[@astoriafest so sorry I forgot to post this yesterday! here’s my ficlet!]
The windows were all Astoria had of the outside world. A rain-stained, dirt washed layer of glass that was supposed to protect her from the danger singing in her blood.
She was eight when she learned to breathe air carefully, that too much could end up her downfall. She was nine when she understood that the strawberries-and-cream her mother always brought her were a delicacy that Daphne couldn’t have. It was only for her, because her days were already numbered, because she had to experience the world while she still had that luxury.
Astoria lived her life through swirling potions that gave off fragile scents from another life. She felt fragile. Every time she stood, she wondered if this would be it, if her blood would have eroded away at the marrow of her bones and they would snap as one, sending her tumbling to the grounds.
She was an enigma to the healers, who looked at her like a crown jewel — a sorrow to her mother, who wished she was normal — a half-sister to Daphne, too pale, too fragile to be a full-sister.
Astoria was glass, and she knew it. Fragile just beneath the skin — living in her blood — and painted pretty colors to hide her weakness.
When her parents let her attend Hogwarts, Astoria thought she must be dying quicker than they’d anticipated. Why else would they let her out of the house?
Astoria had no idea why she was sorted in to Slytherin. Nobody did. Her ambition dwindled with each day death drew closer, with each morning she woke up and almost passed out a second later. Things felt impossibly pointless for her. Death was more of an inevitability for her than anybody else, even though it would come for all of them in the end.
Astoria was fifteen when they told her she had 22 years left before her own blood destroyed her completely. She laughed when Draco Malfoy spent hours rhapsodising about pure blood, about how they — the Slytherins — were superior.
She watched from her armchair in the corner of the Common Room.
Pure blood had done nothing except give her a death-date.
Astoria was sixteen 21-years-until when she stopped celebrating her birthdays in the normal way. She wasn’t counting up in giddy happiness like most. She went backwards, because she had the mark of her death to haunt her instead.
Despite the curse, Astoria did her best not to dwell over the lurking that waited so black and heavy. At least she knew the time she had, as long as she was cautious in her frailty.
So Astoria lingered carefully on the outskirts of the war, careful not to draw too close in fear that the spells would chip off her paint and shatter the glass. She watched from a distance, the fight over blood status, and she laughed with her absence of humor.
Because she, Astoria, she was barely even a pure blood anymore.
Instead she was cursed blood, destined to destroy herself.
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