Hello all! This is an idea I had a really long time ago that I attempted to execute poorly. Recently I've had the chance to revamp and rewrite it and I'm actually really happy with where it's going so I figured I would publish it. I don't have a beta reader, so I apologize for any glaring errors in the story. This will turn into an AU, with small things changing here and there at first, but eventually I expect it to branch off quite a bit from canon. Please feel free to leave me criticism as well, I can't grow as a writer without it. And without further ado, I hope you enjoy.


When I was little I'd have the worst nightmares. The dark would suffocate me, and my screams would be silenced by the terror of the man in front of me. At least I thought so – then I'd wake up to my dad cradling me as I cried. He was a fairly stern man, and seeing him smile was the biggest treat I could ever get. It wasn't always like that. I used to have a mum, and my dad was a different man than the one I have now. I used to relive the worst night of my life because I just couldn't get over it. My dad could barely look at me in the beginning. Sometimes I couldn't look at myself either. I didn't want to look at the girl my birth parents didn't love.

After I turned four, my dad started working at Hogwarts. He couldn't leave me alone so I had to go with him. I spent a lot of time in his quarters, and every once in a while a nice Scottish woman would come keep me company when my dad couldn't. Her name was Professor McGonagall. I think she pitied me most of the time. Sometimes I would say something and she would look really sad, like what I said was wrong. I used to ask why, but she always lied so I stopped. She wasn't the only adult to lie to me.

Despite my being at Hogwarts with my dad almost year-round, I never really met the headmaster. I suppose it wasn't really all that important to meet him when I was just a little girl. But on my sixth birthday, the fifth of February 1984, he came to visit my father in our chambers. I couldn't help the scream when I saw him, or the accidental magic either. It all just escaped me in my fear. The tea, my birthday cake, and the beginner's potion kit my father gave me were all ruined. I might have broken some furniture as well. My dad told the headmaster to leave as a result. He had to comfort me the rest of that night, and I fell asleep in tears. The nightmares got worse than ever that night. I didn't have the heart to tell my dad that the headmaster was the man in my nightmares. That was the beginning of all the lies I would tell.

After that day, my father started teaching me potions. He said I needed to understand the subtle art that it was, and since he was a potions master I was going to learn from the best. I didn't hate it. At first I thought it was boring, and I was too impatient to wait for the next step sometimes. It blew up in my face more than once. Once I started brewing more complex potions though, it was fun. I got to experiment with different ways to make a potion, make them more potent, or less potent. It became a sort of unspoken bonding time with him. I'd had such a hard time connecting with him before, but every time I got something just right he'd give me this weird grin that looked unnatural on his face. I couldn't help giggling in joy whenever I saw it. He was patient when I made mistakes, unless I blew a cauldron up, then he got mad. It also gave me the ability to brew a potion for dreamless sleep. I took advantage far more often than I should have. I just wanted to stop reliving that night every time I dreamed. Sometimes I wished I could just brew a forgetfulness potion.

When I was seven, Professor McGonagall started giving me books on transfiguration. I think she could tell I was bored of being stuck in my father's office or our chambers all day. I got through them faster than she could give me more. My father let me use his wand to practice on inanimate objects sometimes, but only when I fully understood the theory. The beginning of the next school year I was allowed to go to the Great Hall for meals, and I was given my own little chair next to my father's. Students started asking about me after that. The most common one I heard was why I didn't stay with other family during the year. They always got quiet when they were told my dad was all I had. Most of them seemed sad about that. The ones in the red house always looked like they were sorry for me. Sometimes I was sorry for me too.

It was the summer after my eighth birthday that Headmaster Dumbledore came to visit me at Spinner's End. I couldn't help the utter terror I felt when he said he was there for me. It was the first time I'd ever called my father 'daddy', but it certainly wasn't the last. I curled myself up in his lap and gripped his hand like a lifeline. Everything fragile in the room rattled like there was an earthquake. I couldn't look the headmaster in the eye, so I just stared at my dad's hand engulfing mine as he spoke to me. He told me about my brother. My little, baby brother, and how no one could know I was his sister. How he was The-Boy-Who-Lived, the famous Harry Potter. My name was changed when my father took me in. That was okay, my dad was the best father I could have asked for. I'd had so many questions, but I didn't ask the headmaster one of them. He scared me too much, and I wasn't stupid enough to ask him a question that would get me in trouble. I asked my father instead after he left. My father didn't like my questions. I didn't like the answers. We had a tentative silence for three days after. I hated the silence. I hated being scared more.

When I was nine, the pain started to set in. My father and I both thought I was just sick and it would go away in no time. It just got worse. On December 13, 1987 I was admitted to St. Mungo's due to collapsing at lunch the day before. Madame Pomfrey couldn't figure out what was wrong. I'd been dealing with the pain for nine months at that point. My father only grew more distraught when the mediwitches told him I had been using potions to make the pain tolerable for at least a couple of months before I was brought to them. Further work on their behalf and the answers were not pretty. Apparently, there was something seriously wrong with my magical core. I was also apparently suffering the effects of a spell gone wrong. A spell that had to have been cast when I was extremely young, because the pain was a result of years of a small amount of damage being left to grow. They compared it to leaving a single rotten apple in a bowl with apples that had been picked that day. Those fresh apples would rot much faster because they were touching a rotten apple. I think I understood. The pain was only going to get worse, and if they didn't know what spell had been used they couldn't treat me. Neither I nor my father knew what the spell was. All I could do was keep taking potions for the pain until we figured out what it was.

When I was ten, I discovered something else about me that was not right. It started with my eyes. My vision was horrible when I was younger, something I almost certainly was going to need glasses for when I was older. I suppose I didn't really think about it. At least, not until I looked in the mirror one morning to see me eyes looking absolutely monstrous. I almost screamed, until I blinked and my eyes were back to their normal hazel. I dug through Hogwarts' library to see what I could find about weird eyes to no avail. When I cut my tongue on my sharp and aching teeth that hadn't been that sharp before I grew terrified and started digging through books on magical creatures. I found nothing. But suddenly I was paranoid about everything around me. Since my eyes looked weird that one morning I noticed I could see perfectly all of a sudden. I had to be careful about my teeth because they would suddenly get sharper at the weirdest of moments. My sense of smell was heightened too, based off the fact that I could easily tell if a potion ingredient was going bad just by smelling it. I didn't understand what was wrong with me. I was too scared to tell my father. So I didn't. I didn't tell him a lot of things.

When I got my letter to Hogwarts I thought I'd be excited. I wasn't. Not really. Maybe it was because I'd grown up there in a sense. Or maybe it was just because I was in a lot of pain that day. Maybe I just didn't want to have to hide the weird things happening to me from an entire house of students. Headmaster Dumbledore visited a few days after too. He gave me a box of books and a little photo album and told me they were some of my parents' things. He also told me I was named Amelia Rhoswen Potter, and to remember it well because it will be my name again one day. I hated it. Why couldn't my name be what it is now? I didn't want to be a Potter again. From what I could remember, the Potters were awful people.

My first year as a student at Hogwarts was my first year riding the train to get there. It wasn't awful. I sat with a blonde-haired boy named Cedric Diggory, but we didn't speak much. It was weird being one of the students who had to go through the Sorting Ceremony. I almost flinched when the hat started speaking to me. The relief I felt when it announced Slytherin was beyond any words I could use. It was worth the stares I got from people who didn't know my father had a daughter. It wasn't worth the stare I got from Dumbledore. Most of the Slytherins were relatively kind, none of them were bothered by my existence at least. Potions and Transfiguration were my favorite subjects by far, and it seemed Charms was going to be a subject I had to pull myself through by my hair. Herbology bored me, but not nearly as much as History of Magic. Defense was – well, the professor was nothing but useless. For the most part I tried to keep my head down. I ignored the girls in my room as much as possible, their gossip was grating at best.

My ability to stay isolated lasted until my second year, then I had people asking me for favors. It hadn't slipped by anyone's eye that I excelled at Potions, or that Transfiguration was relatively easy for me. People started asking me for help, first with homework, then to cover up a fight. Eventually it grew into the kind of lucrative business that I took full advantage of. There was always a price for a favor from me. And then people started asking if I knew someone, and if I could get information on them. I didn't complain. I had a hand in every house, enough people owed me favors that it worked out in the end. Once he realized it was happening, my father seemed torn between being proud or being disappointed. I think he chose to be proud, as nothing I was doing was illegal or against school rules.

The highlight of my second year was gaining an actual friend. His name was Adrian Pucey. Unfortunately, he also noticed the weird things about me. Like my eyes changing color every so often, and my sense of smell. He didn't say anything until a patch of my arm turned to reddish scales. Neither of us knew what was happening to me, until one day in History of Magic Professor Binns talked about an archaic group of witches and wizards. They called themselves Dragonians. They'd created some potion that entwined their magical core deeply with their circulatory system. It was meant to make it easier for them to channel powerful spells. The potion also allowed them to take on the characteristics of a dragon, such as their eyes, their sense of smell, their scales, etc. They were feared when they existed, because the magic they channeled was powerful dark magic. When I asked why they don't exist anymore, Professor Binns said the potion was lost when their circles were hunted down and their texts burned. Nothing of their teachings survived the hunts, and the group died out. Pucey and I didn't believe him. I wished we could have.

The rest of our second year was spent researching as much as we could about Dragonians. While some of my time was taken by brewing potions and running my trading business, Pucey didn't mind. We had a set classroom to meet in when I was brewing, and he'd read aloud as I went about my potion making. When I was running my trades we'd sit out in the courtyard or by the lake and read together. If I had business he would sit quietly as I worked out a deal, sometimes he'd even pitch in. I found his company reassuring. My first year had been lonely, but now I had a friend. He was fully supportive in figuring out what I was. He didn't even question why I was constantly brewing potions to help with pain, just asked if it was getting worse. On particularly rough days he would sit on the floor in the common room and absent mindedly rub my head as I laid on the couch. I didn't mind, it was comforting. The snickers from some of the older years didn't bother me. They didn't seem to bother him either.

At the end of the year I promised I'd write, and he did the same. It was a bittersweet end to the year, but I knew I'd have him by my side again at the start of term in September. With the summer came Spinner's End, and I couldn't help breathing in deeply at the smell of home. And a whole summer with my father and hardly anyone to bother us. Except for the headmaster. Dumbledore did so love to visit us. I found myself adopting my father's sneer when he insisted upon calling me Amelia. For the first time it was anger that bubbled to the surface when I looked at him, instead of absolute terror. I wasn't sure why, but the nightmares about him had never actually stopped, and anger felt better than fear. It felt so much better than fear.