Chapter Text
As Harry watches Ron and Hermione leave him for the Prefect’s carriage at the far end of the train he sighs and stalls in the middle of the narrow hallway of the Hogwarts Express. He looks around, after a moment, for an empty compartment and, annoyingly, can’t find one--he wishes they hadn’t needed to be shadowed to the station, knows that they would have made it so much earlier if it weren’t for the protective measures put upon him. He does, however, eventually see a compartment with people he recognises sitting in it, the one Ginny must have headed to when she dispersed from the Weasley family on the platform. She is sitting there, having a conversation with Neville Longbottom whose face is impressively pink, both wearing fabulously mis-matched muggle clothes. He recognises a blonde girl sitting in the corner, her long, pale hair a veil over her round, white face, but he doesn’t really know anything about her other than that he’d seen her walking around with Ginny from time to time. She hasn’t made much effort to look like a muggle at all and has her light eyes covered with an odd, eccentric pair of glasses, her long, bony hands holding a magazine open and upside down in front of her face, covering it from the bottom of her nose and down.
Then there are the three other occupants, sitting closely together on the bench opposite. He can't see much of them before stepping in and asking to join, permission which Ginny and Neville grant him with ease. He’s glad for it, knowing that having to sit with people he doesn’t know as well as he knows Neville and Ginny, who are bolder and less caring would be sentencing himself to a barrage of taunts and questions he’s not all too eager to hear. What had once been a line of legs and shoulders, the vague shape of a mass of inky black hair, becomes the image of three teenage boys, dressed much more convincingly as muggles than the purebloods occupying the other half of the carriage, speaking with familiarity to each other in a language Harry is sure he has never heard. Regardless, there is an air of familiarity to it, something vaguely magical.
The one closest to the carriage door is the shortest, with dark hair hanging in loose waves that just barely reach his shoulders, falling occasionally into his pale face, somewhat distorting the disconcertingly dark shapes of his eyes, accented with dark circles that are emphasised by the near paper-white colour of his skin. He is wearing a brown leather jacket, much too large for him, the sleeves pulled back as to not hang over his hands, which are as thin and bony as his face, adorned with a series of black rings and one seemingly out of place silver bracelet with a charm on it in the shape of a sun. Under the jacket he wears a jumper, the chunky, mustard yellow of the yarn and the way it swamps his small figure giving the distinct impression it isn’t his, or at least wasn’t originally. He has one leg drawn up to his chest, wearing tight-fitting black jeans with rips at the knees and dark boots. He gestures a lot with his hands as he speaks, looking weary of Harry and his friends, but evidently comfortable with and enjoying the conversation he is having with his own friends.
Next to him is a boy maybe a year or two older than him and much taller, with a much larger presence yet a similar, lingering impression of emaciation in his lithe frame. His hair is the same jet black, cut shorter with a slightly tighter curl to it and one grey streak amongst it, and his skin has comparable olive undertones, though much darker, seeming almost as though he spent most of his life outside in the sun. The darkness in his complexion and his hair makes the disconcerting brightness of his eyes all the more vivid, both beautiful and unsettling to look at, shining out of his face a bright sea green that seems almost to be moving, like waves contained in his irises. There is a long-sleeved shirt underneath the t-shirt he is wearing, both thread-bare and worn to death, a stain that Harry can only hope isn’t blood mars the left sleeve of the undershirt, made indistinct by its dark charcoal grey colour. The white shape of scars move over his knuckles and the backs of his hands, as well as a light pink asterisk in the centre of his palm that Harry is able to catch as he gestures widely, careful to avoid his companions’ faces with his wide-flung hands. He is wearing a necklace, a simple leather strap around his neck, adorned with a set of six beads of different colours as well as what looks to be coral, and a large watch on one wrist. He has his ears pierced, a simple black stud in each earlobe, and his nails look like someone painted them maybe a month ago, the remnants of dark colour minimal, especially on his thumbs and first two fingers. He is also wearing jeans, a small section of his t-shirt tucked carelessly into one side of them. His belt is made of brown leather and looks to be on its last legs, as does much of what he is wearing, including his dark-wash, loose-fitting jeans which are cuffed at his ankles, revealing graphic socks, and seem to be more hole than they are denim. His shoes are dirty, scuffed to the brink of death, and his socks don’t match.
The last of them, if Harry had to guess, is probably the tallest, and he looks the least alike of the three of them. His skin is a bronze colour, not as pale as the first boy’s nor as dark as the second’s. His hair is dirty blonde, straight and close cropped on the sides, not particularly long on the top of his head either, a far cry from his companions’ dark, unruly mops. They all have high cheekbones, his smattered with a few freckles that crinkle along with his electric blue eyes as he smiles at something Harry can’t understand. There is a scar on his upper lip but he otherwise looks perfectly sensible, like he could be a model student, whereas his companions look like certified trouble makers. His jeans are ironed, crisp creases pressed into them, not a rip or stain in sight, and the same goes for his thin jumper, plain and purple in colour. He is wearing a necklace comparable to his friend’s, though only adorned with a singular bead, the same as sits on the left side of his friend’s. It’s the only accessory he has. His shoes are simple, plain grey trainers with no fault in them aside from the impression of mud barely creeping up the side of the sole. His posture is perfect, his hands folded in his lap, constantly moving but not gesturing like his friends’, feet both planted, firm and still on the carriage floor.
Harry watches them wearily as he tentatively takes a seat across from them, next to the girl whose name he can’t remember. Ginny is quick to tell him, “This is Luna,” she says simply and the blonde girl looks up with a soft smile.
She forgoes a hello and instead starts with, “You’re Harry Potter,” he nods, because, of course, he is. “I’ve been reading about you,” and he winces, because he knows that the grand majority of what people have to say about him lately isn’t exactly a glowing review about his infectious personality and how gracefully he handles all the shit the world keeps putting upon him. “I do believe you, you know?” She continues with. Harry doesn’t know whether she clarified because she saw the look on his face or if it was just where she was planning on going in her slow, disjointed, deliberate manner of speaking. Her voice sounds as if she has found a way to whisper at full volume and Harry isn’t sure if it is pleasant to listen to or as off-putting as the way she takes too long to remember to blink her wide round eyes.
“Nice to meet you,” he says because he doesn’t know what else he can. She nods then sinks back into her upside down magazine. “Who are they?” he asks Ginny, thinking he’s being quiet and not even sure whether the people he’s talking about can understand the language he is speaking in. She shrugs but the stranger in the middle of the three looks away from the shortest of the them, who looks to have cut himself off mid-sentence to look at Harry a little too intensely, near-black eyes focused on a spot on Harry’s forehead where the shape of his scar is masked by his hair.
The boy smiles at Harry, grin stretching further to one side than the other, making only one cheek dimple. His teeth aren’t very straight and there is something scary, almost shark-like, about the elongated point of his canines. “I’m Percy Jackson,” he says. Harry is kind of surprised to hear his American accent but at least it’s confirmation that he speaks English.
“Jason Grace,”
“Nico di Angelo,” his companions introduce, the last being the only one with any kind of accent to suggest he isn’t speaking his native language, and even that is faint, as though he had been speaking English for a very long time with a lot of people.
“Nice to meet you,” Harry says again, “I’m Harry Potter,” he states even though he assumes they probably already knew that. Nico just nods, seemingly answering for all three of them, and Harry really isn’t sure what that’s supposed to mean. Neville and Ginny introduce themselves and the nod remains the only response. Harry hums unsurely to himself before asking “Why haven’t I seen you around before?” He would guess that Nico was his age and Percy and Jason were a year older; there was no way that any of them were eleven, first years.
“We’re transfers,” Percy answers easily, tapping a distracting rhythm on the floor with his toes, “From the states,” Harry is kind of surprised, both that there are transfers to Hogwarts after everything that had happened after last year, and that, in the event of transfers there would be just three of them, a group of teenagers he isn’t convinced aren’t amongst the most intimidating people he has ever met.
“Oh,” he says dumbly, “Just you three?”
“Yep,” the answer is plain and easy but it sounds slightly strained, resigned, and for a split moment Percy’s grin slips and his face settles into something more turbulent and brooding. As quickly as it appears, it’s gone. “It’s not, like, a thing our… school is doing, our family just fucking hates us,” Harry notices the way he hesitates at the word school but doesn’t mention it.
“They hate you,” Nico mutters, amused but clearly also somewhat genuine in his frustration. His voice is thin, kind of how Luna’s is, but Harry doesn’t have to wonder about whether or not he enjoys listening to it. “Jason and I are just collateral,”
Percy waves a dismissive hand, “We all know if I wasn’t there they would have picked a different one of us to hate,” He looks at Nico pointedly who returns it knowingly and Harry, Neville and Ginny watch, feeling as though they have been left out of the loop.
“You’re related?” Ginny asks, bracing her hands on her knees, one of her rolled-up sleeves falling down to her wrist, covering the dense patch of freckles on her forearm. Her knees are bare, revealed by the football shorts and brightly striped knee-high socks she is wearing.
Jason nods. “We’re cousins,”
“Much to my dismay,” Nico adds under his breath and Ginny can't help but grin, especially as Percy turns his torso to look at him.
“You wound me!” he declares melodramatically, “You know you love us, Neeks,”
Nico shakes his head and his hair splays across his narrow shoulders, covering some of the worn leather of his jacket. Harry can’t help but wonder why they’re all dressed for such cold weather when it’s a nice day, probably one of the last they’ll get as the summer dies out. “That gods-forsaken nickname is the precise reason why I do not,”
It’s Jason’s turn to smile, the barest hint of mischief on his handsome face. “Would you prefer Sunshine?” He says and Nico’s face turns pink as he shakes his head with vehemence. Jason may not look like his cousin but Harry thinks they act a lot like siblings, or at least a lot like the Weasleys, who are the best metric he has for what family members are supposed to act like.
“I’m going to kill you,” Nico decides and Harry can’t help but feel like the threat is at least a little bit genuine. A brief glance between Ginny and Neville betrays that they must be thinking the same because Ginny looks pale and weary and Neville looks green and nauseous, swaying in his seat as though lightheaded, as he was inclined to whenever things went terribly wrong. Jason and Percy, however, laugh and Nico glares, only further fuelling Harry’s unease and the Americans’ amusement. “I hate you both,” Nico says, but there is the barest hint of a smile pulling at his lips.
They go back to talking in their strange language and Harry isn’t sure what to make of them, which immediately makes a feeling of suspicion well up in him. He has a tendency of not having the best experience with new people, especially elusive ones. Now that he’s really listening he can tell that Jason’s speech seems to falter, slower than his cousins’ and lacking their native-seeming fluency. He doesn’t speak as much as they do but he still listens with a smile and never once betrays that he maybe doesn’t understand something that has been said.
Eventually the lady shows up at their compartment with her trolley of sweets and they switch back to English. “Anything from the trolley, dears?” she asks with a smile and Nico sits up straight in his seat.
He turns to his cousins and states “You have to buy me chocolate, doctor’s orders,” and Percy laughs, a giggle that matches his troublemaker’s appearance.
“We’re sharing funds,” Jason points out, “There’s no difference between us buying it for you and you buying it for yourself,”
Nico shrugs. “It’s the sentiment that matters,”
Jason sighs and asks the lady to give him whatever chocolate she has. She smiles and hands over a handful of chocolate frogs which he promptly deposits on the table in the centre of the carriage. “I’m telling Solace about the monster that he’s made,”
“He’d be glad,” Nico points out, turning over the ornate box in his hands as Harry collects his own selection of sweets, much smaller than the loot he had got in his first year. His sweets join the frogs on the table and he invites the whole carriage to take whatever they like.
Jason rolls his eyes, “Don’t I know it,” he says, incredibly fond. They might be speaking in his language but Harry still can’t really understand what’s going on, it almost feels like they’re speaking in code. It does nothing to make him feel more comfortable around them.
Nico opens the box he’s holding and grabs the frog before it can jump away. He watches it squirm between his thumb and forefinger like it’s trying to jump before he turns to the Brits in the carriage with an eyebrow raised and asks “These aren’t real frogs, are they?”
Harry shakes his head, a memory coming back to him from years ago. Ginny is the one that actually answers. “Nah,” she waves her hand and grabs a liquorice wand from the table, “it’s an enchantment.” Nico nods and drops the eyebrow, taking a small bite of the chocolate and smiling around it softly. For the first time, Harry sees him as a child, or at least someone like himself, rather than a threat who either holds his gaze for too long or not at all. Percy and Jason clearly see it too and, smiling, they reach for a frog of their own. “There are collectable cards,” Ginny tells them, chewing on the liquorice with the left side of her mouth. “Y’know, I’ve never really considered that wizarding America would have different foods than wizarding Britain,”
Jason shrugs, “I’m not sure how well these would sell back home,” he closes his eyes for a moment, presumably thinking of everything he had left behind halfway across the world.
A moment later, Hermione and Ron show up, both letting out sighs of relief as the door closes behind them and they get a break from Prefect duty. Ron perches himself on the edge of the bench beside Neville and Hermione lingers just in front of the door somewhat awkwardly. Jason gestures to the space on the seat beside him and she smiles at him tightly yet gratefully. As she takes her seat, smoothing out her uniform skirt before she does so, she introduces herself to him. He returns her smile politely and does the same, introducing his cousins as well as himself and telling her that they’re transfer students.
“So have you lot been sorted yet?” Ron asks them bluntly, immediately reaching for the sweets without really paying attention to what it is that he’s grabbing. Jason shakes his head as Percy squints at the card from his chocolate frog and Nico stretches his arms above his head in a yawn. “You don’t want Slytherin,” he tells them matter-of-factly. Hermione makes an indignant squeak by Jason’s side.
“Ronald!” she chastises, “You’re a Prefect now, you can’t talk like that about the other houses!”
“C’mon Mione,” he says, sinking his teeth into a pastry and getting crumbs on his face and shirt. He’s still mostly speaking to her but he turns his head to include Jason, clearly the American most eager to engage in this conversation with him, “There’s not a wizard who's gone bad who wasn’t in Slytherin,” he states like it's an undeniable fact. Jason stares back at him as his cousins make faces.
“Well what about Sirius Black?” Percy asks. He has placed the card in his lap, clearly giving up reading it, and braced his elbows on his knees. Harry watches the exchange and the strange body language of the foreigners, unable to get why he couldn’t read it: the text on the cards wasn’t that small and the font was as legible as any other.
Harry and his friends all tense in their seats, drawing their shoulders up towards their ears and making faces of ranging discomfort. Harry is all too aware of how Percy is looking at them, like he knows something more than he’s letting on and he’s trying to provoke them into reacting so he can monitor how exactly they go about correcting him, or perhaps if they do at all. “He was framed,” Harry says meekly and Percy angles his body further forwards, shoulders level with his jaw.
“Okay,” he accepts simply, “Who by?”
“Oh,” Ron says, slowly, quietly, his cheeks going red as he thinks. “Peter Pettigrew,” he says. Percy nods and Nico continues the conversation.
“And what house was he in?” he asks.
As Ron answers “Gryffindor,” he grows redder still and both Hermione and the Americans are levelling him with a look that makes him squirm in what little of the seat was left for him.
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” Nico says and he and Percy exchange a look like they have experienced that exact type of judgement themselves.
Hermione and Ron stay long enough for the group to make their way through the majority of the sweets before they return to Prefect duties and the Americans disappear to change into their Hogwarts robes, Jason seemingly the only one who isn’t the least bit annoyed by the garments.
“So,” Harry turns to Ginny and Neville as soon as he thinks they have moved far enough away to be out of earshot, “What do you think of them?”
“They’re interesting,” Ginny smiles and looks at Harry with a grin that implies she doesn’t think they’re too difficult on the eyes either. He shakes his head at her before looking at Neville.
He grimaces and Harry immediately feels like he’s a little less paranoid and a little more sensible. “I don’t know,” he says slowly, “They’re weird,” he gulps, “And kind of scary,”
“Oh,” Luna says, putting down her copy of The Quibbler, “No,” she hadn’t had much to say for most of the journey but Harry has a feeling it isn’t out of shyness, but rather that she spent more time with her thoughts than anything else and she was more than happy to observe until she had something to say. “They seem nice,” she shrugs then turns to Ginny, “And interesting. Old,” she added, as though it was supposed to mean much to Harry, “It’s not nargles,” she muses, “But their heads are full of something,” her blue irises are faced to the ceiling rather than the people she is talking to, and there is the hint of a smile on her lips, like there is a joy in the unknown that she is revelling in. Harry feels jealous; the only feeling the unknown ever gave him was dread, he knows much better than to expect good from it these days.
He doesn’t have the chance to ask her what she means because she takes so long getting all the words out that the Americans are already returning by the time that she is finishing her piece. They are dressed in the same version of the robes as the first years will be, lacking the accents and the tie that signify which house they belong to, and they don’t look all too pleased about it. Jason looks to be accepting of the garments even though he stares at his feet as he walks back to his seat, as though very conscious that he could trip at any moment, but Percy and Nico are complaining to each other loudly, only fuelling each other’s hatred with the vehemence of their own.
“This is so impractical,” Nico declares, slumping in his seat.
Percy nods, putting his heels on the bench and wrapping his arms around his knees, “I can’t wait for the bottom of this fucking robe to be ripped to shreds,”
“I give it a week,”
“I think that’s optimistic,”
“That’s a big word--Annabeth teach you it?”
“Why are you so mean to me? I’m not a complete idiot, you know? Okay stop looking at me like that I know I’m not the brightest but I resent that you think of me as an idiot,”
“Then stop acting like an idiot,”
“I’ve done plenty of non-idiotic things!”
“And enough idiotic things to compensate for them,”
“Gods, Neeks, why are you so mean to me?”
“Your ego can take it,”
“But should it have to?”
Nico doesn’t dignify that with an answer and instead returns to ranting about the uniform and how he can’t think of a single type of weather that it is appropriate for.
It isn’t much longer until they arrive at the station so Harry changes into his own uniform before sitting and waiting for the last ten minutes of the trip. He suddenly feels very isolated in the carriage upon his return, as the Americans have switched back to their strange language, Neville is still away changing, and Ginny and Luna are having a conversation he doesn’t understand that sounds as though it could have been pulled straight from the Quibbler. Hermione and Ron haven’t returned, having spent no more than twenty minutes with him throughout the entirety of the journey. They had promised to spend most of it with him and he felt somewhat betrayed that they had barely even tried.
They arrive at the station and Harry clambers out, finding his friends at last and trying to hide the hurt in his expression as he greets Ron and Hermione with a wave. “First years!” Hagrid calls in the background, “First years and transfers!” and the Americans disappear as Harry and his friends near the self-moving carriages that are waiting, as they always are, to draw them towards the castle lingering in the distance that Harry can just see on the horizon, waiting to welcome him to the home that feels less and less like home after every year of disaster and terror it inevitably brings him.