My Sister's Keeper: A Story of the Triwizard Tournament
Summary: AU. Born identical twins, Melinda Bobbin and Belinda Angyal were raised apart and as only children. Part of an experiment to determine the roles of genetics and environment on personality, they were separated in infancy and raised by families of different backgrounds and social standings. Students at, respectively, Hogwarts and Durmstrang, they would neither meet nor know of each other's existence…until the day they arrived in France to compete in the Triwizard Tournament.
Prologue: My Sister's Keeper
It has been years since the second Triwizard Tournament of the revival, postponed two years because of the aftermath of the Second War but held to show the world that we had been neither beaten nor broken, was played, but I still dream of it, sometimes. The warmth of France still seeps into my bones on these cold mornings we have, the ice statues of the Beauxbatons Yule Ball still glitter in memory, and the screams of the crowd still echo. I recall the face of Auguste, the Beauxbatons champion, as it looked when he was seventeen as easily as I recognize it when I see him now, and in the night the face of the first boy I ever kissed, just before the Third Task, comes to me once more. These are the things I dream about when I dream of the Tournament. I never dream about my sister.
On the most basic level, a twin is nothing more and nothing less than an exact genetic replica of someone, the result of an embryo that should have been one person splitting into two separate girls, in our case. On the higher levels, though, a twin, especially a twin sister, is so much more – and an infinite amount less. There is no bond such as tales tell of, no sense of loss or incompletion if one grows up without her. I of all people should know. I was seventeen before I knew I was not an only child, never mind an identical twin, and I never once suspected that it might be anything but utter truth. When I found her - or rather, when we found each other - it shook the foundations of my very world. It took us long enough, too, to get past the inter-school rivalry and the personal awkwardness and have some genuine feelings for each other, something I've never stopped regretting. I lost my twin the same year I got her back, and in the losing lost myself, too.
She was something, Melinda Bobbin was. A princess, almost, and a perfect little English Slytherin heiress anyway. Welcomed in society's best circles, sure to marry well…who wouldn't have wanted to be her? Until that year. Until the Triwizard Tournament. The world swears that Melinda Bobbin died that year, at the beginning of the best years of her life. A tragedy, they called it, but not enough to call off the Tournament. No one died the next time, at Durmstrang, and so now the Tournament is played every five years the way it was meant to be. For all the world knows, Melinda was just another tragic accident, regrettable but probably necessary for the Tournament to evolve into what it now is. I suppose that shows what the world does know – what anyone knows.
Lying here in the arms of the man who should have been her husband, the truth of us is clear, at least to me. I am my sister's keeper. Some would say that the things I have done are immoral at best and anathema at worst, but to hell with them. What I have done, I have done so that my sister can have the life she deserves, the life that was taken from her in France so many years ago. I keep her alive. I keep her safe. I keep her with those who love her as they could never have loved me..
Or at least this is what I have convinced myself is true.