A.N.: I got inspired after seeing HP 6 the second time, and I thought how different would the characters be if they were opposite genders. At first, I was going to have the whole HP generation the opposite gender, but then I thought 'I don't like Ginny and Harry together' so I thought, instead of everyone, just Harry, Ron, Hermione and Neville are opposite genders. (Obviously Neville needed to be, too, because of the prophecy).

So the characters are named thus;

Harry: Harriet Lily Potter

Ron: Rhona (which is a variation of the feminine form of Ronald)

Hermione: Hermes, sticking with Greek mythology.

Neville: Norah Longbottom. I couldn't think of a pretty Ne- name for a girl.

Disclaimer: I DO NOT OWN HARRY POTTER. NO COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT INTENDED: THIS IS SOLELY FOR MY OWN ENJOYMENT AND OVERACTIVE IMAGINATION!!!

The Scar

...Two hundred miles away, the girl called Harriet Potter woke with a start...

Harriet lay flat on her back, breathing hard, dripping with cold-sweat and shivering violently. She had woken with her hands pressed over her face, as if to smother screams: The thin, lightening-bolt scar on the left-side of her forehead burned angrily as if she had just been branded with it. She sat up, moaning softly: Some dream that was, she thought, still clutching her face with one hand and reaching blindly for her glasses and slipped them on. The feel of the glasses was familiar to her, comforting; now, able to see, and see clearly that she sat in her little bed in her cousin Daisy's second-bedroom, which was illuminated by a faint orange glow both from a streetlamp outside her window and the luminous alarm-clock Daisy had pitched through the window last month (which Harriet had salvaged and repaired on the sly) her heartbeat returned to its normal pace.

She cringed as she snapped the lamp on her desk on and squinted in the bright light; she climbed out of bed and tiptoed over to the wardrobe; she opened the door, and peered into the little mirror on the inside of the door.

A skinny girl of fourteen looked back at her, her face pale and glistening with sweat that made her shiver; enormous almond-shaped eyes like fiery emeralds stared back at her, still unnerved by the dream, and she pushed her perpetually untidy black hair out of her face, revealing the scar on her forehead. Despite the stinging, the scar looked perfectly normal—as perfectly normal as a curse-scar given to her by the most feared dark wizard in the world when she was but a toddler could be.

She tried to remember what she had been dreaming before she woke—she always found it so difficult to remember her dreams: she frowned at her reflection, and the darkness looming around her in the background reminded her of the dark, dismal black room, lit only by a small fire, which glistened off the skin of a fearsome snake coiled on a threadbare hearth-rug. There was a man named Peter, nicknamed Wormtail by those who had once been his best-friends before he betrayed them all, and a high, cold voice that sent shivers down Harriet's spine as she remembered it. The voice of Lord Voldemort.

Who was the old man—because there had definitely been an old man, absolutely terrified. Harriet had watched him fall to the ground, dead before he hit the dusty floorboards. She knew Wormtail and Lord Voldemort had been talking about having killed someone—a woman; she couldn't remember the name, now—and plotting to kill someone else.

No-one would win any prizes for guessing who. It had been her, Harriet, whom they were planning to murder. She pressed her hands to her face, then released it, staring around her bedroom, as if expecting mad axmen to jump out of the corners. Any sign of anything abnormal.

As it was, there were several abnormal things about Harriet Potter's bedroom (or rather, her cousin Daisy Dursley's bedroom, which had been given to Harriet in an attempt to assuage her curiosity three years ago at numerous letters being sent to her from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry). An old-fashioned steamer trunk stood open at the foot of her bed, revealing an International-standard racing broomstick, sets of billowing black robes and stacks of spellbooks, rolls of parchment, bottles of ink and feather quills. The surface of her untidy desk not taken up by a large cage, which usually held Harriet's lovely snowy owl Hedwig, was littered with scrap parchment and a select few photographs of the parents she had never known—Lily and James Potter; Lord Voldemort, who had been plotting not seconds ago to kill Harriet, had murdered her parents now thirteen years ago, when she was but a year old.

On the floor beside Harriet's bed was a book: the pictures in this book were all moving, and showed seven women in dark green robes with a golden talon splashed across their chests, zooming in and out of the frames on shining broomsticks, passing a large red ball to each other, dodging black cannon-like balls. She had been reading before she fell asleep; it must've slipped out of her hands. She watched the Seeker of the Holyhead Harpies (her favourite team, which annoyed Rhona because she was the Chudley Cannons' biggest supporter) make a superlative catch of the tiny, glimmering golden snitch, then slammed the book shut with soft squeals from the people in the photographs. Even Quidditch, in Harriet's opinion the best sport in the world, couldn't lift her mood now. She placed Flying with the Harpies on her bedside table, careful not to nudge the photograph of her parents' wedding-day (her godfather Sirius Black, handsome and grinning carelessly beside her mother) already resting under the lamp.

She went to her window, quietly opening the curtains and the window, and gasped softly as the cool breeze wafted comfortingly across her face, drying the sweat still lingering there. There was nothing stirring outside—the breeze wasn't even strong enough to move the few sparse trees placed specifically around the quiet, respectable suburban neighbourhood; as far as she could see, there was nothing there that shouldn't be: the bins for recycling were set out at the ends of the driveways but it would be hours 'til the rubbish was collected. Every window was curtained and the only lights on were the streetlamps that alleviated her worries that Lord Voldemort was lurking by the entrance to Magnolia Crescent. And yet…her scar burned. The last time her scar had burned with such intensity (three years ago, at the end of her first year at Hogwarts) it had been because Lord Voldemort was close by.

She jumped, clutching her heart (which had stopped for a few seconds) as her uncle, beefy, purple-faced Uncle Vernon, gave an enormous grunting snore in the bedroom at the end of the hall. You're just being paranoid, Harriet told herself. There's no-one here but Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia and Daisy. Get a grip! Aunt Petunia would be the first person to notice a stranger in her home—her horsy nose seemed tuned to pick up dirt tracked over her pristine linoleum floor in the kitchen: she would know if someone hadn't taken their shoes off upon entering the house.

Asleep was the way Harriet liked her only-living-relatives best—they were Muggles, who held a very medieval view of sorcery, which meant Harriet, as a witch soon to be entering her fourth year of tutelage at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, was about as welcome as that dirt on a burglar's shoe…But it was comforting to know that they were here, too.

Of course, she would have preferred to live with her godfather—who, in the one evening Harriet had known him before helping him escape on the wings of a condemned Hippogriff, had shown her in that time more about what it meant to be a guardian than the Dursleys had in thirteen years. She sighed sadly and rubbed her scar absently as it twinged, as if wanting to remind her it was still there.

If she was having dreams about Voldemort, surely that couldn't be at all good. She bit her lip and glanced at the photograph of her two best-friends on her desk—Rhona Weasley and Hermes Granger, their arms thrown around her and grinning manically—next to several birthday cards she had been sent at the end of July, and wondered whether she ought to write to them and tell them what she'd seen. She sighed; she could imagine Hermes' panic-stricken face now, and his voice filled her head, anxious; 'Your scar hurt, Harriet! That's really, really serious! You should write to Professor Dumbledore about it. And I'll go and check Magical Ailments and Afflictions.' That would be Hermes' reaction: to seek solace in a book. That was his way, and usually they always came out the better in a situation for his bookworm tendencies.

But to write to Professor Dumbledore about something as trivial as her scar waking her up in the middle of the night seemed foolish—Professor Dumbledore was the greatest wizard in the world: surely he didn't just sit at home during the summer holidays twiddling his thumbs and waiting for pubescent teenaged girls to write to him about a scar burning—she had no idea where he even went for his holidays: Harriet grinned to herself as the sudden image of Professor Dumbledore—who always gave off the impression of great energy and serenity at the same time, despite his questionable age—sitting on the beach with a pair of hibiscus-printed swimming shorts, rubbing suntan oil onto his long, crooked nose. Harriet didn't doubt Hedwig would know where to find him—her owl was uncommonly intelligent and tended to fly to her friends' houses in demand of letters and presents for Harriet (last year she had flown to France to Hermes with the specific goal of bringing back something for her thirteenth birthday)—but what on earth would she write. 'Dear Professor. Sorry to bother you, but my scar hurt—I thought you'd like to know. Harriet.'

So she tried a different tact; she tried to imagine the reaction of her first ever friend, Rhona Weasley, the only daughter of a family of six children. Even in Harriet's imagination, Rhona's freckles went white—'Your scar hurt. But—but—You Know Who can't be near you now, can he? I mean…You'd know, wouldn't you? He'd be tryin' to do you in again. Maybe curse-scars always twinge a bit, 'specially if they're really dark magic. I'll ask dad, or Bill—yeah, Bill'll know.' Mr Weasley, Rhona's father, and her eldest brother Bill, whom Harriet had never met but knew worked as a Curse-Breaker for Gringott's Bank in Egypt, were both fully-qualified wizards. Harriet thought it far more likely that Bill would know, rather than Mr Weasley, who worked in the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office at the Ministry of Magic.

And anyway, Harriet didn't particularly fancy the idea of having the entire Weasley family (eight members, when including the second-eldest brother, Charlie, who worked with dragons in Romania, and whom Harriet had also never met, Percy, the trouble-making twins Fred and George, and Rhona) knowing about her scar hurting—Mrs Weasley would probably have a fit and try and hug the life right out of Harriet. (She was rightly under the impression that Harriet had been under-loved in childhood, and was trying to make up for Harriet being motherless). Fred and George, Rhona's sixteen-year-old twin brothers would claim Harriet (who was the toughest girl they'd ever met) was losing her nerve.

Despite the amount of fuss Mrs Weasley focused on Harriet whenever she went to stay there, she loved The Burrow: she loved the entire Weasley family, except perhaps Percy, who was a bit pompous and a great believer in following the rules, and the twins never let a day go past without them all laughing. Rhona had mentioned something to Harriet on the train back from Hogwarts in June, about inviting Harriet to stay over the summer—for the Quidditch World Cup. But she knew if she even mentioned to Rhona that her scar was hurting, it would get back to Mrs Weasley within minutes, and she hardly wanted any future visit to The Burrow to be ruined by constant inquiries about the state of her scar.

What she really wanted was someone like…someone like… a parent. Here at Privet Drive, Harriet had never been welcomed as a member of the Dursley family. Until she was eleven years old, she had been hidden in the cupboard under the stairs, especially during special occasions. And as lovely as Mrs Weasley was, she fussed too much. Harriet needed somebody—an adult wizard whose advice she could ask without feeling like a numpty. Someone who cared about her unquestioningly and who had her best interests at heart, and someone who had experience with dark magic. Someone like… Harriet caught sight of herself smiling in the reflection of the window.

Someone like Sirius.

It wasn't entirely surprising it had taken Harriet so long to think of this solution—after all, until two months ago she hadn't even met her godfather: he had been imprisoned in the Wizard Prison Azkaban for crimes he didn't commit. Of course, only Professor Dumbledore believed their story, after hearing out what Sirius had to say in the Shrieking Shack, seeing Ronnie's pet rat Scabbers morph into a fully-grown man whom everyone in the Wizarding world thought dead.

Sirius had offered Harriet a home, once his name was cleared: Pettigrew had escaped, however, and Sirius was on the run from the Ministry of Magic. Harriet thought a lot about that home—the one Sirius had offered. An orphan, she had spent most of her childhood thinking about what her life might have been like if only her parents hadn't died (the Dursleys had fed her a lie that her parents had been killed in a car accident) and she still found herself daydreaming sometimes, when she was watering Aunt Petunia's flowers or mowing the lawn or making the dinner, what it would have been like to live with her godfather, who had escaped Azkaban and risked everything to protect her. It had been horrendously difficult to return to the Dursleys this summer, with the knowledge that she could possibly have never had to see them again.

It was down to Sirius, though, that Harriet had access to her schoolbooks and belongings: every summer prior, the Dursleys had locked even the most innocent of her possessions in the cupboard under the stairs that had once been her home: once they found out the insane mass-murderer they'd seen on the television last summer was her godfather (she'd 'forgotten' to tell her aunt and uncle he was innocent) their attitude toward keeping Harriet as downtrodden and miserable as possible had changed considerably. They still ignored her whenever she entered a room, but at least she could do her homework in the daylight rather than huddling under her duvet with a torch at midnight. In both of the two letters Sirius had sent her through late-June and early-July (they had arrived by way of enormous, brightly-coloured tropical birds that put Harriet in mind of palm trees and a sort of…Jack Sparrow-esque vision of her godfather on white sands—Daisy had allowed her to sit in the living-room while she watched Pirates of the Caribbean in the living-room yesterday) he had reminded her to call on him if she ever had the need.

She sat down at her desk and read briefly the letter she had received in reply to a note she'd sent to Cedric Diggory in the beginning of July.

Dear Harriet,

I was really surprised by your letter—I thought you might hate me for what happened at the match, but I'm glad you don't hold a grudge like some of your team-mates. My summer has been alright so far; we went to the Black Forest for two weeks, and I met a few German wizard students who I'm now trading letters with.

I don't know whether you know about this, living with Muggles and all, but the Quidditch World Cup is being held this summer. My father managed to get us two tickets to see the Final; it's being held in England for the first time in thirty years, so it'll probably be something to see!

I saw the Weasley twins a few days ago in Ottery St Catchpole (we both live near that Muggle village) and they mentioned their dad also got hold of a load of tickets. I'm not sure, but perhaps I'll see you there? I know you're very friendly with Rhona Weasley. Anyway, if I don't see you at the match, I know I'll see you back at Hogwarts.

I hope to hear from you again soon,

Yours sincerely,

Cedric

By the time her bedroom walls were gilded with gold of a just-risen sun, and sounds of movement issued from Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia's bedroom, Harriet blew gently on the glistening midnight-navy ink and reread the letter.

Dear Sirius,

Thanks for your last letter—that bird was absolutely fantastic! It barely got through my bedroom-window, and it left quite a few feathers behind (I've kept them in a vase on my bedside table because they're so pretty). Everything in Privet Drive is exactly as it has always been—Aunt Petunia just told us at dinner last night that Mr Next-Door in Number 7 has another family in Chelsea, (and the 'little tart sent [Mrs Next-Door] a letter'!) and Uncle Vernon landed a big deal at his firm Grunnings.

Daisy's diet is going from bad to worse (Aunt Petunia caught her outside the Ice-cream van yesterday buying a 99 Flake ice-cream on the way home from the supermarket). Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon told her they'd have to cut her pocket-money if she kept doing it (she's already having to get special uniforms for her school because she's so large) and she got angry and threw the television they got her for her birthday through her bedroom window.

She's a bit of a numpty, really, as now she doesn't have anything to watch those new DVDs Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon got her in her bedroom. (DVDs are these weird silvery disc things, kind of like little shiny records, that contain Muggle films on them so you can watch them any time without having to wind on the film. They're actually pretty cool, although Daisy likes watching mushy romantic films that make me gag.)

I'm alright—the Dursleys don't pay much attention to me 'cos they're afraid you'll come and hack them to pieces if they upset me! (I 'forgot' to mention to them you're innocent!) The reason I'm writing this at three a.m. is 'cos a weird thing happened—my scar woke me up, burning. Last time my scar hurt, it was 'cos Voldemort was living in the back of my old Defence teacher's head. But I don't think he'd be anywhere near me now, can he?

Do you know whether curse-scars twinge a bit, years afterwards?

Hedwig is off hunting at the moment, so I'll have to wait to send this to you, but say hello to Buckbeak for me when you get this,

All my love,

Harriet Lily.

She had only recently starting signing her letters with her middle name. It was the only thing her mother had left her. That and an aunt who probably wished Harriet had been killed along with her parents. But Harriet could hardly blame her mother for the way Aunt Petunia had turned out—as Aunt Marge, Uncle Vernon's moustached sister, had once said, 'they turn up in the best families.'

She ran her hand through her perpetually tousled black hair, sitting back against the back of her chair, and wondered whether she ought to have put in the bit about the dream—but then, how reliable could a dream be, anyway? She could barely remember most of it now, now that the sun shone and the sounds of people everywhere were beginning to wake up the world.

With the sun shining, it was a lot more difficult to be afraid of Lord Voldemort.

A.N.: Please review :D