After the Dawn: The Philosopher's Stone
Chapter Twelve: Prank
After he left Hagrid's place, Harry wandered, not really paying attention to where he was going, and ended up sitting among the roots of a tree, just on the outskirts of the Forbidden Forest.
"I don't know what to do, Ardeo," he murmured aloud, using Sirius's 'code name', in case there was anyone near by. "I want to make friends, I think. I want to have what me and Dan did, before he died," Harry's voice hitched slightly on the last word. "But I don't want anyone else to be hurt because of me."
"Nemo," a cool, old voice spoke from just near by, and Albus Dumbledore walked into view. "I thought I might find you out here – your house mates are celebrating, you know."
Harry shrugged slightly. "Then I'll stay out here," he replied.
To his surprise, Albus Dumbledore, one of the most powerful and respected wizards of all time came and sat down on the ground beside Harry. "I couldn't help overhear what you were saying to you dog," Albus scratched Sirius gently behind one ear.
Harry was immediately on his guard. "Yes?"
"And I think that it's time you and I had a little talk."
"About what, Sir?" Harry asked slowly.
"You, I think, would be a good beginning topic," Sirius had lifted his head now and was watching Dumbledore with the same wariness as Harry.
"What about me?" Harry asked, withdrawing into himself even more.
"How about, your reluctance to open up to anyone?" Dumbledore suggested, smiling gently.
So, Harry thought, this man is good at appearing at ease when discussing topics that no doubt mean a lot to him, and to those he's talking to. Better watch out for that, he might catch me with a causal question.
"What about it?" Harry asked.
"Why is it that you keep yourself so closed off from people, if you would like to open up to them?" The headmaster asked, turning bright blue eyes on Harry, and making Harry feel uncomfortable.
"Because anyone who is friends with me might
get hurt because of me," Harry replied.
"Could you explain this reasoning,
Nemo?"
"My best friend was killed by Death Eaters who were looking for me," Harry replied, and immediately cursed himself internally for saying that.
"How do you mean, looking for you?" Dumbledore enquired, as Harry had known he would.
"I'm a wizard, Dan wasn't. The Death Eaters were searching for wizards, I heard one of the Hit Wizards say so – wizards my age. Therefore, they must have been looking for me, and they thought Dan was me, and they killed him," Harry said, trying to cover his trail.
"Yes … There have been a disturbing amount of deaths in wizards your age in the past year or so," Dumbledore murmured softly, speaking almost to himself.
"Do you know why, sir?" Harry asked, pretty sure he already knew the answer.
"Because they want Harry Potter dead, and he is your age," Harry had to work hard at stopping his body and face from freezing – he had expected the answer, otherwise he might have failed.
"Harry Potter, sir? I thought he was already dead? Killed by that Death Eater … Sirius Black?" Harry stroked Sirius's ears gently in apology for bringing that up.
"That is the belief of the Wizarding world, but I see no other reason for Death Eaters to be killing or attacking people of that age," Dumbledore said softly. "So perhaps Harry Potter is not as dead as some might think."
"So you don't think he's dead, sir?" Harry asked.
"No, Nemo, I don't. What's more, I never have – though I would appreciate it if that never reached the ears of the Ministry."
"It won't from me Sir, or my family. We don't have anything to do with the politics of the Wizarding World," Harry assured him. Because they're biased fools who just want to stay in power, he added to himself.
"I didn't think that you would," Dumbledore said. "But that is straying from the topic of our conversation, which is not Harry Potter, but you."
Harry had to refrain himself from remarking that the two people were actually one and the same. "I don't want to put anyone in danger for being friends with me," Harry said. "But in some ways I'd like to have friends again. Friends other than Ardeo," he stroked the dogs ears fondly.
"I think, Nemo, that being friends with someone is not something that you can avoid for reasons such as that. It is something those would be friends with you must choose for themselves," Dumbledore remarked slowly.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, it would seem that you are afraid that your friends will be the target of possible attacks, simply because they are your friends. What if you tell them that, and if they still want to be friends with you, knowing the risk, then they may," Dumbledore offered.
"I suppose …" Harry trailed off doubtfully.
"Think about, child. And remember: Help is always given at Hogwarts, to those who ask for it."
With these last cryptic words, the Headmaster of Hogwarts jumped to his feet with the ease that a far younger, more sprightly man could envy, and headed off across the grounds.
"C'mon Ardeo, let's go back up to the castle," Harry said, following the headmasters example and standing himself. "But not to the Gryffindor tower. Maybe the kitchens?"
Sirius gave a woof of happy agreement, and the two of them made their lonely way up to the castle, though they were content in one another's company, as they had always been.
Harry was sitting in a corner of the kitchens, feeling a little bit overwhelmed because all of the house elves were flocking around him and being as helpful as they knew how – which was, of course, every helpful.
He and Ardeo had been provided with more than adequate meals, and Harry was quite happy to do the food and justice, and was full of praise for the cooks.
His meal, however, was interrupted when Fred and George suddenly appeared in the kitchen. They looked very surprised to see Harry there, and walked over to him, asking the house elves for snacks and drinks.
"How did you find your way in here so quickly?" Fred seemed amazed that a mere first year had found the kitchens so fast.
"I'm good at getting into places that I'm supposed to stay out of," Harry admitted with a faint smile. After the talks with Hagrid and Dumbledore, he was feeling a little more receptive to peoples advances, and he liked the Twins, fellow pranksters as they were.
"That's cool," George grinned. "Why aren't you in the Gryffindor Tower, celebrating like the rest of us?"
"I don't like parties much," Harry replied.
"Understandable, I suppose. We're just getting some more refreshments, and searching for this new prankster. He or she is pretty inventive, and we want to team up with them!"
"Really?" Harry arched an eyebrow. "Well, you've found him," he decided that he would trust his heart and not his mind this time. Besides, the lure of a prank was always powerful.
"What?" Both twins stared at him with expressions of amazement.
"You've found him," Harry repeated coolly, grinning at the expressions on their faces.
"You're the one who's been playing all these pranks?" Fred and George gaped at Harry.
"Yup," Harry said proudly.
"B-but!" the twins stammered, "how?"
"Using some stuff that my family taught me," Harry replied. "We're all mischief makers."
"You've done a great job!" Fred and George sat down next to Harry. "We're certainly impressed! Heard about the words on the blackboard in Snape's room – I take it that was you?"
Harry grinned, "yes," he replied. "And Peeves got blamed for it, which was even better. Snape wouldn't have found me out anyway though."
"He's good at finding out things that you might want to hide," Fred warned. "Be careful of him!"
"Oh, I will be," Harry assured them. "I love pranks, but I don't have a death wish."
The three of them laughed at that. "Well … maybe we can band together – plan out a master prank, eh?" George suggested, leaning forwards conspiratorially.
"Maybe," Harry said blandly. "You know the corridor behind the mirror on third floor*?"
"Yeah?" Fred replied.
"Meet me there tomorrow, after classes," Harry told them. "I'll think about it overnight."
"You're a caution mate. We'll see you there – coming to join the party?"
"You know, I don't think I will," Harry replied. "Thanks for the offer though."
Saluting him, Fred and George walked out, taking all of the food that the House Elves had found for them. Harry smiled as he watched them go.
"True Marauders, eh, Ardeo?" He remarked to the dog at his side. Sirius rumbled deep in his chest, and Harry smiled at the sign of agreement. "What say we take a look at the passageway now, mate? We haven't gone down that one yet this year."
Sirius jumped to his feet, and headed for the exit, Harry following on his heels.
Not long after, they'd arrived in the corridor where the passageway was located, and slipped in – not a moment too soon, for, unbeknown to them Filch walked around the corner even as they slipped inside and closed the mirror behind them.
Harry and Sirius walked deep into the tunnel, Harry following his godfather in the form of a large red dog. He didn't know where they were going, but he was certain that Sirius wouldn't get lost – he was, after all, a Marauder.
Finally, Sirius stopped moving and, to Harry's surprise, changed form. "There's a second secret passage that leads off of this one," Sirius explained. "It leads to a Door of Desires."
"Door of Desires?" Harry repeated doubtfully.
"It's a door that takes you anywhere you want to go inside a specific building," Sirius explained. "You can only access it from here though … It does make a handy escape if you ever need one when Filch is chasing you though!"
Harry nodded. "I can see that," he replied. "A bit out of the way, but you can get where you want to be pretty quickly once you're here. How do you get in though, I don't think its on the map."
"It isn't," Sirius agreed. "That's because it's off the maps boundaries, and we didn't discover it until our second year anyway. The password is erised."
"Erised?" Harry repeated.
"Desire backwards – your father and I were coming back from Hogsmeade –an illegal visit, of course- during a phase when we were playing with turning words backwards. Just as we walked by, your father said … What was it? Oh! Yes, that's right! Snave ylil erised I, or, I desire Lily Evans – it was just before she accepted his invitation for a date," Sirius replied. "Of course, the doorway opened, and we were pretty ecstatic about it, especially when we found the Door of Desires!"
"I can imagine," Harry laughed. "Since it gave you access to every single place in all of Hogwarts."
"Exactly! Any place that has a door, anyway," Sirius replied. "There's a lot to be said for Doors of Desires, but they do have their drawbacks."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, it'll lead through any door, but it can't take you to, say, the passage you get at through that humpbacked witches hump," Sirius replied, "because it's not actually a door."
"What about the kitchens?" Harry asked.
"Oddly enough, you can get into them, and anything that requires a password and a picture frame, as long as you know the password. You can get into any of the commons rooms, except for the Ravenclaw one, because you get into that by the base of a statue, again, not a door, or a portrait."
"The Slytherins?"
"Yeah, you can get into those," Sirius replied. "It's a wall that turns into a door. The Door of Desires works strangely – they can be changed a little depending on what they want – a door that wasn't changed at all would take us anywhere at all, through just about any door-like opening, but this has obviously been charmed to emit certain places… Probably by the Founders themselves."
"How often did you use it?" Harry asked.
"Once we'd found it? Every time we had to come back from Hogsmeade in the dead of the night," Sirius answered with a laugh, and waved Harry into a room.
Harry was amazed.
The room, unlike the passage that led to it, was so bright it was almost painful to his eyes, which were used to the gloom of the passageway. There was a high, vaulted ceiling, and the inside of the room was made of wood.
The floor was tiled in white, but in the groves between the separated tiles was gold. Torches shone brightly around the circular room, illuminating everything.
In the very centre of the floor were two monolithic towers of stone. Suspended between them was a white beam, from floor to ceiling. "You have to put your hand into the beam and tell it where you want to go," Sirius told Harry softly. "Then it changed into a door and you can open it and walk to where you wanted to be."
"Cool! I can get back to the Gryffindor tower without having to worry about being seen!" Harry said, sounding very enthusiastic.
Sirius laughed softly. "Quite. Wanna try it?"
Harry nodded and smiled. He stepped up to the white beam and placed his hand within. 'Destination?' a voice whispered in his mind, not unlike that of the Sorting Hat.
"First year boys dormitory, Gryffindor tower," Harry replied firmly.
'Remove your hand,' Harry did so quickly, and the beam of white light shifted into a wooden door with a dull metal handle.
"Go through," Sirius urged. "I'll join you shortly."
Harry put his hand on the metal door handle and turned it. To his delight, it worked just as Sirius had said – there was the boys dormitory, and there wasn't anyone there. He walked through and closed the door gently behind him, going over to his bed and sitting on it as he waited for his godfather to arrive.
It wasn't long before a large black dog slipped through the doorway, and nudged it closed with his nose.
Over the next two weeks, Harry became almost-friends with Fred and George. He didn't hang out with them in public at all, but they greeted each other when they met in the hallway, and often met at odd places around Hogwarts after-hours to plan or talk about pranks.
He also allowed himself to become sort of friends with Hermione and Neville, to the extent of occasionally deigning to sit beside them at a meal, and often sitting near them in classes.
He rarely ever spoke to them, but he noticed that they were becoming closer friends as time went on. He was happy for them – maybe they would stop bugging him to be their friend if they were friends with each other … But he doubted it.
That Friday, in Potions, Harry found himself paired with Hermione, and sitting near the front of the class – he didn't mind though. He, Fred, George and Lee Jordan (the Twin's friend) had planned a huge prank for this period, knowing that Harry would be having his class there.
He hadn't let slip that he could do limited amounts of Wandless magic yet, so the Twins thought that he would have to use his wand to trigger the spell, thus placing him under Snape's scrutiny, but Harry knew that he could get away with it … If he timed it right. He waited until Snape had gone around the room and found something to criticize with every one of the Gryffindors … Except for Harry and Hermione, who he ignored completely.
Harry watched as Snape came up to the front desk and settled down to grade papers – he was fairly certain that most of the people were getting F's, or A+. He was also fairly certain that all of the people except for the Slytherins were getting F's.
When Snape looked up from his grading and focused his attention on Harry and Hermione, who sitting quietly and watching their potion until it was time to add something new, Harry looked up, pretending to the check the board with an innocently concentrating expression on his face. His wand was lying on the desk beside him, clearly not in his hands.
At the back of the class, and explosion occurred.
Behind the Slytherin desks and cauldrons, a bundle –carefully planted by Fred and George the class before- was touched by an explosion spell. It contained many things, but mostly some carefully extracted and re-charmed powder from the Filibuster Fireworks, that would still explode, but they wouldn't do the forming huge whizzing balls and things … Just fizz and spark and fly around the room manically.
The Slytherins screamed as the sparks darted around them, flicking close to, but never actually touching, the students.
Fred and George had been all for allowing the hot bright sparks to touch people, but Harry had said – very firmly – no. After all, what if the sparks went near a Gryffindor? In the end, Fred and George had agreed.
The class was in an uproar and Snape was striding around, waving his wand and muttering, as he tried to get the sparks to stop. Instead he just spread them so that they were hovering around the Gryffindors.
Harry watched the sparks at play delight – they looked very pretty.
Just as Snape was about to order everyone from the room, the sparks swirled together in a huge cloud near the top of the classroom, covering every inch of the available ceiling space, then stopped moving and drifted downwards.
All of the sparks turned from multi-coloured to pale, delicate blue, and the class watched them drifting down with wary expressions.
Everyone ducked downwards as the sparks reached head-height, but Neville was a little too slow, as was Harry, and the blue sparks settled over their hair and shoulders and sparkled.
Harry felt the sparks caressing his cheeks as they fell, and laughed softly because they were cool in the warm air of the potions classroom.
Everyone else was suddenly standing up, and the sparks were settling on them. Harry grinned quietly to himself – the prank wasn't over yet. The sparks all slid aside to avoid the potions, and settled more heavily upon the students.
With an annoyed motion Snape swiped at the blue sparks that had settled on his arm. They didn't move at all. Harry's eyes danced with mischief as more people tried to swipe the sparks away … It didn't work for them either.
Snape took his wand from a pocket, and tried to remove them with a spell. Harry had difficulty containing a smile, for the only thing that happened was that the sparks turned a brilliant shade of bubblegum pink.
"Dismissed," Snape hissed at the students, who were all too happy to leave the stifling dungeons (and Snape's bad temper) behind as swiftly as possible.
Out in the corridor, most of them burst into laughter.
Harry easily avoided everyone else and slipped away into one of the secret passageways, Sirius hard on his heels. Soon enough he was within the secret passageway behind the mirror.
Fred and George were waiting for him there. "Did it work?" George asked, eyes dancing, noticing the blue sparks on Harry's head and shoulders.
"Yup – Snape tried to curse them off," Harry replied, laughing. "He looks weird with little pink sparkly things all over him!"
"We don't have him till Monday, thank god," Fred chuckled. "He'll not be in such a temper by then, hopefully."
"The sparks won't go away until next Friday," Harry pointed out. "So he still could be a little peeved."
"Well, hopefully we'll survive. He can't blame this one on us, even if we did do it," George replied firmly.
"I'll meet you back here after Quidditch practice?" Harry asked. "And discuss our next prank?"
"You're on!" The Twins grinned, and hurried away.
Harry smiled faintly, the mischievous gleam still in his eyes, as he too headed on his way.
***
Well, I know it's been FOREVER since I updated, but look, this time I managed a DOUBLE update! Does that make up for it a LITTLE bit? I HAVE had two or three tests per week for the past month or so, plus homework, so I haven't had THAT much time.
Thanks:
Athenakitty, Lord Nomad, Destined Enchantress, Peak of Triumph, Wren Truesong, Musicstarlover, hp4all, MikiBaby, TopQuark, solar, SlytherinSupreme, Kemenran, jbfritz, Nphipps, Jeanne2, Samara-Morgan-101, Jeni Black, torifire126, Songbreeze Swifteye, draconisdagger2000, shdurrani, Dumbledore's Heir, Schnuff, BlahMiesteR, howling wolf1, Taka ichijouji, JeanieBeanie33, LostWriter08, ananova, azntgr01, Empress Sarah-sama, Prongs4, Draken Smythe, Wynjara, Butler, Jaded Angel8, walker-of-the-shadow-path, Mike Potter 2002, Lil Ole Me 97, munch, FroBoy, Fire Tempest, Fire Tempest, gaul1, BlindJedi, gaia, Nasser Himura, Silver Scale Serpent, Raven Potter Weasley, ritratitsussies, kraeg001, kraeg001, slayer faith, Cyblade Silver, Lady Shoibhan, steve, Quick Mettle, Angel, Prd2bAmerican18, dweem-angel, MagicalHorseGurl, wi11ow, jeangab057, Starlight Dreams, Fate, joe, Stix-the-Rebel, Caitlin, Lil' Moony and Lil' Padfoot, ColdFlameX, stanon_rox, cocopops, jeklsmom, eav, EmeraldKatsEye, Prongsblacks, Sierra-Falls, Star Mage1, Heather, Wytil, Dakana Warrior, AnimeGurl, P. D. Yerf.
Hp4all – For point 1 – No idea how Hagrid does the defrosting broom tails thing, but J.K. was the one that first said it, so try asking her. The Flint thing – hadn't heard it, sorry, otherwise I would have changed it.