the Great Hall
Dear Asphodel,
My older brother has announced that he intends to marry a SQUIB! My parents are furious and ready to disown him, but it must be a love potion. How can I get him away from the filthy creature and calm my parents down long enough for it to wear off?
A Dash of Reason
Dear Dash of Reason,
If your brother is old enough to marry, he’s old enough to marry whoever he wants. Since you care about your brother and he’s determined enough to risk being disowned, your best bet is to realize that humans are humans before you drive him away.
Best,
Asphodel
Lily—
Glad you’ve got that off your chest. Answer their question, and this time remember that this isn’t a political column and love potions can be a real problem. —Rita
Dear Dash of Reason,
Your parents may calm down once they understand either your idea or what your brother sees in his partner. You can make both those things happen if your brother is willing. Tell him that your parents are worried for him, and his best chance of convincing them is to take a love potion antidote and then explain to them why he loves her.
Best,
Asphodel
Lily—
Much better, we’ll just have to put in one edit. First, I don’t know why you’d assume the squib is a witch a girl. Second, don’t ask a wizard to explain why he loves someone. The best case scenario is bad poetry. We’re replacing the last bit with ‘why the objects of his affections is worthy of their family.’ —Rita
Rita, that doesn’t sound like me at all. —L
L— Come up with something the Prophet can print yourself, then. —R
Rita, can I stand you tea or lunch or something? I have a few questions. —L
***
In the glorious Scottish sunlight (it was kind of weak and grumpy looking, actually, just like everyone else who didn’t want to be awake for breakfast, but Bill was On An Adventure) the Great Hall looked open and bright, its blue banners cheerful against the grey stone. The bacon and eggs were piled high, and the students looked, if sleepy and morning-mussed, hopeful and happy to see each other.
Except for the green table, where Ron, Bill’s boatmate from last night, was sitting. They did not look hopeful, or happy. They all looked extremely neat and a bit traumatized, like Bill’s mum had been at them.
Ron didn’t look especially traumatized, so Bill shot him a what’s-with-them look. Ron grinned an I Got To Watch A Free Show Because The Older Kids Are Morons Who Don’t Know Grownups Are Easy grin and shrugged, so Bill grinned back. It was nice to see that face and know it didn’t mean a two-year-old was judging him.
“What’s with him?” asked Bill’s other boatmate who wasn’t a giant fusspot, settling down next to him. Bill had already forgotten the name of the second girl—she wasn’t going to be in their house, anyway—but Gwen was all right. They’d already agreed to cheer for each other’s teams as long as the Cannons and Tornados[1] weren’t playing each other.
Ron wasn’t going to be in their house, but unlike that other girl he knew everything about dogs and crups and awful things about ducks and geese (which his family used to guard the crups), and he knew songs by heart whose titles would have made Mum faint and Dad go temporarily deaf, and Bill was keeping him.
“Dunno,” Bill said, holding out the bacon for Gwen more because you did that for a mate than because Mum would want him to be a gentleman, “but all the other—”
“Euuuughhhhh!” Gwen said. “Thanks, Bill, but no thanks! Just pass me the muesli or the porridge or something, will you?”
Bill looked down at the delicious pile of crackly, delicious, delicious brown delicious bacon smelling deliciously up at him like crackly greasy salty delicious cracklings. “Did a spider fall in it?”
She laughed, and pushed it away. “I don’t eat pigs. Especially their bottoms. Go on, you have mine.”
He blinked, and shrugged, and agreeably took ‘her’ serving. He held her out the eggs instead.
“I don’t eat baby chickens that came out of a mommy chicken’s girl bits, either,” she told him cheerfully. “Really, just the porridge, please.”
He looked down at his own plate, aghast.
Still completely cheerfully, she said, “The porridge, please, and no cream in or I’ll talk to you all about where milk comes from. Oooh, and can you pass me an orange?”
Bill cast around for help.
There was a sudden big space all around them (house of the brave his bum, Dad), and across the hall, Ron had almost fallen into his plate of fluffy baby chickens and delicious crackly pig bits, convulsed in laughter, even though (or maybe because) Bill didn’t think he was close enough to have heard a word of it.
Help came in the form of a tart adult brogue suggesting, “I should pass the young lady her orange if I were you, Mr. Weasley,” and a matching pair of parchment rolls settling down in front of them.
They looked up at their new Head of House, trying not to be intimidated. This was difficult, since she when she was telling them last night to smarten up she hadn’t appeared to care that they needed to smarten up because they’d fallen in the lake. They chorused, “Good morning, Professor.”
She smiled down at them, and if it was a brisker smile than it was warm, it wasn’t unkind, either. “Good morning, Mr. Weasley, Miss Jones. Your year will have Charms first this morning. The Charms classroom can be tricky to find on a Monday, so be sure to allow yourself extra time and ask directions every few portraits, if you cannot find a prefect or Sir Nicholas to escort you.”
Bill and Gwen stared at her, and one of Bill’s new roommates (who’d inched closer once the conversation had turned away from Gwen making eggs unexpectedly horrifying) blurted, “Isn’t there a map or something?”
“Good heavens, no, Mr. Wood,” she smiled, looking really amused. “A map would be quite useless at Hogwarts. You shall have to learn its ways like everyone else. Good morning to you.”
She moved down along the table, dropping off a scroll at every student and exchanging greetings and some longer words with older students.
Bill opened his scroll.
Bill closed his scroll and stood up on the bench. “I don’t know about you lot,” he announced loudly down his table, ignoring any possible raised eyebrows from the teacher’s table, “but I’m going to make a sarnie and see if I can’t grab my charms books before the prefects are finished eating, because,” he waved his scroll aggrievedly, “there aren’t any directions on here!”
There was a little laughter, and then a big chap with a silver badge said amiably, “Don’t worry, squirt, if Professor McGonagall will write a note, we’ll eat slow.”
“Good idea; so will we,” said a girl who also had a silver badge, sitting at the yellow table.
“Our firsties came to breakfast already prepared,” said someone from the blue table, grinning.
“So,” said someone near Ron, not really that much bigger than Bill but scary beyond all reason with eldritch designs crawling all over her hands, her voice very cold, “did ours.”
At the staff table, Professor Dumbledore stood, and everyone fell silent. He looked around, and Bill suddenly wished he’d thought to get down off the bench once the prefects started squabbling.
“Two points each to Slytherin and Ravenclaw,” he said slowly, perhaps a little dangerously, “for foresight and preparedness, and two to Hufflepuff for that readiness to adopt and credit the good ideas of others which we in academia call good sportsmanship.”
His eyes swung around to Bill, who quailed but stuck out his shoulders and chin. He wasn’t going to get sent home for jumping on a table. They’d at least give him a warning first, wouldn’t they?
Then the headmaster burst out into a beardy white smile, eyes going all sparkly and grandfatherly. “And five points to Gryffindor—two earned by its prefects and two by Mr. Weasley for seizing an opportunity to support younger children and one’s peers without being asked, and one for showing common or, indeed, exceptional sense in the face of the unknown.” He clasped his old hands together and beamed down at them all. “We are off to a happy start this year! Be sure to keep it up!”
Bill slid down self-consciously and, because everyone was still sort of staring at him, tried not to look self-conscious as he slapped more pi—bacon and eggs between some toast and hissed to Gwen, “That man is up to something.”
“That’s Professor Dumbledore, that is,” reproached one of Bill’s new roommates, the one who’d kept the light on late because he was afraid of getting quizzed on his first day and getting a Howler from his parents. “He’s a war hero.”
“So he’s probably very good at being up to something,” Bill concluded.
“He looks like my Granddad,” one of Gwen’s roommates said critically. “Only less splodgy.”
“He’s hiding being up to something behind his beard,” Bill insisted, less because she’s made a good point worth acknowledging (which she absolutely hadn’t) than because at this point it was a matter of honor.
“He just gave us five points,” Gwen reminded him irrelevantly, unhappily trying to fold dry muesli into a napkin.
The napkin ballooned away from her fingers and tied itself into a neat package, like Bill had seen in illustrations of wanderers with all their things tied to sticks. A very deep voice commented neutrally from behind them, “Toast would be neater.”
“Bread has eggs in,” Gwen explained, turning around and looking up at the skinny, black-haired man in dark blue-grey. He looked a little familiar; Bill thought he’d been at the welcome feast. What he didn’t look was ‘much older than the seventh-years.’ Bill didn’t know what he was if not a professor, though since he was a grown wizard and didn’t have a Hogwarts uniform on. “Er, thanks.”
His eyes narrowed as he looked at her, and his mouth thinned. Which must have been hard, since it was pretty thin already. “Dull hair, split nails, sore at your lips at an age before acne is likely, hollow eyes at eleven, a touch of jaundice, refuses animal protein even when none other is available. ‘Natural diet’?” he asked disgustedly. Bill could hear the quotation marks.
Gwen’s chin went out, so Bill got ready to back her up even though he didn't know what they were talking about. He knew girls got mean about having blots talked about, if they weren’t just pest bites like Bill had thought hers was. “That’s right.”
The man rolled extremely dark eyes. “When I see Madam Pomfrey at supper, Miss…”
“Jones.”
“Miss Jones, I shall expect her to approach me or Professor Slughorn about which nutritive potion you will need weekly or, indeed, daily, and what arrangements will need to be made for your dietary supplements with the house elves, because you will by then have approached her.”
“Er… what, sir?”
The dark eyes went flat. “Before the end of the schoolday,” the man said, very, very slowly, “which is to say THIS schoolday, during lunch or a free period, you will go to the hospital wing. “You will tell the mediwitch explicitly, which is to say in small words and without dodging, that you do not eat meat or dairy, including anything made with eggs or butter. Unless I misunderstand?”
“Er, no, that’s right.”
“Someday I will be wrong about the fathomless folly of Gryffindors, and then we shall all have cake. Very well: you will tell her that. She will shriek at you. You will run away. She will find me and shriek at me. If she does not come to shriek at me by suppertime, I will go to your Head of House, Professor McGonagall, and then you will be sorry.”
“…Okay?”
“Doubtful. Are you doing this because of an allergy?”
“…What?”
“Or for religious reasons?”
“Huh?” Gwen stared.
“Are you,” he over-enunciated, “a Jainist?”
“Who?”
“Are you even a Hindu, Mahayanan, or Sikh? Because, if so, the acceptability of dairy, at least, is admitted by nearly all—”
“Look, it’s disgusting and we don’t have to and they told my Granddad to stop eating rich foods when he got gout and rich foods are all from animals and if that weren’t basically wrong why would it go bad faster than plants food?”
“I can’t go back in time and murder Ovid,” the man mused, pinching his giant nose as if he had a headache, “or Pythagoras. Seneca and Shelley would be no loss, especially to Mary Shelley, and if Plutarch were strangled at birth we might be rid of professional critics. In which case, no Dorothy Parker. And, then, had Mary Shelley been less miserable, the story might not have boiled out of her. Damn.”
They stared up at him. Bill considered grabbing Gwen and running.
The man heaved a regretful sigh, unpinched his nose, and glared down at her in annoyance. “Please think carefully about how important and how strict your personal philosophy is, as you will be putting your caretakers to extra trouble over your health on extremely short notice—”
“My mum wrote!”
He looked down at her silently.
“…Yesterday,” she admitted.
He lifted an eyebrow which somehow said, all by itself, without his making any noise, “Extremely short notice.”
Then he continued to look at her coolly.
“Er, but you were talking, sir,” she conceded, looking a bit abashed.
“To extra trouble over your health,” he repeated long-sufferingly, “which considerations they are not prepared for, and have never yet needed to think how to manage—for as long as you insist on entirely transcending your species.”
“On what?” Gwen demanded, gaping. Bill kind of agreed, though. Even if the thought of eggs were currently making him a bit queasy, people were not rabbits.
The maybe-teacher ignored that. “I will expect the both of you at ten sharp in the dungeon classroom. Attempt not to faint of hunger or die of malnutrition or,” he eyed Bill’s sandwich in resignation and distaste, “blocked arteries before lunch. I detest foreign bodies in my cauldrons.”
With that, he spun on his heel and stalked off for the teachers’ table, his dark half-cloak rippling out behind him with his annoyance at their life choices.
Gwen said in a stunned sort of voice, “He’s got a lot of nerve having a go at me about fainting of hunger. He was so bony his nose was poking out! Did you see?”
“Everybody’s noses do that,” Bill pointed out, grinning.
“Out of his skin!!!”
Bill gave her a no-it-wasn’t-come-on look.
“You know what I mean!”
“Hey!” Ron said, running up. “That’s the cove who made half the House go back and change their clothes three times and said we should bring all our books to breakfast and stop whinging it’ll do the upper-years good to practice their featherlight charms! What did he want?”
“He wanted Gwen to eat more and get vitamins,” Bill said. Putting it that way made him realize, and he decided, “I’m calling him Mum Jr.”
“You can’t call him Mum Jr.,” Gwen said, staring at Bill. “He’s so….”
“Mean?” offered Wood, who’d been watching like a useless lump, but what could you expect from a Magpies fan. The Magpies won too much; their fans were spoiled.
“I don’t know if he was mean exactly,” Gwen said, frowning. “I mean, he did up my muesli for me. But he was, I don’t know, a bit scary.”
“Super-scary,” Ron agreed, looking, for some weird reason, kind of proud. And, for some weirder reason, like he might start a fight with anyone who tried to argue with him.
Bill smiled loftily at her, and assured them all, “You haven’t met my mum.”
They gave him really big eyes, and Ron asked in an awed tone, “Your mum’s like Apothecary Snape?”
“Well,” Bill backtracked, “I mean, Mum’s really nice when she’s not mad at you! She’s the best, our mum! But if you get dirty when there are guests—or she thinks you need feeding-up—or you Did It On Purpose—oh, Merlin, poor Charlie, poor Perce, I left them all alone with the babies and MUM…”
He had to sit down on the nearest corner of bench, overcome with… not guilt, exactly, because he had to go to Hogwarts. It was like his job, it wasn’t just an amazing adventure he got to do for fun. He was supposed to, and Charlie would come next year. But he was leaving them alone.
So he had to make it worth it.
He jumped up again. “Let’s get the books!”
“I have History of Magic first,” Ron said. “They said to bring a pillow but I think they were joking?”
“Nope,” said a passing tall girl with a blue tie, ruffling Ron’s hair with a commiserating sigh and without slowing down. Ron made stunned-scared-cow eyes at her. Her voice trailed back, “What a way to start your Mondays! Bad luck, firstie.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded a boy in a yellow tie, offering her his arm and grinning down. “History first is the best.” They walked off, debating the relative merits of naps and having extra time to check your other homework vs Actually Learning Something.
“What have you got after that?” asked Gwen, shaking off her Older Kids Are So Weird look.
“A free half hour, to go back and get supplies, I expect, then Double Potions. What makes it double, d’you think? It’s only a half hour longer.”
“I think it’s ‘cause you’ve got it with us! Brilliant!” said Bill. “See you in Potions, then!”
Ron grinned back, and headed back to join his table, waving, “See you then!”
Charms was interesting, but frustrating. The teacher talked for a while about remembering what it felt like when things around the house just did what they wanted or saved them when they were frightened, and pushing that feeling through their wands. Then he gave them homework about trying out different wand-grips from a chart and gave Faisal Fawley two points for asking if it was like something called mutters or mud-dress or something.
Then they got to practice, and that was where it got frustrating. About half the class did at least make their wandtips glow by the end of the period, but only Fawley got a point for making his glow bright, and nobody could manage proper sunlight. Bill tried not to be grumpy about it; he’d won points at breakfast, although that wasn’t from a teacher for doing well in class.
Professor Flitwick told them they’d all done really well for the first day, anyway, and smiled like he meant it. He looked a little flighty, but Bill thought he was nice like Dad, not in the way that their family’s nearest wizarding neighbor was nice.
Mr. Lovegood had, as Mum put it, a good heart, but you sort of got the feeling that his niceness was because he didn’t notice anything bad going on in the world everyone else was living in. Dad noticed everything, and he just… liked everyone.
For example, Bill was pretty sure that Fred and George had worked out how to need a wee at the same time on purpose. And they didn’t really think Mum wanted them to finger-paint on the walls. He was also pretty sure that Dad was on to them. It was driving Mum mental, and Bill and Charlie didn’t have to care, exactly, as long as they made sure the furniture stayed dry, and when someone was shouting Percy was still too little to notice why.
Dad did have to care whether the twins were slow or meant to be awful, because they and Ronny were all still in nappies and Mum expected him to do some of the scolding (Bill thought he was fighting a lost cause; when Charlie had sent a ball through the Fawcett’s window Dad had just been excited about how far it’d gone and took Charlie out to work on his aim). Mum was sure the twins meant to be awful, though she said ‘difficult,’ and Bill sort of agreed. Perce had been wearing ‘big-boy pants’ by their age, after all. Bill didn’t remember when Charlie had stopped needing nappies, but he thought the twins just hadn’t decided yet that being left alone would be worth a bit less attention.
Either way, Mum and Dad were both on Nappy Patrol every second they were both home. And Dad didn’t enjoy it any more than Mum did. But while Mum got all stressed about it, Dad thought it was funny. Even though he also agreed it was pretty smelly.
Professor Flitwick, thought Bill, was like that. He didn’t know what History class was like, for that older girl to feel so sorry for Ron. Maybe he and Gwen would have a terrible class to end Fridays with, and that would almost make it fair. Because starting the week with Charms was, he suspected, going to be great, once he’d talked to Faisal Fawley about mutters.
The Potions teacher was also nice, which was a big surprise after the way Mum Jr. had talked. Admittedly, Mum Jr. hadn’t said he was the potions teacher. Bill was willing to suppose he might not even have been trying to make them think that, if you decided that crack about bodies in his cauldrons had just been a joke.
Not that Bill found out that the Potions teacher was nice straight away. When he and the other Gryffindor first years got to the Potions classroom,[2] Professor Beardily Up To Something was just striding merrily up to the door. He smiled at Bill’s class, and at Ron and the Slytherins, who were approaching at a dazed lurch. Ron had a splodge of ink on his forehead, and another boy was clutching a pillow like he thought it would run away with his wand. A girl, trying to be brisk but sounding mostly desperate, was saying to another girl, “Maybe if we learn to make Up All Night potion in Potions and take it before breakfast…”
Professor Beardily Up To Something instructed, with very twinkly eyes, “Wait here a moment, children, if you would.” He opened the door and drifted in, chiding the occupants in rather an amused tone, “I did think you’d make it at least two hours, boys. What seems to be the trouble?”
There was a noise like a very cranky auntie trying to scold someone over the whistle of a tea kettle, and then the door finished closing.
The kids, left stranded in the hallway, all looked at each other. Bill thought one of Gwen’s roommates was winding up to make a nasty remark, so he told Ron helpfully, “You’ve got ink on your forehead. Was History of Magic really that bad?”
“I fell asleep three times,” Ron said dolefully. He gave the girl who’d talked about potions a look like he wasn’t sure whether to smile or scowl at her and added, “Hopkirk kept pinching me.”
Hopkirk lifted her eyebrows loftily at him and said, “Shafiq and Snape said we had to look out for each other, and you were a snoring, piglike disgrace.”
“Of course he was, he’s a boy,” Gwen said dismissively. Bill said oi! and she grinned at him.
“You say that now, Jones,” Ron told her in tones so slow and dire the words weren’t even all pushed and slurred together. It made him easier to understand, but also a bit ridiculous. “You wait.”
“I heard the teacher’s a ghost,” one of Gwen’s roommates said nervously.
“Yeah,” one of the Slytherin boys agreed. “You can tell because he’s dead boring.” The rest of the Slytherins groaned. In a matter-of-fact sort of way, Hopkirk threw her blotting roll to bounce off the boy’s forehead, and caught neatly it on the rebound.
“Ow!”
“I like her,” Gwen announced in Bill’s general direction, and then bounced over to Hopkirk. “Hi, I’m Gwen Jones.”
“Of the Gwynedd Joneses?” asked Hopkirk, looking interested. A few of the other Slytherins were giving satisfied little nods, while Ron looked lost and the rest tried to look like they weren’t rolling their eyes.
Gwen blinked. “We’re from Anglesey, yeah.”
Hopkirk glanced around at the other Slytherins. It looked to Bill like she was counting votes. After a moment, she nodded decisively and shook Gwen’s hand. “Mal Hopkirk.”
“This is my friend, Bill Weasley,” Gwen gestured at him, and after Bill had waved agreeably at Hopkirk he stopped paying attention to her introducing her roommates in favor of crossing over to Ron.
He heard somebody whisper Granny Cedrella’s name. Dad had said that would happen and mostly it would mean that people were interested in what Bill was like. Dad’s mum had been quite interesting when she was younger, so people still knew about her and would be curious about her grandson. He’d said people were just gossipy like that, and the best thing Bill could do was let them get on with it while he got on with being Bill.
So he paid them no mind, and just asked Ron, “So all that fuss was just about the professor is boring?”
“I think,” said a Slytherin boy, “he’s a vampiric spirit who lulls people to sleep and eats their souls bit by bit to stay alive. Only he can’t do it in Hogwarts,” he added hopefully.
“Maybe that’s why they have him teaching,” suggested Wood. “If he’s got dozens and dozens of students to just sort of nibble at, he doesn’t have to eat anybody’s entire soul.”
They all looked at him. The Slytherins all had the sort of expression on that Mum always gave Mr. Lovegood, the one that said You’re A Guest And I’m Too Polite To Say It. So Bill voiced the collective thought of, “Wood, that’s disgusting.”
He suspected one or two of the other boys might have picked the word ‘terrifying’ instead, but best to leave that in the shade, as Uncle Giddy said.
“Glumbumbles do it!” Wood protested.
“That’s not what they do!” Fawley scowled.
“Is so!”
“Very nearly, Linden,” Professor Beardily Up To Something said from behind them, making at least half of them jump. “If you’re interested in magical creatures, boys, do be sure to have Professor McGonagall introduce you Professor Kettleburn. One can never start too early, after all. You may go in now, children; it’s as safe as any classroom, or library, ever is.” He nodded and smiled at them all, and wandered off in a swirl of light blue and yellow-orange.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Gwen whispered, edging up to Bill while Ron wrote down… what looked like Kidldenyerb. Maybe. His handwriting was pretty bad.
He thought about it, and shrugged. “That we should go in to Potions, I reckon.”
[1]Chudleigh is in Devon, near Exeter and the edge of Dartmoor. The River Otter goes through that area, and has RL muggle towns called things like Ottery St. Mary.
Since Gwen's family (I’ve extrapolated Welshness from her name and future career) is from Anglesey, her local team is Holyhead, but Tutshill isn’t too far away. Besides, it’s fun to support the Tornados, since their performance is a bit roller-coaster-y. Also, just at the moment she thinks the Harpies are gimmicky. (Besides, if she supported her parents team she would have less to fight with her mum about, although this is not a conscious motivator.)
[2]They only got lost twice. And nobody actually got eaten by the tapestry of Merwyn the Malicious, even when a weirdly vividly colored ghost with a soupy sort of voice gave them the wrong password and the tapestry glided off the wall and tried to roll around Gwen.