NOTE: Just a quick note to clear up the structure of this story. This fic is told in a non-linear perspective. As in each chapter will be from different points in time, some decades a part, others a few moments. This means we get to the juicy, meaty part of the story (The Boltons) without a hundred drabbles having to lead up to it lol, and yet, throughout the story, still get an in depth look at Mina's life before she's in Westeros. And on that note, I would like to say this is not a rebirth/reincarnation story. I hope this clears up any confusion!
CHAPTER TWO:
What Is A Knife Compared To A Wand?
Antonin Dolohov's P.O.V
Hot breath wheezing in frigid air. The frenzied, lumbering strides of lopsided footing. The fetid stench of burnt copper, scorched flesh and pine hanging heavy. The woods were tapering now. The terrain nothing but a dashing cline of snow and rock, patches of dead river rush grass like tiny, skeletal fingers reaching up from the depths of the cold earth. An immense frozen river glistening, weaving, snaking. On the horizon stood a single menacing structure.
High walls pierced dense grey sky. Triangular merlons like ragged sharp stone teeth. Colossal turrets overlooking the river like sentry guards in slate armour. Misery made a home here, in the shadow of the castle. Gloom, and frost, and dour men in linen and leather.
Antonin Dolohov darted for it.
Or, perhaps, more accurately, the stooped, wounded man who was once known as Antonin Dolohov, hobbled for it as swiftly as he could. His name didn't feel like his own. Ill-fitting like a choker made of poisoned barbs. Antonin Dolohov was a thing of before. Past. Gone. Whatever he was now, man or less, it was not him, Antonin. It never would be again. She had taken that. Just as she had taken his left foot. His right eye. His fucking duelling arm. She'd stolen that first. Snickered as she did so.
Let's see if you're really so much different than me. I bleed red. What colour do you think you bleed?
The man who used to be Antonin remembered that. She took her time. Skinned it from shoulder to nail-bed. Used just enough fire to stem the bleeding, but not enough to dull the pain or kill the nerves. She knew her anatomy, if nothing else.
It's no fun if you don't scream. You don't want me to have a bad time now, do you, Dolohov? Do you!?
She'd began shedding the muscle next. From finger to elbow, nothing but a rubble of cracked, yellowed bone left. He couldn't move it anymore. Couldn't so much as twiddle a thumb. He'd begged then. Prayed like a child. Snot nosed and trembling. He'd do anything, he said. Give anything. Please, please, please…
How about I have those pretty brown eyes, then? Yes?
Yes! Yes! Take them! Please! Just stop!
She was kind enough to only take one.
It was supposed to be easy. Wilhelmina Potter was just a girl. Fifteen. A mudblood taken in by blood traitors. Or, if rumour was to be believed, the result of a dalliance between a Black and some muggle chit, what with her black hair and silver gaze. Perhaps even Sirius's brood. He did so like sullying himself. Yet, that was all that was. Hearsay. You only needed to take one peek at the girl in person to see how shaky the ground that gossip rose on was.
Come on Dolohov. We're friends now, aren't we? I dare say I've seen more of you than anyone else ever has or will. So, be a good boy and tell me where Tom is. Tell me and all this will stop. No more knives. No more cutting. No more pain. That would be nice, wouldn't it?
He's… in Lestrange manor… Lestrange manor… Please… No… Please… You said you would stop! Please! Stop! You said! You said!
Yes, well, I'm a fucking liar. Now, you know the rules. Hold still.
She didn't have black hair, not in the typical sense, just as you didn't have a black sky, not really. It was dark. Starless. Black in only name for there was no other word for the pigment, or the complete lack of hue. And her eyes… Two strange, pale moons, nearly white, too pale, too large, to ever thought to be silver. No colour. Just absence.
We're going to play a special game today, Dolohov! We're going to see how fast you can run. If you make it back to Tom, you're free. If not… Well, I'm going to be angry. You don't want to make me angry, do you?
No! No! I won't! I promise I won't!
And although she had the aristocratic features the Blacks did, all the refinement was gone, supplanted with a sort of feral splendour. From her left ear hung a single earring, garnet, cut like a drop of blood. Stating she was a Black was like saying a shark and a seabream were the same. Both had fins. Both had gills. Both swam in the sea. Only one would tear you limb from limb.
Remember the game? You go to Tom, I chase. On the count of three, run. One. Two…
Three.
When he and Thorfinn Rowle cornered her in that horrid little mudblood café after crashing that ghastly Weasley wedding, he thought his luck had finally flipped. Here was his chance to deliver the one thing his Lord wanted most, an insipid, tiny, fifteen-year-old girl, and there was no one in his way. No Weasley. No mudblood. No fucking werewolf.
Peak-a-boo, I see you!
She'd been separated by the wedding raid. Alone. Weak. He thought, back then, before he slunk out from behind the cashier, he might even get some pleasure off her young body before handing her over. You know, for all his hard work. Just like old times with the mudbloods. He enjoyed how they thrashed and cried and begged. Now he was the one who writhed and wept and pleaded.
A forest. Hogwarts in the distance. Memory of the safety of it as a boy. Should run to Tom. Wilhelmina said so. Run to Tom. Freedom. Yet, can't fight the remembrance of security. Veered towards it. Run for it. A cave. Run. Run. Run. Keep running. Don't stop. Get to Hogwarts. Get safe.
He'd raised his wand. Hex on the tip of his tongue, her back to his face… And he was promptly hit with a stunner. She was a faster draw than him, spotted him in the reflection of the shop window. Thorfinn had crashed right next to him. She had stood over him then, looked him in the eye, smiled that keen, dimpled smile, and it was then, only then, he realized his mistake. A shark in a human suit.
Through the cave. Winding. Long. Run. Stumble. Fall. Get back up. Out. Something different. Something wrong. Castle not quite Hogwarts any longer. No. Trick. Wilhelmina's trick. She loved her tricks. Still Hogwarts. Has to be. Still safety. Run for it! Run for it!
He did not know fear until she had put her wand back into the bun of her long, dark hair after locking the place down, pulling free a small, glistening knife from her boot. Such a muggle thing. A knife. As a pureblood, you learn to fear magic. Hexes. Curses. Spells. A knife? Too muggle. What was a knife compared to a wand? Nothing.
Everything in Wilhelmina's hands.
He knew that now. He knew that as well as he knew what Thorfinn looked like missing the bottom half of his jaw, tongue lolling and flopping like a floundered trout on his pale neck. He'd died too soon. Mina was furious. She learned from it quickly. Used it against the man who used to be Antonin. She knew how to keep them alive… If this could be counted as living.
Hot breath wheezing in frigid air. The frenzied, lumbering strides of lopsided footing. The fetid stench of burnt copper, scorched flesh and pine hanging heavy. The woods were tapering now. The terrain nothing but a dashing cline of snow and rock, patches of dead river rush grass like tiny, skeletal fingers reaching up from the depths of the cold earth. An immense frozen river glistening, weaving, snaking. On the horizon stood a single menacing structure. Antonin darted for it. Hogwarts. Safety.
She won in the end. She always did. Pain conquered time, obliterated it like glass on concrete, until thought and moments were merely jagged slivers and shards too agonizing to touch. Maybe this was a trick. An illusion. Mina in his mind once more, tearing it apart, ripping and stomping and smashing. She was fond of doing that when she lulled with the knife. Invade your mind, take your memories, distort them and paint them red. By the end, you never knew what was real or what wasn't. In the end, you lost everything. Or maybe Antonin was remembering Hogwarts wrong. Perhaps it had always looked just like this. It didn't matter as he got to the portcullis of the great gate, slammed into the cold metal, pounded with his one good arm.
"Let me in! Let me in!"
Iron churned. Gate opened. Antonin fell to his knees through the entry. Scrabbled in the mud and muck like a worm. A hand on his back. Lifting. He blindly clutched for the person, swollen black and blue fingers wrapping in leather and fur, tugging, jerking. Warmth. Sweet, sweet warmth.
"Locke, what is the delay? If we are to make it to the Weeping Water by midday we must ride now."
Antonin stilled. Soft voice. Lyrical. Contrarily dominating. The pitch was wrong, too deep, but Antonin knew that voice. It was all he had heard for time untold. The chest he was clasping vibrated underneath his numb, frost-bitten hand.
"It seems to be a man, my Lord. Or, should I say, what remains of a man."
The person shirked him off. He fell once more. Crashed to his knees like a puppet with its strings cut. He huddled. He rocked. His good eye stared down, at the floor, at the dirt and sludge, and that shrivelled heap of cracked bone, shredded muscle and burnt flesh rested limply at his side.
"Father, look at his arm…"
Different voice. Harsher. Accented. He should look up. He should see. He knew this, but couldn't. Too many voices. Voices he knows. Different shades but same root. He'd broken the rules. He didn't play the game. He ran, but not to Tom and now-
"Ramsay."
The first voice again. Look up. Look up. Look up. Another new voice joined the fray.
"I had no hand in this."
And he did. He looked up. He saw. Three men, walking closer from a cluster of chestnut horses. Prowling. The oldest was of average size, cloaked in thick black fur, pale and beardless, dark hair held back by leather throng so its long tail dangled down his spine, eyes like two strange moons. The man next to him was younger, same dark hair brushing broad shoulder, curly, adorned in red and pink riding skins, though taller, he was as lithe and nimble as, what could only be, his father.
Then Antonin spotted the boy at their back lurking in the shadows, the owner of the last voice.
Fifteen. Sixteen, perhaps, but Antonin knew he was fifteen. He was dressed crudely. Ragged in pelts and hides, a tattered belt holding a vulgar dagger, as if he had only just been dragged in from the wild or a farm. Lankier than the previous two, his height was tallied with a great scope of sinew and muscle that promised to be broad and strong in later years. A warrior's build, they often called it. You could always tell the heavy hitters from a young age. Antonin had been one, once upon a time before Wilhelmina.
His face was paler than his fathers and brothers, leeched and sharp sloping, and Antonin knew what that skin would look like with his own blood sprayed over it. He'd seen that skin with his blood painting it. He knew those eyes, only a shade darker than the ones that had gleamed so merrily as the knife was twisted and slashed. He knew that plush mouth, how the corners pulled, left slightly higher, in a keen grin when his scream broke free from his convulsing throat. He knew how those thin long fingers could find the spaces between things that should never be divided. He knew that dark, long hair, though the boys was straight as slick ice. He was beautiful, in a feral way.
Antonin knew all this because he saw Wilhelmina right there.
The boy cocked his head at him.
The red garnet earring from his right ear twinkled in the grey light of dawn.
A sound, rough and hoarse and ugly shattered through him, through the chilly air. He was laughing. Laughing loudly. Laughing uncontrollably. Laughing wildly. He didn't recognize it as his own, as he didn't understand the wrecked ruin of his body, as he didn't acknowledge his name any longer. She'd taken his voice too. Nothing was his own anymore.
"I'm sorry! I'll play! You hear that, Mina! I'll play! I swear!"
Whose P.O.V do you want to see next?
A.N: This one went a tad over the word count limit, but I felt like it helped set the tone of the chapter, so I hope no one is too bothered by it. I just wanted to quickly say I am accepting prompts for this fic; be it a single word, a poem, a song, even a colour, anything at all. I'm literally making this up as I go along lol, and any help in the inspiration department would be greatly appreciated. I also want to make a quick note here that I know Mina seems like a outright rabid dog currently, but we have only so far seen from people who she's personally affected very, very negatively. There will be a more, I won't say nice side lol, but a more... human side to her later on. Not every chapter is going to be about torture lmao, even if my inner horror fan is stomping their feet at the mere possibility of anything else. All that said and out the way, I really hope you enjoyed reading this chapter, it was so much fun to write!
THANK YOU to the follows and favourites, and the wonderful reviews! Each notification really does make me smile.