An Intermediate Beginning

***Spoiler Alert: Contains references to a plot-twist/reveal at the end of "Mary Potter and the Heir of Slytherin"***

This is more backstory for the Mary Potter Universe – answering the question 'How the bloody hell is Lily Evans the daughter of Tom Riddle?' and accordingly takes place about ten years before the Marauders went to Hogwarts. It mostly involves characters who are not Hogwarts-contemporaries of Riddle or the Marauders, hence the title.

The story differs somewhat from Snape's speculations at the end of Mary Potter and the Heir of Slytherin. Snape's version of events was based on twenty-year-old memories of his best friend's family, and even then, there were many things he didn't know about the Evanses and the Harrisons.

Canon characters: Voldemort (age 35-37); Bellatrix Black (age 9-11); Lily Evans (age 0-1)

OC characters: Matilde Harrison (Lily's mother); Jenny, Cadmus, and Geoffrey Carmichael (Matilde's BFF, her husband and son); Adamant Smith (senior auror); Carson Bones (hit wizard; Susan Bones' grandfather); Mary Evans (Matilde's sister, Petunia Evans' mother)

Mentions of: The rise of the Knights of Walpurgis; a Black Arts ritual; childbirth in the wizarding world; wizard/muggle gov't. interactions; Dumbledore and Grindelwald; Kitty Turner (the Hogwarts Healer from Fall Back); Petunia Evans, Albert and Marina Harrison (Mary and Matilde's parents), Fred Evans (Petunia's father); Harold Macmillian (real world PM in 1959) and Lester Forbes (Minister of Magic in 1959)

***Trigger warnings: Non-con/rape (non-explicit); torture (non-explicit); PTSD?; long term mental trauma***

Mabon (September) 1959

Matilde swam slowly back to consciousness on the bloody carpet of an abandoned house, alone, save for the fire all around her. Its heat, she thought, had awoken her. Her wand was gone, both of her legs and her left wrist were broken, and even thinking of moving any bit of her body hurt. (Flinching involuntarily away from the flames was indescribable agony.)

She did not know where she was, or how she had gotten there, or why she was (very clearly) left for dead – there was an ugly hole in her memories, from the time she left her friend Jenny at the Leakey, until now.

She felt tears on her face, wet and hopeless, and wondered, distantly, if this was how it was all to end – painfully, and alone, thrown out like yesterday's rubbish, probably never to be identified… a waste of magic and oxygen and space, unable to save herself from burning like a fake witch in a Medieval town square.

Rage blossomed in her chest, hotter than the flames creeping ever closer, singeing her hair and her bare flesh. No. She gathered all of her will, pressing back against the world with every scrap of magic she could muster. I will not die like this! she told herself, as her vision began to blur, grey creeping in around the edges. I WON'T!

There was a crack, like a car backfiring, or perhaps a small handgun shot, and then the blessed crush of apparition, and then pain, again, as she fell to the ground – wasn't she already on the ground? She was so very confused. But alive. Also very alive. (She surely wouldn't hurt this much if she were dead.) And that was the important thing. And then a woman was screaming, and Matilde had no idea where she was, or if the woman was a muggle, but frankly, that didn't matter, because she was alive, and not on fire, and then the darkness finally closed in, and she knew nothing else.

October, 1959

Most of October passed in short, hazy flashes. Matilde woke often enough to know that she was in a muggle hospital, her limbs plastered and immobilized, fed through tubes with IV lines. She knew she had lost a lot of blood, and one of the nurses told her she had died on the operating table the night they brought her in – she had splinched herself badly, apparating without a wand, with no destination in mind, coming out of the Space Between with half her internal organs lacerated; chest and arms badly burned; lungs full of smoke; three limbs and four ribs broken; covered in thousands of tiny cuts. They didn't know what to make of her, and she couldn't tell them what happened.

She didn't know.

She knew she was Matilde Harrison, and that she was a muggleborn witch, graduate of the Hogwarts class of 1953, a proud ex-Gryff. Harold Macmillian was the PM and Lester Forbes was the Minister of Magic, and Albus Dumbledore defeated Gellert Grindelwald to end the War on the Continent the summer before she started school.

She knew her parents were Albert and Marina Harrison, and that she had a two-years-older sister called Mary, a brother-in-law, Fred, and a young niece, Petunia. She knew she hadn't spoken to Albert and Marina since she was eleven, because they would not suffer a witch to live, and that as soon as Mary had moved out of their parents' house, she had made the effort to find the baby sister who disappeared from her life five years prior, for which Matilde would always be grateful, even if they hadn't much in common after all these years.

She knew her best friend was Jenny Carmichael, and that Jenny's two-year-old son Geoffrey was her godson, and the only man in her life. She knew her birthday, and every spell she had ever learned, and that she had completed her third full year as an auror, which was widely regarded as a rite of passage, in July – over half of those aurors who died in the line of duty did so in the first three years after their apprenticeship period ended. She knew that she wasn't planning to make the Aurory her career, but she had fallen into it, given the lack of options for a muggleborn witch, and found she was a rather good detective, even if she wasn't as powerful a witch as many of her peers. She knew everything, up until she left Jenny at the Leakey. Then there was nothing until she woke up here.

She told the doctors she didn't remember anything.

What alternative was there? Nothing she could tell them would make any sense at all.

November, 1959

Matilde healed slowly, longing for the ease of potions and spells, for Kitty Turner's brusque, efficient hands and the awful bedside manner that meant you would be fixed up and out of her hair sooner rather than later, if she had anything to say about it.

She began to stay awake for longer than a few hours at a time, and began to, correspondingly, go stir-crazy, trapped in her bed, with no one to talk to, and nothing to do. She began to eat food again, which felt like a triumph in and of itself.

She missed magic – missed being able to do magic.

She began to wonder, in November, why no one had come for her. She had no means to contact anyone, but surely, surely at least one of her friends must have wondered what happened to her, where she had vanished to so suddenly, now almost two months ago. Why, she wondered, why had they abandoned her? Why had no one come to whisk her back off to the magical world?

Slowly – painfully slowly – her breathing eased, her lungs recovering from the smoke inhalation. Her bones knit themselves back together, and scabs and new, pink skin gave way to something recognizably human.

She copied the runes she found hidden among the scars on her arms and legs into a notebook, vowing to look them up, and find out what she had been used for in that time that she could not remember.

She crawled out of bed and hobbled to the bathroom, one day. Another small triumph. And then began the physical therapy, working her way back to the woman she knew she once was – an able-bodied witch who could walk more than three steps without faltering.

As she healed, her memories returned. She had thought, at first, that she had been obliviated, that they had been taken, stolen from her, like so much else, but it was only the common, universally human reaction to trauma – to forget until she was strong enough to remember.

When she was, well… It was then the nightmares came – a little girl, who lead her off into Knockturn Alley, who frowned intensely as she carved runes into Matilde's arms, saying "Stop wiggling! You're ruining it!" and stabbed her deeply when she disobeyed, who whispered "My Lady says we must give you a chance," before the she cast a bludgeoning hex point-blank at Matilde's head, knocking her unconscious; a man with a charming, false face hiding a snake's red eyes, who raped her mind, tearing through her memories before saying, "Perfect. Well done, child," who smiled as he licked blood from her skin and called on the Dark Powers; and magic, dark and bloody and violent, taking her over, possessing her; her body, no longer hers, violated by the man and the magic at once.

She practiced wand-movements with a pencil in her bed at night, rather than see his face in her dreams.

December, 1959

She left the hospital in December, still with no memory, so far as the muggles knew, nor any family, nor anywhere to go, but with no more reason to stay. She found herself still in London, and made her way, step by painful step, to Diagon Alley, and then Gringott's, and then, when the Goblins informed her that she had died, to the Ministry, where she nearly collapsed in exhaustion on Jenny's husband's desk.

The reunion was tearful.

Jenny apologized over and over, as Geoffrey clung to his favorite auntie – it seemed that when she died on the operating table, her will, magically bound to her life, like all aurors', had been flagged for execution. The goblins, ever-efficient, had summarily informed Jenny (for Matilde had no one to leave anything, save Geoffrey and Petunia, and poor Petunia could not inherit magical gold), who had tried, to no avail, for weeks, to track down her body before she caved and told Mary that her sister was both dead and missing. A pyre had been lit in her name on Samhain, and Mary had held a memorial service the next day.

Telling Mary that she wasn't dead was almost as traumatic as finding out the rest of the world thought she was, though at least her sister was more than happy to accept that someone had made a mistake – the Ministry of Magic, in contrast, seemed to be convinced that she was some sort of imposter.

Why anyone should want to pose as a muggleborn witch with only a few hundred Galleons to her name, no job, no girlfriend, and no wand, Matilde didn't know, but it was her life, and she wanted it back. The rest of the month passed in a blur of red tape, though she hardly cared. Knowing that her friends and family had not abandoned her meant far more than her legal standing, and getting a new wand felt more like being alive than any ministry-issued parchment could, regardless of the number of official seals they stuck on.

January, 1960

It was January, and Matilde had just returned to work when she realized she was pregnant.

(In her defense, she wasn't very lucid during October, and had quite reasonably written off the nausea and lack of menses in the months that followed as side effects of the drugs, or the near-death experience, or the strain of recovery.)

She didn't know how.

Well, she knew how. Obviously she had been raped – there was no sense in shying away from the word, when the evidence of it was growing in her belly – along with whatever else had happened during the time she still could not fully remember. The doctors had told her as much, and she had her memories of the snake-faced man, horrible as they were.

What she didn't understand was how she hadn't lost the child, what with the dying and the ten weeks of recovery and whatever black ritual she had been used in – for she was certain there was a ritual, and there was no doubt it had been dark as sin, the pair of demons using her for their own hellish purposes. The runes suggested it, if nothing else, symbols for possession and sacrifice and un-becoming, carved into her skin. She shivered to think on them and what they might have meant.

She considered, for the briefest moment, losing it intentionally. She had long since given up any hope of ever having a baby of her own. But it was too late to abort safely, even with magical healing.

She considered that perhaps the purpose of whatever magic had been worked on her, through her, was to infect her with some demon-spawn. But if that were the case, why would she have been, so near as she could tell from her injuries, left to die in a fire? (And the healers said it was human, anyway.)

She considered killing it after it was born, just in case, but even more briefly than she considered abortion. If it was human, and not some demonic creature, it was an innocent, and her child just as much as that man's.

In the end, she decided to keep it.

(It wasn't ever really a choice.)

April, 1960

In the spring of 1960, rumors began to surface throughout the wizarding world of a group called the Knights of Walpurgis. They were linked to a number of violently bloody crime scenes over the course of March and April, messy muggle murders. They marked them with their sign, a death's head and a serpent, in killing-curse green, bragging of their evil deeds to any who might see. Word came from informants on the streets of blood purity rhetoric and a dedication to the dark arts, and the black arts, which went far beyond anything a sane man would consider. The Knights' revels, they said, were festivals of debauched sadism, though no one would admit to having attended one themselves.

Matilde, six months pregnant and soon bound to be relegated to desk work until her child was born, volunteered for the case. Her supervisor, perhaps recognizing that this was the closest thing she had to a lead on what might have happened to her, in those three months she was 'dead,' allowed it.

The witch began a concerted effort to question informants, focusing on the Knights' leader, the man they called their Lord. She learned little she could not have guessed. He held himself separated from the rest of them, but led the group in Dark Rituals on the Old Holidays, and when they went on raids against Light wizarding enclaves or muggle towns, he was seen on the front lines. It was said he was brilliant and ruthless – and unstoppably powerful. A name was whispered in awe and terror, from every corner of Magical Britain's seedy underbelly. The new power, this "Dark Lord" called himself Voldemort.

June, 1960

Matilde's coworkers thought she had an unhealthy obsession with her new assignment. She worked on the new case ceaselessly, until her healer demanded she stop, two weeks before the baby was due. Though she was loathe to admit it, it was true. She was obsessed. She had become convinced over two and a half months' gathering of information that the man who had used her – she still did not know for what, aside from the obvious – was the same man who called himself Lord and was slowly drawing the darkest contingent of wizarding society to his cause.

She slept poorly, plagued by flashes of memory, driving herself hard, despite her advancing gravidity, to recover from the trauma of September. Her health declined and she grew more stressed as the months wore on. Her healer worried for her baby. Matilde threw herself ever further into the case, telling herself that taking down the man and his cult would be the revenge that helped her put the whole awful experience behind her.

For some reason she could not fathom, the Aurory did not seem to be taking the imminent threat of a rising Dark Lord very seriously. After a month of piecing together the scattered rumors, building a picture of the "Knights" and their leader, she had gone to her supervisor and requested more manpower – field agents who could seek out further evidence. Her request had been denied, citing a shortage of resources and the recent up-surge in muggle-related major crimes, which had to take priority, to preserve the Statute of Secrecy.

She had asked again a month later, and was again denied. It was then that she began, surreptitiously, to turn her attention toward the tendrils of influence leading from the Knights into the Ministry. A scant week after she began her internally-focused inquiry, she was told in no uncertain terms by both her healer and her supervisor that she must prepare herself for the arrival of the child, recover as much of her health as she could before facing the strain of childbirth – no easier for witches than muggle women.

Matilde acquiesced to their demands with a certain lack of grace, convinced that they were only sending her away because she was on to something. By the time she returned from her maternity leave, she was certain the trails she was following would be cold.

July, 1960

The baby was born at the beginning of July, almost a week past the expected due-date. A girl. Small, at seven pounds even, and just under eighteen inches, but healthy. Her newborn-blue eyes grew to match Matilde's own bright green color over the first few weeks, and she began to sprout a fine fuzz of bright, coppery hair.

Matilde, to her eternal shame, hated her.

The infant had done nothing to deserve her ire – by all accounts, she was uncommonly well-behaved. Her mother could see intelligence shining in her eyes already, always watching the world around her, and she hardly ever cried.

But the witch could not help but see the child's father when she looked at her. She had thought that, as the child was her own, and human, and innocent, she would learn to love her, that it would be instinctive. But the sudden, irrevocable bond between mother and child that all the books spoke of never developed for her.

From the first time the girl opened those wide, then-blue eyes, all Matilde could see was that they were the same almond shape as her sire's red ones, and as day after day passed, she could not help but think that there was something sinister about a babe so well-behaved, so watchful. Surely it was not normal, even for a magical child, to sleep through the night by the end of the third week? To never cry for attention? She distinctly recalled Jenny looking haggard and sleep-deprived for almost a year after Geoffrey was born.

Despite the Healers' assurances, and Jenny's exasperated chiding ("You should be happy, Tilde. Take it as a gift. Geoff didn't sleep through the night for ages!"), Matilde could not shake the idea that the girl – she could hardly think of her as her daughter, no matter how stubbornly determined she was to do so before her birth – was tainted by the dark magic under which she had been conceived.

She knew it was mad, but she couldn't help it.

September, 1960

Matilde had returned to work as soon as she could, at the beginning of August. Though the recovery period after giving birth was much shorter for witches, with magically-assisted healing, it was common to give both new parents at least a month to bond with their child. Matilde had accepted the month rather reluctantly, on top of the three weeks she'd had forced on her prior to the birth, growing ever more wary of the too-perfect child.

She left the girl – called Irene, the name decided long before the birth – with Jenny. Her friend was pregnant with her second child herself, and claimed not to mind watching the girl as well. She declared Irene to be a perfect angel, and besides, Geoffrey found the baby fascinating and she felt it was good for him to gain some experience of infants before his own baby brother was born.

The hints Matilde had found within the Ministry of dark influences had, as she expected, disappeared over her seven weeks' absence, though the whispers of the Knights in the outside world grew more ubiquitous. The muggle murders had continued, the death's head and serpent symbol cropping up every few weeks, all over the country. The Obliviators had been too slow to reach one of the scenes, and some enterprising muggle had taken a still photo of it, selling it to a local rag in Kent before they could mobilize a cover-up. Some branch of Intelligence with a Magical Liaison had caught wind of it and passed it up the chain, while simultaneously spreading the word that the photo was clearly manipulated. The Minister, however, had gotten an earful from his muggle counterpart, and had demanded the Aurory make some headway with the case just weeks before she returned.

Adamant Smith, a senior Auror, had been placed in charge of the case in her absence, and granted a small task force to deal with the scenes as quickly as possible. Smith, a blood purist himself, was far more concerned with concealing the grisly murders from muggles more efficiently than with discovering who was behind them. He welcomed her back rather reluctantly. She dove back into the work, resentful of the fact that the case had been given away, but determined not to let that stop her from finding out who that thrice-cursed man was, truly, and stopping him.

Word must, she thought, have gotten back to the cult that she was not abandoning her own, more thorough, investigations, because the threats started after only two weeks. Sent anonymously with hired owls, they consisted of candid photographs of herself with the same skull-and-snake symbol that blazed over each murder – now nicknamed the 'Dark Mark' – spelled on the back.

She reported it, of course, but Smith patronizingly insisted that she should just do as she was told, and she would be perfectly safe. The group wasn't targeting witches, after all. She ignored him.

Two weeks later, muggleborns – single witches and wizards both, with few connections in the wizarding or muggle worlds, began disappearing, the Mark hovering over their homes. They must, Matilde thought, be hesitant to attack an Auror directly, even one so inexperienced as herself. But the message was clear: ignore our warnings, and face the consequences.

Smith still refused to consider the Knights a significant threat.

The photos began to show Irene, Geoffrey, and the increasingly pregnant Jenny.

Matilde, torn between continuing her crusade and protecting the few people she considered family within the magical world, decided it would be criminal of her not to warn her friend.

Jenny was appalled that her friend was being targeted by the hate group, but not terribly worried for herself. The Carmichaels were a powerful family, and they would defend her. She simply needed to take care not to go out alone. She was very worried about Matilde and Irene. They didn't have the kind of resources she did. She was right. Matilde couldn't give up on this – it was too big, and she wouldn't let herself be intimidated – but she owed it to her child to make sure she was safe. It was at Jenny's urging that Matilde travelled to the poor muggle neighborhood where her sister and brother-in-law lived, and begged her sister to hide her daughter.

Mary agreed at once.

Matilde had kept Mary informed of her work, and the goings-on of the wizarding world. Mary knew of the political challenges of being a muggleborn witch, and the kind of dangers wizards could pose to each other. She also knew her sister was not the sort to be easily flustered. If she was worried for her daughter's safety, it was with good reason.

The sisters conspired to adjust Fred and Petunia's memories, so that the family would believe they had always had two children; Matilde changed the names on the girl's papers; and Fred, at his wife's urging, took the job he'd been considering down in Cokeworth. Matilde had Jenny's husband, Cadmus, remove her own memory of where she had hidden her daughter and hide it away, to be returned to her when the danger had passed. He destroyed the memory of her asking him entirely. He, too, had heard of the Knights and their Dark Lord, and did not doubt that they were very dangerous indeed.

A year to the day after Matilde was taken, it was done, the three-month-old baby (re-Christened Lily by Mary to match their Petunia) was hidden away, soon to be lost in the vast anonymity of the muggle world, her location unknown to any wizard. Jenny, Cadmus, and Geoffrey were safe behind the Carmichael wards. Matilde was ready to jump back into the fight. She could, she thought, protect herself, now that she was on her guard.

Walpurgis (May) 1961

She was wrong.

She was captured in the spring, late in April. She'd thought she had a lead, finally, on the little demon-child who had helped the man with her abduction. She had learned that the Knights were drawing their ranks from the Old Families, the Blacks and Malfoys and Yaxleys and their sort. She had, accordingly, begun snooping around the Old Families, working her way into the good graces of a few well-placed younger sons of Neutral houses. It was sheer coincidence that Carson Bones, a Hit Wizard a few years her senior, had wanted to complain about his son's future peers at the Wednesday night DMLE midweek-drinks-and-bitching party.

Matilde had been hoping he could tell her whether he'd heard of any of the young men, about his age, in the Dark houses, saying anything suspicious. She had not expected him to corner her for twenty minutes to complain about an eleven-year-old psychopath, who would be entering Hogwarts in September with little Eddie.

The girl had, apparently, been involved in an altercation with an older wizard in Knockturn Alley. What she was doing there unattended, Bones had no idea – she said she'd gotten lost, but he didn't believe it for a second. She'd taken the drunk apart – literally – with Dark spells she shouldn't know of, let alone know how to cast, and stood there, cool as you please, watching him slowly bleed to death, while the locals, not usually ones to report anything to the Ministry, called for backup.

When Bones and his partner arrived, the girl had haughtily explained that the man had dared attempt an Imperius on the Heiress of Black, telling her to come with him into the shadows before she had kicked him, breaking his concentration. When he tried to grab her physically, she cut his hand with a cursed dagger, then stole his wand and used a dismemberment curse on him that the Trace experts were still trying to identify.

The Hit Wizards – sent after an armed and dangerous suspect down Knockturn Alley – were unwilling to take in the underage Heiress of Black on a murder charge when the case was so clearly one of self-defense (thus risking the involvement of her father, or worse, her Paterfamilias), and the girl refused to answer any additional questions after she had given her statement. Bones, though, was distinctly uncomfortable about the whole thing, especially the fact that his children would be going through Hogwarts with a known killer.

After hearing that particularly disturbing story, Matilde had begun looking more carefully into the Blacks and their associates. How many pre-Hogwarts girls could be running around Knockturn Alley with cursed knives? She must have tipped someone off, however, and she had definitely become too predictable, because a few weeks later she was intercepted as she walked from the edge of her anti-apparition wards to her house. A stunning spell from behind, and she was port-keyed away.

…

She woke in a windowless room, well-lit by several dozen candles. The pair that haunted her nightmares stood before her.

"Very good, Bella," the man was saying. "Now, Miss… Harrison, is it? I hear you've been looking for me." He smiled, his false face utterly charming. "I'm afraid we simply cannot have aurors poking into our business. Not now. You've ignored the little notes my followers have sent, so… I believe a stronger warning is finally in order."

With that, he turned to the girl and began instructing her, too quietly for Matilde to hear. Excitement lit her dead eyes as she nodded eagerly.

"Crucio!" the girl shouted, pointing her wand furiously at Matilde. Pain licked over her skin like flames, throwing her back to the burning house.

"Hmmm… not quite," the man said calmly, and the pain vanished. "You need to mean it. Intent, desire, is the key with the Unforgivables, just as with any other spell. You must want the victim to hurt for the sake of it…"

The girl cast again, "Crucio!" This time the pain washed through Matilde in waves, far worse than before.

"Better. We'll practice more tomorrow. Come, I have a meeting, and I do not trust you not to get carried away without me." He opened the door and waved the girl out.

Matilde could hear the girl – Bellatrix Black, she was sure of it now – giving the man a sulky "Yes, Master," as they made their way down the corridor, and Matilde herself lay twitching and retching on the floor of her cell, shivering as the candles and the pain brought back memories of burning alive.

…

Matilde was found, dumped like rubbish, in front of the Auror Offices, on the first of May. A Dark Mark was branded over her heart, which still beat, despite her utter unresponsiveness. St. Mungo's best cursebreakers worked for days to disentangle the mess of spells – none of them lethal, even in combination, all of them painful, and most of them weakly cast, as though by a demented child – which had been worked upon her. By the end of the week, they determined that she had been driven mad through overexposure to the Cruciatus. The chances of recovery were slim to none. They moved her to the long-term ward for observation and further study.

…

Adamant Smith, unlike Matilde, took the hint, steering his team deftly away from the targets which apparently drew the attention of the Knights. He did not, after all, care to take up the next bed in the closed ward, and the cultists had only begun to target witches and wizards when the stupid girl had begun to seriously hunt for them. Even then, they had avoided the real witches and wizards, focusing on the mudbloods. Now, he hoped, they would be satisfied again with muggles. There was so much less pressure to find the killers when it was only animals that were targeted.

June, 1961

For the second time in two years, Jenny Carmichael had the rather unpleasant job of telling Matilde's sister that Matilde was dead – or as good as. There was nothing St. Mungo's could do for her, except make her comfortable.

Jenny offered to take Irene. The little girl could have grown up a cherished member of her family, a reminder of her fallen friend. But Mary Evans insisted on keeping the niece she had come to see as a daughter over the nine months she had lived with the muggles. And little Petunia loved her sister, and Fredrick doted on both of the girls – it would have been cruel to take her. There was little harm, Jenny thought, in allowing the girl to grow up with her muggle relatives, allowing her to believe herself a muggleborn. She would, she thought, wait until the child received her Hogwarts Letter, to tell her about her mother.

Mary agreed – it would be for the best to wait. After all, things were starting to look rather nasty over in the magical world, and what if the people who had tortured her sister into insanity came after little Lily as well? When those criminals were rounded up at last, or when Lily was old enough to rejoin the magical world, then Jenny could see her again.

(Jenny Carmichael, age 27, died giving birth to her third child, two years later.)

July 1966

In July of 1966, Matilde Harrison died in the long-term ward of St. Mungo's, the stresses of torture and subsequent attempts at a cure causing early heart failure. The Healers, reluctantly, decided it was kinder to let her go than to attempt to revive her. After all, even if they healed her physically, it was long since clear that her mind was gone. Besides, they hardly had the resources to support a long-term patient with no magical family, no resources, and no chance for recovery.

Mary Evans, listed as Matilde's only contact, received an official owl telling her that her sister had passed away in hospital. She cried as she explained to her children that their aunt had died, and they wouldn't be attending the funeral, even though she had known her baby sister was as good as dead for years.

July 1971

In July of 1971, just a week after Lily's eleventh birthday, another official owl arrived, bearing the promised Hogwarts Letter. Jenny, however, did not reappear, and Mary secretly breathed a sigh of relief. After eleven years, Lily was her child, Matilde was gone, and explaining the adoption would only make things unnecessarily complicated. She didn't think she could bring herself to admit to any of the three – her husband or her daughters – that Matilde had magically made them believe that Lily had been born to Mary. She did wonder, of course, what had become of her sister's friend, but she could hardly ask. Instead she proudly celebrated the fact that they had a witch in the family, determined not to be like her own parents, and drive her child away.

Lily headed off to school in September, and Mary let her go, despite her vague mistrust of the world that had stolen her sister. Perhaps, she thought, Lily would fare better than her mother had done, in the world of magic. She could see much of her sister in the girl – her fire and spirit and can-do attitude. But Lily was far more charming and charismatic than Mary recalled Matilde ever being, let alone at the age of ten, and far sneakier when it came to getting what she wanted. (She must have gotten it from her father – a charismatic man indeed if he had managed to sway Matilde. Mary could have sworn her sister was a Sapphist, and rather suspected magic had been involved in the fact that she had never asked Matilde about the man who knocked her up.)

Yes, she thought rather optimistically, even if the magical world had not overcome its prejudices since Matilde went off to school, at least Lily would, she was certain, be better able to face them than Matilde ever was. If Mary was any judge, her younger daughter would have them all eating out of her hand by the end of the year, and if not, well, at least Mary and Fred would be there for her when she came home, like Marina and Albert never were for Matilde.

Notes:

The ritual Tom performed using Matilde was intended to sacrifice his own fertility in order to increase his body's ability to heal. Matilde was possessed by the Destructive Power. Bellatrix, who has been Tom's devoted apprentice for about five years at this point, allowed Matilde a very slim chance to escape because her patron goddess (an incarnation of the Chaotic Power) demanded it.

Tom never did realize that he was the father of Matilde's child. He didn't bother legilimizing her, which was obviously a major oversight on his part. I'm not sure if he even recognized her from the ritual. He went out of his way to capture her because too much official interest at that point in the Knights' development as an organization would have been potentially disastrous; she hadn't been taking his minions' hints to just drop it; and of course, Bella needed someone on whom to practice her Cruciatus.

Sapphist = lesbian

This work was beta-read by Feenrai, who is fantastic for many reasons, among them putting up with all of my rambling emails and ridiculous flood of backstory twisting canon all out of sorts.