Jekyll and Hyde

Wanda: Hello my lovely readers! Here's another story for your enjoyment - personally, I'm having a ball with this one. The rating is as it is for violence perpetrated by a very young person, blood/gore and mental illness. I do not own Harry Potter.

Chapter 1: Psychosis

Helen Potter had lived in fear her entire life.

Broken plates, unwashed floors, the slightest indiscretion resulted in the cupboard.

No food, no water, and no light.

She would be left in there for days until she thought she was going to die. She would see strange things while her throat burned, unable to distinguish them from the darkness that surrounded her.

She didn't know why her aunt and uncle were doing this to her – did she really deserve to see monstrous shapes in flashes of green light just because she had accidentally burned the bacon?

Her back hurt from being kicked and stomped on by Dudley's gang, her wrists hurt from being shoved against the oven during breakfast.

She lay curled up in a small ball, with nothing in the world to hold her up, the screaming and the curses of her family ringing in her ears.

It was that day that Helen's mind broke.

/

The young red haired girl slowly got out of the cupboard the next morning, her aunt shrieking for her to get over there and start preparing their breakfast. Her head was tilted down slightly, her face obscured by her unkempt hair.

She stopped in the doorway to the kitchen. Vernon Dursley, fat and unpleasant as ever, was sitting in his chair with his nose buried in the newspaper. Dudley was kicking the table, whining that he was hungry and wanted food now.

Petunia had just placed the frying pan on the burner and shot her niece a hateful glare before saying, "Get the bacon ready, girl."

The girl tilted her head, her bangs falling away from her eyes. Her green eyes flashed and hardened. "No." She said flatly.

Three heads whipped towards her and stared. Dudley stopped mid-kick, nearly falling off the chair onto his portly rear, mouth half open.

It wasn't because her tone and posture was completely different from the crying girl who had been flung into the cupboard nearly four days ago, and it wasn't because she had spontaneously developed an American accent – strange things had happened around that girl her entire life.

It was because she was defying them openly and without fear, despite the slightest mistake resulting in cruel and unusual punishments.

"What?" The girl snapped, stalking into the room and crossing her arms. "You have hands and a brain, don't you? If you do it, there's less of a chance of it getting burned. You know, that thing you threw a bitch fit about a few days ago?"

"What did you just say, freak?" Vernon started dangerously, his face beginning to turn purple.

"Are you deaf as well as stupid?" The girl scoffed, rolling her eyes. "That would explain a lot."

Vernon surged out of his chair and ran towards her, roaring, "I will not be spoken to that way!"

The girl smirked ever so slightly and she held up her hand.

Vernon smashed violently into an invisible wall and was flung backwards, his nose broken and bleeding. He crashed against the stove, sending the frying pan onto the floor and knocking the burner dial up. Petunia screamed.

The girl flicked her wrist to the right, and several kitchen knives exploded out of the drawer as though they had minds of their own. Dudley's mouth dropped open, a piece of bacon falling out before he started to wail.

As Vernon started to get up, two silver blurs whistled through the air heading straight for him. A horrible scream rent the air when they nailed his hands to the floor, slicing through bone and embedding themselves in the concrete floor.

Petunia ran for the back door only to find it locked. Desperately she threw her weight against it but it wouldn't budge. Dudley was screaming until another knife flung through the air and struck his shoulder, knocking him out of his chair and splattering blood on the pretty white walls.

"Why not?" The girl asked sarcastically, staring down at her uncle. The table was rattling and so was the pots and pans on the counter top. The entire room seemed to be trembling in anticipation. "I'm a freak...I don't have to listen to you..."

Vernon couldn't even say anything; he was busy whimpering and choking in pain as blood began to pool in his mouth.

Petunia, having abandoned her attempt to escape, had taken one of the knives from the floor and was trying to creep up on her niece. Seeing her out of the corner of her eye, the girl sent one of the chairs flying and struck the woman right at her bony hip, throwing her against the wall.

CRACK! The sound of a bone breaking was followed by a scream as Petunia Dursley writhed on the floor.

Dudley had gotten up again, and completely ignoring the positions his parents were in threw himself at the girl who he had beaten up many times before. The girl's facial expression didn't change, but a fleeting look of amusement flashed by her eyes before his clothes suddenly caught fire.

Dudley howled and proceeded to do the single smartest thing he'd ever considered – he dropped to the ground and rolled over several times until the flames were smothered. But by then there were crude burns on his chest and shoulders, and he was so weak he could only gasp when the girl stepped on his back and over him as she lazily waved one hand in the direction of the sink.

One of the pipes exploded, spraying water all over the floor. The girl stood silently in the middle of the room, looking coldly down at her three tormenters who were now bloody and helpless on the floor.

"H...H..." Petunia choked, searching wildly for a way to salvage the situation that she was in. She was more afraid in that moment then she had been at any other point in her life. "...Helen..."

The girl spun on her heel and snarled like an animal, eyes blazing. "That's not my fucking name!" She bit out. "Helen was left to die. You killed her the day you threw her, begging and crying, into that shithole cupboard."

The toaster was abruptly ripped off the counter and dangled above the water pooling next to her incapacitated aunt. Petunia's eyes widened and she began to scramble backwards as her niece's rage filled the entire room.

"I'm not Helen. She isn't home."

The toaster dropped into the water. Sparks burst across the floor. Petunia's body thrashed and twitched as she let out one final scream before dropping dead.

The girl – she would come to call herself Sierra – turned her attention back towards Vernon.

The man had managed to pull free of the knives without ripping his hands off, surprisingly enough. He crawled over to the body of his wife while Dudley just sat on the ground in shock.

As she stepped around the table, Vernon shook his wife's shoulder and then turned to stare up at her. "You killed her," He choked out.

"I did," Sierra scoffed. "Consider that repayment for how you've treated me. You left me in that cupboard; if I hadn't woken up and gotten some water I would be the corpse now."

"You...vicious...little monster..." Vernon snarled out, stumbling to his feet to have another go at her.

"I am." Sierra agreed, raising her hand again. Vernon began to choke, both hands going to his throat which inexplicably felt as though it was being crushed by cords. "But if it means that you will never hurt me again, then yes, I will be a monster."

Vernon's face turned green, then purple, and finally there was a cracking noise and he slumped to the ground.

Sierra shook her head slightly, lip twitching into something that was almost a smile of relief.

A moment later, she chuckled, placing her head in one hand. She started laughing and crying, a sharp staccato sound of both joy and relief from someone who had never felt hope.

Dudley began to wail again, because he finally understood the totality of what had just happened.

Sierra walked over to him briskly and grabbed his collar. Turning around, she walked down the hall dragging the screaming boy behind her.

The door to the cupboard flew open and Sierra tossed him in, violently kicking him in the stomach to push him to the back. She glared into the small space that had been her prison, her lip curling into something between a smirk and a frown.

"Don't worry, the police will come and get you. Eventually." She said quietly as she slammed the door shut and locked it tight.

She stood in front of the cupboard in silence for a few minutes. Then, her eyes rolled up into her head and she fell to the ground in a dead faint.

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The first thing Helen heard were the sirens. She slowly propped herself up on her elbows and blinked as the bright red and blue lights brought her back to consciousness.

How had she gotten outside? Helen tried to think, but all she remembered was the small, confined space of the cupboard. Her head hurt, too. Had something just happened?

She was sure something had happened, but there was a blank space in her memory. And it felt recent, too – something she should remember, but didn't.

Her hands felt sticky. Helen blinked the stars out of her eyes and looked down at the ground.

Her pale skin was spotted with red, warm blood. Blinking in confusion, Helen rubbed at her hands. Slowly she stood up and look around, seeing policemen wandering about, talking to each other and pointing.

"Helen Potter?"

The young girl jumped and turned around, coming face to face with a grave-looking officer – the deputy of the area, her uncle had said once. She only recognized him from the TV.

"Yes sir?"

"We found you unconscious inside the house, what happened there? What or who did you see?" The man asked briskly, pausing only when the girl's only response was to stare uncomprehendingly at her.

"...I see. You must have been unconscious the entire time."

"Um...sir?" Helen asked timidly. Usually questions resulted in at least a smack or a barbed comment, but the man didn't move. "What-What happened? I-I'm not sure...I don't..."

The impassive look on the man's face shifted into pity at this. "I'm really sorry. Your aunt and uncle are dead. They were killed two days ago. We found you and your cousin inside the house...though he had to be taken straight to the hospital..."

The world seemed to tilt around Helen as she listened, the man's voice sounding like it was coming from very far away.

Her aunt and uncle, dead...dead...dead...

A flash of blood red burst before her eyes, the feeling of steel flashed under her fingers and a violent chill seized her all of a sudden, as though she had been dropped into cold water.

-if it means you'll never hurt me again-

The pain in her head suddenly started acting up – as if she had been struck by the frying pan again. Helen doubled over and clutched her head, whimpering as the deputy barked at nearby medics who gently lead the hyperventilating girl into the ambulance.

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Helen had the nagging suspicion something was wrong with her that no one wanted to believe.

The nurses had assured her that she wasn't seriously hurt – she hadn't been concussed when she fainted and while she was undernourished it was nothing dangerous yet. But two days had rolled by and they still hadn't let her out of the hospital yet.

The police had come back and asked her a whole bunch of questions – if her aunt and uncle had any enemies, what she had seen that day, things like that. She had been very frightened, especially when one of the younger cops started looking murderous when she mentioned the cupboard.

Strangely, they didn't seem to suspect her of doing anything; one of the cops even patted her on the head before leaving the room.

Then another guy came in to see her – a funny guy dressed in white who started asking her really intense questions. He asked why she didn't remember anything and he kept asking her about her family. Helen had been too nervous and confused to tell him anything, even after he said soothingly that her uncle was gone and couldn't hurt her anymore.

When he said that, a brief flash of red blinded Helen again. She shrieked in surprise and fear, causing an nurse to come in.

The other man spoke to her for a moment in a hushed voice. When she asked what was going on, the nurse explained that they were deciding where she was going to stay.

Helen was still confused when she was lead to a black car and driven into the countryside. The man explained that she wound be staying here until they could find a guardian to look after her.

Helen thought the place looked like Petunia and Vernon's house – very clean, very posh, tight locks on doors people didn't want kids to open. There were a few other kids there, but they didn't seem very talkative – one of them, in fact, seemed to be lost in her own world when Helen tried to make conversation with her.

Though she swore that one of the older boys had done nothing but stare at her from the moment she walked in the door.

A stern, very Marge-like woman shunted her into a sparsely decorated room and closed the door. Helen slowly placed her meagre bag on the floor and sank down on the bed. The emotional stress of the day eventually caught up with her and she fell asleep.

She didn't notice she had a shadow.

Later that Night

Helen had another Blank Space when the boy came into her room that night.

There was something in his expression that scared her; it kind of looked like that thing she had seen when Petunia had sent her to being uncle Vernon his coffee a few months ago. She had walked into his room to find him with a mournful-looking woman bent over his desk, licking his lips as though he was about to eat a course of bacon.

He had broken her nose and threatened to throw her in a ditch for the racoons if she breathed a word of what she had seen there to anyone.

But when the blank space ended, she was sitting at the other end of the room, curled up and resting her head against her knees. When she looked up, the boy was hanging from the ceiling, a cable wrapped around his neck.

Helen didn't know what the Blank Spaces meant. She didn't voice her confusion to anyone – she had long been trained not to speak what was inside her head – and someone that young wouldn't know what had happened to her mind. All she knew was that some of the other children feared her, and they all looked at her sometimes as if they were seeing someone else.

The flashes came too, sometimes. The flashes of red, feeling like she was holding something cold or sharp, things like that. They scared her because they seemed to come at random, and she never understood what they meant.

Helen, though she did not know it, was not alone inside her head.

A few weeks Later

Sierra stepped into her room, the door slamming shut behind her on its own.

She frowned when she caught sight of a letter sitting neatly on her desk. No one wrote to her, unless it was a prank – even back with the Dursleys Dudley didn't think her worth the time and effort required for something like that, and the kids here had realized in short order how stupid that would be.

Stalking over to it, she picked it up and opened it.

"...Dear Helen Potter, what the hell, that's not my name...you have been accepted into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. ...What the fuck is this shit?"

Dropping the letter onto the desk, Sierra was distracted by a hoot. An owl was sitting on her windowsill.

A fucking owl, miles from any sort of dense forest where their kind lived.

"...I'm going to strangle Roger with the piano wire if this is him again," Sierra growled, picking up a forgotten book and chucking it at the bird. "Get lost, there aren't any mice here."

Ignoring the angry hooting, Sierra got up and started pacing around her small room. "Magic, what a load of...but wait a minute, I've had weird shit happen around me a lot that just doesn't happen to anyone else. Glass disappears, doors and windows move on their own, not to mention I can chuck knives around with my brain. I figured I had gotten Carrie White syndrome, but what if its magic?"

A short pause, and then she smacked herself on the forehead and laughed unsteadily, "Oh fuck me, I can't believe I'm actually considering that. Roger is right, I am fucked in the head."

Turning on her heel, Sierra continued to pace. "Minerva McGonagall...really, who names their child that in the modern age...ugh, this is so irritating. I can't imagine which of these inmates would be dumb enough to prank me at this point."

Another hoot. That damned owl wasn't taking the hint. Sierra spun around and stabbed it with a fearsome glare. "Go away!" She snarled. The glass in the open window shattered, causing the bird to let out a frightened squawk before finally flying away into the distance.

Huffing, the girl walked over to her bed and flopped down on it, her tangled red hair crashing down over her face.

She thought that was the end of it – unfortunately for her, and a number of other people, some old men can be very stubborn.

A Few Hours Later

Sierra wasn't much of a deep sleeper, unlike Helen – the other girl slept like a stone whenever she was allowed to. Sierra was always on edge, reacting to the slightest thing that affected what little temper she possessed.

So when her door opened in the middle of the night, she jumped straight to her feet, rapidly blinking the sleep out of her eyes to see an enormous bearded man standing in her doorway.

"Hello, Helen!" The man said cheerfully, either not noticing or choosing to ignore the expression on the girl's face. "Las' time I saw you, yeh were only a baby!"

"...Who the fuck are you." Sierra said, her brain catching on the 'I saw you as a baby' part of the sentence. That strange comment delayed her usual reaction skills for a moment. "You have five seconds to get out of here before I start screaming, you crazy child molester."

The giant's eyes widened. He started to say something else, but Sierra was not about to entertain the ramblings of a giant, strange man she had never seen before. She mentally counted down to five, giving the stranger a very Kubrician look, before making her decision.

She was a survivor, and she put self preservation before anything else.

"WHO ARE YOU? GO AWAY, I DON'T KNOW YOU, HOW DID YOU GET INTO MY ROOM! GET AWAY! SOMEBODY HELP ME!" She shrieked in an impressive attempt to mimic Helen's frightened cry.

The people who looked after them responded in record time – they all liked Helen, because Helen was the only one they ever saw.

Helen was sweet and meek and kind and everything that Sierra wasn't.

Sierra didn't experience anything that Helen did. She just listened to people talking about her. The kids who whispered about how she changed from terrified to furious in a split second, how one side of her came out to haunt them whenever they stepped out of line.

They whispered that sometimes. Mostly, they talked about how sweet and doormat-like the girl was – how she shared her food, always went last during games so everyone else had fun, how she smiled shyly at everyone.

Sierra didn't get why they thought that girl was her. She wasn't sweet. She was angry and hateful and bitter, she felt all the sorrow and rage that had haunted her while she lived with her brutal uncle.

The flames of her rage over that mistreatment, her hatred of her evil uncle, shrewish aunt and spoiled cousin. The resentment and the fear taught her that she didn't deserve what happened to her. The sorrow and the suffering allowed her to realize that she needed to destroy the things that threatened her, made her feel that way.

They had given her strength in the pitch darkness of the cupboard.

They allowed her to stand tall instead of cower.

They told her that her life was worth doing anything to preserve, if not for her then for the woman that died in her dreams begging for her child's life.

She pressed her back against the wall while one of the simpering nurses tried to comfort her, whispering apologies and promising that it would never happen again. The crazy bearded man was herded out of the building.

People say that hatred makes you weak. Sierra knew that was bullshit. If it wasn't for her hate, she never would have escaped uncle Vernon. But she hated, and now he would never hurt her again.

Whoever Helen was, she wasn't able to do that. Sierra, as she collapsed back into bed, wondered how the other girl was still alive.

A Week Later

It was Helen who Professor McGonagall met after Hagrid's disastrous attempt to get her the Hogwarts Acceptance Letter.

In retrospect, perhaps it would have given them better perspective of what they were in store for if she had met Sierra instead. Then again, despite having a hospital for it the wizarding world seemed to possess a very medieval attitude towards mental illness – some of which they doubted the existence of.

The nurses initially weren't keen on letting Helen go anywhere with a woman who claimed to be a witch, but after much arguing the professor cast a slight compulsion charm on them, at which point they agreed to release her from the orphanage's care.

Helen entered Diagon Alley, finally knowing the truth about her parents, most importantly the truth that they died for her.

Late that night, Sierra lay awake in bed for a long time, turning over this new truth about her parents. Then, she pulled out a blank sheet of paper and wrote the title of a list on it.

The list was blank for now. But soon enough, there would be names on the page – and the terrible things that had always followed her would begin to spread.

End Chapter

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