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lomonaaerenTitle: His Proper House
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Gen
Content Notes: Slytherin Harry AU, discussion of past violence and character deaths, angst
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 6700
Summary: Harry was Sorted into Slytherin when he arrived at Hogwarts and has been in that House for his first two years. Now, suddenly, at the beginning of his third year, the Sorting Hat has decided that he’s a Gryffindor after pulling the Sword of Gryffindor from the Hat to kill the basilisk. Harry deals with being a Gryffindor moving forwards.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Seasons,” one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. Cruella prompted a scenario that was the opposite of my fic Other People’s Choices, which has a Gryffindor Harry being Sorted into Slytherin at the end of his second year.
His Proper House
Harry dragged his trunk into the Gryffindor common room, and ignored the way that everyone gaped at him. They’d been at the Sorting along with him. They’d heard the Hat’s announcement, seen the way it floated across the room from Professor McGonagall’s grasp—Harry didn’t even know it could do that—and settled on his head, and cried out, “GRYFFINDORI!”
The Hat had even explained that it had re-Sorted him because he had drawn the Sword of Gryffindor to save Ginny Weasley.
Not that the explanation makes anything better, Harry thought, indignation boiling beneath his skin as he watched the boys in his own year staring at him with hostile eyes. Neville Longbottom, who made everything in Potions more dangerous. Seamus Finnigan, who made everything explode and liked taunting and hexing Slytherins when he thought he wouldn’t be noticed. Dean Thomas, who nodded along with Finnigan like he was a puppet for his friend.
And Ron Weasley, who Harry had sat with on the train two years ago, who he’d thought of as a friend, until the morning after he’d been Sorted into Slytherin and Weasley had turned away from his outstretched hand without a word.
“Move along, move along, there,” said the Head Boy, who was Weasley’s older brother. Harry didn’t remember his name, except that it started with P, but decided to refer to him in his own head as Pompous Weasley. “Got to get up to bed, curfew’s soon.” He clapped his hands as if they were much younger children, waving them towards the stairs that curved up the Tower.
Harry trailed behind the others, who were ignoring him and talking loudly. His chest burned. Pompous Weasley was worse than the prefects in his House, his proper House, like the one Harry had called Arrogant Arlington last year, and the one Theo had called—
Theo.
Harry’s chest burned harder. Theo had taken a chance and befriended the Potter outcast in Slytherin last year, after one year of Harry being alone and learning offensive spell after offensive spell, learning wards to keep his possessions safe, growing harder and harder. Theo had decided that he didn’t care about blood status or popularity, not next to the chance to learn more powerful spells.
Somewhere along the line, what with trading hexes and jinxes and then sarcasm like their private names for the prefects and professors, they had become real friends. And towards the end of last year, Pansy Parkinson had joined them, because Malfoy had done something to upset her that she still wouldn’t talk about.
Harry was going to lose both of them. The way he had lost Weasley two years ago, the way he had lost his parents when he was one, the way he lost everyone and everything that ever mattered to him.
Fucking Sorting Hat.
Harry’s hand tightened on his trunk. He was going to survive. The Dursleys had tried to crush him, and that hadn’t worked. The Slytherins had tried to drive him out of the House when he was a first-year, and that hadn’t worked.
He would walk by himself, if he had to. He would grow better and better at dueling spells, which he loved with a passion that Lockhart and Quirrell hadn’t managed to destroy, and which Sirius Black and Dementors and Remus Lupin, who’d gaped at Harry as if he knew him on the train and then turned rapidly away from him at the sight of his serpent crest, weren’t going to destroy either.
Harry and his trunk and his survival instinct thumped up the steps of the Tower.
*
“Look, Potter, we don’t want you here.”
“I don’t want to be here, either.”
Harry ignored the way that Weasley was bristling as he adjusted the tie around his neck. Everything around him was Gryffindor colors, and Finnigan and Thomas were yelling loudly at each other in the bathroom, in a way that no one would have in the Slytherin boys’ room because Malfoy would have had a conniption at them. Harry’s mouth tightened.
“What? How can you say that? Gryffindor is the best House!”
Harry rolled his eyes and looked up. Out of the corner of his vision, he noticed Longbottom lingering next to his bed, but Harry didn’t care as long as the boy didn’t try to hex him from behind. And he doubted that Longbottom would. That wouldn’t be honorable. “Look, Weasley, you spent the past two years loudly proclaiming in my hearing that Slytherins belonged in Slytherin and Gryffindors belonged in Gryffindor. Is it any surprise that I believed you?”
Weasley bristled some more, but also didn’t seem to know what to say. Harry rolled his eyes at him again and turned away, rooting in his trunk for the satchel he’d enchanted last year to hold all his books. He didn’t want to have to run up seven flights of stairs for whatever books he’d need today.
Weasley muttered something and snatched up his towel, bustling off self-importantly to the bathroom. Longbottom cleared his throat and said hesitantly, “You probably don’t want to antagonize him.”
“Because we’re sleeping in the same room?” Harry looked up at Longbottom, small, soft, fat Longbottom who was so good at plants but blew up every potion he touched.
“No, because Fred and George prank people who get him upset.”
Harry blinked and nodded. He hadn’t thought about that, because none of the people in his year in Slytherin had siblings who were in school with them. “Thanks for the advice, Longbottom.”
Longbottom appeared to be bracing himself for something. “You c-can call me N-Neville if you want.”
No one in Slytherin would have offered his first name so freely. But Harry wasn’t in Slytherin anymore, and maybe it was time to embrace that and accept what seemed to be the first good consequence of it. “Neville, then. I’m Harry.”
When Longbottom—Neville smiled and acted genuinely glad to receive the permission to call him by his first name, Harry didn’t care any more how many Potions he exploded.
*
“I want to know if you’re a blood purist.”
Harry blinked at Hermione Granger over the top of his book. He had claimed a table in the library that was near but not the same as the ones where he usually studied with Theo and Pansy. If they came over and wanted to study with him of their own accord, well and good. Otherwise, he would leave them alone.
Harry had thought they might come, or Weasley might confront him again. He hadn’t expected Granger to plant herself in front of him with her hands on her hips.
“No,” Harry said. “How could I be, when my mum was Muggleborn?”
Granger drew back the chair across the table from Harry and plopped down in it without asking for permission. Harry tried not to get irritated. Neville was an outcast in Gryffindor, too, and he had turned out to be a decent bloke. Maybe the other Gryffindor outcast, the one who lectured everyone in a stern voice when they broke even minor rules, would turn out to be okay.
But from the way she glared at him, Harry had the impression that wasn’t the case.
“You were Sorted into Slytherin,” Granger said, a little shrilly. “Even though your mum’s Muggleborn, and even though you’re the Boy-Who-Lived and you defeated You-Know-Who and Slytherin is full of the children of Death Eaters—”
“You mean I defeated Voldemort?”
Seeing Granger tip her chair backwards with the force of her flinch was entertaining. Harry had got that sort of reaction in Slytherin, too, when he mentioned Voldemort’s name, which meant he did it as often as possible. He had thought being afraid of the name was silly since his trip to Diagon Alley with Hagrid.
Hagrid was another person he had lost when he was first Sorted. And then just yesterday, he had got an owl from Hagrid inviting him for tea.
For the first time.
As though I’m suddenly all right since I’m in Gryffindor now, Harry thought bitterly.
“You said his name!”
“Yeah? It’s just a name. And the other ones that people call him are all silly.”
Including, Harry had to admit to himself since he couldn’t admit it to Theo or Pansy, the Dark Lord. Theo could frown all he wanted and say it was a term of respect. Harry couldn’t bring himself to respect someone who had been defeated by a toddler.
Or a toddler’s mum, which was what Harry thought had really happened.
“But why would you be Sorted into Slytherin with everything I said if you weren’t a blood purist?” Granger was rapidly firing the words at him, as if she liked to use them like bullets. “Why did you go there in the first place? Why did you come here now? Why did you think that you could just march into Gryffindor and we would all accept you? I’ve seen you hanging around with Theodore Nott, and I know that he’s a Death Eater’s son!”
“I didn’t just march into Gryffindor,” Harry snapped. “It was the Sorting Hat’s idea. Remember? The Sorting? You were there?” His stomach turned as he remembered it. He’d clung to consciousness when the Dementors invaded the stupid train compartment, only to be plopped into a House he hadn’t wanted.
He hadn’t wanted Slytherin, either, but he’d got used to it. He wondered morbidly if the Hat would jerk him out of Gryffindor, too, if he got used to that. Would he do well on his fourth-year exams and suddenly find himself Sorted into Ravenclaw?
Bloody Hat has it in for me.
He didn’t realize he had muttered that aloud as well as thought it until Granger gasped. “Your language, Potter!”
“Your prissiness, Granger.”
Granger got up and flounced away. Harry studied her back, saw the way that she almost glanced at him over her shoulder before she caught herself, and snorted.
She’d be back. Harry was at least a new face in her House and someone who hadn’t got used to shutting out her scolding and lectures over the last few years. Harry wondered idly whether she would be like Pansy, making an excuse for being friends with him, but still doing it.
Pansy.
Harry buried the thought with some expertise. He had got through a whole year in Slytherin without friends. He would and could do the same in Gryffindor if he had to. And if his Slytherin friends turned their backs on him…
That was okay. Harry had always known he would do what it took to survive, and Slytherin had taught him to disregard the people who disapproved of him.
*
“Mr. Potter, stay after class, please.”
Harry hid a sigh as he turned around from packing up his books. Professor McGonagall had never been very interested in him over the last few years. Harry was never the last one to get a Transfiguration correct, but he was never the first one, either. Battle Transfiguration was complicated stuff. Harry had been a lot more interested in mastering curses and hexes and jinxes.
“I just wanted to take the chance to welcome you to Gryffindor, Mr. Potter.”
Harry blinked at the professor. She had a warm smile on her face and had bent a little towards him from behind her desk, as if she was about to pat him on the head. Snape had certainly never done anything like that, but then, Snape hated Harry unreasonably.
“Er, thank you, Professor,” Harry said as politely as he could, when it dawned on him that she was waiting for something.
“I’m so glad that you’re in your proper House at last.”
Oh. Harry’s stomach soured. Well, that explained that, at least. McGonagall must have known his parents, like Hagrid, and had avoided paying much attention to him for the last few years because she thought he shouldn’t have been in Slytherin.
The Hat had thought so. Then it hadn’t thought so. Malfoy and Snape had never thought so, but who cared about them, anyway? Theo and Pansy had made the difference for Harry, and Harry had adapted.
“Thanks, Professor,” Harry said again, because it was best to be polite to his Head of House if she was going to be polite to him.
Who knows where I really belong? If I’m going to belong somewhere, I’ll have to make that place myself.
*
“Ice Mice,” Harry told the gargoyle at the bottom of the stairs, and rode the moving staircase up to the Headmaster’s office with a sinking in his heart.
He hadn’t had much to do with Headmaster Dumbledore over the last few years, except at the very ends. When he had gone after Quirrell because some of the other Slytherin first-years had been muttering about the Philosopher’s Stone and Harry was afraid the theft would be blamed on him if they could prove he’d seen Quirrell going into the third-floor corridor, Dumbledore had been in the hospital wing when Harry had woken up. He’d questioned Harry intensely about the spells he’d used.
Harry had just pretended ignorance, insisting that he didn’t know how he had made Quirrell’s skin blister when Quirrell touched him. And that was the truth. What wasn’t was that he had just used “harmless jinxes” or “accidental magic” on the Cerberus and the Devil’s Snare and the other obstacles.
Look, if they oppose me, they’re going to get hurt.
In his second year, Harry had discovered that he could speak to snakes, and then it had been revealed in front of everyone else in that stupid dueling club session. Then, of course, everyone had blamed him for being the Heir of Slytherin—except Theo and Pansy—and jinxes had flown thick and fast. Of course Harry had taken the chance to stop the real culprit when he’d realized the weird Weasley girl had made his scar hurt.
It turned out to be her diary, not her, and Harry got involved in a fight with a basilisk. If the Headmaster’s phoenix hadn’t turned up with the Sorting Hat and the Sword of Gryffindor, Harry would have died.
That had led to another intense questioning session with the Headmaster, of course, because he couldn’t just take Harry’s word for it.
Harry sighed as he stepped through the door into the office. If he was going to be subject to another one of those because the Sorting Hat had been an idiot, he wasn’t sure he could stay polite to the Headmaster.
“Harry, my boy! Come in!”
Harry stiffened warily. It had always been “Mr. Potter” before. He came cautiously further into the room and sat down in the chair in front of the desk. The office was full of whirling, spinning things, but Harry couldn’t find them marvelous. He had only ever been in the office when he was in trouble, like being questioned for saving the school.
Those questions had included things like “And you’re really not sure why you can speak Parseltongue?”
How should I know?
Professor Dumbledore beamed at him across the desk. Harry smiled weakly back. The phoenix was sitting on a perch near the fireplace, fluttering his wings and turning back and forth as if he was sunning himself in front of the flames. Harry smiled a little at that, but his smile died when his gaze fell on the Sorting Hat’s shelf.
He jerked his eyes away, just in time to see Dumbledore nodding at him and smiling. “You were admiring Fawkes, my boy? He loves fire.”
“Yes, sir. He saved my life.” Maybe Harry could get through this without snapping and acting like an idiot if he just stuck to simple truths that no one could possibly misinterpret. Although Professor Snape would have tried.
“Yes. A lucky thing, that.” Dumbledore clasped his hands and leaned further forwards still, his eyes madly twinkling. “Doubly lucky in that it gave the Hat to push it needed to Sort you into your proper House!”
Oh, not an interrogation, then. Harry smiled as politely as he could. “Yes, sir.”
“I wanted to know if you were having trouble with any of the other students? Anyone who’s upset about your re-Sorting?”
“Well, sort of Ron Weasley, sir. He thinks I had a plot to get into Gryffindor or something.” Harry sighed. It was tiresome. Weasley hadn’t attacked his trunk or tried to hex him in the back the way a Slytherin would have, but he was always shouting and making loud remarks about how “some people don’t know how lucky they are” and stomping away and slamming doors.
“Oh? But you don’t hold that against him, I suppose?”
“Not really, sir.” I’ll never be friends with him. “I know he thought we were friends on the train when we came for our first year, but then I got Sorted into Slytherin and he sort of took it as a betrayal.”
Professor Dumbledore nodded. “It’s good, very good, that you don’t have worse problems than that. I have to admit that I thought your former Housemates would hold the matter against you.”
Harry had to swallow a lump before he said, “No, sir.” Malfoy had snickered and whispered a few snide things under his breath when they passed each other in the corridors, but most of Slytherin seemed content to ignore Harry’s existence now.
And that includes Pansy and Theo.
“Good, good. I wanted to tell you a few tales of Gryffindor, you see. It’s my old House, and the one your parents were in! It occurs to me that I’ve been unforgivably distant from you the last few years, for which I want to apologize.”
All it takes is for the colors on my tie to change, Harry thought, and they’re all treating me different.
He refused a lemon drop and listened unenthusiastically to tales of his father and his father’s best friends, which apparently included Sirius Black and Remus Lupin. His head was churning with his own thoughts.
The whole House system is stupid. I want my friends to be people who would stand with me all the time, even if I did get Sorted into Ravenclaw in fifth year or something.
*
“Harry.”
“Oh? Finally decided to acknowledge my existence?”
Theo halted with his hand on the side of the library shelves. Harry kept his head bowed, working on the book of advanced Defensive spells that he’d managed to winkle out of Professor Lupin. The man had started falling all over himself to help Harry and apologize to Harry and grant him favors after he’d been moved into Gryffindor. Harry had used it to get at books in the Restricted Section.
“You know why I couldn’t.”
“No, I don’t,” Harry said, and flung his quill away to lean back and scowl at Theo finally. “If it was some kind of danger, you risked it last year, too.”
“Yeah, but…” Theo walked slowly over to the chair on the other side of the table and sat down across from Harry. “You were in our House then.”
Harry bit his cheek as hard as he could, and thought he might have drawn blood. Well, fine. If that was the way it was going to be. “Fine, you’re totally right,” he said, voice flat. “Being Sorted into Gryffindor changed who I am and now I hate everything I was for two years. Fine. Bye.” He picked up his quill again.
“Harry, it’s not like that.”
“What’s it like, then?”
“There are people who would beat me up for associating with you now,” Theo hissed, and brought his fist down in a hard strike on the table. Harry jumped, and Theo looked as though he felt bad, but he didn’t say anything about it. “Okay? It’s different when you’re an outcast Slytherin than when you’re a Gryffindor.”
“Fine,” Harry muttered. He could understand that. It just made him feel worse, though, because now he knew for certain that he’d lost one of his friends rather than just wondering about it. “Then you should go before someone comes in and sees you in here.”
“I still want to be friends.”
“Bloody how?”
“I’ll learn enough hexes to fend off the people who want to beat me up.”
Harry laughed in spite of himself, because that was such a Theo answer. And such a Slytherin answer, for one variety of Slytherin. Harry was pretty sure no one in Gryffindor would have said it, even if they thought it.
Theo looked like he was waiting for an answer.
“Okay,” Harry said, and knew he wasn’t imagining the relief in the smile that flashed across Theo’s face like lightning.
*
“Longbottom.”
“Nott.”
Harry sighed. He’d planned for this to be just an afternoon with Theo, but Neville had followed Harry when he left Gryffindor Tower and had ignored the hints Harry had tried to drop that he was meeting a friend. And now Neville was sitting beside him with his eyes as wide as a house-elf’s and Theo was standing with his hand on the shelves again. He looked half-tempted to walk away.
“If you’re going to be here, then you’re going to get along,” Harry said. “Neville, we’re studying hexes. Keep your mouth shut about that. Theo, he’s here. Don’t taunt him and don’t try to scare him away.”
“Would I do that?” Theo slowly walked over to the table and dropped his books on it, eyeing Neville. He smiled, and this time it was the shark-thing that Harry usually saw him using on Malfoy in the Slytherin common room.
The memory throbbed like a broken finger, and Harry pushed the remembrance away. “Theo, stop doing the shark thing.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
Theo glanced back and forth between Harry and Neville for a minute. Harry looked at Neville too. He had to admit that he was expecting Neville to push back his chair and run away, if only because Theo had a bad reputation among the Gryffindors as someone you didn’t push and left strictly alone.
Neville flushed and shivered, but said after a second, “M-maybe I w-want to learn hexes, too.”
“Why would you? The friend of—”
“I’m not friends with any of the boys in my year,” Neville snapped, flushing. “Except Harry.” He didn’t look at Harry, and so missed the jump Harry couldn’t help giving. Theo noticed, of course. “They’re wankers and bullies. So maybe I want to learn how to hex them, too, so they’ll l-leave me alone!”
His stutter almost goes away when he’s angry, Harry thought, blinking.
“Huh,” Theo said, and nodded a little as he pulled out one of the thick books on hexes and curses that he’d agreed to look up for this afternoon. Harry, special little Gryffindor that he supposedly was now, couldn’t be seen taking it from the shelves in the public section of the library where it had been. “You may be worth something after all.”
Neville flushed at the praise. Harry shook his head slowly. There were times that he hated his own life, but in some ways, he thought Neville had it worse than he had. Harry wouldn’t have felt obligated to someone for faint praise like that.
“Let’s start studying, then,” Harry said firmly, and dragged The Auror’s First Year Worth of Hexes towards him.
*
“I know what you’re studying in the library.”
Unusually, Granger was speaking to Harry during History of Magic, a class where she normally at least read another book instead of talking. Harry turned around in his chair. Everyone else in sight was asleep or lost in their own books or daydreams.
“What do you mean?”
“I know that you’re studying hexes.” Granger tilted her head back and gave him a great view up her nostrils, not that Harry wanted it. “And you should stop. Or I’ll go and tell Professor Dumbledore.”
“If you do that, I’ll hex your mouth shut,” Harry said.
Granger looked shocked. Harry glanced around, but the people dozing in the desks next to them were Finnigan and Weasley, who wouldn’t wake up for anything short of the Hogwarts Express—and Neville, who was watching them. Harry turned back to Granger, who was saying, “You shouldn’t—you shouldn’t do that.”
“And you shouldn’t run around tattling on people.”
“You’re going to do something evil with those hexes!”
“How do you know?”
“Nott’s a Slytherin!”
“And so was I, until the Hat put me in Gryffindor,” Harry said, enjoying the argument for once. “Doesn’t that mean that it could also put Nott into Gryffindor, if it wanted to? Doesn’t it mean that no one is as hopeless or incapable of being saved as you think?”
Granger stared at him. Harry leaned nearer and smiled a little as he delivered the killing blow in a quiet voice.
“Besides, if you think Gryffindors are so great and the embodiment of good, why don’t you have any friends in this House? Even I can see how smart you are. I don’t like you much, but you’re intelligent. Too intelligent to think that people are just good or evil based on where a talking Hat puts them.”
He turned around and faced Binns again, picking up his book. His back tingled, expecting the hex he would have got in Slytherin for speaking to someone there so bluntly.
But it seemed Granger was simply stunned, because she said nothing.
Harry smiled into his book.
*
“What is she doing here?”
Entertainingly enough, Theo and Neville spoke at the same time. Harry snorted. He’d come around a corner of the shelves from going to borrow a book, and discovered Pansy and Granger both standing next to the table. Neville was staring at Pansy, Theo at Granger.
“I didn’t invite either of them, so don’t look at me,” Harry said, and sat down with his book, a compendium of low-level curses and countercurses that the author promised even students in fourth year or below should be able to figure out how to cast. “Are you going to sit down, Pansy, or can’t you be seen associating with us?”
“What about me?”
“You’re not my friend, Granger. Not yet.”
Harry had mostly said that last sentence to prevent Granger from yelling for the librarian or something, but it had an odd effect. She seemed to collapse in on herself. She looked back and forth between Theo and Pansy, and then drew out the chair near Neville and sat down in it.
“Why are you here?” Pansy asked the table in general. She was sitting back, and she looked bored, but Harry knew that look. It was the one she wore just before she pulled out her wand and hexed someone.
“Studying,” Harry said.
Neville nodded, looking too nervous to speak.
“You know why,” Theo said.
“I want friends.”
Harry winced a little from the raw honesty of Granger’s response, and Theo looked uncomfortable, but Pansy gave her a winsome little smile. “Perhaps that can be arranged,” she said, and leaned forwards. “What sort of hair charms do you like?”
“What?”
“Charms. For your hair, Granger. I don’t believe that you just don’t use any.”
That sent Granger off on a rant, but at least it meant she was talking and not storming away to find Madam Pince. Harry caught Theo smiling at him over the top of his book, and Neville watching Pansy and Granger with a bewildered look. Once again, Harry hid a smile in his own book.
*
“You were never a proper Slytherin.”
Harry spat blood. Malfoy and his goons had cornered Harry in a corridor Harry had been using on his way to a secret passage. There were ways to get down near the dungeons and the Slytherin common room, if not actually in the common room, and stay out of sight. Harry had been going to visit Theo.
Harry looked up. Malfoy laughed at him. He’d used some kind of curse that mimicked a punch in the mouth. Harry spat blood again and moved a tooth with his tongue. It felt broken.
“Always knew a disgusting little Mudblood like you—”
Harry had seldom attacked Malfoy before. It was too dangerous. He was popular in Slytherin, or at least popular in the sort of way where people humored him and listened when he spoke, and Harry had been unpopular. The most Harry had dared was to jinx Malfoy with boils or the like when they were in a crowd of students and Malfoy would have no way of knowing where it came from.
But now?
Harry was a Gryffindor. And Malfoy was attacking him anyway.
Harry struck.
Malfoy screamed like a mouse as Harry hexed him full in the face, the hex he’d been studying with Theo that pierced someone’s tongue and stuck it to bottom of their mouth. Malfoy flailed at his mouth and cried, and Crabbe and Goyle stared with their own mouths open. Then Harry turned his wand on them.
Goyle actually ran away.
Crabbe tried to fight back, but Harry had a lot more anger than the bigger boy did, and he hit him with boils so severe that Crabbe’s eyes swelled shut and he flailed around trying to find Harry, with no success. Harry had learned dodging with Dudley. He turned on Malfoy and lifted his wand, and—
“Serpensortia!”
Harry watched open-mouthed as two snakes coiled out of the end of Neville’s wand and headed straight for Malfoy and Crabbe. Neville was standing near the corner, and Harry hadn’t even heard him show up. Harry nodded to him and faced Malfoy.
Crabbe was screaming as one of the snakes bit him on the leg. Malfoy turned and ran away, still crying.
That, of course, was when Professor McGonagall came around the corner, gasped in horror at the sight of Crabbe and the snake, Vanished the snake, and began to scold them.
Harry caught Neville’s eye and grinned, and Neville grinned back. It had been worth it.
*
“…very disappointed in you, Mr. Potter.”
Harry leaned back in the chair in McGonagall’s office and stared at the ceiling. He was used to people saying they were disappointed in him. Snape said it every time one of the other Slytherins attacked Harry. Maybe he said it with more sarcasm in his voice than McGonagall had, but it was still there.
“Mr. Potter, are you paying attention to me?”
Harry blinked and let his gaze drop from the ceiling to his professor’s irate face. “Yes, professor.”
“You don’t seem like it.”
Fuck it, Harry thought abruptly. Theo would probably be proud of him; he was always trying to get Harry to swear more. He said that Harry’s circumstances deserved it. Harry leaned forwards. “I don’t really care because this isn’t the first time that you’ve been disappointed in me.”
Professor McGonagall stared at him. Harry decided this was invitation enough to go on.
“First you were disappointed I wasn’t in Gryffindor. Then because I was in Slytherin and a good student or something.” He had never known what to make of McGonagall’s expression when she had to grudgingly award him points in Transfiguration. “And now you’re disappointed in me for defending myself when it was three on one.”
“The hex you used—”
“Is rated the same as the hex Malfoy used on me,” Harry said, and reached up to touch the dried blood on his face. “You sent him to the hospital wing when you found him and didn’t even use an Episkey on me. You’re continually disappointed in me, perpetually disappointed because I didn’t act like the good little hero from the beginning and get Sorted into your good little House. You know what? I don’t care. I’ve given up on trying to please you. So give me detention or take points or whatever, and let me go. I have an essay to finish.”
Professor McGonagall’s lips were pressed together so tightly that Harry thought she might stop breathing. He sneered at her. Everything he said was true, and she knew it. And she couldn’t make him care.
Malfoy and Crabbe and even Neville got sent to the hospital wing—even though there was nothing wrong with Neville—and she couldn’t be bothered to heal him? Well, fine. Harry was used to being treated differently because of the Dursleys, and then his stupid scar, and then his stupid House, and now because he wasn’t the hero everyone thought he was.
“Mr. Potter, I have never been so disappointed in my life…”
Harry rolled his eyes, and didn’t care about the lecture he got. Or the detention. He’d go to the detention and get it over with. Not the worst thing that had ever happened to him.
*
“Malfoy’s scared of you now.”
Pansy’s soft voice echoed in Harry’s ears. She was the first one to the library study table after Harry. Harry just glanced up at her and nodded. “Good. Then he won’t try to curse me in the corridors anymore.”
Pansy sat down at the table across from him, studying him intently. Harry studied her back. She was one of the more open of the Slytherins, at least in private. She didn’t see the point in maintaining an endlessly sneering haughty mask, she’d told him once. She left that to Greengrass.
“And it’s true that you told off McGonagall?”
Harry laughed. He’d told that to Neville in the Gryffindor common room, but he hadn’t taken any measures to keep it quiet. He wasn’t surprised Pansy had heard. “It’s true.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to remain on good terms with her, since you’re her responsibility now?”
Harry laid down his quill and stared at Pansy. It was the kind of question she would never have asked about Snape.
But she was leaning forwards a little now, shining dark eyes fastened on him, and Harry decided that she was probably interested in an honest answer, for whatever reason. He shook his head. “What responsibility did she take for me? Did she ever take for me? She was just disappointed in me all along, and when she found Malfoy and heard what happened, she sent him to the hospital wing but didn’t even bother healing me.”
He smiled, and saw the way that Pansy continued to lean a little forwards, as if she was about to pounce on him if he didn’t say what was on his mind. “No. The Heads of House are stupid. The House system is stupid. The Sorting Hat is stupid. People talk about me like I exist outside them, anyway. All right. Then I’ll exist outside them.”
“How?”
“I’ll have all the friends I want, in all the Houses I want. I’ll do what I think is right, not what the Houses say is a good code of conduct.”
“That’s all I’ve ever wanted!”
Both Harry and Pansy started and flinched. Pansy’s hand snaked down as if she was gripping her wand, and Harry looked up to see Granger standing by the nearest bookshelf, staring at them.
“That’s what I want,” she repeated. “Doing the right thing, and not caring about the things that other people think are right…” She took a deep breath. “You’ve already mocked me less for my intelligence than people in Gryffindor ever did.”
Pansy stared at her. “They think mocking you for your intelligence is a good idea?”
“Yes!”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I know!”
Granger came over and flopped down at the table, and a few seconds later, she and Pansy were deep in discussion of how stupid specific Gryffindors were. Harry shook his head slowly and reached for his book again.
He’d never thought he’d see the day that Pansy was fast friends with a Gryffindor, but then, Granger was hardly an ordinary Gryffindor.
Harry smiled to himself. And it’s probably going to be Hermione before much longer.
*
“Potter. Stay after class.”
Harry turned around and stood near the door as the other Slytherins and Gryffindors filed past him. Theo grimaced at him, and Neville hovered as if offering to wait, but Harry shook his head at both of them. The door shut with a decisive click, and for the first time since his Sorting, Harry was alone with his former Head of House.
He turned around. Snape was looming over him. His face was twisted in a scowl of satisfaction. Harry hadn’t known such a thing could exist, but he was looking at it.
“I always knew you were a Gryffindor at heart,” Snape whispered. “Always your father’s son. Always a brat and a bully.”
“Your House is full of them. I’m surprised it took you this long to recognize one.”
Snape’s eyes bulged. Harry sneered at him the way he’d sneered at McGonagall. Snape had never once pretended to care when Harry was in danger from other Slytherins. He might have saved Harry’s life with Quirrell—Harry was still somewhat uncertain what had happened after he’d passed out that night—but that wasn’t the same thing as caring whether Harry was safe on a day-to-day basis.
“You are not to associate with students of my House.”
Harry laughed at him. “I’d like to see you stop me.” And them, he thought, but there was no need to make things more difficult for Pansy and Theo.
“That is an order, Potter!”
Snape was intimidating with his robes flaring all around him, but Harry had faced worse things than him. Spending a year alone and friendless in Slytherin. A professor possessed by Voldemort. A basilisk trying to kill him. The realization that he was once again going to be jolted out of a world he’d grown comfortable in and tossed somewhere else on the whim of the Sorting Hat.
“I don’t take orders from you,” Harry said.
There was more ranting and storming and screaming and lecturing. Harry ignored all of it, just watching the way that the muscles around Snape’s eyes tightened.
He was frustrated as hell. And there was nothing he could do about it. He could take points and assign detentions, but Harry didn’t care about those things.
And even if McGonagall and Dumbledore were both disappointed in Harry—Dumbledore had called Harry up to his office after the fight with Malfoy to give him a long, stern talking-to about “nobility” and “chivalry”—neither of them would tolerate Snape actually cursing Harry.
I’ve won, Harry thought, and hoped the rumors about Snape reading minds were true, so Snape could see how loudly Harry was thinking that.
In the end, Snape threw him out of the Potions classroom with thirty points taken from Gryffindor. Harry walked down the corridor with a spring in his step, but slowed when he heard whispering voices. He peered around the corner with his wand in his hand, because he wasn’t about to walk headlong into a trap.
Theo and Neville were having an argument in whispers, complete with hand-waving, about exactly what kind of revenge to take on Snape if he hurt Harry.
Harry stared at them, warm inside in a way he had never felt and didn’t completely understand. He felt as if he was smiling all over.
They became friends for me. They’re my friends. It doesn’t matter—Slytherin and Gryffindor, that kind of thing. It truly doesn’t matter.
Harry thought he could see the future stretching in front of him, as clear as a prophecy. He would have his friends, and maybe others that joined them later. Maybe some Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws, too. They would make friends with each other, and they would fight for him, and he would fight for them, and they would do all the things the professors in the school should be doing but weren’t.
They would stand up to bullies. They would protect themselves. They would learn the kinds of things their classes refused to teach them. They would exist as much outside the House system as they could, and defy the proclamations and people that tried to prove them wrong.
It was Harry’s future, and he liked it.
He stepped around the corner, and smiled at Theo and Neville, who smiled back.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Gen
Content Notes: Slytherin Harry AU, discussion of past violence and character deaths, angst
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 6700
Summary: Harry was Sorted into Slytherin when he arrived at Hogwarts and has been in that House for his first two years. Now, suddenly, at the beginning of his third year, the Sorting Hat has decided that he’s a Gryffindor after pulling the Sword of Gryffindor from the Hat to kill the basilisk. Harry deals with being a Gryffindor moving forwards.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Seasons,” one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. Cruella prompted a scenario that was the opposite of my fic Other People’s Choices, which has a Gryffindor Harry being Sorted into Slytherin at the end of his second year.
His Proper House
Harry dragged his trunk into the Gryffindor common room, and ignored the way that everyone gaped at him. They’d been at the Sorting along with him. They’d heard the Hat’s announcement, seen the way it floated across the room from Professor McGonagall’s grasp—Harry didn’t even know it could do that—and settled on his head, and cried out, “GRYFFINDORI!”
The Hat had even explained that it had re-Sorted him because he had drawn the Sword of Gryffindor to save Ginny Weasley.
Not that the explanation makes anything better, Harry thought, indignation boiling beneath his skin as he watched the boys in his own year staring at him with hostile eyes. Neville Longbottom, who made everything in Potions more dangerous. Seamus Finnigan, who made everything explode and liked taunting and hexing Slytherins when he thought he wouldn’t be noticed. Dean Thomas, who nodded along with Finnigan like he was a puppet for his friend.
And Ron Weasley, who Harry had sat with on the train two years ago, who he’d thought of as a friend, until the morning after he’d been Sorted into Slytherin and Weasley had turned away from his outstretched hand without a word.
“Move along, move along, there,” said the Head Boy, who was Weasley’s older brother. Harry didn’t remember his name, except that it started with P, but decided to refer to him in his own head as Pompous Weasley. “Got to get up to bed, curfew’s soon.” He clapped his hands as if they were much younger children, waving them towards the stairs that curved up the Tower.
Harry trailed behind the others, who were ignoring him and talking loudly. His chest burned. Pompous Weasley was worse than the prefects in his House, his proper House, like the one Harry had called Arrogant Arlington last year, and the one Theo had called—
Theo.
Harry’s chest burned harder. Theo had taken a chance and befriended the Potter outcast in Slytherin last year, after one year of Harry being alone and learning offensive spell after offensive spell, learning wards to keep his possessions safe, growing harder and harder. Theo had decided that he didn’t care about blood status or popularity, not next to the chance to learn more powerful spells.
Somewhere along the line, what with trading hexes and jinxes and then sarcasm like their private names for the prefects and professors, they had become real friends. And towards the end of last year, Pansy Parkinson had joined them, because Malfoy had done something to upset her that she still wouldn’t talk about.
Harry was going to lose both of them. The way he had lost Weasley two years ago, the way he had lost his parents when he was one, the way he lost everyone and everything that ever mattered to him.
Fucking Sorting Hat.
Harry’s hand tightened on his trunk. He was going to survive. The Dursleys had tried to crush him, and that hadn’t worked. The Slytherins had tried to drive him out of the House when he was a first-year, and that hadn’t worked.
He would walk by himself, if he had to. He would grow better and better at dueling spells, which he loved with a passion that Lockhart and Quirrell hadn’t managed to destroy, and which Sirius Black and Dementors and Remus Lupin, who’d gaped at Harry as if he knew him on the train and then turned rapidly away from him at the sight of his serpent crest, weren’t going to destroy either.
Harry and his trunk and his survival instinct thumped up the steps of the Tower.
*
“Look, Potter, we don’t want you here.”
“I don’t want to be here, either.”
Harry ignored the way that Weasley was bristling as he adjusted the tie around his neck. Everything around him was Gryffindor colors, and Finnigan and Thomas were yelling loudly at each other in the bathroom, in a way that no one would have in the Slytherin boys’ room because Malfoy would have had a conniption at them. Harry’s mouth tightened.
“What? How can you say that? Gryffindor is the best House!”
Harry rolled his eyes and looked up. Out of the corner of his vision, he noticed Longbottom lingering next to his bed, but Harry didn’t care as long as the boy didn’t try to hex him from behind. And he doubted that Longbottom would. That wouldn’t be honorable. “Look, Weasley, you spent the past two years loudly proclaiming in my hearing that Slytherins belonged in Slytherin and Gryffindors belonged in Gryffindor. Is it any surprise that I believed you?”
Weasley bristled some more, but also didn’t seem to know what to say. Harry rolled his eyes at him again and turned away, rooting in his trunk for the satchel he’d enchanted last year to hold all his books. He didn’t want to have to run up seven flights of stairs for whatever books he’d need today.
Weasley muttered something and snatched up his towel, bustling off self-importantly to the bathroom. Longbottom cleared his throat and said hesitantly, “You probably don’t want to antagonize him.”
“Because we’re sleeping in the same room?” Harry looked up at Longbottom, small, soft, fat Longbottom who was so good at plants but blew up every potion he touched.
“No, because Fred and George prank people who get him upset.”
Harry blinked and nodded. He hadn’t thought about that, because none of the people in his year in Slytherin had siblings who were in school with them. “Thanks for the advice, Longbottom.”
Longbottom appeared to be bracing himself for something. “You c-can call me N-Neville if you want.”
No one in Slytherin would have offered his first name so freely. But Harry wasn’t in Slytherin anymore, and maybe it was time to embrace that and accept what seemed to be the first good consequence of it. “Neville, then. I’m Harry.”
When Longbottom—Neville smiled and acted genuinely glad to receive the permission to call him by his first name, Harry didn’t care any more how many Potions he exploded.
*
“I want to know if you’re a blood purist.”
Harry blinked at Hermione Granger over the top of his book. He had claimed a table in the library that was near but not the same as the ones where he usually studied with Theo and Pansy. If they came over and wanted to study with him of their own accord, well and good. Otherwise, he would leave them alone.
Harry had thought they might come, or Weasley might confront him again. He hadn’t expected Granger to plant herself in front of him with her hands on her hips.
“No,” Harry said. “How could I be, when my mum was Muggleborn?”
Granger drew back the chair across the table from Harry and plopped down in it without asking for permission. Harry tried not to get irritated. Neville was an outcast in Gryffindor, too, and he had turned out to be a decent bloke. Maybe the other Gryffindor outcast, the one who lectured everyone in a stern voice when they broke even minor rules, would turn out to be okay.
But from the way she glared at him, Harry had the impression that wasn’t the case.
“You were Sorted into Slytherin,” Granger said, a little shrilly. “Even though your mum’s Muggleborn, and even though you’re the Boy-Who-Lived and you defeated You-Know-Who and Slytherin is full of the children of Death Eaters—”
“You mean I defeated Voldemort?”
Seeing Granger tip her chair backwards with the force of her flinch was entertaining. Harry had got that sort of reaction in Slytherin, too, when he mentioned Voldemort’s name, which meant he did it as often as possible. He had thought being afraid of the name was silly since his trip to Diagon Alley with Hagrid.
Hagrid was another person he had lost when he was first Sorted. And then just yesterday, he had got an owl from Hagrid inviting him for tea.
For the first time.
As though I’m suddenly all right since I’m in Gryffindor now, Harry thought bitterly.
“You said his name!”
“Yeah? It’s just a name. And the other ones that people call him are all silly.”
Including, Harry had to admit to himself since he couldn’t admit it to Theo or Pansy, the Dark Lord. Theo could frown all he wanted and say it was a term of respect. Harry couldn’t bring himself to respect someone who had been defeated by a toddler.
Or a toddler’s mum, which was what Harry thought had really happened.
“But why would you be Sorted into Slytherin with everything I said if you weren’t a blood purist?” Granger was rapidly firing the words at him, as if she liked to use them like bullets. “Why did you go there in the first place? Why did you come here now? Why did you think that you could just march into Gryffindor and we would all accept you? I’ve seen you hanging around with Theodore Nott, and I know that he’s a Death Eater’s son!”
“I didn’t just march into Gryffindor,” Harry snapped. “It was the Sorting Hat’s idea. Remember? The Sorting? You were there?” His stomach turned as he remembered it. He’d clung to consciousness when the Dementors invaded the stupid train compartment, only to be plopped into a House he hadn’t wanted.
He hadn’t wanted Slytherin, either, but he’d got used to it. He wondered morbidly if the Hat would jerk him out of Gryffindor, too, if he got used to that. Would he do well on his fourth-year exams and suddenly find himself Sorted into Ravenclaw?
Bloody Hat has it in for me.
He didn’t realize he had muttered that aloud as well as thought it until Granger gasped. “Your language, Potter!”
“Your prissiness, Granger.”
Granger got up and flounced away. Harry studied her back, saw the way that she almost glanced at him over her shoulder before she caught herself, and snorted.
She’d be back. Harry was at least a new face in her House and someone who hadn’t got used to shutting out her scolding and lectures over the last few years. Harry wondered idly whether she would be like Pansy, making an excuse for being friends with him, but still doing it.
Pansy.
Harry buried the thought with some expertise. He had got through a whole year in Slytherin without friends. He would and could do the same in Gryffindor if he had to. And if his Slytherin friends turned their backs on him…
That was okay. Harry had always known he would do what it took to survive, and Slytherin had taught him to disregard the people who disapproved of him.
*
“Mr. Potter, stay after class, please.”
Harry hid a sigh as he turned around from packing up his books. Professor McGonagall had never been very interested in him over the last few years. Harry was never the last one to get a Transfiguration correct, but he was never the first one, either. Battle Transfiguration was complicated stuff. Harry had been a lot more interested in mastering curses and hexes and jinxes.
“I just wanted to take the chance to welcome you to Gryffindor, Mr. Potter.”
Harry blinked at the professor. She had a warm smile on her face and had bent a little towards him from behind her desk, as if she was about to pat him on the head. Snape had certainly never done anything like that, but then, Snape hated Harry unreasonably.
“Er, thank you, Professor,” Harry said as politely as he could, when it dawned on him that she was waiting for something.
“I’m so glad that you’re in your proper House at last.”
Oh. Harry’s stomach soured. Well, that explained that, at least. McGonagall must have known his parents, like Hagrid, and had avoided paying much attention to him for the last few years because she thought he shouldn’t have been in Slytherin.
The Hat had thought so. Then it hadn’t thought so. Malfoy and Snape had never thought so, but who cared about them, anyway? Theo and Pansy had made the difference for Harry, and Harry had adapted.
“Thanks, Professor,” Harry said again, because it was best to be polite to his Head of House if she was going to be polite to him.
Who knows where I really belong? If I’m going to belong somewhere, I’ll have to make that place myself.
*
“Ice Mice,” Harry told the gargoyle at the bottom of the stairs, and rode the moving staircase up to the Headmaster’s office with a sinking in his heart.
He hadn’t had much to do with Headmaster Dumbledore over the last few years, except at the very ends. When he had gone after Quirrell because some of the other Slytherin first-years had been muttering about the Philosopher’s Stone and Harry was afraid the theft would be blamed on him if they could prove he’d seen Quirrell going into the third-floor corridor, Dumbledore had been in the hospital wing when Harry had woken up. He’d questioned Harry intensely about the spells he’d used.
Harry had just pretended ignorance, insisting that he didn’t know how he had made Quirrell’s skin blister when Quirrell touched him. And that was the truth. What wasn’t was that he had just used “harmless jinxes” or “accidental magic” on the Cerberus and the Devil’s Snare and the other obstacles.
Look, if they oppose me, they’re going to get hurt.
In his second year, Harry had discovered that he could speak to snakes, and then it had been revealed in front of everyone else in that stupid dueling club session. Then, of course, everyone had blamed him for being the Heir of Slytherin—except Theo and Pansy—and jinxes had flown thick and fast. Of course Harry had taken the chance to stop the real culprit when he’d realized the weird Weasley girl had made his scar hurt.
It turned out to be her diary, not her, and Harry got involved in a fight with a basilisk. If the Headmaster’s phoenix hadn’t turned up with the Sorting Hat and the Sword of Gryffindor, Harry would have died.
That had led to another intense questioning session with the Headmaster, of course, because he couldn’t just take Harry’s word for it.
Harry sighed as he stepped through the door into the office. If he was going to be subject to another one of those because the Sorting Hat had been an idiot, he wasn’t sure he could stay polite to the Headmaster.
“Harry, my boy! Come in!”
Harry stiffened warily. It had always been “Mr. Potter” before. He came cautiously further into the room and sat down in the chair in front of the desk. The office was full of whirling, spinning things, but Harry couldn’t find them marvelous. He had only ever been in the office when he was in trouble, like being questioned for saving the school.
Those questions had included things like “And you’re really not sure why you can speak Parseltongue?”
How should I know?
Professor Dumbledore beamed at him across the desk. Harry smiled weakly back. The phoenix was sitting on a perch near the fireplace, fluttering his wings and turning back and forth as if he was sunning himself in front of the flames. Harry smiled a little at that, but his smile died when his gaze fell on the Sorting Hat’s shelf.
He jerked his eyes away, just in time to see Dumbledore nodding at him and smiling. “You were admiring Fawkes, my boy? He loves fire.”
“Yes, sir. He saved my life.” Maybe Harry could get through this without snapping and acting like an idiot if he just stuck to simple truths that no one could possibly misinterpret. Although Professor Snape would have tried.
“Yes. A lucky thing, that.” Dumbledore clasped his hands and leaned further forwards still, his eyes madly twinkling. “Doubly lucky in that it gave the Hat to push it needed to Sort you into your proper House!”
Oh, not an interrogation, then. Harry smiled as politely as he could. “Yes, sir.”
“I wanted to know if you were having trouble with any of the other students? Anyone who’s upset about your re-Sorting?”
“Well, sort of Ron Weasley, sir. He thinks I had a plot to get into Gryffindor or something.” Harry sighed. It was tiresome. Weasley hadn’t attacked his trunk or tried to hex him in the back the way a Slytherin would have, but he was always shouting and making loud remarks about how “some people don’t know how lucky they are” and stomping away and slamming doors.
“Oh? But you don’t hold that against him, I suppose?”
“Not really, sir.” I’ll never be friends with him. “I know he thought we were friends on the train when we came for our first year, but then I got Sorted into Slytherin and he sort of took it as a betrayal.”
Professor Dumbledore nodded. “It’s good, very good, that you don’t have worse problems than that. I have to admit that I thought your former Housemates would hold the matter against you.”
Harry had to swallow a lump before he said, “No, sir.” Malfoy had snickered and whispered a few snide things under his breath when they passed each other in the corridors, but most of Slytherin seemed content to ignore Harry’s existence now.
And that includes Pansy and Theo.
“Good, good. I wanted to tell you a few tales of Gryffindor, you see. It’s my old House, and the one your parents were in! It occurs to me that I’ve been unforgivably distant from you the last few years, for which I want to apologize.”
All it takes is for the colors on my tie to change, Harry thought, and they’re all treating me different.
He refused a lemon drop and listened unenthusiastically to tales of his father and his father’s best friends, which apparently included Sirius Black and Remus Lupin. His head was churning with his own thoughts.
The whole House system is stupid. I want my friends to be people who would stand with me all the time, even if I did get Sorted into Ravenclaw in fifth year or something.
*
“Harry.”
“Oh? Finally decided to acknowledge my existence?”
Theo halted with his hand on the side of the library shelves. Harry kept his head bowed, working on the book of advanced Defensive spells that he’d managed to winkle out of Professor Lupin. The man had started falling all over himself to help Harry and apologize to Harry and grant him favors after he’d been moved into Gryffindor. Harry had used it to get at books in the Restricted Section.
“You know why I couldn’t.”
“No, I don’t,” Harry said, and flung his quill away to lean back and scowl at Theo finally. “If it was some kind of danger, you risked it last year, too.”
“Yeah, but…” Theo walked slowly over to the chair on the other side of the table and sat down across from Harry. “You were in our House then.”
Harry bit his cheek as hard as he could, and thought he might have drawn blood. Well, fine. If that was the way it was going to be. “Fine, you’re totally right,” he said, voice flat. “Being Sorted into Gryffindor changed who I am and now I hate everything I was for two years. Fine. Bye.” He picked up his quill again.
“Harry, it’s not like that.”
“What’s it like, then?”
“There are people who would beat me up for associating with you now,” Theo hissed, and brought his fist down in a hard strike on the table. Harry jumped, and Theo looked as though he felt bad, but he didn’t say anything about it. “Okay? It’s different when you’re an outcast Slytherin than when you’re a Gryffindor.”
“Fine,” Harry muttered. He could understand that. It just made him feel worse, though, because now he knew for certain that he’d lost one of his friends rather than just wondering about it. “Then you should go before someone comes in and sees you in here.”
“I still want to be friends.”
“Bloody how?”
“I’ll learn enough hexes to fend off the people who want to beat me up.”
Harry laughed in spite of himself, because that was such a Theo answer. And such a Slytherin answer, for one variety of Slytherin. Harry was pretty sure no one in Gryffindor would have said it, even if they thought it.
Theo looked like he was waiting for an answer.
“Okay,” Harry said, and knew he wasn’t imagining the relief in the smile that flashed across Theo’s face like lightning.
*
“Longbottom.”
“Nott.”
Harry sighed. He’d planned for this to be just an afternoon with Theo, but Neville had followed Harry when he left Gryffindor Tower and had ignored the hints Harry had tried to drop that he was meeting a friend. And now Neville was sitting beside him with his eyes as wide as a house-elf’s and Theo was standing with his hand on the shelves again. He looked half-tempted to walk away.
“If you’re going to be here, then you’re going to get along,” Harry said. “Neville, we’re studying hexes. Keep your mouth shut about that. Theo, he’s here. Don’t taunt him and don’t try to scare him away.”
“Would I do that?” Theo slowly walked over to the table and dropped his books on it, eyeing Neville. He smiled, and this time it was the shark-thing that Harry usually saw him using on Malfoy in the Slytherin common room.
The memory throbbed like a broken finger, and Harry pushed the remembrance away. “Theo, stop doing the shark thing.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
Theo glanced back and forth between Harry and Neville for a minute. Harry looked at Neville too. He had to admit that he was expecting Neville to push back his chair and run away, if only because Theo had a bad reputation among the Gryffindors as someone you didn’t push and left strictly alone.
Neville flushed and shivered, but said after a second, “M-maybe I w-want to learn hexes, too.”
“Why would you? The friend of—”
“I’m not friends with any of the boys in my year,” Neville snapped, flushing. “Except Harry.” He didn’t look at Harry, and so missed the jump Harry couldn’t help giving. Theo noticed, of course. “They’re wankers and bullies. So maybe I want to learn how to hex them, too, so they’ll l-leave me alone!”
His stutter almost goes away when he’s angry, Harry thought, blinking.
“Huh,” Theo said, and nodded a little as he pulled out one of the thick books on hexes and curses that he’d agreed to look up for this afternoon. Harry, special little Gryffindor that he supposedly was now, couldn’t be seen taking it from the shelves in the public section of the library where it had been. “You may be worth something after all.”
Neville flushed at the praise. Harry shook his head slowly. There were times that he hated his own life, but in some ways, he thought Neville had it worse than he had. Harry wouldn’t have felt obligated to someone for faint praise like that.
“Let’s start studying, then,” Harry said firmly, and dragged The Auror’s First Year Worth of Hexes towards him.
*
“I know what you’re studying in the library.”
Unusually, Granger was speaking to Harry during History of Magic, a class where she normally at least read another book instead of talking. Harry turned around in his chair. Everyone else in sight was asleep or lost in their own books or daydreams.
“What do you mean?”
“I know that you’re studying hexes.” Granger tilted her head back and gave him a great view up her nostrils, not that Harry wanted it. “And you should stop. Or I’ll go and tell Professor Dumbledore.”
“If you do that, I’ll hex your mouth shut,” Harry said.
Granger looked shocked. Harry glanced around, but the people dozing in the desks next to them were Finnigan and Weasley, who wouldn’t wake up for anything short of the Hogwarts Express—and Neville, who was watching them. Harry turned back to Granger, who was saying, “You shouldn’t—you shouldn’t do that.”
“And you shouldn’t run around tattling on people.”
“You’re going to do something evil with those hexes!”
“How do you know?”
“Nott’s a Slytherin!”
“And so was I, until the Hat put me in Gryffindor,” Harry said, enjoying the argument for once. “Doesn’t that mean that it could also put Nott into Gryffindor, if it wanted to? Doesn’t it mean that no one is as hopeless or incapable of being saved as you think?”
Granger stared at him. Harry leaned nearer and smiled a little as he delivered the killing blow in a quiet voice.
“Besides, if you think Gryffindors are so great and the embodiment of good, why don’t you have any friends in this House? Even I can see how smart you are. I don’t like you much, but you’re intelligent. Too intelligent to think that people are just good or evil based on where a talking Hat puts them.”
He turned around and faced Binns again, picking up his book. His back tingled, expecting the hex he would have got in Slytherin for speaking to someone there so bluntly.
But it seemed Granger was simply stunned, because she said nothing.
Harry smiled into his book.
*
“What is she doing here?”
Entertainingly enough, Theo and Neville spoke at the same time. Harry snorted. He’d come around a corner of the shelves from going to borrow a book, and discovered Pansy and Granger both standing next to the table. Neville was staring at Pansy, Theo at Granger.
“I didn’t invite either of them, so don’t look at me,” Harry said, and sat down with his book, a compendium of low-level curses and countercurses that the author promised even students in fourth year or below should be able to figure out how to cast. “Are you going to sit down, Pansy, or can’t you be seen associating with us?”
“What about me?”
“You’re not my friend, Granger. Not yet.”
Harry had mostly said that last sentence to prevent Granger from yelling for the librarian or something, but it had an odd effect. She seemed to collapse in on herself. She looked back and forth between Theo and Pansy, and then drew out the chair near Neville and sat down in it.
“Why are you here?” Pansy asked the table in general. She was sitting back, and she looked bored, but Harry knew that look. It was the one she wore just before she pulled out her wand and hexed someone.
“Studying,” Harry said.
Neville nodded, looking too nervous to speak.
“You know why,” Theo said.
“I want friends.”
Harry winced a little from the raw honesty of Granger’s response, and Theo looked uncomfortable, but Pansy gave her a winsome little smile. “Perhaps that can be arranged,” she said, and leaned forwards. “What sort of hair charms do you like?”
“What?”
“Charms. For your hair, Granger. I don’t believe that you just don’t use any.”
That sent Granger off on a rant, but at least it meant she was talking and not storming away to find Madam Pince. Harry caught Theo smiling at him over the top of his book, and Neville watching Pansy and Granger with a bewildered look. Once again, Harry hid a smile in his own book.
*
“You were never a proper Slytherin.”
Harry spat blood. Malfoy and his goons had cornered Harry in a corridor Harry had been using on his way to a secret passage. There were ways to get down near the dungeons and the Slytherin common room, if not actually in the common room, and stay out of sight. Harry had been going to visit Theo.
Harry looked up. Malfoy laughed at him. He’d used some kind of curse that mimicked a punch in the mouth. Harry spat blood again and moved a tooth with his tongue. It felt broken.
“Always knew a disgusting little Mudblood like you—”
Harry had seldom attacked Malfoy before. It was too dangerous. He was popular in Slytherin, or at least popular in the sort of way where people humored him and listened when he spoke, and Harry had been unpopular. The most Harry had dared was to jinx Malfoy with boils or the like when they were in a crowd of students and Malfoy would have no way of knowing where it came from.
But now?
Harry was a Gryffindor. And Malfoy was attacking him anyway.
Harry struck.
Malfoy screamed like a mouse as Harry hexed him full in the face, the hex he’d been studying with Theo that pierced someone’s tongue and stuck it to bottom of their mouth. Malfoy flailed at his mouth and cried, and Crabbe and Goyle stared with their own mouths open. Then Harry turned his wand on them.
Goyle actually ran away.
Crabbe tried to fight back, but Harry had a lot more anger than the bigger boy did, and he hit him with boils so severe that Crabbe’s eyes swelled shut and he flailed around trying to find Harry, with no success. Harry had learned dodging with Dudley. He turned on Malfoy and lifted his wand, and—
“Serpensortia!”
Harry watched open-mouthed as two snakes coiled out of the end of Neville’s wand and headed straight for Malfoy and Crabbe. Neville was standing near the corner, and Harry hadn’t even heard him show up. Harry nodded to him and faced Malfoy.
Crabbe was screaming as one of the snakes bit him on the leg. Malfoy turned and ran away, still crying.
That, of course, was when Professor McGonagall came around the corner, gasped in horror at the sight of Crabbe and the snake, Vanished the snake, and began to scold them.
Harry caught Neville’s eye and grinned, and Neville grinned back. It had been worth it.
*
“…very disappointed in you, Mr. Potter.”
Harry leaned back in the chair in McGonagall’s office and stared at the ceiling. He was used to people saying they were disappointed in him. Snape said it every time one of the other Slytherins attacked Harry. Maybe he said it with more sarcasm in his voice than McGonagall had, but it was still there.
“Mr. Potter, are you paying attention to me?”
Harry blinked and let his gaze drop from the ceiling to his professor’s irate face. “Yes, professor.”
“You don’t seem like it.”
Fuck it, Harry thought abruptly. Theo would probably be proud of him; he was always trying to get Harry to swear more. He said that Harry’s circumstances deserved it. Harry leaned forwards. “I don’t really care because this isn’t the first time that you’ve been disappointed in me.”
Professor McGonagall stared at him. Harry decided this was invitation enough to go on.
“First you were disappointed I wasn’t in Gryffindor. Then because I was in Slytherin and a good student or something.” He had never known what to make of McGonagall’s expression when she had to grudgingly award him points in Transfiguration. “And now you’re disappointed in me for defending myself when it was three on one.”
“The hex you used—”
“Is rated the same as the hex Malfoy used on me,” Harry said, and reached up to touch the dried blood on his face. “You sent him to the hospital wing when you found him and didn’t even use an Episkey on me. You’re continually disappointed in me, perpetually disappointed because I didn’t act like the good little hero from the beginning and get Sorted into your good little House. You know what? I don’t care. I’ve given up on trying to please you. So give me detention or take points or whatever, and let me go. I have an essay to finish.”
Professor McGonagall’s lips were pressed together so tightly that Harry thought she might stop breathing. He sneered at her. Everything he said was true, and she knew it. And she couldn’t make him care.
Malfoy and Crabbe and even Neville got sent to the hospital wing—even though there was nothing wrong with Neville—and she couldn’t be bothered to heal him? Well, fine. Harry was used to being treated differently because of the Dursleys, and then his stupid scar, and then his stupid House, and now because he wasn’t the hero everyone thought he was.
“Mr. Potter, I have never been so disappointed in my life…”
Harry rolled his eyes, and didn’t care about the lecture he got. Or the detention. He’d go to the detention and get it over with. Not the worst thing that had ever happened to him.
*
“Malfoy’s scared of you now.”
Pansy’s soft voice echoed in Harry’s ears. She was the first one to the library study table after Harry. Harry just glanced up at her and nodded. “Good. Then he won’t try to curse me in the corridors anymore.”
Pansy sat down at the table across from him, studying him intently. Harry studied her back. She was one of the more open of the Slytherins, at least in private. She didn’t see the point in maintaining an endlessly sneering haughty mask, she’d told him once. She left that to Greengrass.
“And it’s true that you told off McGonagall?”
Harry laughed. He’d told that to Neville in the Gryffindor common room, but he hadn’t taken any measures to keep it quiet. He wasn’t surprised Pansy had heard. “It’s true.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to remain on good terms with her, since you’re her responsibility now?”
Harry laid down his quill and stared at Pansy. It was the kind of question she would never have asked about Snape.
But she was leaning forwards a little now, shining dark eyes fastened on him, and Harry decided that she was probably interested in an honest answer, for whatever reason. He shook his head. “What responsibility did she take for me? Did she ever take for me? She was just disappointed in me all along, and when she found Malfoy and heard what happened, she sent him to the hospital wing but didn’t even bother healing me.”
He smiled, and saw the way that Pansy continued to lean a little forwards, as if she was about to pounce on him if he didn’t say what was on his mind. “No. The Heads of House are stupid. The House system is stupid. The Sorting Hat is stupid. People talk about me like I exist outside them, anyway. All right. Then I’ll exist outside them.”
“How?”
“I’ll have all the friends I want, in all the Houses I want. I’ll do what I think is right, not what the Houses say is a good code of conduct.”
“That’s all I’ve ever wanted!”
Both Harry and Pansy started and flinched. Pansy’s hand snaked down as if she was gripping her wand, and Harry looked up to see Granger standing by the nearest bookshelf, staring at them.
“That’s what I want,” she repeated. “Doing the right thing, and not caring about the things that other people think are right…” She took a deep breath. “You’ve already mocked me less for my intelligence than people in Gryffindor ever did.”
Pansy stared at her. “They think mocking you for your intelligence is a good idea?”
“Yes!”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I know!”
Granger came over and flopped down at the table, and a few seconds later, she and Pansy were deep in discussion of how stupid specific Gryffindors were. Harry shook his head slowly and reached for his book again.
He’d never thought he’d see the day that Pansy was fast friends with a Gryffindor, but then, Granger was hardly an ordinary Gryffindor.
Harry smiled to himself. And it’s probably going to be Hermione before much longer.
*
“Potter. Stay after class.”
Harry turned around and stood near the door as the other Slytherins and Gryffindors filed past him. Theo grimaced at him, and Neville hovered as if offering to wait, but Harry shook his head at both of them. The door shut with a decisive click, and for the first time since his Sorting, Harry was alone with his former Head of House.
He turned around. Snape was looming over him. His face was twisted in a scowl of satisfaction. Harry hadn’t known such a thing could exist, but he was looking at it.
“I always knew you were a Gryffindor at heart,” Snape whispered. “Always your father’s son. Always a brat and a bully.”
“Your House is full of them. I’m surprised it took you this long to recognize one.”
Snape’s eyes bulged. Harry sneered at him the way he’d sneered at McGonagall. Snape had never once pretended to care when Harry was in danger from other Slytherins. He might have saved Harry’s life with Quirrell—Harry was still somewhat uncertain what had happened after he’d passed out that night—but that wasn’t the same thing as caring whether Harry was safe on a day-to-day basis.
“You are not to associate with students of my House.”
Harry laughed at him. “I’d like to see you stop me.” And them, he thought, but there was no need to make things more difficult for Pansy and Theo.
“That is an order, Potter!”
Snape was intimidating with his robes flaring all around him, but Harry had faced worse things than him. Spending a year alone and friendless in Slytherin. A professor possessed by Voldemort. A basilisk trying to kill him. The realization that he was once again going to be jolted out of a world he’d grown comfortable in and tossed somewhere else on the whim of the Sorting Hat.
“I don’t take orders from you,” Harry said.
There was more ranting and storming and screaming and lecturing. Harry ignored all of it, just watching the way that the muscles around Snape’s eyes tightened.
He was frustrated as hell. And there was nothing he could do about it. He could take points and assign detentions, but Harry didn’t care about those things.
And even if McGonagall and Dumbledore were both disappointed in Harry—Dumbledore had called Harry up to his office after the fight with Malfoy to give him a long, stern talking-to about “nobility” and “chivalry”—neither of them would tolerate Snape actually cursing Harry.
I’ve won, Harry thought, and hoped the rumors about Snape reading minds were true, so Snape could see how loudly Harry was thinking that.
In the end, Snape threw him out of the Potions classroom with thirty points taken from Gryffindor. Harry walked down the corridor with a spring in his step, but slowed when he heard whispering voices. He peered around the corner with his wand in his hand, because he wasn’t about to walk headlong into a trap.
Theo and Neville were having an argument in whispers, complete with hand-waving, about exactly what kind of revenge to take on Snape if he hurt Harry.
Harry stared at them, warm inside in a way he had never felt and didn’t completely understand. He felt as if he was smiling all over.
They became friends for me. They’re my friends. It doesn’t matter—Slytherin and Gryffindor, that kind of thing. It truly doesn’t matter.
Harry thought he could see the future stretching in front of him, as clear as a prophecy. He would have his friends, and maybe others that joined them later. Maybe some Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws, too. They would make friends with each other, and they would fight for him, and he would fight for them, and they would do all the things the professors in the school should be doing but weren’t.
They would stand up to bullies. They would protect themselves. They would learn the kinds of things their classes refused to teach them. They would exist as much outside the House system as they could, and defy the proclamations and people that tried to prove them wrong.
It was Harry’s future, and he liked it.
He stepped around the corner, and smiled at Theo and Neville, who smiled back.
The End.
