[Fic]: Gwen and Ken's Hogwarts Adventure (2400 words)
Gwen and Ken's Hogwarts Adventure
a Draka series-Harry Potter crossover fanfiction by Andrew yclept Aelfwine
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The characters and situations of the Draka series are copyright S.M. Stirling. The characters and situations of the Harry Potter series are copyright J.K. Rowling. They may not be used or reproduced commercially without permission. The use of these characters and situations is not to be construed as challenge to said copyright. They are merely borrowed for this work of non-commercial fanfiction, from which the author derives no financial benefit.
Warnings: Yours truly. Hints of het and femmeslash. Gender change. Confused Samothracians. Cute Draka. The Archangel Michael has an odd sense of humour.
No former Draka archons or Samothracian cyberwarriors were harmed during the making of this fanfic.
ETA: Updated with a slightly edited version for another three hundred words.
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Ken Lafarge woke suddenly. After the experience of falling, locked in combat with that damned Snake bitch, falling into the wreckage of a collapsing molehole and dying, triumphant, knowing he was taking her with him, praise God, and that at least this Earth wasn't falling to the hell that was the Domination of the Draka, not the way the Earth of his ancestors had fallen, not on his watch, it was... unexpected, to put things mildly.
Sure, he had some vague belief, not so much in the specific Heaven of his childhood Catechism classes as in the possibility that there might be some sort of afterlife. But an afterlife surely wouldn't feel exactly like the regular living world. There were meant to be saints and angels and ancestors and people like that, not to mention the presence of the Most High. Even if the afterlife didn't actually work like that, surely he'd not be seeing a plaster ceiling, one that wasn't exactly Samothracian in style but close enough. A ceiling that was much like the ones they'd had in that strange alternate history he'd fought and died to defend.
Then a flood of further memories hit him like a meteorite. Saints and angels and ancestors... he'd seen those. But not the Most High; they told him he wasn't ready to meet the Creator yet. He'd been told he'd done well, but that he had another task, in another world. That he'd be going there, not as some sort of discarnate spirit but physically, in a new body, one suited to the job.
That was one thing. He could deal with another mission. The part that bothered him was that in the afterlife he'd seen the damned Snake he'd been fighting as well. Gwendolyn Ingolfsson. She looked almost like a child, or at least an adolescent. Shy, vulnerable, surprised, even? No, he was not going to feel a single jot of sympathy for a Draka. Much less think that she looked not only human, but almost fetching. Not she. It. It's not human. Homo servus are mind-gelded humans, but Homo drakensis are simply animals that look and act a bit like human beings. They're less like us than chimpanzees. Even they admit they're not human, Lafarge.
He was starting to hope and pray that this was all a hallucination. Or some ridiculous simulation, part of a prank that was being played on him back in cyberwarrior training on Samothrace, where he'd gone into an ordinary training session where he'd fight another battle against computer-generated Draka only to find himself instead subjected to an absurd fantasy world. Not that anyone on Samothrace, even the very worst sort of pervert, would dream of making a Draka look shy or sympathetic, like a young girl on her first day of high school in a new town and state, let alone making her seem cute, of all the disgusting things.
#
Clad in a something like a short loose dress with a leather belt, a Draka school tunic such as he'd seen in images from the enemy's media over the course of his training, her mahogany-red hair loose down her back rather than braided as it had been during their handful of face-to-face encounters, Ingolfsson stood beside Lafarge in something that wasn't a vast room but also wasn't anything else that he could readily get his mind around. He'd imagined she was overwhelmed at being still conscious, still existent. The modern non-human variety of Draka were bad at imagining much of anything that didn't fit with their worldview, and they'd been designed so as to eliminate even the possibility of something resembling religious faith from their minds. But when he glanced at her she grinned and raised a copper-coloured eyebrow. "Well, Yank, yo' got any notion what in Loki's name is gon' on heah? I ain't ashamed to admit I've got flat nothing."
He refused to dignify her with a response. And then her eyes went wide, and she ran to someone who suddenly appeared, or who perhaps had been there all along. More than that, she squealed, as if she were pretending to be an actual human girl who was excited about something. He saw three women, two of them, a blonde and a redhead, with the hard features of the ancient, merely human, merely evil Draka who'd driven his ancestors to Alpha Centauri system and the planet Samothrace. The third one was surprisingly ordinary, dark haired and olive skinned. What didn't make sense was that he saw in an instant that the two Draka treated the third woman as an equal, even a trusted friend or, what was worse, a partner in some unnatural relationship. They all embraced Ingolfsson, as if they cared for her. Well, perhaps they did. The human Draka had been vile bastards, an entire nation of rapists, slavers, perverts, and murderers, but they'd still been human.
Unlike the soulless animals they'd made as their twisted descendents. He was not going to admit that Ingolfsson's imitation of human delight was shockingly believeable, and would have fooled him if he'd not known she was a drakensis. Any more than he was going to admit that he'd seen her shed real tears. Much less that, if he'd not known she was a drakensis, his instinct on finding himself alone with her in that strange vast space would have been to reach out and take her hand, as if they were two children lost alone in the dark.
A little whispering voice in the back of his mind told him that Ingolfsson couldn't be soulless, after all, given that they were apparently both dead and in the next life together. He told it to go and stuff itself.
#
It was at about that time that he saw his parents and forgot about the Snake. At least until, some uncertain amount of time later, after meeting everyone from the sister who'd died in a flyer accident when he was an infant to the legendary Frederick Lafarge who'd led his people to Samothrace, he found himself standing side by side with Ingolfsson and being given instructions by someone he had a bad feeling was the Archangel Michael.
He shook his head and spoke out loud. "Right. Fight a great evil, save another world. Fine. I could even handle the 'using the gifts of magic you never knew in your first life' bit, much as I can't believe there is any such thing as magic. But 'working together with your once-enemy'? No way. Madre de Díos, Archangel, what the Hell are you smoking?"
"Nothing, actually," a voice said inside his head, sounding, unfortunately, nothing like his helpful computer. "You and young Miss Ingolfsson have talents that will help some other fine young beings succeed at fighting evil. And while you're at it you'll be able to help each other with some things neither of you ever managed to do in your last lives. But you can think about all that later. Right now you've got a new life to get used to. You've got a week before you catch the train to school. Don't waste it."
He couldn't remember ever being told how to talk to an archangel, at least not outside of saying his prayers, anyhow. "So, you're going to be riding my shoulder? Doesn't the General of the Heavenly Host have better things to do with his time?"
"I have all the Eternity I or anybody else needs, Lafarge. But as it happens I've been a general since before your entire universe was more than a twinkle in the Father's eye, and I know better than to micromanage an operation. I just thought I'd stop by and say hello. Convince you that you're not insane, that sort of thing. Just a friendly little visit."
"Jesus."
"The Boss is taking an interest as well, of course, but this sort of thing is more my reponsibility. You know about chain-of-command, right, soldier?"
"Right. So, what are my resources?"
"Do a little thinking and you'll remember most all of them. I'll be off now, but don't worry, I'm always watching. And have fun! The Father didn't give your species the capacity for pleasure and amusement and wonder and kindness and love in order for you to waste it being a po-faced sexless little cyborg battle drone."
The voice left, and the strange sense of presence with it. Lafarge sat up. He was in a bed, in something that looked like a small hotel room. He was wearing pyjamas, ordinary ones with wooden buttons. And something was wrong with his chest... He looked down at it. It wasn't shaped right. Madre de Díos! I'm a girl.
He fell flat on his back again, staring up at the ceiling. And a flood of memories ran through his mind.
Growing up on ranches in America, Australia, Argentina. Learning Spanish and English and Japanese, basic Latin, and a fair smattering of Mapuche, but never entirely losing her mother's high plains twang. Learning to rope and ride and throw a bolas, to shoot and stalk and track, to live in the bush, to fight with knife and sword and empty hands... and also physics, chemistry, accounting, ranch management, the principles of potions, and magical theory, because her parents were a witch and a wizard as well as being wealthy ranchers with an interest in scientific research and exotic branches of archaeology.
They'd vanished when she was nine, off on an expedition she was too young to participate in. There was talk of a fight with a local Dark Lord, talk of an experiment gone wrong, even talk of kidnapping by aliens, or an ancient starship that took off unexpectedly with them aboard. Her grandparents, who'd been old even by wizarding standards, had died not long afterward, and from then on she'd been raised mostly by staff, and raised well. She was Kendall Stoddard Lafarge, whom everybody called Ken. And now, at fourteen, she was transferring from the small and obscure Stockton Magical Academy in Colorado to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the most famous magical school in Europe.
I'm going to be classmates with the Boy Who Lived! Ken shook her head. If the famous Harry Potter turns out to not be some sort of witless show-off, maybe we'll be friends. That's it, and it's a big if. She might be a girl, now, but she was damned if she'd be turning into some witless fangirl, even if she never let it show.
She. Not he. It was surprising how easy it was to think of herself with the feminine pronoun. Fine, I'm a girl. I can get used to that. But I'm still Ken Lafarge, thank God. The alarm clock by her bedside went off. She shut it off and dragged herself into the bathroom to start the day. First things first, then calisthenics. I'm not letting myself get soft. More than that, I'm going to beat that pretty Snake's cute little ass. Metaphorically speaking, that is.
She was midway through a set of two hundred two-finger pushups before she realised she'd called Ingolfsson pretty. Bad enough inside my own head, but there's no way I'm going to do it out loud. Remember that, Lafarge.
At last, done with her workout, she went back into the bathroom. It was 0730 hours, local time. The card on the little desk said they'd be serving breakfast downstairs from eight o'clock until ten.
She was feeling properly awake now. She looked at herself in the mirror as she peeled off her shorts and teeshirt. Madre de Díos, I'm gorgeous. If I'd seen me when I was a fourteen year old boy, I'd have been head over heels. She shouldn't look. She really shouldn't look. She especially wasn't going to think about how stunned she would have been as a fourteen year old boy to actually see a girl without any clothes on.
She had small, nicely shaped breasts and a lithe, pleasantly muscled body. Her hair was the same light brown, almost blonde shade as it had been when she was a man, but now it was down to her waist. The male Ken Lafarge had never even imagined having hair that long, but the female Ken Lafarge was surprised to find that she knew exactly how to handle it. Half asleep and shocked at the changes in herself she'd put it up into a neat twist before her workout, and now her hands seemed to know exactly how to let it down, brush it out, and then put it up again before her shower. It was a bit of a surprise, but somehow it didn't seem like such a shock after the initial strangeness of discovering herself as a girl to begin with. And Ken Lafarge always had preferred the look of long hair on a girl. It looks nice. It's not a liability. I'm keeping it.
That was a safe thing to think about. She wasn't going to think about any other hair, especially not the little patch of fleece at the juncture of her thighs. After waking up she'd dealt with the realities of relieving herself in a female body with half-sleeping competence, guided by the strange set of memories that she'd apparently woken up with. She'd do her damnedest to use that same competence to wash herself, and whilst she did that she'd review the female Kendall Lafarge's memories of using one of the local chemical propellant rifles and systematically compare them with the electromagnetic projectile rifles the male Kenneth Lafarge had used to keep leather-winged gruks and other predators off the livestock on the family ranch back on Samothrace.
She was absolutely not going to explore a different aspect of living in a female body. I'm not a pervert. I'm only feeling all tingly when I look at myself in the mirror because I'm still thinking like a man. It will pass. And I am certainly not wondering what it would be like if there were another girl here to scrub my back. Especially not a redhead whose green eyes have just a hint of glow to them.
TBC
So, this is something that essentially fell out of what passes for my mind this afternoon. I'd said I'd not write anything else until I'd finished with my current original project, but I suppose I needed a break. I'm posting it because this bit is actually a self-contained scene, rather than being something like the Harry/Hermione with voyeuristic unicorns fic which is essentially one long scene and can't be posted until it's finished.
The next bit will be Gwen's experience. Then we'll have Diagon Alley and the train to Hogwarts. I've not decided yet if they'll meet Harry and Hermione and friends in Diagon Alley or on the train. For that matter, I've not yet decided if I'll put this in the "real" Fourth Year (i.e. Goblet of Fire) or in a sort of nebulous "Harry and Hermione are fourteen and at Hogwarts with thirteen-year-old Luna and Ginny and fourteen-year-old Gwen and Ken" setting.