[Flitwick’s Office] The sound of white (prof. Flitwick)

She had enough. Perpetua had endured almost five years in the company of her dormmates and she was not sure she could do this much longer. She just didn’t like the other girls and, what was more of a problem, she felt that they, too, disliked her. They stuck together. She was alone. She didn’t feel comfortable in her own dormitory, actually had never felt that it was her second home.

Maybe, she wondered, the Sorting Hat had messed this up big time on her first day at school. Truth be told, she felt that the house Ravenclaw actually suited her personality rather well. However, she thought that Rowen in particular would be much better off in Slytherin. She feared the rich pureblood girl and sleeping in the same room with her and Rowen’s friends was hardly pleasant.

Lately Perpetua didn’t sleep well anymore at all. She wasn’t sure what it really was all about but she felt anxious. Her heart was racing when she lay in her bed, she thought about the other girls who probably thought of her as some oddity and about the upcoming exams. Her imagination ran wild during these sleepless nights, she saw herself failing her exams, heard people laugh at her, saw wands directed at her and sometimes she sneaked out of the dormitory to curl up in an armchair in the common room instead.

When she finally fell asleep, she had weird nightmares that only increased her fear of the other girls. It was slowly but surely getting out of control and Perpetua wondered if there was a way to make things better for herself. She could fail her exams on purpose and repeat the year, of course, but that didn’t seem a very alluring prospect. She wanted to graduate as soon as possible rather than stay at school even longer.

Switching houses seemed to be an option, though. The girl made a list of girls in her year and tried to figure out with whom she’d be willing to share a dormitory. Then she made another list, collecting traits of the other houses and wondering where she could possibly fit in. Clearly she had no Gryffindor personality. She wasn’t courageous and bold. Slytherin didn’t suit her either. In fact, she hadn’t really considered that as an option anyway. That left Hufflepuff as the only real alternative. Loyalty and diligence were nice traits and she felt that she’d fit in there.

Once she had made up her mind, she wanted to find out if switching houses was possible. She had never heard of anyone doing it before but that didn’t mean that it had to be impossible, right? There was still hope. She walked towards professor Flitwick’s office, chewing on her lip thoughtfully. The Ravenclaw head of house was a nice and understanding teacher. He’d surely have some advice for her. She paced up and down in front of his office for a while, trying to figure out how she could bring up the topic.

She still didn’t know what exactly she wanted to say when she finally knocked on the door. When she heard professor Flitwick’s voice, she opened the door a little and peeked inside. “Professor, do you have a moment? I’d like to ask you something.” Her voice was so quiet that she couldn’t be certain that the teacher had even heard her. However, she hoped that he’d ask her to come inside anyway.

@Filius Flitwick

Somebody had been posting humourous, wildly inappropriate limericks to the bulletin board in the Ravenclaw common room, and Filius was attempting – by hook, by crook, by attempting to find fault in the casting of the Permanent Sticking Charm on the latest – to remove them; he had needed to remove the entire bulletin board, which was propped against a bookshelf as he worked, his sleeves rolled up and a monocle screwed into one eye under his already thick spectacles. He was grudgingly impressed by whichever of his charges had done it (both by the lyrical fluency of the limerick and the Permanent Sticking Charm) but not quite enough not to be already trying to come up with a rhyming admonishment for them to write him five hundred iterations of.

The charm was flawless; finally accepting defeat, and making a special note to speak with his N.E.W.T.s Ravenclaws in class on Thursday, Filius conjured a new board and began the less prestigious work of moving everything off the old bulletin board onto its replacement.

There was a knock on the door; eager to abandon his task, he waved his wand to float both bulletin boards to the floor and said, “Come in!” Perpetua Robbins did not come in; she just put her head in, and said something so softly that he leaned forward to hear her, removing the monocle and reaching for his Standard Book of Spells, vol. V – at this time of year, any fifth-year student coming in with concerns was worried about their O.W.L.s. “Come in,” he said again, kindly, and gestured to one of the chairs opposite his desk. “What’s on your mind?”

Perpetua heard her professor say ‘come in’ but hesitated anyway. Even though she really liked professor Flitwick it was still very strange to go and talk to him. However, the situation was that a chat with her teacher was less scary than having to deal with Rowen and the other Ravenclaw girls in her year.

Hesitantly Perpetua stepped into the room, her gaze lowered but as the professor was quite short, she still caught his eye. Turning her face even lower, the girl looked at the tips of her shoes.

“I…” she said as she took a few steps forward and took a seat in front of his desk. “I do not feel at ease in my dormitory,” she mumbled. She didn’t dare look up now. It was all awkward and switching houses wasn’t really what she wanted either. Frankly, she’d rather prefer to get all the others to join a different house but that seemed far less likely than that she could switch houses herself (which Perpetua feared wouldn’t be possible either).

“I wonder…” she cleared her throat nervously and briefly glanced up at her professor. “I wanted to ask you…” She folded her arms in front of her chest and chewed on her lip. “Is it possible to switch houses?” She had spoken quite quickly now and her voice barely carried through the room. However, she hoped that professor Flitwick would not ask her to repeat the question. It had been difficult enough to ask it once.

Miss Robbins was very quiet – Filius had to lean forward, bushy white eyebrows raised, to hear her. “Ah,” he said, and surreptitiously pushed the Standard Book of Spells back off to the side, propping his elbows up on the desk and steepling his fingers in front of his face. This was one of those meetings. The girl sat uneasily facing him, and he folded his fingers over each other and said gently, “I see. Would you care to explain? Are you being teased?”

Perhaps his least favourite task as a Head of House was handling conflicts such as these. As a mere professor he hadn’t needed to concern himself with the petty politics of teenage witches and wizards, but it was necessary nowadays. He especially reviled having to meet with the students prone to tormenting their peers – there were always a few in Ravenclaw, and he thought that wit, creativity, and intelligence were especially wicked qualities in a bully.

With an indecisive hum, sat forward even further on the stack of books stuck to his chair, now perching at the very edge (Miss Robbins was very soft-spoken, which was very inconvenient when he was seventy years old.) She wasn’t the first student to ask about switching houses, either – she wasn’t even the first student in her year, and although most of the time his pupils didn’t wait until O.W.L.s year to venture to ask, he had already noted her shyness.

“It has never been done,” he started. Albus had said, once or twice, that he thought they Sorted too early – that an eleven-year-old child was too, too young to know how his values might change – but the fact remained that Hogwarts had never allowed any student to change his House. “Do you feel out of place as a Ravenclaw? Are you struggling in your classes?” Her charm-work was competent enough.

She had known all along that this conversation wouldn’t be easy, it was part of the reason why she hadn’t knocked and entered the room when she had first reached the door. However, professor Flitwick asked (very sensible) questions that Perpetua honestly didn’t want to answer. When she thought back, she felt that she had never got along with her roommates, that they had always treated her as an outsider, teased her, pranked her, been mean to her. Some of these memories might have gotten out of proportion, things might have been less daunting than Perpetua now thought, but the fact remained that she had never been friends with those girls that she shared a dormitory with, there was nothing but mutual dislike.

“Yes,” Perpetua finally said in response to professor Flitwick’s question, “they’re nasty towards me. I…” her voice trailed off and when she spoke again it was even quieter than before, “I keep having nightmares about them if I sleep at all.” It was the truth, though Perpetua’s nightmares were not only about the other girls, she also dreamed of Arnold (not all of that were actual nightmares much to her own surprise) and of her exams (those dreams were scary for sure - she had this recurring dream where she had an oral exam but couldn’t make a sound).

Her heart sank as professor Flitwick said that it hadn’t ever been done before. Did that mean it was not possible to switch houses at all or could she be the first one to do it? Then again if she switched houses - how would her new dormmates think about her? They’d surely judge her for running away from Rowen and the others… or they’d understand her and they’d become friends and support each other.

“What?” Perpetua asked, quite surprised by the question if she felt out of place. “No… I don’t… I have no trouble in my classes and I think I fit in Ravenclaw…” it’s just that I think the others don’t she wanted to add but didn’t voice these thoughts. Surely it was easier to request that she could switch houses than to ask professor Flitwick to kick all the others out of his house.

At first Filius worried that Miss Robbins hadn’t heard him, but just as he was about to reword his question she came up with an answer. It didn’t surprise him; though he didn’t like to judge his students strictly or disparage them, even in private, some of them were really nasty pieces of work. What she said, too, was of a fairly concerning nature – even in his worst moments (and Filius flattered himself that he had had some particularly awful moments at Hogwarts) he’d never nightmares about his roommates. He nodded, trying to gather his thoughts and to remember what he knew about Perpetua Robbins.

By now, the only students that could still remember the regime of the Death Eaters Carrow were his seventh years, but he had learned not to assume that the younger students didn’t still remember the war. He had never asked any of his students their blood status (having found it an especially rude question his entire life, and having a good ability to guess from context clues) but he wondered now whether Miss Robbins had lost family.

“Could you explain it more to me?” he said, and added, “Would you like me to speak with them?” for posterity, though – in his experience – rarely was that the case.

If Miss Robbins didn’t feel out of place in Ravenclaw, then he was at a loss for understanding of what she hoped to gain by leaving it. He frowned slightly – “Then,” he said, “What seems to be the problem? Maybe we can come to a solution together.”

It came as a shock when professor Flitwick asked her if she wanted him to speak to them. Her mouth opened, her eyes widened and she shook her head. “No!” the girl exclaimed for once in an audible voice. “No, I don’t.” Merlin, if he told Rowen that she was scared of her and that she should treat her nicer, she couldn’t go into the dormitory anymore at all. The other girl would take too much pleasure from that.

“Please don’t,” she said, quietly, almost pleading with her professor to keep this conversation a secret between the two of them.

He didn’t seem to get the problem and Perpetua regretted having come to him. She couldn’t really explain herself properly. She was scared of the other girls, of Rowen in particular. She didn’t want to share a dormitory with them. She felt sure that no matter what her teacher would say to them it would not improve anything.

“I wish they’d be kicked out of Ravenclaw,” she whispered and thought ‘or out of the school altogether’.

A little louder so that professor Flitwick stood a better chance to hear her, Perpetua added “the problem is that I do not feel comfortable sharing a dormitory with some of them.” She stopped herself from adding that she was scared of them. The sighed and looked down at her hands that had clenched her robes quite tightly.

Filius wished he had invited her to sit with him on his little chaise – sitting across the desk from her, he could barely make out a word she was saying, through a brutal combination of the soft rustling of the items on his desk (the raven, the Newton’s cradle, the quill marking down a quiz he’d given the fourth years), his age, and her amazingly soft voice. “Could you speak up a bit?” he said – she was practically whispering.

She did not feel comfortable sharing a dormitory with them. “I’m afraid,” he said, “I need to ask you to explain it to me in a little more detail if I’m to help. You don’t have to give names if you don’t want to.”

Though, again, he suspected he knew who she meant.

The problem was that he somewhat doubted he could help at all. It wasn’t the best solution to speak with the other girls, particularly as it seemed to happen mostly behind his back; he would have to do it, if the situation was bad enough, but Miss Robbins hadn’t wanted him to, which made him reluctant to do it. Usually he preferred to encourage his bullied students to stand up to their tormentors – something he thought would have helped him quite a bit as a student – but he thought Miss Robbins, who could barely bring herself to speak to him, might struggle with it.

That left his least favourite solution (the one he had adopted, as a teenager): telling her to keep a stiff upper lip; this, he thought, was a last resort.

Professor Flitwick asked her to speak up a bit and Perpetua nodded more to herself than in agreement to his question. It was always hard for her to make herself heard. The girl’s insecurities made her struggle to speak up. She felt that her thoughts might seem foolish and she’d be judged for them. She was afraid that her peers would laugh at her and that the professors would think of her as stupid.

It was probably only natural that professor Flitwick asked her to explain a little more but Perpetua felt how her heart was racing and she blinked away a few tears. Why did he have to torment her this much? Why had she come here in the first place? It had been a mistake to approach her head of house.

“They call me a creep,” Perpetua said, her voice trembling. “I’m just really not one of them. I…” she shook her head and looked down. This was an awful situation. She could not tell her professor all the things that Rowen said to her. She could not allow him to see her through Rowen’s eyes.

The girl sniffed and brushed away an obnoxious tear that made its way down her cheek. “I shouldn’t have come,” she whispered but didn’t move.

She gave him only one detail – the other girls called her a creep – and little else; Filius nodded, in what he hoped was a reassuring way. After all the hemming and hawing he had been wondering if there was something really drastic going on – as a student he had been tormented constantly, completely, and creatively – and though she hadn’t said there was, he knew that didn’t mean there wasn’t.

But he couldn’t do anything if she wouldn’t tell him about it; she didn’t seem to want to go on. Politely, Filius looked away, to afford her some privacy as she cried, and waved his wand to float a clean handkerchief from a stack (kept on hand for frustrated O.W.L.s and remedial students) on his desk over to her.

There was little chance, he decided, that Miss Robbins was going to give him any further information, which meant he would either have to make decisions based on what he already knew – which was not much – or he would have to try to reach a solution here, which he thought would not be easy.

Not very hopefully, he changed tactic. “Miss Robbins, I understand it can be difficult to fit in as a Ravenclaw,” he said. “It certainly was for me. It doesn’t make you a creep – there have been many Ravenclaws who were rather ostracised as students, and went on to great careers and happy lives. Hogwarts won’t last forever, you know.”

Professor Flitwick said it could be difficult to fit in as a Ravenclaw and Perpetua looked up at him. It really wasn’t that she felt that she didn’t fit in. She didn’t consider Ravenclaw to be the house of mean girls like Rowen. It was the other girl that was wrong here, not Perpetua. However, that was a thought she could hardly voice aloud. It was strange enough to come here and ask for herself to switch houses, selecting other people to be removed from her house was way too extreme and definitely nothing she could ever succeed with.

His comment about school not lasting forever did nothing to reassure Perpetua. She was in her fifth year now. There were still more than two years to endure. More than twenty one  months that she’d spent at school. She estimated that this would mean roughly ninety weeks that she’d spend in a dormitory with Rowen and the others.

Ninety weeks were a lot, six hundred and thirty days. Right now that did feel like forever.

Instead of answering to this little satisfying comment, Perpetua now thought about the other thing her head of house had said. He had mentioned that it had been difficult for him to fit in. It was obvious, she assumed. Students were often nasty towards those who were different and professor Flitwick was very short and thus different from the majority of people. However, until now, it had never occurred to her that he had been here as a student, that he had had other teenagers torment him.

“You’ve struggled, too?” she asked although this was much less a question than an invitation for him to tell her more. “How did you cope?”

“I have,” said Filius, gratified that she was at least engaging with him now, and no longer seemed like she was about to start weeping. Her eyes were still somewhat wide behind her glasses, but he suspected it was because she had begun the discomfiting process of trying to imagine him as a teenager (and what a teenager he’d been: pimpled, long-haired, three foot five.) “The other boys in my room used to short-sheet my bed – I’m told it took them a few tries to short-sheet it short enough  – plenty of little things like that.”

Scattering his belongings around on high shelves and atop furniture; filling his shoes with mud; swinging bookbags at him as he was walking to class – she hadn’t asked that. She’d asked how he coped. He twisted the end of his bushy moustache between two fingers, his eyebrows pulling low over his eyes – she had not seemed very comforted by the thought that she was nearly five-sevenths of the way through her school career, so he thought it might not help to repeat that.

She hadn’t really given him enough details to be very helpful any other way, though, but – when in doubt – he could be vague.

“Bullies want to upset you,” he said. “They want to make you feel afraid, because that’s the only thing that gives them power over you. You’re a smart girl and a capable student – I’m not saying you should try to fight back or cause trouble –” he had an inkling that Miss Robbins would do no such thing even if he had encouraged it – “but their words can’t hurt you if you don’t let them. Are the things they say about you true?”

Merlin, he hoped not – that would make this very difficult.

Perpetua looked at her professor, as the realisation dawned on her that he had been a student and surely one to stand out in a way that made him an easy target for bullies. It was strange to imagine her professor as a boy but as he told her a little about his school experience she nodded to herself. It made total sense that his school life hadn’t been easy. It had probably been even worse than hers and she already hated hers a lot.

Were the things they said about her true?

Perpetua lifted her hand to push her glasses further up her nose again as she considered the answer. Rowen called her a creep. Was she a creep? Well, she did spy on Arnold but she had her reasons for that. Maybe those reasons didn’t seem valid to some but, Merlin, she was sharing a home with this boy. She ought to know what he was up to. Then again, Arnold wasn’t the reason she was sitting here, she reminded herself. Rowen had been nasty to her before her obsession with the Gryffindor had started.

“Hmm,” Perpetua said. She really didn’t know. She was not one of these popular girls for sure but did that justify the insults? Sometimes she felt that they were right to treat her like that because she really wasn’t like them and knew she would never be one of them. However, she was not short like Flitwick. She was not a giant girl either. She was neither too fat nor too slim. She was not a beauty, okay; and she wore glasses that never seemed to stay where they belonged but was that enough already? Was it maybe her character that was a problem?

“I don’t know,” the girl said earnestly after having taken her time to think about his question. “I guess I’m really not like them.” She added, looking at her head of house almost apologetically. “They will never accept me.”

It seemed like having to think about these things was calming Miss Robbins down considerably; though Filius already had no power to change which House she had been sorted into, he doubted anyway that he would have – she was well-suited for Ravenclaw and he wasn’t sure she was well-suited for the others. He sat back in his chair again and waved his wand to restart the process of transferring things between the two Ravenclaw bulletins, resting on the ground against his desk.

At last she came to a conclusion: she didn’t know. Despite this answer (not the one he had hoped for) he thought she seemed heartened. “Perhaps you aren’t,” he said, “But that’s nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about. Would you really want to be just like them?”

It was never nice to be called names or attacked – he knew that – and he knew that disliking bullies (or pitying them, as he’d eventually come around to doing) wouldn’t change that. As a student Filius had longed for respect and recognition even from students that tormented him. It would be no comfort to tell her that there was a chance that she was right, and that she would not be accepted by her peers while she was still at Hogwarts.

He shook his head: “Perhaps not,” he said, “But they might still leave you alone, if they find they don’t bother you, and they can only bother you so much as you let them.”

Perpetua wrinkled her nose, making her glasses move upwards, as she contemplated her answer to her head of house’s question. Would she really want to be just like them? It felt a bit like a trick question and, at the same time, she wondered if he asked her because he felt that she should not desire to be like her tormentors. Maybe he disliked her dormmates just as much as she did.

Somehow this thought, although there was no proof that he had meant that at all, served to make Perpetua feel considerably better about herself. She did not have a great self-confidence, didn’t consider herself superior or more loveable than the others but maybe professor Flitwick preferred her to Rowen and the likes. She could not ask him, of course - for two reasons - for one it would be inappropriate to ask such a question (and she would likely not get an honest response) and then there was the fact that Perpetua wanted to cherish the thought rather than get her hopes crushed again.

“No,” she said belatedly. “Probably not.” She didn’t want to be a bully. What good was there in treating others badly? Did it really feel good? Perpetua thought that she’d feel very guilty and bad about herself if she treated others the way she was often treated.

“Hmm,” Perpetua started, her tone indicating that she wasn’t convinced. She couldn’t believe that the day would come when she and Rowen would peacefully coexist. As for letting her bother her, Perpetua wasn’t so sure that was true, either. She had been on the receiving end of a hex before, hard to ignore things like that. However, she held her tongue, trying to think of the positive parts of the conversation. She could probably go out of professor Flitwick’s office with her head held high, thinking that he, too, had been bullied and that he liked her more than he liked the bullies she was dealing with.