One more thing...
"So," Aster announced, slamming open the door to the courtyard garden where Bella was apparently attempting to teach Evans how to apparate. "I think I'm done talking to McKinnon, now."
Both Bella and Evans turned to stare at her. She glowered back, dropping onto a nearby bench, then winced — she'd briefly forgotten she was still injured.
"Elaborate," Bella suggested, at exactly the same time Evans said, "What? Why?"
Possibly the worst part of being rich and well-connected was that you could get last-minute appointments with top experts in their fields, even when you'd really prefer not to go to such an appointment at all. Dorea had apparently written McKinnon right around the same time she'd written to Bella this morning, asking him to make time for her this afternoon, and he'd just gone ahead and done it, sent her an owl at noon informing her that he was squeezing her in at two. Which was a great way to completely ruin her afternoon, if she did say so herself.
"Because engineering a moment of catharsis didn't fly with him, and he just spent over an hour trying to lead me into admitting that last night was bad — without actually saying it himself because that would be openly judgy, and mind healers are only allowed to be judgy if they're subtly judgy — and I'm not actually as okay as I think I am, and convince me that I shouldn't cut James out of my life completely because that's just avoiding dealing with the problem, and that I should talk to Dorea before I do anything rash like letting you adopt me back into the House, because don't I hate the House? and throwing my words from like three weeks ago back in my face, as though that's not basically for fucking ever, and I can't guarantee that if I have to go back, I won't try to stab him for trying to tell me how I feel, and if I have to spend another hour of my life, ever, just sitting there while someone fucking lurks in my head and refuses to even talk to me — McKinnon might actually be a bigger creep than de Mort — I might legitimately go mad. And since that would completely defeat the purpose of talking to a mind healer in the first place, and actually hurting him would probably be considered the opposite of progress, I'm thinking I'm done. Not going back."
"Isn't you having regular meetings with a mind healer a condition of you, you know, still going to school?" Evans pointed out.
Aster glared at her, because, yes, it was, and yes, she'd kind of forgotten that. "Maybe I won't go back to school, either."
She already had her OWLs, she could take her NEWTs independently. Fuck, if Bella was serious about adopting her, she'd have the resources to go to the Continent and take the international qualification exams, if she wanted to. (They had more subjects, like Offensive and Defensive Magic — which she could probably pass an exam on today — and were more widely recognised than NEWTs, anyway.)
Bella snorted. "You do know it's not McKinnon's job to coddle you, either, right? Also, you're allowed to tell him to get the fuck out of your head. Unlike Thom, he's actually professionally obligated to respect that sort of request."
She transferred her glare to her cousin. "You do know you sound an awful lot like you're on his side right now, right?"
Bella gave her a nonchalant shrug. "You're not as 'okay' as you think you are, and you probably should admit that asking people to beat the shite out of you isn't really healthy, normal-people behaviour."
For a long moment, Aster was completely without words. "You are such a fucking hypocrite!"
"No, I really am 'okay' — I'm aware of my own instabilities and know how to compensate for them. I'm also aware that normal people consider about eighty...five per cent of everything I do to be disturbing or unhealthy or generally terrifying. That doesn't mean I think it's a problem, or I'm going to stop, but there's no point denying it. And besides, you're not me."
"I'm aware of that, thanks." Even if everyone else kind of seemed to think she was, or wanted to be.
"Oh, stop being a pouty little brat. There's a difference between letting someone hurt you or hurting yourself because you hate yourself and think you deserve it, and letting someone hurt you because they need to or you like the way it feels or because it's a sort of game or because the results are pretty, or you want to prove you can do the impossible, or whatever. Pain is temporary, and there's really very little magic can't heal. McKinnon knows that. He might not approve — actually, I'm sure he doesn't, violence and pain make him ill — but the unhealthy part that a mind healer would say you need to work on is hating yourself. Or, well, not hating yourself. You know what I mean."
Aster did not stop being a pouty little brat, because pouting was really the only reasonable response to what was...probably a good point, even if she didn't want to admit it. Well, that or changing the subject. "How the hell do you even know that? What mind healers think about anything, I mean. And that McKinnon's a bit wet, for that matter."
That little smirk said that Bella knew exactly why she was changing the subject, but she did go along with it. "Mmm, Zee spent quite a lot of time with mind healers when we were younger. Kind of hard to say whether she resents their attempting to 'fix' her more than she appreciates that they taught her how to manipulate people. Well, she absolutely hated the one who compelled her to act normal as a child, we killed him for her fifteenth birthday—" Of course they had. "—but the ones her parents forced her to talk to after they moved here, she's more ambivalent about them. She finds normal people and their motivations and weaknesses to be fascinating, you know. Most of what I know about mind-healing I've picked up from her. And Thom had a freeform magic project he was working on with McKinnon before I started school. We've met a few times. He's good at what he does."
Which was basically Bella saying, you should keep talking to him. "He thinks I need to talk to James — gave me some dragonshite about the end of relationships needing closure — and letting you adopt me back into the House is a bad idea," Aster reminded her.
"So? He can't actually make you do or not do anything. Probably just wants you to make an argument and try to convince him, force you to slow down and think through exactly why you want to do shite. Which doesn't actually help making decisions, but does help figuring out how normal people are going to react to shite you do, so not a completely useless exercise. Don't let him convince you to talk to Potter again, though."
"Why not?" Both Aster and Bella turned to give Evans an are you mad look. "Yes, he's a complete toe-rag and the world's biggest idiot, but it's not like he's going to be able to convince Aster to come back to him."
"No, but..." Bella trailed off, apparently trying to think how to explain that that wasn't really the concern, here, to someone who didn't get feeling shite, or what it really meant to be completely fucking mad.
"She's afraid I'll lose it and actually kill him, because that's what she would do, if she were me."
"No, if you were going to kill him, you would have done that instead of running away yesterday. It's more that he's what Thom would call a destabilising influence. Even if he's not trying to, there's a pretty solid chance that talking to him again would start tipping Aster back into Madness again, and she's much more likely to become suicidally depressed than homicidally enraged. Which should be avoided, because it's much harder to pull someone back up than it is to just let them kill whoever pissed them off."
"...Oh."
Well, based on the past couple of months, Aster couldn't really argue with that. No matter how much she might like to. "It's fine, I don't want to talk to him, he's fucking dead to me. That's about as over as a relationship gets."
Evans frowned. "I think the whole closure thing would be more on Potter's side."
"Well, then, it's even stupider than I thought, and I care even less."
"No, I mean, he's dead to you, but that doesn't mean he's going to let you go. He's probably still going to try to talk to you. Maybe you really shouldn't come back to school with me."
Wait— "You'd go back without me?" Aster asked, hating how shocked and whiny she sounded. Of course Evans wanted to go back to school, she had a fucking life that she hadn't completely ruined over the past two months. Samhain and the admission that de Mort was her sire might've damaged it, a bit, but she could still salvage it if she were to go back tonight. "You don't have to, you could stay here, too."
Evans actually looked like she was considering it, whether there were really any reasons she couldn't just...stay. Snape, maybe, but he could come, too, if he had to. (Ancient House was huge, it wasn't like they didn't have the beds, and she liked Evans enough to put up with living with Snape if she insisted.)
But before she could say anything one way or the other, Bella interrupted, smirking broadly. "Have you changed your mind about the Cause, then?"
Oh, right. Moving in with Bella would kind of be tantamount to joining the bloody Death Eaters, wouldn't it. "I could commandeer the Hogsmeade Cottage, or the townhouse in Cobh, or something."
"You're going to have an awfully hard time convincing the Old Goat to stop fighting a losing war from Cobh." Oh. Right. Aster had kind of forgotten about that. "Not that I'm complaining," Bella continued, "but—"
Aster groaned. Bella would just love it, if the war dragged on another ten years. And even if she didn't care if James died in a fire, she didn't want Marley and Alice and everyone to join the Aurors and promptly get themselves killed without her (or at all, if she could possibly stop it). "Fine, I'll go back! But, in the meanwhile, I would like to not talk about McKinnon or James or me being a crazy person, or anything. Please. I'm so sick of talking! Let's do something fun!"
Bella grinned. "Practice fight?"
"Yes, sure, anything but more bloody talking!" She was definitely going to get her arse handed to her, but at the moment, she found she didn't much care.
"Bella, did you forget Aster's injured?" Evans asked sternly, as though that made any difference to speak of.
"You don't really think people only try to kill you when you're completely uninjured, well-rested, and ready for them, do you?" Bella asked, sounding convincingly concerned that Evans might.
Evans herself didn't seem to realise how serious she was, though. "Generally, people don't try to kill me at all. Or Aster."
"That's really no reason not to learn how to defend yourself. It's better to know how and never need to than not know how if and when someone does try to kill you. Come on, let's go," she said firmly, heading back inside.
"Go where?"
"The training fields, obviously." They were on the opposite side of the building. She groaned, stretching her back as she rose to follow. She was probably going to end up bleeding through her bandages, and cracking open her wounds again would make them more likely to scar, but she didn't really care. "Come on, she gets annoyed when she has to come back and get you."
"Have you forgotten you're injured?"
"Of course not. But I would rather practice than keep talking about stupid people being stupid, and Cassie taught me a couple really good light curses last week."
The more she thought about it, the more fun this sounded, really. The last time she'd had a serious practice bout with anyone was Cissy, the summer before last. She'd still been coming into her power, and at a hopeless disadvantage trying to do anything polarised, but she'd managed to hold her own until Cissy managed to blow up the residual energies that always built up around a duel in her face with a fucking levitation charm. (Fucking cheater.) It had been even longer since she'd practiced with Bella, and obviously she hadn't been able to touch her. Granted, she was still definitely going to get her arse handed to her, but Bella might underestimate her enough she could get at least a couple hits in, which, bragging rights forever.
She ducked into the unofficial armoury for a minute to grab a spare wand as a secondary focus — Bella liked her knife, but Aster had always thought that the versatility of a second wand made up for the lack of a close-range weapon. After all, if anyone managed to get close enough she could cut them, she'd probably already lost. Unfortunately, the one she used to use didn't seem to work for her anymore and it would take a while to find another (assuming any of them were willing to work for a light-attuned witch, they were all Black heirlooms, so would've had dark owners originally). She probably shouldn't be surprised, she had had to get a new wand after re-dedicating herself, but whatever. She had a knife, of course, but it was at school, and she still preferred to at least try to keep Bella out of knife-range, anyway. A saber would work, she guessed, tracing the blood runes to attune it to herself down the blade without even really thinking about it until Evans had asked what she was doing.
She was still explaining the concept of dueling with magical weapons when they got outside. Bella had gotten side-tracked by the werewolves, who were the only other people out here, practicing with slings and lead pellets which would, in a real battle, be enchanted to not only put holes in peoples' heads, but also transfer a curse to anyone who was hit in a less-lethal spot. (Bella could find ways for even non-magical Death Eaters to be effective on the battlefield, which was kind of impressive, and also kind of terrifying.)
"Bella! Are we going to do this or not?" she demanded, interrupting her bantering with Greyback and...she thought those two might be called Hati and Skoll.
"And who are these lovely young ladies?" probably Hati or Skoll asked, leering at her and Evans as they approached.
"Remember my cousin Sirius?"
"The one who doesn't hate us for being werewolves, just for being Death Eaters?" the other slight, dark-haired man asked.
"That's the one. He's a girl now, Asteria. And this is Asphodel, Thom's daughter. And mine, as soon as I convince Old Archie that I'm adopting her, and he can't stop me, so he might as well play along. Aster, Asphodel, meet Fenrir, Hati, and Skoll."
"Ah, hi," Evans muttered, clearly distracted by Greyback and his penchant for never wearing shirts if he could help it. Tall, broad-shouldered, and well-muscled, if it weren't for the werewolf scars, he'd look like he belonged on the cover of one of Marlene's novels.
"Why are you a girl, now?" Hati asked, quickly followed by Skoll's, "How are you a girl, now?"
"Magic, and it seemed like a good idea at the time," Aster said sourly, preemptively annoyed at the thought of another round of this shite.
So she was somewhat pleased when the brothers exchanged a look and a shrug. "Magic's fucking weird," Hati noted.
"You lot turn into wolves on the regular, and you think it's weird I turned into a girl?"
Skoll sniggered. "Well, we'd heard of werewolves before we were turned. I've never heard of a were-girl."
Okay, Aster couldn't quite maintain her annoyed glare in the face of that much obvious, nonchalant silliness. "Not a were-girl, just a girl. No shifting back, or anything."
"Not even at that time of the month?"
"Piss off, Ass-Hat," Aster snapped, trying not to giggle at the reversing of a joke she'd made about Remus's monthly transformation several times. (She was pretty sure that was the nickname Bella had given him.)
Greyback just looked from her to Bella before noting, "The resemblance is even more obvious when you're the same sex." He sounded far more disturbed than either of the others. Aster wasn't sure whether that was because the idea of two Bellas was fucking terrifying, or because he was kind of a prig and found her sex-change offputting, but she didn't really care, either.
"You don't look much like de Mort, though," Skoll noted, turning to Evans. "How does he even have a child?"
"In much the usual fashion," Evans said drily, raising an eyebrow at him in mock surprise. "Or so I hear. I'm sure one of your friends can explain, if you're unfamiliar with the process."
"How does he have a child we didn't know about, is what my brother means." Hati was obviously torn between amusement at his brother's embarrassment — Evans was about half their age — and shock, because her delivery was pure de Mort. (Intentionally, Aster was certain, she wasn't normally quite so dry and condescending with her mockery.)
"I was supposed to kill her mother but my goddess told me not to, so I left it up to Fate, and Death intervened to ensure that she'd be born so that she could be used to destroy Thom should he not stop telling people he's immortal."
Greyback gave Bella a flat, disbelieving look. "Is that so, Sister?"
Sister? Aster was definitely going to have to ask her about that one later...
Bella grinned. "She was raised by muggles. We just found out about her ourselves. Our own little princess raised by goatherds." She grinned, reaching out to ruffle Evans's hair, which wasn't nearly as curly as Aster's, and therefore only ended up looking a bit mussed, rather than properly tousled. This, combined by the glare she fixed on Bella, made her look more like a pouting child than she probably intended. Bella's grin only grew wider. "Metaphorically speaking. I don't know what working-class muggles actually do, but I'm pretty sure there are no goats involved."
"No, no, every lower-class, non-magical household in Europe has a goat. They're like a fixture. Can't properly call a house a home without one," Skoll said, with an impressively straight face.
Bella made a quick series of hand-gestures inviting him to go fuck a small rodent in the sign-language used by humans who couldn't properly pronounce Gobbledygook, and then, in the face of his complete incomprehension, rolled her eyes and flipped him the bird.
"Cheers," Hati sniggered. "So accommodating, our Hela, making rude gestures we actually recognise."
"The first one was go fuck a rat," Aster informed him.
"Ooh, that's a good one! How did it go?" he asked, contorting his fingers into a completely meaningless tangle.
"That one means you're an idiot," Evans volunteered.
"Are you sure she grew up with normal people?" the werewolf asked Bella. "I thought you said your weird sign-language is a goblin thing."
"It is, you're just— Look, it's not funny if I have to explain it. Aster— Why do you have a sword?"
"Because I don't have a back-up wand here, and if I have to try to stab you with something, I want to do it before you're close enough to stab me."
"Ooh, are you giving an exhibition?" the excitable Hati asked.
"Just practicing. Aster's good, but all resemblance aside, she's not me."
"Still more fun to watch than sling practice," Skoll declared, shooting a look at Greyback that Aster interpreted as begging for permission to duck out on their own training session. He glanced at Bella, who shrugged, before nodding. The brothers hurried off to tell the rest of the pack that they got to slack off for the next...however long Aster could keep getting back up.
"Great, love having an audience when I get my arse kicked."
"I still think this is a bad idea, for the record," Evans reminded them.
"Noted. Knock out or yield, nothing we can't heal?" Aster suggested, which were the usual terms for practice fights, but actually limited the shite Bella could use quite a lot, because she wasn't nearly as good at healing as she was at killing people.
She shrugged. "You can use anything you like. But yes, I'll go easy on you."
Oh, good. It wasn't like she'd get much actual practice in if Bella just knocked her out every two seconds until she got bored. Which probably wouldn't take that long, but still. "Try not to fuck me up too badly, Evans has never seen a real fight before."
"Yes, yes, go on." Bella jerked her head toward the dueling arena — not so much a ring as an entire field surrounded by wards to ground anything short of an Unforgivable. She took a minute to cast a handful of stupidly-overpowered charms, raising scattered earthen walls and pillars to hide behind. Right. Because you rarely if ever fight anyone on perfectly level ground with no obstacles outside of practice, so why practice that way? — Aster thought the Aurors could probably take a lesson in practical warfare, there. They might eventually vary their training grounds, but according to Frank Longbottom, who'd been accepted into last summer's cohort, they'd at least started with little more than straight dueling (with fewer rules, obviously). Indoors, even.
When she got closer, she could see that Bella had also broken up the ground in the otherwise relatively clear centre of the field with randomly-placed ankle-breaking holes, ridges, hummocks and conjured rocks, because of course she had. She left the anti-apparation/disapparation wards down, though, so that was something, but also meant un-splittable broad angle spells were on the table, which they definitely hadn't been last time she'd practiced with Bella. Well, last time Bella had tested her to evaluate her progress. She'd been all of fourteen, it wasn't like she'd stood a chance of getting even a single lucky hex in.
Bella also managed to get out to the field before Aster, stepping out of the shadow of one of her pillars with the kind of self-assured smirk that could only come from knowing you were one of the three most powerful (mortal) mages in Britain, and definitely the best battlemage. But if Aster knew her at all, she was also genuinely pleased to be doing this. Bella lived for fighting. Cissy might be better than she was, technically speaking, in an actual dueling ring (at least before her re-dedication), but Aster enjoyed it more. She was the one who would spend all afternoon getting her arse kicked and keep getting up to go again, because the joy and freedom of fighting more than made up for the pain of losing. And there was something about fighting someone who was having just as much fun as you that made it better, even if you were so far out of their league that it wasn't much of an actual fight at all.
And there was a terribly disappointing lack of people around who actually liked fighting. Pretty much everyone took it far too seriously, especially when you started throwing around potentially lethal spells, which was, as far as Aster was concerned, just when it started really getting fun.
"Whenever you're ready, duckie," Bella called, prowling between the walls and columns, waiting for Aster to make the first move.
She slipped into the arena to explore the set-up herself, considering potential opening moves. It was too easy to dodge a point spell, or even a beam, in an almost urban setting like this, and while she might actually be able to pull off a light fire-storm spell, now, she kind of wanted to see if she could get Bella to underestimate her, break that out later in the fight (assuming she made it past the first exchange). If she were facing Cissy, she might pull out a multi-directional light charm or raise a fog to try to blind her, but Bella really didn't need to see to put Aster down. She could 'mask' her own power, that was one of the "basic" focusing exercises Bella had taught all of them as kids, but she didn't know how to hide her presence affecting the flow of ambient magic around herself. Something conjured above her was the obvious tactic, but it was too obvious, Bella would be expecting it. So a distraction, and something conjured. Ooh, or maybe...
She made sure the direct line of sight between herself and Bella was blocked before conjuring half a dozen of those little fire-birds Cissy liked to throw at her, sending them off to seek and destroy (or more likely be destroyed, but whatever) and creeping around to an angle where she could actually see Bella to cast a complicated little curse Burton had mentioned in Arithmancy — it tracked the path of an opponent and predicted where they would be when it struck, before forcing dozens of stone spikes to erupt from the ground. Not exactly the most dangerous attack, even if it did manage to catch you, and Bella had a tendency to be able to fool predictive curses somehow (she'd never explained, but Aster was betting being a black mage in service to Chaos probably helped), but it was definitely distracting, enough that she didn't notice the pure hydrogen conjured around her feet until it rose nearly to head-height, and one of the fire-birds managed to get close enough to set it off.
Bella managed to dive and roll out of the fireball (which was very predictable, a line of earthen spears appearing directly in her path), conjuring a wooden platform beneath herself to catch the spikes and letting them carry her high enough to hop to the top of one of the pillars (which was not, damn it). She crouched there, twiddling her fingers at Aster's semi-concealed position, which was now entirely un-concealed.
Bugger.
She could hear the laughter in Bella's voice as she called down, "My turn!"
Double bugger.
Aster ran. That was pretty much the only half-decent strategy available to her, now that Bella had the advantage of the high ground, leaping between pillars to keep her in sight and raining a barrage of cutting curses and piercing hexes down on her. She couldn't even stop and shield, because Bella varied her spells enough there was no single shield charm (at least that Aster knew of) that would block them all. A few of them managed to tag her as she ducked and rolled and darted out of the way — which, yes, did hurt her back, thanks very much, but fuck it — before she hit on the idea of conjuring an actual, solid shield for herself, catch at least some of the things and let her catch her breath. (She was really out of shape.)
She set it to hovering in the air at an angle to catch and/or deflect most of the incoming curses, and sent the strongest cutting curse she knew arcing across the field at knee-height, channelling it through her sword so she could cast a shield charm to deflect the one dark piercing curse that sailed straight through inert metals like the iron shell she'd conjured to ground everything else out as though they weren't there at all.
Well, it wasn't so much a cutting curse as a vanishing curse, taking a chunk out of everything it passed through before it lost coherency. Including the pillars Bella was using as platforms from which to toy with her. At least a handful of them collapsed with an almighty crash, which completely concealed the pop of her apparating right behind Aster.
"Clever," she noted, even as Aster felt her presence appear in the immediate magical landscape, sending almost electric prickles down her neck.
She yelped, spinning around just in time to catch an overhand slice with her sword — she'd tried that with her bare arm, once, used to have a nice scar across the back of it — and cast the strongest general shield charm she knew even as Bella grinned and aimed a blasting charm at her chest. At point-blank range, it sent her flying, though since Bella was going easy on her, she under-powered it enough it wouldn't overwhelm her shield charm and punch a hole straight through her, which was something. Not a great consolation, though, when she landed on her back and slid several meters before managing to pull her knees up and convert her momentum into a backward somersault, rolling into a guarded crouch to watch Bella saunter toward her all casually.
Shite! She was in the middle of the field! With no cover to speak of and nowhere near enough familiarity with the field to apparate anywhere inside the arena — yes, she could just apparate out, but that was tantamount to yielding. If she wanted to keep going, her only choice was to go on the offensive.
...Which quickly became defensive, as Bella batted the first three curses in her chain directly back at her, and started throwing curses again — duck the cutting curse, bat back a heart-rotting curse (though her aim wasn't as good as Bella's, so she barely had to lean out of the way to dodge it), spin out of the way of a fire-whip — now she was just toying with Aster. Not that she hadn't been before, but no one used a fire-whip in actual combat. She let herself be hit with a waking nightmare hex — Bella wasn't very good at those, comparatively speaking, and Aster was good enough at occlumency to ignore the hallucinations at the edges of her vision — in order to block a handful of dark curses she didn't recognise with another conjured iron plate, letting herself be slowly pushed back across the field until she got close enough to one of Bella's walls to dive behind it, give herself a few seconds to cast the firestorm spell Cassie had taught her.
"Fuck!" Bella yelped — had she actually gotten her? She couldn't help herself peeking over the wall to see...which was, she realised almost immediately, a terrible idea, as the earth grew fluid under her hands, quickly engulfing her up to her neck.
Bugger. "I yield!" she said quickly, before Bella could throw something painful at her for scorching her hair. She'd done it! She'd actually tagged Bella with something! The grass was still on fire in a rough circle about three meters around the spot she'd been standing when Aster cast the spell, and she couldn't stop grinning like a lunatic, despite obviously having lost.
Bella gave her a rueful smirk. "Well done, I'm sure Cissy will envy you horribly when you tell her you finally got a point on me. Clearly I need to stop going quite so easy on you. Again?"
Aster nodded, her better judgment currently entirely stifled beneath the rush of battle and the triumph of actually cursing Bella, in an actual fight...even if she had only managed it because she'd tricked her into underestimating her. It still counted!
"Yes! Again!"
(She was definitely going to get her arse handed to her, but at the moment, she found she didn't much care.)