(I don't own Harry Potter.)
She was cold.
Her fingers were cold underneath the spilled sleeves of freshly laundered robes, as the hat tipped over her eyes and riffled through her thoughts like photographs in an album. It murmured pity and condolences like old greeting cards when it saw her mother, saw explosions and fire and a little girl's bare feet drenched in liquid that smoked and bubbled purple. She ignored it.
"Ravenclaw," the hat called out and when she took it off, her hands felt like ice and the stars in the enchanted ceiling burnt down upon her like fire. Blue and bronze were her new calling cards and she held them close.
She had hoped for friends. On her ceiling back home, she'd painted gold threads, painted swirls and eddies coming together, looping over themselves with the strokes of a paintbrush she'd never quite learnt to master.
She woke up with her trunk scribbled on and her new shoes missing, muffled titters echoing around the room as her new dorm-mates rushed to get ready for class. Things have a way of coming back to you, she thought, but it wasn't with clarity or thoughtfulness, it was with grim expectation and the thought of a spark in her wand that wasn't simply the exultant rush of her magic spilling forth.
She didn't react, not where they could see, and for a while, she thought perhaps that would dissuade them. It didn't. She skipped down the hallway in her socks and felt her earrings weigh down her ears. She shooed away the wrackspurts and copied down notes with a borrowed quill. She read all the old copies of the Quibbler she could find one evening, squirreled away in the corner of the library, and remembered her father when he wrote each article. Her fingers brushed the drawing she'd done when she was eight, her rendering of a nargle, and when the drawing went blurry, she pretended it was the print and not her own tears.
She was warm.
She thought her fingers would shake but they didn't when she signed her name, when she became a member of Dumbledore's Army. Her hands were warm inside her gloves and she felt her resolve burning somewhere deep where ridicule and Umbridge and You Know Who himself could never touch. She hexed her shoe laces so that the next time someone stole her shoes, they'd find themselves with burning palms and smoking wrists. A fifth year girl went to the Hospital Wing the next day, sniffling and red-cheeked. Her shoes remained untouched.
When she straddled a thestral and took to the sky, it felt like something had broken inside of her, but it was a good kind of breaking. She'd always wanted to fly. They called her brave after, but she ignored it. She'd just done what she thought was right, and that involved standing at the side of a boy with crooked glasses and a lightning bolt scar, a boy who found her shoes for her and glared at the boys who tried to take her book bag. A boy whose name was Harry, just Harry, and walked with her in the forest when she took treats for the thestrals and didn't call her "Loony."
She did it for him, but she did it for herself, too. She painted his face on her ceiling. Harry, Hermione, Ron, Neville, Ginny, maybe especially Ginny. They smile down at her from their tangle of golden threads, each swirl connecting them to the next, and then she paints herself there, too. For the first time in a long time, she considered herself a friend. She traces gold threads down her arms, unspooling in each cupped palm, and pretends there are stars glistening there when she looks down.