AN: Okay so this is coming pretty quickly after my last chapter, yay for having free time in the summer! I'm very happy to report that as of May 23, just four days ago, this fic is now a whole year old! 12 chapters in a year isn't too bad, right? If I updated with any consistent regularity that'd be like a chapter a month! Not too shabby, imo. Oh btw this is my LONGEST CHAPTER YET AT ABOUT 8,500 WORDS HOLY GUACAMOLE GUYS!
Slight warning that this chapter is another one of those wow-these-are-fourteen-year-olds-and-they-make-lewd-comments-sometimes chapters. They're still 14 though. I'll be gradually adding maturity as best as I can as they get older, but I fell down a lot of inappropriate internet rabbit holes early on so my conception of growing maturity levels are a liiiiiiittle bit skewed lol.
"Alohamora," came the whispered charm. The old hinges creaked. "Colloportus." The lock clicked back into place.
Marina hitched her bag higher up on her shoulder, very aware of the restricted book tucked inside between her Divination and Astronomy textbooks and hidden under crumpled pieces of parchment. She looked to the right, then to the left, making sure no one else was in the corridor, before walking on to the Grand Staircase. It was late, so late—she'd be falling asleep in class tomorrow, no doubt, but it was probably worth it, wasn't it? She could make herself extra strong tea at breakfast. With a quiet sigh, Marina began the ascent up to the fifth floor. So, so many stairs.
As she climbed, Marina pondered the book she had found. The Humble Journey of a—what was it? Something long and ridiculous, that's what. The introduction by Brutus had told her, more or less, that the original work was old, very old, a thousand years old. It was a journal, someone's notebook of their experiments and research, that this Brutus person discovered in an old Irish monastery, or something, written in an old version of Gaelic mixed with Celtic wizarding runes, and he brought it back to wherever he was from and reworked the whole thing into a book that modern wizarding kind could use and learn from. Whoever had kept the journal originally had, in the end, successfully achieved the animagus transformation, and the information checked out with many leading scholars of Brutus's day, so it was obviously a reputable source. Marina was excited to dive into it, to tell the truth, and hoped it would be everything she needed to learn the transformation. She hoped, too, that no one would notice it was missing from the library.
With the prospects of becoming an animagus so attainable, right in her book bag, in fact, Marina was positively giddy—but maybe that was the lack of sleep, too. Regardless, she was so excited that she couldn't help but let out a little giggle. And that was a mistake.
"STUDENT OUT OF BED! STUDENT ON THE STAIRS!" screamed Peeves the infamous poltergeist, appearing through a wall to Marina's left. "STUDENT OUT OF BED!"
Shocked, Marina froze on the stairs, steps away from the third floor landing. She gawked at the apparition, jaw slack as she watched him cackle to himself and perform delighted loop-de-loops in the air. Then she jumped and spun around to look down at the first floor; someone had just run up the bottom of the Grand Staircase with thundering steps towards the moving stairs. Marina leaned over the rail of the stairs to get a better look, and locked eyes with Filch, the Caretaker. That was all she needed to start running, but just as she took a step towards the landing ahead of her, the stone steps came to life beneath her feet, jerking into motion. Marina stumbled.
"WHAT'S SHE GONNA DO NOW?" laughed Peeves. "TOO FAR FROM HER TOWER, THE ICKLE PRINCESS'LL NEVER MAKE IT!"
Marina bounced on her toes, heart thumping in her chest, waiting as the stairs moved so, so, so agonizingly slowly, listening to the ominous thump, thump, thump as Filch climbed up the stairs as quickly as he could. Oh, Merlin, she had put her foot in it, hadn't she? At last the stairs connected to a floating landing, and she bounded up to it, taking the steps two at a time, hurrying up the next connecting stair segment and praying it wouldn't move away from that fourth floor landing before she could get to it. She jinxed it by thinking about it, apparently, because halfway up it started moving, sending her towards the opposite side of the castle from Ravenclaw Tower.
Peeves was still shouting in glee above her. "FILCHY-PILCHY-POO'S GONNA CATCH YOU!" he cried.
"Shut up!" Marina shouted, pausing to glare daggers at the poltergeist and look down to see where Filch was. He was gaining on her, only two floors away, but luckily there was no direct path connecting them. Marina pushed her hair out of her face and ran on.
At the fourth floor, Marina dashed down the corridor away from the moving staircases, taking turns at frightening speeds, too panicked to pay much attention to where she was going so long as it got her to another set of stairs. She skidded to a stop as she reached a different landing than the one she had arrived on in the first place, and thankfully it featured a direct route up to the fifth floor landing closest to Ravenclaw Tower. She sprinted as well as one could sprint up stairs. Marina reached the center landing and kept going. Two steps up she heard the stairs behind her shift away, thank Merlin. She ran, ran, ran. And then the stairs started moving. With a cry of frustration, Marina stopped and stomped her foot. A glance cast over her shoulder told her that, against her luck, Filch now had direct access to her. Her heart nearly jumped up her throat. The stairs stopped at another floating landing, but Marina didn't care. Her only thought was to escape the caretaker. So she ran.
"MISSED HER STOP, SHE DID! PEEVESIE HOPES TO SEE THE ICKLE PRINCESS STRUNG UP BY HER TOES WHEN SHE'S CAUGHT!"
Up, up, over, up—Marina finally found herself with nowhere else to go but down the left-hand seventh floor corridor. This was where she and Annie had made their exploring attempt, she remembered. Maybe there was a little alcove or something that she could hide in? Marina almost tripped over her own ankles as she stumbled to a stop, having nowhere left to run. The trolls in the tapestry on the wall seemed to mock her, twirling and hopping. Partially to test her luck and partially to stop looking at them, Marina yanked the tapestry to the side, hoping there was a passageway behind it, but there was only the flat stone wall. In the distance, Filch's loud footsteps were growing louder and less distant, making Marina's heart pound even faster. Like a caged animal, she started pacing, wracking her brain for some way to hide. She needed somewhere to hide, desperately. She had to hide from Filch.
An ugly mreowrr noise made Marina gasp and spin around, only to lock eyes with Mrs. Norris. With a squeak, she spun back again, away from the mangy cat, and blinked at the large, ornate doors right in front of her face. They had not been there. Those were not there before. Had they been?
Filch's ominous footfalls prompted Marina to pull the doors open by their ring-shaped handles and duck inside, tugging them shut again behind her. For a moment, she stood at the door, ear pressed to the wood, trying to hear if Filch would try to follow her in. After she listened to him growl a curse and jog away, Marina breathed out a sigh of relief and turned to inspect the room in which she found herself. Before her, as far as she could see in any direction besides the door at her back, were piles, stacks, mountains of stuff. Desks, chests, books, chairs, boxes, cloaks, hats, scarves, bags, stools, lamps, everything she could think of that might show up in Hogwarts was there. In an instant, Marina was filled with the urge to explore forever. Holding the strap of her bag in a secure grip, she stepped closer to a tower of books and tilted her head to read the spines. Some were textbooks that looked water damaged or charred, some were worn muggle books with risqué titles, and some were so mangled that Marina couldn't tell what they were. Her knees knocked into a vandalized chair, on which, she found, was a pile of robes that, upon closer inspection, were all ripped or stained or horribly destroyed in some unpresentable way. To her left was a glass-doored cabinet that contained stacks of broken china plates, cups, and bowls, as well as a few fractured or wholly shattered crystal goblets. A few yards further into the room was a dress form outfitted in a garish set of dress robes, all bright fuchsia and offensive, topped with a silk top hat sporting a single ridiculously large white peacock feather. There was a drawer in a little corner table that was busting with failed essays on flattened parchment scrolls, red-inked marks now mostly faded away. On top of a very tall shelf she noticed a noseless bust wearing a tiara.
What was this place full of forgotten, forsaken things? How had it just appeared out of nowhere? Marina found a pile of ripped cushions to sit down on, and she made herself comfortable as she looked all around her, taking in the sheer amount of stuff the room held. From this new position she could see, in the distance, a whole mound of what looked like splintered and snapped brooms. Could this be a room used as a garbage dump, kept out of sight unless it was needed? After all, everything around her appeared to be items nobody wanted, the refuse of a castle full of wizarding students.
Marina was too tired and the cushions were too comfortable for her to put much thought into it. It must've been nigh on four in the morning, heading towards five. Classes began at eight, and breakfast at 6:30—if she hurried, she could get to her dorm to catch a couple hours of sleep at least. But if Filch was still roaming the halls, looking for her, then she'd never make it, especially with Peeves the poltergeist on the loose. Perhaps she should wait until 5:30, when curfew ended. In the meantime, Marina settled deeper into the cushions and brought the restricted book carefully out of her bag, minding the delicate state of the old binding, even if Madam Pince had fortified it with magic, which she probably had. It seemed the room grew brighter, then, and Marina looked up and around her to find a floor lamp with a very flashy lampshade was suddenly lit behind her shoulder, just in the perfect place for reading light.
After the long, exhausting, eventful night she had, Marina struggled to stay awake once she began reading the book.
I have decided for the good of my own health and the safety of wizardkind that it would benefit me greatly if I were to learn a means of natural and simple disguise. Those with no magic have seen my powers in many occasions of accident of late, in my endeavors to heal their ill and injured and to curate my wandwood trees and herb gardens for my own craft. If I wish to remain undiscovered and unknown, I believe I must become one of the creatures I call friends and helpmates. With any set of new features, whether they be four legs and a fur hide, scales and fins, or feathers and wings, it will be more possible to discretely transport myself from place to place and observe those who have not our gift of magic. The trouble is self-transfiguration and its habit of working too well for those who intend to exploit it, and I do not wish to rely on any other witch or wizard, for they cannot be trusted with knowledge and involvement in my tasks and duties that I have set for myself in this life. There is one perfect means with which a witch or wizard may disguise the self; however, it comes at great cost of time and energy and focus, and the one in pursuit of the skill must be absolutely determined that they should accomplish the feat for fear of continuous failure. I have done my own exploration into the writings of those who come before me in this quest for another form and believe that I have a duty to amass them and contribute my own experience with the matter so that I those who come after me may take the preliminary work I have done and benefit from it. I also find it prudent that I should maintain a record of my every attempt so that I may analyze my course of actions in retrospect should I fail and hope to succeed. In this record first I shall lay out what knowledge on the subject I have in my possession and second shall describe my trials with it and perhaps will annotate to some extent the words of my predecessors in the hope that it will be an aid to whomsoever may look to my humble record for assistance in their own journey to the attainment of this skill.
She found her mind wandering to the question of the room's existence and her eyelids drooping as she stared at the pages of fine print. When she reached the book's first diagram, Marina realized she had no idea what it was talking about or what it was referring to. Her eyes were getting tired, and her lids grew heavy. The fine print on the pages made focusing difficult without squinting and holding the book close to her face, even with the helpful, if inexplicable reading light. Her eyes were sore from being awake too long, and from somewhere, she heard the tolling of the bell tower calling out the half hour, followed by numerous smaller chimes scattered about within the room. The melody of the bells inspired Marina to rest her eyes for just a moment. They really were very comfortable cushions.
When she woke up, Marina realized that her pile of cushions was actually located rather handily near a door labeled as a bathroom and toilet. A clock on a desk with one broken leg near her head read 6:52, and if it had been one of the clocks still miraculously on time, then Marina had gotten around two and a half hours of sleep. That was a sizable nap, at least, but it was less sleep than she would have liked. Annie, Artemis, and Lark probably slept fantastically—and they'd probably be worried when they couldn't find her in the morning. There was still time to catch them at breakfast, though, if Marina moved quickly.
The third-year stood up and stretched out her muscles and bones from her unusual sleeping position. Something in her lower back popped, and her neck was a little sore, but it wasn't anything she couldn't handle. Marina packed her bag up again before heading into the very convenient bathroom. Still tired, it was only after she'd gotten into the shower cubicle that she noticed all the products she used were present, and hers alone, without sitting in a shower caddy that always seemed to have shower gel dried in a long drip down the side. Even the lime green loofah with its missing woven cord loop was sitting balanced on the pumps of her face soap and shampoo bottles, exactly how she kept it at home to avoid having it sit in a puddle of water. Somehow, the fact that the toiletries were tailored to Marina alone was more odd than if it had been a replica of the Ravenclaw girls' bathroom, which was always devoid of anyone's personal touches so long as you got to it early enough in the morning—the castle house elves cleaned it overnight during curfew hours, Marina assumed. Regardless, she had a quick shower, certain she could skip washing her hair for times' sake since she had washed it the day before, and her curls hid any oiliness fairly well, much better than that Snivellus kid's lank hair did, anyway.
"Snivellus" Snape—whose name Marina didn't actually know—was a common target of the second-year Gryffindor boys. From what Lark knew, because Lark was always so much better informed than Marina herself usually was, the Slytherin boy was friends with Lily and had been since before Hogwarts, and that naturally caused some tension between James and Snivellus. It also seemed he was an all-around unpleasant sort of character, rude to first-years and looked up to the older, scary-and-sometimes-cruel-with-pureblood-fanatic-parents type of Slytherins, that sort of thing. As Lily was a muggleborn, as far as Marina knew, she wasn't sure why the younger witch liked the Snivellus boy so much, but she could certainly understand why James, Remus, Peter, and Sirius wouldn't like him. Marina hadn't ever met the kid that she could recall, but she had seen him around from time to time, most often when he was obviously jinxed by the boys and thus quite noticeable in a crowd.
With towels Marina wasn't convinced had been there before her shower, she dried off and wrapped up her hair before brushing her teeth. Again, somehow her own toothbrush was in this bathroom. It was all very strange, and Marina decided she should most definitely consult her roommates about the whole thing. Between Lark's older siblings and Artemis's long magical history she was sure one of them knew something about this improbably convenient room. Unfortunately, the room couldn't conjure up a clean set of school robes, it seemed, because all Marina could do there was cast a Scourgify and hope they didn't look too wrinkled up from being slept in. With one last look around the room, Marina slipped out the tall wooden doors. Noting, again, that the tapestry of the dancing trolls was right across the hall, Marina committed the location of the room to memory in case she needed to use it again or show it to anyone. A few steps down the corridor, she paused and turned to look back for no particular reason—the door was gone. Left even more confused and curious by this development, Marina frowned and started on the long trek down to breakfast.
Apparently twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys didn't get up very early at all, so Marina met the four Gryffindor second-years on the stairs just a little after the bells announced the half-hour. Coming from two sides of the castle, they just about ran into each other. James, she noticed, brightened immediately upon seeing her.
"Good morning Marina!" he greeted. "Did you have a nice Saint Valentine's Day?"
Oh, that was right: yesterday had been Valentine's. That was why she'd left the common room in the first place, wasn't it? She wasn't sure how much Marina wanted to tell them of how her Valentine's went, so she settled on a vague and noncommittal answer, the kind of thing adults use when they just want to be polite but don't really want to answer.
"It was alright," she said with a shrug. "Nothing too out of the ordinary for me."
James's face opened in a picture of indignant surprise. "What, it wasn't absolutely brilliant? Don't you have a boyfriend to do something fantastic for you on the most romantic day of the whole year?" he asked. "I'm offended for you. My dad always got my mum three dozen red roses and a full breakfast in bed every Valentine's."
Marina rolled her eyes, but laughed. Dramatic behavior, she was learning, was quite typical of James in almost every situation. "No, no boyfriend," she said, shaking her head. She immediately thought of Evan presenting her with three dozen red roses, but that thought was best pushed out of her mind. "Please tell me you made it through all of yesterday without any grand gestures for Lily."
"Not a one," James said solemnly. "I'm trying to follow your advice."
With an eyebrow raised in question, Marina looked to the other boys, who all nodded to back up James's claim. "The most we did all day was that stunt with the pink Slytherins at dinner, honest," Sirius said. "Though one time," he continued, looking to James with a smirk, "we did have to restrain the sod—"
"Only once!" James cried. "It's not my fault the firelight makes Lily's whole face glow…"
Before any more teasing could happen, Marina laughed and commended James for his self-restraint. She spent the rest of the walk to the Great Hall listening to the boys bantering amongst themselves. From time to time they called her into it to back something up, like once when Remus was trying to prove that Sirius's idea of setting fire to Slytherin House was stupid and asked Marina whether or not stone was flammable for emphasis. Each time she simply agreed with whatever whichever boy was trying to make a point of, just for fun, and she even heard a portrait or two chuckling in their frames and the boys' antics. By the time they arrived for breakfast, Marina had momentarily forgotten all about the strange room she had spent the night in.
After she parted from the boys inside the Great Hall, Marina went to sit at the Ravenclaw table, joining Artemis and Annie. She was greeted by the wide, worried eyes of Annie and the slightly raised eyebrows of Artemis.
"Where were you this morning?" Annie asked as soon as Marina had climbed over the bench. "I was going to wake you but your bed was empty. Artemis and I didn't know what to think!"
Marina grinned, recalling everything the Gryffindor boys had distracted her from. "I have quite the story," she said, helping herself to toast and blackberry jam. "Don't worry," she added as one of Artemis's eyebrows lifted a little more, "I didn't get in any trouble or do anything dangerous. Well, I almost got caught, but I didn't actually get caught."
"So you snuck out," Artemis guessed—well, it never seemed like she was guessing, but for lack of a better word, she guessed. Extrapolated?
"I did!" She took a large, punctuating bite of her toast, smiling a proud smile. "I was in the common room last night, when you all wanted to sleep and I needed to keep working, you know, and Alfred and Etta were down there and they were truly offensive, so instead of looking at them while I stared idly into space, I looked at the shelves as I stared idly into space—I stared at some Transfiguration textbooks, actually—and that gave me the idea to just go to the library instead, which would get me out of their presence and let me keep re—uh, keep working," she rambled, stopping short as she realized she hadn't told anyone about her animagus project. Marina still wasn't sure it was the sort of thing she should be telling people about. Soon though, she might need help, and it would be more and more difficult to keep it a secret. For now, though, she was sure it would be alright if she didn't say anything about it. It wasn't an important part of last night's story, anyway. She continued. "I made it to the library with no trouble, and I was there until three this morning—oh, good morning Lark."
"Morning," Lark said, sitting down sideways on the bench and grabbing a blueberry scone. "What's this about nighttime library visits?"
"Mina snuck out because Etta and Alfred are sickening," Annie summarized. "She's about to tell us why she didn't come back to the dorm afterwards."
"Oh, do tell." Lark tossed her hair out of her way and took a large bite of her breakfast. "Hurry, though, because we've only got two minutes before we have to head out."
Oh, right, they had double Potions that morning. Fantastic. Just the sort of thing Marina wanted to sit through after getting two and a half hours of sleep. If she had done this tonight, she could've used History of Magic to nap tomorrow morning. With a groan, Marina hurried to get the rest of her toast eaten.
"I'll tell you on our way there," Marina said around her mouthful—usually talking before swallowing was Lark's bad habit, but Marina supposed borrowing it was alright for one day. "We don't have the time to sit and listen to me talk."
The girls finished up and gathered their things, except for Lark, who gathered her things with her half-finished scone held in her mouth. Marina checked through her bag again, reassuring herself that the little restricted book was still, in fact, there, under a crumpled piece of parchment and between her Astronomy and Divination textbooks, just where she had tucked it this morning. She was excited to keep reading it when she had a spare moment and after she'd had a nap. Maybe she should also skim over what she had been reading last night, too, just to make sure she had all the information down.
"Okay, so tell us the rest of the story," Lark prompted as the four Ravenclaw girls left the Great Hall.
"Well, I was in the library until three," Marina continued, choosing not to mention that she went into the restricted section or took a book, "and I was going to come straight upstairs and go to sleep. I was tired, though, so I wasn't being as careful as I should've been being, and I made a little too much noise and attracted Peeves." Marina paused, acknowledging the sympathetic wince Annie was giving her; last semester Annie had been caught up in one of Peeves's dung bomb pranks. "So of course Peeves hollered out that I was a student out of bed, and that brought Filch running. I was working my way up the moving stairs at the time, so I had a mad dash up. I took a few too many detours, though, and I had to miss the fifth floor if I didn't want Filch to catch me. I made it up to the seventh floor, and—Annie, do you remember when we tried exploring and didn't find anything?"
Annie blinked behind her glasses. "Yes," she said, "we only found that tapestry with the loony wizard trying to dance ballet with trolls." A patented Annie grin lit up her face at the memory. "Were you in that corridor?"
With a nod, Marina went on with the story. "I was up there, and I could hear Filch getting closer, and then I spotted Mrs. Norris, and then suddenly these doors—oh, Merlin's saggy pants!" Marina cried, stopping in the middle of the stairs down to the dungeons. She opened her bag and searched through it again, stomach sinking when she realized she'd forgotten her Potions textbook. It was still up in the dorm room where she had left it the previous evening.
"What's wrong?" Annie asked.
"My textbook. I left it upstairs."
"I think you've got time to run up and get it if you go fast," Lark said. "Go on, go!"
Marina nodded, spun around, and began racing up the stairs. Behind her, Artemis called, "They left the Great Hall after we did, careful!" Marina only had a second to wonder what she meant before she ran smack dab into someone at the top of the stairs. She was already in the middle of apologizing before she looked up to see who it was, but when she found herself looking into Evan's warm brown eyes, her tongue tripped and she said "I'm so sorr—I—you—ran in you too" instead of "I'm so sorry I ran into you." Flustered, Marina sidestepped to get around him, suddenly rethinking her decision to skip washing her hair earlier and hoping she wasn't blushing very noticeably, but she sidestepped into Irving What's-his-name, which threw her off balance and had her falling over, happily back towards Evan. This must've been what Artemis meant, then.
Evan caught her and set her right again. "Whoa there, alright Marina?" he asked, hands still on the outsides of her shoulders.
Sweet Merlin. Marina cleared her throat and smiled. "Yeah, I'm alright. I just, uh, I forgot my Potions book upstairs, and I was heading up to get it."
As if he were trying to outdo Annie's sunny grin, Evan smiled a beautiful smile back and let her go. "Well, better hurry, then. It's only Slughorn, but still."
"Yeah, I'm trying," Marina laughed. "Thanks for, well, your help, there."
Her face must've been absolutely on fire as Marina successfully passed between Evan and Xavier, who was on his other side, and continued on her hurried way up to Ravenclaw Tower. As she went, she thought she heard Xavier say something like, "Damn, Evan, did you get a feel in?" and she thought she heard Evan laughingly reply something like, "No, you perverted git!" but she couldn't really be sure. Besides, what would Evan have felt? He'd grabbed her by the upper arms, after all, so—oh, had he been referring to her breasts? Marina made a face. Leave it to Xavier Whatever-his-surname-was to turn something dirty. That had been a common theme with him this year: dirty jokes and comments. It left her feeling a bit icky, the comments, but at least she wasn't so much bothered by his jokes now that she knew what they meant, most of the time. Every so often she still had to check something with Lark, just to make sure she was understanding, but for the most part she thought she had pretty much copped onto the gross boy humor. Not that she thought it was funny—well, okay, maybe sometimes it was funny, but mostly it was just mildly exasperating.
By the time she reached the entrance to Ravenclaw Tower, Marina was quite winded. The eagle knocker asked her a riddle, but she was so tired and out of breath from the running and staying up too late that even if she could have thought up the answer she wouldn't have been able to actually give the answer until she could properly speak again. So it was lucky, really, in some twisted, unfortunate sort of way, that Alfred Smith opened the door from the inside at that exact moment. Nearly bent double trying to catch her breath, Marina couldn't exactly get out of the way quickly, and thus was spotted by Alfred.
"Oh, Marina, I would've thought you'd be downstairs already. Are you looking forward to double Potions? You know, I looked at what we'll be brewing today—you knew we were brewing today, didn't you?—and it looks like quite the piece of cake! I'll wager I've got it down already, in fact. Say, why don't we go down together? I've been looking into the history of using flobberworm mucous in potions and I have to say it's really fascinating; would you like to hear about it as we walk?"
"No, I just came up for my textbook," Marina replied, raising herself up to her full height, which, she was pleased to note, was just a bit taller than Alfred himself. "You'd better go on without me."
Alfred shrugged. "Suit yourself."
As soon as she was out of his line of sight, Marina rolled her eyes with passion. Just her luck she had to run into Alfred up here. Briefly, as she was climbing the stairs up to her dorm room, she wondered why he'd been up in Ravenclaw rather than downstairs in the Great Hall. Did he skip breakfast? She decided, after a moment, that she really didn't care. As soon as she found her textbook, she'd have to rush all the way backdown the stairs, and she didn't want to waste her energy thinking about why Alfred was wherever he was. If anything, she'd rather think about why Evan was wherever he was, but he was, unfortunately, not as perplexing as Alfred had been, and Alfred had only been mildly perplexing at best.
—
At lunch that same day Marina finally picked up the rest of her forgotten story, after Annie and Marina sat through a terrible Divination class with Quincy and Gideon, during which the old Divination professor spent twenty whole minutes humming with her eyes closed and wiggling her fingers over a bowl of bird entrails. Supposedly, they were raven entrails, but Marina wasn't convinced they weren't just plain old sparrow entrails. Either way, Marina had no bloody clue how she was supposed to read Annie's future from bird guts. She spent the class listening to Quincy and Gideon's hushed banter instead, trying very hard not to doze off in the dimly-lit room. Really, the Divination classroom was quite a cozy place, with its incense, lamps of colored glass, and patterned wall hangings, it was just that the forms of divination that were taught therein—and rather poorly taught, in Marina's opinion—were a load of dragon dung. It was left to too much personal interpretation and discretion. So of course every time she was in that class, Marina spent it looking forward to lunch.
"So," Marina said, leaning over her bowl of chicken noodle soup, "I was caught by Peeves, had to run past the fifth floor, got cornered on the seventh floor." She glanced to her right, where Alfred was feeding Etta Coldwater olives a yard or so away, to make sure no one was listening. "Mrs. Norris had me against the wall, and then I turned around and these doors were there. I swear they hadn't been there before. So I went in them, obviously, because I needed somewhere to hide and I didn't have another option, and anyway I wanted to know what was inside the doors. You should've seen it; it was a room just bursting with junk, broken chairs and brooms and failed essays and the like. I ended up spending the night in there. In the morning I found this bathroom that already had all my things in it, which was really strange. I thought I'd ask you two about it," Marina concluded, looking between Artemis and Lark, who were sitting across the table from her and Annie, as usual, "because you both are more likely to know about it than I am."
"How curious," Annie said. "I knew Hogwarts was full of surprises, but I thought it was only secret passages and whatnot, like old servant passages. Old castles have lots of those. I never expected a room could just appear out of thin air."
"Hm," Lark hummed.
"'Hm?'" Marina questioned.
"Yes, 'hm.'" She finished off the last bite of her sandwich. "That's just it: things can't just appear out of thin air. You have to conjure them. I'm not sure you can conjure a room, though, and you never said you specifically conjured anything. And anyway there's no way you could've conjured all the stuff you said was in it, and if you just found the bathroom then it's unlikely you conjured that, either."
The girls sat in silence for a minute, thinking. "Maybe I did conjure it," Marina suggested. "I remember thinking I needed someplace to hide. Do you think that could've done it?" Then she sighed, and answered her own question: "No," she said, "I never specifically conjured it, you're right. That only would've worked if there were already some sort of spell there, don't you think?"
"What, like the room is there all the time but it needs someone to come along and think about it before the door appears?" Annie asked.
Lark cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. "You know, that's more likely than accidentally conjuring a whole room. I bet there's a way you could accidentally conjure a door if a room was already enchanted to wait for someone to accidentally conjure a door."
With a snap, Artemis grabbed the girls' attention. "The Room of Hidden Things," she said, sitting up a little straighter than usual.
"The what?"
"The Room of Hidden Things. It's part of the Come and Go Room."
"Temmie, what in Merlin's name are you talking about?"
Artemis furrowed her eyebrows. "The Come and Go Room. It comes and goes as it's needed. My brother once told me he hid his dress robes in there to get out of going to Slughorn's Christmas party in his seventh year. The Room of Hidden Things shows up if you need to hide something, he said."
The girls sat in the enlightened silence that follows a revelation, or maybe an epiphany. Of course, Marina thought. A room that responds to someone's need responded to her need to hide, and it provided her with the Room of Hidden Things. That's why it was filled with junk: it was all stuff that Hogwarts students (and probably staff, too) had hidden over the years, broken things, failed things, embarrassing things. So it sort of was a garbage room, of sorts. Only, from what little Artemis had said, it sounded as if the Come and Go Room could provide other things, too.
"I didn't know you had a brother," Annie said, breaking the quiet.
"Oh, Apollo's already married with children. He finished school before I started. His wife Siv is very quiet, but Thorfinn, my nephew, is a very clever little boy."
"...Right."
Herbology was right after lunch, so the girls tried to finish quickly so they'd have plenty of time to walk all the way to the greenhouses. Artemis and Lark left first, and Annie lingered at the Ravenclaw table so that Marina could finish her soup. She'd been talking, so she hadn't been able to eat as quickly as everyone else. As Marina slurped up the last few noodles from her bowl, Annie turned to her, sitting with her bent knee on the bench in front of her. She looked as if she had something she wanted to say, and her eyebrows were pinched together and the corners of her mouth were turning down in her usual worrying face. Marina found she was disappointed that Annie's worrying face was making such a common appearance lately; she wasn't disappointed with Annie, really, but she was rather disappointed in the circumstances that happened in just the right way that meant Annie had to worry about them.
"What's wrong?" Marina asked.
Her blonde friend hesitated and took a deep breath before answering, "There's something in your story that you're not telling us, isn't there? You had to correct yourself a couple times, and I doubt you'd go all the way to the library to finish a bit of homework unless there was something else in the library you wanted to do. I know you—you'd rather skip the Divination assignment than go all the way downstairs in the middle of the night."
Marina bit her lip, torn. She wanted to tell Annie about her secret animagus project, truly she did. It was the sort of thing that was exciting enough that it had to be shared, and who better to understand her excitement over it than her friend Annie? Besides, Annie would never tell a soul if Marina asked her not to. Well, neither would Quincy, but Marina was fairly certain that Quincy just wouldn't appreciate her interest in the topic the same way that Annie would. On the other hand…well, Marina could get in a lot of trouble, couldn't she, if Annie did decide to tell? Already she'd broken curfew, snuck into the restricted section of the locked library, and stolen a book, all in the name of her research. The whole business was quite the risk for Marina, and even if Annie didn't let it slip, if someone found out then Annie could get in trouble too.
With a small sigh, Marina made up her mind. "I'll tell you, I swear, but not here. I have to make sure no one can overhear us."
"Is it bad, what you're doing?" Annie asked.
"Well, it's technically—"
"Is it bad?" she asked again, tone more urgent, more hushed.
Marina shook her head. "No. It's got nothing to do with the Dark Arts, I promise."
Annie accepted this with a nod, and then the two girls were off to Herbology. Luckily, Professor Sprout never asked students to use their textbooks during class, and neither did Professor Raleigh, so Marina was able to avoid another run up the stairs. With that fortuitous starting note, classes went smoothly for the rest of the afternoon, including Raleigh's lecture over vampires that Marina largely ignored in favor of gazing at Evan in front of her. As always, Annie subtly kicked Marina when the irritable wizard started suspecting a lapse in attention so that she could at least pretend she was aware of what was actually going on. After class, because it was Tuesday, Marina had to meet Rachel the Hufflepuff in the library. It would likely be uneventful, as always. Rachel had improved loads with her independent work, especially since she first met the girl, and Marina suspected that next year she wouldn't be seeing much of her.
"You may as well come to the library with me," Marina suggested to Annie. "After I'm done with Rachel, we can find somewhere to talk there."
Walking in through the (unlocked) library doors gave Marina an unexpected bout of nerves. Could Madam Pince somehow have found her out? Surely the librarian would have noticed the missing book? But no, not a word was said nor a suspicious eyebrow raised as Marina entered the library with Annie in tow. That, at least, was a relief. However, sitting through the whole hour with Rachel was a challenge that Marina hadn't anticipated. With the quiet, cozy atmosphere, it was extremely tempting to rest her eyes for a moment, but she knew that resting her eyes would result in falling completely asleep. Thankfully, Rachel was diligently working and didn't ask for much help beyond checking if her Potions essay was structured alright, so she probably didn't notice that Marina was slowly slipping away as time wore on. Annie knew her friend well enough to notice, though, as Marina found out after Rachel had left the library.
"You're about to pass out," Annie observed. "Are you sure you wouldn't rather have a nap until dinner?"
Marina stifled a yawn. "I'd like a nap, to be honest, but I did promise to tell you what I was up to last night."
And so, pushing her hair out of her face and trying in vain to get it to stay behind her ears, Marina told Annie the whole story. She started with that Transfiguration lesson about self-transfiguration, when she remembered that her papa was, in fact, an animagus, though he rarely used the skill, and explained how that was the catalyst for the whole project, even though she should've been thinking about ways to help Annie with her family troubles instead. Then there was that Friday when Marina decided she'd try a bit of research and came up empty before she was interrupted by James Potter and his drama with Lily Evans. After that, the whole Alfred and Etta situation sort of put a damper on everyone's motivation to do anything but sit in a bemused and horrified stupor for a while, but Marina took up her thoughts on animagi again last night, when the couple's public displays of affection drove her to come up with a better option than staying in the common room. So that was why Marina snuck down to the library: she had wanted to do more research. Again, she wasn't finding anything she wanted, but then she had the idea to have a peek in the restricted section—
"You looked in the restricted section?" Annie interrupted, eyes wide.
"Yeah, why?"
Annie looked past Marina in the direction of where the restricted section was, even though it was out of sight this far back in the enormous library. "There's all sorts of books there, and a lot of them are apparently horrifying. Did you see anything really scary?" she asked.
"No, not really. Well, maybe I did, but I just didn't realize it. I was skimming for stuff about self-transfiguration, and a lot of the titles I saw had to do with things I hadn't heard of before. Anyway, I found this book—" Marina bent over to rifle through her bag and get out The Humble Journey of a Seeker for the Art of Animagical Transfiguration of the Self, laying it on the table for Annie to see. "—and I think it contains absolutely everything I could ever want to know about animagi. I've started reading it, but I was exhausted at the time, so I think I'll have to go back and reread a good chunk of it."
With cautious hands, Annie picked up the small, old book and flipped it open, taking a quick look at the pages. "This is…dense," she said at last. "When do you expect you'll get through it all?"
"Not sure," Marina said, shrugging. "I don't think I'll be able to start the process before this school term is over, though, but I can't say for sure. Maybe I'll make fast work of it if it's really interesting."
Annie snapped the book closed and looked up. "'Start the process?' You mean you want to become an animagus?"
"Well, maybe. I'm not sure yet," Marina said quickly. As she said the words, Marina realized it was true. She wasn't sure, not really. Originally, yes, she had started on her research with the very vague goal of learning how to become an animagus in mind, but from what Marina had learned so far, it sounded like the process really was as tricky as it was made out to be, and she was pretty sure she had read last night that if it wasn't done exactly right it could be life-threatening. Before deciding if she should try it or not, she needed to do more research and find out exactly what was involved. "For now, can you keep this between us?"
"Oh, of course! It goes without saying that this is a secret project. Lots of Ravenclaws do have secret projects, you know, but not all of them are very good at keeping them secret, especially when they experiment in the common room in full view of everyone. That's just bad planning."
Marina laughed. "I'll keep that in mind. Thank you, Annie."
"You're welcome, but you don't need to thank me. We're friends, so it's my job to have your back, don't you think?" Annie's bright grin was back, and it was just as contagious as always. Marina found herself mirroring the grin back to her friend as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and maybe in that moment it was.
"You're right," she agreed. "I've got your back too, you know."
"I know."
For a while, the good mood of knowing that Annie knew and that Annie trusted her and that she trusted Annie carried Marina through her classes with impressive success. Fertilizing the plants wasn't so gross, dodging jinxes wasn't so annoying, sitting through Binns' droning lectures wasn't so boring, and even practicing her transfiguration spells wasn't so difficult. Nothing could really make Slughorn any more bearable, unfortunately, and Marina still endured the usual name mix-ups with the same sense of exasperation ('Stover-LeBlanc,' anyone?). As February passed and March crawled by, the weather improved, too, and Marina decided she'd go on the Hogsmeade trip that month after all, seeing as it was no longer freezing out. It was a lovely way to have a change of scenery from the castle and its grounds, and Marina took the opportunity to restock on her favorite sweets. Certainly the fact that Alfred and Etta sat in Madam Puddifoot's Tea Shop for most of the day was an added bonus; Marina didn't have to see the pair until dinner that evening.
It seemed, as March neared its end, that everything was going wonderfully, and third year would finish off in peace, so long as everyone made it through exams. Easter holiday was coming up, as well, something Marina was excitedly looking forward to: she'd get to meet her new brother for the first time after he was born in late February. Her parents had settled on naming him Charles Michel, and even though Marina wasn't sure how living with an infant would go, she was willing to give it a shot. Besides, she didn't have any other choice, did she?
On the last Thursday before Easter holiday, Marina's parents sent her a photograph of Charles Michel. He was pretty cute, Marina supposed, but she wasn't very qualified to have an opinion seeing as she hadn't encountered hardly any babies in her life. Lark, who had encountered quite a few babies, said that Charles Michel was certainly one of the cuter infants she'd ever seen. That same morning, Annie's parents also sent her a letter, but it didn't contain anything nearly as exciting as a photo of a baby sibling—Annie didn't have any baby siblings, anyway. No, Annie's letter bore some rather unpleasant news.