Beta Draconis
By
ElanorTheFairest
Disclaimer: As much as I wish I did, I do not own Harry Potter. As a result, any canon characters, places, and scenarios do not belong to me. I wish they did.
A/N: I got this monster of an idea about nrequited love (or obsession) and this was the product. Wow, I must get mega-geek points. I hope you like it.
Rabastan Lestrange was named after the third-brightest star in the constellation Draco. The star in question was also called Alwaid, meaning "who is to be destroyed".
Rabastan learned of this during his sorting.
"A Lestrange, no doubt. You certainly look like one." The sorting hat chuckled as it was placed on his head.
"You can talk?" was Rabastan's reaction.
The hat changed the subject. "Rabastan…" it mused. "Interesting name. Third brightest star in Draco."
Rabastan beamed with pride. "It's much better than my brother Rodolphus's name. His only means wolf."
The hat chuckled. "And a meaning of yours states that you are to be destroyed."
He bristled at this. "No, I won't, you silly hat. I'm to be the greatest. Sort me already, would you?"
The hat chuckled again, and called "SLYTHERIN!" for the whole school to hear.
Rabastan sat at the Slytherin table, between his brother and his future sister-in-law, Bellatrix, who was busy berating her younger sister for being a hat-stall. Andromeda's sorting had taken a full twenty minutes.
Rabastan's brief conversation with the Sorting hat would take a great toll on him later in life.
In Rabastan's fifth year, he hexed the Hufflepuff prefect.
Theodore, known as Ted, Tonks was a mudblood, after all. Not to mention Rabastan hated Ted with all his might. It probably had something to do with the fact Ted obviously fancied Andromeda. And the fact that Andromeda, Rabastan's betrothed, seemed content to mingle with mudbloods over Rabastan.
Rabastan lost seventy-five house points, but gained the attention of a few select seventh years, his brother and Bellatrix included, who planned to take the dark mark.
Rabastan became the youngest Death Eater that summer, joining his brother and sister-in-law among the ranks of Death Eaters.
He felt happy about it. He felt like he belonged.
He hoped that, somehow, it would endear him in Andromeda's eyes.
It did not.
Rabastan's wedding was to have been exactly a week post-Seventh Year.
Andromeda ran away to marry that filthy, bloodsucking, mudblood, Ted, three days before.
She loved the mudblood. He was faced with that terrible truth. She loved that mudblood enough to leave her parents, her sisters, her life, him.
Love for Rabastan was a strange thing. He did not love his parents. He barely tolerated most of his house. He loved his brother, and sister-in-law, only because of their shared affiliations.
He loved Andromeda.
He couldn't remember not loving her.
And she had never, and would never, love him back.
That much was evident.
Rabastan threw every bit of himself into being a death eater.
Before Voldemort fell, he had risen to third in the ranks of the Death Eaters. He was one of the most vehement in the destruction of mudbloods.
Despite this, the mudblood, the blood-traitor, and their abomination of a child were still alive.
Rabastan was imprisoned, rightly so, for the torture of the Longbottom family.
Not to mention thousands of other unspeakable crimes.
His purpose for their torture, unlike his allies Bellatrix, Rodolphus, and Barty, was to find the location of the Tonks family.
Even in Azkaban, in his slow decent into madness, he harbored a plan for the Tonks and Black.
He would slowly torture Ted, and Nymphadora, into madness and death.
And he would take Andromeda back. To be with him, whom she deserved.
Because, despite everything, Rabastan still loved that blood-traitor Andromeda Black. And he thought she deserved the best.
Rabastan was strangely sane after his escape from Azkaban.
But he was also single-minded.
Rabastan still intended to find and kill the Tonks, and take back his (always his, in his mind) Black.
He came close in the Department of Mysteries. He nearly killed Nymphadora Tonks.
She looked like her mother for a moment, despite the pink hair, lumpy nose, and blue eyes. She looked like Andromeda.
That saved her life.
He killed Ted Tonks.
After learning that Ted was on the run, he immediately joined the Snatchers.
And he was in the group that found Ted's group.
"How's Black, mudblood?" He drawled, leering at the vanquished mudblood before him.
"She's fine thanks, as far as I can tell." Ted had responded fairly coolly, considering the circumstances. "Oh, and by the way, Andromeda is not 'Black' anymore. She's Tonks."
"AVADA KEDAVRA!" was Rabastan's reply.
Although Rabastan did not kill Nymphadora Tonks-Lupin, he witnessed her death.
Bellatrix had killed her, for the same reasons he had wanted to.
In death, Nymphadora looked like her mother.
Rabastan was killed by none other than Neville Longbottom, in the not-quite-final moments of the battle.
Third-to-last-to-die.
The third brightest, as it were.
He was destroyed.
Rabastan Lestrange lived up to his name.
Third-brightest.
Destroyed, his goal not quite complete.
Rabastan died with but two regrets.
First, he didn't accomplish his goal.
Second, he had never seen Andromeda after she left.
A/N2: So... you COULD make my day by reviewing. It would be very nice of you.