This is a redrafted version of a story I am nearly finished and had previously posted. However, I was unhappy with a lot of the opening chapters and was unable to keep writing because I was so effing paranoid about what I had already written- it's a sickness. Chapter One has been completely rewritten, but I imagine I will just edit most other chapters and should be putting up a real update sometime soon! Cheers all, dandylion05 x
Chapter One
Rabastan Lestrange twirled the large, vulgar, onyx ring around his little finger, waiting. It looked foreign on his sallow hand, his fingers were no longer used to the grandeur of jewels, and gave his nails a bluish tinge. His expression was more than a little uncomfortable, his thin lips clenched together in a hard line, depriving them of the little colour they had left. His eyes were pinched, exaggerating his deep and jagged crows feet and the charcoal coloured shadows underneath his black eyes. He shuffled in his silk robes as they irritated his skin and he continued to spin the ring.
The ring itself was a thick gold band with a large rock of jet black onyx set into it's face. Upon the uneven surface a coat of arms was engraved in gold leaf. On the finger next to it, his left ring finger, there was another ring. A simpler, much less vulgar ring. A gold wedding band. As he twirled and spun his onyx ring, his finger never so much as brushed the gold band. It would have been as though this second ring wasn't even there, if he hadn't been so carefully avoiding it.
The trees around him, swallowed up into the darkness and, invisible to his naked eye, shivered and swayed in the cool night breeze. Rabastan's back stiffened. His glassy eyes flicked all around him and he pressed his lips tighter together. He forced his body into the wall behind him and receded under his black cloak. He was now completely still, except for the constant spin of his ring.
Azkaban does that to a person. Makes them paranoid. Many wizards, the callous ones, joke that it's part prison, part madhouse. Rabastan couldn't see the joke. How was sitting, waiting, listening for the faint sound of rustling robes coming to take you back to your worst, your most horrid nightmares funny? How was realising that what you were reliving wasn't a nightmare, but your own real life memories in the least bit humorous? How was it at all amusing to spend nearly sixteen years constantly returning to the thoughts you had worked so hard to lock away into the back of your mind?
His finger accidentally brushed the plain gold band of the second, avoided ring. Memories rushed back to him. That familiar smile, simultaneously breathtaking and wicked. Two glittering eyes, frozen blue, nearly grey in the middle but almost navy at the edges. Dark curls of hair falling over olive shoulders.
Worse than reliving what he had done, Rabastan saw what he had lost: he saw his own past.
And then the air contracted and banged. And Rabastan was abruptly pulled back to the present.
He pinned his rigid back against the wall and clenched his fists until the last of the colour from his sallow knuckles drained away. A low wand light silently began to glow, seeping over the ground, the wall, Rabastan's robes and revealing a young girl in deep green robes gracefully settling to a standstill. Rabastan thought he was seeing a ghost, perfectly preserved and plucked from his memory. Her thick, dark, curls fell to her waist, her eyes, just visible in the light from her wand, were light in the middle, and darkened towards the edges, under a thick fringe of eyelashes.
But there was something missing on their smooth surface, he couldn't place it. And in her mouth, as well, it didn't cut the same arc as the smile of his memory. Her mouth better reflected his own: a stiff, straight line, tipping slightly but sharply down at the corners. She wasn't the girl of his dreams and memories. She was no delightful ghost of his youth long gone. Disappointment hit him like a thump in the chest.
The girl's face began to twist into what was supposed to be a smile but looked more like a sneer. It never met her eyes.
"Father," she greeted his with a small nod of her head in strangely lilted English.
He nodded stiffly in reply.
"Breseis."
Behind the wall lay the extensive property of the Malfoy family. Large gardens that were home to two enormous white peacocks, ponds, a lake which froze in the winter but was warm enough to swim in during the summer months, and a long gravel path leading from a wrought iron gate to a massive manor house: Malfoy Manor. The house appeared empty. Heavy curtains were drawn over every window and not a sliver of light escaped. Behind the curtains, however, the house was definitely not empty.
In the parlour, a large room with a high ceiling and wide fireplace, full of ornate armchairs and sofas, a large group of black cloaked figures were congregated. One by one the figures were murmuring farewell to each other and clambering into the hearth, which was full of blazing green flames, and disappearing.
Five figures were seated. Three on a sofa hidden, for the majority, behind the huddle of standing figures. Each had the same pale blonde hair and extremely fair skin. The oldest, a man with long sleek hair, sat on the far left with his hands in his lap. He looked strangely ashamed, his eyes cast down to the deep jade carpet rug that covered the mahogany floorboards. The youngest, merely a boy, looked a little sick. He stared ahead, but it was clear he wasn't really seeing. Between them sat a woman who shared their sharp, pointed features. She had one hand gripped on each man's arm, her husband and her son. She looked at each with pure fear. These were the Malfoys, the owners of the Manor. These were the people who looked most out of place.
Narcissa Malfoy gripped her son's arm a little tighter with each cloaked figure who disappeared. As the crowd waned, they became more visible to the other two seated figures. Narcissa's sister, Bellatrix, was one, her eyes were carefully trained on the face of the other. He was pale, almost completely colourless except for his strange, blood-red eyes. His nose was flat, his nostrils merely slits and he held a wand in front of his strange and terrifying face between the long fingers of his colourless hand. He regarded it with a strange indifferent expression and ignored the way each standing figure bowed to him before exiting through the fire place.
"The meeting was a success, I feel, My Lord," the last standing figure, Rodolphos Lestrange, spoke to his master.
"Indeed," his master replied, his eyes never leaving the wand.
Moments of silence passed awkwardly in the room before the Dark Lord stowed the wand away up his sleeve. Lucius Malfoy's look of shame turned to pain as the wand disappeared and he bowed his head a little more. His son, Draco, also looked pained and ill, but his eyes were locked on something different. An enormous snake, the width of a human in the middle, slithering across the floor, fattened from his dinner earlier that evening.
The room did not feel like the front room of a family home. It seemed more akin to a waiting room to someplace nasty and uncomfortable. The Malfoys felt like awkward guests at the home of some distant, scarcely known relative rather than masters of the house. Through the thick silence the creak and slam of the front door stiffened the backs of each Malfoy. It was only on hearing two sets of footsteps that the others looked warily to the Parlour door. The Malfoys all looked sick, their pale skin turning a strange shade of green. No one was expecting a second pair of feet. No one could fathom who it could be.
Rabastan Lestrange entered the room and bowed low to the Dark Lord.
"You are not alone, Rabastan?" the Dark Lord answered him, his expression pleasantly perplexed.
"No, my Lord," he replied, "I have a guest."
He stood up and nodded in the direction of the door.
"May I present my daughter, Breseis Lestrange?" he asked as the young girl with the dark curls and the deep green robes entered the room.
Like her father before her she bowed low to the Dark Lord, her expression solemn. The Dark Lord cast his eyes to her for but a moment before returning his attention to Rabastan.
"You are unmarried, are you not?" he asked.
"I am now, my Lord. My wife," he gulped, "divorced me after my arrest, but not before we had a child," he gestured to Breseis who was still bowing on the floor.
"Indeed," the Dark Lord's red eyes moved to the young girls still form, "And whom is her mother. I do not at all recall your marriage, Rabastan."
"Her mother is Marie Désirée, of the prominent French pure-blooded Désirées," Rabastan seemed to recite, as if going beyond prepared responses was too much for him to handle.
The Dark Lord rubbed the tip of a long index finger along his lip as he watched the daughter of his faithful servant.
"Stand up, Miss Lestrange," he told her, appraising her form, before turning to Rabastan, "You intend to keep the child here, I take it?"
"Why, yes, my Lord," Rabastan's eyes brightened, "If that is agreeable with Nar-"
"Yes, that will be…agreeable," the Dark Lord pressed his fingertips together and tipped his head, "Tell her what she needs to know, but be warned: you will be held accountable should her presence here become a…disturbance."
With a nod to the young girl the Dark Lord rose from his seat and swept from the room in the time it took Rabastan to make another nervous gulp. The air lost its constricting, crushing quality. Narcissa Malfoy let go of her family, and blood rushed back into her hands. She walked over to her new guest and raised a hand to touch her cheek.
"It has been far too long, Breseis," she told the girl.
"Indeed it has, Aunt Narcissa," she smiled a sickly sweet and bitterly false smile and cast her eyes around the grand room, her gaze skimming over the bloated snake without flinching, though clearly registering it's current state.
Draco watched her, entranced. Not because of her appearance or any attraction to her, but because of the way he felt he recognised her. He just didn't know where from.