September 4th, 1895 - Great Hall

It was perhaps not her finest moment, begging her father, who had the audacity to say no about trying out for beater on the house team. Of all the things to say no to! Mo wasn't exactly built for it, nor had she ever played it, even in the yard, but surely she could tryout? No. She'd been told no. And there weren't any other open positions on the team this year.

Another year without making the team. This year without even the chance to try! Most of them were only fifth years too. It wasn't looking good in the near future. It left a sour taste in her mouth and she was grumpy about it. So she went to the only place she knew she could be grumpy and nobody would judge her. The Slytherins might look at her funny just for sitting there, but that was alright, Mo was sort of used to that.

She sat with her arm on the table, head atop that, as she played idly with the scrambled eggs on her breakfast plate. She was waiting for Connor, because if anybody knew how to mope, it was him. Plus she hadn't seen him more than in passing or in class yet and she wanted to see how his summer had gone. Then they could schedule a chess game, he would inevitably beat her and things would feel a little more normal.

It wasn't a great plan, but it was all she had. As soon as Connor sat down she fixed him with a grimace, sitting up a little more. "Hi, can I join you for breakfast?" She hoped he didn't say no— she'd already started eating.

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Connor Sinnet

  

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Too many people lived in Hogsmeade. People’s parents and siblings worked in the Ministry with Angie. Connor was paranoid that someone, anyone, had heard in passing or seen them around this summer, that someone knew how his life had been upended. That he had been dumped by his parents. That they had moved to Pennyworth, but even his sister didn’t really want him. That soon he would have no friends and no allies at school.

He blinked at seeing Ramona at his table. It wasn’t even weird, exactly, because she had done it plenty of times before – but he had thought it might take a little time for people to adjust at the start of the school year, for house social rules to relax, or for her to spend time with her actual friends first.

But she looked miserable, so even the raised eyebrows beside them didn’t put him off entirely yet. “If you want,” he said, like he didn’t care either way at all, like he wasn’t a little bit pleased to see her – he didn’t think even his grumpy tone would actually put her off enough to leave, anyway. He suspected Miss Pendergast was weird enough not to care what other people thought.

Connor pulled the pumpkin juice towards himself, not feeling terribly hungry himself. “What’s happened to you?” he muttered, scrutinising her as he poured his drink – she looked far more dejected than usual. She looked as miserable as he felt, actually.

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It was going to sound dramatic, Mo knew Connor didn't really care about quidditch, but he had begrudgingly accepted her friendship (like he had a choice) so she thought that he might not completely balk at her situation.

"There's no positions on the house team for me to try out for." She sighed heavily, expression falling and she tried to ignore the sting of tears in the back of her eyes. It was a stupid thing to cry over, but it was so frustrating! Most of the more senior players were only fifth years! At this rate it would be fourth or fifth year before she even got another chance to try out. There was only a beater position this year and her parents had said no! She would have figured it out, or at least tried out for it! "And I'm just a little bitter about it." She didn't want to unload everything on him, so she left it at that.

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Well, Connor thought wryly, if that was the worst problem she had in her life, Ramona was doing much better than him. Not that he could share his problems at the breakfast table... but if he wanted to keep her friendship after, when his heritage or his standing or anything bad about him came to light, he could probably stand not to be too sarcastic at her now.

It was funny, he thought, that they apparently were going to start off every schoolyear the same way. Last year she’d been trying to drown her sorrows by skipping rocks. This year, it looked like, in scrambled eggs. “I’m seeing a pattern here,” Connor pointed out, although that was probably rubbing salt in the wound, that she still hadn’t gotten on the team – and he still didn’t care enough about quidditch to offer her any constructive commiserations from here. Maybe you should find a new hobby, he wanted to say, but again – he needed to stay on her good side while he could. “You could always hex one of your chasers, or whoever,” Connor said offhand (and jokingly, to be clear, but not without sympathy), “and hope they break a wrist or something.” (Possibly this was too Slytherin a style of humour for her, but. He was good at being bitter.)

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Mo snorted, marginally appeased by his more ruthless answer to her problem. "As much as I dislike Jimmy Fletcher," he was such a nuisance. "I don't think that's very sportsmanlike." Mo wanted to earn her spot on the team, not get it because somebody got injured. Hopefully something else would open up next year, or she ought to start working on her beater skills.

"Otherwise, I'm happy to be back," she admitted. Hogwarts was unlike anywhere else and even though she'd had Kaat for a chunk of the summertime, this was something else. "You? Sorry I didn't see you at all over the summer, we were weirdly busy." Between the trial stuff and a trip to see her mum's family in Ireland, they'd been all over the place.

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