CW: Bullying, panic attack, meltdown, depiction of abused animal.

Early the next morning, Harry was awoken by the whispering commotion of her dormmates and the distinctly strident tone of an aggrieved Hermione. “She’s a girl, you heard what Nomi said – and the stairs let her up!”

Harry groaned and rubbed her eyes, sitting up in bed. “Yeah, we’ve established I’m a girl, why is everyone yelling about it?” she grumbled. Hermione faced a shame-faced Lavender, the other girl’s blonde braids in disarray as she glared at Hermione. Harry stretched, disturbing her kitten who promptly crawled into her lap as she leaned back against the headboard of the bed to consider her roommate through a blurry morning haze.

Lavender scowled. “The story always went, you were the Boy who Lived. Now suddenly you’re here being a girl and all, doesn’t make sense.” she snapped, and flounced out of the room, slamming the bedroom door as she went.

Harry pushed her disheveled hair out of her face and scrubbed at her eyes, stroking a purring Calypso’s ears with one hand as she fumbled for her glasses with the other. Now able to see, she looked around the room for anything, a sign of dislike or distrust. Parvati and Hermione already knew, Lavender was in a flap, so that left only Faye out of the loop. The pretty brunette smiled, and shook her head. “Purebloods. They’re so uptight about new things. You’re jus’ trans, right? The stairs let you up, so no argument from me. One of my mums is too, it caused this big fight with the grandparents. Like I said – uptight.” she grumbled, blowing a wisp of hair out of her face. The others agreed, Faye still muttering ill-temperedly about uptight magical folks and ‘the prudey bloody Brits’.

With no other complaint from her dorm-mates, Harry dressed hurriedly and followed her fellow first-years down the stairs to the Gryffindor common room, bouncing her forearm off her hip in time with the stairs as she navigated them cautiously.

Her school shoes clicked on the stairs and felt stiff on her feet, and the stairwell echoed painfully with an overlapping din as everyone else’s steps rang out the same in the still indoor air. Harry shook her head to clear it, and shrunk into her robes to escape the overwhelming racket somewhat. Callie, nestled in her robes, let out a complaining whine and dug her claws into Harry’s ribs.

Distracted by the brief pain amid the noise, Harry misplaced her foot on a stair and tumbled down the last few to the dusty wood panelled floor of the wider common room. She landed hard, one bony shoulder colliding with the floor as she curled protectively around her cat. Fortunate for the cat, it was Harry’s thin frame that bore the fall as she landed on her right side, arms shielding the kitten in her robes.

For a moment, Harry wasn’t really sure which way was up as dizzy stars crowded her vision and the shapes of her housemates’ legs blurred and tangled together. The painful ringing of their footsteps couldn’t quite cover up somebody’s voice as they muttered “Bet she’s just trying to look up skirts,” their malicious snicker fading in and out of her hearing as the crowd blithely moved on past the dazed girl.

Eventually the chaotic clamour stilled, and Harry was able to stiffly reorient herself, letting Calypso tumble free of her now-untucked shirt with a disgruntled scratchy meow. Harry leaned against the wall, adjusting her crooked glasses and straightening her clothes and letting her senses drift back.

She opened her eyes to see a worried Hermione, with Parvati a few steps behind as they were some of the last down the stairs. “Harry! Are you hurt?” Hermione asked, her fingers twisted in her skirt and tapping out a repetitive rhythm of interchanging fingers against the pad of her thumb. Harry shook her head mutely. Her mouth tasted of copper and iron and her right side ached, but nothing felt broken – or at least, no more broken than usual. Her words stuck in her throat, and she felt treacherous tears sting at the corners of her eyes; she dug her nails into her palms and pushed through it. “’M fine,” she mumbled, her voice a little hoarse. “Can we ju- s- jus- t, just, go to b-breakfast?” she managed to whisper, wilting under the attention of even her concerned friends.

Callie wound around her ankles and Harry crouched to retrieve the cat. The rhythm of the incorrigibly cheerful little creature’s low purr resonated in Harry’s hands, the sensation calming the scattered girl somewhat. Her friends didn’t seem terribly convinced that Harry was fine, but aside from some shared looks they didn’t make much an issue of it as they wandered down to the Hall for breakfast.

Since the feast last night, Harry had some idea of what to expect and after her rough morning start, it served only to worsen her anxiety. Still cradling Callie in her arms, she stuck close behind Hermione and braced herself for the cacophony that drifted up out of the hall, audible even as far up the staircases as they were. Unsurprisingly, an intact pre-tenth century castle had horrible acoustics.

Hermione seemed similarly affected by the riot of colours and sounds and movement as the three girls entered the Great Hall a little late for breakfast. Timidly she slipped her hand into Harry’s and clutched it tightly. Harry as ever was startled by the contact but she could feel Hermione’s trembling and the racing of the pulse in her wrist, and set aside her own anxiety for her friend in the moment. The contact, startling at first, calmed Harry too even as she shrank under the stares of other students, and together the three girls found a place in the far corner of the hall. Officially that was the Ravenclaw table, but Harry recognised her housemate Faye and besides, it was the only free space where they’d not be crowded.

The three of them offered shy greetings to the handful of Ravenclaw first-years, and Parvati’s sister Padma introduced them to her own friends – a pretty, humorous Asian Irish girl named Emilia Moon and a cynical red-haired Scottish girl named Morag McDougal; who Harry soon fell into conversation with about magical sports, with Parvati offering occasional comment. Unknown previously to Harry, both her parents had been Quidditch players and she felt an unfamiliar competitive excitement at the idea of the sport. Being small, poor and socially ostracised in school she’d never had much an opportunity for sports but as Morag chattered animatedly about the mechanics and strategies of Quidditch, Harry found herself genuinely interested by the whole concept. Hermione, Emilia and Padma all discussed their new classes, and Harry wondered how they remembered to eat in the midst of their talking as she struggled to multitask herself.

Towards the end of breakfast, a stack of heavy parchment cards were passed down the table, distributing themselves to the owners of the name at the top of each. The three misplaced Gryffindors received theirs as they sailed across the room from the Gryffindor table, and on opening them they proved to be class schedules, one for the first week and one that would remain for the rest of the term following.

All were excited at the prospect of finally doing real magic, especially as the schedule listed Transfiguration as their first class of the day. The schedule informed them that they had three classes a day for their first week, including one double class each day. Following Transfiguration was listed History of Magic, and the groans down the table echoed Harry’s sentiment – the set text for that class was incredibly wizarding-centric, and incredibly dry. Some senior Ravenclaws muttered darkly about getting the propoganda started early, which cynical Harry and Hermione couldn’t help agreeing on. And after History of Magic, their final class of the day would be double Charms, which most looked on much more positively. The Charms professor, Flitwick, was also head of Ravenclaw house and the other Ravenclaws reported him to be an insightful teacher dedicated to offering fair education both inside his more academically-inclined house and to the rest of the school. After the jaded reception to History of Magic, the fond praise of the Charms class made them all a little more excited for their day.

Breakfast seemed to drag on for hours and be over in minutes, and their little group found itself swept out of the Great Hall amid a crowd of other students, the first years in search of Transfiguration which, according to the timetable, the Gryffindors shared the classtime with the Ravenclaws along with History of Magic.

As the crowd thinned out and students went their separate ways to class, Harry fished her cat out of her shirt and set her on her own feet, the day was growing too warm already. Their little group fell in with a handful of other Gryffindors, among them Faye and Ron, on their way to class and they shared gossip about the parts of the castle they passed through as Ron had years worth of stories from his brothers.

In particular, he mentioned the stairs. For some addled reason, the stairs at Hogwarts moved every so often and not even on a set timetable – which bothered Harry and Hermione immensely, there then being no way to compensate for it. Some had trick steps that would trap your foot, others turned into slides occasionally, still more took great pleasure in leading to trick landings and doors that weren’t actually doors.

Distracted by the discussion of Hogwarts’ baffling architectural quirks, the little group were caught unawares by what was at Harry’s best guess a ghost – if ghosts were ordinarily dressed in brilliant scarlet and tangerine and fond of sliding down bannisters. The group were part of the way up an enormous staircase when they encountered this particularly obnoxious denizen of the stairway, and several covered their ears as it whooped in delight upon noticing them.

“Firsties! Ickle firsties! Oh, this is the best time of the year! Peeves can reuse all his favourite pranks!” it – he, crowed gleefully, breezing about through the group tangling hair, flipping cloak hoods over faces, disrupting bags and generally making himself a menace. He stopped, one finger extended, before a wide-eyed Calypso, making kissy faces at her. “Aaaaah, kitty! BOOP!” he exclaimed, startling the kitten with a prod of his semi-corporeal finger to her nose. Before Harry or the others could react, Peeves snatched up the kitten and whirled away up the steps, a trail of kitty-babble still drifting down to them.

The students shook off their shock, some kneeling to retrieve spilled supplies, others having to head back down the stairs to collect theirs. Harry, Hermione, Faye and of all surprises, Ron, were the first to react and the four of them dashed up the staircase after Peeves; Ron managing a harried commentary. “That’s the castle poltergeist,” he explained to them as they ran, skidding around a landing and up another flight of stairs after the still-cackling ghost. “Kinda combination of a ghost and a mischief spirit. No idea who he was when he was alive, even he probably doesn’t know. My brothers told me, we gotta catch him – he’ll get bored and leave the cat in a tree or somethin’” he added, his long legs carrying him ahead of the shorter girls up the stairs.

By the time they caught up to him, Peeves had vanished, leaving the four of them staring up at the cat who was perched atop a framed painting of absolutely nothing. Callie meowed plaintively, stretching one freckled paw down into thin air as she tried to reach them – she was too high for anyone, even Ron, to reach. Harry chewed her lip and flapped her left hand anxiously, Hermione’s tapping pattern increasing to a frantic speed as both froze, unable to think of what to do. It was Ron who rescued them, casting around the group in search of a plan. “Faye, you’re the shortest. Lemme lift you up, it’s only about an extra foot.” he offered, planting his feet wide and bracing a shoulder against the wall beside the painting. Faye nodded briskly and stepped into his cupped hands, leaning forwards against the wall. Callie hissed and backed away, teetering on the edge of the painting, and Faye received a claw to the wrist as she managed to grab the little cat by the scruff. She cradled the angry kitten against her chest as Ron let her down again, but she didn’t manage to keep hold for long as Callie sank her teeth into her thumb. Swearing profusely, Faye slipped as she stepped from Ron’s hand and dropped the tiny tortoiseshell as she grabbed for the landing rail to steady herself. Clearly at this point Callie was not here for any kind of rescue and the kitten dashed off up another flight of stairs. Ron groaned and reached out a hand to shake Hermione, immediately removing it as she whipped around to glare at him. Roused from her panic at least, Hermione took Harry’s hand again gently. “C’mon, just another staircase,” she murmured urgently, shifting from foot to foot – Hogwarts was a big castle to lose a four month old kitten in.

Her words didn’t really register to Harry, but the urgency did and with Hermione’s hand clutched in her white-knuckled grip Harry followed her and the others up the next staircase.

Luckily, they didn’t have far to go. About three-quarters of the way up they saw Callie, and it looked like she’d managed to slip into one of the trick stairs that Ron had been telling them about. They all slowed and Harry moved ahead of the group, still silent, murmuring wordless shushing sounds to comfort the panicked kitten. She felt the tiny body’s frantic heartbeat under her sensitive fingers, the coiled tension and panic and stroked Callie quietly, feeling it slowly begin to ebb away as she stroked the soft, tufty fur into patterns with her fingertips the way the kitten liked. Gently, she reached into the trick stair – a strange feeling, like moving through corn gloop; and curled a hand under the kitten’s trapped back end to lift her free of the stair. The two then sat just below the stair, Harry rocking and murmuring wordlessly to the kitten cradled against her body while the others looked on, confused. It was Hermione who broke their awkward staring and with a withering glare at the other two she joined Harry to sit on the stairs. “Do you need a squish hug?” She asked softly, ignoring the other two to focus on Harry. Harry nodded wordlessly, her hair loose and much of it falling in her face as she sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, forming a stressed cocoon around her cat who settled in the hollow walled by her thighs and torso. Hermione shifted closer and hugged Harry close, and slowly Harry’s distressed rocking slowed as the pressure of Hermione’s arms over her own helped to calm her.

“Please let go now,” Harry murmured and Hermione did so immediately, shifting away so that the younger girl didn’t feel trapped against the stair bannister. They both stood, and Harry had Hermione hold Callie for a moment as she shook herself, taking a moment to physically clear the last remnants of the panic from her body. She avoided the bewildered stares of the two other Gryffindors, and Hermione’s scowl told her they’d probably be in for a dressing-down after classes anyway.

Taking deep breaths, Harry re-centered herself in her body, holding onto the rail of the stairs for security before she felt the courage to face the others.

“I’m ok now. I’m sorry. I’m ok.” she managed, fidgeting with her fingertips. Hermione passed her cat back and she took solace in the kitten who provided a furry sort of barrier between her and the others.

The others didn’t get much of a chance to speak – or at least, Harry couldn’t make what they said turn into actual words in her head. She felt it first through her shoes, a creaking rumble under her feet and she turned away , falling knees-first back onto the stairs and clinging to the guard rail with her free hand while she cradled the cat in her other. “Stairs,” she gasped. Hermione was as ever the first to make sense of it and quickly gestured for the others to grab hold of the bannister rails as the heavy staircase began to move beneath them – just as Ron had described, although neither had expected it to feel so disturbingly wrong, the vibrations carrying through the structure to them set both Harry and Hermione’s teeth on edge. Slowly, with all the finesse of a barge, the stairs swung across ninety degrees to a new landing and settled into place, the creaking slowly dying away as they settled. The whole group came to roughly the same conclusion – the only real way to go was forward, as by the rumbling this wasn’t the only staircase to have shifted. So the four of them, now less than certain of direction given they no longer had a poltergeist or a cat to chase, made their halting way forward up the stairs to the dusty landing stretching into a dim hallway beyond. Lantern brackets on the walls indicated that usually this would be lit, but the hallway stood dark and deserted, cobwebs and dust its’ only fellows in the low light. Their footprints were visible in the thick dust of the landing, and a swathe of lighter dust marked a path others had trod more recently down the hallway and to a tall, heavy door set into the stone wall.

As the four gazed around them at the unattended, empty paintings and searched for any way to where they wanted to go, they were startled this time by an imperious mra-aowr from off to their right. A tall, long-haired tabby tortoiseshell cat with orange eyes watched them almost suspiciously – could a cat look suspicious? This one certainly did. Hermione elbowed Ron and tilted her head to one side, asking for him to elaborate. Ron swore, though coming nowhere close to Faye’s earlier profanity in doing so. “That’s Mrs Norris, the caretaker’s cat. This must be out of bounds. Fred and George said he turns up wherever she does, quick, we gotta hide,” he whispered urgently, casting another glance at the cat.

She wasn’t there. The sounds of a shuffling gait and the thump of a heavy stick on the wood floor heralded the arrival of someone, it had to be Filch, and with another ringing thud of the staff – a walking stick? - on the floor, the four of them were galvanised to action. They dashed into the hallway towards the only door they could see, the heavy one. Harry grabbed at the old-fashioned door handle and sparks flared around her fingertips as she tried to twist it free. “Hermione?” she asked, desperate not to be caught out of bounds on her first day. Her friend was already taking out her wand, and they all stepped clear of the door. Hermione’s face screwed up in distaste as she enunciated, “Alohomora!”, and Harry remembered reading with her about how the spell’s incantation had been devised by English wizards based on a fundamental misuse of a phrase in another language. That explained the expression. But it worked – a heavy click of disused mechanisms inside the door sounded and it swung inwards slightly, letting the four of them, Callie sheltering in Harry’s shirt again, into the room.

They piled in and slammed the door closed, leaning on it and hardly daring to breathe as the shuffle-thump of Filch’s gait drew past the door. The caretaker didn’t seem to notice their tracks, and they caught only his complaints about the dust and teachers not thinking of hygiene when they set areas out of bounds even to him. Eventually he wandered away again, and the four of them could breathe again.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t much an improvement. A rank, sour stink hung in the still air of the darkened room, and as Harry’s eyes adjusted to the gloom she could make out a massive shape hunched towards the back of the room, lit only by a tiny boarded window no bigger than a book. The stench was increasingly familiar to Harry, and she grabbed Hermione’s arm for lack of words, tapping urgently into her friend’s palm – no particular pattern, just trying to alert her friend that something was wrong.

Something was very wrong. The animal – for it had to be an animal – stirred, and a heavy chain clinked somewhere beneath it as it raised its’ head towards them, sniffing the air.

Dog.

All at once, the huddled, indistinct shape became all too clear to them as it stood, another wave of stink washing over the four of them with its’ movement, sour urine and blood and infection. It was still difficult to see in the poorly lit room, but as the animal stood and shifted, the light was cast upon its’ thin frame, throwing its’ ribs into sharp relief. For all her fear, Harry was sickened with pity for the animal. It swayed on unsteady paws, dull eyes taking in the shapes of the four kids. Where Harry had seen only one head there were in fact three, noses running and all reeking of hunger. A light sparked in six hollow eyes – people, familiarity, help? Three tails, tucked between massive hind legs, wagged pitifully against its’ abdomen and it took another step towards them, the single tentative movement swallowing another metre of distance. Now the tiny window’s light illuminated a trap door the dog had previously lain on, now uncovered as it tottered towards them – this information was noted and immediately shoved to the backs of their minds, not relevant, not now. Harry jerked Hermione’s arm, too panicked and sick to speak, and behind them Faye fiddled desperately with the door they’d come in as it seemed to have stuck closed again.

To Harry, the next moments happened all at once. The door swung free and the pitiful monster lunged at them, straining against what Harry could now see to be a heavy collar and harness that looped around all three necks and under its’ chest, paws scratching desperately at the open space – as her friends pulled her away, Harry could see its’ claws were dull and broken, and the pads cracked and bleeding. Harry couldn’t quite process how suddenly they were outside the chamber again, the door slamming closed behind them. She didn’t hear Hermione’s muttered locking spell, all she could do was fall to her knees and retch onto the floor as her cat dug its’ claws into her chest in terror.

She couldn’t speak as Hermione wiped her face and straightened her shirt, or as the three of them shepherded her out of the hallway and back down the stairs. She couldn’t do more than stumble blindly along with them, grounded to reality only by Hermione’s hand in hers as they navigated the new stair layout back to the first floor above the ground, where the Transfiguration classroom was supposed to be located.

And so when they got there, Harry was jolted back to reality like a sleepwalker, staring blankly at the equal parts concerned and irritated face of Professor McGonagall, barely aware that there was even a classroom around her. “Sorry, what?” she asked, shaking her head to clear it and none-too-gently hitting her temple with the heel of her free hand, trying to regain some kind of functionality.

“I asked, Miss Potter, why all you have managed to show up to my class a full forty-five minutes late and bursting in here as if chased by a pack of harpies. Perhaps it is good that you are here in Transfiguration at all. If it happens again, Ronald Weasley -” here she refocused her attention on Ron, who was trying to sidle away into a free chair – “I will transfigure one of you into a pocket watch, so you may all keep better time.”

Harry wilted under the scrutiny, she liked Professor McGonagall and couldn’t stop the repetitive little voice in the back of her head saying she’d be sent home now, she’d messed up too badly, now McGonagall knew just how disruptive she was. “Sorry, P-Profe-ssor,” she stammered, since none of her friends offered an answer. “We got r-really l-lost and there was this g-ghost? P-pesky ghost? And I lost my cat and-”

Professor McGonagall cut her off with a wave of her hand, though her face had a kinder set to it than before. “Perhaps a map then. Take your seats for what little remains of this lesson, and be sure never to disturb my class in such a manner again.” she replied, clearly concluding the issue. Shamefaced, the four Gryffindors slunk into empty seats, rejoining the others they had been separated from earlier who promised to share their class notes afterwards – that, at least was some reassurance to studious Harry and Hermione, though both Faye and Ron groaned silently at the prospect of catching up almost a whole missed class.

As Professor McGonagall had said, they really had missed the whole class. The day went by with little other event as the class moved on from Transfiguration to History of Magic. That subject was taught by a ghost, Professor Binns, and while he in question made much noise about respect, he certainly couldn’t be distracted from his droning by any number of pranks or snickering comments made by some of the less studious of the class as he ‘taught’. Hermione and Harry could really see the merit in the Ravenclaws’ half-sarcastic commentary about the propoganda of it all. The syllabus Professor Binns outlined covered several wizarding conflicts including goblin rebellion, giant wars, witch trials and muggle persecution of magical folk during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, and magical law surrounding the Statute of Secrecy that arose from those. From what they’d read on these topics previously and the comments from the Ravenclaws, it seemed Professor Binns liked to focus on the human magical community’s victimhood throughout the centuries, teaching the students the value of secrecy and tradition; and callous disrespect for the memories and autonomy of muggles to at times outright prejudice towards non-human magical beings and creatures. It seemed very insular to Harry, and having spent so much time reading with Hermione – history and sociology was a favourite topic in the Granger household – she could see the ways in which magical xenophobia mirrored the xenophobia and intolerance outside of the magical world. Her jaded perception of the magical world as just another set of problems was thoroughly reinforced, and by the end of the class hour she, Hermione and some of the Ravenclaws had grown so cynical that she feared only half-jokingly that they might turn grey and lose all optimism for learning entirely.

From History of Magic they were released and wandered off to lunch for a little over an hour, which Harry spent wandering the grounds with her new friends, chattering away about Quidditch again to Morag as they noticed some students playing an improvised version out above the field.

After lunch they split from their Ravenclaw friends and rejoined the rest of the Gryffindor first years and a group of Hufflepuff students for Charms class. Some of them Harry remembered from the Sorting, but her overall impression was one she was beginning to get used to outside her small circle of immediate roommates and their friends – a sort of strange wonder at her overall existence, staring and asking to see her scar, and awkward questions about her gender. Unlike some of the Gryffindors and a couple of Ravenclaw boys, most of the Hufflepuffs had no particular malice or ill intent in their questions at all, but it was alienating and uncomfortable nonetheless. So Harry kept her head down as they drifted into class, and settled with her dorm-mates and Ron near the front of the class so they could better see their teacher.

The teacher in question introduced himself as Ingólfur Flitwick, and he was roughly three foot five. He stood on a stool behind his lectern to address the class, with his first order being to kindly leave all of the History of Magic prejudice at the door lest he change their first lesson from the Levitation Charm to the Banishing Charm. Harry liked him immediately, with his wry humour and old Scandinavian accent. His initial demonstration of the Levitation Charm was to catch an unflattering doodle of him being passed between some boys – Basil Crane and Kiley Jamison, as Flitwick addressed them – solidified Harry’s opinion of the man’s good humour, and his teaching style was engaging. It didn’t hurt that the material was fascinating, and Harry got distracted repeatedly trying to calculate the physics involved in the charm’s action. Her stumbling block was the practical part of the lesson – she struggled with her fear of failure and intense shyness, and was incredibly reluctant to let her classmates see her fail. And further to his credit, Flitwick was nothing but kind to her, where previous teachers had come down hard on her for refusing to participate and labeled her defiant when she melted down under the pressure.

Despite having not cast any spell – no one did, Flitwick was adamant that they learn from the ground up before attempting spellcasting - Harry left the classroom buoyed by good cheer to counteract the cynicism that the previous class had inspired. Maybe she’d do half-decently here after all.