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After dinner, while Bella is squirreled away in her and Tony's room reading her History textbook as though it's a fantasy novel (for the two bear significant resemblance)...
Artemis Burberry is in her room, on Patricia Hall, lamenting to her great horned owl about the lack of relatively private fireplaces for Floo calls here, and wondering where her roommate is.
(Who names their daughter "Sherlock", anyway?)
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occluminous
occluminous
"Um, why did you kill somebody? Who was it? Why aren't you in trouble?"
"My dad," he says. "Way before I came here."
occluminous
Bella awaits the answers to the rest of her questions. She is not sure if she believes him.
He looks and sounds more serious than usual, but not with the kind of strong emotion you'd expect from somebody confessing to the murder of a parent.
"He used to hit me," he says. "I didn't like it. So when I figured out I could set things on fire with magic, I burned him to death."
"He used to hit me," he says. "I didn't like it. So when I figured out I could set things on fire with magic, I burned him to death."
"Yeah, on purpose," Feral snorts. "I lit him up by accident a couple times before that, but he just put it out and then beat me some more."
He shrugs.
"Do you regret asking now?"
"Do you regret asking now?"
occluminous
"I'm not sure if I believe you, but if it's true I'd rather know and if it's not true I'd rather know that it's the kind of thing you'll say," Bella says after a moment. "Why aren't you in trouble, if it's true?"
"In trouble with who? The school? I was out of there for years before they found me, I don't think they even know."
occluminous
"The law. Magical law enforcement. It exists, I saw it in my social studies syllabus."
"What the fuck does magical law enforcement care about one dead Muggle?"
"Not as far as I can tell."
"...What, is that a surprise?"
occluminous
"I have known there was more to magic than me personally being able to do doggerel verse spells for like two weeks and I've only been systematically learning things for a few days and we don't get to magic law enforcement in social studies until unit three," Bella says. "Muggle law enforcement cares a lot when people die, I would know, my dad is a policeman! I thought magic law enforcement would be sort of like that, with magic in."
"Magical law enforcement," says Feral, "cares a lot if purebloods die, and halfbloods mostly count, and Muggle-borns do if anybody was looking. If you fuck up a Muggle, they only care if you did it publicly enough that they have to wipe a bunch of memories. They'll tell you different if you ask, but that's what's true."
occluminous
"That's awful," says Bella. "And also you just told me that nobody official would care if you did murder me as long as you were quiet and there weren't any witnesses."
"Probably," he agrees. "But I knew that already, and I don't wanna murder you, so what difference does it make?"
occluminous
"It's just disturbing." Pause. "And that girl who decided to warn me about you seemed to care if I got murdered. Maybe she doesn't know I'm Muggleborn or maybe you're just wrong about that."
"Did I say people wouldn't care? I didn't say people wouldn't care," says Feral. "It's the whole system that doesn't. People are people, they care about all different stuff."
occluminous
"Is magical law enforcement not done by people?" asks Bella dubiously.
"...It's like the mice," he says. "I bet you when you start on live Transfiguration, if you walk up to the cages and say you're gonna set the mice on fire, you'll get in huge trouble. But when we start on it in my class and I say I'm not gonna point my wand at anything I'm not willing to light up, I'll fail the class again. Caring about mice getting set on fire isn't one thing that works the exact same way everywhere for everybody all the time, or even the same way for the same person all the time, and neither is caring about people dying."