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Bloody blue bollocks on a bloated bullfrog!!
His bloody trunk had been too bloody heavy to lift at the Dursleys, and too bloody heavy to lift at the train station and so of course it was now too bloody heavy to lift on to the bloody train!! He would never be able to get on the train after all, and would have to go back to the Dursleys, and they would send him to St Brutus’ Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys, and he would be beaten to a pulp- possibly that very same evening… probably before pudding. Not that they'd give him pudding, of course.
He was now left with no option but to ask for help- his least favourite option, and one that was sure to result in being told off severely, and maybe even arrested.
He picked the redheaded woman who had a gaggle of children all around her, on the theory that one more wouldn’t register. She also had a round face and a sweet smile, like the woman off the cereal commercial- the very woman that Harry had, on several lonely occasions, auditioned for the role of his Mum.
“Excuse me,” Harry said. His voice came out distressingly small and squeaky to his own ears. “Could you - I'm sorry - c-could you help me get my trunk on the train?”
She gave him a long look.
Was she angry? Harry shifted his weight to his back foot, the better to leg it.
“Oh, of course, dear, of course …” She smiled at him, just as he was getting ready to bolt. “Ronnie! Ronnie, love, come and help - this poor boy can't lift his trunk, give him a hand, would you?”
A redheaded girl came skidding around the side of the trolley.
Harry forgot what a trunk was. He forgot what a train was.
This girl was … she was…ohh.
She was breathtaking. There were freckles scattered all over her nose, more than Harry had ever seen on one person, and he had the sudden ridiculous urge to count them, all of them, then and there. Her cheeks were pink from running and her shaggy shoulder-length crop of hair was the brightest thing on the whole platform, brighter than the slanted afternoon sunlight, brighter than anything, and when she pushed it out of her face and grinned - a little crooked, a little out of breath - Harry felt his own mouth go shy and tugged-up at the corners before he'd decided anything at all.
She was wearing blue jeans with a grass stain on one knee and a hole worn clean through the other, and a faded pink jumper that had quite clearly been someone else’s first, washed soft and gone fuzzy at the cuffs, and trainers in a state of advanced disrepair, and her socks didn’t even match - one stripy, one with little hedgehogs marching round the ankle - and there was a charming smudge of black dirt across the bridge of her nose, right over a scatter of freckles.
She looked like the sort of person you might invent if you were trying to invent a friend. (He had, in fact, invented several friends over the years, in various cupboards and classrooms and forgotten corners of the playground, and not one of them had ever looked half this good, or stood there in odd socks grinning at him.)
Harry liked this all so much, so immediately and for no reason at all that he simply could not work out how to stop staring at her.
“Right,” she said, with another crooked smile.
She bent down, gripped one end of the trunk, and hoisted it onto the train step in one go. Harry's mouth fell open a bit. She grabbed the other end, walked it up two steps in a single shove, and dusted her hands off on the seat of her jeans like she did this sort of thing all the time.
Blimey, Harry thought, breathless all over again.
She was strong. Are girls even allowed to be that strong? She was strong like nobody he had ever met - certainly not Aunt Petunia, who would whinge and moan if she had to so much as lift a shopping bag.
This girl (Ronnie, what a cool name, Harry had never met a girl called Ronnie before, he was going to remember this name for the rest of his life) had picked up his trunk like it was a sandwich, like it was nothing, like helping him was the most ordinary thing in the world and not the strange and enormous thing it actually was, because no one had ever really just done something for him before, not once, not ever, had they?
Harry's stomach was suddenly fizzy and light, like he'd downed an entire bottle of lemonade and stood up too fast. He had to bite down a grin.
She - Ronnie, wow, Ronnie - straightened up. She stood there for a moment on the step, hands stuffed into her back pockets, and looking at him with her head tipped slightly to one side. Then she jumped down. She landed close enough to him that he could see that she had gone a tiny bit pink under the freckles.
“There you go,” she said. She scuffed the side of her trainers along the platform and looked at him. She had eyes a sharp surprised blue, like the very middle of a flame, with lashes long enough to throw little shadows.
“Thanks,” Harry breathed. “Thanks, that was… thanks.” Definitely not a speech for the ages.
“S'all right,” she said, and something about the way she said it made the warm fizzing lemonade-feeling start up again under his ribs.
She stood there a moment longer, looking at him as if there was something else she wanted to say. Then she shrugged, a shrug that seemed addressed more to herself than to him, and turned to wave at the mum, who was already several children downwind and shouting at one of them. But just before she went, she glanced back over her shoulder and gave him a quick small smile.
Harry found an empty compartment near the back of the train and arranged himself by the window in such a way that he could peer outside without, in theory, being peered back at - a manoeuvre he had spent several years perfecting at the Dursleys’ and was rather proud of.
The train began to pick up speed.
Out on the platform, families were waving goodbye. Mums on tiptoe, Dads with hands cupped round their mouths to shout last-minute instructions, smaller siblings being held up to wave by the wrists. Harry spotted the kind plump lady among the throng, waving with both arms at someone several windows down.
He allowed himself to pretend that they were all his family, come to see him off on this epic journey, the very first day of his very first actual school. He too waved at the platform.
“Bye, Mum! Bye Dad! Bye Aunty Bea! Bye Aunty Bea’s friend Sandra!” He called out, “I’ll ring on Sundays! Take care of Fluffy, he likes the telly on! Tell Granny I’m sorry about the greenhouse!”
The train rounded a corner, and all of their faces slipped out of view, all at once. Harry was alone once again. The carriage was quiet, the platform was gone, and the people on it had never been his to begin with.
He sat with that for a moment.
Then, the compartment door slid open and the same glorious redhead appeared in the doorway.
Harry’s stomach did a little hopeful swoop.
“Anyone sitting there?” she asked. “Everywhere else is full, and my brothers are being prats.”
“Yes,” Harry said. “No.. yeah, no.” It was not his finest sentence.
But Ronnie didn’t seem bothered. She thumped down onto the bench across from him, hauled a battered trunk in after herself with another casual show of strength and then folded herself up cross-legged on the seat with her trainers tucked under her knees.
Her socks really were ace - the hedgehogs one especially. There was also dirt on the cuff of her jumper, to go with the dirt on her nose. She was, on the whole, a girl with a notable amount of dirt about her person, and Harry discovered, to his own surprise, that he was entirely in favour of this.
“I'm Ron,” she said.
“Oh,” Harry said, thrilled, to be permitted to address this rather marvellous girl by the familiar Ron rather than her full name, which was clearly Ronnie. Ron felt like an honour. Ron felt like something you earned.
“I'm Harry.”
She looked at him. He awkwardly pushed his fringe off his face.
“Blimey!” she said. “Is that… are you -?”
Harry had not previously been a cool person. He had, in fact, been the opposite- a person to whom cool things happened against, like a cricket ball happened against a window. Coolness had been a thing that other boys had, in the same way that other boys had bicycles and birthdays. But this time…. ohhhh this time….
“Yeah,” he said, and pushed his fringe right up so she could have a proper look.
“Cor,” she breathed, with even more feeling. “Fred and George said you'd be on this train. I didn't believe them- they say loads of rubbish. I had two Sickles on you not being real.”
“Sorry,” said Harry, rather ruefully. He had cost her two whole sickles before they even met, just by existing and now she would hate him, and he had gone and ruined it all. He would pine away with only her memory, and die alone.
“S’all right. Worth it.”
Worth it? He was worth it? Like worth actual money?
“Did it hurt?” she asked.
“A lot,” said Harry, even though he remembered nothing.
"A lot a lot? Or just, like, a lot?"
“A lot a lot.”
“Bloody Morgana's knickers!”
What a fine collection of words. Possibly the finest he had ever heard.
“Can I… d’you mind if I… ?” She leaned forward, hands hovering politely.
Harry tilted his head obligingly so she could get a proper view. Her hands were cool and gentle, and they smelled faintly of soap and cut grass. They settled lightly and carefully at his temples.
Harry couldn’t actually remember the last time someone had touched him so softly. He was mostly used to blows and punches.
“It's a really good shape,” she said earnestly. “Like proper lightning. None of that wonky business.”
“Cheers,” said Harry. Her breath fanned his forehead a little. His eyes wanted to close, and he let them, for just a second.
“D'you remember it happening?”
“Bit of a flash of green light maybe.”
Harry surprised himself with his answer. He had not, until this moment, remembered the flash of green light. He had not known there was a flash of green light to remember. The information arrived in his head as if it had been there all along, just waiting for somebody to ask the question in the right way.
“Wow,” he said slowly. “I just remembered that.”
This girl was definitely a powerful witch.
“Sorry.” She drew her hands back, suddenly seeming embarrassed, “Mum says I’m tactless sometimes.”
“S’all right.” He rather wished she would put her hands back.
“Hang on,” she said, brightening. “Hang on. I've got Scabbers.”
She rummaged in the pocket of her jumper and produced, with some ceremony, a rat. It was grey, fat, old, missing a bit of one ear, and deeply asleep.
“This is Scabbers,” said Ron. “He’s a rat.”
“Right.”
“He sleeps a lot.”
“Right.”
“He used to be Percy’s. My brother. He got an owl for being made a Prefect, so I got Scabbers. Which is … yeah… brilliant.”
“He’s a great rat,” Harry said, quickly and with feeling.
“He’s not.”
“He is.”
“He’s asleep.”
“He’s relaxed. Loads of animals sleep when they're happy.” said Harry, who had no idea whether this was true. “Cats do. Fish do.”
“He’s not happy. He’s just old.”
"He’s distinguished."
“ He’s unconscious.”
“He’s thinking.”
Ron made a small noise somewhere between a laugh and a huff- like Harry had caught her off-guard. Harry had made a girl laugh! This was, officially, the best day of his life.
Ron tucked Scabbers away. Harry noticed that the cuff of her jumper was not just dirty but a bit frayed, and that the elbow had been mended with stitches in a slightly wrong colour. He decided at once that he liked the wrong colour very much, much more, in fact, than the right colour.
She and Harry soon got to chatting about everything and nothing.
Ron told him about her siblings (“Six. Six. Can you imagine?”), about Bill who worked at a bank but with curses on it, about Charlie who tamed dragons in Romania, about her dad who was mad about plugs (plugs? had he heard that right?) and had a whole shed full of them, about her mum who could apparently knit you a jumper while shouting at you for being late.
This world was definitely as magic as it got.
She seemed about to say something else - Harry could see her gathering it up - when the compartment door slid open without anybody bothering to knock.
A pale, pointy-faced boy stood in the doorway.
He had hair so blond it was nearly white, and a face that gave the strong impression of having recently sniffed at something stuck under his shoe. He was flanked by two enormous boys who looked as though they had been ordered out of one of Aunt Petunia’s catalogues under the heading Brutes, Large, Pair Of. One of them was cracking his knuckles. The other one was, as far as Harry could tell, just standing there breathing.
“Is it true?” said the pale boy. “Are you him?”
“Is what true?” asked Harry, who had just realised this was the same berk from Madam Malkin’s.
“They’re saying all down the train that Harry Potter’s in this compartment. So it's you, is it?”
“Yes,” said Harry. He hoped that Ronnie wouldn't be impressed by Rat Face’s clearly uppity behaviour. He didn't think she would, but he could still remember the time Violet Elizabeth from Year Two had stopped talking to him, because her mum had decided he was rough.
The pale boy nodded at his two large companions. “This is Crabbe and this is Goyle. And my name's Malfoy. Draco Malfoy.”
Ron gave a slight cough.
Malfoy's grey eyes slid sideways and landed on her.
“Think my name's funny, do you?” he looked her over- the frayed cuff, the wrong-colour mend, the hand-down jumper. “No need to ask who you are. My father told me all the Weasleys have red hair, freckles, and more children than they can afford.”
Ron's ears went red. This wasn't the cotton-candy pink from before, the pink that meant she was pleased and trying not to show it. This was a deep, hot, miserable red. She looked at a perfectly innocent patch on the floor, chin tipped down, and went still.
Harry discovered, with great clarity, that he wanted to hit Draco Malfoy with the trunk.
It was a startling feeling and an entirely new one. Harry had spent his whole life being the boy that things happened to, the window and not the cricket ball. He had never, not once, wanted to put himself in front of anything.
“You'll soon find out some wizarding families are much better than others, Potter,” Malfoy was saying, mild and indulgent once again. “You don't want to go making friends with the wrong sort. I can help you there.”
He held out his hand.
It was a clean hand. A very clean hand. The hand of a boy who had never lifted his own trunk, let alone anyone else’s.
Harry looked at the hand, and then he looked at Malfoy, and then he looked, very deliberately, at Ron - who was sitting beside him folded small with still-red ears - and then he looked back at Malfoy.
“I think I can tell the wrong sort for myself, thanks,” said Harry.
It came out, by some small miracle, steadily. Harry, who had been bracing for his voice to do its usual under-pressure squeak, was rather impressed with himself.
Malfoy did not, immediately, react.
“I’d be careful if I were you, Potter,” he said, after a moment, with markedly less smoothness than he’d arrived with. “Unless you're a bit politer you'll go the same way as your parents. They didn't know what was good for them, either. You hang around with riff-raff like the Weasleys, and it’ll rub off on you.”
Both Harry and Ron stood up. This was battle, then! He would fight the catalogue brutes and the rat-faced boy, with the fair Ron by his side. Perhaps Harry would suffer a fatal wound to his heart, and sink, pale and gallant, into Ron's lap and she would weep and say she’d never met anyone so brave, and Harry would murmur something devastating, and final, and die.
“Say that again,” said Harry.
A worthy death indeed.
Malfoy scowled. He seemed about to say something back, when a great clattering came down the corridor. Someone was coming.
“You’ll regret this, Potter,” he said, with as much dignity as he could gather. “Come on, you two.”
The brutes lumbered away.
Harry sat down, very slowly. His hands were shaking a tiny bit. He put them firmly under his thighs where they could carry on in private.
The clattering came past the door, and then the other way, and then the door slid open and a little old lady stuck her head in. She had a face like a walnut and a trolley that smelled, gloriously, of sugar.
“Anything off the trolley, dears?”
Harry stood up.
He had the money. He had the appetite. He had, for the first time in his life, the option. He also had an idea.
He bought some of everything, brought it back in a great wobbling armful, and tipped the lot onto the seat between them.
Ron’s eyes went wide.
“Bloody hell,” she said.
Harry felt his ears go hot.
“Here,” he said. “The chocolate ones. You can have all the chocolate.” He pushed it all her- the Frog Legs, the Cauldron Crumbles, the ominously named Dark Magicks.
Ron blinked at him.
“All of it?”
“Yeah. They're for you.”
“Why?”
Harry considered the question.
He had a hazy memory of Uncle Vernon coming home some Fridays with a heart-shaped box, and grunting here, Pet at Aunt Petunia, who would then go all simpery and pleased and put on what Harry privately thought of as her Friday Face. The conclusion was obvious- girls liked chocolate, you gave it to them, and then they were happy with you. Foolproof.
“Because,” he said, with great dignity. “You can just have it.”
Ron looked at him for a long second. A mixture of expressions went across her face - a quick flicker of something that was almost ashamed, and almost suspicious, and almost happy, all at once.
“I bought too many anyway,” Harry added quickly. “I'd never eat all of them on my own. You'd be doing me a favour.”
This was a complete lie. Harry could quite easily have eaten all of them on his own, and that was his back-up plan anyway in case she got mad and walked away. But it turned out to be the right lie, because the almost-shame retreated from Ron's face, and the almost-suspicion went with it, and what was left was just a small embarrassed grin.
“Cheers, Harry,” she said quietly.
She rummaged in her jumper pocket and produced, with a small sigh, a slightly squashed parcel wrapped in greaseproof paper.
“Mum made me sandwiches. Corned beef. D'you want half?”
She held it out. Her hands, too, were shaking a little bit.
“It’s nothing fancy,” she added, quickly, and her ears went a bit pink around the edges - the same red as her hair, which Harry found, on top of everything else about her, deeply pleasing - “I mean, it's not… yeah. With seven of us Mum's always trying to stretch things, so. Only if you want.”
Harry looked at the slightly squashed greaseproof parcel and felt a great wave of feelings. Ron, who had given him a rat to look at and a grin for free and a whole bloody hell about his sweets, was now giving him half of her dinner, and was apologising for it.
“I love corned beef,” he said, with great solemn passion. “It's my favourite. It’s -it’s miles better than chocolate.”
Yet another complete lie. But he took a big bite, and it was the best bloody sandwich he had ever eaten in his entire life.
“S‘good,” he said, mouth full.
Ron was, it turned out, very funny when she was fed chocolate. Hat tip, Uncle Vernon.
Ron’s brand of funniness was nothing like Dudley’s- which was mainly laughing at Harry's face after a good socking, or laughing at Harry's face after a good shoving, neither of which had ever struck Harry as comedy of the highest order.
But Ron was funny in a sideways way. She was now telling him a story about someone called Fred and a batch of homemade sweets.
“He’d been saving them up for weeks, right, these toffees he'd been making-”
“What kind of toffees?”
“Dunno what he put in ‘em. That was sort of the problem. Nicked some bits from Dad’s shed and some bobs from Mum’s cupboard, boiled the lot up when she was out-”
“Is that allowed?”
“Merlin, no.” She said it with enormous satisfaction. "Anyway - Fred pops one in his mouth, right, to test it, and for a second nothing happens… and then George’s legs turn into wheels."
“George’s legs?”
“George’s legs. Fred ate it. Doesn’t make any sense, but that’s sort of how they are, the twins - never can tell where one of ‘em stops and the other one starts.” She said this completely matter-of-factly, and Harry felt a small, pleasant shiver go right up his back. “So George can’t stop now, can he - he’s half-wheels - he’s just rolling, all round the kitchen, knocking into everything, shouting, and Fred’s chasing after him trying to catch him, and they go straight through Mum's clean washing -”
“Did it turn back?”
“Eventually. Mum was furious - proper purple in the face - banned him from the stove for life. There’s still a wheel-mark on the kitchen door.” She grinned. “Fred reckons it was the best day of his life.”
“You’re properly funny,” Harry heard himself say, with such open admiring sincerity that it startled them both.
Ron went a bit pink under her freckles, and looked hard out the window.
Somewhere along the way, they’d ended up on the same bench, both of them peering at the hills sliding past endlessly in the late afternoon. Every so often the train would rock around a bend and her shoulder would bump his shoulder and she wouldn’t move away.
Harry didn’t move away either.
Outside, the light was going long and gold over the hills, and the carriage had gone warm and amber with it, and Ron’s hair had caught fire at the edges in a manner Harry found almost unbearable.
It was a bit like the kitchen at Mrs Figg’s, that one time. She’d had a fire going and a cake under a glass dome on the side, and she’d let Harry sit on the rug with her cat photo albums, and the whole room had smelled of warm sponge for the better part of an hour. At the end, when he was leaving, she'd cut him a slice off it - a day old, gone a little stale at the edge - and wrapped it in a square of kitchen roll for the walk home. Harry had eaten it very slowly, in the dark between the streetlamps, making it last.
For several years running, that memory was the warmest thing he owned. Until today, maybe.
He hoped Ron would be in his dorm.
He hoped Ron would be in all his classes.
He hoped Ron sat next to him at meals. Every meal. Forever. He hoped, in fact, that wherever this school was going to put him next, it would do him the small mercy of putting Ron right beside him, on his left side ideally because she'd been on his left side now for over an hour and Harry had got used to it and had developed a small private opinion about which side of him Ron belonged on.
He hoped Ron lived nearby in the holidays and came over to play.
That seemed unlikely, on inspection. Ron quite clearly came from one of those huge magical families where there were always brothers being prats and mothers shouting on platforms, whereas Harry came from the Dursleys, who would, he was fairly certain, sooner set the house on fire than allow a friend of Harry's to set foot in it. Especially a girl. A girl friend in the house was a thing that, in Aunt Petunia's mental schema, was reserved for Dudley, in approximately thirty years’ time, and even then she would probably want vetting paperwork.
So no. Holidays were probably a non-starter. But he hoped it anyway.
He looked sideways at Ron, who was now licking chocolate off her thumb.
A crackly voice came over the train then, announcing that they were nearly there, and would everyone please leave their trunks and change into their robes.
“Oh,” Harry said. So there were to be robes, then. “Erm -”
Just then, two tall freckled boys stuck their heads round the door, one stacked above the other.
Same red hair as Ron, shorter and bristlier, and the same grin- the exact same grin, Harry noticed, slotted onto two exactly identical faces.
“There he is,” said the top one.
“Boys’ changing compartment's three doors down, Ronnie,” said the bottom one.
“Mum'd never forgive us -”
“- if we lost him -”
“ - on the very first day,” they finished together, in perfect time, without once looking at each other to check. The heads withdrew.
Wait. What??
Boys changing compartment. Mum'd never forgive us if we lost… him.
Ron uncoiled herself - himself - from the bench, stretched in a long lazy way that involved making a unnnh noise, and ambled toward the door.
“C’mon then,” he said over his shoulder.
Harry got up and followed.
His legs felt a little strange. Light, maybe. Or maybe his head was light. It was hard to tell. The corridor of the train sort of swam a bit as he trailed after the back of Ron’s pink jumper.
Ron was a boy.
Ron was a boy.
Ron was a boy, which meant -
- which meant -
- same dormitory -
Harry's chest was starting to go a little warm.
- same dormitory, same room, every night, the kind of room with two beds side by side, maybe bunk beds, or ones with curtains -
- and warmer still -
- same classes, definitely, because boys did boys’ classes with other boys, didn’t they, surely they did, that was how schools worked -
- breakfast together every morning, sat next to each other on a long bench somewhere, passing the toast, Ron nicking the good bit of his toast and Harry letting him -
- dinner together every night -
- weekends together, all of them, every single one, no exceptions -
- holidays - boys had sleepovers, didn’t they, boys went to each other’s houses, boys shared rooms when they stopped over, that was a known thing, Dudley had had Piers Polkiss to sleep over once and they had built a tent in the living room and Harry had not been allowed near it and had been bitterly cross about it at the time and now, looking back, with the new and dazzling realisation that he and Ron could simply do that, that he could have his own Piers Polkiss situation, that he could have it with Ron specifically -
- Quidditch, whatever Quidditch was, they could do it together, they could be on the same side, they could be the two best ones -
- for years -
- for seven whole years -
The cascade was getting bigger. It was tumbling over itself in his head, each new thought blooming into three more, each one warmer than the last, and somewhere underneath all of it was a feeling like he'd swallowed a small sun, and somewhere underneath that was a deep and serious conviction that this - this - was an even better situation than the one he had been hoping for.
The boy-Ron came with privileges that the girl-Ron, by virtue of being a girl, would have been mysteriously denied - privileges like being allowed to sit very close on the sofa and being allowed to wrestle, which was a thing boys did and being allowed to share a bed when there was only one bed, like in books.
Harry was, in this moment, the luckiest boy in the entire magical and non-magical worlds combined. He resisted the urge to break into song.
Ron had got to the boys’ changing compartment and was waiting, holding the door open for him with one slender freckled hand - which, Harry noted, Ron was doing for him, and not the other way round as in Harry's previous gallant fantasy, but Harry found that he didn't mind this at all, that he in fact rather liked it, that there was something about a long-fingered hand holding a door open for him that made his chest do flips and flops.
Outside the window the hills had gone blue and soft, the gold all used up. But the first lights of their destination were coming on now, far off across the dark.
Ron was looking back at him with his eyebrows slightly raised, because Harry had stopped walking. “You all right, mate? You've gone a bit funny.”
Harry started walking again. He stepped past Ron through the door, close, so very close, close enough that his arm brushed the front of Ron's jumper, close enough to catch soap and corned beef and train- and found that he was grinning, helplessly, and couldn't seem to stop.
“I’m fine,” Harry said. “I’m great. I’m… yeah. Great.”
“Right,” said Ron, a bit baffled. He looked at Harry for a second longer. Then his face cracked open into a grin too, just as wide, just as helpless, just as bewildered … clearly grinning because Harry was grinning, with no idea at all why either of them was doing it.
“All right then,” Ron said.
“All right.” Said Harry.
Behind Ron the window was filling slowly with a castle - closer now, climbing, turret over turret over turret, reflected and doubled in the water it stood over, so that there was twice as much light. Harry looked at it over Ron's shoulder, and then back at Ron.
The castle was enormous, and every window was lit up, blazing gold against the darkening sky, and it was full of everything Harry's whole new life was about to be. But it was still out there, on the far side of the glass. In here, there was only the small warm light of the compartment, and the sweets wrappers, and Ron, and Harry found he was in no particular hurry to arrive.