"I look forward to it." 

Once everyone has paid for their wands (Cyrus's is covered by his scholarship), it's time to head back out of the alley. In the alley-vestibule-thing behind the Leaky Cauldron, McGonagall hands out train tickets and explains that the way you get to Hogwarts is by going to King's Cross the morning of September first and walking through a specific wall.

Frantic hand-waving.

"Can I walk through walls in general or just that specific one? What happens if I go check it out two weeks ahead of time?"

"Just that one; it's enchanted to only admit people who know it's there. If you arrive two weeks early you will have a very long wait for the train."

Cy is going to arrive two weeks early and check out the MAGIC TRAIN STATION.

"Beatrice, give me your phone number."

She laughs and tells him her phone number.

"That was a binding agreement, you know. You're going to be my friend forever now."

"Does that mean I can start calling you the names of random Shakespeare characters?"

"Only the villains."

"Okay, Sycorax. I'll see you September first!"

With one thing and another, the next few weeks pass.

Local rooftops go un-broken-into; local businesses go unshoplifted; for the first time in his life, Cy gets a library fine because he legitimately didn’t read the book and not because he forgot about it under his bed. Cy stops talking to nearly all of his friends. They stop by his usual haunts occasionally asking if he wants to come over or go watch a movie or go out for pizza; he waves them away with a “maybe later, I’m busy.” Eventually they stop trying. 

(It occurs to him, when he’s been at Hogwarts for a few weeks, that he should have figured out some way to contact them while he could. But there doesn’t seem to be any way to send messages to your friends from Hogwarts other than an owl, anyway. Hogwarts doesn’t want to make it easy to preserve your Muggle friendships.)

Mrs. Irving would be concerned, if she paid attention. Instead, she’s just vaguely grateful that she no longer has to deal with angry phone calls that obligate her to make some sort of gesture towards Cy being in trouble. 

Each morning, he collects his schoolbooks and departs to the park, the library, or the fish and chip shop with the lady behind the counter who’s the softest touch. He annotates them heavily, folds over the corners on the most interesting pages, adds exclamation points and question marks and “fuck you!!!!!”s to the corner. His notebooks are usually full of sketches of flowers and the night sky, math problems, plans for what he’s going to program next time he gets access to a computer, plans for homemade machines, notes on books he’s reading, half-finished terrible science fiction short stories, and pornographic pictures which show more imagination than anatomical knowledge. Now they fill up with his notes on magic: crossreferences and questions and ideas for experiments and ways that magical theory interacts with Muggle understanding of science. 

He fantasizes about the Hogwarts library. He writes and rewrites lists of books he’s going to read once he’s there, compiled from bibliographies in the back of the book. He makes lists of questions he’ll ask McGonagall when he’s there. 

Cy has a wand now. There’s no reason for him not to get a head start on learning everything. He tries the hardest spells in the books first, on general principles, and keeps trying until he gets them right. Then he flips through and looks for the spells that seem most useful: Alohomora to unlock doors; Lumos for dark places; Reparo so he stops walking around with holes in all of his socks. He doesn’t smash any more cars. 

Cy devours the wizarding fiction. Galath Lan seems like a prig from his book. People keep trying to tempt him to do the Dark Arts and then he’s very noble and refuses. Cy doesn’t see what’s so bad about the Dark Arts, anyway. Making everyone immortal seems like a noble cause. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re destined to save the world since you were a little kid, it turns you into an asshole. 

Cy stops bothering with most of his scams. But he figures out a dozen clever ways to get coins for the payphone-- magic, he concludes, is very useful for a life of petty crime-- and spends hours twirling the cord around his finger talking to Hermione. They talk mostly about magic and what they can figure out about the wizarding world they’re getting into, and as much about science as Hermione is willing to tolerate. From his anecdotes about his life, Hermione learns that Cy is a very busy person, which he makes time for by doing all of his homework in class and cutting school as often as possible. Cy swims and runs and climbs trees; he does various minor forms of juvenile delinquency, shoplifting and breaking into places he’s not supposed to be, mostly for the fun of it, occasionally for money, occasionally to get to use the university telescope; he reads voraciously, fiction and nonfiction; he takes apart machines and builds them better than before; he hangs out with his friends, who are universally female, and has informed opinions on lip gloss and boy bands and suchlike concerns of the female elementary-school set. He doesn’t volunteer any information about anything that happened before he was eight and moved in with Mrs. Irving, and is evasive when asked about it.

Cy heads down to London and checks out Platform Nine and Three Quarters. To his disappointment, it only seems to have a train twice a year. This is the worst public transportation Cy has ever heard of. He spends the rest of the afternoon exploring Diagon Alley, successfully avoiding both dogs and purebloods. He reads the first chapter of the dozen books he most wants to read, finds out what various potion ingredients look like in real life, plays with the owls, unsuccessfully pesters Ollivander with a dozen questions about wandlore, and lusts over a racing broom. Clarity or whatever her name was had told him he wasn’t supposed to go in Knockturn Alley, so of course he goes in. He encounters nothing more dangerous than a shop window full of shrunken heads and some potion ingredients of dubious provenance. 

And, after far too long a time according to Cy, he fills up half a suitcase with his meager possessions, shoplifts some posters to adorn his walls and polish and eyeliner to adorn his fingers, checks out a bunch of books from the library that he has no intention of ever returning, and sets off for the Hogwarts Express.

Hermione is willing to talk quite a lot about science, with occasional frequent tangents into history both magical and non-, and ties up her parents' phone line whenever they're not using it for work stuff. From her anecdotes Cy learns that Hermione is also a busy person: reading, sleeping, reading, doing homework, reading, eating while reading, reading things a second time to make sure she has them memorized, and writing essays nobody asked for which she occasionally tries to turn in anyway. At Cy's urging she asks for a microscope as an early birthday present and brings it to the train station, packed away neatly in her trunk under the clothing and the carefully tetrised wall of books. She's on the platform an hour early, before the train has even pulled in, and already wearing her robes (she came in with them under a jacket so they looked like a skirt, and has mostly smoothed out the resulting wrinkles).

Cy is wearing black jeans, a black tanktop, black eyeliner with little curliques under one of his eyes (he got distracted before he could finish the other one), and black nail polish (badly chipped). 

No one technically said he had to wear robes on the train. Technically. 

"Desdemona!" he says, and gives her a hug. 

She flinches involuntarily at the sudden human contact but then hugs back cheerfully enough. "Iago! I'm so excited, I could barely get to sleep last night! Did you know, I was reading about the Hogwarts Express and it runs on Muggle rails most of the way, but it's very slightly out of sync with the rest of reality so if there's another train in the way it can go right through it!"

"Oh, that's so cool! I wonder if you could make a roller coaster that way."

"What, that goes through itself? Oh, or you mean one that runs more trains on the same track so there's no line, because that would be cool. For people who like roller coasters."

"No, I mean, it looks like you're about to be run over by a train and then it just passes through you. That would be super fun."

"I guess I could see people who like roller coasters liking that? Anyway I want to try to catch the moment when it switches onto the secret line to Hogsmeade station; it's supposed to look like something if you're paying enough attention."

"Ooh, yeah! Let's watch for that."

He waves at the classmates he recognizes from Diagon Alley.

They wave back. Some other students, mostly already in robes, stare at him like he's a possum that somehow got into a convenience store.

He smiles back very cheerfully and raises his fingers in a V!

"Guess they're not fond of Muggle clothes," he says to Hermione.

"I guess not." Caring about clothes, especially about other people's clothes, was a favoured activity of the girls at her old school and she has never seen any value in it. At Hogwarts they'll all wear uniforms and nobody will care about her clothes anymore.

"The train should be here soon. I don't know if we'll be able to get a compartment that's just the two of us."

"If not we can meet new people! Who don't suck."

"Well, red trim on the robes is Gryffindor, blue is Ravenclaw, yellow is Hufflepuff, and green is Slytherin. And I know you want Slytherin and you're nice but it really doesn't have a very good reputation."

Someone with red trim on his robes asks his friend, rather loudly, "Why is that boy wearing makeup? Is he some kind of girlyboy?"

"They're just mad I look hotter than they do."