Hi everybody!
This was my first fanfiction Now I have decided to translate it in English. I'm not sure I can do it properly, so please be merciful with me… and do not hesitate to correct my mistakes!
Of course every character is property of JK Rowling, except Lene Rice, whom I fear is mine.
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1. Big Trouble in Camden Town
Bellatrix Lestrange was a quite pretty woman. Oh, long time ago she could leave you breathless, naturally, but over a decade of Azkaban was not properly a beauty toner.
Her raven hair seemed a skein of silk threads lost in an attic, her skin was of the whitish colour of a depth fish and "tonic" was not the first word you think of watching her bottom.
Moreover Bellatrix Lestrange was mad. Totally insane, to be exact.
Even Thomas Riddle was mad. One can't choose "Voldemort" as a nom de plume and to be totally sane. "Flight of death"… quite melodramatic, indeed. On the other hand it was the nickname he had chosen when he was fourteen, so… oh, many, many years before.
The other peculiar traits of his insanity were a tenacious and persisting desire of immortality and a resolute preference for the dark colours. This was what people thought, at least. Anyone who prefers to look like a big rattlesnake provided to stay alive, not has only lost every dignity, but is completely nuts.
The magic community was quite unanimous on this.
The major part of them, nevertheless, was missing that, in a very peculiar way, Thomas Riddle was perfectly sane. In his own way, of course.
There was a core of sanity in his madness, which conferred him a certain kind of very dangerous, delirious, clearness.
Now – not a kid anymore, he had to admit – his sanity/insanity was evolving.
From a strictly physiological point of view, he was practically a baby. He had come up from the broth of the cauldron which had return him to life no more than an year before.
Even counting his age with the serpents meter (which is probably better) he could be consider barely a teenager.
From the registry point of view, on the other hand, Thomas Riddle had passed the sixty.
One of the immutable facts of the human condition (or semi-human, if you prefer) is that adolescence and middle-age are both critical moments for a man.
Thoms Riddle was experimenting the dubious pleasure to live them together.
Is well-known that teenagers hormones get bigger than seals, and Riddle was understanding that his ones were perhaps more similar to varans, but not less heavily built.
And every man over-sixty begins to advert the impellent need to remark his virility. Abruptly. A sort of biological in-late clock, which cry "Do it, 'till you can!" day and night.
Thomas Riddle could be a little psychopathic, and surely had a good number of complexes - not least a latent inferiority complex quite annoying - but he did know what he wanted.
And generally was better if what he wanted hurried up to his hands, or the probabilities that it remained whole were minimum. This for the inferiority complex, even known as "the fox and the grapes complex". If he couldn't manage to obtain something, there was no reason that this something continued to exist in his same spatial-temporal coordinates.
It could be told that he was one of the more aggressive shine-ones on Earth.
Consequently, if Riddle wanted something, nine to ten he obtained it.
He would prefer ten to ten, to be sincere, but from that point of view he was registering some difficulties. A certain spectacled and badly disfigured kid, with a clucking and interfering voice which drives you crazy, for instance…
Thomas Riddle repressed the annoying thought and observed again Bellatrix. Obviously Rodulphus Lestrange was not a part of the equation for him, but Riddle wasn't sure he wanted, metaphorical speaking, to lay his hands on her.
She was mad. Not that was so important, but madman sometimes do mad-things and Riddle wanted to suffer nothing like that.
Besides, she yelped.
When he reproached her, she yelped (and tented to crawl at his feet). If he commended her, she yelped. For God's sake, she yelped even if he barely stared at her! Riddle couldn't stand that kind of sound effect. He found that silence - or cry, according to the circumstances - was more appropriate.
Riddle fidgeted uneasily in his ebony throne and decided that should be better looking for something else.
Probably she yelled even when in bed, perhaps when sleeping too, and that was clearly too much.
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Magdalene Rice was definitely not the yelling kind. She didn't use to emit sounds with no meaning. It seemed, according to her, that her vocal chords were organs to use with parsimony. On the contrary: better do not use them at all, if even it was possible.
It was her second day of holiday in London and she had pronounced maybe four words. Habitually "How much for this?" and "You're crazy", often in this order.
The prices in London, in fact, didn't stop to thwart her. Obviously in LaBorde, Texas, things are very different.
Man, people could shoot you for less, in LaBorde!
In any case, now she was in holiday and she could pass over those trifles. She didn't like London as she expected. It was cold, damp, and vaguely oppressing.
The buildings tended to be grey and rather old (even if was commune opinion that they were "Victorian" and "historical") and there were cars everywhere.
Londoners were bumptious and pretended to not know her language ('English is my language!' she had shout to the Pakistan newspaper seller). Moreover they were obviously confused about the current t-shirt prizes.
Finally, at Camden Town open-air market, Magdalene (Lene for… well, anyone) found a t-shirt with a "Mind the gap" print on at the reasonable prize of five Pounds. That meant eight dollars more or less. That should be okay.
She liked the "Mind the gap" concept. Even if in the underground stations she had visited they didn't use it anymore (there weren't even gaps anymore), she liked it all the same. In the right perspective it could be a Zen saying. Not that Lene particularly loved Zen sayings, but time to time in her job an extra-ration of Zen could save your day.
Lene was a horse trainer for the "traditional" rodeos for tourists and it's quite difficult to convince a horse to do the hell you're telling him without, at least, some Zen concept to use at the right moment.
Lene, on the other hand, got a quite particular idea of "Zen".
"First shoot and then look ask questions" was a Zen saying in her opinion, as "Get still that goddamnit' tail" and "Keep serpents for the head".
She always had a good feeling with animals. Maybe less good with human beings, but you couldn't expect too much.
Human beings, she thought, were quite strange.
That morning, in London, she had observed some different species of them. There were the ones with purple hair stuck on their head, the ones in mourning with studded collars, the ones that seemed to come from a costume film (not necessarily set in the past) and the ones with long dressing gowns of gaudy colours. She had noted a lot of these lasts, a crew more unusual than others.
She couldn't remember to have seen this specie in LaBorde. Not that there were a lot of he other kind too.
The "gowned ones", as she had start to call them, seemed quite excited.
Maybe they were doing some underground-minority-social-ritual of theirs, like the ones reported by magazines. They ran here and there shaking some sticks and looked around as they expected to see a policeman ready to fine them.
More strange was that every time they perceived you were looking them, they smiled and started abruptly to whistle distractedly. Very curious.
And they weren't lads, too.
Lene had noted a pair of over-sixty. It seemed that these Englishmen had no sense of decency. Over-sixties going freak around like that…
She came back to look for another t-shirt when something stranger happened…
The "gowned ones" began to run all together up to Camden High Street, shaking theirs sticks in all directions.
Lene grew curious and moved a step in the passageway between the stalls. After all, that was a kind of public entertainment: she had got the right to look better, considering the amount of money she was spending in that city.
She kept her eyes peeled and noticed that the gowned ones run away untidily down to the canal. She moved another step to not lose even a second of… anything was going on.
At that point one of the gowned ones turned back and cried something to her (it should be "Attention!" but she wasn't sure with the English accent and everything…). Lene turned back and noticed that besides her there were some more strange gentlemen.
A long and thick pal, muffled up in a sort of black shroud (such a bad taste!) and with a serious conjunctivitis problem pointed his stick on her.
Suddenly Lene adverted that the situation was turning less funny of her previsions.
She couldn't think well over her sudden insight, because Mr. Conjunctivitis started to emit troubling green flashes. Lene had no idea of the meaning of that, but her practical Texan brain interpreted it as a hostility sign and acted of consequence.
She didn't waste her breath to cry. She waved a hand in front of her in an instinctual movement and, equally instinctively, handed her Colt Piton 33mm and shoot once.
Mr. Conjunctivitis, shoot blank in the middle of his chest, fell down, astonished.
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Thomas Riddle, aka Lord Voldemort, aka You-know-who, blinked twice and tried to focus on anything.
"Milord!" squawked a voices just near his ear (too near, in his opinion) "How are you? Well?"
Riddle focused slowly on the dark ceiling (his bedroom ceiling, actually), some old black-wooden furniture and a series of cautious faces were staring at him.
The faces, obviously, owed to his Deatheaters. They are cautious because they didn't even know how seriously he's been injured, neither what to do in case of his premature departing. Last time they didn't behave very well.
"Yes, I'm well," said Riddle, in a spiteful voice. "Where is the damned muggle?"
The Deatheaters expression changed from cautious to guilty, then to fear.
"You're not telling me you didn't captured her, are you?" he hissed. One of the trick he was more pride of was to be capable to bring a room temperature under zero simply with his tone of voice.
The Deatheathers, in fact, look at him frozen.
"Very well" he murmured, intending all the contrary. He raised his eyes to verify that they had understood the implied reproach. Except Crubbe and Goyle, all the rest seemed to got it. "Off you go."
"But… Milord…" tried to object an intrepid one.
"Off you go" repeated Riddle, settling better his head on the pillows.
What the hell had happened? he thought, while the Deatheaters decamped pretending to going out in a decent way. It has been a plain half-bloods hunting. Two families that, by the way, had expressed very hideous opinions about him.
A muggle intervened between them and his Deatheaters.
Riddle had simply done the most obvious thing. He had thrown a mortal curse against the silly creature, to take her off.
And her… that stinking, sticky, filthy muggle… well, she'd had to shoot him. He reminded something about a sort of metal wands which muggles use to kill them each other. The right term was "gun".
Yes, when he was a child, at the orphanage, he heard about "guns". They shoot very small pieces of metal, very quickly, and can seriously injure you. He couldn't remember to have ever seen one of them.
And so the muggle had shot him…
But, he thought while remembering more clearly the facts, that wasn't the thing which had wrongfooted him the most…
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The gowned ones pressed around her. Their number increased, now, and they didn't seem dangerous while over-excited.
A man about sixty, the face half-hidden by a bowler and an impressing defective piece of nose, pointed a finger to her gun.
"Can you take that off?" he asked, in a harsh tone. He seemed quite nervous and a bit annoyed. Yet, he was the first of the gowned ones who told something sensed. The others, or buzzed like an beehive – impossible to understand the single statements – or emitted coloured flashes over bystanders. Bystanders didn't seem to suffer, on the contrary, smiled peacefully. Lene began to doubt if she had got the reason, after all, to shoot. Maybe the conjunctivitis lad wasn't menacing her.
She took off the gun and stared at the man with the bowler.
"I'm sorry. He seemed aggressive. I shot without thinking, really. He… er, he's right, isn't he?"
The other looked at her vacuously with the only visible eye.
All the gowned ones were pressing round her and looked at her vacuously. Oh, shit… she had done off one of them…
"Yea, I mean… he'll recover, won't he? He's… he's surviving."
A girl with pink hair stuck her head between the shoulders of two unsettled lads. Oh, well. So they've got them both: with the gowns and with the strange hair.
"Sorry, but what ya saying?" asked the girl.
Lene raised her eyebrows. "The gentleman with conjunctivitis…" she told, and then she bit her lips. Probably it wasn't polite to speak like that. Very snob, these Briton. "The tall gentleman with the… er, with the dark suit, I mean. I shot him, but I didn't intended to hurt him. It's only that he waved that… stick? … in front of my nose and…"
The girl looked at her wide-eyed for a second. Then she exchanged a look whit a grey-hair, run down, lad beside her and began to laugh. In a few time the entire assembly was laughing out loudly.
"Conjunctivitis…" was sighing the girl with the pink hair. The other ones were splitting their sides with laughter.
Lene relaxed a bit. If they laughed she couldn't have done anything terrible, or not?
She swallowed. "So he's fine…" she ventured.
The gowned ones slowly calmed down. "I really hope not" grumbled someone, in half-voice.
"What's your name, miss?" asked the one with the tired appearance, wiping his tears.
"Magdalene Rice. Lene."
"Strong to be a muggle!" someone said, always in a half-voice.
"American (1), not… whatever he said" corrected Lene. The man with the tired faces smiled largely at her.
"Miss Rice, I can assure you that no one has the intention to criticise you to… had shot… Lord…" a thrill of horror passed along the crowd "… Him" concluded the man. "But we'd have some question for you, if it's possible."
Lene blasphemed mentally. She had heard right: Lord. She had forgotten that in England they had nobility, too. Probably she shot a member of the Royal Family, to add bad luck to bad luck. What will they do? Is there the death penalty, in the UK?
"About what you do before shooting, to be exact" added a red-haired man, zealous. Lene had noticed that he hadn't take off the eyes from her gun for a second. He seemed charmed by it.
She sighed.
"Do I need a layer?" she said.
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(1)This is an untranslatable pun between "Americano" and "Babbano". In Italian, in fact, Muggle is translated with "Babbano" that sound similar to " a silly one". I can't find a word to use in English, apart "muddle", of course, and it doesn't fit the statement.
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Please R&R!