Hello, lovelies! Thank you for all of your wonderful reviews. They make my fingers type so much faster. This one is a bit longer, so I hope you enjoy. Here is Chapter 3!
Smoke filled the night sky, and Charlotte's breaths came to her in gasps.
She knew better than to run into the house, to grab Bibsy, or to grab her photograph albums, or to snatch her husband's pocket watch.
Instead, she stood on the sidewalk lost in the sea of black cloaks and silver masks, to watch her house burn.
Her forearm ached from its fresh branding, but Charlotte welcomed the pain.
Regulus was dead.
"Now, you will be part of this family, Fraser," a whisper haunted behind her, "Forever."
Charlotte shuddered.
For a moment, she regretted her choice. She found herself filled to the brim with doubt. It had been so simple to allow the promise to slip from her lips.
I will take his place.
Perhaps it would have been less painful to simply die. She would not be standing on the sidewalk in London watching everything she had painstakingly worked for turn to ash. She would not hear the sudden scream of her house elf as Bibsy caught fire. Her arm wouldn't hurt with the ugly tattoo it now brandished.
Perhaps Charlotte was not as calculating as she had thought previously.
Perhaps she was simply stupid.
Charlotte woke with the smell of soot in her nostrils.
Carefully, she took her wand from the nightstand and killed the fire that had started in the night, leaving her sweat-soaked and sticky.
After that night, Charlotte had decided she needed to be more cunning. She had sought mentors within her ranks to verse her on what she would need to equip herself with. Dueling, she had learned from Regulus and Sirius during her time at Hogwarts. But it had been Severus who had taught her to lock her mind from prying eyes.
Lest they see the largest secret she had ever burdened herself with.
Nothing had survived the fire but a glass paperweight that she had given Regulus when he accepted his position at the Ministry of Magic after graduation. It was a pretty thing, a pale green glass shot through with emerald-green serpents and genuine ruby eyes. She had recalled wanting through the sooty pile, hidden by muggles after Louisa had cast her charms over the rubble, and stumbling across it, gleaming up at her through a pile of ash.
For a week Charlotte had carried it in her pocket – a heavy reminder of her choice.
Now, she stared at it on the nightstand, and regretted every moment.
Through Severus, Charlotte had become an exceptional Death Eater. Though she would never be as accomplished of a duelist as her dead husband, Severus ensured she was the most versed witch in curses the Dark Lord had ever encountered.
Charlotte had become one of the Dark Lord's most trusted Death Eaters.
She had made up for Regulus.
Snape had taught her how to be an efficient killer.
Rolling over across the quilted bed, Charlotte turned her eyes away from Regulus' paperweight which seemed to follow her every glance, to the window.
She hadn't left her rooms in nearly a week.
Diagon Alley was bustling with students, reuniting after their brief separation at Fortescue's ice cream parlor, or giggling as they linked arms and hurried into shops. Charlotte could remember her own reunions when she went to Diagon Alley with the Blacks, shopping for her school things and running into Louisa, or Wilhemina.
Wilhemina, who was dead.
Charlotte pressed her fingers to her temples and willed the thoughts to go away. At night, she would be plagued with memories that replayed over and over. But during the day, Charlotte wanted just a few hours of peace.
She had earned that, hadn't she?
Every time her eyes caught sight of the fading Dark Mark on her forearm, she flinched.
In stark contrast to her pale, rosy skin still slick from the night spent with a roaring fire, the Dark Mark remained immobile, its skull staring up at her with a devilish grin.
Charlotte pulled down her sleeves.
Sliding from the damp sheets, she wandered across the room and began picking up the books that had fallen from the fireplace mantle in the night and cleaning up a few pieces of laundry she had neglected to place in the hamper.
Perhaps today she would leave her room.
The humiliation to have had such an outburst in front of – of all people – Remus Lupin, had locked her into her rooms and she had satisfied herself by reading the selection of smutty fiction novels she had picked up over the previous summer. She had read the last one three times, reveling in the romance hidden in words carefully printed on parchment.
But now, Charlotte was out of books, and glancing around the room from which she had vehemently denied entry to anyone in the last week, Charlotte decided she could survive a trip to Flourish & Blott's while housekeeping tidied her week of dirty dishes and changed the bedsheets.
After showering, Charlotte slipped into a pair of loose-fitting trousers and her favorite blouse. She paused at the door.
Her breath felt hot in her mouth as her fingers touched the door knob, and Charlotte recalled the sensation. It was like her very first kill, the sudden urge to run from it but the underlying need had always reigned supreme. Three years ago, it had been her life. Now, it was a book.
Charlotte wanted to laugh from the incredulousness of it.
Turning the doorknob, she hastily stepped out of the door and glanced down the hallway.
Charlotte did not respond to Tom's happy wishes of a good morning but scurried through the pub into the busy alleyway outside and breathed a breath of fresh, London area.
The alleyway was still bustling, and no one paid her any mind as she let her nose drink in the syrupy smell of popsicles being sold by a vendor down the street, or the wafting fumes from the apothecary that reminded her of her brooding husband. She let her feet wander, glancing at carts filled with counterfeit wares and baubles.
But Charlotte was on a mission – she had to remind herself mid-transaction with a vendor selling lavender lemonade – to restock her book collection. Sipping her herbaceous lemonade, Charlotte veered into Flourish & Blott's and made her way upstairs to the fiction section that so many witches wandered haphazardly into.
Charlotte wanted a smutty novel that would satisfy her last year and a half of celibacy in under three hundred pages.
She filled her basket with paperback tomes and did not color a single shade as Barnaby Blott read the titles of her purchases with eyes that grew larger and larger. She was exceptionally proud of herself, she decided as she glanced down to her canvas tote filled with smut, that she had not broken down in tears with the absolute ridiculousness of life.
No, instead Charlotte wandered to a familiar place with feet that had little connection to her numbed mind, down an alleyway that went from bright and cheerful to dark and soot-streaked. They side-stepped hunchback witches and wizards with wooden eyes, and before Charlotte had finished her exceptionally large lavender lemonade, she was standing outside of an unfamiliar storefront of a very familiar place.
Charlotte's father had been the last of a long legacy of shopkeepers. They had just one singular store, Fraser's Apothecary, in Knockturn Alley.
When her parents had been killed in 1975 – a bombing – Charlotte had never thought to wonder what had happened to her father's store in Knockturn Alley. She recalled at some point Walburga mentioning that they had closed it and would leave it to Charlotte. But Charlotte had never given the store much thought.
Standing outside of it now, looking through its broken window at its looted innards, Charlotte felt suddenly sad.
She had been in Charms when Professor Dumbledore came with Professor Slughorn to pull her from class and tell her that her parents had been killed by muggles. Charlotte recalled how suddenly muggles – who before had been so very harmless – were now so incredibly dangerous. It had caused some of the largest – and the final – argument between her and Sirius. Because as much as Charlotte would have liked to pretend otherwise, and often did so, she was stone-cold terrified of muggles.
Sirius had never quite understood it. It had been a fluke, he argued, that had left her parents blown up into pieces in Scotland. Most muggles were perfectly harmless. But Charlotte could not be convinced. Every muggle paper she purchased showed that muggles loved to kill their own – they robbed them at gunpoint and blew up pubs and railway stations, they kidnapped children and raped their women. And as the years went on, Charlotte had gone from mild fear to full-blown terror.
Then, Sirius had bought the flat in muggle London with Alphard's money.
He had promised her a safe home away from his mother's demands – away from the rivalry of their school Houses – and had tried to put her into the den of lions.
Charlotte took the last large gulp of her lemonade and discarded the cup.
The sign, which she recalled from childhood being green and bronze, hung haphazardly from one ring, blowing in the light summer breeze. Most of the paint had rubbed away in the last eight years, leaving just the 'F' and 'S' of Fraser legible, and only the 'C' in Apothecary. Charlotte recalled her mother planting butterfly bushes in the old whiskey barrel planters out front, and carefully arranging lavender and sage in window boxes.
Now the window boxes and whiskey barrels were gone, leaving nothing but rusted spots from their hardware on the stone window sills and street before the store. Its windows were broken, and old editions of the Daily Prophet had been taped up in their place.
Most of Charlotte's childhood had been spent in the apothecary, and now she could hardly recognize it.
She wondered what had happened to the pair of elves her father had taken into the shop to keep up after it, and if they still lived there.
Reaching out, she nearly touched the doorknob, before a familiar sensation began to creep from her fingertips to her wrists.
Ice on a burn.
She snapped her fingers back as though shocked, and quickly stepped away from the storefront, staring up at the empty windows that were the flat above it, feeling her body beginning to shake.
From the alleyway, witches and wizards began to veer from her. Her legs trembled beneath her, and she pressed her fingers to her temples and closed her eyes. She tried to focus on her pulse, but it raced beneath her fingertips too fast for her to count from behind her gasping breaths.
Someone would recognize her here.
Charlotte's eyes snapped up, the whites rolling as she stared down Knockturn Alley, looking for familiar faces.
She should not have come here.
Swallowing the urge to vomit, Charlotte hurriedly stepped forward and grasped the knob of the storefront door and hurried inside. It was better, she thought, to have a fit in here than to have a fit amidst the faces of her former comrades.
Charlotte was sweating, and she peeled off her blouse to stand in her long-sleeved undershirt before bunching the sleeves up to her elbows. She dropped her bag on the dusty wooden floorboards and fanned herself with her hands – each gesture bringing the devilish grin of her Dark Mark closer and closer.
When Regulus had died, the Dark Lord had come to seek his revenge.
Charlotte had never known exactly what Regulus had done to incite such benevolence in their master, but she had hastily sought to put the flames of revenge out. She had promised herself to him as payment for her husband's betrayal. Sirius had not particularly cared, she could barely recall him making much of a presence at all at Regulus' overdramatic funeral planned by Walburga.
No, Sirius had only cared about the mark on her arm, that had labeled her an enemy.
Hot tears slid down Charlotte's cheeks as she looked at the peeling wallpaper of the shop, at the brass register laying broken with missing keys on the floor. She choked back a sob as she picked up a jar still holding the remnants of some ingredient, her fingers sliding the dust off the glass's brass plaque 'Fraser Apothecary'.
The noises that left her mouth did not sound particularly human.
She hugged the jar to her chest as she sank to the dusty floor, staring around at the broken shell that had been the pride of her family. It had been stripped to bare bones, a few broken jars, and a thick layer of dust and soot.
More than anything, Charlotte wanted to go back in time. She wanted to stop her parents from going to some stupid muggle area and urge them to stay home. She wanted to drag herself back from her moments of doubt as she had let fear consume her dream. She wanted to stop herself from walking down that aisle drenched in extravagant floral arrangements that had made her eyes stream and nose run and scream at herself not to do it.
Everything had gone wrong from those moments.
Everything was all wrong.
Charlotte heard the papers rattling against the broken window panes, listened to them slice against the shattered glass. She heard the groan of the shop's shelves as they started to sway with every sob that escaped her lips.
Charlotte wanted everything, and then suddenly – nothing at all.
An eerie hush silenced around her, all but her choking sobs as she let go of the carefully constructed walls Severus had taught her to place in her mind. She heard the locks unclick behind the doors she had memorized, and felt too full, as though her mind was going to burst.
Her whole body felt burned.
She could not help but hear the inhuman screams and wondered if perhaps they were coming from her own mouth as she leaned forward on her knees and pressed her palms into the floorboards.
Everyone was dead now, she remembered.
Her parents.
Wilhemina.
Evan.
Regulus.
Bibsy.
Sirius.
Everyone she had ever cared about, snuffed like a forgotten candle.
They were never coming back.
"Come back," She heard herself wail, "Please come back."
The remnants of Fraser's Apothecary were shaking violently, now, and Charlotte was planted on her hands and knees in the middle of it all.
Feeling everything that she had carefully locked away.
You will never forget it.
Charlotte dragged herself to her knees, pressing her palms against her ears.
It will always be there.
"Please, come back to me!"
And sometimes, it will come out.
Severus had promised her, she recalled as she felt her vision pin-pointing.
He had promised that eventually, even occlumency had its faults.
Dumbledore had called it 'repressed magic'.
But as Charlotte felt her breaths coming in thunderous screams that burned her mouth, she knew there was a different word for it.
Obscurus.
Well, there we go. I know some of you probably figured this bit out and saw it coming. Let me know what you think in the review section. Reviews always make me feel like doing cartwheels.
Side note: if any of you know how to do 'TAB' in this format, I would love you forever. I'm manually spacing all of these out right now and it is a PAIN and never seems to keep by the time I get these posted. Please let me know!