Love, Somebody ~ Marauder's Era AU

Chapter 6 | maeve likes butterflies. not beetles.

-----------------------> MAEVE ENVIED BUTTERFLIES. They were so beautiful, yet were unable to see their own beauty even though everybody else could. Unfortunately, everybody else did, and so, the pretty butterflies were captured in jars and preserved between scrapbooks simply for the kaleidoscopic colour of their wings. For them, beauty was dangerous and most of the time they paid for it with their lives.

People were like that as well. The 'not being able to see their own beauty' part, that is. So she liked to write notes complimenting people on their features as well, not just their physical traits but also the unseen mental ones. There was beauty in everything, one only needed to see it.

However, there was absolutely no beauty in Maeve's seething expression as she read the Daily Prophet that day.

The front-page headline, big and bold, was of an exposé article about how the seekers of two rival Quidditch teams, Puddlemere United and Holyhead Harpies, were secretly seeing each other. The next two pages also consisted of comments from the team members to get their view on the 'scandal'. Right at the bottom of the page written clearly were the words, 'Article by Rita Skeeter'.

Of course, it was her.

In Maeve's most honest opinion, it was journalists like Rita Skeeter who were giving the whole occupation a bad name and also furthering the stereotypes of journalists. Rita was awful. Maeve had had the displeasure of meeting her once and the blessing of never seeing that buggy face of hers ever since.

After Hogwarts, Maeve had been debating on whether she wished to specialise in investigative journalism or watch-dog journalism and while Maeve was in the dark with Rita's chosen field, she felt the need to categorise Rita's nasty works into a list of their own because the articles Rita Skeeter wrote wasn't journalism, they were pieces of gossip.

Rita Skeeter completely disregarded a person's right to privacy and there were many instances where Maeve had come across what she assumed were private conversations in Rita's articles. There were a few rare times when Rita actually had a solid fact or important piece, but she tended to over-dramatise things and either over-rate or under-rate them so much that the point she had to make either ended up lost or meaningless.

Maeve had approached the editor multiple times due to Rita's articles and how her useless pieces ended up making the cover than something really worth reading, but to Maeve's outrage, her editor had shrugged and told Maeve that while she was correct, people liked to read gossip and so such articles on the front page tended to attract people to buy the newspapers, hence sending their sales through the roof.

Even now, surrounded between all the interviews of Quidditch stars and sandwiched between Gilderoy Lockheart's latest book and an ad encouraging people to buy Witch Weekly magazine, was a small article about the five muggles who had sadly lost their lives due to the actions of the Dark Lord Voldemort.