Couples Therapy
“No.”
“No?” the mind-healer repeated, as though he might have misheard Asteria. Which was completely ridiculous because I can feel you watching me. It was actually taking just about every shred of her self-control to stop herself from attacking him, because she didn’t know him or trust him, and he was in her fucking head!
“No, absolutely not. I didn’t want to come here in the first place, but I’m definitely not going to discuss me being a fucking crazy person, in front of James. No.”
She’d been absolutely right about not liking whatever shite Dorea was writing “John” about last night, even if it wasn’t quite as bad as surprise, you’re not leaving. Or at least, she hoped that Jamie would help her resist being locked in the bloody loony bin, even if he was still a bit stunned about her being a girl, now. Bella was definitely going to give her shite about being all paranoid, arranging for completely unnecessary help breaking out and going on the run...or else be pleased she was being properly paranoid for once, it could really go either way. She had spent a significant amount of time yesterday lecturing Aster about not being paranoid enough about the enchantments on her clothes, after all. (... No, Aster, don’t trap the mind-healer in an endless loop of shopping memories...)
“Er...Sirius... You know I already know you’re a crazy person, right? You did try to kill Snivels two days ago...”
Asteria was doing her level best to ignore him, sitting in the chair beside her, but she couldn’t let that one pass. “I did not, and you know it! I was trying to get him expelled, it’s not my fault someone put a fucking hole in the wards and didn’t tell me because he’s being a fucking child—”
“You said it was okay if he died, Sirius!”
“I said that that would work — as in, it would accomplish the goal of getting rid of him! And it would have! And yes, sure, fine, I get that you don’t approve of murdering people, like, on principle, or whatever, even if that person is Snivels, but I wasn’t trying to kill him, so I really don’t think you should hold that against me! And if we’re just dragging any fucking person into this shit-show, could we find Evans and make her admit that that wasn’t my fault, either?”
“You fucked her on a sofa in the middle of the bloody common room, Sirius!”
“I was smashed and three kinds of high, and she came onto me, and so what if I did? It didn’t mean anything! She did it specifically to fuck with us because of the thing with Snivels at the end of last year!”
“That’s a load of shite, and you know it — she would never—”
“Have you ever actually met her? Fuck, mate, you’re worse than I am!”
“You turned yourself into a girl! How is that less insane than believing you knew exactly what you were doing with Lily?”
“Me being a girl now has no– very little to do with anything! Don’t change the subject!”
“I’m not changing the subject, the subject is you being a fucking madman, and excuse me if I can’t just get over my best mate turning into a girl overnight in point-two-five seconds like it’s nothing!”
Aster bit the inside of her lip to keep from grinning — he admitted I’m still his best mate! She had been thinking this was a terrible idea, bringing Jamie in to have it out with him in front of the mind healer like they were in fucking couples counseling or something, but he was actually talking to her (kind of), so maybe it wasn’t an entirely shite idea. If she had to be within twenty meters of a mind-healer, at least she’d be getting that out of it.
“Please tell me this is temporary?”
She hesitated, preoccupied with trying to decide whether that thought that at least Jamie was talking to her, and therefore maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to talk to the mind-healer as well, had been influenced by him. (If she weren’t already bloody mad, having to be here would’ve done it...) “Sure, yes, it’s temporary...theoretically.”
“Theoretically?”
“It was supposed to be temporary, it’s not wearing off like it’s supposed to — no, I don’t know why, and yes, I’m aware that this is why you don’t buy potions off dodgy blokes down Knockturn way!”
After some consideration, she’d decided it would be more reasonable to have taken a potion she’d bought, rather than trying to brew something herself. Much easier access, and she hated potion-making anyway, all fiddly and patient and having to follow the directions — bleh. No one would believe that she’d voluntarily been making a potion for herself, even if she was completely out of her mind. Plus, no one would expect her to know what it was or how it had been fucked up if she hadn’t done it herself.
Don’t you dare give it away, McKinnon! She had sworn him to secrecy, to not even mention anything that he got out of her head out loud in front of Jamie or Dorea unless she also said it aloud, and obviously he and Jamie had both promised that whatever she said wouldn’t leave this room. That didn’t mean she was comfortable with it. Especially since, despite being entirely too aware of the mind-healer’s presence just lurking and observing, she couldn’t actually pick up anything from him, not even a hint of amusement or exasperation or anything. It was fucking creepy, you hear me?!
“So why did you, then?! And why aren’t you downstairs trying to get it fixed?!”
“Because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and because I feel pretty — really what the fuck does it matter? It’ll wear off by itself eventually, or it won’t.”
James just blinked at her for a long moment. “You look exactly the same, you do know that, right?”
“I do not — I’m three inches shorter and my face is pointier now. And if I did, that’s even less reason for it to matter, Christ!”
“But you’re not a girl, Sirius!”
“If you want me to take off my fucking pants, I will.”
“No! I don’t need to see that! I’d never be able to un-see it!”
“...Mate, you do realise that if you want to get with Evans, you are eventually going to have to see a muff, up close and personal. Kind of the whole point, really...” Aster was, admittedly, pretty sure that wasn’t his problem, but she had no idea what it actually was. You could make yourself useful and give me a hint instead of just sitting there watching me struggle, you fucking creep...
“Not that you perv — you, as a girl! It’d just be... It’d make things weird!”
Oh. Fucking really? “Yeah, well, I’ve absolutely no intention to start wearing shorts to bed, so get used to the idea. If it makes you feel better, you can think of me as Sirius’s long lost twin sister Asteria.”
“You...picked a girl’s name for yourself?”
“No, it was picked for me. It’s growing on me, though.”
“Who the hell — Was it Bellatrix?”
Fuck. “Was what Bellatrix?”
“The person who picked your name. Because Mum wouldn’t have given you a Black name, not with, well, everything, and—”
“It’s not a Black name. Asteria, Titaness associated with stars, not a star name, there’s a difference.” Of course, Asteria was her second name, Bella — or possibly de Mort — had decided that she should also be called Bellatrix, because it apparently wasn’t enough that they looked practically identical and were both bloody mad, clearly they needed to have the same name, too. (She was betting de Mort, that seemed like the sort of thing he’d think was funny. What do you think? All you creepy mind mages know each other, right?)
“Are you dodging the question?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes! What the hell! You were only gone for a day! And you managed to get yourself turned into a girl for who knows how long, and you’ve been hanging around Death Eaters— Didn’t you say she cursed you for insulting Lord Snakeface last time you saw her?”
“Yeah, but that was Yule. We were both a little edgy from the ritual, she didn’t mean anything by it. Besides, it was months ago.”
“I can’t believe you’re defending her!” Jamie exclaimed, sounding an awful lot like Dorea (who wasn’t there because she was a fucking coward, hadn’t had the balls to face Aster after revealing that Jamie would be here as well, just buggered off to hide in the waiting room).
“I’m not defending her, she’s a twisted, evil bitch. But she is still my cousin, and the resident expert on being a crazy person.”
“So, what, you just waltzed into her house to ask her how she deals with being a homicidal maniac?”
“De Mort’s house, actually. He actually has a house, like he’s a real person or something, in Éire. It’s fucking weird, like just, this super normal little cottage. No whips or chains or dungeons at all.” Well, aside from whatever they had stashed away in their bedroom cupboards, she guessed.
“You really think that’s the important thing to focus on, here?”
“Jamie, mate...I don’t think you get how weird it was. I mean, you know he doesn’t actually look human, right? That’s just an illusion he wears in public. So, try to imagine this fucking lizard-man drinking coffee in his sunny little pastel-decorated kitchen. Absurd, right?” Honestly, she was still having trouble not laughing at the idea, though as Bella had pointed out in response to the cave comment snakes liked sunning themselves, didn’t they? Why wouldn’t he have a nice, sunny breakfast nook? She crafted an image of de Mort lying on his dining table in the sun like that one statue of Hermaphroditus and pushed it at the mind-healer, just to see if she could get a reaction from him. He flinched, apparently not paying close enough attention to have expected that particular form of offensive. Ha!
Jamie wasn’t nearly as amused. “Not as absurd as you just going to the bloody Dark Lord’s house in the first place!”
“Well, it’s not like I knew where we were going. See, I went to see if Zee knew anything about, well, this—” She gestured vaguely at herself. “—because, you know, if anyone knows shite about kinky sex-change potions, you’d think it would be her, and she kind of kidnapped me to talk to Bella because it was, like, two in the morning and she didn’t want to deal with me being insane in her general vicinity. And possibly waking up her husband.” Huh. She hadn’t realised earlier, but...did Zee just have blanket permissions to bring people through de Mort’s wards? That was almost as weird as de Mort having a house. “Really, if I’d known she was taking me to Bella I wouldn’t have gone, but it turns out Bella doesn’t actually hate me, and de Mort is weirdly nice when he’s not actually playing the Dark Lord for, you know, people, and they kind of helped me get my head back on straight, so. Doing much better now, not sure why I’m here.”
That wasn’t entirely true, obviously, but she’d woken up after the Dark was done with her feeling much better — at least as far as being a complete head case went (she was still awfully sore, otherwise, since whatever de Mort had done to her pain perception had faded) — and spending the day with Bella talking about everything that had happened since going back to school and, well, how to deal with being a homicidal maniac, really had helped quite a lot. Put some things in perspective.
Like if she wanted to adopt Jamie’s moral code for herself, use him as a model for the kind of person she wanted to be, that was fine — Bella thought he was a shite choice, but Aster thought de Mort was a shite choice, so she could just fuck off — but as she’d told Dorea last night, Asteria wasn’t Bella and Jamie wasn’t de Mort. She didn’t want to be completely subservient to him — which, she kind of did , but not if it meant having to put up with him being a fucking prat and doing shite like pinning the whole thing with Snivels on her without even talking to her about it first — and he wouldn’t know what to do with her if she were. (Sad, but true.) She couldn’t expect Jamie to take the lead in their relationship, make rules or even vague guidelines for her, because he didn’t know how, and she couldn’t explain it because he was a normal person and wouldn’t get it, would probably find it slightly horrifying, in fact, that she needed the basic principles of their relationship spelled out for her.
That didn’t mean that she didn’t, though. When Bella had pointed it out, like it was just the most obvious thing in the world that she’d lost it because she didn’t have any structure in her life, like rules and stuff, the first thing Aster had thought was that Bella was full of shite, because she hated structure and rules and being forced to conform to them, and she knew Bella did too. But, apparently, there were rules and then there were rules — she didn’t mean the thousand and one specific little rules of Society and proper comportment and shite Walburga would hex you for doing or not doing at tea — though she did think it was important to know those in order to break them in the most obviously intentional and provocative ways, because Bella wasn’t at all subtle about her rejection of petty convention — but more general things.
Things like, don’t talk about family rituals with outsiders, or don’t tell your friends stories involving casual use of Unforgivable curses.
Don’t involve outside authorities in resolving your problems .
If you do something stupid, the consequences are on you. (Corollary: you can’t just try to pin an attempted murder and/or negligent homicide, whatever, on your best mate because it’s convenient, Jamie.)
(And of course, don’t talk about my sexual preferences in front of anyone else who isn’t also a freak, and especially not my godmother, what the fuck, Bella!)
Bella’s theory was Asteria didn’t know how to handle not having some kind of structure to rein her in or fall back on when she didn’t know what the right thing to do was in a given circumstance.
At first she’d thought she must be exaggerating when she pointed out, all dry and sardonic, that Asteria didn’t know how to deal with people without some kind of rules to follow, but no, she was right: pretty much every relationship Asteria had ever had with anyone before Hogwarts had been scripted to some degree or another, expectations exemplified in stories and outlined in explicit social conventions and Duties to the House. She knew how siblings and parents and cousins were expected and permitted to act toward each other, and how formal interactions were supposed to go between people from different Houses and so on, but those rules didn’t apply anymore to vast swaths of her life. (In fact, since she’d broken with the House, they barely applied to any part of her life, which Bella said was probably part of the reason she’d overreacted so badly with Jamie, and Asteria couldn’t really argue the point.)
While it was fine to have casual friendships that didn’t have rules beyond no narcing and follow the Pranking Code, more serious, actually important relationships, the kind she was actually invested in (like being in love with someone) needed more structure than that, or she would inevitably find herself getting carried away and doing things that no sane person would do or appreciate. Normal people supposedly didn’t think it was necessary to have explicit rules for how to act in relationships because they were more or less on the same page about what was excessive or overbearing or generally acceptable or not, by virtue of not being completely fucking mad...and also having normal people around to serve as examples of this shite when they were kids (as opposed to being raised in the House of Black).
So, since Jamie wasn’t going to tell her what to do, obviously she’d have to figure it out for herself. Which was fine, making rules for yourself was part of being an adult (or so Bella claimed). She could do that. (With Bella’s help, obviously, because Asteria wasn’t an adult, she didn’t have the slightest idea what she was doing here.)
First and foremost, she couldn’t keep going around making grand apologetic gestures, no matter how sorry she was. It was a little more complicated than she’d told Dorea, obviously. According to Bella (who had refused to hear any arguments on the point), her attempts to make Jamie see that she was the sorriest arse who’d ever lived were out of proportion with her offence, and Jamie didn’t understand what she was doing or why, because doing shite like trying to get Snivels expelled or turning herself into a girl only made sense to crazy people. (For any reason at all, but also especially to demonstrate her loyalty to James — apparently the connection there between reason and action wasn't nearly as obvious as she thought it was.) Bella had also gotten her to admit that Jamie’s reaction to her screwing Evans (or more accurately, getting screwed by Evans) was also completely disproportionate, and in that light Jamie was actually in the wrong. She really couldn’t let him treat her like that, all while acting like he was the wronged party. Which didn’t actually mean she had to refuse to talk to him or whatever other petty, passive-aggressive shite he came up with, but did mean that it was entirely inappropriate for her to basically be grovelling at his feet.
She could treat this whole thing like he was the one being a pathetic child and blowing things out of proportion, because while she had done exactly the same thing much more dramatically, he had started it. And if she asked Bella — which she hadn’t, but Bella had never actually waited for anyone to ask for advice — she should, because Jamie obviously didn’t want an unequal relationship, or at least not that unequal. If he did, he’d be more angry that she hadn’t asked for permission to get Snape expelled than horrified that she’d done something so extreme for him. Not that it really was that extreme, on a scale of such things, but, normal people.
Really, looking at it from a certain angle, not letting him walk all over her or trying to meet his every desire was the best thing she could do to accommodate his need for this to continue to seem like the friendship he’d always thought they had, at least on the surface. She couldn’t let the fact that she was in love with him adversely affect his life, which meant, generally speaking, not acting like she was in love at all. (And not trying to get rid of his enemies unless he specifically asked her to.)
Which, she could do that. She didn’t need him to know that she loved him and would do anything he asked of her. She could just do it, be everything he wanted, and eventually he’d realise that she was perfect for him (and Evans was a heinous, manipulative bitch) and he’d come around without ever needing to know, problem solved.
Yes, she was aware that normal people, the mind-healer (who was still eavesdropping, but you’re slipping, I can feel you being uncomfortable over there ) included, would say that was an incredibly unhealthy relationship dynamic. Bella had said it was, which probably meant normal people would actually try to have her committed if she told them — which you can’t, you swore an oath, she reminded the healer, just in case he was thinking about it.
Bella had sworn fucking fealty to de Mort, literally promised to love all that he loved and shun all that he shunned, to never do anything unpleasing to him, and to follow him unto death and beyond — and if Aster knew Bella, she’d meant every fucking word, so one would think she had no room to judge. But even if Bella didn’t think it was a terrible idea for Aster to give herself over entirely to following someone else, generally speaking, she also didn’t think Jamie was right for Aster, and the idea of simply acting like someone’s sworn vassal without any reciprocation or even acknowledgment — that she disapproved of. (De Mort, apparently, had sworn to trust Bella’s counsel above all others, to keep no secrets from her, and to publicly acknowledge her as his. Aster really, really didn’t want to admit that their understanding was another one of those things she envied about Bella’s life.)
Aster didn’t care. Bella’s opinion on the matter was almost as unimportant as her own. Jamie needed her to not act like a mad, lovestruck idiot, so she wouldn’t. If he, like the Blacks, wanted some degree of resistance, the semblance of her not ultimately wanting nothing more or less than exactly what he wanted, she would give it to him, pretend they were equals, best mates and nothing more.
Really, she’d been doing that for years.
She’d probably also loved him for years, she just hadn’t realised it until he’d pushed her away like a fucking prick. And then she’d panicked and overreacted — which, yes, that was a thing she’d been known to do, shut up, Bella — because she wasn’t used to feeling things, not like that, all raw and close to the surface. But being more aware of her feelings and motivations didn’t necessarily need to change anything. After all, those feelings and motivations had always been there, affecting things, she just hadn’t consciously noticed them. And, well...it was only going to be weird if she made it weird. Which, she’d decided she wouldn’t, so.
Basically the rules were: act normal; don’t apologise unless it’s definitely warranted (and then only once, not all the time forever until forgiveness is granted); and if uncertain whether something would be appreciated (like getting rid of Snivels), ask first, dumbass. In fact, even if she was certain something would be appreciated, if it required more than a few hours of planning and effort she should probably write Dorea and ask if it was reasonable, because it probably wasn’t.
(See, you creepy, lurking bastard, I’ve got it sorted, I don’t need to be here! Especially if you’re not even going to say anything!)
Dorea had gotten so side-tracked about the idea of Aster talking to Bella on a regular basis that she’d never gotten around to mentioning that Bella had actually encouraged her to talk to Dorea more as well, because Dorea could give her perspective in a way Bella really couldn’t. Zee had also been suggested as someone who could potentially tell her whether normal people would approve of her following through on whatever she was thinking was the best idea ever, but Zee wasn’t really a normal person herself. (If she were, she would never have wanted to befriend Bella, let alone have been able to.) If she were to ask Zee for advice, she’d probably tell Aster exactly why normal people would be horrified by whatever she was planning to do, and then help her carry it out, much as she had with the whole becoming a girl thing.
Obviously it would be preferable if she had her own Zee-like friend who could explain normal people being completely inexplicable and stop her from doing anything too insane. Unfortunately, the only halfway normal, truly cold-blooded, manipulative bitch she knew was Evans, and they were kind of mortal enemies at the moment. Cissy might be an option, but she hated Aster more than Aster hated Evans. (Which, yes, was saying quite a lot.)
Jamie was obviously the best option, but he was considerably less Zee-like than Evans, and couldn’t possibly be expected to figure her out for himself. She suspected that Bella had mentioned to Dorea (somewhere in the midst of informing her that Aster was a dangerous madwoman who should be treated with a degree of caution, or whatever) that it might be a good idea to fill him in on the situation, and given that Dorea was hardly comfortable with Aster at the moment herself, it wasn’t exactly surprising that she would’ve delegated that task to the professional in the room. She just...didn’t think she needed to be there to talk in front of Jamie about her being crazy specifically. Couldn’t he just, she didn’t know, explain that generally speaking, mad people do mad shite, and maybe Jamie should keep an eye out for that and say something to her if he caught her about to do something she really, really shouldn’t?
“Do you even hear yourself when you talk, Sirius?” Jamie demanded. “Because you just said Bellatrix and de Mort helped you get your head back on straight. If they’re your measure for sanity, I’d be shocked if you don’t murder us all in our sleep.”
Okay, that hurt. She glared at him. “Well, I guess that’s why I’m here, then. Because Dorea’s just as worried that I’ll murder you as you are. And because I don’t mind being a girl — apparently that’s grounds for insanity right there.”
“Let’s talk a bit more about that, Asteria,” McKinnon said calmly. He and Bella were the only people who’d really called her that so far, it still kind of struck her as weird. De Mort probably would have as well, but he’d still been sleeping when she and Bella had left his weirdly normal little cottage, so. None of the Potters had, which was fine, they were used to thinking of her as Sirius. It was much more irritating that they kept acting like her being a girl was a terrible mistake that needed to be reversed immediately.
“What is there to talk about?” Can’t you just tell them I really don’t care about being a girl and have done with it?
“How long have you considered yourself to be a girl?” McKinnon suggested, completely ignoring her silent question.
“Shite, what time is it? Thirty-six hours, maybe? Or, I guess I woke up and realised I was still a girl about this time yesterday, so.”
A smile twitched at McKinnon’s lips, more noticeable in his moustache than his mouth, really.
The mind-healer didn’t really look like a creep, somehow managing to avoid that too-understanding, too-helpful vibe ward attendants and family healers often had (which always made her instantly suspicious of their motives), without straying into the brusque dismissiveness that was the emergency cursebreaker end of the spectrum. Of course, it was suspicious in its own way that he would so perfectly manage to hit the competent, confident, and personable, but also firm and not obviously deliberately attempting to establish some degree of rapport mark, but that was probably just Aster being paranoid. She really couldn’t hold him having a decent bedside manner against him, no matter how fucking weird it might be. (She might be particularly prejudiced against mind-healers, but she tended not to like healers in general. Madam Pomfrey in particular had a way of getting under her skin, all nice and soft and mumsy and overly concerned about how many scars Sirius had had before coming to school.)
McKinnon was, she thought, about the same age as Dumbledore, but more the actively supervising mastery healing students, come in and talk during my office hours that’s what they’re there for type than the wise old professor up in his tower doing whatever the hell Dumbledore did all day, which was honestly what she’d expected when she was told he was the Chief Mind-Healer and a contemporary of Dorea’s father. He was clean-shaven, aside from his very muggle-looking moustache, which was, like his hair, trimmed neatly and short — typical for a healer, as were the short sleeved tunic-and-trousers style robes he was wearing. A beard like Dumbledore’s would just get in the way if he was dealing with an emergency. Not that she thought mind-healers really did a lot of emergency healing, but it was still the style for practically everyone at the Hospital.
McKinnon was going a bit grey around the edges, and the lines around his eyes suggested he spent a lot of time frowning empathically rather than giving people patronising, 'grandfatherly' smiles or scowling at them like Aster’s Head of House, who was the closest thing she’d ever had to an actual grandfather (both Castor and Pollux had died before she was born). According to Dorea, McKinnon had known her father, who was born at the turn of the century and had died back in Grindelwald’s war, but looking at him she’d put his age closer to ninety than seventy. Uncle Draco had been a Black Cloak, which meant he was a mind mage as well, which meant McKinnon could easily have been one of his teachers or mentors back in the twenties, though it wouldn’t be entirely odd if they’d simply met through social contacts either.
De Mort, on the other hand, didn’t exactly move in the same circles as the McKinnons. (He wasn’t nearly respectable enough to rub shoulders with light nobility, even with Bella at his side.) She was fairly certain that de Mort wasn’t actually French (or even a Breton), so it wasn’t so weird that he’d have run into one of the most highly-respected mind mages in Britain at some point, but Bella had kind of suggested they actually knew each other, and she didn’t imagine de Mort spent much time around hospitals, either. It would make much more sense if McKinnon had also been one of de Mort’s teachers at some point, which... Surely the bloody Dark Lord hadn’t once been planning on becoming a healer? That’d just be fucking weird.
Or, wait... Had someone actually made de Mort talk to a mind healer when he was a kid? If they had, she pitied the poor bastard who’d had to get in his head...especially since she was pretty sure he was a better legilimens than McKinnon. She never noticed de Mort reading her mind, but she could feel McKinnon in her head like an itch she wasn’t allowed to scratch — don’t flip and push him out Aster, deep breaths — even though he didn’t respond to things she thought at him like de Mort did. Maybe he was just being obvious because it was more polite? If that’s the case, I’d prefer you weren’t... (No response, of course.)
Whatever. She was still pretty sure mind healers tended to be normal people who didn’t want to see memories of de Mort torturing people or whatever even if it was their job. The fact that McKinnon pulled back a little to avoid getting too close to the memory of de Mort cutting on Bella when she and Zee had arrived at his place, the first memory that occurred when thinking about Snakeface being a sadistic bastard, only reinforced that impression. (Which didn’t mean she should keep thinking about similarly sick shite so he’d get the fuck out. No matter how tempting it was.)
“So, there was no long-held desire to become female underlying this decision?” McKinnon said, ignoring her continued low-key freak-out over having to let him legilimise her.
Right. Focus on something else. She could do that.
Honestly, she wasn’t sure what the big deal was. She (as Sirius) and Narcissa had been raised practically identically, albeit with slightly different roles they were expected to play in certain social situations like dancing and shite. She knew there were more differences in other Houses, even among the Dark, with families like the Yaxleys and Greengrasses sort of letting their children specialise in dealing with domestic management-type issues or external relationships — business and politics — or academics or battlemagic or whatever, instead of expecting everyone to learn everything. But as far as she knew, it wasn’t as though all girls have to focus on Wizengamot politics and academics and all boys have to focus on battlemagic and strategy and maintaining relationships with client Houses. Those just happened to be the areas that Opal and Onyx Yaxley (respectively) had the most talent for.
Light Houses pretty obviously had a thing about girls being pretty and delicate and boys being tougher and more violent, more of a chivalrous knights and virtuous ladies aesthetic, but obviously that wasn’t some sort of inherent difference between the sexes. Narcissa was just as ruthless a fighter as Sirius — and arguably a better duelist, though Aster was sure they’d be more evenly matched now she wasn’t fighting her own magic to cast any half-decent dueling spells — and Sirius had been just as pretty as she was, and could, if necessary, act as well-mannered. For that matter, Narcissa could be just as crass and savage as anyone privately, she’d just taken their lessons on how to present yourselves in public a little too much to heart, and was in a position to lose the Family's approval if she didn't.
Being a girl didn’t really feel that different from being a boy. There was a little more sway in her walk, and she found herself sitting a little differently, but other than that?
She was generally happier than she’d been for a while, but she was pretty sure that was because she’d been forcibly ejected from her funk and had had three actual meals in two days now. (She always forgot how dull and flat life became when she didn’t eat for too long, regardless of whether she was otherwise down.) The challenge of having to deal with everyone freaking out over her being a girl and/or insane probably also helped. Gave her something to focus on other than lying around moping like a little bitch.
“Nope, did it on a lark.”
“So why aren’t you trying to get it fixed?” Jamie asked, as though she obviously should want to.
“...Because it’s not really important?”
“Yes, it is!”
“Why? You said it yourself, I look exactly the same, and it’s not like my personality changed — you and Pete and Walters have been calling me a girl since we were eleven.” It really wasn’t her fault they didn’t understand the importance of appearances and presentation, or that a certain degree of (overly) dramatic flamboyance was accepted and even expected from pretty much the entire House of Black. Reggie was just as bad, really, slinking around playing himself up as cool and edgy and untouchably snobbish as opposed to, you know, cool and edgy and actually enjoying life — she was pretty sure he’d worn a fucking cravat on the train back to school this year. Her spending a few hours figuring out how to make her hair look like Jimmy Page’s was nowhere near that ridiculous.
“Yes, but not actually a girl, you git!”
“Well, I don’t care. If it wears off, fine; if it doesn’t, also fine. I’ve been informed I have more important problems to worry about than whether or not all my robes and trousers are too long. Though, for the record, I’m not mad at the moment.”
Another smile twitched at the moustache. “I believe the concern is more that you won’t remain in your current mental state, than that you may still be...less balanced than you believe yourself to be.”
“Dorea definitely still thinks I’m mad, but it’s fine, I talked to Bella, I’ve got it under control.” If the mind-healer had been paying attention, you should know that.
“Oh, yeah, because Bellatrix is definitely the last word on sanity!”
“You do realise why it might be less than reassuring to claim that your cousin has been advising you on this particular issue?”
Not really, no, she thought defiantly, only half lying. Bella really did know what she was talking about. Yes, she was insane, did mad shite all the time, but she chose to do mad shite. The insane part was that she was a fucking psycho and didn’t care about the people who would inevitably be hurt when she did things like starting a fucking war. As far as Aster could tell, she had the Madness pretty much under control.
“Humour me, here, let’s discuss what happened over the course of the last month.”
Aster felt her eyes narrow. You really think Jamie wants to know me losing it was his fault? No. That ran directly counter to the whole idea of acting normal and not making her being in love with him a big deal. “I’m not talking about be being a fucking crazy person with Jamie here.”
“But, Pads—”
“No. All you need to know is if I’m literally begging you to listen to me, I actually need you to listen. That is literally the only difference between me trying to get rid of Snape and dozens of other pranks I’ve suggested in the past five years — you telling me no, that’s a terrible idea, we’re not doing that, tone it down by like half.” Honestly, it wasn’t like she’d suddenly gone insane, she’d never had a very good grasp of how far was too far.
“That is not the only difference,” Jamie said, sounding awfully defensive to believe what he was saying. “Even if you didn’t really want him dead, getting someone expelled is way more over the line than anything else you’ve ever wanted to try!”
Well, yes, because it was kind of a game-ending move, and much as she didn’t like Snape or Evans, she would at least admit that they made life at Hogwarts way more interesting than it otherwise would be. If she was honest, she really didn’t want Snape expelled, even. The only person she’d have to pick fights with when she was bored would be Cissy, and that was a terrible idea, because their feud had long since passed the point that anyone outside the House would think was reasonable. Severe and lingering bodily harm was definitely on the table, and Cissy was a devious, cutthroat bitch, so, yeah, bad idea.
Doing anything that could end the game with Snape and Evans was a major escalation, and not something that Aster would have done if Evans hadn’t deliberately tried to destroy her relationship with Jamie. That was below the fucking belt. Literally — crawling into Sirius’s lap and telling him James didn’t own either of them (which was a dirty fucking lie) and smiling like let’s set your life on fire and watch it burn, and biting him— “Evans started it.”
“You started it when you decided it was okay to fuck her!”
Aster groaned, letting herself slouch further into her chair, because they were back to this, again.
This whole talking thing was going to be tedious and terrible, she could already tell.