Private message to Auri

[alt_antonin]

I know you aren't behind these wards.

I am exceptionally limited in my possible responses here, and the longer you are missing, the more those choices close off until I will be left with only ones that neither of us want to happen. If you turn yourself in to me now, I will do whatever I can, for you and for your family.

Please don't make me do this

Comments

[alt_antonin]

I believe can still salvage this, but only if you don't

-- dammit.

Nevermind. Forget everything I have just said.

[alt_antonin]

Давным-давно I swore to you I would do everything in my power to keep you from making a mistake -- to guide you through all this, to see you safe upon the other shore to the best of my ability -- so long as it did not cross my other obligations.

We are past the point where I must take that vow back from you, sister. Your rooms say this was not a mistake; your preparations say this was not a misunderstanding. I can see no way to read the evidence other than a deliberate choice.

You have always known where my lines are, and the point past which I am no longer capable of having your best interests at heart. I hope you stepped over that line consciously and deliberately, because if you did so accidentally, this is all so much the worse.

If I see you again in this lifetime, it will be at wandpoint. The only promise I can now make you is that should we arrive at that moment, I will try to kill you as quickly and painlessly as possible. And damn you for forcing me to the point where that is the only gift I have left to give.

[alt_sinistra]

Toshenka.

You have always been clear about your limits, your loyalties, the lines you will not cross, from the first. I am sorry it has come to this. I am sorry you are where you are.

Have you ever known me to be anything other than deliberate? I observe the constellations of the world, and do my best to make sense of them. And since June, I have no patience for lies, even ones meant to comfort.

You told me why you followed him. Back when. About wanting magic to be free. Not living in secret. But is Raz free to use his magic? Is Lucius free to use his magic? Is Regulus? Or all those others you’ve trained who’ve died?

We are free to do one thing, now, here. We are free to die.

I made a choice, when I married Raz (when we got permission, and we never thought we would. Like Barty didn’t.) Knowing how many stories ended in death. Counting the notices from Court, the whispers, the gossip. Chloe Selwyn's broken body. A dozen other things, a hundred.

This is not better, this world we have. This is worse. It is killing our students, and killing our friends. Needlessly. Pointlessly. Brutally. Again and again and again. It is killing the families we were born to, the families we made, the families we might make. The family I wanted with Raz

I want a world where we are free to choose. Who we love. How we live. What we learn. Who we marry. Why we marry. Where who learns is about interest and desire, not blood or power. A world that is not living under a sky of fear, our loyalty battered and broken.

The people I'm with don't want me writing to you after this, Toshenka. And I understand why. But I promise that what you write, where I can see it, I will read, and think about. That as long as I live, I will remember you, and all your gifts and thank you for them. Even the final one, if it comes to that.