I'm not *ill*
It was after dinner by the time they Floo’d back to Hogwarts, and even later by the time Dumbledore finished lecturing Asteria about not being a crazy person in his school, if you please, there will be consequences if you fuck up again, blah, blah, blah. He didn’t say anything about her suddenly becoming a girl. Aster wasn’t sure whether he hadn’t noticed — he’d been sitting down when she walked in, that could make it hard to judge other people’s height, and he was about a foot taller than her anyway so he might not see much difference — or whether he didn’t care. It really could go either way.
By the time she got back up to the dorm, everyone was getting ready for bed. Fucking fine with her, she’d had more than enough awkward, tedious, circular conversations for the day. She figured James had filled them all in on some version of what had happened and why she hadn’t been around for the past couple days, because everyone was looking at her with various degrees of fear and scorn — except for Remus, who just looked completely betrayed because she and James had almost accidentally turned him into a murder weapon, or if James had stuck to his story because she had actually tried to make him kill Snape — and no one really tried to talk to her, or said much of anything at all.
Well, until she stripped for bed, throwing her robes and shorts over her desk chair as she had literally every night for the last five years. Then they started muttering to each other. She ignored them for a few seconds, fiddling with her alarm charm, until Pete said, “Er...Sirius, mate...is there...something you’d like to tell us about?”
Whereupon she turned to see that everyone else was staring at her. Well, except James, who was flushed and refusing to look at her. She looked down at herself, then back up at them, and after a long beat of silence said, “Potions accident,” in a firm tone which did not invite further questions.
She yanked her curtains open and flopped onto her bed before one of them could work up the nerve to make her have the gods and Powers, what the fuck is the big deal, why is me being a girl a problem conversation again. (McKinnon and Jamie hadn’t managed to give her a reasonable explanation of that point at any time in the two and a half hours they’d talked in circles around it.) Before she managed to yank them closed, though, Pete managed to ask, “Are you serious?”
And then she couldn’t resist a very acerbic, “No, I’m Asteria, now,” which kind of cursed the plan of avoiding talking to them in the foot.
“Is this— James said you had some kind of breakdown, but— You turned yourself into a girl?” Teague said, sounding completely baffled.
“What does that have to do with trying to kill Snape?” Remus asked.
Called it. Though if they were talking about it in front of the other boys, Jamie and Pete must have told them something other than that Snivels had almost been eaten by Moony. “Pretty much nothing.”
“You’re not...” Pete began, but trailed off to just stare in mute shock.
“You’re not going to be a girl, like, forever, are you?” Gudgeon asked, picking up where he left off.
“...Maybe.”
“But...”
“But what, Walters? Have none of you ever seen a naked girl before? Well, ta fucking da, not really a big deal.”
“We’ve seen girls before, Siri,” Pete said. “Well, everyone but Jamie and Remus, but—”
“Hey!” James snapped, as though he’d ever seen a girl outside of the quidditch locker room, which so didn’t count — Rolanda had left school after their second year, and Felicia and Meredith had never given Jamie so much as the time of day.
“—we’re...worried about you. What the fuck were you thinking, you mad cunt?”
“ Language, Pettigrew! There’s a lady present!” Leach sniggered. Well, at least one of his dorm mates didn’t have his head so far up his arse he couldn’t at least make a joke.
Even if it wasn’t a very good one. “Yeah, keep that up, Aggie over there might faint.”
Leach flipped her off. Good on him. One for seven treating this with all the fanfare it deserved. “When is Black not doing something mad? You lot can sit around talking it over like a bunch of girls yourselves, but we do have McGee’s exam in the morning, so I’m for bed. Keep it down, yeah?”
“Can’t you just...change back?” Teague asked.
“If he could, do you think he’d still be a girl?” Gudgeon.
“Well, it is Black, he’s always been a bit of a girl...” Walters. “Get sick of being buggered, or what?” Arse.
“Seriously, why aren’t you at Saint Mungo’s or something?” Pete.
“Well, you see, I’m not ill, I’m female — there’s a difference.”
“You’re awfully quiet over there, Potter. Nothing to say about your boyfriend suddenly turning into a girl?”
“Oh, fuck off, Walters,” James said, but Aster wasn’t even looking at him and he sounded embarrassed.
“Yeah, you know how Jamie is about cocks, I’m way more fanciable, now.” She even sat up so she could toss her hair over one shoulder and give Walters a flirtatious smoulder. Walters actually went red. Tee hee.
“Fuck off, Black!”
“You do realise you’re naked, right?”
She had, in fact. She’d never made it all the way under the covers, and was actually slightly cold. “What does that have to do with anything Teague?”
“Well, you’re just, you know, sitting there, well, in the open, and—”
“What Ashley means, Black, is have some modesty.”
Aster rolled her eyes at Gudgeon. “When have I ever had modesty?”
“Well, yeah, but you can’t just sit there being all naked and...flirty. It’s bloody weird.”
“I sit around naked making passes at Walters literally all the time, Davey.” Mostly because it made him even more uncomfortable than Jamie, the idea of fucking a boy.
“Can we focus on the trying to kill Snape, thing?” Remus interrupted, pouring ice water all over Aster’s improving mood. (Making her roommates vaguely uncomfortable might’ve been childish, but it was always funny.)
“That depends,” she said slowly, rather at a loss because she didn’t know what story they’d given the others. “What am I supposed to have done, exactly?”
“How do you forget luring someone into an acromantula colony? Did that potion take your brain as well as your cock?”
Ah, thank you, Walters. “Even if it had, I’d still be cleverer than you. It’s not my fault Snivels decided to follow me out into the Forest.”
“I thought you said he set him up to meet you out there, Pete,” Gudgeon interrupted.
“We did, we were supposed to just get him out of bounds and then tell McGee or someone, but Sirius actually showed up and led him off way further away and ditched him — he was about to be eaten when James caught up with him,” Pete said, covering her little lapse.
“Just being out of bounds wouldn’t have been enough to get him expelled,” Aster said, trying very hard to sound at least a little repentant. “I wanted it to look like he was trying to get acromantula venom for a potion or something. I planted a vial on him, so when he got back, we could accuse him of fucking about with restricted shite as well as being out of bounds.” There weren’t any legal potions that used that particular ingredient, she didn’t think. “I didn’t think he’d get so turned around he’d actually wander into the Colony!”
I wanted him to get caught trying to get into a restricted area, Moony, I didn’t think he actually would. Remus got it, she thought. He at least looked slightly conflicted, now, instead of completely betrayed.
“I wasn’t actually trying to put him in real danger—” she added, just in case he hadn’t.
“Pete said you said you didn’t care if he died!” Remus snapped, apparently not quite ready to forgive her.
“Yeah, well, I don’t. Would you, if we weren’t implicated? I mean, really. So tragic, Snivellus going out of his way to put himself in a dangerous situation for a shite reason — whether because he thought he was going to get me in trouble, or because he really was trying to get acromantula venom — it’d be his own fucking fault if he did die, and no, I wouldn’t be crying at his funeral.”
Remy’s glare only grew sharper. “They would have exterminated the Colony, Sirius!”
“Why would anyone care?” Gudgeon asked, giving Remus a look that said he was being a fucking weirdo, giving a shite about giant, man-eating spiders.
“They are sapient beings, Dave. At least, if the standards are applied evenly, regardless of whether they present a danger to humans. I mean, humans kill each other all the time.” Now he was giving her a weird look, but Aster didn’t really care. That statement applied just as much to werewolves as it did to acromantulae. “And I...didn’t really consider that,” she admitted.
That she didn’t have to try to sound like she felt bad about. She really had been thinking that since Moony was exactly where he was supposed to be everyone would see it was obviously all Snivels’s fault. She’d realised since...some point talking to Bella, telling her about what, exactly, had happened, that yeah, the law would have held Remus responsible, despite the fact that he really, really wasn’t, not under any reasonable interpretation of events, because they were written by prejudiced light bastards who thought any excuse to execute a werewolf was a good excuse. But she hadn’t thought of that at the time, because it was just so stupid. And she wished she could tell Remus she was sorry, but she couldn’t, not now, with Gudgeon and Teague and Walters still listening in.
Gudgeon eventually decided to fill the silence that fell over them by saying, “They eat people Black.”
“What?”
“Acromantulae. They’re creatures because they eat people. They don’t just defend their territory or whatever...”
A grin tugged at her lips as she tried to resist saying the first thing that came to mind, but then decided it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like James didn’t already know she’d been hanging out with Bella all weekend anyway. Making a few dark jokes wouldn’t make him think worse of her than that.
“What, your family doesn’t have long pork at Yule?” Gudgeon and Teague exchanged a look as though they couldn’t tell if that had been a joke, even as James snapped his curtains closed around himself, and Remus shook his head with an expression of disgust. “Oh, come off it, you prats, if I were a cannibal, I wouldn’t tell you!” Apparently that didn’t really clarify the situation. (As it shouldn’t — she’d never told them about the Blacks’ actual Yule ritual, after all...) She giggled at their confusion and discomfort.
“Unless you knew we wouldn’t believe you,” Pete pointed out.
“I’ve been trying to come up with a line about Black having a fondness for long pork sausage, or something, but I’m too tired, and it’s just not as funny for some reason when you’re a girl,” Walters admitted, throwing himself onto his own bed.
“Because you’d like to give me a taste of your sausage, perhaps?”
“Piss. Off.”
She smirked as he closed his curtains as well. That was definitely a yes.
“If you don’t stop making passes at him and Jamie, they’re going to be all conflicted when you change back,” Remus said, apparently willing to let her off the hook for almost getting him executed as a dangerous creature, at least for the moment. He’d probably want to have it out again later, in private, somewhere he could rail at her without people overhearing about Moony.
But that was later. “Maybe I won’t,” she suggested. Might as well start getting them used to the idea, since she really wasn’t planning on it. Having her body forced into a new shape from her fundamental identity up had really fucking hurt. And she had been arguing with everyone for the past two days now about whether she was really fine with staying this way. Fuckers thought they could tell her how she felt because it was how they would feel? Well, they could suck the dick she no longer had. She was female, and she was staying that way. “I’m gonna turn in, being a girl is exhausting.”
“Sure it’s not being a fucking madman that’s exhausting?” Remus asked, but she was pretty sure he was being rhetorical, she could be nice and let him have the last word.
Except, well...then she wouldn’t be able to call out, “Night, boys,” in a purposefully high, extra girly tone and snigger to herself as they grumbled uncomfortably back at her.
They’d get over it.