Title: Seeing is Believing is Trouble
Rating: K+ (10+)
Summary: Maggie is a Muggleborn. She knows animals. Fresh off the Express for the first time, her skills are needed even before the Sorting.
Warnings: Descriptions of injury, blood-attracted animals, OFC, thestrals, canon-typical danger to children, post DH, EWE, unBeta'd
Maggie had only known she was a witch for two months.
(Well, if you'd asked her before the woman with the accent and pointed hat showed up, she'd have said she was special. In what way, exactly, might have been the part that stumped her, but…
C'mon! Being able to turn the ugly serving of Momma's mashed squash on her plate into chocolate biscuits? Her dog Chevy floating to the ground after the daft, slobbering mutt leapt out the third-story window after a cat? Those kinds of things didn't happen to normal people.
Maggie wasn't stupid. Without all the facts, maybe, but not stupid!)
She was a little tall for an eleven-year-old, with a round face, lightless curls that just touched her shoulders, and her father's grey eyes. She liked to read, disliked being around too many people at once, hated those who hurt others, and loved animals. The second and last were both fairly easy to facilitate on her parent's ranch, out among the animals and unbothered by the hired hands. She was most interested in Astronomy (only because Care of Magical Creatures was reserved for third years and older), and now had in her care a Great Horned owl she'd decided to call Domino, because – aside from the natural black lines curling around his eyes – the feathers inside those borders were all unanimously golden, giving the solid illusion of a domino face-mask. And she also was the proud owner of a 12 ¾ inch, inflexible hazel wand with a phoenix feather core, which had released a handful of beautiful curls of silver light when she'd taken it.
At the station, her parents had stared around nervously as they bid her farewell, though the presence of so many others – all with similar carts, and animals, and wands to her own – had made them less anxious. When she found her seat in an empty compartment, she'd waved down at them, and they'd waved back. Their shouted promises to owl her were lost in the roar of the departing train.
Maggie frowned to herself when three older students in blue and bronze asked if they could sit with her, but she could see no reason to turn them away. She was untrained, and they had (in all likelihood) been raised in this world, which gave them even more power over her. Thankfully, they all proceeded to bury their noses in their books, so her company was at least uninterested in engaging with her. She was amazed that they read the whole way there, but to each their own.
It was when she got off the train that things began to taste like chaos, and well-thought plans gone nonetheless wrong.
Boats had been pulled up to the lakeshore, and an impossibly large man had been in the process of calling for the first years. Assumedly, the youngest were to cross to the castle on the lake, while the older students were supposed to take the carriages… which were being pulled by what appeared to be, what, zombie Pegasi? That was slightly unsettling, if you asked Maggie, though based on the way they'd just been standing there this was a normal thing.
The reaction of many of the students – all of the oldest, most of the fourth and fifth, and a handful in all the youngest years – told a different story. There were shrieks from the least courageous girls, and angry shouts from boys who were trying and failing to hide their fear, and students who stopped dead and would move no farther, and only a few who walked near without flinching (some who didn't react at all, and others who were obviously confused by the commotion).
A passing fifth year in green and silver, face impassive but voice faintly strained, muttered in her hearing, "Thestrals? Those carriages were pulled by thestrals?! Those are bad omens!" He scoffed at a friend who tentatively questioned the luck of it, and cried, "Only the dead-touched can see them, didn't you pay attention in class? Of course they're bad omens!"
Well, that explained that. Maggie had been in the room last year when Uncle Bernie passed on in his sleep. The thought that such a memory could apply here was morbid, though she was distracted soon enough, when that same student firmly declared, "I refuse to go near them!"
It was said loudly indeed, and heads turned. Maggie watched as the hive mind hummed with thought, and then as the majority decided the lake was obviously a more comforting bet. The large man from before looked in turns stunned, confused, a little hurt, and mostly overwhelmed. Now his boats were being overrun with older students as well as younger. Maggie felt bad for him, and decided that it would hurt no one if she took a carriage.
She wasn't bothered (on the whole, anyway) by what the winged zombie-horses represented, and if her spot on a boat was taken by an older student, it was only right that she balance it out and take his or her seat. As she got closer, it became increasingly clear that it wasn't just the students unsettled by this turn of events: the (what had he called them, again? Thresals? Thestrals? Thesertals?) animals were snorting and stomping, wings and tails rustling with leathery creaks and swooping flicks. It was impossible to tell if their eyes were rolling, given the colorless white orbs they all had, but the overall manner was unmistakable.
Eventually, one outright whinnied (though, it was more a hunter's snarl than an herbivore's cry) and sprang away. It raced pell-mell down the path, kicking up dust with its hooves, and stirring air with wild pulses of its wings. It drug a clattering, empty carriage with it, which lifted off the ground for a moment as the thestral tried to take to the air, the door coming open and clapping nosily against the frame with every lurching step. More students screamed, even more backed bodily away, and those who'd clambered into a carriage tumbled out again, uncertainty and fear lighting their faces.
As close as she was to a carriage already, Maggie let her instincts take charge. The creatures were unsettling, no doubt… But it was all too clear that they were still animals, controlled by harness and path, and thus not as frightening as they might have been.
(Of course, months later, Maggie would be educated on many of the dangers of the wizarding world, and understand with a sick kind of horror just how much more dangerous magical Creatures could be than magical Beings, and just how dangerous what she did might have been… But in the space of a thought, with no other knowledge, she acted and did so well, and she couldn't bring herself to regret that.)
She grabbed the mane of the thestral tossing it's head nervously in front of her, for lack of reins or bridle, and applied her weight. The sudden tug was enough to convince the beast to drop its head, and Maggie felt a shiver run through her as she came eye-to-eye with a whiteness that she couldn't convince herself was as blind as it looked. Her pause was cause enough for the large head to try tossing again, and this time it caught her under the chin.
Unready for the blow, her teeth clacked hard on the lower lip she'd captured in thoughtless concentration earlier, before she had time to haul on it's mane again. It finally got the message, and settled with a low snort, but the damage had been done: coppery salt was filling her mouth and staining her teeth, spilling messy and red down her chin while her lip immediately started swelling. It was the sudden kind of hurting that blew the breath from her lungs like a bellows and dropped stars, bright shining from the sky, into her vision.
It was the careful swipe of a narrow, lizard-like tongue over the throbbing wound that snapped her back to reality with a gasp.
The thestral she had a grip on was breathing easier now, easily enough, if fact, to drink deep lungful's of the blood-stained air around her mouth in a distinctly carnivorous fashion. Glancing around, Maggie focused on the others and saw that they, too, were narrowing their attention to her and her wound. No more tossing head, swishing tails, snapping wings of discomfort… just an eerie laser-focus on the scent of blood. Her heart leapt in her chest in imitation of the one that had galloped off earlier.
Just as she had the creatures spell-bound, so too did they of her. She had no head for the wildly pointing, panicked students, or the man shouting out instructions with a heavy country bur. No one used magic, for fear of startling the thestrals into… partaking of the 'meal'; this wasn't even a dim concern in Maggie's mind, still so unused to the concept of daily magic as she was.
Again that tongue reached for her. This time, she saw it, and reacted: with the hand yet untangled in it's mane, she sharply thumped the glossy black (boney as hell) nose. As it blinked at her, still stunned, Maggie snapped with the same commanding tone she used on a misbehaving Chevy, "No! That's not yours! No!"
When it blew an annoyed snort in her face, she saw the wicked-sharp teeth which caged that offending tongue, and ignored them. The thestral had been handed ample time to bite her; it hadn't yet, so she had to believe it wouldn't unless she showed weakness. A quick glance around confirmed – by way of raised heads and pricked ears – she also had the attention of the herd.
Slowly, she untangled her hand. Freed from the girl, the thestral still did nothing more than watch her. She took an experimental step back. It huffed, but didn't charge her. She took another, wondering if the herd would let her get away. Maggie heaved a huff of her own when her main problem took a calm, measured, single step forward in response.
She glanced over her shoulder, measuring the length of the unfamiliar dirt path as well as she could in the twilight, and deemed it passable. Her experience at home was going to pay off, given she would have the endurance for this trek without getting too run down (hopefully not seeming like prey as long as she stayed steady and confident).
And then she began to walk backwards.
The herd immediately took point, drawn by the scent of her blood… and consequently hiding her from any potential line-of-sight for spells from (what had, at this point, become) the peanut gallery. In the moonlight, a liquid, uneven splash of black blood wove in and around the hoof-prints and wheel-tracks of her mesmerized charges, marking where they'd been. A couple of times, she had to thwap an aspiring thestral on the nose again, but mostly she found herself crooning encouragement to them, same as she would to the Muggle horses she'd had to exercise and feed and groom. It was going well; they were nearly up to the gates, without trouble.
Until a beam of spell-light from behind her narrowly missed her feet, falling in a bright but harmless burst to the ground between her and the herd. Maggie knew not to startle the strong stallions in the stables, lest she court bruise or broken bones. These were far more than Muggle stallions; was there no common sense in these people?!
The herd converged on her with screeches that lit the air in fingernail-scrapping decibals, and rearing to display sharp, dangerous hooves. Black, sleek bodies – deceptively warm, for all that they appeared to be literally skin and bones – pressed around her, still connected to their carriages, and also surprisingly protective. In the crush, she was barely jostled, though a fair number of lizard tongues took a furtive, anonymous taste of her still sluggishly-bleeding wound. Maggie rolled her eyes, but otherwise didn't object; as long as they weren't eating her, she could put up with a magical version of the same treatment that a naïve Chevy would have tried to administer in the same situation.
Once the herd had arranged itself in a manner that was pleasing, and the thestrals on the whole began to settle once more, confident that the girl who had gone from in charge to their charge wouldn't be harmed, Maggie set to work further soothing and easing troubled creatures. The feel of leathery wings was foreign and the sick thinness was still startling, but they stilled under her touch just like the show ponies back home.
Eventually, everyone got through the gates, and she was pushed and prodded and steered by bodies, gentle foreheads nudging, and fluttering wings, toward a dark copse of trees. The appearance – haggard, breathless, and weary – of the large man made the herd pause expectantly. She supposed he had a lot to do with them, if his presence didn't throw them, as rattled as they'd been this night.
"Yeh alright there, Miss?" he called.
"I'm fine. If you could tell me how to stop them from treating me like an injured foal, though, I'd appreciate it."
"Injured?!" he yelped. "Yer hurt?"
She pressed ginger fingers to her lip, testing. They came away only with drying flakes of blood. "I was. I'm not bleeding anymore, though. I think they liked it. They might be hungry."
"Might be hun-! Merlin." The poor man sounded strangled. She could see him drag a hand through his wild hair, and refused to consider what the fear of this man who knew this herd meant he'd expected to happen to her. "Ah—Ah'll be righ' back wi' the steaks. You jus' stay righ' there, an' don't move."
He returned in short order, and began to pass out chunks of raw meat. A head prodded her towards the offering, and Maggie glanced over her shoulder at the offending thestral. She really hoped it wouldn't be offended if she fed the piece to the thestral instead of eating it for herself. Plucking the offered piece out of the air (much to the man's stuttered, bitten off protests), she turned right around and did just that.
In moments, the meat was merely a bloody memory. Thankfully, her hand remained in one piece. Another thestral sniffed hopefully at her, even as it's companions had enough sense to head to the man. Sighing, she backed up just enough for the bucket he'd carried it all in to be within reach, and proceeded to assist with the feeding.
Soon enough, every herd member was sated. Movements became the lazy, slow affair of any contented, fed animal. Keeping a sharp eye on her – though, admittedly less sharp than in the beginning – the large man showed her how to divest their beasts' of their burden. Between the two of them, the harnesses were open, the carriages motionless, and the thestrals freed. Each gave a friendly growl or rumble as they passed, sniffing the man and nuzzling Maggie, into the darkness of the forest.
The man heaved a shuddering sigh, turned to her, and prodded her firmly in the direction of the castle. It was magnificent, and a view that she'd quite overlooked in all the commotion.
He began walking, saying as they went, "C'mon, then. Might's well get yer ter the other Pr'fessors sooner th'n later; th' Forbidd'n Forest's forbidd'n ter students. It'll be detention fer such reckl'ss b'havior, Ah'll bet; ye'll be bestin' the Weasley Twin's record, gettin' called on 'fore the Feast, even. Ah'll eat me own coat 'f yer not a Gryffindor, neither."
She had little idea who the Weasly Twins were, or what a detention in the magical world would be like, and she still didn't know how the Sorting (likely, considering the time, already done) was conducted. But…
"Th' name's Hagrid, by th' way. Rubeus Hagrid, Pr'fessor o' th' Care o' Magical Creatures class, 's'well as Keeper o' the Keys an' Grounds here at Hogwarts." He beamed brightly at her. "Ah'll eat me other coat 'f yeh don't get special permission ter come t' me classes early, considerin' yer skill wi' th' beasts, too. 'Mione'll be pleased ter see such potential!"
… But.
Maggie looked back at the Forest, and spotted a pair of wide eyes, unblinkingly reflecting the moonlight as they stared after her. Her lip throbbed desperately, and itched, too, from the dried blood. In front of her lay mysteries yet undiscovered (and detentions yet unserved) in a stone giant of a castle. And beside her walked a man who knew how to show her all she wanted out of life: how to care for animals.
An auspicious beginning it had not been. There were bound to be rumors and staring in her near future; she hadn't seen any of the older students act as she had. But things were certainly looking up.
"I'm Maggie. Madeline Stray, Muggleborn and animal-lover. So I think I might enjoy that very much indeed, Professor Hagrid."