A/N: Hello all! This little plot idea caught my attention quite by surprise last night and wouldn't let me go. I have no update schedule for this and updates could be sporadic, but I hope you enjoy this. I think it will be about 8 chapters long, one per year. It's an AU where Hermione ends up in Slytherin and Marcus Flint takes a liking to her.

Please let me know what you thought and be on the lookout for year two!

Hermione Granger had been so excited to go to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Finally, a place that she could fit in and be herself, learn amongst peers who were like her, make real friendships. Every day brought her closer to September 1st. By the time she'd gotten on the Hogwarts Express, everything neatly packed in her school trunk, she thought she might know everything there was to know about the school. She'd read Hogwarts: A History cover to cover three times.

She sat next to a quiet boy called Neville on the train, but spent the better part of the journey helping him look for his toad. She couldn't complain too much, because that was how she met Harry Potter. She even got to show off a new spell, though his red haired companion didn't seem to think too much of it.

She hadn't had time to be nervous while she was on the train, worrying about the sorting ceremony. There wasn't much written about the sorting, except that students were placed where the best belonged. Hermione didn't think she'd make a good Gryffindor. Daring and bravery? She didn't have much of that. Hufflepuff seemed out too. She was notoriously impatient, and she'd never had friends to be loyal to in the first place.

No, Hermione thought she'd end up in Ravenclaw. Wit and learning, she had those in spades. But where she really wanted to go was Slytherin. Cunning and ambition. Hermione had big plans for herself. She knew where she was going in life and she knew that Slytherin house would propel her to the top.

To learn that the sorting was done by a ragged looking old hat had been a disappointment. How was that old thing meant to tell her where she was best suited? No one else seemed bothered by it, though, and she watched as her classmates cycled through going to this house and that, until finally, her name was called.

The hat sat on her head for nearly five minutes, humming and hawing and she just knew that this hat was bunk, until it finally decided on a house. "SLYTHERIN!" It shouted out proudly.

She couldn't help but notice that she didn't get the same thunderous applause as other students sorted to their respective houses and briefly wondered why. Hermione walked to the table and sat down next to the girl who went before her, Tracey Davis. "Hi, I'm Hermione." She said, giving her new companion a toothy grin.

"Tracey." The girl responded with a nervous look on her face.

A blonde girl quickly came to join them. "I'm Daphne Greengrass." She said, haughtily. "Are you of the Dagworth-Granger family?" She asked Hermione.

Hermione shrugged her shoulders, perhaps not knowing any better and responded with a wide smile. "No, my parents are muggles."

The two other girls let out horrified gasps to learn that she was a "mudblood!" as they called it. Hermione didn't know what that meant, but they did move away from her, ignoring her for the rest of the feast, leaving her all alone.

Hogwarts was horrible. It had been weeks, and still Hermione hadn't been able to catch a break with her new housemates. The girls were horrible, but none of the other Slytherins would be caught dead speaking to her either. They played horrible pranks on her, charming her bed curtains shut or destroying one of her uniforms.

She cried herself to sleep most nights, her face shoved into a pillow, though she was certain that they could still hear. They probably laughed about it to themselves later when she was gone.

Despite excelling in all of her classes, and getting many house points for Slytherin, her own housemates called her know-it-all, and sniggered with the Gryffindors when Ronald Weasley made fun of her pronunciation of Wingardium Leviosa. Nevermind that she got it right on her first try.

The worst thing, though, was flying. Hermione had read the books before coming to school and she'd been so excited to try flying on a broomstick. She'd be just like a real witch, in the cartoons. But the books could not prepare you for the real thing. No matter how hard she tried, the broom would not respond to her.

Draco Malfoy had laughed at her to her face. "The stupid mudblood can't even call a broom. You aren't even a real witch." He elbowed his two big gorilla like friends, Crabbe and Goyle, and they began laughing too.

She'd looked up what mudblood meant. It was not a nice word. It was a horrendous word. She wanted so badly to wipe that smile of his face, but that would mean a detention and she did not want to get detention so early in the semester.

So, she'd begged Madame Hooch to release her from lessons, but to her dismay, she learned that Flying was a required course for first years. She was forced to face her own failure week after week.

Hermione knew that the one place that she could be alone without worry of being tormented was the library. She loved to study, get ahead on her assignments, and it seemed that the rest of her classmates procrastinated until the last minute to get their work done.

Draco Malfoy wouldn't be caught dead in the library and so she was safe there. Whenever things got to be too tough, she would head over to the library, pull out her books and maybe, if no one else was around, have a good cry.

Things had been particularly horrible that day. Her own Head of House, Professor Snape chastised her for incessant hand waving during potions, and then Pansy Parkinson had "spilled" a glass of pumpkin juice down the front of Hermione's crisp white shirt. And, to top it all off, she'd failed her flying lesson. Again.

She was weeks behind her classmates. Even Neville was doing better than she was!

Sitting at her favorite table, she took a deep breath before the sniffles started. She wished she could just go home, forget that Hogwarts even existed. A voice startled her from her distress.

"Oi! Stop your sniffling!" Hermione looked up, shocked to see the scary looking sixth year Slytherin, Marcus Flint. He was hulking and tall, and an absolute menace on the Quidditch pitch. Hermione knew that he was a frequent breaker of the rules. All the other students whispered that he might have some troll blood.

But, she was too annoyed today to take orders from a brutish boy a few years older than her. "What's it to you?" She demanded, wiping hot tears from her cheeks.

"Some of us are trying to study and we don't need weepy little first years making all kinds of noise." He snapped back at her pushing back from his desk, and stomping his way towards her.

"Oh, just...leave me alone you brute!" Hermione hissed, picking up the nearest object she had, which was, unfortunately, a book. She wound back and hurled it at him, hitting him square in the face before he could stop it.

When the book fell, he didn't even look mad, just surprised. "Do that again." He said, looking at her, head cocked, as though he were discovering something. It had felt good to get a bit of her anger out, so Hermione summoned the book, before hurling at him again. This time when the book made contact, his nose was bleeding.

"Well Merlin's staff!" He said, pulling out the seat across from her. "What's your name?" He demanded.

"Hermione Granger." She replied tersely, wondering just what had put him in such a good mood.

"You're the mud-muggleborn, sorry." He said, noticing her level glare. "That's a chaser's arm you've got there." He complimented, though Hermione was confused.

"Chaser?" She asked, confused.

"Yeah, chaser. Like Quidditch? Have you played before?" Seeing her confused face, he figured she hadn't. She was a muggleborn after all. "How did you get so good at throwing things?"

Hermione licked her lips. This was the first time anyone had ever shown any interest in her and she wasn't about to pass it up. "My father was a champion cricket bowler. He's always made me practice. But girls weren't allowed on my neighborhood team." She said with a frown.

"Cricket?" Marcus asked, his turn to be confused.

"It's a muggle sport." Hermione told him, sure that he would leave her alone, with talk of her muggle heritage.

But he surprised her. "How would you like to play Quidditch?" He asked. Marcus might have been a brute, but he was a brute who loved winning and this girl could throw.

"I guess I would like to, but I can't fly." Hermione told him with a frown. It was her one failure as a witch, and it hurt to admit it to him.

"Then, let me teach you." Marcus demanded. He wasn't about to let her slip between her fingers, because she couldn't figure out a broom. Marcus was one of the best flyers Hogwarts had seen. He'd be damned if she couldn't be taught. Hermione scoffed. "Come on. Alright, how come you were crying in the library anyway?"

Hermione rolled her quill between her fingers. "None of the Slytherins are nice to me because I'm a mudblood. None of the other houses are nice to me because I am a Slytherin." She said quietly. "Malfoy teases me constantly."

"Okay, what if I said I can make that stop, if you let me teach you to fly and to play Quidditch." He offered. It was a long shot, but he figured he could make it happen. Malfoy was a little shit, but Marcus was much bigger than him.

Hermione longed for friends. It was too good of an offer to pass up. "They'll leave me alone?" She asked timidly. Being in Slytherin had taught her not to trust anyone on face value, but Marcus seemed like he really just wanted her to play Quidditch.

"Hell, I can make them be friends with you if you want." He offered, though Hermione doubted that. Besides, she wanted real friends, not those who only talked to her under duress.

Crossing her arms over her chest, she condsidered the offer. "Okay, I will try. But I am not making any promises. If I don't like flying-"

"You will like flying. Trust me." Marcus cut her off. "Meet me down at the pitch after dinner tomorrow. Don't be late."

Hermione felt a bit silly going down to meet Marcus after dinner. She hadn't told him that she couldn't even get a broom to come when called. He was waiting for her in what looked like a practice uniform for Slytherin and she hoped that she'd be alright in her uniform. That's what she wore during flying with Madame Hooch.

"I should tell you that I can't even get a broom to go up when I call it." Hermione said, bypassing greetings, a light blush on her cheeks. Oh, she couldn't stand it if Marcus called her a failure of a witch, too.

"That's because the school brooms are shite." Marcus said. "Hold overs from the seventies. You'll use my broom." He walked her over to where his broom was waiting on the pitch. Hermione could immediately tell it was much nicer, much better cared for than the one the school had provided her for lessons.

"Now." Marcus started, his voice taking on an almost professorial quality. "You need to think of the broom actually in your hand when you call for it. Basically, will it to happen. Go on then, give it a shot." He bounced on his feet, obviously wanting to get through the easy part of their lesson.

Hermione felt herself brace for failure, before squaring herself, imagining the broom coming to her hand. "Up." She said firmly, and almost immediately the broom shot to her outstretched hand, to her astonishment. "I did it!" She squealed.

Marcus gave her a hint of a smile. "Told you the school brooms were shite. Now, that was the easy part. Now that you've got it, go ahead and mount it." He told her.

She had never gotten this far in all of her lessons, and she was eager to get started, and followed his careful instructions on pushing off the ground and before she knew it, she was hovering in a little circle over his head.

"Excellent." Marcus congratulated her. "Now, shall I take you up to look at the rings so you can see what you'll be working with?"

Hermione nodded and waited for him to touch down, before mounting the broom behind her. She let him take over the control of the broom. Her stomach did somersaults as the ground got farther and farther away, but being roped in between Marcus's arms made her feel safe. By the time that they were flying laps about the grounds, Hermione couldn't keep the smile off her face. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad.

It hadn't taken Marcus long to make good on his promise. She wasn't sure how he'd done it with the girls, but before long, Millie Bullstrode and Tracey Davis were including her in their conversations at lunch and dinner. She would later learn that Millie and Marcus were cousins, and he'd blackmailed her with something that he'd tell her parents; he'd reminded Tracey that she was just a half-blood anyway, so she shouldn't be such an uppity bitch if she ever wanted a pureblood husband.

The girls soon learned that Hermione wasn't all that bad, but she was a bit socially awkward. It would never be a true or easy friendship.

She knew how he got Draco to leave her alone, though. Hermione had been minding her own business after potions one day, when Draco had purposefully sent a splitting hex at her overstuffed bag, only to laugh at her while she scrambled to collect her things.

Before she knew it, Marcus was stomping down the corridor, shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and grabbing Malfoy by the ear. He tore into him about leaving Hermione alone. "I don't give a shit if she's a mudblood. She's a Slytherin and you'll leave her alone or you'll have me to answer to."

After Malfoy ran away, tears in his eyes, Marcus bent down and tried to repair her book bag. To her dismay, he wasn't as good with charms as he was with flying, but it was nice to have someone at least make an effort on her behalf.

By the end of first year, Hermione was a fair flyer. She was sure she'd never have the pure talent that Harry Potter had, but she could stay on the broom and score with a quaffle while on it. Marcus made her meet him twice a week on the pitch to explain the rules of Quidditch, run drills, teach her proper technique and of course, practice flying.

She was sure that if he hadn't stepped in when he did, Hermione would have been petrified of flying for the rest of her life, after it got so tangled up in failure. But she was good at it. She could duck and weave, she could catch and pass. She loved the feeling of the wind through her hair.

Marcus was proud of her achievements, perhaps the first person in this blasted school who was. He took time to tell her how well she was doing and gave her good notes on how to improve. Really, Hermione thought, he should teach the whole school to fly. Why everyone was afraid of him, she couldn't say.

"So, you'll make sure you practice your drills over the summer?" He lectured her on their last evening together before the summer break. It was warm and sunny and the days seemed endless.

"Yes, I promise." Hermione said, trying to hide her grin as he nagged her for the fiftieth time.

"Because I don't want to come back in September and learn that you've forgotten everything I taught you this year." Marcus said, his grey eyes steely.

Hermione couldn't stop her grin. Before she knew it, she was launching herself at him and wrapping him in a tight embrace. "I promise Marcus. Have a good summer." She said brightly.

He looked a bit confused to have a tiny little first year - soon to be second year - with her little arms wrapped around his middle. But, he'd developed a soft spot for young Hermione over the year, with her tenacity and inability to accept anything less than perfection. She was gonna make a great Quidditch player.

He hugged her back. "You too, Hermione."