Marauders - Always - Part One

CXCVII: The Secret of Herbert Fleet

Herbert Fleet got up from bed and glanced over at Cedric Diggory, asleep across the room. He'd had a horrid dream, an awful-bad-terrible dream and he couldn't shake the feeling of it.

Cedric had taken a time falling asleep, too, Herbert had heard him tossing and turning and he didn't fancy waking his mate up now that he'd finally drifted off, but blimey would it have been nice to see his eyes open and hear his voice curse Herbert's name for waking him up. Pausing to see that he was breathing steadily on the way by the bed on the way out of the dormitory would have to do.

He scuffed into his slippers and slipped out of the dormitory, down the winding hallway, past the other rooms and into the central common room and set himself down in front of the fireplace, sitting down on the carpet crisscross apple sauce and watching the flickering fire.

The house elves were still cleaning up in the common room, one was dragging a levitating bag of laundry behind him and another putting textbooks back on shelves, pencils back in drawers. Another was clearing away tufts of cat hairs that had snowed down from the curled up felines that lined the rafters.

"Why is you up? You isn't being able to sleep?" asked a house elf with bright eyes. He was wearing two different socks, one on each foot, a tiny hat on his head that looked like it belonged once to a stuffed animal or a doll.

"No, sorry. Had a nightmare."

The elf nodded and continued on with his job of dusting away the cat fur on the ground. Herbert noticed he wore one of the badges Cedric hated so much but the elf had some how rigged it so the top half had the SUPPORT of the support Cedric Diggory side and the face of Harry Potter from the POTTER STINKS side both showing. Clever little thing, he thought, and he watched the elf wander away, dusting as he went.

When he was mostly alone, the elves finishing up just a bit after two, Herbert dug about in his pockets and pulled out a photo - old and a bit worn out from years of being held and carried about - a photo of himself and Cedric Diggory when they were kids, just little mates running about in the summer with fruit stained lips and sun-coloured freckles.

He -Herbert, that is - had always been a scruffy kid. His hair was aways unkempt, clothes always worn out, and his two canine teeth were more prominent than most of the other kids he knew. Most people never thought anything of it. Thing was, though, there was a reason for it.

Herbert's mother was a werewolf, and possibly his father, too, though he didn't know a thing about his father at all, and what he knew of his mother was only bits and pieces, things like her name, a blurry photograph, and the story of how he had been rescued as a very small child from the pack that she called her family.

Wendy Brighton had been turned while pregnant, which was how he became infected with lycanthropy before he was born. The blood that ran through his still developing body was infected and if he hadn't been so far developed, he would have died when her changing changed him as well. It was so rare for a pregnant mother not to lose the child in the process of transforming that a superstitious mediwitch at Mungo's kept the baby when she was commanded to destroy him, as was often customary with lycathropics prematurely born due to the transformation.

The mediwitch, Norma Voortman, took the child home and tried at raising him herself, but she was single and the baby was hard to care for with his special needs, being a werewolf cub, and she held such long hours at Mungo's, that she couldn't keep him herself. It was less than a year before she knew she couldn't keep him forever. And about that time, rumors were spreading about the town - rumors of a werewolf pack taking up residence in the castle on the hill.

It was a tourist destination - school children with their teachers and middle-aged Americans with cameras crowded the halls of the castle most days - but there were entire levels of the castle buried in the mountain, not open to the public, and it was there, rumor had it, that the pack of Blackburn resided. So it was that Norma Voortman left the baby, in a basket, wrapped in cloths, with a note which explained why she was leaving him - and a plea for the pack to care for him.