Amelia had physically arrived at the Ravenclaw table of the Welcoming Feast, but mentally, she was still miles away. Even the bustle of so many students around her, including international students who would have made great fodder for her people-watching fascination, could not pull her out of her own thoughts, which were swirling around and around on themselves, and although she was not smiling in any way that was visible to the people around her, inside, she was beaming.
He had written to her today.
It had been almost six months since his last letter, but he had finally responded. Amelia had all but given up on Raoul ever responding to her last letter, in which she had described to him being taken out of Hogwarts by her less-than-pleased mother, and all because she had entered the Hogwarts Tournament. Amelia had known that Raoul would be displeased with her compliant attitude toward her mother’s decision to remove her from school – he would have put up a fight loud and long enough that Antoinette might have given in just to save herself any further embarrassment – but she hadn’t thought it would keep him from writing her altogether.
Amelia had underestimated her brother, though, because his resolve was clear when the owls stopped coming, first for weeks and then months. She had always known him to be stubborn – it ran in the family, apparently – but these last months without any correspondence had been hellish. Although Raoul had disappeared two years ago now and she still harbored some feelings of abandonment, Amelia could not shake the connection she had to him and her unwillingness to forget. It was hard, knowing he was so free and she was still under the protective and heavy burden of her parents, but his letters let her live vicariously through him, which was better than not living at all.
It would have been ironic, then, that Raoul’s response to her letter about the Hogwarts Tournament had come on the very day that the same tournament was to begin again, but irony only happened when there was no intention. Clearly, in Raoul’s case, there had been intent, because while the letter she received was somewhat apologetic for his hiatus in writing her, it had ended with a strongly worded paragraph on how he fully expected her to enter again this year, and this time, she ought to stick it out if she was selected.
Of course, Amelia was still having second (and third and fourth and seventy-sixth) thoughts about Raoul’s “advice”, but she was finding it difficult to concentrate on this suggestion amid the elation she felt at finally regaining her confidant. Her brother had been the one person she had ever really been close to, and losing him when he left had been the single hardest detachment she had ever experienced, and likely a big part of the reason her personality was so stand-offish now. Since he left, Amelia hadn’t dared to get that close to anyone else, lest she lose them as well. Getting his letter had been like coming up for air after being underwater for hours.
Undeniably, Amelia had a lot of thinking to do about Raoul’s suggestion, and she knew it was unlikely that she would find the resolve to reenter the tournament considering her less-than-admirable reason for leaving last year, and even more unlikely that the goblet would choose her again. But she would save that decision for later; for now, she would bask in the glow of having her brother’s letter tucked into the waistband of her skirt beneath her robes, making her too happy to have left it in her room.
by 
