Wizards & Therapies | An OC Wizarding World Fanfic

Suspicion

Fun fact: the full moon in the year 1993 was on the 30th of October. But we don't need to follow the lunar chart of the real world, do we?
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Sleep did not do her well that night. Eliza drifted in and out of consciousness. When she couldn't sleep, she normally would find the next thing that could keep her brain awake. But reading did not help and Eliza didn't want to seek out the house elves this late at night. She practically begged for a cup of chai with two shots of espresso the next morning. Over breakfast, Eliza found herself rubbing the sleep out of her eyes as she perused the front page of the Daily Prophet. Sirius' face looked back at her. It was a relatively old photo, not like the one they had shown on the muggle news. Give or take, it could be from five years ago.

BLACK SPOTTED IN SCOTLAND, WIZARD COMMUNITY ON HIGH ALERT

The person on the front page looked foreign. The dark bags under his eyes, the loss of his aristocratic features that he used to pride himself on. She wondered if he had turned into a living skeleton with his skin stretched across, walking its way up the castle in search of revenge. It was like the old stories her father would tell her from his hometown.

No, best not to go there. Not ever. Shoving the paper out of the way, she ate her breakfast going through the biography of Alfred Nobel in her head to keep it occupied.

"Watcha thinkin' there, Eliza?" Hagrid wondered. "You seem to be up in the clouds a bit."

"The Order of Merlin and the Nobel Prize," she stabbed at her scrambled eggs. "I wonder if there is a certain political bias when it comes to who gets what prize and how performative it may be."

"That's, uh, interesting," Hagrid frowned. "I assume this Nobel fella was the muggles version of Merlin?"

"Perhaps. He invented the dynamite, which makes things go boom." Eliza made a hand gesture when she said boom.

"I see. I dare say those muggles are gettin' good at livin' without magic," Hagrid said happily. "The only muggles I've really been around have been ah well... Potter's aunt and uncle. Don't say they are the greatest sort."

"Petunia can be alright," Eliza said softly. "She didn't always hate Lily."

The last time Eliza had personally spoken to Petunia was when Dudley had entered Kindergarten. The brown-haired Evan sister did not notice her back then, nor did she make any acknowledgement towards Eliza even though she had been around Lily's house many times during the summer holidays. If Petunia Dursley, though in her mind Eliza preferred to refer to her as Petunia Evans, was good at one thing, it was compartmentalising and ignoring.

"I don't know about that, Lizzie," Hagrid shook his head. "What's your schedule for 'day then?"

She looked down at the timetable. "Well, there aren't many students who take muggle studies so I have all of the houses in one class," Eliza squinted at the schedule. "It's a year a day, so I'm good. Starting with the third years."

"You'll do just fine," Hagrid looked confident. "Should be right up your alley. You were always good at that. The jinxes and what not, but I see Lupin beat ya to that title, didn't he?"

The Muggle Studies classroom was filled with trinkets. There was a vinyl player in the corner, a walkman (How old was that supposed to be for the wizards!), a rubber duck and a bobblehead of the Queen of England waving. Eliza was surprised to find that the projector actually worked in that room. Muggle artefacts went haywire around Hogwarts. Eliza hadn't been allowed to use her portable vinyl player when she was a student unless it was from Diagon Alley, which cost a great load more than what a muggle one would cost.