Parchments, or
Green Groweth the Holly
Chapter 18
Dear Mum, wrote Lucia in the letter (on parchment) an owl had just dropped on Dita's lap, earning an incredulous look from the other person occupying the bench in the park in Budapest.
Everything's been going well at school. It's all quiet, no excitement, which everyone is very happy about, because exciting things have been happening continually for seven years or something, and everyone's sick of it. That's what Chador says. I know he's sick of it. Any time the War comes up, he looks like he's trying very hard not to think of it, and the harder he tries the more he thinks of it, and then it makes him look like his skin is stretched too tight over his bones. Luna talks about it very calmly, but she's glad it's over too. Astoria says she's sick of it, but I think she kind of misses the excitement. Sometimes I wonder if she really should have been in Gryffindor. But she's a good prefect for Slytherin, so maybe she's just what Slytherin needs. I mean, they all seem pretty normal, you know, not crazy like I sort of expected Slytherins to be. The little kids kind of watch the older ones to find out how Slytherins are supposed to act now, and poor Astoria is the one who has to decide how Slytherins are going to act and show them. And me too, Professor Sinistra says, because I'm an older Slytherin too and a Malfoy, technically. I told that Hat it was right for me to be in Slytherin because of who my relatives are and because I'm just normal, more or less. Having Astoria and Luna and Chador as my friends certainly helps. Luna says she used to be very unpopular, but now that she's a hero from the war, everyone's nice to her. Which doesn't seem quite right to me. Shouldn't you be nice to someone whether she's a hero or not? And anyway, Luna is very, very odd but very, very sweet. How could you not be nice to her?
Speaking of Luna, Mummy, she introduced me to Moaning Myrtle, who is one of the strangest people I ever met. Not just because she's a ghost, which is strange enough, but because it seems like the whole purpose of her existence (if she exists) is to whinge and be weird. Of course she was murdered, which is horrible. You can't help being sorry for her and annoyed at her at the same time. Luna told me Draco was Myrtle's friend, but Myrtle won't tell me about him yet. She keeps promising and putting it off. I think she wants me to keep coming back to visit her. It must be so dull to be a ghost. I wonder if Luna and I could get her interested in something else. It'll look strange for us always to be hanging around bathrooms (Myrtle died in one), but Luna's never afraid of looking strange. I admire her for that. So does Chador. He says you never do or learn anything new if you're afraid of looking different from everybody else. He's a very smart boy. I wonder if he likes Luna. They're both in Ravenclaw. But she's a year older.
Anyway, my classes are going well too, even DADA and flying. Professor McGonagall isn't as scary as I thought she'd be. She's strict, but she's always fair. Professor Snape was never fair, they say. He always favored Slytherins, which seems kind of stupid to me. Professor Sinistra doesn't. She's fair too, but she's less stern than Professor McGonagall. Some of the others (even Slytherins) say she's boring, but that's only because she talks quietly and evenly and doesn't make a big fuss. It must be very strange going from Professor Snape to her. I'm not sure if they miss him or not.
Oh, and I finally managed to make one of the elm brooms obey me, after almost a month and a half of trying. Chador's spruce broom was very finicky and didn't like me, and they finally found me an old walnut broom that behaves very well, but Professor Sprout and I have also been looking into the properties of elm to see if knowledge can't overcome my prejudice, and it seems to have done. At least it has begun to do. It won't fly me more than two feet off the ground yet, but Chador thinks that's because I don't want it to, which Madam Hooch said was "an interesting theory" and then never mentioned again. Doesn't anyone study these things? People keep saying I should be in Ravenclaw because I want to know how everything works, but Slytherins have to know how things work too. They really should have Science of Magic classes. Maybe when I teach here…
I suppose I should stop writing before this parchment gets too heavy for the poor owl. Victoria keeps playing with the feather in my quill pen as I write, which is why my handwriting is so bad. She always comes with me to my classes, though I wonder what will happen when she's too big to fit in my pocket. Professor McGonagall seems to be the only one who knows she's there, and she's never complained about it. I wonder if that's because she's a cat herself, being an Animagus. I wonder what it feels like to turn into an animal and if you stop thinking when you do.
Write back and tell me if you're close to finding Draco.
Love, Lucia
Dita smiled as she rolled up the parchment. Reading between the lines, she could tell that Lucia was as happy as she'd ever been, perfectly in her element. "I wonder if" and "I wonder how" had always been her pet phrases.
As for herself, she'd had the same growing sense of the foreboding about Draco that his mother had described. Maybe it was only because of traveling for several weeks across what used to be Yugoslavia, where a war at least as terrible as the recent Wizarding War had ended only a couple years ago. You could still see it in the buildings and in the people. She knew exactly what Lucia meant when she spoke of Chador's response to mentions of the War. She had been barred from entering Kosovo, where the war was still raging below the surface despite a ceasefire a couple months ago, but she'd been able to pick up Draco's trail all across Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia. What had it been like for him, traveling across this devastation while running from devastation back home and carrying his own devastation with him?