Daisy and Dahlia

Ted Tonks was very much not impressed with the scale and extent of Harry's problems. In particular, he was less than thrilled that Harry had, at twelve, been planning to take on the custody of two two-year-olds, and had not seen fit to mention this to the lawyer in whose office he had found himself for a consultation. Nor that Harry was doing all this on the instructions of the woman who had emotionally and physically abused him for almost all of his life, and was callously planning to abandon two of her three children, and Harry was enabling her in so doing.

"I grew up in the Muggle world myself, Harry," he told his new client. "And my parents were frequently out of their depth with all this magic stuff. But they loved me, and they stood by me and supported me as best they could. That's what parents are supposed to do. Your aunt's behaviour is not normal. And I know once you turn thirteen, you can technically become a Head of House, at which point you would be perfectly entitled to act as Paterfamilias for other members of House Potter, if there were any; and, even though the twins aren't members of House Potter, you'd be at least a strong contender to take them under your house's protection. If it turns out you were able to become Paterfamilias of the other family, the Parseltongue-speaking one, you'd have the first right to the twins, and even if their parents wanted to keep them, you could over-rule them. That's just the way wizarding family law works. But just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. You're probably right to take them away from Mrs Dursley; frankly, it sounds like Social Services should have taken all four of you away a long time ago. But that doesn't mean you're actually well placed, as a young teenager, to give two traumatised toddlers everything they need and deserve from a parent. Just you and a house-elf is sub-optimal. So, before I take on your case with the goblins, I want you to promise me that you'll consult me - or another suitable adult - about setting up a stable home situation for those girls." Harry paused and thought about it.

"If you promise you won't make me prioritise what's appropriate over them being loved and cared for. Because they need that. And you won't make me give them away altogether."

"I won't," Ted said composedly. "I agree with you on that. And for the last one, even if I could, I wouldn't."

And so, a fearsomely complex agreement was drafted between Harry and Gringotts, mostly by Ted and by Legal Expert Riptooth. There were commitments made that must be completed before the end of July; commitments with a deadline of the end of August; commitments that depended on whether Harry was declaring Blood Feud or one of the familial alternatives; commitments with no time frame; commitments to be carried out 'as soon as possible, but not at the neglect or to the detriment of Harry James Potter's willingly undertaken dependents, including but not limited to Daisy Dursley, Dahlia Dursley, and Dobby the Elf'; commitments relating to the basilisk corpse; commitments relating to the setting up of trust-vaults for Daisy and Dahlia, and reviving the antique custom of 'elf personal allowance vaults' to set one up for Dobby. Ted Tonks was employed for the day by Harry Potter, for a one-off payment; he was on retainer to Gringotts for the rest of the month; from August onwards, until further notice, he was on retainer to House Potter. Harry was obliged to do everything reasonable, within the limitations of his academic commitments and commitments to his chosen household, to put an end to Tom Marvolo Riddle, his shades and anchors, as soon as was reasonably possible; Gringotts Bank was committed to carry out a variety of services to that end for a tenth of the normal cost of such services; all such services under that rubric were automatically High Discretion. The authorising party was Sub-Chief Ragnok. All signatories to the act used blood quills.

With Ted still there, Harry elected to get the first of his July commitments out of the way. He was to take an inheritance test. The point, as far as the goblins were concerned, was to see how closely related Harry was to Voldemort, and who the head of Voldemort's family was. For Harry, it was an opportunity to discover possible wizarding relatives. He was excited enough he didn't quibble at being made to brush his hair for nine minutes together, until his scalp tingled, and then balance a lump of amber on his head. The contents of the hairbrush were chopped finely, mixed with a number of other substances, beaten to a pulp, and poured into a large circular vat. A filter layer at the bottom of the vat was then lifted up, removing an enormous disk of greyish goo; it was smoothed and dried into a huge, circular sheet of off-white paper. Eight drops of Harry's blood were stirred into a potion, and the lump of amber was dropped in, too. Harry's left thumbnail was trimmed, and the paring gently stroked by a goblin until it transformed into a stylus; a thread of visible magic connected the stylus to the potion. The stylus was set hovering over the paper, and Harry was instructed to breathe on it.

It moved; wrote his name at the centre of the paper in an elegant round hand, with what seemed to be bright blue ink; doubled, and each new stylus wrote his parents' names, in a similar coloured ink, perhaps a somewhat brighter blue for Harry's mother, but a gothic script this time. "Roundhand for the living, and gothic for the dead," explained Ted. They duplicated again; repositioned themselves; continued. Harry could see now why the paper was round. The names of his ancestors were forming an elegant pattern, almost like a flower, small marks in the centre at first, but getting closer and closer to the edge. The pattern was not perfect; sometimes the stylus would vanish rather than duplicating, and gaps appeared, the threads snarling together. "That'll be cousin marriages," said Ted, before peering closer, and raising his eyebrows. The styluses reached the eighth generation; detached from the paper and fused themself to its edges, making a frame.

"It'll take an hour or so to get set up for the Kinship Revealing," advised the goblin, withdrawing. Harry vaguely caught Ted agreeing, addressing him as "Journeyman Diviner Bulbroot," but he was mesmerised by the record of his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and another five generations after that. His was the only name in roundhand, which was unsurprising, if disappointing and rather sad. Surely, if he had had any grandparents or great-grandparents living, they would have been the ones to take him in. Ted was explaining the colours to him, with a foray into wizarding genetics. Black ink meant 'true muggles', individuals whose access to magic was completely cut off on a genetic level; blue ink meant the individual in question had at least some access to magic, though in some cases that would only mean little more than an ability to see some things true Muggles couldn't. Other squibs might be able to brew potions, have a knack with certain magical creatures or plants, or perhaps a touch of Divination manifesting itself as good intuition. Magical power was mostly determined by genetics, but one's overall health was also a factor. Some people had the genetic code for high power levels, but serious enough health problems that their magic was all tied up keeping them alive, to the point where they presented as squibs. The shades of blue on the goblin test showed power available for a living wizard or squib; for a dead one, the kind of power levels they had had in their prime.

Harry's maternal grandmother Heather was apparently a squib rather than a muggle, and had three surnames listed: Evans, her husband's surname which she had presumably taken upon marriage, and two others, Pruitt and Prewett. Her father's surname was Prewett, and from him, a line of Prewett wizarding ancestors continued to the edge of the paper, without any more Pruitts; Ted advised Harry that many wizards who cast their squib children out would change their names to avoid being connected to them in the future: "And that's the nicer ones, that actually provide for the kids, even if they don't keep them. Some of the dark families just kill theirs, and it's still legal, with the consent of parents and the Family Head, and as long as the child is proven non-magical. There were some campaigns in the 70s to change that, but the legislation stalled; these days, very few families would admit to outright killing their Squibs, but 'tragic accidents' do happen."

"My friend Neville Longbottom's great-uncle dropped him out of a window to test his magic when he was nine," said Harry. "He said he meant to dangle him, and only dropped him accidentally, and he bounced, so everyone was really happy. Does that- is that...?"

"Yes, that's the kind of thing," said Ted. "Bit surprised the Longbottoms went in for it - they have a reputation as staunchly Light, though I suppose that's mostly based off Frank and Alice. The older generation might be another matter. Poor kid. Alice would have killed them slowly and painfully for endangering her baby, squib or not. She was a firstie when I was a fifth-year prefect, you know, we were both Hufflepuffs. Good kid. Sweet as you like until somebody messed with one of her friends or family members, then Helga help you, because nobody else would. No surprise to anyone she became an Auror. Terrible shame, what happened. Anyway..."

Heather's mother Peony's parents were double first cousins, "which can't have helped her daughter's magic levels," according to Ted. There was only one snarl of close kinship worse than Peony's parents, and that had to do with Harry's muggle grandfather Darren's wizard grandfather, one Marvolo Gaunt, whose family had apparently practiced severe inbreeding. His parents were half-first cousins; their mutual grandfather Corvinus had had one child with his first cousin once removed and one with his sister; Corvinus' parents were both born Gaunts. "That'll be the Parseltongue connection," said Ted cheerfully. "The Gaunts were very keen on claiming descent from Salazar Slytherin. If you are related to You-Know-Who, it'll be through them."

And so it proved. After the goblins had returned to cast the Kinship Revealing Ritual, and set shimmering spiderwebs of golden light hovering above the paper, the Gaunt connection was the first that was plucked out of the air by Journeyman Bulbroot's long fingers and transferred to parchment. Marvolo Gaunt, after siring a child upon a muggle, had married his sister, who was at that point the only surviving unmarried female Gaunt. No other branch of the Gaunts resulted in any offspring; by 1920, there were only three living Gaunts, Marvolo and his two children by his deceased sister-wife, Morfin and Merope. Merope was the mother of Tom Marvolo Riddle, whose name appeared in a different style of writing from all the others: "neither dead nor alive, that's what that one shows. In this case, it's because the subject is a wraith, but similar results appear from Draught of Living Death, Stonebound Petrification, and a few other causes." Voldemort was officially Harry's half-first cousin, twice removed, and apart from Daisy and Dahlia, there were no other living magical relatives on the Gaunt side, and no unmagical ones other than Petunia and Dudley. Voldemort's uncle Morfin, the previous Gaunt patriarch, had died unmarried and childless; House Gaunt was currently without a head, and their family vault was inaccessible until one of the potiential heirs ascended to the Headship, due to the existence of competing claims.

Journeyman Diviner Bulbroot was distracted enough by the prospect of relaying that particular news to his superiors that he agreed to transfer multiple other family tree selections to parchment: Harry, it seemed, was distantly related to at least half of Hogwarts. He was quite thankful that Marcus Flint and Pansy Parkinson were more distant than third cousins, as were their Patresfamiliae; Cormac McLaggen, a rather unpleasant Gryffindor in the year above, was a third cousin, and likewise Hannah Abbott, Susan Bones and the Patil sisters were less than third cousins. Harry even shared a mutual great-great-grandfather with Justin Finch-Fletchley! Geoffrey Hitchens, Viscount Montagu, had had two daughters: the legitimate one was Justin's ancestor, and the illegitimate one was Harry's. The interesting thing was that Viscount Montagu's mother had been a witch, with the birth name of Isla Black; so Justin wasn't wholly muggle-born. Professor McGonagall was the second cousin of Harry's grandmother, Euphemia Potter nee McKinnon, and though the McKinnons had mostly been killed in the war, with those who hadn't leaving for New Zealand, Harry had two remaining close-ish magical cousins through them: Neville's mother's father had been born Edmund McKinnon before taking his wife's surname of Max, this making Neville Harry's second cousin once removed (and Professor McGonagall's second cousin three times removed). As well as the New Zealand McKinnons and the American Potters, Harry was related to the Volkov family of Bulgaria and Austria through his great-grandmother Elizaveta Volkova. However, Harry's closest adult wizarding relative, much to his surprise, was another person he already knew: Molly Weasley, nee Prewett. Harry's great-grandfather Mercutius Prewett had married again after the death of his wife and the casting out of his Squib daughter; he had had a daughter and two sons by his new wife, and while the sons were marked as deceased, Molly was not only living, but the mother of seven children who were also related to Harry. Molly Weasley was Harry's half-great-aunt, and Ron and his siblings were Harry's half-first cousins once removed. Harry had family, a real, living, magical adult who already cared for him! Cousins his age and older who weren't Dudley! He couldn't wait to tell Ron they were actually family, once the need for secrecy was lifted.

The final piece of parchment showed Harry's godparents; apparently in the wizarding world, becoming a godparent meant swearing a magical oath of loyalty and protection, welcoming a child into one's own kinship network and becoming, in effect, a kind of third or fourth parent to them, and that made it a serious enough tie to appear on heritage tests. Many parents didn't bother naming godparents until after a child's magic was confirmed, as a godparent would not be able to acquiesce to the endangerment or killing of a squib child without suffering magical consequences for oath-breaking, and a disowned child with a godparent would pass to their godparent's family as an orphaned child would, something that would be very inconvenient when the aim of disownment was to remove the child from the wizarding world. In the ordinary way of things, Harry's godparents would have been reckoned closer kin than his aunt, especially since they were magical and Petunia was not; it was highly anomalous that they were still living and Harry had no memory of ever meeting them. Once he saw the names, though, Ted was quick to explain. Since the end of the war, Alice Longbottom had been in hospital, and Sirius Black had been in prison. They would not have been in a position to demand or be granted custody.

"It is odd, though, about Sirius Black..." Ted mused, before shaking his head and sorting through the documents so Harry could get the relevant ones notarised. He'd think more about it later.