The Black Tree

Written By: SilverDrama

Adapted from the fanfiction: The Adventures of Charlotte Black: The Legacy

Author's Note: Okay, so I've written this note about a million times since I claimed hiatus in the middle of my eighth grade. I would like to take this moment to say that while I am a lazy writer, please rest assured any readers who are still reading this, I doubt there are, that Charlotte has never for one day left my mind. She has, however changed. This is a warning. If you are attached to the old Charlotte, this may not be for you. (PS. I'm a senior in high school now…wow time flies, I meant to rewrite this ages ago)

Chapter One: The Man Behind Bars

She stared at the man across from her. His beard was scruffy and rather overgrown. He was the picture of insanity. His eyes were slightly off, only slightly, but still off. Her gray eyes matched his in color, but they were happier. She had not experienced life as he had; not yet. Her hair had once matched his ebony locks too, but with care, her hair was now a smooth peroxide blonde. He assumed it was her mother's influence.

There was silence between the two. There was normally a lot of silence between the two, actually, but today, for some reason, it troubled the man. This girl was all of the non-silence -that wasn't panicked screams- that he got; he liked it when they were talking. It vaguely reminded him of a time he missed, a time before all of this, a time before mind splitting depression, a time before solitude, a time before Azkaban. He had friends once, and the little girl sitting in front of him reminded him of that time when he had friends, back when he was as school.

"When do you start school?" He managed to croak out as his mind brushed over the topic.

The girl looked up. She was almost startled that the silence was broken. She pushed a piece of her long blonde hair out of her face. "Em, this year I think. Haven't gotten my letter though."

"You're old enough to go this year?" He asked, almost shocked. He hadn't realized that much time has passed. She was four when she first visited him – three years into his life sentence. She had to be eleven now. Had seven years really gone by since the little ebony curled toddler visited him for the first time? He remembered that day perfectly.

"You have a visitor." The guard said shortly. This particular guard hardly dealt with inmates well.

The guard unlocked the door and led him down into a small and cramped room. There was a desk with chairs on either side. He was sat on the side closest to the door he came through.

As he sat down, the door on the other side opened. He was shocked by who came in the door. It was his mother. And trust him; he did not get along at all well with his mother. He hadn't seen her since he was about fifteen or sixteen-he couldn't quite remember which. Trailing after his mother was her granddaughter. Her hair was to her shoulders and in tight black curls. His mother sat the toddler in the seat across from him, bowed her head towards him, and left.

He was alone with the little girl, the infamous little girl in his life. The only person he would see for the next two years-his only company.

She could barely peer over the table with her short height, but she managed. "So you're my dad?" She asked curiously. There was a desperation in her voice. A type of longing, as though she had been waiting quite a while to meet one of her parents. Her eyes-her gray eyes-lit up as she looked at him.

He looked at the child. Sometimes while he was in prison, he wished she was his child, like her birth certificate said. She wasn't though. She was his brothers', but that was too complicated of a matter. So instead, he just nodded.

"I'm ten now." The girl said to him.

He paused for a moment. "You go to Hogwarts when you're-."

"Eleven, I know." She cut him off. "I'll be eleven in a week."

He nodded. She'll be eleven? She was a year old when he was put in this hell hole. Had he really spent almost the last decade of his life in here?

"Time's up." The guard announced.

The prisoner nodded and got up to go back to his cell.

The girl stood up from the table and before she left, she looked at the man behind bars.

"Bye Sirius."

And she left.

Libby was twirling a piece of her blonde hair in her fingers. "Where is she?" She began standing on her tip toes as she complained to Louis.

Louis took a sip of his butterbeer as he tried to ignore Libby. She wasn't having that at all though. "Come on, you two used to be like siblings, you know her better than anyone."

Louis gave her an odd look as he put his drink down and straightened his blazer. "Okay, Libby, try and understand this as I explain this to you for the fiftieth time. Charlotte and I have never, and will never, be siblings. We were step-cousins a few years ago when my uncle and her mother were married. We aren't actually related and we haven't lived in the same household since that French villa in the summer of '87."

"Regardless," whined Libby, "she should be here by now. I specifically told her to be here at noon, and it's," Libby glanced down at her golden watch, "almost 1:00."

Louis put a finger to Libby's lips. "I have a headache, shut up. She'll be here when she gets here."

"Thank you master of the freaking obvious," Libby snapped before storming off to find someone else to complain to. Maybe Teddy…

Constantine Megalos no longer understood what was enticing about the idea of marriage. He wasn't a loveless shrew, far from it, he was a husband. He was a husband married to the most sinister, selfish, and vain woman the universe had ever met. She was also one of the most sexual beings he had ever met. While that had once been the thing that had attracted him to the woman in the first place, it wasn't so appealing when his wife was having blatant affairs.

Constantine considered divorce a lot, but there were children to think about. Not his children –no, he would never have children- but rather her children. She had a ten year old daughter, eight year old twins (a girl and a boy), a six year old girl, and a four year old girl. Constantine admittingly was attached to the children. Well, except the six year old; there was something in her eyes that unsettled him, but still, he tried to be nice.

There was a crash from the room above him. He began thinking about the house's floor plan. Above the parlour was the … master bedroom! So it was his wife making a ruckus. He was too lazy –and to be frank, too tipsy– to care about what was going on up there. It sounded like glass breaking, so he figured it was just a liquor bottle, and Eleanor could figure that out on her own.

There was another crash, this time from the ground floor. It was a completely different sound. It wasn't the sound of colliding wood and glass; it was the sound of a door slamming shut.

"Mum!" A curious young girl's voice drifted up the staircase into the parlour.

There was the sound of footsteps on the stairs and suddenly Constantine came face to face with the young girl as she ran past the stairs into the parlour. It was his ten year old step-daughter: Charlotte.

Charlotte wasn't her real name, but she threw extreme fits if anyone referred to her as anything else. (He couldn't blame her, she had the longest name he'd ever heard).

"Constantine, have you seen my mum?" Charlotte asked as she jumped around impatiently she looked ready to run off, but without any direction, her body was merely gaining speed without moving anywhere.

"I think she's in her room," Constantine said. Charlotte made a move out the door, but Constantine cut her off, "I think she spilled a perfume or something," he lied, "so you might not want to bother her at the moment."

Charlotte nodded obediently and trudged back into the parlour. If Eleanor was in a bad mood, it did no one any good asking her of anything.

She looked back at Constantine, "You know, I do know my mother was drinking. You don't have to hide it from me."

Constantine nodded and slowly pushed the gin that he had in his hand behind him.

"And you don't have to hide that from me either. It's not a big deal."

Constantine shook his head, but ignored the issue. "So what do you need your mother for?"

Charlotte's eyes lit up as she remembered. "I need these navy and tangerine striped heels because Libby gave them to me to wear to her mother's show and if I don't have them, she'll murder me, and I wouldn't make a beautiful corpse without those shoes." She whined in a fast pace. It was pretty common that she whined. Out of all of Eleanor's children, Charlotte whined the most. She even whined more than four year old Grace. Eventually, his mind numbed to her whining.

"Did you check your closet?" He asked her.

Charlotte gave him an unimpressed look. "Which one of them?"

That was right, the ten year old had a ridiculous number of large closets….she had that much clothing. In fact, he was sure she had more closets than his parents had bedrooms.

"Under your bed?" He guessed.

"Spotless," she replied.

"Emily's room?"

"Scoured and investigated." She smiled with almost an evil glint in her eyes.

"With your au pair?"

Her eyes lit up and Charlotte ran off instantly, "Thank you!" She yelled out from behind her.

Libby was almost jumping up and down as her older sister tried tying the bow on the back of her dress. "I am going to kill her. Where is she?" Her voice was frantic and her body was shaking so much that she kept ruining the bow her sister was tying. Mary-Jane, her elder sister, wasn't worried so much about the bow as she was worried that Libby might wrinkle the fabric. She put her hands on Libby's waist and held her down.

"Calm down, or I'll jab you with a pinning needle." She threatened holding up the pin cushion to make her point clearer.

Libby gulped and nodded and she stopped shaking, which meant that the tension went towards anger and her porcelain face started to turn as red as a tomato. "I wish Marco had taught me to fight before he left for Germany, because I want to kick her-."

Mary-Jane cut her off, "Charlotte!"

Libby looked up, almost embarrassed, at where Mary-Jane was looking. She saw the one, the only, Charlotte Black, her dead best friend.

She looked at Charlotte with an angry scowl. "You should go shopping for caskets." She announced.

Charlotte gave her an odd look. "Why? You can't murder me. You'll get the shoes bloody."

"No, you should buy a casket for our friendship. It's dead to me." She said extremely haughtily and seriously.

Mary-Jane burst out into laughter. "Are you serious, Libby? Stop being so melodramatic and don't play with your hair." She pulled Libby's hands from her head of hair. "It'll fall out if you do that."

Mary-Jane tucked the pin cushion back into the sewing box and left the room.

After Mary-Jane left, Libby turned her head to Charlotte. "Where were you?" She was breaking up her syllables as she spoke.

"Well I was having problems finding the shoes…" She trailed off.

Libby's eyes flared up. "You lost them?" She screamed.

Charlotte looked at her almost bemused. She pointed to her feet. "Do they look lost? Geesh, get a grip. I lost them for five minutes. And the reason I'm late is because it's Wednesday and I was visiting him."

Libby's face softened. That changed everything.

"Oh, sorry. I guess I forgot." She knew about Sirius. Charlotte had told her a few months ago why Wednesdays were bad days. "Um," she was nervous. "You wanna go give the shoes back to my mom and see if she doesn't kill us in time to watch the show?" She smiled, trying to lighten up the mood.

Charlotte nodded enthusiastically and pulled the shoes off before she and Libby went running to find Molly Moon.

Molly –Libby's mother refused to be referred to as a Mrs. ("You make me sound old, Charlotte!")- hardly even noticed the shoes were gone and the evening went down very well. Anorexic girls walked down a runway wearing clothes whose price could put most of the magical community into poverty, and Charlotte and Libby watched from backstage, giggling the entire time.

"Cheers." The two clicked champagne glasses.

By the time Charlotte got home, it was past midnight and she was the only one home. She liked her house like this. Quiet, still, and comfortable. Charlotte went into the kitchen and grabbed an apple and took a bite out of it. She went and sat down at the breakfast nook. She began flipping through the mail that had come in. There was a lot of mail, but that was common.

Grace's dad would write to her, Victoria-Rose's grandmother always sent her postcards from whatever country she was in, Emily and Dominic had a pen-pal in Canada, and then Constantine got an assortment of mail from relatives and friends. Charlotte got occasional letters from her ex step-brother and her best friend, and then there was no place to begin describing how much mail Eleanor got.

Most of the pile had been depleted. Grace had already attempted to read her letter from her dad (and Charlotte was sure that once Grace gave up on reading it, Constantine read it to her). Eleanor had moved most of her mail as well. As Charlotte flipped through the mail, she found a letter from Canada, two from Constantine's mother, a bill Eleanor didn't want to pay, a postcard from Madrid, and then Charlotte hit her mail.

There was a postcard for her from Blaise (Greetings From Italy!)

Char,
Italy's lame. France was
much better. Anyway,
have you talked to Teddy
lately? Do you know
which school he picked?
I hope he was kidding
about Durmstrang. He
doesn't even speak the
language. Mum says hi.
-Blaise

Charlotte threw the postcard on the table –she intended to pin it to the board she had of all their other postcards- and kept flipping through. And then she found them. She threw the rest of the mail aside and carefully picked up four envelopes. She nervously spread them across the table and muttered to herself, "Oh shit."

Post-Script Note: Um, so Charlotte's last line there is exactly what I thought as I finished this chapter. Three years of hiatus and I'm done. There's no more revisions. I know what I'm writing. Oh, and the tone of this story will change. It won't be girls freaking out over shoes all of the time, I swear. It covers way better things than shoes. And if I'm posting this, then it has Sprinkles' approval!

-Silver