Co-Habilitation

Soon Professor Slughorn entered The Common Room and gave his standard welcoming speech - how the Slytherins were to present a united front to outsiders, how any fights or disagreements between fellow Slytherins would be death with behind closed doors and not turn them into a spectacle for others to comment upon and watch, how if anyone of them stepped a single toe out of line, they could except their Head of House to send a letter to their parents back home and so on and so forth and then left them to the tender mercies of other fifteen year old kids - the Prefects.

----------Line Break-----------

The fifth-year Prefect brought them to the dorms.

Well, Harry had always liked his dorm room in the Gryffindor tower but this was on another whole level.

The Gryffindor rooms certainly couldn't compare to the Slytherin dorms.

They were informed that not all of them would be clumped together in a single room.

Each room would be shared between two people.

Despite being in the dungeons, there was nothing at all damp or cold about the dorms.

The clean Slytherin greens and silvers were set off by beautifully polished panels of mahogany, which lined the floors and ran up the lower parts of the walls seamlessly.

Before he could take in all the splendour, the Prefect spoke up, "The list of your room partners has been pinned on the message board at the end of the corridor. Go and settle yourselves accordingly. Light outs for first years will be at ten o'clock sharp. So you better be in your beds by that time."

Finished with his words, the Prefect left them all standing there and looking at each other.

One by one the boys went ahead to see their names on the list and entered their rooms.

When Hadrian saw who his roommate was, he didn't know whether to curse out loud or laugh.

Bitterly Harry wondered what the universe had against him. All of this could not be a simple coincidence.

Logically, Harry knew that this Riddle wasn't the one who had killed his parents;  he wasn't the one who had tried every trick possible to see Harry leave the mortal coil.

However, he just couldn't imagine himself and Voldemort staying in the same room and not killing each other in a fit of pique one day.

Moreover, Riddle had always been a predator of the highest calibre - a Leopard and it was common sense to know that a Leopard wouldn't change its spots just because he was in a zoo rather than a forest or because he had someone extra around him.

Don't misunderstand him on the zoo point.

Someone might take an offence that he had likened Hogwarts to a zoo but it was the absolute truth.

It was akin to a zoo where the various animals/students were looked at under microscopic scrutiny/sorting hat and then shuffled off to their pens/houses to spend the rest of their lives in those enclosed spaces.

Hardly anyone ever in his time had let go of House prejudices that had been so prevalent in Hogwarts and in the last decade of his new life, Harry hadn't seen anything to dissuade him from this belief this time around as well.

Shaking his head to rid himself of these thoughts, Heir Black entered his allotted room and Tom Riddle followed behind him - like a puppy wagging its tail in the air.

--------Line Break---------

Tom Riddle watched as Heir Black looked around their room and then turned towards him to ask, "Which side of the room do you want?"

"Ah...I'll occupy the left one if it's alright with you."

Heir Black shrugged his shoulders to show his cavalier attitude, walked towards his side of the room and with a flick of his wand opened his trunk. He rummaged inside for a bit and with an 'ah, ha' took out a mirror from it.

Tom furrowed his brows at that.

Why was the other person so happy to look at a mirror?

Did these pompous wealthy kids groom themselves at night as well?

His eyes narrowed and he stepped closer to better observe Black's next actions.

The other person turned around once again and sat comfortably on his bed and said, "My sweetlings" and then nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

At this point, Tom recalled that there was common gossip that said that some of The Blacks were not right in the head and had just a touch of madness.

Well, obviously the books didn't say it explicitly but he had inferred that from between the lines.

He hoped to Merlin that he wasn't roomed with a crackpot.

His worries were put to rest when he heard a squealing sound from the mirror - he had learned that there were talking mirrors in the magical world but this squeal sounded alarmingly human.

Then he heard a soft voice speak, "Big Brother, Elli missed you," and Tom realised that this mirror was like the telephones in the muggle world and heaved a sigh of relief.

Still, he perked up his ears to listen in on the conversation going on at the other end of the room.

"Oh darling, big brother also missed you and Cygnus. Have you had your dinner?"

Before the child could reply, Tom heard a masculine voice say, "Hadrian, How did your sorting go?"

"Father, I know you must have worried yourself sick over my sorting. Don't worry, I got into Slytherin."

The man on the other end of the mirror laughed boisterously at those words and then a lady started speaking.

She must be Black's mother. Tom had seen her that day at the wandmaker's.

"Hadrian, I have sent a few things to you by owl mail. You'll receive them by tomorrow morning. Have a look at them and if you need anything else, just leave a message with Cygnus and I'll take care of things."

There was a soft smile on Black's face as he replied in the affirmative.

However, before The Blacks could get even more sentimental, the door to their room was opened.

Tom turned to look at the audacious person who had the ill-manners to enter someone's room without knocking and give the person a piece of his mind when he saw that the person standing in the doorway was none other than the same blonde boy who was addressed as Abraxas Septimus Malfoy by Black earlier in the day .

When Black saw it was Malfoy at the door, he waved his hand in the universal sign of allowing someone to enter a room.

The other boy came inside and then saw that Black was talking on the mirror to his family and instead of doing the proper thing to allow the other person to have some privacy to complete the talk, he snatched the mirror from Blacks hand and said, "Well met, Mrs Black."

The lady returned his greeting, asked some inane questions about his health and then the call was over.