❝Sometimes I feel my sanity slipping away from me. Then I wonder how strong of a hold I even had on it in the first place.❞
In which Viola Jugson attempts to hold her world together, but it insists on crumbling apart.
BOOK TWO!
started: 1st january...
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SATURDAY DRAGGED BY slowly, the castle's clocks ticking sluggishly as though they were taking a weekend rest. With Harry's first lesson from Dumbledore looming over their heads, it seemed like the sun was forgetting it was supposed to set, the earth forgetting it was meant to keep spinning. Viola and the others filled the day with plenty of theories and speculation, but even that didn't help to while away the hours. Their eager minds were battling the effects of time and losing badly.
At long last, when six o'clock rolled around, Harry set off towards the Headmaster's office and left them behind in the common room. They still had to wait to hear about what was going on, but Viola was glad that the lesson was at least in motion.
She spent her time sitting across from Ron and Hermione, finishing off some homework at a snail's pace. But that only lasted about ten minutes, until she could no longer stand the background noise of the common room. Already she had rewritten the opening line for her Potions essay four times, and it still wasn't sounding right. With a quick explanation to the other two, she went instead to the library, but even that didn't prove to be much help.
Her mind was split, choosing to focus on unrelated topics, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't shift her attention. One part was wandering off to Dumbledore's office, imagining some complex magic that Harry must be learning. If it wasn't that, her mind was busy straying to the letter that was now stuffed deep in her pillow case. The one from someone who hopes to become a friend.
Its words had had her tossing and turning all night, echoing in her head until eventually, when the other girls had fallen asleep, Viola had given in, pulled her bed's curtains, dove under the duvet cover, and read the letter over and over again by wandlight. But if she had been hoping that it would make everything more clear, it had the opposite effect. There was nothing to read between any of the lines, nothing she had caught that had been invisible the first time. It was always the same information no matter how she looked at it.
Perhaps it had been written by the same person who had sent her back her newly repaired wand. Maybe there was no correlation at all. There was a chance that she knew the sender, and just as much of a chance to her oblivious mind that it was someone she had never even heard of before. There was an endless amount of possibilities, bundled together in a knot so huge that she couldn't even tell where the end was.
Since it had only arrived a day ago, it was still a while before the next one was due to come. The letter had said it would give her some time to think about her response, which felt more like a torture than the intended blessing. She didn't like having so long to mull things over, to weigh out decisions from all kinds of points of view. Her mind was like a see-saw, constantly tipping one way before even the slightest weight dragged down the other side. A rash decision to either ignore it or reply would be much preferred, but the sender wanted it to be thought-out. She disliked them already.
