"What the fuck is that?"

Her minder for the day, a veela going by Côme — their people might be (in)famously open to political refugees, especially from a nation with Britain's reputation, but that didn't mean they'd just let a black mage wander around the colony without someone keeping an eye on her — shot her a level, forbidding glare. "I'm sure you didn't mean to say it like that."

She sort of did, though. They were making their way toward the central plaza to get lunch (Côme had had to remind her to eat again, she could be terrible about that), and among the crowd of veela and lilin and humans one particular person had drawn her eye. It was a young boy, too old for the nursery but too young for school, his magic touched with the soothing chill and sharp bite of a lilin. But...he wasn't. Bella couldn't say exactly how she knew, since the difference between lilin (or veela) and humans wasn't truly that great, especially in children, but she did.

That child was human, but had lilin magic. Somehow.

"No, seriously, that kid right there, what is that?"

Côme gave her another disapproving look, probably at how she was just shamelessly pointing at him, but he clearly decided after a moment it wasn't doing any good. With a slight sigh, he said, "He's half-human."

"...That's impossible." Lilin and veela were very particular about keeping their secrets, so Bella wasn't certain of the details of how it worked, but she did know that humans and lilin couldn't interbreed. Nor could veela and humans. Which shouldn't be any surprise whatsoever — they might be very cagey about how exactly their reproduction worked, but she was pretty sure lilin and veela laid eggs.

Here I was under the impression you didn't believe in the impossible.

Yeah, but I'm me.

Eris just giggled.

"It was," Côme admitted, "until quite recently. Lise Delacour designed a method to...circumvent the biological incompatibilities."

Bella instantly recognised that as a veela name — "Delacour" was used when dealing with humans by a clan named Ćur, the vast majority of whom were veela. The Delacours happened to be one of the more numerous and influential veela clans in western Europe, and also happened to be one of the major clans making up this colony. Which made it quite likely this Lise lived here.

However exactly that half-breed child had been created, it had to be a form of blood alchemy, a branch of ritual blood magic, and very old — most heritable magical traits and even a few entire races of magical beings had their origins in blood alchemy. Some were thought to have been performed so long ago they were literally prehistoric, legacies of the earliest experiments with ritual magic in western and southern Asia. Omniglottalism, parseltongue, certain divinatory talents, both types of vampires, veela and lilin themselves, all of them were created through blood alchemy. Even werewolves were thought to have been an attempt to artificially acquire the abilities of animagi gone horribly wrong. The art was very strictly regulated these days, and few had the stomach for the truly innovative experiments anymore, but none could deny blood alchemy had had a transformative effect on practically every aspect of the magical world.

Despite being illegal in modern Britain, ritualised blood alchemy was sometimes still performed by certain individuals among the nobility. Britons had a long history of using it to cure certain deficiencies brought about by inbreeding, or by couples who had difficulty conceiving, or even sometimes simply to get around incompatible sexual orientations. It wasn't considered entirely appropriate to go blabbing about it, but it was widely known that a minority but non-zero proportion of the noble class augmented their own fertility with illegal blood magic, the tradition had gone unacknowledged but undenied for generations.

In fact, Bella had long suspected that Cygnus — not that Cygnus, her great-grandfather — and Violetta had exploited it liberally. Her great-grandmother had had a not-so-secret fascination with blood magic, and they'd managed to have five children, which was quite unusual among their segment of the nobility. And their children had featured Pollux and Castor, twins, Cassiopeia, the first Black metamorph in a century, Marius, a squib, and Dorea, born twenty years after her eldest brothers and shockingly well-adjusted for a Black — yeah, Bella wouldn't be surprised if they had blood alchemy to thank for that peculiar record.

It wasn't even unique for members of incompatible species to create offspring through blood magic — the most obvious example was between humans and goblins, that happened with some frequency, but it'd been done with giants and a few races of lesser fae too. The thing was, the products of these rituals were, essentially, a new race all their own. In most cases, they truly belonged to neither of their parent races, and would need to use blood alchemy themselves if they wished to have children with either. Eventually, if they bred with one of the two preferentially, the traits of the other race would filter out until they were more or less indistinguishable from the first, but it did take a few generations before further blood alchemy was no longer necessary.

But, this could only be done between species that had similar reproductive cycles. Veela and lilin were simply too different. It'd been attempted in the past, but it'd always failed. Spectacularly.

Also? That boy was a human with lilin magic. That was completely bloody impossible.

So, there was really only one thing to say to that. "Can I meet her?"

Lise Delacour, it turned out, had an office of sorts on the fringe of her clan's compound, the signage on the front openly declaring she was a practising blood alchemist (and also artificer, apparently), featuring a list of services she performed, walk-in hours, information on how to make an appointment for a consultation. Which was just completely fascinating — openly advertising that sort of thing on the bloody street, with the culture of magic back in Britain this was simply inconceivable, she loved the Continent sometimes. The first room on entering was a sort of shop space, various enchanted trinkets displayed for sale, a teenage veela girl manning the till. She was old enough her people's mental abilities had manifested but young enough she hadn't quite developed full control of it, but of course it didn't affect Bella, she was only distantly aware of the giddy energy prickling at the edges of her mind. After a brief exchange with the girl, Côme led her further back, into a rather ordinary office, desk and bookshelves in rosey woods, rich but slightly disheveled, the feeling of the place more academic than professional.

Reclined in the chair behind the desk, spooning from a bowl of soup while reading a book propped up against her knees, was— "Wait, Liz Potter?"

The woman coughed, feet tipping back to the ground, nearly spilling her soup all over the text. The round-faced, dark-haired witch was only half-familiar, but that was to be expected — she had to be nearly fifty by now, Bella hadn't seen her since she'd been in third or fourth year, and then knew her mostly just as the only Slytherin prefect with an actual sense of humour, but it was definitely Liz Potter, she'd recognise that asymmetrical, unruly hair anywhere. (The infamous Potter hair was quite distinctive.) Last she'd heard, Liz had run away to the Continent, Bella wasn't even certain she'd taken her NEWTs. She'd done something to anger Charlus, she'd gotten disowned, it'd been a massive scandal, had gotten in the papers and everything. Bella hadn't paid too much attention at the time, she'd been too preoccupied with recruiting for Tom and Zee being Zee, but apparently she was an accomplished blood alchemist now, and going by Dela—

"Gods and Powers, did you run away to Aquitania to marry a veela?! How did I not know about that, that's hilarious!"

Finally done coughing up the soup she'd inhaled, Liz frowned up at her. "...Fuck me, it's Bella Black."

Bella couldn't help laughing a little — she remembered Liz saying that exact thing to her once before, in nearly the same tone. In first year she'd stumbled upon Liz and Kelsey Prewett snogging in a corner, it was this whole thing.

"What are you even doing here? Aren't you supposed to be in Azkaban?"

She shrugged. "Eh, I got bored. So I hear you're a blood alchemist now."

"No, seriously, what the fuck are you doing here?"

"I'm here because a bloody veela colony in fucking Aquitania isn't likely to report where I am to the British Aurors, now, are they? So, about the blood alchemy..."

Liz let out a long sigh, eyes tipping to the ceiling for a moment. "I'm not going to get you to go away if I don't answer your questions, am I?"

"Nope! Can you blame me? You apparently found a way to make lilin half-breeds which, I was under the impression that was impossible."

A slight scowl twisting her lips, Liz said, "Yes, well, you might have noticed I have little respect for people telling me I can't do things. I'm rather known for it, in fact."

"We have that in common." Of course, the thing Liz was known for involved refusing to marry, or even playing along with the whole courting thing the slightest bit, then basically throwing a tantrum and running away to the Continent when the Lord of her House refused to humour her. Bella's similar reputation was much less...mundane, in the particulars.

Bella draped herself across one of the chairs in front of the messy desk, grinning. "So, how does that work, exactly? I'm not so clear on the details, but I was pretty sure lilin and veela laid eggs?" The statement came out sounding more like a question, because she really didn't know — it was a rumour, the People had never actually confirmed it.

"I'm sure I couldn't say," Liz said, tone light and airy. (Which, fine, Bella guessed it was sort of like a family secret, still irritating.) "It's a variation on the ritual I'm sure you're familiar with — blood from the parents is mixed and alchemised to create an embryo, which is then implanted into a human woman. Obviously, I do have to do something different than the usual, since human and veela blood is incompatible. But no, I'm not going to tell you what it is."

"Aww, why not?"

"Well, for one thing, I'm bound by Imperial edict to not reveal the particulars to anyone outside of the community. Also, piss off."

If she were in a less patient mood, that might have angered her. Instead she just laughed. "All right fine, keep your secrets. Just let me analyse one of your specimens instead."

The wary sort of amusement on Liz's face abruptly collapsed into a glare. "No."

"Come on, I won't hurt it!" Anything that would be too painful would masque the results of analysis charms, after all.

"I'm not going to let you play around with one of my kids, Black. Fuck off."

"Really, they won't—" Bella broke off, a moment of surprise quickly breaking into glee. "Wait, your kids? Did you make one for yourself, then?"

The glare only got more intense. "Why do you think I did it in the first place?"

"Er, I don't really think you need a reason to do fun blood alchemy experiments."

"They're not experiments. Is it really so hard to understand that I wanted to start a family with my wife?"

Well...yes? It was, actually. Bella didn't really get why people would want children — especially to want it so badly she'd essentially had to create a new subspecies of humanity to pull it off, that was just completely foreign to her. But there was no point to explaining that. "Just because you had a personal reason for doing it doesn't mean they're not fascinating specimens."

"They're my children, not my—"

"Wait, wife? Can two women get married in Aquitania now?"

That was enough to throw Liz off for a moment, blinking back at Bella in a tense sort of bafflement. "Um... Yes, obviously. It's been legal here for near on a century now, you know, and not just in Aquitania. The muggles have even started talking about it recently."

"Huh." She'd somehow never heard about that. Not that it mattered, at all. "Anyway, I don't see what the big deal is. It's not like I'm going to hurt them."

"It's the principle of the matter, Black."

"Yeah, I really don't get that."

"I really don't expect you to."

Bella let out a slight scoff, shaking her head. It was quite obvious Liz wasn't going to bend on this. Which meant, unfortunately, she was just going to have to leave this mystery unsolved. The only way she was going to get enough time to examine one of these things properly was with permission — judging by Liz's age the oldest were probably still children, and she assumed the parents of the others would be equally unwilling to agree. And just kidnapping one for a few hours would present its own problems. If she started doing shite like that, she was certain she'd outstay her welcome very, very quickly.

She'd probably get away without too much trouble, but she'd seriously offend the People in the process, which she didn't want to do if she could avoid it. She liked the People, they were fun.

"All right, fine, be boring. So, why are you holed up by yourself out here on the Continent anyway?"

Liz raised a doubtful eyebrow. "I'm living in a commune with a veela clan. I'm hardly holed up by myself."

Bella shrugged. "Good point." The People did have ideas of community and property that could seem a bit...unnerving, to normal people. Personally, Bella didn't find their society any more odd and confusing than she did the one she'd been born into, but she was hardly a normal person. "Not really what I meant, though. Guess I'm just a little surprised you've so thoroughly abandoned your responsibilities to your family."

Mostly because, well, even she was still interested in the future of her House, and she'd killed off damn near all of them. If there had been someone running around claiming to be a long-lost Black heir (who wasn't an alternate universe version of herself), she was pretty sure she would want to at least drop in on them a few times, make sure they would live up to the legacy of the House. (Or if they didn't, finish the job — there would really be no point reviving the House of Black if everything that separated them from the other Noble Houses was gone.) And even if Liz wasn't really in contact with anyone in Britain anymore, Bella was still sure she'd heard that James had had a kid at some point. He'd just been in the papers again, what with Lyra faking his death and the Old Goat reacting completely predictably.

"I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about. In fact, I've been told I'm the cool aunt."

"Uh-huh." The sound was tinged with a note of sarcasm, though she didn't actually doubt it — if there'd been an openly practicing blood-alchemist-slash-artificer in the Family, one who didn't take herself too seriously at that, she'd probably have been Bella's favourite aunt too. The closest thing the Blacks had had in her time was Violetta, but she'd been too self-righteous and very boring. "Not what I'm talking about and you know it. I would have thought you'd have gotten the same indoctrination I did growing up — until James was born, you were the only heir the Potters had, after all."

Her face sinking into a glare — not truly harsh, but more exasperated, tired — Liz said, "I haven't any responsibilities to House Potter anymore, Black."

"But Charlus has been dead for ages, now, and given the circum—"

"I was disowned. Twice."

Well, she'd been going to say that House Potter would probably take her back (she doubted Lyra would have much trouble convincing Harry to do something like that), but— What? Bella frowned. "How the fuck do you get disowned twice?"

"The second was mostly in a figurative sense, but the point stands." Lifting one shoulder in a lazy shrug, "I was told by both previous Lords Potter that I was no longer any family of theirs. Jamie even disinvited me from my own father's funeral, so, that bridge hasn't been burned so much as nuked."

Seriously? Even Bella had never been banned from a funeral. "What did you do?"

Liz let out another irritated sigh, but did actually answer the question — probably trying to make the point clearer. "I wrote ahead to arrange temporarily keying us into the wards at the Manor. It was the safest place for us to go — given the political situation at the time, I was concerned for my family's safety, I'm sure you understand."

Bella smirked. That was a remarkably politic way to refer to the fear that the Death Eaters, who she had to know Bella had mostly trained, might have taken the opportunity to torture and murder them all. And a remarkably boring reason to be disinvited.

"Jamie insisted my family was not welcome. I would either come alone, or not at all. I said a few things about what Dorea would think of that sort of attitude which, in retrospect, could have been worded better. We exchanged a few more less-than-pleasant letters, which ended with Jamie saying that I was no longer welcome in his family, and he never wanted to see me again.

"So, Black, I have no responsibilities to the House of Potter. Kindly piss off."

Well, she couldn't argue with any of that, she guessed. "Fine, the Potters might have disowned you, but does that actually matter? I mean, Andromeda named her daughter Nymphadora, for Circe's sake, and she disowned us. Are you telling me you aren't even curious about the Potter kid? I would be, if it was me."

Liz hesitated, her glare wavering for a moment. "Curious...maybe. Yes. A little. But certainly not enough to go sticking my nose in — Jamie's son is none of my business, and definitely not my responsibility, so." The piss off was heavily implied.

Bella ignored it, because, well...she was wrong. "He kind of is, though. I mean, you still count as a Black — I know we didn't disown you — and Harry is our—"

"What? The Blacks couldn't have disowned me, they never owned me in the first place!"

"Your mother was a Black, that's good enough for us." One of those relics of originally having been a matriarchal family, the House law recognised children born to Black women whether they were technically born into the House or not. The weren't incorporated into the Family Magic (anymore), but still.

A baffled note slipping into her glare, Liz drawled, "Er, no, my mother was not a Black. She was a Fawley."

Oh, right, sometimes she forgot Dorea had been Charlus's second wife, she— Bella blinked. "Then why did Dorea keep bringing you to family functions?" She'd seen Liz at Black gatherings more often than James, actually...though by the time James started getting old enough for Bella to really notice him she'd been distracted with the war, and the family had shrunk to the point there weren't nearly so many opportunities to bump into him. And by that time, she was mostly aware of him as one of those Gryffindors Narcissa insisted were having a terrible influence on Sirius. Come to think of it, if he was a little Light prat like Charlus (which he probably had been, he had joined Dumbledore's little vigilante group, after all), Dorea might not have brought him at all by then. So she guessed that sort of made sense. Except for Liz being there at all, that is. "Did she blood adopt you or something?"

"I think I would have noticed if she had. Blood alchemy rituals can be quite painful, you know."

"Huh, that's weird. I wouldn't have thought Arcturus would approve of Dorea bringing you around, then."

"I was never allowed at the really private things," Liz said, lifting a shoulder in another lazy shrug. "The holiday rituals, for example, I was never invited to those." Well, yeah, but she had been at funerals and introduction rituals, and those weren't the sort of things outsiders were supposed to witness, either. That was...weird.

"Did you ever just try to show up?" Liz gave her a look, eloquently expressing how very stupid she thought that sounded. (Even though it really wasn't.) "Should've tried it. It's not like there were invitation cards, Dorea just decided to stop attending after she married Charlus." Dorea had been sort of odd — from a Black perspective, in the sense that she'd actually been rather normal — she'd probably been all too happy to have an excuse to avoid the Family's more extreme rituals. "Still would have been welcome, though." Not that it mattered, really. "In any case, from what I've heard Harry hasn't gotten anything like the appropriate education. House Potter is pretty much screwed."

Liz blinked at her for a long moment, shaking her head slightly at the abrupt reversion of the topic of conversation. "What do you care?"

"Well, aside from the marriage alliance, the Potters' heir apparent is our Lord's godson. House Potter is House Black business."

Liz rolled her eyes. "Fine, whatever, it's Black business. But it's not my business, not anymore. Shouldn't be yours for that matter, aren't you a Lestrange now?"

"Oh, like I ever was really, that was a sham and everyone knows it." Bella didn't know why Liz had even bothered bringing that up, she still called her Black anyway. She grinned. "Besides, Caelan found some excuse to break my marriage contract and disowned me back in Eighty-One, can't imagine why." Really, that was one of the few political developments she'd heard about since her escape that she actually approved of. "But, fine, if you don't want to have anything to do with the Potters, I suppose that's fair. Sirius and Lyra will take care of it. Just, you know, Harry won't really be a Potter, then — they can't give him a proper House Potter education. The only person alive who learned the family lore and traditions is you. If you stay here, it all dies with you."

"I didn't run away for no reason. Perhaps it's better it dies." By the light, distant tone of Liz's voice, it was pretty clear she didn't actually believe that.

"Yeah, well, the nice thing about the House almost-but-not-quite dying is the few people who are left get to decide what they carry forward. And no institution exists for seven hundred years without developing something of worth."

Liz just glared at her for a few long, silent seconds. Then she changed the subject. "Yes, speaking of Houses narrowly avoiding extinction, where the hell did the House of Black manage to find an heir? That is the Lyra you mentioned, yes?"

"Mmm, yep," Bella confirmed, running through the list of potential explanations Lyra and Blaise had offered to various people regarding her origins. There was only one that would stand up to any degree of rigorous investigation. "You weren't wrong when you assumed I was familiar with that particular ritual."

Liz raised an eyebrow at her. "You made a child for yourself. You. Weren't you just saying that you didn't want kids?"

She hadn't, actually, but she supposed it might have been obvious from her reaction, earlier. She didn't actually dislike children, not any more than she did most humans, but they did tend to be a bit dull, certainly not conceptually interesting enough to want one.

"I didn't want the House to fall, either. And besides, it's not like I had to deal with her during the boring years, I was in Azkaban." Which had probably been far more boring than playing nursemaid to a small child would have been, especially considering that the hypothetical child in question was herself, and she knew she had been a little hellion even before she'd made her dedication, but that wasn't the point.

"Who did you— You did use multiple parental contributions, didn't you?"

Bella grinned. If she actually had decided that making a child for herself seemed like a good idea, she might have tried using Tom, but he had sacrificed his ability to have children. Not natural children, any children. Which probably would have fucked up the whole process. Besides, ignoring concerns about the product having a distinct identity, it was much easier to create a copy of a single person than to combine the blood of two or more into a single embryo. (Theoretically, she'd never actually tried it.) "Why mess with perfection?"

"So you're telling me you straight-up cloned yourself." Well she had certainly implied as much. "Using a surrogate, I assume. And, what? Just sent her off to live with... Who? Who the fuck would you trust to raise your precious heir? And who the fuck would do it?"

"Well, given that I also implied that she wouldn't really be a Black if she didn't get a proper education, you could assume that I would have found it worthwhile to track down Cassiopeia and convince her that the plan held enough merit to warrant her cooperation." At the blank look Liz gave her, she added, "One of the Black metamorphs."

Comprehension dawned, and with it, a degree of horror. Tee hee. "You're serious? You actually... Do people know? I assume you don't care about the ethics of the situation, but does she know?"

Bella smirked. "Yes, Lyra knows exactly where she came from, and why. I don't believe she cares about the ethics of the situation, either. And she's been in the public eye for almost a year, now. I'd be shocked if no one else has come to this conclusion yet. It is the most reasonable explanation for her existence."

"...Fuck me — there're really two of you?"

"Yep. The other one is currently off taking care of your nephew. The human one. You really should consider dropping by Britain at some point, unless you want the most responsible person in his life to be a fourteen-year-old me," Bella teased. Though (external loyalties aside) she'd been a very good First Daughter at the age of fourteen. Really, there were far worse people who could be responsible for the Potter kid's future and general wellbeing (like Sirius, or Dumbledore), but Liz didn't know that.

And now she was annoyed again. "I have an appointment in five minutes, Black. Get the fuck out of my office."

Bella rather doubted that — who set appointments for twenty-five minutes past the hour? — but she'd already gotten what she'd wanted, or rather, asked and not gotten it; there was really nothing to be gained in further annoying Delacour with her nonexistent duties to her natal House; and there was only so long she could not-lie about something without fucking it up, so it was probably best to end the conversation here, anyway. She smirked, vacating her chair and heading toward the door with an airy farewell. "Ciao, then. I'll tell Lyra to expect you at some point. And let me know if you change your mind about that examination."

"Not likely, Black."

Yes, well, unlikely things were known to happen around Bella, on occasion. (Eris's amusement radiated through her, an involuntary grin spreading across her face.) She could wait.


Bringing in another of my OCs, so why the fuck not. This subplot sprung into existence from me and Leigha just randomly talking about shit while slightly intoxicated, so...all the rest of you just get to live with the consequences, I guess xD —Lysandra

When Bella mentions the issue of identity, she's referring to a magical connection between blood, one's understanding of oneself, and one's magic — the 'fundamental identity' thing that comes up occasionally in some of my stuff. Basically, this means that it's totally plausible for a blood alchemy clone to read really oddly to some magic, mostly divination charms. It's a much more reasonable explanation than 'time traveller from the past' for, say, Lyra and Bella having magical signatures which are nearly identical, or a spell to determine Lyra's birth-date coming up with Bella's. (Lyra mentioned over Easter that magic thinks she's forty-four.) They aren't exactly the same, that comes up in another summer scene, but similar enough that anything short of proper wards wouldn't necessarily examine their identities closely enough to distinguish them. —Leigha