Cult of Potter

Wanda: It's about time I tried to write a straight up, Dark - Operative style character. Will be rated M down the line for similar reasons to Jekyll and Hyde, though this story will have a somewhat different tone from that one...since this Potter doesn't have a Helen side to balance her out. Essentially, this is a story about a cult power becoming a fringe group in the heart of a corrupted society...creating a third side in the continious blood war.

Fun fact - Edith Potter isn't the only gender bent for this one. She and Dancia Malfoy share a birthday thanks to the butterfly effect.

Anyhows, I'm excited, so let's get the ball rolling! I do not own Harry Potter.

Prologue

In between the coats in a closet, on a normal looking street with a normal looking family, a little girl was biding her time to make a run for it.

She was small and skinny, even for an eight year old. Very dark red hair, matted and uncared for, hung around her face like a curtain, hiding her bright green eyes which always saw too much. She was dressed in ragged old hand me down clothes at least a generation old, which often got laughs out of the richer kids in the neighbourhood.

Now, sometimes kids hid in places like this when playing games with their family. That was not the case here. Actually, the little girl was hiding from her uncle, who was in a drunken rage. She could hear him smashing plates in the kitchen, slurring and shouting over being passed over for a promotion.

Edith Potter had enough experience with these fits to know to stay out of his way. There was a long scar across her arm to prove it from when he'd thrown one of her aunt's fine china plates at her head. Whenever he got like this, her aunt would take her spoiled cousin out to the park or somewhere else where she could spoil him, leaving her unwanted niece behind.

Eventually, Vernon Dursley would drink enough that he would either pass out or fall asleep. This was the moment Edith would take to escape, get outside the house and onto the roads. She would stay there, wandering from place to place, for as long as she could before going back to the place dubiously called her 'home'.

Edith pressed her back against the wooden walls of the closet, biting her lip so hard she could taste blood. She desperately wished that Vernon wouldn't find her, that she could become invisible and he wouldn't be able to hurt her.

Sometimes it worked; he would shamble up to her and then walk right on by for reasons she didn't understand (yet). Other times, she wasn't so lucky. Usually, she'd wake up in the cupboard where she slept with a pounding headache, bloodstains and a lack of memory going back several hours.

That didn't happen as much as the lack of food.

Edith was pretty familiar with pain. It made her ache inside, and she vowed to herself that, once she finally escaped these people, she would protect others from this sort of pain.

I'll make sure nothing bad ever happens to them. I'd be a Queen and they would be my people. I'd make a Utopia and no one would be sad again.

A thud brought her out of her thoughts, followed by quiet. Cautiously, Edith pushed the closet door a crack and eyed the kitchen. Sure enough, Vernon had collapsed on the floor, tongue lolling out and everything.

Quickly, Edith pulled down the ragged black trench coat no one else used and wrapped it around her, slipping into the boots with holes on the sides and stepped out into the room. She glanced over her shoulder one last time, just to be safe, before heading to the door. She swiped the spare key and a handful of crumpled ones off the front hall table and pushed the door open.

Little Whining was a fairly uptown neighbourhood – the prices of the houses had shot up recently thanks to movement in the stock market, so more and more rich families had come to take residence there. It looked very clean, very pristine...in the suberbs, anyway.

Edith started walking down the streets, buttoning up her coat as she went. The square cut green lawns and the unified two story houses bored her in how utterly mundane they were; there wasn't any place for something different or strange. And 'strange' just about summed up Edith in a nutshell.

Being forced to fend for herself, Edith had become very observant. Petunia and Vernon had drilled it into her that she was a 'freak', abnormal, unnatural and a perversion of a regular human being. And was it wrong that strange things kept happening around her?

Things moved when she was scared. Lights exploded or turned themselves off. She would be running from Dudley's gang and suddenly find herself on the roof of the school. Glass windows vanished. Kids insisted they were being given nightmares.

Everyone whispered about her, watching her with wariness in her eyes. Petunia and Vernon made it very clear that Edith was something to be feared. She was freak, a soon to be criminal, they warned. She was cold and selfish and dangerous.

Did she have much of a choice, if everyone kept shunning her? Edith wondered sometimes, though she usually shook the question off. She did whatever she could to simply keep herself relatively safe, which wasn't always easy.

Especially when it came to Dudley's gang, who usually sought her out at school.

So when she spotted them at the end of the street, she turned sharply to the right and hurried further into the heart of the city. She knew her way around there better than they did.

**~The Street, several hours later~**

Edith sat carelessly propped up on an iron bar under a train bridge. It was pouring cold rain and a strong wind; October was inching into November and she didn't have a very adequate winter coat. She nibbled on a stolen apple, idly scraping further tallies across the worn copper surface. Hundreds of marks already existed on this support beam, for the days she had spent here.

She watched the road from above; cars flew along in both directions through the tunnel that lead out of town towards the bigger cities. If anyone noticed her, they went past her without stopping.

Edith adjusted her coat to better cover her neck; her socks were already soaked through and had gone numb. Tossing the core away once she had bitten off all she could, Edith rubbed her hands together in an attempt to warm them up. The cold and numbness made her very tired, but she couldn't afford to fall asleep on the high rise.

Yawning, Edith pulled her knees closer to her chest and refocused her attention at her hands. She was weaving together red and yellow threads around blue and purple beads, turning it over and over to make a bracelet. She had made quite a few; sometimes it was the only way to pass the time in the black cupboard where she was often imprisoned.

Sometimes she had trouble understanding herself. She liked people, but hated her family. She felt compassion for the lost ones, but resented the well dressed and pompous rich folk like her abusive aunt and uncle.

If you watched too much Star Wars, you would assume you can't feel compassion and kindness if you gave into 'the hatred'. Edith always found it funny that Obi-Wan always said, "Only a Sith deals in absolutes"...which was a pretty absolute thing to say.

Edith felt a sense of kinship with Anakin Skywalker. She was a lot like him, though she had less of an easily-triggered temper. Tempers were dangerous when you would get beaten up for imagined crimes. They both began life as slaves. Everyone distrusted them and looked at them with contempt, unless they wanted something from them.

The Jedi wanted him to be their special prophecy child, and they didn't care about what it meant for him – and that didn't even factor into their treatment of his Padawan Ashoka. Yoda even said that you would become evil if you continued to love your mother and your wife. Love, the precious thing, that treated as a fault, an aberration.

Edith found it rather disgusting, personally. Without love, you might as well be dead.

The Emperor had been no different, though he was more outwardly evil. Blatantly so, in fact, it was kind of crazy. Luke eventually managed to restore Anakin to himself, but it wasn't enough to save the man.

Edith heard some yelling down on the streets. Startled out of her thoughts, she looked down at the road. A richly dressed man had been stopped at the corner by three raggedly dressed, desperate looking young boys.

Despite it being a populated city, Edith saw people in their houses either disinterestedly walking by or anxiously disappearing into nearby buildings. No one attempted to assist the man, and he was promptly relieved of everything valuable.

He's lucky, Edith noted. Often times, victims of road attacks like this ended up stabbed or even shot, left to bleed on the roadside.

She had seen that happen a few times before; she had been the one to call the police and kept pressure on the wounds until the ambulance showed up. She saw these kinds of things all the time.

It's a very cold world out here, isn't it? Edith wondered, leaning back against the rain soaked beam. If you try to help these people, you're considered an abnormal boat rocker.

Going back to her bracelet weaving, Edith envisioned a world as she made it – with herself as Queen and the lost ones as her citizens. She would take care of everyone; she would make happiness and security and family a priority. Everyone would be happy and safe.

"Lavander's blue, dilly dilly, lavender's green, when I am king dilly dilly you shall be queen." She sang, twisting the strings around the large pale bead. "who told me so, dilly dilly, who told you so? T'was my own heart dilly dilly, it told me so."

She tied the knot and continued on her way, pressing a small red costume ruby into the mix. "Lavander's green, dilly dilly, lavender's blue, you must love me dilly dilly for I love you."

In her dreams, a beautiful red haired woman sang it to her while rocking the cradle she was lying in. Edith figured that was one of her oldest memories – a memory of her mother, Lily Evans. She followed her instincts on the matter, because Petunia had no pictures of her in the house and it always made Vernon angry when his sister in law came up.

Edith glanced at the wristwatch with a cracked screen she had gotten from a yard sale a year ago. It was past midnight, and the rain was giving no sign of letting up.

Standing up, the young girl climbed down the support beams and walked into the back alley of a fast food restaurant. She slipped in through the open back door, dodging past a pair of cooks and over to the stairwell to the basement.

Nimbly trawling down the stairs, Edith made her way to the back of the basement where the boiler was. Sliding off her rain soaked coat and throwing it over the heater, the young girl curled up in a box and fell into a fitful sleep.

**~At School~**

"Freak! Hey Freak, I'm talking to you!"

Edith grimaced, her fist clenching on her coat when she heard Dudley's squeaky voice behind her. She was standing at the edge of the playground, trying to mind her own business when her cousin sought her out. His entire gang was with him.

Usually, when this happened, she would get beaten so badly she often ended up bleeding from the mouth. It caused the few times that Petunia had actually taken her to the hospital. Today things were going to go differently.

Anger flooded through Edith's veins. Dudley took a perverse joy in beating her up. She hated being mistreated constantly, and she had never fought back.

Until now.

Magic flared from Edith's core, sending a shock wave out around her.

Her cousin and his friends were thrown backwards in every direction; Dudley slammed his head against the iron pole of the fence and dropped like a sack of bricks.

When he didn't move after several seconds, his gang panicked and scattered, leaving Edith standing in a state of alarm several feet away. Tentatively she walked over to her cousin and pushed him onto his size; so small feat since Dudley was easily twice her weight. She saw some blood trickling down the back of his neck where the pole had hit true.

Dropping his arm, Edith sprinted off to get one of the playground supervisors, heart pounding. Had she killed Dudley? Please say no, please...

Thankfully, when the teacher examined him she said he had just gotten cracked skin and a huge lump; the young Potter should have guessed that her cousin's head was too thick to be seriously damaged by something like that. The teacher asked what happened; she said he was roughhousing with his friends and fell.

Dudley and his gang were a pack of ruffians. Edith was a quiet, well behaved young lady. The teacher believed her, especially since the boys were hysterically insisting that she had somehow thrown them all around like rag dolls.

The teacher eventually left the boys with a stern warning that she would be watching them, before taking Dudley back to the school.

Edith stayed where she was, watching them leave, feeling something cool and calculating taking hold inside her chest.

People like her family.

The gang hovered nearby, watching her with new eyes. It was fear...and something else - Respect? Admiration? Edith looked between them, before turning on her heels and calmly walking away from them. They did not follow her, like they had before. They clustered close to each other, watching her leave. The Freak wasn't just some victim anymore. She was something else entirely. She had power.

Edith had learned an important lesson that day – the only language some people understood was violence.

%&%&%&%&%&%&%&

Edith saw the boys again after lunch. They were hovering around the entrance of the cafeteria, shunned by the rest of their schoolmates. The redhead didn't feel pity for them; but the understanding she had gained gave her an idea...

Walking over to them, Edith offered Piers an apple off her tray. The boy stared at her in disbelief, but after a few seconds he accepted it. Tilting her head towards her seat, Edith got herself some more food and waited.

Sure enough, Piers, Duncan, and Matt all hesitantly joined her. Edith casually chatted with them, asking them questions about their day and what they were planning to do on the weekend. Simultaneously the boys were ashamed and happy.

The Freak isn't so bad, they thought. She was tough, but she was also nice even to people who didn't deserve it. Duncan mentally compared her to his bitter, apathetic mother and found he liked Freak better; maybe he could hang out at her house whenever the elder woman got into the alcohol. Piers, military brat that he was, wondered why his grandfather was so disdainful of forgiving, kind people. Matt just found Freak more intimidating than Dudley now, and wanted to stay on her good side. Besides, she talked better than he did.

Edith could see the changes in the boy's eyes. Their loyalty was shifting. The young Potter was good at reading people; the streets had taught her that people's intentions can often be seen in their eyes. Knowing who to avoid was instrumental to avoid getting hurt.

She offered herself as a friend, and a buoy when surrounded by distrustful students and adults who gave them cold, disapproving looks. Doing so secured their loyalty to her.

When Dudley tried to bully her the next day, Duncan told him not to insult her. The look on her cousin's face was absolutely priceless; Edith cracked a small smile at it. When Dudley followed this up by trying to punch her in the face, Matt stepped forward and pushed him to the ground. Duncan threatened to 'mess him up' if he tried to hurt Freak again.

Edith learned another lesson in that time. Kindness was stronger than fear, in many ways.

Fear lasted a generation. Kindness lasted forever.

End Prologue

And so goes Edith's Start of Darkness...what do you think?

Read and Review please!