Chapter Three:
Dead Things
I
In the Iliad when Patroclus appears to Achilles in a dream there is a very touching section where he's overjoyed at the sight of an apparition and tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes before he can touch it. Niklaus is reminded of this story as he stands before a tatty yellow blanket in the exhibition. Not because the blanket belongs to a dead-child, as most things in a museum belonged to dead things, or even that child then grew to be a dead-girl (Niklaus has never truly been sentimental about death, why would he, he's immortal), but because there's a peculiar feeling when one is haunted by a memory, a sensation, what could be held but then vanished. A certain drop that's irreversible.
A drop that says you're too late.
The girl isn't here, and yet she's everywhere all at once.
There's her face on the wall in black ink stamped on paper. She's sandwiched by the term undesirable #1 and a bounty of a million Galleons. A pretty price for a pretty head (a pretty head that someone, sometime, had wanted really, truly dead). She scowls back from the paper, as if she knew already what her image would be used for, a hit on her own life, stares back at Niklaus and Elijah, hair a thorny tangled heap upon her shoulders, and through the twisting locks Klaus glimpses the lightning bolt scar playing peek-a-boo.
He almost feels his own burn upon his brow in response.
Her face is on the opposite wall too, and this picture moves behind the frame, a marvel of magic. It was the first thing Klaus saw as he walked into the lobby not half hour ago, the girl with someone behind her, towering over in merry robes and long beard and half-moon glasses, a gnarled hand, an old hand, that tightens over shoulder as the cameras flash in her face. She winces away from the light but the old man holds her fast in place. Parable to horizon, the eyes a green and bright affair, almost impossibly so and somehow, some way, they're as dull as two pebbles on a beach worn away from the sea.
Klaus understands why when he reads the article below. Her godfather, a man called Sirius Black, had just been murdered by a woman called Bellatrix (wielder's were fond of their constellations, weren't they?) and according sources, the girl herself had just been in a battle for her life against a man simply referred to He Who Must Not Be Named.
She's pale in this photo, under eyes are two dark bruises, the mark of not a sleepless night but nights being haunted in dreams. She's covered in cuts, bottom lips almost split to a fair chin, and there's blood running down her nose.
This is the first time Klaus sees his soulmate, and it's marred with these cuts (not transferred over because they would not scar or linger long), with these bruises, with these dull eyes, with this old hand pinning her in place like a prized piglet at a county fair.
The plaques below the exhibits give him all the details he needs.
A war.
A prophecy.
The hopes of a race of people (who'd always been a little horrendous in Klaus's opinion) pinned on a child's lonely death.
Klaus didn't know what he expected, perhaps an orphanage, foster homes, abuse surely, Klaus had his match of scars, had felt that pain, the burning, every slash, the bubbling blood but he had not, once, never suspected this.
"Do you think this is true?"
Elijah invites from his side as the brothers stand shoulder to shoulder before the last poster sitting in an ocean of photographs. There's the girl staring back from a brick wall, taken by surprise by the photographer (someone short by the angle), there's the girl in a uniform sitting on a windowsill next to a ginger boy and a bushy-haired girl, there's the girl in a run-down kitchen next to a black-haired man in a purple waistcoat, thin and handsome once upon a time, the only photo in which she is smiling, another that moves in a blur, a pitch of some sort, and she's harder to find in this one, a speck in the air, a dot flying at incredible speeds after what is called a 'snitch' in the inscription below.
Elijah's voice may be low, a brittle thing that reminded Klaus of kindling, but like that dried wood his temper is waiting to catch fire. A spark is all it needs.
Klaus has plenty of that fire in his own belly, scalding him from inside.
It's not just anger. It's not even indignation, the idea that something that was intrinsically linked to him being treated this way, an extension of himself locked in a damp cupboard (The egg… She'd carved an egg on the door) as he had once been kicked outside the family hut by Mikael and forced to sleep in the rain.
This is more than Klaus's ego, and less than his penchant for revenge. This feeling is something black and cruel that waits in the bottom of his chest, heavyweight in the lungs, the sudden irreversible drop. It tells him only one thing.
Take.
Find the girl and take her. Find the ones who did this and take more. Take until this horror show of a building quakes and crumbles. Until the streets run red and the halls fall silent, and this shattered mirror of a life is glued back together.
The photo's wink and blink back at him.
Heather in the grass, Heather in a hospital bed, Heather in the rain.
Like the flower she's named after, she's grown in ruined places, through concrete and darkness where nothing else could grow.
She has.
She's survived.
It's… Magnificent.
What Klaus sees, what he suddenly knows… Monstrosity or Master? One exhibit asked in an article, detailing the Deathly Hallows and their unification, and Heather's resurrection after her death at the man who had hunted her down for seventeen years. The witch who wrote the article deposits that Heather's return to life was based on the unification of trinkets, a wand and a stone and a cloak-
Imbeciles, really, so close and yet so far from the marvellous truth. They didn't know what they had. The wonder that was sitting beside them in classrooms and bar stools, staring back from these photographs.
Klaus knows, however. Klaus knows and he's smacked with a stop, and fall, and an unexpected buzz that rings in his ears.
It's funny how myths grow, how muddled they become in time, Klaus had used this to his own advantage with his own curse. Godric had once been fascinated by the Deathly Hallows, had come to Klaus for answers (It was how they had met originally), but the wielder had known the truth of it then as did most others. It was symbolism of the races. The cloak a sign for the protectiveness of magic, Witch, the wand an icon for the power of the Werewolf the most hardy of the three, the stone a character for the wily Vampirism that brings those back from the dead.
To truly conquer death, you needed all three.
Rita Skeeter is right and terribly wrong at the same time. Heather's resurrection, and subsequent bloodbath she unleashed, draining Tom Riddle and Death Eaters before shifting into a wolf according to the article, was because she'd united the Deathly Hallows, but not because she'd held baubles in her hands at any given time.
Somehow Heather had the blood in her. Witch. Werewolf. Vampire.
The three in one small, thorny-haired, green-eyed body.
One way or another, she'd activated all three without cancelling out the previous ancestry.
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 stolen it from him). If he could find Heather, she could be the secret to unlocking-
The larger voice within 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.
II
"The wielders have always been a twisted lot, so hellbent on self-supremacy, but I never thought even they would stoop so low."
Which was a distinction, a not so prestigious glory not many fellows earned in Niklaus's life, to surprise him in such a way, to catch him off-guard.
"But a child?"
The brittleness has given way in Elijah's voice replaced with a rasping sort of incredulousness that twists his tongue up harshly. The noble stag can't seem to wrap his mind around what he's seeing exactly, what is in front of them, the idea of child soldiers and prophecies and the end of a war pinned on the shoulders of one.
None of the plaques say this of course, they mention this Albus Dumbledore in over indulgent vernacular, describe in detail his valiant efforts against a man called Tom Riddle (who must also be this one who can't be named contrarily), praise him and his skill and mourn his death every chance they get (while simultaneously celebrating Heather's), but Niklaus is old, Niklaus is smart, and Niklaus can read between the fucking lines.
He sees the path clearly, and he weaves himself through it. He sees the damp beginnings in the closet, the action of a child on a wall next to a crudely drawn egg, seize the broken pieces of a life shattered, and he sees the reflections of a girl staring back from a million places, again in a closet, in a baby blanket, in a crib, in a quill, in a prophecy orb, as she stares back at him in the middle of this lobby, a girl had been waiting for 1000 years for.
Heather.
Klaus has a name now, he has a face too, and her ghost lingering in the shades of her past, but he doesn't have her.
She's not here.
"Given this delightful exhibition of depravity and negligence, I think we can both agree the sooner we find Heather the better, yes brother?"
There's no time for Elijah to reply, facing the poster of the girl with a split lip and a lightning bolt scar, Nik hears the encroachment of voices coming into the hall.
"I can't believe you let her in here."
A woman's voice is pulled taunt, clipped, as the answering man's is almost whiny.
"I didn't let her do anything, 'Mione. No one lets her do anything, she just… does it. She came to visit me at work and saw the atrocity of a statue we have of her outside. By the time I caught up to her it was too late. She saw the sign for the exhibit."
A tap of a heal, the woman's, as the pair journeyed further into the room. They likely didn't know they could be heard from the other side of the atrium, didn't know supernatural ears were present.
More fool them.
"How many death threats did she chuck at Shacklebolt this time?"
"You know Heather-"
The man glibly replies.
Heather.
The man's ears prick, as Elijah beside him stiffens, hooks and catches.
"She doesn't give death threats, more… Subtly implied if he didn't take all this down and return it to where it came from he and the rest of the Wizengamot would meet very unfortunate accidents soon."
The woman chuckles, it's warm and friendly and, Klaus suspects, built on affectionate recollection, and Klaus still doesn't turn for a look yet.
Yet.
"Looks like it worked if we've been sent to box all this up and hand it over to Andromeda."
"Niklaus-"
Elijah whispers in warning, but the Hybrid is already on the move, strutting across the lobby, American accent thick on his tongue and teeth (secrecy is a must. Wand-wielders and Vampires have… Little regard for one another. The last wielder Niklaus had been halfway fond of, which wasn't saying much, had been that Godric fellow centuries past).
"Excuse me, love."
He interjects. The ginger haired man, stocky if a bit short, and the witch more hair than woman startled slightly at his approach. He recognizes them from the photos on the wall, the long nose and the still slightly buckteeth, and Niklaus tries to dampen his smirk.
"Did you say Heather? As in Heather Potter? Is she around right now?"
The boy rolls his pale blue eyes, freckles crinkling over his nose. He must get the wrong idea, sees Niklaus's enthusiasm as something improper (it just might be), and Niklaus lets him run with it because it gets him talking.
"Look mate, she's not up to signing autographs at the moment. She's more likely to bite your head off."
If Niklaus had been mortal, or perhaps even a wizard like this boy, he might not have heard the literally he muttered under his breath. But he did hear it, and he did see the woman irately scowl towards her…
Lover, clearly. Soulmates by the marching scar they had on forearm. Mudblood etched in skin that Niklaus peeks as they both, simultainoulsy, cross their arms over chest. Wielders, Niklaus thinks with a scoff. So determined to slur each other's skins.
"Ronald! I'm sorry-"
She adds in Niklaus direction, easing her shoulders and the bite to her voice.
"She's not here at the moment. If you have a letter I'm sure you can give it to someone outside behind the desk. They'll pass it along."
Niklaus plasters on the softest smile he can on the face he'd borrowed by a wiccan spell, and gestures behind him.
"Me and my brother, Edward, here have an urgent matter to discuss. It's very important that I meet with her. Perhaps-"
His gaze drifts to the man called Ronald, pupil blowing wide.
"You can tell me where she is?"
Ronald's face went lax, washes white, as slack as his voice became flat.
"Heather's on her way to some place called Mystic Falls, Virginia."
The wizard blinks back to himself as the woman at his side cries his name again, clearly confused on why he'd just given that information out to a stranger in a lobby.
"Bloody hell, Ron! What is wrong with-"
"Ah-"
Niklaus cuts in sharply, as keen as his grin becomes.
"Fantastic."
He doesn't say thank you. He merely strolls on passed the now arguing couple, Elijah's steady gate echoing out behind him as they fall out the entrance of the atrium and then the building and into the street.
"Was that really necessary? They seemed to know the girl. She might be annoyed to find out you glamoured her friends."
Niklaus shrugs at his brother, unperturbed.
"You saw what I saw in there. Clearly these miscreants can't be trusted with her safety, and even if we don't know where Heather-"
He tries the name out for the first time, feels it curl in his mouth to bounce off his teeth like a bullet fired from a throat, a pleasant sensation.
A warm one too.
"Is currently, we now know where she will be."
III
The landscape outside Heathers rental car window starts hard, sharp slanted mountains in the distance shrinking to carry as thirsty young shrubs began sprouting from patchy dirt, the earth beginning to green around her. She has the windows down and she can smell the river from a while away, can almost hear the bubbling over waterfall through the music she has whirring through the car radio, over the wind whistling in her ears, old 80s rock being bounced around the cab that reminds her Sirius's laughter.
It has that same shop rap that rainfall on tin does.
Tapping on the steering wheel, punching along with the drums, she kicks her foot on the gas pedal to the sound of Billy Idol serenading underneath an American sun.
Heather reckons the brochure from the airport was right.
Everything is bigger here.
The horizon goes on for miles, the road she drives on even longer, the journey endless. She feels small in this little boxed Toyota, a speck of dust caught on an Oregon trail to either fortune or failure she isn't quite sure yet.
Heather travels like a muggle to savour these moments, minutes where she can pretend, even if it's only for a little bit, that's she's like everyone else, every other girl, a girl on a road trip like a million other's had taken before. Nothing new, nothing spectacular, just… Human.
Brilliantly human.
It hadn't taken her long to figure out where the name Salvatore come from, even less time to get a round-about address. A quick Google search (Merlin bless the muggles and their ingenuity) showed her that 456,413 people were alive in the world with the last name Salvatore, and while, yes, that was a lot, nearly half a bloody million, the locket that had been stashed with the birth certificate had come in handy for whittling it down.
It wasn't a Salvatore emblem as she had first thought on the locket's face.
Clearly designed for a female, by the delicate lace work of the chain and lock, the three black birds on its visage had caused a lot of problems for Heather's research until she noticed they had no feet. A martlet in heraldry is a mythical bird without feet which never roosts from the moment of its drop-birth until its death fall; martlets are proposed to be continuously on the wing. The inability of the martlet to land is said by some commentators to symbolize the constant quest for knowledge, learning, and adventure. The three on the face of the locket were on a field of black and white stripes, and below sat an inscription. Esperance.
Shortly meaning hope or expectation.
Only one crest with martlets and that word was ever recorded attached to a family name.
Lockwood.
Trawling the internet for any interlocked happenstance of two names gave one result. Just one. There was only one branch of Salvatore and one branch of Lockwood in any one space where they could have intermingled, for a birth certificate to be written and a locket to be passed down.
Virginia, America.
The Salvatore's had moved there in the colonizing rush of the 19th century, to a place, according to archives, the family Lockwood was already present.
A town called Mystic Falls.
It sounds rather quant, a young town (young compared to British cities) which was barely over a century old, founded in 1859, a picturesque municipality located in southwestern Virginia. On their own website on a page called Our History, they list the founding families, Fells and Forbes, Gilbert and Lockwood, and there, registered at the end of a list below a sunny picture of a town hall with a welcome sign, Salvatore.
It's almost funny how easily Heather finds it.
Almost.
She doesn't only have one name now but two.
Two and a town.
So that's where Heather drives to now, to a city she can't quite imagine, to a place she's never been before, where there will be no Hogshead, no Diagon Alley, no Weasley burrow or Ministry of Magic. Just long American roads and tall American trees and wide American spaces.
Heather has no idea what she's going to find there beyond muggles.
Some more names preferably, hopefully first names, one that will go with the lasts that she's already got, the mysterious Salvatore and the feetless Lockwood on a scrap of paper and a lockets' face left for the baby abandoned below an elder tree. If she's lucky, really lucky, lucky in a way that Heathers predominately not, she might even find some distant cousins, relatives, perhaps photos in a library book, a signature on a document, a gravestone she can visit.
She was abandoned for a reason after all.
Perhaps they knew what she was from the very beginning, perhaps they simply didn't want a child, perhaps bad things happen just because bad things happen.
and Heather Potter is a bad, bad thing.
She does, nevertheless, need answers, good, bad, or ugly ones. Like a Rubik's cube, she's got to match the orange to the orange and the red to the red and find out why the fuck she is what she is now. Where did the vampirism come from? The werewolf gene? The magic? Lockwood or Salvatore, Salvatore or Lockwood, maybe even both?
It's not only for her own sake, for her own selfish desires to grow old with her friends and settle down like the martlet can't, but for everyone else's sake too.
She's dangerous.
Maybe then when Heather's mortal (and she will be. She'll fix this. She swears it), she should be able to finally write back on her arm, to finally find the person on the other side of her marks. She could tell them how much those paintings meant to her, how dear the poems came, tell him how they got her through the hardest of days, tell him the little things that people don't think are big but are. Like how she likes how he crosses his T's, in a flourishing flick that reminded her of wand movements, the yellow flowers on her wrist and bicep, prints that brighten her day and make her smile, a little bit of sunshine on her skin when all she had was a locked cupboard door.
Perhaps she'll say she's sorry that she never wrote back after those jokes, three years blank, a moment of weakness when she was scared and alone and locked in a dark ward to a cot, unsure of what she was and young hunger, hunger that devoured her from the inside out, whittled her to something tight and bound and riddled with aching thirst-
Heather had written those jokes in a moment of desperation, a moment of weakness where she had, maybe, wanted him to come find her, take her away to a coast, to a house, to a forest, anywhere, everywhere but the hospital ward she'd been taken to after Tom fell, the place with the hunger in the dark, anywhere he was with his T's and his yellow paints-
But she had realised what she had done in the morning.
She'd put him in danger.
Grave danger.
Because she had awoken with blood on her mouth, down her scrubs, between her teeth, the cot was smashed in half and five dead Healers at her feet. Heather didn't remember draining him. That year in the hospital was blurry, indistinct as faces in the fog, but she had.
She had killed people only trying to help her.
It could have been him.
Herself too.
The killing of a soulmate meant the death of a pair, and Heather would off them both if she wasn't careful. She'd bitten through the neck of one Healer so hard his head had come clean off.
That could have been her soulmate.
Heather did that.
She couldn't stand it.
So she stopped writing back even when she wanted to, even when she ached too, even when she had no one to talk to and the days drew on impossibly long, because that would be selfish.
And Heather's trying her very, very best to be anything but.
Asphalt grinds under a heavy tyre and Heather eases the car along the road, lifting a foot from the gas as a sign came into view. It's blue and it's white, and pleasant in the way that small American towns always seem to be.
Nearly sickly so.
Welcome to Mystic Falls it said.
Heather in the car creeps past it, watches it go out the rear-view mirror, sees the graffiti scribbled on the back in red spray paint. Home of the Weird.
Heather does chuckle then as she picks up speed heading into town, the heart, the beginning.
You have no fucking idea, kid.
Just a bit longer she tells herself. Just a bit longer and the hunger will go away. Just a bit longer and she won't be a danger anymore, she'll get her poems and paint back. Just a bit longer-
And her life can start again.
Next Chapter Preview:
"Revelarus Sanguinium."
Her blood on the page moves like a worm inching up, a vine weaving over brick as it finds its branch to perch on, wraps and settles below a name.
Marianna's name.
Her mother.
Marianna Lockwood, her birth mother, who was born in 1887. The one who'd died by twenty-five.
Heather Lockwood (Marianna mustn't have married her father though his surname is on her birth certificate) it read below, born 1912-. There's no death recorded, just a very, very wrong birth year. Or a very, very right birth year.
The year Marianna had died. Heather was born the year her mother lost her life. There's something a little bit hilariously tragic about that.
The locket hangs heavy around Heather's throat. The weight almost threatens to strangle her, bury her, especially as she sees her blood seep on the page once more, disseminating in the ink and the lineage, up and over and forking wide, churning.
A new name.
Two new names right next to her mother's.
A man called Timothée Parker, born 1880; Oregon- Died 1934 Mystic Falls. Another called Damon Salvatore, born 1839; Mystic Falls-
Blank.
Heather's name dangles below all three like Eve's apple.
Now how did a child have three genetic parents? Heather had never taken muggle biology beyond secondary school, but even she knew to get a child it typically involved one man and one woman and one horizontal tango.
But her magic is sound, her blood has no lies, the ties are there to see.
Furthermore, it seems good ol' papa Salvatore was still alive and kicking… Nearly two centuries later.
Another riddle, another colour on the Rubik's cube.
What the fuck am I?
Heather snatches the family tree, pockets it with the photo, shoves her locket back into her shirt safe and sound, slams the book closed and the filing cabinet, and slips out the door anew.
Something real fuck-y is afoot.
A.N: There won't be much/if any Mikaelsons or Soulmark drama for another two/three chapters. But, and it's a big but, Heather's got quite a lot to get done right now, a lot to riddle out, and it adds a flare of mystic and anticipation for when either Elijah or Klaus jump back into the ring lol. In the mean time I hope you can enjoy Heather losing her mind while trying to deal with the absolute supernatural fuck-fest that is Mystic Falls lmao.
Also, I would love to hear your theories (if you have any) on exactly how Heather came to be. I'll give a tiny hint. Timothée Parker is my own creation, and yes, he's from that Parker family we all love to hate, Marianna is an actual Lockwood from TVD so if you've seen the episode you know how she died, and Damon's Damon lmao. So here's the clue: Siphoning is the distinct ability of siphoners to absorb or consume magic from magical objects and other supernatural beings. So come put on a tin-foil hat and let me know you're conspiracies ;).
Just for a heads-up I know some people are excited for Heather to be Damon's daughter, and while I can't say yes or no to this without giving spoilers to this, I will just mention that Heather's a Salvatore in a not so typical way, and her birth has nothing natural about it. I know that seems vague as hell lol, but It's the best I can do without giving away big plot points. I just don't want to disappoint some readers if they're expecting something and get something else instead. She is a Salvatore though, she does have Salvatore genetics, and one of the brother's is her 'father', but it's a bit more complicated than that lmao.
Thank you to all of you who have taken the time out to read this fic. I hope you are enjoying it and are looking forward to the next chapter. If you have a spare moment, don't forget to drop a review, and I will, fingers crossed, see you all again next Monday! Until then, stay beautiful ~AlwaysEatTheRude21