I don't own Harry Potter.

X

Orphan Holly.

Holly Potter was not like ordinary girls. She lived with her aunt and her uncle and their son, Dudley, and she had to live in fear of her life. The Dursleys hated her. When she was a young toddler, only just surviving bouts of malnutrition which left her incredibly weak because the spoilt Dudley kept throwing her food to the floor, Holly was told her parents were a drunk and a whore, who both died in a car crash.

At school, Dudley ensured everyone despised Holly by beating up or threatening anyone who wanted to be her friend. That and the way Dudley and his friends were encouraged to chase her and beat her made sure the girl was good at running and hiding; after a few beatings even though some of the gang were wary about hitting a girl, Holly became stronger, but her heart turned as cold as ice. During her scholarship at primary school, Holly did her work but she felt her desire for friends die, especially after some of them proved to be as disgusting and as vicious as Dudley.

The library at school and the public library became her sanctuaries. She loved books more than anything, and she came to like the way authors spun a story around, shaping the character or twisting them as the events the author imagined for them evolved. In time the girl began making stories up in her mind, and it quickly became her form of entertainment. A new character, a new story, evolving until the end.

By the time Holly was 4, she had started to dismiss the Dursleys as her family, and she had stopped even thinking of them as such. She started looking coldly at everyone in the neighbourhood, despising them for the way they helped the Dursleys destroy her childhood. More than once she wished she had the power to burn Privet Drive and everyone in the neighbourhood to the ground.

Books became her only friends. Dudley might have succeeded in destroying her hopes for someone she could be a friend with, but he and his gang avoided books like they were a plague. In fact, she often asked herself if Dudley even knew how to read. Holly didn't care if Dudley's education crashed and burnt.

She came to love them because they offered her a way out.

Books were not judgemental, and life was so much more interesting in an adventure novel, while romantic stories gave her a knowledge of the human heart, something she was starting to realise was not possible for her. In a book, there were layers of a story or a character, especially if the author was really good at building a character up, and gave them some interesting plot twists.

Too bad real life was never like that. Holly had quickly worked out the Dursleys were supremely finite. Their narrow-minded nature, the way they hated people from other countries, and the way their lives were so empty were a disappointment for Holly, especially when she realised how so many people out there were obsessed with the mundane. It disappointed her when she realised people loved banality, and they tended to kill or disregarded what was different.

The Dursleys hated her because she was apparently abnormal, but Holly had no idea what their definition of normal was, but she supposed they were referring to the strange things that happened around her. After a while she began to realise she didn't care one jolt about being normal - it was never going to happen. Just like she quickly began to feel nothing for a real mundane life. She just did not care.

The Dursleys could hate her all they wished; Marge (she refused to refer to that woman as her 'Aunt' because the fat bitch was nothing to her) could set all the dogs she liked on her, she could compare Holly's parents to dogs who were diseased or useless all she wished. Petunia could snap at her out of spite all she liked. Dudley could wreck whatever chances of happiness in school all he liked. Vernon could beat her all he liked, it would not change the way she was. They were just too stupid to see it.

At the same time, Holly took one look at school, and she found herself sneering at the weakness of the children around her. They hated her because Dudley hated her. They were weak, useless, pathetic. They were beneath her.

When Holly found the history sections of the library and learnt of the way Adolf Hitler massacred so many Jews because of their religion, Holly realised there was not that much difference between Hitler and the Dursleys; both the Dursleys and Hitler hated what they felt was abnormal and they went out of their way to ensure it was all stamped out, and it wasn't just them; Oswald Mosley, Stalin, the Ku Klux Klan…all of them were so finite in their desires, failing to see the future, failing to see how pointless their boring worlds were. They were weak, and Holly made it her life mission not to be weak.

As time passed Holly began to realise, once and for all, that living at Privet Drive was like living in a prison. And she wanted out. She wanted to grow, like a flower.

X

There was something about the events that happened around her. It wasn't something she could define, never mind describe, and the fact it happened at random did not help. But there was a pattern. Holly, tired of the abuse she was getting after another beating decided to take a look at what was happening to her, and quickly she realised strong emotions like anger or fear sparked them off. She had been furious when the teacher whose wig she turned blue had begun insulting her, and it reacted.

Holly began to experiment. Digging down deep into the anger she felt towards the Dursleys, she was able to unlock the door to the pathetic cupboard under the stairs. Create a ball of light. Summon bottles of water. Once she had found the spark which triggered her powers it was hard and virtually impossible for Holly's powers to not work like it would be impossible for anyone to not walk across a room and through a door.

But she wanted more. Turning someone's wig blue was not going to help her further down the line, she wanted to go further than that. She began to experiment. She found she could move things with her mind, open doors and summon things, but she started using her powers on people. Once when looking out of a window at school, she caused one of the teaching assistants to drop her stuff after tripping her up.

Whenever Dudley or his gang chased after her, she found a way of sneaking around them unnoticed before making sure they suffered from accidents. Sure, Vernon blamed her for them but he had no proof.

X

By the age of 6, she decided to flee the Dursleys and make her way into London, deciding she'd had enough. She was going to escape. She was going to survive in a place where she could depend on herself. The streets of London beckoned. On the streets, she would find new challenges and hopefully, after a short time when she felt it was ready for her to do so, she would go into foster care and change her identity.

But something worried her. In the past, she had tried to escape the Dursleys before….and yet somehow she failed. She always ended up back at the Dursleys. Holly had started to see the pattern when she began harnessing her power, but she was hoping that because the Dursleys were leaving her at Mrs Figg while they went on holiday it would not happen.

Holly wasn't entirely sure about Mrs Figg. The old cat-obsessed nutter didn't like her, but she tolerated Holly which was more than could be said for others. After the Dursleys left her there, Holly spent the first few days watching Mrs Figg, learning her routines while she formed her plans for escape. She had been using her powers to steal money and food over the years, mostly out of necessity but also to see if she could actually pull any of it off.

While that was going on Holly found herself watching a number of movies.

They were film noir movies, showcasing femme-fatales. The crown jewels of the movies. Holly was fascinated by these deadly, beautiful women who masked their agenda and their plans which constantly shifted like the pieces on a chessboard. She had spent more than enough time with the Dursleys to know just how sexist Vernon was, and how Marge and Petunia both firmly believed a woman's place was in the home, or something ridiculous like that.

That kind of life might suit them. They were pathetic wastes to society, but Holly planned to get more out of life and she was prepared to go to whatever means were necessary to get what she wanted. Holly decided that she would become a femme-fatale. However as she watched the movies, making notes about the way the femme-fatales spoke, and how they walked, she noticed they fell into categories; the ones who were killed at the end, or the ones who fell into jail. How would she make sure she didn't fall under the same fate?

However as Holly made her plans to escape, she decided she would wait until she learnt everything she could about survival before she made her ultimate moves as a femme-fatale, but it didn't stop her from dreaming as she saw the lengths some of the film actresses like Rita Heywood and Elizabeth Taylor went to in their roles.

Blackmail.

Murder.

Theft.

Extortion.

Holly wasn't really concerned about those things even though truthfully she did not like how she had been forced to turn to crime. She had just come to see it was a part of everyday life for her. But she did see their cynical and jaded views of the world matched her own, so learning to be like their characters would not be tricky down the line.

But discovering the chains imposed on her by the magical world would be. For a long time, Holly had been aware of her powers but she was also aware of how, every single time, she tried to escape she would find herself back at the Dursleys. When she went through Mrs Figg's house, Holly discovered why. Finding a collection of old parchment letters, Holly learnt about Albus Dumbledore's plans to keep her at the Dursleys because of the blood wards. From those letters, Holly learnt the blood wards were attuned to the Dursleys. If she tried to escape, she would be found quickly and sent back. Holly didn't know why a wizard would want to keep her at Privet Drive, but she knew her course of action. She just hoped she could live with it.

X

Holly made her attempt to escape 5 months following the discovery of the letters. She had been waiting for the right opportunity for a long time, gathering her resources in preparation for what she planned to do. One night, following a particularly nasty beating, Holly took a bottle of white spirit and spread it around the house, especially on the Dursleys' beds until both frames were almost floating on them. Once she was finished she slit their throats in their beds before she dropped a pair of matches onto the Dursleys and closed the doors.

The Dursley house burnt to the ground, and Holly left for London on a train hoping the bodies would be so badly burnt nobody would even realise what she had done. But if they did….

She would lay low for a long time now.

X

When Holly received her Hogwarts letter stamped by Dumbledore's signature, she had been on the streets the entire time. She had opted not to bother going anywhere near a police station where she would have had the means to get a secondary education. She decided she wasn't going to go to secondary school like a normal girl. Normality was wasted on the mundane. She had been using her powers freely to steal as much as she could, getting more money with each successive heist she pulled off. Along the way, she had been meeting other criminals, ones who pointed her in the way of other professionals - fences, other burglars, contacts.

On the streets, she got a much more detailed education than she would have ever managed in school. On the streets, Holly learnt how to blackmail victims after spying on them for lengthy periods, and more importantly, she learnt about the dawning field of computer hacking as computer technology became more advanced until she saw it would take a life on its own. She learnt about poisons, disguises, martial arts and many other things.

The discovery of the magical world threw her off. Learning she was the so-called 'Girl Who Lived,' the so-called hero child who had survived Lord Voldemort while her parents were murdered angered her until she wanted nothing to do with the magical world.

But she came to an epiphany.

The Dursleys had been her enemy, and when she learnt of Dumbledore's role in her home life before she ended the Dursleys completely (Marge meant nothing to her; the woman was no longer important to her while Petunia and the others had been holding her at Number 4) and Voldemort, she realised those two wizards were her worst enemies and if she wanted to survive and prosper, if the Potter family was ever going to survive, she would need to find ways of becoming stronger.

And then she would strike.

X

Hogwarts proved to be a contradiction and a hassle.

When she arrived at the school, Holly was sorted into Ravenclaw. It surprised her a little bit she would be put into the house of the so-called nerds, but after a while, she realised Ravenclaw was the only house for her since the Slytherins would have killed her. In truth she was suited to both Ravenclaw and Slytherin; she was brave, but she believed the best way to fight was to wait until you had an opportunity to strike, and only after you'd adapted to what your opponent could manage. But while she was ambitious, her greatest ambition was to survive and live. She couldn't do that in Slytherin, so she went into Ravenclaw.

While she was there she began work on shortening the gaps in magical knowledge that separated her from Voldemort and Dumbledore. One of the biggest and primary examples was the animagus form. Once she got into the Room of Requirement thanks to the House Elves after she had become interested in exploring the castle and finding little bits of knowledge, she had already begun her research, but when she had learnt there were other methods of making the transfiguration work she had thrown herself into her work. She became an animagus within two years, becoming a black cat.

The gap had shortened.

However as the years passed, going back into the muggle world after getting herself emancipated after proving Dumbledore did not have a clue she had been on the streets and moving into her mother's old flat, Holly was forced to go after Voldemort when the Dark Lord's current incarnation wanted the Philosopher's Stone and again the younger incarnation in a diary, she was forced to showcase her magical knowledge just to win. In her second year, she discovered Voldemort's name.

Tom Marvolo Riddle.

And she had felt like laughing. The infamous and most feared Dark Wizard in recent history had gotten his name from an anagram. Seriously? How pathetic could you be?

In the Room of Requirement, Holly had tried to learn more about the Dark Lord using the resources there, and she had learned more about him. In some ways his life mirrored hers, but where she wanted to grow and become something ultimately better, Riddle had decided to lash out at the world. She knew how he felt. She was disgusted with the discovery he had created horcruxes, ripping his soul to pieces to become immortal.

Finding an Ancient Egyptian spell that was capable of helping her destroy Voldemort's soul, Holly could do nothing more except wait. The spell, when used on one of the Horcruxes, or on Voldemort himself, would tear the evil wizard apart while draining his magic and it would work on anyone foolish enough to be bound to Voldemort. All she had to do was wait.

Holly counted the victory against Dumbledore where he was forced to accept he had made so many mistakes with her as the end of it, but Voldemort was still out there. Still waiting to die.

In the Room, however, she discovered sex magic. Sex magic was powerful and when used the primal nature of the art would make a witch or wizard much more powerful.

Over the holiday she ensured it happened. As a present to herself on her thirteenth birthday, she tattooed the runes responsible for the activation of the sex magic ritual. Losing her virginity, she had sex with nine people, men and women. By the time of her third year, Holly came back buoyant and powerful before discovering the existence of her godfather who was being hunted by the dementors. Holly was unsure what to make of her godfather. He had essentially abandoned her to rot. She was not sure if he was worthy of a second chance.

But at the same time, he was the only adult who seemed to care. Not even her parents' other old friends had done the same. And she had taught herself with Professor Flitwick's help how to use the Patronus charm.

At the end of the harrowing Triwizard Tournament, Holly finally killed Voldemort who had proved his weaknesses and his stupidity for all to see. Not only had he have her name put into the Triwizard Tournament's Goblet of Fire, but she could have been killed before he got to her. Instead of finding a way of simply getting her blood out of the school without her knowledge, his own desire for dramatics could have jeopardised everything.

She enjoyed killing him once she managed to get them back to Hogwarts after showing she could escape from her bonds, and she cast the ancient Egyptian spell the moment she could, blowing Voldemort up and destroying his horcruxes (the pain in her head horrified her, the fact she had one of those foul things in her head….).

X

Thanks to the goblins she had been following her late muggle education, scoring high marks along the way enough to get into college. Over the years Holly had developed a love for art, and she had gone to college with the aim of studying it. As she studied drawing, making sculptures and painting and creating stories with the pigments while working with the clay, Holly committed several crimes before she moved into blackmailing her first mark.

It was easy.

A rich politician with greater ambitions. Believed in taking care of the little guy, but that was the image he had presented. Married to a loving woman with kids. On the outside, he seemed the kind of man who could do no wrong.

Too bad he liked taking women to a private flat and fucking them. Holly discovered he had this little habit, and she saw an opportunity.

Holly approached him one night at a club. "Hey Tiger," she smiled at him enticingly.

It was the start of her career as a femme fatale.

X

If you wish to support my work, please visit pat-reonDOTcom/timetraveller2022.