For a friend.

I don't own Millennium or Harry Potter.

So Alike.

The windmill was surrounded by countryside on all sides, situated in a large field full of overgrown stalks of grass and was the home to hundreds of different varieties of wildflowers whose rich nectar smell attracted bees and a host of other insects for miles around. With the copse of trees to the side and the small gathering of greenhouses and outbuildings which contained different plants and a garage and a fitness gym, the whole area looked picturesque and serene. The nearest town was only a short walk away, with the basic and mundane things that you would expect to find, complete with a small school and a railway station, linking the town to the rest of the railway network.

In the windmill was quite possibly the best cat burglar in Europe.

Holly Potter was sitting in her living room in the converted windmill while she had her laptop in her lap, occasionally rubbing the baby bump she had acquired, her emerald green eyes sweeping across the screen of the computer as she read through the translated newsfeeds from Sweden. She had found this property served a much better base of operations than the flat she often stayed in whenever she was in London. The quiet and the isolation of the countryside had greatly appealed to her especially since she preferred the quieter life considering her tough and stressful childhood.

Holly was a cat burglar. She was also a witch who had lost her entire family when a war was fought in the magical world, a world outside the normal non-magical world and hidden for centuries to protect them from the potential dangers, thanks to the evil wizard known as Lord Voldemort. "You Know Who," "the Dark Lord," "He Who Must Not Be Named," "Tom Riddle"….Voldemort had more than one moniker granted to him by either himself, or his followers, or the rest of the magical world. Holly cared little for any of them. When she had killed Voldemort publicly and slowly to make the evil wizard regret ever coming for her, she had wiped her hands of him for good without a look back.

But before that, her parents were murdered and she was marked by the curse, where a piece of Voldemort's soul was stuck to her head, and became the focus of the plans of another powerful wizard Holly genuinely did not like, especially when he had dumped her at the Dursleys, who had immediately abused her and turned her into a little maid for their personal use while Dumbledore sat back and watched the abuse from afar while he finished his ill-thought-out plans.

But things took a mysterious turn.

Part of the reason why Holly was such a brilliant cat burglar was that she had the means to slip into the shadows and teleport herself across vast distances. She had discovered it just one day when she had been chased by her cousin Dudley when he and his gang were hunting her down. Cornered in a darkened alley, Holly had hidden in the darkest shadow she could find while the gang tried to find her. They would have beaten her up, had she not bothered to escape through the shadows.

It would be a long time before she learnt Albus Dumbledore had bound the majority of her powers, but the old wizard hadn't expected her to have the potential to be a shadow teleporter, or whatever they were called. As a result, it was one of the few abilities she had full control over.

The first time she teleported using the shadows, Holly moved from that dirty part of Little Whinging to the dark tunnels of the Circle Line. She would have died when a train appeared if she hadn't concentrated hard and returned to a part of Little Whinging that was far from the original start-up place. It had earned her a whipping thanks to Dudley telling his parents she had vanished from them, but in Holly's mind, it was worth it. When they had put her back into the cupboard under the stairs, Holly had tested her newfound power to see what it could do. As she went along she discovered she could move from one place to another. Concentration was key. If she went through the shadows without a clear idea of where to go like she had when she first travelled through them, she could travel at random.

Shadow travelling as she called it was her way out, but as she made preparations to escape the Dursleys and make her way into the city, Holly decided to initiate a series of jumps.

She used the powers to explore.

She used the power to steal food and drink whenever she was starved, and eventually, she became so good at it that she found enjoyment in theft. The best part was nobody knew what she had done because as far as the muggles were concerned, she had not left the house. But she needed to learn how to master her abilities. So she began to practice. She quickly discovered a piffling little thing like distance and space meant nothing in the shadows, and as she travelled she came across a scene from a horror movie; a man raping and beating a young woman. Keeping herself invisible in her horror, Holly watched as the man callously beat the woman until she lost all kinds of sense and she saw him smack a young girl while her identical twin just hugged the man as if the horrors hadn't happened.

Holly had watched the two girls with interest. Both of them were more or less identical, but they were completely different in manner. The girl hugging the man who shared one or two physical characteristics so he was likely their father was looking sneeringly at her family like they were not her own. And the man clearly loved it.

The other girl, on the other hand…

Holly had watched in horror and sympathy as the girl took one look at her mother, and she raced into her room and she took a carton of some kind that had been sliced open and sloshed with liquid. It had taken some doing to find some shadows so she could remain hidden, but Holly had watched in horror and fascination as the girl chucked the contents of the carton into the car, and then threw in a lit match. The man went up like a torch.

Holly would have stayed for longer to see if she could help, or to observe - to this day she didn't know what would have happened, but she had left but not before taking in some of the scene and the local language which she later discovered to be Swedish. And she had discovered the girl's name.

Lisbeth Salander.

With the sun rising she returned to Britain, shaken by her discovery.

After she used her shadow abilities to get out of Privet Drive, Holly was on top of the world. She had escaped and for a few years, she began committing bigger thefts and learning how to survive on the streets. By her 11th birthday, Holly had gone into foster care, with plans to leave for another country and start a new life. Britain meant nothing to her. She had it all worked out, and she knew it would have worked if she hadn't received her Hogwarts letter.

The discovery she was a witch made so much sense but at the same time, she was worried. The anonymity she had enjoyed before in the muggle world was non-existent, especially when she learnt of how she was the Girl Who Lived. But she found a sadistic delight when she had been sorted into Ravenclaw, not Gryffindor. She wasn't a hero. She found the wizarding world to be weak. They let their beliefs about her character cloud their reality. They and the Death Eaters failed to see the future. They failed to see the truth.

In short, they were stupid.

Holly showed herself to be an academic, especially after she had gotten herself checked out at Gringotts so she could further understand her powers. The discovery some of them were blocked was bad enough, but discovering a piece of Voldemort was in her after that brainless idiot Hagrid had told her the story angered her. She had it removed and destroyed.

But the experience, while shocking, was a proven eyeopener for Holly who realised she had enemies in both the light and the dark of magic. In unlocking her abilities for her, the goblins discovered memory loss and mental tampering; when they were gone, she discovered she had tried to escape the Dursleys many times over the years. She realised if she wanted to survive, if the Potters were to survive through her, she would need to prepare, she would need to grow stronger.

She would need to master magics like the kind of spells that modified and tampered with her memories. She would need to learn how to fight both magically and physically.

When she arrived at Hogwarts she began evening the odds. Her shadow travel ability was a great start, and over the years she became better at magic, and she even gained three animagus forms; a black cat, a raven, and an orca. Land, air, and sea.

After she managed to defeat Voldemort although she had needed to cheat a little bit in order to win, poisoning the Order of the Phoenix so they would never be a threat to her again, Holly went back into the muggle world where she continued her criminal career. She eventually became so good at it that she became a legend, but nobody knew how to get hold of her. Holly wasn't bothered about that. Most of the people who wanted to get after her, especially after she stole the crown jewels for a few days to make it clear to the British people that she wasn't a burglar to take lightly, were terrorists or mundane burglars or criminals.

She had almost forgotten the girl, Lisbeth Salander. It wasn't until she watched the international news that a story came from Sweden, about how Lisbeth had murdered two people, two journalists and had been hunted down. Holly had been disgusted and amazed by the level of stupidity in the Swedish media, especially when they began spinning senseless stories and accounts describing Lisbeth as a mentally insane lesbian satanist biker.

What the hell?

How did that make sense?

Were people just so stupid?

Why would lesbian Satanists give a damn about journalists?

For a while she watched the story pan out before she saw the report of Lisbeth being critically injured with a head wound. As she read the continuing news unfold, Holly realised she was being told very little. Holly sighed and pushed the laptop off of her with a frustrated sigh after she looked up the details of the hospital before she heaved herself up; she loved her unborn child, she did, but they were so heavy. She grabbed her travelling cloak and she went to the most shadowy part of the room, and concentrating very hard she closed her eyes and focused on the image of the hospital….

X

…. Holly reopened her eyes and, thanks to years of long practice, found herself in the hospital where Lisbeth Salander was being held until she had recovered. Using her magic she cast a very strong notice-me-not charm and she walked through the hospital, opening every ward she could find until she came across a corridor where there were two hospital rooms that had men on guard. Holly walked closer to them, using passive legilimency to see they were guarding Lisbeth and another man.

Holly flicked her wand at the guard and at the door, preventing the muggle from seeing her open the door while making sure nobody noticed her presence. Once inside she got her first good look at Lisbeth Salander for the first time in years. Hooked up to life support machines with a massive crown of bandages wrapped around her head, Salander looked swamped by her surroundings. Medicine was not one of Holly's strong points, but she knew basic healing.

Using her mind art skills, Holly found herself in Lisbeth's mind. She saw everything while she deftly worked to heal some of her injuries, not enough but enough to give her a push.

She watched as Lisbeth saw her father beat and hurt her mother. She watched as Lisbeth tried so hard to tell people from the police to a priest and social workers about what was happening, but always got punished for telling 'lies.' She saw the way Lisbeth lashed out at school against bullies while going silent and ignoring the teachers whom she felt knew nothing.

She saw "All the Evil" where she was thrown into a mental hospital where she was often strapped down to a bed without any kind of outside stimuli at the hands of Dr Peter Teleborian. She watched as Palmgren became Lisbeth's guardian after the unfair and unjustified decision to say Lisbeth was incompetent.

She watched as Lisbeth became a computer hacker, developing her skills until it became a fine art and later became her chief means of making a living. She saw how Lisbeth was raped and brutalised by her second so-called guardian who took an obsessive view of her and sought to control her before Lisbeth overpowered him and blackmailed him, but not before she tattooed a particularly inflammatory truth into his chest. She saw the memories of her time with Blomkvist before discovering the journalist fancied one of his editors, and how Lisbeth walked away and assumed a different identity before travelling the world for a spell before returning, confronting her second guardian who was trying to discover more about her so he could deal with her….only to be accused of murder, thanks to a gun found at the scene of a murder of two journalists, and the resultant investigation which led her to Zalachenko, her own sick father, and the man who was behind so much.

Holly frowned as she saw Lisbeth's knowledge of her father and how he was a spy who had defected from Russia and gave the Swedish a vast amount of knowledge, which they deemed more important than the lives of three mundane people, one of which was Lisbeth, the other being Salander's mother.

Holly smirked to herself as she saw the sweet memory of how Lisbeth dug herself out of the grave the bastard put her in before she attacked him head-on. Zalachenko was in the hospital. Holly would deal with him in a moment, in the meantime, she withdrew from Lisbeth's mind and considered what she had seen.

They were alike, she and Lisbeth; both of them had been manipulated by people who preferred thinking of the bigger picture, and they had paid for it. Okay, she knew Lisbeth had suffered worse than she had. But both of them had suffered. But both of them had risen above it; Holly had become a cat burglar and a powerful witch who had poisoned the Order while killing Voldemort, Lisbeth had become a computer hacker. Both of them preferred living outside the normal norms of society.

They were more alike than anyone.

Holly turned and left the room before she went into Zalachenko's room. Looking down at the crippled twisted old man, Holly quickly dove in and when she came out she was on the verge of killing him. The things he had done, the people whose lives he had destroyed including those of young girls who were tortured and became prostitutes for his organisation made him a target, but she would instead give Blomkvist and Plague, Lisbeth's greatest allies all they needed to bring it down and expose the rotten flesh that the whole thing was.

If that wasn't the perfect revenge for her 'sister' Holly did not know what wasn't.

X

Until the next time.