[OPEN TO ALL] Turning To The Cauldron For Some Christmas Comfort

(Ooc: It's a long post so feel free to skip to the last paragraph before 'BANG' if you like, I just wanted to write - more for my own piece of mine - about why Bertie was at Hogwarts over Christmas).

For the first time in six years Bertie Nogard was spending Christmas at Hogwarts. Usually the Ravenclaw would pack his trunk, leave the common room and spend six hours on the Hogwarts Express before being collected from Kings Cross by his Mother and taken to the coastal town where he lived in Devonshire. However, this year was different. Unlike the previous years it wouldn't have just been his Mother collecting him from the station, no, there would be a man joining her. Bertie's Mother had recently found herself a boyfriend.

Given that Bertie was raised by a single mother she never had had the time to find a partner, never had time for dates or to work on a relationship. Her son had been her dedication and ever when he had turned out to be a wizard and gone off to Hogwarts Bertie's Mother hadn't ever thought of finding a partner a priority. She'd been on her own since Bertie was a baby and had managed fine without a man in her life.

However, towards the end of the summer that all changed. Bertie's Mother had gone to a friends wedding and met Timothy, a forty-something year old who couldn't be any more normal. So normal in fact that Timothy was a muggle. Not a single trace of magical blood ran through his veins and for that reason Bertie's Mother (who was a squib) had held back from confessing that her son was a wizard and studied at a school for magic. Instead she told him that, when Bertie left a week later for Hogwarts, her son was actually off to boarding school for he'd been rewarded a scholarship when he was younger.

Bertie wasn't overly bothered about this little white lie, if you could call it little, he understood why his Mother was keeping his magical abilities a secret. For a start the International Statue of Secrecy made it a criminal offence to inform muggles about magic and secondly the reason Bertie's Father left them when he was only a baby was because of the strange and peculiar things his son could do, so peculiar in fact that the only way to explain them was by confessing to Bertie Father that his son was a wizard - naturally this didn't go down very well, the man thought his fiancé was crazy (much like his son) and left the pair of them in fear. Bertie could only guess that this was the real reason that stopped his Mother confessing the truth about her son.

Of course Bertie's Mother hadn't asked her son to stay at Hogwarts over Christmas so that she could spend it with her boyfriend, in fact shed sent her son a series of letters begging for his return to Devonshire. However it was this time Bertie's turn to lie. The Ravenclaw, much to his own disheartening, told his Mother he had too much work to do now he was an NEWT student and would need to use the library over Christmas.

Not that this was entirely false, the Ravenclaw's work load had increased since the previous year, but the real reason Bertie didn't want to go home was because he didn't want to lie his way through Christmas. He hated lying. He'd always been raised to be honest, to tell the truth - something that had caused him to seem a bit of a snitch when he was younger - and so lying wasn't something Bertie felt comfortable doing. He'd gotten better over time but for an entire three weeks he would've had to come up with an elaborate tale about his life at boarding school. Not that this would have been difficult, Bertie did have a rather impressive imagination and could conjure a whole story in no time, but there was a difference between writing a story and pretending you had a different life. A difference that would only make Bertie worry that he would slip up and ruin his Mothers relationship, especially seeing as she appeared to have been so happy in her letters the past few months.

So it was now a week into the Christmas holidays, Hogwarts was quiet, strangely quiet, and Bertie was feeling a little homesick. It was this emotion that brought him to the potions classroom today. Bertie wasn't a Brewer, the practicality of potion making and having to prepare things in a certain way whilst monitoring the cauldron was multi tasking the Ravenclaw hated. In fact the only reason he'd managed to pass his OWL with a decent grade was thanks to Vivianna Varnes, a Slytherin graduate a few years older who'd become like a sister to Bertie during her time at Hogwarts.

Much like it was Bertie's first Christmas at Hogwarts it was also his first year at Hogwarts without the older Slytherin to keep him company. Vivianna had always been there when he'd needed her, there to hear his stories, there to re-integrate him back into school after four months in St Mungo's, she'd even been there when he'd found himself in a tight spot with Henrietta Finch. Hogwarts had felt like a second home because of Vivianna and now, homesick, he needed her more than ever.

Sadly, the only thing that he could do to put his mind at ease was brew a potion. There was something so bitter sweet about nostalgia. On the one hand Bertie wanted to run away from it but on the other it was comforting and to sit in the potions classroom at the desk where he would watch Vivianna cook up some crazy concoction on a Saturday afternoon was rather soothing.

That was until...

BANG!

Thanks to the warning bubbles Bertie had managed to duck beneath the table in time, only to find that his cauldron had melted around the rim and the sleeping draught he'd been making had splattered across the desk, onto the classroom and had even melted a hole in one of the legs of his stool, which now appeared to be lying like a log on the floor.

'Oh no.' Bertie sighed, staring in disbelief at the mess he'd made. At least he had all day to clean the mess up, after all, the castle was almost deserted so chances are nobody would need to use the classroom for anything.

Bethany wasn't exactly sure why she always ended up at Hogwarts over the holidays, but she sure did know it was boring. Hardly anyone else ever stayed, including the teachers. Nobody thought to organise any activities (she couldn't help thinking that a muggle school would have her day planned out from the moment she woke till she went to sleep) and so, Bethany tended to end up walking the hallways from one end of the school to the other.

That was how she heard the explosion. Well, she'd have described it as an explosion, but really it was just a loud noise. Since it was coming from the potions lab, she assumed something was exploding.

Should she approach or hurry away? Approaching might get her involved in a clean up, but hurrying away might make her look guilty. The Slytherin professors might be new, but they had that whole "don't cross me" vibe about them. Or maybe that was just Slytherins in general...

Maybe she was a sucker, but she preferred to call herself healthily curious. She was a Ravenclaw, after all.

"Nogard?"

Impressive. Being able to pronounce that name.

Bertie was a couple of years older than Bethany so she didn't know him that well, or even at all. Still, given he was in her house, she had a pretty good idea of what was going on here.

"Sooo," she slipped into the room, carefully skirting a puddle that would no doubt melt the rubber of her shoes. "Was it the hypothesis or the execution that was faulty?"