Chapter 2
NL: With Weasley out of commission, that meant that Harry and Granger had to go on alone. The next room contained the troll that Quirrellmort let into the school on Hallowe’en.
DS: Wait...what troll? No one ever heard about a troll in the school.
BZ: On Samhain in our first year, during the feast, professor Quirrell came running into the Great Hall, screaming about a troll in the dungeons, before he passed out. Dumbledore, being the brilliant man he was (the sarcasm was so thick it was a wonder that Zabini’s tongue didn’t go up in flames) told the prefects to escort everyone back to their common rooms. I guess he forgot that the snakepit is in the dungeons, right where the troll was purported to be.
Reluctantly, we went back to Slytherin house, where the house elves had set up a mini-feast for us all. Through rumor and scuttlebutt, we learned that the troll had trapped Granger within a third floor girls’ loo. We didn’t find out until much later that Weasley had been saying some nasty things about her that she’d overheard, and she ran to the bathroom to cry. Anyway, a couple of Granger’s dorm mates told Harry at the beginning of the feast that she was still in the loo, bawling her eyes out, but no one bothered to inform a professor or go check on the girl.
As everyone was heading back to their own common rooms, Potter got the brilliant idea to go and get Granger, since she didn’t know about the troll, and Weasley was guilted into accompanying him. Now here’s where things get a little unbelievable, but having been trained by Potter for a year, I can now believe that this is how that encounter went down, as told to us by Harry himself. Everything we'd heard before those defense lessons had come from Weasley's bragging about the 'adventures', with him as the main character. We all know the truth, however; that Weasley is a bit of a lazy coward who's been riding on Harry's coattails for years.
Harry and Weasley burst through the bathroom door to see the troll smashing the stalls to bits, whilst Granger was cowering underneath a sink. Being the natural hero he is, Harry leapt into action and climbed up the troll’s back to distract it from Granger. His wand somehow ended up shoved up the creature’s nose, which caused it a great deal of pain, and while preoccupied, Weasley made use of the levitation charm they’d just learned and lifted the beast’s club over its head. He lost control, of course, since it was still a new spell for him, and the cudgel crashed down on the creature’s head, knocking it out.
DS: Why weren’t any of the parents notified about this?
SB: Hogwarts has always been touted as the ‘safest place in the wizarding world’ by nearly everyone you speak to about it. A few of us over the years have tried to let our parents know what was happening there, but most of them didn’t believe us. My auntie Amelia, as Head Auror, should have come and done something about the dangers we faced there, but she was always too busy with the Department of Magical Law Enforcement to take my complaints seriously. I guess capturing Mundungus Fletcher was more important than having a troll rampaging through the school.
NL: To continue, the troll in the next room was already incapacitated, which meant that the other person or persons after the stone had made it to the end. Harry and Granger ran across the room and entered the last trap, which was a potions logic problem. Though Severus Snape has always been a harsh and cruel taskmaster to anyone not Slytherin, he is a brilliant Potions Master, and the clues he wrote out would have confused a great many people. Not Granger, though. She read through it twice and was able to identify the poison, as well as the two elixirs that would guarantee one of them a way forward, and the other a way back. Harry sent her back to Weasley and went on alone to face the Noseless One in the last room.
The stone was very cleverly hidden in the Mirror of Erised, and Quirrellmort was trying to figure out how to get it. He didn’t seem to understand that the trap was set up so that whomever desired to protect the stone would be able to retrieve it, which Harry did. There was a bit of a scuffle as the Noseless One tried to wrestle the stone from Harry, but at the touch of Quirrellmort’s hand to Harry’s throat, the possessed professor began to burn. The Noseless One pulled back to protect himself, but Harry didn’t see any way out of his predicament, especially when Quirrellmort tried to kill him again. In self-defense, he grabbed the DADA professor’s face and turned him to ash.
DS: He...he killed someone? At eleven years old? Was there anyone there who could have helped him deal with the trauma of becoming a murderer at eleven, even though it was for his own protection?
LL: Sadly, no. After he collapsed, he was taken to the infirmary, where the headmaster grilled him relentlessly about what happened. That’s the ‘exemplary care’ he received for his efforts after every ‘adventure’ he had in that school. Unfortunately, that was only the first of many tragedies Harry had to endure, and the guilt and remorse just kept piling on.
DS: I’ve a feeling that Potter’s years there didn’t get any better.
TN: They didn’t. Rumors were always flying around about Harry, but when we had those private lessons with him last year, we finally got him to unburden himself about his years at school. Second year, he faced a thousand year old, sixty foot long basilisk, and nearly died for it. He went there to rescue Weasley’s idiot sister, and if it wasn’t for Dumbledore’s phoenix, Potter would most likely have died in the Chamber of Secrets, along with Weaslette, since allegedly, no one else could get down there.
DS: But...but the phoenix...
TN: Exactly. The phoenix. Anyway, the headmaster dragged Potter up to his office after that, despite his urgent need to see the mediwitch for his injuries. Third year, of course, an innocent man was set to be Kissed on the orders of Minister Fudge, and over a hundred dementors were sent to the school for Harry’s protection.
DS: Did...did you say a hundred dementors? (Nott nodded his sad agreement, and I was completely floored) Fudge endangered hundreds of children in order to protect one lone boy?
BZ: Fudge’s incompetence is the reason we’re now in the situation where we have no real way to fight the Noseless One. He’d reduced the Auror forces by quite a bit after the end of the first war, and had also changed up the training. These days, the Aurors couldn’t fight their way out of a nest of kneazle kittens.
TN: After Black went on the run, there was the Triwizard Tournament, in which Harry’s name was illegally entered by a Death Eater masquerading as Mad-Eye Moody. Moody, by the way, has been friends with Dumbledore for over twenty five years, and you’d think he’d know the man’s tics and quirks as intimately as he knows his own. Nope. Or, at least, that’s the front he put up when it was discovered who had put Harry’s name in the Goblet of Fire. Many of us still believe that every task over the last five years was some sort of test, to see if Harry could sacrifice himself when it counted.
NL: Fourth year was when everyone turned on him again, just like they did in second, when it came out that Harry was a parselmouth. Granted, there were too many students who were falling all over themselves at the thought that they were attending school with the Boy Who Lived, but the way they swung from hero-worship to distrust and animosity made them seem almost bipolar.
LL: The really sad part is that Harry did absolutely nothing, to any of them, for them to turn on him and treat him like a leper. Even his supposed best friend, Ron Weasley, betrayed Harry’s trust and faith when he accused Potter of cheating to get into the Tournament. Harry’s had so very few people on his side that he clung to anyone who showed him even a sliver of kindness, and received backstabbing and betrayal for his trust.
NL: Last year was the worst, however. Sirius Black, once he escaped the dementors in third year with his godson's help, promised to give Harry a loving home as soon as he could stop running. Sadly, that promise was never fulfilled, though it was held out as a carrot before the mule many, many times. Dumbledore was the one to encourage that longing the most, hoping that Sirius’ involvement would encourage Harry to sacrifice his life for those he loved. If Albus Dumbledore would have been honest with Harry from the start, Sirius wouldn’t have died at the Ministry.
Harry was never told about the foretelling surrounding himself and the other guy until after Sirius died, which was the reason the Noseless One went after him in the first place. There was more that went unsaid, and that’s the way that Albus Dumbledore liked to play things. None of his most trusted associates in the Order of the Phoenix knew everything, except perhaps Severus Snape, his spy in the monster’s den. I suspect the headmaster knows more about Harry’s link with the Noseless One than he’s willing to tell, and it’s these secrets that had my friend running to the Ministry on a fake ‘vision’ in which Sirius was being tortured to entice Potter to rescue him. The Noseless One was after the prophecy orb in the Department of Mysteries, and thought tricking Harry into going there would get him what he wanted.
Potter hadn’t even heard the prognostication for himself, and was quite unwilling to turn over a potential weapon to the enemy, so he broke it, which infuriated the Noseless One. His inbred sycophants had accompanied their master, in hopes that one of them would be able to talk Harry into giving it up, which didn’t happen. It was Weasley, Weaslette, Granger, Luna and I who accompanied him on his quest, and we held our own quite handily against those genetically challenged oafs, thanks to all the extra training we received from the Chosen One. Once the Order showed up, with Sirius there to rescue Harry, things became a bit more confusing.
Bellatrix Lestrange, one of the people responsible for disabling my parents, was fighting with Sirius over by this arch that had an odd curtain hanging from it. We later found out that it was the Veil of Death, too late to save Sirius, who was driven back through it by a spell his cousin threw at him. That...that broke Harry in a way that nothing else could, and he was never the same afterward. Part of it was the loss of someone who was close to his parents, who could tell him things no one else knew, and part of it was the desperate hope that he’d finally be free of the abuse he’d suffered for most of his life.
DS: What about his friends? Couldn’t they help him with his grief?
SB: After Cedric Diggory was murdered by Peter Pettigrew at the end of the Triwizard Tournament, and Harry was sent back to those disgusting muggles, he told us that he never received any mail from Granger or Weasley. That he was told later that Dumbledore forbade them sending him any owls, for fear that the Noseless One or one of his idiot henchmen would trace the owls and either find his home, or the headquarters for the Order. Harry was left in that wretched environment by himself, to grieve for the death of another student and feel guilty for being responsible for that death.
Harry wanted the win to be a Hogwarts one; he and Cedric had reached the cup at the same time. So our friend offered to share the win by encouraging Cedric to take the cup alongside him. Unfortunately, it was turned into a portkey by the fake Moody, and it took them to the graveyard for the resurrection ritual. Harry once told me that he still has nightmares about that moment; that he can still hear the Noseless One telling Pettigrew to ‘kill the spare’. So, if Dumbledore prohibited Harry’s supposed friends from writing to him at the end of fourth year, it stands to reason that he’d prohibit anyone from writing to Harry after his fifth year. I think he was trying to use those tragic events to drive Potter closer to a desperate depression that would have seen him willingly sacrificing his life, if it meant that he’d get to be reunited with his parents.
DS: That’s...that’s a lot to unpack. Why hasn’t anyone gone to the DMLE about this?
SB: Who are we to go to now? Auntie Amelia was killed a couple weeks before Harry’s birthday, and the Ministry has been taken over by the Noseless One’s gorillas. Things are getting more and more tense as time passes, and frankly I’m surprised that the school hasn’t been taken over yet. The way Dumbledore’s been mismanaging things for the last six years, it wouldn’t surprise me if the school ends up closed before the end of term. In fact, I think it would be in the best interests of the muggleborns and halfbloods if they get out of Dodge while the gettin’s good.