The Lady of (New) Avalon

I was skeptical of this project to write a chronicle of the founding of New Avalon when Aster first suggested it, but I have to admit, the idea is growing on me. Mostly because it's kind of adorable, looking back at her perspective on everything that was going on back then. If I were writing this thing, I would've started with Thom and Candidus  the night they first considered, in a flight of drunken, teenage fancy, that they could do that whole revolution thing better than Grindelwald and Dumbledore (if only because Candidus wouldn't get cold feet, and if he did, and they got into an epic duel over it with the fate of Europe hanging in the balance, Thom wouldn't hesitate to kill him because love). Aster is clearly just using the founding of New Avalon as an excuse to write a memoir.

Not that I disapprove — as I mentioned, it's kind of adorable, and looking at these old memories in a pensieve and narrating them ("for posterity, Evans") is fun. Though I do feel I ought to set the record straight on a couple of points, and if this truly is a chronicle of the founding of our little city-state, and "definitely, one-thousand per cent not a bloody memoir, Evans!" so far as I'm concerned Aster has no right to complain if I do. (And maybe also let "posterity" appreciate a different perspective on sixteen-year-old Aster, who is still as adorable as ever but certainly not the most reliable of narrators, and also conveniently out of her office today.)

First off, gods are not petty arseholes, generally speaking. They're not human, it's entirely unreasonable to expect them to behave like humans. Aster knows this, she's just an enormous brat. The Dark, yes, can be incredibly petty, but I happen to think that this whole plan to get Thom to found a utopia for Her, and thence to serve as a somewhat misleading example of how things could be in a Dark world, was rather mature and well-plotted. (There have been no few attempts to replicate the success of New Avalon over the past several decades — every one of them failing spectacularly, causing massive regional political destabilisation if not outright civil wars throughout the former ICW states, much to Her delight.) Throwing Aster and myself at him and Bella when they started drifting off-track was a bit of long-odds improvisation, but when Fate and Luck conspire...

(When Death and Mystery demand it of them, even Fate and Luck will fall in line.)

Secondly, this was not entirely my fault. I wasn't the one who completely flipped on his "best mate" for fucking a girl who couldn't stand him, as though Potter was somehow entitled to my "entirely non-existent" affections. (I do still get a kick out of that description.) I also wasn't the one who thought it would be a great idea to leave the obviously unstable Sirius Black alone with his thoughts in the wake of his failure to get Sev expelled (Dorea), or the one who so turned him against the Blacks in the years leading up to that moment (Walburga), or who cursed him in the first place (Orion).

(Yes, Aster, if you're still wondering, Orion would have killed you if no one had intervened. But your story had barely begun then, so someone always does. And Orion always curses you, and the Dark always saves you, specifically so that you can undermine the Covenant — because what's the point of having an entire House dedicated to entertaining you if they all get boring?)

I wasn't the one who accidentally impressed an echo of her own self-image on you in the process of rescuing you — that wasn't just Arcturus trying to blame Bella for everything, and you know it — or taught Bella offensive mind arts in the first place despite her having negative aptitude for the subject — the one who shaped the course of Bella's entire life, for that matter, and therefore that of the entire House of Black — or the one who, when his entire world began to crumble around him, decided to acknowledge the Dark again despite renouncing it only months before.

And why are you acting like responsibility for this entire sequence of events — the one leading up to the founding of our city, remember — is a bad thing, anyway? Really, it's not about assigning blame, but sharing credit. Honestly, if Thom finds out you're trying to pin it on me, I'm sure he'll swoop in and claim all of it.

"Evans, don't take this the wrong way, but I might love you!" Black exclaimed, a sly grin erupting on her face as she clearly decided that faking a personality shift in order to trick her best mate into falling for her was the best idea ever.

That was the sort of shite terrible romantic comedies were made of.

Lily considered pointing that out, briefly, but then realised that Black had probably never heard of a romantic comedy. "What? You're not— No, that's insane, Black!"

"Is it? Is it really? I mean, you do it."

Is she... She was pretty sure she was — completely serious. There wasn't even the slightest hint that she thought it was the least bit unreasonable to build a persona especially for James fucking Potter (she would never understand Black's fascination with the toe-rag). But then, she had thought it was a good idea to turn herself into a girl, permanently, for James fucking Potter. Really, doing something like that just because she was curious Lily might understand, but for Potter? The mind boggled. And faking an entirely different personality was way more difficult than suffering through a ritual that couldn't have taken more than a single day — if it had, the timeline wouldn't work out. It required certain qualities Black simply didn't have, like patience and dedication. It was a marathon, not a sprint.

And even Lily wouldn't make up an entire persona just for one person. What the hell would she do when she came into contact with that person and anyone else at the same time? It was one thing to have one persona she only used with Sev — and when she was going by Asphodel, lurking slightly beyond the edge of polite society down in Knockturn Alley — and one for everyone else, because Sev was entirely aware of what she was doing. He was the one who'd realised it was necessary for her to consciously make an effort to act normal, or at least charmingly eccentric, back when they were about nine. (She'd been slightly offended when he'd suggested it, mostly because she knew he was right as soon as he pointed it out.) Obviously he knew the Lily Evans everyone else knew was fake.

But the whole point of this was that Black didn't want Potter to realise that she was having him on. Realistically, she'd have to wear that mask all the time, with everyone, and that was just...exhausting. Even Lily couldn't keep up an act all the time for more than a few months. She'd started hating the necessity of having to try before Samhain of her first year.

And, okay, granted, Black obviously wouldn't have to fake it with her, so she might do a bit better than Lily had — it was really having to play the part literally every waking hour that had made it so unbearable. (She'd resented having to have roommates since they were first shown their dorm. Trying to sleep in a room with six other people...yay.) But that didn't mean it wouldn't drive her mad anyway. She had already obviously been trying to be "good" and live up to Potter's expectations (and those of the Light in general) even when she was Sirius, and in Lily's expert opinion she'd been doing a shite job of it. And that was without trying to add responsible and respectable into the mix.

"Yeah, but I'm me. Do you even know how to pretend to be ‘good' and responsible?"

Black flattened her expression into a faintly disapproving mask of boredom, sitting up straight, hands folded loosely in her lap, and crossing her ankles, tucking her feet off to one side. "You seem to be under the impression, Miss Evans, that I didn't spend the better part of my childhood sitting through etiquette lessons with Cousin Narcissa. I'm perfectly aware of the expectations society holds for a lady of my station — with the proper motivation, I'm even capable of meeting them."

No, she was aware of that. Granted, they tended not to make it quite so obvious most of the time, but it was always there — the way they stood at attention, poised and balanced, even when they didn't think anyone was watching them. A certain air of wariness, almost hidden under their entitled condescension. The way they tended to hesitate before speaking, but never, ever said er or um unless they were being deliberately skeptical. And the way they spoke to each other was practically identical, all barbed quips and obscure quotes (often in foreign languages) implying that the other was an uncultured barbarian or a sex-starved harpy.

It was just... "Potter doesn't like Cousin Narcissa either, though."

"He probably would, if she weren't a Slytherin. Or, you know, if she weren't a Slytherin and had a sense of humour," Black said, relaxing her almost sarcastically correct posture and tone.

"I don't think so. She's too...sharp. Polished. Being a little common and rough around the edges and seemingly unaware of the expectations I'm exceeding is part of the appeal of the façade. The girl you can feel like a rebel for courting, but with the academic and extracurricular qualifications to make her acceptable to your parents despite her lack of pedigree, you know?"

Even Aster was too polished to really pull that off — she might be more willing to act "common" than Narcissa, but it was always obvious she was doing so deliberately. Even more so than when they were deliberately following the rules. (Lily got the impression both Narcissa and Aster found the prevailing attitudes among the other nobles to be kind of affected.)

She knew it, too, making a slightly pained face at her, even as she said, "I think I can make it work."

"I think you're underestimating what a pain in the arse it is to pretend to be someone you're not all the fucking time."

"I think you're underestimating the degree to which I moderate my behaviour all the time anyway."

She probably wasn't. Granted, Lily wasn't really sure, but some of the stories Remus had told her over the years — especially in first and second, when he'd been better friends with her than he had been with Potter and Pettigrew (if you asked her, Remus still wasn't that comfortable with Black) — kind of implied that Black was only vaguely aware of what was acceptable outside of her own House. Well, either that or she was talking out of her arse all the time, but somehow Lily didn't think that little firstie Black would've casually mentioned practising Unforgivable curses on house elves to be edgy. Making jokes about human sacrifice and cannibalism now, sure. Remus had been spending more time with Lily again lately complaining about his roommates — she couldn't imagine why — so she'd been hearing more about Black than she generally would. (She hadn't really thought Black was trying to murder Sev — if she had been, she would've set Walters up to take the fall or something, not Remus. Not that Sev or Remus had actually told her what happened, but it wasn't all that difficult to put it together, reading between the lines.) But Black had pretty clearly been trying to distance herself from the Blacks' reputation, even then.

Casually mentioning that she, Narcissa, and Regulus had considered watching Death Eater recruit training sessions to be some form of entertainment — as though this wasn't deeply disturbing — spoke to a deep, deep gulf between the Blacks' sense of normal and everyone else's.

Still, she didn't think Black would appreciate her pointing that out. "Honestly, I don't know what you even see in him."

Black hesitated, obviously torn between the urge to defend her pathetic obsession with Potter, and not wanting to tell Lily something personal. The former won out after a few moments, as Lily had suspected it would. "He's the only person who's ever told me it didn't matter who my family was, or how mad they all are, that he would judge me for me, and meant it. And he believes I can be a better person than I was raised, and just— I need him, okay? I love him, and—" Oh, love, was it? Give me a break... "Stop looking at me like that!"

Lily had to bite her lip to keep herself from laughing — it was just such a stupid reason to be so absurdly devoted to someone. Not being in love (though she was pretty sure Black wasn't), but Potter's oh so noble resolve to give Black a chance to prove she wasn't as dark and mad and horrible as her family's reputation (even if she totally was). Seriously, not being stupidly prejudiced about someone's family and how they were raised was such a low bar...

"I have to warn you, Black, you may be in the lead for the Pity Cup right now." Black flipped her off. "Dependence and gratitude aren't the same thing as love, you know."

"And you would?" Black scoffed. "Are you even capable of love, crazy bitch? Don't try to tell me how I feel."

That was...a better question than Black was probably aware. Lily was fairly certain she'd never been in love. But until about a month ago, she would have said the way she felt about Sev was love. She hadn't really questioned that assumption until they'd found that mind-melding charm, and she'd experienced how he felt about her.

She'd been wanting to know what it was like to do legilimency since Sev had admitted he was one, but even though she was (apparently) really good at occlumency for someone who wasn't a mind mage, and hadn't been taught the discipline since she was about four, she didn't seem to be able to quite manage the legilimency charm, especially since Sev tended to instinctively resist it. So they'd been looking for another option for the better part of last term. She'd found the spell over the summer, in a positively ancient book Anomos, the owner of the Nameless Bookshop, had let her read in the back room. (He did that sometimes, when there was no way a person could afford anything in his shop — the underground dark magic community was kind of inconsistent about things like making people pay for shite.) Trying it out when she and Sev had finally made up after the whole fucking Black thing seemed like a good way to reassure both of them that nothing had really changed between them.

Okay, mostly her, Sev could read her mind any time he wanted — he probably wouldn't have forgiven her if he couldn't. But he humoured her (about most things, really), because he did love her, in a much deeper, slightly disturbing way, valuing her happiness so far above his own it had frankly made her feel a little ill. Especially since she wasn't the one living with an abusive drunk two months out of the year, and a school full of people who thought she made a perfect target for their bullying the other ten, and he had to put up with her being a cold, selfish bitch all the fucking time — which he actually recognised, but completely gave her a pass on because he somehow still managed to think of her as a much better person than she actually...was. And at least part of that was because she'd been doing everything she could to make his life better since they were six and she'd started sharing her lunch with him at school, but part of it was just...something else.

A warm, soft, almost glowing something that made her look like a bloody angel in his eyes, even when she was explaining that sex was a tool and she'd only fucked Sirius Black to ruin his life, and Sev was thinking that she was still a cold-blooded, bone-deep bitch, but she was also still on his side. He'd been kind of embarrassed about her seeing that memory, presumably because he didn't want her to know how deeply she'd hurt him. (Which had hurt to see — she was the one who protected him, damn it, she hadn't meant to hurt him! Well, not that badly, at least.) But he'd let her, because he knew she needed that reassurance that she really was forgiven, and that was more important to him than his own discomfort.

Which was (again, presumably) the reason he'd (clearly reluctantly) explained afterward that the way he felt about her was perfectly normal, she was the weird one, thinking that sort of feeling was overwhelming and slightly terrifying...which he also said wasn't what other people were feeling when they said something was terrifying. They'd never really talked before about what was or was not normal for people to feel. He had to have known that she wasn't quite on the same page as everyone else, he could have said something on one of the many occasions she'd exclaimed why are people so stupid, Sev?! But she'd never thought to ask whether her experience of the world around them was the same as everyone else's, she'd just kind of assumed it was, and people just tended to overreact to shite because being all dramatic about everything was fun.

...But apparently not. She didn't quite believe that the feeling she called "love" (which Sev called I don't know...a sense of proprietary obligation, or responsibility, or something) was completely invalid. It was certainly the strongest emotion she felt, and she'd been dead serious about murdering Black for Sev...who didn't want her to, so she wasn't going to, but she would have, if he'd wanted that fucker dead. (She was clearly already a total headcase, Lily was sure it wouldn't be that hard to convince her that her life wasn't worth living, and wouldn't it just be easier to jump off the Astronomy tower and have done with it?) But she was willing to admit that it wasn't the same feeling most people were talking about when they said "love".

She wasn't willing to admit it to Black. Instead she just shrugged. "If you were capable of functioning without him, I might think you were really in love. But you're not. That's not love, that's being a codependent mess. And literally every muggleborn in this school has been judging you on your own merits since day one — hard to judge you on your family's reputation when you've never heard of the House of Black. Not that you don't one-thousand per cent live up to your family's reputation anyway, but still."

"You take that back!"

Lily didn't even try not to laugh at that. "Oh, is it the mad part or the dark part you're objecting to? Because you turned yourself into a girl and are seriously considering faking a completely different personality for someone who definitely won't appreciate it, and you've apparently been visiting the shops with the Blackheart and asking the bloody Dark Lord to do rituals for you — even if you don't approve of killing children, your sense of morality is obviously more flexible than the Light generally approves of."

Not that her own wasn't. Though she didn't feel nearly as guilty about that as Black looked. On any of the other Gryffindor girls, the tiny furrow in her brow and narrowing of her eyes, the tension around her mouth, would be barely noticeable, but after five years of watching Sirius Black try not to show it when she managed to get under his skin she knew what all of his trying-not-to-show-it expressions looked like, and becoming Aster Black hadn't changed her reactions in any appreciable way. (It really did strike her as kind of absurd that everyone, even people with no sexual interest in Black whatsoever, was so disturbed by him suddenly becoming her, when everything else about her was the same as it always had been.)

"At least I'm trying, Evans! Unlike some people I could name!"

"You have no idea how hard I try, Black," Lily snapped, rage flaring at the presumption. Hadn't she just admitted that she was every bit as much a soulless, manipulative bitch as Black had been insisting for years? She distinctly recalled attempting to build a degree of rapport by revealing that yes, she did spend practically all of her time pretending to be someone she wasn't, not five minutes ago! And she knew Black had heard her, since she'd thought Lily pulling off something like that meant she should give it a shot, they'd just—

"Trying to intimidate me, Evans?" Black asked, her tone sarcastically sweet. "Because we both know you don't have the power to back up that threat."

Lily glowered at her. "What the hell are you talking about, Black?"

"Don't play coy, now." That snide, superior tone made Lily want to strangle her.

"I didn't threaten you — believe me, you'd know if I had." If she didn't stop acting like a condescending twat, she was going to realise exactly what it sounded like when Lily started threatening her.

"Yeah, well, how else am I supposed to take you going all glowy-eyed at me?"

Wait. What? "I repeat: what the hell are you talking about, Black?"

"Wait, you're serious?"

"I'm almost always serious." Okay, she took it back, one other thing had changed: Black couldn't make Sirius/serious puns anymore. But that was obviously a plus. "What do you mean glowy-eyed?"

"Ah...like this?" Black said, staring off into the middle distance. Nothing happened for just long enough that Lily was about to say something snarky about that being a stunning example of whatever the fuck she was hallucinating at the moment when a wave of red and violet flames shivered over the other girl's skin, blossoming at her fingertips and racing up her arms — Lily startled, leaning away slightly, even as Black's eyes began to take on an eerie violet glow. She had not been expecting that, okay!

And she was supposed to have just done something like this? She didn't think so! She definitely would've noticed if she'd set herself on fire a second ago! Even if it was some sort of odd, magical fire. Maybe especially if it was some sort of odd, magical fire. Which it obviously was. It clearly wasn't hurting Black.

"What the fuck?!" she exclaimed, standing to get a closer look at the flames flickering around her head. She'd never even heard of anything like this. "What are you doing? That's not an illusion, is it?" She didn't think it was. She couldn't say why, it just seemed more substantial, somehow, than an illusion would be.

"Wait, what?" Black let the effect die before Lily could decide whether it was a good idea to touch the fire. (Usually the answer was no, you idiot, why would you touch the pretty coloured fire, but it clearly hadn't been hurting the other girl, so...)

"You're not allowed to be confused right now, I'm confused right now! What the hell was that?"

"...Soulfire? Basically a sort of external aura effect, like freeform magic, but just kind of flexing or flaring your magic around you, forcing it to become visible. Usually it only happens when really powerful sorcerers lose control of their power, like back the fuck off because I'm going to bring down the entire building around us if I lose my shite. Obviously you can do it on purpose, too, but the only reason to is if you're trying to be intimidating or show off or whatever. That's what I meant by glowy-eyed, I thought you were doing it on purpose a minute ago."

"Uh, definitely not, I didn't even know that was a thing you could do. And I'm pretty sure I would've noticed if I were on fucking fire!"

"I would hope so..." Black giggled. "No, your eyes just went fae for a blink. Doesn't change how anything looks, and soulfire's not hot, either, just feels a little tingly."

"...Oh. No, I wasn't trying to intimidate you, that would be a bit asinine since we'd both know it was a bluff. My control's just been shot since I finished attuning my magic last spring."

"A, are you fucking kidding me? And B, finished attuning your magic?"

Er...right. Black would know about that sort of thing. They probably attuned their kids to the dark at age three or something, and she'd obviously realigned her own over the summer. Which meant she was probably going to think what Lily had done was completely mad. The way the book she'd found had described it, a mage's magic could be polarised toward the dark or the light through a ritual, enhancing your ability to do spells from that end of the spectrum and simultaneously making it more difficult to do magic at the other end of the spectrum. That was the reason that Black, despite being probably the best-trained mage in their class before starting school, and quite possibly the most powerful as well, couldn't cast a Patronus Charm (which wasn't really an OWL spell, but Professor Vane had said it was important to know, and she was the best Defense professor they'd had yet, so they'd all tried to learn it anyway and most of them had gotten at least the incorporeal version down before the end of the year). Hell, her Cheering Charm barely scraped an A. Because her magic was (had been) dark-oriented, she'd had to work twice as hard as any of the rest of them to do proper light magic.

Lily had a relatively low channeling threshold, as far as she could tell. She knew magic, instinctively, but what she could do with it directly was severely limited by the amount of magic she could draw and shape. There were a couple of ways around that, the most common being subsumation rituals designed to raise your channeling threshold. They were super illegal because they normally involved human sacrifice, specifically of a mage, and the idea of metaphagy tended to freak people out, because what if some evil fucker starts killing people and absorbing their souls and using them to increase their own power, or stop themselves from aging, or all sorts of other neat shite? Besides, Lily hadn't known about them when she'd first started thinking about the problem, so the solution she'd come up with — or, well, the solution that had come to her in a dream, she couldn't take all the credit, though she had had to figure out how to actually do it — was to attune her magic to both the light and the dark, enhancing her connection to magic overall.

Which was apparently not what Magic had been suggesting she do at all, and was in fact just a very painful, very creative way to (briefly) commit suicide and get told off by Persephone for being a foolishly overconfident idiot child. (Apparently she should have just dedicated herself to Magic, in one of its more encompassing Aspects, like Hecate or Persephone herself. Oops.) In her defense, she hadn't really known much about white and/or black mages back in fourth year (she still wasn't terribly certain what the difference was supposed to be), and when she'd found out about them it hadn't occurred to her that her patron would be able to do something like that for her. (Persephone had called her an idiot again for that — obviously Magic could do anything.)

It could've been worse, she could've turned herself into a squib. Though she was pretty sure Magic would've intervened there the same way it had waking her up after her little bout of terminal overconfidence.

But in any case, "You know how it's way easier to slip into accidentally doing polarised magic than unpolarised, if your magic is attuned to one of them?" She began to explain, in answer to Black's silent skepticism "In case you were wondering, attuning yourself to both poles—"

That was as far as she got before the other girl interrupted. "You did what?!"

Lily shrugged. "Yeah, that was pretty much Sev's reaction, too." Well, after she'd showed up in his room in the middle of the night demanding he do a full panel of diagnostic charms on her, including the soul analytics, they'd established that she was still a witch even if she couldn't get basic first-year wizardry to work at the moment, and she'd finally explained what she'd done.

She'd almost failed her OWLs because she'd had to re-learn how to do unpolarised charms and transfiguration in the two months before the exams. Apparently attuning yourself to both ends of the spectrum made the shite in the middle hard to do. Since she still wasn't a very powerful witch and couldn't just brute-force her way through the problem like Black had with Cheering Charms, she'd had to double down on controlling her magic to make her spells more effective, and she'd had to go back to relying on the wand movements and incantations which had been used to reify certain effects rather than sloppy, close-enough point-casting shite. So, she could see how it might appear that her control had gotten better, she was certainly more precise about her casting now, but that was really just because she had to compensate for inverting her affinity for polarised versus unpolarised magic.

"No fucking shite, Evans, that's insane! Insane by my standards, and I'm a fucking lunatic!"

She just smirked, shrugged again. "Anyway, it makes it much easier to do light and dark magic, and kind of a pain in the arse to do unpolarised shite. I mean, obviously I can, if I really, really focus, but it's much easier to just cheat on a technical level and edge over into emotionally-guided equivalents. And generally speaking, my magic's been much more emotionally responsive than I'm used to — so yeah, control, shot."

"Why? Why the fuck would you do something like— You realise that could have turned you into a squib? Burnout is a thing!"

Oh, did you think you were the only mad idiot in the entire school? "Yeah, well, it wasn't my idea. I don't think Magic would have suggested it if I were going to become a squib. I might have died for a couple of minutes, but."

Black blinked at her for a long moment before repeating, "Magic. Suggested," as skeptically as possible. "Are you actually going to tell me that Magic Itself just, talks to you?"

Lily...honestly couldn't tell whether she didn't believe her because she didn't think that was a thing, or because she couldn't believe Magic would talk to Lily. "It doesn't really talk, just, sometimes I have dreams that aren't really dreams," she clarified, because yeah, if she was hearing an actual voice telling her it was Magic, that would be kind of weird, and definitely mad. Weird not-quite-dreams weren't nearly as likely to be schizophrenia...she didn't think. "It's kind of hard to describe. And before you say it, yes, I know that sounds insane, it's one of the reasons the other girls don't want to live with me."

Black almost choked trying not to laugh, and failed anyway. "You— You actually told your roommates that Magic sends you dreams? Why would you do that? No, seriously, why? What the hell were you thinking?"

Lily glared at her, pointing at herself. "Muggleborn! And I was like, twelve, I didn't know any better! Why wouldn't I think it was perfectly normal for witches to have weird not-dreams sometimes?" She'd actually hesitated for quite some time to tell Cassie about it specifically because of her roommates' reaction. They'd been running around the Forest blowing off steam for months before Cass decided that she wanted to introduce her to Artemis on Imbolc, and Artemis had clearly already known her, though they hadn't really spoken directly, which had required some explanation...

"Um, yeah, heads-up, that's not normal. Neither is mind-reading or talking to snakes."

"Wait, really? What about other animals? Why are snakes special?" She knew legilimency was a relatively rare talent, but she and Sev had both been able to talk to animals when they were kids, including snakes. Not that they ever had much interesting to say. They'd decided it was kind of a childish, kiddie bit of magic, as far as such things went, and stopped bothering well before they came to Hogwarts.

"No, talking to other animals isn't normal either—" Really? Maybe Black didn't get what she was talking about. Obviously they didn't talk back with actual words, but it was pretty fucking clear they understood her, and there was definitely more communication there than just body language. Sure, she could've guessed that Mr. Parsons next door was in trouble when his dog came over to the Evanses' yard all anxious and unaccompanied, but she couldn't have known he'd fallen and hit his head climbing into the bath just from the way Puddles kept trying to lead her back to the house, which she definitely had. "—and snakes are— There's an inherited talent called Parseltongue, probably started with some blood alchemy experiment or snake cult ritual fucking forever ago, it's— Don't change the subject, Evans! I was mocking you for thinking it was a good idea to tell little second-year Light kiddies that you talk to Magic in your dreams."

"Well, when you put it like that it sounds twee as hell...really, exactly the sort of thing you'd think twelve-year-old witches would talk about."

"Um, no, see, high magic is really fucking illegal, and talking to gods is generally something only crazy people do. If you tell some random mage on the street that Magic sends you dreams, they're either going to think you're mad, or be vaguely terrified of you, or both — or potentially vaguely terrified and slightly jealous, if you happen to run into a traditionalist who actually believes in the Powers." Which most people don't anymore was heavily implied. Even among the students from ‘Traditional' houses, it was, Lily had found, relatively rare for other people to have a true understanding of Magic. Marlene, for example, had mentioned at one point that her family did Introduction rituals, so she had to have met Magic, but she still thought Lily was bloody mad for thinking it had a will of its own.

Lily smirked. Something about the way Black said that made her think someone had sat her down at some point to have a Very Serious Talk about Not Talking About Ritual Magic Outside the House. "Yeah? Does that mean you're jealous, then?"

"No, I think you're mad. Don't get me wrong, I believe you, but this is like, serious black mage shite, you don't just tell people—"

"Oh, come off it! I refuse to believe I accidentally became a black mage when I was three or something — I've been dreaming about Magic longer than I can remember, you realise, it was giving me ideas of things to try before I even knew I was a witch." Her mother had not been at all surprised when Professor McGonagall showed up on their doorstep to tell them about Hogwarts, the summer Lily turned eleven. Apparently she'd always been a rather odd, "superstitious" child, making little rituals out of everyday life and inventing what she now recognised as a very crude rune-scheme for herself — the only symbol she remembered anymore was luck, she used to draw that on everything, with absolute faith that it did make good things more likely to happen — and knowing things she had no way of knowing. The time she had thrown a massive temper-tantrum, delaying their departure for Dad's parents' house by half an hour because she just knew if they got in the car they were going to die came to mind. As it was, they'd only been stuck in traffic for an extra two hours because of a smash-up on the motorway about twenty miles away. When they'd finally gotten past it, Dad had been all annoyed, because if Lily hadn't been a little brat they could've been past it before it happened, but Mum had been rather shaken, because they might've been exactly there, exactly then, if they'd left when he meant to. "And anyway, it's not dark, it's just magic."

And she didn't just go around telling people — she'd only told Cassie after Cassie practically admitted that she was dedicated to Artemis (except not really, because commitments, bleh). She'd kind of danced around it with Pandora, because she and Cassie were pretty sure Pandora was dedicated to some Aspect of Innocence, but she never admitted it. Sev knew, of course, because Sev knew everything about her, but aside from them...some people might remember her roommates gossipping about it, back at the beginning of second year, but even by then they'd found her unnerving enough they didn't spread shite about her very often, so she suspected most people had never heard about it, or had long since forgotten. (Black obviously hadn't heard, which suggested no one had talked about it at all outside of their own dorm.)

"Still the sort of thing that would make most people flip out. You're lucky as hell none of the other girls knew shite about high magic, either — thinking you're weird and unnerving is probably the best possible reaction you could've gotten."

"Oh, I don't know, this isn't such a bad reaction. I mean, I do know all of that now — I definitely don't need a lecture on whether it's a good idea to just go telling people that Magic talks to me — but I kind of doubt that you're going to turn me in as a black mage, given you've clearly just used high magic to turn yourself into a girl. And at least you believe me, most of them thought I was making shite up for some gods-unknown reason."

"Of course I believe you, I grew up in the House of Black, worshiping the bloody Dark Itself! I've met our goddess, I know she's real, she's a fucking bitch!"

Lily sniggered. "Yeah, well, what do you expect from the Dark? I mean, that is the antisocial Dark that people are referring to when they talk about someone having a dark personality, right? Not the one-half-of-the-Balance, arbitrarily-pick-one-extreme-in-each-dyad-to-call-'dark' Dark?" She was pretty sure it was, the House of Black wouldn't have the reputation it did if it actually followed the pro-social Dark.

"Yes. If you want to ridiculously oversimplify literally everything, but...basically. You'd fit right in with my family, Evans. And that's not a compliment."

"From any other Black it would be, though, so I'm going to go ahead and take it as one," she said, with an intentionally obnoxious degree of cheerfulness. "So, if you won't tell me how you did it, will you at least tell me what it's like?"

"What?"

Oh, that was kind of a non-sequitur, wasn't it? She'd just remembered that Black had said how she'd become a girl was a family secret — completely ridiculous, it was obviously high ritual, and she'd admitted that Bellatrix and de Mort were involved, it wasn't as though telling her which Aspect they'd called on and what Black had offered in exchange was revealing much more. "Being a girl, now. What's it like?"

"Well, becoming a girl hurts like fucking hell, actually," Black said, sounding oddly indignant about it.

Lily felt her lips twitch in an involuntary smirk. "Did you actually expect it not to?"

"Well, no, but it was definitely the most painful thing that's ever happened to me, including realigning my magic and being put under the Cruciatus."

Lily winced. She'd never been hit with the Cruciatus — never seen anyone cast any of the Unforgivables, even — but magical backlash was bad enough, and she suspected that simultaneously attempting to realign her magic to the dark and hold onto the light had probably hurt more than just realigning her magic, so she wasn't sure how that would compare, but she wouldn't expect any ritual alteration of one's fundamental identity not to hurt. Especially if the Dark was involved. Not that Black had admitted that it was, but it was their familial deity, and Black was still connected to her family magic. It was hard to describe, but she got an odd sense around some of the kids from the older houses that they were a really small part of something much greater than themselves, and while the tenor of Black's magic had changed over the summer, Lily's sense that she was still part of that larger magic hadn't. So it would be kind of weird if the Dark had let anyone else play around with the body and soul of one of its humans.

"Yeah, well, I heard somewhere that the Dark's a fucking bitch. But I actually meant, does it feel different, being a girl? I've always kind of wondered."

Specifically, she'd kind of wondered occasionally what it would be like to be a boy since she and Sev were nine, and she'd let him (practically forced him to, actually) spend a week sleeping in her bed rather than at his awful parents' house, and Dad had hit the roof when he found out, because he's a boy, Lily! (Which obviously she'd known, but she'd...never really considered it that important before?) Yes, she and Sev had done the mind-melding charm, but she'd been kind of preoccupied by all the weird emotional shite, and besides, that was what it felt like to be Sev, not what it would feel like to be a male version of herself. Black was the only person she knew who had first-hand experience of being the male and female version of the same person.

"No, it doesn't. I think maybe it's supposed to, Jamie certainly thinks it should, and the bloody mind-healer—"

"They made you talk to a mind-healer because you turned yourself into a girl?" Lily asked, trying not to sound as completely outraged as she actually was, because even if Black hadn't been trying to get Sev killed, everyone else seemed to think she had. Black's little identity crisis was not more demanding of talking to a mind-reading shrink than trying to kill someone.

Aster glowered at her. "No. I did apparently try to murder someone via proxy first, if you recall. Normal people consider that to be an indication of a certain degree of being a crazy person." Oh. Well. Good. Would it have killed Dumbledore to tell Sev that Black was getting some form of punishment as well? (Stupid question, of course it would.) "Anyway, the mind-healer kept yammering on about some ‘gender identity' dragonshite. I don't get it. I really don't."

"Yeah, well, you always have been kind of...effeminate. Not surprised you're comfortable being a girl."

"Not like I wasn't comfortable being a boy, though. This just...seemed like a good idea at the time. And quite honestly, even if I did want to change back, I'd have to want it a hell of a lot more than I wanted to become a girl in the first place, now that I know how much it hurts."

"So, really the only difference is being a bit shorter?" That was somehow...disappointing. Everyone acted like whether you were a boy or a girl mattered a lot, after all, she'd kind of thought it would have to feel obviously different...

"Well, I mean, there's that, and the shape of my face is a little different. My hips are a little wider and my legs proportionally longer — completely threw off my centre of gravity for a bit, there. My voice is higher, obviously, and I probably don't have the upper body strength to play beater, anymore. Takes longer to come as a girl," she added, completely matter of fact about it, which startled a snort of laughter out of Lily. Obviously the whole genital inversion thing would be the biggest physical change, she guessed, it was just, she couldn't really imagine anyone else just coming out and saying that. Which Black presumably realised, because rather than elaborating, she shrugged and added, with a vaguely distracted smirk, "Though, on the plus side, no random public boners."

Lily couldn't decide whether that was a suggestion that were she still a boy Black would have a (totally not actually random) boner for her right now, and if so whether it was intentional. It was pretty fucking clear she wanted to have another go, almost as much as she wanted to throttle Lily for intentionally ruining her friendship with Potter and unintentionally shoving her into the deep end of the crazy pool. (Or both — Black hadn't hated Lily nearly as much before they'd shagged, and they'd still been rough enough to leave her bruised and aching for days. Not that that was a bad thing, Lily didn't think she'd ever been fucked with that sort of wild abandon and raw need before, no consideration of her comfort or the fact that they were in public surrounded by other people, or any consequences beyond the moment... She'd be lying if she said it hadn't been hot as hell.) Sev said it shouldn't be that surprising, Black was hardly stable, but Lily had kind of seriously underestimated how dependent she was on Potter. In hindsight, breaking their relationship was kind of a major escalation over humiliating Sev by the lake, but that didn't mean she was going to apologise.

It did mean maybe she wouldn't be quite as much of a bitch as she could be, here. They did, after all, have to live together. And while she didn't doubt that they would eventually end up sleeping together again — the sexual tension in here was practically palpable, and Lily had enjoyed that little seduction at least as much as Black (and she had been sober enough she actually remembered it) —  it probably wasn't a great idea to push for round two too quickly.

"Yeah, but on the minus side, have you had a period, yet?" Unless Black was into some really weird shite, that should be sufficiently non-sexual for her to escape the little innuendo-laden area of potential flirting they'd been edging dangerously close to.

"Nope. Not planning on it."

Wait. What? Another startled giggle escaped her. "I don't think you get a choice. Unless, wait, witches don't have some way to avoid that that no one's mentioned to me, have they?"

Now it was Black's turn to laugh. "Of course we do. I mean, not if you want to, you know, have babies, but Bella cursed me so I shouldn't have to worry about either one for a few years."

Lily gaped at her. She couldn't help it. "Sounds great. What's the catch?"

"I...don't think there is one? I assume Bella wouldn't have done it if there were. Granted, it's a curse, it's not meant to be used for birth control or avoiding the nasty, miserable part of being a girl, but, in the words of famed cursebreaker Ciardha Monroe, improvisation is meant for whatever it works for. And I'm fine with not having babies or bleeding, so."

Well, if that was the case, sign Lily up. "Jealous! What curse? Can you do it for me? Periods suck, they're the worst part of being female, hands down."

"I don't know." Lily gave her her best puppy-dog eyes — Please, please, pretty please with sugar on top? "No, seriously, I don't know. Cissy probably would, but I wouldn't actually trust her to let her curse me, if I were you—" She winced — she wouldn't either. "—and I also really don't know if other people use it, might be one of those things that the House of Black does that everyone else would think is completely mad, you know? Or even something Bella does that even the rest of the House thinks is insane."

Lily pouted at her, suddenly distracted by a morbid curiosity about what other things the Blackheart was known to do that even the rest of her notoriously insane house considered mad. "Tch, fine, I'll ask Pomfrey. I mean, she didn't mention anything like that when I asked her about birth control a couple of years ago, but that might just be because advising thirteen-year-olds to go get themselves cursed is probably some kind of malpractice. But I can probably convince her to tell me the name of the bloody thing and look it up myself. Oh!"

"What?"

"Speaking of names, and things that are different now, what's yours?"

"What?" Black repeated.

"Your name, so I can add you as an exception to the wards," she said, flicking her fingers up at the walls. She could probably do it without a name, assuming she could snag a loose hair or something, but a name was easier, especially since Black was probably the most paranoid person Lily had ever met when it came to not leaving traces of herself to be exploited by a creative witch.

"Aster. You have to have heard Remy calling me that, at least."

"Well, yeah, but that's not a Black name, I figured it was short for something."

"Narcissa's named after a flower," Black pointed out. Narcissa was also a bastard, and fairly obviously so, if she was compared to literally any of the other Blacks. "It's short for Asteria. Bellatrix Asteria, if you must know, because de Mort thinks he's funny."

Lily bit her lip trying not to giggle. She wasn't sure what about it tickled her so much — maybe the fact that "Aster" was going along with it even though she could quite reasonably have chosen a different name for herself, or maybe her little pout as she admitted it. Or maybe just that there was something inherently funny about naming someone after someone they looked exactly like. Especially since Black clearly still looked up to the Blackheart, even if she didn't want to admit it. "You did say you look practically identical now, right?"

"Yes," she admitted sourly. "And giving us the same name too isn't creepy at all." She pulled a face before explaining, "They've been together since she was younger than I am now."

Wait, really? Yeah, okay, maybe that was kind of creepy. In which case, Lily thought it was probably funny because the fucking Dark Lord had to know it would make Black uncomfortable, and also because Black was going along with it despite obviously thinking it was super creepy. "Well, he is a Dark Lord, isn't creepy somewhere in the job description?"

Apparently that touched a nerve. Black scowled. "If it's not, it should be, snake-faced fucker's just... Okay, first off, he's a legilimens, and stupidly powerful, so he's almost always listening to your thoughts, which he won't admit if you're at some Family dinner thinking, like, Lord Voldemort and the Death Eaters are the tweest names ever, but if it's just his people around, he sometimes just goes responding to shite you're thinking rather than waiting for you to talk. And did I mention the snake thing? I'm not sure, but I think he might think he should actually be a snake. Like, on my honour, McKinnon, that's the mind-healer, kept going on about people feeling like their body isn't right or doesn't match their identity or whatever, and that's why most people get sex changes — i.e., not on a bloody lark — and all I could think about was fucking de Mort using blood alchemy or whatever to make himself look all snakey. Clearly his gender is snake."

Okay, there was a lot to comment on there, from Black having family dinners with the Dark Lord (it was weird to think he'd been around...presumably her entire life, if he'd been with Bellatrix since she was fifteen or sixteen...which would itself be creepier if Lily didn't know almost all of the purebloods started arranging betrothals by that age), to his being a rude legilimens (Sev, at least, was very uncomfortable about the idea of just reading people's minds all the time for no reason), to Black getting away with calling the fucking Dark Lord twee, to his face, but she was laughing too hard to say any of that, because, "I– I don't think— That's not how gender works," she managed to choke out, "snake is not a gender."

Black rolled her eyes. "Well, then, how does it work? I'd really like to know!" Something in her tone, some hint of suppressed frustration, suggested that that was actually a serious question.

A serious question Lily herself didn't really know the answer to. She shrugged. "I've always thought it was mostly about the expectations other people have for you and how you're supposed to act in different situations." And, you know, life in general. "There is no set of expectations for snake, so it can't be a gender."

Black scoffed. "Well, makes more sense than having some innate sense of maleness or femaleness, at least. But I'm pretty sure that means House of Black is a gender, because society as a whole definitely holds different expectations for us than anyone else, so I'm guessing you don't really know either. At this point, I'm about completely convinced the whole concept is made up. And anyway, that's the whole reason he wants to be a snake, so he doesn't have to deal with human social expectations."

Lily let the I'm guessing you don't know either comment go, because...well, she wasn't wrong. She was positive that ‘snake' wasn't a gender, though. "Still not a gender. Also, isn't that just a Dark Lord thing? Doing whatever you want and fucking expectations and the status quo in general?"

"Yeah, okay, point taken, I guess he wouldn't need to be a snake for that. But the snake thing is still creepy as fuck. And some of the shite he and Bella get up to — when Zee and I got there, he was cutting a design into her back, just as, I don't know, some twisted sort of art? Maybe foreplay? I have no idea. I mean, he could have made the same design with transfiguration or something, so he obviously wanted it to hurt, but if he just wanted to hurt her he could have just flayed her without making pretty patterns out of it."

It...probably wasn't a good idea to say that the appeal seemed obvious to her. Just being in a position where one of the most dangerous people in Britain let you hurt them seemed like it would be kind of gratifying. (Probably even if you were a fucking Dark Lord, and also one of the most dangerous people in Britain.) Black had said it herself that it could have been foreplay, so presumably they were into shite like that. And if you were doing something for fun, why not make it pretty?

"And he's a terrible fucking person, okay, like, makes you murder someone to get into his little club and then makes you swear fealty to him so you can never leave evil, but then he's just randomly nice sometimes, like, he just wanted copies of a couple of memories for helping me with this—" She gestured at herself. "—and I'm like...ninety-six per cent sure that afterward he tucked me into bed — his bed, he doesn't have a guest room, probably because he doesn't ever have guests — and said you did good, kid, which is both incredibly weird and incredibly creepy, because de Mort's been around literally my entire life, and I have never heard him say anything encouraging to anyone. Ever."

Lily thought she might be missing something. "Is that really weird, though? I mean, you are kind of like his girlfriend's kid, right? Why shouldn't he be nice to you?"

"Because he doesn't have a reason to be nice! Bella's not nice either. Niceness itself is suspect! And I'm definitely telling Bella you called her de Mort's girlfriend, and old enough to be my mother."

Wasn't she, though? Granted, she might've been misinterpreting the little hints about their family dynamic Narcissa had let slip over the course of their oddly stilted almost-friendship back in first and second years. She'd certainly missed (at the time) that Cissa seized on the first excuse to break off their relationship because she was actually starting to like Lily. (In her defense, it had been a bit difficult to imagine why anyone would want to dislike someone. It had taken Sev years to convince her that was a thing.)

Anyway, she'd gotten the impression, back when she was passing letters to Andromeda for Narcissa and Cissa was giving her a crash course in not acting like a mudblood, that while Bellatrix was her sister she was much older — maybe not enough to literally be her mother, but enough that she had been more or less a parent to Cissa (and Regulus, and Sirius, though he'd never liked admitting it) pretty much as long as she could remember. In fact, Lily had gotten the impression that Narcissa's actual parents were kind of awful. She'd lived with Sirius's family for a few years before Bellatrix had left school, and then with Bella until she'd come to school. And while the Blacks were very good at not actually telling anyone what happened behind the doors of their fabulously extravagant manors, Cissa reverted to being so stiff and overly formal whenever she strayed too close to an uncomfortable topic it hadn't been hard to figure out that her mother was never around (she might live in France?) and her father (whose mysterious disappearance when Cissa was nine was not on the table for discussion) had been worse than Sev's. Bellatrix might be a harsh teacher with insane standards and expectations — all of the wanna-be Death Eaters agreed on that, according to Sev — but she was pretty much the only adult any of the Blacks actually looked up to.

Also completely mad — apparently she was friends with Fenrir Greyback — and completely terrifying — Amy Bones told her once that, according to her father, Bellatrix had killed at least one person before starting school, and Lily seriously doubted she would be training Baby Death Eaters if she wasn't a scary-competent fighter. But none of the Blacks or Rosiers had a bad thing to say about the way she treated her younger cousins. Most of them could be downright defensive when anyone said a bad word about her.

She shrugged. "Blame Narcissa." (And Reggie, and Evan...) "She always talked about her like she was way older, practically a parent to her. And they're not married, are they? What else would I call their relationship?"

"When did you talk to Narcissa about Bellatrix?" Black demanded, sounding slightly affronted, as though she couldn't imagine they were on speaking terms, which was a bit silly — aside from their 'business' relationship back in first and second years, they did occasionally have to talk to each other as prefects, and the number of students who actually believed in the Powers was kind of tiny. Lily was on speaking terms with all of them, because they had their interest in organising the school holiday rituals in common, if nothing else.

"First year, mostly. I doubt she would've given me the time of day if she hadn't been in such a vulnerable state over Andromeda leaving, but." She shrugged. She wouldn't have been able to find an in with Cissa in the first place if Black hadn't mentioned his older cousin running away over the summer a few weeks into their first year. "Are you going to answer my question?"

"Well, they're definitely not courting, which is kind of the only equivalent we have for dating," Black explained, after a brief moment of confusion. "And no, they're not married, she's engaged to the Lestranges' heir. Consort is probably the best term. And she's only nine years older than me and Cissy. She did arguably have more of a hand in raising Cissy than Auntie Dru, but she's not really anything like a parent..." She trailed off, trying to think how to explain the Dark Lady's role in her younger cousins' life, if Lily had to guess.

"But she takes care of you. I know she does."

Black scoffed. "Yeah, but parents don't. Did Cissy tell you Bella killed their father for raping Andromeda?" Lily couldn't help a tiny gasp, more out of surprise that Black would just out and tell her that than anything, but it was somewhat shocking. Black smirked. "Yeah, Cissy and Meda got to watch. He used to use the Imperius on Bella all the time too, so he'd had it coming for years. My father almost killed me when I was seven — Bella did some impossible black magic healing shite to save me — and nothing any of us do is ever enough for any of them. Reggie and Cissy are the good kids, and even they aren't good enough. Auntie Dru hates children — likes to pretend hers don't exist. Bella and Meda didn't trust her to protect Cissy from Cygnus when she was five, and Orion's even harder on Reg than he was on me, specifically because Reg actually tries to be everything they want in a son — he's too compliant."

"Are you...supposed to tell me this?" Lily asked, slightly stunned. It just seemed like...those weren't the sort of things people talked about. And especially not with people they didn't trust.

Black smirked at her. "No. But I can't say I really care much about the reputation of the House of Black anymore, and anyway, the Aurors are under the impression that Cygnus got himself sucked out of the universe fucking about with Demonic Congress, because Arcturus wasn't going to let them drag the House over the coals for him."

"I see," Lily said, trying not to smirk back. "So...what was the illegal black magic healing thing?" Because most healing rituals were illegal, especially if you weren't licensed to perform them, but most of them were white magic. She didn't actually know any black healing magic, which suddenly seemed like a terrible oversight.

Black shrugged. "Honestly, I'm not sure Bella didn't just make it up on the spot — calling the Dark to burn out the soul-rotting curse Orion used on me and re-establish my fundamental identity. Does it matter?"

Well, not if that was all Black could tell her about it, because that was as close to useless as it was possible to get, as far as a ritual description went. She sighed. "No, I guess not. You were telling me how Bellatrix doing things like that isn't totally parental behaviour...?" she reminded the other girl.

Black rolled her eyes. "Yeah, well, see, doing shite like using a soul-rotting curse on your own son is parental behaviour. Bella's the First Daughter of the House."

Lily couldn't help but raise an eyebrow at that. "Like Amy?" She and Amelia weren't great friends, but enough that she'd heard the Hufflepuff complain on multiple occasions about having to teach her baby cousins basic magic-sensing exercises and such over hols.

"Well, no, the Boneses aren't nearly as fucked up as the Blacks. The actual job is to look out for the younger kids and their interests, teach them shite they need to know and stand up to their parents and Head of House if they have some problem with them. Amy probably only has to give them pointers on elementary charms and shite, maybe keep an eye out for them when they get to Hogwarts. Bella, on the other hand, well, when don't kids in the House of Black have problems with their parents?"

"You can't all hate each other."

"We don't. We tend to like our cousins and siblings, even aunts and uncles." Lily smirked at that. Black rolled her eyes, probably aware of exactly what she was thinking: that they often liked their cousins and siblings just a bit more than was socially acceptable, even — Black Incest Jokes were kind of a thing. "It's just... Dorea likes to say selfish, short-sighted, domineering people tend to raise resourceful, devious, independent children who hate them. And Arcturus is a shite Head of House, completely useless. No one else has ever gone out of their way to take care of us, so a lot of responsibility — especially for me, Cissy, and Reg — ended up falling to Bella. And most people only end up being the First Child for a few years, in their late teens. We had a bit of a generation gap, so Bella's been ours since she was eight, I think? Officially.

"Unofficially, she's been taking care of her sisters since she and Meda were still in the Nursery. If I had to compare her role to the way other families do things, she'd be kind of like an aunt, you know, easier to talk to because she doesn't have direct authority over us and never seriously hurt us, and kind of like a godmother because she has some say on the way we're being raised, shite we're taught, and so on. She actually did a lot of teaching when we were kids, she's old enough she'd left school and was around for a couple of years before Cissy started. She advocates for us with Arcturus and has the authority and obligation to intervene and defend us if our parents are totally out of line."

"And they just...listen to her?"

"Well, they have pretty much as long as I can remember, but she's been a Death Eater since she was fifteen. There might be some violent bastards in the House, and powerful ones at that, but none of them are really trained battlemages. If they refused to take her seriously and she called for an honour duel over it, she could probably have killed any one of them, even then. At this point, she's the most powerful mage in the House, and the best-trained fighter, plus, you know, being a fucking Dark Lady — they'd have to be fucking stupid to ignore her."

"Yeah, but you said she's been doing this since she was a little kid. You're telling me your Head of House would have listened to an eight-year-old if she said one of her aunts or uncles was being an abusive cunt?"

"Well, no, but that never really stopped her trying to intervene directly — mostly on Andromeda's behalf, I don't think she had much contact with the more distant cousins at that age. Even after she learned to resist the Imperius, Cygnus, her father, kicked the shite out of her and raped her pretty fucking regularly until she was fifteen or so." Lily felt her eyes go wide at that. Somehow she just couldn't imagine the woman all the Slytherins talked about like some kind of legendary warrior queen being raped by her father. Black snorted. "That's not a secret, Evans. It's not a weakness to admit you've been violated if you've also killed the person who did it. The fact that she took the beatings so Andromeda and Narcissa wouldn't have to made her a fucking hero when we were little. Yeah, she's a twisted, evil bitch, and completely fucking mad, but she's the only adult in the House who ever really gave a shite about us.

"Obviously she has to know that they're being abusive cunts to actually do something about it, and there's a much higher threshold for what counts as abuse in my family — if I told her Walburga used the Cruciatus on me over the summer, she'd probably tell me I've come into my power and Walburga's not exactly a top-tier battlemage, I can curse the shite out of her myself if I care so much. But she's the one who took care of us when we were little and couldn't take care of ourselves, and she's also the person we'd go to if we needed advice about sex, or what NEWTs to take, or how to manage being a crazy person...which makes it awfully hard to remember sometimes that she tortures and kills people for fun. Like I said, complicated."

Lily winced, mostly because, yeah, she could see how it would be hard to believe the person who cared most about you in the world was actually a terrible person. Like, if she were to find out her dad was a serial killer, or something. She wanted to say she'd disown him as the scum of humanity and turn him in to the police...but she probably wouldn't. They had their differences, yes (mostly about Sev), but she knew he only wanted what was best for her. (Which meant not letting that Snape boy drag her back down into a life of poverty and misery like his father did to his mother. As though that was even possible.) And he loved her, she knew he did. He'd never hurt her, or anyone she cared about (even Sev...at least physically). And that meant a lot more to her than if he were killing some hypothetical strangers she'd never met.

After all, it'd have nothing to do with her.

"Yeah, okay, but I'm going to just go ahead and think of her as kind of your mum," she said...mostly because she had to say something, and she wasn't about to tell Black that it seemed perfectly reasonable to her not to care that Bellatrix tortured and killed people for fun. Even she knew there was a line there, honestly!

Black rolled her eyes. "Older sister would be closer."

"Not in a non-fucked-up family. That's very mumsy sort of shite in my book. Not that I'd actually talk to my mother for advice on any of that, of course."

That was actually a bit of a laugh, the thought of talking to her mum about her love life or career prospects. How would that even go? Her sex life had come up before — she'd stupidly mentioned something about Cassie, forgetting that shagging girls wasn't nearly as acceptable in Mum's world — and that had gone badly enough she'd begged Sev to just make Mum forget they'd talked about it at all. Adding in, yeah, so what is this love thing, exactly? didn't seem likely to make it easier. And the idea of Mum having any relevant opinion on her career was laughable. She didn't even know what the potential options were! And even if she were to convert them into muggle terms...sad as it was to say, Mum probably didn't know Lily well enough to comment, either. How would she know if Lily was more suited to be a doctor or a research scientist or a detective?

They'd barely talked about anything important in years, because things that were important to Lily tended to be weird and vaguely unsettling even for people who were used to magic. She was sure she wasn't much like the little girl they'd known before she started school. Mostly because she couldn't force herself to really, actually care whether people who held no real power over her thought she was weird and disturbing and possibly dangerous, but that didn't mean she wanted to disillusion them about their daughter being a bit mad. They were her family, she cared enough to not want to hurt them, and she was pretty sure being honest enough with them that they could help advise her on career choices would. (It wasn't like she hadn't tried, Sev had had to make them forget several conversations the summer before last.)

...It probably also wasn't a good idea to admit that she was a little jealous Black had someone she could ask for advice on being a crazy person. Lily and Sev were kind of just...muddling through, trying not to draw too much attention to themselves. Or rather, trying to avoid Lily drawing too much attention to them — Sev was really very good at flying below the radar. Though it probably helped he wasn't nearly as...off as Lily, and he could cheat and read people's minds to figure out if he'd said something too dark or weird or whatever. (Lucky bastard.)

"It's still kind of mumsy, though, protecting her kids and you know, raising them."

"Yeah, but we are fucked up, and I'm telling you, parent-child relationships in my House are antagonistic at best. Their job is to turn you into a good, obedient little Black, even if that means they have to fucking break you. Which it does, because we're not bred to be obedient. They're the fucking enemy, okay?"

Lily raised her hands in a gesture of surrender, biting her tongue to keep from commenting on the idea that the Blacks weren't bred for obedience — what were they? fucking horses?

It did very little to calm Black, though she did sound slightly less hysterical as she continued, "And even if they weren't, like in normal families, the idea of a mum is more...hierarchical than whatever Bella is to me and Cissy. And Reggie, but he's always kind of managed to sneak by hiding in our shadows, so Bella didn't have to do as much for him. She doesn't have authority over us, like legally or socially or whatever, she's not responsible for me, really, or, well, not outside the House, at least. I mean, no one insists I have to do what she tells me to, like they have all my life with Arcturus and Walburga, and even Dorea.

"Honestly, all of them, the adults, parents, would probably prefer none of us kids ever did anything Bella told us to, but every single one of us would pick her over them, because unlike them, she has our respect. She's earned it. If it comes down to it, yeah, she's the oldest of us, and the most powerful, but she wasn't always Lady Blackheart, and the fact that she was probably going to get the shite kicked out of her never stopped her standing up for the people she was duty-bound to protect. Which is the sort of thing we've been taught to expect from a real lord, one worthy of our loyalty, since we were old enough to talk.

"It's really, really not a surprise that all of my cousins — and the Rosiers, they're her cousins on her mother's side — support the Death Eaters even though Arcturus fucking hates de Mort. He actually forbade Nash and Danny to take the Mark, and they did it anyway. Because if it came down to it, every Black who's younger than her would support Bella just fucking executing Arcturus and taking over as the Head of the House."

Lily raised an eyebrow at that. She knew it was a big deal, a member of a noble house basically telling their lord to piss off. She almost thought that kind of implied Bellatrix was already their actual Head of House. Also, "Your Head of House opposes the Death Eaters? I thought all the Dark houses were kind of tacitly supporting them, even if they won't admit it in public. That's the impression Sev's gotten, at least."