Demitria quickly disillusioned herself before slipping out of the prefect bathroom. She felt disgusting. After running to Huck and bawling her eyes out on her pseudo-brother's shoulder for almost half an hour, he had let her into the bathroom and told her to breath, clean herself up, and try to calm down. She had scrubbed and scrubbed, but knew that she would not succeed in getting rid of the dirt she could feel staining her skin. Long after the filth and tears no longer existed on her robes or body, Strellie still shuddered in revulsion. Not at Derry. Not at Kitty. Not even at Figaro.

At herself. She was a monster. A monster through and through. She had felt nothing as she completely took away Derry's free will. She had felt nothing beyond a calm superiority even as the Gryffindor threw up on the hem of her robes.

Demitria could only picture her grandmother smiling at her. She could practically hear her. Maybe this creature will be someone someday. Nika maybe even would talk to her again: she had proved her mettle as a veela and had a pureblood boyfriend. She would again be worthy of the attention that a creature didn't deserve.

Monster or Creature? What would she rather be? A monster in the world's eyes or a creature in her family's?

Her bare feet made no noise on the freezing ground as she began a trek to somewhere, anywhere. Her mind caught up with her feet as she began ascending the steps to the astronomy tower. Trishna. Maybe he could help. He helped last time. With a delayed reaction she realized she hadn't put on any make-up or reapplied any of the notice-me-not charms on the scars standing out, stark on her chest and neck. Instead of turning around, she kept going up the stairs. It didn't matter right now. The Russian remembered the last time she had a serious one on one with Professor Trishna. It seemed trivial now. She was no more muggle than she was witch or werewolf. Just enough to mess up her veela blood. Muggle. Werewolf. Veela. Witch. Creature. Monster. It was perverse.

With her bare feet, bare face, and simple black dress, Strellie knocked on the door to Professor Trishna's office, one thing echoing in her mind: I am a monster. 

For Tapendra, it had been a more or less routine day...as routine as days only a few before the Yule Ball and right in the thick of midterms got, anyway. It had been, in a word, busy - and he was thankful for the few hours of downtime he now had. Sat in his office, effectively out of uniform and wrapped in an old throw blanket, he'd set up his papers and his typewriter and was busy getting tests organised.

As well as a late lunch. Coffee and a platter of donuts balanced precariously on the edge of his desk, just barely past the tide of paper. The couch that sat parallel to his desk was covered in papers, too - magazines, newspapers and books had been displaced from the nearby shelves. The one clear cushion on the thing was currently taken up by his cat, who had curled up and was sound asleep.

He'd taken a rather large bite of donut just as she arrived, and Tapendra choked a bit, letting out what had been meant as 'Just a moment!' but it in fact came out rather more garbled. He hurriedly chewed and swallowed, smacking his sternum to get the chunk to go down and not hurt (naturally, this didn't help much). He sucked in air before saying, in as calm a voice as he could, "Come in!"

Then he hurried tried to make the papers on his desk look more organised. Considering the place looked rather like a tornado had hit a filing cabinet, this effort did nothing to help.

After she had knocked on the door, Demitria felt reality starting to settle in once again. A shiver travelled up her spine from her bare feet. Maybe she should have just transfigured her heels into boots...

  "Come in!"

Strellie entered Trishna's classroom silently, her eyes scanning the disarray of the room. It was strange. Between Kesali and Trishna, she seemed to favour teachers who didn't know the magical properties of a filing cabinet or a well organized shelf. "Professor," she nodded, her hair loose and wild. If she would have been honest, she would have admitted that she was as messy as the Professor. Her rational mind came from the intense need she had to sort through the mess.

However, Demitria was not ready to admit that to herself. Instead, she sighed and sat down.
"I have a problem, Professor. And I don't know how to fix it." After a slight pause, she added quietly, "I don't even know where to start." 

Tapendra looked Demitria up and down in surprise, only managing to mask the expression after a few seconds. For a member of the Monarchy - or for herself, for that matter - she seemed awfully under dressed. The lack of shoes, messed up hair and makeup, and general look to her certainly made her words no surprise at all. He doubted Strelnikov would be caught dead looking like that, otherwise.

He gestured towards the couch as she sat down, sitting back in his office chair. Strelnikov had several problems that others didn't know about, he knew, but her appearance was making it difficult to make a guess. His first thought was her father, but  the disheveled appearance didn't seem to match up with that.

He wondered for a moment if someone had made her take a tumble - she certainly looked rather like a post-Pratt Aileen.

Since she didn't know what to say, he tilted his head. "Is it your father again?" He asked, gently. Even if that wasn't the cause, he figured it'd give her a place to start.

The shock was evident in Trishna's face, that much was certain to Demitria. She knew that she did not look... even marginally like she normally did. Like this, it was evident that she was just a sixteen year old girl that had been through too much in her relatively short life.

She sighed when he mentioned her father. He was part of the problem... when was he not? However, he was not what had made her come to the Astronomy Professor. "No, Professor. It's not him this time... Well, not directly at least. It's... it's..."

Words! Why would they not come to her? It was beyond frustrating. In an uncharacteristically Gryffindor move, she looked directly at her Professor, her unnerving green eyes flat, and said the words that had been weighing on her since that morning.

"I am a monster."

Taking a small breath, she continued, "Not like last April when I couldn't stand the idea of being anything less than pureblood." Merlin, it sounded childish now. "I truly am turning into something terrible and I don't know how to stop it."

Demitria knew that Trishna was probably confused beyond belief, but so was she.

...Werewolf, wizard, muggle, veela, creature, monster...

He had relaxed a bit at the mention it wasn't her father - this time, anyway - but he tensed up again at her abrupt comment. Most of his tension was born of surprise, and he was unable to keep his eyebrows from rising automatically. Well, that... hadn't quite been what he'd been expecting to hear. Especially from a student usually so collected.

He sat back in his old chair, which groaned loudly as he did so. One hand rose to his mouth as he considered what was best to say, fingers brushing along his beard.

Given her state, both of dress and mind, it seemed likely that some incident had triggered this - an actual incident, and not some rogue train of thought or another student's offhanded comment. His thoughts shot to the necromancy mess in October. If he was lucky, this wasn't a repeat.

Well...he hadn't heard screaming or been summoned to a meeting or to be responsible for a student yet, so he'd have to hope it had been a fairly routine issue.

He looked at Demitria. As nice as it would be to have that be the case, he doubted it was.

"Would you like some coffee?" He asked, looking at the pot next to him, which still steamed. "You'd better start at the beginning."

Demitria nodded at her Professor, accepting his offer of coffee. It was a huge relief to the usual British offer of tea. Tea was the British response to everything: Trip and fall? Tea. Fail a class? Tea. Your house burned down? Tea. The world collapsing in on itself? Tea. Obviously. Even though she had lived on the island for seven years, hearing a remedy other than tea was pure music to her ears.

"It's a long story if you want it from the beginning, sir," she admitted, her eyes turning downward. She was too proud. If only she had asked for help earlier, she wouldn't be dealing with this. "I'll try to make it as short as I can, though."

It would be easier to start from the beginning. Maybe then she could figure out how she got into this mess in the first place.

"You know that my father came back in April. Well, after that I told my family that I knew about my... heritage. It seems that all of them, including my brothers, had known." She shook her head and muttered, "I would never have expected Maxim to be able to keep a secret." Lifting her head back up she continued. "My grandmother, Nikomedija, began training me to use my veela charm the moment I got home. She's a full veela, another thing my family never told me. That hardly matters now. The thing is that like any veela, she does not understand human emotions, only sadism, madness, and manipulation." She smiled sardonically at her professor. "And unfortunately, it seems that it runs in the family. Anyway, I became proficient  or at least satisfactory in her eyes and she was very pleased with me. It is never a good thing for Grandmother Nika to be pleased with you, but I enjoyed it. It was the first time she had ever paid me more than a passing glance. I had never been worth her time: never pretty enough, never smart enough, never good enough. But suddenly she saw something in me that I never realized I had. I had a strong power over others to rival any other half-breed.

"There always was the thorn in her side that my mother, my birth mother, had been a muggle. So, she was always pitiless when I failed. To survive being with her, I learned to be just as cruel to her. In one of our lessons, I may have even used my brother to set her house on fire..." Her green eyes flashed. "I don't really remember because I blacked out soon after. Midway through July, my mother let me know that the muggle that bore me was also half veela which explained my affinity with Charm. She still wouldn't tell me any more than her name: Irina."

She didn't stop to see if Trishna was following, if she stopped things would make even less sense than they already did. "It all changed during the August full moon. Xav- Xavier Tawse- and I were picnicking in the forest outside his manor when we were attacked by a werewolf. I already had a phobia of dogs from when I was attacked by crups as a child." Her voice dropped to very quiet and she clutched the warm mug that her Professor had given her sometime during her story. "It was a nightmare. It still is. There was so much blood... both of us almost died that night, Professor. The first time Grandmother Nika saw me in St. Mungo's, she decided that it wasn't worth continuing our lessons. She said no one would fall for Charm from a creature like me. Those were the last words she spoke to me for the rest of the summer." Relaxing her grip on the mug, she raised her voice slightly. "The healers told me that I had not caught Lycanthropy, but they didn't tell me just how bad surviving would be. I had already felt like I was splitting into two different people in April, but it turned out to be nothing compared with these past few months. In the day, I would be perfect for the world. At night, I would crash into nightmares and pain with only music and work to keep me from constantly screaming."

Demitria shook her head. "I saw how you looked at me when I came in today. This is the other Strellie: the one I can't show the school or my family. The creature covered in scars with little more than a quick wand and musical ability to recommend me. Only a handful of people have seen this me, and only two know this me. I love this Strellie, the one with no strings attached, and no tainted past. The werewolf, muggle, veela, wizard child. The problem is I love the other half of me just as much. It's not a mask, no, not at all. It's just the opposite side of the coin. She's beautiful, mad, talented, and far closer to perfect than most will ever come. But that Demitria still has to compete with this one and..."

She stopped for a moment and looked at her cup. "You must think I'm going mad. And I am. It runs in the family after all, and it's only a matter of time before this Strellie is squashed by the other. That's what scared me today. I-I... I Charmed another student. I completely took away his free will and I didn't feel anything other than pleasure. My only thought was how good I was getting at controlling my Charm and how I was proving my grandmother wrong- that I wasn't just a worthless creature."

Watching the dark liquid swirl in the cup, she added. "When I snapped out of the charm, I realized that I hadn't felt the simple me at all. That she had been absent for hours, maybe even a day. And she came back screaming that I was turning into a monster. I'm scared, Professor. I'm sorry that you always have to deal with me when my world turns upside down, but I don't know what else to do."

Her light green eyes stole a quick glance upwards, but fell back to her cup after only a moment.

As she spoke, Tapendra rose and got another cup (mismatched, naturally) from a nearby shelf, almost subconsciously choosing a plain white cup instead of the myriad of ones he had with things painted on them. Somehow handing her a cup painted like a rubix cube just didn't seem right.

He filled it and handed it over, a quick gesture (and moving a stack of paper) showing where the cream and sugar were. Then he sat and listened, his brow creasing.

It was stories like this one that made him glad he'd arrived at the small family he now had. His own relatives might be - and have been - crazy and otherwise not very nice people, but most of them were now dead or locked up. They were out of his hair and he was out of theirs. It had left him alone in the world save for his sister, and he preferred it that way, even if at the time it had seemed a devastating lack of connections.

He did wonder, offhand, what her mother being half Veela - half muggle made Strelnikov's blood purity. Halfblood, to be sure, but as far as he knew only wizards married Veela, or, well - had children with them. Perhaps the children weren't naturally magical unless the father was a wizard, and that was why the wizarding world didn't hear about them.

Still - all of it was worrying. He stroked his beard as she spoke, not interrupting until she'd finished. When she finally fell silent, he leaned back in his chair again, and let his breath out. Seeing the normally composed girl so upset again was disheartening, but ever since her father had been so nice to pay him a visit in Egypt, he'd wondered when this sort of breakdown was coming. It hadn't been over the topic he'd expected, admittedly.

"I wish there was some easy answer I could give you, Strelnikov," he said, shaking his head. "But there really isn't. But, no - I don't think you're going mad. Not yet, anyway." She was closer to mad than most, he'd admit, but somehow saying that didn't seem helpful. "But - it seems to me you need to chose which Strellie you want to be. You can't be both, as it currently stands."

He picked up his own coffee cup. "This student whose will you took," he said. "What happened? You didn't use-" His first thought had been the Imperius charm, which he would prefer to not think of the girl using, for a myriad of reasons.