Coda
AURORA SINISTRA continues as Astronomy professor at Hogwarts, eventually taking over as head of Hufflepuff. In the first years, she works all the time, with occasional and often awkward visits with a small number of close friends and her family. She focuses on documenting the locational magics of the war and quietly finding ways to support students in becoming their best selves.
After Evelyn, she takes on the occasional apprentice (mostly people interested in teaching wizarding astronomy at other schools) and contributes to her Guild. She refuses to let them make her Guild Master for the same reasons she'd refuse to be Headmistress if anyone offered it to her: she will never give up teaching. (Privately, she does not trust herself to do it right, to not be tainted.)
While she'll talk with Charlie for his project (she's especially interested in Chloe and Dominic's story getting told well), she avoids talking about the Protectorate era without excellent reason. She is at every memorial that involves any of her former students, always, if she's in the country, but otherwise avoids Order gatherings.
She spends her summers travelling, combinations of lectures and discussions with astronomers in other places, anything to distract her from anniversaries. In 2009, while lecturing in New Zealand, she meets a Muggleborn woman, a doctor who'd served with various relief efforts in other war-torn places who then emigrates to Albion.
They don't ever actually marry (their pasts have convinced them both that something horrible will happen if they do), and their lives and work often keep them apart for days or weeks at a time, but they don't make a secret of each other, either. Siz wears the engagement and wedding rings Raz gave her until she dies, but she eventually has to retire the wand holster that saved her life at Barra.
They do not have children, though late one night Siz does confess that she had once thought about adopting Arista and Hector, to give them a home with someone who understood loving a Death Eater. Instead, they wind up opening their cottage near Siz's family to a string of Siz's former students and Zoë's colleagues who need company for the holidays or a place to stay between flats or jobs. Linus was only the first.
While travelling the summer after the war, she arranges a roundabout set of owl forwarding services to deliver Tosha's prayer books to him in Cairo, and after that, they have a lifelong but erratic correspondence, the timing dictated for years by when she can get someone to send an owl from Vienna or America or some other place. She never tells him anything about anyone or anything in Albion (unless they ask, but who would?) but in 2013, she and Zoë do visit him briefly in Cairo. Mostly she writes about her research, occasionally about Raz, and always about books.
After her death, a complete copy of their correspondence from when they first met, with annotations, is found in a Gringotts vault in her name outside Albion, along with Siz's own notes about her views of the war. They make it clear she never made peace with Tosha's choices during the war, her own failure to predict the notice-me-not disappearing in Ireland (and the subsequent deaths there), or her decision to write to Tosha afterwards. Since that kind of peace wasn't on offer anyway, she decided to detail the process of wrestling with it, complete with occasional allusions to angels at fords, the nature of good and evil in Neo-Platonic philosophy, and one cryptic mention of the fact that Ursa Major is the constellation of Set in Egyptian mythology.
After Evelyn, she takes on the occasional apprentice (mostly people interested in teaching wizarding astronomy at other schools) and contributes to her Guild. She refuses to let them make her Guild Master for the same reasons she'd refuse to be Headmistress if anyone offered it to her: she will never give up teaching. (Privately, she does not trust herself to do it right, to not be tainted.)
While she'll talk with Charlie for his project (she's especially interested in Chloe and Dominic's story getting told well), she avoids talking about the Protectorate era without excellent reason. She is at every memorial that involves any of her former students, always, if she's in the country, but otherwise avoids Order gatherings.
She spends her summers travelling, combinations of lectures and discussions with astronomers in other places, anything to distract her from anniversaries. In 2009, while lecturing in New Zealand, she meets a Muggleborn woman, a doctor who'd served with various relief efforts in other war-torn places who then emigrates to Albion.
They don't ever actually marry (their pasts have convinced them both that something horrible will happen if they do), and their lives and work often keep them apart for days or weeks at a time, but they don't make a secret of each other, either. Siz wears the engagement and wedding rings Raz gave her until she dies, but she eventually has to retire the wand holster that saved her life at Barra.
They do not have children, though late one night Siz does confess that she had once thought about adopting Arista and Hector, to give them a home with someone who understood loving a Death Eater. Instead, they wind up opening their cottage near Siz's family to a string of Siz's former students and Zoë's colleagues who need company for the holidays or a place to stay between flats or jobs. Linus was only the first.
While travelling the summer after the war, she arranges a roundabout set of owl forwarding services to deliver Tosha's prayer books to him in Cairo, and after that, they have a lifelong but erratic correspondence, the timing dictated for years by when she can get someone to send an owl from Vienna or America or some other place. She never tells him anything about anyone or anything in Albion (unless they ask, but who would?) but in 2013, she and Zoë do visit him briefly in Cairo. Mostly she writes about her research, occasionally about Raz, and always about books.
After her death, a complete copy of their correspondence from when they first met, with annotations, is found in a Gringotts vault in her name outside Albion, along with Siz's own notes about her views of the war. They make it clear she never made peace with Tosha's choices during the war, her own failure to predict the notice-me-not disappearing in Ireland (and the subsequent deaths there), or her decision to write to Tosha afterwards. Since that kind of peace wasn't on offer anyway, she decided to detail the process of wrestling with it, complete with occasional allusions to angels at fords, the nature of good and evil in Neo-Platonic philosophy, and one cryptic mention of the fact that Ursa Major is the constellation of Set in Egyptian mythology.