Chapter Text
‘You can leave your things in your trunk,’ Blaise Zabini tells him only minutes after he’s made it into their dormitory, his home for the next seven years, four stone walls and two canopied beds with trunks at their feet. When his eyes pass over Harry – he’s done a good job of ignoring him since dinner, so it’s not particularly often – they flicker with a suffering disdain, like he’s already grown exasperated with Harry’s presence despite meeting him hardly two hours before.
‘But what about my wardrobe?’
‘Your…?’
He just tilts his head at him with faux confusion before turning away and proceeding to put up his things in both of the wardrobes the room supplies. Zabini has more in the way of clothes than Harry can even picture owning. In moments, he’s already unpacked into just one wardrobe more than Harry has in his whole trunk, school things included.
And yet, there’s little else in the room to distinguish it from any other, just the two boys, two beds, and two places to store their things. Without even the last, as Harry has nothing of his own to display about the space, he can’t help but feel he hasn’t moved himself in at all. No proof the room is his, that he inhabits it, that he couldn’t take hold of his trunk and set out without a moment’s notice.
Nothing to unpack and no one to talk to, Harry lays on his bed and watches the blankness, his heart prickling at the unfairness of it all.
Zabini doesn’t spare him so much as a look after informing him that he wouldn’t be allowed the use of the things that were supposed to be there for him. He’s gone from Dudley’s Second Bedroom to Zabini’s Second Wardrobe, and he was stupid to think anything would be different at Hogwarts, all because he was with other wizards.
He doesn’t have much anyway, he tries to console himself. They’re different, a bedroom and a wardrobe. He didn’t fit in the cupboard, at least not since he can remember, but his things fit just fine in his trunk. It’s fine. It is. He’s got the most comfortable bed he’s ever tried in his life, including the time when he accidentally fell asleep on Aunt Petunia’s bed when he was eight, and the room isn’t too hot or too cold, and his things seem safe enough in his trunk, and his uniforms are clean and fit right, and, well, it could be worse.
When he puts it out like that, he feels foolish for wanting to snarl and shout at Zabini. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make the urge go away.
He’s glad, at least, to only have to room with one of the other Slytherins in his year. The blond boy he met in Diagon Alley earlier that summer – Malfoy, he’s since learned to be his name – is rooming with a boy called Nott, and a pair of boys built like trolls called Crabbe and Goyle are sharing the last. The other boys seem familiar enough with each other, though Harry doesn’t know if they’re somehow old friends or if they’re just more likeable than he is himself. They joked together through the feast, and though the jokes often ranged a bit mean for Harry’s comfort – really, what business was it of Malfoy’s if Hannah Abbott had stumbled on her way to the Hufflepuff table or Terry Boot’s shoes were worn around the soles – they still held that comfort and familiarity that he had to sit outside of for hours on end.
Harry shuts his eyes and waits for sleep.
***
He’s stopped on his way to the common room the next morning.
‘A word, Potter,’ says the boy whose arm blocks his path. He’s tall and reedy – nearly as thin as Harry himself, he thinks – but he doesn’t walk like he’s weak. Heavy rings adorn each of his fingers, glinting in the torchlight, and the look on his face is unfeeling. It’s an expression he saw on the faces of many of the older Slytherins the night before as well, a blankness that he can’t picture being anything but trained into them. There’s very little welcoming about such looks, but the others in his own year were doing their best to mimic the bored chill of the older students and they managed to attach themselves to each other quickly. The lack of friendliness clearly doesn’t have to mean a lack of friends, which means … well, it means it’s just Harry himself that’s the problem.
Harry wonders if he could make a run for it, but even if he manages to evade this one boy, the rest of Slytherin doesn’t seem much better, and he would get lost running around the castle in minutes. So he only nods, following behind him obediently and glaring at his back.
A number of his Housemates, already lounging around the common room despite the early hour, cast curious looks at the strange pair, but make no move to interrupt, clearing a space instead for them by the fire.
‘Do you know who I am?’ he asks, and Harry shakes his head. Surprisingly, it sounds nothing like Malfoy’s pompous assumptions or even Zabini’s scoff of importance, just a question that Harry doesn’t know the answer to. In some ways, it’s worse. ‘I’m your sixth year prefect. Name’s Derrick. This is all standard stuff, really, having a bit of a sit-down with the new Snakes.’
‘Shouldn’t we wait for the others, then?’
This earns him a short laugh. ‘The others aren’t causing any trouble, though, are they. Look, it’s just a warning, really. There’s a way of things in Slytherin. We don’t take kindly to that way being upset.’
‘I don’t want to upset anyone.’
‘That’s good,’ he says softly, which is no less discomforting. ‘See that you don’t.’