𝐂𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐌𝐎𝐎𝐍 𝐒𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐒, oliver wood

six.

06

FRIENDLY GAMES

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June sat at the dinning table for Slytherin as the other students began to shuffle in for breakfast. How long has she been there? Long enough to have vivid memories of house elves cleaning up and loading tables. They had worked around her silently, even placed a steaming cup of herbal tea in her hands. 

"How long have you been here?" Louisa suddenly spawned in front of her, Juniper hadn't even heard her approach the table. "I was waiting outside your dorm for ten minutes until I figured you came down for first pick of the food."

Louisa was buttering a piece of toast, cutting it into triangles and placed it on June's plate silently. She added a few grapes and an orange. 

"I thought the house elves could use a hand," she forced a smile as she rubbed the lack of sleep from her eyes. She could feel the back of her legs growing numb. How long had she really been there? 

"Are you still having troubles sleeping?"

June robotically took a sip of her, now cold, herbal tea. "It has gone beyond troubles. It is now bordering impossible. I just lay away at night staring at the canopy, listening to the other girls gossip about that Diggory guy and plotting my revenge. I got so tired of their gossip that I set up camp in the common room this week."

Lousia watched her with a sort of motherly worry, a look she had seen on her sister Rosemary's face many times. "I have it on good authority that Professor Snape has teacher meetings for the next hour. Why don't you sneak down and brew a Potion for Dreamless Sleep? It worked wonders for me last year during exam season."

Juniper briefly recalled nodding her head as she began to make her way back down to the dungeons, slippers still on her feet. Students were still making their way back to the dinning room for breakfast, sending her glares at her tired stance. It was barely a month into the term and she was already walking around as if she had the weight of exams on her shoulders. First years looked the most worried.

She expected to find the potions classroom empty, but there was Ennis Elms polishing cauldrons with sweat dripping down his brow. "What are you doing here?" he asked as he barely looked up from his pile of cauldrons,.

"What are you doing here?" she asked suspiciously, staying in the doorway. 

"One week of detention for handing in my essay late. Snape wants these so shiny that he can see his reflection. Don't know why," he moved onto the next cauldron. "You next. Why are you doing here? Shouldn't you be enjoying breakfast?"

His stomach growled. June took his freshly polished cauldron and passed him the orange that she had slipped into her pocket for later. She didn't have much of an appetite these days, but somehow the citrus of the orange was one of the only flavours that she could tolerate. He was too focussed on eating the orange that he didn't complain about her taking the cauldron and a heap of other supplies.

"A friend of mine needs a sleeping potion for her exams next week. I thought that I would do her a favour," she began to meticulously pour the ingredients into the cauldron. Juniper expertly diced up the wormwood and crushed the lavender.

"I can never get that one right, I always mess up on the wormwood," his mouth was full of orange as he spoke and usually June would have snapped, but she didn't.

"Here," she beckoned him over with her head and made him watch as she held wormwood tightly in her right and the knife in her left. "If you make a bridge with your fingers, you can hold it tightly so that it doesn't jump around. Slice it like this, then turn. And then slice it like this, then turn. Easy to do once you get the hang of it."