Lexi Layyer my only weakness*hp fanfic*

A letter to a Malfoy

I’m really worried about Lexi.

Honestly, I never thought those words would leave my mouth several months ago, but there it is.

There’s just something so odd about her whole disappearance. As soon as I finished that Daily Prophet article at Christmas, I knew not only that I felt slightly sick about the whole thing, but there was something very fishy about her going missing.

For one – why was Lexi out on London’s South Bank in the first place? The article said she was out Christmas shopping – but why there? What’s out in that Muggle area that isn’t in Diagon Alley?

Secondly, was it a coincidence that there was a Death Eater attack there, right at that very same time?

And furthermore, is it a coincidence still that Malfoy and Blaise Zabini are no longer at school?

It all just seems so… strange.

But what’s frustrating is that no one will even listen to me when I try to mention it.

It’s all the Prophet’s fault – honestly, that awful newspaper makes me worried for humanity. The Christmas edition of the paper with the headline about Lexi’s disappearance made record sales, apparently, and ever since they’ve become incapable of talking about anything else.

At first I was almost happy that they were doing it – for once, it seemed the Prophet was doing the right thing by getting her name known, encouraging people to step forward if they had any kind of information about her whereabouts, and just getting her case recognized. It wasn’t long before her name was on the lips of every wizard around – and everyone was rooting for her return.

It really seems that if you can drum the same lie into people’s heads enough times, they really do start to believe it. It was just like the summer after fourth year, when Harry and Dumbledore announced that Voldemort was back. The Prophet published so many articles declaring them both mad that people started to ignore reason and they were genuinely deluded into believing that the Ministry was right and that they were safe.

And it was the same thing with Lexi.

“She’s coming back,” Ron would say, over and over again. I was never sure if he was trying to convince me or himself. “They’re saying it everywhere. They’ve got Aurors to temporarily stop looking for criminals and to start search parties instead. And no one said Alex would recover, and he did, so why should Lexi be any different? If one Layyer sibling can perform miracles, than why can’t another?”

I wanted to believe him, too. I know Lexi and I spent most of our school careers – not disliking each other, necessarily, but just – avoiding each other because of our equal attachments to Ron – but in the months leading up to Christmas, we began to bond a little, I suppose, over Ron’s new relationship with Lavender, and I thought she was nice enough. Oh, well to be honest I – I suppose I was always just a bit jealous of her, really.

But I wanted her to come back just as much as everyone else. I wouldn’t wish the circumstances that have happened to her on anyone, and I hate the affect her disappearance has had on everyone. Especially Ron.

So I never voiced my skepticism over what the Prophet was saying. But as every morning my subscription to the Prophet brought me a new headline on how the wizarding world would “never give up hope” about finding Lexi, that “the chances are that she was still alive”… I couldn’t shake what that awful Rita Skeeter had once said to me, either.

“The Prophet exists to sell itself,” she’d once gloated. And I wanted to believe that the press and the Ministry meant it when they swore they’d never stop looking for her, I really did. But I knew that everything could very quickly turn…