"Page sixteen?" I said. "Dumbledore made me go through all of that just for a little blurb on page sixteen?"
Page sixteen was the health column, but I'd expected...more, from the way he'd built the whole thing up. Was anyone still reading by page sixteen? How much of a difference would a tiny little article actually make?
"It made you look good," Hermione said. "It's not like she did a hatchet piece on you or anything."
She'd hinted that I'd been tortured. It would explain the strange looks I'd been getting from the other students all day, a combination of sympathy and horror.
Hermione had been careful not to ask about it, but I'd seen the question in her eyes too. It irritated me; was the nebulous potential rewards in the future worth the loss of regard I'd suffer in everyone's eyes? I wasn't a victim. I'd given that up on the stay I'd been pulled screaming out of a locker years ago.
I was never going to be a victim again.
That didn't mean that horrible things weren't going to happen to me; my luck had never been particularly good. But even having my arm cut off hadn't made me a victim. Being a victim was a mindset as much as anything. At the worst, I was a survivor, which was an entirely different state of mind.
"How can anybody believe anything they see in the paper?" I asked irritably. "I never had tears in my eyes or talked about how my parents would have been proud of me."
"Ummm...artistic license?" Hermione said. She looked distinctly uncomfortable.
Despite all of my training, she still sometimes tended to take things that she read as the gospel truth. Having the fact that sometimes lies were printed right in front of her had to be disconcerting.
"Don't believe anything the woman says," I said.
I'd be more angry at Dumbledore, but I'd listened in as Flitwick had gone to him to protest. Apparently, upon learning that Skeeter would be conducting the interview, he'd gotten in contact with her editor. He'd gotten him to agree to let Dumbledore look over the article before it was published, and had given him the right to kill the story if he didn't like it.
It was a corrupt system, but Dumbledore knew how to work it. Skeeter hadn't known about this back room deal, and likely would have been furious if she'd known. I'd known journalists before, and even the worst of them tended to believe that the press should be an independent entity.
Hermione nodded soberly. "I hadn't realized that it was this bad. Journalistic standards in the Wizarding world are rather poor, aren't they?"
I glanced at her and wondered whether she really thought muggle newspapers were all that much better. Maybe they were, here. Back at home, the Protectorate had wielded an unusual amount of influence over the news outlets. In an ideal world, that would have been unacceptable, but it had happened nevertheless.
The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth, even if it had arguably worked out in my favor. Dumbledore had been pushing his muggleborn agenda, but it could have just as easily been Lucius Malfoy or one of the other Death Eaters pressuring the editor to push their own agenda.
How much of the war involved backroom deals like this?
Politics in general had always disgusted me. Politicians needed to compromise to get deals done, but the problem was that the more you compromised, the easier it became to continue doing so. You lost sight of the fact that there were occasionally points on which you should never compromise, and in the end you became something that you would not have recognized.
Political power was more corrupting than other types of power, because it required selling your soul.
"Well," Hermione said slowly. "It's not like it's going to amount to much. It's just a page sixteen article."
Right.
So why had Dumbledore insisted on it? Was he so desperate to change people's minds, even by a fraction of an inch that he'd take any opportunity? Were things that bad already?
I'd seen a lot of casual racism in the general population. It was there in the way that the students talked, in the implicit assumptions that they made, in the jokes they told when they thought no one was listening. Presumably they'd gotten that from their parents, but their parents were likely worse, because they weren't exposed to the muggleborn on a day to day basis.
Wizards were ab;e to live in little insulated enclaves where they never had to expose themselves to the kinds of people they didn't like. They didn't even have to listen to ideas they didn't like. It was likely part of the reason that the Daily Prophet had so much influence on them; they weren't getting their news from any other source.
The Quibbler, unfortunately didn't count. It seemed to be a strange fringe paper full of conspiracy theories. More people read it to laugh at it than to seriously believe in what it said.
Worse, Wizards tended to live twice as long as muggles, which meant that old, racist ideas that would have simply died out in the muggle world were continued, spread to great grandchildren and propagated.
There were people who were progressive for their day, but by today's standards would be considered horribly racist. In the Wizarding world, a lot of them were still around.
Well, there was nothing I could do about it now. The article was out, and whatever plans Dumbledore had were already in motion. I'd been foolish to agree to it in the first place, but maybe Dumbledore was right. There were people who were going to be helped by the cure, and if that included people in power I might be able to leverage that to my advantage somehow.
It wasn't much consolation when people kept looking at me strangely. I wanted to snap at them, but given the fact that there were still a few boggarts left in the school, that was a good way to get wands pointed at me.
Those same looks lasted for the next several weeks, even as everything else settled back into a routine. There were no more attacks on me, although I did receive letters from several people thanking me for what I had done.
Neville had managed to drag me to both of the Quidditch matches, and while I'd been horrified about how dangerous the whole thing was to schoolchildren, it had been kind of fun. In retrospect, asking Vista to face Lung had been even less safe, and least this was entertaining.
They were examined by Snape before I received them, of course. He'd done it because I refused to open my own mail for obvious reasons, and also because he probably worried that I was doing something nefarious through correspondence.
If I'd really been doing something like that, I'd have gone through the Weasley twins, Hermione, Neville, or Millie. Most likely I'd have gone through the twins since no one knew about our connection.
I watched and took note as the new caretaker stole several things around the castle. He didn't do it often, but I wrote all of it down. Having blackmail opportunities might come in handy later.
It wasn't something I planned to use casually. Fletcher was Dumbledore's man, and he'd wonder how I knew what I knew. If I wasn't lucky he'd go to Dumbledore, even if it meant revealing the things he'd done. He didn't strike me as the type to put the good of others over himself, but I'd been wrong before.
It was time for Winter Break almost before I knew it. Settling back into school had been easier than I would have thought, even if I was using the human detecting spell on a daily basis. I didn't just use it for fear of intruders; I also suspected that any of the professors could use the disillusionment spells.
On two occasions I'd found Mundungus Fletcher trying to follow me invisibly as I made my way to a practice session with the Weasley twins. I made sure that Hermione, Neville and Millicent knew the spell too, and that they used them religiously.
It was presumably good training for what I'd have to deal with once school was out in the summer.
There was snow piled up outside, and that meant that most of my bugs were dormant or dead. The interior of the castle was warm enough for them to survive, especially the magical ones, but I'd taken to filling my fanny back with as many emergency bugs as I could. It kept them warm and left them ready to attack with, but it reduced my ability to spy on the people around me drastically.
In the future, I planned to see if there was a way to extend warming charms to others. Most likely I wouldn't be able to extend them to every bug in my repertoire individually, but it might be something to look into nevertheless.
I had bugs nesting in inaccessible places around the pipes; the hot water was more than enough to keep them alive throughout the worst of the winter, but they were sluggish and difficult to use when they left to spy for me.
That had been making me a little paranoid.
Still, my reputation was apparently enough to stop further attacks, or maybe it was the idea that the staff and paintings were keeping a close eye on me. Rumors around school were that it was as much to protect them from me as vice versa.
"I would have been happy to have you come home with me for break," Hermione said. There were tears in her yes, which made me feel a little uncomfortable.
"I wouldn't endanger all of you like that," I said. "And I'm glad that you are taking your holiday in Europe this year."
"I talked about it with my parents," she said. "They wanted to withdraw me from school, but I convinced them that I was actually safer here than I would have been out there. They're safer when I'm here too."
I nodded. At least her parents had been willing to listen. I was willing to bet that a lot of muggleborn parents were likely to underestimate the extent of the danger they were in, especially as they didn't get the Wizarding paper.
Not that Skeeter or the others had done any real reporting about what was happening. There were hints of what was going on in the papers that I stole from Neville from time to time, but nothing substantive. They were doing a disservice to the general population as far as I was concerned.
"I'll be looking forward to seeing you when you get back," I said.
She nodded.
Her bags were packed, and she levitated a trunk behind her. It was funny that only a few months before she'd been amazed that I'd levitated an empty trunk, but now she was doing it casually, as though it wasn't anything.
The holiday was only two weeks long, and the vast majority of the students were going home. Within an hour of the castle being emptied, it felt as though the whole place echoed and was much larger than it was when it was full of students.
There was an eerie feeling to it. Normally it was a place that was filled with laughter, with the sounds of running feet. Now it felt abandoned.
In some ways I was safer than I had previously been. There were fewer people who wanted to shove me off the stairs, and watching my back was going to be easier when there was no background sound to mask the sound of approaching footsteps.
At the same time, there was no one around to hear me scream. Even part of the staff was leaving for the holidays, leaving them running on a skeleton staff (not literally, to the chagrin of some of the students.)
There would be no one to give me presents, and no one to give presents to; none of my friends had chosen to stay behind. Neville was spending the holidays with his grandmother, Millie with her family. The Weasleys were off doing whatever Weasleys did.
Even the younger Weasley left.
Still, it was an opportunity to redouble my studies. I found myself in the Dungeons beside the fire in the comfortable chair as often as not, surrounded by books of the darkest magic I could find that wasn't in the restricted section.
It was nice being able to doze by the fire; the heat there was enough that I could hide some of my bugs all around me to keep watch even as I dozed. I'd learned that my power worked even when I slept, and so I was actually able to relax.
The Great Hall was empty at meals, enough so that one day as I sat down for lunch, I felt an unfamiliar presence sitting down beside me.
The dark haired Gryffindor boy was staring at me.
"Potter, right?" I asked.
He nodded.
"You didn't have anybody to go home to?" he asked.
"I'm an orphan," I said. "You?"
"Might as well be," he said.
Ah...bad family. I'd seen a lot of that when I was in the Wards. Para human powers didn't go to well adjusted people who didn't have a lot of trauma. Most parahumans came from broken homes to say the least, unless their trauma was from some other source.
"Why are you sitting at the Slytherin table?" I asked.
"Ron isn't here, and I figure it'll piss Snape off," he said. He grinned. "Malfoy too. School's kind of fantastic, isn't it."
"It'd be better if I wasn't in Slytherin," I said.
He glanced around. "The hat tried to put me in Slytherin, but I begged it not to."
"It wouldn't listen to me," I admitted. "I tried to get it to put me in Hufflepuff."
He snorted.
When he saw that I wasn't joking, he laughed out loud. "You belong in Hufflepuff like you-know-who belongs there."
"You aren't comparing me to the Dark Lord are you?" I asked stiffly.
"Everybody else does," he said. "I don't see it myself...I haven't thought that since I saw you save Neville from falling. He speaks highly of you. Then when you saved his ma..."
"I didn't do anything there," I said. "I just had an idea. Pomfrey and the others did all the work. I'm glad it was able to help him though. She recognizes him now at least."
"They're taking her home," Potter said. "It'll be his first Christmas with his mother, and it's all thanks to you."
I shrugged uncomfortably.
"So did you really stab a troll in the bollocks?" he asked suddenly.
I stared at him for a moment, then sighed. While Potter seemed nice enough, he was still an eleven year old boy.
"Yes," I said. "Several times. It was the best place to kill him since that's where the skin was thinner."
"How did you know?" he asked, leaning forward.
"It was an educated guess," I said. "I could have easily been wrong, in which case I likely would have just run away."
He glanced down. "You weren't scared?"
"Everybody's scared," I said. "Some people more than others, but it happens to everyone at least some of the time. The only thing that matters is what you do when you are scared. Do you run, or do you stand and fight."
"It's easier to run sometimes," he said.
"But you can't run from yourself," I said. "And you'll always know that you were the one to run."
He stared off into the distance. "Sometimes there's things you just can't fight."
I frowned. Was he talking about the Death Eaters, or about his unhappy family life? The Wizarding World didn't have a lot in the way of social services. That was part of the reason that Dumbledore was having such a hard time placing me.
Mostly orphans were taken in by the friends of their parents, or by grandparents of other relatives. People were so interrelated in the Wizarding world that there was almost always someone willing to take them in. Only the muggleborn didn't have that option, and usually Ministry officials tried to place those with other muggleborn families.
In my case, doing that would doubtlessly result in the deaths of my and my foster family. I needed to be placed with a Wizarding family, and one with strong wards, or who had other strong defenses.
"I hear the Christmas Feast is going to be something special," Potter said. "Hagrid is bringing in Christmas trees and everything. It's kind of boring without Ron here."
"Big families tend to expect their family home for Christmas," I said.
"Well, it's kind of your fault too," Potter said with a rueful smile. "There's a Great Aunt that was a Cruciatus victim; she's better now, and Ron's mom insisted that they all come home for Christmas."
Hmmm... the twins hadn't said anything about that.
"You want to play chess sometimes?" he asked. "Ron was teaching me. I'm not very good, but I'm sure I could teach you."
"I can play chess," I said. "My mother taught me."
"So?"
"Maybe," I said reluctantly. It would cut into my studying time, but Potter was possibly the only person the Death Eaters hated more than me. It was possible that he might know something, even though the glimpses I'd seen of him through my bugs were those of a happy, well adjusted kid who was having the kind of first year that I'd only wished I had.
His grades weren't even that bad, other than potions, and that was at least partially because Snape seemed to hate him.
I felt Snape coming long before Potter. Potter seemed startled when the man loomed over both of us.
"I wasn't aware that you had changed houses, Potter," he said.
Potter looked up at him and grinned. "You think I should?"
Before Snape could assign points, Potter was already scrambling to his feet and heading back to his own table.
Snape stared at me for a moment inscrutably before heading back to the head table.