Author's Note: I at least have year one completely written. Expect some delays between years. I wait until a year is finished before I start posting chapters for it. Currently, I plan on continuing Acacia's story even past Hogwarts, but that could change in the future...

I've been working on different versions of this story for years, so finally posting something has me kind of excited.

Book One

Chapter One: Start of Life

At first, the world is dark, warm, and moist. She is safe, enclosed snug and cozy within a tiny space, and she sleeps peacefully for she knows she is loved.

Then there is motion. The world is ready for her.

She feels everything suddenly contract painfully around her, and then she is shoved, out into bright lights and cold air and loud noise. There is a female cry, unintelligible and strange, and the world slowly evolves into a blur of flickering light across a dark ceiling. Then a face appears before her, lined and strict, so much bigger than she is. This is the woman who was crying out. She cannot understand what the woman is saying to her. She sees the woman look up, showing her chin, and respond in strange babble to another, unseen female voice.

She is lifted up and carried by giant hands The world is strange to her, and the wet to her skin is freezing, and she doesn't understand what's going on. She doesn't know how to communicate this so she makes pitiful, frightened noises and squirms against the hold, which is firm. She feels herself dried off by cloth, wrapped in blankets, and then placed in a pair of vast, warm arms.

A different face is looking down at her now, also female. It is immediately calming, kind and lovely, not that she has much to compare it to, having few memories. The eyes are green and the hair is soft and red, getting into her face. She wrinkles her nose against the hair and there's a loud laugh; the hair is moved. For some reason, she knows she is safe here.

Exhausted, she slowly falls asleep.

Lily relaxes into the sheets, her slog over, panting and sweating. It is so unbearably hot. There is candle light all around her; it's early in the morning of July 31st, and still dark in the window outside. She can see the night framed by the brocade curtains. James's footsteps can be heard pacing restlessly outside their bedroom, the impromptu birthing room. For obvious reasons - they are in hiding from Lord Voldemort - the birth was done at home. The child certainly came at his first opportunity, and it had surprised even them.

The private midwife Dumbledore hired cries out warmly, "There he is!" She walks over to the baby, snipping off the umbilical cord, and then pauses in surprise, expressionlessness falling over her face.

"What's wrong?" Lily asks worriedly. "Is he alright?"

"... She," says the midwife, looking up. "And she is fine."

Lily pauses, blinking. "It's a girl?" she asks stupidly before she can stop herself. For some reason, though it shouldn't have, it surprises her. The great and anticipated savior of the wizarding world is a woman?

She goes back over the Prophecy in her mind: The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches, born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies. And the Dark Lord will mark the Powerful One as his equal, but the Powerful One will have power the Dark Lord knows not. And one must die instead of the other for neither can live while the other survives. The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies.

Nothing in there that said the Powerful One couldn't be a woman.

Lily scolds herself. She is a talented witch. Of course she could give birth to a talented witch as well!

Suddenly, she wants to see this baby girl.

"Let me hold her," Lily pleads to the midwife. The midwife washes the baby, swaddles her in blankets, and then places the baby in Lily's arms. Lily looks down into that wailing cherub face - a good set of lungs, sharp and strong. The eyes are hazel, she notes - brown in base tone, but with a whole host of vivid green and blue and gold flecks in them if one looks close enough. James's eyes.

The baby slowly calms as Lily rocks her. The wails fade into silence; the eyelids droop. Some of Lily's hair gets in her face and the girl's nose wrinkles; she makes a little sneezing noise. Lily laughs, suddenly elated; in her eyes, the baby is beautiful, precious. She will hide her, defend her, do whatever it takes to keep her safe from that madman and from her possible fate. Lily moves her hair back behind her, over her shoulder. She watches her new daughter fall asleep.

At last, there is a tentative knock on the door. "Is the hell over?" Sirius's voice. As the child's godfather, he has come in moral support. She realizes James's footsteps have stopped, and she imagines him frozen, terrified and elated, on the other side of the door.

Lily laughs softly. "You can come in," she says, and then the door bursts in and James and Sirius tromp inside. "It's a girl," she says, and they both stop, their eyes widening.

To Lily's relief, a smile breaks over James's face. "It is?!" he asks, then says incredulously, "Well, of course it is! Come here, let me see her." He walks over, looks into her face, and says triumphantly, "Ha! She's already gorgeous!"

"Because that's so important," says Lily dryly.

"Well, it does help," Sirius adds.

"Quiet, you two, or you'll wake the baby," Lily scolds.

"Sorry." They grin in unison, twins even in this, unrepentant.

"So what are we going to name her?" Lily asks thoughtfully. "Obviously, Harry won't work."

"We could still name her Harry," says James.

"We're not naming our daughter Harry," says Lily.

"What about Harriet?"

Lily wrinkles her nose. "God," she says, "that's awful."

"You could name her Egelbertha," Sirius adds.

"We're not naming our daughter Egelbertha Potter! You two are terrible at naming!" But the three of them are all laughing now. "Besides," Lily adds at last, "it should be a flower name. It runs in my family, you know."

"Linnea," James offers. "Magnolia."

Lily shakes her head. "Something simpler," she says. "More casual on the tongue..."

"I like the regal names, though," James argues. "The interesting ones."

They throw around different names for a while, including Jasmine, Ivy, Iris, and Marigold, before eventually they settle on Acacia. They give her the middle name Estelle, after Sirius, whose entire family were named after stars.

And so on July 31st, Acacia Estelle Potter is born.

Tom, the Lord Voldemort, clenches the arms of the wing back chair before him, staring unseeingly at the far dark wall. He has just finished a conversation with the Potter spy, Peter Pettigrew. A spineless, pathetic man, but a useful one. Tom has been working toward this moment for months. He now knows the location of both possible families. The attack will come soon.

But who to attack first?

The conversation was very interesting. It had surprised him. He hadn't expected the Potter child to be a girl. Should this factor into his planning? He had planned on attacking the Potters first. The child is a half blood, and though Tom will only grudgingly admit it even to himself, that hits too close to home for comfort. He must take this threat seriously, and eliminate it.

But a girl... Of course, a woman is just as capable of being deadly as a man. Dear Bella has taught him that. But the idea surprises him, nonetheless. The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches, born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies. When most people think of a woman defeating a man, the first, reflexive thing they think of is - Tom sneers - love.

He has the sudden urge to kill something right there.

Perhaps he will kill the Potter child first after all. He needs to destroy any inclination anyone might have that he could be felled by something as trivial and ridiculous as romantic affection.

Tom smiles coldly, standing back, in a good mood now that he has decided. Acacia Potter will die. He will make it Halloween night, the most powerfully magical holiday.

Perhaps he will go torture one of the war prisoners.

Mary MacDonald, blonde and quiet, sits back in shock in the Potters' sitting room. "You want me to be the godmother?" she asks.

Lily smiles as if trying to make it easier. "A fairy godmother!" she says grandly. "Just like in all the legends! Any little girl needs a fairy godmother, Mary. And we've been friends since school. Who else would I ask?"

"But... but I'm not even a fighter in the war. I'm just a Healer." Mary is, as usual, self deprecating.

"You may be quiet, Mary, but you're protective, smart, and you have the courage of a lion when you find someone in need," says James. "I think it's a great idea. So does Sirius Black - he's the godfather."

"I'm... I'm honored," Mary says at last. "Of course, I accept."

Tom, dressed in his black hooded cloak, glides through the village of Godric's Hollow, holding himself in contempt above the Muggles around him, their paltry Halloween decorations and their wanton misunderstanding of something they do not believe in. Ordinary humans, all ordinary humans, are beneath him. He is the great Lord Voldemort; they feel compulsively and he feels little. He is well on his way to becoming immortal, and they are not.

He has waited for this night for a very long time, and he will have his victory.

Few approach him, and those who do back up in horror from his face. He wants to kill all of them, but restrains himself with the admirable willpower that has over the years become a part of him. Once they would have been charmed by his appearance, the false mask of his foolish, dirty Muggle father, but that time is long gone.

The cottage is away from the main part of town, down a dark country road unlit by street lamps. He sees it come into sight, sees through the Fidelius Charm instantly, thanks to Peter Pettigrew. The Potters are there, inside. Silently, he walks up to the gate; silently, at the point of a wand, it swings open for him. He goes past the hedgerows and pauses, watching them through the sitting room window.

The little girl is a toddler by now. She has a headful of dark crimson hair and wears a turquoise nightgown; her skin tone is golden and she is pretty, even as a child. A frown of concentration has spread over her face; she has taken apart a pocket watch and appears to be trying to figure out how it works. Even as he watches, she takes a cog out of the back of the watch and examines it closely, puzzled, before tossing it away carelessly.

She is already intelligent, and that is dangerous. He knows now that he chose correctly.

Her parents enter; her father, dark-haired and bespectacled, scoops her up and hands her to her mother, who looks remarkably similar to her. Acacia complains. They laugh and tell her something, carrying her toward the staircase for bed.

She will never sleep again, Tom knows. He can sense it.

He points his wand at the door; it bursts open. The duel with the father is fierce - the man is talented at Transfiguration - and when he is dead, the screaming, hysterical mother refuses to leave from her place in front of her child. She shoots off a spell, but he disarms her easily. He asks her to stand aside over and over, and again she refuses. She asks him to kill her instead.

He did not expect this, does not understand, and it frustrates him. His own mother gave him up; he had expected the same from her. He had promised one of his servants he would spare her, a talented man with a surprising hidden weakness of infatuation, but when she will not move from before her child he feels the inexplicable desire to kill her. And so he does.

Then it is just him and the child, amid the burning, crumbling ruins of the house. She is standing in her crib before him. He can hear shouts and footsteps outside the house; people will be breaking in soon, he knows, not that he couldn't handle it. So he does not have long to pause. He looks into the girl's eyes for a split second, a multitude of colors. She meets his eyes, solemn and quiet, and she is the only one tonight who looks up at him without fear. She is tiny and delicate, seems harmless enough. And yet she is the one who has the power to destroy him?

He lifts his wand and, still looking at her, he shoots off the Killing Curse. It hits her forehead, and she screams, falling, and then the light rebounds and green fills his vision, followed by pain, the greatest pain he has ever known. For the first time in a very long time, he runs. Away from his body. A phantom wraith, barely alive, and only then thanks to his own experiments with Dark magic. He runs away from the house, and away from her, his spirit traveling madly, brokenly across the British countryside.

He will realize later, bitterly, what it was that undid him. Lily sacrificed herself standing before her daughter, and in doing so invoked an ancient kind of protective magic. What undid him... was love.

Mary's heart stops as she looks at the burning ruins of the Potter home. Sirius has fallen to his knees, broken, before the charred shell. She does not know him well, nor does she understand his connection to the Potters, but in that moment she can feel exactly how he feels. Mary had been told Lord Voldemort was after the Potters, and she has no doubt in her mind that Lily and James are dead. For a moment, it is as if time has stopped.

Then the nurse in her takes over. "Where is the baby?" she says suddenly. She turns to the silent, staring Sirius and grabs his shirt lapels. "Where is the baby?!" Sirius is unresponsive, almost comatose with grief.

Mary lets go of him, suddenly terrified, and runs into the burning building, shooting off water spells to fend off the fire, coughing from the smoke, running up the steps to the nursery on the second floor. The child is lying inside, and her crib is the only thing the fire hasn't reached, and the smell is terrible. Mary clears a path to the crib and rushes over to the child, who is lying there limp. For a terrible moment, Mary thinks the child is dead, but then she feels her chest. The child is breathing. Acacia Potter is still alive.

A flash of blood catches her eye. There is a bloody lightning bolt scar on Acacia's forehead. A curse scar. The sign of a Killing Curse that was cast, and rebounded off its victim, failing to kill properly. Mary stares in disbelief for a moment. Lord Voldemort is gone. Surely he would not leave a job unfinished. There is no Dark Mark over the house. And if the curse rebounded... that has to mean...

There is a crack and Mary realizes she can't be brooding on implications. She grabs Acacia up in her arms and jumps through a hole in the wall to the outside, taking out her wand and floating down to the ground. Then she runs back to the outside street. She makes it just in time for the cottage behind her to collapse in on itself.

She sets the unconscious Acacia down, and runs back over to the house, putting the fire out with her wand. Sirius is already gone.

Mary has a flat in the Alleys in London, and this is where she Apparates to and takes Acacia, who after all now rightly belongs either to her or to Sirius, who is in no fit mental state to take care of any child. Mary is calmer. She has seen disaster in the wards many times before, has seen many deaths during this civil war against the Dark Lord. The bright Lily's death has shaken her, but she holds firm, steady and boring.

Acacia wakes up with a shriek from her place on the couch, convulsing, tears in her eyes, and Mary has to take Acacia into her lap, hug her and calm her. Mary is a familiar face, and this seems to help Acacia relax. "Mummy?" she asks, looking up into Mary's face. "Daddy?"

Mary's eyes burn with tears and she hugs Acacia tighter, hiding her face in the girl's hair. "No, Acacia," she whispers shakily. "No Mummy. No Daddy."

Acacia puts her face into Mary's robes, and is silent.

The next morning at breakfast, there is a knock on the door. Mary goes to the door and opens it to find Albus Dumbledore on the outside. Immediately, she's nervous. "Professor Dumbledore!"

"Mary. Always a pleasure. May I come in?"

"O-of course." Mary steps aside, tells Dumbledore to take a seat in the kitchen, offers him a warm beverage. Little Acacia toddles up to Dumbledore and tugs on his robe.

"Hm?" He looks down.

"Hi." Acacia waves.

Dumbledore smiles, his eyes brightening. "Well, hello, Acacia." Acacia smiles back, looking up at him. Dumbledore's eyes inevitably trail up to the scar on her forehead. "There it is," he says quietly.

"Is it what I think it is, Dumbledore?" Mary leans back against the kitchen counter. "Did she really...?"

"Yes, I believe so," says Dumbledore.

"... How?"

"No one knows." Dumbledore shrugs. "I have hypotheses, nothing more."

"Your hypotheses are better than most people's facts."

"You flatter me."

"Hm."

They watch each other across the space for a moment. "I suppose you're here about her living accommodations," Mary says reluctantly at last. "I think she should stay with me, for now." Mary has already grown attached to the little thing. Acacia is the last remnant she has of her beloved friend. "I am her godmother."

"I appreciate that," says Dumbledore calmly. "But Acacia has living relatives. She should stay with them."

"What living relatives? Both sets of grandparents are dead," says Mary in surprise.

"But Lily had a sister. Petunia. Petunia has a family in Surrey," says Dumbledore.

"You mean the sister who hated her?" Mary raises her eyebrows dubiously.

"Hate is a strong word."

"They certainly didn't get along."

"You don't trust her to take good care of her niece?"

"Not really."

Dumbledore sighs. "I have just recently heard the same argument from Professor McGonagall. Something along the lines of the Dursleys being disgusting human beings."

Mary privately blesses Minerva McGonagall's good sense. "They're Muggles and they won't understand," says Mary. "No matter what happened Halloween night, all the signs point to Acacia becoming an enormously magical child. What about her bursts of accidental magic?"

"Petunia had such experiences with her sister," says Dumbledore.

"Yes, and those just turned out so well," adds Mary in a rare moment of sarcasm.

"Mary." Professor Dumbledore looks sternly at her over the top of his half moon glasses. Mary looks away. "The fact that they are Muggles is precisely why Acacia must stay with them. They will not treat her differently because of her unusual beginnings."

"You're saying I'd spoil her?"

Professor Dumbledore raises his hands placatingly. "I'm saying I'm not sure she could handle her fame at such a young age. People are talking, you know, Mary. She was in this morning's edition of the Daily Prophet. They're calling her the Girl Who Lived. She features largely in several current international celebrations."

"So, we can go somewhere obscure, far away from prying eyes. Lord knows she has enough money from the House of Potter."

"Mary..." Professor Dumbledore sounds, for the first time, tired.

"Why are you so gung ho about Acacia living with her aunt?" Mary asks wonderingly.

"Because," says Dumbledore quietly after a moment, "if she were living with her blood relatives, I could strengthen the wards around her home better. I could protect her better there."

There is a pause. "The war is over," says Mary uncertainly.

"Yes, but the Death Eaters must still be rounded up..."

"But the war's over."

"Yes," says Dumbledore at last, "for now, it seems the war is over."

"You Know Who is dead."

"Gone," says Dumbledore, and it never occurs to her that this is not an agreement. He seems to think for a moment. "I just have the nasty feeling there is more to come," he admits at last, heavily. As a member of the Wizengamot Council, Dumbledore had been elected to lead the war effort, and Mary suspects this still weighs heavily on him.

"You could just be coming down from your stress," Mary suggests softly, ever the Healer. "There might not be anything more to come at all. You shouldn't send a child to people who don't want her just because of a feeling."

Dumbledore sighs. "I hope you're right," he says. "Alright. She can stay with you. As long as Sirius doesn't contest it - and I suspect he won't - she belongs to you under Lily and James's word anyway."

Sirius's will quickly becomes a moot point. It's all over the news: Sirius confronted his friend Peter Pettigrew in a Muggle street. Peter accused Sirius of betraying the Potters to Voldemort; then there was a giant explosion that killed thirteen Muggles and the biggest piece of Peter that could be found was a finger. Sirius was taken away to Azkaban Prison, laughing hysterically all the way.

This news shakes Mary more than she cares to admit. Thank goodness she'd been around to save Acacia from Sirius and Dumbledore.

Mary takes Acacia out to a little cottage in the English countryside, far away from prying eyes, the address a carefully guarded secret. Dumbledore comes himself to put protective wards around the house. They live off of Acacia's trust fund and the Potter family account.

Mary begins raising Acacia in the best way she knows how. There's a lot of getting used to each other at first. Acacia misses her parents and Mary has had no preparation for having to raise a child - being an only child herself.

Still, they grow to love each other. Mary tries to give Acacia the best childhood she can.

As Acacia grows, her world shifts. She learns her name and what she looks like, and learns the faces and voices of her Mummy and her Daddy. Their home together is warm and she is safe and loved.

Then comes that night, breaking her fairytale dream, smashing it into pieces on the floor.

She remembers a chaotic cacophony of crashes and bright lights, distant male shouting. She remembers her mother's breath in her ear as she runs up the stairs into her nursery. She remembers watching her mother's back through the crib bars, sounds of screaming and crying, then her mother falling and collapsing limply onto the floor in a burst of green light. Acacia does not understand. She doesn't know why her mother would fall over like that. And then she looks up, and up, into a bone-white face, flat and snake-like, with red slit eyes. The face is fascinating to her, like nothing she has ever seen before. Then there's a burst of green light and a burning pain on her forehead, and after that she never sees her parents or their fairytale house again.

After that is Mary, Godmum. Mary and her soft voice and hands, her worried face. Their house together in the countryside.

This is when Acacia's life truly starts.

Acacia screams from the memory of pain in her forehead and shoots upright in her bed one night, in a cold sweat. After a few moments, there are the sounds of footsteps and Mary runs into the room.

"What is it?!" Her eyes are wide, frantic; she's in her nightgown and holding a candle.

"Nightmare..." Acacia looks down, pouting, her eyes filling with tears despite herself.

Mary immediately comes over, sits down and wraps her warm arms around Acacia's shoulders. "It's alright, you're safe now," she says. "You are safe."

And Acacia believes her.