Harry Potter and the Distaff Side
Anguish
By Clell65619
Author Notes:
A/N: I own none of this. I do not own Harry Potter or any rights to his image or personality. I do not own the moon or the stars. I do not own human genders, other than my own personal original factory equipment. Honest. Nope, not me. I most certainly do not own the rights to a billion dollar literary work. Damn it.
"Mr. Potter," the Headmistress said sadness evident in her voice. "Please sit down."
Harry sat, confused.
"Director Bones arranged for you to be returned to Hogwarts before I had a chance to speak with you," she said hesitantly. "Have you spoken with Miss Lovegood since you returned?"
Harry nodded. The memory of Luna's reaction to the danger of being around him still stung.
"I was afraid of that," the old woman sighed. "You deserve an explanation. When you were arrested, she was stunned, was she not?"
"From behind," Harry admitted. "One second we were starting our lunch, and then she slumped on top of me."
"I was surprised that you didn't fight."
"I thought about it," Harry admitted. "But they were Aurors, and that man, Umbridge identified himself as being from the Ministry."
Dumbledore nodded. "Did any of them tend to Miss Lovegood during your arrest?"
"When I was being cuffed, the Ministry Man checked on Luna," Harry blinked as realization came to him. "He did something to her, didn't he?"
"He did," Dumbledore admitted. "Delos Umbridge is a supporter of Pureblood supremacy, and he was angered at the thought of a pureblood heir dallying with a half blood. He cast an old, dark spell on Miss Lovegood. The Morum Genere spell was intended to bind willful heirs to the will of their matriarch. It was never intended to allow an outsider to change someone."
"So, Luna is… different because of what he did to her?" Harry demanded as he stood. "Can it be fixed?"
"The spell can be removed," Blanch admitted, "but therein lays the problem."
"What problem?" Harry asked, sinking into the chair again.
"Delos Umbridge is currently sitting in a Ministry cell for casting a spell that modified a young woman's mind and personality without the permission of the young woman or the head of her family." Dumbledore explained. "Removing the spell will once again be modifying her mind and personality. Xena Lovegood is more enraged than I have ever seen her, and is hounding the Ministry for a pound of Delos Umbridge's flesh. She wants her daughter's personality returned to normal, but she will not allow Luna's mind to be forcibly modified again. She will allow the spell to be removed, but only if the young woman agrees."
"And Luna doesn't agree," Harry suggested.
"As of this morning, she does not," Dumbledore admitted. "As far as she is concerned, she feels as she has always felt. She still has most her memories, but those of you and your… adventures together, are changed . She now sees you as more of an annoying sycophant than a friend. She is aware of your feelings for her, but believes she never shared them."
Harry stood up again. "I see."
"Harry…" Dumbledore began.
"I'll still fight for you," Harry interrupted, "at least; I'll fight for my sister. However, I am warning you now, when all of this is over, If I survive and that bastard Umbridge is free, I will kill him, slowly. He was trying to get to Harri through me, and while doing so, he hurt Luna."
"Harry…" Blanch started.
"No… Just no," Harry interrupted. "Leave Luna alone, she'll be safer well away from me. Are we done Headmistress?"
"Yes, Harry, we're done," she said sadly, while silently cursing Delos Umbridge.
-===ooo000ooo===-
Orestes shouldered his book bag and exited the classroom, finding Harri waiting for him. He smiled widely and took his girlfriend's hand.
"Good class?" Harri asked.
"Excellent, we worked through the arithmantic matrix for the Unbreakable Charm. It was really interesting, I've got some ideas about making a few changes to it, but Professor Vector cautioned us against making changes to a charm before we get our Spell Creation certifications."
"Spell creation?" Harri asked. "Isn't that how Luna's father died?"
"Well, yes," Orestes admitted. "The job is risky, sure, but it needs to be done, and you know me, I'd be careful."
"Oh, yes, you're so very careful… I mean you'd never follow a pair of girls with more bravery than common sense into danger," Harry laughed, squeezing Oreste's hand as they made their way through the corridor.
"I am not that bad," Orestes protested with a huff. "Someone has to keep you two out of trouble. Speaking of Luna, did I do something to offend her? I tried to get her to help me with a new project and she wouldn't even look at me."
"That's odd," Harri said, furrowing her brow. "And I mean really odd for Luna. Since we met her, I've never seen her be anything but happy and friendly."
A thunderous rumble passed through the castle, Orestes could have sworn he saw a large ripple roll through the stone floor. Both he and Harri where thrown to the wall, along with everyone else moving through the hallway.
"What the bloody hell?" Harri hissed, her wand appearing in her hand and she began to run toward the source of the rumble, just in time for another crack of thunder and a ripple running through the stone. Orestes watched as his girlfriend vaulted the moving wave that passed through the stonework and kept running.
Pausing for a moment to appreciate the girl's form, and wondering if he was about to make a mistake, Orestes gathered his things and followed as best he could.
-===ooo000ooo===-
Harriet Potter arrived at the entrance of the Room of Requirements having followed the magical disruptions of the castle to their apparent source.
She wasn't at all surprised to find that several members of the staff had beaten her to the scene.
"What is this place?" Snape demanded. "I've never seen this door before."
"It's a room Hogwarts provides for training, Sylvia," Dumbledore explained as she spotted the young student arriving. "Ah, Miss Potter, the door will not open for any of us, perhaps it will for you…"
"I'll try," Harri agreed as she rushed forward.
"Why would Potter of all people be able to…" Sylvia Snape sneered until the door opened with a click as soon as the girl touched the knob.
-===ooo000ooo===-
Dumbledore was the first through the doorway into the Room of Requirements, her wand at the ready. What she found almost made her drop her wand.
The room was in a shambles. The floor was cratered, the walls cracked and scorched, the far wall still aflame, the ceiling high above was shattered and broken. In the middle of the wreckage, on his knees, was Harry Potter. His head down, the boy seemed to radiate anger.
"What has happened?" the aspect of the Dark Lady demanded when she materialized at the Head Mistress' side. "The boy has gone mad. The room couldn't contain the magic he was expending."
"My lady?" Silvia Snape gasped when she spotted the Dark Lady Riddle's aspect.
"Calm yourself Silvia," the Room construct sniffed. "I am not her."
"What have you done to him?" Harriet Potter demanded as she shouldered her way past her Potions Professor.
"Nothing," Riddle's aspect said. "He has exhausted himself in his anger, after destroying several versions of me and my male counterpart in the process."
"A training mishap," Dumbledore announced, as she realized how many people where now in the previously secret room. "Nothing more. Miss Potter, if you will see to your brother…"
"Yes, Headmistress," Harriet said before rushing to the side of her dimensional twin.
-===ooo000ooo===-
Harry woke slowly, realizing as he did so that he was, once again, waking up in the Hospital wing. His entire body ached like it had in the old days when Dudley and his friends would take great pleasure in showing the little freak just how much stronger they were by beating him until he couldn't move.
His waking had not gone unnoticed, as a familiar blur at his bedside was handing him his glasses. Putting them on his face, the blur resolved into the young woman who was his twin.
"Welcome back, Moron," she said with a wide grin.
"You are far too cheerful for the morning," Harry grumbled.
"Seeing as it is after three in the afternoon, I don't really see your point," Harriet laughed.
"Three…" Harry gasped. "How long was I out?"
"Two days," Harri explained, losing her laughter. "You exhausted yourself with your tantrum in the Room of Requirements, and depleted your magic to a dangerous level. Healer Pomfrey kept you under to allow your magic to restore itself"
"Ah," Harry nodded, sitting up. "I feel fine, outside of a few aches and pains, and I need to use the bog."
"It's classy language like that that is going to make it hard for me to get you married off properly," Harriet joked.
Harry froze as his feet his the stone floor, turning to the young woman he had come to think of as a sister, he fixed her with a stare. "Don't make jokes about that. Ever."
-===ooo000ooo===-
Harri swallowed hard once the young man she had come to think of as her brother broke his eye contact with her and shuffled his way to the toilet. She had actually been terrified for a moment by the look in his eyes. It had been worse than facing Riddle back in the cemetery and it had come from… Harry?
She followed him to the door, before changing her mind about following him inside. She leaned against the wall alongside the door wondering if he would be all right in there alone. Didn't boys always go to the toilet in groups?
She waited until she heard the water running in the sink before calling through the door. "Are you going to tell me what happened?"
"It doesn't matter," he grunted as he came through the door, avoiding her eyes.
"I think it does," she responded as she followed him back to the bed. "You all but destroyed the Room, and almost took the castle with it. Riddle told me you tore through her and Voldemort both, several times on the way to exhausting yourself."
"I did?" Harry asked incredulously. "It was all kind of a blur. I just… I just got so angry."
"That part I've got," Harriet Potter said quietly. "What I don't know is, why were you so angry?"
-===ooo000ooo===-
"I've found it," Orestes said quietly looking up from the massive book.
Harri carefully marked her place in the book she had been reading and moved to sit beside her boyfriend.
"Morum Genere," Orestes read in low tones, barely over a whisper, "an ancient spell used to bind wayward heirs to the family norms."
"Lovely," Harri commented.
"It fell out of favor and common usage more than two hundred years ago, due to the way the spell could introduce instability to the heirs it is used on," Orestes summarized.
"Instability?" Harri asked.
"Madness," Orestes said, his mouth forming a firm line, as his fingers "The more the forced change varies from the victim's original personality the more the risk of madness."
"Bloody hell," the messy haired girl murmured.
"Language Harri," Orestes scolded absentmindedly. "What are we going to do?"
Harriet looked across the library where an uncharacteristically focused Luna sat studying. "She's been changed so much…" The Potter girl ran her left hand through her hair. "How much more of a personality change could a person have?"
Orestes shook his head. He had been wondering the same thing.
-===ooo000ooo===-
"The girl was shaming her heritage," Umbridge declared, glaring at the assembled Wiccegamot. "I did what needed to be done."
"Minister Fudge's Undersecretary exceeded the brief of his office," the Prosecutor noted. "He inflicted a personality modification spell on the heir of a noted, if quirky, pureblood line. If this is allowed to stand, then a ministry functionary could be making changes to any of your heirs to suit their world view.
Delos Umbridge looked up at the Minister for assistance, and failed to find any. Cornelia Fudge studiously refused to meet her Undersecretary's gaze.
"If it pleases the Wiccegamot," Xena Lovegood said as she stood in the visitor's gallery, "and even if it doesn't. I have come today to plead for the release of Delos Umbridge from his incarceration."
A shocked gasp rippled through the plum robed officials sitting in judgement of the Undersecretary.
Almanzo Bones leaned back in his chair and removed his monocle. "You are advocating for his release?"
"As soon as the bastard is release, he will no longer be shielded from my challenge of an honor duel," Xena explained. "He will be dead within fifteen minutes of you releasing him. He is going to pay for what he did to my daughter."
-===ooo000ooo===-
"Where are you going?" Orestes asked.
"Out," Harri answered vaguely.
Orestes nodded and slung his book bag over his shoulder. "Wonderful idea, I think I'll join you."
The bushy haired lad waited until the pair were out of the dorm and in the hallway. "What's going on?"
"I tried to talk to Harry."
"Didn't go well, I take it?" Orestes asked. "I've tried to talk to him several times over the last couple of days, but he just snarls at me and stomps off."
"Same as with me," Harri admitted. "He's just so furious about what happened to Luna and he blames himself."
"I wonder how you could possibly imagine what he's thinking…" Orestes said dryly.
"It might be that I know if that Ministry ass had done anything like that to you, I'd be burning the damned place down," the Potter girl admitted. "As it is, I'm admiring his restraint."
"So, what are we going to do?"
"It occurred to me that if we want to help Harry," Harri sighed, "we would have to get Luna back to how she was."
"Harri!" Orestes hissed, grabbing her shoulders with both hands and pushing her into a dark corner of the hallway. "You can't be thinking about trying to reverse the Morum Genere spell on your own. It takes all kinds of magic, which you have, but it also takes a great deal of control, which you do not have. You could make her worse, or totally wipe her memories."
"I know that," Harri said, gently removing her boyfriend's hands from her shoulders. "It would take someone like the Headmistress to remove the spell and put her personality back to how it was. Luna, as she is, is refusing it have it done and her mother isn't willing to have her personality changed without Luna agreeing to it."
"So what are we doing?"
"Changing Luna's mind," Harri explained as she started up the staircase. "And to do that, I need to talk to Luna."
"But Luna won't talk to either of us," Orestes protested.
"Which is why we're on the way to talk to Luna."
-===ooo000ooo===-
"You can't really believe you're going to get away with this," Luna spat as Harriet Potter shoved her into the Room of Requirements.
"I'll take my chances," Harriet Potter said as her pet Mudblood entered the room behind them and sealed the door.
It was clear that the Mudblood was near panic. During their abduction, Luna had heard him blathering on about some sort of therapy that they were forcing her into.
And rightly so, if she had anything to say about it, the pair were looking a prison time… or worse.
Luna looked around the room, and was shocked by the confusion that suddenly consumed her, "I… I've been here before."
"Of course you've been here before," her own voice interjected. She turned to find herself facing… herself.
"Hello me," the other Luna said, pulling herself into a hug. "Oh, what a wrackspurt infestation you've got."
"No!" Luna shouted. "This is…"
"Oh, dear," the other Luna interrupted her. "It's just as you said, Orestes, I've become so very dull and normal."
"Whatever else my daughter is," a man's voice interjected, "she is never dull and normal."
Luna turned from her duplicate to find her father standing nearby, watching her, concern written all over his face.
"Daddy?" she whispered as she rushed to his arms. "But you died, I saw it."
"You did, and I am," Hyperion Lovegood agreed. He tipped the real Luna's head up so that they were staring into each other's eyes. "I am only here through the magic of this wonderful room. Among the memories stolen from you, was an earlier visit you and I had here, courtesy of one Harry Potter."
"Oh, we thanked him quite thoroughly," the other Luna chirped. "Not that you remember that."
Luna watched as her doppelganger turned to the pair of Gryffindors that had forced her into the room. "You two can go, Daddy, and I and I have much to talk about"
-===ooo000ooo===-
Blanch Dumbledore woke to pounding on her office door. While such things were far from unknown, it had been several years since any student had dared wake her in the middle of the night.
Wrapping her dressing gown around herself, Blanch moved from her quarters to her office and unlocked the door with a wave of her wand.
Luna Lovegood rushed through the open door, her face wet from tears.
"Miss Lovegood," Blanch said, "what brings you to my office after curfew?"
"Do it," she said tersely.
"Excuse me?"
"Do what you need to do to make me as I was," the girl said, tears streaming down her face.
"You've changed your mind," Dumbledore noted. "Might I ask why? You were quite adamant about not wishing to return to the mindset you do not remember."
"I was… I spoke with my father," Luna said, her head downcast. "Not really my father, some sort of magical room…"
"I am familiar with the room," Blanch reached out and wiped the girl's face with a conjured handkerchief. "So you spoke with your father?"
"And myself."
"Ah," the Headmistress nodded, "yourself as you were."
"As I was," the girl said sadly. "The way I don't remember ever being. She called me normal and boring. I'm frightened to change myself from what I am, but Daddy said that she is what I was, what I am meant to be… even if it means associating with Muggleborn and halfbloods."
"We'll call your mother," Dumbledore said as she crossed to her office's fireplace. "She'll want to be here."
"Yes," the girl said, looking down, her hair hiding her face. "It's so very hard to give up what you are."
"I can only imagine," the Headmistress said, "it must be difficult."
"I'm so…" the girl's voice broke into a sob as she began to cry again, "so… very frightened."
-===ooo000ooo===-
"That is your plan?" the shade of Voldemort asked.
"It is," Orestes said with a nod.
"That is insane," Voldemort pronounced.
"Only if it doesn't work," Orestes disagreed. "If it does work, then the plan is inspired and a work of genius. You haven't answered my question, will you help me?"
The magical construct narrowed its eyes. "What happens if I say no?"
"Then I go out that door," Orestes said simply, "and I reconfigure the room as many times as it takes until I get a Shade willing to do what I need."
The Dark Lord's shade regarded the young wizard for several seconds. "Agreed. It will never work, but I'll do my part."
-===ooo000ooo===-
Author Notes:
A/N: Hey, look. A new chapter. Well, that's a cliffie dealt with, and a puzzle added. What fun.