Heaven, If You Sent Us Down

The food was incredible, and there was so much of it Steve couldn’t hide his shock. He ate until he could hold no more, and realised he’d forgotten what it was like to be really full. When everyone was done, the plates vanished, cutlery, leftovers and all. Steve jumped when they disappeared, but he wasn’t the only first-year to do so. The older kids began to rise, and Steve and the others followed suit.
“Gryffindors, this way,” called a redheaded girl with a badge on her chest. The rest of the table began to file off after her. Around the room, Steve could see the other tables rising as well, heading towards various doors around the hall.
The Gryffindors followed the redheaded girl out a door to the right of the hall. They trooped down corridors and up stairs, the older kids chattering among themselves. Everything was illuminated by the flickering light of the candles set in sconces along the walls, filling the hallways with a warm yellow glow.
Steve tried as best he could to keep track of the twists and turns – his sense of direction was pretty good, always had been – but even he was starting to get lost. It didn’t help that the staircases seemed to be rearranging themselves, always just out of sight, so he wasn’t sure if it was actually happening or not.
His suspicions were confirmed when, as the mob of black-clad students climbed yet another stair, it swung beneath their feet, stretching and warping towards a higher landing. The older students seemed unruffled, but there were gasps from the first-years. Some hurried to the bannisters to look down into the gap. Steve stayed put, shoving down a wave of nausea: it was like some amusement park attraction of the kind he never wanted to ride, like the Cyclone he’d seen once, and which Bucky had sworn he’d take him on someday.
The staircase reached the upper landing. “Thank you,” said the girl, and led the way off the steps and through a wooden door. The door led into a large room, with a thick carpet on the floor and armchairs and small tables around the walls. A fire blazed in a hearth, and the whole room was cosy and pleasantly stuffy.
The girl stopped in the middle of the room and gestured to several doors set into the walls. “First-years, dormitories are upstairs. Girls on the left, boys on the right.” She yawned. “Off you go.”
The first-years split off towards the doors they’d been shown. The right-hand exit led to another set of stairs, steep and spiraling upwards, and Steve guessed they were in one of the towers. Eventually, they came to a section of corridor with several doors set into the wall, each with a list of names tacked to the wood. They were fairly high up, and the door with Steve’s name was the highest, which was going to be difficult. Steve’s chest was already tightening from the climb, although he didn’t need to pull out his inhaler just yet.
Inside the room was another fireplace, with coals flickering in the grate, and four canopied beds. They were bigger than any bed Steve had ever seen, and each had a trunk lying on the mattress. Steve recognised his on a bed by the wall and hurried over.
He heaved the trunk off the bed. He’d been trying to lift it, but his grip slipped and it tumbled. The floor was thickly carpeted, though, and the trunk landed with nothing more than a soft thud.
Steve climbed onto the bed, which sank underneath him. Wow. This was a far cry from his bed at the Barnes home, or from the trundle bed he’d slept on when he was small, which had tucked away under his mother’s bed when not in use.
He grinned as he remembered all the times Bucky had complained about Steve kicking him in his sleep. This bed was large enough to fit both Steve and Bucky comfortably, twice over . . . but Bucky wasn’t here, was he?
Steve shoved down the pang of homesickness and busied himself hunting in the trunk for his pyjamas. The other three boys assigned to his dorm had arrived now, and were digging in their own trunks.
“Hey,” said one of them, looking up. He had a soft voice, with some kind of lilting accent – Welsh? “I suppose that if we’re going to be spending seven years sleeping in the same room, we might as well know each other’s names. I’m Edmund.”
“Are you just?” drawled a bigger boy. “What’s your last name?”
“Ah . . . Aldridge,” said Edmund, looking bemused. “Lumos,” he added. Light shone from the tip of his wand and he set it on a table, letting it illuminate the room.
The big kid snorted. “I might have known.”
Steve frowned and opened his mouth, but before he could say anything the fourth kid in the dorm spoke up, in the tired voice of a peacemaker. “I’m Calvin. Calvin Cochran,” he added, shooting a glance at the big boy. “And you are?”
The question was directed at Steve. “Ah . . . Steve. Steve Rogers.” He looked over at the bigger boy – maybe he hadn’t meant to sound so dismissive. He was probably homesick, like the rest of them. “How about you?”
The big kid rolled his eyes, and Steve revised his estimations. “Hodge. Gilmore Hodge.” He looked around like he was expecting them all to be incredibly impressed, and scowled when he realised they weren’t. he sat on his bed and pulled the curtains around him with very bad grace.
Another thing Steve was confused by. Why did the beds have curtains? They weren’t windows.
Aldridge and Cochran exchanged a look, and went back to their trunks. Steve found his pyjamas and immediately realised the purpose of the curtains. He got changed behind their screen and pulled them open again, feeling a little uncomfortable sleeping in their stuffy closeness.
Cochran and Aldridge were talking in low voices, but Steve’s dicky ears couldn’t pick up the actual words. There was no sound from Hodge’s bed, and he hadn’t reopened his curtains either. What was his problem, Steve wondered.
Aldridge had put out his wand’s glow, and the moonlight poured in through tall, slitted windows, painting the room in shades of blue and silver. Outside, the castle grounds spread to a tangled forest, dark under the full moon.
Steve watched the light and breeze playing on the branches of a young willow in the courtyard – no, that wasn’t right, was it? There was no breeze. The tree moved by itself.
Aldridge and Cochran’s conversation died away. Steve, absorbed in watching the moving tree, forgot his tiredness – or rather, accepted that he wasn’t going to manage much in the way of sleep. He was too excited, and everything was too new and unfamiliar. Instead, he found his sketchbook and moved to the window, perching on the ledge in the bright moonlight.
He drew the room and the sleeping shapes of the other boys, sketched messily in pale blues and greys. He drew the willow, and the forest outside, and the red-bearded man from the feast – the Headmaster. He drew Howard, leaning eagerly over the prow of a boat. He drew the Hogwarts train, steaming its way through a winding valley. He drew Peggy, the Sorting Hat hiding her eyes in deep shadow, and then began on a portrait of Bucky, of his cheerful excitement last night, propped on his elbows in bed with the blankets half-tented over his head and a book open in front of him, grinning at Steve in the candlelight.
He wondered how Bucky was going. Hopefully he was asleep – Steve was pretty sure his friend hadn’t slept at all last night. He found himself chuckling, quietly, at what he’d just thought: usually Bucky was the mother-hen of the two, and now here was Steve, taking his role.
And at some point he fell asleep, curled on the window-ledge, sketchbook open on his lap and pencil still clutched in one hand.