"This isn't the kind of Christmas you're used to," I asked Potter.

We were sitting on a ledge and staring out a window at the snow. There weren't enough students for a snowball fight, but a couple of students were making snowmen. I wondered if they were going to animate them.

Could I make a Frosty the snowman type hat eventually? Maybe having hats that could animate bodies would make the Sorting Hat jealous. It wouldn't even have to be snowmen; animating corpses would likely be more useful, and wouldn't have the whole heat and fire problem.

Of course, snowmen would be easier to make than corpses, at first at least, but they were crap during the summer, so likely not. Or maybe I could get them to animate trash, a little like Mush.

Harry Potter snorted.

"Yeah...this Christmas is fantastic. Only way it could be better was if Ron had stayed around. I actually got presents this year, and people are happy to have me around."

"Must be nice," I said. "You should be glad you didn't end up in Slytherin. Being a half-blood would be all right, but killing off old Moldy shorts would have probably ruffled a few feathers."

"You aren't scared of him at all, are you?" he asked, looking at me strangely. "Everybody else, even the adults are terrified of him."

"He's a small time symptom of a bigger problem," I said. "Most Dark Wizards are, at least as far as I can see."

"What do you mean?" he asked slowly.

"It's a problem with Wizarding society," I said. "Actually, in parts of muggle society too. There are people who don't get a fair chance to have a say in what's going to happen to them... a Dark Wizard rises and tells them that he'll give them that chance, but the new government he creates ends up just as bad as the last one."

"You act like Dark Wizards wins sometimes," he said, looking surprised.

"Of course they do... I've read the history books. It's just that if they win they generally don't get called Dark Wizards. They're considered just and right. History is written by the winners, or at least the people who fawn over all of them."

"You've got some pretty definite ideas about how things should be," he said. "I thought Slytherins were more flexible than that."

"You mean that they follow whoever has the power?" I asked. "That's probably true. But you have to have somebody who thinks they know better than everyone else, or nothing would ever get done/"

"What?"

"Well... you've heard of comic book superheroes, right?"

"Like Batman, or Bananaman," he said.

Bananaman? Whatever.

"Right. Well, Superheroes think that things should be a certain way. Usually, that's the way things already are. Supervillains believe just as strongly that things should change. Because superheroes tend to side with the government, they get all the good press."

"So supervillains aren't bad?"

"Some of them are very bad," I said. "But not all of them are as bad as the others. They all get the same label though. It's the same thing with Dark Lords. Somebody who is a revolutionary gets that label when they are really just trying to change things for the better."

"I thought you said they didn't make anything any better?"

"Usually they don't. Some of them mean to, but power is addicting, especially power over other people. Even if they don't fall victim to it, their followers might, or if not them, then their descendants."

"So you-know-who isn't bad?"

"His people tortured people until they were insane," I said. "And he tried to murder a baby, unsuccessfully. That's a combination of being evil and incompetent that's pretty dangerous."

He stared at me, then laughed shortly. "Trust a Slytherin to make fun of the thing that ruined my life."

I shrugged. "Terrible things happen to everybody. The question is whether you get up, dust yourself and do something about it, or if you decide to lay down and die. I don't believe in giving up."

"Not everybody can be...you," he said. "Sometimes you don't have any power to change things."

He was right, of course. When I'd been abused by Emma, Sophia and Madison, there hadn't been much I could do. I could have tried to fight back, but that would have only led to more pain.

There were things that I hadn't been willing to do, but the consequences of those would have led to jail or worse.

"Then you watch and wait," I said. "You won't always be powerless, and there will come a time when things change. That's when you make your move."

"You can be pretty cold sometimes."

"I'm a Slytherin," I said, shrugging. "As much as I didn't want to be, the hat was probably right. Personally, I think that the people I'd want at my back would have the characteristics of all of the houses. I'd want people who were smart as a Ravenclaw, loyal as a Hufflepuff, brave as a Gryffindor, and as sly as a Slytherin. Give me twenty wizards like that, and I'd have control of Wizarding Britain in a year, and the world within ten."

"Isn't that what you-konow-who tried?" Potter asked.

"He's an idiot," I said. "Trying to rule through terror means that you always have to worry about someone stabbing you in the back. If you make people think they want you to rule them, it works much better."

He looked at me strangely. "Aren't you doing that?"

"I'm not trying to rule anybody," I said irritably. "I just want people to leave me alone. If they did that, I'd be fine."

"Even if people were getting hurt?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Lets say they weren't targeting you... maybe you're a pureblood, but they're still going after muggleborn. Would you do anything or wouldn't you?"

"I can't answer that," I said. "Being a pureblood would mean that I would be a fundamentally different person. I'd like to think that I would, but there's no guarantee. The person I am now? I couldn't stand by and let people get hurt."

"They're getting hurt now," Potter said.

"I'm waiting for my moment," I said. "As a first year, I'm not as powerful as some people would like to think."

Not even me, really. It was frustrating, being this limited.

Magic had endless applications; parahumans typically only had one power, albeit often a power with multiple uses. Wizards could do almost anything, given enough time and creativity. I wanted to be able to do all of those things, but magic took hard work too, and spells were like math in a way.

In math, everything led to everything else. Without addition and subtraction, you couldn't do multiplication. Without multiplication, you couldn't do division. Without all of those skills, you couldn't even start the higher order skills.

It was the same with magic. I couldn't simply start wandlessly and silently casting spells like I was Merlin himself. Skills led to other skills, and while I had the advantage of determination and a good work ethic, I wasn't even as much of a magical genius as Hermione.

Reading ahead was only going to take me so far; some magic required practical demonstration, and the Weasley twins were only third years.

In magic, I was finding, it was better to be a master of a few spells rather than know a vast number of spells that you could barely cast.

Harry was silent for a moment. "My relatives hate me for being a Wizard."

I stared at him. That wasn't the kind of revelation that you shared with a stranger unless it was something that you just had to say.

"Then it's not really about you, is it?"

He looked up at me, surprised.

"People hate what they don't understand, and I'm not sure I understand this thing that we do. It's got to be even scarier to be powerless. That's not so bad if nobody has power, but when somebody sees that other people do...they probably feel a little jealous."

His face tightened.

"You don't know them. The way they treat me isn't right."

"Are they abusing you?" I asked. "Because there are things the muggle authorities can do. The Wizards don't seem to have a lot, but being a half-blood means you have a foot in both worlds. Use what you have to in order to get out."

"Nobody would believe me," he said sullenly. "And I've had a talk with Dumbledore. He told me that there's magical protections on my house to keep me safe, which is why he keeps me there."

"He can't find another place with magical protections?" I asked. "Did you tell him how bad it is at home?"

He shook his head.

"Maybe you should," I said. "Wizards have ways of changing people's minds, and if he has to keep you with them, maybe he can make them be nicer to you. Maybe he can just terrify them into compliance, or maybe he can make them forget that they hate you. Either way, you win."

"It won't be the same as if they really loved me," he said.

"But at least the abuse will stop. I'm not aware of any magic that can make someone genuinely love you, although I've heard of love potions. From what I understand, those are bad ideas, though."

He frowned and looked down at the floor. It looked like he was considering what I was saying, which was good.

I'd been lucky.

My parents had loved me. Even though my mother had died, she'd left me with the memory of that love, and that had been part of what had helped me get through the dark days ahead. Even in the darkest days of my father's depression I hadn't doubted that he loved me. He hadn't been able to show it, but I'd known.

What would it have been like to have been raised in a household without love, with people who actively despised you?

Potter didn't look like he was terribly abused, but then almost no one did. He was underweight, but he'd been filling out over the past few months.

He seemed to be gregarious, and seemed carefree and happy; was that a mask to cover his underlying pain?

I'd have liked to have helped him, but I wasn't in a position to do much. Going to his house and terrifying his adoptive parents would likely just make them turn their fear into anger, which they'd take out on him.

It would require an actual threat of retaliation from someone that they knew who could follow through, like Dumbledore to actually make a difference.

Calling the muggle authorities would just get him thrown out of the house, and then he'd be in the same situation as me over the summer break. The Death Eaters were on the rise, and leaving the protection of the house would be a good way to get him killed.

"You can't be loved," I said. "Not at home. That doesn't mean you won't find other people who love you. Sometimes friends can be your second family."

I felt a sudden wave of sadness. Sarah, Rachel, Brian...they'd been good to me despite being villains. I hadn't been as close to my team in the Wards, except maybe Golem, but they'd been decent as well.

He nodded.

"Ron was going to stay for Christmas, but there was something about an aunt coming home or something that interfered."

"Oh?" I said casually.

"Ron wasn't that excited, because he'd never met her, but some of his oldest brothers remembered her."

So essentially I'd cheated him out of Christmas with a his friend. I'd have felt bad about that, except that the cure had helped more people than it had hurt, and sometimes it was important to be pragmatic about things like that.

"It's almost time for dinner," I said. "I've heard that it's going to be something special."

"Yeah!" he said enthusiastically, seemingly forgetting his upset about his family and Ron. "Hagrid told me all about it. Since everybody is stuck here away from their families, they try to make the dinner something special."

"So let's go," I said.

He was right about the dinner.

There were turkeys, roasts and potatoes. There was a kind of sausage that was apparently called chipolatas. There were other foods too, although most of them were undeniably British.

There were Wizarding fireworks on the table too; some of the Gryffindors pulled them, and they went off with a blast that sounded like a cannon; it engulfed them in a cloud of blue smoke, and ejected an admiral's hat and several white mice.

Some of the other students also used them, and while the sound and the smoke seemed the same, the colors were different, and the things that emerged seemed almost random, like the old toys in the bottom of cereal cartons, from before people realized that kids would either swallow them or just tear the box up looking for them.

Whenever anyone wasn't looking, I began slipping as many of the fireworks as I could reach into my fanny pack. They were free, and you never know when you might need a distraction and a puff of smoke. I was reasonably sure that my bugs would be able to activate one too. I might even be able to activate several. It wouldn't give me much of an advantage, but sometimes there was a thin razor's edge between being dead, and being not dead.

I saw Snape frown several times as he looked toward me. I suspected that he was noticing the disappearing party favors, even though I was only slipping them into my pack when no one was looking. The best time to do so tended to be when one of the other students used their firework, because there was a human tendency to look at the source of a loud noise.

I smiled at Snape sweetly, and he looked vaguely disturbed.

I was either going to have to work on looking more sincere when I smiled, or I was going to have to work on my public persona.

Dumbledore was wearing some sort of flowered monstrosity instead of his usual hat. It looked a little girlish on his head, but from what I'd seen, Wizard fashions had diverted from muggle fashions a long time ago.

Scotsmen wore kilts, after all, and no one assumed that meant they were crossdressing. I was going to have to learn to check my assumptions when dealing with different cultures. After all, my experiences with different cultures was very limited.

I'd been in different countries during Endbringer attacks, but those had typically been frantic efforts to keep people alive, and the surroundings had barely registered with me. My only interaction with the locals had usually been to scream instructions to them,.or use my bugs to find survivors.

Other than that, I'd spent my entire life in the States. While there were certainly regional cultural variations, the States were really homogeneous compared to the rest of the world.

There was a silver sickle in my flaming pudding, which seemed like a health hazard frankly. I had to frown a moment; galleons were worth five pounds, and there were seventeen sickles in a galleon. It was irritating that they didn't use the decimal system for their money, because that made mental conversions a lot harder.

It wasn't a lot of money; I had a lot more than that hidden in my room. Neither Millie or Tracey had touched it, and none of the other girls had gone after it either. I suspected that my reputation as a seer and as someone likely to seek violent revenge had led to that.

The things that came out of the fireworks apparently didn't disappear, which meant that the kids who had shot them off left laden with all sorts of Christmas gifts.

For appearances sake, I did blast one off, and I found myself in possession of a grow your own warts kit.

It was the perfect gift for someone living in a dorm filled with girls who hated her. It would make for a subtle form of revenge if used at the right time.

All in all, I found myself satisfied as Christmas ended. I had stolen more than a dozen fireworks which were now in my pack, I had a belly filled with food that was even better than the usual excellent quality of their food.

Finally, I was planning on sneaking into the restricted section of the library. Now was the perfect time; everyone was going to be in a food coma, and a lot of the paintings were off partying with paintings in other castles. Some of them were still on duty, but I could send my bugs out short term to watch before going back into my fanny pack and the warmth of my robes.

Reading those books might give me some of the answers I had; among those answers were what was in the books that made them restricted.

It had nagged at me all semester. There was no better way to make someone want to do something than to tell them that they couldn't.

I wasn't even going to enter the restricted section myself. I was going to see if I could use magic to lift a book across the line, or if they had some sort of magical alarm system. I already had my escape route plotted just in case.

If this worked out, my magical skills might get much better in a much shorter period than I'd planned for.

This was going to be great.