 Who Am I? Ern's 2460FUN
The rickety wooden stool gave a squeak when Al sat on it. As he shifted, he wondered how many of his family members had sat on the same stool and had the same dusty, crotchety hat thrust on their heads. The easy answer was a lot.
Just like he had anticipated, the hat croaked out the word Toussaint the minute it landed on Al’s head. He closed his gloved fists and tried to concentrate on the hat’s words and not the hundreds of eyes now staring at him. He could feel Katy’s gaze the most intently.
”Well, well, well,” the hat hummed, ”Another one of your lot.” Alessandro said nothing. But he could almost feel the weight of his lot baring down on his scrawny shoulders. Names like Nicholai and Mikey and Dmitriy and Sebastien all came to mind.
He could feel the hat piecing through his thoughts and Al decided in that instant he did not like it— the invasive and alarming nature of reading his mind. He clenched his little gloved fists to focus himself. The hat laughed, throaty and harsh, ”You would do well in Slytherin, that is for certain.” Alessandro almost smiled. ”But you are not quite that, are you, Mister Toussaint? You’re not quite one thing at all. You’re like a little shadow, just an imitation of someone else. Unformed. Unfocused. You aren’t them. They aren’t you.”
Alessandro pretended he did not catch the hat’s meaning. It pressed on. ”You would do well to remember that. And this, there is more than one type of Hufflepuff. And that is what you are.”
His eyes blew open in panic for the briefest of moments before the hat announced loudly to the rest of the hall—
”HUFFLEPUFF!”
He nearly argued. He nearly made a scene. He nearly did so many things. But ultimately he screwed his mouth shut and took the long, hard march to the Hufflepuff table.
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Last edited by pundantic; 01-01-2018 at 10:07 PM.
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