#princess of repressed anger issues. tbh

[buffyspeak]

smh i wish lexie grey had lived long enough to see a rage room. she would have DEMOLISHED and had everyone shaken.

[zeleniafic]

I don't know much Auriga, and that is a travesty cause I love hp ocs. Please tell me more about her so we can fix that!

I’ve never posted about her before!! Auriga has existed in word docs and emails and notes for several years but I’ve never posted anything about her/her fic. She’s very dear to my heart and it’s like... weirdly difficult to throw info about her up here now after just working on it in private for so long?!

Warning that this is INSANELY long even though I tried to condense it, I am so sorry lmao. Auriga means so much to me and I have a LOT of stuff for her from over the years... this really is the “short” version LOL

So anyway... Auriga is Sirius’ twin. She spawned out of a desire to explore the Black family dynamics, and have a character that is not so polarized as Sirius... and, in some characterizations, Regulus too. The story does address Sirius’ darker side (like, say, sending a schoolyard nemesis to potentially get eaten by a werewolf?! bro.......) but for the majority Auriga is the shade of gray in the middle of the brothers, in a sense. She never strays toward Voldemort like Regulus did at first, but she is not as stereotypically “good” as Sirius, as far as the general consensus of the wizarding world is concerned. The “light v dark” / “good v evil” system being SO SO RIGID in HP is something I passionately hate and I consistently reject it in my writings, even with more lighthearted characters. Auriga, in essence, was created directly because of that. She is not a “light” witch nor is she a “dark” witch, and in fact, she rejects that entire dichotomy as I also usually do. She’s just... Auriga. Not a goody two shoes Order member who won’t aim to kill if she needs to, but also not a murdering bigot like the Death Eaters.

Unfortunately, her willingness to get her hands dirty without remorse puts her at odds with the Order more often than not, while her refusal to follow Voldemort makes her a target. She very much gets stuck as a lone wolf figure, which... she kind of always was, tbh. She was very close with both Sirius and Regulus growing up, but the older they get the more fractured it is - she is always stuck in the middle of their fighting or unspoken tension at home, and her being sorted into Slytherin distances her from Sirius. She so desperately wants them to stop fighting and for the three of them to be a united front again the way they were as children, but it just never happens. As soon as Sirius is sorted, there’s a fault line between the brothers and she is left straddling the divide trying not to fall. Regulus’ death is something that fractures her as a person, and she sees it as her greatest failure in life that she could not save him. There is also some other stuff going on in her life, and some decisions she made with lasting repercussions, that make her feel like it is her fault he ended up where he did.

Auriga is... kind of repressed, tbh? The way she was raised, she’s just really emotionally stunted. Sirius and Regulus are too but it displays a bit differently for each of them, and for her it’s being the perfect pureblood princess and having trouble displaying her “improper” emotions or having agency for herself beyond the family’s uses and expectations for her as a daughter.

To be frank, I think her fic is the darkest and grimmest of any of my WIPs. It’s just a very ADULT story, in terms of the themes that play a big role in it and the difficult subjects it tackles, if that makes sense? It looks at a lot of aspects of pureblood culture that are just footnotes in canon, and it builds from there. Walburga and Orion’s parenting being directly abusive in several ways, and the psychological/emotional aspect of growing up in the culture and household that the Black kids did. It grapples with the commonly accepted sense of morality, and how it gets murky in wartimes. And it also tackles the patriarchal elements of pureblood society - betrothals, arranged or even FORCED marriages, and the potential lack of agency/lack of consent for witches in particular that stems from a blood/lineage/name obsessed culture. One of the rifts that forms between Auriga and Sirius as they get older is that he does NOT understand what it is like to be a pureblood witch from a family like theirs, and how different it is from his lot. They can commiserate about their family and their upbringing, but so much of his freedoms are not available to her. When he runs away to the Potters’ and she refuses to go with him, unwilling to abandon Regulus, this comes to a head. Walburga is furious about Sirius of course, and this is shown by how much more controlling she is over the two remaining children - Regulus being pushed toward Voldemort, and Auriga being pushed into a betrothal she was diplomatically resisting beforehand. This is a whoooooole fiasco and plotline that deals with forced marriages, lack of consent, and mental manipulation/use of mind-altering magic in order to trap Auriga into the marriage.

After escaping this, she’s... pretty traumatized, understandably. She changes fundamentally as a character after this, becoming less stoic and composed “pureblood heiress” and instead lets out all the anger that’s been collecting inside her all this time. She leaves the family after she’s mentally coherent again, in a pretty theatrical way, but she is VERY angry with Sirius and - illogical or not - she throws a lot of blame his way for what happened to her, so she refuses to show up at the Potters and instead makes her own way. This is a BIG fracturing moment for the siblings.

A lot of her seventh year is dealing with the repercussions of that forced marriage, both physically and mentally. She’s in a really bad place when the year starts. The silver lining is, she 100% gets her revenge on the fiance AND on Walburga for what they did to her, and eventually she starts to be more of herself - her true self, the one she was hiding behind the mask all those years. She finally is able to pursue the relationship between herself and Remus, which had been building for years but which she consistently denied because she was afraid to make him a target of her family. By the end of the seventh year, she has completely the family off and they are in a relationship.

The golden few years here in the middle, ironically, take place during a war. She has mostly patched things up with Sirius, and she and Remus are dating and sickeningly happy, she’s got true friends for the first time in her life. Things are really good on a personal level, even as they are fighting a war.

Unfortunately, things fall apart again. After Peter’s betrayal and Sirius’ framing, she has a falling out with Remus over his believing the story. Despite all the issues between herself and Sirius, she never EVER doubts his innocence. EVER. She completely cuts Remus off when he starts believing it, and the both of them are spiraling after that. This is worsened by the fact that shortly later she is wanted as a supposed accomplice of Sirius and has to go on the run. It’s not surprising - she was the Slytherin, she was always darker than him, she’d committed lesser crimes or toed the line of what the Ministry approves of... if they named Sirius Black, infamously defiant of his family and a loud and proud Gryffindor, as a Death Eater... it’s a lot easier to make the leap that she was one too. The public wholeheartedly accepts it and she is hated intensely, and is forever on the run after that. By the time it gets to Harry’s time, she’s a pretty dangerous character, even more so than before. She and Sirius reunite, and eventually she and Remus patch things up. There are some lasting complications from earlier plotlines I won’t delve into right now, and tbh their ending is... pretty fucking depressing?! They don’t ride off into the sunset in any way shape or form. But they do get closure, and they do find their own kind of peace before the end. And I think it suits them, and the story, in the end. Auriga’s story was never intended to be a fix-it fic or even really address major HP canon lot elements, it’s very much just about HER as an individual and the different dynamics of what it means to be someone like her in that culture, society, and world.

So basically I’m really mean to Auri but writing about and really diving into difficult topics through her POV is really cathartic for me for various personal reasons and despite her entire life being a FUCKING TRAGEDY, she’s been around for a long time for me and I love her so much and she means a lot to me!! :’)