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whitechapel198 words. Storybook logic.
When Luna is small, her mother reads to her from picture books with glossy, brightly-colored dragons flickering across the page. Luna likes the pictures; she likes to sit with the book spread out in front of her, and she watches the bright animals chase each other across the page. Luna’s mother reads the books in a rather orderly way, giving the sentences a staccato, hopscotch sort of rhythm. Luna doesn’t like the words in the books because they don’t match up with the pictures very well. The pictures are pleasant to look at, soothingly chaotic, but the words are just sing-song and far too obvious.
“The dragon is angry,” her mother chants, pointing out the words as she reads. (Luna is supposed to be watching the words instead of the pictures, which Luna thinks is silly.) “The dragon roars. The King is afraid of the dragon.”
On the page, the dragon blows a few tendrils of fire at the King, who cowers behind his shield. The dragon’s blue scales shimmer in the colored-pencil sunlight.
“He’s not afraid of the dragon,” Luna corrects her mother. “He’s afraid of the fire.”
She thinks the story makes more sense that way.
176 words. Writing analysis.
Luna thinks you can tell an awful lot about somebody by the way they write.
It’s not just with handwriting—though Padma’s sister dots her i’s with hearts, and this is rather telling. It’s also the specific manner in which they decide to torture grammar and sentence structure. Parvati is an easy example, simply because she uses Luna as a note-passing emissary fairly regularly. She never uses capital letters outside her essays, she underlines people’s names even when they don’t warrant emphasis, and she is a master of the dangling participle.
When she tries to explain this, Ginny isn’t especially interested in the linguistic implications. “What do the notes talk about?” she asks eagerly.
Luna shrugs. “Parvati sorts of things, I suppose. The last one had hair-clips and a boy, but most of them do.”
Ginny wants to hear more about the boys, but Luna doesn’t think she understands. The content doesn’t change very much, but the sentence structure and affected stylistics change a little each time, and they say more about Parvati than she knows.
88 words. Nurturing instincts.
When he was seven, Tom found an injured baby bird that had fallen out of its nest into the bushes.
He watched it for a few moments, watched its unbroken wing flap frantically as it squeaked for its mother. He wasn’t sure what he ought to do with it. The mother-bird, of course, was nowhere to be seen.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he told it finally. “You’re a stupid bird. Your mother isn’t going to want you now.”
The bird showed no signs of having heard him.
100 words. Sorting one's thoughts.
Well now. This is very interesting.
Good.
I could, of course, tell you what you already know. But you know yourself very well already, don’t you? You know who you are and you know what you want. And I know what you want, too.
I don’t like that you’re looking at what I think.
Your thoughts are safe with me. But it’s not what you think that’s important right now—it’s what you feel.
They’re the same thing.
That may be. Now tell me something, Tom Riddle. What is it that you’re most afraid of?
I’m afraid of being nothing.
200 words. First Response.
In 1979, Lily is transferred from the trauma unit to first response. She feels more like a soldier than a Healer.
In Muggle neighborhoods, she has to fight tooth and nail to get to the victim before the Obliviators do. They’re so caught up in national security that they don’t realize that more neural interference is the last thing someone needs after Crucio—so desperate to keep a lid on everything that they even obliviate corpses just in case. She loses one because his brain couldn’t take it; after that she hexes her way past them and explains herself later.
She gets used to recognizing patients more quickly than she likes to think. The first time she loses a former classmate it feels like a knife to her stomach. Two weeks later, she pronounces an Order member she recognizes through the blood and it all feels disturbingly routine.
She heads to the scene expecting to see a dead body because they so rarely make it to the hospital. Lily gets used to telling families she’s very sorry for their loss, and even when she had to pull a mask away she can make herself sound as though she means it.
183 words. Physiology of a curse.
Most people believed, mistakenly, that Avada Kedavra killed by causing cardiac arrest. It wasn’t nearly that simple.
A cardiac arrest, even one brought about without blood clots or aneurysms, could be pinpointed as the cause of death by very delicate magical means. As the autopsy instructor had explained, there was no cause of death to be found in the flesh when the Killing Curse had been used. For many years, no one knew exactly how the curse worked; even now it was only detectable by the fact that it couldn’t be detected.
Research eventually revealed that on a molecular level, the curse was perfect. It wasn’t so clumsy as to attack a single organ. The magic reached every cell in the body and, all at once, arrested mitochondrial respiration. Every cell simultaneously lost energy and stopped functioning, the life virtually drained out of them; in that fraction of a second, everything ceased. It was horribly efficient.
Lily’s medical textbooks played over in her head, clinical and utilitarian, and didn’t quite manage to drown out the sound of the words in the next room.
182 words. Narcissa; pragmatism.
When people behave as though they like him, Severus knows that it’s really just because they think he’s useful. As a general rule, this doesn’t upset him—it’s one of the necessary consequences of being in Slytherin.
It does bother him a little in Narcissa, but it’s because her brand of diplomacy is too obvious. She keeps him around because she’s a poor hand at potions, and rather than offering any useful skills of her own in return, she startles him by buying him a book for his birthday and makes oblique references to her social connections. Her world consists mostly of other people, and Severus doesn’t have much use for any of them.
Narcissa is helpful in one way, but it’s not something she seems to intend. The fact that he’s got a Black making every appearance of being friendly to him prevents the other Slytherins from thinking to ask why they’ve never heard of his father. He could handle them quite easily if they did, of course, but Narcissa’s existence saves him a modest amount of trouble. He tolerates her.
307 words. MWPP; patterns of behaviour.
When you step back and look at it objectively, their pattern never changes.
It’s usually Black who devises the trap. He has an engineer’s mind and a keen grasp of cause and effect, and can orchestrate new ways to make you miserable as easily as he can turn a flower into a moth.
Lupin serves two purposes. He’s the liaison to the authorities, usually, because he has a way of widening his eyes just so and nobody ever believes he could do anything wrong. More often than not, he’s also the bait. He’ll pretend to be friendly, or pretend he’s really going to act like a prefect this time—anything to lull you into a false sense of security. He’s good at that.
Of course, Potter deals strictly in dramatics. He steps in at exactly the right moment to maximize the impact of his presence; he pretends to be clever or cruel or merciful, depending on who the target audience is. If the world is a stage, Potter does everything he can to make sure he’s front and center.
And Pettigrew—boring, shy, sharp-eyed little Peter—irons everything out when the others aren’t looking. He deals in details and damage control and has made himself indispensable.
Their behavior is almost algorithmic, to the point where it always stands out vividly in retrospect.
Lupin returns from another one of his too-regular absences, wearing a disarming smile and stammering a little over the lies he tells.
Pettigrew uses the wrong words here and there, laying the bait as carefully and meticulously as the plan requires.
“If you’re so curious,” says Black, pretending to lose his temper, “then you can bloody well see for yourself.”
You follow their lead because they’ve made sure you will, and Potter, just as the pattern predicts, leaps in and seizes his chance to shine.
203 words. Of abysses gazing back.
Remus sometimes thought that for someone so outspoken against them, James seemed startlingly uninterested in the dark arts.
It didn’t interfere with his daily school performance, of course. So long as everything was prefaced with “Defence Against,” James was thrilled to learn about new aspects of the dark arts—but that was as far as he believed he ought to go. He thought that the defence aspects alone would help him hold his own against the Death Eaters, but he didn’t feel the need to examine the dark arts themselves.
“It’s a slippery slope,” he would say loftily. “If you get too close to learning them, next thing you know you’ll be using them.”
“Are you familiar with the phrase ‘know thine enemy’?” Remus asked dryly over the top of a book about cursed artifacts. James just repeated his stubborn moralising and wouldn’t hear a word to the contrary.
Remus didn’t press the subject, but he privately thought that James was being short-sighted. He thought it was more important to adhere to a general moral path than to stick unbendingly to guidelines that might hinder him. If knowing his enemy occasionally led him places he’d rather not go, the benefits outweighed the risks.
111 words. Sirius used to just get it for the crosswords.
He’s taken to flipping to the back of the paper and skimming the obituaries to see if any of the names are familiar. It’s morbid, a bit, but he knows it’s worse to ask after a school acquaintance and be met with blank looks. Emily? Sirius, she’s been dead for weeks, didn’t you see? This way, he can go through the list of people he knows and mentally cross them off before he has to hear it from someone else.
The list gets shorter by three or four names every morning. He wonders, vaguely, how many people will be left on his list before he ends up in the obituaries himself.
294 words. Sowing seeds of doubt.
The door swings shut, and the remaining three exchange a grim look, their smiles fading.
There’s a heavy silence. Peter chews nervously on his lip and glances at the door. “He’s... been doing rather a lot of that lately, hasn’t he?” he says, looking as though he feels a bit guilty for saying it.
James pulls off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose as though he has a headache. “He’s always had things going on that we didn’t know much about. Remus doesn’t talk a lot, you know?”
“Oh, he talks plenty.” Sirius has his arms folded and is glaring at the tabletop. “He talks about the artifacts and Dark Arts books he’s collecting like they’re fucking Chocolate Frog cards.”
Peter squirms. “Isn’t that kind of a know-what-you’re-facing thing? He can’t mean any harm by it.”
Sirius gives a derisive laugh. “He thinks it’s fun, Peter. He knows just enough to be dangerous and not nearly enough to know what he’s getting into.”
“Would be getting into,” Peter says, though he sounds uncertain.
James puts his glasses back on and leans back in his chair restlessly. “Look, I think what he does is dangerous,” he concedes. “But you can get into the Dark Arts without being a Death Eater, and if that’s all it is then it might not be too late to kick some sense into him.”
Sirius’s expression suddenly shifts from deep skepticism to a look of dawning realization. “Peter,” he says slowly, “who was it you saw him talking to at the Ministry, again?”
All eyes are on Peter now, and he goes a bit pale.
“It was hard to tell at a distance,” he says in a small voice, “but I think it might’ve been Rabastan Lestrange.”