IT'S THE OPHELIAC IN ME !

[OPHELIAC ADMINS]

IT'S THE OPHELIAC IN ME.

the too long; didn't read version: Harry Potter characters from 1947 and 1980 get sent back to Victorian England, 1875. Conflict, corsets, prostitution and all sorts of awesome ensues. Oh, and Opheliac's a sexy, character-driven site that we defy you to get bored of. No, really. If you're interested, the full deal's below.

- - - - - - - - - -

“Is she pure?” There it was again, that same question. It always came. Edward Rosier knew the pattern. The door would slot open and the man would walk through; and tall or short, velvet waistcoat or patched cloak, that was always what they asked when they saw whatever girl he suggested. It was getting rather tiresome. The halfbloods and mudbloods simply went to the more anonymous muggle brothels nowadays and the pureblood patrons left over -- well, they were picky. Inconveniently so. Day after day, they’d come, and they’d ask, and after he’d failed to weasel out of the question, the door would slam. Edward failed to understand it. Blood was hardly the most important liquid involved. In any case, they were expecting too much. If a woman was as pure as the driven snow, she’d hardly be opening her legs for strangers. She’d be married, that barrier of barriers. This wasn’t America, for the love of Merlin. Things weren’t that loose yet. When they were, one would think that would be enough. Edward knew the look well. He saw it a lot in his line of work. It was that hunted, hungry expression of men who’d gotten nothing worth mentioning from their wife since the heir was born, who could never hope to get a decent girl tangled in the sheets precisely because she was decent. Without anyone actually telling them as much, they were restricted. Of course, there was the freedom to do as they wished; there was always a cabaret or a dubious gentleman’s club. That should have been enough. Damn it -- it was enough. Edward could understand the logic behind marrying someone pure, but one hardly planned to carry on the family line with a prostitute. The act would last mere minutes, the memory even less. Who were they to care about the quality of the blood when it pulsed around such ready, tender flesh? They were idiots, for starters. If only that was the end of it, but alas, there was more to it. They were idiots who were slowly doing him out of business. Now Edward too had that hungry look, but with none of the leering; it was simply the gradual caving in of a man who lived on nothing but ale. And day and day again, he heard the same question. There were small variations; small was probably doing them too much justice. ‘Is she pure?’, or, ‘Can I have a pureblood?’, or, ‘You do realise that I won’t lie with muggle filth?’ They all probably thought of themselves as being on pedestals -- the one decent pureblood man, the only one who refused to turn his back on his wife and family unless it was with someone of perfect pedigree. How fucking noble. Edward could live with hypocrisy; however, hypocrisy that didn’t pay his rent bothered him. The door kept slamming, no matter how clever her retort was. The first time he’d gotten the question, he’d lied and confirmed that his youngest girl was a virgin. It hadn’t been such a stupid slant to take on the question. One sort of purity was quite as impossible to find in a whorehouse as the other. None of his women were, or would ever be, any kind of pure. It was too late for that. The sheets were stained,and their inhibitions had been torn. The door slammed and slammed again, but the facts couldn’t be swept away along with all the warm air in the building every time it was flung open. You couldn’t manufacture purity, or Edward would’ve started selling it long ago.

You could imitate it, though.

He’d bought a time-turner that year, before business had taken such a turn for the worse. Not for the ability to shift through time itself -- Edward was too practical to much care about that. It was purely the fact that it had somehow ended up at a muggle jumble sale, disguised as a curiosity. Solid gold, only made that year, and it was being pawned off for the price of half a fuck at his charming establishment. (Granted, the better half, but all the same.) The idiot had smiled when he’d handed over the scanty coins, no doubt imagining that he’d pulled off the scam of the day. And so it was his. Very bloody convenient, because now, he had an idea. He’d heard that it wasn’t always like this -- the sexual repression. Though their children denied it prolifically, a generation or two, the Georgians had bed-hopped like there was no tomorrow. Besides, even if that wasn’t the case, if he could persuade some random pureblood women to come back to his era -- even if he could just trick them into it -- they’d be at his mercy. He could control them, and he could certainly use them to supply the new demand for refined meat. Edward was smiling now. It was all so very simple. Fuck around with time, confuse a person or two, and business would be booming before he knew it. Edward was hungrier every day, you see; too hungry to wonder why it’d been so cheap, why the merchant had been so eager to pawn it off on him. He turned it, flicking through centuries with cursory rotations. He kept turning. The clock on the wall ticked eight o’clock in the evening, and the calendar had every day crossed up until December the twenty-eight. It would be a new year soon. How ironic. He kept turning.

____________________________

Abraxas palmed the time-turner, examining the fading lines. There was history behind it, as with every Malfoy heirloom. The story of choice was that a medieval ancestor had brought it back from some holy pureblood war or other. He liked that idea; the idea that the tarnishes were hard-earned, righteous. There were detractors who claimed that just a generation ago it had been stolen from a brothel, but that story was ludicrous on so many levels. As if a Malfoy would do anything of the sort. Get real. Whatever its origins, however, he cherished it. Usually, it was just for itself, but now there was one reason more. The Malfoys had been sorely disappointed after Grindelwald lost the war. All their dreams had been captured in his ideals; all their pride had been incarnated through his march. Step after another, they’d followed willinging behind, and now it was over. Or was it? Some ideas are good, some ideas are bad, and some ideas are downright awful. Abraxas didn’t know which heading his fell under, but there was only one way to find out. He’d save it -- the war. The pureblood cause. It was decided as soon as he dreamed it up. There was only thing Grindelwald had lacked, one edge to sharpen the whole thing up: hindsight. And if a trustworthy pureblood travelled back a decade or so to warn him of his future mistakes? There’d be no beating it. Dumbledore was far too much of a cautious pansy to counteract it. The world would be theirs for the taking. Abraxas had initially planned to tell his father, to double- and triple-check that it was all safe, but he was smarter than that. If he went around disclosing his plan, someone else could easily take all the credit. That simply wasn’t on. It was his idea, and it would be his rush of glory. Abraxas liked secrets, and this was one to top all others. Good enough. That had been Abraxas’s cattle tag for so long. It branded him, restricted him. You could change the emphasis, but it didn’t change the meaning. Good enough. Good enough. It made no difference whatsoever, because he was sick and tired of it. His time was approaching, and it would only reach him when he slipped back ten years from it. He’d be better. Supreme. All it took was one step, one that he was quite prepared to make. Brushing his hair out of his eyes, Abraxas examined the time-turner, ignoring the doubt sinking into him and peppering his bland intentions. He couldn’t turn back. Grindelwald needed him. The world needed him. Above all, he needed him, if he was ever going to lift this cloud of mediocrity. But yet -- it didn’t seem quite right. The thing had, allegedly, survived centuries, so it would surely live through this. That didn’t explain why his hand was shaking and he kept glancing over his shoulder. The unsettled feeling -- it didn’t explain that, either. But enough of his foolishness. Abraxas bit his lower lip with determination. He had to leave this sort of thinking behind him, or he’d never impress anyone. Misgivings were for women and idiots. He twisted the time-turner with a vigilant eye on how many years he was by-passing, barely hearing the clock on the wall at it ticked over to 8pm. It was just another twenty-eight of December, after all. Nothing to be alarmed about.

____________________________

He was old enough to be her father. Their families had never been close. Her school-friends Lucius and Narcissa would throw a bitch-fit if they found out -- what if he married her? None of it mattered to Serenade, though. She’d always been old beyond her years, and her eyes never sparkled with novelty. Her cheeks never flushed with first-time embarrassment. She’d been born knowing it all, and she needed a man, a proper man. She knew that it couldn’t go further. Abraxas was too hardened to care. She saw the way he looked at her, like something with a definite value on it. It was a high value, but he’d still trade her in for something better. She had a function. That was it. She’d tried to change him -- oh, how she’d tried. It always resulted in this, though. Abraxas sliding out of her bed and leaving her crumpled there, part of the creased sheets, clothes scattered around her. She always kept her eyes shut, because it was sentimental and stupid, but she could never watch him go. She could never face the fact that he looked straight ahead whenever he walked out. If she kept her face buried in the pillow until he was gone, she could keep that little hope burning, that little hope that he spared her a glance. There was every reason for him to love her. She was beautiful, and cunning, and, if she did say so herself, spectacular in bed. It was his age, she’d decided. He was hardened from the years, the tumult of lost passion. His wife had died. It was too late to rekindle that. She’d still be there, though. She’d still be swaddled in her bed-clothes, and she’d still fuss at her make-up every time she expected him, and she’d still wash it down her face with a few slight tears whenever he went. It was a trail by now, and though the eyeliner was black, it could have been blood red. It happened every time, and this occasion was no different. Twenty-eight of December, 1980. Nothing that history would remember, and nothing that she should, either; just another tryst. Serenade stirred a little, opening her eyes grudgingly once she was sure that he was well out of sight. Another day in the life -- and perhaps it made her a fool, but she sat up straighter when she noticed that he’d left something behind. His coat was still lying on the floor, bunched up. Without even thinking properly, Serenade leaned down and picked it up, smelling the collar in spite of being perfectly aware that she was torturing herself. There it was. That musk. She breathed in slowly so as not to be inundated, and finally, she’d had enough. Serenade started to fold the coat, but as she did, she noticed an unusual heaviness. Something was weighing it down, something in the left pocket. She felt it gingerly, and she would have left it at that -- a Malfoy carry valuables was hardly unusual -- but it had the distinct feel of jewellery of some sort. And there she went again, hoping the impossible. Abraxas had bought her something, surely. With a steady sort of purpose, she unravelled the mystery package. While it was gold and borne on a chain, it sure as fuck wasn’t a lovely little locket.

Try a time-turner.

It was clear what he wanted her to do. Logically, he’d probably just left it there by accident and would want her to return it at once, but Serenade decided to screw logic from an alternate angle. No, it had to be a subconscious way of telling her to fix things. If she could go back to when Abraxas was her age, before he married Elvina and forgot how to love, who could tell what would happen? Serenade could change the course of all their lives for the better. There’d be no sneaking around and leaving words unsaid. It’d go like a map, a plan drawn out on index cards. Perfection. It wasn’t impossible. Serenade knew enough about time-turners to realise what she had to do, and without any further thought, she started twisting it. She couldn’t consider her actions, not now. If she did, she’d turn back, and she wasn’t one to back away from things. She kept twisting, almost frantically now, and the more frightened she was, the more she twisted.

____________________________

“Colin, I’m shit without you.” Dennis still talked to his brother sometimes, but he could never find the right words. There was so much to it, and being ‘shit without him’ was all he could come up with? It wasn’t unfair, having feelings and not being able to do anything with them. But there it was. Even if he was emotionally impotent, it didn’t mean that he could get up in the mornings now. Colin had always been the early riser. Up with the birds, he called it; up to take pictures of them, he meant. And Dennis got up, always. Some days, his brother pulled the quilt off him and the grinding cold sent him burrowing back into his pillow, but he could never stay asleep for long. Now Colin was gone and no-one cared how late he slept. “The poor pet is grieving,” he could hear his mother say from downstairs. “We’re all devastated, you know.” And there it was – out there, so easily, on display for everyone. She didn’t even notice that she was doing it. Dennis had never been that artless. His throat betrayed him when he tried to say it aloud; either that, or people didn’t care. And he couldn’t blame them when he bumbled on so. “I’m shit without you, Colin,” he tried again, and even in his head, it sounded gawky. He wasn’t designed to have to do this. His system wasn’t streamlined for coping without Colin. How could it be, when it had been built around his older brother? He was like one half of a circuit now, giving off no light, radiating no energy. He simply slept, and then he lay there until he fell asleep again. He wasn’t sad. If only it had been that simple. What this was was a termination. All trains at a standstill; no planes leaving the airport. His life hadn’t ended, but the pause button had been pressed by someone, and now he couldn’t find the remote control to get things playing again. That was what bothered him: how temporary it all felt. It was almost as if Colin wasn’t gone gone, just waiting for Dennis to bring back. Which made his despondency all his fault. If the onus was on him – if his brother wasn’t here because of him – then wasn’t it his duty to do something about it? But there was nothing, zilch, fuck-all, that he could do, so instead, he stayed in his bedroom with the curtains down.

Until he found a time-turner in the antique shop he worked in.

____________________________

Suffice to say that Edward, Abraxas and Serenade and Dennis all screwed up. Majorly.

It couldn’t be. It was the same time-turner, and the fibres of the universe couldn’t comprehend four people using it at once. The coinciding of time and date merely added to the chaos. The systems and restrictions that had governed the use of the device were, to put it simply, fucked. The world was being rearranged in pattern pieces when they completed their turning, and it all fell together in a decidedly odd mosaic. The time-turner had been made in Edward’s year; therefore, that was where its natural pull lay. This is all understandable enough. What gets difficult to explain is an influx of people from 2000, 1980 and 1947, Potter, Marauder and Riddle era, pureblood, halfblood and muggleborn -- a stampede of them flowing through Victorian society and turning things upside down. Groping each other in the street. Exposing their ankles. Swearing openly. It had to be controlled, but there was no-one who could control it. If you think you know chaos, try to define it in a way that fits Wizarding London, 1875. Given up yet? Good. For now, it’s a confounding jumble of corsets and corruption. A pureblood prostitution society, Velours Pur Embrasser, flourishes despite the efforts of the Reform Society to stop them in their debauched tracks. Add this to the confusion of Tom Riddle and his Knights of Walpurgis, young and idealistic and wholly confused; stir a bit and sprinkle with Death Eaters, Order Members and spies; serve with some pure outrageousness on the side. It’s anyone’s guess what’ll happen next. Can they get to the bottom of it? Is it fate? Or is it, perhaps, just THE OPHELIAC IN ME?