Disclaimer: I don't own the Harry Potter universe or any of its characters. Those belong to the very rich and blond J. K. Rowing.
Warning: I don't have a beta, so there might be some grammar issues, but please know I tried my best to keep those little monsters out.
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Left in the Cold:
Salazar grumbled as his foot landed in a mud puddle. He irritably pulled up the hem of his emerald green robe and flicked back a lock of his jet hair as he inspected the mess his left foot his become before casting a cleaning charm at it. He continued to mutter darkly about said mess as he walked the pathway to his warded Keep.
Salazar suddenly felt a pang of loneliness as he remembered when his robes had been in a similar situation and Helga had cast a quick cleaning charm before he had even been able to start complaining. "What are you, Salazar," she'd asked, "a wizard or a muggle?" He had sputtered a good five minutes after that while Godric had chuckled merrily and Rowena had giggled behind her hand.
Godric hadn't been able to use his right hand for a whole week once Salazar had regained his wits.
Salazar shook his head in an effort to banish the memories away. He had left Hogwarts and for a good reason—it wouldn't do any good for him to come running back within an hour of leaving. (Godric would never let him live it down for one.) Nodding to himself, Salazar set off once again.
It took him a while to recognize it—it wasn't as if he'd heard the noise often, after all—but when he did he had dismissed it. A baby crying. But surely the babe was in the arms of its mother and was only crying from the cold. Never mind that no other muggles lived nearby his home and he the fact that he was currently surrounded by forest. Not even the most barbarian of muggles would leave a baby out in the late autumn cold.
Right?
But as Salazar got closer to his home and the crying got more insistent, he began to wonder. Finally the babe's wails were so loud the Salazar stepped off the path and the in the direction of the child's cries—if only to give the carless muggle guarding it a piece of his mind.
And when Salazar found the babe—all alone on the ground leaning against an oak tree swaddled in a thin and worn brown blanket, and as scared as anything—he felt not only his rage at the child's parents increase tenfold, but his concern for the child increase as well.
The little baby ceased its crying briefly to look up at Salazar with huge soulful baby-blue eyes, and Salazar felt his heart melt immediately. Then the babe was wailing again for all its worth as Salazar gingerly picked it up and cradled it in his arms.
"Where are your parents, little one?" he asked the baby, not expecting an answer. So he wasn't really surprised when he just got more tears for a response. "Well, whoever they are, they don't deserve you, little one." Salazar continued under his breath.
It wasn't until Salazar and his new charge were safely inside his Keep and in front of a roaring fire that Salazar realized something. "How long were you in the cold, little babe?"he asked his young charge. Though it was not yet winter, the autumn chill was cold enough to cause frost bite and even death if one stayed out long enough in it without a cloak or at least thick clothing.
The baby—now know to be a girl according to the house elf who had changed the child's former blanket in favor of a thick and soft one of deep purple—just gurgled at him happily and tugged at a lock of his long hair. Salazar hummed from the back of his throat, as if he had received only the most eloquent of answers.
The baby had wisps of thin coal colored baby-fine hair that glinted a deep auburn in the firelight. Chubby baby hands clutched at Salazar's robes as the baby demanded in the clearest of baby-voices "foo!"
Chuckling at his little charge, Salazar called a house elf to bring them both warm soup to heat their bones.
The steaming bowls arrived in front of them moments later and, though Salazar knew his late father would be shouting by now about not eating at the proper dining table, Salazar still felt the chill from the day's journey and refused to leave the fireside. He dipped the wooden spoon into the soup, catching a chunk of chicken on the way up, blew on it until he felt the spoonful cool enough, and pressed the rim of the spoon to the baby's lips.
The infant reared back her head and wrinkled her nose cutely at the meat floating in the broth until, to Salazar's amazement, the pale chicken turned to dark beef—the baby giggled and clapped her hands excitedly.
Salazar blinked, looked upon his new charge in a new light, and blinked again before smirking and feeding the baby her soup. But his smile quickly diminished as he realized the most probable cause of why his little infant was in the forest around his Keep. Muggleborn children were said to sometimes show their magic as young as infants—which was rarely received well by their deeply religious parents and the local ministers who believed magic to be a sin. True, Salazar had heard the horror stories of what muggle parents could do to their young, but he had never really grasped the concept that a child's own parents could leave a baby in the woods alone to die.
Salazar had to stomp down on the sudden urge to hunt down his baby's parents himself and kill them.
Then the baby—whom Salazar would have to name soon—tugged on his hair again and said quite loudly, "foo!"
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"Ailsa Sytherin!" Salazar bellowed after his currently laughing, wild eight-year-old, "Get back here this instant! You'll trip!"
Her purple and silver robes swished roughly around her as she ran through the wild lavender that grew around the Keep. "I never trip Papa—come and get me!" she cried back.
Salazar sighed before calmly following his adopted daughter at a much more sedated pace. Ailsa's bloody midnight hair had taken after his in that they both had curtains of dark waves cascading past their shoulders. They both also had pale white skin except that, where Salazar's skin always tanned a deep golden brown in the summer, his daughter's only burned—though she did get a light dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheekbones. The dark head in front of him turned to reveal a pair of ice-blue eyes and plump child lips pulled into a pout. "You're no fun when you're quite like this, Papa." Ailsa whined.
Salazar raised an eyebrow. "And when am I not, child?"
"Well, there was the time when I played in the mud when I was four, or when I tried to bring a wild rabbit in as a pet and named it Floppy, or when—"
"Alright, child, I understand. How about we go inside for our midday meal and then I'll do my best to be loud for you?"
"Okay, Papa! But you have to be really loud this time. Not like last time when you just made a loud noise with your wand." Ailsa mock scolded as she skipped up to her father before taking his offered hand in hers.
Ailsa loved her papa because, even though he's not very loud like her and isn't nearly as hyper—and scolded her whenever she ran inside the Keep—she knew he loved her with all his heart and he tried his best to make her happy. He even gave her his gold locket her last birthday—well, the anniversary of the day he found her since they didn't know her real birthday. But the thoughts of her "birthday" and all that entrailed brought up a troublesome thought: how would she bear not knowing where she really came from-even as painful as they were, and of course she didn't want to be anywhere other than where she was right then-when she went to Hogwarts?
"Papa?" she asked. Salazar hummed at her in acknowledgment and she went on. "What will I say when I go to Hogwarts and they ask about my parents? You've already said that I can't say I'm your daughter 'cause-"
"Because," Salazar automaticaly corrected.
"-because you left, and I don't know my blood parents or the village I came from, so what do I say?"
Salazer stopped and knelt down to where he was eye-level with Ailsa, his dark oak leaf eyes meeting her winter ice, and willed her to listen and understand him. "You will tell them that your homelife is none of their bussiness other than that you have a good home and a father that loves you more than anything else in the whole world." He even gave the sentence an air of finality by kissing his daughter right on the tip of her nose and starting to walk back towards their home, tugging her along with him.
Ailsa closed her eyes in happiness and kissed the back of her father's hand, missing the grin her father gave her as he felt it. She didn't miss it when he scooped her up in his arms and kissed her forhead, with his black goatee brushing her cheeks, however. Her half-shrieks of laughter and embarassment along with Salazar's deep chuckle could be heard by the house elf all the way on the other side of the Keep.
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Well, that's it for now. I may write a sequel later, but, well you never know. (I thought people might get a kick out of the fact that Tommy-Boy's so engrossed in being the heir of Salazar Sytherin when Salazar never had any children other than Ailsa-at least in this story. All that bragging when he wasn't even biologically related. Funny, huh?) Anyway, please review! Reviews make an author's world go 'round.