Fic: Three Universes Allison Argent Never Got to Visit [Teen Wolf][1/2]
Title: Three Universes Allison Argent Never Got to Visit
Fandom: Teen Wolf w/ Harry Potter and Percy Jackson & the Olympians
Characters/Pairings: Allison, Scott, Lydia, mostly gen with Allison/Scott and one implied Allison/Scott/Isaac
Summary: In the heart of the Hale Woods, there's a copse of enchanted trees. It's all very Nightmare Before Christmas, really.
Word Count: 12,000
Notes: For oneoffour111 and usernameism and laria_gwyn! I took the prompts they left me for NaNoWriMo and combined them: Teen Wolf at Hogwarts for oneoffour111, Teen Wolf as demigods for usernameism and the AU where Allison's the werewolf for laria_gwyn.
[read @ AO3]
In the heart of the Hale woods, there's a copse of enchanted trees.
It's not anything obvious, not really, but a werewolf would know it's there, and even the average observant human or two would probably stop and look around, overcome by a feeling that doesn't have a name -- a feeling like being watched in the woods, an aloneness that doesn't have anything to do with loneliness. Hales have lived on this land for time out of memory, in one form or another, since before wolves even dreamed of humans with a human name.
Here, the trees grow close together -- in some places, branches overlap and leaves blur into a gradient of greens and browns.
They say that a tree can contain an entire universe. Touch the trunk of one, and know that galaxies spin beneath the bark with colossal slowness. Pick up a leaf off the ground and trace the genetic map of worlds in its veins. A tree lives a hundred lives.
They're right, of course.
Universes begin and end in the enchanted trees in the old Hale woods.
the first tree: a greenspire linden
The morning she leaves, Aunt Kate comes in and puts her wand down on the bathroom counter and does Allison’s hair by hand. Allison will never admit it (she probably doesn’t have to, her father does private security for wizarding functions and as such is the most accomplished Legilimens she knows, besides maybe her mother,) but she loves it best when Aunt Kate braids her hair by hand, because her mom usually does them and spells them too tight, so she has a headache by lunch.
Aunt Kate’s dressed to go out in the Muggle world, in a short black skirt and long corduroy jacket pulled over it with the belt synched tight, headphones snaking out of her pocket up to her ears. Her knee-high boots have bright silver buckles on them. They look too hot for September weather.
"Are you coming with us?" Allison asks curiously.
"I got errands of my own to run," Aunt Kate answers, smiling at her in the mirror. "Besides, I think your parents want you to themselves before you go off and they don’t see you for four whole months."
Allison rolls her eyes at that, because she’s sure her parents are going to be fine.
When her braids are done, they go down and sit together on the bottom step, which is too narrow for both of them to fit comfortably, even if Allison is pint-sized for an eleven-year-old. Aunt Kate lets her share an earbud with her, because, "you’re going to be without the Internet until Christmas, babe, you better get your fill of the Muggles’ finest to tide you over," and so Gorillaz chants in one ear and Allison drums her foot against the edge of her trunk.
Aunt Kate regards her solemnly. "Is there anything you want to ask me?" she probes. "I know your dad’s full of advice, but I was at Hogwarts a lot more recently than he was."
Allison fidgets, and in the brief lull before the music switches tracks, she blurts out, "Do you remember the Battle of Hogwarts?"
Her aunt’s eyebrows go up, but she nods without hesitation. "Yes," she says. "That was ... Merlin’s beard, that was almost ten years ago. I was a third year. Why?" She squints thoughtfully. "Are you nervous?"
She doesn’t say anything, and Aunt Kate sighs, pulling her in close so Allison’s head rests against her shoulder.
She strokes her hair and says, "There’s honestly no safer place to be, okay? And you know that at the first sign of trouble, your mum will Summon you back to us so fast you’ll probably break Hogwart’s wards zooming across the countryside."
Allison giggles.
"There you go," Aunt Kate’s mouth curves in the corner, and she squeezes her tight. "You’ll be fine, baby girl. Hey, think fast: what’s the best House?"
"Slytherin!"
"Good girl. Of course you’re allowed to go wherever you want to go, I’m not saying you shouldn’t make up your own mind, but Slytherin House is only for the best and you --" she touches the end of Allison’s nose with a fingertip. "Are the best."
"I know," Allison answers primly, and laughs when Aunt Kate hugs her close again, hard enough that she feels like a puppy, the one everybody wants to pet and hold.
"Can you promise me something?"
"What?"
Aunt Kate’s eyes sparkle. "When you come home at break, promise me the first bit of magic you’re going to do is levitate your dad in the middle of Christmas pudding. String him right up by the ankle."
Allison has no idea when she’s going to learn the spell for levitation, but she crosses her heart and promises anyway.
Eventually, her parents come downstairs, dressed in the Muggle clothes they saw on the front of a rock magazine once, and Allison says good-bye to Aunt Kate, who tells her to "knock ‘em dead, babe," in her phoniest accent, before her mother takes her arm and her dad takes her trunk and they Apparate away.
~*
Allison has several Argent cousins currently enrolled at Hogwarts; her parents and Aunt Kate remind her that this means she won’t be alone at school, because they’ll look out for her and hex anybody who tries to mess with her.
She finds them on the train and sits with them, but she can tell immediately that if she’s looking for companionship, she’s doing it in the wrong place: other than a "hey" when they first recognize her, they largely ignore her, drifting off to hang with their own groups of friends. Allison scrunches up in her seat and cracks open one of her new spellbooks, getting maybe four paragraphs into the introduction before she loses interest and takes to staring out the window as they leave the last of London behind.
She isn’t surprised. Most of the Argents moved base to the Cayman Islands for tax evasion reasons when she was much younger, so she only saw her cousins during the holidays, their hair highlighted and their skin wholesomely tan.
They still send their kids to Hogwarts, of course, because they’re still British and it’s tradition.
She falls asleep as the sun goes down, waking up when they pull into Hogsmeade and she has to hurriedly pull on her robes and join the other first years gathering on the platform, rounded up by a sour-faced young man with a lantern hoisted up high. Everybody tries to avoid standing too close to him, because he’s eyeing them hawkishly, the way people do when they don’t have a lot of experience with small children.
"We’re going to get turned into toads and then we’re going to die," whimpers a boy to Allison’s right.
She tries to smile at him, because she’s pretty sure human-to-animal Transfiguration for the purpose of eating is still cannibalism and therefore illegal, but the kid on his other side elbows him.
"Wouldn’t that be awesome?" he goes in a low, delighted hiss, while the groundskeeper counts them. Even in the low platform lighting, Allison can see his fingernails are coated with a rim of grime. "If that was the initiation test we have to take? I’ve never been a toad, I wonder what it’s like. Come on," he goes, when the boy next to him looks dubious. "Don’t tell me you wouldn’t want to ribbit if you had the opportunity!"
The boys continue their discussion in that vein, stopping only when the little boats glide out around the bend and they see their first glimpse of Hogwarts, which looks like any other castle Allison’s dad would take her to so he could show her how to weave protective wards together to make a shield, except bigger.
She thinks they might be a little disappointed when Professor Flitwick comes out and tells them that the Sorting Hat will be choosing their Houses for them, like they really had worked themselves up to believe they were going to have to survive their first week at Hogwarts as toads.
Squeakily, Professor Flitwick calls her name up to the Hat first.
Hmmmm, goes a little voice, snug in her ear, as she settles herself on the stool, hooking her feet around the rung. Hello, Argent.
"Hat," Allison returns respectfully.
I’ve Sorted your entire family into Slytherin, you know, dating all the way back to when I was but a young and sprightly thing.
"I know. Can I go there, please?"
Are you sure? The Hat sounds, if anything, thoughtful. The same way every family has something they don’t want seen in their cellar --
She startles, because how can the Hat know that? Even Allison technically isn’t supposed to know that, but Aunt Kate’s never been particularly subtle about the auras of the things she brings back to the estate; even when she’s in her room, some of those items are malevolent enough to make her grit her teeth until one of the adults strengthens the protective charms on the cellar door again.
-- every person has something hidden inside of them, too. There might be another House where you could belong.
Allison considers it, peeking out at the tables from underneath the brim. Nobody looks actively hostile or actively welcoming: mostly everybody just looks hungry. She lets the brim fall.
"Thanks, Hat, but I know Slytherin best and you’re most comfortable with what you know, and you’re happiest where you’re comfortable. So, can I go there?"
The Hat doesn’t answer, but it does open its rip wide enough to shout, "SLYTHERIN!" to the whole Hall.
"Cheers!" says Allison, depositing the Hat back on the stool and crossing down to where the Slytherins are applauding. A fourth year who still hasn’t swapped his side-facing cap for his wizard’s hat yet leans over to grab her in some bro-handshake that leaves her a little confused. A couple cousins wave, looking unsurprised.
She turns around to watch the rest of the Sorting. Three girls and a boy join her at the Slytherin table; "Martin, Lydia," keeps making snide comments about the other first years as they go up, which Allison politely ignores because she figures she’s coming down from nerves. The toad boys both go to Hufflepuff -- the second one, whose name seems to be all consonants, so Flitwick mumbles it helplessly like "ghmmph Stilinkski," makes everybody shout laughter by accidentally grabbing Flitwick’s hat instead of the Sorting Hat, as Flitwick and the stool are the same height. Ears bright red, he shoves the real Hat -- considerably more shabby than the other -- over his head and promptly takes it back off to go join his friend.
By the end of the Sorting, "Whittemore, Jackson," becomes the last Slytherin. A prefect frowns sidelong at them and says, clearly audible, "There are fewer of them every year."
Allison blinks, but before she can think about why that unsettles her, the Headmistress stands to address them, and she forgets.
~*
Lydia Martin has auburn hair and very neat nails, and she sizes up all the Slytherin first years over the next week and comes to the executive decision that Allison shall be her best friend, and sets about making that happen.
Before the Sorting Hat started rattling off qualities like a horoscope, the only thing Allison really knew about Slytherin was that it was the House for the best, and therefore the House for Argents (and also, their colors were green and silver, which were, coincidentally, the two most prominent colors in the Argent wardrobe, so that was convenient,) but she thinks that maybe the Sorting Hat sings out House traits with exactly people like Lydia in mind. Either that, or Lydia listened carefully and then molded herself to fit.
Allison’s pretty sure that Lydia’s either a genius, or she’s been doing underage magic behind her parents’ back for a long time before coming to Hogwarts, because by the time they move from theory and safety into beginner’s spellcasting, Lydia barely even needs to try before she succeeds, and spends the rest of class looking bored.
Allison, Lydia, and Jackson Whittemore are the only Slytherin first years who aren’t pureblood, and as such, tend to stick together.
"Muggleborn," Jackson confesses; he’s got a thin, pinched face and too many freckles and a gross habit of wiping his nose in his sleeve, and he doesn’t smile much, like it hurts his face. "Or, a least, adopted by Muggles, so who knows how dirty that makes my blood."
"Don’t be ridiculous," snorts Lydia, spooning porridge into her mouth and flipping to the back of Standard Book of Spells: Grade 3, which she snatched out of somebody’s bag while Allison had them distracted by asking for directions. (She hadn’t had to fake it: she really was lost, although she supposes Lydia wasn’t.)
Jackson sneers back at her, but since Lydia hadn’t bothered to look up at him, she misses it. Allison smiles sympathetically.
"What about you?" he finally asks, coming up behind them as they head down to the dungeons for Potions with Professor Harris. His tone is belligerent, and he scuffs angrily with his feet as they walk. "Why aren’t you invited to sit with the cool kids?"
"We are the cool kids," Lydia interjects, sounding offended at the idea that they wouldn't be. Seeing both Jackson and Allison brighten, she straightens her shoulders and adds proudly, "I’m half-and-half. Like making an alloy or a blended fabric or a mash-up, it’s just more genetically sound to mix. It’s silly to think otherwise, and unbecoming of this House."
Allison never talked about blood status with her parents: it just wasn’t something they were concerned about, so much as what people chose to do with their magic.
~*
Lydia says that Slytherin is more of a girl house, anyway, and that's why Jackson's the only boy in their year. Girls have to be more ambitious and more cunning than blokes on a daily basis just to survive, so really, it's a good thing there's a Hogwarts house to accommodate that. Allison believes her, because Lydia's going to be the youngest witch to receive the Order of Merlin First Class -- she's going to be, because she says she is.
She doesn't think about what it means for Jackson to be the only Slytherin boy in their year, until Creepy Creevey mentions something about Jackson's friendship with a Gryffindor.
Creepy Creevey isn't technically Slytherin's ghost, but she sees him around a lot more often than she does the Bloody Baron; endlessly curious about the dormitories and the daily lives of its inhabitants, once or twice he's been caught uncomfortably close to the girl's lav, which Allison supposes is where the name "Creepy Creevey" comes from, but mostly she sees him floating around the common room, staring at things, and when she asks him what he's doing, he looks surprised, like it hadn't occurred to him to wonder until she made him wonder about it.
"I wish I had my camera," is what he settles on. "It's like a --"
"I know what a camera is," Allison interrupts, because he seems like somebody who would talk incessantly if not politely redirected.
"Do you?" he seems pleased. "Slytherins are so surprising sometimes!"
"Are we?"
He pauses at that, rotating slowly in midair until he's nearly upside-down without seeming to notice that he's doing it. The greenish light from the windows turns him the same color as garnets, a faint glow around his cheeks. "I guess," he says slowly. "People are only surprising if you have really narrow ideas of what people are. Then they catch you off-guard all the time."
Allison isn't sure what this has to do with cameras, but it might have something to do with the fact that Slytherins aren't traditionally very familiar with Muggle technology.
"The green light's very pretty," she offers, because she thinks that's what he's getting at it.
"Yes, it is," he says wistfully, his hands twitching around a shape in front of his eyes. Camera, Allison thinks, and her heart squeezes itself, a little sad. "I wish I'd know that when I was alive, I would have tried harder to get down here."
Although technically a Gryffindor sixth year, Creepy Creevey is more around Aunt Kate's age, which still makes him the youngest ghost that Allison knows. She thinks. She doesn't actually know how old the ghost is that lives in Aunt Kate's cellar, just that sometimes she gets really angry and it starts leaking out around the edges of the wards, making all the hairs on Allison's arms stand on end and the corners of the room go dark. When her parents go out, they leave an elderly house elf in charge of keeping the ghost down there, because house elf magic is stronger than a wizard's in some ways, but she's old and falls asleep in front of the fire a lot, so Allison's woken up in the middle of the night before to find this horrible, knotted caricature of a woman hovering over her bed, ghostly grey and humming. Her eyes are terrifying. Allison would have expected her to try to escape the instant she had a chance, but she doesn't: she stays right by her side, trying to pet her hair and sing her to sleep like protecting Allison is the only thing she can imagine doing, and she'll stay there until someone arrives to shackle her back down in the cellar.
Allison's starting to think that her experience with ghosts might not be everyone else's experience with ghosts.
~*
Jackson Whittemore and Danny Mahealani both make the Quidditch team the following year, becoming their House's respective Keepers. Putting two twelve-year-old boys in front of the goals means that for the first couple matches, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw completely wipe the pitch with them, but the first Gryffindor-Slytherin match lasts for two and a half days because nobody can score and nobody can find the Snitch, and Allison gives up and goes inside to have hot cocoa and hears about it from Lydia, but apparently Headmistress McGonagall had to go out there and cancel the match at the fifty-two hour mark because the fifth years were learning self-Transfiguration and she wanted to have at least one year where nobody got turned into a flower lei, and how could they expect that to happen if none of the fifth years had gotten any sleep?
Allison and Lydia learn not to wait for them afterward, because they'll invariably stay behind on the pitch no matter the weather, where they'll argue in that way that's really just loudly agreeing with each other and fly around until the groundskeeper -- a mean, taciturn wizard named Mr Hale who never makes eye contact with anybody -- comes out to yell at them.
Danny's turning him into a very competitive Chocolate Card collector, Creepy Creevey reports.
"Good," Lydia decides, spelling the ends of her nails a molten gold and then silver and then back to the gold, which she smiles proudly at, fanning her fingers out for them to take a look at. "He could use someone to challenge him."
And maybe it's something about the way people just stop treating Jackson and Danny's inter-House friendship as odd, but when Scott McCall starts booting Stiles's arse off his stool in Herbology to sit next to Allison instead and ask her questions about, like, her favorite colors and stuff, she finds she doesn't mind so much. Without entirely meaning to, she winds up with a very large cache of information on him -- his mother's a Muggle, he wants to take Care of Magical Creatures with Professor Deaton in his third year, and he's going to try out for the Quidditch team until the day they accept him because there's no other way they're going to get rid of him.
"Um, why are you still tolerating that Hufflepuff?" Lydia asks at the start of next term, when Scott walks her all the way to the corridor outside the Slytherin common room for seemingly no reason -- it means he's going to have to backtrack half-way across the castle to reach the Hufflepuff entrance by the kitchens.
She says it in the tone people use when they're saying what's that? about things stuck to the bottoms of other people's shoes.
"I'm fostering relationships outside of my comfort zone to further my own agenda," Allison replies promptly. "And also, he's sweet."
"Sweet," Lydia echoes blankly, like she can't fathom it, and Allison hugs her, quick and overcome with fondness.
Then Scott starts joining them at the Slytherin table at breakfast on the mornings when the Slytherins and Hufflepuffs have double Herbology afterwards.
This, of course, means that Stiles comes too, and Lydia looks horrified.
~*
Their fifth year, when Scott McCall tries out for a position on the Quidditch team and fails yet again, Allison doesn't.
"Where have you been hiding these past couple years?" Mr Finstock demands, completely ignoring the way the Slytherin Captain is trying to get him to leave the pitch so she can get on with the rest of the tryouts. "Slytherin's been bottoming out in fourth place for the Quidditch cup for the past five years!"
Behind him, Jackson's face grows even more sour and pinched than usual.
Finstock isn't done. "Your aim is incredible, Argent! Greenburg, if you don't give her the spot as Beater, I'm hexing you to fly crooked next game."
"You can't do that, you're the ref," Greenburg deadpans back. "And I can't announce the position until I've seen all the tryouts, so will you please clear the field?"
"Her aim's always incredible," Scott says loyally, pulling Allison with him back towards the bleachers and leaving Finstock no choice but to follow. "You should see her in Charms, or in Defense Against the Dark Arts, I've never seen her miss a mark, no matter how far away she's standing!" Seeing the look on her face, he tugs on the sleeve of her robes lightly and smiles. "People just don't notice how good you are because Lydia's your best friend."
Finstock eyeballs him. "What are you even doing here, McCall? Finished embarrassing yourself at the Hufflepuff tryouts, so you've come to see if the Slytherins are desperate enough to take you?"
"I've come to support my friends," Scott says blankly.
"Right, of course. Hufflepuff," he says with enough disgust to make Lydia proud.
When she makes the team, the only person who's surprised is her. Danny applauds her from the Gryffindor table when she walks into the Great Hall the next morning, and Erica Reyes and Vernon Boyd -- the Gryffindor Beaters -- immediately swoop upon her to give her exaggeratedly airy kisses like she's royalty. Lydia grabs her hand as soon as she sits down, giving it a fond squeeze. Her grin lights up her entire face, and Allison leans their shoulders together.
~*
That same year, Allison learns that the ghost in the Argent family cellar is a witch named Talia Hale.
~*
"You know, I think you were Sorted into the wrong House."
Isaac Lahey's been hovering at the end of the row for five minutes now; Allison keeps catching glimpses of him in her peripheral vision as she ducks her head over her spellbooks and he pretends to be checking the reference numbers. He still somehow surprises her when he speaks -- she jumps, and the end of the sentence she was writing scratches crookedly down an inch, blotting there. Voices in the library will do that to you.
She looks up at him, scratching at the corner of her parchment with her quill to make sure the tip isn't broken. He picks at the corner of the shelf with his nails and peeks back at her.
She shoves the chair across from her out with her foot.
He's got the kind of face where his ears move when he smiles. She smiles back, because she likes that about him. He's a Hufflepuff from the year below and so she doesn't see him much outside of meals, but he sneaks into Scott and Stiles's dorm to sleep for reasons they don't explain to her, and Allison doesn't ask because it's really none of her business. She assumes it's like how Jackson spends summer hols with the Mahealanis.
"Well, yeah," she agrees. "I know that."
He settles into the chair, pulling his schoolbag around onto his lap. "That you were Sorted into the wrong House?"
"Yeah. You figure it out eventually. It's barmy, innit, Sorting kids when they're eleven?" she shrugs. "How are you supposed to have any grasp of self-identification when you're that age, or have any idea what kind of person you want to grow up to be?"
He watches her the way Scott watches the poisonous creatures that Professor Deaton brings out for the good lessons; unblinking and fascinated.
"The kid I was at eleven is completely different from the person I am at sixteen. If the Sorting Hat was put on my head today, it wouldn't sort me into Slytherin at all. I wouldn't ask it to, either, because I'm not that eleven-year-old. I think that's true for most of us -- we Sort too early."
"Do you think that's intentional?"
"I think it's traditional."
They exchange rueful smiles, because everybody knows how the wizarding world gets about its traditions.
"I mean," Isaac continues. "Do you think maybe we Sort children into houses they'll grow out of on purpose, to drive them to develop relationships with students in other Houses because their own don't fit as well anymore?"
"Maybe," Allison allows. "Out of curiosity, if you think Slytherin isn't for me, then what is?"
Stiles should have been a Slytherin, she thinks. But Scott was Sorted first, and Scott went into Hufflepuff, so really, there was no way Stiles Stilinski was going to let himself go anywhere else. Besides, Lydia and Jackson would have eaten him alive. So maybe Isaac has a point: Stiles had to grow into them before he knew himself well enough to hang out with them and not go barmy.
She kind of expects Isaac to say she belongs in Hufflepuff with them -- him and Scott and Stiles -- so she's surprised when he bares the corner of a smile and shrugs, "Gryffindor, of course."
"Go go Gryffindor," Allison agrees, and laughs when he does.
continue on to part two -->
Fandom: Teen Wolf w/ Harry Potter and Percy Jackson & the Olympians
Characters/Pairings: Allison, Scott, Lydia, mostly gen with Allison/Scott and one implied Allison/Scott/Isaac
Summary: In the heart of the Hale Woods, there's a copse of enchanted trees. It's all very Nightmare Before Christmas, really.
Word Count: 12,000
Notes: For oneoffour111 and usernameism and laria_gwyn! I took the prompts they left me for NaNoWriMo and combined them: Teen Wolf at Hogwarts for oneoffour111, Teen Wolf as demigods for usernameism and the AU where Allison's the werewolf for laria_gwyn.
[read @ AO3]
In the heart of the Hale woods, there's a copse of enchanted trees.
It's not anything obvious, not really, but a werewolf would know it's there, and even the average observant human or two would probably stop and look around, overcome by a feeling that doesn't have a name -- a feeling like being watched in the woods, an aloneness that doesn't have anything to do with loneliness. Hales have lived on this land for time out of memory, in one form or another, since before wolves even dreamed of humans with a human name.
Here, the trees grow close together -- in some places, branches overlap and leaves blur into a gradient of greens and browns.
They say that a tree can contain an entire universe. Touch the trunk of one, and know that galaxies spin beneath the bark with colossal slowness. Pick up a leaf off the ground and trace the genetic map of worlds in its veins. A tree lives a hundred lives.
They're right, of course.
Universes begin and end in the enchanted trees in the old Hale woods.
the first tree: a greenspire linden
The morning she leaves, Aunt Kate comes in and puts her wand down on the bathroom counter and does Allison’s hair by hand. Allison will never admit it (she probably doesn’t have to, her father does private security for wizarding functions and as such is the most accomplished Legilimens she knows, besides maybe her mother,) but she loves it best when Aunt Kate braids her hair by hand, because her mom usually does them and spells them too tight, so she has a headache by lunch.
Aunt Kate’s dressed to go out in the Muggle world, in a short black skirt and long corduroy jacket pulled over it with the belt synched tight, headphones snaking out of her pocket up to her ears. Her knee-high boots have bright silver buckles on them. They look too hot for September weather.
"Are you coming with us?" Allison asks curiously.
"I got errands of my own to run," Aunt Kate answers, smiling at her in the mirror. "Besides, I think your parents want you to themselves before you go off and they don’t see you for four whole months."
Allison rolls her eyes at that, because she’s sure her parents are going to be fine.
When her braids are done, they go down and sit together on the bottom step, which is too narrow for both of them to fit comfortably, even if Allison is pint-sized for an eleven-year-old. Aunt Kate lets her share an earbud with her, because, "you’re going to be without the Internet until Christmas, babe, you better get your fill of the Muggles’ finest to tide you over," and so Gorillaz chants in one ear and Allison drums her foot against the edge of her trunk.
Aunt Kate regards her solemnly. "Is there anything you want to ask me?" she probes. "I know your dad’s full of advice, but I was at Hogwarts a lot more recently than he was."
Allison fidgets, and in the brief lull before the music switches tracks, she blurts out, "Do you remember the Battle of Hogwarts?"
Her aunt’s eyebrows go up, but she nods without hesitation. "Yes," she says. "That was ... Merlin’s beard, that was almost ten years ago. I was a third year. Why?" She squints thoughtfully. "Are you nervous?"
She doesn’t say anything, and Aunt Kate sighs, pulling her in close so Allison’s head rests against her shoulder.
She strokes her hair and says, "There’s honestly no safer place to be, okay? And you know that at the first sign of trouble, your mum will Summon you back to us so fast you’ll probably break Hogwart’s wards zooming across the countryside."
Allison giggles.
"There you go," Aunt Kate’s mouth curves in the corner, and she squeezes her tight. "You’ll be fine, baby girl. Hey, think fast: what’s the best House?"
"Slytherin!"
"Good girl. Of course you’re allowed to go wherever you want to go, I’m not saying you shouldn’t make up your own mind, but Slytherin House is only for the best and you --" she touches the end of Allison’s nose with a fingertip. "Are the best."
"I know," Allison answers primly, and laughs when Aunt Kate hugs her close again, hard enough that she feels like a puppy, the one everybody wants to pet and hold.
"Can you promise me something?"
"What?"
Aunt Kate’s eyes sparkle. "When you come home at break, promise me the first bit of magic you’re going to do is levitate your dad in the middle of Christmas pudding. String him right up by the ankle."
Allison has no idea when she’s going to learn the spell for levitation, but she crosses her heart and promises anyway.
Eventually, her parents come downstairs, dressed in the Muggle clothes they saw on the front of a rock magazine once, and Allison says good-bye to Aunt Kate, who tells her to "knock ‘em dead, babe," in her phoniest accent, before her mother takes her arm and her dad takes her trunk and they Apparate away.
~*
Allison has several Argent cousins currently enrolled at Hogwarts; her parents and Aunt Kate remind her that this means she won’t be alone at school, because they’ll look out for her and hex anybody who tries to mess with her.
She finds them on the train and sits with them, but she can tell immediately that if she’s looking for companionship, she’s doing it in the wrong place: other than a "hey" when they first recognize her, they largely ignore her, drifting off to hang with their own groups of friends. Allison scrunches up in her seat and cracks open one of her new spellbooks, getting maybe four paragraphs into the introduction before she loses interest and takes to staring out the window as they leave the last of London behind.
She isn’t surprised. Most of the Argents moved base to the Cayman Islands for tax evasion reasons when she was much younger, so she only saw her cousins during the holidays, their hair highlighted and their skin wholesomely tan.
They still send their kids to Hogwarts, of course, because they’re still British and it’s tradition.
She falls asleep as the sun goes down, waking up when they pull into Hogsmeade and she has to hurriedly pull on her robes and join the other first years gathering on the platform, rounded up by a sour-faced young man with a lantern hoisted up high. Everybody tries to avoid standing too close to him, because he’s eyeing them hawkishly, the way people do when they don’t have a lot of experience with small children.
"We’re going to get turned into toads and then we’re going to die," whimpers a boy to Allison’s right.
She tries to smile at him, because she’s pretty sure human-to-animal Transfiguration for the purpose of eating is still cannibalism and therefore illegal, but the kid on his other side elbows him.
"Wouldn’t that be awesome?" he goes in a low, delighted hiss, while the groundskeeper counts them. Even in the low platform lighting, Allison can see his fingernails are coated with a rim of grime. "If that was the initiation test we have to take? I’ve never been a toad, I wonder what it’s like. Come on," he goes, when the boy next to him looks dubious. "Don’t tell me you wouldn’t want to ribbit if you had the opportunity!"
The boys continue their discussion in that vein, stopping only when the little boats glide out around the bend and they see their first glimpse of Hogwarts, which looks like any other castle Allison’s dad would take her to so he could show her how to weave protective wards together to make a shield, except bigger.
She thinks they might be a little disappointed when Professor Flitwick comes out and tells them that the Sorting Hat will be choosing their Houses for them, like they really had worked themselves up to believe they were going to have to survive their first week at Hogwarts as toads.
Squeakily, Professor Flitwick calls her name up to the Hat first.
Hmmmm, goes a little voice, snug in her ear, as she settles herself on the stool, hooking her feet around the rung. Hello, Argent.
"Hat," Allison returns respectfully.
I’ve Sorted your entire family into Slytherin, you know, dating all the way back to when I was but a young and sprightly thing.
"I know. Can I go there, please?"
Are you sure? The Hat sounds, if anything, thoughtful. The same way every family has something they don’t want seen in their cellar --
She startles, because how can the Hat know that? Even Allison technically isn’t supposed to know that, but Aunt Kate’s never been particularly subtle about the auras of the things she brings back to the estate; even when she’s in her room, some of those items are malevolent enough to make her grit her teeth until one of the adults strengthens the protective charms on the cellar door again.
-- every person has something hidden inside of them, too. There might be another House where you could belong.
Allison considers it, peeking out at the tables from underneath the brim. Nobody looks actively hostile or actively welcoming: mostly everybody just looks hungry. She lets the brim fall.
"Thanks, Hat, but I know Slytherin best and you’re most comfortable with what you know, and you’re happiest where you’re comfortable. So, can I go there?"
The Hat doesn’t answer, but it does open its rip wide enough to shout, "SLYTHERIN!" to the whole Hall.
"Cheers!" says Allison, depositing the Hat back on the stool and crossing down to where the Slytherins are applauding. A fourth year who still hasn’t swapped his side-facing cap for his wizard’s hat yet leans over to grab her in some bro-handshake that leaves her a little confused. A couple cousins wave, looking unsurprised.
She turns around to watch the rest of the Sorting. Three girls and a boy join her at the Slytherin table; "Martin, Lydia," keeps making snide comments about the other first years as they go up, which Allison politely ignores because she figures she’s coming down from nerves. The toad boys both go to Hufflepuff -- the second one, whose name seems to be all consonants, so Flitwick mumbles it helplessly like "ghmmph Stilinkski," makes everybody shout laughter by accidentally grabbing Flitwick’s hat instead of the Sorting Hat, as Flitwick and the stool are the same height. Ears bright red, he shoves the real Hat -- considerably more shabby than the other -- over his head and promptly takes it back off to go join his friend.
By the end of the Sorting, "Whittemore, Jackson," becomes the last Slytherin. A prefect frowns sidelong at them and says, clearly audible, "There are fewer of them every year."
Allison blinks, but before she can think about why that unsettles her, the Headmistress stands to address them, and she forgets.
~*
Lydia Martin has auburn hair and very neat nails, and she sizes up all the Slytherin first years over the next week and comes to the executive decision that Allison shall be her best friend, and sets about making that happen.
Before the Sorting Hat started rattling off qualities like a horoscope, the only thing Allison really knew about Slytherin was that it was the House for the best, and therefore the House for Argents (and also, their colors were green and silver, which were, coincidentally, the two most prominent colors in the Argent wardrobe, so that was convenient,) but she thinks that maybe the Sorting Hat sings out House traits with exactly people like Lydia in mind. Either that, or Lydia listened carefully and then molded herself to fit.
Allison’s pretty sure that Lydia’s either a genius, or she’s been doing underage magic behind her parents’ back for a long time before coming to Hogwarts, because by the time they move from theory and safety into beginner’s spellcasting, Lydia barely even needs to try before she succeeds, and spends the rest of class looking bored.
Allison, Lydia, and Jackson Whittemore are the only Slytherin first years who aren’t pureblood, and as such, tend to stick together.
"Muggleborn," Jackson confesses; he’s got a thin, pinched face and too many freckles and a gross habit of wiping his nose in his sleeve, and he doesn’t smile much, like it hurts his face. "Or, a least, adopted by Muggles, so who knows how dirty that makes my blood."
"Don’t be ridiculous," snorts Lydia, spooning porridge into her mouth and flipping to the back of Standard Book of Spells: Grade 3, which she snatched out of somebody’s bag while Allison had them distracted by asking for directions. (She hadn’t had to fake it: she really was lost, although she supposes Lydia wasn’t.)
Jackson sneers back at her, but since Lydia hadn’t bothered to look up at him, she misses it. Allison smiles sympathetically.
"What about you?" he finally asks, coming up behind them as they head down to the dungeons for Potions with Professor Harris. His tone is belligerent, and he scuffs angrily with his feet as they walk. "Why aren’t you invited to sit with the cool kids?"
"We are the cool kids," Lydia interjects, sounding offended at the idea that they wouldn't be. Seeing both Jackson and Allison brighten, she straightens her shoulders and adds proudly, "I’m half-and-half. Like making an alloy or a blended fabric or a mash-up, it’s just more genetically sound to mix. It’s silly to think otherwise, and unbecoming of this House."
Allison never talked about blood status with her parents: it just wasn’t something they were concerned about, so much as what people chose to do with their magic.
~*
Lydia says that Slytherin is more of a girl house, anyway, and that's why Jackson's the only boy in their year. Girls have to be more ambitious and more cunning than blokes on a daily basis just to survive, so really, it's a good thing there's a Hogwarts house to accommodate that. Allison believes her, because Lydia's going to be the youngest witch to receive the Order of Merlin First Class -- she's going to be, because she says she is.
She doesn't think about what it means for Jackson to be the only Slytherin boy in their year, until Creepy Creevey mentions something about Jackson's friendship with a Gryffindor.
Creepy Creevey isn't technically Slytherin's ghost, but she sees him around a lot more often than she does the Bloody Baron; endlessly curious about the dormitories and the daily lives of its inhabitants, once or twice he's been caught uncomfortably close to the girl's lav, which Allison supposes is where the name "Creepy Creevey" comes from, but mostly she sees him floating around the common room, staring at things, and when she asks him what he's doing, he looks surprised, like it hadn't occurred to him to wonder until she made him wonder about it.
"I wish I had my camera," is what he settles on. "It's like a --"
"I know what a camera is," Allison interrupts, because he seems like somebody who would talk incessantly if not politely redirected.
"Do you?" he seems pleased. "Slytherins are so surprising sometimes!"
"Are we?"
He pauses at that, rotating slowly in midair until he's nearly upside-down without seeming to notice that he's doing it. The greenish light from the windows turns him the same color as garnets, a faint glow around his cheeks. "I guess," he says slowly. "People are only surprising if you have really narrow ideas of what people are. Then they catch you off-guard all the time."
Allison isn't sure what this has to do with cameras, but it might have something to do with the fact that Slytherins aren't traditionally very familiar with Muggle technology.
"The green light's very pretty," she offers, because she thinks that's what he's getting at it.
"Yes, it is," he says wistfully, his hands twitching around a shape in front of his eyes. Camera, Allison thinks, and her heart squeezes itself, a little sad. "I wish I'd know that when I was alive, I would have tried harder to get down here."
Although technically a Gryffindor sixth year, Creepy Creevey is more around Aunt Kate's age, which still makes him the youngest ghost that Allison knows. She thinks. She doesn't actually know how old the ghost is that lives in Aunt Kate's cellar, just that sometimes she gets really angry and it starts leaking out around the edges of the wards, making all the hairs on Allison's arms stand on end and the corners of the room go dark. When her parents go out, they leave an elderly house elf in charge of keeping the ghost down there, because house elf magic is stronger than a wizard's in some ways, but she's old and falls asleep in front of the fire a lot, so Allison's woken up in the middle of the night before to find this horrible, knotted caricature of a woman hovering over her bed, ghostly grey and humming. Her eyes are terrifying. Allison would have expected her to try to escape the instant she had a chance, but she doesn't: she stays right by her side, trying to pet her hair and sing her to sleep like protecting Allison is the only thing she can imagine doing, and she'll stay there until someone arrives to shackle her back down in the cellar.
Allison's starting to think that her experience with ghosts might not be everyone else's experience with ghosts.
~*
Jackson Whittemore and Danny Mahealani both make the Quidditch team the following year, becoming their House's respective Keepers. Putting two twelve-year-old boys in front of the goals means that for the first couple matches, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw completely wipe the pitch with them, but the first Gryffindor-Slytherin match lasts for two and a half days because nobody can score and nobody can find the Snitch, and Allison gives up and goes inside to have hot cocoa and hears about it from Lydia, but apparently Headmistress McGonagall had to go out there and cancel the match at the fifty-two hour mark because the fifth years were learning self-Transfiguration and she wanted to have at least one year where nobody got turned into a flower lei, and how could they expect that to happen if none of the fifth years had gotten any sleep?
Allison and Lydia learn not to wait for them afterward, because they'll invariably stay behind on the pitch no matter the weather, where they'll argue in that way that's really just loudly agreeing with each other and fly around until the groundskeeper -- a mean, taciturn wizard named Mr Hale who never makes eye contact with anybody -- comes out to yell at them.
Danny's turning him into a very competitive Chocolate Card collector, Creepy Creevey reports.
"Good," Lydia decides, spelling the ends of her nails a molten gold and then silver and then back to the gold, which she smiles proudly at, fanning her fingers out for them to take a look at. "He could use someone to challenge him."
And maybe it's something about the way people just stop treating Jackson and Danny's inter-House friendship as odd, but when Scott McCall starts booting Stiles's arse off his stool in Herbology to sit next to Allison instead and ask her questions about, like, her favorite colors and stuff, she finds she doesn't mind so much. Without entirely meaning to, she winds up with a very large cache of information on him -- his mother's a Muggle, he wants to take Care of Magical Creatures with Professor Deaton in his third year, and he's going to try out for the Quidditch team until the day they accept him because there's no other way they're going to get rid of him.
"Um, why are you still tolerating that Hufflepuff?" Lydia asks at the start of next term, when Scott walks her all the way to the corridor outside the Slytherin common room for seemingly no reason -- it means he's going to have to backtrack half-way across the castle to reach the Hufflepuff entrance by the kitchens.
She says it in the tone people use when they're saying what's that? about things stuck to the bottoms of other people's shoes.
"I'm fostering relationships outside of my comfort zone to further my own agenda," Allison replies promptly. "And also, he's sweet."
"Sweet," Lydia echoes blankly, like she can't fathom it, and Allison hugs her, quick and overcome with fondness.
Then Scott starts joining them at the Slytherin table at breakfast on the mornings when the Slytherins and Hufflepuffs have double Herbology afterwards.
This, of course, means that Stiles comes too, and Lydia looks horrified.
~*
Their fifth year, when Scott McCall tries out for a position on the Quidditch team and fails yet again, Allison doesn't.
"Where have you been hiding these past couple years?" Mr Finstock demands, completely ignoring the way the Slytherin Captain is trying to get him to leave the pitch so she can get on with the rest of the tryouts. "Slytherin's been bottoming out in fourth place for the Quidditch cup for the past five years!"
Behind him, Jackson's face grows even more sour and pinched than usual.
Finstock isn't done. "Your aim is incredible, Argent! Greenburg, if you don't give her the spot as Beater, I'm hexing you to fly crooked next game."
"You can't do that, you're the ref," Greenburg deadpans back. "And I can't announce the position until I've seen all the tryouts, so will you please clear the field?"
"Her aim's always incredible," Scott says loyally, pulling Allison with him back towards the bleachers and leaving Finstock no choice but to follow. "You should see her in Charms, or in Defense Against the Dark Arts, I've never seen her miss a mark, no matter how far away she's standing!" Seeing the look on her face, he tugs on the sleeve of her robes lightly and smiles. "People just don't notice how good you are because Lydia's your best friend."
Finstock eyeballs him. "What are you even doing here, McCall? Finished embarrassing yourself at the Hufflepuff tryouts, so you've come to see if the Slytherins are desperate enough to take you?"
"I've come to support my friends," Scott says blankly.
"Right, of course. Hufflepuff," he says with enough disgust to make Lydia proud.
When she makes the team, the only person who's surprised is her. Danny applauds her from the Gryffindor table when she walks into the Great Hall the next morning, and Erica Reyes and Vernon Boyd -- the Gryffindor Beaters -- immediately swoop upon her to give her exaggeratedly airy kisses like she's royalty. Lydia grabs her hand as soon as she sits down, giving it a fond squeeze. Her grin lights up her entire face, and Allison leans their shoulders together.
~*
That same year, Allison learns that the ghost in the Argent family cellar is a witch named Talia Hale.
~*
"You know, I think you were Sorted into the wrong House."
Isaac Lahey's been hovering at the end of the row for five minutes now; Allison keeps catching glimpses of him in her peripheral vision as she ducks her head over her spellbooks and he pretends to be checking the reference numbers. He still somehow surprises her when he speaks -- she jumps, and the end of the sentence she was writing scratches crookedly down an inch, blotting there. Voices in the library will do that to you.
She looks up at him, scratching at the corner of her parchment with her quill to make sure the tip isn't broken. He picks at the corner of the shelf with his nails and peeks back at her.
She shoves the chair across from her out with her foot.
He's got the kind of face where his ears move when he smiles. She smiles back, because she likes that about him. He's a Hufflepuff from the year below and so she doesn't see him much outside of meals, but he sneaks into Scott and Stiles's dorm to sleep for reasons they don't explain to her, and Allison doesn't ask because it's really none of her business. She assumes it's like how Jackson spends summer hols with the Mahealanis.
"Well, yeah," she agrees. "I know that."
He settles into the chair, pulling his schoolbag around onto his lap. "That you were Sorted into the wrong House?"
"Yeah. You figure it out eventually. It's barmy, innit, Sorting kids when they're eleven?" she shrugs. "How are you supposed to have any grasp of self-identification when you're that age, or have any idea what kind of person you want to grow up to be?"
He watches her the way Scott watches the poisonous creatures that Professor Deaton brings out for the good lessons; unblinking and fascinated.
"The kid I was at eleven is completely different from the person I am at sixteen. If the Sorting Hat was put on my head today, it wouldn't sort me into Slytherin at all. I wouldn't ask it to, either, because I'm not that eleven-year-old. I think that's true for most of us -- we Sort too early."
"Do you think that's intentional?"
"I think it's traditional."
They exchange rueful smiles, because everybody knows how the wizarding world gets about its traditions.
"I mean," Isaac continues. "Do you think maybe we Sort children into houses they'll grow out of on purpose, to drive them to develop relationships with students in other Houses because their own don't fit as well anymore?"
"Maybe," Allison allows. "Out of curiosity, if you think Slytherin isn't for me, then what is?"
Stiles should have been a Slytherin, she thinks. But Scott was Sorted first, and Scott went into Hufflepuff, so really, there was no way Stiles Stilinski was going to let himself go anywhere else. Besides, Lydia and Jackson would have eaten him alive. So maybe Isaac has a point: Stiles had to grow into them before he knew himself well enough to hang out with them and not go barmy.
She kind of expects Isaac to say she belongs in Hufflepuff with them -- him and Scott and Stiles -- so she's surprised when he bares the corner of a smile and shrugs, "Gryffindor, of course."
"Go go Gryffindor," Allison agrees, and laughs when he does.
continue on to part two -->