Draco I
No one actually gives a fuck about things like blood purity here- it takes you very little time to figure this out.
The vision of Slytherin house your father gave you is very different from the reality. Or well, reality now. It must have been as he described it when he was in school, though the older students say it’s been like this since they were first years, years after Uncle Severus started at Hogwarts as Head of House.
Physically it’s the same, in the dungeons, with a lot of green, charmed windows showing the lake. The common room is filled with books, the dorms technically divided by gender. There are lanterns hung in the dorms themselves, which are secondarily divided by grade, the older students sleeping farther underground.
What’s missing is the sort of purity that Lucius said would be there, a house supposedly populated by children of Death Eaters, and children of Death Eaters only. There are many of your peers there, children you’ve known since you were too small to mount a broom, but they aren’t like you remember, proper little idiots who you hated hanging out with because they seemed like mini versions of their parents.
Instead what you find is a group of kids ranging from your age to seventh years just sort of- hanging out. Not having petty squabbles or miniature power plays like the ones you’ve been forced to watch since you could sit up at the formal dinner table at Malfoy Manor. These people are just hanging out, enjoying each other’s company.
There’s a notice board with various papers stuck to it, along with “This Week’s Password: Mjolnir” in green lettering, which you glance at for only a moment before Blaise Zabini pushes through the crowd and says “HEY DRACO IS HERE YOU DIDN’T GET LOST” at high volume, pulling you into a massive hug. You return it, this is the first time you’ve been hugged in nearly a year, since Uncle Severus’ visit to Malfoy Manor.
One of the prefects, a tall ambiguously gendered freckled person with red and silver hair laughs, before beginning the process of herding you, and the other first years, into your dorms to show you what it looks like, to show you where you’re sleeping.
You grin to yourself, when Blaise lets you go. You’re home. You’re not sure how you know this, but you do, and it only took the hat screaming SLYTHERIN loud enough to burst your eardrums and a meal that was, unfortunately, very much like your meals at home, to figure this out. The people milling about are very different from the people you met at first in the great hall, ones whose company filled you with dread at the idea of spending the next seven years with them.
It seems that you and Uncle Severus aren’t the only ones with a tendency to wear masks in public, in this case sometimes literally. The prefect who is showing you your rooms was a very pinched red haired boy in the Great Hall, but whatever illusion spell they wore has been removed, and the same seems to have happened with a lot of the other older students.
That night, as you get ready for sleep, Blaise tells you, “you know, Pansy’s going to show me how to wear dresses,” and grins at you.
You grin back and pull the curtains around you, falling asleep much quicker than you ever did at home.