Poppy felt like she perhaps had been dead and had been shoved back into her body, and it was a body she didn't want to be in at the moment because it really hurt. Her head seered and pounded. She wondered, if, when she were able to put her hand to her head, if she were going to find a massive dent there or if part if it were truly missing. She had never had more pain in her short life. She tried to remember what happened, as her vision began to clear.
Her father. He'd been at it again. He had taken one of her mother's silk dresses, a crème colored silk, had resized it and had ordered her to wear it, with her mother's gold lame heels and her gold jewelry. With a drink in one hand and his wand in the other, he had cast glamour spells on her to do her hair and make up. He had then paraded her in front of his houseful of drunken friends and bragged yet once more about the beauty his dna had created. It made her skin crawl. Her light brown hair and blue eyes made her wonder what part of his dark hair and dark eyes she had, exactly, inherited. She desperately hoped she had not inherited any part of his personality. That would, truly, have been a curse.
His friends would often pull her down on their laps and shower her with kisses, making her call them 'uncle.' She felt victimized and abused. She had reached any limit with this a long time ago but he had pushed her beyond that today when they started bidding on her for marriage as soon as she reached the legal age according to the marriage law. He had actually said he would accept the right bid if it were high enough.
When he'd let her go, she had gone upstairs, unable to discard her mother's clothes fast enough. She had dressed, taken a handful of coins from a little jar of spare change that was in one of her mother's drawers and shoved the coins in her pocket. When her father and his friends had disappeared back into the kitchen for more revelry, she had grabbed her doll, raced down the stairs, stretched as high as she could reach to the mantel for floo powder and had left the house, terrified it was no longer safe for her there.
She had gone to Diagon Alley, afraid, alone, and not sure where she was going to go or what she was going to do. She had wandered the street for awhile, getting a chocolate frog and pocketing the Godric Gryffindor card. She saw some intimidating looking goblins, all muttering unhappily to each other, all seemingly on their way to Gringotts. She'd never seen them this close but she felt she needed to get out of their way. She had turned into the first side street she'd seen. It was a dark and forbidding place. She tripped on a board from a packing crate, fell, and skinned her knee. She curled up tight next to the wall, crying.
"What seems to be the matter?" a deep voice asked. She looked up to see what she believed was a giant over her. "Lost your way, have you?"
"Um..yes," she said. "Yes, lost. I'm lost."
"This is no place for someone like you," the man had said. "Bad things happen to little girls here. Come with me. No one messes with me, I promise you that." He had reached for her hand. She pt her hand over her bloodied knee to get up, and he helped her up. "One errand first, though." She nodded.
He took her through a hidden doorway, down a staircase deep underground. It was a large stone room with shelves and shelves of jars and bottles, many cauldrons, etc. There were three women there working over the cauldrons. The man said little. He went to him, and she saw him transform. He grew hair and claws. She began to scream, terrified. He turned back to her, and she saw he wasn't human anymore. She tried to run. He backhanded her, his hand so huge that when it struck her temple, it went up into her hairline and down her face across her cheek. Everything went black.
Now she woke in a stone room that had only firelight from fireplaces and candlelight. It was cold. She was cold. It smelled bad here. Like lots of wet dogs. Men and women and children here of all ages--some of them seemed to be part monster---like the giant that had hit her. She thought of her brother Anton. He always protected her, but he was no match for these monsters. And he wasn't here. She wanted her mother. She wanted Anton.
She lifted her hand up to her aching head and it came back bloodied. That frightened her. She didn't know how bad it was, and she doubted any of these hairy people used bandaids. She looked for her doll. It was gone. She was truly alone now. She shivered in the cold. The giant looked at her from across the room. He picked up a piece of raw meat off a wood work table and threw it at her, the meat landing on the floor.
"Eat," he told her. She looked at the meat. Eat? Eat what? That? It wasn't cooked.
"You git," A hoarse, deep voice rose from the shadows. It seemed to be the voice of a man. Or a man monster...well, whatever they were called. "She's too human for that. She can't eat that until she's turned. If you're going to feed her, get her something she can eat."
"Maybe I'll just turn her, then, and get it overwith," the giant said menacingly.
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