When Celebrimbor reached the Great Hall in the morning, his head was reeling. The creatures had called themselves elves, which his brain, loaded with information about this new language called English, told him was the same as quendi. But even if he tried to be extremely charitable about it, he could see no similarities between his own people and these, these, house elves. He had always heard both Dwarves and Second Born refer to Elves as stuck-up assholes (when they thought that no Elf was listening) and, from his own admission, there was some truth to that. Elves were proud. About ninety percent of the problems they had encountered so far in the history of their world was because of that. The other ten percent were because some of them were also brilliant idiots.
In his own timeline, Celebrimbor belonged to both categories.
These ones were anything but proud. And he couldn't wrap his head around the fact that, while as far as he knew no one had realised he was a different species, these diminutive, subservient, house elves, had seen through him at once. He, of course, didn't know that had happened because of a lapse in the perception filter that Aulë had put up. See, he had tuned the filter to all those that counted as sentient and autonomous for that universe's demiurge — and house elves weren't as a rule included in this category because of racist essentialism. House elf sentience was, to her, awarded on a case-by-case basis dictated by plot, and the hordes of happy slaves as a whole had never registered on that scale.
Whatever the reason, the house elves had brought Celebrimbor up to date on several important points that he had missed — mostly re: their own enslavement (which made Celebrimbor's blood boil), and the fact that Slytherin's monster had been released once before (it had taken some questioning to reach that point in conversation), and that the girl it had killed had become one of the castle's ghosts. That last bit they had volunteered spontaneously when complaining of the extra work she caused them because she kept flooding the bathroom she had died in.
All in all, it had made Celebrimbor tremendously late for breakfast and, when he slid into his chair, he lost no time before stuffing himself with porridge. Or he would have, had not his neighbour with the dark hair and the constipated look smugly said: "My, my, Gilderoy, are you still hungover? You'll be late to class — careful, the headmaster might think another would be better suited for your job."
Celebrimbor was, as stated above, a proud and also brilliant idiot. He was also extremely kind and rather timid (at least compared to the rest of this family tree, which to be true doesn't say much) but, sometimes, his self-control slipped. It mostly happened when he was either extremely worried or so completely absorbed by a task that he didn't notice someone was talking to him. And he was very touchy upon the subject of his competence, real or supposed; call it unresolved grand-father issues. It was therefore no surprise that he snapped.
"I was investigating," he said. "Which is more that can be said of you. I am on the verge of discovering what attacked those children. I didn't give my word in vain. My kind never does."
Taking upon himself an empty promise made by a drunk Gilderoy Lockhart, of all people, might not have been the brightest move, destiny-wise, but then. Brilliant idiot.
"So, Severus," he added since the house elves had been kind enough to provide him with the pictures and names of all the staff, "if you want to do my job for me, why don't we teach together to these children how to defend themselves? Let's see. Tomorrow's Saturday. Extra class in the evening for those who wish. Let the best teacher shine."
He had time to eat a whole toast before Severus Snape regained the ability to speak: for a while, it appeared as if the Potions master had suffered a heart attack. When the man next spoke, he was hissing like an angry kettle.
"You think that you're a better teacher than me? Gilderoy, you haven't even earned that title, you attention-seeking fraud, you little…"
His hand convulsively gripped his wand below the table. Without missing a beat, Celebrimbor caught his wrist and twisted it until the man paled.
"Never call me that slur again," he said in a low voice. "You know not who I am."
He waited a few instants more, just to drive the point home. Celebrimbor was a smith; his handgrip was quite powerful. When at last he released the Potions master, the man didn't flinch — but his skin was bruised.
Dabbing his lips with his napkin, Celebrimbor then left the table to head to class. He had lost his appetite.
Just like the day before, Celebrimbor's morning was spent winding it through several classes. Since he hadn't found any trace of curriculum prepared by his look-alike, he had decided that his own course would be to teach critical thinking to his pupils. He may not have had the slightest clue as to how wands were used (he still hadn't had time to look at the broken one that had been loaned to him), but he knew how to spot evil. Or so he believed. And, indeed, as he talked with his students, he couldn't help but think back to Eregion. Now that there was some distance between them, some things Annatar had said and done appeared more suspicious to him — less informal banter and more sly calumny, less tutoring and more idea stealing.
When midday came, instead of heading back to the Great Hall, Celebrimbor decided to pay a visit to Hagrid the groundskeeper. Some students, who definitely would have deserved a medal as tour guides, pointed him to a rustic cottage within walking distance of the castle.
It was the first time that Celebrimbor left the cosy castle interior. He had seen the snow outside and thought to take a cape — a fur-lined affair that was extremely well cut and only missed some jewelry at the collar to be perfect — expecting the same crisp cold that came from the Misty Mountains during the Eregion winters. To his chagrin, however, this weather felt more drab and damp than it should have. Perhaps it was the clouds that still hung low, stifling sunlight into a grey brightness reminiscent of nothingness, but Celebrimbor felt this world to be old and weary. That children seemed to thrive there was but another mystery.
He found the humble house by the edge of a forest, made dark and foreboding by the wintry season. After pushing a small gate that mustn't be much of an obstacle to the foxes and deer, Celebrimbor crossed a garden patch waiting to be seeded come spring, and he knocked on the door. A dog barked inside. The panel opened.
Celebrimbor had seen all sorts of people in his life: cultured noldorin Elves, snobby sylvan Elves, silent Dwarves, and chaotic Second Born. He supposed that this was Hagrid, as he looked like the picture the house elves had shown him. But he was tall. Too tall. And, for some reason that probably had to do with the bushy beard, he reminded Celebrimbor of an over-sized Dwarf.
"Professor Lockhart," grumbled the giant Dwarf. "Ye're back then?"
"Yes. I wondered if we could have a talk."
"Ye know there ain't slugs anymore since the last pumpkins are gone. Nothin' for ye to help me with, I'm 'fraid."
"The Headmaster advised me to come to you, Hagrid. May I step in?"
With a huff, Hagrid relented. "If Dumbledore sends ye, I s'ppose it's OK. Come in, but don't sit on the big armchair, it's Fang's. Don't want that much hair on yer fancy cape."
The inside was a cosy mess that smelled of peat fire and soup. Hagrid made a show of pretending to tidy up while Celebrimbor removed his cape, rendered useless by the sudden stuffy warmth, and sat on a chair. The dog — a great hound that would have made Oromë proud — at first eyed Celebrimbor with caution. Being, like the house elves, free of the perception filter, he wasn't under the impression that their visitor was the much despised Gilderoy Lockhart, and soon came to sniff Celebrimbor's hands. Satisfied with his inspection, he then proceeded to lie at his feet. He was just tall enough that his head could rest on Celebrimbor's lap: a quite pointed incitation to pets was given with pleading eyes, and ear scritches were dutifully given. Hagrid watched Fang's ease with a newfound curiosity and, after a few common platitudes, signaled Celebrimbor to state what his visit was about.
With great care, Celebrimbor spoke. He said that he had found out the monster that terrified the school had already been released once before; it was therefore not the complete unknown thing that most seemed to believe. He also said that Hagrid's expertise on creatures of all sorts probably made him the closest thing to an expert on the subject.
"Why don't ye ask Professor Kettleburn," remarked Hagrid. "He's the expert on beasts an' everything. Ministry-sanctioned an' all."
"The Headmaster didn't direct me to him," Celebrimbor replied in a quiet voice.
"The Headmaster ain't always right."
"Yet, from what I surmise, he is often so. I have taken an oath to rid the school of this monster. Will you help me, Hagrid, master of the Hogwarts grounds?"
There was silence for a while. The fire burned silently, for peat almost always does, until Hagrid suddenly said: "Ye're different today. Not trying to lord over me or anything. Why's that?"
"Would you believe me if I said that, yesterday, I woke up a different man?"
"Ye know, ever since ye arrived at the castle, I thought ye were some sort of cheat. Ye felt too good to be true, havin' done all these great things an' then, poof, barely able to cast a spell. An' there ye are, carin' abou' the kids an' all, askin' me my opinion as if ye valued it…"
After a pause, Celebrimbor replied: "I do. I apologise if my actions ever let you think otherwise. It has come to me that I may not always have behaved in the appropriate mannerly way."
" 'pology accepted," gruffly replied Hagrid. "I'll answer yer questions, 'cause Dumbledore obviously asks. But I don't trust ye yet. Pretty is as pretty do, me dad used to say, and ye haven't done nothin' so far."
From Hagrid, Celebrimbor learned that the monster, whatever it was, made spiders afraid — so much that those who dwelt either in the castle or on the grounds tried to leave in droves. This unsettled him, for he had always held spiders (especially the giant kind — although Hagrid had said nothing of his former pet Aragog) as fell creatures that spawned in the very shadow of evil. From a naturalist standpoint, this is obviously quite false, as most spiders are gentle beings quite happy to live their small lives free of interference of every kind, be it evil or good. But the stigma remained.
Anyway, it made Celebrimbor — well, not afraid, but wary. Because what kind of monster can scare eight-legged evil whose too many eyes made him scream like a child lost in the night? As he left Hagrid's cottage, he tried to think back to Madam Pince's bibliography. A cat, a boy, and a ghost had already been petrified. The answer as to what creature had done the deed had to be somewhere; probably in the broken toilets the house elves had spoken of. However, more in-depth analysis would have to wait, as Celebrimbor had classes to attend.
When evening came and the castle settled into the quiet night, Celebrimbor walked to the kitchens. He only got lost four times, which was a definite improvement. There weren't many people about, except for a few ghosts. The kitchen, however, when he pushed the door, was still bustling with activity; in the few instants it took for the house elves to notice him, Celebrimbor admired the impression of efficiency their work displayed. The craftsman in him recognized professionals at work.
One by one, however, the house elves stopped their labour, assembling silently around Celebrimbor. Their great eyes were lit by awe, and none spoke until he had made his way to a stool and sat down to be at their height.
"I am sorry," he said. "To me, you look like small goblins — and yet you call yourselves elves. Why do you know me? How do you know me, when nobody else does? What kinship lies between us?"
"We have dreams," they answered. "We dream of another world, in another time, where we were tall and free. We never had such dreams before, but on Wednesday night we all did, and yesterday once again. The dreams told us what you were."
The rational explanation, of course, was a mere bug in the Archive machine that Aulë had set up: the three universe matrixes had clashed in a weird way, and something of Middle Earth had seeped through into Hogwarts by a sort of hardware osmosis. A few dogs in Eregion had also been bothered by nightmares involving Demodogs. However, since, unlike the house elves, they were unable to speak, it only manifested in normal canine behaviour such as wanton destruction of propriety when left alone for too long — because nobody puts the Demodog in a corner. A peculiar linguistic timeline retrocontamination had also given birth to the legend of the High Elves among the Hogwarts house elves. Three days ago, this legend didn't exist, but now — it had always been.
"We have stories," they therefore said. "Stories that while today we serve and are mortal, in ancient days we ruled as deathless. Our humbling is lost in time, but we have not forgotten."
Celebrimbor thought — he thought of the rumours of what shapes Morgoth had twisted the Elves into during the First Age, and in the nameless years before. He decided that it wasn't totally absurd for these house elves to be some sort of descendants of the unlucky thralls of Morgoth.
"What can we do for you, lord," they asked.
"You have already done much," replied Celebrimbor. "Thanks to you, I am better able to navigate this place, and I have a lead in my inquest."
But one of them pushed a mincemeat pie in his open hand, and another served him a weak beer that tasted a thousand times better than anything the Dwarves had crafted so far. Celebrimbor was a simple man: he ate. Food, he had decided, was definitely one of the high points of this place. Once he had washed down the last of the pie with the last of the butterbeer and dutifully licked his fingers clean of any remaining crumb, he pulled Ron Weasley's broken wand from his robes and asked what the elves knew about these things.
"We are forbidden to hold them," said the one who had given him the pie. Her name was Veeney.
"By whom? And why?"
"The wizards. They fear we would rebel like the goblins did, because wands would make us their equals."
Celebrimbor winced while Veeney didn't seem too much bothered by the disturbing implications of her answer. The more he learned about elf/wizard relations, and the less he liked it.
"From what I understand," he said, "they use it to practice magic. Are all the Second Born here wizards?"
"No, lord, only a few are. Most humans are Muggles and don't even know that magic and wizards exist."
Muggles? What a strange word. And that magic — the word seemed to include quite a few phenomenons that Celebrimbor would not have classified as unnatural, but further questioning of the elves made him reconsider. Singing, in this world, appeared to be a strictly artistic endeavour.
He was now closely examining the wand, half-listening to Veeney who was explaining about unicorn hair. He could feel some remnants of a spell holding the pieces together: the hair alone wouldn't have managed. He tried to hum a song of healing, and was surprised at how hard it was — but it worked, and only a small scar remained on the wood.
"How does one use a wand?" he asked. "You must have at least some theoretical knowledge."
Later, when he left the kitchen, Celebrimbor had a few working notions of wand magic. He had even tried a simple spell or two, and had been delighted when a bright light had shone at the tip of the wand — to the great fascination of the house elves. He must find a way to reward these diminutive people for their help, that was proving to be invaluable as Veeney had already offered to guide him to the broken bathroom in the morning. Being the fëanorian he was, his mind already of course wandered to the "break them free of all restraints" options: some things are hardwired into people.
Saturday morning felt less busy, and more relaxed, than Thursday and Friday had been. When Celebrimbor had breakfast — at dawn, although considering the season that didn't say much — he was the only teacher in sight in the Great Hall. Being able to drink tea in peace was a welcome change.
The ginger boy — Ron Weasley — was there, too, with his two friends. When Celebrimbor signaled for them to get closer, the scrawny black-haired nerd suddenly had the look of a deer who sees the hunter, and the girl with the enthusiastic hair all but hit his shoulder before whispering something to him. Ron, however, bravely walked to Celebrimbor, an expression of half hope and half worry on his freckled face. My, how young these were! Celebrimbor wasn't exactly good at estimating Second Born ages, but he was pretty sure they must be barely over ten or eleven. Certainly, they couldn't be twenty.
"Here, Ron Weasley," he said, holding out the boy's repaired wand. "As promised."
A whoop and an aborted somersault later, the boy was gone. He had said something about his mother not being able to get back at him for it because it was Professor Lockhart, and the three children left in a hurry. Gilderoy Lockhart's own wand was now instead in Celebrimbor's grasp. It felt different than the boy's — more fickle, if that could be believed.
Anyway. Celebrimbor tucked the wand in his belt the way people here seemed to do, and dabbed his lips before he rose from the table. He had an elf to meet and a bathroom to visit.
Walking the castle with Veeney was a harrowing endeavour: it appeared that house elves strived not to be seen, and that imposed quite a lot of detour and not a few sudden turns to avoid people who were wandering the halls. When Celebrimbor asked the reason behind this secrecy, Veeney shook her head and said: "Wizards do not like to see us. We are ugly, and we are servants. It would be painful for them to be reminded of our existence. It is better for us to remain hidden."
Celebrimbor breathed hard through his nostrils.
The bathroom door was as underwhelming as could be expected. Celebrimbor's sharp hearing caught some voices inside before he opened it, but it must have been the ghost, for the translucent spirit of a girl stood softly singing to herself by a closed stall. Even in death, she wore thick glasses, and she screamed when she saw Celebrimbor. Veeney, meanwhile, had vanished.
"It's quite all right," Celebrimbor said in the voice he usually reserved for spooked horses. "I am a teacher here at the school. Are you the one called Myrtle?"
"This is a girl's bathroom, professor," said the ghost, drawing herself to her full height. "But yes, I'm Myrtle, and I can't even get peace from creeps while I'm in a girl's bathroom! Is it too much to ask to be able to think about death without being disturbed?"
Due to very different gender dynamics, the Noldor didn't gender bathrooms. Celebrimbor wondered briefly why such segregation would be necessary, and filed the question under the "useless trivia I should ask about someday" category before shaking the vacant look on his face.
"I have heard, Myrtle, that you died a victim of a hidden monster of yore. Could you, perhaps, tell me more about it?"
All of a sudden, the ghost went from surly to delighted; she launched into a long description of her death using the long, winding, sentences of a teenager recounting her favourite story. As Myrtle was a ghost, she had no need to catch her breath, and could therefore pause for drama at random places. In the end, Celebrimbor learned nothing much about the monster itself — but he deduced that its lair must open in this very room, and a thousand new questions sprang to mind. Did this mean the monster was a girl, as these people seemed to be quite particular as to who had the right to be there? But even the must unruly little girl he knew (and that was Galadriel's daughter Celebrían, that he loved fondly) hardly qualified as a lethal creature (although she could be quite a handful at times).
Anyway, Celebrimbor started searching the room. Identical washbasins and broken mirrors yielding nothing, although one of the faucets didn't work. The first stall was empty — Celebrimbor wrinkled his nose at a foul odor that seemed to drift from a nearby one. The drip-drip of water and the gargle of bubbles made a sad background noise behind Myrtle's weeping monologue. The second stall was empty, too, and the third one had a blocked door.
Celebrimbor forced against the door with his shoulder. It seemed to give a little, until the door forced back. Celebrimbor took a step back and, disregarding the legendary subtlety that was his, gave a great kick right in the middle of the door, that splintered as only cheap wood is wont to do. Behind it stood, transfixed, their mouths gaping, Ron Weasley and his two friends, trying to hide a bubbling cauldron behind themselves.
Celebrimbor, perhaps, should have asked what they were doing here. Celebrimbor, however, had very little experience with children (apart from keeping Celebrían out of harm's way when she haunted his workshop despite her mother's orders). Celebrimbor, therefore, merely said: "Is that what gives away that dreadful smell?"
The girl — Hermione Granger, he remembered — had her hands to her face; her nails dug half-moons into her cheeks, pale as death. But she was viscerally incapable to leave a question unanswered, so she slowly nodded. The dark-haired boy said quickly: "Sleekeasy's Hair Potion, professor."
Celebrimbor peered carefully over the cauldron edge. The stench was terrible — quite fitting, though, for the place.
"You would put that in your hair?"
"Yessir. Hermione and I are tired of being bullied for our hair. Smell only lasts while it's hot anyway."
"You know, I have several liters of hair lotion in my rooms. I would be more than happy to share some with you. This bathroom is hardly a safe place for you to be. I surmise you heard what Myrtle told me?"
"Yessir. Very scary. Didn't understand all of it, though."
The boy looked at him with innocent green eyes, not unlike those of Celebrían when she lied — that is, a first-rate puppy impersonation. Coming from one who had so far obviously squirmed each time there had been a risk Celebrimbor might talk to him, the verdict was quite certain.
"Go back to wherever you ought to be, the three of you. I'll take that cauldron of yours."
Once the children were gone, Veeney reappeared by Celebrimbor's elbow. She asked what he wanted to do with the still warm potion.
"I have a feeling that they will want it back, and it looks forbidden, therefore probably dangerous," he replied. "So, let's not put it in my office, or in my rooms. Can you hide it in the kitchens, and keep on a low boil as it was? I am loath to destroy that which I do not understand and, who knows, it could come in handy once I know more about it."