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lomonaaerenTitle: A Game of Eagles
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: AU (both Harry and Theo are in Ravenclaw), angst, violence, underage kissing
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Both Harry and Theo, when they go under the Sorting Hat, make different choices. Therefore, so does the Hat. And so do Harry and Theo, and other people, in the future years, in the fight against Voldemort, and in all their lives to come.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. Exalloid asked for Harry and Theo being friends and lovers, and both Sorted into Ravenclaw.
A Game of Eagles
Theo sat under the Sorting Hat, and he thought about books and how his father expected him to Sort into Slytherin and how he didn’t want to have to defend himself and his possessions against preening idiots like Malfoy and how he wished there was another choice.
When the Hat whispered that there was, Theo began to wish with all his heart, and the Hat announced, “RAVENCLAW!”
*
Not Slytherin, Harry thought. Not a specific House. Just Not Slytherin over and over again, and the Hat chuckled and asked why, and Harry thought about how he wasn’t ambitious or cunning enough to fight all these battles with Slytherins and it would be like being bullied by his cousin all over again. He would rather be smart than cunning.
Would you? the Hat asked, sounding delighted for some reason, and then, “Better be RAVENCLAW!”
*
Theo glanced around the bedroom. There were six boys in Ravenclaw this year: Theo himself, Michael Corner and Terry Boot—both probably half-bloods—and Anthony Goldstein and Stephen Cornfoot, both purebloods from families Theo’s father had never bothered with.
And Harry bloody Potter.
Potter noticed Theo staring at him and just nodded back, before he turned around and put an admiring hand on his bed curtains. Theo snorted a little as he arranged his own trunk at the foot of his bed and hung up clothes in the wardrobe. Potter acted like he’d never slept in a bed before.
When he was safely inside the curtains himself after a few curt words with his roommates, Theo let himself relax against the pillows and really think about being surrounded by blue instead of green.
He hadn’t thought of this. He had always assumed that he would be part of his father’s plans for him when he got to Hogwarts, which meant being part of Slytherin.
But this was freedom that Theo hadn’t thought of, and he would catch hold of it with both hands.
*
“There! Over there! Next to that pale boy!”
Harry had rapidly become tired of people shouting about him and staring at his scar. At least the other Ravenclaws weren’t that bad about it, but Corner had still asked him the first night what he remembered of his parents being killed, and Cornfoot and Boot had somehow got the impression that Harry rode dragons and killed Dark wizards with a sword.
Goldstein hadn’t asked those questions, but that seemed to be because he was intensely involved in Gobstones and Quidditch and assumed that no one was worth talking to unless they shared his hobbies. Nott hadn’t asked just because he was quiet.
Harry liked quiet. He had sometimes hung out with quiet Muggle kids as a child before Dudley chased them away.
So he spent a lot of time with Nott, and the first time he caught Nott rolling his eyes about some of the people shouting Harry’s name in the corridors and snorted in agreement, Nott looked surprised, and then smiled, and so they became friendly.
*
Theo stared at Professor Snape as he shot questions at Potter that some of the Ravenclaw seventh-years wouldn’t have known, and thought that he had never been so glad to escape Slytherin.
*
“Go to bed, Potter.”
Harry started. He’d been reading in the common room for hours, scouring Potions books from the small Ravenclaw library available to new students for hints of obscure knowledge Professor Snape might ask him about next, and he was half-asleep. But…
“If I lose more points for cheek and wrong answers in class tomorrow, then everyone’s going to hate me,” he whispered to Nott, who was standing behind his chair and looking profoundly unimpressed. Then again, Nott tended to look that way about everything except books.
“You lost points for the cheek, not the wrong answers.” Nott replied, and rubbed his face as he yawned. “No one blames you for not knowing things that aren’t taught before you get to school. Just don’t talk back to him, and things will be fine. Now come to bed.”
It occurred to Harry, later when he was lying on his bed and listening to Cornfoot’s snores and Corner’s snorts and Nott’s absolute silence, that even though he’d done it brusquely and still called Harry by his last name all the time, Nott coming to get him in the common room was something a friend would do. Harry grinned at the canopy of his four-poster, hoping he had the chance to be as good a friend to Nott in the future.
*
“And you don’t know the answer to that one, either, Potter. Two points from Ravenclaw.”
“No, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Theo grimaced a little as he watched Potter lose points for the wrong answers after all. At least he kept his eyes down and didn’t lose any for cheek. Theo was becoming more and more convinced he had made the best decision of his life thinking about Ravenclaw under the Hat, if this was what it would have been like to have Snape as his Head of House.
*
“Why are there are blisters on your hand, Potter?”
“I’m brewing potions on my own, since Snape isn’t going to help any. Are you going to join in or just stand there gaping at me?”
*
It turned out that Potter was a good brewer, when he didn’t have Snape to distract him.
He might not be as inspired as someone like Draco was always bragging about being, Theo thought critically, as he corrected Potter’s chopping technique for the sixth or seventh time that morning. But he wasn’t as insufferable, either. Potter never bragged.
“Why did you decide to set up your own brewing station?”
Potter brushed his hair back from his forehead. Theo had thought at first he did that to make a point of emphasizing his scar, but he never seemed to notice or refer to it. So he was probably just doing it thoughtlessly. “Because this is dangerous. Snape doesn’t want to teach me properly, but I could still get hurt in class. So I’m doing it to make sure I’m safe.”
“Did you do something like this in the past?”
“No. None of the Muggle subjects in school are that dangerous, so I just went along with it. But none of the teachers in my primary school were as bad as Snape, either.”
Theo stared at Potter. Potter was bending over the instructions for the Boil Cure potion, muttering them under his breath and frowning.
“Potter. You—grew up Muggle?”
“Yeah? I thought maybe most people knew that. They seem to know everything else, like when my birthday is and all that stuff.” Potter began to crush the snake fangs, glaring all the while at the recipe as though it had done something to him.
“No,” Theo whispered, unable to take his gaze from the boy in front of him, while different thoughts he’d had about Potter whirled around and fell into new places. “We all thought you grew up magical.”
“No.” Potter blinked at him. “I don’t think I have any magical family left. I’m with my mother’s Muggle sister and my uncle and cousin.” Then he paused. “You’re not one of those people who’s weird about Muggleborns, are you?”
For a moment, Theo entertained himself with the thought of what his father’s face would look like if he heard his deepest beliefs referred to as “weirdness about Muggleborns.” Then he realized Potter was still waiting for an answer, and had in fact edged a little away from him.
“No.”
“Good,” Potter said. “I didn’t think you were. That kind is like Malfoy and can never keep it to themselves.”
“You know Malfoy?”
“He’s the reason I didn’t want to go into Slytherin.”
“The Hat offered you Slytherin?”
“Yeah. Had to talk it out of Sorting me there. Now, come on, you’re clever, how fine do the snake fangs have to be?”
Theo shook his head a little and stepped up to Potter’s shoulder. Apparently he’d been hesitating about the recipe because he didn’t know exactly how fine or not some of the ingredients should be, which was the kind of finicky question Theo could appreciate. “It doesn’t matter as much as how quickly you put them in and what order.”
“Yeah? Why?”
“I don’t know,” Theo admitted. “Want to research it in the school library tomorrow?”
He’d been hesitating to openly invite Potter to associate with him, because surely at some point someone would tell Potter that Theo was a Death Eater’s son and the rupture of what little companionship they’d managed to achieve would be more painful. But Theo was deciding now that he wouldn’t willingly let this go.
Potter grinned at him. “Let’s.”
And Theo, who’d been thinking he would go through Ravenclaw mostly alone and that was the only thing he regretted having lost by not Sorting Slytherin, relaxed a little.
*
“Why did you Sort Ravenclaw, mate?”
“The Hat offered me a few different choices, but that was the one that suited me best.”
Harry gave Ron a small smile as Ron leaned against the shelf of books that Harry was searching for some reference to how Potions ingredients were diced. Ron just shook his head and said, “I suppose it’s better than Slytherin.”
“Definitely,” Harry agreed fervently. The Ravenclaws shared more classes with Hufflepuff than Slytherin, but he’d had enough time to see how stupid Malfoy was in class and hear his bragging in the corridors.
“Potter, did you—oh.”
“Hi, Nott,” Harry said, with a small wave. “I’ve almost found the book. I think the one we really wanted is out with one of the Ravenclaw seventh-years, though.”
Ringing silence descended on the aisle of books. Harry looked up, and found Ron and Nott glaring at each other. He sighed a little. Nott was nowhere near as bad as Malfoy, and Harry didn’t think he had a name that Ron thought was stupid, either.
“Harry,” Ron began, speaking through gritted teeth.
“What?”
“Nott’s father is a Death Eater!”
“What’s that?”
Harry glanced at Nott and saw how still he had gone. Probably paler, too, but with his complexion, it was hard to tell. He had his arms folded and an expression on his face that was a little familiar for some reason.
After a moment, Harry recognized it. It was the expression he had probably worn himself when Dudley was telling other kids that Harry was a freak.
“Someone who followed You-Know-Who!” Ron was bouncing in place slightly, looking like he wanted to get closer to Harry and like he didn’t. “Someone who thought all Muggleborns should die!”
“I don’t think that,” said Nott, the first time Harry had seen him voluntarily talking to someone who wasn’t a professor or a Ravenclaw.
“Your dad does!”
“And your father thinks that Muggles are silly funny creatures who never notice when they’re being baited. Does that mean you do?”
Ron just stared at Nott, and Harry sighed and stepped in between them. “I don’t care about whose father did what,” he said loudly. It was something he’d had to learn not to care about, because he’d known nothing about his dad except the Dursleys’ lies. “I care about your being friends with me.”
“You can’t be friends with a Nott.”
“I’m going to say who I’m friends with, and I’m friends with him.”
Nott made a strange little sound. Harry didn’t look at him, because he thought it would hurt Nott. Just kept his attention on Ron, who worried his lip with his teeth for a few seconds and then nodded weakly.
“Okay, but if you knew—”
“I’m a Ravenclaw. I’ll read books about it.”
“Okay,” Ron repeated. He gave Nott a distrustful look. “Say, uh, mate, I think I hear Seamus and Dean calling me.”
Harry didn’t, but he was willing to allow Ron a way out of the situation that would let him have some pride. He nodded. “Okay.”
Ron nodded back and almost ran over and out of the library. Harry shook his head. He turned back to Nott finally, and found him standing with his arms wrapped around his stomach and his head bowed. He looked like he’d eaten too much.
“You all right, Nott?”
“You defended me to him.”
“Yes, because you’re my friend?”
Harry hated the way his voice went up on the last question. But, well, he’d thought he had friends before, and Dudley had proven him wrong.
“Yes,” Nott said slowly. He kept watching Harry like he thought Harry would transform into a bird and fly away or something. “Friends. I agree.” He half-bowed his head. “You will not find my friendship lacking.”
Harry could have protested against that and said it was already a good friendship, but it seemed important to Nott to say this. So he nodded. “Thank you. Can you show me a good book on the history of the war?”
“You would trust me to?”
“Yes, because we’re friends.”
Harry said it more firmly this time, and Nott threw him a long, lingering glance, but nodded and turned to walk into the shelves. He came to a stop near a thick book with a green cover, studied it for a second as though he wanted to make sure it was the right one, and pulled it from the shelves to gently place it in Harry’s hands.
“This one talks about the factors that led to the rise of the Dark Lord. It stops a year before the end, though, and the way you—defeated him.”
Harry wondered what he should say to someone whose family might have been harmed by him defeating Voldemort, and then decided that the best way to deal with it would be to say nothing at all. He took a firm grip on the book.
“Thank you.”
*
“Mr. Potter, if you could stay after class?”
Theo turned his head to watch Potter frowning. He caught Theo’s eye and shrugged a little. Theo shrugged back. Potter hadn’t been the quickest in the class to perform the Transfiguration, but neither was he the slowest.
Theo walked out the classroom door, but then lingered and cast an Eavesdropping Charm. He had learned that one early, by necessity.
“Sit down, please, Harry.”
“Er—thanks, Professor.”
Theo’s interest sharpened. None of their professors had called Potter by his first name so far.
“Now, Mr. Potter, I wanted to reassure you that your classroom performance has been fine. I am more worried about the company you keep.”
Yes, this was worth listening to.
“Er—the other Ravenclaws, Professor?”
McGonagall sighed as if she was hoping to Transfigure her breath into wind. “I see that I will have to speak plainly. I mean Mr. Nott, Harry. You do know that his father was a Death Eater and followed You-Know-Who?”
“Why does everyone keep assuming I don’t know that?” Potter complained, and Theo bit back a laugh. Potter had only known it for a few weeks. “I promise, Professor, Nott and I are friends and classmates. It’s not like I’m asking him for advice on Dark Arts or to invite me over to his house for the hols.”
Theo paused. It had struck him that, while he knew Potter had grown up Muggle, he knew nothing about where Potter was planning to spend the holidays.
He would have to ask.
“But if he tried to lure you into—”
“I grew up with a cousin who was a bully, Professor. Believe me, I know when someone is pretending to be my friend and they don’t really mean it.”
That explained a little about Potter’s impatience with some of the people in Ravenclaw who only wanted to be his friends for the fame, Theo thought.
McGonagall sighed. “You will tell me if Mr. Nott says anything dubious to you?”
“Why not Professor Flitwick? He’s my Head of House.”
“Well, to tell the truth, Harry, I had always hoped and assumed you would be a Gryffindor, like your parents were.”
Theo rolled his eyes. Potter had courage of a kind, yes, to brew on his own and keep going even when Theo had graphically explained some of the dangers of potions exploding. But he was far from wanting to fit people’s expectations. If he had, he would have pranced around Hogwarts reveling in his fame.
“I watched over your parents during their seven years of schooling, and fought beside them during the war,” McGonagall was going on. “I would have watched over you if it wasn’t imperative that you live with your Muggle family for your safety.”
Theo breathed in hard. She had just lost Potter, and had no idea.
“I see,” Potter said emptily. “Well, I’ll confide in you if I have to, Professor. But Nott is my friend.”
Professor McGonagall sighed and let Potter go. He stepped outside and didn’t seem surprised to see Theo standing there. He just nodded and started walking down the corridor, his face set in harsh lines.
“Is it because she knew about the Muggles and thought you should stay there anyway?” Theo asked, when they had gone far enough that there was no chance of McGonagall overhearing them.
Potter nodded, once.
Theo studied the side of Potter’s face. He knew him, he knew something about his background that Potter didn’t share with most people, and Potter had defended him to the Head of Gryffindor. They were friends. “Call me Theo.”
Potter started and glanced at him, then smiled, a quiet, brilliant smile Theo had never seen before. “Harry, then.”
And something in Theo settled.
*
“Why are we here?”
“I didn’t mean to be here!”
The staircase beneath them was still swinging around, and then it came to a floor. Harry peered ahead at the corridor warily. It didn’t look like one he was familiar with. It definitely didn’t lead back to Ravenclaw Tower.
“The third floor,” said Theo abruptly.
“What?”
“This is the third-floor corridor. The forbidden one. The one that we should stay away from unless we want to die a painful death?”
Theo’s voice was rising. Harry reached out and patted his shoulder without taking his eyes from the corridor ahead. He could feel a faint urge to explore it, mostly because he didn’t know what was down there and why it would be in a school.
Then again, they had dangerous Potions ingredients in the school and dangerous beasts in the Forbidden Forest.
“Do you know a spell we could use to summon the professors?” Harry asked. He glanced back down the staircase. It had swung away from all the others, so they could step off it into the third-floor corridor but not anywhere else.
“Um.”
Harry stared. Theo was blushing, and Harry had never seen him do that. “Theo?”
“I know a spell,” Theo whispered. “But it’s not one that I’m supposed to know.”
“Is it Dark Arts?”
“What? No! Just not the kind of spell that any of the professors are going to—appreciate.”
“Well, they’re the ones who should have set things up so that the students can’t just get on moving staircases that swing them into forbidden corridors,” Harry said firmly. “Cast it, please.”
Theo took his wand out and aimed it at the ceiling. Then he spoke a quiet phrase that Harry thought didn’t sound like Latin, and an enormous noise rolled out, like they were standing right in the middle of a thunderstorm.
Harry yelped and clapped his hands over his ears. He watched some dust drifting down from the ceiling, and heard running footsteps start from several directions. Theo sighed and put his wand away.
“That’ll teach us to stay out late exploring,” he muttered.
Harry nodded, and sighed in turn when Professor McGonagall was the first to appear near the bottom of the staircase across from them. He hadn’t realized they were so near her office. She glared at them, and Harry coughed and stood up. “Sorry, Professor, it’s my fault,” he said loudly. “I was scared, and my magic—built up—and it—sorry.”
He was aware of Theo gaping at him, but Theo luckily shut his mouth and just nodded by the time McGonagall got around to glancing at him.
“All right, Mr. Potter. Five points from Ravenclaw for being out after curfew.”
Neither of them spoke again until they were in Ravenclaw Tower, and then Theo glanced around and drew Harry into a corner near the fireplace. Some of the older students were studying and arguing near the bookcases and probably wouldn’t notice them.
“You think it’s a coincidence that the staircase brought us there?”
“No,” Harry said.
After a long moment, Theo nodded.
*
“Yes, Miss Granger can have visitors.”
Harry looked solemn as they walked towards the Muggleborn’s curtained bed. Theo felt rigid. He did not want to be here. And he didn’t know why Harry seemed to feel some sense of responsibility for Granger getting injured by the troll. He hadn’t caused her to run off crying to the bathroom. He hadn’t even been there when it had happened, or when the troll had hurt her.
But he’d wanted to come visit her, so here they were.
Madam Pomfrey pulled back the curtains and glanced sternly at all of them. “No more than ten minutes, mind.”
“Yes, Madam Pomfrey,” Theo murmured. Harry just nodded, his eyes fastened on the girl in the bed.
Granger gave them a wide-eyed glance. She had a book on the bed beside her. Theo was a little amused to see it was about trolls. He wondered who had got it from the library for her, or if she’d already had it and had just got around to reading it now.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Granger. We wanted to see how you were.” Theo just nodded, because it didn’t require him to speak. “Madam Pomfrey said that your arm was broken? Do you know how long you’ll have to stay?”
“It was my arm and my collarbone and my left leg.”
Theo winced before he could stop himself. As strange as it felt to be close to a Muggleborn after all of Father’s rants, he didn’t think that someone deserved those wounds just for being a little stuck-up and running off to cry in a bathroom.
“Ouch. Sorry.”
“Yeah,” Granger whispered. She looked at Harry then, sharply. “I know that we’ve never spoken. And why did you want to know who I was? We don’t share that many classes, and you compete with me for the top marks.”
It was actually Theo who competed most often for top marks with Granger, and sometimes Patil. Harry got the practicalities pretty well, but his grasp of theory was weak. It evened out so that he coasted along somewhere between an Acceptable and an Exceeds Expectations.
But that didn’t matter, because Harry was giving Granger a weird look. He said, “Because you’re a human being? And you were hurt?”
“You didn’t care before, when that awful Weasley boy was teasing me!”
“I didn’t know he was!”
“You could have asked!”
Theo stood back, his eyebrows rising. He had to admit that he didn’t know what to make of Granger. He supposed it was kind of Harry to want to come and ask after her, but if she was just going to blame Harry for her problems so that she didn’t have to blame another Gryffindor—
But then Granger gasped and looked at her blanket-covered lap and whispered, “I didn’t mean that. Please don’t leave.”
“Okay, we won’t,” Harry said, with a quick glance at Theo. Theo lifted his shoulders. He didn’t mind staying. “But why didn’t you go and talk to Professor McGonagall if Weasley was teasing you? That’s what Patil—Padma Patil, in our House, you know—did when one of the second-years was teasing her.”
“I—it would be snitching.”
Harry shook his head impatiently. “If your Housemates don’t like you for it, it doesn’t matter. They already don’t like you.”
“Some tact, Harry,” Theo hissed, watching Granger’s face crumple again.
“Sorry.” Harry ran his hand over his face and took a deep breath. “But anyway, they can’t like you less, can they?”
“No.”
Granger’s shoulders straightened. Fascinated, Theo watched her. He wouldn’t have thought that a Gryffindor would need Harry’s encouragement to be more Gryffindor, but it seemed she did.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll try it. You’re right, it can’t make a negative difference, and it may make a positive one.”
“Right.”
Granger abruptly leaned around Harry and stared directly at Theo. Theo felt his shoulders go rigid. He didn’t need someone staring at him, like they were trying to figure him out with the sheer power of their eyes.
“And what about you? Someone pointed you out to me and said that you didn’t like Muggleborns, but you came up and visited me, and you haven’t called me awful names like Malfoy did.”
“I’m not Malfoy,” Theo said, a little stiffly. It was about all he could say in public, even though he didn’t think either Harry or Granger was the sort to contact his father and talk about Theo being nice to Muggleborns.
Granger studied him with calm eyes for a long moment. Then she nodded and faced Harry. “Anyway, it was nice of you to come here. Do you think we can be friends and study together in the library?”
Theo bristled. If she was trying to take his only friend from him—
“Yeah, we could do that.”
Theo sighed as Granger beamed. It seemed he would have to get used to it, because after actually being welcomed into Harry’s life, he had no intention of giving friendship up. He could have some luxuries because he’d been Sorted into Ravenclaw, and Granger was not taking that away from him.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: AU (both Harry and Theo are in Ravenclaw), angst, violence, underage kissing
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Both Harry and Theo, when they go under the Sorting Hat, make different choices. Therefore, so does the Hat. And so do Harry and Theo, and other people, in the future years, in the fight against Voldemort, and in all their lives to come.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. Exalloid asked for Harry and Theo being friends and lovers, and both Sorted into Ravenclaw.
A Game of Eagles
Theo sat under the Sorting Hat, and he thought about books and how his father expected him to Sort into Slytherin and how he didn’t want to have to defend himself and his possessions against preening idiots like Malfoy and how he wished there was another choice.
When the Hat whispered that there was, Theo began to wish with all his heart, and the Hat announced, “RAVENCLAW!”
*
Not Slytherin, Harry thought. Not a specific House. Just Not Slytherin over and over again, and the Hat chuckled and asked why, and Harry thought about how he wasn’t ambitious or cunning enough to fight all these battles with Slytherins and it would be like being bullied by his cousin all over again. He would rather be smart than cunning.
Would you? the Hat asked, sounding delighted for some reason, and then, “Better be RAVENCLAW!”
*
Theo glanced around the bedroom. There were six boys in Ravenclaw this year: Theo himself, Michael Corner and Terry Boot—both probably half-bloods—and Anthony Goldstein and Stephen Cornfoot, both purebloods from families Theo’s father had never bothered with.
And Harry bloody Potter.
Potter noticed Theo staring at him and just nodded back, before he turned around and put an admiring hand on his bed curtains. Theo snorted a little as he arranged his own trunk at the foot of his bed and hung up clothes in the wardrobe. Potter acted like he’d never slept in a bed before.
When he was safely inside the curtains himself after a few curt words with his roommates, Theo let himself relax against the pillows and really think about being surrounded by blue instead of green.
He hadn’t thought of this. He had always assumed that he would be part of his father’s plans for him when he got to Hogwarts, which meant being part of Slytherin.
But this was freedom that Theo hadn’t thought of, and he would catch hold of it with both hands.
*
“There! Over there! Next to that pale boy!”
Harry had rapidly become tired of people shouting about him and staring at his scar. At least the other Ravenclaws weren’t that bad about it, but Corner had still asked him the first night what he remembered of his parents being killed, and Cornfoot and Boot had somehow got the impression that Harry rode dragons and killed Dark wizards with a sword.
Goldstein hadn’t asked those questions, but that seemed to be because he was intensely involved in Gobstones and Quidditch and assumed that no one was worth talking to unless they shared his hobbies. Nott hadn’t asked just because he was quiet.
Harry liked quiet. He had sometimes hung out with quiet Muggle kids as a child before Dudley chased them away.
So he spent a lot of time with Nott, and the first time he caught Nott rolling his eyes about some of the people shouting Harry’s name in the corridors and snorted in agreement, Nott looked surprised, and then smiled, and so they became friendly.
*
Theo stared at Professor Snape as he shot questions at Potter that some of the Ravenclaw seventh-years wouldn’t have known, and thought that he had never been so glad to escape Slytherin.
*
“Go to bed, Potter.”
Harry started. He’d been reading in the common room for hours, scouring Potions books from the small Ravenclaw library available to new students for hints of obscure knowledge Professor Snape might ask him about next, and he was half-asleep. But…
“If I lose more points for cheek and wrong answers in class tomorrow, then everyone’s going to hate me,” he whispered to Nott, who was standing behind his chair and looking profoundly unimpressed. Then again, Nott tended to look that way about everything except books.
“You lost points for the cheek, not the wrong answers.” Nott replied, and rubbed his face as he yawned. “No one blames you for not knowing things that aren’t taught before you get to school. Just don’t talk back to him, and things will be fine. Now come to bed.”
It occurred to Harry, later when he was lying on his bed and listening to Cornfoot’s snores and Corner’s snorts and Nott’s absolute silence, that even though he’d done it brusquely and still called Harry by his last name all the time, Nott coming to get him in the common room was something a friend would do. Harry grinned at the canopy of his four-poster, hoping he had the chance to be as good a friend to Nott in the future.
*
“And you don’t know the answer to that one, either, Potter. Two points from Ravenclaw.”
“No, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Theo grimaced a little as he watched Potter lose points for the wrong answers after all. At least he kept his eyes down and didn’t lose any for cheek. Theo was becoming more and more convinced he had made the best decision of his life thinking about Ravenclaw under the Hat, if this was what it would have been like to have Snape as his Head of House.
*
“Why are there are blisters on your hand, Potter?”
“I’m brewing potions on my own, since Snape isn’t going to help any. Are you going to join in or just stand there gaping at me?”
*
It turned out that Potter was a good brewer, when he didn’t have Snape to distract him.
He might not be as inspired as someone like Draco was always bragging about being, Theo thought critically, as he corrected Potter’s chopping technique for the sixth or seventh time that morning. But he wasn’t as insufferable, either. Potter never bragged.
“Why did you decide to set up your own brewing station?”
Potter brushed his hair back from his forehead. Theo had thought at first he did that to make a point of emphasizing his scar, but he never seemed to notice or refer to it. So he was probably just doing it thoughtlessly. “Because this is dangerous. Snape doesn’t want to teach me properly, but I could still get hurt in class. So I’m doing it to make sure I’m safe.”
“Did you do something like this in the past?”
“No. None of the Muggle subjects in school are that dangerous, so I just went along with it. But none of the teachers in my primary school were as bad as Snape, either.”
Theo stared at Potter. Potter was bending over the instructions for the Boil Cure potion, muttering them under his breath and frowning.
“Potter. You—grew up Muggle?”
“Yeah? I thought maybe most people knew that. They seem to know everything else, like when my birthday is and all that stuff.” Potter began to crush the snake fangs, glaring all the while at the recipe as though it had done something to him.
“No,” Theo whispered, unable to take his gaze from the boy in front of him, while different thoughts he’d had about Potter whirled around and fell into new places. “We all thought you grew up magical.”
“No.” Potter blinked at him. “I don’t think I have any magical family left. I’m with my mother’s Muggle sister and my uncle and cousin.” Then he paused. “You’re not one of those people who’s weird about Muggleborns, are you?”
For a moment, Theo entertained himself with the thought of what his father’s face would look like if he heard his deepest beliefs referred to as “weirdness about Muggleborns.” Then he realized Potter was still waiting for an answer, and had in fact edged a little away from him.
“No.”
“Good,” Potter said. “I didn’t think you were. That kind is like Malfoy and can never keep it to themselves.”
“You know Malfoy?”
“He’s the reason I didn’t want to go into Slytherin.”
“The Hat offered you Slytherin?”
“Yeah. Had to talk it out of Sorting me there. Now, come on, you’re clever, how fine do the snake fangs have to be?”
Theo shook his head a little and stepped up to Potter’s shoulder. Apparently he’d been hesitating about the recipe because he didn’t know exactly how fine or not some of the ingredients should be, which was the kind of finicky question Theo could appreciate. “It doesn’t matter as much as how quickly you put them in and what order.”
“Yeah? Why?”
“I don’t know,” Theo admitted. “Want to research it in the school library tomorrow?”
He’d been hesitating to openly invite Potter to associate with him, because surely at some point someone would tell Potter that Theo was a Death Eater’s son and the rupture of what little companionship they’d managed to achieve would be more painful. But Theo was deciding now that he wouldn’t willingly let this go.
Potter grinned at him. “Let’s.”
And Theo, who’d been thinking he would go through Ravenclaw mostly alone and that was the only thing he regretted having lost by not Sorting Slytherin, relaxed a little.
*
“Why did you Sort Ravenclaw, mate?”
“The Hat offered me a few different choices, but that was the one that suited me best.”
Harry gave Ron a small smile as Ron leaned against the shelf of books that Harry was searching for some reference to how Potions ingredients were diced. Ron just shook his head and said, “I suppose it’s better than Slytherin.”
“Definitely,” Harry agreed fervently. The Ravenclaws shared more classes with Hufflepuff than Slytherin, but he’d had enough time to see how stupid Malfoy was in class and hear his bragging in the corridors.
“Potter, did you—oh.”
“Hi, Nott,” Harry said, with a small wave. “I’ve almost found the book. I think the one we really wanted is out with one of the Ravenclaw seventh-years, though.”
Ringing silence descended on the aisle of books. Harry looked up, and found Ron and Nott glaring at each other. He sighed a little. Nott was nowhere near as bad as Malfoy, and Harry didn’t think he had a name that Ron thought was stupid, either.
“Harry,” Ron began, speaking through gritted teeth.
“What?”
“Nott’s father is a Death Eater!”
“What’s that?”
Harry glanced at Nott and saw how still he had gone. Probably paler, too, but with his complexion, it was hard to tell. He had his arms folded and an expression on his face that was a little familiar for some reason.
After a moment, Harry recognized it. It was the expression he had probably worn himself when Dudley was telling other kids that Harry was a freak.
“Someone who followed You-Know-Who!” Ron was bouncing in place slightly, looking like he wanted to get closer to Harry and like he didn’t. “Someone who thought all Muggleborns should die!”
“I don’t think that,” said Nott, the first time Harry had seen him voluntarily talking to someone who wasn’t a professor or a Ravenclaw.
“Your dad does!”
“And your father thinks that Muggles are silly funny creatures who never notice when they’re being baited. Does that mean you do?”
Ron just stared at Nott, and Harry sighed and stepped in between them. “I don’t care about whose father did what,” he said loudly. It was something he’d had to learn not to care about, because he’d known nothing about his dad except the Dursleys’ lies. “I care about your being friends with me.”
“You can’t be friends with a Nott.”
“I’m going to say who I’m friends with, and I’m friends with him.”
Nott made a strange little sound. Harry didn’t look at him, because he thought it would hurt Nott. Just kept his attention on Ron, who worried his lip with his teeth for a few seconds and then nodded weakly.
“Okay, but if you knew—”
“I’m a Ravenclaw. I’ll read books about it.”
“Okay,” Ron repeated. He gave Nott a distrustful look. “Say, uh, mate, I think I hear Seamus and Dean calling me.”
Harry didn’t, but he was willing to allow Ron a way out of the situation that would let him have some pride. He nodded. “Okay.”
Ron nodded back and almost ran over and out of the library. Harry shook his head. He turned back to Nott finally, and found him standing with his arms wrapped around his stomach and his head bowed. He looked like he’d eaten too much.
“You all right, Nott?”
“You defended me to him.”
“Yes, because you’re my friend?”
Harry hated the way his voice went up on the last question. But, well, he’d thought he had friends before, and Dudley had proven him wrong.
“Yes,” Nott said slowly. He kept watching Harry like he thought Harry would transform into a bird and fly away or something. “Friends. I agree.” He half-bowed his head. “You will not find my friendship lacking.”
Harry could have protested against that and said it was already a good friendship, but it seemed important to Nott to say this. So he nodded. “Thank you. Can you show me a good book on the history of the war?”
“You would trust me to?”
“Yes, because we’re friends.”
Harry said it more firmly this time, and Nott threw him a long, lingering glance, but nodded and turned to walk into the shelves. He came to a stop near a thick book with a green cover, studied it for a second as though he wanted to make sure it was the right one, and pulled it from the shelves to gently place it in Harry’s hands.
“This one talks about the factors that led to the rise of the Dark Lord. It stops a year before the end, though, and the way you—defeated him.”
Harry wondered what he should say to someone whose family might have been harmed by him defeating Voldemort, and then decided that the best way to deal with it would be to say nothing at all. He took a firm grip on the book.
“Thank you.”
*
“Mr. Potter, if you could stay after class?”
Theo turned his head to watch Potter frowning. He caught Theo’s eye and shrugged a little. Theo shrugged back. Potter hadn’t been the quickest in the class to perform the Transfiguration, but neither was he the slowest.
Theo walked out the classroom door, but then lingered and cast an Eavesdropping Charm. He had learned that one early, by necessity.
“Sit down, please, Harry.”
“Er—thanks, Professor.”
Theo’s interest sharpened. None of their professors had called Potter by his first name so far.
“Now, Mr. Potter, I wanted to reassure you that your classroom performance has been fine. I am more worried about the company you keep.”
Yes, this was worth listening to.
“Er—the other Ravenclaws, Professor?”
McGonagall sighed as if she was hoping to Transfigure her breath into wind. “I see that I will have to speak plainly. I mean Mr. Nott, Harry. You do know that his father was a Death Eater and followed You-Know-Who?”
“Why does everyone keep assuming I don’t know that?” Potter complained, and Theo bit back a laugh. Potter had only known it for a few weeks. “I promise, Professor, Nott and I are friends and classmates. It’s not like I’m asking him for advice on Dark Arts or to invite me over to his house for the hols.”
Theo paused. It had struck him that, while he knew Potter had grown up Muggle, he knew nothing about where Potter was planning to spend the holidays.
He would have to ask.
“But if he tried to lure you into—”
“I grew up with a cousin who was a bully, Professor. Believe me, I know when someone is pretending to be my friend and they don’t really mean it.”
That explained a little about Potter’s impatience with some of the people in Ravenclaw who only wanted to be his friends for the fame, Theo thought.
McGonagall sighed. “You will tell me if Mr. Nott says anything dubious to you?”
“Why not Professor Flitwick? He’s my Head of House.”
“Well, to tell the truth, Harry, I had always hoped and assumed you would be a Gryffindor, like your parents were.”
Theo rolled his eyes. Potter had courage of a kind, yes, to brew on his own and keep going even when Theo had graphically explained some of the dangers of potions exploding. But he was far from wanting to fit people’s expectations. If he had, he would have pranced around Hogwarts reveling in his fame.
“I watched over your parents during their seven years of schooling, and fought beside them during the war,” McGonagall was going on. “I would have watched over you if it wasn’t imperative that you live with your Muggle family for your safety.”
Theo breathed in hard. She had just lost Potter, and had no idea.
“I see,” Potter said emptily. “Well, I’ll confide in you if I have to, Professor. But Nott is my friend.”
Professor McGonagall sighed and let Potter go. He stepped outside and didn’t seem surprised to see Theo standing there. He just nodded and started walking down the corridor, his face set in harsh lines.
“Is it because she knew about the Muggles and thought you should stay there anyway?” Theo asked, when they had gone far enough that there was no chance of McGonagall overhearing them.
Potter nodded, once.
Theo studied the side of Potter’s face. He knew him, he knew something about his background that Potter didn’t share with most people, and Potter had defended him to the Head of Gryffindor. They were friends. “Call me Theo.”
Potter started and glanced at him, then smiled, a quiet, brilliant smile Theo had never seen before. “Harry, then.”
And something in Theo settled.
*
“Why are we here?”
“I didn’t mean to be here!”
The staircase beneath them was still swinging around, and then it came to a floor. Harry peered ahead at the corridor warily. It didn’t look like one he was familiar with. It definitely didn’t lead back to Ravenclaw Tower.
“The third floor,” said Theo abruptly.
“What?”
“This is the third-floor corridor. The forbidden one. The one that we should stay away from unless we want to die a painful death?”
Theo’s voice was rising. Harry reached out and patted his shoulder without taking his eyes from the corridor ahead. He could feel a faint urge to explore it, mostly because he didn’t know what was down there and why it would be in a school.
Then again, they had dangerous Potions ingredients in the school and dangerous beasts in the Forbidden Forest.
“Do you know a spell we could use to summon the professors?” Harry asked. He glanced back down the staircase. It had swung away from all the others, so they could step off it into the third-floor corridor but not anywhere else.
“Um.”
Harry stared. Theo was blushing, and Harry had never seen him do that. “Theo?”
“I know a spell,” Theo whispered. “But it’s not one that I’m supposed to know.”
“Is it Dark Arts?”
“What? No! Just not the kind of spell that any of the professors are going to—appreciate.”
“Well, they’re the ones who should have set things up so that the students can’t just get on moving staircases that swing them into forbidden corridors,” Harry said firmly. “Cast it, please.”
Theo took his wand out and aimed it at the ceiling. Then he spoke a quiet phrase that Harry thought didn’t sound like Latin, and an enormous noise rolled out, like they were standing right in the middle of a thunderstorm.
Harry yelped and clapped his hands over his ears. He watched some dust drifting down from the ceiling, and heard running footsteps start from several directions. Theo sighed and put his wand away.
“That’ll teach us to stay out late exploring,” he muttered.
Harry nodded, and sighed in turn when Professor McGonagall was the first to appear near the bottom of the staircase across from them. He hadn’t realized they were so near her office. She glared at them, and Harry coughed and stood up. “Sorry, Professor, it’s my fault,” he said loudly. “I was scared, and my magic—built up—and it—sorry.”
He was aware of Theo gaping at him, but Theo luckily shut his mouth and just nodded by the time McGonagall got around to glancing at him.
“All right, Mr. Potter. Five points from Ravenclaw for being out after curfew.”
Neither of them spoke again until they were in Ravenclaw Tower, and then Theo glanced around and drew Harry into a corner near the fireplace. Some of the older students were studying and arguing near the bookcases and probably wouldn’t notice them.
“You think it’s a coincidence that the staircase brought us there?”
“No,” Harry said.
After a long moment, Theo nodded.
*
“Yes, Miss Granger can have visitors.”
Harry looked solemn as they walked towards the Muggleborn’s curtained bed. Theo felt rigid. He did not want to be here. And he didn’t know why Harry seemed to feel some sense of responsibility for Granger getting injured by the troll. He hadn’t caused her to run off crying to the bathroom. He hadn’t even been there when it had happened, or when the troll had hurt her.
But he’d wanted to come visit her, so here they were.
Madam Pomfrey pulled back the curtains and glanced sternly at all of them. “No more than ten minutes, mind.”
“Yes, Madam Pomfrey,” Theo murmured. Harry just nodded, his eyes fastened on the girl in the bed.
Granger gave them a wide-eyed glance. She had a book on the bed beside her. Theo was a little amused to see it was about trolls. He wondered who had got it from the library for her, or if she’d already had it and had just got around to reading it now.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Granger. We wanted to see how you were.” Theo just nodded, because it didn’t require him to speak. “Madam Pomfrey said that your arm was broken? Do you know how long you’ll have to stay?”
“It was my arm and my collarbone and my left leg.”
Theo winced before he could stop himself. As strange as it felt to be close to a Muggleborn after all of Father’s rants, he didn’t think that someone deserved those wounds just for being a little stuck-up and running off to cry in a bathroom.
“Ouch. Sorry.”
“Yeah,” Granger whispered. She looked at Harry then, sharply. “I know that we’ve never spoken. And why did you want to know who I was? We don’t share that many classes, and you compete with me for the top marks.”
It was actually Theo who competed most often for top marks with Granger, and sometimes Patil. Harry got the practicalities pretty well, but his grasp of theory was weak. It evened out so that he coasted along somewhere between an Acceptable and an Exceeds Expectations.
But that didn’t matter, because Harry was giving Granger a weird look. He said, “Because you’re a human being? And you were hurt?”
“You didn’t care before, when that awful Weasley boy was teasing me!”
“I didn’t know he was!”
“You could have asked!”
Theo stood back, his eyebrows rising. He had to admit that he didn’t know what to make of Granger. He supposed it was kind of Harry to want to come and ask after her, but if she was just going to blame Harry for her problems so that she didn’t have to blame another Gryffindor—
But then Granger gasped and looked at her blanket-covered lap and whispered, “I didn’t mean that. Please don’t leave.”
“Okay, we won’t,” Harry said, with a quick glance at Theo. Theo lifted his shoulders. He didn’t mind staying. “But why didn’t you go and talk to Professor McGonagall if Weasley was teasing you? That’s what Patil—Padma Patil, in our House, you know—did when one of the second-years was teasing her.”
“I—it would be snitching.”
Harry shook his head impatiently. “If your Housemates don’t like you for it, it doesn’t matter. They already don’t like you.”
“Some tact, Harry,” Theo hissed, watching Granger’s face crumple again.
“Sorry.” Harry ran his hand over his face and took a deep breath. “But anyway, they can’t like you less, can they?”
“No.”
Granger’s shoulders straightened. Fascinated, Theo watched her. He wouldn’t have thought that a Gryffindor would need Harry’s encouragement to be more Gryffindor, but it seemed she did.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll try it. You’re right, it can’t make a negative difference, and it may make a positive one.”
“Right.”
Granger abruptly leaned around Harry and stared directly at Theo. Theo felt his shoulders go rigid. He didn’t need someone staring at him, like they were trying to figure him out with the sheer power of their eyes.
“And what about you? Someone pointed you out to me and said that you didn’t like Muggleborns, but you came up and visited me, and you haven’t called me awful names like Malfoy did.”
“I’m not Malfoy,” Theo said, a little stiffly. It was about all he could say in public, even though he didn’t think either Harry or Granger was the sort to contact his father and talk about Theo being nice to Muggleborns.
Granger studied him with calm eyes for a long moment. Then she nodded and faced Harry. “Anyway, it was nice of you to come here. Do you think we can be friends and study together in the library?”
Theo bristled. If she was trying to take his only friend from him—
“Yeah, we could do that.”
Theo sighed as Granger beamed. It seemed he would have to get used to it, because after actually being welcomed into Harry’s life, he had no intention of giving friendship up. He could have some luxuries because he’d been Sorted into Ravenclaw, and Granger was not taking that away from him.
