Chapter 5.
At the start of October, those who had been collecting evidence on Professor Snape's teaching had a meeting. After a month, the picture was quite stark: no points taken from Slytherin, no points awarded to the other three houses, and detentions overwhelmingly assigned to the other three houses as well. No teaching before the brewing started and all the teaching that occurred during brewing again consisted almost entirely of praise for Slytherins and insults to students of the other three houses.
Professor Flitwick promised to take their letter documenting the evidence to the headmaster, but nothing changed. Since they had already been warned of this they continued documenting everything that occurred during Potions class. Snape had started to take points from those students who were noting down what he did, but by then everyone knew what was going on, and most of the non-Slytherin students were taking notes, and Snape couldn't punish everyone all the time. Snape's classroom had never looked so spotless because of all the detentions.
Then, during the Hallowe'en feast, Professor Quirrell ran in, shouting about a troll. The headmaster had quickly suppressed the rising panic, but then had taken all the teachers to deal with the troll, so when Sally, who had been sorted into Gryffindor, gathered all the first-year muggle-raised children around her to say that Hermione was last seen in the toilet nearest the Charms classroom. Harry had his own moment of rising panic, that he quickly suppressed and then ran up to the Head Girl who was a Ravenclaw. She called on all the prefects to come with her and ordered the other older students to protect the younger students on their way to their common rooms. Some time later Professor Flitwick came to the common room to report that the 12 prefects had stunned the troll and that miss Granger was shaken put otherwise fine.
The next morning, Harry made his way over to the Gryffindor table, and soon all the muggle-raised students were gathered there to talk about what had happened. They all expressed their relief that Hermione was fine. When pressed, Hermione reluctantly confessed that she had been in the bathroom because Ron Weasley had insulted her. The others took pains to reassure her that Ron was an idiot, and probably jealous that she was a better student.
"If this is the kind of thing that happens after two months in magic school, then I think we need to learn faster than what Professor Quirrell teaches us in class," Harry argued.
"Hilliard told me that Professor Flitwick used to be a duelling champion," Kevin contributed.
When Hermione admitted that learning more to defend herself would make her feel less insecure, they agreed to go talk to him after the day's classes. Professor Flitwick encouraged them to start fitness training, and to practice the few spells that they had learned so far, arguing that even the Lumos spell could be used to temporarily blind one's opponent at night, and that for anything more, they would have to wait until classes had covered more of the basics, but that if they wanted, he could teach them some spells to practice in January. However, he also warned them that for several more years, their best bet would still be to try and find a teacher or a prefect.
Meanwhile, Professor Snape walked around with a limp, and rumours were flying around the school that there was a Cerberus in the third-floor corridor that they had been warned away from.
During the next weekend they wrote to the Board and the WEA to report on the unprofessional conduct of Professor Snape, and the lack of improvement after they had complained to the headmaster. They attached their documentation of all Snape's classes. The Board didn't reply, but Madam Marchbanks, the director of the WEA sent them a letter thanking them for their comprehensive efforts, and admitting that the WEA had been reporting the poor OWL standards and the low number of NEWT Potions students, but that the WEA didn't have the authority to dismiss Hogwarts staff, and that the Board had been unwilling to respond to individual complaints so far. She advised them to write to the media, including the Daily Prophet and the Practical Potioneer. They did that, but once again were ignored. Not willing to give up, they got everybody to agree to continue documenting what happened, hoping that a more complete picture of how bad the situation was would make someone see sense.
Another month went by, when Susan invited him to come to spend the last 7 days of the holidays at Bones manor. During the same week Professor Flitwick came by to ask who was staying at Hogwarts during the holidays and Harry signed up. Somehow, Malfoy had managed to learn of this, and had taunted Harry about having no proper family, but Harry had learned that bullies were only encouraged by any reaction he showed, and after a month of training he was back to his ability to outrun any would-be Harry-Hunters, so as long as they didn't proceed to cursing, Harry would just shrug. Malfoy had made sure he had an audience when making his obnoxious comment, so some of the muggle-born students had heard as well, but when they had got the others to sit at the Ravenclaw table for dinner and expressed their concern, Harry had waved them off, saying that he would be fine. Upon reflection, though, he had admitted that he was not looking forward to spending 10 weeks with his relatives over the summer.
For the Christmas holidays Harry had set himself the task of finding out how to lock a door with runes. He also made a fake wand. Though his relatives had been content to leave him alone last August, now that he knew some magic he was worried what their distaste for all things magic would make them do. He had gone to Madam Pince, arguing that he was looking for books that taught Runes the way Charms and Transfiguration were taught, starting with using existing spells and learning about spell creation only at the mastery level. Unfortunately, Madam Pince had told him he was trying to run before he could walk, that Professor Babbling had a good reason to teach a lot of theory and even language before they got to the applications. So Harry had written to Flourish and Blotts and also to Tomes and Scrolls, who had both sent him lists of books. Tomes and Scrolls also had mentioned that if he was looking for ready-made rune sequences, that it would be less important to understand the language the runes were written in, though still essential to write the runes flawlessly, and that Professor Babbling might be able to recommend some foreign language books. That sounded very different from the repressive comment by Madam Pince. Since Professor Babbling had taken on Harry as a first year, he thought he could at least ask, and Professor Babbling had been happy to lend him some books and even taught him a translation spell, but had also given him several reasons to explain why Runes were not taught like Charms, ranging from the fact that adults used existing charms on a daily basis, while runes had much more specialised applications, that most of those applications were unique, either to protect product development or to make ward-breaking as difficult as possible, and that therefore a full understanding of the assembling of rune sequences was central to the process, and even why it was only taught from third year. She hastened to assure Harry that she had no complaints about his dedication to her class, and that if in his spare time he wanted to learn about ready-made applications, that she would be happy to tutor him.
Because Harry was trying to protect himself from muggles, he didn't need to worry about them finding the counter, so it didn't take him long to find a locking array, and he even successfully tried it out on the door of an unused classroom and managed to activate it without his wand.
Having his most urgent task under control, he went to speak to Madam Pomfrey to talk about healing. She was happy to teach him some of the easier diagnostic and healing charms. When he asked about potions, she initially demurred that that was covered by Professor Snape's class, but when Harry told her how Snape only attacked them when they did something wrong without telling them how they should have done it, she euphemistically allowed the Professor Snape's teaching methods didn't work for everyone and referred him to some books and agreed to answer any questions or supervise the brewing of any potion that Professor Snape had already covered in his class if Harry felt he hadn't mastered it. None of the books were in the Hogwarts library, but they were in the Ravenclaw library, and Harry made a note to tell the other muggle-raised pupils about them after the holidays.
On Christmas morning he found a heap of presents at the foot of his bed, most of them sweets and other minor presents from the first years he regularly interacted with, but there was also an anonymous gift of an invisibility cloak with a note that said it used to be his father's. Harry thought about this and decided that if he used it frequently, people were bound to figure it out, so it would be most effective if he only used it for emergencies. Therefore, he hid it in his trunk. Although his trunk had a lock, he decided to add looking into password protection to his runes-to-be-learned list.
There were so few people in the castle that they had Christmas dinner with all the staff and students around one table. Harry was still determined to avoid Ron Weasley, so he ended up sitting between Percy and George Weasley. Percy was very serious, and Harry didn't want to speak about his attending Ancient Runes class within hearing of the headmaster, so he ended up talking mostly to George, who was nice, though he might be trying a little too hard to be the polar opposite of Percy. Mostly, though, George, with the help of Fred, did manage to make absolutely everything funny.
The last week of the holidays Harry went to Bones Manor. Harry was introduced to someone who called himself Sinclair McKinnon, a distant relative of Harry. This was in fact Sirius Black, who was under house-arrest at Bones Manor. Harry and the Bones went to Godric's Hollow to visit his parents' grave and the cottage where they and Harry had lived. Madam Bones also told him that she had been talking to other members of the Wizengamot to try and convince them to transfer ownership of the cottage to Harry, but that she had yet to convince a majority, and until she got there she felt it would be counterproductive to raise it during a Wizengamot session. This was in fact only a half-truth, as the real sticking points were the unsealing of the Potter's will, and the need to keep the truth getting to either Dumbledore or the supporters of Voldemort before she was ready to deal with their objections. When they learned how little Harry knew about magical society and his role in it as the heir to an Ancient house, Sinclair got Harry to agree to a correspondence, to talk both about whatever occurred at Hogwarts and about what Harry might want to do with his Gringotts account, and how to prepare himself for his future position of Head of House and his Wizengamot seat.
The Bones were attending a New Year's Eve ball, and Madam Bones had gotten Harry Potter invited as well. She offered to take him shopping for dress robes, but Harry Potter had never had any new clothing before and was uncomfortable with buying something that he would likely only wear once, while Madam Bones was against him wearing his school robes, so they compromised on Harry wearing dress robes that used to belong to a male Bones child. The ball was at the Patil home. Harry shared all his classes with Padma Patil, and he got along with her reasonably well. Parvati, on the other hand, appeared to be a Boy-Who-Lived admirer. Although the sisters were identical twins, they had very different personalities, as evidenced by them being sorted into different houses. It was rather interesting to observe how their classmates interacted with the two. Susan was friendly with both of them, but it quickly become apparent that he was not the only one who avoided Parvati while getting along with Padma. She had obviously noticed the same thing and came over, introducing herself, "hello, I'm Tracey Davis."
"Harry Potter. Have you known Padma long?"
"Yes, for as long as I can remember. Do you want to dance?"
"I'm sorry, I don't know how."
"I could teach you?"
"Please."
Once Tracey had taught him the steps, she tried to get Harry to relax by expanding on her previous answer, "my mother and her father are both healers, though her father is a few years older and much more important. He's the head of contagious diseases. My mother works in the poisoning department."
"I was speaking to Madam Pomfrey last week. She agreed to teach me healing. And after I pressed her, she also agreed she could help me if I had any trouble with Potions."
"Did she now? I was going to wait until we have learned some of the basics in Charms and Potions first."
"She did warn me that even the most basic diagnostic spells might be difficult to learn for a first year, but that she agreed to teach me for half an hour every Sunday afternoon that she's not busy with patients."
"Errr, Harry, is dancing the only thing that you haven't been taught that the heir of an ancient family would be expected to know?"
"No, I know nothing. Dumbledore literally dumped me on the doorstep of my muggle aunt. She never even told me that the strange things that happened around me were magic."
"So I can ask you something that a muggleborn would be willing to say no to, but that a pureblood would find rude?"
"Yes, ask away."
"Would it be alright if I asked Madam Pomfrey if I could join when she's teaching you healing?"
"Yes, I would be glad to." Upon reflection he added, "how would a pureblood go about it if it's rude to ask?"
"Because I expressed interest in healing training at some unspecified future date, it would be up to you to offer if you were happy for me to join, or not to offer if not."
