Chapter Text
He breathed in, breathed out, luxuriating in that basic physical function the girl still took for granted. She wouldn’t, not forever. Her life, like his, wouldn’t begin and end with a single body. Switching her into his embryonic body was an accidental kindness. When this body died, in a year or a decade or a century, and he had to shift her into another shape, she’d be grateful for the practice.
He searched the room for her wand with some annoyance but no urgency. She wouldn’t be back for this body anytime soon--assuming she even could find her way back without his aid. Her magic was as primitive as it was powerful and relied too much on physical media. He’d break her of that crutch someday, but it could be suffered for now, provided they took certain precautions.
He found a letter from Dumbledore on the nightstand, and his lip curled as he scanned the contents. He didn’t doubt Dumbledore would join his horcrux to go after the Grim, no more than he doubted that the old man would see to it she didn’t survive the experience. He smiled thinly. Unless, of course, he gave the old man a reason to ensure Heather’s survival. The girl would be livid, of course, but it wasn’t as though she hadn’t considered the option. She should be grateful he was handling it for her.
Finding the wand under the bed, he set out to begin those precautions.
He dressed her body in Muggle clothes—a low-slung skirt, a tight red shirt, ridiculous heels. He painted her lips in carmine and wound her hair up with his wand, in a motion he’d seen Bellatrix practice on the prisoners when she was very, very bored. He surveyed her image in the mirror. Beautiful enough, he supposed. She’d do.
Then he checked to see Rupert was awake on the main level, set a silencing spell on a timer for an hour over the dungeons, cancelled most of the spells on the Sedgewick heir’s cell, and loosened the man’s cuffs.
Aldon Sedgewick looked at Heather’s body and its Muggle coverings with an expression that was equal parts contempt and lust.
Lord Voldemort knew then that the Sedgewick heir would give Heather the protection she needed.
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She awoke in her own bed to a dream of drowning, and fumbled for the light. The motion was painful. Her whole body felt like a bruise. She reached questioningly for the Dark Lord’s mind. He embraced her with a bloody satisfaction. There was a glimpse of the pool, and the bodies of the girls he’d killed to balance the power she’d used in marking Candace Bushnell, and the sour milk smell of clotting blood. There was no explanation for what he’d done to her body though, so she turned her focus back to her own eyes.
There were bruises down her own arms, like handprints. She was nude under the covers. The bruises went down her chest, and between her thighs, and there was blood there, between her legs. Her throat went dry.
She knew what he’d done, of course. She’d been stalling, and he’d done it for her. It didn’t make her feel any less violated.
“Milady?” came a questioning knock from the door. Miranda. Of course. At her acquiescence, Heather let the woman come in and cosset her with hot chocolate and biscuits, let her wash her and braid her hair and dress her in soft silks. It was only when the woman began babbling apologies for having failed her in her lack of vigilance that Heather held up a hand.
“Stop. This isn’t your fault. It’s mine. I planned this.”
Miranda’s mouth fell open. “You planned to let Aldon Sedgewick rape you and try to carry you off?”
Not like this, she hadn’t, but, “Yes.”
Idly, she wondered how the Dark Lord could have handled the indignity of it.
I’ve used attraction to gain what I desired before this, he whispered. Immortality has its cost. There was a memory there, of a shrivelled old woman and a golden cup, of cloyingly intimate afternoons and pretended affection, but she didn’t pursue it.
Miranda wasn’t unintelligent. “So you did it so that could bear the Sedgewick heir, and take down the wards.”
That is but one benefit, the Dark Lord murmured. Dumbledore and his men won’t touch a pregnant woman. And Sedgewick’s mother was a Naga. Do you know how rare parselmagic is, how powerful such a child would be?
“I’m not carrying the child to term,” she said in response to both Miranda and the Dark Lord. “But yes. Once the Sedgewick heir is dead, if I’m carrying a boy—” and it had better be a boy, she thought acidly at the Dark Lord, I doubt Sedgewick is so stupid as to try this a second time, “—he’ll be the heir to the Sedgewicks. And carrying the heir will give me the ability to destroy the damned wards. Is that bastard still alive?”
“Yes,” Miranda responded uncomfortably. “Your Uncle Charles shot him in both kneecaps already, but Rupert convinced him that it was up to you what to do with him.”
She laughed unexpectedly. If this was ever over, she’d buy Uncle Charles a holiday house in Majorca and all the classic guns he’d ever want.
And if this were ever over, she’d kill the Dark Lord, again, and make it stick this time. He only laughed at the thought of it.
Setting aside her disdain, she invited him into her mind.
If she had to kill Sedgewick, the Dark Lord would show her how to make good use of his death.
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She emerged from the pond fully healed. Sedgewick’s dismembered corpse floated amid the cattails behind her. Rupert said nothing of her red eyes. He handed her a robe, and cast a second Muggle-Repelling Ward as asked, though the Dark Lord was amused that she’d bother.
Yes, well, I don’t leave bodies around to traumatize hapless Muggles, she told him, eying the joggers in the distance. They’d done the ritual in the Thames. Potter Cottage disliked her enough, and the Dark Lord admitted a blood sacrifice on its grounds would either damage its wards significantly, or cause the house to expel her entirely as a matter of self defence. They’d leave the corpse in the river though. As a favourite dumping ground of murderers, the Thames still drank blood, but not as it had in the days when King Olaf’s men pulled down London bridge to drown the invading Danes.
She bent to wash the last of the blood from her hands, and the waters lapped them clean. She shuddered.
The land is alive, and it must eat to regain its strength, he reminded her.
“This is London,” she murmured. “I never thought it was like this.”
Rupert looked at her questioningly. She flinched. She’d forgotten he was there.
“The Muggles have scary stories they like to tell themselves—stories of eldritch horrors, of creatures outside this dimension, that are old and powerful and unknowable, that don’t care anything for humanity. I never expected them to exist, least of all in the places I knew.”
Rupert paused. “There have been people before, Muggles and Wizards both, people like the Dark Lord, who care nothing for humanity, who are powerful and terrible.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve known people who loved, and were loved, and were familiar and dear to you.”
She nodded.
“Places exist like people do. They’ve always been here. Perhaps you never really knew them before,” he looked out over the Thames, “and perhaps you still don’t.”
She stared at his profile, this man who stood by calmly while she executed a prisoner. Severus had hired him, she reminded herself. She trusted Severus.
She kept staring at him though, past the point when he noticed, and it would have been polite to turn away, and he gazed back, his black eyes barely visible by the light of far-off streetlamps.
“You don’t know how significant you are, do you?” he said quietly. “The Chosen One, the Girl Who Lived, Lady Potter—I don’t think you really understand what those titles mean to us. I don’t think you even understand what you’re doing.”
“Well, thanks,” she said, turning away finally to begin the walk back to the Manor.
He ignored her sarcasm and continued speaking, low and earnest. “Everyone expected you to be another Ministry figurehead. Another façade for Muggleborn integration, while the Old Ones kept killing in their quiet corners of the world. They expected you to oppose the Dark Lord’s bloody revolution. Not to redirect it.”
“Okay.”
She waited for him to say something about what Voldemort might have done while he was inhabiting her body, but he didn’t. Instead—
“Did you know, my father was a Muggle. An anthropology professor from Oxford. He was travelling through religious sites in Japan when he met my mother. Japan—it’s different from here. The wizards there are more tied to the land, are more open about their magic, and the Muggles are more accepting of it. My mother’s magic wouldn’t let her leave Japan for Britain, but it also wouldn’t let me stay in Japan, not when a thousand generations of my father’s family lived and died and bled on British soil.
“So, I came here, and I watched as innocents were killed by their wizards, by the people who should have guided and protected them. The Ministry is built on stolen ground. The white wizards might stop at killing, but they obliviated my father’s ancestors and cast them out into the world nameless. And they still do this. And you,” he continued earnestly, “you respect all people. You respect the land. When Severus told me about you, I was dubious, but you’re the real thing.”
She was uncomfortable. “Severus told you things about me,” she repeated.
“That you cared, about all people,” he repeated. “That you wanted a better world, a world where there weren’t divisions between wizards and Muggles. A world without bloody sacrifices.”
She thought of Apple Whitby, of Sedgewick’s men, of her mother.
Rupert was wrong, she thought uneasily. She wasn’t the heroine of this story. She didn’t care about people, not the way he thought she did, with some kind of disinterested altruism. She cared for certain people. She wanted the world to be the way it ought to be for the Petunia Dursleys and Aunt Marges, and, well, the Severus Snapes of the world. But if it ended up better for everyone else too—well, then maybe what she felt, and what she was doing, was enough.
They returned to the house in silence. A robed figure waited at the periphery of the wards. She drew back her hood, and Heather almost mistook her for Bellatrix.
“You’re a Black.”
The woman sniffed, and stiffened. “You reek of blood magic.” The woman tossed a parchment at her. “Dumbledore didn’t want to risk this being intercepted by Sedgewick or any of the other old purebloods. We’re ready to attack when you are, the sooner the better. Everyone is afraid. The less time they have to consider what we’re doing, the easier this will be.” She sniffed again, speculatively. “You’re pregnant.”
It had only been hours. “How can you—”
“I’m a Black,” the woman reminded her unhappily. “It’s Sedgewick’s, isn’t it. You’re ready then, aren’t you?”
Heather nodded, dry-mouthed.
“Noon tomorrow then,” the woman promised, and disappeared with no further notice. Heather entered the cottage in a daze, past ready for bed. She could hear Miranda and Charles speaking urgently on the floor below, and another voice that should have been familiar, that she couldn’t place. For once, she ignored it.
She reached for Nagini and the Dark Lord, and their minds cradled hers as she slept, curled up around the silver egg.