Work Text:
2020
By the time the last of the feast had been cleared from the long tables — the puddings vanishing off the gold plates as though they had never been, the candles guttering lower in the air above everyone's heads — Riley Weasley was so tired that the enchanted ceiling had stopped looking like the sky and started looking like the inside of her own eyelids.
She had heard about that ceiling her whole life. Her dad had described it more times than she could count, usually with his arms thrown wide and his voice doing the thing it did when he wanted you to gasp, so that by the age of about six Riley had been fairly sure he was making half of it up. He hadn't been. The ceiling really did go up and up into a deep autumn black, scattered with stars, and there really were hundreds of candles floating beneath it with nothing holding them at all. She'd spent most of the feast with her neck tipped back and her mouth slightly open, the way you weren't supposed to in front of people, and she hadn't cared one bit.
Now the magic of it was wearing thin, the way magic did when you were eleven and had been awake since five o'clock that morning and had cried a little on the platform without meaning to and had then been ferried across a great black lake in a tiny boat in the dark.
"First years, this way! Come on, then — Gryffindors, follow me, mind the step —"
The prefect leading them up out of the Great Hall had a loud, cheerful voice and a head of bright ginger hair that, in the crush of students, Riley kept half-mistaking for somebody she knew. Half the people in this castle seemed to have hair like hers, which was a strange feeling, comforting and lonely at the same time. She trailed at the back of the little knot of first-years, her legs aching, her new shoes pinching, and tried to keep her eyes on the prefect's bobbing head and not on the staircases.
The staircases were the worst part, in the best way.
They moved. Of course they moved — she'd known that too — but knowing it and standing on one as it swung itself, with a great grinding yawn of stone, out over a drop she couldn't see the bottom of, were not the same thing at all. Riley gripped the banister so hard her knuckles went white and shuffled along in the middle of the group, where if a step disappeared she could at least grab somebody's sleeve. The portraits on the walls leaned out of their frames to watch the new lot go by. A fat monk in one of them waved. A sour-faced witch in another sniffed and said something about standards and the year she'd had to teach the Prewett boys, which made the prefect laugh.
"That's the second cousins twice removed or whatever they are," the prefect said over her shoulder, to nobody in particular. "Half this lot's related. You'll get used to it."
Riley said nothing. She was used to it already. That was rather the trouble.
Up and up they went, past suits of armour that creaked their helmets round to follow them, past a corridor that breathed out a smell of damp stone and old smoke, until at last they came to a portrait of an enormously fat lady in a pink silk dress, who was sitting in her painted armchair looking thoroughly put out at being woken.
"Password," said the Fat Lady, with the air of someone who'd said it five hundred times that evening and meant to make these last ones suffer for it.
"Niffler's gold," said the prefect.
"Hmph," said the Fat Lady, but the whole portrait swung forward like a door, and behind it was a round hole in the wall, and behind that —
Riley's breath caught a little.
It was the warmest room she had ever stood in. That was the first thing — the warmth, after the long stone cold of the staircases. A fire roared in a great grate, throwing gold light up the round walls and into a tangle of squashy red armchairs, and everything was red and gold, red and gold, the colours of her family's house when her dad was feeling festive, the colours her grandmother knitted into half her jumpers. Tapestries hung from the walls. Notice-boards bristled with bits of parchment. Tall windows looked out onto nothing but black night and the white pinpricks of stars, and somewhere above, through a haze of warmth and smoke and a hundred years of other children being homesick in exactly this spot, Riley could just make out the shapes of two staircases curling up out of the common room — one for the boys, one for the girls.
"Right," said the prefect, clapping her hands. "Boys' dormitories up and to your left, girls' up and to your right. Your trunks have already gone up. Your beds've got your names on. Breakfast's at eight, and if you're late nobody will come and wake you, so don't be. Welcome to Gryffindor. Now please, for the love of Merlin, go to sleep."
The crowd broke apart, yawning, drifting toward the two staircases. Riley let herself be carried with the trickle of girls toward the right-hand stair, and she was halfway up it, one hand on the cool curving wall, when a voice called her name across the common room.
"Oi! Riley!"
She turned. And there, leaning over the back of one of the squashy red armchairs by the fire with his long legs sprawled out and his chestnut hair flopping into his eyes, was her brother.
Calvin grinned at her. He was seventeen, a seventh-year now, impossibly tall and impossibly relaxed in a way that Riley was fairly certain she would never manage if she lived to be a hundred. He'd barely spoken to her on the train — he'd been off down the carriage with his enormous loud seventh-year friends, far too important to sit with his baby sister, which Riley had told herself she didn't mind — and now here he was, lit up by the fire, looking at her as though he'd been waiting for her.
"Gryffindor, then," he called, jerking his chin at the red and gold all around them. "Knew you would be. You owe me two Galleons — I bet Mum."
"You did not," said Riley.
"Did. Ask her." He waggled his eyebrows. "First night's the strangest. Just so you know. It gets miles better after this. By Wednesday you won't remember what you were on about." He said it lightly, the way he said everything, but he was watching her face when he said it, and Riley understood, the way you understood things from family without them being spelled out, that this was Calvin's way of telling her that he knew. That he'd been eleven and far from home once too, in this exact room, and that he was just down the corridor of a different staircase, and that if the worst came to the worst she could find him.
"Night, Cal," she managed.
"Night, Ri. Don't let the dormitory ghosts get you." He winked. "There aren't any. Probably."
And he sank back into his armchair, and the conversation of the older students closed over him like water, and Riley went on up the curling stair.
***
The dormitory was round, like the common room, only smaller and quieter and much darker. Five four-poster beds stood around the walls, each one hung with curtains of deep red velvet, each one with its hangings half-drawn so that the room was full of shadowed alcoves. A single lamp burned low on a table in the middle. The window here looked out, like all the others, onto the great black nothing of the grounds and the cold stars.
At the foot of one of the beds sat Riley's trunk.
She knew it at once, even in the dark — the battered brown trunk with the dented corner where Callum had once ridden it down the stairs at home, and her initials painted on the lid in her mum's neat hand: R.M.W. Riley Molly Weasley. She crossed to it, and it was the most enormous relief to see something of her own in this strange high room, like coming round a corner in a crowd and seeing a familiar face.
Two of the other beds already had their curtains fully drawn, with the soft sounds of breathing behind them. A third girl was sitting cross-legged on her covers brushing out a long dark plait, and she gave Riley a tired, friendly sort of nod that didn't ask for anything back, which Riley was grateful for. And on the bed beside Riley's own, a small fair-haired girl was sitting very upright with her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped round them, staring at the velvet canopy over her head as though she half expected it to fall on her.
"Hello," said the girl, in a whisper, when she saw Riley looking. "I'm Tilly. Tilly Brooks." She had a thin, anxious face and a way of talking very fast and very quietly. "Is — is it always like this? The stairs and everything? Because nobody told me about the stairs. Nobody told me about any of it, really. My mum and dad are — they're not — they don't —" She stopped, and went a bit pink, and said in a rush, "They're Muggles. So they didn't know. I didn't know there'd be a ceiling."
"Nobody could've told you about the ceiling," said Riley honestly. "You have to just see it."
"Are you — " Tilly's eyes went to the trunk, to the painted initials, and Riley watched her work it out, the way people did. " — Weasley? Like — there's loads of you, aren't there? Somebody at the feast said. The red hair." She said it not unkindly, only with the wide-eyed wonder of a girl to whom everything that day had been a wonder. "So you must know all about all of this. You must've grown up with it."
"Sort of," said Riley.
And that was true, and it was also, somehow, exactly the thing that made the back of her throat go tight.
Because she had grown up with it. She'd grown up on stories of this castle and these staircases and that impossible ceiling; she'd grown up knowing she'd come here one day the way other children knew they'd grow up and get jobs. She had a brother three floors away and cousins scattered through every house and every year of the school, a great untidy net of family stretched right through the building. She was, by any sensible reckoning, the least alone girl in the whole dormitory.
So she couldn't for the life of her work out why she felt so completely, achingly far from home.
"It's nice, though," Tilly whispered, mistaking Riley's silence, looking round the dark dormitory with her chin on her knees. "Isn't it? It's nice."
"Yeah," said Riley. "It's brilliant."
She got into her pyjamas in the half-dark, fumbling the buttons, and she folded her uniform over the end of the bed the way her mum had taught her, and she got in under the cold heavy covers and drew the velvet curtains shut around herself, and she lay there in the red velvet dark and listened to the breathing of four girls she didn't know, in a tower she'd never slept in, in a country she'd lived in her whole life that had never once felt foreign until tonight.
And then the lamp went out — somebody must have whispered it dark — and there was nothing at all but the black.
***
It was the quiet that did it.
That was the thing Riley hadn't expected, the thing nobody warns you about because nobody thinks to. She had expected to miss her mum and dad. She'd braced for that on the platform and felt it come, and got through it. What she hadn't braced for was the quiet, the simple wrongness of the quiet, lying in the dark with her eyes open and waiting, without even knowing she was waiting, for sounds that didn't come.
At home there was always noise. Their house was never, ever silent — her dad saw to that. There was the steady, ridiculous hum of whatever half-finished invention he'd brought home from the shop and left ticking on the kitchen dresser; the bang of the back door; her dad's voice and her mum's twining together downstairs after they thought the children were asleep, low and easy, broken now and then by one of them laughing. There was Sophie. Riley shared a room with Sophie at home, Sophie who was nine and never stopped talking, who narrated her own dreams aloud and kicked the wall in her sleep and could be relied upon, every single night, to ask one more question into the dark just as Riley was dropping off — Ri, are you asleep? Ri? What d'you reckon owls dream about? — until Riley told her to shut up, and then Sophie would go quiet for exactly thirty seconds and start again.
There was Callum, who was six, thumping down the landing to their parents' room when he had a bad dream, his bare feet slapping the floorboards. There was the whole warm machinery of a full house breathing around her in the night, the sound of belonging to people, and she had heard it every night of her life without once knowing she was hearing it.
And now there was none of it. Now there was just the wind round the tower, and four strangers' breath, and a great cold castle full of children who weren't hers.
Riley lay very still and felt the homesickness come up through her like water filling a boat — not all at once, but slowly, from the bottom, until it was up around her chest and she couldn't get a proper breath round it. She thought about her mum's face that morning. She thought about her dad pretending he had something in his eye on the platform and blaming the steam. She thought about Sophie asking, last week, in the careless cruel way of little sisters, whether Riley would even bother writing, and Riley saying obviously not, why would I write to you, and both of them knowing she would write every week.
She thought, I want to go home, and the wanting was so big and so plain and so completely useless — because she couldn't, of course; the train wasn't going back; this was simply where she lived now — that two hot tears slid sideways out of her eyes and into her hair before she'd even decided to cry.
She didn't make a sound. She was a Weasley, and she had three cousins in this house alone who would never let her hear the end of it, and anyway crying loudly had never been Riley's way; she did it the way her dad did everything difficult, quietly and with a great show of being fine. She lay in the dark in her four-poster and let the tears run into her hair and bit down hard on the inside of her cheek and thought, Stop it. Stop it. It's one night. You'll feel stupid in the morning.
And then, because she could not lie there in the dark a single second longer with the quiet pressing on her, she rolled over, parted the velvet curtains a crack, and reached down for her trunk.
***
She found the latches by feel and eased the lid up slowly, wincing at every creak. Inside, on top of her neatly packed things — her mum had packed them; you could tell, everything in straight layers, the way Riley never managed — there were three things that had not been there when Riley last looked.
The first was a parcel.
It was wrapped, unmistakably, in the violently bright purple-and-orange paper of Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes, the paper Riley had been seeing her whole life, the paper that meant her dad. He must have slipped it in when she wasn't looking. Tied to the top with string was a label, and on the label, in her father's truly atrocious handwriting — Fred Weasley wrote as though the quill were running away from him — were the words:
EMERGENCY USE ONLY. (Examples of an emergency: a boring professor. A boring meal. A boring Tuesday. Homesickness — see other side.)
Riley's heart did something complicated in her chest. She turned the label over with shaking fingers, holding it up to the faint grey light from the window, and on the back, smaller and crammed in and much less jokey, her dad had written:
Listen. First night's the worst one, and then it isn't, and then it's the best place in the world — your old man's word on it, and your old man knows. You're a Weasley, Ri. The castle's already half yours. Go and take the other half. Love you to the moon. — Dad
(Don't tell your mother I let you have the Fanged Frisbees. — also Dad)
And underneath that, in handwriting Riley would have known blindfolded — small and round and careful, her mum's hand, the same hand that had painted R.M.W. on the trunk:
Write the moment you land. I mean it. We'll be waiting. Be brave, my darling, and be kind, and remember exactly whose girl you are. All my love — Mum xx
Riley sat there in the dark with the label in both hands and cried properly for about a minute and a half, and it was a completely different sort of crying from before — it didn't fill the boat, it bailed it. She didn't even bother to stop herself. When it was finished she scrubbed her face on the sleeve of her pyjamas and felt about a stone lighter, and she peeled the corner of the parcel open just enough to see a glint of Fanged Frisbees and a fat bag of her favourite Honeydukes toffees, and she thought, Dad, and laughed a wet little laugh into the quiet, and the quiet didn't feel quite so cold after that.
The second thing in the trunk was the photograph.
It was in a small wooden frame, and even before she'd lifted it into the light Riley knew which one it was, because her mum had been threatening to send it to school with her for a month. It had been taken in the garden at the Burrow at the end of the summer, all of them squashed in together because Grandma had insisted, and now in the grey light Riley watched it move — watched her tiny photograph-family wave and jostle and laugh up at her, soundless, on a loop of one golden afternoon. There was her dad with his arm slung round her mum, both of them grinning, her dad saying something that made her mum swat at him. There was Sophie pulling a face. There was Callum, who had got bored halfway through and was trying to crawl out of the bottom of the frame and being hauled back in by the collar. There was Grandma Molly in the middle of it all, slightly out of breath from rounding everybody up, her hands folded over her cardigan, beaming — Grandma Molly, who Riley had been named for, Riley Molly, a fact that had always made Grandma go a bit pink and pretend to be cross when it came up.
Riley propped the photograph on her bedside table where she could see it, and the little waving family in the frame made the dark dormitory feel, for the first time, like a room she could possibly fall asleep in.
The third thing was a parcel too, but soft, and squashy, and Riley knew the shape of it through the brown paper before she'd even got the string off, because there was only one thing in the world it could be.
It was a jumper.
It was a deep, warm scarlet — Gryffindor, Riley thought, with a small thrill, though Grandma couldn't have known, Grandma had finished it back in July, it was just luck, or maybe it wasn't, maybe Grandma Molly had always known too — and on the front, knitted in gold so it stood out a mile, was a single enormous letter R. Riley had grown up watching that letter appear on every Christmas jumper she'd ever owned. Every cousin had one in their own colour with their own initial; the Burrow at Christmas was a riot of them. But this one was new, and soft, and smelled — Riley pressed it to her face and breathed in, and her eyes stung again — this one smelled of home, of the Burrow, of woodsmoke and wool and her grandmother's kitchen, a smell that had soaked into it through whatever drawer it had waited in all summer.
Riley pulled the jumper on over her pyjamas right there in the dark. It was far too warm for September in a bed under heavy covers, and she didn't care in the slightest. She lay back down inside the smell of it, with the toffees from her dad and the message from her mum tucked under her pillow and the little soundless garden waving on the table beside her, wrapped in scarlet wool with a great gold R on the front, and she felt, at last, like herself again. Like somebody's girl, in a tower far from home, who was nonetheless not nearly so alone as she had managed to convince herself she was.
***
She had thought everyone else was asleep.
But the velvet curtains of the bed beside hers parted with a soft rustle, and a small face appeared in the gap, pale in the starlight, and Tilly Brooks whispered, "Riley? Are you awake?"
For half a second Riley nearly laughed, because it was so exactly the thing Sophie said. Ri, are you asleep? As if there were any answer to that question except the one that gave you away.
"Yeah," Riley whispered back. "I'm awake."
There was a small silence.
"I can't sleep," Tilly admitted, in the tiniest voice. "It's too quiet. Isn't it too quiet? At home there's the boiler, and the dog, and the trains go past at the bottom of our road, and it's never — it's never just — nothing. Like this." She sniffed, very quietly, and Riley understood that Tilly had been lying behind her own curtains crying too, in the dark, in exactly the same way, thinking she was the only one. "I keep listening for things that aren't there."
"Yeah," said Riley. "Me too. The quiet's the worst bit."
"It is the worst bit," said Tilly, with enormous feeling, and something in her relaxed, just hearing it said aloud by somebody else. "I thought it was just me. I thought — you've got family here, and you grew up with it all, so I thought you'd just be — fine."
"I'm not fine," said Riley. And then, because she was Fred Weasley's daughter after all, and because her dad's first and best answer to anything heavy was always to make somebody laugh: "I cried into my hair. There's a wet patch. I'm going to have to sleep on the dry side now like an absolute tragedy."
A muffled snort came from behind Tilly's curtain. From across the room, the dark-haired girl with the plait — whom they'd both assumed asleep — said into the blackness, in a thick voice, "I cried as well. Just so we're all being honest," and then, after a pause, "I'm Priya. Hello." And one of the two girls behind the fully drawn curtains, who really had seemed dead to the world, let out a watery little hiccup of a laugh and said, "Oh thank God, I thought it was only me," and that set all five of them off, very quietly, the helpless suppressed midnight giggling of children who have all been crying and are all enormously relieved to find out they're in good company.
"We're all homesick," said Tilly, wonderingly, when it had died down, as if she'd discovered something marvellous.
"'Course we are," said Riley. "First night's the worst one." She heard her father's voice come out of her own mouth, his exact words, and felt obscurely proud of them. "It gets miles better after this. By Wednesday we won't remember what we were on about."
"Promise?" said Tilly.
"My brother promised it. He's a seventh-year, he's huge, he knows everything." Riley pulled the great gold R of her jumper up under her chin and looked at the little waving photograph on the table, the family in the garden, her grandmother beaming out of the frame. "So, yeah. I'm promising it."
Tilly's face, in the gap of the curtains, broke into a small, exhausted, enormously relieved smile. "Okay," she whispered. "Night, Riley."
"Night, Tilly. Night, Priya. Night, everyone."
A chorus of sleepy nights came back at her out of the dark, from all the corners of the round room, five girls in five four-posters who had been strangers six hours ago, and Tilly's curtains rustled shut, and the dormitory settled.
***
Riley lay on her back in her grandmother's scarlet wool and watched the photograph until the figures in it slowed and stilled, the way they did when nobody was looking, her family freezing mid-wave in the dark.
She thought about tomorrow. She'd write to her mum the moment she woke — first thing, before breakfast, she'd promised — and she already knew most of what she'd say. She'd tell her about the ceiling, and how Dad had been right about all of it, even the bits she'd been certain he'd made up. She'd tell her she'd got Gryffindor and that Calvin owed somebody two Galleons. She'd tell her about the toffees and the jumper and the smell of the Burrow in the wool, though she'd probably have to stop and scrub her face again writing that part. She would absolutely not tell her about the wet patch on the pillow.
She thought about the two odd, fair-haired twin boys she'd noticed earlier, down by the boats and then again at the Sorting — Scamanders, somebody had said, two of them exactly alike, who'd stood at the edge of the crowd looking at the castle with their heads tipped at the same angle and talked to each other in a low private murmur about whether the lake had a monster in it that the older students were lying about, and one of whom had turned, just for a second, and caught Riley's eye, and given her a slow, sunny, peculiar smile, as though they were already friends and he was simply waiting for her to catch up. She'd thought, well, they're weird, and felt a bit better, because at least she wasn't the weirdest, and resolved to talk to them tomorrow because anyone who argued seriously about a lake monster was clearly worth knowing.
She thought, finally, drifting now, the warm wool and the long day pulling her under, that the castle really was half hers, the way her dad had said. Calvin was three floors down. Somewhere in this enormous building there were cousins asleep in every house and every year, a great net of family woven right through the stone, holding the whole thing up. And here, in this round room at the top of a moving staircase, there were four other girls who'd cried into their own pillows tonight and laughed about it in the dark, which was, when you thought about it, very nearly the start of friends.
Go and take the other half, her dad had written.
All right, Riley thought, as her eyes finally slid shut, her grandmother's R rising and falling on her chest, the little frozen photograph keeping watch in the dark. All right. Tomorrow.
And outside the tall window the stars wheeled slowly on over the lake and the mountains and the great sleeping castle, and somewhere far below in the kitchens the fires were being banked for the night, and Riley Molly Weasley — homesick, eleven years old, exactly whose girl she was — fell deeply and dreamlessly asleep on the dry side of her pillow, in the warmest room in the warmest tower of the only other place in the world that was ever going to feel like home.