Crossovers

Mimosa Black stared up the building in front of her, wondering what her parents were thinking when they bought it. She could see Prongs and Paddy going all for this sort of place but assumed that her mother would have stopped them and reminded them that she was one girl. Suppose mum was too busy with Marigold’s new baby to spare the thought for her other daughter. Wasn’t enough just sending the odd one off was it? Her jaw clenched and she breathed deep, taking a moment to calm down a little bit. A group therapy home had been the first thing her parents had slapped her into when she woke up from what amounted to pretty much a sleeping beauty curse so they didn’t have to deal with her and once they released her for being stable, told her they’d already set her up for one of the fancy new Doors.

Heavily regulated, they were a piece for extravagantly wealthy wixen that had been made off of pieces of the Veil that opened into other similar worlds without the whole, stripping one’s soul for reincarnation while trapping the ghosts that the Veil had done. They were mostly considered lavish holiday worlds and had helped in revitalizing the Ministry and economy after the war had devastated it beforehand. This Door was relatively old hat, mostly swept to the side for more exotic and adventurous or relaxing Doors which meant it was a great place for them to dump their spare daughter at since it was mostly abandoned by the wixen anyhow. The magics of the world were different, but not so much so that it provided much challenge for adventure seekers and not similar enough to insert wixen into the magical communities without very blatantly standing out. There were witch hunter associations and the like for the different hedge-wixen or wiccans or shamans, or other forms of magic user which was also a point of dislike. She was pretty sure her parents had bought the door entirely for their own private use so they didn’t have to go through the hassle of getting her paperwork and the like in order for an elongated stay. Since it wasn’t a popular Door and the combined wealth and prestige of Prongs and Paddy both were well enough to commandeer one of them for the Black heiress.

Paddy wasn’t much interested in his own family, the Blacks and the family Mimosa inherited from him. He was a third parent to both her and Marigold, added in with a blood ritual and potion combination that was banned a long time ago given that Paddy would never have an heir otherwise and given she and Marigold were twins, gave them a Potter heir and Black heir rather neatly. Of course, Mari didn’t have to deal with being dragged to Black lessons with grandmother Walburga and the portrait of grandfather Orion and the portrait of Dorea, their other paternal grandmother. Or deal with their cousins, Narcissa and her son Draco at half those lessons. Pushing her off as a Black when she was just as much a Potter as her sister and daughter of a muggleborn too, even if their two Pureblooded fathers made them Purebloods as well. When tensions started rising with the outbreak of Peter Pettigrew and whispers of Dark Marks getting dark again, she was sent off to Beauxbaton for her third year and beyond. Not so much for her safety as much that ‘she’s a Black, she’s the Black heiress and they all know how Blacks turn’.

As though they didn’t abandon her to the Blacks in the first place. They sent carefully worded letters, some of them feeling out her beliefs and just what kind of ideology she was taught by the Blacks and from Narcissa. Treated like she might be a traitor because they already had a Potter daughter and didn’t need a second.

She’d been a bitter, spiteful and brilliantly applauded student at Beauxbaton and while she heard of the mess happening in Britain, she turned away from it entirely. They didn’t want her? Didn’t trust her? Fine.

And she quickly knew better than to tell them about the strange visions and terrors that she woke from some nights with a bloody scar. They would snatch her back to lock her away or accuse her of Dark magic. She was proficient in Dark magic, having been mostly reared by Black portraits but it wasn’t all just torture spells and killing babies for blood sacrifices and taking their bones for Dark potions. Paddy should know better but he hated his family so much that he’d just as quickly turn her away. Not that he didn’t already do that, but still.

When grandmother Walburga died, she got a pocket sized pendant portrait so the woman could always reach her. The death of Regulus had changed her and while she was still horribly bigoted, she was no longer blindly following the Dark Lord. Walburga kept those thoughts mostly to herself but it did show in the way she was taught about the Dark Lord’s reign and the devastation he wrought not only on the muggle and ‘mudblood’ population but on Pureblooded families as well, as well as his dismissal and irreverence of older magical traditions. His goal wasn’t for the better of Purebloods and protecting their world from the contamination of muggles muddying their own history and traditions, his goal was his own power and immortality. The Pureblooded cause was merely a way for him to reach those goals and even then the Death Eaters largely devolved into nothing more than vicious wealthy thugs that could bribe their way out of trouble. The older Black portraits considered him nothing but an arrogant upstart that helped destroy Pureblood culture.

Through grandmother Walburga, she learned all about the house that was hers to inherit being pilfered and rummaged through when Paddy offered it up as a headquarter for the Order of the Phoenix while she was away. And the matriarch was able to get Kreacher to send all the important old books and enchanted items that would otherwise be thrown out or locked up or destroyed for being Dark to Mimosa before anyone was any wiser. Grandmother Walburga was furious that her home was being defiled and that they chose to do this without so much as warning the Heiress of the estate given that Paddy, really, had barelyany authority over the old Black home.

After she had gotten an old locket that Kreacher had been hesitant to let go of, other things found their way to her. Things with a familiar burn of magic that felt good to have close by, a diadem and an old ring with a cracked black stone. They gave her visions as well but they weren’t the searing painful ones that she sometimes got.

Eventually, when she was fifteen she learned what the items were and why she felt so close to them- all because Grandmother Walburga ‘overheard’ a certain pesky conversation.

Grandmother Walburga had been horrified and it had taken her days to finally tell Mimosa what she’d learned from eavesdropping on a private conversation between Dumbledore, Snape and her three parents.

Mimosa destroyed a lot of things for a while and while she maintained stellar grades she was known more for her borderline feral disposition and prickly demeanor, even among her friends. When she was brought back to herself well into seventeen her rage was enough to concoct a mad scheme that killed her. Killed her, but only briefly and in a ritual she found in an old Black Grimoire from a sidhe that married in that let her yank the other slivers of soul from their containers and vessels. It also involved a furious battle of psyches that she won by virtue of pure teenage angst and biting icy anger if she was ever asked about it. She did win though, since the Dark Lord’s soul had been in pieces for so long and since the largest horcrux, an old diary, had been destroyed long ago. Her soul was whole and hale, which powered her psyche on to overpower his.

She didn’t know how long it had made her dead for, and then passed out once she woke up from that but it didn’t take long for it to be declared that a ritual she had done had finally and completely wiped the Dark Lord out and away. Given it was during a point where the war had long since picked up and the Dark Lord had already practically won, Dumbledore dead and the Order scattered, she was hailed a hero by the Dark Lord’s victims.

She had been blunt, when she was dragged back to Britain, that she didn’t care for the attention and had ripped into the Ministry, families that supported the Dark Lord’s ideology even if they didn’t support him, the Order of the Phoenix for its lackluster performance and British wixen culture overall and how it nurtured someone like the Dark Lord to power in the first place. Then told them all to leave her alone and kicked out anyone still lingering in Grimmauld to take her house back and repair some of the damage done to it by unwelcome trespassers and tracking down that sniveling little thief and shaking him down for everything to recollect what he’d swiped unhindered from her intended inheritance.

She had only gone out a handful of times after that, both at the pleading and whinging of the Potters (Paddy included in there) who she, by then, didn’t really consider herself a part of when they finally accepted her as one. Her interactions with them were largely stiff and she still held a smoldering burn of negativity about them. Her sister a little less, given that it was the adults that had abandoned her but still. It was when she had been on one of those outings that she was ambushed and cursed.

Thank goodness it was a mangled pronunciation or the curse would have tried to kill her and she…

Well she knew to keep quiet about a pale wand with elderberries that showed up next to her in her sleep, the family cloak that found itself with her much more than with her sister who it’d been given to, the cracked black stone now set in a pendant that was clingier than the other two items. Or to talk about the weight they sometimes gained when they were together, a sort of sentience whispering to her in her sleep. Researching through the Black books and through older French texts and tomes led her to believe that while Death as a whole wasn’t sentient but simply was, items touched with Deathly magics (not to be confused with necromancy) may gain sentience after time. Of course it was debated that there was no such thing as Death objects like the Deathly Hallows or other cultural items of legend similar given their secretive and often hidden nature.

Either way, she was sent into sleep. She didn’t age in the years she spent like that and she’d heard they had eventually considered it as a side effect of the mangled curse. She didn’t have long to orientate herself when she woke up before her parents, who had some amount of authority over her, had her thrown into the group therapy house. Mari visited often with her son and daughter, Heath and Heather and it had been an unpleasant shock to see her twin older than her while their collective three parents brought Mimosa to visit on holidays where they all still lived in a large Potter estate alongside Mari’s husband, Fred Weasley. And during holidays, Fred’s large family also tended to be visit, including the numerous next generation of Weasleys. Inevitably, she found herself watching over children for hours at a time, or entertaining them and when she wasn’t doing that, Fleur’s sister Gabrielle was talking about how she still held unbroken records in Beauxbaton and how her connections and old schoolmates were there for her if she wanted to leave Britain behind when she got out of therapy.

That would have been her choice, if she’d been given one at all. As it stood, her parents had taken the liberty of sending her not just away from the continent at large, but to another world entirely. Her first night in a yank hotel, her sister had sent her a hurried, flustered letter. The Door wouldn’t let her back through for the next five years, a fine print on the contract that let it be used in a residential manner instead of using it for hols that neither Prongs nor Paddy had really read. For the first two months the Door would be shut entirely, though it had a letter box connected that would send her letters. If she addressed her own return letters to the Door and put it in a postbox, it would be sent back to the old world through the Door. But they couldn’t actually come through on a visit- which they could leave from, since they weren’t contract bound to the world and Door like Mimosa, until the two month period was up. Mari said she had absolutely ripped into Prongs and Paddy for it and she no doubt would be getting more letters soon and the first chance they got, they would be coming through to see her.

She wondered if it hadn’t been an accident like Prongs and Paddy told Mari it was and she had cried. Why did they have any sort of legal control over her in the first place? Why did they get to choose for her where she would go, without ever asking her? It was the same way it had always been with them. What she wanted or her opinion never mattered. They had already left her, now why couldn’t they leave her alone now that she could choose things for herself?

She breathed in and out and pursed her lips. Since the Door was now privately owned, the old spells and regulations and Ministry embassy for tourists and visitors had all been shut down and taken away, though there were still old hidden wizarding spaces here and there where the buildings sat empty besides enchanted cleaning and upkeep items that kept them clean and waiting. It also meant that laws and regulations about conjuring muggle money or laws about using spells or magic no longer applied. She had a bank account and money already in her name, as well as the yank house that Prongs and Paddy chose for her. Ostensibly for her to experience travel and stability without the politics or dangers she might face in their world, a sort of getaway free of danger or her fame that had exploded across Britain that seemed to trickle out. She would have, at most, been a minor celebrity or just a wealthy tourist back home if she really had traveled across the pond, if she was even recognized at all so she rather thought it was all shite. Why send her to the U.S. anyways? Weren’t they rather notorious for their racial tensions?

It was annoying enough to be brown back in Blighty, but in a place that looked to color like the Purebloods looked at blood? And she’d been called middle eastern here. She had South Asian roots from the Desi Potters, she had no idea why they thought to call it middle east. Preposterous. To say nothing of her scars, or the sleeve she had on her left arm. Even if it was all beautifully lovely flowers and a snake sliding down the whole of her arm, a fairly pretty tattoo, she’d still gotten looks for it. And then more looks because she had a scar smack on her face. It favored the right side, a bolt that struck down her eye to the top of her cheek. Add the vivid paleness of her green eyes, and people tended to stare at her.

She brushed down her dress. Floral chiffon, swishy and the skirt ended just above her ankles with flutter sleeves and a nude set of court shoes. Living for years with either the Blacks or in Beauxbaton had left her wardrobe rather more posh than the ripped denim and pullovers Mari wore. Of course, Mari didn’t have to wear corsets to keep her spine straight and her figure smooth and Mari wasn’t coached from a young age about how to walk and move and taught about how to dress for her form, curvy pear shaped and leggy but rather petite. The only time Mimosa sloughed off those prim teachings were when she was dueling, at which point her ‘feral’ moniker came in especially strong. It was also why she had a more toff dialect like Paddy, given she was raised in the same house he was raised in.

Mari was a little jealous of her fluency in French, given that Paddy had refused to teach her or have her be taught, especially since on the rare occasion she was invited into Grimmauld, the portraits spoke solely in French since they knew Mari didn’t speak a lick of it. The Blacks were bilingual at the very least, growing up with a blend of English and French and that was if they didn’t think to add more languages. While wixen Britain at large was more into isolationist politics and ideals, individual families did carry on a few other typically European ties, some in very minor ways and others in more blatant ways, like incorporating languages into their upbringing.

Usually not much more than that, or certain traditional foods or smaller customs that they upkept. Never bringing wine to a dinner party but always come with a gift, being mindful of the flowers they gifted, morning tea or coffee from a bowl, faire la bise for her few close friends and saying hello and goodbye and Beaujolais nouveau, which they always celebrated in Beauxbaton. Little things she wouldn’t think twice about, ingrained from the Blacks and Beauxbaton.

So it would make sense for them to find her somewhere she felt familiar. Which seemed enough reason to throw here to a different continent that she had no interest in, apparently.

“Putain de bordel de merde.” she muttered under her breath. “Je me suis fait baiser.”

And even more insultingly, vendors wouldn’t sell her wine! She’d tried to ask for wine at the yank hotel and had to resort to befuddling someone in order to get any. And the food, oh. Complete tragedy. She’d passed so many fast food style restaurants as well. She knew of course that nothing would really compare to nymphs singing to them while they enjoyed their leisurely lunches and dinners (aside from the fossegrim set that had visited the school every two years or so) but the absolute state of the menus she’d peeked at. It was good, she decided, that she had taken cooking classes for an extracurricular. The enslavement of house elves was illegal there, and house elves had their own coalitions and unions, strict contracts and certainly not abused or encouraged to abuse themselves. Most well to do families didn’t use them at all, more in line with having enchanted cleaning equipment and general cookery spellbooks or a certified crone in their home. More often house elves were employed by businesses and commercial or public avenues and services, their brand of magic particularly prized for those types of things, or for those that needed specialized home care.

“Chantal,” she sighed, picking up the plush cat carrier bag. “Notre nouvelle maison.” she presented to the huge forest cat and kneazle mix that was her familiar. The cat trilled to her sweetly and it made a smile curl her lips. Chantal had been a gift from Lucien Malfois, a quarter Veela boy a year above her, after her post owl got eaten by a gargouille. To be honest, the owl wasn’t her familiar and she only had it because it was an awkward going-away gift from mum when she started schooling. She wasn’t all that fond of the severe prickly bird. One especially dull and rude compared to her sister’s much larger majestic snowy owl.

Mimosa had never been much fond of owls, they were post animals and she was kind but she would never take one as a familiar. And given that Hogwarts only accepted three different types of animal…

Even if she wasn’t often at the Potter estate when she was young, often tossed for weeks at a time with grandmother Walburga, she was told she couldn’t have a cat because it might not get along with Wiggles, the Potter house cat. Wiggles, who was friendly with both people and other animals, who’d never been territorial and that was besides that even after she started at Hogwarts, she still spent most of her time out of school at Grimmauld before grandmother Walburga died. After she spent holidays and hols with schoolmates, including yearmate Margaux Malfois.

Her brother Luc had been Mimosa’s especially attentive admirer and she’d been particularly displeased to have been dragged back to Britain. She should have married him as soon as she was able so they wouldn’t be able to lock her to Britain with Heiress duties. And look what good it did her at all! Thrust into a sleep for years and when the obligatory period she needed to stay in Grimmauld to appease Heiress responsibilities was well over, she was tossed around elsewhere!

No doubt Luc would have moved on and to be entirely fair, while they were amorous and enamored and all, they weren’t really in love. If anything, they would have likely gone onto P.A.C. partnership rather than fully committing to marriage until they either found someone else or fell into a deeper love. But it would have superseded the tricks the Ministry pulled to get her back on British soil.

She would need to get Chantal a new playmate as well, the one she’d gotten before for her when she was pulled away from the Malfois estate and the other cats Chantal interacted with had apparently been given up for adoption elsewhere because she wasn’t Mimosa’s familiar. In fact, if Mimosa didn’t have the paperwork noting Chantal as her familiar, they would have tried to get rid of her too.

Altogether, Mimosa was absolutely not fond of her closest family. She could get along alright with her sister, as long as the topic of their parents didn’t come up because they had been exposed to wildly different treatment and care from them. Mari often couldn’t see her parents as being cruel or neglectful or dismissive but those were the kinder words Mimosa knew for them. Mimosa knew they were warm and supportive for Mari, and tangibly there for her but she could not actually envision them as loving or doting parents. She had the Blacks, who took a lot of their familial interactions as strict or emotionally distant, and she had her schoolmates that pulled her in and softened her harsher edges.

Here, she didn’t have any access to either. Well, she did still have her grandmother Walburga pendant, and a trunk that she had two days to put together before she was being shoved through the Door. In the two days she had to be aware of what was going to happen, she had also very explicitly left the care and house of Grimmauld to Kreacher and to Narcissa and Draco Malfoy in her absence, which at the time she’d thought would be more temporary. The two had been less involved in the posturing and prostrating and torturing that Lord Malfoy had been part of and had redeemed themselves through what she’d been told was a daring escape from Malfoy Manor with the likes of a few prisoners of the time and a host of information against the Dark Lord and his followers. Still, even with that it had been by the skin of their teeth that they had avoided Azkaban.

In those papers, under no circumstances were Prongs, Paddy or mum allowed to step foot within Grimmauld, nor have any say in the estate whatsoever. Mari, if invited, could enter the premises but only under condition that nothing was to be taken from Grimmauld. It was unlikely Narcissa or Draco would invite her anyways. She also sent forms and petitions in to strip whatever legal authority her parents might have over her. She was an adult and had already reached her magical majority by the time she was plopped back onto English soil. Her parents weren’t even on her emergency contact list, but she did wonder if that was just the English folk willfully ignoring it since the ones that were on her emergency contact list were all French and rather than sending her to the care services she had on file, they put her in St. Mungo’s to keep her on British soil.

As soon as she was able to escape the Door, she would flee back to France, any other legal mess be damned. She could seek higher learning and make rounds at the dueling circuits, eventually wind down and perhaps even have the chance to take up teaching at Beauxbaton if they’d have her, marry and pop out a few of her own children who’ll be given unconditional love and support.

That was the dream anyways.

Cinq année, she thought darkly.

The first step onto the estate proper made her lip curl up. There was a sludge like ambient magic here and it attempted coyness as it tried to wrap about her. She brushed it away with an annoyed lash of her free arm, heading up to the door. The house already had been filled by interior designers that Prongs threw money at. The folder she had been given said that the original designs that the previous owners had renewed and restored in their year of renovation had been taken into account so as not to undo their progress but that the basement had been avoided in respect of the terrible murder-suicide that had happened there. Hopefully that all meant she wouldn’t need to furnish the house entirely but she had no doubts she would need to tweak things here or there. Basement, ground floor, first floor and loft. There were a few notes about hearing things or seeing things, but they were ultimately brushed off as superstition with the recent deaths of the previous owners by whoever put together the folder. She leafed through the photographs she’d gotten just that morning, with everything done and ready and inspections, cleaning and preparations all done before she ever stepped foot in the house. There was food from local sources in the kitchen and pantry (with small placards to denote where it came from if she wanted to resupply), cat necessities brought in, bedding and linens and the like cleaned and pressed, general toiletries taken care of.

She wasn’t sure who exactly Paddy and Prongs had found to do all of that, but she could only assume they conjured quite a lot of muggle money for the services. She would need to go out to the shops to get more personal things, clothes and makeup and scents, hair washes and products and all. She was a little...Wary of muggle beauty products, but she knew well enough how to make her own and at worst, that pale wand was eager to be of use and if duplicating the things she managed to scramble together in two days was something she wanted to do, it would be quick to oblige. Most curiously, the wand also seemed able to duplicate and even conjure food and the like, ingredients that should not be available in this different world so at least she had that for potion brewing. Likely, she would have to do so in the basement after she cleared a room and warded it to be a potions lab.

The photos of the rooms seemed to favor neoclassical focal pieces but aside from that seemed to be chosen for thematic cohesion. There was also rather unfortunate photos of murals in the drawing room after the peeling wallpaper had been pulled off but it was hit with paint thinner and cut out entirely in spots where that didn’t work and the wall above the wainscoting now boasted cream flocked wallpaper and heavy dark blue velvet curtains that puddled on gleaming wood floors, a gauzy thinner curtain filtering the light coming in to be more gentle from the windows. The blue also came up in the upholstery of the sofa and in small baubles sitting on a side table and in the soft pillows sitting in the cream upholstered chairs. An intricate rug sat beneath it in reds and blues and greens.

She put those away, she would be seeing the rooms herself soon enough and put the folder back in the side pocket of the cat carrier to pull out the key to let herself in. Immediately to her side when opening the door was a coat closet with a shoe rack already wedged inside. It was pretty, she would certainly give the house that but that didn’t make her upcoming tenure that much more pleasant. She went into the sitting room and her sharp eyes caught on something that made her smile.

It fit in the palm of her hand, a small snake carving in resplendent jade and seastone greens. She put it back in its place, wandering to the sofa to set down the carrier and open it for Chantal to come stretching out. She was a pretty tortie and the long feathery flourish of her tail nearly hid the extra volume tuft at the end of it. There was a litter box in the room, stealthily hiding in a corner. She would cast a common charm to neutralize the scent to humanoid noses. There was also climbing shelves and a cat hammock hung up on the walls, and a few cat toys sat nestled in a wide brimmed wicker basket. There was the sofa and two armchairs and sitting in a corner by the window was a very plush wide chair that could likely fit two of her in dark leather with a faux-fur throw on it that she already knew would quickly become her nesting chair. Beyond that, the dining room had a long table that could seat more people than she would likely ever invite in and the runner was made of sturdy lace that could likely be bleached as needed for any stains and the buffet cabinets on the side had sets of dining wear. The kitchen was spacious, which was good considering how much cooking she’d have to do. She’d need to rune ward a chest to preserve what she made so she could cook in batches but that wasn’t exactly a hard thing to do. She checked the pantry and then made her way to the first floor, Chantal trotting alongside her.

There were four rooms on this floor, five if one counted the morning room and of those rooms, the master bedroom was included. They were devoid of more personalized decoration or items but that was to be expected she supposed.

The master bedroom had a lovely sitting area and windows but she didn’t much like it. She chose the turquoise room instead with its four poster canopy bed. She would change the drapery and the bedding to more suite her own tastes but she rather liked the layout of the room more. And the color to be honest, not all that fond of plain white walls. Maybe if it were a hint more bluish or purplish or really anything but that droll white in the master suite. She also wasn’t the biggest fan of a fireplace in her room, too used to floo fireplaces and the connotation stuck even if it wasn’t that kind of fireplace. She pulled out her wand to turn the plain cotton drapes of the four poster canopy into longer and more aesthetically pleasing velvet drapery in pinkish mauve with a satiny interior canopy in a teal shade a bit darker than the walls. The bedskirt was next to be changed into a gathered material in a deeper more raspberry color- the same color the satin pillows were changed to and she sheets as well. The duvet and quilt became a pleasingly plush pinkish mauve of velveteen with sherpa underside. The rug beneath on the floor was made into a pile rug a few shades lighter than the walls. She changed the armchair into a squishy, inviting papasan chair (another nesting chair) and conjured a luxuriously soft faux fur throw to fold over it. She pulled out the shrunken luggage pieces she had. More stylish than the trunks typically found in Diagon, they mimicked a vintage muggle style set and hers were in soft pastel blue. A flick of her wand set them open and neatly organizing and putting away clothes, and sit a few day to day necessities out. Chantal leapt up onto the bed, already kneading and pleased at the soft material.