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The Slytherin Common Room was unlike anything Hermione had ever seen.

It was huge—much larger than the Gryffindor Common Room. Several shades of green were present throughout the room, found in the greenish light of the round lamps hung in the air by chains and the green fabric of many chairs throughout. The high-domed ceiling curved into a half sphere at the very top, leading downwards to tall glass windows bordered by archaically-carved stone walls. Through the glass, only murky water could be seen—it was water from the Black Lake, as the room was in the dungeons. Multiple grand chandeliers dropped from the ceiling, hanging low above the carpeted floor. A crackling fireplace was installed into one wall, its elaborate mantle adorned with a portrait of a big green serpent, and black leather sofas were set in front of it. Large tapestries of famous Medieval Slytherins were scattered around the room, decorating the walls. To the side in the back, an entrance in the wall revealed the bottom of a dark stone staircase, which no doubt led to the dormitories.

However, that was all the observation that Hermione could gather, having barely stepped foot through the common room entrance, before a low, accusing voice hit her:

"What's she doing here?"

From one of the black sofas by the fireplace, a tall, brown-haired student with heavy-lidded eyes and immensely-pronounced eyebags had stood up and was glaring in Hermione's direction. She recognized him immediately—Theodore 'Theo' Nott, a Slytherin in her year that she'd shared a few classes with throughout the years but had never actually spoken to. His father, Nott Sr., had stood trial at the Ministry after the war for his Death Eater activities and was now imprisoned at Azkaban.

Next to him, lounging on the sofa and staring silently at Hermione, was Blaise Zabini, and a familiar girl with a black-haired bob on the opposite side of Zabini had similarly joined Nott in rising and glaring, her fiercely-painted lips and nails glinting red in the dim lighting of the common room.

"What's she doing here?" repeated Theo, staring hard not at Hermione, but at the blonde Slytherin standing next to her.

"I invited her," said Malfoy nonchalantly from where he was leaning against the wall of the entrance door, his blonde hair glistening green in the luminance of the common room.

"This is not a game, Draco," spat Pansy Parkinson, ignoring Hermione. "You want it to get worse? You want her to go blabber to all her little Gryffindor friends about us?"

Hermione had no idea what they were talking about, and she was beginning to feel her impatience overtake her initial wonder of her surroundings. With an imperceptible flick of her wand from under her sleeve, she cast a silent Muffliato—just a precaution in case things escalated to any degree. She then shifted slightly and shot Malfoy a warning look of questioning, which he pretended to not see as he casually ran his hand through his hair and replied to Pansy, "I'm just giving her a tour."

"Well, nobody's hosting any fucking tours here! Get her out!"

"Excuse me," blurted Hermione, unable to contain her annoyance at being talked about as if she wasn't there anymore, and four pairs of Slytherin eyes snapped onto her, "but I'd prefer if you talked about me straight to my face. I don't know why you're all acting so hostile when Malfoy just wanted to show me your common room—that's it."

"As if you know anything," Pansy sneered. "You're just a know-it-all Gryffindor who's going to go back and bitch about us to everyone who looks up to the Hermione Granger, our heroine, as soon as you leave." She raised her voice up an octave higher. "Oh, the Slytherins are so mean! They treated me so horribly when all I wanted to do was look around their little common room! All you Gryffindors do is spread that shit about us!"

Hermione angrily stepped forward, feeling the familiar burn of her combative and confrontational side spread across her body like a defensive wildfire. "What's your problem? Who cares who I am or what House I am? I can't take a look around your common room?"

"Well, this is it," jeered Theo, spreading his arms wide mockingly. "Welcome to the Snake Pit."

Hermione looked from Theo and Pansy, who were both still standing and facing her aggressively, to Blaise and Malfoy, who were eyeing her with impassive expressions. She couldn't believe the belligerence she was being welcomed with. She wanted to scoff—and here she'd really thought it'd maybe be different.

"After surviving a whole war that only started because of prejudice and bigotry, you're all still treating people like me like this? Is this because I'm a Mudblood?" She ignored the slight flinches, raising her voice angrily as she leveled each of them with infuriated stares. "I'm a Mudblood, and what's anyone going to do about it? This is unbelievable. None of you have changed at all."

"See, she's doing it too!" exclaimed Pansy shrilly, turning to Theo and Blaise as she gave a hollow laugh. "Of course she is!" She looked back, and there were furious blotches of red on her cheeks as she fiercely pointed a red-painted finger at Hermione "You think we're discriminating against you? You're discriminating against us! All of you! I can't fucking stand it!"

There was a moment of silence after Pansy's outburst. Hermione watched as Pansy's chest heaved before she silently sat back down next to Blaise, breathing heavily and staring challengingly at Hermione.

"How am I," asked Hermione slowly, "discriminating against you?" She felt the fire of anger within her chest traveling up her limbs furiously as she tried to tamp down the urge to fly into a rageful tangent. How dare they accuse her of inflicting any sort of prejudiced views against them—in whatever insane way they were implying—as if they hadn't inflicted the same evil thing on her all these years? How else did she learn the meaning of Mudblood or realize that people like her weren't welcomed by everyone? How could she forget how people like Pansy Parkinson and Draco Malfoy treated her as if she was inferior, someone to look down on, just because she'd been labeled something different by wizarding society because of her blood?

Both Theo and Pansy opened their mouths to retort, but someone else beat them to it:

"Why don't you sit down, Granger?" offered Blaise, speaking for the first time as he eyed Hermione meaningfully. His smooth, deep voice resounded around the small space they occupied.

"Blaise," said Theo warningly, glancing at his friend. "What the hell are you doing?"

Ignoring him, Blaise gestured to the empty sofa across from the one he, Pansy, and Theo occupied as he continued staring at Hermione. She held his gaze for a moment before cautiously walking forward, edging into the space between the sofa and the coffee table in front of it and sitting down on the edge. After all, this felt like a challenge, Hermione Granger wasn't one to back down from challenges.

After a second, Malfoy joined her, lounging back on the other end of the sofa as he observed the gathering around him with a clinically-raised eyebrow. There was a moment of tense silence in which nobody spoke as Hermione exchanged charged glares with Pansy and Theo across the table, refusing to talk first, before Blaise sighed and leaned forward.

"Look around," he said to Hermione, gesturing around them. "Do you see how crowded our common room is?"

Hermione did see. The entire common room was just about filled to the brim with Slytherins—all around them, students of all years mingled, whether that referred to the younger students playing Wizard's Chess and battling with Gobstones at the wooden tables scattered around the room, or the small hordes of students by the windows, chatting quietly under the glow of the Black Lake, or the groups of students lounging in the nearby sofas, warming their hands by the fireplace, or the steady stream of students going up and down the dormitory staircase in the back.

In fact, it was impossible that their presence and noticeable belligerent air hadn't gone unnoticed by such a crowd. As Hermione nodded cautiously to Blaise's question, she caught more than a few curious and cautious glances from nearby students, no doubt sensing the brewing animosity from them and wondering what was going on, unable to hear anything through her Muffliato.

"I'm guessing the Gryffindor Common Room is never this crowded," continued Blaise, looking at Hermione for confirmation. When she nodded again, he continued: "The Slytherin Common Room never used to be either."

"Blaise, what's the point of explaining this to her?" demanded Pansy, but Blaise only gave her a cautionary look. She scoffed, crossing her arms, but fell silent as Blaise then said, "We wouldn't all be confined to our dorms and common room if it weren't for the fact that anytime we step outside, we're jeered at and cast aside just for being Slytherins."

Hermione felt Malfoy slightly straighten next to her, staring at Blaise with an inscrutable expression on his face. Theo was silently looking hard at his feet, knuckles clenched, while Pansy was looking directly at Hermione with a challenging air, as if daring her to say something like What are you talking about? or No you aren't.

Instead, Hermione kept her face neutral. "Can you clarify?" she asked, but she felt like she already knew anyway.

"After the war, you and all your friends were hailed as heroes—heroes who brought down the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters. Heroes." Blaise's mouth twisted at the word, as if he'd had something foul-tasting. "I don't blame you for not realizing, but maybe it never occurred to you that those who had previous connections and ties with that side of the war and those people only suffered more after it all ended."

Hermione pulled her robes around herself tightly, the chill of the room piercing through the black fabric. She gazed around at the crowded Slytherin Common Room again, heart sinking as realization slowly sunk in with every passing second.

"We get ostracized daily just for being a part of the House the Dark Lord was in," said Blaise. "The House that so many Death Eaters were in. Slytherin is and always will be associated with them, and it doesn't help that many of us are involuntarily related to Death Eaters." He gestured at a group of small first-years quietly playing Gobstones near the corner of the room. "Our younger students should be out gallivanting around and discovering the castle, but they can't even do that without getting pushed around for the color of their tie."

"That's not fair," Hermione whispered, and she was suddenly back to first-year, reliving the experiences of a small, bushy-haired Gryffindor against a plethora of voices bombarding her with her every move.

Mudblood, they taunted. Mudblood, Mudblood, Mudblood.

"Well, what do you expect," said Theo bitterly, staring over at the first-years. "We'll always be seen as the Death Eater House." An ugly expression came over his face. "You know who my father is—don't pretend you don't—and just about everyone else does too." He scoffed. "I can't help who my family is—none of us asked to get involved in this. I don't even remember the last time another Hufflepuff voluntarily spoke to me."

Maybe Malfoy could sense that Hermione was internally comparing Theo's said situation to the publicized image of the reformed Malfoys that most of society seemed to have accepted, because he smirked down at her. "Granger, just because my father's Galleons and my mother's words did some nice damage control after the war doesn't mean I don't get cursed at or hostilely stared at every once in a while either."

"Yes. Maybe not everybody has a prejudice against Slytherins," said Blaise seriously, "but it's so widespread that it's not like we're welcomed anywhere with open arms. It's not always outspoken or direct, really, but the prejudice comes in the forms of silent ostracization and passive aggressiveness. You'll find that barely anyone from other Houses wants to directly associate with a Slytherin. We're not invited to parties, and people avoid us in the hallways. Other than in school, it's alright at Hogsmeade because we're not required to wear our House robes or ties, but people still recognize us and steer clear." He shot Hermione a crooked smile. "Malfoy and I were half-expecting you and Ginevra to bolt when we came up to you last time in Hogsmeade."

"And I suppose many people see this as karma for everything we inflicted or believed in before the war," interjected Pansy resentfully. "But they don't fucking realize the terrible influences we were around—which doesn't excuse our behavior, but you know—the daily microaggressions aren't fucking great."

"I do," said Hermione. "I know very well."

She hadn't meant for it to sound accusing—this wasn't about her—but it must've come out that way, as Pansy fell silent, and the three other Slytherins around her all looked down at their feet, even Malfoy.

"So," said Hermione quickly to defuse the already-awkward tension permeating the space, "why don't you report this to McGonagall?"

Malfoy raised his head, scoffing loudly. "As if dear old McGonagall could do anything except lecture the other three Houses on how to be kind and inclusive and make them hate us even more for reporting behavior that they'll say we made up or over exaggerated or something. Don't look at me like that, Granger—you know that's true."

Hermione broke off her stare at Malfoy and gazed instead at the rest of the group, at Pansy's hardened expression and Theo's defensive stance and Blaise's quiet resignation. She was at a loss of words, not because she wasn't familiar with this topic of discrimination—of course she was—but because she was beginning to realize that she'd experienced it in a very different way.

Hermione had always had a support system to fall back on. When she was taunted for her blood status or called slurs, she always had Harry and Ron to comfort her and talk to her. If not Harry or Ron, then Ginny or Neville. If not Ginny or Neville, then Luna or Fred or George or Mr. and Mrs. Weasley or Sirius or Professor Lupin . . . and so on.

As Hermione scanned around the Slytherin Common Room, she realized that the Slytherins didn't have that sort of support. Sure, they had each other to commiserate about going through the same struggles with, but that was different from having people on the outside to side with you and comfort you and tell you It's okay and It doesn't matter.

The Slytherins were alone.

And when Hermione stepped back through the common room entrance door a few minutes later, quickly citing a class she was going to be late for as she exchanged hesitantly-cordial nods with the Slytherins she left behind (Malfoy elected to stay with his housemates), she left in a daze, barely registering the corridors and hallways she passed as she already mentally began her process of deep thinking.

Hermione stayed in deep thought for the rest of the day, floating in and out of classrooms like a ghost. She couldn't help it—once she was faced with an issue, she fixated on it, and this one hit close to home especially. She couldn't just ignore what had been presented to her.

Merlin, she hadn't even realized what the Slytherins were going through. They'd always kept to themselves to begin with—they were known for their reclusivity—and she hadn't noticed that that reclusivity had slowly shifted into bigoted exclusion. As the day went on, Hermione felt a stone of guilt and pity sink lower and lower in the pit of her stomach, because the feelings of being prejudiced against were all coming back to her, and she was reliving it, and she knew exactly how it felt, and she wouldn't wish it on her worst enemies—even those who orchestrated it, and that was ironic because the perpetrators of her past terrible experiences were the ones experiencing them now.

Maybe that fact would make some vindictively satisfied, but it didn't make Hermione Granger feel better about anything. She didn't see it as karma, as Pansy Parkinson had stated—she saw it as just another repeat of the vicious cycle of prejudice.

"You look like how you used to look when you would scheme for SPEW," observed Ginny at dinner, eyeing Hermione nervously from where she sat next to her at the Gryffindor table.

"S.P.E.W.," Hermione corrected absently, poking at a steamed potato and missing it, spearing a green bean instead. She was staring at the Slytherin table on the opposite end of the hall, observing how they were all conversing quietly amongst themselves and barely mingling with the rest of the hall.

How hadn't she realized the isolation they were experiencing? After the war, McGonagall had implemented a change in the name of inter-house unity so that students of all different Houses could move about freely throughout all four House tables during mealtimes and interact with each other. Hermione saw Ravenclaws conversing with Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors sharing plates of food with students donning ties of blue and yellow, but she observed barely any travelers to or from the Slytherin table. How hadn't she ever noticed? Or cared?

"Hermione," came a voice from across the table, interrupting Hermione's observations. She turned to look at Neville, who was sitting next to Seamus across from her. "How's your Polyjuice with Malfoy coming along?"

Hermione blinked, bringing herself out of her thoughts and drawing Potions momentarily to the forefront of her mind. It'd do her some good to think about something else for a while anyway. "Surprisingly fine," she answered. "You two have Felix Felicis, right? How's that going?"

Next to Neville, Seamus sighed helplessly, jabbing at a mince pie. "Well, I couldn't help that I was excited for the Falcons and Cannons Quidditch team, and today was the day of, and I was just looking at player stats, and I didn't really see that the bottle of grinded Occamy eggshell was by my elbow, and I guess I accidentally knocked it over or something—"

"He blew up the potion," finished Neville sadly.

And then Hermione had a brilliant idea.