"A, don't mope, she's been gone for two hours." Carmilla rolled her eyes at the dramatic girl next to her.
Ace continued to pour far too much gravy onto what looked like a scone. She sighed and stared into the distance. Carmilla couldn't even tell if she was joking or not. "Two long Juneless hours......"
She stabbed her wand into one of the waffles stacked on a golden dish and put it onto her plate. There was no chocolate sauce on any of their tables. She still didn't know where the waffle girl from Divination got hers.
Carmilla was about to open her mouth when something hit her squarely on the back off her head.
She whipped around with a glare but was met with the sad face of James Potter.
He was at his own table with his friends, but because both of their tables were next to each other, they may as well have been eating breakfast together. Carmilla had yet to sink back into the playful banter she usually had with James and Sirius, and the kinder conversations with the other two. It had only been a week since the 'incident' as Ace now called it, so she thought their neediness was a little exaggerated.
She tipped some raspberries onto her waffles. Carmilla wasn't quite sure why they were so upset over their spat, it wasn't a fight. They weren't even friends.
Were they friends?
"A, am I friends with them?" Carmilla whispered, her thumb over her shoulder, pointing towards the four boys.
They waved when Ace looked around her friend to see who Carmilla was pointing at. She scrunched up her nose. She scoffed. "Yes? I mean, unless you're still mad at them...but that doesn't mean you've ditched them forever."
"Really?"
"Wait, you don't think your friends? You and Sirius are like-"
Carmilla cut off Ace's rant, not wanting to hear anything that would make her gag. She stood up, took her plate of waffles and berries, and walked over to the Gryffindor table. She sat down between James and Remus. James put down the sliced cucumber he had been throwing at her warily.
"Are we friends?" She asked, and began squashing the raspberries into her waffles. She cut a piece of waffle off as everyone stared at her. They didn't answer her question.
"Are we not friends?" Sirius asked quietly, looking up from his bowl of bobbing cereal puffs that smelt of honey.
"I don't know how humans work," Carmilla muttered.
No one picked up on what she meant, hopefully taking it as a joke, but Remus choked on his slice of toast lathered in some orange paste. James took a bite of his cucumber. "Yeah... if you're not wanting to kill me...?"
"Nah," Carmilla said. She ate another bit of her waffle. Ace and Carmilla had walked June down to the train station, with her bags and arms full of magical Christmas presents for her family, who were muggles, but the girls had ended up missing breakfast, so now they were starving. Luckily, they still served waffles at lunchtime. And dinner. "I got over that ages ago."
Peter started making a baguette sandwich. "So have you decided to be our friend? I'd wait a few days, if I were you. James was planning to stage a-"
"Nope!" James hissed, and threw his thoroughly chewed on cucumber at Peter, who ducked it without looking up from his slices of ham. "I never thought you'd be the one who betrayed me! How could you?"
"Yeah yeah, we're friends." Carmilla huffed, and let Sirius steal one of her waffles.
She had Charlie, the girls, and these idiots.
How lucky could she get?
Carmilla was still revelling at the fact she had so many friends once she'd finished her breakfast and used her blotted map that had begun to run in one corner to find her way back to the Astronomy classroom.
It went against most of the students in the school's morals to do work, least of all for classes, during the holidays, least of all the Christmas holidays.
For Carmilla, this was the time of the year to do work.
If she had gone home to the home, she would be cooking for hours to make the feast of crunchy bread and ham and a stuffed duck. She would be doing the donation rounds on the eve of the day all the girls would rise before the sun and run the masses and hand out packet lemonade to the families who came to pray. She would be stitching up everyones best dresses that they got caught on brambles when they played in the cemetery.
This lazing around and having fun every day didn't make much sense. There were things to do.
Carmilla hummed. She wasn't sure what the song actually was. Just one of the records that played daily in the common room and got stuck in her head.
Ace was chatting to Angela as they got closer to the empty classroom. Everyone taking the class was definitely looking forwards to the warmer months so they could stay up to see the stars, but the temperature itself didn't bother Carmilla that much. She was cool to the touch.
"He honestly isn't even that good off a kisser." Angela was ranting again, sipping her cinnamon coffee that was making Carmilla's nose itchy with the strength of all the spices put in there.
There wasn't actually coffee at the tables in the great hall, but some genius sixth year had brought supplies from home and had a secret business running out of a broom closet. You only had to pay a few knuts, which were as common as dust bunnies.
"Why would you want to kiss him?" Ace asked, scrunching her nose up and gagging at the thought of whichever boy they were talking about.
Angela looked thoroughly offended.
"Have you seen his face? It's so...manly..." The obsessive girl trailed off, holding her books to her chest and opening the door. It was musty and the curtains were closed.
The two girls hadn't gotten around to starting their moon project, and it was due for presentation the second day back. Ace wasn't even in their Astronomy class but June was gone and the quidditch pitch was being used by the Gryffindor's. She threw the quaffle they had stolen up into the air and caught it. "Blech."
"You wouldn't understand."
"...So why exactly can't you just shrink the moon and hand it in as classwork?" Ace asked, hopping onto the desk opposite Carmilla and Angela, who pulled out their half-finished diagrams and quills.
Angela sighed, less dreamy and more bored this time. "Because then the ocean would disappear or something, I don't know."
Carmilla had already thought of shrinking the moon, but more so for Remus than their teacher, who's name she couldn't even remember. Yesterday was the full moon of the month. Carmilla had caught a glimpse of Remus bandaged up and sleeping when she had gone to the infirmary to try a potion Madame Pomphrey thought might help with holding her fangs back when she went to the Christmas ball, which apparently was known to go for hours into the night.
She still didn't have anything to wear. She was relying on the fact everything got done in time if you put it off for long enough. Like this moon project.
Angela started ripping up the newspaper into strips to dip in the glue paste, which they would then wrap around the Quaffle that hopefully the school had a spare of for the games.
It wasn't their fault it was the perfect size.
"What if we make it glow?"
"Or we could just bring a rock in from the black lake." Angela muttered, grimacing when the pasty glue got stuck underneath her red and green fingernails.
"Sirius!" Carmilla shrieked, launching her book at the laughing boy. Remus rolled his eyes at her from the stark white hospital bed he was laying in. She glared at both of them. "Don't sneak up on me again."
"It's not my fault I have quiet feet!" Sirius shot back. He didn't have quiet feet unless he wanted to. Usually, he was stomping around the castle like a grumpy elephant, calling out and knocking things over, but when it came to sneaking up behind people to scare the shit out of them. Well, he was silent.
Carmilla rolled her eyes. "Whatever you say, catfeet."
"I call you Cami, which is an awesome nickname by the way, and I get catfeet? That is so unfair!" he grumbled at her.
"Okay catfoot."
Sirius picked up the books she was reading at the moment, or at least skimming until she spotted a word she recognised. He promptly held it above his head, grinning down with his grey eyes sparkling stupidly.
None of the other boys looked up from their own activities. Betrayal.
Carmilla was tempted to walk up the wall next to him to get her book back and also scare the life out of him in return for sneaking up on her. She resigned herself to the option that wouldn't reveal herself as a vampire. She kicked him in the shins.
"Ow!" He gasped, hobbling away from the triumphant girl, clutching his leg in horror and crashing into a plastic chair that tipped over and sent a vase of flowers crashing to the floor as well.
Peter chuckled, setting down the notebook he had been scribbling furiously in. He put his thin glasses on the top of his head to watch as Carmilla grabbed her book back and smiled down at Sirius. "Thank you."
"You broke my leg!"
"You're in the right place, catfoot." Peter muttered, holding his notebook in front of his face when Sirius threw an empty chocolate box at his head.
Carmilla searched through the contents of her overflowing bag for a bookmark, pulling out the multiple drawings she had kept in there. She had discovered that lots of books had a few blank sheets at the back, and decided to use them. There were a few of Thestrals, which she liked drawing, some of her friends [they weren't as good, she couldn't get faces right] and a half-finished painting of a snake she had seen hidden in the green houses a while back.
Remus didn't look up from his own book, but he moved his gangly legs out of the way while she dumped everything on the end of his bed. She pulled out the map she had finished, and a book on charms she wanted to experiment with once Ace read it aloud to her.
"What's this?" Peter asked, unfolding the map of Hogwarts.
Carmilla shrugged and put the drawings between the pages of the charms book so that they wouldn't get crumpled. "A map I drew up a while ago. I kept getting lost and it's pretty helpful. I still can't find my way to the Owlery by myself, though."
"Really?" James asked with a chuckle, putting the flowers back into the plastic vase and setting it on the bedside table where it belonged.
"Watch." Carmilla prodded it with her wand, the top floor turning transparent and showing the level below. Another tap showed the floor underneath that one, with the tunnel to Honeydukes and the corridor of the disappearing room. As well as that one spot a ghost tended to leave her severed hand sometimes.
"Can I borrow this?" Peter asked, looking down at the parchment with his eyebrows creased. "I have an idea."
Carmilla shrugged. "Go for it."
He left. Carmilla went back to her book, her feet up on the bed, which was comfortable until James got bored of being relaxed after thirty seconds and attempted to use her legs as a hurdle.
She watched his foot get caught on her knee, and then she watched him faceplant straight onto the floor with a high-pitched yelp.
Carmilla went back to her book. She sucked on a pepper imp from the bag of them she'd dumped next to Remus when she came in. She and Ace were still doing the sweet selling rounds, and the preteen girls were buying even more now that they had to send home presents for Christmas.
Together they'd made around seventy galleons, and a shoebox full of knuts. Ace kept the sickles, storing them on the other side of the room so Carmilla would stop randomly breaking out in red spots, and that meant Carmilla ended up with forty-five galleons to add to her stash in the bottom of her trunk.
The shoebox of knuts had been donated to the common room for people to buy coffees with in return for the silence of the students about the entire illegally selling byproducts thing they had going on.
This year she would get to buy presents to send home for Christmas, and maybe even for Charlie, June, and Ace too.
Keeping in mind that she needed to save up for school supplies next year, of course.
She already knew what she was going to do for her Gryffindor friends. Despite not being friends enough to do Christmas presents yet, she had thought of drawings she could do for them a while ago and figured it wouldn't hurt. At that, and a word with far too many vowels to sound out in her head, Carmilla used a pepper imp packet as a bookmark, as well as a pepper imp still in its packet for Ace.
Peter was still gone, so she decided to start on his.
Her grey lead pencil was getting pretty short, but when she used quills, everything ended up ink stained, including her hands. They were only really good for scary scratchy drawings of thestrals and flowers.
The thick book on sad rabbits or something along those lines proved a solid surface, but when she got to the actual drawing part, she paused. She swallowed her pepper imp. "Does anyone have a photo of Peter?"
James sat up immediately with a grin, from where he'd been trying to nap across three plastic chairs. Or at least that's what it looked like. "Yep!"
"Really?" Sirius asked.
He rifled around in his pockets and pulled out a handful of polaroid pictures with thick black lettering on them, dumping them onto the blankets. "I've got one of everyone."
"I can't figure out if that's stalkerish or sweet," Remus said putting down his book and looking at the photos too. "If you have that one of me in second year, I will bite your face off."
"...Not that he bites," Sirius chuckled nervously, and Carmilla couldn't be bothered to pretend to believe him. She picked up one of them. It was the one Remus was searching for, of him curled up like a dog on a puffy red armchair, fast asleep, in fuzzy slippers that certainly didn't belong to him
She handed it over, and Sirius took a peek. "Aw, you were so cute and little!"
"Catfoot, this was taken two weeks ago," Remus said tiredly, and held his hand on Sirius's face when the boy launched himself forward in retaliation for the use of his new nickname.
Carmilla looked at the others. There was one of Peter holding about ten bow truckles in his arms, a few on his head, and more sticking out of his pockets. He'd bet Charlie's record of six at one time by miles. She put that one on her parchment.
There was another polaroid of an Indian woman in a yellow and orange flowery robe, sitting next to man juggling three cups of tea very badly. She held it out to James, "are these your parents?"
She already figured out they were, judging from the smile on the woman's face and the round glasses the man was wearing, but she thought it was polite to ask first. James beamed the second she held it out. "Yep! That's mum and dad, they're-"
"Awesome," Sirius said, and squinted down at the picture he was holding. "Mate, why'd you use this one?"
Carmilla looked over his shoulder. It was a polaroid of him with at least a meter of records stacked on top of his head, sitting cross legged on Peter's bed, beaming. He looked a bit younger. It might've been taken last year. She poked his cheek. "I didn't know you could smile that hard."
Remus chuckled. "Trust me, he wasn't smiling for long. That was our record for most records stacked on his head without magic. James spent twenty minutes taking photos."
"I need one of you!" James realised, dropping a photo of Lily Evans in a green sweater taking a photo of someone else with a long lensed professional looking camera. She'd signed her name on the polaroid, so Carmilla took that to mean James wasn't being a creep.
Then she realised what he'd said.
She stared at him.
"I don't do photos," she said, and ate another pepper imp quickly. Remus looked up from the photo of an old fluffy cat with one ear, alarmed.
"I don't show them to people!" James assured her. Then he squinted to nothing and tilted his head. "...I mean I do. A lot. Pretty much everyone, actually. But I'll take a really pretty one! I promise!"
Carmilla shook her head stubbornly. "I don't do photos."
What she meant, was that she didn't show up in photos, but he didn't need to know that.
"Why do you even have these?" Sirius asked. The photo in his hand was of a guy with his hair tied half up half down, which was covered in sprinkles that a girl was tipping all over him with a scrunched up nose.
"I like telling people about you guys," James said with a grin. His glasses fell down his nose.
Remus rolled his eyes, but he was grinning too. "Dork."
"You guys are so weird," Carmilla said, and then picked up the polaroids of the boys, and put them on the parchment she was about to draw on. "I'll give these back later."
"What are you gonna do with em?"
"Add them to my stalker wall."
ugh this chapter makes me want to eat everyone in it [in a good way] I'm getting the marauders era brainrot real bad
<3 <3 <3