The Last Peverell

Chapter 50

Enjoy!

Chapter 50

Familial revelations aside, Jasmine continued to live her life as normal, finishing her summer work and helping Monty whenever he asked for anything. Honestly, the entire family was coddling him, but when someone nearly dies, that tends to happen.

It was a little less than a week before her birthday and two away from when she was going to visit Lily. Euphemia had asked her what she wanted for her birthday, she was turning sixteen after all. She was finally going to have some kind of say in public affairs with a proxy as a sole heir. That in itself was a gift enough, but that didn't seem to please her guardian all that much.

Jasmine had never been good at figuring out what she wanted for her birthday, it wasn't that she was being difficult, it was more along the lines of having everything she could want and not having the desire to ask for more. It just seemed so superfluous. Living with the Dursley's over multiple lives had conditioned her to never want for more than she already had and being grateful to her caretakers for just providing shelter for her.

The Potters were far better than that, hell the Chesters were better caretakers than the Dursleys, but some habits and ways of thinking are hard to break.

There was also the fact that she didn't like asking people for anything. She had lived far too many lives where asking something could get you smacked with a frying pan or locked away for days at a time.

Nine different lives of Dursley induced trauma and abuse to contend with made birthdays difficult. As Harriet, she had never quite shaken all of the different verbal abuse they had flung at her over the years. Even as Jasmine she feared asking Euphemia and Monty for anything, and she knew they weren't going to hit her or lock her in a cupboard without supper for three days, but the inborn fear was still there. She doubted that it was going to go away anytime soon. She had talked to her Mind Healer about it, claiming that the Chesters had done it and, they had reminded her, that she wasn't behaving abnormally and it would take time for her to feel comfortable breaking out of the habits that her abusers had ingrained into her. Jasmine doubted that she would ever truly push past this fear. Not without a lot of prompting first and Euphemia was always pushing Jasmine to ask for something.

Jasmine was aware of the problem, knew what it was now, but that didn't make the anxiety go away, or the self-hatred, when she realized what she was doing to herself, again. The Potters were nothing like the Dursleys. Jasmine knew this and yet...it still took her nine hours to talk herself into asking Euphemia for a gift.

It was later that evening after Euphemia had come home that Jasmine worked up the nerve to ask her guardian for a gift of sorts. Her aunt was resting in the sitting room, quietly reading over a report from work. The fire crackling a few meters from her. She looked so much like James it was crazy. James had his father's build, but he had his mother's aristocratic features, it was especially prevalent in their faces.

Jasmine cleared her throat, no backing down now. Her guardian paused, a pair of gold rimmed reading glasses slid down her nose as she looked up.

"I have a few friends that I met during my time at the dueling tournament that wanted to visit for my birthday, as well as a few friends from school. Would that be alright as a gift?"

Euphemia put her report down gently on the coffee table in front other her. She was quiet for a few moments and Jasmine was worried that she was going to say no. She really needed to see Blaise and Theo. They found something and needed an excuse to come overseas for a few days to help her set some kind of spell up. Her birthday was a good cover to get them across the pond.