HOGWARTS YEAR 1013
PART I: SALAZAR
There is a room in the castle that reveals itself only when it is needed most. It cannot be seen on any map or located by any spell. Once inside its occupants are kept safe, the room cares for them, providing them with everything they require—to be comfortable, to be satisfied, to be happy. The idea had been Salazar's, the others indulging him. Indulging his paranoia. Having a safe place to hide is very important to Salazar. It is, in fact, the reason that he is alive.
When he was six his mother woke him once in the middle of the night. There had been lots of yelling and people running about. Their whole family lived in one small cottage in the countryside. His brothers and cousins and uncles all worked the fields, while the women washed and sowed and cooked. The house was bursting with people and laughter and life. Salazar loved it. Loved all of them. But that night the shouting had not been drunken or joyous. It had been fearful.
"Come my darling, my sweet thing, come, come," his mother had cooed as she carried him out of the house and across the back lawn towards the small shed they used to store tools and dry meat. She had shoved around crates and other debris before laying a blanket on the ground in the corner and gesturing for him to lie down. Salazar had been too tired to ask questions.
"Sleep now darling," she'd kissed the top of his head. "Everything will be alright. But you must stay here, yes? No moving, no making any noise at all, not until I come get you okay? Sal?"
"M'kay momma," he'd slurred, already half asleep.
"Good boy."
He was vaguely aware of her moving things back to their places in front of him. Hiding him from view.
That was the last time he saw his mother.
The last time he saw any of his family.
The Muggle town a day's ride away had heard rumours about them. About what they were. As good Christians they could not allow such an abomination to continue. A family of witches and warlocks. Of devil worshippers.
Salazar would never know what happened exactly. Why his family hadn't used magic against them. Or if they had, why it had failed. He'd been asleep in the shed. And when he awoke his family was dead, their home smouldering in the sunrise. The flames not quite burnt out.
Having somewhere to hide is import to Salazar.
It is especially important in a place that is made for children. Hogwarts is alive—not just a building, but a living being that thinks and feels and acts. It is the protector of every child within its walls. A surrogate mother. Who will keep her children safe when the monsters come looking for them in the middle of the night. That is why he added the room to the school's plans, why he figured out the complicated Spell work required to make it possible. He spent months on it, so that it would be there incase of an emergency. When the students would need their mother most.
And yet, the first time the room was summoned, it was not by a frightened student in need of shelter. It was by two men, standing in a shadowy hallway, voices low and desperate, hands more so. It had given them a place to hide. To be together. To be safe—not from monsters necessarily, but from everyone else. Everyone who would never understand.
This is not the need Salazar had anticipated when he built the room. Not a need that had even occurred to him. And yet for years now, he had found himself here, standing in this room, created just for the two of them. He had stopped seeing this as a space of desperation, of last resort, and started thinking of it as home. A word he had not used since he was six years old.
He's looking at a painting of the night sky when he hears the door open behind him. Salazar has always loved the night. The stars. They hold the future in their orbits and Salazar is jealous. He wants nothing more than to reach out and steal their secrets.
