Quidditch league Season 11 Round 4
Team: Tutshill Tornados
Position: Keeper
Warning: mention of toxic relationship, verbal and physical abuse leading to death (you know Helena's story is not happy), some kind of dissociation so don't read on if you are sensitive to any of these themes.
AN: This was HARD to write, and I'm still not satisfied but I had to wrap something up in the end.
During her numerous years as Hogwarts resident ghost, the Grey Lady had witnessed countless love stories and almost as many break-ups. She often saw crying Ravenclaws run to the tower with tears in their eyes, and always found herself in distress when witnessing it.
No one ever sought comfort in her wise wards for such matters... They surely thought that a ghost like her would have nothing to say in the matters of the Heart. How were they mistaken! None had thought to ask her if she had been once fallen in love, if she had once been in a relationship, if she had once been loved. If they had asked her, she would have reluctantly, answered that she had once had a love life. She had once been in a sort of relationship. She knew what heartbreak was.
Okay, maybe she wasn't the best advisor. But she knew what all the traps were and what mistakes to avoid, she had her transparent body as a proof.
Helena tried to warm her fingers by getting closer to the fire. The Albanian winter was rigorous, and she started to regret the large walls of Hogwarts which protected her from the cold back in Scotland. This was just a fleeting thought which she cast away quickly as she remembered why she had left.
There were two main reasons as to why she had left, even though she would later say that there only was one.
The first and most obvious one was the strong argument with her mother which had led to her leaving with Rowena Ravenclaw's diadem in her bag. She was tired of always being second best and extremely jealous of her mother's intelligence which she found ill-achieved as it came in some way from her diadem. One day, after an extremely heated argument, she decided to steal it from her and to try and retrieve the same capacities as her mother with the diadem's help. She fled to Albania, fearing her mother's wrath and at the same time confident in the diadem's ability to keep her safe by enlightening her decisions.
She was however very deceived to find that, while it did enhance her intellectual capacities, it did not help her make better decisions and instead made her life even more complicated. Each time she had to make a choice, all the alternatives presented themselves to her in extreme detail and with carefully studied consequences, side-effects, and even precisions on how the magic performed in this scenario worked (a footnote of some kind). While it was remarkably interesting it did not help deciding wisely as it made the task of taking a decision excruciatingly long and, she would admit it, boring. In the end, she just gave up the idea of using the diadem to help her make decisions. It may have explained while she found herself in such a predicament: alone, in Albania, frightened and so cold her teeth had started chattering.
The second reason why she had left was not something she even wanted to think about. Each time her mind tried to wander back to this idea, she set it back on track with force, trying to remind herself why she had made such choices.
She had been the one to break things up with the Baron, and she did not regret it in the slightest. The Baron… She had tried not to think about him but visibly it was a lost cause. At this point, she might as well give up the fight and think about him.
They had met at Hogwarts where Helena resided since her earliest years, privilege of being the daughter of one of the founders. He had been a student there, a few years older than her. When time had come for him to leave school, he had decided to offer his services to her mother despite having been sorted in Slytherin.
As he spent a lot of time in Ravenclaw's part of the castle, he had started to get closer to Helena. As time went on, he started to court her. She was not especially attracted to him at first, but it felt good to have someone interested in her instead of her mother for once. She had started to respond to his advances, and, in return, he became bolder and bolder. While she was happy to comply at first, a smile at dinner, a kiss on the cheek, then on the lips, she soon understood that it was not what she wanted.
She had enjoyed the first months of their little romance as she felt charmed by this man who went out of his way to court her. She felt important and she was impressed by all the thoughts he put into the way he tried to entertain her, reading poems, playing lute, and discussing magical theory. However, as she started to respond to his affection, he started to uncover his true face. The real Baron was violent, he often got into fights with guards and was always proud to say how many he had knocked out the night before and how. When asked what the men had done to deserve such treatment, he would shrug and answer evasively something about how they had looked at him strangely or just stood there as if he had wanted to punch someone. At first, she had tried to ignore this part of him, but as he got comfortable around her, she could feel the violence running in his veins in the way he would sometimes forcefully take her hand to lead her somewhere or berate her for so much as looking at another man. In such situations, his eyes would start shooting daggers and a shiver would run down her spine. It was a shiver of fear, she recognised it.
One day, after many hours spent pondering on what to do, she decided that she could never live with such a man. She did not love him and, if anything, she had started to feel afraid around him. She had also seen the way he had been approaching the subject of the wedding and she was terrified of him asking Rowena her daughter's hand. She would never survive a marriage with him. Therefore, she decided to tell him that whatever was going on between them was finished and that he needed to leave her alone.
She did so in a public space, afraid what he might do if they were alone. Surprisingly, he did not attempt anything. He only shot daggers at her before turning his back to her. As she returned to the tower, Helena could feel her heart beating in her ribcage. She was terrified, utterly terrified and she didn't exactly know of what.
Three days later, she had a huge row with her mother and left for Albania.
Helena turned once again her thoughts away from the Baron to think about the present. That morning, she had finally decided to get rid of the diadem, hiding it in front of a tree in the forest. She needed to decide what to do next and for the moment she had no idea. She was tempted to return to Scotland but at the same time, she had started to hate her mother a little more each second, she wore the diadem, angered at the idea that her mother kept such an important artefact for herself and at how wrongly conceived it was at the same time.
Suddenly, a loud bang was heard from behind her. She turned her head towards where it came from and found herself face to face with the person she had tried to escape: the Baron.
His eyes seemed crazy, and he was smiling maniacally. He was breathing heavily and was the perfect portrayal of the crazy assassin that might murder you in your sleep. He was babbling incoherently about how her mother was ill and that she needed to see her one last time. Helena did not listen to him, lost in her overwhelming fear, trying desperately to find an escape route. She was trying not to remember what horrors he used to brag about, how he would punch and torture the people who didn't act how he wanted. It didn't work. She remembered exactly that he had told her he would never hit a woman and she tried to find solace in this fact.
A punch to her stomach made her reconsider this thought. The man who swore he would never hurt her had just done that and continued to do so. As he kept on harming her, she wondered if it was her leaving him which prompted this change in him. He seemed even more feral than she had ever seen him and even more vicious. He seemed to have changed for the worst in the space of the few months she had left him.
As strange as it may seem, she felt detached from the scene, as if it weren't her that was being questioned, begged, and hit. Suddenly, this feeling of detachment was not only a feeling but a fact. She saw herself from above, her body being abused, and her life being taken from her.
In an evanescent moment, she understood that she had died, killed by a man who claimed to have loved her and had become mad at the idea of not having her. When the choice was given to her, she could not accept the idea of facing death as she could not bear to meet her mother. Instead, she chose to spend the rest of her eternity as a ghost. Little did she know that the Baron would do the same.
So, yes Helena had experience in the matters of the heart. It was not a pleasant experience, it was quite a disaster you may say, but she knew what happened when one's heart was hurt by love. During numerous years, she had blamed herself for what had happened, thinking that she may have changed things, before one day realising that it was not her fault. The Baron had always been a mean man, their break-up had been a turning point for his violence, but she wasn't guilty in it. From that day on, the Baron, then known as the Bloody Baron, would display the worst humour ever seen, some would way that it was because he was heartbroken, Helena told herself that it was just because he never accepted to have failed to seduce and enrapture her.