Chapter Text
Clarke heaved her trunk onto the railway trolley as the ministry car that had dropped her off sped away into the distance. It took far more effort than when her mother’s flunkey whisked them all into the boot of the car back at home. That only took a flick of his wand. Still, she fully understood why he hadn’t repeated the trick at the busy unloading zone at Kings Cross station. There were muggles everywhere, pushing wheeled suitcases and loaded up with enormous backpacks, racing to catch one of the red London double decker buses dropping off and picking up train passengers. Black cabs weaved in and out of traffic, as ordinary cars battled the city traffic. For a moment Clarke wished she was back in their country home, but she was excited about returning to school too.
Clarke sighed and tried to shake off her annoyance at the departing car. It was not the driver’s fault that her mother was too busy to see her off to school. Again. She carefully balanced the animal cages on top of the trunk, before setting herself to get the heavy load moving.
Clarke was well aware that being a single mother and Minister for Magic would be no easy feat. Her mother was always racing from one engagement to another and her reading pile was enormous. The spell was yet to be invented that would simply insert all that information into a brain in the way that a memory could be extracted to review in a pensieve later. Even worse, they couldn’t use any of the AI summarising programs that Raven had been raving about either. Clarke’s best mate Raven spent a good chunk of all her holidays perusing muggle technology magazines and checking out the internet at the local library.
Despite Clarke’s begrudging sympathy for her mother’s position, she was also well aware that she had been pretty much left to her own devices for most of the summer holidays. And even though she felt lonely, she appreciated that her mother trusted her. She would like to think that she was a reasonably mature sixteen-year-old too. The school seemed to agree. Her Sixth-year prefect badge had arrived with her list of books and equipment she needed for her proposed NEWT level studies, and her mother had proudly activated the spell to have her robes embroidery updated, the word Prefect appearing in swirly cursive script underneath the Gryffindor crest. Now that she was heading back to Hogwarts, her mother didn’t have to worry at all about her day-to-day welfare. No wonder her mother had seemed so relieved at breakfast.
That’s not to say her holidays had been entirely boring. Raven had come to stay at the Griffin country manor down in Cornwall for three weeks, and she had gone on a trip with Monty Green’s family to Japan and Korea, which had stretched her mind and her taste buds in all sorts of different directions.
Before that, her mother had taken her on a trip to Paris to celebrate after she received her Ordinary Wizard Level results. There was nothing ordinary about the scores she had received. She had ‘Outstanding’s in Potions, Defence Against the Dark Arts, Transfiguration and Herbology as well as ‘Exceeding Expectations’ in Care of Magical Creatures and Charms. She had dropped Divination as soon as she could and Arithmancy made her brain hurt. She had scraped a passing mark on the exams, but it wasn’t something she planned to continue on with for NEWTs.
Unfortunately, Marcus Kane, Head of Gryffindor House, and her mother’s not so secret boyfriend, came along for the trip. Clarke had done her best to ignore the constant goo-goo eyes they made to each other when they thought she wasn’t looking, and the frequent allusions to the ‘City of Love’. If this is what love was about, she wasn’t sure she could stomach it.
Her mother had also insisted that they make formal visits to the French Ministry and the Beauxbatons Principal while they were there. This would not have been on Clarke’s itinerary for a fun week in France, but perhaps it justified her mother’s expense claims that she was going to submit on the way home. Clarke did enjoy the opportunity to do some shopping while she was there, splurging some galleons she’d saved from birthday and Christmas presents on some very classy sunglasses and a new set of dress robes.
Clarke approached the stone wall between platforms nine and ten and took a deep breath. No matter how many times she’d gone through in the past, entering platform nine and three-quarters still made her heart rate get elevated. The social anxiety of crashing into the wall, spilling her trolley contents out in front of all the muggles had given way to an existential dread of becoming stuck inside the stone. Neither of the occupants of the cages she had sat on top of the trunk even flinched; Mecha and Agro merely glared at her for her hesitation interrupting their sleep. Mecha twitched her whiskers and closed her eyes again, while Agro hid her head under her wings, as though Clarke’s hesitation caused her embarrassment too.
Once Clarke was through the secret entrance she moved away quickly so as not to be collected in the back of the legs by the next trolley-wielding student and looked around for her friends.
She saw Raven ahead and mouthed ‘save me a seat’. Raven nodded and continued on with her conversation with Nate Miller. Clarke saw Roan and one of the Slytherin Prefects, waving at her from the train doors. She nodded that she’d be there as soon as she could and promptly headed over to drop off her luggage with a porter so that her trunk and animal cages could be stowed appropriately, ahead of the all-day journey to Hogwarts. She understood why the train didn’t simply apparate most of the way – trainspotters would be sure to notice if a historic steam train entered one tunnel and then didn’t leave it again – but it was not the most convenient mode of travel in the wizarding world.
After touching base with Roan, Clarke and the other prefects made their way up and down the platform encouraging children to finish their farewells and board the train. She pointed out that if they settled into a carriage quickly, they would be able to wave to their families out the window as they departed.
She deliberately tried to make a point of smiling at the younger siblings of children who were going to Hogwarts for the first time, especially the non-magical background families, muggles, who stood out like dogs’ bollocks, with their normal muggle clothing and nervous expressions. Clarke hadn’t changed into her Hogwart’s uniform yet, and was wearing jeans and a hoody with a big yellow G on a maroon background. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be a parent, having done all your planning for your child’s education at the best muggle school you could find, only to have them receive a thick envelope inviting them to take up their place at Hogwarts.
Anyone who failed to respond, ‘yes’ via the school owls within a reasonable amount of time would then receive a follow up visit from a Hogwarts’ Professor from the school. Most muggle families did receive this visit. It was simply unrealistic to expect a family with no exposure to the magical world to react well to a letter written on parchment and sealed with wax.
Those who didn’t believe the Professors got to meet someone sent by the Ministry of Magic’s underage magic department next. Nothing was more critical to the Ministry than preventing muggles discovering the magic world. In this case, they had to weigh up the risk of a muggle-born child performing uncontrolled magic in front of scores of muggles by mistake against the revelation to their parents when they sat them down to explain that magic was real. At the same time, they could inform them that their child had won a free place in an international standard boarding school to learn how to perform it in a controlled manner. Children born into the wizarding world might have had more leeway to decline their place, in favour of being home-schooled, but then responsibility for their education fell to their parents who were already bound to follow ministry injunctions.
Finally, the whistle blew, and the announcement calling for all passengers for Hogwarts to board now was made so Clarke leapt aboard.
As the train pulled out of Kings Cross station, Clarke dodged all the waving students and made her way to the Prefect’s compartment. It wasn’t as if she had anyone on the platform to wave to.
Clarke took her place in the Prefect’s compartment as the others made their way through the train. She had time to examine the Head Boy. He wasn’t a big selection surprise. The Hufflepuff student wore his hair long, mostly tied back in a bit of a man-bun so that it wouldn’t get in the way and an easy, cat-like smile. He wasn’t one to shout or carry on or engage in excessive self-promotion. His quiet confidence in his own abilities wasn’t readily apparent as strength to casual observers, however no one who knew him doubted the quality of his backbone, given how much he went against his family’s history when he was sorted into Hufflepuff. Every one of his cousins and his parents, grandparents and even great- grandparents from what Clarke had heard, had been gone into Slytherin house.
Roan was more of a classy support act, who helped everyone around him succeed, and as such was ideally suited to the model of leadership Headmistress Indra espoused.
Anya, the Head Girl from Slytherin, was his natural opposite in many ways, though like him she was also reserved and not prone to unnecessary conversation or talking for talking’s sake.
The beauty of this combination, Clarke realised, was that Prefect meetings were never likely to last excessively long, and within fifteen minutes, they had welcomed all the new prefects and explained their expectations before releasing them to go back to their normal carriages to maintain order during the eight-hour journey northwards. They didn’t ask them to do more than keep an eye on things, though Roan did remind them to make sure that the new students had someone to sit with and were doing OK.
*****
An hour out from Hogwarts, the soporific clackity-clack of the wheels on the rails was replaced by a noisy hubbub as prefects reminded everyone to get changed before arrival. Some items of clothing had to be rescued from the trunk’s stowage compartment, but eventually each carriage was checked to ensure that everyone, especially the new children, were wearing their black leather lace up shoes, regulation grey socks, shorts, trousers or skirts for preference, white shirt, tie, and Hogwarts standard robes, with their pointed hat ready for the feast. Some clothing might have been mended more often than others, but by the time they arrived, they all looked more or less identical.
The first years looked even more identical, given that the magic inherent in the Hogwarts uniform, activated when the sorting hat made its declaration of which house the student was to go into, had yet to occur so they had no coloured trim on their robes yet.
It was a one-time only spell, which made it hard to hand down items of uniform like scarves and jumpers to younger relatives if they were in different houses, but it was still impressive magic.
A few members of Hogwarts staff greeted them on the platform, gathering up the first years to travel down to the boats. When each boat was full, the staff member pushed it away from the wharf, and the next one would drift into line. Then the giant squid gathered up all the handles at the bottom of the boat and silently pulled them across the lake as new students got their first ever look of the castle that housed the school and its surrounding outbuildings.
Clarke and Raven climbed into one of the thestral-drawn carriages together. Clarke glanced across at Wells, who had told her once that he’d always been able to see them. He’d lost his mother early to a long illness before he even joined Hogwarts. He’d said once that he was worried that he could not tell the difference between memories and what was shown in wizarding photos.
Raven had never known her dad, but had been the one to find her mother’s body when she arrived home after first year. Since then, she’d spent her holidays split between a number of families. Raven had saved a few apples to bring with her and surreptitiously fed them to the horse-like animals, trying to ignore the funny looks some of the other students, who obviously had never seen death face to face and therefore could only see plain air where the thestrals stood harnessed in front of the carriages. Clarke had suggested to her previously that they generally ate meat, but Raven had simply pointed out that she couldn’t very well keep a piece of bloody steak in her pocket for the entire journey. They never seemed to refuse her offering, at any rate.
Clarke followed her school friends into the Great Hall, knowing that Agro would have been let out of her cage and would be heading to the owlery under her own steam already, while Mecha and her trunk would have been sent directly to the Gryffindor girl’s dormitory. This year she would only be sharing with Raven; one of the privileges of finally making it into the senior school. For the first time, they would have desks in their rooms, rather than being forced to work in the common room.
Of course, Clarke had long ago started studying in bed. No one got results like she did sitting next to raucous games of exploding snap every night. And Abby Griffin was not the kind of parent who would have accepted poor marks or excuses.
Once all the second year and beyond students had taken their places at the four long house tables, the gaggle of students who’d made their way by boat and were now gathered in the entrance at the front of the room were pushed forward. Some of them had robes long enough to drag on the ground, and they tripped over them while trying to get a view of their surroundings. Clarke could not believe that she and her friends had ever been so small.
The numbers were thinner amongst the senior students, that is, the sixth- and seventh-year ones. Evidently, not everyone had achieved the OWL results they required to proceed to NEWT level studies.
Clarke noticed Octavia Blake sitting alone at the Gryffindor table, without her shadow of an older brother who had been by her side since she’d arrived at the school two years behind him. Clarke had heard that Bellamy Blake had only been permitted to commence sixth year the year before on a remedial study program, having only scraped through with barely acceptable OWL results.
It didn’t look like he’d done enough to be allowed to continue with this NEWT studies. She didn’t like to be critical of her fellow Gryffindor, but maybe if he’d been more focused on his studies he would have returned for seventh year? Clearly the temptation to spend his time policing Octavia’s love life while running around doing whatever the hell he wanted and trying to show off to his mates had been too strong. Clarke made a mental note to keep an eye on Octavia to make sure she was all right without him. Frankly, the sparkle in her eye as she surveyed the room suggested to Clarke that without Bellamy’s overbearing presence, she was going to be thriving sooner rather than later.
Professor Kane, Gryffindor’s head of house, tapped on a glass melodiously and Indra stood, using her wand to amplify the tinkling glass sound until the room fell silent.
Without further ado, the Headmistress introduced the sorting hat to the first years, rapidly regaining their attention which had been almost universally drifting to the sights and sound of the Great Hall.
All the children, regardless of their background, looked nervous about the sorting process. The houses would shape many of their friendships over the next seven years, as well as where they lived throughout their stay at Hogwarts’ School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Clarke found herself zoning out a little at the sorting went on. She perked up each time to cheer for another child being sorted into Gryffindor with the rest of her housemates, and a promising little group seemed to be forming. Suddenly a name was called for a second time. The whole room went quiet as the first years looked at each other accusingly.
“Keenan Mykulac. Keenan? Is there a Keenan here?”
After a further silence, Headmistress Forrester caught Professor Byrne’s eye and she stood and slipped out of the hall, presumably to look for the missing little girl.
Professor Cartwright continued with the names but Professor Byrne returned just as she reached Emily Zachariah, the last child left standing next to her. There was no reappearance of the missing student.
Indra took to her feet and welcomed everyone officially to the new school year.
“Welcome, everyone, to Hogwarts.”
Now that the room was silent, Indra had no trouble projecting her voice to reach the very back corners of the room, even without apparently using magic.
“Just a few start-of-term announcements. There are to be no students outside of their dormitories after curfew without permission from a teacher and, as I must reiterate every year, the Forbidden Forest remains out of bounds to all first years and is not recommended except to those who are prepared to risk a most painful death. I’d like to especially welcome two new members of staff this year. Mr Lincoln Forrester is taking over role of Keeper of Grounds and Keys, as well as responsibilities as the Care of Magical Creatures Instructor. Mr Lovejoy, on my right, is relieving Mr Filch who has headed off on a well-deserved retirement holiday with Mrs Norris the Fourth.
There were whispers around the room as people explained to the new students that Mr Filch was formerly the school caretaker and Mrs Norris was not someone’s wife; in fact, she was his cat. And probably should have been Mister or Master Norris.
Speaking of cats, Clarke assumed that Mecha would have managed to curl up and fall asleep in their dormitory by now. For Raven’s sake, she hoped she’d found her bed rather than Clarke’s, as Mecha had been sleeping at the foot of Clarke’s bed for a couple of months now. Raven’s peripatetic summer holiday lifestyle, flitting from one household to another wasn’t so suitable for a cat, so Clarke had permission from her mother to keep her during the holidays before presenting Raven with the kitten for Christmas a few years ago.
Indra had nearly finished her speech, and Clarke realised with a start that she’d probably zoned out for at least half of it.
“Remember students; here at Hogwarts we expect everyone to work hard, study hard and ask your professors and the senior student lots of tough questions! Now, enjoy the feast!”
With a flourish, Indra waved her wand and dinner appeared on the table to ooh’s and aah’s and spontaneous applause from every member of the school community present.
Clarke’s stomach growled. The food trolley on the Hogwarts Express had been a long time ago. She wasn’t sure how some of the teenage boys sitting around her had even survived the sorting and the speech.
The food at Hogwarts was unbelievably good and the opening night feast always got them off to a fantastic start. Big platters of chicken drumsticks. Bowls of roast potatoes. Large dishes with steamed asparagus and broccolini. There was a huge platter of pre-carved leg ham on each table and salads and fresh fruit within easy reach of every student.
Other than the scrape of cutlery on plates, the Great Hall was mostly quiet. Conversation was kept to a minimum, barring the need to ask someone to pass another plate of something. Astonishingly fast, Clarke placed her knife carefully next to her fork and pushed her plate away from her, completely satiated. She hoped that there would be a bit of a pause before dessert, even if her eyes were threatening to close by themselves as she slipped into a food coma.
Once the dessert courses arrived, she helped herself to a little portion of jelly and a bunch of green seedless grapes and a slice of watermelon. The chocolate self-saucing pudding tempted her, but she knew from experience that she’d probably feel sick afterwards.
She glanced down the table at Octavia and noted that she was practically drooling, and it wasn’t over her chocolate chip ice cream cake dessert. Clarke followed her line of sight to see Lincoln over chatting to a group of junior Slytherin students.
Clarke had always been surprised that he was a member of that house. She knew it was near blasphemous to doubt the sorting hat’s judgment, but as far as Clarke could tell, Lincoln was the least ambitious person you could find. He did his work without any trouble but you were far more likely to find him lounging against the trunk of a shady tree sketching his classmates rather than being the first to insist on extra quidditch practice ahead of a bit match. Despite that, he was a far better than average player, his imposing size made him an impressive beater, though maybe not good enough to turn professional, despite a stellar school career for Slytherin house.
Clarke snorted at Octavia’s single-focused expression and then had to pretend to cough when Octavia turned and looked at her quizzically.
She didn’t want to explain herself. Clearly, Octavia had never seen Lincoln as a pimply student. He looked taller and more confident than when he’d left Hogwarts, only a few years prior, so Octavia was no doubt the only teenaged witch swooning after him. She trusted that Indra would have reminded him of his responsibilities when it came to the teenaged witches and wizards entrusted to his care, but there wasn’t much the Headmistress could do about the students’ raging hormones.
She turned to Raven to share the joke with her, but she seemed to have an equally one-tracked focus on the head girl. Raven mooning after Anya wasn’t a new development, but it was far more upsetting in Clarke’s view, as it affected her best friend. Raven was one of the smartest witches she knew, but she seemed to have terrible taste in both men and women.
She sighed. If you had a taste for unattainable ice-maidens, Clarke would happily concede that the Head Girl was hot. If you wanted your arse kicked or your head filled in, though, you were probably more likely to have your wish fulfilled. She had been really optimistic that Raven might have forgotten her infatuation with the woman over the long holiday period, but it didn’t appear to be the case.
Finally, she noticed Charlotte. She hadn’t had a chance to catch up with the junior Gryffindor yet.
“Hey Charlotte, did you get up to anything good in your summer break?”
“Hmm, sorry, what did you say Clarke?”
Clarke realised that Charlotte was just as deep in drooling stations as Raven was. For a moment she thought that Charlotte was making heart eyes at the Head Girl too and then she realised that she’d set her sights on Tris who followed Anya around like a bit of a puppy dog. Clarke sighed.
“Charlotte, I get it. Tris is cute. I’m hardly going to judge, but she’s still a Slytherin. They’re just not necessarily good people, you know?”
As if her sixth-year prefect counterpart in the Slytherin house had enhanced hearing, Lexa Woods turned around and glared at them until Clarke dropped eye contact.
When she turned around again, Clarke turned to Charlotte.
“Just promise me that you’re really going to get to know Tris before you try to actually get involved, OK?”
The fourth year nodded. Clarke sighed. If only someone had given her similar advice before Finn-a-ling came on the scene when she was just a little bit younger.
After everyone was finished, the older students drifted away and the prefects gathered their house’s first years together to show them the way. It was not just that they needed to know how to get from the Great Hall to their common room and dormitories; they also had to be able to find their way back independently the next morning for breakfast.
It was easiest for Hufflepuff. Their basement dormitories overlooked the kitchen gardens and were built basically adjacent to the kitchens. This was almost directly below the Great Hall, to minimise the risk of moving the food from a to b.
Slytherin’s dungeons were also relatively unchallenging to find, being on the side of the castle that abutted the lake.
Gryffindor and Ravenclaw towers, on the other hand, represented real traps for the unwary, the new, or the distracted. If you didn’t have your wits fully about you, you were just as likely to find yourself on a stairway that moved while you were already on them, rather than taking you to where you were expecting to go. All the kids would work it out in the end, but you generally needed to know how to get back from all sorts of different landings, as well as more than one route to your preferred destination. She simply assumed that if she had managed to work it out, eventually these kids would too.
The fifth- and sixth-year female prefects led their charges up the stairs to the girls’ dormitories where the first years were divided between two adjacent dormitories lower down in the tower. Most of them had marked their trunks clearly, so it was a simple job of finding their bed and cupboard. Clarke helped them get the key things packed away and encouraged each child to quickly write a letter home that they could send in the morning to let their families know that they’d arrived safely and which house they were in.
One of the new girls was crying and Clarke went to comfort her.
“What’s the matter? It’s Madi, isn’t it?”
The girl nodded and sniffed, rubbing her tears away with her shirtsleeve.
“I’ve never used a quill and ink before.”
Clarke noticed that she had upset her inkpot and there was royal blue ink spilled everywhere, threatening to seep through the bed spread onto the sheets below.
Clarke quickly charmed it back into the bottle with a light flick and swish.
She helped Madi write the letter and neatly penned the address on it, so that they could take it to a school owl in the morning before breakfast.
Madi was starting to cheer up, and Clarke turned her attention to the other four girls in the room. Most of them needed some help unpacking their trunks and she made sure that they each had their clothing for the next day and their bathing things set out and ready for the next morning. Once they were all in bed, she was able to blow out the lamp and return to her own room. She felt exhausted from the chatter of the eleven-year-olds, and it seemed like hours had elapsed since she left the Great Hall.
Raven was already asleep in bed, with Mecha also curled up on her feet. Clarke pulled the curtains of Raven’s four-poster bed closed so she could move around without disturbing them. She opened her trunk and quickly got a uniform ready for the next day. She’d have to sort out the rest of her gear tomorrow evening. She glanced over at Raven’s side of the room, which was already threatening to descend into chaos. Despite the extra time she’d had, only half her clothes were hung up. With the wardrobe door still open, it was evident that they weren’t in any particular order either.
Raven had some muggle thingumajig taking up pride of place on her desk. With Clarke’s limited understanding of the muggle world, she would have guessed it came from a car as it smelled faintly of grease. She didn’t think it was anything explosive, but you could never be entirely sure when it came to Raven. Clarke just hoped that she’d had the sense to put something absorbent underneath it. Charming spilled ink back into a bottle while it was still wet was one thing. Oil or grease that had soaked into the wood and dried out was another order of magnitude more difficult.
Clarke blew out the lamp and paused at the dormitory window. From here, she could admire the stars and then look down to see the just waning moon reflecting off the lake. She imagined that the ripples she could make out were caused by the giant squid languidly making its rounds, but she knew that the autumn breeze blowing away the last warmth of summer was more likely to be responsible. She distantly heard howls coming from the woods. She wondered how many of the first years heard it to and were trying to convince each other that there was something out there, just waiting to eat them up. It was probably just the outcome of one of the many rewilding projects at work in this part of Scotland. That was part of the joy of going to school in such a pristine and remote location.
Clarke sighed with happiness as she climbed into bed. She only had one more year after this one and the workload would be intense. This was the year that she became an adult in the wizarding world and she was determined that sixth year was going to be the very best yet.