friendships and worcestershire sauce
*
October 1, 1575
At first when Merlin started sitting at the Gryffindor table with Arthur, or Ravenclaw with Gwen, the other students tittered and muttered.
While people did have friends in other houses, it wasn’t exactly the done thing to go sit with them at meals. Especially not Slytherins and Gryffindors.
However, after a bit of time and one outburst from Arthur of “What are you all staring at!”, people have come to accept this inter-house friendship as a thing.
Which is great, because it means Merlin can spend many a breakfast hiding the Worcestershire sauce from Arthur when the prince isn’t looking. Arthur puts Worcestershire sauce on absolutely everything, it’s actually not normal.
And it’s not like they don’t also have friends in their own houses too- Arthur, charming as he is, has a large gang of equally loud, friendly Gryffindors such as Lancelot and Gawain.
Gwen herself has not only made friends in Ravenclaw, but also in Slytherin with Morgana and Hufflepuff with twins Avery and Amory.
In Merlin’s case, he’d tried to be polite but distant towards the other Slytherins, preferring to be by himself when studying et cetera.
However, this tactic did not quite work out for him..
Morgana- a tall, somewhat scary dark-haired girl, with a quick wit Merlin admired- had somehow become friends with him. All that had happened was that she’d been sitting alone in the common room, playing chess against herself, and Merlin had felt bad for the girl that seemed to be left out by other Slytherin witches. He also knew that she was sort of friends with Gwen, so couldn’t be too bad. So, he’d asked if he could play her at chess.
Morgana had in fact been abysmal at Wizarding chess, not even seeming to know the rules, but he’d pretended like he was bad too and they both enjoyed the game. Somehow this had grown into them becoming friends, two Slytherin weirdos together.
Merlin had also found a friend/study partner in Rowan, a clever Slytherin boy with tawny hair and bad eyesight (he had to hold books 10 cm from his face). Rowan had first shared Merlin’s study table in silence, before asking him tentatively about quidditch and they’d become friends from there. (Merlin loves quidditch but never had a chance to play it, as his mum couldn’t afford to get him a broom)
During the first few weeks, too, Merlin discovers that no, Parseltongue doesn’t seem to be spoken by any other 1st years and no, seeing people’s ‘magic’ is not something most first years can do. The way he found out these sad facts were by reading a whole shelf of ‘restricted section’ books on the topics. Courtesy of his invisibility cloak, of course.
Even though his father left him and his mother all those years ago, Merlin can’t help feeling grateful for the cloak, a small part of him wondering if his father ever snuck into Gryffindor or the Library’s restricted section when he had been a student..