Chapter 2: Welcome to Hogwarts
Harry slid the compartment door open. It was empty—he'd arrived early enough to beat most of his fellow students, very much on purpose. He put his trunk in the overhead shelf and flopped down onto the seat near the window. Outside the thin pane the early beginnings of a crowd milled around each other, new arrivals pouring in through the false pillar to join the mass of human traffic. Trunks bounced and wheeled through tightly packed robed bodies, owls and cats and frogs crying out with their respective complaints as they were manhandled onto the train, interleaving with the cries of children, calling out to each other as they reunited with friends or darted away from their family's embrace. The noise was muted through the glass, barely reverberating in through the shut door.
Witches and wizards, almost all of them, hidden in plain sight. An entire world that he'd had no clue existed till barely a month ago.
The feeling of the crowd prickled at Harry's skin. Bright, bubbling excitement mixed with anxiety in a pungent wave that rolled over the rest of the platform, and sent sympathetic twitches down his back as his heart sped up. He scooted away from the window and the feeling died down. But only a little bit.
He eyed the interior of his compartment with the same underwhelmed expression he had for the bright crimson locomotive outside. As comforting a sight for the muggle parents as it must be he found it a bit...mundane for the method of transportation to a school of magic. More and more families drifted past his window, some of them peeking into the train as they passed. He felt their eyes on him as they passed, tickling at the back of his neck. He sunk down, trying to lower his head out of sight from the window, bringing it closer to the wood paneling beside his seat.
He felt heat bloom in his nostrils, sharp and powerful, and his mouth filled with the taste of ash. He reared back, flattening himself against the seat. An invisible heartbeat pounded in his sinuses, pulsing waves of heat all the way down to the tips of his toes. Metal screeched faintly in his ears, brakes slowing chugging wheels. He hacked and coughed, shaking his head wildly, forcing the sensations to fade away, shoving them down.
The door swung open and three older-looking boys peered down at him. Harry's gaze shot to them quickly, still wide-eyed from the burst of panic. "'Lo," one of them nodded in greeting. "This one taken?"
"No," Harry said faintly. He could still hear the echo of the train in his ears, his heart thumping wildly in his chest.
"Brilliant." The boys stomped in through the door, lugging their trunks in behind. Each of them were already dressed in their robes, blue ties hanging from their necks. Ravenclaw, Harry recalled.
"We're gonna go catch up with some friends before the ride. Anyone comes by tell 'em its already taken." The speaker eyed Harry's uncolored tie and added with a sympathetic look, "And if any Slytherin tries to give you trouble just say we were prefects. Should get them to back off. Yeah?"
Harry nodded. "Yeah."
"Cheers, firstie." The door slid shut behind them and Harry was alone again. In the end their advice proved unneeded as no more students knocked on his compartment until the Hogwart's Express whistled, the last stragglers jumping on with shouted partings from their parents. The train hummed to life beneath Harry as it started forward, slowly at first, and then gaining speed, rocking the compartment as the train pulled away from the station and on to Scotland. Harry slid back to the seat near the window, now free from the presence of the crowd, and stared out into the passing scenery.
It was supposedly a long ride till they reached Hogwarts. There were a few textbooks in his trunk but his already limited desire to read through them was further stifled by the bouncing train around him. He knew there was no way he'd be able to focus. So instead he kept staring out the window, slumped against it, letting his eyes close and his mind wander. Eventually the three older boys returned but Harry didn't open his eyes, content to soak in the relaxing hum of the train's engine against his cheek, and they endeavored to leave him be, joking quietly amongst themselves.
Harry jerked away from the window, blinking the fogginess from his eyes. He wasn't sure when he had fallen asleep. The sky outside had darkened, dusk swallowing the green countryside into grey shadow, the sun a red blur just above the distant horizon. The compartment was quiet, one of the boys nose-deep in a book while the other two stared in concentration at a chessboard between them.
"We're almost there," Harry muttered to himself. But in the silence of the compartment the others heard him clearly.
One of the chess players cocked an eyebrow at him and then took a peek around Harry to the world outside. "Yeah, looks like its getting late enough. How'd you know?"
"The engine changed."
The older boys eyed him curiously but shrugged and went back to their own pastimes. The steady thrum of the locomotive had reverberated throughout the train, echoing all the way up Harry's arms and legs, nestling deep into his chest, until his heart pounded in unison, lulling him to sleep with its powerful drum. Now he could feel it separate, slowing down.
The Hogwart's Express finally screeched to a stop fifteen minutes later.
Harry waited a few minutes after the Ravenclaws left before making his own exit. When they had opened the doors into the stream of excited children rushing by, eager to reach the castle, Harry's nose stung, his eyes watering from the feeling of overwhelming exuberance. He slipped in with the stragglers, hurrying off the train and out into open space.
"Firs'-years! Firs'-years! Firs'-years over here!" a powerful voice boomed overhead. Harry craned his neck and saw a massive silhouette of a man looming over the passing crowd of students, only recognizable as human by the lantern dangling in front of him. He stood more than twice as tall as Harry and as wide as a shed. Harry obediently trotted over to where he was standing.
The first year students gathered around the mountain of a man as he directed them towards a row of old wooden boats, shouting instructions over their nervous chatter, and swinging his lantern overhead to light the way. Harry stared up at him in fascination until the man turned to look at him with a quizzical expression. His tiny black eyes glinted in the darkness.
"Er—all right there? Need help gettin' in a boat?"
Harry blinked as the sound of high-pitched laughter reached him from behind. He shook his head and made his way to the edge of the water, stepping right into one of the boats without a care for how it rocked, provoking squawks of outrage from its occupants.
"Careful!" one of them hissed at him, while holding the hem of her robes up away from the water. Harry ignored them, taking his own seat and turning to look at the giant expectantly.
"That's all of ye then, lets be off!"
The fleet of rickety old boats pushed away from the shore without a sound or paddle, gliding across the glass-like surface with barely a ripple. Harry leaned over the edge of the boat and stared into the black pane beneath them.
"Careful or you'll fall in!" one of the girls in the boat warned him.
The one who had complained before sniffed haughtily, as they eyed the expanse of water with a disdainful gaze, "Probably spill us all in with him."
"Look there, yer firs' sight of her!" the huge man bellowed cheerfully, pointing a massive finger. A collective gasp of wonder rose from the group of children as the gleaming sight of Hogwarts came into a view; a massive castle, standing tall and proud above the lake, glowing with orange light across its towers. They all craned their necks back and stared, wild excitement suffusing them as they took in the spectacle of their new home.
Except for Harry, who was still looking in the opposite direction, straight down into the depths of the lake. He trailed a hand through the water. It was icy cold to the touch. The water pushed against his hand from underneath, rising up from below. Something large and smooth slid across the palm of his hand, like a steel cord wrapped in velvet. Harry caught a glimpse of pale scar tissue on a shadow blacker than the water. And then it was gone, back into the depths. He blew out a held breath and inspected his hand, drawing some strange looks from the other students in his boat as their gazes pulled away from the castle.
The boats passed through an ivy-laden hole in the cliff-face and into a dark tunnel. They emerged into a small harbor among the rocks, lit by flickering torches. The boats ran themselves aground and the students started hopping out, clumping together into a mass as the huge man stomped up to the door on the rock face and banged a meaty fist against it.
The stern looking woman that emerged was the same professor that had first taken him into this world for his school shopping, Professor McGonagall. She ordered them all into a straight line and led them into the castle proper, her disapproving stare enough to stymie the nervous jostling, and silence the chatter. They stopped at another door and waited while she said a few words to the students—but Harry was too busy gawking around, taking in the ancient stone of the castle.
Bright silver poured out of the walls in twisting shimmer of smoke, until it formed a face, and then a body, the strange apparition smiling down on the now terrified students.
A ghost, Harry heard.
More ghosts poured in, sweeping through the students, greeting them and swirling up above where they hung with their peers, muttering observations. Harry noticed that they seemed to part around him, their eyes sliding over him as they drifted past his side.
"Excuse me," a sharp voice rang out behind him. He whirled and saw the backs of his classmates disappearing through the open door, and a frowning McGonagall looking at him.
"Sorry," he muttered, and hurried in after his peers.
Harry stepped into a massive hall; four long, wooden tables stretched across the flagstones to the far side of the hall, another sitting perpendicular on a raised platform at the head, seated with who Harry presumed were the Professors, judging by how old they appeared and the fact that Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts, was sitting on an ornate chair in the very center. His eyes shone fondly as they passed over the new students. Harry's head tilted upwards and the rest of the hall faded away.
Deep black stretched away from his eyes, swirling with blue and gleaming purple, an impossibly deep kaleidoscope of abyssal shades, dotted with brilliant pinpricks of starlight burning their way through the nebula. His breath caught. Just below, a layer of tiny candles floated in the air above him, a crude mimicry of the scene beyond. He looked through that and into the void. The world faded around him, hurtling away as stars burned past his ears, and his skin blanched from the freezing cold, utter nothingness around him, nothing but space, and magic. He breathed out and the heat returned to his skin and the hard floor resumed its resistance against his feet as the hall swam back into existence.
"HUFFLEPUFF!"
Harry blinked away the disorientating sensation as McGonagall pulled a large, stained, pointed hat off the head of one of the other first years, who jumped off a stool with a relieved expression and scurried over to the table with yellow ties.
He turned to the boy beside him. "How did they get a piece of the sky into the ceiling?" The boy gave him a bewildered look, eyes flickering between him and the ceiling and the distracted McGonagall before shrugging.
"It's not a part of the sky," a girl behind him said with a lecturing tone. "If you had read Hogwarts: A History you would know that it is only bewitched to match the sky outside."
"Were we supposed to read that? Isn't that book like a thousand pages long?" someone else muttered worriedly.
A stern glare from McGonagall quieted them all. Harry found his gaze inexorably drawn back upwards into the darkness of the false-sky—except he knew that wasn't true. He could feel it. There was no way this was a simple enchanted painting. Certainty hummed in his bones that if he pushed his hand up past the floating stratum of candles it would push into true void; a window to the universe beyond chained down and wrapped around the surface of a school hall. And apparently these wizards didn't even realize it? A cold chill raced down his spine.
"Dursley, Dudley," McGonagall called out.
Harry's attention was pulled back down as his cousin stepped up, roughly shouldering his way through the other students. Harry vaguely noticed that Dudley took a circuitous route, pushing around to the other side of the line from where Harry stood, purposefully avoiding him. Muted amusement hummed in his chest as Dudley waddled forward and plopped himself down on the stool. His puffy face was flushed red as his eyes flickered around the hall in greedy fascination. The old hat slipped over his head and hid his eyes before they found Harry's.
There was a moment of silence as everyone waited impatiently for the hat to sort another unknown, eager to finish and get to the feast. Harry cocked his head as he stared unblinkingly at his cousin. The hat seemed to be separating students based on some opaque criteria that only it was privy to, but he remembered the few words he had been told about the houses, and the virtues they celebrated. He wondered to himself, what virtue would this hat find in as miserable a specimen as Dudley Dursley?
The brim of the hat split like an ash-stained mouth and croaked out, "HUFFLEPUFF!"
Dudley heaved himself off the stool with a squeak of straining wood and hesitantly moved towards the yellow-tie table. His eyes happened to pass over the first years and met Harry's cold gaze. He shuddered, almost stumbling, before his face twisted into a nasty glare, cheeks flushing, and with a quick movement of his neck tore his gaze away as he hurried the rest of the way to his house table.
Harry hummed thoughtfully and turned back to the wondrous scene above him.
When he slid onto the wood bench beside his new housemates the rest of the hall was oddly silent, only a few halfhearted claps from the other tables, and some rather unsure ones from his own. The professors' table at least had the mind to clap politely as normal. On either side and in front of him the other first years stared at him unabashedly. All along the table people craned their heads around their neighbors to get a peek at him. Harry thought about introducing himself to make them stop, but then realized that would've seemed a bit stupid considering his name had just been called out in front of the school. But as Professor McGonagall continued calling out names from her roll of parchment the stares were reluctantly drawn away from him.
McGonagall had warned him, back when she had taken him to get his school supplies. He was a celebrity in this world. She'd told him that people would pay extra attention to him, every little action scrutinized to try and ascertain his abilities.
He ignored the people staring.
Sometime while Harry was examining a knot in the table the last of the students must've been sorted and the welcoming words spoken because the platters all along the table filled with food, startling him. As he scooped a more than healthy helping of roast potatoes onto his plate the hall filled up with the rumbling buzz of chatter, and his classmates judged it an appropriate time to address his presence.
"Welcome to Slytherin, Potter," a blond boy seated diagonally from him said, the others nodding along, naturally following his lead. "I'd hoped you'd end up here—only right for a wizard like you."
"I thought you were sure to go Gryffindor," one of the girls piped up. Harry blinked owlishly at her. He was sure he'd never met this girl before. How would she know where he fit in?
"Why?"
"Oh, well," she hesitated. "Your—well your parents were both in Gryffindor. Everyone knows that."
"Not me. I never knew my parents."
"Right," she squeaked, looking away awkwardly.
"This is the right place for you," the blond boy continued, giving Harry a confident smile that Harry thought looked wildly out of place—and silly—on his childish face, "among proper folk. Gryffindor is full of muggles and idiots."
"Like my parents?"
The boy sputtered as the others sitting near Harry leaned away from the pair. Frowning in annoyance the blond boy shook his head.
"Perhaps," he said primly to the shock of the others, judging by the in-drawn breaths around Harry, "you just admitted you wouldn't know."
Harry stared at him evenly for a second, before nodding, and turning back to his plate. "Fair enough, I suppose."
"Draco!" one of the girls hissed.
The blond boy, Draco apparently, looked down his nose at her. "What? Potter didn't mind, right, Potter?" Harry looked up from his half-eaten potato and shook his head in the general direction Draco had been talking to.
"See?" Draco said triumphantly.
"I bet the Gryffindors are going to be bloody pissed this year," one of the other boys said. "They were just as sure that Potter was going to them."
"Then it'll just hurt more when we trounce them for the cup again," Draco said. "And my Father taught me a few jinxes to get them in the corridors." That prompted a chorus of impressed sounds.
"What about you, Potter? Know any good ones?"
Harry frowned. Spells? The silly little words in their textbooks to make marbles dance and turn parchment into soap?
"Not really."
"Shame, that," Draco clicked his tongue. "If you want I could show you one or two, though it may take you a while to get the hang of them." His voice trailed off in a very poor attempt to hide the condescension.
Harry shrugged. "Okay."
"You don't have any problems cursing Gryffindors?"
"Not particularly." Not that he had any interest in it either, really.
Draco grinned at him. "Yeah, you'll fit in here, all right."
Harry would take his word for it.
Eventually the feast came to an end and the food disappeared from their plates without a trace, and the professors bid them back to their dormitories for the night. En masse the students rose from their tables, groaning and yawning, sleepy from the food and crashing from their earlier excitement. Harry felt it in the air, a dripping malaise that settled itself over the hall, weighing down on him—but it wasn't nearly as overwhelming as the sensation at the platform. He wasn't used to being around such large groups of people. Hopefully he'd adjust.
One of the older Slytherins, a prefect, corralled all the first years under his watchful eye and marched them away from the Great Hall, heading downwards, deeper into the bowels of the ancient castle. They passed groups from the other houses heading up to the towers, climbing up staircases that moved on their own accord, swinging from floor to floor. The walls were lined with paintings and portraits, all of the subjects inside animated and moving, calling out to the new students as they passed. Every inch of the castle thrummed with life. Even the other first years around Harry gaped with wonder as they walked, despite most of them seemingly having grown up with magic.
As they went deeper the air grew cooler and the shadows deepened in the windowless hallways beneath the ground. The dungeons were made of a darker stone than the Great Hall, almost black in the flickering torchlight. The prefect drew short up ahead, staring at a blank stretch of stone.
He looked back to make sure they were all watching. "Power."
With a low grumble the wall slid open, a narrow passageway wriggling its way out from the center of the stone.
"The password changes every month. Don't forget it. And don't tell the other houses."
Despite the depth of the common room, it was surprisingly well-lit. Large portholes across the walls and ceiling were lit from within by green light, revealing water all around them and casting sinuous bands of reflection across the rows of sofas that dominated the space.
We must be touching the lake.
At the back the room split into two different staircases, each one branching out into a series of hallways. Older students filled the space, lounging on sofas and gathering in small groups, talking and laughing and showing off things they picked up over the summer. The first years were split up and led to their new dorms.
There were three other boys rooming with Harry. Each one had their own four-poster bed with green curtains and their trunks already stacked at the foot of each.
"Looks like we'll be roommates then, Potter," Draco said as he entered the room behind Harry. Two burly figures trailed in after him.
"This is Vincent Crabbe, Gregory Goyle," Draco said pointing at them in turn. Goyle give him a quick once over with his pair of beady eyes before dismissing Harry and stumping over to his bed. Crabbe nodded once, his chin sinking into his massive neck with the movement. He almost reminded Harry a bit of Dudley with how round he was, but he carried it better, and was a fair amount taller to boot.
"My da says you've been missing for years. Where were you?" Crabbe said. His eyes darted over Harry's shoulder as he spoke, getting distracted. Harry turned and saw Goyle was now unwrapping a pile of chocolates that had been in his trunk.
"Some family took me in."
"I didn't know the Potters had any living relatives," Draco said with a note of interest.
"No—it was on my mother's side."
Crabbe nodded in satisfaction but Draco's face screwed up in disgust. "Your mother? You mean muggles?"
"Yeah."
"How awful," Draco said disdainfully. "I don't know why the Ministry didn't let you get taken in by a wizarding family, really. Muggles have no place raising a magical child, don't you think?"
"I wouldn't have minded that."
Draco snorted. "Oh, good. I was worried I'd have to share a dorm with a muggle-lover. But then you wouldn't have got put into Slytherin I imagine. So you really don't know anything about the wizarding world?"
"Only what Professor McGonagall told me when she took me to Diagon Alley."
"That old bat," Draco sneered. "Don't you worry, Potter. We'll teach you the right way of things here in Slytherin."
By the time the boys had settled down into the dorm and explored its bathrooms and pulled all their belongings out of their trunks, the excitement of the day had long worn off, and the weariness was setting in. There wasn't much more talk, only the grunting curses of Crabbe and Goyle as they played some strange magical version of marbles on the ground between their beds.
Harry followed Draco's lead and got into his bed, drawing the curtains closed. As he lay in the dark, staring up at the wood above him, Harry's fingers went to his wrist, brushing along the bracelet there. Links of twisted metal, cold to the touch, and stained dark, almost like they were burned, so that no glow reflected off them.
I'm here, he thought to himself.