Harry Gets Sorted - 1. Chapter 1

The black haired, eleven year old wizard sat on the stool, and he looked out upon the Great Hall of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

He looked around at all of the students, the ghosts, the floating candles, the enchanted ceiling, and anything else to try to take his mind off of the churning of his stomach. The last thing he needed, the last thing he wanted, was to throw up at his new school in full view of the entire student body and the whole teaching faculty.

He heard all of the whispered conversations running around the Great Hall; it had started as soon as his name had been called out. He tried to pick out who was doing the whispering, but he couldn’t make out any of the details; he wondered just how many of those whispers were about him.

He watched Sally-Anne Perks as she trotted off to join her house’s table, and then he saw the blond boy who had so irked him in Madam Malkin’s Robes for All Occasions.

Before he could take anything else in, the stern looking witch, whom Hagrid had earlier addressed as Professor McGonagall, plopped the raggedy looking Sorting Hat on his head, just as she had done with those students who had come before him. Unlike the other students, including the cute Malfoy boy, the Hat seemed to be struggling where to place him. In spite of his deepest fears, the damned Hat wanted to put him in Slytherin!

But why did that bother him so much?

Sure, Voldemort had been in Slytherin, and sure, He Who Must Not Be Named had killed his parents, along with who knew how many other witches, wizards, and muggles.

Hagrid, who for some reason he trusted implicitly, had told him at Diagon Alley ‘There’s not a witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t in Slytherin’.

Aside from that, he had no real reason to object to being in Slytherin.

Surely, Voldemort would still have killed his parents had he been in Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw, and perhaps, just perhaps, there had even been kids who had once been in the great and noble Gryffindor House who had crossed over to join You Know Who.

Harry doubted very much that every single witch and wizard throughout all of history, who had ever done anything even remotely illegal, had all been in Slytherin, and that the other three houses were as pure as the driven snow.

Harry thought back over his life. He certainly didn’t hate muggles; he knew that much. After all, his mother had been a muggle born witch, but then again, could he truly say that he liked them?

His limited contact with muggles had consisted of his Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon, who had made his life unutterably miserable ever since that fated day when he had landed on their doorstep as a baby. They had kept him locked him up in a cupboard underneath the staircase until the first of the Hogwarts letters had started arriving, a few days before his eleventh birthday. They had underfed him for years, they bullied him nearly as badly as Dudley had, and they resented his very presence in their home.

Naturally, there had also been the great lump himself, the bane of Harry's childhood, Dudley Dursley. Piers Polkiss and the rest of his cousin’s cronies were just as bad; growing up, their favourite sport had always been to use Harry as a punching bag.

There had been kids at their primary school who had completely ignored and avoided him for years. They weren’t too bad really; they all had to live with the terror of Dudley and his gaggle of idiots day in and day out. They had enough to worry about, just trying to stay under the bully’s radar; befriending Harry would just have been a very bad idea.

There were the kids at his old school who had openly tormented him and bullied him; they were the worst. They were most likely either hoping that Dudley would allow them to join his gang, or that Dudley would leave them alone when he saw how they treated Harry.

Last of all, there was nutty Mrs Figg from down the street, with all of her cats, who occasionally fed him stale chocolate cake, and always bored him stupid with her photo albums of all of her dearly departed feline pets.

Harry's experience of muggles during his ten years at Number 4, Privet Drive had been neither positive nor pleasant. However, he was smart enough to recognise that his exposure to the muggle world was a very tiny snippet of a much larger world, a snippet that was largely dominated by his aunt and uncle’s bigoted views on all things that didn’t conform to their narrow minded view of normalcy. Those views had, over the years, naturally been passed onto his cousin.

Not that any of that meant that he believed for a moment that muggles should be tortured and killed for simply being who they were. Though, he wondered for a brief moment, if all of that was enough to mean that the muggles should be kept in the dark about the magical world.

What was it the blond boy had said to him back in Diagon Alley? Something about not letting the other sort in to Hogwarts? About keeping it in the old wizarding families? If his family were indicative of muggles, then perhaps that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

He had enjoyed his journey on the train with Ron, and had thought he would like to have Ron as a friend, but his mind kept on returning to the cute blond boy whose hand he had refused to shake.

Sure, Malfoy seemed an arrogant opinionated git who was full of himself, and he clearly thought that he was better than anyone else; however, one thing certainly could not be denied, he was a hell of lot cuter than any of the other boys in his year were.

Harry surreptitiously glanced over at the Slytherin table, and he realised that Malfoy was practically the only cute boy, hell the only cute kid, in that entire house. The girls looked as though they were sucking on lemons, and the boys looked like their arses were where their faces should have been; and that was actually the better looking ones.

Harry wondered what it would have been like to have taken that offered hand on the Hogwarts’ Express. To have felt Malfoy’s skin against his own. To have become lost in those stormy grey eyes. And those compartments on the train had seemed pretty private, so who knows what might have been able to happen on the long journey up from London.

Would it really be so bad if he were put in Slytherin?

In spite of the reputation of the house of Slytherin, the house had continued to exist. Surely, if the students, and the house, were so dangerous, were such a threat to the world, then the house would have been disbanded decades, if not centuries, ago. In the muggle world, college and university fraternities had been stripped of their charters and closed down owing to illicit activities; surely, there were similar laws in the magical world? If Slytherin House had endured for so long, in spite of its dark reputation, then perhaps being in Slytherin wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Then last, but certainly by no means least, there was the biggest bonus of all if he were sorted into Slytherin House; he would get to share a dorm with Malfoy, spend every night with Malfoy for the next seven years.

Harry could only imagine how this Sorting looked to the rest of the school. He had been sat on the stool for ages, his backside had gone numb, and he was beginning to wonder if the Hat would ever Sort him. Unbeknownst to Harry, the entire school had been watching this Sorting with bated breath.

Unseen by everyone, except for the ever observant Minerva McGonagall, Headmaster Albus Dumbledore checked his pocket watch for the fifth time since the Sorting Hat had been placed on Harry's head. Professor McGonagall glanced over at Professor Dumbledore and he gave her an almost imperceptible nod; it was now official, this had been the longest Sorting in Hogwarts history.

The Sorting Hat spoke to Harry once again. “Not Slytherin?”

Harry finally gave in to the inevitability of it all; he knew where his destiny lay.

The Hat spoke again. “Well, if you’re sure?” Harry just nodded.

The Sorting Hat opened its mouth wide, the entire Great Hall was on tenterhooks, and even the usually reserved Professor McGonagall was verging on apoplexy.

“Better be . . . SLYTHERIN!”