Wolf and Woman
Some days
I am more wolf
Than woman
And I am still learning
How to stop apologizing
For my wild
~Nikita Gill
One:
The Blank Space
People do not say Hel looks like her father. They merely tell her she has her mother's eyes. Too green Petunia would moan, sickly looking Vernon would agree, hellish Remus would good naturedly chuckle at his pun. Yet, Hel thinks, by elimination they must mean she did, in fact, look like her father.
She does not have her mother's flowing red hair, neither is she tall and willowy like the sparse photo she's seen of the woman. There's no dimple to her smile or playful cock of her brow. She's a dark tangled thing of wild imaginings, a raven's feather caught in a wolf's tooth Sirius used to call her, and Hermione had once said she looked pretty in the way a tiger looked pretty… Right before it ripped a mans throat out.
Still, some days Hel wonders where her face came from, where the black hair bled down, which way the pale skin had slipped in and the too keen smile had passed hands from. She's a puzzle made from missing pieces, features unknown, and she sometimes tries to see through the fragments to the image that laid beyond like one would try to peer through the clouds to see where the sun hid.
Most of all, however, she wonders where her fucked up legs come from.
It's called Osteogenesis imperfecta, though most knew it as brittle bones disease. It's an inherited genetic disorder. A child born with OI may have soft bones that break easily, bones that are not formed normally, and other such problems. Signs and symptoms may range from mild to severe.
Hel loses the hereditary lottery before she leaves the womb, and her legs come out riddled with it. She doesn't learn to walk upright until she goes to Hogwarts, until Madam Pomphrey sets her on a course of Skele-Gro twice daily. The potion helps, keeps her legs relatively strong though her right still needs its fixed brace to keep from breaking or seizing on her.
She'll be on the potion for life, the nurse tells her, but it holds the worst of her genetic defect at bay.
She may not have known how to walk until eleven but she swiftly becomes the best Seeker Gryffindor has seen in centuries. She takes to the air like a dragon, as fast as one too, The Black Dread she's nicknamed by other Quidditch teams.
Hel doesn't let it hold her back. She's more than her body, than her legs, than her face.
Still, in mornings and nights, before she chokes down the burning concoction that knits her bones tougher just to do the same thing tomorrow, she wonders where it came from, this bad blood, this born misfortune.
It sure as fuck wasn't Lily.
It's him again, Hel suspects.
The shadowy unknown. The blank space next to her mother's on her birth certificate.
That's her father. An empty space and a pair of bad fucking legs. Her mother's a corpse underneath a headstone.
Is it any surprise she turns out the way she does?
Hel hurt Dudley when she was eight. Really, badly hurts him. She's in the dirt outside in the garden, the only place she can be because Petunia says a wheelchair is too expensive for someone like her, not understanding what like her meant at that age, and the last one they had on the NHS Dudley had thrown into a bush with his friends for a laugh at the cripple girl forced to try and crawl home.
Not that she had one of those either.
She was sitting in the clover patch, pulling up weeds by their mangled roots because Petunia wanted a rose bush beneath the kitchen window but no dirt underneath her own nails. Hel didn't know when Dudley came out of the back door exactly, doesn't know why he came out at all that morning because Dudley hated running about even though he could, she only knew he was there when he darted at her full pelt, snickering like a piglet, foot lashing out.
It catches her leg.
She hears her bone snap as if it's happening right in her ear, right in her throat, and fire bursts to life in her blood. The pain was indescribable, an explosion as it flared bright hot and white, up and down her leg and sprinting through her spine until she could feel the bonfire licking at the back of her neck.
It's not half as hot as her temper, however. Her cousin learns that the hard way.
Dudley bloody laughs at her, bowed over as he clutched his stomach. Laughs loudly as she too curves over nearly retching, fingers still in the mud, silent and suddenly breathless in the pain, Dudley laughs.
He was always laughing, dear Dudley. Laughing when he sees her slither out from underneath the cupboard. Laughing when she sits at school alone because no one wants to play with the Girl-Who-Breaks. Laughing, laughing, laughing.
Her hand must have clenched around a rock hidden by the weeds, one she hadn't even known was there until it was too late, because the next thing Hel knows is she's lifting it up and swinging, and Dudley isn't laughing anymore.
It was just one hit. A good hit. That's all it ever takes.
It strikes him across the temple, and Dudley goes down like a bag of bricks. Petunia screams murder when she comes out seconds later, having heard the thunk from the kitchen table where she read her gossip magazine. Hel supposes it's the blood that sets her off.
Head wounds bleed a lot.
Dudley spends two nights in hospital, one of them unconscious. He's fine when he wakes up, although he has a stutter from then on.
He never fucking kicks her again though.
Perhaps Hel had more than a blank space, face and bad legs from her father, then. Maybe she had a temper too. A vile fucking thing that simmered and seared inside, waiting, always waiting, salivating for that rock in her grip to swing.
The dark anger gets the best of Hel occasionally. She tries to throw a Crucio at Bellatrix and succeeds when she hurls one at Carrow not so long after. She blows up Aunt Marge and smiles as the balloon of a woman drifts off into the evening sky. Grieving Sirius and needing the pressure to stop, just stop!, for a moment or her head was going to explode, she trashes Dumbledore's office, letting a year of misery and rage bleed out with the glass she shatters against the walls. She snaps at Ron, and yells at Hermione, and in the third-floor bathroom she uses Sectumsempra against Malfoy, standing over him as he bleeds out. He only survives because Snape comes dashing in the nick of time.
Hel wonders what's inside of her, this boundless wrath, this bottomless resentment. She wonders who she can blame for it. Herself? Definitely. She's not so much a coward not to face the consequences of her own actions. Her circumstances? Maybe. Hermione speaks of things like PTSD and depression, particularly after Hel watches Cedric die, has to limp back with two broken legs carrying a sons corpse to his distraught father, and gets tortured against a gravestone. Family?
Possibly.
Maybe like her legs and her hair and the cut of her jaw, her anger comes from the too hot blood. She ponders if her father, wherever he was or whoever he was, bruised easily, both inside and out, if he was as mad in the blood as she was.
Maybe then someone would understand why when Hel comes back from the dead she doesn't lift her wand to Tom Riddle. Instead she finds her deadly grip on a broken bit of window blown out from the Astronomy tower when the Wards fell, and she lunges, and she stabs, and she doesn't stop even as Hermione and Bill try to drag her off. She'd nearly cut through her own fingers along with Tom's entrails.
No one looks at her the same after that.
Hel doesn't blame them.
She can't stomach to look at herself most days either.
Hel had closed her eyes and turned the stone over in her hand three times. She knew something had happened because she heard slight movements around her that suggested frail bodies shifting their footing on the loamy, twig-strewn ground that marked the outer edge of the forest. When she opened her eyes again, she saw them.
They were neither ghost nor truly flesh, she could see. They resembled most closely the Riddle that had escaped from the diary so long ago, and he had been memory made nearly solid. Less substantial than living bodies, but much more than ghosts.
There's James Potter, her mother's best friend and one half of her god-parents, wearing the clothes in which he had died, hair untidy and ruffled and his glasses a little lopsided. Sirius was tall and handsome, and younger by far than what Hel had seen him in life. He loped with an easy grace, his hands in his pockets and a grin on his face. Lupin was younger too, and much less shabby, his hair thicker and darker. He looked happy to be back in a familiar place, a scene of so many adolescent wanderings.
Lily's smile was the widest of all. She pushed her long red hair back as she drew closer to Hel, and her green eyes, so alike, searched Hel's face hungrily, as though she would never be able to look at her enough.
That's when she saw the rest. The strangers with not so strange faces and the oddest of clothes. There's a man with the bluest of eyes next to a blond woman in a fur cloak, beside them a tank of a man as broad as he was tall, another who looked as much like the first man as possible next to clearly two brothers and a woman with hair that rivalled her mother's in its amber hues and-
And him.
He stands beneath a tree, propped up by his shoulder, and though he wore strange black leathers he had braces on his legs and a face that matched her own. There he is, in a blank space, with a matching visage, and all Hel can do is ask one thing. Everything else seems so insignificant.
"Does it hurt?"
He grins at her with the same keen slices she grins with, and he doesn't lie to her.
"It's quick."
His accent is strange too, and Hel lets the stone drop from her hand, lets the faces fade with the light.
She walks to her death then. Walks with her head held high. She'd fought tooth and claw, dragged herself here by sheer determination, and soon, quick, she'd be on the other side. She could rest then wherever it is the dead go. Maybe have a Firewhisky, and tell her mother all she'd done. Maybe finally have a name for the man beneath the tree, and all the others she'd seen.
Only Hel doesn't die.
Not that day.
She comes careening back with a shudder and a gasp, and she fights harder, fights faster, fights smarter, and she fucking wins.
She still doesn't have a name for her father. She almost regrets it.
Almost.
Hel was sitting outside the steps of Godric's Hollow when Hermione finally comes cautiously up the garden path, curls damp and cheeks flushed and huddled in a downy coat.
"Sorry it took me so long to get here. I got your Patronus while I was in the shower."
Hel rolled the cigarette over her bottom lip before striking fire to the end, letting her voice drift on the waft of smoke dancing into the evening air.
"You remember your time-turner, don't you, 'Mione?"
Hermione doesn't come closer, stays a good few feet and more away, and Hel almost laughs, almost winces. She supposed seeing your childhood friend hack through the bogeyman with a shard of glass not three months ago might breed a touch of caution.
It didn't make it hurt any less.
"Of course I remember it, Hel. Why?"
Hel hummed and stole another drag of her smoke, reaching down her right leg to pull the strap on her brace around her knee tighter. She'd need another dose of Skele-Gro soon.
"It was the only one at school, wasn't it?"
Hermione scanned her face, looking for something, seeking somewhat, and Circe knew what she actually saw there. Perhaps the purple sleepless bruises blooming underneath Hel's eyes. Perhaps the wrinkles in her jumper and slacks. Maybe her unbrushed hair or the state of her fuckin leg in its brace, but whatever it was it must have worried her by the way Hermione chewed harshly on her bottom lip.
"The only one in England, actually. McGonagall had special dispensation from the Ministry to have it as a relic for teaching purposes. All the other Time-turners were destroyed in the seventeen hundreds by Unspeakables. Some Wizards and Witches were using them to go back and kill their rivals ancestors-… But I don't think I'm here for a history lesson, am I?
Hel used her thumb to flick her ash off on the stone, watching it burst as it hit, smear in grey and black.
"Why would you say that?"
Despite everything that had happened, any caution she might still feel, Hermione scoffed, crossing her arms back over her chest, looking exactly as she had so many times before when she told Hel it was time to study in the library. Exasperated.
"Because you look like shit, and I know how much you hate it when I lecture. You wouldn't so willingly ask for one, so come on then, out with it. What's going on?"
Hel flicked her smoke away, spark disappearing into the grass, and delved her hand into her slacks pocket.
"I saw something when I had the resurrection stone. Something that didn't make sense. Dead people dressed like they'd been dead for hundreds of years… So it got me curious. I came here looking through my mother's things. James let her stay here when-"
When Tom Riddle had decided Lily was a target and Dumbledore had tried hiding her under the watch of her best friend.
Pulling her hand out, gilded chain wrapped around her finger but fist closed, Hel raised it out between them.
"I found this stashed and concealed underneath my crib."
Unfurling her hand the chain dropped, hooked on her finger the Time-turner swung like a pendulum in the breeze.
"Now what the fuck was my mother doing with one of these if they're supposed to be all destroyed now?"
Woo or Boo?
A.N: My good internet buddy is feeling sick, and seen as I can't make virtual noodle soup and send it to her, I did the next best thing I could do. I know she likes Vikings, Ivar's her favourite character, likes family fics, and so I did the best I could lol. I hope she likes it, and I hope you guys like this too.
I am currently bogged with my Master's work, but I am working on updates for my other fics so please bear with me. I really need to just have some fun right now lol.
As always, thank you all so much for taking the time out to read this nonsense. I hope you guys enjoyed this chapter, and what more is to come. If you have a spare moment or two, don't forget to drop a review, they keep the fingers typing, and I will hopefully see you all soon if my Masters doesn't kill me first!