She wears strength and darkness equally well, the girl has always been half goddess, half hell.

~Nikita Gill

Ten: Cracks and Crevices Unseen

Hel ducked back behind the corner, dragging Ubbe by the flap of his cloak with her. They barely have enough time to press themselves flat against the bare wall at their back before the sound of footsteps come.

Hel holds her breath all the way through the low chatter buzzing like bees, feeling beneath her clenched fingers as Ubbe does the same. Only when the rhythmic thud, thud, thudding is hardly audible does she release the burning inhale through a long sigh from her nose. "This is taking too long."

"We can't keep scurrying through halls. Someone will see us if we are not careful." Ubbe readily agreed. "We need a plan."

Hel frees her uncle from her grip with a frustrated roll of her jaw and a scrunch of her nose. This castle was large, larger than she originally thought from the outside looking in, filled to the brim with pilgrims, poverty-stricken masses, and rosewater scented nobility.

And crosses.

So many crosses.

Everywhere, hanging on wall, tapestry, door frames and courtyards. It makes the hair on the back of Hel's neck stand on end, this innocuous symbol that represented so much pain to her people. To so many people. Witch burnings, dockings, branding-

And that was a problem. As much as she wanted to, really, really, wanted to, Hel couldn't run out head first and start shooting off spells. These are Christians, and Christians were prone to mass hysteria, genocidal rampages, inquisitions and crusades, even if their monks looked harmless enough with that ridiculous bald spot on their heads. The last thing Hel needed was to accidently kick off the great Witch Hunt five hundred fuckin' years early by giving them a reason to sow their hatred as they had.

So she would need to do this the Muggle way, and that meant having patience.

A virtue Hel sorely lacked.

They needed to find out where this King Ecbert had secreted Ivar and Ragnar away. Merely sneaking around hoping for the best was proving pointless and tiring. All they had stumbled across so far was kitchens and servants quarters and, somehow, even more crosses.

"We're going to have to split up. We'll cover more ground that way." Hel heard Ubbe shake his head from underneath the hood of his cloak more than she saw the movement, a ruffling of fur that was almost lost in the breeze coming through the open courtyard door they had slunk through only a little down the way.

"What if one of us is captured? Both? How are we to-" Slipping a hand between the folds of her own cloak, Hel dipped into the pocket of her leg brace, fingers searching in the dark before striking something small, cold, and firm. She pulls it free and unceremoniously flicks it towards Ubbe, who scrambled to catch it before the coin could bounce off down the hall to cracks and crevices unseen.

"Take that." Hel turned her attention back to the corridors ahead. They too get mapped into her mental design, creating warrens and burrows she prints and provides for possibilities and opportunities they might need later. Down the narrow board it forked off abruptly, one hall going left and the other right. Choices, options, more ground to cover. "If you get into trouble, spin it between your fingers three times. I have a matching one. It'll heat up and I'll come and find you."

"And if you get into trouble?" Ubbe asked, curiously examining his new coin, using the broad pad of his thumb to swipe over the worn-down face on one side.

"Oh-" Hel grinned with a wink thrown carelessly over her shoulder, finally edging out the bend they were hiding behind. Ubbe must have caught it like he caught the coin by the way his shoulders sagged in annoyance underneath the fur lined cloak. Exasperatedly. "I'm going to get into trouble, alright-" Ubbe's mouth opened, obviously readying to argue, but she beat him to the punchline. "But it's not anything I can't handle. Now-"

Hel eyed the corridor anew, picturing the castle from elsewhere, from when she had been on the hillside looking down upon it. It's a blueprint in her mind, carefully and meticulously entombed in her memory like every hall, window and door she had so far come across. It had three towers from her count, and obviously a dungeon somewhere southward where low trellises had been, and Circe knows how many floors to climb. There was a stable westward she had made particular note of, if only that all the hay inside would be exceedingly flammable.

A good distraction if they needed one.

Still, Hel had a choice to make.

Ubbe spoke of this King Ecbert with the same type of begrudging respect perhaps a shark would speak about a jaguar with. He appeared to be a smart man, according to the snippets Ubbe had dropped, arrogant too, fond of his own fancy and wealth.

Hel was a smart women as well, and it wasn't hard to slip into this Kings shoes.

The chances are, from what she can figure from the little she knows, Ecbert had either, one; stashed Ivar in a tower, because if he was like her, but without the braces and potion, there would be no chance of escape for him with that many flights of stairs, or two; been conceited enough to place Ivar low down in a dungeon or lower floor, thinking his crippled legs would hinder him enough to expunge any escape attempts, but also to insult by placing him so close to an exit he couldn't reach.

If Ecbert was smart, smart like Hel, he wouldn't have placed Ivar and Ragnar together. She definitely wouldn't have; it would be too risky. Best to keep any possibility of scheming by the two to a minimum with limited contact. Yet, if he was arrogant enough to place Ivar down low, it meant he'd want to show off his prize prisoner in Ragnar, meaning the Kattegat-one-time-King would likely be paraded in a cage in a feast hall somewhere.

Which means they have two people to find in far flung places of this Muggle riddled castle filled with fuckin' crosses and Christians who wouldn't think twice about tying Hel to a pyre and trying to burn her alive.

But that's not really the choice, is it? The choice is something a little, whole lot, worse. The question is simple, really. Who does Hel go for, and who does she send Ubbe to?

Ragnar will be heavily guarded by Hel's summation, he must be, and it will be exceedingly tricky, even for a Witch like Hel, to get in, get close, and break him out without starting a lynch mob or lockdown. Yet Ivar is her father, he's who she's come here for, killed for, he's so close and she's almost made it-

It's selfish, wanting to be the one to go to her father when they have all this on the line, but Hel has never said, nor would she ever say, she wasn't a selfish person. Yet that means sending Ubbe into the most hostile territory with nothing but a dagger and a clap on the back.

So the choice comes down to doing what she wanted or doing what was smart.

"Now?" Ubbe questioned when Hel lingered a bit too long on the drawing silence. She snaps out of it from the verbal push, turning resolutely away from the corridor.

Smart or want? Want or smart?

"I presume they've placed Ragnar in a feasting hall somewhere. Maybe even a throne room. Somewhere they can show him off-"The logical choice for the interest of an uncomplicated rescue, or the choice she wants to make just because she can?

"Similarly, they've likely placed Ivar somewhere down low if not the dungeons." And Hel, begrudgingly, does the right thing. "You take the dungeons and I'll go for the first tower-" It seems, however, that Hel's unnaturally pragmatic and altruistic plan of sending herself for Ragnar and Ubbe for Ivar was met with a stony rebuttal.

"No." Ubbe denies lightly but pitilessly. "You take the dungeons and I'll take the towers."

"No offense-" Hel would definitely mean every offense coming, she was a bit of a dirtbag always spoiling for a fight that way, "but I have magic, I'm faster, stronger, more practiced in rescue missions and-" just to rub salt into the wound and unravel the suddenly skyrocketing tension hammering down in the hall with a joke "I'm at least three times more pretty than you. The full package really-" From the long shadows cast by his hood, Hel doesn't mistake Ubbe's lenient smile that sprung provoked on his face, "so the smart choice would be for me to go get Ragnar, and for you to retrieve Ivar."

"Smart?" Ubbe asked flippantly. "Yes, definitely, but it is not what's going to happen."

"And why is that exactly?" Hel asked with a frown to match her frustration. It appeared causing trouble was in the Lothbrok blood, and it felt odd, extremely strange, to be on the opposite end of it. To be the one trying to put a cork in the bottle and not the one making said bottle into a Molotov.

Huh.

Is this how Hermione felt all those years?

"Because it should be you who sees Ivar first-" this time Ubbe beat Hel back from arguing, voice dropping low and limp like chipped flint "and I wish to speak to my father. Him being here now is not an accident and I-" Ubbe cut himself off with another shake, biting back whatever had been moments from spilling from his mouth. "I need to speak to him."

Hel hesitates, chewing through the heavy air settling around them. There was clearly something Ubbe was not saying, something to do with him and his father, something that leant itself to the hurt she could see drawing his mouth tight and lined.

It's still not the smart choice and-

And Hel wants to find Ivar and see him for herself too, see that he was real, alive still, see what her mother had loved so dearly she had sacrificed everything for, so much so that she disregards the smart choice without much more prompting.

It turns out that two Lothbrok's are decidedly more troublesome than one.

"Alright-" she cracks along with her knuckles "you get Ragnar, I'll get Ivar. Meet us outside in the west courtyard behind the wine barrels by the time the sun is high above our heads. If you're not there by then, I'm setting this castle on fire to find you."

Ubbe nods. "West courtyard. High sun." He's already turning away.

"Oh, and Goober?" He glances back. "Don't die."

"I didn't know you cared so much. I'm touched, truly-"

"I bloody don't." Hel denies without much heat to make it convincing enough. In the end, she only sounds petulant, to the clear delight on what little she could see of Ubbe's face. "I just don't want to have to cart your overgrown arse back to Nid and fly dead weight all the way back home for a burial. If you die, I'm leaving you in a ditch outside the gate. The crows can have you and your ridiculously long legs."

It was Ubbe's turn to call her back from marching down the opposite end of the hallway, but she can hear the humour haunting in his throat and chest like barely repressed laughter. "Hel?" she hummed in response, but he does not, unlike his actions, mirror her speech. In fact, quite the opposite. "Don't kill or maim too many people, yes?"

Hel rolls her eyes, but she is smiling as she turns the final corner, disappearing from view. "You're no fun, Ubbe. None at all."

How exactly Hel ended up in the south court herb garden was a long story of two nuns, a kitchen pot, and a one eared mouse. Nevertheless, pan still in hand, here Hel crouches between a rosemary patch and a bed of mint sprigs.

According to nun one, after Hel had nun two in a headlock, a Norseman was being kept just over the way of this small garden, in an outhouse like outcrop at the far end of the castle. Hel didn't know how many Norseman King Ecbert could possibly be holding prisoner, but it was a safe bet given the circumstances that it might be Ivar.

It was the only scent trail she'd picked up so far, at least.

Ditching the pan into the rosemary, Hel idly wonders who would find the unconscious nuns stashed in the pantry first. Stable boy? Scullery maid? King Ecbert on a midnight munchies raid? Do pre-medieval Kings get night-time cravings?

It doesn't really matter, and it's completely off point, the two knocked-out nuns were shoved behind so many sacks of flour they weren't going to be easily stumbled across. Even so, she feels a little bad about throwing that mouse at their-

And, quickly, Hel realizes what she's doing. Crouched here with the rising sun, lost in the green and the dirt staring at the squat building across the way, one window, more an open maw in the brick than a glass pane, in view, Hel is stalling.

It's not something she's used to. Oh, she's stalled in a fight to buy herself more time, she's been cautious as she's worked her way deeper into a Death Eater infected Ministry, she's hesitated in flinging a spell if only to think of a stronger one to hurl at an enemy. But there is no fight here to reason away her pause, only the sudden nerves lighting up her belly like fireworks on Bonfire night.

She's not nervous.

Well, not in the way Hel thinks of nervousness. Sweaty palms, lump in throat, shake to her fingers. She's steady here, huddled in the leaves like a tiger in the underbrush. She's sure of herself, her actions, and what she is about to do.

It's not herself she worries over, rather it's what's on the other side of that window that unexpectedly has her wavering.

Growing up, Hel never really gave much thought about this abstract concept known as 'father' beyond what Vernon had showed her. Fists, cupboard, and ungodly pain. Of course, she'd asked herself things she believed most orphans or one parent children contemplated. The tedious 'I wonder where he is' or 'did he not love me' or the perfunctory 'maybe it's better this way'.

Mainly, Hel's father had been a notion whittled down to the discomfort and pain of her legs. That was all she had of him; Hel had thought. All she would ever have to construct the idea of 'dad'.

And she'd worn him well throughout the years, hadn't she? Despite what people thought, Hel's disability had not made her. She had made herself through it. The pain, the constant push down, every single belittling remark, spending so long crawling on her belly had made Hel strong.

Bitter and black like coffee maybe, but strong.

Hel knows what to do with her legs. She binds them, she drinks her potion, and she gets the fuck on with life. But her father wasn't just her legs, was he? Her father was, possibly, through that window right there above a fennel bush. She can't bind that, can't shove a potion down its throat, can't just get on with it.

Hel hadn't truly thought of that until this moment. Yet now that she was here, it was suddenly smacking her in the face.

This was her father, and that meant something Hel, who'd grown up an orphan, couldn't put into words because she had never been given the vocabulary for it. All she really knows is her worst traits are staring back at her from the mouth of an empty window.

Her anger, her spite, every dank, dark thing she's done, there it is in the cracks and the crevices. She's not a hero, not anymore if she was ever one to begin with. Hel barely does the right thing most days. She's mean and she's cruel, and she gets people killed.

Hel is a far stretch from her mother.

And there it is, the hesitation now with a name.

Lily Evans.

Hel is not her mother. From all she knew, Lily had been bright and kind, soft like the sea. Hel, instead, was a tempest, a thing that rages and breaks, and that storm inside her had to come from somewhere.

For fuck sake, her first thought of seeing a stable is let's burn that down. Hel is the type of girl who knows how to destroy, how to end a war, how to fight and finish, not create or build. And that's what you do with relationships, isn't it? Build them up, not burn them down.

Hel knows who she is, but she doesn't know who the other person on the opposite side of that window is, but she's swiftly aware that he might look at her, see her for the wrong she is, and think… let's burn that down.

Yet she's come too far to turn back now, too Gryffindor to let her fear come any closer to the surface, too-

Too Lothbrok to back down from a fight.

So Hel swallows her worry like one would swallow pills, all at once and dryly, leaving a stale aftertaste she can't quite get rid of, and she creeps towards the window.

When she peeps in through the break in the wall, Hel can't see much of anything. The room is dark and cramped, the angles of the walls oddly placed leaving corners unseen, cracks in the periphery, but Hel does spy a chessboard on a table.

She sees the two men second.

One has his back to her, long hair brushing the shoulders of his velvet doublet, the other facing towards the window with his eyes on the board with a rook in his hand as he pushes it across the coloured squares.

There he is, Hel thinks straight away. There he is.

The man from before, in the woods, with the ghosts and the stone in her hand. There he is.

It's a little bit wonderous, and a bit more terrifying. There he is.

Its all she can think in that moment, a thought well-formed but stunted in its scope, as if it's gone and whittled her vision to a sharp, fine needle-point. There he is.

It takes her breath away a little, makes her swell with a petty sort of anger too, or maybe its not anger but hurt because there he is, and her mother's fuckin' dead and where the hell was he when he was needed?

Hel knows that's not fair; she knows and she knows and she knows, that charge she levels against his absence taken, likely, not by his own choice, but she can't help but feel it, a little, a lot.

There he is.

Hel had needed him, time and time again she had, without realizing, without knowing it until this very moment peering in through the dark at a face so alike her own in the flesh, that she had desperately needed her father, and he hadn't been there.

His fault, her fault, fates fault, it didn't change what had happened.

There he is.

But it's wonderous too, because there he is. Alive, healthy, his dark hair far shorter than the vision she'd seen with the Deathly Hollow. Younger too, maybe even only a couple of years older than herself now, and its fuckin' magical, isn't it? A whole lot miraculous, dizzying too, a little sickening and invigorating and-

There he is.

It hits her hard, it hits her fast, and it nearly knocks her back from the window like a punch to the throat.

For a long while now, Hel had been going through the motions she, too late, recognizes. She can't pinpoint when it started, maybe when Sirius had died, maybe when she had learned of her own impending death, maybe earlier and maybe later, but somewhere along the way Hel had lost her drive.

Perhaps that was why she was so ready to run after Fenrir, to fling herself so far into the past.

It's hard to describe, that sort of wrapping depression that crept up on her until it was all she had, consuming everything else until nothing remained but the aching disinterest. Soon fighting for something just became fighting because it was what was expected of her, and then she realized none of it truly matters. The bell would go again tomorrow, a new fight would start, someone would throw her into the ring, and Hel would look about herself, surrounded by friends, surrounded by enemies, and she had the funniest idea that nothing had felt… real.

Not a single fuckin' thing.

Like she was trapped in a school play, or maybe a children's book written by a middle-aged author who didn't quite understand what experiencing war at such a young age could do to a kid but wanted to encapsulated the curiosity of childhood. Everything was cardboard, the stage lights were blinding, the consequences ended at the edge of a stage she was forced to dance upon.

There he is.

And abruptly it felt like she was looking out across that stage and seeing someone sitting in the empty audience seats. They're not clapping her on, they don't know she's there, but, fuck, they're real.

They're real, and Hel feels like crying, sobbing, she feels a many damn thing, good, bad, some unnameable, so much all at once that she might just explode.

Hel doesn't explode. Of course she doesn't. But she does feel a little too big for her broken bones. She also feels dangerously awake. There was no other way to describe it.

Awake and aware and clumsily alive.

There he is, and for once, Hel doesn't have to think much more than that.

Hel mutters a spell, slipping her wand point through the open gap that constituted a window, and then there's a sharp, shot of red light.

The man in the doublet collapses against the table, knocked unconscious, long before Hel heaves herself up and over the stone holding her outside. The movement is awkward, her last dose of Skele-Gro long enough ago to make it excruciatingly painful too, and she has to fight with her cloak to manually swing her right braced leg over and into the room.

Her left leg wasn't doing much better.

It was enough of a distraction that keeps her eyes from the table to allow the other occupant of the room to roll into action. There was a thud, a hiss of leather, and the next time Hel looks up with both her feet on bare stone floor finally, she spies Ivar now on the ground with-

With a dagger in his hand from where he must have swiped it from the unconscious man. He's fast, Hel would give him that, maybe where she had gotten her Seeker skills from, and he has the dagger point aimed right at her. "I know what you are."

It's the first thing he's said to her, or at least the first thing she remembers, and on the flight over from Denmark Hel had contemplated what she would say to him. Hi I'm Hel had been what she had uncreatively settled on. Clean, to the point, lacking frills. Just how she liked it.

Yet, here with her hood up, Hel can only smile and rise to the barb. "Then you know how useless that dagger really is against me. You'd have to get close, and that takes time. Time that would allow me to get a good few spells shot off before you move even a muscle."

There's a waver on Ivar's face, and Hel watches it roll across his features like the tide coming into a shore. It comes and it settles and then it laps away again leaving behind nothing but frothy caution.

He recognizes her accent.

The point of the dagger pulls away, turning, bracing. "But could you get one off before I throw it at your neck?"

With the light from the window at her back, with her hood still up in case someone peeked into the room, Hel realized Ivar couldn't see her face. He can't even see the braces on her legs because of how long the cloak was. He doesn't know who she is, he can't, and saying hi I'm Hel doesn't seem good enough, real enough, anymore.

But that all changes as Hel gently, in full view with fingers trembling from nerves, reaches into the breast of her cloak, towards her throat, and there's the click-clack of a chain breaking.

The broken time-turner bounces across the stone as she softly throws it his way. Ivar takes one look at it, and that's all he can steal. It grabs him as it had grabbed her back in Godric's Hollow. Irrevocably.

He recognizes that too.

"Where did you get that?" His voice wavers like Hel's fingers, the dagger drops and clips the stone, and there's so much to say and Hel doesn't have the voice for it.

So she doesn't try.

Instead she pulls away from the window, and she hobbles across the room with her braces creaking. Ivar's eyes snap up from the necklace ruined on the floor, just enough of it left to be familiar, and his gaze lands on her legs, her uneven gate, and he has to know, he has to suspect, because over the dark and through the silence, she can here the piercing, snapping intake of breath that catches somewhere between a rib and a heart.

She falls ungracefully down, legs folding like paper cards in a wind, aching as she settles before Ivar. The bones were broken, the muscles torn, the braces barely holding her upright, and she had no time from Fenrir to Aslaug to let them heal. One more good blow, and they'd be out of commission for months, perhaps as much as a year, even with her potion.

It's worth it though.

This is all worth it.

Her right brace comes into view as the cloak folds over itself, catching the sun from the window and sparking silver like stars in the night. Ivar doesn't have time to stare at it long before Hel's reaching up and slipping her hood off now she's out of view from the window.

Blue meets green, eye to eye. "My mother left it to me when she died." There they sit, amongst the cracks and the crevices unseen, and everything is achingly, brutally real. "Along with a warning that my father was going to die. I hope I'm not too late, then?"

Hel was an angry woman. So angry for so long. Angry with the universe, with her friends, with Tom and Albus yes, but with Molly and McGonagall and every other adult too, who knew what she had been going through and still turned a blind eye. Angry with Hogwarts, angry with the Ministry, angry she had died, angry she had survived, angry, angry, angry.

And abruptly she's not.

Sitting here with her father, Hel isn't angry.

She doesn't laugh, neither does she cry, she doesn't wince or weep, shout or shy away. She's here, she exists, she's seen and she…

She feels-

Alive.

For the first time since that flash of putrid green in that dark forest, Hel feels alive.

Ivar doesn't take his too-bright eyes from her, doesn't glance away or recoil, he stares and he sees and he knows her just as she knew him back in the forbidden forest. "Hel?"

He doesn't need her to smile or nod, to say yes. He knows despite how impossible it must be to him.

How the ground between them was erased, Hel would never be able to tell, only that it indeed vanishes. She doesn't know whether he snatches at her or Hel lunges at him, but one moment they were apart and then they were somehow both in the middle, between the barren stone. His hands were cradled around her head, big palms on her cheeks, drawing Hel in closer for an embrace that nearly crushes, and it's awkward, clumsy, four legs fucked by a heredity bone disorder, but that's what makes it all the more wonderful, all the more beautiful, these little imperfections that make something real.

This time she returns the hug. She can feel her body tremble, maybe shudder, missed time they will never make back, sixteen years away with the clouds. And then he knocks his temple against her own, and Hel burrows deeper into the hold, and his breath is warm against her ear as it breaks halfway through. "There you are."

There she is.

A.N: I know this chapter was very emotionally driven and internally focused, but it sort of needed to be given the circumstances of what it centred on. That said, action comes roaring back in next chapter as Ragnar is finally introduced and the Great Escape is undertook. How do you think things are going to go? Swimmingly? Tits up? The only way it can go with four Lothbrok's on the loose?

Thank you everyone, reviewers, favouriters, and followers. I do sincerely hope you are enjoying this ride so far. As always, if you have a spare moment, don't forget to drop a review, and I will hopefully see you all again soon.