Chapter One
"Scorpius, where the hell are we going?"
With a sharp intake of breath, I rounded a tight corner, weaving my way as fast and unobtrusively as I could through a mob of students who were seemingly flocking to block my path.
"Scorpius!" the boy behind me shouted again, panting heavily. "Slow…the fuck … down…"
Paying no attention to his ignorant commands, I bounded upon the familiar bright red train, taking off down a narrow, carpeted corridor, and sliding open the door to the first compartment I happened to fall into. I grabbed William by his bony arm and dragged him in with me, and within a split-second we were propped up against the closed door, trying to remain as obscure as possible.
I regretted bringing him into this as soon as I heard his hard, jagged breathing that was sure to give us both away.
Making sure to glare pointedly at Will, I pressed my head up against the curtained window and listened. A set of padded footsteps rushed past our hiding place, stampeding down the rest of the corridor and finally diminishing to where we could no longer hear anything but our own hearts beating wildly against their rib cages.
Will poked his unruly mop of hair into a corner of the window, peering down both sides of the hallway.
"All clear," he reassured me, and I finally exhaled freely. He grinned to himself, evidently amused by all of this chaos. "You think she would have killed you?" He asked, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall of the compartment casually.
"I don't think her intelligence would permit her to cast anything beyond a nail-buffing spell," I responded honestly. William chuckled, shaking his wild, brown hair out of his eyes, and apparently deciding he hadn't pestered me enough for one morning.
"You could have at least remembered her name."
"No, I actually couldn't, obviously." His chiding was beginning to get on my nerves. "Besides, she's dim-witted enough. I'll bet you my inheritance she'll have a new love interest by next week."
"Wouldn't want to be throwing that in the air now, would we?" He replied simply.
He had a valid point.
I brushed past him, running a hand nonchalantly through my platinum hair, and stepped out of the small compartment.
"No wonder she wanted to strangle you," Will added unnecessarily from behind me.
"Oh, shut up."
William Rosier was, quite metaphorically, my blood brother. He was probably the first child I had laid eyes on in my own infancy, and throughout most of the experiences our families had required us to endure together, we had become best mates. Neither of us would probably admit to this - we bickered more than a quarrelsome couple consisting of a nagging wife and an opinionated husband – but through all the trials we had undergone, we had really only grown closer to each other.
It was he who followed me out of the train to stand on the platform of the Hogwarts Express, the vessel that would soon carry us to our final year of studies and classes that we would face as young witches and wizards. After this we would be abruptly deposited into the real world, like wild poultry being fired savagely into a pit of hungry lions.
Needless to say, I had been waiting for this moment my entire life.
Freedom was a term that, as I learned that year, was not to be taken lightly. As abstract as the concept may seem, once it is anchored in your reality for even the slightest amount of time, you will soon learn never to take it for granted again. When one is under the impression that they are "free," it changes their entire outlook on life. They are at the liberty to make their own mistakes and suffer the consequences for them, as opposed to hearing someone tell them that their mistakes have consequences. In essence, freedom has the power to liberate, but also to imprison.
If I had taken this nugget of wisdom to heart a little earlier on in the year, maybe things would have ended differently.
Maybe I could have even saved a life or two.
Platform 9 ¾ was the most prominent symbol of freedom I had encountered yet in my life. It not only signified my release from the dull, patronizing evenings I was required to spend with my father at dinner, the cold, stone manner that restrained me and isolated me from the rest of the world, and the torture of listening to my father as he met with his suspicious comrades in our library, knowing that their hushed tones were concealing some of the greatest secrets in the wizarding world, and that I would be executed for overhearing them. It also signified my return to the one place where I wouldn't be quarantined, or forced to sit in my room and read a book about newly evoked Ministry laws. There would actually be people my own age to talk to. Swarming around me like flies, greeting me everywhere I went, filling in the dull patches in conversations with their incessant noise and ensuring that I was never alone…
"Will," I said tensely, spotting another unwelcomingly familiar female face in the crowd. "Is that another one?"
"How am I supposed to know? You're the one who – "
BAM.
Before I could register what had just slammed into me, a trunk had spilled onto the ground, and its contents were rolling across the filthy floor of the station, entirely at the mercy of the witches and wizards trampling them underfoot. A tall, unfamiliar boy had leapt to the ground after them, offering useless apologies as he tried to collect rolling inkwells, potions flasks and scrolls of parchment, shoving them unceremoniously back into his trunk. I pulled myself up from the floor and wiped the soot off the front of my expensive slacks, only to notice that a crowd had formed around us, and judging by the shocked expressions of the onlookers, (most of whom happened to be first years,) they were expecting some sort of furious reaction out of me.
I looked around me, realizing that I was not half as infuriated as I expected myself to be. Perhaps my curiosity was outweighing my desire to wring the responsible man's neck at the moment. His possessions were strewn about the ground like ashes, some of them lying dangerously near the tracks to the Hogwarts Express. Much to the dismay of some of the younger students, I bent down to help him retrieve them. In fact, the crowd dispersed entirely when they understood that I was neither going to hex this boy, nor verbally abuse him publicly. He obviously didn't think I was going to do so either, which led me to believe that he wasn't at all familiar with the social customs of our school.
"I'm sorry," he mumbled under his breath, picking up a stack of photographs and piling them into his school trunk, almost nervously. I hardly ever accepted apologies from complete strangers, but this particular dimwit struck me as a rather intriguing individual. It was almost as though he didn't belong at a school with people like us.
"Forget it," I responded offhandedly, picking up a stack of photographs myself. I turned my head sideways to glance at the moving picture curiously.
At first I couldn't identify what exactly the photographer's target had been; it was a picture of the Great Hall during a mealtime, and a group of Slytherins were crowded around the long table strewn with various items of food.
And then I spotted my blonde head in the center of the photograph. I was sitting there, reading a sheet of paper with a look of intense curiosity on my face. Will was next to me, and my friend Josephine on my other side.
I flipped through the rest of the pictures piled haphazardly in the stack, and to my horror, found that I was the subject of these photographs as well. Pictures of me walking through the corridors, riding my broomstick, studying alone at the library, taking exams…Christ, how were those photographs even captured without my knowledge?
"Who the hell are you?" I demanded in an entirely different tone, rising to my feet and taxing him up and down, wondering what this boy was trying to pull. Was this a joke? Some sort of sick plan to humiliate me on the first day back?
"No one of your concern," He answered, standing up to face me. I could look at his dark face now, the firm jawline, high cheekbones and chocolate brown eyes that still were obscure in my memory. I had never seen him before in my life.
"Yeah, well it just became my concern." I threw down the stack of photographs harshly on the ground, reaching for my wand which was securely tucked away in my pocket.
So much for not giving the first years a performance.
"What are you playing at?" And when he didn't speak, I raised my voice. "Answer me!"
"Scorpius, I never meant for you to – "
"How the fuck do you know my name?"
"Just listen to me…" He took a step closer to me, his eyes gleaming with what appeared to be trepidation.
Before he had a chance to explain himself, however, a short girl with a long, black ponytail and medium-colored skin threw herself between us.
"Scorp, what are you doing?" she asked, looking nervously between me and the boy. She glanced down at the wand that was clenched in my fist, aimed at the boy who had just caused my stomach to wrench over backwards, and was making me feel more and more uneasy by the minute.
I was forced to take my eyes off him when she announced loudly that we were all getting on the train, and that the Slytherins were waiting in our usual compartment for me. She thrust a piece of parchment into my hands with a list of all the prefects the year on it, and then strode towards the train, expecting me to follow in her wake. However, when I looked back to see the boy who had been standing next to us a moment ago, he was gone.
"Jo, I need to talk to you," I spoke to the girl who was leading me down the narrow train corridor, which was now abuzz with activity.
"Can it wait? We have prefect duty, and as you'll recall, you're really in no position to be flouting responsibility this early on in the semester…" She was referring, of course, to that embarrassing encounter at the end of last year where I was caught screwing a girl in an empty classroom during the closing ceremonies by none other than Professor McGonnagall. Who just happens to be our Headmistress.
"It's about that boy on the platform, actually," I persisted, anxious to drop the subject I knew she would want to bring up sooner or later. "He… Oh, come here." I pulled her into an empty compartment and shut the sliding door behind us, just as I had with Will only minutes before.
"What?" She looked irritable, and I remembered how much I missed seeing Josephine Zabini angry with me over the summer. I recalled her twin brother Sabian giving me that exact same look before we parted last spring on more than indifferent terms.
I fixed my eyes on hers, straining my mind to come up with a reasonable explanation for all of this.
"He had… a stack full of pictures in his trunk… They were from all around Hogwarts, but…" I looked over my shoulder at the window, confirming that there were no meddlesome students sticking their noses into our conversation… "They were all of me. In potions class, in the common room, even playing Quidditch…"
Her face wrinkled in confusion; apparently this sounded just as odd to her as it did to me.
"Anyway," I continued, still staring into her puzzled, light hazel eyes. "It's even scarier because I've never seen this twat before in my life, and he's apparently been keeping tabs on me for the last 3 years."
"I didn't recognize him either." She narrowed her eyes, as if trying to recall a memory. "And you'd think we would have known if he went to Hogwarts with us. We don't exactly get new students every day."
"Why would he even go to the trouble? Seems like a lot of work, making sure to keep himself out of sight while he caught me off guard with his camera…"
"Maybe he just wanted to shag you," she said with an arched eyebrow, bringing back unwanted memories of something Sabian had said to me last year.
"See, this is why I confide in you, Jo. You always make me feel so much better…" She laughed at me and looked me straight in the eyes, tucking a piece of long, white-blond hair behind my ear.
"Free moral support is hard to pass up these days."
"Which is the only reason we're friends. The second you start charging, you can just say good-bye to that new broomstick my dad bought you for Christmas."
My mind was still reeling with the images I had just seen moments ago in the boy's trunk. Was it just my imagination? Had I hallucinated this entire ordeal for a lack of anything exciting happening in my life all summer? Or was there something this stranger was hiding from me that I needed to find out about?
"Come on," I said to Jo, sliding open the door to the compartment and stepping outside "Let's go find your brother."