OOo!

[sporky_rat]

And now we have an answer from Tosha to Sally-Anne!

He is just smooth. Smooth as butter. Good butter.

Comments

[kiya]

Okay, when I'm done laughing my ass off, I really, really, really want to see Dolohov's response to "You have never tried to kill me during class!"

It's the extracurriculars that will get you in the end.

[capericious]

Hahaha I had the same reaction. This conversation has been Slytherin double-talk at its finest!

[teceler]

Heh, this. I'm wondering what angle he'll try for 'reassuring'.

(Also, I realized on thinking about it that Sally-Anne's pretty much told him she's almost certain he knows it was them. Because otherwise she's giving him the perfect opening to figure it out, and that would be Bad.)

[cheyinka]

Except since he did already know, she's presented him with a puzzle: how does she know I know? Did I give it away when I talked to her and Hydra, or was it in class on Monday? Is she, or someone she knows, a Legilmens? Can she somehow read private messages? Or does she not know that I know, and she's volunteering information for some purpose? (A bribe? To protect one of the others who was with her?)

[kiya]

Though it's genuinely not hard to figure out that he knew, given his actual actions upon figuring it out: the diverting Barty temporarily, and more relevantly, the lifting of the curses cast. Those actions make no sense unless he had specific reason to be merciful to them.

Similarly, his opening in his first response is an equivalent gambit, the "I can certainly understand why you would wish to conduct conversation via journal at the moment." Especially since S-A has been not only one of his star students but one of the regulars at his office hours, and thus if there weren't an issue between them specifically it would be hard to imagine why she'd bother to do the explicitly avoidant journal thing rather than drop in at his salon like normal.

So they've been doing the "I know you know, I know that you know that I know" dance from the beginning.

Alecto is here serving as a useful stand-in, one who can be safely spoken poorly of: "I had a teacher who tried to kill me once (she's dead now and you don't like her anyway, so we don't have to mince words about her). Well, I recognise that she wasn't actually trying to kill me per se, that if she had been I'd have been a goner, but I got significantly hurt and it's left me with some issues here. My interest in the subject material has to balance against my concerns about not becoming dead."

Or, once the subterfuge is combed out a bit, she appears to me to be saying: an acknowledgement that she is alive because he was not acting to kill, but raising the concern about the possibility for future Issues Of This Nature.

She has active interests in the materials as he describes them, but not only is she concerned about long-term consequences of the DoM venture, but she may be issuing a very direct challenge: "I'm not going to stop being an insurgent just because I'm your student. If you can't teach me, knowing that, then we're both better off letting me drop this class."

In other words, I don't read her as just saying she might have trauma issues around learning from someone she's crossed wands with, though some of what she's probably fishing for is a clearer answer to her previous "Explain to me why I'm not dead".

They're dancing around the subject of "You know I'm up to shit that you don't know about" - holy hell, I wonder if he'll speculate about how often they've done this kind of operation, because breaking into the DoM is not something you do on your first try - he's going to figure out that this is the team that took out Umbridge if he hasn't already, that they are at some level a tactical squad that works together - which means he might figure out Fawcett. Um, sorry, tangent. They are both aware that he knows she's up to things. Those things are a potential source of a catastrophic rift in their relationship, if that has not already happened.

At some point the direct/indirect question of "Are my extracurricular activities going to be a problem that you're going to have to deal with with even more hostile force than the last go-around" is probably going to have to be sorted. Especially if they spend any significant amount of time together.

Erm. That's how my Slytherclaw brain reads this bit, at least.

[cheyinka]

"He must have figured out that at least one of us was a student" isn't the same as "He must know that I was there", though. I mean, I didn't think about his "you've got good reason to want to have this conversation out of wand range" opening might be sufficient "proof", and that's a good point - but he could have been testing to see whether she was one of the students involved. She knows he's not, because she knows he knows, but if she didn't know he knew, she wouldn't know he wasn't. (I think I got that sentence out right, anyway.)

[teceler]

Yeah, and he might think she thought that the fact he knew about at least one of them and no one has disappeared yet + the spells being lifted means he isn't going to turn them in, but he should know she would/should consider the alternative, that he's trying to round them all up first.

...this is tricky to talk about.

[teceler]

Yeah, I think that's what they're dancing around. I'm not sure how they're going to continue this conversation on the journals--it'll take a lot of working around--but knowing them, they'll manage. That, or he'll ask Sally-Anne and Justin and maybe a few others to come talk to him in person.

Also, on your tangent: oooh. That would be interesting. I mean, I think he'll guess they were working with Harry on Umbridge pretty quickly, but Fawcett...
hm.
I can't think of any way he could confirm it, but I won't be surprised if he starts wondering.

Anyway. I'm very curious as to how this conversation continues to go.

[kiya]

The tactics of the two breakouts are very similar: some people set up a diversion or two (the dragon firework; Peeves with dungbombs) to attract school attention while other people break into U's office, free the prisoner(s), and cause damage.

So once he gets "a tactical team of sixteen-year-olds exists, and I had a run-in with them at the DoM", as soon as he connects that to Harry he's got "a tactical team of sixteen-year-olds exists and is at Harry's command." From there it's hardly a leap to "and they broke him out of Umbridge's", and from there it's only a moment to analyse other actions.

The big leap is not Fawcett, it's Harry.

[cheyinka]

But he already suspects Harry was present: he thinks either Harry or Draco confronted Barty, and that one's presence necessitated the other's (even though that wouldn't have been true pre-Toadifying).

Fawcett is the logical leap because it can happen even if he can't confirm either Harry's or Draco's presence: two kids really thoroughly disappeared, even though they themselves didn't have the resources to make it happen, in a circumstance where adults either dudn't assist or assisted so secretively that no one detected them. A kid really thoroughly disappeared from Hogwarts, and the "signs of struggle" didn't involve any human blood... ergo, maybe they disappeared her too.