Chapter Two:
A Ticket to Mortality
I
Hermione Granger finds Heather sitting in a booth in a corner of a little bistro on the outskirts of Edinburgh. It was a shabby place with an Americano twist, smudges on the window with a counter of pies under glass domes. The cheap Formica table tops had dents and scratches across their faces, names carved in corners and gum stuck underneath, and the red and white checkered floor made it feel like Hermione was ambling across a chessboard as the bell above the door announced her arrival.
"I heard you were back to cause trouble."
Hermione says in way of greeting with a screw of a smile as she steals the seat opposite the girl, the easy banter of a life-long friendship making it seem like no time had passed since she last saw her dear friend. Heather glances up from her black coffee on the table resting on a curling edged napkin, untouched, and though Hermione knows her friend had likely heard her coming from two streets away, the smile she shoots back is positively devilish.
That was Heather, Hermione thinks. Leather and boots and fine chiselled features. Mercurial and devastating.
"Would you look at that? You've got a little wrinkle by your eye, and is that a grey hair I spot near your temple?"
Heather's still smiling, smiling hard enough to flash all her white teeth with fangs just a shade too sharp, and there's a spark of wonder in her green gaze, a flicker of surprise as she soaks Hermione in from lash to neckline, picking up the changes and shifts a year had given her.
"Yeah, well, I'm getting old."
Hermione tries to joke back only to choke on the words that slip free with a wince, realizing her mistake as the smile on Heather's face falters in its fringes, a tiny, little sway of unsurety that's as ill-fitting on Heather as a halo on a demon is.
Heather hadn't changed a day since they were sixteen, since she resurrected in Hogwarts courtyard, bit Tom Riddle's throat clean out, and then bloody shifted into a wolf, not a Werewolf, not like Remus with his ungainly limbs and bald patches and his bones caught halfway human, but to a wolf, to something-
Something no one had ever seen before.
Something impossible (which, when it came to Heather, everything was entirely possible).
"Did you find something?"
Hermione hopes her friend had. If she did, that meant Heather was finally back to stay, finally back to settle down, finally back to-
Grow old and get her own grey hairs.
Nevertheless, Hermione thinks she knows the answer before she finishes the question as Heather reaches for a little wooden stick from a silver pot on their table, dunking it into her coffee to swirl the liquid around a chipped mug. She wouldn't drink it no matter how many sugar packets she poured in. It was a prop piece if anything. To make her blend in, perhaps to make her feel like everyone else sitting in this bistro, human.
"Nothing of use."
The last letter Hermione had received from her friend was dated two months ago with a return label in the corner coming from Tibet. The one before that was from Greece. Two were sent from Northern China, and three came from the Balkans. Three years of travelling punctuated by postman stamps.
"I've visited shamans and necromancers, monks and occultists, and they tell me the same as the Healers from Saint Mungo's. Whatever I am now, it was not given through bite or infection, curse or magic. It's in-"
Heather peeks up from her coffee then, smile small and sardonic.
"The blood. Which is more than slightly ironic."
And even more still troublesome. Infections could be managed if not out rightly cured, curses could be dismantled-
A born disorder was harder to rid yourself of. Sometimes impossible.
Heather knows that too.
Hermione reaches across the table, lays a hand across Heather's lax one at the side, over the sleeve of Sirius's old leather jacket she's wearing. It rolls up a little, flashing pale skin and petals of a pansy painted bracelet (Heather had long stopped answering back to the marks on her skin, had refused to write anything more than a desperate midnight set of jokes three weeks into her stay with Saint Mungo's after the battle of Hogwarts when she'd been let out of her restraints, afraid if the one on the other end ever did catch up to her she might drain them dry.).
"We'll fix this. Any luck tracking down your birth parents?"
At the mention Heather pulls her arm free of Hermione's grasp, slinking limbs under table, turning head to look outside the smudged window of their corner booth.
"Nothing on that front either. The most I know is what Remus told me once. I was found abandoned under an Elder tree a couple of months old when James discovered me on Auror patrols and he and Lily took me in. Sirius-… He knew even less. You know-"
Heather chuckles as she watches muggles and mortals stroll outside the busy street. Hermione idly wonders what Heather sees out there exactly. The humdrum of a nine-to-five? Normalcy? Ages and stages she will never reach?
Food?
"Sometimes I think our life is one, big proverbial coin toss, and somehow I can't make heads or tails of it. Wasn't it supposed to get easier after the war?"
Hermione hid her wince in a grin, waving down a waitress to order some tea and cream cake for lunch.
"Yeah… Yeah it was."
What Hermione doesn't say was that it had… For everyone apart from Heather. They'd all gotten jobs, found their soulmates through mishap and mischief, settled down in houses and routines, Hermione worked in the Ministry and Ron was advancing his Auror career, and Heather-
Heather couldn't stay in a room longer than half hour with any of them, with anything supernatural, before she wanted to start taking chunks out with her teeth, before the hunger that she'd awoken with when they were sixteen grew too large and too strong and-
And bad, bad things happened.
No potion suppressed it. No charm could keep the fangs at bay. After killing Tom, Heather had been hospital bound for a whole year as they tried to figure out what had happened, what she was, strapped to a cot for three whole weeks towards the end where she grew starved, poked and prodded and-
Nothing.
Whatever Heather was, wolf (sometimes), witch (mostly) or bloody vampire (terribly), either one and all should cancel out the others, you can't be all three, and yet-
Yet here Heather was, and there Heather would go soon, drifting from place to place to try and figure out what went wrong, and she'd come back to visit for a day, come to see how much she'd missed, how much they'd changed and she had stayed the same (Hermione would say she's a little masochistic), and once the hunger picked up pace, off she'd go over, to places Hermione couldn't follow.
But, again, that would be rubbing salt into the wound, wouldn't it? Instead Hermione crosses her arms and smiles on, and tries to pretend how little it was disconcerting to see Heather still exactly the same as she always had been.
"Now tell me about those Buddhist monks you stayed with. Could they truly astral project?"
II
Elijah could smell the meat grilling with onions, the hot oil from a deep fryer that hadn't been changed in over a year, the astringent tang of vinegary coleslaw over burnt coffee and the bleach cleaner of a freshly washed floor.
"And you are sure she had this scar?"
The waitress across the counter, perched beside a deflating banoffee pie, nodded as Elijah points to his own forehead, underneath the flop of fringe to the bolt of a blemish.
"Oh, aye!"
She chirps with a thick Edinburgh accent, fiddling with the straps of her apron.
"I remember because the lass sat over there-"
She gestures to a corner booth with a tilt of her chin.
"And she tipped me a bloody hundred pound, which of course I thought was odd. She'd only ordered coffee, and she hadn't even touched it."
The waitress, with a lacklustre tilt, shrugs.
"But I cannae complain. Mum always told me not to turn my nose up at free money."
"And was she alone?"
"No. She sat with a friend for about twenty minutes but they split soon after. Saw them part ways outside. One went left, the other went right. Are you two…"
The waitress's watery eyes flickered up for a moment, catching on the scar she now knew hid underneath Elijah's fringe even when the hair had fallen back into place. It was impolite and positively crude (even for a mortal who were known to be very crude very often) to outright ask someone if they were soulmates, and yet, clearly by the blush lingering high on her cheeks, curiosity had gotten the better of the short, brown bobbed woman in her mid-twenties.
"Yes."
Elijah replies with a soft smile, catching the blush and pulling on, clearly, the romantic notions this woman had swimming through her head. Let the mortal daydream what she wished, conjured tales of love affairs and clandestine desire, as long as she gave him what he wanted.
Information.
"So you see why it's important that I find her, yes? Anything you can tell me I will greatly appreciate."
Across the counter the woman almost bounced on her heels.
"Oh, how romantic!-"
But her smile sluggishly dried-up on her face, coiling sour at the corners like paper dipped into a flame.
"But I really can't say anymore. We didn't speak much, and she didn't stay long. But…"
"But?"
Elijah prompts. The woman leaned over the counter, voice dropping elastic and low-slung.
"She seemed… Sad. Very sad. You see people like that here sometimes. The ones who don't seem to fit into the crowd. Don't know what it was, but… She seemed lost. Lost and alone even with her friend there."
"And what did she look like?"
The waitress slinked back down onto her two feet, away as they slipped into safer conversation.
"Curly black hair. She had it cut off at the shoulders. Short, pale, pretty thing. She wore a large leather jacket… Seemed to be a mans and-… Oh! The greenest eyes you will ever see! Dylan, our fry cook, he got a good look at her from the kitchen and he said they were obviously contacts, but I was up close and I swear they were real. Greener than the highlands in spring!"
Black hair. Green eyes. Pale. Short of stature.
It wasn't a lot, but it was more than either Elijah or Niklaus had that morning. Skulking a hand into the pocket of his slacks, Elijah pulled free his wallet and slapped two fifty-pound bills on the counter.
"For your time."
He says with a smile, heading for the door. The waitress called to his back on last parting shot.
"Oh, and she had a scar or tattoo on her hand! I saw it as she took the cup of coffee!"
Elijah stalls, his own hands creaking in their leather gloves as fingers flexed at side.
"It was writing. Something about I Mustn't… Something. I couldn't see the last words."
The waitress had not seen Elijah's hands, not outside his gloves, she couldn't possibly know… Which meant-
"She went left, if you wanted to know!"
When Elijah steps into the narrow street in Edinburgh, opening the umbrella he had at hand to stave of the incessant drizzle of rain coming from the bloated clouds above, he pulls free his cell from his breast pocket and takes a left down the busy avenue. The line rings thrice before a voice barks out from the other side.
"Glasgow is a bust. I've found nothing. No sign, no trace, not so much as a shoe. She's awfully good at hiding."
"I think I have something in Edinburgh."
"Oh?"
"A diner waitress recognized the scar on my forehead."
"So did the witches from Inverness, the ones who ran the black magic shop. They were only after your money."
"Yes, and you took their heads-"
Elijah sighed, turning the corner, eyeing the hotels he stumbled across. Was this where the trail led?
"But the fact remains that the waitress here said she noticed another scar. One on the back of a hand. It began with I Mustn't. I have gloves on, Niklaus."
A beat of silence, a crackle on the line-
"I'm coming."
The line went dead with a click and no goodbye (pointless he posits if Niklaus was going to be there by nightfall), and Elijah pocketed the cell anew as he eyed the hotels before him, five in total. He supposes it doesn't matter which one he started with, the Gardens Hotel & Spa or the Point Resort, he'd end up searching each one anyway.
Elijah side-steps a puddle off the pavement and headed for the first door.
III
Heather stands in the atrium of the Ministry and recoils at the sight that greets her, shirking deeper into Sirius's jacket as if the leather could shield her. Ron Weasley watches as she eyes the space they'd cleared out a year ago, cleared out and filled in.
"I can't adequately state how much I fucking hate… this."
Ron winces as, from the corner of his eye, he spots Heather's nose curl in disgust as if she smelled something foul. Which she couldn't, of course, not with the strong sense dampening spell laced over her, the only reason she could get in the Ministry, be so close around so many witches and wizards, without wanting to take a… nibble from a passer-by.
"Me and Hermione tried our best to appeal the Wizengamot to take it down, mate, but they were having none of it. They said it's for-"
Ron holds up two fingers on each hand, flexing the digits to furl and unfurl.
"Prosperity."
He scoffs lightly.
"Plus, they said soon little witches and wizards are going to be born and running a muck around the place, people who don't know what happened, and they want them to understand the war, learn from our mistakes. Plus the exhibit brings in cash they needed to help rebuild."
Heather shoves her hands into her pockets, shuffling, head cranked back to stare up at the face that stared down on them.
"And they thought the best way to do that was… what? Erect a thirty-foot statue of me?"
The statue wasn't thirty-foot… it was twenty-six. Where once a statue of subjugation of muggleborns stood crushed under the rock and might of wizarding power, now stood Heather Potter, dressed in robes (though she had never, outside her Hogwarts' school uniform's cloak, spent a minute of her life dressed in wizarding robes), wand in hand, smiling benevolently down upon the workers buzzing around the atrium like bees.
Bashfully, Ron scratches at the back of his neck.
"They originally wanted it in gold, but Hermione managed to talk them down to limestone."
Ron helplessly offers. It does little to comfort, or temper, Heathers' reaction.
"Limestone?"
She denounces, and swiftly motions to the large poster in a gilt frame perched on the pillar beside the sign that read The Wizarding War Memorial: Heather Potter's Exhibit.
"And the blown-up print of my Undesirable No. 1 poster? Who's brain child was that?"
Heather's on the move, heading through the opening towards the exhibit, and Ron is fast on her heels, fast to tell her perhaps she doesn't want to go in there, but she's already pushing through, pushing in, pushing towards glass casings and stands and warded showcases.
A life sectioned off between wards and velvet ropes.
"Fucking hell! Is that a plank from my understairs' cupboard door?!"
It is, but Ron doesn't need to say that as Heather halts beside the first case, a wooden plank under thick glass and charm with Heather's Room : ) wonkily carved into the wood next to what appeared to be an attempt at shaping an egg. A childish effort to brighten the nightmare of her home life. Next to it is a little plaque detailing what they knew of the cupboard, the layout, the damp, how long Heather was often locked inside.
Heather balks and whirls, marches, incredulous and angry and caught in a spiders web of exploitation and misuse.
"My first year Gryffindor scarf? The fang I used to kill the Basilisk? Buckbeak's feather and the broken time-turner… no… Fucking no. One of my personal letters from Sirius? Who… How?"
Heather doesn't give Ron time to answer, she's reeling on the Prophecy orb under a spotlight plinth, another poster blown-up, the news article from the Daily Prophet where she stands bruised and broken, wincing at the flashing light of reporters next to Albus Dumbledore, moments after she had lost Sirius and nearly been fully possessed. She's hit with a case full of broken Horcruxes, a photo of herself placed next to a tag that read Seventh, struck by a sock she'd given to Dobby, and a scale from the Ukrainian Ironbelly she'd freed from Gringotts, and Tom Riddle's yearbook photo next to her own which made them look eerily similar.
The worst is the Rita Skeeter article labelled Monstrosity or Master?
"You were travelling and-"
"Travelling, yes! Not gone forever! Is that my third-year quidditch uniform?! How did they get any of this? Who the hell-"
"Technically your… Well, you're dead mate."
It's the word that pushes the pause button, and Ron hurries to rectify himself.
"Not dead-dead, yeah, but you are dead. Or you were… I don't know how it works but Vold-"
Ron still has trouble using that name, and stumbles with it half on his tongue.
"Riddle, he used the Killing Curse on you. No one comes back from that, and the logbooks in the Ministry have charms set up to record deaths. Yours was recorded. You came back but… legally, by Wizarding law, you're dead. As having no direct next of kin, your stuff was appropriated by the Ministry."
Heather's nostrils flared, the fist at her hip clenched, and there was a taste of gunpowder in the air, oak moss and gunpowder and something sweet and dark like Norwegian pine, a crackle of magic, and Ron rushes to deactivate the bomb about to blow.
"Andromeda's trying to fix it. She's petitioned the Wizengamot for the stuff on grounds that your distantly related to Teddy through Sirius being your Godfather. But you know how the Wizengamot works. It's going to be a year before she even gets a hearing. We didn't think you'd be back before-… Well."
Something catches Heather's gaze, something in a case against the farthest wall of the large lobby, and she marches for it, Ron slinking at her back.
"What the fuck is this?"
It's the newer exhibits, installed a week ago, still missing plaques detailing their importance, and Ron shrugs, cringing at what he knew he must say.
"Stuff from… Godric's Hollow."
Heather's head snaps around so fast Ron can't see the movement, it's inhuman her speed, only knows she's suddenly staring at him with weighty eyes, green and on fire, and Ron held his hands up in surrender.
"Not me! I told them not to! I said to leave the place alone but they didn't listen!"
Heather glances back to the ramshackle case, to the broken bar of a crib (her crib), the folded and soft-yellow baby blanket (the last Lily had wrapped her in that fateful night), a piece of carpet from the stairs (a rusty mark in the corner, perhaps James' blood), and-
Heather leans over the case, ignoring the rope, fingers skimming glass as she tapped.
"What's this then?"
Ron, sensing the confusion seeping out the anger (a small blessing, when Heather blew, she blew), and peers over too. He doesn't see much. Just a piece of parchment (paper the muggles call it), and a locket with a strange S embossed on the silver face.
The paper doesn't say much. Something called a birth certificate, must be muggle he supposes, with a cursive sway of Salvatore under infant name, and a checked box next to female.
Crack.
Ron startles as Heather punches right through the glass, as a siren of the ward placed on the case starts baring in the air, and she's unmindful of it, heedless of Ron's jump and quick dart of eyes to the entrance, as the glass tinkles to the floor and she swoops into the box and scoops up the parchment and locket in tight, white-knuckled fists.
"This is it-"
She says softly, quietly, and-
And beams at Ron, waving the parchment under his nose.
"This is fucking it! What I've been looking for!"
Heather turns just as Aurors break through the entrance, stalling as they see the woman from the statue in the flesh marching towards them.
"Try and fucking stop me, I dare you."
She throws at them-
Not one lifts their wand. One poor sod even stumbles away, back against the wall to let Heather through.
"What is it?!"
Ron calls back as he dashes to catch-up. Heather's laughter is bright and light, prickly and sticky too. Pine-needles covered in sap.
"My ticket to mortality!"
Instead of taking a left outside the exhibit, towards the exit of the Ministry of Magic, Heather takes a sharp right just as the sirens behind them are silenced.
An Auror choosing not to pick a fight with the Girl-Who-Lived. Clever man, Westerway.
"Where are you going now?"
"First-"
Heather grins from over her shoulder, shaking the glass from the sleeve of her jacket as she pockets the paper and locket. The cuts on her hand from smashing the glass have already healed, glossed over, nothing but pale skin (rumours said Heather had taken to hunting down rogue Death Eater's in the following years after the war for… sustenance. Ron didn't know how true that was, but she had been clearly eating something).
"I'm going to rip Shacklebolt a new one for letting this happen, and then I'm going to find out what or who Salvatore is."
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She's a hybrid-
A Tribrid.
How, Klaus does not yet know, but a little voice in the back of his mind, the one who had spent a thousand years trying to figure out the loopholes of his own misbegotten curse, tells him this is it. This could possibly be the key to his own affliction, the gnawing, gaping cavity he feels inside all-day-every-day-every-deplorable-century, where once his werewolf blood had sung (though he had not known it was that at the time before the wiccans had stole it from him). If he could find Heather, she could be the secret to unlocking-
The larger voice inside wants to laugh.
These foolish people had not known what they had in their grasp, in their nest.
Klaus knows.
Oh, he knows.
And more than that, he feels it.
The more he sees, the more he knows, the more he feels and the more he gets a sense of the girl. She exists as an island, without anyone, and while she has friends, Klaus sees them smiling back from the photographs himself, even amongst them there's a sense of she being on the outside. Just as he had been as a mortal boy, a mortal boy who had been crushed under the fist of Mikael, something in these exhibits is pulling at him, reaching in and burrowing, calling to him, asking for a kind of compassion he could use himself.
They're different sides to the same deadly coin.
That same something inside him, the something that pulls, dark and uncharted, warms with possessive delight.
She's mine.
A.N: I like the idea that while Niklaus is fighting to undo the curse placed upon him to get back to what he was born as, to become more immortal, Heather's doing the exact opposite, trying to undo what she was born with to become what she never was, mortal. Here Klaus wants power and Heather wants to grow old with those she loves. Klaus thinks this will protect himself, and therefore any soulmate, and Heather thinks being what she is now will put her own soulmate in danger (If mortal she'll outlive them, if supernatural she might eat them, hence why she stopped writing back after her stay in the hospital when she figured out she wasn't quite human and possibly never had been, and realized the risk she posed to any future soulmate). I think it adds a nice symmetry to the pair of them... And Elijah just wants a cool glass of St-Emilion wine and a fireside to read his books by lmao.
I know some readers get pissed off at my previews but I like writing them, they make it seem more like a TV show promo lmao (Next week on Garland of Bones, que theme music lol), and they're clearly labelled so you can skip them if you wish.
A reader asked what exact time frame this is set in. For Harry Potter, after all the books (barring the epilogue), and for The Vampire Diaries, around the end-ish of Season One/beginning of season two. So before Niklaus or any Mikaelsons officially show up in canon(and clearly his arrival is altered in this fic now). I hope that clears it up a little, and I hope it becomes more clear as we move with Heather into Mystic Falls and you see what the Scooby gang is up to as she tries to track down 'Salvatore'.
P.S you can't convince me that the Wizarding world that exploited an orphaned child to win a war wouldn't then go on to exploit that now adult for some extra cash flow. Historical inquisition ethics and management morality doesn't really go hand in hand with the Ministry of Magic lol. They want that sweet, sweet moolah, and Heather's now infamous name would reel that in lol.
Thank you to everyone who has followed, favourited and reviewed. I hope you guys liked this chapter, and are looking forward to the next. If you have a spare moment, please drop a few words over in the review box. They keep the muses fed. Until next time, stay beautiful! ~AlwaysEatTheRude21