I don't own Harry Potter, so please let me know what you think.
X
Attempted Line Theft.
Holly Potter had always known she was different from everyone around her. But as she went through her life from the years of hell she had lived at the Dursleys, and when she lived on the streets of London before she entered the magical world and was inducted into Slytherin House, she discovered her differences had grown more and more.
She truly didn't know what set her apart from everyone else, but she had always seen the world differently. By the time she left Hogwarts after she defied that stupid prophecy she had learnt about, the one which had linked Neville Longbottom and Lord Voldemort together thanks to the stupid scar on the Boy who Lived's forehead, Holly had come to realise that her differences weren't just due to the way she had skirted between the magical world and the muggle world.
She was just different and for reasons she could not work out even for herself. And when she discovered that Holly felt freer than she had ever felt in her entire life.
She killed Voldemort, not out of any sense of loyalty for the so-called Light; after what the bastards had done to her family and her, and the job they weren't even finished with by the time she was older, why would she lift a finger to help them.
No, she killed Voldemort to show her contempt for Dumbledore and Longbottom and how useless they were overall.
The first signs of her differences came from the fact she preferred reading once she had been allowed to go to school by the Dursleys - as she grew up and her intellect expanded, Holly would ask herself why the Dursleys had allowed her to go to school in the first place; they had made it very clear to her over the years that they would have preferred it if she had been a retard, so the truth would be forever out of her grasp - instead of playing with dolls, although she didn't mind the idea of dressing them all up in different clothes, and spinning new stories for them.
For instance, Action-Man could become a baby, or even a new villain who wanted to take over the world by stealing the electricity supply from all corners of the Earth, but Holly found it easier and even nicer for herself to take refuge in a book. As she learnt about deduction from the Sherlock Holmes stories (she had liked Agatha Christie's stories well enough, even if she thought the prime detectives of the woman writer were pompous and full of themselves to the point of madness) and from other detective and mystery writers, Holly started applying those approaches to everyday life.
She found life to be more enthralling and more entertaining and less boring and predictable than what you found in a book. It was a blow to discover that real life was rarely that easy.
People loved banality, the Dursleys more than most. Holly quickly realised that; there was not a single book in the house that wasn't something like a cookbook, and that was because the Dursleys disliked imagination. It seemed that the only imagination allowed in the world was what you found in TV dramas, movies, and books. Anything in real life was to be ignored or at best mocked. And the Dursleys were the worst perpetrators of mocking everyone who didn't conform to normality.
It seemed to be a trend among humans to crave that desire for banality, worse they were prepared to kill what was different. Holly found everyone in Little Whinging was like that. They were like the Dursleys, sometimes taking their desire to show off to new heights to new levels. Everyone in Little Whinging had made sure their houses were inwardly and outwardly spotless, that they had to have the best, newest, sinfully most expensive car they could actually buy without any consideration whatsoever that the money they were spending could help impoverished people and children and animals.
Not that they cared.
If there was one thing Holly noticed on the days before she left the Dursleys, that was she was the one who was different, but as time passed that became a strength, but at the time it was something she found hard to accept.
Holly left the Dursleys for a number of reasons. The first and the most obvious reasons were the abuse she took and the periods of starvation she was frequently punished with. Holly wasn't stupid; she knew the Dursleys had been looking for whatever stupid reason they could come up with to give themselves the excuse to punish her with.
Broken crockery.
Dirty carpets.
A brick through a window, the car or the house itself (that actually happened once, and Holly was still punished severely for it even if she had been somewhere else at the time, but she had quickly discovered that Vernon and Petunia Dursley were not interested in the truth; they simply wanted her to be punished although she was worried about just how stupid they were since they knew she was a witch).
She had learnt her lessons. She had learnt how to stay one step ahead, and as time passed Dudley very rarely managed to get her in trouble; occasionally he succeeded, but the petty little victories from Mr Creosote Junior became fewer and further between. But it didn't stop him. Holly also didn't have any problems with finding ways to avoid her cousin. But she didn't want to do it for the rest of her life. When she had mastered the notice-me-not charm, although at the time she hadn't even known what it was and wouldn't until after she had read up on concealment spells when she first stepped into Diagon Alley, Holly had found avoiding the Dursleys was easy and simple, but it was no way to live. Sometimes the Dursleys did get lucky and sometimes she was punished.
Second, Holly wanted to have a life where she wasn't scared or worried about being beaten up so badly. When she had been a toddler, the Dursleys had slapped her around, knowing she was too young to take something like a punch although it hadn't stopped Vernon from breaking an arm or a leg. As she got older, Holly began to fear for her life. Some of the beatings she was getting were becoming worse, and she knew they would cross the line of fatality.
Third, Holly knew if she escaped from the Dursleys then she could easily change her identity after a certain amount of time and she could get a fresh start where nobody would know anything about her past. There was no doubt in Holly's mind at the time the Dursleys would not tell anybody where she was, never mind raise the alarm when she discovered she was missing. They hated her and called her a freak, and that was all she would ever be to them.
One night, Holly just vanished. She unlocked the door of the cupboard and she had snuck out of the house, and she ran to the train station, and used her powers which she had begun mastering as soon as she discovered their existence when she learnt they were not a fluke or a coincidence, she made herself unnoticed
When she left the Dursleys, Holly waited for a year and a half on the streets of London although she doubted she needed that amount of time since there was no sign of the Dursleys giving any kind of thought whatsoever about her, never mind lifting a finger to tell anyone she was missing. For that length of time, Holly turned to crime just to survive.
Not a problem, she had learnt that the only way she could survive at Number 4 Privet Drive was by stealing; she didn't like breaking the law, well at least at first but as time passed it became just a fact of life for her. And when she learnt of her powers, it became easy for her to simply will the doors to open and for the security alarms to be turned off like they weren't even there. Once she was through she would steal the food and water she needed to just stay alive. When she got into the streets, she had an admittedly easy time because of her powers; it was easy for her to steal money and food, and it was even simpler for her to keep herself warm and dry and unnoticed. Which was what she wanted.
A year and a half later, Holly had walked into a police station and she found herself in foster care. The Holly Potter who walked into the police station that day was very different from the one who'd run from the Dursleys.
The new Holly Potter had spent that time learning how to survive and how to use her cunning to get what she wanted; there was nothing like a rough life on the streets of a city to help somebody grow in ways nobody could even imagine.
Nobody tried to adopt her. But that was fine with her after a while because at the time Holly had come to realise she wasn't interested in having someone to call mum and dad. It was a shame though since when she had left the Dursleys behind, a part of her had yearned for the chance to have a loving family, something she had wanted a long time ago, as she had grown older, it simply became a fantasy in the back of her mind, a fantasy she knew would never come true, and she self-internalised the pain that realisation caused.
As for her time in the foster home… well, she had hoped to spend a few years in the foster home and then she would leave, get a place of her own, and go to university and become better than the Dursleys had ever imagined or pictured she would be, and if they tried to harm her again, well she would deal with them. She had learnt the value of patience and she had also learned the value of settling scores since an enemy who remained was doomed to always be there. It was the real world. It wasn't one of those moronic stupid concepts those comic book superheroes didn't see; they kept going on about being boy or girl scouts, they failed to see real-life and teaching it to kids.
Who cared if kids learnt the harsh truths of the world?
Mollycoddling was not going to work. Sometimes you had to bash a kid over the head with the hard truths of the world. Holly knew she was being antagonistic because of the upbringing she'd had, so she didn't understand why parents didn't just tell their kids what really went on. Her plans were virtually ruined or they needed to be adapted when she received her Hogwarts letter, and she discovered the truth.
She was a witch. She could do magic.
Her parents were both a witch and wizard.
They were killed in a war, they weren't drunkards like the Dursleys had told her they were, but she had guessed that since the Dursleys loved making themselves up to be the epitome of law-abiding citizens and everyone else was beneath them, although her father's betrayal of the Longbottoms meant she had to pick up the pieces. Holly was horrified and furious by the news when she received it. Thanks to what her father supposedly did because she found herself having several questions on her mind after the goblins revealed the truth to her, the Potter family virtually lost everything; not only did the Longbottoms and several so-called Light sided families tear her family fortune to pieces, throwing themselves at it like a school of scavenging sharks feasting themselves on the carcass of a dead and rotting whale floating in a current, their businesses were shut down essentially overnight, their properties were looted and ransacked and valuable portraits dating back centuries were destroyed, and with them burnt in their own frames in an act of callousness towards the family who betrayed their precious saviour….and her mother was murdered by them as well. And she was sent to the Dursleys as an orphan, a baby unaware of what happened to her family. Her own godfather abandoned her without a thought. It was as though everyone could smell some kind of stench that they wanted to get rid of.
Her sorting into Slytherin had taken the school by storm, which had started when they found she was there. Many people had not liked the thought of a 'traitor's daughter' attending their school, attending the same classes they were, breathing the same air, and eating the same food. The very fact she had been sorted into the so-called 'darkest' house of the school hadn't bothered her. Holly didn't care for the philosophy of the magical world all that much, but it just gave her the excuse she needed; Holly fought her way to the top.
It wasn't like she had much trouble, never mind choice.
She didn't have any trouble because she knew her intellect was unbound. Dumbledore was clearly interested in her, but he seemed content to leave her alone; she had the feeling if the old wizard considered she was putting a toe out of line, he would come down hard on her, so she was very careful with her plans. Many of the schemes she came up with were for the rebuilding of the Potter family.
Another thing she didn't have any problem with becoming a top student of the school was, unlike the mudblood Granger, Holly knew how to have a life (she thought and even called Granger a mudblood not out of any sympathy for the Death Eater philosophy, but because she genuinely thought the insult stuck with Granger, who believed life should be about following rules and authority, but also her arrogance got on Holly's nerves, and truthfully she couldn't think of a more appropriate insult to remind Granger she was in a world unlike her precious muggle world).
Holly had her own memories of the muggle world, and many of them had been far from pleasant.
Choice…. When she discovered the magical world and the truth of what had happened to her parents, she had also learnt how so many people had taken from her family.
As the years passed and her powers and knowledge of magic grew to the point where she knew she could make the Dursleys regret touching her, Holly came to understand the reasons why she was sorted into Slytherin; she wanted her family fortune back. She wanted to bring back everything taken from her, but to do that she would need to grow stronger, and she would need the knowledge she gained to gain an edge; she learned that Dumbledore and Augusta Longbottom were the leaders of the purge (that was what she referred to what the magical world did to the Potters), and they were magically and politically powerful.
In order to deal with them, Holly would need to become politically and magically powerful, to shorten the gaps between herself, and them. She was doing that with the studies she was taking into magic. But she needed to find a piece of leverage to restore her family. She wanted to learn, but she knew how to live her life. She had started looking for ways of bridging the gap, while she was left disgusted with how easily the other three-quarters of the school's student population took their anger at her father out on her. As the years passed, Holly became a top student. And that wasn't just because she bought books from higher levels and practiced, oh no.
Thanks to the older students, Holly had discovered the way to the kitchens. To the House-Elves. Thanks to them and their eagerness to help her, Holly discovered the Room of Requirement. When she discovered what the room could do, and how to make it work for her, the Room of Requirement became the perfect place for her to grow her skills. When she returned to the muggle world for the summer holidays, she would try to look up ways that would help her understand how the Room worked; the only thing that truly made sense to her was the Room actively opened a form of a portal, a wormhole, and would scoop up whatever the user of the Room wanted.
What did Holly want?
Money.
Riches.
Books on ancient magical spells. Books on Ancient Runes. Books on Dark Magic. Books on Potions. Take your pick. Holly read through the books, and she became better. But all that time, Holly continued looking into the events which got her father locked up, and she also wanted to know if Dumbledore or anybody else had plans for her.
But she needed leverage. And that was the primary reason why Holly was doing this. It had taken her a while, but Holly had learnt that the Potter elves had survived, they had been waiting in a kind of limbo, waiting for their only mistress to give them orders. And she had; Holly had learnt the Longbottoms were hosting a ball. That was what she needed. She had discovered that while Augusta had stolen a lot, and had even made questionable enquiries about her, questions Holly truly did not like.
Now it was time for the old hag to learn of the consequences of what would happen if anyone crossed Holly Potter. But she was not the only one; Dumbledore would be there, but she felt it was doubtful she could do anything with him. But she had learnt enough about the events surrounding the attack on Neville that terrible night to have suspicions about other members of the Longbottom family, and now it was time to set records straight.
X
Holly snapped out of her thoughts when she saw her Elves waiting faithfully for her in their new home; she had managed to steal enough money from muggle shops and bookies, and she had worked long and hard to use magic to make sure the muggles didn't interfere, never mind the muggle world. It was smaller than what the elves were used to, but they were delighted. They were serving a Potter, a powerful Potter once more. Granted, they knew her magic was slightly darker, but she was compassionate and gentle towards them, seeing them as friends rather than slaves.
"Are we ready?" She asked.
"Yes, Miss Holly," one of the elves, a female called Cal replied.
Holly grinned. "Excellent. Now we can begin."
She knew there would be a risk involved, but if she played her cards right she would win.