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They stopped calling it a hatstall twenty minutes ago.
It was unprecedented, to say the least. The Sorting Hat’s record for the longest time to sort a student was seven minutes and 23 seconds - something that Professor Flitwick felt the need to say repeatedly as his gaze flickered between his watch and the boy on the stool, back and forth as though he was afraid he might miss something.
Headmistress McGonagall failed to see exactly what he could miss. Certainly, just past the five minute mark, the hall could hardly contain the frenetic waves of anticipation, everyone excited at the sheer privilege of seeing a hatstall. Even McGonagall - with an impressive sixty years at Hogwarts under her belt - had only seen enough hatstalls to count on one hand.
But by now at - “36 minutes and 43 seconds”, Flitwick dutifully reported when McGonagall tapped his shoulder - the excitement had trickled down to a tepid confusion and then finally dried up to boredom. There was nothing visually interesting about a boy with an oversized tattered hat on his head. Any grand conflict was in the private confines of the boy’s mind.
Weariness had begun to settle into the staff’s shoulders, except perhaps in Professor Longbottom who was amusing Hagrid with new terms for stalling the Sorting Hat past twenty minutes.
“Hat purgatory. Hat hell. What, you don’t like that one? I mean, it’s accurate at least. Think of the stench in that hat after centuries of being on people’s heads.”
The first years who had yet to be sorted had already gathered on the floor before the stage, muttering amongst themselves and the braver ones chatting to the upper years nearby. Restlessness weaved through the houses, cutlery clinking now and again, reminders of dinner yet to be served. Yet, no one stood up to complain. It was clear with observation that any vocal dissenters were head off and forcefully placated with scheming hopes that the first day of classes might be cancelled.
“Absolutely ridiculous,” McGonagall muttered into her hands, clasped to ward off her impatience. Tradition be damned. They couldn’t wait the whole night for one child to be sorted into a house. And it’s not like the hat hadn’t already made its decision. It had barely alighted upon one Tooru Oikawa’s head when it squawked out “Slyth-” The child had clamped the hat’s mouth, manhandled it over his ears, and had somehow bargained for a delay of verdict for more than half an hour.
But that’s all it was. A delay. A waste of time.
Oikawa would know soon just how much Headmistress McGonagall hated wasted time.
A tap on Flitwick’s shoulder, “40 minutes and 32 seconds,” and that was officially too much for a farce. McGonagall stood up to run interference (despite Flitwick’s gasp that she would skew the record) when the hall’s excellent acoustics caught and magnified the unmistakable sound of sniffling. Interest in the hall peaked again, this time with the undercurrent of discomfort as the boy on the stool scrunched up into himself trying not to cry.
“I-I don’t see why… Why not Gryffindor? I just want to be with Iwa-chan.”
“And I’m telling you,” the hat said with an unheard of exasperation for a scrap of cloth, “Slytherin will surely take you farther. You’ll find more people of your ilk there.”
Any remnants of the boy’s composure crumbled, and he tugged the hat even further down around his ears, equal parts a show of stubbornness and a convenient method to muffle his crying.
Iwa-chan. McGonagall rolled the name around in her head, disappointed that it didn’t bring any faces to mind. Lucky for her, the face presented itself as a first year wandered from the Gryffindor table and hopped onto the stage. Hajime Iwaizumi, and it clicked in her mind.
“I’m going to talk to him,” Iwaizumi said, more stating a fact than asking for permission. Before the protest perched on her tongue could take flight, he had already gone to Oikawa’s side, and once she saw them together, she swallowed her words entirely.
It was fascinating, the sheer good Iwaizumi did for Oikawa. Like magic, she laughed to herself humorlessly.
After the initial shock of suddenly someone whispering in his ear, Oikawa did a one eighty between Iwaizumi’s presumably consoling words and the protective arm curled around the boy’s back. He had been taut shoulders and rigid lines the entire time he had been on the stool, and now relief was sketching Oikawa into something softer, almost boneless with comfort and reassurance. Just what kind of spell was Iwaizumi whispering to conjure Oikawa’s agreeable sniffles and nods? Unfortunate that McGonagall couldn’t hear a thing without intruding on their space, for they had certainly drawn a large impassable bubble around themselves.
She had an inkling that Iwaizumi would cast a wondrously impenetrable protego in the future.
Finally, Iwaizumi loudly slapped Oikawa’s arm. “So stop being an idiot, Shittykawa.”
Oikawa sniffed and gave a watery little laugh. “Ow.”
“Are we done?” The hat asked, obviously straining its last thread of patience. A pause as Iwaizumi squeezed Oikawa’s shoulder and Oikawa nodded. “Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for your never ending patience,” the hat announced, always aware of an audience. “Tooru Oikawa. SLYTHERIN.”
The hall erupted into wild cheers - even the houses that weren’t Slytherin, though the way they waved their knives and forks, they were clearly cheering at the prospect of food.
And the noise promptly fell to confusion and cries of outrage as Iwaizumi plopped the hat onto his head for the second time that day. There was no time to gawp at his audacity as McGonagall wrangled the group to silence, magically catching a wayward fork or knife thrown at Iwaizumi (who was surprisingly undaunted in the face of a mini mob). She had half her attention attached to the conversation between hat and boy.
Or rather just hat, since the Sorting Hat was the only one speaking aloud.
“I don’t change my mind, child. You were sorted into Gryffindor and there you’ll stay… Well true yes. You do have more qualities of a Slytherin than Tooru Oikawa did for Gryff… Yes, I was already choosing between Slytherin and Gryffindor for you but… No. No, I think we both agree giving me back to Tooru Oikawa would lead to nowhere.”
And then the boys shared a look.
There it was in that moment, laid out in plain sight, the traits of their houses scribbled all over them to lay claim. Oikawa’s teethy grin spelled cocky, smug but with an honest exuberance, confident down to the grain of his bones that things would go his way. That things always went his way as long as Iwaizumi entered the mix. He was a Slytherin through and through.
And Iwaizumi was colored by different hands, different houses - Gryffindor in the relaxed strength that drew him tall, a slice of Hufflepuff in the sharp but indulging raise of his brow, and there, the Slytherin. An unwavering determination in his gaze, an ambition to achieve nothing less than what he and Oikawa set out to do.
Their stance stood as strong as fact, permission again laid to the wayside. They weren’t coming down from this stage, absolutely not, unless it was together to the same house.
And McGonagall thought that the Sorting Hat was losing its touch if it couldn’t make the call that was clear even to her.
“Fine,” it said. If it had eyes, they would have narrowed with a disdain for the whole fiasco, for hundreds of years of credibility unraveled by two hands that wouldn’t let go. “Don’t complain to me if you come to regret this. SLYTHERIN!”
There were no cheers. Just stunned befuddlement and the one or two uncertain bouts of clapping. Iwaizumi paid them no mind as he took Oikawa’s arm and led him down to the Slytherin table. As they passed by, McGonagall managed to catch a fraction of their whispered conversation.
“You wouldn’t regret it, right? Iwa-chan?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
Oikawa grinned, a bit more pep in his step. “Right? Like you would regret spending more time with me.” Even as Iwaizumi whacked him upside the head, Oikawa didn’t stop smiling.
“I didn’t think anyone could make a bigger entrance than the Weasley Twins.” Flitwick muttered at her side. “I mean, they magicked the food to attack people. Remember when we had to claw turkeys off people’s heads? But those two… Those two just bullied the Sorting Hat into switching someone’s house. That’s unprecedented!”
McGonagall pinched her nose as if adjusting her glasses, trying not to show just how tired she was of unprecedented. It would also be unprecedented for the Headmistress to abandon the opening ceremony to go to her office for a good drink. But no one would be as impressed with that. She glanced at the pair, talking and laughing, hardly mindful of the curious gawking their way.
She fought off a twitch of a smile as she wrenched back everyone’s attention and called the next first year up to the hat. She was losing her edge if she was so easily taken by her students.
A pair worse than the Weasley Twins.
God forbid.
A shame, though, she thought with something that was not fond wistfulness, that they hadn’t ended up in Gryffindor.