#aster montero

Sometimes childhood is like a festering wound. Aster’s was. She was cut open somehow, left bleeding and hurt, the kind of damage where infection was bound to set in. There was something wrong with her, something intrinsic that set her apart, a glaringly obvious difference between her and her birth parents. They remain dark and sinister figures in her mind, linger like so many nightmares. They crafted her into a monster with no comparison, a beast of repression and hatred and fear, something dark and parasitic latching on to her very soul. It feeds on her, on the magic that blossomed in her.

The more her inherent magic tries to blossom, the more she pushes it down. She finds a place deep within herself and locks it away, a box with a key and a chain around it. Still. Something grows in her until she’s choking on it, yet she doesn’t fear it. The beast is hers, it lives inside her. The beast will want her alive, until it doesn’t. And it’s better than the monsters who live on the outside, a father with hungry and vicious eyes, a mother too apathetic to care what happens to little Aster.

Little Aster is a magnet for pain. Fear grows and festers until it’s anger. Until she’s so small and so furious that she can’t contain it. It’s when the fury grows that everything changes –– what was once quiet inside bursts out. One moment, Aster is afraid and furious. The next second, her house is half gone, and she feels calmer. Her father has fallen and doesn’t get up anymore, and it seems like in the blink of an eye what remains of their home is flooded with people. Neighbors that are herded away by official looking grown ups.

Abel and Cassandra Montero are the opposite of everything she’s ever known. They’re the Aurors who come and talk to her, look her in the eyes and then share concerned glances with one another. The internal and external battles of her childhood must be written across her for all to see, to be understood within an instant. Abel carries her away from the house in their arms, and she glances her father as they do, the strange markings left on him where he lays, the smokey darkness of the room. She turns her face away, presses it against Abel instead, and lets herself be rescued from the life she knew before.

They take her back to their office and sit her down in a chair in a little room. Abel gives her hot chocolate and talks to her in quiet tones, but she can hear Cassandra on the other side of the door, for a few moments. She’s talking to someone. Arguing with someone. When she comes back in she’s calm and sweet, and she brings someone with her. A strange man in strange clothes, light blue and calming. He asks her questions. He waves his stick. His eyes grew uncertain and a little fearful, because he must see the broken things in her as well as her parents used to. The beast that lives beneath the girl.

She is something strange and unique, they tell her. An obscurial. There really is something dark inside her. But she’s lucky, too. Because she isn’t a lost cause, because it hasn’t taken her completely. There have been so few people like her, but still developments have been made in recent years. They can’t take the monster out of her at this point without killing her. They can’t let it run rampant without killing her. But they can find a middle ground. Her new life begins, and it’s one based on balance. A journey of acceptance, away from the self hatred and fear that festers inside her. Wards and chains around certain parts of her mind and certain parts of her magic.

 Abel and Cassandra Montero adopt her, and it is a revelation. Aster has never had parents like them. Kind, and patient, and full of more love than she really knew was possible. They don’t yell. They don’t hurt her. They don’t make her feel the need to hide. It helps her to understand that her old life wasn’t what it should have been –– the so called love there wasn’t really love at all. She’s still a flighty child, skittish eyes and a humminbird quick heartbeat. She still panics when she should settle down instead. She’s oh so very scared that one day, she’ll hurt them, that the thing inside her will stop playing nice. But she rarely feels the choking smoke of the monster that lives inside her.

When you look at things objectively, she grows up as a happy girl. The early years of her life as a Montero are plagued by magical therapy, lessons in control. There will always be things that Aster can’t master –– not with a literal parasite living off of her magic. The most important thing she learns is control. Stay steady, stay calm, keep everything in perfect balance. It would be so dangerous if Aster ever lost control, life and death could hang in the balance. It was a heavy weight to put on the shoulders of a young girl, and she doesn’t think she would have been able to handle it without Able and Cassandra there to guide her. Her new parents.

Abel, in particular, understands exactly the way she must be feeling. They aren’t afflicted in the same ways, but there is an overlap in their struggle. Aster and her problems with the flow of power, how sometimes her magic sputters out completely, fed on too heavily by the beast inside her. How sometimes she has too much of it. How she, in all actuality, might be a ticking time bomb. She’s a lucky one, she knows, because she still has more than they did, because she wasn’t attacked in the same way.

When Aster goes away to school, she writes them a letter every day for the first month. She settles in much quicker than she expected, and all of the professors have been briefed on her situation. Aster is given every opportunity to grow, extra lessons to try and refine her control. She keeps her affliction a secret to all of her peers, because the choice is hers above all else, who she wants to tell. She can count the number of people who know on one hand. Aster wants more than anything to be a normal girl, to have friends and to fit in, not to be the monster at the end of the story.

She’s a good student. She strives to be the very best, the smartest and the fastest. She manages to climb her way to the top of her year and stay there. For a little while, it seems like she’s going to get everything she wants. Aster has a life, and a family who loves her, and she’s holding on to her control with careful fingers. She has a best friend, too –– until she doesn’t. Maybe it’s hormones, maybe it’s the desperate crush she has, maybe it’s the way that everything seems like the end of the world when you’re a teenage girl. They have a fight, and Aster gets so angry that she can practically taste the smoke at the back of her throat, she can feel the bonds that hold her monster tight fraying. She feels ready to explore. So she runs away instead, hides her shaking body in an empty classroom, and realises that she’ll never be a normal girl.

Aster doesn’t think she’ll ever be safe. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be right. Acceptance is so important, to get through something like this, but Aster can’t accept herself. She puts herself on a tighter leash, tries to close off as much as she can. She becomes a colder person, and she doesn’t get attached anymore. She still has friends, but not as many as she did before, and there’s a distance now caused by her much more icy persona. Everyone is held at arm’s length.

 Her parents are her heroes. That much hasn’t changed since she was a little girl. She’s always thought they were the bravest, the best people on this earth. Abel and Cassandra make her want to be as good as them. They’re exactly the reason why she wants to become an auror. Maybe that reason is silly, but it’s her reason. Cassandra changes the world every day she goes to work. Abel did the same, until they started to change the world in different ways. Aster knows that she can do the same thing, that despite everything wrong with her, she is a good person.