Orphic » Sirius Black

Chapter 25 - Hiding Spots

With the passing of the days, Juniper realised the foolishness of trusting only an Ovomancy reading. Both readings had been accurate, almost explicitly, but she wasn't yet satisfied. She needed another source that could enlighten her way out of the maze she was lost in. She didn't care if it was the map to the whole puzzle, clues, or just the exit, but she needed something else. Anything so she could figure it out would work.

The amount of work she had was exhausting her by just giving a glimpse at the pile above her desk. A very heavy sense of idleness flooded her, but she pulled herself up, and summoned Advanced Defense Against the Dark Arts for the classes' debate on Unforgivable Curses in the next session.

She soon realized that she had been thinking and worrying about the future only. But to understand what's to come, one must ponder on the past, the lineage of thought, the conception of the ideas, and the incentives for one's actions to trace up entailed demeanors. And Cassia had offered her the first leads.

If Mars had been a devotee for Lord Voldemort by the time her mother had taken Jasper and her out of the Callister Manor, that meant he had been for a while. And after they left? Juniper assumed the same. After all, Jasper had gone to him for that exact reason.

War had been around for almost a decade now, and Juniper had been, for most of that time, too young to understand what was going on. But it was now her problem, too, and even though it wasn't directly affecting her, a little piece of her was. Juniper was scared, but for the first time in her life, she presumed it was a good thing. She had the urge to pluck herself out of where she didn't want to be identified as: a Pureblood supremacist—just like her father and, as much as she wanted to deny it, Jasper as well—because she wasn't one. And she would never be.

Juniper couldn't resist any more and went to the library to ask Madam Pince if they had copies of the Daily Prophet in there. There were not as many as she wished, but she could make something out of those.

"I could request Dumbledore to bring a new stack of newspapers from a specific range of dates," suggested Madam Pince as Juniper skimmed through the pages. "What are you looking for, exactly?"

"Oh, nothing special," she lied as she picked the prints. "This'll do."

Juniper set them aside and duplicated most of the copies as best as possible. Her transfiguration skills were coming back to her, and she couldn't be more thankful. She was just out of form, apparently.

She got to her dorm with the stack in between her arms and threw them on top of her desk. And one by one, she began reading.

For the next week, Juniper did nothing but read. Before long, Juniper soaked herself with topics not only about the Ministry and its administrative chaos, but also about wizarding health, a bit of goblin economy, and even entertainment. Her main leads were located mostly in the back pages: attacks of the last weeks, and the respective lists of dead and missing people. Some of the articles held some names, cities, villages, and dates. There was no sign of her dad's name yet, nor his pseudonym.

Every free period she had, Juniper would zoom into her room and plunge her nose into the articles, reading as fast as she could. If the door creaked open, Juniper would immediately hide the page under her pillow and pretend she was just waking up from a nap. Her roommates were too curious for her to just leave the pages rolling around the dorm and not expect any questions, especially if she didn't want to answer any. But she knew Ophelia was already growing suspicious.

There had to be something, even a minuscule sign, that her father had been a Death Eater for the past years. Of the little she knew about him, what resonated in her the most was his craving to be recognized and seen among others. It was almost impossible that his name or something of his authorship hadn't been displayed to the world before—he wouldn't have let his accomplishments go unnoticed. When the range of time began to limit her investigations, she had no other choice but to collect a copy of the paper every single morning.