antebellum [t. riddle]

introduction

welcome to
antebellum

dramatis personae (cast)

sicaria edwards

tom riddle

adonis rosier

adrien lestrange

thomas nott

abraxas malfoy

alexei leonov

barry campbell

albus dumbledore

eileen vota

gellert grindelwald

seraphina picquery

content warning

substance abuse

sexual content

graphic depictions of violence

death

mental health episodes

•••

What makes someone human?

That was a question that remained unanswered, even after the millennia that humanity had roamed the earth. Every philosopher would give a different answer; some scientific and some prophetic. Blood, life, ability to make mistakes, conscious thought, a human body- all of these were things that people were told made someone human.

Sicaria disagreed. She believed that humanity was defined by the ability to create chaos.

And what was more chaotic than war, the greatest and most destructive human creation?

Before they were killed by followers of Gellert Grindelwald, Sicaria Edwards' parents spent their entire lives making her fit into a box. The entirety of her life had been spent living amid war, and the people who were supposed to protect her from it were actively preparing to throw her directly into the crossfire. She needed to be rational, cunning, and above all, useful, they said, if she wanted to survive. A perfect spy, not that she realized it at the time. She resented them deeply, training their child to fight in a war that she was too young to understand.

In the wake of their deaths, she struggled to feel anything, neither happy nor sad, just pure apathy. The Edwards' had flown too close to the sun; getting swallowed up by the mayhem of their creation, and Sicaria lived to pay the price for it.

Her shock subsided after only a few days; at that point, she was freer than she had ever been. The dead are not to be spoken ill of, according to tradition; instead, Sicaria laughed at them. Her humor was short-lived.

Until that is, the tyrannical and newly desperately desperate Magical Congress of the United States informed her that she would have to fill her mother and father's place due to the circumstances of their deaths. Her parents had signed a magically binding vow, they said, one that managed to chain their entire bloodline to MACUSA. She laughed at first; what kind of joke was that? How much use could they make of a sixteen-year-old?

Surprisingly, quite a lot.

Her parents had managed to make her life more miserable from beyond the grave, pulling her into the eye of the hurricane of their creation. Two years later, MACUSA was nowhere near done using the nearly nineteen-year-old Sicaria. Not for lack of trying on her part; she did everything in her power to get them to release her, but if she refused service, they threatened her with ten years in Azkaban for, "aiding and abetting international terrorism."

Sicaria was too good of an asset to let her slip through their greedy, hopeless little fingers. She was talented and she was brilliant and she was powerful, beyond the levels that her parents even dreamt of her reaching. Now, MACUSA had sent her on her most remote (and most meaningless, she originally thought) assignment yet. They shipped her away to a British boarding school to spy on a group of pureblood, spoiled teenagers. To put minors on a terrorist watchlist was a new level of desperation for MACUSA, who had been steadily trying to distance themselves from it. The war was centralized across the Atlantic ocean, and as long as it remained in Europe, the Americans felt it was no longer their problem.

During this surprisingly revelatory mission, she met a boy who destroyed everything that she had spent her whole life attempting to build. Sicaria was a spy, for Merlin's sake; she was supposed to know better than to get attached and compromised. She should hate him for it, and for a very long time she did. The boy was relentless; he did not cease. She would suffer damnation at the hands of his perseverance.

He was too powerful and too perfect to be human, but he, like everyone else, had that one trait that defined humanity.

He was chaos personified.

But he knew how to control it. He could bend the world to his will, try as she might to run from it. She got tired of fighting; after all, he had given her something she never knew she wanted.

She never thought she would see the day that a boy would break her resolve and slither his way into her life through the cracks she thought were closed. Sicaria spent all her life praying for the day when she could live caring only for herself, but how could she, now that all she longed to do was chain herself to a boy who had ambitions that defied the laws of magic?

He took her to places she had never been before, dragging her through hell only to show her the heavens.

Sicaria was caught between two different types of chaos, pulling her in opposite directions.

She tipped the scales of war for him, but just how far was he willing to go for her?

a/n: hi! thanks for giving this fic a chance. just a few notes. (1) i originally wrote this whole book in all lowercase, but i get a lot of messages saying that it's hard to read that way, so i'm in the process of rewriting/editing/capitalizing everything. i've already written 60 chapters of this so far, so it'll probably take a while. (2) yes, tom is very prominent in this book. while we mostly follow my oc's journey through the war, tom is a very very important part of her journey. (3) i love love love seeing your comments so please feel free. (4) please heed the warnings. on individual chapters, i'll mark anything that's super explicit/graphic, but there are times when it may be mentioned in passing. sicaria is a drug addict, and her addiction is not mentioned every chapter, but is an important part of her as a character. (5) my interpretation of tom is somewhat different in all three of my current fics about him.

now that those are out of the way, thank you for reading, and enjoy!