A quick shout out to Alice Helena! Any author would be lucky to have you as a fan. It's rare to have a reviewer who consistently does justice to the effort I put into my story. Thank you so much for your continued support. I said it a couple of chapters back and I'll say it again. This one's just for you. :)

Posted: 12/16/15

Beta:the/ artful scribbler

/A/N: Luxminder is pronounced with a short i sound like in bit. Not long i like bite.

Daxender is pronounced Daksender.

And Xander is pronounced Zander.

Hope you enjoy this belated introduction to the real "Jane".

A Dissembler in an Oubliette

The Poet

Farther from me, o hour, you grow.

Your wingbeat wounds me upon its way.

What would I do with my lips, though?

With my night? With my day?

I have no beloved, no shelter,

No homestead at which to be.

All things I lavish my self on

Grow rich and lavish me.

- Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Walter W. Arndt

16th October, 1998

10:20 pm

It was a night for good thoughts.

Crowding sweeps of Milky Way stars engulfed the night, blotting out the inky parts. The obliterated darkness was in retreat, glossed over by encroaching points of light. The piercing clusters of stars were practically embracing one another tonight, groping after each other in their black void, tired of being cold and alone. Like Luxminder.

She sat in the deep soft window seat, bathed in the lactescent starglow, smoking a cigarette that she'd nicked from Dragon a couple of hours ago when he had gone to the loo. The chilly air from the open window sucked all the tell-tale smoke out of the room, and she was allowing happy memories to wash through her. This was something she rarely did. It felt dangerous to remember her real past - to remember who she really was.

Without anybody watching her, her whole manner was softened, toned-down - more real. She appeared much calmer for one thing. And her eyes shone with intelligence and a saddened, obdurate substance as they gazed into the multitude of bright stars that had come out to wish her a happy birthday. In fact, if anybody saw the slow easy way she sucked and puffed on the cigarette, they would have been shocked that a person who looked as young as her could seem as equally jaded. Luxminder felt older than the stars.

According to the clock on the overmantle, it wouldn't be her birthday for another hour and a half, but she didn't care.

She had considered telling the Malfoys it was her birthday - not that she would ever reveal her true age to them of course - but children always got excited over birthdays so it would have been the appropriate way for her to behave. Every time Luxminder had tried to tell them, she had instead found her mouth clamping tightly closed – almost of its own accord. So she kept putting it off and now it felt too late. But this was just fine. After all, it would not just be her birthday soon, and it gave her quiet pleasure to know that, no matter how far apart they were and no matter how long it had been since they had seen each other – or would see each other for who knew how long – she and Daxender would always be almost the exact same age as each other. One of them had come first of course, but they would never know which – because they didn't know, and probably never would, who their biological parents were.

If Luxminder told the Malfoys it was her birthday, either one of two things would happen. They would put on a very bad pretense of caring - might even give her a cake and some presents – and she could sit through it all and try not to cry. Or, especially now that their hatred for her had reached such a fever pitch, they might say "And?" Then proceed to ignore her as much as they always did. Since Lux couldn't decide which of these pathetic outcomes would be the most sad-making, she ultimately decided that she wasn't going to tell them a thing.

She was just going to celebrate it by herself, in her own way.

Once the cigarette was spent, pulled casually down to the butt, Luxminder flicked it gracefully out the window, picked up her one candle and the only source of light she had in the night, and headed into the leviathan lavatory. The paltry candle was no match for the cold marble room; the vaulted ceiling kept stretching darkly up, easily outpacing the sole flickering flame. She could have taken the candle to the sconces on the wall, held the burning flame to the cold wicks, lit the whole place up like an obscenely sparkling cathedral, but Lux liked being encapsulated in the small yellow globe of warm light. Her little sphere of illumination made her feel close and safe.

Luxminder set the solitary candle on the wide ledge of the bath. The hot tap never had to run for a while before the water warmed the way it did in Muggle homes, so she turned both taps together and fiddled with them for a minute until the water was as hot as she could stand it. Then she started taking down her favorite salts, oils, and bath beads and Luxminder used them to create an infusion: the sharp, clean scent of lavender, softened by an underscore of sweet, sumptuous sandalwood.

Luxminder undressed swiftly and although the small light cast by her single candle seemed to give the commodious loo more shadows than light, she avoided looking at herself in the large gilded mirror as she crossed the room to get some luxuriant, duvet-thick towels. When alone, her limp was a lot less pronounced than it was when there might be witches and wizards, real or painted, watching. Back at the bath, she sat down on the broad edge and removed her prosthetic limb.

Once she had it off, Luxminder spent the time it took for the enormous bath to finish filling massaging the area where the rubber suction held the fake limb to her stump, stimulating her blood flow the way the doctors had instructed her years ago. The end of her not-quite half-leg was completely smooth, unlike an amputee's; there were no shiny, hardened scars rimming it, no puckering ridges from cut-off muscles. It was just a birth defect, an incomplete thing. Dragging along behind her, slowing her down a bit – keeping her separate from people who were born whole and taking it all in their smooth-flowing stride. She loved and hated it, equally. It had endeared her to some people, and kept her isolated from others. Like Dax. Well, not that it was his fault for that, but rather the people that had decided to adopt him, and leave her. Luxminder was always being left behind.

She slipped into the scorching water and gasped a little from her abrupt immersion into the heat. The displaced foam gathered up around her face, blocking her view of the room and she pushed fluffy bubbles out of her way. Luxminder slid her bottom out from underneath her and let her body float to the surface. She relaxed and closed her eyes. Once her body warmed up, got used to the scalding temperature, she almost felt like she was in a sensory deprivation tank. Not that Luxminder had ever been in one, she had only read about them. But she sort of liked the idea of them. To be completely cut off from the world seemed like it might be a sort of paradise to her a lot of the time.

She felt almost nothing in the water; her arms and legs were totally malleable, like jell-o, and she drifted idly around the steamy, frothy basin in a purposeless bliss, and let herself remember Dax.

Luxminder pictured his large violet eyes. They were a completely gorgeous, utterly unique blend of indigo blue and royal purple – the way her eyes were lapis lazuli and emeralds. She saw him little, sitting beside her on the paint-chipped porch swing, dangling his perfect, jean-clad legs; pumping them in a rhythmic sync with hers.

He was such a serious little boy, with a fiery intensity that blazed from his eyes and even his body and sometimes it put her on edge. It was captivating as well. He was a charismatic, captivating little boy. He was much more special than her, she knew.

"You think your dad and mom might want to adopt me?" he asked her, out of nowhere it had seemed to her then. She knew he did not love his adoptive parents as fiercely as she loved hers, but at that inchoate age she had yet to realize how much he was beginning to loathe them.

"You have a mum and dad, Dax," she told him.

She wished with all her heart that her mum and dad could adopt him and they could always be together, instead of just on the weekends. But Luxminder could not think it was at all possible that his parents would ever let him go. The idea that a mum and dad might give away a child they had adopted was too scary to consider.

"So? I spend more time with Jenna than I do them," he murmured, so quietly she could hardly hear him above the squealing chains of the old swing.

"Do you?" she asked. She knew that Jenna was his nanny, but she thought he was only with her when his parents were too busy working.

"Yeah."

"But…" she hesitated, not even understanding enough to know what to ask. "You're with them in the evening when they get home from work."

"Lenora doesn't really work," he said in a sulky voice.

"She's an actress," she said stupidly.

Dax fixed her with a look that was half-pity, half-contempt. Luxminder did not understand that the pity was for himself and the contempt was all for his mom, not her. And she looked away from him, at one of the palm trees across the street, swaying gently in the breeze like a giant green umbrella.

"She doesn't really get any jobs anymore, Dolly. She just goes shopping with her friends all the time. Sometimes she meets with her agent, Mike," - he said "Mike" the way her mother, a nurse, might have said 'incompetent doctor' - "and she has about one audition a month. No one wants to hire her because she can't act and she's too old."

"But Ben's a big-shot producer," she said uncertainly. It was something Luxminder had overheard her parents talking about and she did not really understand what all of it meant. "He has…influence," and she smiled with happiness at finding an appropriate context to use the word in – they were only seven. "He can help her. Can't he?"

Dax's face warped into a grisly sneer, which she hated, while he told her, "Ben offered to pay for some acting lessons."

"She takes you with her to shop sometimes," she said. "And last month they wouldn't let you come over that weekend because they took you to the zoo."

"Jenna took me to the zoo," he told her.

"What?"

He just nodded. Agreeing with all the shock in her voice.

"You wanted to go to the zoo with Jenna instead of coming here?"

"What?! No! I wanted to come here, but they said I needed a break," he told her, mumbling so bad on the last part that she could barely make out what he'd said.

"A break from what? Me?" Luxminder could not believe what he was telling her. She could feel tears building up behind her eyes and she started to blink them rapidly, like she was sending the palm tree across the road some urgent message in Morse code. Despite all of her desperate dots and dashes, the hot tears seeped out anyway.

"It isn't just you," he told her. He did not want her know what his parents were like, the sort of mean thoughts that they had about everybody, especially each other. He just wanted her mom and dad to adopt him.

"They don't like me."

"They don't like anybody," he assured her. But that just seemed to make her sadder. That's what he loved so much about his sister. She was nothing like all the spoiled, jaded kids he went to school with in Beverly Hills; the majority of whom came from divorced, patched-up step-families, and most of whom were taken care of by full-time nannies like him. But his sister was like a turtle without a shell. Her big, aquatic eyes were like portals to vast seas of sweetness and innocence.

He slid across the bench and put his arm around her.

Luxminder had never been to her brother's house. But she could tell from the way he talked about it that it was huge - way better than hers and her parent's. She also knew that he had an Atari and a Nintendo, about a hundred games to go with both of them, and a TV in his room to play them on – undreamed of luxuries in her neighborhood.

"Do you like coming here?" she wanted to know. What she really wanted to know was whether he liked her, but she was too insecure to ask him that. If he said no, it would break her.

"I love it," he said simply. "Why else would I want your parents to adopt me?"

She looked at his eyes while he told her that, and she could see a lot of sincerity in them. She beamed at him and he started wiping away her tears.

"Do you like it when I come?" he asked her, his eyes suddenly filled with fear and uncertainty.

She nodded. "I love you, Dax."

He laughed, pleased that she had said it out loud. Luxminder was the only person Daxender knew that he could have completely normal conversation with. He never knew if she was lying to him, he never got bored with her, and even though he had to work to understand her, he found himself liking that the most. He reveled in the mystery of her quiet mind.

"Do you think Xander and Liza would adopt me?" he asked again.

"I think so," she said softly. "They act happy about you coming over."

"I know they like me, Lux," he said. They seemed to like him a lot more than Ben and Lenora. "Do you think they have enough money to have another kid, though?"

Her eyebrows slid closer together at his question. "Probably," she said, confused. Her dad and mum didn't really talk about money around her.

Money was just about all Ben and Lenora talked about. And fought about. Constantly. But she didn't know that yet. It would be a few more years before she and Daxender would trust each other enough to start confessing all their secrets to one another. "I don't know. Do you want me to ask them?"

He nodded as he instructed her, "Ask them tonight when we're having dinner, okay? Then I'll know the truth."

"Should we ask them if they want to adopt you?"

"It wouldn't bother you if I live here too? Are you sure?" He seemed uneasy.

"How could it?"

"Because, if I live here too, then Xander won't have as much time to spend with just you, Luxminder. He'd have to spend time with me, too," he explained.

Oh. It hadn't really occurred to her that his living with them meant she'd have to share her parents' attention with him. But she didn't care. She wanted her brother around all the time. He never called her mean names the way a lot of the kids in her neighborhood and school did. He never tried to make her feel bad about being born without a leg. He liked to read books almost as much as she did, and he never gave her funny looks when she used big words the way other kids did. Daxender was clever and funny and beautiful.

"I'd really like it," she told him confidently. In a characteristic gesture of affectionate spontaneity, she leaned over and kissed his cheek. He smiled at her again, his white teeth flashing brightly against his thick red lips and the olive tone of his skin. They looked so much alike.

The water was still pretty hot.

Luxminder sat up and got the bar of French-milled soap from its niche. She looked at her hands and was pleased to see that the soaking was softening the dirt caked under her nails. She held the soap between her hands and started to swiftly gyrate it until a thick lather started forming and oozed out the sides; then, using her fingernails, she started to work the black goop out from under them.

She wasn't worried that anybody would notice how clean she was tomorrow. Their eyes always slithered right over her, as if she was slathered in grease. And she wasn't worried that someone might come to the room and find her in the bath, on her own, without any rude language or empty intimidations about certain men stripping her clothes off and throwing her into the tub. Once they'd locked her in for the night, nobody poked their head in the door to see if she needed anything or to make sure her candle was still burning. This was the place where she was relegated with relish, at the end of each day, so the Malfoys could unburden themselves of her unbearable presence. This was the place where they brought her to be forgotten.

After her nails were clean she shampooed her hair and soaped off the rest of her body, making sure she got in every last crease and cranny. She added a little more hot water to the tub, leaned back again, and closed her eyes once more.

"Dolly, tonight we are going to create a feast that even the Duchess of York couldn't resist," her dad told her as he tied a big apron around his middle.

She giggled. Her dad was such a goof.

She was standing on a stool at the sink washing some lettuce. If her mother were home from work, she wouldn't be on a rolling stool. But her dad rarely discouraged her from doing anything that a kid with two legs would do.

"Maybe she'll smell it," she said, playing along. "Maybe she'll ring the bell and ask if she can eat with us." When she was at school she talked like an American, but at home she talked like her dad and mum did.

"Well, the Santa Anas are blowing something fierce this time of year. It could carry the savory smell of our scrrrumptious supper to our motherland and into her rrroyal nostrils. So she might very well decide to make the trans-Atlantic journey and dine with the diaspora," he said, his accent broadening the way it always did when he talked about his beloved Britain. And he since he was talking about the royal family, he added some silly posh inflections. "Perrrhaps we should bring out the good china."

She laughed at him again.

"What are we making, Daddy?"

"Zucchini casserole and…" he stopped.

"And?"

"And?" he returned.

She looked down at the lettuce in her hands. "Salad?"

"That's an excellent idea my dear. Why don't you grab some lettuce and wash it for us?" he asked as he headed over to the sink to grab a shallow baking-pan from the cupboard by her feet. When he got close enough to see the head of lettuce in her hands he made an exaggerated face of mock surprise at her, clapping his hands on his cheeks and drawing in an audible gasp. "How'd ya get it so fast, Dolly?"

"Dad," she scolded him, and rolled her eyes. But she couldn't help giggling at him, no matter how corny he acted. "You left it by the sink."

"Oh. That explains that then."

He let her cut the zucchini. "Very good, dear. Perfect, uniform slices."

They took turns blowing on a spoonful of steaming marinara so they could taste-test it, and when it was ready they layered the sauce into the pan with the squash, mozzarella, and some fresh basil leaves from her dad's herb garden.

Once the casserole was in the oven they debated over what to put in the salad.

"We should finish off the carrots, Dad. They're looking a bit dodgy."

"Well zen by all means, Luxie, off weez zair 'eads."

"Some capsicum would be good, don't ya think?"

"Your mother isn't fond of that, Dolly."

"But we are. Sides, she'll just pick hers out."

She watched as he took a metal wine-bucket out of the bottom of the hutch and started putting ice in it.

"You're having wine tonight?" she asked him.

"Yeah. Look Babydolly, don't put the peppers in tonight, alright? There still looking pretty fresh and they'll keep for a bit longer yet."

"Sure thing, Daddio."

Xander had her set the table with the good china while he finished making the salad just the way he knew Eliza liked it, and then he put some candlesticks and flowers on the table. He hummed a merry tune while he crafted his glimmery, visual feast.

She kept smiling to herself.

"What's got your flib in the jib?" he asked, noticing her grins.

She looked at him and her face lit up as she giggled. "Nothing."

He returned her smile and said, "Doesn't sound like nothing."

But he let it go.

Eliza walked in the door at a quarter till eight. The first thing she did was go to the couch and remove her white sneakers because, no matter how comfortable they were, after spending twelve hours in them, only taking them off could give her feet any relief.

She leaned back into the couch cushions and sighed.

Xander brought her a glass of chilled wine and pulled one of her feet into his lap and began to knead his fingers into it.

"Oooooh, my darling husband," Eliza sang. "That's feels amazing, love."

She closed her eyes and sank deeper into the cushions.

She watched her parents from the kitchen, smiling at her dad's velvet tactics. Perhaps it was the fact that she was an only child and was therefore very in-tune to the adults around her, or maybe it was her dad's belief that children shouldn't be cosseted, or it could have been due to the fact that they lived so close to Hollywood, but it was most likely that, now she was going on ten and was finally aware of her ability to slip away, she often watched her parents when they thought they were alone - whatever the case – a combination of it all probably – she knew exactly what her dad was angling for. He was a pretty smooth operator.

After five minutes Elizabeth shoved her other foot into his lap. "This one's starting to feel left out, hon."

"We don't want any part of you to feel left out." He started massaging the proffered foot.

Eliza issued a very girl-like giggle. "Xan."

"'Ow's it at that ol' 'ospice, luvey?" he asked.

"Mmm. Okay. I think I might off that fellow Patel."

"What was he up to today?"

"Oh, just the usual idiocy. You know how I told you last week he was making such an unholy fuss over the trolleys?"

"Yeah. He wanted the old ones put away in storage and it was making all the maintenance workers talk about going on strike."

"Right, well, today he told the poor dears to bring them back out."

"What? Why?"

"Well, apparently he hadn't got it cleared with the right people, and it came from up top that the old ones have to be used till next May."

"Really?"

"Yes," she groaned. "We replace the old gurneys every May. I told him that, Janice told him that, everybody pretty much told him that. Even Eduardo, the head of maintenance knows it, and told him so. But why would he listen to any of us? We've only been there eons longer than him.

"I don't know how he got that job! They should have promoted someone from inside the hospital, instead of bringing in some puffed up, pigheaded, know-it-all nobody. He's insufferable, Xan."

She was a little surprised by her mother's harsh language, but this new guy at the hospital, Patel, really had her wound up.

"They should have given you the job, Eliza," he told her. She laughed. "It's true. You could do his job loads better than him, I bet."

"Aw, you're a dear for saying it," she said, grinning happily.

"You know I mean every word." He released the foot he was working on, leaned over his wife and kissed her.

She kissed him back for about thirty seconds but then she pushed him away. She was way too tired and stressed-out for her mind to head in that direction just yet. But Xander wasn't discouraged. He still had some tricks up his sleeve.

"What's that delicious smell wafting in from the direction of the kitchen?"

"It's a fabulous concoction of my own invention, Sweetiekins."

By now Luxminder had come out of the kitchen, and she was perched on the armrest watching them. She snorted and said, "I'm surprised you can smell supper over the stench of his stop bath."

"Ha. Ha," was his sarcastic response to his daughter's teasing remark.

Her mother chortled a bit and then she moaned and said, "I'm knackered."

"Well I'm peckish, you silly lovebirds," she contributed from the end of the couch.

"Oh, you poor starving little darling!" her mother laughed. "Come here, Dollface."

She went and leaned over her mum and got a hug and a kiss.

"Did you help Daddy cook?"

She nodded.

"You're getting to be such a big girl," her mum cooed at her while she stroked the side of her face and admired her. Her mum and dad both thought she was the most beautiful child they'd ever seen.

Then her dad teased her, "I knew when we adopted you that someday you'd turn out right useful."

She and her mum laughed and she said, "Thanks!" while her mom cried, "Xan!"

"Let's eat!" her dad crowed.

At the dinner table Elizabeth complimented everything, the food, the fragrant, pink oleanders and the candles, and Alexander made sure that her wineglass stayed full.

They asked her about school and she told them about a history project that her teacher had assigned them to complete by Christmas break.

"What do you think you want to do it on, Luxminder?" her mum asked her.

"Sacagawea."

"Gesundheit."

"Dad."

"Well, that sounds lovely," her mother told her. She'd grown up in England of course and wasn't really certain who Sacagawea was.

"I read a book about her this summer and she's fascinating," she told them.

Her dad gave her an indulgent smile. "What's so fascinating about her?"

"When she was twelve she was kidnapped during an annual raid that the Hidatsa's made every year on the Shoshone. Then when she was only thirteen, this horrid man named Charbonneau won her when he was gambling and he took her and this other native named Otter Woman for his wives."

"Ew," her mother said, wrinkling her nose in disgust. She mirrored her mum's face and said, "Right?

"Then when she was only about fourteen or fifteen, historians aren't positive, she had her first baby. And then, only a few months later, she helped Lewis and Clark on this really long expedition to reach the west coast. She was really useful to them. When they were starving she gathered plants and herbs for them to eat, and one time when their boat capsized she swam around and gathered their belongings. They couldn't have done it without her. In fact, by all accounts she was much more useful to the silly palefaces, than her rapist husband."

"Was he a rapist?" her dad asked.

"He was, Daddy," and then she laughed. "Before he married her, when he lived up north in Montreal, this old woman caught him raping her daughter, so she stabbed him with a canoe awl."

Her dad and mum laughed. "Sounds like he got what he deserved then," Xander said brightly.

"But the most interesting thing of all is the controversability over when Sacagawea really died. See, Charbonneau- "

"Controversy," her dad corrected her.

"Yes, that's what I meant, Dad. When her husband went off and left her while he went on some fur trading expedition, she supposedly got sick and died, but then decades later these rumors circulated that she'd really escaped and gone with this Comanche man to live up north. It was a controversy, you see. About when she actually died. That's what I'm going to focus on in my report."

"Sounds fascinating," her dad agreed with her. Then he chuckled softly and asked, "So she saved the silly palefaces' hides, eh?"

She nodded and shoved a big pile of her gooey casserole into her mouth.

"Don't take such big bites," her mother chided.

"So what do you reckon the director will do about this Patel prat, Liza?" her father non-sequitured.

She was surprised her dad had reintroduced the subject since, by all appearances, he was hoping to get lucky tonight.

Her mum sighed and said, "Who knows?"

"He sounds completely daft."

Her mother shrugged and ran a frustrated hand across her forehead. "Yeah well, eventually our director will cotton-on to that fact."

"I'm not surprised at how thick he is. He flunked out of medical school," her dad related casually.

"What?" her mother asked, clearly shocked by her husband's little bombshell.

"What?" he asked, feigning innocence.

"He did not!" she exclaimed.

"He did too," her dad maintained, his light brown eyes sparkling with contained mischief.

"How do you know that?" her mother asked, her voice tinged with skepticism.

"His ex-wife's sister is a teller at the place where Margo banks," he told her. Then he bobbed his eyebrows up and down a few times while he smirked at her.

Eliza's whole face was suddenly overcome with suppressed glee and she emitted a deep chuckle. "Oooh. You always know just what to say to cheer me up, darling," she told him with twinkling eyes.

"I thought you'd like that, love," he murmured and leaned in for another kiss. This time she was more relaxed and less unhappy so she let him linger.

"Can I have a pet for my birthday?" she asked when they'd finished kissing.

"What sort of pet?" her mum asked.

"A great pet."

"What sort of pet?" her dad asked.

"A unique pet."

"For the hundredth time, Luxminder, we can't get you a baby penguin," her mum told her exasperated.

"Not a penguin."

"Then what sort of pet?" her dad pressed.

"I want a chicken."

Eliza and Xander looked at each other, her mum looking slightly frustrated, her dad highly amused.

"Why on God's green earth do you want a chicken?" Eliza asked.

"It could be dead useful, Daddy. If we let it roam loose in the backyard, it'll eat the bad insects in the vegetable garden and its poo will fertilize the soil."

Xander couldn't help laughing. "And if there's an apocalypse like that loon who stands on the corner by the grocery store is always shouting about, and we're starving, we could also eat it."

"We'd never eat her," she told him calmly. "We'd love her."

"I'm not certain I could ever love a chicken, Dolly," her mum said pensively, "no matter how useful it is. Why don't you ever ask for a normal pet? Don't you want a-a…a gerbil or something." Eliza shuddered a bit, saying that. She detested rodents.

"You could love a gerbil?" she asked her mom with a knowing, impish grin.

"Hasn't it occurred to you, little lady, if we have a chicken roaming around in our backyard, Shere Khan will eat it?" Eliza asked her.

Shere Kahn was this humongous tomcat who wandered around their little neighborhood, and he was bigger than an ocelot and twice as wild. His real name was Dulce, and he belonged to a little Hispanic family a few houses down from theirs, but the people who officially owned him and had haphazardly named him, didn't have much interest in trying to civilize him. Despite numerous complaints by various incensed families that he killed the exotic hummingbirds that came to drink from the winding, tangled trumpet vines, and that he overturned metal trashcans, and that he shredded everybody's window screens when he used them to sharpen his claws, the Ecuadorians still gave him a free and unsupervised rein. And, in spite of the rumors that he'd made Billy Foster's pitbull cry, they continued to call him Dulce.

"Fine then, can I have a puppy?" she asked.

Her father gave her a dark look.

"Luxminder." It wasn't quite a groan, but it wasn't exactly a happy sound.

Her memories, all of her memories, weren't like drowsy-morning half-dreams. Her family was as lucid to her as graphite on white paper. Every thread of gray in their hair, every crease when they smiled and frowned, was sown into her skin. The sounds of their voices were sketched over her, and the vinegary scent of her dad's stop bath was inked into her mind like a tattoo.

She realized that tears were falling into the bathwater.

She always cried when she remembered them, that's why she didn't let herself think about them very much. Remembering her past never felt safe – even if Snakeface couldn't read her thoughts. For the most part she just tried to embody her persona, to be Jane Wellington, ignoramus orphan, who was raised in the gutters. She tried not to think in words, or to think about anything.

Her parents and her little sister had died in a car collision a couple of months after her fourteenth birthday, and barely a day had passed, from then until now, when she didn't wish she had been in the car with them.

She sat up and took a few deep breaths, collecting herself. It was a night for happy indulgences, not self-pity.

She ran her hand down the flat plain of her stomach, and then dipped two of her fingers between her legs.

Masturbating wasn't something Luxminder felt the urge to do very often. Especially since she'd come here. She felt way too uncomfortable the majority of the time in this mausoleum of a manor, this embellished tomb. All of the portraits were kept to the communal areas around the mansion, none were placed in bedrooms, or even spare bedrooms, and that was a relief. But she never felt like she had complete privacy. What if somebody did decide to walk into the room without knocking? She would die of mortification if anybody caught her in the act.

She had tried doing this a couple of times in the last four months since coming here, but both times her enjoyment had simply plateaued and she'd rapidly given it up as a lost cause. But tonight, since it was almost her birthday, she wanted to give it another go.

She stretched back and rested her neck on the cool curved corner of the mini-pool, and spread her legs to have better access to the folds of her sex. Gently pulling them together over the sensitive nodule of her clitoris, she used the slick inner-sides of her labia as a shield between the coarser skin of her fingers and the delicate tissue of her body's most pleasure-receptive tip.

She pressed lightly, reserving pressure till later, and began to work the folds of her hood over her clitoris back and forth, and then she switched to circular motions to avoid a numbing repetition. When she read about sex in romance novels she often wondered whether any of the people writing them had ever actually had sex; nobody described this sort of thing very accurately as far as she was concerned.

In spite of the fact that she'd seen so much sex as a result of her ability to hang around unseen and watch random people – sometimes she thought that she'd probably seen as much of it as a porn director, which had eventually imbued her with the clinical detachment of a doctor – her fantasies were as chaste as her intact hymen.

She was in a big bed, and nimble slices of light angled down from high somber windows, flowing through gossamer curtains that fountained down the four sides of the bed, like a gauzy mosquito net. She was wearing an almost-sheer, satin gown, the hem and bodice were trimmed with scalloped lace and it made her feel unhurried and sexy. There was a young man with her. This imaginary lover was quite mutable and she often changed the lines of his shape and the colors of his eyes, hair, and skin depending on her mood, but in essentials he stayed the same. He was handsome and considerate; a gentleman. He never tried to pressure her into anything that might make her uncomfortable. They were as awkward and fumbling as babes in the bed together. But what they lacked in experience and skill, they made up for with passion.

Her make-believe man had no distinctive face, and no name. But he had a rock-hard body. Sinewy, graceful limbs; darker skin than hers tonight, well-polished mahogany that nearly glowed; a full sensuous mouth; long, beautiful, piano-playing fingers that skimmed her shy, expressive breasts and clung hungry to her hips. It was his hand between her legs. He held her so tight - as if his life might depend on how close he could hold her to him without hurting. He kissed her sweet, whispered her real name to her. He always had a deep, sultry voice, and he used his clever lips and tongue to trace sensual paths over the line of her jaw, up around her earlobes, and then he moved down her neck and started exploring the hollow dips above her collarbones. His breath was warm and damp on her amenable flesh.

Perhaps it was that the hot water had burned so much stress out of her otherwise frightened, frigid body, but tonight she was really feeling it.

When this nebulous young man finally brought her to orgasm, she didn't moan, or even gasp, the way the perfect protagonists of smutty romance novels always did. She stopped breathing, curled in on herself. Her legs shuddered and trembled as the intense frissons coursed down her thighs, and they swept upwards as well: engulfing her abdomen, coiling around her shoulders and spiraling down her arms. Then the pleasure frenetically unfurled in her mind, melting away everything that didn't concern pure chaotic ecstasy.

When it was over, when all the rapture had subsided completely, she collapsed and took two deep, juddering breaths. She basked in the afterglow. So much blood had abandoned her extremities, whooshed away to pool around her genitalia, that her toes and fingertips had gone numb. But even more delicious than that, was a tingling, fizzled feeling in her lips and at the end of her tongue.

Would she live long enough to get the chance to ever experience sex? Fall in love? Go on a date? See her brother again? Finish school? Get a job? Get married? Have a baby? She loved babies. Or would Bellatrix LeCrazyLady wind up getting her heart's most fervent desire – well, her heart's second desire - and be allowed to take her behind the manor to slit her throat? As if she'd ever restrain herself to just that. Oh, that insane witch would make her scream until the sun came up. Her love for inflicting pain was surpassed only by her obsession with Lord What's-his-face. And she was frightened of Bellatrix. She was frightened by all of them. (Well, except for Dragon - he was more like a pesky fly to her.)

Luxminder didn't want to die in this den of vipers. But she didn't know what to do anymore. She barely knew how to breathe. Fear fattened up in her; congealed in her blood like tar; cemented her tendons and joints till she felt paralyzed by it; fear had seeped into her marrow, blackening her, and it made her feel so small and unclean. She mostly went through her days in a kind of unthinking trance. She could feel parts of her brain petrifying from lack of use, and the rest of it was liquefying. Sometimes fat, traitorous, polysyllabic words would float up at her, through the rancid pool of stupidity that she'd trained her mind to become. She hated it when this happened, but she seemed to have absolutely no control of it and this terrified her. Was she going crazy?

She remembered Sirius begging her to quit spying, to go back to America. But where could she go? She'd been tempted to go to New York. It would have been easy to find Dax, for her. As easy as lying on a bed, slipping away, and picturing his familiar, piercing face. She and Dax together might have convinced Lenora to let her live with them; it wasn't as if she couldn't afford her. Lenora, that snooty, plastic bitch, hadn't given a damn when the British authorities called and told her that her adopted son's biological sister was an orphan once more, and didn't she want to keep her now? No, of course not. She hadn't wanted the little crippled girl when she was only a year old, baby-faced fresh and artless. At the very least Luxminder could have put herself into the foster system. Lightening didn't strike the same place twice. She could have found a semi-decent place to live until she turned eighteen and then she would have gotten hold of her modest inheritance.

But Dumbledore had kept feeding her big dollops of hope. Hope that Voldemort would soon be captured, wandless and locked away. She'd believed Dumbledore, and she'd desperately wanted to stop Voldemort. How could she not? Back then she had these grandiose dreams of Voldemort being imprisoned, and she'd track down all of his Death Eaters, and then Dumbledore would step forward, unveil her to the public. And she and he could say, "See? We have a Muggle – a Muggle – to thank as our redeemer!" God, she'd been so naïve.

What would happen to her?

She got out of the bath, pulled the plug, and dried herself off.

After she reattached her prostheses she put on a fresh nightgown, threw her used towels into a hamper, and took her candle into the bedroom. According to the clock on her bedside table it was now, officially, her birthday.

The hot bath and the release of her orgasm had drowsied her mind. She fumbled up the side of the gigantic bed, removed her leg again, and burrowed down into the thick, numerous layers of bedclothes.

A ghost of a contented smile haunted the corners of her mouth.

Happy birthday, Dax, she thought. Happy birthday…Luxminder.

She went ahead and thought of her real name, as singular as Jane Wellington was generic. After all, it was her birthday. And you only turned eighteen once in your life.

~x~}{~x~

A quiet voice, a deep voice, a male voice was uttering something unintelligible.

Luxminder cracked her eyes and focused them on the clock next to the bed. It was so blurry that she had to concentrate, to focus them. It wasn't working. She reached over and grabbed her glasses, put them on, and studied the clock. The delicate hands were pointing at the two and the three. 2:15. Am or pm?

The masculine voice was still muttering incomprehensibly. Lights rocketed past her vision - across the room. Who was casting spells at this time of night? And why?

She sat up and looked around the room.

There was a man dressed like a Muggle, one she had never seen before, standing in front of the cold fireplace, wand waving, while he cast spells at the walls.

A chilly draft drew her eye to the open window. She had forgotten to pull the casement shut before she went to sleep, and she foggily took in the broom resting against the wall in the alcove.

Fear, muddled yet quick, was cascading its way down her spine and deluging her stomach.

What was happening? Who was he? Luxminder had never seen him before. However, as she looked at him closer, he somehow changed. But he didn't change at all. It was like she could see two men when she looked at him.

There was a hulking, broad-shouldered man before her. He had a globby belly, pudgy hands, pasty skin, a shiny hairless pate, and thick fleshy jowls that looked like they would jiggle and shake when he spoke. But when she really concentrated on him she could see someone smaller, different, inside the big one. This man had the translucent sheen of a spirit, exactly like Sirius when he had used Polyjuice Potion to accompany her when she made trips to shop, or like when Dumbledore and Snakeface used a Disillusionment Charm or an Invisibility Cloak. But despite his immaterial quality, she could still recognize him.

Right as she registered who stood in the room with her, he finished his spell-casting and turned to look at her. A grin of sheer malice lit his face when he saw her sitting up, her face full of dread, taking him in.

She opened her mouth, drew in as much air as her lungs could hold, and trumpeted a blast of bloodcurdling terror. It was a call for help. But would they come in time to save her?