Rodolphus Lestrange and the New Dark Queen

DISCLAIMER: The Harry Potter series of books was created by Joanne K. Rowling. I'm just playing in her precious and delightful garden (or may it be her backyard today?), and I solemnly swear to leave it as neatly in order as I found it. If you haven't read these books yet, go and do it now. Then, if you still want to, come back here. Everything you recognize is obviously not my creation, and I don't claim it.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a play written by Jack Thorne (and directed by John Tiffany), based on an unpublished story by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne. Saying that you should go and watch it now would be cruel, because most of us probably can't, and I myself only read the Special Rehearsal Script. You may go and read this too, or you may wait for the finalized version, which will be the Collector's Edition, and come back when you have read that. Any contradictions between this story and the final version of the play are my fault, because I'm impatient and couldn't wait.


During a summer night, under a crescent moon and a starry sky only occasionally obscured by a drifting cloud, a newborn child was found, wrapped in worn-out robes, on the threshold of a shop in Hogsmeade. Incidentally, it may have been the night when Albus Dumbledore fell off the Astronomy Tower under suspicious circumstances, and the shopkeepers may have gone out on the streets to look at what caused the shouts and the fighting sounds from Hogwarts. But the exact date and place doesn't actually matter.

When all attempts to identify the child and to find her parents had failed, the little girl was finally given to Euphemia Rowle to raise her as best as she could. Some of the Rowles are known to have been pretty extreme Death Eaters, but Euphemia was never accused of supporting the Dark Lord, and never spent a day in Azkaban. Unfortunately, the world is not divided into good people and Death Eaters. The girl later claimed that Ms Rowles only took her in for the money the Ministry of Magic paid her. This money, of course, was meant to support the child, not to increase the foster mother's wealth, but the little orphan never got to see much of it. She was kept short on everything and forced to earn food, goods and attention by doing household chores from an early age, and despite all her efforts, Euphemia never stopped telling her that she was useless and overall a terrible person.

Things didn't get better when Euphemia found out that her foster child was a Parselmouth. Unlike many mislead people, Ms Rowles did not believe that every Parselmouth must be a descendant of Salazar Slytherin. However, this did not prevent her speculating that the ill-bred girl she had taken in might be Voldemort's daughter, and she used to say that the Augurey she kept in a cage probably knew and cried because it did foresee the sticky end this cursed child would come to. The girl, meanwhile, learned to obey and to suffer silently, and she desperately hoped for some lost relative to show up to take her away from that spiteful person. Her wish was fulfilled in the worst way possible.

When Rodolphus Lestrange returned from Azkaban, he still was an unrepentant Death Eater, although he had long come to think that he was better off without the constant thread of being tortured for less-than-perfect performance. Talking to his former companions or their friends and relatives, he soon learned that Voldemort was really gone for good, and that no other Dark Lord rising had shown up yet. But when he visited Euphemia Rowle, he found out that she raised an orphaned Parselmouth whose parents were unknown, and knowing that he was not made of Dark Lord material himself and nobody in their right mind would listen to him, Rodolphus came up with a cunning plan: He would be the new Dark Queen's advisor and grey eminence, pulling the strings from backstage.

Rodolphus Lestrange found ways to talk to the young girl behind her foster mother's back and found her quite susceptible. He pretended to have known her parents, and he told a quite romantic and slightly gothic tale of lovers who could not confess their love in public for complex political and magical reasons. The orphan soaked it up with delight. Of course her father, the great Dark Lord, would not give his royal consort's hand to anybody but his most trusted follower. Of course her mother, the greatest witch of all times, would not accept to be married off to anybody but her lover's second in command. It all made so much sense, although some of the details didn't actually match historical records or Euphemia's tale of how the child had come to her. In the young Parselmouth's mind, the old hag was just as trustworthy as official history books written by the victors – not at all! Given the first choice in her life, she ran away with Rodolphus Lestrange.

But Rodolphus was unlucky. The girl he intended to make a Dark Queen never showed much interest in ruling the world. She rather pestered her advisor with questions about magical means to bring her demised parents back. In her mind, "Bellatrix's loyal husband" was still just a surrogate for a happy family, and that was all she wanted. Rodolphus realized soon that he would lose his future Queen's trust if he insisted that the dead can never be brought back. To keep the girl interested in his advice, he made up a prophecy about the Dark Lord's return, and he worded it carefully to distract from any reasonable ways of using a Time-Turner in case one would ever be found. Then he continued advising her that she should gain power first and establish her rule before she even tried to find a Time-Turner, some spares to spare and some invisible children who were willing to murder their fathers.

What happened to Rodolphus Lestrange is not known. Since Azkaban, in the midst of the Northern Sea, never became a healthy living place even when the Dementors had left, Rodolphus may have already been sick when he returned, and he may just have worn himself out before his plans came to fruition. Or his future Dark Queen may just have been fed up with his insistence that she should rule rather than her father, and may have run away again.

Even when her advisor was gone, the girl who had gotten an Augurey tattoo in remembrance of her awful foster mother and to remind herself that the future was now hers to make never actually learned to make decisions on her own. She continued depending on prophecies to tell her what should or should not be done. What finally happened to the poor girl when she found an interpretation of Rodolphus's fake prophecy that made sense to her is known far too well. Everybody talked about it when the Wizengamot sent her to Azkaban for murdering Craig Bowker, but only few observers noticed that minor accusations, like illegal use of a Time-Turner and attempting to change history, had been shoved under the rug.


A/N: Thanks to my beta readers Iximaz and Storme Hawk of the Protectors of the Plot Continuum, and my apologies for this being a mere draft of what might be written if I had the time and skill.