Slytherin Slytherin Slytherin Slytherin... The chant was continuous and made it rather difficult for the Sorting Hat to think properly. Rowena had insisted, when she had enchanted the Hat to hear student's thoughts, that it would be able to sort through all of the gobbledygook to find what was truly important about each student, but the Sorting Hat was starting to wonder if that portion of the enchantment was wearing off. Or if children were simply louder and more annoying these days.

"Is there a particular reason why you want to be in Slytherin?" the Hat asked.

There were a few seconds of silence, during which the Hat ascertained that this particular boy was not very well suited to Slytherin. He had no more ambition than most of the other students the Hat had sorted over the years, who wanted to do well in school and please their parents while also wanting to grow up enough that they no longer needed to please their parents. And while he was plenty resourceful, Sirius Black had all the cunning of a charging bull– he reacted to an unusually difficult problem by hitting harder rather than by coming up with new tactics.

"My entire family's been in Slytherin."

"And you were worried, for some reason, that you would not be?" The boy seemed to be under more than usual pressure from his parents, and the Sorting Hat rather doubted that they would be impressed by their son breaking the family tradition, but it had been specially warned against taking parents into too much consideration. The ones who really cared where their offspring were sorted tended to be too overly invested in whatever preferred (or unpreferred) House they had selected to judge how well suited it was for their child.

"Not really. But I bet a bloke on the train ten galleons that you just put people in the first house they think of."

"You may tell him that I do not." The Hat did not follow this with any comment on how he was sorting Sirius Black himself, not the boy's entire family, or on the boy's lack of aptitude for Slytherin.

Mercifully, the boy was more or less quiet as he mulled over what next to ask the Hat. While the Hat could understand everything that crossed his mind, the thoughts were never quite crystallized into words and so were easy to ignore in favor of a deeper dive into the boy's psyche.

Rowena would have liked his sheer brilliance– Sirius Black might well prove to be the smartest among this crop of first years– but the lack of wisdom to temper it coupled with the boy's recklessness would have driven her round the bend. Likewise the shear single-mindedness that the boy usually seemed to pursue tasks with was alien to Ravenclaw– Rowena had always known when to quit and usually preferred to work around difficulties rather than barrel through them.

"You're a very loyal young man," the Hat told the boy. He did not mention Black's parents, or some of their more questionable parenting choices, because he knew how the boy would react. "With a remarkably well developed instinct for fair play." He did not quite have Helga's ability to compensate for weakness in others, but then Helga had not had that in the beginning either.

"What does any of this have to do with Slytherin?"

"Nothing at all. You want friends, Mr. Black, friends that you can trust absolutely without needing to constantly worry about how good of a showing you've made–" friends who would support him and help him cope with his parents and the rest of his cutthroat family, though the Hat did not add that. "You could easily find many such friends in Hufflepuff."

"You can't put me in Hufflepuff. Mum would go spare." The undercurrent in the boy's mind suggested that he would rather enjoy the spectacle, if he hadn't thought that it would come with his mother's undying hatred.

The Sorting Hat had been warned against taking parent's desires– or children's perceptions of them, rather, as the Hat could say nothing about the desires themselves– into consideration and it could overrule a student's wishes, if it thought it necessary, but the Hat thought that it would not be in this instance.

The boy was not especially brave at the moment, but he did have a kernel that could grow into genuine bravery if given the right impetus. While it would certainly take no small amount of courage for the boy to tell his parents that he had been sorted against their wishes, the Hat did not think that Hufflepuff was quite the right soil for that momentary courage to turn into a genuine character trait. Hufflepuff had a tendency to go with the flow that might very well end with Sirius Black doing everything in his power to appease his angry parents.

The boy was certainly daring enough for Godric's taste– it had taken the man more than a decade to really work out what sorts of risks eleven year-olds should actually be taking– and if his attachment to his younger brother was any indication he had the potential to develop a fair amount of chivalry as well.

"You're quite right. Hufflepuff would not suit you best. You'll be better served by GRYFFINDOR!"