This chapter is the result of an interlude Poll held on Patreon which resulted in Harley getting the W. There is currently another Harry Potter interlude Poll going on which I will close in a few days. Currently in the lead, Flitwick, currently second, Neville.
Free members get to give the for POVs ideas once a month. I also post one update schedule per month if you want to know on which day exactly the chapters will come.
Hope you enjoy this one. A bit of light-heartedness to welcome December, the unarguably best month of the year (It's my birthday).
-/-
"How's my little baby girl doing!?" Sirius shouted happily from Platform 9 ¾ as Harley descended from the train, seemingly deep in conversation with Neville and Hermione, who were all going home for Christmas vacation.
For her part, the young black-haired girl froze in absolute mortification as she beheld how exactly her father was waiting for her at the stations.
He was dressed in a bright pink robe and a baby blue party hat. In his left arm were balloons in the shape of hearts and in his right a cardboard cutout with the glittery words, 'Waiting for the bestest girl in the whole wide world, rider of unicorns and lover of glitter, Harley Black.'
The parents of the other children were giving the obviously deranged weirdo a wide berth.
Neville and Hermione as well, for all that they had stood together against a troll and had forged a bond stronger than most knew their whole time in Hogwarts, warily stepped away from the girl so as not to be implicated.
Harley, at the age of thirteen, seriously considered running away from home, starting from this very train station. She could get back on the Hogwarts Express and go live in the Forbidden Forest.
Sirius got on one knee and threw his arms wide open.
Harley reluctantly—and she couldn't emphasise the reluctantly enough—went to her father and stood a full meter in front of him instead of going in for the hug he was offering.
Sirius wiggled his eyebrows at her and stretched his fingers.
"Come on. Don't leave your poor father hanging," he said.
Harley rolled her eyes, stepped forward, and enveloped the idiot in a hug. Sirius promptly used the opportunity to stick a piece of paper on her back.
'I eat farts,' it read.
"Are we leaving or not," Harley asked in annoyance.
Sirius shook his head, allowing more time to pass so that people who passed behind Harley had the time to double-take reading what was on her back.
"Won't you introduce me to your friends?" he asked teasingly.
"You already know Neville," Harley muttered.
"I saw a curly-haired girl I don't know yet, a new beau. You like 'em young, huh?"
Harley turned around to check, but Hermione was nowhere to be seen. She'd probably rushed through the wall to get to her parents.
"Let's just go already," the girl whined.
"Fine, fine," Sirius said, extending an arm for her to grip.
"Clench your buttcheeks," he warned before they both twisted together in a point and disappeared with a quiet pop.
-/-
Harley emerged with a cough in the dusty house her father always neglected when she wasn't home. Grimmauld Place lived up to its name, being a grim old place.
They'd redecorated it somewhat, changed the tapestries to green with little birds, and refloored the floor with a brighter wood, but there was still just something about it.
Too much dark magic had happened here.
The portrait was gone. Harley curled her lips in disgust as the duo passed through the entrance corridor, past the burnt-out spot where Walburga Black had used to reside and where she had brought the young Harley to tears often enough with her accusations of blood impurity and stupid naming.
Her father had ended up paying a foreign dark wizard of some renown to apply a controlled and brief burst of Fiendfyre on the wall. Not that she was supposed to tell anyone.
"We should get a house elf," Harley complained for the umpteenth time.
Sirius awkwardly chuckled as they passed into the pastel-yellow kitchen. He started prepping a tea, and Harley deposited her trunk by the door.
"We'll do a cleaning session before sleep; it will be fun!" he exclaimed, sounding unconvinced.
Harley grimaced. It wasn't possible to clean a house saturated with so much magic and history with simple cleaning spells sometimes. In certain rooms, they'd have to take their hands to the dusty walls.
"You shouldn't have killed Kreacher-" she said petulantly.
"His head is on the wall; it's what he always wanted," Sirius interrupted.
"Without arranging a replacement," Harley finished.
"He burned your name off the wall. I didn't even know he could do that!" Sirius defended himself.
"He was a senile house-elf trained by a family of dark wizards; what were you expecting?" Harley asked. Having his name blasted off the genealogy tree had always been her dad's trauma. She didn't care much. She'd much rather have known her mother instead.
"Blasted elf," Sirius grumbled as he deposited two steaming mugs on the table while also producing a tin box of what seemed to be expired Christmas cookies from last year.
He suddenly became more serious, "Harley, I have to ask, and this is important."
Harley paused just as she was reaching a hand towards the cookies, knowing she could soften them up by dunking them in the tea. Her dad was seldom… serious.
"Have you ever, and I mean ever, seen a golden hexagonal locket with an emerald S on it?" he asked. "Even a hint, a vague memory."
"What's this about, Dad?" Harley asked, feeling a bit uncomfortable.
"Answer the question, and I'll tell you."
Harley thought about the topic and was just about to shake her head before pausing.
Once she'd.
When she'd been a little girl.
She'd crawled into the space where Kreacher slept. It smelt terrible and looked worse, but she'd been curious.
There, she'd seen some things. Toenail clippings in a little glass vial entitled "Walburga Black," a book about the Black family, and a… golden locket. She couldn't remember if it had an S engraved on it or not.
Not long after, Kreacher burned her name off that wall and lost his head for it.
His little hovel had been the last part of the house to be cleaned out and remodelled.
She scrunched her nose. Just for that greeting that Sirius had given her back at the train station, she shouldn't have told him anything.
But…
The auror's eyes were drawn tightly together, and his mouth was set in a thin, pale line.
"In Kreacher's hovel, I remember a golden locket, but… I don't know if it was the one you're talking about," Harley said hesitantly.
"Describe it," Sirius urged.
Harley thought hard. "It was on a golden chain. It was gold. It wasn't round. It was… squarish?" she trailed off.
"We threw all the things in that hole in the nearest dump," Sirius muttered discontentedly.
"What's this about, Dad?" Harley asked, wondering if she should be worried.
Sirius shook his head and took a sip of his tea. "Don't worry about it. Just a favour to Dumbledore. He asked me to look for the object but didn't tell me why. He said that it was something that used to belong to You-Know-Who."
Harley froze.
Most of the dark artefacts in the house had been removed before she'd been old enough to remember. But something from You-Know-Who was…
"Anyway, he seemed weirdly focused on it," Sirius continued. "Maybe I can teach you the memory extraction method this Christmas. See if we can get a better look at what you remembered."
"I'm on vacation, Dad," Harley whined.
The older man cracked an eyebrow. "You're the one who asked me to teach you duelling over the break," he said, affronted. "I took two weeks off work!"
"You do that every Christmas!"
Sirius crossed his arms petulantly. "Well, this time is special," he whined. "You wrote that you and Neville were practising with that Evans kid?" he asked. "Only in your second year and already breaking the no-violence rules, I have to say, I'm very proud of you."
Harley blushed. "You're proud of that but not the Outstandings I got in last year's end-of-year exams?"
Sirius dismissively waved a hand. "It's great, sure, but don't brag too much. No one likes an overachiever."
Harley threw up her hands. This was probably the only household in the world where the parent didn't care about good grades but verbally praised the rule-breaking.
"Yes, we've been practising. I've learned the disarming charm," she bragged. "Neville can do the knockback jinx wordlessly."
Sirius paused and stared at her. "He can do what?" he asked with a confused look on his face.
"He can do the knockback jinx wordlessly," Harley repeated slowly as if talking to a mentally disabled child.
"Are you sure he's not just mumbling it?" Sirius asked sceptically.
Harley shook her head. "Nope." She popped the p.
"That's…" Sirius trailed off. "Impressive. How long are these duelling sessions, and how often do they take place?" he asked.
"Once or twice a week, and they last for hours; Harry's such a slave driver," Harley complained. Not that she had anything to complain about; she could see herself getting better. Her likelihood of keeping her winning streak against Neville would have been bleak if he'd continued the practice without her even after Halloween, she freely admitted to herself in the confines of her own mind. "He's treating it like a matter of life and death," she said with a roll of her eyes. "It's all, 'Harley, you're dodging like you think you have wings, a killing curse will hit you in mid-air, and your conjurations are non-existent,' and, 'you call that a disarming jinx? It wouldn't hurt a fly, or rather, it would hurt its feelings since you'd be underestimating its vitality for sending this shite at it,'" Harley mimicked in the older boy's deeper voice. "I'm a second-year student," she then complained. "What conjurations am I supposed to know?" She then looked up to see that Sirius was looking at her intently, not going along with the gaffe.
"Well, I imagine he has a bigger reason to be paranoid than most," he ended up saying.
"What do you mean?" Harley asked.
"Forget about it. Anyway, yes, we can do some duelling," Sirius muttered. "Maybe we can invite Neville as well. James will be busy. I can gauge the progress of the two of you and see this… wordless knockback jinx."
"Is he still campaigning?" Harley asked curiously.
"It's Minister of Magic, of course, he's campaigning. Kissing babies and shaking the hands of former death eaters," Sirius muttered darkly. "There will be a news article about the war soon; don't read it. It will be nasty. Just a recounting of past tragedies."
"You think he has a chance? Everyone at school is talking about Fudge. He killed the werewolf," Harley said, causing her dad to scoff.
"Yes, well, how Fudge of all people grew a backbone is the mystery of the ages, isn't it? I still remember how he vomited his guts out when he saw the aftermath of Peter blowing up that street in an attempt to…"
Harley perked up. Her dad seldom talked about Peter, whom she knew had been a former friend. He'd always start the stories he liked to tell about his school days with, 'Me, James, Remus and… well, you don't have to know,' but sometimes he let the name slip.
She didn't know much, and it was burning at her. She only knew that the man was a rat animagus, that he'd betrayed the good guys during the war, and that he was now in Azkaban.
"Whatever, unpleasant topic," her father trailed off. "We're invited to dinner at the Potter's tonight. James managed to free up this one slot to welcome everyone back from Hogwarts: us, them, the Tonkses. I'd like to see if we can get that memory before we leave, so if you want to change and come back, now would be the time."
"I'll go change," Harley said, finishing her tea before standing up. She liked robes as much as anyone, but wearing them the whole time at Hogwarts was exhausting.
She whipped out her wand and levitated her trunk to follow her as she walked up the stairs, one creaky step at a time. The house was renovated, yes, but sometimes old was just old.
On the second floor, she walked past her dad's bedroom, past her uncle's chained-up and barred room, and into her own little niche on the corner of the house, where she often sat at the window sill to look down at the street.
She had the room with the most light, facing the sun as it drew its path across the sky.
If it wasn't raining that was, which it often did. She threw her trunk to the side, not planning on using anything in it until a few days before term started again. Homework could wait.
Going over to her closet, she opened it to reveal a stupefyingly large display of muggle clothing. She had everything from pink skirts to spike-studded jackets. Considering that the Blacks were rich, she hadn't grown up too privileged. The only exception, the things that her dad never said no to, were things that were too muggle for wizarding society. If she'd wanted, she was pretty sure he would have bought her a motorcycle. She preferred clothes.
She slipped off her robes and paused when she felt a crinkle in the back that shouldn't be there.
Turning the robe around, she found a piece of paper glued to it with what must have been a sticking charm.
'I eat farts,' it proclaimed proudly.
Harley's eyebrow twitched.
She bent down to open the little compartment at the bottom of her large wooden closet. Only, as she opened it, it was revealed that it wasn't that little. It came out and continued on and on and on until it slammed into the wall on the other side of the room 10 meters away.
What came to light in the drawer was a veritable arsenal of prank items. None of the Zonko's stuff either. These were all things that Uncle Remus and Uncle James had been giving her over the years so she could defend herself against her insufferable father.
In other words. In terms of pranking equipment, this was military-grade stuff.
Hair dye that couldn't be dispelled. Slips of paper enchanted with different effects, such as making someone burp so often they couldn't enunciate spells. A powder that made someone hallucinate that everyone in the room had switched places with someone else, causing some confusing glances when having a conversation. Subtle, but deadly. Once, Sirius had ended up looking at Amelia Bones' cleavage for a solid one minute, thinking that he was looking at his daughter's head.
That one had been revenge for him making a joke about the more erotic usages of a wand in front of Ollivander, of all people.
Harley ran red in the face, half embarrassment, half rage.
Her hands quickly grabbed a variety of items to stuff into her pockets.
"This means war, old man," she muttered darkly.
-/-
AN: Hope you liked the chapter, always loved little expansions around holiday season to make the world pop a bit more :P. If you don't agree, turn yourself in at the nearest grumpy grump adoption centre and a family will pick up you post-haste to teach you the importance of the christmas spirit.
Thank you to my new Patrons who are the light of my soul and the fire of my loins: Bela, Gopard, Wyat Frost, Bardya Rezaei, Montana, Akira, Dwentay, ItsNipply, mkh, Secret Mage, TumultyPride, Zow, Aagkard, Max Turry, Brunhild41