Title: At King's Cross
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: G
Length: 248 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: None
Summary: Too short to need one

      The Hat gets so much of the blame. The dividing, the separating of friends and family into a separate House, defining them in a way that marks them and haunts them for the rest of their lives.

      But maybe that's not fully on the Hat.

      Because doesn't so much of the dividing, the separating start here, at King's Cross?

     That first trip through the barrier, that's really the beginning of it. No matter how you grew up to that point, now you're marked as something different. You aren't a child anymore, you are not like those Muggles running about. You're magical, you have a destiny far beyond what you ever dreamed, and you're about to be among your own kind, possibly for the first time ever, and certainly on a scale heretofore unimagined.

     The dividing begins at King's Cross, on Platform 9 and 3/4, as children make shy overtures of friendship to one another, or are abruptly herded away by family members, with whispers of They aren't our kind. The older students flock to members of their own Houses, and the first-years are left to drift, to straddle that brief glorious bridge where for a few hours they will all be together in uncertainty and high nerves, until the Hat divides them irrevocably. But by the time they reach the Hat, most of them have made up their minds, hearing the talk on the train, the whispers and rumors about each House.

     The sorting began before the Sorting.