Hogwarts Reimagined

SPECIFIC CONTENT WARNING FOR THIS CHAPTER.
This chapter includes targeted homophobia and transphobia, ableism and ableist slurs, bullying and racist commentary. Specific note for use of slurs, including ableist and queerphobic slurs, and degrading racist language. Note also for significant injury - don't worry, Harry's alright!

Rather than it occurring straight away, Harry and Hermione received a note each about their detention at breakfast the next morning, informing them that it was being planned and that they would be informed further of the time and place next week. So with that thought in mind, both girls went about their study throughout the week quietly and with little further comment in class. Potions was as awful as ever, but luckily without further injuries that week.

Classes continued as their new usual, and Harry felt as if the week had been pulled out from under her feet by the time they reached Saturday. From her conversations with Morag and Padma, Harry’s excitement for the prospect of flying lessons and magical sports was growing, even through the ever-present fear of failure.

And speaking of fear of failure – even that began to ease. Harry and Hermione had a tendency to unintentionally fuel eachother’s perfectionist anxiety. As Harry slowly gained new friends, in particular Ron, Neville, Morag and Faye; slowly she learned to push out her comfort zone and gradually she started to develop if not a rapport with her fellow students, then at least a new confidence. A fragile one to be certain, but that is how everything begins if it is to grow.

Aside from Hermione, it was probably Neville that Harry was closest with. She empathised with the older boy’s shyness and the way he felt incompetent and out of step with the world, and their confidence grew together as Harry discovered Neville’s grasp of Herbology and alchemical science far outstripped her own. That was too easily overlooked given Neville’s social impairment, but that was something Harry shared – and she enjoyed watching the genuine confidence that grew in her friend as he realised there were things he could teach her, instead of feeling as if he was a burden on their study sessions.

Study aside, it was flying class – not really something you could study for – that held Harry’s attention today. She walked hand in hand with Neville having found the physical contact helped to settle his anxieties, while chattering animatedly to Hermione and Parvati about the possible class curriculum and the mechanics of flying manoeuvres she’d read about prior.

Flying class was held on a field designated for training, directly beside the castle itself and its’ outer reaches ringed by a stone wall. Further out was a mass of scaffolding, towers and heraldry that Harry’s new peers had informed her was the Quidditch stadium, and farther still was the looming mantle of the Forbidden Forest, today its’ canopy obscured by the last remnants of cloud that still clung to it even this late in the morning.

At the head of the field stood a lean, gray-haired woman of average height, dressed in plain black robes of an athletic cut Harry hadn’t seen on other magical folk. Before her were laid out rows of broomsticks, four rows of ten each. Some were straighter, while others had a distinct warp to them. All had bent twigs, and looked well in need of care. Harry joined her friends as they lined up into the assigned rows, managing to snag one of the straighter brooms – the asymmetry of the others niggled at her and her brain raced, composing hypothetical solutions for the mechanics of a spell to coax the warp from the aged fibers; at the peculiarly yellow-eyed teacher’s gesture and scowl they redistributed themselves out of their house ordering. Harry found herself between Padma and Hermione, with Neville directly across from her in the next row. She cast around anxiously for others she recognised, disoriented in the change of organisation. Her bespectacled gaze found Parvati further down the line from Neville and Faye further to her own right, with Morag and Emilia in the other line parallel to Harry’s. Also nearby were others she recognised – Sally-Anne Perks and Megan Cassidy, Hufflepuffs that Harry liked well enough after their initial awkwardness, and Tracey Davis and Daphne Greengrass, two Slytherins who Harry had noticed were by far friendlier in class than their housemates overall. Dabs of red in the sea of uniforms told Harry where the rest of her housemates were, even though she didn’t know them as well as her dorm-mates specifically, and she relaxed a little as she familiarised herself with their new structure in the hope it wasn’t liable to change again suddenly.

The gray-haired instructor clapped her hands, stilling the babble of chatter and stories of childhood flying mishaps. “Alright, class. Doesn’t matter how many of you have flown before or not, this class is to iron out any possible bad habits just as much as it’s to teach the newcomers. A point from Gryffindor, Finnigan, I didn’t ask you to pick up that broom – your enthusiasm is commendable, though I would prefer your attention.” she began, with a raised eyebrow at the errant boy who, red-faced, abruptly returned the broom to the ground.

“Now, we’ll be starting from the basics. I’m Madam Hooch. Treat my brooms well or you’ll be in detention polishing them. You should all be standing with your broom on the side of your wand hand. If you aren’t, please do so now – and make room for those who need to change sides, the lot of you.” There was some minor reshuffling in the lines, as left-handed wand users and those who’d found themselves simply lined up wrong straightened themselves out as the teacher ordered. “Now, stick that wand hand out over your broom and command it, ‘up’. They may not be wand-wood, but these brooms can still sense your hesitation, and they won’t budge if you’re not sincere. We’ll move on once you’re all confident at this stage.” Madam Hooch finished, demonstrating for the class with her own broom as she spoke.

Harry eyed the broom warily. Its’ varnish was faded and chipped in places, and more than a few tail twigs were out of place. Still, there were no splinters she could see. And there was nothing in particular to fear about asking a broom into her hand – idly Harry wondered if the same concept could apply to summoning a wand, it seemed similar in principle. She stuck her bony right hand out over the broomstick and scowled at it, scripting the word in her head. “Up!” she ordered it. Unsurprisingly, the broomstick remained grounded. A chorus of similar commands rang out unevenly throughout the four lines, and Harry contemplated her broomstick. Again, she ran the word over in her head, planning out even the tone and cadence in an attempt to evade her stutter. “Up!” she ordered it again, and this time the broom at least rolled over on the ground.

It took Harry the best part of five minutes to convince the broom into her hand, another five before she could do so every time she tried. She noted Hermione took a little longer, and some nervous students overcompensated and got hit in the face with the handle of their broom. Harry was envious of the students who got it down first time or quickly, among them Ron, Morag and the sneering blond boy, Draco Malfoy. Within around twenty minutes, the rest of the class had picked up the exercise well enough, Neville with Harry’s help as the two signed back and forth across the class lines. Neville’s round face was lined with anxiety even with help, and the shorter boy had a sheen of sweat visible under the late morning sun.

“Right, class. Now you’ve all got the hang of that, you’re going to mount your brooms. Some might have been taught side-saddle but I want you all seated astride. Push off from the ground firmly, keep your grip and your brooms steady. Rise a few feet – absolutely no more than ten – and then come back to the ground by leaning forward. On my whistle.” Madam Hooch instructed, her clipped lowland accent carrying across the still field.

The whistle blast echoed in Harry’s ears, but she didn’t get a chance to so much as mount her broom. Neville, made hasty in his worry, was the first astride his broom and he didn’t so much push off the ground as he did leap into the air. One loose arm flailing, the panicked boy gripped his broom with the other. His weight was too far back and his broom lurched backwards at an alarming rate. Abruptly it stopped, and Neville was thrown forward onto the broom’s handle, hugging it with both arms. Harry couldn’t see well enough at a distance to discern exactly what happened, but it looked like Neville took a blow from the broom’s handle to the forehead as he lurched forward, and slowly, as if time ran through glass, he slipped from the airborne broom and tumbled to the ground with a sickening crunch.

Harry was first to his side, Madam Hooch close behind. Words stuck in her throat and she cracked the knuckles of her right hand in succession at her side, returning to anxiously flapping. Neville lay at an awkward ankle, his thick dirty-blond hair in disarray and his face, what little Harry could see of it as he lay mostly on his stomach, contorted with pain. He curled around his right arm, and Harry felt ill as she noted that the top of it jutted out from his body at an angle that could only be described as fundamentally wrong, forming an ungainly mass forward of where his shoulder should normally be. Anterior dislocation, some factual part of Harry’s mind informed her. Possible damage to elbow and/or wrist.

Madam Hooch swore softly, she must have come to a similar conclusion to Harry. “Class paused while I get this lad to the Hospital Wing. Nobody is to leave the ground, you hear?” she ordered. Neville stifled a shriek as she lifted him from the ground. Harry seized his good hand, squeezing it for comfort as Madam Hooch paused. She spelled against the pulse point in his wrist, two letters repeating. Ok. Ok. Ok. Neville’s eyes were screwed closed, but a hitch in his breathing and a weakly returned squeeze told Harry that he’d understood.

Numb and confused, Harry stumbled back to her place in the rows of brooms as Madam Hooch took her semi-conscious friend away. Hermione put her arm around Harry, squeezing the other girl into her side. As always, Harry relaxed under the pressure, her tapping hand against Hermione’s leg signalled when to let go.

As she calmed, Harry’s senses returned to her and her brows drew together as a pale figure in green-accented robes broke from the rest of the class, long-legged strides carrying them to where Neville had fallen. Harry couldn’t see what, but they retrieved something from the short-cropped grass beside the now-grounded broomstick and held it aloft. “It’s that thing of Longbottom’s!” the blond figure crowed, and now as he spoke Harry recognised him to be Malfoy. She scowled and, broom in hand – perhaps to beat him with, she wasn’t quite sure why – she stomped over until she stood before the sneering blond boy. Closer now, she recognised in his hand the clear orb, a single band of brass encircling it and a small nexus of red smoke swirling at its’ core. A Remembrall - Neville had received it in the mail at breakfast earlier in the week. “G-g-gi-ve it back, Ma-lfoy,” she snapped, her voice catching on the words.

The blond boy’s face lit in a mocking smile. “Duel me for it, Potter,” he jeered, dancing back out of her reach as she lunged for the enchanted globe. He laughed, holding it high above her head. “Nobody believes your story about your name being Harriet, you know. Anyone can see what you’ve got under that skirt, sissy,” he taunted. Harry flushed with fury, the tips of her ears burning. The edges of her vision dimmed and glittered as they always did under strain. “I’m not dueling you, Malfoy, give it back.” she retorted, missing again as she snatched at it. Malfoy’s lip curled. “Figures, faggot. Let’s leave this where the retard can find it… maybe at the top of a tower? Or, no, I know, on top of the Quidditch hoops.” he sneered, turning his back to her as he mounted his broom.

The familiar taunt bit at Harry’s ears, but it was the slur he directed at Neville that had her pulse pounding in her ears. Harry mounted her broom, her grip white-knuckled on the handle, her feet spread in a wide stance on the ground as she studied Malfoy’s movements. It was as if she watched the scene from just outside her body and as if she was trapped inside as a passenger at once; Malfoy leapt from the ground and Harry shot off in pursuit of him. Her vision blurred and sparked and she narrowed her eyes, squinting through the glare on her lenses. The sunlight bounced from the globe in Malfoy’s hand and the blond boy laughed back over his shoulder at her – he’d not been lying in his boasts throughout the week, he was a competent flier. “You’re not fooling anybody, faggot. Everyone knows what you were born. I can’t believe you – you, who survived a curse that rebounded on it’s maker – you grew up to be a filthy tranny bitch.” he taunted as Harry matched his movements, the pair rising higher above the field. She shook her head mutely, too angry to speak, too focused to lift a hand from the broom. “And you could have made something here at Hogwarts, but no. You and your retard, and that monkey and the rest of your queer friends, you’re everything that’s wrong with this place. He had the right idea, to clean out the half-breeds like the lot of you.”

Half-breed. Retard. Monkey. Tranny. Faggot. The words dinned in Harry’s brain, her vision suffused with sparks as her hands shook on the broom’s handle. Somewhere along the way, Malfoy’s voice had taken on a tone so familiar to her, so derisive, it felt that even here, sixty feet above a highland castle, she was back with the Dursleys. The insults mirrored those her uncle favoured, the sheer derision echoed her aunt. Harry shook her head, the phrase blinded by rage could not have been more accurate in the moment. “No.” she choked out, her jaw trembling along with the rest of her. Her vision seized on the brass-banded orb, still clutched in Malfoy’s long-fingered grip. She lunged, but up here Malfoy had no speed advantage over her and her movement was steady, the broom carrying her forward as she tucked in on herself. Acting only by instinct she shoulder-checked the taunting blond, sending the Remembrall tumbling from his now-flailing grasp. The loose hand caught in her thick hair as she dove past him, tearing a furious scream free of her lips. Draco couldn’t hold on long and Harry now had the advantage, her thin frame flat against the broom as she forced it into a steep dive, plummeting from the sky after the glinting orb. The ground barely registered in her awareness as she closed on it. Thirty feet. Twenty feet. Fifteen feet. Five feet. Three. One, the glass ball glinting just out of reach. It collided with her palm and she tucked it in against her chest, hauling the broom out of the dive with all her weight thrown backwards.

Malfoy landed some feet away, just below Harry now as she hovered atop her broomstick clutching her prize. She was gratified to see his chest heaving and hair askew, and for the first time in her life Harry felt the heady, vengeful thrill of victory over a bully. But the moment didn’t last, as she drifted to the ground she tumbled from the broom and sank to her knees, hugging the ball. Malfoy’s longer legs ate up the distance between them, and he knelt before her, the vicious smile gone from his thin face. Now he seemed fearful, ashamed, and there was a wildness to him there hadn’t been previously. Bullies survived with their control, brought to them by fear. Beaten so publicly, that was threatened, and Harry didn’t miss the quiver in his lips as he knelt, bringing himself to eye level with her. “I meant it, freak. You’ll duel me, or-” he hissed, cut off abruptly as another figure entered Harry’s limited field of view. He was pushed aside by an impatient green-robed figure – Professor McGonagall, Harry noted mutely as she raised her head to see better. Hurriedly she got to her feet and lowered her gaze again, stepping back with the broom now in one hand and the Remembrall in the other.

“Never, in all my time at Hogwarts – You, lass! You count yourself bloody lucky I don’t have you out here on the next train, cat and all!” the professor snapped, her stern voice lapsing into what must be her native Highland brogue in her high temper. Harry quailed under what she could only interpret as fury, and Professor McGonagall shook her head. “Ten points from Slytherin, Malfoy, you and I both know why. I’ll be speaking to Severus about this. And you, Potter, you come with me.” she ordered, the temper seeping from her voice. Harry was swept along with the professor as she strode from the field, dropping the broom somewhere along the way. She turned back to the rest of the class a moment, and her heart sank as she read the challenge in Malfoy’s expression. “Right here. Midnight. Or else.” he mouthed, her blood turning icy at the bitter resentment in the rival boy’s pale blue eyes.

As ever, Harry barely registered their surroundings as she trailed along in Professor McGonagall’s wake into the castle. Even the architecture, capricious as it was, bowed to the stern professor’s manner and soon Harry found herself waiting to one side before a door Harry recognised as that which led to the Charms Classroom. “Excuse me, Ingolfúr, may I borrow Wood for a moment?” Professor McGonagall called out, leaning in through the door. Harry fumbled for the name, then realised she had to be speaking to Professor Flitwick. Was Wood the name of a cane that the professor wished to borrow? It seemed out of character for the woman who had found Harry accomodation with the Grangers, but Harry could never be surprised by the vicious twists of human beings by this point.

Wood, as it turned out, was a broad-shouldered youth of about fifteen by Harry’s best guess, his brown hair cropped short and his face freckled and ruddy. He had a good-humoured but serious look about him, and he nodded politely to the professor as she closed the classroom door behind them.

Professor McGonagall beckoned them both after her as she strode off down the hallway, coming to another classroom door that stood ajar. Both Harry and the boy McGonagall had referred to as Wood entered the classroom behind the professor, empty save for themselves and Peeves, who was drawing a marvellous spiralling work across the blackboard – a work that, Harry noted with a stifled giggle, was made up entirely of stylised genitalia.

“Ach, get out ye menace,” Professor McGonagall muttered tiredly, shooing the poltergeist from the room with a wordless stream of lime-green light from her wand. The door slammed closed behind him, and McGonagall turned to face the two students.

“Wood, I’ve found you a Seeker.” she announced, a broad grin spreading across her usually serious face as she regarded them both. Wood’s face, previously a mask of bewilderment, changed to delight. “Are you serious, professor?” he asked, rubbing his palms together excitedly. Harry was still confused – Quidditch? Her? - and set about flapping her left hand against her hip, hoping they would enlighten her.
“That was your first time on a broom, ay lass?” the professor inquired as if already knowing the answer. Harry nodded hurriedly, still having not quite lost the dizzying rush of her dive.
“Caught that thing -” here McGonagall gestured to the swirling reddish orb still clutched in Harry’s spare hand – “after a fifty-foot dive, not a scratch on her. Fantastic shoulder-check to seize it too, I’ve not seen anything like it. Even Charlie Weasley couldn’t’ve pulled that off green.”

By now both were alive with energy, and Harry felt their expectations like a heavy mantle about her shoulders. She hadn’t really thought of the height, and was sick at the idea of it now even as the rush of it still burned at her nerve endings. “Ever seen a game of Quidditch, Potter?” Harry was asked, and she blinked owlishly at the fifth-year boy. She shook her head no. “But I-I’ve read a lot abou-t-t it,” she offered, the edges of her mouth quirking upwards hopefully. Quidditch. Real Hogwarts Quidditch like they’d been talking about, her.

Wood studied her now, nodding enthusiastically. “She’s just the build for a Seeker too. A little undermuscled, but that’ll come with training... We’ll need to get her a broom, Prof, maybe an older model Nimbus or the new Cleansweep.” he suggested.

Professor McGonagall was already nodding. “Yes, yes. I’ll speak to Professor Dumbledore about it, and there’s already a loophole in the school ruling I can think of if he says no... the Morrìgan only knows we need it, flattened by Slytherin in that last match, Severus lorded it over us for weeks...” she trailed off, muttering away to herself. Wood shrugged, and turned to Harry. “You’ll use a spare until we can get you a decent broom. Training Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, just follow the other Gryffindors on down. And call me Oliver.” he instructed, offering a hand for Harry to shake. She shook her head, but offered him a genuine grin, albeit one a little crooked with nerves. “I-I’ll see you tomorrow then.” she agreed and, still a little giddy with it all, she took her leave as McGonagall nodded permission and skipped off to tell her friends about the bewildering developments of the morning.