Under the collective claps and hoots emanating from the Slytherin table, Hermione mouthed the name of her assigned House with leveled disbelief. She hastily recollected herself once she felt the hat being lifted off her head. In the unsorted throng she spotted Harry's stiffened stature and look of apprehension, and felt something cold and hard prodding her chest. The boy she had been in cordial conversation with but minutes ago was gawking at her with lucent dread. Beside him, Weasley's orange eyebrows were raised, his expression perplexed, but soon dissolving to what appeared to be relief. And then Hermione recalled the condemning comment he had made on the train…
Her confidence had to remain (externally) steadfast, she thought. To eradicate any visible remnant of her fleeting shock, Hermione beamed convincingly and hopped off the stool, her body language elated. Though, inwardly, she regarded her overjoyed saunter to the Slytherin table congruous to skipping down a wooden plank, below which ravenous sharks awaited with empty bellies for their Muggle-born meal to come plummeting down into their wretched waters. She sat between two older Slytherins and fixated her attention to the subsequent first year (Neville Longbottom) sitting on the stool.
"Welcome to Slytherin, little fledgling," a boy seated left of her warmly greeted. Hermione turned to the affable smile of a seemly male. "Hermione Granger, right? I'm Terence Higgs."
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Terence," she weakly replied, shaking his extended hand.
"Wow, you're trembling, girl," he said with concern.
There was no way for her to conceal it now. "I'm sorry. I'm quite nervous…to be in Slytherin…"
Terence chuckled. "Don't feel embarrassed, Slytherin's reputation for manufacturing bad eggs precedes the very House itself! A handful of us came close to wetting ourselves when we were sorted here as first years, but I assure you, Slytherin isn't the bastion of evil that people claim it to be." Terence's assurance earned a less-limp smile from Hermione.
"Thanks for enlightening me, but there's something else…You see, I'm a Muggle-born."
"Huh? What was that?" Terence asked, for the last word of her revelation had been drowned out by the applause that followed Draco Malfoy being made a Slytherin.
She sighed. "I said I'm a Muggle-born."
Terence blinked. "Is that right? Huh…So that's what the hat meant by rarity…"
Hermione's palms were becoming damp and her heartrate more rapid―was this that thing people called nervousness? "Does…that bother you?"
"Oh, Merlin, yes," he coolly responded, his expression darkening with menace. "Remove your non-Pureblood backside from our House before we hex you into oblivion."
His change in character was so spontaneous that Hermione couldn't mask her shock: her lower lip quivered and her eyes flooded with horror. Terence then grasped her shoulder, the humanity resurrected in his eyes. "Granger, I'm joking."
She exhaled before angrily swatting off his hand. "I don't find that very amusing!"
"It's regular for a Slytherin to have a dark sense of humor, so I would advise you become a bit more thick-skinned," he whimsically said.
"You certainly come off as thick-witted," she remarked with disdain.
"Spoken as a true Slytherin! But honestly, Granger, your blood-status―"
"Better be GRYFFINDOR!" the Sorting Hat screamed.
Harry shakily approached the Gryffindor table, sporting an expression of relief. Hermione felt inexplicably crestfallen; the fear that Harry had displayed upon her Sorting was still vivid enough to cause her to re-experience the initial pang in her chest. So she sharply averted her gaze when Harry stole a rueful glance at her. Howls of "We got Potter! We got Potter!" rushed vertically down the Gryffindor table as he took his place amongst his decided Housemates.
Terence coughed. "Anyways, Granger, don't be apprehensive, your being a Muggle-born Slytherin is no cause for―"
"Muggle-born?" A dark-haired boy seated right of Hermione turned in his seat. Instantly, she was intimidated by his trollish features. She must have been quite inundated by her shock to have not noticed him the moment she'd sat down, she fearfully thought. Everything from his hulking anatomy―discernible even under his robes―to the uneven alignment and abnormal size of his teeth frightened Hermione. She laboriously suppressed a shiver invoked under his mere gaze…
"Oh, yeah, Flint!" Terence pointed to Hermione. "Granger here's a Muggle-born."
Announce it to the whole table why don't you? she mentally seethed. She was momentarily surprised by her ignominiousness. Since when was she embarrassed by her blood-status?
"Flint" studied Hermione for a few unsettling seconds, as though a witch of her status being in Slytherin was more bizarre a concept than the existence of magic, itself. If this was the response that nearly every other Slytherin would exhibit at the knowledge of her blood-status, she'd wholeheartedly assume a social life as a recluse while at Hogwarts.
"Is what he said true?" he grunted. "You a Muggle-born, Granger?"
All of her exertion was put into her indifferent stare, thus the most intrepid response she could muster was a solemn nod.
His reply was a wide, iniquitous grin that revealed the full size of his large-enough-to-frighten-away-a-pack-of-werewolves chompers. "So we've got ourselves a brown snake, this year! This suggests a rather interesting term to come, don't it? You're bound to become the source of talk throughout Slytherin once all the hype Potter's brought cools down. Maybe sooner…"
Hermione―unconsciously―scooted away from Flint and his perturbing twaddle. She realized her petite frame had pressed against Terence's torso only when she felt his breath brushing past the top of her head as he chided, "Ease off, Flint! You're spookin' her!"
"I can see," he purred before turning away.
Terence soothingly patted Hermione's shoulder.
"Marcus Flint, captain of our Quidditch team," he whispered. "Charming git, isn't he?"
"He certainly knows how welcome a new student," she said uneasily.
"Before I'm cut off again, know that not every Slytherin is as polite as I. And I'm not going to say that you won't encounter any supremacist brats. But the more decent of us won't be bothered by your presence―so long as what you lack in blood-purity you make up for with a shrewd mind."
Hermione's stomach lightened. While Terence had demonstrated his potential to be the posterchild for annoying boys everywhere, his welcoming nature was fairly endearing. She pondered the possibility of a small, golden fraction of a Hufflepuff existing somewhere past that Slytherin uniform.
"That's very sweet of you to say," she stated with a gracious smile, gradually starting to warm up to Terence.
He winked. "No problem."
Albus Dumbledore had commenced his welcoming speech. "Welcome! Welcome to a new year at Hogwarts! Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!
"Thank you!"
Hermione giggled at the eccentric headmaster's words. Following the eruption of applause, the banquet appeared before the Houses' individual tables. Animated conversations and clinks of utensils against plates soon filled the Great Hall. At the sight of the glorious repast Hermione realized she'd dedicated more time to nourishing her brain than her rumbling stomach. She began to eat, briefly feeling the emerald stare of two bespectacled eyes at the back of her head.
She didn't require 360-degree vision to know whose…