It was a dream
We all carry with us this dream:
that something wonderful will happen,
that it must happen -
that time will open,
that the heart will open,
that doors will open,
that cliffs will be opened,
that springs will well forth,
that the dream will be opened,
- that we one peaceful morning will glide in -
onto a bay we had not been aware of.
~ Olav Hauge
Chapter One:
Tell Us A Joke?
It is not unusual for a Wizarding child to be born with marks already present upon their skin. When lives ran into the centuries rather than the decades, an age gap wasn't unheard of. Dumbledore was born with a scar upon his knee the exact shape of the London underground. Remus Lupin had a birthmark on his calf that predictably didn't show up outside of those born to the House of Black. Molly and Arthur had an identical colour-burst on their palms from one of Arthur's many mishaps as a toddler.
Heather was born with tattoos.
That wasn't so normal.
Witches and Wizards didn't usually meddle with muggle tattoos, let alone get two (Sirius's rebellious teenage years hellbent on infuriating his pureblood parents not withstanding). Heather's born with a feather bursting to birds on an arm, and an oddly placed triangle on a shoulder blade.
When Heather's older she'll add to the latter. Sit in a chair for thirty minutes in a parlour filled with cigarette smoke to get a circle and a line put through and around, and makes the mark her own.
As Lily Evans sat with the child in her arms in the Headmaster's office, James at her side and a new life ahead of them after years of facing infertility, she ran a curious finger over the fringes of the feather peaking out the blanket. She wonders what it means for the child given into her care, a miracle in black and green and pale skin, a child that Albus tells them is special, alone, without family or home or anyone at all and only a name on a birth certificate that will end up collecting dust in Lily's bedside table, forgotten for years to come.
Salvatore.
No first name, no middle, no mother's or father's, just Salvatore written next to a checked box of female. Poor mite was found abandoned underneath an Elder tree with a locket and the certificate hidden in the fold of her blanket. Nothing else. No one close by. Who knows how long she'd been left crying in the night before the Aurors found her.
They take the child home that day, name her Heather Potter, and the question follows Lily's steps up Godric Hollow's garden path. The child was definitely magical, there was no doubt to be had about that, she's three weeks old when she magics her nursery walls yellow after all, but the tattoo's are worrying.
Heather's going to live a long life, Lily knows almost unnaturally. As a Witch, maybe even well into her three-hundreds. Having a mortal as a soulmate seems almost unfair to an already unjust start to life.
James tells her not to worry with that lopsided smile of his.
Soulmates were soulmates, he'd shrugged. Destiny would find a way.
Fate, it seemed, would strike sooner rather than later, and take James Potter's life on a staircase and Lily's in the yellow nursery.
Niklaus Mikaelson was well into his millennia of life when he awakes one night in a bitter-cold sweat, something green flashing in his dream, searing pain scorching across his forehead. He thinks he's been hit at first, snuck upon by Mikael, always Mikael, while he lay slumbering in his villa in Tuscany on the hunt for the cure to his curse.
But no one's in the room, and as the agonizing pain, as if he's been branded, slowly begins to diminish, when Klaus finally manages to get the walls to stop spinning and the floor to halt from rushing up at him as he slinks from the bed with knocking knees, tumbles to the ensuite and stares at the new scar, pink and angry and bloody livid, tearing down his brow in the mirror above the sink, he's struck silent.
He'd gone his whole life, and to a Mikaelson a whole life was a whole lot of life, without so much as a scratch on his skin, a smudge of ink, a doodle, nothing, barren, and he'd come to the assumption that most of the Mikaelsons had. Whatever spell their mother had used to turn them into what they were, the first of their kind, had somehow, someway, negated any matches in souls.
Souls Finn would say none of them had any longer.
Yet here Niklaus stood at three in the morning, bare-chested and bare-footed bent over a sink bowl gawking at proof quite to the contrary.
He smiles at his reflection just as the knock on his bedroom door rings out in a bout of three.
As he'd guessed, Klaus finds Elijah on the other side-
Sporting the same scare on his forehead.
A bolt of lightning.
Heather Potter has magical skin, and even Aunt Petunia with her bony handed scrubbing can't take that away (though she tries, Merlin she tries, she tries so hard until Heather's skin is tender and swollen). Petunia, nevertheless, stops trying to wash the marks off after a couple of years, when she realizes how fruitless the task is, stops trying to get rid of the dancing layers of colours on Heather's left arm, gentle vines that spread in the night, or marigold bracelets that appear in spring, sunflowers in summer or roses on holidays, and the elegant squiggle of poetry that comes on Heather's right arm.
Det er den draumen comes quite a lot.
It's Norwegian Hermione will tell Heather later. A poem by someone called Olav Hauge called It was a dream. At seven, however, Heather doesn't know that, can't understand the foreign words, not when she sneaks a pen from the pot at school and scribbles back in chicken scrawl.
I like eggs : ). (When she's older she'll be embarrassed to realize that's the first ever thing she'd ever said to her soulmates).
She wakes up the next day to eggs painted up to her bicep, chicken ones and goose ones and ones decorated like Easter treats and even one or two that's been fried and look like their glopping down her wrist (these are her very favourite).
It makes her smile even when Petunia yells for fifty minutes straight and locks her cupboard door.
Elijah was feeling impatient and at a horrible loss. The scars come ready and fast in the years that follow as if they were saying I'm here, see me, find me. A burst comes not twelve years later from the first, a blow to the arm that must have broken bone and pierced flesh and been the size of a rail-road spike and burns as if bleach had been poured in their blood. I Must Not Tell Lies appears over knuckles one evening, an engraving of an S in the shape of a locket over breast a little over that.
And between these is a promise his (and mine Klaus would adamantly add) soulmate was growing up somewhere.
Growing up and getting scars as if they were scout badges.
They just had to find the place where the growing up was happening.
But the marks did not work that way. Names never transferred, and places were only smears vague and indistinguishable as a bruise. Whatever magic it was that linked soulmates through flesh and body, it didn't like being circumvented. Elijah had tried to get around that, around destiny, not long after the S scar, asking the one on the other side what she could see around her then. She'd written back, Elijah could feel it, a blush of warmth settling on his skin by his wrist-
Invisibly.
It was there, he just couldn't see it. Elijah thought, perhaps, that was worse yet. Having it right there-
And nothing.
Sometimes Elijah wonders what they would be like. How old were they now? Seventeen? Eighteen? She's brazen, Elijah knows fondly. The first words she writes back in Norwegian, a nephew language to Old Norse, their native tongue, are curses bubbled with smiley faces and a translated recipe for eggs on toast (a running joke throughout the years).
And then Niklaus paints a Petunia on her arm one morning after she's been silent on her end for a whole week (odd, strange, worrying), and three hours later she's scribbled over it almost violently in red, and starts writing corny jokes below (or what he thinks at first are corny jokes).
What's the difference between Scotland and a tea bag? The tea bag stays in the cup longer.
What does the Loch Ness monster eat? Fish and ships
What does an Owl in Scotland watch? Dr. Whoot.
There it is.
A sign in a joke, and his clever girl has gone and done it, did what he himself could not, what Niklaus couldn't paint through to her side.
Scotland.
The brother's are on the next plane over from Italy that day. They still don't find her for another three years.
A.N: Still sick, still writing lol. I'm taking it a little easy for a bit, and wanted something rather fluffy to come and do, and so here we are. Hope you guys liked it!
