Written for Hogwarts' Muggle History Assignment: Task 8 - Angelica Schuyler: Write about never being satisfied.
Also for the Auction Challenge: (character) Rita Skeeter, the Writing Club - Disney Challenge: Tigger - Write about someone who is always moving and has a lot of energy.
Word count: 452
never satisfied
When Rita is eight, her mother gets her a quill. It's a simple thing — just a white quill, with a tip that she has to sharpen every other day because otherwise it starts scratching holes in the parchment she uses.
She knows her mother doesn't really mean it kindly. She's tired of hearing Rita talk all the time, always asking questions, always running around.
(Rita's father is gone now, and he's not coming back.
Rita pretends she doesn't know why, but she does.
She saw him, once, with that girl he liked. Younger and prettier than Rita's mother, and he had kissed her and touched her like Rita knew he was only supposed to touch her mother.
"It's our little secret, alright?" Her father had told her later, when he had found out that Rita knew. "I'll buy you ice-cream if you promise not to tell your mother."
Rita likes ice-cream, so she had promised. Even now, she doesn't think she regrets it — even though her father left and hasn't sent one letter since, not even for her birthday.
But secrets, she decides, are bad.)
So her mother is tired, because Rita is too much and she has to work twice as much as before now, to support them both, and she gets Rita a quill and some cheap parchment to keep her busy.
It backfires.
Oh sweet Merlin does it backfire.
.
Rita writes and writes and writes. She writes stories, like the kind her father used to tell her before bed.
(She rips those up afterward, and even if she wants to burn them she can't, so she saves the scraps and hides them underneath her bed.
Sometimes, late at night, she takes them out and stares at the dark, shiny ink until the words blur and she falls asleep.)
She rewrites the news too, makes them better, so that when she tells them to her mother it'll make her smile again.
It doesn't. her mother snatches the parchment right from her hands and rips it in two before throwing it away like it's garbage.
"Lies!" she screeches. "I didn't raise you to be a fucking liar!"
You're just like your father, she doesn't say, but only just.
Only just, and Rita hears it anyway.
It's fine. She'll do better next time. Her story will be so real her mother won't be able to call her a liar again.
(But she does. Again, and again, and again, until Rita can feel the word digs its way through her skin, its poisonous vines wrapping themselves around her heart.
Better. She had to be better. Has to write more.
And maybe… maybe her mother will love her again.)
