lv. alley brawlers
Harriet took a bite of blueberry ice cream and sighed.
Summer seemed heavier in the Alley than in the rest of London, burning hot and implacable, laying sticky perspiration on the back of Harriet's neck, melting her frozen confection almost faster than she could eat it. Diagon was crowded with witches and wizards getting school supplies for their kids or taking advantage of the summer's end sales, milling from the North to South ends, spilling out of Gringotts with varying disgruntled faces. She saw Professor Selwyn walking with boxes under his arm and Professor Sinistra swanned by holding half of a telescope like it was her first-born child. She thought Longbottom made an appearance, but it was difficult to see in the crush of bodies.
Harriet could little believe that she'd only known she was a witch for a year. Livi shifted under her shirt and Harriet patted his side.
"We still need our books from Flourish and Blotts, and Harriet needs more clothes from Madam Malkin's or Twilfitt's," Elara said aloud as she studiously checked her list, legs crossed at the ankles below her chair, a soft pink flush on her fair skin from the sun. She looked much too warm in Harriet's opinion, but she wore the same long-sleeved dress and gloves she always did, the buttons on the collar done all the way to the top. "I need to visit Madam Malkin's as well."
"Alright," Tonks replied, a dab of pistachio ice cream on her chin, her hair electric blue and eye-catching. "Malkin's is up by Flourish and Blotts, so we should probably wander down to Twilfitt's on the South end, then come back up."
"Harriet needs to visit Weeoanwhisker's on Horizont for a haircut."
"Harriet is sitting right here," the girl in question groused. "And I don't need a haircut."
"It'd be best to do it before term starts," Elara argued. "Or you'll have to have Madam Pomfrey do it and she's not fussed with making it look nice."
"As long as we're back to meet Snape at the Apothecary on time," Tonks said, leaning her chair on its back legs. "I don't much fancy making the bat wait."
Elara wrinkled her nose as she folded her list and placed it inside her robe pocket. Harriet wondered how she could stand all that black. "Is he honestly going to spend the whole day there?"
"He said something about doing the school account," Harriet put in, finishing off her ice cream. Yeah, he said that in between all the mutterings about meddling old fools and babysitting. They'd left that morning with Tonks and Professor Snape, the latter peeling off the second they'd arrived to go to Slug and Jiggers, saying he'd be there if needed and they should meet him at the store when ready to leave—which, incidentally, was no later than three. He also told Harriet and Elara that if they wandered off, he'd make sure they spent all of next summer locked inside Grimmauld Place.
Harriet grimaced at the thought.
"Alright, you lot!" Tonks said as she jumped to her feet and nearly trod on a bloke trying to reach his own table. "Finished with your lunch, yeah? Got all your packages still?"
Both girls obediently patted their pockets to ensure their shrunken parcels were still stashed inside.
"Good! On to Twilfitt's, then. And maybe we'll pop into Gambol and Japes right quick, love their Wet-Start fireworks…."
The trio of witches left the patio outside Florean Fortescue's and entered the fray, Tonks and Elara easily parting the way with their taller stature and Tonks' loping gait. Harriet, in contrast, found herself getting trod on more often than not and had difficulty keeping up. Somebody dropped a crate with a fire-breathing chicken inside and caused a mild panic.
"Excuse me, I need to—." She squeezed by a witch carrying a heavy cauldron and craned her neck in an attempt to see more than thighs and backsides. A flash of electric blue caught Harriet's eye and she headed after it, trapped behind a broad wizard and his darkly clad witch, neither inclined to jostle about and let Harriet through. The bespectacled girl let out an aggravated breath and contented herself with following the crowd in the direction Tonks had gone. Behind her, a bloke in maroon robes came stomping out of the crowd to yell at the man who'd been carrying the chicken crate.
"Sss…." Livi stirred beneath Harriet's loose shirt and laid his angular head on her collarbone, creating an odd lump she hoped no one looked at too closely. "Hungry."
"You have to wait," she hissed in reply, lifting her collar over her mouth. "I told you it'd probably be better to stay at the house with Kevin. Kreacher would've fed you."
"Muttering elf-creature isss annoying," the serpent grumped. "And Misstresss isss warm."
"So you've said before." Harriet sighed and gently poked his nose until he lowered it into a less obvious position. "I'll try to get you a snack before we go back."
The pair in front of Harriet finally turned away. Harriet lifted her head to get her bearings and—.
Stopped. She blinked once, twice, opened her mouth, and shut it again. She didn't know where she was.
Spinning in a tight circle, Harriet looked at the narrow, grubby brick walls and searched for a familiar landmark, something to orient herself, given that she'd spent a considerable amount of time in London's Wizarding district exploring its many recesses and should recognize where she was. Few shops dotted the row she stood in, and those that did had grubby, hard to read signs, some boarded up with their windows covered by old Daily Prophets.
Witches and wizards still crowded the street—but they were different too, rougher, a perfidious smell choking the air that Harriet didn't rightly have a name for, something thick and cloying, mixed with the odor of unwashed body and spoiled potion. Swallowing, Harriet ducked her head and turned on her heels, heading back the way she'd come.
The row opened into a warren of shorter passages through dimly lit and shadowed breaks in the high walls, men and women crowded in the mouths of seedy shops, leering at Harriet when they caught sight of her. The bespectacled witch had done her fair share of traveling to new locales over the summer, but that was always with a sense of direction and destination, map in hand and a set course in mind. This was different; Diagon Alley had vanished and Harriet hadn't a clue where it'd gone, where she was, or how she'd gotten here.
She felt the weight of eyes burning into the back of her neck.
"Okay," Harriet whispered to herself, heart beating heavy and wet in her throat, her hands sweaty. "Okay, don't panic, numpty. I couldn't have come that far. I must have taken a wrong turn—stay hidden," she added to Livius, who had begun to stir beneath her clothes, sensing her agitation. The last thing she needed was him biting someone out in broad daylight.
Pausing in her harried wandering, Harriet looked down at her feet and muttered, "Set." She waited, hoping he'd heard her, but when a repeated utterance of the name did nothing, Harriet cursed under her breath and stomped a foot. "Oh, you git. Where are you when I need you?"
She picked up the pace, and then Harriet bit her lip, stopping again, trying to recall what she could of the path here and wishing she hadn't been so distracted by Livi's peckishness and her own wool-gathering. Snape's going to bloody murder me.
"Ooh, there's a pretty lass," crooned a witch leaning in the doorway of Dystyl Phaelanges. Dusty bones cluttered the display window.
"Scrawny little bint," her wizard companion said, puffing on his pipe. He glared at Harriet while the witch smiled, sending shivers down Harriet's spine.
"Lost, little lamb?" the witch asked. "Need a hand?"
"Err—no," Harriet managed to say before scuttling off, the witch and wizard guffawing in her wake. She came to the next corner and took it, telling herself the sooner she found the end of this place, the sooner she'd be able to find the beginning. Gut sinking, Harriet became more and more certain with every step that she'd somehow managed to take that blighted archway into Knockturn Alley, the one place in the district she'd always stayed away from, as it was emphatically not for untended children. "Shite."
She backed out of a little leeway that dead-ended with a place called McHavelock's Wizarding Headgear, where a loitering wizard with a scraggly beard watched her too close for comfort, and continued instead up a set of short, broad stone steps. Harriet didn't remember taking any steps before so she knew she must be going in the wrong direction, but heading back the way she'd come seemed a terrible idea, and she remembered Knockturn opened somewhere along Toad Road just as it did Diagon. So long as she got out of Knockturn, Harriet could find her way back to Tonks and Elara.
She tried not to run; the fastest way to make herself vulnerable was to run about scared and lost, so Harriet forced her spine stiff and blanked her face, pretending she knew her own business and wouldn't be fussed with someone trying to interfere. She was a Slytherin, for Merlin's sake, and one thing the older Slytherins loved to do late at night in the common room was brag about their adventures in Knockturn Alley. Harriet guessed most of their supposed exploits were a load of dragon dung, but most had one common thread; the Floo Network connected to Borgin and Burkes.
If she could find the shop, she'd have another place to escape—exit—from.
She turned onto another passage, darker than the last, and she thought the lane ahead looked brighter and more open than any of the rest she'd seen so far. Harriet rushed forward—and hurtled headlong into the cobblestones when the bite of a Tripping Jinx caught her unawares by the ankles. Harriet threw out her hands to catch her weight, scouring her palms on the rough stones, saving Livi from the brunt of the impact even as her knees and elbows throbbed. Her glasses skittered away, thrown by her momentum, and Harriet cursed her bloody eyesight as she rolled to her back and yanked her wand free of its brace.
It was the wizard she'd seen before, the one with the scraggly beard and low cap, moving purposely toward her with his wand extended. Harriet readied herself to hex the bollocks off the bastard, when she felt the soft brush of robes against her cheek, and the approaching wizard backed off as if spooked. He walked backward until he reached the alley mouth and disappeared.
Harriet glanced up to see her savior—and decided she might not be saved after all.
Standing stiff and poised, Professor Slytherin looked down his nose at Harriet crumpled on the ground, several emotions flickering over his face one by one, like a man switching masks, trying them on until he had the one that fit best. His red eyes narrowed. "Miss…Potter."
"P-Professor Slytherin," she managed, scrambling to her feet on her own. A small gash bled on her right hand, stinging where dirt had gotten into the wound, and her bones ached from colliding with the stones. She squinted, searching for her glasses, but the light was low and the walls too textured—.
Slytherin snapped his fingers, and Harriet's spectacles came darting up from a groove in the lane, landing squarely in his palm. He curled his lip at the dirt and shoved them into Harriet's hand, who quickly put them back into place, wincing at the long, spidery cracks marring one of the lenses. "Thank you, Professor."
He made a noise of acknowledgment, half-hum and half-scoff, then said, "Far be it from me to discourage…extracurricular interests, but you're not meant to be down here on your own. Where is your guardian?"
"We got separated," Harriet rushed to explain. "I'm—I didn't mean to come down here."
"Hmm." He considered her for a long, uncomfortable moment, then Slytherin extended his hand, and though Harriet didn't much want to touch him, she reached out to take hold of it, Slytherin's fingers snapping into place around hers. His skin was ice cold and Harriet's neck hurt.
Without explanation, Professor Slytherin started off in a new direction and Harriet had to jog to keep up, lest the wizard drag her through the streets like an unhappy dog on a leash. Those people who'd sneered and watched Harriet from their shop stoops now quickly found other places to be or shrank into the shadows, eyes averted, all but jumping out of Slytherin's way. For his part, the professor simply looked bored, face slack and eyes half-closed, like his mind was a million leagues away from that dingy alley and the girl he yanked along by the arm.
Through the twisting byways they went until, from one step to the next, they came out from under a thick stone arch and once more entered the wider, louder congregation floating along the middle of Diagon Alley. Harriet barely had time to take in a relieved breath before they were off again, Slytherin towing her through the throng faster than before, heading straight into a dense cluster comprised mostly of giggling, middle-aged witches.
"Harriet!"
Professor Slytherin came to a sudden halt and Elara darted out of the crowd, colliding with Harriet, ripping her hand out of Slytherin's grasp. Harriet heard the older girl whisper, "Thank God," as Elara squeezed her tight and Harriet coughed. Livi grunted a complaint.
"Can't breathe, Elara—."
A wizard bellowed aloud when Tonks came careening into their little group, having elbowed the unfortunate man in a sensitive area to get him out of her way. "Merlin's balls!" the auror almost wailed, clapping both hands onto Harriet's arms, narrowly missing Livi's coils. The serpent in question drew himself tighter around his witch's middle and hissed in warning, the sound going unheard in the louder hubbub. "Where did you go?! Are you trying to get me murdered? Because I swear, Harriet, there are kinder ways to go about it—."
Tonks choked when she caught sight of Professor Slytherin favoring her with a contemptuous look. "Miss Tonks," he said, his smile hard. "How very…surprising. Does the Aurory often order you to babysit?"
Pale and obviously spooked, Tonks quietly acknowledged him with a muttered, "Professor," and gathered Harriet nearer, away from the wizard.
"Do try to keep better track of your charges, hmm? You never know where they might…wander."
Tonks nodded, not meeting his eyes, and Slytherin bled back into the crowd the way they'd come, presumably to return to Knockturn Alley—though he did glance at Harriet once more before disappearing. Tonks exhaled and straightened once he was out of sight—then thumped the shorter witch on the top of her head.
"Ouch!" Harriet shouted, hands jumping to the sore spot. "What was that for?!"
"For giving me a heart attack!" Tonk replied. She still looked rather pale, Harriet noted. "Holy Helga, don't tell Snape. Please don't tell Snape; they won't find enough of my body parts for the coffin."
"That'd be a waste of perfectly good potion ingredients," Elara said in an eerily accurate imitation of the aforementioned Potions Master, and Harriet—relieved to be away from Knockturn Alley and her Defense professor—started giggling.
"You're not funny," Tonks said, scowling. A witch fighting her way to the front of the crowd jostled her, and Tonks looked around with a wince. "Hell—we don't have time for this lot. You still have that list of stuff you needed from Malkin's and Twilfitt's, cousin?"
Elara did, of course, still have the list, and she brought it out, handing it to Tonks. "Alright, then. I'm going to dash and get your clothes—don't worry, they have Sizing Charms, so everything should fit right—and you two are going to get your books. You're going to stay right here at Flourish and Blotts until I come back, right? Not a toe out line! And stick together! Buddy system!"
"We're not babies," Harriet complained, though she didn't protest when Elara took one of her hands, giving it a squeeze. "We'll stay right here."
"No wandering off?"
"I didn't wander off, I got lost in the stupid crowd."
Tonks snorted. "Yeah, well…. In case there's an emergency—." She lifted a hand and pointed out Slug and Jiggers only three doors down from Flourish and Blotts. Snape was supposedly there still. "But, like I said, only an emergency—."
After getting several more assurances they wouldn't let each other out their sights and would stay in Flourish and Blotts, Tonks took off at high speed, meaning to get the rest of their stuff before they had to meet Snape at the apothecary and leave. Elara didn't release Harriet's hand and started to bodily shove witches and wizards out of the way, her glare sharp enough to head off any protests, and they came to a stop before the shop's entrance.
"'Meet the author of Magical Me!'" Harriet read aloud from the glittering banner strung across the facia. "Who's the author of Magical Me?"
"Him." Elara jerked her chin toward the front display window, in which a teetering stack of purple books had been set up, a blond, smiling wizard's portrait blowing kisses at the witches pressed up to the glass.
"Er…?"
Harriet didn't know what to say to that, and instead let Elara pull her inside the bookshop like putty through a very tight tube, the interior hot and muggy, the skinny manager who'd frowned when Harriet passed through too often in the beginning of the summer looking quite harassed at the moment. The tables in the front where they'd put out the different year bundles last summer had disappeared.
"Where's the book?"
"They've moved them for the stupid signing, obviously. We can find them ourselves, come on…."
Elara and Harriet headed down an aisle, finding themselves among a few other Hogwarts students instead of a gaggling horde of twitter-pated, middle-aged witches. "D'you think we're going to be like that when we're older?" Harriet asked, earning a scandalized look from her friend. "I'm serious. Do our brains go wonky or something at a certain age? Turn to pudding—? Hey, Hermione!"
Harriet had been set to complain more about the buzzing witches when she caught a glimpse of bushy, brunette hair from the corner of her eye, flouncing around the corner from Autumnal Charms to Applications of Dactyliomancy. The hair in question came whipping back into sight when Hermione—balancing an absolute mountain of books—ran into their row.
"Elara! Harriet!"
A bit of awkward shuffling followed, the books having to be set down on the floor before the trio of witches could embrace, grinning from ear to ear. "Enjoying your summer, Hermione?" Elara asked.
"Well enough," she answered, pulling back to study her friends, tucking her frazzled hair behind her ears. "Oh, Harriet, what happened to your glasses? You're covered in dirt and—your hand! What have you done?"
She fussed over the bespectacled witch, muttering, "Oculus Reparo," as she tapped her wand against Harriet's glasses, while Elara pulled a handkerchief from her skirt pocket and wrapped it around her bleeding palm.
"Long story," Harriet said as her cheeks pinked. "I, um, well—I tripped." Which technically wasn't a lie.
Both Elara and Hermione gave her a look clearly indicating they didn't believe her, but instead of pushing the issue, Hermione shook her head. "Never mind. I haven't much time before the Malfoys come back for me. What have you been up to these past weeks? I might have, well, been eavesdropping a bit in the library, and I heard about you staying with Elara from Snape of all people…."
They shared an abbreviated and vague conversation on the events that had occurred over the last week or so, mindful of the potential ears listening in all around them. Hermione, for her part, summed up her vacation in just a few words. "I've been studying. That's it, really. Mr. Malfoy quizzes us almost daily."
"Are you…enjoying it?" Harriet asked, not sure if she should. Hermione loved testing her knowledge, but the look on her face didn't look nearly half so pleased as Harriet would have thought.
"Not especially, no. You know I rather like learning, and I am learning so many things—did you know there's fifteen different schools of magic in Transfiguration alone? Professor McGonagall's mastery had an emphasis in eight of the fields, including Animation, Transmutation, and Golemnry, though obviously the professor's main emphasis was in Transformation."
"What the heck is Golemnry?"
"The production of golems—you know what a golem is, Harriet, you carry one in your shirt pocket half the time. Anyway; no, I can't say I much enjoy the testing. It's incredibly stressful."
Someone let out a put-upon sigh behind them, and the three witches turned to see Neville Longbottom standing in the middle of the aisle with his arms crossed. He stood with Ron Weasley and Dean Thomas as well, the latter pair busy chortling over a garishly colored book of joke jinxes. "Get out of the way, Slytherins," the Boy Who Lived grumbled.
"Bugger off, Longbottom."
"Harriet," Hermione reprimanded. "Really!"
"You're blocking the row," Longbottom snapped—which was true, once the witches considered Hermione's stack of books and their own bodies.
"Oh…." They shuffled over, moving the books with them, and Longbottom passed by. Ron and Dean barely spared them any attention at all.
Harriet hated the anger that swelled in her guts, that petty, envious feeling she got every time she had to look at Longbottom, especially after what Headmaster Dumbledore had said at the end of the year. He had parents, friends, fame—Harriet didn't much want fame, but she despised how her own family had been reduced to some footnote in a textbook when Longbottom hadn't actually done anything.
Gritting her teeth, Harriet shoved the feeling away and reminded herself she had much to be grateful for, and though her childhood hadn't been ideal, she had a home now—and a git of a pseudo-guardian who was going to be furious if they didn't get their textbooks together on time. At least he cared, in his own way. The Dursleys wouldn't have bothered with getting mad; they'd have just left her there.
"C'mon, we need our books…."
Hermione, having already gathered her own texts, helped Harriet and Elara find what they needed, and afterward Harriet wandered into the fiction section while Elara and Hermione argued over the reliability of a Transfiguration author. Harriet idly flipped through a few wizarding novels, her thoughts drifting toward Knockturn, wondering what Professor Slytherin had been doing down there. In the end, she decided she really didn't want to know and it would be wiser to keep her mouth shut.
Those people in the street were terrified of him….
By the time they found their way back toward the front of the shop to make their purchases, the crowd had become impossibly thick, and Elara had one hand fisted in the hem of Harriet's shirt so they wouldn't be separated. They paid for their school books, then allowed themselves to be swept aside like flotsam since none of the three young witches could leave the store without their guardian.
"Hermione, do you have anything to eat?"
"I think I have a Cauldron Cake in my robe pocket, why?"
"Can I have a piece?"
Puzzled, Hermione found the Cauldron Cake and peeled back the wrapper, handing over the allotted bite of sweet bread—which Harriet promptly stuck under the collar of her shirt. At first the older witch blinked, confused, and then her eyes narrowed. "Are you daft?" she hissed. "Really, Harriet. Why would you bring him with you—?"
"Potter, did you just stick Cauldron Cake down your shirt?" The smarmy voice of Draco Malfoy startled the trio tucked in the corner, and he came slinking over, primly dressed in silver-tooled robes, haughty smirk firmly in place.
Harriet scowled. "No," she lied, wiping her fingers clean on her collar, feeling Livi swallow the bit of cake whole with a satisfied huff.
Malfoy didn't believe her, but he only shook his head. "Merlin, you're a weird witch."
The gathered spectators chose that moment to burst into applause, and Harriet strained to see a blond, resplendent wizard with gleaming white teeth come swanning out of the employee lounge. "Yes, hello! Lovely—how lovely it is to be here! Thank you!"
He waved at the gathered witches and winked, earning more than a few delighted gasps and bursts of excited giggling. "Who is that?" Harriet asked, wrinkling her nose.
"Gilderoy Lockhart," Hermione said, breathless, and when Harriet glanced over, she found her friend's face had turned a startling shade of pink. "He's—quite brilliant, really. His books are fascinating—here, I'll lend you one of mine…."
"Brilliantly stupid," Malfoy quipped, frowning at Hermione as she slipped a shrunken copy of Gadding with Ghouls into Harriet's hands. "What's wrong with you Granger? You've gone all red."
"N-nothing!"
"You don't fancy that pompous git, do you?"
Hermione reddened further, and Elara intervened. "Deflecting a crush of your own, Malfoy?" she drawled. "How unexpected."
"Shut up, Black."
"Is your father here, Draco? Is it time to leave?" Hermione asked, shooting Elara a grateful look. "I assume that's why you're bothering with us."
"Yes, he sent me to fetch you. He's just over—father!"
Their small group managed to look around in time to witness Mr. Malfoy get slugged by a slightly balding, red-haired bloke in patched robes, and they toppled over into one of the shelves, books raining on them and the crowd. Witches shrieked, a shorter, red-haired woman screaming "Arthur!" louder than the rest while the harassed store manager burst into tears. Two boys somewhere in the thick of things started yelling, "Get him, Dad!" and a photographer from the Daily Prophet clicked away on his camera like mad.
Torn between running to his father's rescue and not getting punched for the effort, Draco stood frozen, mouth agape.
"Break it up, you two! Break it up!" boomed a familiar voice. Harriet smiled when she saw Hagrid squeeze his way through the entrance, nudging aside witches with little effort on his part to reach Mr. Malfoy and the red-haired wizard, yanking the pair apart by the scruffs of their necks. "That's 'nuff of that!"
Mr. Malfoy staggered on his own two feet and yanked his tailored robes back into place, his eye already purpling, pale hair splayed about his shoulders. It irked Harriet that, like his son, he still managed to look pretty even when mussed and angry—the git. "Unhand me, I'm on the Board of Governors and could have you dismissed in an instant—." Mr. Malfoy sucked in a ragged breath. "Draco! Hermione! We are leaving; I won't patronize an establishment that serves such…commoners."
Draco shuffled forward, one hand latched on Hermione's sleeve, and Hermione cast a final, despairing look at Harriet and Elara before she let herself be steered from the store. The witch who'd screamed was busy mopping the red-haired wizard's—Arthur?—bloodied lip, all while furiously berating him for brawling in public. Harriet spotted Fred and George Weasley standing nearby, and guessed the couple had to be their mum and dad.
As the book signing continued, and Lockhart went into raptures when he spotted Longbottom among the onlookers, Harriet caught Elara's eye and the other witch suddenly grinned, white teeth bright with plain humor. "Do you think it would be inappropriate for me to send Mr. Weasley a thank you gift?" she asked. "Because that was amazing."
Harriet laughed.
A/N: Random note I'll probably extrapolate more on later in the story, but I'm not going to magically fix Harriet's eye-sight. It bothers me when fics change that aspect of Harry right off, like it's some kind of horrid flaw. Magic has its limits, and I want to preserve that part that seems to quintessentially Harriet.
Poor Tonks. She was 99% prepared for Snape to murder her, no doubt.
