Jupiter | Harry James Potter

prologue

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"She is beautiful, and she is in agony."

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    Bellatrix and Rodolphus Lestrange had a marriage born of cold calculation, bound together for the sake of pure-blood supremacy and the Noble House of Black. Love had nothing to do with it. Their purpose was clear: produce an heir and continue the Black legacy, outshining Bellatrix's sisters in the process. Yet Bellatrix never hid her disdain for her daughter, Jupiter Cassiopeia Lestrange, a child who, in her mother's eyes, was her greatest disappointment—made worse by Jupiter's striking resemblance to her father.

Jupiter was, indeed, an odd child, or so her parents thought. The first shock: she was a Gryffindor. The second: she had befriended the very person her mother had warned her to avoid. And she had no patience for her cousin Draco's company, preferring solitude over his clique's arrogance. Instead, she immersed herself in reading, finding escape and solace within the pages of her books. By twelve, she had devoured every title in her family's grand library, fleeing the shadow of her mother's demanding presence whenever she could.

So, when she returned to Hogwarts for her second year and found a new book tucked into her trunk, she was elated. But her excitement faltered as she examined it—a battered, faded journal with every page blank. The only inscription was on the pastedown: Property of Tom Marvolo Riddle.

The name struck an ominous chord in her, a familiar pang of dread settling in her stomach. She knew, instinctively, that she should set it aside, let it gather dust. But defiance was in her nature; perhaps that's why the Sorting Hat placed her in Gryffindor despite her birth into one of the most cutthroat pure-blood families of the Sacred Twenty-Eight.

She couldn't shake the allure of that name, couldn't resist the pull of mystery. The blank pages seemed to hum with secrets waiting to be uncovered. So, quill in hand, Jupiter sat on her four-poster bed in her dormitory and wrote. She poured her feelings onto the pages—her frustrations with her parents, her fears, the pressures of school, and most embarrassingly, her secret crush on her best friend.

The diary wrote back.

What began as a release turned into a consuming addiction. She confided in it, feeling its ink and paper wrap around her loneliness, feeling it feed on her as she fed on its companionship. The diary understood her in a way no one else could; it felt almost alive. Soon, she began to wonder if there wasn't something more behind those blank pages—something with a voice, maybe even a mind.

But then, strange things started happening. One moment she'd be writing; the next, she'd awaken on the cold stone floor of the second-floor girls' bathroom, not knowing how she got there. These incidents became more frequent, almost daily, until she recognized the truth: it was the book. The diary didn't merely answer her thoughts—it knew her too well. It wasn't just enchanted; it was something darker, something that felt too close.

Finally, desperate and afraid, she scrawled her last message to Tom Marvolo Riddle, whispering her farewell to the diary before flushing it down the toilet. And for a time, things eased. With the cursed book gone, the strange lapses stopped, and her life resumed a fragile normalcy.

But one evening, as she entered the common room, her heart froze. There was Harry, her best friend, bent over the diary, his quill scratching across its pages. Panic gripped her. She waited until he left for class the next morning, then broke into the boys' dormitory and tore through his belongings until she found it. She couldn't let the diary tighten its grip on him—not when she was the reason it was even here.

With trembling hands, she wrote to the diary once more, begging it to leave Harry and come back to her, pleading for it to hold her instead. And for the last time, the world went dark as she surrendered herself to Tom.