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Mind the fine print.
The castle is listening.
✦
Slytherin did not applaud Harry Potter.
It stared at him as if applause would have been childish, and as if childish things were done somewhere else.
The common room sat under the lake in green glass, dark wood, low lamps, and the stale chill of stone that had learned to keep secrets.
Water moved beyond the windows in slow black sheets.
Something pale drifted past once, too large to be a fish and too bored to care about first-years.
Harry stood just inside the entrance with his trunk handle biting into his palm.
Everyone looked.
No one hissed.
That would have been too easy to answer.
The prefect who had brought them down from the Great Hall was broad-shouldered, tidy, and already tired of them.
His badge caught the green light whenever he turned.
“Welcome to Slytherin House,” he said.
Someone near the back coughed into a sleeve.
Someone else whispered, “Potter,” and got elbowed hard enough to make a glass clink.
The prefect waited until both stopped.
“You will hear many things about this House.
Some will be lies.
Some will be bait.
Some will be both, because the world is rarely kind enough to sort itself for your convenience.”
A few older students smiled.
Harry kept his face still and tried not to look toward Draco too quickly.
He failed by half a second.
Draco Malfoy was near the mantel, pale hair neat again after the train, robes arranged as if he had never been laughed at in a compartment.
Two older boys stood close enough to flatter him and far enough away to deny it.
Draco saw Harry look.
His mouth twitched.
The train had left a grudge behind, and Draco had dressed it for dinner.
Harry looked away before Draco could make a whole meal of it.
“Rules,” the prefect continued.
“Do not embarrass the House in public.
Do not bring private feuds into shared rooms unless you enjoy having an audience choose your ending.
Curfew is real.
So are inspections.
Duels require witnesses, forms, and enough sense to lose quietly if you must lose at all.”
A second-year snorted.
The prefect pointed at him without looking.
“Mr.
Flint, if you are volunteering to explain last year’s tapestry fire to our new students, I will fetch Professor Snape.”
The second-year shut up.
That helped.
The speech was not soft, but the room had rules that could trip its own people, too.
“If you require help,” the prefect said, “ask your year first.
Then a prefect.
If you require secrecy, remember that asking for it in a room full of Slytherins is already a poor start.”
That one earned actual laughter, quick and sharp.
The room relaxed by a finger-width.
Harry did not.
He had learned too recently that a finger-width could be where the blade entered.
Daphne Greengrass sat near the fire with a closed book in her lap.
She had moved six inches for him at dinner.
It had felt like permission then.
Here, with other Slytherins watching her, she did not move at all.
Fair enough.
The speech ended.
The room broke apart at once, not into chaos, but into pockets.
Older students reclaimed chairs.
First-years hovered and tried not to hover.
Someone complained that the lake made everything smell damp.
Someone else told him the smell was probably him.
Harry stepped toward the nearest empty chair.
A boy two years older slid a stack of books onto it before Harry arrived.
The room noticed.
Of course it did.
Harry stopped.
His hand tightened on the trunk.
If he demanded the chair, he was the famous orphan throwing his name around.
If he walked away, the chair became a story before breakfast.
If he looked for the prefect, he might as well ask the Sorting Hat for a transfer.
Draco’s smile sharpened.
“Potter,” he said, loud enough for half the room.
“You may sit.
We have chairs.
It is one of our many ancient advantages.”
A few students laughed.
Harry wanted Ron’s rude, ordinary voice in the compartment.
He wanted Hermione’s furious little frown when a rule failed to make sense.
Wanting either in this room was a bad idea.
He set his trunk beside a narrow table, picked up the nearest chair by its back, and turned it around so it faced the room rather than the fire.
The legs scraped louder than he meant them to.
Someone laughed for real this time.
Harry sat anyway.
The older boy with the books blinked, then looked annoyed that the test had become less elegant.
Let him be annoyed.
Harry’s ears felt hot.
“Improvised furniture,” Draco said.
“Bold.”
“I learned from your introduction style.”
The words landed before Harry had weighed them.
A mistake.
Draco flushed.
Not as badly as on the train.
Enough.
Daphne looked up from her closed book.
Her expression did not change, but her finger tapped once against the cover.
Harry heard the warning in it too late.
“Careful,” Draco said.
“You are not in a compartment now.”
“I noticed.”
“Did you?
The Great Hall seemed to surprise you.”
That cut cleaner.
Ron halfway standing.
Hermione frozen over her notebook.
Gryffindor cheering for everyone except the boy who had chosen green.
Harry’s answer stuck behind his teeth.
Draco saw it and looked pleased.
“Most people would call Slytherin an opportunity,” he said.
“Most people were not sorted with half the hall waiting to be disappointed.”
“And did you disappoint them on purpose?”
The circles near them quieted.
Not completely.
Enough.
Harry should have shrugged.
He should have made a joke.
He should have remembered that everyone here collected mistakes.
“The Hat asked where I would survive,” he said.
It was too honest.
The room went colder.
Draco tilted his head.
“And it chose us?”
Harry swallowed.
“I did.”
That landed differently.
Choice made people nervous in Slytherin.
It meant you could be blamed.
“How brave,” someone murmured.
“Wrong table for bravery,” another said.
Daphne closed her book with a soft clap.
“Only if you are unimaginative.”
The room noticed her.
Draco did most of all.
“Greengrass,” he said.
“I was wondering when you would open a book at us.”
“I was waiting for the conversation to need one.”
A few students laughed.
Daphne did not.
“Potter either made a decision,” she said, “or panicked in a direction he now has to defend.
Both are more interesting than pretending the Hat dragged him here by the collar.”
Harry wished she had said less.
He was also grateful she had said anything.
Both feelings were inconvenient.
Draco pushed away from the mantel.
“Then perhaps he should defend it.”
The old Harry in his head had answers.
War answers.
Voldemort answers.
Slytherin roots under old banners.
A map of dangers nobody in this room had earned.
This Harry was tired, overfed after years of underfeeding, and still carrying Ron’s hurt face like a bruise.
“Gryffindor would have been simpler,” he said.
That surprised them.
It surprised him too.
“Simpler?” Draco repeated.
“People already knew what story they wanted from me there.”
“And here?”
Harry looked around the room.
At the older boy with the books.
At the second-years pretending not to listen.
At Daphne’s still hands.
At Cassian Selwyn, whose smile looked practiced enough to have tutors.
At Nott, thin and quiet, watching from the edge of the first-years as if he had already decided silence was the least expensive thing he owned.
“Here they have to decide whether I am trouble before they decide what kind.”
The answer was not brilliant.
It did not win the room.
It did, however, sound like something a frightened person might say while trying not to sound frightened.
Daphne’s eyes sharpened.
Draco looked less pleased than interested, which made the floor feel less steady under Harry’s shoes.
“Trouble usually announces itself,” he said.
“Then Hogwarts should have sent a louder letter.”
That earned a laugh from the second-year Flint, who tried to hide it and failed.
Draco shot him a look.
Flint examined the floor.
The prefect appeared at Draco’s shoulder as if summoned by the smell of overplayed pride.
“Dorm assignments,” he said.
The release of pressure was almost physical.
Harry unclenched his hand from the chair and found crescent marks in his palm.
Names were called.
Students moved.
Harry listened hard enough to miss two of them.
“Potter.
Nott.
Selwyn.”
Of course.
Theodore Nott said nothing.
Blaise Zabini gave Harry a lazy once-over that somehow included shoes, cuffs, wand pocket, trunk, and the owl feather stuck to his sleeve.
Cassian Selwyn smiled as if the room had just handed him a private joke.
As Harry stood, Daphne passed close enough that her sleeve brushed the back of his chair.
She did not stop.
“You answer too fast,” she said.
“You warn too late.”
Now she stopped.
For a second she looked almost her age.
Annoyed, curious, and not pleased to be either.
“Warnings given early are called advice,” she said.
“People ignore advice.”
“And warnings given late?”
“Those tell me whether you bleed loudly.”
It was a horrible thing to say.
It was also more alive than half the polished lines he had heard tonight.
Harry almost smiled.
“Did I?”
“A little.”
Then she walked away.
He carried his trunk to the dormitory with the others before the room could decide what that meant.
The boys’ dormitory was handsome in a cold way: dark posts, green hangings, carved trunks fitted into spaces that had clearly been measured for generations of sons who owned more than three shirts.
The lake light moved on the ceiling.
It made everyone’s face look half-drowned.
Nott chose a bed without asking.
Zabini opened a drawer, inspected it, and said, “At least it does not smell like my aunt’s house.
That is a mercy.”
Cassian smiled.
“Your aunt’s house smells expensive.”
“So does dragon dung, if you buy enough of it.”
Harry laughed before he could stop himself.
Zabini looked at him with mild approval.
Nott’s mouth moved, barely.
Cassian’s smile thinned, then recovered.
“Potter,” Cassian said.
“My family wondered whether you would arrive.”
Harry set his trunk on the bed.
“Mine did not.”
That made the room go awkward in a much younger way.
Nobody had a clean answer to a dead family and a cupboard.
Harry let the polish crack there.
Cassian recovered first.
“And now that you have arrived?”
“I need to find my socks.”
Zabini snorted.
Nott looked down at his book.
Cassian gave Harry a measuring look, but it was less certain than before.
Harry unpacked only what he needed: nightclothes, toiletries, wand, the folded letter, the narrow black box hidden under shirts, the Gringotts receipt tucked where he could feel it when he closed the trunk.
He did not explain any of it.
The room pretended not to watch him not explain.
For five minutes, nothing happened.
No one attacked him.
No one befriended him.
Zabini complained about the pillows.
Nott read.
Cassian wrote two lines on a small card and slid it into a book before Harry could see the name.
In Slytherin, five quiet minutes felt less like peace than a held breath.
Then the dormitory door opened without a knock.
Professor Snape stood outside in black robes that made the corridor behind him look underdressed.
Every small sound died.
Nott lowered his book.
Zabini became still.
Cassian put the card away with care too quick to be casual.
Snape’s eyes moved once around the room.
They reached Harry last.
“Potter.”
Harry stood.
His scar did not burn.
His stomach still dropped.
“Professor.”
Snape’s mouth curled as if the title had arrived dirty.
“My office.
Now.”
Someone behind Harry breathed in and stopped halfway.
The room had found its first proper story.
Harry picked up his wand because leaving it behind would be foolish.
Bringing it would be noticed.
Snape noticed.
Of course he did.
Harry followed him into the corridor.
The common room watched him pass when they came back through it: older students, first-years, Daphne by the fire with her book open at last, Draco no longer smiling.
Daphne did not warn him this time.
She only looked up, and Harry understood the warning anyway.
Questions were coming.
In Slytherin, apparently, they always were.
Snape swept ahead without glancing back.
Harry closed his fingers around his wand and wished, too late, that he had learned how to look less like a boy being led away.
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