i am lord voldemort • Tom Riddle

Epilogue III: Rabastan Lestrange

Rabastan placed a silencing charm around himself and the child, sitting on the icy steps outside the boy's house.

The screaming didn't much bother him — not anymore, not for a long time — but he reckoned the boy didn't need to hear his parent's torture. In truth, Rabastan didn't even know his name. No point asking, either. At a year old, the kid likely didn't know it himself, and Rabastan wasn't particularly keen on making conversation with a toddler.

He sighed, wondering how his life brought him to that point and at the same time knowing he had only himself to blame. Thimgs could have been so different, that's what fueled the bitter churning in his chest.

That's what made him hate her.

The girl he knew never to speak of again, even as her face turned gray in his mind, even as the sound of her voice turned to a soft whisper and disappeared in the riptide of time and memory. Somedays he'd think about her every day, every second, for a month, others he would go a year without her crossing his mind.

Were it not for meeting her...

She ruined all their lives, he believed. Not just her own, not just Tom's. She ruined more lives than she could count and she wasn't even alive to see it.

She could have made Tom better. For a brief, fleeting moment, it seemed like maybe she had.

But then she went and did that stupid thing people are prone to do.

She died.

After that, everything changed. Rabastan's fate was sealed. Voldemort would kill him in an instant, like he had so many others, if he tried to leave, to abandon the path they had been walking down for — for how long now? Half of their yearmates were dead already. Some by their side, others at the nasty end of their wands.

Like Fenella.

She died on a night like this, under a deceptively pleasant sky, beneath stars so bright Rabastan could almost reach up and scoop them into his palm. He wished he'd thought to die with her. Alas, she was always the most sensible of their miserable band of misfits.

Rabastan knew better than to think his old friend had actually been killed by the Potter boy. Tom and Ophelia thought they'd been sly in their veiled allusions to the Horcruxes, they never imagined Rabastan, behind his, foolish, whimsical demeanor, could have pieced two and two together, especially as Tom transformed into an unrecognizable fragment of his former self. He'd nearly laughed when the Dark Lord ordered him to place that chalice in Rabastan's own vault. The power he'd given Rabastan, without even realising it! What a fool. Or maybe he, himself, was the fool for never destroying it.

How Bella had rejoiced at that honour. Bella, who was married to his own brother. Bella, who loved the husk of Tom Riddle like no other.

Again and again, Rabastan implored her to be rid of that horrible infatuation. Nothing would come of it. No good ever came to the women who loved that monster. "The Dark Lord does not love," he'd say. It was true enough. The Dark Lord did not love her, at least. Bella would have a fit if she ever learned of the one her master might have once cared for, but no one was ever going to speak that name aloud. Not anymore.

"Ophelia."

Rabastan looked straight down at the boy and spoke her name, just one last, meaningless act of defiance. Wide, sleepy eyes blinked back, unknowing of just what was happening to his mother and father merely a wall away.

"They'll kill them, you know," he told the unnamed boy. "Even if they say what happened to Tom, to Lord Voldemort, your parents are going die."

He felt comfortable calling the "Dark Lord" by his true name there, within his spell's bubble where no sound could enter or leave.

"Maybe... maybe they'll kill you, too, when they're done."

It wouldn't be the first time Bella slaughtered a child for the sport of it.

The boy balled a meaty fist, seemingly in opposition to his fate. Despite his young age, he looked remarkably like his grandfather. Rabastan didn't know the man well, but back in school he always thought Ophelia was fond of the Longbottom, and he was sure he didn't imagine how Tom despised that fondness. Rabastan often wondered if that was the only reason that family still lived. Ephiriam's path had crossed more than once with the Dark Lord. His child's and his wife's path had intersected with his on occasions too numerous to count, and against all odds they kept walking away unscathed.

Not this time.

On a whim, Rabastan directed his wand towards the heavens and uttered the words to conjure the dark mark above the house. "Morsmordre."

An aurora of emerald light masked the stars overhead, weaving into a bare skull with a serpent coiling from its mouth. Someone, somewhere, would see it. Someone, somewhere, would look out their window only for a sharp spike of fear to stab into their heart.

And when the Ministry showed only a few minutes later, Rabastan didn't move to warn the others, didn't move at all. He let the Aurors disarm him and "rescue" the young Longbottom boy, as if seeing it all from far away. He held no illusions about his future. He would go to Azkaban, and if he was lucky he'd be long dead by the time his old friend re-emerged from the darkness he'd hidden himself in.

Rabastan was never strong enough to stop Tom Riddle anyway, even as children. When did loyalty turn into blind servitude? When did being supportive morph into cowardice?

He only wanted to be a part something great. Anyone could have seen Tom would change the world.

And Tom was great. Tom did change the world.

He just wasn't good.

A/N

I decided to write an alternate ending at the behest of a couple readers, that will start following this chapter. Not to spoil (but also it's obvious since I wouldn't be writing otherwise) but in the alternate Ophelia will NOT die.

I'm not sadistic enough to kill her twice.