The next morning, Harry's Alarm Charm woke them all up at a depressingly early hour. He'd tried to teach it to his roommates the previous night, but Kevin's just made an almost-inaudible ding noise and Neville's went off every minute and a half for reasons unknown. Kevin took a little coaxing to get out of bed, but jumped up when Neville pointed out that being late for the first day would be a terrible way to start the term.
They hurried to shower and ran upstairs only to find the girls already waiting for them.
"Half seven on the nose," Susan said. "You called it, Hermione."
Harry rolled his eyes. "We're not late."
The girls all giggled. "She also," Megan said, "guessed you'd respond like that."
"Humph," Harry said. "We may have had this conversation a few times in the past."
"A few times?" Hermione asked.
Before Harry could respond, a sleepy Alvina came downstairs. "Oh, good, you're all here," she said. "I was worried we'd have to haul you all out of bed."
"You may still have to do that," Hermione said. "I don't see the other boys yet."
"Good point," Alvina said as Osmund climbed the stairs into the common room. "Oz, can you grab the other three Firstie boys?"
"Will do," he said.
While Oz rounded up their classmates, Alvina sat them all down on a couple of sofas. "Did you all manage to get any sleep?"
Harry, Kevin, and Neville nodded. "Yeah," Kevin said, "we were exhausted."
"You did?" Hannah asked. "We didn't get to sleep for at least two hours. It was like a huge sleepover!"
Megan yawned. "It really was."
The Prefect smiled. "We have those a lot in Hufflepuff. Sadly, it's now Monday, your worst day of the week for classes."
They all groaned.
"We'll worry about that in a bit, though," Alvina said. "Why don't you all tell me a little about yourselves?"
After about ten minutes of small talk, Osmund came back downstairs with a mostly presentable Justin, Wayne, and Zacharias. "I've got our sleepyheads," he said.
"Excellent!" Alvina clapped her hands, startling them all into somewhat more wakefulness. "Let's get going. There's still plenty of time for breakfast, then we'll pass out your schedules."
Osmund and Alvina led them back up to the Great Hall, where they all took their places once again at the Hufflepuff table. A full English breakfast appeared in front of them once they were all seated.
"So far, I'm loving this," Harry said as he tore off a bit of toast to sop up the egg. "We'll need to work out more if we're going to eat like this every day, though."
"Don't you worry about that," Osmund said. "You'll do plenty of stairs each day to make up for it, and that's before you factor in that they move around and you need to take extra flights sometimes."
Hermione dropped her fork. "The stairs what?"
"They move," Alvina said blithely. "Don't worry. We'll show you how to navigate them after breakfast."
"It's OK." Harry patted Hermione on the shoulders. "We'll sort it out."
Megan nodded. "Lots of other students manage to navigate this place. We'll figure it out, too."
"You're right," Hermione said. "We can do this."
"Together," Susan added.
"Together." Hermione nodded.
Harry gave her a quick one-armed hug with one hand and fist-bumped Neville with the other. "Together."
Alvina and Osmund grinned at each other as the rest of the Firsties said, "Together."
After about half an hour for breakfast, the tall, strong-featured blonde woman Harry had seen at the head table the night before came up to them. "Good morning!" she said. "My name is Professor Charity Burbage, and I'm the Head of Hufflepuff House. It's a pleasure to have you all in our House and I can't wait to see what perspective and talents each of you bring to Hogwarts. Please reach out to me or one of the prefects if you ever need anything."
The students all nodded to her.
"Well, I'm off!" she said. "Miss Winterflood, do you have the—"
Alvina held up a stack of parchments.
"Perfect," Professor Burbage said. "Good luck today, everyone!"
After she left, Alvina passed out copies of their schedules for the year. "Oz and I will walk you to your classes today and tomorrow to help you get around the castle," she said. "After that, you're responsible for navigation."
They all nodded, and Hermione seemed especially serious.
She and Oz led them out of the Great Hall, around a looping corridor from the Entrance Hall, and through a long corridor and into a cloister that Oz called the Middle Courtyard, and then into Classroom 1b.
"Here you go," Alvina said. "And with ten minutes to spare. Just a hint: never assume a professor can't see or hear you in their classroom just because you can't see or hear them. You might be surprised what kinds of monitoring they're capable of."
"That's good to know," Harry said, and the other students nodded.
They all took seats in the right half of the classroom while they awaited their professor's arrival. Hermione naturally wanted to sit in the front row, so Harry joined her. Neville seemed torn between wanting to stay with them and wanting to hide in the back, but his desire to stick with them won out and he took the third and final seat in that half of the row. A couple of Gryffindors were already there, but otherwise there was only a tabby cat sitting on the desk that Harry assumed was the professor's pet or familiar.
As soon as they sat down, Hermione pulled out a quill and parchment and began writing down how they'd gotten there.
"We should probably get ready for class," Harry suggested to her.
She shook her head. "We need to remember how to get here so we're not late next week."
"We also need to take good notes and focus on class," Harry replied. "We can map this place out in the evenings."
"We'll need to do homework then." Hermione still wasn't looking up from her notes.
"We won't be spending every hour of the evenings doing homework," Harry said. "We'll have time."
"What if we don't?" Hermione snapped.
Neville flinched, but Harry only sighed. "I'll be right back," he said.
Hermione didn't look up as Harry rose from his seat and walked up to the professor's desk. "Hello, kitty," he said, holding out his hand for the cat to sniff.
It shot him a disdainful look and went back to licking its paws, then rubbing them against its ears.
"May I borrow you for a second?" Harry asked. "I think my friend needs to hug a cat."
The cat cocked its head at him, then went back to what it was doing.
Harry shrugged and reached out his hands slowly to pick it up. He figured that it would let him know if it didn't want to be picked up.
It didn't hiss or react violently, but it did unsheathe the claws on one of its forepaws and rest them gently against the skin of his hand as he reached for it.
"Nevermind!" Harry said quickly and dropped the attempt. Instead, he returned to his seat and said, "Hermione, listen to me. I'm going to take notes as well as I can in this class, but we've both seen my notes and my handwriting. We'll do better if you're taking notes, too. I promise you that we'll treat navigation as homework over the next few days and get the hang of the layout of the castle."
She sighed and put down her quill. "Fine. You're probably right."
"I know I am." He put a hand on her shoulder. "Are you alright? I haven't seen you like this since the end-of-term exams last year."
"There's just so much to figure out!"
"I know. We can figure it all out, just not all at once. We'll take it one thing at a time, OK?"
Hermione took a deep, shuddering breath. "OK."
"Good." Harry tried not to sigh too obviously in relief. "Let's get ready. Class starts in a few minutes."
She looked around. "It does? But there are several Gryffindors missing!"
"That's their problem, then," Harry said. "They'll be late, get punished one way or another, and class will move on. That's the same thing that would happen to us if we're late: it'll be rough, but we'll be OK in the long run. Now get yourself ready. It's almost time to transfigure some shite."
"Harry!" Hermione hissed. "Language."
He grinned. "Good to have you back."
"You did that intentionally?" Hermione blinked. "I'm that predictable?"
"Yes and very yes," Harry replied.
She rolled her eyes. "Prat."
The cat unexpectedly yowled, a melancholy sound that implied a deeper sorrow than Harry would have expected in such a small and apparently carefree animal. Before he could think about it much, though, the Hogwarts class bell tolled, a deep, reverberating knell that made the whole school seem to vibrate. Even though Harry knew in the abstract to expect it at the start and end of each class period, it still made him (and all of the other students in the room) jump.
A few seconds later, Ernie MacMillan, Ron Weasley, and Seamus Finnegan dashed through the classroom doors and sat in the back.
"Whew!" Ron said.
"It's a good job Professor McGonagall isn't here yet," Ernie said.
"If anyone asks," Seamus added, "we were on time."
The tabby cat leapt off the desk and, mid-air, morphed into the form of a very stern-faced Professor McGonagall. "Then it's good I shan't be asking, then, isn't it?" she said. "One point each from Gryffindor for tardiness. I shall expect you to be on time in the future."
She then turned to a red-faced Harry. "Mr. Potter: one point from Hufflepuff for foul language." The corners of her lips twitched upwards. "One point to Hufflepuff for helping a classmate…and another for being observant enough to respect a cat's boundaries."
He nodded. Hermione's jaw was practically on the floor while Neville was desperately trying not to laugh.
"That is my first lesson in Transfiguration," Professor McGonagall. "Never assume you know what a thing is if you do not know what it was. Regarding what it will be, that is up to you. My second lesson in Transfiguration is that this is a dangerous branch of magic, requiring the utmost in focus and care. I will allow no horseplay in this class, and anyone who does disrupt it will find themselves thrown out and serving a great deal of detention. Do I make myself clear?"
Everyone nodded.
"Good. Now, let's begin."
After what seemed like an eternity of note-taking about the dangers of Transfiguration, the underlying theory, and the importance of visualisation, Professor McGonagall passed around two matchboxes. They each took one and, as their first assignment, attempted to Transfigure it into a needle. It went universally poorly, and Harry thought the only thing keeping Hermione from freaking out was that nobody was getting it. Harry's had gotten a bit more silvery, which was a start, and Neville's had narrowed a little and its head had turned into something more akin to a thorn than a needle's tip, but Hermione's was both silvery and somewhat pointed. Professor McGonagall complimented her work at the end of class, gave her a five points for Hufflepuff, assigned them all two feet of parchment's worth of essay on the theory behind the spell, and dismissed them just as the closing bell tolled.
As they packed up, Professor McGonagall said, "Mr. Potter, Miss Granger, and Mr. Longbottom, a moment of your time."
The three of them went up to her desk, where she continued, "Mr. Potter, I must say that your speech to Miss Granger before class reminded me a great deal of something Alice Longbottom…or Alice Tofty, as she was back then, once said to calm down her friend Lily Evans…right up through the ending of your comment, which was purely your father."
"Really?" Harry said. "I didn't know that."
"And I didn't know my mother was like that," Neville said. "Gran doesn't talk about her much."
"If you and Mr. Potter ever wish to come by on Friday afternoon for tea, please let me know," McGonagall said. "I would be happy to tell you about them."
"Thank you!" Neville said.
"Yes, thank you!" Harry added. "May Hermione come, too, though?"
"She would be welcome," McGonagall said, "but I don't want to obligate her to listen to an old woman tell stories of people she's never met."
"I would love to hear stories about Harry and Neville's parents," Hermione said. "Harry and Neville are an important part of my life and I'll never get to meet their parents the way they've gotten to meet mine."
The professor looked down at her desk and sighed. "I suppose you won't," she said, sounding for the first time like the old woman she'd just claimed to be. "I'll see you all on Friday, then. Now, hurry along. I don't wish to inconvenience your prefects."
They nodded and hurried off.
As soon as the door closed behind the three students, Professor McGonagall conjured a handkerchief and dabbed away a few tears. Another generation of students had arrived, this one already suffering for her mistakes.
She blinked away a few more tears and straightened up. Now that she was only a professor again, she had time and she intended to spend it more wisely than she had in the past. Far better to do one thing well than three things half-arsed.
The Prefects led them on a hurried trip up some staircases that shifted around periodically, eventually taking them to a classroom on the Fourth Floor just as the bell tolled to announce the start of the period. Fortunately, the Gryffindors, lacking Prefect guidance and heading to the same class, had tagged along and so the entire class came in simultaneously. The moustachioed and goateed professor shrugged as his classroom went from empty to full and seemed to decide not to worry about it.
"Welcome!" he said when they'd all settled into their seats. "My name is Kennilworthy Whisp and I'm the new History of Magic Professor here at Hogwarts. I look forward to getting to know all of you and teaching you the history of Wizarding Britain. Of course, to do that, we're going to have to start with the history of the glorious game: Quidditch. You see, it is my contention that Wizarding history cannot possibly be understood except through the lens of its most perfect pastime, and I intend to demonstrate that to all of you." He paused. "Of course, Griselda Marchbanks hasn't quite bought into that position when it comes to the O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s, but I'll keep working on her, don't you worry."
There was a small snapping sound as Hermione broke her quill cleanly in half.
"Well," Harry thought, "I guess it's going to be self-study for our exams. At least this class doesn't involve magic, so it'll be easier to teach ourselves."
After an hour of tortured attempts to shoehorn major events into Quidditch history, including some that happened before Quidditch was invented, the bell tolled again and the prefects collected them to take them back downstairs for lunch. Once again, the Gryffindors tagged along, since they were all hungry and headed in the same direction. They seemed like a nice enough bunch to Harry, though he got a weird vibe from MacMillan, Finnigan, and Weasley. It almost seemed like they were disappointed in him for some reason, which made no sense. He didn't have a chance to give it much thought, though, because Parvati Patil and Lavender Brown kept trying to pump him for information about himself and his relationship with Hermione.
Harry was seriously tempted to start making up completely insane stories just to mess with them, but after what happened with Ron Weasley, he decided to give that idea a miss and just stick with vague (but accurate) statements. He'd never been so happy to get to the table for lunch as he was after that, mainly because the separate House tables forced them to stop talking to him.
"Thank you," Hermione said as they sat down. "I was being driven mad just listening to them, so I appreciate you not asking me to talk to them."
"I didn't want to get you in trouble for hexing them silly…well, sillier," Harry said.
Neville sighed as he took a roast beef sandwich from a platter that appeared on the table. "I don't envy you that attention, mate."
"I could live without it," Harry agreed.
Before Harry could take a bite of his sandwich, an unwelcome voice behind him said, "Hey, Scarhead."
Harry sighed and ignored Malfoy.
"Hey, Scarhead, I'm talking to you!"
The other Hufflepuffs were glaring daggers at Malfoy, but Harry just took a bite of his sandwich.
"I'm talking to you, Potter!" Malfoy said.
Harry held up one finger in the universal sign for "wait a moment," finished chewing, and turned around to face Malfoy. Hermione and Neville did so, both keeping their wands ready but concealed. As he'd expected, Crabbe and Goyle were with the poncy blond wizard.
"Then why did you call me Scarhead?" Harry asked.
"Because of your scar," Malfoy replied. "Does hanging around with Granger make you stupid or something?"
All of the Hufflepuff Firstie girls burst out laughing, which made Malfoy's face turn red with anger.
"What scar?" Harry lifted up his bangs to show his forehead, clear except for a couple of small pimples.
"Your…but your scar! It's supposed to be…" Malfoy trailed off.
"Listen, mate," Harry said. "You can't very well go calling me names that have nothing to do with me and expect me to have the slightest idea what you're on about. Would you like me to make you a list of my actual physical features as a reference? I can periodically quiz you on it to make sure you're paying attention."
Harry held up his arm and spread the long, wide sleeve of his robe over his hair. "Pop quiz, Malfoy. Is my hair: (A) Brown; (B) Red; (C) Black; or (D) Orange with blue streaks?"
The other boy sputtered.
"What about you, Crabbe?" Harry turned to the boy he was pretty sure was Crabbe. "Can you help Malfoy with this?"
"Um…A?" Crabbe said.
"It's not A!" Malfoy told his crony. "He has black hair!"
Harry nodded. "I'm sorry, mate, but Malfoy's right." He lowered his arm to show his hair again. "Pro tip on tests: if you don't know, always guess 'C.'"
"Oh," Crabbe screwed up his face in thought. "Thanks."
"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!" Malfoy said.
Hermione rolled her eyes. "I think that's an urban legend."
"See?" Malfoy said. "It's a stupid idea."
Harry turned to Hermione. "Well, I wasn't sure if I believed you before, but now that Malfoy is vouching for you being smart, I guess I have to."
Her eyes widened and Harry saw her left cheek suck inwards a little as she bit it to try not to laugh. The others at their table were now loudly snickering.
"That's not what I said!" Malfoy said.
"It's OK," Harry said. "She's a good person and won't think she's better than you just because you think she's smarter than you are."
"I do not think some mudblood is smarter than me!" Draco shouted.
The entire Great Hall fell silent.
"Mr. Malfoy!" Professor Vector leapt to her feet and stormed over. "Twenty points from Slytherin, detention with me tonight, and detention with Mr. Filch for the remainder of the week. If I hear you use that word again, I will double your detention each time."
Malfoy blanched, which made the pale-skinned blond boy look practically dead. "When my father hears about this—"
"He'll what, Mr. Malfoy?" Vector asked. "Applaud you for your cunning in letting Mr. Potter goad you into making a fool of yourself in public? Congratulate your acumen as you run to him to clean up your mess? Get out of here, Mr. Malfoy, and spend the remainder of your lunch period in your room pondering your errors just now."
Malfoy stormed off while Vector turned to the Hufflepuff table. "I apologise unreservedly to all of you," she said. "That sort of language has no place in civilised society."
"Thank you," Hermione said. "I accept your apology. I know he doesn't represent the best of Slytherin House."
Vector's lips quirked into a smile. "Well said, and thank you." She nodded and left.
When Harry and Hermione turned back to their food, there were a lot of amazed Hufflepuffs staring at them.
"That was incredible!" Hannah said. "Malfoy is always nasty to me because I'm a half-blood."
Susan nodded. "His father and his father's friends probably helped kill my parents, not that they'll ever see justice for it."
"We'll do our best to change that," Hermione said. Harry nodded.
"I'm not even sure," Kevin said, "why Malfoy hates us muggleborn so much. Is he just jealous that we've better hair care products?"
They all burst out laughing.