Even having screwed up and gotten hurt, rushing to Draco's rescue earned me popularity in certain quarters, Lucius Malfoy among them. When he came to Hogwarts, several days after his son recovered, to lay the framework for the various legal actions he planned to take, he sent a message ahead saying the he wanted to speak with me. We met in Snape's office, later in the afternoon.
I was not much inclined to like Lucius Malfoy. Annoying as his son's manner was, I never forgot my suspicions that it was a reaction to his father's cruel indifference. My first encounter with the man only confirmed that possibility.
He dressed immaculately and conspicuously, even though the only meetings he had that day were with schoolchildren. He barely spoke a word to Snape, who glanced quickly to me as he absented himself in a gesture equal parts tact and submission. And though Lucius Malfoy never specifically mentioned my father on his own, he made constant references to my heritage.
"So, Master Rookwood, it would seem that my family owes yours a debt of gratitude for having aided my son at great risk to yourself."
To this day, I take pride in the memory of the resentful glare I fixed him with.
"I screwed up. So did he. Neither of us would have gotten hurt otherwise."
His falsely indulgent smile might've been a lot more chilling if I hadn't been getting used to my father's icy expressions.
"You are merely, how old exactly? Thirteen? No one would expect children of that age to act flawlessly. To fault you would be in error."
Lucius Malfoy always sounded like a politician. Never a specific where a generality could go. Never admitting wrongdoing on the part of himself or his allies, even when it didn't matter. So I decided to see what he had to say about my father.
"I hear you knew my father," I began, doing a bad job of faking well-intended interest, "but he's never mentioned you when I visit him in Azkaban."
In retrospect, it wasn't wise to provoke Lucius Malfoy. He was still powerful back then, and I was vulnerable to the kinds of power he wielded. But sod it, I wasn't going to grovel to some asshole.
"Azkaban really is a terrible place, isn't it? It's a pity about having the guards here, but with Black on the loose, I'm afraid it's a matter of security."
"What was my father like, back when you knew him?"
He wasn't even subtle about refusing to answer my questions.
"I'm afraid that I'm running a bit late. We'll have to talk about that another time. I'm terribly sorry."
He gave me another fake smile, this one apologetic, and although he made a great show of being effusively thankful in his parting, he never really met my eyes after that.
It wasn't really good practice, we were often reminded, to use incarcerated parents as an excuse for our behavior or a means of alienating others. But things were different with Lucius Malfoy. He knew, and I reminded him, that he had earned a place by my father's side in Azkaban. And try as he might, he could only occasionally believe the lies he told to secure his freedom.
But even the irreverent way I'd treated Lucius Malfoy wasn't enough for Hermione Granger. I was failing to align myself with what she though was the righteous side of important issues, and she was figuring out that I wasn't about to pass everything I was learning with Snape on to her secondhand. She never said anything, but I could tell she was losing interest in my company.
You have to be careful what you damn someone for.
But over the course of third year, she and I still spent a good deal of time together, especially when she and Weasley fell out. I never fought with her, though we disagreed on lots of things.
Among the topics on which we differed was the matter of Professor Lupin. She and I were both perfectly aware, after Snape's substitute lesson on the topic, that Professor Lupin was a werewolf. She was infuriated by the obviousness of Snape's lesson.
"How dare he…" she fumed, as we worked on the homework he had assigned.
Snape had an incredible ability to keep secrets, and he was often amazingly charitable in his use of this skill, though the very nature of the deed meant he would almost certainly never get any thanks. That he had come so close to breaking confidence alarmed me. I was sure there was a reason.
"It hasn't been handled well," I told her, guessing vainly at Snape's purpose. "We might be in danger, and we weren't even told."
"That's just the sort of thing people say about werewolves," she said, crossing her arms over her chest and giving me a warning look, "and then they're horrible about it. Obviously, Dumbledore's taken precautions."
As if she knew what sort of things people say about werewolves. Hermione Granger was as much a stranger to the wizarding world as me. And of course she trusted Dumbledore to take care of these things. If I'd felt kinder towards Professor Lupin, I could've brought up that maybe it wasn't the nicest thing for Dumbldore to put him in a position where he had to keep quiet about what he really was.
"Then we should've been told about it, so we could decide for ourselves. Or our parents should've."
We left it at that, having encountered the point of disagreement. What's more, I was drawing from information I knew I couldn't share.
Snape was afraid of Lupin. To most of the school, it must have looked like hatred. Resentment for the man who got the job Snape wanted, or maybe an old grudge. But I knew Snape, maybe better than anyone, and I saw when he let his guard down. He was afraid, in a half-buried, residual way, not of a thing that might happen. It was something that had already happened, a long time ago.
The atrocities of men are born in the dreams of children.
When I regarded Professor Lupin with mistrust, it was because I knew he had done something horrible to earn Snape's fear. But Hermione Granger always wanted to leap to the aid of the disenfranchised. She saw in me the prejudice of others.
You have to be careful what you damn someone for.
I was still taking lessons with Snape, and we had begun to encounter certain topics which, I was informed, would likely be tested in OWLs. I don't think it was a matter of my being spectacularly talented. I'm not a particularly powerful spell caster. I just learned the material in a logical order and with the aid of a growing knowledge of Muggle things, subjects that were much more helpful in my study of magic than the wizarding world seemed to think they would be.
When Snape taught me healing magic, as he had said he would, a basic understanding of biology proved to be immensely useful. Of course, biology being an aspect of Muggle science, it wasn't taught at Hogwarts, and the typical Hogwarts graduate's ignorance of anatomy is second only to the medieval concept of the four humors. My self-fostered knowledge of the subject, rudimentary as it was, gave me a huge advantage. Snape noticed.