lomonaaeren

“Come over here, Harry.”

Harry blinked at Theo. They’d come into Potions, and just like normal, Harry had turned towards Ron. He always partnered with Ron in Potions. Hermione would probably have worked with them sometimes, but Snape had pretty much assigned her permanently to poor Longbottom.

“What?”

“Come. Over. Here.” Theo set his cauldron down on his own table with a pointed thunk and raised his eyebrows at Harry.

“No, thanks,” Harry said lightly. He reckoned that Theo was just trying to flex his mental muscles or something because he was still upset that Harry had sat with Ron and Hermione on the train. He shook his head as he sat down next to Ron, who was watching them with rapidly blinking eyes.

“Why not?”

“Because Ron and I are partners in Potions.”

Ron beamed and patted Harry’s shoulder. “That’s right, Nott.”

Harry set out his tools, ignoring the way that Theo and Blaise were regarding each other. They had their silent conversations, and Harry had his ploys. It wasn’t equal, but it was something they both had.

“Mr. Nott, what are you doing?”

Snape had swept into the classroom silently, which wasn’t unusual, but the focus on Theo was. Theo stood up, though, and formed his face into a determined expression. “I just think it’s strange that a Slytherin is always sitting over on the Gryffindor side of the classroom, Professor, and helping a Gryffindor.”

Snape’s attention swung to Harry. “I must admit I find it a little strange as well,” he said softly. “Mr. Potter, why are you not helping a Slytherin partner?”

Snape hadn’t phrased it as a demand for Harry to move away from Ron, so he still had a chance to make things go how he wanted them to. Harry chewed his lip and cast his eyes down and fidgeted a little.

“Mr. Potter?”

“Because I think that I learn better with Ron,” Harry said, willing his face to turn red. He wasn’t sure how well it was working, but right now, he wasn’t going to look up at Snape. “Nott and Zabini are so much more skilled than I am, and there’s just no comparison between me and Malfoy. I’d—hold them back.”

He made that last confession in a rush, as if it were something he didn’t want to say, and hid a smile as he felt Snape sneer. Yes, he’d soothed Snape’s suspicion of him and told him something he could well believe.

“Poor Potions students must learn to improve,” Snape said softly. “You will remain with Mr. Weasley for this term, Mr. Potter.”

It wasn’t the same as a permanent assignment all year, but Harry elected to ignore that. The important thing was that he’d got his way. “Yes, sir,” he mumbled, aiming for a mixture of relieved and disappointed.

Snape put the instructions for the first potion on the board, and Harry went to the supply cupboard to get the ingredients he and Ron needed. Theo was there, glaring at him while his hands flew among the ingredients.

“What are you playing at, Harry?”

“What are you?”

“Blaise and I want to spend some more time with you,” Theo said, as if that were obvious.

“Then you could have told me that, instead of springing it on me.”

Theo stared at him, but Harry had already turned away with the glass flasks of salt and lavender petals in his hands. Ron leaned forwards as Harry sat down beside him again. “What did Nott want?”

“To play some game,” Harry said. “But I won’t let him play it when he tries to use my friends as pieces.”

Ron smiled. He might take that as an implication that Harry wasn’t really friends with Theo, which was fine. Harry just didn’t want to get into an argument about it in the middle of Potions, and it wasn’t like he intended to spend time with all four of them at once.

“Good. You know, mate, I wish there was a way that you could ask the Hat to let you be Sorted into Gryffindor. You really don’t belong in Slytherin at all.”

Harry smiled tightly as he began to cut up the spotted slugs that he had already had in his Potions kit. “You have no idea.”

*

“You have no idea what you’re doing in Potions, Potter.”

Harry ignored Malfoy. He’d got better at doing that lately. Compared to Uncle Vernon, Malfoy really had no ability to get under Harry’s skin.

And if Malfoy got better at it?

Well, Harry had managed to get Uncle Vernon to leave him the fuck alone. He would manage the same thing with Malfoy if he had to.

“I would like to know the real reason that you always partner with Weasley,” Blaise drawled, from where he was lounging in the middle of his bed apparently waiting for something to entertain him.

“Because he’s my friend.”

“We’re your friends, too.”

“Speak for yourself, Blaise,” Malfoy snarled, and started some diatribe that Harry didn’t pay attention to. He was too busy making sure that he had all the books he had checked out from the library about house-elves in his satchel.

Not that there were that many. The school library seemed to contain mostly books that applied directly to homework, or maybe to some of the upper-level subjects that the OWL and NEWT students studied, even if they weren’t offered as classes at the school. Harry had looked through them carefully and learned little about house-elves.

But Hermione had scoured the library, too, and she had somehow managed to blackmail the Weasley twins into telling her the location of the kitchens. She and Harry were going there today to interview house-elves.

Ron, not unsurprisingly, had begged off. But Harry did feel like Hermione was his friend now, not just Ron’s, and they could spend time together by themselves.

They just needed to—

Harry felt the thickening of magic in the air and raised a wall of fire between him and Malfoy with a twitch of his finger. He looked up to see Malfoy’s hex, whatever it had been, dissolving into the flames. There wasn’t enough of a trail, or even sparks, left between Malfoy and the shield for him to be sure of what it had been.

Malfoy was gaping at him. Blaise’s face had gone back to studied neutrality. Crabbe and Goyle were ignoring everything, as usual, and Theo wasn’t there.

“That was stupid, Potter,” Malfoy eventually chose to say, although his eyes were uncertain. “You raise a Shield Charm when you want to prevent someone from hexing you, not just stupid fire.”

“I do what works,” Harry said coolly, and swung his satchel over his shoulder.

“I find myself curious how you knew dearest Draco was going to hex you,” Blaise said.

“He hasn’t mastered wordless magic yet,” Harry said, and slipped away as Malfoy went on another rant.

Blaise’s eyes remained on his back. Harry’s eyes remained on the path in front of him.

*

“It’s terrible.”

Harry nodded as he sat beside Hermione at a table in the kitchens. The elves rushed around them, squeaking and calling to each other as they dashed puddings and potatoes and bread and sandwiches for the students’ lunch from hand to hand. They seemed happy when they spoke with Harry and Hermione, insisting they were treated well at Hogwarts.

But they also seemed frantic now, as if they thought they’d be punished like Dobby if a single student reached for something they wanted and it wasn’t there. And there was—

Harry leaned back and squinted. Yes, the elves’ magic was jagged and dancing around their bodies. Harry couldn’t really see it as much as feel it, pressing against his skin in sudden spikes that would disappear a few seconds later. And Harry couldn’t feel it as well as he could feel another wizard or witch’s magic when it was something like Malfoy getting ready to hex him.

But it didn’t feel as though the elves’ magic was happy.

“Harry, can I ask you something?”

Harry blinked and turned his attention away from the elves’ magic to his friend. “Sure, Hermione.”

“You’re—you manipulated Professor Snape the other day into leaving you and Ron together.”

Harry smiled. If a Gryffindor was going to see what he was doing, he should have known it would be Hermione. “Yes, I did.”

“Why do that, instead of just asking Professor Snape to leave you there?”

“Because Snape—”

“Professor Snape, Harry.”

Harry ignored that. “Hates me. He wouldn’t deliberately do anything that he thought would make me happy. So I gave him a reason he could believe. He probably wanted to anyway. He doesn’t lose anything from making me work with Ron, and he knows that all the Slytherins in my year except Crabbe and Goyle are better than I am at Potions.”

“Why do you think he didn’t make you work with Crabbe or Goyle, then?’

“It wouldn’t be enough of a punishment for me. They’re so thick that they would just do as I said instead of sabotaging their potions, and Snape would have messes to clean up instead of being able to even take points.”

“He does take points a lot when you work with Ron.”

“Right, but he has the excuse that I am working with a Gryffindor then. And they’re all from your lot. He wouldn’t really be able to have an excuse for that if I was just working with a Slytherin.”

Hermione’s mouth opened a little, then closed. She finally said faintly, “You like that sort of thing?’

“No, I don’t like that Snape hates me, Hermione. I’m not mental.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Hermione bit her lip, while the elves bustled around them and Harry felt the jagged press of their magic against his skin again and again. “You enjoy—the game of manipulating him?”

“No,” Harry said, and he knew he was being honest. “I would much rather just be able to work with who I want to work with and have Snape ignore me the way he does Crabbe and Goyle. But I don’t have that, so I’ll manipulate him if I have to.”

“That’s terrible!”

“But it’s the way things are.”

“Someone ought to intervene!”

“Has Professor McGonagall intervened on Longbottom’s behalf?”

Hermione opened her mouth, then closed it. Then she said, uncertain, “I’m not sure Professor McGonagall knows how Professor Snape treats Neville.”

“You should tell her.”

Hermione flushed, and then firmed her jaw and nodded. “You’re right. I should. Thank you, Harry. I’ve been remiss in my duty.”

Harry blinked, because he didn’t know about that, but he decided to simply accept the compliment. “You’re welcome, Hermione.”

“And what do you think about the house-elves? How can we help them, if they think they’re happy, and if no one here is punishing them enough to make them want to change?”

Harry smiled a little. It was terrible, but he knew, like Hermione, that the house-elves probably wouldn’t change unless they saw a reason to, like Dobby, or had terrible masters. “We can talk with a few more of them. When they aren’t so busy. And ask them about how their magic feels.”

“How their magic feels?”

Harry hesitated, because he hadn’t intended to tell anyone about this, but he didn’t think Hermione would gossip with people in Slytherin, so he thought he could tell her. “I can feel the magic around them. Or around a human using a spell. The elves’ magic is really jagged now that they’re working, even though they would probably say they’re fine.”

Hermione’s eyes narrowed, and Harry tensed. But Hermione just nodded and whipped a piece of parchment out of her satchel. “This is really useful, Harry! We can find out…”

And Harry relaxed again.

*

“Why do you spend so much time with your Gryffindor friends?”

Harry rolled his eyes. He and Blaise and Theo were sitting in front of the fire in the Slytherin common room, and they’d been working on a Transfiguration essay that required a lot of checking the book’s footnotes and further chapters for answers to tricky questions. Harry hadn’t really wanted to be dragged away from it. “Because they’re my friends.”

“So are we, but you never spend any time with us.”

Harry looked at them, and then around the common room.

“That doesn’t count. We spend time studying, but you don’t spend time outside of that with us.”

“I must have imagined our conversation at lunch this afternoon,” Harry muttered, flipping a page and wondering if his obvious lack of interest would give Blaise a clue.

“That was about Quidditch.”

“So? Half my conversations with Ron are about Quidditch, and pretty much all my time with Hermione is spent studying. Or my time with both of them, because she drags Ron into it.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but Blaise and Theo didn’t need to know that, and Hermione’s reputation for fanaticism about her marks was well-known enough that Harry didn’t think either of them would question it. Theo leaned forwards. “We want to talk with you about other things.”

“Oh? Like what?”

Theo flailed about, visibly. Harry set aside his book and regarded him, because this was more interesting than the Transfiguration book, if not as productive.

“I—well, I don’t know. But we want you to feel that you can talk to us about anything.”

They want more of my secrets.

Harry swallowed his disappointment. He’d been hoping that Theo’s offer was even halfway sincere. But maybe it was just a little under halfway there, and he would take what he could get. “Well, come up with a topic, and we can talk about it. Quidditch and homework are most of my conversations with Ron and Hermione, like I said.”

“You and Granger have a research project?”

Harry glanced at Blaise. “Yeah.”

“You go to the kitchens.”

Harry nodded. “We talk to the house-elves.”

“What? Why?”

“Because they’re interesting.”

Blaise and Theo stared at him, then exchanged glances. Harry just sat looking at them, and Theo was the one who gave his head a disgusted shake and said, “House-elves. I suppose two people new to the magical world can find anything interesting, but really?”

“I wanted to know more about them after the crazy one who showed up at my relatives’ house this summer. And Hermione just wants to know more in general.”

“Never mind,” Blaise said, snatching up his own essay. “That isn’t interesting.”

Told you, Harry thought, and looked at his own parchment again.

He did sense Theo watching him for most of the afternoon, as if he wanted to suggest another conversation topic, but didn’t know how. Harry refused to help him out. He did want to be friends with Blaise and Theo, but if they were dissatisfied with the conversations Harry had with them on a regular basis, then it was up to them to suggest new ones.