WHOOT! One hundred chapters of Short Story Drabbles! Thank you for your continued support! XD
She couldn't believe this. Her best friends, people who had been with her through countless adventures and life threatening danger...were abandoning her?! Now, when she needed their help the most?!
"Why?!"
"Let's face it, you don't have a plan. You never did," sneered Ron.
"Well...perhaps a small break would do us some good," offered Hermione.
"Let me get this straight. You want to abandon the hunt and take a break...with Riddle and his goons out there looking for you?" she said pinching the bridge of her nose.
This was ridiculous.
The tinkling of a chain calmed her down a little. No matter what, her mother's bracelet always seemed to make her feel better. It was priceless to her because it was the one thing she had of her mother. Even Petunia never tried to remove it, which spoke volumes of how much she treasured it.
"Mate, we would follow you to the ends of magic. But let's face it, there's no point running around trying to find these things when we don't have a bloody idea where the things are!" said Ron.
"And now I know something is wrong. You are never reasonable and the word logic doesn't exist in a pure blood's vocabulary. What's really going on?" she demanded.
Hermione and Ron squirmed under her emerald gaze. And after everything that had happened, all the pain she had gone through, she had enough of the lying. And since she lost her wand, she was going to channel it into the one thing she always had with her.
The bracelet.
Hermione and Ron were pinned to a tree just inside the wards.
"Start talking or I swear to Loki I'll start choking. And considering I'm sick of being lied to, I might not stop even if you do start telling me the truth!" she snarled.
This...this felt right. Channeling magic into the bracelet felt far more natural than her wand.
It didn't take long before Hermione broke first. Out of them all, she was the weakest link.
She always was.
She spoke of the marriage contract, the fact they had been paid to befriend her first year in order to keep her isolated, the way they had kept her from learning about her Potter heritage...everything.
By the time Hermione finished, her rage was so great that the only reason she didn't kill them both was because she had no desire for her first kills to be her former best friends.
"Get out of my sight. I don't ever want to see your faces ever again," she snarled.
The two scrambled as they apparated away, probably to the Burrow. She gathered what little she would actually need and went straight back to Godric's Hallow. She had seen a bar there and she highly doubted the Death Eaters would think to check that place after their near disaster which resulted in the loss of her wand last week.
She barely remembered the bar. The only thing she did recall was someone helping her to a car and to an apartment where she slept off most of the alcohol, and that it had been a woman who got her out of there.
"Oh god...my aching head..." she said.
"Oh good, you're awake. Mind telling me why you were trying to kill yourself via alcohol poisoning?" asked the woman who brought her back.
She squinted. She could see a mass of red but that was it. The woman helpfully handed her glasses over, but that didn't help. A vial of hangover potion did.
A few minutes later and she could see clearly without the room spinning.
And what she saw had her jaw dropping. This woman was almost identical to her, only her eyes were the wrong color and her hair was shorter. She almost looked like the photos of her mother Lily.
"Who are you?"
"I have a better question. Why have you been wandering around Europe so often the past four months? And why were those people chasing you?" she asked.
"We were looking for something, and those men work for the person trying to take over Europe. He wants us dead at any costs, and I just happen to be on his shit list," she said bluntly, "So who are you and why do you look so much like my mother?"
The woman walked up to her and took the arm that held the bracelet. She uncovered the crest that was etched into the metal, and then pulled back her own sleeve, revealing a similar bracelet, this one in white gold as opposed to her silver one.
"Because I'm your real aunt. Petunia was your mother's distant cousin. I'm sorry I couldn't take you in when they died, but I had my own problems and having an infant would have made things worse," said the woman honestly.
Her eyes doubled at the sight of the bracelet. Her mouth grew dry in shock that she really did have a family still out there. It took a few moment for her alcohol addled brain to catch up to this new information before she remembered something important.
"You're the one who kept Dumbledore from being called my magical guardian and locked all the vaults down. The reason I had to do a blood test because all the keys were rendered void," she said in recollection.
Hagrid had attempted to access the vault with an old key that Dumbledore had given him, but the goblins had been firm. She had to go into a private room to get the vaults unsealed and the keys rebound to the bloodline. It was why she did all her shopping herself, despite the fact Mrs. Weasley tried to do it for her fifth year.
It was also the only reason she had any photos or portraits of her parents. Her mother, Lily, had told her via portrait that she had a living aunt who not only knew magic but had always kept an eye on her as a child. However her job kept her aunt Tasha from coming too close.
She looked at the calm woman and said with a hesitant voice "Are you Aunt Tasha?"
"Natasha, but Lily always called me that. If I had known how much danger you were in, I would have collected you early before you turned seventeen."
"What sort of job is so dangerous that..."
"I'm an assassin. People call me the Black Widow. Normally I would have left you be and kept my distance like I did Lily, but I've been keeping tabs on you. They're subtly training you to be a loyal weapon, and there's no way in hell I'm letting them turn my only family into a weapon like I was," said Natasha firmly.
She tried to sit up, but her stomach nearly heaved. Natasha sat her back down.
"Get some rest. Once you're ready, we'll start severing your ties to England. You're old enough to handle yourself and a pair of 'sisters' traveling around is less conspicuous than a woman traveling with an infant."
She nodded and laid back down. She was exhausted from having to be alert all the time. She was out like a light before Natasha had left the room.
Natasha watched her niece and her calm demeanor was shot to hell the second the girl was actually out cold. She was pissed.
She had kept her distance to avoid having her sister and niece from being turned into weapons like she had! She had fought tooth and nail to escape that nightmare, to be free. And here her niece was right in the middle of the same thing!
Not on her watch. She would be damned if she would let the English turn her only family into a weapon incapable of knowing what love and loyalty felt like.
Natasha sighed angrily. She had thought Lily would be safe with their many times distant relatives, but apparently safety was a lie. She had known the English were utterly backwards, but her assumptions that taking them so far out of Russia would keep her sister alive was coming back to haunt her.
At least Lily had died quickly and in protection of her daughter rather than by suicide, torture or gods-forbid, because of being overused as a breeding ground for these backwards idiots. She moved a stray piece of hair away from her niece's face.
The girl could pass as her sister or daughter. The only thing wrong was the eyes, but a pair of color contacts would solve her eyesight problem and the color issue.
Natasha made a list and prepared to end the English's attempts to use and betray her niece. She had failed Lily. She would not fail her sister's only daughter.
A small part of her, the part that whispered of her hellish training under the Red Room, said that the girl would be very useful as a body double if the need came to it. That she had the right instincts and the girl just needed the training.
When she woke up, Natasha outlined the plan.
Contrary to popular belief, there were branches of Gringotts. It was just that the main English branch was in Diagon and people grew used to going there first.
Natasha was going to take her to the Irish one to transfer all her assets to the 'Evans' vault before they changed the name to Lily's real last name, Romanov. Once that was done, the Potter line would end permanently until she had children and they chose to take it back up.
However there was a small glitch. Because she used the bracelet as her focus instead of the wand (something Natasha approved of because she never took it off and the only one who could was the one it was protecting), the magic it had contained dispelled, believing that it's job was done. If she wanted it back, she would have to sacrifice something to keep it going.
She knew the perfect thing.
"I'm sick of being the Girl-Who-Lived. When we're done, I want my past to be gone."
"What will you call yourself?"
"Natalia," she said with conviction. If she was going to make a clean break, then she would need a new name to go by, and what better way to honor her new found aunt than by taking part of her name?
Natasha blinked, surprised.
"Natalia it is. Until then you'll have to use the current name until we finish erasing your previous identity."
The newly named Natalia nodded.
"Come on Lia, let's get this over with. The sooner we clean out the trash, the sooner I can get to training you," said Natasha.
Natasha looked at the house with cold eyes. Inside was the man who killed her sister, orphaned her niece and had tried to kill her only remaining family countless times. It was partially because of him she had to remove her niece from England. He would not live to see morning.
It was pathetically easy, killing off every soul in that mansion. The English were far too arrogant in their superiority.
Hitting them with the Kiss and then blowing up the entire building (after robbing them blind first) made ending the war simple.
The prophecy, as a consequence was filled not by a single epic battle, but the 'power he knew not'...which was family. Dumbledore only got it half right.
If Voldemort hadn't targeted Natalia, he would have never been targeted by her overprotective aunt. If he had left Lily alive, Natasha would never have considered killing him in such a brutal fashion.
In short, what ended the war was not magic that only Natalia had, but the love of her real family coming to insure she lived after.
"Aunt Tasha? What's this one mean?" asked Natalia, before she sniffed the air, "And why do you smell of napalm and gunpowder?"
Natasha looked at the books she left Natalia. She was teaching her to speak Russian, since the best way to keep her safe was to make people believe she was the Black Widow.
"That one means 'crypt'," said Natasha.
In order to speed up the process of learning a new language and writing, Natasha had given Natalia her memories pertaining to languages. Latin was easier, considering she had been using it to cast spells up to this point, but the Russian was killing her.
She blamed the writing personally.
"So where were you?" asked Natalia.
"Killing Riddle and robbing the Malfoy mansion. I released their prisoners, but I killed everyone else."
Natalia paused, put a bookmark where she was, and then looked at Natasha.
"Riddle is dead. His main minions are gone. I'm...free?" she asked. It was almost a question.
"The 'power the dark lord knows not' was muggle technology and the ruthlessness of an assassin."
"Or the love of family," said Natalia. She was still in shock that the biggest threat to her life and freedom was dead.
"We better leave before they try to find you. It will take a few days for the truth to come out that they're all dead," said Natasha.
Natalia started packing. She picked up on the routine fast and this was the third time they had to leave before they were found.
"Well if I don't have to deal with Riddle anymore then that means we don't have to stay in England anymore. Though I will leave a letter to Andromeda about Teddy."
Theodore 'Teddy' Lupin was Remus' son. After Remus was killed in a raid, he was left in the care of his grandmother, Andromeda Tonk ne Black. However Natalia knew the English. Now that the war was over there was every chance Teddy would be hunted simply because he was a werewolf's son.
Natasha only agreed to it so long as Natalia didn't slack in her training.
"So where do you want to go?"
"Best place in the world to train as a spy without anyone actually noticing. Black Island. It's off this island chain were spy wannabes and James Bond enthusiasts would likely hang out and try to recreate their favorite movies."
Natasha snorted before she laughed.
Living on a tropical island that was close to a place where James Bond enthusiasts would congregate? That was the perfect place to train her niece. No one would take them seriously if she let any of the training slip!