Harry Potter: How I Met Your Mother
The Team's New Seeker
DISCLAIMER: I do not own Harry Potter, its characters, or its settings. They belong to JK Rowling, Warner Brothers, and Wizarding World. I do claim my original characters: Hands Off!
I am writing this story for my own amusement and ego gratification. I neither expect nor deserve any sort of financial reward for this work of fiction. If you like this story, please write and post a positive review.
This story has no relation to the How I Met Your Mother television program
Harry Potter: How I Met Your Mother* Harry Potter: How I Met Your Mother* Harry Potter: How I Met Your Mother
"The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Let the enemies of the Heir beware!" read Draco Malfoy. "You'll be next, Mudbloods!"
Prat, I thought angrily. I used my size to push some younger students out of the way and saw something dangling from a lantern sconce. I got to see that it was a cat. It looked dead.
We all crowded around the awful sight to get a better look at the writing and to guess whose cat was dangling from the sconces. It didn't take me but a couple of seconds to identify the victim as Mrs. Norris, Argus Filch's pet and the most hated cat at Hogwarts.
Mr. Filch arrived in seconds. "What's going on here? What's going on?" he said. Then he saw that it was his cat dangling from the sconce and his expression turned to horror. "My cat! My cat! What's happened to Mrs. Norris?"
His eyes turned away from Mrs. Norris and towards Harry Potter and the youngest Weasley brother and said You! You've murdered my cat! You've killed her! I'll kill you!" He stepped forward to take vengeance when the Headmaster raised his voice and said "ARGUS!" The Caretaker froze in place.
The Headmaster looked around and said "This has been an attack! Prefects, take your students back to your dormitories!" His eyes fell on Potter, Weasley and your Mum. "—except you three."
The rest of us began walking towards our dormitories while the three Gryffindors stayed behind. I joined the rest of my fellow Slytherins heading for our common room. There we waited, our prefects and our Seventh Years standing grimly and facing the door, wands at the ready. After a while, the prefects sent the First, Second, and Third-Years up to their rooms. The rest of us sat or stood and waited.
It seemed like we waited forever. Eventually, Professor Snape entered the common room and we all felt a sense of relief. Our relief didn't last very long. "Prefects, I want you to go upstairs and bring down the First, Second, and Third Years," he said. "I want them down here in ten minutes. I will address all of you then."
A few minutes later, the sleepy-eyed ickles began streaming into the Common Room dressed in bathrobes and pajamas. It might have been endearing if the circumstances weren't so dire.
"May I have your attention?" said Professor Snape, his eyes roaming around the room, banishing sleep and replacing it with fright as we took note of his tone of voice.
"Earlier this evening, someone petrified Mr. Filch's cat and wrote a message in blood saying that the Chamber of Secrets has been opened. I want whoever did this for whatever reason to know that this is no prank. The headmaster and the faculty of this school regard this as an attack on Hogwarts and its students. Should we discover the identity of the perpetrator of these acts, he or she will be immediately expelled from school and the matter turned over to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Am I clear?"
His eyes roamed around the room, continuing to hold us in thrall. Both the oldest and the youngest students began murmuring "Yes, sir," and their responses began moving around the room. He waited until he was satisfied that we had all gotten the messages, then he sent us off to bed.
I awoke early the next morning wondering about who had attacked Filch's cat, how they'd petrified her, and whether the Chamber of Secrets might exist after all. The other guys were already awake and were talking quietly about the Chamber of Secrets. I decided to enter the conversation and drew back my curtains.
"I'm up," I said.
"You didn't get petrified by the Heir of Slytherin?" said Edgar.
"No, I passed muster so he left me alone," I said.
"Do you think it was an actual attack or was someone pranking us?" said Willys.
"I dunno," I said. "I thought that the Chamber of Secrets was just some old legend somebody thought of ages ago to scare the Firsties."
"Maybe not," said Toole, who usually held himself aloof from our discussion. Toole was a scholarly sort and for the life of me I still don't understand why the Sorting Hat didn't send him to Ravenclaw. "I think there was a row or something about it fifty or sixty years ago."
"So why didn't we hear anything about it?" I asked.
"I don't know," said Toole. "That was when my grandparents were attending Hogwarts. Dippet was Headmaster back then. There was something attacking students, a Muggleborn girl died, then the attacks stopped."
"So why didn't you tell us?" I asked.
Toole shrugged. "I didn't think that it was important. I thought that Dippet or one of the professors took care it."
He didn't think it was important, I thought, rolling my eyes. What else does Dalwyn know about that could save our arses if the legend turned out to be real?
"So should we do anything?" said Willys.
Aside from looking for the Chamber of Secrets myself and disturbing whatever thing was paralyzing students, I couldn't see anything that I could do anything about it. "I dunno," I said. "I think I'm going to get dressed and see how my brother is holding up."
I washed up, dressed, and went downstairs. By luck, Titus was sitting with some friends he'd made and finishing up breakfast. I was pleased to see that they weren't just Claws: he'd made friends in other houses.
"Good morning, Titus!" I said.
"Good morning, Tris," he said. A couple of his friends gave me curious looks.
"Quite a way to end Halloween last night," I said.
"It wasn't funny," said Titus.
"I agree," I said. "Whoever wrote that message on the wall and petrified Filch's cat ought to slung out of school on his arse. What I wanted to know was how you are holding up?"
"I'm all right, I guess," said Titus. He paused, then said "A little scared."
"Don't tell anyone, but we all are," I said.
"You don't think they're going to cancel school, do you?" he said.
"I don't think so," I said. "So far all it's been is writing on the wall and Filch's cat getting paralyzed. Rule-breaking might get a little easier with Mrs. Norris out of play, but don't tell anyone."
Titus smiled, as did some of his table-mates, and I left thinking that he was handling it about as well as anyone.
A lot of us grew interested in the legend of the Chamber of Secrets for the next few days. It wasn't just a Slytherin thing or a Gryffindor thing: I'd say that interest ran across the houses. We, and by that I mean all of us, bombarded our professors with questions about the Chamber of Secrets and whether it had been opened. Their reactions were mixed, but negative. Most of our professors told us that the Chamber was a myth, a couple denied its existence, and a couple, like Professor Snape, promptly squelched any in-class inquiries, informing us that anyone asking questions about the Chamber of Secrets would lose points and face detention. I don't think that his approach squashed interest in the Chamber of Secrets, but it did convince students within and without Slytherin that the Chamber was not a suitable topic of inquiry.
Malfoy claimed to know something. It was tempting, so very tempting, to grab the git by the ankles and dangle him over the edge of one of the staircases until he told us what he knew—or what he said he knew—and had his father not been on the school Board of Governors or a force to be reckoned with in the Ministry, I might have acted on it.
Curiosity about the Chamber of Secrets gradually receded but didn't go away. We had other bright and shiny baubles to distract us: Quidditch. The first game of the season was rapidly approaching: Slytherin versus Gryffindor. There was already speculation as to how the game would go. The consensus within Slytherin was that our house would trounce the Tabbies, thanks to our training, our new brooms, and the fact that Draco Malfoy was proving to be a better flyer than Terrence Higgs.
As game time approached, those of us who weren't on the team trooped to the Quidditch to watch Gryffindor get its comeuppance. We filled the stands, full of enthusiasm and anticipation, and cheered heartily as our Quidditch team flew by.
The game started. At first it seemed that things were going normally. Not that they stayed that way. After twenty minutes later, it started raining. After a while we discovered that just like the year before, someone was using magic to tamper with the game. Whoever it was wasn't interfering with Potter's broom: they'd done something to one of the Bludgers.
"Something's happened to the Bludger," said Carlyle, a Sixth-year who was seating on the row behind us. "It's going after Potter." That caught my attention, Carlyle had little feeling for Gryffindor seekers and if he said a Bludger was wonky, that was something to be concerned about. After all, the Bludgers could start threatening our players. I put my binoculars to my eyes and searched for Potter and the Bludger.
The Bludger had taken an interest in Potter. I watched with concerned as it chased him above and around the Quidditch pitch. Someone ought to do something about it, I thought. Then I saw something small and shiny near our Seeker. Did young Malfoy notice the Snitch? He didn't. Potter noticed the Snitch despite the Bludger. Shortly afterwards the Bludger turned and was in hot pursuit. The Bludger knocked a couple of players off their brooms, then began to tear through the timbers below the stands.
"Jesus!" said "Navy" Anson, a visiting Ravenclaw who was sweet on a Slytherin witch, "that Bludger is dangerous! Someone ought to take it out of the game before it kills somebody!" At the time I thought that Anson was being sentimental, but the sound of the Bludger crashing through the timbers below our stand made me think that he might have a point. Why didn't Hooch or somebody do something? Potter and Malfoy emerged back out onto the pitch and I first saw the Bludger knock Malfoy off his broom, then crash into Potter's outstretched arm. That didn't stop Potter. The little git caught the snitch.
The end of the game did not stop the Snitch from going after Potter. It bounced up and down on the sand several times until someone finally pointed their wands at it and used the Finite Incantatum charm on it and it exploded. I looked down at the ground below with feelings of relief and frustration. We'd lost the game but the killer Bludger had been destroyed.
We slunk back to our dormitories in a sour mood. Not only had the Tabbies won the game, but Malfoy's inattention had lost us a chance to catch the snitch, and someone had interfered by using a bewitched Bludger. If I were to use one word to describe our mindset at dinner that evening, I'd say sullen. I heard later on that Flint gave Malfoy a good bollicking for missing the Snitch. As far as I was concerned he deserved it. I went to bed early that evening, consumed with dark thoughts and still feeling frustration about a win that should have been ours.
It wasn't until the following day that I learned that the little Gryffindor camera bug had been petrified like Filch's cat.
Author's notes: I decided to go with the film version of the Halloween attack, not the book version. It struck me that Professor Dumbledore would have taken the Halloween incident far more seriously than he did in the book.
