FIC: Scenes from the Hufflepuff Common Room (G)
Title: Scenes from the Hufflepuff Common Room
House Category: Hufflepuff
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Pomona Sprout, various others
Author: slumber
Beta Reader(s): jaggarte
Rating: G
(Highlight to View) Warning(s): None.
Note: I wanted to write a story about the students, but Pomona became the best way to tell it. In the end though, I think she'd say this is still about the students.
Summary: One day Pomona Sprout put up a bulletin board. Then her students made it their own.
1992
"Are you sure it isn't him, Albus?"
"These are unfortunate circumstances, Pomona. Dangerous, yes, and certainly sinister as well." Albus Dumbledore removed his half-moon glasses and looked every bit as tired as Pomona felt. "But Voldemort is far away, and the danger facing Hogwarts lives inside the castle walls."
Pomona swallowed the lump rising in her throat. "What are we going to do?"
"Minerva and I are drafting an initial set of guidelines for staff and prefects to follow," Albus told her. "But for now, I suggest you see to your students."
She nodded, feeling somewhat chastised. The problem is that she'd gotten too lax, too settled. She'd forgotten what it was like when the threat of something ominous hung thick in the air. "Of course," she said.
Her prefects had gathered all the Hufflepuff students into the common room by the time she returned, but where the tunnels would normally be echoing with animated chatter, there was only the crackling of the fireplace and the quiet shuffling of feet. The second years, clustered near the center of the room, looked at her with equal parts fear and hope.
"Madam Pomfrey says Justin should be fine," she said, sensing the cause of their concerns and wishing to soothe it first. "They'll be keeping him at the infirmary until the Mandrakes are old enough, but he's in good hands until then."
It was hard to miss the relief washing over everyone's faces, the way the heavy air around the room seemed to lift, even a little. She knew there were more reminders to give out, more warnings that her students would need to heed, but those could wait until the morning.
She lifted her wand to move aside a large tapestry of Helga's glen from the wall, conjuring a cork board in its place. With a second flick of her wrist, she hung a banner above it:
WELCOME BACK, JUSTIN
"Why don't you use this board to write Justin messages to read when he gets back?" she suggested. "Make sure he doesn't miss anything while he's sleeping."
One student raised her hand.
"Professor Sprout?"
"Yes, Susan?"
"Should we put his homework there too?"
Amid the smattering of laughter, Pomona found herself smiling. "Yes, Susan. We can't let him miss that either, can we?"
1993
Pomona didn't know why she never took the board down. Summer came and passed and when she walked in at the start of term, somebody had already tacked on a lost and found notice right beside the transcription for that year's Sorting song.
She had no idea how anybody managed to write down what the hat even sang, but she applauded them for their effort.
The next few days found a few oddities gracing the bulletin: homework advice, Quidditch tryout results, Hogsmeade trip countdowns. Once an ode to Professor Lupin's "sad eyes and kind smile" showed up, but it seemed harmless enough that Pomona allowed the anonymous student to keep it there until somebody else took it down.
Then one day, right after he attacked the Fat Lady, Sirius Black's mug graced the board.
"I understand there is concern amongst you," Pomona told her students. "And I know I cannot stop the gossip and fear-mongering but I do not want our common room-and our House board-to be a source of worry. This is ours. As much as possible, let's try to turn this into a source of comfort, shall we?"
1994
Pomona wasn't sure about comfort, but the year after that, with Cedric Diggory one of Hogwarts' champions, the board turned into a year-long source of House pride. Someone had charmed the words "Good Luck Cedric" to blink in alternating yellow and black letters right in the middle, and the message was surrounded by a cacophony of letters and notes and even a list of the ten reasons Cedric would be the Triwizard Tournament champion.
It was difficult, with Harry Potter's inclusion in the tournament, to keep the messages centered on Cedric, and certainly once or twice the Potter Stinks badge must have made its appearance, but for the most part-or at least, whenever she came by to check on them-the board followed the guideline she'd instituted the year before.
She hadn't known what to do when Cedric died.
She didn't have the heart to take any of it down, and while it didn't seem right to have the board continue to cheer him on, she didn't feel as though there was anything else that she could replace it with instead.
One night somebody tore everything away. Ernie Macmillan had knocked on Pomona's door, asked her what they should do. The remnants still littered the common room floor when the students woke up. On the board, a scribbled sentence on a piece of parchment:
Remember Cedric
Her students all looked at her, waiting for her cue. With a sweep of her wand she cleaned the mess, then looked to them in return. "He was a good boy," she said, blinking back the tears that threatened to spill any second. She continued speaking. "Terrible at handling Mandrakes-he passed out once because he didn't hear my warning-"
Some students laughed, so she told the rest of the story.
"He helped me with my homework once," Jonathan Summerby volunteered once she was done. "Potions. I don't know why. He stank at it."
"He beat Harry in that match last year. Best Seeker we've ever had," Wayne Hopkins said.
"He lent me his broom in first year, when he heard I wanted to make the team," Zacharias Smith spoke up. "Sorry, Professor. I know it was against the rules but-"
"Too late to give you detention now, isn't it, though?" Pomona asked.
Beside Zacharias, Megan Jones smiled. "He was a great Captain." She picked up a parchment and quill and wrote down those words before posting them on the board, right beneath "Remember".
"One of the better Prefects I've had the pleasure of working with," Pomona said, adding those to the upper corner.
"He was really fit," Hannah Abbott murmured, loud enough that a few other girls who heard agreed. That went on the board too.
Once the students had gone for the summer holidays, Pomona asked the house elves to leave the bulletin board as it was. Darker times were ahead and Dumbledore was right: they needed to remember Cedric.
1995
"What's this?"
"It's a memorial, Dolores. For Cedric." Even though she gritted her teeth to keep from shaking, even though she desperately wished to be snippy in response, she knew her students were watching, taking their cues from her. For their sake and not hers, she would be civil. "Surely there isn't an Educational Decree against those?"
Someone snickered behind her, and Pomona cringed at the look Umbridge wore. She'd pay for that later.
"No, there isn't," Umbridge said, primly. She tore a piece of parchment from the bulletin board and thrust it towards Pomona. "But there is one against lies. Who posted this?"
Pomona glanced down at the note. Cedric Diggory was murdered. "I don't know."
"Surely you must know, Pomona. This is your House. Haven't you control over your own students?"
"It's an anonymous board."
"And you allow lies to be posted upon it?"
"It's not a lie!"
Umbridge's eyes doubled in size. "Who said that?" she demanded, stepping back as Zacharias Smith came forward.
"He was killed. Don't they tell you this kind of thing at the Ministry, Professor?"
"He died in an accident."
Ernie Macmillan walked up beside Zacharias and Justin Finch-Fletchley emerged from the other side. "Was this accident called Voldemort, Professor?"
"That's enough," Pomona said, stepping in before Dolores Umbridge could pick her jaw up off the floor and start doling out punishments. The rest of the Hufflepuffs had also started crowding around Umbridge, encouraged by the nerve of the three fifth years.
"Detention!" Umbridge squeaked. "All of you!"
"Absolutely," Pomona said, voice ringing strong. "I'll meet you all here tomorrow at 7 PM sharp for detention. No supper for any of you."
"Professor Sprout, I can handle-"
"These are my students, Professor Umbridge," Pomona said. "I know them well. Don't you think I should decide what their punishment ought to be?"
Umbridge must have either thought it was a losing battle or a pointless cause, because she nodded stiffly. "Very well," said she, mustering as much dignity as she could before she left.
The common room burst into protests once Umbridge was gone, silenced once again when Pomona held up a hand.
"I'll see you here tomorrow at seven. I'll have the elves send dinner," she said, moving her wand to hang banners off the walls. Then she grinned at her students. "I think a House party's in order, don't you?"
1996
It was difficult to pretend life could ever attain a semblance of normality when a war threatened to rage on just outside the castle walls, but Pomona was allowed to hope, was she not?
"I don't suppose we're ready to take this down yet, are we?"
Beside her, the Fat Friar smiled. "Rhetorical questions again, Pomona?"
"They remember him, but sometimes I wonder if they remember him too much. He was just a boy, and they're young. They ought to have more than war on their minds."
He laughed. "Oh believe me, they do. You wouldn't want to know what I caught your prefects doing in the east wing corridors the other night."
"John!"
"They're resilient," he told her. "You needn't worry; they'll be fine."
1997
Pomona had trouble believing in that resilience the year Severus Snape took over as Headmaster. How could it? The Carrows terrorized everyone and the House-however few they had left at Hogwarts-had taken on a sullen, deadened air. Students shuffled lackluster into classes, the younger years, feigning all manners of illnesses, often made excuses to stay in the infirmary, and it wasn't unusual for Pomona to help the prefects tend to injuries sustained during Dark Arts classes.
But there were dissidents, and those she recognized by the resolve in some of her students' eyes, the defiance thick in their voices when they refused to torture one of their own, the increasingly creative ways they managed to encourage and support each other with furtive nods or the slightest pursing of lips.
She couldn't be prouder of them then, even when her own resolve faltered at times. She was the one who had to dine at the same table that the Carrows and Snape did, after all. She was the one who held her tongue when the first years were lined up against the wall and the third years put them under the Unforgivables. At the beginning of term Minerva had gathered the other professors around to stress how imperative it was that they keep the students safe at all times. As long as they were in Hogwarts they were at least capable of doing exactly that, but at which point does her silence cross over from good sense into complicity?
She found her answer on Cedric's board.
She'd nearly missed it, as well. Over the last year the memorial had begun to fade into the background. There were rarely any new additions; she imagined it was because students concerned themselves with more immediate issues, and those who sought comfort would not have seen it in the shrine for a boy who'd died.
Whoever it was hadn't taken the memorial down. Instead there was a large sheet of white paper covering the entirety of the board, and the animated drawing of a large dragon flapping its wings right in the very center.
She squinted to make out the words of a building on the lower left of the scene: Gringotts. Just then, three little figures popped up on the dragon's back-quickly, for just a split second, before disappearing behind its large wings once again.
"Of course," Pomona murmured, smiling for the first time in months.
1998
"Good morning, Pomona!"
"Morning, John!"
"Summer holidays went well?"
"Fantastic, actually. Yours?"
"Dead as always, and couldn't be better for it!"
Pomona laughed. It was the 31st of August, and the students were expected to arrive the next day. Hogwarts bustled with the usual preparations of professors and staffers alike. "I'm glad you enjoyed it," she said.
"Where did Cedric go?"
"Minerva found Dumbledore's Army an actual classroom to use should they choose to continue their activities this year-and I suspect they will," Pomona said. "It's where Defense is. I thought it best to have him there."
"I'll miss him. Him and Rudy."
"Rudy?"
"That's what the students have named the dragon, didn't you know?"
She shook her head. "Of course they did."
"I suppose it's time for Helga's glen to return to its rightful place, then?"
"Oh, no, actually I've moved her to my office quite a while ago."
"This wall will be so empty." He sounded uncharacteristically forlorn.
"Not quite, John, don't get ahead of me now," Pomona said. A new corkboard appeared where Cedric's once was. She whispered a spell to conjure a moving badger onto its surface. Another charm, and bright yellow and black letters were hung above it:
WELCOME HOME, HUFFLEPUFFS!
House Category: Hufflepuff
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Pomona Sprout, various others
Author: slumber
Beta Reader(s): jaggarte
Rating: G
(Highlight to View) Warning(s): None.
Note: I wanted to write a story about the students, but Pomona became the best way to tell it. In the end though, I think she'd say this is still about the students.
Summary: One day Pomona Sprout put up a bulletin board. Then her students made it their own.
1992
"Are you sure it isn't him, Albus?"
"These are unfortunate circumstances, Pomona. Dangerous, yes, and certainly sinister as well." Albus Dumbledore removed his half-moon glasses and looked every bit as tired as Pomona felt. "But Voldemort is far away, and the danger facing Hogwarts lives inside the castle walls."
Pomona swallowed the lump rising in her throat. "What are we going to do?"
"Minerva and I are drafting an initial set of guidelines for staff and prefects to follow," Albus told her. "But for now, I suggest you see to your students."
She nodded, feeling somewhat chastised. The problem is that she'd gotten too lax, too settled. She'd forgotten what it was like when the threat of something ominous hung thick in the air. "Of course," she said.
Her prefects had gathered all the Hufflepuff students into the common room by the time she returned, but where the tunnels would normally be echoing with animated chatter, there was only the crackling of the fireplace and the quiet shuffling of feet. The second years, clustered near the center of the room, looked at her with equal parts fear and hope.
"Madam Pomfrey says Justin should be fine," she said, sensing the cause of their concerns and wishing to soothe it first. "They'll be keeping him at the infirmary until the Mandrakes are old enough, but he's in good hands until then."
It was hard to miss the relief washing over everyone's faces, the way the heavy air around the room seemed to lift, even a little. She knew there were more reminders to give out, more warnings that her students would need to heed, but those could wait until the morning.
She lifted her wand to move aside a large tapestry of Helga's glen from the wall, conjuring a cork board in its place. With a second flick of her wrist, she hung a banner above it:
WELCOME BACK, JUSTIN
"Why don't you use this board to write Justin messages to read when he gets back?" she suggested. "Make sure he doesn't miss anything while he's sleeping."
One student raised her hand.
"Professor Sprout?"
"Yes, Susan?"
"Should we put his homework there too?"
Amid the smattering of laughter, Pomona found herself smiling. "Yes, Susan. We can't let him miss that either, can we?"
1993
Pomona didn't know why she never took the board down. Summer came and passed and when she walked in at the start of term, somebody had already tacked on a lost and found notice right beside the transcription for that year's Sorting song.
She had no idea how anybody managed to write down what the hat even sang, but she applauded them for their effort.
The next few days found a few oddities gracing the bulletin: homework advice, Quidditch tryout results, Hogsmeade trip countdowns. Once an ode to Professor Lupin's "sad eyes and kind smile" showed up, but it seemed harmless enough that Pomona allowed the anonymous student to keep it there until somebody else took it down.
Then one day, right after he attacked the Fat Lady, Sirius Black's mug graced the board.
"I understand there is concern amongst you," Pomona told her students. "And I know I cannot stop the gossip and fear-mongering but I do not want our common room-and our House board-to be a source of worry. This is ours. As much as possible, let's try to turn this into a source of comfort, shall we?"
1994
Pomona wasn't sure about comfort, but the year after that, with Cedric Diggory one of Hogwarts' champions, the board turned into a year-long source of House pride. Someone had charmed the words "Good Luck Cedric" to blink in alternating yellow and black letters right in the middle, and the message was surrounded by a cacophony of letters and notes and even a list of the ten reasons Cedric would be the Triwizard Tournament champion.
It was difficult, with Harry Potter's inclusion in the tournament, to keep the messages centered on Cedric, and certainly once or twice the Potter Stinks badge must have made its appearance, but for the most part-or at least, whenever she came by to check on them-the board followed the guideline she'd instituted the year before.
She hadn't known what to do when Cedric died.
She didn't have the heart to take any of it down, and while it didn't seem right to have the board continue to cheer him on, she didn't feel as though there was anything else that she could replace it with instead.
One night somebody tore everything away. Ernie Macmillan had knocked on Pomona's door, asked her what they should do. The remnants still littered the common room floor when the students woke up. On the board, a scribbled sentence on a piece of parchment:
Remember Cedric
Her students all looked at her, waiting for her cue. With a sweep of her wand she cleaned the mess, then looked to them in return. "He was a good boy," she said, blinking back the tears that threatened to spill any second. She continued speaking. "Terrible at handling Mandrakes-he passed out once because he didn't hear my warning-"
Some students laughed, so she told the rest of the story.
"He helped me with my homework once," Jonathan Summerby volunteered once she was done. "Potions. I don't know why. He stank at it."
"He beat Harry in that match last year. Best Seeker we've ever had," Wayne Hopkins said.
"He lent me his broom in first year, when he heard I wanted to make the team," Zacharias Smith spoke up. "Sorry, Professor. I know it was against the rules but-"
"Too late to give you detention now, isn't it, though?" Pomona asked.
Beside Zacharias, Megan Jones smiled. "He was a great Captain." She picked up a parchment and quill and wrote down those words before posting them on the board, right beneath "Remember".
"One of the better Prefects I've had the pleasure of working with," Pomona said, adding those to the upper corner.
"He was really fit," Hannah Abbott murmured, loud enough that a few other girls who heard agreed. That went on the board too.
Once the students had gone for the summer holidays, Pomona asked the house elves to leave the bulletin board as it was. Darker times were ahead and Dumbledore was right: they needed to remember Cedric.
1995
"What's this?"
"It's a memorial, Dolores. For Cedric." Even though she gritted her teeth to keep from shaking, even though she desperately wished to be snippy in response, she knew her students were watching, taking their cues from her. For their sake and not hers, she would be civil. "Surely there isn't an Educational Decree against those?"
Someone snickered behind her, and Pomona cringed at the look Umbridge wore. She'd pay for that later.
"No, there isn't," Umbridge said, primly. She tore a piece of parchment from the bulletin board and thrust it towards Pomona. "But there is one against lies. Who posted this?"
Pomona glanced down at the note. Cedric Diggory was murdered. "I don't know."
"Surely you must know, Pomona. This is your House. Haven't you control over your own students?"
"It's an anonymous board."
"And you allow lies to be posted upon it?"
"It's not a lie!"
Umbridge's eyes doubled in size. "Who said that?" she demanded, stepping back as Zacharias Smith came forward.
"He was killed. Don't they tell you this kind of thing at the Ministry, Professor?"
"He died in an accident."
Ernie Macmillan walked up beside Zacharias and Justin Finch-Fletchley emerged from the other side. "Was this accident called Voldemort, Professor?"
"That's enough," Pomona said, stepping in before Dolores Umbridge could pick her jaw up off the floor and start doling out punishments. The rest of the Hufflepuffs had also started crowding around Umbridge, encouraged by the nerve of the three fifth years.
"Detention!" Umbridge squeaked. "All of you!"
"Absolutely," Pomona said, voice ringing strong. "I'll meet you all here tomorrow at 7 PM sharp for detention. No supper for any of you."
"Professor Sprout, I can handle-"
"These are my students, Professor Umbridge," Pomona said. "I know them well. Don't you think I should decide what their punishment ought to be?"
Umbridge must have either thought it was a losing battle or a pointless cause, because she nodded stiffly. "Very well," said she, mustering as much dignity as she could before she left.
The common room burst into protests once Umbridge was gone, silenced once again when Pomona held up a hand.
"I'll see you here tomorrow at seven. I'll have the elves send dinner," she said, moving her wand to hang banners off the walls. Then she grinned at her students. "I think a House party's in order, don't you?"
1996
It was difficult to pretend life could ever attain a semblance of normality when a war threatened to rage on just outside the castle walls, but Pomona was allowed to hope, was she not?
"I don't suppose we're ready to take this down yet, are we?"
Beside her, the Fat Friar smiled. "Rhetorical questions again, Pomona?"
"They remember him, but sometimes I wonder if they remember him too much. He was just a boy, and they're young. They ought to have more than war on their minds."
He laughed. "Oh believe me, they do. You wouldn't want to know what I caught your prefects doing in the east wing corridors the other night."
"John!"
"They're resilient," he told her. "You needn't worry; they'll be fine."
1997
Pomona had trouble believing in that resilience the year Severus Snape took over as Headmaster. How could it? The Carrows terrorized everyone and the House-however few they had left at Hogwarts-had taken on a sullen, deadened air. Students shuffled lackluster into classes, the younger years, feigning all manners of illnesses, often made excuses to stay in the infirmary, and it wasn't unusual for Pomona to help the prefects tend to injuries sustained during Dark Arts classes.
But there were dissidents, and those she recognized by the resolve in some of her students' eyes, the defiance thick in their voices when they refused to torture one of their own, the increasingly creative ways they managed to encourage and support each other with furtive nods or the slightest pursing of lips.
She couldn't be prouder of them then, even when her own resolve faltered at times. She was the one who had to dine at the same table that the Carrows and Snape did, after all. She was the one who held her tongue when the first years were lined up against the wall and the third years put them under the Unforgivables. At the beginning of term Minerva had gathered the other professors around to stress how imperative it was that they keep the students safe at all times. As long as they were in Hogwarts they were at least capable of doing exactly that, but at which point does her silence cross over from good sense into complicity?
She found her answer on Cedric's board.
She'd nearly missed it, as well. Over the last year the memorial had begun to fade into the background. There were rarely any new additions; she imagined it was because students concerned themselves with more immediate issues, and those who sought comfort would not have seen it in the shrine for a boy who'd died.
Whoever it was hadn't taken the memorial down. Instead there was a large sheet of white paper covering the entirety of the board, and the animated drawing of a large dragon flapping its wings right in the very center.
She squinted to make out the words of a building on the lower left of the scene: Gringotts. Just then, three little figures popped up on the dragon's back-quickly, for just a split second, before disappearing behind its large wings once again.
"Of course," Pomona murmured, smiling for the first time in months.
1998
"Good morning, Pomona!"
"Morning, John!"
"Summer holidays went well?"
"Fantastic, actually. Yours?"
"Dead as always, and couldn't be better for it!"
Pomona laughed. It was the 31st of August, and the students were expected to arrive the next day. Hogwarts bustled with the usual preparations of professors and staffers alike. "I'm glad you enjoyed it," she said.
"Where did Cedric go?"
"Minerva found Dumbledore's Army an actual classroom to use should they choose to continue their activities this year-and I suspect they will," Pomona said. "It's where Defense is. I thought it best to have him there."
"I'll miss him. Him and Rudy."
"Rudy?"
"That's what the students have named the dragon, didn't you know?"
She shook her head. "Of course they did."
"I suppose it's time for Helga's glen to return to its rightful place, then?"
"Oh, no, actually I've moved her to my office quite a while ago."
"This wall will be so empty." He sounded uncharacteristically forlorn.
"Not quite, John, don't get ahead of me now," Pomona said. A new corkboard appeared where Cedric's once was. She whispered a spell to conjure a moving badger onto its surface. Another charm, and bright yellow and black letters were hung above it:
WELCOME HOME, HUFFLEPUFFS!