Platform Nine and Three-Quarters — September 1, 1991
One step through the barrier and the harsh fluorescent lights of King's Cross vanished, replaced by the swirl of steam, the shouts and chatter of a crowd, and the deep, steady chuff of a waiting train. Owls hooted from cages piled on trolleys. Trolley wheels rattled over the stone floor. Somewhere to the left, a man called out a name—maybe "Cedric"—but the noise swallowed it before the second syllable could land.
Draco had been here before. Multiple times — accompanying his mother when she saw off the children of family friends, standing through platform farewells that felt like performances more than partings. He was familiar with the space, its heat-radiating bright red engine, the distinct smell of coal, and how the steam diffused the morning light, blurring all outlines. He'd always watched from the side that stayed. Today, the trunk was his, and he'd be the one leaving.
Narcissa walked beside him, unhurried. She had dressed with her usual precision — robes that signalled wealth without announcing it, her hair exact. She carried nothing. Lucius walked two paces behind, his cane marking a steady rhythm against the stone, his presence clearing a subtle corridor through the crowd.
They stopped near the forward carriages, where the platform was widest. Narcissa turned to face him. Her hands found the clasp of his travelling cloak — not crooked, not loose, perfectly fine — and she adjusted it anyway. Her fingers lingered on the fabric for a moment, pressing the clasp flat against his chest. A small, specific gesture. The kind of thing you do when your hands need a reason to touch someone.
"Write to me when you are settled," she said. Not a request. A quiet instruction that lay underneath everything she was not going to say on a public platform. Her eyes held his, steady and composed. "Not the first night — you will be tired, and there will be nothing useful to say. The second evening. Tell me what you have noticed. The things that surprised you, and the things that did not."
"I will," Draco said. "The second evening. Though I suspect the things that do not surprise me will make a longer letter."
"Then write a long letter." Her hand dropped from the clasp. The smallest pause. "I find I have the time for them."
The adjustment was complete. Narcissa stepped back.
Lucius stepped forward. He looked at Draco the way he looked at anything that bore the family name — with expectation.
"Conduct yourself well."
"Yes, Father."
Lucius inclined his head. One motion, measured, and then he was still again. It was exactly what Draco had expected, and he received it with the exact correctness it required. Performed warmth, the kind Lucius could accept as real because its formality kept it at a manageable distance.
Draco turned toward the train. He did not look back.
Behind him, on the platform, Narcissa watched him go. Her hand, the one that had pressed the clasp flat, had not moved to her side. It stayed where it was — hovering at the level of her chest, fingers slightly curled, as though the shape of the clasp was still between them.
The corridor was narrow, warm, and smelled of coal smoke and old carpet. Students filled it in clusters — upper-years moving with the bored efficiency of routine, younger students navigating trunks that were too large for the space. Draco stepped into the flow. Crabbe materialised on his left, having been waiting near the second carriage door. Goyle appeared from somewhere behind, already carrying his own trunk and managing Draco's as well, apparently having intercepted it from the porter without being asked. They fell into step. Crabbe slightly ahead, Goyle slightly behind. Habitual.
Draco moved toward the rear of the train. The compartments here were quieter, further from the boarding crush, less trafficked by the restless wandering of students who hadn't yet found their people. He chose one on the right side — platform-facing, the window wide and catching the grey-white light from outside. The glass was thick, faintly scratched from years of use, and it framed the platform in a rectangle of activity: parents and children and trunks, farewells happening in every direction.
Goyle stowed the trunks on the overhead rack with methodical patience. Crabbe took the seat nearest the door. Draco sat by the window. The upholstery was worn burgundy velvet beneath him — not threadbare, but softened by generations of students who had sat exactly here, waiting for the train to move. The seat held a shallow impression that was no one's in particular.
The door slid open.
Pansy stepped in, her travelling cloak already unfastened at the collar, her eyes taking in the compartment — the seating arrangement, the stowed trunks, the window — in one efficient sweep. Behind her, Millicent Bulstrode followed, carrying her own trunk under one arm with the uncomplicated strength of someone who did not see the point of porters. She stowed it on the rack beside the others without waiting for help, took the seat next to Crabbe, and settled with the quiet efficiency of someone who did not need to announce her arrival.
"Half the families on this platform," Pansy said, settling into the seat opposite Draco, "look like they are sending their children off to war. The Macmillan woman was actually dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief — and not discreetly, mind you, with the full theatrical commitment of someone who wants the adjacent families to see how much she cares." She arranged her cloak across the seat beside her, managing the small space with the precise economy of someone who had been taught well. "They are going to school. There are owls. They can write."
"Perhaps she is going to miss the quiet," Draco said ironically.
"With Ernie Macmillan? I doubt it was ever quiet. I sat next to him at the Longbottom garden party two summers ago and he told me the history of the Macmillan greenhouses in a single breath. He's thorough." She smoothed a crease from her cloak. "You look settled. How long have you been here — ten minutes?"
"Five."
"Of course. You would have timed it." The faintest curve at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile. Acknowledgement. "I saw your mother on the platform. She looked exactly as composed as a person can look while watching someone walk away from her."
Pansy's eyes stayed on his for a moment — holding the silence — and then moved on, her attention turning to the compartment window.
Goyle pulled the compartment door shut. The noise of the corridor dropped to a muffled register — voices, footsteps, the distant calling of names, all of it softened by the closed door and the glass. Inside, the compartment was theirs. Small, enclosed, the five of them arranged in the configuration that would hold for the hours ahead.
Somewhere ahead, the engine note shifted — deeper, more deliberate, the sound of something preparing to move. Draco's wand box sat in his pocket. He could feel the edge of it against his thigh — specific, constant, present. The platform light caught the compartment window. In the glass, a faint reflection: five students in a compartment, settled.
Hogwarts Express — September 1, 1991
The countryside was sliding past the window at a steady pace — fields, hedgerows, the occasional farmhouse, all of it moving with the train's percussion underneath. The compartment had been theirs for less than an hour and already it felt established. Crabbe had produced a bag of Bertie Bott's from somewhere in his trunk and was working through them with the methodical focus of someone conducting a survey. Goyle sat by the opposite window, watching the landscape pass with the comfortable blankness of a person who did not need to fill silence with speech. Millicent had claimed her corner early and was reading — a thick, battered book with no visible title on the spine, held open with one hand while the other rested on the armrest. She had not spoken since boarding and did not appear to find this a problem. Pansy had her legs folded beneath her, shoes off, her stockinged feet tucked under the edge of her cloak.
"Potter's on this train," Pansy said.
She said it the way she said most things that mattered — as a fact placed into the room for someone else to pick up. Her eyes were on the corridor side of the compartment, as though she could see through the door and down the length of the train to wherever Harry Potter was sitting.
Draco didn't look up from the window. "He is."
"Everyone will want a look at him. Half the train's probably already tried — I saw two girls , probably second years, walking very deliberately toward the back carriages, and neither of them had any business going down there." She turned a Chocolate Frog card between her fingers — she'd taken one from Crabbe's supply without asking, which Crabbe had not objected to. "What do you think he'll be like? Raised by Muggles — he won't know anything, will he? The etiquette, the families, any of it. He's been out of the wizarding world since he was a baby."
"Probably not. A Muggle household wouldn't have prepared him for any of this — even if they'd wanted to. He'll arrive knowing his name is famous and nothing about why it matters to the people around him."
"So he'll be walking into Hogwarts blind. Famous and clueless — which is a combination that either makes people charming or makes them insufferable, and there's no middle ground." The card turned once more. "We should introduce ourselves."
The suggestion sat between them for a beat. Draco let it sit — not to manufacture drama, but because she'd arrived at the thing he'd already been thinking about from a different angle.
"Why?"
"Because it's normal," Pansy said. "Because ignoring the most famous person our age on a train we're all sharing for seven hours looks stranger than saying hello. And because everyone else will — every family with a name and an opinion has told their child to shake Harry Potter's hand before the Sorting. Being the ones who didn't is a choice that people will notice, and they'll notice it in the wrong direction. They'll think we're hostile, or they'll think we're frightened, and I don't care for either reading."
"Everyone else will," Draco agreed. "That's the problem."
She looked at him properly.
"There will be a queue," he said. "Not a literal one. But every family on this train with any ambition at all has told their child to make a good impression on Harry Potter. The Macmillans, the Finch-Fletchleys — half of them probably rehearsed. He's going to spend this entire journey being approached by people who want something from him, and every single one of them will think they're being original about it."
Pansy's expression shifted. She was listening — not agreeing yet, but listening.
"Everyone will queue. Not literally, but— they'll hover. Knock. Linger." He glanced at her. "A Malfoy doesn't queue. We don't approach someone because the whole train is doing it. We don't walk down the corridor and introduce ourselves as though we're hoping he'll like us. Everything about that approach says we need him to notice us." He paused. Outside, a river appeared and vanished beneath a bridge. "He'll have seven years at Hogwarts. There's no rush."
"There's a difference between patience and avoidance," Pansy said. "You're describing what you won't do. I'm asking what you will. Because 'we don't queue' is a principle, not a plan — and he's not going to wander into the Slytherin common room on his own looking for conversation."
"He might. He might not. But the boy who walks past Harry Potter's compartment and doesn't stop is the one Potter remembers three weeks from now, when he's forgotten the names of everyone who shook his hand today."
"That's a lovely theory." Her voice had an edge to it — not hostile, but precise, the way it got when she thought he was being too clever by half. "It assumes he notices us not stopping. It assumes he's paying attention to who walks past. A boy raised by Muggles, on his first day in the wizarding world — he's not cataloguing the corridor, Draco. He's trying not to drown."
"Which is exactly why approaching him now is wasted effort. He can't process us properly. He doesn't know what a Malfoy is — or a Parkinson, or any of it. To him we're just names he's never heard before. We'd be introducing ourselves to someone who has no frame to put us in." He let that settle. "He'll learn what our names mean soon enough. I'd rather we're not the ones begging for space in his memory on day one."
Pansy was quiet for a moment. She set the Chocolate Frog card down on the seat beside her — Merlin, Draco noticed, though the detail didn't matter.
"Fine," she said. "But 'patience' only works if he eventually hears from us at all. You can't be interesting from a distance forever. At some point the distance just looks like indifference, and Indifference is the one thing nobody finds compelling. Trust me."
"I don't intend to let it get that far."
"Good." She said it in a way that closed the topic without closing her opinion on it. The word left room to reopen the topic later. Draco didn't mind. Pansy was allowed to disagree; she was also sensible enough to see the logic. The matter was settled.
"What house do you think he'll be?" Pansy asked, the pivot natural, the previous conversation set aside with the ease of someone who knew when to move on.
"Gryffindor. The entire country expects it."
"Does the Hat sort on expectation?"
"It sorts on what it finds. But a boy raised on his parents' legend, surrounded by people telling him he's brave and special — what do you think it finds?"
"Narcissism," Pansy said, and the corner of Draco's mouth twitched.
"That goes to Slytherin."
"Not always. The Lockhart family were Ravenclaws for three generations, and I've never met a more narcissistic group of people." She glanced toward the corridor — a pair of older students passed, visible through the glass for a moment, robes already on. "What about the Bones girl? Susan. Her aunt runs the DMLE."
"Hufflepuff, probably. The family's been there for generations. But the aunt's interesting — Amelia Bones doesn't think like a Hufflepuff. She's run the Department for six years and nobody's managed to remove her so far."
"The Abbott girl will be with her. They're always together — I don't think I've ever seen Hannah Abbott at a function without Susan Bones within arm's reach." Pansy watched the corridor. A younger student hurried past, dragging a trunk that was clearly too heavy. "I think we should walk the train."
Draco looked at her.
"Not to Potter's door," she added. "Just — see who's here. Say hello to people. It's a seven-hour journey and we've spoken to no one but each other, and as much as I enjoy your company, that's not a strategy. It's just sitting."
She was right. And the walkabout served the same purpose he'd just argued against approaching Potter — it showed them without showing effort. Two soon-to-be Slytherins walking the corridor, pleasant and available, not chasing anyone.
"Crabbe. Goyle. Millicent. We'll be back."
Crabbe glanced up from a green bean with what might have been relief or might have been disappointment — he'd been building to something. Goyle nodded without turning from the window. Millicent turned a page.
The corridor was a different country. Someone coming the other way clipped Draco's shoulder and muttered something that might have been apology or irritation. Draco didn't look back. The passage changed shape, adapting to their presence. The compartment door slid open and the noise came in — voices layered over the train's rhythm, the distant chime of what could only be the sweets trolley, laughter from somewhere ahead. Here, the lighting was subdued, with a warm hue cast by brass sconces that created gentle glows on the wood-paneled walls. Students moved in both directions, most of them older.
An upper-year Slytherin — Marcus Flint, Draco recognised the set of his jaw — passed coming the other way and gave them a nod without slowing. Acknowledgement between years. The corridor's geometry was efficient: two people could walk abreast if they tucked their elbows, which meant Pansy was close enough that their conversation was private even in the busier stretches.
They found Neville Longbottom three compartments forward, alone except for a toad that was trying to climb the window. The door was half-open. Draco saw him before he saw them — round-faced, uncertain in the way of someone who hadn't decided whether to read or just sit, a Herbology textbook open on his lap but clearly unread.
Draco's stomach tightened — fast, involuntary. Longbottom. St Mungo's. A familiar absence at Malfoy dinners, a subject Narcissa never permitted to exist for long.
"Longbottom." Draco stopped at the half-open door. Correct register. Polite.
Neville looked up. The flash of surprise was brief — controlled quickly into something watchful and civil. "Malfoy."
"Looking forward to the Sorting?"
"I suppose." Neville's hand went to the toad, steadying it on the windowsill with practised gentleness. "Gran says it's straightforward. You just sit there and it sorts itself out. She made it sound simple, but I think that might be her way of telling me not to worry about it."
"Sounds like your grandmother."
"You've met her?" A flicker of something — not quite surprise, more like a readjustment.
"Once. At a Ministry function. She was very direct." It was a truthful and charitable description of a woman whose look at his father could have been used to tan hides.
"Pansy Parkinson," Pansy said, stepping into the space Draco's greeting had opened. Her voice shifted — warmer, a half-register softer. "Is that a toad? I haven't seen one in ages. Most people have owls now — my mother says toads used to be far more common, but they've fallen out of fashion, which is ridiculous because owls are just as much trouble and twice as loud."
"Trevor." Neville's voice warmed a fraction. People rarely asked about Trevor in a way that sounded interested rather than politely baffled. "He's been trying to get through the window for the last twenty minutes. I'm not sure if he wants to escape or if he just doesn't understand glass."
"Ambitious either way." Pansy smiled. Actual warmth — her eyes involved, not just her mouth. "Good luck with the Sorting. I'm sure it'll be fine — and if your grandmother says it's simple, I'd trust her over anyone else's opinion."
Neville nodded. His shoulders had dropped a fraction. "Thanks. You too. Both of you." He hesitated. "I mean — yes. You'll be fine. I expect."
They moved on. The corridor stretched ahead, compartment doors passing in sequence — glass panels showing clusters of students in various arrangements. Two girls sharing a textbook. A group of boys playing Exploding Snap, the cards detonating in small contained bursts.
Two compartments ahead, Susan Bones and Hannah Abbott could be seen through the glass; Susan's distinctive red hair stood out, and Hannah was absently braiding and unbraiding her own hair, a sign of hands needing occupation.
Pansy knocked. Susan looked up, assessed them through the glass for a beat, and then opened the door. Not unwelcoming — but not the immediate wave-in of someone who'd been expecting company.
"Pansy Parkinson. And Draco Malfoy." Pansy's hand extended. Susan took it. Hannah followed, a half-step slower.
"We're just walking the train," Pansy said. "Saying hello to people before we arrive. Are you two settled?"
"We're all right here," Susan said. She had an easy directness — the Bones manner, Draco supposed. Her aunt's niece. "Have either of you been to Hogwarts before? To visit, I mean. My aunt took me once, to see the grounds — but only the grounds, she said the castle would spoil the first night."
"No, but my mother's described it so often I feel like I could draw a map from memory," Pansy said. "The lake, apparently, is something else entirely. She says it looks different every time depending on the weather and the time of year. She actually cried at my fitting appointment — three separate times. Once when the robes were finished, once when I put them on, and once when she saw the Hogwarts crest on the chest. She said it made it real." A pause — something genuine in it. "I didn't mind, actually. It was rather sweet."
Hannah's expression softened. "My mum cried at the supply list," she offered. Quieter than before — offered to Pansy specifically, one daughter to another.
"Did your aunt tell you about the boats?" Pansy asked Susan.
Susan laughed. "She said we'd be terrified and it would be the best five minutes of our lives. She's dramatic about boats specifically — I think something happened on her crossing that she won't tell me about, because she gets this look whenever it comes up."
"I hope they live up to the build-up," Draco said. "Seven years of my mother's commentary will be difficult to match."
Susan smiled — polite, contained. The kind of smile that acknowledged a pleasant exchange without committing to anything beyond it, still slightly guarded.
They stayed for another minute. Susan mentioned a cousin in Ravenclaw, third year. Pansy asked a follow-up question. Hannah listened more than she spoke. The conversation moved easily enough, touched lightly, and ended with the natural momentum of people who had made a decent first impression and knew not to overstay it.
"Nice to meet you both," Susan said. Civil. Genuine enough.
"See you at the Sorting," Pansy said.
They kept walking. The corridor stretched ahead, thinning out — most students had settled into the journey's middle hours, the initial restlessness of departure giving way to closed doors and quieter stretches.
One compartment drew more glances than the rest — she could see it in the way students slowed as they passed, the way heads turned with studied casualness. Pansy's gaze flicked once toward the glass. Draco didn't slow.
They turned back toward their compartment. Somewhere behind them, the trolley chimed again, closer now.
Pansy's eyes remained fixed on the corridor and compartment they had passed and disregarded. Her mouth thinned. She looked at the back of Draco's head the way you look at someone who has just walked past an open door in a burning building — a way out, right there, and he did not know. Then she caught up, smoothed her expression, and said nothing.
The compartment door slid shut behind them. The noise dropped. Crabbe was exactly where they'd left him, the Bertie Bott's bag somewhat depleted. Goyle had shifted his gaze from the window to the door when they entered, registered them, and returned to the window. Millicent had not moved. The book was thirty pages further along.
"The Bones girl is pleasant," Pansy said, sitting. "Straightforward — she didn't perform at all, which is refreshing. And the aunt is Amelia Bones, so that connection is worth having regardless of what house Susan ends up in."
Draco sat by the window. "Longbottom was fine. Polite. Quiet."
"He was sweet. Genuinely sweet, not the kind where someone's trying. The toad is attempting to escape through a closed window and he finds that endearing rather than concerning, which tells you something about his temperament." She tucked her feet back under her cloak. "Hannah Abbott's mother cried at the supply list. I respect that level of commitment. Did you see anyone else interesting?"
"Flint. He nodded."
"Flint nods at everything. It's his whole conversational range — nod, grunt, and occasionally a sentence if you catch him on a good day." She adjusted her cloak. "I suppose that's how you captain a Quidditch team. You just nod until people do what you want."
The sweets trolley arrived before Draco could respond — a knock on the compartment door, and then the sliding panel revealed a witch with a cart stacked in bright, precarious towers of sugar. Crabbe sat up with an alertness that had been entirely absent during the political discussion.
"A selection, please," Draco said. "Pumpkin Pasties, Cauldron Cakes, and Chocolate Frogs. Enough for five."
The witch counted out the order. Draco paid.
Crabbe received his share with the uncomplicated gratitude of someone for whom this moment was the train journey's clear peak. He ate with focus and enthusiasm. The Chocolate Frogs went first — three in rapid succession, the cards discarded after a glance — then the Pumpkin Pasties, then a Cauldron Cake, then another Chocolate Frog that Draco suspected had been concealed during the first round. Then a pause. A considering look. Then a second Cauldron Cake.
Goyle watched this progression with the calm attention of someone who could see the ending.
Crabbe's chewing slowed. He set down the remainder of the Cauldron Cake. His expression shifted from contentment to something more internal and evaluative. He stood, carefully, and stepped into the corridor without comment. The door slid shut behind him.
Goyle looked at the closed door. Then he looked at Pansy.
"He'll be fine," Pansy said. "He just needs a minute. And possibly a window that opens."
Goyle's expression did not change, but something in it settled. He turned back to his own window.
The compartment was quiet. The train moved. The light outside had shifted — later afternoon, the shadows longer across the fields. Draco sat with a Pumpkin Pasty he hadn't started and let the walkabout's encounters settle into place.
One thing, though. He'd walked nearly the length of the train, passed dozens of compartments, seen students in every configuration of first-day nervousness and excitement. And at no point had that particular kind of intensity arrived in the form of one Hermione Granger at their door — toad, introductions, unparalleled belief in her certainty. He'd half-expected it. But this year ran older. Different inputs, different outputs.
He filed it. Interesting, not actionable. The first of what he suspected would be many adjustments to his foreknowledge — although not too quickly, he hoped, before he could take advantage.
Crabbe returned, looking somewhat paler but composed. He took his seat by the door, where Goyle silently offered him a Pumpkin Pasty, and declined it with a small shake of his head that carried the weight of hard-won wisdom. Goyle ate it himself without comment.
The compartment settled. The window showed the light beginning to change — the later afternoon, lower and warmer across the fields.
Hogwarts Express — September 1, 1991
The knock was three quick raps — cheerful, familiar, the kind of knock that assumed it would be welcome.
"Open up, you lot — it's only us." Tracey Davis's voice carried through the compartment door with the easy warmth of someone who had never considered she might be turned away.
Pansy reached for the door and slid it open.
Tracey filled the doorway. She was already smiling — not at anyone in particular, at the situation, at arriving, at the compartment generally. Her eyes moved across the group the way they always did: everyone, no one left out.
"Pansy, you look very settled — like you've been here for hours and the rest of us are just catching up. Crabbe — are those Pumpkin Pasties? Brilliant, save me one next time. Greg, hello. Millie — oh good, you're here, I was going to come find you but you've saved me the trip. And Draco." She stepped in, or rather leaned in, one hand on the doorframe. "I just saw a first-year try to get his trunk through the corridor by levitating it. Which — ambitious. The aim, less so. It went sideways about three seconds in and took out a stack of Cauldron Cakes. It was tragic. I think he's still apologising to the prefect."
Crabbe looked up. "Did it hit someone?"
"It hit the trolley. The sweets witch was very understanding about it — she said it happens every year, which I thought was generous of her. The prefect less so. He looked like he was personally offended on behalf of the Cauldron Cakes." Tracey's laugh was short and genuine, and Crabbe almost smiled, which for Crabbe was the equivalent of joining in.
"That's nothing," Millicent said from her corner. "I saw a girl try to shut her trunk on a cat. Not hers. Someone else's cat. It had climbed in while she wasn't looking and she just — sat on the lid."
"Was the cat all right?" Tracey asked, delighted.
"The cat was fine. The trunk latch wasn't. The girl was crying." Millicent delivered this with the flat precision of someone who found the world's incompetence quietly fascinating.
Behind Tracey, Daphne Greengrass stepped into the frame of the open door.
The afternoon light from the sconces caught the edge of Daphne's features, and Draco's attention stayed there a half-second longer than it should have. Her hair fell across her shoulder in a golden curtain, framing the pale symmetry of her face — the clean line of her cheekbones, the precise heart-shaped arrangement of her features that looked like something a painter would have spent too long on. Her skin had that quality some girls had where everything was flawless and untouched and slightly unreal, and for a moment Draco could not look away from it. Then he reset.
"Greengrass. Davis. Passing through, or have you come to inspect?"
Smooth, hopefully. The voice you use with people you've known since you were nine.
To his left, Pansy's gaze moved from Daphne to Draco. A quick, lateral glance — the kind that measured the distance between where someone was looking and where they should have been. Her expression didn't change. But something behind her eyes sharpened, briefly, like a door closing in a room you weren't supposed to see into. His attention was already on the conversation, the reset complete, the mask in place.
"Passing through," Daphne said. "Tracey wanted to say hello to everyone on the train. I think she's working her way through the entire Hogwarts intake, and I've been drafted as company." Her voice was warm, unhurried, pleasant in the way of someone who had no agenda beyond being where she was.
"Not the entire intake," Tracey said. "Just the people I like. Which is most people, admittedly, so the distinction may not matter as much as I'd like it to."
"Where are you two sitting?" Pansy asked. Her voice was exactly right — warm, interested, perfectly pitched. If something had shifted behind her eyes a moment ago, it had been packed away with the efficiency of someone who had been learning to manage rooms since she could talk. She sat straighter, her attention moving to Tracey with focused interest. "Just the two of you, or have you collected others along the way? Tracey, knowing you, you've probably assembled half the train by now."
"Just us so far," Tracey said. "Two compartments up. We've got space — too much, honestly. It's just the two of us rattling around in there like peas in a very quiet tin."
"You should come sit with us for a bit," Pansy said. "We've got sweets, we've got us, so the conversational standard is already quite high." She smiled sweetly.
Daphne's mouth curved — that quiet, contained amusement that never quite became a full smile but was somehow warmer for the restraint.
"We should keep moving, actually," Tracey said, straightening from the doorframe. "I want to find the Patil twins before we arrive. Padma said she'd save me a certain Chocolate Frog card, and I don't trust her to remember if I don't remind her in person. She's a collector — once something's in her hand, the promise gets renegotiated." She looked at the group again — all of them, the full sweep. "See you at the Sorting. Save us seats if you get there first."
"We'll manage something," Draco said.
"Greengrass. Davis." Pansy's goodbye carried the same register as her greeting — warm, precise, equal. Not a note out of place. "Don't let Tracey talk to everyone — you'll never make it to Hogsmeade."
"Too late," Daphne said. A small smile — inclusive, easy, aimed at the group and no one in particular — and then she turned, and Tracey was already moving, and the corridor noise rose and fell as they passed out of the doorway and down the corridor.
Pansy slid the door shut.
The compartment settled. The corridor noise dropped to its muffled register. Crabbe ate the last Pumpkin Pasty.
"The Patil twins are in Ravenclaw, calling it now," Pansy said. "Both of them. The mother's a Shafiq — they're not going to Hufflepuff, and I don't see them in Gryffindor. Too composed."
Her voice was brisk. Efficient. She had moved into analysis with the speed of someone changing subjects on purpose, and if her comments covered Tracey and the Patils and the Sorting and everything else on the train, they did not, at any point, cover Daphne Greengrass. The omission sat in the room like a chair no one was using.
"Gryffindor for one," Draco said. "They won't want to be in the same house."
"You think fourteen-year-old twins want to be separated?" She tilted her head. "Is that what you'd want?"
"I think fourteen-year-old twins are tired of being treated as a unit. They've spent their whole lives being 'the Patil twins.' The Hat might give one of them the chance to be just Patil, and I think she'd take it."
Pansy considered this. "Fair. Though I'd bet it's the louder one who goes — Parvati. Padma would stay where the books are." She tucked her feet back under her cloak. "Tracey's going to know everyone by name before the Sorting Hat's even been brought out. She's probably already on first-name terms with half the train."
"She usually is."
The train moved. The light was shifting outside — the fields giving way to something hillier, the sky deepening. Goyle had returned to the window. Crabbe had closed his eyes, not sleeping but resting, the afternoon's sugar crash arriving on schedule. Millicent had produced another book from somewhere — thick, battered, no title visible on the spine — and was reading with the concentrated stillness of someone who preferred pages to people. The compartment was theirs again, small and enclosed, the door shut, the register private.
Hogsmeade Station / The Black Lake — September 1, 1991
The light had been changing for the last hour — so gradually that the countryside outside the window had gone from green to grey to the deep blue-black of a Scottish evening without anyone commenting on it. But when the train began to slow, the compartment noticed. The rhythm underfoot shifted, the pitch of the engine dropped, and the landscape outside stopped sliding and started crawling, and then the trees became individual trees rather than a continuous wall, and somewhere ahead a platform appeared in the gathering dark.
"Robes," Draco said.
Nobody argued. Pansy glanced at Millicent. "Out," she said to the boys — not unkindly, but without room for discussion. Draco stepped into the corridor with Crabbe and Goyle. The passage was already crowded — other boys displaced from their own compartments, leaning against windows or standing in awkward clusters while they waited. Crabbe and Goyle changed with efficient indifference, Goyle holding his cloak between his teeth while he pulled his robes straight. Draco managed the process with the minimum possible contact with the corridor wall, which was cold and faintly damp.
Pansy knocked from inside — two raps, quick — and they filed back in. The girls were already finished. Millicent had closed her book without marking the page — either she'd remember where she was or she wouldn't care — and stood. Pansy's shoes were on, her cloak straight, her collar precise.
The corridor erupted. Doors slid open in sequence — a cascade of noise, movement, students spilling from compartments with the urgency of people who had been sitting for seven hours. Draco stepped into the current. His group fell into formation: Crabbe ahead, Goyle behind, Pansy beside him, Millicent moving at her own pace a step behind.
The air hit first — cold, clean, sharp with pine and something mineral that was probably the lake. After the compartment's closed warmth, the platform felt enormous and exposed. Lanterns hung at intervals, throwing warm circles onto rough stone. Students streamed in both directions — the older ones moving with the loose certainty of people who knew exactly where they were going, shouldering between first-years without apology.
A voice cut across the platform noise. Deep, carrying, impossible to miss.
"First-years! First-years, this way!"
Hagrid. Draco did not look at him directly. He followed the flow of students sorting themselves into two rivers — upper years leftward toward what must be the carriages, first-years right, down a narrow path that dropped toward the waterline.
He saw Harry Potter in the gap between the two streams.
Small. That was the first thing. Small for fourteen — wiry, thin-faced, sharp-featured in a way that came from not enough rather than from design. His hair was dark and disordered. His glasses were slightly too large for the face beneath them. His robes were new but everything else about him wasn't — the way he held himself, the secondhand alertness of someone who had learned to watch rooms before entering them. The scar wasn't visible at this distance.
The boy who had survived the Killing Curse looked like a boy who had not been properly fed. Draco noted it — an unwelcome detail that refused to become a plan — and let his pace carry him past.
The path to the boats was steep and damp. The lantern light didn't reach far and the trees on either side pressed close, their canopy cutting out what remained of the sky. The noise of the platform fell away behind them as first-years descended in an uneven column, the braver ones talking, the nervous ones quiet.
The boats were at the water's edge. Small, wooden, their paint dark and old. Four to a boat — the natural arrangement. Draco stepped in first. Pansy followed, taking the seat beside him. Crabbe lowered himself into the stern with the careful deliberation of someone who did not trust the structural integrity of the vessel. The boat rocked. Crabbe's hand found the gunwale and did not leave it. Goyle sat last, his weight settling the boat deeper into the water, and then they were still. Behind them, Millicent climbed into the next boat with Tracey, Daphne, and a girl Draco didn't recognise.
The boats moved without oars or visible propulsion — a steady, smooth glide that left the shore behind. The lake opened around them. Black water, flat and depthless, close enough beneath the hull that Draco could have reached down and touched it. The cold came off the surface in a slow, steady breath.
And then it was quiet.
After hours of the train's constant rhythm, the silence was a physical thing. The water made small sounds against the boat's hull — not lapping, just the faint compression of surface against wood as they moved. Voices carried from other boats — murmurs, a nervous laugh — but they were muted by the distance and the dark and the vast open space of the lake. The sky was deep overhead. Stars were beginning to come out.
The castle appeared.
Not all at once. The shape was too uniform, too upright, and too intentionally outlined against the dimming sky to be a natural slope of land. Then the windows, hundreds of them, lit from within, throwing gold across the water in long distorted columns. Towers. Battlements. The silhouette of something enormous built on rock above the lake, stone rising from stone, the whole mass of it catching the last light of the sky along its western edge while the windows blazed from inside.
From a boat ahead, someone whispered something that carried across the water.
It was the size of it. Not the beauty, though the beauty was there too — the lit windows, the towers against the stars, the reflection broken on the water. But the size. He had read about it, carried a version of it in his mind for years, and the version in his mind had been wrong. Not wrong in its details but wrong in its scale. The castle was vast and it was real and it was right there, growing across the sky as the boats drew closer, and for one unguarded moment Draco was not a strategist or an heir or a boy with a war to prepare for. He sat in his boat, staring at something impossibly large with a flicker of disbelief.
"Merlin," Pansy said. Quiet. Not to anyone. Then, after a moment: "The boats were worth it."
The moment held. Then the knowledge settled back into place. Somewhere inside that castle, behind one of those lit windows, a man was teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts with something ancient and parasitic living on the back of his skull. The beauty was real. What it contained was also real. Both true. He breathed in the cold lake air and let the walls in his mind do what they had been trained to do. His mother's voice, distant and precise, echoed in his mind: "Occlumency is not a shield, Draco. It is architecture. Breathe first. Then build." The walls settled, and Draco sent a silent thanks to his mother.
Crabbe's knuckles were white on the gunwale. Goyle was watching the castle with his characteristic unreadable attention — taking it in the way he took in everything, silently, completely, without needing to say what he saw. The boat moved forward. The castle grew. The water was black and still and cold beneath them, and the lit windows threw their reflections down into it, and the reflections reached all the way to the hull.
The shore was close now. Stone steps rose from the waterline into darkness. Above them, the castle waited.
Author's note:
Thank you for reading. I truly appreciate it.
I won't commit to a schedule, as I'd like to keep this enjoyable, but comments are always appreciated and help with motivation.