Chapter 4
They were afraid of him.
They were afraid of him.
Harry took another glance around his dorm, and wormed his small form more deeply into his bedcovers. His stomach was full, a strange feeling that he liked and disliked at the same time. It was warm in his bed, but the constant nagging feeling of... paranoia? Fear?
Something was wrong.
Harry glanced around the room again, quickly reaffirming the contents of each large bed. Draco Malfoy. Vincent Crabbe. Gregory Goyle. Predictably with Draco in the middle. Blaise Zabini and Theodore Nott were on the left of Harry's bed.
He turned around on his side again, and tried to relax.
Nothing happened.
He turned over again.
And again.
Again.
The girl was staring at him.
Tracey Davis.
She was short, had a rather light brunette hair. Reasonably attractive.
She was staring at him.
Harry took another bite of his breakfast and stared back.
Harry had only gone to school for 1 term before the Dursleys had withdrawn him again, but Harry knew how to keep others away from him. Make them squirm.
Tracey was squirming.
Finally she said quietly, "We all heard you last night, Harry."
Then she dropped her eyes and didn't look at him again.
"Detention, Mr. Potter."
Harry's head snapped up again, after almost dozing off in the middle of Transfiguration.
"Laziness is intolerable," McGonagall warned, as she flicked a wand at him. His book flipped open and spun several times before it landed on the right page.
Harry noticed that the rest of the Slytherins were giving him scared or concerned looks.
Harry through off his covers.
He could not sleep.
Crawling out of his bed, he grabbed his wand and exited his bed.
Harry walked out of the dorms. There were the dying remains of a fire, burning slowly. Harry pointed his wand at it.
Incendio.
IHe had only briefly gone through his textbook and memorized the spells. This one had had put much practice into, but could never truly cast it out of Hogwarts.
Nothing happened.
Harry concentrated harder.
"Incendio," he repeated quietly, and flicked his wand more vigorously.
A small, uncontrolled burst of flame, the equivalent to several candles, flicked out and dissipated quickly. The effort left him almost panting, as if he had just completed a hard physical task.
Comforted by the small warmth, he crawled into a corner of the common room, behind a bookcase and tried to sleep.
He could relax now, but is body refused to drop off.
So he stayed up.
Hermione could not tolerate it.
That lazy Potter.
Of course, Lucius had helped her. Lucius always helped her.
Snape had seen to that the most obnoxious of his students to go with the most lazy. That ignorant bully of a teacher thought he knew better than her. Thought that he should pair her to what his prejudiced mind believed.
Potter had been half asleep and haphazardly slashed through the wubblegrubber roots and dumped them into the potion before Hermione or Lucius could stop him. Fortunately, Lucius had known what to do to stop a cataclysmic explosion, and expertly instructed her to add a precise amount of counter-reagent (it was just like chemistry). Unfortunately, Snape had seen it and took the opportunity to dock 10 points for apprehending an outbreak of severe boils all over Potter's forearms, as it would have 'taught him a lesson useful for future potion-making'.
Potter did not care.
In fact, he didn't even thank her.
Maybe there was some substance to what the Weasley boy said about Slytherin house.
Harry hated debts.
They would want something back, and at an inopportune time - something, a commitment, to pay back for the debt.
So, in order to pay Hermione for 'apprehending an outbreak of severe boils all over Potter's forearms', he would have to save her from the troll that had broken into Hogwarts.
Fire or acid.
It was fairly simple.
A troll of that intelligence was so occupied with Hermione cowering in a corner that it didn't notice when Harry jumped on it's back, shoved a wand up its nose, and cast Incendio.
It did notice, however, when an unbelievably fast spell-chain of purple, white, blue, and a indescribably coloured flash of light smashed into the troll, leaving a smoking crater in the floor and blowing the troll into nothingness, as well as half the stalls.
Harry, who was riding the back of the troll, was smashed off the troll after the second spell, bounced off the back wall of the bathroom, and landed on the ground, unconscious.
Lucius took the opportunity of Hermione's shock to quickly erase the memory of her casting the spells and plant a few flashes of false memory in her mind to replace it.
Dumbledore was more confused than ever.
Both his and Snape's reports agreed - there was little malicious intent in the boy's mind. But how did that match with Ms. Granger's recount?
After 20 minutes of thinking, he had gotten no-where, so after swiftly extracting the memory and dumping it into the pensive, he replayed Hermione's account.
She had said... hiding in the girls bathroom... Harry entering... and several flashes of blurred memory, panic, being shoved into a stall with Harry punching her and ripping at her robe with Incendio, then a flash of what appeared to be accidental magic.
Dumbledore retreated out of the memory and examined Harry's wand, on the table. A quick Priori Incantem told him nothing, only the Incendio that had Hermione had told him of.
Hermione's account seemed to show some sort of... sexual assault? From a 11 year old boy? Unlikely. And the accidental magic performed by Hermione, to blow a troll who had happened to be there into smithereens but throw Harry harmlessly into a wall?
Something was wrong, he decided, on Hermione's side. However, the report she had given was that that displayed no untruthfulness, and Dumbledore, at 111, was a excellent reader of truthfulness. Something in these accounts was out of line.
Well, that's that chapter finished.
If anyone's picked it up, I'm sort of copying Araceil's style exposed in Beyond the Pale. (Read it, it's a nice fic. Sadly it never went anywhere).
Comments are appreciated. I'm wanting to know how you saw this, because when you write something, you are the worst person to proofread it.
EVER.