When they got back to school, the silent, awkward tension broke as Echo began to admire his new wand like any child would. Once things seemed at ease, Dumbledore led the boy to a private chamber in one of the towers for him to rest for the day. It was a quaint little room that was perfectly suited for one person for a night or so. Once inside the room, Echo sat down next to the ever-burning fireplace and continued to look over his wand, as if trying to figure something out about it.
"How can a piece of wood be cursed? Sure, it's kind of ugly, but I wouldn't say cursed, " he asked no one in particular.
Not knowing if he has been spoken to, Dumbledore decided to reply and tell him, "You shouldn't be concerning yourself with that. You should clean yourself up and get ready for bed. You have a big day tomorrow.", Echo still seemed to ignore him, now lost in his thoughts as he sat there holding the wand in his lap and staring at it. Dumbledore took one last look at the boy before shutting the door and saying, "Sleep well."
"Yeah…..thanks.", Echo replied mindlessly.
From there, Echo didn't move from his spot; he just sat there looking at his wand as his mind went in circles trying to think. It had barely been half a day, and not only had he just died, but he was reborn in a young, healthy body, and he was sent back in time and to another freaking dimension! Said dimension just so happened to be from a book series he had little to no knowledge of! Then he finds out he's a wizard and is given a cursed wand that somehow chooses him. What did this all mean? Why was he here? What was his purpose? Did he even have a purpose?
These thoughts continue to circle through his head until the moon falls and the sun rises the next morning. Dumbledore burst through the doorway that same morning, bright and cheerful as ever! Greeting the boy as he did.
"Good Morning, Mister Echo! I hope you…slept….at all…." He fell off his high of joy at seeing the same sight as he left.
Echo, still sitting hunched over in the same spot in front of the fireplace with the wand in his lap. The boy didn't even take notice of his entrance until after he moved closer.
Echo looked up at the old wizard, who had a dazed and glazed-over look in his eyes as he woozily said, "Huh? Oh, hey, Dumbledore. What are you doing back here so soon?"
"Soon? Echo… did you sleep?", Dumbledore asked him.
"Sleep?", Echo asked back.
Realizing what he had done, Dumbledore exclaimed, "You've been awake all night! The sorting ceremony is starting a bit, and you have not even changed or bathed properly."
Echo looked around the room mindlessly and asked, "Is it tomorrow already?"
"Oh, never mind. You can eat when you get to the grand hall and are sorted into your house. Just grab yourself and follow me.", Dumbledore sighed while rushing the boy to his feet and out the door.
Still lost in the haze of his mind, Echo asked, "Has it been that long?"
Now his joy was replaced with worry as Dumbledore said to himself, "Merlin's beard, I really underestimated how well you would take in all the information you were given."
Dumbledore quickly took the boy through the large and winding halls of Hogwarts until they finally made it to the main hall. It looked like a feasting hall in a medieval castle, but clean. There were four huge tables with four distinct colors. At the front was a group of children around his age, and a bit further up was a raised stage with a podium and a long table with every teacher in Hogwarts sitting at it. At the front of the podium was Professor McGonagall, standing next to a tall stool while holding an old but very creepy-looking wizard hat that seemed to have a face on it.
She was saying something to the kids, but none of it registered in his blank mind as Dumbledore pushed him into the group, and he took his seat at the head chair in the center. McGonagle still spoke, but questions, thoughts, ideas, and other half-baked conclusions still swarmed his head like a cloud of gnats. As he stood there in his thoughts and somehow made it to the center of the children's group, he was very quickly isolated in a circle.
Some of the kids whispered to one another about him—about his clothes, hair, expression, and, most of all, his smell. Many plugged their noses and commented on it and his "poor man's clothes." But he never took heed of it. He was always so used to being alone that it didn't register, and his mind was still swimming like a tsunami.
He was so lost that he didn't even hear his name get called several times by the witch.
Finally, his brain came back to reality, and he looked up at the old witch with a dumb look on his face. He only mumbled out sounds of reconciliation, leading some of the other children around him to snicker.
"Echo," Minerva called out again, only for the boy's glaze-over expression to fade and for him to look around dumbly before pointing to himself. Minerva hoods back a sigh and says, "Yes, you. Come up and take a seat.", leading more of the children to laugh and giggle a bit more loudly.
Echo walks up to the stage on shaky legs and with an uncertain disposition. Minerva motions to the stool, and Echo climbs onto it, where she places her hand on his head.
After a few seconds, the hat speaks and says, "Hmmmm. What a strange case."
Echo's eyes shoot open in fear, and he yells in panic while trying to rip the hat off, "Oh shit, it talks! It's gonna eat my brain like an alien! Get it off! Get it off! Get it off!"
Echo managed to rip the hat off, throw it on the ground, and begin stomping on it like a bug, which caused all the other children to break out into laughter!
Minerva manages to stop and restrain the boy from continuing, while telling him, "Calm down! It's not gonna eat your brain! It's the Sorting Hat."
Echo stopped his assault on the clothing and ripped away while exclaiming in retaliation, "Well, how was I supposed to know?! Clothes don't usually talk!" A thought then crossed his mind, and he looked down at his clothes and asked, "Hello?"
This caused the entire room of children of all ages to start losing their minds with laughter until the Sorting Hat managed to pull itself up from its flattened state.
"Quite down!" the hat yelled so loud that everyone immediately shut their mouths, causing a dead silence to come on as quickly as the laughter.
The sorting hat shuffled around, and looking at Echo, it told him, "I'm not an alien. I won't eat your brain, and I'm the only one of my kind–so don't make it a habit of talking to your dungarees."
Minerva motions back to the stool, firmly, and Echo takes a seat again. She picks up the Sorting Hat and places it on a begrudging boy's head.
The hat sat there for a moment before it spoke, "Now let's see here. Hmmm." It hummed for a bit before saying, "Yes, you are quite a strange case. You are confused, very, very confused. You have been placed in a precarious situation, one you never expected to be in. In addition to learning about a world you have next to no knowledge about and are not able to properly process, you also had quite a rotten life before coming here. However, you have no good or bad qualities about you."
Echo silently rolled his eyes at that comment.
After a few more seconds of silence and scanning his mind, the hat said, "Hmmm. You don't seem to fit into any of the houses. No bravery, no loyalty, no intelligence, and no ambition. This will be hard." Echo was confused by this but let the hat talk. "Let's see…you have no bravery whatsoever in your actions, you'd get spooked by your own shadow if you didn't already know what it was. Not Gryffindor. I don't see a shred of kindness surrounding your heart, a heart cloaked in something black. You couldn't truly show any such feelings to anything, even yourself. Not Hufflepuff." It listed the two houses as unsuitable.
Echo grunted at this and shot back, "Walk a year in my life and then ask me to be kind."
"Your intelligence is….subpar, to put it nicely. Not Ravenclaw," said the hat.
Making Echo glare up at it and angrily comment in a low tone, "Says the living piece of dry, stretched-out cow ass."
The hat scowled at this statement and remarked, "I resent my earlier statement; you have that mouth about you." It then continues its mental dissection of the boy's character. "Now, the only thing I see in you is a willingness to understand and try your best to cope in your new… placement. That's the most ambitious I can sense. You truly have nothing that drives you. So perhaps Slytherin," it says while thinking to itself before shouting, "Slytherin!"
As the many students clapped and laughed, Minerva took off the hat, and Echo hopped off while looking around at what to do next. Seeing this, the witch told him, while pointing to a green table, "Go and sit at your house's table."
Echo awkwardly nodded and walked off the stage while Minerva called up the next person. As he moved around the crowd of others, he passed by two of the other house tables, who all looked at him. Looks like he didn't like it. When he passed by the Gryffindor table, a few faces stuck out to him for some reason.
A boy with black hair and soft brown eyes with the beginnings of a bowl haircut and glasses on his face, another boy who was short pudgy, and had curly brown hair whose face almost resembled that of a mouse, another boy with long black hair who seems to have a very smug aura to him, a tall blonde boy with short hair and scars across his face, and finally a girl with striking green eyes and beautiful red hair. Echo didn't know these people, but for some reason, they felt significant.
He finally made it to the Slytherin table and saw all of them look up at him with a wide array of expressions. Still, the majority of them didn't seem pleased to see him.
He gulped, gave a small wave, and said, "Um… hi."
But none of them returned the sentiment. Out of all the faces on the table, only two stick out to him. A young blonde boy with pristine features and long blonde hair, who had a very pompous attitude, was sitting beside two other kids who seemed to be his cronies, and at the back was a thin, pale-faced boy with medium black hair and a hooked nose. Just like with the Gryffindor table, he had no idea who these people were, but felt they had some kind of significance. So he decided to do the most plausible thing in this situation and took a seat at the back.
One seated, he didn't even notice the enormous spread of different and delicious foods before him. He mindlessly watched as all the children were called up one by one and sorted into their houses. After a bit, Echo looked up and across the table at his partner, seeing that the black-haired boy had his nose deep in a book. He decided that since this was a new world and an entirely new start for him, he might as well attempt to make friends since he never got the chance to in his previous life.
He cleared his throat, hoping to get the other boy's attention. When that didn't work, he decided to try talking.
"Um, hi, " he started with, only to get no response in return. "I guess we're gonna be housemates?" He tried again but was still getting no response. "I'm Echo, but I'm sure you already know that." Still no response. "What's yours?" He tried once more before getting fed up with the lack of interaction. Scowling, he said, "Are you going to tell me or do you want me to make one up for you?"
This got his attention, and the boy, without looking up from his book, spoke, "Severus." Echo cocked an eyebrow at his first word and listened as he said, "My name is Severus Snape."
"Nice meeting you." Echo tried to be cordial, only to be ignored once more.
From that point, Echo just gave up on trying to make nice with Severus, and from the looks of it, anyone else at the table. After the sorting ceremony, Echo, alongside the others at his table, was escorted by what he could only think of as their class rep, and we're taken to the common rooms. The Slytherin common rooms were located near the dungeons at the lowest point of the castle, directly near the lake, and looking into it from below in a glass dome. Echo couldn't help but feel amazed by this sight alone and wanted more than anything to look out into it like an aquarium.
But that had to be put on hold as he was brought into his room with two other people. Apart from him, no one else was sorted into Slytherin. So he was sharing with Snape and one other person he didn't care to know about. All the things that Echo and Dumbledore had bought earlier that day had been placed in the room, at the only unoccupied bed. He jumped onto the bed and realized for the first time all day just how tired he was! Between walking around everywhere, sitting up all night, and only sitting back down when he was in a carriage or the mess hall, he was sore! But he couldn't sleep…at least not yet. His mind was still racing with everything that had just happened. So he decided to do something he hoped would help calm his mind. Write.
He took out one of the many notebooks he had been given and decided to pen down everything that had happened in the last two days. He wrote of everything: waking up in the open field, meeting Dumbledore, finding out he was a wizard, finding out about this world, flying in the carriage, getting his school supplies, getting his wand and knowing about the curse, the Sorting Ceremony, the Sorting Hat, even his first interaction with Slytherin and Snape, and even the unusual characters he could help but feel drawn to for some reason.
In the end, he wrote, "I'm lost, confused, stressed, unsure, and sinking. I'm... scared." That calmed his mind enough for him to fall asleep finally.