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

chapter five

           𝕯espite what half the wizarding world and her peers may believe, Winnie Bulstrode is a master at control. Years of suppression make her walls splattered with emotions that fight to be released. It may flicker and shatter into fragments of anger at times, but her feelings are kept tightly to her heart.

           The blonde is aware that there is a problem with her heart. She is aware of the faulty vials, the faulty bloodstream that pumps and gives life to her heart. It is broken, however, and she is very much aware of the fact. Ever since she was a child, she has had sticky apple sauce cheeks and fingers.

           The problem with Winnie Bulstrode's heart is that it makes her feel too much. She handles everything, even emotions that aren't even her own.

         If she allowed herself, she would enter a room and have emotions crash over like a series of ocean waves. Crashing into her, tasting peaches in the summer from swallowing acid that burns your throat all the way down.

         Her parents have told her she is too dramatic, that she simply imagines those feelings, and she needs to clamp down. Needs to be mature and reasonable. Winne has tried to be both of those things ever since she was five.

         When she was five, she lost her pet bunny, Oscar. The blonde had sat and cried for hours, her cheek sore and stained with tear tracks. She sniffled and whimpered like one had lost their mother, but a wicked pain in her heart made her feel hollow, empty like she could never feel warmth again.

        The problem is, while grieving for her own pet, she felt her sister's hollow loss in her chest. Felt every tear and sob that raked Millie's chest as she sat inches from her.

         When Winnie was seven, she snuck away to greet the old man above her bedroom. Where Firewhiskey burned her nostrils, and the smell of cigars stained her clothing. While she sat, hands wrapped around a brown teddy bear, she was hit with a wave of grief so real she wept. Her Grandfather looked at her with one twinkling eye and told her stories of his late wife.

            She was only seven and never had faced a death that burned her so tenderly, yet she felt that urgent grip so fiercely that her Grandfather uttered words she will never forget.

        "You, my dear, are cursed with a bleeding heart."

           It wouldn't be until Winnie Bulstrode was twelve years old, seeing the blank nothingness flashing in her parent's eyes, she would understand what that meant.

           Every night, she would lay with her hair cascaded over the crimson cotton of her pillow for most of her life. Her heart hammering as she stared at the tiny, white ball of light she would summon with her wand from above her heart. Watching it twists and burns brightly with every emotion she sucked out of people and ignored with a raise of her chin.

           Then, she let it float back down, sink in between her ribs and lodge itself back into her heart. Before it melted into her bloodstream and became a reality of emotions and not just a constant itch in her soul, she would wash it all away in books. Her eyes closed, and her mind strained against the pressure as she locked away those emotions, keeping them hidden in some secret layer of her mind in the library she had built full of books she never dared to open.