AN: So sorry for the wait on this! I was working with my beta, and then, of course, as soon as she gets the chapter to me I lose internet because of the snow. Sigh. It's really great snow, though. So, hope you enjoy this one!
Chapter 3
The corridors were dark, abandoned, and cavernous. Sherlock slunk through them silently, not even the paintings realizing he was there. He had cast a weak Disillusionment Charm over himself, but his limited practice meant that instead of making him blend in with his surroundings, the spell rendered him a fainter, slightly shimmering form against the dark walls. He hadn't been in this tower before; it was between Gryffindor Tower and the North Tower, but not nearly as tall as either of those two. He crept past several slumbering portraits, and then slipped open a heavy wooden door to slide inside its room. As he made to do so, however, something brushed the top of his hair, and he looked up to see what it was. The lowest leaf of a sprig of mistletoe was dangling down from the doorway.
Sherlock scowled and a crease appeared on the bridge of his nose. Unlike the rest of the first years, Sherlock was not at all enchanted by the festive decorations that had recently sprung up all around the castle, and he ignored the mistletoe in favor of finding out what the room held. Once inside, however, he saw it was just another disused classroom. On his way out, Sherlock paused. A step away from the door, one hand on the handle to pull it shut again, he pulled out his wand and muttered Diffindo! under his breath. He deftly caught the mistletoe berries that fell from the ceiling and pocketed them—useful for potions.
Many of the rooms Sherlock had found and added to his mind palace were empty or just had a few desks and chairs, yet some stored useful, but mundane equipment for the teachers. Every once in a while, however, he would come across something interesting. About an hour after the mistletoe, Sherlock found a side hallway that was covered in a faint, golden mist. It wasn't exactly connected to the central paths most students would take, and he'd had to pull aside a few tapestries to find it. Sherlock doubted that students were expected to ever see it.
The golden mist hovered about a foot above the floor and extended up to the arched ceiling, and was completely silent. Larger flecks of light seemed to drift through it languidly, and Sherlock regarded it warily. He knew that sticking a hand into anything unknown in the magical world was generally a fairly bad idea—but suddenly, he felt a wicked grin seize his face, and he stepped straight into it.
The whole world turned upside down. Sherlock felt his hair fall away from his face and towards the floor as he saw his feet somehow holding him erect in the air. The mist was all around him now, and though he didn't feel anything, he understood that it had somehow seized him and flipped his orientation of up and down. For several minutes, Sherlock was content to just stay there, observing the mist passively and wondering how it had done that. After this became boring, however, he started to think about how to get down.
He could try levitating himself away from the mist, but he doubted that would restore which way was up and which was down. He could try casting a spell to blow it away, and perhaps in its absence things would reset themselves. But stepping into the mist had put him in this position—wasn't it logical to assume that he could step right out of it again?
Sherlock moved a foot, and, feeling some resistance, wrenched it free to take a step out of the mist. Immediately, everything returned to how it had been before. The light of the mist winked playfully back at him. Sherlock's face was flushed from the blood rushing to his head and then receding, and he grinned. This, now this, was good.
Another hour later, Sherlock had found an owl hiding where it shouldn't be, a cabinet he was quite sure contained a boggart (and which he didn't disturb), a secret passage behind a large tapestry that he had followed and seen led to Hogsmeade, and a hidden swimming pool. As Sherlock stepped into the dark and echoey chamber, light flashed off the gently rippling surface, and he saw that the water was lit from the bottom by sparsely-scattered clusters of a sort of bioluminescent flower. There were no torches on the walls or other sources of light, nor towels or benches by the pool's edge; yet the pool was long and fairly deep, and Sherlock was sure there would be room for several students to swim if they all found their way here. Once again, however, it didn't seem that they were meant to.
Leaving the pool, Sherlock sneaked down another few staircases to find himself on the third floor. This was one of the last places he needed to survey—the rest were already carefully noted as his mind palace.
Sherlock didn't have to go far down the right-hand side before he found a locked door, something fairly odd in and of itself at Hogwarts. He pulled out his wand again and whispered "Alohomora," barely more than a breath. The lock clicked quietly, and Sherlock slid between the weighty door and the stone wall. He was in a narrow, fairly short corridor coming to an end in a bare stone wall, and it seemed more of a room than a corridor. There were no other doors or hallways branching off from it. He walked down to the end, however, and soon saw that there was a small trapdoor built into the floor. Curious, Sherlock surveyed the rest of the corridor, but everything else was bare. The square of wood that made up the trapdoor's lid was barely big enough for a full-grown man, especially one with broad shoulders, but it left ample room for an eleven-year-old like Sherlock. He slid a finger against the iron clasp and pulled it open, lifting the heavy weight with both arms. The dust muffled the sound as the trapdoor fell against the floor, and Sherlock peered down beneath him. Everything was dark. He cast a light, and with a flick of his wand, sent a beam down that briefly lit up the room below. It seemed to be empty, and Sherlock caught a glimpse of the floor several meters down.
Here goes nothing, Sherlock thought to himself. Then he quickly cast a cushioning charm and lowered himself into the empty air, feet first. He let go.
There was only a second, perhaps a fraction more, during which Sherlock fell through the air before making contact with his own enchantment. It felt rather like suddenly encountering a large airbag before he made it to the floor. Once there, he pulled himself up and said "Lumos."
As he had thought, the room was entirely empty. It was slightly smaller than one of the school classrooms, but a good deal taller, and Sherlock could see the trap door above as a small patch of orange light against the ceiling. There would always have to be something to break the fall for anyone to ever use this room, unless they were to come down on broomsticks, he thought.
There was an archway in one corner of the room, and Sherlock took it, entering another chamber. This one had tall, sloping and arched ceilings, and was much more brilliantly lit than the initial corridor had been. Sherlock wondered if, aside from the common rooms where there still may be a few older students studying, this was the brightest room in the castle at that moment. There was a heavy wooden door on the other end, and after realizing that there was nothing interesting to see in the rest of the room, Sherlock took it, to reveal yet another space. This one was bigger than the previous two, but still just as empty. It gave way to still one more room through another door, another classroom-like space that was completely bare. Sherlock crossed to the next door, directly in front of him, and entered a much smaller chamber which ended in a small fireplace. Unlike other fireplaces, however, this one had no wall behind it, and Sherlock found that it was tall enough for him to walk through like a doorway.
The next room appeared to be the last, and Sherlock couldn't find any way out of it other than the way he had come. The room itself was unremarkable: a stretch of stone floor followed by stone stairs with another level of the room below it, but all still slightly smaller than the Transfiguration classroom. Sherlock looked up curiously at the torches lining the walls, wondering why they were kept lit down here if no one used these rooms. The strangest thing about this whole series of rooms wasn't their contents—they all appeared to be empty—but simply that they were there at all, hidden under a trapdoor behind a locked door. As Sherlock wandered back to the start, he wondered why the castle included such rooms. He had found many hidden places in the castle, and it seemed that the architects hadn't followed any logical pattern when designing it, merely their own pure whim. He suspected that much of the castle had been added on to and manipulated since its original construction. This sequence of rooms seemed a place obscure to the point of invisibility, perhaps completely unknown, and the ideal place to hide something.
Sherlock cast a levitation charm on his own body to carefully raise himself up through the trapdoor again, and he carefully replaced the lid, blowing over the dust with his wand to obscure any sign that he'd disturbed it in the first place. He investigated the rest of the third floor, finding little else of interest compared to the chambers behind the trap door, and then, finally around four o'clock in the morning, returned to the Ravenclaw common room. He would slip in between the dark blue sheets of his four-poster and perhaps catch a few winks of sleep before he got up again for morning classes.
As he did so, however, snuggling down in the covers with his curls falling across the pillow, Sherlock couldn't help his mind whizzing away, trying to deconstruct the many secrets he was sure Dumbledore was guarding. How many of them concerned Hogwarts and its students? One of them was fairly obvious, of course, and it was clear that the secret society was in opposition to Voldemort; it was easy to tell when he had been away on business concerning the war. But did anything he was hiding have something to do with the locked door and the empty rooms behind it? Was Dumbledore planning to hide something there? Or did he, perhaps, always keep such an area ready, prepared to be filled when next needed?
A flurry of silver gave a faint sparkle in the frosty air before hitting the window pane and melting into the snow already accumulated there. John winked sleepily at it from the other side of the glass. His head was resting against his hand, elbow propped up against the stone of the window ledge in his dormitory as his fist pushed his cheek up above his drowsy smile. He'd woken up early this Christmas morning, and he was the only boy from his dormitory left at Hogwarts for break, the covers on the other beds resting in their neatly folded sheets of fabric. John blinked as a barn owl soared over the trees outside, each like a turret of frosting under azure blue sky. The snow was falling thinner and thinner, but days of white crystals had already piled over the grounds.
Softly, softly he padded out of the room after changing out of his pajamas, and John decided to write a short letter to his parents in the common room below. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he saw that a crackling fire was already complimenting the warm scarlet decorations of the room. John jumped onto a sofa by the fire to compose his letter, pausing every few moments to consider what he wanted to say. He knew his parents had planned for him and Harry to be home for Christmas, but things hadn't worked out that way. It had been only two days before the first term was to end that Harry's owl had arrived with their letter—his parents were regretful, but they seemed to think they'd be working over break and it would be best for John and Harry to stay at Hogwarts, "where we know you'll be looked after." John looked out the common room windows, out at the panorama of snow and forest, thinking. It was easy – from here, anyway – to forget that the Wizarding World was at war.
Through the cozy, festive halls and past the suits of armor glowing with faerie lights, John made his way to the West tower. He didn't meet a single person along the way, and he pulled his cloak and Gryffindor scarf more tightly around himself as he ascended the steps to the Owlery. A hundred owls perched around him, and a few were only just soaring through the empty gaps in the walls as they returned from a night of hunting.
It took John a few moments to find Harry's owl, but once he did he fasted the note to its leg and watched it swoop out the window, receding into the sunlit sky. John brushed a few flecks of snow out of his hair, then started off for the main castle and its warmth again. He never had found the kitchens, but sometimes there was hot cocoa in the common room.
"Sarah, cover me!" yelled John as he ran out from behind the tree, pelting snowballs with as much accuracy as he could at the opposing Hufflepuffs, who turned their faces away and shrieked as the snowballs hit them. John dived for the cover of the trees again and felt a snowball smack into his lower leg just as he made it. Sarah stepped over him to deliver another at the Hufflepuffs, and John could hear it hit, even if he wasn't sure what. The snowball fight had been going on for quite some time now, and both teams had reached the point where they didn't have ammunition from the original piles anymore, everyone having to scoop up their own snow and hastily pack it together between dodging the flying projectiles in order to have anything to throw.
"Alright, alright, we surrender!" said a voice, and John saw Joshua, a Hufflepuff third year, step out from the trees with his arms raised. Two of his teammates were lying in the snow, and the girl next to him dropped the snow she had been holding.
"Excellent," said Anisha, the fifth year Gryffindor who had been heading their attack, and who also happened to be a prefect in addition to having a superb throwing arm. She stepped out from the trees and folded her arms, smirking at Joshua.
Sarah laughed at the look he gave her, and then crossed over to help pull up Mike Stamford, the pudgy first year she and John had sat with on the train, and who was lying in the snow in defeat.
Anisha checked her watch, noting the golden planets and stars around its edge. "Dinner's in about an hour. We should probably go back to the school and warm up first."
"Alright," said John, looking at the others. "Race you there!"
When John arrived at the Great Hall for Christmas dinner about an hour later with Sarah, he was surprised to see how many students had remained over the break. There were enough, even, for the house tables to have remained in place, though he noticed that they seemed a bit shorter than usual. He talked to Harry for a few minutes, and swapped his present of chocolate frogs for hers of sugar quills, then waved to Mike and Yasha at their different tables.
Dumbledore led them in a few Christmas carols, the group ending with a rather off-key rendition of "The Holly and the Ivy." John pulled Christmas crackers with Sarah and the other few Gryffindors gathered there. He ended up with a pack of Ice Mice, a small box of Filibuster fireworks, and a small pile of bee-shaped honey candies, which fascinated him. The detail in their wings and eyes really was amazing, considering how small they were.
John spent most of the dinner talking to Sarah, the only other Gryffindor first year there, but she seemed distracted and he kept noticing her eyes wandering. He remembered how she, too, had received a letter from her parents telling her to stay only at the last minute. Halfway through the pudding, John followed her gaze to the staff table, where he could see Dumbledore in deep conversation with professor Flitwick, a green Christmas crown perched upon his long white hair. The staff table was more solemn than it had been at the start of the meal, and much more so than the students' tables. This sobriety seemed slightly ominous as snow fell from the enchanted ceiling and disappeared just above the teachers' heads.
As John scooped up another bite of Yule log, he saw Harry two tables down with the Hufflepuffs, giggling as a dark-haired girl John didn't recognize laid her head on her shoulder with a contented smile, their sides touching as they sat closely together on the bench. He thought they were holding hands under the table. He nudged Sarah, who said "What?" and looked over.
"My sister," he whispered, jerking his head. Harry, however, was far from noticing. Sarah looked around for a moment, then her eyes fell upon Harry and the girl and she smiled tentatively at John. She seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but then she just giggled and shrugged at him. Over her shoulder John met eyes with Anisha, who smirked and winked at him. She was now wearing a pair of dangling Christmas light earrings in addition to her gold nose ring.
"Do you think this many people normally stay for Christmas?" John asked Sarah.
"I have no idea," she replied. "I think more might be because of the war."
"Yeah," said John, looking out over the heads gathered there. "I think my parents thought Harry and I'd be safer here."
"That's not really a surprise," said Sarah. Then she dropped her voice to a whisper, and said "I know Julian Arden was planning to go home this year, but he just found out about two weeks ago that his dad was killed by Death Eaters. His mom had been gone for years already." She was indicating a freckled boy at the Ravenclaw table who didn't seem to be joining in the conversation there. The few other students beneath the blue hangings all seemed to be older. Ravenclaw had a few fewer students than Hufflepuff, but more than Slytherin, whose table seemed nearly empty.
John sighed as he looked around the hall. He had been feeling so cheerful just moments before, but seeing the filled seats made him wonder why each of the students here couldn't go home, and seeing the empty seats made him fervently hope that those students who had left weren't having a grim or lonely Christmas with worried families.
"It's been like that more and more the past few years, I think." John focused back at the space in front of him and saw that Anisha had slid down the bench on the other side to sit across from them. "Barely anyone stayed my first year, but there's been slightly more each year since. Some people lose family, others just have parents who want them here instead of at home for the holidays."
"It seems like most parents would want their kids close, though," said Sarah, looking puzzled. John frowned at her. Why had her parents decided to have her stay over break? He'd never asked, and somehow he didn't think he would.
Anisha gave a tilt of her head to the side with a small shrug. "It really just depends. Some do, a couple of parents have even pulled their kids out of school in the past few years, but others really think they're safer with Dumbledore."
"What about you, Anisha?" asked John. Somehow he didn't feel odd asking her. Anisha was just so confident in herself, so blunt and open.
She shrugged. "My family's Hindu. Christmas is great and all, but it's not really a big deal in our family like it is for most English people."
John smiled. "Oh, do you ever go home for Diwali?"
"Yep, I did this year. Not last year, though. We just kinda decide year to year whatever works. I can't take the train, obviously, so I had to get Professor McGonagall to let me use her fire for the Floo network. She didn't seem to mind though."
"That's pretty cool," said John.
Anisha smiled and tossed some of her dark hair over one shoulder. They spent the rest of the meal talking together (Diwali was bigger in some parts of India than others, John learned), but the other students were slowly starting to trickle out, and soon Anisha stood up to go off with some of the older students.
"Want to go back to the common room?" John asked Sarah.
"Sure," she said, smiling. The two of them stood up to leave the hall, and when they walked through the large, wooden doors John saw Anisha standing with a small knot of older students in the Entrance Hall.
John was just noticing the nuns in a particular portrait looking like they were preparing to sing, and he turned to look at them better. He was just about to say something to Sarah when he took a step backwards and bumped into something.
John turned around immediately and saw a tall figure towering over him. He was certainly an older student, with slicked-back, slightly ginger hair and an immaculate green and silver tie protruding from his collar and into his creaseless robes. John saw the head boy badge on his chest and hastily took another step back. He realized that he hadn't seen this boy at the Slytherin table at dinner.
"Sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to bump into you."
"No matter," said the boy in a reserved tone, his lips slightly pursed. He tapped the umbrella he was holding against the floor and twirled it in a circle once. "Just mind you be more careful of where you're going in the future, Mr. Watson."
"How do you know my name?" asked John, frowning at him.
The boy smirked. "Oh don't worry, you've no need to be alarmed. I mean no aggression or threat."
"But how do you know my name?" repeated John, feeling defiant.
"I know many things about this school and the students who pass through it, Mr. Watson," said the boy, tapping his umbrella against the floor again. "Now, if you'll excuse me," he said, with a rather false smile, walking past John as if he had done nothing out of the ordinary in any respect. John turned to watch his back retreating towards the dungeons, wondering if he should question him again. Then he saw Anisha had turned her head over her shoulder and was watching; she looked like she wanted to say something.
John and Sarah moved towards her, and Anisha turned a bit away from her group to talk to them. "That's Mycroft Holmes," she said. "Head boy this year, from Slytherin. He's a bit odd…it's best just to give him a wide berth, really."
"Why?" asked John.
Anisha frowned after the retreating Slytherin as he and his umbrella were lost to sight down the dungeon staircase. "Just is, really. He's not really intrusive, but sometimes he seems that way. I've heard he can read on you whatever you've been up to within the past few days, who your friends are, anything you just wouldn't expect him to know without having talked to you before."
"That's a little creepy," said Sarah.
"I guess so," said Anisha, still frowning. "It's just the way he is, you know? As a rule, though, don't piss off the Slytherin head boy or prefects, especially as Gryffindors." She reached out and patted John on the shoulder, then turned back to her friends.
John joined Sarah in a few games of wizard's chess, but after just a few rounds it became clear that they were both feeling very full and sleepy from dinner. They said their good nights, and John ascended the spiral staircase to his empty dormitory. The grounds were long dark by now, but a few lights from the castle shone sparkling strips across the snow. He sat on his bed for a few minutes, resting his elbows on his knees as he gazed out at the grounds.
First Christmas at Hogwarts, thought John as he pulled back the covers and slid under them. He had little time for other thoughts, however, for soon he was fast asleep, the dark washing over him, soothing and silent.
AN: Thanks for reading! Thanks to my beta, That Kid with the Long Coat. Check them out! I'll be posting the next chapter soon.
