The Secrets We Leave Behind | George Weasley

Chapter 2

Hogwarts was certainly taking some getting used to. Not only was the place ginormous, but the moving staircases, disappearing doors, and paintings whose subjects could go in and out of the confines of their painting at will all made getting her barings of the place difficult to say the least.

She also had to get used to scheduled classes, as opposed to the randomly timed mentor sessions, indiscriminate bouts of wisdom the elders would dole out during their more generous moods, and the offhand lessons the kids gave each other on a new spell or potion they'd picked up. The way lessons were planned for an entire year seemed odd to her. How did the school decide when a student needed any particular knowledge? How did they decide that a 4th year needed to know a severing charm but a 5th year needed to know a silencing charm? It all seemed very arbitrary to Vivian.

Seeing as her transferred credits from her "old school" were shoddy at best (and were proving difficult to locate and verify as Professor McGonagall had told her when she handed Vivian her timetable at breakfast the first morning of classes), Vivian had a full schedule, much to her dismay, and more than a few classes she was nervous about.

Potions, Defense Against the Dark Arts, Herbology, and Care of Magical Creatures were all subjects Vivian could practice in her sleep, knew like the back of her hand. Practical subjects. Yes/no answer subjects. She was skilled enough at Transfiguration and Charms had never given her much difficulty in practice, but while Fred and George were giving her the rundown of Hogwarts' resident professors as they looked over her class schedule, they made a point to mention the excessive amount of essays that Professors McGonagall and Flitwick had assigned their respective classes last year in a way that did not fill her with optimism.

"Minnie loves a good essay," George had said to her as she walked with the twins to their shared Transfiguration class after breakfast that morning, "On the first day last year, she assigned us to three feet of parchment on the ethical ramifications of turning an inanimate object into an animate one. I spent hours on it and I still don't know exactly what I was talking about" he laughed, remembering the near incohesive essay he had turned in that earned him a Poor grade.

"That was nothing compared to Flitwick's four feet essay on the differences in spells resulting from casters with various accents," chimed in Fred, who did not mention that it was one of the many essays he decided not to do that year.

This had Vivian more than a little worried. She could cast a spell. She could brew a potion. Hell, she could turn a Mandrake into Fire Crab and tell you exactly how to harvest its shell.

What she could NOT do is explain why you had to move your hand in a U motion for that spell. Or why three drops of peppermint oil achieved the desired effect in a Calming Draught but four drops would send the ingester into uncontrollable sobbing.

She had, of course, learned these crucial distinctions as any witch worth her salt would. Either the hard way herself, through trial and error or because one of her mentors had told her, having themselves come to the conclusion by trial and error or the teachings of their own mentors. She wasn't sure if she could put pen to paper and put words to the facts that were second nature to her now and that she only knew instinctively.

Much to Vivian's relief, she was only assigned one paper the first week of classes- a one foot parchment assignment from the History of Magic Professor Binns on any magical historical event of our choosing. According to Binns, he used this essay to get to know his students every year (Vivian had to fight off an eye roll at this, not seeing how something that she'd been wholly uninvolved with would tell this man anything about her).

McGonagall had foregone the essay assignment, choosing to have the class focus on transfiguring the teacups in front of them into mice and back again, a task Vivian enthusiastically jumped into when Fred began bragging about his natural talent in the subject (Vivian was never one to back down from a little friendly competition).