This is the revised copy of 'A Home, A School, An Escape'. Most of the content of the next three chapters is the same, with the addition of a few scenes throughout the chapters, and is, well, what I consider to be better written that what I previously had uploaded. If you're unwilling to go through everything again, I will have a new chapter up shortly. I hope you enjoy ;)


For many, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was merely a school. A sprawling castle and its grounds where students spent a large amount of their adolescent years. Classes that taught spells, history and potions that could be put to use in one way or another. Classmates who became fast friends, archenemies, and perhaps partners for life.

Others had come to think of the school as a second home. Their houses and friends became a second family. The teachers became mentors, guiding them through the often-stressful times to the light at the end. The turrets and halls were as familiar to them as their own rooms at home, and just as cherished.

And to some, to those desperate few, it quickly became an escape. A refuge from everything that they could not leave behind in their dreams, from the people and places which left a bad taste in mouths and a sick feeling in the stomach. Hogwarts surpassed a school, and even a home. It became their lifelines, one that they clung to with all of their strength.

Jason Black was one of those Godforsaken people. The day he received his Hogwarts letter was the day he finally recognised the meaning of hope. Nine months a year of the next seven years could be spent elsewhere, away from the harsh environment that most would hesitate to call a home. As a branch of the infamous Black family, he was used to being shunned by many of the mixed-blood wizarding communities, and extremely well versed in the pureblood propaganda that his relatives lived by, but that was not the worst of it. Not by a long way. Hogwarts was to be his saviour.