A/N: I came home last night and my younger brothers were ensconced in front of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. After the odd rapture about how cute they all look (don't they? Especially after you've just spent two hours in a movie theatre complaining about how badly Dan Radcliffe needs to shave?) the scene at King's Cross came on and I thought, the poor guard. People must do that to him all the time. Then I decided to write a quick fic from a train-guard's POV. So here we are. Enjoy!
-for you!
Jim Broyden woke up in a bad mood and wasn't quite sure why.
It's probably fair to say he wasn't the brightest star in the sky, so it wasn't until he was sitting down to breakfast and that crucial first cup of coffee that he looked up at the clock and saw the date.
September the first. Ah.
Every year on the first day of September some huge group of weirdos flocked to King's Cross station where he worked and took the piss out of the staff. He wondered every year how they managed to organise such a big gathering; there must be hundreds of people and it only got bigger every year. They'd been doing it for as long as anyone could remember, and Old Pete had been working the newspaper stand for nearly sixty years.
So as he stomped into the shower he knew perfectly well why he was cross. Tough titties if he wasn't in the mood to deal with a bunch of nut-jobs asking for Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. They'd been planning this all year and they sure as hell weren't going to put it off because some platform supervisor didn't feel like playing.
The thing was, it wasn't just one or two people coming up to him during the course of the day and asking directions to a platform that obviously didn't exist. It was that some of them didn't ask at all, just wandered about talking about it like it was definitely there, and Jim knew that platform staff had searched the entire building for anything that could be named Platform Nine and Three-Quarters and not found anything.
The only blessing was that after eleven all the weirdos disappeared. They seemed to just evaporate into thin air; no-one could ever discern what happened to them. One minute they were there, chatting at the tops of their irritating voices about Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, the next they were gone, and Jim Broyden wasn't sorry at all.
And as if the whole nine-and-three-quarters thing wasn't enough, that wasn't the only thing. It was usually the timid ones who approached the guards, little boys and girls who looked hardly older than eleven, young parents, grandparents. Not the real weirdos, they strolled about like they owned the place. The ones who approached him and asked – often ever-so-politely and innocently – if he could maybe direct them to platform Nine and Three-Quarters please, usually went on to mention something called Hogwarts and possibly even the word 'witch' or 'wizard'. That was usually when Jim threatened to call security.
But the others, the bold ones, they dressed in funny clothes and brought their funny pets in their funny cages, and their funny children would all have huge old trunks and suitcases like they were going on some boot-camp for psychos. And the words they used – Jim was positive he didn't want to know what a Muggle was, because the number of times someone has thrown him an odd look and muttered it out of the corner of their mouth doesn't bear talking about. And the worst thing was that they all seemed to know each other, these extreme types, like everyone was all one big extended family here for the annual get-together. A get-together at King's Cross Station? It was ridiculous.
Jim wife thought they were all mad. Not the weirdos, mind, she had a good laugh at them; it was him and the other staff she scolded. When she heard about the people who trolled the internet looking for mentions of the words 'platform nine and three quarters', 'hogwarts' or 'muggle' in case they were organising it through Facebook or something she lay down on her bed and laughed.
He'd been rather cross about that. It was all very well for someone who wasn't there to laugh at the folly of the staff, but obviously they weren't there. This wasn't just a random prank like ringing up Pizza Hutt and asking for a pizza with grapes; this was large-scale, highly organised, and somehow made to look completely random. It was uncanny was what it was. It creeped everyone out.
Jim put his mug and plate in the dishwasher and picked up his hat; his wife walked into the room, saw his face – like thunder, it was – and frowned. "Jim," she said sternly. He scowled. "What's the matter?"
He gestured towards the clock. "September the first."
She frowned for a moment longer, then she realised what he was grumpy about and gave a little giggle. "Oh," she said teasingly. "That time of year again." He held his scowl in place for a while and so she wiped the smirk off her sweet face and went to rub his back soothingly. "Hey," she said softly. "Don't let it bother you, love. They're just kids and pranksters and layabouts. Ignore them."
He nodded dutifully, like he always did, but his mood didn't lighten as he left the house. Kids and pranksters and layabouts didn't have the brains for large-scale, long-running operations like this. It was creepy.
Maybe he'd commission another search this quarter. Or hire someone to watch the strangers in cloaks and pointy hats and find out where they all went after eleven. One day, he thought to himself – one day he was going to get the better of these weirdos.