Ten years after I began at Hogwarts, Sebastian Sallow is back. And he's Professor Sallow now. He disappeared after the fall of Ranrok and Rookwood, after I lost Professor Fig, and after Ominis and I couldn't keep him from losing himself. But I never...
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Before crawling back into bed, I scamper to the coffee table to retrieve Sebastian's collection of letters and memories and place it on the free side of the bed, mentioning as I go, "I don't understand why you left your wand behind."
Sebastian lets out a deep sigh while I add, "I feel like your whole thing was taking responsibility for magic – learning the unforgivable curses in the name of understanding or what not."
"I was arrogant and foolish. I didn't know what I didn't know," he says while pouring two cups of tea, and continuing "when I think about the end of that year, where my headspace was, it really did seem like the only way. I had convinced myself for a time that my actions were justified but I couldn't cling to that for very long. They weren't justified. They were extreme. There were other ways to handle everything. Handle Solomon. All of it."
After a sip of his tea he says, frankly, "I knew better, I just couldn't do better. That really scared me."
I'm impressed by how objectively he is able to discuss all of this, and I feel validated by his words and how they resonate deep within me. "I get that."
"Yeah?" he asks.
"...yeah, Seb. You weren't the only one who did seriously questionable shit that year," I say with a kind of levity in my voice, but concerned that he, perhaps, forgot that part? But I move along with another question, "do you regret leaving your wand?"
Through a bite of a chunk of bread he explains, "honestly, no. It ended up being really good for me to sort of strip everything away. Pass me that, would you?" he gestures to the folio and begins rummaging through after I hand it to him.
We read together through a handful of the first letters. There are a handful from me about the minutiae of Hogwarts and Ominis and I laying low, studying for exams, and the occasional Hogsmeade trip. It occurs to me that none of my letters really convey what it was like during those years – how it felt. How Ominis and I clung to each other like life rafts, adrift at sea. How Ominis practically lived here in the Room of Requirement with me. How no one else understood what we'd been through. How broken and rejected we felt just being left behind to pick up the pieces of our tragedy on our own. How frantic we were to find Anne. But somehow it seems like too much to add into the narrative at this point.
Next, we read through the letters he wrote in response to mine. I'm glad he's here because he explains so much more to me than the letters do, all about living at an all-boys muggle school in Japan and studying there. He gets excited telling me about the principles of jujutsu, comparing the skills to dueling.
"It's all about turning your opponent against themselves. Not about being on the defense, so much as making an offense out of defensive strategies." I like to see his passion come through. "I could teach you a bit, if you'd like," he offers, and continues to exhaust the subject. But I don't mind listening. It's such a refreshing change from the years of not knowing.
