This story is complete as of 15 August 2015, and it is un-beta'd. I like to think that my grammar's not horrible, but there are bound to be typos, so if anyone is interested in proofing it, please PM me. I also have a lovely PDF version (with better formatting). If anyone would prefer that format, PM me with your email address (make sure NOT to include the 'at' symbol) and I'll send you a copy.

This A/N chapter, as well as the next five chapters, was updated on 8 September 2016 to account for certain issues with my initial interpretation of Harry's character, and a few details regarding the way the Dursleys treated Mary.

This is an A/N chapter.

It is not necessary to read this chapter to understand the story, but the little bit of background explanation contained here may be interesting to some readers, and I like knowing what I'm getting into with a new Alternate Universe, so this is for those who share my opinion on that.

IF YOU WOULD RATHER SKIP STRAIGHT TO THE STORY, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO DO SO!

So: how does this AU differ from the Canon Universe?

This is supposed to be a single-point-of-divergence Fem!Harry AU, but quickly got out of hand, so there are now non-canon aspects of magic; twisted inversions of canon characterization of basically everyone from the first war (James and Lily, the Marauders, Tom Riddle, Bellatrix, Snape); dates that are consistent with the actual holidays and days of the week starting in 1991; and as of somewhere in the middle of Book 3, there are about 350 named characters, many of which are OCs. I'm using the books as canon, with the fairly large assumptions that 1) Harry is an unreliable narrator and 2) people occasionally lied to him.

All that aside, I'm still making an effort to conform to the events and details of canon – so, for example, my version of Lily Potter is being portrayed as a badass Combat Medic, but she still begged Voldemort for her baby's life, and that is as Harry remembered it in canon… but there's more to the situation than Harry ever knew. I did gratuitously change Lily's birthdate, because I didn't remember that JKR had given her one in the books until after I had written An Intermediate Beginning, and was too lazy to fix it. I deliberately changed a few details of the earlier books to be consistent with details revealed in later books (like McGonagall asking how Dumbledore, her old Transfiguration professor and employer of 25 years, knew that she was an animagus). I've probably also screwed up accidentally in loads of other places, especially with the Slytherin Quidditch players. If you spot a continuity error, please let me know!

There are now quite a few "Mary Potter background" stories on my profile that give an impression of Voldemort's War in the 1970s; the dynamics between James, Lily, and the Marauders, the Death Eaters and the Black family; and other pertinent bits of characterization and Alternate History for worldbuilding purposes. One thing that I still haven't written much about is the Dursleys… mostly because, well… I don't want to write about the Dursleys. I wrote them out of the series early on, because I hated the way they treated Harry in canon, so out of the original Preface, the only parts not likely to come up in-story somewhere (or in a side-fic) are the reasons the Dursleys behaved the way they did toward Harry and/or Mary.

Petunia hated, feared, and resented magic itself even before her sister's child was unceremoniously dropped on her doorstep. As a child, her jealousy of Lily stemmed mostly from the fact that she was very determined to make it out of the lower middle class/upper lower class lifestyle she had been born into, and Lily got to take what seemed like the easy way out, being swept off into some kind of fairy tale, complete with magic and castles.

(Marrying handsome, wealthy James Potter didn't help with that.)

The Potters distanced themselves from the Dursleys after Mr. and Mrs. Evans were killed in 1980, partially because Petunia (correctly) blamed Lily and the magical war for their deaths, and partially because it was safest for the Dursleys if they pretended they didn't know anything about magic. The sisters hadn't really been close, anyway, by that point.

After the child was left with the Dursleys, Petunia developed a degree of paranoia around the idea that anyone might find out about magic. This is based on 1) having been told by her parents as a child that she had to keep magic a secret, or the government would punish them in some indeterminate fashion; 2) the little she knew of the War; and 3) Dumbledore's insistence that they had to keep the child for their own protection, because the danger of the War still hadn't completely passed.

Vernon did not hate or fear magic before 1991 and the Zoo Incident, since none of the child's accidental magic had ever affected his family directly, though he followed his wife's lead in rejecting the freakishness.

He hated Harry himself, mostly subconsciously, because Harry was much more the sort of son he wanted than Dudley was. Dudley was the kind of boy who cried to his mother about not wanting his cousin to come to the zoo, (pretended?) not to know how to count up by two, and needed a gang of friends with him to beat up a six-year-old. Harry was the kind of boy who took his licks and stood up to make another snarky comment the next week, despite knowing what he'd get for it. Vernon likes to think of himself as a strong, manly man, (ex-)rugby player, the sort of man who provides for his family, etc. Though he would never articulate it even to himself, Canon!Vernon knew that Dudley did not have the personality and temperament to be that kind of man, and that he is (at least as much as Petunia) to blame for spoiling the boy.

With Harry in the picture, Vernon was constantly reminded that Dudley was shaping up to be a failure. Rather than trying to correct that, Vernon encouraged Dudley to show Harry who was the boss, telling himself (and everyone else) that he didn't want some nancy-boy as a son anyway, and that if Dudley could beat Harry into the ground, he was clearly the superior child (with Petunia's hatred of magic as an excuse). With no Harry, he is able to ignore Dudley's childhood shortcomings fairly effectively. Mary he largely ignores, unless Petunia asks him to deliver corporal punishments, which she doesn't very often.

Dumbledore placed the Potter child with the Dursleys in his capacity as Chief Warlock – he's not just the Headmaster, after all. This is also how he obtained the key to Harry's vault: An emergency session of the Wizengamot on 1 November 1981 granted him the authority to hide away the Potter child as a national treasure and asset in a time of war. He did not actually have custody himself, or he doubtless would have kept the child at Hogwarts (the "safest place in the world") or in any case, near himself. As for the next ten years, Albus set wards to let him know if the child was under attack or in mortal peril, and went about his duties as Headmaster, Chief Warlock, and Supreme Mugwump. He's a busy man. He ignored several very rude letters from the Dursleys, until they stopped writing to him, and just assumed that they would take decent care of the child, because they were blood kin.

In the Mary Potter Universe, Vernon's relative rationality in dealing with Mary-related problems (as opposed to Harry-related problems) leads the Dursleys to try to get rid of Mary instead of trying to keep her from magic. This has a surprisingly large effect on the plot. It leads to a whole slew of other changes to Mary's upbringing in the summers that follow, the people she interacts with before school, her Sorting, and eventually her self-esteem and approach to problem-solving.

As implied by the fact that this story is posted on a fanfiction site, I do not own most of the characters in this story, or the general plot, or most of the settings. I don't claim to. Even things that are not taken from canon may bear a striking resemblance to other fan works, due to the fact that I've read far too many such things. No plagiarism is intended. If you see something that looks familiar from fan fiction, PM me and I will add a reference.

This story is written for fun, not profit, and I have and will receive no money in relation to it. Furthermore, as this is a single-point-of-divergence universe (or it's supposed to be), there will be points where dialogue and descriptions which have not been affected by changes to canon thus far are lifted directly from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. In order to preserve the pacing of the story, these passages have not been marked. I do not claim ownership of those lines. If you recognize them, you doubtless know who does.

Cross-posted on AO3.