A/N: I will acknowledge ideas that I first found in others' fics in the A/N to the particular chapters, even if I can't remember the title or the author. I'm not actively soliciting permission but if you kick up a fuss I will of course rearrange the story around your unauthorized contributions. But I warn that I'm borrowing on the simple grounds that a) we're all writing this stuff by borrowing off another (DISCLAIMER: Rowling author, goddess, some big company owns rights, not original work, author – me – lays no copyright or creative or any claims at all to this work, for private entertainment, I'm making no profit, better no one else make none either, don't sue me I've no money, etc., etc., we all know the tune) and b) even within the bounds of the fandom there's so much rampant borrowing and building off the ideas of another that it's impossible to ask collective permission for use of the most widespread conventions, especially the MWPP/L/S/verymanyvariousothers subfandom, and basically the whole idea of copyrighting here is null and void. As said, will acknowledge, will remove if demanded to do so, and that's already more than most do.
First acknowledgment: Mr Lovegood's first name comes from Jaida and Rave's "The Shoebox Project." As do echoes of his characterisation (though his made-up words and stringiness are mine own stamp). As does my whole idea of dressing up an HP fanfic above and beyond the normal, into absurdly pretentious grounds.
Second acknowledgment: "Broadmoor" was a surname I first found in auroraziazan's "NotSoLittle White Lies." Finding wizardly-sounding names is tough and that's such a good one.
Chapter II – Heads, and a few First-Years
Even after the mysterious disappearance of Mr H Summers the community-at-large still strove to prevent a war that they didn't realize had already hatched above them. From the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies was the great age of middle-of-the-road appointments to all important posts. In a saner era the scholarly Millicent Bagnold, early orphaned, engrossed in mastering obscure, half-dead branches of magic, and completely unideological, would have wound up an Unspeakable. In 1966 she became Minister of Magic. Ephraim Creed as Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Perdita Vance as chief administrator of St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, Elspeth Monkman as the British representative to France, and Oran Abercrombie as captain of the Kenmare Kestrels – in the midst of all this, as sort of an accident, the remarkable Albus Dumbledore became Headmaster of Hogwarts.
Not to say that Dumbledore himself was the accident. The accident was that someone so capable was appointed to anything in that time – especially to so important a post as headmaster of Hogwarts. After all, everyone had been actively seeking mediocrity.
As for Dumbledore himself, nobody wound up surprised after a few months and blinked away and said, "Say, who's that?" How could they not know, with a country-wide debate on whether to take the school board hostage to ensure that they the people got their way in the matter? With compromising sorts assuring everybody that Dumbledore was very old, a venerable token, just an interim figure? And separatists snarling that thinking that one hundred and thirty was on the grave-brink showed a Muggle-lover? And "Muggle-lovers" (who mostly weren't any such thing) making things no better by loudly declaring that they hoped their man outlived them all yet, and filled Hogwarts chockfull of all the Muggle-born wizards he could find, and do whatever else he wanted with the school, because they would support him in everything.
Dumbledore himself didn't help matters. He gave a speech to the school board, who made it a semipublic event, in which he wished to say a few words to reassure those who doubted his good intent.
For one thing, everyone there could see that he wasn't going to be nice and dead in a few years. It was true that even by Wizarding reckoning one hundred and thirty was old, and Dumbledore, appropriate to his years, had a long white beard longer than a scarf. But he was probably in better health than most people in the room half or even a third his age. It was whispered that he was so by magical powers beyond most the rest of them. No one could deny he was one of the best wizards of the age. His love was alchemy, an art nobody else had taken seriously for a couple of hundred years. Some suggested that, like his friend on the Continent who in his six hundreds, Dumbledore had attained the height of that art.
For another thing, those reassuring words went as follows:
"I wish to share a joke with everyone here." (A few rueful smiles from his supporters.) "You all remember Gorrima the Gourmet, of course. A story goes that a respected family of the time invited her to dinner. Gorrima, unfailingly polite, made it clearly but tactfully known that she was feeling light-headed and would rather not eat. Her host asked, 'Musn't the venerable witch who banished two Dark Wizards need take a good many curses in stride?' Gorrima replied, 'Yes. But it is not the same thing when she must needs find them in her roasted fowl.'"
Dumbledore left an expectant pause that signaled the joke was over.
There were a few uneasy laughs.
Eyes twinkling – he was really enjoying himself hugely – he cocked his head and then said, "Maybe I didn't tell it right."
He could afford to joke, and however badly, because there was really no doubt he would get the job. He had been Deputy Headmaster for three decades already, and precedent alone dictated him as next-in-line. No one could quibble over his credentials. The big question was how partisan he was. "We can't reject him on grounds he's a Gryffindor," the governor said dryly, reluctantly fair. Dumbledore had killed the extreme purist Grindelwald, but no one in the civil arena would cite that as proof of his Muggle-lovingness, because Grindelwald had been so blatantly sociopathic that moderate conservatives wanted no truck with him. Otherwise he had done nothing more but advise behind-the-scenes to ease up on admitting Muggle-borns and those with interestingly non-human ancestors, but, by definition, nothing behind-the-scenes is open to public scrutiny. A minority, but a well-placed minority of conservatives gave him their support. So did the Head of Slytherin, who generally speaks for that constituency. (We can't lump Horace Slughorn under conservatives because no one was quite sure what he was, except someone who tried to deny as political or social rifts existed altogether.)
So Dumbledore serenely accepted permission to drop the adjective from his title acting headmaster and set to work on the summer owlings. He appointed a Muggle-born Head Boy. He accepted eight Muggle-borns among the first-years alone. And one werewolf.
The lattermost was the most radical decision, considering the last time a werewolf had set foot in Hogwarts disguised as a student she had done so without the administration's knowledge and would up dead from repeated Stinging Hexes once her cover was blown.
Of course, this was the Middle Ages.
But nobody knew about this decision, so it was the foremost that made the controversy. Controversy buzzed throughout the school for most of Dumbledore's time; he simply piled logs unto the blazing generation. And I think sometimes he enjoyed it.
The Head Boy and Girl of '71 were both to die within ten years. So let's get acquainted.
---
Dear Mum – Hi it's me! I am doing O.K. I like Hogwarts, lots of people here are stupider than me. Of course most everyone else is from magic families, but many of them cann't read or write. Wow! Some others here are Muggles (that means not magic) I met one on the train first thing, her name is Lily. I like that name. But we were sorted into different houses. I am in HUFFLEPUFF which I did NOT want becuase on the train Lily and I were HELD PRISONER by Hufflepuff girls who were a lot older. They kept saying how pretty she was. But not me. But Lily didn't like them either. Anyway I wound up in Hufflepuff but since I am not so pretty they leave me alone most of the time. I don't like any of the girls in this house because they are STUPID. But they all are nice. People say that Muggles like me do best in Hufflepuff because Hufflepuff doesn't hate them. I like some of the Hufflepuff boys. They make me laugh. My best friend here is a boy named Myrom. I think that's a funny name. In one class it is called Defence Against the Dark Arts the teacher has a staff that belonged to some famous witch called Morgan Laffy. We are not allowed to touch it but Myrom pretended like he did and then pretended like he was choking and dying on the floor He wasn't though. The nurse who's name is Madame Pompom was angry at him when she found that out. Myrom is in love with Mercy Mullen who is a Ravenclaw girl our year who is SO beautiful but I always pretend with Myrom that I think she's ugly. She's not though.
I am starting a new paragraph because lots of people here don't know about paragraphs. The magic here is very neat. Hogwarts is a big castle with secret passages and everything but the secret passages more around sometimes. There are REAL GHOSTS. There is also a giant around here I've seen a few times. Myrom says no its not a giant its just a hagred and his brother knows him. I think he hit his head on the floor too hard. Myrom I mean. Because it IS a giant.
We haven't learned ANY spells in class yet! It is all talking notes which is silly because like I said a lot of them cann't write. But Myrom's brother has showed him some and other Hufflepuffs show us a lot. I can change colours on things now. I can also make a blue light on the end of my wand and also make water shoot out the end of it which is SO much fun to shoot at people. I can't make things fly yet but Myrom can. I promise to learn lots. I would write more but this letter has taken me an hour already. I will write more later.
I love you.
Samantha
---
It's 1971 – 1 September. 1 September always begins Hogwarts's term, be it any day of the week, or when the Apparition point is under Muggle martial law, as in 1645. Of course there is no longer the traditional broom flight to get there – the old fashion had a nasty habit of killing would-be students or losing them "somewhere in the countryside," and so with the advent of Muggle technology wizards synthesized it. You've heard from the extreme conservatives; the extreme liberals are of the opinion that wizards are intellectual parasites.
If you go to King's Cross Station – that's in London, in England, and yes, it actually exists – and stop between the nondescript platform nine and the even duller platform ten, with all the smells and plastic and bacterially colonized handrails, and lean against the wall – well, nothing will happen to you. If you went 1 September, and hung around, and watched – and you needn't be very careful, mind. This was 1971, and wizards were convinced that Muggles never noticed anything. (The Sixties had just been rollicking through, so this isn't as delusive a belief as it might have been.)
You may have seen person after person go right through that wall… right into thin concrete. And you would've ached to know what was on the other side that remained so closed to you, no?
The shrill voices of British schoolchildren. The long-suffering yells of their parents. Toddlers wailing and tantruming, the cawking of caged – and uncaged – birds, the meowing of content cats, the shrieking of cats whose tails had been stepped upon by some ungainly human, the booms of miscast spells… students got rusty over the summer, you weren't allowed to do magic outside of Hogwarts until seventeen… the tossing of firecrackers, the swishing of the cloaks of the Blacks, who were the only ones in wizarding robes among a garish mess of the mismatching, would-be Muggle-donned, the slamming of sliding glass doors, the oomphing of baggage handling and tossing, the chuffing of an engine eye-scarringly scarlet, which was the Hogwarts Express – and all of the above was Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters. Tourists often overlook it.
Today there is a loud shout of "Op-PY!" booming through all the rest every so often. It's mostly Mike Zeller, who shuts up only because Frank Longbottom makes motions to hex him in annoyance.
Oppy – or young Mr Wilfed Croniss, to his friends – has already curled deep back in a nice and solitary compartment, amidst mountains of luggage. But then there is a last call, and, with great reluctance, he emerges from his hiding, and stumbles to the front of the train, shoulders slouched as a barrier to several catcalls.
The chaos is increasing – the stationmaster is bellowing about five minute warnings, and there are shrieks and scuffles to secure their spots on the train and to yell farewells – the engine releases a great chuff of steam – it rises to a pitch – a dozen different children are bawling their eyes and lungs out – the train is moving noisily – and hundreds, almost a thousand people are shouting – it's out of sight, leaving behind hundreds of Apparitiatory poppings, like a monster piece of bubble wrap, or, in our new Wizarding terms, like a boiling cauldron of some noisily bubbling concoction.
---
(To the Moon family from their middle son, Henry)
Hello it's me. I'm sorry. But I'm doing bad. We have to do a lot of writeing at hogwarts. I'm trying really hard to learn. There are some here from mugle families. Who already learned at there schools. And even some of the other purebloods laf becuase they say my writeing looks like a baby's. I'm learning how to do it fast as I can. Clive's wand does not work for me very good. They say it does not work good unless its your own. Can I get my own for my birthday. I am looking for ward to flying brooms next Thursday. I also like the food here. The desserts most of all. When we all lurn how to make water come out of our wands we will have a fite out side this weekend. There is lots of room out side. Yes tir day most of the Slytherin 1 year boys tryed to run arond the hule castill. I made it farther then any one.
---
Inside the train, dodging aside to leave room to students chasing each other and the witch evermore faithfully pushing that snack trolley –
To the older students the compartments are quite roomy, and themselves quite limby. They're in great big laughing packs. The younger escape claustrophobia by hanging together in two and threes. I'm afraid we'll have to leave them behind. We're entering the prefects' compartment. All twenty four were more or less squished inside one for a meeting. I say more or less – many were standing in the corridor, with the door open to listen, or not to listen, as pleases each. Inside were only the Greengrass faction. You and I can enter – we must, if we're to meet at last the Head Boy and Girl. Why, you've met the former already – Oppy is now next to the window seat, chin in hand on elbow on windowsill, staring at the fast-flashing countryside scenery. He could not be more overshadowed by Persis Greengrass, who is calling for silence. In the past hour and a half they have already established a pattern with Persis's calls for attention. Persis orders quiet at an unurgent volume. Everyone begins to obey, wrapping up the last bit of their conversation. While waiting, Persis gets distracted by one of her friends, and they start their own conversation. Meanwhile everyone else figures she means to do nothing and their own talks pick up steam. Persis comes to and yells at them all for being inattentive.
"All right, everybody, we have to stop wasting time. It's been almost two hours now and we haven't got all that much done." It was a statement of beautiful honesty. Persis felt no pressure. Half the prefects were friends of hers. A wide circle of relatives meant a wide circle of friends meant a bright future meant she glowed enough to almost be worthy of her one great beauty, her red-gold hair (that to Oppy seemed deliberately taunting).
To be fair to Persis – it would be hard for anyone to lead this group. This cross-section of Hogwarts featured first the Greengrass-supportive faction, composedly mainly of her many friends, who were composed mainly of family acquaintances and retainers.
Another popular group – who represented a group of very male Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs, whom we'll call "The Boys" – consisted of the sixth-year male Gryffindor (Mike Zeller, occupied with controlling an orange cat), the seventh-year male Gryffindor (Frank Longbottom, who owned the cat, sort of), and the seventh-year male Hufflepuff, Nathaniel Perks (with whom the cat often spent the night). They were friendly to the Greengrass faction, but independent, and high-spirited, the noisiest talkers. They would do their duties and then get on to the good bits. They also had nicknamed Croniss "Oppy," for intoxicated reasons not entirely clear now even to them. Did they need a reason? They were secure enough.
Then again, there were also "The Slytherins" – the seventh-year male Lucius Malfoy, the seventh-year female Bellatrix Black, and the sixth-year male, Jarvis Eames, all of whom simply stood together and back and looked scorn upon Persis's chatty helmship. They would soon enough progress to saying barbed things, but first they were waiting for the Greengrass faction to self-destruct. With such incompetence how could it not?
There were three other Slytherins. They are not the Slytherins. Indeed, like most of the Ravenclaws, who were uncomfortable and wishing they were with their own friends or had a book, they were all fairly alone, and among those standing outside the compartment. These included the fifth-year Richard Moran. Even at fifteen he was distinguished-looking, with the classical Moran nose. These Slytherins and Ravenclaws could have wielded great power as a bloc, but they never got around to cohesion.
The next group, privileged to also sit in the compartment with the diehard Greengrassites, although not of them, consisted solely of the two sixth-year Hufflepuffs, Zenobia Dobbs and Ted Tonks, who in an almost Ravenclawish manner were perfectly content to leave the squabbles to everyone else, and to talk together (they were both great talkers), occasionally interrupting the meeting with laughter. Usually Hufflepuffs did do this; they patterned the platonic relationship decades before it teenagers took it up all throughout the English-speaking world.
Anyone not mentioned was squarely in the Greengrass majority.
"Okay, is that all settled now?" Persis was asking, in one of her ephemeral businesslike spurts. "Everybody, shut up and listen! Now, the password to the prefects' meeting room is going to be the Croftwell evasion."
"Is it?" asked Oppy, without taking his eyes from the window. His tone rather put a damper to the incipient approval, for at the moment Sean Croftwell was the best-loved figure in all of Wizarding Britain. (Quidditch. We'll get to the technicalities of the Croftwell evasion later, maybe.)
"Yes," said Persis agreeably, rolling her eyes, "it is."
"Oh, right. I do remember discussing that with you and agreeing to it, now."
"Glad to hear it. Now, that's pretty much it, isn't it? Does anyone have any questions?"
There was a very loquacious negative. In a corner of the compartment, two sixth-years – the Slytherin female and the Ravenclaw male – were busily ignoring proceedings together. Nathaniel Perks had squeezed into the compartment after the erstwhile cat while the rest of The Boys continued to horse around outside. The Slytherin faction was considering a very pointed, ill-natured question. But Oppy Croniss was a faction all of himself. "Why don't we have all the new fifth-years introduced?" he asked archly.
With an effort, Persis controlled herself. "Right. All right. I know Francine… and Darius… and Dill… who're you?" she gestured to a fifth-year girl, who immediately looked twice as ill-at-ease as before.
"I don't know who they all are," said Oppy. "Francine who?" (Francine flipped her hair over her shoulder with a little laugh.) "Maybe they should all introduce themselves, and say their House."
There was a slight pause. Then the fifth-year girl, taking a little heart from Oppy, said that she was Clover Marwood of Ravenclaw. One at a time they all followed her lead, even the favoured three.
"Do you lot all know what Houses all the rest of us are in?" Oppy asked, appealing directly to the fifth-years over the head of the cliquey Gryffindor leadership. "I think maybe this year, to promote inter-House unity, all the fifth-years should be assigned to two older prefects from two different Houses. Look, I worked it all out here – " And he rummaged in his schoolbag for the appropriate piece of parchment. But Oppy was infamously slow, and his bag an infamous mess of crumpled parchment, so the others had a chance to at last stop being polite about the two-hour tension they had just endured, partly at Oppy's hands.
"Look, Oppy," said Dill, "everybody knows the only reason you're Head Boy is because Dumbledore wanted to make sure a Muggle-born got it."
There was a laugh – a laugh partly ashamed, but agreeing.
"Was I?" asked Oppy. "I suppose I'm too out of the loop to even know that."
He always spoke slowly, and Persis, ever-quicker, overrode a good half his words by saying, "Yeah, that doesn't mean you get to make any executive decisions or anything."
"Oh, I'm sorry," said Clover Marwood. "I thought I was at the prefects' meeting. I thought this was a prefects' meeting, not a purists' get-together, not a Muggle-bashing rally."
She spoke long enough that everybody at last heard at least some of what she said.
"What Muggle-bashing rally?" asked Mike Zeller.
Clover looked at him with great directness, considering she was a year younger, and much out of his social circle. "I've watched you and Longbottom patronise him for years. You call him Oppy even though he hates that name."
"We don't hate Muggles!" said Mike, exchanging an outraged look with Frank Longbottom.
"I'm not bashing Muggles, Croniss isn't a Muggle, he's as much a wizard as me," said Dill.
"Better," pointed out Clover.
"Yeah, exactly. But he has no business being Head Boy. I'm sorry, Oppy, but you're not, you're not the Head Boy type. Everyone knows Tiberius McLaggen should have been. Dumbledore just wanted a Muggle-born, and didn't want to appoint two cousins."
This stirred The Boys. Frank Longbottom only had his badge because Tiberius McLaggen had sent his back during the summer in a huff over this whole little affaire.
"Right!" Mike nodded. "He just didn't want two Gryffindors, and the Hufflepuffs are too cosy with us too I suppose, and he didn't want to seem like he was favouring us, and that's – well, mate, that's pretty much why you're here. Glad to have you and all, but – " He shrugged most agreeably.
Oppy took a long stare at them all and then pulled out his wand. Everyone (that is, the Greengrassites) flinched until he went off in the corner and used it to blow random bubbles and sparks into the air, a practice then called "fripping," in slang.
Persis ordered them all out to patrol corridors, and introduce the unknown first-years to the proprieties of Hogwarts and report miscreants, and then she went out laughing with those among the prefects who were her friends. Oppy sighed, curled up in a corner, and fripped as the train rattled forward.
---
Dear Mother and Father,
I was Sorted into Ravenclaw! I'm as surprised as anyone else, but Ravenclaw is a decent House, isn't it? It's not as if I was Sorted into Hufflepuff, is it? Actually I find it quite satisfactory. Of course it has its share of odd ducks. Being in Ravenclaw means putting up with this enormous pest Lovegood each evening. Two of my roommates are Muggle-born (one with distant Wizarding relatives). Still even the Muggle-borns aren't as low as some of the Slytherin purebloods. In the dormitory we all expected I'd be in there is one of those long-haired Moon boys. There's also the son of a blood traitor, with a Muggle name. The one's far too country and the other's far too city so far as I can see. The others in my dormitory are Quirke, Higgs, and Broadmoor, though, so that's all right. But as to that Sorting, I told off Jarvis and Spalding as soon as I saw them, let me tell you. We did not have to get past a troll. I do think it would have been good of you to have simply told me about the Sorting Hat. I don't see why it was such a great secret. Indeed it was a pretty ratty hat.
Say hello to Eugene for me. I wish I had been the youngest so I could be home alone for a couple of years. Tell him I said that if he keeps studying Astronomy will be extremely easy for about two years, as I see it.
I'm actually most enjoying Transfiguration. Potions is interesting; the Muggle-borns don't understand the attractions of it. History of Magic has the most absurd textbook. Have you ever read it? It calls Spurius de Huguén Spurius the Splenetic and describes him as a "mad and cruelextremist." No mention of that little detail of having saved the entire village of Beaslebury, although the book later blames "Slytherin politics" for its destruction two centuries later. And J. and S. are right: that class is very boring, the way it is taught. Father, you've told us it used to be done quite differently, right?
Yours sincerely,
Beverly
P.S. Is Mullen a suitable family?
---
Night was falling, and Lionel Lovegood came into the prefects' compartment to find Oppy exactly as before. Oppy knew that Lovegood was in on the Ravenclaw's busybody newspaper-like production, and immediately groaned. "I deny everything. I don't talk about what went on in prefects' meetings. Tell you editor to – " And here he said something enormously rude.
Lovegood was not in the least put off. He was a stringy, colourless, washed-out, battered creature, long at the bottom of the male adolescent food chain. Oppy's dirtiest didn't faze him. "I don't care about that," he said, with magnificent unconcern. "But I've been collecting theories as to where the name 'Oppy' arose. Was it from some supposed resemblance to the infamous tricorn breeder Hal Oppenheimer? Is it from the Greek phrase 'opus magnum' – or, in English 'shining opal' – and therefore a coded reference to the by-product of that censored experiment by the fearless radical Rosalind Bungs? Or, while they were very intoxicated, did they by chance ask you to open the door, with Oppy resultant their best effort, which – to the perverse amusement signat of all drunks – stuck? Or does it come from you once trying to hex them – with opsoleturus?" he finished, hopefully. "I thought Mike Zeller seemed to be blowing his nose a great deal more than usual the past year or so."
For once, Oppy looked rather startled, but he recovered quick enough. "Why not ask Zeller and Longbottom and Perks and Pucey and all the rest of that lot?"
"I considered it," said Lovegood, as Frank Longbottom's independent-minded gold cat tried to crawl up his leg. "But I don't think I'll get an answer. They, they think I'm weird."
"Do they."
Oppy the Saturnine was never in such danger of smiling in all his life.