Harry found Draco compartment's about five minutes later. He was sitting with two boys and a girl.
"Harry!" he exclaimed as Harry slid the compartment door open. He grinned. "I was just about to go look for you."
"Well, I got impatient," Harry said jokingly, not wanting to bring up Ron. "Who are your friends?"
"This is Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle," Draco said, gesturing to the two boys. "And this is Pansy Parkinson. Guys, this is Harry Potter."
"Nice to meet you," Harry said, moving to sit down next to Pansy, who smiled at him.
"And all this time I thought Draco was lying about meeting the Harry Potter," she said. "It's nice to meet you, too."
The two boys, Crabbe and Goyle, both grunted their greetings, and Harry smiled at them. Draco had mentioned them in his letters. He had said that neither spoke much, but they had been his friends for nearly as long as he could remember.
"Do you really have a pet snake?" Pansy asked, clearly interested. Persephone slithered out a moment later, apparently having heard Pansy's question.
"Oh, it's beautiful," Pansy said with a sigh. "Is it a boy or a girl?"
"Persephone is a girl," Harry said, and watched Perse preen at the praise with amusement.
"What a lovely name, too," Pansy said. "What kind of snake is she?"
"A grass snake," Harry said. "Or at least, I think so. I found her in my relative's garden when I was nine."
"She's big for a grass snake," Goyle said, peering at Persephone. "More pretty, too. Look, she shimmers in the sun."
Harry was a little bit surprised the Gregory spoke so much. From what Draco had said, he didn't expect to hear anything from him, at least not until they knew each other better. He looked at Persephone, wanting to see what Goyle was talking about, and noticed it immediately. Persephone had moved to sun herself in a beam of light, and as she shifted, her scales were iridescent.
How had he not realized that before? He was certain her scales hadn't done that when he had first met her and spent so much time in the garden with her. So she must have changed, and slowly enough that he hadn't seen it happen.
He wondered if it was the familiar bond that Professor Snape had told him about. Was it that powerful?
The thought was comforting. He had read in one of his books about familiars, and though it had only been half chapter, he knew that he was now hers as much as she was his. She would never leave him, and he would never leave her. And his magic would protect both of them.
"I guess she does," Harry said with a smile.
"Can I pet her?" Goyle asked, almost shyly. Harry bit his lip. He wanted to ask Persephone if it was okay with her, but he didn't dare speak to her, not now. Not when he was around people he didn't know yet. Goyle must have seen his hesitation, and looked disappointed.
Before Harry could apologize, Persephone slithered onto the other boy's lap. Goyle looked delighted, and Harry laughed.
"Of course you can," he said.
With a wide grin on his face, Goyle stroked Persephone's head with a large finger. She tasted the air before coiling up, apparently content to stay where she was.
"Cool," Goyle whispered, almost frozen in his seat, so that he wouldn't disturb the sleeping serpent.
"So, Harry," Pansy said, clearly ready to change the subject. "Draco told me you live with muggles. What are they like?"
He wondered if he would get that question a lot. If so, it was going to get irritating quickly.
"Well," he said, thinking his answer over more than he has with Ron Weasley, "my relatives are pretty awful." He was about to say that not all muggles were like that, of course, when he hesitated. He thought of all the teachers who had ignored him, all of the neighbors who gossiped about him. He hadn't met many decent people until Professor Snape came along,
"Let's just say, finding out I was a proper wizard was the best moment of my life," he said simply.
Pansy and Draco stared.
"You mean you didn't even know you were a wizard?" Draco asked, disbelieving. "What about accidental magic? Didn't you ever do anything like that?"
"Sure. But I never realized it was magic until I was nine, when," and here, he hesitated. When Persephone had told him. But he couldn't very well say that, could he? "When I figure out all the strange things that happened were because of me, and not a coincidence," he finished.
Draco looked suspicious, but Pansy didn't seem to mind his hesitation.
"But what about the Dark Lord?" she asked, clearly bewildered. "Didn't you know about him?"
"Not until Professor Snape told me," he said. "The Dursley's - that's my relatives - told me that my parents died in a car crash."
"What's a car?" Crabbe asked.
"Er, kind of like a horseless carriage," Harry said, struggling only for a moment to describe the concept.
He didn't say that the Uncle Vernon had said that his father had been drunk, that it had been his fault that his mother had been killed. That Harry had almost hated his parents for leaving him with the Dursley's, that he had wondered if they cared about him at all before they died.
That seemed too personal, too private.
"I wonder why they told you that?" Draco said. Harry shrugged.
"They hate magic," he said simply, "and anything they see as unnatural."
Pansy and Draco looked outraged.
"Magic is natural!" Pansy exclaimed. "It's the most natural thing in the world."
"They don't think so," Harry said shortly. "It doesn't matter, anyway - I won't see them again until the summer. And I don't want to spend my first trip to Hogwarts talking about them."
Draco and Pansy still both looked outraged, but they seemed to be willing to let things lie, at least, for now.
"Did you ever convince your father to get you that broom, Draco?" Harry asked, desperate to change the subject. Draco pouted.
"No. Mother put her foot down. She said that I can wait a few months to get it."
Harry was a little bit surprised. From what he had seen of the Malfoy's, he would have assumed that Draco's father would be the one putting his foot down, not Narcissa.
"I can't wait to try flying on a broomstick," Harry said. "It sounds amazing."
"You've never flown before?" Pansy asked, clearly outraged.
"Muggle raised, remember?" Harry said. "They don't think that brooms can fly."
"Well, flying is amazing," Draco said definitively. "You'll love it once we have the opportunity. What other classes are you looking forward to?"
"Potions," Harry said immediately, without thinking, his mind going to Professor Snape.
"Really? I'd have thought it was Defense Against the Dark Arts."
Harry shrugged. It was true, he was looking forward to learning to cast spells. But he was also worried that somehow he wouldn't be very good at it. But potions - that was enough like cooking that he thought he would be able to get the hang of it quickly.
But he didn't want to tell them that. So instead, he talked about the other reason he was looking forward to the lesson.
"Professor Snape seems like a good teacher."
"He is," Draco said proudly. "He's brilliant."
"Of course you think that, he's your godfather," Pansy said.
"That doesn't make it any less true," Draco pointed out reasonably.
Harry was about to ask was Draco and the others were excited about, when there was a knock at the door. It was an elderly witch, pushing a cart full of food.
"Anything of the trolley?" she asked, and all of them eagerly moved forward, except for Goyle, who asked Crabbe to get him some sweets.
The trolley witch left, and they spread their bounty out on the seats. Harry had never heard of the sweets that he had bought, but he had followed his new friend's lead. There were cauldron cakes, pumpkin pasties, licorice wands, and more, and he was eager to try everything.
He bit into a pumpkin pasty, suddenly starving. He had, after all, skipped breakfast. Devouring the savory food, he reached for a Chocolate Frog.
"They're not actual frogs, are they?" he asked, hesitating for just a moment. He didn't know what to expect.
"Just chocolate," Crabbe said in a reassuring sort of way. Harry opened the package, and the frog leaped for freedom. Harry managed to catch it a the last second, and moments later it went still in his hands. He took a bite. It was the best chocolate he had ever tasted - not that he had ever tasted much. Examining the card curiously, Harry read about Albus Dumbledore - the infamous headmaster of Hogwarts.
"People collect the cards," Pansy told him, so he pocketed it.
The other told him all about the different sweets and what they did, but it wasn't until the jelly beans that Harry hesitated.
"You mean it could be anything?" he asked, half fascinated, half horrified. "Not just sweet flavors?"
"Oh yeah," Draco said, biting into one a jelly slug with a grin. "You get all sorts. Candies and the like, but then you get flavors like onion or ketchup or even grass," he said with a disgusted face.
Harry ended up not trying the Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans.
Persephone seemed curious about the sweets, and jealous that Harry was eating. He let her taste one of the ice mice, to which she exclaimed in disgust. Fell guilty for his amusement, Harry gave her one of the preserved mice from the Magical Menagerie, and they all watched, fascinated, as she consumed it.
Just as the tail disappeared down her throat, their compartment door slid open. A fellow first-year girl stood there, with lots of bushy brown hair and rather large front teeth.
"Have any of you seen a toad? Neville's lost one," she said in a bossy sort of way.
"No," Harry said, prepared to be polite about it, but then the girl spotted Persephone.
"That's a snake!" she said, seeming half outraged, half frightened. "They're not allowed. Only owls, cats, and toads. The letter said so."
"Professor Snape gave me permission to bring her," Harry said defensively, one hand curling around Persephone, who was somewhat slow after eating.
The girl sniffed.
"Well, I suppose if you have permission," she said haughtily, as if she didn't believe him. "What was it eating?" she asked suspiciously.
"A toad," Draco said with a nasty grin on his face. "It hopped in and Harry here set his snake on it."
"Shut up, Draco," Harry said with a laugh. "I fed her a mouse," he told the girl.
"Oh," she said, her impending anger deflating. "That's alright, then. I'm Hermione Granger," she said, introducing herself.
"Harry Potter," he said, trying to be polite.
"Are you really?" said Hermione. "I know all about you, of course - I got a few extra books for background reading, and you're in Modern Magical History and The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts and Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century."
"Yes, I know," Harry said. "I've read them." They had been among the extra books he had gotten, as well.
Granger looked like she didn't know how to react to this.
"Just because you've read about Harry doesn't mean you know him," Draco interjected harshly. "Those books aren't even all that accurate, my father says."
Harry didn't know about the accuracy of the books, though he had taken the information with a grain of salt. No one had asked him about them, after all. But he did think that Draco was right - just because she knew that he was the Boy-Who-Lived didn't mean she knew him.
"I suppose you have a point," she said, and she sounded almost reluctant, as though she didn't want to admit it. "Do any of you know what house you'll be in?" Hermione changed the subject. "I've been asking around and I hope I'm in Gryffindor, it sounds by far the best, I hear Dumbledore himself was one, but I suppose Ravenclaw wouldn't be too bad. Anyway, we'd better go and look for Neville's toad. You two had better change, you know, I expect we'll be there soon."
And with that, she left.
"Ravenclaw wouldn't be too bad. Gryffindor is the best," Draco said mockingly. "I'm glad I'm going to be in Slytherin, without her."
"How do you know?" Harry asked, bringing up something that concerned him ever since he had heard of Hogwarts Houses.
"My whole family has been." Draco was obviously proud of this fact. "Besides, I just know."
Harry himself was far from certain about which house he would go into.
"I don't even know what house my parents were in," he said, a miserable tone creeping into his voice.
"Gryffindor, I think," Pansy said cautiously. "The Potter's are well known for being in that house."
"What do you mean?" Harry asked. "How is my family well known at all?" He knew he was famous, but he hadn't realized his family was, too.
Pansy and Draco exchanged a look.
"Well," Draco said. "Your father was Lord Potter, wasn't he?"
"Lord Potter? What does that even mean? Lord of what?"
"It's a title from the Wizengamot, the council that governs the wizarding world," Draco said. "Your family has been a member of the Wizengamot for, I don't know, centuries. They were pretty powerful and rich."
Harry had realized his family was wealthy, of course, but he hadn't realized they were a part of some council as well. He sat back, surprised. Snape couldn't have told him everything, of course - they only had so much time together, and there was so much to learn.
But Harry was starting to wonder what else he didn't know.
[A/N: Some of Hermione's dialogue is taken from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.]