He’s not fully Kelpie — not a shapeshifter, not a beast — but his mother’s bloodline carried something old. Something dark. Something that let him walk into the Black Lake at eleven and come back out with his robes dry.
So when he drinks the potion in the cave — his hands shaking, Kreacher wailing — he whispers, “Don’t fight me. I’ll come back.”
And he does.
The Inferi don’t touch him. The lake parts.
Because Regulus is not prey — he is kin.
He washes up a mile down the cliff, coughing salt and bile, the locket clutched to his chest.
It takes him two years to recover.
But he lives.
What follows is a period of humiliating survival. A slog through the unforgiving terrain, too weak to get far. He drags himself to a creek and eats little minnows and tadpoles that crunch beneath his teeth.
He hides in the marshlands of Wales, living off raw fish and memory. His body changes. His teeth lengthen. His eyes lose all white. He avoids his reflection in the water.
to those who kicked me in this post ( @forovnix and @saltier-than-thou ): i grant you some words you kicked me into writing
also @dystopiansushi bc i love her
from a fic i haven’t really talked about but hinted at a few times shhh
im hope u like and it isnt trash
(also i tried posting this once before and i think tumblr ate it????? sorry if u had to see this twice idk what’s happening w/ this hellsite)
If Viktor had counted the times Yakov had told him to come inside from standing in the rain, he could have filled many, many more pages of his diary, leather bound and still sitting open on his desk.
Who’s to say, though, who might have read that diary and wondered why every time it rained, he went outside and stood watching the sky until he was called in, soaking wet and windswept, with the same look of wonder in his eyes time and time again.
He had always found a certain peace when it rained – although he never liked the wild, thrashing kind of thunderstorms that blew the leaves off of tree branches and flooded the sidewalks with the river’s murky waters. He had always preferred the days with a steady downfall and distant rumbles of thunder that followed the bright flashes of lightning across the sky.
And he found a certain therapy in retreating to the river when it stormed, standing underneath the trees and waiting for heavy droplets to fall to the ground from overburdened leaves into puddles where he could watch his reflection disappear and reappear from each disruption and eventual settling of every drop.
And that rainy November morning had been no different than the rest, as Viktor set outside to the deserted sidewalks with his umbrella in hand and his long silver hair bound tightly in a braid swaying against the wind.
He traveled back to the river that day, expecting to find the banks overflowing, stirred by the relentless battery of the rain. He was dressed to encounter such, bundled in a heavy blue coat adorned with fur around the hood, along with his favorite pair of pink rain boots, although the color had drained into a mushy reddish brown, faded from their frequent use. They were gifted to him when he was young, when they couldn’t quite fit his feet and flopped comically whenever he splashed in the puddles on the sidewalk.
On his endeavors, he often tied his hair into a long braid in an attempt to keep the strands out of his eyes, but every time, without fail, a few unruly locks of silver found a way out of their restraints to block his vision.
Brushing the loose strands back behind his ear, he absently traces the well-worn path to his favorite spot at the nearby riverbank. The rain had hardened, casting larger drops relentlessly upon the top if his umbrella. Even in the dark of the overcast sky, Viktor could tell he was nearing his place of refuge as the trees around him formed familiar silhouettes and the lights of the neighborhood faded in the distance.
lol yeh i was busy editing this today thx for kicking me
this is probably nowhere near what the final product will be bc im an editing monster who’s never happy with her work rip
also this isnt even a fic yet it’s just viktor standing in the rain LMAO
im gonna try to finish this one eventually bc im actually pretty happy with it
anyway i hope you enjoyed this sample of my trash writing again thx for kicking me earlier i needed that
