Chapter 1
“Since you couldn’t finish your chores on time, freak, you’ll be staying out there until you do,” Petunia remarked with a nasty sneer. “You’ll not be allowed back into the house after dark, and you won’t get anything to eat.” She turned and stormed back into number four, Privet Drive, slamming the door so hard that the windows rattled. The five year old flinched as he heard the locks snick, and he sighed heavily as he turned back to the work in front of him. He was working on his aunt’s prized roses, and the toil was hard and demanding. He’d had to dig around every single bush to pull up all the weeds and shoots of other plants that had tried to invade the space, and his fingers were raw and bleeding from cuts in some places. His arms were all scratched up from the thorns he brushed against as he reached underneath the flowers to get at the difficult places.
It was full dark when he finally finished, and he knew that he wouldn’t be welcome in the house, so he took himself off to the park down the street, finding the overhanging plants under which he’d made his frequent bed. There was a threadbare blanket that he’d rescued from someone’s trash under there, and a sofa cushion on which he’d curled up, that came from a couch someone was throwing out. A handmade decorative pillow that he’d grabbed from Mrs. Number Seven’s refuse supported his head, and he sighed tiredly as his eyes slipped closed.
Rabastan Lestrange observed from the shadows a few yards away, in his St. Bernard animagus form, as a child that looked no older than three curled up underneath some thick, overgrown shrubbery in an infrequently visited part of the community park, a deep furrow of anger and concern on his furry brow as he watched the boy fall asleep. He glanced around quickly, to ascertain whether or not the child’s parents were nearby, but he saw no other adults in the vicinity who might possibly lay claim to the tot. He looked at the position of the stars and moon in the sky and guessed it was around midnight, making the crease deepen in worry for the safety of the child. Bella, Rodolphus and he had been trying for several years to have a child, ever since the fall of the Dark Lord, but were unsuccessful.
A medical scan and tests revealed that his mate’s constant exposure to the cruciatus had badly damaged her ovaries, rendering her sterile. For a while, Bellatrix had gone mad, inconsolable and borderline suicidal in her rage, before Severus Snape had created some potions that would clear her mind and bring her back to a version of sanity that was acceptable.
She was still slightly unhinged, but she was better able to control it, and it was through long talks with both of her husbands that she finally realized that, though she couldn’t physically give birth, she could still help raise the children of their friends and family, and that soothed a part of her unrelenting sadness. Having her own child to spoil, however, was always at the back of her mind, and she would stare longingly at other people’s offspring, fingers twitching with the need to grab them up and run.
Here, though, was the perfect opportunity for them to finally have the family they’d always wanted, since the child’s parents obviously didn’t care for him. So thinking, he quietly and gently crawled under the bushes, curling himself around the toddler to add warmth until the sun came up, when he would revert to his human form and apparate away. He was still concerned that the adults charged with the child’s care would come looking for the little waif, and didn’t want to invite any sort of muggle interference should that happen, up to and including the Prime Minister contacting the Minister for Magic about an abducted muggle child.
The next morning, in the misty light, he changed back into his human form, cast a temporary sleeping charm on the curled up form, and wrapped the boy up in the blanket before picking him up, scowling at the lack of any appreciable weight. He looked around quickly, noticing muggles passing by on the distant sidewalk, but none seemed to be anxiously searching for the bundle in his arms, so he breathed a quiet sigh of relief. He stood and stared down into a face that had evidence of a lot of unkind treatment, and, snarling softly, he spun on the spot and disapparated, landing in the receiving room of Lestrange Castle.
A house elf popped in immediately, eyes widening on the sight of the little boy in its master’s arms. “Master Lestrange is being bringing a little one,” it whispered eagerly. “Chesty is being telling Beenie that there is being a little one in the manor.” With that pronouncement, he popped away to alert the house elf staff that a child had finally come home. It only took a few moments before Rodolphus and Bellatrix were sliding into the receiving room, eyes wide and anxious on the bundle in their third’s arms.
“Is that…” the female of the triad whispered, voice trembling.
“It is,” Rab agreed with a distinct angry growl in his voice, the only indication of his deep connection to his animagus form. “I found him curled up on some discarded cushions underneath some shrubbery in a park down the street from where the Potter brat is supposed to be living.”
“He can’t be more than three years old,” Rodolphus whisper-shrieked incredulously. “What parent, in their right mind, would allow a toddler out past midnight in a muggle neighborhood?”
“Who cares,” Bella hissed angrily, eyes staring at the child greedily. “Finders, keepers, I say.” With that, she took the little boy from her mate’s arms and carried him away, cooing nonsense at him the whole way.
“Well, even if we find out who he is and to whom he belongs, he’s never leaving this house,” Rodolphus remarked as he watched his mate walk away.
“That’s exactly what I had in mind,” Rabastan agreed, a fond smile on his face for his wayward wife.
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“So, have you found out to whom the child belonged?” Narcissa asked a week later. It took that long for the rest of their family and friends to meet the boy because of the pernicious neglect and starvation the child had suffered for nearly five years. They discovered the day following his ‘rescue’ that the child was actually Harry Potter, and that he’d been living with abusive muggles since his parents were murdered.
At first, the three were unsure what to do. They knew that fairly soon, someone would come looking for the child, but they were not willing to give him up, considering how Rab had found the boy in the first place. So they beefed up their wards and protections in preparation for a Ministry raid to recover the Boy Who Lived, and spent several days waiting breathlessly on tenterhooks for Aurors to come storming into the manor. When nothing happened, Rodolphus went to the Ministry and skulked around, listening to all the scuttlebutt he could to gauge how desperate the government was to find their missing hero.
When he heard not a single peep about the boy, he went back home, completely befuddled that no one had put out a red alert for the child. So he reached out to Severus Snape, one of their contacts in the school, who sent them a letter a day later, telling them that Albus Dumbledore was the one to leave Potter with his muggle relatives, and that he seemed to be sure that the child was safe, and felt no need to check up on the boy. With that news, the Lestranges heaved a sigh of relief and, that very day, they performed a blood adoption on their son, renaming him Cassini Lestrange. Though the Boy Who Lived’s birthday was July thirty-first, the adoption became an unintentional rebirthing ceremony, and his new birthday became September eleventh, nineteen eighty.
“His parents are deceased,” Bella explained softly as she cuddled her son on her lap. She was very reluctant to share her son’s true origins with anyone outside the immediate family for fear that they would target him for the loss of the Dark Lord. She and her two husbands were intent on protecting the child as much as they could, and that included making sure he wasn’t drawn back into the center of the war of egos. The child soaked up all the love he could, having gone without for nearly five years, and he didn’t mind that his mum was always hugging him or holding him. He welcomed all the contact with which his parents were willing to gift him, and would go out of his way to seek his three parents out in order to make sure that it wasn’t a dream he was having whilst he was locked in the cupboard underneath his aunt and uncle’s front stairs.
“So he was an orphan,” Lucius intoned, eyes narrowed as he thought about that. “I know that there were a lot of orphans when the Dark Lord fell, but I’m pretty sure there were only a few toddlers left without parents at that time, and two of them are rather famous.”
“There’s that keen intelligence that’s so valuable in our line of work,” his wife chided him gently. “So this is Harry Potter, then? I see the signature scar, and if you want him to remain hidden, that will need to be removed as soon as possible.”
“Oddly enough, the blood adoption became a rebirthing ceremony toward the end, and he was christened Cassini Rudostan Lestrange, born September eleventh, nineteen eighty, to commemorated the date of the adoption,” Rodolphus remarked with a grin. “And yes, we’ve spoken to the goblins about the scar, and there seems to be a bit of Riddle’s Dark magic trapped behind it, which is why it hasn’t healed like it should. We’re scheduled for a ritual cleanse, and at the same time they’ll be removing all the binds on his magic. It seems,” the man’s voice deepened into an angry growl, “that the benevolent headmaster decided to restrict his power, leaving him defenseless for the muggles’ abuse.”
“How long do you think it’ll be before he notices his missing savior?” Regulus queried curiously. “Severus has agreed to keep an eye on the man, and let us know when he makes any sort of move to confront the muggles, should he discover that the boy is no longer with his relatives.”
“What about the supposed wards behind which the boy was thought to have been placed for his protection?” Bella asked, eyes still on her son, who had fallen asleep in her lap. “What kind of wards were they, anyway?”
“According to my husband, Severus,” Lord Regulus Black replied with a frown, “the old man had placed blood wards around that muggle home, linked to Potter’s blood connection between his mother and her sister. Dumbledore has been nattering on about Lily’s ‘love’ protecting her son, which is why he survived the killing curse that night. We all know that hundreds of parents had sacrificed their lives to protect their children, yet not a single one of them ever survived Riddle’s attacks. We also know, since James and Lily were part of our ‘association’, that the both of them most likely worked some sort of powerful sacrificial ritual that provided protection for the child, and were able to take out the threat to our world at the same time.”
“Yes,” Lucius murmured softly, a fond, sad smile on his face. “They certainly fulfilled the contract in a most spectacular way whilst still protecting the one thing most precious to them. It will be our duty to raise and train their son and heir in our ways, to honor them by ushering in their son as the next generation of elite assassin who will lead our children to greatness, once we’ve finally terminated the true threat to our world and our way of life: Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, the true Dark Lord of prophecy.”