Post by Astrit Župan on Mar 13, 2016 7:08:13 GMT
astrit vuk aleksander zupan
Male | 13 |
Half-Albanian | Pansexual |
137 cm | 29 kg |
Half-blood | |
personality
[attr="class","profileboxscroll"]Astrit is a complicated person with many layers to him, some of which seem at first glance to contradict each other. On closer inspection, however, he proves to be built on a pattern after all, albeit one that makes far more sense in the context of his life and past.
The first thing you're likely to notice upon meeting him is that Astrit is tough and cynical. He sort of has to be, given that he has a history of utterly rotten luck. In an attempt to protect himself, he tries to present himself to the world as strong in the sort of way that you don't want to mess with, and to that end puts forth extra effort in Defense Against the Dark Arts classes so that he will in fact be capable of defending himself should there be need. Despite his hilariously small size interfering with this goal (poor kid really can't catch a break; he comforts himself with the thought that he still has time to hit a growth spurt that would put him at a height closer to the rest of his family), he has had some success, bolstered by his Slytherin-like gift for mystery and cunning. He's a clever little bastard, in the most literal sense, and good at using that to his advantage.
That cynic's façade is hiding a surprisingly deep-rooted idealistic streak. In spite of everything, he genuinely believes in goodness and internally holds himself to a very high standard of honor and morality. He tries to keep this part hidden, but the fact that he's walking around Hogwarts with the Gryffindor colors on might give a hint to those inclined to think it through. In a secret part of his heart, he wants to be genuinely good in a way that he's often been told he can't possibly be for one reason or another, and not idly either: he works hard to live up to his ideals, keeping every promise he makes and hating unfairness even on the (rare) occasion when things are rigged in his own favor.
He's been told he can't possibly be good so many times, though, that the idea that it could be true has eaten its way into his mind and left him with insecurities digging painful roots deep into him. Astrit is terrified of what could happen if he were to ever stop fighting to be good, and just as frightened, if not more so, of the possibility that he may prove unable to be good enough to live a normal life. Because of this, he struggles to keep himself from despairing, and puts quite a bit of work into trying to prevent himself from even being at risk of hurting others. If he slips up even a little, it can be enough to send him into a fit of fearful despair.
It is probably worth mentioning how this boy responds to a crisis, since those happen at Hogwarts from time to time. For a generic crisis, one caused by simple bad luck or someone else's bad actions (it's a different story if he himself feels responsible, but we'll get to that later), he actually deals quite well in the moment: he keeps a fairly clear head, and may make jokes to ensure that he isn't overwhelmed, and thinks on his feet quickly. However, this state of mind can only be maintained for as long as the crisis lasts, and once it's over he will usually find some privacy to have a minor nervous breakdown. It's perfectly harmless and he usually recovers in a length of time that makes sense proportionate to how bad the crisis was; he just needs to work through having the reactions he'd toned down in order to keep his head in the moment. The most dangerous thing is if he's in a high-stress situation for an extended length of time (how long "extended" is depends on how bad the stress is), because he knows he can't function on this level indefinitely but doesn't dare step aside while the thing is still going on, so in that case he starts looking for something drastic to do about it. "Something drastic" tends to be high-risk in some way or another, and may in fact be very stupid. The other dangerous thing is if Astrit thinks he's at fault for whatever disaster is occurring, because in that case he is almost certainly too distracted by guilt to make good decisions, and there is a chance that he will instead make self-destructive choices because of thinking that all the bad things he's been told are true after all.
But perhaps we should consier something happier now, like food, or friends, or food and friends. (Note that there is no overlap between the two, except insofar as Astrit likes to eat together with cool people. People are friends, not food.) For reasons that should probably be obvious considering his age, Astrit loves to eat, and he can eat surprisingly large quantities of food considering how tiny he remains. For the most part he isn't picky about what he eats, putting more value on getting to eat his fill of whatever's served, though he does show signs of being especially fond of meat. The one thing that makes food better, in his opinion, is sharing it with people he cares about. Although Astrit keeps a lot of secrets (and not all of them by his own choice), he loves to share what he can with his friends, and time with conversation that ends with everyone being comfortably fed is a good thing to share indeed.
The first thing you're likely to notice upon meeting him is that Astrit is tough and cynical. He sort of has to be, given that he has a history of utterly rotten luck. In an attempt to protect himself, he tries to present himself to the world as strong in the sort of way that you don't want to mess with, and to that end puts forth extra effort in Defense Against the Dark Arts classes so that he will in fact be capable of defending himself should there be need. Despite his hilariously small size interfering with this goal (poor kid really can't catch a break; he comforts himself with the thought that he still has time to hit a growth spurt that would put him at a height closer to the rest of his family), he has had some success, bolstered by his Slytherin-like gift for mystery and cunning. He's a clever little bastard, in the most literal sense, and good at using that to his advantage.
That cynic's façade is hiding a surprisingly deep-rooted idealistic streak. In spite of everything, he genuinely believes in goodness and internally holds himself to a very high standard of honor and morality. He tries to keep this part hidden, but the fact that he's walking around Hogwarts with the Gryffindor colors on might give a hint to those inclined to think it through. In a secret part of his heart, he wants to be genuinely good in a way that he's often been told he can't possibly be for one reason or another, and not idly either: he works hard to live up to his ideals, keeping every promise he makes and hating unfairness even on the (rare) occasion when things are rigged in his own favor.
He's been told he can't possibly be good so many times, though, that the idea that it could be true has eaten its way into his mind and left him with insecurities digging painful roots deep into him. Astrit is terrified of what could happen if he were to ever stop fighting to be good, and just as frightened, if not more so, of the possibility that he may prove unable to be good enough to live a normal life. Because of this, he struggles to keep himself from despairing, and puts quite a bit of work into trying to prevent himself from even being at risk of hurting others. If he slips up even a little, it can be enough to send him into a fit of fearful despair.
It is probably worth mentioning how this boy responds to a crisis, since those happen at Hogwarts from time to time. For a generic crisis, one caused by simple bad luck or someone else's bad actions (it's a different story if he himself feels responsible, but we'll get to that later), he actually deals quite well in the moment: he keeps a fairly clear head, and may make jokes to ensure that he isn't overwhelmed, and thinks on his feet quickly. However, this state of mind can only be maintained for as long as the crisis lasts, and once it's over he will usually find some privacy to have a minor nervous breakdown. It's perfectly harmless and he usually recovers in a length of time that makes sense proportionate to how bad the crisis was; he just needs to work through having the reactions he'd toned down in order to keep his head in the moment. The most dangerous thing is if he's in a high-stress situation for an extended length of time (how long "extended" is depends on how bad the stress is), because he knows he can't function on this level indefinitely but doesn't dare step aside while the thing is still going on, so in that case he starts looking for something drastic to do about it. "Something drastic" tends to be high-risk in some way or another, and may in fact be very stupid. The other dangerous thing is if Astrit thinks he's at fault for whatever disaster is occurring, because in that case he is almost certainly too distracted by guilt to make good decisions, and there is a chance that he will instead make self-destructive choices because of thinking that all the bad things he's been told are true after all.
But perhaps we should consier something happier now, like food, or friends, or food and friends. (Note that there is no overlap between the two, except insofar as Astrit likes to eat together with cool people. People are friends, not food.) For reasons that should probably be obvious considering his age, Astrit loves to eat, and he can eat surprisingly large quantities of food considering how tiny he remains. For the most part he isn't picky about what he eats, putting more value on getting to eat his fill of whatever's served, though he does show signs of being especially fond of meat. The one thing that makes food better, in his opinion, is sharing it with people he cares about. Although Astrit keeps a lot of secrets (and not all of them by his own choice), he loves to share what he can with his friends, and time with conversation that ends with everyone being comfortably fed is a good thing to share indeed.
history
[attr="class","profileboxscroll"]Astrit was born on the seventeenth day of February of about thirteen years ago. As far as anyone knew at the time, he was the third daughter of a couple by the names of Petar Knežević and Božena Župan. They were both of pure-blood Wizarding descent, and both ethnic Serbians.
Yes, Serbian purebloods. If you read the information at the top of this bio, rather than going straight to the history for whatever reason, you've probably already deduced that there's going to be a problem here.
It took a while for anyone to notice there was anything unusual about the child who would grow up to be Astrit. Not that he was called that at the time, though he could have been; his parents (or, well, his mother and the man who was thought to be his father) had gone to a Seer when he was born, as some Wizarding parents traditionally did, to inquire about names that might be suitable for the child. The Seer suggested "Astrit Vuk" for a given name, either half being suitable for everyday use, but that was so obviously ridiculous that Petar stormed out immediately, convinced that the Seer was a fraud. Božena was no less taken aback, though she had slightly less reason to be; she quickly realized that one aspect of the strangeness of the suggestion was confirmation of something she had suspected but not known for certain, and kept the rest of it in the back of her mind against the time that she should come to understand more.
At the end of it, the baby still needed a name, so the couple found one on their own. They settled on "Zora," which they thought was suitably pleasant, and for a while, that seemed to be all that would come of that episode. Zora would be raised as a perfectly ordinary girl, just like the then-four-year-old twins Snežana and Melanija.
A word on those twins. Like any pair of twins, or indeed any pair of siblings more generally, by four years old they already had many things in common, and also many important ways in which they were different. They looked very alike, with similar thick, dark hair (though Melanija's was a shade or two lighter) and identical honey-brown eyes and precisely the same slim build and what would obviously become matching Roman noses once they reached the age for it, and they spoke alike for the most part as well, but they never dressed alike, they wanted to be different things when they grew up, and most relevantly they reacted to the introduction of a new baby to the family in entirely different ways. Melanija took advantage of their mother's distraction to engage in her own pursuits with fewer interruptions, while Snežana was deeply taken with the idea of being a big sister for sure (their parents had seen fit to keep it a secret from the twins which of them was older, which was probably wise given what they would most likely have done with that information) and wanted to spend all kinds of time with little Zora, serving as "Mama's Little Helper" or just playing with the baby.
As strange as it would seem to anyone who met the family in later years, or even to Astrit himself now, in those early days they were all actually pretty happy. He had two loving and involved mothers, since Snežana was bound and determined to fill that role in tandem with Majka--their actual mother--as well as another sister who occasionally had something to do with him, and a distant father he called "Otac" who never really had much to do with any of them (at least not as far as Zora usually saw; what happened after the littlest member of the family was in bed remained a mystery for the ages, or at least for only the older ones to know) but was sort of symbolically there as a signal to the world that they were a normal family. They wanted for nothing that Zora knew of; after all, there was always enough food and water, perhaps a few too many clothes sometimes, their safety at home was never in doubt, and there was never any shortage of love and play. These are the earliest memories Astrit has, the happy ones from before his mother's secret was revealed.
Of course the secret was revealed eventually, and it should already be plain what secret that was. Majka had... done things, with someone she really wasn't supposed to, and Zora was the result. This came to light very loudly one day long after the fact, once the unfortunate child was already six years old, and though none of the children of the family ever did figure out what exactly it was that led to Otac finding out, the fallout was obvious. Majka and the twins didn't treat him much differently--aside from Snežana's becoming even more protective than she had been before--but Otac (no, suddenly he wasn't even allowed to say that anymore, he just had to... pretend they didn't know each other at all) seemed to blame Zora for the whole mess, so instead of having a father suddenly he had a hostile stranger living in the same house with him and obviously resenting his presence. To make matters worse, word got out among their neighbors, such that Snežana's protectiveness proved necessary when the other children (who were, they later discovered, given the idea by... by Majka's husband) decided that Zora was clearly an acceptable target for all manner of picking-on and other such nastiness.
This went on for around two years, before suddenly arrangements that had been going on without any of the children's knowledge were completed, and the youngest was packed off to live with his real father, who as it turned out was a part-blood wizard by the distinctly Albanian name of Aleksandër Kastrati. Majka would be staying with the family for a while, but would probably visit from time to time, though the twins were forbidden to do so. Snežana took this particularly hard, since she was closer to Zora than to anyone else, even including her own twin Melanija. Zora wasn't any happier about it, but comforted himself a little with the thought of who else would not be coming with. Sure, he was going to be alone without anyone he knew, but... that also meant without... him, the guy he wasn't allowed to refer to by any name anymore.
Snežana's favorite doll also came with him. That helped, too. He pretended the doll was an old friend (not difficult, they had played together with that doll so often) who was coming with him to keep him company, or perhaps to keep him safe.
At the train station where his new (well... pre-existing, but he hadn't met them before) family would be waiting for him, Zora made a nervous picture. Eight years old, wearing an excessively flouncy blue dress (a far cry from the comfortable play-clothes he really would have preferred, but this was how Majka dressed her daughters when she wanted them to make a good impression), clutching a somewhat worn doll as tightly as he could with one arm and a little suitcase containing everything he owned in the other hand, and his eyes couldn't stop skipping from one person to another as he sought out someone who resembled the picture he'd been given of his father. He wanted to take it out to check against some of the faces he saw hurrying past, but he'd been warned that he had to be careful with wizard photographs in front of Muggles like this station was full of, so he didn't dare. So, of course, his father caught sight of him first and came to join him instead of the other way around.
Father--Babi, as he soon asked his child to call him--turned out to be a tall and friendly man of about the same age as Majka, with a kind face and brown eyes just like Zora's. The child had known most of this to start with because of the picture, but Babi turned out to be much nicer in person. He was gentle with the frightened eight-year-old in a new town surrounded by strangers, and he knew the only language Zora had grown up speaking even though it wasn't spoken around here. With him was his older, legitimate daughter, a girl slightly younger than the twins, whose name was Era and who was excited about the prospect of having a little sister even though they needed Babi to translate for them at first. The child felt welcome immediately, and quickly came to fit in with the family, though it took him a while to really understand the language they normally spoke. Slowly, though, he got used to being with his family and speaking Albanian with them. He never lost his first language, though, because he wrote letters to Majka and Snežana on a regular basis, and to Melanija sometimes as well. When he went back to school that fall, at the local Muggle elementary, Zora's classes were mostly in Albanian, but there were one or two subjects for which he joined a small group of Serbian-speaking students. He didn't really feel the need to explain to anyone why he was here or why he divided his time among the different languages, even though he knew perfectly well by now that there would be plenty of rumors going around because of it.
Things really did seem to be going better now. Babi was a very good father, Era was a wonderful sister (and, for the first month at least, an enthusiastic tour guide as well), and Zora hadn't really lost his other family either since they had owls flying back and forth at least once a week carrying news about the latest developments in their lives. Everyone was so much kinder, so much easier to deal with, and Zora slowly started to relax, like finally letting out a breath he had forgotten he'd been holding for two years and starting to breathe freely again. And after a few months, Majka began paying visits of a few days to a week each time; it was a little odd that she looked noticeably older every time she visited even though only it hadn't even been a year, which caught Zora by surprise at first since he had thought grown-ups didn't really change that quickly, but she was always the same wonderful mother he remembered her being. Even when Era went off to school at Beauxbatons, he wasn't lonely--though he did wish he could follow her; learning magic sounded amazing and his other sisters were there too. It was like returning to that early, happy time before everything had started to go wrong.
Which, of course, was why it couldn't last. He'd been with his father for a little more than a year and a half, and was a few weeks shy of turning ten, when it happened during one of Majka's visits. Things seemed to be going just fine until one evening just before dinner. Majka and Babi were in the kitchen together, collaborating on something that smelled delicious, while Zora played a little way outside the house. The sun had set and the full moon had risen, but nobody gave it that much thought until a wolf appeared seemingly out of nowhere and attacked.
The sound of the child's screams summoned his parents immediately. It didn't take them long to realize that that was a werewolf attacking their child--it had the human eyes, the short nose, and the strange tail--but it made no move to attack them, and ran away when they started yelling at it. Once it was gone, Božena ran back inside to get some first-aid supplies and turn off the stove, while Aleksandër went to see how Zora was. While the reader will already have presumed that the child was not mortally injured (after all, we have already established that he is still alive now), his father found that Zora had indeed been bitten. Delivering the news to Božena when she returned, Aleksandër was surprised by the extent to which it was clear that she wasn't surprised. She was horrified, of course, but it also seemed to fit perfectly as a solution to another part of the riddle she had been sitting on for nearly a decade now, and which she finally told Aleksandër now, once they had patched up their child's injuries. The Seer had said that the right name was "Astrit Vuk." Astrit is an Albanian name whose meaning is unclear. Vuk is Serbian for wolf.
One more piece of the puzzle remained, and it fell into place surprisingly soon after, when Era came home to visit on the grounds that this qualified as a "family emergency." While Zora's injuries weren't fatal, and were surely less grave than they would have been had his parents not intervened, he was still seriously injured, which meant a lot of time spent resting in bed, which would have been rather boring if his sister hadn't come in with books and conversation. The books were on subjects that they both found interesting, including history both magical and Muggle. This is important because one of those books, actually one of the ones on the Muggle history of Albania, mentioned something about women who became men, which caught Zora's attention in a way that no one had precisely been expecting. He wanted to know more. The fact that we have been calling him a he all along, despite what everyone thought at the time, should probably serve to explain most of the rest. The last piece of the riddle--why it was a boy's name--became clear. In light of everything, Božena adopted the position that Astrit had been fated to be a boy all along, with only a quirk of nature making everyone else's recognition of that fact a bit roundabout, and gave her son the name she now admitted he had really deserved all along, with her apologies for keeping it from him for a while.
It was done, as far as their little family was concerned: that was the easy part. The hard part was explaining everything that had just happened to anyone else. Majka helped Astrit write a long letter to Snežana giving it their best shot, but the owl returned still carrying the letter and looking rather dazed, from which they concluded that it hadn't been able to deliver it. Their attempts to explain to Astrit's school went a bit better, though the entire sequence of events still came out sounding pretty bizarre ("wait, so you're telling us that your daughter is actually your son... and has been all along, but you're just finding out now, when he's ten years old... and this all came to light because a wolf tried to eat him?"), and at one point Astrit was sorely tempted to claim that Zora had been killed by a rabid wolf and he just happened to fall from the sky around the same time. It seemed like a simpler explanation to him, but fortunately his parents talked him out of saying it.
Even with as plain and sensible an explanation of what had happened to him as possible, Astrit ended up being the weird one among his peers again in consequence of this turn of events. The fact that he had started breaking out in accidental magic from time to time didn't help; as far as he was aware, he was the only magical student currently enrolled at the school, so nobody could have explained why things tended to get weird when he was around (Astrit himself knew but wasn't allowed to tell for obvious reasons) but everyone figured out sooner or later that they did get weird. People also found it strange that he was now living with both his parents permanently, since something seemed to have come up and Majka couldn't go back home. Astrit was pretty sure that having two parents wasn't weird in itself, but the sudden appearance of his mother (and the fact that there was something obviously foreign about her) struck many of his classmates as a bit suspicious.
For as weird as he was to Muggles, Astrit had even more problems with wizards now. Both his parents had Wizarding friends, of course, but suddenly many of them were afraid of the boy. His newly acquired scars became objects of terror as soon as anyone knew the truth about where he had gotten them, no matter whether the moon was anywhere near full, no matter how much Babi reassured his friends that his son meant no harm to anyone... and Astrit learned from all this to fear what he had become. It hit the same chord as many of the things he had heard or been told back then, before he had come here, too--the things that the other children had said about him because of his parentage. Majka thought he was fated to be a boy. Was he fated to be a monster, too? So were born his worst fears.
As time passed, Astrit's parents began considering the fact that, whatever else he was, he was inarguably a wizard. They were probably qualified to teach him magic themselves, but that probably left some room for doubt and they did think that it would likely be good for him to spend time with other Wizarding children. Their own alma maters, though, were ruled out as places to send him--Aleksandër had been to Durmstrang, which they agreed was probably not the best place for Astrit, and Božena suspected that Beauxbatons would not take a werewolf. Hogwarts, however... they might get somewhere with Hogwarts.
As far as anyone knew, Astrit was the first person in his family ever to go to Hogwarts. He was nervous: he knew some English but at that point wasn't fluent in the language, and he had no one to turn to for advice about how things worked there. Still, he went through his last few months of Muggle school with some enthusiasm (and extra attention paid in English class), and that fall he traveled to England, accompanied by his parents as far as London, and started wizard school.
The Sorting Hat had a hard time deciding what to do with Astrit. It spent a lot of time thinking, while he mentally put in his own opinions (he admitted that he liked some aspects of his own personality better than others), but eventually settled on Gryffindor. Gryffindor was good, Astrit could be happy with Gryffindor. The cheering that arose from the table that he went to join reminded him that being far away from home had its advantages: he had no premade reputation here, no legacy from parents or sisters to overcome or live up to, and only the teachers knew he was a werewolf. Maybe this time he could make a good name for himself.
Astrit's first two years went all right; his luck still hasn't been great, but when things aren't left up to chance, he deals pretty well. Found friends, though he still has to keep secrets from them. He can now usually carry on a conversation with his classmates, which is nice, and he still stays in close contact with his parents and Era, and he still wonders whatever became of the twins...
Yes, Serbian purebloods. If you read the information at the top of this bio, rather than going straight to the history for whatever reason, you've probably already deduced that there's going to be a problem here.
It took a while for anyone to notice there was anything unusual about the child who would grow up to be Astrit. Not that he was called that at the time, though he could have been; his parents (or, well, his mother and the man who was thought to be his father) had gone to a Seer when he was born, as some Wizarding parents traditionally did, to inquire about names that might be suitable for the child. The Seer suggested "Astrit Vuk" for a given name, either half being suitable for everyday use, but that was so obviously ridiculous that Petar stormed out immediately, convinced that the Seer was a fraud. Božena was no less taken aback, though she had slightly less reason to be; she quickly realized that one aspect of the strangeness of the suggestion was confirmation of something she had suspected but not known for certain, and kept the rest of it in the back of her mind against the time that she should come to understand more.
At the end of it, the baby still needed a name, so the couple found one on their own. They settled on "Zora," which they thought was suitably pleasant, and for a while, that seemed to be all that would come of that episode. Zora would be raised as a perfectly ordinary girl, just like the then-four-year-old twins Snežana and Melanija.
A word on those twins. Like any pair of twins, or indeed any pair of siblings more generally, by four years old they already had many things in common, and also many important ways in which they were different. They looked very alike, with similar thick, dark hair (though Melanija's was a shade or two lighter) and identical honey-brown eyes and precisely the same slim build and what would obviously become matching Roman noses once they reached the age for it, and they spoke alike for the most part as well, but they never dressed alike, they wanted to be different things when they grew up, and most relevantly they reacted to the introduction of a new baby to the family in entirely different ways. Melanija took advantage of their mother's distraction to engage in her own pursuits with fewer interruptions, while Snežana was deeply taken with the idea of being a big sister for sure (their parents had seen fit to keep it a secret from the twins which of them was older, which was probably wise given what they would most likely have done with that information) and wanted to spend all kinds of time with little Zora, serving as "Mama's Little Helper" or just playing with the baby.
As strange as it would seem to anyone who met the family in later years, or even to Astrit himself now, in those early days they were all actually pretty happy. He had two loving and involved mothers, since Snežana was bound and determined to fill that role in tandem with Majka--their actual mother--as well as another sister who occasionally had something to do with him, and a distant father he called "Otac" who never really had much to do with any of them (at least not as far as Zora usually saw; what happened after the littlest member of the family was in bed remained a mystery for the ages, or at least for only the older ones to know) but was sort of symbolically there as a signal to the world that they were a normal family. They wanted for nothing that Zora knew of; after all, there was always enough food and water, perhaps a few too many clothes sometimes, their safety at home was never in doubt, and there was never any shortage of love and play. These are the earliest memories Astrit has, the happy ones from before his mother's secret was revealed.
Of course the secret was revealed eventually, and it should already be plain what secret that was. Majka had... done things, with someone she really wasn't supposed to, and Zora was the result. This came to light very loudly one day long after the fact, once the unfortunate child was already six years old, and though none of the children of the family ever did figure out what exactly it was that led to Otac finding out, the fallout was obvious. Majka and the twins didn't treat him much differently--aside from Snežana's becoming even more protective than she had been before--but Otac (no, suddenly he wasn't even allowed to say that anymore, he just had to... pretend they didn't know each other at all) seemed to blame Zora for the whole mess, so instead of having a father suddenly he had a hostile stranger living in the same house with him and obviously resenting his presence. To make matters worse, word got out among their neighbors, such that Snežana's protectiveness proved necessary when the other children (who were, they later discovered, given the idea by... by Majka's husband) decided that Zora was clearly an acceptable target for all manner of picking-on and other such nastiness.
This went on for around two years, before suddenly arrangements that had been going on without any of the children's knowledge were completed, and the youngest was packed off to live with his real father, who as it turned out was a part-blood wizard by the distinctly Albanian name of Aleksandër Kastrati. Majka would be staying with the family for a while, but would probably visit from time to time, though the twins were forbidden to do so. Snežana took this particularly hard, since she was closer to Zora than to anyone else, even including her own twin Melanija. Zora wasn't any happier about it, but comforted himself a little with the thought of who else would not be coming with. Sure, he was going to be alone without anyone he knew, but... that also meant without... him, the guy he wasn't allowed to refer to by any name anymore.
Snežana's favorite doll also came with him. That helped, too. He pretended the doll was an old friend (not difficult, they had played together with that doll so often) who was coming with him to keep him company, or perhaps to keep him safe.
At the train station where his new (well... pre-existing, but he hadn't met them before) family would be waiting for him, Zora made a nervous picture. Eight years old, wearing an excessively flouncy blue dress (a far cry from the comfortable play-clothes he really would have preferred, but this was how Majka dressed her daughters when she wanted them to make a good impression), clutching a somewhat worn doll as tightly as he could with one arm and a little suitcase containing everything he owned in the other hand, and his eyes couldn't stop skipping from one person to another as he sought out someone who resembled the picture he'd been given of his father. He wanted to take it out to check against some of the faces he saw hurrying past, but he'd been warned that he had to be careful with wizard photographs in front of Muggles like this station was full of, so he didn't dare. So, of course, his father caught sight of him first and came to join him instead of the other way around.
Father--Babi, as he soon asked his child to call him--turned out to be a tall and friendly man of about the same age as Majka, with a kind face and brown eyes just like Zora's. The child had known most of this to start with because of the picture, but Babi turned out to be much nicer in person. He was gentle with the frightened eight-year-old in a new town surrounded by strangers, and he knew the only language Zora had grown up speaking even though it wasn't spoken around here. With him was his older, legitimate daughter, a girl slightly younger than the twins, whose name was Era and who was excited about the prospect of having a little sister even though they needed Babi to translate for them at first. The child felt welcome immediately, and quickly came to fit in with the family, though it took him a while to really understand the language they normally spoke. Slowly, though, he got used to being with his family and speaking Albanian with them. He never lost his first language, though, because he wrote letters to Majka and Snežana on a regular basis, and to Melanija sometimes as well. When he went back to school that fall, at the local Muggle elementary, Zora's classes were mostly in Albanian, but there were one or two subjects for which he joined a small group of Serbian-speaking students. He didn't really feel the need to explain to anyone why he was here or why he divided his time among the different languages, even though he knew perfectly well by now that there would be plenty of rumors going around because of it.
Things really did seem to be going better now. Babi was a very good father, Era was a wonderful sister (and, for the first month at least, an enthusiastic tour guide as well), and Zora hadn't really lost his other family either since they had owls flying back and forth at least once a week carrying news about the latest developments in their lives. Everyone was so much kinder, so much easier to deal with, and Zora slowly started to relax, like finally letting out a breath he had forgotten he'd been holding for two years and starting to breathe freely again. And after a few months, Majka began paying visits of a few days to a week each time; it was a little odd that she looked noticeably older every time she visited even though only it hadn't even been a year, which caught Zora by surprise at first since he had thought grown-ups didn't really change that quickly, but she was always the same wonderful mother he remembered her being. Even when Era went off to school at Beauxbatons, he wasn't lonely--though he did wish he could follow her; learning magic sounded amazing and his other sisters were there too. It was like returning to that early, happy time before everything had started to go wrong.
Which, of course, was why it couldn't last. He'd been with his father for a little more than a year and a half, and was a few weeks shy of turning ten, when it happened during one of Majka's visits. Things seemed to be going just fine until one evening just before dinner. Majka and Babi were in the kitchen together, collaborating on something that smelled delicious, while Zora played a little way outside the house. The sun had set and the full moon had risen, but nobody gave it that much thought until a wolf appeared seemingly out of nowhere and attacked.
The sound of the child's screams summoned his parents immediately. It didn't take them long to realize that that was a werewolf attacking their child--it had the human eyes, the short nose, and the strange tail--but it made no move to attack them, and ran away when they started yelling at it. Once it was gone, Božena ran back inside to get some first-aid supplies and turn off the stove, while Aleksandër went to see how Zora was. While the reader will already have presumed that the child was not mortally injured (after all, we have already established that he is still alive now), his father found that Zora had indeed been bitten. Delivering the news to Božena when she returned, Aleksandër was surprised by the extent to which it was clear that she wasn't surprised. She was horrified, of course, but it also seemed to fit perfectly as a solution to another part of the riddle she had been sitting on for nearly a decade now, and which she finally told Aleksandër now, once they had patched up their child's injuries. The Seer had said that the right name was "Astrit Vuk." Astrit is an Albanian name whose meaning is unclear. Vuk is Serbian for wolf.
One more piece of the puzzle remained, and it fell into place surprisingly soon after, when Era came home to visit on the grounds that this qualified as a "family emergency." While Zora's injuries weren't fatal, and were surely less grave than they would have been had his parents not intervened, he was still seriously injured, which meant a lot of time spent resting in bed, which would have been rather boring if his sister hadn't come in with books and conversation. The books were on subjects that they both found interesting, including history both magical and Muggle. This is important because one of those books, actually one of the ones on the Muggle history of Albania, mentioned something about women who became men, which caught Zora's attention in a way that no one had precisely been expecting. He wanted to know more. The fact that we have been calling him a he all along, despite what everyone thought at the time, should probably serve to explain most of the rest. The last piece of the riddle--why it was a boy's name--became clear. In light of everything, Božena adopted the position that Astrit had been fated to be a boy all along, with only a quirk of nature making everyone else's recognition of that fact a bit roundabout, and gave her son the name she now admitted he had really deserved all along, with her apologies for keeping it from him for a while.
It was done, as far as their little family was concerned: that was the easy part. The hard part was explaining everything that had just happened to anyone else. Majka helped Astrit write a long letter to Snežana giving it their best shot, but the owl returned still carrying the letter and looking rather dazed, from which they concluded that it hadn't been able to deliver it. Their attempts to explain to Astrit's school went a bit better, though the entire sequence of events still came out sounding pretty bizarre ("wait, so you're telling us that your daughter is actually your son... and has been all along, but you're just finding out now, when he's ten years old... and this all came to light because a wolf tried to eat him?"), and at one point Astrit was sorely tempted to claim that Zora had been killed by a rabid wolf and he just happened to fall from the sky around the same time. It seemed like a simpler explanation to him, but fortunately his parents talked him out of saying it.
Even with as plain and sensible an explanation of what had happened to him as possible, Astrit ended up being the weird one among his peers again in consequence of this turn of events. The fact that he had started breaking out in accidental magic from time to time didn't help; as far as he was aware, he was the only magical student currently enrolled at the school, so nobody could have explained why things tended to get weird when he was around (Astrit himself knew but wasn't allowed to tell for obvious reasons) but everyone figured out sooner or later that they did get weird. People also found it strange that he was now living with both his parents permanently, since something seemed to have come up and Majka couldn't go back home. Astrit was pretty sure that having two parents wasn't weird in itself, but the sudden appearance of his mother (and the fact that there was something obviously foreign about her) struck many of his classmates as a bit suspicious.
For as weird as he was to Muggles, Astrit had even more problems with wizards now. Both his parents had Wizarding friends, of course, but suddenly many of them were afraid of the boy. His newly acquired scars became objects of terror as soon as anyone knew the truth about where he had gotten them, no matter whether the moon was anywhere near full, no matter how much Babi reassured his friends that his son meant no harm to anyone... and Astrit learned from all this to fear what he had become. It hit the same chord as many of the things he had heard or been told back then, before he had come here, too--the things that the other children had said about him because of his parentage. Majka thought he was fated to be a boy. Was he fated to be a monster, too? So were born his worst fears.
As time passed, Astrit's parents began considering the fact that, whatever else he was, he was inarguably a wizard. They were probably qualified to teach him magic themselves, but that probably left some room for doubt and they did think that it would likely be good for him to spend time with other Wizarding children. Their own alma maters, though, were ruled out as places to send him--Aleksandër had been to Durmstrang, which they agreed was probably not the best place for Astrit, and Božena suspected that Beauxbatons would not take a werewolf. Hogwarts, however... they might get somewhere with Hogwarts.
As far as anyone knew, Astrit was the first person in his family ever to go to Hogwarts. He was nervous: he knew some English but at that point wasn't fluent in the language, and he had no one to turn to for advice about how things worked there. Still, he went through his last few months of Muggle school with some enthusiasm (and extra attention paid in English class), and that fall he traveled to England, accompanied by his parents as far as London, and started wizard school.
The Sorting Hat had a hard time deciding what to do with Astrit. It spent a lot of time thinking, while he mentally put in his own opinions (he admitted that he liked some aspects of his own personality better than others), but eventually settled on Gryffindor. Gryffindor was good, Astrit could be happy with Gryffindor. The cheering that arose from the table that he went to join reminded him that being far away from home had its advantages: he had no premade reputation here, no legacy from parents or sisters to overcome or live up to, and only the teachers knew he was a werewolf. Maybe this time he could make a good name for himself.
Astrit's first two years went all right; his luck still hasn't been great, but when things aren't left up to chance, he deals pretty well. Found friends, though he still has to keep secrets from them. He can now usually carry on a conversation with his classmates, which is nice, and he still stays in close contact with his parents and Era, and he still wonders whatever became of the twins...
rp sample
[attr="class","profileboxscroll"](From Tomorrow Never Dies)
“Your sister would be a very good history teacher,” Charlie said, and Astrit couldn't help smiling in response.
“She'd have done better than the one we got, at any rate,” he admitted easily. “Though I guess he's pretty talented in his own way. How is it even possible to make wars boring?” The question was rhetorical, largely because Astrit wasn't sure there was any real answer. War was about as inherently exciting a topic as existed. It could easily be presented as glorious or as horrific, but you had to work at it to make it boring.
His classmate's reminder jogged the boy's memory about what they had been discussing. World War I, that was it. They had been talking about the war, and he had been telling stories about what had happened to his family before and after it, before he had distracted himself. And there was a project they had to do...
“I don't feel much like using it to do our project with,” Charlie said, referring to the textbook, at almost the same moment as Astrit remembered that the project existed. “Not when it's telling us things that are wrong.”
She showed him something she had just drawn. It looked like a sketch of the British flag, but it was colored in totally differently from the real thing, in green and orange and black instead of red and blue and white. The boy inspected the picture for a long moment before offering his answer.
“I don't think the textbook is wrong, exactly, as much as it's just... only telling part of the truth. I'm not gonna argue about generals and battle lines and dates and all that. It's just that there's a lot of important stuff—half the point of everything—that isn't there.”
Astrit met his classmate's gaze and grinned, a wicked look creeping into his eyes. “And I bet you and I are the best people in the class to bring some of what was left out back in.”
He knew what she was proposing, all right. He knew it, and he was entirely on board with it. It would be a tricky thing to do well, but it would be worth it just to shock everyone and fill in some of those missing pieces.
“Your sister would be a very good history teacher,” Charlie said, and Astrit couldn't help smiling in response.
“She'd have done better than the one we got, at any rate,” he admitted easily. “Though I guess he's pretty talented in his own way. How is it even possible to make wars boring?” The question was rhetorical, largely because Astrit wasn't sure there was any real answer. War was about as inherently exciting a topic as existed. It could easily be presented as glorious or as horrific, but you had to work at it to make it boring.
His classmate's reminder jogged the boy's memory about what they had been discussing. World War I, that was it. They had been talking about the war, and he had been telling stories about what had happened to his family before and after it, before he had distracted himself. And there was a project they had to do...
“I don't feel much like using it to do our project with,” Charlie said, referring to the textbook, at almost the same moment as Astrit remembered that the project existed. “Not when it's telling us things that are wrong.”
She showed him something she had just drawn. It looked like a sketch of the British flag, but it was colored in totally differently from the real thing, in green and orange and black instead of red and blue and white. The boy inspected the picture for a long moment before offering his answer.
“I don't think the textbook is wrong, exactly, as much as it's just... only telling part of the truth. I'm not gonna argue about generals and battle lines and dates and all that. It's just that there's a lot of important stuff—half the point of everything—that isn't there.”
Astrit met his classmate's gaze and grinned, a wicked look creeping into his eyes. “And I bet you and I are the best people in the class to bring some of what was left out back in.”
He knew what she was proposing, all right. He knew it, and he was entirely on board with it. It would be a tricky thing to do well, but it would be worth it just to shock everyone and fill in some of those missing pieces.
other
Wand | |
Phoenix feather | Laurel |
13" | Brittle |
Strongest Subject | Weakest Subject |
Defence Against the Dark Arts | Transfiguration |
Familiar | Patronus |
Ginger tabby tomcat | Blackbird |
KOUICHI SAKAKIBARA from ANOTHER | |
KOKO | |
