Reflection: Beginning, Part i

For Time,
Because maybe if I'm nice
You'll lend yourself to me more often.

Theodore Nott’s mother died before he was born.

Impossible yes, but the notion of impossibility was a bit skewed in the world of dark magic and blind ambition.

It had happened in her bedroom, the one across the sprawling manor from her husband’s, and it had been the fault of a stray shard of glass, forgotten by the house elves the time Annabelle Nott had shattered the handheld mirror in her palms in a fit of what most deemed irrational despair, though she would beg to differ. Post-partem depression before the baby was born, they speculated…pre-partem depression. Was that even possible?

She was too disoriented to care. Her husband didn’t care enough to notice. And the Healers noticed enough to realize that intervention could cost them far more than just a slightly blemished conscious and the moral battle felt within every time they pretended to turn a blind eye.

It got to be stifling for Annabelle, the despair; she was a woman wed to a man with no soul, pregnant with a child she felt sure would become a demon, a corporeal form of the winged, venomed claws of the loneliness that slashed so slowly at her heart, blowing icy breath into her veins and laying heavy granite eggs of helplessness in her stomach.

When she glimpsed herself in the jagged corner of the glass nestled into the ivory threads of the carpets of her bedroom, peaking out from beneath her vanity chair, she saw the corner of a letter slid partway beneath a door, waiting to be read like a poor man waits on the streetcorner for a few Knuts. There was no return address, but it had her name sprawled across the front in childlike print, red ink blotted at the beginning of every letter where the finger rested while the shape of that particular letter was carefully remembered. She knew it wasn’t real, that her child was unborn, innocent still and unable to fathom the evil she knew, but she thought it a plea from him, requesting she allow him to remain safe in her womb, protected from the cold world of his father so that he couldn’t be molded into something far more sinister than a letter addressed in blood.

Theodore knew none of this, of course, being that he was merely a negative two weeks old when it happened. So when his mother discovered the jagged mirror-piece beneath her vanity chair and used it to bite at the insides of her wrists and the underside of her jaw, he only knew that it got a bit colder inside his small dormitory and not that the white carpets of his mother’s bedroom were steadily stained red as the blood flowed from her veins like the black waters of the river Styx.

It was concluded upon the discovery of her corpse that the baby within Annabelle Nott’s womb was no longer living, as is only rational when an expecting mother dies before she gives birth, but Theodore lived for a day and a half inside his mother’s cold body, his first accidental magic a product of necessity for survival rather than strong emotion. He was only removed when the mortician realized he was still, miraculously, alive. A bit of magic later, and he was blinking his eyes open for the first time, staring at the body of his dead mother in complete and total indifference, silent.

Shortly thereafter he was staring at the hard, sharp face of his father as the mortician presented the man his son. His father stared back at him for approximately twenty seconds before he called for a house elf, handed the baby off to the small creature, and told it to feed his namesake whenever he started crying. Theodore didn’t cry at all the first day of his life, and the house elves had to press their hands against the stove and shut their heads in the pantry door as they warmed the milk they knew he needed despite his silence.

It was a depressing and lonely beginning to what most would consider a depressing and lonely lifetime, and as Theodore stared into the milky white eyes of the skeletal horse standing before him eleven years later, he suspected it might have been the reason he despised the human race to such an extreme.

The horse’s eyes reminded him of the fog that clung to the buttresses of Nott Hall in the very small hours of the morning, when the fire in his room still burned slowly as he sat on the windowsill, his bed left neatly made and un-slept in behind him. Ghostlike faces molded themselves outside his window, flickering and smirking at him as he sat, and he hadn’t realized they were all versions his own- older, younger, only a bit paler- until he saw the same ones reflected back at him from the murky depths of the horse’s eyes.

The thestral he was standing before snorted and moved its head slowly so that it was facing the opposite direction, towards the lawns sloping up to the entrance of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Theodore caught a glimpse of a young girl with long brown curls and soft green eyes standing on the opposite side of the horse, staring through its head to Theodore’s face and frowning slightly as if she were thinking about addressing him. He looked away from her before she had a chance and followed the lantern of the giant man leading them through the dark to the waiting rickety boats. He chose one slightly off to the side, whose own lantern was rocking slightly and creaking as it let out a dim light, and sat in the back of it, not sharing in the nervous chatter of the three other students around him.

Miracles, to Theodore, were much the same as impossibilities: he simply did not believe in them. And it would be a miracle for him to relate to the students musing about which house they would be in and how big the troll they would have to fight would be, instead of mulling over just exactly why his reflection in the fog of the thestral’s eye seemed to be smirking at him ironically.

He mulled this over throughout his trek from the mossy underground chamber beneath the castle, all the way to the room outside the Great Hall, and from there up the aisle in the middle of the Great Hall itself, and onto the rickety stool at the front. He was still thinking about it when the tattered old hat was plopped on top of his head.

“Ah,” a voice said in his ear, and Theodore didn’t even flinch at the unexpected noise, instead staring at the inside of the hat indifferently. “Not one to let our emotions get the better of us, are we?”

Theodore made no response, out loud or no, besides to blink his eyes once and then resume his staring.

“Well,” said the hat, “I think we both know to which house you belong, but I wonder…what choice will you make?”

Theodore couldn’t help but to frown slightly at the hat’s words, and it wasn’t long after he did that there was a soft laugh in his ear and the hat said,

“You are wondering what choice I speak of, are you not?” It paused as if to allow Theodore time to respond, but continued on unanswered. “It’s simple really. Merely a matter of will-power.”

Theodore frowned once again but did not question the hat, as it seemed to wish of him. Instead, he shifted slightly on the hard stool and was then still once again. The hat laughed.

“Well, you do have patience, that’s a thing. Good, for where you’ll end up, should you choose that path, but I wonder if you will be willing to let others help you in your decisions…”

This time the hat got a bit more of a response, as Theodore snorted disdainfully, and turned his head as if to ignore any further words it had to say. Once again, the hat laughed.

“Ah yes, stubborn as well, aren’t you? Well, no matter, these things tend to balance themselves out with time. For now, all I can do for you is to ask the one question that will help you discover why, exactly, you saw that reflection in the thestral’s eyes.”

The hat was gratified with more of a reaction this time, as Theodore sat up with more attention and frowned in surprise at the tattered leather in front of his eyes.

“What choice will you make, Theodore Nott? The easy one, the one with less bother attached, or the one that will take you through the dark, towards the unknown, with no guarantees as assured attachments?”

And with that, Theodore was left only to frown in wonder as the hat bellowed loudly, over the whisperings that were starting across the four tables, “SLYTHERIN!” and he was pushed towards the table at the far left of the Hall.

A/N: So there’s the first of the Four. Theodore Nott. Any ideas as to which he is: Author, Spectator, Illusionist, or Acrobat? I’m not telling. You’ll know eventually.

On a different note, the prologue has been slightly changed. I was informed by darksworld on my Yahoo!Group that I spelled infinity wrong the entire time. I thought about claiming I meant to do it and there was a reason, but all I could think of was that I used four “i’s” in the spelling and there are four main characters in this story, but that sounded weak even to me, so I’m shifting the blame instead. My calculus teacher in high school actually made us spell it “infiniti” and she wasn’t one you argued with much.

But really, I was just being stupid. It has been changed. Thanks darksworld :)

Review?

-h

PS: Any guesses as to the rest of the four? I’ll give you a hint…Malfoy isn’t one of them, there are two girls left and a boy, none of them are original, and only one was mentioned in the books more than sparsely.