AN: This is the first of what will eventually be a series of oneshots about how different characters from the HP Universe view beauty. I don't know the identity of this first character - she can be whoever you want her to be. Part 2 is in the works.
Enjoy!
1.
Size Matters
Big doesn't mean beautiful, she thinks as she stares at the castle looming above her. Big means majestic and awe-inspiring and overpowering, but most of all big means terrifying.
Terror is all she can feel as the rows and rows of windows come closer and closer, like rows of teeth reaching out to gobble her up. They get even closer, and the castle blocks out even the moon, a big empty patch on the starry sky.
The Entrance Hall is no less big, no less scary. It's bigger than her entire house, she's sure, and she can't help but think that somehow she's in a giant's castle. If the hall is this big, how big are the bedrooms? The toilets? The thought of gigantic toilets frightens her so much that she lets a hysterical giggle escape before she remembers where she is. Then she shuts up quickly, and goes back to staring at her shoes, trying to forget the walls stretching up seemingly endlessly on each side, how the ceiling is lost in a gloom the flickering torchlight can't penetrate.
The massive doors set into one wall swing open, and then they're being frog-marched into the Great Hall, and she really thinks she's going to faint this time, because never mind her house, her entire primary school could fit in this room, and it makes the Entrance Hall look like a broom cupboard. There's a sea of faces stretching out in every direction, so many they fade into a haze of black. She can hardly see the back wall, it's so far away, and when she glances upwards, she gasps. Because where the roof should be there's the sky instead, dotted with stars just like the one outside. It takes her a moment to notice the rafters, to realise that it's just a picture, a copy of the real thing.
Out of everything she's seen since the old women in funny clothes turned up on her doorstep with a letter a month ago, this is the one that feels the most like real magic, not just the silly stuff she read in books when she was little.
It's such a relief, when she finally gets to her dormitory, to find that it's just a normal-sized room, and her bed is the same sized as her one at home, just prettier. Even the toilets are normal-sized. As long as she doesn't look out the window, to the ground such a long way down, or step out of the common room, into the high, echoing corridors, she can pretend she's just in a normal house.
She sees the beauty in the details straight away, in the way her duvet is the same sky-blue as the curtains on the long windows in her dormitory, with the silver stars embroidered on them twinkling like the real thing. She admires the pattern of roses and vines carved into the handrail of the spiral staircase that leads to her tower. She gets lost in the beauty of words, of the spells they learn, of the way the unfamiliar syllables roll off her tongue like she's been saying them all her life. She even finds beauty in the ingredients they use in Potions –the handfuls of beetles eyes and lacewing flies, the scoops of powered newt, because they must be beautiful, or how could they make the beautiful potions they do, all pretty colours and enticing aromas.
It takes her longer to see the beauty in the big things. She realizes it, the first time she's sitting by the lake and looks up to the castle and doesn't flinch away from the looming hugeness of it. Without even noticing, she's gotten used to the echoing halls, doesn't feel small and powerless when she walks down them alone, no longer suffocated by the weight of the stone above her. The Entrance Hall doesn't seem quite so big anymore, and she finds herself wondering of her whole house could really fit into it, or if it just the soaring walls and the ceiling she can never quite glimpse that make it feel that way. Even the Great Hall seems smaller, when she's squashed in among a hundred other students, rather than them all staring up at her. She loves to watch the enchanted ceiling now, reading the day's forecast off the roof each morning at breakfast.
When she goes home for Christmas, she finds herself missing the hugeness, the space, the way she can always find a quiet corner to hide from the world in. when she comes back, two weeks later, and sees the castle looming over her again, she's not scared. Instead she marvels at the beauty of this massive building, of its crooked silhouette with the setting sun behind it, and she smiles.
AN: I hope you enjoyed my first attempt at fan fiction! I won't ask for a review, because I'm absolutely hopeless at writing them, but you can if you want to :)