lomonaaeren

“Mr. Potter, why don’t you sit here with Miss Granger?”

Harry tightened his throat against a swallow. He hadn’t expected to find Professor McGonagall when he went into the library, but apparently here she was, discussing something with Madam Pince. And gesturing him towards a table where Granger sat, surrounded by enormous mounds of books.

Granger’s face popped around the edge of one massive tome. She was giving him a cautious look. Harry knew why. He was famous and a Slytherin, and she didn’t have any reason to think he wasn’t a blood purist.

“Hullo,” Harry said, and dropped his books on the table. Professor McGonagall smiled and nodded at them, then turned back to an intense discussion with Madam Pince, too low-voiced for Harry to hear.

“Hullo.” Granger hesitated. “You don’t mind studying with me? You know that I’m Muggleborn.”

Harry admired the way she just came out and said it, without caring whether the other person believed in blood purity. Well, no, she probably did care, Harry corrected himself, after he glanced down and saw her hands trembling. But she had said it anyway, and it meant that she wouldn’t retreat.

“I don’t mind. My mum was Muggleborn, after all, and I don’t understand the appeal of blood purity to anyone who doesn’t have parents who believe in it.”

There. If someone was spying on them from behind the shelves—an idea that made Harry feel paranoid, but which might be true—then they had heard Harry give an answer he could say was sympathetic to purebloods.

Even as he thought that, though, a spark of defiance burned in him. Maybe he would say it was stupid, in front of everyone. Daphne didn’t believe in it, Blaise didn’t seem to, and Draco seemed like he was shaking it off.

Even though Harry didn’t know why.

“Potter?”

Harry snapped back to the conversation to see Granger looking wary again. He must have missed something she’d said, and now she thought he was ignoring her. One thing being in Slytherin had made him good at was guessing the likely reason for some people’s emotions.

“Sorry.” He opened his Charms book, sort of at random, but luckily he’d left a bookmark in there near the last spells Professor Flitwick had had them study. “Do you think that Wingardium Leviosa is all that hard?”

“No.” Then Granger blushed as if she’d been caught doing something nasty. “I mean…not that we’re supposed to be practicing ahead!”

Harry laughed a little. “It’s fine, Granger. I studied and practiced the spell just like you did. Me and a friend of mine.”

“Who’s that?”

“Daphne Greengrass. From Slytherin.”

“Someone in Gryffindor said she was…”

“A blood purist? Nasty? Sharp-tongued?”

“All of those, I think.”

“Well, she can be nasty and sharp with people she doesn’t know or like. But she’s my friend, and she was willing to talk to me and interact with me even before that. The really strict blood purists wouldn’t even be willing to do that. Or they would only be doing it to try and gain something from me. Like information, or a way to use me.”

“That’s terrible!”

Harry blinked. He had forgotten, or not thought about, the fact that Granger was a Gryffindor. Now her face was flushed, and her eyes sparkled with indignation.

For him.

Harry was oddly touched.

“Well, it would probably happen in lots of contexts, because I’m famous,” he said, and then hoped that didn’t sound like he was proud of it. He just moved on, though, because Draco had taught him that apologizing all the time for a mistake was a good way to get the other person to focus on it. “But Daphne’s not like that.”

“Oh,” Granger said softly. “But some of the others are?”

“Yeah. But I don’t want to talk about them now,” Harry added hastily, because Granger was opening her mouth to probably ask another question. “What’s it like in Gryffindor? I don’t know that.”

“Oh. Well, it’s great. Everyone’s so brave and open and tells you what they think, you know…”

But Granger was avoiding his eyes. Harry leaned forwards, a little concerned. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong!”

“But you’re looking down and acting like something is.”

Granger bit her lip and looked up at him again. Harry kept his face as warm and open as he could. Sometimes he felt like Slytherin had taught him better control of his expressions, and sometimes he just felt that it meant he didn’t know what his face looked like anymore.

“They don’t like me,” Granger whispered at last. “They call me a know-it-all and say I shouldn’t raise my hand to answer every question.” Her voice got a little louder. “But what should happen when a professor asks a question and none of them know it? There’s got to be someone to say something!”

Harry blinked, at a loss for words. He sometimes felt awkward sitting in silence, too, but he had never thought he should be the one to break the silence. Eventually his primary school teachers would have just called on someone else, and his professors would, too.

He thought.

“Oh. Um. Well. Maybe you could try letting some of them answer sometimes? Keeping your hand down some of the time?”

“But what if no one answers?”

“Then no one does. A lot of the professors have been teaching a long time, right? None of them are new? Even if Professor Quirrell is new at Defense Against the Dark Arts, he’s been teaching Muggle Studies. They must be used to classes where some people sit in silence and sometimes no one just knows the answer to a question?”

Harry didn’t like Professor Quirrell much. He always seemed to have a headache in the professor’s class, and Quirrell was one of those people who stared at him and his scar without saying anything about it and just expected Harry to put up with the staring. But he wasn’t going to say that to Granger, who looked as if a meteor had crashed into her head.

“They—they wouldn’t mind?”

“I mean, they might not like it some of the time, but they wouldn’t expect just one person to answer all the questions, either. And it might give you some peace with your Housemates.”

“Because they would expect me to be stupid!”

Harry scowled at her before he could help himself. “I don’t know all the answers to all the questions, either. Do you think that means I’m stupid?”

Granger sat back in her seat and clenched her jaw. She was obviously struggling to keep her opinion to herself. Harry thought that most of the problems she was having in Gryffindor probably were her Housemates, but some of it was because she was also quick and loud to say everything that went through her head.

“No,” Granger said at last, in a little mumble.

Harry nodded, satisfied that she hadn’t blurted out whatever else she was obviously thinking. “Okay. Then no one will think you’re stupid if you don’t answer all the questions, either. It’s not a race or an—an exam. Everyone’s already seen how smart you are. Just give other people a chance to look that way too, all right?”

“I didn’t think of it that way.”

Now Granger seemed as if she might crumble in remorse. Harry reached across the table and patted her hand. “It’s okay. The only thing that matters is what you do going forwards, not what you did in the past.”

“But they’ll still see me that way.”

“Maybe not, though. Maybe not if you give them a chance to think about you differently.”

Granger took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. Thanks.” She peered at him as she pulled a piece of parchment in front of her. “How are you so wise?”

Harry shrugged, embarrassed. It was the first time someone had called him wise, especially with all the things about the magical world that he didn’t know. “I just—I know the way that people interact, sometimes. And I think it would be a shame if people kept ignoring or making fun of you just because you’re smart.”

“That’s not what they did!”

Harry looked at her.

“All right, fine, they did,” Granger admitted. “But that doesn’t mean that Slytherin is better than Gryffindor, or whatever you were about to say.”

“I…wasn’t?”

“Okay,” Granger said, still squinting at him as if she wasn’t sure she believed him, but at least she could go back to her homework and Harry could go back to his.

So far, befriending a Gryffindor was going all right.

*

Theo leaned out from behind a shelf, frowning. The books he had found in the library had been disappointing. They had only told him things he’d already known, and which wouldn’t be valuable to combat people like Potter.

But now he’d heard Potter’s voice in the library. That might mean that Potter suspected what Theo was doing and had come to put a stop to it. Theo would deny to his dying breath that Potter had Parseltongue, but he wouldn’t deny Potter was clever.

It turned out to be better than that, though. Potter was sitting at a table with someone Theo had to sneak into another aisle to see.

A Gryffindor someone.

The know-it-all Mudblood, Granger.

Theo had to grip the edge of the shelf to keep from falling down with excitement. And indignation. This was really it, wasn’t it? Potter thought he could sit in the open and associate with the enemy because he thought his reputation would protect him.

But this was the kind of crime that lots of people in Slytherin would scowl at.

Theo sneaked back into the aisle and out of the library without Potter seeing him. He would move slowly, even though he had undeniable proof. Zabini’s words were still ringing in his mind. Theo didn’t intend to be left behind in the power struggles in Slytherin because he had chosen the wrong audience or someone who didn’t care about blood purity.

Parkinson, though…

She does care. And Zabini’s wrong about the way that she would agree to follow Potter.

Theo had to conceal a smile as he entered the dungeons. Parkinson might agree to follow Theo, though. If he played his Gobstones right.

Or at least form an alliance against those who would degrade the good name of Slytherin. Theo would take that, too.

*

“What are we studying?”

Harry and Daphne blinked and glanced up. They had both settled into a back corner of the Transfiguration classroom when Professor McGonagall had told them to practice with turning wooden buttons into metal. Neither had expected Blaise to join them.

Harry cleared his throat and glanced at Daphne, expecting her to take the lead. But she sat back and lifted her eyebrows in a way that said he was the one who ought to handle this.

Harry bit his lip, hard, and settled his face in the way that he had seen Mrs. Malfoy do sometimes right before she started talking to Draco about something he wasn’t allowed to do, like fly his broom without supervision. “Turning buttons into metal ones.”

“Silly lesson,” Blaise murmured, even as he flipped a sheet of parchment open to what looked like the notes that McGonagall had been putting on the board. “There’s no reason that you couldn’t just buy your own buttons in real life.”

Harry looked at Daphne. She gave an expansive shrug.

Right. Handling this was still up to him, then.

“Um. Well, what if you were in an emergency situation? Far away from home and you couldn’t reach your clothes that had the right kind of buttons? Or you had a piece of wood right before you were supposed to meet with someone important, but no metal?”

Blaise tilted his head to the side and stared hard at Harry. Harry found himself holding his breath, and was irritated that he was doing it.

“That’s very clever, Harry. You might make me like this stupid lesson yet.” Blaise smiled at him and looked down at his notes again. “I got the matchstick transformation all right, so I should get this one. I’ll go first.”

“I want to go first.”

Harry blinked and glanced up. Draco was coming over to their corner, and of course, where he went, Crabbe and Goyle followed. This time, he didn’t bother glancing at Daphne. He just waved to them, and they settled in the seats that flanked Blaise.

“We’ll all get a turn, Draco darling dearest.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“But it’s so entertaining,” Blaise said, with a look of such angelic innocence on his face that Harry might have been fooled if he didn’t know him.

“I’ll show you entertaining, Zabini.”

Draco and Blaise started to bicker. Harry glanced at Daphne again. She motioned him to her side of the table, and Harry went, gladly. He didn’t want to get caught up in teaching or trying to teach Crabbe and Goyle, who sort of meant well, but also didn’t get what Harry explained to them no matter how many times he tried.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Millicent Bulstrode and Tracey Davis edging towards their cluster of desks, and tensed a little. Then he shrugged. He supposed it didn’t matter. Both Bulstrode and Davis tended to listen instead of jumping into the middle of most conversations. They wouldn’t disrupt anything.

“Let’s see you try, Harry.”

Harry raised his wand and took a deep breath. He still got self-conscious when he performed most pieces of magic. Parseltongue was different, it was just simple and didn’t require anything from him, and Potions was mostly okay if you knew the ingredients. But channeling magic through his wand was still new.

“Commuto!”

Nothing happened.

Daphne shook her head, not looking surprised or disappointed. “My turn, then,” she said, and flicked her wand at the button. “Commuto!”

The button spun a little, but didn’t change, either.

“I wanted to be first!” Draco said from the side, loudly and impatiently, the way he did everything.

“Then you should have started casting earlier,” Blaise said, with so much patience in his voice that Harry had to cover his mouth. He was going to laugh if this went on much longer, and that wouldn’t do him any good in his standing with Draco.

“Shut up, Zabini!”

“Mr. Zabini, Mr. Malfoy, is everything all right here?”

Professor McGonagall had come swooping over at the first sign of something potentially going wrong, because of course she had. Harry forced himself to look up and into her eyes with a calm smile. He hadn’t done anything wrong, he reminded himself. She wasn’t irritated at him.

“No, professor,” Draco said, with a childish glare at Blaise.

“No, professor.” Blaise’s smile was sunny.

McGonagall raised an unimpressed eyebrow and turned away. Harry went back to trying to Transfigure his button, ignoring Draco’s mutters.

Everything was all right. At least for this class.

*

“You’re not thinking of joining them, are you, Parkinson?”

Parkinson jumped and jerked her eyes back to Theo’s face. “Of course not,” she said, but her denial was weak.

Theo hid his frown behind his wand as he looked down at the button in front of him. “Then I would work on your Transfiguration.”

Parkinson did, but she still sneaked glances over at the group of eight on the other side of the classroom, arguing with each other and laughing and gasping when someone apparently got the Transfiguration halfway right. That much, Theo couldn’t blame her for, as long as she didn’t move over and join them. As long as she maintained the pride of their blood.

He was staring, too.

Everyone else is going to follow Potter, and I’m going to be left behind.

Theo shook his head as he thought about it. No. That wouldn’t happen. He had Parkinson with him, and he would have other Slytherins later on. He would make sure that everyone knew about Potter’s tendency to make friends with lesser people outside his own House.

He didn’t feel lonely, because he never did. He kept on working, and ignored the temptation to look over again, even though Parkinson didn’t.

Some things, the pride of their blood demanded.