Chapter Text
The spell hit like a Bludger.
She would never know which one it was, nor what its effects would have been; there wasn't enough time for it to take effect. All she knew, as the impact sent her flying, was the look of stark horror on Sirius's face, and Hermione's scream of horror...
Then she heard rustling all around her, felt some infinitely-light, infinitely-smooth cloth pass over her entire body, and saw a translucent filter fall across her sight, like a veil -- and then there was nothing.
She came back to consciousness with a sensation that reminded her rather of Voldemort's Cruciatus in the graveyard at Little Hangelton. Except this was a bit milder.
A bit.
Groaning, she pushed herself up -- and, when her hand slipped, nearly fell off her small bed. As she righted herself, blinking into the darkness (she hoped it was darkness, and she hadn't gone blind), her left elbow bumped into the wall.
She grabbed it, hissing at the sudden pain, but something far worse than the ache in every bone of her body was spreading through her. Familiarity.
She knew the dimensions of this place by heart.
She hoped she was wrong, but when she gingerly got out of bed and tottered forward on disturbingly-weak (and disturbingly-short) limbs, the door was exactly where she expected it to be. At that moment, her legs gave out beneath her, and her forehead slammed into the door -- conveniently enough, because then she could rest it against the wood while her heart hammered in her chest and her mind whirled.
Unmistakably, this was her cupboard. How had she gotten back here?
A better question occurred to her, now that she was awake enough to pay attention to her surroundings. Why was she covered in blood?
Hoping she was wrong, she raised her hand to her mouth and licked the crusty stuff she could feel on her skin. Yes -- definitely blood. And she could feel it all over her body -- all dried, mercifully. She wasn't sure whether to hope it was hers or hope it was someone else's.
Probably hers -- that would explain why she felt so weak. She had no memory whatsoever of anything that would have left her like this. Perhaps this had been an effect of that spell. She couldn't figure why whatever she had bumped into would have taken her back here...
She touched the spot on her chest where the spell had hit her, and discovered abruptly that she no longer had breasts. One panicked moment later, she ascertained that she was still female. Combined with her surreal feeling of being shorter, though, and still being a perfect fit for her old cot -- she had a terrible feeling that she was a prepubescent female.
So she was back at the Dursleys', she was in a prepubescent body, and she was covered in blood. The last was at least comforting for being unfamiliar. If she'd woken up on a perfectly ordinary night at the Dursleys', she might have had some wild fear that everything -- everything -- had been a dream, and this was the real life. Sometimes she had nightmares like that. The only thing that had assured her of her sanity when she'd woken up was the knowledge that, say, Aunt Petunia didn't really go around wearing a live octopus as a hat, or that Uncle Vernon would never make investments in television-gopher hybrids, or...
"Lilith?" The anxious voice made her jerk away from the door. "Lilith, are you awake? Are -- are you okay?"
...or that Dudley would never be friendly, she supposed. She stared at the door as though it had grown tentacles. That was unmistakably a pre-pubescent Dudley. But why in the world would he be sounding like that? Like he cared?
Dudley didn't have the brains to be a good actor when it came to anything other than manipulating his parents. Besides, there was no reason to fool the "freak" into dropping her guard when he could just bully her with sheer physical force. And...
Honestly, she'd never heard Dudley sounding timid in her life. She wouldn't have guessed he had the range. Did this have something to do with why she was covered with blood and hurt all over? That might freak out even Dudley...
"Lilith?"
Well -- she figured it couldn't make the situation worse. "Yes," she rasped, then coughed in surprise at how bad her throat felt. Several unpleasant seconds later, she coughed up a large clot of blood. Swallowing it back down, she decided she was in even worse shape than she thought.
She didn't have long to contemplate it, though, because she heard the latch rattling, and a moment later Dudley swung open the door. She blinked, then squinted at his outline. To her surprise, no punch greeted her. "C'mon," he said, motioning her in the direction of the living room. He paused. "Uh -- can you walk?"
"With effort."
He nodded, then led her to the kitchen. A moment after she rested her back against the sink, he flipped on the lights -- and had to stifle a yell.
"Yes, I know," Lilith said wryly. "I'm a mess." Then she stopped squinting against the light and looked at Dudley.
This wasn't the Dudley she was used to in more ways than one. He still had a piggy face, but his bulk was vastly decreased -- stout, but not massive. Something had also subtly changed about his features, though she couldn't tell without her glasses on. Far odder than either of those things, though, was his vertical size. All told, she guessed him to be about ten years old.
"Oh, God, Lilith, I'm sorry," he blubbered. "I'm so sorry." He gave a choked sob, the tears rolling freely down his face. "I -- I couldn't stop Dad --"
It suddenly occurred to her that a dark blotch on the right side of his face might, in fact, not be a shadow, but a bruise.
"They're both gone completely around the bend -- I don't --" He tried to give her a smile. "It's -- it's okay, though -- I've got a plan--"
Without explanation, he ran back towards the cupboard, and she was briefly startled to see Dudley running rather than lumbering. Then she was just confused.
She was definitely the size of a ten-year-old -- and good grief, but she was splattered with blood. When she pulled up her shirt, it looked like it might have explained a lot if at least one of her ribs had broken through the skin, but instead there was only smooth skin and particularly-ugly bruises. And it hurt badly when she touched that spot. Could accidental magic have fixed her up? It... might have, but she had enough bruises all over that she couldn't tell.
Since several were shaped vaguely like the bottom of a boot, her mind began to construct a very unpleasant idea of what had happened.
The only thing that prevented her from immediately accepting it was that Uncle Vernon had never beaten her. Left it to Dudley, yes. Threatened her, swung at her, yes. But there had never been a full-out beating -- and he'd lorded that over her and reminded her extensively whenever he really wanted her to obey. If she wanted to feel sorry for herself, he'd really give her something to be sorry about -- that had always been his threat. So what had --
Dudley arrived, huffing, puffing, and hauling a suitcase behind him. She stared. "I -- I've got everything we need in here," he said proudly. "Clothes, snacks, even a few toys--"
She didn't have the heart to immediately remark that snacks weren't going to last them long. "What -- what are you doing?" she managed, massaging her sore throat.
He blinked. "We're -- we're gonna run away, of course," he said, his voice quavering. "We've gotta. I didn't dare before this, but--" He swallowed. "You weren't moving when Dad threw you in the cupboard," he said in a barely-audible voice. "You-- you didn't look like you were breathing. I thought you were--"
He broke off and began crying again. Lilith stared at him, then blinked and shook her head. She woke up as a ten-year-old, with a ten-year-old Dudley who didn't look like himself and -- apparently -- an Uncle Vernon who had beaten her mostly to death.
Assuming it had been "mostly". The last thing she remembered, she'd been hit by a spell she didn't know in a place full of the strangest things she'd ever seen. She remembered the Time-Turners, the brains, and even that creepy...
Wait! Had she gone through that mysterious archway? She tried to reconstruct the chamber in her mind and figure out where she'd been, but the fighting had been too pitched for her to have anything more than an instinctual knowledge of her surroundings. What were the last things she remembered? Backing down the stairs, dueling furiously, and then --
Yes, she quite possibly could. And, given what passed for logic when magic was involved, something that looked like a gateway might have been a gateway. If, by plowing into the curtain covering it, she'd been sent through...
She rubbed her forehead, frowning. She had an uncomfortable feeling that it was no coincidence she'd awoken in this... body right after this... body had been beaten almost to death. Assuming the "almost" was really an "almost".
The closest thing to anything like this situation that she could think of was, insane as it was, some of Hermione's "leisure reading". Almost all of what her best friend read was nonfiction, because she huffed that knowledge was more important than stories, but Hermione made an exception for science fiction, particularly when she was tired and couldn't think any more about school. (Yes, though it would undoubtedly shock Ron, even Hermione had her limits.) Though a life with the Dursleys had instilled reluctance to ask for anything, Hermione had loaned her the occasional book when she'd caught too many curious glances at a cover, and she'd found many weird concepts -- yes, even by the standards of a student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry -- between those flashy covers. One of them was time travel -- which she at least knew worked in the Wizarding world, albeit to a limited degree. Another was travel between parallel worlds.
It had been obvious fiction... well, just like time travel. Her frown deepened. It was, as Ron would have said, completely mental to think she'd somehow wound up in a parallel world in which Dudley wasn't a brat and Uncle Vernon -- she didn't want to think about that. It was, however, completely mental that she was in the same room as a Dudley that wasn't a brat, bloodied and bruised, and ten years old.
She pushed down that thought for now. Hermione was the thinker -- she was the doer. How she ended up here wasn't important right now except as it pertained to what she did now that she was here. And she couldn't figure out how to apply that. She could be careful about assuming everything would be the same as she remembered, but she'd probably assume everything would be if she had no indication otherwise.
"Well, I'm not dead," she said, causing Dudley to pause in his sobbing and wipe his nose on his pajama sleeve. She hoped he didn't catch her emphasis.
"Yeah," he said weakly. She began to smile at him -- this Dudley seemed like a decent sort, even if the Dudley she knew was nothing of the like -- but one other thing occurred to her.
"What do you mean, we're running away?" She frowned. "Me, yeah, but the Dursleys -- er, your parents -- love you, at least. They--"
But this drove a fresh spate of tears from Dudley, and she realized, with a sinking feeling, an obvious reason this Dudley might not be such a brat. "I thought they did," he said miserably, giving a great, hiccoughing sob. "But -- then --" His sobbing made him temporarily incapable of speech. "If they really did, they really, really did, they wouldn't have gotten so mad at me when I turned out to be a freak--"