The weeks passed quickly until Halloween, following Max's accident, Harry and his friends had discussed their suspicions of Professor Quirrell with Ron and Max. Initially the two boys had wanted to immediately inform the headmaster, but they had quickly been dissuaded by logical arguments from Hermione and Daphne - the most convincing of which was simply that no one would believe them; they had no evidence, and it would ultimately come down to their word against a teacher's. After disregarding that option, Max and Ron had begun joining them occasionally for study sessions, whenever they were able to find a place secluded from prying eyes. The need for secrecy was twofold; first and most importantly, they didn't want there to be any possibility of them accidentally alerting Quirrell, additionally the infamous rivalry between Slytherin and Gryffindor houses would put a target on all of their backs if they were seen studying together.
Despite their weeks of secret meetings, avid researching on the part of Hermione and the Slytherin, and all of them keeping half an eye on Quirrell whenever they could, by Halloween they were no closer to answers than they had been on the day of Max's 'accident'.
The alarm that went off in the Slytherin dorms early on the 31st October was much too loud for Harry's liking. They had been taught the charm a few weeks earlier, and Draco had been experimenting with it to see if he could change the sound – evidently, he had failed. Three angry male voices yelling the countercharm, effectively silenced the irritating noise, and quick tempus revealed the time; 6:15, breakfast wouldn't start for two hours.
In the corner of the room, snoring could be heard coming from beneath a mound of blankets, with a pale head peeking out. "How can he sleep through that?" Theo's voice was incredulous, yet slurred by sleep.
"Dunno', but it doesn't seem fair does it. It was his alarm after all. What do you say we wake him up?" Blaise, much to Harry's chagrin seemed entirely unaffected by the early hour and seemed delighted by the excuse to prank Draco.
Harry considered it momentarily, while Draco had been less antagonistic of late, the other boy could still be an arrogant bigot at times, and a prank seemed like pretty harmless retribution. He nodded at Blaise, then groaned slightly as he crawled out of bed, before slumping on the floor, the picture of pre-teen dramatics. Blaise by comparison, sprung out of bed, and happily proceeded to drag a protesting Theo from his blanket cocoon. Five minutes later, the three boys were standing at the foot of Draco's bed, wands in hand, and devious smiles contorting their features.
"Wingardium leviosa!" The three boys each lowered their wands to point at the bowls of water they had taken from the bathroom, levitating the water up above Draco's head. At a shout from Blasie, they each released the spell, jumping back out of the way of the shower. For half a second nothing happened, then Draco bolted upright, yelling wordlessly, eyes wild and hair askew. He gulped soundlessly at the three other boys, before finally forming words. "You! I'll get you back for this! I'm drenched, I'll tell my Father! I'll tell Snape!"
Theo, Blaise and Harry just looked at him, faces blank, until the corner of Harry's mouth quirked upwards, and the three exploded into raucous laughter. Between laughs he managed to gasp out a retort, "And what do you think your Dad's going to say when you go whining to him about some harmless prank. I wouldn't expect much sympathy from Snape either."
Draco flushed red, and clambered from his bed before stalking off to the bathroom. The other three boys stopped laughing as he retreated, and Theo looked slightly guilty – Draco had looked more upset than they had really intended. He turned to Blaise to say something, but the other boy just shook his head. "Leave him, it was only a prank, he might be a bit sour for a couple of days, but then he'll cool off." He paused and looked thoughtful. "Of course if he's a real Slytherin he might try for some revenge, so I suggest you watch your backs!" Theo and Harry laughed again, then split up to get ready.
Draco took every opportunity he could to glare at his three roommates throughout breakfast, petty actions conveying his annoyance. He refused to speak to the other three boys, and pretended not to hear them when they spoke to him. Blaise especially found this rather amusing, and so breakfast was punctuated with bursts of laughter at Draco's immaturity. As soon as the meal was over, Draco stalked off, swiftly followed by Vincent and Gregory. The three had been almost inseparable since Draco had curtailed his friendship with Jack Dolohov, although Harry suspected that this was due more to political alliances between their friends than any real friendship. Moments later, to Harry's surprise Jack followed them, swiftly catching up with Draco and drawing him into conversation.
"I hope Draco doesn't get Jack to help him with some sort of revenge. Draco's not too bad on his own, he'd probably keep it to pranks. Jack's got a cruel streak though, and he's got plenty of friends in the older years, friends with rather … dubious alliances." Theo's tone was rather more worried than Harry thought the situation warranted; Jack was only a first year, there was only so much damage he could do.
Blaise let out a short laugh, clearly agreeing with Harry's sentiment, "Jack's all talk. People are scared of him because of his family's reputation. I think they overestimate how much an eleven year old can do." Harry nodded and laughed in agreement, but the reminder of Jack's family had worried him a little. Jack's Father, Antonin, was one of the most feared Death Eaters of the first war for good reason, only Bellatrix Lestrange surpassed him in cruelty and imagination. None was more ruthless, and only Voldemort had more deaths to his name. Who knew what a family like the Dolohov's really taught their children.
Theo huffed at Blaise's response but didn't comment further, instead he glanced at his watch pointedly. Neither Harry nor Blaise noticed, but Daphne took the hint and stood up, gesturing for the others to follow her towards Professor McGonagall's classroom. The group arrived minutes later, sliding into their seats moments before the class began, earning Harry a reproving glance from Hermione. "Where were you?" She asked, once the Professor had explained their task for the day.
Harry glanced up to the front before answering, checking that McGonagall was distracted, "We pranked Draco this morning, he's not too happy about it, and Dolohov seems to be giving him advice to get back at us." Hemione looked back at him concernedly, she too knew of his Father's reputation, but unlike the others, as a Ravenclaw muggleborn, she had been on the receiving end of some of his more vicious 'pranks' – something she had hidden from her friends.
Harry opened his mouth to continue speaking, but was interrupted by Professor McGonagall appearing in front of his desk. "I don't see any birds Mr Potter, let me see you attempt the spell please." Harry nodded slightly embarrassed, but noticed that the Professor appeared to have singled him out; he could spot at least five Ravenclaws who had yet to attempt the spell.
Rather that remark on it, he pointed his wand at the small statue in front of him. "Avifors." The statue shook slightly and morphed its shape into something similar to a small thrush, it hopped lightly and spread its wings. Harry sighed slightly at the sight, the transfiguration was incomplete, rather than feathers, the bird's wings were carved from stone, too heavy for it to fly. His Professor seemed to agree with his assessment, and waved her wand to vanish the poor bird. She proceeded to lecture him on the importance of concentration, before taking five points and warning him to be more prepared next week.
When McGonagall walked off, Theo chuckled bitterly and Harry smirked back rather miserably, knowing what the other boy was thinking. McGonagall was far less prejudiced than some of the other teachers, but even she would hand out a harsher punishment to a Slytherin, than to anyone else who struggled in her class. The only two staff members who really treated the houses equally were the Headmaster and Professor Binns (largely because he was completely oblivious to his students anyway). Even Snape could not be said to be treating the Slytherins fairly, he might not take points as freely as he did from the other houses, but his favouritism in class was a ruse – any Slytherin who misbehaved in Potions could expect a multitude of detentions behind closed doors.
The class ended quickly after that, and Harry packed away his things and followed his friends out of the room, waving to Hermione as he went. "Defence next, yeah?" He asked Rachel who was walking beside him.
"Yeah, when are you planning on learning the timetable?"
Harry laughed in response and Blaise turned around. "He doesn't have to, with such beautiful ladies to show him the way around!" he jokingly winked in Rachels direction, and she pretended to hit him.
Daphne sighed at their antics. "If you two don't quit messing around, we'll be late to class."
"As if Quirrell would notice anyway." Theo put in, smirking. Daphne rolled her eyes in response and didn't comment, instead picking up her pace.
The group remained quiet until they reached the door to the defence classroom, when Daphne turned back to the others. "There's nothing new on Quirrell though right?"
"Not unless you spot something toady, I'm beginning to think we've hit a dead end. There's something going on for sure, but I'm not convinced that we're ever going to find it." Blaise sighed slightly as he finished speaking. "We should take our seats, or we really will be late." The rest of the group in unison and proceeded into the classroom.
The defence class passed slowly. Quirrell was ill prepared for the class, a not unexpected turn of events, and his lecturing was disjointed and unclear. The topic was hexes, and the second half of the lesson comprised of the class attempting to perfect their stinging hexes. They were meant to be practicing on some hastily conjured mannequins, but under Quirrell's poor supervision, the first years quickly descended into flinging the hexes at each other.
An hour later, when class had ended, the students trudged rather wearily out, most of them sporting some rather painful stings. Amongst the Gryffindors only Max had escaped unscathed – the result of years of pretend duelling matches with Harry, and occasionally their Father. The Slytherin's had fared much better; a result of them only attacking the Gryffindors, instead of each other. Amongst them Harry, Dolohov, Daphne and Theo were unscathed, a fact that Blaise bemoaned loudly throughout lunch.
After lunch followed Charms, in which Harry enjoyed the chance to chat unobtrusively with Hermione. History subsequently provided everyone an excellent opportunity to catch up on some much-needed sleep. Potions as the last lesson of the day seemed to drag on indefinitely, the class was only an hour in length, so was devoted to theory over practical work, but listening to Professor Snape snarl in a particularly angry tone for the duration was enough to set even the Slytherins on edge.
By the end of the lesson, Harry was almost relieved to be leaving, despite the fact that the end of lessons predicted the imminent start of the Halloween feast. His friends had been doing a good job of distracting him for most of the day, and he had been trying to ignore the significance of the date, but no amount of excellent food and company could make him enjoy a feast on the anniversary of his Mother's death. Max was waiting for him outside the classroom when he extracted himself from his friends, and the two brothers walked off together neither speaking.
They were nearing the great hall when Max finally spoke. "Can you remember her? Before… that night, I-I know that's probably just as burned in your memory as it is in mine."
Harry stopped walking and stared at his hands, clutching them together, as though trying to catch a memory long since fled. Wizarding blood made for prodigious memories, but the twins had barely been three when Lily had died. "I think I remember her singing, all the time, whenever she did anything – especially in the garden. She loved potions and charms, Dad's always said that, and I found some of her old notebooks, pages and pages of writing all about them. I think I remember us all going to the beach once, Tara might just have been born, I think we played in the sea, and Mum made little animals out of water droplets, and got them to fly around. Everything else is hazy, if it weren't for photos I wouldn't even really know what she looked like." There was a tear track glistening down the side of his cheek by the time Harry stopped talking, and Max let out a choked laugh.
"It seems you've got more than me then." He didn't elaborate, but Harry knew full well what that meant. Max could remember that Halloween, everything in vivid horrible detail, like a motion picture tinted red. But unlike Harry, that was all he could remember, he didn't have any days on the beech to lookback on, he couldn't remember the sound of her voice, or the way she always smelt faintly of potions, from long hours spent in a lab. Those memories were Harry's alone, but he would have given all the world in that moment, to be able to share them.
The two boys stood outside until the sounds had faded in the corridors around them, and a steady stream of hundreds of overlapping conversations flowed from beneath the huge oak doors of the Great Hall. It was only as the sounds lulled in favour of food, that the two slid inside.
Harry didn't talk for the duration of the meal. His friends respected his uncustomary silence, and left him to his own devices, the whole wizarding world knew what this date represented, and they would let him mourn in peace.
It wasn't until desert was well underway that chaos broke free. "Troll! In the dungeons!" Professor Quirrell ran into the dungeons in a tornado of purple fabric, panted out his warning, and abruptly fainted. Immediately the Great Hall erupted, trolls aren't exactly well liked, and the idea of a gargantuan one invading the school was enough to send a good portion of the student population into hysterics.
"Students to your dorms, Slytherin, remain here. You will all be accompanied by a member of staff, no one is to go anywhere without a professor." Dumbledore's clear voice rang out across the hall, courtesy of an amplifying charm. Immediately the students quietened, the edge of their panic dulled by the Headmaster's calm. Within moments groups of students were being ushered out of the school, year by year, flanked by their teachers. Professor Snape gave the Slytherin prefects a quick set of instructions, before he hurried off in pursuit of Dumbledore.
Soon only the Slytherins remained, with two teachers guarding the main doors. Harry and his friends began to converse in urgent low tones – Daphne had spotted a problem. "I don't see Draco, I don't think he came up to dinner, I think we might need to inform one of the Prefects."
Harry and Rachel looked around worriedly, while Blaise and Theo looked mildly guilty. After a few glares from the two girls, Theo reluctantly explained. "After the prank we played on him this morning we saw Draco go off with Dolohov." Harry nodded; they all already knew that much. "Well a little bit later on, we overheard them talking. Dolohov was persuading Draco to try and steal some potions ingredients from Snapes cupboard to prank us back with. The ingredients were pretty nasty, and Draco almost certainly wouldn't have been able to brew a successful potion with them without having an accident, which I guess was Dolohov's plan all along. We weren't going to let him actually try brewing anything, but we thought we'd let him actually steal the stuff before we confronted him."
"We have to let one of the Professors know, Trolls are dangerous, Draco could be in trouble." Daphne chimed as ever, the voice of reason.
Blaise and Theo looked guilty as they confessed. "We can't, the teachers would want to know why we didn't report it earlier. Besides I would rather not come to Lucius Malfoy's attention as the kid who got his son expelled." Despite the fragility of the argument, it was enough to convince Daphne to stand down.
"Then we have to go warn him ourselves." Harry as usual was the one to suggest the unorthodox and risky solution. Despite obvious reluctance, the others nodded. "Ok, if the rest of you stay here and cause a distraction me and Theo will sneak out and go find Malfoy."
At Harry's nod Daphne took her cue to begin screaming, Rachel and Blaise joining her with overlapping shouts, drawing a crowd towards themselves, and allowing Theo and Harry to slip past in the chaos. When the commotion finally grew large enough to draw the notice of the teachers and prefects, Harry and Theo took their chance to dart out of the Hall, through the now abandoned great doors.
Once outside they took the steps three at a time, bounding down towards the dungeons at top speed, both panting with exertion and no small trace of fear. Harry mentally ran over the list of spells he knew in his head, trying to come up with something that would be even partially effective against a full grown mountain troll.
As they reached the bottom of the dungeons, both boys froze at the sound of roaring emanating from a door, mere feet from the bottom of the stairs. Theo took a step back, but Harry, regaining control of his limbs, lunged for his arms and dragged him forward. "That's the way to Snape's labs, undoubtedly where Draco was headed." Theo nodded shakily, but picked up his pace, emboldened by the reminder of the danger their classmate might be facing.
The two boys burst through the door side by side, wands held up before their whitened faces.
The Troll was huge, towering up to the ceiling, half crouched to contain its height. Its face was a mess of green horror, eyes rimmed red, wide and staring, blazing with battle rage, nose squashed and misshaped, like a boxer on a loosing streak. But worst of all was its mouth, elongated canines, dripping with emerald saliva, bared against thick chapped lips, open to reveal rotted, blackened teeth.
There was no sign of Draco, and in the disarray of the room, a small first year would have been difficult to miss. A line of cupboards at the back of the room, one with the door slightly ajar revealed his likely hiding place. The troll was sniffing the air, short sighted it had likely missed where its prey had scuttled away to. As he began to turn towards the cupboards, completely ignoring the two boys standing shaking before him, Harry made a split second decision. "Grab Draco and run!"
Harry didn't wait to see if Theo would heed his words, instead he ran straight for the troll. A quick shouted argumenti, saw the troll drenched in water, and his attention firmly fixed on Harry. Out of the corner of his eye Harry saw Theo pull a shaking Draco out of the cupboards, and start heading for the door. But he didn't have time to be relieved, as the massive troll towered above him, baring its gargantuan teeth.
As a first year, Harry's repertoire of spells was limited, but a lifetime of living with one of the best Aurors in the country had left him with an excellent working knowledge of a variety of dangerous creatures. Trolls have an excellent sense of smell, the worse the sent the better – usually an advantage. But there's a flip side, like most creatures Trolls have some scents they can't stand – the sort of things humans like, flowers, cookies and so on, but there was one scent they loathed above all others, a smell that was anathema to them. And Harry was in a potion's lab. He scurried backwards, jumping to and fro to dodge the roaring beast, until he had his back resting against one of the cupboards. Using the door as a shield, he crouched down, shoving potions off the shelves in a desperate effort to find what he was searching for. The troll roared, and swiped his fist against the cupboard door, gouging into the wood. Harry's hands closed around the potion bottle even as he fell backwards, and his hand swung upwards, smashing the potion into the troll's face.
The troll howled, eyes wide and rolling, tears streaming down its face. It staggered backwards a couple of steps, legs shuddering, before falling with an almighty thud onto the stone floor, unconscious.
For a few moments Harry did not move, merely stared at the huge beast on the floor in front of him. The adrenaline leaving his body was giving rise to a queasiness that felt awfully like fear, and so the young Slytherin just lay there, not trusting his legs to support him if he attempted to stand up.
Theo and Draco rushed towards him, both shaking rather violently themselves. But before either of them could so much as ask how Harry was, the door to the potions room swung backwards, crashing into the wall, to reveal an irate Professor Snape standing glaring at them. He took in the scene before him, and having ascertained that the troll no longer posed any serious danger, his face reddened even more. When he finally composed himself enough to speak, the hiss that came out of his mouth sounded more like parsletongue than any human language. "Would one of you care to explain what the three of you are doing here, rather than in the Great Hall where you are supposed to be?"
No one spoke, and Snape's snarl curled viscously. Just as he was about to launch into an angry tirade, much to Theo and Harry's surprise, Draco deigned to speak up. "It's my fault professor. Earlier, I was planning on sneaking into your store-room to steal some ingredients for a potion. Theo must have overheard me talking about it. I guess he didn't tell anyone because he didn't want to get me into trouble, and when he realised that I was in danger he decided to get Harry to come and help me."
Harry and Theo both stared incredulously at Draco, neither had expected him to ever admit any wrongdoing, not when he had someone else to use as a convenient scapegoat. Admittedly he hadn't quite told the whole story, but given that the truth was likely to get him expelled, neither boy could really fault him for that. Unfortunately Draco's admission seemed to have done nothing to appease Snape's temper.
"So, what I believe you are telling me, is that you, Mr Malfoy, were involved in some sort of plot, presumably with another student, to steal from my stores, in order to brew a potentially highly dangerous potion." He twirled to face Harry and Theo. "And you two upon discovering this, decided not to divulge this information to a teacher, and furthermore when you realised that your housemate was in imminent danger, preceded to launch your own imbecilic rescue mission, directly contravening my own orders, instead of informing one of the many highly competent witches or wizards you had at your disposal. And that as a result of this, the three of you were almost killed by a seven foot monster?!"
All three boys paled considerably at Snape's acerbic tone, before weakly nodding their heads in unison. "In that case, the three of you had better think of some way of explaining this to your parents, whom I will be informing immediately. You are all mere hairsbreadths from expulsion, and as such, any disciplinary incident in the next three months, that warrants anything more than a single detention, will be grounds for permanent exclusion. For the duration of that time, you will be serving thrice weekly detentions, and you will each be required to write me a three-foot essay, detailing exactly why your actions today were so foolish."
None of the boys spoke, merely stared fearfully at their head of house. When he motioned for them to follow him out of the room, they did so without even daring to look at each other, and followed him the whole way to the hospital wing, aware of the silent eyes of the school admonishing them.
A/N I know that this is late, very late, by a few months... Sorry, but real life got in the way.
I hope you liked the chapter though! I will update, possibly, hopefully.