Summary: It was a broken down old building in an age of space travel and flying cars to every Muggle that saw it. It was nothing special, except to one curious girl with no past or future.
A/N: I realize that nothing happened in 1998 called the Radicals' Revolution, but for my purposes, I have tweaked history to fit the storyline. Leave me alone about it.
"What's that thing over there?" Katie asked the salesman.
The man shaded his eyes with one hand and peered off in the direction his client had pointed. All he could see was an old abandoned building that had been there as long as he or anyone else could remember. The wood was rotting and breaking down and the records said that the place was hazardous to people.
"It's nothing," he told her lightly. "It's going to be torn down if the land doesn't sell soon."
Katie couldn't believe her ears. Tear down such a beautiful old castle? Why? She looked at the price the man had listed on his data pad. It was a bit steeper than she really wanted.
A few minutes and several offers later, Katie and the salesman had reached a deal. The salesman vanished the moment the sale was complete, leaving Katie totally on her own in the middle of her new property, staring up at the old castle.
"I wonder why this building has so little value to anyone," she murmured as she began trudging towards the building at the other end of the lake.
The castle had multiple towers with one sitting a fair distance from the main building. A small hut lay just outside of the forest's edge. Everything looked so strange to a girl used to gleaming cities and organized farmland. For some reason, no one had dared to touch this land in the process of making the world one big city. Everyone said it was cursed. Land rolled out around the castle for miles, utterly untouched by mankind for over a century. No one had dared to set foot on the land until Katie had come along.
Katie stepped up to the large perfectly preserved wooden doors leading into the castle. She shoved against the doors. They wouldn't budge. She shoved harder and the door began to move inward with a deep groan.
"Hello?" The call echoed off of the walls of a huge entrance hall. It looked as though someone had kept the place spotless. The floors were free of debris and the stairs and railings were uncovered by dust. Candles burned brightly in a chandelier and torches burned in their holders.
"Hello?" Katie called again.
"What—what's that?" a voice called out. "Hey, look, chaps! Some girl is here!"
"A girl you say?" another voice called back. "By Merlin's beard! There is someone here!"
"After all this time!" someone else said.
"Who are you?" Katie called into the emptiness of the hall.
"We are the inhabitants of the Hogwarts Gallery," yet another voice called to her.
"Hogwarts Gallery?" Katie looked around her wildly. She could see no one anywhere around her, just lines and lines of paintings on the walls. They moved, but looked so fake. The ones in her old home were so much better.
"Where are you?" she asked.
"We're in the paintings, dear," a kindly voice said from just above her head.
Katie spun around and stared at the picture. A stately looking woman sat on the back of a pawing horse. Katie's paintings had never talking, neither had her pictures.
"Why do you look so shocked, my dear?" the woman asked kindly. "We're just normal paintings."
"I've never seen a talking painting before," Katie managed.
"Really?" All of the painting people looked at each other in surprise.
"You must have seen one of our kind," the woman said. "We're everywhere."
Katie shook her head. "No talking paintings exist, except in the old stories."
"The old stories?" The painting people exchange glances yet again.
"The stories from the Radicals' Revolution of 1998," Katie explained. "They found strange paintings in an underground building. The pictures screamed as they were burned according to all of the records. The building was so strange, of course, that it was buried by explosives."
"The Ministry," the woman murmured solemnly.
"Did the old stories mention any people?" one of the other painting people asked.
Katie nodded. "A few do. They tell of people with dangerous powers fighting against revolutionaries. The stories are so strange though. They tell of an old woman, the last woman standing, who tried to escape by turning into a cat. There is also mention of a black-haired, green-eyed boy with a lightening bolt scar on his forehead that everyone seemed to rally around. The weirdest story is about a girl who vanished from plain view, never to be seen or heard from again."
The painting people exchanged more glances and the murmuring continued.
The woman on horseback studied Katie for a long time.
"You must be a witch," she said finally. "How else could you find this place?"
"A witch!?" Katie was in a panic. Even though the leaders of the Radicals' Revolution had been thrown from power, some still feared the ancient powers enough they would do anything to erase their existence.
"That's a good thing here," the woman told her in a reassuring tone. "This was once a school for your kind." She sighed sadly as she looked around her. "But it has been empty since the attack on the Ministry, the underground building in your old stories. Everyone perished in the fight for the power of fear is far stronger than even the strongest of our kind."
The other painting people nodded sadly. The hall was silent for a long moment.
"I suppose we should get you acquainted with Hogwarts, my dear," the woman said, brightening. "After all, you plan to stay a while. Don't you?"
Katie shrugged. "Sure, why not?"
The woman smiled brightly. "That's settled then! You may call me 'Evangelina.'"
"Er, thanks. My name's Katie," Katie told her.
"Excellent! Follow me, please," Evangelina told the young woman. She moved from painting to painting on her horse, through the halls and up stairs.
The first room she led Katie to was a huge hall with four long tables running the length of the room and a table at the far end of the room. Katie looked up and stared. There seemed to be no ceiling, rather a clear blue sky sat above her. An occasional cloud seemed to drift across the flat blue.
"This room was once filled with hundreds of young students, teachers, and ghosts," Evangelina said quietly. "It was the Great Hall, the Banquet Hall, the Yule Ballroom, whatever you wanted."
She led Katie deeper into the castle, showing her old classrooms and offices. They passed a small bit of swamp roped off in one of the corridors.
"Why is there a swamp there?" Katie asked a bit bewildered by its location.
Evangelina smiled sadly before replying, "Fred and George Weasley left a much larger swamp in this corridor before fleeing Hogwarts during the Ministry of Magic's reign of terror."
"Whatever happened to them?"
"Fred was killed by an explosion during the Final Battle against Voldemort, and George," her voice trailed off. "No one knows what happened to him exactly. It is suspected that he was killed during the attack on the Ministry during the Revolution."
She stopped before the portrait of a fat lady.
"Password?" the woman asked in a very tired voice.
"Now, now, Arabella," Evangelina scolded. "You know very well that there is no password any longer. Just let the girl in, she's living here now and should get acquainted with the whole castle."
The fat lady sighed and her portrait swung forward to reveal a doorway behind it.
"Where you are going, I cannot follow," Evangelina announced. "No danger awaits you there, only questions."
Katie nodded and stepped through the portrait hole. A short hall led into a room completely decorated in gold and maroon. A fire burned brightly in the hearth, bathing the room in gentle golden light. Against one wall was a trophy case with pictures of people in what appeared to be sporting gear. They were smiling and clapping each other on the back.
She peered closely at the moving pictures. Some of the images were in black-and-white, suggesting they were much older than most of the pictures. One picture in particular caught her eye. It was one of the more recent pictures, or so it seemed. It was so strange. Like de ja vu, only not.
"This is so weird," Katie muttered as she stared at the picture. Wearing the strange sporting gear was a girl who could have been Katie. The girl had the same straight brown hair and hazel eyes. A young man with short brown hair and dark brown eyes had one arm slung over her shoulder. They were laughing and poking each other.
Gingerly, Katie reached out and picked up the picture and turned it over in her hands. She slid off the back looking for a date and some bit of information about the people in the picture. On the back in neat, legible handwriting was the date October 29, 1992. All over the backing was the messy scrawled handwriting of at least two different people with a third person joining at the very end.
Stop poking me, Oliver Wood!
Why, Kates?
That's Katie Bell to you, Mr. Wood. At least until you stop poking me.
But you're so pretty when you're flustered, Katie, darling.
Oliver!
Oh stop it, you two! It's bad enough that we have to watch you flirt all through practice!
The mini conversation ended, but Katie stared in stunned silence at the words. The girl was Katie Bell. The girl looked exactly like her and had the same name. But then again, it could be purely coincidental. After all, Katie was a very common name for years and Bell was not an unusual name. But still . . .
Katie wandered slowly up the spiral staircase at on end of the room. She passed the door marked 'Boys' and continued up the stairs to a door marked 'Girls.' The door opened silently inward, allowing Katie and unobstructed view of the room. Different door branched out from the main room she had entered, each marked with a year. The rooms for years 1-6 were empty, but in room 7 Katie found trunks and suitcases sitting on the beds.
Of the five beds in the room, one had a double load of luggage.
"I'm so glad to see you back, Katie," a tiny voice said from behind a pile of trunks. "I was beginning to think you'd forgotten all about me."
Katie stared at the pile of trunks for a moment and then gingerly peered over the top. In the middle of the pile was a tiny figurine. It was the figurine of a young man who looked identical to the young man in the picture she had just been looking at. He was resting lightly in the center of a pillow with a tiny magazine.
"You have no idea how hard it is to read the same articles over and over for over two hundred years," said the young man, Oliver Katie's mind supplied. "I love Quidditch, but even I'm not that obsessed." He stood up and jumped over to a ladder, shimmying up to stand on the trunks at eye level with Katie.
Katie stared at the little man for several long minutes.
"I have got to cut back on my alcohol intake," Katie muttered under her breath. Apparently the one drink she'd had at her going away party had affected her more than she'd previously believed.
"Didn't you miss me at all?" the tiny Oliver asked, a bit of a Scottish accent beginning to show through.
"How could I?" Katie asked. "I didn't even know you existed until a moment ago."
Tiny Oliver looked hurt and turned to head back to his little "room."
"Look," Katie said, catching the figurine about the waist, "I don't exactly have many memories. I was found wandering the streets of London six years ago with no memory of who I was or where I'd come from. All I had was the name 'Katie Bell' in my head. There have been so many Katie Bells in the past two hundred years that the authorities finally gave up trying to identify me. I know nothing about my past and suddenly I arrive here where things seem so familiar and yet nothing looks familiar."
"So you don't know me?"
Katie shook her head. "I'm guessing you're the Oliver Wood mentioned in the picture downstairs."
Tiny Oliver nodded and then looked slightly guilty.
"Well, that's sort of true," Tiny Oliver admitted. "Actually I'm a toy of Oliver Wood that the real Oliver Wood gave you to remember him by while he was out on tour playing Quidditch. I'm just to give you someone to talk to until he gets back."
Katie lowered her open palm so the man could step onto it. The small Scotsman smiled gently at her, a smile that Katie was sure she would melt at if a real human had given it to her.
"So, can you show me around the place?" Katie asked.
"Sure can, love!" Oliver said excitedly. He clambered up her sleeve to rest on her shoulder, right next to her ear.