The Tempest - or: Max does more writing ... ;-)

I wasn't here for a long time. Real life made me busy and besides ... I was writing and once I wasn't only writing for my living, but just for the fun of it. And I've had a lot of fun with the two stories I wrote.The first one, "A Winter Tale", is now up at FF.net and AFF.net. And it found a few readers who obviously like it. The second one I'll probably publish on AFF.net too - after the first one is done, of course. Until then ... perhaps some one likes to read it here already? Yet I have to warn you: My beta is still busy with the first story, so this is how I wrote it - with all the usual mistakes. I hope you can bear with me.The TempestBy: Max[Disclaimer: I unfortunately don't own Harry Potter. It belongs to J. K. Rowlings and her publishers. So I've only borrowed for a little playing ? Besides I've got an "inspiration" for this story by Rilla's wonderful "Fire and Ice". If you didn't read it yet, do so - you find it at http://sycophanthex.lordandladysnape.com/viewstory.php?sid=401&PHPSESSID=fb9dd24e5a0f63e0e4a9bae35336d555]Chapter 1: Narcissa's Journal, part 1: A light in the darkness, part 1Sometimes I think you read too much muggle psychology. Or what was it what got you the idea that it would do me "a lot of good" to write the story of my life down? You think it will help me to get it "out of my system" and you've talked about "catharsis" and - you always know how to get me! - that you would like to learn more about me.I lay next to you, my hand on your naked chest, feeling the beat of your heart under my palm and as always when you'd made love to me - or, when we had made love to each other as you'd insist to name it - I felt not only sated and content, but at home, for the very first time of my life. Then you started to talk about the journal you want me to write during the long hours I'm alone every day because you have to go away and as you stated you'd like to learn more about me, I asked you: "Why? You know what counts about me: That I love you. What more do you need to know?"You rarely become angry. Your kindness - not a fa?ade, not something you show people because it makes it easier to manipulate them, but a kindness which comes from your heart - I didn't always understand and appreciate, but now I couldn't live without any more. Yet I love your temper too. You rule it with hard discipline and all your willpower, but your eyes betray your always calm voice, sparking and radiating the sheer power which is you. "You're more as that!" you said firmly. "You were a person of your own before I came in your life and you'll be one when I'm gone one day. You don't need me to define yourself."I didn't answer - not this night. But now, after I've thought about you'll get an answer and I'll know, you'll like it because it's almost so "salomonic" as some of the answers you give to important questions. It's "yes" and "no".Yes - I am a person of my own. I lived 43 years without you, or, better said: Without being close to you. And I know I'll probably have once to live another 43 years without you again and I will manage, becoming a person of my own again.But - I see you look now at me, laughing and saying: "But me no buts, dear" - you're wrong when you state I wouldn't need you to define me. What makes the person I am, the person I've come to like over the past months, the person I'm even sometimes proud off, is - no, not your love for me although it is next to my son, of course the most precious thing I have. But what defines me is my love for you. It's the tenderness which fills me so much that I sometimes think I'm going to burst when I look at you, sleeping in my arms; it's the passion you're able to enflame in me; it's my pride on you and more as anything else an overwhelming, sometimes terrifying need to make you happy. I would give my life for your happiness laughingly, I would fight monsters and the evil for a smile of you and it is for the knowledge that I am able to make you happy, that I am proud of myself.You say I'm so "passionately discreet" as you are curious. Maybe you're right. But for you I'm to give up the discretion of a lifetime. To you I will tell my story - and by doing so I probably get my son to understand too.I grew up in darkness. Our house was dark, my father was dark, my sister and my brother were dark and my mother, although she was the one I got my blonde hair from, was a person who lived in the darkness too. I can't remember I ever saw her room - decorated in such a dark red it always reminded me of dried blood - ever lightened, not even on the rare occasions I came there during a day. The curtains were always closed and mother mostly lay on her four poster bed with the red hangings, suffering from a migraine or what she called her "depressions". Today I know it was probably neither depressions nor migraine but the after waves of too much alcohol and other drugs. But as a child I always thought I'd be the one who were responsible for her suffering and if I only would manage to become a better person she'd probably become healthy and then she would rose and lighten a few candles and drove away the darkness. But she never did and she died shortly after my sixth birthday it didn't make a big difference to the way we lived our lives, being linked through our blood and our name, but not in our hearts.Our name - I always found them very fitting. "Black" like the darkness surrounding us. "Black" like the hair and the eyes of my father and my brother - and probably like their souls?My father was very proud of our name. He rarely spoke to my sister and me - we were only girls after all and we wouldn't have been both born when his first child would have been already the heir he desired so much. It is like that in the most pure blood families. When they get daughters, then only because even their magic can make sure their firstborn is already the son. I sometimes wonder how they think they could survive without us women - but today I'm actually glad about this traditional way. I would hate to have a daughter to worry about and I would even more hate if she would become treated by her father as my father treated Bellatrix and me.But even without speaking much directly with us - we were in the room where he taught our brother and so we heard how he said at least once a day: "You're a Black - don't ever forget it! It's something you have to live up to!"Even then as the small child I was I sometimes asked myself: What was it about the Blacks that Tiberius would have to live up to? I know our family had once been rich - our uncle still was. But my father as the second born and fallen out with his elder brother had only the big, but almost ruined Mansion which would actually have needed an entire army of house elves to be kept in shape. Yet with my father dabbling around with the muggle financial market, the famous Black fortune had been lost and all attempts of father to get it back - even the attempts which connected him to the Dark Lord - never were successes.So Bellatrix and I actually were his only chance to get back some wealth. Marrying us off to rich wizards was what my father probably intended to do as soon as we were born and both of us we hardly elder then six or seven years as he already started to negotiate with the great families. I remember the day in my 10th summer as Filthy - the last remaining house elf in our house, a creature even exceptional ugly and dirty for one of his kind - came to take me down in my father's study where a very cold looking man in black robes looked at me as if I were a kettle on the stock market and then drawled in a bored voice: "Maybe you're right, Black. This once could become a beauty." And gripping in my hair and looking at the colour he added: "Her grandmother was Veela, wasn't she?""Yes, yes," my father answered eagerly. "She seems to have inherited a lot from her.""Interesting," the blonde man snarled. "And what's with her magic? Any good at it, girl?" he addressed me directly.I've always been proud on my magic since I got it in the age of six. And being a lonely child in a dark house with an elder sister who found it funny to make me cry I'd spent a good deal of time hidden in the attic of our house where I'd had found a few boxes with books - mostly old schoolbooks and silly books like "1001 charms for bewitching wizards" or "Beauty spells for witches", probably books my mother had read during her school days. But the best thing I'd found there was a wand - old and splinted and pretty jumpy, often sending sparks out instead of obeying to me, but nevertheless: it was a wand and I could use it for practise.But now it was the stranger's wand which was presented to me and with a malicious smile he said: "Show me what you can do with a wand, girl. Just something easy like," he looked around, then he pointed with his chin to a goblet on my father's desk, "? levitating this old thing there!"My father looked for a second angry and as if he'd have liked to forbid it. The goblet was one of the rare really valuable things he still possessed - a beautiful golden foot keeping a bowl from finest Venetian crystal. I knew he'd hate losing it, but he didn't dare to disagree with the stranger and so he only bite his teeth together as I waved the wand once - I wanted to get a feeling for it - and then, after I've got how powerful it was, directed it at the goblet, softly commanding: "Wingardium leviosa!" The goblet hesitated a moment, but as I raised the wand a big higher, it followed my lead, hovering over the desk. Sinking wand and goblet carefully back, I looked at the blond wizard with the cold eyes."Impressive!" he said with a glimmer in his eyes. "I think I'll take her, Black."It sounded as if he'd buy me - and in fact: What he made then with my father after I was sent back to my room was something like buying me: He promised to pay not only for my education at Hogwarts, but for "appropriate dresses" too and therefore my father gave his wizard's word of honour that I would at my 16. Birthday become the bride of the blonde's only son and heir.First it didn't bother me much. I was a child and the six years until I'd become 16 were more then half of my entire lifetime. It seemed eternity and so it wasn't more as a mild curiosity I felt about the boy who'd once - in a far away future - become my husband.It was Hogwarts - the fact that I would go to Hogwarts soon, following my sister who was already there - what concerned me more. As every child in the magical world I knew, that the letters were sent out in July, but nevertheless I started months before to wait for it and every time when a brown barn owl - I even knew that Hogwarts uses mostly brown barn owls - arrived at our house, my heart speed up. In June I became so nervous, I suffered almost every night through a nightmare. I dreamed of being the first Black in generations who didn't get the letter.It was a Monday - July 5, 1971 - as the letter finally arrived and even today, I see it before me:HOGWARTS SCHOOLOF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRYHeadmaster Armando Dippet, Order of Merlin First Class, Grand Sorc., Mugwump, International Confed. of WizardsDear Miss Black,We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of witchcraft and wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of necessary books and equipment. Term begins on September 1. We await your owl by no later then July 31.Yours sincerely- Unreadable -Deputy HeadmasterI danced in joy and for this day, I didn't find our house dark. The letter was like a light and it brightened my days over all the summer. And there were other things - like the letter my father got a few days later. He'd obviously informed Achilles Malfoy about me being accepted at Hogwarts. The father of my once-to-be-fianc?e informed us that his wife Valkyrie would want to meet me at August 7 in Diagon Alley to provide me with "appropriate clothing".Despite the lack of money my father was suffering I actually thought I was dressed well. On the attic of our house I'd found tons of dress robes and all day robes in all colours and fashions and with my mothers old books I'd learned how to make them fit me. I was even so good in changing robes that my father's mistress asked me to work on hers. For doing so she always got me new things like shoes and undergarment.So I felt well dressed - in a light blue robe with only a small golden decoration at the hems - as I walked in Madame Maulkin's shop to meet my future mother-in-law who was a tall, blonde with an austere face and huge, but firm corseted breasts. To me she seemed to suit her name very well and later I learned that she really was a descendent from an old Nordic family and probably the great-great-great granddaughter of a Valkyrie.If she liked me or not I can't say. I only know that she didn't disapprove of me entirely and that was already a lot when it came from Valkyrie Malfoy who found most women simply "silly gooses - only they aren't as useful as gooses" and probably every men with the exception of her husband and her son "blabbering idiots who think the possession of a more or less working penis would make them superior." Having said so, she snorted - and snorting was something she often did and a snort was with what she looked at me, saying: "Tiny little thing you are. No arse, no tits - only legs and arms. Have you got at least some brain?" Yet she let me look for my robes myself and watching me, she snorted again: "Seems you've got taste." Nevertheless she disapproved of almost half of the things I'd picked because she found them "too ordinary" and so I got my first lesson for becoming a Malfoy: Nothing as the best will do.A few weeks later I came to Hogwarts, was sorted - as it was to expect - in Slytherin house and met my future husband Lucius Malfoy for the first time. He was - or better said, he still is (isn't it odd that even I who was never very close to him, have a tendency to speak in past tense about him as if he'd ceased to exit as I left him? Perhaps it's wishful thinking what makes me do so) five years my senior, so he was already in his sixth year, leader of a group who was using every opportunity to sneak out of the school for visiting the "Saucy Sorcerers Club" at Hogsmeade and naturally he was not much interested in a little girl like me.Yet he was aware of our connection and he obviously saw me already as his possession what meant he made my elder sister stop harassing me. I never learned how exactly he did, I only know that it was the beginning of Bellatrix hating him, but at this time she didn't dare to show it, but obeyed to him. I was very grateful for it - it made my life not only at Hogwarts, but at home easier. Besides Bellatrix, who was more alike to our father as I and therefore hadn't got a marriage offer from one of the old families, soon became very busy with our Head of house, Hogwarts this time potion master Darius Lestrange. This made for me avoiding her even more as before because even to me who grew up in darkness and with a father who found it probably to use "imperio" as to say "please" - Tiberius said once father had used an "imperio" at him only to get cream for his tea at breakfast - Darius Lestrange was too much of a dark wizard. He was a good looking man - blue eyed and with blonde curls who fell down his back to his belt and his face was - on the first sight - almost too pretty for a man, but his eyes were icy and his smile forbidding and even today I shudder by thinking what my 15 year old sister had to do when she was with him in his bedchamber.Yet she pretended to love him and "it" - whatever "it" meant - and I'm not entirely sure she only pretended or even then was already debauched enough to really love "it". In every case she loved the power she saw in Lestrange and in summer 1972 after my first year at Hogwarts, Bellatrix became one day so bored during the break that she honoured me with her confidence. She told me then that headmaster Dippet was soon to retire and that her lover harboured high hopes to become Hogwarts next headmaster.I think it was then that I spoke the name out loudly for the first time. Looking at Bellatrix I asked: "But what about Professor Dumbledore? He's a friend of Headmaster Dippet, he's the deputy headmaster and supposed to become Dippet's successor."Bellatrix waved her hand. "Forget about him. Dippet likes him, but the governors aren't convinced about him. They even didn't make him head of a house." She giggled then. "Darius says it's probably because Dumbledore was a Hufflepuff. And look at him. He isn't good for anything as transfiguration and even there he mostly lets his assistant McGonagall teach the serious stuff in the high classes. He only plays around a bit with the first and second years.""But I've heard he defeated Grindelwald," I said because I actually liked our playful transfiguration master. His classes were always fun and often the highlight of my days. I had never before really played, but in transfiguration I did, changing quills to lollipops, running around in chasing the mice our teacher wanted us to change in goblets and laughing as he demonstrated us hair transfiguration with changing his auburn-silver hair to a pink hallo around his head - and seating there with the pink hair he pretended he wouldn't know how to change it back and so it was our task to look for a spell and to try.Bellatrix snorted. "Poor, sheer luck, Darius says. Dumbledore was incidentally at the right time at the right place and got Grindelwald as he was weak. Everybody with a little magic could have done it."Only a few days later Bellatrix got an owl from her lover, telling her that he was "tricked out by our dear transfiguration teacher". But he swore to Bellatrix that Dumbledore wouldn't enjoy being Hogwarts headmaster. He - Lestrange, I mean - was "to make sure Dumbledore becomes the shortest lasting headmaster in the history of Hogwarts. Give me only three months in the new term and you'll see him packing his lemon sherbets!" It came just the other way round - only it didn't need three months, but only three weeks. Then, one morning as we sat in the potions classroom, waiting for Professor Lestrange and already wondering because he'd never been late before, the headmaster himself - as ever an imposing sight in a dark blue velvet robe with tiny golden stars - swept in, smiled at us and said: "Unfortunately Professor Lestrange left us. That means you'll have to with me until we'll get a new potion teacher."I was so surprised I probably gaped like a goldfish out of water. But next to me sat Ravenclaw Persephone Fudge- the high intelligent sister of a very stupid brother who unfortunately is now the minister of magic - my girlfriend and she noticed what I hadn't seen. "Uiii!" she whispered at me. "Dumbledore's mad like hell!"I didn't understand. "How do you come to that?" I asked her. "He's smiling and he sounds as calm as always.""Look at his eyes and his hands!" Persephone advised me. "I've never seen his eyes so icy! And he doesn't twinkle, but his hands are shaking."Later at this day, as I came back to our common room, my curiosity about Lestrange's sudden exit became satisfied by Lucius who just shouted at my sister: "Lestrange is an idiot! He could have thought of Dumbledore monitoring him closely! And to get caught in flagrante delicto - how thick must one be for letting this happen? Now you only can hope that Dumbledore is discreet and doesn't tell who was fucked by Lestrange. It wouldn't do you and your family's reputation much good."Just at this moment a house elf appeared and asked Bellatrix to go up to the main tower - the headmaster would want to see her.I had to attend other classes. So I didn't see Bellatrix again for the next few hours. She didn't come to dinner; she wasn't in the common room at this evening, so I went to her dormitory in the night. She had cried - I heard it in her voice. But she didn't show me sadness - this wasn't her way. She only told me that I was - "as always" - the lucky one because the "headmaster didn't inform the ministry and the governors about the student who was with Darius. He said he wouldn't want to ruin my and your future. So you'll become Mistress Malfoy.""And you?" I asked her. "Do you love Professor Lestrange?""What good is in that?" she almost screamed. "Dumbledore only refrained from suing him for the promise on the wizard's word that he wouldn't have contact with me until I'm of age.""But you will be age soon," I tried to comfort my sister. "And if Lestrange really loves you he'll wait for you.""Oh, Narcissa - what a silly fool you are!" my sister ranted at me. "Darius is a grown man and he's a passionate one. He can't live without sex and so he'll get himself another mistress quicker as you can say 'but Bellatrix'. So Dumbledore ruined my future today - he made me lose the only man I'll ever love. But he will pay for it! I'll make him pay for it!"to be continued ...