Wild One

Sloane Cressida Rosier | Outfit
November 19, 2017

She had had to go to that wedding last night, and Kate thought that she was just glad that it was over. Yes Donna was one of her friends, or as much of a friend as the witch really had. But still, she thought that there was more to it than that. She thought that she had done it just because it left Kate almost in a league of her own, and that annoyed her. She didn't think that she needed any more reasons for her mother to harp on her for not getting married. She just didn't see the point in marrying someone just to get married. It wasn't worth it if she was just going to be miserable. Maybe she would marry some day, or maybe she wouldn't, but really she didn't think that she was in any hurry about it. Catherine had always been a little too wild for her mother's taste, but she thought that the fact that Sloane was getting married again, and that Griff and Davina were expecting a baby in less than two months... All of that was stacking the odds against her for her mother making it through the holiday season without bringing it up over and over again. Mercifully she didn't think that Vitalia had caught on to the fact that Sloane was pregnant too, or she would really be in for an earful.

It was going to happen sooner or later. She knew that, but Kate thought that she would like to put it off for as long as possible before she had to sit there and attempt to tune her mother out at dinner. Maybe with Fitz home for the holidays she would let it alone, but somehow the red head didn't think that she was going to get that lucky. She thought that there were plenty of reasons that she would have had to do something very unbecoming of a lady at that point in time. She knew that her mother thought that it wasn't just her own outlook on the whole thing that was stopping her from getting married. She knew that her mother didn't approve of what she did with her time. Oh, the magazine was fine. That was a respectable thing for a pureblood witch to do. But to go around interacting with ghosts and the like was very unladylike if you were to ask Vitalia. And though no one ever did, that didn't seem to stop her from talking about it either. She thought that at least if she were to go and see Sloane she wasn't going to have to worry about the possibility of running into her mother. Because going to Mayberry meant that there was a chance Vitalia could be over there, 'checking on Davina' as she liked to put it. Kate was almost certain there was a favorite daughter in this family, and that it wasn't her.

She didn't even really think that she wanted to be her mother's favorite. Because everyone knew that they couldn't out do Fitz with being the baby, and the perfect one. But she thought that she could have at least been the favorite daughter... No, that seemed to be the daughter-in-law, that was having a baby, and doing everything that she was supposed to be doing as a pureblood witch. Kate was just not of the same mindset that her mother was on that. She thought that it wasn't necessary to settle down, and raise babies. Not when she had other things that she wanted to do. Part of her was waiting for Davina to tell them that she had decided that she wasn't going to keep working after all, and that she was going to stay home with Ava, and be perfect. And everything that Kate didn't think that she was ever going to be. It was no bloody wonder that Vitalia seemed to like her more. Shaking her head she apparated to her cousin's door and knocked, probably a little harder than she should have. But she just thought that she would like to go somewhere, and not have to think about the fact that she wasn't the perfect little witch that she was supposed to be. She knew that Sloane, at least, wouldn't be the first one to throw her under the bus for not being everything that every pureblood witch manual said that she was supposed to be.

WILD ONE

OUTFIT

Sloane was not meant to be… the domestic one. That had never really been what she was interested in. She had convinced her father to teach her almost everything that he’d also taught her brother when they were growing up. She had wanted to know more than just how to act like a lady, and since her mother was gone, and it was just her father, it hadn’t been too hard to convince him to let her in on the teachings. There were some matters that she wasn’t allowed to learn—that she was too delicate for, apparently, but she had learned plenty that other girls weren’t allowed to learn. She had taken a particular shine to potions, poisons obviously. Still, she had always known that she would have to get married at some point, and do everything involved with being a wife. Getting shipped off hadn’t been what she’d expected, though, and she had hated everything about her relationship with Ralf. He had been rude, and controlling, and demeaning, and she had learned to play him, but that hadn’t meant that she had ever wanted to be his wife. She had decided early on that she was never going to allow herself to get pregnant for him. No Østberg sons for him, or even daughters. That had annoyed him, but he’d just determined that she had to be defective, and had stopped trying to actually get her pregnant. He had his… other witches for that, for a while anyway.

Once she had killed him, and she had come back to England, she hadn’t thought that she would ever get married again. Not unless her brother arranged something else for her, or her father did once he was out of Azkaban. Sloane had figured that was just about the only way that it would ever happen, and she had wanted to enjoy herself just a little, until that happened. That was how everything had started up with Carlisle. She had gone to visit Genevieve, and he had been home instead… it had just happened, and she had told herself that it wasn’t going to happen again. Until it had, again and again, and then she’d been pregnant. That had not been a part of the plan. She was the other woman… and not the only one, from what she’d heard about Carlisle. She’d wondered if there was even a point in telling him, but she had wanted him to know. She was pregnant, and she had ever intention of keeping it. Sloane didn’t like kids—at all, but for some reason, she’d wanted this one. Maybe because it was hers, she wasn’t sure, but giving it up hadn’t been an option. She had told Carlisle that she could find other wizard, shag him, and pass it off as his, and it would be fine. But he hadn’t wanted that… had actually asked who she would even shag and pretend to get pregnant with, and she had to admit there weren’t many tempting options.

There were plenty of attractive purebloods in their circle that she could have chosen from, but she didn’t really want to shag anyone else. Certainly didn’t want any of them thinking that it was their kid when it was Carlisle’s. Then he had brought up leaving his wife, and she’d… well, she had thought that it was just one of those things that people said. She knew it was a bit of a… cliché. The man offering to leave the wife for the mistress. It was something people said, but not something that ever actually happened. But then he had divorced Genevieve, and the entire wizarding world knew that she had moved in right after. Rumors moved quickly here, and so now it was… out there, and she had the ring on her finger. It was a beautiful ring, too, even if his entire family had practically hazed her in his proposal. But it was still a proposal. More than she had gotten last time. She didn’t know when they were actually going to do the whole marriage thing, but she thought she’d like to not be huge when it happened, so she figured it would probably just have to wait until after Brenna was born. But that was fine. There was no rush for them to actually get married. She was doing everything that needed done as if they were married anyhow. Today, she hadn’t had much at all to do, but she was still surprised to hear a knock on the door—a rather loud one, because she wasn’t expecting anyone and most people would Floo right in. She headed in the direction of the door and pulled it open, raising her eyebrows when she saw Kate. “Who got your knickers in a twist?” She asked, before taking a step back to let her inside.

Her relationship with Donna was not something that she thought all that much about. Kate knew that the other witch considered her her best friend, and she was grateful for that. She thought that it was sweet. And she wished that she thought of anyone that way. When it came to having a best friend, she wasn't sure that she had one. If she was being honest, she thought that Draco might be her best friend, and that was almost as sad as it was annoying. Maybe it was because she didn't have to pretend around him. Because she didn't feel like she had to compete in any way. There weren't expectations to be met the way that there were with the rest of her friends. He was just as content to be on his own as she was, and that worked for them. It made them good at being friends. Right now, she wasn't sure if she wanted to go looking for him or not. She thought that she knew how that would end, and she wasn't sure that she wanted to end up in that position just yet. Right now, she had decided that she was annoyed with all men, and that included him. He was on the list of people that annoyed her, simply because he was him, and no one was pestering him at weddings about when he was getting married and why he hadn't settled down and had a couple of kids yet? She thought that she was going to punch something here in a minute if she didn't cool off.

It wasn't fair that there was some sort of double standard. It wasn't' fair that just because she was a woman, it was her fault that she wasn't married, and hadn't had a couple of kids. It wasn't her fault that her father hadn't forced her into a marriage contract. He had done that for Griffith, and then nothing had ever come of it, and there had been a war going on when she had been old enough to really worry about it. Then she had gone more than a little crazy for a time in there, and it hadn't been worth it. She had straightened out though, and she was successful, and most of the time she was happy. She didn't know why that wasn't enough. It infuriated her that she couldn't just be her. If anything, she was even less her every time that her mother came around, because Davina was a part of their lives now. And Davina was perfect. Davina was married, and Davina kept a perfect house. And she had a perfect husband, and a perfect dog, and she was going to have a perfect baby, and all of it was just perfect, and Kate was Kate. She was covered in dirt half the time, sleep deprived from working weird hours, and often didn't know when the last time that she had actually bothered to wear a bra was. She wasn't everyone's, let alone her mother's, version of perfect. But she wasn't an annoyingly perfect little Hufflepuff. She wasn't going to give up her life for something that she wasn't ready for, with some stranger that her mother picked out, just because she was supposed to be something that she wasn't yet.

She was a failure, and she knew it. Of course, Griffith was thirty-eight, and he had only just gotten married, to Davina, no less, who was older than Kate by nearly a year. But that didn't matter to Mother. Of course not. It didn't matter because Donna was married, and Astoria had been married and divorced. And Jocelyn had been married and divorced. Sloane had been married and widowed, and now she was with Carlisle, set to be the next Lady Rosier. Things were perfect for everyone else, and she was the failure. She was the one that wasn't going to amount to anything in society, because she was an old maid, and she wasn't good enough for anything. And everything else that her mother, and Donna, and everyone else, made her feel. She wasn't even sure that Sloane and her perfect little house, and her fiancé, and her baby, and everything else, was going to make her feel better, but it was this or go back to Tara, and if she went home she was bound to do something stupid, and she didn't think she was ready to do something stupid yet. No matter how convinced she was that she was going to end up there anyway. She thought that it was inevitable really. But until she reached that point she needed human contact with someone that wasn't going to judge her attitude. "Mother." The answer to her cousin's question was simple enough, and probably enough on its own to have her cousin letting her inside, no more questions asked. Shaking her head in frustration she slipped past the dark-haired witch and set her bag down as she paused in the foyer. "Sorry. About the banging."

This hadn't been a part of any plan that she'd had. In fact, she'd spent the past decade and a half trying to get out of a marriage that she'd wanted no part of. When she had moved back to the United Kingdom, the last thing that Sloane had expected was to get married again… not unless her father forced her to. When she had first come back, that hadn't even been a concern. Her father had still been in Azkaban, after all, and not in a position to arrange another marriage for her. The only one that could was her brother, and while she knew that was a possibility, he seemed fine with her just doing what she wanted, as long as it didn't embarrass him or the rest of the family. That had been fine with her. She knew how to act-she always knew how to act. That wasn't a problem for her. Sometimes she bent the rules, but only sometimes. For the most part, she knew the way that she was supposed to be around other people. She knew how to avoid the wrong sort of attention, and what not to do when she was out in public. It was something she'd had to be careful about in Norway, to avoid any problems with her husband or in-laws.

Keeping up appearances had been all that her brother had cared about, but then Wentzell had taken over. Her father had been released from Azkaban, and that was good. Him being free was good, even if the time in prison had changed him. He was still mostly the man that she had known, and she knew there was a good chance that he'd see fit to arrange another match for her. It didn't matter to him that she was a widow in her late thirties, that hadn't been able to bear a child for her last husband-or at least, that was how it looked. He would still arrange something for her, just because there was no reason not to. She thought that he would have gotten around to it eventually,, if she hadn't unintentionally beaten him to it by getting pregnant. She had always been extremely careful about that-it was habit from refusing to get pregnant for Ralf, and something that she had known that Carlisle trusted her to deal with. He trusted her to take care of it, and make sure that they didn't have any accidents. And yet they had.

Sloane hadn't thought that it would end up quite like this. She had been prepared to deal with it on her own. Kids had never been in the plans for her-she didn't much like kids, but once she had been pregnant, she couldn't imagine getting rid of the baby. So she had told Carlisle that she was pregnant, and that she didn't expect anything from him, because she hadn't. She had meant it when she had told him that she'd figure something out, so that no one even had to know that the baby was his. He was married. He had a wife, he had kids of his own, and she had never meant to mess that up. But she also wasn't going to really turn it down if he wanted to be in their child's life. If he didn't want her to pass the baby off as someone else's, then she wouldn't do that. Had she thought he'd been being serious when he said he could divorce Genevieve and marry her? Not really. No one had ever wanted her enough to do something like that, no one had ever really cared enough to put her first. Even if it was just for a pureblood marriage, that didn't mean anything.

That was all she had thought that it had been for him anyway, but it meant something now. She thought it did, anyway. She cared about him, and she loved Brenna. Everything had worked out better than she even could have expected. Sloane didn't actually know how she had lucked into something like this-she hadn't done anything to deserve it. She wasn't a good person. She didn't really think she was the type of person that got to have someone like Carlisle Rosier walk into her life and change it completely. But he had. It was as simple as that. He and Brenna had, and she was grateful for that. She absolutely never could have expected it. But she knew that wasn't the type of thing that she needed to think about around Kate. She had been dealing with her mother pushing her to get married for Merlin knew how long, and she knew that her being with Carlisle didn't make it any easier-since she was probably just about Kate's last single friend. Sloane let the door shut behind her, before glancing back at her cousin. "It's okay. Do you want something to drink?" Drinking always helped, and she could live vicariously through Kate since she still had months before she could drink again.

It was just a fact of life that things changed, that people changed, but Kate knew that her own changing life was not enough for anyone to worry about. She was still at the Ministry, she was still doing her thing at the magazine, she was still happy, she was still successful, and whether or not that was good enough for her mother was just something that they were going to have to get over. No one else was going to get to judge her for it, and she thought that it was crucial that they just start minding their own business. The fact of the matter, was that her mother seemed to think that absolutely everything that Kate did, was her business. Vitalia had seemed to forget that Kate wasn't a child. That she wasn't Fitz, and that she didn't need to check in with her about every little detail of her life. She was a thirty-five-year-old witch for Merlin's sake. She didn't need her mother checking in on her every other minute to make sure that she hadn't done something stupid. She wasn't the Yaxley that had gotten pregnant out of wedlock, with a man that was, well, not happily married given the fact that he had so easily chosen Sloane over Genevieve, but still.

She wasn't the one that had gotten herself in this sort of situation, and she thought that honestly her mother might have preferred that. She might have preferred that Kate get pregnant with a married man's child, so long as it was a pureblood, because if it worked out as well as it did for Sloane, then she wouldn't see the problem. Her mother needed her priorities checked, but the red headed witch didn't think that anyone was going to be up for doing that any time soon. Getting on the wrong side of Vitalia was just someplace that most people tended to not want to be. She didn't want to be there, and she was perpetually there. It was just a state of being for Kate. Shaking her head, she knew that she needed to just get it out of her mind. She wasn't going to be able to fix this, she couldn't make all of this right with just a word, and so she needed to give up the ghost. Or maybe that was exactly the problem, her mother didn't approve of any of the choices that Kate had made with her life, and ghost stories… Those weren't proper.

Turning her life into a ghost story was not something that she thought that she was going to get used to. She thought that she could just be her for a little while, and not worry about the fact that she was the anti-Davina. Some people thought that the anti-Christ or whatever, was the worst thing that you could be, but not in this family. When it came to the Yaxleys it seemed to Kate that being the anti-Davina was about as bad as it could get. She was the good one. The perfect one. She was the one that Griff had married, and she had had a baby almost as fast as she could get one here. Well, her niece wasn't here yet, but that was beside the point. She knew that this was all just something that they were going to have to deal with. That Kate was going to have to deal with. Because she was the anti-Davina. She wasn't married, she wasn't providing anyone any babies. She could, if she wanted to settle down, and do that sort of thing. She could play that game, it was just as simple as the fact that she didn't want to, unless she decided that she was ready.

She wasn't going to be ready just because her mother told her to be. And it was times like these that she was almost envious that Sloane and Davina didn't actually have mothers to gripe at them. Because her mother seemed to love both of them, and Andromeda loved both of them, and they were just perfect. And it was frustrating. Being so… Different than what she was supposed to have been. And Kate knew that there was really no one to blame but herself for that. That she was the reason that she was the way that she was. She was the one that had run away. She was the one that had let herself go a little crazy. Crazy Katie, after all, wasn't just a nickname because it was an alliteration. "Whatever you're serving." She wasn't going to be picky about it, she wasn't going to say no to whatever it was either. Because drinking it away would help. It always had. And it was either booze or sex and coming to Sloane meant that she wasn't going to get the latter. So alcohol was going to have to do the trick.

Sloane had come back to England thinking that she would be alone forever. That might sound depressing to some people, but to her it had just felt like freedom. She’d spent nearly two decades of her life married to someone that she could hardly stand to be around for more than an hour at a time, usually less… but that all depended on his mood. Being free of all of that and never getting married again had sounded pretty good to her. It was all that she had thought about when she was stuck in Ålesund. In some ways, it had kept her going. Sloane had known that she could have ended it at any time, and she could have gone home. But she’d also known that it would be more suspicious, if she didn’t wait long enough. And it wasn’t as if she had gone into the marriage planning on killing him. It was just something that had happened along the way. As time had gone on, it had just become obvious. She had known that she could spend the rest of her life being subjected to Ralf, to his family that had never accepted her.

Her father had taught her plenty. He had taught her a lot of what fathers only taught their sons, because it wasn’t deemed as appropriate to teach their daughters how to brew poisons and how to kill people. He had made her into a warrior, and he had… hired people to teach her the rest. She knew all of that too. She knew how to play that part, but the fact that there was another side to her at all was not something that her in-laws had been fond of. They had just wanted her to be the perfect pureblood housewife, to stand quietly beside Ralf at parties and say the right charming little comments at the right time. That was what the rest of the wives were like. They let their husbands run everything and demand everything. She had never been good at that. Eventually, maybe she’d gotten all right at acting like she was sort of like them… if only because she had decided that she had wanted the distilleries. She had to play the long game and there had been certain concessions that she’d had to make in order to pull that off. But even that had never been enough to change his family’s opinions of her.

She had known that she was never going to get rid of them, from the moment that the will was read. They had all been expecting the distilleries to be passed down to the next male in the family--he hadn’t had any sons, and so that had meant his brother. Sloane had rather enjoyed how expectant his expression had been, like he had known exactly how it was all going to go down. That expression then changing to shock when her name had been read off instead had been incredibly amusing. But from that moment on, she had known that she would always have to deal with them. They were still Østbergs. The distilleries had their names, and they worked in different parts of the company. She couldn’t fire them without suspicion, but they didn’t have a reason to have a coup or anything. Not when she was going such a good job, and not when she had befriended the right people throughout the years. All they had was their suspicions that she had killed Ralf, and that had never been enough. Not when she knew how to brew a poison that didn’t leave a trace.

Sloane had known she’d had it all figured out but coming back and getting married again wasn’t a part of any plan. She hadn’t expected to fall for anybody. If she got conned into marriage again she had thought that it would have been because her father forced the issue, not because she got pregnant and then slowly started falling for the man that had left his wife to be with her and the baby. She hadn’t known if it was just out of obligation or if it was something more, not for a while anyway, but now she knew that it was more and that was just… unexpected. All of it was, but she didn’t have any complaints. She just knew that she had to keep most of these thoughts off of her mind in the presence of her… clearly upset cousin. Kate’s life was fine. Enviable, really, since she got to do whatever she wanted and she was free-spirited enough not to care what people thought about her ghost hunting in dresses and ruining clothes by doing that and being in old dusty houses. But she knew that the rest of her family, or a portion of it anyway, didn’t exactly consider that to be enviable. “So I can give Carlisle a break and use you as a test subject for my gin?” She asked, with a smile, as she headed in the direction of the living room.

@ sloane[break]827[break]Kate's Outfit

WILD ONE

with an angel's grace

Her life didn’t look anything like it was supposed to for a pureblood witch of her age. She knew that. Kate wasn’t married, she had never been married. She wasn’t some widow that was just doing her own thing now that her husband was gone. She didn’t have any children that had passed along anyone’s name. And she knew that if that opportunity ever came about, maybe she would take it. But she didn’t think that that was a possibility right now. She didn’t think that there was anyone that would ever actually want to marry her, and she didn’t think that she was going to sign up for any kind of political marriage, when she wasn’t sure that she was going to be the housewife type. And no one wanted a wife that they couldn’t control. People weren’t going to understand her. None of the pureblood men would have understood her desire to go, and do, and learn. And she would have settled, if she had to. She would have stayed home, and wrote, and worried about remodeling houses, and all of the aspects of her life that didn’t involve crawling around in the dark, and the dirt, and everything else, looking for spirits.

She had a wanderlust that should have faded by now, only it hadn’t, and she didn’t quite think that she wanted it to. Not until she didn’t have any other choice. That was when Kate thought that she would really worry about it. When she didn’t have any other choice. When she had to settle down and raise a family for someone. Because she thought that it would happen eventually. And maybe it wouldn’t happen until she was Andromeda’s age, and she had accomplished everything that she needed to do. Maybe she’d be almost forty. Maybe she’d be in her fifties, like her boss, and finally settle with someone that she thought that she could see herself waking up next to for the rest of her life. Because she wasn’t good at being still long enough not to think that she didn’t want to take off to Africa, or South America, or somewhere else, and follow a ghost story. Kate followed ghost stories all over the world, and she thought that that was something that she wanted to continue to do. She wanted to be herself, and she had gotten to be so far. No one had told her to grow up. No one had married her off.

And she though that it was more to do with the fact that her father was pretty sure that no one wanted a hot headed, red-haired, Scottish girl, than the fact that she wasn’t in the mood to settle down. If her father could have found her someone to marry, he thought that he would have rid himself of her already, but that wasn’t the case. Kate knew that she wasn’t really burdening them. She didn’t even see them more than she had to. Obligatory family functions and all of that. And it wasn’t all of her family that she avoided. Because she was more than willing to meet with her brother, and her cousins, and even Fitz, who thought that she was crazy, got more of her attention than her parents did. She knew that they thought that she was crazy too, but Fitz was the only one who had ever actually voiced that. Kate didn’t much care though, she got to do what most pureblood women didn’t, and she got to be herself. She didn’t have to answer to anyone all that often, and when she did, they didn’t want anything important.

Still, she thought that didn’t think that that was any reason for her not to be upset over the fact that her mother had deemed it necessary to lecture her, again, about the fact that she was improper, and that she would never make anything of herself like this. Kate thought that she was doing just fine the way that she was. It wasn’t fair that no one picked on Sloane. No one got mad that Griff and Davina did their own thing. Because they did proper things. Because Davina was perfect, and having a baby, and even if the baby was a girl, it didn’t matter, because they were trying. They were providing more pureblood heirs to the world, and Kate… What was Kate doing? Running around, ruining her dresses and wasting her life away chasing ghost stories. Just ask her mother. That was exactly what she was doing. She chuckled at her cousin’s words and then shook her head, “Why not? Can’t be any worse than the rest of this day. And even if it is, it’ll give me something else to think about.” Kate knew that she was blessed, and cursed, with her free spirit, and she was glad that at least Sloane wasn’t going to judge her for it. “Does he have to try every batch?”

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