Chapter 1: The Prologue
A/N: Hey fanfiction! The idea for this story popped into my head in a dream one night and I just had to start writing it immediately because I got so excited about it. I've noticed similarities between Bellatrix and Voldemort's relationship (well the one in my head canon anyway :P) with Beauty and the Beast before (beyond just the awesome Belle/Bellatrix connection) but never thought much of it...until now :D Please tell me what you think-Reviews are the only tool I have for knowing what you guys like and don't like about my stories, so reviewing it is the only way to make it better aside from Pm-ing me. I've already written a chapter two, but I want to see what you all think before I post it.
Thanks, and happy writing/reading!
~Sundance
Notes:
-The lines "As a world without a glance
Of the ocean's fair expanse
Such the world would be
If no love did flow in he" that I use as part of the prophecy in this chapter are a modification of lyrics in a song called "Beauty and the Beast" by Nightwish. I don't own those lines, specifically, but the rest of the chapter is my own original content. I also don't own the Potter universe, Voldemort, Snape, Bellatrix, etc, obvi (or the ending of the series would have been very different)
-Time Frame: Shortly after Snape killed Dumbledore, three weeks before Harry Potter's 17th birthday (so beginning of DH)
Chapter 1: The Prologue
(Voldemort)
***There is no light, no sound, no feeling in this place. Only emptiness. A woman lays crying in the cold, her clothes are tattered and worn, her hair is tangled and she has forgotten she was ever able to do magic. This woman is about to have a baby, but no one will take her in? Where in the world is there a place for her magical child?***
***A baby is born on the steps of an orphanage in London. But this baby is different. It does not cry. It does not want for anything, yet it needs everything. It reaches for a strand of its mother's dirty hair, but she does not react. Her skin is cold. Her blood is dry and growing colder, but the baby's skin burns hot as coals.***
***From the time that he is a very young child, he knows that he is different. ***
Voldemort sat in his personal study, flipping through book after useless book looking for anything he could go off of. Anything that might bring him closer to finding what he sought most-the Elder Wand, the Wand of Destiny, The Deathstick. The one tool that might guarantee him the ability to finally kill Harry Potter as he knew he was destined to from the moment he was born on the steps of a filthy muggle orphanage, already great. Ready to be greater. The small platinum model of a serpent on Voldemort's desk hissed, bringing him out of his reverie. Someone was at the door. With one hand tensely clasped around the base of his wand, he shut his eyes and listened for the visitor's thoughts.
Who dares to disturb me? He thought into the air, slicing its stillness like a knife.
A vision of thick black smoke smoldering around a single one-word thought and blocking out all others from Legilimency view-Severus, my Lord-the visitor was thinking, and indeed, the smoke curtain cleared just enough that Voldemort could see the image of his most useful servant brooding out in the hall with his thick black Death Eater hood pulled over his head, though he was the only one who didn't wear the silver mask.
"Enter," Voldemort instructed, aloud this time, as he shut his battered and dog-eared copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard and placed a thick, red and leather-bound book of Advanced Dark Magic on top of it. He wasn't ready for anyone to know his plans yet, not even Severus. Especially when the small possibility still lingered that the Wand wasn't even real and he, the most powerful Dark wizard of all time, was chasing a fantasy out of a children's book. Severus pulled open the heavy door and immediately dropped to the floor in a deep bow.
"My Lord," he said respectfully, keeping his eyes downcast and his posture stooped slightly as he rose.
"Severus, you have killed Albus Dumbledore. You have proven yourself most capable of all my Death Eaters…" Voldemort began proudly, but then his face twisted into a scowl as he roared "LOOK ME IN THE EYE!"
"Sybil Trelawney has made another prophecy, my Lord," Severus said, this time looking directly into Voldemort's small red irises without blinking. Sybil Trelawney...he'd heard that name before, Voldemort mused as he searched through his memories. Then it hit him like a shard of glass-more aptly, hundreds of tiny shards of blue glass dissolving into dust upon contact-the residue of a broken prophecy, made nearly twenty years ago.
"She's the Seer who-"
"I KNOW WHO SHE IS!" Voldemort bellowed. If there was one behavior of his Death Eaters that he despised more than any others, it was when they underestimated him. Even still, Snape projected through his thoughts an image of a woman with long and matted blond hair and large round glasses that magnified her hazel eyes to the size of tennis balls.
He reached into the left side pocket of his dark cloak and retrieved a small bottle of wispy grey haze, sealed tightly at the top with cork stopper. "My memory of the prophecy, my Lord," he said and Voldemort snatched it from him at once, not altogether trusting Snape not to change his mind or break the little bottle. Once it was safely in his grasp, Voldemort examined it curiously. He'd always been fascinated by memory. When he was young and living in the orphanage, before he even knew he was a wizard (well, he often liked to argue that deep down, he'd always known...just hadn't been told until he was eleven), he liked to play with memories-extracting them in cobweb strings between his fingertips whenever he thought about something really intently-or tried to remember something he would have been too young to really remember-and when he got a little older, extracting memories from other children as well, usually when he needed proof that they were lying to him.
**Voldemort is ten years old. A slender, handsome boy that all the other children are afraid
of. He knows they talk about him behind his back-calling him a freak, a demon, a spawn of the devil-everyone here does-children and adults alike. He knows that Amy Benson and Dennis Bishop aren't really his friends. They pretend to be, pretend to go along with whatever he says...but then they laugh about him with everyone else when they think he isn't paying attention. Good thing he has always been cleverer than they are.
The cave is cool and damp inside when the three of them enter, having successfully slipped away from the rest of the group on the summer outing.
"Where are we going?" Amy asks and her voice quivers like she's trying not to show him how scared she is. But he knows better. Why be scared? They're supposed to be his friends, aren't they?
"C'mon Tom, we must be getting back. Miss Cole is going to be furious when she notices we're gone!" Dennis exclaims. Weak, thinks the young boy who will one day become Voldemort. Where is their sense of adventure? Real friends wouldn't be scared.
"I wanted to show you this place that I found. It's cooler here. And quieter-we can talk here," the boy extends his arm to gesture to the splendor of the cave that only he seems able to see, ignoring the anxious questioning of the other children as if he hasn't heard them. He is bent slightly, examining a perfectly pointed, creamy stalagmite on the side of the cave wall and trying to find flaw with it when he hears Dennis whisper something to Amy. He doesn't catch it all, but he hears the words "weird" and "when he's not looking." The young Voldemort whips around at once, his thick black hair standing on end and his pale face shining like fluorescence.
"What did you just say? No need to whisper. We're all friends, after all," he says, offering a smile that curls upwards into a smirk at the end.
"We were… we were just...we…"
Without uttering a word, Tom Marvolo Riddle crosses his arms across his chest and at once, Dennis and Amy are upside-down, hanging from invisible threads suspended from the cave ceiling. They scream, but Tom knows that no one can hear them. He reaches out to Amy first, brushing his long white fingertips against the side of her face with one hand and pulling one of her blond pigtails with the other. She shrieks more wildly, but Tom hardly hears her. He is focused now on the wad of what resembled runny wet cement that he held between his thumb and index finger. He fixates on the vision...Amy and Dennis and Billy Suggs at lunch the other day.
"He's a freak-an animal," Billy says. "I don't understand how you could even try to be his friends."
"He's lonely. I feel bad for him...plus, he's not all bad...he's kind of interesting."
"Interesting? Try a monster. He killed my rabbit. We need to watch him and the next time he does something, we've got to tell Miss Cole. Hopefully then, they'll lock him up in the nuthouse where he belongs…" Dennis nods at Billy's words and finally, so does Amy, admittedly with some hesitancy, but she nods, she goes along with them...she betrays him.
"C'mon Tom, let us down...you said it yourself, we're your friends. We…" Tom opens his eyes and returns to the present, to Amy and Dennis hanging by their ankles as the blood rushed to their heads.
"I don't need friends, I need loyalty." He blinks, and they fall harshly against the ground, not enough to hurt them, but enough to let them know he is special, he is no freak, and he is not to be provoked. They are only envious of his power. ***
Voldemort ordered Snape out and locked the door behind him before making his way across the room to the standing bust of Salazar Slytherin made of onyx with gleaming malachite eyes, but passed over it in favor of the far plainer looking Wizard's Chess set beside it. He moved the queen-side black knight to check the white king and the chest set folded inward on itself as Voldemort's Pensieve rose from within it to the surface and its eagerly beckoning Master.
His Pensieve was a truly magnificent art piece of his own design, made of shiny black obsidian and guarded on all sides by serpents carved out of rare Russian Jade. These, he spoke to in Parseltongue and they bowed their heads to him, slithering to their respective corners of the Pensieve, dragging its lid with them and revealing the depths of Voldemort's memories and their surface that glittered invitingly with thousands of pin-prick sized emeralds.
Voldemort felt something-the pounding of his own heart-as he poured the contents of the memory into the Pensieve. The first prophecy made by this infernal Trelawney woman had set the course of his entire life-what power could this new one hold? None stronger than his own. Nothing he couldn't handle...but still, he felt triumphant at having hold of something-a weapon, of sorts-that Potter and the Order didn't have. Couldn't have. And it was with this warm sense of victory, that Voldemort stuck his head through the barrier of emeralds and into the swirling, luminous liquid below.
***Voldemort's feet hit the floor with a thud that went unnoticed by the other people in the room, because his presence didn't exist to them. Not in their present time, anyway. He recognized the room as the Headmaster's Office at Hogwarts.
He watched, bored, as Snape coaxed Sybil Trelawney with sherry and encouraged her to divulge her thoughts with a patience that Voldemort had to admit he found somewhat impressive. Though he wished Snape would have cut to the point in giving him this memory. He didn't care about, nor did he have time for, Trelawney's drunken sob stories about old lovers and wasted dreams. Not ever, but especially not right now when time was of the essence and so much was at stake. Suddenly, she reached for her throat, wrapping her fingers, covered in costume rings, around her neck as though about to choke herself. Snape did nothing, but sit back in the Headmaster's high-backed chair and watch astutely. He had, after all, heard the old Seer deliver a prophecy once before this and knew what to expect.
"Crow and Coyote met in the field where the stars greeted the horizon and Sun and Moon stood entwined as lovers," Trelawney gasped, her prophetic voice raspy from disuse. Though she had her back to Voldemort, he knew her eyes were seeing something he and Snape, unfortunately, could not.
"A kiss of Love, a seal of Death
The time of the fall of the Dark Lord approaches
As the fifth month dies, if he shall fail to conquer the last of an old sacred magic
He shall be marked by the power from the hand of his enemy saved by that same power
Either must die at the hand of Love, either must receive the kiss of Death
Learn to love and be loved in return
As a world without a glance
Of the ocean's fair expanse
Such the world would be
If no love did flow in he
For who could ever learn to love a beast?
The last petal of the enchanted rose will fall, as the fifth month dies
For who could ever learn to love a beast?-"
Voldemort wrenched his head out of the Pensieve and his study swam into view once more. He balled his hands into fists and slammed them down against the Pensieve, which had returned once more to its chess board form. Such confusion as that which coursed through him presently was unfamiliar, and he resented it.
