In which Lily is not sorted into Gryffindor, Wizard Lenin begins scheming once again after a significant break, and the sorting hat begins to show more than a few performance issues.
It seemed, given the stares of the students on her as she sat on a stool with a hat on her head where Rabbit had previously been, that this moment was the culmination of Eleanor Potter's entire existence. Unfortunately for them, and perhaps for the idea that was Eleanor Potter, Ellie Potter didn't really exist and never had. For Lily, it was all a bit anticlimactic, as it always was.
"Oh dear," the hat on her head said. "This won't do at all."
She fully agreed with the talking hat and she found that a telling statement in and of itself.
The rest of the trip to Hogwarts had been uneventful. She hadn't seen the pimp-in-training or his robot minions, although she had looked for them. You didn't see minion robots like that every day. Mostly, she'd stuck next to Ron as he'd prattled on about the glories of Gryffindor the house his family had been sorted into for generations and that he was fully expected to get into.
According to Ron, the breakdown of the four houses was quite simple: Gryffindor was the best, Slytherin was full of evil psychopaths that ate babies, Ravenclaw was for nerds, and Hufflepuff was eh. It seemed like a simpler explanation than Hogwarts a History had given and since Lily didn't really like overthinking the pseudo glitch manipulating society, she was willing to take him at his words even if she could feel Wizard Lenin disagreeing wordlessly in her head.
"You have to get into Gryffindor." he'd concluded with a bright grin, restating himself from earlier that day with more confidence.
"Well if I have to, then I suppose I have no real choice." That's what necessity was after all.
Stepping off the train, he frowned at her a bit, as if that wasn't quite the answer he had wanted from her, but he didn't say anything about it. Instead, they walked over to the giant shouting "firs' years firs' years."
At least, she thought he was a giant. He was certainly big enough, looking quite wider and taller than even Uncle Vernon. He also had an impressive beard which just gave off that giant feel to him; if he had been wearing plaid and had a blue ox been around, she wouldn't have been surprised if he was Paul Bunyan.
"He's employed at a school filled with children. You know, the more decisions I see Dumbledore make, the more questionable I find his whole thought process." Wizard Lenin commented inside her head and through her brain, she saw images of herself locked starving in a cupboard, Professor Snape entering her bedroom and later accompanying her in an ill-fitting suit, and finally this giant of a man flashing through her head.
She eyed the giant warily then. She didn't see any skulls, and so far, he hadn't talked about grinding the bones of Englishmen into bones, so she wasn't sure if she should be concerned or not. Although, considering her deathless status as Death of the universe, she supposed it wouldn't be her who she should be concerned for it. Ron would be the one who would stay digested.
"Hagrid here was found to be responsible for the petrification of several students and the death of one in 1943 by raising and setting loose a giant, intelligent, man eating spider in the school that he affectionately called Aggy. And he's a half-giant, not a giant, so eating Englishmen probably comes a little too close to cannibalism for comfort." Wizard Lenin explained.
"Was he responsible?" Lily asked, catching Wizard Lenin's clever wording in his explanation. Found responsible was not the same as responsible after all.
"Had the spider continued to grow unmolested in the castle walls, I'm certain there would have been several dead students by the end of the year. As it was though, no, the spider never got a chance. Hagrid had the misfortune of playing the role of Occam's Razor; he provided the simplest and most reasonable explanation for the terror stalking the walls, and the wizards took him gratefully."
It was left unsaid, but Lily highly suspected that it was Wizard Lenin who had, at least in some manner, been responsible for the events instead. However, being in the business of drugs, blood, and money herself, she was hardly one to judge and besides, one could hardly have a revolution without violence.
As she passed by the half-giant with Ron, he took a look at her and beamed. "If it isn't little Ellie Potter!"
"Oh, hi, do we know each other?" Lily asked. She hadn't remembered running into him during the whole Diagon Alley thing and other than that, she had never really gone into the shopping district as Ellie.
"It's Hagrid! I knew you when you were just a baby, carried you in a motorbike to your aunt and uncle. You were so small then." He sniffed dramatically, as if the very memory of her as an infant was touching.
"Oh, neat. I don't really remember things from that early." she said as he continued to beam at her; but it didn't seem as if he expected her to reminisce with him and instead nodded. Next to her Ron, shifted impatiently as if waiting to reclaim her attention so he could continue talking about the troll they had to slaughter in order to be sorted.
"Who's your bunny friend?" Hagrid asked looking at Rabbit still sitting on top of her head as if he was an adorable little creature rather than a terror from beyond the universe. Then again, Hagrid had apparently once had a man eating spider for a pet so perhaps he was merely unconcerned.
"This is Rabbit. He's not actually a rabbit though, he's… something else." Given the reaction of everyone else so far, she felt it would be best to keep the explanation of Rabbit short. Hagrid nodded, not in understanding, but as if he felt nodding was necessary.
"Well, he's got to go to the school with your trunk and everything else. He'll be just fine."
"That," Lily said flatly, "would be a singularly bad idea."
Hagrid pursed his lips. "I know it's hard to stay away from your friends…"
"Rabbit is not a friend." she interrupted. "And the consequences of leaving him unmonitored are beyond even my imagination."
She didn't manage to convince him though and soon enough, Rabbit was off her head and staring back at her with cold black eyes from atop her trunk, looking like the ancient and terrible being he truly was. She wondered if she should warn them that Hogwarts was unlikely to be standing by the time they got there, if Rabbit was travelling on ahead. However, none of them had listened to her warnings thus far, so she decided she'd let their future be a surprise.
Other than that, the journey had been fairly boring. There had been boats, lanterns, castles, and all sorts of things, but nothing of any real significance. Her only real surprise was that the castle was somehow still standing and populated even with Rabbit sent faithfully on ahead. As far as she could tell, no damage had been wrought so far.
So it seemed that Ellie Potter's life had reached its first climax with an old singing hat on her head and hundreds of eyes on her small black robed form.
The hat talked a bit like Wizard Lenin, not out loud but in her head. The difference was that it lacked inflection. It had some shallow resemblance to emotion, but it lacked Wizard Lenin's undertone of unspoken thought and emotion. It seemed flat in comparison.
A program, she decided, a very sophisticated program but it was artificial intelligence nonetheless.
"Don't... please... stop thinking." the hat said haltingly. "It makes the process very difficult if you think."
"I don't think I can. Not think, I mean. Besides, I sort of like being sentient. Resorting to the Dursley status would be almost sad, I think." she commented. The hat had not been programmed well enough to respond to such queries.
"I think that perhaps our combined presence is a bit much. It was only designed to sort one head at a time after all." Wizard Lenin commented with hesitance. She could feel the gears in his head turning, as if he was slowly being drawn to the conclusion that she had just broken the sorting hat.
"Surely it doesn't make that much of a difference. All it has to do is shout out a word."
She could almost see Wizard Lenin, in his usual black and red, shrugging slightly with a bemused expression.
"Spells and enchantments aren't as flexible as your glitches, they are designed for certain conditions and perform very well within those conditions. However as with a program, situations that were not accounted for can crash the magic causing it to… 'malfunction' is the word, I suppose. As with memory charms, and I suspect any charms having to do with the mind, the arithmancy used to design this hat did not take into account a mind such as yours, where there is more than one consciousness present. I doubt the founders dreamed such a thing was possible when they designed the stupid thing."
The hat did not say "error" after that explanation, but she could tell it was close to saying it. It seemed very distracted on her head, darting between her and Wizard Lenin in confusion. She also wondered when Wizard Lenin had learned so much about programming since he had forbidden her to even look at the books. If he had known so much about it, she didn't know why he was so touchy when she suggested his robot form; like Robocop, only cooler.
" 'Robocop, only cooler'; that perfectly summarizes why I will not allow you to design and create a body for me using robotics." he responded shortly, as if that very name gravely insulted him.
"Doesn't it have a default or something, an else clause?" Lily wondered with a sigh as they continued to sit there in silence. She could feel the room going quiet, as if the long and drawn out process was simply adding more tension to the monumental event.
"I doubt it; for one thing, it would be highly unethical for the founders to have labelled one house as being the default, although many would argue that this is Hufflepuff's function. They also probably never considered that they'd run into this problem. Eleven-year-olds, no matter how complicated they are, aren't you." Wizard Lenin concluded.
So they sat there, the hat still on her head, slowly but surely losing the free memory space to communicate via language with her and instead appearing stuck on some infinite loop of darting between her and Wizard Lenin wondering which one was the bona fide student to be sorted. She was starting to wonder if the thing would ever recover.
In her head, Wizard Lenin was becoming almost philosophical, thinking back to that night his body had been burned to cinders by green death lasers. In his mind's eye, she saw herself as she had been as a five-year-old; a thin, bright-haired, and very odd little girl who had bled power as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Even then, though he had not thought it at the time, she had never looked truly human.
If a dark lord could not touch her, how had they expected a hat to fare?
"All we have to do is just shout a house, right? Do we even need the hat?" Lily asked once it seemed as if far too much time and more had passed. Most of the children had been under for a few seconds, the long ones had been under for maybe half of a minute. Lily's time was extending far past any of these.
"I suppose, it doesn't seem as if anyone is going to do it for you."
Something in Wizard Lenin's mind sparked, something that had been still for a long time, and gears began to turn once again.
"Alright then, what are my choices again?"
She lifted the hat slightly so she could stare more easily into the sea of students marking the different tables as Wizard Lenin offered explanation for each.
"The green and silver table with the very wealthy and elitist looking children is Slytherin. It is known for ambition, cunning, and cleverness. However, this is only what is known for. It actually tends to house either the racist government elite who have been conditioned to follow in their father's footsteps or else the abused and desperate children who grow up only knowing their own ruthlessness as a guide."
After a pause, Wizard Lenin reflected and said, "Given that it was my house as a school boy, I would say that it's the best of the four."
Her eyes flicked to the right and settled on a table featuring blue and bronze students who were looking at her with a little more anticipation than the last table had.
"Ravenclaw is known for housing intelligent and curious students, those inclined to become academics. I never had any particular problem with Ravenclaws, however academics without purpose was never my inclination."
She'd only just looked at Hufflepuff before Wizard Lenin cut in, "Hell would freeze over before you would belong in Hufflepuff, don't even bother looking."
Finally, her eyes rested on that table of red and gold. Red was a good color, it was Wizard Lenin's color at the end of things, as well as her own hair color. At the table, she could see the rest of the Weasley gaggle that she had met at the station, as well as Neville Longbottom and Hermione Granger.
"I doubt you could be a Gryffindor if you tried."
"Why not? It's just a word after all." Lily said. And it was expected of her, as Ron had pointed out. It seemed the eyes that looked at her constantly looked at Gryffindor.
"Gryffindor is supposed to represent honor, nobility, valor, and heroism; words that you can't even comprehend because they're subjects so alien to you. What it does represent, what it has transformed into, is a house of hooligans who are constantly attempting to prove themselves to be more than they were meant to be and failing hopelessly; the incarnation of youthful stupidity and foolishness. Lily, having lived in your head for ten years now, I can tell you that Gryffindor escapes you in every capacity." Wizard Lenin said.
He was taking his position of sorting hat very seriously, she found herself thinking, or perhaps he had something against Gryffindor. He didn't seem to like it, looking at them, but it wasn't so much the idea of the house, although he found such things like honor and nobility to be wastes of time as much as she did. No, she saw that when he looked at them, all he could see were hypocrites who thought themselves morally superior than the rest of the world based on the words of a talking hat.
For that alone, her path to Gryffindor was closed. Perhaps he was right, because there were things she couldn't understand that even Wizard Lenin could grasp. Honor, valor, heroism, these things were by-products of her actions but they were not the actions themselves.
"No, I'm afraid, Lily, there's only one house for you if we're going to do this honestly."
In her head, an image of a younger Wizard Lenin appeared, a green and silver tie on his neck, and pale blue eyes burning ahead with all the determination and dissatisfaction of the proletariat.
"Really? Slytherin?"
She looked back over at them. She didn't eat children, so she didn't see how she fit Ron's criteria of Slytherin.
"Lily, if you aren't sorted into Slytherin, then Slytherin has no reason to exist. Manipulation is second nature to you. You lack cunning only because you have no use for it. I think it's clear from your actions regarding everything in this universe that there is no other place for you."
That was true enough, she supposed. Most of her life was spent coercing the Dursleys through operant conditioning, as well as sometimes classic conditioning, into giving her what she wanted. Drug lording was certainly an art form in getting junkies to pay their bills on time. So she supposed it was somewhat true that her life did seem to revolve in getting the uncooperative obstacles that took the form of people out of her way, but even so, she felt as if something was lacking in that.
She also felt that Wizard Lenin was scheming. He wasn't looking at the headmaster but his thoughts were more on the old man than they were on Lily's future house. Wizard Lenin felt that Dumbledore fully expected, and desired, his Girl-Who-Lived to be a Gryffindor or perhaps even a Hufflepuff and would be highly unnerved to have her within reach of the Malfoys and the other pureblood families who had once joined Wizard Lenin's revolution. It would be easier, to get the revolution rolling once again if Wizard Lenin had access to these wealthy influential children and to have access to them, Lily need access to them as well.
They'd be much more receptive to a Girl-Who-Lived who did not follow all the rules of the political faction known as 'the light'.
"You want me to recruit the mini pimp?" Lily asked wondering what possible use he could have with him, unless he really was considering his robot golem minions.
"Mini pimp, as you call him, is exceedingly wealthy and his father practically owns the government. The government Lily Riddle doesn't own, that is. He certainly owns the only reputable paper in magical Britain and thus most of the public's opinions. Taking the country is much easier when you have money and a good newspaper behind you." Wizard Lenin cut in, mildly annoyed that she had been snooping in on his thoughts.
She surveyed the Slytherin table. They all looked kind of small to support a revolution, even if she wanted to recruit for Wizard Lenin.
She wasn't sure why he wanted her to do it anyway, he was very protective of his movement, and she'd always assumed that he'd want to do his own speeches and recruiting.
"That's not the point."
"Really? I kind of thought it was the point."
"No." he said shortly. "The point is that it's a chance to see what they'll make of a wrench in their plans. The best way to know your enemy is to see how they twitch when they're in trouble. And besides, if you remember, it appears that Severus Snape is the head of Slytherin's house and it will be much easier to make him suffer if we have close access to him as a student in his house."
Well, she couldn't say no to an argument like that.
The hat seemed to have almost lost all processing ability in the meantime, but she supposed it was worth nudging it to see if it was still functioning correctly.
"Yo, hat, we've come to a decision. You can shout Slytherin. Or not, you know, whatever you feel like doing."
The hat wasn't responding.
"Lenin, I think we broke the hat."
"You broke the hat Lily." Wizard Lenin corrected stiffly, reminding her that he had once attended this school and his sorting had hardly resulted in a broken hat.
"Well, it's just a hat." Lily said. She'd fixed a lot of things, some very complicated. Houses, doors, stoves, what was a hat in comparison to those.
"It's not just a… Oh, why do I even bother? Go ahead and try, who knows, the result will certainly be more interesting than the original was."
With Wizard Lenin's permission, she closed her eyes and concentrated, focusing on that feel of splintering in the air around her, of the universe in flux and giving it the vision of a talking hat that resembled thought but did not truly own it.
"SLYTHERIN!" the thing shouted, on cue.
"There we go, problem solved."
She stood with a grin and placed a hat on the chair before realizing that the room was still silent each and every one in the room staring at her in fascinated horror as if they had just seen a great airplane disaster and had not yet come to terms with the dead people falling out of the sky.
"Just keep walking." was Wizard Lenin's advice.
So she walked purposefully down to the green and silver table, each member staring at her with open mouths, as if they still couldn't quite believe she was walking towards them.
"Hey, hey, hey everybody. I have completed the great trial of having a talking hat on my head and thus have entered this fine establishment of glitch manipulation and thus have brought honor and glory to my family."
"What the hell is Potter doing here?" a rather bulky eleven year old with dark eyes and thin hair said with a frown.
"The hat shouted a word. I wasn't aware that there was any other prerequisite. If there are trolls that need slaying, then I can and will slay them if that's what you require." Lily explained, taking a seat across from him and next to the mini pimp. She smiled at her new house mates who were showing no move to smile back.
Strange, that had always been the polite course of action to take. Perhaps she had been wrong on that as well, as it was if her cheerful smile made them exceedingly uncomfortable.
"Well, clearly, Potter knows the best house to pick, Nott." the mini pimp said, coming to her defense slowly as if trying to decide if he was pleased or not that she was sitting next to him. He turned to her with raised eyebrows. "Trolls?"
"I heard it was a possibility. However given the lack of blood and dead children, I thought that it might have gone out of fashion." she said with a shrug. As far as she could tell, unlike what Ron had said, the hat was the end all be all.
The mini pimp regarded her for a few moments, looking as if he wished to comment, and then looked away and back towards the sorting. The hat, as good as it worked for Lily, was appearing to have some trouble working correctly.
For the first couple students after her, it seemed to work fine, shouting Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw, or Hufflepuff as necessary. A couple students after her, it shouted a new house. "DEFAULT!"
They all stared at the student on the chair, a shivering thing looking horrified at the prospect of being in the dreaded Default house.
"Default?" She heard from across the table.
"Well, it does need an else clause, otherwise the enchantments would crash and the thing would break. Really, it's only reasonable." Lily explained, although she was wondering if she should, wizards weren't very reasonable creatures and she doubted they'd like the idea that she broke their fancy hat.
"There's no Default house. What does that even mean?" a girl whose face looked a bit like a pug said in a whining tone, as if the very idea of a Default offended her.
Lily was wondering why it had to mean anything; Default was clearly Default. As it was, she was wondering if she couldn't redo her sorting and switch to Default instead of Slytherin. It seemed much more exclusive and therefore cooler than the other houses. The fact that it had halted the entire sorting ceremony made it seem very important.
Professor McGonagall was staring down at the red faced and crying little girl, who thought she had failed some sort of life-altering exam if Lily was remembering correctly, in stunned shock and finally seemed to reach some decision, sending the girl rushing off to Hufflepuff. No one said a word to contradict this action and the Hufflepuff table started a forced sort of clapping when they realized the girl was coming to them.
"I guess Hufflepuff is the default house after all." Wizard Lenin commented drily in her head, as if this was what he suspected all along.
"I should have gone to Default, look how underappreciated their awesomeness is." Lily commented to Wizard Lenin.
The little Default student was trying to choke back tears through a smile at her new table and pretend like the whole thing never happened.
"There is no Default, Lily. Be happy in Slytherin, torment Snape - it's why you're here after all." Wizard Lenin added when he realized that Default not existing wasn't enough of an argument for Lily. As it was, even with the prospect of tormenting Professor Snape, she was still drawn to the house that didn't have a banner or table and was causing McGonagall and every other professor to look at the sorting hat dubiously.
That was the sort of reputation that Lily Riddle had, the kind that made everyone stop what they were doing and swivel their heads, where she walked into a bank with aviators and a jig in her step and five managers were running to her at once with detailed reports of all her accounts. If Lily Riddle had gone to Hogwarts, she would have gone to Default, the best house there never was.
"Is it too late to switch?" Lily asked the table, causing them all to glare at her as if she had just spat on their mothers in the street.
"Slytherin too dark for you, Potter?!" Nott spat with a dark look in his eyes. He might have said something else but they were all clapping to welcome some girl, Romilda Vane, into the fold. As they were sitting, she responded.
"No, it's perfectly well lit, it's just, well… Default sounds so much cooler."
"Cooler?!" the mini pimp sputtered in offense. "It isn't even a house!"
"That's not what the sorting hat says, and that thing does seem to be the authority on this sorting business." Lily noted drily. If anything, this seemed to offend her new housemates even more.
The mini pimp slammed his hands on the table and attempted to look intimidating, with his two minions looming behind him to add effect. Nott's sneer became more pronounced and would be dangerous if it wasn't on an eleven-year-old's face, and the pug-faced girl's face was turning a Vernon Dursley shade of red.
Their little Mexican Standoff was interrupted by the introduction of a final member to their house, one Blaise Zabini, and with it, the students who had been sitting near her slowly but surely moved away so that she was surrounded by the familiar bubble known as isolation. She had known that bubble well in her school days. It seemed Hogwarts wasn't that different after all.
She turned to survey the staff table. Most members were still looking at the hat with raised eyebrows, whispering to each other as if trying to decide whether or not they should do something about it.
Severus Snape was staring straight at her, death in his eyes like the mangy black crow that he was. Lily gave him a small salute and his hand that was holding a goblet of wine clenched.
Lily's eyes travelled down the line. Next to Snape was a man twitchy enough to be a junky, wearing a turban that looked rather ridiculous. It seemed every loud noise had him jumping out of his seat and looking around for the source.
Finally, they came to rest on the esteemed headmaster, the ultimate source of Wizard Lenin's frustration, a man in bright yellow robes looking like Santa Clause on a serious diet.
"Albus Dumbledore." Wizard Lenin finished for her, and for a moment it seemed as if Albus Dumbledore was staring right at her as he stood, but soon enough his eyes were turning to the room as a whole.
The room fell silent under his gaze without him even having to say a word.
"Thank you all. Welcome to Hogwarts. For those of you new and old, there are a few rules to go over this year. One is that the Forbidden Forest is forbidden, as implied by the name. Another is that the locked corridor on the third floor leads to certain death. If you feel the need to meet certain death, you may trespass as you please, but if you wish to live, I advise leaving that particular door be. The sorting hat will be inspected for next year's ceremony. With that, I give you these final words. Nitwick, blubber, tweak, DEFAULT. Thank you."
He sat back down, leaving Lily as well as everyone else to stare back at him.
"Fool." She heard the mini pimp, who now sat a decent ways away from her. "My father says it's only a matter of time until he's removed as Headmaster."
Lily thought it was the most sense that any wizard besides Wizard Lenin had ever made, certainly the best speech she had ever heard given by one of them. That very thought though caused her brain to catch on fire as Wizard Lenin's migraine of rage came in without warning.
"You will not respect Albus Dumbledore, particularly not for that performance."
There was fire in those words, cold fire that he had not used since that first day she had met him, when she was still the Girl-Who-Lived and he was still an unnamed dark lord realizing he was trapped in her head.
That was not a battle she was willing to wage, not for something as inconsequential and irrelevant as Albus Dumbledore. What battle she was to wage instead on Wizard Lenin's behalf remained unsaid but hanging in the air nonetheless. There would be blood before the year was out, she could almost taste it.
With that thought, the food appeared and they each began to dig in.
Author's Note: Now everyone can rest easily, Lily has been sorted. Really, a lot of weight was put onto this sorting ceremony, personally I never seem to take it as seriously as everyone else, but here we are with an entire chapter devoted to the ceremony. Anyway thanks to readers, reviewers, and Kurama's Foxy Rose for the beta job. Reviews, as always, are much appreciated.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter
