Title/Link: Where the lost find themselves
Team: Tutshill Tornados
Position: Beater 2
Extension Used: Yes (⅓)
Reserve: No
Prompts: (theme) forgiveness; (plot point) a character descending into madness
WC: 1275
A/N and Triggers: Dehumanisation, mentions of war, ptsd, magical exclusions and othering and childharm. This mentions social justice topics such as healthcare, politics and the role of classism, please read with caution should any of the above trigger you.
Betas: Bea, Ash and Charlotte
Lavender takes the first steps to bridge the gap that becoming a werewolf has made in her life. Her body is no longer her own, governed by the cycles of the moon. It takes a year, but she can feel herself losing grip on what it means to be a Witch. Afterall, according to everyone else, she is more animal than anything else. For the first time in Lavender's life, she opens textbooks and reads with a voracious appetite what other people call her affliction. Lycanthrothy, after all, has a long history and tradition of being a weapon in biological warfare dating all the way back to the Crusades. It is just as ancient as the act of war itself.
Lavender hates what the full moon now does to her. She has no community anymore, and she desperately misses being in a crowd amongst her peers. She misses being held and loved. She misses finding a home in people, and it is because of this that Lavender goes hunting to find him. All her research carefully curated and colour-coded leads back to him.
She is not sure where to start at first. Her owls come back to her with her letters still attached. Lavender tries other means too. She's so desperate that she aimlessly sends her werewolf patronus running to places she cannot follow.
She finally receives a letter that demands she leaves everything behind. If she wants a home, she can no longer be the master of her own destiny. The loneliness is too much for Lavender to bear. She craves people, something other than the disgust that seems to follow her after her diagnosis.
Lavender begins to pack in earnest and writes back that she will forsake everything—a part of her whispers that she is being stupid, callously so.
Lavender does not know what she expects when she meets him.
He comes to meet her, and the wards around the enclosure drop just for a minute to allow Lavender in. He is a stocky man, the kind of man she associates with physical labour. Underneath his nails is a layer of dirt, Lavender has always paid attention to people's nails, her own nails carefully manicured and painted in various cool tones. He smells like the ground after the rain. She knows that with him she can find a home where she is not hated. He is nothing like the man she wants to hate, and that somehow makes her despise him even more.
She feels more like an animal than anything else. Her teeth now jut out in fangs. She would die of hunger if she didn't eat the red meat that previously revolted her. Lavender is no longer human. And as she stands with the werewolf who created her, she cannot help but appreciate her most animalistic of traits.
It is then she notices how his shoulders soften as the wards build back up. It is almost like building a wall, brick by painful brick. He looks exhausted by the time he is done, and already Lavender's mind is spinning for some kind of solution.
"I am Lavender," she says, jutting her hand out and watching as his hand swallows her whole in the process.
Fenrir Greyback grins at her, his yellowed teeth stained with what Lavender assumes is blood. She does not shiver. She is a Gryffindor. She will not show weakness.
Lavender has read the statistics, but seeing it in person is almost awe-inspiring. Her first month is spent with her wand clutched to her side. It is an affirmation of whatever part of her humanity is left. He argues with her on that. How she uselessly clutches her wand and spends too much time writing letter after letter that never makes it anywhere useful. Lavender has been taught to protest injustice, but there is a fury clawing inside of her, one that is too large for even words to begin to describe.
"Why do you let them treat us like that?"
"Why did you infect me?"
"You do know that a ward tied to the moon cycles helps no one when it comes to our protection?"
Lavender asks questions, but before The Bite, she was a child of The Vision, and now without it, she can no longer rely on her tarot cards, crystal balls and a cup of tea to ask about the future. She has always been a little too much for most, but as a werewolf she feels almost too much for herself.
She has to ask people, read the newspapers and him. She has to learn how to see the trends in her own oppression, and as proactively as possible Lavender has to fight back. Her history is tied to Fenrir's people now, and his people have become hers. There is something biblically beautiful about it all, especially when she learns that the nightmares she faces are not unique to her, and allowing the wolf to do what it wants on the full moon makes it much easier to get along the rest of the month with her body.
In werewolf legislation, there is only one party. The Wixen. It angers Lavender to no end that she is relegated to having a non-opinion about her life. She thought that by living with Fenrir, she would find peace. Lavender does—honestly, she does. While she finds peace in her scars and the disfigurement of her face, she finds anger too.
Lavender comes to Fenrir angry at the world, but she stays with him and turns downright furious. Furious enough to consider biting children rather than attend Wizengamont sessions, where Wixen who are given seats of privilege discuss lives they will never have to lead. Lavender thought her generation would be better about it, that they would be more understanding. However, she comes to find, with the taste of betrayal tinged with copper and iron as she physically bites her tongue, that her peers carry the biases that their ancestors did. They do not fight to make wolfsbane more accessible, Lavender's own generous war hero compensation is never enough to cover the doses she needs. Lavender still has to drag Hermione to get a place for a magical werewolf child at Hogwarts, and each time her heart breaks at the utter humiliation the child has to go through as she angrily demands them the education she once so easily received.
Every day becomes a fight, and Lavender realises that she is just as jaded as Fenrir. The whispers in Knockturn Alley are that she just might be a bit more ruthless than her reluctant mentor. Fenrir made her this, this animal with claws and teeth and far more power than she ever gave herself.
For that, and only that reason, she forgives him.
But he is also instrumental in her learning that there is never any fairness in the Wixen world. That no matter how she wants to fight it, the world only seems to listen to her and her people when she is desperate, wild and feral in their eyes.
She learns to advocate peacefully too. However, her distaste for violence only grows in appetite as she learns to knows what is best. Lavender has forgiven, no one can be a werewolf surviving longer than a year if they do not have wells of forgiveness to pull from. However, she learns when to make her choices from a place of almost clinical madness, with far less grip on her sanity.
After all, the war made her a weapon long after it was over. It gave her a side, and she could not turn her back against it.