20th August, 1895 — Whizzhard Books, Hogsmeade High Street

Jimmy hadn’t looked at the list of NEWT level school supplies properly until today, although it had come weeks ago. What else had come, from a different source, was more interesting: the funds for his tuition. Great-Gran had always paid his way, but Jimmy had known the money wasn’t from her – she didn’t have any – but he had not, until this year, actually held the borrowed key to an anonymous Gringotts vault in his hands.

Jimmy wondered whether he even ought to use the money for school or not – what good would NEWTs do him? But then, if he went, there would presumably be money next year too... His head had been full of ideas the moment he’d stepped out of Gringotts; but this morning, Jimmy had tucked the school supply list in the pocket of his trousers and gone out, whistling and feeling positively wealthy.

He stopped into Whizzhards’ first, with the intention of getting the boring stuff out of the way first, but when he started searching for new textbooks (Great-Gran might have been spendthrift and found him old books, but no second hand racks for him today!), a different book caught his eye. A Complete Compendium of Tracing and Tracking Charms. It would have sounded deathly boring to him any other day, but suddenly Jimmy wondered – could he put it on the letter somehow, and see where the Gringotts key winged away to?

Which left Jimmy, a good quarter of an hour later, perched in a bookshop armchair, head buried in a dense book of Charms and more blind to the rest of the world than possibly he had ever been before while reading.

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   Charley Goode

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Some folk had to buy perfume, and some relied on charms. She could walk about all day with a sweet smell in her nose, no coin or wand required. It was a breath of fresh air, literally, to be out of the hot, stuffy shop, and the best part was that Charley could still enjoy the sweet perfume of the charming bouquet in her arms.

The urchin didn't care that the flowers weren't for her, either. She was sure they'd still be smelling as sweet no matter how many times her nose ducked down close to the blooms to inhale. That was the best part of her job, and if the thought of it didn't offend her sense of pride, she might have done the whole job for free just for the walking perfume.

Her perk was short-lived, as they all were. Charley headed for an unusual place for today's delivery, one she'd rarely be caught dead inside otherwise. It just wasn't right, not among the sort whose opinions mattered, to put her nose in a book. That's all the shop had somehow, books, and dead-nosed patrons looking for books. How a bookworm might even notice the beauty of a carefully-arranged bouquet in the first place was beyond her, but the urchin's job wasn't to interrogate, just deliver.

Charley stopped short just inside the door, her breath taken away entirely. Not by the smell, the musty tomes were easy to fight with the floral aromas in her arms, but by the sight of one particular bookworm filling out a chair in the shop. He was so bewitched by the book that the urchin wondered if he wasn't playing them all for a lark, pretending to read with a magazine tucked inside instead. Growing closer proved her wrong, and in all the worst ways.

There was something not right at all with Jimmy Fletcher.

"Ya don't feel warm or nothin'," Charley declared after placing her hand on his forehead. And if Jimmy hadn't even noticed her doing that, there was something seriously wrong with him. Forgotten flowers fell out of her arms to land in his lap, but the urchin was paying more attention to the tiny printing of the book in his hands. "That can't be yer usual sort of readin', en't seeing naught 'bout Quidditch or summat. Gonna give us a fright, Fletcher, if you, of all people, wind up bein' academic after all."

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Writer Notes: Charley is a street urchin in both appearance and behavior, unless written otherwise here.
Interactions may reflect Victorian-era morals rather than modern sensibilities; this is allowed and acceptable to this writer.

He was so engrossed in trying to understand the book’s (rather complicated) description of the wand movements for the tracking charm that he was slow to realise someone was touching his forehead. (Weird.)

So he didn’t flinch at the sudden contact on his skin, or even at the sudden appearance of a fistful of flowers on his lap. He – perhaps not adding to her impression that he was ill – couldn’t hold in a sneeze. Sniffing carelessly, he looked up at Charley, only slightly lowering the book. (He couldn’t put it down in his lap now without completely crushing her flower delivery.) “A fright or two’s good for you, I think,” Jimmy declared, non-committally, though of course he didn’t like the idea of being thought academic. “And how do you know what it says, anyway?” he joked, mostly without thinking. “That would mean you know how to read.” He raised his eyebrows high, as if at that far-fetched idea.

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The following 1 user Likes James Fletcher's post:1 user Likes James Fletcher's post
   Charley Goode

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The longer that Fletcher sat, stiffer than a statue, the more she was convinced about it. Something was truly wrong with him, and moreso than usual. He wasn't old enough, however much older a year could make, to be so docile yet. The urchin had a mind to test that, with a finger aimed to jab him in the arm, just a moment before he finally lowered the book and spoke.

"I en't no fool, I can read fine!" Charley took a glance at the pages of his thick tome again, squinting to see if there was any word worth knowing on the page. It was a lot of diagrams, with descriptions that the academic sorts liked to put on their diagrams. To make themselves look smart, the urchin figured, there wasn't much other reason to mark up a drawing. She planted her finger, all armed and ready, on the drawings in the book to point them out. "'Sides, those don't got the look o' brooms or a pitch, anyhow. Mind yerself, or folk'll see there's ya take seriously than tricks or games."

And no one needed to read to figure that out.

She started to lean back with that glow of satisfaction, Charley had earned that much. Her eyes didn't miss much, less than her hands today, and spotted the flowers she'd dropped at just that moment. With a sharp gasp, the urchin swooped down to snatch them back from the boy's lap before he started getting clever thoughts about it. Not like anyone would be sending him flowers, and if it were up to her, Fletcher would never see them delivered. Not again, anyway. "An' those don't belong to ya!"

With the flowers tucked neatly in her arms again, the urchin took a step around to stand in front of him. Keeping that boy where she could see him was her best defense. There was no telling what he was up to, so conveniently sitting in the same place she had to deliver to. Charley had to be on her toes around someone like Fletcher. Or her heels, anyway, surely she had a little bit of a head start while he was sitting down.

Her narrowed eyes were happy to match the high arches above his, squaring off more roundly than she could take him in a fight. Charley wasn't like to try with this one, anyway. She could only ever match him at his weakest points, and those changed faster than his tastes in reading material. "How'd ya manage gettin' in here anyhow? Can't tell me they let yer sort jes walk in through the door."

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Writer Notes: Charley is a street urchin in both appearance and behavior, unless written otherwise here.
Interactions may reflect Victorian-era morals rather than modern sensibilities; this is allowed and acceptable to this writer.

He was too busy guffawing with laughter at her protestations that she could read, and her poking at the diagrams in the book – Jimmy’s heart clenched in the worry she would ask what he was looking up, if not quidditch as she’d expected – to react quick enough when she went for the flowers again.

She snatched them clean away again before he could hold them hostage, and Jimmy pouted. “Are you sure, Charley? Feels like you wanted to give them to me.” He waggled his eyebrows. (Not the first time, if you counted the time he’d pranked her by ordering them himself – but these were actually nice flowers, and pretty fangless, so it would have been worrying, if that was how she wanted to show her appreciation to him. It would have almost felt sincere.)

He snapped the book shut, annoyed at the way her nonstop chatter had interrupted his admittedly un-Jimmy-like research errand. “My sort? I should be asking you that question, I think. I’m still a Hogwarts student. I have to buy my new books.” Unlike you, he intimated silently, with a lofty look and a quick press of his foot on the toes of her shoe, since she was loitering just there in front of him – he felt it his duty to provoke her.

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   Charley Goode

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Oh, Fletcher was surely up to something. It was the matter of what, exactly, that Charley couldn't wrap her finger around. Not that her fingers weren't busy at the moment, clutched defensively around the bouquet that was meant for delivery, and definitely not for the oversized lump perusing books like a foolish scholar. Freer hands than hers would have balled into fists, but Charley was quick enough with her words as well. "Not hardly. Gonna hafta be spendin' outta yer ol' gran's coin 'gain or summat. Or find yerself a pretty lass what fancies sendin' ya gifts."

Charley wrinkled her own nose at that suggestion, freckles banding together to dispel any notion that she might be Fletcher’s pretty lass somehow. Or that he might even end up with one. For all she knew, the boy had his sights set upon being a lifelong bachelor, and for that the urchin might breathe a huge sigh of relief. She wouldn’t be the only one, of that there was no doubt. If there was a match in all of Britain for a detention-patented rogue who stalked rooftops and florist shops for victims to befoul their dreams, then there wasn’t a hit-wizard alive who could defeat that sort of darkness.

"Yer sort," The urchin said again, wondering if he had a hearing problem as well as reading. No, from the trance she’d found him in, the book had Fletcher fully engrossed in the way only a bookworm would have been. The ones who must live in among shelves and ink-faded tomes, for as much as their sort practically reeked of ancient, withered pages. He didn’t sport their paled skin or squinty-eyed look at something other than a lettered text, anyway, a determination that came with so little relief that his next words nearly knocked Charley right over.

"Yer still a..." she mulled past the word of it, skipping ahead to what that meant for him. What that meant for her. Charley had counted on the talk she’d been hearing, the tutting of old biddies who seemed to know everyone’s future, that Jimmy Fletcher would follow in footsteps forged by all but the slyest, and most lucky to be chosen or found at the right spot, of their fellow shack-dwelling, low-prospect-ridden, empty-pocketed ne’er-do-wells. With just enough success to get by, but never ahead.

Just like her.

"’Cept that means that you —an’ really, you?— managed to get all the way..." Charley’s mind spun, and her thoughts tumbled out all at once. "They let ya? An’ didn’t laugh? Can’t right believe ya knew what to do with all that parchment, really. Nor’d they go easy on ya, neither, not ‘nuff money or connections. So it hadta be you, jes you facin’ those OWLs, no prank nor farce. Which really means—"

She couldn’t bear it at all, how someone like Jimmy Fletcher could have sat for exams she’d never have a chance to take.

"You. Passed?!" Charley’s jaw hung open for a moment, before she could swing it closed. And then it gaped apart once more at what his boast really meant. "An’ you get to go back, ya got the coin for it?!"

The wall of freckles gave her reddened face a ruddy brown hue instead, hardly the sort of pretty lass that Jimmy’d want to take flowers from. Mean ol’ Jimmy. Dumb, crass Jimmy. That big bully, who’d get everything he wanted by laughs and half-measures. The one leaving her without a single chance to take him down a notch, like she really ought to. It wasn’t fair, or right, and knowing Fletcher he’d done it all on purpose, too.

"How dare you!"

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James Fletcher

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Writer Notes: Charley is a street urchin in both appearance and behavior, unless written otherwise here.
Interactions may reflect Victorian-era morals rather than modern sensibilities; this is allowed and acceptable to this writer.