Prologue:
There is a reason the wizarding world hid themselves from muggles, and it was not for something so trite as muggle sensibilities.
.oOo.
The book she was reading was large enough to cover all of her legs. Her feet barely hung over the edge of the chair as she looked up.
"Why did we leave, Miss Bathilda?"
The witch tittered in her own seat, waving a gnarled hand with the same motion that pulled her shawl closer.
"We're different," said a voice blended with gravel, coarse as a rabbit's scream. "We've always been different."
The girl opened her mouth, but the woman headed her off.
"Not just magic," she snapped, her eyes falling shut, making her face seem little more than a hollow skull. "It's our culture. Muggles can't feel the core of magic. If you had a wand, you'd know," she trailed off spitefully, hooking one finger like a warning towards the girl in the chair.
"It stays with you," she continued, but the inflections in her voice were no longer connected with her words. She might have been saying anything. "Your magic is your self. Don't forget that. And that's why we can never blend with them. We are different creatures entirely."
.oOo.
Bathilda did not think there was anything particularly special about the child across from her. She had a round puppy cuteness that was customary of her age, offset by tight ebon curls that looked a tad restrictive and painful on her head. Her small hands were a little misshapen but that was hardly noticeable.
There was awkwardness in her face, her eyes too far apart, her features poking out from the plumpness in way that was indescribably odd. She still had baby teeth to lose, which made her unseemly whenever she spoke or ate. Her lower lip was too large and her jawline was insolent no matter what Bathilda did with her hair. Overall, Bathilda could not help but think that despite the hints of beauty, she was quite an ugly child.
All of this could be overlooked though, she thought, if not for her eyes. They were overlarge, like enormous glass marbles rather than the pretty almond shape they should be. Like an animal's. Her forehead seemed to bulge to accommodate them, making her freakish. Everything else could be overlooked with growing pains, but not those eyes. There at once seemed too much and too little in her gaze. Bathilda could not yet determine if her eyes shone or if they only reflected light. In the color itself, the verdant was perverted by the blackness of an Avada Kadavra glare.
They were unreadable, sitting stoically on her disproportioned face. It would take many more years before Bathilda would realize that the child was intelligent, that the way she had never acted like a child wasn't something that impressed her.
The old woman mumbled off, losing herself once more in a haze of little miseries. "Different creatures entirely."
.oOo.
That lesson stayed with me. Sometimes, I could hear the ghost of the old woman's voice lecturing me years later. For whatever it was worth, Bathilda Bagshot stayed with me. She was half-senile raising me, but for better or worse, everything she said stuck.
I wondered sometimes if Dumbledore knew what he was doing, placing me in her care. I think he was half-crazed himself. But, I could never be too sure. Not with him.
Bathilda did have her good points. When she was not maddened by hostile rants, she knew things that I wanted to burn into the back of my skull. I never knew how old she was, but she was already a known woman when little Albus was in school.
Her house was filled with books and the musty scent of mold. How the place reeked of cat when she never allowed the beasts in was a mystery pervaded not even by magic. She was a strict and impatient teacher, especially to a young girl, but I learned. Sometimes, Bathilda did not see me but her nephew Gellert. She told me things I dare not repeat. I don't think she was ever kind to that boy.
My life was a train of books and tutors. Bathilda was a historian by hobby and a governess by profession. She enforced the same rigid scheduling on me as pureblood children. Even without a wand, history, politics, Latin, runes, verse, theory, ritual, etiquette - I was buried in studies. As a reprieve, Dumbledore allotted time for me to practice singing, but I never truly enjoyed it. It was only another lesson, one that often had Bathilda howling at me and throwing pans.
There was a method in her madness, in the chimes of the great Mostyn Tompion clock shoved tilted in the corner. The clock dictated food, bathing, sleep, but like Bathilda, it was half-mad too, tolling at odd, uneven hours. I learned to work between its whims, curving the starched discipline of that house into a scimitar.
For all the cruelty, I have much to thank Bathilda for.
I don't remember the first time I was told that I was to live my life in servitude. It seemed to me a fact I had always in some way known, as familiar as my own face. It was the how and why they bred me.
My blood-house owed a life debt. Abraxas Malfoy had saved the eldest brother of my father, the details of the debt having escaped even the omnipotent Albus. Osric Potter died before he was able to fulfill the debt. He was an old man. His heart gave. It should have passed down to his son, but he did not believe in such things. The debt would have bore on him, but he too died, too young, and the deed fell again. Here, the story gets tricky. The debt should have passed to Osric's grandchild, but Osric's brother offered his child instead.
My mother died in childbirth, and my father, an auror, was killed in a raid. I was taken to Miss Bagshot until I reached of age, when I'd fulfill the duties to my family. And the debt waited.
This was the only life I knew. Other than the heir, I was the last blood of my house. I had wealth to my name, and orphan or not, I was pureblood. I had decent marriage rites, a good dowry. I could have tried to resuscitate our house. To many, this would have seemed the better option, much preferable to slavery. But that fate seemed to me, lacking.
To marry, to spawn an heir, even to run a household, held no allure for me. I read the old tales, of kings and queens, and was moved only by those of the knights. I lacked ambition, even that to govern my own will. Even the thought exhausted me beyond endurance. I didn't think this strange until later, when I was thrust into the world and saw people fight and die for the will I held in such contempt.
Do not misunderstand me. I was not fickle. I had one purpose in my life, and I never faltered. That is my only pride and I hold it in much regard.
I doubted anyone else in the world would understand what it felt like to me, being subject to bonds so far outside my ken, or how I could not be bitter at having the most primal decision in my life taken from me. Even now, I cannot explain why, only tell you that this was the person I was. I never resented my fate, even when it pained me to understand myself, knowing that I was different.
But that is the tale I tell.
As I've started at the beginning, let me speak of my time with Bathilda. It is perhaps the most boring, the most mundane, but I did not emerge fully grown from dirt.
I was not idle. I had an avid interest in everything of the world, exacerbated by my stay indoors. I read journals and literature and histories impartially. I devoured every book I could get my hands on, even the most boring of treatises. There was no text too dry or dense even when I had to sit with an encyclopedia and dictionary by my side.
In between reading, Bathilda tortured me with a spry sprig of peach tree. Sometimes she would forget I was a servant and drummed my knuckles and demand I recite poetry from memory. Other times, she frothed that it was unseemly for an attendant to read and made me stand at attention for hours, striking me on the buttocks when I moved.
I wouldn't say she was particularly cruel in her punishments. She seemed more irritated than eager whenever she struck me, and when she remembered, she always made sure to feed me. She never invaded my bedroom, even in her moods, though she did scream like a banshee whenever I did not move from it quickly enough.
She taught me vigilance and restraint, and her lessons, though sometimes brutal, were always useful.
It has been asked that in such a house, how could I ever learn to love.
The very question is atrocious and shows only ignorance.
I loved. I loved with more loyalty and ferocity than such fools can imagine. They say such things. I was brainwashed. I was coerced. What a pitiful girl.
Fools! How I burn to end you, to throttle the life from such a throat! You should be lucky I love so well, for it was the only leash chaining my teeth from you and your pathetic little understanding.
I ask you. Does a mother not love her son without seeing him? Does a father not love his daughter even when he's ignorant of her? I grant you, not all sires and dames feel this way, but enough. How was my love any different? A mother would tear the world apart to protect her children. I have seen these things.
And I see how your Darwinism will speak like a fanatic and say that such love is biology. Implant the seed, insure survival. Long live the species!
I read this and I wish I might recant all science for such a gross abomination! Was not Darwin tortured by his love? Oh, what torment to his wife to wed an atheist, to love each other so profoundly and think there would be no succor in each other's arms in the afterlife!
At my most contemptible, I am drawn to such romances. I could weep for them as if their loss were my very own, and you call me heartless.
It is my thought that I love too easily. I need so very little. I accepted men into my heart who I never knew. I loved and hated Dumbledore.
You who judge me, do you even know that hate in an action of the heart?
Did I love?
I was readily possessed by it.
In my life, I would love many men and even a few women. I saw my love manifest not as a warmth unspooling in the gut, but a shield. Let the enemy beat against me. I had no yield, no retreat. I needed no affection. I would have been appalled if some misplaced sense of comfort caused harm to those to whom I were sworn.
People dared to say I did not love. Then they dared to call my passions false! They treated me like a fool, an incompetent. They blamed Dumbledore and pitied me, and denied my strength. They imagined that their mediocre, indecisive lives were superior to mine. My dream.
Yes, I blame Dumbledore too. I was thrown out into the world and expected to understand it. I never begrudged my fate, but I did begrudge my isolation. It left me so dumb and weak. All for his secrets.
It was always about secrets with that man.
I knew nothing of the war, the world. All the books and maps in the world could not prepare me for the tests to come. Blindly, I emerged thinking my place was secure and instead was met with doubts and disasters.
How does a well kept secret emerge into the world? How does she reconcile with the sights, the sounds, the incorrigible mass of inadequacies suddenly placed upon her? How can she be a shield when she can't even find the direction of a blade?
I'd spent nearly twenty years practicing for the moment of my release. It was as anticlimactic as passing through a door. For a rebirth, it was insidiously uneventful. I'd only realize much latter, after the fact, how bloody and raucous my entrance was, how what I had thought was a natural event upset the fortunes and lives of so many. The Malfoys, Harry, even the Weaselys, Neville, my truculent Prince, and so, so many others, some I had only briefly met, others I'd never come across at all.
For the story of a girl so disposable, I made quite a name for myself at the end. I place all my deeds on the altar of love and servitude, only to have it spurned.
In the end, it was not the name of a knight gifted me, nor even that of a hero. I didn't even have the honor to be called a whore. To read myself in history, I am only ever known as a victim. Of Dumbledore, of Voldemort, the Malfoys, even the Potters. But it is not true. And most these men I loved as easily as a babe.
But to truly begin my story, I should start with my given name. Like Harry, it was simple and uninspiring, yet it hid more than I knew.
I am Rosalind.