I still stand by my initial assessment that Remy would have been happier with the Starlighters from the start. It was, however, perhaps fortunate that circumstances prevented his joining them immediately. The community was always a bit...tenuous, their resources both financial and emotional practically always overextended. And they experienced a minor tragedy of their own on the full moon of November, Nineteen Seventy-Six. Those who would generally be expected to help a new refugee come to terms with life as a Starlighter were entirely preoccupied by their own problems, and little prepared to welcome and support anyone as wet as Remus. Let alone mind him as I suspect he would've needed, in order to keep him from turning himself in.
I also stand by my assessment that the poverty and hardship of Starlight, the oppression, would likely have been too much for Remus to bear at that point in his life. For all he suffered with his condition, he marginalised himself far more than did anyone else over the course of the years we shared at Hogwarts, attempting to keep a low profile and avoiding doing anything that might suggest he was anything other than a perfectly average, perfectly human teenage boy, with a distinctly paranoid degree of caution.
Starlighters are — were, I should say, but at this point in the story this was still the case — accustomed to newcomers to their society requiring a period to adjust to their new circumstances — hardly anyone who was turned came from the muggle slums they were often forced to live in, and even those who chose to abandon their human lives and join the Starlighters by choice tended to be...more privileged in their origins. Sure, there might have been less difference between being a cat or a bird in daylight society and in Starlight, but there was still some difference. And not many metamorphs choose to live in extreme poverty, when they can be young and beautiful and socially accepted (at least until they grow bored with society). That doesn't mean there isn't a degree of resentment from Starlighters who don't have a choice — or even sometimes today from former Starlighters who didn't have a choice (kids these days have it much easier, according to everyone who came to Avalon as British refugees) — toward those soft, pampered fools who saw Starlight as a change of pace, rather than a lifestyle any sane person would avoid, given the choice.
It's possible I was...less than well received, when I first stumbled into their community. The phrase "poncy human tourist" might as well have been my name over the first week or two of my hanging about, and I offended nearly everyone I spoke to at first, with my casual disregard for the material realities of their situation. My only saving grace was that I had no reservations about doing whatever I could to help — not as some sort of charity, which would be exceedingly unwelcome (and just as offensive as my entirely thoughtless comments about living like muggles and initial assumption they must at least have access to enough food for everyone), but simply because, well...noblesse oblige, basically. They weren't my people, as in explicitly my responsibility to care for (not then, at least), but the British nobility as a whole had a responsibility to the common people, generally speaking. Allowing Starlight to exist in such conditions was quite frankly shameful.
I daresay that their lifestyle was more shocking to me for the way it reflected on their social betters, myself included, than for the actual experience they suffered. I had been raised in luxury myself, of course, but...not to expect luxury, I suppose. The House of Black might have been the pinnacle of power and wealth (and therefore Society) by the time I was born, but the history I was taught, the priorities I was given as a child, made it clear that this had not always been the case, and might easily not be the case again at some point in the future. The survival of the House entailed in the Covenant did not equate to the success of the House — that was up to us to ensure.
Plus it wasn't exactly a secret that we — the House of Black — considered the overly-refined affectations of Society to be...well, overly-refined and affected. We might have been taught to play their silly social games, and to do so with the same degree of excellence we were expected to do everything else, but the House of Black were warriors, not aristocrats (at least in our own heavily mythologised conception of ourselves). What kind of warrior was more at home in a fancy fucking townhome than in a sparcely accommodated military encampment? No, the Starlighters' lifestyle might've been surprising, might've taken some getting used to in practice, but it never struck me as shocking and unbearable. The shocking thing was that that state of deprivation was allowed to exist within our own common population, in a time of peace and relative prosperity — forcing magical people, magical children to live like the poorest of muggles? I didn't know a single noble who, if presented with the problem in that light, would consider it anything other than unconscionable.
The Light refusing to recognise the personhood and therefore minimal rights of even non-citizens with respect to the upyri and werewolves was an extreme blow to my confidence in their moral superiority, and the fact that the Dark Houses didn't take it upon themselves to rectify the situation, but instead simply whinged about non-human rights in the Wizengamot and waited for the Ministry to do something about it — and make no mistake, if the Houses of Black, Lestrange, and Yaxley had chosen to do so, they could have made significant strides in providing basic necessities to the beleaguered Starlighters — was also horribly disillusioning.
The Starlighters weren't our people, our vassals or clients, we had no explicit responsibility to do so, that was true, but one would think that people who prided themselves on their superiority over non-magical people would hesitate to allow any magical population to languish in conditions well below those of the average muggle household in this day and age. That we had not achieved our position at the pinnacle of society by engaging in rampant charity was not an excuse for acting like a fucking mudblood (in the sense of considering muggle standards to be acceptable for anyone), and it was a fucking embarrassment that the fucking Death Eaters were doing more to provide for the commoners than the House of Black — or so I argued. Arcturus just told me to get the fuck out of his office and not come back until I managed to rid myself of my childish concern for the welfare of such impoverished deplorables. (Bastard.)
In any case, there was little enough I could do to help the Starlighters on my own, as the largely-disfavoured son of a wealthy Noble House. Charming a leaking roof to keep out water and enchanting blankets to retain warmth, making a few talismans to deflect the attention of muggles from the minor oddities in the appearance of upyri and werewolves' disfigurements — those were about the extent of my contributions before I was forced to flee to the Potters' in the wake of my destruction of the Covenant. Hardly anything, just fixing problems as they became immediately obvious to me, and the casual ease with which such minor miracles were accomplished — and the fact that I so unceremoniously disappeared midway through the summer, taking such help with me — rendered me even more of an elitist prick in some eyes, but it was enough that those not inlined to hate me simply for the advantages I'd been born with came to welcome me as an ally of sorts. Or at the very least, to acknowledge that I meant them no harm, and ignore me as perhaps annoying, a constant reminder of the inequalities inherent in our society, but not personally a threat to their safety and security. That was really the best an outsider, a human, could expect from them, given the realities of the situation.
As things stood in November of Nineteen Seventy-Six, I was as welcome in Starlight as any human could expect to be. It was hardly absurd for me to expect that, if I were to bring a fugitive to them, they would take him in (regardless of the potential danger his presence might pose in terms of increased official scrutiny). And when I came bearing a warning for the werewolves' leader, I had every expectation of being heard out.
"Hey, Connie, is Lady Em around?" Aster asked, poking her head into what passed for the front room of a tiny flat in a miserably run-down muggle apartment building to see an exhausted-looking man studying a tattered textbook by the dim light that filtered in through a grimy window.
About half the Starlight wolves lived here, in this building, at least for now — according to Maeve, an upyri girl Aster had struck up a somewhat more than casual friendship with over the summer. They usually moved a few times a year, as landlords kicked them out for failing to make rent or the Ministry cracked down on them renting from muggles without 'appropriate measures' in place to ensure the slum-lords who owned the places wouldn't realise they were renting to magical folk. Which was a load of bollocks, most of the wolves couldn't do magic at all — even the ones who were mages were almost completely untrained — and it wasn't as though they transformed anywhere near anyone they might be tempted to attack. Not to mention, Aster was pretty fucking sure the disgusting slugs who owned these buildings didn't set foot in them if they could help it, it'd be pretty fucking difficult for them to realise they were renting to werewolves even if they did do magic all the time.
Constantine, a wizard-wolf in his early twenties, looked up to give her an I'm too tired to deal with you today glare. He was one of the more presentable among the Starlight wolves — relatively young and handsome in an ambiguously Eastern European way, unscarred at least anywhere visible — and one of the more ambitious, with more contacts in the Underground than most and an obvious determination to learn as much magic as he could, studying in whatever odd free moments he could find. Aster had only met him in passing, but she knew he hadn't been formally educated. He spent most of his time doing odd jobs in the muggle world or the Underground. He was also relatively close to Morgen. Aster wasn't really sure what his deal was, but he was even more protective of the old lady than most of the Starlighters. It wasn't at all surprising that he was acting as her doorkeeper today.
He cocked his head to one side in obvious confusion. "Sirius?"
"It's Asteria, now. Long story. Well, not really, but not actually important, either. Where's Morgen?"
"It's not a great time, kid."
"It's never a great time for bad news. I wouldn't be here if it weren't important."
"How important are we talking, here? Because Grandmother had a bad night last weekend, get it? Got tore up by one of the new kids when he realised he was trapped."
Aster winced. She wasn't exactly an expert on werewolves, but the oldest, frailest wolf in the pack babysitting some angry, new-turned teenager sounded like a bad idea even to her. "Seriously? The fuck, Connie? Why'd you let her—"
"Piss off, Black," he snapped. "It wasn't my choice. She thought someone should keep him company on his first moon, stop him from tearing himself up over not being able to run, and an old lady like her would be less of a threat."
"How bad is it?" she asked, unable to hide her concern.
"Bad enough. Not much Pulaski can do for her until the new moon. He sewed her up, gave us some potion to help her sleep through the pain — she's hanging in there, but she's weak, and it's been a long fucking week." He sighed. "Look, what do you want?"
Pulaski was one of the Death Eaters' training healers, maybe their chief healer? She wasn't really sure, honestly, she didn't really keep up with the internal workings of the Organisation these days. He'd be the one running the Starlight clinic though, presumably. Almost all the Death Eaters thought Bella was completely mad for extending their resources to the Starlighters, though none of them would challenge her authority to do so. Pulaski, if Aster remembered correctly, actually supported the idea of a free clinic — it gave his trainees practice with the more day-to-day healing there wasn't much call for on a battlefield or the immediate aftermath, and he refused to promote his apprentices to mastery if they couldn't even heal a sinus infection or whatever.
"Is she conscious? Can I see her?"
"What the fuck is so important—"
"I just want to see she's okay, shite-for-brains, I'm not going to bother her with bad news when she's lying in hospital! Who's her second? They can deal with the possible impending visits from everyone's favourite Ministry goons. But I still want to see her."
Constantine, already peaky with exhaustion and worry, paled further at the thought of the Ministry coming in and roughing them up a bit yet again, maybe even before they could be healed from the moon. They tended to raid Starlight a few times a year, trying to catch them doing anything they could use as an excuse to arrest them and chuck them in Azkaban for a few months — or, failing that, just turn them out of whatever tenuous housing they'd managed to acquire — but they usually had the good grace to wait until the wolves had had a chance to recover from the moon, first. (Not really, the actual reason was that werewolves tended to be weaker and less aggressive around the new moon, without the Curse reinforcing their natural strength.) "Regulation and Control? What— Why're they going to be poking their noses in, pray tell?"
"They're complete morons, mostly. There was a werewolf attack in Hogsmeade last week. You know the friend I mentioned Dumbledore let in?" She'd mentioned over the summer — on one of the few occasions she'd spent much time talking to Morgen and her people at all, really — that they might be able to petition the Headmaster to take on a few more werewolf students, if there were any kids young enough in Starlight.
There weren't, as it turned out. Most little kids didn't survive getting Turned, and those who did, their families tended to try to take care of them on their own, like Remus's parents. Or, if they were nobility — light nobility, especially — quietly disposed of the little embarrassment. Muggle wolf-pups tended to get out of control and come to Ministry attention within a few months of being turned — and if, through some improbable stroke of luck, they hadn't yet passed on the Curse — they were often removed from their parents' custody, given over to a so-called 'Troubled Children's Home' to be raised by self-righteous arseholes like Remy's father. Most of them killed themselves before they were old enough to run away with any hope of success, find their way to Starlight or across the Channel.
Still, word had gotten around that there was a werewolf at Hogwarts, to mixed reactions. Envy was a big one, and hope that with the Chief Warlock on their side they might actually start to see some changes for the better in British law, but there were also quite a few who had (rightly) predicted that this was going to end very badly, for everyone involved.
Constantine nodded.
"Yeah, well, a certain reckless, self-centred fool let Moony out of his safehouse. He managed to bite someone down in Hogsmeade before I intercepted him. I'm pretty sure she went to St. Mungo's like a good little idiot daylighter and sold him out to R. and C. — Bella and I barely got Moony off the scene ahead of their sweep. He's with Fenrir's pack at the moment, and Dumbledore's going to point investigators in their direction, but who's betting they won't take the excuse to shake things up around here when they can't find them? I mean, it's not like they haven't been trying to find and take in the Underground wolves for the last five years." More than that, probably... "I guess it'll probably be a few days, even those morons won't expect Moony to've made it here from Hogwarts already. They've already been to scare the shite out of his parents, they don't know anything, obviously. I got a letter from them yesterday, asking if I know anything, so R. and C. probably think he's on his own, travelling overland on foot, sans magic to avoid the Trace, or injured and lying low until after the new moon or something. They might not even come sticking their noses in until next moon passes and there's no reports or anything and they know for sure he's got to be staying with someone. But I wanted to make sure I got here before they did, you know?"
Honestly, she'd been far more concerned about Remus and how he was handling his sudden exile from the daylight world and the necessity of staying at Ancient House (not great, honestly). It'd been the letter from the Lupins that'd reminded her the Ministry would still be looking for Remy and she should maybe give Starlight a heads-up, especially if she wanted them to be willing to take him in a couple of months.
The werewolf slouched back in his chair, massaging his temples. "Fuck. How's the kid holding up?" His eyes narrowed, flicking over Aster's stiff posture, the way she was keeping most of her weight off her injured leg. "How are you holding up? If you got between him and a human... He bit you, too, didn't he?"
"Was it the limping that gave it away?" she snarked. "Yeah, he did. He's fine. Well, angsty and miserable and kind of wants to turn himself in and commit suicide by capital punishment, but not physically hurt, and some older witch-wolf I hadn't met, Annie? is being all mumsy over him, so he'll be fine, anyway. I've got about a hundred sutures keeping my insides on the inside, in both forms — so that's fun. And people keep giving me that look, the one on your face right now, like I'm completely fucked and don't even realise it yet."
"Yeah, well, I know you're a couple cards short of a full deck, Black, but the Change is no picnic."
"So I'm told. And I'm also told that it doesn't matter that I was bitten in dog form, animagi are still human enough for the Curse to take, but this isn't the first time Moony and I've gotten a little carried away scrapping on the moon. Granted, I've never been bitten this badly before, but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to Turn. So can I see Morgen before I go?"
Constantine just blinked at her, apparently shocked. "But— You're human. You can't not be— What?"
Aster gave him a crooked smirk. "Bella's immune to the Curse too, and she's as human as I am." Connie gave her a very doubtful look, probably because no one in Starlight actually thought of Bella as human. "Maybe it's just a Black thing. Apparently there's a rumour none of us are as human as we look — too much magic in our blood, makes us all a little fae, or something? Whatever, I advise not thinking about it too hard. So..."
The werewolf apparently decided that not thinking about it too hard was probably the best course of action. He shook his head as though to clear it, jerking his thumb at the doorway behind him. "Through there. If she's asleep, don't wake her up. Got it?"
"Yeah, yeah..." she muttered, limping past him.
"And keep it short, Black!" he called after her. "She needs to rest!"
She rolled her eyes, making her way through the small, dark room he'd pointed to, to a half-open door on the other side of it, the only other exit. She gave it a light tap, pushing it further open to reveal a slightly larger room.
The paper was peeling from the walls and several slats were missing from the shutters, letting in enough light to see that despite the condition of the building, some effort had been taken to keep this room cleaner than the other. No dust or cobwebs in the corners, and though there was a vague scent in the air that Aster associated with sick-rooms — herbal and not unpleasant, save for the association, mixed with the smell of a human body confined to a bed and washed somewhat less than thoroughly — and a faint whiff of piss — probably from a chamber-pot under the bed, she'd be shocked if there were indoor toilets, here — it wasn't musty or damp like she might expect for a room in a building like this. There was a narrow bed with a small side-table, a rickety-looking chair and a few hooks on one wall holding what was probably all the clothes Morgen owned. The quilt on the bed, covering a lump that was presumably the woman herself, was faded and worn, any pattern long-since lost under years of patches, but clean, and there was a new(-ish) candle on the bedside table, along with a pitcher and water-glass.
"Lady Morgen?" she called quietly, unable to see from here whether the lump was awake.
"Mmm, who's that?" the old woman muttered, her voice a sad, weak imitation of her usual commanding tone.
"It's Asteria— Sirius Black, I mean. I'm a girl now. Long story. How're you doing, Grandmother?"
"Been better, boy. Girl?" She clicked her tongue disapprovingly, one hand rising above the blanket to wave at the chair. "Well, come over here, don't make me sit up to see you!"
Aster chuckled, a small, deliberate heh that didn't jostle her wounds too badly, taking the offered seat. "Yeah, Connie out there mentioned you got in a fight on the full moon. Let me guess, I should see the other guy?"
Morgen sighed, squinting up at her. She looked impossibly tired, and even older than Aster remembered. "Arnold. Poor boy was... Are you sure you're a girl, now? You look exactly the same."
"I'm sure. And I'm shorter now, you just can't tell, all horizontal like that. What were you saying about Arnold?"
She let out a soft, coughing sort of laugh, then shook her head, rocking it slowly from side to side without rising from the pillow. "Sound the same, too. Arnie. Poor boy blames himself. Too new. Doesn't know the Wolf, yet. Doesn't understand...not his fault... Why're you here, child? Not just to visit an old lady, I'm sure."
"Ah, well, I was just going to ask what you know about how the Curse works on animagi," she said, casting about quickly for an excuse that wouldn't worry the old wolf. "But it's not urgent, I can come back after new moon. Pulaski's going to get his poncy old arse over here and get you fixed up then, yeah?"
She gave a heavy sigh. "Aye. Ten— No, nine more days?" Aster nodded. The old wolf gave another heavy sigh, the breath sounding rather laboured. "I'm getting too old for this. I should've– should've listened to Connie-boy when he— But young Arnold was— It's better he did this to me, not himself. I'm old. He'd have to live with the– with the pain, and the scars, longer...they never stop hurting, you know— It– It never stops..." A tear leaked out of the corner of her eye.
Aster brushed it away with a gentle thumb, trying not to notice how thin and delicate her skin felt, wrinkling at the slightest touch. "Hey, now. It gets better. I know it doesn't stop, but it gets better. Where's your potion? Constantine said you have a potion for the pain..."
"Can't, yet. Not time. Just, water..." She raised a shaking hand toward the glass.
"Okay." Aster vanished the tepid liquid, refilling the glass with a quick aguamenti. "Can you sit up, Grandmother?"
She tried, struggling against the blankets to push herself a few inches higher, the top of her head pressing against the wall, leaving her neck at what had to be an uncomfortable angle.
"Hey, hey, wait a second." How did that charm go, again? Oh, right... "Area apergion!" she incanted, indicating the area of the bed with a few quick flicks, the force of gravity within it immediately reduced by half.
"Oh!" Morgen gasped. "That does— It's easy to forget, sometimes, how wondrous magic can be..."
Kind of an odd thing to say, Aster thought. She'd kind of assumed Morgen was a witch — there weren't, as a rule, too many muggles around called Morgen. But she didn't have a wand any more than Constantine — the wolves, and the lower classes in general, tended to use more witchcraft than wizardry. To have forgotten how amazing magic could be, though, kind of implied she'd once spent a lot more time around proper wizardry. Maybe she was a squib? Or if she'd been turned young, she could've been chucked out of her family before she really started to learn magic herself, Aster guessed. Not that it was terribly important.
"It doesn't last very long." It didn't actually last at all, per se. It took effect suddenly, and then started fading out of effect immediately, but slowly and gently enough it was barely noticeable. (Rather than gravity suddenly reasserting itself and slamming anyone in the area of the spell to the ground if they weren't expecting it.) She shifted herself to the edge of the bed to help the old woman reposition herself, propping her up with a quickly-conjured pillow before she grew too heavy again.
"Thank you, dear..."
Aster didn't respond, too busy hissing in sympathy as the blanket shifted, revealing a series of long, neatly sutured slashes across her chest and ribs, dressed in translucent, spider-silk gauze (the good stuff, probably used so the wolves could keep an eye on whether the wounds looked like they were getting infected). There were a couple of deep-looking length-wise cuts on her left forearm, too — lucky she hadn't bled to death from those — and a few very ugly, torn punctures around her shoulder. Her left hand was curled around a splint, immobilised. If Aster had to guess...Morgen had been on her back, the other wolf had gone in for the kill, and she'd clawed at his face to save her neck, got her paw crushed instead.
"Water?"
"Wh— Yes, here." She had to help the broken wolf steady the glass as she raised it to her lips one-handed.
After a few awkward moments, Morgen let her head tip back against the wall.
"Lady Em? You okay?"
"Mmm, I think I should lie down again..."
Aster renewed the charm first, but by the time the old woman settled onto her back again, her eyes were already drifting closed, her face tight with pain and exhaustion. She relaxed slightly under the influence of a sleeping charm. Constantine was right, the best thing anyone injured this badly could do was rest.
...Though she couldn't quite stop herself peeking under the quilt to see how bad this badly actually was. Her legs looked even worse than her arms, flanks torn and savaged. Forget being lucky she hadn't bled out from her forearm, she was lucky she hadn't lost her left leg. With the way werewolf wounds scarred and the tearing around her knee, she probably wasn't going to walk again. Not without a cane, at least. It was bad enough Aster suspected Pulaski wouldn't push her through healing it all in a single day — Morgen was old, her body couldn't handle rebuilding itself so quickly — so she was going to have to wait another whole month, after this month's new moon, and then there was the issue of what damage she might do to herself on the full moon before she was completely healed...
Constantine appeared in the doorway right around the time Aster was tucking the bedding back around the fragile, broken woman. He looked almost as broken as she did, if in a very different way. "She's sleeping?"
Aster nodded. "Getting water exhausted her, so I knocked her out."
"Good." He jerked his head back toward the front room, rubbing his face as though attempting to wake himself up, or maybe keep from crying. The Starlighters didn't call Morgen Grandmother for nothing — she'd been the wolves' matriarch for decades. There was no one left who was older, or who had been a wolf longer, she was a fixture to the Starlight wolves, basically their adopted mother. And Aster wasn't really an expert healer, or even very good at judging wounds on other people, but that amount of damage would be bad for her. On Morgen, it looked like she was dying.
"What odds did Pulaski give her on making it to the new moon?" she asked, keeping her voice low and quiet.
"Fifty-fifty. He said if she made it through the first night, she had a chance, but..." He shook his head, collapsing back into his chair. "I don't know if she's going to make it, Black. She's barely eating, you saw how hard it is for her... We managed to make rent this month, but if the Ministry raids us, kicks us out before new moon..."
Right. It wasn't much of a secret Regulation and Control would throw even the most law-abiding werewolves out on the street if they could come up with the least excuse. And if they'd already paid for this flat, they likely wouldn't have money to take another for her, so she'd be out on the street, or crammed into another already-overcrowded set of rooms... (It was a little weird that it was just Morgen and Constantine here at the moment, but Aster suspected more wolves would make their way here to crash come nightfall.) R and C would probably think it a good thing if Morgen died of exposure before she could be healed. Aster had actually heard those bastards — older Gryffindors who'd joined the Department after leaving school, at least — say that the only good werewolf was a dead werewolf.
"There might be something I could do," Aster found herself saying, making the offer without really thinking it through.
She realised it might be a bad idea as soon as Constantine, all suspicion and reluctant hope, asked "What?" but she wasn't going to take it back.
"Ah...soul magic. Well, kind of like halfway between blood magic and soul magic? Not healing her, I don't have any idea how to do something like that, even without the Curse mucking shite up, but I'm pretty sure I can make sure she makes it to the new moon."
"How?" Aster flinched, slightly taken aback by the raw desperation in his voice. "Pulaski said there wasn't— Tell me you're not fucking with me, Black!"
"I'm not! It's, ah, Pulaski wouldn't consider trying it because, well, he'd probably be worried about the Curse spreading to himself. And he's kind of getting old and frail, too. And he's also not really the self-sacrificing type. It probably wouldn't even occur to him, honestly."
"What. Are. You. Talking. About?"
"Well...using blood magic — sympathy, basically — to bind the two of us to each other, her life-force to mine, make a conduit between us so she can't die unless I die. Basically let her draw energy off me to sustain herself, heal faster." She'd have to talk to Pulaski to find out for sure, but it might actually let him pull her all the way through the healing process this month, rather than waiting until next month, which would definitely help.
"That sounds...dangerous," the man said grudgingly, as though he knew he ought to tell her it was actually a bad idea, but didn't want to if it had even the slightest chance of helping.
"No shite? It's not as dangerous as you're probably thinking, though. I'm a lot younger than she is. I'm physically stronger, and my soul burns brighter than hers."
"Burns brighter?" he repeated.
"Er... If you look at us with magic, there's more energy in my metaphysical being than hers, even taking the Curse into account." Aster didn't really have to look to know that, she could count on one hand the people she'd met who were brighter than herself (and she was related to most of them). "It won't be comfortable for me, but it shouldn't hurt me, really. It'll just make me really tired for a few days."
And probably hungry. And it might actually make her a little soul-sick, like coming off of a viv high, essentially keeping someone else lit up for over a week. (Theoretically, she'd never actually tried viv — contrary to popular belief, there were some drugs even she thought were a Bad Idea to play around with.) And it would probably slow her own healing down considerably. But if it got too bad, she could lean into the Family Magic to take the strain off herself — advantages of so many of their wards being blood-based — and it wasn't as though she could heal herself until the new moon either.
"But you're already injured, and you said the Curse might spread— Is there— Could I do it, instead, this spell?"
"...Maybe? There's not really a spell, as such. It's just...power, focus, and intent. Deep, primal magic." She paused to let Constantine respond, if he thought he could do it. He hesitated. Just as well — she doubted he was actually prepared to do it, even if he thought he might be able to. "It's really not the sort of thing you want to try for the first time with something as important as this. I'll do it. I'm not in the habit of making offers I don't intend to follow through on, and I'm pretty sure if actually getting bitten doesn't turn me, this won't either."
The man gave her a grim nod. "Do it, then. If it might help her...do it."
Aster gave him a one-shouldered shrug, avoiding pulling at the cut running up the back of her neck. "I don't know if it will help her, but it can't hurt, I don't think," she assured him, stumping back to the werewolf matriarch's sick-room. Conjuring a few balls of light had her eyes blinking open, though she didn't really seem to be focusing quite well enough to follow Aster's explanation of what she intended to do.
Though that might've been Aster's explanation. She seemed to understand just fine when Constantine explained, cutting out her tendency to meander. At least enough to object.
"That's— No, dear, I can't let you—"
"Sure you can. You don't even have to do anything, really. Though I guess we should probably test if it works, first, me lighting you up." She closed her eyes to focus for a second, envisioning reddish purple flames flickering into life in her hand and pushing— Constantine's gasp let her know it had worked even before she opened them again. "Here, hold out your hand."
"What is...?" the old woman asked, staring at the fire as though transfixed, a cautious finger reaching toward it as though of its own accord.
"Soulfire? It's...magic. Energy. Life." She turned the old woman's hand palm-up, tipped the fire into it. "And I'm giving it to you." It sank into her skin like water into sand. It might've been Aster's imagination, but she thought a bit of colour might've come back into the old werewolf's cheeks. It definitely wasn't her imagination that Morgen relaxed a bit, some of the pained lines easing around her eyes. "Feel it?"
"It's...warm," she sighed, fingers ghosting over her heart.
Aster giggled. (Ow.) "Of course it is, it's fire." Actually, that wasn't entirely obvious. When Bella lit her up — which she'd only done a handful of times, when Aster was little and Bella was especially up and wanted company — it felt more electric than warm, and the Yule ritual was painfully dark-cold, like some kind of anti-fire. But this was life freely given with the intent to sustain, not stolen and violently transformed into raw energy to feed the Family Magic (and by extension, the Family). It should be warm. Pleasant.
"Please, Grandmother," Connie said, voice tight. Strained. He was doing a pretty good job not looking completely distraught, but Aster could still tell.
"No, child. You shouldn't— You're hurt yourself, don't waste your magic on a broken old thing like me."
Aster pouted at her. "Don't be stupid, Grandmother. Do you want to die?"
It might've been her imagination, but she kind of thought the old woman hesitated a little too long before saying, "No...no, of course not..." and then after another moment's hesitation she added, "I'm old, child. And...tired. If it's my time... Death won't take kindly to your keeping me from him."
"I know someone who can put in a good word for me," Aster responded, as drily and disapprovingly as she could manage. Honestly, she wasn't all that surprised, really, that the old wolf was ready to die. Changing every month took a toll on a person, and being the rock all the other wolves leaned on probably didn't help.
"I— Grandmother..." Constantine didn't seem to know what he wanted to say, falling to his knees at her side.
"There, there, Connie-boy, don't cry for me, there's a good lad..."
"Grandmother, please, don't leave us! Don't—" His voice broke.
"Hush, Connie... Hush, now. I don't want to leave you. But...when it's time...if it's time...I won't put it off."
"Are you sure? You're not just saying so because you don't want to be a burden or something, are you?" Aster asked. "Because you won't be, I offered, it's fine."
"You're a sweet one, child, but no. What will be, will be. And I'm tired..." Her eyes fluttered shut again, her good hand clasped gently between Constantine's.
Aster sighed in defeat. (Ow.) If Morgen didn't want her help, she wasn't about to force it on her. Keeping her alive if she wanted to die would be...cruel. "Maybe we should just...let her rest?"
He shook his head. "You go. I'm... I'm going to stay with her. Just a while longer."
She nodded, turning for the door. What else was there to say?
"Thank you."
Well, there was that, she supposed. "Don't thank me," she muttered. "I did little enough. Sleep well, Grandmother. Constantine." She tipped her head toward him in a more formal farewell.
Morgen might've already been unconscious, it was hard to tell, but Connie nodded. "Black."
"...I'll see myself out."