Partners
"-And Miss Meadowes shall be partnering with... Miss Mckinnon", Slughorn read out.
Dorcas slid over to Marlene's desk, glaring at her, "If you mess up this potion, I will kill you."
Marlene nodded, swinging her legs as they sat on a stool, "Sure, Sure. Get thrown in Azkaban for murder, then."
Dorcas ignored them, instead deciding to start on the assignment.
Marlene glanced over to their parchment as Dorcas wrote notes down, "Do you think dementors enjoy the happy memories they steal?"
Dorcas turned to her, "What?"
"Cause, they steal happy memories, right? But why? What benefit would they gain from that? I mean surely it must be tiring going around day after day in a freezing building and just sucking people's souls. So do y'think they get to keep the memories they take and it makes them happy? Like an exchange of happiness?"
Dorcas frowned in thought, pausing their writing.
"Huh. I hadn't thought about that."
Marlene gasped, "Oh, do you want to hear this theory I have?"
Dorcas' frown deepened, "I shockingly do."
"So, basically I have this theory that the dementors are actually kinda like dogs. And they think that azkaban and the prisoners in there are their food, but their owners, so that's the ministry, they tell them 'oh you can only have little bits of all these different types of foods', so kind of like a diet, and the dementors listen because they're the kind of dogs that are super well trained, and so our souls are their food and so they have to take them or they'll be starving. But, if you think about it, if we let the dementors be like wild dogs, wouldn't that mean they'd be happier and we would also be happier. Cause they'd only eat a few people's souls, and if you didn't want them to take your soul then you could just be in the light all the time, it's really not a big deal."
Dorcas covered their smile with their hand, "Sure, Mckinnon."
Marlene turned to them, "I burnt the potion by the way."
"What?" Dorcas frantically stood up and leaned over to look at the blackened contents in their cauldron, "We hadn't even started yet!"
Marlene shrugged, "I know, but Sluggie was boring earlier so I put all those ingredients he wrote on the board into the cauldron whilst he was still talking rubbish."
"But the potion doesn't even require heat!"
"Okay, well that isn't my fault! You let me rant to you about my theory, and whenever I rant I start playing with my lighter and I subconsciously put the lighter inside the cauldron and all the ingredients burned! So really that's your fault for not making me shut up."
Dorcas scoffed in disbelief, shaking her head slightly as her stubborn mouth still tried to twist into a smile.
"You must be the worst person to partner with in class."
Marlene gasped, "That is so not fair! Because I was partners with Snape last term and he never let me do anything to help, or let me talk, or mess around or anything. He's definitely the worst partner, because he's such a boring control freak. Like even more a control freak than Lily, although I say that with love and only because she called herself it just last week."
Dorcas gave up on the aims of hiding her smile as she passed her notes to Marlene, "Here, you can tell me what I need to do and you can rant all you want whilst I do make the potion, just in case you get any more urges to put a lighter in the cauldron."
Marlene grinned, "Well, Meadowes", she started to read the notes, "Start off with adding 50ml of leech juice whilst I tell you the story of when I broke James' arm when we were nine and beat him so bad in a 1v1 game of quidditch that he made his parents get rid of his hoops for a year."