Chapter 121

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Sunday 13/10/92

Dear Spencer

I'm glad to hear you're enjoying your classes and your classmates are treating you better. I'm especially glad that you're learning what a group project should really be like. Please don't offer to take over the other 4/5ths of the project even if you have already finished your allocated share, offer advice as to research resources if you think it will be well received but try to trust the others to do their share of the work until it becomes obvious that they aren't going to make it by the due date. As much as a lot of students you've come across are happy for you to do all the work for them, at the level you're working now there are probably some who won't be, who take pride in doing their own work just like you do, and if you get along with this group well and complete the project successfully as a group effort and do well with it maybe they'll want you to work with them again next time. Are any of your group friendly outside of the project and class?

I got invited to a party. Nearly Headless Nick, the Gryffindor ghost is having his 500th Deathday party on Halloween and invited me to it. It seems a funny thing to do to celebrate the anniversary of becoming a ghost instead of your birthday. I would have thought it was a sad occasion to become a ghost but apparently it's quite an achievement to hang around this long without 'passing over'. I think the party might be interesting and he was already upset about being turned down by the headless hunt because his head is still slightly attached, so I didn't have the heart to say no. At least Nick is going to let me invite my friends but he also said that Dumbledore might come so I'm going to have to invite Ron and Hermione, though I did mention it to the other boys as well hoping that all five of us would go.

Ron wasn't very happy with me about it. I didn't realise when I accepted that the party is on at the same time as the Halloween Feast. Seamus, Dean and Neville all refused to come. But as Hermione said, I did promise to go and it's a party, surely there will be food there even if ghosts can't eat and she promised that she and Ron would be there with me so at least I won't be the only living student there. I can't think what hold she has over Ron to make him agree to miss the Halloween feast.

The Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff quidditch teams heard about the Slytherin brooms and are as upset about it as we are, the Hufflepuffs have put out a petition wanting to change the rules to make quidditch fairer for everyone. I've signed it, even if it means giving up using my broom for quidditch. Like I said I'd rather win fairly and I'm not really interested in improving the house standing in the points, it's all just a tool to manipulate us into policing bad behaviour ourselves through peer pressure. Most of the Gryffindors, all the Hufflepuffs and about three quarters of the Ravenclaws have signed it plus a surprising handful of Slytherins, though of course none of the current team. I don't know if it will do any good. None of the other things that student complain about are taken seriously. Even things far more serious than whether quidditch is fair. Though McGonagall is a huge Quidditch fan so maybe she will intervene to make sure we have a chance of winning the Quidditch Cup to sit in her office. Otherwise, I don't think she'd do anything, she certainly didn't care when my broom gave the Gryffindor team the advantage, she's the one who chose it. She didn't buy it for me though, the money came from my vault which is a little annoying. I didn't need the best broom on the market, something equivalent to the brooms the other seekers were using would've been good enough and a whole lot cheaper. Who was she to decide to spend that much of my money? She couldn't have known how much was in my vault and how did she have the access to pay anyway? Dumbledore was supposed to have been removed from access before that so he can't have given her permission.

My Scoil Draiocht History studies are going well the textbooks and essay questions are all really interesting, though I still miss the class and the professors way of leading you to a point you made deeper connections and insights into things. I'll probably send the books to you after I finish, I'm sure you will love them. Hogwarts History class is still a terrible bore memorising dates of goblin rebellions and trying to stay awake listening to Binns drone on and on. How they can make something that should be about war and the differences between our cultures so boring and useless is beyond me. My other Scoil Draiocht class is Geography which a lot harder than history, not that it shouldn't be interesting but the book is full of dry facts and figures to learn rather than bringing the different cultures to life. There's a whole heap of things I wouldn't mind reading more about the human side of stuff to bring it all to life, but I won't have access to any supplemental reading until the summer.

Professor Idiot continues to be annoying. You are right about nearly every parent being able to teach the class better than he could. I'm sure that you're a better teacher than he is, though you'd have trouble not being able to actually demonstrate the magic. Even still it would be better than the hours of torture we experience at the moment, I don't think even Hermione has learnt a single useful fact or spell in that class this year so far and I can't imagine anything short of replacing the professor could improve the situation. I feel sorry for the fifth and seventh years who have to sit internationally standardised exams at the end of the year.

It would be bad enough that he's so full of himself and incompetent at anything he does, even if he didn't keep singling me out. At least half the girls in the class are all blushing and silly around him, even Hermione in spite of the way he's treating me which is making Dean and Seamus furious with both the idiot and Hermione on my behalf. They take it as proof that any affection she claims to feel for me is false but I don't know about that. I don't believe she's genuinely much of a friend but crushes seem to be a bit out of people's control. I can't believe she'd want to be crushing on the idiot if she could see clearly what he was actually like. I wish I could work out a spell to hex him with that would keep him away from me without me getting in trouble for it. I hope there is a genuine curse on the DADA professor position, I can't wait for it to get him. At least I know he won't be back next year if I am stuck here again. Is it wrong of me to hope he's one of the unlucky one's who is killed or too damaged to teach again?

Seamus and Dean are still my friends on the quiet, I think the idea of a secret friendship amuses them, but the fact we're friendly isn't totally secret. They often sit with me now in the library if we arrive before Hermione but they won't join us if she's already there and she often is. We've chosen an empty classroom to study in and I try to meet them there at least twice a week. We get our books out like we're studying but really we just enjoy spending time together We catch up on the news going around the castle and stuff. It is surprising the amount of stuff the two of them hear that I have no idea about. It's nice to be able to relax and let my guard down without being totally alone I like being able to say what I'm thinking without worrying who's listening and who they're going to tell, and to know that what the other's say is what they really think too. I also do most of my Scoil Draiocht homework there with them. They're not interested in doing a correspondence subject themselves but they are supportive of me doing it. I think that they realise that it helps me to have some nonmagical work to ground me and remind me that I'm not stuck here forever. I would like to invite Neville to join us, I'm sure he'd enjoy the break from Hermione's naggin and Ron's arguing with her as much as we do, but his mind isn't protected like Dean's and Seamus' is so I can't let him in on the secret of how close we are without putting Dean and Seamus at risk, still I feel bad for Neville always being the odd man out.

Dean spends a lot of time drawing, getting into the magical drawing class next year has encouraged him to work on what has always been a hobby in the hope if he gets good enough he could make a career of it. He often draws bits and pieces of me, hands feet ears, odd things but never a whole recognisable picture. I think that he's trying to protect the knowledge that we spend a lot of time together if someone looks through his sketchbook and also to protect my privacy since he knows that a good picture of me might actually be worth something to the newspaper or the likes of Ginny Weasley, and that if the wrong person found it, it would be like the signed photograph debacle all over again. He draws Seamus sometimes and it's a good likeness but most of the time he draws girls, older girls mostly and often wearing less than they do in a draughty castles in the Scottish highlands, or copying pictures from Seamus' dirty magazines or of Snape and the idiot being tortured or bitten by a werewolf or eaten by a hag. I helped him put stronger privacy charms on his sketchbook because most of the girls in the school would kill him if they saw it. One of my favourites is Snape as the vampire feeding on Lockhart. I must admit I'd like to sneak into the idiot Lockhart's classroom and paper it with photo's of him being tortured, killed or eaten, not the one of Snape, he would kill us when he found out and he would, but the idiot is too stupid to be able to track down who did it or who drew the pictures and I'm fairly sure Dean would go for it.

Your friend always

Harry

A/N: Thank you to all those who reviewed followed or favourited this story for your support.

Please stay safe everyone.