Déjà Vu • Fred Weasley

Prologue

Now ~ Evelyn

The hallways are too crowded.

The foreign hallways are too full of wizarding students she doesn't know, their countless voices mixing together to create a blurred, confusing, overwhelming sound that made her want to reach up and cover her ears, just to get a moment of quiet. Her heart beats quickly in her chest, no matter how many deep breaths she takes in hopes to calm it down.

She's already stressed enough as it is, trying to navigate the castle that's seeming to turn into more and more of a maze with every turn she takes. Why the hell do the staircases move?

Luckily, she'd been led to her room by a prefect when she first arrived at Hogwarts a couple of hours ago, but she had been more focused on admiring the paintings that she passed than which turns they were taking. She has a room all to herself, something that she was informed of when she first met with Mcgonnagal, and it's something that she knows she'll be eternally grateful for. Apparently there's an uneven amount of students as well as an extra room, so the school had decided that the single room would go to the new fifth-year student, electing not to throw her in with all the other new first years. Thank God.

She'd spent the entirety of her time before dinner unpacking her things and setting up her room, distracting herself from the looming idea of having to meet a whole bunch of new people shortly. She doesn't know a single person at Hogwarts. Not a single one.

She's not very good with meeting too many new people at once, but she's just going to have to suck it up for a little, try to make herself seem at least a little bit more confident than she really is. It didn't mean that she's not dreading it with her entire body, though.

The time had come, and she hadn't expected that the journey to the dining hall would be something to dread, too. She'd been too prideful to accept the offer to get a tour of the school when the prefect had led her to her room; she hadn't wanted to follow along with all of the first years, towering over their small bodies and standing out even more than she already felt she did.

So she's stuck figuring things out for herself, trying to make sense of the outdated map in her hands as she takes a turn into another hallway. It's apparently the wrong one, judging by the way it's void of students, so she whips back around, knowing that she's already running late for the meal. She needs to just follow along with where the other students are going instead of trusting the map, the anxiety that has been slowly building in her chest reminding her of the nightmare that being late to dinner would be.

When she turns around, the first step that she takes is right into another body, because, of course it is. She looks up to quickly apologize, more worried about getting to her first meal in time than offending some unknown student but halts in both her movements and her words when she takes in the face in front of her. The soft, handsome, all too familiar face in front of her.

"Ev?" he asks, clearly just as bewildered as she is to see her.

"Fred," she breathes out in shock, voice barely audible over the overpacked hallway behind them.

They just stare at each other for a long moment, each of them looking as if they've just seen a ghost.

His jaw is still hanging wide open when he speaks, apparently having found his voice. "You're a witch?" he asks in disbelief.

"You're a wizard?" she replies in the same manner.

He doesn't answer her, just as she hadn't answered him. It's fairly obvious that neither of them are muggles.

"What the hell are you doing here?" he asks.

She scoffs and gestures down to her school uniform. "What does it look like?"