An Eagle's Head, A Badger's Heart
You're a lot of things that you aren't supposed to be. You're a lot of things you wish you weren't. But there is one thing that, on your deathbed, you will never regret: the only thing you've done right in your life. Hogwarts, and all you did there, is something that you will stand by forever.
Your mother died when you were just a little girl. Your father tried, bless him, but he never tried hard enough. That's where you learned how to cook. It was either cook or eat from the garden, your father insisted. Needless to say, you adapted pretty quickly to being the lady of the house.
Your father made you take lessons from the Dark Arts master in town. You resisted, at first. But then you gave in. You were weak, back then. Taken over by the visions of you that could be and drunk with ambition at such a young age. The thing you most regret is trying the new form of magic because you thought that it would make you powerful.
For six years, you 'tried them out,' telling yourself that you weren't doing anything wrong by whispering Crucatius every now and then or using a little Imperio on a bad day. It was your seventeenth birthday when everything changed. You could feel that it wasn't just a hobby anymore, it was an addiction. And when you saw your best friend snogging the boy you were courting, a little Avada Kedavra slipped out. Twice.
You got down on your knees, you prayed over their fallen bodies, and your heart broke in two. Who had you become? Who were you going to be? Where would this take you, dear?
You knew that the answer was down a path you never wanted to walk.
"Please, please God, forgive me," you whispered, clutching tight to your cross as you walked to town with a bag and your wand. "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus…" As you stopped in front of the healer's house, you knocked on the door and squeezed your eyes shut. "Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death."
A woman opened the door. "Helga?"
"Amen."
For three years, you relearned all of your magic under Madam Lyre. She taught you how to heal instead of maim, give life instead of administer death. Best of all, you got to cook for her children and for the children who stayed at her house. They were the light of your life. After all, children are innocence, and wasn't that exactly what you needed?
As you took care of them, and found that cooking and healing were your new passions, you felt a transformation. That bitter little piece of you that had grown to the size of a castle shrunk down and melted away until there was none left. (And if there was any, you certainly wouldn't let it show.)
The day after your twenty-first birthday, your life changed for good.
A knock on your door in the middle of the night was hardly unexpected. But in the middle of the night during the worst snowstorm that the valley had seen in years? Unlikely. Yet there it was, and the mistress of the house gone—so you answered it.
When you opened the door, a tall man with extraordinarily broad shoulders stood in front of you. "Sir?" Holding a young woman in his arms. "What's wrong?"
"You're the healer in town?" he asked.
"Not me, sir, but the mistress of the house. She's away for the evening."
"Can you help her?"
"Bring her inside, please, it must be freezing. Is this your wife, sir?"
"No."
"Where did you find her?"
"Lyin' half-under a pile of snow, over there." The man pointed across the street.
You felt her hands. They were frozen. "Sir, I hate to ask you this."
"What is it?"
"I'm going to need to boil some water to unfreeze this poor soul, but we can only fetch our water from the well down the road."
"I'll go, it's no bother."
"But sir!"
He picked up the bucket and headed down the road with not another word. That was the day you met Godric Gryffindor, and failed to save the woman under the snow. It was the best and the worst day of your life, all at once.
When he came back with the water, you were crouched on the floor. "I couldn't save her," you whispered, as you rocked back and forth. You couldn't save anyone, could you? The voices told you that you couldn't, dear, and who were you to say you could?
"It's okay," he said, picking you up off of the ground. "It's okay." He looked you in the eyes and you swore for a minute that perhaps, just maybe, it was okay.
When you were quite through crying and feeling sorry for yourself, he introduced you to his friends.
"Salazar," the man in green smiled, and shook your hand gracefully. You were entranced.
"Rowena," the lady in blue said. All thoughts of Salazar left your head, and she, she was the one who remained. You shook your head to clear the thoughts.
But dear, she won't leave you.
"It's lovely to meet you all. I'm Helga."
And darling, you won't leave her.
She was everything you needed, wasn't she? She was beautiful, charming, and intelligent—you were her puzzle piece; her other half. But she was flying too high for you to catch—and you were stuck on the ground.
So they tell you of their secret; their idea. A school for magic. Suddenly, you were whisked back to your eleven year-old days when you were screaming and crying and resisting but giving in by the end because really, the Crucatius is only one sided happiness and you certainly weren't on the right side.
"Okay," you found yourself saying. "Okay. When do we start?"
Piece by piece you built up those castle walls. Was it to keep your newfound happiness tucked safe away inside? Or was it to hide from your past? You knew they would never love you if some of it slipped into this safe haven.
So you worked diligently, and you earned yourself the labels you've always wanted. Hard-working, they said. Loyal, they said. Compassionate, they said. Excellent in the kitchen, they said.
Scared,you said.
But you saved people, didn't you? You saved them from the cold floor of an unforgivable word or two and a cold life of things they wouldn't regret, in the end. Your heart grew every day and you loved, you loved so much that it was your downfall, in the end.
Perhaps not your downfall. More of an upfall.
She came down to the ground, once. Right before you opened the school—you remember. She wasn't sure if she was doing the right thing. "Intelligence is sometimes not all that matters," she whispered, and you wiped the tears away.
"And it won't," you said. "That's why all four of us are in this together."
You forgot the fact that Godric had gotten a little too high and mighty for your liking, or that Salazar had turned into something that wasn't so charming anymore, or that Rowena liked her blade a little too much. You especially ignored the fact that they all reminded you a little too much of who you used to be; a version of yourself that you left in the past. You loved them and you held them together. Maybe that was your purpose in life.
And on the first day, when over four hundred eleven to seventeen year old children filed into the room, you smiled at Rowena and you squeezed her hand and you whispered in her ear "This is what we fight for."
And then when she flew back up to the sky, she took you with her that time. Little humble Hufflepuff, she said, let me show you the world.
She taught you how to fly and to dance and to love the way that a book smells when you first open it. She taught you how to hide your common room and properly drink Firewhiskey (though that one was a secret) and the delight of sitting by a glowing fire in a thunderstorm. Best of all, she taught you what love and passion and strength meant to a girl who just barely got off the ground.
You have come so far, dear, and you're with her now, and you're flying because you can.
You are Helga Hufflepuff, you are the home for the loyal and the hard-working and the compassionate and the outcasts, and you are alive for the first time in your life.
When she holds out her hand, and invites you to jump with her—well, you don't say no. They'll say she died of a broken heart, because of that daughter of hers. "It's too bad," they'll say. "She really was such a bright witch." She wants so much more than to be 'bright.' She wants to be immortal, she wants to love, and so you give it to her.
A broken heart? Well, maybe. But in the second before you hit the ground, flying from that high tower of hers, you realize that maybe it wasn't a broken heart after all. It was just a heart that wanted to live forever—and found that it couldn't.
You give her forever, and you take yours away. But if it's forever with her, does it really matter? You've loved, you've lived, and you don't regret Hogwarts, the place that became your home and your sanctuary. She is your home now.
You fly from her nest, and you land on your ground. An eagle's head to a badger's heart.
She saved you. So in return, you give her everything.
A/N: Written for Camp Potter: History Appreciation, the Femmeslash Project, and the If You Dare Challenge.
I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. Please leave a review whether you did or not, and I'll be eternally grateful!
Allie