Chapter 3 - Let's all hate the Gryffindors!

"There, look."

"Where?"

"Between the kid with the pale face and the kid with the shifty eyes."

"Wearing the glasses?"

"Did you see his face?"

"Did you see his scar?"

Whispers followed Harry from the moment he left his dorm the next day. People queuing outside classrooms stood on tiptoe to get a look at him or doubled back to pass him in the corridors again, staring. Harry wished they wouldn't, because he was attempting to concentrate on finding his was to classes.

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide sweeping ones; narrow rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step half way up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where things were, as they tended to move around a lot, thoroughly confusing the first years. The portraits kept going to visit one another and the suits of armour could walk.

The Ghosts didn't help much either. It was always a nasty shock when one of them glided through a door you were trying to open. Nearly Headless Nick, the Gryffindor's resident ghost, would help out anyone, so long as they weren't Slytherin (so he was no help to Harry) and the Bloody Baron (Slytherin's ghost) would just help Slytherin's who hadn't annoyed him at some point, or whose parents' hadn't annoyed him, so, again, he didn't help Harry much. But Peeves was worth a locked door and a trick staircase if you met him when you were late for class, though the other houses would probably say it was worse (Peeves didn't annoy the Slytherins too much because he had a massive fear of the Baron, the reason behind it was not known). If you met him when you were late for class he would drop waste paper baskets on your head, pull rugs from under your feet, pelt you with bit of chalk and pieces of screwed up parchment or sneak up to you invisible, grab your nose and screech, 'GOT YOUR CONK!"

Even worse than Peeves, though only just, was the caretaker, Argus Filch. Harry, along with the two first years he was closest to (Draco and Ed) managed to get on his wrong side on their very first morning. Filch had found them trying to force their way through a door which unluckily turned out to be to the out-of-bounds corridor on the third floor. Apparently a couple of Gryffindors had tried to do the same thing a little earlier, and were going to attend a detention that night. Filch wouldn't believe that the three of them were lost, was sure that they were trying to break into the forbidden corridor (and he didn't react too kindly when Ed pointed out that Dumbledore had said that it was only off bounds to those who didn't want to die a painful death) and was threatening all sorts of punishments when they were rescued by stuttering Professor Quirrel, who was passing.

Filch owned a cat, a tabby with bulgy eyes so much like her owner's. She patrolled the corridors alone, and alerted Filch to any rule breakers that she didn't like (fortunately the Slytherins knew that they could bribe her with several dead mice each day that were left just outside the common room each morning) almost instantly. The two of them knew the secret passages of the school better than anyone else in the school (except two Gryffindors, Fred and George Weasley, the elder brothers of the red-headed idiot who had thought that they had to wrestle a troll to be sorted) and could pop up as suddenly as any of the ghosts. The students all hated Filch, and many a student dreamt of giving Mrs Norris a good kick.

Once you got to the class, there was the lesson itself. As Harry soon found out, there was a lot more to magic that waving your wand and saying some Latin.

They had to study the night sky every Wednesday at midnight (which was the only legitimate excuse for being out of your common room after curfew) through their telescopes and learn the names of different starts and the movements of the planets. Three times a week they went out to the greenhouses behind the castle to study Herbology with a short, fat witch named Professor Sprout, where they learned how to take care of all the strange plants and fungi and found out what they were used for. It was easily the most boring subject for Harry.

Harry was probably one of the few students in the school who found Professor Binns', the sole ghost member of the faculty, History of Magic class interesting. For some strange reason he had always found learning about the past interesting, and even though Binns taught the subject in the most boring way possible, nothing could dull the subject too much for him.

Charms, Harry had to admit, was interesting, even if it was taught by a tiny little wizard who fell off his chair the first time he came to Harry's name on the register.

Another class Harry was interested was transfiguration, the art of changing something into something else. Professor McGonagall, the Head of Gryffindor, was extremely strict, though clever too. She gave them a talking-to the moment they had sat down in her first lesson.

"Transfiguration is some of the most complex and dangerous magic you will learn at Hogwarts," she said. "Anyone caught messing around in my class will leave immediately and not come back. You have been warned."

The work she set them too do was to turn a match into a needle. By the end of the lesson only Crabbe and Goyle had managed to make any difference to their matches, but that was because they were charred from where they had set them alight.

The class he hadn't really been looking forwards to was Defence Against the Dark Arts, as he expected it to be a bit of a joke, having a teacher who was scared of his own shadow teach something where they would come across things a whole lot scarier than them. And he was right to think that, because by the time they had finished the class everyone was making snide comments about his turban and stutter.

The first Friday at the school was an important day for the first year Slytherins. They would get to have their first class with the Gryffindors, and it just so happened to be double Potions with their own head of house, Professor Snape, who hated Gryffindors, and greatly favoured Slytherin.

The Potion's lesson itself took place in one of the dungeons. It was colder in the dungeons than anywhere else in the school, including the common room, even though that was in the dungeons, and was really creepy, especially with the pickled animals floating around in glass jars all around the walls.

Snape, like Flitwick, started the class off by taking the register, and when he came to Harry's name, like all of the other professors, except Flitwick, he simply paused. Next came the idiot red-head's name, Ronald Weasley, and here Snape decided to make a remark.

"Weasley? Another one? Is there not enough of you in the school yet?"

Weasley flushed red, the Slythrins snickered behind their hands and Snape continued calling out names then looked back up at the class. His eyes were black, cold and empty, giving Harry the impression that the man had been through a lot in his life. Snape did, like McGonagall, start the lesson off with a speech, and ended it with an insult to them all. One Gryffindor, a bushy haired mudblood, seemed eager to prove that he was wrong. Then Snape started firing random questions at the class, the first of which was aimed at him.

"Potter!" he said suddenly. "What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?"

Harry's forehead creased. All of the Slytherin first years, knowing about Snape's random first lesson questions, had brushed up on their Potion's knowledge.

"The Draught of Living Death," he said, his voice holding far more confidence that he felt. Snape's lip curled at the answer.

"Excellent. Five points to Slytherin. Finnigan!" said Snape, moving onto another student, a Gryffindor. "Where would you look if I asked you to find me a bezoar?"

"I don't know sir," Finnigan looked completely confused. Snape smirked.

"Let's try again. What is the difference, Finnigan, between monkshood and wolfsbane?"

"I don't know sir," said Finnigan, then motioned towards bushy-haired Granger the mudblood who was trying her hardest to get him to notice her. "I think Hermione does though, why don't you try her?"

The Gryffindors laughed. Snape, however, was not in the least amused.

"Sit down!" he snapped at Granger. "For your information, Finnigan, A bezoar can be found in the stomach of a goat and will cure you of most poisons. As for monkshood and wolfsbane, they are part of the same plant, which also goes by the name of aconite. Well? Why aren't you copying any of that down?"

There was a sudden rummaging for quills and parchment. Over the noise, Snape said, "And a point from Gryffindor for your cheek, Finnigan."

Things didn't improve for the Gryffindors the entire lesson, which only provided for more entertainment for the Slytherins. It seemed that Gryffindor had been blessed with an incredibly clumsy boy by the name of Neville Longbottom. Snape swept about criticising everyone except Draco, and, even though he had the distinct feeling Snape didn't like him, Harry. About half an hour after starting to work on a potion to cure boils, Longbottom's cauldron spewed out acid green smoke and a loud hissing sound filled the dungeon. Longbottom had somehow managed to melt Finnigan's cauldron into a twisted blob and their potion was seeping across the stone floor, burning holes in people's shoes. Within seconds, the whole class were standing on their stools, while Longbottom, who had been drenched in the Potion when the cauldron collapsed, moaned in pain as angry red boils sprang up all over his arms and legs.

"Idiot boy!" snarled Snape, clearing the spilled potion away with one wave of his wand. "I suppose you added the porcupine quills before taking it off the fire?"

Longbottom whimpered as boils started to pop up all over his nose.

"Take him to the hospital wing," Snape spat at Finnigan. Then he rounded on Weasley and another boy who had been working next to Neville.

"You two! Weasley! Thomas! Why didn't you tell him not to add the quills? Thought it'd look good if he got it wrong, did you? That's another point you've lost for Gryffindor."

Thomas looked as if he was going to argue over the unfairness of it as Snape turned away, but stopped when Weasley whispered something to him out of the corner of him mouth.

It was needless to say that potion's lesson kept the first year Slytherin's amused for most of the following week. Or, at least it did until they found out some news that could be taken as good or bad, depending on how each individual person took it.

A/N: Another chapter done, what do you think? And yes, I do realise that nothing too different has happened as of yet, but they won't truly start until next chapter, and from there they really start to change. Just about to put this up.. Oh yeah!

Nyoko: Thanks for the review! Yes, Harry and Draco shall be friends, but only after a shaky start.