Hari Rabbit: A Potter's Tail.

Disclaimer: If you can recognise it as part of Harry Potter or any Looney Tunes or Disney movie, cartoon or comic, I don't own it. If you don't recognise it, but it bears a lot of similarities to some mix of the above, I don't own that either. The only things I could claim are the plot and two characters from the Toon-town side of things (Rocket & Roxy: Flying Foxes!) and I'm not getting anything for them (except the enjoyment of telling a story). Now that that's out of the way, please enjoy.

Some speech conventions:

"Normal speech".

"SHOUTING!"

"Thinking..."

«French»

§Parseltongue§

This is a response to whitetigerwolf's Harry Rabbit challenge.

Required:

- Harry is raised by Jessica Rabbit.

- Toons cannot, normally anyway, be part of the Wizard world (Cartoons being muggle and all that).

- Harry must attend Hogwarts.

- Harry cannot be involved in a M/M slash pairing.

Recomended:

- Jessica being a single mother to Harry (how is up to you).

- FemHarry (How many wizards do you think she'd give a heart attack to after being raised by Jessica?).

- Harry blood, or probably ink, adopted by Jessica (Picture toon Harry and how hard he'd be to kill).

- Jessica somehow (How is up to you, especially since I have no idea) being related to Lily.

- Lily actually being Jessica in disguise (Again, I have no idea how).

It takes but a moment to change the face of the future, the thing that transforms fate and destiny can seem almost insignificant. A simple change in diet on one particular night, a tiny whim that chooses strawberry ice-cream over chocolate, for example. It doesn't seem like much, but it has an effect, nonetheless. A single microscopic cell moves a little slower, and is beaten to the goal by another, the same in almost every way, but one... Congratulations, Mrs Potter, it's a girl...

Chapter 1: A Most Implausible Occurrence.

She was four years old, and frighteningly intelligent. She had taught herself to read last year, although her reading material consisted mostly of old Looney Tunes comics that Dudley had torn before throwing them away. Mostly, she was forced to read them in her cupboard under the stairs, late at night, with an old torch rescued from Dudley's 'broken stuff'. "Honestly," she had thought to herself, "My cousin is a bit of a berk. All I had to do was tighten the casing, and it worked fine."

She wasn't entirely certain of her own name, although she was sure that her mummy wouldn't have named her 'Freak' or 'Girl'. And it was on this day that she asked her aunt several questions. She had to time it carefully, so Uncle Vernon (whose motto seemed to be 'don't ask, don't get a beating') was away at work for Grunnings Drills. Dudley was in the back yard with a magnifying glass and an anthill. He'd be busy for hours.

"Auntie," she asked, not trying for her aunt's full name, as she didn't want another punishment for calling her 'Patooey', "Why don't I have a mummy and daddy, like Dudley?"

The woman must have been in a good mood, looking at her niece's black hair and green eyes. "They died in a car crash, girl," she answered.

"What were they like?"

"Decidedly strange."

The girl mustered all her courage for the next questions. "Did they love me? What did they name me?"

Petunia Dursley looked into those vividly emerald orbs, so much like Lily's, and answered her niece honestly, for the first time. "Yes, they did," she said, unable to keep a tinge of vitriol from her terse, clipped tone. "And they gave you a horrid, long name: Angharad Jennifer Potter."

Angharad, she decided, was far too large a name for such a small child, at least for everyday use, not that the Dursleys would use it. Vernon had been heard to disparage it as "some filthy, foreign name", wondering why a good British name wasn't enough. Hari was the right length, she thought. Although she knew names were supposed to mean something more than just "hey, you", she found that Dudley believed hers meant "punching bag", a view that her walrus-like uncle fostered and encouraged.

She'd only known her name for a few days when Aunt Petunia decided she would have to "earn her keep", and started her in on chores, including cooking, with swats from a wooden spoon if she made a mistake. Hari learned that while she was cooking, she was somewhat safe from other retribution, unless it was from her uncle. Vernon Dursley blamed her for anything that went wrong, and even when things were going well, blamed her for them not being better. Even if there was no possible way for her to be involved.

The disappearance of the Dursleys' niece was not good news. Their neighbours had noticed her, and although her presence was downplayed by that family, her absence called them into question rather severely. Especially since Vernon Dursley had to be committed to an asylum after his mental breakdown. He kept shouting, as they carried him away, "THE TV! SHE"S IN THE BLOODY TV!"

The tall, thin man who arrived at Privet Drive shortly after that was most odd. For starters, he wore a purple, two-piece suit, complete with a dark green bowler hat. His beard was well-groomed, and easily reached his waist. Perhaps the strangest thing about him was that even though he should have stood out like a sore thumb, everyone, from the neighbours to the investigating officers of the law, completely ignored him as he walked among them.

This was Albus Dumbledore. Quietly taking Petunia aside, he soon discovered what had happened. Dudley was watching the cartoons, and as the Tom & Jerry episode gave way to an old Roger Rabbit show, he'd decided to re-enact the cartoon that had just finished, with his cousin filling in for whichever character had been on the wrong end of the stick. Vernon was laughing as his son chased Hari around the room with a rounders bat, and when the little girl had tripped, had egged the boy on. Then things got weird.

As Dudley struck, Hari had tried to escape, and fell towards the television. Seeing his beloved telly in danger, Vernon had leaped to his feet, shouting incoherently, as little Hari Potter released a very strong burst of what had to be accidental magic, a worrisome fact, given that Dumbledore himself had bound four fifths of the girl's magical core.

When Hari fell into the TV, she landed head-first, crying from the injuries, her lower body and legs sticking out of the screen. The undamaged screen. Then something happened that quite put Dudley off cartoons for life. As he brought the rounders bat down towards his cousin's leg, the white-furred arm of the cartoon character reached out of the screen and grabbed his wrist in a yellow-gloved hand, pushing the boy back and spilling him to the floor. The other cartoon, a generously endowed redhead with blue eyes (who still reminded Petunia far too much of her sister Lily) had gathered the little girl in her arms, bringing the child completely inside the television! Then the rabbit had snatched Vernon's remote, stood back from the screen and pressed the button, whereupon the TV, not really meant to be turned off from the inside, had died, smoke escaping from the vents at the back.

As he left the Dursley home, Dumbledore was worried. With the muggles out of the big picture, he had no way to monitor and protect his investment. If he wanted Voldemort gone for good, he needed Angharad Potter. Blasted prophecy...

The city known as Toon-town was physically situated somewhere near Hollywood, California. For a given definition of physically. Which actually had little or nothing to do with physics, geography or even what passed for reality to most normal people. It was midnight, and Roger and Jessica Rabbit were calling on another toon. Possibly the only one who would be able to help them. Knocking on his door had an owl poke his head out of the small door above the knocker and glare around, finally coming to rest, not just on the toon rabbit and his wife, but also on the four-year old girl sleeping in Jessica's arms.

"What on earth do you..." he began, as the little girl stirred and revealed a scar, a lightning bolt above her right eye. "Oh. Bugger." Archimedes was not happy. Turning around, he started yelling into the house. "MERLIN! GET YOUR ARSE OUT OF BED! IT'S THAT KID YOU WERE WORRIED ABOUT!" The grouchy familiar slammed the miniature door, just as a toon, a scrawny old man with a beard that reached his feet, wearing purple robes and wizard's hat, opened the door.

"Ah, yes, little Miss Potter," he said. Looking up at the two toons before him, he smiled. "Come in, my friends, I've been expecting this day. I was hoping it wouldn't arrive, but here we stand." Stepping back from the door, the world's greatest and most famous wizard invited the Rabbits inside.

Seven years later...

"Hari Rabbit," the anthropomorphic foxes yelled. They were toons, of course. Half the people Hari knew were toons. The foxes were Rocket and Roxy, her best friends, and they could fly, really fast. None of the foxes' parents were ready to see their kids in a cartoon yet, although come to that, neither was Hari's mother, Jessica. It had become a sore point between Jessica and Roger after a couple of years, and he'd thrown himself into his work (literally, these are toons we're talking about). Thanks to a magical adoption ceremony set up by Grandpa Merlin, as Hari called him, the child that the two toons had rescued was now herself, for all intents and purposes, as much a toon as they. Hari didn't just become a toon, however. She'd changed physically, gaining certain of Roger's traits, blended with Jessica's. Her hair remained black, but instead of a 'messy, every which way it could' hair style, it was a gorgeous fall of midnight that flowed down her back, stopping just shy of her black-tipped puff-ball tail. She was covered in white fur, fluffy to the touch, but sleek to the eye. Her rabbit's ears, black tipped, much as her tail was, were long and very expressive. Hari dressed as human teens and pre-teens did, jeans, sneakers and T-shirt, and took enough of her mother's nature to look good doing so. That isn't to say she wasn't who she was born, of course. Features from before her adoption remained, such as the scar on her brow. Then there was her magic.

Grandpa Merlin had explained to her that she wasn't just a little girl, nor would she be just a toon, before performing the ceremony. She was a witch. Once she learned how to harness it properly, she would be a very powerful one, too. Of course, he could teach her a few exercises, study techniques and such, to help prepare her for that day, but he couldn't actually teach her. On top of that, once she was adopted, she would have to get used to the silly-putty laws of reality toons inflicted on their surroundings.

As her friends caught up to her, the trio discussed such things as children of that age will discuss, school, sports, fashion and boys (Rocket refused to be drawn in on that one, and wasn't old enough to feel like commenting on girls). They arrived at Hari's house at the same time as a large mundane owl, which dropped a letter in her mailbox, then landed on it and waited.

Upon taking the letter from the mailbox, Hari revised her opinion of the owl. Rather than mundane, it was magical, a postal owl in fact. Turning to her friends, she sighed.

"This could take me awhile, guys," she said. "You should probably go on home without me."

"Not your fault, Hari," Roxy replied, as the two foxes flexed their legs, bending in preparation for jumping. "We'll see you tomorrow, though, won't we?"

"Likely not," she answered. "I've no idea what this is going to take, so I have to speak to Mom and Grandpa Merlin."

Rocket nodded. Her toon friends knew about Hari's magic, as Merlin had told her what to expect. It was dangerous to bind someone's magical core, as it was intimately connected with the soul and life force of the person who had it. On top of that, the toon wizard had been unable to unbind her. There were only two ways to unbind it, the first was if the binder were to release the block, and the other was for the blocked person to break out through the bindings themselves, a much riskier prospect, but not without rewards for the risks: a witch, for example, who shattered the bonds on her magical core tended to be more powerful than one who didn't 'exercise' their core. As she watched her friends launch themselves into flight(she always thought of it as falling with style, but they kept forgetting to hit the ground), Hari shook her hair and ears, trying to shake the feeling that she wouldn't see them again, and walked into the house.

Then she peeled herself off the wall, and went inside.