The Bauer/Douglas Family (![]() ![]() @ 2012-10-24 00:39:00 |
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Current mood: | busy |
Beauty and the Brat
Books were strewn all over Alicia Bauer’s bed and the floor around it, marring the look of her usually immaculate bedroom, as someone knocked on the door. “Enter,” she called, trying to keep the irritation in her voice to a minimum. She didn’t want to see any of her family right now, but she knew that she didn’t really have a choice.
A small boy with a stubbornly untidy head of pale brown hair obeyed the instruction. Isaac Douglas’s green eyes moved from out of place thing to out of place thing, but his face betrayed nothing. Alicia dropped the pretense of paying attention as soon as she saw it was him, her own eyes going back to moving back and forth between a catalogue and a Transfiguration text. “Speak, rodent,” she commanded, knowing this sibling, at least, had no interest in sentimental reunions with her and was here on business.
Isaac, for his part, didn’t react to the less-than-affectionate nickname any more than he did to the mess. “I just heard a Floo call,” he said. “Grandmother’s coming for dinner on Thursday.”
Alicia kept her face carefully blank, not sure what the proper reaction even was. She and Gramma Alma had always gotten along very well, but after she had failed to come home for midterm last year, things had been tense over the summer, the few times they’d seen each other. “Duly noted,” she said, and only looked up when she registered that Isaac wasn’t leaving. “What else?” she asked.
“What are you doing?” he asked, looking still around at all her books.
“None of your business,” Alicia replied.
“Is it any of Momma's business?” he asked.
Alicia shrugged. “Go ahead and ask if she thinks so,” she said. “I’m sure she’d be scandalized by me doing my Christmas shopping and studying Transfiguration.”
In reality, she knew her mother would fuss over her for ‘pushing herself too hard’ if she saw the Transfiguration, at least. After months of struggling to get to the point of a successful inanimate-to-animate Transfiguration, she had decided that she should concentrate on that during the midterm holidays and leave her other projects until school resumed in January. Her mother seeing this would maybe pose a minor threat to Emily’s policy of regarding her as an innocent three-year-old in a lacy dress, and she could live without that, if it came to that. Her Christmas shopping, though, was completely a non-issue, at least with Momma; if she had a problem there, she expected it to be with Rachel, which was why she was avoiding her eldest sister like the Black Death at the moment.
Something was up with Thad. Alicia didn’t know what, but something was. She was sure of that, and she didn’t really know what to do about it. Asking repeatedly what it was would not, she thought, be a good idea; being nagged was one of the things that made the Cruciatus Curse sound less bad than usual to her, and if her friend ultimately decided he needed to take his feelings out violently on something, she would prefer that it wasn’t her. So instead, she had split the few hours she had been at home between studying and looking for a perfect Christmas present, and she knew that Rachel would disapprove. Her sister had spent too much of the summer talking about how she should be careful, it was one thing to be on friendly terms with girls but boys might expect certain things as they all got older and Alicia knew they weren’t the kind of people who could give them, and so on and so forth for Alicia to have any doubt about that, and she didn’t feel like listening to the message that they were stuck where they were again.
She didn’t feel like hearing it, anyway. Listening had never been an option for her. Rachel, in her opinion, was an overcautious Crotalus idiot. She had no imagination. The world was what they made of it.
Isaac snorted with laughter. “Why not just buy your loser friends a bunch of Transfiguration books?” he asked.
“I might,” she said, distracted from her thoughts by him. “Or I might buy them guides to hexing their friends’ bratty little brothers into jelly. Doesn’t that sound fun?”
“Haven’t got the guts to do it yourself,” Isaac remarked. “I see.”
“Want to try me?”
Isaac laughed, supremely comfortable in his position. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said confidently, not bothering to keep the expression on his face just short of a smirk.
Isaac didn’t doubt that his sister could do exactly what she had described, but he also knew, too, that he was right about how she never would. Alicia was smart enough to know never to turn her wand on a real pureblood. From the look in her eyes, she knew this, too, behind the teasing, and it was eating her alive. Right now, she was bigger and stronger than he was, but one day he was going to give the orders and she was going to follow them and hope he was feeling fraternal enough to keep her up for her trouble. All his sisters would have to do what he said, and his cousins on his mother’s side would, too, or so his father said, and he thought Dad was usually right about these things.
She didn’t rise to the bait, not even enough to try to turn things around and put him in his place. Instead, she lowered her lashes and turned back to one of the more remote books on her bed. “You keep thinking that,” she said. “While you go away. I’m bored with you now.”
He wasn't completely sure he had just earned a victory, but Isaac decided to leave anyway. She was, after all, bigger and stronger right now, and he was bored, too, if all she was doing was reading about Transfiguration. That was sad, really. Who had any use for a girl who read during her free time?