Chapter Two:

A Messy Childhood for a Messier Monster


Well it rains and it pours when you're out on your own


Dudley Dursley was never the same after the accident. He spent five months in the hospital, three of which in a medically induced coma, and many years afterwards trapped in a cycle of physio, speech therapy, and self-loathing that would inevitably see the brutish boy become a brutish man trying to drown his imagined inadequacies in the bottom of a bottle.

They couldn't save his leg that had been crushed underneath the tire, as much as they could save his speech from the bursting blow to his head when it thwacked off tarmac, and so Dudley got a new one, a leg that is, a shiny one, one he would forever hate.

Dudley doesn't remember that day, doesn't really remember much of the seven years before, has trouble remembering what he had for dinner the previous evening, long term memory now scattered and strewn to the wind, a thorny thing Dudley has trouble picking up and putting back together again. Poppy, however, got her own room. A real one, with four walls and a window and a ceiling light and no damp in sight. Her Friend preens a little at that, tells her see, see, see, the pop of her name without the p.

The whole affair was brushed under the rug rather quickly, put down as an unhappy accident in someone's clipboard at the hospital. Dudley's laces had been untied. Two children had been playing a game of tag in the street under no adult supervision. The couple had been cruising at a cosy seventy in a thirty zone.

It was a bad spot of luck, a boy falling at the wrong time in the wrong place, or so the police said.

When Dudley did come home to number 4 Privet Drive, he was stitched up and bound together in bandages and plaster and shiny steel staples, and he had this funny stutter he was never able to grow out of.

Poppy learned pretty quickly not to outwardly laugh about that. People gave her a strange look when she did.

Still, things did change subsequently, more than Dudley's staples and steel leg and sieve-like mind. There was no more belts, and no more bruises, and no more cupboards for Poppy. Vernon and Petunia gave her Dudley's second room, and made her breakfast some mornings, packed her bag for school and tremblingly handed her money for lunch, and Poppy relishes in it even as her Friend croons see, see, see.

Sometimes they looked at her strangely, especially Petunia, but most people looked strange to Poppy. It wasn't until she was older, much older, when she realized what it was. A tension around the eye, a cautious glance when they thought she wasn't looking back, a tightness to the jaw bellying teeth clamped and ground to bone dust.

Fear.

They were scared of her.

The empty-eyed smiles and the carefully cooked meals and the big spacious room…

A game of mommy's and pappies with no baby, just a prowling tiger with a taste for man-flesh.

See, see, see!

Poppy does see, and she doesn't want to.


If it looks like I'm laughing I'm really just asking to leave this alone


Poppy found out she was adopted when she was eleven years old. A special letter for a special girl comes tumbling out the letterbox one morning close to her birthday, in thick yellow parchment and a glossy ring-shaped dip of red wax.

Her Friend didn't like that, they didn't like that one bit, and they spent the rest of the day hissing at her, being mean in the only way her Friend could be, digging their claws into the soft parts of her memories and scratching, trying to implant bad stuff over the good.

What little good Poppy had.

It wasn't addressed to Poppy Potter, but someone else, another Poppy, a different Poppy, and so she ignored it. Her Friend liked that better. They told her not to look. They told her bad things came with that name, like poison and pollution and petrified panic on the end of a roaring chainsaw. They told her don't see, see, see.

Until Petunia said that was her when another letter came, and another, and another in a frustrated explosion. This different name, this different girl, left her with that letter and didn't look back, scurrying for the kitchen and away from the girl with, apparently, two names. Then the big man comes, with shaggy hair and a wild, tangled beard on her birthday, and goes

"Ah, aye. Sorry 'bout that. Hogwarts' records uses blood magic, don't it. Ol' pureblood nonsense, if ye ask me, to keep track of the Muggleborns-... I'm sure Professor Dumbledore will sort it out for ye when ye get to Hogwarts, lass."

Dumbledore does sort it out, eventually. Yet, Poppy can't un-see that name. Suddenly it's-

There.

Poppy never tells anyone about it. Not one word or one utter or one sigh. She instead carries it with her intangibly, strapped across her back like a travelling tombstone. The tombstone of a girl who's parents died in a car accident only to be rescued from the wreckage by a Lily and James Potter who had been on scene, close by, visiting Lily's uncle who was a policeman in America, his wife Lily's aunt. Then Lily and James went and died in a car crash and-

And that was a lie, wasn't it?

They hadn't died in a car crash.

They had been murdered-

Well, all good lies were based in some form of truth. What did it matter if one set or two sets of parents were slain in a car? A lot, apparently.

A whole fuckin' lot.

Still, Poppy doesn't stop to consider the alternative, that neither set had died how she thought they had, no wreckage or rubble of a torn asunder engine in a headlong collision.

That doesn't become apparent until she's in her twenties, in America, and big-brother Brian hits her over the head with it like an ice-pick straight to the neo-cortex.


You can watch me corrode like a beast in repose


Poppy didn't, and doesn't, make friends easily. She never had and she thought she never would be able to. Still, Ronald Weasley comes plunking along in copper curls and hand-me-downs to plop down beside her on the Hogwarts express, and she's…

Thankful?

Resentful?

Something full about it.

He talks a lot, Ron. It made things… Simple. Poppy was awkward back in those days, unsure of social necessities and rules and procedures, what mask to wear in what setting so her Friend would stop whistling and whittling in her ear. Ron doesn't seem to mind that. He didn't seem to mind that at all. When Poppy trundled into her long, swelling silences, unsure of what to say or what to do or what she should be doing or saying, Ron filled it all in with his own innate chatter, none the wiser and none the quicker.

Poppy hardly listens, but that was besides the point.

And when she does slip, and Poppy slipped a lot in her teenage years, when her Friend becomes too loud and tricky and tells her to throw Malfoy down the grand steps of the entrance hall as she had threw Dudley under that car, and she takes that step towards him to do just that, picturing the blond at the bottom, twirled and twisted and tangled up in shattered limbs, always limbs, always broken, sliced off limbs in a red sticky pile, Ron cuts in with a quip, and suddenly people are laughing and the tension is bursting and-

And no one looks too close at Poppy when Ron was around, and Poppy made sure to always keep him close.

It was… Good.

Great.

She was thankful for Ron, really. Thankful for Hermione to, when their two becomes a three, the bushy-haired girl's head so far into her textbooks she forgets to check the antlered beast sitting beside her, but-

But Poppy hates them too.

A little.

A lot.

It was a heavy-heady mix.

See, see, see.

Poppy does see. She see's that no one sees her. Not really, not truly, not ever. They see what they want to see. They see a poor orphan girl twice over, in tatty trainers and tangled curls, and they coo and cluck and chuckle at what they think is a baby-bird with a broken wing.

Her Friend finds that hilarious. It was for the best, they tell her late in the night, in her dreams, those hazy things of copper colours and chainsaws melodies.

This is how you do it. People could be disguises, they could be screens to duck behind, they could be skins to wear and perform the human tango.

Over the next month Poppy Potter watches, she watches closely, every smile and joke and mouthful Ron gives, and she learns, she adapts, she mimics, and she joins the Quidditch team, and everybody, apart from Slytherin but that only solidifies her place in Gryffindor, loves her.

See, see, see.

No, they don't, and Poppy despises them for it, loves them for it, all of it, and somehow, feels nothing about it at all.


So why don't you blow me a kiss before she goes


It was a right of passage for First Years seemingly. Little children in their cloaks and striped scarfs crowding into Honeydukes on their first foray into Hogsmeade, coin already in hand and teeth itching for something sweet. They swarm the place in droves, and buy until there's only a few colourful candies left. The shopkeeper shakes her head ruefully, but keeps on smiling with her own wallet so bloated.

Ron met Poppy outside, prize in hand, grinning with his gilt freckles. He jabbed the lollipop in her direction.

"Here! You have to suck it until its gone or it don't count."

Hermione, her own sweet in hand, dubiously staring at the plastic wrappings, scoffed.

"Is it even safe for human consumption? They're made for Vampires, Ronald. How do we know-"

"Oh, relax will you, 'Mione."

Ron rolls his eyes.

"Fred and George did it, and so did everyone else. It's a game. A challenge. No one's managed to do it before puking yet… Or are you not Witch enough?"

The soft blow to Hermione's ego was just hard enough to see her scowl and rip off her own lollipop wrapper. Poppy watches as the dark red ball meets tongue-

And is immediately spat out again with a scrunched-up face and Ron's breathless laughter.

Children play these sorts of games all the time. A double-dog dare straight into destruction.

Poppy's never seen it done with lollipops before.

"And what are these, exactly?"

Ron lights up, igniting, and it's almost magical to Poppy, how easy emotions come to Ron and Hermione, how nice it must be to feel and be at the same time and not have to mask one or the other or fake both.

"Blood Pops, made with the real stuff! Gross, right?"

Poppy's fingers tighten on the lollipop stick so hard she nearly bends the woven paper, and there was a rapid drop in her stomach, in her heartbeat, in her mind, a roiling whine of the ground beneath her as she sank into it, the soft-jagged hum of a chainsaw-

"Well, are you going to do it or not?"

She blinks back to herself, her Friend, her Shadow, tossing in her thoughts, cackling, tutting, ears perked and salivating, and she finds Hermione smiling, Ron's own lollipop on the floor, spat out, discarded in the snow as he ruthlessly scrubbed at his mouth with the back of his hand, and she had missed-

Poppy unwrapped the gift, and popped the lollipop in her mouth. Copper and rust, and something darkly sweet meets her tongue.

The chainsaw quietens, the sense of something sticky and warm lapping at her legs diminishes, and there was only the taste, this copper-rust flavour, and-

There's no longer a lollipop in her mouth but something else, a small wiggling finger, a child's finger, a child's finger covered in blood, a dark, grim place and a groaning moan-

And fingers snatched from her aching mouth and her parched throat.

She's thirsty, Biney-

"So…"

Poppy flickers and flashes, and Poppy rolls the lollipop in her mouth, around her tongue, candy knocking against her teeth with a rattle. It's like she has a new fang-

An old fang she had forgotten about, a fang no one else had, one of those snake teeth the little hatchlings are born with, the ones they use to crack out of their tough shells. Only hers had never dropped off, merely been overlooked, neglected.

"I like it."

Ron startles her with a laugh, a bright peeling belt of it, and he waves his hand at the crowd nearby, shouting.

"Hey, look! Poppy's gone and bloody done it!"

Done what, is what Poppy wants to ask but doesn't. Instead she sucks sharper on the lollipop. Sucks until there's nothing left, no chainsaw ghost or copper-rust or strange child's voice in her ear. She sucks until there's only a rolled-up stick of confectionary paper, and even then, she chews that into a keen point and keeps it stashed in her pocket.

And then she goes and buys another Blood Pop, and starts the routine all over again until her tongue is numb and her lips are stained red and for once there was no other, darker voice corrupting her thoughts gruesomely.


You're comin' home - there's blood on the walls and Charlie and the family made house calls.


Poppy Potter was twelve when she saw the writing on the wall. Figuratively and literally.

She, Ron, and Hermione had been coming back to nest in Gryffindor Tower from Nearly-Headless Nick's deathday party when Poppy had heard the noise. A disembodied voice speaking lowly, rustling, violently.

Kill, kill, kill.

It wasn't her Friend, and it wasn't her own thoughts, and it wasn't even that malformed thing her Shadow had tramped down and shoved into a far corner of her psyche, it was something else, something sleek and slick-

Poppy had run after it because of course she had.

It, whatever it was, this thing only she could hear, one of a growing number apparently, it was long gone by the time the three children came skidding into the long first-floor corridor outside Moaning Myrtles bathroom.

The ground had been flooded was Poppy's first thought. The water deep and dark and reflective, cold and icy in her Mary-jane shoes, the ripples of her reflection staring back from green frozen eyes.

She noticed the cat next, bobbing in the reflection as it swayed above, Mrs Norris strung up on the torch by her tail and lightly, stiffly, nodding in the breeze.

The wall came last.

Over it, written in blood, was a message, upside down and inside out until Poppy tore her gaze from the thick dull waters to the granite across the way.

The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the heir… beware.

Not surprisingly, that was about when the class came around the corner, and Argus Filch too, shrieking and sobbing and snotty at the sight of his dear-dead cat. Someone shouted through the quiet crowd.

"Enemies of the Heir, beware! You'll be next, Mudbloods!"

It was Draco Malfoy, warbling as he pushed to the front of the crowd, cold eyes alive, his usually pale face flushed, grinning at the sight of the hanging, immobile cat.

Poppy had stood staring at the wall.

Malfoy didn't scare her. Not even a bit.

He played the part, and sang the song, but he didn't know the words meant, didn't understand their flavour as if they were written in another language, was only mimicking what his father and his father before him sang.

Malfoy was as dangerous as Poppy was like any other child.

Not at all.

Still, Poppy stared for a long, long while at the writing on the wall. Blood, rusted, printed on stone. She felt as if hands came stretching out of the writing, reaching for her, sticky and warm and wrapping around her thin neck, squeezing, stealing the breath out of her.

There was something funny there that Poppy couldn't understand at twelve. Something funny and tragic and confusing.

Blood.

It was always there. Always following. Always pumping through her life like her story had arteries. Big juicy veins people kept coming along to slit open. She can't escape it. She can never escape it. And it all came crashing down upon her shoulders, upon her bones, at twelve.

Blood.

It doesn't come off easily, blood. Hot water makes it stain, and it crests under fingernails, makes a slither of rust in the bed like a bloody moon in waxing and waning, and it seeps into the white and blooms. Her life was like a hospital sheet after an emergency surgery.

Soiled.

She wonders, idly, if she was the tumour the doctors had tried to remove, one cell overlooked and now regrown in monstrous proportions.

"Come on Poppy, let's get out of here."

Hermione tugged on her sleeve, but Poppy's feet don't move.

Blood.

It was going to drown her one day. Swallow her whole and up and through. Slowly, Poppy turned away from the writing, away from the blood, but it never left her.

It never does.

And, that year, when she's faced with the Diary and the Basilisk and a nearly dead Ginny Weasley in a cold, empty Chamber of Secrets, when she, herself, is dying and has a fang in her hand, poised over the book that had brought the blood back, Poppy does not hesitate.

It felt good to see Tom screech and scream, as the book bubbled with black blood, ink and soulless brutality, not red, finally not red, and-

And she wakes up in the hospital wing, Dumbledore smiling down upon her, table covered in gifts.

She understands then, as does her Friend, her Shadow, the only person to see Poppy for what she was.

The same as it.

Blood was okay when it was the right persons, the bad guys, the Tom Riddles of the world, and what a bastard world it was to be filled with so many of them. Blood was good when violence was an answer, when a child was forced to fight the monsters lurking beneath their bed. Blood was best when it stopped other blood from being spilled.

If Poppy was going to sink in the sticky-hot stuff, she would make sure she wasn't the only one.


Can you hear them in the darkness, helter-skelter, spiral madness


Poppy was thirteen when she realized she might be a danger to others. It sounds odd, peculiar, perhaps even naïve and foolish, but it was true. Doing what she had done to Dudley, what she had done to Diary-Tom, what she wanted to do to a whole lot of people, these urges she has that her Friend keeps sweetly singing in her ear, one might suspect that Poppy would know this by then.

She hadn't.

She knew people tended to get hurt around her, by her own affect or by mere proximity, but she had not put two and two together. Not until she could see Ron fall at the Whomping Willow, watched as he had hooked his foot around a tree root as Poppy and Hermione dodged a blow from a branch, in an effort to stop the black dog from sinking its teeth further into his other leg, to pull him underground, but a horrible crack cut the air like a gunshot, Ron's leg had broken, and a moment later, along with his twisted foot, the boy had vanished from sight.

Poppy smelled the twang of copper in the air, and knew Ron had been bleeding.

Anyone else would have been worried for their friend. Anyone else would have dived down into that pit of a hole beneath the willow to try and save him from the black dog. Anyone else would have-

Poppy wasn't anyone else.

She leaps for the hole, spots a splatter of blood at the lip of it, and she-

She hungers, and her Friend howls, and there's that chainsaw roar in her mind and-

Her blood.

That was her blood.

If Ron really was her friend, as much as Poppy could have friends Ron would surely be it, that meant his blood was her blood and-

She's thirsty, Biney-

Only a little, then-

And that fuckin' dog had gone and snatched it away and-

Her Shadow claws and mews and pops and tears throbbing holes into her head, as deep and dark as the one before her, trying to break out, to break free-

Poppy chases after Ron to the Shrieking Shack with Hermione slow on her heels. She doesn't do it because Ron is her friend, she doesn't do it because it was the right thing to do, Poppy had always had trouble knowing exactly what that was, what good really meant, she does it because-

Because it was hers.

Poppy was a thirsty, messy monster.

And it turned out she didn't like to share.

Maybe… Maybe that was as close as Poppy would ever get to love. This hunger. This starvation. This burning thirst. This fucked up balancing act to keep up of holding people just close enough that they make her look like all the others, a straw doll lost in the porcelain faces, and keeping them far enough away that she wouldn't hurt them herself.

Ron was one of the few she kept closest, and she hates having him stolen out her taloned grip.

Close your eyes, mommy loves you-

Re-re-re-re-re-roooooooooooooar-

A child's hand reaching for her, a plea in the dark, in the red-

Please! Don't leave me too-

So Poppy dived into that hole, threw herself down into the dirt, maybe where she belonged most, and when she found Ron cowering in the corner of the room, she lunges for Sirius Black, punches and kicks and even gets a bite in like she's some sort of wild animal unleashed, all hindbrain, all instinct, and she has to be dragged off by Remus fuckin' Lupin, has to be pinned down and told the truth, no betrayal, not from them, just a rat-

But she has blood on her teeth, on her tongue, and down her throat, and a red-hot anger boiling in her chest right where a heart should be, and the girl who leaves that shack isn't the same who had gone tumbling in.

Poppy's more, so much more, and somehow horribly less.


California sun - but you're still in bed and the California rain is turning red.


Poppy was fourteen the first time she held a dead body close, clung to Cedric Diggory's corpse, refused to let it go, even as she collapses down into the weeds of the maze, in front of a crowd, a throng, a morbid mob of onlookers, and she tried to hold on even after Albus Dumbledore pulled him away from her straining grasp.

Amos Diggory comes spilling out the stands in a blunder and a misstep, pale and ghostly, crying at the lifeless figure now amongst them, lost in the silence of the shocked spectators.

"Not my boy! Not my precious boy!"

Poppy wanted to spit at him, spit and hit and shriek. Her Friend wants worse, wants to lift her wand and take aim, peel back a layer of skin, just the first few, only a little snack, make the red flow-

Who else was it going to be, she would shout back at the grieving father.

Me? You'd like that, wouldn't you? You would all like that-

She doesn't, of course, say anything at all. Instead, Poppy stands and watches a broken father cry over an empty shell, and she sees Cedric, pale and limp and white under the silver moonlight and she thinks-

She thinks he looks beautiful, this way.

Tragically, terribly beautiful.

Not a drop of blood in sight, the Killing Curse was magical that way, and still peacefully, calmly dead.

For once fuckin' quiet and-

Poppy tries to get a grip of herself, she's lucky people think she's in shock, bowled over, crippled, a poor girl who can't outrun the silhouette of Death persistently hunting after her.

They don't see it, the mistake they've made. There is no silhouette. Just her.

Her and Tom Riddle, and the world wasn't dark enough for both of them to stay.


They'll summon you, to wake from the dead as you lie bleeding, murdered in your bed.


Poppy was fifteen when she thinks of that name again, the one from the other Poppy, and it makes her wonder at how blood connects all things.

Mrs Weasley, Poppy, Hermione, Ron, Fred and George had been tasked with cleaning Grimmauld place originally. Kreacher had made it an absolute nightmare to do so, resisting every effort, sneaking off with items he didn't want thrown out, muttering insults under his putrid breath.

Her Friend shouts them right back in her head.

Members of the Order come and go, delivering news and checking in far out of Poppy's hearing range.

That was when Poppy found the room, and Sirius found her staring at the wall. The Black family tapestry he called it, branches of a great oak tree stretching up to the ceiling, spiralling out like unravelled DNA, pictures and names all dotted about like buds about to bloom.

Sirius is down at the bottom, a streak of black the only sign a portrait had once hung there on that very spot. The work of his mother, he laughs. His punishment, to be blasted off the Black tree, for refusing to full under Voldemort's influence and philosophies.

"Sometimes love, we're more than our family. We have to be more."

Poppy glances to Sirius and she thinks… She thinks he might just see.

Not fully, never fully, but maybe that dark little part in him, the one who lured a boy out to meet a turned werewolf out in the open at midnight for a laugh, sees the big black thing inside her with antlers and chainsaws for breath.

Nevertheless, Poppy doesn't know who he speaks about. James and Lily, or the others, the faceless but not quite nameless ones of before the great green flash. Sirius must have seen her struggling, as he reached out and braced a palm on her shoulder, squeezing softly.

"And sometimes we can make our own families. They're always the best. Me and you… We'll make it through this, and then we'll find a little place, better than this one, settle down and you can-… We can… Everything will be good."

Blood, sometimes, doesn't come in liquid form. Sometimes it came in names and family trees and scars, in moments such as these, with a Godfather's hand on his cracked wards shoulder, with a promise of tomorrow on his lips.

And Poppy nearly buys it. For a whole minute she imagines it. Her and Sirius somewhere far away from here, from the war, from the blood. Somewhere where the red could never touch them, never get in their mouths and slip down their throats and take horrendous form in their bellies.

Maybe she would be better than, a real girl and not this wooden toy, Pinocchio without the growing nose, a good girl with good dreams and kind clean hands.

Certainly, as Poppy always half-way knew, it was never meant to be. Sirius died not three months later, slipping through the Veil to the sound of Bellatrix's cackle.

The dream dies with him.

The hope of a better her goes with them too. There was no other path, not for Poppy, other than this.

Blood and death and chunks of herself torn off.


Execution halts your breath, helter-skelter spiral death,


Poppy was sixteen when she uses that spell. It all happened so fast, and then not fast enough.

There had been a loud bang, and the bin behind Poppy had exploded, and she had attempted to use a leg-locker Curse that backfired off the wall behind Malfoy's ear and smashed a cistern beneath Moaning Myrtle, who screamed deafeningly. Water had poured everywhere, and Poppy had slipped, as Malfoy, face contorted in rage, cried-

"Cruci-"

Poppy, however, was faster, and more reckless, and more hungry for blood.

"Sectumsempra!"

It began gradually, a small rivet of blood spurted from Malfoy's face as he staggered backwards, then came a streak across his chest, as though he had been slashed with an invisible knife, and then came the rushes, the abrasions, the splits on his hands and legs and shoulders and face and-

Everywhere, all at once, far and wide.

Malfoy fell backward, collapsing onto the waterlogged floor with a great and heavy splash, his wand falling from his limp right hand.

Poppy-

Poppy didn't panic. There was no whipping sensation, no roaring of a chainsaw in her ear, her Shadow, her Friend, was purring, nothing more, rumbling and humming, delighted and-

It was the first time in her relatively short life that Poppy, upon seeing blood, felt…

Calm.

In control.

Powerful.

I did that.

She thinks proudly, pathetically. Not Ginny under the influence of Tom. Not a car speeding down a road. Not a bludger or a slicing hex-

Me.

It's-

It's-

It's intoxicating.

Giddy and pungent and invigoratingly heavy. Poppy was moving before she knew it, steps wading in the water, right on over to Malfoy's spluttering side, and she stood there, bearing down, glaring as he sobbed-

Good.

It felt good.

So, so, fuckin' good.

Poppy took a deep breath, tasted the copper-rust all over again, and she held it there, in her lungs, in her throat, in her mouth, finally freed, finally fed. It was the deepest she had ever breathed, the freest she had ever been, the best-

Moaning Myrtle let out a thunderous scream.

"Murder! Murder in the Bathroom!"

Snape wasn't far behind the cry, bursting into the room, shoving Poppy roughly aside as he knelt over Malfoy, drew his wand, and traced it over the weeping wounds Poppy's curse had made, muttering an incantation that almost sounded like a song. The flow of blood seemed to ease, and with it Poppy's breathing and heartbeat, Snape wiped the residue from Malfoy's unconscious face, and repeated the spell, the wounds now knitting and-

He glanced backwards, her way, snarling underneath that beak of a nose.

"What in Merlin's name do you think you were doing, you misbegotten-"

Snape realized something, he must have, because he freezes when his dark gaze seeks Poppy's green, and his mouth moves loose and surprised all at once, a glimmer of his eye widening, a momentary slip of control, and he looks-

Snape looks scared.

I did that too.

All me.

"Go."

Snape respires, thorny, prickly, tinged with something like grief or reminiscence or sympathy. Poppy couldn't tell which, but she does turn and leaves but she doesn't run.

She's done running.


But there's nowhere you break out baby


Poppy was seventeen, and she knows Tom is going to use the Killing Curse, it's his thing, his tag, his own little Blood Pop. Poppy's almost grateful for it. She knows that she isn't going to become the thing she hates most, the thing she loves the best, a puddle of blood.

It's just about enough to see her through this… Nearly.

Her Shadow, her Friend, is with her to the very end.

They growl in her head, so loud they sound like a chainsaw pressed against her cheek, mind you, bulking and bucking and headbutting against her for this, at walking to her own death willingly, they tell her to fight and struggle and claw her way to freedom, to mayhem, they're both the same thing to her Friend, but Poppy doesn't.

Maybe it was better this way.

Perhaps it was always going to end like this.

The rest-

The rest had been a joke. A sick, tortured, demented joke.

The best kind, really.

Poppy didn't lift her wand, and she didn't fight back, and Poppy Potter died to Voldemort's bellow of glee and a flash of green. The problem is she does not stay dead. Poppy comes back, and so does her Friend, and it's slobbering, slavering, hungry and voracious and-

And then it was Tom's turn to scream. Bellatrix's too. Dolohov and Lestrange and Greyback and Lucius, and too many other's to count.

They all screamed in the end.

No one knew where she got the knife from, Poppy didn't either, only that she had woken up with it curled coolly in her palm, serrated blade glinting.

It hadn't stayed clean for very long.


There's no where you can run to baby


Poppy Potter was eighteen when she finally left England. She had to go. She couldn't stay-

No one said anything, no one had done anything, no one had wanted or dared to arrest the Saviour of the Wizarding world, but… They all looked at her the same now. The same way Dudley had before she pushed him, the same way Petunia did when she thought Poppy wasn't looking, the same way Snape did in that bloodstained bathroom. Ron and Hermione, peaking cautiously at each other and then at her too, as if seeing a stranger where their friend now sat.

They were scared of her. Scared of what she did that day, the way she kept slashing and cutting and slicing-

Poppy doesn't remember much, but what she does remember, what everyone else remembers, is enough. The mask had slipped and people had gotten a peak, and that was enough for them.

So she packs her bag, and Sirius's bike, and she leaves. Hermione and Ron promise to write, and to visit, and Poppy does the same, but they all know what it is.

Formality.

Poppy didn't know where she was going in the beginning. She spent a whole year drifting across the continent. From Paris to Prague, she visits and she travels and she-

Hungers.

Her Shadow had a taste now, a hint, a little lick and it-

Wanted more.

So Poppy keeps on going and going and going, and along the way, Poppy Potter doesn't exist much at all.

She changes her name somewhere in Istanbul. The Hotel Clerk asks for a reservation, and she says-

It seems fitting to use the other name now, the one she never got to be, the one before Lily and James and the Wizarding war. Poppy doesn't quite know why she does it, steals back that name that was stolen from her so very long ago, but she does. Maybe she really was running from what she had done, what she had tasted fully, finally, running from Poppy Potter back to Poppy M-

Somewhere along the way, a few and sparse few visits to Hermione and Ron married with kids now to draw the years out, Poppy ends up in America. She builds… Something there.

Not a home.

She's never had one of those, but she does build something. A place to call her own.

A hunting ground, her Friend tells her.

She finally signs up for the FBI two years into her citizenship, and they put her on the BAU, and by the time she was twenty-three she was a Criminal Behaviour Analyst. A year later, several names under her belt, and several more under something just a shade more sharper, they put her in charge of hunting down serial killers operating in the southeast of America. She almost weeps with laughter.

Her Friend does.

At twenty-six, she's one of the best Profilers in the country, her record nearly spotless, clean, calm, collected-

Controlled.

No one looked sideways at the killers Poppy couldn't catch. No one was perfect, of course a few would slip the net-

Only they don't slip anything but a noose around their necks, but no one else needed to know that, needed to know they had ended up as-

Poppy was twenty-Seven, nearly twenty-eight, when the call came in.

She was needed in Miami of all places, and isn't that funny and tragic and-

She wonders if she's going to see the same street Lily and James saw on their visit, when they came home with an extra bundle in the backseat of their car.

Poppy doubts she'll have time to walk down memory lane.

The local precinct was having a bit of grief getting their hands on a serial killer they had making waves down on the golden sand beaches. The Captain had just made the fuck-up of the decade, publicly pointing a finger at a suspect who was later discovered to be a victim and was now, according to her file, one hand and one leg down in a hospital, traumatized and clueless on who had done it to him and quickly clamming up under the clumsy scrutiny of the police. Poppy was being sent in to get things under heel and under wraps as soon as possible before a real media shitstorm could hit the Miami Metro Homicide.

Another day, another killer, another game of tic-tac-toe-got-your-nose.

Poppy leaves for Miami that night, and touches down on runway come dawn.


Bloodbath in paradise


Today's the day.

Dexter Morgan loved mornings like this one. Early enough that the air was warm but not quite so midday humid, and he wavers in the parking lot underneath the blue sky, tilts his chin just so, lets the sunrays heat his skin, graze golden kisses against his cheek. Even Rudy Cooper, Debs new boyfriend, couldn't distil this quiet calm he felt, despite the strange man's almost incessant need to try and integrate himself into the Morgan household with offers of cook-outs and Saturday nights in for family friendly fun.

Dexter doesn't doubt that Rudy Cooper, prosthetist extraordinaire, has a very different notion to Dexter's as what constituted as family friendly fun.

Which includes less knives and less cellophane, he suspects.

Customary pink box of donuts in hand, Dexter took a lingering breath before he righted himself and made his way into the police station, all smiles, all charm, all mask and sugary treats, right until he gets to his own floor, where-

Where he would ordinarily make a round trip, dropping off his faux contributions of the friendly neighbourhood psychopath, tribute to not being seen to closely, everybody had a tax to pay, only that day, that sunshine bright morning, raised voices were coming from Lieutenant Maria Laguerta's office, mingled with the baritone of Captain Thomas Matthews, and Dexter, despondently darling Dexter, comes to an abrupt halt by Angel Batista's desk.

"What's going on?"

For a moment, one tick of time that set his teeth on edge and his heart lodging in his suddenly parched throat, Dexter thinks this was it, the Ice Truck Killer had finally struck again while Dexter had been sweetly sleeping, none the wiser to the the gift that would greet him once he awoke, this was it, after so long, after so much patience, this was him, this was-

Angel broke his gaze from watching the Lieutenants door and glanced his way, nodding to the paper box in Dexter's hands.

Dexter opened the box silently, allowing Angel to pluck up a syrupy treat in exchange for his information.

"News came down from Quantico last night. They're sending over a Behaviour Analyst to help with the Ice Truck Killer case."

Not him then.

Not another body.

Not another work of art to ponder and play with.

Dexter feels… Flattened by the revelation. As if someone had come along and taken the air out of his tires, and then his lungs and brain.

"Oh… Are the BAU moving in on the case?"

That possibility stings. Itches at something in his hindbrain, pulls tight on his domineering inclinations, and Dexter's hands, somewhat, marginally, tighten around the box in his grip.

Angel shook his head.

"They say they aren't but they've gone and sent in the big guns. One of their top sniffer's. They don't typically do that unless they're looking for a poach. I've heard she's-"

"A right cunt?"

The voice from behind was new, female, British accent marked with something thicker and Celtic so the hard consonants rolled instead of bounced between teeth. Dexter swivels on his heel, just as Angel, too, span. He wasn't used to having people sneak up on him-

He wasn't used to people being able to sneak up on him.

He pauses when he catches sight of the woman behind them, kicked back against an empty desk for who knew how long.

She was-

Younger than he expects. Late twenties, perhaps. Short. Tiny, really. Not dressed in the tweed suit and lanyard typical of her profession, she was in a tatty old rock band t-shirt, jeans and big kicker boots with black, almost shockingly curly hair, and green eyes just ten shades too intense as if she was a TV and someone had reached inside that delicate head and turned her brightness up to max.

She looks at him and grins, toothy smile blotted with dimples.

Dexter blinks, and on the back of his eyelids he sees-

Something.

A flash. A flare. A half-formed sensation of weight in his arms in the dark red, green eyes scrunching and a wail of a child crying-

Dexter blinks and the image is gone, and the hand that had been unconsciously lifting to reach for the woman falls back to his hip, dipping in his pocket to say safely away and safely in control, phantom forgotten already, too slippery and too prickly to hold for too long.

The woman's hand slunk out from her own side, lazily coming to flick at her forehead in a mock two-fingered salute.

"Poppy Moser, aforementioned big gun, at your service."


Woo or Boo?


A.N: This is set somewhere between the Dexter season 1 episodes Father Knows Best and Seeing Red. That said, you don't need to have watched Dexter to get along with this fic, as this is told, mostly, from Poppy's point of view, and therefore, as readers, you'll be along for the ride and being introduced to characters/situations with her, and so, hopefully, if I've done it right lol, it won't be too confusing and accessible to most.

I am as sick as a dog, feeling a bit down, and finishing this chapter up was some fun that took my mind off the Niagara Falls currently coming out my nose, it's the start of the dreaded flu season, so I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I liked writing it. I don't normally update so fast, not only does it tend to annoy readers but it gains less engagement, yet seen as I am bed bound and bored out of my little mind lol, I thought I would just post it instead of sitting on it.

P.S: The lyrics in this chapter are from Sharpest of Lives by My Chemical Romance, and Bloodbath in Paradise by Ozzy Osbourne.

Thank you to everyone who followed, favourited and, of course, reviewed. I hope you all enjoyed this, at least a little bit, next chapter sees the ball really begin to roll, and if you have a spare moment don't forget to drop a review! I love hearing from you all! And I will hopefully see you guys again with a fresh new update.