"Hello, Orochimaru!"
The former sannin immediately recognized that voice, which he had heard only on the Hogwarts Express. On his first day of school.
"Tonks...", He stretched his voice thoughtfully, turning another page of the book. "How can I help?"
"Oh, please. It's my job, as your older cousin, to help you." She grinned, pushing her chair up to Orochimaru's with the help of her wand. "What are you reading?"
"Oh, nothing," he said, lazily pushing the book aside, "copycat notes. So what do you want from me?"
"Mm, I see." Clearly she didn't understand, Tonks muttered, deciding to move on to another topic. "I wanted to ask you something. Why did you do this to them?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"You don't have to play the innocent. You're the one who set the snakes on little Malfoy and his boars, aren't you?" She smiled. "The whole of Hogwarts is buzzing about it already. Maybe they don't say a word, but the pale look on their faces when you enter the Great Hall is obvious to all."
The girl frankly started cackling at that, but when she heard the librarian's angry outburst, she immediately switched to whispering.
"Besides, you're the most like a snake at Hogwarts. Don't worry, no one at Hufflepuff condemns you for that. No one liked Malfoy. I heard that Gryffindor freshmen even wanted to throw a party to celebrate snake bites, but McGonagall stopped it."
"This is only circumstantial evidence.", Calmly he threw back. "So we should have put a seal on it after all, rather than confining ourselves to intimidation", Grudgingly, Orochimaru thought. "Of course, there was a risk that it could have somehow been detected in the medical examination. All right", he rumbled, "it's not me who needs to be afraid of trouble. It's whoever tries to get me in trouble..." Orochimaru smirked, tucking a small book with the time-worn inscription "Horcruxes" into his sleeve.
One autumn day, Orochimaru noticed that routine days were disrupted by some sort of unhealthy frenzy. Since he preferred not to have any contact with the other students, he only found out that it was Halloween when he arrived in the great hall.
"What a strange holiday. Lots of kids, dressed up in fancy costumes, going around other people's houses and trying to scare people while begging for candy. I don't know about now, but in my day, this holiday would not have caught on. Too many people got to see real monsters in human bodies during the war to be scared of ugly costumes", He grinned.
In all this time, Orochimaru still hadn't had time to survey the entire castle to find a good place for the lab, which infuriated him immensely.
"I need a large enough, yet unattended, room that no one will think to look for when I put genjutsu on it."
With these thoughts in mind, Orochimaru followed the rest of the students to a charms lesson. A lesson he couldn't send a shadow clone to this time, since practice was promised that day.
"I need to talk to Dumbledore about this. I don't want to waste my time attending inherently useless classes. Flitwick and McGonagall's lectures may be interesting, but they are seriously behind my pace. The only thing I need is full access to the Hogwarts library, and room for practice and research. While I can practice in abandoned classrooms, I need a lab for research. Which brings me back to my first problem..."
"Children, repeat after me. Vin-gar-di-um Le-vi-O-sa!" - Spelled out the half goblin, making sweeping motions with his wand.
Orochimaru didn't want to make silly shouts to the whole class, so he just silently waved his wand, reciting in his head the formula he had already learned, not paying attention to the scoring from the professor, and the tired look from some fellow students, who were already used to some of his antics.
"Why not teach the children silent witchcraft right away? It's incredibly easy, after all. Even the dumbest genies never call out the names of their techniques. Why give your opponent a chance to use a counter technique?"
"You're mispronouncing the spell!" A girlish voice rang out. "It's not Le-vi-o-soo, it's Le-vi-O-sa!"
"Hermione Granger", Immediately he remembered the little Gryffindor girl's name. "Wouldn't call her an Itachi-level genius, but as far as I know, she's already mastered the second-year curriculum. And when you consider the fact that she wasn't even born into the clan, but she's already surpassed the generic wizards... Well, have to see if she's interested in knowledge, not grades. Maybe she'd make a good assistant, if I could get the squeamishness that is so peculiar to the locals off of her. The main thing is not to burn myself on her like I did with Anko."
Stopping to pay attention to the other children in the class, Orochimaru went back to his business, this time trying to pick up his quill again, but not using his wand.
"As much as I try to channel magic as I do with my wand, the standard spells are totally inadequate for this."
Orochimaru had already learned how to properly blend the yin-chakra to keep nature's energy under control, but it wasn't enough. Attempting to repeat the wand movements with his finger again, he achieved only a harmless release of magic through his fingertip. Orochimaru searched for books on wandless magic in the wilds of the Restricted Section for quite some time, but so far he had found nothing but shamanistic rituals from Africa.
When Orochimaru saw the feather shrouded in magic begin to rise slowly, he couldn't help but chuckle.
"That's the easiest spell in the textbook, isn't it? Maybe I should try sewing the wand into my hand after all."
"Troll in the dungeon! Thought you ought know..."
After these words, Professor Quirrell, whose lessons Orochimaru tried his best to ignore, fainted.
"Only rank four...", He thought sadly. "Ouch, okay. I wanted to go to the Forbidden Forest today anyway, to relieve some stress on the local beasts. At least I'm going to stretch my legs."
Waiting until no one was paying attention to him in the commotion, Orochimaru applied an invisibility technique so that he could fly over the students' heads in quick leaps.
"Just as I thought, there's no one in the dungeon. Either he managed to escape from there, or my suspicions about Quirrell are justified after all."
But running a little closer, Orochimaru was able to spot another magical signature.
"I wonder if anyone else wanted to test their powers?", He smiled. "Then I'd better hurry, lest my prey be stolen."
When Orochimaru was already approaching the troll, who was diligently pounding into the entrance to the women's bathroom, he immediately removed his invisibility.
"Somebody's hunt didn't go well." Orochimaru grinned, walking leisurely toward the tall creature, who had managed to break through the entrance with his cudgel after all.
Following him, Orochimaru, who was driven by curiosity to discover the daredevil's identity, made a surprised face when he could make out the small feet that were visible from below the stall.
"Junior?", He thought, not noticing as the troll's attention suddenly shifted to him. "What a stupid..."
When the troll slowly darted at him with his club, Orochimaru didn't rush to dodge in any way, but only put his right hand up in the direction of the flying weapon.
The troll was immensely surprised to see his cudgel helplessly scattered in his hand.
"Disappointingly"
It was obvious that self-preservation instincts were foreign to the creature, for instead of fleeing in fright, the troll began angrily shaking his feet on the floor, and waving his arms in all directions, making a leap toward his target.
Orochimaru, looking disdainfully at the creature rushing toward him, began to accumulate chakra in his fist to make a swift lunge a moment later.
Small, even for a human, Orochimaru's fist met the mountain troll's huge fist.
A rather surreal sight opened the eyes of Hermione Granger, whose head was sticking out through the ajar door. She stared in unbelievable amazement at the freshman from the other department with whom she had made an unspoken bet back in the first week.
"He's going to die, isn't he?", Hermione thought, staring helplessly at Harry Potter frozen in place, who was staring at the fist flying at him with surprising calmness.
Hermione was about to raise her wand to try to use at least some of the battle spells she had had time to learn, even though she knew that all in vain, since the troll's hide was resistant to magic, and it would be better to leave the boy altogether to save herself.
But when the troll's fist was within inches of Harry Potter's face, causing a terrified Hermione to almost faint, the troll suddenly disappeared.
When she looked back in the direction of the loud sound that sounded somewhere on the side, Hermione was horrified to see the bloody corpse of the missing troll stuck in the heavily cracked wall.
"I wonder if it will be the same with the dragon?"
"What's going on here?", Minerva exclaimed, bursting into the ruined bathroom with her wand at the ready.
She had already noticed Orochimaru from the side of the entrance, so her question didn't seem strange to any of the professors standing behind her.
But once inside, she could see the full picture, which made her stand silently in place with her mouth gaping in amazement.
"Orochimaru, my boy!" exclaimed the smiling headmaster, who was trailing a procession of professors. "How was the hunt?"
These words seemed to knock the ground out from under the feet of the astonished professors, who had previously been warily looking at the boy, who with a bloody robe stood serenely ten meters from the dead troll. Except for Snape, of course.
"Albus!", Pomona exclaimed. "This is no time for your jokes. The boy needs to go to the hospital immediately..."
But she, too, fell silent as she saw the named boy pull out his wand with a calm face, and apply a silent Evanesco on himself, revealing that there was not a scratch on him, and all the blood clearly belonged to the troll smeared on the wall.
The room fell back into deep silence.
I remember that I should have posted it back on the 8th. But due to a computer breakdown, I was trivially unable to do so. So I apologize.