Chapter 9 – Fun and Games
The next morning Harry found waking up in the dorms to be a bit awkward given the argument the night before, but since it was Draco's fault, he felt justified in not talking to the other boy. Lessons would have helped, but in light of the incidents the previous night, Dumbledore had cancelled lessons for the day, so Harry was left without anything structured to do. He didn't want to spend the entire day pointedly ignoring Draco in the Common Room, but he would if he had to, since it was all Draco's fault for being awful.
But not too long after breakfast Tracey invited Harry to go play in the cellars with some of the Hufflepuffs, so he didn't have to linger in the Common Room with the others. It wouldn't have been so bad if Blaise hadn't completely disappeared, but he had, and Theodore seemed glued to Draco, so in all Harry was glad to get away.
As the pair walked through the dungeons in search of their Hufflepuff friends, Harry caught snatches of whispered conversations whose speakers he couldn't actually see.
"…so hungry…"
"…lonely… so alone…"
"Did you hear that?" he asked Tracey in a low whisper. "I can hear someone talking…"
Tracey shook her head.
"I didn't hear anything, but maybe it's the Hufflepuffs? They should be around here…"
"Yeah, maybe," said Harry, although he didn't feel especially sure given the content he'd overheard.
He worried about just which Hufflepuffs would be there until Tracey managed to find them, and he saw that they included Ernie, which made him feel a bit better. At least Ernie wasn't prone to bouts of sudden nastiness. He had brought with him another boy from Hufflepuff whose name Harry couldn't recall, and a girl he thought might be called Susan. They seemed friendly enough.
"Millie's a bit late," said Tracey when they reached the right alcove, "but she is coming."
"I brought some games," said Ernie. "But Millie was supposed to bring Oraclue, so I didn't fetch it with me."
"And I brought my Gobstones set and some spares in case we want to play," said the girl. "I'm Susan," she said. "We haven't met properly yet but we've got Charms together!"
"Nice to meet you," said Harry.
"I'm Justin," said the other boy. "Finch-Fletchley. I'm in Charms with you as well."
"What games did you bring?" asked Tracey. "I'm Tracey," she added, almost as an afterthought, as she looked over the stack of games Ernie had brought. "Ooh, you brought Hungry, Hungry Hippogriffs! I love that one."
"He brought Labyrinth as well," said Susan. "I know it's a bit long but we do have all day."
"I don't know what any of these games are about," said Justin. "I'm used to, well, you know, Monopoly, or Cluedo… I have seen wizard chess, though."
"Me neither," admitted Harry. "Whenever we played Monopoly at home, my cousin always made me pick the shoe. But all of these games are new to me..."
He sat down on the floor opposite Ernie, and leaned over to look at the boxes of games. Just like Muggle board games, the boxes were printed in bright colours with pictures, but unlike Muggle board games, the pictures moved. One of the boxes kept trying to sing an advertising jingle at them, but whether through age or some other means, it came out muddled up and almost inaudible.
"What's Tombs & Treasures?" asked Harry. The box art included a pyramid and a blinking sphinx, with a mummy shambling across a desert.
"It's a bit long—I only brought it because Millie likes it," said Ernie. He shrugged. "But we can give it a go if you want to. You have to explore these old Egyptian tombs and find the treasure. It uses this charm to make infinite variations of tombs which is quite cool I suppose because it's never the same tomb twice... I prefer Oraclue though; the visions are really fun!"
"That is clever," said Justin. "I don't think you'd get that in any Muggle game. On a computer, maybe? I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised, this is the magical world after all. You know, I was so shocked to get my letter; I was already at Eton! But I just couldn't say no, you understand."
Harry took another look at Justin. He had a vague idea that Eton was that fancy school where very rich and well-connected people went – Harry knew that it had fees many times in excess of what Smeltings charged, and had the reputation to match. If Justin had been in attendance there, his family must have had some serious money.
"I get what you mean," Harry said. "Although I was just at my local comprehensive. I'm really glad to be here instead!" Harry had only thought about Stonewall High a few times since arriving at Hogwarts. He missed his friends but there was so much going on at Hogwarts, and so many new people, that he hadn't given them that much thought at all. His Muggle life felt at times almost like a half-remembered dream.
He had a brief twinge of guilt at the realisation, but it soon passed. After all, he had a magic wand! He could fly! That was way better chemistry and maths, even if he had had to leave his Muggle friends behind. And it's not like they had really gone anywhere, so he could still see them in the summer...
Before anyone else could say anything, Millicent came skidding around the corner slightly out of breath.
"Sorry I'm late! Couldn't find Oraclue… Mum packed it shrunk, and then I had to ask a prefect to unshrink it for me. It's here though." She sat on the floor next to Tracey and placed a large rectangular box onto the pile of board games. "And I brought my gobstones as well, just in case."
"I thought we could start with Hungry, Hungry Hippogriffs," said Ernie, "ease into it a bit, then move on to Oraclue if we're all game?"
"I don't mind," said Harry. Truthfully, he was curious to play all of the games—except maybe gobstones, which he'd already grown bored of – so he felt happy to go along with the group.
"That's a good idea," said Susan. "Oh, we'll have to extend the board since there's six of us… does the charm still work, Ernie?"
"Oh, bother," said Ernie. He pulled open the box. "I reckon it should, but you know how these games get after a while… let me just set it up."
Ernie set up the board, and then tapped his wand against it. It elongated, and he repeated the process with two of the pieces that it came with – some sort of animal Harry didn't recognise but which looked like a cross between a horse and a bird. Ernie passed each of them what looked like a toy wand, then started placing coloured balls onto various parts of the board.
"You control your hippogriff with the toy wand," he said absently. "You'll get the hang of it, it's easy," he explained to Harry and Justin. "When we start the game the balls all start flying, see, and then we want the hippogriffs to eat them. Whoever eats the most balls wins."
"The scores pop up in the air so it's all easy and no one can cheat," said Susan.
"How do we make the hippo—griff? How do we make it eat the balls?" asked Justin.
"They do it on their own," said Millicent. "Let's start, it's easy!"
She jabbed her toy wand in the air and her hippogriff rose up until it hovered about a foot above the game board. Harry followed her example and soon the game was well underway. It took him a little while to get the hang of it, but the practise he'd had with the Levitation Charm helped.
The hippogriff ate each ball its mouth came into contact with automatically, which Harry thought was helpful, and after his rocky start he found he was actually quite good at it. Balls danced and twirled through the air over the game board, snatched – or knocked askew – by the floating, chomping hippogriffs.
After a couple of minutes the game was over and smoky numbers showing each player's score popped into place above each hippogriff. Harry grinned when he saw his score was highest – his hippogriff had caught twenty eight balls!
"Nice one, Harry," said Ernie. "Beginner's luck, though, I'll bet!"
"I'll reset the board and burp the hippogriffs," said Susan. She gathered the hippogriffs to her and poked at them with her wand so that they spit up all the balls they had eaten.
"Did you lot hear the rumours this morning?" asked Ernie. "About the trolls?"
"We heard Granger got sent to St Mungo's," said Tracey carefully, "after a horrible accident with the trolls." Harry didn't blame her – he wasn't overly keen to see a repeat of last night's scenes with Draco either. "What did you hear?"
"Tragic," said Justin. "We heard that too, but one of our prefects said—what was it, Ernie? Trolls ruined one of the bathrooms, and Granger was hiding in it, wasn't she?"
Ernie nodded.
"The girls' bathroom where the dungeons turn into the cellars," he explained.
"Why was she there? Does anyone know?" Harry asked. "It's a long way from where the Gryffindors are, isn't it? And on a Sunday, so no lessons..."
Susan glanced around as if checking for someone.
"Well, I don't want to gossip, but I did hear that Granger goes down there to cry sometimes, because the Gryffindors don't like going there, and she's had trouble making friends." Susan shrugged. "That's just what I've heard."
"Oh," said Harry. It made sense, even if it wasn't a nice thing to think about.
"The teachers have fixed the bathrooms by now, of course, but Granger wasn't so lucky," continued Ernie after a few moments of awkward silence after Susan's statement.
"She isn't dead, is she?" asked Harry, shocked. He hadn't thought…
"No, no!" said Susan. "Thank Merlin. But Truman said it must be really serious to get sent to St Mungo's, since Madam Pomfrey is a professional mediwitch and everything. We were really lucky there was that passage, or it could have been one of us…"
"Thank God," said Justin. "It was hard enough getting Mum and Dad to agree on sending me here. If I'd got hurt like that, they'd never let me come back."
"Muggleborn students have to attend an accredited school," said Susan idly as she reset the game board, "and that means Hogwarts or Wandwright's. And you need an invitation to attend Wandwright's so you'd be fine."
"There's a school in Wales you could go to as well," Tracey added, "but you probably don't speak Welsh... so it's just Hogwarts for you!"
Justin frowned at that, but before he could say anything Ernie spoke instead.
"They can fix almost anything at St Mungo's," said Ernie confidently. "She'll be back before the end of the week, I'm sure."
"I heard Filch's office was broken into last night, while everyone else was dealing with the trolls," Susan said. She paused and glanced at Harry. "Stebbins—our one, not the other one—was saying that it could have been Sirius Black."
"Well, I hope not," said Harry. Black, inside Hogwarts? The safest building in Britain, a place where Harry had been assured he would be safe? It wasn't a pleasant thought. Although he did wonder why, of all places, Black should break into the Squib caretaker's office. There were surely many more important places to tackle than that in a place like Hogwarts even if Black hadn't wanted to attack Harry.
"I heard that it wasn't Filch's office that got broken into," Millicent said. "Rowle said—well, not to me, to Shafiq when I was listening—that someone nicked something from Dumbledore's office last night too."
"Really?" asked Tracey. "Do you know what?"
"Nah," said Millicent. "But I reckon they'd keep that secret anyway. Dumbledore's probably got all sorts of weird things in his office."
"But Filch's office was definitely broken into as well," said Susan. "Stebbins said he heard it from Professor Sprout after the prefects' meeting."
"So you think Black hit the caretaker's office, then Dumbledore's?" said Justin. "Busy night for him."
"Or he had someone in the castle helping him, I suppose," reasoned Millicent. "Could be anyone." Then she looked over at Harry. "Er, not to worry you. Sorry. It's probably not..."
"Another game? Or should we switch to Oraclue?" said Ernie quickly.
"Nah," said Millicent, evidently recovered from her little blunder. "Let's play Goblin Wars!"
"Ugh, that's such a boy game!" complained Susan. "Er, no offence," she added after realising just who had suggested it.
"It's this really fun game," said Millicent with a sideways look at Susan, "where you play as different goblin tribes and have to take over all the goblin caves. It needs strategy and quick thinking," she said pointedly. "And the game pieces smash each other to bits! It's like chess but loads better."
"Okay, fine!" said Susan. "We can play, if you want. My little brother and my dad always make me play, so I do know how." She looked around the group. "If everyone else wants to play as well, I mean." She appeared hopeful that someone would object, but nobody did.
"It sounds a bit like this muggle game," said Harry. "It's called Risk. Do you know it, Justin?" It had, in fact, been one of the few games his uncle Vernon actually approved of, and so Harry had spent quite a lot of time playing it with him and Dudley.
Justin nodded.
"I've heard of it," he said. "I don't mind playing."
"Brilliant!" said Millicent. She cleared the other games out of the way and started to set up Goblin Wars. Harry looked at the board—or, rather, boards. Goblin Wars came with several different game boards each featuring a different kind of subterranean environment. Illustrations of animals moved around the board and hid in and around giant mushrooms, and at various points throughout the painted caves were little pictures of outposts and buildings. Between the three game boards Millicent placed a dimly glowing rock.
"Pop!" said Millicent, tapping her wand against each of the three game boards. Some of the illustrations—mostly just the buildings, although a few mushrooms too—popped up off the boards and swelled into three dimensions. "I'm going Toothcrusher Tribe," Millicent said.
"Oh, I'll go Goldgrabber, then," said Ernie.
"I'm Ironblood," said Susan.
"I don't know what any of this means," complained Justin. "Does the Tribe matter?"
"A little bit," said Tracey. "I'm going to go Gemhallow. Each Tribe has a special piece or ability, Toothcrusher has a dragon, Ironblood has a war-unicorn. You know, stuff like that."
"Er, right," said Harry.
"Harry, you should go Silvermist Tribe," said Tracey, "they're good for beginners. They get to place an extra piece every turn. And Justin, you should go Steelsmith, because all their pieces are stronger, so they're good for beginners too."
Millicent launched into a rather quick and overly simplified explanation of the rules – at least in Harry's opinion – and how to play the game, and soon enough the game was underway. The objective was fairly simple – control all the goblin caves – but it was made more complex by the fact that each Tribe could only make a limited number of moves per turn, and only had a restricted number of pieces to place on the board, of which there were several.
The rock in the middle of the game boards started to glow brighter, and words appeared in smoky letters above it.
Harvest +2 mushrooms for an extra unit
"Harvest the mushroom," commanded Millicent, who had declared she would start the game. Harry would have preferred to roll dice to determine who started, but no one seemed keen to argue with Millicent, so he let it go. And as the game didn't appear to have dice at all, he didn't think there was even anything to roll.
One of Millicent's Toothcrusher pieces moved across the game board she shared with Susan and started to harvest one of the mushrooms that had grown out of it. "Mushrooms give our pieces more health," she explained for Harry and Justin's benefit. "And I had the mission, so next turn I can put down two pieces."
"Oh, the crystal gives missions and tasks," explained Ernie, since Millicent had left that out of her hurried recounting of the game and its rules. "You're supposed to do them, but every family has their own rules, see… so sometimes at home, we ignore the missions."
"You can't ignore the missions!" said Millicent.
"The missions are like the whole point!" said Susan.
"Some of the tasks are annoying, though," said Tracey, "so at home, we ignore those ones too."
"Are we playing or are we chatting like old ladies?" asked Millicent. "It's your turn, Susan." Millicent passed a faceted crystal over to Susan, who took it in her hand. The smoky, floating text puffed into a different string of words as Susan took hold of the crystal.
Capture an outpost
"Oh, bother," said Susan. "Okay then, move forward one space, then deploy another piece. This mission always takes ages if you get it first go…"
Susan's piece moved and another hopped up from the spares to join it on the board.
Next came Tracey's turn, and she seemed really pleased by her mission. Harry didn't have too much time to think about it because it was his turn after that, and he felt more worried that he'd do something stupid and look like a berk. He put down his two pieces and followed along with the mission before handing the crystal over to Justin. Harry still didn't really know what he was doing, after all, although it did seem a bit like the Muggle game Risk, albeit with some bells and whistles. The game progressed quite quickly after that as everyone – even Harry and Justin – got into the swing of things.
The game seemed reasonably evenly-matched for a little while as each of the players advanced in order to capture their caves. Harry found that it was quite fun even if he didn't know exactly what to do or why he was doing it.
Before too long Millicent managed to destroy the last of Ernie's game pieces, and Susan had utterly thrashed Tracey. Justin hung on a little longer, although Millicent crushed his last piece as it tried to harvest some mushrooms.
Harry found himself backed into a corner and nearly out of the game, while Millicent and Susan and battled each other for the right to take him out. Susan had deployed her war-unicorn to great effect, cutting off the last of Harry's warriors, but Millicent commanded the Toothcrusher dragon to follow behind her.
"Take your turn, Harry," said Millicent. "Move left, or otherwise Susan wins, and we wouldn't want a Hufflepuff to win, would we?"
"I think you should move right," countered Susan, "because otherwise Millicent will win, and she cheated, so that's not fair."
"I didn't cheat! You're allowed to use the dragon like that. It's not my fault Justin's never played before!"
Harry sat back and ignored the two girls and their argument. Each of them was correct – if he moved right, Millicent would win, and if he moved left, Susan would win. But he wondered if he had a third option, so that whatever he did, it wouldn't automatically mean one of the girls won. He couldn't move backwards, since there was no backwards to move, and moving in either direction would cause him to lose.
Could he somehow hang on, and then maybe even win after the girls took each other out? Harry surveyed the board. He had a mushroom in range of his warrior, and he could place an extra two warriors down after moving his remaining piece.
"Hm," Harry said, thinking.
"If you put down a goblin engineer, you could build a wall with the stone you mined on your last turn," said Tracey. "Then it will take two turns for Susan or Millie to knock it down."
"Don't help him!" shouted Millicent.
"That's not fair!" said Susan.
Harry considered it. Whichever girl decided to attack Harry's wall would leave herself open to attack by the other, and then when it got back around to Harry's turn, he could attack with his own pieces – and the extra ones from his special ability – and maybe win the game that way.
"Alright," he said. "Warrior, wait this turn. Engineer, deploy yourself and another warrior, then build a wall."
Harry leaned back to watch as his engineer got up and walked onto the board along with his second warrior, and then built a wall. Whatever happened afterwards was up to Millicent, whose turn it was next. He passed the crystal over to her.
"Warriors, I want you to split attack Harry's wall and Susan's flank."
"You shouldn't have done that," warned Susan. She glared at Millicent. "You could have come second, but now you'll come third."
The goblin warriors closest to Harry's wall started hacking at it with their weapons, while the others moved to fight with Susan's warriors. Several of them fell to her war-unicorn, but were quickly replaced by her dragon, which took their spot on the game board and swiped at Susan's unicorn for a great deal of damage. It still stood, but bowed its head and moved slowly.
"I still have a healer in play," said Susan smugly as she snatched the game crystal from Millicent. "Healer, fix my unicorn. Unicorn, destroy the dragon, and warriors, follow on behind."
Susan's healer restored her unicorn to full health, and it charged forward to attack Millicent's dragon. The two game pieces fought for nearly a minute until the dragon exploded into hundreds of little pieces, then reformed and slinked off the game board with droopy wings and its tail between its legs. The rest of Susan's goblin warriors swept Millicent's few remaining pieces from the board, then stood still at the end of the turn.
"Here, Harry," said Susan cheerfully. "It's your turn." She passed him the crystal. "Hurry up so I can win, please."
Millicent's dragon hadn't managed to destroy Susan's unicorn, and she still had several of her goblin warriors left. Harry could put down two more warriors with his turn, which would give him five pieces to Susan's four. But with one of those pieces being a war-unicorn – even if it was slightly damaged – Harry didn't think he'd stand a chance.
Still, he had to try.
"Deploy two more warriors and then swarm the war-unicorn," he commanded. "If I'm going down, I'm going down fighting!"
Two more goblin warriors marched onto the game board from his discard pile and as a unit Harry's remaining pieces charged Susan's war-unicorn. It gave a valiant defence – and took out Harry's engineer and two of his warriors as it did so – but eventually fell, smashed into pieces by his warriors' tiny hammers. Their allotted movements used up, Harry's warriors went still.
"Tough luck," said Ernie. "She'll win now, she has too many pieces left."
"She might be unlucky," said Millicent. "Maybe she used up the last of her luck on my dragon."
"That was strategy," protested Susan.
Harry handed the crystal over to Susan, who took it and didn't hesitate to take her turn.
"Deploy another warrior and then kill Harry's goblins," she ordered.
Susan's goblin platoon advanced on Harry's remaining units, his wall already having been taken down in Millicent's failed attack. It took less than a minute for her forces to utterly destroy Harry's last units, and the central crystal glowed with the colours of Susan's Tribe. Smoky letters appeared above it.
Ironblood wins! Long live Ironblood Tribe!
Play again?
"I thought you didn't want to play," said Millicent sourly. "Because it's a boys' game. And then you ended up winning."
"I never said that I didn't know how to play," said Susan. "You just assumed. Dad taught my little brother and he kept winning whenever we played together. And we had to play together a lot because it's one of the only games he likes. So my aunt Amelia taught me the right strategies. She's the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, so she's good at strategy and things like that. We play together when she comes 'round." Susan took a look at her watch. "Oh, bother. It's too late to play Oraclue! This is why I didn't want to play, it takes ages for someone to win!"
"I've always wanted a brother or sister," said Justin wistfully. "It's just me at home. I have an uncle and some cousins, though I daresay that's rather different than a brother. But my uncle does work in government too, the Muggle sort, you know."
"Mum's pregnant," said Millicent, "so I'll get to find out if I like having a brother or sister soon. Hopefully before Christmas so I can meet the new baby before summer!"
"You'll have to bring back pictures!" said Tracey. "Babies are so cute!"
Harry didn't necessarily agree that babies were cute – from his admittedly rather limited experience, they cried a lot and smelled like poo. But he supposed they did look better in photographs. He wondered if his parents would have had any other children if – well, if they hadn't been murdered by an insane racist wizard. Harry did have Dudley – and they'd been raised together since they were only just over a year old, so it was practically the same thing as having a brother – but he still felt as if having a brother or a sister, someone he could have looked at and seen himself in, would have been different, perhaps ineffably so. Even better if they'd been magical, too.
But he would never know.
"I've just got a cousin—only one. My uncle doesn't work for the government though, he just sells drills," said Harry in what he hoped was a light-hearted tone of voice.
"What's a drill?" asked Ernie.
Of all the questions Harry was expecting, that wasn't on the list. Of course, he should have realised that the most interesting bit to a pureblood wizard wouldn't be Harry's muggle cousin, or even his aunt or uncle, but instead drills.
"You use them to make holes in walls and pieces of wood and stuff like that," said Harry. He shook his head and grinned. Since becoming a wizard he'd found himself explaining all sorts of mundane things to interested onlookers.
"I've never met my cousins," Susan said quietly, "but I've heard all about them. They died in the war, you see, and their parents did, too," she explained. "I don't mind talking about them. Aunt Amelia says it's—she says it's important to keep their memory alive, even if I've never met them."
"Quite right," said Ernie. "That's what Dad always says, too. His brother—my uncle—died in the Hogsmeade Massacre. Left a family behind. We light a candle on Remembrance Day for him. I wish I could have known him though—he played Chaser for the Montrose Magpies, you know."
"I should have had an older brother," said Tracey. "But he died in the war—Mam was hurt in the Diagon Alley attack—you know, that big one near the end of the war? And she lost the baby. They don't talk about it much but Nan said I should know before…"
Everyone nodded. It seemed like they all had some sort of story, some shared experience, of the war that went almost without saying. Harry supposed he had that, too, only his was written about history books and discussed in whispers whenever he entered a room.
He didn't know what to say. His parents had died in the war, but everyone already knew that – even people he'd never met and would never meet. What could he say? He'd never met his parents, and nobody in Slytherin ever mentioned the war if they could help it, so it wasn't as if he'd had any practise talking about it. Even Tracey and Millicent looked a bit awkward, although Tracey hadn't said much and Millicent nothing at all. He even had the spectre of Sirius Black, Voldemort's right-hand man and the man who had betrayed his parents, looming over him, newly escaped from prison and looking to cause havoc.
Harry sat there in silence, mulling over events years past, a churning, roiling sensation in his stomach. He wished... He wished a lot of things, chief among them that Voldemort had never existed, but knew none of them would ever come true.
"That war was a rather big deal, wasn't it?" said Justin after a few moments of silence. "I knew it was serious—it's a war and all—but it always seemed like something that was done and gone, you know? But it isn't, is it? When McGonagall turned up and explained everything, she made it sound as if it was all over, done and dusted, just a footnote for history boffins. Barely mentioned it at all, really. But it's still here—even… well." He glanced at Harry quickly.
"I didn't get it when I read about it, you know," Justin continued. "How could a baby stop a war? Preposterous. But everyone here has a story about the fighting even though we were all too young to remember it, and most of them end with something like, 'Thank Merlin for Harry Potter'. It's a lot to put on a chap, I'll tell you that for free. I think they forget sometimes that it wasn't all roses for you, Harry. The 'Boy-Who-Lived', because everyone else died. I'm happy to be here, wouldn't change it for the world, but I'm not happy how it all came about."
There was silence for an agonisingly long length of time until Harry felt like he should say something.
"Er, thanks, Justin," said Harry. No one had ever said anything like that to him before – thank you, yes, and even before he'd known about magic or Voldemort that had happened, but never an understanding that what was an unquestionably good event for most wizards was the end of Harry's whole world, and the beginning of a life that should never have been. "I mean it."
"We should go get ready for lunch," said Millicent, looking at her watch.
"That last game did go on a bit, didn't it?" said Ernie. "Well, we should get going as well. See you tomorrow in Charms?"
"Yeah—yeah, of course," said Harry. "See you all later."
"It was lovely to properly meet you both," said Tracey. "Let's do this again! And soon!"
After saying their goodbyes the Hufflepuffs and Slytherins parted ways and went back to their own Common Rooms to get ready for lunch. Harry was quieter than normal as they made their way back, his head full of thoughts about what the others had shared. Nobody had exactly his story – that much had been made quite clear by almost everyone since he entered this strange new world – but he wasn't completely unique in every way, just one in particular.
It made him very glad that Voldemort had died, even if it was just so that nobody else would ever have to go through anything like that again.
Lessons resumed on the Tuesday, although there was no sign at all of Granger returning from the hospital over the rest of the week. Aside from lingering whispers about Sirius Black, the attack on the school – and even Granger's injury – had largely been forgotten by the school and its denizens in favour of more quotidian concerns.
Harry picked at his breakfast the next Saturday morning distractedly. Today he would witness his first ever real Quidditch game, and although he wasn't going to play it in himself, he felt nervous for the team. He'd sat in on all their practises so far, after all, so he felt personally invested in the team's success—or failure. And next year, despite Draco's own ambitions, Harry would be playing, and he wanted to start playing for a decent team.
Theodore nudged Harry gently.
"Look over there," he said. "Granger just got back."
Harry looked up from his breakfast and glanced towards the doors from the Entrance Hall. Hermione Granger, looking a bit tired and dishevelled but otherwise quite well, walked through the doors into the Great Hall accompanied by Professor McGonagall. Silence crept through the Great Hall for a few moments until it slowly erupted into exaggerated whispers and eventually, much louder talking. Although not everyone was talking about Granger, as many were arguing about the upcoming Gryffindor-Slytherin Quidditch match and some were as always gossiping about Sirius Black, some were, which Harry knew because he could hear them.
"Maybe she'll settle down a bit more, uppity little snit," sniggered Pansy from across the table.
"At least it wasn't one of ours," said Victoria Runcorn.
Most of the older students were uninterested in Granger's sudden return to school, especially the Quidditch boys, who had broken out into a pre-game set of chants and grunts.
"Who's gonna win? SLYTHERIN!"
"Lions gonna lose!"
"Who's gonna win? SLYTHERIN!"
"HISSSSSSS!"
Pregame hype session finished with, the Slytherin Quidditch team and their hangers on left the Great Hall to a chorus of applause and cheers from the Slytherins, and boos from the Gryffindors.
"She looks alright, doesn't she?" said Harry after the Quidditch boys had left. "I was expecting—well, you know, trolls, and it's been nearly a week..."
"St Mungo's is really good," said Theodore. He shrugged. "I'm more surprised it took until today to fix her up, but maybe they kept her in just to make sure… I do wonder what she had to have done, though." Theodore craned his neck out to have a better look, then gave up when it didn't improve his view.
"Come on! Eat up, Harry," said Tracey. "We'll have to go soon if you want good seats, and I know you're excited for the first game of the season! So let's go!"
Harry grinned and nodded, and forced a few more bites of his breakfast down. Once everyone had finished breakfast and was ready to go, Harry and his friends headed out of the Great Hall with the rest of the Slytherins to watch the Quidditch match.
After the fiasco at Hallowe'en, and the rumoured infiltration of the castle by Sirius Black, even more Aurors had been posted at key points all over the grounds. Harry thought most of the Aurors in the entire country were now posted at Hogwarts and in Hogsmeade. As well as the two Aurors guarding the main entrance to the castle, Aurors stood in twos along the path to the Quidditch stadium, and a number of them had been posted and seeded throughout the stands.
As an extra safety precaution, another Auror had been posted at the Entrance Hall doors with an array of Dark detection artefacts and scanned each of the students and members of staff as they left the castle. Dumbledore had told the school that most of the Aurors would be attending the match in order to protect the students, so Harry felt safe enough sat in the stands – and with so many people there, even if Black was mad enough to attack, it would take him ages to actually find Harry.
Despite Tracey's insistence that the first years get to the Quidditch stadium quickly so that they could get good seats, it appeared that all the first years were relegated to the worst seats on offer anyway – the older students didn't want to sit in them either, and shooed away any first years with the temerity to attempt to sit somewhere nice. Harry and his friends squeezed in as far away from some of the teachers as they could get without infringing on the upper years' invisible wall of personal space that they enforced quite zealously.
The match got off to a great start, with one of the Gryffindor boys commentating, accompanied by stern remonstrations from Professor McGonagall whenever he said anything particularly off-colour. Harry tried to identify the various different plays used by each of the teams, based on what he had been taught already by Flint, but it was difficult because none of them quite matched up to what he had learned. Still, he could manage to recognise some of them, and he pointed them out happily to Theodore and Tracey whenever he did so.
"See, that one's the Backwards Reverse Takahashi Roll," Harry said, although he didn't think anyone was really listening, "but Pucey didn't do it properly, so it's more like a Takahashi Slide…"
"The Weasleys just did a… well I forgot what it's called but it's a special Beater technique, I think it's a something Bash?" Harry pointed out to a disinterested Tracey and Theodore. "You're supposed to use those whenever the opposing Seeker is going for the Snitch, and they did it really well to be fair to them."
When the Slytherin team scored its first goal Harry forgot which technique the Chasers had used and instead cheered along with everyone else.
"And Slytherin scores!" shouted the Gryffindor commentator – something Jordan, Harry thought he was called. "Bunch of bloody cheaters—sorry, Professor!"
The Slytherins in the crowd booed, Harry included, but the game quickly moved on. Neither Seeker appeared to have seen the Snitch yet, although Harry thought he saw it – briefly – lurking near the Gryffindor goalposts. It wasn't so odd for neither Seeker to have seen the Snitch yet as Snitches were known to be temperamental and some Quidditch matches lasted weeks on end, though not usually the Hogwarts Quidditch matches. Harry idly wondered if they had specially enchanted Snitches to keep matches running over a certain length, but he lost the thought when the Gryffindors scored a goal and the crowd cheered.
"I wonder where Professor Snape is," said Tracey in between one of Harry's explanations of the techniques used by the players. "Oh, and Professor Quirrell! I think they're the only teachers not here today."
"What about that one who lives in the tower, you know, the mad Divination professor?" asked Theodore. "I don't see her here. Her apprentice is though – he's over there with Miss Root."
"But she never goes to anything, not even dinner," said Tracey. "So she doesn't count. Look, Mr Shafiq is here all on his own! I wonder why he's not sitting with anyone."
Harry shook his head. His friends were missing the match to talk about where the teachers were, and what they were doing, of all the possible things! Who cared where Professor Snape was? Or Professor Quirrell – it was probably something utterly revolting, or terminally boring, respectively. And the absence of two teachers would surely be more than balanced out by the presence of a whole bunch of Aurors in the event anything bad happened, so Harry felt like it didn't matter.
"Look! There's the Snitch! See it?" said Harry excitedly. "Just there, at the edge of the stands!"
By the time his friends managed to look for it, the Snitch was already gone.
"Oh, you missed it!"
"It's a good job we're not the Seekers," said Blaise drily.
The Slytherin Chasers launched another successful offensive and scored a second goal. With the ball back in play, the Slytherin team continued to dominate the game, scoring another three goals in quick succession.
"The Gryffindors are looking to end the game, see," said Harry, pointing to the Gryffindor Seeker, "but their Seeker isn't very good, so they probably won't catch the Snitch."
"Who've they got playing, anyway? It's a new one this year, isn't it?" asked Blaise.
Harry shrugged.
"Dunno. Flint said he's a second year, so must be new. Darvey? Jarvis? Jones? I can't remember," he replied. "Higgs is better, anyway, and Higgs is the weakest player on our team, so…"
"A fantastic block by Weasley—er, George, not Fred—and a beautiful pass from Johnson to Spinnet—and that's a goal! Yes! Take that, you Slytherin ba—" shouted the commentator.
"Mr Jordan!" shouted Professor McGonagall into the microphone. "That's quite enough!"
After Jordan's outburst Professor McGonagall took over the commentary, but ended up getting quite annoyed herself as the Slytherin team scored another seven goals to Gryffindor's single success.
The Slytherin section of the stands grew louder and more boisterous with every successive goal, although the boos from the Gryffindors came quite close to the level of noise.
Harry glimpsed a snatch of gold near the edge of the Gryffindor goals, and quite close to where both Higgs and the Gryffindor Seeker were circling each other.
Neither of them noticed it.
"I can't believe they're missing it!" he shouted. "It's right there! If we end the game now, we're twelve to one!"
Then, after what seemed to Harry like an entire lifetime, Higgs looked up, and shot off in pursuit of the tiny little golden ball.
"Mr Higgs veers off in pursuit of the Snitch," said Professor McGonagall, her tone resigned and nearly flat as if she knew how it would end, "followed closely by young Mr Dovey. Mr Dovey is brand-new this year, a promising young player but still new to the game, and yet he's close on the tail of Mr Higgs."
Harry knew that Higgs had a quite nice and modern broom, but not the best. An earlier Nimbus, perhaps, and it looked like Dovey had a pretty good broom too, as he managed to keep pace with Higgs during the chase.
"I reckon it's going to come down to skill," said Harry. "Yeah—look! Look! Higgs is about to grab the Snitch!"
Higgs just about managed to edge past Dovey to catch the Snitch to a roaring applause from the Slytherins in the stands.
"Mr Higgs catches the Snitch, and Slytherin wins the match," said Professor McGonagall eventually, with rather less enthusiasm than she had started her commentary. "At 270 points to 10, the Slytherin House team wins the first match of the season against Gryffindor."
"That was brilliant!" said Harry breathlessly. "I mean, Higgs made loads of mistakes, and I bet Flint will really go at him in the changing rooms, but—I can't wait to play myself!"
"Glad you enjoyed," said Blaise. "Me, I'm looking forward to the after party in the Common Room! Come on, let's get back."
Harry and the others joined the mass of students exiting the stands on the way back to the Common Room, and even joined in with the victory chants started by the older students as they marched along the pathway to the castle, watched over by professors and Aurors both. Harry felt buoyed by his first match, and resolved to get good enough to win a place on the team.
