Victoria Smith
1928-1943
Volant ex Mortem
I'd visited only once after her funeral, after I graduated from Hogwarts and would never ever go back. They asked me what words should go on her gravestone and for some reason I told them my namesake. She was dead now, my greatest weakness destroyed, and no one would ever make the connection between her and I. In a cemetry up the road from Wool's orphanage she was burried, I would never go back, but I would think of her. She was the reason for my fear of death, my hatred of hesitation, she was my conviction and motivation, she was how I knew, without a doubt that I was an evil man.
I often wondered through my life what her advise would be, about the defense job I didn't get, the dissapointing Job at Borgin and Burkes, my sending the house elf to azkaban for the murder of her mistress. What her thoughts on the prophecy would be. I often wondered, saydreamed you coud say of a life where she was Aquilla Black and she was well and magical; how she might have changed my life, what she would be like as an adult, an elder, a mother, even, thoughts that had itruded on me when thinking about my brief, sad meeting with the mudblood Potter.
More disturbing yet, were thoughts of what our children would have been like, had she been a witch and had she lived. I perhaps had the thought twice in my life, of her growing to a young woman and our marriage and having children, what I would call the normal progression of a relationship between a boy and a girl like we were though I also understood I had no desire, capacity or need to live a life like that. Thoughts like this wasted my time and did nothing for my being in a good mood. She was dead, I'd made sure of that.
But I would see her once more, upon my death that is, the final death. When my beloved horcruxes were destroyed and my enemy killed me with pure luck and a second year spell. All my choices up until that moment bared down on me but none more so than the night I'd killed Victoria Smith. I had no regret in me for my choices, I had little to nothing human left by this point, it had been decades since I'd even thought of her for any length of time.
She was strong again, standing tall and proud, young, but older than when she died, Bellatrix would not know my favrotism of her was due to her resemblace to this squib aunt she'd never even know existed. It would have disgusted her, the association with the non magical.
She just stared at me with those familliar dark eyes, I was weak now, the weak one, deformed and bloody. Not aware - a fraction of myself. She would not touch me, would not speak, I didn't know her purpose here, if there was one, she just stared for a long time. I wonder if she met every destroyed piece of my soul, but I knew she hadn't; those parts of myself were destroyed, death was saved for the living.
It was a long time before she left me. I didn't see her again. I finally understood there were worse things than death.