The first thing I remembered was the ceiling.
Not this world's ceiling— the old one. A water stain that was shaped vaguely like Australia, the crack near the light I'd been meaning to report to my landlord for eight months and never had. I remember looking at it and thinking, I should really deal with that.
Just a stain shaped like Australia, and then, with no transition at all, a room ceiling that wasn't mine— high, carved, moulded plaster in a pattern I'd later learn was supposed to represent some ancestor's coat of arms— in a body that wasn't mine either, too small and too soft.
I want to say I handled it well. I didn't. I screamed, which is the only response available to you when trapped inside something with none of your motor control and all of your memories. Someone came almost immediately— not a mother's footsteps, but the instant silent appearance of a house-elf.
Materializing at my crib before the sound had even finished leaving my throat, murmuring something soothing in a voice too old for that small body. Its appearance told me two things through the panic I felt at his sudden arrival. First, I had somehow landed inside the Harry Potter universe; second, I was important enough to warrant instant attention.
It took the better part of a year to stop being afraid every single day.
I had read the books in my teens, and I have read them again in my twenties when I thought that I had outgrown them, but I haven't.
None of that was useful for now.
I'd been dropped into the one story I actually knew cover to cover, but I wasn't yet in the story. I was three years early, in a world where the Boy Who Lived hadn't even been born yet, born into a family whose name was entirely unknown to me— no mention in any of the seven books, not even a footnote.
I knew a world that hadn't happened yet, raised by parents who talked about blood purity over breakfast the way other families discussed the weather. None of it— not one page I'd ever read— had prepared me for what that ideology actually sounded like from the inside, delivered gently by people who genuinely loved me.
Eventually, the environment forced my adaptation. Most of the Ashworth family house had already stopped feeling strange to me by the time I turned six—you can get used to a great deal, it turns out, if you are forced to sit in the middle of it every morning at breakfast.
I learned the names of oil-painted ancestors before I ever learned those of my living cousins. I learned which topics were safe at the dinner table and which weren't, mostly by watching my mother's mouth thin into a line whenever my father drifted too close to it, and adjusting my own words accordingly.
I was, by every account anyone in that house ever gave me, a remarkably composed child. Sensible beyond my years. Nobody in Ashworth Hall ever guessed that "composed" was simply what it looked like from the outside when a woman well past her twenties spends her days in a body too young for her mind.
I eventually got very good at nodding at the right moments, pretending my accidental magic was a surprise to me, the first few times it happened, when in fact I'd been waiting for it for years.
I haven't told anyone what I am. I'm not going to. There's no version of that conversation that ends anywhere to my advantage.
Marcus made all of it easier, honestly, though I doubt he's ever once suspected as much. We've known each other since we were very young— to the point that neither of us remembers not knowing the other— our mothers had been at Hogwarts together, and some agreement was apparently struck before either of us could talk that we'd grow up thick as thieves whether we liked it or not.
Mostly, I liked it. Marcus is loud and blunt, which after years of very carefully managing what I let slip in front of people, is its own kind of relief. He has never once looked at me and wondered if I meant something else by what I said. I've never had to wonder that about him either.
When the letter finally came— I'd told myself, repeatedly, on the platform and in the weeks leading up to it, that I already knew every character, every ghost and every thing worth knowing, that there was nothing here that could actually surprise me.
And I wholly believed that until Marcus shoved open that compartment door and went in, hauling his trunk over the threshold. And sitting inside was a light ash-brown-haired boy, perfectly composed and entirely indifferent to the intrusion. A book lay open on his lap that he didn't look up from until Marcus had finished making a fool of himself to the point where it was impossible to ignore.
I noticed his face before I noticed anything else about him— he was simply gorgeous!
But the real problem was that he wasn't supposed to exist. And I was not being dramatic. That's just a fact: if there were such a person who looked like this, it would surely be mentioned in the books, he was someone who could be a celebrity in the wizarding world without doing anything, just based on his looks.
And then he said his name was Aegeus Granger.
Granger? Is he Hermione's brother?
By our second week of school, his face started to be the least concerning thing about him. Now it's his talent, I'd read about talent before— Hermione's, precocious and built out of sheer, stubborn effort; the twins', chaotic and brilliant.
But Aegeus had no source I could point to in the books. If there was a comparison to be made at all, it could only be with Albus Dumbledore himself!
But I find myself watching him, not in the same way I see everyone else does.
Because everyone watches him. That's the part I don't think he has noticed yet, or perhaps he did but simply didn't care enough to acknowledge— I genuinely can't tell which, and I've been trying to work it out for weeks now.
Girls two years above us find reasons to walk past our table at meals. A pair of Ravenclaws in Transfiguration spend more time glancing at the back of his head than at their own matchsticks.
Even some of the older students, the ones who should, by rights, be far too dignified to care what a first-year looks like, find some excuse to linger a beat too long near wherever he happens to be standing. It's a constant, low hum of attention that follows him down every corridor, and the strange, almost funny thing about it is the timing— nobody ever looks at him while he is looking back.
The moment his eyes drift anywhere near them, they find something urgent to study on the floor, or the ceiling, or their own hands, and only return to watch once his attention has already moved elsewhere. An entire castle's worth of people, coordinating without ever discussing it, all performing the same careful little dance of look-away-just-in-time.
But I watch him differently. I'm not interested in his face— not really. I'm interested only in his future. What kind of waves will this new addition unleash upon the Harry Potter universe? And unlike everyone else in the castle, I have no intention of averting my eyes the moment he catches me looking.
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TO BE CONTINUED
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