Chapter Seventeen of 'For the Game'

[lomonaaeren]

“It really does seem like they don’t understand the concept of freedom.”

Hermione sounded so frustrated that Harry reached out and squeezed her hand in response. They had just got through with their second interview with the house-elves in the kitchens, and not much had gone differently from the first one. The elves Hermione wanted to talk to frowned or squeaked when she asked them about freedom, and shook their heads and didn’t answer directly. And their magic still felt jagged to Harry when they worked.

“I think they might, enough to be upset about it. That’s not the same thing as wanting to be free themselves.”

“But everyone wants to be free.”

“Well, maybe magical non-human people think about it differently. And anyway, if you’d never been free, would you know exactly what it meant?”

Hermione hesitated. “I think I could imagine it.”

“But it would be more difficult.”

“Yes.” Hermione frowned down at the pile of books she carried. She looked upset and tired. “I can’t believe that no one has ever questioned this. I mentioned house-elves in front of Ron, and he just looked wistful and said he wished his family could afford one!”

“So you can buy them?”

“Yes, Harry, that’s what being slaves means.”

“It’s just that none of the elves or the few books we managed to find said that. They talked about binding them, and about freeing them by giving them clothes, but not about buying them.”

Hermione gasped a little. “You’re right, Harry! How did I miss that? I’m going to go to the library to look it up and then go back to Gryffindor Tower with the books I find.”

Harry smiled. “All right. I’ll see you later?”

“You could…come with me.”

“I don’t have any materials with me to work on homework or anything. And there are some essays I ought to get done.”

“I meant. I meant.” Hermione hesitated so long that Harry stared at her and wondered if someone had been making fun of her, because it seemed like she wouldn’t have stopped speaking otherwise. “You could go to the library with me to work on house-elves, and then come to Gryffindor Tower?”

“Don’t—the Slytherin common room has a rule against bringing in people from other Houses. Don’t the Gryffindors?”

“If we do, no one’s ever mentioned it to me.”

Harry had to grin at the way Hermione’s chin was tilting upwards, so like the way that she looked when she was talking about freedom for house-elves. “Well, all right. Just keep in mind that it probably won’t make you any more popular.”

“As if I care about being popular.”

From the way Hermione’s eyes glazed over a little and her magic danced, Harry was sure that part of her could imagine it and want it, just like house-elves might be able to want freedom. But God forbid he discourage her from being his friend. “All right.”

*

The noise volume of Gryffindor Tower was loud, but collapsed the instant Harry stepped through the door after Hermione. The woman in the portrait hadn’t wanted to let him in, complaining and grumbling the whole time, but Hermione had marched straight at her in a way that said she might actually break through paint and canvas if the woman didn’t cooperate. In the end, they’d got in.

Now someone said, “A Slytherin? What are you doing, Granger?”

“He’s Harry Potter, and he’s my friend.”

Hermione’s voice was trembling a little. Harry moved up beside her, while trying not to blink at the abundance of red, gold, squashy chairs, students sprawled all over each other, and parchments on the floor. It was completely different from the way that the Slytherin common room looked. “I really didn’t come here to spy on secrets or something. I keep thinking that maybe I should have been in Gryffindor instead, so I wanted to see what it was like.”

There was a moment when everything felt as if it were hovering on the edge of violence, and Harry thought that he might have to draw his wand. Then Ron stood up from his armchair and glared around at people.

“Harry is my friend, too. So if you don’t like him here,” and Ron took a deep breath as though he was about to declare war, “you can bugger off.”

“Ron! Language!”

Either Ron’s words, or his presence, or the fact that Hermione was scolding him for language, broke the tension. Harry heard laughter and saw the Weasley twins getting up from their own chairs to walk over to him. He tensed a little as they put their arms around his shoulders, but they didn’t try to blow up his hair or anything.

“If Ronniekins says Harrikins here is all right—”

“Then he’s all right. And besides, who could fool the smartest witch in the House?”

That started an argument who was really the smartest witch in Gryffindor, and Harry relaxed. He was able to slip over to a corner with Ron, Hermione, and the twins, who simultaneously tried to involve him in a game of chess and ask him questions about Slytherin Quidditch team moves. Harry avoided answering those, but answered a few about what the common room looked like and what his House was doing in response to the Heir of Slytherin idea.

People argued around them, shouted, played Exploding Snap loudly enough that Harry quit jumping in five minutes, and somehow buried themselves in books like Hermione, ignoring the chaos. Harry didn’t want to ignore it, though. He looked around and felt a great wistfulness well up in him.

He thought he was learning to understand Slytherin friendship like the kind Blaise and Theo could offer him, but he also felt as though this was real friendship. The kind he had always pictured when he thought about getting away from the Dursleys and finding people who liked him for him.

He missed it.

*

“Heard you were in Gryffindor, Potter.”

Harry eyed Marcus Flint over the top of his book. Flint had just walked up to him and sat down next to him in the empty chair Blaise had left when he went to the dormitory for something. Across from Harry, Theo sat up, his eyes fixed on Flint.

Well, Flint was a sort of leader for the other Slytherins because of his position on the Quidditch team, so Harry supposed hat made sense.

“Yes,” Harry said.

Flint waited. When Harry said nothing else, Flint leaned towards him, a mighty frown on his face. “Maybe you haven’t heard that we don’t visit other Houses’ common rooms?”

“I know that no one from another House is supposed to be in Slytherin, but the Gryffindors welcomed me.”

People were turning towards them, as usual. Harry wanted to roll his eyes, but that would probably get Flint angry. Still. He was so irritated that so many of them would gape at anything to do with him, whether or not it concerned them.

“Maybe you really don’t get it,” Flint said slowly, as if he were considering that. “We don’t visit other Houses’ common rooms, Potter. It doesn’t matter how much they would welcome us. Hell, the Hufflepuffs would probably throw a party. We keep to ourselves.”

“I don’t.”

Flint leaned closer to him, while Theo sucked in a breath. “What was that, Potter?” Flint asked softly. “It almost sounded like you were challenging me to a duel.”

“A duel? What are you on about? I was just making a point that I have Gryffindor friends, I had Gryffindor friends all last year, and even if everyone else only has friends in Slytherin, that’s not me. I thought you knew that already.”

“That sounds like an invitation to a duel to me.”

Harry glanced at Theo for help, but Theo was just sitting still with very wide eyes, no help. Harry turned to Flint. “I don’t know why. I didn’t say that I want to fight you. I don’t. I’m just saying that I thought you already knew I had Gryffindor friends, and so it isn’t a surprise that I got invited to their common room.”

There was a grim little smile on Flint’s face as he drew his wand. “Defend yourself, Potter. The first to give up wins.”

People started scattering. Harry rose to his feet, staring at Flint. That was apparently serious. Even though he’d never done anything to Flint and he was five years younger and Flint knew a lot more spells—

Surprise gave way to anger.

This was just like Malfoy all over again, wasn’t it? Or people not believing him when he said that he didn’t know how he’d defeated the Dark Lord or that he wasn’t the Heir of Slytherin. People still wanted Harry to fight and stand up for himself even though no one else in Slytherin had to do it half as often.

Fine. Harry had learned the rule of how to fight a Slytherin last year. Win the fight as fast as possible, make them hurt as much as possible.

He opened his mouth and hissed while Flint was still using his wand to move couches out of the way. “Someone is trying to kill me, and if he does, there will be no rats.”

The snake had been sleeping underneath the couch, although Harry hadn’t warned anyone about that, because they didn’t need to know. The snake would just crawl up his leg and into his sleeve again when Harry left the common room, mostly, and it was easy to cover Parseltongue under the sound of moving and the fire crackling.

“No rats?”

“None, if the big one curses me.”

The snake reared up with a hiss. Now it had come fully out from under the couch. Now Flint could see it. He froze, and then his eyes flickered up and landed on Harry. “No snakes in the duel.”

“Why not? I didn’t know that someone could make rules like that.”

“It’s a rule.”

“Why?”

Flint shifted from foot to foot, and then he seemed to glance around and realize that everyone else was watching to see what would happen next. Harry could see the moment his face hardened and he decided that he wouldn’t back down. It would cost him too much in pride.

What goes before a fall?

“Because you can only use your wand in a duel like this,” Flint said, and then he lifted his wand and cast a silent curse, bright red, at Harry.

Harry rolled and dodged on the floor. He’d got a lot of practice at that with Dudley, and it was still one of his most useful skills. He heard the spell smash into and splinter a chair, and he came up on the other side of it, already casting.

“Impedimenta!”

Flint laughed as he conjured a shield that bounced the hex. “Did you think you could get to me with that little spell, Potter?”

Harry gave him a hard smile. Maybe it would have made someone smarter than Flint pause, but he was too busy advancing with his wand held out, his eyes trained on Harry, and if a few people shrieked, none were using words to warn him.

Not going to hurt you d with the spell.

The snake bit Flint in the back of the leg with a triumphant hiss. “You shall not kill the rat-killer!”

Flint staggered with a yell, and to the accompaniment of more shrieks from the watching Slytherins. Meanwhile, Harry dashed in. There was always the chance that Flint would try to ignore it and keep casting, and so Harry had to make sure that he stayed down and the duel was really over.

He extended his hand towards Flint’s forehead as Flint bent double with the pain from the poison, and concentrated on his rage.

He set Flint’s hair on fire.

Flint yelled again and staggered, and then he went down on one knee, gasping out, “Potter…Potter, what are you doing…?”

“You wanted to duel me,” Harry said, and he pushed his hand, with flames dancing over it that didn’t burn him, closer to Flint’s eyes. “You haven’t given up yet. Are you going to yield or not?”

Maybe Flint would still have let his pride take over if he could have seen the other Slytherins gaping at them, but he couldn’t see them past the flames dancing around his eyes, and maybe past Harry’s firelit face.

“Potter,” Flint whispered, and then seemed to give up on reasoning with Harry. He bowed his head. “I yield! I fucking yield!”

Harry let the flames burn one more second to prove his point, and then stepped back and swept his hand around in front of him. He didn’t really need to do that to make them stop burning, he just needed to extinguish his will, but it would look more dramatic and powerful to the people watching.

“You can stop trying to bite him,” he added to the snake.

“He will not kill you?”

“No.”

The snake gave a last, menacing hiss at Flint, and then slithered away from the Quidditch Captain and towards Harry. Harry picked it up. “You should tell them not to get into fights with you. Then I would not have to bite them.”

“I think he’s regretting getting into the fight with me,” Harry said, watching with interest as Flint collapsed.

“Get him to Pomfrey!”

Harry ignored the people running over to collect Flint. He ignored the whispers of “Heir of Slytherin” and “killer.” He ignored Theo’s wide eyes and the way that he could see Blaise standing perfectly still on the stairs leading up to the dormitories.

He turned around to face the common room, and the crowd fell still.

“You want to think I’m holding secrets and I’m the Slytherin Heir and I’m lying about everything,” he told them. “That’s fine. But when you attack me, then I’m going to defeat you, and maybe you should think about what that means.” He glanced over at Flint, who appeared to be having convulsions. “Just in case.”

The snake reared up on his shoulder and hissed, proving it had a fine sense of drama. Harry shook his head when people just kept staring at him, even leaning around their neighbors’ shoulders to do so, and walked up the stairs.

Theo and Blaise followed him into the room, but remained talking quietly on their own beds, glancing over at Harry without approaching. Harry dressed for bed even though it was early in the evening and pulled his curtains shut emphatically.

“I stopped him from hurting you.”

“Yes, you did. Thank you.”

“You still smell angry.”

“Yes.” Harry stroked the snake and looked up at the canopy of his bed as the snake curled up between his neck and his shoulder. “But just at how stupid people are, and no venom can fix that.”