Mother's Mercy

Chapter 1

August 25, 1996 - Geneva (Muggle Switzerland) / Région romande, États Magiques Gaulois (Romandy region of the Gallic Magisterium or Gallic Magical States)

Hari yawns, swings her legs over the side of the bed, and stretches. Her date from last night snores adorably into the pillow. Ballard's hair is every which-way, his boots cast long, rustic shadows in the post-dawn sun, his wand balances precariously on the nightstand, and his plane ticket--cute that he prefers Muggle transit--sits next to the dregs of the bottle of red from last night.

She wonders, like she does every morning: What would the Dursleys think? More freakish to be magical, or to laze around the flat and check in with old friends at the brothel rather than get a 'proper' job? She can't even tell if the wizarding world has proper jobs that aren't utter fucking nonsense or worse, Ministry jobs. Auntie Nym has a good point: It doesn't have to be respectable to anybody else to be right.

She probably meant it more about murder than sex. "All the best things end in S, little Blackling. Murderess. Villainess. Temptress. Sorceress." Good old Auntie Nym.

Hari lifts her wand from the pocket of the jeans she wore last night and transfigures her little black book back to a readable size. Red slashes have grown across two names--pity those ladies cancelled--and where Aphrodite's distaff had been next to the next pair of names, Mercury's mark spreads across the page.

Couples don't usually do that, especially not couples who request a woman in their bed. She hasn't played with "H" and "F" before, but just for giving her an excuse to really flex her shifting in bed, she might have to make them a habit.

First, the important things: Step out for some post-fuck gelato.

She shakes her hair out with her fingers, glances in the mirror by the door, and dons Harry's face again. Despite being the only form she knew with the Dursleys, Harry doesn't feel as natural as Hari, not quite, but not far off.

Easier to pop down the street with a man's body. No one will bother, or whistle, or want.

Unless that old woman is out and about. Randier than a bloody succubus, that one.

A lorry squeezes up behind them on the twisting alpine road. Hermione hisses and grabs the doorframe. Fleur's eyes flick to the rearview in annoyance, irises tightening and pupils crackling with fey flames. Manicured fingers flick three chromed dip switches on the dash, grab the shifter, and throw it through a complicated sequence before she jams her foot on the pedal.

The engine of the vintage Citroën--because of course a veela drives sexy-as-hell, proudly-French sports car--growls happily at its mistress' new orders. With a smear of their surroundings and a crackle of static electricity that dances over Hermione's skin, they blaze ahead.

Fleur kisses two fingertips and presses them to the dash. "Good girl."

"What...the...fuck?" Hermione finally manages to pant out, whipping her gaze between the side mirror and the back window. The lorry is a speck now, easily three kilometres back. "Some car."

"Rather like that...James Bond, no?"

Hermione moans around the last bite of chocolate and crust, licking her fingers without shame. If another lunch or break for the lavatory or a stop for petrol involves orgasmically tasty pastries, she's going to propose before they reach their destination.

All day, Fleur has watched her. In the hotel in Paris, she smirked at her over a cup of coffee, indigo eyes darkening whenever Hermione took a bite.

At lunch just across the Swiss border, She rambled in soft, swirling French about her family. Gabrielle, the younger sister with a mad obsession for Harry Potter. Her late father--several years ago, but the wound is clearly still fresh for Fleur. Hermione will not survive watching tears roll down such a lovely face again.

While Hermione halfway-napped under the cafe's umbrella, Fleur lamented her mother's decision to take an English curse-breaker as a lover. She sounds far more irked about his nationality than the fact that he's closer to Fleur's age or that Fleur now has a half-sister twenty-three years her junior.

And then satiny skin and strong fingers squeezed her thigh and Hermione let herself be brought to her feet and half-carried back to the car.

They've two hours still to drive. Fleur is alert enough to be safe as a driver but Hermione's not so sure she's safe. At night, her Veela side surfaces. Her skin catches every glimpse of starlight and moonlight, turning paleness into luster like sterling silver and even glow--faint reflections dance on the leather of the glovebox. Her hair not only whips on the wind rushing past the window, it drifts weightless behind her.

If she can't find something else to think about besides how bloody gorgeous she is in the moonlight, Hermione will need to ask Fleur to pull over so she can shag her.

"What are we doing, and where exactly in Geneva are we going?" she asks.

"To find Harry Potter. At a brothel in the magic district."

"What? At a brothel?"

"That is what I said, no?"

Fleur smirks. Brat. Hermione could just...lick that off her pretty little lips.

"You're joking, Fleur."

"Harry Potter works in a brothel, according to the dossier." Plucking her ornate wand from the leather holster hanging on the back of the passenger seat, she summons a folder marked TOP SECRET from her satchel into Hermione's lap. "He was taken from Britain by Nymphadora Black, we think."

"The Auror intern? The one they made a big fuss about hiring since she's half blood?"

"Nymphadora Black the First. She was the point of the wand for English invaders during the Hundred Years War. The founder of Beauxbatons duelled her as a younger woman. Scarcely escaped with her life."

"So she must be...well, she'd have to be a metamorphmagus to be that old."

"Precisely. Unless Dumbledore's spells were excellent, she could take the boy so long as she did not harm him. Even if she couldn't simply adapt herself to mimic the magic of a permitted wizard or witch, blood relations matter as greatly as intent, especially when one's bloodline is that old. Blacks and Malfoys pioneered warding in England to protect their gold, as Lestrange and Rosier did here."

Fleur spits out her window.

"Scum."

Hermione shouldn't find it so bloody hot that the death-to-the-rich spirit of the Revolution is alive and well in the magical French, even those like Fleur who grew up privileged. But she's just come from America, where the No-Maj's have managed to infect MACUSA with capitalism. She nearly fled right back to Miskatonic to try to get tenure, perhaps leverage her paper on desecration-powered exceptions to the limitations on necromancy into a fellowship.

"So the whole fucking time Dumbledore was ripping its beard out looking for Harry Potter, he was living with his guardian in a brothel in Geneva?"

Fleur smiles.

"Nymphadora Black is known to have operated such houses many times before she went underground. It is established history that she had many lovers, both men and women. She had an affection for women looked down on for such reasons. Two of her little killing sprees in Paris in the late 14th Century were on behalf of a whore or mistress who had been harmed. She had the ideal combination for a madam: A combination of extreme prowess."

Fleur drags a manicured finger across her throat.

"A high-bred's upbringing, and an eye for talent. She could find the best talent, protect them, outfit the house in a manner suited for high society, and charge accordingly. And, of course, her own beauty would have helped. There is ancient graffiti at Beauxbatons praising her beauty and her...skills," the veela teases. "At least in the girl's dormitory."

Not bad for a woman who disappeared before the Spanish Inquisition got started.

"The GMS runs a tight ship on sex worker safety. Would've turned up any underage employees, and young men working there are likely doubly scrutinised. Britain is looking for a young man. What are the odds that Harry Potter is the ward of an infamous witch most people think is a ghost story, living at a brothel?" Hermione muses. "I do wonder how they tricked the gender portion of diagnosis charms."

"The Sorcerer of Secrets thinks they're a metamorphmagus," Fleur replies, somehow making the way three of her fingers curl around the chromed tip of turn signal lever suggest something deeply obscene she can't wait to try when they bed down at the hostel. "Mata Hari is a working name, I think."

"That'd work," Hermione mumbles. "A play on 'Harry' but no one's going to know with that sort of reference."

"Fuuuuck," Hari groans.

There's an owl in the gelato. Not a local owl, either. It doesn't have the medallion of the Gallic Magisterium's post office around the message leg.

They also don't use snowy owls, not even in the alpine areas.

If it wasn't for the letter clamped tight in the left-hand talons, they'd think the bird was a stray. Certainly acting needy, cuddling close like a puppy that just found a home.

Good thing this place is in the magical quarter. Pet owls would raise some eyebrows among the ordinaires.

"What am I going to do with you?" Hari sighs, dragging a finger down its beak. "You'll need a name, for one. And you owe me for this garbage."

They trace a protection rune with spilt caramel and set the envelope on the table--Nymphadora taught her everything she ever learned about killing and not getting killed, and she knew more than most armies--then slit the envelope with a hex and unfold the letter with a lifting charm.

The addressing alone was suspicious: Mr. Harry Potter, third window on the top floor, Bowtruckle Rd, Geneva, Gallic Magical States.

Odd.

Harry Potter isn't something anyone who knows them would use--Harry shows up, good name for a man their age--but it's usually just 'Hari'. Certainly never 'Harry Potter'. They're not stupid enough to go around with that name. That's disturbing, that the sender doesn't know who they are, but does know the window.

The bird barks happily and tucks her head under her wing. Little brat is utterly unrepentant despite having brought a letter that fairly oozes self-importance.

Supreme Mugwump, Chief Warlock and Headmaster? No wonder he feels entitled to summon Hari somewhere.

The black book heats up in their pocket and Hari stands with a groan. They flick their wand at the parchment, again and again, showering it in detection charms.

"Well," Hari confesses to their feathered hanger-on, glancing at the bird. "I wasn't expecting it to be clean."

The owl looks back with...some form of avian emotion. Unclear what, exactly. Varies by owl, and they haven't gotten to know each other yet.

They tap their shoulder and the bird hoots agreeably, swooping onto it and snuggling down.

"Come along, then."

Something snags their middle and tugs.

"Portkey. Why the fuck isn't that in the detection charms?" They screech at the owl but it's lost in a whirlwind of between-ness.

August 26, 1996 - Hogwarts

"Fuuuuuck," Hari groans. "That's one shitty Portkey. Where am I?"

A saccharine-sweet trill from atop the spiral staircase is their only answer. Carried on the birdsong is magic so light and bright it hammers against their magic, organs, even their bones.

Fantastic. A bloody phoenix.

The contrasting magics--theirs and the phoenixes--crackles like lightning at the edge of colliding storms. A straight razor being sharpened on raw nerves.

A plea--or three--in semi-passable Persian suffice to shut the bird up. It probably doesn't hear much of the desert tongues, or hear its name as humans first spoke it.

Hari looks over the room. Pensieve and memory-bottles in a cabinet. Books upon books. Disgusting old hat. Hasn't been washed since before the Battle of Hastings, by the look of it. Half a dozen goblin silver trinkets on the desk, whirring, hissing, fizzing, shrieking. Fifty more on the shelves behind.

There's a spiral staircase, in what is clearly an office. Truly, the owner of this place has no equal in self importance.

"I say, is that... Surely not. Not in those Muggle clothes!"

Whipping around, wand drawn, thumb hooked into a string concealed under her belt, ready to tug free a cursed blade, Hari focuses on the shadows behind the gold-encrusted desk. Something moves, not a shadow on the wall, but not a person, either. Poltergeist, perhaps. Or they're disillusioned.

"Show yourself, or I'll discover where that Portkey took me with an entrail reading."

"Hah! Perhaps you are a Black. Afraid you won't find much use for these old guts, child. They're nothing but oil and spell-thread on canvas. Come closer, then. Let me look at you."

"Lumos."

Hari toes off the heeled boots they wore on their doomed gelato run. Not so much unwieldy as loud. Click-clack against the stones. Announcing oneself is foolish in a strange fortress, as a captive with the good luck to not currently be chained.

"Caution," the apparently-painting muses. "A good trait in a witch."

Wand lifted in the shadow under the staircase, Hari is face to face with a painting of a wizard in dated robes, wearing a velvet dressing gown, short-trimmed beard of silver hair, and a fez-style cap with a goblin-silver charm dangling from the tassel.

Phineas Nigellus Black, the plaque reads.

Hari curtseys.

"Patriarch."

He might have been a "Foppish idiot fit neither for teaching nor being Patriarch, scarcely fit as a hat-stand", but he was once the Patriarch of the Blacks. Familias ante omnia, and all that.

"What is your name, girl?"

"Girl?" Hari huffs, before closing their eyes and shifting. Breasts shrink. Hips narrow. Muscles thicken and lengthen, and the padding fat above them fades. A moment's consideration stalls the change, then they commit. Their cunt curls on itself, filling, twisting, out and down, out and down. Out and down. Out...these leather trousers are not the least bit comfortable now.

Perhaps if I wasn't so vain, he thinks. But why shapeshift at all if not to be as fuckable as possible?

"Magics and gods," her interrogator breathes. "You're not so simple."

Hari lifts his shoulders in a shrug.

"I like to think not."

"Metamorphmagus, then? And this is your true form? True form as a man, at least?"

"It's the one I've settled on."

"And...you have the hair...oh, yes, you have the Black hair. Something else besides, but those eyes of yours are not Black. But the curls could only be..." The frustrated huff flutters the tassels of the painted hat and shakes the curtain behind the frame. "Damn it all. One question: Are you a Black?"

"I was brought into the family by Nymphadora. My grand-dame was Dorea Black, my grand-sire a Potter. My sire a Potter. Black by law and Potter by blood, though I suspect I've got the Potter hair more than Black."

Phineas hums, a smile spreading on his painted face. "I daresay you're right. You made a mess of it. And the eyes? Green eyes. Bones, mayhaps? MacDougal?"

"My mother was a keen witch with a sharp edge. All you need to know about her is that she was deadly, and clever, and sought all three Mysteries. A sorceress by twenty. If she'd faced anyone but a Dark Lord four decades her elder, I'd not be an orphan. Without the ritual she worked over my crib and potions I was given at her breast, I would be dead and the Dark Lord would rule."

"Hmph. Meaning you're Lily Evans' spawn," Phineas huffs. "I saw her in this very office."

He knew my mum?

"She had a mind, I'll grant. And a taste for power. Dangerous combination in a mudblood. She had designs far beyond her station. Worse, she managed them. Married and ruined one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight. And yet..."

Phineas lowers his spectacles and stares harder--if a painting could.

"A Black sought you out, and made you her ward. I presume this was not the Nymphadora that Albus dragged here after she impersonated McGonagall and measured the girls' uniform skirts?"

"Never met her," Hari replies. "She sounds like fun. Am I free to go, Patriarch?"

"Gods below, boy!" Phineas barks a laugh. "I may be a painting, but I'll not risk the anger of Nymphadora the First. Rather not find out if she can raise my old bones just to torture them."

Hari chuckles. "Auntie did mention she needs new hobbies."

Phineas nods at the door.

"Get out. If you are Lily Potter's child, then Dumbledore has hunted you for nearly a decade. And you are the last unwe-" He stops and gives her a hard look over his spectacles, one plump eyebrow arched.

"I am unwed, yes."

"Then you are the last unwed witch in the Black line with a clean name. Decrees from cads do not honour restore. I don't know why Albus wants you, and I don't think I want to. He cannot have you. You're a Black, you belong to us. Get out of this office. Get past the wards, if you can, and flee. I'll go to my frame at Grimmauld and see if I can't get you some help."

Hari glances at the door.

"The window, boy! The one you shattered coming in!"

"Right, sorry."

"Do me a favour and don't get captured before sundown. Be embarrassing to explain that to the current heir."

Hari flicks his wand at the jagged shards still dangling in the windowpane. The breaks outline a spread-eagled figure--hitting face-first would explain the headache. Dumbledore really wanted me, all right. That window must have been warded with the rest of the castle, and he lowered them.

Daphne winces at Pansy's shriek, and turns to Tracey after a particularly uncouth tap on the shoulder. More of a slap, really. And in public. Tracey will need to be...corrected.

"Look!"

A dark brown blur dives from one of the towers, outlined against the afternoon sun. Wings spread wide, translucent, veins showing through thin skin.

"That's a big bat," Tracey mumbles.

Firsties scatter as the bat swoops under the dead oak in the courtyard and with three great scoops of its wings, alights on Daphne's shoulders.

Handsome creature.

One of the fruit-eaters from the jungles--not local at all--and a big one. The wingspan is easily equal to her height, and the weight hanging off her is substantial. At least the grip is careful, clinging to heavy stitching and clasps on her robes rather than digging its short claws into the fabric. A downy head rubs against her cheek and a hot, furry body settles against the side of her neck. The beast yawns, tongue a tulip-pink curl, huffs twice, and lays its head over her shoulder and dozes off.

Tracey giggles.

"Looks like it fancies you," she teases. "Do you think it kno-"

"Not a word, Davis. Not a thrice-damned word."

"Come on, then. We'll be late for Professor Snape's tutoring. I will not be outscored by a Weasley again."

"Miss Greengrass," Snape drawls. "Would you care to explain your...fashion choices?"

Pansy snickers from her spot next to Draco, who sneers. Tracey scowls at the both of them.

"It followed me here. Appears tame enough. I am here to learn, Professor. Unless you think it will be harmful, I would like to begin. Perhaps it wishes to get a leg up on next year's Potions. Fitting if an animal had a leg up on the Gryffindors, don't you think?"

Snape arches a brow, then turns in a swirl of robes to write on the board.

Hari likes this girl--woman, really, she's at least seventeen. Words are fuzzy, hazy things when he's an animal, heard but not often understood. Her name is leaf something? No...grass something.

Pretty, pink, precisely plumped, perfumed, primped...yet willing to host a flying fox around her neck like a shawl. There's also the scent of her, familiar to his animagus and oh-so-enticing. She must be an animagus herself, and most likely a bat. Perhaps even the exact same sort of bat. A careful tuck of the wing hides the excitement his bat feels, so close to what the animal sees as a potential mate.

When he discovered this form, he read up on flying foxes. Largest bat in the world. Fruit-eater. Handsome compared to vampire bats or those ghastly ear-headed things. Unfortunately, willing to mate year round, not breeding only in a certain season. There went the shift-to-cool-off plan he'd hoped to use for the duration of puberty. Social, roosting in groups the size of cities. Bit embarrassing, especially if he shifts while female. Female flying foxes...bond in the colonies.

There's enough human left in him to know that she won't want a bat's stiffy against her neck.

Not while she's human, at least.

Daphne slams her dormitory door shut with her foot, silences it with charm traced in midair, warding it with a rune smeared in rogue across the back of her hand, and glances at the bat that hasn't left her shoulder for more than a moment. It flew to the windowsill while she was in the loo and climbed down her arm to eat a pear out of her hand at dinner, but every other instant of the day, it's been hanging from her shoulders like a shawl.

"Explain. You're an animagus pretending to be my pet. Why? What are you hiding from?"

The bat alights on her headboard just as its shape starts to ripple. She spins to face her wardrobe, then remembers she's put her back to a strange animagus. A whispered charm and fingertip on her pocket mirror let her peer through the floor-length mirror beside her vanity.

Where the bat was is a man, long-limbed and lean, sleek and slim. Well, one part of him is fat, though just as long and sleek and mouthwatering as the others. She tries to tear her eyes off it but Sweet Morgana. After a occlumency routine so intense her head spins, she manages to focus on his face instead. Black hair in absolute chaos, rather like it hadn't been seen to since some lucky witch had it in fistfuls to keep that smirking mouth where she nee--Control yourself!--frame a pale, patrician face dominated by eyes the same green as a will-o-wisp on the moors at the estate.

She frowns. She thought she had this sorted. She has no time to mix her studies with infatuation, so she had meticulously catalogued the aesthetic and mental faults of her male classmates until she could recite them to Tracey faster than the answers to the potions quiz. She had hoped that logic might outweigh impulse.

The stranger seems to be in no hurry to put clothes on. In fact, the clothes released from the Animagus charms' containment are a woman's clothes. Odd, that...

Then the stranger shifts again, imperceptibly at first, then faster, faster, faster. She doesn't have to stare at a stupidly tempting cock now. Worse. She has to stare at those same green eyes and those cheekbones with cupid's bow lips, sheets of jet-black curls that almost cover the succulent jewels capping her breasts, and a lush tuft of fur on her mons.

Daphne groans.

The stranger looks up at the mirror, chuckles, and runs her tongue around her lips.

"Please don't do that again."

"Mrh?" She asks.

Her world is made of wool and tits and smirks. "You're right fit. Fainting is a turn-off, though. Got the charm on you before you hit the floor. Didn't get it in time for the bedpost. Sorry."

Explains her aching head, and why it took her until now to realise she's looking up from the stranger's lap, past the sweater-clad curve of her breasts, and into her eyes.

"M'Daphne."

"M'Hari," she teases back.

"Cunt."

"Can't wait, gorgeous. Bet yours tastes like spring gooseberries. But I'm not that sort of metamorph. Not without dinner first."

The stranger sighs.

"I need to get out of here before whoever kidnapped me figures out I skipped the net. You all right to make it to bed?"

Daphne slides her fingers across the floor until she finds her wand. She can't possibly stand with her head like this, but she's not about to be carried to bed like a toddler.

"I'm a witch."

Albus knows the Portkey he'd woven into the acceptance letter worked, the wards told him that much. After hundred of letters over ten years, one made it. The letter itself is flakes of ash on the floor, and the silver thread he stitched the envelope shut with was peeled out, knotted into a tiny noose, and draped across his desktop.

He had Harry in this room and somehow the boy got away. How? He's an orphan child who ran away from home. He's been on the run for a decade, falling behind on his Muggle schoolwork, no doubt. He can't have been trained in magic. Surely Olympe would have told him if he'd turned up at Beauxbatons. If he'd gone to Durmstrang, the monitors for Harry's blood would have alerted him, no doubt. Igor would've slit the boy's throat the first night.

Ilvermorny wouldn't deign to take a strange English wizard, not without citizenship and other paperwork a child could not hope to achieve alone.

Salem would leap at the chance to steal a student, and delights in sponsoring foreigners to come into the Magical Americas, but the Salem Witches Institute is just that. Witches. They wouldn't take a boy, not even Harry.

He's no closer to having Harry. All this did was tip his hand and show his desperation. Once captured, the boy will have to be soothed, and made to feel at home. And he's short on options. No one in the Order save Molly and Arthur have a child of Hogwarts age.

Barring the youngest two, the Weasleys have all graduated. Molly pulled her daughter out after the fiasco with the chamber, but would send young Ginerva back if he asked.

Their oldest grandchild won't be here for another nine years--and even if the babes' mother weren't a dangerous statute sceptic like Apolline Delacour, a budding veela is hardly a safe friend to a young boy.

"Damn it all," Albus mutters.

Fawkes trills his agreement--or his mockery, one never knows with a phoenix. His familiar is agitated, but the reason is not clear. If Harry had attacked the bird, he'd not have gotten away, and Fawkes would've likely attacked Albus for interrupting his nap.

The portraits were no help; half a dozen were not in frame, as always. Phineas Nigellus must be at Grimmauld Place, and as much as Sirius worries Albus, it's unlikely he had a hand in Harry's abduction, or his current escape. For all his bull-headness and insubordination, the boy is not a Death Eater. Lestrange, likewise, has been ruled out.

The House of Black has nothing to do with young Harry, exactly as it should be. Sirius hasn't changed his will, but he will keep to his agreement not to contact Harry. That was the cost of Dumbledore's tiebreaker vote to clear him at the trial.

He reaches for a quill.

"Could you deliver something to the Burrow, old friend?"