Chapter 11
See, the thing is, she is the genius daughter of the Girl-Who-Lived. Heather Nott née Potter, their savior twice over, the leader of the resistance once Britain fell.
Sure, most if not all of her brothers are also geniuses, but still. Let her have this.
She grew up in the midst of a war. The thing that most people seemed to have forgotten, before all of this, is that Dark Lords and Death Eaters, prophecies and manipulative headmasters and an unsafe school and fucking martyring yourself in a forest, aren’t the only ways that a country can break. Magical people have regular wars just like everybody else, and well…
Russia took their state of disrepair as an excuse to attack, whilst they were recovering from the Blood Wars. Years after they were semi-rebuilt. They were in such a state of disrepair, after what happened in ‘98, that international politics was literally the last thing they were worried about.
They were worried about the Death Eater trials, about getting rid of the Dementors and making prison rehabilitation again and not torture. They were busy rebuilding the ministry from the bottom up.
She is the youngest of five, the only girl of the family, and she had no memories of peace. Her brothers, she knew, had memoires like that. They had memories of their father, they had memories of their ancestral homes and flying on brooms in their backyard, of a time where their mum put on pretty dresses and wove flowers into her hair because she had the time to.
Now she constantly lives in her battle robes, a wand in each holster, ever vigilant.
She does not have the memories of peacetime, or the fuzzy recollection of their father that her brothers do. She is jealous, even of Teddy, because he was far enough removed from their dad that his death didn’t seem to hurt him as much as it hurt them. He’d had attachment issues, being half-werewolf and losing the first parents he’d imprinted on, after all.
She knew she wasn’t adopted, had snuck hair and blood and done diagnostic charms to ensure it, but she didn’t look much like the rest of her family.
Her mum had straight deep burgundy hair, and so did her brothers. Her mum had deep, rich skin that she’d gotten from her father, who’s mum had been from India. So did her brothers. Alex and Nick had their mum’s emerald green eyes, and Chris had their grandfather’s hazel.
Then there was her. Honey tinged tan, compared to her family's beautiful dark skin. Curly milk tea brown. Purple eyes, which is how they found out she was a Metamorphmagus, like all of her brothers, albeit not as powerful as Teddy. None of them are, though all four of them are Metamorphmagi.
Her mum hadn’t really thought anything of it, when she’d asked why she looked so different. Said that sometimes genetics worked like that, that her brothers took after her and she took after her dad, with her skin tone and hair, that her eyes were purple unless she changed it because she herself had been dressed in purple when she’d given birth and she’d probably latched onto that. She said that her James Potter’s mum had been called Dorea Black, that that’s probably where she’d gotten the curly hair and also where all her brothers had gotten the Metamorphmagus abilities.
She usually shifted to have her hair the same red as her mum’s, her eyes the same brown as Chris, the same deep skin the rest of her family had. Made her feel more secure. She already stood out enough, as the only girl. Hell, she was even named a bit differently. Her brothers were Alexander Theodore Nott, Christopher James Nott, and Nicholas Charles Nott, but she was Jasmine Dorea Nott.
She also didn’t really… act like them very much. Alex was said to act like a more serious Sirius Black and Chris and Nick had their whole… thing. Nick with his creepy as shit skull he’d found in the forest, his dabbling into dark magic which none of them actually minded until he started talking about it in public, and his inability to shut the fuck up about anything he ‘deducted’ about other people.
Nick and Chris both were natural legilimens, but pretty young her mum made them wear charms that blocked the magic. They both made up for this by obsessively studying body language and, like, the specific crinkles of clothing and what that means. Deductions. At some point it didn’t matter if they had the charms or not because they knew everything anyways.
Chris was… eerie. He never had any facial expressions, and he thought that emotion as a whole was a weakness and actually really fucked Nick up about that even though he was more driven by emotion then anyone else they knew.
When the war was over, when she was their new savior, getting revenge with that famous temper of hers for Alex’s death while Chris tended to their injured mum and Teddy and Nick worked on the very few stragglers that’d escaped her wrath, she’d fled to Italy.
Left a note, said she’d be in touch but that she wasn’t sticking around for the aftermath of everything. Told them they could very well rebuild the country without her. That she needed time to grieve.
She was fifteen, Nick was seventeen and Chris was eighteen, almost nineteen. Teddy was, what, twenty? Twenty one?
Then she tried to figure out what the hell the purple fire, the same shade of purple as her eyes, that kept erupting from her was. She’d used it in that last battle, the one that won them their country back, and most had assumed it was some sort of deadly form of accidental magic fueled desperation.
That wasn’t it. She could constantly feel it, under her skin. She could feel the new set of instincts, the ‘protect the territory’ and ‘they’re standing too close, they’re standing too close’ and the ache that her brother’s death left, the need to either settle down in a territory for good or constantly move around.
Luckily for her, muggle Italy was full of people who knew what the deadly fire was, even if half of them tried to kill her for the… ‘purity’ of the flames and the other half tried to half recruit, half coerce her into their various criminal organizations.
She’d put as many anti-tracking charms on herself that she could find, but eventually sent a mail box back so she could get letters, and was promptly informed that Chris and Nick had fucked off to muggle England and changed their names, Nick was doing cocaine and solving muggle murders with his ‘deductions’ and Chris had manipulated himself a muggle government position, and that she was pretty sure Teddy was somewhere undercover in Russia, killing the man that’d killed Alex’s entire family and everyone that had ever interacted with him ever.
She sent letters back every once and a while, sent her well wishes and souvenirs often, but couldn’t bear to go back and visit.
Not with what she was doing with her life, the name she was making for herself in the underworld.
She’s freelance. Not a hitman, not an assassin. A mercenary. There’s a difference, in the underworld. A hitman is usually loosely affiliated with an organization and considered on loan when they weren’t working for said organization, an assassin will shoot you in the back if they disagree with you, and a mercenary will do whatever the fuck is in their contract to the letter.
She’s been hired for everything from corporate espionage to cold blooded murder to clean-up after someone else committed a murder.
She disguised herself, obviously, made convenient with her Metamorphmagus abilities. She wasn’t especially worried about anybody recognizing her, since she knew they wouldn’t, but if her brothers or god forbid her mother found out she’d be as good as dead.
She decided on waist-length cotton candy pink hair. Red eyes, not that anybody would ever see them with her mask. She needed a persona, obviously, all of her brothers had obviously created one by now, or at least exaggerated certain parts of their personality and dropped others, and she wasn’t going to be left behind.
She decided to go for a mix of theater/classics nerd and punk anarcho-antifaism. She wore combat boots, ones that looked like basic doc martins but were actually very sturdy military grade shit, laced with blue and orange in one shoe and yellow and purple in the other one.