I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good

[alt_ron]

This is the longest day ever. Runes went on forever, and now it's Double Potions. Oi! I'm dying over here.

If my head falls into my cauldron, duck!

Only I was up almost all night because of Gareth Archer. Heard him shouting in the middle of the night. Ours is the closest room to theirs, so I was the one who got there first. Well, except for his mates, but they're a useless lot. Ed Bones and Jimmy Peakes were both sitting up, staring at him, but they seemed like they were still sound asleep, really. I swear Peakes was snoring. And soon as I got there, they both flopped over and were out again.

But Archer wasn't going back to sleep. No way. He didn't want to go see Madam Pomfrey, and I don't blame him, so we went downstairs and played chess. All the way til breakfast.

I didn't mind. I mean, McLaggen came in right after I did, but he's got OWLs this week and looked a wreck. And really, even on a good day, no one wants to spend time with McLaggen. And Archer was a bit of a mess, too.

Said he'd had a dream about his father coming back--you know about his dad, right?

Anywiz, last night he had this dream his father came back and was going to kill him. He figures it's because he read what those Dogstar people wrote in the journals yesterday. Thing is, I guess Archer really hated his dad. For leaving him and his mum and for being a traitor. Did you know MLE questioned him and his cousin--watshername, the Slytherin one--only Archer couldn't tell them anything because he hadn't talked to his father in years. Well, I guess he did tell them something--last night he told me he told MLE he was glad his father was dead.

I mean, yeah. That's dead awful, innit?

Comments

[alt_sally_anne]

Aurelia's the Slytherin who's his cousin. She's a year ahead of me and if she ever talks about it, it's not to me.

But I do know she was close to him, because they shared a House -- neither of her parents are Slytherins, you see (and obviously his children didn't grow up to be Slytherins, so.) They'd exchanged a lot of owls. When he died she gave all of his letters to MLE and I don't know if she ever got them back.

He wasn't exactly a traitor, you know. He died under suspicious circumstances while MLE was interviewing him but they didn't know anything for sure because he died so suddenly. People talked -- when Aurelia wasn't around -- and what everyone thought was that he WAS a traitor and killed himself somehow, you know? So that he wouldn't tell them anything no matter what. Because the other possibility was MLE killing him by accident and that didn't seem likely.

Private message to Ron

[alt_sally_anne]

I kept thinking yesterday about Woods, and whether he turned on his family. I don't think he turned them in. I mean, I don't think he went to MLE and said, 'hey, you should know this thing about my awful traitor parents.' But I think when everyone got arrested he might have figured the only way to save himself was to say, 'I always suspected they were rotten blood-traitors but I never knew for sure! I'm so disgusted by all of them, the horrible things they got up to while I was at school!'

I kept thinking

ugh

I kept thinking about your family. If someone in your family got caught doing something illegal, what the others would have to do, and whether you'd they'd be able to do it.

The Vale felt a lot like the Burrow, you know? Crowded and friendly with chickens running around and gardens and pick-up quidditch and homemade cider. The Woods were a lot like your family.