Ursa VII
There was a thick wire of tension running through her mother’s body, her fingers catching on the tangles she’d usually find before she ran her brush through Ursa’s hair - or so Ursa thought, hoped perhaps. Otherwise, the apathetic care was more of a permanent aspect of her demeanour rather than a result of Ursa’s own difficult nature.
It had been years since her mother had taken up brushing out her hair each night, leaving the task to her sister instead when it became clear who, exactly, her youngest child favoured. Time had worn away the memories, which had never been terribly pleasant, to begin with, and left her with her sister’s much more temperate maintenance as a baseline. Now, it was slightly awkward, generally unpleasant, and more of a necessity than a want.
She’d messed up; which in her line of life, wasn’t at all uncommon and generally happened more often than not, but this time had been bad. A runic array had exploded mid-construction and burnt away skin from her palms to the crook of her elbow. Most of her were still intact, but it prickled like a thousand needles when she moved, and so she had resigned herself to sitting in abject stillness for the next fortnight.
Ursa had learned a valuable lesson: that the reason many runes were pre-made for use was that making new ones had explosive tendencies. She’d also wrecked a table, but Bellatrix had wrecked thrice that, so her mother had merely told the elves to order a new one before leading her off for medical care.
Not that she had done anything special; Ursa might have well as bandaged them herself! She’d been expecting a potion, maybe, or numbing cream, and instead got a smear of scar-prevention cream and a pat on the shoulder as the only medical attention beyond the bandages themselves. Her mother had declared she’d learn to live with the pain of what she’d caused, looking as pleased as punch. Now, as it was, she’d be out of commission for anything other than writing brief sentences, reading or eating very, very daintily for the next fortnight.
It must be a dream come true, for you, she’d had to hold herself from spitting out when her mother had proclaimed the punishment.
Ursa had never been an easy child to raise in pureblood practices, or at all, which was a first. All of her sisters had adopted the cold, complicated nature with ease, even if it was in an unconventional manner. The old clingings of being a working-class girl had never left, and she’d never wanted to leave them, so all those quaint mannerisms had stayed a distant figment in her mind, and all that queer finery had sat on her like oil on water.
But now Ursa had been betrayed by her own body and forced to take on limitations she’d never had to before. Her mother had been practically preening through that first dinner as Ursa used all her cutlery correctly with a straight back and a grimacing, pained face.
It had mostly been a cover she’d held onto lest she threw the plate at Druella’s face, hot food and all. The punishment for that would be far, far worse but the thought had made her smile.
Her mother started on the back of her hair, splitting the final few strands apart as she ran the comb through. Despite its ‘magical enchantment’, the comb seemed to catch on every knot and tangle in the bird’s nest she called hair. It had been a gift from some relative, though likely more of an attempt to get rid of the useless thing, and if she ever found out who, she was going to beat them with it.
“You know, you’d have such beautiful hair, if only you cared for it.” Druella commented absently, an attempt to form conversation. “Your father’s hair - only you and Bella ever got it.”
“Mmh,” Ursa said because a reply was expected of her.
The claws of the comb just kissed the curls of her hair, slowing in their descent as Druella sighed deeply. “I don’t mean to hurt you, you know. You’re still young, Ursa, for however smart and clever you are. You don’t know how this world works. I don’t want you to get hurt because I wasn’t strong enough to teach you what was needed, but you will learn, even if you hate me for it.”
“It’s boring,” Ursa told her bluntly. Then she was forced to bite down on a hiss when her mother tugged just too hard at a knot; what a bitch, she seethed within the safe confines of her head, aggravated at the pulsing in her scalp and in her fingers.
“Ursa.” Her voice was flat; a warning. “I understand you don’t like our traditions, but if you want to get anywhere in this life, you’re going to have to learn.”
In this life hit her like a fiery lash to the chest. She swallowed down the lump of unwanted emotion immediately, so used to compartmentalising these brief flashes of grief that she barely blinked. A simmering irritation replaced it - not yet anger, but not the placidity that’d remained in her heart before.
The whole idea of conforming to standards rankled on her; the last, kept part of her that she refused to let go, like a sacred grail that proved her existence of a before. Her family, her memories, her accent and the love she held for her hobbies had all been discarded to keep going, and it all seemed so silly in retrospect when compared with that. If anything, her demeanour should have been the first willing sacrifice, but it hadn’t been, and now she was facing the repercussions.
If she did, and she hadn’t yet decided to stamp out the very last dusty remnant she hadn’t even realised kept clogging up her senses, there would be no going back. If she did, she’d be able to conform to high society - and imagine how far she could go if she really tried. The blood of her cousins might not need to be spilt in such great amounts if she could keep them from the frontlines, and her sisters might keep distantly connected instead of utterly separated.
Her lips twitched into a frown, and she caught it before it could flood her face with untoward emotion. “I’ll try, mother.”
And Druella smiled, a warm, heartfelt expression that only a mother gave to their child. Ursa felt a glacial shiver clamber up her back and settle, supreme, around her shoulders, feeling a bit like she was standing in the shade whilst the sun was out. “You will.”
She did try; there just wasn’t much opportunity to do so.
When her hands healed, she went straight back to trying to decipher where she went wrong in the array - or what went wrong. It was, in theory, a very simple light-warmth rune. There were so many variations of the damn thing that she’d thought, huh, where can I go wrong?
Well, now Ursa had faint, streaky lines stretching from underneath her nails to the deep crevices in her palms as proof of her mistakes, so.
She theorised a myriad of reasons; ranging from a mix-up in the overlap to an incorrect array shape to an incomplete rune to a simple miswritten rune. In most magic branches, there were only a handful of ways to go wrong that had any major consequences. In runes, there were so many variations with so many different outcomes that listing them on a page was a waste of paper, or simply hadn’t occurred before. That’s why you had tutors, who could politely point out the error before it could happen or contain it appropriately.
Ursa had gotten into so much trouble because she’d been working without her tutor - who changed so often due to magical politics, her own protection or her parents' whims that she didn’t really know, or bother to learn, their names; currently, it was a greying fellow with keen blue eyes and a penchant for smoking - and without telling anybody about her little experiment.
“Here,” he pointed out in his gravely and old voice, tracing the tangent line with one knobbly finger.
The man was gentle enough in nature, although it was obvious the world had not been gentle enough to him. Around his throat was a coil of angry red scarring, the skin contracted, tight and shiny where it had been burnt and branded. Often, his hands shook so intensely that he hid them beneath the blue fabric of his sleeves and his wrists were marred with layered, white shackle scars. Sometimes, Ursa pitied him for his overt misery and sometimes, she wondered about it. Either way, it remained a mystery.
“It looks like the lighting function of the Madds-Morrison signal.” Ursa tilted her head as if it would give her a better perspective. It was what she’d been aiming for; something similar, used for large spaces such as ballrooms or dining halls, which typically didn’t have much lighting at night, but were capable of heating too. “What about it?”
He clicked his tongue. “No, here, look. Where you’ve drawn uruz, it’s on the same tangent as where you’ve drawn laguz.”
She frowned. He was right; just along the thin line of charcoal where she’d drawn the tangent, gently kissing the end of it, laguz linked the two runic lines together in a dangerous combination. Ursa recalled the moment when everything had gone up in literal flames, and although the memory was fuzzy, she must have been-
..writing the last sequence for the third-quarter of the nexus, in which laguz resided.
“Oh.” She said, bereft of anything else. A tiny mistake so unnoticeable that she’d not even remember writing until it had ruined the whole thing until it had torn up her hands so badly that she'd been unable to do anything more than a light sketch for the past two weeks, leaving her helpless and in pain. After the first week, her mother had taken pity on her and given her a pain cream, but still.
A teeny, tiny mistake that would have left her hands permanently scarred and borderline disfigured, if she hadn’t been a Black.
“It’s alright. You can re-write it, can’t you?” He looked at her, old eyes peering into her soul when she met them.
Ursa refused to let anything surface other than her resolve, nodding. “Of course.”
You can re-write it, can’t you?
Those words bounced around her skull, ricocheting off the inside of her skull like a twisted version of a pinball game. They carried with them a truth that hadn’t been meant so literally, but to someone like her, who knew everything that would happen to the wizarding world, her world, in the next decade and the consequences of it, it meant everything.
Or perhaps it hadn’t meant anything at all, but to exist as a reminder.
A reminder that no matter what she did to refute the course, she’d never change anything as she was. She’d told herself, lied to herself, that she was, via small steps and tiny adjustments; and she had, since obviously, Aries existed, though she’d seen neither hide nor hair of him for months, now. But what change would that do, when her sisters led lives that would destroy each other?
At most, she’d be able to steal one of You-Know-Who’s horcruxes at eleven. But that was where it ended; without basilisk venom, fiendfyre or a killing curse, it’d be just as useful as one of the artefacts around the manor.
The rest were best not mentioned, especially when half of them had been tucked away so trivially that their locations had faded in memory like vibrant silk, to where she knew their vague situation, but nothing more. Some would be revealed so far into the future that, at best, all she could do was twiddle her thumbs and pray that her sister allowed her to snoop around her home without question.
But, didn’t a butterfly flap its wings, and across the world, a hurricane begins?
There must have been other factors - there were, she remembered, suddenly, thinking of her parents' locked-door conversations and the unshielded glee on her sister’s face when she talked about greatness and all things associated. Or are, if one is to consider that some of these things are presently occurring, or will be, if you factor in the future, too. Which she must, if she wants to be something more than a disgraced Black scion.
(if she wants her cousins to be more than a falsely-branded mass murderer and dead before twenty; if she wants her sister to be capable of talking to Andy without shame; if she wants to be more than a dark footnote in history.)
And, she told herself that next morning in the mirror, because it seemed like the right thing to do, though Ursa was not so certain that the right thing fit so snugly with the building blocks that made up her being anymore, to save the lives that would otherwise send rivers of blood through the Wizarding World.
In preparation for her Great, Totally Going To Work plan, Ursa read.
A lot.
Which was saying something, considering that she, at present, spent most of her time reading. Her tutors had never given her material to learn from, merely rattled off a list of recommendations before jumping into the nitty-gritty details of waving a wand, incantations and mixing poisons that spoke of a lack of experience in teaching small children. Luckily for them, she was not a small child; at least, not fully.
It made the sessions entertaining, at least, but it also meant that after her ‘classes’ finished, she’d have to go to the library and make notes on her own time. The only boon was that, with Narcissa away and her cousins locked in Grimmauld Place, it didn’t rankle so much to spend most of her free time carefully filling up journals with intensive theory. She didn’t understand all of it from the get-go; no, in fact, a lot of her Transfiguration notes waited patiently for when she decided to try and wrap her head around them.
This time was different, though; she delved into the dusty, heavy tomes for the simple reason that, somewhere, Voldemort found his power in the history of wizardry - after all, horcruxes were a nigh-forbidden, mostly forgotten subject with the artefacts themselves being known only in rumour. As a pureblood scion, of the very old, very big House Black no less, she knew she had much more material to work with; after all, as her aunt used to say when asked on the subject, any respecting pureblood who lets other fingers wander without watchful eyes is either stupid or naive.
There had been a lot more in that rant about how the library in your home was proof of your knowledge and a badge of status, but that more or less boiled it down, when it came to Aunt Walburga’s obsessive nature over what was ‘right’.
“You don’t often read that sort of material, dear.” Her mother commented at lunch, her keen eyes flickering over the black, soot-covered covers of Fyrt hja midnatt. An old book focused on Scandinavian magic, which was both fairly interesting and fairly useless in equal measure.
Ursa hummed, careful not to scrape her fork against the porcelain of the plate. “I’ve developed a new interest.”
“You’d be better in my father’s library if that is what you are looking for.” Her mother mentioned absently buttered a scone, dark tea pouring itself into a ceramic cup painted with hopping, blue dancers. “Most of the Black libraries are Roman-based but the Rosiers used to have a branch family in Norway before they died out- oh when was it? Sometime before the 19th century, perhaps?”
“It was long before then.” Her father corrected, where he had deigned to join them for lunch. He often took mid-day meals in his office, locking himself away from the world, but he was more likely to skip dinner than lunch.
“Well, whenever it was, it was quite a while ago. Though I believe it was Rosetta who inherited it all when grandfather died since they were much more her style of magic than mine.” Her mother took a long sip of tea, her face soft in quiet contemplation. “Until Andromeda comes of age, though, the house will be locked.”
Ursa pushed down the urge to chew on her lip, a habit easy to throw out, and turned to her father. “Would Uncle Orion have any similar topics?”
“No,” Cygnus said curtly, but not unkindly. “He prefers-”
“His wife prefers, you mean.”
“He prefers the study of the more active side of magic.” He continued as if he hadn’t just been interrupted. The two of them do it so often to each other, that if it were an Olympic sport, it’d be a fight to win gold. “That means that most of the historical accounts are centred on the family or old wiccan traditions. At best there might be a few old spells, but remember, those are strictly forbidden, so don’t get caught.”
“Don’t encourage her. She’s not even eleven.” Druella complained. “And we’ve already had to cover up for Bellatrix one too many times.”
Her father didn’t hesitate. “And we’ll continue to cover up for her.”
“Well, I say a stint in Azkaban would do that girl some good. She’s a wild thing, going around duelling anybody who so much as disagrees with her, and she doesn’t even have the excuse of age on her side anymore. Maybe the dementors could put some sense into her.”
“She defends the family, Dru, and that’s enough. Until the Lord says anything, we’ll keep bailing her out and do our duty.” Her mother turned her face away from her father, face dark. “Now, enough of this talk in front of the child.”
It was very strange, how one could be forgotten at their own table, but Ursa had enough experience in the phenomena to not so much as bat an eyelid when it occurred. Perhaps she ought to be more insulted, but it was nice to get a break from being the only conversationalist. If her parents had it their way, they’d eat in sullen silence and say nought at all.
Druella’s face softened, but tension still lingered in the tightness of her brow and the twitchy set of her lips. “Apologies, dear. Now, tell me about your studies.”