Entanglement

The First Lessons

Elena woke up and got dressed more quickly than she ever had. She ran down, seeing the twins stand nearly right at the doorway of the girls dormitories, and stopped.
"You scared me," she said, and they opened a way for her to go between them.
"Say," Fred began, "how'd you know my name? Yesterday, on the train? You thanked me for saying we'd come back later. Here we are," he teased, and Elena raised a brow, then her eyes flickered to George.
There's no way. They were trying to pretend to be the other twin.
"I said George, you're Fred. He's George, you two said so, to your mum- before you got on the platform?" She replied, and they both exchanged looks.
"How are you so sure I'm George and he's not?" George asked, and Elena smiled.
"I just know," she lied, and kept walking.

Elena could tell subtle differences. Fred seemed to instigate the jokes, and had more of a defined jaw.
Though, Elena knew she preferred George, and how he could be empathetic easily, and his softer gaze when you met his eyes.

Elena heard whispers about Harry from the moment she left her dorm the next day. People queuing outside classrooms stood on tiptoe to get a look at him, or doubled back to pass him in the corridors again, staring.

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. There were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in the right place, and doors that were solid walls pretending. It was also hard to remember where anything was, because it moved around. Elena wanted to stay by Hermione's side, knowing that Hermione would help. Elena admired her knowledge. However, Hermione got tired of Elena being so behind in where everything was. Fred and George were happy to help, oddly enough. Elena just really wanted to be Hermione's friend, she wanted to impress the other girl- but she didn't know how.
"Say Potter, thought you'd know the way better," Fred began.
"If only you would've told us before you'd get lost so easy," George teased.
"You're not funny," Elena replied, but spoke with a teasing tone back.

The ghosts didn't help, either. Nearly Headless Nick was always happy to point new Gryffindors in the right direction, but Peeves was worth two locked doors and a trick staircase if you met him when you were late. He would drop paper baskets on your head, pull rugs from under your feet, pelt you with chalk or sneak up behind you, invisible, grab your nose and screech, "GOT YOUR CONK!"

Even worse than Peeves, was the caretaker, Argus Filch. Elena and Ron managed to get on the wrong side of him on their very first morning. Filch found them trying to force their way through a door which unluckily turned out to be the entrance to the out-of-bounds corridor on the third floor. He wouldn't believe they were lost, was sure they were trying to break in on purpose and was threatening to lock them in the dungeons when they were rescued by Professor Quirrell, who was passing.
Filch owned a cat called Mrs Norris. She patrolled the corridors alone. Break a rule in front of her, put just one toe out of line, and she'd whisk off for Filch, who'd appear, wheezing, two seconds later. Filch knew the secret passageways of the school better than anyone- except perhaps George and Fred- and could pop up as suddenly as any of the ghosts. The students all hated him.

And then, once you had managed to find them, there were the lessons themselves. There was a lot more to magic, as Ron quickly found out, than waving your wand and saying a few funny words. Elena wasn't too shabby at the lessons, this was where Hermione admired Elena's intelligence.

Easily the most boring lesson was History of Magic, which was the only class taught by a ghost. Professor Binns was very old when he fell asleep in front of the staff room fire and got up next morning to teach, leaving his body behind him. Binns droned on while they scribbled down names and dates and got Emeric the Evil and Uric the Oddball mixed up.