• — • — •
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
—OSCAR WILDE
• — • — •
"I've been looking forward to meeting you, Aeliana."
Voldemort's voice slithered over her like a soft caress. Aeliana shivered with an uneven mixture of pent up anticipation and delight. She'd been waiting for this moment for so long.
"Thank you, my lord. You flatter me more than I deserve. It is I who have been wanting to meet you," Lia replied, meaning every word.
He stepped forward, gesturing for her to rise from her steep bow. Around them, a dozen Death Eaters crowded the Great Hall of Malfoy Manor, each with their face concealed by a dark mask. Lia, alone, wore her regular robes, as opposed to their elaborate dark twisting folds.
"I must admit, I'd always hoped the Gryffindors would side by my cause. A shame how things turned out. I would have liked to avoid spilling such rare, pure blood," Voldemort said.
"No! It is I who am ashamed, my lord. I am sorry for how my family behaved, and I hope you will not judge me by their foolishness, my lord," Lia begged, gripped by a foreign passion. "Even if it is just me now, the Gryffindor line would like nothing more than to make your dream our own."
"Yes, that's what I hoped," he mused, circling slowly around her, his long, draping robes trailing behind. "But I need proof of your loyalty."
"Anything, my lord," she replied earnestly. "I would do anything for you."
She meant every word. Her heart ached to serve him; it was the only thing she really wanted. Her parents were fools for turning their backs on him. As far as she was concerned, the world was better off with them gone.
"Then open your mind," he said, placing a cold finger to her temple. "Let me see your desire to serve me."
"Of course, my lord." Lia shut her eyes, savouring the feeling of his cool skin against hers.
Slowly, she lowered all the wards protecting her mind. After living so long with them present, she forgot the vulnerable feeling of an exposed mind. It was like being naked, alone in the middle of a sandy beach. She could feel each breeze with a sharp, cutting clarity, except it wasn't a breeze at all, but this new, foreign mind.
Deep down, somewhere, a part of her screamed to throw her walls back in place as Lord Voldemort dived through her memories. Lia frowned at the urge. Why would she want to keep him out? This was all she ever wanted... right?
She saw what he saw as he rifled through her head. Her annoyance at her old, idiot friends for wanting to keep her away from Lord Voldemort, the desperate search to find out everything that she could about him, her joy when Regulus and them said she would finally get to meet their master, and even her confusion the time Sirius kissed her a few days after her family's funeral. The thought of Sirius sent a shot something burning through her, but what? The emotion dissipated almost immediately, so fast she was certain she'd imagined it.
By the end of it, her mind felt rubbed raw, weak from overexertion, but Voldemort seemed satisfied. He took a solitary step back and turned to the assembled Death Eaters, his arms spread wide in welcome.
"My friends," he began, diplomatically, "today our ranks grow by one, and not just anyone, but by a person whose noble lineage nearly matches my own. Meet our newest addition, the last heir of Gryffindor!"
Elation rose like a balloon at his words. Nothing could have matched the pure jubilation thundering through her veins at that moment.
"Your wand arm," Lord Voldemort ordered. striding back towards her.
Without hesitation, Lia rolled up the sleeve covering her left arm and held it out. He pulled out his wand with one hand and grasping her arm firmly with the other. He was unnaturally cold, like a corpse pulled from a freezing lake, yet his grip remained tight as a vice, almost painfully so.
Then his wand made contact with her forearm. In an instant, it was like her arm went from being in a pail of ice water to being shoved into a bucket of searing lava. Her breathing came out in uneven huffs as she tried to hold in the scream bubbling up her throat.
As quickly as it began, it was over. Lia collapsed onto her side, clutching her new brand close to her heart. Her very own Dark Mark. Her own part of him.
"Th-thank you, my lord," she gasped breathlessly, scrambling back to her feet. "Thank you. Thank you..."
"Congratulations, Aeliana. Welcome to your new family. I look foreword to talking with you soon."
With that, he strode out the great double doors, a massive snake sliding across the tiles after him. The moment he was gone, Regulus appeared by her side to lend a supporting hand.
"C'mon, let's get outta here, Lia," he murmured, pulling her from the room out the back door, Severus close behind. "We still have a lot to explain, now that you're in."
She flinched as he accidentally brushed the Mark.
"That area will feel sensitive for the next few days," Severus observed coolly.
"I don't care, so long as I am able to serve," was Lia's only reply.
He speared her a cryptic look that she couldn't hope to decipher. Why was he looking at her like that? It wasn't like she had changed or anything.
• — • — •
Weeks flew by in an instant. Even as Barty, Regulus, and Severus returned to Hogwarts, Aeliana elected to stay behind alongside Alecto and Amycus at Lord Voldemort's behest.
Lia couldn't help but grin as she exited the dingy old pub in Nocturn Ally. It took all her willpower to not skip on the way out. Lord Voldemort had finally agreed to let her in on his big operations, after nearly a month of dogging his heels. Now, she could finally prove herself worthy of his trust.
As she ducked into a dimly lit alley behind Borgan Burkes, a shortcut back to Diagon Ally, however, her ears caught the soft pounding of footsteps upon cobblestones closing in behind her. At first, she considered the idea that maybe someone else was about to be jumped in this darklit, abandoned alley, but ultimately kicked that idea to the curb when the pace increased, now accompanied by hushed words hissed back and forth.
Four figures hurtled around the corner, wands at the ready, not expecting Lia to be expecting them. They might have gotten the hint the moment her first spell hit its mark, the amber light radiating off the curse momentarily enveloping the three others. The fourth lay face down and still on the ground, but Lia didn't need to see his dumpy frame to guess who he was. Given his company, Remus, Sirius, and James, she didn't need to be a genius to know that Peter Pettigrew would never be far behind, and, by the rotten luck that had plagued him his whole life, he happened to be the one to get hit.
But that still didn't explain why they cornered her here while they should have been at school.
"Lia," Sirius huffed, chest heaving wildly from exertion. "We finally found you."
"Sirius, don't—" Remus tried to warn him, but it was already too late.
Lia fired, but James, catching on quickly, shoved his friend out of the way and deflected the curse with a flick of his wand.
Sirius stumbled back in shock. "What're you doing—"
Not waiting a second, she turned and sprinted down the alleyway away from her pursuers, firing off another spell over her shoulder for good measure as she went.
The rumble of brick and cobblestone raining down behind her alerted Lia to the success of her spell. James could easily block direct curses, but he'd have a hell of a time trying to block an explosion. Lia slowed out of her sprint to admire the fruits of her labour.
Utter devastation. Half of a building's wall was blasted apart, while the once pristine cobbled street lay upturned and in ruins. With no small amount of satisfaction, she noted that her pursuers had been caught within the blast, utterly unconscious and half buried beneath rubble.
One body, two, three... wait. where's the fourth?
Just as it clicked that Remus wasn't lying there with the others, something shoved her from behind. Remus striking her hard into the ground, forcing her to use her hands to break the fall lest she break her nose, and forcing her to forsake her wand in the process. Before she could recover, a heavy force slammed atop her spine, stealing the breath from her lungs and pinning both of her hands with one of his own. With his other, he brought his wand to her temple, and in an exhausted gasp, began whispering an unintelligible incantation.
Lia thrashed wildly, but the weight of his body atop hers prevented any escape. Her last frenzied thought before he finished the spell was, What the hell is he about to do to me?
She was only dimly aware of a voice murmuring in her ear, saying, "I'm not going to hurt you," but obviously he was lying. Remus was her enemy, after all. Why else would he pin her to the ground? He stood against Lord Voldemort, and that made him her enemy. He wanted to kill her.
A dam broke in her mind, flooding it with new images, new memories. Memories of pain and fear, but also purpose. Too much information and emotion for her consciousness to handle and before long she felt herself being pulled under, slipping into the peaceful darkness.
It could have been seconds later or hours, but Lia eventually awoke to a throbbing temple, exacerbated by someone roughly shaking her shoulders.
"Come on, you need to wake up," they hissed. "Right now!"
That voice. Remus. The plan. It actually worked? Wait, where did that thought come from? What plan?
Slowly, order washed through her haphazard jumble of thoughts and Lia made sense of the new re-emerging memories that had hidden themselves.
"Did you seriously jump me in a dark alley? I was only joking when I suggested it," she mumbled, rising to a sitting position.
"This isn't the time," Remus replied, looking back at the still bodies of Sirius, James, and Wormtail.
"Are they alright? I didn't mean to hurt them —I mean, I did at the time, but—"
"They'll be fine," he reassured her anxiously, "but you won't be if you don't get out of here now. People will have heard all the commotion, even this late at night. They'll be coming to check it out, and I don't know when they," he pointed his finger over his shoulder at his friends, "will wake up."
He dragged Lia into a standing position, forced her wand back into her hand, and stepped back.
"You'll have to knock me out, too, if we don't want them to be suspicious." He swallowed hard. "We'll talk... later. Just — just send me a message somehow and I'll be there. We'll sort things out then."
"Remus... I can't knock you out!" Lia took a staggering step back.
"Just do it quickly! We haven't much time!"
He grabbed her wand and placed the tip at the centre of his chest, refusing to let go even when she attempted to draw away.
"I can't do it!" she insisted, shaking her head wildly.
Over his shoulder, Lia could see Sirius stirring amongst the rubble.
"Come on! Do it!"
"No!"
"Now!" he yelled, digging her wand deeper into his chest with one hand and shaking her shoulder roughly with the other.
"Stupefy!" Lia cried, letting the spell fly from her lips, because he was right. She'd come so far and couldn't afford to waste everything just because she didn't want to hex one friend.
The close proximity of the attack propelled Remus backwards several feet, where he collapsed over the dusty pile of rubble. The scene of Remus, James, Peter, and Sirius all lying unconscious on a field of debris and knowing she was the one that put them there struck hard at her core. Somewhere, in seeking out her revenge, Lia crossed a line she wasn't sure she could come back from.
She could have been mistaken, but a second before she Apparated she could have sworn she saw Sirius raise his head to meet her eyes, something almost like longing peaking through under the blood trickling down his face from his temple. It didn't matter, though. She was already gone.
"I'm sorry," she whispered to Remus, to Sirius, and to who she once was, because there was no going back now. "I'd do it again."