Order only: Private Message to Sally-Anne and Pansy

[alt_hermione]

Look, I can't PM all three of you, but I'm really disappointed you and Ron didn't think of a way to let Draco know what was happening.

He could have humoured Patil long enough to get her help. He could have avoided her or at least told St M's that he thought it was a potion. Did any of you think to trust him not to only tell what he needed to tell, without getting any of the Order into trouble?

And even if he didn't have to tell anyone, he deserved to know why she was going after him. He thought it was his challenge!

It wasn't right to do that to Patil, either. She's a horrible cow but no one deserves being forced to humiliate themselves in public. Terry and I should know. And certainly no one deserves to be driven to try to commit suicide. Someone should have been ready to watch for a reaction like that. Love potions are really dangerous, even mild ones. And it's positively cruel to play with someone's feelings, no matter what the reason.

I know you have a history with her but that's all it was: Cruel. And unfair to Draco, too. And I thought you were all better than that.

That's all.

Comments

[alt_pansy]

Sally-Anne's been at Sherwood all day. I went with her in the morning, and then went out for dinner, and only just now saw everything because I wanted to check and see if she'd written as to when she was getting back.

I didn't know Padma'd tried to commit suicide. And I'm sorry to hear that. And maybe we should've told Draco about it last night, once she started clinging to him, but we thought it was obvious that it was a potion, and that her friends or the half-dozen Healers in the crowd would handle things.

Ugh. What a mess.

Anyways, yes, I'm sorry we didn't tell Draco last night, and that it got to be such a trouble for him today, and I'll tell him. I do think he was overreacting, though. Threatening to quit and everything, I mean. Do you think there might be something else going on that'd set him off like that?

[alt_hermione]

Yes, there are other factors. But it's all right--I mean, it's nothing that can be fixed instantly.

And I guess it wasn't as obvious to everyone else as it was to you, but then no one else knew you'd done anything.

[alt_sally_anne]

Just got back. Pansy told me I should come read my journal and I'm only about half caught up.

It wasn't a targeted potion. If it HAD been a targeted potion, Ron wouldn't have targeted Draco. It was supposed to make her go after her 'heart's desire' and there was absolutely no reason to believe it was Draco until she started following him around, at which point there was no way to tell him discreetly because he was ignoring his journal completely last night.

[alt_hermione]

There were all sorts of ways to tell him discreetly. You were all at the same party! Would it have been so impossible for one of you to distract Patil long enough for he and Ron to go somewhere semi-private and talk?

[alt_sally_anne]

Um, YES. It would have been ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE to distract Patil, given that she was under a love potion that was making her CLING TO DRACO'S LEG.

Which is why I find it baffling that her friends couldn't tell. Or maybe they could, but were perfectly happy to see her humiliated because secretly they can't stand her either. (And SERIOUSLY you're going to lecture us on humiliating Patil? The people in the challenge are supposed to be AUDITIONING TO BE DEATH EATERS, humiliating a vicious pureblooded mean girl at a party is ... just about the least-awful thing Ron could have done without failing this challenge outright. He needs to fail 'gracefully' and I think some people in the Order are not aware of just how delicate a balance that is.)

[alt_hermione]

Right, well, I'll try to remember that when someone uses a compulsion on one of you to do a striptease in the middle of dinner or something.

[alt_sally_anne]

You know, someone already decided it would be brilliant to Imperius me into sharing a secret and then telling the whole school I get beaten by my father. And Pansy's challenge this time round is to brew a dangerous potion that's poisonous if you do it wrong, and test it on me. Fortunately, she can have Mr Snape watch her brew it and hopefully he'll know if she's done it properly, but you know, I'm the best friend of one competitor and the girlfriend of another AND I'm a half-blood. In Slytherin. So don't let's pretend I'm not potentially a fat, juicy, tempting target for all sorts of possible challenges.

[alt_hermione]

No one's pretending anything of the kind. But it doesn't give us the right to strike back with the same, nor should we. I'm not saying the challenges aren't difficult but there have to be more creative ways to meet them without completely compromising common decency.


Damn it, Sally-Anne. We're supposed to be better than they are.

[alt_sally_anne]

Ron was told to do something to seriously harm Draco, Hydra, Patil or Finnigan in the standings.

This WAS the creative way to meet that challenge that didn't compromise common decency. (That was NOT supposed to target Draco.)

[alt_sally_anne]

I mean, that was the idea, and I still think it's way less awful than the other things he could have done.

[alt_hermione]

How awful isn't the point.

Have you forgotten the time I had to go about with 'Filthy Mudblood' on my forehead? Or when Carrow made Terry's clothes disappear? There are loads of awful things that have happened or could happen. We've endured them before and will again.

The point isn't about shaming her publicly (though I still say that it just makes you as mean as the person you're shaming). It's having done it in a way that robs her of her self-control. I'm sure it was funny at the time, and I'm not saying I wouldn't have laughed, too, but I would have laughed harder if it was something she'd brought on by herself, instead of being forced to behave so ridiculously.

You could have come up with any number of solutions that didn't involve taking away her choices. If the idea was to harm her in the standings, you could have convinced or confunded some of the sponsors so they'd hate her and downgrade her on the next few challenges. You could have cast an illiteracy hex on her when the next round came, so she couldn't read the assignment. You could have obliviated her memory of her next task. You could have snapped her wand, or damaged it somehow so that she couldn't cast spells correctly.

And if we'd all been talking about it together, we might have come up with one of those options. Even if we'd decided in the end that this was the best possible course, then at least the others would have been prepared for it. I don't just mean Draco, I mean him and Hydra and Madam Pomfrey and Professor Sprout--everyone who was there.

I know you absolutely hate to admit when you're wrong, Sally-Anne, but...you're wrong this time, about this.

[alt_sally_anne]

I can think of worse things that could happen to me before June than being forced to perform a strip tease.

Though I'm sorry that happened to you.