Chapter Text
“HUFFLEPUFF!”
Harry took a long breath and snatched the Hat off his head. It had been trying to persuade him to go to Gryffindor, but Harry had seen how some of the people at the Gryffindor table had booed the Slytherin Sortings, and he didn’t want to be in a House of bullies.
He bounced over to the Hufflepuff table, which was exploding with cheers, the way they did for all their new people. Harry had briefly spoken with Neville Longbottom, evidently the Boy-Who-Lived, on the train, and he didn’t know what was so bad about Hufflepuff.
Right now, people were reaching out to shake Harry’s hand and introduce themselves, only interrupted by their cheers when someone new got Sorted into the House.
It was exactly the kind of place Harry had always wanted to be.
*
“It’s unfair how much Professor Snape dislikes you,” Susan whispered to Harry as they walked out of their first Potions class. “I mean, he doesn’t really like anyone except the Slytherins, but he never normally singles out someone in another House.”
Harry nodded. He might have cowered in front of Professor Snape, but he had felt the disapproving weight of Hufflepuff behind him, and he’d spoken up.
And lost a couple of points, but then, so had Ernie, for “being too enthusiastic.” So it seemed no one really cared about that.
“We ought to do something about this,” Justin said, dropping back to walk next to Harry.
Harry looked thoughtfully at Justin. He had wondered if Justin would feel that way, because he was the sort of posh person Uncle Vernon would have wanted Dudley to be, and that probably meant he shared the Dursleys’ attitudes. But it didn’t seem so.
“What can we do, though?” Zacharias cut in with a scowl. He scowled a lot for a Hufflepuff, Harry thought. “I heard that other people have tried to complain about Professor Snape to the Headmaster, and he always dismisses the complaints.”
“We can give him a taste of his own medicine,” Harry said.
“What do you mean?”
“Poison him?”
“Zacharias, that is not appropriate!”
“No,” Harry said, raising his voice a little as Zacharias and Ernie dissolved into bickering. “I mean, make sure that he gets singled out. That things happen to him that he wants to happen to other people. What do you think?”
“Prank a professor?” Hannah, her blonde pigtails bouncing as she walked, looked shocked.
“Well, it doesn’t have to be cruel,” Harry said quickly. He had often wished he could do cruel things to Dudley, but he knew he would have felt differently about them if he’d ever managed to actually do them. “But it could single him out. Make people notice him and laugh at him.”
“I can’t think of a way to ask him questions that he can’t answer,” Justin said slowly.
“Not that,” Harry said. “Just if we can come up with a way for people to stare at him.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“I don’t know. Let me think about it.”
Justin smiled at him. “Sure thing.”
*
“And then there’s Fluffy—no, no, forget I mentioned ‘im.”
Harry looked up, blinking. He’d been playing with Hagrid’s boarhound, Fang, while Hagrid puttered around the hut talking about the various pets that he’d had over the years. Mostly dogs, it sounded like. Harry thought he might like dogs, at least if it meant more who weren’t like Ripper.
“Who’s Fluffy?”
“Forget I mentioned ‘im, I said.”
Hagrid’s face was turning bright red, but Harry was no longer afraid to ask questions, at least where Hagrid was concerned. He leaned forwards and gave Hagrid the sort of look that he’d seen some of the prefects give Hufflepuffs like Smith who were complaining about unreasonable things. “Come on, Hagrid. You mentioned Fluffy, so you must want me to know about him.”
“No, it just slipped out!”
“Hagrid.”
Harry now used the stern tone that some of his primary school teachers had on him when they were trying to get Harry to “admit” that he had done something Dudley had actually done. They had always made Harry feel guilty, even though he wasn’t. And on someone like Hagrid, all it really took was that tone and a stern glare, and Hagrid blurted it out.
“Fluffy’s my Cerberus.”
“A what?”
“A three-headed dog. Dumbledore wanted him to guard the thing on the third-floor corridor…”
The story came spilling out. Harry shook his head several times as it did. Hagrid still refused to admit what the thing hidden up in the third-floor corridor was, but Harry didn’t care that much about that. What mattered was that it was mental to keep a huge three-headed dog in the school for any purpose.
“But you don’t need to worry about the traps,” Hagrid earnestly assured Harry. “The professors set them up and they check them every day. I go visit Fluffy every week myself.”
“Did Professor Snape set up one of the traps?”
“Oh, yeah, he did! Clever tricky trap to get through. He’s a right one that way, Professor Snape is.”
Harry was thinking intently as he kept playing with Fang. There was a chance that he could cause some trouble that would embarrass Professor Snape if the professor kept being a bully. He just had to think about how to do it.
*
“I still don’t understand what this is supposed to accomplish.”
“Shhh!”
“Everyone else is at the Halloween Feast, who’s going to hear us?”
Harry stopped and looked sternly at Justin over the top of the squirming bag they held between them. Justin didn’t seem abashed. He just frowned at Harry a little harder.
“I told you,” Harry said. “We’ve trained this puppy to react to the smell of Professor Snape’s robe. The next time he goes to check on his part of the traps, the puppy is going to bite him and cause him a lot of embarrassment.”
“I still don’t know how you trained it to react to the smell of Professor Snape’s robes. You didn’t manage to take a piece of his robes the way you were going to.”
Harry lowered his voice as they got nearer to the door with Fluffy behind it. They were going to have to be at least a little quiet, no matter what Justin thought, if they didn’t want Fluffy to attack them before he saw the sack. “I told you. I took the puppy into the classroom and let it sniff around, and right outside his office, too.”
“How do you know it’ll bite him, though? Instead of just be happy to see him?”
“Shhh!”
Justin rolled his eyes, but he did keep a watch down the corridor while Harry opened the sack and held it carefully towards the door. Then they unlocked it with the Alohomora Charm, which Justin had heard Granger from Gryffindor say had unlocked the door when she, Weasley, and Neville Longbottom had ended up here for some reason.
The door clicked open quietly.
A growl drifted out, but only until Harry shook the sack open and the puppy inside tumbled onto the floor with a little triple growl of its own. Fluffy promptly went quiet and then began to sniff the puppy all over.
Harry had to laugh a little. Hagrid had said that Fluffy really missed the puppies that his mate had given birth to just a few days before he had to go guard the thing from Gringotts, but it was still cute and funny to watch them sniffing each other, three heads to three heads.
“Let’s go, Harry! Someone’s coming!”
Harry blinked and glanced down the corridor. Yes, he could hear footsteps, quiet and hurried. He almost wanted to wait to see if it was Snape coming to check on his traps, but Justin pulled on his arm, and they turned and ran down the stairs.
In the meantime, Harry thought they could just blend quietly with the students leaving the Halloween Feast, and everyone wouldn’t know where he and Justin went.
That didn’t happen, but what did was kind of even better. The Feast had ended because of the threat of a troll in the dungeons, so the prefects escorted Harry and Justin and the other first-years back to their common room, and no one asked where they’d been. They were just relieved that Harry and Justin were all right.
Harry grinned at Justin as they settled into chairs by the fireplace. He hoped that the news would be all over the school in the morning as to how Snape had got bitten by a puppy.
*
“Students, I have tragic news for you.”
Dumbledore was standing up at the professors’ table, his face solemn. Harry frowned and traded a glance with Justin. He could see Snape sitting up there next to the Headmaster, so it couldn’t be that Snape had got bitten by the puppy.
In fact, Snape looked kind of smug. That was annoying.
“Professor Quirrell, our dear Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, is dead.”
More than one person gasped. Ernie whispered, “Do you think it’s the curse? It’s never struck so early in the year before. My cousin Fanny said that.”
“Will you shut up about your cousin Fanny?” Zacharias demanded, and they started arguing again, the way they so often did.
Harry exchanged a frowning look with Justin. He wondered what had happened. Had Professor Quirrell also gone to check on his traps and been killed by Professor Snape? Harry could see that happening.
“I am afraid that the third-floor corridor will be closed for the remainder of the year,” Professor Dumbledore announced. “Those who would like to speak with their Head of House or exchange memories of Professor Quirrell are welcome to do so for this day. Classes will be canceled.”
“Oh, good!” Hannah exclaimed. “I haven’t finished my Defense essay yet.”
“Hannah, you should be more respectful,” Susan scolded her.
“Why? He was a horrible professor—”
And Susan and Hannah started bickering, just like Ernie and Zacharias.
Harry shook his head. He was glad that he and Justin never bickered that way, even if Justin was also whispering that they needed to find out what had happened.
“We’ll go talk to Hagrid and see about getting the puppy back out,” Harry whispered to Justin under the cover of students loudly exclaiming and speculating about what could have happened to Professor Quirrell.
Justin frowned, but nodded.
*
“The puppy is out. So is Fluffy.”
Harry blinked at Hagrid. He and Justin were sitting on the rough wooden chairs that Hagrid kept around his table, and drinking tea. Justin kept clearing his throat when he did. “What do you mean? Did you go in and get them out after Professor Snape killed Professor Quirrell?”
“I keep telling yah, Harry, Professor Snape is on our side!”
“Then why does he bully people so much?”
Hagrid was the one to clear his throat this time. “Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? What matters is that Professor Quirrell went to check on his own trap, and he got—well, Fluffy didn’t want him coming in there—he saw Professor Quirrell as a threat to his puppy.”
Harry and Justin traded silent, horrified glances. Harry did feel pretty guilty, even though he couldn’t have had any idea that Fluffy would kill someone in reaction to the professor entering the room where his puppy was. If anything, Harry had thought the puppy would be the one to bite, since Fluffy was tame enough to be in the school with a bunch of kids.
Justin said softly, “So it was an accident?”
“It were, yeah. But after that, Professor Dumbledore decided that we needed another guard for the St—I mean, the treasure.” Hagrid wiped his cheeks and cleared his throat. “And Fluffy and the puppies need to go to Greece, where they have the means to handle ‘em.”
“I’m sorry, Hagrid. We never meant to take Fluffy away from you.”
Hagrid waved his hands, while Justin mouthed “We?” at Harry. “It’s for the best. They’ll have the freedom to run around. And no one will be trying to hunt them for their three hearts, which some people try to do here.”
“They do?”
Harry listened to Hagrid’s stories of Cerberus-hunting in horrified silence. Then he and Justin left.
Justin shook his head the minute Hagrid’s door closed behind him. “I’m not going to take part in another scheme to stop Professor Snape, Harry.”
“Not that! We have to stop them from hunting Cerberuses!”
“What?”
“You heard Hagrid! They’re killing puppies. It’s tragic.”
Justin laughed for some reason, and Harry glared at him. But Justin just put his hand up. “I only hope that you never change, Harry.”
“Er,” Harry said. “Well. Good.”
*
No one ever found out who had released the troll into the school, and no one ever found out that Harry and Justin were technically behind Professor Quirrell’s death, either. Harry told Professor Snape directly to his face what he thought about him being a bully, and served many detentions. And he and Justin learned a little more about the Forbidden Forest, and creepy centaurs who thought Mars had “turned back” for some reason.
But the year was quiet after that, at least. Except for Ernie and Zacharias always bickering.
*
“That means the Heir is after me. And people like me,” Justin added after a minute.
Harry put his arm around Justin’s shoulders. They were sitting huddled together in the Hufflepuff common room, although according to Professor Sprout and the prefects, they should have been in bed already. But Harry didn’t know how anyone was supposed to sleep after seeing the Heir’s message on the wall.
“I won’t let him get you, Justin. Don’t worry.”
“How can you stop him?” Justin asked simply, his eyes wide and bright with worry. “I just—I don’t know what to do, Harry. This Heir of Slytherin must be someone really powerful if he Petrified a cat like that.”
Harry bit his lip. “I don’t know. But I promise that I will.”
“Promise me something else, too.”
“What?”
“If—if the Heir Petrifies or kills me? Please make sure that you send an owl to my parents and tell them, okay? I’m not sure how much Hogwarts tells Muggleborns’ families. My parents seemed satisfied with what Professor McGonagall said to them when she visited me, but I don’t know how good the communication is now that we’re in school.”
Harry squeezed Justin’s shoulders. “I promise.”
*
Harry swallowed as he stood staring at Justin lying still and frozen on the hospital bed. Behind him, Ernie, Zacharias, Susan, and Hannah waited, all quiet and solemn for once instead of arguing with each other.
Justin was staring straight up at the ceiling. He looked as if he had started to lift his hands to throw something back, but they were frozen in place, too.
It was so unnatural. Harry had never known Justin when he wasn’t shifting in place or leaning over to whisper something or rolling his eyes or muttering under his breath. He didn’t get involved in lots of arguments like the others, but that just made it worse now, when he was so silent.
It was unnatural.
Harry stared at Justin with anger stirring in his belly. He’d promised that he would stop the Heir of Slytherin, and he’d failed. But he could still keep the one promise Justin had asked of him.
“Come on,” he whispered to the rest of the second-year Hufflepuffs, and they slipped out of the hospital wing.
“What are we going to do?” Susan said in a quiet voice as they made the trek back down to their common room.
“Justin asked me to write to his parents and let them know what’s going on.” Harry straightened his shoulders. “I’m going to do that. And I’m the only one staying here for Christmas, so I’ll look around for the Heir of Slytherin and see if there’s any way of stopping him. Or her. Or them.”
“I still say it’s Longbottom. He’s a Parselmouth!”
Zacharias snorted. “You really think that Longbottom, who’s afraid of his own shadow and spouts about how necessary it is to love Muggleborns at every opportunity, is running around setting a beast on them?”
Harry didn’t usually agree with the most abrasive Hufflepuff in his year, but right now, he did. “Yeah. I don’t think it’s him. Everyone always watches him, anyway. It would be harder for him to get away with things.”
That was a new argument Ernie hadn’t considered before, from the wrinkle in his brow, so Harry took the silence as a gift and continued.
“I’ll try to figure it out, and I’ll write to Justin’s parents, and I’ll let you know if they answer. All right?”
“Thanks, Harry,” Hannah said, and surprised him by hugging him tightly. “You’re a really good friend.”
Harry hugged her back. He’d had disagreements with the other Hufflepuffs, especially Zacharias and Ernie, but it was nice to be reminded that they’d all been Sorted into the same House and they had each other’s backs.
*
Justin’s parents did better than just answer the owl. They told Harry they were coming to the gates of Hogwarts and expected to be let in. Apparently they’d both done some kind of test when Justin was first invited to the school and they were actually Squibs rather than just Muggles, so they could see Hogwarts.
Harry went to meet them on the morning of the last full day of the Christmas holidays, shaking Mr. Finch-Fletchley’s hand somewhat shyly. “It’s nice to meet you, sir.” Justin’s dad was a tall man with blond hair, and reminded Harry of what Uncle Vernon might have been like if he were thinner and smarter.
“Please call me Jack,” said Mr. Finch-Fletchley, with a shake of his head. “No one informed us about Justin’s condition other than you, you know. And this is my wife Monica.”
Monica, as she insisted that Harry call her, at least wasn’t like Aunt Petunia at all, with brown hair and gentle, fierce eyes and a light plumpness. “Now, can you tell us more clearly what happened to Petrify our son?”
Harry explained on the way up to Hogwarts. There were few students in the school, and they didn’t meet anyone on the way to the hospital wing, but Madam Pomfrey pounced on them the minute they got post the door. “Mr. Potter! What is this?”
“These are Justin’s parents, Madam Pomfrey. They came to visit him.”
Madam Pomfrey puffed up the way Hedwig always did if Harry petted one of the other owls instead of just her. “Now see here, I know how to treat my patients—”
“Evidently you don’t, madam, as no one informed us.” Harry was surprised that icicles didn’t form in the air from the way Monica was speaking. “It took this one brave little boy, Justin’s best friend, to write to us and let us know what is going on. Now, what’s this nonsense about not being able to get fresh Mandrakes for five months?”
Justin called me his best friend?
Harry had thought of Justin that way, but Justin was friends with people in other Houses, too, and Harry hadn’t known for sure that Justin thought of him that way, too. He stood there and glowed with quiet warmth inside while Jack and Monica argued with Madam Pomfrey.
In the end, they arranged to pay for a shipment of fresh Mandrakes to Hogwarts to be made into the potion that would wake Justin and the others up. They had a lot of money, Harry thought. They shook Harry’s hand again on their way out the gates of Hogwarts.
“You did the right thing, Harry,” Jack told him. “Never doubt that.”
Monica smiled at him. “Justin is lucky to have someone like you as his friend, Harry. Do come visit us this summer, if you can.”
Harry stood there and glowed some more while they went to be Apparated back to the Ministry by the Auror they’d evidently paid to do it. Then he went back inside and sat by Justin’s bed.
No Heir of Slytherin was going to get Justin while Harry was around.
*
Justin’s parents came through, and the Mandrake Draught was distributed to him and Mrs. Norris and even Nearly Headless Nick somehow (Harry didn’t know exactly how). Also, Aurors that Justin’s parents had paid came to the school and patrolled it up and down. They found the Heir of Slytherin somehow, although evidently it was a student being controlled by some sort of magical artifact and the details were kept quiet.
Headmaster Dumbledore looked constipated when he announced that to the school a month later. Harry wondered if he thought that the professors should have found the Heir instead of the Aurors, but, well, he should have given the professors more time to patrol and investigate if that was the case.
“We’re well-off,” Justin said simply, when the others asked him how Jack and Monica had stopped the Heir of Slytherin.
“So am I!”
“Stop bragging about your wealth, Ernie, it’s crass.”
As Ernie and Zacharias vanished into another bickering storm, Justin leaned over to Harry. “Thank you,” he said fiercely. “And you’re going to spend the whole summer with us.”
“How do you know my relatives wouldn’t be worried?”
Justin gave him a withering look. “I’ve heard the way you talk about them, Harry, and seen the way you look. I left it alone last year because I wanted you to bring it up to me yourself, but you’re not doing that, so I’m saving you. The way you saved me and the others.”
Harry smiled at him, and Justin nudged an elbow into his ribs. They laughed and went on eating, while the rest of the House chattered around them with happy relief.
Harry was just glad that standing up to the Heir of Slytherin had worked better than standing up to Professor Snape.