Chapter Text
Harry is thrilled. He’s stumbling a little coming out the wizarding bank, his legs feeling shaky and trembling, his heart pounding in his chest. He’s pretty sure he’s grinning. He’s heard about roller coasters before, seen pictures, and he thinks that maybe that is what one feels like.
Hagrid, on the other hand, looks nearly green. “Might as well get yer uniform,” Hagrid tells him, gesturing towards a shop that apparently sells robes. That’s what it said on the letter, as well, though he doesn’t understand why they want children to wear robes for school instead of trousers. “Listen, Harry, would yeh mind if I slipped off few a pick-me-up in the Leaky Cauldron? I hate them Gringotts cars.”
Harry isn’t sure how he can argue, and Hagrid does look rather sick, so Harry nods, watching Hagrid head off before walking into Madam Malkin’s Robes for All Occasions alone. His heart is pounding again, though this is not in excitement but nervousness. The woman who greets him is short, dressed robes of a light purplish color. He hopes he doesn’t need to buy robes of that color; his classmates would never let him live it down.
“Hogwarts, dear?” she asks with a smile before he can even open his mouth to speak. “Got the lot here—another young man being fitted up just now, in fact.”
Harry looks towards where she’s pointing to see a blond boy his age being fitted in, Harry sees with some relief, a black robe. The woman leads him over to a footstool next to the boy, pulling a mass of black cloth over his head and starting to pin it.
“Hello,” the boy says. “Hogwarts, too?”
Harry nods. “Yes.” He has the sudden thought that Dudley won’t be at this new school to make sure Harry has no friends, and so maybe this boy can be his friend. “What’s your name?”
“Draco Malfoy. You?”
“Harry.”
The boy doesn’t react to his name as the men in the pub had, which Harry is glad for, because he doesn’t want that fuss and mess again. All those eyes on him, it made his skin crawl. “My father’s next door buying my books and Mother’s up the street looking at wands.” He eyes Harry, who wants to fidget with the robe that’s being hemmed around him. “What about you? Where are your parents?”
Harry doesn’t want say that they’re dead, because it will either make the conversation awkward or make the boy feel sorry for him, and he doesn’t want either, because maybe he can be friends with this boy. So he just gestures towards the street outside the shop, figuring it’s not quite a lie because he doesn’t know where his parents are buried but they’re not inside the shop and hoping the boy doesn’t question him about it.
He doesn’t, instead asking, “They’re like us, right? They’re our kind?”
“They’re, uh, witch and wizard, if that’s what you mean.” He can’t think of what other kind both he and Draco would be, because Draco sounds posh and rich, and even with all of that gold in Harry’s vault he most certainly isn’t.
Draco opens his mouth, and then the door opens and they both look over to see a tall blond woman who looks elegant and beautiful and like what he imagines a Lord’s wife to look like. Draco’s face lights up. “Mother.”
“I expect you are finished with this now.”
The woman pinning Draco’s hem waves her wand, then stands, nodding. Draco hops off the stool, turning back to look at Harry. “Well, I’ll see you at Hogwarts, I suppose.”
Harry nods and smiles, quite liking that idea. The woman gives him an odd look, not quite a sneer, then touches Draco’s shoulder, and the two of them walk out of the shop. Watching them, briefly, Harry has the thought that he would want a mother like that, to touch him on the shoulder and fetch him from shops so he doesn’t have to be there alone. But then he dismisses that idea, because people like him don’t get mothers, and it’s not worth wishing for something that will never happen.
What he does get, though, is a beautiful white owl as his first ever birthday present—or second, he supposes, if he counts the cake Hagrid gave him, or third if he counts Hagrid showing up in the first place. And nobody stares at him there, either, because Hagrid doesn’t say his name, and he’s glad to not have to deal with that here.
Perhaps nobody at school will know about what he’s supposedly done. If they’re his age, they won’t remember it, and he can’t imagine the teachers wanting to treat him special. Teachers never do.
So hopefully they’ll all ignore it and he can be just Harry. Not a freak. Because freaks don’t get friends.
He likes the feeling of the wand in his hand, though, and it’s the first time that all of this really feels real. Because the bank, the robe shop, even the owl, that could all be explained away as some sort of dream, but the way that that little stick feels in his hand like there’s something coming from him, like there’s power inside of him, that he couldn’t dream up.
And so maybe all of this might be real. Maybe he’ll be free from the Dursleys, at least for a few months, and he’ll be somewhere new, somewhere different.
Leaving feels equally odd, everything in the real world blurring past like it’s not quite there, because there’s this whole other world underneath it, or beside or, or inside of it, all of these people with magic that you can get to through the wall in a pub, and isn’t that bizarre. And more bizarre, he’s one of them.
If his mother was one, though, he wonders why Aunt Petunia or Dudley aren’t ones, though maybe it skips some people.
Sitting there, eating his hamburger during the best but oddest birthday of his life, Harry tells Hagrid, “Everyone thinks I’m special. All those people in the Leaky Cauldron, Professor Quirrell, Mr. Ollivander…but I don’t know anything about magic at all. How can they expect great things? I’m famous and I can’t even remember what I’m famous for. I don’t know what happened when Vol-, sorry—I mean, the night my parents died.”
Hagrid leans across the table at him, and there is a very kind smile on his hairy face. It might be the kindest smile Harry has ever seen.
“Don’ you worry, Harry. You’ll learn fast enough. Everyone starts at the beginning at Hogwarts, you’ll be just fine. Just be yerself. I know it’s hard. Yeh’ve been singled out, an’ that’s always hard. But yeh’ll have a great time at Hogwarts—I did—still do, ‘smatter of fact.”
Harry stares at him for a while longer, eating the rest of his hamburger slowly, savoring it because he doesn’t know when he’ll get food like this again, and he doesn’t know what to say. Because he just wants to cry that he doesn’t want to be singled out, that someone else can have it. Give it to that boy with a mother and a father. Give it to someone who wants him, and give him his parents back instead.
But there’s nothing Hagrid can do about it, and so Harry doesn’t say anything else.
Hagrid gives him his ticket before putting him on the train to go back to Little Whinging, and Harry wants to beg him to stay, but he doesn’t. Instead, he presses his nose to the glass of the train and watches him go until he disappears from sight.
--
The following month is one of the most unpleasant Harry could have imagined. He had thought it would be fun, Dudley with the pig’s tail that they haven’t yet figured out how to remove, too afraid to be in the same room as him and Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon not shoving him back in his cupboard or shouting at him, but nobody has spoken to him in weeks, and he’s taken to talking to himself just to hear his own voice.
He talks to Hedwig, too, whose name he found from his textbook A History of Magic. He likes the owl, though he’s never heard of anyone having an owl before and despite the fact she keeps on bringing back dead mice.
His school books are interesting, though there are words that they use that he doesn’t know and doesn’t know how to look up. He keeps the Herbology book open when he reads the P0.otions book to try to find the ingredients it mentions. It’s hard, though, and he can’t find all of them, and most of them he forgets before he gets to the next page.
He wants to read all of the books, though, all of all of them, because he doesn’t want to look a fool when he first gets to school, but he doesn’t think he’ll be able to do that because he has to spend so much time checking everything again and again.
History of magic he figures must be most important, because he’ll need to know how magic works, but it’s so long and dry that he keeps falling asleep while reading it, even if he does it while sitting on the floor instead of lying on his bed.
By the end of August he is only perhaps a third of the way into the history of magic book and has only gotten all the way through the Defense Against the Dark Arts textbook, though he doesn’t understand all of it.
He talks Uncle Vernon into taking him to King’s Cross Station, though he has a guess that that is as much because Uncle Vernon wants to get rid of him as anything else. Which Harry is fine with, because he wants to be rid of them just as much.
Once he’s at the station, though, it’s a time of panic, because Hagrid apparently forgot to tell him about this, about how you get to a platform’s a fraction, and the guard decides he’s a time-waster as soon as he mentions Hogwarts, so with only ten minutes until he’s supposed to be on the platform he can’t find, he isn’t sure what to do. He imagines himself spending the night at King’s Cross, sleeping on a bench with an owl on one side of him and his trunk on the other, with no way to get back to Surrey and no money.
But Hagrid said Hedwig could find him, so maybe he can send him a note and say that he couldn’t get to Hogwarts and could Hagrid maybe pick him up.
But before he can figure out how to actually do that, or whether he should start tapping the walls with his wand, he sees a group of redheads, and a comment about Muggles. He can’t imagine anyone else saying a word like that, and so he swings around and pushes his trolley towards them, heart pounding in his ears.
There are four boys that he sees, and a woman holding the hand of a girl, and as Harry watches the oldest marches towards platforms nine and ten, heading straight for the barrier between them. He doesn’t take out his wand, though, or say anything, or tap anything, and then a crowd of tourists swarms around him, and the boy is gone.
“Fred,” the woman says as though her son disappearing is a normal occurrence, “you next.”
“I’m not Fred, I’m George,” one of the twins says. “Honestly, woman, you call yourself our mother? Can’t you tell I’m George?”
“Sorry, George, dear.”
“Only joking, I am Fred.” He takes off towards the barrier, his twin—George?—calling after him to hurry up, and then the Fred is gone and a moment later so is George, and Harry still has no idea how it’s been managed.
“Excuse me,” Harry says.
The woman turns and smiles at him. Her eyes go to Hedwig for a second. “Hello, dear. First time at Hogwarts? Ron’s new, too.” She gestures towards the only boy left, who’s tall and gangly with hands he looks like he hasn’t quite grown into yet.
It can’t hurt to say, so he nods. “Yes. The thing is—the thing is, I don’t know how to—”
With a smile, she explains how he can get through to the platform, and though running into a barrier and hoping he magically passes through seems absolutely barmy to him, he has no other option, so he runs towards it—
And finds himself in the middle of chaos on the other side, parents and children everywhere, a scarlet red steam engine on one side of him. There are animals everywhere, more than he has ever seen all together outside of a zoo, and he keeps one eye on the ground so as not trip over a cat winding its way around his feet.
The first few carriages are already packed, students hanging out of windows to wave to their parents, and so he pushes his cart down the platform, past a boy named Neville telling his gran that he’s lost his toad and a boy with dreadlocks showing off something in a box to a shrieking crowd.
Near the end of the train he finds an empty compartment and places Hedwig inside then tries to shove his trunk in. But it’s so large and heavy he can hardly lift the end to heave it all the way inside.
After the second time he drops it in on his foot hard enough that there’s no doubt he’ll have a bruise by the night, one of the twins he’d followed through the barrier offers, “Want a hand?”
“Yes, please.”
“Oy, Fred, c’mere and help.” That must be George, then, if he got the names right. He’s not sure the name of the other boy, or the girl who was with their mother, but maybe he’ll find out while they’re at the school. They seem friendly enough, at least.
The three of them manage to shove it up into the train, though he’s sweating and a little bit out of breath by the end of it. Shoving his sweaty hair out of his eyes, he mutters, “Thanks.”
They both nod to him, and then one of the twins—he’s lost track of which one—points at the scar on his forehead, asking, “What’s that?”
“Blimey,” says the other one. “Are you—”
“He is. Aren’t you?”
Harry’s not positive what he’s talking about. “What?”
“Harry Potter.”
“Oh, him. I mean, yes, I am.” It sounds almost like a lie coming out of his mouth, which is absurd because it’s actually true. He is Harry Potter. He’s just still not sure he understands why that matters so bloody much.
Before they can gawk at him anymore, though, their mother calls, and he ducks down in his seat so he doesn’t attract any more attention, peering out just enough that he can see them. Their mother is fussing over them, and for the longest time he’s thought he wouldn’t want to be fussed over the way Aunt Petunia warbles over Dudley, but maybe the way this woman is with her children, maybe he would like that.
Not that it matters, because it’s not something he’ll ever have. But maybe he’d like it.
The eldest is named Percy, he learns, and he’s apparently a prefect and proud of it. And then the twins announce who he is, and he feels absurdly a little betrayed, even though he had no reason to expect the twins not to say anything. They don’t know him; they don’t owe him anything. But it would have been nice to have at least one set of people in this bizarre new world who didn’t think of him just as…whatever he is.
That boy from the robe shop doesn’t know, he doesn’t think, but Harry doesn’t know when he’ll see him again, so that doesn’t really help anything.
The train starts moving abruptly, sending him jerking forward in his seat, and he looks out the window to see the girl and her mother waving before they disappear from view as the train picks up speed. Houses rush past, and he feels a rush of excitement. He’s free from the Dursleys, at least for a few months. Wherever he’s going has to be better than what he’s leaving behind.
The door opens next to him, and he looks over to see the youngest redhead poke his head in. “Anyone sitting there? Everywhere else is full.”
Harry shakes his head, and the boy sits down across from him. Harry sees him looking and then pretending not to look, and he wonders if this is what the rest of his life will be like.