Disclaimer: Not JKR, ect., ect.
1. a changeling born
She's born in April, when the sprawling gardens of their vineyard home in Chartreuse, France, are just beginning to bud. Druella's little tuft of hair is the same colour as the red, red roses for a heartbeat, and then it shimmers to the delicate, silvery blonde it was the moment she came out; and then blue, and green, and black and her mother is crying in horror as the changes go on and on and on.
Metamorphagai are rare, but they do run in families, as squibs do.
Druella is the first to appear in the pure, pure blood of Rosier, and her father never looks at her mother the same way after - she doesn't know this, grows up with this. Her mother will always hate her for that, for being broken in a way that can't be fixed. She doesn't know if somewhere in her mother's blood there's a reason for the way she changes, moment to moment, impulse to impulse, and she never finds out.
The first six years of her life are spent in the manor, kept away from all but her mother and father, and the brother who will have to take up the burden of her secret after them - her little brother, to whom she owes her respect, for she's only a girl, and a useless one at that.
"You must learn not to change," Her mother says, cold and stern and hateful, that this has been given to her.
Druella doesn't know how not to change, not at first. It's hard, really. Her looks change at the barest thought, the slightest impulse - she thinks how pretty the new blue china is and suddenly her eyes and hair mirror it.
She learns. It's hard, and painful because she won't learn otherwise, she asks once why but eventually she learns to keep to the most natural state of being. She doesn't know if it's her, if this is really what Druella Rosier looks like, but it feels right, so she supposes it's as close as she'll ever get.
The uncertain, hesitant face in the mirror is heart-shaped with narrow, sharp features, and dashed thin lips. Her hair has a tendency to curl, and is closer to her father's light blonde than her mother's darker shade. Druella cups her cheeks with slender little hands and wonders if it's a lie or not.
It doesn't matter, anyway. Her mother sees one advantage to this whole misery; she shows Druella pictures, has her little girl learn how to have fuller lips, softer features; Druella's hair becomes softer, straighter, less given to frizz. She's more beautiful like this, her mother tells her, and Druella supposes this must be true; it's a hopeless to think it'll make her mother proud of her, but at least it will make her pleased, for a time.
So Druella at six is beautiful in an unearthly way, and restrained in a way no child should be.
She doesn't know why she changes and no one else does, not at six; she only knows it's a 'curse' and she's terrible for making her family suffer it. She reads poetry books taken from her father's library and supposes she must be a fairy child, a wicked thing, stuck between evil and good, like the girl in Charlotte Mew's poem. She thinks Charlotte Mew must have been like her, and it makes her feel a bit better to know she's not the only fairy girl in the world.
Druella's worst fear, as a little girl, is that she'll be taken back to wherever she came from and she'll never see her family again. They don't love her, not really, but they tolerate her, and she knows them. She thinks that's love, at six, and she doesn't want to lose that. It's all she knows.
She'll know differently later, when she attends school and spends most of her time sequestered in the library; there she'll find the word in a book she pulled at random, will read what she is while her classmates turn over the newest Transfiguration problem in their heads.
It won't make a difference, except that it will.