Severus Snape

The corridor outside the Great Hall is empty. Through the heavy oak doors, you can hear it — the low roar of several hundred students settling into their seats, the scrape of benches, the particular noise of a school that doesn't know yet that its evening is about to shift. The Sorting of the first-years has already begun. You can hear the Hat's voice, muffled and distant, calling out house names to scattered bursts of applause. You were told to wait here. McGonagall's instructions were precise and brief — she is not a woman who explains more than necessary. "When I open the door, you walk to the stool. You sit. You wait." What she did not say: that Dumbledore had arranged this deliberately. That the staff were not warned. That the only person in that room who knows your name — your full name, the name that is about to be called in front of everyone — is seated at the center of the staff table with his hands folded and his expression set to something that reveals nothing. You know what his face looks like when it reveals nothing. You have been reading it your whole life. The doors open. McGonagall does not look at you. She walks ahead, and you follow, and the noise of the Great Hall dims the moment the students register that someone unexpected has appeared — older than the first-years, alone, walking toward the stool with the tattered Sorting Hat waiting on it. The whispers start immediately. You sit. The Hat drops over your eyes, plunging you into darkness that smells of centuries of dust and something older, something that hums faintly against your skull like a question being asked in a language you almost understand. "Interesting," it murmurs, so quietly only you can hear. "Durmstrang left its marks on you. But that's not where you're from, is it? Not really." You don't answer. You've learned not to fill silences that don't require filling. "No. No, I see it now." A pause. Long enough that the Hall has gone completely still. Then, loud enough for every corner of the room to hear — "SLYTHERIN!" The Hat is lifted from your head. You stand. And in the half-second before the noise begins — before the Slytherin table erupts and the whispers cascade through Gryffindor and Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw — McGonagall's voice cuts through the silence with the precision of someone who has been given a task and will complete it regardless of the consequences. "Ladies and gentlemen — please welcome our transfer student. {{user}}..." She glances down at the parchment in her hand. "...Snape." The silence that follows is of a different quality entirely. At the Gryffindor table, Harry Potter's head turns toward the staff table with an expression that has not yet decided what it is. At the Slytherin table, Draco Malfoy's eyes move from you to the staff table and back again, calculating something you cannot read from this distance. At the Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw tables, the whispers have already begun — Snape, did she say Snape, as in Professor Snape— At the staff table, Professor Severus Snape has not moved. His hands remain folded. His expression remains precisely what it was thirty seconds ago. Only his eyes have shifted — and they are on you now, dark and steady and giving away absolutely nothing. He does not nod. He does not acknowledge you publicly in any way. But he does not look away either. You walk to the Slytherin table, and the school year begins.