2.

On Halloween night, the most powerfully magical day of the year, the wind and rain howled about the windows, slanting sideways. It was pitch black, but there was a circle of warm firelight from the fireplace inside Potter Cottage. Lily and James were in elegant robes, the children in brilliantly gold-embroidered nightgowns.

The Potters had celebrated Samhain in at least a somewhat traditional way, trying to maintain rituals even though they were in hiding. They'd prepared a feast, made offerings to an ancestors altar, used tarot to look into the coming year, and prepared a cauldron over the fire into which they had placed wishes for the new year and habits they wanted to undo. James and Lily had lifted their children over the bubbling cauldron, letting them drop the wishes in; the children had watched in fascination as the potion hissed and turned briefly blue.

But it was late at night now, and time for bed. James occupied the children with magic tricks from his wand; they watched in fascination from the living room floor as Lily cleaned up the kitchen further within the depths of the house.

Then Lily came out into the living room. "Bedtime," she said, and she picked up two children while James picked up the third. His hands were busy and he didn't have time to throw down his wand as he usually would.

Lord Voldemort crept through the front gate, took out his wand, and blasted the door off its hinges.

James realized all at once what was going on, but one of his arms was full with a child. "Shit!" he spat, and set the child behind him, standing in front of Luna and taking out his wand. Lily had time to run in and grab for her wand, and she joined James to face Voldemort. Their children were huddled behind them.

"Children," said Lily in an unsteady voice, "stay there."

Lord Voldemort let out a high, unnatural, bone-chilling laugh. "Two against me," he said dryly. "That's almost fair."

Then he started blasting curses at them.

Lily and James's wands flew outward and they went to work. James transfigured objects to guard their way while Lily animated the furniture into doing her bidding, having it attack Voldemort. Voldemort disappeared - and Apparated behind them, right in front of the children.

Lily Apparated as fast as she could and just got there in time, guarding her children with her body - and taking the green light of the Killing Curse instead. Her eyes and mouth widened in momentary surprise, and then she fell over dead.

"Lily!" James shouted. The children were screaming.

James began furiously shooting curses at Voldemort - they Apparated and Apparated around each other, curses flying - then Voldemort shot a Killing Curse underneath James's raised arm at the children, and he didn't have time to put up any sort of magical blockade. He ducked in front of them, taking the attack instead and falling atop his wife at the children's feet.

The children were still screaming. The crash of falling furniture and curses, the violence to their parent's deaths, had frightened them. Lord Voldemort loomed over them in his black robes and cloak. His hood had fallen and as he trapped them in a corner, and they turned to look up at him, they could see his face: thin, bone white, and skeletal, the cheekbones in sharp relief, the scalp completely bald, the eyes crimson slits like bloody snake eyes.

Luna and Ginevra were crying. Harry, however, had fallen silent. He stood in front of his sisters, staring into Voldemort's face very fiercely.

"Idiot boy," said Lord Voldemort softly to Harry. "It's you I wanted all along."

He lifted his wand, pointed it at Harry's forehead, and fired off the Killing Curse. The girls would be killed - it would be most prudent to kill them all - but the boy had to come first. The boy was the main threat, and Voldemort had to see that destroyed.

All three children saw the green light fill their vision - and then abruptly they were all bathed in a glow of white light. Their parents' protection. Having died shielding their children from Voldemort, Voldemort now could not touch their children.

The green light bounced off of Harry's forehead - leaving a lightning bolt scar - and hit Voldemort instead. Familial love protection. Being without love himself, it was the one thing Voldemort hadn't counted on.

He felt horrible pain fill him, and as his body disintegrated in a great fiery explosion, his loose soul flitted, ran, away. But it had fractured, unbeknownst even to Voldemort himself. That fractured piece of soul floated around the room, until it entered the only thing it could - the open wound on the forehead of Harry Potter.

Voldemort realized in that moment what had happened - familial love protection. It seemed obvious now, painfully so, in the wake of his defeat.

His soul hiding there all those years, deep in the dark forests of Albania, living temporarily through the bodies of animals, he reflected. Those girls were also part of the Potters' blood protection, and had become in their defiance and destruction of him just as dangerous as the boy.

He resolved that if he ever gained a body back, he would go after all three of them. If only to make a statement. That some lucky young girls with loving parents could not best him.

Unbeknownst to him, the most ironic part of it all was when he thought of the girls as "lucky."

The door slammed off its hinges, the group of Death Eaters led by Bellatrix Lestrange - Voldemort's beautiful and highly insane dark-haired right hand woman - standing in the doorway of the Longbottoms' hideout. It was a darkened trailer in the middle of a large city.

Bellatrix, a Pureblood herself and a believer in Pureblood ideology, knew of course her master would have gone for the Pureblood boy. The Longbottoms should know where the Dark Lord had disappeared to.

"We're home!" she cried, beaming and throwing out her arms, and the Death Eaters behind her chuckled. "Come out, come out, wherever you are..." she cooed gleefully, the large group of Death Eaters stalking cautiously into the darkened hideout. A teakettle sat hissing on the stove.

Then suddenly a curse flew at Bellatrix from the side; she blocked just in time. "Ooh, that wasn't bad!" She smirked. "As to be expected from Frank and Alice Longbottom, the great Aurors." Heavy sarcasm laced her voice.

The Longbottoms stood there, hard as iron, in the doorway. Bellatrix could see their infant son in the room behind them.

"Yes," she told the waiting Death Eaters. "That's them."

Then all five attacked the two Aurors at once. Five Dark fighters against two Aurors - Frank and Alice never stood a chance. "We need them alive!" Bellatrix shrieked periodically as she fought, and when Frank and Alice were bound at her feet, she pointed her wand at them and hissed, "Where is the Dark Lord?"

"We - we don't know, we don't know -"

"Answer me!"

"We don't know!" Alice Longbottom wailed, at last losing her head.

In another room, the Portkey touching their son activated. He was sucked away to his grandmother's house with a minute pop.

Bellatrix smirked, looking down at them all. "So you're going to be that way, are you? Very well then... Crucio!"

Frank and Alice Longbottom screamed and writhed as the blue light tore into their bodies.

"WHERE IS THE DARK LORD?!" Bellatrix screamed.

The most tragic part was that it was no use. Voldemort had not chosen to target the Longbottoms after all, and they had no idea where he was.

Rubeus Hagrid, a giant of a man, slammed into the burning wreckage of the house, tearing down the door, wrapped against the smoke and soot in his leather coat. He stamped through the magical flames currently burning down the wreckage that was once Potter Cottage.

Dumbledore had intimated he had to make this fast. Death Eaters would be after these children.

It was easy to find them. Three children stood among the flames tearing up the walls, surrounded by a halo of white light, completely unharmed. The flames, as an extension of Voldemort himself, could not touch them. They stood there and stared at Hagrid solemnly, almost eerily, the two girls behind and on either side of the boy with the bleeding forehead.

Hagrid had passed by the corpses of Lily and James, though he had not emotionally processed this part yet. It was no use. The children were orphans.

He stormed over to them, grabbed them up, wrapped them in the gigantic leather coat, and ran out of the house, storming through fallen pieces of wood until at last he made it to the outside and the clear night air, coughing.

He looked down at the children. The glowing light had faded; the cut on Harry Potter's forehead had dried, leaving only a scar.

Hagrid held them for a while, staring at the cottage until the flames at last had burned themselves out.

The rumble of a motorcycle came from the sky and Sirius Black landed in front of the ruins of Potter Cottage, leaping off the motorcycle. "... No," he said. "No. No!" He ran forward - stumbled to a halt - fell to his knees looking stunned. The village was quiet, the stars clear in the night sky.

"It's - it's no use, Sirius, I - I saw 'em," said Hagrid tearfully, placing a hand on Sirius's shoulder. "The murderer's gone. The children somehow managed to block his final attack and turn it back on him. Harry's got the scar ter prove it. But... they put up a good fight, but... Lily an' James're gone." Hagrid cleared his throat, blinking heavily, looking up at the stars.

"... I should have been there," Sirius whispered.

"Sirius... there's nothing ya could've done," said Hagrid. "Not against him. Frankly, I don't know how these children managed it. You'd just have died too."

"The children..." Sirius suddenly shot to his feet, looking at Hagrid. "Hagrid, I - I need them. I was meant to raise them. They're my godchildren."

Hagrid shook his head. "Dumbledore wants ter take 'em ter their aunt and uncle. Thinks it'd be better if they were - y'know, if they were raised by family."

Sirius nodded, looking down, his face shadowed. Then he looked back up, angry determination in his expression.

"Very well, then," he said. "I have something else to do. You can borrow my motorbike to take the children to their aunt and uncle, Hagrid.

"Where I'm going, I won't be needing it."

Hagrid landed in front of the Muggle home of Lily's sister Petunia and her husband and son - at number four, Privet Drive, Surrey - with the children in his arms, to find McGonagall and Dumbledore already there in the silent black suburban street. Even the street lamps had magically gone out.

"Hagrid. At last," said Dumbledore. "And where did you get that motorcycle?"

"Borrowed it, Professor Dumbledore, sir," said Hagrid, climbing off of the motorcycle as he spoke. "Young Sirius Black lent it to me. I've got 'em, sir."

"No problems, were there?"

"No, sir. Little tykes fell asleep just as we was flyin' over Bristol."

Dumbledore and McGonagall bent forward over the bundles of blankets swathed in Hagrid's huge arms - into the faces of the sleeping children they were about to leave on the doorstep of the children's aunt, Petunia Dursley.

Dumbledore knew it had to be this way. As all three children had been protected at once, the only way for blood protection to extend to their entire place of residence was if they lived with Potter or Evans family - and the Dursleys were their only living relatives.

Dumbledore had the suspicious feeling they had not seen the last of Lord Voldemort.

Petunia Dursley opened her front door to put out the milk bottles the next cold November morning, looked down at the doorstep, and shrieked, waking the children into wails that in turn charged up the wails of her own infant son Dudley and sent her husband Vernon thundering down the stairs in one of his boring corporate ties to see "what the bloody hell was going on."

Three children were swaddled there, a letter tucked inside the scarred boy's blankets.

"Peter!"

Peter Pettigrew, already on the run, whirled around and paled to see Sirius Black standing there. He had been found. And Peter was a feeble little man; Sirius was a better duelist than he was.

There was only one way to get out of this unscathed. He put his hands behind his back, Sirius's wand still pointed into his face.

"How could you do it, Sirius?" said Peter, feigning tearfulness. "How could you?"

Then he chopped off one of his fingers as evidence and, with his wand behind his back, blew up the entire Muggle city street around him. An unregistered Animagus, he himself escaped as a rat and scampered into the sewers, bloody and in pain.

Sirius stood there, momentarily stunned. All the Muggles around him were unconscious; entrails littered the street, as some had been blown into smithereens.

His former best friend had just escaped and framed him for thirteen murders - as well as treason against the Potters.

Sirius Black was still laughing in a sad, hysterical way, unmoving, when the wizarding authorities came to arrest him.

The wreckage was explained to Muggles as a gas explosion.

Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, the Longbottoms were still being tortured. Not that it was of any use. By that point, they were vegetables.

Several Months Later

Dumbledore was looking over the moving pictures in The Daily Prophet - End of War Continues! Bellatrix Lestrange and Cronies Rounded Up! - when his office door at Hogwarts slammed open.

Molly and Arthur Weasley and Xenophilus Lovegood stormed inside, past the countless whirring silver instruments, the black cabinets, the gold perch of Fawkes the phoenix, the moving portraits along the walls.

"Ah, Xenophilus," said Dumbledore cheerfully to the unusually thin man. "Out of the hospital, I see. How are you?"

Xeno flinched, but rallied. "I want my daughter back," he said boldly, lifting his chin.

"So do we!" Molly snapped. "We demand Ginny back!"

Dumbledore sobered; in that moment, his long silver beard and grandfather spectacles seemed all too appropriate. "I'm afraid that's not possible," he said in a deep tone of voice, putting down the newspaper.

"Just because you don't want to give up -!" Molly began hotly.

"No, you don't understand," said Dumbledore, pained. "Your biological daughters were made Potters in a Wiccan blood ritual. I'm sure you can understand how heavy that is."

A stunned, heavy silence filled the office.

"That aside," said Dumbledore, steepling his long fingers before himself, "legally they already have their own trust funds connected to the main Potter vault inside Gringotts. They've been named Potters in legal documents. We cannot just give you back your biological children or open the adoptions back up because something tragic has happened.

"Those girls are being raised alongside their brother and their cousin by Lily's sister and her husband, and that is where they must stay."

"I just... After everything that's happened... I just wanted my daughter back..." Molly whispered.

"I can understand," said Dumbledore quietly. "But you must also understand why I cannot allow it."

"Damnit!" Xeno pounded the desk with a fist. "Isn't there anything you can do?!"

Arthur was silent, stricken.

"... I am afraid not," said Dumbledore quietly. Just in case, he decided privately in that moment that no one in the wizarding world could ever know where the Potters lived. Just in case.

Dumbledore had his own reasons. He had already deduced that part of the prophecy - of the Chosen One, Harry Potter, having "a power the Dark Lord knew not" - may very well refer to Harry Potter's two sisters. Either way, now they would certainly be Voldemort's targets.

The fate of the wizarding world may very well rest on the shoulders of two little girls and their brother.

Hundreds of miles away, Ginevra, Luna, and Harry played on the Dursleys' living room rug next to their cousin Dudley - who had been forbidden from harming them, as he had sisters - completely unconscious of what was going on around them.

Author's Notes: The Potters will not have a perfect, happy childhood, but because of the presence of girls it will be significantly more complex than canon Harry's. Remember, the Dursleys are great believers in traditional gender roles.