Chapter Text
There is a GAUNT family curse.
The family tree is a withered thing, gnarled and twisted from centuries of marrying cousins to cousins and clinging to a bloodline steeped in dark magic. The curse is evident in every branch, the poison seeping through their veins. The fruit it bears is bitter as the intent that first sowed it. Each generation is more puckered and stunted than the last, a collection of sour grapes on a vine that should have been pruned long ago.
ISADORA is the only Gaunt left, and she knows the family curse well. She is a shrivelled plum dangling precariously on the last branch. It is a miracle she didn't drop off and rot into the soil altogether. She married into sanity, into safety, away from the poison that had wrapped itself into the roots of her family.
Then, there is MATILDA.
Sometimes, Isadora can't help but think her daughter is the fruit of that old tree.
The thought shames her. She loves Matilda, that much is true. But love, as Isadora has learned, is not always enough.
Matilda is a quiet baby.
She does not cry when the other children cry. She does not babble at toys or reach for movement. She lies still for hours, staring up at the ceiling with wide, dark eyes. Sometimes she makes small, breathy sounds; just air passing through her lips like she's remembering how to breathe.
OLIVER says it's nothing to worry about. Babies are different.
But Oliver Kaspbrak did not grow up in the Gaunt house. He does not know what it means to watch a child sit in stillness and wonder if something rotted inside them before they were even born.
Isadora knows the signs. She grew up in a house full of them—cousins who muttered to themselves, uncles who bit the insides of their cheeks until they bled, aunts who spent whole afternoons staring at walls. The Gaunt family never called it madness, they called it PURITY. Said the power ran too deep, too old, too sacred for the world to understand. But Isadora had understood. It was rot. It was what happened when blood was more important than people.
She'd sworn Matilda would be free of it.
It is the last promise she ever makes.
Do you believe her now?
"Lucky to be alive," they say, but Matilda Kaspbrak had barely felt alive to begin with.
Isadora Kaspbrak had died a slow, painful death. It was a cruel thing, the way life clung to her, refusing to let go even as her body failed her. REDACTED had not meant for it to be quick. They had wanted Isadora to SUFFER, to feel every moment of her punishment. The word traitor had been carved into her arm long before the breath had been stolen from her lungs.
There are different versions of what happened that night. Some say SIRIUS BLACK killed her. He was reckless, untrustworthy, half-mad by the end of the war. He hated her, didn't he? Never hid it. Others claim it was SEVERUS SNAPE, that he lured her into a trap and watched her bleed. There are those who insist she did it to herself, that the madness caught up with her after all.
Everyone had known the walking tragedy of Matilda Kaspbrak before she'd even stepped into Hogwarts.
ALBUS DUMBLEDORE had known when he saw her name scrawled on the 1992 Hogwarts acceptance list. He had looked at it for a long time, too long, until the ink seemed to bleed and blur into her mother's name instead. He had failed her, and though the blood wasn't technically on his hands, it might as well have been.
But Albus does not dwell. Not openly. He is too clever for that, too clever in the art of knowing and not knowing.He wonders if Matilda knows. He wonders if she'll blame him one day. But, then, what does it matter? He has carried the deaths of others before and never let guilt stop him. He knows Matilda will grow to hate him. She already looks at him the way her mother once did; like he is both savior and traitor in one.
The ghost of Isadora lingers in Matilda's every breath. Her dark hair is her mother's; her eyes, too, though softer. Isadora's had been burning, full of fire. Matilda's are wide and watery, like she's lost in a dream she can't wake up from.
Severus Snape had known the moment Matilda Kaspbrak sat down in his classroom for her very first Potions lesson. It was as if the universe had decided to test him. It wasn't that she was disruptive. No, that would have been easier to manage.
It was the way she seemed so utterly incapable of understanding the cruelty she lived in. The world would eat her alive, and she wouldn't even understand why.
Severus did not know what to do with her. He did not want to know what to do with her. But she had Isadora's way of looking at him like he was not the worst thing in the room, and he did not deserve that trust. He is not kind, and he is certainly not safe.
Matilda Kaspbrak was very lucky to have someone like GILDEROY LOCKHART, he thought. He had a particular sense for spotting the quiet ones; the ones who drifted through corridors like ghosts, who clung to the edges of crowds, who looked at him not with adoration but confusion. Confusion was the first sign. Confusion became curiosity. Curiosity became trust, and Matilda trusted easily. That was her greatest flaw, in his opinion. And her greatest use.
She had trouble keeping up in class, and he, being the most charismatic and patient professor on staff (self-declared), had agreed to help. If there were gaps afterward, well, that was hardly his fault, was it? Children forgot things all the time, and Matilda was very good at forgetting.
No one had known Matilda Kaspbrak quite like TOM RIDDLE.
He had known the moment Ginny Weasley pressed the diary into Matilda's small, shaking hands. Ginny had been difficult; emotional, stubborn, clinging to her secrets with trembling fingers even as he pried them loose one by one. She had needed coaxing, careful questions and soft reassurances. But Matilda? She had poured herself onto the page with wide, clumsy strokes, her sentences broken and misspelled but brimming with honesty.
It was almost disappointing.
She carried SALAZER SLYTHERIN's blood in her veins, diluted but undeniable, and yet she did nothing with it. She did not hunger. She did not reach. She did not even resent the world that had taken everything from her and expected her gratitude in return.
Such a waste.
Given time, she could have done great things. Terrible things. If she had reached for the power offered to her instead of shrinking from it. He told her the world had been unkind to her because it fears what she could become.
MATILDA: But if the world is cruel, then I want to be kind.
Still, she belonged to Tom far more completely than Ginny ever had. Because the GAUNT family had always known how to recognise their own.
Fruit does not choose the vine it grows on. And some fruit, no matter how carefully picked, still comes up bitter.