Prologue
Disclaimer: Genau wie bei meinem anderen HP fic gilt hier auch: Mir gehört gar nix. Nur Desi.
Prologue
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
-- Max Ehrmann, Desiderata
* * *
One of my earliest memories is of my birth.
No, I don't have that good a memory, but I remember the stories my Nanny used to tell me about it.
She told me I was something of a miracle child for my parents. They had been married for quite some time and my mother hadn't been able to carry a child to full term until I came along. She also said that this was how I got my name. Desiderata. "Things missing and felt to be needed," if you translate it literally. Ah well. There are worse names you could have to live up to.
She said it truly was a dark and dreary night, like in all of the Celtic fairy-tales that are as much part of Ireland, my homeland, as it's abundance of green pastures, sheep and rocks.
My mother wasn't the youngest of women anymore, already well past forty, and it wasn't an easy birth. We both nearly died that night. Something my dearest mother liked to remind me of repeatedly when she could be bothered to take an interest in my upbringing. But anyway, apparently they even resorted to bringing in a muggle doctor, to the shock of both my father's AND my mother's family, because the hardened witch who served as the midwife in the town that surrounded our castle had fainted after entering the room and seeing all the blood.
You see, the birth of a witch or wizard is quite different than the birth of a Muggle. Normally there are lots of spells cast before, during and after the process to limit actual "ickyness". The muggle method of literally pulling the child out of the mother's womb was just that. It was a muggle method and therefore incredibly barbaric and unrefined. But sometimes nature can be pretty barbaric and unrefined, too; something most of my pureblood friends never were able to understand. After all, if it isn't the way you want it to be, why not just change it into something more pleasant?
I'm afraid the mindset of most of my fellow purebloods is to believe themselves the crowning achievement of creation.
But to get back to the point, after the muggle doctor arrived (Merlin knows where my father found him, there hadn't really been many Muggle settlements around there in 1960), had gotten over the shock of standing in a castle that hadn't been there moments ago and had seen the condition my mother was in, he immediately performed something the muggles call "caesarean section" and which apparently involves cutting the mother open and taking the child out of her manually. Jenna, a muggle-born friend of mine, told me that it must have been an incredible risk to take. She said that these things usually take place in a sterilized hospital room, not in a blood-soaked bed in an invisible castle in the middle of an Irish gleann.
But we survived. I would hardly be sitting here, telling this story, if I hadn't, right?
In the incredibly romantic version my Nanny Luisa used to tell me, there had been this huge storm outside, complete with thunder and lightning, drawing eerie patterns on my mother's pale blond hair and the blood on the bedspread. But as soon as the doctor had taken me out of my mother's womb, she said that the clouds had moved and a single ray of moonlight fell on me, illuminating my tiny, still bloody body and the soft tufts of hair, almost the same colour as the blood that covered the room. She told me I was going to be a child ruled by the moon. That I *must* have been blessed in some way.
Sappy, isn't it?
Yeah, I've never really believed it either.
Not after the life I've led.
03/24/99 - Dublin, Ireland
