Welcome to the Family
Bella thought Aster was being ridiculous when she asked whether it was possible de Mort had any illegitimate children running around Britain, because her new roommate reminded her of the snakey bastard, and just humour me, Bella, please.
Well, her first response had been, I doubt it. Why do you ask?
It was after Aster had sent her a second letter, scribbled on the back of her response and sent back without even reading the rest of it, let alone responding to it (Because Evans keeps reminding me of him, and we just found out she's adopted, and just humour me, is it possible?!), that she'd said Aster was being ridiculous. Particularly in her punctuation and sentence structure, but also in general. De Mort couldn't have children, he'd sacrificed his ability to do so in a ritual well before Aster was born — and (she'd realised after Bella assured her he wasn't Evans's father) even if he hadn't, who knew what weird side effects fucking about with cross-species blood alchemy might have. It was entirely possible he'd never been able to have human children, or at least not accidentally. (Of course, she didn't know that, but it seemed like reasonable speculation to her.)
So she definitely hadn't been expecting to be hit from behind with a dark-shaded stinging jinx, right over the heart, as she and Evans meandered through Hogsmeade avoiding Jamie, Narcissa, and anyone who'd have a problem with Evans being a bit more unnerving than usual because it was Samhain. Which was practically everyone — even Snape had come up with some excuse to be elsewhere after ascertaining that yes, Aster would make sure Evans didn't do anything insane in public...or at least anything that would get her arrested. (Not like it was hard, as long as she didn't go talking to people and alerting them to the fact that she was a bit fae at the moment. In both the obviously preoccupied by magic sense and the vaguely sociopathic and/or inhuman sense.)
Not that Aster was particularly keen on avoiding Jamie or minding Evans, but she had had to admit that his little freak-out when he hadn't been able to find her last Saturday suggested that maybe she should try playing a bit hard-to-get rather than throwing herself at him. Granted, he'd mostly been concerned that she was sulking in the girls' dorm (actually sulking, not code-for-masturbating sulking) and refusing to eat again because he'd colluded with the rest of those wankers to kick her out of their dorm with no warning whatsoever, and he hadn't seen her for over twenty-four hours afterward. But she had to admit, that was one of the more obvious things he liked about Prefect Evans — attempting to woo her was a challenge. Of course, Aster couldn't completely ignore him, because he wasn't unreasonably obsessed with her. (Yet. ...And yes, because she actually was unreasonably obsessed with him, but that wasn't the point.) It was still probably a good idea not to force her company on him all the time. (She thought she was great company, but she was well aware that even the other Marauders thought that she could be a bit overwhelming.)
So when Evans told Jamie she couldn't go to the Samhain Students' Weekend with him because they (she and Aster) were having a roommate bonding day — because yes, Potter, this is a thing girls do, making nice with their roommates, even incredibly annoying roommates who only recently became girls — she'd agreed to play along. Mostly because Evans had managed to say that completely straight-faced despite the fact that she hadn't 'made nice' with any of her other six roommates for years. It had only been a week, and the fact that Aster wasn't uncomfortable sleeping in her part of the room already had Ellie and Mary asking leading questions, hinting that Aster had to be a bit mad herself (as though that wasn't patently obvious) if she hadn't noticed Evans was kind of creepy. Which of course she had, that was also patently obvious, it was just she knew the difference between creepy and malicious, which Evans actually wasn't. She might occasionally say unnerving shite — like, yes, of course I know what kind of rituals they used to do here a thousand years ago, I was there — but it wasn't like Aster thought she was going to try to murder her in her sleep for leaving a wet towel on the floor (unlike certain Narcissas she could name).
And she apparently really didn't have a problem with Aster's disregard for clothes and the concept of personal property. She had forbidden Aster to open any locked drawers in her desk, so that was probably where she was keeping any illegal books she might have, and her personal grimoire and/or diary, but that was fine. It was slightly tempting to break in to see what Evans was hiding, exactly, but Aster wasn't going to break their truce over something so trivial, and it wasn't like she was going to forget that she wasn't supposed to borrow shite it actually took effort to access the same way she grabbed whichever copy of their potions textbook she happened to spot first when she was packing her bag in the morning. Evans had actually been pleased with Aster expanding the interior of her wardrobe so they could just share and get rid of Aster's, which was something Aster had been trying to convince the boys to do for years. (She really, really didn't like not having any space to move in the room.) Honestly, she'd kind of expected the prefect to refuse too, which was why she hadn't told her she was doing it, just presented it as a fait accompli. Really, dealing with Evans being a bit fae on occasion was probably far less annoying than everyone else apparently found living with Aster.
For example, people who didn't live with Aster didn't generally have to worry about being ambushed by crazy people in the middle of Hogsmeade.
She yelped as the curse struck, the dark twist on it making it sting magically as well as physically. Evans hadn't managed to get a single word out ("Wha—?") before she'd spun to face her attacker, wand in hand. Bella, being Bella, was faster — and also cheated, stepping out of a shadow behind her to jab her in the right shoulder blade with a caloris. Aster yelped and spun around again. "Bella! Stop it! You're going to burn a hole in my shirt!"
"And whose fault is that?" she asked, grinning like a lunatic.
"I know where you're going with this, and no one is going to mistake me for you wearing this," a Led Zeppelin concert tee-shirt she'd found in a resale shop over the summer, "so piss off! What the fuck are you even doing here?"
"Well, technically I'm chaperoning Cissy and Lucy's very prim and proper and boring luncheon, but it's not like he'd do anything scandalous even if she begged for it, so since he was the one who thought they ought to have a chaperone to sit four feet away from each other and make small talk in the middle of a crowded restaurant, I decided Cissy can defend her own honour. Or lack thereof — I don't know, she tells me more about your sex life than hers, could be a bigger slut than Zee for all I know. Going to introduce me?"
Aster rolled her eyes. "Do either of you not know who the other is?"
"Well, no. Or, well, I assume I need no introduction," Bella said, raising an eyebrow in Evans's direction in silent question.
"Aster did mention your name a moment ago, Miss Black," Evans said coolly, in a tone which might have been meant to be an imitation of Cissy, but was a little too openly impatient and annoyed to pass. Not to mention, no one called Bella Miss Black.
Apparently Bella thought it was as weird to hear herself referred to as Miss Black as Aster did. "If you want to be formal, it's my Lady. Otherwise, Bellatrix. Bella, if you like. And you're the Lily Evans I've heard so much about."
Evans shrugged, abandoning her Narcissa impression. "I'm certainly some Lily Evans. Probably not one you've heard much about, though. And you're not my lady, so I suppose formality is right out. Bella."
Bella giggled. "You'd be surprised. Little Aster's never been good at keeping secrets from me, and you may have heard I have a lot of friends in dark places. Asphodel."
"Oh." Evans looked slightly flummoxed. "Maybe I am the Lily Evans you've heard about, then. Why were you asking about me in Knockturn of all places?"
"Wait, stop!" Aster demanded.
"What?" Evans asked.
Bella smirked, eyes flicking from Aster to Evans and back. "You didn't tell her your theory?"
"A, no, and B, you said I was wrong! And C, we are not talking about this in the middle of the Hogsmeade high-street! And D, why am I the voice of reason right now?"
"Because little Asphodel here has no idea what we're talking about, and I really don't care if people overhear me discussing—" She broke off, grinning. "But that's fine. We can go to lunch. Any preference?"
"Somewhere I won't be seen talking to you?" Aster suggested. Not that plenty of people hadn't already seen them talking right now, but being accosted in the middle of the street wasn't really the same as being spotted having a civil conversation over a meal. "And I'm pretty sure Evans only speaks English."
"Well then, you can translate the menu for her," Bella said, in French, stepping forward to link her arms through both of theirs and dragging the lot of them into the Space Between.
When she pulled them back into the mundane plane, they were in the courtyard of a restaurant which, like the last place Bella had dragged Aster to, was tiny and otherwise deserted. This one seemed to be a pizzeria, though, and the host greeted them in Italian, before realising Aster and Evans couldn't understand him, and switching to French to offer them a table.
"You know I don't speak Italian," Aster pointed out, as their host bustled off to fetch drinks.
"I was going to take you to Café Louis, but I changed my mind." In the half second between making that quip and apparating all three of them, because of course she had. "Their lunch crowd is obnoxious. And in answer to your question," she added, turning to Evans, "I was asking about you in Knockturn because someone suggested you reminded her of my Lord, and I happened to recall someone else recently asking me whether he has a daughter — I believe you met my cousin Cian at the Bookshop over the summer. Or, well, saw him at least, I'd be shocked if he introduced himself."
"Oh, he did, actually. Rosier, right? He saw I was looking at a copy of Dearborn's response to Flanders's Metaphysics and suggested I have a look at a certain series of essays if I was interested in arithmantic descriptions of cross-planar interactions."
Bella rolled her eyes. "Let me guess, the Ochiá essays? Or did he actually send you after the time articles?"
"Ochiá — he wasn't wrong, they are bloody brilliant, even if they're completely tangential to what I was looking for. I'm guessing you've read them?"
"I wrote them." Evans did a bit of a double-take — understandable, Aster guessed, Bella was much better known for being a violent crazy person than a fucking genius, especially among people who knew de Mort was the Dark Lord. Bella's role in the Death Eaters wasn't really well-known outside of the organisation, but the baby Death Eaters would obviously be aware that she trained new recruits and Aster had told the Marauders, so there were rumours around, even if there wasn't any actual proof. There was proof of her brutally humiliating half a dozen would-be suitors' Heads of House in public duels when she was Aster's age, though — some of them still hadn't forgiven Arcturus — and the whole thing at the Festa Morgana. Even if people didn't know she was a bloody Dark Lady, they did know she was fucking terrifying. "What were you looking for?"
Aster groaned. Even if Evans was interested in highly technical discussions of magical theory, she definitely wasn't.
"Er... Using arithmancy to describe ritual spells, and how that's different from using it to describe potions, because Professor Slughorn says they're different disciplines but I couldn't really find anything on it. I...didn't know you were an arithmancer?"
Bella smirked at her, probably just as aware as Aster of her reputation outside of her little cult. "I'm not, really. I dabble." Oh, yes, because most people who dabble in a subject have published essays in professional journals — really Bella? "You couldn't find anything because potion-making and alchemy are, for descriptive purposes, exactly the same as low ritual. They're only considered their own disciplines for political reasons. For high ritual, Aspects are characterised in much the same way you would a person in a predictive model, except they're influenced by the understanding of the person who invokes them, so there's no universal characterisation for any of them, which makes describing any given ritual for anyone else a bit worthless."
"Oh. But then—"
"Oh, thank God! Wine!" Aster exclaimed as their host returned. "Thank you, Luca, my hero. If I have to listen to endless nerdy arithmancy shite, I would infinitely prefer to be pissed while doing so."
Luca seemed slightly startled by her vehemence, almost spilled pouring her wine, but recovered quickly. "You are very welcome, young lady. We will have food for you all shortly."
Bella echoed her thanks as he excused himself again.
"I take it you don't come to this place for the talk?"
"Not to talk to the staff. Did you not notice the anti-eavesdropping charms?" Well, now that she pointed it out, there were kind of a lot of them... "And it's more private than the Parliament. They're technically not open for lunch at all, but they're friends of Zee's aunt Adara, so we get special treatment."
Adara was a metamorph and a mind mage, which was just cheating at life. At least one of her personae was supposedly a notorious grifter and jewel thief — this place was probably a front for the Mafia or something.
"Ah, care to fill me in on what all that was about?" Evans asked.
"Just Asteria being a lush."
"Fuck you, Bella."
"I'm up for it if you are, carina. Though, not right now, I did track you down for a reason." Aster felt her face grow slightly warm. No, bad thoughts! Do not think about how much fun that might be... "And it wasn't to give an arithmancy lecture."
Yes, good, think about arithmancy, or Evans being a fucking de Mort! Not Bella and getting her back for that caloris jinx, earlier... Damn it! (She'd always been fucking terrible at pink elephants.)
"Er, right... Um, why did you, then? This isn't a recruitment pitch, is it? Because if it is, I'll save you some time. I already have plans for after leaving school."
"It's not. Aster tells me you're adopted."
"So it seems. I suppose you subscribe to her Death Eater Rape Baby theory?"
"Mmm, you could say that. Though I was under the impression that the theory was a little more specific than that."
"You told me there was no possible way that de Mort could have a kid my age," Aster reminded her.
"Yes, but then I actually went back and looked up the date we did that ritual, and, well... When is your birthday, exactly?"
"July first."
"Of Nineteen-Sixty?" Evans nodded. "Which would put your conception right around Mabon of Fifty-Nine?"
"Er...I guess so? Maybe closer to the beginning of the month, but... Where exactly are you going with this?" Evans asked, a note of doubt in her tone suggesting she knew the answer to that question already, and didn't think it was quite as ridiculous as it really ought to seem.
"I think you know exactly where I'm going with this. On a scale of shrug to starting a duel here and now, how upset would you be if I told you my Lord raped your mother as a ritual sacrifice, and two years later I tortured her into insanity because she wouldn't drop her investigation of us? Hypothetically speaking."
Evans just stared at her for a long moment, the flat look broken by a sip of wine, but still just...unnervingly calm. Did she just not believe it? Because Aster would have expected a killing curse glare at least. Certainly not for her to casually inform Bella that, "Hypothetically speaking, I'd say you must be mistaken. My sire's name was Thomas Riddle."
Now it was Bella's turn to go unnervingly quiet. And still — had she actually turned herself into a vampire when no one was looking?
"That's not exactly convincing evidence to the contrary, Evans. De Mort's first name is Thom, and everyone knows his last name is fake. How do you even know that, anyway?"
"I asked Persephone this morning, and there are loads of people named Tom, Aster. It's not exactly uncommon."
Maybe it was just hard to get worked up about people being tortured and killed when you've just been asking Magic questions in your dreams — which had to be what she meant, because she might've had time to light a candle or two while Aster was in the shower this morning, but certainly not time to make any sort of proper offering or invocation. Never mind that they'd been in the school and any external response from anything as powerful as Death would definitely have alerted someone. "No, but casually talking to bloody gods is uncommon — creepy fucking sociopaths, both of you."
"I'm pretty fucking certain that not every ritualist in the bloody world is related—" Her voice cut off suddenly under the silencing jinx Bella tended to throw around whenever she was tired of hearing stupid, childish arguments. That annoyed her, even if the idea that Bella had tortured her mother into catatonia didn't. Her eyes flashed with power and rage, the flare of magic breaking the spell. "Hey!"
Bella, of course, was completely unintimidated — short of actually asking Magic to fuck up her life, there was practically nothing Evans could really do to threaten her. And even that wasn't guaranteed to work, Bella and de Mort had their own allies among the gods. She did sound kind of...shaken probably wasn't the right word — suddenly and unusually intense, suggesting a degree of investment that hadn't been there before — asking, "What else did she tell you? Kore."
Evans's response was delayed by the arrival of their food, but Bella maintained that same uncomfortable intensity until she said, "He was the son of a muggle and a squib, raised in a muggle orphanage. He's still alive, but he doesn't use that name anymore in this universe, so—"
"So, it's really only more likely that he's going by, say, de Mort now?"
"Shut up, Aster! No one asked you!"
Aster opened her mouth to respond with Evans's line about being a nice person, volunteering information, but closed it again at Bella's warning glare. "She's right, though, you know. It would mean Thom lied to me about where he came from—" He claimed, Aster was pretty sure, to be an unrecognised bastard of some French noble house. Mortis, maybe, or one of the houses that had died out in Grindelwald's purges like Durant or Fèvre. "—but," she grinned, "that's a good thing."
"What?" Aster couldn't imagine a single way in which Bella would think her precious lord and master lying to her about being a fucking mudblood — worse, being an actual muggleborn — was a good thing.
"Oh, well, I lied to him about killing her mother," she said, shrugging. "I was told I had to give her a chance, so it was practically guaranteed she was going to escape. I think this makes us even. Well, I was nine at the time. I hadn't sworn my vows yet. He kept lying to me after swearing he wouldn't, so technically his lie is worse. He should be pleased I'm willing to call it even instead of demanding he find some way to make it up to me."
"We never established your lord is my sire," Evans pointed out, holding up a finger for silence as Bella began to respond. She actually shut her mouth, smirking like a cat in cream, because that was such a de Mort thing to do. "But if he were, would that put me in some sort of negotiating position? Hypothetically speaking."
Bella cackled. "Oh, yes, you're definitely his daughter."
Evans pouted at her. "I still don't know why you're so sure of that."
"Maybe because your answer to would you be upset if we raped and tortured your biological mother is what's in it for me?" Aster suggested. "Does that mean Evans is actually part snake?"
"What? No, don't be ridiculous, Aster."
Evans ignored the snake question entirely. "Am I supposed to grieve for a woman I never knew? I think I'm still more annoyed with my mum hiding that I was adopted for my entire life. I can't say I'm pleased about it, but I do like existing, so I can't really hold the circumstances of my conception against them. I'm less pleased about Bella torturing her until her brain melted or whatever, but she was an Auror. Presumably she posed an actual threat to them and they wanted to make an example of her—"
Bella shrugged. "We could have just killed her, but I needed someone to practise pain curses on. Since we were getting rid of her anyway, it seemed more efficient to use her than kidnap someone else just for that."
Oh, yes, very commendable, consolidating the people you're planning on torturing to death, or as good as.
Evans's eyes narrowed, as though just for practice was a less acceptable excuse for torturing her bearer than because they were on opposite sides of the law — ignoring that she was just trying to hold them accountable for raping her, on top of whatever other criminal activities they'd been up to. "How very ethical of you. Anyway, I may not like it, but I'm not going to take it personally, declare a blood feud against them or something. I mean, even if I did take it personally I wouldn't declare a blood feud against them — I know they could kill me without even thinking about it, I'm not stupid, but that's so not the point. And I can't imagine any incentive you might have to lie about this, so I'm willing to provisionally accept that it's possible that your lord is my sire. Is there any reason I should care? Is there any reason he should care? So yeah, I guess you could say my answer is what's in it for me?"
"I suppose that depends entirely on what you want from me," de Mort said, strolling casually out of a shadowy corner, glamoured to look completely human — thin-faced and pale, with piercing blue eyes and dark hair, "aged" from what Aster guessed he probably looked like before he embarked on his quest to become a carnival freak, but not the red-eyed, slightly strung out, someone's-done-too-many-power-enhancing-rituals "Dark Lord" face he sometimes wore in public when he didn't want pretty Thom de Mort to be associated with whatever business he was conducting. She didn't see him appear, but somehow she wasn't surprised that he was there, and apparently knew exactly what was going on. Bella had probably summoned the creepy bastard somehow, and if you got the details of our conversation from me, kindly piss off, Lord Snake-face.
His lips (or the illusion thereof) twitched slightly. Bella filled me in.
GET OUT OF MY HEAD, DE MORT! I MEAN RIDDLE!
"I haven't thought of myself as Riddle in ages, you know," he said aloud, confirming Evans's parentage as casually as he took a seat beside Bella and stole an anchovy off her pizza. "And I never told you I wasn't raised by muggles. In fact, my generally negative opinion of their society is based almost entirely on my own experience growing up in it. Not that Magical Britain really did any better by me."
Bella sniffed, apparently accepting that excuse for his lies, at least provisionally. "Thom, meet Lily Evans, known as Asphodel in certain circles. Asphodel, this is Thom de Mort, Lord of the Knights of Walpurgis — and apparently your father."
"Usually he looks more snake-like," Aster volunteered.
"Bella could have been in the middle of Charing for all I knew, and going about un-glamoured tends to cause a scene."
Bella smacked his hand as he reached for another anchovy. "That's only cute when I do it to Mickey," she informed him. "Order your own."
He didn't, instead conjuring a glass and helping himself to the wine. "So, Daughter. What is it exactly that you were hoping to negotiate for?"
"Severus Snape," she said coolly. "He's mine. You can't have him."
"Who?"
"Promising hedgewitch in the girls' year. Specialises in potions and mind magic. Reggie's been trying to recruit him to the Cause." Apparently Bella had made a point of looking into the kid Aster had tried to get rid of, because she hadn't known that two weeks ago.
"Ah, yes," de Mort said, in a tone suggesting that he totally knew who they were talking about now, because he definitely paid attention to everything that was going on at every level of his organisation.
"The overgrown dungeon bat I was trying to get expelled last month."
"Oh! Right, okay. And what are you offering in exchange for Mister Snape?"
"Er... Honestly? I hadn't really given it much thought, I didn't think this negotiation was going to happen immediately. I kind of just wanted to know if maybe I should think about it, you know, because I might theoretically have some kind of leverage."
"You don't." The Dark Lord sounded almost disinterested — certainly entirely unthreatened. "I suppose you could attempt to link Riddle or de Mort to the crimes you know me to have committed, which might cause me some slight inconvenience—" Oh, right, Aster tended to forget it wasn't common knowledge outside of his allies' families that de Mort was the Dark Lord. Most people actually considered him more or less respectable, like Bella. "—but you would in so doing publicly out yourself as my daughter, which would be far more inconvenient for you than it would be for me."
Evans pouted. "Well, you still can't have Sev. He's mine. He's mine like Bella is yours, and has been since we were nine years old."
Aster snorted. She couldn't help it — the first thing she thought of when she thought of Bella belonging to de Mort was her letting him carve up her back last time Aster had seen them together. Nor could she help saying, when Evans glared at her for interrupting, "That's some pretty kinky shite for a nine-year-old. Just saying."
"Do you need help recalling the sort of kinky shite you were into at the age of nine?" de Mort asked, tugging a memory of Aster and Narcissa practicing the Imperius on each other at that age to the front of her mind. Their excuse had been learning to resist it, after Cygnus used it on Meda, but they'd mostly just forced each other to do increasingly humiliating things, which had been fun in a way Aster hadn't really understood at the time but now recognised as being really fucking hot.
...She was pretty sure that was his way of saying, shut up, this has nothing to do with you.
Give the girl a biscuit, de Mort thought, his tone patronising as fuck.
"Piss off," she snapped.
"Aster, shut up, this has nothing to do with you," Evans said, which was just creepy as hell.
Did you make her say that?
No, the resemblance truly is uncanny.
Bella apparently thought so, too, giggling and saying, "Becoming a girl was one thing, Aster, but going out and finding your own version of my Lord to follow might be slightly excessive, so far as imitation goes. Not that I disapprove, I'm sure she'll do a better job keeping you in check than dear Cousin Jamie, but—"
"This has nothing to do with you, either," Evans interrupted, glowering at Bella.
Bella smirked, magic twisting in the air around them at her will, emphasising that she could crush Evans like a bug if she so chose. "Is this the bit where you say I'm not your real mum?"
"No, this is the bit where I tell you I'm not intimidated, and you keep upping the ante until your Lord tells you to knock it off, because this has nothing to do with you."
De Mort sniggered and hissed something at Bella, who rolled her eyes.
"Hey! Just because I might be your daughter, doesn't mean I'm going to join your stupid Revolution. Especially if the ideology has really drifted enough that you think you're a fucking king of some kind."
Aster should probably be surprised that Evans was a parselmouth, but she really, really wasn't. For that matter, she hadn't found Bella's don't be ridiculous brush-off to be a convincing denial of Evans actually being part snake, either.
"What part of stop antagonising the little serpent princess sounded like it had anything to do with the Cause?" Bella asked.
"The part where it was possessive and implied she belongs, maybe?"
Bella rolled her eyes. "Fine, stop antagonising our little serpent princess. As in, Yes, Bella, I know she's about as threatening as a baby basilisk, and that's just fucking adorable, but stop teasing our daughter. Nothing to do with the Cause or the Death Eaters, though it is pretty fucking obvious you do belong on our side of the war."
"...our daughter?" Evans repeated, ignoring the totally not a recruitment pitch. Apparently she hadn't caught the implication behind not your real mum a second ago.
Aster wasn't surprised, Bella and de Mort were practically married, in every sense except legally. Obviously she would consider his long lost daughter to be hers as well. And, well, the Family could be a bit weird about reckoning kinship anyway. Anyone with the name Black was Family, obviously, but also first cousins on their mothers' sides (or first cousins of cousins raised as your own siblings — Aster only had one set of actual first cousins, but she and Reg kind of considered the Rosiers to be more closely related than they actually were because of Narcissa), and anyone whose mother (or maternal grandmother) was a Black (if they liked them), and occasionally more distantly related cousins who happened to be particularly dark-minded and/or mad and/or god-touched and therefore acted more like a Black than a Fawley or Parkinson or whatever. Evans would fit right in with most of the Blacks, so it wasn't much of a stretch that Bella would be open to considering her Family. Hell, Aster wouldn't be surprised if she offered to adopt Evans, she was probably exactly the sort of daughter Bella would have liked to have had (if she'd ever wanted kids).
"If she hadn't refused to kill your mother, you wouldn't be here," de Mort pointed out. "And you would describe her as—" (strangled hissing noise) "—or—" (could be the exact same bloody hissing noise, for all Aster knew) "—in Parsel." (More hissing, completely indistinguishable from the other hissing.) "—just means you share a nest. The exact nature of the relationship between you and Bella isn't specified, but given that Bella has been my consort rather than my student for several years now, our daughter is a better translation than your sister."
"You do realise you're implying that your relationship is weirdly incestuous, right?" Aster interjected, mostly to remind them that she was still there and didn't speak fucking Snakeish.
"Pretty sure—" (hiss, hiss, meaningless hiss) "—applies to you, too, since they turned you into a girl and we live together," Evans said. "So that one time we fucked is now retroactively incestuous, too."
Which didn't make the idea of doing it again any less appealing. Aster might not be inclined to admit it to most people — normal people — but close cousins were generally considered the best matches in the House of Black, because (as de Mort had recently reminded her with that memory of Cissy) they tended to be a bit mad and a bit cruel and could, generally speaking, keep up. (Jamie thought she was weird for not having any preference to speak of when it came to the sex of her partners, but honestly anyone who wasn't Family, or at least a sadistic, manipulative bitch, was a bit second-rate. Their sex had nothing to do with it.)
Bella smirked. "Yes, well, welcome to the House of Black. Our entire family tree is one big incest joke. I could adopt you," she offered. "Make it official."
Called it. Sure, she'd suggested it as one of those jokes that could not be a joke, if you wanted to take it seriously, but Evans actually seemed to be considering it, which, on the one hand, made perfect (mad) sense, but on the other... Aster was pretty sure Evans didn't actually understand what it meant to be part of the Family, or even a House in general — being subject to Family Magic and House Law, not to mention having to deal with social obligations as a member of a Noble and Most Ancient House. "Am I still supposed to be making sure you don't do anything insane today?"
"I think we agreed that you were supposed to be making sure I didn't do anything that I could get arrested for — or, failing that, help me not get caught. But I take your point. I'll think about it and get back to you." Which was possibly the most absurd answer she could possibly have given, even more so than an enthusiastic yes, let's do it, right now! — at least that would be understandable from a social climbing perspective. Taking it seriously, but acting like it wasn't really a big deal, was just ridiculous. Aster might not have a very high opinion of them, but being invited to join the House of Black was kind of major. (Even if that invitation was apparently made completely impulsively — she was pretty sure Arcturus would be less enthusiastic about the idea than Bella.) "I do already have a family, you know. I'm not really in the market for a new one, no matter how annoyed I am with my mum at the moment. The only thing I actually want from either of you is for your idiot recruiters to leave Sev alone."
"Ah, yes, your little thrall."
Evans's eyes flashed, her voice taking on a distinctly offended tone. "Thrall? He's my friend, not my fucking slave!"
De Mort chuckled. "I do know where you were going with your declaration before Aster interrupted earlier. He's yours. You own him. You're the most important person in his world. He would die for you, if you asked him to. Call it whatever you like — love or obsession or loyal friendship — but I recognise enthrallment when I see it."
"Oh, for fuck's sake, I'm not a mind mage, I can't just enthrall someone! And I think Sev would have noticed—"
"You are, though. And you don't need mind magic to enthrall someone, it just takes longer."
"What?"
Aster was with Evans on this one. Yes, what?!
"You are a mind mage. A very, very weak one, granted — you obviously didn't compel this boy to love you — but you didn't actually think it was entirely normal, to be that good at reading people and showing them exactly what they want to see in you." That wasn't a question, because of course it wasn't, this was de Mort.
"Well, no, but I thought it was just, you know, magic making me seem a little more charismatic than I really am. I mean, you three are all shiny and attractive, just...because magic likes you. I thought it was just that."
"Mmm, no. That's being graced by magic, it's different. As is the gravity exerted by the magic of powerful sorcerers, which is also part of what you're feeling from Bella and myself. Being graced — god-touched, if you like — doesn't make you particularly likeable or charming. That is a subconscious mind-magic effect, giving you an intuitive understanding of what people want from you, how they'll react if you do or say certain things, maybe pushing them a little to overlook minor slips in the performance of a persona."
Evans glared at him as though she didn't believe him, though Aster thought that sounded unnervingly spot-on. She'd thought it was weird that they'd managed to spend literally hours talking the first time they ever held a proper conversation, even as it was happening, but that hadn't stopped her continuing it, or agreeing to go visit Evans's parents the next day. Mind magic being involved seemed a perfectly reasonable explanation to her. "Oh, come off it! It's not like everyone likes me! Aster doesn't, or my roommates, or my bloody family for that matter!"
The Dark Wanker smirked. "Aster actually does like you — the Blacks can be a bit fuzzy on the distinctions between friends and enemies and antagonising and flirting." Aster glared at him for implying that Aster was flirting with Evans, because she definitely wasn't. (Keep telling yourself that, star-child.) "You didn't want your roommates to like you. You wanted them to give you space. Same with your muggle family — you want to distance yourself from them, let your relationship with them just fade away, because— Yes, actually. Not often, most people either fear me or respect me too much to actually tell me I'm creepy, but it does happen."
"Because you are creepy," Aster reminded him, though it sounded like Evans just had, too. "I'm sure everyone else is thinking it too, even if they don't want to admit it."
De Mort shrugged, nodded. "There are a few exceptions, but yes. I try not to let it bother me."
Uh-huh. Because Aster was so sure it was even possible to hurt de Mort's feelings — honestly, they were just as nonexistent as Evans's. That was one of the things that had made Aster think she was his daughter in the first place.
Oh, because her being a god-touched parselmouth with control issues and a distinct physical resemblance to myself didn't give it away?
Get OUT of my head!
The ironic thing about you demanding I leave you alone is that you aren't actually uncomfortable with my presence or the invasion of your privacy, you just think you should be.
You may have noticed, the Blacks can be a bit fuzzy on the concept of privacy. The memory of Bella inviting her to continue masturbating while she showered came to mind. But I don't like other voices talking in my head! Even if she knew it wasn't a hallucination sort of voice, and the Black Madness didn't normally involve much hearing voices, anyway — unless the gods were talking to you, she guessed — but she still didn't like feeling like a bloody crazy person, and hearing voices in your bloody head was definitely crazy person territory!
And yet, talking back to foreign voices in your head comes so very naturally to you.
I'm ignoring you. This is me, ignoring you. Piss off. She conjured a mental image of herself flipping the bird at a snake-faced caricature of de Mort, just for good measure, before very pointedly turning her attention back to the conversation which had continued between the other three while she'd been distracted by the snake-faced creep, who was probably still eavesdropping on her if the smirk he gave her was any indication, though he didn't actually say anything. In her head or otherwise.
They'd gotten off topic again, assuming the topic was still to convince Bella to tell Reggie to lay off Snape. Though, it might have shifted to trying to recruit Evans instead. Or...building a floating island? What? "What the hell is New Avalon?"
Evans rolled her eyes. "Read the bloody manifesto, Aster!"
"Well I would, but no one gave me a copy! I didn't even know there was a fucking manifesto!"
"Yes, well, you were already so firmly set against joining us by the time you were old enough to read it and think critically about the political climate in which we live, I assumed you'd just burn it," Bella explained.
Well, that did admittedly sound like something Aster would do — probably with the Marauders, as a dramatic symbolic act demonstrating her rejection of everything the Death Eaters stood for — but obviously she would read it first. It was important to know what your enemy was actually trying to accomplish. Bella knew that — she'd taught her that, for fuck's sake!
"I'll owl you a copy if you agree to talk to Dumbledore about it after you read it," de Mort offered.
"What? Why?"
"Obviously he would burn it without reading it. If he understood exactly what we want, he might be far less resistant to the idea of opening negotiations between ourselves and the Wizengamot. We're hardly the monsters he believes us to be — I might go so far as to say he's swallowed too much of his own propaganda on that front."
Aster's eyes narrowed involuntarily. "I suppose all those children in Kensington slaughtered themselves, then."
"Er...right. Is that really necessary? The whole killing children thing?" Evans asked, sounding slightly uncomfortable for the first time all day. Which was a bloody stupid question, obviously it wasn't necessary. How could it possibly be?
"It's expedient," de Mort said.
"And fun." De Mort raised an eyebrow at Bella, who gave him an unrepentant shrug, because while de Mort might not be as much of a monster as Dumbledore thought he was — maybe, in the scale of his violence, at least — the Light underestimated how sick and twisted Bella was by quite a lot. "What? You told me to get their attention. You didn't say I couldn't have fun while I was poking sleeping dragons. Though, the fun part is really more fighting anyone who shows up to stop you killing children," she explained, presumably for Evans's benefit. "The children themselves don't tend to put up much of a fight, but Aurors seem to find murders more abhorrent the younger the victims are, so."
Evans looked for a moment as though she had something to say to that, but she clearly thought better of it. "Expedient to what end?"
"Sovereignty, obviously."
"Forcing the Wizengamot to come to the table and negotiate with us as an independent state," Bella elaborated. "The Ministry can't stop us by force. The I.C.W. might be able to, but I can definitely turn Great Britain into a blood-soaked, Staute-shattering mess before they manage it — and Dumbledore knows it, he'd be a fucking fool to invite them to the party. At this point it's really just a matter of time until they admit that we are effectively outside of their control. If Crouch and Dumbledore weren't such stubborn arses, I suspect we'd already be at the negotiation stage. But alas, it seems I need to cut the message a little deeper yet." Bella grinned, making it clear that she was in no way disappointed about Britain's stubborn refusal to just let "New Avalon" secede and form their own Miskatonic-like state.
Where would they even put it? Were they really building a bloody travelling island for themselves?
Yes, Project Atlantis, de Mort slipped into her mind. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near the point of viability yet. Ideally, we want the Isle of Man for New Avalon. It would hardly be any effort at all to relocate any magical inhabitants who prefer to remain in Britain, and I have it on good authority that the Queen would be willing to discuss an arrangement very similar to the one Miskatonic holds with the American Confederation, in anticipation of the inevitable failure of the Statute.
Oh. Well...
Fuck.
That actually...seemed kind of reasonable. Well, it was still bloody mad, just deciding that you were going to carve out your own bloody country for yourself, but Aster hadn't realised they had, like, a concrete goal.
She meant, building a bloody island was the kind of cloud-castle dreaming that you could work toward your whole life without actually achieving. Taking over Mann actually seemed possible. Like, short-term, where do you see yourself in five years possible.
De Mort just smirked at her, tipping his wine glass a bit in acknowledgment of that realisation, before saying (in response to something Evans had said, she thought, she'd gotten distracted again), "Yes, well, keep it in mind that if you were to join us, you wouldn't have to profess an interest in healing in order to justify your knowledge of the Maleficia."
"I don't have to say I want to be a healer now — forensic spell-reconstruction was also an option. I actually like healing. I mean, I know I'd be a shite paediatrician or G.P., but you don't need a good bedside manner to be an emergency intake cursebreaker-healer any more than you do to be a bloody surgeon, and generally speaking healing charms are more about control than raw power, and anatomy is just a fascinating subject. Besides, I've been playing with Life and Death since I was, what? seven or eight? Seemed the natural choice, really."
De Mort seemed to be trying not to smile. "Just for the record, your...friend was right, bringing dead kittens back to life isn't normal accidental magic."
Evans rolled her eyes. "Well, obviously. I don't think I've done magic accidentally since I was about four. I definitely meant to bring her back. I just...don't really know how I did it. She just shouldn't have been dead. There wasn't even anything wrong with her, some cruel bastard fucking drowned her, probably because black cats are bad luck or some equally stupid reason."
"Wait, are you saying that evil little moggy you call a familiar is actually undead? Like, a bloody cat-inferius, or something?" It was bad enough Evans's stupid cat had taken to sleeping on Aster's bed, getting its bloody fur everywhere, if it was actually a dead cat... Well, she wouldn't feel at all bad about chucking it out a window next time she caught it stretched out on her fucking pillow, was all she had to say.
Evans glared at her. "That evil little moggy has a name, it's Nyx, and she's not evil, and she is my familiar, which is how I know she hates you because you kicked her down the stairs when we were first-years."
"She was trying to trip me!" Aster interjected. Evans ignored this as she had since they were eleven, but it was absolutely true, that stupid animal had it out for her!
"And she's not a bloody inferius, she's a living cat, she just happens to have been dead for a few hours when she was a few weeks old."
"Living might be overstating the case, a bit," de Mort said, presumably looking a bit closer at the memory as discussing it drew it closer to the surface. "Yes, she grew up, which traditional undead wouldn't, but if I had to guess her life is probably dependent on yours. That flash there, that was the bond between you taking hold, your life-spark shifting to animate her as well."
"I thought that was just..."
"No, those the life hadn't entirely faded from."
The really annoying thing about legilimens is only being able to hear half the conversation, Aster thought at de Mort.
He responded by pushing a memory of a tiny Lily Evans — presumably, it was from a first-person perspective, but Snape was there and looked to be about seven years old — cradling a dead bird in her hands, its neck snapped from flying into a window just moments ago, feeling with bone-deep certainty that this creature should not be dead.
Deciding, with a frankly disturbing degree of conviction, that she wouldn't let it be dead.
Magic twisted around her, flowing through her and into the broken bird, repairing crushed bones and torn muscles as she breathed a command over it, so lightly Aster thought Snape might not have heard it. "Wake up." There was a jolt, the magic between them snapping, sudden exhaustion dragging at her. The bird's eyes shot open as it fluttered and righted itself, launched itself into the air and away. There was a grin tugging at Evans's lips, a feeling of elation—
Tiny Snape caught her eye, every bit as serious as he still was practically all the time, awe and terror in his voice as he said, "Lily...that bird was dead."
Her grin stretched wider. "And now it's not."
"...Don't tell anyone about this."
From the way de Mort was talking, that wasn't the only time she'd done something like that either, which was just fucking terrifying. "You only needed to trap their life-spark in their bodies and support them long enough to repair the physical damage — a bit like the bridging technique used to sustain the connection between body and soul in the process of creating a vampire. Your Nyx is a textbook Lazarus Resurrection, reigniting and sustaining the life-spark in an otherwise stable vessel, but rather than Death possessing the vessel and simulating the presence of its soul you're projecting intelligence and awareness through the approximation of a familiar bond." He grinned. "It's barely necromancy, since cats are hardly sapient creatures, but still neat. And very impressive for an eight-year-old."
Evans just blinked at him. "Oh. Um...thanks?"
"Ooh! You should try resurrecting someone who's been avada'd sometime," Bella suggested, interrupting what would be a very touching father-daughter bonding moment if they were in a bloody novel, and not talking about the fucking undead cat that was probably shedding all over Aster's favourite blanket right now. "If you do it before their soul starts to assimilate, it should even hold together on its own."
"Er...no," Evans said, shaking her head emphatically. "Even if it does take a few days for a soul to assimilate into Magic, they're still beyond the Veil as soon as their ties to the mortal plane break. If I didn't trap them here, I'd have to ask for them back — and I can pretty much guarantee Persephone wouldn't give them to me if I killed them just to practise reviving them—" Aster wondered if she realised she was implying that Persephone would let her play with the unassimilated souls of the dead under some other circumstances. Probably not, she decided, because that was a hell of a thing to imply! "—and if I did trap them first, that would just be bridging them over. There are less traumatic ways to temporarily remove a soul from a body. Erm, theoretically. Which I would know nothing about, because that would be very illegal."
Bella snorted, but otherwise ignored Evans's nod toward pretending they weren't having lunch with a couple of crazy people who didn't give a single flying fuck whether she'd been poking around with soul magic in her spare time. "Well, obviously you wouldn't avada them yourself."
"Pretty sure just standing there while you kill them so I can try to bring them back would also be frowned upon. Just a hunch," Evans said, rolling her eyes.
Bella pouted at her. "You're no fun."
"I'm loads of fun, I'm just not stupid. I'm not going to annoy Death just to amuse you. I still haven't repaid her for the last favour she granted me. I mean, I would argue that was mostly Hecate's fault, but I still owe her something nice."
"Is there a story there? It sounds like there's a story there."
There was. One Aster had already heard, at least the short version of, and she was pretty fucking sure the longer version was going to meander off into horrible tangents on magical theory because of course it was, de Mort, Evans, and Bella were the three biggest magic theory nerds she'd ever met (in that order). "Luca! Please! Save me! We need more wine!"