Note: The main character is transgender. If this bothers you, I suggest that you leave now.

Longer author's notes at the end.

Of all the dumb ways to die, it seemed that the universe had chosen the dumbest one for me.

It was a combination of unfortunate coincidences and really shitty luck that led to a piano falling on me à la Tom and Jerry.

I was part of the theatre tech crew for my school, and the set for the upcoming musical required an upper level with a grand piano. As a few people began hoisting the piano up via pulley, I had been crossing the stage (not below the piano – we had all been warned to steer clear, and I wasn't stupid enough to disregard those instructions) to grab some duct tape I'd left on the opposite side.

That was when the earthquake hit.

It wasn't a major earthquake; no giant chasms opening from the earth, no buildings collapsing. Probably no more than a 3 on the Richter scale at most. This was California, and all of us were pretty used to earthquakes. But still, the shaking was enough to send me stumbling under where the piano was, and enough to cause the two people lifting the piano to lose their grip on the ropes.

And that was how I died.

(A part of me was glad that I'd never get to see how people would react to my unfortunate demise. With my luck, I'd probably be known as the "piano girl", never mind the fact that I had a life as well as a death and that I wasn't a girl.)

After I died, I got neither pearly gates nor raging infernos nor simple oblivion. I saw a light at the end of a tunnel, felt a powerful push, and suddenly, I was in the world again.

It felt like no more than 5 seconds had passed since I fell, and the sudden change was completely disorienting. Immediately, I went into sensory overload. Everything was too bright, someone's disgusting baby was screaming, what the hell was that stuff clinging to me, and oh my god why does it smell like shit in here.

I don't remember the exact chain of events after that, lost in the fog of my meltdown, but during all this a small part of me that was still functioning dimly realized that I must have been reincarnated. I managed to get my breathing under control, and opened my eyes to once more look at the world around me. I had been cleaned and swaddled, and the room had settled down. The woman I had been handed to – I refused to think of her as my mother – was having a conversation with another woman in the room.

"Thank you so much for helping with the birth," the redhead holding me said. A British accent, part of my mind noted.

"It was my pleasure, and I'm happy to see that everything turned out all right for you and baby Lizzy," the other replied.

That was when I finally got a good look at my surroundings, and realized that I hadn't been born in a hospital, but rather in a bedroom with a midwife.

Panic set in; what kind of backwards-ass family would refuse modern medicine and painkillers? Had I been sent to the past somehow? What if they had no access to any technology at all?

But oh my god, that name. Lizzy. I had known a girl named Elizabeth back in my first life, and she had hated the nickname Lizzy with the burning passion of a thousand suns. Now I understood why. There was just something so grating about that name, and it felt like the kind of name you'd give a pet, not a person. I resolved that I would stick to my old name, Leo. In many of the self-inserts I had had the pleasure of reading, the protagonist would choose to go by their new name, no questions asked. Maybe I'd've been fine with that if the name Leo had been chosen for me, but no. It was my name that I'd picked myself, and no guardians would be able to do better. If they had a problem with that, they'd have to just deal with it. I'd be Leo, now and forever.

(During later reflection, I would attribute my unwillingness to accept a new name to the lack of 'death period' between my first and second lives. There was no timeless void, no nine months in the womb to distance me from my first 18 years. There was only the sudden transition from "oh shit, here comes the piano" to "oh shit, here comes the baby.")

With the revelation of my name came the realization that, once again, I had been designated female. Lovely. Wonderful. Another lifetime of misgendering and ridicule. Not that I would have had any less of a hard time being designated male, but at least then the pronouns assigned to me by default would be my chosen ones.

I'll skip the gorier details for you: the breastfeeding, the inability to control my bodily functions, et cetera. But needless to say, they happened, and it was absolute hell. For the first two weeks or so, I alternated mostly between sleeping and crying, neither of them willingly, as I was filled with loathing for myself, the universe, and my "parents". I ignored their attempts to play with me or otherwise engage me, barely consented to feeding, screamed whenever they tried to make me do baby things, and was just in general a miserable nuisance. I feel a little guilty about it now. It's a good thing that they had thoroughly baby-proofed the area around me and that I was incapable of moving my limbs, or else I probably would have deliberately choked myself with something.

At this point, I couldn't really do much on my own. I could flail a little bit, suck, swallow, and cry. I couldn't even turn myself over, let alone crawl. (I had been taking a Developmental Psychology class just before my death – it takes two months to roll over, five or six to crawl, about a year to walk. To me, less than a month had passed since I had learned these details, even though it was a lifetime away. Part of me still refused to accept that this was anything more than an elaborate hallucination induced by severe head trauma, or a dream as I laid near death in a coma in a hospital.)

The turning point came about three weeks after my birth, when one of the couple's (not my parents, never my parents) friends came to visit.

The man was holding me as he went to get the door. "James!" the visitor greeted, and the two embraced. I screamed, hoping that if I made enough of a fuss I wouldn't have to deal with all this.

"Little Lizzy has a real pair of lungs, doesn't she?" the visitor observed.

There was the hated name once again. I screamed louder just to spite him.

"Yeah," the man replied with a chuckle over the sounds of my crying. "She hasn't slept through the night yet. She's running Lily and me ragged. But what's the news on the War?"

I let my cries settle down. It seemed I had been born in the middle of a war, which fell firmly into the category of Not Good. As much as I hated being an infant, I didn't want to be a civilian casualty, either, not that I'd be able to do anything about if a bomb happened to drop. Whatever news there was to be had, I needed to hear it, for my (hopeful) peace of mind, if nothing else. Maybe I'd get some clue as to where and when I was (Or what fantasy your mind has made for you, a more cynical part of me added).

"Moody's got Karkaroff; that's one more Death Eater off the streets—"

Moody, Karkaroff, Death Eaters.

James. Lily.

Stupid, stupid, stupid! I should have thought of this the instant I heard those two's names! I would have smacked myself in the face if I had enough motor control to do so. Instead, my hand collided solidly with James' chest.

I tuned out the rest of the conversation, barely paying attention when I was shifted to the other man's arms. My mind was whirling with the implications of this discovery. Your parents are James and Lily. The Wizarding War is still going on. I had positively devoured reincarnation fanfiction – I should have suspected something like this would happen the instant I found myself as an infant. But no, I had wallowed in self-pity, tuning out the world around me, while I was in the Harry Potter world.

After that, I made an effort to be a more tolerable baby. James and Lily would never be parents to me, but they were nice people, at least, and they didn't deserve the misery I was causing them.

The conclusion I had reached about my position in this world was that I had ended up as Harry Potter's older sister – I didn't even consider the fact that I could be Harry Potter himself. So I began trying to work out a timeline in my head, trying to predict the birth of a brother who would never come. Lily and James had graduated Hogwarts in the late 70s, and Harry was born in the summer of 1980. They got married after graduating Hogwarts, and didn't conceive until after that. Allowing for at least six months between my birth and Harry's conception, I had been born sometime between spring 1976 and fall 1979.

As I began contemplating dates and ages, I realized that Lily and James were barely older than I had been at the time of my death, perhaps even younger. I had been 18 when I died; assuming I had my timeline right, they couldn't be older than 21. Thanks to my poor infant vision and the fact I always had to look up at them, I couldn't guess by their appearances whether they were on the younger or older part of that spectrum. I was frustrated by my inability to do much more than sit and wait. Not once did I consider the possibility of trying to warn them about Voldemort; who would believe a small child if not outright baby that their Secret Keeper would betray them and that a Dark Lord would kill them on Halloween?

No, what I began to do was plan on how to help Harry, and my first priority in that vein was surviving Halloween 1981 when Voldemort came calling. I burned at the idea of letting Lily and James die, but there was honestly nothing I could do about it. The best strategy, I decided, was to find a good hidey-hole and ollie outta there.

I was on the fence about whether or not I would accompany Harry to the Dursleys. On the one hand, as his older 'sister' (brother) I would be able to stop or at least mitigate some of the abuse he might receive. On the other hand, I would be opened up to abuse myself. I was leaning towards staying with Harry, though, since if I had the responsibility to make a child's life a little less miserable I should choose to take it. However, I was cognizant of the fact that the decision might very well be made without my input. Depending on how much older I was than Harry, Dumbledore might choose to put me with a surrogate Wizarding family if it could be reasonably assumed that I knew enough to be a threat to the Stature of Secrecy. Then, there were the Dursleys themselves, who might outright refuse to take in a second "waste of space" when I would offer no additional blood protection to their family, and I could end up in the Muggle foster system.

The next priority would be getting as much control over my magic as possible before I started Hogwarts. This would be more difficult if there ended up being a large age gap between me and Harry, because then I would lose a few years' worth of practice due to the scrutiny of Lily and James. This also depended on how much of my childhood I spent with access to the Wizarding World's resources; I would have an easier time studying magic with direct access to spellbooks.

How much I would be able to help Harry depended, once again, on the age gap and the timeline. A small age difference would put me either one or two years above him, allowing me to help him with his school troubles – murderous teachers, magical creatures, and all – much more easily. The maximum possible age difference would put me out of school during Harry's 4th year. If there ended up being a larger age difference, I might end up with more influence during Harry's earlier years and be a greater help during the actual war, at the expense of not being present for Harry's later years at Hogwarts. My plan would have to be tailored to how much older than Harry I was, so I decided to hold off on planning the specifics until after Harry was born.

After that, I had a singleminded determination to be the fastest-developing baby the world had ever seen. A part of me still had the muscle memory of actions, even if my new body lacked the motor skill to actually perform them. I knew all the thought in the world would mean nothing if I just physically lacked the muscle and nerve and neural connections to perform them, but that didn't stop me from trying. So as the months passed, I practiced, with mixed results: trying to touch my nose without poking myself in the eye, lifting my head, making a few shaky steps across the floor.

I did have some relative success: I reached my major developmental milestones earlier than a normal baby. Bowel control still eluded me (unfortunately – I couldn't wait until I was out of diapers) but I prided myself on walking by 10 months.

I held off on talking until I was reasonably certain that I could produce coherent words – I wanted to avoid baby talk (and the probable cooing that would follow) as much as possible.

Something incredibly concerning, however, was the fact that I had yet to manifest any accidental magic. What if I was just as much of a Muggle in this life as I was in the last one? How would I be able to change anything if I ended up being a Squib? Part of me knew I was being irrational – it would be years before Neville first displayed accidental magic, and he still ended up a wizard. Despite that, my fear persisted

Time passed.

The war was still going on. I caught snippets of what was going on now and then – this family was killed, that Death Eater was caught, this location was attacked. I wasn't very concerned about it, because I knew that the Potters would be safe until almost a year and a half after Harry's birth. With this relief came guilt, though. Even if I personally was safe, there were still people dying out there. They weren't just lines of text anymore.

I silently celebrated my 19th birthday towards the end of winter. Thanks to my lack of calendar access, I was forced to guesstimate when February 5th actually was. As to how old I was, I knew I had probably lost a few months from the jump to the date of my death to the date of my birth, but I didn't know how long and I didn't feel like trying to calculate a new birthday for my mental age.

The Marauders visited periodically. I liked Moony the best – he would talk to me like an adult, to the point where I almost suspected that he knew the truth. (But I figured it was more likely that he just didn't know how to deal with babies.) He'd tell me about what was going on in life, holding almost a one-sided conversation. James would make fun of him for it, but I appreciated Remus's presence. I was kind of neutral about Sirius – he cared, I could tell, but I couldn't really love him when he still treated me like an infant. He was a good guy, though, and that he'd go through a lot of shit in the future, and he'd be like a father figure to Harry, and we'd probably get along better when I could hold a conversation, so I tried to be nice to him. As for Wormtail, I pitied the guy a little bit. He would kind of stand around, shuffling back and forth, while holding me awkwardly and looking guilty. I began wondering how early his doubts had started, whether he was one of Voldemort's followers even now. I tried not to hate him – he hadn't done anything yet, after all – and did my best to avoid dealing with him as much as possible, insomuch as a baby has control over its daily schedule.

Remus firmly established a place in my heart the day I spoke my first words. I was a several months old, and Remus and Sirius had come to visit. "Lizzy!" Sirius had greeted me. I had replied, "Not Wizzy, Wi'bef." Here were the various responses: Sirius proceeded to crow about how I clearly liked him best since I had spoken to him first; the Potters were only happy that I had spoken at all; and Remus began calling me Elizabeth. Even at less than a year old, to him I was a person with an opinion worth respecting.

(I would have asked to be called Leo, but I doubted that would be received too well at this point. Baby steps, I told myself, baby steps.)

My first birthday arrived, with little fanfare. Me, Lily, James, and a little old lady who was introduced to me as Bathilda Bagshot. Bagshot cooed in my face and pinched my cheeks; I resisted the urge to vomit on her. I listened with half my attention as Bathilda told Lily stories about the younger Dumbledore while I tried with little success to eat mashed potatoes without getting them everywhere.

(Sirius sent me a toy broom for my birthday. James was eager to get me on it, insisting to Lily that I'd be a great Quidditch star and live up to the family name. Let me just say it was a good thing the broom was charmed to go no higher than a foot off the ground – I fell off it within a minute. James tried to convince me to have another go; I refused to get back on.)

Three months later, everything went wrong.

I sat on the floor, James in front of me, as he made colored puffs of smoke appear from his wand. I watched in amazement, though probably not for whatever reasons he suspected. (I was wondering about how the mechanics of the spell – was it willpower that allowed him to change the colors? Did this fall under conjuring? How advanced was it?)

Lily entered. "Looks like Lizzy is pretty impressed," she remarked with a chuckle. James scooped me up and handed me to Lily, dropping his wand on the nearby sofa.

"Yeah, she was really into it," he replied. "I'm going downstairs for some food. Want anything?" Lily shook her head, and James left the room.

Lily bounced me up and down on her hip, cooing about how I was her beautiful baby girl, et cetera.

Then the front door downstairs burst open with a bang. I screamed.

"Lily, take Lizzy and go! It's him! Go—run! I'll hold him off!"

Lily sprang into action, bursting out of the sitting room and charging into my room. She began moving whatever furniture she could in front of the door, with me still in her arms. The dresser, a lamp—anything that could possibly slow down Voldemort. She yanked boxes out of the closet, throwing them in front of the door.

I heard a laugh. "AVADA KEDAVRA!"

Meanwhile, I was in absolute panic mode. This is wrong, all wrong, this isn't supposed to be happening know, where's Harry, it should be Harry, why me, the thoughts in my head looped. My pulse began skyrocketing, and my breathing quickened. Oh God, there is no Harry Potter, you're Harry Potter.

Lily screamed, and I screamed with her. She stopped with her efforts to barricade the door, and instead began whispering in a language I couldn't recognize. I was still too much in shock to recognize it for what it must have been: the enchantment that would reflect the killing curse. Magic swirled around the room, almost tangible, as Lily cast whatever spell that was.

Her attempts at barricading the door had been for naught; this door burst open just as smoothly as the front door had. Lily ceased her spell, and the magic in the room vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

I caught a brief glimpse of Voldemort, wearing dark robes and a hood over his head. His features were serpentine, but he still looked mostly human – not the pale, red-eyed, noseless abomination from the graveyard and after. That was the only look I got before Lily deposited me in the crib. She stood between me and Voldemort, trembling but determined, as she spread her arms out as if to protect me. Meanwhile, I continued crying. How had I fucked up this badly, to not even realize that I was the one being thrust into all this?

"Not Lizzy, not Lizzy, please, not Lizzy!" she begged.

I couldn't even work up annoyance for that wretched name. Instead, I was marveling at the devotion, the pure love Lily had for me, to do anything she could to save me, even to die for me.

The panic had faded to a dull background hum – I was having trouble processing the fact that this was all real, that this was more than just the scene I had read and watched a thousand times before.

But even if I could process it, there was still nothing I could do apart from let it play out. Lily and James would die, and I couldn't do much more than hope that I still held the same degree of Plot Armor that Harry had.

"Stand aside, you stupid girl!"

"Not Lizzy, please no, take me, kill me instead!"

"This is my last warning!"

"Please, not Lizzy, have mercy, please have mercy, not Lizzy, I'll do anything!"

"Stand aside—stand aside, girl—AVADA KEDAVRA!"

A flash of green, and Lily fell. Dully, I noted that, at some point, my crying had stopped. I stood, clutching the bars of the crib, as the Dark Lord approached.

Voldemort looked down at me with a sort of quiet determination, the shadows of the hood covering his face.

"Voldemort," I murmured, meeting his eyes. They were green, I noted silently, green like the Killing Curse, and slitted like a snake's.

I could see hints of the handsome boy the books had always said he was, but his features were distorted. He looked, in a word, predatorial.

(He still had the nose at this point, I noted with internal satisfaction.)

"Lizzy Potter," he acknowledged, slowly and deliberately moving his wand in front of my face.

I ignored the wand, continuing to look Lord Voldemort in the eye. What the hell are you doing? The disconnected, rational part of me demanded. I tried without success to squash my annoyance at that awful name, and my urge to shake things up a little.

"My name's not Lizzy," I snapped, aware of the fact that my tone was nothing close to a two-year-old's. "It's Leo."

Why would you tell him that?! Stupid!

"No matter. Avada Kedavra."

There was a flash of green, and then the room exploded. Pain erupted from my forehead, and I screamed as rubble began to rain down around me. Voldemort was gone; his robes were on the ground and his wand had fallen into my crib.

Wormtail's gonna come for the wand. The thought materialized into my head almost spontaneously, a half-remembered fragment from one book or another springing to life. Thinking quickly, I stuck the wand up my pant leg, the only real place I could think of to hide it.

Not a moment too soon, because just after I had done so I heard the squeaking of a rat. Wormtail resumed his human form, a desperate look on his face. He dug through Voldemort's robes, searching for the wand, looking more and more panicked as he couldn't find it. I continued crying, trying not to give away anything.

Finally, more noise came from downstairs. Peter jumped up with a gasp, changed back into rat form, and scurried away.

Then, Snape entered the room. As he saw the body of Lily Potter, his eyes widened, a distraught look appearing on his face.

"Lily," he whispered, kneeling and cradling her body in his arms. "I'm so sorry—he was supposed to spare you, Lily, I'm sorry—"

I was thoroughly disgusted. In my first life, I had gone through approximately three stages of thought regarding Snape. The first time I read the books, before Deathly Hollows had even come out, I had hated the evil potions teacher who made Harry's life miserable. Second, after reading the Deathly Hollows and seeing his backstory revealed, I had thought he was a good guy after all. Finally, as I became more analytical and mature, I recognized that being friendzoned by Lily and bullied by James did not justify calling her slurs, joining a group of Wizard Nazis, arranging the death of the Potters, and doing his best to make Harry's time at Hogwarts miserable.

Snape felt no remorse over the murder of James and the attempted murder of Harry; he was only upset that Lily wasn't alive to fulfill his twisted waifu fantasy where she'd fall into his arms once her family was out of the way.

So I felt absolutely no sympathy for Snape as he grieved over Lily Potter, and was pleased to see him leave.

I had one more visitor before the night was over: Hagrid, who dug his way through the rubble to my crib while loudly sobbing over the Potters. I had just about dozed off when I heard the sound of him, and I let him pick me up without complaint. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to stay awake for the flying motorcycle ride – you don't get to see things like that every day, after all – but I was completely exhausted from the ordeal with Voldemort.

It wasn't until I had been handed to Dumbledore to be placed on the steps of Number 4, Privet Drive that the reality of what was going to happen now had finally set in. I was going to the Dursleys, the family that had neglected if not outright abused Harry for more than 10 years for the crime of existing.

As soon as Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Hagrid had taken their leave, I panicked. The letter that would doom me was right there, rolled up next to me. Somehow, I had to get rid of it. Maybe if the Dursleys didn't know I was related to the Potters they would just put me up for adoption, and I could end up spending the next decade with a family who cared, or at least wouldn't lock me in a cupboard.

But how would I get rid of the letter? I couldn't just throw it to the wind – somebody would be bound to find it and start asking questions. I briefly considered the oldest trick in the book, simply eating the paper. I even gave the parchment an experimental nibble. Not a chance; it was a lot thicker than the kinds of Muggle paper I was used to, and I didn't even have all my teeth yet.

I shifted, then realized that Voldemort's wand was still up my pant leg. That could be the solution to my problem! With a little bit of contorting, I managed to free it. I placed the wand into my right hand and the letter in my left.

Vanishing spell, vanishing spell, what was the incantation for the vanishing spell? It wasn't coming to mind, so I went with the next best magical alternative, praying with all my heart that it would work, that I wouldn't be a Squib.

"Incendio," I whispered, pointing the wand's tip at the letter.

Within seconds, the letter was little more than ash. The wand thrummed warmly in my hand; it had accepted me as its new master.

I grinned with triumph. Here I was, a former Muggle, physically 15 months old, casting spells with Voldemort's wand. Here, finally, was the proof that I really did belong in this world, that I was a wizard now. I doubted anybody else would be able to claim they'd gone through this experience.

Oh shit, the wand! I'd have to hide it somewhere so that Petunia and Vernon wouldn't discover it. They'd probably have me out of their house soon, but I would have to bet on the fact that I'd stay here for a few days and be able to retrieve it. Voldemort's wand would be my livelihood for the next decade or more; I'd be able to get a head start on spellcasting, and once school started I'd have access to a wand without the trace on it. And then, of course, was the fact that Voldemort would be without a wand – no 'brother wand' shit to deal with, and he'd be forced to settle for an inferior wand. (I didn't think about the fact that it might just start his search for the Elder Wand earlier.) I wasn't too concerned about the wand breaking, though. It would still put it out of commission for Voldemort, and that would just mean I could try cultivating a talent for wandless magic instead.

So I chucked the wand into the bush next to the doorsteps. Proud of myself for having come up with such an ingenious solution, I nestled into my blanket, finally falling asleep.

Less than a week later, as I was christened Margaret Dursley, I wondered how my predictions could have been so wrong.

A/N: Hello and welcome! If you've gotten this far, I'll assume you're not about to flame me for writing a transgender character.

A few things about this story:
- Leo isn't a direct SI. I am not transgender, there are some definite personality changes, and opinions expressed by Leo do not necessarily reflect my own.
- I was originally inspired by Tozette and the Tumblr self-insert writer community, to which I was but a humble observer.
- No pairings are currently planned.
- I don't intend to do any bashing, but I do not like Snape.
- There's going to be heavy butterfly effect as the fic progresses.
- This won't be a curbstomp fic. You don't need to worry about Leo chucking wandless fireballs around by 1st year.

Thank you if you've read this far. Questions, comments, and reviews are more than welcome!

March 1, 2016
Notes updated May 2, 2018