Four Ravenclaws, and One Little Bird (sorted too late)

I: Luna Lovegood

In seventh year, Luna enjoys reading, but considerably less so than her housemates. She wants to speak to them sometimes, but their eyes always end up flickering away and she remains silent. They are not like Harry, they do not pretend, and act polite, when they don't wish to speak to her. She almost doesn't mind.

Luna has grown tired of theories and plans and dry, dusty, immobile tomes. Her housemates hide behind their black and white pages, but Luna has seen too much to be entirely content. Luna has always seen too much, and understood too much and really, known too little.

Little white lines form ridges along her arms where Bellatrix's knife had cut into her skin. They are nothing like the paper cuts that flower on the other Ravenclaws' fingertips like little fireworks.

Luna closes her book and smiles her vague smile at nobody in particular.

II: Cho Chang

Cho grew up in a world muffled by walls of books and history—the house of her childhood had always seemed quiet, like a public library. Her muggle mother reads her the classics, a thousand years old or more, and her father is a magical historian, but his biography of the magical emperors of China reads incomplete, transparent and fractured in parts, and too convoluted in other parts. She won't tell her father, but she prefers the simplicity of Basho or Li Po.

Once, she made the mistake of asking Professor Binns about her father's dead kings. Cho was rewarded with an odd stare; Professor Binn's eyes had become unfocussed and uninterested, and muttered vaguely something about consulting the library, and "not my expertise".

She spends her first year at Hogwarts trying to somehow overcome her Ravenclaw-ness. Hogwarts might be a time to reinvent herself—to be the girl she never was: pretty and carefree and not so clever as to have her name in the record books. Cho succeeds (her parents had always to her that she could succeed at whatever goal she put her mind to).

Her first kiss is Theodore Nott (he always seemed lonely, and she likes the way his grey eyes tilt when he smiles at her). They are only in third year and they have not yet learnt the natural order of things, as history demands it.

Her first date is with Cedric. It was one hundred and seventy two days before his death and the second rise of the Dark Lord. She can no longer remember what it was that had made her agree to date him. Some things recede horribly with perspective, she thinks, but she cannot but feel a stab of regret.

After the fall of the Dark Lord, she returns to Hogwarts, and takes History of Magic. Professor Binns doesn't know a thing about anything, she decides. She ignores him and soars her way into the record books with the highest NEWTs in a century (privately she thinks it's because the examiners don't know any more than Binns). When Cho is thirty, she takes the teaching post at Hogwarts. The first years ask about the fine scar that runs across her cheek; Cho smiles and they never do reach the subject of Goblin Rebellions.

III: Moaning Myrtle

Myrtle wears glasses—the muggle children back home used to call her four eyes, but she never cared for them. She had friends: little Melissa with the longest pig-tails in the school and silent Ethan who would chatter endlessly after drinking his mother's special tea. Myrtle knew she was different—the bullies never could find her.

When Professor Dumbledore arrives on her doorstep one day and tells her she has a place at Hogwarts, she did not want to go. She did not want to leave her friends and her doddery, kind-hearted parents. Her magic would always be her own but her friends mightn't be. But Professor Dumbledore said: "You will be where you belong." Myrtle thought of her glasses and the bullies and she had smiled with a child's naivety. As though signing a contract, Professor Dumbledore pulls out his wand and with a wave transfigures Myrtle's ugly glasses into something beautiful and shining and new. Dumbledore's eyes twinkle and Myrtle holds out her hand for the booklist. She stares at her face in the mirror every day, and counts the days to September 1st.

IV: Helena Ravenclaw

Helena Ravenclaw never wanted to live in the shadow of her mother, but in her own way, she had always used it as a cover. No-one really sees her, they never see her father's eyes, or the fine fan of freckles across her nose. They only see her mother's blue-black hair and—"oh what a clever girl!"

If anyone asks (and no-one will because no-one ever does) Helena loves her father more. He is a plain man, pale haired and unthreatening. (Rowena has never been able to stand for competition.) Helena was bright and fiery and bitter, and when she had put on Godric's hat, it had fit snugly and told her what she already knew. Rowena had always loved the idea of a daughter more than Helena, but Helena didn't love only the idea of a mother.

Salazar Slytherine leaves when she is only eleven. It burns up her mother. Rowena now wears her diadem constantly, shut up in her library, endlessly, endlessly sketching and re-sketching the plans of Hogwarts, adding and taking away. Something doesn't add up: convexes where there should be concaves and hollows where there should have been substance. Helena sees the other two sometimes, and thinks that once they four were too intense for the world to hold them. (But now they are mere men and women.)

When the Baron stares at her with adoration in his ghost-grey eyes, she turns away—and, she won't give her heart away (not for flesh, nor blood, nor stone).

V: Albus Dumbledore

"The courage to do right, no matter what."

It sounds like an excuse, even to Albus. He remains adamant nonetheless.

"Twelve minutes he was under that thing," someone says, "it must have been the longest sorting ever!"

The Gryffindors seem pleased at the thought, and they welcome Albus with loud applause.

"What happened?" asks another first-year excitedly, her curiosity spilling over.

"Oh. We merely chatted," Albus allows his bright blue eyes to twinkle, "I suppose we were too caught up in conversation. Sorry to keep you all waiting." He remains mysterious (because secret-keeping has become a habit, he curses his mother and father, but it is too late, always too late).

And no-one asks more of this boy—auburn haired and brilliant, charitable, the solver of the world's problems. The Sorting Incidents only builds up Albus' mythology—the first in a long series of distinctions. He remains silent on the subject of all of them; smiling, blue eyes and candy have become his currency, his only currency. Can you bear those burdens you hold so dear, the Sorting Hat had asked him. And with something like relish he had replied, "Yes, yes."

It is the choices that matter: The Sorting Hat has outlasted them all, and what does it care for appearances?

Notes: Standard disclaimers apply. Any mistakes are mine. Also, Cho's section was inspired by another fanfiction which I read and can't remember the title of, which also involved Cho and History of Magic (if anyone knows that story please tell me!)