Lycoris- Regulus had named her after some Great Aunt of his- Black had her Father's eyes. So grey they appeared white. And she knew things- or rather, she saw things. The future, mostly. Little glimpses here and there. Maybe.

It was hard to get a straight answer from a two-year-old.

She was so much like her father. Sometimes Juliette didn't feel like a mother, didn't feel like the baby with the black hair and grey eyes was hers at all. She had her father's looks and his smile and his unnerving ability of knowing.

Juliette should have been overjoyed. A seer, even a half-assed one with only a smidge of the sight, was something to boast about. Within the Pureblood lines of Black and Rosier, there hadn't been any seers in… Well, a really long time. It was rare, incredibly so, no matter the blood status. But a two-year-old, who had only recently begun to talk, knowing things they shouldn't was terrifying.

There was hardly anything of herself in the child. She searched for it all the time, the little tell-tale that this baby was hers, that she'd come from her womb at all.

White-eyes (Grey was her least favourite colour) stared incessantly. A childish, poor excuse for a vocabulary couldn't put a stop to the eeriness of it all.

"Splat!" Lycoris cooed, "Splat!"

It was silly, but Juliette leaned forward with wild abandon anyway. "What do you mean? What goes splat?" She said as if a two-year-old could coherently explain anything. She held up the plate, with its portion of meat and vegetables and mashed potatoes, all mushed up and coated with gravy that the house-elf would spoon-feed into her messy, slobbery mouth. "The food? Does food go splat?"

"Splat!" Lycoris screamed, joyfully.

Juliette shoved the plate back onto the tray of her highchair. She really did hate children. In school, she'd had no deliberations of motherhood, had sneered when the other girls cooed about having a child of their own one day. Evan had been much the same, though he'd been good with Lycoris while he was alive. He was the only one who could stop her crying.

And the crying seemed endless, an inevitable blimp that overcast her day time and time again. It wasn't surprising, that's what babies do. They eat and spew it back up, all over her designer velvet top with the flattering plunge that dipped to her breasts, the silk blouse her Mother gave her for her fourteenth birthday that stained so terribly nothing could coax it out, and the necklace Evan gave her that cemented itself to her chest with a concoction of half-digested milk and carrot slop she'd fed her child only twenty minutes before. They shit- oh, her manicure was never meant for cloth nappies (Mother insisted)- all over themselves, two minutes out of the bath only for her bowels to let loose and stain the selkie rug that had cost a fortune, another bath, then. And they cry. The crying never stopped, it seems.

Regulus had left all this to her, the baby and the house and the wedding that never happened because he had disappeared. Because he died, like the useless, selfish prat he always had been- nevermind that he named the baby, that he looked at their newborn child the way he never looked at her, the way he charmed the fucking wallpaper into a constellation that was too bright to put a child to sleep under- and she really should have known better.

It wasn't him she mourned, though. She did know better now, despite what the other girls had whispered when she'd dropped out of school at fifteen and pregnant with a child she never wanted, despite the names Daddy had thrown her way when he'd found out about this Merlin awful mess. Juliette bemoaned the day she met Regulus Arcturus Black, the day she'd let him talk her into his silk-lined sheets, but never the day he died. No, it was Evan she was heartbroken about.

Evan, her sweet brother who'd damn near killed Daddy for calling her a whore, Evan who offered to off Regulus once and for all when the pregnancy made her so ill she could hardly move at all. It was him by her side at St. Mungos, holding her hand, wiping the sweat from her forehead with a barely-there touch and cold skin. It had been Rabastan Lestrange who broke the news, he'd stood on her doorstep with his hard eyes that only defrosted for her, and he'd held her as she cried. Nobody held her now.

Her brother was dead, and the baby would start her crying soon and she couldn't do anything to stop it. She reached for her wand, sometimes, during especially loud bouts of wailing that came from teething and nappy rashes and hunger. A simple silencio begging to leave her lips, but she could never quite coax the word out. Did that make her a bad Mother?

She floated away, lost in thought. It tended to happen more often now, her losing track of what was going on around her as she got swept away by the past. Happened when she debated how good of a Mother she was, or how much Lycoris looked like her Dad, or during an especially bone weary visit from her own Mother.

She didn't notice Lycoris taking handfuls of potatoes lashed in gravy, smearing them around the tray. It was in her hair, painted across her face, stuck to her brand new shirt. She got them everywhere, and Juliette didn't notice one bit.

The problem with having a suspected seer for a child was that everything could be prophetic. It drove her up the wall, trying to wean the answers out of a child that could not give them- even if she wanted to, Lycoris had only graduated from vague sounds to a select few words- but some part of Juliette thought it was to spite her. It was stupid, there was no way, but it crept up on her all the same. Regulus had certainly been a vindictive prat, why shouldn't his offspring take after him?

(Lycoris stopped smearing the potatoes across the tray, little face turned to the window by the sink with bright features in gentle awe.)

(CAW!)

She was eighteen, now. Juliette felt much older and so very much younger all at the same time. She missed boys and her friends, missed her brother most of all, and wished her parents would stop with the badgering and the pointed remarks and the talk of other young socialites getting married like good girls should. About married mothers, because only an idiot gets pregnant out of wedlock at fifteen. And isn't that what all girls are? Pretty little fools with hair to curl or straighten with serums and spells and to dress up in the latest fashion. Merlin forbid they have a sex drive or curiosity or some sort of academic incline.

Maybe Lycoris wasn't a seer. Maybe she was just going mad. The baby had already shown signs of accidental magic. Strong, unmistakable signs. Floating teddies, moving dolls, the house-elf being chased by a dress that cost more than a dragonhide handbag from Russia.

Juliette was tired and painstakingly alone. She couldn't date, she couldn't go out for drinks or dinners with friends, she had nobody to go out with in the first place. There was no comfort for her.

(CACAW!)

(Lycoris stared at the birds in delight. The black crows swarmed, wings battering against the windowpane in a frenzy.)

Recklessly, she thought of Rabastan. He'd stood at her doorstep, all those months ago, with the rain thundering around him. With Evan's death on his lips, with unspoken feelings for her on his face.

She'd meant to marry him, all those years ago. Juliette Rosier was to be betrothed to Rabastan Lestrange, the announcement was going to be made for her sixteenth birthday. He was going to let her finish school, a year-long engagement and a summer wedding. Instead, she'd left school, stomach swollen with Regulus Black's seed, and Rabastan told her he'd claim the child as his own as a last ditch effort to keep her. She should have said yes. Should have had a little baby Lestrange with any name but Lycoris and any eyes but grey. Why hadn't she?

(There were so many of the feathery things that the room went dark as if they'd stolen all the light and flew away with it. Outside was just a black mass, a mess of feathers and eyes like little stones, glaring vivaciously.)

"Birdie!" Lycoris chirped, chubby fists pounding against the mess of the food tray. "Birdie! SPLAT!"

Had she ever loved Rabastan? She thought she might have, back in school with his long hair and his tie that was always undone. The way he'd held her hand that night in the common room, sparing her smiles meant for her and nobody else. Before Regulus, she'd believed in a lot of things.

(Then,)

THUD!

(the birdie hit the glass with a SPLAT!)

Juliette screamed. Her chair clattered to the linoleum floor before she even knew she was standing.

Outside the window, the crows flew off, their terrible cries piercing out- how had she not heard them? How long had they been there?

Drawing her wand, she approached with timid steps. Evan would have laughed if he could see her now, all pale-faced and oh-so-scared. Everything scared her when they were children, but nothing could ever touch Evan, not even Daddy with his belt with the family crest engraved.

The window was open. When had that happened?

She groaned when she saw it. The pane was a mess of dust and grime, the outline of a bird mid-flight imprinted against the glass, and there was blood. It was smeared all across the glass the same as the mashed potatoes.

There, sitting innocuously on the ledge, was a dead crow with a crooked neck.

"What…?" she breathed, throat constricting painfully as she choked down the words.

Lycoris beamed from the highchair, mouth stretched wide with the few teeth she had glimpsing. "Splat! Birdie go splat!"

It occurred to her, then, that Lycoris looked every bit like Evan.

And so, Juliette began to cry.