Children of the Gods

by inwardtransience

When the message came, there was little left of Cassiopeia Black in her — soon she would move on, shed her face and her name for another. But, at the last possible moment, she found a reason to carry on, the smouldering embers of her identity sparking to new life. Unfortunately, adopting the Boy Who Lived came with complications. (metamorphs, fairies, AU and very weird)

9. Visitors — V

Cassie probably should have gotten Violet in to see a healer ages ago.

In her defence, there'd kind of been a lot going on, with stealing her from that awful place Albus had stuck her, getting her set up with clothes and things for her room and whatever else, getting her in with a mind healer — which had felt like the higher priority, since Violet at least seemed more or less healthy — and getting back in touch with various people she'd slipped out of contact with over the last few years, and just trying to get things settled in their new home in general and getting used to each other and... Also, Cassie had picked a horrible day to quit drinking, that didn't help...

There were still a few things she hadn't gotten straightened out. There were the internal affairs of House Potter, she and Albus hadn't decided what to do about that yet — obviously Cassie couldn't openly take over running things on Violet's behalf, as that would put an end to Violet's anonymity as soon as anyone noticed — and she'd just gotten a letter from Narcissa a couple days ago she was still mulling over. She'd expected Cissa would want to catch up once she heard the rumours that Cassie had taken in a Black kid, implying she'd be sticking around for a while now, but it wasn't so simple as just catching up. Sure, she could drop by the Malfoys' for tea one day, but Violet made things...complicated. To put it mildly, she didn't want to risk leaving Violet alone with Lucius even for a second.

To put it less mildly, if he even looked at her kid funny she'd flay him alive. So, yeah, complicated.

Of course, now that Violet's scar was gone, that Lucius would ever realise the 'Boy' Who Lived was in his house at all was extremely unlikely. But that was something to worry about too. Not that Cassie didn't trust the fairy healers' work...exactly. She meant, they weren't human themselves, so it wasn't out of the question they could have fucked something up without noticing, and they'd been primarily focused on disentangling Violet's soul from the not-horcrux — and soul magic could be seriously volatile stuff. They could have missed some perfectly mundane problem while their attention was elsewhere. And, getting fairy magic all mixed up in her, who knew what effects that could have?

Violet didn't...seem much different, but it was hard to say for sure. Cassie thought she was sleeping better, maybe? She knew the poor girl had nightmares sometimes, though they'd never talked about it — she assumed Violet would get into it with Shannon, and Cassie didn't really need to ask to guess the general idea of what was going on there. (The more time went on, the more she regretted that she hadn't murdered that vile woman.) Cassie thought it was better but, well, she'd never asked in the first place, so. And she was maybe just slightly more bright and cheerful, but still a neurotic little thing most of the time, the stammering and such wasn't any different, so...

Cassie had intended to bring her to a healer anyway, just in case, and thankfully she'd already had an appointment set up beforehand, only a few days after their stressful encounter with the visitors. Convenient how that worked out.

Finding a competent healer who was actually qualified to deal with a metamorph and not make an arse of themselves wasn't a simple matter. Finding one in Britain who wouldn't react unfavourably to learning Violet's birth name was simply impossible — any healers with the proper knowledge and temperament were far too likely to have been in some way associated with the Knights of Walpurgis. There was Andi, she guessed, but she wasn't a family healer, and would have to see Violet outside of her ordinary working hours, and that woman was already working far too much as it was.

And so Cassie was forced to go to Aquitania. The laws regulating allowable magics were rather looser there than in Britain, and they'd long had a culture far more accepting of people who were not perfectly ordinary human mages — veela, goblins, nymphs, and whatever else. Including humans with the more visible magical traits, such as metamorphy. (Metamorphs were generally held in high regard, true, but for far too many their acceptance was conditioned on the metamorph passing for an ordinary human most of the time.) It hadn't been difficult to find a practitioner who claimed to have some experience with metamorphs, no more than a handful of letters back and forth to set up an appointment.

It might have taken fewer letters, but it turned out routine healer visits were covered by the Republic. Cassie had known that — most of the more neocommunalist-leaning magical countries did the same — but she hadn't realised that they even covered the expenses of foreign residents. There'd been a couple extra exchanges because Cassie insisted on paying — she could afford it, and it wasn't her country, she'd feel uneasy using resources meant for their own people. The healer's assistant had confirmed she really did intend to pay for their expenses, making it clear she didn't need to, and when she continued to insist arranging the details of how that would be done. Cassie suspected it would actually go on the books as a donation to whatever the Aquitanian equivalent of the DHF was called, which would do well enough to ease Cassie's conscience.

Cassie talked to Violet about it the day before. Well, she'd already told Violet she was looking in to setting something up with a healer, and that there was an appointment coming up, but she hadn't explained that it was in a different country, and how they would be getting there. Violet had never travelled, it turned out — her relatives had on occasion, but they'd never brought her with — she'd never even ventured so far as Ireland before Cassie had taken her. Even well after the discussion about the healer, that detail had stuck in her head. That was definitely something they could do, but the world was a big place, she wouldn't know where to start — she should think about it, maybe she could figure something out...

Anyway, there were multiple ways to get from here to the National Hospital in Toulouse, though only two were in any way viable. They could take a portkey from the keyport here in the Refuge to the one in Toulouse, from which they could either floo or walk to the hospital. (Violet giggled at taking a portkey from a keyport, which was fair, it did sound a little silly.) Portkeys could be a bit rough, though, especially for children and especially the first time — Cassie wasn't sure Violet would want to deal with that, doubly so when already nervous about going to see a new healer in a foreign country. The alternative would be for Cassie to apparate them to the international floo hub at Castle White in Brittany, floo from there to the hub in Toulouse, from which they could floo or walk to the hospital. For future appointments, Cassie would theoretically be able to apparate them straight to the hospital, but she shouldn't, for legal reasons, evading customs and all that. They were unlikely to get in trouble for it, and even then it would just be a fine, but going through the proper channels would only take a couple minutes, so they might as well just to avoid the bother.

After a bit talking about it, Violet agreed that flooing from Castle White was probably the better idea. And so, a bit after nine in the morning, breakfast prepared and eaten and cleaned up after, Violet bounced down the stairs back into the entryway, changed and ready to go. (Recently Violet had started coming down for breakfast in her nightdress, which Cassie took as a good sign, that she was growing more comfortable here.) She'd gone with muggle-style clothes today, which she did seem to prefer, a fuzzy blue jumper and that white dress with the flowers embroidered around the hem, which she wore often enough Cassie suspected it was one of her favourites — though the green leggings were intended to be worn with shorter robes, and obviously the boots were in a magical style, enchanted leather, clunking against the wood of the stairs as she tromped down.

The colours were slightly mismatched, but Cassie suspected Violet meant to do that, she seemed to prefer vibrant colours and to have some variety. Not nearly so stridently clashing as Dora liked, true, but even if she did go that far with it, unlike her own mother, Cassie wouldn't do anything about it — it was Cassie's job to provide the clothing, not tell her how to wear it. "Ready to go?"

"Yes," Violet gasped, slightly out of breath — she had rushed a little getting changed and all, not wanting to be late. "Um. D-does my face l-l-llook right? It keeps chan-changing on me."

That was one difference Cassie had noticed since the not-horcrux had been removed: Violet had far more frequent unconscious shifts now. She had no idea why — perhaps the presence of cursed tissues had been reinforcing her formal inertia somewhat, that would make sense — and while it was a noticeable difference it still wasn't that much. Cassie had changed much more frequently and obviously when she'd been Violet's age, but while Violet had been unusually (and concerningly) static before it was actually noticeable now. But in any case, "We're metamorphs, darling — the 'right' way to look like for us is however we want to look in the moment. So long as you're happy with your face the way it is, then that is what it's supposed to be."

Violet gave her a kind of funny look, her nose pinching a little. "Okay. I'm ready."

Cassie noticed Violet had cheated pronouncing "ready", the R sound coming out more like a W, must be one of those tricks she was working on with Shannon. It was still identifiable as the sound it was supposed to be, just sounded slightly off. "All right, let's go." She held out her hand, Violet drew in a steadying breath before taking it.

Castle White was one of the oldest known sites associated with the House of Black — old enough to predate the family's relocation to the Isles, and with it the name change. It hadn't always been a castle, of course, the present-day structure was a much more recent construction, but the family had been at Aber Wrach since...well, Roman times, at least, and almost certainly longer. All the above-ground construction was relatively modern, the first stones of the Castle itself laid no later than the 12th Century and expanded on several separate occasions since, but the catacombs underground were much older, in some places well over two thousand years old.

The family did still hold Castle White and the land it stood on, though nobody had lived here full-time in generations — not since shortly after the Statute, Cassie thought, when their title within the peerage of the Kingdom of France had lapsed with Secrecy, and there was no longer any need to keep it occupied to meet political obligations. Many of the magical families living in the area — and, indeed, throughout Brittany — were technically still their vassals, but they'd long ago devolved most authority to local administrations, village governments and the like, so at this point it was little more than a polite legal fiction. The Castle itself was still private property, for the most part, but most of it had been boarded up and set under stasis wards, the Great Hall signed over to the Ministry to use as their foothold into the Continental Floo Network — floo travel weakened considerably when crossing water, flooing to Castle White and then further inland greatly increased the possible range, and also functioned as a convenient place to stop international travellers for customs and such.

Since Castle White was still Black land, Cassie was one of the very, very few people alive who could apparate there — though not within the Great Hall itself, which was warded separately by the Ministry. Instead they arrived atop the outer wall, overlooking the inner courtyard to one side and the river and the outlet to the sea in the near distance on the other. It was perhaps not the most convenient place to appear, as it'd be a couple minutes' walk from here to the Great Hall, but it did have the best view. Looking out past the merlons over the surrounding lands and waters, quaint little muggle towns dotted here and there (magical settlements hidden from sight under wards), Violet let out a little ooooh, still and wide-eyed.

Cassie wondered if this kid realised how adorable she was sometimes. Probably not.

She let Violet look around for a minute or two before leading her along the wall by the hand, explaining a little bit about Castle White as they walked. Violet seemed taken aback that the Blacks had an actual castle — which was a little silly, because they had three Cassie could think of off the top of her head, but that wasn't important just now. In time, they came to one of the towers on the wall, a spiralling set of stairs led them down to the inner courtyard, and from there it was a short walk to the Great Hall. One of the Hit Wizards on guard gave them a double take as they walked in through a side door, but he shrugged it off, likely assuming that, as the rest of the Castle was warded against anyone not explicitly invited by the Blacks, they were supposed to be there. Which was sloppy of him, but he was a Hit Wizard.

The Great Hall was a large, open space crafted of polished granite, gold and silver gilding here and there sparkling in the sun let in by tall stained-glass windows — originally built as a grand banquet hall to entertain notables from all across Europe (especially British and French nobility and royalty both muggle and magical), but long ago converted for the Ministry's purposes. There was some activity in here — people shuffling back and forth, domestic travellers walking straight from one side of the hall to the other, international travellers drawn over to the side to present their belongings for inspection and to answer a few quick questions about their intentions in Britain — but Cassie ignored it all, pulling Violet over to the bank of hearths marked for outgoing international travel. There were a smattering of people ahead of them, including two families with small children, but there were enough hearths it wouldn't take them long to get through.

Cassie asked Violet if she wanted to be carried through again, which she did, so Cassie quick picked her up — cheating with a wandless featherweight charm, so she could easily support Violet with one arm hugged under her thighs. By the time they had that straightened out, it was their turn. Taking a generous pinch of the powder — Violet's added mass was unlikely to have them falling short, but just in case — a short walk through swirling green fire, and they were stepping out into the international floo hub in Toulouse.

The place was very modern looking, by magical standards, almost even muggle-ish — stone tile walls and floor, mostly in plain black and white except for where broken with Aquitanian red and gold (that big cross in the floor there was specifically for Toulouse), large windows formed of slanted rectangular panes overhead. Unsurprisingly it was cloudy, Cassie didn't know if Toulouse got much more sun than the Refuge at this time of year. Cassie hurried away from the bank of floos — there was rather more through-traffic here, didn't want to get run over by anyone — and waited for Violet to recover.

Once she was set down again, Violet asked if Cassie could cast her a mirror, so she could fix her hair. Personally, Cassie thought the floo-green swirls set against the black were neat, but she did as bid anyway. It looked like Violet's face might also have been slightly affected by her unconscious shift, but if it was Violet either didn't notice or didn't care, only transfigured her hair back to solid black before nodding she was done.

Toulouse's floo hub didn't only look modern, it was modern — there had been a major battle during Grindelwald's War, when a group of battlemages had pierced Aquitania's war-wards to floo from Genoa straight to the hub in central Toulouse. The attack had been unexpected, executed without a formal declaration of war — at the time Aquitania had been supporting the Revolutionaries diplomatically and materially, but hadn't yet joined the fighting — so the band of Genoese, Tuscan, and Swiss battlemages had done some significant damage before the Aquitanians had mustered a response. The old floo hub, remodelled centuries ago upon a foundation dating to the Roman Empire, had been perhaps the worst hit, all but entirely destroyed, and had needed to be rebuilt from scratch in the years after the war.

And so it'd been built from the foundation to accommodate more modern laws concerning transportation and trade, which the hub at Castle White most certainly hadn't been. The arrivals hall housed a bank of floo grates, and little else, signs in a variety of languages — Aquitanian (in both northern and southern varieties), French, Sicilian, Helvetican German, Spanish, Genoese — pointing off toward bathrooms, a lounge and café (for those on a multi-leg journey to rest before continuing on), and the widest doors toward customs and security. Once Violet was ready, Cassie took her hand again, and led her through the thin stream of people moving in that direction.

On the other side was another wide open space, again made of black and white (and occasionally red and gold) tile, ceiling all in glass supported by metal frames. Down the middle was a barrier, a waist-high wall of more stone tile extended upward with more glass — and above that with wards, Cassie assumed — built into it a row of desks and open archways for travellers to enter through. Waiting behind the desks were officials in Toulouse red and blue, robes cut in a modern Continental style, simple and tailored close to their figure, without all the baggy draping the older style came with. (Almost like an old-fashioned muggle suit with an overlong jacket, though not quite.) There were enough of them that even with the greater volume of travellers there were a couple desks open, Cassie led Violet straight toward one.

After confirming she spoke French — it was the working language of the ICW, most people did — the attendant asked Cassie to surrender her bag to be analysed quick, along with any enchanted devices on their person (not including wands). That also didn't include clothing, and they only had a few bits of enchanted jewellery on their persons, it didn't take long to hand them over. While their things were analysed for illegal spells or materials — automatically, there was a table to the side of her desk, the attendant simply set them down over there, Cassie could feel the tingle of analysis spells from here — she asked them a few simple questions about where they were from, what their business was in Toulouse, that sort of thing. Cassie had been sent a letter from the hospital to present to the authorities, so that mostly took care of that. She was told she would need to visit some local government office if she meant to extend her stay — if Cassie were to work in Toulouse, she would need to pay taxes to the Republic, and would need documentation before she could access public services, so of course they'd have to know she was here — but otherwise they didn't need to do anything further. A sheet was printed from the analysis table, the attendant glanced at it quick before handing their things back, waved them through the archway and wished them a pleasant visit.

On the other side of this room was a larger, open hall, with little shops along the walls or stalls set up in the middle of the floor, signs pointing off to various government and information offices, a hotel, outgoing floo banks, the keyport, and the exits to the street. After a moment of thought, Cassie led Violet toward the outgoing floos — they'd taken a little longer to get this far than she'd expected, and she'd never been to the National Hospital before, didn't know how long it'd take to get to the right clinic. Cassie doubted they would miss their appointment, but she would prefer to not be late.

Violet pouted, but Cassie promised they could explore the town later, get lunch somewhere here, and apparate home when they were done, which seemed to help a little.

Once again carrying Violet, Cassie stepped through swirling green fire into the floo hall at the hospital. Violet must have had another unconscious shift — Cassie had felt the light magic hot and prickling at her skin, like the blast from an oven — so she immediately dipped to the side, took a look around. This room was clearly much older, done in the pale reddish-pinkish bricks Toulouse was known for, doorways and the ceiling overhead arching a bit, the thickness of the construction suggesting it dated to a time before modern magically-strengthened materials and architectural enchantments. Though, there had been modifications done in the time since — especially, it seemed the room had been expanded, the ward-crafters cheating by duplicating the room four times, obvious from the undulating curve to the ceiling, arching to an identical point in five different places. Cassie suspected that, if she cared to check, the floor and the walls and the ceiling and the hearth in four of the five conjoined sections would be conjured, but they would be supported by the wards, so it hardly mattered.

Unlike the floo hall at Saint Mungo's, this one had no sign of injured people being rushed back and forth, the open floor instead scattered with chairs and sofas, for guests to recover or wait for people sent ahead into the hospital to finish with their business. She'd been told in the letters that the Hospital had several different floo passwords — the one she'd been given was for the visitors' entrance, staff and medical emergencies were routed through different locations. Once Violet was recovered, the floo-green once again transfigured out of her hair, they continued on, Cassie following the signs toward main reception.

The National Hospital was, properly, multiple healing institutions all bundled together, operating out of a collection of separate buildings. (Converted mostly from old Renaissance-era middle-class residential blocks, she thought.) Apparently, the building they'd flooed to was mostly an off-campus Beauxbatons site run by their Mastery-level healing programme, though it had a few general and specialist (but non-emergency) clinics alongside its educational functions. The receptionist in the main hall — nearly as large and open as the Entrance Hall at Hogwarts (definitely expanded), red brick and grey granite, banks of stained glass letting in streaks of coloured sunlight — said that their appointment should be at the Perenelle Flamel Maternity and Childrens' Healing Centre (Toulouse), which would be straight out those doors and to the right, follow the path, you can't miss it.

They, in fact, couldn't miss it. There were multiple walkpaths outside, more Toulouse pinkish-red brick bordered with white...terracotta, probably, cutting through swaths of grass and patches of brush (mostly leafless for winter), buildings stretching high overhead to every side, mostly out of that same Toulouse brick, windows framed with curling arches, thick with almost Gothic elaboration in...probably more terracotta, but it could be carved stone, she guessed. (Which was more likely depended on how old this all was.) Violet was looking around wide-eyed as they walked, trying to take it all in at once — and, as complex and delicate as the carvings along the arches and lining the roofs were, there was far too much to see — leaning this way and that to try to look around the empty branches of the row of trees their path crossed under as it slipped through a narrower gap between a pair of buildings, the motion tugging on Cassie's hand a little.

Before too long, this path opened up into a courtyard, dominated by a fountain made out of...well, some kind of blueish-greenish material, she wasn't sure what that was — it seemed to be all one piece, slight variations of the shade in swirls uninterrupted through the entire structure, looked as solid as stone, but seemed to glow slightly along the edges, as though refracting light from behind. The odd material was carved into a mix of forest creatures, deer and foxes and wolves and such, mixed in with beings, humans but also goblins and elves and centaurs and nymphs, Cassie suspected the big bird-looking things were veela or lilin (or both). Distracted by the fountain, it took a moment for Cassie to see the figures carved into the façade of one of the buildings: a female figure wearing a shawl over her head, her arms spread, gathered around her several children, their dress and their posture meant to hint at poverty, old symbols of healing and charity speckled here and there around them.

Cassie didn't have to make out the row of letters over the bank of doors leading inside to guess that was supposed to be Perenelle Flamel — she was rather famous for founding hospitals and schools and orphanages all over Europe. (There was a reason why they specified that this was the Perenelle Flamel Maternity and Childrens' Healing Centre in Toulouse.) She also wasn't surprised when, on the way toward the entrance, she noticed a plaque set into the base of the fountain pool stating that this courtyard and the fountain at the centre of it had been designed (and the fountain personally built) by Nicolas Flamel, as a donation to the Hospital. He was known for doing that kind of thing, fancied himself an architect alongside an alchemist...which also explained why she didn't recognise what the fountain was made out of, probably some exotic alchemised material...

One of the receptionists inside pointed Cassie and Violet toward the proper clinic on the correct floor, so they started up. There were lifts in here (definitely a more recent addition, the building itself was too old), but they took the stairs anyway — the lifts were better left to the less mobile patients, injured children and pregnant women. (That Cassie didn't like lifts was quite beside the point.) The upper level they stepped out onto was more modern-looking, the interior redone — in smooth tile, more easily-cleaned surfaces, presumably for sanitation reasons, the hallways rather wider than she'd expect of this style of building — it didn't take long for Cassie to find the proper clinic, one geared toward providing routine care to children with particular magical traits (such as metamorphy). The waiting room was also modern-looking, not so different from Shannon's office, with the carpets and posters on the walls and the rows of chairs, though without the overabundance of synthetic materials.

There were a few people around, though it was empty enough Cassie didn't have to wait before approaching the receptionist. Unlike at Shannon's office, there wasn't any paperwork to fill out, though there was something for Cassie to sign — legal stuff, confirming that she was responsible for Violet and that she consented to the healer taking a look at her. The receptionist was slightly confused at the note in Violet's file explaining that Cassie insisted on paying them, but he just shrugged it off, said Cassie would be getting a letter with details about that in a couple days. Go ahead and sit down, their healer would be right out.

Cassie glanced at a nearby clock and, yeah, good thing they hadn't walked here, their timing had turned out pretty close. The whole time they waited, Violet sat in her chair with her hands folded in her lap, hardly making a sound, fidgeting a little now and then, her feet starting to bob before seeming to restrain herself. Nervous, Cassie would guess. Cassie idly babbled off about things to do with the Flamels, hopefully providing a good distraction.

But it was maybe only five minutes later when a woman stepped out of the door leading deeper into the clinic, calling for them — and so Cassie and Violet met Chloé Delacour.

There had been a few considerations Cassie had kept in mind when looking for a healer for Violet, and not all of them had been solely practical. There were the concerns that had led her to looking overseas, yes, but then there were more besides. Extending the scheme that had Cassie introducing Violet to Starlight in the first place, she'd thought someone nonhuman might be a good idea — given their own innate self-transfigurative abilities, a veela or lilin had seemed a good fit. Between the two, veela were better, since Violet's magic was also Light-aligned. Cassie wasn't certain about this, she was still so young, but if the last few months were any indication it seemed pretty likely that Violet was going to stick with being a girl, so a woman would be preferable. Altogether, that still left her with several options to narrow down from.

The last condition had nothing to do with the healing itself. Over the last couple months, Cassie had been checking up on things, going back over her last few years of letters from Dorea. She'd been reminded that Jamie's disowned half-sister hadn't just refused a proper marriage and run away from Britain, which had been quite the scandal at the time: years later, she'd ended up marrying a veela. Dorea had attended the wedding and everything, the only one of the Potters who'd gone — Charlie had still been smarting over her running away, and maybe didn't approve of his daughter's new wife being a veela (the human chauvinist bastard) — and later travelled to Aquitania to hold her first (step-)grandchild.

Her half-veela grandchild. That rang a bell, after a bit more looking around Cassie tracked down an announcement in a healing journal (and also French and Aquitanian newspapers) that an artificer and blood-alchemist by the name of Lise Delacour had managed to create the first known human–veela hybrids in history. There were some kind of incompatibilities between their people, Cassie wasn't certain what — it presumably had something to do with the People of the Song hatching from eggs. The process required that the human parent be a woman — Lise Delacour had carried the child herself, conceived with blood from her veela wife — the particulars fiercely kept secret by the People's government, out of fear that too many details about their life cycle getting out might aid a theoretical future effort to wipe them out of existence. (Slightly paranoid, but a justified paranoia, given how some humans could be.) Cassie vaguely remembered reading about that at the time, though it'd been during the war and she hadn't had much attention to spare for it, but she hadn't realised that "Lise Delacour" had once been Elizabeth Potter — she suspected that first miracle child, Doriane, was even named after her baby sister.

Elizabeth was the sole living person left who'd gotten a proper Potter education, who should know all the family lore and traditions. Cassie wasn't going to demand that the two meet — Elizabeth had been disowned, ages ago now, and Violet had enough going on at the moment without bringing in more family drama — but she saw nothing wrong with dropping a hint through her in-laws that Cassie might be open to some kind of arrangement. What that would look like, well, that would depend on what Violet might agree to further down the line, but opening up a line of communication here and now (no matter how indirect) was an innocuous place to start.

Chloé Delacour was tall and shapely, though her green and white healer's robes were loose enough — unusually so, in fact, the People of the Song all had an instinctive aversion to restrictive clothing — to merely hint at her figure. She had the silvery hair so many veela did, smooth and shimmery enough to almost look metallic, her eyes a vibrant orange-gold. And, of course, her magic burned intensely light, uncomfortably so. She was projecting something at them (most of the People did at all times, impulsively), causing some of the tension to dribble out of Violet, but Cassie couldn't even feel what it was beneath the searing, nauseating lightness of it — though when Cassie flinched Delacour immediately retreated from her mind, clearly picking up on her discomfort.

(As very attractive as they tended to be, Cassie simply couldn't contemplate having sex with a veela, due to how painfully light their magic was. But lilin, on the other hand, mmm...)

Delacour greeted Violet first, crouching down closer to her height, arms folded over her knees. "Nice to meet you, Violet. My name is Chloé. Your mum picked me to be your new healer, if that's okay with you?" Of course, another reason Cassie had gone with Chloé was that she'd been told this one spoke English — with a bit of an odd, lilting accent, but even so.

Violet just stared at Delacour for a moment. "Um. C-Cassie's my aunt. Your magic is r-r-r—" Violet cut herself off with a huff. "Pretty."

"Oh, you can feel that? You're very sensitive for your age. That's because I'm a... 'Veela' is the term in English?" she asked, her eyes flicking up to Cassie. At her nod, Delacour continued, "Yes, all veela will have magic like mine. Do you know what veela are?"

"Sorry, no..."

"That's all right, sweetie, how about we get started and I'll tell you all about it?" Delacour straightened again, holding a hand toward Cassie in the muggle style. "And you would be Cassiopeia?"

"Cassie." The brief hand-shake left a faint warm tingle clinging to her skin — veela truly were absurdly light, almost as bad as phoenixes — but it quickly faded.

"Chloé. Come now, back this way..."

A short walk down the hall brought them to what was clearly an exam room of some kind — floor walls and ceiling smooth, sterile ceramic tiling, broken with a few cabinets along one wall and a free-standing sink (no dials on the faucet, automated somehow), a variety of healing devices and supplies attached to the walls here and there, a single elevated exam bed and a couple little chairs toward the corner. Still giving Violet a basic overview about the People of the Song, Chloé nodded toward the chairs, suggesting Cassie could sit, but she didn't expect they'd be here very long. If Violet could remove her boots and her jumper and hop up onto the bed, please, they could get started.

Violet glanced at Cassie — to make sure this was okay? — before sitting down on one of the steps worked into the platform holding up the exam bed, so she could get her boots off. The healer was wandering around the room, plucking this thing and that off the walls, bringing them back to set down on the bed, still babbling off about veela and lilin. Violet seemed a little taken aback that they were actually birds — their human shape was technically an exotic self-transfiguration, though one anchored such that it couldn't be reversed through outside magics — Chloé cast some kind of transportation spell with a swirl of her wand, a figurine appearing in her hand. A veela in their true form, looking something like a hawk all done in white and gold — a fully-articulated figurine, Chloé handed it to Violet and she played with spreading the thing's wings, fiddling with its taloned feet.

"This is r-r-really what you l-look like? For real?"

"Of course. I have a bit of orange down my back here," Chloé said, one finger pointing along the figure's spine, "many people in my family do. Though, of course, that is much smaller than a real veela — a real veela would be about the same size as a human. But yes, my people are special, like you and Cassie here."

There was an odd look on Violet's face that Cassie couldn't quite read, but she just nodded.

The exam went relatively painlessly. At the beginning, Chloé drew a little bit of blood — with assurances that she would give the sample to Cassie to destroy once the analysis was over. A wave of her wand over Violet's wrist, and a trickle of blood was summoned through her skin and into a phial. The phial was stuck into one of the devices in the wall, Chloé pressed a couple buttons and flicked a switch before returning to Violet. The tests she did were rather more thorough than those done by most healers Cassie had been to as a child, though nothing particularly invasive. Clicking open one of the devices she'd brought over, one piece separated to be held between pointer and middle finger and another clipped over the shell of her ear, after warning Violet what she was doing the bit she was holding gently pressed to Violet's chest — listening to her heart, it seemed. While keeping up a running commentary on how hearts worked, Chloé would slowly shift the bit around, looking for the right spot; then she would click something on the main body of the device, hold it there for a couple seconds, a strip of paper being printed out by the device; then it would click again, and she would find another spot, print out another strip of paper. She did this a few times (one for each valve, maybe?), before swapping out the bit she was holding for one with a wider end, and listening to Violet's lungs instead.

After that she checked Violet's eyes and ears — Violet visibly cringed during these, obviously uncomfortable with such sensitive organs being prodded at — and then her mouth, tongue and teeth and the back of her throat — visually, only took a few seconds, possibly hurried along by how very awkward Violet looked about it. Around then the device on the wall beeped — a rather larger sheet of paper was printed out, full-width and easily the length of Chloé's forearm. She looked over it quick, her eyebrows twitching upward at a couple points, but didn't comment, folded it up and set it down with the print-outs from Violet's heart; the vial of blood was retrieved and handed to Cassie, who simply vanished the whole thing with a snap of her fingers. (That also earned a raised eyebrow, but Chloé kept whatever she was thinking to herself.)

Violet was then directed to lie down on the bed, and Chloé started prodding at her abdomen with her fingers — that wasn't something Cassie had seen a healer do before, didn't know what she was trying to accomplish there. Violet was clearly uncomfortable with that, fidgeting, fingers and feet tapping, Cassie almost even stepped in, but presumably the healer knew what she was doing. When that was finally over with, Chloé checked Violet's hands, thumbs kneading her wrist and then checking over the length of her fingers, and then her feet, and then a few other joints, knees and shoulders and hips — Chloé paused briefly before the latter, explaining that she was only checking the shape of her bones, if any other grown-up went trying to touch Violet around here she should definitely tell Cassie about it. (Cassie had already had that talk with Violet, but she appreciated the caution.) The last was something in her throat, Cassie didn't know what that was about, but as soon as she was done Chloé stepped back, said that was it, Violet could get up and put her boots and jumper back on now, and once she was ready they could move to Chloé's office for the rest of their meeting.

Chloé's office was open and airy, as Cassie might have expected — veela didn't tend to like enclosed spaces any more than restrictive clothing. One wall was almost entirely composed of window, which was definitely not an original feature of the building, as the architectural techniques of the time wouldn't have been able to tolerate such a large hole in the wall. The other walls and the carpets and the upholstery were in soft, warm, pastel colours, woods light, the colour scheme matching the original rosey brick (the few places it showed) surprisingly well. There was a desk with a few chairs in front of it, behind it bookshelves and filing cabinets, but it looked too orderly, the chairs set perfectly symmetrical, Cassie assumed it wasn't used much; the little conversation circle toward the other side of the room, a sofa and a few armchairs around a coffee table, looked much more used.

Chloé had some coffee and tea and snacks for them, because of course she did. While the coffee and tea steeped — Chloé cannily asked Violet what she preferred first, if she'd known beforehand that Cassie and Chloé were both going to be drinking coffee she might not have said anything — Chloé stood at the bank of windows with Violet, pointing out this or that landmark while Violet nibbled at a chocolate biscuit. The office had a pretty good view of the main avenue of the magical enclave and, beyond that, the old city along the banks of the Garonne. Cassie recognised some of the names, but Chloé was using the local Aquitanian dialect — Cassie was much more familiar with the French.

One landmark she pointed out snagged at Cassie's attention, holding it long after Chloé moved on, Cassie missed most of the rest of the conversation — there, not far from the Republic's government buildings (Toulouse was effectively the capital city of Aquitania), was the Duelling Hall.

Duelling.

Cassie had just been thinking lately that maybe she should travel with Violet, but that she didn't know where to go. Touring the circuit, following events as they were held throughout the year, would give some needed guidance in such an endeavour and bring them to a wide variety of locations all over the globe. Since she wouldn't have sponsorships or contracts to worry about, she could participate in as few or as many events as she liked, as convenient for whatever their lives looked at the time.

Not to mention, it was definitely possible Cassie was rusty — there were a few years there she hadn't really done much of anything. She couldn't forget that there were still Death Eaters out there, and even the Dark Lord himself...and Cassie was raising "Harry" Potter. Having an endless array of professional duellists to practise against could do her some good. Just in case.

That sounded like a very good idea, actually. She'd sit on it for a little while, perhaps an objection would occur to her later...

Cassie was startled back to the present moment when the drinks were ready. Chloé settled herself in one of the armchairs, Violet sitting next to Cassie on the sofa — she suspected the intent was for the child to sit with their parent(s) here, but Violet followed Cassie here on her own, so. (She also took things like this to be a good sign.) Once they were all settled in, the papers Chloé had taken with her set on the table, she said, "Okay, let's get started, then.

"I don't know how much your aunt remembers from when she was a child," nodding at Cassie, "but keeping an eye on the health of a metamorph can be...difficult. Some of the big things are often no good at all — for example, I didn't bother taking your height or weight. These things change too much in metamorphs for them to really mean anything. Instead there are smaller signs we look at. A metamorph who doesn't know much about how their body works might mess something up when they change, or an accidental change might do damage they don't notice. There are various places things might go wrong, but they show up first and most obviously, easiest to find, on the organs in your gut and around your joints."

"Oh!" Chloé's eyes flicked toward Cassie, she shrugged. "I was wondering why you were doing a manual examination, but I just figured it out — you were checking for minor deformities in texture, weren't you?"

The healer nodded, smiling, a pulse of burning light magic carrying some kind of feeling out across the air — it rippled around Cassie, Chloé consciously avoiding touching her, but Violet let out a little giggle, her feet kicking in the air. "Precisely so. The standard analysis charms have their uses, but they aren't tuned to detect the sort of detail I was looking for. I did notice some unusual placement of a couple things — that does happen in metamorphs, and sometimes even ordinary people — but nothing serious enough to concern ourselves with, structurally.

"However, chemically..." Chloé's hand moved to one of the papers, by how large it was presumably the blood test. "What your body uses blood for," she said, to Violet, "is to carry around the things all the different parts of your body need to work. Some parts of your body put stuff into your blood, and other parts take stuff out. So, by looking at what's in your blood, we can see if you have enough of the right kinds of stuff in there, and get an idea of what might not be working as it should. The test we did shows that some of this stuff is somewhat off of where it should be.

"It's not off by very much, the way it is now isn't something to worry about yet." Something of Chloé's tone, rushed and soft but firm, suggested to Cassie that she was reacting to some sign of worry from Violet — Cassie hadn't noticed anything, but veela were empaths, Violet wouldn't have to show any external sign for Chloé to pick up on it. "We don't need to do anything about it today, but it is something we should keep an eye on. If, one day, we do need to do something about it, it won't be a big deal. I'll set up an appointment for you with one of the pharmacologists across the courtyard over there, and he'll give you some potions. You'll need to stay for an hour or so after taking them — just to make sure they're working right, so if something goes wrong we can fix it right away. We should only need to do it once. You'll be able to feel the potions work, and you can remember what it feels like when you're healthy, and just fix it yourself next time."

"Oh, I get it," Cassie said as it clicked, "that's clever." Cassie had had the same problem when she'd been a child, of course, but her mother had given her a wide variety of potions over the years to tweak this or that minor problem, Cassie gradually learning to manage her body's chemistry on her own. What Chloé was talking about, there were a class of advanced, modern healing potions that transfigured a person's organs into a healthy state (a distinct potion geared toward each) — since transfiguration was temporary, the patient was only to be on this regimen for a short time, until the underlying problem causing the organ damage could be dealt with or a replacement grown. But, since transfiguration for metamorphs was permanent, Violet only needed to take them once, and then she could remember what the healthy state felt like.

Much simpler than how they'd managed it when Cassie had been a child, but in her mother's defence those potions were new enough they hadn't been available yet — Cassie only heard of them in the first place from discussions about comrades' course of treatment during the war, and they'd been a recent innovation then. Violet would end up with less fine control of her body than Cassie had, but it wasn't as though Cassie ever used most of that anyway — there was really very little utility to fiddling with the basic functioning of her internal organs — and she was much less likely to accidentally make herself ill. As she'd said, very clever.

Chloé smiled at her with another little nod. "We'll need to keep an eye on that, but it's not a problem we need to do anything about just yet. Your heart is perfect. There are small defects I noticed in your lungs, but only small ones — another thing to keep an eye on, but not a problem yet. All of your joints are fine, with the exception of your ankles, which have been schematised. But they're working for you the way they are now, so we don't need to 'fix' that either. I'm sure if you want to do something about it later, Cassie can help you with that."

"You're going to have to explain for Violet what that means."

"Oh, of course, excuse me." Chloé paused for a moment, fingers tapping at her coffee cup, eyes tracing along the ceiling. "Mm, when you are transfiguring a very complicated thing, there are two ways you can do it. One is, how to say, bottom-up — you get all the little, fiddly bits exactly right, so when they're working together the thing as a whole works as it's supposed to. The other is top-down — you think of how you want the thing as a whole to work, and you let magic or your own instincts worry about the little things.

"Feet are very complicated things. See, here..." Chloé set down her coffee cup, cast an illusion with a little frown and a flick of her fingers (impressive) — the bones of a human foot, showing from the toes to the first few inches of the tibia and fibula, all cast in a soft white. "You see, you have all these little narrow bones in there, kind of like your hand here." She turned the back of her hand to Violet, pointed at the lines of the bones under her skin. "And then above that there are these odd little blocky bones, just kind of cobbled together here. And there are the ligaments and tendons and things holding them all together..." Another flick of her fingers added those, blue against the white. "How they're wrapped around and connected is very complicated, even turning your foot a little bit requires a bunch of little pushes and pulls here, here and here, the whole thing shifting around, it's very complicated.

"Now, when making an ankle, you can do all these little details — but if you get even a little thing wrong, it won't work right. On the other hand, you can do this instead." Chloé flicked her fingers again, the bones and fibrous tissues shifting into...well, sort of a formless blob. The lower part of the foot toward the toes was the same, and the bottom of the leg bones and the heel were still in the right places, but between them was just an indistinct mass, uniform and shapeless. "You don't know what the little details of an ankle are supposed to look like, so you just make something that works right. You think of the big details, that you want it to be shaped like this and bend in certain ways, and just let magic deal with the rest of it. If I were to take a muggle x-ray of your ankle, the bones here leading to your toes, and your heel over here, these would show, but in the middle there'd be a gap, like there's nothing there. Because there are no bones there — you made something that acts like there are, but it's just magic.

"This kind of thing happens all the time, when doing other magic. Like, say, when most people conjure an animal, like so..." Chloé drew her wand, and conjured a little blue and gold songbird with a flick. It flew over at Violet, she twitched a little in surprise, and then let out a giggle as it landed on her legs, hopping and tweeting. "...they don't worry about the little details. They don't think, I want bones that look like this, and muscles that look like this, and feathers that look like this — they just think, I want a bird. If I gave this bird an x-ray, it would just look like a fuzzy blob. If someone were to dissect the poor dear, they wouldn't find inside the things you'd expect for a normal bird, but just a bunch of icky goo."

Violet made a face at her, but couldn't hold it for very long — the conjured bird hopped up onto her hand, Violet couldn't hold in a delighted grin. "It's warm! I thought it's not r-real."

"I told magic I wanted a bird — birds are warm. The same way this cute little thing seems just like a real bird, you asked for an ankle, so you got something just like one. But only on the outside, if you look on the inside it wouldn't look right. And that's okay. It will work just the way it should, because you want it to work. It's a good idea for you to learn what it should look like, just in case — since your ankles are working through magic, if someone does magic on you that doesn't mix well with yours, your ankles might stop working. You should learn how to do it right, when you're old enough, but most of the time you can do it the easy, sloppy way, and it'll work just fine. It's not something we need to fix, just something to think about."

"Okay," Violet said, nodding. "Um, what do I d-do with this?" bobbing her hand a little to indicate the conjured bird.

Chloé just vanished it with a flick of her fingers; Violet looked slightly disappointed that it was gone, but didn't say anything, just reached for another chocolate biscuit. (Cassie should think about getting her a pet, maybe something soft and cuddly...) "Those are the only thing I noticed in the exam worth talking about — you're perfectly healthy otherwise. You do seem a little small for your age, do you do that on purpose?"

"...A little, I g-guh-guess." Violet glanced at Cassie, her shoulders hitching up a little.

That was all Cassie needed to guess what was going on — Violet had intentionally made herself smaller than the other children in an effort to avoid notice. "That's another matter, it's already being taken care of. We don't need to talk about it now." Violet instantly relaxed, clearly didn't want to be made to talk about it today.

Chloé's head tilted a little, eyes narrowing. Switching to (mildly accented) French, she said, "I'm not convinced this isn't a matter to be concerned with."

"Before I took her in back around Samhain, Violet was in an abusive home. She's seeing a..." Cassie didn't know the word in French. "...a muggle talking doctor, whatever you call it. As I said, it's already being taken care of."

"Oh, I see." To her credit, Chloé didn't even ask about the muggle therapist detail — obviously, Cassie would almost certainly have needed to break Secrecy to arrange such a thing. She just nodded, dismissing the subject, and turned back to Violet. "So," again in English, "that's all from me. Did either of you have concerns you wanted to talk about?"

"A couple things, yes." Cassie set down her empty coffee cup, leaning back against the sofa, her arm resting along the back. Violet shuffled a little closer to her side — seemingly without thinking about it, Cassie wondered if she even noticed. "A minor curiosity first. I don't know how thorough your blood test is, I'm wondering, did it test for sex?"

One of Chloé's eyebrows twitched. "Yes — as a matter of routine, searching for indicators of certain heritable diseases. Violet is a carrier of a few, but that's obviously not something we have to worry about yet. Why?"

"Wait, you can identify carriers?" Blood alchemists had come up with methods to replace faulty genes with healthy ones, centuries ago now — though isolating some defects had taken longer than others — but so far as Cassie knew, there was no way to detect these diseases in people who, well, didn't have them.

"Oh sure." Chloé moved some of her papers around, bringing the blood test back to the top. "Violet's a carrier of cystic fibrosis, and an X-linked form of heritable blindness found in certain magical families." Cassie hadn't heard the term "X-linked" before (carried on the X-chromosome, presumably), but she was familiar with the disease — one of her cousins had it, it'd been cured in a blood alchemy ritual when he'd been four or five. "More concerningly, she's also a carrier of galactosemia — cystic fibrosis is common enough, and the blindness is noted to occur in the old British nobility, but galactosemia is almost unheard of in those same magical families. It's relatively common among certain muggle groups, but..."

Slightly dazed, Cassie said, "Violet's mother is muggleborn."

"Ah, yes, that makes it much more feasible, and muggles have a higher incidence of cystic fibrosis as well. Though, that would suggest the blindness is on one X-chromosome, and the galactosemia on the other — should she have a son, he would certainly have one of the two. I strongly recommend Violet arrange an appointment with a blood alchemist to remove at least the galactosemia before having children, just in case. The blindness is relatively easily cured in childhood, but galactosemia can do irreversible damage very quickly, it's best to prevent it from happening in the first place. But obviously that's not something we need to worry about just now."

"Right, of course." It took some effort for Cassie to wrench herself back around to what the topic of this conversation was supposed to be — that blood alchemists on the Continent could identify carriers of heritable conditions, and repair them before the child was even conceived, was just... She'd never heard of such a thing, that was all, it was incredible to contemplate. Unfortunately blood alchemy was technically illegal in Britain, working to eliminate certain defects floating around among the nobility could do so much good... "Ah, excuse me. So, Violet is female. Genetically, I mean."

Chloé frowned, just a little. "Yes?"

Cassie nodded. Turning down to Violet next to her, at a somewhat awkward angle so Cassie could make out her face, "You were born a girl. I thought so already, because of all the things we talked about before, but the blood test Chloé did just proved it for certain."

"...Oh." Violet was frowning, the expression seeming mild, vague and uncertain. But she held the frown for only a couple seconds before she shrugged, her boots slightly swaying in the air. "Okay." Cassie let out a little amused huff — just okay, silly girl — before ruffling her hair and settling the arm that had been on the back of the sofa around Violet instead. There was a little bit of squirming, but Violet wasn't trying to shrug her arm off, just finding a more comfortable position leaning against her before stilling again.

"I'm afraid I don't understand," Chloé said, slow and confused.

"What I'm about to tell you doesn't go in Violet's papers. It must remain secret, for Violet's safety." She waited for Chloé to nod — reluctantly, wary of what she was agreeing to — before admitting, "Violet's birth name is Henrik Potter." Violet twitched, surprised, the narrow shoulders under Cassie's arm hunching in a little, defensively.

For a second, Chloé just stared back at Cassie, face blank and unblinking. "Potter. You mean, the same Harry Potter the British are always talking about these days."

"Yes, the same one. And that aside, I'm aware you would be familiar with Elizabeth."

Chloé let out a short, sharp chuckle. "You could say that, I suppose..."

That was an odd reaction, but okay. Turning back down to Violet, "Darling, I don't know if you remember, the day we met I said your father had a half-sister?" Violet hesitated for a moment before nodding, which could mean either that she did remember or she didn't, and was just nodding so Cassie would continue. "Going over old letters from your grandmother, I found out she married a veela — a Delacour, one of Chloé's family. It's part of why I picked Chloé for your healer. I'm not going to make you meet Elizabeth if you don't want to, but I thought I should make contact with them anyway.

"Is that okay? I suppose I should have asked first..." In her defence, she'd been originally operating on the assumption that she wouldn't tell the healer who Violet was until later down the road, after talking about it with Violet. But that had been before the incident with the fairy healers — she was going to explain the situation with Violet's scar in a couple minutes here, so it was going to come up anyway. Oh well.

Violet looked a little confused, blinking up at Cassie — which was an odd reaction, no idea what that was about. "Um. It's okay."

"Me."

Cassie blinked, glanced back at Chloé. "Excuse me?"

"Elizabeth Potter did marry a Delacour — me. Lise is my wife."

...

"Oh, well, that's a hell of a coincidence." Perhaps not much of one, when she thought about it — Dorea had mentioned in her letters that Elizabeth and her wife had met while both attending Beauxbatons's healing programme, and there couldn't be that many Delacour healers. Still, funny how that'd worked out. "I guess, say hello to your veela aunt, Violet."

"Ummm..." The poor girl seemed to have no idea what to say, just staring over at Chloé all still and wide-eyed. Which was fair, Cassie didn't really know where to go with this either — she'd expected she'd be asking the healer to carry a message on to Elizabeth's family, not that she would be Elizabeth's family.

Thankfully, Chloé seemed less taken aback than the two of them, or at least was better at powering through this particular brand of awkwardness. With a bright smile, another pulse of burning light magic that thankfully avoided Cassie (the tension in Violet's shoulders immediately easing), she chirped, "Oh my. It's all right, Violet, I know this is probably a bit much. We can just go ahead and ignore this whole thing for now. If we are to talk about family things, it shouldn't be in a healing appointment. Okay?"

"Um...okay. Yes, l-l-l—" Violet huffed, frustrated. "C-c-c-c— There's, um, a l-lot going on, and, I d-don't w-w-wuh-w—" She groaned, leaning forward a little, hiding her face in her hands.

"No, darling, it's okay," Cassie muttered, rubbing her back. Violet started, as often happened with unexpected touches, but relaxed immediately, so Cassie kept it up. "You don't want to meet Elizabeth and her family right now, because you're still getting used to all the other big changes in your life." Violet's messy shroud of black curls shuffled around a little, nodding.

"And that's okay. We can forget all about this today." Chloé shot Cassie a look. "Though I might suggest Lise write to Cassie, we don't have to talk about it anymore. So," she chirped, sharp enough Violet twitched a little. "It sounded like you had a concern you wished to talk about with me."

"Yes, it's why I needed to tell you who Violet is — I would have left it for a better time, otherwise. I don't know how much you know about the story, but..."

And so Cassie explained, from the beginning, everything she knew about what happened on that Samhain. It was mostly conjecture, true, but she was speaking from an educated perspective — Aurors tended to learn a bit about the Dark Arts just from exposure, but she picked up a lot more than most just from poking around the library at Ancient House — so she wasn't just talking out of her arse, at least (Albus). Chloé hardly reacted externally to the description of Lily's self-sacrificial ritual, perhaps save with slightly widened eyes, but Cassie didn't miss the shiver on the ambient magic in the room, Violet shifting uncomfortably next to her. Obviously Chloé was projecting something, as veela were wont to do, but she was still taking care to avoid hitting Cassie with it. Anyway, there'd been no clear signs of long-term consequences of that night, and they might not have considered the possibility Violet might come to harm because of her scar, until those fairy healers explained what the Dark Lord could do to her, if he learned about their connection — they considered it serious enough of a problem they wouldn't accept "no" for an answer, which was fine, Cassie wouldn't have refused anyway once it'd been explained to her.

Chloé did visibly react to the story of their weird soul magic healing ritual. Her eyes had gone even wider, the shivering around Cassie's head growing more intense — enough that she started feeling uncomfortable warm, flashes of hot tingles flaring on her skin, as the veela lost control of her magic a little — even gaping back at Cassie, lips parting in a silent gasp. "This is..." She cleared her throat, shrugged her shoulders, as though trying to physically shake something off. A glance at her watch, and she said, "Ah, do you have the time to stay here a half hour longer? Soul magic can be very delicate, and it would be too easy to— There's a test I would like to do. It's somewhat involved, though it's not invasive — you won't feel a thing," she added, with a glance at Violet. "But, as sensitive as these structures are, we certainly should at least check for any...fundamental alterations."

If Violet's essence had been permanently altered by the healing, she meant. The younger Avalonian had said she would be, but that he couldn't tell them how or how severely — perhaps now that things were more settled, a deeper analysis would be able to tell them more. "That is why I'm telling you about it. We don't have anything else on, we were just going to get lunch when we were done here, so we can stay long. If that's all right with you, darling."

Violet twitched a little. "Um, okay?"

"Okay, one moment." Chloé stood up, walked over to a metallic box set into the wall near the door Cassie hadn't noticed earlier. Some kind of cover was flipped aside, something inside pressed. In the local Aquitanian, Chloé spoke into the box, Cassie only understood some of it. Something about pushing back her next appointment — Cassie suspected the next kid and their family were being sent to a nearby restaurant to have a free lunch while they waited — and if...something was available, didn't follow that part. By Chloé's response, it sounded like there was one of whatever that was they could use, they'd be there in a couple minutes. Flipping the box back closed, she started walking back to the table. "Okay. We're in luck, an I.R.C.T.—" The letter names were said in the local Aquitanian. "—room is available, but we have to go immediately. It's in this building, let me tidy this up quick..."

After bundling together all of Violet's papers, shuffling them into a file she carried folded under her arm, Chloé led them out of her office. She didn't lead them out of the clinic into the main hallways, instead remaining in the clinic's back halls, then stepping through a door into an undecorated hallway, all the surfaces plain ceramic tile — long and wide and relatively low-ceilinged, and if Cassie was tracking distances properly this should actually pass straight through the hallway she and Violet had taken to get to the clinic. Another door brought them to the back halls of a different clinic, a turn around a corner and they arrived at a single lift. Stepping through the door, Cassie grimaced, but it wasn't that bad, actually — it was larger inside than she'd expected (to fit a patient on a gurney, she guessed), the walls smooth and enclosed, without the glimpses into the shaft she was used to trying to ignore, its motion downward smooth and quiet. All right, then. Before long, they stepped out into the back halls of another clinic, this one somewhat more active than either of the ones above, more people bustling about chattering, patients alongside staff, even a couple injured children and very pregnant women being pushed about on wheelchairs.

As they went, Chloé explained what exactly "IRCT" was. Transplanar Corona Resonance Imagery — Chloé wasn't aware of an official English name, she translated it herself — was a very modern analysis technique, exploiting what sounded like a combination of shadow-magic and sympathy. Basically, they induced a sort of sympathetic resonance between a full size room and a little box, the latter contained inside a device which then detected the magical emanations within it. One of the problems with the analysis charms used in healing was that, obviously, casting charms on something changed it, even if only slightly — while this was perfectly fine when attempting to map the physical structure of a thing, magic interacting with someone's mind and soul caused a reaction within it, which could make mapping its resting state prohibitively difficult. But, since this technique only interacted with the magic in the box, reflecting the magic inside the room due to the sympathetic state enforced between them, they were able to analyse a person's magic without technically even touching them.

Which was amazingly clever, Cassie would have never thought of that — the things artificers were coming up with these days...

The "display room" was, like most of the internal spaces in this building, mostly covered in ceramic tile, in this case a sterile white, a bit of blue toward the ceiling. There was a desk against one wall with...some kind of equipment on it, built into the wall — metal, polished to a shine, with a variety of switches and buttons and things, presumably controlling their analysis...thing. There were a few comfortable-looking padded chairs in here, a wheeled armchair at the desk, presumably for the patient (and family) and their healer to discuss the results. They were met by a human man in plain healer's robes, showing obvious signs of age, face wrinkling and grey at his temples. Perhaps her age, a bit older, it could be hard to say sometimes (and that was assuming he was even human), Brèç Teissièr still had a firm, warm grip, in the muggle-style greeting handshake he also insisted on doing, brightly smiling with a deep, steady voice, so clearly not fading yet. After introducing himself, he waved them toward another door, narrower than most in the building.

The room beyond was small, made out of the same ceramic tile, a bench standing over here, a couple shelves, some empty and others with thick fluffy towels sitting folded on them. The air felt thin here, making Cassie a little light-headed, Violet apparently sensitive enough to feel it too, hitching to a halt at the threshold with a shudder — Chloé explained that there were enchantments in the walls that continually stripped and neutralised magic from the environment inside the room, which, yeah, that would do it. Apparently the exam was extremely sensitive, enough that it required a very simple cleansing ritual first — the largest thing in this little room was a bathtub against the wall, already filled with neutralised saltwater — and ideally was done in the nude. The interaction between someone's magic and any even unenchanted clothing they might be wearing was minimal, but it did still have an effect, which could blur the image they would get somewhat.

Chloé reassured Violet that there weren't any cameras or anything in the exam room — they were taking pictures only of her magic, they wouldn't be able to see what she physically looked like. She would need to undress, immerse herself in the tub quick — she didn't need to stay in there long, but she did need to fully immerse herself, if only for a second — and then walk straight through this doorway right here. There was an enchantment built into the frame that would strip away the water, which might feel rather cold. Past that was a short hallway, with more enchantments to strip lingering foreign magic — going through those might feel uncomfortable, but they wouldn't hurt.

Once she was inside the room past that, the door would automatically close behind her — if she got scared and wanted to leave, knock and it would open — go stand in the circle in the middle. Once they started taking a picture, a red light on the wall would turn on — don't move too much, and don't do any magic, it would only take maybe ten or fifteen seconds. Then a green light would turn on, and start flashing — that meant she was supposed to cast magic, any kind of magic, something small would do. Changing something about her appearance would work, it didn't matter what it was. The light would go out, and then it would turn red again, no magic; then it would flash green some more, do some kind of magic; and then red again, no magic. If something went wrong, and they didn't get a clear picture, they might go through it again once or twice, but eventually the light would turn blue and the door would open, come back here and get dressed, and they were done.

Chloé slipped back out the door, and Cassie followed her, pausing at the threshold for a second — Violet noticed, gave Cassie a little nod, so she stepped out and closed the door behind her. After a few minutes, Teissièr started prodding at the switches and stuff at the desk, so Violet must be in the exam room already. Now and then, this one little device would crackle with magic for a second, and then a large illusion would be projected into the middle of the room. A web of colour, kinking and curling strands fanning out from a central point in all directions — sort of like those odd little lamps some muggles liked, the balls with the tiny, weirdly static lightning bolts in them, but much more complex — glowing soft white and gold and sharper red and silver and, appropriately, a vivid violet. Teissièr would turn in his wheeled little armchair, eyes scanning the illusion, if he was satisfied press a button. A couple clicking noises, and he'd take a reservoir stone out of a slot in the equipment — actual diamond, it looked like, ideal reservoir stones but rarely used due to the difficulty in procuring them — replacing it with a fresh one, and repeating the process.

All in all, it took maybe fifteen minutes at the most before the door into the bath opened again, and Violet stepped out. She was hugging her arms around herself, cold — Cassie cast a warming charm at her with a flick of her fingers, and she immediately relaxed. The two of them were waved over toward the chairs to sit, while the healers went over the images, occasionally swapping from one to the next, pointing at this or that bit of the colourful webs, lowly chattering in Aquitanian. Sometimes, Teissièr would flick a switch on something, and bundles of coloured runes would appear along the tangled tendrils of the projection — Egyptian, but Cassie was too far away to make them out.

Presumably they were getting something out of this, though Cassie had no idea what. She couldn't even really tell the difference between the images — she could tell there was a difference, but not much more than that.

"Sorry for the delay, Miss Black, Violet," Teissièr said, giving them a crooked smile. "This is a, hmm. It isn't often anyone sees the results of Avalonian healing. Now, what we are looking at..." Drawing his wand, he stepped closer to the image — stepping partially inside of it, in fact, the kinking tendrils of light passing through him undisturbed. "Now, the mind and soul are often spoken of as though they are separate entities, but it is perhaps better to consider them two parts of a whole. The nerves, all the little bits in your brain, they interact in a very complex system, in the process generating magical energy. This energy one can say is the mind. Everything has this energy, everything with a brain, it isn't special.

"But there is something that happens with a mind, if it grows complex enough." Using his wand as a pointing stick, he indicated the indistinct blob in the middle, where all the tendrils grew out of. "Should the mind grow complex and dense enough, there will in time be a spark—" He snapped his fingers, Violet twitched slightly at the unexpected noise. "—and the mind will be reordered into something much more organised, growing in a regular pattern around a single source of direction. A mind so ordered is now conscious, a thinking, self-aware being. These lines, you may think of them as the paths that magic takes through you. They start here in the middle, and every time you have a feeling or a thought, or move so much as a finger, or cast magic, a signal is sent out along one of these lines," tracing along one with the tip of his wand, "and out into the world. Are you following me so far?"

He waited to get a pair of nods, somewhat more uncertainly from Violet, before continuing. "Yes. Now, there are things that can happen to a person that can destroy or alter these pathways — ritual soul magics, various curses, and subsumption, mostly. If a path is destroyed, the signal cannot go that way anymore, so the person loses whatever ability was associated with it. But if a path is changed instead, then the end result that gets out into the world is also changed. What that change will be is hard to predict — it depends on what was done, what the intent of the person doing the alteration was, what interference there might have been in the environment, all kinds of things.

"See here, these areas, the silver and the purple?" he asked, his wand circling those sections of the projection. It wasn't a small fraction, maybe about a quarter, though it was hard to say for certain — there were many tendrils where almost the entire length was purple, only a few silver, the silver instead mostly speckled here and there against the other colours, seemingly at random. "These colours do not belong. The yellow and the white and the red, these are Violet's soul, as it is by nature. Very light, and quite dense — you are already powerful for your age, and quite sensitive to your surroundings, and I imagine quite intelligent?" That was said as though it were a question, Teissièr looking to them for confirmation.

Violet looked like she had no idea what to say to that. A little amused, Cassie said, "She taught herself to read before even starting muggle school." Violet huddled a little deeper into the chair, her cheeks pinking a little.

"Yes, yes, I'm not surprised, this bundle right here— And she has natural talent for transfiguration — which is as expected, all metamorphs do — and also for gross physical effects. Charms," he clarified, "movement and changing things like the temperature and shape, animation, and so forth. Mm, and you might consider starting her on traditional witchcraft — gardening and potions particularly, I mean to say. She may do quite well there as well.

"But as I was saying. The red, white, yellow, these are Violet, herself. The silver and purple are fairy magic. Violet's soul was not altered in that ritual you spoke of — entire segments of it have been replaced." There was a faint note of awe on Teissièr's voice, astounded. The feeling was so intense Cassie guessed that, had he not done the exam himself, he would have been sceptical such a thing were even possible.

She guessed because, had she not been there when the ritual was done, she would have thought the same. Of course, the younger fairy had already told her they'd be doing so, so this wasn't a surprise exactly — the point of doing this in the first place was to learn what the effects of that would be. "I did suspect as much."

"You suspected as—" Teissièr broke off with a sigh, hissing a rapid string of syllables in Aquitanian. Whatever it was, Chloé fought to choke down a giggle, pressing the back of her wrist to her lips. "Forgive me, Miss Black, I don't mean to— Well, it is simply that I have never even heard of such a thing being done. There are major alterations one may do to one's soul, even integrate outside magic though deep subsumption, but something like this..." He trailed off, eyes flickering over the illusion, head slowly shaking. "This is incredible. I have never even imagined the like."

Yeah, couldn't blame him, it was kind of absurd when she thought about it. "So, then you can't tell us what the effects may be."

"Mm, some, perhaps." Teissièr started walking back to the desk, as he said, "I don't imagine there would have been obvious changes in Violet's character. It appears whatever ritual the Avalonians performed included a continuous reinforcement of Violet's identity, and so the new pathways were laid in an echo of what came before — not precisely identical, perhaps, but near enough." The illusion winked out as Teissièr removed the reservoir stone, replacing it with another. "The integration of fragments outside that large sector that was replaced may indicate places where there were once intersections with the parasite you described. I would not be surprised if Violet has found herself, hmm, somewhat more clear-headed than before, certain thoughts or feelings or skills may come more easily than once they had. It is likely not a large difference, though.

"As far as deeper changes go, the effects of having so much of her being replaced with Avalonian magic, this I can only guess." A new illusion appeared, this one virtually identical. It did seem a little brighter in places, not universally, the centre blob and only some of the kinking tendrils effected — the most obvious difference was that, every few seconds, an odd silvery shimmer would spread from the centre out to the tips in a wave. Cassie assumed this was one of the ones Violet had been casting magic for. "You can see here, when Violet is channelling magic, an echo of the ritual propogates through her essence." Oh right, wasn't the silver fairy magic? Huh... "It seems that, in reinforcing her identity as an aspect of the ritual, that reinforcement itself was permanently integrated into her identity. Whether this is a mistake, hmm, it's possible they meant to do this — enticing Violet's identity to self-reinforce by nature may be intended to prevent her essence from decohering in the days and weeks following.

"But what the unintended effects of this might be," Teissièr continued on, moving right on past the horrifying implications of Violet's soul decohering, "that I can't say. We are standing at the very cusp of our understanding of the soul, and so I can only guess, and that with little confidence. When it comes time to begin teaching her wizardry, I would be very cautious — fairy magic behaves differently from ours in several important ways. I would start slowly, and carefully observe the resolution of each spell for irregularities before moving on to the next. If you don't notice anything unusual, than you may possibly relax, but different spell classes may behave differently. It will not present a danger to her, no, but spells acting unpredictably may present a danger to everyone around her, or simply cause minor accidents, so, it is something you will want to keep an eye on.

"Outside of that, well, I wonder." Teissièr turned to Violet, his head cocking a little. "Please humour my curiosity, Violet. Tell me a lie." Wait, he didn't mean...

"Um?" Violet blinked up at him for a moment, visibly confused, glanced at Cassie. "What k-k-kind?"

"Any lie will do, it doesn't matter what it is. Perhaps, what is the name of the town where you live?"

"Um. Llllluh." Violet scowled. "D-D-D-didduh, ugh! An t-Anacal! Sorry..."

One of Teissièr's eyebrows ticked up, he glanced at Cassie. "That last one was the truth. Violet, darling, did you give up because of the stammer, or..."

"That d– didn't help, but..." Lifting one shoulder in an awkward shrug, Violet hunched deeper into her chair, avoiding their eyes. "Um. I'm not s'posed to lie. Before, you know." One of the rules at her old relatives' house, Cassie assumed — which was fucking rich, because Evans had lied to Violet plenty... "B-but, um. That felt...r-r-rreally weird. That's new. Is that fairy stuff?"

Moving past the implications about Violet's previous homelife as easily as he had the possible catastrophic failure of the fairies' healing ritual, Teissièr just nodded. "Yes, I suspect so. Many denizens of the other world are incapable of telling a lie — their very magic does not allow them to. They find ways around it, creatively avoiding the truth while never speaking a falsehood in the strictest sense, but even so. And another thought: promise me you will clap your hands right now, and then try not to." Oh no, not being able to lie was bad enough...

Violet glanced up at Cassie. "Go ahead and try it, darling."

She looked a little confused — probably wondering what this was supposed to prove — but after a moment of hesitation she obeyed. "Um. I pr-promise to clap my hands, now." A second after getting the word out, she twitched, just a little, her shoulders squaring. And it got worse as time passed, Violet's head slowly bowing as she curled into herself, seemingly unconsciously, eyes squeezing shut and lips twisting into a grimace, her hands fisting in her skirt. The longer she fought it the more and more tense she became, until she was practically shivering in place, and—

Maybe she'd be able to get past it if she fought it long enough, but — a cold stone dropping into her stomach as it became obvious what was happening, the back of her neck crawling — Cassie couldn't keep watching. A hand resting on her shoulder, Cassie said, "Violet, clap your hands, please."

Her fingers releasing her skirt, her hands snapped up in a blink, and she clapped once — immediately she relaxed, letting out a shaky sigh. Cassie transfigured their chairs, melting them together and removing the armrests in the middle. Violet limply allowed herself to be hugged against Cassie's side, head turned to rest against her chest, Cassie's hand gently rubbing her shoulder.

As much for her own comfort as Violet's, if she was being honest. "She's bound to her word, as an elf." It wasn't really a question.

"Perhaps. I'm sorry, Violet, but can you describe to me what that felt like?"

"Like..." Violet hesitated, the hand opposite Cassie coming up, fingers vaguely wiggling toward her own shoulder. "Um. Like a spider crawling on you, k-kainda? A lot of little puh-pokey things, but sharp and c-c-cuh-cold, and bleh."

Teissièr nodded. "So she is not bound as an elf, in fact. When most varieties of fairy or elf give their word, it is as a self-directed ritual — in making an oath, they alter their own fundamental identity such that fulfilling that oath becomes a part of who they are. They keep their word, because they are made into a person who will do what they have promised to regardless. What Violet describes sounds more like breaching a ritually-enforced oath.

"I don't know if anyone told you this, Violet," his voice turning slightly softer, as it seemed to every time he spoke directly to her, "but all healers, both muggle and magical, give oaths upon finishing our training. For muggles, these are only words, but mages give them as part of an old ritual, and magic makes us keep them. If we break one of them — by harming one of our patients on purpose, for example — it is very unpleasant for us. In fact, what you described just now sounds very much like what I was feeling myself, telling you to try this and not immediately telling you to give up. It stopped for me as soon as you clapped your hands, just as it did for you."

Huh, neat. Cassie was aware their ritual oaths existed, but there was very little understanding of just how sensitive and comprehensive they were — obviously, testing such a thing would be terribly unethical. That a response had been triggered by something so minor really was quite fascinating. Well, maybe it made a difference that Teissièr had clearly expected it to be uncomfortable for Violet, but...

Well, that's not too bad, she guessed. If it did act like a ritual-enforced oath, then at the very least Violet wouldn't be able to give an oath that was literally impossible for her to keep. This was mostly anecdotal, of course, as such things would also be unethical to test, but the common belief was that if a fairy (including even house-elves) made an impossible oath they died, instantly, torn apart by the force of their own magic attempting to fulfil it; on the other hand, if a human gave a ritual-enforced oath there would be no punishment even if they failed, so long as they tried. (Sometimes patients simply died, but the healer's oaths would rarely punish them for it, so long as they tried.) Still not ideal, of course, but it could be worse.

Turning down to Violet, she said, "I know it might be hard to remember, darling, as little meaningless promises are just a part of how people talk, but this is very important. You need to be careful with how you talk. From now on, you can't make a promise to anyone, even little things. Unless you're very, very certain you're going to do it — because it sounds like your magic is going to make you do it. I'm sorry you have to deal with this, but it really was best to get that thing out of you, and..."

Violet turned up to give Cassie a look — not sure how to read that, exactly, maybe confused? annoyed? "It's okay. Ah-ah-I never liked it, the scar, and it sounded r-really bad, if we didn't, and. Well, I already don't mmake a promise if I'm not g-g-g-g—" Violet pouted. "I hate that l-letter."

Trying not to smile — would hate for Violet to misread it as Cassie making fun of her — Cassie hugged the girl closer against her, dropped a kiss on top of her head. "I know, darling. And I know you're already careful with how you talk—" Presumably because her previous guardians would punish her for even the slightest disrespect, real or imagined, and ooh, Cassie really should have flayed that woman alive when she'd had the chance... "—but now it's very important. And, it's not really a bad thing. Most people think being as honest as possible and keeping your word is...very honourable behaviour, a sign of a good, trustworthy person, but of course most people have to choose to do it. It's an effort for most people, to try to live up to it. You don't have the choice anymore, the fairy magic you got stuck with won't let you. So you have to be careful."

That earned another funny look, didn't know what that one was about either. Whatever it was, Violet just nodded, and muttered, "Okay."

At least it sounded like Violet was taking it seriously, she guessed. Not like she was a particularly deceitful kid to begin with, but... "Okay."

As they proceeded to wrap up their appointment — Teissièr giving Cassie a last few warnings to keep an eye on Violet's magical development and maybe return for another exam if something especially troubling came up, Chloé leading them back up to her clinic to finish off some paperwork and arranging their next appointment in the summer — Cassie did her best to hide her simmering unease. First she learned that her baby sister's grandchild had been put in an abusive home (and nobody had thought to check up on her in all that time, Albus), and then Violet turned out to be so sensitive to dark magic she couldn't tolerate Cassie's preferred wards, and then she learned Jamie had gotten enough Light shite crammed into his head that he thought it was a great idea to pass off his metamorph daughter as a son, and regularly dose her with unnecessary potions for the sake of his own comfort (Cassie did not approve of giving infants Riemann's Draught, to put it mildly), and then her very subtle stammer began to severely worsen, and then the shite with her scar and the fairy healers, and...

And it'd only been, what, two months plus a week or two? Cassie couldn't help wondering what the next mess would be. Not that she regretted taking Violet away, of course not — if she hadn't she'd still be stuck in that house, and dealing with her metamorphy on her own, which was not acceptable. Not to mention, Cassie's own mental health was very much improved, she could admit that much. (When Nola had joked that she'd be dead from drink by now without him, he'd only been sort of exaggerating.) It was just a lot to deal with, that was all.

She did kind of regret that she'd resolved to quit drinking, though, fuck, she could really use one right about now...

፠

As much as Violet still didn't really get what the point of talking to Shannon about stuff was, it wasn't a bad thing to do. Seemed a little pointless, but Shannon was nice enough, so.

It'd been a little bit since they'd seen Shannon — she took a few weeks off for the holidays, so she could spend time with her son and go visit her parents and stuff, so she hadn't had any appointments for a while. The last time they'd talked, it was before Cassie had brought Violet to see the Starlighters, and before Christmas with the Tonkses, and before they met the fairies, and before the healer visit, and...

When Violet paused and thought about it for a little bit, a lot of things had happened. Not just since their last visit with Shannon, but since Hallowe'en, ever since Cassie had shown up. Not bad things, no — most of it was good, they thought — but there was so much going on it was kind of crazy to think about sometimes.

Though, when it came down to it, they didn't really have that much to say about...most of it. The Starlighters were nice — it was still kind of weird that the cats were also people, and they hadn't know before people could be blue, but. It was sad that they were so poor, normal magic people were mean, but there wasn't anything Violet could do about that. The Tonkses were also nice, and it was nice having a real Christmas. Also puzzles! The magic puzzles were so cool — and also space was cool, Violet had never really given it much thought before, they hadn't realised how cool space was, all big and pretty and wow, you know? They still hadn't finished all the magic puzzles, because there was a lot going on and also the puzzles were big and some of them were really hard, but still, they were fun.

And the fairy healing thing, and the stuff about their soul having fairy stuff in it now which Violet hadn't really understood, there wasn't much to say about that either. They couldn't tell lies or break their promises anymore — so what? It wasn't like they ever did that anyway. It was kind of scary, especially the stuff about their magic maybe acting weird when they started learning stuff proper — Violet hadn't missed the older man (forgot his name) saying they might hurt people by accident, which sounded scary — and they would be careful what they said and everything, but it wasn't that big of a deal. Or, not so much Violet would prefer not to have done it — they really hadn't liked the scar, especially after learning where they got it from.

Violet did keep changing things on accident way more than they used to, which Cassie thought was related to the scar being gone, which was a little annoying, but it wasn't like Violet was going to get in trouble for that, so it was fine. Still worth it.

Really, as many things had happened, there wasn't that much to talk about. Violet ended up spending more time talking about how cool space was and Cassie's sex friend Síomha. (Shannon thought it was funny when Violet called them Cassie's "sex friends", but they didn't know what else they were supposed to call them.) Of Cassie's sex friends they'd met so far, Violet thought Síomha was their favourite. She was younger — must have been really young when she and Cassie met, Violet didn't know exactly — and really nice, of course, but in a different way from Julie. Julie was, you know, all mumsy, nice in a soft and warm and huggy way (though she only tried the once, and remembered that Violet didn't want her to, so), while Síomha was louder and more playful, joking and messing around and stuff. Also, she preferred Irish (Gaelic, whatever), enough she had a really obvious accent when speaking English, so was also good for practising. One time, Cassie went out to buy a couple things and left Violet home with Síomha (Cassie had to floo there, for some reason, Violet chose not to go), and they ended up going outside, running around and climbing trees with some of the neighbour kids, it was fun, Síomha was nice.

Shannon suggested they should tell Cassie they liked Síomha, which...Violet hadn't thought of that, honestly. They were Cassie's friends, Violet thought it wasn't their business? It kind of wasn't, obviously Violet didn't get to pick Cassie's friends, but Shannon said that which people Violet liked better might be something Cassie would want to know when trying to decide who they would have around the house — and that was only fair, because it was Violet's house too. That made sense, so, fine, they could do that, they guessed.

And that was really it, Violet just babbling about whatever while poking at another jigsaw puzzle — this one was of a lighthouse on a rocky shore somewhere, waves going fwoosh, the sunset making the clouds in the background all orange and red and purple, very pretty. (Though they wouldn't have time to finish it, still, pretty.) Shannon seemed to hang up on the have to tell the truth and keep promises thing, and maybe thought it was a little weird that Violet wasn't freaking out about it? They thought that she didn't really believe that Violet was okay with it, asked multiple times in a couple different ways, but really, they were fine. They thought it was kinda neat, actually, maybe things would be better if everybody else couldn't lie and had to keep their promises too...

But anyway, as much as there wasn't much to talk about on all that had happened recently (at least, Violet didn't think there was), there was something they kind of wanted to talk about. Something they didn't really get. Well, two things, really. But they were uncomfortable and awkward, and... They didn't know how long they'd been in here already, and if they kept stalling they would never get to it. But, at the same time, if Violet kept it toward the end, then Shannon wouldn't be able to stick on it too long, 'cause then they'd have to go. Which was maybe a little bit of a sneaky thing to do, but Violet could only take talking about serious things so long before their chest got too tight and then it was just hard to talk at all, and they had to stop, and Shannon knew that, and was good about not pushing them once they had to stop, so...

Guessing by how much of the puzzle they'd finish, Violet thought they had to be two-thirds through the meeting, at least. Which meant now was probably a good time. "Um. There were a c-couple things I was thinking about."

Shannon glanced up at Violet from the puzzle — though Violet was still looking down, so. Most of the time, Shannon would help with the puzzle Violet was doing, but she was a lot slower, didn't really add much to it. Violet thought maybe she was being slow on purpose, but they didn't really get why...though Violet was also apparently just good at puzzles, so who knew. "Oh? What about?"

"About boy and g-g– ugh, girl things." Stupid Gs... "Um. How that all works. You know?"

"I'm not sure I do. What about boy and girl things?"

"Um. How do you tell? Which one you are. I d-don't mean, um, body stuff, obviously," they said, waving at themself, "that's easy, but. I mean, boys and g-girls are supposed to be d-d-duh-d– nnot the same, and, I dunno how you tell."

"Well, that's a little bit of a complicated question." Shannon was quiet for a little bit, connecting a couple pieces together, but Violet could tell by now that meant she was thinking. "It's not a natural thing, you see. All the ideas we have about what kinds of things, clothes and toys and hobbies and whatever else, are boy things and which are girl things, it's not because of body stuff, as you put it. They're not connected. The only reason boy things are boy things and girl things are girl things is everyone agreeing that they are. Just like how words are just sounds, but we all agree what they mean — we agree some things are boy things and some things are girl things, and that's all it is."

"...Okay." Violet didn't...really get it. They meant, they kind of got it — obviously there was nothing about having a penis that meant you were supposed to like the colour blue — but just because it was all kind of fake, a thing everyone agreed to do just because, didn't make it any less confusing. "But...how many g-girl things do have to do before it's all like, oh hey, that p-p-p—" Violet's lips, pressed together trying to force the sound out, made a funny loud buzzing kind of noise, whoops... "Um. You know. How do you tell?"

"Mm, I suppose that depends. Have you been thinking about this recently?"

"Uh-huh. For a while, really. I mean..." Their fingers tapping at the table, Violet thought for a little, frowning down at the scattered puzzle pieces. They didn't really know how to explain this. "I never r-r-really got this stuff?" The R and not the G that time, jeez... "Um. You know, I'm not supposed to be a g-g— Except I guess I k-kinda am now, you know, the blood test said so? A-a-annd I was born that way and everything. But, I didn't know that, before. And, I always helped with the cooking and ga-ga-gardening, before, and, cooking and flowers and stuff are s'posed to be girl things, but maybe not, 'cause Pet-Petunia was big about me being a boy and everything... But boys do do those things too.

"And..." Violet plucked their skirt up a little, before dropping it with a shrug. "Um, boys can be pretty too, you know—" Though Vernon usually called those kinds of boys what Violet knew now were bad words. "—but, um, not supposed to wear d-d-dresses and things, you know. Um. I don't know. How you tell."

Shannon was smiling a little, though Violet didn't really know why. "These things can be very difficult for some people, but because you can be either as you like, it's really very simple for you. Which one do you want to be? Or, let's say, if you're talking to someone, which one do you want them to think of you as?"

Well, that one actually wasn't a hard question to answer at all. "But, I don't know if that's why."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I l-l-like being Violet better than Harry, but I don't know if that's j-just because...everything's better now. My own room, and C-C-Cassie, and the neighbours and everything. How do you tell?"

"Sometimes you can't tell. There is often no one right answer to these things, Violet. People are fuzzy and changing and complicated, and sometimes it can be hard to tell what thing is causing what feeling. Sometimes it's a combination of things, and it's impossible to tell. But, when we're talking about this kind of thing, how you want to be, there is also no wrong answer. And different things feel differently to different people. When I say I'm a girl, I might know that, and feel that, in a different way than Cassie does. And that's fine. What it means for you might not be the same as it means for someone else, and that's fine. That's the way it's supposed to be." Shannon leaned over the table a little, her lips twitching. "If everyone were exactly the same in every way, I think that would be boring — don't you?"

Well, yeah, when she put it like that...

Shannon sat back in her spot again, smirking just a little. "It's hard for me to give a firm answer, how you tell, how many girly things you need to do to be a girl, because there is no firm answer. Being a girl isn't a rigid, specific thing, a test you need enough points on. It just is. Either being one feels right to you, or it doesn't. Either you want people to think of you as one, or you don't. It's something you get to decide, and no one else can tell you you're doing it wrong. Because you can't do it wrong. Am I making any sense?"

"...Yeah." Chewing on their lip, Violet hesitated for a second. Then, leaning up onto their knees, they reached over toward the table where the pink, blue, and clear bracelets were sitting (missing one clear and one pink one that were on Violet and Shannon's wrists already), grabbed the remaining pink one, and pulled it over her hand. Plucking at the clear one next to it, she said, "I'm k-keeping this one, 'cause I'm not sure and I still don't really g-g-get it."

"That's okay," Shannon said, smiling across the table at her. "Just like the meanings of some words can be fuzzy, this can be fuzzy too. You don't have to be a hundred per cent one or the other, if you sometimes feel like you're not really either one, that's fine too."

Yeah, Shannon and Cassie and even Amy had said that before, but Violet didn't really get it. She kind of thought people could only be boys or girls? Except Violet, they guessed, Violet could kind of be both so in a weird way kind of wasn't really either, she just meant, she didn't get it. "Right. Okay. That was one thing, do we have time for the other thing?"

"We're getting toward the end of our time, but there's still a bit left. If it's a big thing you think might take a while to get through, we can wait until next time."

"No, it's k-kuh-quick." All about one word, really — kind of a big word, but still, not complicated. "You know Susan?"

"You mean your friend Susan? Cassie's niece's kid, she's come to play at your house a few times."

"Yeah. It's about that, k-kinda. I mean, her being Amy's kid. Because she's not, you know? Her parents died when she was l-l-l– argh, young, and she can't remember her parents at all, A-Amy was always t-taking c-c-c-care of her, and. Amy's her aunt, not her mum."

"Oh, I see." Shannon had stopped looking at the puzzle, staring across the table at Violet — she was definitely thinking something, but Violet wasn't looking at her face. Violet wasn't getting any puzzling done herself either, just kinda poking at the pieces, but she didn't want to look up, her shoulders hunching a little. (Being stared at made them uncomfortable, sometimes.) "You're wondering if you can do the same. Call Cassie your mum."

"Um. How does that work? I mean, I d-don't remember my parents, either, but P-P-P-P... It d-didn't work like that, before."

"Did you ever try to? Call them 'Mum' and 'Dad', I mean."

"Um..." Violet didn't know, honestly. It was weird, it was kind of hard to remember Privet Drive very clearly at all. She meant, she knew she used to live there, obviously, and she did remember, if she sat down and thought about it — and sometimes things would jump out at them, really loud and sharp, but then they would look out their window and remember they weren't there anymore and it was fine. But most of the time, it felt so far away, which was kind of weird, because it wasn't really. It was only a few months ago... "Um. Mmmaybe? I dunno. I know P-Petunia told me they wer-weren't my parents, but I was r-r-r-really l-little. Bleh." Stupid stammer...

"Well." Shannon stared across the table for a second, her fingers fiddling with one of the puzzle pieces — Violet didn't know what she was thinking, wasn't looking at her face. "Like being a girl, this isn't something that has firm, easy-to-explain rules either. Sometimes, when a kid is adopted, or is being taken care of by their aunt or an uncle or whatever else, they'll call their guardian their mum or dad. But then, sometimes, they won't. And sometimes, people will call their birth parents by their names too — my son, for example, he's only met his father a few times, so they're not close, and he uses his name instead. There aren't firm rules about this kind of thing."

Of course there weren't. "Then, why do some people d-d-do it, and others don't?"

"People decide what feels right for them. If someone feels they have that kind of relationship, and they feel comfortable using those words, then they will. This isn't something I can tell you yes or no on, Violet. I can't tell you how you should feel about Cassie, or how you should think about your relationship. I can't tell you what word you should use — that's your decision, and no one else's."

"Oh. Okay." Despite it being a fuzzy thing that didn't have rules, which you would think would make it more confusing (and it did, kinda), that actually made it easier. Kind of like the being a girl thing, really, when she thought about it. "That's all I w-w-wanted to know, I'm done now."

"If you do decide you want to call Cassie your mum, you should ask her if that's okay — your relationship involves both of you, and you shouldn't make decisions for other people without asking them first." Oh, well, that made sense too, when Violet thought about it. Not that she actually had decided, she'd just been confused about Susan and Amy and wondering how this worked, but that was something to keep in mind. Shannon paused, just for a couple seconds, before adding, "If it helps, I'm pretty sure that if you do ask if you can, Cassie will be very touched, and she'll say yes."

...Violet guessed that was also something to keep in mind. Though, that was kind of...

It was still kind of weird, whenever Violet slowed down to think about it, that Cassie actually wanted her here. All the trouble she'd made for herself, not least of which buying a whole house because Violet's magic was picky, a house where Violet had their own bedroom — two, actually, though she wasn't doing anything with the other one yet...besides using the floor to do puzzles, Nola had taken out the carpet (with a quick snap of his fingers, cleaning away the dust with a second snap) to make it easier and everything — and always going out of her way to do things for Violet, like taking her to see Shannon in the first place, and...

She didn't know. It was a little confusing, when she thought about it, she didn't know why Cassie wanted her and Petunia and Vernon hadn't. Their first assumption had been, well, Cassie is a freak too, so clearly that made sense, but that was before Violet knew more about magic people, and everyone being freaks didn't necessarily make them be nice to each other. There were different kinds of freaks, sure, but... And, Arcturus wanted her here too, just because Cassie was taking care of her and they were related (somehow, Violet forgot exactly), and that was even weirder, because he was magic racist and everything, but. And then she'd wonder if, maybe Cassie was just especially nice, but that didn't fit either — she did like the Starlighters and stuff, she wasn't magic racist at all, but also she could get really cold and scary sometimes, when she was angry.

It was easy to forget, sometimes, because she was always nice to Violet, and the neighbours, and her sex friends, and everything, but the day they'd met Cassie had made the air cold, and had made Petunia scream from pain with some kind of spell. (It must have been a spell, she'd been pointing her wand at her, but Violet had never seen anything like that since.) It'd been really scary, Cassie had been all...her hair gone red, like blood, too pale, like her face was carved out of white rock, and there'd been a cold wintery breeze in the kitchen, despite being inside, her hair and her fancy magical dress fluttering...

It'd been really scary. Violet vaguely remembered they'd been kind of scared of Cassie at first, but it felt like so long ago (despite actually not being that long ago), it was hard to imagine feeling like that now. She hadn't forgotten Cassie could be scary, could kind of get why other people might think she was scary, but... Cassie would never hurt Violet, so Cassie being scary was just...a thing she knew, like how far away Saturn was. Except not even as interesting as Saturn, she guessed, Saturn was so cool...

Violet was starting to think that Petunia and Vernon were just bad people, and that was why they hadn't... But that was a...big thought, and it was scary to look at for too long, so she mostly didn't. Little idle thoughts now and then, about the bad names they called people all the time — or what Violet realised now were bad names, she hadn't known better at the time and thought sluts and nancies and stuff were just...what some people were called — and she would think, huh, and move on, just one of those things. That it wasn't only about not wanting Violet, maybe they were just bad people, but...

(That it wasn't actually Violet's fault at all, and there was nothing wrong with her, that she wasn't a freak and they were the people who weren't the way they should be.)

But that was a big thought, and kind of hurt to look at too long, so she mostly didn't.

It wasn't very long after that that they were done, and it was time to leave. Violet put her shoes back on — it was kind of uncomfortable to sit at the table and do puzzles with her shoes on, and Shannon didn't mind, so she always took them off as soon as she got here — and then her jumper, because it was always so warm in here. Not unpleasantly warm, no, just warm enough that it was uncomfortable with her jumper sometimes. She was about to pull Shannon's bracelets off to put them back, but Shannon told her she could keep them, just remember to wear them back next time. Which, okay then...

Cassie was in the waiting room, talking to one of the other ladies in here — when she spotted Shannon and Violet she got up to meet them. There were a couple comments back and forth about how it had gone, like always, after a little bit Shannon said, "Show Cassie your bracelets, Violet."

What did— Oh! Right, of course, she guessed that was a thing Cassie might want to know. Violet didn't know if she should say anything, also it was a little awkward with strangers hanging around, so she just lifted her hand, fiddling with the other bracelets on her wrist, to make sure Cassie could make out Shannon's clear and pink ones. "Oh, I see," Cassie said, smiling. "This is new? I don't think I've ever seen you pick one of the pink ones."

"Um, yeah? I mean, I still don't r-r-really get it, but, um." She shrugged. "A-and, the pink is pretty, so."

Cassie chuckled a little. "That it is. Speaking of pink, how about we go to that coffeehouse back in London, for tea and tiny cakes?"

...Because some of the tiny cakes were also pink? Okay. Also, Violet was pretty sure Cassie mostly called them "tiny cakes" because that was what Violet had called them once when she hadn't known what they were actually called, and she was kind of teasing her. But that was fine, whatever. "Um, okay, tiny cakes are g-good." She could take or leave the tea though, honestly, fizzy pop was better.

After a little bit more, they said goodbye to Shannon, and they left the place, Cassie leading her off by the hand. They didn't really need to hold hands now, Violet guessed, but they would need to for the apparation in a minute, so. Violet had the way to the stairs memorised by now — sometimes they'd go all the way up, and pop out from the roof, but sometimes if there was no one around they'd leave from the stairs.

So before they got that far, Violet slowed to a stop, Cassie stopping with her once she felt the tug on her hand. "Um."

"What is it, darling?"

Violet looked up at Cassie for a second — not really meeting her eyes, but just looking at her, you know, her everything. She thought, when Cassie was her mum, Violet was gonna copy her hair, so they'd look more like it. They were both metamorphs, so they didn't have to look like it, but. Yeah. But changing things was still kind of scary, so Violet would wait until she thought she was ready for that. "Um. Shannon said I should tell you I l-l-like Síomha best. Of your sex friends, I mean."

"Oh." Cassie blinked down at her for a second, maybe surprised. "Well, I like Síomha too." Obviously, she was Cassie's friend in the first place. "And it is more convenient for her to come over than most of the others, you know, they all have their own lives going on."

Yeah, Violet had been told about that for Rufus and Julie in particular. Rufus had his job and everything, and Julie actually had a husband (forgot his name, Violet hadn't met him yet), and kids and even grandkids — she didn't look old enough to be a grandma, but supposedly mages aged slower than normal people. If Julie had a husband, Violet didn't know why she was doing sex with Cassie, wasn't that against the rules? Except, before, Violet kind of thought it was against the rules for two girls to be doing sex in the first place — though, she wouldn't have put it like that before, because she hadn't known what sex was, but she still knew girls were supposed to go with boys — or for people to have more than one person they were doing sex with, and she still didn't really get it, but Cassie's sex things weren't her business, so. Cassie's sex friends had other things to do, which could make it hard for them to come over whenever, was the point.

...Did Síomha have a job at all? Probably, she was younger and wasn't married or anything, but Violet didn't actually know.

"I can ask Síomha to stay over more often if you like."

"No, you don't have to, I was just saying."

"Hmm..." Cassie started walking again, slowly at first, to make sure Violet would follow along — no reason not to, that was really all she'd wanted to say, before she forgot. "I've been thinking about starting with the League, and it wouldn't be a bad idea to have someone who can stay home with you when I have to be somewhere, or to go to events with you, you know."

Violet didn't know, actually. "What's the League?"

"Oh, the International Duelling League. It's a kind of— Well, they're sort of like professional athletes, like muggles have football players, you know? I was thinking, they hold matches all over the world, and we could go travelling to follow them. Would you like that, to go visit other places? Not just magical countries, we can visit muggle places too."

...She meant, like, travelling all over the world, while Cassie did some kind of sport thing? "Oh, that sounds cool! I've never left Britain before." Except she kind of had, since she had been living in Ireland for a few months now, but that was the same country on the magical side... "Um, you d-don't have to, but. Could I still go to school with Lasairín and Susan next year, if we're doing that?"

"Sure, I'd be able to pick and choose which events I go to, so we can do it only on weekends or when you have breaks from school. Síomha's studying at the Academy too, actually — she's in a Mastery programme, which is sort of like muggle university—" Ooohh, Síomha didn't have a job, but she was in school still, okay. "—so we'd need to work around her schedule anyway. I would want someone to come with us, so they can watch you during the events — I don't want to leave you alone in the stands while I'm competing."

She meant, like, up in the stadium with the audience while Cassie was on the field or whatever it was, no, that made sense. Being on her own in a place like that would be scary. "So, we would be travelling around the world, g-going all kinds of places, with Síomha, while you do sport things?"

"That's the idea, yeah. I also might invite Susan along now and then, I'll ask Amy about it. Sound fun?"

"Yeah!" Violet chirped, bouncing on her toes a little. She didn't mean to, it was just so exciting, she kind of couldn't help it. "That sounds greh-great!"

(Living with Cassie was so cool, she got to do all kinds of things she couldn't before. She was so lucky Cassie found her...)

Cassie grinned down at her. "All right, darling, I'll go sign up when I have a free couple hours. Right, I think we can go from here," she said, stopping in the middle of the stairwell — it was really quiet in here, and Violet hadn't seen anyone in a little while, so. "Ready?"

Some of her excitement immediately dribbling away, Violet groaned — the floo was worse, but she still hated apparation...

---

Yet another chapter where nothing happens, but also sort of a lot happens. My specialty.

Just to clarify, in a lot of comments it looks like people are misinterpreting the use of the word "identity". In my Harry Potter fics — and also LeighaGreene's, who I originally stole the term from — "fundamental identity" is a magic theory term. Hmm, how to explain this briefly? It's been mentioned several times that transfiguration is temporary — the fundamental identity of an object is...you can call it the memory of its true nature, what it will always return to when any spells on it run out. For conscious beings, the quality of their mind/soul is part of their fundamental identity, though obviously this concept is far more detailed and murky than that of a physical object. Of course, a "fundamental identity" doesn't actually exist in the world, all it means is what a thing naturally is without magic acting on it, it's just a concept used in academic settings to help describe how magic works.

When we say the fairies' ritual involved reinforcing Violet's fundamental identity, it's kind of like holding a reversion spell on an object so it can't be transfigured — they were doing some kind of magic to stabilise Violet's mind/soul so outside magic can't alter it. The only way this would have an effect on Violet's "identity" in the IRL colloquial, non-magic-theory sense is if they failed to fully reinforce her fundamental identity, and changes were allowed to happen. The only difference the ritual should have made for Violet's personality and her self-image are secondary effects due to Voldemort's soul fragment no longer being there — which are non-zero, yes, but subtle and gradual, no different from people naturally changing over time. It won't change anything about how she identifies, because that's not what the term means here.

Right, that'll do. I hope that made some sense, at least xD

Moving on. That was the last visitors chapter. The last of the introductory stuff is out of the way now, so this will start moving more quickly, with more time skips and stuff. No idea how long it'll take to get to Hogwarts though, I guess we'll find out. It's an adventure! Weee!