Who: Rita Skeeter When: About 8am, May 11, 1980, Monday Where: Random bench, random school, random place What: The inner musings of one very conflicted writer. Where's your tough-as-nails persona now, Rita Skeeter? Note: A sort of plottily important thing mentioned at the end. Please read? Rating: 14A for a few mental swear words
Yesterday, Rita had received many congratulations from her boss for the first article she'd written on Tower Bridge, and the subsequent four assignments she'd been given over the next few days. He'd told her he had no idea she had that kind of skill tucked away hidden, he'd said she'd be wasting it if he gave her a column or put her on Society. He wanted to put her in the field permanently. He even wanted to give her some investigative pieces, rather than just straight up reporting.
He wanted her out there asking the questions no one else would, he'd said.
She'd said thank you and asked for her old job in obits back. Rita had seen what the other side could do, she'd seen it a few times. She had ten year old pictures of a dark mark above her Cambridge home, and she had a skinned knee from tripping over rubble that had a body beneath it. She wanted nothing to do with that. That would land her the same place as her father, except what would she have to show for it? Not a kid. Not a legacy of published works. Not anything.
She didn't want that, no thank you. Her boss had seemed confused when she'd walked out, but Rita wasn't. She was sure. She'd gone to a pub--not the Leaky, not this time--and drank all afternoon and late into the night, and now it was eight the next morning, she was hungover, and she was sitting on a bus bench watching muggle parents dropping their children off at school, fussing and worried like terrorists might target elementary education institutions next. Rita felt a little bitter and kind of sick with herself, and it was more than just a hangover.
She was twenty-seven, and as a child, this was not what she thought her life would be like. Not at all. She and her father had talked about sailing the oceans and saving the world and he had talked about what it had been like to fall in love with her mother, and Rita had wanted so many different things.
She would not be afraid of being dragged into a war she didn't want to be a part of, even if some fucking higher power seemed intent on getting her involved.
Closing her eyes, Rita tried not to play back the prophecy she'd overheard, tried not to think about the information she'd been given. She was a reporter. It was in her nature to be curious, to ask questions, to stick her nose into other people's business. That prophecy, that damned prophecy, was something she wished she'd never heard, and something she hoped no one ever found out she knew.
The mums were watching her now, looking at her as if she might spring up in all her wild-haired, smudged-makeup, wrinkly-clothed glory and try to snatch their precious little angels away from them, and Rita thought it was time to go. Enough of this self-pitying rubbish. She had to go home, shower, dress for success, and go beg for her job back.
After all, she wasn't a pureblood. She didn't come from old money. She needed the bloody paycheck, prophecy or no.