Midday, December 10, 2022

Valentin sat down at the end of a long dining hall table during Durmstrang’s lunch hour, pouring himself a glass of hot chai and pulling a newspaper over from across the table. He thumbed quickly through the pages to proceed immediately to the sports and comics pages, keen on getting the new end-of-year quidditch season statistics and washing them down with some much-needed humor. December was always the hardest time of year for Valentin.

The white seeker flexed his right foot a few times with amusement as he absorbed himself in the paper’s tables and articles and, turning the page, he pulled off the front half of the paper and set it down for someone else’s use. After all, he was going to be a while with the other section. Resting with its front page facing up, the newspaper declared: INFAMOUS MURDERER MUSICIAN, HUGO SCHNELL, ESCAPES FROM PRISON. Below, cut off by the bend in the page, a moving picture showed the top of a man’s fair-haired head, looking up with a pair of sharp eyes lined with contempt as he swayed from side to side. For a prisoner, the man still seemed quite kempt, what with his soft-looking hair kept remarkably clean and with only a fine rim of stubble lining his jaw. Valentin set his now-empty tea cup to the side and pushed the headlines blindly out of the way as he poured himself another spot of chai. He skipped past the first page of comics to head straight to his favorite strip, known for lampooning current events. The pale boy's smile opened up into a laugh as he curled the long fingers of his right hand around his warm mug. This one was particularly funny to Valentin because it featured some crazed pianist attacking someone with a broken music note. Feeling he could relate to it after months of failing to complete one particularly gnarly piano composition, Valentin returned to the front page of the comics to read through them all in his usual completionist fashion.

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