Private message to Auror Crouch

[alt_hydra]

How much am I like my mother?

Comments

[alt_crouch_jr]

Not sure what metric to apply.

0.3333 bella-units +/- 0.0001 (adjusted for ambivalence)

[alt_crouch_jr]

What do you really want to know?

[alt_hydra]

I don't want to be like her.

[alt_crouch_jr]

But you suspect there are ways in which you are?


If it's helpful, I'll go on record as thinking you're entitled to differentiate yourself. One might say Bella's inimitable. Frees you to go your own way.

[alt_hydra]

More than that. She's heartless. Not just in matters of strategy, but in every possible way. And if I said it to her face she wouldn't deny it.

But, I don't think she is capable of being anything else.

Apparently, according to some, I can be the same way. In my own fashion.

It wasn't intended as a compliment.

[alt_crouch_jr]

Significant that it bothers you to think you might be taken as sharing that characteristic.

I don't believe you do.

When you say she's heartless, I think you mean that your mother lacks personal attachments, fondness, love, compassion, empathy, and I agree she wouldn't deny it, though she doesn't view their absence as a lack.

It's partly the work, and partly the depth of her commitment to Our Lord. Those things have shaped her. She wasn't always what she is now. But... the seeds of it have been there as long as I've known her. If anything I'd say she's become more herself with time. Attributes that were always part of her have intensified.

Maybe that sounds ominous, but you're not your mother. You were raised by her, and that shaped you, but you're not destined to be identical, any more than she's identical to her mother (whom I can't claim to know well, but have met and observed) or a duplicate of her father (whom I did meet and remember vividly). Any more than I'm like my own father. Partly it's that your father also shaped you, and partly it's that you have your own rather vigorous ideas about what you want and want to be.

Let's stick with something I've observed directly. You fight differently than she does, and one of the ways in which your fighting differs is that while she reads her opponents' emotions and is quite canny about manipulating them, she doesn't understand most of those emotions and her attention to them is strictly to find weakness. Like a colour blind person who sees only certain shades on a map, she recognises and exploits pride and fear. (Not saying that's not effective. It certainly is.)

You, however, seem to glean more nuance in your opponents, and you use the information differently--yes for an opening, and yes for pressure points you can exploit, but I've watched you find anxieties, irritations, and sentiments that you've been able to play to advantage.

I watched you disarm an opponent in Sherwood by widening your eyes and affecting a childish look--you told me that you'd seen that you reminded him of a girl he had some attachment to (you thought a niece).

The point is that you're not heartless. The heartless cannot parse such things or make that appeal to emotions that your foe couldn't reconcile. And so you had him. Absolutely. Your mother would have had him, too, mind you, but it would have gone quite differently.

[alt_hydra]

I would hope that it doesn't take highly skilled Auror to spot the differences between us.

I want to become more myself, too. Once I know what that is, exactly.

[alt_crouch_jr]

Shouldn't think it would. Someone else's answer would address other differences than mine.

No one wants you to be a duplicate of your mother. Except, possibly, your mother, herself.

I'd suggest, however, that were she to consider the prospect dispassionately, she wouldn't much care for your becoming a second Bellatrix.

Our job's to find out what you are. Who.

[alt_hydra]

No, I don't believe she would care for that.

So you don't want me to be a duplicate of you, either?

Because I'm prettier than you and I'd rather like to keep it that way.

[alt_crouch_jr]

Ha. I concede on the question of prettiness.

And for that as well as other reasons, the world can well do without a second of me.

Don't you think?

[alt_crouch_jr]

Tomorrow evening. Full-on run through the Salle.

Think you're ready to manage that?

[alt_hydra]

One seems to get the job done.

[alt_hydra]

Yes.

Straight after supper?

[alt_crouch_jr]

Yes.

Will see you then.