Intimidation

On Thursday, Flitwick started them on a new spell set.

"Until the break, we will be continuing practicing with the fire-making charm, but we will also be starting the locking and unlocking charms. These are some of the most basic spells that will have applications in warding theory and other situations for when you are older," their professor introduced them to the subject.

Will raised his hand, "Professor, why do we need to know locking charms if there is an unlocking charm?"

"That is an excellent question and one that is asked every year. Can anyone answer it?"

Hannah raised her hand and was called on, "The unlocking charm requires a wand, so the locking charm is primarily used for keeping young children out of places they shouldn't be in."

"Correct! Three points to Hufflepuff! The most common use for the locking and unlocking charm will be parents who are child-proofing their homes. Accidental magic is more of a brute force spell, it will not overcome a locking spell that requires a very specific counterspell to undo. It is also commonly used to lock animal enclosures of different types, as the spell will work on portals that don't truly have locks; like fences, or gates. It can also be used on almost anything that can open and close including, but not limited to; backpacks, drawers, cabinets, closets, boxes, and jars."

Flitwick levitated a miniature doorframe with a door from behind his desk into the center of the room. The door had a knob but no lock on it. He closed the door and cast, "Colloportus!" There was a squelching sound and a little bit of light glowed around the inside of the door frame.

"Now, despite there being no actual lock on the door, it is sealed. To unseal it, you will need to cast an unlocking spell of the same or greater power. At the end of today's class, each house will take four of these smaller doors back to their common room. I suggest that you trade off and practice your levitation charms to bring them to your common rooms. Three of the doors are enchanted to lock whenever they are closed and are increasingly difficult to unlock, based on their size. The white door in each set is not enchanted, and you can practice locking this one. Next week we will move onto actual locks."

For the rest of their class, they learned the locking and unlocking spells. They weren't that hard in themselves, though the unlocking charm would become more difficult when they needed to open more intricate locks.

Potions started in an unusual fashion. When they arrived in class, there was a book on their desks, of muggle origin - The Sleeping Beauty. The cover had an image of a woman in a blue dress with a particularly looking evil character standing behind her.

Snape entered the classroom in his usual fashion, his robes billowing behind him as if he were bringing a storm with him to the class. He stared down at all the students who were looking at him with curious eyes due to the books.

"The books on your desks are from a muggle children's story about magic. You will read them all for homework and write up instances of what magic in it would be possible and what is impossible."

The rest of the class, they reviewed the Sleeping Potion they had brewed in the last class. When the class finished, everyone produced a potion of sufficient quality to be consumed. Harry and Greg had managed to produce a medical-quality potion along with Luna and Lyra. The medical quality potion ratings were helpful to Harry as he was using his time in the potions club to brew potions to earn back the points he lost for breaking curfew during his attempted duel with Draco. He had already made up all the points, but Cedric had told him to make them up with interest, so he was trying to do at least double.

With less drama going on outside of class and nothing planned until the winter break, Harry threw himself into the Explorer's Club. He really wanted to discover all the secrets of Hogwarts. It had been nearly three months and they hadn't even found everything on the ground floor. Every few steps there was something new or weird about the castle like it was making things up to match their movements.

Colin had opened up the club to other houses and a few Gryffindors had joined, though mostly they just liked looking through what had already been found and recorded in their library and maps. Even if they weren't helping to find anything new, they were doing a good job finding if different elements of the castle moved or changed based on the day or other factors.

They also seemed to be very interested in finding out how to get into the Scamander common room, but the Class One Fish Tale tactic allowed Harry and his housemates to tell them whatever they wanted instead of avoiding the question. Colin was having a good time with it in particular. He roped Neville into doing the "I'm a little teapot" song and dance together while two Gryffindor students watched from the first clearing and then disappeared into the maze the wrong way only to sneak up behind them and take pictures of them trying to do it which he developed for his collection.

Now that Colin had mastered the animated photo potion, he was spending a significant amount of time in the darkroom developing the possibly a thousand pictures he had taken since the beginning of the year. He prioritized the photos he was asked to develop by his Slytherin tutors, who still thought they got the good end of the deal due to the high cost of firebird feather ash on the open market. Harry got as many photos as he could of himself and Lyra, particularly from the night of Dumbledore's birthday. In one of the old classrooms Lyra explored one day, she found an empty leather photo album, so Harry started putting all his photos in there. He made sure to pay Colin for them despite his protests, only taking a discount for the feather ash Lyra was giving him.

On Saturday, Harry had his final detention and his next class on intimidation with Professor Snape. Arriving early, he snuck into the classroom to find it empty. Without Snape around to stop him, he could sit at his desk first to at least show that he could sit there without his teacher's permission. He might not sit in the small chair in front of the desk but this would be a good first step.

Moving as quietly as he could, he snuck up onto the platform and around the desk. He took a quick look at all the jars of preserved limbs and creatures on the walls around the desk and pulled out the chair to sit down. As soon as his rear hit the seat, the seat became scalding hot which caused him to jump back up and scream. As he was checking to make sure his uniform was not on fire, he heard a chuckle from the doorway next to him.

Professor Snape was standing there watching him dance around after sitting in the seat, "It was a good try, I didn't expect you to show up early for detention but my desk always has security precautions to keep students away from it when class is not in session."

"That hurt, how does the chair not catch on fire if it is that hot?" Harry asked.

"Magic," Snape replied. "Sorry, I know that's a horrible answer. It is a curse that causes things that touch the object it is cast on to heat up. So the chair stays the same temperature but things that touch it may catch on fire if they are held against it for a long time. You will not learn such a spell for a few years."

Harry made up his mind right then to learn that spell by the end of the year, then asked his teacher, "So what am I learning today?"

"You're going to learn how to talk to people, the basics of getting what you want. When I want to intimidate someone it is easy because I have a reputation for being evil. Most Slytherins will have that as well just by their nature and by wearing green on their robes. I'm assuming that was the message that Brandt was trying to get across when he gave you that dark green shirt at the party." Harry nodded at the memory.

"Lyra was given a dress with the colors of her house and you were given colors to show you were a bit more mysterious than people would assume. I like to wear black for that same reason, and after years of doing so, people also tend to believe I'm a vampire or other equally ridiculous ideas."

Harry giggled a bit at that which made Snape smirk a little. "So if you are in a situation where you are planning to intimidate someone, you can take three routes with the way you dress. You can go over the top and wear something that looks scary, you can wear something elegant and use subtlety to imply you are dangerous, or you can appear harmless and suddenly do something terrifying. Can you think of examples for any of these?"

Harry thought about it, then replied, "Well for the last one, I think Dumbledore fits that one. He always wears bright clothes and he looks like someone's grandfather… but then he pinned everyone to the floor and carried Vincent out of the Great Hall with one hand. For elegance, I would say Padma and Pavarti's parents. They gave off some kind of energy when they came over to our table at the party that they were above everyone else, but then Uncle Arcturus said something to them about a rug in his house and seemed to take their power from them. The only times I've seen someone deliberately try to be scary have been you and Lyra when she threatened my aunt and Draco, so I don't know about that one."

"Those are good examples, so you understand the idea. You are a child, so it will be difficult for you to do anything except the Dumbledore route. You don't have the sophistication to pull off the path of elegance, as even if you dress nicely, you will still be a child. However, you aren't any child, you are Harry Potter. Despite not wanting to be a celebrity, you are. You have killed a Dark Lord, engaged in a mysterious education before attending Hogwarts, fought against Lucius Malfoy and disfigured him, stabbed the man's son, and dented a bludger. So, intelligent people will think twice before angering you, while less intelligent people try to test you and see if you live up to your legend."

Harry frowned at the description. It was too much for him, but he wanted to find out about the man that betrayed his family and confront Dumbledore for his role in his childhood experiences. He couldn't be too mad with the results as they had brought him to Lyra and his family but he still wanted to know why.

"So I need to remind people that I'm dangerous? Like I do when hitting your snake?"

"That is correct, though most of the time you don't need to hit them. Most of the time you just need to reinforce their own delusions about you."

"Like when you asked Hannah for a cup of blood at the tea shop?"

Snape chuckled, "Exactly like that. So small reminders of your power and history could be just carrying around your staff when you don't need to but are in public. You could also occasionally poke various things with the tip of the staff without doing any harm to them, or pick up a piece of paper from the ground by piercing it just to remind people that it isn't just for show. If you were ever to play as a quidditch beater, you would have a constant reminder to people of your strength."

Harry nodded, everyone seemed to want him to play quidditch for one reason or another.

"All of what we just spoke about are things you do in your daily life, but not with anyone specific. The best advice I can give you is to treat people you want to intimidate with kindness. It sounds like the opposite of what you want to do but if people think you're dangerous, they will believe your kindness is a trick and start looking for the evil plot you are trying to run. Imagine if I took over the detention for Fred and George Weasley and told them they were to report to my office Sunday afternoon for tea and cakes. What would they think?"

Harry laughed a bit and then thought about it. He didn't know them well but their reputation preceded them, as it did with Snape.

"They'd probably show up with their pockets filled with antidotes and bezoars," Harry told his professor.

"Exactly, now while you do have a reputation, if you treat someone nicely, they probably won't be on guard at all until you make demands of what you are after. Have a polite conversation, and talk to them about things they want to talk about. Then slowly steer it towards something you can offer them or what you can take away from them. Once you have dangled the bait, figure out if it is worth trading for whatever you want from them. You may need to give someone a lot for a little in exchange or destroy someone's life for something minor in exchange. It's up to you to decide if the price is worth the action."

Snape watched Harry's reaction to his lesson. He could see the conflict working through his face. He didn't want to stoop to that level, but he was thinking about whatever Arcturus wanted him to do as well as trying to draw some kind of connection to something he had done in the past. Snape could see Harry make up his mind that the cost was worth it for whatever it was he was trying to do.

"Now, you are going to get a practical lesson on getting information out of someone. Go ahead and start scrubbing out the cauldrons over by the sink and the lesson will start soon," Snape instructed Harry.

Harry wasn't sure how scrubbing cauldrons was supposed to help him with the lesson but did as he was told. When he was halfway through his first pot, there was a knock on the door.

"Enter!" Snape called out from his desk.

An older boy in Slytherin robes entered the room. He gave a glance over towards Harry at the sinks before walking over to the professor's desk and standing straight with his arms clasped behind his back. Snape let him stand there for a minute in silence, and just as the boy started to fidget with his fingers behind his back, Snape started to speak.

"Mr. Bletchley, tell me, what is the third rule of the house?" Severus asked.

"Don't get caught," he replied, standing stiffly again.

"And why are you here right now?" Severus heavily leaned on the 'why' in his question.

There was a pause, Harry started scrubbing the dishes again as he listened.

"Rule number ten," the boy responded.

"As long as you know. You will be scrubbing cauldrons with Mr. Potter today. I am going to go check on Mr. Malfoy in his detention and make sure Filch isn't abusing him and Mr. Crabbe too much. When I return, I expect all of the stacked cauldrons to be spotless." With that said, he stood up and walked out of the room.

The boy looked over towards Harry, then walked over to the sink next to him and rolled up his sleeves to start working. They each had ten cauldrons to wash out and they didn't know when Professor Snape would be returning so they worked as quickly as they could.

Harry finished his first cauldron but realized that the drying rack was on the other side of the room. While it wasn't too heavy, he thought if there was any other approach he could use for the situation. He had been trying to think of a way to use his staff for the cleaning, but shielding and bursts of magic really didn't do much on cauldrons. Laughing at himself for his next idea, he pulled out his staff and tapped his finished cauldron while upside down, freezing it in place to dry.

The other boy stared at him while he handled his staff and worked his magic. Just as Harry was about to start working again, the boy asked, "So, what the bloody hell is that thing anyway?"

Harry stared at the boy's outburst of a question, he decided to attempt the second path of intimidation that Snape had told him was not possible for him at his age. He could do sophistication, if he wanted, just because he was raised on an island in the middle of nowhere by the Hidden didn't mean he couldn't be civilized.

"I don't know where you come from," Harry started, "but it would be polite to introduce yourself before asking such a personal question."

The boy looked a bit guilty, then straightened his robes and dried off his hands, "My apologies, Mr. Potter. My name is Miles Bletchley, Third Year Student, Keeper for the Slytherin Quidditch Team." He extended his hand to Harry.

"Your apology is accepted Mr. Blechley. Harry Potter, First Year Student, and The Boy-Who-Bludgeoned," he smiled a bit as he shook the boy's hand.

"You don't like your other nickname?" Miles asked him. They turned back to keep working on their scrubbing.

"I don't really know what happened, and it is the night my parents died, I'd prefer to be known by more fun things," Harry said with a bit of a grimace. "Even if I killed some Dark Lord, I'd prefer to know I could do it again if I wanted to, like when I had a bounce duel with an auror over the summer," Harry added, reminded of the incident with Lyra's warming spell.

"A bounce duel?" Miles asked with curiosity.

"Is it not something people do?" Harry asked. "Alastor Moody set it up to see what I can do with my staff. I ended up launching an auror across a room that had been charmed so we would bounce off the walls if we struck them."

Miles alternated between looking scared and impressed, then asked, "May I ask what your staff is made of?"

Harry debated it for a moment before deciding to tell him while giving as little information as possible. "People know I was away for my preliminary education, right?" Miles nodded. "There were a lot of magical creatures where I was, some that don't even have names. The staff is made from one of the local trees and covered with the shed of a large magical snake from the region which was very difficult to retrieve. The antler is from a large magical deer, I also didn't know the name of it when I collected it. My tutor called it something in his native language, but it sounded like grunts to me."

"That's pretty cool," Miles said while staring at it leaning up against the wall. The two of them scrubbed their cauldrons until Miles finished his first one and asked Harry to freeze his upside down too. Harry just raised an eyebrow at the boy and let him start to walk away to the drying rack before calling him back to perform the magic.

"So you're on the quidditch team?" Harry asked and Miles nodded. "People keep asking me to play but I don't feel right hurting people in a game. Games should be fun, they shouldn't hurt people."

"So I've heard, 'Pain is for your enemies, not your friends,' right?" Harry had heard people repeating the quote that he had said after the last quidditch game. "Excuse me for asking, but does that mean you feel fine about the pain you caused Mr. Malfoy?"

"Which Mr. Malfoy?" Harry asked, remembering the incident in St. Mungos. "Both of them attacked me, both were my enemies in those moments. I wouldn't feel bad about hitting a bludger because it is trying to hit me, and I have no problem hurting someone who is threatening me or my family. I told Draco what he needs to do to avoid being my enemy in the future but he seems determined to repeat his mistakes," Harry had turned his tone to deadly serious.

"What did you tell him?" Miles asked hesitantly.

Harry thought about telling him it wasn't any of his business, but he needed to start steering the conversation to find out what Snape had implied he needed to learn, so he just replied with, "What's rule number ten?"

"Got it, that's his business. A Slytherin's business stays in Slytherin. How'd you know the rule though?"

Harry tried to think of a good response. He didn't know the rule, the boy had only assumed he did. It was like Severus had told him, just by wearing the green shirt, people might assume he was a Slytherin in nature. Gemma had said that a Slytherin will always recognize another Slytherin even in another house. He just needed to convince this boy he was a snake to get his secrets.

"The same way I know about the venomous snakes in the Slytherin common room."

Miles's mouth hung open in shock, "Have you been in our room?"

"Rule number three," Harry replied. This was too easy.

Miles just continued to stand there in shock as Harry froze another clean cauldron in the air and started his third one.

"The Slytherin common room hasn't been breached in fifteen years! I'm going to have to tell Professor Snape about this."

This wasn't the direction Harry wanted to go in, this boy was threatening him now, and even if he didn't have any real power over Harry, the only two choices were to let him be in charge or show him that he didn't have the power he thought he did.

Harry picked up his staff off the wall, the top glowing with a tiny ball of light, and looking straight at Miles, he said, "Or, you could not do that. You have no proof and you know what I think of having enemies."

Miles realized that he had just been threatening Harry Potter: The-Boy-Who-Stabbed-His-Enemies-And-Didn't-Feel-The-Least-Bit-Bad-About-It. His eyes grew frightened at the idea of being enemies with Harry.

Remembering how Blaise had originally tried to make friends with him, Harry thought an exchange might work out. The boy had something to hold over him, even if it was false; so he could even things out by getting something to hold over Miles.

"Look," Harry started, not lowering his staff even a little bit. "You have something you know about me, tell me something about yourself that you don't want to get out, and then we can spend the rest of our detention talking about quidditch. Sounds good?" Desperately wanting to get out of the situation, Miles nodded his head. "You know I'm here because of Draco's fake duel that I agreed to. So just tell me why you're here and we can call it even."

Miles let out a breath he had been holding. He thought Harry was going to ask to reveal a murder plot the way he was standing. The boy was shorter than he was but the way he stood with his staff, the tip glowing with the reminder that it had once been buried in another child's shoulder made him seem twice as tall.

"I was selling fake amulets for warding off vampires to first-year muggleborns. One of them showed it to Professor Sprout who knew it was fake and reported it to Professor Snape."

"You made an amulet?" Harry asked with interest. "Was it blood magic?"

Miles looked shocked at the implication, "Of course not! Blood magic is illegal! It was made of garlic and other herbs."

Harry was a bit disappointed, "How would that ward off a vampire?"

"That's the point, it wouldn't. Muggles think that vampires hate garlic." Harry nodded, and Miles asked, "What do you know about blood magic?"

Harry had been warned by Brandt that blood magic was 'frowned upon' but not that it was against the law.

"My tutor growing up would talk about it. I didn't grow up here, so it wasn't illegal for him to know about it. It always seemed very powerful, so it might be worth learning. From what I've read about vampires, I thought that you would need something blood-based to ward them off."

"That makes sense, I guess," Miles shivered. "You said you wanted to talk about quidditch?"

"Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out how to play without hurting people," Harry told Miles.

The rest of their time, they spent scrubbing cauldrons and talking quidditch. Apparently, the only permanent injury that Miles had seen in his three years at Hogwarts was the bludger hit that had messed up Marcus Flint's teeth. He didn't get them fixed because the magical procedure took a long time and was excruciatingly painful. Miles stared at Harry in disbelief when he said that muggles could fix his teeth with less pain. He told Miles that Hermione Granger's parents specialized in fixing teeth, and they might be able to help. Other injuries he'd seen were sometimes fixed in the middle of a game or the worst ended up involving an overnight stay in the infirmary.

Nearly an hour and a half after he left, Snape returned. Harry and Miles were sitting and discussing quidditch with twenty cauldrons hovering over their heads. Professor Snape stared at them floating above the desks and at the children who looked like they had been caught doing… something.

He walked over to a cabinet and opened it, then said simply, "Put them away, Potter, stay here when you finish. Bletchley, you are excused after they are stored."

Miles wasn't sure how to pull the cauldrons out of the air, so Harry showed him just to pull them down. Once he started pulling, they started to fall and had to be caught. It took them a few minutes to take them all down and store them in the cabinets. The two boys exchanged a nod as Miles left the room, leaving Harry alone with Snape.

"So you were successful?"

"He was selling fake vampire warding amulets to first-year muggleborns."

"Good, how did you get him to tell you?"

"He had questions about my staff, which led to talking about my confrontations between Draco and his father. Then I said something that made him believe he could turn me in for breaking some rule. Instead of telling him he was wrong and that he had nothing on me, I just reminded him that we had been discussing earlier that I prefer to have friends than enemies." Harry paused to take a breath, "When he realized that he had threatened me and I had threatened him back, I proposed an exchange of information so we each had something on the other."

Snape chuckled, "but in reality, neither of you has anything on the other. He thinks he knows that you broke into the common room and you have information on why he was in detention. The reason he is in detention isn't something that he can be punished again for. So he probably thinks he got the good end of the deal."

Harry started to smile as well before realizing what his professor just said, "Wait, how do you know what we were talking about?"

"You didn't put up any privacy charms. After I checked on Draco and Vincent, I've been sitting in the room on the other side of the wall, listening to the whole thing. Next time you're having a sensitive conversation, remember to protect it. Also, stop talking about blood magic."

Harry looked at his feet, ashamed. "OK, but I do want to learn about it more."

Severus wasn't sure what to say to that, so he just dismissed Harry for the rest of his weekend.