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A/N: Two letters today. As you can see the second isn't an answer to the first but sent before it arrived.
Sunday 12/22/91
DearHarry
Merry Christmas, I hope you didn't have to go home to the Dursleys and that you managed to have a enjoyable Christmas for a change. I guess though that it would've been nice to see your friends at the restaurant again and let them know that you're doing okay now and they don't need to worry about you at least during the school year.
I'm going home for Christmas of course, I have to go to give Mom's carers a break even if I didn't want to for Mom's and my own sake which I do. It's been a busy semester and I'll be glad of the break now my last exam is over. I'm not going to be so silly as to try not to read anything at all for days again. That was surprisingly stressful last time but I am not going to read anything related to my course work for the two weeks I'm home except for the essential pre-reading for the second Biochemistry unit.
I've sent you books again. But this time they're some of the better texts recommended for your year level in English, along with a list of the essay questions they'd use with those books. I enjoyed reading all these books and I hope you will too. Please don't feel that you have to write the essays but perhaps it would be a good idea to read the novels with some of those themes and questions in mind. I know it's kind of like more school work than a proper present but I hope you get some enjoyment out of the books as well.
I've also sent you a scarf and hat and socks. I know crimson and black might not be exactly your school house colours but they were so nice and soft. I bought a hat in blue for Mom and a purple and black set for myself. I know some people think purple is a little girly but hopefully the black offsets that enough. It's my favourite colour and I've never had the courage to wear it before but I think it suits me.
Don't worry about the cost too much. They were cheap because it doesn't really get cold enough to need them in the day time here and they weren't selling. I don't know why because it still gets awfully cold at night, though not as cold as Vegas at night in winter.
Merry Christmas Harry, I'll write properly soon.
Your friend always
Spencer.
Monday 23/12/91
Dear Spencer
Merry Christmas, I'm sending you a book that the Floursh and Blotts catalogue says is a classic novel everyone should read, though I found it a bit boring other than the magic and the stuff it told me about wizarding culture though I'm not too sure how accurate or up to date that is, and also my 'muggleborn guide to Herbology and potion making' , it's the nearest thing we have to Chemistry but when you read the book you'll see that it isn't very near at all. Snape doesn't teach much theory at all, not even the little that's in the book, it's all following recipes and essays on the uses and preparation methods of specific ingredients with very little information about why you should do things that way for a particular potion and not another. It's very frustrating.
As you can read there isn't any actual magic used by the brewer so you could probably make potions if you had access to the ingredients though you'd have to be very careful because they sometimes explode if you don't do it exactly right, just please don't try to take any of them, Madam Pomfrey told me that most of them don't work on muggles or squibs. There are some potions made specifically for squibs apparently that might work on you but we don't learn any of them at Hogwarts and I'm not game to risk it without knowing for sure. Still I hope you find the books interesting.
The sweets I sent are safe to eat though, there's no potions in them. My teammate Angelina actually bought the sweets for me to send you because first and second years aren't allowed to leave the school, but her mum is a muggle and she regularly eats all of the things that Angelina bought. The chocolate frogs have a spell on them to make them hop about when you first open them, so please be extra careful not to leave them where they could be taken by someone. The other two chasers on my team, Katie and Alicia showed me how to put preservation spells on them too so they'll keep as long as you want. I'll be able to do that with the biscotti next time I make them too. Not that I have access to a kitchen here, but I could send you some of my favourite things from the restaurant this summer, even meat would be safe to keep with this spell.
I'm staying at Hogwarts for the holidays. There're a few others staying too, including Ron and his brothers. His parents are going to Romania to visit one of the older brothers which seems pretty strange to me. Ron's always going on about them being poor and all his books and uniforms and his casual clothes are second hand but they can afford to go to Romania to visit for a fortnight. Not to mention that I would've thought they'd want the kids home over the holiday, since this is the first time Ron's been anywhere without his parents. Literally, he'd never spent the night anywhere without them, and now he's going to be away from them for more than six months because they decided to go and visit one of their older sons rather than having their four younger sons home for Christmas.
I'd tell you to wish Ethan and your mum a merry Christmas from me but they probably don't know about me. I haven't told my new friends about you, other than Dean that is and Seamus knows too since he's around when I give Dean the letters from his mum that Hedwig delivers to me with yours. I just don't want to listen to Ron rant about how stupid muggles are like he often does when Hermione mentions something her parents have done or said, and I don't want to tell Hermione things and ask her to keep them secret from Ron. It doesn't feel right. Not to mention that she'd ask about you and then get jealous that I have a friend so much more intelligent than she is that I turn to for advice. Dean and Seamus seem to understand without me telling them not to speak about the letters to the others. I hope I haven't upset you by telling you that my other friends don't know about our friendship. I wouldn't really mind if Neville finds out but it seems wrong to tell him and not Ron and Hermione. They are going to be angry enough at me when they find out, if they find out the rest of the dorm knew as well I don't think they'd ever forgive me.
Thanks for the reminder to be myself. You're right, Ron and Hermione aren't being very good friends in trying to stop me from studying the way I want to.
That sentence just struck me. I meant to write that they weren't very good friends if they were trying to change who I am and the way I do things but when I read it, I had another thought. What I wrote was literally true too. Ron and Hermione are both in their ways stopping me from studying as much as I would without them. Ron drags me away from my studying to play with him until the last minute when I have to rush to get the assignments done at all and they're never done as well as they could be. It also stops me from looking up other things in the library or doing any of the extra reading for my subjects. Hermione on the other hand wants me to concentrate on my assignments, in fact she seems to just about want to do half the work for us. I write a rough outline to plan out what I want to research and include, and she grabs it and corrects it as though it was a finished assignment, filling in just enough extra information to make sure I pass but don't do as well as she does.
Do you think that they might be trying to stop me from learning too much, just like Hagrid seemed to on Diagon Alley the day he took me to buy my books? Could they be doing it deliberately? And why? Or am I just being paranoid? Please tell me I'm just being paranoid and my friends aren't deliberately trying to sabotage me.
Hermione I could understand kind of. If she's been bullied as badly as we think she might have been she might feel that she needs to do our homework for us so we will stay friends with her, and it's understandable that she still wants to do better than we do since it's all her own work. And Ron could easily just be as lazy as he seems to be. His eating habits are a lot like Dudley's so it stands to reason that his study habits would be too. They're both signs of selfishness and the need for immediate gratification of an earlier stage of development. It could just be a coincidence, couldn't it?
You asked me about my other dorm mates. Yes, Dean and I get along okay, he's a nice guy but he mostly hangs out with Seamus who he met on the train and who's become his best friend. I like Seamus too but we don't really gel. I'm not sure why not. Seamus and Dean don't get along with Ron. It's mostly Ron's fault. They're both football fans and Seamus' dad sends him football scores and magazines which Ron thinks are rubbish. He's frequently complaining how dumb football is and you can imagine how well that goes down. Of course, I mean our football, what you call soccer but I'm sure the fans are the same. Seamus is a science fiction and superhero movie and comics fan. His mum sends him a new comic every week and he and Ron got into a huge argument the other day when he caught Ron trying to throw some out. They were encroaching into Ron's stuff, neither of them are at all tidy and their stuff is everywhere but that's no excuse. I just throw things back onto their beds when I'm cleaning my part of the dorm.
Neville the fifth boy in our dorm and the only other tidy person, doesn't really fit in with Me and Ron or Seamus and Dean either, though he's a lot more polite about it, he just doesn't understand all the football talk from Dean and all the movie and comic references from Seamus. He sits with us and Hermione in classes when the tables sit even numbers and he's wickedly good at Herbology so Hermione likes to partner with him then, and in potions so she can make sure he doesn't blow us all up and she protects him as much as she can from Professor Snape's wrath. He's grateful because he's terrified of Snape, even if she is a bit too condescending about it. He sometimes sits with us to study and I like working with him, we both just knuckle down and get on with it asking each other for help as we need it but not assuming that the other person doesn't understand things properly unless we ask. Other times he sits with with Lavender and Parvati when they're actually working and not just gossiping but I can't join the girls, they get all giggly and silly. I think Neville also has friends from before we started school in Hufflepuff. I wonder why he was so disappointed about the idea that he would be put there instead of Gryffindor. He might have been better off with them.
Is Ethan tidy? Does it drive you nuts that he's not and you are or that he's a neat freak and you're not so much? I realise I don't know for sure whether you're naturally tidy or whether you just had to keep everything in the sealed containers in the hideout. It's funny some of the things we don't know about each other when we know so much else isn't it.
Your friend
Harry
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