Midnight's Child

Midnight's Child

What is your ambition, Miss Lestrange?
Sir?
To be worthy of your name, perhaps, or to redeem it in the eyes of men, or maybe to be so ordinary that you will be swept away in the tide of the unfulfilled desires of lesser hearts and beached by the lacklustre dreams around you.

From Muggle Studies, by Slytherincess

Words she knew. Words she'd heard before. Echoes in her nightmares and which pervaded the waking moments that she left unguarded. Her first interview with her head of house came to haunt her repeatedly.

He always did that, kept tabs on the ambitions of his students, either by stealth or by open question. Every student. Each year, he'd make some unobtrusive comment that would show you that he'd been watching you, how you were making your progress towards your stated goals. No obvious congratulation, and the subtler the comment, the greater the praise implied.

And so she had begun. She knew she wasn't like everyone, cooler than the others she was acutely aware of her sorting. The only other to be so acclaimed at been no less than the great Harry Potter when he went to Gryffindor. What Potter was to the Lions, so was Lestrange to the Vipers. A name that conjured the image to go with "Malfoy, Black, Rosier, and Montague." A name with which went the expectations of the house of ambition.

She had known what to expect, of course. You weren't raised in the oldest family only to neglect your heritage, and your lineage. What you chose to do with it was your own concern, but the breeding was there.

She sat in her lesson, writing and erasing the words in the air - to be worthy, to redeem, to disappear, to fail. Words only she could see, listing ideas beyond the scope of her classmates.

The professors changed, and remained the same. All watching, expectantly, for the redeemer, whether her or Potter. She liked it. She liked the feeling of cheating them under their noses. Potter would be corrupted; she was never pure to begin with. She knew that. Her brain didn't. It carried on whirring, as if she was undecided, when the choice had been made since always. She stopped the mental noise by pinching herself, letting her hand find the softest skin on her leg, and giving it the hardest bite she could with her fingers. It stopped dead, letting her focus, just for now on the lesson, and her world subsided into the shared make believe of Hogwarts.

*~--^--~*

A spell, and she is back in the dungeon, listening to her mind, and that of her professor. Just once, she blocks, briefly, the images thrown back to her are of her mother, clear, sharp, beautiful.

And another, a man with matted hair, sat beside the memory room of her mother, sharing the same prison of another man's ideas. She stopped blocking, sliding easily into her thoughts, her professor barely aware of the pause in his search for the spell. Eyes met hers, in shadow and in song, a sound unbidden rising in her mind. A lullaby of sorts to her infant mind.