Boys' Dormitories

[MadMadamMalfoy]

Image credit: hermionesclone


Just inside the door next to the statue of Rowena Ravenclaw is a pair of spiral staircases, the left of which leads to the boys’ dormitories. The dorms are assigned by year, and each door is clearly marked with a wooden plaque so there should be no danger of wandering into the wrong room.

Plush bronze-colored carpet lines the floors of the dorms. The dorms are furnished with four poster beds, enough for each student, and each bed has its own adjacent nightstand, complete with a drawer for storing books and spare studying supplies.The beds are topped with bronze-colored sheets, cozy midnight blue blankets, and two pillows in alternating blue and bronze pillowcases. A thick matching blue curtain surrounds each bed, perfect for pulling shut should you want some extra privacy.

Should you need some light, you need only open the similar blue curtains adorning the arched windows to let in warm sunlight or a calming starscape, depending on the time of day. The view really is spectacular from up here!

[Cassirin]

Mercer was IN AWE of his dorm. He was in awe of everything, but he was super duper in awe of this room. Number one, he had roommates and he wasn't related to any of them. Number two, it was all blue and bronze and birdy. Very thematic. Number three (was it three?), there were all sorts of things to look at, places to hide things, places to hide HIM in a rousing game of hide and seek.

He wasn't hiding now, though. Just putting his stuff away, and then he spotted the open space beneath his bed, and now he'd just pulled all blankets and pillows down there and made a little secret dark study nook. Not great for studying, since it was dark, but maybe he'd learn a light spell soon.

To anyone who came in, there was NO Mercer, but there was humming from under the bed, and a pair of socked feet scuffing the floor.

[Felixir]

One thing Milo had soon discovered was that this tower was not nearly as bad as the grounds or the Great Hall or the Entrance Hall or the train or most of the corridors or anywhere where people tended to gather in clusters or gaggles or crowds or swarms. He still felt uneasy up here, but it was closer to the previous worsts, and so an easier kind of uneasy.

If the tower didn't have such a terrible security system, it might have almost felt safe up here. As it would never actually be safe, it was for the best that it wouldn't ever feel that way.

He had been poking around the common room itself, finding what there was to be found and opening what there was to be opened, but mostly watching the door and seeing that it was just as easy to walk out as it was to walk in. Now Milo entered the dormitory, staring at his hands in consternation, when the humming brought his attention to the feet. Ser-en-dip-it-ous. Dropping down to a crouch, Milo tugged at one of the socks, to free its inhabitants. "I need toes," was his overly generous explanation. Ser-en-dip-it-toes.

If he were to remove his own socks, he might float away. They were high up enough that it was, in fact, extremely likely.

[Cassirin]

Mercer started when someone began to tug on his sock, the crown of his head striking the underside of his bunk. Wow. Ouch. The fort-under-the-bed went from being a perfect hideaway to being the place where he was concussed in a second.

He shoved himself out from under the bed, rubbing to top of his head. "Um? I have toes. I have ten toes. But they're mine. So... what would you plan to do with them?" He tugged his feet back under him and examined Milo's own socked feet. "You have some too. Why don't you use yours?"

[Felixir]

This was no good. It was very difficult to remove someone's sock when they were wriggling around and concussing themselves. Milo barely even got a good grip on it before-... Oh. Mercer.

"Because of my socks," he explained, falling back into a sitting position and pulling his feet under him. That was it, in terms of answers, but Milo had questions too. "Do you know if we have this dormitory until we leave, or do we move to a new one next year?" The order in which the doors had been labelled suggested they were set to keep this one, but Milo didn't actually know for sure, and it hadn't ever occurred to him to ask any of his family how this worked.

[Cassirin]

"I don't know? Are you thinking that maybe we should pull up the floorboards and hide our treasures here for the next seven years? Because I DID check already, and none of them are loose, so if there's a treasure already hidden here, it's not gonna be that easy." Mercer did NOT understand what Milo was on about, and while he had a hundred MILLION questions to ask, he was hyper focused on treasure at the moment.

Like... really, the only reason to care if this was their permanent dorm was if they needed to make sure no one else bothered their stuff for a duration. "Is my head bleeding?" He tilted his head down so Milo could check the top of it, his glasses sliding off his nose and dropping into his lap. "I have other socks, so you know. Ones I'm not wearing."

[Felixir]

Milo shook his head. He didn't have treasures. Not because Rose couldn't afford to get him nice things, but because there wasn't anything he treasured, at least not right now. He paused, and struggled for a moment, planning to explain what it was he was thinking about, but couldn't fit the thoughts into the right words. Which was fine; some thoughts weren't supposed to be forced out into the open. "Nail it down and curse it. The floorboards." Loose ones were no good. Maybe they could curse the door of the dormitory. Maybe with runes.

Milo gave Mercer's head a quick appraisal. "No," he said, fairly sure that was true, and was about to explain that it wasn't the socks - not Mercer's socks anyway - that mattered, when a new thought occurred to him. "It's the beds," he explained (that term used loosely) at last, springing to his feet, locating his trunk, and flipping it open. He grabbed the first writing materials he set eyes on - a green ballpoint pen, and The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1 - and turned back around. "But not entirely. Nothing is entirely."

[Cassirin]

Milo was cryptic, and Mercer might be a Ravenclaw, but he wasn't good at conversation hopping. Like he could handle riddles and puzzles and randomness, but this was a bit of all of those. "We're cursing the floorboards? With nails? Have you been talking to Suki lately?"

Mercer pulled himself up on the edge of his bed and watched the Milo scramble. "What about beds? Entirely beds? These are entirely beds. Look." He bounced up and down lightly. Beds were entirely beds. "Milo, I'm gonna need you to be a little more... chatty."

[Felixir]

Milo was not sure where these concepts had become lost in translation, but it happened often enough that he didn't bat an eyelid when Mercer jumbled it up. Or perhaps Milo had been the one to jumble it up, scrambling his words on their way from his brain to his mouth. That sometimes happened.

"I don't know." If Suki was Mitsuki, and recently was in the last few hours, then the answer was yes, but 'I don't know' was a safe answer, and a frequent fallback of Milo's. More frequent even than 'I know'.

Inviting himself over to Mercer's allegedly-entirely-bed, Milo sat beside him and flipped open the textbook to the first page where he had some space to work with, but then paused, unsure exactly how to proceed. So he looked at Mercer instead. "Why?" And then, after a moment's pause, "You mean about the weather?" Chattering chittering twittering, like birds. Only eagles didn't seem the twittering sort. "Was your father a Ravenclaw?"

[Cassirin]

"Why... because... because I don't know you very well yet, so I don't know exactly how you communicate, right? Like Cooper talks a certain way and he's easy to understand, but my sisters are different. And Suki is very hard to understand at first, right? RIGHT? So I just mean that my brain doesn't know how to follow your brain yet. But I'll figure it out. I'll make a map and follow it all the way to what you mean." Mercer knew he was babbling a little bit, but sometimes there was too much space and he liked to shove words into those spaces until they felt less... big.

"I don't mean about weather. I mean about all the stuff you're doing, just explain a little more?" Mercer bounced again, but he was watching the textbook that Milo was showing him. "My dad WAS a Ravenclaw. My mom. My brother. My grandmas. Aunt and uncle."

[Felixir]

Milo was quiet, absently blocking out various words on his chosen page, neutralising them. He didn't want anyone making maps of his brain, or following it from his words through his thoughts to get to his meanings. Milo himself couldn't do that, or rather, he definitely got lost in the other direction a lot of the time, but it never seemed to matter much when the only audience he was concerned with was himself. It was occasionally frustrating when nobody understood the important things he wanted to communicate.

He didn't like making explanations, and he also didn't like to explain why he didn't like it, but this mapping business needed to be forgotten. It would be much easier if Mercer would understand without knowing, but that seemed unlikely.

"Rose says I am limitless." That was all he said for a moment - pulling words back out of the spaces that Mercer had just filled up - and instead drew out seven vertical rectangles and labelled them, one to seven. "I want to know who's lived in this room, and for how long."

[Cassirin]

Mercer wasn't terribly self aware at this point in his life, and he didn't always take signals that he was making people uncomfortable with his incessant questions, but he could tell he wasn't getting anywhere by insisting on sensible answers. Maybe you just had to enjoy Milo as he was. Which was fun and interesting, so not bad at all.

"I'd like to be limitless. How does that feel?" Mercer peered at the drawing, poking to where they were on his bed. Helpful. "Maybe we could look at yearbooks to find who stayed in this room, but I don't know to tell who slept in which bed. I suppose people might carve their names underneath or... on a post?"

[Felixir]

How did it feel? That was another kind of question that Milo did not know how to answer. He had a net made of words and was using it to scoop out water made of thoughts and feelings and Things He Just Knew™ despite knowing that the two were not compatible.

"It feels like it always does," he said vaguely after a moment, and prodded Mercer's finger with the ink end of the pen. But Milo was already wilting, moments into the explanation, so now instead inked spiky patterns into the margins of the book. "This might have been your dad's dormitory. Or uncle's. Not your brother's unless they change every year, and I think they don't. Or unless you have another brother." One he didn't know about yet even. It could happen.

[Cassirin]

"Yeah!" Mercer was EXCITED about this thought, and he bounced hard on the mattress again in exclamation. Milo was a super genius. Was that the limitless thing? Having a brain that just expanded and grew until it touched everything the light touched? Beautiful mind stuff.

"So I can owl my dad and my Uncle Max and my... great-uncle Alec! And maybe my aunts and gran would know someone to contact for their years and years around them. I like that idea. We don't have to do any crazy sleuthing until we've talked to everyone we can first. Do you know anyone else we can ask?"

[Felixir]

Bobbing up and down slightly, on account of how hard Mercer was bouncing on the bed, Milo thought hard for a moment. Not about who he could ask - that part was easy and did not require much effort in thinking - but about who of those would be much help.

"My uncles. I don't need to owl." And, now that he thought about it, one might have the exact dates he needed about the only person he wanted to know about. Rose definitely would, but Milo already knew that writing to her via avian post was unlikely to ever happen. After a pause, he spoke again, neglecting to mention he had jumped from the track of owls and uncles and onto an entirely new one. "Do they lock the gates?"

[Cassirin]

"Are your uncles here?" Mercer was tempted to look under the bed, he was so surprised to hear that Milo could contact his uncles without an owl. That meant he could just talk to them any old time? Magically? Or... walk down the hall and...?

"They definitely lock the gates. This place is the uber safest of all safe spots in the entire world. Unless it isn't. It's all one or the other, I guess."

[Felixir]

Milo nodded. "Two in second year. One in sixth year. One in Slytherin." So they were here, but not right-here-here, but some were a closer-here than others. Milo didn't need to owl to ask them things, but it suddenly struck him that maybe he didn't want to go asking them too many questions, even though the figuring out he and Mercer were planning on doing was hardly the suspicious kind.

"Everywhere is the safest place unless it isn't, but not loose floorboards." And Mercer could have that one for free. Milo paused a moment, thoughts hovering somewhere in the region of the school gates and also in the process of climbing over them, but then he prodded Mercer right on the boniest part of his shoulder. "Do you know what's on the other side of the forest?"