Harry's first day of classes was as thus: double Potions, followed by lunch, followed by Charms and ending with Care of Magical Creatures.

Potions went fairly well. Snape even complimented Draco and Harry's potion at one point, saying that it was 'well done'. Draco had been ecstatic, and the compliment had gotten Harry out of the bad mood he'd been in since the night before.

Lunch was spent discussing Quidditch. Harry had talked to Dudley after Potions class, and apparently he and Ron were still going to try out for the Gryffindor team. Harry then thought to ask Draco why he didn't try out for Slytherin.

"You're a good flyer, Draco," Harry said after taking a swallow of his juice. "In fact, you're amazing. Why don't you join me on the team?" He held up a triumphant fist with a grin. "Together we can destroy Gryffindor!"

Blaise laughed at him from across the table and Draco grinned reluctantly. "Harry," he explained mock-regretfully, "I would join, but I'd hate to make you lose your place on the team. I'm a Seeker, and I did teach you everything you know."

Harry rolled his eyes. "Of course you did."

Pansy snickered at Draco. "I remember what you taught him. 'It's in the hips'." Her imitation of Draco was perfect, even if the eyebrow waggling was a bit over exaggerated. "Terribly useful, that."

Draco's indignant look was spoiled by the spots of red on his face. "I did not say it like that!"

Blaise and Harry looked at him knowingly. He glared back in embarrassment. "I didn't!"

"Of course you didn't, dear," Pansy said with a wicked smirk. "Sausage, Blaise?"

Blaise burst into surprised laughter and declined, saying, "Let's go, we're going to be late for Charms."

Charms passed quickly, Harry, Pansy and Blaise having entertained themselves by embarrassing Draco horribly the entire time, repeating everything Flitwick said in a way that made it sound positively obscene.

"I need twelve inches by Friday," Pansy snickered as they left the classroom.

"Stop saying it like that!" Draco exclaimed, scandalized. "Anything will sound depraved if you say it like that!"

By the time they reached the group of students surrounding the gamekeeper's hut, Draco's blush had subsided and Harry had gone back to trying to convince him to join the Quidditch team. He only paused in his attempt when the giant gamekeeper, Professor Hagrid as he had identified himself, appeared and explained to them how exactly they were supposed to open the monstrous books he'd had them buy. Harry hadn't touched his since he'd bought it in Diagon Alley, unwilling to take it out of the carefully tied bag that the shopkeeper had given him.

Hagrid led them around the edge of the forest to an enclosure filled with strange creatures he identified as hippogriffs, and Harry took a moment to take in the half horse, half bird before he started in on Draco again.

"One of the old Chasers finally graduated, Draco, you wouldn't be a reserve," he whispered as Hagrid went on about the creatures.

"...easily offended, hippogriffs are. Don't ever insult one, 'cause it might be the last thing yeh do..."

"Come on, you really should try out," Harry continued prodding. Draco looked near breaking at this point.

"Any volunteers?" Hagrid was asking hopefully, surveying the group. Dudley, who had been in front of the Slytherins next to Hermione and the other Gryffindors, backed up so far he bumped into Harry, who stopped talking at this point, worried that he might accidentally volunteer himself. Draco glanced at him, then the hippogriffs, then back. A slow smirk spread across his face.

"Fine," Draco finally agreed in a low whisper, to Harry's delight. "But! Only if you'll volunteer."

Harry looked at the hippogriffs, then at Draco, then at Professor Hagrid's hopeful face.

He shrugged. "Yeah, alright. But if I die, Blaise has to avenge me. And you still have to join the Quidditch team."

Draco's mouth dropped open and Blaise nodded solemnly. Harry stepped forward and raised his hand.

"I'll try it," he told Hagrid, who looked positively delighted.

"Good man!" Hagrid roared, causing Harry to falter slightly as he climbed the fence separating student from hippgriff. "Lets see how yeh get on with Buckbeak."

Hagrid separated one of the hippogriffs from the small herd and slipped off the leather collar. Draco, who had pushed his way to the front along with Pansy, Blaise and Hermione, watched in morbid fascination and some worry.

"Easy, now, Mister Potter," Hagrid said, much more quietly, as Harry approached Buckbeak slowly. "Keep eye contact, and try not ter blink...Hippogriffs don' trust yeh if yeh blink too much..."

Harry kept eye contact, although he nearly broke it when Hagrid told him to bow. Expose the back of his neck to those talons? Was he serious? Harry took a deep breath and, maintaining eye contact and refusing to blink, gave a short bow.

The hippogriff considered him for several tense moments before sinking, to Harry's surprise, into an unmistakable bow.

"Fine, I'll try out for the bloody Quidditch team," Draco agreed, although the expression on his face was far too amused for Harry's liking. He was taking a break, and Draco had approached him at the fence after having abandoned Blaise and Pansy's group.

"After what just happened to me? Even if you don't make the team you're going to be the bloody water boy," Harry said, still slightly disgruntled from his ride on Buckbeak. It had been fun, true, but having the giant professor suddenly seize him and toss him on a hippogriff's back before setting the thing flying without so much as a warning was not Harry's idea of a stellar afternoon.

"It was pretty spectacular, wasn't it?" Draco agreed in good humor. "The look on your face when he picked you up!"

Harry's expression remained mildly surly as Draco laughed.

"Why're you over here, anyhow?" Harry finally asked, having had enough of that. Draco sobered a bit.

"They wouldn't let me stay, said I was going to get myself killed or some such nonsense," Draco said, mildly irritated. "Prats, the both of them, Merlin only knows what their problem is. You rode one of those great ugly things, what could be so hard about getting it to bow to you?"

"Maybe you should stay away from them," Harry said, grimly imagining hippogriff rage and the entire paddock soaked in Draco's pure, aristocratic blood.

Draco huffed and leaned against the fence next to Harry.

"Mister Potter, could yeh give me a hand with this one?"

Harry looked over to where the professor was standing with a smaller hippogriff and waving Harry over. Harry glanced back at Draco, who raised his hands and backed away.

"I don't want to ride any hippogriffs today, thanks," he said, smirking. Harry rolled his eyes and walked over to Hagrid.

Hagrid explained that he wanted Harry to help brush the horse part of the creature, and spent a few minutes showing him how before stepping back and surveying him with a crinkly smile.

"Beau'iful, isn' he? Yeh're good with animals. Jus' like your father."

Harry nearly dropped the brush he was using.

"You knew my father?" he asked incredulously, having forgotten completely about the hippogriff.

"I've bin at Hogwarts fer years an' years," Hagrid explained, taking the brush from Harry and continuing where Harry had left off. "I used ter catch yer father an' his friends sneakin' off ter the forest almos' every other night. Worse 'n those Weasley twins, yer father an' his friends."

Harry nodded, eyes wide. He had pictures of his mother, had his father's cloak, had even seen them in the Mirror of Erised first year, but never had he met someone who had actually known them and was willing to talk about them.

"What was my father like?" Harry asked, throwing caution to the winds in his desire for this knowledge. "What were his friends like? Why were they worse than the Weasley twins? Did you know my mother as well? Do you know-"

Hagrid raised a hand to interrupt him. "Why don't yeh come down fer tea this evenin'?"

Harry barely hesitated. "Alright. Can I bring a friend or two?"

"Yer welcome ter bring anyone yeh like, Harry," Hagrid said jovially. "Now get goin', class is dismissed."

"Thank you very much, Professor," Harry said as he turned to leave, nearly tripping over himself.

Pansy, Blaise and Draco were waiting by the fence. Everyone else had already gone. "What could you possibly have spent so long talking to the gamekeeper about?" Pansy asked as they walked away.

Harry grinned at her. "I'm going to have tea at his house tonight, he knew my parents and he's going to tell me about them, want to come?"

His three friends blinked at him as they digested this information.

"He knew your parents?" Blaise asked, looking surprised at Harry's excited nod. "I suppose it makes sense that he's worked here since they went to school here."

"You're going to have tea with him?" Draco asked, looking distasteful.

Pansy gave Harry's excited expression a glance and raised her eyebrow at the other two. "Yes we are, aren't we, Blaise?"

Blaise nodded. "We are." The two of them stared pointedly at Draco, who raised an eyebrow at them. "Aren't we, Draco?"

Draco rolled his eyes elaborately at the castle as they approached. "I suppose," he said. "But if I die from some horrible common disease, Blaise has to avenge my death instead of Harry's."

Blaise nodded agreeably, although he appeared mildly exasperated. "Why do you all think I'd be good for avenging your deaths? Harry alone has made me promise to avenge him at least five times since first year, and I haven't done a thing to encourage it."

"Perhaps he heard those rumors about your mother and assumed she's taught you a thing or two," Pansy said innocently.

Harry had been paying very little attention, having been coming up with a list of questions for Hagrid, but now he cut in. "I don't really know much about your mother aside from what Draco's told me," he shrugged. "I just figured you'd be the best choice, as Pansy would probably have been the one to kill me in the first place, and of course she would probably frame Draco, so you're the only one who would have the time and ability to give proper attention to the avenging process."

"This is true," Blaise said with a contemplative frown.

"We've taught you so well, Harry," Pansy said, smiling mistily. Draco sulked a bit as they finally made their way inside and to the Great Hall for food.

"By the way, Harry, what did Draco tell you about my mother?" Blaise asked curiously.

"Shepard's Pie, Harry!" Draco said loudly, pulling Harry over to the Slytherin table. "It's your favourite, right? Why don't you have some?"

"I-"

"Wow, the house elves have outdone themselves today!" Draco said with a big smile as Blaise eyed him in suspicion. "Blaise, why don't you have some? How about those Tornadoes this year, eh?"

"I'm going to find out what you said about my mother," Blaise said in an undertone as they sat at the large wooden table in Hagrid's hut later that night. "I can get it out of Harry in under five minutes, you know I can."

Draco winced, in part at Blaise's statement, and in part because he'd just nearly cracked a tooth on one of the rock cakes the gamekeeper had given them. Harry spared them a glance and took a moment from his interrogation of Hagrid to raise an eyebrow at Blaise.

"Five minutes?" he asked, shaking his head. "I'm offended. You'd only get that information out of me if I wanted you to know!"

He turned back to Hagrid, who was eying him with an uncertain sort of amusement.

"It's strange, you bein' a Slytherin," Hagrid said, "Yer parents were both Gryffindor ter the bone. Yer father was always bullyin' the Slytherins."

Harry frowned at this, as did his three friends sitting around him. "Do you think my father would have-"

Hagrid seemed to realized what he'd said and backtracked quickly. "He woulda bin fine with you bein' a Slytherin, Harry, hones'. One o' his bes' friends was from a family full of 'em."

"Really?" Harry asked curiously. "Who was that?"

Hagrid faltered at this, and Harry realised that he must be talking about Sirius Black.

This didn't really reassure Harry.

"Yer father had a load o' friends," Hagrid said evasively. "As a matter o' fact, Lupin was good friends with 'im."

"The new professor?" Pansy asked, surprised, and Hagrid nodded, beaming.

"Right, yer new Defense professor," he said. "An' he knows much more abou' yer father than I could ever tell yeh, Harry."

Harry's head was now spinning at the thought of having already met one of his father's friends and not even having known it. He had to talk to the professor soon, then, and that was all there was to it.

Blaise had pulled his schedule out of his bag and was examining it. "We've got him day after tomorrow," he announced.

"Bugger," Harry said unhappily. He glanced up at Hagrid sheepishly. "I mean, um, golly..."

Hagrid laughed, a big booming sort of laugh that caused all four of them to jump in their seats. "I'll not take points off yeh," he said, his black eyes crinkling in a friendly way. "Yer a good lad. Jus' come round fer tea every once in a while, tha's all. All o' yeh are welcome anytime."

All four of them thanked him, and stayed a bit longer as Harry asked several more questions. Finally Pansy yawned politely and Blaise took the hint.

"Harry, it's getting pretty late," he said. "We've got a load of homework."

Hagrid nodded. "Firs' day o' classes an' all," he agreed. "You lot had better get back up ter the castle before it gets too dark. Come an' visit any time."

Harry looked reluctant, but allowed himself to be led out of the hut and across the lawns to the castle.

"So do you think he took the name literally and actually put rocks in the rock cakes?" Draco asked eventually, rubbing his jaw.

Harry frowned. "I didn't actually try mine."

"That was probably for the best," Draco informed him.

"I didn't like the idea that my father used to bully our house," Harry said, his forehead furrowing slightly. "And the friend with family in Slytherin had to have been Sirius Black."

"His family has all been in Slytherin for a while now," Draco agreed.

"How do you know that?" Harry asked. Draco blinked.

"Well, you know, my family makes a point to know these things," Draco explained in a matter-of-fact tone. Pansy frowned at him, but he paid her no attention. "They were a very prominent family, you know?"

"Alright," Harry said agreeably, letting it drop. "Listen, I'm going to see if Hermione's in the library, any of you want to come?"

Draco shrugged. "Sure," he said. Pansy and Blaise declined, and they separated in the Entrance Hall as Draco and Harry climbed the stairs to the library.

Sure enough, Hermione was there with Neville and Dudley. Ron never came to study groups on the first day, he claimed it was indecent. Harry sat down next to Hermione, who was looking through what looked like an old yearbook. There were a few piled up next to her as well.

"Hi Harry," Dudley said. "Did Hagrid have any good stories about your parents?"

Harry shrugged. "He didn't really know them that well," he said.

"That sucks," Dudley said sympathetically. Harry nodded.

"He told me that Professor Lupin did, though, so I'm going to talk to him after class on Wednesday," Harry continued.

Hermione finally looked up from her book at that. "I thought he might have been friends with them," she said, sorting through the stack of books. "I was looking through the yearbooks anyway, and when you mentioned you were going to talk to Hagrid about your parents, I thought I'd find their year."

She handed him the proper book triumphantly, and Harry opened it to the marked page. "I didn't even know there were yearbooks," he said, scanning the page. "Thanks Hermione."

He found his mother and father in the Gryffindor section, smiling up at him among their friends. Draco sat down next to him and looked over his shoulder.

"Wow, your father does look a lot like you," he commented. Harry smiled. Aside from his eyes, in that they were hazel and without glasses, James Potter did look very much like a seventeen year old version of Harry.

Next to Harry, Hermione was now mumbling to herself and flipping through several yearbooks. Harry ignored her as he looked for names he'd read before. His mother looked like she had in the pictures Harry had of her, only in her school uniform instead of muggle clothes. Peter Pettigrew was there as well, a small, mousey boy with a pointy nose, and Remus Lupin didn't look very different than he had on the train. Perhaps dressed better and with less grey hair, but still generally tired and calm. Sirius Black was actually in Gryffindor with the rest of them, and Harry stared at him for a moment. He had a careless smirk, and was very handsome. Harry went back to examining his parent's pictures, and 'accidentally' covered Black's picture with his thumb, causing him to flail a bit as he tried to escape.

"He's the only one here," Hermione said finally. "He must have been half and half."

"Who are you talking about?" Harry left his thumb on Black's face to mark his page and glanced over at her curiously.

"Tom Riddle," she said. "He's the only Riddle I can find, and that means that either he's a muggleborn or his mother is a witch, and with a name like Marvolo, it was probably the latter. It's likely he was named after someone in his mother's family, but I can't find anything about him aside from his Hogwarts records. He did win an award for services to the school, and he was Head Boy, but that's about it. He graduated back in the forties. I don't know where Dudley can have gotten his diary from, or why it made him do what it did."

Harry shrugged and looked at the yearbook she was looking at. Riddle had been a Slytherin. His gaze was icy and condescending, and made Harry shiver, even if it was just a picture. He didn't like Tom Riddle at all.

"Well he looks a bit like you too, Harry," Draco said, jokingly. "Maybe yearbook pictures just make everyone look alike."

Harry glared at Draco, who promptly shut up and looked over to see what Neville was doing.

"Considering what his diary did, I'd check the records for Azkaban," Harry suggested darkly, glancing down at the picture again. Hermione shrugged.

"I might as well," she said. "It's not as though I've got anywhere else to look. Do you think students even have access to those?"

Harry shook his head. "Not a clue, but it couldn't hurt to ask."