a charming child

“Regana was an idiot who feverishly soaked up everything Walburga and Orion commanded, I doubt she had a brain of her own.”

“Well yes, but when she was a child she was so sweet. You must remember that at the least.”

“I suppose so.”

“She was a charming child,” a faint smile spread across Lucius’s lips, “I remember her running around at one of the balls picking the icing roses off the cakes and eating them whole.”

Narcicca appeared to thaw at the memory, “The parents used to all adore her,” she shook her head slightly before straightening, “Not that it matters by her third year she had changed.”

Draco opened his mouth to ask how, but fell silent as Narcissa picked up the paper again. He had millions of questions running through his head about his aunt and her disappearance, but his mother seemed closed on the matter.

***

It’s so cold. Am I underwater? What’s going on?

Reagana opens my eyes slowly and sees corpses with sickly translucent skin, and webbed hands surrounding her. She jerks away from the icy touch of one and looks around. She’s underwater in an inferi infested lake. A bubble of air leaves her mouth and she swims towards it as it rises. As she moves the inferi tighten their grip on hair and pull her back.

Stop moving. Relax. I can't breathe. Hurry. What gets rid of inferi. What are they afraid of? 

Fire.

Her wand isn’t in her pocket. 

Ok. Not the end of the world. I’ve practiced wandless magic before. Fire. Focus on the heat. This isn’t gonna work. No stop. You have to try. Drowning’s a painful way to go.

Hot green flames engulf her body and the inferi jerk backward. Reagana swims up, free of their icy grip and takes in a huge gasp when she finally meets air. A small patch of land sits nearby and she slowly swims towards it. Her body is weighed down by her waterlogged clothes. She collapses up the shore and lays down as the flames collapse. Minutes or hours pass as she lays there catching her breath before flipping to the side as water burns up her throat and splatters across the pebbles.

A sharp pain in her side, and leg make her freeze. The adrenaline must have hidden it from her while swimming.She stands up anyway, resolving to check it out once she can be sure she’s safe from any imminent threats. 

Scanning the surrounding area it starts to come back to her. Voldemort. The horcrux. She remembers destroying it but everything after that remains a mystery. She clumsily transfigures a rock into another boat and slowly rows herself towards the entrance of the cave. It takes far longer than normal due to her weakened state. She docks the boat and slowly limps out of the damp cave. 

A sharp wind runs through the night, sending a deeper chill through her wet clothes. She stumbles home half delirious. 

Reagana steps in and freezes as dust paints over every surface.

How long was I in the cave for?

She immediately spins and frantically hobbles back outside, to the muggle newspaper box at the end of the block. The box opens easily and she grabs the paper. 

June 2022.

2022.

She falls back against the cold metal box dumbly as her breath starts to quicken into short gasps. 

It’s been 17 years. What. What the fuck. Is everyone okay? Where’s Voldemort? What happened in that goddamn cave. Fuck. I can’t. They’ll. I. 

Her thoughts spiral deeper and deeper, as she stays there until it starts to rain. 

The dust rises slightly and flits over each other as she steps through the hall. Each unsteady exhale sends the dust flying through the air again. She walks up the stairs clutching the railing as if it’s her life line. It hurts. Everything. Her side. Her leg. Her head. Her insides ache and who knows if it’s because she’s been gone for 17 years, or was drowning for 17 years. 

She grabs a towel from the closet and steps into the bathroom. Reagana freezes in front of the mirror. She looks nearly the exact same except for her eyes. Once a dark brown, have turned a dark, murky green. There’s a small cut underneath her left eye, and deep greyish eye bags under both. Her skin is sickly, and her cheekbones jut out more than before. Her once thick black hair is now scraggly. She tears herself away from the mirror and steps into the shower. The heat is amazing, but she has to stop and sit down to catch her breath, and slow the spinning in her head. 

After what feels like forever but is likely only a few minutes she climbs out of the shower and towels herself off. There's a large dark bruise on her leg, and side. The rest of her skin is covered in tiny cuts from the nails of the inferi. An involuntary shudder runs through her body at the mere thought of them. She’s too weak to do much of anything other than light the fireplace and fall asleep.

Reagana wakes up as her body flinches and jerks her out of her nightmares. She curls into herself trying to chase away the nightmarish inferi and their cold grip.

A laugh bubbles past her lips, and suddenly she’s laughing. It’s hysterical and any sane person watching would be tempted to ship her to a mental hospital.

Oh god I’m really going insane now aren’t I. I’m turning right into mother aren’t I?

She laughs as tears run out of her eyes and drip through the hollows of her cheeks. 

She pushes herself up and immediately falls into her set drawers. Her body is weak and her leg screams in a pain she hadn’t noticed or felt earlier. She transfigures a forgotten earring on the floor into a crappy stick and uses it to make her way downstairs. 

Her cupboards are bare, and the dishes covered in a thick layer of dust. With a groan she grabs a black coat from her closet, feels leftover change in the pocket, and steps outside. 

The wind whips her hair into her face and she spits it out. Reagana clutches her stick like it’s her lifeline and walks down the block to a coffee shop at the corner. The wind bites at her from every angle, and a slight pink grows on her nose and the heights of her cheeks. The strong scent of coffee hits her as she opens the door and warms her face. 

She orders a large black coffee and a bagel, and heads back to her house of horrors. 

Once inside she lets her coat fall to the floor and heads upstairs to have her breakfast in front of the already lit fireplace. Her eyes catch on the dark mark on her left arm. The skull and snake tattoo seems to jump out in contrast to her pale skin. 

“Shit.” The dark lord uses the mark to call on the death eaters but who knows if that’s all it can do. She crams the rest of the bagel into her mouth and limps down two sets of stairs to her basement where her potions lab is.

She sets the coffee down on the workbench and pulls out a cauldron. Reagana can’t risk the dark lord finding out she’s alive. Although she doesn’t know anything that happened while she was out there isn’t time to waste and that is a risk she cannot afford. She pulls out an old book from her shelf and flips through until she finds the recipe she’s looking for. The recipe is complicated and if the ministry knew she had the book she would surely be arrested. The book itself was about the dark arts’ potions. It had recipes for controlling large crowds, creating lively puppets, and many needed sacrifices. The potion she was looking for would replace a limb with a functional silver replica as long as the wound was still bleeding when it was ingested. 

An hour later the potion was ready. 

Reagana grit her teeth as she slashed her wand through the air and a bright red line appeared three inches down from the crook of her elbow. Her arm fell off and landed on the floor with a thud. Blood spilled out of the cut and she screamed out in pain. The edges of her sight blackened in pain as she downed the potion in one go. She froze in amazement as silver lines immediately grew out of her arm creating a skeletal hand. It looked like someone had peeled away her skin and blood and changed the colour of her skeleton to silver. She flexed the hand as the pain faded away as quickly as it had come.

She spent the rest of the day buying groceries and cleaning her house. By nightfall she was both dead to the world, and trapped in her own personal hell that was her head. 

The rest of the week was spent enrolling in Hogwarts, hiding her tracks, and catching up to the current state of the world.