A/N: Well I'm back! Sorry about the stupid deletion but the good news is the suspension is over and I'm gonna try and get as much up as possible in the next 2 days. For those of you who have read this before it's deletion by the mods, you'll notice that the first 2 chapters and prologue are now rewritten and completely different than before. The reasons for this is because 1) I got sick of trying to get it validated and whatnot here and at HPFF the way it was and 2) I really wasnt happy with the way it flowed. Currently, I'm almost done rewriting chapter 2 but as of now I'm not planning to rewrite anything else though that is subject to change depending on how I think it flows. As before, please please please please review and let me know what you all think! Love you all! Kai
Long Road Home
will their destiny lie in the future, or is it trapped somewhere in their past?
Prologue
A battered and bruised, nineteen year old woman lay in a head, huddled in the corner of her cold, damp, bare cell. She had been here for almost eight long months and she was starting to fear she'd never make it out alive. That she'd never see her fiancé again, or her brand new baby girl that was only two little months old when she disappeared. She had even spent her nineteenth birthday in that very cell, given a birthday present of countless beatings and curses.
The woman was also surprised that it seemed that no one in the outside world either knew she was missing-though that seemed impossible because she had left on a mission and just never shown up and it's not a normal thing to simply get lost during a portkey trip. But, yet, that's exactly what happened. She had left with the others that morning by portkey only to experience some sort of invisible force trapping her within the portkey and changing her destination. She was supposed to be headed to Egypt but instead she found herself face down on the hard concrete of the very cell that had become her home for the past eight months. And yet, no one had ever come to find her or even looked for her at all-something that she wasn't positive of but by the fact that she was still there after all this time, it was starting to look that way.
Instead she had been left here to endure months of beatings and curses and other awful things that the mind couldn't even fathom. She had been raped multiple times now by her own almost-father-in-law and the images of each encounter haunted her every time she closed her eyes and fell into unconsciousness on that cold, hard floor. She was enduring countless flashes of the encounters whenever she was alone in the room, which was all the time except when one of the Death Eaters that were holding her captive decided to beat her or throw curses at her or whenever Lucius decided to try and break her spirit by raping her. She knew that she would never have had to endure Lucius' pain if it wasn't for the fact she loved his son and helped him to betray his father and the Dark Lord.
She had come to the conclusion a few months before that if she wanted out of this place, she was going to have to find some way to escape herself, which was not an easy task considering they had broken her wand when they took her, but she was determined to find a way…no matter what the cost.
She had tried countless times to call out to her fiancé using their joint telepathy but had yet to be able to reach him and that scared her to no extent. She didn't want to think about the possible reasons why she couldn't contact him, they had overcome the distance problem and had been able to communicate to each other from great distances, so why couldn't she hear him? Or perhaps he couldn't even hear her. As she passed out again that cold Christmas eve night, she recalled the beautiful holiday she had spent just a short year ago with her friends and her wonderfully loving fiancé, both anxiously awaiting the arrival of their first baby, a girl, that would be born only two short months later and named Alexis Jade Malfoy. As her body and mind were swept once more into a deafening state of unconsciousness, she cried out telepathically one more time, begging and pleading that her beloved would finally hear her and answer her pleas.
Please sweetheart, please hear me. Save me from this hell before it's too late….
That same cold, December, night, a young, heartbroken man kneeled on the ground in front of a beautiful marble angel tombstone in his family's cemetery. The snow fluttered all around him, freezing normal people to the bone but tonight, this young man couldn't feel the cold. He was completely numb with grief that his friends and loved ones were greatly becoming scared of his mental health. He was a very young man, only eighteen years old, but he appeared many years older. His once flawless, pale, skin had now lost it's illuminant glowthat it had once had and he had already begun to develop small lines around his eyes. The once bright and sparkling ice-blue eyes that had enticed and enthralled many a young girls in their time were now distant and dull, as if the life force that had made his eyes shine and twinkle had been abruptly put out.
He kneeled in the harshly cold snow this night, his eyes lowered to the ground and his fingers fiddling with a platinum band that was a circled serpent….the matching piece to the beautifully detailed serpent, diamond, emerald, and ruby ring that had resided on the beautiful angel he loved; the angel that was now buried six feet beneath him, taken from him and their daughter much too soon. She had been overcome with her destiny and the fate that had come to her best friend and it had overwhelmed her life to the point where he had felt he no choice left but to take their newborn daughter and go into hiding somewhere safe until the time when she had finally overcome the obstacles that had overcome her life. The young man had never regretted anything more than he regretted that day looking back now. When he left with their baby girl that morning after his fiancé had gone to a meeting, he had never imagined in his worst, most terrifying nightmares, that it would've been the very last time that he would have ever seen his angel.
She disappeared later that same day in a mysterious portkey accident-that's what the ministry and everyone had finally begun calling it- and had never been seen or heard from again. Never, that is, until the fateful day he picked up the morning's daily prophet that day in October, six long and tiresome months after her disappearance. The prophet's front page held a large picture of his angel, dressed in her Head Girl robes from a couple years prior during their last year at Hogwarts. Her bright smile was shining up at him and his deep honey brown eyes were twinkling the same way they had the first time they had emitted their love for each other. The young man's heart leapt into his throat when he saw the picture until his eyes drifted slightly upwards and he saw the terrible headline that was placed directly above the picture….
Former Head Girl Found Dead on Egyptian Beach
That was the beginning of the end of the young man's life, or at least that's how it felt to him. He remembered shoving his chair back and leaping to his feet disbelievingly when he read those words. He could feel his heart shattering into a million pieces and he felt as if he had just received the dreaded Dementor's Kiss-like his very soul had been ripped unwillingly from his body.
Now he was spending his Christmas eve night the same way he had spent very many days and nights for the first few weeks after the article was released….kneeling in front of the large angel tombstone that he had erected in memory of his angel-his one true love.
The cold, battered young woman awoke to a familiar sound the following morning, the evil, malicious, voice of her almost father-in-law.
"Get up Mudblood." his gritting voice echoed through the dark cell and jerked the young woman from her uneasy sleep.
He strolled determinedly across to where she lay in a crumpled and dirty heap in the corner and the young woman immediately gritted her teeth and forced her mind to go somewhere else because she knew what was about to come, the same thing that she had awoken to almost every morning for the past - gods she didn't even know how long it had been going on for anymore.
As her body was tortured in every way possible, her mind refused to focus on the acts that were currently happening and instead she focused, as she always did during these 'episodes', on finding a way out and back to her family. She was suddenly overcome with a tremendous feeling of hope, a feeling she had not felt in many, many months and had almost completely begun to believe didn't exist anymore and somehow she knew that finally, this day would be her last in this hell. She opened her eyes slowly, the first time she had actually opened her eyes during one of their morning rituals, and that's when she saw it-her hope.
Just a short distance from where they were laying, his cloak lay strewn on the cold floor and there, sticking out of the pocket of the cloak, gleaming like a beacon in a foggy night, was her salvation-his wand. All she had to do was reach out and grab it. She slowly slid her arm towards the wand, trying desperately to keep his attention elsewhere so that he would not notice. Closer, closer, her fingers moved till finally it was in her grasp. With one final push, not caring whether or not he noticed anymore, she lunged sideways and clasped her bony fingers around the slender piece of wood. Using every ounce of power she could muster, she shoved her attacker backwards and shot up, her adrenaline pumping rapidly and pointed the wand at her attacker.
He saw what she was doing but it was too late. She had already thrown a harsh stunning spell at him and unlocked the door using the same unlocking spell she had heard the other Death Eaters use on countless occasions. She was surprised that her magic seemed to come back so naturally after many months of unuse but it all seemed so natural. She knocked out a few more Death Eaters that she met in the corridor and ran as fast as her weakened legs could carry her. It was after the second turn that she realized that she had no clue where she was at…she had assumed for months that they had simply taken her back to the Malfoy Manor as they did last time but this was definitely not it. Summoning up her intuition she followed the corridors through, making abrupt turns every so often when her gut told her to and after about 30 minutes she went cautiously through a heavy iron door and was blasted with a sight she had so longed to see for the past eight months….sunlight. She gasped and blinked her eyes a few times, trying to adjust to the brightness after only seeing the inside of a dim dungeon for eight long months. Finally her eyes adjusted well enough to look around and she saw that she was in an alleyway . Traveling towards the street she saw just up ahead, she emerged into what she noticed was a busy bustling street. Glancing around to see if she could recognize anything, she realized after a few moments that she was in the one place she had always dreamed of being-Venice, Italy.
Taking one last long look down the alleyway to ensure she was not being followed and, taking a deep breath and stuffing the confiscated wand into her pocket and covering with the tattered tail of her dirty shirt, made her way on to the bustling Italian street, her mind focused now on one thing and one thing only….
Draco Malfoy.