Disclaimer: Any characters, places, people or things that you recognize are not mine.

From the Desk of Narcissa

Prologue: The Gift

It was on the morning of her tenth birthday when Narcissa Black received the first book. It was a small thing, filled with blank parchment, each page titles and bound with leather, black, of course.

Narcissa could not at first see the point of the book. After all, what use had she for something like this? It had nothing to read in it, and it was clearly not for schoolwork. It was from her grandfather, Pollux, and she did not dare ask him what it was for, so she waited until later and asked her older sister, Andromeda what it was for.

"It is a diary. You write your thoughts in it, things that you simply must get out, but don't want others to know, or simply things that happen to you over the course of the day. I doubt that he will ever ask to see it, so you needn't use it. He simply gives them to all of his grandchildren on their tenth birthdays. I threw mine away. I don't know for certain, but I suppose that Bella did the same."

"In fact, I really don't know what he thinks that we're going to do with him. I think he has some crazy idea that we'll write in them every day and title each entry 'From the desk of Andromeda Black' and then write 'dear diary, today I learned a new song on the piano. It is simply beautiful. I love it.' Honestly, you are much better off if you just throw it in the waste basket."

But Narcissa didn't dispose of the diary. She wrote in it. Not every day, but often enough. It became her companion during the time when her sisters were away at school, and then a refuge when schoolwork or schoolmates overwhelmed her.

The diary liked her. It didn't practically ignore her birthday just because it was the day before her sisters left for school. It didn't constantly tell her to sit straight or eat properly. It would never yell at her if it found that she was hiding storybooks under her bed.

She came to treasure that diary, and kept it for the rest of her life, a testament of the year before she started at Hogwarts and began to take on her role as a member of the Black family.

Author's note: This started out as a reflection, but as you can see, it got a little bit out of hand. I'm not totally certain how far I'm going to go with this, and it's sort of just a side thing, I'm focusing more on Second Chances, but it popped into my head, and even when I tried to get back to what I was supposed to be doing, which was writing Narcissa's reflection it wanted me to write it, so I did. If you like it and want me to continue please tell me. I promise that I'll respond to every signed review.