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2021-02-26
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2021-06-10
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Dahlia Parkinson is Dead

Chapter 7: A Debriefing and a Request

Notes:

There’s a bit of a summary regarding my altered version of ‘Captain America: Civil War’, which I tried to stick as close to as suited both the needs of this fic and my own personal preferences.

DISCLAIMER: I don’t own the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Potterverse, or any characters from either of them.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Previously on ‘Dahlia Parkinson is Dead’:

“There,” Steve sighed in relief. The third man and Sam gradually let go, although Steve moved over and gripped his shoulder in what was clearly meant to be a comforting gesture.

Bucky groaned, his head still more than a little fuzzy. “What happened?” he asked, his voice a raspy whisper.

Steve looked pained. “We were at a HYDRA base in Siberia, remember? We were trying to get there before Zemo could release those other soldiers.”

Zemo.

Yes, he remembered that name.


Monday, August 22nd, 2016

Bucky tried to recall what happened. It all came rushing back to him remarkably quickly.

A Sokovian nutjob named Helmut Zemo had bombed a United Nations building in Vienna, while wearing a rubber mask in a vague likeness Bucky – vague, but still good enough to fool a grainy security camera. If Bucky hadn’t been in Avengers Tower at the time, overseeing a training session of the Tower’s newest security forces, he likely would have had every anti-terror organisation on the damn planet out to get him. As it was, the Wakandan Prince T’Challa, whose father had been killed in the blast while they were visiting, hadn’t gotten the message until after the Avengers had arrived on scene to help. He’d nearly killed Bucky before the others intervened, and had ended up impulsively revealing himself as an Enhanced Person as well. The new King of Wakanda had strength and speed to rival Bucky and Steve, and better reflexes, to boot.

And once they’d gotten that mess sorted out, Helmut Zemo had shown up, disguised as a first responder treating the injured. He’d gotten Bucky alone and locked him in a reinforced room, and then the bastard had read a series of HYDRA trigger words that put Bucky under his control. Bucky had had no choice but to give him the location of a HYDRA base in Siberia – a location he hadn’t even remembered until Zemo had unlocked that memory.

And then it had gotten even worse. By the time their ‘conversation’ had been done, security had been well aware that something was wrong, so Zemo had covered his escape by forcing Bucky to attack the guards and his own teammates as a distraction.

The problem had been partially solved by Steve managing to knock him out in the scuffle, and Bucky had been himself when he woke again, but then their situation had gotten worse – much, much worse.

While CIA Agent Everett Ross seemed willing to believe that Bucky had not been in control of his actions for that brief period of time, the new State Secretary Thaddeus Ross (a man of no relation to the agent, but who had a long and very unpleasant history with Stark, the still-missing Avenger Bruce Banner, and Banner’s alter-ego) had insisted that he be taken into custody as a possible accomplice in the bombing. Bucky had escaped the facility with Steve, Sam, and Wanda (the other Avengers probably would have helped, but they’d been in a different section of the building at the time that clusterfuck all went down, and there hadn’t been enough time to tell them). Plus, plausible deniability was probably the only thing that kept Secretary Ross from arresting the rest of the team.

They’d wound up meeting the others at the Siberian base, along with King T’Challa, who was out for revenge on his father’s killer. Zemo had been waiting for them, and had revealed the tragic, painful truth of what had driven him to his act of mass-murder: his father, wife, and young son had all been killed during Ultron’s attack in Sokovia, and he blamed the Avengers for it. Apparently, the bombing of a building on the other side of the Atlantic was all part of his convoluted plan to get revenge on the team.

From there, however, Bucky’s memory of events was a little fuzzy. Thankfully, Steve was there to fill him in. “Zemo played a surveillance recording of Howard and Maria’s deaths. He was trying to tear the team apart from the inside, and have us destroy ourselves, but he didn’t count on you and I having already told Tony what really happened. I mean, Tony was still pissed off, but mostly at Zemo for trying to use the memory of his parents to hurt us. Then the bastard set those other Winter Soldiers on us.”

Bucky was starting to vaguely remember the fight, now. The five assassins had apparently – and predictably – been furious when Zemo had told them that Captain America was alive, and that he’d outed HYDRA to the world. So, following the old saying ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’, they’d been more than happy to let Zemo live and focus on killing the Avengers, instead.

“We took a pretty bad beating, but you and Rhodey got the worst of it by far. One of the Soldiers dodged a laser shot from Vision, and Rhodey got hit in the back. And you…” Steve swallowed. “One of the other Soldiers had Tony down for the count, and was trying to rip out the Arc Reactor with his bare hands. You were trying to pull the bastard off when Tony blasted him.”

Steve’s eyes trailed over to Bucky’s left side, and Bucky finally dared to turn his heavy head to look at the damage he’d been feeling since he woke up.

The metal arm was gone. The only part of it that remained was the shoulder and a short stub of burned, twisted metal. “Fuck,” Bucky whispered, unable to come up with anything else at the moment.

It really wasn’t all that funny, but apparently everyone nearby was desperate for some kind of levity in this shitty situation, so the other three men all chuckled, even if it died out quickly.

King T’Challa spoke up, now. “Your friend Stark was already discussing the idea of making a replacement for that arm, and I have offered my assistance and my country’s resources.”

Bucky was skeptical at that. From what he’d heard, Wakanda was a small, poor nation, with very few resources to offer. He appreciated the gesture, but how could they possibly help?

Sam seemed to read the confusion on his face. “Yeah, it turns out that the Wakandans have a few not-so-little secrets they’ve been keeping from the rest of the world. Including but certainly not limited to this jet.”

Bucky looked around, taking in the curved metal walls and ceiling of the room they were in. It was only then that he realised he could hear the whooshing of air as they flew through it at high speeds. It was also then that he noticed Rhodes lying in another bed opposite his, apparently out cold.

Sam burst out laughing. “Don’t tell me the super-soldier-assassin didn’t even realize he was on a goddamn plane until just now! I thought you super-spy types were a hell of a lot more observant than that!”

Bucky scowled. He normally was more observant than that. And he normally had a better poker face, too. “Well, I’m not usually on whatever goddamn drugs you’ve put in me.” A thought occurred to him. “What goddamn drugs have you put in me, exactly?”

“It’s the special stuff that was mixed up for you and me,” Steve answered, “We were able to grab a few IV bags of it from the Quinjet before leaving.”

Well, that was a small relief, at least. After having been shot up with at least two versions of the Super Soldier Serum by HYDRA – and God only knew what else – Bucky was more than a little paranoid about what kind of drugs got put into his body. The custom concoctions the Stark Industries BioChem division whipped up for him and Steve were something he was okay with, though. Something he could trust. “Good. So, what now?”

Steve frowned. “Right now, we need to lay low. Tony and Pepper are taking care of smoothing things over with Secretary Ross and the rest of the upper brass. Until then, Nat’s taking Wanda to hide out at Clint’s place, and we’re headed to Wakanda to get you and Rhodey treated.”

Bucky sighed. “Guess I’m gonna be off the roster for a while,” he mused, “Can’t go out in the field with a missing arm and a head full of HYDRA triggers…” He was getting tired. Did someone just give him more drugs? He hated it when that happened.

“We will see what we can do about those, as well,” King T’Challa told him, “For now, you should get some more rest.”

He said something else, but Bucky couldn’t hear him as he slipped into sleep once more.


Thursday, September 1st, 2016

Harry had just had a fairly good – if bittersweet – morning. He’d seen James off on the Hogwarts Express, said goodbye to Ginny, Albus, and Lily, and headed off to the Ministry. He wasn’t expecting to see a vaguely familiar witch standing in his private office, a file folder in hand and a couple of rolled-up newspapers tucked under her arm. “Auror Potter.”

Harry blinked. He knew he’d seen her somewhere, but he couldn’t place her. “Er… Yes, that’s me.”

The witch rolled her eyes. “My name is Tracey Higgs, born Tracey Davis, and you and I were in the same year at Hogwarts. I was in Slytherin House, but you probably don’t remember me because I wasn’t one of Draco Malfoy’s little groupies.”

“Ah. What can I do for you?”

Higgs held her file out to him. “Since you can’t even remember me from when we shared a classroom, I should perhaps tell you that I’m now an Unspeakable, and you once played Quidditch against my husband Terry.”

Harry could somewhat recall a red-headed witch in Slytherin green sitting next to one of his more memorable classmates from that house, but had to admit to himself that it was a lot easier to remember Terence Higgs, the fifth-year Slytherin Seeker he’d gone up against in his first-ever Quidditch match.

“Your department has been monitoring the remaining Death Eaters and their families, right?”

Harry raised one eyebrow, and opened the folder to see an aerial photograph of a person standing in an empty parking lot next to an abandoned-looking building, carrying a second person, who appeared to be unconscious, in their arms. The picture didn’t move, indicating that it was Muggle in origin. “Yes, we have been, but we can’t do much unless we have a reason to suspect one of them of an actual crime.”

“How about kidnapping, or colluding with sentient Dark Creatures in an attack on humans?” Higgs slapped both newspapers onto Harry’s desk, and Harry recognised the first one immediately. It was an issue of the Daily Prophet from last July, announcing the shocking Dementor attack in America. The second publication was easily identified as the New York Times, and upon a quick look, appeared to report on the same event from a Muggle perspective.

He quickly made the connection between Higgs’s question and the newspapers. “You think a Death Eater is behind this?”

“His son, actually. I have reason to believe that that is Theodore Nott, using the Dementors to abduct a Squib who used to be a member of the Parkinson Family.”

Harry looked up at her. He was well aware that, after Draco Malfoy had started to distance himself from the pure-blood supremacists, his Hogwarts girlfriend Pansy Parkinson had wound up marrying Theodore Nott. He looked at the picture again. “Well, this picture doesn’t look like it’s not him, but I assume you have more evidence than this.”

“Of course I do. The target of the attack is one Darcy Lewis, formerly known as Dahlia Parkinson. If you believe Lord Parkinson, his younger daughter tragically died of the Black Cat Flu at age seven, during the outbreak in the middle of our fifth year, but there’s no documentation to prove that. What actually happened was that her parents left her at a Muggle orphanage, where she was eventually adopted by an American couple, because she turned out to be a Squib.”

Harry frowned. “But why in Merlin’s name would Nott want to abduct her?”

Higgs then decided to get comfortable, sitting in down the extra chair and crossing her legs primly. “Not Nott – Dederick Parkinson. I think dear Theo is only helping his father-in-law out. Apparently, Pansy has been discovered as being unable to conceive children, which would mean that she and her father would be the last living members of the Parkinson Family. And that’s something Dederick Parkinson won’t just take lying down. Miss Lewis may be a Squib, but any children she has by a pure-blood wizard would also be considered pure-bloods. And her father desperately wants a pure-blood heir to continue the family bloodline after he and Pansy are gone, even if the name itself vanishes.”

She was painting a very disturbing picture. “You think that she was abducted to be married off to a pure-blood groom?”

“My source tells me that she received several letters, each one increasingly hostile and demanding in nature, in the weeks leading up to the second attack. And yes, I said the ‘second attack’. The first attempt to take her didn’t make the Prophet, although you may have heard of it. Does the name Sylvanus Rookwood ring a bell?”

It did. “Augustus Rookwood’s son. He was arrested in America for using the Cruciatus Curse on a Muggle last May.”

“Darcy Lewis’s boyfriend, actually, while he was stopping Rookwood from snatching her off the street. Rookwood alleges that Dederick Parkinson hired him to take her, but he has no supporting documentation, so that accusation won’t wash with the Wizengamot.”

Now her motivations for coming to him were becoming a little clearer. “You know there’s only so much investigating I can do without the Wizengamot’s approval. Especially since Parkinson never actually took the Dark Mark.”

“Then do what you can!” she snapped, before visibly calming herself, “It’s not just Darcy Lewis’s life that’s in danger. Apparently, she was pregnant when she was taken. Her friends are concerned about the safety of her child, and it’s only a matter of time before they act rashly out of that concern. And believe me when I say that those people acting rashly could have serious, long-reaching consequences.”


Tracey Higgs, née Davis, was not an ordinary Slytherin student. For starters, she was not a pure-blood. Her maternal grandfather, John Falsworth, was a muggle-born, which just barely made her a half-blood (her and Terry’s potential children would still be classed as pure-bloods, which was possibly the biggest reason why his parents didn’t demand that he break off their engagement when they found out). During the Dark Lord’s reign, she’d kept her head down and flown under the radar, and had come out unscathed. But it was not her grandfather who had kept her somewhat educated on Muggle history; rather, it was his older brother. Tracey had spent the first several years of her life listening to her Great-Uncle James’s stories about his time fighting in World War Two alongside Captain America, Bucky Barnes, and the other Howling Commandoes. So, she knew full well the significance of the identity of Darcy’s boyfriend, and why the Times had considered him notable enough to make a mention of him being at the site of the Dementor attack.

Being a grand-niece of a Howling Commando, as opposed to a granddaughter, she wasn’t quite as close with the direct descendants of the famed group, but she had been in contact with Sharon Carter, mainly due to the fact that her mother, Gemma Falsworth Davis, had grown up knowing Sharon’s father. And being involved with Carter had led her to meeting Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. Hawkeye and the Black Widow. So, whenever the assassin pair had a mission-related query regarding the magical communities in Britain and the rest of Europe, they usually directed that query through her.

So, when Tracey learned from Romanoff that Sergeant Barnes’s girlfriend and unborn child had been abducted by a British wizard, she knew she had to come through. Because the Avengers’ hands were currently tied by both the Statute of Secrecy and the Sokovia Accords, and M.A.C.U.S.A. wasn’t having any luck obtaining actionable evidence against the Parkinson Family. If they got desperate enough, the Avengers could easily break the aforementioned ties and launch their own search mission in England, without permission from their government, which would have severe penalties for violating the Accords. And if they chose to break the Statute to obtain permission, they could easily start a war between the magical and mundane halves of America, if not the rest of the world, since witches and wizards could easily fall under the Accords’ jurisdiction, but would be highly resistant to registering. It was an issue that was now being faced by nearly every magical Ministry in the world, including her own.

This meant that she had to come up with enough evidence to justify a full investigation from this side, and hopefully a rescue mission, as well. And she had to do it before the Avengers lost their patience with the politics of this whole mess.

She told Potter as such, although she left out her own familial connection to the Howling Commandoes. She also had to go into a bit of detail about who the Avengers were, because although he’d learned about Captain America and the Commandoes in Muggle school prior to Hogwarts, he’d apparently become somewhat out of touch with the Muggle world since joining the magical one, meaning he didn’t even know that the Captain and Barnes were still alive and active. He did, at least, know about the alien invasion in New York, and the disaster in Sokovia. (Of course, you’d have to be living under a rock – even by magical standards when it came to the Muggle world – to not know about those).

Potter was quick to agree that a war between the magical and Muggle worlds over the Sokovia Accords was something that had to be avoided at all costs. “I’ll see what I can do about extra surveillance on Nott, but I can’t do anything about Parkinson and his daughter, yet.”

Tracey frowned, but conceded that this was the best she could hope for, for now. “I’ll let Romanoff know to alert me if they come up with any other evidence.”

It was a bit underhanded, going through back channels to get results instead of the official ones, but if it meant preventing a war (and hopefully saving the newest descendant of the Howling Commandoes and their mother), then Tracey felt that it would be worth it.

Notes:

Alright, so as you can see, some of ‘Captain America: Civil War’ still happened… except for, you know, the actual Civil War (which was actually my least favourite part of the movie, no matter how awesome the Airport Battle was) and Steve not being honest with Tony about the Starks’ deaths.

Regarding Tracey Davis’s blood status: according to the HP Wiki and Pottermore, the official definition of a ‘pure-blood’ is a witch or wizard who does not have any Muggle or Muggle-born grandparents. A half-blood is anyone who falls between this definition and a Muggle-born (note that both your parents being Muggle-born makes you one, too). Having one muggle-born grandparent would basically be the closest to ‘pure’ that a half-blood can get, and if their partner is a pure-blood or also close enough, their children can be considered pure-bloods. I was also originally planning to pair her up with Blaise Zabini, but then I figured that just wouldn’t work with his character (he may not have been a Death Eater or a sympathiser in canon, but he’s still a stuck-up blood snob). Higgs is really only memorable as the Slytherin Seeker in ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’, and then he basically vanishes from the story. Basically, he’s one of the less actively nasty Slytherin characters, as far as we can tell, so I figured he’d be a better match for a half-blood, at least in that House.

In Marvel Comics canon, James Montgomery Falsworth, a.k.a. Union Jack, was actually active during World War One, and he had a younger brother named John, who became a vampire (and I think his grandson did, too). In the MCU, however, James is a member of the Howling Commandoes in World War Two, with no mention of his family or the Union Jack moniker. And in this AU, John is a muggleborn wizard instead of a vampire. Or – since there are vampires in the Potterverse – maybe he became a vampire after having Tracey’s mother, which could be why Tracey spent so much time with his brother instead of him. Either way, I’m not overly familiar with that storyline, so I’m not touching it.