Chapter Text
September 1991
She didn’t even want the toad anyway; toads are not cool. Eleanor knows that. Everyone knows that. Cats are cool. Owls are cool. Even rats are marginally cooler than a toad. But it was a gift, from her uncle. A reward. The emphatic pop of a champagne bottle. For thank the very good Lord above, she is not a squib.
Some days, she wishes she had been a squib. Life might have been easier then. She could have escaped home. Perhaps her grandmother might have disowned her, put her out for adoption, and then Eleanor could have started life afresh. A Muggle. This is what she imagines every night before she goes to sleep. An imaginary life, in an unknown world, where she’s different and cool and pretty and popular. Not nervous and shy and disappointing and always losing everything.
Eleanor trawls the Hogwarts Express, head down and eyes out. She should just let Trevor go. Perhaps it was his way of mutually agreeing with her that it would be best if they parted ways, early on. No use trying to make things work. It’s just not meant to be, Nell, she imagines Trevor croaking at her as he hops around the train.
The train has hit the countryside now, London far behind them. The rolling green fields blur past her. She’s never been on a train before. She wonders how fast they must be travelling. They pass a herd of sheep. Tens of them, maybe even a hundred. Little blobs of white on the green. Each one gone before she can count.
The speed of the train makes her dizzy. Her hands hot and heavy, fingers clumping together. Come on, Trevor, she pleads. As two older students nudge past her, she stumbles; something warm trickles down her nose.
Eleanor brings her hand up and as she pulls it away, a streak of red slashes across the back of her hand. It’s bright against her pale skin, like paint on a blank canvas.
“No,” she whispers to herself, pressing the back of her hand into her nose. “Not now.”
Eleanor takes her chance on the lone girl she’s found in one of the carriages. She pulls open the door. Blood falling thicker now.
“Erm - excuse me?” Her voice is nasalled, stoppered by her hand on her nose.
“Yes?” The girl turns around. She has terribly bushy hair. It curls in all directions. She holds her chin out first, proudly, as though she already knows exactly who she is and what she wants.
“Oh,” exclaims the girl, eyes widening and snapping her book shut. “Are you having a nosebleed?”
“Yes,” she says, as another spatter of blood hits her hand. “And I’ve lost my toad.”
“Come on,” says the girl briskly. “You’re getting blood all over your dress.”
The girl’s brown eyes scan quickly all over Eleanor’s pudgy frame. Taking in her pink cheeks and pigtails. Her dress, little forget-me-nots stitched into the white fabric, collar slightly askew. And the splotches of blood. They could be roses, or tulips.
“Come on, where?” Eleanor asks. “I just need a tissue.”
“Yes,” says the girl. “The bathroom is this way.”
The girl - or Hermione Granger - is waiting outside for Eleanor as she sits on the toilet, lid down, bundle of tissue screwed up around her nose, waiting for the bleeding to stop. Eleanor can feel Hermione’s presence through the door, like a humming sound. Or a buzzing.
When the bleeding stops, she washes her hands first. Her head feels light and she would like to lie down. But she scrubs hard across the cracks in her hands where the blood has dried, and under her nails. She takes another wad of toilet roll and runs it under the tap quickly. Then she wipes around her nose and her face.
She tries to wipe the rosey splotches on her dress but the water only seems to make it worse. Turning them pinkish and making them bigger. Petals, perhaps. Maybe Hermione will know a spell.
“Oh, good, it’s stopped, has it?” Hermione has her hands clasped together. “I’ve been thinking about the best way to look for your toad and I think we should start from the very top of the train by the driver and work our way down—“
Eleanor has stopped listening. Her head is fuzzy, as she follows Hermione down the train blindly. Hopping between compartments as they ask older students if they’ve seen a toad. Watching their eyebrows raise or mouths curling between the urge to laugh and distate. She wonders, briefly, if this is what her parents feel in their heads. Fuzzy. Empty. Light. The world happening around you but not knowing what it is that’s happening, or what people are saying. Just wanting to lie down, close your eyes, and go to sleep. Almost like living in a dream. Or on a cloud.
As it happens, Trevor is at the very end of the train. In the hands of a very brutish looking boy.
“Oh,” Eleanor starts, pulling on Hermione’s sleeve, “that’s Trevor there.”
“With those boys?”
The two girls eyes the three boys warily. Eleanor has never done well with boys, and especially not ones like these, and especially not with ones like the boy in the middle. He has blonde hair, slicked back. His mother probably did it for him. His clothes are well-pressed, his face pointed and assured.
Hermione, Eleanor suspects, does not do well with boys like this either.
“Go on, then,” says Hermione, arms folded over her chest. “Go ask for him back.”
Her set face says, I’ve already done enough for you and my limit has been reached. Your toad, your problem.
Really, they are both terrified.
Eleanor casts a glance between the boys, who are prodding and poking Trevor, the occassional guffaw floating down, and Hermione. Determined to make Eleanor do her own dirty work.
The thought of letting the boys just have Trevor crosses her mind. But she sees the blonde one tugging on Trevor’s leg, hard, as though to make Trevor hurt. Your parents were brave, her grandmother always says, with the tone that she, Eleanor, by comparison is not brave.
You should aspire to be more like your parents, Eleanor.
Eleanor wrings her warm hands together. “Okay.”
She approaches the boys almost at a tiptoe. Her damp fingers find the end of her dress, curling into the fabric.
“Excuse me,” she says. Her voice is squeaky and it cracks at the end.
The three boys turn to her, eyes suspicious, gazes vicious.
“That’s my toad,” she says, pointing to Trevor, who is wriggling against the thick grasp.
The two bigger boys look straight to the boy with blonde hair. At closer inspection, Eleanor sees the haughtiness against the softness of his skin. The indefinite air of superiority on a well-made bed of money. And something angry in his eyes, as though he is concentrating on something very hard. This anger is adult.
“Your toad?” The boy drawls.
“Yes, I lost him at the start of the journey. My uncle got him for me.”
The boy raises an eyebrow, taking in her appearance. She still has the splotches of blood on her dress.
“Is that blood?” The boy wrinkles his nose, eyes flashing. Striking gold on something to hold, to exploit. Boys like this always grasp their claws into anything they can, soaring away. They’re like magpies. Hunting for treasure. And Eleanor is just the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.
“No,” she lies, hands flattening over her dress. Her cheeks are warming. The lightheadedness, returning.
“Jam, then?” The boy sneers, and then makes a look at the other two boys, who, under instruction, sneer too. Laughingly.
“No,” she says. “Please may I have my toad back?”
“What do you say, Goyle?” The boy glances at the boy who’s nearly strangling Trevor. Eleanor is convinced he’s going to kill him. Trevor will die. Here, on the train to Hogwarts. Murdered. She’d have to bury him as soon as they got off the train, or maybe she would have to throw him out the window, into one of the passing fields.
Goyle grunts, shrugging his shoulders, but tightening his hold all the same. Trevor lets out a strained croak.
“You’re hurting him,” Eleanor says quietly.
“It’s a toad,” the blonde boy snaps. Then he changes track, “Are your parents wizards?”
The word parents causes her stomach to lurch.
“Yes.”
“Really? What’s your name?”
“Eleanor,” she says.
The boy does one of these sneering laughs again at her. “No, you idiot. Your surname.”
“Please,” she begs, “can I just have my toad back?”
“Are you an Abbot? Father told me there was an Abbot girl starting this year.”
“My name is Eleanor Longbottom,” she says quickly. “Now, please can I have my toad?”
But they don’t hear her third plea, because the blonde boy bursts into a spatter of laughter. The two brutish boys following suit. Laughing loudly. It echoes through the train. She daren’t look back at Hermione. Perhaps Hermione has left her. Unable to stomach her performance against these boys.
“Longbottom?” The boy spits with another burst of laughter, lip curling. “Have your toad, then.”
She almost snatches Trevor out of Goyle’s hands and turns as fast as she can to move back towards Hermione.
As she scurries back, she hears the boy drawl, “You know that saying about people looking like their pets…” and more laughter.
Hermione studies her for a moment, eyes bright with what might be worry, and without another word they walk back down the train. Her face flushes as their footsteps hit the carpet floor. Her eyes sting. She didn’t want to cry this early on. Her vision blurs. Her hands grip Trevor, unwilling to let him go again, and she holds him tight until they reach Hogsmeade station and even tighter as they cross the boat to the lake.
The castle is beautiful, even Hermione is stunned into silence by the way it sits against the night. It's so very big. The Moon glows, bright and guiding, above them all. Eleanor feels small, minor, aimless in front of it all, and maybe a bit excited. Her parents made this journey too, they walked up to this castle once as eleven year olds. All that nervousness and excitement thrumming through them. Ready to take on a new adventure.
"Oi, Longbottom!" A voice hisses through the group of first years. Eleanor's head whips round and her stomach drops as she recognises the boy from the train.
"What is it?" She should narrow her eyes, look intimidating, and say something cutting. That's how you deal with boys like this. You need to match them in force, show them that you can't be pushed around, because the more you lie down and take it, the more they'll enjoy it.
"How's your toad?" There's some guffawing.
"Fine," she snaps. "Especially now that he's out of your fat reach."
She could be flush with pride at herself. It's clear even the boy is momentarily taken aback. He hadn't been expecting this, not her to bite - however weakly - so soon. Perhaps he thought he would have more time to play with his food.
He recovers quickly though, "You'd know all about fat, wouldn't you?"
Her flush turns outward. The other first years around them have started to whisper and look between the two of them. This was the last thing she wanted: a scene.
"Shove off, Malfoy," a boy from her left calls out.
Eleanor turns to see a very lanky red-haired boy, looking at her a bit cautiously, but offering a weak grin, in consolation. "You should ignore him," says the ginger boy, "we met him on the train. He's a prat."
'We' is the ginger boy and another boy to the right. Small, scrawny, jet-black hair, and--she tries her hardest not to stare at the scar on his forehead.
Eleanor gives the boy a weak grin back, "I didn't realise he was a Malfoy."
"Know the Malfoys do you?" The ginger boy asks.
"Of them," she says. Her grandmother can talk anyone's ear off about the Malfoys, she should have known from the blonde hair. "I'm Eleanor, by the way."
"Ron," says the boy. "And this is Harry."
The three of them smile awkwardly at each other. They're saved from having to talk anymore by Professor McGonagall leading them from the Entrance Hall to the sorting.
The list of names goes too slowly and too fast at the same time. She wants it to be her turn and also wishes she was last. Eleanor would be lying if she said she hadn't put much thought into what House she wants to be in. It's obvious. She wants to be in Gryffindor, like her parents. That would make her happy, and her grandmother. She doesn't want to get her hopes up though, it's unlikely, after all. Hufflepuff will be fine. She can still have a nice time in Hufflepuff.
She predicted Hermione would be in Ravenclaw, but the girl was just sorted into Gryffindor. It would be nice to be together. They're not quite friends yet, but they're allies.
McGonagall calls out, "Longbottom, Eleanor."
She hears a suppressed snort from behind her, no doubt, Malfoy. Ron, to her side, gives her an encouraging nod and a smile. Though it's slightly pitying.
She grips the wood of the stool hard, as the hat descends her head and the hall disappears from view. Gryffindor, she pleads, over and over.
"Gryffindor, eh?" The voice echoes in her mind. It's neither warm nor cold, happy or sad. "You're braver than you think. Hm. Interesting. Loyal, too, oh, incredible loyalty. A thirst not so much to be great, but to be loved. Well, I think, it better had be...GRYFFINDOR!"