Arrival
Hogsmeade station received them in the rain, which was the traditional arrival experience and one that the Scottish climate appeared to take seriously as a professional commitment.
McGonagall was on the platform.
She moved through the crowd with the specific efficiency of someone who had done this enough times to know exactly where her targets were before she reached them. She found Harry first — "Mr Potter, if you'll come with me" — and then, with a slight pivot, Hermione — "Miss Granger, a word as well." Both of them were extracted from the flow of students with the smooth inevitability of a process that had been decided before the train stopped. Harry gave Ron a look over his shoulder. Hermione gave him a slightly different look, which communicated I know what this is about and I'll tell you later with the efficiency of someone who had got very good at communicating large amounts of information in a single expression.
Ron watched them go and then turned toward the carriages.
The thestrals were waiting in the dark beyond the platform, patient and still in the rain. He had known to look for them — had been looking for them since the train slowed — and they were there: the skeletal elegance of something that did not require the living to see it but did require those who had seen death to see it clearly. The nearest one turned its head and looked at him with the flat, attentive eye of a creature that had made no judgement about the fact of being seen and was not going to start now.
He stood for a moment in the rain and looked back.
He had seen death twice, as things stood. Once at thirty-two, in his own apartment, in a way that he was still not entirely sure counted in the conventional sense. Once in the Chamber, when Tom Riddle's screaming dissolution had ended with the specific totality of something that had been unmade rather than merely stopped. Neither of those was the clean category of loss that the thestrals were supposed to respond to. He had thought, over the summer, that he might not be able to see them at all — that whatever the mechanism was might not recognise what he had experienced as qualifying.
The thestral in front of him blinked.
He reached out slowly and let it take his measure, the way you let any creature take your measure — without pushing, without retreating, just present and available. Its breath was warm against his hand despite the rain. It felt like a horse and did not feel like a horse, and he filed the specific texture of that paradox away with the other things he was building toward understanding.
He dropped his hand.
"Right," he said, to no one in particular, and found a carriage.
The interior of the castle received them in the way it always did — the warmth, the candlelight, the particular smell of something old that had been inhabited for so long that the inhabiting had become part of the structure. The Great Hall was arranged for the feast and the Sorting, the four house tables stretching the length of the room with the banners overhead doing their slow, colourful business in the draught from the doors.
He found a seat at the Gryffindor table near enough to the door to see clearly and far enough from the front that the view of the staff table was adequate. The seat beside him was empty. The seat beside that one was empty. He sat with the specific self-contained quality of someone who was comfortable being alone at a table and had things to think about while being alone at a table, and he thought about Lupin's Patronus and the specific movement of his wand and the way the silver light had built, and he turned it over in his head the way you turned over a mechanism you intended to understand.
The Sorting happened.
He watched it with the attention of someone who had not been watching it for two years — or who had been watching it, in the peripheral way of someone for whom it was happening in the background while something else occupied the foreground, and was now actually looking. The Sorting Hat's song was the Sorting Hat's song, which was to say it was the work of an enchanted object that had been composing variations on the same theme for a thousand years and had not yet run out of new things to say about it. He listened to it properly this time.
The first-years filed up one by one and sat in the chair and the Hat did what the Hat did, and he watched the eleven-year-old faces with the attention of someone who understood that the children being sorted now were the people he would be sharing the next four years with — not the third-years already around him, but the people who would be in the years below, the ones who would be in the castle when the hardest parts of the next few years arrived, and who would need to be ready for that without knowing what they were being readied for.
He thought about Neville Longbottom, sorted three years ago, standing in front of the same Hat with the specific anxious quality of someone who had been told his whole life that he wasn't much and was waiting to be officially confirmed in that assessment. He thought about what the Hat had told him — Gryffindor — and what it had seen in him that the people around him had mostly failed to see, and he thought that the Hat, whatever else it was, was not careless.
Harry arrived during the Sorting — slipping in from the side door with the practiced invisibility of someone who had been doing the side-entrance thing for two years. Hermione arrived three minutes after him, slightly flushed, settling into the seat beside Ron with the movement of someone who had been somewhere and was returning with information she was processing on the way.
"Time-Turner?" he said, quietly.
She looked at him with the expression she had in the train compartment when he had known. "Yes," she said. "McGonagall gave me the briefing."
He nodded.
Harry leaned across from the other side. "What's a Time-Turner?"