As ever, standard disclaimers apply.
Octavius woke early, just as he did every day both at home and here at school. It had been two weeks and he had yet to hear anything from his father. For which he was profoundly grateful. Perhaps the old wizard had forgotten he existed. He wished it were so but doubted it. Most likely it was simply that he'd nothing to say to his last attempt at continuing the Lestrange line. Which was equally fine with the boy. It did not mean the old wizard was not keeping an eye on him, so it did not mean the child could neglect his duties. Thus the child rose extra early and after a quick wash and dressing went outside to practice the charms his father insisted he master.
As it was a Tuesday, it meant he was supposed to practice the cutting charms that severed insects' legs from their bodies. He held his wand in one hand and eyed the beetle in his other hand. It was squirming. Of course it wanted to escape and be on its way. He could hardly blame it for that. "I'm sorry, bug," he muttered as he always did (though if his father was near he'd merely think it). He took a breath and whispered the charm.
Two legs came right off, falling uselessly to the ground. He winced though the bug didn't seem fazed at all. it continued to squirm with its remaining legs. But Octavius thought it must have hurt. It certainly hurt him!
"You! You rotten little boy!" someone screeched, startling him so that he dropped the creature (which took the opportunity to make a hasty and unexpectedly efficient retreat).
Octavius spun towards the yell just as someone grabbed his arm and twisted it backwards until he dropped his wand. As much as it hurt, however, he didn't make a sound and even though he clenched his teeth hard, he didn't show how much it hurt.
"You nasty boy!" It was a girl. Much bigger than he was and clearly several years older. She was a Gryffindor, by the patch on her uniform, with red hair and deep green eyes. "Whatever do you think you are doing?"
"Let me go!" Octavius demanded, telling himself that as the girl was not a teacher or his father he should be able to make the demand with impunity.
"Oh ho, so you can go off and torture small creatures? I think not! Ow!" She let go when he kicked her in the shins. But she was fast to recover and before he could retrieve his wand, it was held tight in her hand. "You brat!"
"Give it back!"
"No." She held it up over her head far above where he could reach. "Not until you promise to stop torturing other living things."
"Fine. I promise."
"Wizard's Word?"
What did that mean? "Yes."
"All right, here." She handed it back. "If you break your word you'll break out in hives." She grinned at him. "You won't like it.
He snarled at her. Hives? What was that? It couldn't be any worse than the beatings his father gave him. He turned abruptly and huffed off to the Great Hall for breakfast leaving the older girl fuming but placated.
He found he was neither first nor last at the Slytherin table. He found a place far from the small groups of friends and when he sat a place setting appeared in front of him. He took a slice of dry toast and practically flung it onto the plate. And then he simply stared at it instead of eating it.
Someone giggled and he looked up to see several faces turned his way. "It isn't going to attack first, you know," a thin boy with short dark blonde hair told him amusedly.
"Mind your own affairs," Octavius sneered haughtily.
The rest of the table broke up in laughter at this.
Octavius felt his insides clench; he felt a familiar wash of anger blind him; then heard the shattering of glass as something exploded. Someone screamed. He felt something wet and warm run down his face. And then he felt a tightness around his shoulders and arms pressing them against his sides. He could open his eyes then, the anger had passed. Professor Vector's concerned face hovered in front of his. It was she who was holding his arms.
"I... I'm sorry..." he gasped knowing that whatever had happened had been violent and his fault. He looked past his shocked Head of House to see that his table was covered with glass shards and the remains of pumpkin juice that had been splattered everywhere.
"Are you in control now?" The Arithmancy professor asked sternly.
Octavius nodded. Then he looked more closely at the table. There were spatters of blood. He didn't think it was his own. "I'm sorry," he sniffed, mortified at this violent expression of his emotions.
"This is not acceptable, Mr Lestrange," his Head of House still had not released him.
He bit his lip. His father often stirred up this anger. He said it showed that the boy wasn't a total weakling but that he was in need of learning control. And then he'd be beaten. Would he be beaten now? He'd hurt his fellow students. Surely that would be more than enough for a beating. A long one with a switch... He shuddered and bit his lip harder as memories fed imagination and terror.
Well, if you can be calm now, I'll have someone escort you to the Hospital wing."
Hospital wing? "Who... Who is going to administer my punishment?"
"What punishment? Uncontrolled magic happens with first years sometimes. You won't be punished, but you will have to learn some control and you will have to talk about your anger with Mr Potter." Vector gingerly released the boy, somewhat taken aback that he appeared to be quite amazed to hear that there was no real punishment to be handed out.
"Have you experienced uncontrolled magic before, Mr Lestrange?" It was Mr Potter's voice that asked this question. Octavius shifted his gaze to find the man and several other teachers as well as the Headmistress hovering behind his Head of House.
He nodded slowly, uncertain whether the truth or a lie was better in this instance and so deciding to give the truth for now.
"We'll talk about it later. First let's get you up to the Hospital wing. You do know that you are bleeding?"
He shook his head. No, he hadn't realized that.
Madame Pomfrey was not at all surprised to see him, not considering that she had just finished healing everyone else who had been at the Slytherin table during his outburst. She treated him as gently as she had everyone else and then made sure he had something to eat before releasing him with a note to explain why he was late (again) for a class.
Meanwhile, the Headmistress and Potter were having an impromptu meeting in her office. Vector would have been there, but she had a class in session. Interestingly, the portrait of Albus Dumbledore was sitting forward in his chair, listening quite attentively to their discussion.
"There is no evidence that the man murdered his children," McGonagall was reading aloud from a document sent by the Ministry. "It has been confirmed, however, that none of his first seven children survived past the age of nine." She looked up, "apparently they'd rather believe that the Lestrange bloodline is weak rather than that a former Death Eater would murder his children."
"I'd say both, but the important thing is that we get Octavius away from him."
"It is not going to be easy." But before the younger wizard could interrupt, the witch continued, "But Lestrange is no longer a young man and all that time he spent in Azkaban could not have done his sanity any good. Surely there is something there that we could work with. The boy has clearly been mistreated. Even if they will not blame the father they can see that he certainly has not protected the child."
"That's pretty good, Minerva. I wonder if maybe Hermoine could use that." Hermoine Granger (now Granger-Weasley) had become a Mistress of Wizard Law, a field that was the study of both Law and Philosophy with a bit of History thrown in. Her friends all expected her to become a member of the Wizengamot before she was fifty! An unheard of precedent. But in fact, she was not in any hurry. "I'll talk to her. Ginny and I are going to Ron and Hermoine's for dinner on Thursday." He smiled fondly at the thought. "It'll be their fifteenth anniversary this year."
McGonagall nodded thoughtfully. "I still find I am surprised by that match. Still, if they are happy, that is all that matters."
"Indeed."
"And to think you and Ginny just celebrated your sixteenth last spring." The Headmistress removed her glasses and gave them an absentminded polish. "Ah, I remember when you were just a small child yourself..." she trailed off and sighed. "I remember when your father was a child!"
"And now another generation!" He grinned thinking of his own four and the various nieces and nephews that were almost all red heads. But then he lost the smile as he thought of the Weasley twins who had died during the war and whose names his own twins bore. "I'll talk to Hermoine then. It's probably not the best time, but I don't want to wait."
--
Octavius was attentive in class. That is to say, he did not make noise, he did not pass notes, he did not look at anyone or speak to anyone. He simply bent over his parchment and took copious notes in a carefully precise script, oblivious to the other students around him. In potions class, he was odd man out and so was able to work on his own. So far this had worked out well. But today they had to retrieve some ingredients from the storage cabinet and that meant he had to leave his cauldron unattended. He gave this no thought but someone else did. A ginger-red haired boy whose flyaway locks were all but uncontrollable watched the small Slytherin make his way to the storage bin and wait patiently for his own turn to get what he needed.
Sirius John Potter knew that his name would not buy him any privilege, but this was too good a chance to pass up. He'd heard all about pranking from his friends Stuart and Sean Finnigan. Stuart and he, in fact, had already decided to become Hogwarts most famous pranksters even before they came to school. And of course this meant practice. Practice entailed finding and easy target. And clearly, the shy, reclusive Slytherin was a very easy and accessible target. Sirius passed the dung bomb to Stuart. Stuart quickly dropped it into the simmering cauldron that had no one looking after it.
All right, it was an old prank. But this was just practice. it didn't really matter if it had been done before. But neither child realized that dung bombs and this new cleaning potion were not as innocuous as might be expected. The cauldron contents began to sizzle. A nasty, oily smoke began to rise. Octavius quickly tossed in the last ingredient and looked into the cauldron, expecting the color to turn bright orange and smell like whatever orange blossoms smelled like. he really had no idea what that was and so did not realize it was all going bad until the color turned a horrible shade of brackish brown.
He frowned and wrinkled his nose at the noxious fumes. Nearby, other students were making sounds of intense dismay and moving away from him. He peered into the cauldron again and then consulted his notes. And then peered--
A thick burp erupted from the sludge his potion had turned into and he jerked away just in time as the professor, having noticed the growing stench (not to mention the behavior of the other students at that part of the room) pulled him back out of the way as the tar like substance shot straight up at the ceiling.
A wave of her wand sent the aberrant stuff into oblivion. She glared at Octavius then, realizing his shock meant he knew nothing of what had occurred she turned her ire at the rest of the students. "All right, who put the dung bomb in this cauldron?"
A sea of innocent (if sick looking) faces stared back at her. She sighed. "Fine. I will assume, then, that since Mr Lestrange is in Slytherin House, this was a Gryffindor prank. Therefore, Gryffindor House will lose two points per student."
There was, in answer to this proclamation, a long drawn out groan of dismay. And a large number of malevolent glares directed equally between the Slytherin child and two of the Gryffindor students. Sirius John Potter and Stuart Finnigan were not going to get off completely unscathed. "Class dismissed."
Octavius knew there would be more trouble when the two Gryffindors caught him alone in a quiet corner of the library. He took the initiative and started off by glaring malevolently at them. And then he remembered the disaster of the exploding glassware. "You remember this morning, don't you?" He growled at them. "That could easily be your heads if you don't leave me alone."
It had, for a moment at least, the desired effect. Both of the other two boys started back. But Sirius John recovered almost at once. "You wouldn't dare! My mother is a professor and my father is the counselor! You'd be expelled in an instant!"
"You're Potter?" Octavius hissed in surprise. Then he too recovered his wits and he added in a more properly dangerous tone, "Yes, but you'd be dead, wouldn't you." And then he pushed past the two other first years and hurried as quickly as he could to the Slytherin dormitories and the perceived safety of his curtained (and warded) bed.