Curiosity Is Not a Sin

A Letter From Home

Rose had to reread the letter three times before she actually managed to process what it said. Predictably, her mother had spent a paragraph going on about how proud she was of Rose for finally being able to look past House lines, but she really wished that Rose had told her about it so she didn't have to hear it from another source.

Rose was starting to have growing suspicions about who that 'other source' was, and if she was right, she thought that she really might kill him.

Her father's reaction initially came across as a bit less awkward. The jump from her mother's neat handwriting urging Rose to write home detailing how exactly she'd come to get involved with Scorpius to her father's messy scrawl discussing the latest Quidditch results was a bit jarring, but she preferred the latter by far.

In fact, her father seemed like he would quite like not to mention it at all. Despite the fact that they had presumably written because of this - her mother certainly hadn't said anything about any other subject - her father spent almost half a page talking about Quidditch, and only managed a brief comment saying that when they'd met him at the Potters' in the years since the three had started at Hogwarts, Scorpius had seemed like a decent enough kid for a Malfoy and a Slytherin.

There was an implicit suggestion that that wasn't saying much, but still, at least he didn't want details. She suspected that the fewer details he had, the happier he'd probably be.

On her second read through, however, she caught a little note that father had scrawled on the bottom of the parchment: "But we'll see what he's really like once I ask around."

Rose had no idea what 'ask around' meant, but she was fairly sure that it would be embarrassing.

Once she was satisfied that there was nothing else in the letter that she'd managed to miss, she hopped out of bed and made her way down the stairs. The Common Room wasn't especially crowded yet, but she did see James sitting with Lily by the windows, and she hurried across the room.

"I am going to kill your brother," she told them. At the sound of her voice, he looked up from Lily's Defense Against the Dark Arts essay.

"What?" he asked in confusion.

She lowered her voice, and Lily leaned across the table to listen in. "I'm going to kill Albus," she repeated. Her cousins both gave her blank looks, and she sighed and collapsed into one of the chairs. "I'm pretty sure he told my parents about Scorpius."

James let out a loud guffaw, and she glared at him. He'd warned her that if she didn't tell her parents about Scorpius soon, they'd find out soon enough, anyway.

She really hated it when he was right.

Lily didn't react quite as strongly, but she couldn't hold in a laugh.

"This isn't funny," Rose insisted. "It's not."

"Yes it is," they said at the same time.

She looked around the room again, but she didn't see the bright red hair anywhere. "I'm going to kill him," she repeated.

"How do you know it was him?" James asked reasonably.

"Oh, come on, James. Who else would have? Besides, he was awkward about his letter yesterday - I bet he wrote home about it all without thinking and your parents went and told my parents and-"

"Is it really such a bad thing?" James wondered out loud. She must have looked furious, because he held up his hands. "Rosie, it's an honest question. You'd have to tell them eventually."r32;
"It's not funny," she said again, choosing to ignore the simple truth he was spelling out. Her cousins snorted again.