The Unbreakable Vow

17th June 1989 - Mattheo Riddle

Mattheo was an angry child. His mother - God, his evil, torturous mother - had made him this way. He memorized the shift of her weight on the stairs, the creak the floorboards made when she walked towards his bedroom. Even the speed at which the door opened was an identifier of who was behind it. 

He didn’t know why, or even when, he learned to associate the crrr-cruck! of the floorboards with his mother’s presence. He just knew that she would be coming for him. 

It was sickening. His mother, her nest of hair, her cruel grin and her manic laugh. The tilt of her head when he threatened her, a dare in the motion. A crazed glint in her eyes.

She was a matter of when, not if. 

That much Mattheo had learned. 

He had been forced to grow up fast, to mature without mistakes, without misbehavior. He wasn’t allowed a wand, though he often saw the end of his mother’s. He grew up in darkness, in the cold, and often alone. It didn’t count as presence when all your mother wanted to do was hurt you. 

She loved him. He knew that in her own twisted way, what she did to him was love. Facing the torturous Cruciatus curse, he knew that because she could not make him feel loved, she could make him feel pain. Her insanity bridged the gap between good and bad, linking both emotions into the idea of feeling. Love was pain, he learned. Love was pain, he endured. 

Below him, the house quaked with the ruckus of his mother’s friends. His mother’s husband - stepfather, really, but Mattheo had learned to dislike anything considered “half” - ran with his true father’s (who had long since abandoned Mattheo, and the rest of the world, it seems) crowd. 

The crowd, the Deatheaters, were everything his mother liked. Villainous, torturous, evil. Nights like these were her favorite, Mattheo assumed, where they played games of “hunt, chase, kill” in the forest. Really, his mother loved it most when he was at the other end of these games - the prey they would set into the forest because it forced him to fight back, to be heartless like her. It was in this game he learned to adapt—humanity would do no good weaponless and alone in the forest. He knew he could trace his sociopathic demeanor to this game.

It helped his mother see the similarities between him and her. And cruelly enough, that was her love. Whatever a burden it might be.

Between Mattheo Riddle, son of Voldemort, and Bellatrix Lestrange, baby mother and whore of the Dark Lord, his legacy was his parents’ life.

Mattheo was sick of it. 

And he was only eleven. 

He knew this had to stop, and it likely wouldn’t end with him alive. Mattheo had long ago come to terms with his death - nobody knew he existed, other than the Deatheaters, and since they would most likely be the ones to kill him, he didn’t seem to think any of it mattered. He would be no martyr. Just a body in the woods. 

It was horrid, the way he thought. But if you lived with a Deatheater, it became a basic survival instinct: He was a boy . And he wanted to live . 

It was time to become the prey. 

-

He had been running for hours. Or at least until the full moon had finally bared its teeth. 

A wolf howled in the distance.

That’ll be Fenrir Greyback, he rolled his eyes. No wonder tonight was one of Mother’s little game nights.

Bellatrix Lestrange kept… different company. Compared to what Mattheo imagined typical wizard family friends looked like, he was pretty sure he was right. A werewolf friend had to be highly unusual for wizard families to keep around. Especially ones with children. And especially on nights of the full moon.

Unfortunately for Mattheo, that seemed to be the only night Greyback came to the Lestrange’s. 

And he definitely wasn’t ready to suffer from lycanthropy just yet. 

So he kept running.

The branches scraped like his mother’s nails across his flesh. Singed like the brand she left on his arm, half-blood, carved with her canines. If there was something Mattheo hated more than anything, it was not having control. And there was nothing more uncontrollable than being shackled to the moon every month. 

His legs were stiff with lactic acid, his lungs dry and aching. A hummingbird flapped in his chest. He stopped running. The night around him was pitch dark and leering with locusts and cicadas. In the moonlight, the glade Mattheo was in was eerie. Ominous. A boulder was at its center. On its left was a massive beech tree, its branches beckoning tendrils. Mattheo carefully walked around its trunk, taking inventory of the hollow center, its opening half hidden by the looming stone.

He wondered—

A snap of a twig being broken jolted Mattheo from his thoughts. He could sense the beast behind him. Its huff was too loud for a typical wolf, its step too thunderous for a stag. It was too late. 

Greyback had found him.

Same night - Vivianne Vole

The rock—or rather, the beast behind the rock—stopped howling.

Vi stopped where she was, her ears ringing and her eyes wide. She knew the beast could sense her presence, and if not that, it could definitely smell her. She shook in her place, her lower lip wobbling in fear.

The beast stood from behind the rock. Its eyes— human eyes—were reflectors in the light from Vi’s wand. Her arm quaked in a second wave of fear, and the light went out. 

She was blind, save for the dim streaks of moonlight brightening the clearing. Darkness was no aid to trembling legs. Vi could still hear the large beast’s breath, see its elongated snout and wiry gray fur in her head. The crunching of the forest floor told Vi that the beast was making its way around the boulder, coming straight towards her. 

She forced her shaking legs forwards, willing feeling back into her frozen toes and silence in her steps. She knew from her father’s warnings that this beast meant death.

“Don’t go in the woods at night, Vivianne,” her father warned her for the first time after she told him she could hear the trees breathing. “There are dangerous creatures out there.”

“What kinda creatures?” she had asked him. Her father had sat her in his lap, and she played with the wire frames that were perched on the end of his nose.

“Werewolves, Vi. If they bite you…” her father’s speech trailed off, and the young girl looked into his face. The crease between his eyebrows grew deeper the more he thought. “Vi, if you ever get bitten by a werewolf, you’re dead already.”

The werewolf was close enough to the girl that she recoiled at its putrid scent, and tiptoed faster around the boulder. Its own steps increased in speed, its growl was even nearer, the sick warmth of its body was suddenly right behind her—

Crrrack!

A thud came from the edge of the glade, maybe thirty feet from Vi. She felt a cold rush of air as the beast’s head swung towards the noise, its heavy footfalls a signal to its brief—and likely temporary—departure. Vi was safe—for now. 

A crushing grip on her arm made her squeak, and she was dragged to the other side of the boulder—away from the beast—and into the hollow of the tree. She kicked her legs and made contact with something that went oof and opened her mouth to scream. A hand clamped over her mouth. 

“Please don’t scream,” a voice whispered. Brown eyes met her own in the sudden reappearance of her wand’s Lumos. They squinted shut at the light.

“For Merlin’s sa—” the boy paused. “Put that out, please, before he comes back.”

The light went out again. 

Vi continued to shake. The shadow of the boy removed his hand from her mouth, staring at her wide eyes, petrified with fright. She could not move. She wanted to cry. Most of all, she wanted her father.

Her bottom lip trembled again. Her eyes grew blurry. 

“What are you—? What is—, stop that, please. ” The boy didn’t seem to understand that Vi was about to start wailing. He was desperate for a way to survive the next five minutes, and that seemed imminent on the girl’s ability to not cry . 

Vi’s grip on her wand tightened when the boy made a grab for it. He sighed in frustration. 

“If you don’t give me your wand, I can’t help you,” he said angrily. 

Vi’s lip wobbled. It wasn’t as if she knew how to use it, and the beast was still out there. She thought about what her father said. Dead already. 

She gave the boy her wand. 

Same night - Mattheo Riddle

With the new weight in his hand, Mattheo felt he could do anything. Even if, logically, he knew no magic. The only spells he had seen cast were Unforgivable, and even then, he didn’t know if they’d work on a werewolf.

But he had to try. If not to live through the night, then for this girl who had been wandering around the forest. He was not a monster. He was a boy. And he wanted to live. 

And he also knew she was a witch. She had to have family nearby, a house, even. A sliver of hope sparked in him. Maybe they would take him in. Maybe he could finally have a family. He looked at the girl. She was shaking in the darkness, her green eyes wide and searching frantically, blindly in the dark. But when they had met his own in the light of her wand, something in him had shifted. It wasn’t fate. Oh, no. Mattheo knew what fate felt like. Fate was cruel and fickle. Fate had chewed him up and chucked him with the worst of the worst. This was something else, something more. 

Darkness was all Mattheo had known. His only friend. But when he saw this girl, he felt drawn to her. Her green eyes flecked with silver, her white gold hair that seemed to be of its own sentience, floating around her round face, tendrils almost lovingly licking at her cheeks. This was something else. She was something else.

All his life, Mattheo had focused solely on his own survival. His mother’s games, her neglect, the darkness—he knew it had all been to train him for what was to come. But he couldn’t do what he was trained to. He couldn’t throw this girl to Greyback and run the other way. 

The wand was warm in his left hand, as if it was ready for a fight. As if it knew just how Unforgivable Mattheo was about to be. But not to her.

To himself.

“ Imperio, ” he whispered, pointing the wand at the girl. The hollow of the tree was small enough that as he spoke the curse, the wand tapped her forehead. Her small frame seemed to snap to his attention, eager to obey. “Wait until my signal,” he ordered the girl, “and then run. As fast as you can, run home. Never come back here, and say nothing to nobody. You never saw me or Greyback. Understand?” The girl nodded. She had stopped shaking. Mattheo shuddered. A side effect of the spell, he supposed. She only felt what he wanted her to feel. 

Mattheo crept towards the opening in the hollow. Hesitating, he looked back at the girl. She was a statue behind him, her eyes—now soulless, undriven, controlled eyes—followed his movement. On a whim he asked, “What’s your name?”

“Vivianne.” He flinched. Even her voice was monotone. 

“I promise I’ll make this up to you, Annie,” he said before leaving the hollow and stepping into the glade.