When Theo finally got to Hogwarts, she knew where she wanted to be sorted.

She had a Death Eater father and a mother who had once been in Ravenclaw, and she knew that no matter what, she wouldn't be disowned. Her father wasn't like Lucius Malfoy – and even if he were, her mother's will had meant that all her money went to Theo. No matter what, she would still remain the person she was in the eyes of the world.

She could have chosen Gryffindor – the Hat gave her that option – but she had always known where she was meant to be. Harry Potter closed his eyes and said, "Anything but Slytherin." Theo Nott closed her eyes and whispered, "Slytherin. Please."

Theo's story is one without princes and princesses, because he's both. He's used to the stairs in the girl's dorm being the way the rest of his house knows who he is on that day, and the fact that he's as close to Daphne and Tracy as he is to Blaise.

Draco Malfoy and his cronies plot ways to be the Slytherins the world expects – Theo, Blaise, Tracy and Daphne spend their time becoming the Slytherins their house is meant to produce.

She's not blind, of course – none of them are. They can all see further than Malfoy's childish attacks, and they all know what's ever so slowly coming towards them. But no one knows when the next war will hit, and until then, they have a world to begin to conquer.

Slytherins are sly and cunning. They're the true power in the wizarding world, even if they're not always visible.

The world thinks Lucius Malfoy is the one who controls the Ministry, with the money he throws at every politician who agrees to his bidding. They don't see the ones who don't – the ones who make the real decisions, the ones whose strings are pulled so subtly that not even they know it.

If there's one thing that Theo's father taught him, it's to respect knowledge. Ravenclaws are the house of learning, but most of them don't know how to use what they know. But Slytherins – they're almost as good as the eagles when it comes to absorbing information, and infinitely better at utilising it.

There's a reason most of the action-oriented members of the Department of Mysteries were never Gryffindors or Raveclaws, but Slytherins.

No one notices him or his closest friends. Slytherin's public image is tied to that of Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle, at least for as long as they all are at Hogwarts. Malfoy would call it a disadvantage – to Theo, it's anything but. He's the one who knows what is truly happening behind the scenes of the flashes that Malfoy and Potter throw at each other – he's the one who hears the secrets and decides whether or not to reveal them.

This is a story about a child who did all she could to survive. There were others who were too bright and too loved to be attacked, and just because their ideal prey is impossible to reach doesn't mean that the hunters stop looking.

Battle lines were drawn between Slytherin and the rest of Hogwarts long before Theo took a step in her hallowed halls. She was only doing what she could to survive.

The other students sneered at them for being who they were – to them, they were all pureblood extremists, favoured by a professor who hated the world. (No one realised that Daphne's mother was Muggleborn, or than most of them had at least one parent who hadn't been a Slytherin.)

So maybe Theo played up in Potions – not as much as Draco did, but enough for everyone else to know that she was favoured too – but in the end, it was just a way to survive. McGonagall, Flitwick and Sprout would never treat them fairly, no matter what they said about houses not meaning anything, and she didn't see anything wrong with taking what favour she could.

And maybe that meant that she aligned with Umbridge instead of seeking out Potter's little group of misfits, or that she laughed at Lupin just as much as Malfoy, but the ones who looked down upon her for it had never tried to survive in Slytherin.

The house was her choice. Most of the people weren't.

Theo knew he was different. The fact that he'd been in both halves of the Slytherin dorms was proof enough. He knew where Vaisey hides the Parisian chocolates his parents sent him, and if asked, could reveal just how often Millicent practiced her beauty spells to please her mother.

It was part of the reason he chose Slytherin in the first place – despite their reputation for blood superiority, most of their house didn't care about a person's heritage as long as they were cunning enough to navigate their way through the dynamics of Slytherin.

He knew his father supported He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, but his generation weren't the same as the one that had fought in the Great Wizarding War. He could see them reaching that point, that much was true, but most of them would never become as fanatical as the Slytherins of twenty years past had been.

That was the thing about Slytherins. They watched and learned, and apart from the fools like Malfoy, they had learned that trying to change the world by killing more than half of it was never going to be a workable solution.

The only way to mould the world was to do it in a way that no one noticed, and that was something that Slytherin trained its students to do. Malfoy measured his victories by how many times he could get a rise out of Potter or one of the other Slytherins – Theo measured hers by the way that Mugglebors stopped looking confused when she turned up to class with her hair tied in a plait.

She knew she'd never belong in any of the other houses – not really, not even in Hufflepuff, where they claimed to accept everyone. There would always be someone who looked at her in askance. But in Slytherin – in Slytherin, she belonged.

This is a story about a person who had three best friends. About someone who didn't understand why she needed to specify her friendship with the word 'best' in the first place.

He had known Blaise since childhood – their mothers had once been the closest of friends, despite the fact that they had been in different houses during their time at Hogwarts. And despite the fact that his mother was dead, Mrs Zabini had refused to let the bond she had once shared with her disappear – he had stayed at Blaise's home as often as he stayed at his own.

Tracy and Daphne he had found at Hogwarts. They had been unsure of trusting him at first, both holding too many secrets they never wanted Malfoy to get wind of, but once they realised that the only Slytherins Malfoy was interested in were those named Crabbe, Goyle, Bulstrode and Parkinson, they had warmed up to him quickly.

He had never once thought of them as anything more than that.

At least, not before fourth year, when Blaise pulled him aside and asked him to go to the Yule Ball with him.

It was an odd thought, not one he truly understood. But they were friends, and he saw no reason to say no. It wasn't until the night of the ball, when Daphne and Tracy pulled him aside hours before it started and spelled the stairs on the girls' dorm into letting him in that he realised that perhaps, there had been more to it all than he saw.

Because listening to Pans gleefully giggling with Millicent over the fact that she was going as Malfoy's date, he realised that a part of him wanted to do the same. A part – a large part – of him was just as thrilled about going with Blaise as Pansy was about going with Malfoy.

That day didn't change them, not really. In the end, they remained the people they were, four friends who understood each other better than anyone else ever could.

(And maybe Blaise asked him out the next Hogsmeade weekend too, and they never stopped going together, but that was nothing that would ever have the ability to change the four of them.)

Gryffindors talked about Hogwarts as their second home in the most flowery terms possible. Theo would never view the castle as they did, not truly, but he almost understood why they said that.

His father loved him, but there was a reason he had spent more time living at Blaise's than at his home following his fourth year. And for two years after that, Hogwarts became what Blaise's home was – a place where he was certain he was safe.

And then Dumbledore fell. And then his last year as a Hogwarts student dawned.

In the coming years when he worked at the Ministry, he would have different reasons for being thankful that Malfoy and his cronies were Slytherin's most meretricious students, and that he was practically invisible to the world at large. That, however, was years away. In that moment, he was thankful for another reason altogether.

In the Carrows' world, the only way to survive was doing as they said. And with Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle being their model Slytherins, the worst tasks often fell to them. With those three being the face of Slytherin, he was never the one the Carrows called to oversee detentions.

Blaise worried, he knew that. For all that the Carrows would think twice before going after a Slytherin student, they would still do so if they thought that the student in question didn't support them, and they knew they wouldn't face any backlash. And there were always days when she wasn't living in the boys' dorm – when she wasn't near Blaise, whose mother's reputation meant that he had immunity from attack from the Carrows.

And, of course, there were always the other students. There was a reason that she started carrying a knife with her everywhere, and the reason wasn't the Carrows. Wasn't Snape.

Once, being hated for being a Slytherin had meant sneers and muttered words, maybe a jinx to trip you up at most. Now it meant being attacked from behind jinxes replaced with cutting curses, and eyes that wanted to kill.

To Hogwarts, it didn't matter that she hated he Carrows as much as most of them did. It didn't matter that she was as afraid for her father as they were for the families they had left behind. She was a Slytherin, and when they couldn't risk attacking the ones they wanted to hurt, she presented an easy target.

It was almost enough to make her understand why some of the Slytherins supported the Carrows despite not caring for their pureblood fanaticism and devotion to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

Unlike other stories, this is not a love story. He loved Blaise, and Blaise loved him back – but that was only a facet of each of them. That wasn't the start and end of who they were, not like the stories the Hufflepuffs liked to sigh over.

Blaise worried about him when he wasn't in the boys' dorm, Theo knew that. But he also knew that Blaise was well aware of the fact that he could defend himself from anyone who attacked him.

This is not a love story about two people who were so devoted to each other that they would sacrifice the world. This is a story about four friends who were, more than anything, pragmatic.

In their seventh year, Daphne taught herself healing charms. Tracy took Theo's knife and cut off her hair, all while teaching herself every offensive spell this side of illegal. Theo taught himself to attack from behind impenetrable shields, and Blaise walked confidently enough that no one could bring themselves to go against him.

Theo still received messaged from his father, of course, talking about everything the Dark Lord planned on changing now that he was in power. And he stored every letter in box only his blood, willingly given, could open.

The Dark Lord would lose, history had taught them all that much. And when he did, the last thing that would go into evidence against his father were the letter he and sent him.

Instead, in the time they had free (and with terror stalking the halls of Hogwarts, they had a lot of that) the four of them planned defences. They learned all they could from the trials of those who had gone free all those years ago – but even after nearly twenty years, the best way to avoid Azkaban was still fake tears and the words "He would've killed me!"

In the end, there was nothing left for them to do but wait.

War finally came to Hogwarts, gleaming clearer than ever before, despite the fact that she had been living in Hogwarts for the better part of a year. And though Theo, Blaise, Daphne and Tracy defended themselves, that was all that they did.

Expectations or not, they were Slytherins. Turning a bad situation to their advantage was written in every facet of their beings. No matter who won the war, they would come out on top.

Of course, Potter's final victory wasn't really a surprise – not the way a triumph for the Dark Lord would have been. Theo's father was taken away by the remnants of the Ministry immediately, of course – and tomorrow, the four of them would begin their efforts to free him.

But in that moment, Theo contented herself with being in Blaise's arms, Tracy and Daphne close by.

They might not have been the most visible of students, but Theo was pretty sure that they had still managed to survive Hogwarts as the best off of them all.

A/N: The reason for the confluence of pronouns when referring to Theo is that they're gender fluid here. Sometimes they identify as male, sometimes as female, and I've tried to bring that out here. While I know that gender neutral pronouns exist, none of them felt right for the story - the Theo here identifies with a gender, the only difference between them and a cis-gendered person being that said gender changes often, and is not stagnant.
However, all material here is based on online research - please feel free to drop me an NM correcting me if I've gotten something wrong here due to a lack of first-hand information C:

This was written for the Hunger Games: Fanfic Style Competition, using the word, dialogue, pairing, weapon and class prompts.

I hope you guys liked this! As always, please don't forget to drop a review on your way out! C: