Wolves Without Teeth ── theodore nott ¹ ( UNDER EDITING )

chapter eight

    𝖂innie Bulstrode has one absolute favourite person.

    Being twelve, she supposes her favourite things change each day. Once upon a time, when she first heard about attending Hogwarts, her favourite animal was a snake. Everything in her home had been based upon that one animal. She was raised to be that one animal. To represent it just as well as everyone had before her.

        Winnie Bulstrode never had a problem with that. Not even when her younger sister Millie had come barging into her room one night, crying and screaming at her because 'you're their favourite, it isn't fair!' Winnie didn't understand at the time. She couldn't understand her sister's pain. She could feel it, she could feel the hardened stone that dropped in her stomach, but she didn't understand it. In her mind, her parents loved them; equally, they spent all their money on them and gave them whatever they wanted when asked what could be wrong?

       Her favourite animal changed when she started Hogwarts when her life of green and silver changed to a life of red and gold. Suddenly, Winnie Buldstrode likes lions much more than snakes.

         But unlike her favourite animal, her famous person stayed the same. Her favourite person was a strange man with white hair and cold, bitter eyes. He was a man who liked his whiskey hard and painful, a man who stayed away in his room, hidden from the public in Bulstrode Manor. He was a man who her sister called scary and tasteless, but Winnie thought he was intelligent and amusing. This man was her grandfather, perhaps the only reason she ended up as a lion instead of a snake.

        He was the one who taught her the workings of her heart, how to heal one's emotional pain with a touch, and how to block people's emotions from entering her bloodstream. How to be anything but an empath.

         Winnie Bulstrode was incredibly sneaky; she knew exactly how to sneak out from under her parent's eye and into her grandfather's room. While her parents thought he was a crazy bat and unsafe to be around, years later, Winnie realized that it was only because he was different that they didn't like him.

         Right before she left the comfort of her home to attend Hogwarts, her grandfather had sat her down. A glass of firewhiskey in his hands and — to her great surprise — a smile on his face.

"Winifred, don't do a single thing you don't want to do in your life. You run your own life. You don't have to be a follower, Winifred. You've proven that much by coming here and seeing this old crazy bat. You are exactly who you are supposed to be, no matter what, and there's nothing wrong with that."

        The exact words whispered through her head as she was sorted and the same ones going through her head as she sat in her home again. Her tiny hands were placed on her lap as she wore her Gryffindor sweater, a sharp crimson contrasting everything terrible around her.

        "W-What do you mean he's dead?" Winnie's lip trembles as she stares blurry eyes at her parents. Her mother's chin is high as she stares unmoving at her eldest daughter, her father's lips painted into a scowl. Millie sat beside her, utterly untouched by the news of their grandfather's death.

        "Are you daft? The old crook died," her father spoke, scoffing, and Winnie briefly wondered how he could talk so freely about his father in law's death. "Stop crying, Winifred, don't be a bigger disappointment."

Disappointment.

     "I, I don't understand," her lip trembled as she reached up and wiped at her face, willing herself to stop crying. Her emotions were too big for her mind, for her heart and eyes continued to grieve. Her mind continued to stare at the empty faces of her parents. Not once had they told her they missed her, not once had they said they loved her or were proud of her. Instead, they simply stared at her as if she was a disease. They looked at her like they looked at her grandfather. Broken. Disappointment. Different.