Saviour, Chapter 1

Impressionable

Alanna had never really been of the impressionable sort. An obstinately fiery child, she had always insisted on forging her own crude path, separate from the common road. Even during the crucial years of adolescence, when the most resolute of children bend and break, she seemed impermeable as ever to outside influence. She did not conform. She did not change. And because of her peculiar nature, none really knew her.

She was unclassifiable by normal standards, and therefore unpredictable. All mistook this for danger; that was the way of young girls. None braved a close friendship with her, lest they find themselves plunged into unfamiliar territory. They did not dare.

But if anyone had looked closely enough, they would have seen that her psyche swung dangerously to and fro, her heart suspended on a pendulum. She went from extreme to perilous extreme across that arc and never stayed in the same place even as long as she herself deemed necessary. The arc itself, the range in which she wavered back and forth, seemed to grow over time, until it came to a point where she felt that her heart could soar in the sky and crash on the rocks within the same instant. And in her mind there was nobody to command control. So simply she had none.

As a result, school was a long string of dismal failures. Her concentration splayed about so that others could never depend on her to remember anything. Patience was something that she had never had. And though she was a witch—she had been granted acceptance to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry—she had seemingly no aptitude for anything magical. Her lack of focus made it impossible.

In this manner she had spent seventeen long years before coming of age, dissatisfied and restless for want of a goal. She regarded Hogwarts as a general inconvenience, an obstacle which limited her, though she greatly preferred the castle to her summer lodgings: she stayed at an orphanage in stinking, festering Liverpool.

Nobody knew that she was an orphan. She rarely thought about her parents and spoke of them even less. What was the point? They were gone, and she knew nearly nothing about it. On the books she was a pureblood, simply by the surname they had left her with at the orphanage: Lancaster. The workers at the orphanage told her that her mother had been burdened with a mysterious disorder of the psyche, and that her father had left them both when the woman's behavior became unbearable. Her mother had been found unconscious, sedated with drugs, a few weeks later.

Alanna Lancaster had been four. She remembered nothing of her mother, but of her father she knew his laugh. A low chuckling, like a man is prone to uttering when he is amused by his child. But every time she heard a sound remotely like her father's laugh, it sent a searing pain through her heart. That was why she preferred not to remember them. She would much rather keep to the familiarity of her own life than delve into the depths of the pain hidden in her memories.

Even as she isolated these thoughts within her brain, a flammable temper and unstable mood swings alienated her from the rest of her peers. Girls who were more prone to banding together, who thrived as a group, wanted nothing to do with her eccentricity. In plain defiance, she expressed no interest in ever joining them. And although she later grew into a beauty of peculiar features, with dark hair and light green eyes, she also never expressed an interest in the boys that dared to pursue her. There was a reason there, as well. And his name was Rabastan Lestrange.

Rabastan Lestrange and his older brother Rodolphus looked to be of the ordinary pureblood sort. They were dark-haired with aristocratic features and a regal air. Both showed the haughty disdain of generations in their manner. Anyone else would say that Rabastan Lestrange was absolutely predictable.

But there was something in his eyes that simply fascinated Alanna. She had never once in her life met another person who seemed to embody the state of her own scattered soul in their own, but in Rabastan's face there lay a dark and incomprehensible chaos that, unknown to others, had been familiar to her for years. It was neither wholly despair nor indecision that created such a feeling, and she had yet to understand it herself. But the darkness and the swinging of their hearts' pendulums connected him to her, and she longed for him to recognize himself in her as she had in him.

After discovering this strange restlessness in another, for the first time in her life, Alanna felt as though she were not whole; it was as though she needed someone else to be complete. She was certain that she and Rabastan were two fragments that would only heal when they were united. And the draw she felt towards him was far less selfish than that of unrequited love; it seemed inevitable to her that they were already bonded by fate.

The interest in life that had dimmed within her during her early years of discontent was to be sparked anew by the discovery of Rabastan Lestrange, but in a different manner. Never again would she assume the carefree happiness of a child, for even when the matter was completely unrelated, her mind automatically deferred to him. She knew that even as her heart's pendulum swung, there was now somebody to command control. Her life had been adamantly fused with his, and bucked and wavered with his every move. It could have been only a product of her psyche's instability, but it could have just as easily been the catalyst that spurred her to new heights.

Alanna Lancaster had never been of the impressionable sort. But when it came to Rabastan, Alanna was as impressionable as she needed to be.

Strong as her feelings were, it took nearly six years for him to deign to glance her way. He was a fleeting sort of partner, jumping from girl to girl and losing interest quickly. It wasn't because he set out to hurt them; quite the opposite, he was often consumed with confused guilt after his latest flight. Alanna, upon examination, could see the visible unquiet in him after these episodes. He simply could not help himself.

Again, this only served to confirm to her that they were one and the same. Rabastan's dating conquests had never hurt Alanna, because she knew and understood that they meant nothing to him.

She could understand, because it was exactly the way she had been with everyone who had ever shown her affection. Once the pendulum began to swing back in the other direction, Alanna was gone to them, maybe for a week, maybe forever. She wandered, dissatisfied, because she knew that there was only one person in the world whose company she needed—and she was impatient to cast aside all else in deference to that bond.

Nobody she knew could tolerate this treatment from her, and Rabastan was the only other who doled it out. It was undeniable that they were meant for each other.

For the first five years at Hogwarts, Alanna had watched him mainly from afar. They belonged to the same House, Slytherin, but he was a year older than her, and became a prefect in his fifth year. Because they virtually never crossed paths, she could only satisfy herself with covert glances while in the Slytherin common room or the Great Hall during meals. She was both desperate and terrified to speak to him, and though the chance never arose, she agonized over it as if it had. What could one say to the man whose fate was irreversibly bound to yours?

From first year through fifth year, the arc of the pendulum swung increasingly wider as her mood began to depend solely on his. With his smile, her heart would soar. She could survive for days on a single glance of his face.

But there were inevitably times when he frowned, and if she caught sight of it, her heart would crash. They were one and the same, so what made him unhappy could surely break her as well. She would lie in bed for days after these episodes, her mind simultaneously empty and racing.

Even so, the strangest, most unpredictable way in which Rabastan affected her was when he laughed. The deep chuckle that sounded from his throat made Alanna want to vomit with grief, for it was identical to the one which haunted her only memory of her family. And yet, because such a horrid sound emitted from a heavenly being, she endured it, and in time even came to treasure it. Like every smile that she had ever spotted on his face, she hoarded his laughs like personal tokens.

Despite her eager affection, she could not say for sure exactly when he had started to notice her. It was sixth year, the abandoned time between the crushing OWL exams and the ominous NEWTs. It seemed that he spent less time studying than he should have, as a seventh year. Instead he consulted his pureblood friends constantly, their conversations hidden in a corner of the common room behind serious expressions. But once in a while he looked up to see her watching them curiously. After several such instances, he began to give her a small smile every time he saw her in passing. It was like they shared a secret, though Alanna really knew nothing.

And after that, their relationship had progressed faster than she had thought possible. He began to catch her nightly in front of the girls' staircase. Propriety thrown aside, he recognized at once the advantage he had over her. Whatever he asked of her, she acquiesced. With each passing day, Alanna surrendered more to him than she had ever known she owned. In less than a fortnight, she had given herself up to him wholly.

At the time she had attributed this new attention to his long-overdue recognition of the bond between them, but in reality it had been something of a mix between an attraction to her beauty and a need to subdue her curiosity for the sake of his friends.

To Alanna, his obscurity seemed to her a small price to pay for his affection, and the following year passed in a blur of rare happiness and content. The pendulum ceased to swing. It seemed that she had been right all along, that only the safety of Rabastan's embrace could bring the peace she had so coveted in her chaotic mind for years. And thankfully, blissfully, when the pendulum ceased to swing, she also ceased to think.

In fact, the one and only thing Alanna could recall from those days with absolute clarity was the day he finally admitted what he and his friends had been up to.

He was eighteen, graduated and long-gone from Hogwarts. Alanna suffered through only a month of school without him before, caught in a raging need, she stole a broomstick from the Quidditch stores and disappeared for good. The Headmaster, knowing her orphan state and also her relationship with the younger Lestrange brother, regretfully sent her belongings to Rabastan's house when it appeared that Alanna was never going to return.

When these packages arrived at his door, Rabastan knew with some chagrin that Alanna intended to stay with him permanently, and resolved to truly confide in her. Not because he wanted her to know, but because it was the easiest way: it would be too difficult to lie to her when she lived under the same roof. And by then he had figured out her dependence on him as well. He knew she would possibly die before betraying him.

"Rodolphus and I are part of a, erm, secret society," he had begun. "It is headed by an old graduate of Hogwarts by the name of Tom Riddle."

"Oh, is he an Auror? An Unspeakable?" Alanna asked.

Rabastan looked uncomfortable. "No, he isn't. He's an innovative wizard with some—er—ideas for social reform. It involves…purifying the Wizarding race to raise our potential for achieving greatness."

"It sounds wonderful," Alanna pronounced, and there had been no further questions asked. It came as no surprise to her that such underground anti-Ministry policy organizations existed. After all, it was the 70s, a time of radical social upheaval and the rise of the most opinionated young generation ever raised by the Wizarding world. Even when Rabastan was on a task for his association and came home late, or did not come home to spend the night at all, she overlooked it without suspicion. She had spent the last seventeen years of her life alone and eternally waiting for Rabastan, so this was no different.

There was nothing much in that quiet house to do. When Rabastan was gone, nobody came and went, and the pendulum swung a wider arc than ever. Alanna woke up every morning full of hope, and every night returned to an empty bed in a fit of despair. Some days she neglected to get out of bed at all.

There were times when she regretted ever leaving Hogwarts. Sometime between their permanent establishment as a couple and Rabastan's increasing involvement with his organization, Alanna realized that she had hemmed herself in completely. Without a complete education, she had no aspirations for the future, save to one day hold the title of Mrs. Rabastan Lestrange. But even as this realization cast a hopeless pallor on her lonely days, Alanna knew without a doubt that she could not bear to leave. Without him, she was broken and confused. With him, the pendulum ceased to swing.

She had taken to listening to the wireless in the sitting room, sometimes laughing, sometimes weeping, and mostly painfully indifferent. It was on those days that the pendulum had halted momentarily of its own accord in a middle zone, and she could bring herself to care about nothing, because the man who completed her was not there. But every time he entered the door, weary but exhilarated, unfailingly Alanna would leap up from her seat and fling her arms around his neck in an embrace that made up for all she had felt in his absence.

It was a cycle, an unstoppable continuity in which both of them seemed unsatisfied, but also unwilling to contribute more. Alanna was afraid that any stress, a single shift, would fracture their delicate balance and Rabastan would be gone to her forever.

Rabastan only feared that if he dismissed her, and hurt her enough, she would go to the Ministry about his underground society. And he would then be finished.

In all truth, he felt a certain endearment towards the woman who looked to him with such unyielding adoration. He didn't wish to hurt her; she was like a relic that held no real interest, but which he could not yet afford to throw away. She kept his household and left him free to pursue other interests. Therefore, it was to his advantage to reserve a small part of his love for her.

And so in this way these two lived for long years. It was neither a miserable nor happy existence, but they could not hope to expect anything more from one another.

A/N: Hey guys, I decided to post this story here as well as HPFF. Please let me know if you like this or not! All feedback is appreciated.