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wrenfinchly · 7 months

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Theo had been fourteen when his father first introduced him to dark magic. He told Theo that it would be important for him to be prepared for what was coming. Nott Senior had taken his son to his personal study, rekeying the wards to accept him, and shown Theo his grimoire for the first time. The book was bound in a heavy leather with little adornment and it matched its owner well in that regard. Theo had been warrily impressed by it, he had wondered at the time if this meant things would be different with his father. It had been as close to hoping as he ever came.

His father’s grimoire was full of charts, diagrams, and runes. There were tables of ingredients segregated by moon phase and then again by seasons. His father had drawn the constellations as they were to the norse and then again to the greeks, the egyptians, the chinese. There were the brewing steps of potions, written in his father’s tight scrawl, sections dedicated to numerology, sketches with detailed labels, and notes from experiments whether failed or succeeded. It was one of the ironies of a pureblood household that a book so full of magic could feel so mundane, and Theo had almost been relieved by it. Then he came to the spells.

Spellcraft and wardings were what Nott Senior excelled at. There was a darkness in them that Theo was unsure he could master. His father must have known it too, because the first lesson he gave Theo was not one from the grimoire, it was a lesson in anger.

Anger can have many uses in casting. Locating the biting broken core of oneself is essential in casting dark spells in the same way that locating the bright wholeness of one’s soul was necessary in casting a patronus. Theo had always understood the theory of this kind of magic but it was something else entirely to practice it.

Nott Senior taunted him as he tried to coax the anger out of him. He reminded him of how he had cried over his dead birds. The birds, his father admitted, had only been a minor annoyance to him. Didn’t that make Theo angry? When it did not have the desired effect, his father escalated and kept on escalating.

Up until that point in his life, Theo had kept a tight lid on his emotions. His father had taught him well after all. Where shame and belittling failed, Nott Senior tried his fists. When his fists failed and Theo’s body looked as though it could take nothing more, his father used the cruciatus.

“Are you angry at me yet, Theodore!” his father had laughed. “Do you wish your mother was here to let you be soft and weak?”

Here was the man that had raised Theo to be obedient, to be quiet, to suppress his own wants and desires and most importantly his emotions. And even beyond that, this was the man that Theo eternally sought approval from, and that only because Theo knew innately that he would never have his love. This was not the senseless violence of a man not in control of himself, it was calculated in the same way that his father calculated the stars of four civilizations and transcribed neat little notes on his vivisection diagrams.

And Theo was angry at him finally and he learned the thing he had always known inside himself. One day Theo would be a murderer and it would be because he would kill the awful man in front of him, because this was a man who made choices and he had chosen not to love him. The wellspring of his emotions finally tapped, Theo did not even need his wand to cast back on his father. If he thought Nott Senior would beg him to stop, he was wrong. The older wizard merely continued his taunting laugh through the pain of Theo’s magic.

When Theo finally relented his father had told him only that they would continue tomorrow.

“That was a good start Theodore, you have the makings of power in you, but it will take much to see you through to it. You may yet become the man I had hoped to raise.”

Theo had stood that night in front of the mirror with his nearly broken face and contemplated his father’s words. At fourteen years old, he still could not find the point in which he had ever failed him, but his failure was there innately. In his fathers words the long sought redemption was finally alluded and offered. The anger burned in him both foreign and familiar, and Theo thought about how sweet it would be to give his father the son he had always wanted. It would be that son who would destroy him.

At the cusp of seventeen, already a marked death eater, Theo knew he was close.

#theodore nott #draco malfoy #pansy parkinson #dreo #hermione is endgame #death eaters #ao3 #wip

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