Closed A thread of hope

[Leda Layton]

Leda was terrified of knowing the truth, but there was no way she could sit on what she was thinking and not find out whether she was imagining it. Losing Olive was hard enough, but realising that she may have been the reason the Olive had even been in danger in the first place broke her heart. After reading the article at the end of her time at Hogwarts that had confirmed it had been a werewolf that killed her sister, Leda hadn't been the same since, replaying images over and over in her head of one of her own friends in that house. It would add up if it had been him, although she couldn't quite let go yet of the thread of hope she had that it was her own thoughts running away with themselves. Honestly Leda wouldn't have been able to tell if Alistair was lying to her either, and he could quite easily have a perfectly good alibi as to how it wasn't him, and the former Head Girl wasn't exactly known for her tact. It was a bad combination but the longer Leda tried to ignore it, the louder it got.​

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She knew if she wanted to get Alistair to tell the truth, she was going to have to go into this without too much suspicion. She didn't want to believe he was capable of something like that, they'd been pretty good friends at school asides from the small incident around the Hogwarts Monthly article. She'd invited him round to her house like she had a couple of her friends, although whether or not she'd be inviting him in would be something she left up to how she felt when he arrived. She tried to keep things as "normal" as she could as to not make it obvious about what she was trying to find out. Perhaps she was over thinking this, and instead Alistair would be able to help her determine who had been involved with Olive. Perhaps her sister and told him of her other clients, and then they'd have a starting point. Yes, that had to be it. She was pacing around the house waiting for her former house mate to turn up. It had been over a year since she'd seen him and this was already going to be a tough conversation regardless of the outcome.​

 

[Alistair Lancaster]

It had been difficult to see Olive's face again, moving animatedly in the paper as she had when she'd been alive. Before Alistair had taken her life. No, it hadn't been him. Not really. He wouldn't have, couldn't have ever done what he'd done to her. It was the beast that lurked inside of him, fighting to take over the closer he drew to every full moon. Yet even with that monster to blame, he couldn't look at Olive's face without feeling a pang of guilt that sickened him to his stomach. He had to convince himself that it wasn't his fault every single day, since the wolf had done what it had done. He had to, to just do whatever he could to make sure it wasn't he who was locked away in Azkaban for the wolfs actions.

The papers report on Olive's death had been hard enough. Fear had flooded him as he read through it, afraid there'd been some sort of lead that connected him to the scene. Now to make matters worse, Leda had invited him over. It had been too hard to speak to her after he'd the wolf had killed her sister. He knew. He remembered. Every little detail, as much as he wanted to pull those memories out of his head, he couldn't. How could he look her in the face, and not relive the horrors of that night? But to ignore her would only be suspicious. She didn't know he'd been there when it happened. She was just an old friend, grieving, reaching out to someone she could trust. Or, that was what he told himself as he approached her house and knocked on the door. Everything was going to be okay.​