Hogwarts Legacy; the Story

Chapter 1 (Game Intro-Slytherin common room)

Every tick of the clock feels like it sounding from inside me instead of hanging where it is, precariously above my four poster bed, the one I'm hunched on the ground beside in my newly appointed dorm, thankfully empty, not that I would have noticed anyone anyhow, in my current state.
Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock,
My breath is heavy and I'm coiled up into myself like my house emblem, or a sad sullen version of it, but my breathing is too quick, I can't tell where one breath stops and the other starts, all I have to ground myself is the clock, chiming physical palpitations in my chest.

I have had the most horrible morning.
I'll start at the beginning, some mornings ago.
I woke up to my mother wrestling my four younger half siblings for the first day of school, all magically gifted, the infuriating lot of them, two boys and two girls and all admitted at Beaubatons. Beaubatons where I should have been God-damn-it! If it weren't for the unexplainable conundrum of my letter never arriving. 'Unexplainable' and 'conundrum' both my mothers words, as well as 'a great misfortune' she often likes to add.
The only misfortune is my rodent faced step father.

He married my mother nine years ago, my own father having never been in the picture to begin with, it was a vacant spot to fill. I'm embarrassed to admit that despite his cobbler vocation, his rodent shaped face, and bead-like eyes, I was excited. I thought to myself better an ugly father than no father, see how mature and deep I was? I didn't even mind that he was French, the same as all those people that looked didn't spare me two glances at school, and still glared at me and my mother on the streets of non-magique towns, where without her magic to metaphorically blend us in, we clearly stood out, tawny complexions, brown eyes, foreign, other.

I thought that he would be different, but children grow out of naïveté like they grow out of their old sweaters and socks, and in that at least, I am no exception.
All my step fathers sly narrow eyed glances and upturned nose aside, all his 'complimenting' my mother in ways that are really just thinly veiled insults aside, his hiding my letter was a new low.
And he did hide it.
My mother, Beauxbatons alumni, was the top scholar of her year, all of my siblings received entrance letters to the preliminary school, vellum parchment, gold embossed, on each of their respective birthdays, before midday, with the youngest, my four year old brother Henri, receiving his an entire year early, courtesy of step fathers prodding and probing, literally kissing the boots of one of the higher-up board members he crafted patent leather shoes for, suffice to say he's doesn't have magic.
I was already enrolled in a normal non-magique school, since I was five, so Beauxbatons Preliminarily wasn't necessary, but the college is another matter and I should have received my letter years ago.

I know what my step father thinks of me, though my mother denies it. Dirty, beneath him, from another world continents away, the South of Asia, and unfit to spend more time than absolutely necessary with his fair skinned, rosy cheeked children. And if they tan too easy, and may grow into more dramatic features, their eyes undeniably the shade of scorched autumn leaves, he'll probably hide that away into some small dusty corner where he no doubt did away with my letter!

Anyway, that all aside, the morning in question started with my bidding adieu to mother who only nodded at me, before I lugged my suitcase into a cab, then the cheapest train I could find, and stepped onto English soil for the first time in my life. Hogwarts.
Maybe I hate it because it's not Beauxbatons.
Maybe I hate it because of the hideous name.
But I'd be remiss to ignore the facts, (I am not my stepfather), that I would be working somewhere doing someone else's laundry till my knuckles were scraped pink, if I hadn't received this letter.