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

chapter thirty five

Screams of excitement filled the early august air, where a family made upon redheads whizzed above the grounds on brooms. Each playing their own version of quidditch, throwing a quaffle towards each goal set with cheers of happiness. Words twisted around the Burrow, filled with softhearted insults from each sibling.

In a tree, furthest from the ongoing game and out of the hit zone, sat a girl. Her back pressed into the rough bark of the tree, a white summer dress decorated with blue flowers hugged her shoulders and body. As one leg hung over the side of the branch she perched upon, the other rested out in front of her. She watched, unfazed by the screams or noise around her, as mist slowly curled its hands upwards. Drifting in from the slow setting sun.

Mist was everywhere these days, she knew this only because of the newspaper she would read during the early hours. It was the first real sign of mayhem in the United States, the second was the crashing of bridges and muggles disappearing.

It was all a slow ticking flame to a bomb that was awaiting its time to explode.

The girl had a book rested upon her lap, leather bound and dog ear tagged, ( Remus Lupin would surely be the one to kill her later, ) though she paid little mind to the written words. Instead, her mind drifted onwards, as it tended to usually do lately.

She would get lost in her mind, a thousand people could be talking to her at once, but she would hear none of it. Only the words in her brain and the soft thumping of her skin sharing its sole with another. She would feel their worries, they would soak into the pores of her flesh and take a hold upon her heart strings, but she would speak not a word and feel it alone.

Her mind was lost now, drifting far off from her.

For instance, now her mind was conjuring up every single scenario that could've happened to her father.

Elijah Buldstrode had disappeared from his tiny cell in Azkaban two weeks prior to this day in the Burrow. Images of his pasted face and emotionless gaze haunted her everywhere she went, she had nearly crushed a plate in between her fingers when his picture shocked her on the cover of the Daily Prophet.

Sirius Black had burned the paper right then and there.

But she wondered, where was he now? Was he harmed? Was he begging for mercy by the hands of some wicked villain with searing crimson eyes?

There was a part of her that deliciously yearned that he was.

But the more human part of her, felt nothing but hollowness as she imagined that.

It was one thing to wish for harm to come to someone, but it is another thing altogether to know that it was happening, and there was quite literally nothing she could do to halt it.

A soft sigh left her lips, as the pads of her fingers smoothed over her new Hawthorn wand. Hazel's eyes trickled downwards towards the darker coco shade of the wand, it was resting between the pages of her books, always on her and near her hand somehow.

It was a habit she adapted ever since she got her new wand, if it wasn't pressed into the skin on her palm or strapped to her thigh, fear would twist up her spine and eat away at her until she crumpled to the floor.

She remembered the way Remus looked at her when he found her squeezing it to her chest after they had got it. It was a Dragonstring core, filtering magic like shimmering rays of gold and smelling of citrus fruits, and she nearly doubled over in relief when she was gifted with it.