Chapter 10

The Potions Master

A/N: Thank you to everyone who has reviewed the last chapter! I'm so glad that all of you are reading! To those who are disappointed by Harry becoming a Gryffindor, I hope that in time you will come to appreciate the choice. Finally, I don't own Harry Potter.

There was a long stone hallway with an intricately carved wooden door at its end. Harry stood at an intersection with the door in front of him and two hallways branching off to the left and right. Harry somehow knew that something horrible was beyond the door. The sight of it filled him with an incredible, earth-shaking fear. The hallway to the left was a comforting green color and Harry felt a warmth come over him, but the warm, comforting feeling held something dark beneath it, something sinister. He instinctively stepped backwards and pressed his back against the cold stone wall.

Looking to the right hallway, Harry felt ice reaching up toward him from behind and saw images of torture and violence. He saw a child lying dead in the middle of a street. He saw burning buildings. He saw a woman with long brown hair crying black tears as she held a dead man to her chest. Harry turned back to the door and found new detail in its inlay. An ornate face was staring at him with a forked tongue and slitted eyes. Around it were demons dancing amidst a fire.

Taking a beginning step forward, Harry approached the door. He knew that something horrible was behind it, but he also knew that the other paths would release it. He didn't know how he knew it, but he did. Placing his hands on the door, Harry pushed and it flew open. Inside, what he saw shocked him. There was a child with black hair lying on the floor, bathed in crimson blood. His arms were bent and broken into odd angles. His chest was collapsed, clearly having been shattered. Next to the body, Harry saw a dangerous-looking black dagger.

The small room had little in it beyond the body. There was a tall cabinet in the right corner of the room. A wooden table with various items scattered across it—a lock of blond hair, a vial full of clear liquid, and several other baubles—lay at the back of the room. To the right was an ivory Victorian dresser with a large mirror atop it.

Harry's eyes returned to the center of the room and he stepped forward to look at the boy more closely. As he did, the door slammed shut behind him. A shadow detached itself from a crevice and took on the outline of a man. It was indistinct, but clearly human. The dead boy's eyes flew open. How is he alive? Harry thought to himself. The boy was so covered in crimson blood that it was difficult to recognize him. His jaw was clearly out of place. His nose was broken. His eyes fluttered around furiously and he shook as he tried to move broken limbs. He groaned out his fear, his panic, his mindless terror. It was the most frightening sound Harry had ever heard. Then the boy's eyes met his.

Harry knew those eyes. The familiar, pure bright green color. They were his own.

"Yes, Harry." The voice slid down Harry's spine and sunk into his body, freezing him with fear. "You've already lost. You should never have come here." The voice hissed.

Harry tried to speak, but was so utterly terrified that he couldn't summon a word to his lips.

"Harry, dear Harry, How could you hope to succeed in this world? You are nothing. You are unwanted. Your relatives don't want you. You have no friends. Everything you are, I gave to you. Yet you had the audacity to come here. This is what you are." The shadow gestured to the bloodied boy with his last words. Harry watched the shadow become more and more corporeal as he stood. Starting as a vague darkness, there was color and distinction coming into the being. Red eyes, a flat, snakelike face. Harry saw its jaw move.

"You will die here, and no one will care. Your death will usher in an era of destruction." The images from the right hallway sprang back to Harry's mind and he tried to run, but remained paralyzed. The man laughed. "Yes, yes. Everything you saw is to come. Your death will be the catalyst for revolution. The world will finally be pure. I ask you kindly; let it happen."

Taking a few steps forward, the man reached down slowly to grip the knife and the bloody, broken Harry's eyes stared at him. "These are your final moments; enjoy the purity of your fear. Never will you reach this plane again." Lifting the knife, the man lazily dragged it down from the body's mouth toward its chest.

And Harry's mind suddenly became clear. He knew that that what the man said was true. He saw the images of terror from before, but the terror wasn't for himself anymore. Harry no longer laid claim to it. He was fearful for all of those within the images. If he died each of them would die as well. Looking at the man, Harry knew what he had to do.

As the man lifted the dagger in his hands, rearing back like a snake before it strikes, Harry launched himself forward. The man plunged the dagger down and it imbedded itself deeply into Harry's left shoulder. He felt an obscene pain as the dagger ground against his bones. The man looked shocked for a brief moment before Harry shoved him backward. Grasping the hilt of the dagger firmly, Harry withdrew it from his shoulder with a strangled yelp.

"How?" the man muttered in confusion. "H-how did you break it?"

Harry had no idea what he was talking about, but gave the question no consideration. The man rose up and produced a wand, seemingly from nowhere. He pointed it at Harry and began to mutter a spell, as Harry jumped forward. Harry sheathed the dagger in the man's chest before withdrawing it and burying it again. He repeated this over and over, blood spraying wildly with each thrust. The man became less distinct moment by moment until finally, he was gone.

Harry looked down to himself on the floor. But the bloodied, broken Harry was gone. Looking up, Harry saw himself in the mirror. He was covered in brown, dirty-looking blood from the top of his head down to his feet. Harry wretched at the disgusting sight. He looked back to the mirror. The bloody dagger was still in his hand, and he saw his own eyes staring back at him, but not the same. There was still a bright green ring at the edge of his iris, but now, closest to the black dot of his pupil, there was a deep, dark ring of green, verging on black.

Harry glanced at the knife he had just killed with, then back to the mirror. The broken Harry was there, next to him. A shattered femur poked through the skin of his leg. His chest was concave. The broken parts of him were plainly visible. But he smiled. The two Harrys' eyes met, and the broken one smiled at the sight of the murderer.

Harry awoke in a cold sweat and heard shouting. Gasping, he curled into a ball and hoped to escape the brunt of whatever beating had been intended for him. When no attack came immediately, Harry remembered where he was. He opened his eyes and was greeted by red curtains. Opening the curtains, Harry found that the shouting most likely came from Neville, who was sprawled on the floor with his legs tangled in the curtains from his fourposter.

"Are you alright?" Harry asked, getting up and crossing the room to help extricate Neville from his predicament.

"I'm fine." Neville said with embarrassment. "Just rolled out of bed."

Appearing from behind his curtains Ron fixed Neville and Harry with a glare. "Was the shouting absolutely necessary?" He asked angrily. Neville dropped his head and muttered some sort of unintelligible apology.

"It was an accident, Ron." Harry said, annoyed at the boy's annoyance.

Ron gave a sheepish look and began to dress without speaking. Seamus and Blaise appeared from their respective beds, and as the boys prepared for breakfast Seamus blathered on about a dream he had had where a giant snake had swallowed Hogwarts castle whole. Harry thought on his own dream, shivering as he remembered the voice that had whispered horrors to him. He looked down at his body and remembered the broken Harry he had seen before.

Harry remained deep in thought all the way down to the Great Hall. When he finally sat to eat, he noticed people all across the room staring at him while they whispered conversation with their neighbors. Ignoring their looks, Harry helped himself to a bowl of honeyed porridge as Ron sat down across from him.

"Sleep well?" Ron asked politely.

"Not so much, I had a strange dream."

"Strange as Seamus's?" Ron questioned. "It's hard to beat the castle being swallowed by a snake."

"Stranger." Harry said solemnly, remembering the feeling of the knife grating at his bones. "I'd rather not talk about it. What of you? Any dreams?"

"No, I mostly just couldn't sleep because I was nervous about today. We've got Potions and Defense Against the Dark Arts today. I've heard Snape is horrible. Don't know much about the Dark Arts teacher. What's his name, Professor Squirrel?"

"Quirrell." Harry corrected, remembering the nervous man he had met with Hagrid at Diagon Alley.

"All the same, it's going to be an interesting day."

Suddenly, dozens of owls came swooping into the great hall, dropping letters and parcels to various students, and even the teachers.

Harry looked up in shock. Ron saw his confused look. "It's the mail, Harry. Comes every morning."

As Harry watched the owls dropping their packages, he caught sight of familiar white feathers. Hedwig circled closer to him and landed neatly on the table, sticking out her leg for Harry to remove a letter.

"Hedwig!" Harry said happily. "So you made it here, and even brought me a letter?" The owl hooted an affirmative as Harry untied the letter. It read:

"Dear Harry,

I know you get Friday afternoons off, so would you like to come and have a cup of tea with me around three? I want to hear all about your first week. Send us an answer back with Hedwig.

Hagrid"

Harry flipped the note over and scribbled a hasty yes before reattaching it to Hedwig's leg and asking her to deliver it to Hagrid. Just as she was flapping away, a disheveled-looking Hermione burst into the great hall, red-faced. She strode quickly to the Gryffindor table and sat down a dozen feet from Harry and Ron, quickly piling food onto her plate.

Harry was about to leave to ask Hermione what was wrong when he saw Neville enter the Great Hall, followed closely by Draco and his two large friends. They were taunting Neville, calling him a squib and saying he was a waste of a wizard, and his face was the color of a pomegranate. As he approached the Gryffindor table, the boys dropped back and parted from him. Harry looked at the clearly-shaken boy and said to him, "I'm sorry about what they said. It's not true you know."

"But it is true, Harry." Neville insisted. "I didn't show any magic until I was nine. Nine!"

"So what?" Harry asked, puzzled.

"Everyone knows that the later you start doing magic the weaker your magic is. Malfoy started when he was two. Among the pureblood families, that puts him at such a higher rank than me, I can't even explain."

"Neville," Harry said softly. "Why does it matter what people think? I'm sure that if you work at it, you'll be able to do anything that Malfoy can do."

Ron, hearing most of the conversation, interjected. "Yeah, I'm sure that the age of manifestation doesn't matter. My older brother Charlie didn't do magic until he was nearly seven, and he's an amazing wizard."

Age of manifestation? Harry thought, surprised that Ron knew what the terms meant. He thought that perhaps he had misjudged the redheaded boy when an older Gryffindor student broke in from across the table. "Don't be daft, Weasley. I'm sure your parents just didn't realize when he did manifest. Everyone knows the Weasleys might as well be muggleborns for all they understand magic. You're lucky you're even allowed to come to Hogwarts with the way your father acts about muggles." He stood up from the table with the end of this statement and walked away while Ron's face turned redder than Neville's.

"What was that about?" Harry asked quietly.

"My dad, he likes muggle things." Ron bit off the words. "Hasn't given our family the greatest reputation recently."

Harry didn't know what to say, and so he remained quiet. He didn't understand why a man's fondness for muggle things would hurt his family's reputation, as he knew that many muggle things were quite useful. He was about to say so to Ron, when Neville muttered, "It's time for Potions."

Ron and Neville stood and left the table, while Harry took the time to gather his books up before following. Hermione's distress forgotten, Harry slowly made his way down to the dungeons using a map that proved less than helpful, considering that several stairways it listed led in different directions than the map said. He thought he had found the door, when in fact he had only found a fake door that stood in a lower corridor of the castle. After nearly a half-hour of searching, Harry found himself stumbling into the Potions room.

Scattered across the room were over a dozen square stone tables, each with four seats placed around them and four cauldron-holding apparatuses with small fires fizzling at their base. Many of the seats had already been taken with cauldrons set in place atop fires. Harry saw no open seats near anyone he knew, so he sat himself at an empty table in the back of the classroom and began withdrawing his cauldron from its bag, placing it as he saw the others had, above the almost-absent fire.

He was withdrawing his potions book and other materials for the class when Hermione stalked into the dungeon. She appraised the room and seemed relieved when she saw Harry sitting at a table by himself. She took the seat next to him without saying anything and began preparing her cauldron similarly. Looking at the large clock on the wall, Harry saw that it was almost time for class to have begun, and neither Ron nor Neville had apparently arrived yet.

Looking around the room, Harry noticed that the teacher had not yet arrived and hoped that Neville and Ron might be able to beat him to the classroom. His hopes were dashed, however, when the greasy-haired potions teacher came striding into the dungeon, black cloak billowing behind him.

"All wands should be put away. There will be no foolishness in this class. I understand that many of you may be incapable of appreciating the fine art of potions-making, as it requires no fantastical wand-waving. A true potions-master may, however, do more than many a spellcaster. With the proper application of knowledge, one can bottle luck, brew fame, and become a master of death."

It was at this entirely inopportune moment that Neville and Ron stumbled into the potions classroom, and on seeing the teacher at the front of the class, both rushed to sit at the closest open table, Harry and Hermione's.

The teacher's sharp eyes followed the pair and he said, "I will inform you that class has already started, and you have interrupted me." He said viciously. "Twenty points from Gryffindor."

Ron looked outraged, while Neville simply hung his head in shame. Hermione and Harry kept their eyes on the teacher, neither wanting to risk appearing to commiserate with the two across from them, having heard that their teacher had a habit of punishing anyone near a troublemaker.

"As I was saying, there is a great deal of nuance and structure that is necessary for a properly made potion. I will attempt to inform those of you who have the slightest talent of these rules. My name is Severus Snape."

After this speech, he began reading names from a roster of students, each student acknowledging their presence with a chorus of "Present!". When he spoke Harry's name, the teacher paused and looked up at Harry with the same strange look his face had held when he first saw him.

"It appears," he said slowly. "That we have a celebrity in our class. This does not give reason for special treatment or dawdling." He looked to Ronald who idly toyed with a pencil across from Harry.

He continued down the list without any further incident, and Harry began his first potions class. They were attempting to brew a potion that would cure boils, a simple concoction that would provide little challenge to anyone who had had to follow a cooking recipe.

"That git!" Ron said angrily as he threw ingredients into his cauldron. "He took twenty points away from me and Neville, all because a staircase changed directions while we were still on it! He always favors his precious Slytherins."

"Well I quite think you deserved what you got." Hermione said. "Really, showing up late on your first day? Why didn't you leave earlier so you would be sure to arrive on time?"

"Well, little miss know-it-all," Ron said with an acid tongue. "We did leave early, this castle just turned us around so much that we couldn't find our way down here."

"I told you we should've used the map." Neville said as he lazily stirred his potion, looking gloomy.

"You didn't even use the map?" Hermione asked incredulously. "Of course you didn't get here on time then. Why I can't believe that you—"

"I don't need a muggleborn lecturing me on how to act at Hogwarts." Ronald cut her off. "I can manage just fine without your input."

Hermione looked down and Harry saw tears in her eyes. He was about to tell Ron off for what he had said when Neville's cauldron exploded, sending potion flying across the table to strike them in various places.

Slowly walking over to survey the damage, Snape said, "It seems that you inverted the ingredient list before making this. Ten points from Gryffindor for sheer thickheadedness." As he spoke, angry red boils appeared across Neville's face where the potion had landed, as well as on the rest of their hands. "Each of you should go to the hospital wing for Madam Pomfrey to mend this mess."

Looking at the three still-full cauldrons, Snape inspected them slowly. "Full points to you two." He said, gesturing to Harry and Hermione. "But Mr. Weasley here has somehow managed to turn his potion orange instead of the pink color it should be. Half points."

Ron's face fell at Snape's declaration and Harry could almost see the boy's angry thoughts written across his face. Each of their potions was vanished by Snape and they gathered their potions supplies before heading to the hospital wing. Hermione led the way with Ron begrudgingly following after he had declared that the boils on his hands hurt too bad for him to withdraw his map.

They entered the wing and within minutes Madam Pomfrey had their boils disappeared. "Just be careful next time." She said to Neville in a grandmotherly tone. "Professor Snape is prone to remember all of a student's mistakes, and if he takes to disliking you, well he never quite stops." Neville nodded along, an expression of hopelessness on his face.

Hermione and Harry kept their silence, both seeming to be happy with their thoughts as their companions. They departed the hospital wing as a group, breaking off to go their separate ways immediately after exiting. Harry remembered Ron's words about Hermione being a muggleborn. It reminded him of how he had been treated at the Dursleys, like there was something wrong with him that he couldn't control. As he made his way up to the Gryffindor common room, the thought occurred to Harry that he might as well have been muggleborn, considering that he was raised by resolved to himself that he would confront Ron about his treatment of Hermione the next day.

Upon entering the common room, many of the older students who hadn't had the opportunity to speak to Harry after the sorting approached him and introduced themselves. He met a friend of Fred and George's named Lee Jordan. He met several members of the Gryffindor quidditch team, including the captain Oliver Wood who, from what Harry had heard, was one of the best keepers Hogwarts had seen in many years. He met person after person, but in all of his meeting, Harry stayed quiet, keeping his thoughts to himself, knowing that though he had escaped the Dursleys, he was still a freak. He was the Boy-Who-Lived.

A/N: That's chapter 10 for you! What did you think? Love it? Hate it? Let me know! Tell me your thoughts on Harry's dream! I hope to have another chapter to upload in the next couple days. Thank you for reading!

Where were you when I was in between 4th and 2nd street?