#q79

when: quarantine hourz

who: this honestly quite frightening bunch of people & aggie

Dorcas sat down on a pumpkin and cast herself a heating charm. “I’m frustrated and I want to hex something, but there’s nothing I can hex, so this is me just speaking my frustration aloud!” she said to no one in particular. God, this was going to be an awful day. “I’m never walking around the grounds again.”

“Pick your poison,” he said to Hestia, “and then we can figure out how we’re going to sleep on this goddamn stone floor.” The initial shock of the quarantine had passed; he was almost excited to solve the problem of these thirty hours.

2 April, 1979

Thanks for the potion. How are you holding up? xx Dorcas

2 April, 1979

James,

Figured out how to charm notepaper so it flies. Hopefully this finds you and not some rando. (If you’re a rando, though, write me back. I’m bored.) I’m outside Hagrid’s hut, so I’m about two minutes away from asking someone to smash my head in with a pumpkin. Anyway, I hope you don’t have dragon pox. I wonder who does.

x Dorcas 

when: sometime in the thirty (30) CURSED hours of this quarantine

who: Potions quaransquad

“I dunno whether to be disappointed or relieved that we can’t get into the Potions storeroom.”

when: mid-afternoon, April 2, when the gang decides to go truly crazy

who: the experimental brewers! 

The potatoes had been diced and mashed and mixed with barley. But the frustrating part came next. Turning to a stoic-looking witch, Benjy said, “Do you want to keep the cauldron at the right temperature, or stir while I control the flame?”

2 April, 1979

Dearest Lillian,

I hope this letter finds you in good health and good company, or as best as you can make do with given the circumstances. The plague doctor seems to fear we will not make it to morning light, so I thought I had to write you and say my last farewells. Give my love to the music club. I think you and Remus will make admirable co-presidents. You are welcome to divide my record collection between the two of you; my only request is that he gets Honky Chateau and you get the White Album. This is because “Rocket Man” is his song and “Dear Prudence” is yours. I can say this to you without embarrassment because the pox is going to take me. 

Anyway, let me know where you are and if you can send me some blank parchment with your reply. If not I will write your next note on a Transfigured leaf, and I don’t know how that will go. (Honestly, at this rate both Flitwick and McGonagall should give me Os in their classes for sheer quarantine ingenuity. Currently I am trying to turn a pumpkin into a bed and I have never felt so sympathetic towards Cinderella’s fairy godmother.) Yours in these trying times, with best wishes and all my love, Dorcas H. M.