Author's Note
Look who's completed the first chapter of her Potter Omens fic instead of studying for her midterms! …I'm sure I'll regret it this weekend when I have to do all the schoolwork that's piled up, but hey, why write essays when you can write fanfiction, right?
Here's the thing: I plan on this being a rather lengthy multi-chapter story, and while I have it all plotted out in my head this is all I've actually written up so far. And assuming I'll be a good little college student from now on and put homework before this, updates will likely be extremely sporadic. Therefore, here's my disclaimer: I wouldn't suggest beginning this now unless you're okay with waiting a while for the next installment. But I promise, I firmly intend finish this fic—just about the only thing that could stop me from completing it is death (and perhaps not even death: if need be, my ghost-self will just have to rise from its grave to finish this darn thing)—it just might take me a while.
One reason for posting this chapter now instead of waiting till I have more written is that I'd really appreciate some feedback! I know, I know, same old story, the writer whining for more reviews—but carving out a patch of Hogwarts that supports the characters of Good Omens has proven to be quite a challenge for me, and I really would love to hear what I'm doing right or wrong. If something seems off to you, or if you have suggestions for anything, let me know and I can fix it in chapters down the line!
Oh, and another thing, I came up with the title in a spurt of desperation; don't be surprised if I change it soon (please, brain, please come up with something better…)
Anyway, this longwinded author's note is finally nearing its conclusion. Whew. This story takes place in what in J. K. Rowling's masterful series is Harry's third year; thus many of the events of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban are alluded to. Crowley and Aziraphale are in their fifth year. Hope you enjoy!
As the Hogwarts Express pulled out from Platform 9 and ¾ with a hiss of steam and an earsplitting blast from its whistle, Crowley slouched sullenly in his seat across from Aziraphale. He was glaring out the window through dark-tinted sunglasses, inwardly seething at his own idiocy.
Aziraphale seemed oblivious to the Gryffindor's bad mood. He hadn't stopped talking since they'd been reunited in the station, and if Crowley weren't too busy brooding, he'd have been wondering whether his friend were even pausing between words for air.
"Now, fifth year is when things get serious," Aziraphale was saying at that moment. "I've drawn up study schedules for us both so that we can get to work on OWL preparations right away…"
Crowley wasn't listening. His mind was fuming at him, over and over: "You fool. Of all the idiotic notions…you stupid, ridiculous, fool."
He'd been eager to see Aziraphale again, of course—after all, a whole summer is a long time to go without seeing your best friend. He'd arrived at King's Cross with his trunk and his owl and looked around for the short little Ravenclaw with the unruly curls—and found himself gazing not down but straight into Aziraphale's sparkling eyes. The bastard seemed to have had his growth spurt at last over break; he was now almost exactly the same height as Crowley.
Excitable as ever, Az had swept his friend into a hug, and Crowley was suddenly hyper-aware of every point of contact: of Aziraphale's robes tangling with his own, of Aziraphale's hands against his shoulder blades and Aziraphale's hair tickling his ear.
The Ravenclaw had pulled back and beamed at Crowley, whose reeling mind fell back on his customary nonchalance.
"Wow, you've gotten tall, Az. You get zapped by an engorgement charm or something?"
As the train huffed out of King's Cross and London fell away, the view from the window opened onto a serene, unsullied stretch of English countryside. Lulled by the rhythmic cadence of the wheels clattering away along the tracks below, Crowley felt the shock of his realization gradually subside.
Fancy his best friend? Fancy Aziraphale? No. It was absurd. It would pass—he'd make sure it did.
He allowed himself to relax, loosening muscles he hadn't even realized he'd tensed and straightening up a little in his seat to flash Aziraphale a devilish grin.
"Honestly, Az, it's not even the first day of classes yet—do you really need to worry about studying already? If you jabber on any longer about school, I'll hex you and you can spend the rest of the trip stuffed in the luggage rack."
They spent the next few hours swapping stories about their respective summers. As they conversed, the world outside the train grew shadowy and then black as the clouds grew thicker and stormier above the rolling fields of Northern England and then of Scotland. Rain lashed out against the windows, but inside the car was cozy and bathed in the warm golden glow of the lamps.
Aziraphale had gone on holiday in France with his family, and Crowley got a kick out of hearing the various proceedings of muggle life ("But how does something that big stay up in the air without magic? And with a whole load of people in it too! Nah, it's gotta be magic." "Packing by hand, cleaning by hand, no spells to keep the sand out of your hair or the water out of your eyes on the beach—you sure this was a holiday? Sounds more like torture to me.")
Crowley had spent the summer at his less-than-sane grandfather's manor in Northern England. He spent almost all of his breaks there—his father was, well, who knew where, and his mum was an auror and therefore rarely home to take care of him.
He managed to send Aziraphale into hysterics with his recounting of the night his grandfather coerced him into venturing out under a full moon to hunt for "seleniradesecens toadstools" in the bogs. Before finding a single one of the glowing mushrooms—which Crowley was almost certain didn't actually exist in the first place—they'd been assailed by a swarm of doxies. ("He's absolutely barmy, I tell you. And I kept finding more doxy bites in awkward places for at least a week afterward.")
His animated retelling of the evening his granddad had accidently mixed a babbling beverage into their supper's stew was interrupted by the compartment door sliding open.
In glided a graceful girl with sharp features; she had a glint in her eyes that suggested she knew far more about everything and everyone than was entirely decent. An exquisite jade pin* swept her glossy black hair back from her face and complimented the green of the Slytherin insignia on her robes. Following her came a tall, gangly boy with too-long limbs and features even darker than his companion's. He stumbled on the threshold, almost careening into the girl but catching himself just in time.
"Anathema, Newton, nice to see you!" said Crowley, grinning at the newcomers.
"Crowley. Aziraphale," the Slytherin said in way of greeting, bobbing her sharp chin in the direction of each as she said their names. "Mind if we join you?"
"Not at all," said Aziraphale warmly. He gestured to the badges clearly visible on both their chests. "I see you were both made prefects. Congratulations!"
"I'm a bit surprised you weren't, Aziraphale," said Newton, clumsily folding his limbs into the seat next to the Ravenclaw. "I can understand why they didn't pick you, Crowley—no offence—but Aziraphale has always been good about following the rules and all."
Anathema snorted as she slid fluidly into the seat beside Crowley. "They know better than to make someone like Aziraphale a prefect," she explained matter-of-factly. "He always has his head in the clouds, or his nose in a book. He could walk past students having an all-out duel and not even notice the jinxes whizzing over his head, let alone have the inclination to put a stop to it."
She paused, and her eyes flashed Aziraphale a meaningful look that sent a strange chill down his spine. "Plus," she added, a mysterious and utterly unnerving smile playing along her lips, "our respectable little Ravenclaw is going to be getting up to a quite a lot of mischief this year."
An uncomfortable silence settled briefly over the compartment. Crowley glanced at Newt, who gave him an apologetic look, as if to say, You know I don't have any more idea where she gets this stuff than you do.
Aziraphale was the one who broke it, looking miffed. "Well, I can't imagine what sort of 'mischief' you expect me to be planning on, Anathema," he huffed. "It's our fifth year, and in case you lot have forgotten we have our OWLs, a test that will decide our entire futures, in spring. So I don't know about you, but I for one will be much too busy studying to make any trouble."
Crowley could scarcely keep from sniggering at the excessively severe expression on his friend's face. Aziraphale finished his statement with a toss of his head that caused his curls to bounce vigorously and Crowley lost it.
"And what do you think is so funny?" Aziraphale snapped, thoroughly peeved now. He fixed the Gryffindor with a glowering look that reminded Crowley just how dangerous his harmless-looking friend could be; he sobered up immediately.
"Nothing at all, Az," he said smoothly, the very picture of sincerity. "I'm just so very happy to be among friends again, aren't we having a jolly time?"
Anathema threw a cushion at him. He seized it and whacked her over the head with it, cackling absurdly. Half-laughing, half-shrieking, she dove for another cushion to retaliate.
Newt quickly joined the fray, followed by Aziraphale, and soon enough the compartment was ringing with shrieks and thumps and peals of riotous laughter. Anyone passing by in the corridor outside would have thought it was full of immature first years, not four fifth years—and two of them prefects, no less.
Their roughhousing was interrupted abruptly.
As Crowley and Newton wrestled for control of a cushion and Aziraphale deflected Anathema's assault with a ludicrously hefty book, the lights suddenly flickered off, leaving them submerged in darkness.
"Mmmf. Ger-off me," came a muffled voice from underneath Newton.
"Sorry, Crowley," the gangly Hufflepuff said, awkwardly disentangling his long limbs from where he'd toppled over onto the disgruntled Gryffindor. "Why'd the lights go out?"
Everyone turned to Anathema. By this point it was second nature to all of them to consult her whenever something peculiar had happened; the prescient Slytherin often greeted such uncanny events with a disconcerting grin and a smug, "Saw that one coming a mile off."
This time, however, the silhouette that was Anathema in the dense blanket of darkness merely shrugged. "I…don't know," she said, sounding as surprised as they were to find herself without an answer.
"The train's stopped," Aziraphale stated calmly, and suddenly they all noticed what they hadn't before—during their tussle, the rhythmic movement beneath their feet had slowed and shuddered to a halt. No longer could they hear the heaving of the pistons and the rattling of the wheels. There was a deathly hush over everything, a silence so heavy it was nearly palpable, broken only by the moaning of the wind and the rain beating relentlessly against the panes.
Aziraphale's tone had been one of composure, but Crowley knew his friend too well to fail to notice the tiny tremor in the Ravenclaw's voice. He felt his way past Newt to stand beside Aziraphale in the gloom, wordlessly passing a steadying arm over his shoulder.
"I'm sure it's nothing," he said, trying to reassure himself as well as the others. "They'll have things up and running again soon enough."
And then the temperature plummeted.
Crowley hated the cold. He found even mildly chilly days almost unbearable, bundling up into as many layers as he could get his hands on as soon as the first hint of frost crept over the Hogwarts grounds in late autumn. Once, when he'd been mountain climbing in northern Europe, he'd gotten terrible frostbite and nearly lost some fingers. That expedition had been the coldest he'd ever felt—but this was a completely different species of cold.
It was a cold so complete it seemed to penetrate far deeper than the skin, deeper even than the marrow of their bones. It sucked every last vestige of heat from their very chests, burrowing into their hearts like a worm of ice, gnawing out all traces of warmth and leaving an empty frozenness in its wake. Instinctively, Crowley's arm around Aziraphale tightened. He heard the Ravenclaw whimper.
Through the window of the compartment door, they could see spectral figures drifting through the corridor. Taller than any man, draped in ragged hoods and cloaks even blacker than the shadows all around them, even through the glass they emitted an aura for which Crowley's suddenly frozen brain could only find one word: Horror.
Thoughts were entering his head and congealing there, suspended ruthlessly in the icy tundra of his mind—memories that he'd never dared to dwell upon. He felt sick, and numb, and horribly, horribly miserable; the only thing keeping him on his feet was Aziraphale. They clung to each other, and Newt and Anathema in the darkness did the same. The four of them watched, immobile, as one of the horrifying beings paused outside their compartment.
As in a nightmare, Crowley willed his body to move, to lock the bloody door, to do anything, but his limbs, drenched with that potent, probing cold, refused to budge. An ashen hand protruded from beneath the ink-black robe, scabbed and bloated like that of a waterlogged corpse, and raised itself to slide the door open. The four of them looked on helplessly, eyes wide and awful memories drowning out all other thought.
And then, from the midst of the overwhelming darkness, a light, blissfully bright, silver as the moon, burst into being. It charged down the corridor, slicing through the shadows like a sword through wood. The phantom figures fled at its approach, sliding away like so much smoke wafted into oblivion by a purifying gust of wind.
The silver light melted away as soon as the last spectral form had fled from the train. Gradually, the lanterns above the luggage racks flickered back into life, chasing away all remnants of shadow.
The four companions released each other and, one by one, sank into their seats. They could hear the sound of other students moving about in the other cars, laughing shakily or murmuring comfort to each other, picking up fallen trunks and moving to other compartments to check on friends. Soon enough, the sound of the train coming back to life filled the compartment, and the floor shook once more with the steady cadence of the wheels clattering along the track, as the Hogwarts Express hurtled through the rain towards its destination once again.
"W-what were those things?" Newt finally asked, his voice weak and cracking on the last syllable.
"Dementors," Aziraphale said woodenly. Crowley didn't like the haunted look in his friend's eyes. He considered putting his arm back around the Ravenclaw, the way Newt still had his around Anathema's, but now that the immediate terror had passed he found he was too embarrassed to do so. "They feed off happiness," Aziraphale continued, and as he spoke Crowley was relieved to see a bit of life return to his gaze, " leaving you with nothing but despair. I—I have no idea how they ended up on the Hogwarts Express, though. They're supposed to guard Azkaban…perhaps it has to do with Black's escape?"
Anathema shifted, shrugging off Newton's arm as she stood.
"We're prefects now, we ought to be checking on everyone, making sure they're all right," she said.
"Oh, um, right," Newt said. He stood too. "We'll be back soon enough," he said to Aziraphale and Crowley, and trailed behind the Slytherin as she strode purposefully out into the corridor.
Crowley and Aziraphale were left in awkward silence.
"Er…they were here about Black's escape, you said?" Crowley said, just to break the silence. "Yeah, could be. And I wonder what that silver light thing was that scared them off..."
He glanced over at Aziraphale beside him and saw that the Ravenclaw was staring at him appraisingly, eyes keen and earnest through his thick spectacles. Crowley felt the back of his neck grow hot, and shifted in his seat. "…What?"
"Crowley, are you…you know, all right?" Aziraphale appeared suddenly embarrassed, but didn't look away. "I just mean, that, well…the dementors force you to relive your worst memories, and I know you've got some pretty, er, pretty bad ones—"
"I'm fine," Crowley snapped, harsher than he'd intended. "I'm fine, Az," he repeated, more gently. "It's over now, those bloody joy-suckers are gone, so what's the use in thinking about it anymore, right?"
Damn, he hated that look Aziraphale had, the one so overflowing with compassion and understanding that he didn't know how the Ravenclaw didn't explode with it. It was enough to make him puke.
"And you're okay, right, Azi?" he returned, a bit haltingly.
"Yes. You're right, of course, it's over now." To his relief, Aziraphale finally blinked and looked away to peer towards the corridor. "Hopefully Newton and Anathema can help calm down any younger students who need it, and we can all put this behind us."
"Terrible creatures though, yeah? What the hell's the Ministry thinking, letting them get away from Azkaban?"
They continued to converse in broken sentences, discussing Black, the murderous fugitive, and attempting to describe the feeling the dementors had instilled in them. They spoke less because they had something to say than because they feared the newly-unearthed memories that would float insidiously back into their thoughts if they were left in silence.
Anathema and Newt slipped back into the car soon enough, and they brought more information with them.
"The silver beam that made all the dementors go away? That was a patronus," Anathema said in lieu of greeting. "We popped our head into one car, and Harry Potter was passed out on the seat—"
"I thought he was dead for a second," Newton interrupted, "he was that pale—"
"Yeah, well, you must be blind because he was shaking like a leaf," Anathema scoffed. "Plus I definitely would've been alerted if something as big as the 'boy who lived' dying was about to occur."
"Are you ever going to tell us where you even get your information?" Crowley asked, but only out of habit.**
True to form, the Slytherin ignored his question, continuing as if she hadn't heard: "I feel bad for the poor kid, the whole school's going to be gossiping about his fit or whatever it was for the next week at least. But anyway, there was a teacher, our new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, I'd guess, in there with them; he'd cast the patronus, so there's that mystery cleared up. He had that coach under control, so we moved on to the next one—oh, but he gave us this to give to everyone, I saved a bit for you two…" She drew a tinfoil wrapper from her robes and unwrapped the last of what must have been a very large, very dense bar of chocolate. She broke it in half—it made a pleasantly crisp snapping sound—and handed a piece each to Crowley and Aziraphale.
"Just eat it, it really does help," Newt prompted, observing Crowley's questioning look.
Shrugging, Crowley placed the sliver of chocolate in his mouth—and felt the lingering chill, a residue of gloom that not even the relit lamps had been able to dispel, melt away. It was as if he'd forgotten that a numbing shard of ice wedged was in his heart, and it had been suddenly removed, allowing warmth to flow through his bloodstream into his limbs at last. It felt so good that he actually smiled, relaxing as the melancholy drained from his skin and also—he could have sworn—from his soul.
"Thank you, Anathema," Aziraphale said gratefully from beside him. "That feels much better."
By the time the Hogwarts Express had huffed into Hogsmeade Station, they had all more or less recovered. The incident had receded into memory, an ordeal that had occurred but was past now, and their limbs had lost their shakiness as they stood up to gather their trunks and pets and shuffle down the corridor and out into the chill of the rainy night.
They clambered into a stagecoach*** and settled in. Rainwater dripped from their robes onto the seats as they let themselves be driven down the long, muddy track towards the turrets and towers of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Footnotes
*The pin was more than just a pretty adornment—being descended from a line of sensible witches, Anathema knew better than to place the entirety of her faith in protective amulets and spells; keeping a knife on one's person never went amiss, in her experience.
**Anathema had been making her uncanny predictions since their first year and everyone was still clueless about how she made them—it wasn't tea leaves, or crystal balls, or tarot cards, or any of the standard divination methods, as far as they knew; though she was quite proficient in those as well.
***Crowley shuddered only a little bit at the skeletally gaunt equine creatures with the veiny gossamer wings and ghostly white eyes pulling them; he'd grown used to them by that point and had given up trying to convince Aziraphale they were really there.