Chapter 1
"Slade Wilson!"
The young boy, eleven years old as every other of his peers, but the robes that frame him makes him look dwarfed by his own ill-fitting clothes. He walks up to the chair, steps quiet and almost gliding like the long, ankle-length robes give everyone the illusion of, but it's the soundlessness of it that sells the image of his ghost.
He's a pale child, hair so blonde it's almost a silver-white, a moonlight quality to it that makes the Malfoy-famous blonde hair pale in comparison; quiet and almost listless, with a twisted look in his eye that sends shivering chills down one's spine–out of fear, out of merely seeing something unnatural, something dead. (A ghost, a dead person walking, dead but alive.)
The boy doesn't look at anyone, nowhere but the floor until he tracks his own steps up to the stool. He finally glances up at McGonagall who nods at him to sit down like all the new first-year students had before him, and so he does, already anticipating the heavy weight of an old song-singing hat to be place on the top of his head.
It's only his simmering anticipation–no, more like wariness–that he doesn't flinch when an old, gravelly voice speak directly into his mind. He tenses though, fingers curling around the fabric over his legs, hands not yet gripping or clenching.
"How interesting," the Sorting Hat almost purrs into his mind, and for the first time since he had arrived into the Great Hall, he finally felt an emotion.
Annoyance.
"You, my boy, are so very interesting." The Hat doesn't care about his emotions, however, powering on to seek through his mind and memories.
Slade wants to rip the Hat off, burn it, anything to make it stop. But he knows it would do nothing but serve suspicion towards himself, suspicion and anger and unwanted attention. The Sorting Hat doesn't say a murmur or react to his violent thoughts, continuing onwards like a scholar entranced by their detailed book.
"Hmm, you would do great things in any house," the Hat admits, "Slytherin I believe, you have proven your best qualities. Or perhaps Ravenclaw, with your eagerness to learn, your wit and creativity when it comes to things that matter to you. Gryffindor, perhaps, with your bravery in the face of anything.
"No," the Hat stops itself, and Slade's fingers curl further at the imprint of an amused smirk. "I know just the house for you."
"You cannot be serious," Slade finally replies; not angrily, not even annoyed; he's emptily shocked.
"My child–" the House starts, but finally Slade feels an emotion unmuted.
"I am not a child," Slade snaps into his own head.
"You are a child to me, Deathstroke the Terminator," the Hat hisses. "Do not forget, I have existed for well over a thousand of your years; you are a child to me."
Slade clenches his teeth around nothing, brimming with rage unfit for his small body.
"Doesn't mean you have the experience for it," Slade almost bares his teeth, catching himself last second. "Sitting around all day in some dusty cabinet, only brought out to see the artificial light of inside a room, your only company the memories of some children; must be awfully boring."
"Sometimes it is," the Hat agrees easily, "But I have the Headmaster, and other professors when it's particularly lonely."
Slade falls quiet, fingers playing with the fabric now; pinching and rubbing and twisting out of nothing else to do. (He knows that later he'll curse himself for showing such weakness in front of everyone, but until then he won't think of it as anything more than a necessary distraction.)
“Could you say the same?”
And Slade’s mind wanders to empty safehouses, his only companion the sound of him maintaining his weapons. Or just silence. Wintergreen has his own life, too, and Slade cannot ask of him to ease the loneliness that sometimes creeps up any more than Wintergreen already has.
Everyone else… well, Slade amends, there is no one else.
But the Sorting Hat doesn’t need his words to know that.
"You could do great things in–"
"Any house," Slade interrupts, empty and drained with the surge of anger gone. "Yeah, I know."
"But what do I do with a student who has already done great things, worthy of the name Slytherin?"
Slade pauses, blinks, confused.
"I know just the one," the Sorting Hat murmurs into his mind with a small hiss. "They can help you, but only if you let them; only if you try."
"Why should I?" Slade retorts. "What use is helping me? I'm already– there's no point."
"My boy," the Hat gently says, "You are not the most broken man I have met. You are not the most heinous mad man I have ever known. Even in your last life, there were those even worse than you. This life has given you a second chance, a chance to wipe the slate clean, so I am giving you your house just as so."
"Then you'll know that there's nothing you can do to help me."
"You kept your eye from this life, no?" The Hat comments,
"Not much of a chance to mutilate it," Slade scoffs.
The Sorting Hat falls quiet for a moment; "I think you're too scared to let yourself have this."
Slade's blood runs cold at the words, eyes widening with shock; "Scared?" He sneers. "Why would I be scared?"
"You are barely living as is."
"Hard to do with a drunkard of a father breathing down my neck again," Slade snaps.
"And yet he's alive, and you've willingly stayed with him over the last few years."
"Running away was easy last time, but staying away was harder. You know this. I'm not an idiot."
"You're more than experienced and skilled to live on your own, even in this body." The Sorting Hat argues. "You're trying to punish yourself for your past life's sins."
Slade glares out to the floor in front of him, ignoring the brim of the Hat in his sight.
"But you want to give yourself this chance, want to redo your childhood, as much of it that can be redone. You don't want to stay the same person that puts Slytherin himself almost to shame, do you? You haven't, not since your son–"
"Shut up!" Slade mentally shouts. "You don't know anything!"
The Sorting Hat ignores him.
"--Not since your son's throat was cut, when he almost died all because of your morals. That's many, many years ago, and since then the way you showed love for your family was distant, twisted. You've only grown further as that same person, until you could no longer go back and fix things."
"You know nothing."
"I know as much as you do," the Sorting Hat states. "And you know the way you have loved has only hurt those you love. Manipulation and lies and convoluted plans–as I have said, all of it is almost enough to put Salazar Slytherin himself to shame. And then proud enough to take you on as his student."
Slade falls silent again, heart thrumming painfully quick as he grips his robes tightly.
"But this is the second chance you need," the Hat continues. "The clean slate you should take."
"And you're going to force me into it?" Slade almost laughs.
"I could," the Hat admits easily. "I could put you in any other house, but they won't understand what you need like Hufflepuff does. They cannot help you like Hufflepuff can. They will not be so willing to understand."
"I don't need the help."
"Then you're lying to yourself."
"Then I don't want it!"
"You may not be able to admit it to yourself yet, but you do. You have been yearning for this chance for decades now."
"I haven't."
"You have been wanting your family to go back to the way things were before. This is the chance you need for you to never make the same mistake again this time around. Every other house will only feed the habits that ruined you before.
"Slytherin will be ecstatic for your unparalleled cunning and sly and ambition, but you will stand on an untouchable pedestal; Ravenclaw will respect your intelligence and devouring of knowledge, but you will be isolated from your peers; Gryffindor will admire your bravery and lack of fear, but they are hard-pressed to accept your other traits and introverted nature. In all these Houses, you will be respected, but isolated, and left proven once more that nurturing your darkness is the only way for you to survive, the only way you can survive."
"It's better to be feared than loved," Slade quotes in lieu of a response.
"You do not want nor need love from your House, and fear as a motivator is hardly your style. Fear does not command nor inspire true loyalty after all, correct?"
Slade can't say anything against the Sorting Hat, not when it would directly oppose his own beliefs.
"Yet another thing that would make you a great Hufflepuff," the Sorting Hat smiles.
Slade doesn't reply, he can't over the deafening roar of the Hat's silent condemnation of, "HUFFLEPUFF!"
The Sorting Hat is taken off him, and Slade is standing up when it says in a low voice in McGonagall's hand, "Remember, they can only help you if you let them."
Slade stares at it, his gaze dead and cold and empty and the Sorting Hat laughs as he turns away, gliding down like a ghost to meet his execution site in the form of the cheering Hufflepuff House. His Executioner? The Hat itself, of course.