A/N: I love writing this story and want to know if you guys think that I should put all seven years into HSG or do seven separate parts. Tell me what you think. Thanks for all of the follows, favorites, and reviews. You guys rock!

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or any of its associated characters, places, or ideas. That all belongs to JK Rowling. If I owned Harry Potter, well… I'd be rich. I'm not rich and therefore I don't own Harry Potter.

The Hope a Stranger Gives

Chapter 7: Dungeons and Trolls

October 31st 1991

The smell of pumpkins and cinnamon waft throughout the whole of castle Hogwarts as everyone celebrates what this day means. Every person is celebrating except one. Harry Potter is not celebrating, because Harry Potter is mourning the death of his parents.

Look back to October 31st of 1981 and you'll hear the story of how a baby overcame the power of he-who-must-not-be-named and vanquished a great evil at the cost of losing his parents. On that night, a short while after the destruction of you-know-who, the wizarding world partied harder than a rich frat boy named Brody ever could hope to.

Back to the present though, and we find our young hero currently in charms class with his Slytherin housemates and the Ravenclaws. They are currently trying to cast the levitation spell known as "Wingardium Leviosa". While on any other day, Harry could cast this spell with his eyes closed and using his left hand instead of his right, today Harry finds himself losing concentration.

While the boy has promised himself not to cry over the deaths of his parents, he can not help that he stills feels the weight of the loss, particularly on days like Halloween, Christmas, and his Birthday.

By the end of the class, only Hermione and Daphne had cast the charm correctly much to the shock of Professor Flitwick who knew that Harry was one of the best in his year at charms. While Harry wasn't at Hermione's level in sheer knowledge of the subject and almost always was beat out by Hermione in who could cast the spell first, Harry used the spells that he knew much more creatively than the bookish girl.

"Mr. Potter, could you stay behind please. I would like to speak with you," The half-goblin professor said while the rest of the class was packing their bags for their next class. After telling his friends that he'd meet them at the next class and to let the teacher know that he had to stay behind, Harry walked up to Flitwick's desk.

After two minutes of Flitwick going through the files of his desk, the man stood back up and handed Harry a roll of parchment. Harry eyed the roll quizzically and Flitwick saw the expression and gestured for him to read it.

Unrolling the scroll, Harry is met with neat writing that reads "Lily J. Evans' Charms Mastery". "That is the essay that your mother wrote to complete her mastery. I don't expect you to understand her essay just yet but I wanted to show it to you. She was the greatest student that I've ever had."

As Harry moved to hand it back to the man, Flitwick shook his head morosely and said "While that is one of my prized possessions, I feel as though you should keep it. Call it motivation, I expect your mastery essay on my desk in no later than ten years."

At Harry's smile, Flitwick gestured to the door for Harry to head to his next class. "Go on, lad. Don't want to be late, do you?" Harry smiled once more and started for the door and before he exited he looked over his shoulder and said "Thanks, professor. This means a lot to me."

Professor Flitwick gave a smile and nodded his acceptance before turning back to his desk to prepare for the next class. Harry exited the room and made his way to his final class for the day. Being that it is Halloween, they have less classes than usual. Whereas they normally have four classes each day, today they have only two. While it may not seem like a lot, the class load increases once they get to third year and receive electives.

Reaching the DADA classroom, Harry quietly took his seat and tuned out Quirrell's babbling. While he tried to do something productive with the time, like the metre long essay on the differences between stirring a potion clockwise and counterclockwise, Harry couldn't concentrate at all. In charms, it was due to being depressed, but now it was due to a massive migraine.

Harry felt like his head was being torn open and his brain consumed with the fiery pain. He had grown used to the pain associated with DADA but today the pain was over the top. Harry found himself slightly hunched over his desk and absently massaging his temples to relieve the pain.

Noticing her friend's behaviour, Daphne shot Harry worried looks throughout the class. Harry had told his friends about the pains and they had chalked it up to him being particularly adverse to the smell of garlic.

Right now though, Daphne isn't so sure. The smell of garlic is horrible but it shouldn't cause Harry to have migraines. When Harry rubs his scar, Daphne thinks back to a book that she read on cursed scars. Harry being the only one to have ever survived the killing curse means that no one can know the after effects of the curse.

In Daphne's mind, it couldn't possibly be a coincidence that the headache seems worse than ever on this day.

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"Are you sure that you don't want one of us to stay with you?" Tracey asks Harry for the seventh time since he had revealed that he wouldn't be attending the Halloween feast. "I'm sure, Trace. I'm just going to stay here and finish my Potion essay. Go and have fun, I'll be fine."

With one last tentative look, Harry's friends left the common room and made their way to the great hall. When the portrait closed and he was the only one left in the common room, Harry sat on the couch in front of the fireplace and pulled out his rough draft of the sixty-two centimeter long essay and started rewriting it.

Thirty minutes into revising his essay, Harry heard loud smashing noises coming from outside of the common room. Curious as to what's going on, the young heir marked his page and exited the common room.

As Harry advanced down the corridor, the noise grew and the smell of rot was present. The smell was so indescribable in its sheer disgustingness that there isn't a word bad enough that could due justice to the stench.

Harry turned the final corner and saw a grey-skinned troll standing more than four metres in height and twice as wide as Hagrid in width. The troll had a wooden club that was twice the size of Harry and thrice the weight of him as well.

Startled from seeing the troll, Harry let out a surprised gasp that alerted the troll to his position. Turning around with a roar, the troll raised his club and sprinted towards Harry. With widened eyes, the boy-who-lived drew his wand and aimed at the troll with a shout of "Iter scandalum," the beast tripped and fell.

Not wanting to take chances with the dangerous troll for any longer than he had to, Harry used the "Bombarda" curse on the club and caused it to explode into dozens of sharp splinters. After firing the curse, he quickly crouched down and used his robes to cover his face so that the splinters wouldn't harm him. One exceptionally sharp splinter managed to tear through his cape and cut his left cheek, causing some blood to spill out of the the wound.

Another of the splinters sliced his left leg but Harry didn't think that it was too bad. The slate-haired hero tried to stand back up to incapacitate the troll and then get help but his injured leg gave out and he collapsed to the ground with a scream.

Gently raising his left hand toward the wound, the Potter heir touched the wound and noticed that the splinter cut deeper than he thought and that he would need medical for it. Not knowing any healing spells, Harry was forced to leave the cut as it be and return his attention to the troll. Said troll just so happened to have fully stood up by the end of Hadrian's damage assessment and growled at the sight of his destroyed club.

Marching toward the puny human that dared to not be pummeled by him, the troll reared his massive fist back and drove it straight towards Harry. Luckily though, the emerald-eyed boy dove to his left and out of the way of the fist. Instead of hitting Harry like he wanted to, the troll struck the wall behind the boy. Left fist now stuck in the concrete wall, the troll was forced to use his right hand to try and free the trapped one.

Forcing himself to stand, Harry limped away from the troll and was prepared to leave when he heard the beast growl in rage. 'If I don't finish that troll now, he could get out and hurt someone else. The other first years don't know as many spells as I do and I still got messed up. I need to do something.'

The troll finally freed his hand from the wall and was standing back up when Harry shot a blasting hex at the troll's right knee, forcing the troll to drop once more. The now murderous troll was holding its hands against the stump that used to be it's lower leg and Harry slowly limped towards a large pile of the destroyed wooden club.

Using the beast's distraction to his advantage, Harry cast "Wingardium Leviosa" to levitate all of the splinters and aimed them at the troll's back and head. Quickly transfiguring the pieces of wood into glass and with a cry of "Depulso" the boy banished all of the shards towards the beast.

Harry's aim was true and the shards hit their mark, causing the troll to stop struggling and slump against the wall, dead. Hadrian walked to the opposite wall before collapsing against it in both magical and mental exhaustion, Harry closed his eyes and took a deep breath as the weight of killing another living being fell on him.

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Helping himself to a baked potato, Draco looked up when Professor Quirrell rushed into the hall horrified and turban askew, the cowardly man slumped against the table and looked up at Dumbledore. With a gasp the man informed "Troll in the dungeons. Thought you should know."

The man promptly fainted and the whole hall went ballistic. But while everyone else was terrified over the prospect of a troll in the castle, Draco was thinking about how Quirrell hadn't stuttered once when he was supposedly terrified.

The Malfoy heir didn't think on that for long before multiple purple firecrackers exploding drew his attention back to Dumbledore. "Prefects, lead your houses back to their dormitories! Slytherin students will stay in the great hall until this matter has been settled."

Eyes widening in realization, Draco stood and darted over to Professor Snape who was standing with McGonagall. Looking down at his godson, Snape raised an eyebrow at the boy, prompting him to reveal what he was doing.

"Harry is in the dungeon," Draco replied to the unasked question. Snape looked up quickly and scanned the Slytherin table and once he saw that Harry really wasn't in the hall, strode over to the Headmaster.

Going back to his friends, Draco spotted the group of professors, now including an awake Quirrell, hurriedly leaving the hall. "I knew that we should've made him come with us or something. I hope that he's okay," Tracey said worriedly whilst she was staring at the door that the professors left through.

"He'll be fine, Trace. He probably is still in the dorms, we don't even know if he's seen it." Daphne said this but Draco wasn't sure if she was trying to convince Tracey or herself.

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'How did Tom get a troll into the castle without me knowing? The wards never even went off. Harry better be okay, the world needs him to be,' thought Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore as he raced through the twists and turns of the castle to the entrance of the dungeons. With him were his trusted friends and fellow teachers: Severus Snape, Minerva McGonagall, and Filius Flitwick. Also with him was Quirinus Quirrell, an old friend that is now carrying the spirit form of his old student Tom Riddle.

"Through here," shouted Severus as the greasy potions master turned the final corner with the others all following closely behind him. Upon turning the corner, they were met with a grim sight. The gigantic troll was slumped forward against the wall on the left side of the short hallway with large glass shards protruding from it's back.

The glass shards were dripping in what could only be blood and if one looked at the floor, they would see a puddle of the fluid. The beast was undeniably dead and the killer was just a few feet away. Harry Potter was sitting against the wall on the right side of the hall, parallel to the troll. The boy had his head buried in his hands as if he were ashamed of what he had done.

"Oh my," Quirrell exclaimed when he noticed the blood. The intrusion brought Harry's attention the arrived adults. Flitwick saw the boy's sad expression and asked "Are you okay, Mr. Potter?" Before Harry could reply to that, Minerva asked "Do you require medical attention?" Snape quickly followed up with asking "What happened here?" The traumatized boy looked at the questioning and concerned professors and answered both Flitwick's and McGonagall's questions with a "I'm relatively fine sir but I do need to visit the nurse."

Shakily pushing himself up from the floor and ignoring the proffered hands of help, Harry stood and started for the hospital wing. The professors followed behind the boy and Harry told them what happened and how he ended up killing the troll. By the end of his tale, the headmaster and his four professor's were wowed by the boy's performance.

When Dumbledore praised the boy, he shook his head and said that he just got lucky and that they could've easily had found him dead instead of the troll. Even though the boy had had to kill long before he should've, Albus was proud that Harry was obviously bothered with killing and not indifferent to it. It didn't appear that the boy would be bragging about this incident either. 'Of course, I will let it slip that he was the one to kill the troll when I announce his special service to the school award. That will gain him even more social clout and fans. The boy needs to get used to everyone looking at him like he is more than everyone else.'

Once they arrived at the hospital and Harry was settled in a bed with Madam Pomfrey scanning him, all of the teachers bid farewell and then went back so that they could clean up the troll and its blood. Settling into the hospital bed, Harry tried to relax and nap for a bit but every time that he closed his eyes, he saw the dead troll. Even now in the hospital, Harry could smell the blood that soaked the floor beneath the troll.

'I hope that I never have to kill anything ever again. I don't know if I could handle it,' thought Harry before he downed the dreamless sleep potion that Pomfrey had set down on the table after she noticed his troubles.

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Harry was released the next day (Friday) and after exiting the the hospital, he noticed people staring at him with looks of awe, jealousy, and even affection. Harry didn't know it yet but Dumbledore had indeed announced that he was receiving a SSA, which hadn't been given out since the 40's to a man named Tom Riddle.

The announcement received mixed reactions from different people with most Gryffindor boys becoming jealous of the boy-who-lived. Ravenclaws were intrigued with exactly how he killed a troll and what spells he used while Hufflepuffs were just awed by the fact a first year killed a troll. Slytherins were obviously proud of the young snake because the last person to get one of the awards was a Slytherin as well.

An extra outcome of the announcement was that girls who had crushes on the boy only became even more infatuated with him and some of the girls that didn't like him already were now noticing him. House barriers didn't even affect how the girls saw him.

So it was an annoyed Ron Weasley and Seamus Finnigan that watched their respective crushes, Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil, swoon over Hadrian Potter's "dreamy eyes" and "gorgeous smile". Ron Weasley was about to come up with a revenge plan when a voice in his head that sounded a lot like himself say "Do you want more detention? Remember what McGonagall said and just leave it alone."

With a sigh, Ron dragged himself up to his dorm room with Seamus trailing behind him. The two boys had made up earlier that month and Ron wasn't even an outcast any more. He did have to apologise to the whole common room before they forgave him, though.

Ron pulled out his potions book and some parchment and asked "Did you finish your essay for Snape?" Seamus looked at Ron and smiled slightly before saying "Yes, I wrote the essay. All sixty-one centimeters of it." Giving a raised eyebrow, Ron shrugged and then went back to finishing his essay for Monday.

He normally would leave homework for the last minute but McGonagall had floo-called his mother over his grades which were horrible and she laid into him about never getting a job. Ron does not want to be poor for all of his life and if he wants to not be poor, the only chance he has is to get some huge ministry job. His father said that they require at least four OWLS for even the most basic of ministry positions.

After the talk that he had with his parents, Ron Weasley is a changed boy. He now thinks before he acts and doesn't blame everything on others. He doesn't know it, but not befriending Harry was the greatest thing that could ever happen to the both of them.

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On November 4th of 1991, Gryffindors and Slytherins pour into the Potions classroom. It is the first class of the day and the week due to it being Monday. Their second essay for this class is due today and everyone is anxious because Snape's grading is much harder than any other professor's. As a matter of fact, there are only six kids in their year that consistently get O's in potions and three of them are Slytherins, one is a Hufflepuff and the other two are Ravenclaws.

Two minutes after settling into their seats, Snape struts into the class and straight to his desk. "Get your essays out and have them ready for me to collect." Complying with the professor, everyone pulls out their roll of parchment that they wrote their essay on and place them in front of them.

Striding through the room, Severus quickly collects all of the essays and sits at his desk to mark them. 'As usual Potter, Draco, and Greengrass all receive O's with Nott, Zabini, and Davis receiving E's. Bulstrode got an A and Parkinson got an E. Crabbe and Goyle both receive D's and that was only because he doesn't give Slytherin's T's. Except for those last two and Bulstrode, all of my snakes did great.'

Stacking the Slytherin papers together, Snape stands and hands those out to his students before going back to his desk and watching for their reactions. Harry and Draco share a fist bump under their desk while Greengrass' lips turn slightly up. Zabini and Nott nod in satisfaction while Davis smiles but Crabbe and Goyle don't even check their marks.

Snape didn't even notice Parkinson's or Bulstrode's reactions because he was so incredibly annoyed at the two dunderheads for their indifference. Grabbing for the Gryffindor papers, Snape is surprised once he's finished reading through the first which happened to be Weasley's. 'An O. The boy actually managed an O and I don't think that he even cheated.' Snape put the paper to the side and and continued with the others.

'Brown gets an E, nothing new there. Thomas gets an A because of spelling mistakes, I'll tell him to work on that. Patil gets an A because she is short six centimeters. Now for Finnigan. What? T! I haven't given anyone a T since my first year teaching! This "essay" is eight sentences long! All he did was make each letter seven centimeters tall! The eight sentences aren't even spelt properly and there aren't any spaces between words!'

"Out!" Snape snapped suddenly, startling the children. Once he realised that no one knew what he was talking about, he clarified "Finnigan, get out right now! This is pathetic, I have not given anyone a T since my first year teaching!"

At hearing that he received a T for what he felt was funny, Seamus stood and started for the door. When Snape noticed Crabbe and Goyle snickering, he lost it "Take Crabbe and Goyle with you, Finnigan. I don't want any of the three of you in my class. Got a problem with it and you can complain to the headmaster."

After he was finished, Snape calmed down and went back to the papers. "Crabbe and Goyle just lost Slytherin five points a piece and Finnigan lost Gryffindor five points as well." Standing, Snape took in the annoyed looks one everyone's faces and decided that if he was going to punish for bad grades, he should award for good ones. No more holding hands or taking points for no reason.

Snape went back to his desk and regraded Lavender's paper to an O.

"Potter, Malfoy, and Greengrass, for scoring an O on the essay, I award each of you five points." Severus walked around the class and handed the Gryffindors their papers until Ron and Lavender were the only ones without theirs. "Weasley and Brown, for scoring an O on the essay, I award both of you five points each."

Every student in the class shared a surprised look because Snape never gives Gryffindor's O's and they all knew that Crabbe and Goyle should've been making T's the whole year. Those three idiots must've angered him a great deal to have him change his grading.

No one knew at that moment, but what Snape did that day by changing his grade system took away a lot of the animosity between the two rival houses. Maybe one day Gryffindors and Slytherins will be able to get along.

As Finnigan is currently getting a swirly from an angry Crabbe and Goyle, it won't be any time soon.