A/N: Written by Chaser 1 of Montrose Magpies for the QLFC Season 5 finals.

Prompt: Write about a student's (other than Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Draco) experience during one of the seven years that Harry Potter was at school. In my case, it's Harry's third year (1993-1994).

Optional prompts: (word) intelligent; (word) disgusted; (word) never

The OCs here allude to the events of the series sometimes, but they don't always do so accurately. While I think they would have a decent understanding of the biggest events, I think many of the details would have been lost or warped along the way.

Thank you so much to Fai's smile for betaing this for me and to all of my teammates, the judges, and the other players for a wonderful season.

Word count: 2143

September

As the platform faded from sight, Anjali lowered her hand and turned away from the window to focus on her friends. The compartment was filled with excited chatter as they all shared stories about their holidays, the noise almost entirely drowning out the low chugging of the train as it started to pick up speed.

A soft smile spread across her face as her chest warmed with contentment. She had never been one for excessive sentimentality, but Professor Flitwick was right; her housemates really were like a second family to her.

And now, she was home with them.

"Isn't that right, Anjali?" a voice asked, cutting through her musings.

Anjali shook her head to get rid of the last of her stray thoughts and turned to face her best friend. "Isn't what right?"

Caradoc gestured to his little sister, Eira. It was the girl's first year, and if her pale face and wide eyes were anything to go by, she wasn't as enthusiastic about Hogwarts as the sixth-years. Caradoc had insisted that she sit with them until she made some friends, and Anjali was beginning to think that had been a wise decision. "Eira is worried about Sirius Black. We've told her there's nothing to fear, but she won't listen to any of us. Your dad works in the DMLE; she might believe it if she hears it from you."

Anjali nodded in understanding. Given her father's connections, her friends usually turned to her when they wanted inside insight into the Ministry. She wasn't supposed to pass on any of the things he told her, but she was of the firm opinion that knowledge was made to be shared. It was how new knowledge was developed, after all.

"Your brother's right," Anjali said, speaking calmly to help soothe the girl. "Hogwarts is one of the safest places in the world. Even if Black tries to get in — and there's no reason to believe he will — he won't be able to get past its defences."

"Are you sure?" Eira asked. "Absolutely, positively sure?"

"Yes," Anjali replied, "I'm absolutely, positively sure."

It was a lie. Strange things had been happening at Hogwarts ever since Potter started school. They were few and far between, and most of them only seemed to affect Potter and his friends, but it was enough that she wasn't sure. She couldn't be. No one could.

But it if helped an eleven-year-old kid sleep at night, she was willing to pretend.

Eira's whole body relaxed at her words, and Anjali knew she had done the right thing.

"Has everyone put their DADA bets in?" Tessa asked, her eyes shining as she leant forward in her seat. "I sent mine in yesterday."

Caradoc snorted. "Of course. I got mine in weeks ago."

"Bets?" Eira asked, looking up at her older brother. "Mum and Dad said gambling is bad. They wouldn't be happy — "

Tessa laughed and ruffled her hair. "It's only ever a few knuts each year. Your parents won't care; it's more for bragging rights than anything else."

"Do you remember how I told you about the rumour that there's a curse on the DADA position?" Caradoc asked.

Eira nodded, starting to look worried again. "You said that it's just a myth — that curses can't last that long."

"They can't," he assured her. "But all myths are based on some kind of fact. And the fact is that for the last thirty-odd years, Hogwarts has been unable to keep a DADA professor for longer than one school year. It's probably just that the sort of people who are interested in teaching that subject are the sort of people who have dark secrets, but everyone likes to pretend it's a curse because it seems more mysterious that way."

"Which brings us back to the bet," Anjali said, taking over. "Their secrets always seem to be the reason they leave — or related to it, anyway."

Tessa nodded. "Williams' secret was that he was experimenting on the magical creatures he brought in for demonstrations, and he was fired for it. Stefanov's secret was that he had a terminal illness, and he had to go on medical leave a few months before the exams. Lockhart's secret was that he had no idea what he was doing, and… Well, we haven't been able to work out exactly what happened to him yet, but he ended up in a mental health ward at St Mungo's, so there seems to have been a link."

Eira was watching her with wide eyes.

"It's a bit morbid," Anjali admitted, "but the seventh-year Ravenclaws started a betting pool several years ago to see if anyone could guess what each new professor's secret was. It's grown since then; now, anyone in the House can participate as long as they place their bet before the school term starts."

"Has anyone ever gotten it right?"

"Once," Tessa replied, her face darkening and her voice dripping with contempt. "Professor Hall. He was the Ancient Runes professor before he changed over, so most of us already knew what to expect."

Anjali's breath caught in her throat.

Eira opened her mouth, but Caradoc cut in before she could say anything. "Not in front of Eira," he said. His tone held a note of finality.

An awkward silence descended on the compartment. Forcing herself not to think too deeply about Professor Hall and his cloying over-friendliness, Anjali said with false cheer, "I think it's going to be a woman again this year, and she's going to quit because she wants to join a Muggle circus."

"Really?" Tessa asked, frowning.

Anjali shrugged and winked at Eira, who seemed to giggle despite herself. "No. I'm pants at Divination; you know that. But we haven't had a good, light-hearted reason for ages. We're due one, I think."

It worked; with her words, the tension broke, and the compartments' occupants returned to their prior good mood.

-x-

October

A month into the school term, Anjali concluded that her promise to Eira — who had, to Caradoc's pleasure, become one of the newest additions to Ravenclaw House — really wasn't that far-fetched after all. True, Sirius Black had been sighted in the surrounding area, but she wasn't concerned about that. He still had no way to get in; even last year, the basilisk had come from inside the castle, not outside.

Not that that would be reassuring for the girl to hear.

Still, all in all, things were good. Her DADA bet had been way off; Professor Lupin wasn't a woman, and he showed no signs of being interested in or suited to the attention and athleticism that came with performing in a circus. But he was competent and quite intelligent, and he knew how to keep a class engaged. After suffering through Quirrell's logical but boring lessons and Lockhart's amusing but hollow ones, Lupin's thought-out and engaging coursework was a treat.

The Dementors were horrible, of course, and their icy horror was casting a dark shadow over the whole castle, but as long as she stayed inside, Anjali was able to avoid the worst of it.

And since she started at Hogwarts, she had learnt to count her blessings. Soul-sucking creatures on the loose but capable and engaging teaching staff? To borrow the words of her mother, a Muggle mathematician, that was a net positive. It was certainly better than the year prior; then, they'd had to contend with mortal peril and inept teaching.

Sometimes, she worried that Hogwarts was making her cavalier.

-x-

February

Anjali set aside her Arithmancy summary and rested her head against the back of the lounge. She had woken up two hours early to read through her notes before the quiz that day, but she was struggling to concentrate properly. Her eyes felt like sandpaper, and her mind was starting to wander. It was getting to the stage where forcing herself to 'study' was doing more harm than good.

Maybe she could take a little nap before breakfast. That way, she would be able to approach the quiz with a clear mind.

Without a second thought, she Transfigured a tissue into a blanket and set up a Wake-Up Charm — or, as she and her friends liked to call it, an Alarm Charm — to ensure she didn't oversleep. Laying down, she closed her eyes, a smile flitting across her face as she sunk into a cocoon of warmth and comfort.

Before she could drift off, however, a loud bang cut through the silence of the common room. Flinching, she jerked up into a sitting position, staring at the door with bleary eyes. It had been thrown open, and a figure was standing at the threshold, their body heaving as if they had run a marathon.

Her body relaxed when she realised that it was just Tessa. "If you're going to sneak out to meet your boyfriend, at least make sure you're quiet when you get back," she quipped.

But Tessa didn't laugh, or smile, or even acknowledge her in any way. She merely slammed the door shut behind herself before darting over to the lounge across from Anjali, dropping down onto it without a sound.

"Tessa?" Anjali asked, leaning forward. "Are you alright?"

"It's Sirius Black," she said, her voice as frail as a newborn bird. "He… He broke into Gryffindor Tower. He was there, Anj. He was there when I was."

The last tendrils of sleep fell away from Anjali's mind, replaced by the rapid beating of her heart. "What? He's in the castle?"

Tessa shook her head. "Was. It happened a few hours ago, but Professor McGonagall wouldn't let me leave until the professors confirmed he was gone. They couldn't find him anywhere."

"Do they know what he wanted?" Anjali asked, although she suspected she knew the answer.

"No, but he was in the third-year boys' dormitory. He was trying to get Ronald Weasley… I don't know why. Maybe he got the wrong bed."

"It figures," Anjali muttered under her breath, her theory confirmed. Potter and his friends were, it seemed, at the centre of anything weird and dangerous.

It was getting rather old.

She knew her parents would be disgusted if they ever found out she had thought such a thing. It's a young boy's life, they would say. Show some respect. But they weren't there. They weren't constantly inundated with horror stories that, somehow, always came back to Potter in the end.

She was a firm believer in the fact that it was better to laugh in the face of fear than to cry under its suffocating weight.

Based on the way Tessa was still shaking in her seat, however, this might be the exception to that rule. Lifting up one side of her blanket, Anjali said gently, "Come here."

Tessa did without a moment's hesitation. "I was so scared," she whispered as she leant her head against Anjali's shoulder.

"I know," Anjali replied, wrapping an arm around her.

-x-

June

The Great Hall was silent in the wake of Professor Snape's revelation. Anjali's mind was blank — it felt as if someone had come through and wiped it clean like a blackboard at the end of a lesson. It had been one thing to hear that Sirius Black had evaded capture yet again, slipping out right under the Minister's nose. But Professor Lupin, a werewolf? She couldn't reconcile the kind, gentle professor with those bloodthirsty monsters. It just didn't make sense.

Then, she heard Caradoc mutter in a tone of awe, "Werewolf? I never would have guessed that… Oscar, did anybody guess that?"

"No," Oscar, that year's bet coordinator, replied, looking up from the piece of parchment that he was using to keep a record of everyone's guesses. He looked just as shocked as Anjali felt. "No one did."

It was, perhaps, fortunate for Anjali that the students chose that moment to erupt into conversation, catapulting the Great Hall from soundlessness to clamour in the space of a heartbeat.

After all, it was probably inappropriate that her first response was to burst into laughter. Caradoc was right; as far as she was aware, in a house of almost a hundred students, not one of them had thought to bet 'werewolf'. It felt like they had guessed everything under the sun — from circus hopeful to mass murderer to Professor Burbage's long-lost twin — yet nobody had guessed bloody 'werewolf'.

"I'm going to miss him," she said once the surprise wore off. It was a given that he would have to resign or be fired. There was no way he could stay at Hogwarts after this; the Board of Governors would never allow it.

Tessa nodded. "Me too. He was one of the good ones."

Anjali was glad he had survived, at least.

Not all of them did.