dinner
The Ravenclaw table had no shortage of students reading while eating. Well, really no Hogwarts House had a table without at least one student reading while dining, but the Gryffindors and Slytherins usually wait until after they’ve made friends already, later in the school year. This year had an exception in the Muggleborn Gryffindor Hermione Granger, who had yet to befriend anyone and doubted that talking while eating would do anything more to endear her to her classmates. But other than that, students often read while eating their food - all books from any Magical source would’ve been charmed against staining or water damage before publication, so no risk of incurring Madam Pince’s wrath was invoked. The Great Hall was filled with forks poking absently at plates while the heads of the mouths receiving the food remained inside of books.
Harry Potter, however, was not one such student. Not yet. He was too shocked at just how much food there was, how much variety existed, how much choice he had - just how different his life was in almost a week. Harry would never dare read at the table because he didn’t want to risk being unaware, risk vulnerability to his plate being snatched or the food disappearing before he could eat it. Before, he could never read at the table because he could never read in front of his relatives without being called a swot or lazy and being made to do chores, and because he never sat at the table with them. Now that he had visited a library, however, he understood the urge to, although he still looked at his focused on reading classmates with some bewilderment. His book on the way time magic interacted with the protections on libraries before the Muggle/Wizarding split occurred was just so interesting and related to his curiosity about History of Magic more broadly, and his mind was still preoccupied by theories about the existence of the time capsule dimension, an idea he had read about where the wizards of Alexandria had stored away the information within the the Library of Alexandria, so that even though the physical copies burnt, the knowledge still existed, only now lost almost entirely to Muggles. Harry ate until his stomach felt like it needed a break. Harry had skipped lunch that first Saturday for the same reason - he wasn’t used to being fed that often, and when he ate three meals that first week he would find himself puking most of it back up and feeling tired anyway.
Harry only ate. He did not participate in conversation with his classmates. After dinner, he returned to the Library, where he stayed until he tired and found some older Ravenclaws to follow back to the dormitory.