PLEASE READ THIS: If you read the original fic: the first two chapters have been rewritten, please start from chapter one.
Most wizards seemed to be of the opinion that Slytherins were backstabbing liars, too caught up in their own ambition and hopelessly drawn to dark magic. Whether or not that was true was always a subject of heated debate in the wizarding community, but a good argument against that prejudice was a scrawny Welsh half-blood named Tegan Llwellyn.
Tegan was as honest as a thirteen-year-old reasonably could be. She was witty, sharp-tongued, and possibly a little too sweet. There was something intractably likable about her, though it was never noticed by her more...prejudiced classmates.
Tegan thought it was a great joke of the wizarding world, to criticize people with a prejudice by lumping them all in something as arbitrary as a school house. Most Llwellyns were sorted into Slytherin, and those that didn't were sorted into Ravenclaw.
Some called it their birthright, and maybe it was, it certainly made sense.
Tegan leaned her head against the train window, pushing her glasses against her face. Her friend, Jonathan, had fallen asleep on her arm, tightly gripping a tattered potions book against his chest. The well-worn cover disguised the truth of what looked like an ancient hand-me-down: it had been bought brand new their first year at Hogwarts. Jonathan had read and reread the book so many times that it had aged far beyond its years. Across from her sat two more classmates, Zeke and Pamela, both barely paying attention to the world around them.
"Have you heard?" Pamela broke the silence suddenly, "Harry Potter's on the train."
"Basil talks about him an awful lot," Zeke muttered. Basil was Zeke's older cousin, a dark-haired Romanian vampire who was adept at potion making, in love with weird magical creatures, and was in his final year at Durmstrang Institute. Though Zeke and Basil got along well, Basil was often a touch arrogant and crass when it came to school pride, and often made it very clear that he didn't think much of Hogwarts or any school that wasn't his own. Very few people knew Basil was a vampire, and a majority of that lot were also some shred of vampiric; they'd forced a classmate named Graham Montague into an Unbreakable Vow their second year so he wouldn't tell a soul. Basil didn't like talking about it; neither did Zeke or his twin brother Dante, for that matter.
The train continued to speed along as the three began to talk about what classes they'd signed up for that year. They almost always had similar schedules, being in the same house. Yet this year, Tegan had chosen Divination, her family already had a knack for it. Zeke, conversely, had selected Ancient Runes, and Pamela had picked out Arithmancy.
"No one cared enough to take Muggle Studies?" Zeke asked.
"I don't see how muggles are that hard to understand," Tegan replied.
"Tegan how close to Stonehenge do you live?" Jonathan asked, revealing that the three had either woken him up or were keeping him up.
"Touche."
The compartment went silent and the four quietly began settling into their usual habits. That is, Jonathan tried to go back to sleep, Pamela began to read, Tegan, ever the diviner, had begun shuffling a pack of Tarot cards, and Zeke, finding nothing else useful to do, was pestering Jonathan's raven Nightmare. That is, he was until the compartment door slid open and a trio of first years poked their heads in. Jonathan's teeth began to grind, his eyes opening slightly, and Tegan immediately tossed her black uniform robe over her suitcase. There wasn't much that needed to be said between anyone in the compartment, the white-blonde hair on the front boy told everyone in there who it was and why they should be wary.
"Pardon but do you know where Harry Potter might be?" the boy asked. Tegan got the impression he only needed to look at the robes of the four in the room, all from somewhat wealthy wizarding families at the very least, to know he needed to be polite.
"Not a clue," Zeke cut in quickly, knowing Jonathan wouldn't want to speak and whatever ghost of an accent Tegan had might give away her family immediately, "didn't even know he was on the train. That's pretty interesting, though."
"Isn't it?" the boy beamed, "Say, what house are you four in?"
"We're all in Slytherin," Pamela replied, seeming somewhat guarded, unsurprisingly, "are you hoping to join us?"
Jonathan's teeth ground together even louder, in such a way that there was no doubt the first year couldn't hear it. If he could, he was willfully ignoring the sound, because he happily responded to Pamela's question.
"But of course," he puffed out his chest proudly, "I don't know a pureblood who wouldn't." He paused and looked Pamela up and down. Jonathan's teeth grinding came to a halt and he motioned for Pamela to hide her hands, which were calloused with dirt so deep under her fingernails that she'd painted them dark green in a futile attempt to hide it. The warning came too late, however, and the halt to Jonathan's grinding teeth hand given Malfoy a hint to look at everyone more closely. He likely noticed, as most did when first looking at the trio, that they had markedly well-tailored robes, though Pamela's were frequently sporting frayed ends, as was the case with her entire family, herbologists and potion makers, the lot of them.
"Are you all purebloods?" he asked.
"Nope," Jonathan and Tegan finally spoke, in perfect unison, but after a moment Jonathan added, "Tegan and I are half-bloods."
"Oh," the first-year seemed surprised, but seemingly shrugged it off, side-eyeing the two, who had so quietly seethed and shifted to hide their blood-lineage or something like that. Tegan had done so for a markedly different reason than Jonathan, but they'd had the same motive in the end.
Then his eyes drifted up to the luggage above and he noticed the "Cheyne" engraved and filled in silver on Jonathan's pitch black trunk. Just like that, he was scared, and he was gone.
No one in Great Britain talked about the Cheynes. They were a wealthy family of witches and wizards with a reputation unlike any other. They were best known for being uniformly sorted into Slytherin or Ravenclaw, and almost all of them were said to have corvids as their patronous. They weren't Dark Wizards, but like any dangerous wizarding family, you didn't actively go looking to piss one off, they were good with potions and even better with illusions and hexes. Jonathan was included in this group, being their year's favorite of their quite biased potions master, every year had one, and such students were always in Slytherin. The favorite of the year below them happened to be Tegan's fiery and almost too Gryffindor-like sister Melody, who many believed had no place in the Slytherin house, and who made up for her sheer unwillingness to behave in class with her brilliant potion making.
"Well," Jonathan spoke up, kicking the compartment door shut, "I think my last name alone sufficiently scared at least two years off of his life."
"How does a family of Dark Wizards develop a fear of non-Dark Wizards?" Pamela asked.
"You garner a reputation of scaring everyone half to death and then milk it for all it's worth."
That took longer than it should've and I'm sorry for that, chapter 2 will be up soon and I am getting back on track with this.
Stay tuned!
-The Jashinist
PS: This will also be up on Ao3