Sequel to A Captive Path. Not required to read, but it does make the setting a bit easier to understand! This is roughly eighteen years after Harry Potter failed to defeat Voldemort.
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Abandoned Paths
by May
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Chapter 1:
Rodmilla
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"There's a secret garden she hides..."
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The seasons in New England were so clearly defined, especially in the countryside Rodmilla had grown up in. Winter was harsh and unyielding, while spring was long in coming but certainly worth the wait, color bursting forth all over, from the grass to her mother's lilac trees. Summer was short, sweet and hot, sticky and filled with humming insects, hummingbirds, cool lakes and afternoons spent reading in tree houses. And then there was autumn, a brilliant riot of color and crisp scents, of comfortable coolness and her mum's hot spiced apple cider. A season she hadn't seen at home for six years, not since she'd started school.
There was already a chill on the air in late August though, a scent among the still-green leaves and ripe fields that was unmistakably crisp and holding autumn's promise. It was Rodmilla's favorite time of year, and it was also her favorite scent, drifting through her open windows on the last golden afternoon of August. The sixteen year old girl was finishing up the packing of her school trunk, the mark of a summer well-spent all over her, from freckled pale skin to sun-touched strawberry hair. By the end of the school year she would be dimmed again, but looking forward to another summer.
Her littlest sister was sitting on the window-seat of Rodmilla's tower bedroom, reaching up and running her small fingers through the crystals and prisms hanging from the curtains. Cacilia was facing another school year at home, being ten years old and the last of her brothers and sisters. The previous year had been rather lonely for the girl without her five elder siblings, but then, she'd also gotten something one rarely got in their house: the illusion of being an only child. Still, she greatly envied her older sister, and drilled her with questions about school.
"And you'll tell me all about your London weekends?" Cacilia asked for the umpteenth time, looking out over the lake and surrounding woods while the evening sun lit on her pale blonde hair. Rodmilla smiled softly, crisply and perfectly folding a uniform skirt, tucking it into her trunk next to her Slytherin scarves,
"I wouldn't dream of leaving a single thing out," Rodmilla assured her, rolling up a green and silver tie, "And you'll write me, telling me all about your music lessons?" At that Cacilia rolled her eyes slightly toward the pointed ceiling above, turning away from the window to look at her sister with a rather bored look on her young face,
"You mean the lessons during which my tutor learns more from me than I do her?" The ten year old asked in reply, before smirking back at Rodmilla, "I'll tell you all about them."
"Good," Rodmilla grinned back, crossing the swirling blue and silver carpet to her dresser. Picking up two of the small jewelry boxes there, she brought them back to the open trunk on her bed, while Cacilia looked on in interest. Rodmilla carefully and lovingly wrapped up the boxes for safe travel before placing them in her trunk, the silver clam-shaped one in a blue silk scarf, and the carved wooden box from India inside one of her mittens.
The younger girl knew that inside of the clam (which was in fact an heirloom from their mother's mum, who'd been dead for many years), was a necklace of gold coins, which their father had bought for Rodmilla in Rome when she was fourteen. She wasn't sure what was in the wooden box, though. Her sister hadn't brought it with her last year. Cacilia thought that it must have been the ivory combs she'd gotten for Christmas, or maybe the Amethyst friendship ring she shared with Oubliette Lestrange (Oubby had the Topaz one). But no, Rodmilla was wearing that at the moment, as she almost always did. Cacilia was just about to ask after the mysterious box, when a voice called up to them,
"Milla!" Their brother Alexander shouted from the spiral staircase that came up through the floor of Rodmilla's room, "Cacilia! Dinnertime!"
"Coming," Rodmilla sang down in reply, closing and locking her trunk before turning and reaching out for her sister's hand. Cacilia hopped down from the window, taking the offered hand and pulling her older sister along down the stairs.
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The Nott house was really a few turrets away from being a small castle, and it was easy to get lost in the oddly set up labyrinth of a home. The family, however, had been there since before Rodmilla and her twin Rodrigue had even been born, and as such it was warm and quite familiar to everyone who lived there. While also, of course, being of a practical enough size to house a family of eight, their house elves and the servants.
Hurrying down the staircase, through the music room below Rodmilla's room and then down another floor into the main house, the two girls made their way through a passage and then out into the main hallway, which led to the grand staircase of the house's main stone entrance hall. Rodmilla arrived at the head of the stairs just as Alexander was finishing a splendid slide down the banister, his Gryffindor tie tied 'round his head, putting his ashy blonde mop up at all angles.
"Bravo!" Rodmilla laughed, her long green summer dress swishing around her ankles as she descended the stairs. Alexander turned from where he'd landed, giving his sisters a dramatic bow, his tie hanging in his face. A light, musical laugh echoed through the main hall behind him, a sound all of them had heard since they were babies, and were thus very familiar with. And it made the twelve year old boy turn swiftly, his face red as his mother appeared in a vision of waist-length blonde hair, sandaled feet and silvery grey robes, looking like a paler, mature version of her daughters with moon-shaped earrings and a long string of blue glass beads hanging from her slender neck.
"Fancy meeting you here, mum," Alexander coughed theatrically, as his sisters lighted off the stairs behind him. Luna just smiled, reaching out and pulling the tie off of his head and straightening his hair with her ringed fingers.
"You're lucky I am the one who saw you," She said in her drifty voice (which, her children well knew, was never as distracted as it sounded), fixing the collar of his shirt as well, "Your father would not have been as amused."
"What can I say?" The soon-to-be second year Gryffindor gave his mum a charming smile, "Schoolboy enthusiasm!"
"Methinks you've played that card to exhaustion this week, Alexander," Luna informed him wryly, kissing his forehead and pushing him lightly in the direction of the dining room. Turning back to her daughters, Luna smiled wider, looking up at Rodmilla, who was a step above her, "Have you finished packing your trunk?"
"Just completed said task," Rodmilla hummed, leaning forward and kissing her mum on the cheek. As much as the children all loved their parents, they were not usually so affectionate. But there was something about the last night before they left for school that drew everyone closer. Rodmilla fancied it was the simple fact that for as long as she could remember, they had all been a crowd together. In fact, the very first sibling she could clearly remember being born was Cacilia, who was the youngest. Whenever even one of them had to leave for some reason, everyone felt the distance, their mother perhaps most of all.
"Good," Luna replied serenely, just as her third daughter was hopping down the stairs two at a time above to join them, "You've finished packing too, Claudette?"
"Packing?" Claudette replied, in a voice much like her mother's, which was almost odd to hear seeing as how she looked so much like a little female version of her father, "Oh yes that," She smiled, "Still have a few things...floating about..."
"We'll finish tonight then," Luna turned to keep walking, motioning them to follow, "For now, dinner is on the table," And her three girls followed her, Cacilia close between her two older sisters, not wanting to miss a moment before they left.
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Theodore Nott was a highly imposing figure to most. He was an attractive man of thirty-five, but somehow his looks only made him more unsettling with his height, silent demeanor, piercing stare, and the fact that he'd been a sworn Death Eater at a rather young age. He happened to enjoy having this effect on outsiders, and occasionally his children (more often his youngest son), but in his own home and at the head of his dinner table, his family saw a very relaxed, pleased father of six. And the fact that this was the last night he would have a filled family table until Christmastime made him wish to savor it all the more.
From her seat to her father's left, Cacilia was also taking in the scene with a fond, serious eye. She wanted to memorize it all, as time seemed to pass so slowly for a little girl when she had no siblings around to be her constant playmates. The table was, as always, a very traditional setting. Her father was at the head and her oldest brother at the opposite end, talking in whispers with his twin. Rodrigue and Rodmilla had always been like that, even as they played and interacted with their friends and their younger siblings. There were still twins, with their odd connections, and even something as simple as asking what the other was studying in Arithmancy was talked about in this whispering manner, that shut the rest of the world away.
The three girls were all in a row to Theodore's left, while Luna, Alexander and their middle son Laurent sat to his right. It had always been this way, and Cacilia remembered vividly how odd it had felt a year before at dinner on September 1st, with just the three of them, her parents and her.
"I'll expect the usual letters on how you and your siblings are keeping on in your studies," Theodore directed at his eldest, who in turn gave his father a nod, and a small smile,
"Weekly," Rod promised, drinking his lemonade. Alexander looked over at his brother with a smarmy grin,
"And he means school studies," The younger boy reminded him, "Not your piles of poems about the way," And here he seemed to be quoting from memory, eye drawn upwards as he clutched his heart, "...the sunlight catches upon fair Oubliette Lestrange's flowing ebony tresses?" Across from him Claudette giggled just slightly, while Laurent rolled his eyes and Rod turned a deep shade of red, looking down at his plate.
"Alexander..." His father's voice reached his ears, and Alexander glanced tentatively up at his father, still grinning but now in a rather sheepish manner, as Theodore's unamused gaze fixed itself on him, "Have you been into your brother's notebooks again?"
"I was looking for his old Transfiguration notes?" Alexander tried, and was not bought so easily.
"One more breech of sibling privacy, young man..." No one was quite sure what would happen, should one more anything happen. But it was certain that no one ever allowed one more anything TO happen, after that tone of voice. All of the children loved their father, but they also knew better than to cross him, or their mother.
"Yes sir."
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"Breech of sibling privacy!" Alexander exclaimed later that night, falling into his bed in the tower across from Rodmilla's, in the room he shared with Laurent, "And just what, I wonder, is forcing two brothers who don't get along to share a room called?"
"Teaching us to cohabitate," The thirteen year old Slytherin reminded his younger brother in a mumble, as he lie in the hammock across the room. For all of the Utopia-esque charm of home, there had to be friction somewhere. It manifested itself between the quiet, somewhat brooding Laurent, and the adventurous Alexander, who was far too much like his namesake and Grandfather Alexander Lovegood for his own good.
"Well clearly, that was rubbish," Alexander stared up at his sloping ceilings, strewn with Quidditch posters and his mum's aura-guard, "We've spent a whole summer in the same room and we still don't get along..."
"You do not get along," Laurent corrected boredly, as he wrote in one of his many green leather-bound notebooks, "I sit, and say nothing, while you make fun of my hair."
"It's pouf hair!" Alexander broke out into adolescent giggles, clutching his sides, "It's longer on one side than on the other!"
"Oh, you are DEAD, Nott!" Laurent growled, only partially enraged as he grabbed a pillow from his bed and lunged across the room, intent on sibling suffocation...
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Author's Notes: Heehee, hiya again! I've been working this out for a while, less serious and more for fun than the fic that started this. For those involved in the RPG, this is all just AU, I don't want anyone to think they're getting a peak at future plot events mwaahaahaa. Sit back and enjoy! Everyone from the last fic will be showing up here somehow...somewhere...