Author's Note: There was a question about Immortality, and I wanted to clarify.
Though somewhat similar, my wood-elves are in no way related to Tolkien's Moriquendi, Silvan, Sindarin…these are not Tolkien elves. I haven't even decided if they're Immortal, they may just be very long-lived. And Harry would have a shorter life-span than a full elf, but still inhumanly long.
- Now that that's done… -
Harry – he must get used to calling himself this, he thought – searched for an empty compartment he could read his books in, having already changed into his normal clothes and thrown a robe on over it.
"Can I sit here? Everywhere else is full," a redheaded, freckled boy asked in English.
"Sure," Harry said after a moment's search for acceptable slang.
"Changed already?" the boy observed belatedly. "D'you, er, think I should?" he questioned helplessly.
Harry shrugged. "I don't feel comfortable in Muggle clothes." This was true enough. "It's the seams, I think." He didn't offer more than that.
"Oh. Well. I'll let it be, then," his new compartment-mate decided. "Ron Weasley," he said firmly, sticking out a hand. Somewhat perplexed, Harry nodded.
His etiquette lessons returning belatedly, he shook the hand and introduced himself also. "Harry Potter." He'd been practicing that for the last three days so he wouldn't muck it up, and he'd probably just mucked it up anyway. "Pleasure to make your acquaintance," he added, dropping his hand to his lap when they'd finished the greeting ritual.
"Oh!" gasped Ron. "The pleasure's all mine, really. Harry Potter," he sighed whimsically. Harry raised his eyebrows. "Muggle clothes really bother you? But I thought you were raised by Muggles?"
"That's a rumor only," two voices put in. Harry had heard the door open, and known there were two new occupants, but he hadn't expected a chorus. Redheaded twins observed him quietly. Measuring, Harry thought.
"Fred," one began.
"And George," added the other.
"Weasley," they finished together. "Pleasure," they continued.
Harry smiled. "Is all mine," he cut them off. "Oma and Opa do that sometimes."
"They twins?" Ron asked miserably.
Harry laughed at that. "No, I certainly hope not. My grandparents."
All three boys went red at this.
"Wizards?" asked one twin – Fred, Harry thought, if they'd introduced themselves, and not his brother.
"Of a sort," Harry replied vaguely. "Helmuth's the only proper, living wizard in the family." He frowned, wondering how to describe that relationship. "He's technically my uncle, but I call him a brother, anyway. Of course, I was always closer to him and Jaeger and Maud than Johann and the rest of my aunt/sisters." He decided to drop that subject. "What about your family, Ron? Fred, George, and who else? You could sit, if you like," he said in an aside to the older boys, who decided they did like.
"Well, we may as well start at the top," George and Fred switched off.
"Mum n' Dad," Ron put in. "Dad works in the Ministry, Department of Misuse of Muggle Artifacts."
"The Ministry of Magic?" Harry asked in clarification, getting affirmatives.
"Mum's stayed home since she had Bill," Fred put in.
"Bill's the oldest," Ron admitted, with the same misery he'd asked about Harry's grandparents. "He's a curse-breaker for the Egypt branch of Gringotts. He's thirteen years older'n me, graduated Head Boy."
"Then Charlie," George added.
"Second oldest, graduated a couple years back. Works with dragons in Romania (even though he ought to be playing professional Quidditch, he was the Gryffindor team captain at Hogwarts.) Mum sends him a vat of burn-salve every Christmas and on his birthday, but he still runs out," Ron rolls his eyes.
"And Percy." All three boys hissed slightly at this name, like they'd been stung.
"Percy?" Harry asked.
"He just got Prefect, won't shut up about it. Real stickler for rules," Ron scowled.
"Fred and George," the twins repeated cheerily.
"Ugly, pranking gits," Ron elaborated on the names. "Can't leave a bloke alone for five minutes, love to badger and batter and bleedin' bloody-up anybody who holds still."
"We're Beaters on the Gryffindor House Quidditch team," Fred explained in a stage whisper.
"Ron didn't like that we used his Puffskein for practice."
Harry's stomach churned. "Did you kill it?" he demanded.
Bewildered, they glanced at each other.
"Just stunned it a bit. Mum didn't like that, though, so she let it go off in the woods."
Harry relaxed again. "Go on."
"Well, then there's Ickle Ronniekins!" the twins said with maddened glee.
"He's about your age,"
"'lot taller, though,"
"bit gangly, really,"
"freckly,"
"got dirt on his nose…" Ron rubbed his nose furiously at this.
"But he's a damn fine chess player."
"Got a big old heart, too."
"Finally," Ron cut them off in an odd voice. "We've got Ginny." His voice grew warmer. "Only girl in the lot. She's a year younger than us, but very bright, even if she's shy. Wants to come to school – it gets lonely at home, with everyone else off and only Mum there. It was bad enough for me the last two years, it'll probably be worse for her, because she hasn't got…well, her. No one her age lives anywhere near us."
Harry smiled sadly. "Jaeger talks about – Tigerlilie that way. My mum," he explained.
"I thought her name was just Lily?" Fred asked with deliberate tact.
"Tigerlilie's a pet name, mostly," he broke off, blinking. "They don't talk about her very often, with me, anyway."
"What about your dad?" Ron questioned, clearly curious.
Harry laughed again. "The 'Wizard-boy who took my daughter'? That's what Opa calls him. James Potter," he said, somewhat wistfully. "I'm afraid I don't know much about him at all, but he never met my mother's side of the family, that I know of. Speaking of Opa, I need to finish his letter – I said I would before I left Diagon Alley. Though I don't have my own owl…" he paused, deliberating.
"The school has a small flock of official ones, but the Headmaster reads mail from them, I think," George offered.
"Ah, good. Opa will probably end up sending that taube anyway," he trailed off, lost in thought again.
"Taube?" Fred asked.
"Oh, I meant 'dove.' Johann calls them that, so it kind of caught," Harry shrugged. He didn't want to explain knowing two forms of German, as well as a multitude of other languages. "He trains messenger doves."
"What kind?" questioned Ron.
"Oh…he has a colony of different breeds of turtle-doves, and another colony of – well." Harry stopped. "Don't you dare call him a pigeon-fancier. Pigeons are rats with wings, and his doves are dead useful. He would never keep one of those awful Rock Doves – that's your common pigeon."
The twins were instantly scandalized. "We'd never call him a pigeon-fancier!" one said innocently. The other nodded furiously.
"All the same. I'd rather not talk about Johann. He's nice enough, but he is going into the bleeding priesthood, and I don't think there's a soul in my family who's pleased over that. At least Helmuth works at St. Mungo's."
"Which department?" Ron asked reflexively.
"Special Victims," Harry answered after a moment's pause. "He's terribly good, too, taught me loads of healing magic, especially when he had summers and hols from the academy or whatever. Which is just as well, because I've got bloody awful luck with injuries. At least now I can heal my own."
"At Hogwarts, yeah," George sighed.
"They pass out advisories – y'know, 'Parents are reminded that students are not allowed to practice magic outside of school.' Dead annoying," Fred muttered angrily.
Harry hid his grin at this. Helmuth hadn't had any trouble performing elf-mage-craft the summer between his fifth and sixth, or sixth and seventh years (the only ones Harry could remember Helmuth being there during. "I've heard interesting things about the Forbidden Forest," Harry mentioned after a moment. "Do either of you know anything about it?" he asked the twins.
"Well," Fred began with some trepidation.
"This is only what we've heard, mind," George warned him.
Harry couldn't help laughing again. "You've been inside, don't bother lying."
Fred coughed. "Erm. There's a great bloody load of spiders, for one – they keep hidden, but they get huge. I've heard Hagrid, he's a half-giant groundskeeper of sorts, actually raised the father of the colony: a bleedin' acromantula. Then he brought a mate for it - which was really dead wrong of him, seeing as you're not s'posed to introduce new species into the wild. Other than the spiders, there're centaurs and unicorns and stuff like that. No matter what anyone says, there're no werewolves. Real wolves, maybe, but there's so many Ministry restrictions, a roaming werewolf can't get within miles of Hogwarts on a full moon."
"Any snakes?" questioned Harry eagerly.
"Except Slytherins, we've never seen a snake anywhere near Hogwarts. Still, we aren't the type to check the fauna when we go gallivanting. We don't even go into the forest very often, we usually go under it. There's loads of passages out of or into Hogwarts," they answered.
Harry sighed. "I like snakes, but they weren't on the approved list of pets, so I had to leave her at home."
"What'd you name yours?" asked George, curious.
The elf-prince started. "Snakes don't have names," he told the redheads as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. "They're solitary animals, they don't need names. You call them by their patterns. Only mammals and flock-birds have names, anyway," he waved the question off.
"Really?" Ron questioned. "How do you know?"
"I…oh, isn't it obvious?" he demanded. "Why would a creature that only meets its own kind to mate need a name? It could only be calling itself that, and why would it bother? That's a very silly question. But mammals keep their children with them for so long they need names, especially the ones who have litters or twins. You can't call four different children the same thing and expect them to know which one you're speaking to. Pack animals, like wolves, have names that change – when they're pups, it's silly names like Pouncer and Growlpup. But when they grow up it's names like Stubtail and Ragear. Of course, to a snake, all those names are silly."
"Why do you like snakes so much?" pestered Fred.
"I used to have nightmares about my parents. When my snake came, she chased the nightmares away."
"How?"
"Wrapped all around me like a living blanket," Harry smiled. "Oma screamed terribly. Everyone came, terrified that I'd been killed because of the way she was carrying on. My ears hurt for days. Maud still teases me."
George frowned slightly. "Is English your second language?"
Harry's head jerked up. "Ah…I'm really not supposed to tell anyone this…"
"We won't tell anyone, right, Ron?" Fred nudged his brother.
"Right," Ron nodded impatiently.
"Ja, Englisch ist mein zweite Sprache – my Oma and Opa don't speak English very well, they're from Germany."
"Oh," Fred mumbled. "Our mum still swears in Gaelic, even though she hasn't been to Ireland since she married Da," he offered.
Harry laughed. "Helmuth went to Ireland once on a sort of field trip – he was a bit disappointed, I think, that they didn't go to any forests. The whole family loves them – forests, I mean. The day I got my letter, a bunch of Muggles were going to cut down a bit of the forest near our house, and the whole family chained themselves to trees so they couldn't. It was…actually, kinda fun."
"Anything off the cart, dears?" a smiling witch asked them. The Weasleys frowned slightly.
"I'll buy," Harry shrugged. "Any suggestions? Never had much contact with wizarding candy, except the Chocolate Frogs that Helmuth's addicted to."
"Oh, you know Helmuth?" asked the witch, smiling even broader now.
"Yeah, he's kind of my uncle. Did you go to school with him?"
"Yes, then he went off to that Healing school, and I never did have much talent at medimagic," she sighed. "My name's Josephine, Josie Gooding. You tell Helmuth you saw me, and I'll give you four of everything for a quarter of the price."
Harry beamed. "Perfect. I'd've mentioned you anyway," he shrugged, pulling out several coins. "How much?"
The four of them gorged on various sweets, mostly unfamiliar to Harry. A boy with black dreadlocks swung by, introducing himself as Lee Jordan and dragging the twins out. After the twins left with Lee, and Ron decided to go ahead and change. While he was gone, a bushy-haired girl asked after some boy's toad, and a blond snob tried to persuade him to join his two flunkies and become a third. Harry laughed in his face.
"Draco Malfoy, are you? I've read about your family. Those that you can't buy off with bribery, you slander at every opportunity. Not exactly my kind of company. Besides, if you ever manage to figure out who my family is, you'll realize that I'm out of your league, Bad-Faith Dragon. Goodbye," he waved mockingly. "I was not born to be a lackey, so you can take your offers of 'friendship' and give them to other people until you actually want a friend."
Furiously, the blond left, his cloak twirling and his lackeys following dumbly. Ron returned and Harry didn't mention Draco Malfoy.
The train slowed not too long after nightfall. A booming voice called first-years to him. A large man who was clearly a half-giant introduced himself as Rubeus Hagrid, Keeper of Keys and Grounds at Hogwarts. He shooed the first-years into a small fleet of boats, but his large, black eyes caught on Harry. He lifted the half-elf up by the back of his cloak. "Hullo there," he rumbled.
Harry smiled enigmatically, and spoke two of the very few numbers of Giant he knew. "Greet, biggun." Biggun was really "Ga'nt," which was what Giants called their species and language. Greet was an all-purpose "Hello," the actual word being "Gyah."
Hagrid laughed a great, bellowing laugh, and returned it with, "Greet, littlun. Elfing?" "Littlun" of course, was Ba'nt – used to describe every beast or being that was smaller than a Giant. "Elfing" was actually "El'fring", an almost English contraction meaning "Elf-kin," or "Related to Elves."
"Half. Hushings. You?" Hushings was the best English translation for a Giant word that meant, roughly, "It's a secret, don't tell anyone." Hushings is used here, but the Ga'nt word is "Shuh," obviously in reference for the English "Sh" and Yiddish "Chah." "Half" is one of the very few numerical concepts that Giants use, their word for it being "Pell." "Pell-Ga" is more-than-half, "Pell-Ba" is less-than-half.
"Half," Hagrid agreed, setting Harry down. Ron quickly ran up, asking what that was all about. "Shuh!" Hagrid whispered roughly to Harry, who nodded firmly and refused to tell his new friend anything except that Hagrid was a nice fellow, and Harry was considering having tea with him in some vague point in the near future.
The boat ride to Hogwarts was quiet and tense. Ron and Harry shared their boat with the boy who had lost his toad, Neville, and the girl who had looked for it with him, Hermione. Hermione was rather insufferably bright. Harry frowned deeper and deeper as she babbled under her breath about spells and the Sorting and the number of staircases in Hogwarts.
"Hermione Granger, yes?" he asked after the boats were halfway there.
"Yes," she answered.
"While I'm pleased you've studied the school so extensively, and already have a rudimentary knowledge of magic and magical theory, there is a giant squid in this lake, and, though I love animals, I'm not in the mood to meet it just because you were so loud and fidgety it knocked the boat over in agitation," he told her softly. "Please keep your inner musings in your mind and not aloud."
She blushed and ducked her head. Ron punched his shoulder in a light, "Good-going" kind of gesture, which he glared at the redhead for. "I also don't intend to fall in on my own, Ron," he said pointedly. Hermione hid a grin, and Neville's mouth twitched in his round face. Harry smiled to, to let Ron know he wasn't really angry. Humans needed such reminders, he recalled from etiquette lessons. Elves would know simply by his eyes – but these weren't Elves, after all.
Slowly, the fleet made progress to the castle. Harry could appreciate the architecture in a vague way, but was not relishing the thought of spending twenty-one seasons sleeping in stones. His magic was perfectly adequate for an Elf, and he was positively sulky about brewing potions in a bloody dungeon, even if it would be easy as archery for him.
A stern woman answered the door after Hagrid's heavy knocking. She gave a lecture on the Houses that Harry didn't like much, either. Until today, he'd barely met anyone but family, and the idea that total strangers could become family was a foreign, improbable idea that made him nervous. What if the priests became Johann's family, or Helmuth's coworkers became his family? His mother's House must have been her family, since the Bright Goddess knew her Muggle family could never have understood her. She would have been talking to birds at the age of two if she progressed normally. That was when Harry had started, anyway.
Birds couldn't answer back properly (always talking about nuts and wings and moltings and silly bird things), like snakes, but they seemed to understand him well enough to know where he was sending them. They were too stupid for more than that, even if some of them did make pretty songs. He sighed, realizing that letting his mind wander hadn't distracted him from his discomfort.
Harry hadn't liked the look of the outside of the castle, and he liked the dark, dank cave of a room the first years were left to stew in even less. They were trying to make him more apprehensive, and he didn't like the drama of that, either. Ghosts came and startled most of the new students, and then the stern woman (McGonagall, the part of his mind that had paid attention whispered) came back and led them into a big hall with a ceiling bewitched to look like the sky.
There, at least, was something Harry could be pleased about. He smiled at the constellations and observed idly that the moon was waning again, almost gone. The severe McGonagall called named from a register in alphabetical order, after the hat on a stool opened its gob and sang. He settled back on his heels for a wait. Potter, after all, would come near the end. He easily figured out the names of the Houses and which table was which. Slytherins looked unsavory, all either big and mean-looking or small and sneaky-looking. The Ravenclaws were quiet and clever-seeming, curious as ravens.
Hufflepuffs welcomed everyone, and Gryffindors smiled and clapped for all their new additions, too. He noted that there were three redheads who looked similar, the twins included. A silver badge glinted from the third's chest – he must have been Percy.
"Potter, Harry," came the call of McGonagall, and Harry answered it, weaving to the front of the room. He easily heard the whispers from every corner, asking about his scar and his life and if he remembered, and they came from the professors, too, mentioning James over and over. He allowed the singing hat to be plopped on his head, and listened to the whisperings of the magical scrap-cloth.
The Sorting Hat's words were just as boring as McGonagall's speech had been, and his attention span was not particularly long for an Elf (a species with notoriously bad Attention Deficit Disorder.)
Harry crossed and uncrossed his ankles disinterestedly. The Hat muttered more furiously, talking about flagrant disregard, and finally called out "GRYFFINDOR."
The twins were chanting "We got Potter," and the rest of the table looked pleased as a punch, as did Professor McGonagall. Harry pulled off the hat, set it back down, and walked unconcernedly to his new House, sitting between Hermione (Granger, her last name had been called) and Neville (Longbottom, McGonagall had said.)
Ron was one of the last to be Sorted, and was positively ready to faint when he finally sat across from Harry at the Gryffindor table.
Headmaster Dumbledore forbid them from entering the third floor corridor and the Forbidden Forest, bade them to enjoy the feast, and said a few seemingly random words that were actually mild oaths in one of the more obscure languages Harry had learned. Well, he was mispronouncing them, but the words were certainly intentional.
The feast was large and impressive, but most of the dishes were too heavy for Harry's stomach – he had grown up in a largely vegetarian society, after all, which only killed animals when every part of the carcass would be used. Still, the poultry went down easily, since he'd always thought birds were more beak than brain, and there was plenty of fruit.
"Not much of a carnivore, are you, Harry?" Hermione smiled timidly. She, too, had only taken a wing from the platter of chicken parts.
"My family is mostly vegetarian," he shrugged. "We only eat meat on special occasions, like Christmas and Easter." What he meant was solstice holidays…but that would earn funny looks. "All life is sacred to us, and we try to use or sell every part of anything we kill."
"Why wouldn't you just buy some beef or something?" asked Neville.
Harry sighed. "Another aspect of our particular beliefs is that you should only eat what you can kill. That's part of the reason our forest is so sacred – we hunt there for deer, rabbit, and wild fowl, and fish in the streams."
Ron seemed to find this to be a daft way of thinking.
"Well, it's not for everyone," Harry added amenably as he finished his chicken delicately. Unlike the redhead, who had positively gorged himself and ended up eating the components of several birds in pairs, Harry preferred eating only one thing at a time.
Percy the Prefect stood when the meal was done, and led the first years to Gryffindor Tower. A portrait of a large woman in pink silk asked for the password – Percy gave it to her, "Caput Draconis." He directed the boys and girls to their dorm rooms and dropped his hand to Harry's shoulder to stay him.
"Your room is at the very top of the tower. Just keep climbing the stairs. Once I leave Hogwarts, you can have mine; it's warmer in the winter."
Harry bowed his head. "Thank you, Percy Weasley." They climbed the stairs together, and Percy waved him on as he disappeared behind a door.
The room at the top of the tower had a door with a vaguely elliptical shape. It was five and a half feet tall and curved everywhere except the three feet of flat bottom. Horizontally, it was about four feet wide at its thickest. There was a lock on the door, with the key inserted. Harry opened it.
Instantly, his homesickness vanished. Helmuth's sketches of his dwelling hadn't been idle play, then. He'd been working on a secret sanctuary for Harry all along.
The four-poster was decked in red, not green, and larger than his own, but otherwise identical. It had thick wall hangings for the winter chill, and a coverlet that would boil him in the summers, doubtless. The walls were the color of summer clover, and the floor was charmed hardwood with a large, handmade elf-rug covering a good deal of the center. A large desk held an inkwell and who knew what else, but the bookshelves almost made Harry weep.
Every language he knew was represented in dozens, but they would be charmed into harmless English bedtime stories when looked at by another student. His texts were shelved neatly, also, as were the extras he had bought in Diagon Alley. As a matter of fact, all of his things had been neatly stowed – clothes in the closet or the large bureau, school supplies in the desk, potions ingredients in a bag he had definitely not purchased, which had neatly labeled pockets for everything.
A note rested on his closed, empty school trunk, in Helmuth's hand. The writing was in an ancient Elvish dialect no one used except in ceremonies these days. Translated, it read,
"Little Henrik,
This was my room when I attended Hogwarts. It exists only for nonhumans and is spelled to move into whatever House they attend. A Gryffindor used it before me, and I was in Hufflepuff. Whatever House you're in, it will become your sanctuary. I had carefully recreated a normal Elf-dwelling for myself, I had a few details changed for you. Don't thank me, it was entirely the work of House-Elves.
Our little cousins number in the hundreds here at Hogwarts, they serve the Headmaster. I don't find this to be very flattering to our (or their) heritage, but the House-Elves seem happy enough with their lot.
If you every happen across a large portrait containing a bowl of fruit, tickle the pear and open it. You can thank them personally.
-Helmuth"
Harry pulled an anthology of Machiavelli (in its original Italian) from the shelves and read himself to sleep with dreams of politics.