you are a weapon, darling boy, but you live and you breathe
The moment the hat shouts, "SLYTHERIN!", the Great Hall forgoes applause for a crescendo of whispers and outrage. Harry looks to Ron.
Ron doesn't look back.
He swallows the first bullet, a thick pain in his throat, settles the Sorting Hat on the stool—Professor McGonagall is staring at him as though he's something other than human— and walks the plank to the table decked in green and silver.
The echoing hisses of him becoming a "nasty Dark wizard, like You-Know-Who" and being "slimy Slytherin scum" stab him in the back. He is alone, before having known anything else.
Malfoy is hard at work too, already burning bridges with him being a "blood-traitor befriending freak" before he can make them.
He holds his head up high, and tells himself he doesn't care.
A glance at the Head Table makes that harder. McGonagall, someone who had given him a kind smile and encouraging nod onto the stool now has her lips thinly pressed in disapproval. Dumbledore's eyes aren't smiling like they had been for everyone else. They're muttering together, and Harry knows it's about him.
There's a menacing, hooked-nose man who sends a sharp burn through his scar. Hatred burns in his eyes the way it does with the Dursleys. Instead, Harry tries to seek some reassurance, kindness, something, from Hagrid.
Hagrid looks away.
That bullet is harder to swallow. It lodges in his throat, then drops to his stomach like a lead weight and stays.
Harry's hit with so many hexes during the Feast he can barely walk down to the dungeons. The physical pain mingles with his own, a thick, sludgy type of pollution. The hurting will never stop, from here on out. He is utterly, utterly alone.
He spends his first night in Slytherin with ripped strips of an old shirt wrapped around raw red welts.
***
Hogwarts is his own, personalised living Hell.
They call him things. Words he's never heard before, names he claims no identity to. What is he a traitor of? How can an eleven year old boy eat death?
What is it about him, that makes him so unloved, unlovable and unwanted?