FIC: This Strange Intelligence (PG)
Title: This Strange Intelligence
House Category: Ravenclaw
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Helena Ravenclaw, Moaning Myrtle, Bellatrix Lestrange, and Luna Lovegood, with cameo appearances by Nicholas de Mimsy Porpington, the Fat Friar, the Bloody Baron, the Cavalier, Filius Flitwick, and Neville Longbottom
Author: leela_cat
Beta Reader(s): eeyore9990, the_minx_17, batdina
Rating: PG
(Highlight to View) Warning(s): None.
Note: The title and the section headings are quotes from Macbeth.
Summary: "Luna is kind, unlike so many of the others." [Helena Ravenclaw to Harry Potter in Deathly Hallows 2 (the movie)]
1. Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing
Over the centuries I've come to believe that there ought to be a Sorting ceremony for ghosts. The current system is, quite frankly, rather haphazard. It boggles the mind that I, who died thousands of miles from here, across land and moving water, am sentenced to haunt this same pile of stones that I had worked so hard to escape in life. Most of the other ghosts are a rather imbecilic group of lack-wits; invariably, those few who might prove interesting after death are sent to haunt elsewhere or continue on to whatever is beyond this world.
Damn their souls.
"You could at least do us the courtesy of listening," Nicholas says, interrupting my thoughts.
I trap the word Why behind my tongue and say, "I simply do not understand how she could possibly be my problem."
"The poor girl was a Ravenclaw," the Fat Friar says, as if that could make me care, "and she clearly requires comfort and guidance."
"Poor girl? Are you mad?" I stare down at him. "She was an absolute horror when alive and infinitely worse now."
The Baron's chains writhe in silent, unbearable sympathy. I look away and focus on the world outside the window, taking comfort in a view over the Black Lake that has not changed since I was a child. It is far more interesting than this farce of a 'Ghost House Council' that Nicholas insists on conducting.
Nicholas clears his throat, making an awful wispy sound that never fails to make me want to hurt him. "My dear lady, as the Ravenclaw ghost, you have responsib-"
I turn on him, pivoting around so quickly that he flinches and his head flops sideways. "You know nothing of Ravenclaw." My hands curl into my cloak like talons. "Do not presume to speak to me of it."
"We are all experts on our own houses, He-" The Friar cuts himself off before he reveals my name. We have agreed to hold each other's identities secret, knowing them merely because we were once pupils together in this castle. "Heaven knows," he says, "someone needs to watch over the children."
"Myrtle Miggins is no longer a pupil at Hogwarts," I say.
Nicholas's response is rendered unintelligible because he is speaking whilst pulling his head back into place. The Baron continues to loom and to stare at me.
The Friar fumbles at his belt, his action providing me with a visible reminder of the vows he broke when he helped me escape with my mother's diadem. Defeated, as I always will be by this one action, I bow my head in acknowledgement. It never pays to blackmail clergy.
"Be gentle," he says, just before I swoop through the wall.
.:.
Finding Myrtle is a simple matter of sinking into the stones of Hogwarts and reaching out for the blue threads that mark the presence of each Ravenclaw in the building. Like my own, her thread is the palest of blues - the colour of glacier ice.
She is precisely where I expect her to be, in the toilet where she died. Wishing it were possible to take a deep breath, I steel myself to face her as I fly through Hogwarts. I float through the bathroom door and pause. Her caterwauling assaults my ears from one of the stalls.
"Miss Miggins," I say in my best professorial voice.
Her keening increases in volume.
I repeat her name, and she gets even louder. "Be silent," I tell her and, at a wave of my hand, the stall door crashes open.
She's perching on the edge of the toilet. The lenses of her thick spectacles are smeared, and silvery tracks mark her cheeks. If I didn't know her, I might feel some sympathy for her. However, I'm aware of everything that occurs to my Ravenclaws. I felt the change in the threads as Miss Hornsby was transferred from the infirmary to St Mungo's, and I know the viciousness that lies beneath Myrtle's façade.
"Ooooh... look at you." A small smile curls the corner of Myrtle's mouth. "Ordering me around as if you were the queen of Ravenclaw."
Princess, actually, I think, and it takes everything I have not to snap the words aloud. However, I will not hand Myrtle that much power over me. Instead, I tap my foot on the floor, knowing that the sound is audible to her spectral ears. "You went too far with Olive Hornsby. Her parents have complained to the Governors."
"I didn't do anything."
"Do not lie to me."
Tears begin to trickle from Myrtle's eyes. "Hornsby was mean to me," Myrtle whines. "Pimply Myrtle. Speccy Myrtle. Blind as a bat, and thicker than her glasses. You can't expect me to just ignore her."
"Why not?" I ask, genuinely confused. "She cannot hurt you."
Myrtle sniffed. "You don't know anything."
"I know that if you continue the way you are, the mortals will feel compelled to interfere in ghostly matters," I say. "That must be avoided at all costs."
"Then tell Hornsby to stop. It's not my fault that she's mean and nasty and can't keep her mouth shut to save her life."
I almost slap her. Honestly, it is beyond even me to understand how she could possibly have been Sorted into Ravenclaw. She's an embarrassment to my House.
"You're blaming me, too," she says before I can come up with an appropriate response. "It's Myrtle's fault. Fifty points from Myrtle for being a miserable, fat, moaning waste of spectral energy."
"Myrtle, you cannot expect-"
She bursts into anguished sobs, and I close my mouth. She is hardly worth the effort.
"I should just kill myself and make everyone happy," she says, then floats upright to stand in front of me. "Except I can't, can I? Because even I'm not stupid enough to miss the fact that I'm already dead."
At the last word, she draws herself up and slams through me in a blast of pain and hatred and a grasping need for revenge. It is all I can do to hold myself together until she disappears down the toilet in the next stall.
When she is gone and the bathroom is once again silent, I float away through the walls. I am in need of the solace that can only be found in my Aunt Helga's greenhouses.
It is unfortunate that I cannot banish Myrtle from my House, but that is beyond even my powers as the Ghost of Ravenclaw. However, if the mortals from the Ministry come to discipline her as threatened, I will not interfere. Nor will I permit the other ghosts to do so, precedent be damned.
~*~
2. Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under 't
"The children are entering the castle, milady." The Cavalier doffs his hat and gives me a small bow. The Baron rattles his chains to protest the Cavalier's familiarity, but we both ignore him.
"Thank you, good sir," I say to the Cavalier and incline my head in acknowledgement of his manners.
Replacing his hat with a flourish, the Cavalier goes to join his assigned group, The Baron, who is incapable of learning even after death, moves into his self-appointed position between the Cavalier and I.
The Friar rubs his hands together. "Shall we drift down and see how this year's Sorting will go? I can already sense the presence of new Hufflepuff blood."
"Distraction," Nick was telling the assembled ghosts. "That is your job. Talk to each other, swoop around, and even argue. Anything that draws the attention of the first years away from the Ghost House Council and allows us to identify where each youngster will be Sorted."
A few mutter, but they have sufficient sense not to say anything directly to Nicholas. The last time a ghost did that, perhaps fifty or sixty years ago, Nicholas pontificated so long that the children were already eating by the time we made it downstairs. Instead, they shift around, as if dancing a quadrille. After a few minutes, Nicholas raises his hands as if he were conducting an orchestra and counts off three beats.
We begin moving on the second. He's still complaining when we stream into the chamber where the first years are assembled.
The Friar and Nicholas swoop down on a cluster of girls who are giggling and pointing at the different ghosts. It takes me mere seconds to dismiss them. Most will clearly be Hufflepuffs, perhaps one or two Gryffindors. None worth my time, however, unlike the mixed group huddled near the back which includes two Slytherins and three potential Ravenclaws.
The twins are clearly mine, but the dark haired girl hovers on a wand-edge between Slytherin and Ravenclaw. The grimoire tucked in her pocket speaks to my House, as does the avidity with which she unconsciously strokes it. It is when she looks up and sees me that I feel a shiver, as if a mortal has walked over my grave in far Illyria.
The girl's eyes are dark brown, ringed in black, as ordinary as her curly black hair is extraordinary. However, looking into her eyes is like looking into my own. Her mind and soul are limned by the same treachery and hunger for knowledge that once led me to steal my mother's diadem.
To permit her in Ravenclaw and thus grant her access to my mother's journals - I am no Seer, but even I can see that that could only result in disaster.
A boy who will definitely be a Slytherin murmurs, "Bella."
She gives me a sharp smile and then turns to him. Her hand is once again caressing the grimoire in her pocket.
Released, I rejoin the ghostly promenade. We swoop around the chamber before floating back out through the wall and into the Great Hall.
After making a circuit of my House table, I fly upwards and take up a position above the staff table. My grey form is nearly invisible against the overcast sky that forms the ceiling. As I watch, the first years troop up to the front.
Minerva takes her place by the stool and calls out, "Black, Bellatrix."
The girl I have been watching steps up to the front. As Minerva places the Hat on her head, I slide my hands up and into the ancient beam at the centre of the enchanted ceiling. As a child of the Founders, I am granted access to all by Hogwarts. I focus on my Uncle Godric's hat.
Hmmm, you have a Black's ambition. But, oh my, such a craving for knowledge.
I can feel the spark of magic as the Black girl presses a fingernail into the spine of her grimoire. She wants to be sorted into my House and learn the secrets she is sure we have.
With a twist of my wrist, I invoke the magic of Ravenclaw and send a rejection into the Sorting Hat.
The Hat yells, "Slytherin!"
Rather than going to her House table when the Hat is removed, Bellatrix Black tilts her head back and looks directly at me.
~*~
"No one rejects me." Bellatrix Black has her grimoire in one hand and her wand in the other. Walnut, I cannot help noticing, and I file that information away with all the other random facts I have collected over the centuries.
"How wonderful for you," I say and return to my contemplations of the night sky. It is the dark of the moon before Samhain, and the perfect time to discover the stories that the stars are considering for the coming year.
"No one ignores me, either."
The edge to her voice, far too adult for an eleven year old, catches my attention, and I finally turn my attention on her. "I was reading the stars before you entered."
Her ringlets fly around in the wind, as Medusa's snakes must have done once upon a time, and she's smiling at me. She lifts her wand and her book, aiming them at me.
I float towards the window, aiming to fly back to Ravenclaw Tower, only to find my path blocked. Impossible, my mind shrieks even as I run through all the ghost-related spells I know. I've reached the trapping charms when she hisses a phrase that twists me inside out.
The tower walls and the night sky fade away as I writhe in agony, and pearlescent clouds surround me. Pain is an ever-present companion in this not-world. It rises and falls with the regularity of a heartbeat, the press and release of the cushion-soft walls of my prison.
I survive. Minute after identical minute, I run through every piece of information I know. Runes, arithmantic equations, magical laws, potions, ingredients, and charms. One after another, I recite them, categorise them, and move on. I've reached the first charm I ever learned, Wingardium Leviosa, when a fleck of black stains the white in front of my face.
My thoughts, my knowledge, spiral away as I watch the fleck become a keyhole and then expand into a door. When it opens, Filius is standing on the other side in a world filled with light and colour. He holds out his hand, and I race out. My prison implodes behind me.
Filius twirls his moustaches in triumph and sweeps me a bow.
I grant him a curtsey in response. "Thank you."
"The grimoire has been confiscated and added to the Ravenclaw collection," he says.
"She would not have been good for our House."
"Too cruel," he says in agreement. "Ravenclaw is grateful." After a moment's pause, he adds, "And so am I."
He's gone before I can respond. When I'm completely alone, I smile. My skirts and cloak billow as I spin in mid-air, enjoying the freedom of what existence I am granted.
~*~
3. When the Hurlyburly's Done
The damage is everywhere. Pain radiates from Hogwarts' stones. Like the other House ghosts, I bear the signs of the destruction caused to my House by the battle that was waged in the castle. My cloak has as many holes as the ceiling of Ravenclaw Tower. Silvery fluid flows from my wrists and drips in my wake as I examine each floor.
I can hear Myrtle wailing in the second year girls' bathroom where she's taken up residence. She screeched about rotten, nasty Potter imposters when she flew past me in the middle of the battle, but I was rather distracted at the time. Still, her caterwauling is somehow comforting and appropriate to the death and destruction that surrounds us.
Death took so many by surprise over the past few hours. Hogwarts has gained a few new ghosts, and the Fat Friar and the Baron are greeting them since Hufflepuff and Slytherin were relatively untouched by the fighting. We lost a ghost as well. It ought to have been impossible, but Nicholas de Mimsy Porpington is no longer among us. I prefer to believe that he chose to move on. The alternative is as unthinkable as the knowledge that my Uncle Godric's tower has been reduced to rubble.
Still, I shall have to acquaint myself with the new ghosts sooner rather than later. Gryffindor will require a new House ghost when the repairs are complete and students return to Hogwarts.
Weighted down by sorrow, I descend through the floor of the first year boys' dorm and into the common room. The wide circular room is open to the elements and to the school. The door hangs off its hinges. Wind is blowing ash and other debris through the windows, which are unprotected by the shards of glass that remain.
I place my hands on the stones next to a window that is more a gaping hole than anything else, but Hogwarts does not have sufficient magic to spare for me to repair the window.
Some of the bookcases are damaged beyond repair, as are far too many of the books. A shredded net hangs from the domed ceiling for no apparent reason, although the walls tell me that the Carrows were once confined by it.
When I cannot delay any longer, I turn slowly to face my mother's statue. A network of cracks covers her hair and runs down her dress. She is tilted at a precarious and rather drunken angle, looking more approachable than she did for much of her life. She would be appalled.
I focus and wave my hand, but the statue does not move. I try again, using both hands, but they merely sink into the stone. As I pull out, I bleed silvery tracks down my mother's arms.
The truth hits me between the eyes like a hex. All my carefully hoarded knowledge, all of my vaunted intelligence is worthless right now. I am a ghost, a mere spectre of the witch I once was. I cannot help Hogwarts.
~*~
"It's cracked." Luna runs a finger over the stone diadem that graces my mother's brow. A fissure runs directly through the centre.
"You have a marvellous sense of the obvious."
"Of course I do," she says. "Although few are intelligent enough to see it." She strokes the stone again. "Harry destroyed the original. He wanted you to know that he kept his promise."
For a moment, I'm lost in the memory of that moment, of the scream that licked at me like flames in a fire. I hadn't realised before then how much of my spirit was bound to that diadem. "I know," I finally say, because anything else seems inadequate.
Luna has turned from examining the statue that she had straightened at my request to looking at me. Her gaze is sharply observant and utterly at odds with her vague expression.
"You're bleeding." Crouching before me, Luna cups her hands beneath my right wrist and catches the flow of silvery fluid. "We need to stop it before someone realises what they can do with this."
Insults pile up on my tongue, and I do my best to swallow them all down. Luna does not truly deserve them. "Ravenclaw" is the only polite word I can manage, and there is an edge of sarcasm to it that I cannot prevent.
"Ravenclaw," Luna says with satisfaction and agreement. "I do like it when a riddle contains a puzzle." She gives me a bright smile as she gets to her feet.
I drift in her wake as she walks carefully back to my mother's statue. Getting up on the plinth, she rises up on her tiptoes and opens her hands.
As my essence spills over the stone diadem, both the cracks in the stone and the rents in my cloak heal over. The sensation is like nothing I have ever felt before. As if I am being woven back together, one strand at a time, by gentle hands and soothing magic.
"Luna?" Neville Longbottom stands in the doorway. He holds the Gryffindor sword in exactly the same way my uncle once did. He will likely never realise that it is his birthright, but I expect that is for the best.
Her smile brightening, Luna beckons him.
He picks his way carefully across the room towards us. His frown deepens with each step, and I shrink back as he approaches.
"Don't leave," Luna says to me, as if I were capable of leaving Ravenclaw in this condition. "He's very good at clearing Wrackspurts and Nargles."
I'm rolling my eyes when Longbottom says, "Luna's more often right than not." He shrugs. "Too many people dismiss her out of hand, because it's easier than paying attention."
I give the boy my most gracious nod. He is clearly more intelligent than I thought. "You are a credit to your House," I tell him, holding back the ultimate accolade - that he would make an excellent ghost for Gryffindor. Somehow I doubt Longbottom is sufficiently afraid of death to hang around afterwards. It's a pity really. Hogwarts could use someone like him.
"Put it here." Luna's instruction and gesture draw my attention back to her.
Without comment or protest, Longbottom places the sword point first on the plinth and rests the hilt against my mother's waist. Then he steps back.
"Could you hold your wrists like this, Helena?" Luna raises her hands into the air, palms downwards. "Right over your mother's head and heart."
The angle is odd and strange, and I have to hover behind the statue to make it possible. In that position, half of my dress is in my mother's statue and the bottom of my cloak is inside the walls. Silvery fluid drips from my wrists, onto my mother's hair, down the front of her dress, over her book, and down my uncle's sword to the plinth.
I almost inform her that I cannot do this, but Luna is kind and I trust her not to hurt me. On purpose, at least.
Luna begins to twirl. Her hair flares around her. She constructs a complex pattern with her wand. Then, when the tip glistens deep blue, she aims it at my mother's forehead and murmurs, "Reparo."
Her simple spell does not heal all of the wounds, either Ravenclaw's or mine. However, her magic is warm and comforting, and contains more love than I've felt in an aeon. When it releases me, she grants me one of her smiles, and I cannot help but return it.
Luna's kindness is like nothing I have known before. I wonder if it is contagious.
House Category: Ravenclaw
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Helena Ravenclaw, Moaning Myrtle, Bellatrix Lestrange, and Luna Lovegood, with cameo appearances by Nicholas de Mimsy Porpington, the Fat Friar, the Bloody Baron, the Cavalier, Filius Flitwick, and Neville Longbottom
Author: leela_cat
Beta Reader(s): eeyore9990, the_minx_17, batdina
Rating: PG
(Highlight to View) Warning(s): None.
Note: The title and the section headings are quotes from Macbeth.
Summary: "Luna is kind, unlike so many of the others." [Helena Ravenclaw to Harry Potter in Deathly Hallows 2 (the movie)]
1. Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing
Over the centuries I've come to believe that there ought to be a Sorting ceremony for ghosts. The current system is, quite frankly, rather haphazard. It boggles the mind that I, who died thousands of miles from here, across land and moving water, am sentenced to haunt this same pile of stones that I had worked so hard to escape in life. Most of the other ghosts are a rather imbecilic group of lack-wits; invariably, those few who might prove interesting after death are sent to haunt elsewhere or continue on to whatever is beyond this world.
Damn their souls.
"You could at least do us the courtesy of listening," Nicholas says, interrupting my thoughts.
I trap the word Why behind my tongue and say, "I simply do not understand how she could possibly be my problem."
"The poor girl was a Ravenclaw," the Fat Friar says, as if that could make me care, "and she clearly requires comfort and guidance."
"Poor girl? Are you mad?" I stare down at him. "She was an absolute horror when alive and infinitely worse now."
The Baron's chains writhe in silent, unbearable sympathy. I look away and focus on the world outside the window, taking comfort in a view over the Black Lake that has not changed since I was a child. It is far more interesting than this farce of a 'Ghost House Council' that Nicholas insists on conducting.
Nicholas clears his throat, making an awful wispy sound that never fails to make me want to hurt him. "My dear lady, as the Ravenclaw ghost, you have responsib-"
I turn on him, pivoting around so quickly that he flinches and his head flops sideways. "You know nothing of Ravenclaw." My hands curl into my cloak like talons. "Do not presume to speak to me of it."
"We are all experts on our own houses, He-" The Friar cuts himself off before he reveals my name. We have agreed to hold each other's identities secret, knowing them merely because we were once pupils together in this castle. "Heaven knows," he says, "someone needs to watch over the children."
"Myrtle Miggins is no longer a pupil at Hogwarts," I say.
Nicholas's response is rendered unintelligible because he is speaking whilst pulling his head back into place. The Baron continues to loom and to stare at me.
The Friar fumbles at his belt, his action providing me with a visible reminder of the vows he broke when he helped me escape with my mother's diadem. Defeated, as I always will be by this one action, I bow my head in acknowledgement. It never pays to blackmail clergy.
"Be gentle," he says, just before I swoop through the wall.
.:.
Finding Myrtle is a simple matter of sinking into the stones of Hogwarts and reaching out for the blue threads that mark the presence of each Ravenclaw in the building. Like my own, her thread is the palest of blues - the colour of glacier ice.
She is precisely where I expect her to be, in the toilet where she died. Wishing it were possible to take a deep breath, I steel myself to face her as I fly through Hogwarts. I float through the bathroom door and pause. Her caterwauling assaults my ears from one of the stalls.
"Miss Miggins," I say in my best professorial voice.
Her keening increases in volume.
I repeat her name, and she gets even louder. "Be silent," I tell her and, at a wave of my hand, the stall door crashes open.
She's perching on the edge of the toilet. The lenses of her thick spectacles are smeared, and silvery tracks mark her cheeks. If I didn't know her, I might feel some sympathy for her. However, I'm aware of everything that occurs to my Ravenclaws. I felt the change in the threads as Miss Hornsby was transferred from the infirmary to St Mungo's, and I know the viciousness that lies beneath Myrtle's façade.
"Ooooh... look at you." A small smile curls the corner of Myrtle's mouth. "Ordering me around as if you were the queen of Ravenclaw."
Princess, actually, I think, and it takes everything I have not to snap the words aloud. However, I will not hand Myrtle that much power over me. Instead, I tap my foot on the floor, knowing that the sound is audible to her spectral ears. "You went too far with Olive Hornsby. Her parents have complained to the Governors."
"I didn't do anything."
"Do not lie to me."
Tears begin to trickle from Myrtle's eyes. "Hornsby was mean to me," Myrtle whines. "Pimply Myrtle. Speccy Myrtle. Blind as a bat, and thicker than her glasses. You can't expect me to just ignore her."
"Why not?" I ask, genuinely confused. "She cannot hurt you."
Myrtle sniffed. "You don't know anything."
"I know that if you continue the way you are, the mortals will feel compelled to interfere in ghostly matters," I say. "That must be avoided at all costs."
"Then tell Hornsby to stop. It's not my fault that she's mean and nasty and can't keep her mouth shut to save her life."
I almost slap her. Honestly, it is beyond even me to understand how she could possibly have been Sorted into Ravenclaw. She's an embarrassment to my House.
"You're blaming me, too," she says before I can come up with an appropriate response. "It's Myrtle's fault. Fifty points from Myrtle for being a miserable, fat, moaning waste of spectral energy."
"Myrtle, you cannot expect-"
She bursts into anguished sobs, and I close my mouth. She is hardly worth the effort.
"I should just kill myself and make everyone happy," she says, then floats upright to stand in front of me. "Except I can't, can I? Because even I'm not stupid enough to miss the fact that I'm already dead."
At the last word, she draws herself up and slams through me in a blast of pain and hatred and a grasping need for revenge. It is all I can do to hold myself together until she disappears down the toilet in the next stall.
When she is gone and the bathroom is once again silent, I float away through the walls. I am in need of the solace that can only be found in my Aunt Helga's greenhouses.
It is unfortunate that I cannot banish Myrtle from my House, but that is beyond even my powers as the Ghost of Ravenclaw. However, if the mortals from the Ministry come to discipline her as threatened, I will not interfere. Nor will I permit the other ghosts to do so, precedent be damned.
~*~
2. Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under 't
"The children are entering the castle, milady." The Cavalier doffs his hat and gives me a small bow. The Baron rattles his chains to protest the Cavalier's familiarity, but we both ignore him.
"Thank you, good sir," I say to the Cavalier and incline my head in acknowledgement of his manners.
Replacing his hat with a flourish, the Cavalier goes to join his assigned group, The Baron, who is incapable of learning even after death, moves into his self-appointed position between the Cavalier and I.
The Friar rubs his hands together. "Shall we drift down and see how this year's Sorting will go? I can already sense the presence of new Hufflepuff blood."
"Distraction," Nick was telling the assembled ghosts. "That is your job. Talk to each other, swoop around, and even argue. Anything that draws the attention of the first years away from the Ghost House Council and allows us to identify where each youngster will be Sorted."
A few mutter, but they have sufficient sense not to say anything directly to Nicholas. The last time a ghost did that, perhaps fifty or sixty years ago, Nicholas pontificated so long that the children were already eating by the time we made it downstairs. Instead, they shift around, as if dancing a quadrille. After a few minutes, Nicholas raises his hands as if he were conducting an orchestra and counts off three beats.
We begin moving on the second. He's still complaining when we stream into the chamber where the first years are assembled.
The Friar and Nicholas swoop down on a cluster of girls who are giggling and pointing at the different ghosts. It takes me mere seconds to dismiss them. Most will clearly be Hufflepuffs, perhaps one or two Gryffindors. None worth my time, however, unlike the mixed group huddled near the back which includes two Slytherins and three potential Ravenclaws.
The twins are clearly mine, but the dark haired girl hovers on a wand-edge between Slytherin and Ravenclaw. The grimoire tucked in her pocket speaks to my House, as does the avidity with which she unconsciously strokes it. It is when she looks up and sees me that I feel a shiver, as if a mortal has walked over my grave in far Illyria.
The girl's eyes are dark brown, ringed in black, as ordinary as her curly black hair is extraordinary. However, looking into her eyes is like looking into my own. Her mind and soul are limned by the same treachery and hunger for knowledge that once led me to steal my mother's diadem.
To permit her in Ravenclaw and thus grant her access to my mother's journals - I am no Seer, but even I can see that that could only result in disaster.
A boy who will definitely be a Slytherin murmurs, "Bella."
She gives me a sharp smile and then turns to him. Her hand is once again caressing the grimoire in her pocket.
Released, I rejoin the ghostly promenade. We swoop around the chamber before floating back out through the wall and into the Great Hall.
After making a circuit of my House table, I fly upwards and take up a position above the staff table. My grey form is nearly invisible against the overcast sky that forms the ceiling. As I watch, the first years troop up to the front.
Minerva takes her place by the stool and calls out, "Black, Bellatrix."
The girl I have been watching steps up to the front. As Minerva places the Hat on her head, I slide my hands up and into the ancient beam at the centre of the enchanted ceiling. As a child of the Founders, I am granted access to all by Hogwarts. I focus on my Uncle Godric's hat.
Hmmm, you have a Black's ambition. But, oh my, such a craving for knowledge.
I can feel the spark of magic as the Black girl presses a fingernail into the spine of her grimoire. She wants to be sorted into my House and learn the secrets she is sure we have.
With a twist of my wrist, I invoke the magic of Ravenclaw and send a rejection into the Sorting Hat.
The Hat yells, "Slytherin!"
Rather than going to her House table when the Hat is removed, Bellatrix Black tilts her head back and looks directly at me.
~*~
"No one rejects me." Bellatrix Black has her grimoire in one hand and her wand in the other. Walnut, I cannot help noticing, and I file that information away with all the other random facts I have collected over the centuries.
"How wonderful for you," I say and return to my contemplations of the night sky. It is the dark of the moon before Samhain, and the perfect time to discover the stories that the stars are considering for the coming year.
"No one ignores me, either."
The edge to her voice, far too adult for an eleven year old, catches my attention, and I finally turn my attention on her. "I was reading the stars before you entered."
Her ringlets fly around in the wind, as Medusa's snakes must have done once upon a time, and she's smiling at me. She lifts her wand and her book, aiming them at me.
I float towards the window, aiming to fly back to Ravenclaw Tower, only to find my path blocked. Impossible, my mind shrieks even as I run through all the ghost-related spells I know. I've reached the trapping charms when she hisses a phrase that twists me inside out.
The tower walls and the night sky fade away as I writhe in agony, and pearlescent clouds surround me. Pain is an ever-present companion in this not-world. It rises and falls with the regularity of a heartbeat, the press and release of the cushion-soft walls of my prison.
I survive. Minute after identical minute, I run through every piece of information I know. Runes, arithmantic equations, magical laws, potions, ingredients, and charms. One after another, I recite them, categorise them, and move on. I've reached the first charm I ever learned, Wingardium Leviosa, when a fleck of black stains the white in front of my face.
My thoughts, my knowledge, spiral away as I watch the fleck become a keyhole and then expand into a door. When it opens, Filius is standing on the other side in a world filled with light and colour. He holds out his hand, and I race out. My prison implodes behind me.
Filius twirls his moustaches in triumph and sweeps me a bow.
I grant him a curtsey in response. "Thank you."
"The grimoire has been confiscated and added to the Ravenclaw collection," he says.
"She would not have been good for our House."
"Too cruel," he says in agreement. "Ravenclaw is grateful." After a moment's pause, he adds, "And so am I."
He's gone before I can respond. When I'm completely alone, I smile. My skirts and cloak billow as I spin in mid-air, enjoying the freedom of what existence I am granted.
~*~
3. When the Hurlyburly's Done
The damage is everywhere. Pain radiates from Hogwarts' stones. Like the other House ghosts, I bear the signs of the destruction caused to my House by the battle that was waged in the castle. My cloak has as many holes as the ceiling of Ravenclaw Tower. Silvery fluid flows from my wrists and drips in my wake as I examine each floor.
I can hear Myrtle wailing in the second year girls' bathroom where she's taken up residence. She screeched about rotten, nasty Potter imposters when she flew past me in the middle of the battle, but I was rather distracted at the time. Still, her caterwauling is somehow comforting and appropriate to the death and destruction that surrounds us.
Death took so many by surprise over the past few hours. Hogwarts has gained a few new ghosts, and the Fat Friar and the Baron are greeting them since Hufflepuff and Slytherin were relatively untouched by the fighting. We lost a ghost as well. It ought to have been impossible, but Nicholas de Mimsy Porpington is no longer among us. I prefer to believe that he chose to move on. The alternative is as unthinkable as the knowledge that my Uncle Godric's tower has been reduced to rubble.
Still, I shall have to acquaint myself with the new ghosts sooner rather than later. Gryffindor will require a new House ghost when the repairs are complete and students return to Hogwarts.
Weighted down by sorrow, I descend through the floor of the first year boys' dorm and into the common room. The wide circular room is open to the elements and to the school. The door hangs off its hinges. Wind is blowing ash and other debris through the windows, which are unprotected by the shards of glass that remain.
I place my hands on the stones next to a window that is more a gaping hole than anything else, but Hogwarts does not have sufficient magic to spare for me to repair the window.
Some of the bookcases are damaged beyond repair, as are far too many of the books. A shredded net hangs from the domed ceiling for no apparent reason, although the walls tell me that the Carrows were once confined by it.
When I cannot delay any longer, I turn slowly to face my mother's statue. A network of cracks covers her hair and runs down her dress. She is tilted at a precarious and rather drunken angle, looking more approachable than she did for much of her life. She would be appalled.
I focus and wave my hand, but the statue does not move. I try again, using both hands, but they merely sink into the stone. As I pull out, I bleed silvery tracks down my mother's arms.
The truth hits me between the eyes like a hex. All my carefully hoarded knowledge, all of my vaunted intelligence is worthless right now. I am a ghost, a mere spectre of the witch I once was. I cannot help Hogwarts.
~*~
"It's cracked." Luna runs a finger over the stone diadem that graces my mother's brow. A fissure runs directly through the centre.
"You have a marvellous sense of the obvious."
"Of course I do," she says. "Although few are intelligent enough to see it." She strokes the stone again. "Harry destroyed the original. He wanted you to know that he kept his promise."
For a moment, I'm lost in the memory of that moment, of the scream that licked at me like flames in a fire. I hadn't realised before then how much of my spirit was bound to that diadem. "I know," I finally say, because anything else seems inadequate.
Luna has turned from examining the statue that she had straightened at my request to looking at me. Her gaze is sharply observant and utterly at odds with her vague expression.
"You're bleeding." Crouching before me, Luna cups her hands beneath my right wrist and catches the flow of silvery fluid. "We need to stop it before someone realises what they can do with this."
Insults pile up on my tongue, and I do my best to swallow them all down. Luna does not truly deserve them. "Ravenclaw" is the only polite word I can manage, and there is an edge of sarcasm to it that I cannot prevent.
"Ravenclaw," Luna says with satisfaction and agreement. "I do like it when a riddle contains a puzzle." She gives me a bright smile as she gets to her feet.
I drift in her wake as she walks carefully back to my mother's statue. Getting up on the plinth, she rises up on her tiptoes and opens her hands.
As my essence spills over the stone diadem, both the cracks in the stone and the rents in my cloak heal over. The sensation is like nothing I have ever felt before. As if I am being woven back together, one strand at a time, by gentle hands and soothing magic.
"Luna?" Neville Longbottom stands in the doorway. He holds the Gryffindor sword in exactly the same way my uncle once did. He will likely never realise that it is his birthright, but I expect that is for the best.
Her smile brightening, Luna beckons him.
He picks his way carefully across the room towards us. His frown deepens with each step, and I shrink back as he approaches.
"Don't leave," Luna says to me, as if I were capable of leaving Ravenclaw in this condition. "He's very good at clearing Wrackspurts and Nargles."
I'm rolling my eyes when Longbottom says, "Luna's more often right than not." He shrugs. "Too many people dismiss her out of hand, because it's easier than paying attention."
I give the boy my most gracious nod. He is clearly more intelligent than I thought. "You are a credit to your House," I tell him, holding back the ultimate accolade - that he would make an excellent ghost for Gryffindor. Somehow I doubt Longbottom is sufficiently afraid of death to hang around afterwards. It's a pity really. Hogwarts could use someone like him.
"Put it here." Luna's instruction and gesture draw my attention back to her.
Without comment or protest, Longbottom places the sword point first on the plinth and rests the hilt against my mother's waist. Then he steps back.
"Could you hold your wrists like this, Helena?" Luna raises her hands into the air, palms downwards. "Right over your mother's head and heart."
The angle is odd and strange, and I have to hover behind the statue to make it possible. In that position, half of my dress is in my mother's statue and the bottom of my cloak is inside the walls. Silvery fluid drips from my wrists, onto my mother's hair, down the front of her dress, over her book, and down my uncle's sword to the plinth.
I almost inform her that I cannot do this, but Luna is kind and I trust her not to hurt me. On purpose, at least.
Luna begins to twirl. Her hair flares around her. She constructs a complex pattern with her wand. Then, when the tip glistens deep blue, she aims it at my mother's forehead and murmurs, "Reparo."
Her simple spell does not heal all of the wounds, either Ravenclaw's or mine. However, her magic is warm and comforting, and contains more love than I've felt in an aeon. When it releases me, she grants me one of her smiles, and I cannot help but return it.
Luna's kindness is like nothing I have known before. I wonder if it is contagious.