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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.

Chapter Text

Clarke groaned as her alarm clock rang and rolled onto the floor, forcing her to unscramble herself from her cocoon of sheets and blankets to chase after the clock before it rolled underneath a bed or became a target for Mecha’s style of feline enthusiasm.

She’d set it early, as many of the first years wouldn’t even be used to the fact that alarms on mobile phones or electronic watches didn’t work in Hogwarts. Cell phones were specifically on the list that students were forbidden to bring to the school, along with weapons, gunpowder and non-prescribed medications. Electronic watches simply stopped working, but no one would stop someone wearing one as jewellery.

Her clock was a present from Raven. Typical of her friend, it was some kind of borderline-legal combination of magical and the mundane. Raven said that she’d found the old-fashioned wind-up clock at a garage sale, where muggles offloaded their old household items for extra pounds and pennies. Clarke was dubious, but Raven had unscrewed the back of the clock one day, to show her how the various springs and gears ran the clock’s mechanisms and told the time. The part that Raven added, other than the elbow grease to clean up fifty years of grime, was a charm that made the clock leap up in the air, curl up into a ball and zoom around the floor until the clock’s owner chased it down, like a maniacal dormitory based non-flying golden snitch.

Clarke sighed as she flicked the lever to turn off the alarm and carefully placed it back on her bedside table. Her heart was pounding, and her hair was a mess, and she knew that she had a higher chance finding a boggart in her breakfast cereal than returning to sleep by mistake.

She grabbed her toiletries and towel and made her way to the Gryffindor senior girls’ bathroom. The prefect’s bathroom was gorgeous, but really only practical for a weekend soak. Wandering across the castle in her slippers and a breezy dressing gown would take more time than she could really afford when it came to getting ready on a school day.

Before long she was presentable again and took a moment to check in on the first years. The girls from the other years seemed to be doing the right thing and helping them out, and before long a gaggle of Gryffindors was making their way down the steps, through the common room, past the Fat Lady portrait and into the Great Hall.

She already knew she had the OWL results she needed for the NEWTs she wanted to take. Potions, Herbology, Defence against the Dark Arts, Charms and Transfiguration. A couple of other students were talking to Professors nervously. Clarke was grateful that her sixth-year letter hadn’t included the dreaded ‘subject to confirmation’ caveat next to any of her proposed courses, so she had purchased textbooks and the required equipment confidently. Clarke was certain that Agro wouldn’t have minded being sent off to pick something up something from Borgen and Blotts, but she just preferred being prepared. She might only be sixteen, but she already knew that life had a habit of being unpredictable enough. Why add to the chaos through your own neglect?

Trusting that she’d have time to return to her room after breakfast to gather what she needed for class, she had headed off for breakfast without any textbooks or equipment weighing her down.

Clarke made sure that everyone was helping themselves to breakfast and then went and got a fresh mug of coffee from Blinky, one of two Australian baristas on Hogwarts’ payroll (the other being Bluey). One of the teachers had let slip that they’d only had instant coffee when she was at Hogwarts, and Clarke wasn’t sure how she would have survived.

The house-elf exchange program followed the Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards’ announcement that house-elves were to be free in every part of the universe, discovered or otherwise. Clarke was proud that her country had pushed for this. She’d learned in History of Magic that following Voldemort’s defeat, the UK Ministry of Magic had quickly passed the House Elf Freedom Act, only to discover a few families sending their house-elves to relatives living outside the country to circumvent the law.

Many people thought that House-elves would use this new freedom to travel internationally to go and see the rest of the world. Unfortunately, unlike wizards, most house-elves found holidays deeply unpleasant, being constitutionally just not designed to just flop on a beach for any period of time, with or without a fancy drink sporting a garishly coloured paper umbrella.

House-elves couldn’t relax without succumbing to the temptation to collect and remove all flotsam and jetsam marring the sand. A deeply unhappy house-elf had been known to even attempt to remove all the seashells, and didn’t recuperate until housekeeping permitted them to spend an hour per day assisting them to straighten out rooms.

This gave rise to the suggestion of a working exchange program to different countries which had proven to be extremely popular. No wizarding café in a popular UK location was complete without a barista from the antipodes. Bluey had been working at Madam Puddifoot’s, when she had formed an attachment to a Hogwarts-employed house-elf and had happily accepted the position when it was offered. When the service turned out to be enormously popular, she got in touch with her mate Blinky and told him not to be a great galah and to come and take up the opportunity.

Over time the students began to understand their accents and strange slang and found them to be quite harmless, except around quidditch world cup tournaments, when they kept yelling out aggressively partisan sayings, like ‘ave a go yer mug’ and ‘aussie aussie aussie - oi oi oi’ and drinking enough butterbeer afterwards to still smell of it the next morning.

Kane passed up and down the group passing out timetables as Clarke sipped the rest of her coffee after finishing her food. The seventh years had already gone off to their classes and the sixth years’ were next to receive their timetables. Clarke tried to ignore Professor Kane’s attempts to make eye contact and smile at her.

If he was disappointed that she’d dropped the subject he taught, at least the Arithmancy Professor had the grace not to show it. Frankly, Clarke planned to avoid the man during term time as much as possible. The last thing she needed was someone sending detailed owls about her moods and day to day (mis)adventures to her mother. It had sent her mad with curiosity how her mother had come to know some of the things she referred to last year. She’d even accused Raven of letting something slip, noting that her mother tended to act more maternally to her friend than she did towards her. When Kane showed up on their trip to France, the penny had dropped in a most unpleasant way.

Just as she was standing to add her empty mug to the tray of dirty crockery heading back to the kitchen, Professor Kane touched her arm to get her attention. She flinched with surprise retracting it and he mumbled sorry.

“Just one more thing, Clarke.”

She stiffened and stood straighter so she could come closer to staring him eye to eye.

“Master Jackson has requested you drop in this week. He has a proposition to make. Give him a few days to see all the new students, and pop in when you’re free after class.”

Clarke stammered an acknowledgement and escaped. That hadn’t been what she would have guessed at all.

A few days later she made her way up the Hospital Wing. Clarke couldn’t understand why he had chosen to work at Hogwarts, of all places. Her mother was always saying how much she liked his medical skills. If that was the case, why had he chosen not to progress to an area of specialisation at St Mungo’s?

The ward was empty, which was always good to see. In winter it started to fill up with sporting injuries and respiratory illness cases that were better recovering away from their dormitory mates but right now a dozen metal-framed beds faced each other, neatly made up with white linen and hospital blankets. With the curtains on the beds pushed right back, the afternoon light streaming in the large tower windows was unobstructed. While Clarke admired the view, the hospital wing’s overseer emerged from his rooms.

“So, Miss Griffin. I see Professor Kane passed on my message.”

Clarke nodded. “Master Jackson.”

“I know that you have a full load of classes, but I was wondering if you would take on the role of potions assistant?”

“Potions assistant? Is this a regular role?”

“No, it’s honorary, but I could do with a hand, and I understand you’re planning to study medicine.”

“That’s right. I want to be some kind of Healer.”

“I can give you a jump on the practical requirements of your studies, if you like. Bit of mentoring, answer any questions you have, you know? We’ll keep records of the potions you’ve successfully made without assistance, and when you have your competency log, send it to me, and I’ll sign them off.”

“You can do that?”

“Of course. I got it cleared with St Mungo’s Chief and the Head of Training already.”

Clarke’s eyes narrowed. “Did my mother put you up to this?”

“No. No of course not. It was Professor Cartwright’s idea, actually. I asked her if she would be available to provide help with potions for hospital wing use, but she said that she’s too busy with being Ravenclaw’s Head of House as well.”

That sounded fair to Clarke, and she let her shoulders relax again. Professor Cartwright was renowned for being house mum as well as Head of House.

“She was very sorry that she couldn’t help, as you’d imagine, and said she’d try and think of something. She came back to me when the teachers returned to Hogwarts and suggested that while the seventh years were too busy, you were her most promising sixth year potions student. Not to mention that you were also interested in healing. It sounded perfect to me, what do you think?”

“It sounds perfect to me as well. When do I start?”

“No time like the present? Here’s a list of basic potions that form the building blocks to many of the draughts we require for patients. Professor Cartwright suggested that you work through these first and we’ll meet back at the end of the week to review your progress.”

****

Everyone else had long left for the day but a lone sixth year Gryffindor was working late after Thursday’s dinner. After discovering she’d skipped dinner the night before, Raven had insisted Clarke actually come to the Great Hall to eat properly.

Food was forbidden in the potions laboratories, for obvious reasons. The risk of accidentally ingesting an ingredient rather than your dinner was just too high and the outcomes were unlikely to be beneficial. While health and safety requirements in the wizarding world weren’t quite on par with the muggle world, Indra had insisted on some dramatic improvements since she’d been a Hogwarts student herself.

Clarke refreshed her lumos spell, sending a new ball of glowing light into the air above her head. Then she sent another spell after it, charming it to be mobile so that it would move around her to ensure that the desk and her cauldron were never cast in shadows.  

The spare potions laboratory for students’ use was located in the dungeons. This was where the infamous Professor Snape used to teach, though it likely predated his tenure. As a Slytherin he might have had an affinity for the dark and dank corners of Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, but Professor Callie Cartwright had been appalled. Light and fresh air were essential in her view if one aspired to become a truly proficient potioneer.

The Potions Professor, known to all her students as ‘CeeCee’, never taught senior classes there. It was all very well for junior potions classes, if there was a clash and it couldn’t be avoided.

Although plenty of students found potions challenging, Clarke knew that it was usually just an issue of focus. To get a pass mark at OWL standard potions it really was all about following the recipe. Three drops of moonshine oil and a generous pinch of frogweed - not the reverse. If it’s meant to be stirred clockwise four times, a careless fifth stir in the other direction won’t make it better. Don't say gardiola when you mean gardiolo.

Provided you followed the same recipe, you could expect to get the same acceptable results. 

Senior classes needed a bit more... touch. The combination of the wizard and their wand mattered. A slight emphasis on one syllable and not another. An extra drop of a secret ingredient added to achieve an enhanced effect. An extra stir clockwise but not the other way round. But done deliberately, to match an individual’s magical signature. That’s where the practice was required. Your book learning of all the ingredients is important. But even more so was the touch and intuition that could only be gained from hours in front of a cauldron sitting on a burner. Trial and error; guided by intuition and recording the positive results, as well as the unexpected outcomes that might lead to whole new potions in the future. That was the approach Professor Cartwright championed.

Ordinary Wizard Level potions was simple science.

NEWTs raised it to an artform.

To that end, Professor CeCe constantly emphasised the need for lots of natural light to help observe the subtle graduations in colour saturation; the point where a mixture turned cloudy or started to fizz. All of these could guide you as you produced your potion.

Fresh air was a must as well so that you can assess how your brew is going by its changing scent. The dungeons classroom seemed to have a residual rotten egg smell from one too many first-year class explosions over the decades. 

Or perhaps it was one of Raven’s more recent experiments? Whenever Raven was left to her own devices for too long, she could be reliably found attempting to create explosions.

She was one of the reasons why they weren't permitted to practice their potions work in the regular laboratory, or their dormitories. She'd almost burnt down the Ravenclaw tower. She'd suffered the incredibly rare feat of being thrown out of her House and this was one of the grounds. The bronze raven knocker on the door simply refused to give her any more riddles or questions to answer, so she couldn't get in, even if she was plenty smart enough to excel in that House.

It wasn’t the only reason, but it was the one given out in public, if anyone asked.

Ravenclaw’s loss was Gryffindor’s gain. Clarke didn’t know what she’d do without her best friend. Wells had been her best friend growing up, but since being sorted into different Houses they had started to grow apart. His father’s role in leading to and covering up Jake Griffin’s death hadn’t helped either and meant she never saw him outside of school anymore. Not that she blamed Wells. Having his only parent locked away in Azkaban must have been tough. She’d heard that underage wizards weren’t even permitted to visit as the risk of being unable to defend themselves against the Azkaban guards, the Dementors, was just too high.

She still missed Jake every day.

Her mother might now be Minister for Magic, no doubt assisted by a wave of voters sympathetic to her cause who had followed Jake, but plenty of the Council Members under Jaha had retained their positions and others loyal to him were still holding senior positions in the department. 

She wanted nothing to do with it, despite her mother’s assurance that she could get her a safe job in any department.

Clarke didn’t want a job just because it was safe, and she certainly didn’t want something just handed to her on a platter. Not that she was crazy brave seeking out something reckless, but she wanted to do something that mattered. And she was willing to back herself to be able to undertake the studies and training required to win that job on her own merits.

She really did think that something medical was where her interests lay. Maybe she should work at St Mungo's, developing better cures for the most serious of maladies effecting the magical community? Or she could become a travelling medical researcher, finding new ingredients for healing spells. Work with hidden magical communities to learn and improve their methods to share with the wider community? Magical maladies that effected the mind interested her too. There were still casualties of the second wizarding world who were shadows of their former selves. Imagine being able to bring them back into a position to fully engage in the world, while they were young enough to still reach their potential after so many wasted years.

So long as the branch she chose was something miles different from her mother’s area of expertise. Her position as Head of the Magical Surgery Department had given her the profile she needed to get into politics when she first sought out a seat on the Council. 

Politics. That was one thing she absolutely would not be doing. She had seen all the back room deals and it depressed her. Besides, she might have been given a prefect badge but she was no leader.

She was determined to forge her own destiny. She didn't want anyone to think everything had been given to her.

Not like that stuck up Slytherin sixth year, Lexa Woods. She'd been their quidditch captain since second year. Everyone had heard that Lexa had inherited a whole house and so many gold coins it took a team of Gringotts goblins two weeks just to confirm that they were all there.  She would not have to work a day in her life if she didn't feel like it. Maybe just deal in dubious antiquities like the Malfoy family in shops located down shady alleyways. Clarke had heard rumours that the Lexa’s father’s family and the Malfoys had shared a common ancestor not that many generations ago.

The old-fashioned clock in the corner gave it’s chime sequence to let her know that it was a quarter of an hour to curfew. While as a prefect she could claim that she was undertaking some kind of duty requirement, it was too early in the semester to start making up excuses. Clarke packed away the unused ingredients and stoppered the cooling bottles of a muscle soothing draught she’d produced. She washed out the cauldron, chopping board and other equipment and left them in the drainer to dry overnight. Professor Cartwright had given her a key to the teacher’s preparation room so she didn’t have to constantly lug her equipment back to the dormitory each night, and from here she could also access the safe with more ingredients than the standard ones used for homework practice stored in the cupboard at the front of the laboratory.

She made it back through the portrait with five minutes to spare and dragged herself up the stairs to the girls’ dormitories, regretting that the smaller senior girls rooms were right up the top of the tower.

Raven was working on the final touches of her homework and Clarke bit her tongue before issuing the complaint about her workload that was on the tip of it. Raven had signed up for Arithmancy and Advanced Muggle Studies as well as four of the five NEWT’s that Clarke was working on. The projects she was constantly tinkering with often included the creation of small devices like Clarke’s alarm clock. Selling these to other students was her main source of sickles and the occasional galleon to fund her Hogsmeade purchases. As an orphan, the ministry gave her a small stipend, but that barely covered her clothing and school books.

The lamplight illuminated the sign above Raven’s desk.

“Make a Bang at The Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes”

Clarke had retained the ministry brochure that she spotted at the careers fair held toward the middle of the previous year that was supposed to motivate them to greater efforts in their OWLs and to help guide subject selection for years 6 and 7. She’d kept it in mint condition and had it framed for Raven for her birthday.

To the best of Clarke’s knowledge, Raven hadn’t decided on what she wanted to do after Hogwarts. With the sort of NEWTs she was likely to get, she’d have no trouble finding a job, but it would be a waste if she didn’t get one that used her brain to its fullest extent. Growing up with a muggle mother, Raven was still learning about new magical occupations, and didn’t want to commit to anything too soon.

Raven rinsed out her quill and put the lid back on her bottle of ink.

“Long night?” Raven turned to Clarke.

“Yeah. It took me a few goes with this draught tonight. It’s similar to something we last made in second year, so it took a while to get back in the swing of it.”

“Sounds like good revision.”

“It is. I’ve still got some reading to finish for tomorrow.”

“Don’t stay up all night. It’s still only the first week, remember.”

“Hey, pot calling kettle!”

Raven laughed and cancelled the charm causing the origami crane to flit around the room. It looked tired, and Clarke guessed that Raven had put the spell on it hours ago. She always set it up for Mecha to play with while she was engrossed in her studies. If the cat wasn’t sufficiently tuckered out when the humans went to bed, she had a most upsetting habit of launching herself at feet in order to wake someone up to go play with her. But Mecha had clearly satiated her urge to play and was curled up at the end of Raven’s bed, soundly asleep.