So You Want To Go To Hogwarts?

So you want to go to Hogwarts? You've heard all the glorious stuff about magic, the wizarding world, fantastic beasts, wondrous sports and exciting adventures?

Well, let me tell you how it is - introduce you to the things that don't make it into the brochure, the report they should send with the famous Hogwarts Letter, but sure as hell won't. Heck, if I were Deputy Headmistress MacGonagall, I wouldn't either!

* * *

So you get your Hogwarts Letter one cloudy morning, accompanied by the ominous flap of retreating owl wings. Of course, you don't know it's an owl. You open the envelope, scan over the parchment with knitted brows, and look for the accompanying advertisement for a new magic-themed adventure park. It's missing. Those PR-buggers really are as dumb as their reputation. You throw the crap in the bin.

Next comes an ominous visitor one late evening, a strange fellow with a cloak and too much beard, who talks in hushed, serious tones to your parents in the living room. Of course you eavesdrop. Many words are spoken, about magic, rare gifts and great opportunities.

The folks seem not particularly thrilled - there's Aunt Ernestine's provision for your future education at a good university to consider - she probably won't shell out for an MA in Applied Magic, despite her membership in the Theosophic Society. They want to present you to the acquaintances as a future doctor, barrister, dentist, whatever. Even a lowly accountant would be more respectable than a... wizard?

But the old-timer keeps talking and talking and finally they seem to come around. Heck, he probably put a spell on them, or it was the only way to shut him up.

The next day they tell you about it, leave the decision to you, actually. Smeltings Public School for Boys, or Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? Hell, you're eleven, you read too much, dream too often and you really don't have friends to speak of. What would you choose? Yeah, me too!

~ ~ ~

Then the weirdos send some bloke to take you to their magical headquarters or somesuch, Diagon Alley. 'Bloke' actually is a euphemism for 'huge enough to put a block of flats to shame'. He'd probably be able to eat you in three bites, but is kind of all right, in a gruff way. Parents nearly have a heart attack, though.

You exchange money with a couple of rat, man and rat trap crossover Tolkien rejects. You buy a pile of strange books, a box full of disgusting potion ingredients and a bleeding cauldron of all things. You had to read Macbeth in school, and you swear you'll be damned before you dance around it spouting weird prophecies in blank verse!

Of course, Lousy, your cat, isn't good enough for your new school. You have to have a magical animal. So you buy an owl. Everybody seems to have one, and it makes the huge guy happy. Clutching your train ticket, you return home.

~ ~ ~

Two weeks later, you stand in the late morning bustle of London's King's Cross Station, surrounded by hundreds of eager travellers - ok, make that frustrated travellers considering the quality of the British rail system - with a trunk on a trolley, an owl in a cage, and not the slightest idea where to go. There just is no bloody Platform 9 3/4, and of course bloody nobody bothered to tell you how to get onto it even if there happened to be one. You start searching. You continue searching. You search some more.

You panic. You're close to tears. You're in tears.

At last you notice another boy with a trunk on a trolley, a rat in a cage, and you summon up all your courage and ask him about the Hogwarts Express. You're told to fuck off back into the Muggle world, disgusting Mudblood! Speechless, you watch him disappear through a wall. Finally, you follow.

~ ~ ~

The train is scarlet, old-fashioned and crowded with pupils, most of them much bigger than you. They all seem to know each other, and a lot about magic, too. You cling to your seat, quieter than ever, and try not to get yourself noticed. Finally one of the prefects tells you you've almost reached your destination, and you'd better change into your robes. You do, glad there's no mirror. What's it with the black robes, anyway? Satanic conspiracy trainee camp? Better not even think about the pointed hat!

The castle is... impressive, truly. A monstrosity the collective assembly of Hammer Film Producers would sell their souls for, including an inbuilt fog machine. Ok, maybe it's because of all the rain. Although you don't get why they ship the new first years in flimsy boats over a bottomless, icy lake in the pouring rain, while everybody else gets the comfortable carriages. Probably to point out at the very beginning that Hogwarts is slightly preferable to death by water...

A drowned rat in the company of a crowd of other drowned rats you file into the Great Hall. A ghost walks right through your shoulder. You scream, utterly creeped out. Laughter. Yes, this works a lot like shock therapy! Why, oh why, didn't you fill out the Smeltings application forms instead? The prospect of spending the next seven years at the same place as Vernon Dursley the arch-moron is beginning to look pretty good in comparison.

Having to sit on a stool in front of hundreds of people, all eyes on you, with a singing! hat on - well, all over - your head just about tops today's indignities. You hate attention. The frigging hat suddenly starts to mumble into your ear, and you jump again, violently enough to fall off the stool. More laughter. The filthy piece of headwear informs you that the house you'd be best suited for doesn't accept 'your kind', so you'd better be RAVENCLAW!

There's a whole tableful of them, but they're not such a bad lot. Restrained, polite, with a burning thirst for knowledge. Most know tons of things about things you've never heard about in your life. But don't worry, Muggle-borns catch up quickly, the older students reassure you. They like being nice to the nervous, quiet one. It makes them feel better. It makes you go even quieter.

~ ~ ~

It gets better from there, though. The food's a marvel. Your housemates are bearable. Classes are fascinating - well, at least those that are not outright frightening. You ace Charms and Astronomy, and do well enough in Transfiguration, even if the Deputy Headmistress tends to look at you as if you could have ended up in a better house. Or as a better person. Potions is worse. The Potions master looks at you in just the same way, except that to him it doesn't matter what kind of person you are. You've been born wrong. Nothing will ever make up for that.

Defence against the Dark Arts is the worst. Oh, it's easy enough to learn hexes and counter-hexes, jinxes and counter-jinxes, curses and counter-curses. Until you start to think. Think that they actually expect you to use these. To defend yourself, ideally, but still - have you ever reflected on what it really means to throw, say, "Incendio!" at an opponent who doesn't come up with a flame-freezing charm quickly enough? Not pretty! These tricks are the wizarding world's version of weapons, and they teach them to their beginners? At least in the Muggle world - well, in its more civilised enclaves anyway - they don't train fifth formers in the use of machine guns!

And the temptation to use the stuff is overwhelming. On the many who whisper 'Mudblood' behind your back, or the few who spit it into your face. On those who sabotage your class work with well-placed hexes or firecrackers flung into your cauldron. Mostly, however, on those who enjoy ambushing you in dark corridors, either with magic or brute force. Of course, some of it is ordinary stuff - exuberance, school rivalry, dislike plain and simple. A lot, however, is not. You're a Muggle-born who is actually good with magic, who is quiet but doesn't back down to the bullies just because they're calling themselves 'pureblood', and that means you have your plate full. So you use the hexes you've been taught until they back off a little. And you enjoy both.

But sometimes, at night with the moon shining through the tower windows, you sit on the blue-grey sheets of your overly posh four-poster, a random book in your lap, and think. And sometimes, it still feels wrong.

~ ~ ~

And then, there's the War. The magnified, real-life mirror image of your Hogwarts troubles. Evil guy wants to take over the world, or at least the magical world for starters. Wants to get rid of everybody who's not 'pure blooded', read: in the incestuous inner circle of inbred wizarding families. Has a bunch of masked and caped cronies who take care of the murdering and torturing for him. Sounds like a bad James Bond meets Apartheid plot to you? It is. Except that the good guys don't do such a hot-shot job in this movie. The best the old geezer - the one who got you into this - can do is keeping his world from dissolving into outright hysteria. While the bad guys are offing people left and right. Particularly Mudbloods. Like you.

It impacts on everyone at school. On those who get owls from home about family members who have died, killed by one or the other side. On those who have already chosen their side, and try to stick it to the other. On the teachers, who run some kind of secret resistance army-cum-spy network that's so clandestine even the first years discuss it openly in the Great Hall during breakfast. On you, when you hear for the umpteenth time that once the Dark Lord takes over, you'll be squished like a bug, just not as quickly.

~ ~ ~

The years pass, and you adjust. You do well enough in your classes. Oh, you're still the quiet, solitary one, but you've won the tolerance of your housemates and even the grudging respect of some of your enemies.

Over the holidays you return to the Muggle world, and wonder what to talk about with your family. You make them nervous. They make you feel like an alien. Not on purpose, of course, but the rift is visible, and it increases over time. Even Lousy, the cat, avoids you. Your cousins chat about their schools, teachers, career plans, about movies, dances, girls. You think about the war, Death Eaters and hexes, and shrink back into your chair whenever the attacks are mentioned that have spread into the Muggle world, where they are blamed on whatever blackguards dominate the day's tabloid headlines - the Communists, the Irish, the Arabs, the fucking CIA.

At night, you sit on your old bed, in your old room that hasn't changed since you were eleven, and wonder about where you belong.

~ ~ ~

Two days after your sixteenth birthday, you come out among the top of your year in the O.W.L.s, to the delight of most of your teachers. Of course it pisses off a lot of the pureblood faction who didn't do quite as well. By now, however, you're so used to the threats and insults that you hardly bat an eyelash. Instead, you sneak off with your housemates to the Three Broomsticks in Hogsmeade to celebrate. Yes, even Ravenclaws party when the occasion calls for it.

And that's where they get you. The Death Eaters. Such an abysmally stupid name in theory, so utterly frightening in practice. It's not the first Death Eater attack in Hogsmeade. It won't be the last. Just part of their ongoing campaign to terrify the wizarding populace into submission.

The Three Broomsticks is almost blasted apart by the force of their entrance. They throw a handful of lazy curses at the screaming, fleeing patrons. But it's you they point out and surround, wands drawn. The upstart Mudblood they want to make an example of. Perhaps your grades got a bit too good, or your enmity with one of their supporters at Hogwarts got a little too heated.

You never see their faces. At some point you wonder whether there are people you know behind the masks. The taunters, the insulters. You pray there a not. You cling to the hope that your schoolmates, no matter how despicable, would not do something like this to you. But deep, deep down, you don't believe it.

Left with no way out, you fight. For the first time, you use your curse arsenal in earnest, including the Incendio. You don't think, you just act. But of course it isn't enough. You're an excellent student, but not a duellist, particularly not against a group of experienced Death Eaters. They take you down. Drag you off to Merlin knows where. Then they revive you and start... hurting you.

You're not the heroic type. At first, you beg them to release you. Then you beg them not to kill you. How incredibly, unbelievably foolish!

And later, for a long, long time, you just beg for death.

It's the only one of your pleas they finally grant.

~ ~ ~

They drop off your broken, lifeless body in front of Hogwarts' main gate a week after the attack. It creates a greater public outcry than you'd have expected. Your Head of House gives you a moving memorial tribute. The Headmaster urges the student populace to face the dangers posed by the Dark Lord with courageous unity to honour your memory. Does he know that some of his charges had a hand in your abduction and torture? If he knows, he doesn't give a sign.

For a while, they remember you. But the war rages on, each week bringing new atrocities, and finally, they forget. You don't blame them. It's not a good memory to carry around. You'd like to forget, too, but you can't.

~ ~ ~

At last, the war ends. And through the following decade, the wizarding world holds its collective breath. And then it starts again. As you've always known it would.

* * *

Have they told you that ghosts can only haunt the place where they were killed? Bullshit! We can go wherever we have an emotional attachment. Well, only if we have enough of an axe to grind to stay around in the first place, of course. So it had to be Hogwarts.

No, don't creep backwards, girl. If you had the nerve to listen to this story from the beginning, you don't need to start worrying now. Revenge isn't my thing. I don't have so much an axe to grind as a point to make. That's why I hang around in this wretched castle and occasionally force my tale on one of the Muggle-born students who, like you, look... pensive.

As if they sometimes wonder, too.

Sometimes I notice the old geezer standing on a flight of stairs and looking at me sadly. Such infinite sadness. He never tries to interfere, although he could, with all the Defence against the Dark Arts experts at his disposal. He could have me exorcised in a heartbeat, but he doesn't. Because there's guilt in his eyes when he looks at me.

He got us into this, little one - because his side cannot survive without the help of Muggle-born witches and wizards, because the wizarding world as a whole would curl in on itself and wither away into stagnation without us. So they tell us about the wonders and the magic, and leave us to find out about the dangers only after we've been ensnared so thoroughly that leaving would be worse than chopping off a limb with our own hand. They court us and entice us, and forget to mention that accepting the invitation will place us right at the centre of the target, will put us on the very forefront of the war.

And that's what you have to know. That's why you've been standing here for half an hour, being cornered by a ghost who - like other people I could name - never seems to shut up.

No, to answer your question, I do not hate the old man. I might well have taken his side despite the danger. But I couldn't make that choice, even as a naive, romantic eleven-year old, because I did not know!

So think!

Before you are completely overwhelmed by all the wonders you see and experience, before the magic becomes an integral part of you, before the effortless power seduces you utterly, think.

Are you ready to pay the price? Will you face the monsters when they come to your door? Suffer the agonies of the damned? Die if you have to?

Think about it. Think hard. Stay if your heart tells you to, or leave without once looking back if you're wise.

I didn't have that choice, girl.

But you, you will!

~ finis ~