March 1994
The second time her period came around was even worse than the first.
Liz had more warning it was coming, at least — or not really, she guessed, she was just more aware of what the warning signs were. There were a few little things that might or might not be related, being vaguely tired for a few days leading up to it and maybe slightly hungrier than usual — though it was hard to tell, her appetite came and went by itself — and she also felt weirdly stiff, some of her joints almost painful, but that could just be from exercise, and she could work it out pretty easy, so. The dull, subtle ache low in her abdomen, sort of like muscle soreness after working harder than usual, was a big blaring red flag, though. As soon as she noticed it, she knew what was coming — she planned ahead, dropped by Pomfrey's office to get potions for the cramps and the nausea. (She'd pull from her own stash to deal with a headache, if she got that again.) Pomfrey repeated Dorea's warning that she could only take the pink one once every twenty-four hours, if it was still really bad Liz should come to the Hospital Wing. Since being in hospital was terrible, Liz planned to ignore that recommendation, but maybe she hadn't been the only mind mage in the room, because Pomfrey warned her that particularly stubborn pain could be a sign of more serious health problems, so, keep that in mind.
If Pomfrey had been more forthcoming about what the course of treatment would be like, she might not have bothered.
Like last time, the ache stayed subtle and mostly ignorable for a couple days, with only occasional more noticeable spikes. It wasn't really painful, or at least not distractingly so — though knowing what was coming and not being able to do anything about it put her in a shitty mood. (Liz hated feeling trapped.) She caught thoughts from a few people that she was acting more irritable than usual, but most people wrote it off as related to the custody thing. Which hadn't been that bad, actually. It'd been nearly two weeks since the hearing, and, of course there'd been articles about it and whatever, but...
Well, the reaction when it'd first gotten into the papers, a few months ago now, that had been much worse. Now that the facts were actually out — why it was happening, so people couldn't speculate and make up crazy theories, or just assume she was obviously evil and that was why she didn't like Dumbledore, or whatever — the tone of how people talked about it had shifted dramatically. She noticed much less anger and distrust pointed at her over it, and a lot more pointed at Dumbledore, which she could live with (and even encouraged, honestly, fuck Dumbledore). And now that they knew some of what happened, people actually asked her about it much less often, which was kind of funny, maybe she should have just told people months ago and saved herself the bother. In response to people questioning whether Severus was really the right person, there'd even been a few letters printed in the Herald from current but mostly former students whose abusive families he'd intervened in over the years — the tone of the letters was honestly kind of funny, all like yeah, he's a scary intimidating bastard, but he's even scarier to people who fuck with his Slytherins, "Ellie" will be fine — which was doing interesting things to how the non-Slytherins in the school thought of him, Severus getting a lot of odd looks at meals or in the halls or in Potions, so people weren't even angry at him anymore either.
Liz had even gotten apologies from some of the people who'd been particularly shitty about it at first. It was bloody weird.
But if they were going to give her such a convenient excuse for her to lean on, she definitely wasn't going to correct them — besides, the dinner table wasn't exactly a place she wanted to talk about her uterus working up the nerve to start trying to murder her, thanks.
The ache had slowly worsened, but the actual bleeding part started unexpectedly, in the middle of the day. She'd taken a hard hit from a hex in duelling practice, which wasn't exactly unusual, and not really bad enough she couldn't keep going after a couple quick healing charms from Faolán and some stretches, no big deal. (Faolán Monroe was the captain of the senior division team, and kind of in charge of the whole club, which was the only reason Liz hadn't yelled at him over the head of his family voting against her and Severus.) She went straight back to practice, and didn't even realise anything was wrong until a good ten or fifteen minutes later.
Because apparently taking a hard hex had...shaken something loose in there. Eich. She didn't want to start visibly leaking, so she'd begged off. Cynfelyn seemed somewhat sceptical of her sudden decision she wasn't feeling well, but he didn't try to stop her, so. Nilanse took care of it before it got very far, repeating her trick of just vanishing all of it, but Liz still took a shower, because eeuuggghhhh...
The pain part didn't hit until early the next morning. Maybe Liz's memory was off, but it seemed even worse than last time. And, of course, the little pink potion didn't do shite — well no, it helped a little, just, not enough.
And food was even more disgusting than it'd been the first time, but thankfully she had a nausea potion for that...though that didn't make it completely go away, it was better enough she actually ate something at breakfast. Though it wasn't easy, for whatever reason the grease on the bacon and sausages was setting her off, even the smell of them, ugh...
That afternoon, she only made it halfway up the stairs to Divination, backtracked to the Hospital Wing instead — trying to climb stairs just made it worse, and it sure as hell felt like the potion was wearing off already, fuck this. Either Liz had drastically misunderstood what Pomfrey had told her before, or she'd oversold how much she could actually do about this. Supposedly, painful periods was something that just happened sometimes, especially in teenagers (though they often grow out of it)...and apparently having psychological issues and being especially athletic were risk factors, because of course they were. Lily had gotten it too — Pomfrey hadn't been the healer that long, but Hogwarts didn't destroy students' records when they graduated — was a bit of a problem in fourth and fifth year, but by the time she graduated it'd become manageable. So it was possible whatever was causing it was heritable, which was a thing that could happen, and it'd fix itself given long enough. But Liz did not want to wait that long.
There were other medical problems that could cause it, but Pomfrey couldn't test for many of them just now — it turned out healers' analysis charms had some serious limitations. One of the basic rules of magic was that you had to see something to manipulate it, or make direct contact with it in some other way, which was obviously rather more difficult with internal organs. There were charms that could detect internal problems, but they worked by querying the body's 'memory' of what it was supposed to be like — they were fine for injuries and curses and stuff, but defects tended not to show up at all, because the body normally didn't even realise there was a problem. To Pomfrey's analysis charms, it just read like bad muscle cramps (which was what the pink potion was for), plus some mild blood pressure irregularities in the area (which was normal even in people who didn't get pain), and also something Liz hadn't really understood about the tissues being off such that any pregnancy would almost certainly result in miscarriage — Pomfrey 'reassured' her that that wasn't unusual, and would most likely resolve in a couple years as her body developed further, but Liz planned on never having kids anyway, so she did not care — and that was really it. Her blood tests showed some of Liz's levels were off (she made her drink a bunch of mineral water, had a funny aftertaste but whatever), and of course her hormones (in general, like stress things or whatever, not just sex-related stuff) were all over the place, but that was normal. Since Liz had already taken the pink potion and one of her own for her headache, there wasn't much Pomfrey could do without taking more extreme measures.
It was possible for her to stop the cramping entirely, but to do that she'd pretty much have to...basically shut Liz's muscles off, but that would lay her up in bed for as long as it lasted and she would also definitely soil herself, so, not doing that. The only alternative was to begin deeper analysis, to look for any underlying problem that might be causing it. The first step was a pelvic exam, which would involve Pomfrey sticking shite up there to get a closer look than normal analysis charms allowed, which Liz shut down immediately — she did not want to, just, sit there while Pomfrey poked about between her legs, no thank you.
The next step, a more extreme option was to get the magical equivalent of an x-ray, basically. There were two ways to do that. The first was to do a ritual to create a perfect recreation of Liz's body (in the form of an illusion), that a healer could peel apart as they liked and look for issues. Pomfrey did know how to do that, part of her healer training, but they couldn't do it in the school — in fact, they couldn't do it indoors, they'd have to go to one of the prepared ritual sites around the country and do it there. Since Liz would have to be completely naked for that, and also go through a cleansing ritual first to prevent bringing in any extraneous magics (which would also be done completely naked), and would need to go to an outside healer for it because reasons, yeah, didn't sound like that was happening. In recent centuries, healers had begun making internal imaging devices that could do the same thing without a ritual, worked through some really complicated theoretical shite, Pomfrey didn't understand it exactly. But they were still very new, and finicky to operate, and very expensive — there was only one in the whole country, at Saint Mungo's, and there was a stupid long waiting list to get in there, especially since Liz's case wasn't urgent. She'd have better luck trying a hospital on the Continent, Severus would know who to ask.
Another possibility would be to go to one of the traditional healers still lingering around in Britain — that is, priests of old religions that still did rituals and shite to heal people. Pomfrey insisted that those methods did work — inconsistently, depending on the talent of the practitioner and whether the entity the ritualist invoked chose to cooperate or not (because apparently gods were real?) — but they were less reliable and the results harder to reproduce, so wasn't the sort of thing normal healers were usually taught. That kind of magic was still relatively common among poor people (who couldn't afford a real healer) and the particularly religious, especially in the old communes and just Ireland in general, shouldn't be difficult to find someone. If the problem persisted, or if it worsened to the point that she had trouble even going to class, Pomfrey would recommend she go to a healer on the Continent to get one of those exams done, or alternatively find a midwife working with the priests of Bríd or Áirmidh — obviously she wasn't trying to get pregnant, but midwives were just what they called healers specialised in things to do with this part of the body in general (in addition to fertility and baby stuff), so that's still who she would go to for this kind of thing. Which was good to know, she guessed.
Beyond that, there wasn't really anything Pomfrey could do for her at this time. She could make sure to have a stronger formulation of the pink potion on hand for next month, but sorry, that was the best she could do.
(Talking about the possible causes and things that could make it worse, Pomfrey mentioned that, like with other health conditions, a mage's mental state could have effects on their physical health — kind of accidentally fucking themselves up with magic, but slowly. For this thing in particular, apparently it happened more often than baseline with people who found menstruation especially distressing, or who were uncomfortable with their own body for whatever reason. Pomfrey hadn't explicitly suggested that was a factor, but she had made a point of bringing it up, and given how so openly talking about certain parts of her body was terribly unnerving, she might have a point. Liz didn't know what she could possibly do about that in the short term, though.)
Anyway, weird uncomfortable shite aside, Pomfrey couldn't do anything to help. And she wouldn't be able to the next month either. Or the next. Or the next.
The second time she woke up with her uterus still trying to murder her, again not having gone away overnight, Liz decided that getting her period twice was quite enough. She was just going to go ahead and stop it from happening again, because fuck this.
Figuring out how to do that would take a bit of work. Tamsyn had mentioned such curses existed, but nothing else about them. She'd also said no respectable healer would cast one for her — or at least not so early in her life, supposedly it was a thing they sometimes did with adults who had particularly bad periods and were just done with it — so she couldn't just go to an outside healer (or get Tamsyn to do it for her, since she was all the way in America and Liz had told her to stay away from her). She kind of doubted Severus would do it for her either. There were health risks that came with stagnant curses, particularly cancer and the like, and the longer she kept a sterility curse in place the more likely it was she'd permanently sterilise herself — she remembered Severus saying she might change her mind one day, and, maybe he'd put up a token resistance and do what she wanted anyway, but she just didn't want to argue about it.
(It didn't help that so openly talking about certain parts of her body was terribly unnerving, she'd rather avoid that if at all possible.)
So, if Liz was going to do this, she would need to do it herself. It only took three days, picking over the books on healing and battlemagic in the library, to decide that she wasn't going to find anything here. There might be something in the library at Clyde Rock, but given how silly purebloods could be about family and children and whatever, she had the feeling Cediny might protest Liz tracking down a sterility curse to cast on herself. Severus's library was out, for similar reasons. Which left her one option.
Liz needed to break into the Restricted Section.
This turned out to be rather less difficult than Liz might have expected. Near the entrance in the library was a somewhat open area, the ceiling double-high, windows looking over the lake stretching all the way up, on the other three sides the second level of the library overlooking the space. Madam Pince's desk was here, where she could often be found sorting through returned books, making repairs to ones that had been damaged somehow, or reading in wait of something to do. Behind her desk was an otherwise unmarked doorway leading into the Restricted Section — an empty doorway, no actual door in it. There was no way Liz could get permission to go in there, and Pince had surprisingly good occlumency, her mind solid and contained, smooth and cool, Liz wasn't confident of her ability to compel the librarian to let her in. And if she was caught in the attempt she would almost certainly be banned from the library for a time, so, not worth the risk to try and find out. She'd overheard from other students that there were some kind of wards over the door, that Pince always knew when people tried to sneak in there, and would catch them quickly enough they couldn't even get to the books. Even in the middle of the night — apparently Pince had an odd, irregular sleep schedule, and her rooms were adjacent to the library anyway, even if she wasn't awake it didn't take her long to get here.
Which meant Liz had to do it the hard way. She took a couple days to learn an analysis spell — she knew some to detect whether a potion or object were dangerous, but not enough to figure out what kind of spell was on it — surreptitiously cast it on the doorway while Pince was reshelving books and copy down the illusory runs floating in front of her eyes, then pick apart the magic to figure out what it did with the help of an introductory cursebreaking book in the Runes section. This wasn't something she'd really done before, so she might have expected it to take longer than a couple days, but once she had the analysis it only took a single afternoon to decipher it — it was just a basic tripline, notifying someone (presumably Pince) if a mind passed through the plane of the doorway. Well, a soul, technically, but same difference. (Because apparently Pince had put up a ward in her library that worked through soul magic, she wondered if Dumbledore knew about that...) There wasn't even a part to try to identify who the intruder was, just detected people and alerted Pince, that was it.
Huh. She'd thought it would be more complicated than that.
Of course, that presented enough problems by itself. Even if Liz could learn how to break a ward within a couple weeks (which seemed implausible), as simple as this was it was a proper ward — wards created a sort of mental link with people keyed into them, Pince would also be alerted once it was broken. (So, maybe the defences on the door didn't need to be any more thorough than this, when she thought about it.) She would come running, and Liz still wouldn't be able to compel her away. Also, she had to worry about witnesses — there were a few portraits in the library and in the halls, there could be some in the Restricted Section itself, for all she knew. So she needed some way to avoid being detected.
Luckily for her, Dumbledore had sent her her father's invisibility cloak way back in first year. She'd never actually used the thing before — there'd never been a situation where it would be useful to be invisible but compelling people away with mind magic wouldn't work just as well — but it wasn't hard to find it, folded up at the bottom of the compartment in her trunk she kept her clothes in. Despite being folded so long, the cloth — smooth and silvery, almost felt wet to the touch, like waving her hand through mist, but Liz thought that was just in her head, a funny magesight thing — hadn't developed any seams, the surface without any visible discontinuities or flaws whatsoever. Which was neat, there must be enchantments for that — and there was definitely serious magic in this thing, tingling against her fingers, she was struck with the oddest urge to shiver.
Anyway, the "cloak" wasn't just the name, it was in the shape of a cloak — with the bit that was meant to be a hood, a chain to hold it closed over the wearer's throat. Curiously, there was actually decoration on the..."button" wasn't the right word, the part that latched onto a spot on the opposite side to hold the chain in place. (It took her a while to find where it was supposed to latch onto, searching it with her fingers, the cloth too smooth and featureless.) It was like a little medallion, small enough to fit in the depression in the palm of her hand, silver etched with a design of some kind, Liz leaned closer to make it out, squinting and turning it in the light. That looked like...a wolf, maybe, with the wings of some kind of bird tented over it, facing forward and with its mouth wide open, between its teeth in the middle...a swastika? Was she seeing that right?
...Weird.
Anyway, she threw the thing over her shoulders, after a lot of fiddling around and searching for the damn latch thing again, she got it closed. She turned to look at her mirror, and— Woah, that was freaky-looking, just her head (with all her damn hair) and part of her neck floating there in mid-air, the rest of her completely invisible. After a bit of struggling with her hair, pushing it back and tucking it under the cloak, she pulled the hood up, and she just disappeared completely. Which...the hood wasn't actually covering her face — she could see the hem in her peripheral vision, but it wasn't even down to the level of her eyebrows, she should be able to see her own face still — and not to mention, it closed just under her throat, but...
Liz stuck her foot out, but still on the ground, as though halfway through a step — her leg pushed through the opening of the cloak, nearly up to her knee...but her leg was still invisible. Bunching up some of the cloth in her hand, she gradually dragged it up, up and up, over her knee above the hem of her dress, and further up her thigh and...her leg stayed invisible. She pushed her hands out in front of her, and gradually parted the cloak to the sides, opening it up, invisible, invisible, still invisible despite being mostly uncovered now...until the cloak was finally shrugged off of her shoulders, just hanging from the chain, and suddenly she was visible again — completely visible, including her head and the cloth itself, like the cloak had just suddenly turned off. Pulling one side of the cloak back over her shoulder, visible, the second she pulled the other side back up, boom, suddenly completely invisible again, despite only being partially covered by the cloak.
Huh. That was neat. She'd thought it was that just the cloth made anything under it invisible...though when she thought about it, that didn't make a lot of sense, since it wasn't like the cloth was invisible to begin with. The cloak must be enchanted to make the wearer invisible, whether they were fully covered or not — and of course, for there to be a wearer they had to be, well, wearing it, once the enchantments detected it was being worn it switched on.
Neat! Magic was so cool sometimes, she wondered how that worked...
Carrying her bookbag under the cloak — she did check, but her bag was made invisible with everything else (she'd assumed it would, since it got her clothes too) — Liz waited until after curfew to leave. It was a relatively short walk up to the library (by the standards of Hogwarts, place was too bloody big), the halls dark and still and silent. Not that not being able to see very well bothered her, she'd feel anyone coming long before they would see her (if she wasn't invisible anyway), and the castle was magical enough she wasn't going to run into a wall or anything. The doors of the library were closed, and locked, but she didn't think there were any spells on them — she'd tested that too, as long as the cloak remained properly on she could stick her wand out and it'd stay invisible — she cast a quick silencing before unlocking the door, slipping inside, and pulling it gently closed behind her.
It was dark in the library, but not actually as dark as she'd expected — there was a lamp at the end of every row, shuttered but still burning, casting a moody, reddish light over their nearby surroundings, the stacks and chairs and whatever else blocking it to make deep, stubborn shadows. It was a cloudy day, the grounds outside dark, the texture of the land only dimly visible in greys and taupes and subtle greens, a faint glimmer visible here and there deep in the forests, the centaurs' villages? It was surprisingly pretty, actually, and quiet, quieter than even the library ever got. Liz might have to sneak up here just to read in peace every once in a while, it was oddly nice.
But she had a thing to do. Liz turned straight toward Pince's desk, slipped over to the back. Her skin tingling with nerves, Liz took a long, slow breath, and then stepped through the doorway — there was a faint crackle of magic on the air, but it didn't try to stop her. She didn't stop as soon as she was through, kept walking deeper into the hidden section of the library — looking much the same as the rest of it, with the same carpets and shelves and armchairs and tables, but no windows — continuing into one of the study nooks, where she paused. She held perfectly still, breathing as quietly as possible, and watched the entrance, waiting.
And waiting...
And waiting...
Pince never showed up.
The longer it went, the more confused Liz got, until the ten minute mark finally passed and Liz decided the librarian simply wasn't coming. That was...weird. Maybe she was out of the castle or something, or maybe the cloak blocked all forms of detection, not just sight. She didn't have any way to test that, though, so... Maybe try to be quiet, just in case, but it looked like she'd be fine...
Over the next week, she would head upstairs after curfew every night, slipping in and out of the Restricted Section without incident. Her third night of research, she got confirmation that there was something funny going on here: not only was Pince definitely in the building, but she was in the Restricted Section itself, sitting at one of the tables reading from...well, she was in the Arithmancy section, but Liz was too wary of being caught to get closer and try to get a glimpse of the book. Apparently Liz wasn't tripping the ward, which was odd, but she just shrugged it off, must be the cloak doing that somehow. Pince was actually in here pretty often — not that Liz could blame her, if she had full access to the library she suspected she'd spend a large portion of her free time reading whatever caught her eye — on those nights Liz just put a silencing paling around where she was working, was careful not to move things around too much.
She did have one close call, when Pince walked by and noticed things had been moved around. Liz wasn't a complete idiot, so she'd kept her cloak on, she snatched up the book she was currently looking at and her notes and squeezed herself into a corner as the middle-aged woman — tall and slender, face pale and angular, dark eyes narrowed into a suspicious glare, her black hair, normally corralled into a tight bun, now let free, mostly straight but with a few random kinks here and there, her mind tight and simmering — walked into Liz's study nook, eyes bouncing between the chairs and the shelves and the books sitting on the table. Coming up to the table, Pince nudged one of the books, turned so she could see the title, one of her eyebrows twitching — most of the books she was looking at weren't particularly pleasant, probably assuming some student was planning to do something. A wand appeared in her hand, she snapped off a charm of some kind, and shockingly powerful (Liz hadn't realised Pince was that good of a mage), magic crawling over Liz's surroundings...but it completely ignored her, passing through the space Liz was occupying like she wasn't here at all. Pince relaxed, if just a little, muttered something under her breath Liz didn't quite catch. She returned the books on the table to the shelves, and then turned and walked away. Liz didn't allow herself to breathe again until she vanished through the doorway into the main body of the library.
But besides that one time, it went very smoothly. The research part, not so much.
There was a section in here on battlemagic and curses and stuff, but finding what she was looking for was, just, bloody tedious. She'd figured out pretty quickly that general books on curses didn't do her any good — they might mention the sort of curses she was looking for, but only briefly, without enough information to decide whether it was a safe one to use. But, a book being about cursing people in general was actually kind of rare, and there were books specifically about this sort of thing...or topics that obviously included this kind of thing, anyway. She did look through several of these books, but they were...
Well, these blokes really hated women, to put it bluntly. They were not pleasant to read. She didn't know what she'd expected, honestly, picking up books that were about curses specifically intended to be used on women, but it was... She'd been just done with one of these books when it talked about a curse that, kind of like an entrail-expelling curse (which was gross), but, you know, targeting the internal baby-making shite instead and yanking it out through– and of course doing that tore a bunch of blood vessels and shite, so it was a lethal curse, and there were already plenty of those, but apparently the author thought he needed an especially horrifying way to murder women who annoyed him (though he characterised it as humiliating, for some reason Liz didn't quite get), out of some delusional sense of—
It was a lot, that was all. Made her skin crawl, reading this shite.
(Liz didn't normally agree with the idea of banning or even restricting books, but in this case it didn't bother her so much. In fact, if she were in charge, she thought she'd burn them all — and also the authors, just in case.)
And there were kind of a lot of these things — which was seriously unnerving, when she took a second to think about it, magical Britain was a small country and most of them weren't even that old... — but she could only take so many hours in a row reading this shite, she had to break it up now and then with other things. She ended up vacillating back and forth between creepy misogynist shite and healing books, which, while much less unpleasant to read, seemed rather less likely to actually be helpful. She did jot down notes for a few healing charms, so not completely useless, just not why she was here. One book seemed promising at first, was all about periods and puberty and pregnancy and shite, in a lot of detail — the introduction said it was written by a midwife with a good century of experience, so coming at it from a slightly different angle than most of the other healing books.
But, unfortunately, after nearly a whole night flipping through the thing and reading snippets, it became clear this one wasn't actually going to do her any good. It did talk about sterility curses and potions, but primarily in the interest of healing them, not actually using them. The book seemed pretty innocuous, really, nothing in here was what she would call dangerous — the author did describe a lot of blood and ritual magics, she assumed that was the only reason it was Restricted (which was dumb, but whatever). She did copy down a charm to detect pregnancy — supposedly it would work a hundred per cent of the time from the sunrise after the egg rooted in place (gross), which normally happened about a week after the actual sex part (again, gross) — and also the entire formula and directions and warnings, word for word, for a potion to induce a miscarriage (so, an abortion potion, basically). Liz would obviously never need this shite herself, but she didn't know, Hermione or Dorea or someone might one day, might as well have it on hand.
(Given how silly purebloods could be about their families and all, Liz had the feeling it was pretty hard to get an abortion in the magical world, so.)
She'd been visiting the library every night for going on a week before she started getting seriously worried. Honestly, she'd thought it wouldn't be hard, obviously anything that had sterility curses in them should talk about how they actually worked and what they did, right? That just made sense, a lot of the other curse books did that. That had maybe been a bit naïve of her, in retrospect — for stupid misogynist reasons, it seemed all the books that talked about casting sterility curses were written by men, and naturally they weren't so concerned about the details, being creepy misogynist bastards. The ones by female authors pretty much exclusively talked about breaking them or healing the damage from ones left to set — despite what she'd been told, that was possible, though it seemed to require ritual magic in most cases — which was obviously the exact opposite of what she wanted.
As the days went by, Liz started seriously considering going to Severus. He had spent a lot of time around Death Eaters and the like, presumably he was familiar with some, and he was a healer, so he should know which were safe to use (or, less unsafe, at least). She'd assumed he would disapprove of her cursing herself to permanently break her own body (which was technically what she was going for here), but it turned out it was reversible, if she came to him with proof of that he might be more willing to cooperate. She wouldn't count on it, but if she had no other option...
And it was increasingly starting to look like she didn't have any other option. The second time hadn't been precisely a month after the first time, but assuming they'd come at regular intervals, well, she was working with a deadline here. She didn't want to have to go through it a third time if there was absolutely anything she could do to stop it. (Short of suicide, obviously.) As the first week melted into the second week, days slipping by one by one, and she didn't have forever, she stayed in the Restricted Section longer and longer every night, she didn't have time to read every bloody book in here, but— It was eating into her sleep, enough she was having trouble paying attention in class — well, more than usual, class was pretty boring most of the time — but she couldn't stop, started sneaking naps when she could, she had to find something...
Until after nearly two weeks, she finally found it.
Since the battlemagic and healing books weren't doing her much good, she'd started branching out, poking through other sections — partially, if she was being honest, just to give herself a break from the aggressively unpleasant books. Looking through a section on other magical beings and family law — an odd combination, but it seemed potentially promising, if less so than some other sections — her attention had been drawn to a shelf with several copies of the same book right in a row. That was odd, some books she'd noticed had two or three copies, but never that many. Looking over the introduction, it'd been written by a Lord Carpenter (bastard) from the 19th Century, as a guide for other Lords or Masters (the title for heads of Common Houses) on how to manage their families. Most of it seemed completely useless to her, she honestly wasn't sure why she stuck with it. It didn't feel like a seer intuition thing, but it could be hard to tell sometimes, maybe she just didn't feel like reading more vile trash.
(Honestly, spending so many nights in a row reading this stuff was emotionally exhausting, on top of just normal exhausting.)
Flipping through the thing, reading a page here or there, she eventually stumbled on a section managing the population of the House...including preventing unwanted births — her heart jumping into her throat, Liz leaned closer over the table, stopped skimming and started reading every word. This Carpenter bloke was rather unpleasant himself, if not quite so aggressively terrible as some of the other authors she'd read lately. Honestly, after some of the awful misogynist vitriol she'd had to slog through, someone who clearly thought of the women in his family as little more than bargaining chips with other families and incubators for the next generation was a step up. (Which was just sad, she couldn't wait until she was done with this shite.) And, after reading through some pretty creepy eugenics-ish shite, she found exactly what she was looking for.
Though this section was a bit creepy itself, because of course it was going to be. The reason Lord Carpenter here was concerned with sterility curses was because you can't have your women embarrassing the family before they were sold off all proper, and women are such vain, intemperate creatures, and you definitely can't depend on the more willful ones to have any concern whatsoever for morals or the potential consequences, no, it was easier to just curse them. (Bastard.) He went through several different relatively safe sterility curses — that is, ones that were unlikely to result in any secondary health problems — weighing the pros and cons of each. See, which one might be better to use would depend on exactly why you wanted to use one. It seemed some were less pleasant to be under than others — if you were trying to punish a disobedient girl in the family, than obviously you'd use one of the more unpleasant ones, but there were legitimate health reasons why it might be a good idea to put one on someone temporarily, and you wouldn't want to subject the obedient women to something unpleasant unnecessarily, so.
(Bastard.)
One curse in particular was very promising. Most sterility curses worked by breaking something, or interrupting the process involved in something to prevent the bits from working correctly. The effects of the curse being in place depended on how it worked — for example, if one just stopped ovulation, or the egg from rooting, then the person would still get periods and everything, they just couldn't get pregnant (which was obviously useless for Liz's purposes). This one worked differently: it basically froze the bits at the point of the cycle they were at at that moment. Not in time, they still interacted with the rest of the body like normal, and developed and aged as they should, they just stayed at that same point in the cycle until the curse was broken, which was very neat.
Carpenter had a surprising amount of commentary on this one, actually. One of the weird things about mages was... Well, apparently women only got so many shots at it — she meant, there was a total number of periods they would get, once they were out they were out — but this didn't really change much between mages and muggles, despite mages living significantly longer. That was actually why mages married and had kids really young, the age range they were capable of it was weighted closer to the beginning of their lives than it was for muggles, so they just got it out of the way right away so they didn't miss it. Sometimes, there might be some medical reason why having kids wouldn't be a good idea, and it might persist for a while — since this curse stopped shite from happening, the chances a woman would have could be saved for later, until after whatever the other health problem was was dealt with.
Of course, there were also less pleasant uses Carpenter had come up with, depending on when in the cycle you were freezing it at. Kind of like the good use of it in reverse, freezing the cycle exactly when ovulation was going on would just have the woman constantly spitting out eggs (gross) which would deplete their shots in the space of a couple months, instead of a few decades. (Liz knew from that midwife's book that that was actually fixable, but it required deep ritual magic.) Another option was to cast it during their period, which would basically make them keep bleeding and never stop — Liz was...pretty sure that's not how that worked, they should just run out of...stuff and not grow any more, maybe the spell was doing something weird there. Anyway, not only was that very gross, but the woman would then always be steadily loosing blood, which got pretty damn miserable pretty quickly, so of course Carpenter recommended it for especially rebellious girls (bastard). Between the former and the latter, there was a span of time where, for weird hormone reasons, women's libido was at a minimum, which he also recommended for girls who won't be good and not have sex because the men whose property they were told them not to, because of course (bastard).
There was a window in the couple days before ovulation where, for weird hormone reasons, women's libido was at a maximum, in which he specifically recommended not to use this particular curse, because obviously we couldn't have horny little shites running around, how embarrassing.
The curse was, though, very safe. There could be some knock-on effects, depending on when exactly in the cycle it was done, but for the most part they weren't a big deal. Because it wasn't breaking anything, the cancer and fever and inflammation risks were actually very low — that sort of thing could happen, but less frequently than in more aggressive curses. Also, since the tissues weren't damaged or frozen in any way, it didn't cause tearing effects at the boundary, and still allowed them to grow correctly, so it was safe to use on younger girls or over long periods of time. And the curse wasn't even that difficult to cast, either.
It looked exactly like what Liz was looking for.
She checked the time — two in the morning, not too late. After confirming quick in Carpenter's description that the curse required a body to act on (so wouldn't damage physical materials at all), and that Pince wasn't anywhere in here at the moment, Liz practised casting the curse. It took five tries to get it to resolve at all, and another ten to get it to work consistently, each attempt after that making the greenish-blueish spellglow brighter and thicker and...snappier. (Didn't know what she meant by that, just the word that occurred to her.) By half after three, she thought she had it down pretty good. Just in case, she went back to the healing section and found that midwife's book again, looked for...
Ah, here it was, a charm to detect what point in the cycle someone was at — obviously she should check where she was at before deciding to use the curse. (She'd be very annoyed if she had to wait through a third time.) It wasn't too difficult to cast, only took a couple attempts, and the author said clothing wouldn't interfere, so, good. She cast it on herself, grimacing a little at the sharp little tines of ice crawling through her middle — ergh, light magic, of course — the area around her waist and hips glowed a soft, warm purple for a few seconds before fading again, Liz letting out a sigh as the chill went away with it. Right, the table was over here, purple, purple purple...
Oh. Purple was for those couple days just before ovulation. That happened to be when the chances were best of successfully getting pregnant — the charm had been designed with the assumption it'd be used by people trying to have children, and purple was the good colour, see.
But that also happened to be the time that, for weird hormone reasons, the sex drive was at its peak. Evolution-related, Liz thought, that did make sense when she thought about it.
Which meant, if Liz did the curse now, she'd pretty much be a little horny shite all the time, forever.
...
Fine. The alternative was waiting for three weeks, going through it all a third time, because if she just waited a few days then she'd be in the sex is kind of hard and shite point, and she didn't want to do that — masturbating was fun, so. Her hormones constantly fucking with her might get a little distracting sometimes, sure, but she could live with that. If it got too much she could always just undo it and wait a couple weeks before doing it again, but she didn't think it'd be a problem.
(Masturbating was fun, after all.)
Right, let's do this. Liz returned the midwife's book to the shelf, and then went back to Carpenter's book and her notes, and— Actually, let's not do this here. Pince could walk in on her at any time, and she didn't know what the curse being set would be like — her feeling was it would probably be painful, and she'd rather not be caught in the Restricted Section at four in the morning cursing herself. Besides, she was wearing her magic-made vest and the cloak and, they hadn't interfered with that analysis spell a minute ago, but sometimes things could fuck with spells, so, it'd be safer to do this without the vest and a neat unknown invisibility spell active. And taking her clothes off in the Restricted Section at four in the morning seemed like a bad idea.
So Liz quick jotted down the description of the ritual to reverse the curse — she didn't think she'd ever need it, but it was possible the curse might interfere with healing stuff she might end up needing down the line — packed up her things and left. A (relatively) short walk later, and Liz was back in her dorm room. She wavered for a moment on what to do with the invisibility cloak before folding it up and putting it back at the bottom of her trunk, under her old dresses that didn't even fit anymore — people didn't come into her room very often, but she thought it was best to keep the fact that she had this as secret as possible. (Also, it had a swastika on it? It couldn't be a Nazi thing, it was a magic family heirloom so it must be older than that, but she still didn't want to leave it out where someone might see it.) After double-checking her door was locked, because Liz could be paranoid like that sometimes, she pulled off her dress and her vest, and also her wand holster (it was enchanted, so, just in case), stood in the middle of her room with her wand in her hand, ready.
...Was her chest more lopsided than she remembered? She thought it was...
Anyway. Right. Liz took a long, slow breath, trying to force down the nervous jitters. Let's do this thing.
Before she could second-guess herself, Liz cast the spell, the instant the wand motion was down wrenching her wrist back around to gesture at herself — the magic she was channelling stuttered for a second before leaping back into motion, and—
Liz's off hand leapt to her abdomen, she stumbled back a couple steps with a low "gugh," as something hot sliced through her skin and then settled, with a hard enough of a lurch she felt it all through her body — a weight falling and coming to a sudden stop heavy and sharp enough it felt like the ground was dropping out from under her, she lost her balance, barely staying on her feet as it thumped into place. The heat immediately faded away, but it left behind a cool, solid pressure, like something hard and a little below her body temperature had somehow been placed under her skin, under her waist and between her hips.
It took a moment for Liz's breathing to slow down again, the startled tension gradually dribbling away. That hadn't been painful, exactly, but it had been unpleasant — good bet not doing it right there in the Restricted Section, she'd made enough noise that that portrait in the history section definitely would have heard her. (And why were there Restricted history books, anyway? Bloody weird...) As the seconds ticked by, that hard, solid feeling in her abdomen — the curse — didn't go away, exactly, she didn't even think it was really getting weaker. It, just, slowly felt less weird. She meant, it didn't hurt, and it wasn't really getting in the way — she tried a few stretches just to make sure — just, kind of like how she didn't really notice the weight of her scarf around her neck most of the time but would be able to feel it there if she thought about it, the presence of the curse down there gradually faded out of her attention.
Even as she noticed it was happening, which was honestly a little weird — minds were funny things like that, she guessed.
Liz felt her lips twitching, feeling a little bit giddy. She wasn't an expert, and she didn't know any charms to check, but it seemed like it'd worked. She'd be able to tell for sure in a couple weeks but, well, mission accomplished, she was pretty sure. Good, good, that was...good.
Very good, she was almost shivering with relief. She really hadn't wanted to have to go through that again...
Liz did some final repacking of her bag for class tomorrow (it was stupid late, she had to be up in barely two hours), by the time she was crawling into bed the weight of the curse slipped out of her mind entirely. She didn't really feel it there until she noted that she didn't — and then she could, the thought drawing her attention to it, but it was so subtle it was pretty easy to not think about it. Which, well, good. It clearly wouldn't be distracting, then. Really, this had been a great idea. Why didn't they tell teenage girls to do this all the time? They hadn't really had any SRE at Hogwarts at all, she guessed (though supposedly the Hufflepuffs did, arranged by Sprout and the prefects), she was just saying...
Switching off the lights with a word, Liz settled in to nap with a smile on her face.
April 1994
Liz hadn't been imagining it — her chest was more lopsided than before.
Most of the time, Liz didn't pay much attention to her body at all, to an extent that she was starting to realise was unusual. Not, like— Obviously she knew it was there, and her hair was bloody awful, and the muscle aches and injuries she got in quidditch and duelling made things impossible to ignore sometimes, and when she did notice the hints of muscle she had here and there (not super obvious, but visible), that wasn't so bad, she liked that. But there was just... She was uncomfortable about some things in ways that, she'd learned from eavesdropping on people's thoughts, most other people weren't.
When the other girls got onto certain topics, it could honestly be a little unnerving. She guessed it didn't help that they were actually censoring some of the more explicit details, but Liz could see what they were thinking too, so she got the really personal shite people kept to themselves. And so she could see these more explicit things didn't bother other people, they censored them because it would be embarrassing — not because the things themselves were uncomfortable, just because they weren't the sort of thing that was talked about. Which was, just, weird.
Liz didn't like thinking about her body, if she could help it. Especially certain parts of it. She tried not to.
It might be a little neurotic, and it wasn't really that she was worried about being seen — though that was part of it, true, she was always careful to make sure the door was locked — but she generally spent as little time with her clothes off as possible. She undressed to shower, which was also when she changed her pants (and her vest), and that was pretty much it. She slept in her vest and pants (and sometimes the shorts too, depending), she pretty much never took those off, unless there was some reason she had to. Apparently it was pretty common for mages to sleep naked, or sometimes in a nightdress sort of thing without knickers under it, which honestly Liz had trouble contemplating, just, no.
That Hermione was willing (if somewhat nervous) to go to nude beaches when on holiday was, just, completely incomprehensible to Liz. The purebloods found it rather shocking too — bathing with single-sex groups they had no problem with, but mixed-sex groups was odd to them (unless it was a tight-knit group, like a quidditch team), and doing it outdoors was just scandalous — so Liz had actually heard Hermione talk (and think) about it, and it was just weird. She also knew from something picked up in a completely different conversation that Hermione had once, er, checked out shite down there with a hand mirror, which, ugh, why?
(Liz was aware she was especially squeamish about this shite for some inexplicable reason, but it was just really unnerving, she didn't understand why it didn't bother other people. Bodies were gross.)
She didn't even undress to masturbate...or as little as possible, at least. Obviously she didn't really need to take off her pants to get her hand in there, but she hadn't really liked doing that before Tamsyn had told her about that charm (because bodies were gross), but she'd quickly figured out it was better and easier if there wasn't an extra layer of cloth between her and the pillow. Though even that she would usually try to avoid, at least at first — she'd found a weak cooling charm on the pillow helped, just enough that the temperature difference was noticeable — until she got into it enough that she was getting frustrated with her pants and was distracted enough she wasn't really thinking about it...though she'd still make a point of making sure she was under her bed covers. And she definitely never took her vest off.
She was a bit neurotic about this shite, was what she was saying. So she didn't spend a lot of time looking at her chest — mostly just incidentally, in the mirror getting in and out of the shower. That was how she'd noticed she was getting lopsided in the first place.
So maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that she noticed she was getting even more lopsided incidentally, in the bathroom. They were approaching their second game of the year with Gryffindor, who were the only real competition, so quidditch practice was pretty intense lately, Liz had gone straight into the shower once they were done. She'd just grabbed a clean dress at random to change into, not really paying attention to it (she didn't care that much what she wore), and it turned out it was one of the older ones, maybe slightly too small.
Though, Liz didn't really mind that, honestly. As she'd discovered nearly a year ago now, she liked clothes that hugged close to her skin. She was wearing a vest and shorts under it, and this dress was tight enough around the waist that she could faintly make out the hems of her underclothes, but she had to look pretty closely...and also she didn't really care if people noticed. Perhaps she should take this one out of the rotation soon — at the very least, she didn't want to tear anything — but for now it was comfortable.
And she noticed in her peripheral vision, while looking down to tighten the straps of her wand holster, that she was visibly lopsided, a spot on the right side bulging out in a way that the left side just didn't.
She'd known that was happening, but apparently it'd gotten bad enough that it was noticeable even when she was dressed.
Liz spent what felt like long minutes staring down at herself, her breath hot and tight in her throat.
No. This was unacceptable. She couldn't—
She needed to see Severus.
Once she'd gathered herself enough to go out in public — which took embarrassingly long, her fingers twitching with nerves — Liz returned to her room, self-consciously folding her arms even though she could feel there wasn't anyone around at the moment, slammed the door behind her. Her dress pulled over her head, she reached for her school robes...and then changed her mind, trying on her red and black one, the one she'd gotten over the summer — their interview with Skeeter was coming up, she'd been planning on wearing this, but if it was... Okay, it wasn't obvious, the combination of the rigid inner layer and the loose wrap of the outer layer hid it, okay. Liz swapped back into her uniform, pulled on her boots, and left for the common room.
Severus's office door was closed, of course. Maybe there were student meetings going on at the moment (second-years should be signing up for OWL classes and fifth-years for NEWTs right about now) and she'd have to wait, she went by the notice board to check his schedule. Oh, there was a note that he was in his lab brewing for the Hospital Wing, right. They weren't supposed to interrupt him unless it was truly necessary, but she didn't want to— No, she needed to go now.
The door to his lab was, of course, locked. Liz knocked three times, and then forced herself to stop — continually knocking until he answered wasn't going to make him any less annoyed with being interrupted — stood there trying not to fidget. She counted off the seconds in her head, one, two, three, four...
At twelve, Liz's patience running perilously thin, there was finally a little flicker of magic, the door let out a click. Liz immediately pushed it open and stepped inside — she might have closed it behind her harder than necessary, she winced a little at the slamming noise. (The fumes from the brewing potions stinging in her nose, like Petunia's bleach, she remembered Petunia telling her off for not being gentle enough with the cupboard doors, she tried not to breathe through her nose, she was fine.) Severus was at one of the tables, his robe missing, leaving him in trousers and a long-sleeve shirt (to protect his arms), his hair tied back out of the way. He was in the middle of stirring a potion, folding it over this way and then that with a glass spoon.
As the door slammed he glanced up, Liz tried not to cringe (ugh, why was she so nervous all of a sudden, he wasn't going to do anything, she was fine), but the pulse of emotion from him, sharp and warm, didn't seem angry, so. "Is something the matter, Elizabeth?"
"I'm lopsided."
He blinked. "What?"
"You heard me. It isn't..." She took a second to breathe, biting back the hot tension crawling up her throat. "It's— I know we talked about it before, and there's the blood alchemy thing and all, but I— It's getting worse. I was getting dressed earlier, one of my muggle dresses, and I looked down and— I could see it, Severus, and, I can't."
"Elizabeth..."
"This isn't new, I knew it was— And, and it's just going to get worse, and I can't tell wearing robes yet, but who knows how long that'll be, and then— I don't know what to do, but I can't, I'm not—"
"Elizabeth." He'd raised his voice, just a little, cool and sharp, Liz cut off with a twitch. He raised his wand, she tried not to cringe, a flick and a chair appeared at a nearby (empty) table. "Sit down. I'll be with you shortly. Fennis."
A vaguely familiar elf appeared with the usual pop — male, Liz was pretty sure, his eyes a bright blue. "Yes, Master Sev?"
Severus didn't answer though, just waved him toward Liz, and the little bloke turned to look up at her, quick enough his ears flopped about a little. What was she supposed to— Oh, ask for a drink, she got it...
That was probably a good idea. Once she was seated at a chair with a cup of coffee — Fennis had looked sceptical at her claim that she didn't want sugar or honey or anything in it, but he'd done as she asked anyway — taking a slightly shaky sip, she realised her throat was all tight, and— She made sure her back was to Severus, surreptitiously checked just under her eyes, but her skin wasn't noticeably damp there. The hot drink did help to work out the knot in her throat, while Severus put his brewing potions under stasis charms and whatever Liz focussed on her breathing between sips of her coffee, slow and deep and even, trying to calm down.
After a couple minutes, there was a faint crackle of magic, another chair appearing at the table — not next to Liz but nearby, around the corner of the table just to her left. There was a little house-elf pop, but Fennis didn't actually show up, a mug of coffee just appearing on the table in front of Severus. He didn't say anything right away, silence looming for a long moment. They would both take a sip of their coffee, now and then, an occasional faint scrape or thump as Severus picked up or set down his mug (Liz was hugging hers closer to herself, it was warm), stretching on into one minute and the next and the next. His mind was turning, low and tingling, Liz didn't look up, staring down at her coffee.
Finally, he let out a little sigh — very little, she almost didn't hear it. "I realise this isn't quite helpful, but that this may happen was expected. We've talked about it before."
"I know." Her voice came out low, hoarse, croaking a little. She took another sip of coffee, cleared her throat. "It's different, knowing it might happen, and it actually happening."
For some reason, there was a twitter of amusement from his head, cool and...reluctant, almost. "Yes, I do recall being young." ...Liz wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean. "I only mean to say, there is... This is a matter that we have already taken into account. When the time comes, you still intend to visit a blood alchemist, yes?"
"Well, yes, but that's... You have to wait, what, twenty months from, er..."
"Eighteen months from menarche is the general rule of thumb. For girls, of course, it can be earlier or later for boys, dependent upon individual development. This is not a universal standard, however — different practitioners draw the line in different places. When you see a blood alchemist, they will do a variety of analyses to confirm it is safe to go forward with any profound alterations. Due to being a mind mage and your practice of blood-mediated subsumption, you will reach the necessary threshold toward the early end of the range, though it will only make a difference of a couple months."
Right. Liz was pretty sure the sterility curse shouldn't change that — it said all of her bits were still ageing the way they should normally, it shouldn't have any effect on this sort of thing. She thought. She was going to be very annoyed if she was unknowingly pushing back the time she could fix this... "So, August of Ninety-Five?"
"Most likely sometime that summer, yes."
"Fuck, that's so far away..."
"I understand it may feel so."
Liz tried to hold in the urge to roll her eyes at him. "Severus, eighteen months is...like, a ninth of my entire life — and for a good two ninths I was too little to remember, so more than that, really..."
There was a little flicker of surprise, one of his eyebrows ticking up. "A ninth?"
"Yeah, isn't that right? I'm thirteen and, er, more like three-quarters, but let's say thirteen and a half, the maths are easier. Um, so that's thirteen and a half divided by one and a half, but that sucks to do in your head, so, that's three over two and thirteen is twenty-six and twenty-seven over two, flip them, and we got twenty-seven times two which is fifty-four then over six which is nine." Liz paused for a second — she was pretty sure that was right, but fractions were stupid, she imagined the numbers and doing the shite and... "Yeah, it's nine. A little less than a ninth, because I rounded my age down, but pretty close. Right?"
And now Severus sounded amused. "I see your maths are coming along."
...She was pretty sure Severus was making fun of her, she just didn't know what the joke was. "That's not hard—" Maybe a little, trying to keep it all straight in her head, but. "—I know I was shite at maths before starting Arithmancy, but you don't have to laugh at me about it."
"Am I laughing?"
"You're laughing on the inside. Anyway, my point was that eighteen months might not seem like much to you, but it's a big chunk of my life up to this point, and also you're not the one who's lopsided and has to deal with it literally every day of those eighteen months."
"True enough. I don't mean to diminish what you are going through, simply to point out that nothing has changed — it may be difficult now, but it will not be forever." There was a lurch in his head, Severus let out a little sigh. "Of course, I do remember being your age, so I am fully aware that that may not...seem terribly reassuring. But I'm afraid there is nothing terribly reassuring to say. I wouldn't have known it was worsening if you hadn't said anything, as it's entirely hidden by your school robes, but I don't know what reassurance that may be."
"I know, I noticed it in one of my muggle dresses, robes are better. The red ones, I was going to wear those for Skeeter's thing, and those are fine too. But..." She felt her throat start to fight her, she paused for a second, tried to loosen it up with another sip of coffee. "But how much longer until... The red ones will probably be fine for longer, because of how the funny wrap-around thing works, but school robes don't... If it keeps happening, it will be a problem, eventually, and..."
Severus let silence linger for a moment, Liz glaring down at the table and struggling to control her breathing again, fighting down the frustration burning in her chest. "I would recommend the white robes, for our interview with Skeeter — there will be pictures, and I suspect the white will be received better." She'd almost forgotten about the pictures, ergh, of course. "You needn't go to quite so much effort as you did for the Wizengamot meeting, with your hair and the jewellery and the gloves and all, should you wish not to subject yourself to all that." Well, honestly, she didn't mind that much, though she really couldn't do the hair herself...skip most of the jewellery, at least, but she kind of liked the gloves... "For the second one planned over the summer, perhaps meeting her in the duelling team uniform would be appropriate. I would ask Narcissa about it, if you're uncertain.
"I can also..." He glanced away, his fingertips tapping against the ceramic of his mug. Liz pulled away from his head, grimacing — his uncertainty came with a sort of rippling thing that was making her a little nauseous, for some reason. (Being a mind mage was weird sometimes.) "This is a matter I have no special knowledge of, of course, but I can ask Narcissa if there may be...strategies to reduce the visibility. Or you may write her yourself, if you don't wish for me to have any part in that conversation. Asking your friends is another option — even if they haven't any ideas themselves, they have mothers and aunts and cousins they can ask for advice — but I understand you may be uncomfortable speaking with them on the matter. You must wait to see a blood alchemist, but in the meantime taking measures to hide it, should you truly feel it necessary to do so, I suspect is...feasible."
Idly, Liz wondered whether Severus was uncomfortable talking about this stuff, or if he was just aware that she was, and was trying to accommodate her. But anyway, that... She guessed that might be possible, there were probably things she could... But that wasn't really solving the problem, was it? She would still be able to tell, which was going to be distracting, and as it got worse it was only going to get harder to hide, and she...
It was just going to get worse. Slowly, every day, for the next eighteen months.
That was just...extremely frustrating, her throat was starting to actually seriously hurt, too tight and hot and— A couple more sips of coffee and breathing very carefully helped a little, but not much. She, just, hated this, that there was nothing she could do, she—
(Liz hated feeling trapped.)
"I hate my body."
She hadn't really meant to say that, she'd just been thinking... Well, that, she guessed, and it just kind of— She hadn't even realised she'd said it out loud until she picked up the cold, lurching, stuttering...something in Severus's head, didn't know what to call that. Hunching down in her chair, Liz grimaced, her fingers tightening harder around her coffee mug. She kind of wished she could take that back, but it was too late now.
After all, it wasn't like she could tell him she hadn't meant it — he'd feel the lie, and trying to lie about it would probably just make the talk they were about to have even worse.
Severus was silent a long moment, thoughts continually turning over, his head... Well, she wasn't sure what feeling that was, exactly — it wasn't pleasant, she could tell that much. After what felt like a good minute, his voice low and tentative, he said, "I will not tell you that you are wrong to feel that way, that you are in any way at fault. That would not be helpful. Though there is little I can simply tell you that would be. I imagine relating my own difficulties when I was your age would do you little good — I have never been a teenage girl, obviously, and I understand enough to know that it...can be different, for girls. Not entirely incomparable, but different, so I'm uncertain it would be of any help.
"That aside, this isn't something that should simply be left to fester, I suspect you know that. At the very least, I would suggest... This feeling does not come from nowhere, and the first step to resolving it must be to analyse it so as to determine its source. You do have certain challenges that most other people your age do not, that is true. But how you think of those is what causes the feeling, and it is that that must be interrogated. I think you can guess that I suspect there may be certain unhealthy assumptions or associations laying there unspoken — you can't be rid of your body, but you can identify precisely what troubles you, and work to resolve it.
"But we needn't talk about this now. It can wait for some other time, when the matter of your scars is less pressing, after you've had time to think about it some on your own. In the meantime, I'm afraid, I can't think of anything I can do to help."
Oh, well, that wasn't so bad, actually. Liz had been worried Severus was going to insist they talk about it right now, which she really did not want to do, she felt herself relaxing as it became clear he wasn't going to. Not that she really thought thinking about it was going to get her anywhere. She didn't now what... She meant, obviously her scars bothered her, and her hair was stupid, and bodies were just kind of gross in general sometimes, but beyond that, she didn't know what... Those were the 'challenges' Severus had been referring to, but he obviously thought there was something between all those things and hating her body, and she didn't know what that was. Obviously those things were bad enough, did there really need to be anything else? She kind of thought those connected on their own...
Other than hating feeling trapped, but there wasn't any solution to there being no escape from her own body — besides suicide, she guessed, but that wasn't really solving the problem, just making a new one, and even when she'd been in that horrible down mood and thinking about it, she'd known she didn't actually want to die, not really, it wouldn't have been scary if she did, so.
...Actually, the more she thought about it, she thought there was something there. Not about killing herself, obviously, but the feeling trapped thing. She meant, she had scars, from things she hadn't been able to control, and she couldn't do anything about still having them (yet), and her hair was bloody impossible, it wouldn't do anything she tried to make it to, at least not for very long, and... She'd hated her own bloody uterus trying to murder her, but she'd fixed that problem, and that had felt great, honestly, she'd been slightly giddy over the accomplishment for a couple days — it wasn't quite time the third one should have happened yet, she thought it was still a few days away, but whenever she thought about what was supposed to happen, and that it wouldn't, she got a warm little thrill of accomplishment, that...
It was almost like winning, in a way, like at duelling or quidditch. Not quite the same feeling, but in the same family of things, she thought.
Maybe, just maybe, she hated her body because she hated feeling trapped — and she felt trapped because there was all this shitty stuff about it, and she had no control over any of it. There was something to that, she thought, but she didn't know what she could do to fix it. Because, well, eighteen months.
She'd thought of it before, but just now she decided one hundred per cent for certain that she was changing her hair, as long as she was getting her scars removed. That was also a thing they could do with blood alchemy, and her hair was bloody impossible and she hated it, so. Maybe she'd change the colour too, having red hair might be neat...
(Ooh, maybe after she could get some cute little hats, like that blonde girl on the train first year...)
But all that was stuff to think about later. She was jarred out of her thoughts a little at the end of Severus's speech — and she tensed again, already beginning to tingle with nervousness. She had no idea how he would take this. But this was why she'd come to see him in the first place, and he'd left her such a good opening, and she would never know if she didn't ask... "You can curse me."
There was an odd shiver in his head, Severus rearing back in his chair a little, turning to give her a surprised look. "Excuse me?"
His eyes were crawling on her skin like ants, but she stubbornly stared back up at him, unblinking. Forcing her voice as calm and level as possible, she insisted, "I want you to curse me. To stop them from growing. That's why I came to see you in the first place."
"Elizabeth..." He turned away, let out a little sigh, his mind still shivering cool and hot and sharp — surprise and discomfort and disapproval... Or maybe not disapproval, Liz thought, it didn't feel quite right, that might actually be concern... "I know you are aware doing such a thing is inadvisable. Static curses can cause a wide range of serious complications for one's health."
"Severus, my chest is already covered in curse scars. What difference does it make?"
"Active magic anchored to flesh presents a distinct—" He cut off with a harsh sigh, apparently deciding not to go down that tangent. "It is different, though I imagine you would hardly be deterred by the marginally increased risk."
"Well, especially not if it's marginal! And I'm gonna get it all chopped off and replaced in a year in a half anyway, so what does it matter?"
"It does matter. Curses are not meant to be used in such a manner, and the health consequences can be unpredictable. Many healers argue such tactics are in violation of their oaths."
"I don't care! I don't want to— It's just going to get worse! And now that I know it's getting worse, and I can actually see it through my clothes, and there isn't—" She felt her throat squeezing on her, her voice turning harsh and shaky, she cut off with a thick, hot breath. She leaned forward, her elbow on the table and her forehead resting on her hand, covering her face — she'd felt the prickling in her eyes, she didn't want to— Severus wasn't going to flip out on her, she knew that (she hadn't forgotten Godric's Hollow), but she still didn't like crying, and she felt pointless fear beginning to sizzle at the back of her mind (Uncle Vernon hated it when she cried — which was irrelevant, Severus wasn't him, she was fine), he wasn't going to punish her for it, she was fine. "I can't, Severus."
There was a silence, Liz struggling to control herself, Severus's mind churning with— "Very well."
She twitched, her head snapping up again to look at him— "What?" —and then belatedly realised she'd been hiding her face for a reason, scrambled to wipe at her eyes with the back of her sleeve, ugh...
"I'll do it. I suspect that a carefully-laid curse might well be the lesser evil when weighed against the emotional turmoil leaving things as they are will cause. I'm not happy about it, but I'll do it."
Oh. Oh good. The nervous tension suddenly breaking, Liz slumped forward in her chair a bit, leaning on the table, turned to hide her face with her hair. She was practically shivering with relief, it was very hard to breathe, her eyes still stubbornly stinging — she hadn't been sure he would agree, it seemed like the sort of thing he wouldn't like (and he had admitted as much), and she didn't know what— She was very relieved, that was all. "Thank you."
"Of course. But do try not to get into the habit of resolving issues you have with your body by permanently cursing them out of existence — it is not healthy, and can sometimes lend one to...inadvisable modes of thought. It is a terrible habit to get into."
And Severus didn't even know about the sterility curse yet. Not that she was telling, he'd probably be happier not knowing.
"We will have to arrange a time to—"
"Is right now okay?"
His mind giving an odd lurch, Severus cut off with a little sigh. "Fine. You'll need to undress, from the waist. I would recommend taking a dose of your potion first — in order to prevent only partially arresting development or affecting the surrounding area, I must first prime the tissues to be cursed, which will require touching them."
Liz grimaced, just the thought enough to have her chest tightening a little again, skin already crawling like ants — yeah, a calming potion might be a good idea. The only problem was, "Um, I don't have one on me. It's in my book bag, back in my room."
"Fennis." She twitched at the pop of an elf teleporting, the same one from before appearing next to Severus's chair. "We need a calming potion, the little blue ones." Fennis turned to glance up at Liz, big elf eyes narrowing a little — perhaps sceptical that she really needed a calming potion at the moment — but he clearly shrugged it off, popped away again. Pushing himself up with another little sigh, Severus said, "I will need to square away some of my brewing first. It will only take a moment... I suppose here on the table is acceptable — it's clean. Undress and lie down when you're ready, I'll be with you in a moment." Severus took both their coffee cups, setting them down on a nearby counter against the wall, before sweeping off toward his paused potions, a feeling she couldn't quite read simmering away in his head.
He definitely wasn't happy about it. But he'd agreed to do it, and pretty quickly too, hadn't made her argue about it more than a couple minutes. Which, she realised she could be a bit of a pain sometimes, she had made his life a lot more complicated than it'd been before. He said he didn't mind, that she'd kind of even got him out of spying with the Death Eaters if (when) the Dark Lord came back — which was a good thing he was very relieved about, even if it maybe ended up being a problem for everyone else (which Liz didn't care about, to be honest, the whole damn country could go to hell) — but still, she realised she wasn't exactly easy to deal with, and interrupting his brewing and getting him to do something he was clearly unhappy about, and she didn't—
She appreciated it, that was all. A lot. At some level, she still didn't really expect him to do things like this for her just because she asked, and it was, just, nice, when she thought about it.
But she didn't know how to say that either, so she just kept her mouth shut.
(He was a mind mage too, and she was terribly loud all the time, so she guessed she didn't really need to say it.)
Fennis was back in a moment with a familiar little bottle of blueish potion — next to Severus, he waved him toward Liz and he skipped over, still looking a little doubtful but handing off the potion easily enough. Once Fennis was gone, Liz downed about half of it in a gulp, just to be safe. Numbness crashed over her in a wave, cool and tingly, the confusing mix of nervousness and discomfort and relief and...whatever the fuck that all was abruptly lifted away, left only with the (vague) hot tension in her throat and chest, the relaxed sigh slipping out a little thickened.
The moment of dizziness passed, Liz began pulling at the laces of her robes, an absent smile twitching at her lips.
Liz was going to get herself killed one of these days.
Or, that was the feeling Dorea had, anyway, any time something like this was going on. Perhaps she was letting her own issues get away with her — it was possible that she'd been overly cautious about the dangers of hurting herself for half of her life now. She'd gone through a serious health scare with her seizures, and she'd been told that getting hit in the head would be bad, that she should avoid it if at all possible. And, well, she'd been suffering enough brain damage toward the end that it had started messing with her coordination (which had been terrifying), she'd had a few nasty falls even when her brain wasn't frying itself, so she'd already been slower and more cautious than before anyway; the warning about hitting her head had just given her a reason to be even more careful on top of that.
There'd been a couple years there when she'd even been afraid of travelling by car — she'd been worried they'd get in a smash-up, and Dorea would hurt her head, and... Well, they maybe hadn't been quite as clear as they could have been what would happen if something had gone wrong, she'd thought at the time that a hard enough hit would throw her into a seizure that wouldn't end, and she would die then and there. She knew now that it wouldn't be nearly that bad — bad, yes, a hard enough hit would require intervention, and possibly redoing her treatment, but it wouldn't be an instant death sentence. They hadn't had a car at the time — the one they had now was technically Richard's, Mum has never owned a car — and they had lived in London so they didn't really need to, but they'd gone places with some of Mum's friends a few times, and that always made Dorea really nervous. She was mostly over it by now, though she did still prefer travelling by train.
Hanging lanterns during Solstice at the Greenwood was literally the first time she'd climbed a tree since she'd been six. And she'd never played quidditch, even the slow, simple, bludger-less games they'd had in flying lessons — she was simply too afraid to fly that high.
Though, if she were being honest, she didn't entirely get quidditch. She didn't get football or rugby or whatever else either, but at least those didn't have enchanted balls flying around trying to smash into you hard enough to break bones — and on top of that, a bad hit might have you falling a few dozens metres to the ground...where you'd then be bounced along at whatever speed you'd been flying at. Being obsessed with things like football struck her as, just, rather silly, but quidditch seemed outright mad.
Liz had been hospitalised! She'd broken her spine! That she wasn't discouraged after something like that, just kept playing like nothing had happened, was completely incomprehensible to Dorea.
And she was even still a reckless little idiot about it, Dorea thought, watching Liz with a helpless sigh, inaudible in the noise of the crowd.
It was another Gryffindor match, the second of the year — and the penultimate in the season, there was a Ravenclaw–Hufflepuff match in a couple weeks...after which Slytherin and Gryffindor would almost certainly get a third match in the final, because of course. (It'd worked out that way last year too, the other two teams weren't any real competition.) Thankfully, it was a rather clear, warm, pleasant day, a bit of a chilly breeze coming off of the Lake but it wasn't that bad. Dorea hadn't bothered wearing a cloak or even a jumper, it was nice enough. Unseasonably warm for the Highlands this time of year, she thought, but that happened sometimes, she was pretty sure the high density of magic in the Valley did odd things to the weather. The game had been going on for nearly a half hour — the bell hadn't gone off, it was still early enough that a capture of the snitch wouldn't end the game, but it'd been long enough that things had sort of settled in.
And there was something odd going on up there. Dorea wasn't exactly an expert on quidditch, but the general pattern, right, was that the chasers (and seekers) would be trying to score, and the beaters would be flying around trying to time their hits to break up plays as much as possible — they had a preference for aiming at the opposing seeker, to hopefully get a few injuries so they'd be slower when it came time to compete for the snitch. Of course, when flying defence the chasers would try to trip each other up too, but they took targets of opportunity moving to block people or intercept passes in whatever way made sense depending on how the flow of people moving around worked out. Unless there was a very particular strategy going on, chasers didn't mark a single opponent and stick with them, that was more effort than people normally bothered with.
There was definitely something going on between Liz and Katie Bell. Dorea didn't really know Bell at all. She was vaguely familiar with the family, not noble themselves but connected by marriages in recent generations with the Dunbars and Peakes in Common Fate and the Greys in the Light (though Bell's father was actually muggleborn). Bell herself, well, she'd been one of Gryffindor's chasers last year, and had taken over as seeker this year; she was a rather talented duellist, the rumour was she hoped to join the Aurors after school; Hermione didn't have a problem with her, said she mostly hung around in the common room with the other girls on the quidditch team and didn't really bother anyone, had even told off upperclassmen for harassing Hermione a couple times; beyond that, Dorea couldn't say she knew much else about her.
Before recently, anyway, Liz would mention her sometimes now — they were both on the duelling team, the Captain had even put them in a trio together with him so they worked together a lot. Not that Liz really said much about her personally. Liz wasn't one for gossip, and probably didn't know that much about Katie as a person anyway. When she did mention Katie it was mostly about something they'd done in duelling practice, Katie being impressively good with transfiguration (especially in a fight, which was difficult to begin with), and Liz had actually beaten her in a practice match (sounding excited and very proud of herself), but that trick wasn't going to work a second time so she'd need to come up with something new, that sort of thing.
Dorea had kind of gotten the feeling they were friends now, actually. A weird kind of friends, where they spent most of the time they were together trying to hex each other, but Liz was a violent little thing sometimes and sport nuts could be weird like that, so. It didn't really seem any different from her relationship with the quidditch team, same deal — if newer, since she'd been on the quidditch team for over a year and a half but the duelling team for only four months.
But Dorea had to wonder about that now, because this didn't seem very friendly. Normally, the chasers would pick who they were covering in the moment, however it made sense at the time, but Dorea was positive Katie was marking Liz. Whenever Slytherin took possession Katie would instantly move onto an intercept course for Liz — not a collision course, no, just swooping in to put herself in a position to more easily intercept a pass or intervene if Liz started manoeuvring. Liz's strategy normally involved cutting through the pack at high speed and unexpected angles, to quickly reposition the quaffle or even break up their opponents' plays — basically acting like a human bludger, which was terribly dangerous, given how tiny she was, if she actually hit someone... — but she was having more difficulty with it this time, Katie moving in place to interfere.
Like, Liz would position herself above and to the side of the pack, preparing to dive through, grab the quaffle, and swoop under and past the opposite chasers (Dorea wasn't an expert, but she had seen enough games to work up some pattern recognition); the instant she half-stood on her broom, suddenly kicking it around at a sharp angle, Katie leaned flat and took off like a shot — not directly at Liz, but at an angle that brought her in front of Liz, drifting to a stop directly in her path with an odd little twirling flourish; Liz would then have to break off, sometimes with very little warning, oohs running through the crowd as she spun off half out of control, the announcer sometimes biting out curses at near misses (followed by half-hearted chastisements from McGonagall). That happened a few times, but Katie would stick close to her when Gryffindor had possession too, already on two separate occasions, when Liz suddenly dipped in to intercept a pass Katie would cut in front, intercepting the interception, tossing it off to another one of the chasers hardly before Liz could react. (One of those even resulted in Johnson scoring bare seconds later.) Katie never got very far from Liz, sometimes flying very close, practically knee to elbow, harassing her constantly. The Weasley Twins weren't even aiming bludgers at Liz, as they normally would, the Gryffindors seemingly having decided to leave containing her to Katie.
As frustrating as that seemed to Dorea, Liz didn't seem to mind that much. It was hard to tell from this distance, but sometimes after Katie'd messed up one of her plays, Liz would pause in mid-air for a moment, turning to look back at Katie, and... Dorea didn't know, exactly. And Liz got with the programme quickly, it was clear after a few minutes that she'd decided to focus on Katie as well, the two of them constantly interfering with each other's flying — each of them prevented from helping their team much, but also stopping their opposite from doing so, dancing around each other at the fringes of the pack. Liz did actually manage to score once — Katie had been flying too close, Liz had successfully tricked her with a feint, quickly acquiring the quaffle and getting it past Wood before Katie could catch up (Katie kept a little further back after that) — but for the most part they had each other occupied, and they—
Dorea jumped to her feet, the crowd noisily surging around her, as Katie finally pulled one of her manoeuvres too close, not giving Liz enough time to avoid her — Liz slammed into her at speed, thankfully they managed to miss each other's brooms (narrowly), Liz's shoulder hitting Katie low on the side. Katie reeled, thrown into a little spin, but Liz's hands were torn from her broom, flung backward at a little bit of an angle, her feet slipping from the leg braces and...she managed to catch herself with one knee, hooked over her broom just above the bristles. She was still moving pretty damn fast, her hair hanging down and fluttering, swaying from her momentum. Her grip was loosening as the broom rolled — Katie, mostly recovered already, swooped around just under Liz, apparently to try to catch her if she fell — but before she slipped off she managed to reach behind her head and up, caught the opposite leg brace with both hands, swinging back rightside-up as her leg slipped off. She must be able to control the broom's spells from there, because it slowed and abruptly dipped, quicker than falling speed, bringing it up alongside Liz so she could easily climb back on, to cheering from the Slytherin and Ravenclaw sections (and the Hufflepuffs, more politely).
Dorea let out a breath — that had been close...
Liz paused for a moment, turning to point at Katie, shouting something. Katie must have said something back, Dorea could just barely make out Liz's shoulders shift with a huff. She jumped into motion, flying right at Katie and then into a long, slipping curve of a turn — timed such that her bristles came within a couple feet of Katie's face — before darting off toward the quaffle, Katie hot on her tail.
Sinking back to her seat with a sigh, Dorea shook her head to herself. "Those two are bloody mad," she said, raising her voice a bit to be heard over the crowd.
There were a few comments, but the loudest was from Terry: "Has anyone told Liz and Bell that the middle of a quidditch match isn't the place for courting?"
Dorea dramatically rolled her eyes, but she felt her lips twitch at the giggles from some of their friends — it was kind of funny.
It was only because she was rolling her eyes that she noticed Hermione wasn't really paying attention to the game. Though that wasn't a surprise, Hermione didn't get this sort of thing any more than Dorea did — she only came out to quidditch games at all to support Liz. She'd started going so far as to sit with the Slytherins (and Ravenclaws, this time) in the stands, and she'd even bought a Slytherin scarf to wear to matches. The rest of their house was, not unexpectedly, less than happy with her over it.
Though, the enmity Hermione got from her housemates for her 'betrayal' wasn't quite as bad as it used to be, since the hearings over Liz's custody in the Wizengamot, and especially since the piece in Witch Weekly. That'd come out almost a week ago now, and it'd been...well, pretty good, actually. Skeeter hadn't written about the Dursleys or anything at all, and even Liz being a mind mage was covered very favourably — there'd been a bit about it being confusing and overwhelming sometimes, especially when there were too many people around, and that was about it. It was mostly just fluffy harmless personal stuff, friends and hobbies and schoolwork and quidditch and duelling, and her relationship with "Severus", all pretty mild and inoffensive. Skeeter hadn't even bothered trying to stir up controversy anywhere, apparently just staking claim on being the first person to interview the Girl Who Lived for bragging rights — though she did obliquely mention the recent hearings and the terrible predicament Dumbledore was in, so, she did take a couple shots, but it wasn't the focus of the piece, at least.
And a significant section of it hadn't even been about Liz, since Skeeter had interviewed Snape too. A lot of that had been pretty interesting to know, Dorea guessed, though short on shocking revelations...well, unless one counted Snape admitting that he'd been abused by his alcoholic muggle father as a child (had Dorea known he was a halfblood before? that seemed like the sort of thing people would talk about more...), his anger over that and his callous treatment by the authorities at school and the state of magical Britain in general what had led him to join the Death Eaters in the first place. And he did admit that he'd joined them willingly, but that wasn't really a secret — he explained that he'd been taken in by their propaganda (particularly from Dorea's uncle Regulus Black, who'd been one of his few friends at school), had turned spy for Dumbledore as soon as he'd come to understand the reality of what he'd gotten himself into. Snape didn't spell it out, but Skeeter didn't bother being subtle about it, see, clearly the better part of why Snape had taken on looking after Liz himself was because he didn't want her to make the same mistakes he had, and also as a queer sort of repayment for failing to save her mother — Dorea had known Snape and Lily Evans had been childhood friends, Liz had mentioned it (and also Remus, in retrospect), but it hadn't been public knowledge before Skeeter's piece. So, there were a few big revelations in there, when she thought about it, but not really anything scandalous, Skeeter's framing had been very sympathetic, and the reception at Hogwarts, as far as Dorea could tell, had been pretty positive too.
The Gryffindors seemed mostly confused — after all, Dumbledore was supposed to be good, and Death Eaters, even reformed ones, were supposed to be bad. The truth of what happened to Liz must be terribly upsetting to read about for them.
(Dorea suspected Snape had intentionally timed the article to come out shortly before Sirius's trial started, so it'd be in and out of the public consciousness quickly, but Liz never said and she'd never asked.)
So, the Gryffindors might be less annoyed about Hermione 'siding with' the Slytherins than they might have been before, but less didn't mean zero — Neville and Lily had decided to sit with their mutual friends in Hufflepuff instead. (Hufflepuff had had a house meeting about it, with a vote and everything — because Hufflepuffs — where they'd decided they'd be neutral, by which they meant they'd cheer for Slytherin and Gryffindor and hope everyone has a good time — because Hufflepuffs.) But Hermione seemingly just didn't care anymore. Of course, she also didn't like quidditch much, she would always bring something to read for when she got bored. It was hard for Dorea to imagine being bored, with Liz constantly almost getting herself killed up there, but fine.
Interestingly, it wasn't a book or something this time, instead a handwritten letter on multiple sheets of plain muggle-style paper. Which was weird — Hermione's parents would write her, or occasionally forward a letter from more distant relatives, but she didn't get much post — enough that Dorea decided to ask, mostly just to distract herself from Liz being needlessly reckless. "What's that?"
"Hmm?" Hermione's attention was only slowly drawn away from the pages, reluctantly looking up to Dorea. "Oh, from my mother, came in this morning. Just the normal things, but also news."
It'd sounded like Hermione was going to say what the news was, but she just kind of trailed off there — that could happen sometimes, especially when there was something to read in her hand, Hermione was easily distractible like that. "What kind of news?"
A bit absently, Hermione said, "My mum's pregnant."
"Really? That's..." Already up and smiling — Dorea's mum was having another one too, she'd found out a couple months ago (she liked getting baby siblings) — she belatedly realised that Hermione wasn't so cheerful about it, looking...preoccupied. "Is that not good news?"
Hermione shot her a suggestive kind of look. "My mum's older, you know."
...Oh. That made sense. Dorea was vaguely aware that there were risks that came with age, though she couldn't say what they were — just that, obviously, a physically demanding thing like pregnancy was going to be more of a strain for older people. Sure, Emma was in very good shape for her age, but she was... She'd been close to the age Mum was now when Hermione was born, Dorea was pretty sure, which meant she had to be nearly fifty now. She might have been told Emma's age at some point, but she didn't remember, it was probably somewhere around there. Mum should be fine, but fifty was getting pretty old to be having kids. "Right, of course, I forgot about that. Is she okay?"
"They think so. They waited a couple months to make sure it would stick, and did all the usual tests and things — if it turned out there was something wrong, they might have been forced to get rid of it, you know." Dorea grimaced. That was a very cavalier way to refer to her mother getting an abortion, but she guessed it would have been medically necessary, so. "Everything's looking good so far, though, so. They think it'll be okay, but you really can't know a hundred per cent until the birth."
Right, that made sense. "Well, that's good. Then, allow me to give you a premature welcome to the big sisters club."
Hermione shot her a weak, crooked smile. "Don't say 'premature', you'll jinx it." Oh, um. She obviously wasn't actually serious, didn't wait for a beat before asking, "There's a club? I didn't know that, how exciting."
"And now you're mocking me. You've been hanging around Slytherins too much."
"Hypocrite."
"Slytherin. When's she due? Are you going to be home for it? If we're back at school by then, we can probably ask Snape to let you floo through to my house, when the time comes..." Or Oxford, she guessed, there was a public floo there, though she didn't know where in Oxfordshire Hermione lived exactly.
"September, probably. My little brother or sister will have a birthday very close to mine — looks like my parents enjoy the holidays maybe a little too much," Hermione said with a bit of a drawl on her voice, smirking just a little.
Dorea blinked. "What?"
"My birthday's in September. Count back the months."
...Oh, she meant she must have been conceived near Christmas. It probably wasn't exactly, and Dorea didn't want to bother trying to count the weeks, but right around then. "That is pretty funny, I guess they..." She trailed off, frowning.
After a couple seconds, Hermione startled her, nudging her in the knee. "Dorea?"
"I was just thinking, that— Lisa!" She was sitting a row in front of Dorea, a few seats away, it took Dorea shouting a couple times for Lisa to hear her over the crowd. "I'm sorry, you said your mother's pregnant?"
Lisa frowned a little, confused. "Yeah?"
"When's she due?"
"End of summer, September. Why?"
"I think— Meet me with Daphne, up there," she said, pointing over her shoulder — Daphne and Tracey and Millie were sitting together up on the back row, near the border with Hufflepuff. (For some reason, Dorea didn't know why they weren't sitting with the rest of them.) "I have to go check something."
It took more effort than it really should to squeeze out of the row, people packed together and jostling around, jumping up and cheering as things happened. Dorea quickly ended up a little bruised, her ears ringing, she tried to ignore it — she almost didn't notice at first that Hermione was following her. Leaning close, bumping into Dorea as someone got in the way, "You said Daphne, you don't think..."
"I don't think anything yet, I have to check. Come on."
It took probably a few minutes to spot where their Hufflepuff and Gryffindor friends were, toward the Slytherin side of the Hufflepuff seats, about halfway up the stands. Thankfully they weren't packed far in, Dorea didn't get beat up too much more. Lily, Sophie, and Sally-Anne all three of their mothers were also pregnant, Dorea had already known about that; they also all confirmed that they were due at the end of summer, which Dorea hadn't been told — if she had, she might have noticed earlier. Justin's family had also been at the Greenwood, but if his mother was pregnant too he hadn't mentioned it. He wasn't sitting with the girls, and Susan didn't know where he was, so Dorea couldn't ask him just now, so they would leave it at that. She could probably track down some of Astoria's friends too, but by this point it was very obvious what was happening — by the thoughtful frown on Hermione's face, she'd put it together too.
It was too noisy in the stands to hear a damn thing, and there wasn't room where Daphne and Tracey were sitting for them to all stand around. But, close to the top of the stands as they were, it was quick enough to get up to one of the stairs down the back. They climbed down a few of the switch-backing flights, about halfway Daphne paused, casting a privacy charm around them — the landings weren't quite big enough to comfortably fit all of them, but with a few girls standing on the first couple steps up or down it would be fine. Tucking her wand away again, Daphne asked, "I'm sorry, what is this about? I didn't hear you before."
Nudging herself a little closer to Daphne, Dorea said, "Our mothers are expecting."
"Expecting... Oh!" Daphne's eyes went wide in realisation for a second, and then she broke into a wide grin — one of the stronger expressions Dorea had ever seen from her, warm and bright and— Were her eyes twinkling? It looked like her eyes were twinkling... "You mean— How many of you?"
"All of us," Lisa said. "All of our mothers are pregnant, Hermione was the last to find out just today."
"Oh, well that's wonderful! Congratulations, truly. We'll have to send all of them something, I'll talk to Mother. Though the normal favours won't do, they may be a little conspicuous in a muggle home, hmm..."
Tracey, quietly leaning against the railing at the corner of the landing, was smirking a little, probably realised where this was going. Dorea fixed Daphne with a glare. "Is there something you'd like to tell us?"
Distracted out of her planning — it was expected in the more old-fashioned families to send mothers-to-be gifts, practical stuff and also just traditional good-luck things — Daphne blinked at Dorea for a second. "Excuse me?"
"What do all of our parents have in common?" Hermione asked. Daphne still seemed rather confused, so she added, "You invited us all to the Greenwood for the holiday, remember."
"Yes, of course. What does that have to do with— Aah," Daphne cut herself off, confusion vanishing in favour of a crooked, amused smile. "Well, it's good to know our guests enjoyed themselves. I suppose you're welcome." There were a few scoffs and giggles at that — the latter especially from Sophie and Sally-Anne, they didn't seem particularly concerned about this.
Lisa at least looked unamused, flatly staring at Daphne, her arms firmly crossed. "Don't you think that's curious? What are the chances of that many women all getting pregnant at the same time, hmm, that just doesn't happen."
"It's unlikely, perhaps, but not truly a surprise — when we say our magics promote the fertility of the land, we don't just mean all the plants."
...Well, Dorea guessed that explained why there'd been so bloody many people there. The magical population in general had been declining for a while, but the Greenwood...
"I know for a fact that my parents use contraceptive magics." That was kind of a funny thing for Lisa to know for a fact, but as Hermione's parents had shown some were far more open with their children about that sort of thing than others, so.
"Oh, those don't work on the Greenwood."
There was some muttering at that, Hermione asking, "How does that work? That seems like it'd be a pretty difficult thing to put on the wards."
"It's not the wards. It's not even something we did on purpose, truly, we only discovered it a couple centuries ago. An unintended effect of the magics on the land, we assume — we're not sure how it works, but given we don't use contraceptives anyway, it's not something we're particularly concerned about."
"You could have at least warned us about it," Lisa said. "My parents weren't planning on having another child, you know."
Daphne blinked. "We did? Were they not told about that?" she asked, glancing over her shoulder toward Tracey.
Who, of course, still seemed terribly amused with this whole thing, which was really starting to annoy Dorea. (Sometimes Tracey rubbed her the wrong way, but she and Liz were close, so she tried to be nice.) In a sort of drawl, wiggling just slightly with suppressed laughter, Tracey said, "They were, sort of. In the talk about the rules of the commune, shortly after they arrived, they would have been told they'll have better luck getting pregnant so long as they're on the Greenwood — and in the talk before the ritual, they'd have been told the effect would be even greater that night, and for the week or so afterward. That contraceptives don't work there — magical contraceptives, of course, physical barriers still work — that wouldn't have come up. Nobody living on the Greenwood uses any of that kind of magic, why would they think to mention it?"
"...Oh." Daphne frowned for a second, then shrugged. "My apologies. If there's anything my family can do to make up for the inconvenience, of course you need only say so."
"No, it's fine, I guess, it's just some warning would have been nice..."
"We're fine, my parents are thrilled about it."
"Yeah, mine too," Lily said, smiling a little. "We think it's twins, the midwife in town said it might be just a couple weeks ago..." A few congratulations and wishes of good luck went around at that news, particularly from Daphne, Lisa, and Tracey — there were superstitions about twins in magical culture, it was a whole thing.
Once that was done, Hermione said, rather lower and more solemn than the others, "I'm going to see how it goes before being happy about it. My mum's getting a little old, you know, it might not end well. They did decide to keep it, but..."
Daphne frowned, confused. "Well, of course they decided to keep it? I don't understand what you mean. Naturally I wouldn't want to— Well, it didn't occur to me until just now that Emma might have trouble, my apologies. There are potions and things that might help, and of course she's welcome to come to the Greenwood for the birth — spending the last month or so there might help it go more smoothly, and we have more than enough midwives and healers on hand. That offer is open to the rest of you too, of course."
"I'll mention it, but my parents are doctors, I think they'd prefer to do it the muggle way. And, is abortion not allowed in magical Britain?"
Lisa and Lily looked rather uncomfortable, but Daphne still looked confused. "Abortion of...?" Tracey rolled her eyes, leaned forward a little to whisper something to her in Cambrian. She twitched, stared wide-eyed at Tracey over her shoulder for a second before turning back to Hermione. "This is something people do? truly?"
Sophie snorted. "Yeah, Maïa, I think that's a 'no'."
"It is legal," Tracey said, "but strongly discouraged, especially among 'decent' purebloods. A noblewoman getting outed as having done it would be a big scandal, doubly so if she's married at the time, and it's definitely not something people talk about — in case you couldn't tell by how quiet and awkward these two got," flipping her fingers at Lisa and Lily. "It does happen, but people don't talk about it."
"So, that my mum had one ages ago, when she was still in university, isn't the sort of thing I should admit in the magical world," Hermione said — sounding slightly amused, for some unfathomable reason.
Tracey smirked right back at her. "Yes, Granger, that's not the sort of thing you should admit."
In case Hermione couldn't have guessed by how Daphne looked slightly horrified, glancing back and forth between Hermione and Tracey (who was apparently their Mistwalker-to-normal-person translator for the day). "...Truly? People do this?" she asked again, absently.
That got a little exasperated sigh from Tracey, but she also gave Daphne a gentle, sympathetic sort of pat on the shoulder. "Of course, most people are aware it happens, even if they don't talk about it. But Daphne's bloody weird sometimes — on the Greenwood, they consider killing animals to be murder, so."
There was a little bit more talk from there, about their families and their plans and their younger siblings and the like, whether they thought their parents would take the offer to go to the Greenwood for the birth. Lily seemed like the only one who thought they definitely would, but her family was rather poor — probably the poorest in their year, though similar to the Weasleys (even in being vassals to a noble family who didn't give them much support beyond a spot at Hogwarts) — Dorea guessed they might like to have healers on hand they wouldn't be expected to pay, just in case something went wrong. (No NHS on the magical side, unfortunately.) Their group gradually started to break apart, people trickling up bit by bit — they had missed several minutes of the game now, and Liz was playing.
Of course, the fact that Liz was playing was one of the reasons Dorea wasn't in any particular rush to get back up there. She didn't like watching the mad little idiot almost get herself killed.
Before long the rest had gone, leaving Dorea with Daphne and Tracey, wordlessly starting up the stairs. The other two were talking in mutters, Cambrian — she didn't understand every word, but she was pretty sure it was about contraception and abortion, that these were things people did, really, not joking. Now that Dorea thought about it, Daphne had continued giving Hermione funny looks for the rest of their little meeting. If Dorea understood correctly, by Greenwood morality, Hermione had basically just come out and admitted that her mother had murdered her elder sibling, and that she hadn't any problem with this (and neither had half of the rest of them), if anything seemed to think it was a little silly that anyone else would, was probably very, very weird to Daphne. Dorea didn't tend to consider how strange it must be for Daphne and Astoria sometimes, being outside of the weird little isolated religious community they'd grown up in. She tended to act more or less normal most of the time — a very conscious performance, Dorea better understood now (Astoria being much worse at it kind of gave it away) — but it looked like some things were just harder to skim over than others.
They were a good part of the way up when Tracey called, "Hey, Black. Weren't you the one organising that whole confrontation? You hardly said anything."
"Oh, I'm—" Dorea let out a little sigh, hitching to a halt. Once the conversation had gotten going, she hadn't said much, mostly just stood there listening. She guessed that might seem odd, without explanation. Turning to face them, she said, "I'm not angry with you about it, Daphne. My mum was going back to school, and those plans are going to have to be put on hold, so it is a little annoying that we weren't warned properly, but it's not unwelcome. Mum and Richard are happy about it — especially since they'll never have to worry about the money, with the Black fortune to lean on. Personally, I'm hoping for a girl this time. Just, when I realised what happened I thought they should have the opportunity to complain about it if they wanted to. Especially Hermione and Lisa, considering — you know, she was playing it down a little, but she is really worried about her mum. Hermione, I mean."
Grimacing a little, Daphne nodded. "Yes, and I did apologise about that. I suppose we...could have been clearer. Honestly, it wouldn't have occurred to me to warn them if I were the one giving those talks. I have a hard time imagining why anyone wouldn't be pleased — in Emma's case, I suppose, I understand muggle healing is less reliable, but..."
...That was completely ridiculous. "You can't imagine why anyone would ever not be happy about an unplanned pregnancy."
Daphne, again looking confused, glanced at Tracey, who was of course smirking again — actually, Dorea suspected she was biting the inside of her lip to keep herself from laughing at this farce. "...No? Why wouldn't you be?"
"Honestly, Daphne. What if one of us got pregnant? I didn't do anything, but I know there was snogging going on, something could have happened."
"I suppose that would be inconvenient, and might make things difficult when courting age comes around, but I don't understand why a child shouldn't be welcomed regardless."
"Oh for the love of— What would you do if you got knocked up at our age?"
She shrugged. "I wouldn't, to begin with. Humans have mouths for a reason, you know," she added with a suggestive smirk.
Dorea covered her face with one hand, trying to ignore the warmth on her cheeks, that Daphne would come out and just— Okay, that had just blindsided her, she wasn't used to the people so strongly morally opposed to abortion (especially on religious grounds) to also suggest teenagers have oral sex instead, that was just...unexpected. And there was no reason to laugh at her about it, Tracey!
"But should I become pregnant regardless, well, I do want to continue my education, so I suppose I would leave the child at home and return to school. You would not?"
"No, I would terminate it."
Daphne startled, rearing back a little, the smile abruptly vanishing from her face. "You would do..." She trailed off, apparently not sure how to end that sentence.
"Yes, Daphne," she hissed, glaring down at her...not defensively... Well, kind of defensively, she guessed — she couldn't help the feeling that Daphne was judging her, and it was annoying. "I am not ready to be having a child right now, not in the slightest. I'm not saying I'd skip off to the clinic all cheerful about it, but if I got pregnant over the solstice, or any time before graduating, I would get an abortion, one hundred per cent."
"But it..." She didn't manage to get anything more than that out, blankly staring up at Dorea. More confused than anything else, Dorea thought, struggling to mesh everything she knew about Dorea together with this. Which, Dorea didn't think that should be difficult — that girls who were still children themselves had no business being mothers really wasn't a complicated idea — but she understood the Mistwalkers felt differently about these things. Obviously, it'd sure looked like Daphne hadn't even realised abortion existed before this conversation...
After a moment, Tracey let out a little sigh, her eyes tipping up to the sky for a second. "Right, I'm going to take this one," she said, hooking Daphne by the elbow, "down to the kitchens, where she can rant about how terrible and confusing outsiders are in peace. Maybe have some biscuits, sound good?"
Daphne grimaced. "The biscuits have eggs in them. Milk caramels."
"Caramels it is. Maybe they'll have some chocolate truffles too, we'll ask. See you later, Dorea," Tracey said, nodding up at her. "You'll have to tell us how the match goes."
The odd pair turned right around and started descending the stairs, muttering to each other in Cambrian. For a moment, Dorea watched them go, shaking her head to herself — she didn't entirely get those two, or even just Daphne in general, honestly. She'd had at least one foot in for ages now, but the magical world still struck her as very strange sometimes, and the Mistwalkers especially so.
With a sigh, she turned back around and continued up. That conversation hadn't quite gone the way she'd expected...
Dorea got to the top of the stairs just in time to see that Liz happened to be chasing after the snitch at the moment...and then she nearly crashed again when Katie slipped in front of her. Because of course.
(Sometimes she wished all of her friends weren't so bloody mad, but that was life in magical Britain for you.)
SRE — For my fellow non-Brits, that's sex ed.
It's possible that Severus has realised he doesn't need to keep up his terrible reputation anymore, since he can't take up his spying job again anyway, so decided to use the opportunity of their interview with Skeeter to one-shot kill it. He probably could have been more subtle about it, but this country is full of idiots, so go big or go home. Also, let this be a reminder that Daphne is a religious person from a weird isolated subculture, and is going through low-intensity culture shock pretty much 100% of the time — usually she's just quiet about it.
The timing of this chapter in relation to the restriction of abortion in my home country — and literally in the place I'm living right now, though our ban is kind of in limbo at the moment — is a complete coincidence. These scenes were all planned ages ago, just worked out that way. I realise this chapter was somewhat ambivalent on this issue, given Daphne's presence, but abortion should 100% be legal — and even free, because for-profit healthcare is some evil bullshit.
And the Supreme Court can get fucked. Seriously, why the hell do we have nine people, given a lifetime appointment outside of the electoral process, making decisions with force of law over the entire country? There isn't even a pretense of democracy, we literally have a panel of unelected bureaucrats making up laws in closed chambers they don't even allow cameras in. That's some seriously authoritarian shit right there. Any protestations of democracy the United States makes are egregious nonsense so long as the institution of the Supreme Court remains in place...and the Senate...and the electoral college...and single-delegate districts...and felon disenfranchisement...and a fuckload of things, honestly — under no reasonable definition is this country a democracy, don't make me laugh.
Anyway, on that cheery note, Sirius's trial is next chapter, see you all then.