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Old 12-29-2018, 02:35 AM   #114 (permalink)
Cassirin

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Hogwarts RPG Name:
Mercer Branxton
Ravenclaw
Seventh Year

Ministry RPG Name:
Genevieve James
Minister's Office

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Made of Awesome | Ern-la the Best-wa | TZ's Apogee

8.5 Personal History

Rose stumbled into the common room after patrols, happy to be alone once she'd ditched Yates. Or maybe he had ditched her so he could sneak away for a quick snog with Mei. Or, knowing him, to meet some other girl drawn into his icky spider web of charm. Regardless, Rose was well rid of him, and she immediately made a beeline for the table where her friends were studying. Her heart swelled at the sight of them diligently at work on their homework, especially Al, who was happy to let Rose take the lead on assignments. Not tonight, however, which was a relief after the evening Rose had suffered. She wasn't in the mood to do multiple copies of the same assignment, not when all she really wanted was her slippers and as much distance from her crummy, creepy fellow sixth year prefect as possible.

The heart swelling was short-lived. To Rose's dismay, although Jayne and Al were sitting at the study table surrounded by books, they did not seem to be engaging in homework-related activities. Instead, they had created an army of parchment origami creatures who were battling themselves into tiny piles of paper mush. Under different circumstances, it would be an impressive bit of magic, but considering they had a History of Magic essay due the next day and a Charms practical the day after, any delay at all in their classwork was unacceptable.

Rose snatched up a particularly clever paper dragon that was about to attack Jayne's lumbering erumpent. Ignoring the protests from Al, she set about unfolding it, sticking them both with alternating dark glances. "Merlin, I can't believe you two. Have you even started your essay for tomorrow? It isn't the time for you to be slacking off your school work, not just because we're sixth years and everyone else seems to do. I don't have to tell you..."

"Rose. Shut it." Jayne used the surprised shock that stalled Rose's movements, grabbing the parchment back out of her hands and refolding it with a wave of her wand. "We're not all you. We don't have to care about the stuff you care about."

Which was, honestly, just mean. Rose did not go around foisting her passions on people, but she cared enough to want them not to have to repeat sixth year for want of a few completed assignments. It wasn't purely selfish, either - not only did Rose not want to spend seventh year without Al and Jayne in classes with her, not only did she want Al to succeed to he could be Head Boy, not only did she want Jayne to succeed so she could be Quidditch captain, not only those things. She also wanted to save them the stigma of failure. She wanted them to enjoy the warm glow of a job done well. Rose Weasley was an excellent friend, and it was just preposterous of Jayne Wood to suggest otherwise.

"You shut it." Not the cleverest of comebacks, but then Rose was not often noted as being particularly quick on her feet.

"You're not really helping matters," Al addressed Jayne as he took back his dragon. "But thanks."

Thanks, though? He was thanking Jayne for being a snarky twit to his own flesh and blood. "I do not understand you two anymore. I don't think I understand anything." Rose sank into an empty chair and laid her head against the table. The cool blankness of it felt good against her cheek, uncomplicated and somehow comforting. "You don't have to be hostile about it. I was trying to help."

"Yeah, but we don't need lectures, do we? We aren't babies," Jayne pitched in again, unaccountably aggressive, which Jayne never was except on the pitch.

Al gave Jayne a quelling glance before refolding one of the scraps of paper into a bird, which he placed in front of Rose. A dove. A peace offering. How very poetic of him. "We're not writing the essay for History of Magic. I should have told you before, but we just... I just can't do it."

"We can't," Jayne agreed.

In spite of the placating tones and actions, Rose found herself even more stymied than if Jayne had continued to yell at her. How did one just decide not to do a homework assignment? It seemed like an impossible thing, like gravity failing. Doing homework because it was assigned was a law of nature, or at least a law of social norms. What happened when you failed to perform according to the laws of social norms? Society rose and fell on such things, and the first step to anarchy was something like refusing to turn in an assignment. Rose stared at them both in open horror.

"Told you she wouldn't understand," Jayne said simply, returning to the drawn lines of battle across her end of the table.

"No, I do not understand," Rose agreed, looking from Al to Jayne and back again. "But you could try explaining it instead of sitting in judgement about it."

All things considered, if they were going to take a stand against homework, Rose imagined it would be something a little more difficult than a lousy History of Magic essay. And about their own history, no less. They need only consult the book to point out the ways the author was obviously biased and flawed, as Rose had done. In fact, her notes on the ways the author got it wrong had taken an extra twelve inches of parchment, nearly doubling the length of her essay. She could have written more. She wanted to, in fact, but thought that discretion was her watchword in times like these. If Al and Jayne were going to give up on homework, they should save it for something that required real research and time in the library that could be going to other things, not a simple assignment like this.

Explore how the Chamber of Secrets came to be opened during the 1992-1993 school year.

"It's a really easy assignment, honestly, even if the book gets it totally wrong. I can give you my outline, and you'll..."

"I'm not writing it," Al shook his head and turned all his attention to removing some scorch marks from the table top. Perhaps they were a result of his battle, but it was more likely the by-product of some long ago Charms practice gone awry. A surprising number of scorch marks could be found throughout the Common Room. "You don't know what it's like, having to write an essay about my dad. Having to force myself into this out of body persona just to read the text, or having to distance myself from my own history just to write about him. And my mum... do you know what it's like to hear about the Chamber of Secrets opening and know that your mother was possessed by the Dark Lord? To have to somehow put yourself into her shoes to have lively class discussions about whether or not she enjoyed it on some level? It's sick, Rose. I'm not doing it."

Rose sat back in her seat, stunned. They all handled it differently, this thing about being one generation removed from history itself, but it did not mean that Al was alone in how he felt. Did he honestly forget that he had two siblings in the school and innumerable Weasley cousins? That there were people all over Hogwarts who had lost someone during the war? It was personal to everyone, and only Binns failed to realize it. Binns and Al, apparently.

"Of course I know what it's like. Don't you think that when they talk about how brave my dad was in the books and articles, about what he sacrificed, that I don't think about how he sounds like some fairy tale story? They don't know how he can never find a matching pair of shoes. Or how he fights with my mom about the stupidest things. Or how he always burns toast, always. History forgets about who people are and only remembers what they did, and it gets the why and the how wrong almost all the time. And my mom..." Rose shook her head at him. He knew how often Hermione Granger-Weasley was raked over the coals by academics and historians. Rose's mother was the most intelligent person Rose knew, was sincere in everything she did, and was genuinely kind. She was a good person, maybe too good, since she left an impossible bar for Rose to meet, but she was recorded in history books as a clingy groupie of Harry Potter. Her contributions were generally wrongly attributed, and her meteoric rise through the Ministry was often bashed as something beyond her due. She was the lucky girl who had been allowed within Potter's circle of friends, and she continued to reap the benefits to this day. None of what she had was properly earned, according to some. It was nauseating, gender and blood bias mixed with historical inaccuracy alive and well in modern Wizarding society. "History will never remember my mom the way she deserves. They canonize my dad and villify my mom. Of course I know."

"No, it's more than that," Al insisted, his jaw set stubbornly. "I don't want to have to spend the rest of my life explaining to people why they are wrong. I don't want to have to rewrite history over and over because the historians aren't getting it right. I just want... I just want to feel normal."

"What, like you... don't want to be you? You wish your father wasn't Harry Potter?" Rose asked in a hushed tone, mostly because Al's rising one was bringing them unwanted attention.

"No. Yes." He sighed in exasperation. "I don't know. I want him to be Harry Potter to me, but not to anyone else. I want him to belong just to me, but right now he belongs to everyone, and everyone has their own version."

She still didn't understand, which was frustrating to Rose. She always understood Al, but right now, he wasn't making any sense. "You can't change that, though. You can't make him stop being the Chosen One."

"I KNOW," Al roared, clearly done with the conversation. Every head in the room turned toward them, toward the spectacle of Al shouting when he was always so good-natured. Jayne took Al's hand and squeezed. "I know that, Rose. I do. But I can refuse to write the essay."

"What about you?" Rose asked Jayne, almost wearily. Jayne's father was famous in his own regard, but they hadn't had to write any essays on him. Maybe that's the part she hated, the fact that they didn't pay enough attention to Quidditch stars. It seemed a bit thin, but Rose decided nothing else would surprise her today. Not with Al yelling, and the both of them refusing to do their homework.

She shrugged. "I just think it's stupid, and if Al doesn't want to write it, then I won't write it either. We have thousands of years of history to cover, but Binns wants to talk about something that happened 20 years ago."

"Recent history is still history. It still formed society as it stands today," Rose insisted, although she wasn't sure why she bothered. It wasn't like she agreed with the stance Binns was taking on this, plus she could see the harm in dealing with recent history with the same clinical detachment with which they dealt with goblin wars and old treaties.

Jayne's paper niffler jumped on Al's dragon and was immediately set on fire by a tiny burst of flame from its mouth. Very impressive spell work. "It isn't everyone's history, Rose. It's my history. It's your history. It isn't something up for public consumption. And our minds are made up."

Based on the settled look to their faces, Rose agreed with that assessment. They weren't going to budge on this, and she could either waste her time and alienate them further by arguing, or she could let them be. She fiddled with the dove Al had made for her, flapping the wings slightly as they resumed their game once again. The dove wasn't made from parchment, as she had assumed, but from a finer quality paper that had print slanting across the wings to disappear underneath the body. With a curious frown, Rose untucked a wing and unfolded it outward, trying to catch a phrase or sentence that made sense in the jumbled bits of text.

"Harry Potter was destined for greatness from before his birth. Surely the first signs of the impending…

It was Al's History of Magic textbook.
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