Chapter Text
Fia Lennox was used to making enemies without the intention of doing so. She had come to terms with the fact that as soon as the old, off-tune Sorting Hat was placed on her head and shouted, "Slytherin," she would lose more than half of Hogwarts' trust. It wasn't that she wasn't fine with it, but sometimes she wondered how her life would have been were she to have been sorted into the likes of Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff. She wondered what the view of the Great Hall was from the other tables (even Gryffindor, for that matter) because she had never left the bubble of the Slytherin table and everything that came with it.
She had only felt comfortable bringing up her thoughts to Mariam Lestrange, the stuck-up brunette who would stand in front of her everytime any of her unintentional enemies would send a hex her way, and she had brushed it off as soon as she said it. "You would've hated being in any other house. Trust me." Perhaps it was coming from her own adventures from first-year when she walked around the Great Hall on the first school day, trying to make friends with more people across the school. Everyone she talked to had turned small upon seeing the green lining of her robes, and Mariam decided that they were all cowards and swore to never want anything to do with them again.
They were the Slytherins whose parents hadn't drilled the idea of blood-purity and sacredness into their mind enough, because everytime Walburga Black brought it up, they would shrug their shoulders and nod along. That wasn't to say they didn't try, though, because if they hadn't, Mariam's twin brother wouldn't be hexing Muggleborns and Half-Bloods with the most tormenting spells he could find in the library's restricted section. Mariam was just different, and Fia liked to think she was, too.
Her parents liked to show her the importance of blood purity rather than tell her. She blamed her great sense of dancing and posture on that. There was an innate sense of luxury in every map of Fia's life; the dark walls of her manor (that she always felt were caving in on her, but that's besides the point), the perfectly cooked food, or the clothes she wore as a child that were hand-sewn by the greatest designers in Wizard London.
The first time she realized that blood truly ran the world was when her father had an emergency work visit to Norway and decided it would be best if they moved there for the year with Fia enrolled in Durmstrang. It wasn't ideal—having her fifth-year with her friends taken away just so she could make new, temporary ones—but she was back exactly where she felt she belonged a year later.
Some people assumed her father had ties to Grindelwald, but she didn't like thinking about that. She knew that Henry Lennox was an intense man that would look the other way were he to see a Muggle, but she didn't believe her father was, in any way, tied to the darkest Wizard of her time.