Chapter Text
Chapter 1 – Where He Thought He Belonged.
Jean had always felt like a misfit.
Even before Hogwarts—long before magic, wands, or the notion of enchanted ceilings—he carried a quiet sense that he simply didn’t fit anywhere. Growing up in a small Muggle neighbourhood with his mother, who worked two jobs and still managed to tuck him into bed every night with a kiss on the forehead, Jean wasn’t unhappy. He had food, warmth, and love. But he had always felt something hollow inside him, like a missing step on a staircase he couldn’t climb.
Jean knew nothing about his father. His mother always stiffened at the mention of him, as though the very idea pricked like nettles. All she ever said was that the man had been strange—charming in a distant, unsettling way—and that after she told him she was expecting, he vanished without so much as a forwarding address.
Much later, when Jean learned what magic could do… how some witches and wizards could alter memories as easily as flicking a wand, the truth became horribly, shamefully clear.
His mother did not remember the man leaving.
She remembered simply waking one morning, confused, with a dull ache behind her eyes and an emptiness beside her in the bed. No fights, no explanations, just absence, as though he had been swallowed by thin air.
Jean had once overheard her whisper to a neighbor, “It’s as if he was never there at all.”
At eleven, he didn’t understand. At twelve, he suspected. By thirteen, he knew:
whoever his father was, he had not been a decent man. And he had almost certainly been a wizard—one who had wiped himself from Jean’s mother’s memories to escape responsibility.
Jean never spoke of it. And he never wanted to meet the man.
Still… when the strange things began happening, it might have been useful to have someone who understood.
It started small. One dull Tuesday in June, Jean was running late for school and frantically searching for the new trainers Mum had saved up to buy him. He’d looked everywhere—under the bed, in the wardrobe, behind the settee—before groaning in frustration.
“I swear I left them right here!”
And then, as though the universe had taken pity on him, the trainers tumbled down from the very top shelf of the wardrobe with a loud thump—far too high for Jean to have put them there, and far too strange for him to rationalise. He stared at them for a full minute, his skin prickling.
Later that month, he accidentally turned his mother’s tea bright purple just by wishing it would look less boring.
By the time an owl tapped at their window with a heavy parchment envelope clutched in its beak, Jean had begun to suspect he wasn’t as normal as he’d always believed.
His mother screamed, then apologized to the owl, then sat down on the kitchen floor and cried. Jean wasn’t sure if she was frightened, relieved, or both. But when he tore open the letter and read the words Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, everything inside him lit up. For the first time in his life, the hollow space in his chest felt full.
He devoured every bit of information he could find—books, pamphlets, anything—and the more he read, the more certain he became.
Hogwarts houses, traditions, founders… it all felt like a puzzle he was suddenly meant to solve, and somehow everything pointed him toward the same answer.
Slytherin.
Ever since he started learning about the houses, he knew he was one of them. He felt it in his bones. Ambition—he had plenty of that. A hunger to prove himself—more than enough. Power… well, he wouldn’t deny wanting it. After all those years of feeling average and invisible, the idea of being someone important was intoxicating.
So yes, Slytherin. Obviously. It made perfect sense...
Except it didn’t.
Because on the day that was supposed to be the best of his life—his big moment, his chance to finally belong somewhere—the Sorting Hat barely touched his hair before shouting:
“GRYFFINDOR!”
Much to his shock, he was wrong.
Completely, spectacularly wrong.
Jean just sat there, blinking up at the enchanted ceiling like someone had dropped a bucket of ice water over his head while the hall cheered around him. Surely it had made a mistake. Him? A Gryffindor? His disappointment must have been written all over his face, because he noticed several students glancing at him curiously when he failed to cheer like most freshly sorted first-years.
He hadn’t understood it. Not then. He had spent the rest of the evening sulking under the noise of the feast, wondering how everything he believed about himself could have been wrong…
Four years later, Jean had learned to live with it. He would never call himself the proudest Gryffindor in the wizarding world—Merlin, no—but it certainly wasn’t the tragedy he once thought it was. Gryffindor Tower had become familiar, almost comfortable. He had friends here: Armin, who could talk for hours about obscure spells; Sasha, who somehow always had food; Connie, who never seemed to know what was happening but was unfailingly loyal.
And then there was Mikasa.
Jean would never admit it aloud, but he’d fancied her from the moment she walked into their first Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson with that calm, steady gaze. Too bad she was absolutely, irrevocably, utterly devoted to the most insufferable boy in Gryffindor.
Eren Jaeger.
Jean and Eren had been at odds since the very first night in the Great Hall. Jean remembered it with painful clarity:
“Not happy to be here?” Eren had said, loud enough for half the table to hear, eyeing Jean’s less-than-thrilled expression.
Jean bristled. “Mind your own business.”
“I’m just saying,” Eren had shrugged, stuffing his mouth with bread, “you could at least pretend to be proud. You’re a Gryffindor now.”
It had gone downhill from there.
Over the years, though, they had—if not warmed up to each other—at least grown accustomed to the other’s presence. Quidditch helped. There was nothing like screaming at each other during practice to turn pure hatred into a sort of irritated tolerance. Sharing a dormitory also left them very little choice. They argued, they rolled their eyes, they competed over everything… but they stayed on their side of the room and didn’t actually hex each other, which for Gryffindors counted as progress.
Despite all that, Jean still asked himself, quietly and privately, why the Hat had put him here.
He didn’t feel like a Gryffindor. Not the way others seemed to.
He wasn’t fearless or reckless or particularly noble. He didn’t rush into danger, didn’t crave adventure, didn’t enjoy the spotlight as much as everyone assumed just because he played Quidditch. He was good at it—better than good, honestly—and the victory against Slytherin last year had made him annoyingly popular. But even with all that, something never quite fit right.
Some nights he still caught himself imagining absurd scenarios: Professor Smith standing in the middle of the Great Hall, clearing his throat and announcing that the Sorting Hat had changed its mind; that Jean Kirstein really belonged in Slytherin after all.
Ridiculous, yes. Impossible, obviously,
But he dreamed it anyway.
In truth, Jean’s closest friend wasn’t even in Gryffindor. It was Floch.
They’d met on the Hogwarts Express their first year, two nervous boys hovering awkwardly near the same compartment. Floch had been certain he’d be a Gryffindor. He’d said it with such smug confidence that Jean had believed his own hopes even more.
They spent the whole train ride talking excitedly about classes and house tables and how everyone always said Gryffindors were “daring” and “bold.” Floch even said—face shining with anticipation—that they’d probably share a dorm. Jean laughed and told him that was unlikely since he was most certainly going to be a Slytherin.
And then the Sorting happened.
Floch went to Slytherin, Jean went to Gryffindor.
Neither of them had seen it coming.
Floch adapted astonishingly quickly. Within weeks he was strutting around in green and silver, talking about Quidditch stats and praising his Head of House as though he had been born in the dungeons.
Still, they remained friends.
If Floch changed, it was in small ways—little things Jean told himself he was imagining. A quicker smirk. A new sharpness in his jokes. A confidence that hadn’t been there when he first arrived. Jean shrugged it off. Hogwarts changed everyone a little.
Sometimes he wondered if Floch adapted too easily… but later he decided it was probably just jealousy talking. At the end of the day, he wished he could move through the castle the way Floch did—so sure of where he belonged.
They met between classes, swapped homework notes, snuck Chocolate Frogs from the kitchens in third year. House colours didn’t matter much when they were laughing over burnt toast or complaining about professors.
And for a long time, that was enough.
In the end, this was simply the life of Jean Kirschtein: the least brave, most painfully average Gryffindor anyone could name.