The Mudblood

Chapter 129 : Reconnection

This wonderful painting of the Slytherin Six was created by https://www.quotev.com/146289325

Some might say it was cruel of me to Obliviate the minds of the Muggles that had overtaken my childhood home and then relocate them, but I was a former Death Eater, so...nothing was beneath me.

After leaving the care facility with my bag of belongings and my mother's even smaller bag of belongings, Lisa Fitzroy and I traveled to the little yellow structure that I'd grown up in with my brothers. To my delight, Lisa actually remembered the place, and since she hadn't been here to witness Ray's murder, she had no negative connections to the place. I, of course, avoided the living room at all costs because the sight of it always managed to invoke flashbacks of that horrid night. And my little old bedroom felt impossibly large without Lyle's presence. But...being in this house instilled a sense of warmth within me, even with all of the memories.

Part of me wanted to Apparate to Russia and retrieve Garren and Evan. There had to be some way to reverse the effects of the potion I'd fed them. But then I remembered how happy Garren had been at his wedding, and how satisfied Evan had seemed with Anuva. Perhaps Evan and Anuva were married by now. I hoped so. I hoped my two remaining brothers could live simple lives, unaffected by the horrors that had befallen our family years ago. That was why I ultimately decided that it would just be Lisa and me living in this house together...with the occasional visit from the king of all scumbags, Augustus Rookwood.

The day I'd retrieved my mother from the care facility had been a good day for her, to say the least. Once moving into our former home again, her moods became much less stable. She oscillated between serenity and anxiety, lucidity and insanity. Some days she remembered me as her daughter, and others she believed I was her nurse. It was...frustrating, especially after a few months when we began to run low on money and I decided that I needed to find a proper job. I'd been doing odd jobs for Muggles in the neighborhood, but it wasn't enough to sustain us, and given Lisa's mental volatility, she wouldn't be able to help our financial situation.

By the end of the summer, I finally began looking for work within the wizarding world. Interviews usually went well until I admitted that I'd never officially graduated from Hogwarts...and then had to explain why. As soon as employers realized who I truly was—Lainey Fitzroy, sister of Harry Potter, former Death Eater—they politely told me they would send me an owl, and then they never did. Sometimes I tried to falsifying my story, claiming I'd had to quit school to help my sick mother, but that name—my name—always brought us back to the same point. Potter wouldn't have been any better than Fitzroy. Everyone knew that Harry Potter's sister had fought for the wrong side, Voldemort's side.

That autumn, when Ginny, Harry, Ron, and Hermione came by for a visit, Hermione offered me a job as a receptionist at her parents' dentistry. Dealing with people didn't seem like the ideal position for me, but...they were all Muggles, and it was unlikely that I'd know any of them personally, so I took the job, submersing myself in a life of normalcy. I found that I enjoyed it quite a bit, being a part of society again, but Lisa...

Her condition continued to decline, and I found by Christmas time that it was the days farthest from Rookwood's last visit and closest to his next visit that she fared the worst. It made sense: being away from her Latchee was draining, and being around him was rejuvenating. Yet, I was still reluctant to increase his visits to biweekly and then, eventually, by the summer of 2000, declare him her daily caretaker. He was always so smug when he visited, and I couldn't tell if it was because he enjoyed Lisa's presence or because he reveled in the fact that I hated his presence.

A few times we had to hide him in a closet when my brother and Ginny unexpectedly showed up to check on me. They called it "spending time with me", but I knew they were really just monitoring me. I wouldn't have been surprised if the Ministry had me on some secret probation because I'd been a Death Eater.