Happy holidays! You write the most wonderful stories :D For the fic prompt... any thoughts on a genderbent Harry Potter?
you see, the thing is, everything would have been different if harry was a girl. do you know how i know?
harry didn’t do anything. he was a baby, they call him the boy who lived, because that’s all he did - he just didn’t die. and that’s not on him, that’s not because he was some extremely powerful one year old. no. it’s because of lily potter, because of her love, or something, because i very much doubt she was the first woman who loved her child enough to die for them. but whatever it is she did, that’s what killed the dark lord.
harry didn’t defeat voldemort. lily did.
so when little harriet survives the killing curse, no one cares. because it wasn’t her, it wasn’t anything she did.
james potter, who died, but saved his daughter and defeated the dark lord! and it doesn’t make any sense, but neither does lauding a baby as the defeater of darkness, so when has the wizarding world ever needed to make sense? harry survives, is marked as an equal, by voldemort, and no one cares.
but do you know what that means?
harry doesn’t go to live with dursleys, because why would voldemort ever be after her - she didn’t do anything, she was just there, it was all james potter. and maybe dumbledore knows better, and tries to put his foot down, but - no one cares. she’s james potter’s daughter, the daughter of the man who killed voldemort, she’s not going to be sent to live with some muggles!
and the next safest place is hogwarts, but none of the professors can raise a child, they’re all either too old or busy or snape, so who raises little harriet potter?
why, rubeus hagrid of course!
and people aren’t happy about this either, but it’s better than the muggles, and it seems right, to them, that the daughter of james potter grows up in hogwarts.
so hagrid builds an addition to his little cabin, a nursery that will one day be a bedroom, and harriet potter grows up. she knows the forbidden forest like the back of her hand, knows all those creatures in the forest as her best friends. firenzes somehow ends up babysitting her, multiple times, and he never knows how it happens. she rides unicorns and thestrals and hippogriffs, and is good friends with aragog, and all sorts of other creatures.
she grows up in the forbidden forest, really, and it knows her, it loves her
the kids adore her, and she has hundred and hundreds of older siblings. she’s james potter’s daughter, and a cute kid, and “i was playing with harriet!” is an excuse that works with almost all the professors for a large array of misdeeds. by the time she’s eight, she’s helping kids study for their owl and newts in care of magical creatures.
oh, and herbology, of course, because a forest is not just animals, it’s plants too. and she loves her forest, so she’s constantly getting underfoot with professor sprout. and all the other professors care for her too, and by the time she’s eleven they’re all internally fretting about what she’s going to do in class, because they’ve already taught her most of it.
she meets draco malfoy, and they should hate each other, they should. but draco understands what it’s like to grow up in your father’s shadow, to always be the child of someone instead of just your own person, and harriet can’t help but be friends with him, they become friends seemingly against both their wills.
and harriet’s in gryffindor, of course, with that reckless courage she can hardly go anywhere else. and she knows the weasleys of course, they’ve all been her friends, and she’s delighted now that she gets a weasley of her own. which is what she tells ron on the first day of classes, who was warned about her by all his brothers, and has in fact met her before on multiple occasions, so he just rolls with it.
and harriet adopts hermione and brings into the group, because just like her father, just like hagrid, she can’t stand someone being alone and upset without trying to help, that’s not who she is, it’s not how she was raised.
so she has her friends and her experiences, and she’s james potter’s daughter, which is fine, she likes her life, and her friends.
but nothing good can stay. voldemort returns, and he doesn’t even target her, why does he care for her, it was her father who did this (he was there and still he goes along with the narrative, it couldn’t have been lily, couldn’t have been harriet, no, it had to be james) but somehow harriet and her friends keep on foiling his plans, keep on getting in his way, and for the first time -
she’s not james potter’s daughter, not rubeus hagrid’s daughter -
she’s harriet potter, and she’s in voldemort’s way, and she’s not planning to move for him. she wasn’t raised to bend, and if that breaks her - so be it.
