Order Only: The Letter

[alt_hermione]

We reconstructed the letter, we think. Draco and Mr Snape and a little help from Sirius. Anything in brackets was something we decided from context, but there are places we just couldn't make out what it said.

Father,

I don't know if [you'll] ever come back, but if you do, I [will] be gone. I [made] a mistake and tried to make Tom (?) love me. But he'll never love [me] the way I love him. I [ ] him about the baby and he [laughed]. LAUGHED. I thought if I [shifted the] (Mr Snape thinks it's lifted) spell, he would remember something of the way [we fell] (? (Sirius thinks it's felt.). But it wasn't [right?]. He doesn't love me.

But you never loved me, either.

You've always wanted the [Grant] line to continue. It will, but it won't be pure. If it's a boy, I'm naming him [Tom Marvolo], to honour our ancestors, but all I'll tell him is about a [muggle] father who had [grateful], and [king], and [winsome]. And he's going to know love.

Don't try to find me. Not that you will.

Mercre (still not sure about that?)

We're still working on it but that's at least enough to figure out what the letter was about. I've never heard of anyone named Mercre, though. Maybe it was Mercure? But that doesn't make any better sense.

Comments

[alt_sally_anne]

Megan Jones got raised by a horrid old lady and didn't have any sort of real home.

She didn't exactly turn out brilliantly but she's not the Lord Protector, either.

Hydra grew up with a real home but she had Bellatrix Lestrange as a mother. And she's brave and kind and decent.

I mean yeah, it's easier to grow up into a good person when you're being raised by good people but at some point you're not tragic, you're just awful.

[alt_daphne]

Certainly, but it's hard to determine where tragic ends and awful begins, isn't it? I mean, yes, I see that in the case of the Lord Protector he wouldn't have turned out decent no matter how he was raised, or by who, but he may have been far less dangerous, if things had been different.

But I suppose there's no point in speculating, since we'll never know.