King's Cross Station
Y/N jolts up in her bed. “What the heck was that?” she whispers to herself. Y/N sighs and smacks a palm to her face, dragging it down until her fingertips reach the end of her chin. It’s been months since she had that first dream—exactly three months and two days. Y/N has spent her summer practising her magic under the supervision of Professor McGonagall and reading over each of her school books multiple times, along with some extra books for background information. Today marks Y/N’s last lesson with McGonagall before she boards the Hogwarts Express and makes her way to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Going through her daily routine of showering, brushing her teeth, getting dressed, and doing her hair, Y/N spends little time dallying. She heads to her study station—at the start of the summer she had set up her desk to prepare herself for Hogwarts’ learning curriculum. A knock at her front door is heard. Y/N rushes downstairs to answer it, opening the door with a warm smile and greeting Professor McGonagall with a small hug.
“Good morning, Professor! How was your evening yesterday?” Y/N says warmly as she greets McGonagall. Over the summer, Professor McGonagall had become somewhat of a second mother to Y/N, as she sees McGonagall on a daily basis and spends so much time with her.
McGonagall hugs Y/N back and smiles as she asks about Y/N's evening. “It was quite a fine evening for me, how about you?” she says with a kind smile.
Y/N replies with a sweet “Mine was good too!” and takes McGonagall to the study, where their lesson starts and lasts until mid-afternoon. As their lesson progresses, Y/N finds herself smiling as she learns how to cast new spells, transfigure a pincushion into a hedgehog, and brew a bottle of swelling solution. By the end of her last summer lesson, Y/N knows everything she needs for her first year at Hogwarts. After bidding McGonagall goodbye, Y/N spends the rest of her day practising the spells and everything else she learned. After hours of practising, Y/N’s mother called her to eat dinner with her. Y/N had a nice chat with her mother while watching television; they were watching their favourite show, Blossom. At some point, Y/N must’ve fallen asleep, because when she opened her eyes, she was surprised.
Y/N opened her eyes to a sight she hadn't seen in months—a familiar scene of tall, lush green hedges adorned with blossoming blood-red roses. The sight shocked and confused her simultaneously. She sighed and closed her eyes, wondering whether she could interact with the people in this 'memory' or if, like that unsettling night watching through the mirror, she would be forced to sit back and observe. Each of these dreams revealed more about Y/N than she thought she knew. However, every time a new 'memory' occurred, Y/N's mind entered a slump—a sort of short-lived depression lasting for days on end, until it abruptly stopped. Each memory seemed to be spaced out in some strange time-frame. Something confused Y/N after each dream; every time she woke up, it felt as if she hadn't dreamed of the infamous 'memories.' It seemed like her mind was attempting to block out and forget every new piece of information her subconscious fed her during the downtime of being asleep.
Something wasn’t right.
Y/N opened her eyes and let them slowly adjust to the bright light coming from the sun. She scooted to have her back up against the tall hedges and let her head rest on the leaves of the shrubbery. ‘There has to be some reason that my mind keeps blocking out these memories; it’s treating them like they’re trash needing to be incinerated,’ Y/N thought as she looked around herself, checking to make sure no one was going to sneak up on her like Riddle did the first time she had one of these types of dreams. Suddenly, Y/N hears… sobbing? Snapping her head in the direction she hears the sobbing coming from, Y/N’s eyes widen as she sees something so unexpected, she almost gasps, but stops herself in fear of revealing her presence. There, right before her eyes, is Riddle’s tyrannical mother, sobbing.
As Y/N is about to get up and closer inspect Riddle’s mother and try to figure out why she’s crying, the dream starts fading. Like water being poured on drying paint, the imagery in front of her starts smudging and becoming blurry, before it just simply dissipates.
This dream was the icing on the cake, never in the times Y/N had been experiencing these dreams had she expected to see something so shocking. She had never expected to see a tyrant sobbing in a hedge maze, yet today she did. The more awake she became, the faster Y/N started forgetting the dream. She panicked; these dreams were the key to unlocking the reason why she had never felt normal, why she had always felt different to the other kids, no matter how much she had tried to fit in. Y/N stood up from the couch and her mother’s embrace in a hurry and ran upstairs to her room, quickly digging her journal with the previous recollections of dreams out and ripping it open to the next page to jot down everything from the dream. Y/N dropped her pencil with a sigh of relief as she wrote the final words on the page and slumped down in her chair as she relaxed.
Y/N looked at the clock and began another bout of panic; she had an hour to get ready before it was time to board the Hogwarts Express. She abruptly stood up from her chair and rushed to get ready, throwing on a long-sleeved shirt with a denim jacket on top of it she tucked the shirt into some dark blue jeans. She tossed half of her hair up into a side pony with a scrunchie, sprayed aquanet into her hair after teasing the bottom half of it and called it a day. Y/N ran downstairs and woke her mother up once she had finished putting on some deodorant and brushing her teeth.
“There’s less than 20 minutes left for me to get ready, why didn’t you wake me up sooner?” Y/N’s mother asked frantically as she got up from her spot on the couch.
“I was rushing to get myself ready!” Y/N replied just as frantic as her mother. She rushed back upstairs and dragged her trunk to the car. Y/N and her mother hurry out the door and load themselves into the car.
Y/N checks around herself and makes sure everything is there and looks around with wide eyes as she realises that in her panic, she forgot Kit. “Mum, stop the car! We forgot Kit!” Y/N says hysterically.
The car comes to a fast stop as Lorely looks at Y/N from the front seat and cries “Well, go get him!” Opening the car door, Y/N runs up the driveway and slams the front door open, only to find Kit sitting there patiently looking up at her disapprovingly.
She chuckles nervously and picks Kit up gently and pats his head. Y/N says sorry to Kit about a billion times as she runs to the car with him in her arms and hops back in.
When they arrive at the train station Y/N gives her mother a kiss on the cheek, signs ‘I love you’, and grabs her trunk from the back. She walks into King’s Cross with her trunk and ticket in hand. Y/N takes a glance around the train station and back down at her ticket, ‘Where is platform 9 ¾?’ she thinks to herself. Doing the logical thing to do, Y/N walks to platform 9 and watches as a black-haired boy runs through the wall between platform 9 and 10. ‘What the fuck.’ She watches with wide eyes as a group of gingers run through the wall as well. Kit meows at her, as if to say that she needs to do what they did and run through the wall. She looks at Kit as if he was insane and whispers “Seriously?”
But Kit just rolls his eyes and bats his paw at Y/N, as if to say ‘Just do what I say’ and she does. She takes a deep breath and runs straight into the wall with her trunk. The world ripples around her once she reaches the other side and suddenly she’s in front of a classic red train that’s labelled “The Hogwarts Express” steam coming from the front and filling the station. There are children propping themselves out of their compartment’s windows to wave to their parents before the train takes the tracks to Hogwarts, where they’ll be staying till holiday break hits. Y/N realises that the train is just about to leave and her eyes widen. She takes her trunks and boards the train as quickly as possible, trying to find a compartment that’s empty.
Y/N is walking down the cosy halls of the train searching for a booth she can sit in when she accidentally bumps into someone. She stands up and attempts to stay composed while opening her mouth to speak, trying her very best to not get flushed from embarrassment in front of the stranger. “I apologise; I didn’t mean to bump into you.”
The boy she bumped into laughs and says, “It's fine, no need to worry.” Y/N looks at the laughing boy; he’s a dark-skinned boy with dark, earthy brown eyes, dreadlocks, and a huge smile. When Y/N bumped into the boy, she had dropped her trunk—the items inside had spilled out and scattered themselves on the floor of the train. Noticing this, she crouches to the ground to pick her belongings up, and the boy helps her gather them.
She takes glances at him while they’re collecting her fallen trunk’s contents and whispers out a ‘thank you’ with a small smile. Clicking her trunk shut, Y/N stands up and dusts her knees off, awkwardly bouncing back and forth on her heels and the balls of her feet as the boy gets up and hands her the rest of her items. “So...” Y/N says looking anywhere but his eyes, “what’s your name?”
“Lee, Lee Jordan.” The boy says with a smirk. “And you, what’s yours? Surely an interesting lady like you has one to match your mysterious aura.” He says with a snicker.
Y/N gets flustered and sputters out a response to Lee, “W-well, uh, of course I have a name!”
He snorts at her flustered state and brings a hand up to his mouth to cover his laugh and widening smile. “What is it, then?” Lee teases with one eyebrow raised.
“Y/N, Y/N Rose–errr, I mean, HalleWell.” She says her actual last name proudly after catching her mess-up, wearing her family name like a gold medal. ‘I wonder why I almost said Rosehearts, I know my last name isn’t—ugh, forget it, my dream from last night probably messed with my psyche or something. After all, I haven’t had one of those “memories” in such a long time.’ Y/N’s head started to form a small headache in the middle of her thought process, snapping her out of it.
“I’ve never heard of that last name before, are your parents muggles?” Lee curiously asks.
Y/N deflates like a balloon. She becomes flustered once again and looks down with flushed cheeks, wrapping an arm around her front and grabbing her limp arm. “Um, yeah. My mum’s a muggle; I’ve got no father, though.” She whispers shyly. Over the months she had studied with McGonagall, she had learned one very important lesson that McGonagall made sure to remind her that she would do well to remember when in the wizarding world; muggle-borns aren’t taken lightly with certain pure-bloods and pure-blood families. In one lesson, she found out that muggle-borns are often referred to as “Mudbloods” by purists, a nasty name used to insult muggle–borns for having non magical parents.
Lee nodded and replied, “I myself am a half-blood. My father’s a wizard and my mum’s a muggle.” Y/N visibly relaxed at his words, her shoulders slumping slightly out of her tensed position. She didn’t know whether he had noticed her tenseness or not, but if he had, he didn’t mention it, which comforted her. Lee spoke up again, “Have you found a compartment yet?
“Oh, no, I haven’t. That’s actually what I was doing when I bumped into you, sorry for that, again.” She sheepishly says, apologising again while rubbing her temple to soothe her headache.
“Pshh–no big deal, seriously, I’m fine, don’t worry about apologising.” Lee says while grabbing her forearm, dragging her to a compartment. “Me and my friends have an open seat in our compartment, sit with us!” He says, pushing her into the compartment, where her eyes meet two heads of a familiar fiery red colour.
“Well, well, well, who is this, Lee?” One of the twins asks with a mischievous smirk.
Nodding at what his twin said, the other red-head adds, “Yeah, who've you brought with you?” with his own smirk, the right side of his mouth curving slightly higher than the left.
When Y/N decides to pay closer attention to the details their faces respectively have, she notices the freckles that dotted the identical twins’ faces.
“This is Y/N HalleWell; she’s a muggle-born witch!” Lee Jordan introduces her with a large bout of enthusiasm. Y/N blushes embarrassedly at the introduction.
The twins look at each other and smirk. One twin raises a single brow and smugly says “I’m Fred Weasley, and this is George Weasley.”
Y/N nods and shyly says, “Good to meet you, Fred, George.” She takes a seat in the compartment next to Lee Jordan after putting her trunks on the racks above the booths. Finally being fully in the compartment, Y/N is able to focus her attention to each twin individually. Fred had a rounder face than George, while George’s face was in more of an oval shape. They both had chocolate brown eyes, and when looking at their noses, Y/N noticed that George’s nose had a more distinct bump on the bridge, with Fred’s bump being less noticeable. Her eyes trailed down from their noses to their lips; Fred had a straighter upper lip, and George had a somewhat curvier upper lip. When looking at their build, they were both sturdy, with broad shoulders and just barely defined biceps and triceps. One would only notice the muscles if they were looking, and Y/N was looking.
“Ah, so she’s a looker.” Fred snickers with a shit-eating grin plastered on his freckled face. His little comment caused Y/N to blush a little, but did not deter her from analysing them.
George noticed that Fred’s remark didn’t do much and smirks slightly, making his own joke about how she must be determined to kill them with her stare. That was the comment that made her look away. Lee, while finding the twins’ playful jabs funny, he lightheartedly scolded them for their antics around the new arrival.
“What? We’re just testing her” Fred says, looking at George while they both grin widely.
Just then, a girl with bushy brown hair, brown eyes—similar to that of the Weasley twins’—and rather large front teeth opens the compartment door and looks at its inhabitants. “Has any one of you seen a toad? A boy named Neville’s lost his.” The bushy haired girl asks.
Y/N is the first to reply, “No, I haven’t,” she looks at Lee, then to George, and then at Fred, who are giving her confused looks, “and it looks as if they haven’t either. Sorry…?”
“Hermione, Hermione Granger.” The bushy haired girl sighs as she responds.
“Sorry, Hermione, but we haven’t seen any toads. Nice meeting you.” Y/N solemnly says.
“Even so, you all ought to change into your robes; I suspect we will be arriving soon.” Hermione replies in a less-than-pleased tone.
As Hermione leaves the compartment and shuts the door, the twins mock her, causing Y/N to laugh and Lee to snicker. “Well then, I should probably change into my robes,” Y/N says through her laughs, “I’ll be back.”
Stepping out of the compartment, Y/N takes her change of clothes with her to the girl’s lavatory that is somehow bigger than it looks, with steam from the girl’s showers fogging up mirrors that hang above the white porcelain hanging sinks. A chemical smell filled the air—likely the hair spray that girls used when getting ready—along with multiple scents of shampoos, conditioners, body washes, and perfumes. All mixing together to make this dreadful smell, one would assume they had just entered a factory. Y/N rushes into one of the open bathroom stalls and changes as quickly as she can, wanting to get as far away from this atrocious odour as soon as possible. Stumbling out of the bathroom stall that she was in, Y/N wipes a fogged mirror and checks her appearance, making sure everything was in its rightful place before exiting the washroom and heading back to her compartment, where the Weasley twins and Lee Jordan were awaiting her return in.
“Welcome back.” George says as soon as she opens the compartment’s door. Y/N tries to wipe the horrendous smell of the girl’s bathroom from her memories but simply cannot, grimacing at the thought, looking as though she’d been tasting it rather than just smelling it.
“What happened to you?” Lee asks, making his own face of grief while looking at her expression.
“Nothing, just, the girl’s lavatory smells absolutely dreadful! How can one place reek so much of artificial death and chemicals, yet smell so sweet and flowery? I will never understand. Biggest mystery in the world, that smell.” Y/N huffs in disgust at just recalling the odour out loud.
“Sounds like you had a positively dreadful experience.” Fred and George snicker out at the same time, as if they’re in sync—which wouldn’t be all that shocking to Y/N. After the Weasley twins and Lee were done laughing at her misery, Y/N heard the Hogwarts Express’ whistle and felt the train screeching to a stop. The prefects on the train yelled at everybody to ‘get off, we’ve arrived at Hogwarts.’ Y/N was delighted; the train ride had lasted an unbelievably long time in her mind. When Y/N checked for her trunks that were supposed to be on the racks above the booths in her compartment, she noticed they weren’t there, and she had started to panic.
“No need to get all worked up,” Fred said in an uncharacteristically kind voice—well; at least uncharacteristic for the Fred that Y/N had come to know on the train ride. “The house elves took them while you were changing; the only thing you need to worry about is if you’re going to get eaten alive by the wicked deadly beasts surrounding Hogwarts.” He then snickered as he and the others walked off to where the older students were directed to go. The first-years, however, were instructed to follow a rough, but gentle looking giant.
Y/N followed the giant close behind, walking next to a student who had messy black hair, glasses, emerald green eyes, and was rather scrawny. She looked over to him and whispered, “Quite exciting, isn’t it? Magic! See I’m a muggle–born, so I’ve never seen it, thought it was a trick when I had first been introduced to it!”
“I’ve never seen magic either. I was shocked when I first saw it in Diagon Alley!” The scrawny boy replied.
“Ah, are you a muggle–born too?” Y/N asks with a glint of delight in her eyes.
“Oh, no, I’m not, I think I'm a half–blood, but my parents died when I was a baby, so I can't know for sure. I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle, who are muggles and wanted nothing to do with magic. I grew up being told magic didn’t exist and it was foolish to think it did.” He says, his voice faltering when mentioning his dead parents.
“Oh... I’m sorry about that. My mum hasn’t told me a thing about my father, and I don’t expect her to—it’s a sensitive subject for her—so I can kind of relate to you, in the fatherless aspect, that is.” Y/N says in a gentle voice and offers a small smile.
The boy gives her a smile that matches her own, “Well, nice to have someone I can relate to.” Y/N giggles and nods at him, her smile widening.
“I’m Y/N, Y/N HalleWell. Nice to meet you, what’s your name?” She asks the boy, looking into his enchanting green eyes with a large grin that says ‘I hope we can be friends’, which he returns.
“I’m Harry, Harry Potter.”