The Tinkerer

by wickwynn

The Dursley family, who valued normalcy above all else, would of course never dream of keeping their orphan nephew in a cupboard, or of making a spectacle of him. That isn't to say they wanted to spend all of their time and money on him, however. From the salvage of broken toys and unwanted junk, left alone to his own devices, Harry built dreams.

5. Chapter 5

The Tinkerer

Chapter 5

By the time the period was over and they were let out from the greenhouses, Harry felt normal again, and found himself laughing easily with Neville, Ernie, Justin and Wayne as they made their way back up to the castle. As soon as Draco was safely far away, Ernie told a dramatized version of the brief interaction, making it sound as legendary as a few sentences possibly could be. Harry, denying everything but laughing about everything, couldn't help but feel a bit pleased with himself.

"I swear, he looked just like a fish," Ernie said not for the first time, doing a wide-eyed, gaping mouthed impression, and then, in an offensively stupid sounding voice: "Durr, err, I can see what you mean, Harry! Wow, you're so clever, Harry! I wonder if I'll ever think of anything clever."

"Ernie, stop," Harry pleaded, although he was barely not laughing like the rest of the boys.

"Seriously, Macmillan," someone said. "Piss off."

"What was that?" Ernie demanding, swinging around in a flash. The other boys all turned too. It was a boy from Slytherin House who Harry did not know. Ernie looked the boy up and down contemptfully.

"I said," the boy said, now standing very close to the Hufflepuffs, "Why don't you go have a piss upwind?" The boy pushed passed them and continued up to the castle.

Belatedly, after he was already several yards away, Justin yelled, "Why don't you piss off!"

All of the Hufflepuffs knew that that was not a very good comeback. Justin rubbed the back of his head while Ernie seethed. "That bottom-feeding git," he muttered. "Where does he get off?"

"Who was that guy?" Harry asked.

"Nothing but an upstart trying to get some brownie points," Ernie snapped. He straightened his tie and cleared his throat in a gesture that seemed to be how he calmed himself down, and said, "Forget it. We have history next, is that right?"

"Yeah," Harry said.

"Great. I could use a nap."

Even as Ernie attempted to understate just how calm he now was by sharing with all of the other boys the stories his sister had told him about Professor Binns's dreadfully boring history lectures, and even as tried with what was to Harry obvious deliberateness to lighten the mood further with a number of jokes, it was apparent even to the most unobservant among the Hufflepuffs that his mood had, under the facade, darkened several shades. To the most observant among them, Harry, it was a rather disconcerting display.

Harry found that not only was Binns' slow, droning voice almost hypnotically boring, but also, looking through his textbook, the few bits that he was able to pay attention to long enough to actually hear and process seemed to have no relation to the text (which had printed a new edition only the year prior, unlike Binns who apparently hadn't changed anything in years). In fact, the particular goblin war which Binns was talking about for the entire two hours was summed up in five sentences in the textbook, and in such a way as to imply that it was of little historical significance and was only being mentioned at all for completeness (since the conditions of the treaty that ended the war were identical to the conditions of the treaty that the goblins had broken when they started the war, there was effectively zero impact on society other than for those who may have personally known one of the very few people to die in the fighting). Moreover, oddly enough, Binns seemed almost to be glorifying the goblin actions in the war, waxing on about notable goblin after notable goblin ad infinitum. Notable goblins like Emetic the Evil (known for his cruelty towards female goblins, small animals and houseplants) and Bellypus of Pointy Things (who was known for his preference towards killing his enemies by method of thousands of pokes with needles and pointed sticks and things, as well as for the repugnant growth on his stomach which he never covered up even at state ceremonies). Besides glorifying the strategic victories of the goblins (who had seemingly never actually won a rebellion, nor learned to stop trying), the lecture consisted primarily of a seemingly endless string of dates, names of events, and names of the leading participants, without ever really explaining what the event was or why it mattered to anyone. Harry, wanting to at least try to be a good student, did his best to make notes, up until the building annoyance caused him to press too hard on his quill, snapping it. At that point, he just stopped, even though he had plenty more quills.

Harry's history text, on the other hand, was rather informative, although it did not seem to be written with the same level of academic impartialness that (respectable) histories in the muggle world generally aimed for.

Harry saw that Hermione was still diligently taking notes. He felt an incredulous admiration for her work ethic, and then continued to not do his own work.

Unlike the ephemeral professor's metronomically crooning lecture, the textbook placed the most emphasis on wars between humans, with goblins acting as one of many background characters. It was, actually, extremely informative. Harry regretted having never really looked at his history textbook before, except for the part that he was in.

For now he skipped past all of the parts about Merlin and the Founders and the enactment of the Statute. Certainly those sections were replete with invaluable information, but it seemed to him that in dealing with history, it makes more sense to move from the present back, instead of moving from some arbitrary point in time towards the present. This had the advantage of beginning with the present, which one was at least passingly familiar with, and gradually adding more and more changes that added up to the various time periods of study. The main flaw with this approach was that you had to see all of the effects before you learned what had caused them – a flaw which could be overcome by just getting into the spirit of the mystery, turning a history text into a kind of poor man's detective story. Having already read the very last sections, which discussed the war that he had put to an end, which was, worryingly enough, called the Sixth Civil War (while Harry was no great history buff, he was pretty sure that in the muggle world the count was nowhere near six), Harry began to read the book backwards from there (sometimes page-by-page, sometimes sentence-by-sentence and sometimes chapter-by-chapter, because there is no wrong way to read a book backwards, as long as one remembers to insert the phrase, 'and before that' everywhere, so that there was at least some kind of narrative).

The last sentence of the chapter prior to the one in which Harry appeared in the textbook read quite simply, "It appeared that nothing could stop the Dark Lord from victory." As he read back, it soon became quite apparent to Harry how it would seem so. Voldemort had had the Ministry on the ropes for years, seemingly toying with them, picking off their best Aurors and their political leaders at his leisure.

Susan's parents were some of the last victims of this that the textbook named explicitly.

Harry could not help but glance over at her surreptitiously. She was as bored as anyone else in that class, nor, as she doodled birds in a most relaxed manner, did she give off the air of a person broken by the tragedies of recent war. The horrific manner of her parents' public execution-by-torture being such recent news to him, Harry wanted to say something consoling, even though that made little sense. He thought about how, eventually, Susan too would read that part of their textbook that described in grisly detail her parents' murders.

He said, "I like that drawing." It was a crow or a raven. It had something in its beak, but he could not tell what.

She smiled cheerfully. "Thanks!"

After a moment, he asked if it was a crow or a raven.

"It's a crow," she said.

"Do you have crows, at home?"

Susan rested her head on her palm and looked at him playfully. "Why do you ask?" she said.

Harry felt the beginnings of embarrassment. He did not know why. He wondered what to say. She grinned at him, and Harry realized that he was being teased. A realization that did not help him think of anything particularly good to say. "I've always liked crows."

"What do you like about crows, Harry Potter?"

It had not been a lie. He did like crows. But as for why, he had no idea. He racked his mind. It seemed like he did not know any solid facts about crows other than that they were birds and that they were black. "Let me think," he said, and, doing so, tried to remember all the times he had seen crows. "They look out for one another," he realized. "They're always in groups, and they warn each other about things. And then at night, you'll see them all on one particular tree that isn't any different from the other trees except for the hundred crows sitting on it. They're kind of like us Hufflepuffs."

"That … was a very good answer," Susan said. Her smile had lost its teasing edge, and was now just a soft smile. She looked back down at her drawing. He looked back down at his book.

Before that last burst of ungodly brutal, frequently public murderings at the end, the Dark Lord and his minions had not always been so theatrical. Prior to that last year of pure terror, the victims would most often simply disappear, either from work or from a public place or from the person's home, where the Death Eaters would leave their calling card (which was not pictured in the book, nor described), only to reappear as corpses in Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley or the Ministry Atrium. Sometimes the corpses would be complete enough to hang up on a wall somewhere, while other times the body parts had had to be piked. Sometimes the corpses would just be thrown into the Floo, like garbage into an incinerator. As he read further back, this strategy seemed to have been the preferred one going back to the very beginnings of the war. Thinking it over, Harry supposed it made sense. Having largescale battles against a well-trained opposing force, like the Aurors, would not have inspired anywhere near the same level of terror in the wizarding folk. Battles like that, both sides would have suffered heavy losses, and there would have been just as many dark wizard corpses as Auror corpses lying around after it was over. It would make the dark wizards seem more human, more vulnerable. But the way that Voldemort had conducted things during most of the war, relying primarily on abductions, meant that Death Eaters almost never left one of their own corpses behind, and the fact that anyone could just disappear one night made them seem much more terrifying: rather than just opposing soldiers, they were like boogeymen. They had their enemies staying up all night, too terrified to sleep, knowing that despite the defenses on their homes, people with better wards than theirs had already been abducted. As a strategy of terror, it was an effective one.

Still, it was also a slow strategy. Voldemort, for all of his powers, and for all of the fear he inspired, never actually managed to take over the government. Despite the textbook's assertion that the Dark Lord had had the government on the ropes, to Harry it looked like he had made precious little actual, measurable progress over his nine year long reign of terror. One man stood in his way: Albus Dumbledore, who was able to single-handedly defend not only Hogwarts, but the Ministry itself. There were accounts of a few duels between the Headmaster and the Dark Lord, and each of them ended with Voldemort fleeing. And, while there were a handful of wizards that could say they survived a direct confrontation with the Dark Lord, Albus Dumbledore stood alone as the only man to fend him off in a one-on-one duel, a feat which he repeated several times. Harry puzzled over the strangeness of this. Why had Voldemort started this war at all, when Albus Dumbledore would never let him win it? Had he thought that his powers were greater, back before he started the war? Or had he thought that at some point during it, he would either grow strong enough to defeat Dumbledore, or perhaps get lucky one day? The more Harry thought about it, the less sense it made. The concept of starting a war without the confidence to win it was unfathomable.

Harry shut his book and puzzled over the self-contradictory information. Two points which had each been stressed by the text were completely at odds with each other. First, it was said that Voldemort was right on the cusp of absolute victory. But second, it also said that Dumbledore alone could and did defend the Ministry and Hogwarts. With those two strongholds secure and beyond Voldemort's means of capturing, by what definition could he be said to be at the cusp of victory? Looking at it this way, the increasingly bold acts of violence and destruction towards the end of the war did not look like the actions of a person who was on the verge of victory, but rather the actions of one who had given up on achieving it and was simply venting their rage. But there was another contradiction too: if Dumbledore alone could not only beat Voldemort in each of their duels, but indeed defend two strongholds on opposite sides of the country at the same time, then why had he lacked the power to simply destroy the dark lord? Harry continued to ruminate over these issues for next twenty minutes or so, but it seemed that he was just going around in circles that led nowhere.

He opened his textbook again and continued to read backwards. Before the Sixth Civil war, there was a period known as the Long Peace, a period of ninety-six years during which magical Britain was not involved in any wars at all, except for putting down a few very minor rebellions in the colonies, events which were considered police actions rather than wars. Britain had remained neutral in Grindelwald's wars on the continent, which between 1906 and 1944 had mired all of Europe, coastal North Africa, Anatolia and the Levant in a seemingly-endless series of struggles that only ever ended in capitulation. So, for thirty-eight of the ninety-six years known as the Long Peace, it was anything but peaceful outside of Great Britain and Ireland (of course on the muggle side of things, Britain had not been neutral in any major conflict). But those wars on the continent, which Britain was not part of, had finally come to an end only when Albus Dumbledore traveled to Austria to meet Grindelwald in single combat. It was a duel for the ages, a duel from which Dumbledore emerged victorious. Grindelwald was not killed, however, but captured and put in Nurmengard Prison, where he remains to this day. Thirty-eight years of war that spanned continents, put to a stop by the whim of Albus Dumbledore. The same man who, three decades or so later, had forced Voldemort to flee in all of their duels. Harry could not understand it. Why had Dumbledore traveled all the way over to Central Europe to put down a war that his country was determined to remain neutral in – an act that could be considered treason, really, since it jeopardized the national policy of neutrality – yet had failed to make any decisive moves in the civil war that waged in his own homeland? Definitely, there were a number of odd things about Dumbledore. As Harry learned more and more about the elder figurehead of his nation, each fact he learned bothered him more. Harry suddenly remembered what his uncle had said: "That man is no simple schoolteacher, Harry. It seems that he led some sort of army against this Dark Volde-thing. An army that your parents were part of." Even Harry's muggle uncle, who had never even personally witnessed any acts of magic to Harry's knowledge, recognized Dumbledore as the leader of a guerilla or vigilante group which stood in opposition against Voldemort (a group who, Harry observed, was not actually mentioned anywhere in his textbook). But, being that Dumbledore was moonlighting as a counter-terrorist vigilante, why did he never try to uproot Voldemort, a wizard he was more powerful than? Perhaps in the thirty or so years between the Grindelwald wars and the Sixth Civil War, Dumbledore had simply lost his touch.

It was odd, he realized suddenly, how personally invested he was in this history text. When he had read books about World War II, or about any of the other wars in history, he had never felt so personally involved in them. Of course, those books had not had his name printed in them, nor did they discuss events that led to his family's deaths. It was interesting also, he thought as he flipped through that final chapter which covered the events he was party to personally, that there was little said about why his parents had been targeted. Of course, it was known to Harry that they were part of Dumbledore's group, and it was apparent that the textbook did not acknowledge the existence of said group, but he would have expected it to at least provide some explanation, even if only speculative.

Looking over the book, while Susan's parents were referenced by name, they were some of the very few that were. They were only reference specifically because they were terribly important people, and because their murders were a convenient marker for the turning point when Voldemort had abandoned all subtlety and restraint. Other than a few specific cases like the Boneses and the Potters, the book was a lot of sweeping claims and general descriptions with very few specific details to be found. Certainly, this book was worth reading, but he was starting to wish he had some better resource material on hand. Remembering that the library had a newspaper archive, he wondered when he would find the time to research it all more thoroughly. He remembered what Neville had said on the train about the terrible fate of his parents: "Well. I guess it's common knowledge for a lot of people. But I've never really talked about it." That kind of common knowledge that people don't usually talk about was invaluable, and Harry figured that if texts written after the dust had settled left most of those personal details out, perhaps the newspapers written during the heat of the conflict, by writers who genuinely feared for their life every day, would not.

By the time the class period was over, a proper study of the history of magic was firmly placed on Harry's hit-list of topics to study. As the Hufflepuffs filed out of the classroom – Ernie and Justin with much yawning and stretching, since they had fallen asleep in uncomfortable positions – Harry remembered about the post he had to send off. Unfortunately, he could not excuse himself to run off to the owlry just then, since it would tip Cerie off to the fact that he had lied about already ordering the supplies. The solution he came up with for this was simple: during lunch he ate quickly while he drafted a brief letter to his aunt and uncle. Using that letter as his reason to head up to the owlry, he told the other Puffs that he'd catch up with him at Defense class and excused himself.

Apparently lunch time on the second day of school was a very popular time to send off letters to family back home. Fortunately, none of his group had any mail to send off, since they had done so the day before while he and Hermione were in the library. Fortunately again, Harry was able to tag along with Algernon Silvestris, the sixth year prefect, so it wouldn't take him forever to find the place. After making the required adjustments to his letter for the enchanting shop, and placing the twenty-four galleons in the envelope for the bookshop (which Algernon charmed to be as light as a feather), Harry sent off his three letters, instructing the owl to deliver the one to the bookshop first, since after all it did contain more than a handful of gold coins. Frankly, his muggle upbringing made it seem quite odd to him to send cash in the mail, and although Algernon reassured him that mail theft was very rare, and that ordering things by mail like this was commonplace, something did not sit right with him about sending off an owl with a pile of gold coins. But apparently this is how things were done in the wizarding world, where the concept of a cheque did not exist. All of this, Algernon (who was familiar with the muggle world) explained, was due to a variety of factors: for one thing, wizards don't really trust their own banking system, since it was, after all, controlled by a hostile species. In fact, the goblins were strictly prohibited from accessing any wizard's vault without the wizard being physically present. Also, with space-expanding coin purses, the Feather-Light Charm and the Coin-Counting Charm, it was considerably easier for wizards to deal with large piles of coins than it would be for muggles, so the convenience factor of cheques and bank notes was much less. Algernon, whose NEWT schedule gave him a free period after lunch, dropped him off at his Defense classroom and Harry, making a mental note to look up those two charms, expressed his gratitude.

He was the first Hufflepuff to show up for Defense class. Actually, there were only a few other students there. Harry wondered if he was very early. There were few clocks around the school, since there was a charm that told the time, but Harry did not know that spell, either, nor had he bought a magical watch. Terry and Sonny, who were among the five students to show up before Harry, waved him over. Seeing no reason not to, Harry sat down next to them.

"What's the rumor mill saying about this class?" he asked.

"Another snooze," Sonny said. "Just like history. Apparently Quirrell was a half-decent professor when he was here a few years ago, but from what I've heard he's somehow turned to rubbish."

Harry rubbed the bridge of his nose, feeling frustrated. "It can't actually be as bad as Binns though," he said, although he didn't feel any of the optimism that those words might suggest.

Terry snorted. Sonny said, "We'll see, I guess."

Shortly after the lesson actually got underway (half an hour late, since apparently even the teacher got lost trying to find the place, even though he had already held half a dozen classes in this room over the last two days), it soon became apparent that Professor Quirrell was, in fact, a significantly worse teacher than Professor Binns. First of all, the man's stuttering, stammering, halting, frankly broken speech was nigh-incomprehensible. Harry didn't have anything against people that stuttered, but he had to wonder if teaching – lecturing – was a good career choice. Quirrell's speech was both more difficult to pay attention to, and more slowly-delivered than Binns's, and while Binns had had a sort of almost-hypnotic boringness that put people to sleep, Quirrell only inspired irritation in most of the students or pity in the most sympathetic ones, and his sudden changes in volume, pitch and rate of speech made him far more difficult to tune out than Binns. Harry couldn't even read his enchanting book, the man was so distracting. The professor's second obvious flaw was that he seemed to be constantly in a state of near-hysterical fear. He jumped at the sight of his own shadow twice in that two hour period, and when a cloud moved to stop covering the sun, he flattened himself against the wall, apparently mistaking the sudden sunlight for spellfire. Some of the students laughed at him, while others just regarded him with piteous bemusement, but for Harry the man's over-the-top paranoia was simply annoying. Thirdly, and this is no minor point, the man stank. The strand of garlic cloves that he wore as a necklace could not entirely cover up a putrid odor that reminded Harry of ground beef that, forgotten in the back of a refrigerator, had gone bad to the point of greening. Frankly, Harry despised the man, and as much as he tried he could not remember ever meeting anyone that had repulsed him so much. By the end of his first class, Harry was at the point of abject loathing, and was in a very foul temper made only worse by a rather painful headache.

Harry stood up to leave so quickly that he was temporarily blinded from lightheadedness, which unfortunately made it rather difficult for him to actually go anywhere, since the classroom was far from familiar enough to walk around blindly in. That left him standing there awkwardly as all of the other students filed out. Harry's friends, he realized, must have assumed that he wanted a private word with the teacher, and had left. Part of him was annoyed that nobody had even asked why he was just standing there, but a larger part of him was grateful that nobody had made a big deal about it. As his vision cleared and expanded, Harry realized that he was not actually alone. Terry and Sonny were still sitting in their seats. Professor Quirrell was regarding Harry with an unreadable, unblinking expression.

"Did you have some question, Mr. Potter?"

Now caught, he had to say something, or risk appearing foolish to his fool professor, which was not something that he could permit to happen. "Professor, I noticed that you didn't assign us any homework," he said.

"No," the professor agreed with a smile that was trying to be pleasant, but wasn't.

"Well, I had been thinking about doing a bit of self-study to get ahead, and I was wondering which of the spells from The Dark Forces we would be learning first, so that I could go ahead and work on that."

"Oh that w-w-w-w-won't be necessary, Mr. P-p-potter. No spells are learned in this class until th-th-th-th … until third year."

Harry nodded. "I see," he said, and left, Terry and Sonny hot on his heels.

"What was that about?" Terry asked.

"I'll be needing to learn spells that make me deaf, and make me unable to smell," Harry said by way of explanation.

Terry started laughing. Sonny, however, didn't follow. "What for?" he said.

"I'll have to think of some excuse to skip class until I learn those spells," Harry said. "There is no way I'm going back without them."

As it turned out, the Hogwarts Library had vanishingly few books that instructed on the casting of jinxes, hexes and curses (and a spell that makes someone deaf or anosmic (which means nose-blind) would definitely qualify as a jinx or hex, according to Terry and Sonny). However, it just so happened that Sonny's Hufflepuff older sister was a bit of a mischief-maker who was known to do a bit of pranking from time to time. Her primary targets tended to be the Slytherin girls in her year, who never did figure out who kept making their fingernails rot every second Wedsneday of the month ever since second year like clockwork. With her adorable little brother's recommendation, Sonny thought she would be more than happy to help Harry jinx himself. The procedure surrounding pranking, and discussion of pranks, was apparently a serious matter, since plotting to jinx another student was punishable the same as actually doing so (and far less satisfying). So, Sonny wrote a letter of introduction for Harry to assure his sister that he wasn't a nark. The letter read:

Hey Becca. My friend Harry Potter was wondering if you could give him a few pointers on the runic properties of potions ingredients. Cheers! – Sonny

"The runic properties of potions ingredients?" Harry read. "What does that even mean?"

"Complete gibberish. She'll know what it means," Sonny said. "Hopefully."

So, slip of parchment rolled up and pocketed, Harry went back to Hufflepuff to look for Sonny's sister. Having never been in the position of placing discrete inquiries for prohibited goods, he wasn't quite sure where to begin. Certainly he couldn't just ask a prefect to point out Becca Albright of fourth year – that would be like sending a letter to a shop warning them you're going to rob them next week.

Spotting a group of girls that he thought might be about the right age sitting around the Hearth, Harry just casually walked over, took a seat at a nice armchair nearby, said "Hey" and started looking for his Charms text and some parchment.

"Hey yourself, Harry Potter," one of them said.

He gave them a brief smile and got out his ink pot, then continued scrounging around in his bag for a bit. "Does one of you have a quill I could borrow?" he asked. He had forty-one quills in his bag, including the dirty one from Herbology.

A boy sitting on the other side of him gave Harry the quill that he was using and said, "Keep it."

Harry wanted to curse. He said, "Thanks." The boy nodded and got out another quill to keep writing whatever it was that he had been writing. The quill that Harry now had was already wet with ink. It dripped on his book. He stared at the ink puddle. He felt foolish. He wished he had a tissue. He glanced over at the older girls. They were all looking at him and their eyes were all shining with amusement. He felt himself blushing. The quill dripped again. Harry opened his Charms book and set up the parchment over it, and the quill over that, so that the ink would drip onto the parchment and not onto the book. His inkwell was sitting on the arm of the chair, unopened. He wondered what he would do with this balancing act when it came time to dip the quill. A blot of ink dripped onto the parchment. He chanced another glance over at the group of older girls. They were all watching him still. He said the best thing he could come up with, which was: "I've just remembered where my quill is."

Two of them starting laughing. The other three looked like they wanted to laugh, too. One of those three leaned over, resting her elbow on the arm of the couch and her chin on her hand, and looked at him with shining brown eyes. Harry wanted to look away, but he held her gaze. After about two seconds, she spoke with lips that formed both words and a dimpled smile. "Is 'hey' all you wanted to say to us?"

Harry replayed the events so far in his mind: his super casual approach and his offhand greeting had worked so well. But then he had asked to borrow a quill, and everything had gone to hell. He could picture what he would look like from their angle, bumbling about with book and quill and parchment and inkwell, making a complete mess, looking so self-conscious. Wearing a ridiculous pointed hat the whole while. He looked like a sad clown trying to do a happy clown's bit. He had no idea what to say. He wished Neville or Ernie or Justin would come over and plop down and help. But the girl's eyes were not cruel as she leaned in close to him. She was just teasing him a little bit. And in its own way, even though he was the butt of the joke, this was kind of a perfect little moment. "I wish I could see my face right now," he said.

"I'm glad I can," she said, bringing her other elbow up on the couch's arm, interlacing her fingers under her chin and leaning in closer. The other four were watching with all of the enthusiasm of soap opera addicts watching a series finale.

Harry wondered if maybe he wasn't up to snuff for Hufflepuff. He felt so very out of his depth. An antisocial boy like him had decided to go to Hufflepuff why? Harry was pretty sure that the boy who had offered him his own quill was watching him, too, but he didn't dare to turn around and look.

The girl puffed out her lips a tiny bit, and Harry found himself looking at them, and his brain was suddenly so much chaos that he couldn't really call any particular thought a conscious thought anymore. Somewhere in what remnants of logic were left, he realized that even if one of these girls were Sonny's sister Becca, there was no way he could admit that he had sat down next to them, and gone through all of this, just to borrow a book from a girl he didn't know. The admission that he had deliberately caused this ridiculous situation would make him look even more foolish than he already did. This realization appeared somewhere in the back of his head, but slowly it lit up the rest of his mind, and the understanding that his plan had dramatically failed released him. He felt free to act.

He thought he might try turning the tables a bit. He said, "Actually, the truth is, I just saw you sitting here, and I wanted to know your name. Pretty lame, right?" The boy whose quill he was still holding had a fit of coughs. Harry could not see what the other girls were doing, since the one was leaning in so close. Steeling his determination, Harry continued to stare the girl down.

"It's just the lamest," she agreed, but her smile brightened.

Harry wondered if he could just start the conversation over, or if he had to make some sort of announcement about it. But he didn't really want to say, 'let's just start over,' so he just went ahead and did. "Hey," he said, "My name is Harry Potter. How do you do?"

"I do well, Harry Potter," she said. "My name is Samantha Fleck."

Harry had no idea where he was going with this. He raked and scraped his mind, but there was not the slightest interesting thing there to say. His mind ran through a number of terrible choices: 'Nice day today, eh?' – 'How about that Professor Quirrell?' – 'Are you into the Weird Sisters?' – 'The fire's nice, isn't it?' – 'I really should be doing my Potions homework, I don't know why I have my Charms book out.' – 'Prime numbers are pretty great, don't you think?' – 'What Quidditch team do you favor?' – 'I have a huge house right in London. Where do you live?' – 'My parents are dead. What do your parents do for work?' – 'Fancy a game of billiards?' – 'Ever thought about learning Chinese?' – and on and on and on, and not a single possibility stood out as particularly not-daft. Finally he settled on, "Pleasure to meet you, Miss Fleck."

"The pleasure is mutual, Mr. Potter," she said.

Harry could see that she wasn't about to help him out. Since she would be just as happy to see him flounder as to see him come through, it was entirely up to him to figure it out. He thought he might be able to get some traction with a compliment, but he struggled to come up with one that wouldn't be embarrassing for him to say. His stupid brain provided a number of bad choices: 'You're really pretty.' – 'Your eyes are really pretty.' – 'Your hair looks really soft.' – 'Your dimples are amazing.' – 'Your lips make me want to turn into a piping hot cup of tea for you to blow the steam off of and sip.' – and that's when his brain locked up completely for a moment. He considered himself fortunate for the second time that day that his mouth seemed to be able to keep working completely independently of his brain in times of great need. Acting on its own, his mouth said, "That's a really nice bracelet." In truth, he had barely noticed the bracelet.

"Thanks," she said, glancing down at it. "My boyfriend gave it to me for our one-year." She looked over Harry's shoulder.

He looked around and found his quill donor grinning at him. "Good eye with that," Harry said unsurely.

"Right?" the boy said. He extended his hand for Harry to shake. Harry shuffled his quill into his left hand and shook. "Frankie Wooten," the boy said.

"Harry Potter. Nice to meetcha," Harry said. How awkward he felt, sitting between them! What was he doing? The realization that he was sitting right in between a couple made him feel very out of place, intrusive really. The fact that they both seemed to want to mess with him made it so much worse. But this, Harry realized with what part of his mind was still working at a high level, was probably all just part of the hazing process for firstie Puffs, so he had to go through with whatever this was. The four other girls were still watching keenly. Harry wished that he had an interest that was more relateable to other witches than computers, just so that he would have something to divert the conversation to. But he didn't know anything about music or sports or whatever else wizarding popular culture consisted of, leaving him with only Hogwarts to talk about. It was something that he would have to rectify at some point. For now, obvious topics of discussion he could start a conversation about included: the subjects taught at school (Charms might be a good choice, since his Charms book was in his lap), the teachers, the House system, the ghosts, the castle itself, the nearby village. "So," he said, "do you think Hufflepuff has a chance at the Quidditch Cup this year?"

Frankie Wooten stroked his jaw in consideration. Samantha Fleck rolled her eyes with a little laugh. Harry was surpised when she answered while Frankie was still thinking it over. "That all depends on who we get as our new Seeker," she said. "We'll be hurting if we can't find someone to replace Bailey."

"So true," Frankie Wooten said.

"Bailey?" Harry asked.

"Our old seeker," Frankie told him. "She graduated. She was pretty good."

"She never beat Charlie Weasley," one of the other girls on the couch put in. "That man was a god on a broom."

"So true," Frankie said again.

This topic, Harry concluded, had been a good choice. It seemed that everyone had an opinion to share. Mostly just listening in the friendly debate that ensued between Frankie and the girls, Harry felt relieved to have the attention off of him for a change. Frankie had taken over the conversation, and Harry was glad of it. He did notice, however, that Samantha Fleck would look over at him from time to time, sometimes looking at him for just a glance, sometimes for a second or two. He thought that she must have something she wanted to say to him, but he didn't want to ask her since this Quidditch conversation was going so well. Besides, if he asked her what was on her mind, the most likely answer by far was 'nothing,' and all he would have accomplished was getting everyone's attention and learning nothing.

The Hufflepuffs' chances, the group all agreed, was most dependant on the quality of the Seeker chosen to replace Bailey. However, apparently the Keeper, one Patrick Mayhew, had let a few easy blocks get through in Hufflepuff's last game against Ravenclaw last year, and although they had won the match thanks to Bailey's catching of the snitch, there was a rumor that the team captain, Joshua Mallory, would be having tryouts for that position as well. The girl that had offered her opinion on Charlie Weasley, whose name was Tosha Timely, thought that since Mallory was looking to replace the Mayhew, he'd probably just hold tryouts for all of the positions even though the team already had three good Chasers. That way, it wouldn't look like he was singling Mayhew out. Tosha hoped that that was the case, because even though the Chasers they had were pretty solid, she wanted to try out for that position herself. Another girl pointed out to Tosha that she would have to perform insanely well for Mallory to give one of the Chasers he already had the boot and let her take their spot. "I know that, Becca," she said, and Harry's ears perked up. "I'll just have to give it my best."

Once she had been identified, the family resemblance to Sonny was obvious. She had the same hazel eyes and slightly puffy brown hair, and a similar smallish nose and wide jaw. Harry, who had given up on his original mission a long time ago, had given up the hope that any of the girls here were the one he was looking for. Still, it wasn't as though he could just suddenly ask her about that jinx. His reasons for giving up had been solid, and still applied even though he had now figured out who Becca Albright was.

"I wish firsties were allowed to play," Harry said, although he didn't really mean it.

"Oh, they are, technically at least," Tosha Timely said. "I looked it up first year. Even though it's forbidden to have your own broom, there's no rule on the books that I could find that says you can't join the team."

"I see," Harry said. Now, Harry hadn't really meant anything when he had said that he wished firsties could play. He had never in his life played any sports. The closest he had ever come was kicking around a football at school back in Surrey. He wasn't particularly terrible, from what he remembered, although he definitely wasn't any good, either. But now he considered the possibility: although he might not know anything about sports, he knew that playing them could increase your popularity by an order of magnitude. If he played, and if he was good at it, it would earn him the goodwill of everyone in Hufflepuff House, and the admiration of everyone else at school. While playing for the Hufflepuff team would obviously take up a huge amount of time and energy, Harry was already committed to spending a huge amount of time and energy on making himself well-liked and well-respected. Currently his only strategies for doing so were being nice to people and doing well in classes, which would probably never earn him any recognition beyond people just saying 'Yeah, he's nice, pretty bright too.' But Quidditch … the wizarding world was absolutely obsessed with the game. From what he could tell, even football fever back in the muggle world didn't come close. So, as he turned the idea over and around in his mind, Harry thought maybe playing Quidditch would be the absolute best way to spend his time and energy.

"Do you even fly?" Frankie asked. "I heard you grew up in the muggle world."

"I've never flown a broom," Harry confirmed. "But how hard could it be?"

"Do you want to find out?" Becca asked, a glint in her eye.

Becca, Tosha and Frankie dragged Harry away to a quiet corner in the game room. Tosha and Frankie set up a chessboard so that it would look like they were doing something other than conspiring to break school rules. Once they were sure that there were no prefects or narks around – which took some time, since a boy called Leonard Dumpkin, who Becca would never forgive for ratting her out for something or other in first year, was lingering nearby – they devised a plan which received the codename Project Owlflight.

Finalizing the details of the plan shortly after the start of the dinnertime, the lot of them tried not to smirk or otherwise look devious as they made their way to the Great Hall.

"You're late!" Hannah said.

"Seriously?" Harry rolled his eyes. "I'm only half an hour late."

"I'm only playing," Hananh said, but she started scooping food onto his plate.

"Where have you been, anyway?" Neville asked while Harry watched, baffled, as Hannah continued to pile on the vegetables.

"Oh, I just got roped into playing a few games of chess with some of the upperyears," he said, trying to sound like the experience had been painful. "Turns out I'm terrible at chess."

Shit. Harry thought that he really needed to watch his mouth. Now he would have to remember that he was supposed to be terrible at chess. With the mental equivalent of a shrug, he filed that away.

The other firsties started talking about the potions assignment that was due the next afternoon, which Harry had completely forgotten about. Actually, it was Hermione who started the discussion, since she was the only one besides Harry who hadn't done the assignment the day before, right after class.

"It really was ever so interesting," she gushed. "I mean, I read about the properties of all of the different ingredients over summer, but it never actually occurred to me to look at a real potion and run through it and see how it all worked together! It really was enlightening. Don't you think so, Harry?"

"I'll have to do it after dinner," he admitted. Before she could chastize him for procrastinating, he added, "That really does sound like a fun assignment though. I can't wait to get started."

"It doesn't make any sense," Wayne said. "I mean, we got it done, but the way the ingredients interact is so confusing."

"Oh, really, Wayne. You've just got to keep the Sixteen Laws in mind and it's all perfectly clear," Hermione said.

"But that's the problem," Wayne said. "There's sixteen of them and some of them contradict each other."

"That is why they are in order," Hermione stated. "Look, how about we go over it together after dinner?"

Wayne looked like that was just about the last thing he wanted to do in his precious evening hours of freedom, but he said weakly, "All right."

Much to the amazement of Wayne and several of the others, Neville said, "I think I'll join you. It doesn't really make sense to me, either."

"Excellent!" Hermione said, glowing.

When it came time for Harry to do the assignment himself about an hour or so later, he excused himself from the group and ducked into the quiet study room. Having heard Hermione's advice for Wayne, he began by opening up Magical Draughts and Potions to the appendix that listed all Sixteen Laws of Transmigration and Tessellation. The Sixteen Laws were, in his opinion, misnamed, because many of the laws actually contained more than one, and sometimes as many as twelve, subsidiary rules. In all, the Sixteen Laws took three pages of the book, and it was a rather wide and tall book. He had looked over them more than once over the summer, but never with the intention of memorizing them. Looking at them much more closely than ever before, he realized that, taken as a whole, the Sixteen Laws were not entirely dissimilar to a class in programming. The metaphor was far from perfect, but immediately he saw that it was useful. Looking at each Law as though it were a method of a SixteenLaws class, and looking at each of its subrules as just a conditional statement within that method, Harry was slowly able to put together in his mind the class that they made up, and see how it all worked together. While some of the 'methods' referenced things he didn't quite understand yet, for now he didn't worry about that and just let those be 'black boxes' that just did what they did.

Now in a state of mind that came very close to meditative, he began to assemble the program that would make use of this class to actually make a potion.

Very quickly he realized that he needed a class for the ingredients, as well. The best design that he could come up with would be to simply make the Ingredient class inherit from the SixteenLaws class, and then have a bunch of variables whose values were specific to each different ingredient, which would then inform how the inherited methods from SixteenLaws worked.

Finally, there must be a class for the potion itself. The only important things about this class was that it contained an array of Ingredient objects and a method called AddIngredient.

So, bit by bit he pieced all of this together in mental pseudo-code until he thought he might have something that would actually work. In all, it took two or three hours. All of this he was able to store in his mind just as easily as he was able to store the definition of every method of every class in BitHeap – of course his BrewPotion pseudo-program was considerably simpler than BitHeap. So much simpler, in fact, that he felt no need to write anything down. Once he was pretty satisfied with it, he let it sort of settle and solidify in his mind. The problem now, he realized as he looked down at his blank sheet of parchment, was how to translate this into language that a wizard could understand.

Harry's first Potions assignment was only six inches of parchment, but in all it took him three hours to do, most of which were spent staring at the wall or just sitting there with his eyes closed. However, he was fully confident that he could use his new 'mental program' BrewPotion for the rest of his life, making patches along the way whenever he learned something new. So he was all smiles when he left the quiet study room, rejoined his fellow firsties, and let Hermione read over his assignment.

But the night was young yet for Harry.

Project Owlflight began at exactly thirty minutes past one in the morning. Harry, still wearing his pants, shirt and shoes, slipped out of bed, threw on his robes, and, quiet as could be, pausing only to double-check that insomniac Ernie was definitely asleep, made his way down the long hallway to the Common Room. The other three were already waiting for him, lurking in a particularly dark corner near the exit, Frankie and Tosha holding brooms. Wordlessly, they crept over to the exit and peered out. The coast was clear. Becca led them all down the hallway in the opposite direction of the Entrance Hall. The hallway terminated in a what Harry had to admit was a pretty suspicious featureless gray wall with no doors around. Becca squated down by one corner of the hallway's dead-end wall, and Harry watched as she wrapped her hands around one stone in particular and lifted up. The stone wall opened up like it was no more than a curtain, and the four Puffs slipped through.

"Brilliant," Harry said.

Becca shook her head with a laugh. "Hardly," she said. "It's one of the most poorly hidden secret passageways in the castle. That hallway just ending like that is just too damn suspicious."

"So true," Frankie said. "That's why the Hufflepuffs back in the thirties did this. Lumos!"

The corridor in front of them was completely caved-in. It was clear at the first glance that there would be no getting through. Harry thought that not even magic could repair the corridor, an opinion that he voiced.

"That's just Our Lady the Saint of Mischief's Why-Try Charm working on you," Becca explained.

"It prevents people from trying to solve a problem," Tosha explained. "In this case, it's making you think that even with magic you'll never be able to get through this corridor. You probably feel like just giving up and going back to bed, right?"

Harry nodded, eyes wide. He never knew that magic could do things like that. Although, thinking about it, it wasn't too terribly different from the Notice-Me-Not Charm that prevented muggles from seeing the Leaky Cauldron.

"We all feel like that right now," Frankie said. "Just ignore it."

Becca was off to the left side of the blocked-off corridor, poking at the various stones comprising the wall with her wand. "I could use some light over here," she said.

"Sorry," Frankie said, moving over to illuminate the perfectly boring wall for her.

"The password changes every night," Becca explained. "There's a pattern to it … but this might take a while."

Becca continued to poke at the stones for the next five minutes until finally she found the right code and the wall opened up for them. Beyond it there was a roughly-hewn corridor that led off to the right, parallel to the blocked-off corridor. After a few hundred feet, the little tunnel they were in abruptly ended. Becca found a reddish rock that stood out from the mostly gray rocks around it, and poked it with her wand, and this wall opened up, too.

"We're trusting you with this, by the way," Tosha said as they came out of the little tunnel into the much wider corridor. To his right, Harry saw that the cave-in extended all the way to where they now were. Excluding any pockets of air in between, there was at least two or three hundred feet of debris.

Becca and Frankie nodded in agreement to what Tosha was saying. Becca said, "We can't let the Gryffindors find out about this place."

"Or the Slytherins," Frankie added.

"Sure, them too. But those damn Gryffindors are the real problem. That's why we had to block off this tunnel to begin with, you know? The Fendors found out about it – well, it wasn't well-hidden back then – and apparently one of the Fendors back in the thirties couldn't keep his damn mouth shut, and soon the entire castle knew about it. So Our Lady the Saint of Mischief came up with this. Nobody knows how she was able to collapse the whole damn corridor without waking up the entire castle."

"Or killing herself," Tosha muttered.

"Impressive," Harry said. "Who is Our Lady the Saint of Mischief?"

"Amelia Bones," they all chorused.

Harry gaped. When he found his voice again, he repeated the traditional oath Tosha told him. He swore to never reveal the secret passageway to any prefect, nark, Fendor or Otherwise Shady Individual, which included all of his fellow firsties who hadn't yet gotten Becca's personal stamp of approval. It wasn't a magically-binding oath because, according to Tosha, Hufflepuffs don't need the threat of looming death or squibbery just to keep their word.

The corridor seemed to go on forever. After a while, the stonework matching the castle faded away and they were in a tunnel that seemed to be carved right into the bedrock, and still it went on and on.

"How long is this tunnel, anyway?" Harry asked.

"Two point six miles," Frankie answered easily.

"You get used to it," Tosha said.

"I kind of enjoy the walk," Becca revealed. "It's really peaceful down here."

"Yeah," Frankie said, "But you're mad, though."

"Actually, we usually fly down the tunnel," Tosha explained. "But it's not really the ideal place to learn how to fly."

The tunnel got narrower and narrower as they went ever deeper down, and pretty soon they were walking in a file and Harry couldn't imagine racing along on a broom, especially since you would need to use one hand to do a Lumos. Finally they came to a point where the tunnel seemed to abruptly end. On closer inspection, however, there was a tiny hole in the wall which Becca peered through like a peephole. Furthermore there was a tiny circle etched in the stone just above the peephole. After confirming that the coast was clear, she tapped the circle with her wand and the peephole expanded until it was wide enough for them to pass through. They emerged in a small cavern that showed signs of habitation: there were beer bottles piled up in one corner, a few small mattresses in another, and in the middle of the cavern was a fire pit.

"Sometimes we come out here and party," Tosha explained. She went over to one random wall and tapped it with her wand and it opened up to reveal a primitive shelf cut right into the rock of the cave wall. "There's only two left," she said, retrieving a pair of bottles.

"We'll just have to share," Becca said with a shrug, accepting the bottle Tosha opened and handed her. Tosha took a sip of the other one and handed it to Harry. It was a very weird tasting drink, but he thought he liked it.

"What is this stuff?" he asked.

"Wow, I keep forgetting that you don't know anything," Becca said. "That's butterbeer. Chin-chin!" They clinked their bottles, had another sip, and handed them off. Becca led Harry and the others out of the cavern, and Harry was amazed when he emerged. The cave was cut into a cliff, and the cliff stood over lawned hills that rolled down below them like a staircase. Far, far below them, Harry could make out the faintly twinkling lights of what must have been the village, because looming over it he could see the impressive silhouette of Hogwarts cut out in the moonlight – but all of that was just in one direction. Around them in every other directon was a seemingly endless, absolutely gorgeous sea of hills. It was a breathtaking view.

"Enough sight-seeing," Becca said after letting Harry take it in for a while. "We're on a mission. Project Owlflight, stage two, go!" But in contradiction to her word, Becca went over to a nice chair-like rock and sat down, gazing down at the splendid view.

"Becca's not much good with brooms," Tosha explained as she and Frankie led him off to a relatively flat patch of lawn.

Within twenty minutes, Harry was up in the air, following Tosha around on Frankie's broom. An hour or so later, Harry was doing barrel rolls and corkscrew-dives to the astonishment of the older students. Then Tosha let Harry use her broom, a Galeburst, which was about twice as fast as Frankie's Cleansweep, and he was screaming with joy as he whipped it around. Eventually Becca came over and joined them, and seeing how far Harry had come in that short time, she decided that they might as well see as far as he can go. So she retrieved a galleon from her pocket, said, "Catch this or you owe me!" and threw it as hard as she could. Harry shot after it like a rocket and, to his own astonishment, caught it just before it hit the ground. He barely managed to pull his broom up in time to avoid crashing into the ground at a speed that would probably have killed him. Frankie and Tosha burst into cheers, hooting and pumping their fists. Becca looked on with a satisfied, almost parental smirk.

Harry felt amazing.

"Looks like we found our Seeker," Becca said.

"So true," Frankie said.

---

Some notes:

Puffs, like Slytherins, prize most of all a trait that relies on other people. Puff loyalty, like Slytherin cutthroatiness, is meaningless if you live on an island with a population of one. By contrast, Claw intelligence and Fendor bravery do not rely on other people being around: you can still be more or less intelligent, and more or less brave, on an island of one. I'm not saying that Hufflepuff and Slytherin are two sides of the same coin, but they're not completely different currencies either. Anyway, I hope that all of the teasing and secrecy in this chapter illustrates this.

Yep, Gryffindors will henceforth be known as Fendors.

So, Amelia Bones is a Legend. Actually, a lot of people in the Bones family tree are Legends, but Amelia Bones is a Next-Level Legend. In case you're wondering, because the ages don't really add up, she's not actually Susan's aunt, but rather Susan's father's father's sister, making her Susan's Great Aunt (in this story). You'll be hearing a lot about Our Lady the Saint of Mischief.

Cheers!