Hogwarts Legacy: The Dark Veins In Time

Summertime Sadness, Part VI

SEBASTIAN POV

The morning after witnessing the Red-Devil Phantoms waltz into the University of London and escorting Daphne home following her run in with them I wrote to the Auror Isaac Price with the rundown of the night. Though I would be happy to never see his pompous face again I knew contacting him would be more fruitful than involving Officer Plummly or anyone else, and a small part of me hoped that Isaac would maybe include me in whatever he planned to do about the gang going forward.

However it had now been two weeks since I sent the owl and hadn't heard a single word back from him. I became increasingly annoyed when daily deliveries of fresh roses arrived for Anne promptly at breakfast, always containing some moonminded note from Isaac that she never let me read. The man was obviously enjoying taunting me by ignoring my correspondence and making cliche attempts to woo my sister.

If anything good came from the night at the theatre it was Anne's change in attitude towards me. There was definitely some deep seeded resentment inside her, something I had accepted may never go away, but we were speaking to each other again almost the way we used to. Our joint sessions with Dr. Kessington had gone from silent standoffs to heated back and forth arguments over things I had done throughout our lives that she hated or an hour of sobbing when emotions ran particularly high.

There had been a couple talks of Solomon with Anne standing strong in her collaboration of the story Y/N had told the Ministry Authorities. Knowing she was still so sad and emotionally attached to the man made the weight of guilt heavy on my shoulders.

I had been seeing Daphne everyday for lunch however. She was still eternally grateful for 'saving her' that night though I really did nothing. When asked for details about what happened before she ran from the Red-Devils she wouldn't offer much, just the same story about getting lost and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It struck me as odd but I wasn't about to upset the only other person I had befriended since coming here. There were places I still wanted to go and needed the company.

"Anne?" I called, knocking on the door between our rooms before entering. Anne sat the couch in her room, sifting through a pile of old letters with a look of concern on her face. "Is something the matter?"

"Oh, um..I don't know. It's probably nothing." She answered, tucking the stack of papers beneath her. "Are you going out into the city today to see your friend?"

"Yes and I wanted to tell you I'd be gone awhile. We're going to a couple of places Y/N had told me about before and I wanted to see them for myself. Will you be okay without me until dinner time?" I asked. "Did your letters have bad news or something?"

Anne sat back into the couch and crossed her arms tightly, chewing on her lower lip. This was often a stance she took when something wasn't going her way and she didn't want to talk about it, forcing me to pry the problem out of her. "There's just something different about Ominis' letters as of late."

"How so? Did he finally run out of poetics to scribble away at you?" I sat next to her on the couch in surprise of her instant release of information. Ominis and Anne - now those two thought they were clever around me. It was nearing the end of our second year when Anne's crush on Ominis became obvious. She spent that entire summer before third year writing to him two and three times a week, and to my surprise he always wrote back immediately. Sometime during third year she had worked up the nerve to tell Ominis how she felt and from what I could gather, he accepted her feelings, often catching them holding hands in the halls and jumping away from each other every time I caught them.

When Ominis spent that first summer holiday with us before fourth year she had started to change - her hair was suddenly more neatly brushed, she started to wear tinted lip balms, and experimented with a number of perfumes - all in pursuit of Ominis. I often teased her that she could look like a dugbog and it wouldn't matter to the man, it wasn't like he could see her, which got me in trouble more than once. As fourth year started he asked if it were okay that he and Anne were "more than friendly" and of course, I approved.