Chapter Text
The first thing she ever killed was a rabbit, and she cried for a week—honestly, bitterly, like only children and saints cry, from the soul instead of the throat. She had not meant to kill it. That much she knew. But innocence, once wounded, doesn’t heal back to the same shape. And what followed—squirrel, cat, things with names and soft fur and too much trust in the world—wasn’t a list she recited. It was one she carried, silent and close, like old folks carry aches that bloom before the rain.
She told herself it wasn’t her. And maybe it wasn’t. There’s a kind of mercy in believing that. That something else took over—something dark and slavering, clawed and carnal, rising with the moon like some pagan curse out of the old stories. And so she told herself, again and again, like a prayer muttered with gritted teeth: It wasn’t me. She’d have said it to God if He’d answered. But monsters don’t pray. And girls who become monsters learn quick not to, either.
What mattered most, though, what tilted the whole thing from tragedy into farce, was this: the beast the world feared most—an XXXXX-classified, man-eating horror of the forest, feared even by those who didn’t believe in fear—was, at the time, a little girl. Eleven years old. Used to sleep with the lights on. Thought her father was the smartest man alive.
The irony of it all didn’t escape her. It rarely does, for those who live on the knife-edge between what they are and what they fear to become. There’s something theatrical about that kind of life, when the costume doesn’t quite fit and the mask starts to feel more like skin. And she knew, as children sometimes do before adults ruin the knowing, that her name—her real name, the one people whispered about behind closed doors—was not her own. It belonged to what had happened. And what had happened had teeth.
The Turning, they called it. A neat little term. Like it could be folded up and packed away in a box with medical records and moon charts. But for her, it was never neat. It was the ruin at the center of her memory, the tremor beneath every hour of peace. It stayed with her like a fever that never quite broke, like the scent of iron in the nostrils that no amount of soap could scrub out.
It is, she decided once, a special cruelty of the human mind—that it allows you to both suffer and observe your suffering. That you can sit in the front row of your own unraveling and take notes on the lighting.
Even now—older, but not yet old, wiser only in the way pain teaches—she could recall the moment in grotesque clarity. His eyes: empty, tunnel-like. The way her ribs bowed inward, her lungs fluttering like birds trapped under a bell jar. Her heart clawed at her chest like it wanted to flee without her. But her voice—her voice had vanished, sealed somewhere behind her teeth like a body behind brickwork.
Fenrir Greyback. She didn’t say his name often. Saying it felt like chewing glass. But it came to her anyway, unbidden and sharp, when the nights were long or the wind sounded too much like breath. He lingered in her, a phantom with the scent of wet fur and spoiled meat. And yet—she lived. Which is, perhaps, the worst revenge a ghost can be dealt.
She understood herself too well to pretend otherwise. She knew the monster didn’t leave; it learned manners. Some days, she imagined it sitting across the tea table, civil as you please, claws politely folded in its lap.
“No need to shout,” she’d murmur. “Let’s be proper about this.”
And after, she’d wash the cups. Dry them. Wait for the next showing.
Because it was a performance, wasn’t it? A one-woman tragedy with no curtains, no intermission. It played on repeat, unchanging. The horrors never softened, only grew familiar. That was the curse of remembering—not that it hurt, but that it became routine.
And yet, somehow, she remained. Stitched together with a child’s laughter, a survivor’s bitterness, and a peculiar grace that belongs only to those who have danced with monsters and lived long enough to choose the music next time.
“Are we late?”
His voice cut through the moment like sunlight through cathedral dust—unapologetically bright, unbothered by the quiet hush of thought she’d been folded inside. He always did that: waded in, muddy boots and all, into the soft velvet corners of her mind. And somehow, she never minded.
Remus Lupin lifted his wrist as though time were still a gentleman’s affair. The sleeve fell back to reveal an old watch—its face cloudy with scratches, its leather band softened by years of human sweat and quiet effort. The thing ticked on, stubborn as its owner. Its hands turned not with urgency, but patience, like it knew what it meant to wait.
She loved that watch. More accurately, she loved the hand it clung to—the knuckles slightly gnarled, the veins like old tree roots, the skin pale and freckled in places the sun had tried to kiss and failed. She loved his hands with a ferocity that startled her, as if they were something holy—tools of a man who had mended a life from splinters and soft string.
Before he could read the time, she swatted at him. Lightly. Familiar as breath. “We’re on time, Dad,” she said, easy and amused and brighter than she felt.
He smiled—quietly, without needing to prove it—and she turned to gesture toward the station clock. It loomed above them in its crimson-and-gold regalia, hands sweeping across its face like scepters, drawing thin lines between destinies with a monarch’s bored precision. Around them, the platform seethed with life.
Children with noses pressed to owl cages. Mothers kissing foreheads and wiping lips after. Fathers carrying trunks like they were lighter than their fears. And there, in the thick of it, stood Reese—deliberately facing away from the spectacle. She had learned, slowly and bitterly, that watching other people’s joy too long can leave a film over your own. There was nothing cruel in these little scenes—not really. But there was a softness to them she hadn’t been built for, and she feared it might unmake her if she looked too long.
So she kept her eyes on him. Her father. Her compass. Her piece of sky that never changed shape.
Later, when the noise dimmed and the platform blurred into something less than real, he knelt before her. Not out of ceremony or dramatics—though there was something noble in the way his coat folded around him, something nearly ancient in the way his body bowed. He did it so his words wouldn’t tower over her. So she’d know he meant them.
His hands found hers—not urgently, not theatrically, but like roots find soil: seeking, certain. The grip was warm. Alive. “You are an intelligent girl, Reese,” he said, and the words came slowly, like he feared rushing them might break their spine. “Don’t let anyone convince you that small is safe. Or that normal is the goal. People will try. God knows they always try.”
He paused then. His eyes searched hers—not frantically, not pleading, but searching in that soft, parental way that asked do you understand me? and are you still mine? in the same breath. “You’re better than that. Than their rules. Better than shrinking to fit someone else’s fear.”
She nodded. Not quickly, but with gravity. With intention. It was not a gesture of obedience—it was something closer to belief.
His smile was brief and worn and laced with sorrow, like he knew what belief cost in a world like this.
His hands rose to her shoulders and pressed—not hard, not possessive, just enough. Just to remind her that she was here, solid and rooted, no matter how loose the earth might feel. “You’ll find people who understand,” he said, voice lower now, not for secrecy, but for softness. “And if you don’t—if the world makes you wait longer than you should—know that I understand.”
And something inside her—something knotted and quiet and made of too many nights spent listening for monsters—unwound.
She stepped into him like she’d done a hundred times before, only this time it felt more like confession than comfort. Her face pressed into the wool of his jumper, and she breathed deep. He smelled of parchment and Earl Grey and the kind of warmth that doesn’t demand anything in return. His arms came around her, neither shield nor restraint—just warmth, just love. The old kind. The kind that said: You can go, and I’ll still be here.
And for a beat, maybe two, the entire merciless machinery of the world ground to a blessed halt. Her worries unspooled into the ether, replaced by a mellow surge of something suspiciously like joy—a rare biochemical benediction she wasn’t inclined to interrogate too closely. Here, wrapped up in him, was the simplest form of grace she’d ever known.
“Did you?”
The words came quiet, like something that had been waiting all morning for a door to open. They tumbled out against the curve of his shoulder, muffled in wool and nerves and the small, breakable hope that lives only in daughters asking things they’re not sure they’re ready to hear.
His chest shifted beneath her cheek, the slow exhale of a man who has spent too long living in questions. “Did I what, darling?”
She hesitated—just a second, but in it was all the fear of hearing the wrong thing. “Find others who understood?”
There are silences that fester, and then there are silences like this one—thick, sacred things that settle heavy over the lungs and force you to hold very, very still. She almost regretted it. Almost reached out to snatch the question back, stuff it down into the attic of all her other little cowardices.
But then she felt it. The smallest of nods. Not performative. Not delayed for effect. Just true.
“Yes,” he said. And the word was soft, but it held weight—weathered and worn like a stone that had been turned over a thousand times in the palm of his memory. Yes. Not quickly. Not painlessly. But yes.
“But you must also trust yourself,” he said at last, and his voice, though soft, was laced with that sober, slightly sardonic music she adored. One callused finger tapped her chest—tap tap—like a small summons. “Depending on others, no matter how pure their intentions, won’t solve everything. You are independent, Reese. Don’t shrink from it. Wield it.”
She wanted to laugh then—some dry, irreverent remark about how independence was overrated, especially when it meant having to wrestle daily with one’s own relentless mind. But instead she just leaned forward until their foreheads touched, stealing one last breath of that mingled sorrow and solace.
Reese basked—truly basked—in the radiant spill of her father’s eloquence, as though each carefully weighted syllable were some rare, jeweled liquor poured just for her to savor. His words lilted forth with an unstudied grace that made her wonder, half-suspiciously, if he had once been tutored by dusty prophets or kindly ghosts.
There was something timeless about the cadence, as if he were not merely speaking but channeling a long procession of mournful sages whose collective wisdom had been distilled for this singular audience: her. And oh, how that selfish, starved part of her spirit gorged on it—on being seen, on being precious, on being regarded as something worth the careful architecture of language.
When he bent to press a kiss to her forehead, it landed like a benediction, light as moth wings yet crackling with unspoken urgencies.
Then he straightened, assuming his habitual posture of gentle defiance, hands buried deep in his pockets as if to keep them from trembling. “I love you,” he said, simple and unadorned, which made it somehow more devastating. “Stay safe. Be smart.”
(It was funny, in a macabre sort of way, how the heart always seemed to seize hardest at the plain truths.)
She left him there on the bustling platform, a figure haloed by steam and the frayed grandeur of departure. The sight of his tender, slightly disheveled steadiness receded by slow degrees, until it was swallowed by the glassy murk of the window—like a saint painted onto fog. And wasn’t that just her luck: to carry around a personal saint, all battered dignity and soft decrees, destined to fade precisely when she needed him most.
Inside the compartment, she lowered herself onto the velvet seat with the deliberate, weighted motion of someone trying not to spook the lurking beasts of her mind. Already, the old phantoms were quick to curl up beside her—insecurities with moth-eaten pelts, difference with its cold breath and sharp little claws.
Around her, young witches and wizards cavorted in blithe ignorance of her private menagerie of anxieties. Their laughter sparkled in the air, bright and brittle as spun sugar. Even her father, moments ago, had looked at the swirl of magical trunks and fluttering owls with eyes full of innocent wonder—despite having walked this path long enough to know that marvel was just the stage makeup hastily daubed over something far stranger, far crueller.
Her attention snagged—helplessly, almost hungrily—on a tangle of brilliant red hair cutting through the crowd. It was a family, unmistakably bound by some conspiratorial filament that kept them from scattering in the human tide. They moved with chaotic unity, laughing too loudly, clutching each other’s arms as though the sheer excess of their affection required frequent physical outlet. The mother—stout, radiant with good humor, hair aflame—bustled about, planting brisk kisses on each child’s cheek before shooing them onto the train with the exaggerated impatience of someone trying not to cry.
Reese watched them, a bittersweet intrigue tightening low in her gut. There was a kind of savage, enviable abundance in how they existed together, spilling over with noise and color. It made something inside her curl protectively, as if wary of catching fire by mere proximity. Still, she couldn’t look away. Her gaze followed them with the wary fascination of a stray dog observing a lavish feast—half hoping for scraps, half terrified of the banquet itself.
Reese’s gaze drifted—lazy, almost louche—until it snagged upon a small ginger girl whose freckles bloomed across her nose like startled constellations. The girl was clutching the hem of her mother’s cloak with white-knuckled intensity, her anxious smile wincing out from beneath a crop of bright, unruly hair. For one taut, sticky moment, their eyes collided, and Reese felt an absurd, almost violent rush of kinship—quickly strangled by embarrassment.
She tore her gaze away, feigning grand indifference with all the clumsy aplomb of the terminally self-conscious. Her hand dove into her pocket to worry the cool edges of her coins, fingertips skating over the tiny minted ridges as if hoping for some talismanic reprieve.
With exaggerated deliberation, she tugged a book from her bag, letting it rest against her chest like a small, private shield. Drawing her knees close, she pressed her spine into the cushion and let the subtle rocking of the train coax her into a fragile calm.
She stared at the page, eyes tracing the neat black letters with a kind of desperate fidelity, but comprehension was slippery. Her thoughts twisted away, tugged by the hungry gravity of the unknown waiting just beyond the window: Hogwarts, Diagon Alley, entire worlds cloaked in robes and wandlight that didn’t quite know what to do with people like her. The ache that unfurled low in her stomach was strangely tender, like a bruise pressed by curious fingers.
She’d scarcely made it to the bottom of the first paragraph when a soft rap at the glass startled her heart into a wild clamor. Her head snapped up—too fast, she’d scold herself later—and there in the doorway stood a girl who seemed composed entirely of sharp lines and frizzing curls. Her posture was militant, spine arrow-straight, hands braced against the doorframe as if she’d been rehearsing her entrance all morning.
“Hello,” the girl said, each syllable bright and firm, trained like little soldiers. Her eyes pinned Reese in place, expectant. “Are you sitting here alone? Mind if I join you?”
Reese offered a shrug that was supposed to read as breezy but probably telegraphed mild existential crisis. The girl took it as an invitation regardless, bustling in with the authoritative self-assurance of someone who’d appointed herself Queen of the Compartment. She nudged Reese’s trunk aside with minimal ceremony and perched primly across from her.
“You excited for Hogwarts? I am. I mean—I really am. My mum and dad are Muggles, so I’m no expert or anything. Diagon Alley was—good grief, it was a whole new planet. You should’ve seen their faces when they read the supply list—oh! They’re Muggles. Did I mention that?”
The words spilled from her in a headlong torrent, as though she feared they’d sour if left unspoken. Her breathless enthusiasm slapped against Reese’s reticence in a way that might’ve been painful if it weren’t so oddly endearing.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” the girl asked, tilting her head with surgical curiosity.
Reese merely shrugged after rifling through her subpar response options in her head.
“Oh, well, what’s your name?”
“Reese.”
“Reese,” the girl repeated, as if testing the flavor of it. “Nice to meet you. I’m Hermione Granger.” She extended a hand with the solemnity of a diplomat negotiating a fragile ceasefire.
Reese took it, her fingers closing around Hermione’s with automatic politeness, though her mind remained half elsewhere—still trailing behind like a fraying ribbon, caught on the edge of the platform.
Sunlight fractured across the train window in shifting shards of gold, casting restless, kaleidoscopic patterns across her lap. The light painted her skin with fleeting brilliance, warm as breath, soft as apology, but it did nothing to lighten the dull ache pressing against her skull. Her eyes roamed the thinning platform in one last desperate sweep, the way a castaway might scan a receding shoreline. But the figure she sought—tweed-wrapped, weather-softened, impossibly beloved—was gone. Vanished into the swirling smog that the train belched into the morning air, as if swallowed whole by the very world he had prepared her for.
She blinked once, slowly. And just like that, she was alone again.
The train groaned into motion, metal screaming against metal, as if the engine itself objected to this severance. Hermione's voice, bright and eager, flitted through the haze like a bird that hadn’t yet realized it had flown into a chapel. Reese nodded vaguely at the ceiling, the motion of the train syncing to the odd, leaden tempo of her heart.
“What are you reading?” Hermione asked, peering forward with undisguised interest. Her chin jutted inquisitively over the edge of the seat like an eager sparrow.
Reese turned the book in her hands, exposing its battered cover without comment. It was a paperback, creased and loved and war-touched, the corners softened by many rereads. A relic of the Muggle world she was still secretly mourning.
Hermione leaned in. Her eyes, large and searching, narrowed slightly as she attempted to decipher the title. “Hmm. Interesting. Is that fiction?”
Reese perked up, if only a little. “Yeah. You’ve read it?”
Hermione shook her head and made a small noise of distaste. “Afraid not. I don’t really do fiction. I’m more of a non-fiction person, aren’t you? Goodness, I’ve read so many books this summer. I started on the Hogwarts reading the day my letter arrived. You wouldn’t believe the material—history, spells, theory—utterly brilliant. I’ve practically memorized Hogwarts: A History. Don’t you think it’s just a momentous occasion, going to school in a castle?”
Her voice rushed ahead like a river that had long since abandoned the notion of banks. Reese sat quietly, nodding now and then, letting the current pass her by without trying to swim. She appreciated Hermione’s enthusiasm, truly. It was like sitting beside a lit match—hot, flickering, self-consuming.
She gave a faint “mhm” in response, but the tightness in her chest had begun to coil again. New place. New people. Same ache.
Friendship had always been a finicky, elusive animal for Reese. In primary school, she'd often been treated like a rumor that had taken corporeal form—half myth, half cautionary tale.
The scars on her skin, scattered across her cheek like reluctant punctuation, had once convinced a group of older boys at her old school that she must be part of a Muggle gang. A gang, as if her life were some gritty BBC drama with theme music and slow-motion fights in back alleys. The rumor had stuck for an uncomfortably long time. Sometimes she still laughed about it, but only in the lonelier hours, when the absurdity was less funny and more bitter.
She bit the inside of her cheek. Hermione was still talking, filling the silence with the gleeful abandon of someone who had never once had to fear it.
Then, a stutter-step of hesitation.
“If you don’t mind,” Hermione said suddenly, voice tilting toward caution, “what are those, erm… scratches?”
Her hand lifted vaguely, pointing toward Reese’s face with a delicacy that was almost worse than bluntness. Mid-motion, she seemed to realize the impropriety and snapped her hand back as if burned, eyes widening in mortification.
Reese blinked. Ah. There it was. The inevitable breach.
She could’ve lied. Said it was a cat. A fall. A stupid tree branch, maybe. She’d used all three before. But something about Hermione’s sheepish grimace—the sincere horror at her own boldness—softened the edge of the moment.
Reese squirmed in her seat, a barely perceptible twitch of discomfort, as if the train itself had shifted beneath her—not in motion, but in memory. The past surged back with all the grace of a freight train, brutal and uninvited, a tidal wave that dragged her inward. Her fingernails dug crescent moons into the flesh of her palms, pain blooming like tiny prayers—blunt, physical, manageable. Better, at least, than the memory: sharp teeth, cold air, the humiliating certainty of her own helplessness.
The knock startled her like a slap. Loud, frantic, unrepentant.
“Hello? Excuse me but I—erm, have either of you seen my toad?”
Reese blinked toward the doorway, dazed. Standing there was a boy with a face like a pudding cup: soft, open, perpetually on the verge of collapse. His brown hair flopped miserably as he glanced between them with wide, anxious eyes.
She and Hermione exchanged a glance, a silent pact of mutual confusion. Then, in tandem, they shook their heads.
“No… we haven’t,” Hermione said, tilting her head like a curious bird. “Why on Earth are you looking for a—”
“Trevor is my toad and I need to find him!”
Reese, against her will, admired the conviction. There was something almost noble in the way he said it, as if ‘Trevor’ were a knight and not an amphibian.
Hermione leapt to her feet like someone fulfilling a sacred destiny. “I’d be happy to help look for him!”
The boy’s gratitude spilled forth in grateful stammering, and together they vanished down the corridor, a quest born of panic and endearingly poor planning.
Her fingers returned dutifully to her book, but the words swam uselessly across the page, reshaping themselves into hieroglyphs of disinterest. Her eyes flicked left to right, back to front, performing the ghost of reading while her mind wandered off to gnaw at the same old bone: the uneasy arithmetic of starting over.
Would this life be better? And what exactly did better mean? More tolerable? Less lonely? More carefully disguised?
She had left behind the only person who knew her whole—faults, secrets, teeth and all—in exchange for a place that might never quite see her at all. Acceptance, Dumbledore had promised her. Tolerance, even warmth. Hogwarts would be a sanctuary, he’d said, for children with strangeness sewn into their skin. But now, as the train rattled toward the unknown, her skepticism curled at the edges like parchment too close to flame. Acceptance was a word people loved to say—rarely one they practiced.
Seven years of secrets. Seven years of calculated small talk and strategically long sleeves. It was exhausting just thinking about it.
“Knock, knock,” someone sang.
The compartment door slid open again, and Reese looked up, already bracing.
A boy lounged in the doorway, dark-skinned and loose-limbed, his robes draped across him like a forgotten coat on a chair. His lashes were absurdly long, his voice even longer.
“You don’t mind if I sit here, do you?” he asked, not waiting for a reply before easing into Hermione’s abandoned seat. “Would’ve stayed in mine, but all they talked about was… Quilludge? Couldn’t make sense of the fuss.”
Reese blinked. “Quilludge?”
He nodded solemnly. “Something like that. Did I say it wrong?”
“Quidditch?”
“Ah. Yes. Quidditch. That’s what it’s called!” He flailed his arms upward in theatrical exasperation, like someone admitting defeat in a tragic opera. “It was driving me absolutely mad.”
Despite herself, a laugh fluttered in Reese’s chest—small, uncertain, but real. The boy caught it, grinned, and leaned back as if pleased with himself.
“You a fan of it?” he asked.
“No,” she said, voice dry as dust. “But I admire the passion it inspires. It’s like a religion with goalposts.”
“I’d never even heard of it until today,” the boy admitted, his voice soft with uncertainty. “My parents are Muggles.”
The words landed between them like something sacred and a little dangerous—an offering, not just of fact, but of vulnerability. His shoulders tensed as though bracing for ridicule, or worse, pity. As if those syllables might sabotage whatever fragile rapport had begun to grow between them.
Reese hummed in quiet understanding, a sound low and noncommittal but not unkind. She folded her book closed, its weight a comforting pressure in her lap, and tucked it between herself and the seat cushion, as if shelving a part of herself for later.
He shifted slightly, relaxing into the moment with cautious curiosity. “And your folks?” he asked, voice light but fishing.
“Father’s a wizard,” she replied, the words clipped and clean. Truthful, but pointedly incomplete. The other half—her mother, her blood, the muddied question mark of it all—she kept wrapped tight and untouched, buried like a tooth beneath floorboards.
Silence crept in then, gentle and companionable. Reese returned to worrying the fraying hem of her sweater with deliberate focus, threads catching beneath her fingernails. Conversation, like breath, could be overdone. Sometimes it was better to let it lapse into quiet, especially when someone else was filling the air with expectation.
And then—like a gust of wind bursting into a room that had only just remembered stillness—Hermione returned.
“All right,” she declared breathlessly, dropping back into her former seat with a graceless thump that sent the boy scrambling sideways to avoid her elbow, “so, I didn’t find the toad, but you will never believe who I ran into, Reese—”
She paused dramatically, and the boy opened his mouth to ask who, but Hermione steamrolled right over him with the self-satisfied flair of someone revealing a state secret.
“Harry Potter!”
She sat there, arms spread wide, waiting for awe. For gasps. For perhaps a fainting spell.
None came.
Hermione’s smile wavered.
“Come on! Harry Potter.” Her voice rose, imploring. “The Boy Who Lived?”
The boy glanced over at Reese, one brow arching slowly, the picture of polite confusion. “Do you know what she’s on about?”
Reese shrugged, one shoulder rising and falling in an artful pantomime of indifference. “Vaguely.”
In truth, the name had struck something deep in her—a note held too long in the background of her mind, now finally vibrating into awareness. Harry Potter. The myth. The story whispered through decades like smoke. She remembered the photographs her father kept—grainy images from before the war, before the betrayal, before everything turned. There had been a James Potter, always laughing, head tilted back, one arm flung around Remus like a lopsided scarf. And now there was a son. Same eyes. Same look. A living echo.
Her thoughts spiraled somewhere far from the compartment, tangled in ghosts, until Hermione’s sharp tone snapped her back.
“Excuse me,” Hermione said, crossing her arms with militant offense, “who are you, exactly?”
“Dean Thomas,” he said with the sort of easy pride that suggested he’d practiced saying it in the mirror a few times, just to see how it landed. He slouched deeper into the seat, limbs long and unbothered, as if he’d already claimed the space as his own. When Hermione stuck out her hand with professional zeal, he blinked once, then grinned and shook it, half-amused by the ceremony of it all.
“Hermione Granger,” she announced crisply, as though signing a treaty.
As the train wound its serpentine course deeper into the countryside, the compartment pulsed with the rhythmic clatter of wheels and half-formed conversation. But Reese found herself adrift. Her book lay open in her lap, its pages fluttering slightly with the draft, but her eyes kept tracing and retracing the same paragraph as though caught in a spell. The words didn’t stick. They slid off her like oil, like lies.
Anxiety bloomed beneath her ribs in that familiar, gnawing way—like some small, sharp-toothed creature had made a home inside her. She could feel the pull of the full moon approaching, not in her skin (not yet), but in her blood, her breath, the aching tightness behind her eyes. It loomed in her thoughts like a rising tide, dragging her back to the private ritual of pain she would now endure alone.
Her father’s absence pressed at her like a missing limb. The way he would wordlessly hand her a cup of tea the night before. The quiet fortitude of his presence, all steadiness and wool. She had told him—haltingly, embarrassed by the tremor in her voice—that she didn’t know how to do it without him. He’d cupped her face in both hands and told her she could. That Dumbledore had made arrangements. That she was safe.
Safe.
Such a ridiculous word. Like wrapping silk around a blade and calling it harmless.
Across from her, Hermione was speaking with the luminous confidence of someone whose beliefs had not yet been tested by real darkness. “It’s preposterous to assume that blood status defines one’s magical abilities. I mean—anyone can become a great witch or wizard, if they want it enough... right?”
The conviction in her voice made Reese look up. She blinked. “Anyone?” she asked, and the word tasted strange in her mouth—light and heavy all at once.
Hermione hesitated, as if realizing the complexity of what she'd just said. “I suppose... within reason.”
Dean jumped in before the air could grow too thick. “Why not? It’s not like you need a license or anything, right?” His voice was half-muffled by a licorice wand hanging from his mouth, the image absurd enough to pull a reluctant smile from Reese.
Hermione inhaled sharply. “Actually, you do need a license to Apparate. And Animagi must be registered by the Ministry. There’s an entire—”
“Ah yes, yes, obviously, all that,” Dean interrupted, waving a hand dismissively, nearly whacking Hermione in the nose. “But you get what I mean. No one’s going to stop you from trying.”
The flicker in her chest wasn’t quite hope, but it was its cousin—ambition, still timid but growing bolder with every second she didn’t squash it flat.
Hermione suddenly sat upright. “Wait—look!”
All three heads snapped to the window. In the distance, through the veil of mist and fading sun, a silhouette began to form—majestic, ancient, impossibly real.
“Hogwarts,” Hermione whispered, reverent.
Reese stared.
The castle rose from the hills like a myth clawing its way out of the earth—spires sharp against the grey, windows aglow like molten stars. Her chest tightened, caught between awe and a low, crawling dread.
Reese’s fingers, deft and familiar, slipped into the front pouch of her trunk, rifling through half-folded parchment and the occasional rogue quill until they found what they sought: her robes, wrinkled and warm from confinement, smelling faintly of ink and summer dust. She shook them out and shrugged them on with the casual efficiency of someone performing a ritual she didn’t quite believe in, smoothing the fabric down over her knees as if it might somehow make her more prepared.
The rhythmic chug of the train faltered, grew halting, and finally stilled—a mechanical sigh that marked the end of one world and the breathless beginning of another.
Dean looked visibly bewildered, his gaze flicking from Reese to Hermione and back again, as though hoping one of them had been issued a map. Hermione, of course, had. Not physically, perhaps, but internally—judging by the precise tilt of her chin and the prim excitement burning in her eyes. Dean, Muggle-born like Reese, seemed caught in that same uneasy balance of awe and confusion, but with far less pretense.
“Where’re we supposed to go?” he asked, glancing toward the throng of students pressing toward the corridor.
Reese gave a shrug that was equal parts apology and deflection. Your guess is as good as mine, it said. Probably better.
But Hermione surged forward, the unspoken reins already in her hands.
“Firs’ years! This way, please! Firs’ years, over here!”
The voice boomed from outside—rich, warm, and slightly muffled by the train's echoing architecture. It cut through the din of student chatter like a bell tolling across a cathedral.
“Well, come along then!” Hermione beckoned, already weaving through the litter of trunks and robes with a determination that bordered on zealotry.
Reese tucked her book away with reluctant care, standing in sync with Dean, the two of them moving in tandem with the quiet, unconscious rhythm of shared bewilderment. They followed the procession of wide-eyed children, their feet echoing against the platform as the cool night air swept through their robes, setting them adrift in a sea of newness.
And then—there he was.
“Goodness,” Hermione breathed, her voice caught between reverence and terror.
Reese’s gaze locked on the towering figure silhouetted by moonlight. He was massive—unreal in scale, like something dredged from folklore and given skin. His hair hung wild and tangled, forming a crown of thorns around a face lined with mysteries and mud. The lamplight caught in the tangle of his beard and glinted off his eyes—small, sharp things tucked beneath shaggy brows.
“The name’s Rubeus Hagrid,” he bellowed, and his voice rolled through the air like distant thunder shaking loose the bones of the world.
Reese swallowed. Something inside her curled in response—not quite fear, not quite comfort. Just… magnitude. The sense that the night had shifted, that they had stepped into a story far older than themselves.
Hagrid’s voice rose again, guiding them down a shadowy path flanked by towering trees whose branches reached out like ancient arms, their leaves rustling in a language long forgotten. The night was velvet-draped and thick with enchantment, pierced only by the flicker of lanterns and the occasional startled whisper.
They walked.
Reese, keeping close to Dean, could feel the pressure in the air change—the way the world seemed to inhale before revelation.
And then it appeared.
Hogwarts.
It didn’t rise so much as emerge—like a mountain uncurling itself from fog. Turrets stretched upward into the heavens, windows glimmering like a constellation half-buried in the stone. It wasn’t beautiful in any delicate way. It was terrible and enormous and alive. A fortress, a cathedral, a secret.
A collective breath exhaled from the group, audible and strange—a synchronous Oooh, reverent and small.
Hogwarts rose from the horizon with the deliberate majesty of something ancient remembering itself. It didn’t sit on the land so much as emerge from it, hewn from stone and myth, every spire and parapet etched with the kind of obsessive craftsmanship usually reserved for holy relics. The castle glowed beneath the moon’s indifferent gaze, bathed in soft silver light that caught the sharp angles of its towers and softened them into something dreamlike. There was an unearthly precision to it all—every turret a prayer, every window a secret. It was a cathedral masquerading as a school.
She wanted to say something—to name what she saw, to express even a fragment of what this moment was doing to her insides—but language had left the building. Words felt clumsy and mortal, like trying to capture the wind in a jam jar.
The lake mirrored the impossible splendor, still as glass and black as polished onyx, the castle’s reflection swaying slightly with each ripple like a candle flame in a cathedral. The sky above was a stitched tapestry of stars, each one hung with suspicious perfection, as though the night itself had conspired to dazzle them. Clouds meandered past in lazy, silken strokes, adding a painter’s flourish to the celestial drama.
Beside her, Dean slowed. His eyes were wide, lips parted in unguarded reverence. For a moment he was silent, which—Reese had come to learn—meant the universe was doing something particularly moving.
Then, softly, like a benediction:
“Bloody hell,” he murmured, “I think this is worth suffering through Quilludge.”