Catherine's voice pierced Ethan's ears like a drill.

  "Ethan! There was a power outage! Get up right now or you'll miss the train!"

  Ethan groaned and buried his head under the pillow. The digital clock on his nightstand seemed to have died, emitting the smell of burnt pstic.

  "Five more minutes..." he mumbled, not even having the strength to open his eyelids.

  The answer came in the form of blinding light when Catherine flung open the curtains and pulled the pillow covering her son's head. The pale light of the September dawn invaded the room mercilessly.

  "Not a minute more. The train leaves at eleven and we need to be at King's Cross with plenty of time to spare."

  Ethan swore Catherine was becoming a half Asian and half Latina mother at this moment, because if he didn't listened to her, she would probably start banging pots with cutlery left and right.

  Even with his eyes closed, he had no choice but to get up like a zombie from his grave.

  "Ugh, why do we have to leave so early? Cambridge isn't that far from King's Cross."

  Catherine was already pulling clothes from the closet and throwing them over Ethan's face, almost knocking him over in bed. No, Ethan really did fall over the bed again, using the unched clothes like a couple of bed sheets.

  "Because I have to return for the teacher meeting at ten, and because st year you arrived with barely five minutes to spare. Or have you already forgotten how you had to run all over the station?"

  Ethan hadn't forgotten any of that, mainly because it had never happened. But apparently, in this altered reality, he had been at Hogwarts the previous year. He already had the second-year books(probably delivered to his home), a brown owl named Hermes that he supposedly used to send letters home, and a trunk with the Gryffindor crest.

  "Mmm, I'm coming," he conceded, dragging himself out of bed.

  Forty minutes ter, mother and son were at Cambridge station, waiting for the first train to London. Ethan's trunk rested at his feet, and Hermes was dozing in his cage as if nothing had happened.

  "Do you have everything you need?" Catherine asked for the umpteenth time. "Books? Wand? The money I gave you for emergencies?"

  "Yes, Mom," Ethan replied, suppressing a yawn. "You were the one who organized everything, as always... And you know I have faith in you..."

  All he gained was Catherine squeezing his cheek until it turned red. "Your sense of humor doesn't improve with hours of sleep, does it?"

  Ethan couldn't even respond as he stroked the mark of her fingers on his pale skin when the train arrived with a screech of brakes, and soon they were on their way to London.

  There was a lot he wanted to tell Catherine, these two weeks had been difficult for him, especially feeling a love that he knew didn't belong to him.

  Ethan watched the ndscape change gradually as the sun began to rise over the horizon. His right hand unconsciously traced the rune in one of the faces of his neckce. The stone was trapped in a metal ring with an inscription in Latin.

  "Does your neck hurt?" Catherine asked, noticing how Ethan adjusted his neckce.

  "No, just... I make sure it doesn't fall off."

  "That neckce..." Catherine frowned. "I don't remember buying it for you."

  Ethan didn't even blink when he lied. "A friend gave it to me at Hogwarts. For my birthday." He needed to find out when his birthday was.

  "What friend?"

  "Eh... Dean. Dean Thomas."

  Catherine nodded, apparently satisfied with the answer, which made him breathe a sigh of relief. The lie had come out naturally, although at first he almost named Neville, someone who couldn't lie even if his interrogator was a tiny mosquito, much less under someone like his mother (if they ever met).

  Although he didn't know anything about st year, it was impossible not to make any friends in Gryffindor... Right?

  They arrived at King's Cross at 7:30 AM, surprisingly early even by Catherine's standards.

  "Well, here we are," she said, checking her watch. "I have time for a quick coffee before I go back."

  They crossed towards the barrier between ptforms 9 and 10. Ethan felt the unknown sensation of passing through a cold curtain before emerging onto ptform 9?. The Hogwarts Express was already there, its scarlet engine gleaming under the lights, although there were barely a dozen students scattered around the ptform.

  "Looks like we're not the only early birds," Catherine commented.

  A group of three older students were chatting near the train, all wearing tunics with the Hufflepuff crest. A family with what looked like twin first-year students were meticulously arranging their trunks. And sitting alone on a bench, reading a thick tome, was a dark-haired girl that Ethan didn't recognize.

  "Well, I guess it's time to say goodbye," Catherine said, hugging Ethan tightly. "Write to me when you arrive, okay? And don't cause any trouble this year."

  "When have I ever caused trouble?" asked Ethan with genuine innocence. It was a reflex question he couldn't help but make even though his brain already knew the answer.

  Catherine raised an eyebrow. "Do you want me to start with the time you 'accidentally' turned your Transfiguration teacher's hair into feathers?"

  Ethan's eyes widened, assimiting this new information about his supposed first year. This new information seemed completely impossible: Ethan should be given the position of minister of Magic if he was capable of pying a prank on someone like Professor McGonagall. On the other hand, transfiguration wasn't something so easily and even less doing it with such precision like turning someone's hair into other things... At least for Ethan, a first year wouldn't have pulled it off, unless it was some reincarnated wizard.

  "I thought so." Catherine kissed his forehead. "I love you. Study hard."

  "I-I love you too, Mom," he stammered, something was definitely wrong, and it wasn't the stupidity of telling his own mother about such an impossible accident.

  No, even lying to his own mother about something impossible like that made no sense even if he suffered from masochistic tendencies... After all, the only thing he would gain from it was a beating.

  Finally, Ethan was left alone on the ptform with plenty of time and a bad feeling in his stomach.