I'm sorry it's taken so long to update, but I hope you enjoy what I've written.
Please let me know what you think, and I don't own Harry Potter.
X
The Dursleys.
Holly flinched as she pushed more of her magic into the wound that had been ripped into her thigh by Ripper. She grunted quietly as she shifted herself around, careful to not make a sound unless she wanted Vernon to come tearing over to her and beating her. The poor confines and the unwashed bed and cupboard made her worried about infection, although it was possible Ripper's poor hygiene made her worried about the future of the wound, although she was using her occlumency to control and filter out any emotions or feelings that she didn't want to contaminate the wound, and she kept running scanning spells separately to monitor the work.
The work was coming along well, albeit slowly as she didn't have the benefit of a wand to repair the damage. Under her anger and pain induced magic, Holly directed her power to repair the torn tissues, picturing them as healed under the flow of her magic. In the past, Holly's accidental magic had proven to be a godsend in keeping her alive, and the almost continuous use of her magic had allowed her access to a number of magical gifts she had only just been able to harness.
In her first two years, Holly had learnt about the Room of Requirement and what it could do for her. Once she had mastered it quickly, Holly had spent many an hour in there, practicing with the more arcane forms of magic, using the properties of the Room which generated small wormholes to scoop up whatever the user of the Room wished for, and what she had wanted was old sources of magical knowledge.
Thanks to the Room of Requirement, Holly became a collector of many forms of magical lore. She gathered old and new books on magical healing, written in the days when magic people pushed their powers to bend reality itself, and she learnt of a form of healing where the witch or wizard used the power of their minds to direct their magic into diagnosing and healing injuries or diseased flesh. Through years of experimentation, magically and occlumency enhanced meditation, those legendary and ancient healers had performed miracles that made what could be seen as godlike, but for Holly, they were simply something that could be done because it was what their bodies could do on their own, all they had done was make the art more refined, and Holly had become a veritable master of the art.
Upon discovering her parseltongue ability, Holly had studied that magical art, discovering parselmagic was based on healing, but it had its own equivalents of transfiguration spells and ordinary and more powerful charms, and high-powered curses. It was the uncertainty of what a parselmouth could say that made the art extremely feared, and once she discovered the full extent of what the power could do, Holly had developed a very strong spell repertoire. Merlin, it was a relief when she learnt that her inherent ability to speak parseltongue came from her mother, not Voldemort.
Holly was relieved that she had taken those studies so seriously, especially those involved in her wandless magic. Wandless magic was something Holly had learnt to understand as soon as she had gone to Hogwarts, knowing it would give her an edge, especially after Dobby had made the mistake of taking away one of her weapons, but it was not a problem for her since she was able to leave her bedroom after that fiasco with the pudding when Dobby levitated it up and dropped it on one of Vernon's guests. Holly had managed to unlock the door of her bedroom when she attacked the Dursleys.
She had thought about the things that had frustrated her or angered her over the last decade. The discoveries of her hidden heritage, the way Dumbledore and McGonagall both tried to stop her learning more about her family while Flitwick did his best to help, the petty and meaningless bullying of Draco Malfoy and the other Slytherins who believed she had been a pushover despite her good grades, the arrogance of Snape as he compared her constantly to James Potter and her annoyance with the thirty odd year old man who wanted to continue a childish feud with a girl who hadn't even been born, the stupidity of the Gryffindors who had problems just accepting the fact she wasn't one of them, the shadow of Lord Voldemort after she had learnt he was in Hogwarts, the games of Albus Dumbledore as they unfolded, and then recently the incompetence of the Ministry of Magic for failing to even bother to investigate the cause….all of them boiled in her mind before she added in the years of mental and physical abuse at the hands of the Dursleys, who had forced her to steal in order to survive for another week instead of either ignoring Dumbledore's threats in the letter he'd left with her after he'd dropped her off originally.
Once she had added that in, Holly had remembered everything else the Dursleys and their peers had done to her over the years; helping the Dursleys to enslave her in order to snap whatever spirit she possessed so they could destroy her potential as a witch, Marge setting those rabid monstrosities on her as a child, starving her, beating her…. All of it caused her anger to burn into a molten rage, and she became powerful enough to disintegrate the door and the locks that imprisoned her, and by the end of it the Dursleys quickly realised nothing they could ever do would hurt her. She was in control.
And…she saw no reason why she couldn't do that again.
With her wandless magic and her ability to draw upon the ambient magic as she had learnt in those more arcane magical books written by ancient sorcerers who'd done much the same thing and passed down their knowledge for the benefit of future generations, Holly would not have any problems dealing with the Dursleys.
But should she? She knew if she harmed them, and the magical world discovered it, they would prosecute her, and while she wasn't sure or not if it was a good idea or not, it was possible as well the magical world would discover she was from a parallel universe, and she had travelled into this world from another where muggles had discovered the magical world and destroyed it, she could find herself causing the same war she was trying to prevent. But at the same time, killing the Dursleys came with a number of advantages, namely not getting herself beaten up for absolutely nothing, and enslaved, but at the same time, she could try to make this second childhood better than the last, which was what she had been trying to do before her mother died. Again.
One of the reasons she had opted to become a baby again when she made up her mind to travel back into the past of a parallel universe was to give herself the childhood she had never had, only to receive a total repeat which had been the last thing she had wanted, but she had only lived in this world 5 years, there was still plenty of time to change that, she had wanted to give herself and her magic time to adjust in this new body.
The only problem she saw was what she was going to do next. She would almost certainly travel to London, but she decided to give herself the life she had never had before and she would make sure she got it, and this time around there didn't seem to be anything in the way of stopping her from leaving and so she wasn't bothered about coming back, but if she did…well, the Dursleys would need to learn quickly just what she was.
When she had been sorted into Ravenclaw, Holly had been in awe of the magical world and she had worked long and hard, trying and learning to understand the limits of her powers, and going further onwards, despite Dumbledore's meddling interference when the arrogant old man had wanted her contained and controlled, even going as far as to use magical core blocks on her to prevent her becoming too powerful. She had them discovered and removed in the summer before her third year, which was when she shone as a powerful witch.
Marge had never been a truly good dog breeder, contrary to what she liked to boast and think about herself. But if she needed any kind of proof of what the muggle authorities were like, she had it in spades, but in all honestly if there was one thing both muggle and magical had in common, it was how lazy they were when it came to things like checking up on whether some sick bitch was raising dogs to be family pets and not bloodthirsty monsters who were teeming with all kinds of nasty diseases and were off long before they died and stank everything.
Her leg glowed white as her magic tried to heal the injury, and she visualised the bite marks which had been deep enough to draw blood when Marge had set the disgusting animal on her sealing themselves up while any secondary infection was cleared up.
Her anger amplified her magic, which healed the injuries even faster than before. She had been angry ever since the dog attacked her, and when Vernon and Dudley had laughed at her when Ripper had taken hold of her thigh and refused to let go as he'd shaken his head. Holly had been keeping well out of the way of the Dursleys ever since the disgusting obese bitch had come for one of her self-invited visits to Privet Drive.
From the living room, muffled slightly by distance and the wooden door to the Cupboard under the Stairs, Holly could hear Dudley guffawing at something, and she had no idea if it was something on TV or at what he had seen Ripper do to her. It made all the things she had done to the Dursleys that much more justified in her book.
"Filthy muggles," Holly whispered malevolently as she listened to Dudley's brainless laughter and remembered how nobody had stopped Marge from going too far in her last reality, to say nothing of the teachers, the neighbours and heaven knew who else in Little Whinging. A part of her was beginning to wish she had used that secondary ritual instead, the one which would allow her to retain her full adult identity instead of de-ageing her and allowing her to take her baby self's place, but the problems with that ritual were numerous, but she was starting to wish she had taken that option and besides she would have had problems changing her name and identity so she could take her counterpart with her and raise that version of her.
Holly hissed as the magic she was using sent a wave of pain through her leg. She was thankful Ripper wasn't a fiercer type of dog, otherwise, the injury would likely be far worse than what it was. She grimaced, picturing a parallel universe where Dumbledore and the rest of the so-called light dumped her on the Dursleys' doorstep, or a version of her at any rate, and Marge bred something far worse; the Dursleys might have laughed themselves stupid the first time around, but they would not do anything while the fucking thing tore her to bits. The thought made her angrier than before.
The spike in her emotions pushed a little more magic into her efforts to repair the damage to her legs, allowing them to heal a little bit more. Holly had learnt magic was attuned to her emotions, and she had learnt the lesson in her previous life when she was in this very cupboard. Closing her eyes, Holly called upon her parseltongue abilities, going through her mind for the healing arts branches of parselmagic, and picturing a pit of snakes from cobras to vipers, and anacondas and pythons and basilisks, and runespoors and hydras, she let the language of parseltongue murmur through her lips as she felt her magic flow through her.
As she worked, closing her eyes to help her concentrate as this was powerful and dangerous magic that could be unstable if performed wrongly, Holly distantly became aware of a dog barking, and loud voices nearby.
She had been holding back from using this particular kind of magic for the last few minutes because she had wanted time to think, and because she didn't have a wand to properly focus such a delicate spell which made this use of it very reckless, but now she wanted out of this shit hole. Once the spell was over, Holly conjured a small ball of light and held it over the wound. Except the wound was healed. Aside from the smears of dried blood, which she quickly removed, her leg looked as perfect as ever. Holly smirked, but the dog was still barking, but now she was back in the real world it took her only a moment to realise the dog barking was Ripper. He likely sensed something was wrong, but it surprised her the Dursleys had yet to work out what was wrong was coming from her.
A wicked smirk crossed her face, and in the gloom of the cupboard she saw a faint green glow, and she felt the power rush to her eyes. She knew precisely what had happened. She had learnt long ago how to flush magic to her eyes. As an intimidation tactic as well as a sign of her power as a witch, it was almost perfect.
No matter. Holly took a deep breath as she prepared to leave the Dursleys and Number 4 behind, this time for good. Waving a hand and once more letting the ethereal, eerie and disturbing language of parseltongue drip from her fingers, Holly transfigured her clothes. Soon the oversized clothes that made her look like a tomboy with a fetish for oversized clothes….vanished, becoming a long, flowing and loose set of witch robes that made her look a lot like Bellatrix LeStrange, except hers were lined with silver and white trim. Once she'd taken stock of her outfit change, Holly focused on collapsing the wards around the property, which was really easy. There were no complicated spells or wards around the property, making it even simpler for her to find a way out.
Closing her eyes, Holly gathered her magic and mentally viewed the place she wanted to apparate to while she flushed magic to every part of her body, mentally forcing herself to appear in a flash of green flames, Holly's magic snapped….
…and she reappeared in a blaze of fire before the Dursleys, in their living room, making them shriek with horror before they realised she was standing in the middle of the flames before they died out.
"What's up?" Holly sneered before she took in their reactions while she magically crushed the television set, making it spark and create a small fire mixed with burning plastic and glass, scaring the Dursleys although Dudley was too shocked to react. Once she cast one look, just the one look over the small group, Holly smiled in sinister satisfaction when she saw Dudley was staring at her with his usual, gormless expression while Marge looked like she had spilt some of the wine, brandy, whiskey, or whatever it was she had just been drinking.
But Vernon and Petunia - the two members of the Dursley family who knew about magic - were gazing at her in horror. Her sinister smile grew when she saw they not only had they failed to stop her from learning about her heritage, but she could see they wondered just how she had discovered it.
"H-How did you do that?" Dudley asked.
Holly smirked and pointed at her cousin's idiot parents. "Ask them. They know precisely who and what I really am."
Dudley turned expectantly to her parents, but they were too horrified to answer their son's unspoken question. Holly decided to make it easier for them.
"I am a witch," she said, pointing at herself. "And I am proud to be higher on the evolutionary ladder than you, stunted, pathetic, miserable creatures."
Vernon's eyes were wide with horror, but he quickly tried to get control over the situation before anyone could say anything although Marge looked like she was on the cusp of speaking and saying something stupid. "You little freak! You will stop this right now, or-," suddenly Vernon gasped and his hands flew to his throat as he felt something constrict his larynx.
"Or you will do what?" Holly's magically enhanced voice demanded while the Dursley cowered in fear. "You seriously don't understand, do you, you filthy muggle, you cannot hurt me, and I'm going to make sure it's about time you realise your place in the world, and I am not going back to that stupid cupboard. Look at yourself, you have no power over me."
With an almost bored gesture, she threw Vernon against the wall, where the fat man made a sizeable dent in the effeminate wallpaper.
"VERNON!" Petunia shrieked and rushed to her husband, where she tried to help him get up, but he was too dazed from the lack of oxygen and the violence of the assault. Holly looked on, unimpressed and unmoved by the display while she laughed, her laughter turning into a full-blown sinister cackle that sounded brutally loud in the tension-filled room. It chilled the Dursleys by the bone. She knew how Petunia mollycoddled everyone she loved, with Marge and herself being the obvious exceptions.
"Ripper, get her!" Marge's sudden shout drew the witch's attention back to them and Holly stopped cackling immediately, and she saw without any kind of surprise that Marge had regained enough control over her senses to give her dog that rather weird order. The woman had just seen her use magic, and she clearly still believed a physical bite was going to injure her.
Ripper charged.
Holly had grown to loathe dogs, and it had started with Marge's monstrosities. They had been bred by the woman, and she had her doubts the woman had even acknowledged the fact the law demanded dogs trained the way Marge bred them was not to be a danger to the public, namely children. Marge was as arrogant as her brother, believing that she was instantly superior to everyone who came her way, but now it was time to make sure she knew it was not going to last.
After a moment of inner self-reflection, Holly brought up all of her rage at what Ripper - this version and the original - had done to her, and she thought about the parseltongue equivalent of the cruciatus curse. The sound of the hissing language shook the Dursleys, who immediately began panicking, especially as she dramatically added a rushing wind swirling around her and them to spook them, and she directed the force of her magic against the still charging dog.
Ripper didn't even see it coming, the animal's senses were either deadened by a lack of real use or they had never been there, to begin with, and he was hit by the curse, which made him howl and writhe with agony as the curse attacked his mind and his nerves, like a series of red hot needles were being pushed into each nerve at the same time before Holly, making a gesture with her hand, snapped the dog's neck.
"RIPPER!" Marge charged toward Holly, proving truly she wasn't sharp or intelligent enough to realise she was making the same mistake as before, something her sister in law was smart enough to avoid. Petunia had lifted her head when she heard Marge call her dog's name, and in a split second the horse-faced woman took in the scene and realised what was happening, but she was too late. But surprisingly Holly let her come close, and actually grab hold of her robed shoulders, but as the woman was about to smack her with one of her shovel-like hands, Marge found herself screaming in panic and fear when the conjured scorpions which had just appeared on Holly's arms and skittered across the young-looking girl, and onto Marge.
Holly's face took on a smirk before she extended her hands, and bright red lightning struck Marge, making her scream and writhe in pain before the panic-stricken scorpions stung her at once while they were electrocuted along with Marge, her unnatural emerald green eyes lighting up with power.
Holly wasn't in the mood to prolong this, she had seen to the Dursleys in her old reality and if she were honest she had better things to do with her time than repeat the original encounter. She had a better way of dealing permanently with them, she killed Marge in exactly the same way as she killed the dog. With a cruel, malicious smile, Holly turned to the other Dursleys, who cowered in terror away from her. Holly stepped closer to them, using her magic to provide small, dramatic effects such as gentle, slow breezes rippling through the air, and steam rising from her clothes and body. They were smoke and mirror tricks, nothing spectacular; a child with only a single year of magical education could have done it if they had found the right books and practiced the right way.
"This could have been avoided, you know," Holly told the Dursleys, lacing her magic into her words to keep them silent before she decided to unleash her wrath on them, although the most sinister reason why they kept silent was that her eyes were glowing green, giving her a demonic appearance while the magic crackled in the eye. "All you had to do was to either ignore me or at the least dump me somewhere. If you didn't want me so much then you could have gotten me away from here; there are hospitals and police stations. All it would have taken would be just dropping me off and then forgetting I existed. Why did you keep me here, I wonder," Holly finished before she waved her hand in Petunia's direction.
The Dursleys looked on in horror as Petunia floated over to Holly, where the witch forced Petunia to open her eyes and keep them open, and Holly performed a legilimency probe. Easily bypassing the muggle's weak but natural defences, Holly 'thought' of what she wanted to probe, and she looked further into Petunia's mind. What many people failed to realise was the human brain recorded everything it was exposed to, but what many didn't bother to recognise is the brain couldn't process and supply everything in memory. It didn't take long for the witch to find the memory of the morning after she'd been dropped on the Dursley's doorstep - it played out much as it had for the Petunia that Holly had known before, but this time things were different.
Holly didn't remember anything from the night before because she had been asleep, courtesy of a stunning spell when her cries had bothered the so-called 'light' after they killed her mother (Holly was going to get to the bottom of that and discover what the hell had happened, and the implications of what could happen to her long-term plans), but like before she had been woken up by the shrill shrieking of Petunia Dursley, who had opened her front door for the milk, only to find her. Holly smiled inwardly when she saw in her 'aunt's' mind's eye the letter. It seemed some things were consistent in realities, after all. In her world, Holly had been left on the Dursley's doorstep with nothing but a letter written by Dumbledore, but this letter was written instead by Sirius Black. It essentially told the Dursleys to look after her, as her parents were gone, and to wait until she was 11 before she received her Hogwarts letter. Holly grimaced as she thought about what the Dursleys had tried to do after they'd gotten her this time around, they had taken her to the bonfire, and they had tried to kill her but she had been rescued by Remus Lupin, who simply dumped her back. The werewolf had even cursed the Dursleys, and Holly had paid enough attention after she had made sure to cast a flame-freezing charm around herself while she had prepared to send herself somewhere else to get away from this dump. Only for her father's pet werewolf to get in the way.
Lupin had told them there were monitoring spells on Holly to make sure she was still alive, and when her life was threatened although she didn't understand why they were bothering her since they dropped her here, in her mind they just wanted to shove her into some forgotten hole in the ground and pretend she didn't exist.
The letter didn't really go into too much detail. It just told the Dursleys to look after her, but it was clearly written in such an uncaring way that Holly could very well believe that they wanted the Dursleys to mistreat her, just not kill her. Holly pulled out of her aunt's mind extremely gently - she had bad memories of Snape's attacks on her mind during her fifth year despite her really strong shields. Holly stared down at the Dursleys as they cowered before her, her mind going back to the time when a similar scene had played out. But that was a long time ago, and she didn't want to do anything but the barest minimum to get the Dursleys out of her life, for good.
She lifted her hand, and the Dursleys didn't have a chance to do anything when there was a flash of green light. The killing curse hit all three Dursleys and rendered them stone dead. Staring down at the bodies coldly for a moment, Holly sighed in frustration. Killing had never sat well with her, never, but she had learnt that sometimes you had to kill in order to defend yourself, but the Dursleys had crossed the line with her a long time ago, so she felt nothing for them.
She looked around the living room, contemplating what to do now. She needed to make this quick; she had put up silencing and privacy wards around the entire Dursley property, especially for this occasion. She went back to the cupboard, transfiguring her clothes, exchanging the witch robes (Morgana, it felt so good wearing something of her heritage, she hadn't really realised how good it did feel, but if she was going to live in the muggle world for a spell, she would need to dress like them) into a simple t-shirt, baggy trousers, and a jacket with a hood. She opened the cupboard and collected her stuff, including the money she had stolen from the muggles around here, and some of the food she had collected, stuffing it and the books she had collected in the backpack she owned before she took it all to the hall.
After going through a drawer where she picked out the box of matches, Holly opened the front door slowly, peeking out into the street. With her eyes she scanned for any sign of magical activity - animagi, invisibility cloaks, notice-me-not charms, and disillusionment charms, any sign of anyone from the magical world watching the house, anything that gave a hint she was being monitored or the Dursleys were.
But there was nothing.
The entire street was silent, and once Holly realised that there was no one there, she relaxed and stepped out of the front door, waving her hands at the lamp posts, shutting them off. She waved her hand at the Dursley's car, summoning some of the petrol her uncle kept in the tank. For a moment nothing happened, and then the cloud of the foul-smelling petrol floated into her hand where it gathered together in a ball of petrol.
Concentrating on holding the bubble of petrol in her hand, Holly sent it through the house in a cloud of mist that permeated throughout the house while keeping her completely dry as the particles of petrol settled throughout the house. Stepping backwards through the open door, Holly took out the box of matches, and she struck four of them at once, using her magic to bind the flames to keep them burning and never dying out, and then she expelled them to different parts of the house, with one of them being sent to the living room. Within minutes the first signs of the blaze were visible and Holly left, turning her back on Number 4 Privet Drive, hopefully for the last time, in his or any other parallel universe.
X
Wrapped in a notice-me-not charm, Holly walked towards the railway station; as she passed through Privet Drive, the blaze started to get out of control in the Dursley house as it was fed by the oxygen being let in through the still-open front door, and the smoke alarms from the Dursley property had been loud enough to attract attention when Holly cancelled her privacy wards, which have raised a racket all by itself.
But she had also triggered off the car alarms.
All of them.
In the whole street, so the muggles would have to leave their houses or stick their heads out of the windows, tired, bleary with sleep, and they would notice the house was ablaze. Holly didn't care. Her loathing for the neighbours of the Dursleys had been stoked by the last few years, it was good to get an ounce of petty revenge. By the time she reached the railway station, Holly saw a fire engine rush past with the sirens and the lights going off madly.
Holly liked the fire service far better than the police, who had done fuck all for her back in her old world and seemed as complacent and lazy in this new one. When she reached the station, Holly just walked straight through the station and down to the platforms. She walked to the end of the platform and waited idly for half an hour before the train arrived.
Once the train had stopped, she got on board the empty carriage and took a seat and reflected on her plans.
Holly didn't regret what she had done to the Dursleys. She had long since gotten over the point where she felt bad about any of the people whom she murdered, but what worried her was what the magical world would do; she still wasn't entirely sure about why her mother and herself were attacked so callously and why her mother was murdered, and she didn't know what had happened to James, but she knew it must have been something for the light to attack them like that. Holly decided to wait until she was eleven before she discovered the truth, she had come to this decision a long while ago. As far as the wizarding world was concerned, she had been a baby when she was orphaned (the assumption James was dead as well had a lot of credibility since why else would she have been exiled to the Dursleys doorstep, and why would Dumbledore's pet werewolf take her back to the Dursleys without caring about what happened to her?) and she had no knowledge of the magical world, and it would look odd if she just appeared out of nowhere although it was tempting to disguise herself.
But she had quickly stopped that idea in its tracks although it did raise its head once in a while. The best people to gather information from were the goblins; they lacked the bias and arrogant prejudice that she'd found from wizards over the years, but they would be surprised by her if she arrived, given her age. There was nothing else for it, she would have to wait until she was eleven - at least in the body - and old enough to come to Gringotts, and hopefully there she would find out the truth. Holly had come to a number of conclusions about what had happened that night, and once she had even looked for any sign of Blood Wards on Privet Drive.
But there weren't any, there were really basic and flimsy wards that were meant to monitor her wellbeing, but no more than that. Holly wondered how long it would be before Sirius and Remus discovered what had happened; with luck, they would find the property gutted and burnt to the ground, and they would think she had escaped, but she was even more hopeful that they didn't ask anything more. She could always say she was out, and it was doubtful they'd use one of the more extreme methods of extorting the truth.
Holly decided she would spend the next 6-8 months on the streets of London to make sure there wasn't any magical or muggle interference, and then she would head down south. London didn't attract her, especially after what she had seen in the days before her transport into this universe, but down South, hopefully, Brighton, she might find something better waiting for her.
Leaning back in her chair, Holly relaxed and smiled to herself. Her plan was the same, she would prevent the muggles from their wanton destruction of the wizarding world and she would have the life she should have always had, but never got. Soon she would discover the truth about what had happened to the Potter family.
And woe betide anyone who stood in her way.
X
Until the next time.
