Disclaimer:
Harry Potter and all of its characters belong to J.K. Rowling.
I own nothing but the original characters I make.
"Dialogue"
'Thoughts'
-Author notes-
Chapter 02 The Strange Trip To The Zoo
The weeks that followed were the strangest of Daniel's life, or rather, of Harry's life, which was now also Daniel's life, and wasn't that a headache to think about.
He woke each morning in the large, lavender-scented bedroom and had to remind himself where he was.
The ceiling of wooden planks, the glass pendant lamp, or the wardrobe with the mirror that showed him a face that was not his own.
Every day began with a small, sharp jolt of wrongness, followed by the reluctant acceptance of a person learning to live with an impossible truth.
The Dursleys were relentlessly kind.
Petunia packed his lunches with the same care she gave Dudley's. She asked about his dreams, his appetite, and whether he needed new shoes. She brushed the hair out of his eyes without being asked and called him "love" so often that the word began to lose its strangeness and become almost ordinary.
Vernon read him stories at bedtime. Yes, Vernon Dursley, who in the books had been a bull-necked tyrant with a purple face and a hatred of all things unusual, sat in a worn armchair and read The Hobbit in a series of different voices, doing the goblins as a raspy growl and the elves as a soft, musical whisper.
He had to admit that the man had a talent for it.
Dudley, meanwhile, had apparently decided that Harry was his best friend. He saved him the best seat near the telly. He let him choose which video to watch on rainy afternoons. He even, on one memorable occasion, offered Harry the last slice of cake without being asked.
This is wrong, Daniel thought every single day. This is deeply, profoundly wrong.
But he could not bring himself to dislike it.
His life had not been a pleasant one. Abandoned by his parents and having to spend the majority of his short life, lying in a hospital bed, being taken care of by disgruntled nurses and cold doctors.
The only respite during those harsh days was his books and his television. His body could not leave the hospital, but his mind left it every day. He would travel to other worlds and become all sorts of different people. Going on adventures with his companions and defeating the bad guys.
Perhaps this was his heaven after all. Perhaps Paradise didn't need the clouds and angels, and it just needed to fulfil a wish of his...to have a happy life as a healthy boy. To make some friends and go on adventures as the characters of his books.
Perhaps the real him had died on that hospital bed, and this new life was his compensation for all that suffering.
If that was the case, he would take it...
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The morning of June 23rd dawned on him.
"Happy birthday, Diddy-kins!" Petunia sang, sweeping into Dudley's bedroom with a tray of presents wrapped in shiny gold paper.
Dudley, who was now officially eleven years old, beamed from ear to ear. He had already opened half the presents before breakfast. A new computer game, a remote-controlled car, a watch that glowed in the dark, but the real treat, he had been told, was yet to come.
"The zoo!" he roared, punching the air with both fists. "We're going to the zoo!"
"We're going to the zoo," Vernon confirmed, appearing in the doorway with his camera already slung around his neck. He was wearing his best summer shirt, a short-sleeved number covered in palm trees, and he looked genuinely excited. "And Harry's coming too, of course."
He blinked. In the original story, Harry had been allowed to come only because Mrs. Figg had broken her leg and there had been no one else to leave him with.
Here, the invitation had been offered without hesitation, as if the thought of leaving him behind had never even occurred to them.
"Great," he said, and meant it, mostly. The zoo was the zoo. He had never been to one in his old life... the hospital did not offer many field trips for the kids, and the prospect was not unpleasant.
But there was a knot of anxiety in his stomach that had nothing to do with crowds or animals.
In the story, he thought, Harry talks to a snake at the zoo. He discovers he's a Parselmouth. That's the first proof that magic is real, that he's a wizard.
But what happens if I can't?, he wondered.
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Piers Polkiss arrived at half past nine.
For some reason, he had still been expecting someone like the Piers from the books, a weedy, spotty boy with a cruel streak and a talent for making Dudley look almost likeable.
The boy who climbed out of the car in the Dursleys' driveway was nothing of the sort.
Piers was tall for his age, with a mop of sandy hair and a face full of freckles. He was carrying a gift bag in one hand and a football under his arm, and when he saw Harry standing on the front step, his face split into a wide, genuine grin.
"Harry! Brilliant! Dudley said you were coming." He bounded up the path and thrust the football into Harry's hands. "Here, this is for you. I've got one already. Thought you might like it for the park later."
He stared at the football, then at Piers, and then at Dudley, who was watching with an expression of cheerful approval.
"Thanks," he managed.
"No problem." Piers clapped him lightly on the shoulder, the way friends do. "Come on, let's get in the car. I call shotgun!"
"You do not!" Dudley shouted, and the two of them raced down the drive, shoving each other and laughing, while Vernon jingled his car keys and Petunia locked the front door behind them.
He stood on the step for a moment longer, the football tucked under his arm, watching them go.
What is this world? He wondered. And who are these people?. Why is everything so different?.
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The zoo was crowded, as zoos always are on warm summer Saturdays.
Families swarmed the pathways like ants at a picnic. Children shrieked with delight at the monkeys. Fathers consulted maps with exaggerated seriousness while mothers handed out sandwiches and reminded everyone to use the loo before the reptile house.
The Dursleys moved through it all with ease and confidence.
Vernon bought everyone ice cream without being asked. Petunia took photographs of the boys in front of every exhibit, insisting on "just one more" each time.
Dudley and Piers ran ahead and doubled back, pointing at animals and making jokes that Daniel only half heard.
And through it all, Daniel watched. He watched the way Petunia's hand rested on his shoulder when they walked. He watched the way Vernon steered him away from a slippery patch of floor without a word, just a gentle pressure on his arm.
He watched the way Piers offered him a turn with the binoculars, and Dudley saved him a spot at the front of the penguin pool.
This is not the Dursley family I know, he thought. This is someone else entirely. Or perhaps… perhaps this is who they could have been, in a different story.
The thought unsettled him more than he wanted to admit. Because...if the Durleys were so different...what about the other characters?.
The reptile house was cool and dim after the bright heat of the afternoon sun.
His heart began to beat faster.
This is the moment, he thought. This is where it happens. He remembers it all like it had happened to him already. The snake, the glass disappearing with accidental magic, and the conversation with the Brazilian snake.
He followed Dudley and Piers past the glass cases, each one containing a different reptile. A massive python coiled around a branch, unblinking. A lizard the colour of old grass, frozen mid-stride. A toad the size of a dinner plate, staring at nothing with ancient, bulging eyes.
And then...there it was.
The glass case was larger than the others, filled with sand and a few flat rocks and a single, gnarled log. And lying across the log, basking in the warmth of a heat lamp, was a snake. It was not enormous, perhaps four feet long, with scales of deep, glossy brown and a pattern of darker diamonds running down its back. Its head was raised slightly, its tongue flicking in and out with lazy regularity.
Dudley pressed his nose against the glass. "Bit boring, isn't it?"
"Snakes dont really do much," Piers pointed out. "They sleep a lot, and my dad says they only eat once a week."
He stepped closer and noticed how sweaty his palms were.
Talk to it, he told himself. Just try. Like in the book. The snake should look at him, and he should feel something, and then the words will come.
He looked at the snake.
The snake looked back.
Its eyes were golden, slit-pupilled, and utterly, completely blank. It flicked its tongue again, once, twice, and then lowered its head onto the log with a soft, barely audible thump.
Nothing happened.
Daniel waited. His heart hammered against his ribs. He focused all his attention on the snake, willing it to speak, willing himself to speak, to understand, to do something.
"Hello?" he whispered, so quietly that even Dudley did not hear.
The snake did not react.
He tried again, louder this time. "Hello. Can you… can you understand me?"
Nothing. The snake's sides rose and fell with slow breathing. Its golden eyes stared through the glass, through Daniel, and through the whole reptile exhibition.
No words came. No hiss of Parseltongue. No strange, sibilant language flowing unbidden from his lips. Just the ordinary, human sound of a boy whispering to a creature that could not hear him.
He stepped back from the glass.
His chest felt tight, his throat burned. For the first time since waking up in Harry Potter's body, he felt something close to genuine panic.
I can't talk to it, he thought. I'm not a Parselmouth. Or… or maybe Parselmouths don't exist here. Maybe none of it exists.
He thought of the scar on his forehead. It was just a scar, a pale, raised line of tissue. It had never hurt him or glowed. It had never given him visions of a dark lord's mind.
It was just a mark, left over from a night he did not remember, in a life that might not have been magical at all.
What if I'm wrong? he thought. What if this isn't the Wizarding World? What if I died, really died, and I've been reborn into a world that only looks like the Harry Potter books? A world with no magic, no Hogwarts, no anything?
The thought was terrible but also somewhat liberating. If there was no magic, then there was no Dark Lord plotting to take his life.
No crazy Headmaster trying to use him as a pawn. No magical school filled with horrors.
"Harry? You all right?"
Piers was looking at him with concern. Dudley had moved on to the next case, but Piers had stayed behind, his freckled face creased with worry.
"Fine," Daniel said, and his voice sounded hollow even to his own ears.
"Just… tired, I think."
"We can go soon," Piers said. "My mum says zoos are knackering. Come on, Dudley's found a lizard with a blue tongue. It's mental!."
He followed him, but he did not look back at the snake. He did not need to. The snake had nothing to tell him.
The rest of the zoo trip passed in a blur of noise and colour that he barely registered. He ate his sandwich and nodded at the right moments. He let Petunia take a photograph of him, Dudley, and Piers in front of the lion enclosure, smiling automatically when she told him to.
But his mind was elsewhere, turning over the same questions like stones in a river.
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That night, after the birthday cake had been eaten and the last present had been unwrapped and Dudley had been tucked into bed with a stomach ache from too much chocolate, he sat on the edge of his own bed and thought.
He had two choices.
The first was to wait. In the original story, Harry's first letter from Hogwarts arrived a week before his eleventh birthday, on July 24.
That was just a month away. If the letter came, if it was real, then magic existed. Hogwarts existed, and he would have his answer.
The second choice was to ask. Petunia knew something...she had to. She was Lily Potter's sister. Even in this strange, inverted world, that much was surely true.
If James and Lily had been wizards, Petunia would know. If they had been something else...ordinary people, dead in a car crash, as the Dursleys had told Harry in the original story...then she would know that too.
He could walk downstairs right now. He could sit her down and ask her, plainly and directly: Who were my parents? How did they die? Was there anything strange about them? Anything… magical?
But the thought made his stomach clench with fear. Not because he was afraid of Petuni, the woman who had called him "love" and brushed the hair from his eyes, but because he was afraid of the answer.
What if she says there was no such thing as real magic? What if she looks at me like I'm crazy and tells me that James Potter was an accountant and Lily was a primary school teacher, and they died in a car crash, as everyone said?
He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling...at the wooden planks, the glass pendant lamp, and the tiny prisms of light that danced across the walls.
Wait, he told himself. Wait for the letter. If it comes, you'll have your answer. If it doesn't… then you'll ask.
But not yet. Not until you have to.
With his decision made, he closed his eyes.
Somewhere, in the distance, an owl hooted.
Or perhaps it was just the wind.