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Dataset card Data Studio Files
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But I wasn't allowed to return to my dormitory, Harry didn't say. Snape would just take points for talking back. "I understand, sir," Harry ground out.
"Good," Snape said, and gave Harry's bag back. "That will be all." And he headed towards the dungeons, robes billowing behind him.
"Git," Harry said once he was out of earshot.
"Who's a git?" Ron asked as he and Hermione returned. Hermione looked somewhat mollified; Ron must have made a decent apology.
"Snape," Neville said. "He took points off Harry for carrying his Potions knife."
"Git," Hermione said, and Neville and Ron gave her shocked looks. Harry grinned at her.
"Come on," Harry said, "Snape said I'm cleared to enter the Tower again. I'm hip-deep in homework right now; I should get some of it out of the way."
Gryffindor Tower, though, was only marginally friendlier to Harry than Snape's classroom. The boy playing keep-away with the food at lunch was only the first incident of the day. All afternoon, Gryffindors glared at Harry, whispered when he was in sight, and bumped into him on purpose. Two different girls spilled ink o...
And so after two hours spent scrubbing at his own bloody shoe prints under Flich's supervision, Harry found himself venting to Hermione instead of reading his Defense assignment. "They're all angry with me, but they don't even really know what happened—just what McGonagall said."
Hermione tapped the end of her quill on the desk they were sharing. "Well, what if we told them?" she suggested.
"What do you mean?" Harry asked.
She told him. Then they went to find a prefect. Percy wasn't amenable, but his female counterpart was willing to listen.
And so the next morning, after a grueling Quidditch practice, a shower in the locker room, and another search by Snape, Harry found Hermione waiting for him beside the Fat Lady's portrait.
"Everyone's inside, Harry. They're waiting for you."
He ran a hand through his hair. "I hope you're right about this," he said.
"Me too," Hermione admitted.
"After we're done, give me half an hour and come on up to my dormitory, all right? Knock on the door before you enter. Then we'll do our first training session."
"Okay," she said.
"Pig snout," Harry said to the Fat Lady, and they entered.
The Common Room was packed. Nearly every Gryffindor was there, in chairs and on couches, leaning against walls and standing up straight. Most of them looked none too friendly. They seemed to be facing the fireplace, so Harry and Hermione cut through the crowd to stand there.
"Thanks for coming, everyone," he said. "I'm afraid I dug a bit of a hole for us"—there was some mutinous muttering—"and I thought my House deserved to at least know why."
Everyone at least looked curious at this. It was a start, he supposed.
"It all started during dinner last night. Hermione wasn't there, and I'd heard that she was in one of the girl's loos. She didn't know the troll was loose. I couldn't get P—a prefect's attention, and I couldn't see any of the teachers, so I stayed behind in the Great Hall..."
And so Harry told the whole story, editing it only lightly to avoid mentioning the Invisibility Cloak. When he mentioned throwing a knife at the troll's back, Seamus broke in.
"Wait a minute, you had a knife?"
"I carry several different knives and daggers," Harry said. "Or at least I did until McGonagall took them."
"The, er, place I live...it isn't very safe," he said uncomfortably. "I have to carry knives to keep...people from hurting me. I've never really attacked anyone with one of my knives; just drawing it is usually enough. Knives need no demonstrations."
"There are places like that?" Seamus asked curiously.
"Yeah, my neighborhood's pretty rough, too," Dean said. "I'd carry a knife there if I could get my hands on one."
"Why did you keep carrying them when you were at Hogwarts, though?" Angelina Johnson, his Quidditch teammate, asked.
"I..." He looked down at the ground and adjusted his glasses on his nose, trying to decide how to approach this. "When Voldemort—really, people, it's just a word, not a curse—when he attacked my parents, they were unarmed. Defenseless. I don't ever want to make the same mistake."
Nobody knew how to respond to that, so after a moment, he continued the story. When he got to the part where he stabbed the troll's neck, the boy from lunch the previous day scoffed. "Jumped on a troll's back and slit its throat? Are we supposed to believe this tripe?"
Harry stared at the boy for a long moment. He was either a large second year or a small third year, though Katie Bell's presence behind the couch he was lounging on suggested the former. The silence was finally broken by the most unlikely person.
"W-where d'you think the blood came from, then?" Neville said. "We all saw it Thursday night."
"He messed around with some knives, and cut himself, and McGonagall caught him, and he mouthed off," the boy said. "And he's lying to the whole House now to cover his arse."
Harry narrowed his eyes and was about to reply scathingly, but George cut across him from the back of the common room. "He can't have, McLaggen."
"We all showered after practice this morning," Fred said.
"He didn't have a cut on him, "cept the obvious head wound," George continued.
"So he went to Pomfrey and she fixed him up," this McLaggen said.
"But she didn't clean up the blood?" Hermione said. "I was there—I saw the whole thing. It went as Harry said."
"Yeah, you would say that," McLaggen said.
"I've heard about you, you know. Following Potter around like an eager puppy. His little pet Muggle."
Hermione opened her mouth to respond, but Harry got there first. "You'll want to be careful there, McLaggen," he said coldly. "Last time something had a go at Hermione, it ended up bleeding out in a girls" loo."
McLaggen's eyes narrowed. "Are you threatening me?"
Harry made an educated guess about McLaggen. "I'm just saying, some people are just talk, and some people aren't. The first type ought to be careful of the second."
McLaggen lunged for Harry, reaching for his wand, but Katie Bell grabbed his shoulders and forced him back down. "Sit down and shut up, you bloody berk."
McLaggen glowered, but stayed put.
"Cheers, Katie," Harry said. "Now, for the rest..." He glanced at Hermione uncertainly.
"Oh! Er...well, the teachers came a moment later," Hermione said. "McGonagall started scolding Harry for rescuing me, and..."
"She sort of implied that the Hogwarts rules were more important than Hermione's life."
Hermione was looking the floor. "I couldn't stand to be in that room any longer. I ran."
"And I followed her," Harry said, "ignoring McGonagall's instructions to stay."
Harry looked over the assembled Gryffindors. They were silent.
"I'm not sorry for what I did, but I am sorry that Gryffindor got hurt because of it. I'll try to pick up points where I can, but I doubt I'll make up the whole deficit, and I'm sorry about that." He paused and cracked a smile. "Besides, at the rate Hermione earns points, we'd be worse off if she were out for a month."
"Harry!" she said, and smacked his arm. But she had an oddly pleased smile on her face, too.
"I won't take up any more of your time. Thanks for listening." And with that, the crowd started to break up. Percy and a group of fifth years headed for the portrait hole; McLaggen started to lift himself off the couch; the Weasley twins headed for the boys" dormitory stairs. Harry made a beeline for the twins, but sto...
"By the way, McLaggen?"
Hermione raised her wand. "Petrificus Totalus!"
McLaggen's entire body suddenly went stiff as a board, and he fell forward on his face. Several people laughed. It was an impressive bit of magic; Harry didn't know Hermione was that far ahead.
"You'd best remember that I'm a witch, not a Muggle."
Harry grinned at her, then headed up the stairs. He caught up to the Weasley twins a floor up. "George, George, I have a proposition for you two."
The twins looked at each other. "Didn't Mum tell us not to listen to propositions from boys?" one of them said.
"No, she told Ginny that," the other one said. "She never said it to us."
"Okay," the first twin shrugged. "Why not?"
The two of them followed Harry into his dormitory. "I have a magical object you'd probably be able to put to good use," Harry said. "The problem is, I don't really know how to use it properly without getting caught. I suspect there are some spells that could help. I'd be willing to let you borrow it occasionally if you...
The twins looked at each other again for a long moment, seeming to have a silent conversation. Finally, the one on the left said, "We could probably do that, depending on what this "object" is."
Harry reached into his mokeskin pouch, and they gasped as he drew out his Invisibility Cloak.
Once they'd finished bowing and scraping and retreated to their room with the Cloak for some heavy-duty plotting, Harry closed the door and opened his trunk's library compartment. He inverted Beedle the Bard and the shelves slid down, revealing an empty portrait.
"Grandmother? Grandfather?" Harry called.
Charlus peaked around the edge of the frame. "Harry, is that you?"
"I heard voices yesterday. What was that about?"
"I got into a bit of trouble, and the teachers searched my trunk..." Harry quickly explained the events of the previous night.
"You're all right, though?" Dorea asked.
"Yes, Grandmother," Harry answered.
"And your friend is fine too?"
"Yes, Grandmother," Harry said again, with a hint of irritation.
"Good." She smacked Charlus's shoulder. "This is all your fault, you know. No Black ever did something so reckless, and the Evanses were such a gentle couple..."
"What about Sirius?" Charlus said.
"Only after spending years with a Potter," Dorea said, spitting out the name like a curse.
"You spent decades with me," Charlus pointed out.
"And I didn't faint dead away when I heard that my grandson jumped on a troll's back and slit its throat," Dorea retorted. "You Potters have obviously led me astray, too." She turned back to Harry. "Please, honey, please be careful. You're the last Potter. Don't end up being the last Potter."
"I understand, Grandmother," Harry said with a sad smile. "I need to get into the compartment—Hermione asked me to teach her how to fight."
Dorea shook her head ruefully. "Another perfectly sensible person swept up the family madness," she said as the portrait clicked and swung open.
The compartment contained only a few items: the nude photos, the illegal charms book, and the remainder of Harry's knife collection. He left his butterfly knife (and its blunt trainer) in the compartment—it was too difficult for him to throw accurately, too intricate for Hermione to learn quickly, and frankly too showy...
Harry heard a knock on the door. "Just a minute!" he said. He quickly extracted his selections, closed the portrait, bookcase, and trunk, and crossed to the door. Hermione was waiting when he opened it.
"Come in," he said, and he closed the door behind her.
She glanced at his hands, still holding the knives. "I should've known you'd have more," she said with a hint of amusement. "We're not going to do this here, are we?"
"No," Harry said, "I have another place for that. The problem is, Snape's been searching me every chance he gets." He looked into her eyes. "I'll need you to carry these."
Hermione bit her lip for a moment, but when she took the knives and said "Sure," it was with conviction.
The two of them headed down to the common room and through the portrait hole, and Hermione followed Harry to the abandoned corridor he'd found. He showed he around (she seemed particularly interested in the anatomical dummies), then they sat down in the classroom.
"Okay, this is the knife you'll be using. The blade and the handle should be obvious enough. The metal part that extends from the blade and runs through the handle is called the tang..."
"...and the point on the pommel is for breaking glass, sir," Hermione finished half an hour later.
Harry raised an eyebrow.
"That...that is the pommel, right?"
"Yes. You got it all right." Did she not realize she said "sir'? He mentally shrugged. "Now that we've covered all that, let's look at how you grip it..."
The talk with Gryffindor did a lot of good. Many Gryffindors" ire shifted from Harry to Professor McGonagall; nobody volunteered an answer in Harry's next Transfiguration class, and he didn't see a Gryffindor approach her at a meal or in the hallways for over a week. Not everyone was on Harry's side—Percy Weasley seeme...
It helped that the first Quidditch game was growing nearer. Not only was Gryffindor's attention diverted to their rivalry with Slytherin, but Harry was their great hope to win the game. It was hard to hold a grudge against the boy you were counting on for a victory.
All this meant Harry's performance in the Quidditch game would be even more important. A win, he was sure, would bury the remaining animosity; a loss would reignite it. Wood ramped up the practices—Filch gritted his teeth, jowls quivering with indignation, when Harry told him that, for the fifth night in a row, he woul...
"—looks like Potter is completely out of control up there!" Lee Jordan's voice boomed through the stadium.
Harry would've sent a glare towards the commentator's box if he weren't clinging for his life to his broom, which had started zigzagging and rolling over all on its own. Then the broom jerked wildly and he was flying through the air. For a moment he flailed his arms, desperately reaching for the broom, and barely caugh...