Chapter Six of 'For the Game'

[lomonaaeren]

“You are not what I expected, Mr. Potter.”

Harry blinked and glanced up from where he’d been cutting up slugs to prepare for some kind of potion Professor Snape wanted to do with the upper-year classes. The professor was leaning against the wall of the office, staring at him.

“Yes, sir,” Harry said. He wanted to add that not many people seemed to have expected him at all, but that would probably count as cheek. He went back to cutting up the slugs.

“Where did you grow up, Potter?”

Weird topic. Then again, it was also something Nott and Zabini had asked about. Harry restrained a shrug and said, “In the Muggle world, sir.” He glanced at the cuts on the slugs in front of him and decided that he had to slice them a bit more thinly.

“In whose home?”

Really? But Snape seemed to hate him no matter what, so maybe he was asking for the name so he could hate every detail of Harry’s life. Harry simply murmured, “With my aunt and uncle, sir.”

“Their names?” There was an insult in Professor Snape’s tone, it sounded like, if not the words. He was probably a moment away from sneering “You idiot.”

“Petunia and Vernon Dursley, sir.”

There was a loud crash, and Harry spun around, falling into the defensive crouch that was already pretty natural to him after the duels and hexes he’d gone through. He stared when he saw a broken glass jar on the floor, oozing green liquid everywhere. It looked as though Professor Snape had knocked it over with his elbow from where it had been standing on a table.

“Idiot boy! You’ve cut yourself!”

I knew we wouldn’t get through this detention without an insult, Harry thought absently as he glanced down at his hand. The blade he’d been using to slice the slugs was so sharp that he hadn’t felt it go in at all. But yeah, there was the bleeding cut.

“Sorry, sir,” he said, and put the knife down, looking around for something that would do for bandages. Snape had taken his wand when he came into the detention, or he would have cast a mild healing spell, something else he’d got quite good at.

“This way, you dunderhead.”

Snape was waiting for him with his wand out. Harry controlled his instinctive flinch, and held as still as he could while Snape cast a healing spell at him with angry motions. His wound stopped bleeding and knitted back together, the skin crawling like insects. Harry shivered.

“You are an idiot, Potter. Someone who cannot handle a knife properly…”

Harry just nodded along to Snape’s diatribe, a little glad that he was just going to go back to treating Harry normally instead of blaming him for the glass jar or something. Which Snape himself had clearly knocked over.

But why? Why would hearing that Harry lived in the Muggle world—or the names of his relatives—make him react that way?

Harry mentally shrugged and went back to slicing slugs. Snape was the only one who could answer that question, and Harry knew exactly how likely it was that his professor ever would. Snape might be there for the other Slytherins as their Head of House, but with Harry, he was always going to be distant and hateful. That, or indifferent. That was just the way everyone was to Harry, except Ron, Hermione, and Hagrid.

It’s like a law of nature.

*

Harry grimaced. He didn’t like the coincidence that had left him walking up a staircase with Zabini and Nott after Potions, but Ron was sick in the infirmary today and Hermione had been helping Longbottom with his potion—Snape decided to be sadistic about assigning partners—and Harry happened to leave Potions at the same time as Zabini and Nott.

At least they were having their own conversation and ignoring him.

Harry felt the sudden buildup of subtle lightning, like static electricity, in the air around him. He promptly ducked, and the spell that was aimed at one of the three of them, he couldn’t tell who, skipped past him in a shower of red sparks and vanished into the darkness below the staircase. Harry snatched his wand and straightened up.

There were three older Ravenclaws standing in front of him. Harry thought he remembered hearing that the tall one in the middle was named Yaxley, but he didn’t know the other two.

“You can get out of here, Potter,” said Yaxley. His eyes were aimed behind Harry, astonishingly enough, at the two Slytherins Harry had been traveling with. “We’re just here for Nott, traitor that he is.”

Harry wondered on earth how Nott could be a traitor to anything, when he was a pureblood and his father had followed Voldemort around or something like that. But he knew one thing he wasn’t going to do. He wasn’t going to walk away and just let Yaxley curse Nott. The spell that had gone past Harry was the kind that could have knocked someone off the staircase.

Nott was a coward and a wanker who thought that Harry should be his good friend when he’d just stood back and let Malfoy do whatever he wanted, but he didn’t deserve to die. Or get tortured.

“No.”

“What?”

Yaxley looked genuinely shocked. Harry straightened up with a grim smile that he knew made him look creepy, because Ron had told him that. “I said no.”

“You realize that we’re going to curse you? We can curse you pretty seriously.” The slender girl behind Yaxley was trying to sound intimidating, but she wasn’t even as good at threats as Dudley.

“You’d have to catch me first,” Harry said, and then he attacked.

They weren’t expecting him to do that, and there was a lot of yelping and scrambling. Harry had jumped across the distance between their staircase and the one he’d been on, not even hesitating. He could hear Zabini yelling something behind him, but he didn’t look back. The important thing was to stop them.

Put them down, the way he’d done with Malfoy.

He crashed into Yaxley before the attempted murderer could get over the surprise and really raise his wand. Harry stuck his wand right into Yaxley’s side and used the Lightning Charm. It wasn’t like the Lightning Curse, which could kill people, but it would give you a nasty shock. Harry had started looking up charms like that after the duel with Malfoy and the weird way that Professor Quirrell was behaving.

Yaxley went down, his limbs flailing in every direction. Harry spun around and faced the slender girl and the third Ravenclaw, who looked like he might be a year younger than the others.

The other boy backed away with his hands in the air, then turned around and ran. The girl, though, tossed her blonde braid over her shoulder and aimed her wand at Harry. She cast silently, meaning that he didn’t have any chance to know what it was.

It hurt like one of Dudley’s punches when it slammed into his shoulder, and Harry grunted as something pulled. A tendon, or something. But it only hurt like one of Dudley’s punches, and he ran towards her while she was probably expecting him to be panting and crying on the ground like Yaxley, and shocked her with the Lightning Charm, too.

There was a long moment when Harry stood in the middle of the two Ravenclaws and watched them, ready to shock them again if he had to. Then he jerked his head up. Rapid footsteps were coming towards them from the direction where the third Ravenclaw had gone.

“Potter! Let’s go!”

Harry didn’t really need Nott’s warning. He turned around and leaped from the staircase he was on to his original one, and then all three of them took off running to the dungeons. Harry didn’t look back.

When they got into the dungeons themselves, Harry leaned against a wall and panted. Nott and Zabini were doing the same thing. And also staring at him.

Harry ignored them for a bit, although he kept his wand in his hand in case they decided to hex him while he was distracted. But finally he straightened up, stopped breathing hard, and stuck his wand into his sleeve.

When he started to walk back to the common room, Nott stepped into his path. Harry whipped his wand out again, darting his eyes to the side. Zabini had got behind him, and he swore internally. That was carless of me.

“We’re not going to hex you, Potter.”

“Why not?”

“You saved our lives.”

Harry blinked. He knew that was a big deal to purebloods—he’d heard some people talking about it when someone else had saved a classmate from falling off a broom—but he hadn’t realized that it would count in this case. “I don’t know that the spell would have killed you,” he said slowly.

“It could at least have knocked Theo off the staircase,” Zabini said, stepping up to stand beside Nott. He didn’t have his wand out. Harry let his eyes drift between them, really not sure what they were trying to do. “Or me. Yaxley isn’t known for being sane or taking account of rules, only trying to cover up what he did afterwards. We both owe you a life-debt.”

Harry nodded slowly. “All right.”

“Do you have anything in mind to repay it?” Nott asked casually.

Harry thought one more time. Maybe he could have come up with something better if he wasn’t so tired, but maybe not. There was only one thing that Nott and Zabini could do that he wanted, anyway.

“Don’t take Malfoy’s side,” he said simply. “I don’t care if you fight for me. I wouldn’t expect you to. But don’t join in on Malfoy’s side. Or the side of anyone fighting for blood purity,” he added. Maybe that would prevent Nott and Zabini from turning on him in the future if Voldemort really wasn’t dead.

“Done.”

“Done.”

There was a shift, a click in the air around them, and Harry blinked, then shrugged. He supposed that was the life-debts being fulfilled.

He wanted to get to bed, so he started to step past Nott.

“We’re not done here, Potter.”

Harry whirled around, crouched low, wand out and aimed. Maybe this was the part where they would take out their fury at Harry seeing their “weakness” on him—

Nott rolled his eyes and said, “I know what kind of alliance I want in the future, and it’s not someone like Yaxley, or someone like Draco who thinks that everyone should just do what he tells them. If we’re not attacking you, we might as well be your friends.”

Harry squinted at him. “I didn’t think that was how it worked for Slytherins.”

“You’re a Slytherin,” Zabini said, sounding vaguely offended. “A good one.”

“I thought that you agreed with Malfoy about how I didn’t belong here.”

“We did,” Nott said simply. “We don’t now. Call me Theo.” He held out his hand.

Harry slowly lifted his hand and shook Nott’s, almost in a dream, then did the same with Zabini’s when he held it out and asked Harry to call him Blaise. He invited them to use his first name, too, because he kind of had to, and thought pretty hard about it as they made their journey back to the common room.

Was changing your mind just like that—allowed?

It seemed like it was, and he definitely didn’t want to go back to being alone and fighting off five enemies in his dormitory. With Nott and Zabini, it would be three against three.

That alone was enough reason for Harry to accept their alliance, as he supposed it would be. It was a long way from being real friends.

But it was a start.