"The main dragon conservatory in this country— do you have ties with them?" Simon asked, ladling a generous helping of fried potatoes onto his plate, raising one blond eyebrow at Teodor, who sat stiffly in his chair, picking at the food before him. For Simon's trouble, he received a blank glare.

"You could call them that," Teodor said icily. "When they deign to lend a helping hand and offer us money. The rest of time, we are inconvenience, and they ignore."

Across the table, Oana was waving her hands frantically, and shaking her head with a surprising vehemence. Charlie gathered that the conservatory was most likely not the dinner conversation that Teodor would appreciate, and glanced sideways at Simon. Sorcha, on the other hand, had no such compunctions, and indeed, seemed to have forgotten her own advice to Charlie only days earlier. "Why is that, Mr. Osadci?" she asked sweetly, sawing a piece of meat into tiny pieces.

Teodor abruptly pushed his chair back from the table, the wood screeching unpleasantly against the stone floor. "Enjoy dinner," he said, grating voice fading from hearing as he stalked from the room, to the outside. The English delegation blinked at each other, confused; or in Sorcha's case, pleased. Sofia spoke, and her voice was a purr. The Romanian she used was slow and simplified, and even Simon and Sorcha could understand. "Ah, you must excuse Teodor. He used to have an important position there. But not any more. Mistakes were made.."

"And we /wouldn't/ want to bring up old wounds, would we?" Charlie said, putting emphasis on the words as he glanced sideways at his black-haired friend. Evidently she finally took the hint, and opened wide her cornflower-blue eyes at them, blinking innocently. However, no one was fooled, and Aurel even laughed softly to himself, mismatched optics crinkling in a grin. Sorcha had the decency to blush, and returned her attention to her steak.

Simon cleared his throat and looked at Oana. "So, have you been here long? No offense meant, but you look much younger than the others here."

Oana instantly turned an extremely bright red and looked down at the table, gnawing on her lip before answering. Charlie blinked in surprise: it wasn't as if Simon had said anything embarrassing. But the girl seemed to be a shy one, and her response, though in perfect English, was hesitating. "I.. no, I have not. I am seventeen, but I have been here a year." She twisted her napkin between her fingers, causing pale streaks to appear, as the blood was pushed from them.

"Really?" Sorcha said, interested despite herself. "Are you finished with school?"

"Perhaps," said Nicolae, "We leave personal questions for later. Eh?"

"It's fine, Nicolae," Oana said, surprising them all. Charlie, for one, had figured she would not speak unless spoken to. The girl pushed her glasses further up onto her nose, they had slipped down to the tip. It seemed to Charlie as though she was constantly fidgeting nervously, and he had the sudden desire to grab her hands and hold them down on the table, and tell her to calm down. "No. I dropped out." She said no more, and no one asked her anything else.

As the food gradually disappeared and appetites slackened, Sofia rose importantly and surveyed them with snapping brown eyes. "I show you rooms," she said, in broken English, before switching over to Romanian again. "They're rather small. They could have been built larger, but we thought that privacy would be preferable." Here, she smiled knifelike at Simon and Charlie, who glanced at each other. Simon rolled his eyes, but Charlie only shrugged.

The rooms were, as stated, tiny. Three of them, in a row, to house the newly arrived wizards, each with a nametag slipped into a holder on the door. Inside each was a cot tucked into the corner, a desk and chair, and a small stand for holding spare robes, over that rested a mirror. Even with that miniscule number of furnishings, there wasn't much room to move, and Charlie was forced to sidle sideways through the space left between each piece. "Ouch!" he exclaimed, banging his shin on the desk.

After Sofia had left, Simon and Sorcha piled into his room. Sorcha sat on the desk, as she was the shortest one there; Simon had the chair, and Charlie sprawled on the cot. "So what d' you think of them?" he asked, propping his head up with his hand. He found that as the night went on, his grasp of the language was improving. It was something like catching a Snitch: you just had to hear the right things, see the right details, and there it was.

"They're a strange bunch of people," Sorcha said, with force. "I like Aurel, though. And Oana."

"Something's wrong with Teodor," Simon said lazily, yawning. "Everything you say, he takes the wrong way. It's impossible to talk to the man." He scratched his head absently, fluffing up already messy hair even further. Another wide yawn that split his face into two, and he squirmed out of the room. "Sorch, you coming?"

"The name, you over-grown oaf, is Sorcha." But she followed him out, slipping her hand into his.

Charlie flopped over on the bed, stretching his arms in the air. The cramped atmosphere of the room was not encroaching, but comforting: a little bit of home. He had shared a room with his brother Bill for all his life, one not that much larger than this. It was a reminder, perhaps, of humble origins. Most of the other Weasley brothers weren't at all happy with their financial situation, Percy especially. In retrospect, Charlie thought, it was surprising that Perce hadn't been put into Slytherin: he certainly had more than enough ambition for it. Charlie, on the other hand, didn't give a flying.. Well. He didn't care much about being wealthy.

Sitting up, Charlie bounced on the bed reflectively for several seconds, glancing around the room again. The mirror caught his attention: there was a large brown splotch in the middle. Ah, well. Mirrors weren't anything important either. "What?" a bubbly voice interrupted him, speaking in Romanian, "You're not going to clean me?"

Startled, Charlie ran a hand through his hair, and put on a pensive expression as he watched the mirror. "Hmm, let me think.." he muttered, and then answered the mirror, just as brightly, "Nope!"

"But.. but you have to clean me! Don't you want to look at yourself?" the mirror said, sounding shocked, though that tinkly-cheerful quality was still in its voice.

"Why would I want to do that?" Charlie asked it, amused.

"Well.. I won't have anything to do, if you don't look at yourself..."

"In case you haven't noticed, I'm not exactly a Narcissus."

"Can you just clean off the spot?"

"Nope. It's late, I think I'll go to sleep now."

"You know, if you spent less time in the sun, you wouldn't have so many freckles—"

"If you say one more word, I'm going to smear you with grease and mud."

The mirror abruptly silenced itself.

-----

The sun poking through the window woke Charlie Weasley in the morning, slanting fiery flaxen light into his eyes. "Urgh," he groaned, rubbing at his eyes uncomfortably. He had never been much of a morning person, and the thin curtains on the windows did absolutely nothing to hide the morning brilliance. Rolling over on his side, he peered at the wizard clock affixed to the wall. The hand pointed to 'time to get up,' which elicited another grumble from the sleepy mage.

"Time to get up, my ass," Charlie complained, stumbling around the room and promptly stubbing his toe against the chair.

"See?" the mirror said affably, "Maybe if you'd cleaned me, you would've put the chair somewhere else, and then you wouldn't have bumped your toe—"

"Oh, shut up," Charlie grunted, riffling through the clothes-stand for his robes. To his surprise, it took some time to find them. Apparently the cabinet was enchanted, so that the inside was larger than the outside: it broke some laws of physics quite neatly, which amused him enough that a tiny smile quirked his face. The mirror, he could just tell, was about to comment, and so a warning look was shot in its direction, accompanied by a growled, "Don't even think about it."

He clumped down the stairs to find the kitchen mostly deserted, with only Oana seated at the table, working her way through a bowl of oatmeal. A book was propped in front of her, and the quiet girl seemed to have forgotten about it, so absorbed was she in the words. "What's that?" he asked, voice still creaky with lack of use. Clearing his throat, Charlie glanced over her shoulder at the writing. "Hey! That's in English."

Oana's face gradually turned red, and Charlie sighed. It would be a lot easier to talk to the girl, he supposed, if she didn't flush crimson every time someone looked her way. Hunting around in the cabinets, he found boxes of cereal, and in the refrigerator, bottles of milk. "The bowls and spoons are in that drawer," Oana said, pointing a skinny finger at the proper place.

"Thanks," Charlie said. He munched thoughtfully. "So what /are/ you reading?"

"'Life and Habits of British Wizards,'" she replied, showing him the cover of the book.

"I read that the mountains have one of the highest concentrations of dragons, anywhere in the world."

"That's right," Oana said, pleased. "Mostly Romanian Longhorns, but that's to be expected."

"We've managed to introduce some non-native species into the wild," Aurel said, lounging against the doorway. Startled, Charlie glanced over his shoulder. He hadn't heard the man enter, though Aurel certainly made enough noise once he walked into the kitchen, banging drawers open and shut with exuberant force. "Though nothing really exotic, like the Chinese varieties.." His face went momentarily dreamy.

Oana giggled, shaking her head. "Aurel's obsessed with the really rare types of foreign dragon. The ones he'll probably never see.. Unless, of course, he goes to the Conservatory."

"Not for several years, though," Aurel replied, tipping cereal into his bowl. "You have to start here, first. And only if they like your research, do you get accepted into the Conservatory.." He sighed. "Teodor's still bitter about it. They don't like him very much. Hasn't told us much as to why, but that's Teodor for you—" His last words were muffled by the cereal. "Ouch!" he exclaimed suddenly.

They both looked, startled, at Oana, who had just tossed a breakfast roll at his head. "Don't eat with your mouth full," she said seriously, fighting back a grin.