Author's Note: Here is the plan.
I am going to write four Fem Harrys. Each one, for me, fits the perfect profile of a different Hogwarts house. Each will also have a different name, so readers can differentiate better. Based on their house profiling, they will each also have different wand woods and Patronuses. In all other respects, however, they will just be Harry. I will take that starting canvas and create further differences with it within the text itself. These girls will be similar yet dissimilar to the Harry that you know, and also similar yet dissimilar to each other.
I will make four different stories and rotate through chapters for each girl, telling her full story with her at the helm. I call this the Four Fem Harrys Project.
This document you're reading right now is the Ravenclaw Fem Harry.
Please note that this is a full canon rewrite. All canon information and unchanged aspects will be included. I will also be attempting to make the story as relatable and floating timeline as possible.
The final pairing for each girl will be Tom Riddle, different from Voldemort, partly because one of the only things all four girls will have in common is a connection to the same person - but in his younger human self, before some of the corruption and most of the crimes, I think the interest and potential changes would be far more pronounced.
Lucy One
Nearly ten years had passed since the Dursleys had woken up to find their niece on the front step, but Privet Drive had hardly changed at all.
The sun rose over their expensive detached suburban home and their neat, colorful, homeowner's association style garden and flower beds. It glanced over their grand mahogany and stained glass front door with its carefully polished bronze number four, through their large living room window and their floor-length expensive curtains, and into their living room. The living room was made up of lots of less expensive fabrics and furnishings made to look incredibly expensive, from fireplace and armchairs to standing tables with vases and little glass tea-tables. Everything had a 'look but don't touch' aura, and with the aid of a subtly placed air freshener, the room with its perfectly clean carpets even smelled expensive.
Everything almost exactly the same as it had been on the night when Mr Dursley had seen that fateful news report about the owls. Only the photographs on the polished mantel piece really showed how much time had passed. Ten years ago there had been lots of pictures of what looked like a large pink beach ball wearing different colored bonnets. But Dudley Dursley was no longer a baby, and now the photographs showed a large blond boy riding his first bicycle, on a carousel at the fair, playing a computer game with his father, being hugged and kissed by his mother.
The room also held signs of a small, dark-haired girl. She was in a serious, formal family dinner party portrait on one wall, here playing the role of "perfect little daughter" and dressed rather like a mini Chanel. But she wasn't in many other places. In most other photographs, either she was playing and riding bikes with Dudley - the only one to include her - or she didn't exist at all.
The small, dark-haired girl was Lucy Potter, the Dursleys' niece, and she was asleep at the moment but not for long. Her Aunt Petunia was awake and her cry pierced the air like that of a particularly loud and obnoxious bird.
"Up! Get up! Now!"
Lucy woke with a start. Her aunt rapped on the door again.
"Up!" she screeched. Lucy curled up in her bed, eyes big from underneath the covers, and lay very still as she waited for her aunt to go away. At last, she heard Aunt Petunia sigh and heard her heels clack away. Lucy relaxed. Safe again. She sat up and scratched at the side of her head through her wild black hair, blinking peacefully at the far wall in the quiet early morning. She tried to remember the dream she had been having. It had been a good one. There had been a flying motorcycle in it. She had a funny feeling she'd had the same dream before.
Her aunt was back outside the door. "Are you up yet?" she demanded.
"Yes," Lucy lied automatically.
"Well get a move on, I want you to look after the bacon. And don't you dare let it burn, I want everything perfect on Duddy's birthday."
Lucy gave a minute sigh and closed her eyes. That was right. Dudley was turning eleven today and he hadn't been able to swing letting her come along. Here came another day at Mrs Figg's.
"Are you listening to me?" her aunt demanded.
"Loud and clear," said Lucy flatly, annoyed, and she rolled out of bed as she heard her aunt's heels clack away up the stairs.
Lucy got slowly out of bed and started looking for socks. She found a pair under her bed and, after pulling a spider off one of them, put them on. Lucy was used to spiders, because the cupboard under the stairs was full of them and that was where she slept. It had been that way ever since she could remember - ever since she'd been orphaned as an infant and sent to live with her aunt and uncle, the Dursleys.
Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon were strict, chore-heavy, and repressive. They never bought her nice clothes or things; sometimes they even bullied her. Everything nice she had was on the kindness of her cousin Dudley. Dudley was very spoiled by his adoring parents and a bit of a bully at school himself, getting into fights a lot that his parents turned a blissful blind eye to. But he took care of her as his smaller sister, and often used temper tantrums to get his own way with things, including when it came to her. He was in her class at school, so he kept her from being bullied, allowed her hobbies and school friends. He even paid for many of the clothes and things that she wanted. All of her hobbies, her cupboard decorations, her nice clothes - they were all him. He used some of the endless hoard of money his parents gave him on her. Sisters, he said, were there to be protected - including surrogate ones.
So her entire cupboard was a reflection of the things he bought her. A small and plain space, narrow and rectangular with a slanting ceiling and plain wood linings, it had a single bare light bulb and did sometimes carry spiders. Lucy constantly felt repressed, suffocated in there.
But she got to decorate it the way she liked, at least. She'd hung long, patterned, colorful sheets on the walls in lieu of window curtains. Fluorescent planets and stars were glued to the ceiling, so that it seemed she was always looking upward at the night sky. And she had a small collection of her most precious, treasured books between nice bookends on a high shelf.
Her cupboard itself was covered in piles of books, though. One of her favorite hobbies was reading, and she had books everywhere, all bought as presents by Dudley or her school friends. They spilled haphazardly all over the floor, mingled with the mess of clothes. Information was vital to Lucy. She had a particular interest in books on astrology, and one big midnight-blue astronomical star chart covered a cupboard wall. Lucy loved studies on the stars; she was fascinated by space.
She got dressed in what she liked best, there in the cupboard, and here again Dudley had played a great hand in what she had been able to purchase for herself. Lucy had naturally thick and wild shiny black hair, almond shaped bright green eyes, a thin friendly face, a tiny pixie-like body, dimpled knees, and glasses.
She also carried a thin scar on her forehead that was shaped like a bolt of lightning. It did make her rather self conscious, she'd had it as long as she could remember, and the first question she could ever remember asking her Aunt Petunia was how she had gotten it.
"In the car crash when your parents died," she had said, "and don't ask questions."
Don't ask questions - that was the first rule for a quiet life with the Dursleys. It was very trying for Lucy in particular, because her ultimate goal was to accumulate as much knowledge as possible at all times - doing the smart thing and the wise thing was very important to her.
In clothing, some of her biggest points of interest were button-up blouses, high-waisted skirts and the shirts that tucked beneath them, bracelets that snagged on everything, soft fabrics, ballet flats with scuffs on the shoes, and stripes and polka dots.
She usually either wore her hair in a soft side braid or in a messy braided bun. Her glasses were slim, rectangular silver spectacles.
Put it all together and one had Lucy's look. The ever present glasses came first. One outfit could be a button-up blouse tucked underneath a high waisted skirt, snagging bracelets, scuffed ballet shoes, and a messy braided bun. Another outfit could be a soft loose expensive fabric polka dotted shirt, extra long, with a soft side braid she liked to run her hands over when she was thinking.
When she was ready for the day, she went downstairs and down the hall into the kitchen. It was a combined kitchen and dining room with gleaming marble tiling, expensive black accents, and a surprisingly modest wood table that really made the rest of the room seem that much fancier. Today the table was almost hidden beneath all Dudley's birthday presents. It looked as though Dudley had gotten the new computer he wanted, not to mention the second television and the racing bike.
Uncle Vernon entered the kitchen as Lucy was turning over the bacon. He looked her over, found nothing amiss, made a little harrumphing noise, and sat down to his morning newspaper, ignoring her. Being ignored by Uncle Vernon was usually Lucy's safest outcome, no matter how much she deep down disliked being ignored.
Uncle Vernon wore expensive black suits and boring ties, carefully tailored to be just slightly beyond his actual money bracket, and he carried the weight and ruddy face of a man in his forties who liked three helpings at every meal, his stay-at-home wife's puddings, and a pastry every day for lunch at the corporate office he drove to in his shiny expensive car. He had a thick black mustache, a receding hairline that made his temple look constantly angry, and he paid a great deal of attention to the news.
Aunt Petunia, whose main point of focus was gossip, looked very different. She had the same hideous but flowery taste in dresses that she did in vases. She wore chignons of hair, crinkling bracelets, and expensive perfumes, and she was a thin, blonde woman with bony elbows and almost unhealthily sunken cheeks.
Lucy was frying eggs by the time Dudley arrived in the kitchen with his mother. Dudley wore ugly sweaters bought by his mother and was pudgy and pink-faced with smooth blond hair and small blue eyes. This had initially made him a target for bullying and he'd overcome this by taking up boxing and wrestling in addition to his video games, forming a gang, and taking them around to beat up anyone so much as looked at him funny.
This was somewhat morally reprehensible, but had been very effective.
Lucy put the plates of egg and bacon on the table, which was difficult as there wasn't much room. As she often did, she remained neutral in expression and quiet and had retreated inside herself, falling into quirky little imaginings and daydreams as she sat down to eat. Dudley meanwhile was counting his presents. His face fell.
"Thirty-six," he said, looking up at his mother and father. "That's two less than last year."
"Darling, you haven't counted Auntie Marge's present, see, it's here, under this big one from Mummy and Daddy."
"All right, thirty-seven then," said Dudley, going red in the face. Lucy, who could see a huge Dudley tantrum coming on, quickly pulled her plate into her lap in case Dudley turned the table over.
Aunt Petunia obviously scented danger, too, because she said quickly, "And we'll buy you another two presents while we're out today. How's that, popkin? Two more presents. Is that all right?"
Dudley thought for a moment. It looked like hard work. "Add the last part of the original number to two," Lucy finally offered cautiously.
"Seven… two… nine," Dudley realized, surprised. "Thirty-nine."
"That's right, sweetums," said Aunt Petunia, pleased.
"Oh." Dudley sat down heavily and grabbed the nearest parcel. "All right then."
Uncle Vernon chuckled.
"Little tyke wants his money's worth, just like his father. 'Atta boy, Dudley!" He ruffled Dudley's hair.
At that moment the telephone rang and Aunt Petunia went to answer it while Lucy and Uncle Vernon watched Dudley unwrap the racing bike, a video camera, a remote controlled aeroplane, sixteen new video games, and a movie player. He was ripping the paper off a gold wristwatch when Aunt Petunia came back from the telephone, looking both angry and worried.
"Bad news, Vernon," she said. "Mrs Figg's broken her leg. She can't take her." She jerked her head in Lucy's direction.
Dudley and Lucy exchanged a glance as Lucy's heart gave a leap of hope, her eyes widening slightly. Every year on Dudley's birthday, his parents took him and a friend out for the day, to adventure parks, hamburger restaurants, or the movies. Unless Dudley could swing letting Lucy come along, every year Lucy was left behind with Mrs Figg, a mad old lady who lived two streets away. Mrs Figg's house always smelled like medicine and dust, was very dark and cluttered and covered in ugly afghans, and was crawling with very bad-tempered cats. Mrs Figg was obsessed with dead cat photographs.
Lucy always dreaded Dudley's birthdays, because they usually involved Mrs Figg. This year had been one of those years.
"Now what?" said Aunt Petunia, looking furiously at Lucy as though she'd planned this.
"Perhaps I could go visit a friend?" Lucy suggested airily, smiling whimsically.
"No. I'm not making some poor, unsuspecting family put up with you for an entire day," said Aunt Petunia rudely. Lucy's airiness faded. She ducked her head and a surly little frown formed on her features.
"We could phone Marge," Uncle Vernon suggested.
"Don't be silly, Vernon, she hates the girl."
The Dursleys often spoke about Lucy like this, as though she wasn't there - or rather, as though she was something very nasty that couldn't understand them, like a slug. Lucy hated this, but tried her best not to show it, as she did almost everything. Sharp-eyed caution was usually best.
So she fisted her hands in her lap, clenched her teeth, and remained coldly silent. Privately she wanted to stay at home, read and map star charts quirkily out in the open, but she didn't think the Dursleys were in that kind of mood. Lucy was an expert by now at reading moods.
"What about what's-her-name, your friend - Yvonne?"
"On vacation in Majorca," snapped Aunt Petunia. She seemed to be thinking hard. "I suppose we could take her to the zoo," she admitted slowly, "and leave her in the car…"
"That car's new, she's not sitting in it alone…"
Dudley began to cry loudly. In fact, he wasn't really crying - it had been years since he'd really cried - but he knew that if he screwed up his face and wailed, his mother would give him anything he wanted.
"Mummy, I want… her… to… come," he wailed between huge, pretend sobs.
The Dursleys were awful people, so Lucy didn't feel sorry for this bit of manipulation in the slightest. The Dursleys deserved everything they were getting.
"Oh, my sweet, sensitive, good-hearted little boy!" Aunt Petunia sighed, flinging her arms around him. Dudley shot Lucy a secretive, mischievous grin through the gap in his mother's arms. Lucy gave a shy little smile back.
Just then, the doorbell rang - "Oh, good Lord, they're here!" said Aunt Petunia frantically - and a moment later Dudley's best friend, Piers Polkiss, walked in with his mother. Completely different from the boy who held people's arms behind their backs while Dudley hit them on the playground, he now wore a friendly, open grin over his tan face. Piers was thin and nerdy, but a good sort, at least to Lucy. Dudley stopped pretending to cry at once.
Half an hour later, Lucy was sitting in the dark leather seated back of the Dursleys' car with Piers and Dudley, smiling slightly and talking to Dudley and Piers in a soft, kind voice, her big green eyes shining. She was officially on the way to the zoo for the first time in her life. Her aunt and uncle hadn't been able to think of anything else to do with her, and anyway Dudley had asked.
But before they'd left, Uncle Vernon had taken Lucy aside into the living room.
"I'm warning you," he had said, putting his large purple face right up close to Lucy's as Lucy tensed, wide-eyed, and kept herself very still, "I'm warning you now, girl - any funny business, anything at all - and you'll be in that cupboard from now until Christmas."
"... I won't do anything," said Lucy in a monotone voice, staring blankly at a spot over Uncle Vernon's shoulder. And at last, he let her go.
But he didn't believe her. No one ever did.
The problem was, strange things often happened around Lucy, and it was just no good telling the Dursleys she didn't make them happen.
Once, Aunt Petunia, tired of Lucy coming back from the barber's looking as though she hadn't been at all, equally tired of hearing Uncle Vernon complain about it, had taken a pair of kitchen scissors and cut Lucy's hair short she was almost bald except for her bangs, which her aunt left "to hide that horrible scar." Even Dudley hadn't been able to help teasing Lucy, and though he'd also promised to protect her, she'd spent a sleepless night in her cupboard sick with fear, dreading being laughed at in school the next day. Next morning, however, she'd gotten up to find her hair exactly as it had been before Aunt Petunia had sheared it off. She had been given a week in her cupboard for this, even though she had tried to explain that she couldn't explain how it had grown back so quickly.
Another time, back before Dudley and her school friends began buying her clothes, Aunt Petunia had been trying to force Lucy into a particular hideous and ugly greying secondhand dress. The harder she tried to pull it over Lucy's head, the smaller it seemed to become, until finally it might have fitted a hand puppet but certainly wouldn't fit Lucy. Aunt Petunia had decided it must have shrunk in the wash and, to her great relief, Lucy wasn't punished.
On the other hand, she'd gotten into terrible trouble for that bullying incident two years ago. A much older and larger bully had cornered Lucy one day on the playground, and even as Dudley went to run over he'd pushed her - and then the strangest thing had happened. He'd began running all over the play yard, screaming and pulling at his clothes. He'd gotten the sudden sensation that there were bugs crawling all over his skin. A very angry letter had been sent home from Lucy's headmistress. Lucy wasn't sure how she'd done that, either, but all she had been able to do was shout in distress at Uncle Vernon through the locked door of her cupboard.
But today, nothing was going to go wrong. When she was having fun with Dudley and Piers, as it always was when doing her own hobbies or with her own friends, life was perfect.
While he drove, Uncle Vernon complained to Aunt Petunia. He liked to complain about things. People at work, Lucy, the council, Lucy, the bank, and Lucy were just a few of his favorite subjects. This morning, it was motorcycles.
"... roaring along like maniacs, the young hoodlums," he said, as a motorcycle overtook them.
Lucy carefully and cautiously said nothing about her flying motorcycle dream, and went back to talking with Dudley and Piers. If there was one thing the Dursleys hated even more than her asking questions, it was her talking about anything acting in a way it shouldn't, no matter if it was in a dream or even a cartoon. They seemed to think she might get dangerous ideas. Even reading was barely allowed because of Dudley, in Lucy's eyes the worst of their crimes.
Lack of curiosity and imagination was terrible.
It was a very sunny Saturday and the zoo was crowded with families; they swarmed toward the big gate entrance decorated with gigantic carved statues of animals. The Dursleys bought Dudley and Piers large chocolate ice creams at the entrance, and when the smiling ice cream van lady's smile dropped as she watched Dudley try to pay for Lucy's ice cream, Uncle Vernon seemed deeply embarrassed and he ended up buying Lucy a small lemon sherbet twist ice cream. Reluctantly, of course.
Lucy had a very good morning. She, Dudley, and Piers had fun walking the twisting, clay-like roads and over the bridges, looking with interest over the different animal enclosures. Dudley and Piers were starting to get bored with the animals by lunchtime, though Lucy could have gone on for another good few hours. They ate lunch in the zoo restaurant, which was full of fake plastic trees with monkeys swinging from them and jungle sounds coming from hidden speakers, and besides Dudley having a tantrum because his Knickerbocker Glory didn't have enough ice cream on top, everything went fine there too.
After lunch they went to the reptile house. It was cool and dark in there, with lit windows all along the walls. The reptile house arced around in a kind of C, the dark cold brickwork inlaid with glowing golden glass tanks set along the walls. Behind the glass, all sorts of lizards and snakes were crawling and slithering over bits of wood and stone. Dudley and Piers wanted to see huge, poisonous cobras and thick, man-crushing pythons. It made Lucy sigh a little to herself and think of them as plebeians, but not everyone could share her inherent intellectual interest in all types of animals.
Dudley quickly found the largest snake in the place. It could have wrapped its body twice around Uncle Vernon's car and crushed it into a trash can, but at the moment it didn't look in the mood. In fact, it was fast asleep.
Dudley stood with his nose pressed against the glass, staring at the glistening brown coils.
"Make it move," he whined at his father. Uncle Vernon tapped on the glass, but the snake didn't budge.
"Do it again," Dudley ordered. Uncle Vernon rapped the glass smartly with his knuckles, but the snake just snoozed on.
"This is boring," Dudley moaned. He shuffled away.
Lucy moved in front of the tank and looked intently at the snake. She wouldn't have been surprised if it had died of boredom itself - no company except stupid people drumming their fingers on the glass, trying to disturb it all day long. It was worse than having a cupboard as a bedroom, where the only visitor was Aunt Petunia hammering on the door to wake you up. At least she had plenty of other places she could visit.
The snake suddenly opened its beady eyes. Slowly, very slowly, it raised its head until its eyes were on a level with Lucy's.
It winked.
Lucy stared. Then she looked quickly around to see if anyone was watching. They weren't. She looked back at the snake and winked, too.
The snake jerked its head toward Uncle Vernon and Dudley, then raised its eyes to the ceiling. It gave Lucy a look that said quite plainly:
"I get that all the time."
"I know," Lucy murmured through the glass, though she wasn't sure the snake could hear her. "It must be really annoying."
The snake nodded vigorously.
"Where do you come from, anyway?" Lucy asked.
The snake jabbed its tail at a little sign next to the glass. Lucy peered at it.
Boa Constrictor, Brazil.
"Was it nice there?"
The boa constrictor jabbed its tail at the sign again and Lucy read on: This specimen was bred in the zoo. "Oh, I see - so you've never been to Brazil?"
As the snake shook its head, a deafening shout behind Lucy made both of them jump. "DUDLEY! MR DURSLEY! COME AND LOOK AT THIS SNAKE! YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT IT'S DOING!"
Dudley came waddling toward them as fast as he could.
"Out of the way, you," he told Lucy brusquely, and giving in was the smartest route, so Lucy stepped quickly aside. Piers and Dudley leaned right up close to the glass, oohing and aahing.
Lucy watched with a veiled, muted kind of sorrow and sadness as the boa constrictor hissed irritably at them and sank slowly down into its former torpor.
Lucy thought she was in the clear. But then they were all piling back in Uncle Vernon's car in the zoo parking lot at the end of the day, and Piers calmed down enough to say, "Lucy was talking to it, weren't you, Lucy?"
Lucy remained cautious. "What would have made you dream up a thing like that?" she asked flatly, a distinct lack of airiness in her tone and in her unusual glare. Piers looked surprised.
But Uncle Vernon wasn't fooled.
He waited until Piers was safely out of the house before starting in on Lucy. But Dudley stepped quickly between them. "Dad, she was trying to help me," he said quickly, shielding Lucy as her face broke into touched surprise and relief. "She was talking to the snake, hoping it would move for me."
"... Fine," Uncle Vernon bit out. "Tonight and tomorrow in the cupboard. No meals. She's let out the morning after."
It was better than Lucy could have hoped for, but Dudley wasn't satisfied. "But Dad -" he began, protesting.
"It was going to be two weeks with only one meal a day!" Uncle Vernon thundered there in the dark living room space that suddenly seemed somehow smaller, more dangerous, and more constricting. His eyes flashed in Lucy's direction. "Go!"
She scampered away as Uncle Vernon collapsed into an armchair, and Aunt Petunia had to run and get him a large brandy.
Lucy lay in her dark cupboard much later, staring at her watch. Her most practical request from Dudley, she'd asked for a watch for a very specific reason.
She waited until a time she was sure the Dursleys were in bed. Then she snuck out into the kitchen and stole food during cupboard punishments.
This was not a manifestation of Lucy's truest nature. This was a survival mechanism. She kept plastic bags full of food from nighttime thievery underneath her bed during cupboard punishments.
She had other little survival mechanisms like that. A bucket in a corner in case she had to pee outside of her two allotted times outside the cupboard per day. A light bulb that always worked so that she could read and study the stars during long afternoons in her cupboard. A can of bug spray for the really nasty spiders. The worst were the ones that got in her hair at night while she was sleeping, in that tiny, dim, enclosed space.
Survival mechanisms.
She'd lived with the Dursleys almost ten years, ten miserable years, as long as she could remember, ever since she'd been a baby and her parents had died in that car crash. She couldn't remember being in the car when her parents had died. Sometimes, when she strained her memory during long hours in her cupboard, she came up with a strange vision: a blinding flash of green light and a burning pain on her forehead. This, she supposed, was the car crash, though she couldn't imagine where all the green light came from. She couldn't remember her parents at all. Her aunt and uncle never spoke about them, and of course she was forbidden to ask questions. There were no photographs of them in the house.
When she had been younger, Lucy had wandered countless streets just trying to escape her home, had dreamed and dreamed of some unknown relation coming to take her away, but it had never happened and nothing had ever worked; the Dursleys were her only family. Yet sometimes she thought (or maybe hoped) that strangers in the street seemed to know her. Very strange strangers they were, too. A tiny man in a violet top hat had bowed to her once while out shopping with Aunt Petunia and Dudley. After asking Lucy furiously if she knew the man, Aunt Petunia had rushed them out of the shop without buying anything. A wild-looking old woman dressed all in green had waved merrily at her once on a bus. A bald man in a very long purple coat had actually taken her hand and kissed it, like she was a princess, in the street the other day and then walked away without a word.
The weirdest thing about all these people was the way they seemed to vanish the second Lucy tried to get a closer look.