deserve a bit of dinner, don’t you think, girls?”

Lily Evans beamed at her mother before she turned to Holly, grabbing the hand that wasn’t in Mrs Evans’ grasp. Even Petunia smiled a little uncertainly as the five of them walked out the precinct.

Holly couldn’t believe this was her life and she stared back at the squat little building of the police precinct all the way until they reached the bus stop.