⁂

Of all the ways that Ginny Weasley had imagined meeting Harry Potter, getting dropped on top of him in a cramped, dimly lit space was not one that she had imagined.

...Well, okay, depending on how you interpreted things, that wasn't quite true, but she was finding the experience significantly less cozy than she had expected, so she wasn't counting it.

As if that wasn't bad enough, though, it was only a fraction of a moment later that the portal that she had come through closed and 'dimly lit' became 'completely blind' as the two of them were cast into what seemed to be pitch darkness to her daylight-attuned eyes.

It wasn't long before she was glad for the darkness, though, because it was beginning to sink in that she was in a dark space with the Harry Potter. Also, she'd lost her dress at some point in her tumbling, so she was naked in a dark space with Harry Potter. Admittedly, he hadn't looked like much in the short glance that she'd gotten of him, but that could easily be explained as one of the variety of challenging circumstances that Harry Potter always got into in the books. She'd read them all, you see, and there weren't many that didn't involve him getting into some sort of unpleasant situation at some point of the story.

That said, having some idea what might be going on didn't really change the fact that it was going on. She'd never thought all that much about what it would actually be like to be personally drudging through a South American jungle or captured and trapped by Egyptian cultists, and she wasn't enjoying the experience, especially so soon after being turned into a winged pony of some sort.

Yes, she remembered that Luna had called her a snorkack. No, she wasn't going to call herself that. Ginny had long ago developed a certain level of tolerance for her friend's quirky ideas, but that really hadn't really been up to Luna's typical standards considering Ginny didn't even have a horn, crumpled or not, and she'd been called out on it.

What to call herself was not the important thing right now, though. The important thing was that she still barely knew her hooves from her elbows and she was all tangled up and naked with a bony, knobbly boy, even if that boy was Harry Potter. Really, you'd think that that would excuse a lot, but with his heel lodged under her ribs, she couldn't even come up with a more attractive way to put it.

Groaning, Ginny struggled to orient herself in the dark and untangle herself from the internationally famous boy hero. It didn't go as well as she would have liked, and she was pretty sure she elbowed him in the ribs two or three times in her attempts to get free until he physically stopped her.

"Woah, there, uh... girl?" Harry Potter said, his voice scratchy from disuse. Ginny blushed at being manhandled, halting all her twisting and jostling almost as a side effect. Unintentional or not, once Ginny had stopped squirming, Harry Potter slowly loosened his grip in increments, eventually releasing his surprisingly wiry grip from her bare shoulders.

Once he was reassured that Ginny wasn't going to do him any further harm, his hands found her head and he began patting her, which seemed like a strange thing for a young boy to do immediately after meeting someone, but what did she know?

"There, now, girl..." he said, entirely too conscious of how awkward it was to call her that. His voice quavered with uncertainty even as he continued to pat her on the head. Ginny wanted to tell him what her name was, but the words refused to come out because Harry Potter was patting her on the head and stroking her hair and that wasn't something that she was at all prepared for.

"Did that really just happen?" he asked, distinctly bemused. "I suppose it must have, being that whatever it is is still happening, you being here and all," he reasoned, sounding almost as if he was talking to himself. Well, that wasn't exactly unreasonable, she supposed, considering how vocal she wasn't being.

The mood was instantly ruined when Harry Potter began scratching underneath her muzzle and it suddenly dawned on Ginny that he thought she was an animal.

Because, you know, she was an animal.

"I have a name, you know," Ginny dryly informed him. "It's Ginny Weasley."

It did not go at all as planned.

Ginny had expected the cool and suave reaction of a seasoned boy who had been on uncountable adventures. Maybe he would give a casual response, or suddenly get his serious face on as he tried to decide if this creature that had been thrown in with him was friend or foe. Ginny couldn't see his face, so she didn't know what the expression was that crossed it in the moments right after she'd spoken, but it didn't really matter as he exploded into motion, scrabbling away from her.

"You're—!" he all but yelled, then got distinctly quieter. "You talked!" he hissed.

Ginny would have liked to have responded with a clever one-liner like the girls in the books always did, but she found it rather difficult, crammed as she was into an even smaller space one one end of whatever tiny, awkwardly-shaped room it was that they were tucked away in. Forget speaking, she was folded up under something wooden to the point that breathing was an issue, and it took more than a short moment for her to wiggle her way free, gasping for breath.

Harry too was gasping for breath, though he quieted long before Ginny had recovered herself. "...I don't know why I'm surprised," he admitted. "I mean, that makes sense, doesn't it? It's not the first time I've talked to an animal, after all."

Ginny supposed that was true; there were plenty of animals in the books that had talked and he'd never responded quite so violently before. Maybe it was different when you were in a cramped, dark space petting something, though.

"...Sorry," he said. "Ginny Weasley, you said? I've never thought I'd meet an animal with a last name," he admitted.

"Well, I wasn't an animal ten minutes ago!" Ginny hotly insisted, one hand—or a hoof, rather—gravitating to a tender spot on her stomach. Had Harry Potter kicked her? The longer this went on, the further and further things seemed to drift from anything she'd ever imagined meeting Harry Potter to be like.

Harry Potter seemed to take a moment to think about that. "...That sounds nice, actually."

"Well, sure, if it was intentional, maybe!" Ginny spat. "I mean, yeah, being an animagus at ten-maybe-eleven would be cool and all, but no—that's not what happened. Instead, the sodding faerie queen had to show up at my friend's house right out of the blue and just wouldn't take 'no' for an answer! It's not my bloody fault! I said no! I said it over and over, but she just kept on pushing until I said something just wrong enough that she could take it as a deal, and now I'm a pony-pet to the Boy Who Lived! I mean, no offense; I did want to go to Hogwarts with you, but not like this!"

The silence that followed was telling.

"...Sorry," she apologized, rubbing her face with her hands and wiping away the moisture that had gathered in her eyes, which was definitely sweat and not the hint of tears. "Sorry for the ranting and the swearing. I know this is probably just business as usual for you after everything you've done, but it's not business as usual for me. All I wanted was to go to school a little early, and now I'm a slave, not even human and stuck—where even are we? Some kind of crawl space? Are you hiding from dark wizards or something? On a scale from one to thirteen, how much danger are we in?"

The previous silence returned for a moment before Harry Potter finally asked, "...Did you hit your head?"

Ginny blinked, not that it did her any good. Her eyes were beginning to adjust, but she could still only see the barest hints of shape in the dark. "I mean, yeah, a bit when you kicked me into the corner. Why, though? Are we going to have to run? Because my head is fine but I've only just gotten four legs, so that's not gonna happen. Might be I could fly, though."

"Look, uhh, Ginny," Harry Potter said, searching out the right words for the situation. "I have no idea who you think I am or what you think is going on, but I think you're confused."

Ginny opened her mouth, paused as the words failed to come to her mouth, then made a connection she should have made the instant she got a flash of the scrawny, weedy looking boy. "Oh thank Merlin," she blurted out, nearly collapsing on herself in relief. "You're not Harry Potter, then. Titania said she was sending me to him, so he must be nearby—probably coming to save you or something? He does that sort of thing."

The vague impression of a shadow that was the unnamed boy shifted in place. "Um, no, I am Harry Potter," he said. "I don't do... anything like that, though, and this is the cupboard under the stairs in my aunt's house. I've had weird things happen to me before, but if you weren't a talking pony I'd think you were mad. You are a talking pony, though, so maybe I'm mad. I figure after being locked in here for three weeks, it's about time."

"Stop," Ginny interrupted. "Stop talking. You're starting to remind me of my friend, and while I love her like a sister, you don't pull it off nearly so well." Ginny took a breath and went back over things, her heart sinking with each passing second. "...Your name really is Harry Potter?" she asked.

"Yes," the boy responded.

"...And you've never even heard of magic?" Ginny said, dreading the confirmation

"Well, I've heard of it, sure," he said. "But it's not real—I mean, I'm not stupid, you're a talking pony and talking about magic, so I guess it must be, but it's not real as far as anything I've ever heard before... Especially in this house."

Well, that was just great. "What do you mean, 'especially in this house'?"

"Well, just that my aunt and uncle have always been really very vehement about magic not existing," he said. "Which, now that I say it out loud, does sound rather suspicious knowing magic apparently does exist. I just figured that it was more of their insistence on being seen as 'normal.' No, wait, that's probably related too, isn't it? The things you learn about your family when you're visited by a magical talking pony in the night."

"It's not night," Ginny informed him, because that was apparently the part of what he'd said that her mind had grabbed onto. "It was mid-afternoon at best."

"Oh," the boy said, sounding a little downcast. "I guess I did see that when you arrived. I was hoping it was closer to dinner."

Ginny's head swam with the implications. Well, implication. There was only one, really, and it was more of an inescapable conclusion.

"You're not Harry Potter,"

"I am, though?"

"You're not the Harry Potter that rides dragons and goes on adventures."

"Oh... well, no, I suppose not."

"Bollocks."

⁂

"Well," Sunset said, staring at the spot where Ginny and the brief portal had been, which was now an empty spot on the dirt road leading up to the Lovegood home. "I guess that's that." Neither Luna or Titania had anything to add to that, so she gave into her curiosity and asked, "So, who is this Harry Potter kid anyway? He didn't look like anything special."

"I have absolutely no idea," Titania confidently declared, sounding ever so proud of herself.

Sunset frowned, looking over to the seelie queen with mingled curiosity and exasperation. "How do you know you got the right Harry Potter, then?"

Titania dismissed the matter with a wave of her carapaced hoof. "Oh, don't worry about that. It's the right one," she insisted. "Some things transcend language."

Sunset had her doubts. "Really? Because I kinda got the impression that everything you do is rooted in exactly that kind of language trickery." The whole 'give me your name,' thing was an obvious example.

"Perhaps," Luna said, one finger pressed to her cheek in thought. "Queen Titania is just annoyed she didn't think of it first."

"Oh, I absolutely did," Titania insisted. "That would have been more work, though, as I'd have to give another Harry Potter magic."

Sunset raised an eyebrow at the seelie queen. "Is efficiency really a part of it?" she asked, actually curious. "How much magic did it take to conjure up my—" It was only as she was about to say it that Sunset realized that it was maybe not the best idea to mention her ascension into an alicorn in a conversation about efficiency, considering she'd stolen it.

Or at all, really.

If it bothered Titania, though, it didn't show on her face. Sunset suspected that that didn't mean much, however. "That?" Titania said, thinking back to what had been at least a year for the seelie queen, if she even experienced time in the same way. "Oh, it would have been much harder, actually. Humans with magic are remarkably similar to those without in all the biological ways, but magic-wise, bridging that gap takes a lot."

"You, on the other hoof," she continued, taking relish in using the ponyism. "Already had the seed of your ascension inside of you. As magical as you already are, it's not so different from changing the color of someone's hair."

Sunset frowned, somewhat disquieted. Being that so much of her recent life had centered around her ascension, thinking that it was cheap... well, cheapened it and her achievement.

Not that it actually represented an achievement of anything. Maybe an argument could be made that it was an achievement in the art of thievery—but realistically it hadn't even been that, as her thievery had been completely artless.

"Wait," Sunset said, her mind having caught on something. "Where does turning that Ginny girl into a pegasus pony fall on the scale, then?" she asked. "If me being magical is so different from the humans, wouldn't turning her into a pony be a huge deal?"

"Ah, but she already had the spark of magic in her, so it really wasn't all that much," Titania claimed.

Sunset eyed the seelie queen suspiciously, wondering if she was being honest. Luna had said that she couldn't lie, but phrases like 'not that much' could be stretched nearly endlessly.

She couldn't help herself, though; she wanted to know. "So, now that she's a pony, does that mean that you could make her an alicorn?"

"Sunset!" Luna hissed in warning.

Sunset scanned the area for anything that might have snuck up on them, but the entire area was pleasantly peaceful to an almost absurd degree. Really, the most dangerous thing present was the seelie queen, who was standing right next to them. Honestly, most any danger she could imagine in an idyllic countryside like this could hardly be worse than taking her eyes off Titania.

Coming up empty, Sunset turned to Luna with a questioning look. "What?" she asked, only to realize that Luna had her face buried in her hands in embarrassment.

"I think what the dear sweet child is warning you about is that you were perilously close to asking me to do something," Titania said, her mouth spread wide into a sharklike grin.

Sunset blinked, thought back to what she'd said and blanched. "Oh. Right," she said and proceeded to do what she always does when she's reminded of one of her mistakes: change the subject. "...Is that really all there is to it? The girl got the real thing because screwing her over would have been harder?"

"Not at all!" Titania beamed happily. "I also got the impression that this was funnier, and getting to find out why will only make it better."

Sunset didn't know what she had expected. "Of course," she said with a sigh. This time, when she looked to Luna, it was with a growing level of frustration at the situation. "So, who is this Harry Potter kid, anyway?"

Luna cocked her head in thought and said, "Oh, I'm fairly certain that he doesn't exist."

Sunset's train of thought was brought up short at that. "I'm pretty sure he does, considering we just saw him."

"Well," Luna said, "Ten years ago, the wizarding world was in the middle of a war; things were terribly bad, and we were on the brink of losing to the forces of darkness."

"Wait, hold on a second," Sunset said, interrupting. "Your current government—the one that erases people's memories and has that abominable statue in the entryway to their government building—they were the good guys in this war? As in, the other side was worse?"

Without hesitation, Luna nodded, and said, "Yes," though after a moment she reconsidered and said, "But also no."

"I'm glad we got that cleared up," Sunset dryly remarked.

Titania, for her part, was sitting tidily with her front hooves planted on the ground, leaning forward with eager anticipation. "Go on," she urged.

"The dark lord of the time was a nasty, horrible man whose favorite spell is what we call the 'Killing Curse.'"

"What does it do?" Titania asked.

Luna was momentarily flummoxed. "It... kills people? I think so, anyway, or lots of very bad people will be very cross that all of their victims were just pretending so as not to embarrass them."

Titania rolled her eyes. "Yes, yes, but how? Does it attack the magic? The soul? Or is it just a very involved method of transforming a person's insides into outsides?"

"I'm eleven," Luna said, which Sunset thought was a reasonable excuse for not knowing how a death curse works. "But it never fails and doesn't leave a mark."

"I see," Titania mused, not at all disappointed, but clearly thinking on the matter.

Sunset did not find this reassuring, and silently urged Luna to continue and hopefully distract the seelie queen from ever coming back to that train of thought.

"The war wasn't one of armies and battle lines, but fought in everyday places such as marketplaces and people's residences. They say that the dark lord of the time, after being thwarted one too many times by James and Lily Potter, tracked them down to their home in Godric's Hollow.

"Harry Potter's parents died that night—but not Harry Potter. Only a year old, Harry Potter was little more than a baby at the time, and the dark lord did not shy away from killing babies. He cast the infallible killing curse on the child... and it failed."

"Yeah, makes sense," Sunset said matter-of-factly, finding nothing at all strange about the statement, much to Luna's consternation.

"The infallible killing curse failed," Luna repeated, hands fisted on her hips as she glared at Sunset.

Sunset nodded. "Yep. That'll happen."

"It's not supposed to fail," Luna explained. "It's never failed before."

"Yeah, but foals are terrifying like that," Sunset told her. "Seriously, their magic can do anything. Literally anything. Especially the impossible. They don't know any better. Princess Celestia made me foalsit once as a punishment and I swear that that earth pony teleported every time I took my eyes off her. I mean, foal magic isn't usually as dangerous as all that, but foals also aren't usually faced with defending themselves from their parents' murderer."

"I'm trying to tell a story, Sunset," Luna chided.

Sunset rolled her eyes. "Right, right—fine—the foal was saved by harmony magic and the power of love; that works too."

Luna nodded and went back to telling the story. "Somehow, the Dark Lord's killing curse turned back on him, and he was vanquished, leaving Harry Potter a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt above his right eye and earning him the title of the Boy Who Lived. From then on, Harry Potter has led a charmed life, almost as if escaping death once has left death unable to find him again—and what does a young boy do when freed from fate and destiny? To find out you'll have to read his published works, which you can pick up at Flourish & Blotts for only a handful of sickles."

"So... they're story books?" Sunset asked, taking the hint.

"Well," Luna said. "That's the thing, isn't it? The dark lord did exist and he did disappear ten years ago after going after the Potters. Harry Potter even exists and survived the experience. Did he ride a dragon at the age of five, though, or save a herd of unicorns from an evil cult when he was seven? Some seem to think so."

"You don't?" Sunset asked. "I mean, I got into worse trouble than that when I was a filly, and I didn't have some sort of get-out-of-death-free card. Remind me to tell you about when I caught the griffon ambassador of the time smuggling liquid rainbow to the yaks under the guise of having an affair. I mean, I guess that's more of a corporate espionage sort of thing, but it's not that different."

"Liquid rainbow?" Luna asked curiously, and Titania seemed just as interested; she was taking notes, in fact, and her hoofwriting was better than Sunset's best hornwriting.

"Sure," Sunset said. "I don't know what the yaks wanted with it, really; it's not like they're going to spin up their own weather factory. Yakyakistan is in the mountains so they do have the necessary altitude, but they're yaks. I'm not saying I put much stock in stereotypes, but there's a reason you don't trust yaks with anything delicate. Maybe one of them is weird and likes it on their food? It's technically edible, I guess, but you'd have to have a tongue like a rubber balloon to enjoy it."

If Sunset was any judge, the look on Titania's face pretty much guaranteed she was going to try it as soon as equinely possible. That was her prerogative, though. There was a reason that Sunset knew what rainbows tasted like, herself, after all. Everyone tries it once—and usually only once.

Luna hmmed, thinking over Sunset's story. "Well, the thing about Harry Potter is that not a lot of people have ever actually seen him," she said. "That's not unusual for a lot of the things that daddy and I have looked for, but it is more than a bit unusual for a celebrity, I think."

"And that did not look like a celebrity," Sunset added.

"And that did not look like a celebrity," Luna agreed.

Sunset considered the matter. "He kinda looked more like an orphan, to be honest."

"He is an orphan," Luna observed. "His parents are dead."

"That's not—" Sunset let out a groan. "I mean the kind of orphan that's—look, it doesn't matter. As an ex-orphan, I know what I'm talking about."

"How do you become an ex-orphan?" Luna wondered. "Did your parents come back to life?"

Sunset sighed. "No, I was adopted by the crown."

"Didn't you get kicked out, though?" Luna pointed out. "I'd think that would make you an orphan again."

"Not officially," Sunset insisted. "Technically, I was released from my mentorship, but not actually disowned. Besides, I'm old enough that it doesn't count any more. You're more of an orphan right now than I am."

"I am not an orphan," Luna insisted. "I'm sure that daddy will be back any day now."

"Sure," Sunset said, not wanting to get into that discussion. "But until then, you're an orphan."

Luna shook her head. "Nope. I've been adopted by the crown," she declared.

"How does that work?" Sunset asked.

"Well, if you say you're still technically a member, then so am I as you've adopted me," Luna said.

"I'm not sure Princess Celestia would agree," Sunset said, then stopped and realized what she was saying. "No, scratch that, she absolutely would. Ugh. This is what I get for taking on responsibility."

"You know, speaking of responsibility..." Luna said, trailing off with a thoughtful lilt to her voice.

Sunset groaned. "I'm not going to like this, am I?"

"Someone really ought to tell the Weasleys that Ginny has been snorkackified."

"Not it," Sunset instantly declared.

"Not it," Titania followed along remarkably quickly.

Luna blinked, but she was too late in following along. "Not—oh, poo."

Sunset gave her a look. "Did you really think that it would have been a good idea for one of us to do it anyway?"

Luna crossed her arms and looked at one of them, then the other. "You know, that's fair," she admitted, and immediately began to walk down the dirt road in what Sunset could only assume was the direction of the Weasley house.

Titania cleared her throat, which had a distinct buzzing to it. "And just where do you think you're going, young lady?"

Luna froze, but couldn't seem to come up with anything to say but, "...To the Weasleys?"

"Not without your knife, you're not," the seelie queen scolded her. "Now go back upstairs and equip yourself properly."

Luna groaned, but soon disappeared inside to do as she was told.

⁂

After Ginny had explained Harry Potter to the boy who was supposedly also named Harry Potter, said boy remained unconvinced. "...Are you sure the Harry Potter you're talking about is a real person?" he asked. "Because I've read books like that, too, but none of the people in them are actually real."

Ginny scoffed, but she supposed that he didn't know any better. "Just like magic isn't real?" she said, and he shut up at that. "Of course Harry Potter is real; this isn't ancient history pieced together from tomes and tombs; the war was only ten years ago, and if Harry Potter didn't exist, it might never have even ended. That means he has to exist. I mean, the books probably aren't word-for-word accurate or anything—they're storybooks—but those things happened."

"Those things could have been done by someone else, though," the boy argued.

Ginny shook her head. "It's not like you could mistake someone else for him. He's got the scar and everything."

"Err," the boy said, somehow not immediately convinced and having to think about it, which was just ridiculous. There wasn't a single hole in her argument. She supposed, though, that muggleborns would probably need to get used to the idea of magic existing, and she was dropping this whole thing on him on top of it. Maybe she was expecting too much.

"It's fine, take your time," Ginny said, letting out a sigh as she 'looked' around the cupboard. Aside from a thin band of light around the door, there wasn't much to see, though she was beginning to be able to see the general shape of the space. "It's not like I'm going anywhere."

"Um, about that..." the boy said. Then, realizing that he might not be being clear enough, he clarified, "The scar, I mean. You said it's above his right eye?"

"Uh-huh," Ginny said, only too happy to talk about her personal hero.

For some reason, he seemed hesitant to ask, "And it's shaped like a lightning bolt?"

"Yep," she confirmed.

The silence that followed was broken by the quietest whisper, only audible because the cupboard was dead silent otherwise. "...My aunt and uncle told me I got it in a car crash."

Ginny's felt like she'd skipped a page, there, only this was real life. "Huh?" she asked, not sure how what she'd heard made any sense.

"My scar," he said. "My aunt and uncle told me I got it in a car crash when my parents were killed."

Ginny frowned. "...You have a scar?" she asked.

"Yes, shaped like a lightning bolt," he claimed.

That just wasn't possible. "...You're lying," she insisted, growing hostile. "You have to be."

"I'm not," he retorted, a bit of indignance showing through the meekness he'd shown so far.

"Come here," Ginny said, grabbing him by his threadbare shirt and pulling him towards her. She didn't even realize that she'd somehow managed to do so with her hoof until the other one hit the boy in the face.

"Ow!" he cried out, pulling away from Ginny. "I'm not lying! You don't need to hit me!"

"...Sorry," Ginny sheepishly apologized, because she really hadn't meant to do that. "I didn't mean to hit you; I just wanted to feel your face, and I forgot I have hooves."

"You forgot you have hooves?" he asked, very much unconvinced. "How do you forget you have hooves?"

"I told you, I've only been a winged pony since just before I got sent here." Ginny reminded him, miffed at having to do so because, really, this was hard enough on her as it was.

"Right," he said, not sounding all that mollified, and Ginny thought she could see his silhouette rubbing his cheek. "Just... give me your hoof, then, and I'll show you."

Ginny pointlessly rolled her eyes in the dark, but decided she might as well go along with it if it would solve whether or not he was lying. She could almost imagine that she was standing someplace romantic giving the real Harry Potter her hand rather than being stuck in a dirty cupboard offering her hoof to some boy she didn't even know.

For his part, the boy was gentle enough in guiding her hoof to his forehead, and she felt...

...

"Well?" the boy asked, and...

...

"You can't actually feel anything with those hooves, can you?" he guessed.

"...No," Ginny admitted, removing her hoof from the boy's forehead and experimentally rubbing her forehooves against each other. "I mean, I can, but it's like I'm wearing Bill's old dragonhide gloves."

"Bill?" the boy asked, then seemed even more alarmed when he realized she'd said, "Dragonhide?"

"My oldest brother," she explained. "And yes, dragonhide is what they use when making potions and... lots of things, really. Dragon hide resists magic and is really tough besides, so it's what you want for almost anything to do with magic or anything not to do with magic."

The boy shook his head. "Sorry, I'm still catching up to the fact that magic is real. If magic and dragons are real, what else is real? Are unicorns real? Are they all tiny, like you?"

Ginny was going to scoff and say no, of course not, and also she wasn't tiny, but then she remembered Queen Titania and the one that was Luna's familiar, and she didn't know exactly what to say about that.

"Ugh," she groaned, getting the idea that this was going to be a real headache. "Let me explain..."

⁂

"...And then Queen Titania pushed her through the portal to Harry Potter," Luna said, finishing up her longwinded explanation of the whole situation.

The boy that had been introduced as Ron Weasley stared blankly back at Luna long enough for it to become awkward before he yelled at the top of his lungs, "Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum!"

There was a rattling from inside the house, before a woman's voice called back, "What is it, Ronnie dear?"

"Ginny sold eleven days of her life to the fae to go to Hogwarts as Harry Potter's familiar!" he shouted back.

"What was that, honey?" Molly Weasley asked, wiping her hands with a dish rag as she came out the door. "You should try harder to get along with your sister, you know. There's only another month and a half before she's going to be here on her own."

"She's not, though," Ron said. "Didn't you hear what I said?"

Molly shook her head. "Something about your sister and Harry Potter I gather, but no, I had the dishes putting themselves away and couldn't hear you." It was only then that she seemed to notice that they had company. "Oh, hello, Luna dear. Isn't Ginny with you? I swear I heard her shout that she was going over to your place as she tore out of here not half an hour ago. Honestly, that girl."

Ron looked briefly embarrassed to have a mother. "No, mom. Ginny isn't with her. I just said: she sold eleven days of her life to the fae to go to Hogwarts as Harry Potter's familiar."

Molly Weasley didn't look happy to hear that. "Really now, Ronald," she said, unhappy with her youngest son. "There's no need to make up stories to get your sister in trouble."

Luna cleared her throat to get the Weasley matriarch's attention. "I'm afraid it's true, Mrs. Weasley," she informed her. "And allow me to introduce to you Sunset Shimmer and Queen Titania."

Molly Weasley looked briefly alarmed, then calmed herself and became distinctly irate. "Luna Lovegood," she said, giving the young girl a severe scolding. "I'm not one to tell you what you can name your pets, but that is not funny. Mentioning Her at all is in poor taste, but that is entirely out of line. I know that most people don't think of the Fae very much any more, but you of all people should know better. You might as well have called it You Know Who—at least he is dead."

"Who?" Sunset asked, but her question went unnoticed when the seelie queen stepped forward looking entirely too pleased with herself.

"Well, well, well," Titania said, grinning ear to ear. "It's good to see that I haven't been forgotten—but one does also like to be recognized. All the effort spent on gaining the proper respect for a name is wasted if you don't recognize the thing for what it is when it's right in front of you... especially when we've met before, Molly Prewitt."

Molly Weasley paled, clutching the dishrag to her chest as her wide eyes focused on the seelie queen. "No... it can't be... You don't look anything like her."

"Oh, this?" Titania said, stretching her foreleg out in front of herself and looking it over with appreciation. "It's the latest fashion, you know; it's all the rage back in Faerie and don't you know it, I think it's catching on here as well."

Molly Weasley took a step back, looking distinctly distressed. Looking around, her eyes latched onto Sunset and she asked, "Ginny?"

"Ah, not as such, no, sorry," Sunset apologized.

"Mum," Ron said, pulling on his mother's skirt from behind her. "I tried to tell you; Ginny traded eleven days of her life to go to Hogwarts with Harry Potter as his familiar."

If it was possible, Molly Weasley got even more distressed on hearing that, looking to Titania with panic and concern, looking very much like she wanted to say something unkind, but knew better than to upset the seelie queen. Biting her lip, she hesitated, then disappeared back inside the house without a word.

"...Well, that was helpful," Sunset remarked. Looking to Luna, she asked, "Where do you suppose she's going?"

It was Ron that actually responded. "Off to floo Dumbledore, probably," he guessed. "Since it's Harry Potter and all."

"Dumbledore was the headmaster?" Sunset asked Luna, who nodded.

"Yes," she said. "And a few other things as well."

Sunset supposed that made sense. In the absence of any orphanage or child welfare system, which had come up in regards to Luna, the headmaster of the school would probably be the one to ask. From the way Ron had said it, though, she got the impression that there was more of a sense of leadership to it than that; something to do with these other positions, maybe?

Ron, though, had other things on his mind. Shuffling awkwardly in place and studying his feet at first, he eventually managed to work up the courage to meet Titania's eyes and ask, "You really know my mum?"

Titania smiled, eager to respond, but before she could do so, the door to the Weasley home opened up and Molly grabbed her son.

The only thing that they heard before the door closed again was, "Honestly, Ronald—"

⁂

"...Huh," the boy said, taking it all in. "So not only is magic real, but dragons and unicorns and even fairies are real too."

Ginny was almost enjoying the simple awe that the boy had in hearing about things that seemed mundane to her.

"You know," he said, sounding thoughtful. "I've hardly ever been allowed to see much of the world outside this house, except for school. I always imagined that the rest of the world must be so much better, but I never imagined that there was a whole secret magical world besides—and other worlds, too. You really met Queen Titania?"

Ginny's mood turned rather sour at having the boy's awe focused in the direction of faeries. Faeries were, she thought, not something to be thought nicely of. "Yes, but you shouldn't take the fae lightly. They're dangerous; I mean, I knew what I was doing and still look at me."

"Well, yeah, I know; I don't know what's on the telly, but I got to read some of the old fairy tales in the library, once—I don't think the teachers really realized what it was; my aunt and uncle certainly didn't, or they'd have had it burned—but I know they do things like steal babies and leave changelings in their place."

Ginny nodded in fierce agreement. "Yes. They're best avoided."

There was a shuffling in the dark that Ginny thought might be a shrug. "Sure, if you're normal, I guess," he said. "I kind of envied the kids in those stories, though. If the kids are taken away from loving parents, then that's awful—but that's never applied to me. Not since I was a baby, anyway. It couldn't really be worse than living in a cupboard or getting locked out of the house for Christmas dinner every year."

Something inside of Ginny was appalled, but it was silenced by the part of her that didn't want to give an inch of favor to the fae. "The problem with the fae is that whatever you think you're getting, you're not. Maybe being kidnapped would have been better for you in theory, but they don't make things better."

"I guess if I was this other Harry Potter that you told me about, then maybe I would agree, but even if you took me to the top of a tower, locked me in a cage and fed me scraps from the kennels, it might still be better than here. At least I might get some fresh air, then, and sometimes all I get to eat is what I can sneak when I'm cooking for them."

Okay, that appalled bit was getting stronger now, but still. "I think they only reserve that sort of thing for actual princesses, or at least girls. At least, I've never heard of a boy being locked up in a tower."

"They're fairies," the boy pointed out. "I rather think that me being a boy is something they could work around if they really wanted a girl to put in a tower."

That, Ginny had to admit, was true, and it rather proved her point, didn't it? "There, see?" she said, triumphant. "Even when you think you've got what you want, they'd do something like that and it'd be terrible for you."

The silhouette that was the boy in the cupboard with her thought about it, then shook his head. "No, I don't think I'd mind. It'd still be worth it."

"Wait, what?" Ginny didn't know how to take that. That just wasn't something a boy would usually say. "You think you'd be fine if they turned you into a girl?"

"Well," he said, giving it a thought. "It can't be that bad, can it? Girls manage it just fine."

Ginny crossed her arms to keep herself from strangling this boy. "It's harder than you think," she insisted. "They smother you and coddle you and... and..." It was only after she'd started talking that she realized that her own frustrations with being a girl sounded really, really shallow in her current situation. "...And, err, they make you help with the cooking..."

"Which I do anyway, and probably wouldn't be doing if the fairies took me," he said. "Look, I get what you're saying and it's not like I want to be a girl or anything; I just don't see that if I was being chained up in a tower that it would really make much difference."

Ginny was dumbstruck. Sure, she'd joked to herself about taking Ron's place earlier that day, but that was different. There were actual benefits to being a boy and—wait, this was all stupid anyway.

How had they even gotten onto the subject of children being taken by the fae... and... replaced...

Ginny froze as a stray thought struck her.

"What if you're a decoy?" she asked.

The boy didn't quite follow what she was saying, at first. "Huh?" he said, thoroughly perplexed. "You mean... what if I'm actually a fairy they left behind?"

"No, no, not the fae," Ginny said, waving her hand in dismissal and realizing she could really actually kind of see it pretty well by now. The boy, too, she could pretty much make out the face of, and it really struck her that as far as she could see in the dark he did actually look a lot like the pictures that she'd seen of the real Harry Potter, round glasses, scar and all. "Someone else."

Seeing it all together suddenly made her even more certain of her wild flight of fancy.

"What if you're not just some muggleborn that happens to have the same name as Harry Potter?" Ginny said, leaning and lowering her voice like she was sharing a great secret—and, you know what? Maybe she was. "What if someone actually left you here as a decoy? A fake Harry Potter to distract everyone from the real one?"

The boy was just as speechless at her for a moment, then shook his head violently. "No. No, that can't be. No one would actually do something like that."

"Really," Ginny wheedled, scooting closer as her mind worked to solidify the idea in her head. "Nothing in your life suggests that you're being set up? This doesn't all seem like too much of a coincidence? You're practically the archetypical orphan boy, here—just what you'd expect if they wanted to convince people that the real Harry Potter wasn't all that special after all; that he couldn't possibly have done all those things."

The boy was clearly resistant to the idea, then a flash of something crossed his face and he scowled even harder.

"No," he repeated.

Ginny refused to let it go. "You thought of something," she said, grinning.

"Look—just because I didn't know my name until I went to school doesn't mean anything," he insisted.

"School?" Ginny said, remembering that she'd heard Percy mention that muggleborn kids went to muggle schools before Hogwarts. "How old was that?"

"Well, I didn't get to go to reception since it's not required," he said, and Ginny had no idea what that meant. "So I started in primary when I was... five?"

Ginny lit up, which was probably an entirely inappropriate thing to do, given the situation, but that wasn't important right now. "You didn't know your name until you were five?" she said.

"My aunt and uncle always just called me 'boy,'" he said, hesitated, then whispered, "...or 'freak.'"

Ginny nearly choked on her tongue. She didn't think she was supposed to hear that, but crammed together in such a small space as they were, they could hardly even swallow without the other one hearing it. She wanted to ask him if that didn't seem suspicious, but for once in her life felt like pushing the matter just then wasn't the right thing to do.

Instead, she thought about it and said, "Well, if I'm right—and I think I am—then they're probably not even really your aunt and uncle.

"...Is that really better?" he asked. "Because, that'd mean it was intentional. And how would that even work?"

Ginny threw her arms up in the air, only managing not to bang them on the ceiling of the cupboard because they were something like half as long as they'd used to be. "I don't know!" she whisper-shouted. "I wasn't there, obviously, but maybe that's when you were put here."

"Can magic even do that?" he asked, rather uneasy. "Make me forget my name and hand me off to the worst people imaginable who suddenly think they've adopted a nephew, who by the way is named Harry Potter?"

"...Yeah, it can, actually," Ginny admitted, lowering her arms and slumping down. She didn't really like thinking about the obliviators, but when you had a father who worked at the ministry, you got to hear all sorts of things. "That's the kind of thing they do to muggles who find out about magic—they make them forget, sometimes give them new memories to explain things."

The boy's eyes widened at that, though they quickly became confused. "Muggles?" he asked.

"People like your probably-not-aunt-and-uncle," Ginny explained.

"Ah," he said, and slowly, over the course of a minute or so, all the fight seemed to drain out of him. "You really think I'm being set up as a fake Harry Potter?" he asked, one last, weak attempt to deny it.

Ginny made sure to think about it before honestly responding, "Yeah. Yeah, I think so."

"But... I don't get it," he said. "What would happen when the real Harry Potter shows up at Hogwarts?"

Ginny's train of thought stopped dead at that. "I... don't know. Does that mean that whatever they put you here as a decoy for, it's already over?"

"You mean... like people coming here to kill me?" he asked, maybe halfway between alarmed and doubtful. "I don't think that's ever happened... but come to think of it, I've had a few people come up to me and shake my hand."

"Wait, really?" Ginny asked, integrating the new information into her idea about what must be going on. "Hold on... did any of them take your picture?"

The boy furrowed his brow in thought. "Maybe?" he said. "Not openly, but I remember having to blink the spots out of my eyes once or twice when people got me on the street with a really powerful flash. That's just what it's like in London, though."

"...Is it?" Ginny asked, not knowing herself, but guessing that he had his doubts.

Of course, if he didn't have his doubts, though, he certainly did now after the idea had been put in his head. "Well, I thought it was!" he insisted. "It's not like I get to go out there to the salons every other week with my—my maybe-not-my-aunt!"

That... okay, If the photos of Harry Potter that she'd seen were actually this boy, then that just made things weird... though at least it explained how the boy looked like Harry Potter. Still, there was one bright side to this train of thought. "At least you should find out soon, if it's only until school starts."

"What if it's not, though?" he asked.

"Huh?" Ginny said, squinting in the dim light to see if there was any hint as to what he meant. "What else would happen? They're not going to have two people claiming to be the same Harry Potter."

"Would that Harry Potter actually go to Hogwarts, though?" the boy asked. "If what you said is true, it doesn't sound like he needs it."

"That... that..." That couldn't be true, could it? He had a point, though. Would the real Harry Potter go to Hogwarts? Suddenly, her heart sank as another piece fell into place. "Oh no."

"What?" the boy said, sitting straighter and giving her all of his attention. "Did something happen?"

Ginny banged her head into her... hooves. "Stupid, stupid..." Groaning, she explained, "I told Queen Titania that I wanted to go to school with Harry Potter, but if the real Harry Potter isn't going to Hogwarts..."

"...Then it was always going to be me," he reasoned, following her logic to... a conclusion.

What Ginny didn't say was that if the real Harry Potter wasn't going to Hogwarts, Titania was probably entirely capable of retroactively creating one. After everything that the boy had explained about his life, she felt sick thinking that it might in some way be because of her.

"I... I guess that's what I get for saying the wrong thing," Ginny grumbled without any real heart in it, hoping to move the conversation away from that... very awkward issue. She had heart to spare on the subject, though, so couldn't help but add, "Not that I had any choice. I didn't want to make a deal with her in the first place!"

Fortunately, the threat of returning to that subject got Harry's attention, and he decided to change the subject himself.

"So, tell me more about the wizarding world..."

⁂

Sunset's first reaction on seeing the wizard that stepped out of the floo was, "Huh, now that's a proper wizard's robe, for the most part."

Both Luna and Molly Weasley remained quiet on the subject, though the latter pursed her lips in silent distaste. The robe in question was a rich wash of blues with a sparkling depiction of the night sky along with actual gold stars and a large crescent moon hanging from the frills around his neck and waist.

Titania also didn't comment, but in her case it was because she was entirely absent. That could only be a good thing, Sunset thought, unless she'd wandered off and got involved with the other Weasley children. Maybe she would have needed to be invited in, though, or something had been done to keep her out. Come to think of it, there had been a rusty iron horseshoe hanging above the front door; was that related?

Dumbledore seemed quite pleased with Sunset's comment, though. "Why, thank you, miss...?"

Luna, normally content to stay in the background, stepped forward to introduce Sunset, as she had done previously with Ron and Molly. "Sunset Shimmer, my crumple-horned snorkack familiar." Idly, Sunset wondered if there was some societal norm prompting Luna to be the one to introduce her familiar, or if she just wanted to establish to everyone that Sunset was a crumple-horned snorkack.

"Miss Sunset Shimmer," Dumbledore finished, bowing. "If I may ask, was there something in particular you felt that my outfit is missing?"

"Well, it's the bells, mainly," Sunset explained. "Though the stars and moon are close."

Dumbledore looked intrigued. "Bells, you say?" he asked, his eyes sparkling.

"That's not important right now," Molly Weasley interrupted, to which Dumbledore looked on the surface to be quite put out, though Sunset expected it was just him having some fun. Princess Celestia hadn't been quite so openly playful, but there was a similarity.

Huh. She'd now compared both Professor McGonagall and Dumbledore to Celestia in different ways. Sunset wondered if it was them or if it was her. She didn't have all that many positive role models that she had actually respected.

Hopefully neither Professor McGonagall or Dumbledore would disappoint Sunset quite as much as her mentor had.

"Now, my dear Mrs. Weasley, " Dumbledore said, exuding a calm and reasonable manner. "What seems to be the problem? You were quite distraught over the floo."

"Professor Dumbledore, it's my daughter, Ginny—she... she..." Molly Weasley's hysteria hit a wal there, and she scrambled for an explanation that she didn't quite have. Looking to Luna, she asked, "What actually happened?"

If she expected Luna to give a great deal more information than she already had, though, she was sorely disappointed. "Well," Luna said, finger on her lips. Lifting the finger, she pointed and said, "Ginny has been turned into a snorkack—though we haven't yet had a chance to name her particular variety. She has wings, you see, so can't be a crumple-horned snorkack like Sunset."

Dumbledore, though, was anything but disappointed by Luna's description. "Ah, that does sound serious," he mused. "It will certainly make the paperwork more difficult, at least. Now, my girl, would you care to explain to me exactly how this happened."

"Well, I can't say for certain as I wasn't there," Luna said. "But a reliable source tells me that it was Titania."

Dumbledore's wide, fuzzy eyebrows widened at that. "Titania, you say? The queen of the summer court?"

"The very same," Luna agreed quite seriously.

Dumbledore hmmed, and asked, "And who, may I inquire, was your reliable source, if it's not an imposition."

"Titania, the queen of the summer court, of course," Luna cited.

"Ah, a very reliable source, then," Dumbledore agreed, nodding all the while. "And where is Miss Weasley now?"

"I have no idea," Luna declared.

Molly Weasley, whose head had been going back and forth between the two of them like a weathervane, shot up at that. "What? But you said...!"

"Well, according to a less reliable witness, she was with Harry Potter about twenty minutes ago, now," Luna pointed out. "But I'm afraid I can't say more than that with any certainty."

"And who was your less reliable witness, then?" Dumbledore asked, clearly enjoying himself while getting to the bottom of things.

"Titania, the queen of the summer court, of course," Luna repeated word for word, because of course she did.

Dumbledore's eyes shone with delight. "Of course," he agreed. "Now, Miss Lovegood, tell me..."

Five minutes later, Dumbledore had teased essentially everything out of Luna and Molly Weasley was just about at her wit's end.

"...And then she opened a portal to who she said was Harry Potter, but hardly looked the part aside from the face. And the scar. And the glasses."

"So, essentially everything?" Dumbledore suggested, though the brightness in his eyes seemed to have dimmed a bit, and not from Ginny Weasley's predicament.

"No, no, there's more to a person than a face, a scar and some glasses," Luna disagreed.

Dumbledore sighed, for a moment looking at least a portion of his age. "You would think so," he mused, almost to himself. "You would think so..."

"Professor Dumbledore, please," Molly Weasley interjected, a fearful urgency in her voice. "You know where Harry Potter is; you have to go get my daughter before something happens.

Dumbledore closed his eyes and took a breath as he stood back up from where he was bent over from talking to Luna. It was several breaths before he opened his eyes and gave Molly Weasley the most sorrowful look that Sunset had yet seen on a human. It might even have been genuine.

"I'm afraid, Molly, that I cannot do that."

"What?" the Weasley matriarch shrieked. Immediately, absolute shock turned to desperate plea. "Please, Headmaster, you must."

"My dear, forgive me for playing the grammarian for you—but I said not that I will not, but that I can not. The wards that I placed there just under ten years ago will not allow it."

"What do you mean?" Molly Weasley said, seeming almost incredulous that there was something that the old wizard couldn't do. That, too, was something that Sunset had seen many times in court back in Canterlot, as was the pain in Dumbledore's eyes in admitting it. "You're the one that put them there!"

Dumbledore nodded. "That I did," he agreed. "And, alas, as clever as I am, I thought it would be best if not even I was exempt from them."

"What do these wards do, Professor?" Luna asked, ever curious. Sunset, too, wanted to know what kind of wards would keep anyone from going to get Ginny, because it didn't sound like the problem with the idea that she was aware of.

Dumbledore looked Luna over, perhaps judging whether to say anything or not. His gaze then moved to Sunset, and she decided that that was exactly what he was doing. Whatever he was looking for, he must have found, because he next pulled a strange, knobbly wand out of his sleeve and waved it, producing a nearly deafening feeling of silence and echoes that made Sunset stumble in place and sit down before she could fall.

Dumbledore's eyes widened in surprise at this and quickly dismissed the spell. "My dear, what happened?"

Sunset shook her head like she was trying to get novocaine-soaked cotton out of her ears. "Ugh," she groaned. "My horn's been more sensitive to magic since I scraped it raw a few days ago, and that change was kind of baked in when I... never mind." She didn't need to tell him too much. Just what she'd said already could link her to the unicorn pony that escaped from the Department of Mysteries, and kindly old man or not, she didn't know him nearly well enough to trust him with even that much. "I don't know what to say. No spell that anyone has cast near me has been so completely overwhelming as that."

Dumbledore looked thoughtfully down at his wand, and Sunset couldn't tell what he was feeling. "Sunset Shimmer, you said your name was?" he asked.

"Luna did," Sunset said pedantically. "But yes."

Dumbledore nodded, then asked, "Can I ask specifically if that hurt, Miss Shimmer, or was it merely uncomfortable?"

"It was..." She considered her words. "Stifling in the most distressing way, with a suddenness that was shocking—but no, it didn't exactly hurt."

Dumbledore carefully put his strange, irregular wand away into the same sleeve he had pulled it from, then retrieved a more plain, ordinary looking wand from the other. "If I may try something? By which I mean the same thing with another wand."

Sunset tentatively nodded, and Dumbledore waved his wand again.

At first, Sunset thought that the same thing had happened, but after a few moments of not being incapacitated, she realized that while the feeling was the same, it wasn't overpowering in the same sort of way. It was still stifling, but it was something she could ignore if she wanted to; a nagging feeling of needing to pop her ears and wipe something out of her eye, but nothing more. Not a big deal for the sake of privacy, she supposed.

"Good, good," Dumbledore said with satisfaction, not seeming to need her confirmation that this was workable. "Of course, this brings us back to the matter at hand," he said with less enthusiasm.

"Professor?" Molly Weasley prompted after the explanation was just slightly too long in coming.

"There are several wards that protect Harry Potter," he said. "And I need not go into detail about them all. One of them, which I was quite proud of at the time, could only ever be erected once at that place and time, and so I endeavored to ensure that it did not go to waste, which might have happened if, for instance, the tenants of the house had decided to move. The ward also has several blind spots, which I sought to account for through the casting of more spells, and I'm afraid that the combination has become both far less and far more effective than I had intended, as I am no wardmaster or cursebreaker.

"The reason, Mrs. Weasley, that I cannot retrieve your daughter, is that anyone who attempts to remove Harry Potter from his home is prevented from doing so, usually with the gentlest of nudges, but less so against a determined aggressor—and if the young Miss Weasley is, in fact, Harry's familiar, that protection will have certainly spread to her. Familiar bonds manifest in many various ways, but it is a connection that runs as deep as that of blood."

"What about just bringing down the wards?" Molly Weasley asked. "It's been ten years since the war ended; surely they're no longer necessary, and with enough time... If—if it's money, then I'm sure..."

Dumbledore raised his hand to stop the Weasley Matriarch from embarrassing herself with her desperate rambling. "I maintain, as I always have, that the threat that Voldemort poses yet remains," he said, and Sunset noticed that when he said, 'Voldemort,' Molly Weasley cringed like she'd bitten down on a pebble in the grass. Curiously, even the ever-placid Luna didn't quite manage to hide her wince. "I am afraid, however, that even if I thought it best to do so, no amount of time or money would be able to wear it down. The original ward that all the rest are placed on top of was truly unique, and they have all since become a single—misguided—work of magic."

"Does that mean that Harry Potter will be forced to live there forever?" Luna asked.

Dumbledore shook his head. "No. He is the one person who can pull the stick out of the dam, as it were, and collapse the entire thing. If he ever really, truly ceases to see the place as a home of any kind, then the wards will fall and I will have the chance to find a better, more well-considered place for him."

Molly Weasley had a thought and brightened, saying, "Then all we need to do is tell him—" but Dumbledore was already shaking his head.

"The only reason anyone would have to tell him about it would be to get him to break the wards, and so, the wards would stop them," Dumbledore explained.

"Couldn't we convince someone that he's at risk of breaking them, and they need to tell him about it to prevent him from doing so?" Sunset asked, mostly just playing discord's advocate.

"Perhaps," Dumbledore mused. "Perhaps. But if there is a person who, on being told that a boy Harry's age does not see the only residence he has ever known as any kind of home, would then seek to keep him there, then I should not like to meet them, or certainly trust them with Harry's safety if the wards did then fall, of which there is no guarantee."

"Would he, do you think?" Luna asked. "From what I saw, I don't think I'd have liked much to be in his place. I think I'd rather have my clothes fit, or not at all."

There was the slightest twinkle in Dumbledore's eyes as he said, "I do believe that is the style of the muggle youths these days, with their baggy shirts and torn-up trousers... but alas, in seeing him for a moment, you've seen him a moment more than me. I made my decision in the moment to keep Harry safe, and like many of the decisions I have made in my life, I have questioned it constantly ever since. I'm afraid that I haven't seen a wink of him since that cold November morning."

"But... But Dumbledore..." Molly Weasley wailed, tearing up. "She's my baby girl... there has to be something..."

Sunset cleared her throat, finally deciding to say what she'd thought of back at the beginning. "That... may not be the best idea, Mrs. Weasley," she informed her.

"What? Why?" the woman asked. "How can you say that?"

"Well, the thing is... remember that Titania promised to see to it that Ginny goes to Hogwarts with Harry Potter?" Sunset said.

Dumbledore seemed to see where she was going immediately. Luna may or may not have; her casual smile hadn't diminished at all through the difficult conversation they were having.

"That hasn't actually happened yet," she pointed out. "So if we actually managed to take Ginny away from Harry Potter, Titania would be obligated to try to send her back, and that's not a game I think any of us want to play. I'm fairly sure we'd lose." It was a hard thing to admit, but deep down, the fae scared her, and there was probably something wrong with her that she could banter with the queen so casually. "Although... Luna does have that tank."

"I told you," Luna chided her. "Daddy says not until I'm sixteen."

Molly Weasley sniffled a couple of times, then finally broke down, bawling.

"MY BABY GIRL IS A HORSE."

"Pony."

"Snorkack."

⁂

Ginny was bored. Bored bored bored. Sure, her mother had punished her by having her sit in a corner before, but she'd never been forced into a small space for hours on end; it was maddening. She'd hardly exhausted the number of things that she could tell this pseudo-Harry-Potter about the wizarding world, but she'd absolutely exhausted her willingness to do so.

By now, she'd considered picking the lock no less than four times, but for all she had the skill, she no longer had the tools or the hands to hold them. Also, cupboards didn't actually have knobs or keyholes on the inside.

"You've seriously been locked up in here for three weeks?" she asked him, not really needing confirmation on what she already knew, just expressing her disbelief. "I don't know how you're still sane."

The boy, who she could see fairly well now in the dimming light from the gap at the bottom of the cupboard door, just shrugged. "I've had all my life to get used to it," he said. "And they do let me out to fix meals and use the loo."

"Ugh, I knooooow," she whined. "But still, you don't even have any books? Don't answer that—I know trying to read in the dark like this would be terrible. 'You'll ruin your eyes, Ginny,'" she said in a high, shrill voice, badly mimicking her mother. "They make potions for that. Dumbledore just wears glasses to make himself look smart, I'm sure."

The boy in the cupboard with her perked up. "They have potions to fix your eyes?" he asked.

"I think so, yeah. It's probably in Moste Potente Potions, actually," she said, then shot up in shock when she remembered the book. "Bollocks," she cursed. "I had it before I got turned into a pony; where did it end up?"

"Moste Potente Potions?" the boy asked.

"It's a book. An old, really nasty, not-kid-friendly potion's book. It's got all sorts of wicked things in it," she explained. "More importantly, though, it's my mom's, and she doesn't know I took it yet."

The boy got a funny look on his face, reached behind himself, tilted in place and came up with... a book? "Is this it?"

Ginny snatched the book away from him and squinted at the book, running her hoof over the cover. "It is! You had this the whole time? Why didn't you say anything?"

Even in the dark of the cupboard, Ginny could tell that the boy had rolled his eyes. "I didn't 'have it,'" he said. "Except in how I 'had it' sticking into my backside. I didn't know what it was."

"But you knew as soon as I mentioned it," Ginny responded, though the conversation was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of a door whooshing open and slamming closed, followed by the heavy sound of shoes stomping into the house, causing the floorboards to creak.

"What was that? A troll?" Ginny asked, because that couldn't possibly have been a person, right?

Ginny didn't get the answer she expected, though. Instead of responding to her half-serious question, the boy's eyes widened large enough for her to see the whites of them in the dark, and he rushed forward to clap his hands over her mouth, which went rather poorly for both of them as she had something closer to a muzzle. The whispered, "Shh! Quiet!" that followed was clear enough, though.

Ginny automatically struggled out of the boy's grasp almost as a reflex; she had a lot of experience with six older brothers, and the smooth coat of fur along with her smaller stature made it almost trivial to slip free, though she was reminded by a few ruffled feathers that she did, in fact, have wings. Wings that felt much better without something covering them. She had been trying not to think about that, no matter how normal it probably was for a winged pony.

"Sheesh," she grumbled sourly, keeping her voice down if just to keep him from jumping her like that again. "What's the big deal? I get that they're terrible people, but what are they gonna do? I'd like to give them a piece of my mind."

The boy bit his lip and looked away with uncertainty. "I'm not sure, but they might actually kill you."

"What?" Ginny said with disbelief, almost forgetting to stay quiet. "They can't possibly be that bad, can they? Why would they kill some random girl that showed up in their house?"

"You don't understand my rela—the Dursleys," he said, correcting himself from calling them his relatives since it seemed increasingly likely that they weren't anything of the sort. "Look, they hate magic. They hate anything to do with it. My cousin can do no wrong in their eyes, but they still won't let him have any books or games or anything that has magic in it."

"Maybe they're squibs?" she said, and when the boy looked to her uncomprehendingly, she explained, "People born to magical families that don't have magic themselves. Some of the older families go as far as to kick them out of the family and pretend they don't exist, but even when that doesn't happen a lot of them are still really bitter about it. That still wouldn't excuse murder, though!"

The boy shook his head. "They wouldn't see it as murder," he said, being entirely serious. "All on their own, they're already the sort of people that don't count anyone who's different from them as people... I really doubt they'd think twice about doing something about a... well... a person who looks like an animal. A magical person who looks like a magical animal. Especially if they thought that they could get away with it. Vernon's sister, Marge, breeds bulldogs and she's a real nasty piece of work, always talking about things like drowning the runt of the litter and feeding it to the rest of them. I bet... I bet if he had a problem, she'd be able to make it go away."

That... no. "You're... you're not serious," she insisted, but he just nodded and she could see in his eyes that he really meant it. If the Dursleys found out about her, she could actually die.

Maybe she could handle staying in the cupboard a bit longer.

Ginny nearly jumped out of her skin when the loud clack of the cupboard lock echoed through the tiny space and the door opened a crack, but it stopped there and was left like that.

"Boy! Get out here and get started on dinner!" shouted a harsh, shrill voice that made Ginny cringe.

That was the woman of the house? Ginny was never going to complain about her mother's yelling ever again.

⁂

Dumbledore stepped out of the floo into his office and sighed. Slowly, he made his way over to his ornate, padded chair and collapsed into it.

That had been a challenge. Dumbledore ever so hated disappointing people, and yet more and more, it seemed to be all that he could do as he got older. He also hated lying to people, and yet he also seemed to do more and more of that with the advancement of time, too.

He reassured himself that he had not lied about anything big or important; not really. He had, in fact, trusted the children—and he included Molly Weasley in that—with quite a bit more than he was used to doing. He felt, though, that with the faerie queen getting involved with Harry Potter, that Miss Lovegood might have an important role to play in things going forward. At the very least, the more she knew the less likely she would be to make as much of a cock-up of things as he had done.

Perhaps, though, it was just that he saw himself in her. She certainly had the right style, he thought with a fond smile.

The main thing that he had lied about was to deny knowing much at all about Harry Potter's situation behind those damnable wards. True, he didn't know much, but given the wards in question, the fact that there was little that anyone could report to him told him that it wasn't anything good. Of course, even in that he was lying to himself, because truthfully, he didn't need a lack of reports to convince himself that he should have placed Harry Potter somewhere else; he'd been told as much by Minerva immediately before doing so, after all.

Speaking of Minerva, Dumbledore had only had a moment to sit and rest before the good professor stormed into the room, parchment in hand and all het up about something or other.

Shaking his head, Dumbledore decided to cut her off before she could get into a rant. "And what, pray tell, has got you up in arms today, my dear professor?"

"It's this," she said, stepping forward and slapping a parchment bearing the seal of the Ministry of Magic on it. specifically, it seemed to be from the department of the control of magical creatures. "It was one thing to have Miss Lovegood show up with a 'crumple-horned snorkack,' she said, miming the quotes with her fingers. "We've not seen something of the like before, so she technically gets to call her whatever she wants—though I must warn you, Sunset Shimmer is more student than familiar, and claims to possess a full magical aptitude and education, which will no doubt make the coming year quite interesting.

"What I cannot excuse, though, is this," she said, slamming her finger down on the piece of parchment. Dumbledore leaned in, adjusting his glasses and found that it was exactly what he had begun to expect; a familiar registry for Miss Weasley. "Ginevra Weasley has been registered as Harry Potter's familiar and I am expected to allow her to come to Hogwarts as a... as a pet!"

Idly, Dumbledore scanned down the page and wondered if Minerva had noticed that the signature at the bottom of the page was not the untidy scrawl of a ten-year-old boy, but that of the seelie queen herself. That made the parchment quite the unique article indeed.

"Ah, so they have chosen to call her a tuft-winged snorkack," he observed blithely, ever so enjoying astounding people with knowledge that he just happened to have. It was, perhaps, one of his more prideful traits, but at his age he was allowed a harmless vice or two.

The color that Minerva's face went as she clenched her jaw told him that maybe he had pushed it a little too far. "You knew about this?" she said, her nostrils flaring in anger as she glared at him.

"Only in that I have just returned from getting quite the earful from Mrs. Weasley, I assure you," he said, attempting to mollify her. This did do some of the job, as she winced almost as if he had said Voldemort's name. In the past decade, ever since her eldest son, Bill, had entered the halls of Hogwarts, the howlers of Mrs. Weasley had become quite infamous. It was not, he thought, the way to endear an entire generation to her family, but that really wasn't his place to say.

Regrettably, it was his place to inform Minerva about the rest of the situation, though, and he didn't imagine the news would go down any better with her than it had with Mrs. Weasley. "The situation that we have found ourselves in is quite the pickle, I'm afraid..." he began, and proceeded to cover all of the same topics that he had gone over at the Burrow. It was more than a little tiresome, sometimes, just how much of his life involved repeating conversations with several different people.

He was right; Minerva didn't take it well. In fact, she was quite a bit more truculent, refusing to accept that there was nothing he could do about the situation until she had exhausted every last possibility herself. It was a good quality, he believed, if a little inconvenient at times.

Times like this, mainly.

The exact frequency that times like this came up in his lines of work really did not say much about the life he was leading. Or, well, it was more accurate to say that it did say much, and little of it good.

"...If that is all, then, Minerva, I am certain that we both have—"

"Oh, but that isn't all," Minerva told him, and proceeded to wave her wand, levitating a large book into his office from where it had been waiting just out of sight.

He recognized the book, of course; it was the Hogwarts book of admittance, inside which the quill of acceptance was charmed to write down the names of all who were eligible to attend Hogwarts, continually growing with each passing year as new, upcoming students were added to the rosters. The book was, as a rule, almost never removed from the tower in which it sat, so that alone was enough to raise Dumbledore's eyebrows, and the fact that he wasn't sure where exactly this was leading brought a bit of mischief to Minerva's eyes. Clearly, she was enjoying being on the other side of the reveal for once.

Minerva set the book of admittance down directly on top of Ginevra Weasley's registration form, which turned out not to be a coincidence. The book was open to the page containing one Ginevra Weasley, now listed as having been born July 31ˢᵗ 1980, just above the cut-off, placing her in the current year, which, after all, had been exactly what Ginevra had asked for.

"...Ah," was all Dumbledore said.

Minerva let out a snort of amusement. "Yes, 'Ah.'"

"You have already sent out the letters for this year, I take it?" he asked.

"The pureblood and half-blood letters have gone out," she informed him, giving him an unpleasant look at that. "But I've only just started on the muggleborn visits, and I suppose that I now know why I've been putting off scheduling Harry Potter's. You know that none of that matters, though. With the way the book of acceptance works—requiring a proof of magic before it will allow the name to be written in—we have to honor any late admittances right up to the deadline and do our due diligence to get them enrolled."

Dumbledore shook his head. "Yes, of course," he said. "And truly, it is a relief that Miss Weasley will not go uneducated due to her new circumstances. That said, I do not envy any of us having to explain why Miss Weasley is allowed in classes while Miss Shimmer is not—unless...?"

Minerva shook her head. "No, I'm afraid Miss Shimmer is not in the book—not even the upper years."

"More's the pity," Dumbledore mused. "She seemed like a bright young mind, for the brief time I met her."

"About Miss Weasley, though," Minerva said, furrowing her brow.

"Yes?"

"How is she going to hold a wand?"

Author's Note

It'll be interesting to see what the reactions are to this. For the record, while I tend to put new directions on canon-compliant ideas, the details of the ward is not intended to be entirely canon compliant—just close enough to make you think. Also, feel free to try to rules lawyer it in the comments, just keep in mind that yes, Dumbledore probably could come up with some way to get Harry to break the ward if he really thought that it was necessary.

Also, sorry if it disappoints anyone but, it's not my intention to make Harry actually trans or anything; he's just too alienated from society be able to actually understand anything like that at this point, and pretty much just playing foil to Ginny in that exchange.

Thanks go out to those supporting me on Patreon and ko-fi, pomegranate horsie, Sunny, Zervon Tora, Katharine Berry, LD, Jan Sterba, senaxyva, Ersmiller, Canary In The Coal Mine, Jason Langford, Денис, J T, Andrew Pam, Southpaw, Andrew Denton, Trellmor, Kirishala, djthomp, SirHoli, IamUnknown, fused, CvBrony, bloons3