First day as a Slytherin

'Sophia's' backstory. Reaching out to Thorfinn. Was advised in a review recently to use pairing labels so in case my first attempt wasn't clear, let me clearly state: this will be Thorfinn/Hermione! She might dance around, briefly, with other characters but she will end up with Thorfinn at the end of this story!

Hermione opened her eyes. For a moment she thought she was back in her old dorm, until she saw the green canopy and silver drapes. Then she remembered. She'd been thrown back in time, for some unknown reason, and now she was not only a Slytherin but also Snape's daughter, to boot! She peeped out of the drapes. Luckily none of the other girls were awake yet. She picked out a fresh set of clothes and went to take a shower. When she got back, feeling more alert, some of the others were awake.

"Good morning, Sophia." Greeted Daphne Greengrass. She and Pansy Parkinson were discussing what outfits they wanted to wear. Millicent Bulstrode jumped up, grabbed clothes and left without a word. Tracy Davis tentatively smiled at Hermione who smiled back shyly.

"So Professor Snape is your dad?" Pansy asked boldly.

"Yes, he is. Excuse me. He wanted to see me as soon as I was ready, something about my timetable." Hermione hastily excused herself and darted out of the dorm. On her way down the shallow steps leading to the common room, she tripped and almost fell. Bracing for an impact, she squealed in surprise as she was caught and set back on her feet. She looked up and Rowle was staring down at her, amused.

"Watch it, firstie, you could really hurt yourself like that." He chuckled. Hermione rolled her eyes.

"I told you Rowle, my name isn't firstie! Its Sophia or Snape, whichever you prefer to use!" she scolded him.

"Hmm, yes. I forgot that but then again I like calling you firstie. So I think I'll keep calling you that." He winked at her as he headed out of the common room.

Hermione rolled her eyes. Of course, the annoying boy would settle on the most annoying nickname he could find! She left behind him and went to Snape's office. She knocked on the door and was bidden to enter.

"I just wanted to say thank you. Both for believing me and for helping me as much as you have. You could have just dumped me into Dumbledore's lap and washed your hands of the whole mess but you didn't. So thank you. I'll be the best Snape daughter I can be." She grinned at him mischievously and was surprised but pleased to see an answering smile on his face.

"Just be intelligent and snarky (like me) and above all, don't be insufferable! I WILL still call on you in class. I WILL NOT show you any favoritism. But I will also expect you, maybe not be on your best behavior, but at least do not embarrass 'your father.' He looked at her sternly. He handed her a timetable. Just before Hermione left, he had one last piece of advice.

"If you expect to get through this without any big mess-ups, Miss Granger, I would suggest that you stop thinking of yourself as Hermione Granger and start thinking of yourself as Sophia Snape." He looked pensive.

"Sir, I'm used to being affectionate with my father. If I'm to make it through this, thinking of you as my father, would I be permitted to,, hug you,, once in a while?" she wondered quietly. Snape looked surprised, then he slowly nodded. He stood to escort her out the door. Just as he opened the door, she took the opportunity to hug him tightly. He stiffened but then he returned the hug.

"One last thing. Given your behavior towards one another, I'm going to assume you and Rowle have clashed before. Granted, he may not be the ideal companion that you'd prefer, but he knows the true situation. Therefore, I'd suggest you keep in close contact with him. There may be times you'd like to talk or just relax. Being around a teacher and a Headmaster is not conductive to relaxing." Snape advised her.

She understood the underlying message. Ignoring Rowle was not an option. She herself had immediately suspected this whole thing had something to do with him, given that she'd shown up at his feet. She headed back to the Slytherins dorms, willing herself to be Sophia Snape.

Present time

Thorfinn Rowle was chasing after a Bludger. No sooner had he knocked it away than he paused, an image flitting through his head. He blinked bemusedly and kept on practicing. After practice was over, he was leaving the locker rooms. He paused again and thought: 'why had he been thinking of Hermione Granger? A Gryffindor Mudblood and best friend of Harry Potter? A girl he hadn't set eyes on since her fourth year?'

At Hogwarts, there was an uproar in the Headmaster's office. It appeared as though they had lost a student. Severus Snape curled his lip. Apparently, Hermione Granger, Potter's best friend had gone to the library and disappeared. Nobody had seen her since the end of the school day. Ginny Weasley was quite noticeably upset because she had been the last one to see the girl. Madam Pince remembered seeing her come in but didn't know if she had left and the other students who had been present had last seen her going into the stacks. When pointed out, the row of stacks she had been seen entering had yielded no clue except a yearbook laying in the floor.

He backed away from everyone else as he tried to figure out where the clever little know it all might now be. Suddenly he was startled by the briefest sensation: 'like that of being hugged'. He looked around. Nobody had seen his strange behavior or reaction. After he went back to his private quarters, he paced his living room. 'What had that been?' he closed his eyes and concentrated on the memory of the feeling. Suddenly he felt it again, only this time it was accompanied by a name, Sophia Snape. He frowned. 'Who the devil was that? His mother had been Eileen and he had no sisters!'

In the past

Sophia Snape came back to the dorms with her timetable and working out a cover story for why she was only just getting acquainted with her 'dad'. When she had first come to Hogwarts and realized there was actually a class system, she'd done research on the various magical families. She'd found there had a magical family of Granger's but they had left England for France and scattered out from there. Since her new identity was from France, she decided to stick as close to the truth as possible. The family she had come up with did exist, after all, in HER SIXTH YEAR time!

She grabbed her bag. Looking at her timetable, she saw that her first lesson of the day would be Ancient Runes. She wouldn't have to worry about Potions until the next day. She was coming up with a plan but it involved Rowle. 'Dad' was right. There was no way she'd ever relax around or idly talk to a teacher or the Headmaster. Another student, on the other hand, especially the one who actually knew her true identity, was an ideal companion. Even if he wasn't her preferred choice of a companion.

"Sophia!" she still wasn't used to hearing Pansy Parkinson address her almost as a friend. She headed over to the other girl, seeing the other first year girls were also gathered around her. The first year boys were hovering around the edges of the group. She suddenly thought of trying to get to know Theodore, if only because doing it now might trickle back down to her time and help Ginny! She smiled at them as they watched her approach.

"So." Draco paused. "Professor Snape's daughter?" he looked bewildered, as though it had never occurred to him that the teachers had lives outside the school.

"Yes, I'm Snape's daughter. Hard to believe but I didn't know it myself until recently. My mother passed and the powers that be at Beauxbatons decided it was time to pass me off to him. I always thought of myself as Sophia Granger," rolling the r's and drawing the a sound out. "It never occurred to me that my father was anyone but Pierre Granger of Paris, France."

"Granger? You're a Mudblood?!" Draco exclaimed, pulling back and wrinkling his nose at her.

"The Granger's in France are magical, Draco." Theo said quietly. "My cousin is married into one of the branches. There are about five different branches, if not more. I've heard of Pierre Granger. He died a long time ago, didn't he, Sophia?"

"Yes, shortly after my fifth birthday. My mother didn't talk about him much. It was an arranged marriage, you see." She said.

"So, how did your mother and Snape meet? When and where did they meet?" Pansy hopped excitedly.

Sophia smiled as she began to weave a very simple story of courtship for her star-crossed parents. She was so busy talking, she didn't notice some of the older Slytherins, including Thorfinn Rowle, come back to the common room and listen in.

"Well, my mother's parents brought her over here to visit English relatives. She always told me it was the most boring thing she ever had to do. Sit in a room with her mother and father, talking to some old biddies who couldn't half hear. Her parents were quite old themselves. They died around my ninth birthday. Mother and I lived with distant relatives after that. Mother had gone to Beauxbatons and that's where she wanted me to go. She actually talked Madame Maxime into testing me to see if I might be able to start early. Fortunately, my magic had already kicked in and she agreed." Sophia paused to gather her thoughts.

"The old aunts lived on Dragon Alley. My mother wasn't the best Potions student and got her parents to let her go to the apothecary and get Potions ingredients. She had Potions assignments to rewrite and remake. She was in danger of failing her seventh year if she couldn't make them to her teacher's satisfaction. She had to send them to him, you see, so he could grade them." She rolled her eyes. "She always said I inherited her Potion skills! Anyway, she was buying her ingredients when this man spoke to her. 'I surely hope you are not buying all those ingredients for one potion!' As it turned out, she was. She had seven potions to pass. Five of them were fairly simple, she managed to pass them. She only had two more and they were both tricky. She turned up her nose at him and said, 'Yes, I am! What business is it of yours, I might ask!'

"'No business of mine, just let me know where you are brewing so I can relocate away from there. You'll have the whole Alley leveled when you blow that potion up!' he said to her." Her enthralled audience laughed at her perfect impression of their Head of House. Thorfinn was watching her closely. He wasn't sure if he liked her better as the daughter of his Head of House or as the addled girl who claimed to have time traveled, a story he still only half believed!

"Then he offered to help her make the potion correctly. She told him she was perfectly capable of making her own potions, thank you very much! She said he didn't try to fight her about it, he shrugged and told her he would see her the next day. That evening, she tried to make the potion and it blew up her room! The next day, she went back to the apothecary and he was there waiting for her. He'd already bought her ingredients, too. The apothecary owner allowed him to brew potions in his back room. He took her back there and made her go, step by step, through the whole process. He never laid a hand on anything. She fixed her ingredients, she added them as needed. The only time he spoke was to tell her the next step or correct something she was about to mess up." She stopped to catch her breath.

"Even with his help, it still took her two tries to get that one right. Her teacher was very strict, you see. The last one was the hardest one. Between the two of them, it took five tries on that one. She didn't think she was ever going to pass it. She swore up and down that old man hated her and wanted her to have to repeat her seventh year! Her and my dad had started out fighting but then bonded over trying to get those stupid potions exactly right for that teacher. He asked her to see her textbook and she showed it to him. 'Well,' he said, 'right there is your problem. This book is outdated and useless. It's no wonder you were having trouble.' She said he sat down and started crossing out sentences and making notes all through the rest of the book. Then he gave it back and told her, 'Now you have a slight chance of passing the rest of your year.'" She closed her eyes and laughed. "My mother was thrilled that it wasn't all just her being bad at Potions."

"They had grown close while they worked on her potions. She invited him to meet her parents and the aunts. They all seemed to like him and they had no objections to her continuing to meet with him. They had one night together, just the one night. The next day her parents, claiming a family emergency, took her back to France and forbade her to talk, see or communicate with him ever again. They told her she already had a betrothal contract and she would honor it! The next day, she met Pierre Granger. By the end of the week, they were married. She said they hated each other. They just barely made it through their wedding night without killing each other! She never saw Professor Snape again. Her husband wouldn't allow her to travel anywhere. She couldn't even visit her parents. Soon after that, I was born."

"She said, for the longest time, she hated me, not realizing I wasn't Pierre's child. It wasn't until I got old enough and didn't look like either of them that she got suspicious. She did a test on me one night, after I was asleep, and while he was out of the house. It clearly showed I wasn't his. She never told anyone about that test. She was afraid he'd reject me. She always told me he was a god-awful husband but a wonderful father." Here she sat down and sighed. "It's been so long since I thought of him. He'd have meetings there at the house. Mother hated them and refused to go but he would take me right into the room with him. I even had my own little mask and robes." When she said that, the older students straightened up and the younger ones gasped, realizing she was talking about a Death Eater meeting!

Theo poked Draco, hissing at him. "See, I told you! The French Granger's are even more blood purists than your family! They train the children practically from birth!" Draco's eyes were shining at her. His parents would definitely want him to get to know this girl! Rowle saw that look and narrowed his eyes. 'Damned if the Malfoy brat was going to get near her! He'd throw the little prat off the fucking astronomy tower first!'

As if realizing what she'd slipped up and revealed, Sophia clammed up and declared she was starving for breakfast. Realizing they all needed to get a move on or risk not only missing breakfast but also being late for class, the students lined up and walked out in a large group. Rowle noted, with displeasure, that Draco and Theo had managed to get on each side of her. He was happy to see that she spoke to Theo more often than she did Draco. The rest of the day was filled with classes. Thorfinn was stopped briefly by his Head of House and told Becky Selwyn no longer presented a problem.

Strangely enough, he'd completely forgotten about her! Instead, he'd been on the lookout all day for 'his little firstie'. When he'd begun feeling possessive of the girl, he wasn't sure. He just knew he didn't want anyone else getting close to her! Friends, yeah, she could have ALL the friends she wanted! Anything more than that and the offending students would find themselves on the wrong end of his wand, facing the wrath of Rowle!

That evening, he was doing homework on one of the couches scattered through the common room. This one was considered property of the Slytherin Quidditch team. Dolohov and Yaxley, the Seeker and the Captain, were in the armchairs bookending that couch. He was so engrossed in his Potions essay that he didn't see the small figure at the end of the couch. It took Dolohov throwing a paper wad at him and jerking his thumb to the right to see Sophia.

"Firstie? Hello, come here. What's going on?" he smiled encouragingly. She inched closer and perched beside him. Her year mates were all watching in awe.

"My dad told me to talk to you. He says you're one of his best students. He received my records from Beauxbatons today." Here, Sophia cringed. Thorfinn bit his lip to keep from laughing. He could almost guess what she was about to say! "He, uh, he wasn't too thrilled when he, um, saw my." She capped her hands over her face. "My Potions grade. I'm basically failing Potions. This will actually be my second year of basic Potions. To put it mildly, he was not thrilled. At all! So he said I'd better bring the grade up or else. Then he demanded to see my textbook. He actually threw it away! 'The same old useless, outdated garbage!' Sophia seemed like that particular action had really caught her by surprise.

"It must have been the same kind of textbook mother used to use. He told me he didn't want me to even look at the textbook from now on, that everything I needed, references, sources, everything was always written on the board and left there for the entire class period. He said until I managed to get my grade up, however, he wanted one of his older students to mentor my progress. That's when he specifically mentioned you."

Yaxley and Dolohov were sniggering quietly, knowing how Thorfinn was with the first year students. Thor, himself, stared at her for a moment. 'Surely Snape had to know what he was letting this girl in for!' he smiled, reached and tugged her hair. "Of course, I'll mentor you." He said with a sweet, wide grin. She let out a deep breath, smiled and thanked him before running back to her own group.

Thorfinn went to take a shower before bed. He'd been considering the many ways he would be able to torment little Sophia. As he was drying off, he had a thought. A thought so wickedly delicious, he had to smile at himself in the mirror. 'Oh, little Sophia was in for a huge shock!' normally he'd have to wait until after classes or until she emerged from Gryffindor Tower to catch her. But now, now, she was in Slytherin, his territory. It was open season on the little witch until she was able to disappear back to her own time!

A/N: From here until she's back to her own time, Hermione Granger will now be Sophia Snape. I'll not be writing from both points of view, else I'll mess my own self up. You'll see why as I go further into the story. Sections of story in italics will indicate what is being changed while she's in the past.