The Chronicles of Black.

With that, the three of them Apparated away to their respective houses, leaving the grounds of the heavily warded, heavily guarded, previously abandoned manor house that their Lord was hidden inside.

Xerxes was very confused when he finally found his grandsons in the mismatched house, only to see Rodolphus comforting a sobbing Rabastan in the front room when he got home. He'd only just told their Lord how well Rabastan was coming on, only to find him in this disgraceful state upon his return.

"What in the name of Merlin has happened?" He demanded of his grandsons.

"It's Harry." Rodolphus told him. "Is he alright? He hasn't been injured has he?" He asked quickly.

"No. He hasn't sent Rabastan a letter in three weeks, but an hour ago a letter turned up with Hedwig, one that looked like he'd been writing it for two weeks, but it isn't finished. Harry cut himself off in mid-sentence, left a cryptic ending about needing to talk to Rabastan face-to-face and ended it with a rushed signature."

"He's going to break off the betrothal, I know he is!" Rabastan growled in a rough voice that was harsh from his tears. "I'm not what he wants, of course, I'm not. I'm ugly and old and decrepit! He's going to want some young thing that's handsome and strong, who hasn't been ruined by years in Azkaban and I'm not regaining my strength quickly enough, I know that. I'll never be able to regain what Azkaban has taken from me and he sees that too, he doesn't want to be stuck with the likes of me for the rest of his life."

"I think you have the wrong end of the stick." Xerxes told his younger grandson, easing himself down beside him. "Young Draco sent his father a letter a week or so ago. Harry unwittingly revealed some rather…unsavoury facts about his childhood and he's been forced to come out with the truth. If this is about what I think it is, then he sent you that letter in haste before the news could get to you from someone other than himself, so that it doesn't look like he's hiding anything from you. He sent a message to Lucius just hours after Draco did and then he must have waited for his owl to come back before sending this letter to you. I assure you that he is not looking to break the contract, in fact, from what Lucius was saying he's already preparing for a quick engagement, so I suggest that you have a ring fashioned for him ready for when he comes home for the winter holidays." "What happened to him in his childhood?" Rabastan demanded, becoming the protective man that Azkaban had tried to whittle away and that Harry had rekindled.

Xerxes sighed. "I know very little, as does Draco and Lucius I imagine, as Harry wasn't very forthcoming with details on the train journey and his letter to Lucius was rushed. But from what he let slip, he was abused, beaten, and starved as a young child by those muggle beasts that he lived with. It's why he accepted the adoption with the Malfoy family so easily, he'd never known the love and care of a real family before and now he craves it."

"They hurt him?" Rabastan growled.

"My betrothed? I'll kill them. I'll kill all of them and I'll make it slow, for all the years that my Harry had to suffer from them! I will find out what they did to him, every last little thing and I'll make sure that they suffer for every single one of the instances where they hurt or upset him."

"That was the thought of Lucius and I." Xerxes nodded. "He's going to talk to Harry, to see if he needs a mind healer after everything that he's been through, as he is clinging to the three Malfoys quite tightly despite how little time he's actually truly known them, and then he's going to find out from him where those muggles live and he's going to invite us to go with him to pay them a little visit. Those pieces of filth will regret every instance that they laid a finger on him or denied him food before their end."

The three of them slipped into contemplative silence and stayed with their own thoughts, thinking about all the painful, horrifying curses that they knew and would use on those muggles once they found out how very badly they had hurt Harry. "Does our Lord have any news or new missions for us?" Rodolphus asked after several minutes of internal pleasure, thinking of the effects his curses would have on mere muggles.

"No. He asks that you remain on your recovery regimes and that you work on making yourselves healthy and combat-ready. He also asks, Rabastan, that you do your all to keep Harry attached to you and that you do nothing to sever the bond between you. He is very pleased with the progress that you have made with the boy and he is pleased that you are both getting healthier and fitter. He is content to plan future missions and to send out lower level Death Eaters for the assassinations that he needs to be completed. He is content to wait until you are both better before giving either of you your own missions."

"I dislike not being able to help the cause." Rodolphus said in frustration. "Rabastan has a mission of sorts. He has Harry and he has to work on his betrothal, I have nothing to distract myself with."

"You could always try to get that wife of yours with a child. It wouldn't hurt to at least try, even if you had to force her."

Rodolphus' face pinched in disgust at the thought of sleeping with his own wife.

"I wouldn't put it past her to purposely thwart my reluctant attempts by injuring herself while carrying the baby and then I would have done so for nought. It would be just like her." He sneered.

"I say it often, but your father is the biggest fool I've ever had the displeasure of knowing." Xerxes sighed. "If it weren't for the both of you, I would be happy to call him my biggest mistake. He took too much from that bitch wife of mine and I was always away on missions for our Lord, so Lyvia got into his head and the sparse time that I spent with him was not enough to combat her potent poison. I'm glad that he never had the chance to do the same to you both, that he left you to me and flounced off to India after the death of your mother to leave me to raise you both in peace. You two are the sons that I always wanted to have, but all I got was Rhadamanthus."

"You know that we see you as our father more than him." Rabastan said. "I didn't even meet him for the time until the year after I graduated Hogwarts and even then I was thrown into Azkaban only a few short years afterwards. The one and only time that he actually came and visited was when Rodolphus was fifteen and he only came back to set up his engagement with Bellatrix and I was spending that summer in Brazil with that penfriend I had. I never had enough interaction with him to see him as anything other than a distant relative; he's a near stranger to me." "I feel the same way. I was three when he left and I don't remember that far back. All I can remember of my childhood is you, Grandfather. How happy I was, how happy we were. How you taught us and built us up. You are my father in my mind, even if it's not official. That man came back when I was fifteen because he thought that I was actually a year older than I was. He thought that I was sixteen already and he was actually angry with me when I informed this stranger in my home that I was only fifteen. He set up that engagement immediately, regardless of anything else and he told me that it was my duty to the Lestrange line to accept. You were away on a mission, Grandfather, I had no one to help me, so I was pressured into signing the contract over that summer and I have regretted it every day since."

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