Harry rested beneath the ledge of the roof beside the hut, dense fur cloak she'd nabbed slung haphazardly over her shoulders, watching the thunderstorm rage above her head. It had begun quietly last night, nothing but dark clouds rolling in on the tide and the moonlight, a warning far out over the sea beside the seer's hut on the shore. The soft murmur of thunder had come next, somewhere lost in the twilight, and it had awoken Harry in the night, lured her out, lured her here to watch the storm come home.

She doesn't know how long she sat there, watching the horizon from the ground beneath the roof. It could have been minutes or hours before the clouds closed and lightning set the bloating ocean afire. The first bolt had struck somewhere between the sky and sea, and the thunder had rumbled on, stuttered and crackled as if it couldn't keep up with the light. The waves grew rough, high rising and crashing hard, and Harry listened to them slap and smack across the coast like the gnashing of teeth. The rain came after that, all at once and in sheets, soaking the sand and swelling the sea. Everything was rhythmically balanced for a too short moment. Light and shadow. Uproar and calm. Sea and sky. The storm broke as dawn came creeping in, the clouds coming apart like window drapes opened on a new day, and though the rain still fell it came in soft and soothing slips now.

Harry could see the horizon again… In more ways than one.

"Your father adores storms. I am surprised not to find him out here with you."

The voice came tenderly from the back by the huts door, and Harry knew who stood behind before she glanced over her shoulder. Helga, donned in the same butter yellow dress of last night, her own dense cloak tightly wrapped around her neck, wavered a little at the side. Harry tries her best to smile at the woman, but she's not convinced she does a very good job of it.

"I like the freedom of them. The unpredictability. They come out of nowhere from far flung lands, and they blow their anger out and they pass right on by to another shore."

Harry doesn't know what the woman takes from what she says, but Helga does take something from it, an invitation maybe as she comes slowly over to sit beside her.

"Siggy-… Your friend left with Bjorn and Lagertha for their homestead not so long ago. I asked if she wanted to come say goodbye to you but she said it might be best to leave it be. That I should tell you she understands."

Harry faced the sea anew, watching the seafoam lip at pebble and coral, and like the storm had blown away above her, the anger she had from last night had simmered to something small. Not gone, no, but less.

Bitter.

She's thankful Luna didn't come speak to her, and that might sound horrible, awful, but it was the truth. Harry didn't know if she could face her right now. It made her feel slightly worse that Luna must have known this, must have understood, was decent enough to give her time and space to get her thoughts in order.

Luna, like Dumbledore before her, had taken her choice away. Stripped her of authority and agency over her own future. She might have had good intentions, fuck, if Luna had come and told Harry all this before she had sent them both sailing back in time, Harry still wasn't sure she would have believed her, but still-

Still.

It would have been her choice.

Luna, good intentions or not, to save her life or not, taking that from Harry was something not so easily forgiven, and almost certainly never forgotten. Luna presumably knew that too, knew what doing this would sacrifice between them, would chip away at their friendship, and had still gone through with it.

Maybe in time Harry could forgive, but not right now.

"Were are we exactly?"

"Here?"

Helga asked gently.

"This is Kattegat."

Kattegat. A strange name. Foreign. Unknown. It hadn't always been so though, had it? Harry, Angrboða, was possibly born right here, on this coast someplace. Maybe in the woodlands and thickets on the pitcher's mound, because Harry had a fleeting flash of smell that tickled the fractured memories in her mind, oakmoss and fern and mud in the rain, and a boy with blue eyes-

Her temple thrummed in pain, and like Luna advised, she didn't fight the memory, didn't try to pull it any closer for further inspection either, like the storm she let it come and go again and hoped one day it would blow right back around, that one day she could remember it all without the threat of her brain melting out her nose swinging like a noose above her.

"Do you live here?"

Helga took to fiddling with the embroidery of her sleeve, a fine white thread she picked and pulled.

"Me and Floki live not too far away, on a little island out west called Læsø. Your father likes his space as much as he likes his storms."

Helga smiled as she pointed out toward the coast.

"You can find it peaking over the fjord. See?"

Harry did see it, a patch of crag and soil around the bend of the fjord, not so very far off coast but too far to swim.

"Do you ride a boat over?"

Helga nodded, her grin widening.

"Yes."

Harry hummed.

"I like boats."

And she did. She always had. Harry remembered the wonder of her first ride in the back of a little rowboat, a littler first year making their way to Hogwarts castle, how awestruck she had been at the dark waters and the soft sway of the waves that reflected the lamplights like stars as if she was flying through the sky. It was only later that she had realized the other first years had been in amazement of the castle ahead and not the ride, most definitely not the boat, and she had felt a little silly when Ron had scoffed at her.

Helga, nevertheless, doesn't scoff. She smiles impossibly brighter somehow, a streak of sunlight down here on the ground.

"Your father likes boats too."

Despite herself, regardless of feeling emotionally drained from yesterday, Harry found herself chuckling lightly.

"Boats and storms? I suppose we make quite the pair."

Suddenly Harry wonders what else there could be in similarity. Did Helga like spring as much as Harry did? Did Floki like mint on his lamb? Did she get her temper from one and her giggle the other? So many questions and so little answers, and unexpectedly Harry wants to know them all, every single one, wants to know them with a hunger she never thought she could have, greedy, incessant.

It strikes her then dumbfoundedly. Really, truly hits home. These were her parents. Her mother. Her father. Their blood was her blood, and that somehow, to an orphan, seemed as magical as any spell Harry could and would ever cast. It's confusing too, bewildering, because she's still hurt at Luna, still angry, so fuckin' angry, grieving too, mourning the loss of a world she understood, Hermione, Ron, Hogwarts and Hogsmeade, all of it, and yet-

Yet here she is staring at the face of a mother she didn't know she had, and although Harry would always, always, think of Lily and James Potter as mother and father, maybe family could be a little like emotions. You could feel more than one thing so thoroughly at once, the good and the bad and the downright ugly, and family could be however big or small you wanted it to be.

"Home."

Harry croaks, suddenly suffocating on the feelings in her chest bubbling up to lodge in her throat, speaking without meaning to.

"I want to go home."

And she smells it again, oakmoss and fern and mud from the rain, sees the flash of a boy with blue eyes, and Harry wants to go there desperately, to the island peeking over the fjord, to a place where she had been a child once, an innocent child, where she hadn't fought a war and died only a year ago, where she wasn't the Girl-Who-Lived, where she didn't have to run each morning to escape her nightmares-

Where she could sleep. Finally sleep. Where maybe, just maybe, Angrboða could wake back up and begin living the life snatched from her too soon. A life where her mother had sunshine hair, and her father liked boats and storms, and where horizon met sea.

Helga's smile wavers, flickers, threatens to fall, but she holds it in place, reaches out to hold Harry's hands too, and it's only then Harry realizes how badly she's shaking, how weak she feels, as gentle thumb brushes over scarred knuckle.

"Then let us go home."

Three Weeks Later

Harry's head broke the surface of the sea, and she gasped for cool, crisp air before struggling to brush back her sopping locks from her face and eyes, lashes dripping saltwater onto her flushed cheeks. Wading over the short distance for the rock beside her near the shore, she plucked up the square of soap she'd left there before taking a dip, giving an experimental whiff.

Her nose curled. It smelled of oak ash and some sort of fat, maybe goat because Helga had a few on the island, and although there was no lavender or lemon to ease the smell the soap did a good job of scrubbing off the dirt a morning turning the hay in the goats paddock had coated her in. Heaving herself up on the rock, careful not to wet the set of boiled leather breaches and the tunic she had folded on the side, naked as the day she was born, Harry began the arduous task of cleaning her copper curls.

This early in the morning, Helga was likely in the house, salting the herring from last nights catch in baskets for keep over winter. Floki was possibly at his boat dock already, preparing to strip planks from trees for the next ship he was to build.

It had been a quiet three weeks, tentative in a way as Harry took up space in a house they were trying to make a home, as the three learned to navigate each other's spheres, discovered what lines existed and which ones couldn't be crossed. They had their moments of awkwardness, times where Helga or Floki inadvertently mentioned something, asked about her past Harry wasn't ready to speak about over dinners of stew and bread and Harry got deathly silent, or when Harry waved her hand to levitate the basket Helga was struggling to carry to store out back and she had jumped at the show of magic, made Harry flinch in fear from the memories of Petunia, and drop the spell and both watched on as fish and salt spilled across the floor. Yet those were only little flashes, moments of learning to exist in the same place, to come to know one another all over again, and the rest had been… Well, the rest had been wonderful.

Floki had taken her to the patch of tree's on the west of the island a week ago, made her laugh when he showed her how he picked the best planks for his ship by pressing his ear to the bark. And it had felt like it had been the first time Harry had laughed in months, perhaps years, really laughed, laughed hard enough that good pain jittered in her ribs, that Harry remembered good pain could exist. Helga helped her braid her hair, something Harry had always struggled with, and gave her so many little kindness's that it was hard to keep track, always brought over another blanket for bed, turned the fire in the hearth a little higher when Harry came in from her bath in the sea, stitched the very clothes folded beside her in a matter of a day as if Helga was a witch herself.

No one had ever made Harry anything before. She'd nearly cried the first time she'd worn them.

So yes it was hard, and yes it was still early days, and yes, Harry thought, growing pains were there, but that, in the end, only meant something was growing.

Dropping the soap back down, Harry scrubbed the suds into her curls, flinging her hair over her shoulder, humming as she set to using the brush at her hip to clean between her toes. As soon as she was done washing she should go help Helga hang the herbs on the rafters for drying. Maybe see if she could take some cured meat and bread over to Floki for lunch-

"Who are you?"

Harry yelped at the voice coming not a few feet from shore, dropped the brush into the ocean, startled, and flung herself back into the waters, dipping behind a rock. When the surprise wore off at getting caught starkers, which happened pretty fast considering the flare of indignation taking its place, she snapped her head out from behind the crag to glare at the shore. It was easy to spot the interloper, as he didn't seem to be trying to hide considering he very much had clearly snuck up on a naked woman.

He couldn't be much older than her, a year at the very push Harry would guess. He was pale, his features almost coldly cut, keen in the sweeps and lines, with a crop of dark black hair that was shaved around the sides and growing dishevelled from atop. He was broad shouldered, leading her to think he had one hell of a mean swing if you ever got in his range, and dressed in boiled, starched leathers she had seen many of the people around here wear, the kind she herself had taken to, though his was darker, died black and grey and mottled sombre in places. He was perched right near the water's edge, sitting-

Not sitting. His legs were straight out, bound together by straps of leather working their way up in bands, and from the direction the feet were pointing, he must have dragged himself over from the south of the island, where the boats from Kattegat docked.

Harry glared fiercely.

He would have seen her naked from a mile off and he'd still chosen to come closer the fuckin' creep.

"Who am I? Who the fuck are you?"

That was about when he grinned, his teeth white and his smile wild.

"Angrboða?"

Harry finally got a good look at his eyes, and there it was, an abrupt strike right to the solar plexus, the scent of oakmoss and fern and mud from the rain-

The boy with the blue eyes. The man from the mirror of Erised. The memory of a name.

"Ivar?"

I have one more exam for this year at university, a lovely four hour one, so the next update should be next week on Thursday… So that was a fucking lie lol. It's been four years since I've updated this fic and a lot has happened. I finally finished my degree and got a first class, adopted a cat, and did boring life stuff. My writing just sort of fell to the wayside, and I've only recently been getting back into it. For old nostalgia sake I came back to this fic and re-read it, hated some of it, and was surprised anyone could read it at all with the grammar and spelling mistakes (Not that I've likely gotten any better lol), but there was just something about this fic that kept pulling me back and I thought why the hell not give it a shot and try and revive the dead? So here we are folks, with my flimsy resuscitation, and I know this chapter's small but I'm learning to dip my toes back into the water.

I do want to say a huge, huge thank you to everyone who reviewed. I do read them all, and I know some of you enjoyed reading this as much as I liked writing it, and I hope that will be the same again. If not, cheers for taking the time out to read this nonsense anyway. I can't say when the next update will be exactly, but I am working on it so I am hoping the wait be a lot fuckin' shorter than four bloody years lol.