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When Marius awoke on his 11th birthday, excitement bubbled up inside of him. He bounced downstairs after he’d gotten dressed, though it was more a quick walk rather than bounce because his mother would hex him if he did something as uncouth as bounce.
His mother was eating crêpes with a dainty fork when he came into the dining room, smiling gently as he sat down across from her. It was his designated spot that put him between his sisters, Cassiopeia, and Dorea.
Cassiopeia, 2 years older and already in Hogwarts, had told him all about the magnificent school, from the moving stairwells to the enchanted dome in the Great Hall – it was enchanted with the most amazing things and Marius could not wait to experience it all with his own eyes.
“Eat your breakfast, Marius,” his mother said, amusement glimmering in her eyes. “Your letter will come.”
Marius nodded and began eating all while watching the window for owls. By the end of breakfast, he’d eaten a hearty meal and no letter had arrived.
His mother stared at the window with narrowed eyes, as though they had missed an owl come through. Marius swallowed. “Perhaps they’re just late with their letters, Mother. Cassiopeia did say that they had a large number of students.”
She raised an eyebrow. “With your grandfather as Headmaster, I would hope that they would run efficiently... I will send a letter and we will have this cleared up.” Marius nodded slowly.
Was this from his lack of accidental magic? He could make sparks on his hands, a light trick he had learned when he was 3 years old. And he wasn’t nearly as adept with using his magic like his little sister Dorea was, but he was good at it. He did have it.
He sighed and shook his head, fiddling with a button on his robe. He would get his letter and he would go to Hogwarts.
Anything else was incomprehensible.
But the incomprehensible did happen.
For 21 days, the rest of June, Marius waited for his letter. Each day sent anxiety tingling up his spine, especially when his mother and father looked at him during random times of the day. They whispered about him, he knew they did. Sometimes he entered a room and they abruptly changed the subject or just stopped talking.
His grandfather flooed over to speak with his parents. Marius swallowed when his grandfather’s gaze bore into his head. It didn’t mean anything good, he was sure.
And then his sister came home, a cold smile on her face when she greeted him. “Little brother,” she replied stiffly to his bright smile and happy greeting. It seemed that 8-year-old Dorea was the only one that treated him normally.
July crawled forward and Marius had become even more anxious for his letter. What was the problem? He could do magic, he’d done his finger sparks for Dorea because she loved the multi-colored sparks, but his parents didn’t seem appeased.
It was only after July 31st, the cutoff date for Hogwarts, had passed and Marius felt his stomach sink to his feet.
On August 2nd, he felt the Black Family magic, black like a crow and cold like the bare tree the bird perched upon, syphon out of him, forcefully ripping itself from underneath his ribcage. It was one of the few times that Marius had ever truly cried, and he made a sound unlike any other, clawing at his chest as though he could stop what was happening. Tears slipped down his face and onto the floor as he knelt down, holding himself as he waited through the unimaginable pain.
Then his father appeared, grabbed him, and apparated them so forcefully that Marius would’ve felt shocked at not splinching if he hadn’t been so delirious with pain.
“Fath- father, please. Don’t… don’t leave me here.” Marius pleaded, holding as tightly as he could, but his father easily peeled off his weak grip.
His father dropped him on the doorstep of a crooked building, with only a brisk knock on the door. Then he apparated away.
On August 2nd Marius was abandoned by his family, a cold and empty feeling in his chest as he was pulled into his new home by an old, wrinkled woman.
The orphanage was cold, the matron unkind, and the other kids were all filthy. They stared at Marius in his silken robes, some even pushing him into the mud so his clothes would stain. Of course, such plebeian actions were repaid in full, with Marius dropping crumbs around the perpetrators’ rooms and getting them into trouble for stealing rations.
Many couples wanted to adopt him because of his Black features, but Marius would stare at them unblinkingly, not smiling, just imitating a statue, and they would be unnerved enough to leave him alone. As if he wanted to be adopted by muggles.
This made the matron quite hostile towards him, but Marius couldn’t care less. He was ostracized inside the orphanage but that only made things much more opportune for him. He charmed coin from people, especially if he made a sob story about how his parents didn’t want him.
It was disgusting how lowly he had become, having to work for his money, when the rest of his family had piles and piles of gold at Gringotts.
But he knew if he made enough money, he would be able to teach himself. He made enough coin to get a ride to a store near the Leaky Cauldron, and converted enough of his pounds to galleons at Gringotts to afford some books on Potions, Runes, Herbology, and Arithmancy.
The last two were not as much of a priority as Potions and Runes, but they would help with his jobs. If he could make less poisonous medicines for muggles – magical herbs did not mix well with their digestive systems – it meant that he could potentially make “homemade” cures for sickness. That would allow for more coin and more books.
While in Diagon, Marius also bought himself a new set of trousers with self-adjusting charms so that he wouldn’t have to buy new clothes with every inch he grew. When he got back to the orphanage, the matron sniffed at his bag of books and pursed her lips at his new trousers.
He rolled his eyes and sneered at her back. “Filthy woman,” he muttered and went back to his room, pushing the rickety old chair underneath the doorknob so no unwanted visitors could enter.
Marius sat down and took out his book on Runes, sitting against the wall with the book propped on his knees. It was imperative that he learn Runes because Runes required little magic to activate and were used before Charms, as Charms were merely a scrubbed version of Runes.
So Marius read and read, and learned. Invisibility Runes covered all sequences that he drew, when he did little repairs on trinkets and such, that earned him much – the matron began pushing him forward whenever something broke, or when she heard that somebody needed something fixed.
Soon he worked up enough money to go back to Gringotts and exchange the money for galleons, and then he bought multiple ingredients from an apothecary. It cost him 9 galleons, the equivalent of nearly 100 pounds, but Marius didn’t show how much that affected his meagre budgeting.
During the night he began experimenting with the potions, especially as some of the children around the orphanage grew sick. Marius would slip a few drops into the childrens’ mouths during the night, and in the morning, he would hear if any of them recovered or worsened.
“Marissa seems better now – she’s not so feverish,” one of the assistants muttered to the matron once and Marius grinned at his success.
“Little Joel started seizing during the night. We don’t have enough money to call the doctor,” another stated as she hung laundry; Marius frowned and got back to work, changing ingredients once again.
It took him almost 6 months, but he got the potions to work for all muggles. The news spread quickly from the gossipy muggles, that a 12-year-old orphan was able to cure many illnesses. Marius was taken to the nearby church by the matron, who sat him down with his worn case full of vials and his pestle and mortar that he used to make the medicine.
After that the priests would say that he was a gift from their God, who allowed him to heal young and old; Marius never showed his derisiveness, but he did sneer and roll his eyes when they had their backs turned. It benefited him though, especially as many were amazed that such a lowly orphan could be so educated.
His research and learning was funded in greater amounts and that allowed him to buy better clothing and refurbish his bedroom slightly, so that it wasn’t so filthy and broken down.
It was perhaps the one decent room in the orphanage, but if the matron didn’t know how to create revenue for the orphanage, was that really his problem?
With a steady income, things looked up for him, as he continued with his potions and his runes.
Then, in December of 1928, when Marius was 13 and it was just before the new year, they got another orphan. Thomas Marvolo Riddle.
Marvolo.
The lady’s name was Merope, and she was a bland, distasteful girl but Marius felt the energy – the family magic – around her. It snapped around like a snake and he heard a soft hiss leave her before she died. That coupled with the child’s name and his knowledge of every pureblood family, Marius knew well who it was.
Every pureblood family knew of the Gaunt family. Despite how savage the family had become, how poor and lowly, their blood was from Salazar Slytherin and Cadmus Peverell, both of whom were well-known within educated circles.
Now, it was rather disgusting that such a noble line had lowered themselves to breeding with muggles but the babe that was born was a descendent of Slytherin. When Marius was back in his room, he began laughing – it was a laugh so much like the mad cackle that was found only in his family, and he knew that it would have the matron calling an asylum had she heard it.
From the moment Tom was placed in the nursery, Marius was the one who took care of him. He readied the bottles for him, changed his nappies no matter how lowly he thought the job was – he was the primary caretaker for the babe.
The matron didn’t care at all, even seemed happy that she could ignore the child. Marius rolled his eyes and continued to care for the infant.
He never spoke in those strange, high voices that one of the other helper girls did with the other babes, he spoke in a mixture of English, French, and Latin. Tom was magical, a powerful wizard, that much Marius could feel. He didn’t have a parent to bind his magic to prevent harming himself accidentally, so it was entirely up to Marius to make sure that he was content and happy.
Marius took his new task with a great vigor, solidifying within himself that he would help Tom to succeed when he went to Hogwarts. He would not be an uneducated muggleborn.
He took to reading his books to Tom as bedtime stories, even buying books on the theory of Transfiguration, Charms, Defence Against the Dark Arts, and other magics so that he could teach Tom. Of course his knowledge was a bit limited but it was better than nothing.
Tom flourished as he grew into a very smart toddler, who often spoke a messy mixture of English and French, as those were the primary languages that Marius spoke. No one in the orphanage could speak anything other than English anyways.
When Tom was 4 years of age, Marius was delighted to learn that Tom was, indeed, a Parselmouth. He had been so happy that he had taken the toddler to Diagon Alley to experience his first real taste of magic. Tom had been overjoyed and was absolutely enamoured by the colorful and lively alley.
Marius, despite how happy he had been about the news, found that he viewed Diagon Alley with a bittersweet memory. It was magical, it was beautiful, it was flourishing, but it was also exclusively for wizards and witches.
He couldn’t use most of the things that they sold because it was for those that could use magic, not 16 year olds who relied on Runes and Potions and the only real bit of magic they could do was sparks on their fingertips. It brought back memories of his father, and his uncle who was Lord at the time, who stripped him of his magic. They cast him out and anger simmered inside of him. He hadn’t forgotten, he just simply hadn’t been able to retaliate.
At the age of 18, Marius was officially of age in the muggle world and immediately made a bargain with the matron to take Tom out every day with the stipulation to buy whatever she needed for the orphanage. She agreed immediately and Marius got a job at the apothecary in Diagon, as he had done his OWLs at 14 and his NEWTs at 16.
He got an apartment when he was 19 years old and Tom nearly 5 years old, adopted Tom, and officially made a name for himself in the magical world. He enchanted things with Runes and Arithmetic equations before selling them, soon enough making a hit in the market.
Tom went to Hogwarts, graduated Hogwarts as Head Boy with all Os on his NEWTs and was called a genius by many of his Professors. He had friends within many pureblood circles due to his training and his name was everywhere, especially when he received his Slytherin Lordship.
Throughout all of this, Marius worked furiously as he got the latest news and gossip from Tom, who always came back after a particularly stressful day. Marius never complained that Tom technically never moved out, only using the Slytherin Manor for events and galas that required a certain amount of lavishness that a small 2 bedroom flat didn’t have.
Then Marius got a letter from the House of Black asking for a pendant, specifically for Sirius BlackⅡ. It was a request to have protective runes etched on it.
Who was he to pass up such a wonderful opportunity? And such an ironic one at that.
Marius took a pinch of floo powder and threw it into the fire, watching as it turned green. “Black Townhouse; Toujours Pur.” He was whisked away in a whirl of color before being spat out.
The receiving room had been redecorated slightly; with every new year came new fashions and the Black Family would let nobody say that they were not up to date with the newest fashions. Sirius Black Ⅱ was there, pouring two tumblers of firewhisky. When he looked up though, his expression resembled curdled cheese.
Nice to know that much hasn’t changed, Marius thought idly as he adjusted the cuffs of his robes. He smiled loosely at his Uncle.
“Hello Uncle. How are you?”
“Get out of my house!” his uncle hissed, his face flushing with anger. “You don’t get to step foot here, after you sullied it with your worthlessness.”
Marius pinched his lips together at the insult, raising a single, condescending eyebrow. “Do you really think so lowly of me? And here I thought that you would’ve thought better of me after requesting my aid. Surely, you’ve heard of me by now. Though I suppose that Marius is a common name among your circles.”
He lifted a shoulder in the sense of a shrug and sighed before showing the pendant in his hand. It was a known symbol, mainly of his own business that had been bought by many wealthy individuals… including a few from his former family. His uncle started and gaped, rather unflatteringly for a man of his status.
Marius gripped the pendant tightly, feeling the pulse of magic. He longed to touch the magic that had been stripped from him when he was 11 years old, the Black Family magic that crowed so loudly with its darkness. Instead, he was ripped from its warm chill and left out with Muggles like an old, dying elf.
Bitterness-longing-sorrow-anger flashed from him, and he looked back at his uncle before throwing the pendant. On instinct, his uncle caught it and Marius felt a sliver of joy at the fact that his plan had succeeded. One would think that with how dark the Black family was, they would be far more cautious about what they touched.
“ Dénué ,” he muttered lightly and he watched as the pendant flashed.
Sirius gasped and the pendant clattered on the ground as the man fell to his knees, clutching at his chest. The man heaved great breaths, searching for the air that was slowly being taken from him. Grey eyes flashed with something, an emotion that Marius could not identify.
Sirius coughed brokenly, slumping to the ground, his eyes flickering around. Perhaps he was seeing things. A flicker of interest rose inside of him at this before it was swept away in a wave of satisfaction.
This man had stripped a great well of magic from him, ripped it from his own blood. Still, Marius had a single question for him. “Do you regret it?” He stared at the dying man; his jaw clenched tightly as he waited for his answer.
There was a beat, ragged breathing filled the air, and Sirius shook his head. “At - at the time... no… now, I regret.”
Marius smiled sharply, though he was sure it looked more like he was baring his teeth.
“Good.”
When Sirius took his last breath, Marius nodded. There wasn’t a jumping glee inside of him, not like when he had woken up the morning of his 11th birthday, but just a calm sense of satisfaction that he had gotten his revenge.