Ravenclaw.
Carmilla stood up quickly, relief flooding through her body, and took the brown hat off.
Cheering surrounded her as she hurried to a seat next to Ace, who grinned brightly and opened her mouth to say something. She was interrupted.
Professor Dumbledore stood up from behind the long table the teachers were seated at. He walked to a podium made of a golden owl and smiled down at all the waiting students with shiny teeth. "Hello. Welcome to Hogwarts, and welcome back, to the rest of you. I'll try not to bore you with an old man's waffling, but a few rules need to be... reinstated."
He glanced to some people underneath the red and gold banner next to the Ravenclaw table, closest to the big doors. The floorboards were as shiny and polished as Dumbledoor's teeth.
Carmilla turned to look at the group he was eyeballing, and made eye contact with a tired looking boy. His face was littered in vicious scars. He was blatantly staring at Carmilla, and didn't look away until she stuck her tongue out him in retaliation.
The boy had a funny smell. Magical like the rest of the witches and wizards in the great hall, but something else as well.
Dumbledore continued to make his speech. He introduced another teacher for a lesson on the dark arts, or maybe it was defence against them. She wasn't paying attention. Instead Carmilla took the time to properly take in the room. It was amazing, really, the roof must have been magic as the stars shone down on them from above, and the moon helped light up the hall. It was aided by lots of floating candles.
There were around one hundred students along her dark table, matching the rest. What really stood out was the plates, bowls, and cutlery. They were all gold. She wasn't sure if it was solid gold, but it shone all the same. Carmilla glanced down at her robes, and sure enough, they were a dark blue.
She matched everyone else along the table.
The Ravenclaws were second from the door, Gryffindors, with the scarred boy, being first. The green house where the twins had gone, was on the other end. Then there was Heather and Ophelia, sitting with some other yellow robed people wearing gold jewellery and colourful headbands.
Dumbledore said a few words Carmilla was pretty sure weren't real. The golden plates in front of them filled with food.
Carmilla's eyes widened as she took in the sight.
Plates of juicy meat, piles of roast vegetables, boats of gravy, and everything in-between.
Her mouth started watering involuntarily as people piled the feast onto their plates. At the girls home, there had never been an abundance of food. The girls were never starved, but the nuns who cared for them weren't rich, so the best meals they had were on Easter and Christmas, when the town would donate to the church.
Carmilla picked up a bowl of roast potatoes and some Yorkshire puddings. She didn't take any meat. She had never actually eaten any, never wanting to gain a taste for flesh and blood. She was scared she might like it a bit too much. It was going to be hard enough to make friends without the added complications of wanting to drink their blood.
"I'm so glad you're in Ravenclaw, I knew you were one of us. You'll probably be in my dorm. Me and June are the only ones in it, the spares." Ace enthusiastically said, while pouring too much gravy for her own good onto the peas.
"I'm just thankful I'm not sitting next to him instead." Carmilla answered, eyeing the greasy looking boy at the Slytherin table. She wasn't one to judge appearances, but there was something else about him too. Something harsh.
Ace chuckled at that. "Yup, that's Severus, he's friends with Lily Evans, the one sitting next to those annoying boys. I don't know them very well, they're a bit obnoxious and loud, but I sat next to Remus in potions last year and he seemed fairly lovely when he was actually there."
She had motioned to the boy who'd been staring at her before, and two others, one with unruly hair and round glasses, the boy who had knocked into her on the train station. He was shoving a guy with a big smirk and great hair.
Remus turned to them, probably feeling their eyes, and Carmilla just glared, if he suspected anything about her, she certainly didn't want to get with that crowd.
A short, nice-looking man strolled up to them, handing out cards to the other students on the way. "Miss King! It's a pleasure to meet you, I'm your head of house." He smiled brightly at them, passing timetables over.
That was adult talk for 'when you get in trouble, I'm the one who dishes out the detentions, so watch it'.
Carmilla smiled. "Hello."
"I'm sure Miss London here can show you to the common room after dinner, but Professor Dumbledore wants to speak to you first. Maybe about liquorice wands. I will see you in charms tomorrow, have a nice evening girls!"
He left to talk to some older students, leaving a confused Carmilla. "Liquorice wands?"
"Don't worry, I have a few detentions under my belt, I can show you where his office is. Lemme see your timetable, I don't want to sit by myself in transfiguration again." Ace said, and compared their timetables while a girl called Angela introduced herself to Carmilla.
"Where did you transfer from?" She asked.
Carmilla glanced up from her Yorkshire pudding, "Ilvermorny, in America. I'm starting my third year."
She found out that Angela was also in her third year, and they shared potions and what she learned was Defence Against the Dark Arts. She had Transfiguration, Charms, and History of Magic with Ace, who told her to bring a pillow to the latter.
Apparently, Transfiguration was difficult, which meant that Carmilla would have to practise whatever they were learning that day beforehand, or at least read up on the subject afterwards. Lot's of studying involved.
She hadn't read any of her books required for school. Her plan had been to just struggle through the first week, and then learn to read over the weekend so she was slightly prepared.
If she was in Ravenclaw, it couldn't be that hard... right?
The only core subject she had without Ace or Angela was Herbology, with the Gryffindor's, but apparently that was easy if you just copied everyone else and didn't say rude things to the plants.
Astronomy was with the Hufflepuffs, but hopefully Heather and her friends would be kind to her.
It was all a lot of information on her first night, but she would just have to organise herself. And not sleep in. At the girls home, they were up by seven in the morning for mass, so she should be fine.
Living at an orphanage, and a religious one at that, proved hard, since she was surrounded by crosses, but once she had told the girls how her skin became hot and blotchy sitting at the front near the altar, they just organised themselves so that she was seated to the back of the church. Then she could draw pictures for the younger sisters in the back of the bibles.
Mistress Theeny never made her wear a cross necklace either. Mistress Theeny was quite an understanding nun, considering she was dealing with a 'spawn of Satan', and had informed Carmilla that she was a Squib.
That was why she couldn't tell her a lot about the Wizarding world. She didn't know.
Carmilla's fangs were a bit of a problem too. They would come out when it got dark, or someone was bleeding, or her emotions got too big to keep a metaphorical lid on. She didn't get overcome with bloodlust, at least as far as she knew, but she would still leave the room before anything happened. She didn't want to risk it.
One of the few perks of her condition was that there were only a few ways she could be killed, as morbid as that may sound. A stake through the heart, a good old-fashioned beheading, or weapons made of silver. She couldn't get hurt, no bruises or cuts or broken bones. She could feel a bit of the pain, but no real injuries.
This was hard to explain sometimes, but at a magical school it couldn't be that hard to cover up. Hopefully.
People filed out of the hall slowly, and soon the three girls left as well, after eating a hearty dessert of watermelon flavoured sweets and sticky date pudding, a new dish everyone was quite excited about. Carmilla was sure she would be sick with all the rich foods she'd eaten, but she seemed to be okay so far.
Angela headed back to the common room with the rest of the Ravenclaws, while Ace showed Carmilla the way to Dumbledore's office.
The hallways were long and winding. Carmilla was bound to get lost at some point. People must need maps to get around here, and the switching staircases were just a royal pain. The moving paintings scared the life out of her. Not literally, but Ace was still cackling over her fright when they stopped in front of a large stone gargoyle.
Three boys were sitting in the corridor. Remus's two loud friends, and a short sandy haired boy who had sprinkles on his face. They were playing a game of cards with fireworks in it, but they looked up when Carmilla and Ace stopped by the grotesque statue.
"Liquorice wands." Ace said clearly, looking at the gargoyle.
Carmilla watched in confusion, ignoring the curious boys, as the statue turned around slowly, revealing a staircase leading upwards. A secret office. How peculiar. It did make sense, after all. Dumbledore spoke in riddles and wore a big hat, of course he'd have a secret office.
"Someone's up there, love, you'll have to wait." The grey eyed boy said with another wide smirk. He was leaning back against a wall with his legs crossed, shuffling the cards.
Sparks flew from them.
Carmilla stared at him for a moment, and then walked up the stairs.
Hopefully this wouldn't take too long. She would hate for them to annoy Ace. She could probably take them all, if they didn't use their wands. The only spell she knew with hers was reaching behind her bed with it when things fell down the side to poke them out. The staircase ended at a wooden door. There wasn't anything else, so she knocked.
"Enter."
Well, that was quite formal, considering Dumbledore came to her through the back door of the girls home wearing gumboots.
He'd never explained it, either. She pushed the door open and was met with a large study. Bookshelves, odd ornaments, and strange spinning metal contraptions filled it. There was a large red bird in one corner, its head under its wing.
Dumbledore sat behind a big desk, and in one of the two much smaller seats in front of him, there was another student.
Carmilla smiled a little and sat down, waiting for him to speak. When he didn't, she snuck a glance to her left. The other student, as it turned out, was Remus. This was not ideal. Then Dumbledore spoke. "Mr Lupin here, has agreed to inform you that he is a werewolf."
This was not the introduction speech she had been expecting.
Remus was looking at the floor now. His heart rate has increased tenfold, and his knuckles were white when he scratched at them. Carmilla supposed that being a werewolf explained the way he smelt like magic plus something else mixed in. Fur. Or slobber. Carmilla had never seen a werewolf. She assumed they were just really big dogs.
"This is so you both know, that there is someone else you can talk to at Hogwarts, although my office is always open, I doubt that you want to listen to an old man's wisdom," Dumbledore said, his eyes twinkling.
Carmilla eyed him. He was right.
Remus shifted in his seat. His hair was very fluffy, and it fell over his scarred and scared face.
"I hope that you settle into Hogwarts, Miss King," Dumbledore said. He clapped once, and Remus nearly fell out of his seat. "Now, off to bed both of you. You've got a big day tomorrow."
Carmilla watched one of the red birds' feathers spark like the playing cards, and then shrivel up and blacken. She stepped back into the moving staircase when Dumbledore turned back to whatever it is teachers do in their spare time. Practise their mean faces, maybe.
There was an awkward silence, with only the quite scraping sound of stone on stone. Remus gulped. He was a guilty looking kid. "Why did... why did he want me to tell you? I'm dangerous."
"Yeah, well, so am I." Carmilla said.
He looked up at her and she debated which explanation would scare him most.
Then she opened her mouth, hoped she didn't have any sticky date pudding stuck between her teeth [that would be embarrassing], and let her incisors slide down until they clicked against her bottom teeth.
His eyes widened and the staircase came to a rumbling stop, but it didn't grind its way back around and spit them into the corridor yet. It gave her a second to push her fangs back into normal sized sharp teeth with her tongue. How kind of it.
She patted the gargoyle on the nose and stepped into the hallway a second later.
"You're-" Remus started, and fell silent, glancing towards their company.
"See you around," was all she said, and waved at Remus as she left in the opposite direction. He looked a bit baffled.
"What did he want? And with Remus?" Ace asked once they were out of earshot from the boys. They passed a painting of a pretty girl with a big headband and a round white earring. She looked over her shoulder, eyes glittering with oils, and smiled at the girls.
Carmilla waved at the girl with the pearl earring, "he was just wondering how I liked it, hoped I'd settled in. I think he was talking to Remus before I got there."
The lie slipped out easily. She felt kind of bad for it, but she wasn't about to stop keeping herself safe from social exclusion and pitchforks, let alone expose Remus the werewolf either. No one deserved that.
After a few minutes, and lots more stairs, they stopped at the entrance to the Ravenclaw common rooms. It was a dark door, lined with gold and an intricate eagle door knocker that Ace rapped on aggressively.
Carmilla jumped when it started talking, and was met with mere laughter at her fright.
"You'll get used to it, don't worry," Ace said, not hiding her smile. Carmilla rolled her eyes.
This five-letter word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it. What is the word?
Ace huffed and lent against the wall. "I suck at these, usually I just wait for someone, apparently, I'm too 'impatient,'" she said, making air quotes and sliding to the floor and pulling something from her pocket. "We can just wait until the prefects get back from their meeting anyway."
"You? impatient?" Carmilla asked, raising an eyebrow. She sat down next to Ace.
Ace began weaving pink thread between her fingers, her tongue stuck out in concentration. The torch in a bracket by the door flickered. Carmilla watched an ember fall slowly to the carpet and die out.
A painting sneezed. She reached into the pockets of her second hand robe, and pulled out a still sticky sweet wrapper from the train, a handful of the smallest coins, and a short grey lead pencil.
Footsteps echoed against soft carpet a hallway away. Carmilla heard them getting closer. A much older boy rounded the corner, glancing down at them.
This five-letter word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it. What is the word?
"Short," the boy said, and patted the knocker as he walked through the open doors. "You're repeating them, man."
Warmth and the smell of vanilla and mint wafted over them.Ace scrambled to her feet, stuffing the thread in the pockets of her robes, and they followed him.
It was like a library, except half of the bookshelves that snugly fit two doors between them were filled with owl cages and dioramas and record players. Couches and fireplaces were dotted around in clusters. A few Ravenclaw house banners were on the walls, but it was mainly old paintings in fancy frames, and a few just thumbtacked up. One was pinned with medieval sword. Wait, actually, three of them were.
The girl from the hallway with the headband and the pearl earrings was sitting with another girl in a golden frame. Carmilla couldn't tell if the second painting was smiling or not. She didn't have any eyebrows.
A little kitchen off to the side was covered in biscuit tins and scraps of paper. It all looked like somewhere you could get lost for days, and there were already students doing just that.
The best thing was the roof, despite the cosiness of the room. It was a dome shape, tinted a dark blue, but light enough that you could see the stars shining through it. Arrows and labels adorned it, pointing out each constellation.
"It moves with the stars, and it's always right." Ace said softly, admiring it as well. She shrugged. "Astronomy's kind of our thing, even though Flit teaches charms."
"Flitwick?"
"Yup," Ace said, and began ripping off little strips of paper from the posters that were all layered on the fridge next to them. Carmilla couldn't read them, but she saw drawings of chess pieces and a sad looking cat.
How did you lose a pet three hours into the school term?
Carmilla squinted at the biggest poster, which was half covered by a giant magnet shaped like something inappropriate. "Wait... do you guys actually fly around on brooms?"
"Quidditch!" Ace said happily, putting the paper strips into her pocket. "You'll love it, Ravenclaw came second last year. There's the seeker, the chasers, a keeper, and the beaters. Four balls, six hoops, it's great. You should try out; you look like you'd be a good flyer."
"Maybe." Carmilla didn't own a broom, but she should be able to borrow one from the school if she decided to try out.
Ace led her to the doors and pointed at the one they didn't go through. "It's split up between boys and girls. And I think there used to be a charm to block the doors to the wrong gender, but that was years ago. Someone got rid of it."
Carmilla spotted her name on a piece of parchment, attached to a door in the hallway, and pointed to it. Thankfully, Mistress Theeny had thought to show her the very basics. "That's my dorm." "
"Oh great! This is me and June's dorm! Flit probably did that on purpose, he gets everyone in with people they'd be great friends with. Dunno how."
The door swung open, revealing where Carmilla would be living. It didn't disappoint. There were three four-poster beds with dark blue covers. On the other side of the room were some beanbags and a squishy looking couch. The moon shone through multiple windows, bright enough to light everything up, though candles were lit, and there was a trunk at the foot of every bed.
"Hey A, we have another bed this year, do you think..." A girl with almond eyes and dangly sunflower earrings poked her head out of what must be the bathroom, a toothbrush in hand.
She stopped talking when she saw Carmilla standing in the middle of the room.
"June this is Carmilla, Milla this is June. Milla is new this year, transfer from Ilvermorny." Ace said quickly, and flopped onto the middle bed, which was very obviously hers, hence the bursting trunk at the end, quidditch posters, and neon cacti on the bedside table.
"Milla happened quickly." Carmilla said, unlocking the trunk at the end of her bed. It was the furthest from the bathroom, closest to the door.
"Oh, it absolutely will, my name's Juniper. Nobody even remembers that anymore, because someone thought of a nickname." June complained, and stuck her tongue out at a grinning Ace, who carried her pajamas into the bathroom.
June's side of the room had paintings around the headboard, hanging plants, and a fluffy cat bed at the foot of her own.
Carmilla took her books out of her trunk and stacked them next to her bedside table. It looked too weak to hold the multiple hardcovers. She dug around for her pajamas as well.
Ace came out of the bathroom in green and white stripes, just like her favourite sweet.
"Little miss minty over here," June smirked, and began brushing her wavy black hair out. She had a fringe too. Her pyjamas were purple with a faint flower pattern.
Carmilla looked down to her cream-coloured ones, donated to the girls home a few years ago. They weren't very nice looking, and there were stains on the sleeve cuffs from spilt hot chocolate and drool.
She would have to get over that though, she was living with these girls now.
"Where's sass?"
Carmilla frowned. "Why do you need extra sass?"
"That was sassy in itself," Ace muttered through the toothpaste dribbling down her chin. It filled the room with the smell of grape sweets, and looked a bit holographic. Wizarding products really were the strangest.
"Sass is the name of my cat, because he's a sassy little bitch." June explained and began reaching underneath her bed. Her voice turned singsong. "Here bitch, here little bitchy bitch!"
She pushed aside her potions kit to find her own things, holding back a sneeze. One toothbrush, a bar of soap that someone had carved a love heart into, probably Rose, a hairbrush, and her favourite of the old teddy bears from the playroom. It was a manky bear who'd lost his colour by the time he made his way to the girls home, but Carmilla had grown up with him. His name was Ted.
She pushed him into the bottom of her case and then frowned at the soft toy next to him.
Then the brown toy opened its eyes and glared at her, whiskers shifting. She looked to June and pointed at her trunk. "Got him."
"Shit. Sorry, he tends to do that," June grumbled, and reached into Carmilla's neatly packed things, scooping out the grumpy looking cat, who meowled in protest and tried to scratch at their faces.
"It's okay," Carmilla wiped her nose. "I'm just... slightly allergic."
wow, another long chapter! don't expect it every time lol
<3