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Before you read, I only want to remind you the wizarding world and characters belong to JK Rowling, and ask your feedback, impressions and comments!
Aiming to post a new chapter every Tuesday. Thank you for reading!
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Chapter 11: The Free Elf
Dinner had a subdued atmosphere. Feeling inexplicably exhausted, Harry would have liked to go up to bed but they had been assigned quite a lot of homework already. Ron and Harry sat in Gryffindor's common room at a fireside table with their astrology charts.
"This is mental," Ron said, sleepily.
"I know I've got a Neptune, here, but my new calculation mounts Neptune there, too. That can't be right," said Harry.
"Ah, Harry! When two Neptunes appear in the sky, it's a sure sign a midget in glasses is born!" Ron mimicked a certain professor's mystical rasp, wickedly.
Harry smirked.
"Back to our old standby, do you reckon?" asked Ron, stretching his gangling legs.
"What, make it up? I guess it's worked before," Harry shrugged.
"Next Monday," Ron muttered as he scribbled, "I'll be likely to develop a cough owing to the unlucky conjunction of Mars and Jupiter. You know Trelawney, enough misery and she'll just lap it up!"
"Right," said Harry, crumpling his first chart and lobbing it over the heads of chattering first years and into the fire. "Okay, Monday, I will be in danger of burns... "
"Yeah, you will, we're seeing the Skrewts on Monday," said Ron darkly. "Tuesday?"
"Lose a treasured possession," Harry suggested while thumbing through the text for inspiration.
"Good, good, because of...erm... Mercury. Why don't you get stabbed in the back by someone you thought was a friend?"
"Yeah ... cool ..." Harry approved, "because Venus is in the twelfth house."
"On Wednesday, I'll come off worse in a fight."
"Aaah, I was going to have a fight. Okay, I'll lose a bet."
"Yeah, you'll be betting I'll win my fight!"
They continued to make "predictions", which grew steadily more tragic, for another hour, as the common room slowly emptied. Crookshanks jumped on Harry's lap with a squashed sideways look as though accusing Harry of not doing his homework properly. After an hour of consulting 'Unfogging the Future', Harry and Ron had arranged days and days of misery ahead, due to regrettable planetary alignments.
Staring around the room trying to contrive of a new type of pain or suffering, he perceived the Weasley twins in the darkest corner, heads together conspiratorially. Odd, he thought. If they were still conniving to enter the tournament, more likely they'd include Ron, and Lee Jordan. It was uncharacteristic for Fred and George to avoid attention- they lived to be in the thick of things.
"No," George shook his head, "that sounds like we're accusing him. Got to be careful..."
He glanced up and Harry smiled lightly and quickly went back to his work. He didn't want George and Fred to think he was snooping.
Hermione entered the common room later with an odd look on her face.
"Hello!" she said, brightly.
Crookshanks meowed in greeting and hopped off of Harry's lap.
"Done!" Ron said triumphantly, throwing up his arms.
Hermione looked over at their tabled charts.
"Not going to have a very nice month, are you?" she said sardonically.
"Ah, well, at least I'm forewarned," Ron yawned.
"You seem to be drowning twice. Don't you think it will be obvious you've invented all of these?"
"How dare you?" Ron said in mock outrage, "we've been working like house-elves in here!"
Hermione raised her eyebrows.
Ron said hastily, "It's just an expression!"
Harry had just finished his final entry- death by decapitation. He set down his quill, looked up at Hermione and asked, "What's in the box?"
"Funny you should ask," she scowled at Ron and displayed the contents: fifty or so badges reading 'S.P.E.W.' in colourful lettering.
"Spew?" Harry picked one up.
"Not spew, S-P-E-W stands for Society for the Promotion of Elvish Welfare. I've just started it!"
She beamed at them.
"Really? How many members you got?" Ron asked with mild surprise.
"Well, just three, if you two join."
"You think we want to go around wearing the word 'spew', do you?"
"I've been researching the entire library and no one has ever addressed house elf rights," Hermione explained, looking deeply irritated, "And Elf enslavement goes back for centuries!"
"Hermione," Ron was rising and pulling his schoolwork into his bag, "Open your ears! They. Like. It. They like being enslaved!"
Ignoring her friend, Hermione spoke even more loudly.
"Our short-term aims are to secure house-elves fair wages and working conditions. Our long-term aims include changing the law about wand-use, and having an Elf join The Department for the Control of Magical Creatures."
"And how do we do all this?" Harry asked.
"Firstly, selling badges at two sickles each, to fund a leaflet campaign."
Harry looked to his left and saw Ron heading up to the dormitory entrance. Ron backtracked for a moment.
"Well, I'll say this- House-elves usually come with big manors and belong to rich families- you wouldn't catch one in our house! We've got a ghoul though, so feel free to start G.G.G.A.R.," he raised an eyebrow and smirked, "to Give Gross Ghouls a Raise, for all their brilliantly overlooked haunting!"
In his absence, Harry pulled the box to him for a closer look at the badges.
"You've put a lot of work into these," he observed.
"So you'll join?" she squealed.
Harry gazed back steadily.
"I'll consider it," he hedged, thinking about Dobby's self-punishing as a result of the powerful connection in place between a house elf and its masters.
"But, Hermione, changing something like this is difficult. You'll need to consider every perspective- Ron's reaction is proof. I'll join, if we can find a house elf and an adult Wizard who supports the aims."
Hermione made to reply, but Harry interrupted, "Tomorrow. Let's visit the kitchens, okay?"
Hermione looked slightly defeated but nodded in agreement, and they split off to go into their respective dormitories.
Finally it was Friday, and a first week had never been so busy, what with the extra homework that the teachers attributed to O.W.L. exams coming, next year. As a single reprieve, Friday morning's Care of Magical Creatures presented, sans skrewts.
Hagrid explained, "Skrewts will have to wait. I've been told to prepare fourth years for O.W.L.s, which means knowing gnarls from hedgehogs, so we've got several gnarls in here today. Open yer books, please, and who's first ter tell me a magical use for their quills?"
Moody's second lesson with the fourth years was perhaps less shocking than the initial introduction to Unforgiveables.
"You'll need basics in self-defence before defending against curses, or even duelling," he had growled at them.
Each would need to practice canceling spells with ill effects. He had set them to practice their own jinxes in pairs.
"Constant VIGILANCE!" he yelled.
Ron and Harry had cast the Jelly Legs Curse on each other several times. Near the end of class, Moody lined them up and jinxed each student in turn. Before leaving for the day, each was required to successfully use 'Finite incantatem!' to cancel a non-verbal jinx. Hermione may or may not have whispered the counter-charm under her breath during Neville's turn. If she did, Moody didn't comment.
"When," asked Ron, "are we supposed to read about countering jinxes for that paranoid old codger, on top of practicing transfiguring hedgehogs into pincushions?"
They were at dinner, tucking into shepherds pie.
"And writing our essay for History of a Magic, researching antidotes for potions, and filling out more stupid astrology charts," Harry added.
"We'd best visit the library to tackle our homework," Hermione suggested.
Hermione had been impatient all day to visit the House-elves, but Harry reasoned that the kitchens would be overwhelmed during mealtimes, and to wait for late evening. Ron snorted at this idea, clearly feeling that they should take his advice and give it up.
He joined them in the library as all three began to wade through Professor Binns' essay on goblin rebellions. By 8:30pm, when they were feeling thoroughly sick of regurgitating facts and dates about beheadings and battles, they rolled up their parchments.
"We'll see you upstairs," Harry said to Ron outside of the library.
He and Hermione then headed to the kitchen. Harry had the Maurader's Map that George and Fred had bequeathed unto him last year. They descended the marble staircase to the entrance hall and took a left down a corridor until they found a door, which led down a flight of stone steps. Instead of dungeons, this led to a wide, torchlit passageway decorated with paintings of breads, cakes and fruits. When he tapped the map with his wand, words appeared saying, "Tickle the pear."
Harry tickled the pear in the bowl-of-fruit painting, which became a green door handle. Hermione pulled it open to reveal a gigantic kitchen as large and long as the Great Hall above. It was heaping with brass pots and pans on stoves around the stone walls, and...elves! Harry had barely registered the multititudes of elves dressed in uniform white towels, when...
"Harry Potter, sir! Harry Potter!"
The next second, all the wind had been knocked out of him as the squealing Elf hit him hard in the gut with a tight hug.
"D-dobby?" Harry gasped.
"It is Dobby, sir, it is!"
Without releasing Harry, Dobby said, "Dobby has been hoping and hoping to see Harry Potter, sir, and Harry Potter has come to see him, sir!"
Dobby was wearing the oddest combination of clothing they'd ever seen: a pair of baggy football shorts, a tie patterned with horseshoes over his bare chest, and a tea cosy-hat which he'd covered in a collection of badges for added colour! His socks were, one pink and orange-striped, the other the black sock of Harry's which had freed Dobby.
Hermione and Harry, who were receiving occasional glances from the busy elves, asked Dobby if they could talk to him. He obliged, and a few helpful elves brought over three chairs and a pot of tea, serving them each a cup. Dobby's tennis-ball, green eyes and bat-like ears quivered as Harry asked him how things had been since being freed. He had travelled, searching throughout Britain for a family to work for, but had been unable to find one willing to pay him wages. He then described visiting his friend, Winky, to find out she had been freed also, and deciding the best place for two house-elves to find work was Hogwarts! Dobby looked very pleased.
"Winky's here?" gasped Hermione.
"Oh, yes!" Dobby said, and led them both past four long tables, positioned just below the house tables of the Great Hall.
Hermione winced as the elves they passed by curtsied and bowed. They each wore a white towel, toga-style, with a small stamp of the Hogwarts crest on the corner. Winky was sitting next to the hearth of a giant fire grate.
"Winky, sir," Dobby said to Harry.
Unlike Dobby's clothing, Winky's choice of garb was neither odd nor well cared for. Her little skirt and blouse were burned in places and terribly stained.
"Hello, Winky," said Harry.
His greeting seemed to prompt emotion as Winky's eyes teared and her nose like a squashed tomato started to run. Hermione patted Winky on the back.
"What's the matter, Winky?" she asked the inconsolable elf.
Dobby answered for his friend.
"Winky is not happy to be freed. She is not convinced she can work here at Hogwarts, because of her shame over being made to leave her family," squeaked Dobby, sadly.
"I tell her that Headmaster Dumbledore is a good master to elves! He is paying Dobby a Galleon per week, and Dobby gets one day off each month!"
"That's not much!" Hermione exclaimed.
"Oh, yes," said Dobby quite happily, "the Headmaster offered Dobby ten Galleons a week and weekends off," he shivered as though at the thought of such luxury, "but Dobby beat him down! Dobby likes freedom, Miss, but Dobby likes work better!"
"How much are you paid, Winky?"
Winky's sobs abruptly stopped. She straightened and squeaked, "Winky is a disgraced Elf, Miss, but she is not yet stooped to accepting pay! Winky is properly ashamed of being freed."
Hermione said, "But Mr. Crouch treated you so harshly, firing you when you did nothing wrong-"
At this, Winky's distress returned.
"You is not insulting Mr. Crouch, Miss! Winky is bad. My poor Mr. Crouch, what is he doing without his Winky?"
Dobby led them away from her scene, apologetically, and told them more about his plans to buy a sweater soon with his wages. Before they left the kitchens, Hermione had a final question.
"Dobby, wouldn't more of the Hogwarts elves like to be freed? To wear what they like, have pay and days off, as well as work?"
Dobby looked up at her, thoughtfully.
"Maybe, Miss, but... you see, most elves think of freedom and joblessness together, and that is the worst fate for an elf!"
"But, what about abusive masters, Dobby? Could we convince them that freedom was for the best, if it meant their house-elf friends who have masters like the Malfoys, would be treated right?"
Harry thought Dobby looked deeply troubled.
"I is not knowing, Miss," he said, "they is being very loyal to a master, they may not like to risk their employment."
Dobby hung his head sadly, onto his horseshoe tie.
"Thank you, Dobby," said Harry, firmly.
"Can Dobby come and visit Harry Potter sometimes?"
"Sure, Dobby!"
The elf brightened, and the two stepped out of the kitchen and through the painting, where they realized it was just minutes to curfew, and rushed up the grande staircase.
