Chapter 10: New Friends & Old Enemies
No, this wasn't difficult, Harry thought as he waited outside the Potions classroom.
Their first day had gone perfectly. He ate a bit, had a good class and even won a few points from Professor McGonagall. Hermione had made friends with the girls and with Remus. Harry found that his young father was surprisingly easy to talk to, as were two of his friends. He avoided speaking to Peter entirely, but no one seemed to notice. Lunch, homework, dinner and the evening spent in the common room were as comfortable and normal as anything.
But that was yesterday.
This was a new day, Friday. A day with Potions. A day with Slytherins.
He stood outside the classroom between Hermione and Sirius. His 'sister' was carefully studying a borrowed textbook. He glanced over her shoulder to scan the page, anything to avoid having to look across the corridor at the Slytherins. A particularly thin and angular boy was glaring at him as if Harry had insulted him, though Harry hadn't said a word since leaving the entrance hall. Still the boy's black eyes remained fixed on him; even as he leaned over and whispered to a rather dangerous-looking classmate, his eyes followed Harry.
"What's got you so intense this morning, Snivelly?" Sirius smiled. "I see you staring at my new friend. Sorry, but I don't think he swings your way… not into spiders."
The boy's eyes moved slowly from Harry to Sirius as a cold sneer formed on his thin lips. "I doubt anyone of quality would swing your way, Black. A pity Regulus has to have such unfortunate relations."
As the deep and disdainful voice left his mouth, Harry knew immediately who the boy would grow into. Snape. Looking at him, he was surprised he hadn't recognised him sooner. He looked almost the same as he did in adulthood, a bit shorter perhaps.
"I'd say it's a shame he has to have such unfortunate housemates," Sirius retorted, earning a disapproving scowl from Snape. The boy's Slytherin housemates grumbled under their breath at the insult from a pureblood wizard who ought to have been one of them. Snape flinched as the Slytherin nearest him leaned in and whispered into his ear, no doubt spurring him on.
"And now you're going so far as to associate with Mudbloods," Snape's emotionless black eyes focused on Hermione, who sucked in a shocked breath. He looked back to Harry again and the sneer reformed.
"Muggle-raised, actually," Harry grinned cheekily. He could finally say what he liked to Snape. The man had no power to take points or give detentions or expel him. It was liberating and potentially the greatest thing that had happened to him since discovering he had a Godfather.
"Little difference, Granger," Snape spat his new name as violently as he had Harry's old one; apparently his physical similarity to James Potter went a long way to making Snape hate him on sight. "That only makes you a blood traitor."
"Are you as bored with this as I am?" Sirius asked and all but turned his back on Snape. He was not actually foolish enough to make himself vulnerable to attack, but the slight turn was enough to insult the Slytherins. "So Harry James Granger, you into Quidditch?"
Harry smiled and took up the boy's light tone just to annoy Snape. "Yes. I don't have much opportunity to follow the professional teams, but I play."
"What position?" James asked eagerly. "It's a rebuilding year for us, so we need new… just about everything but one Chaser and a Beater."
"I was Seeker on my school team," Harry said proudly. Hermione jabbed him in the ribs and shook her head pointedly while she glared at him. Being good academically was a great deal different than outshining everyone on the Quidditch pitch. He knew as well as she did that people still talked of the great Quidditch players decades after they had graduated Hogwarts and gone on to mundane jobs at the Ministry or Gringotts. Harry was an exceptional Seeker; they would certainly be talking of him for generations if he joined the team.
"Oh… but I don't think I'll be trying out."
"What?" Sirius balked and slapped him on the head. "Why not? Didn't you hear the man?"
Harry's brain scrambled for a viable excuse. He couldn't claim to be injured; they'd cart him to the infirmary to have him looked over. Unexpectedly developed a fear of flying, maybe? That would never work. He lit on an idea.
"Well, I was set to be Captain of my team and I don't think I could settle for anything less after all those years of hard work."
James nodded. If there's one thing he appreciated it was pride in one's accomplishments. "Okay, but if we can't find a decent Seeker, you are going to try out whether you like it or not." He levelled a look on the boy that left no room for argument.
Harry nodded though he had no intention of playing.
"Very nice," Hermione whispered.
"Thank you," Harry grinned.
"Harry James Granger," Sirius interrupted their private exchange. "Care to be my potions partner? I'm quite good."
"Brilliant," Harry beamed up at the handsome face of his young Godfather, amazed that he would want to spend more time with him. "I need all the help I can get in Potions. I still don't know how I managed to get an E in it. I don't even have a book; I assumed I wouldn't get to take it this year."
Sirius studied the boy, his grey eyes taking in Harry's honest amazement. "If you're so rubbish, why keep at it?"
He shrugged, "I need it if I want to become an Auror."
"You're trying to become an Auror?" he took a step back and looked at him appraisingly, nodding his approval. "Not bad, Harry James Granger. Not bad at all."
"It's the only career I've ever considered. I'm not sure what my father did for a living before he died," Harry said, looking briefly at James. "But a professor suggested it might be good for me… well, it wasn't a professor, actually. It was a crazed murderous lunatic disguised as a professor with Polyjuice, but the advice still held." Harry said with a shrug, oblivious to the incredulous looks he was getting from James and Sirius.
Hermione stomped hard on his foot. He was saved her opinion of his little speech by the arrival of the Potions professor.
"Good morning," the professor greeted them jovially and opened the door wide for them to enter. Harry stumbled to a stop and stared at the large man with his ridiculous robes and matching waistcoat, polished brass buttons and waxed moustache. It was Horace Slughorn, the man he had helped lure out of retirement just a few weeks earlier. He looked, if anything, more preposterous than he did when Harry met him over the summer.
He was the Potions teacher?
"No…" Harry whispered in astonished disbelief as his eyes darted to Snape. If Slughorn was taking over Potions from Snape, that meant Snape was moving to a different position. The only open position, as it was every year, was Defence. Snape would finally get to teach Defence Against the Dark Arts. What had Professor Dumbledore been thinking when he agreed to that? The man was a reformed Death Eater. Dumbledore might as well have gone down into Muggle London and conjured a wet bar at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
"Come in, Mr Granger," Slughorn smiled and pulled him into the classroom. Harry hurried to the empty seat beside Sirius, still watching the fat professor in horrified wonder.
"Grotesque, isn't he?" Sirius whispered. "He's head of Slytherin House. Tried talking me into switching houses so he could have a whole 'set' of Blacks. Freak."
Harry nodded numbly, barely listening to Sirius as he wondered how Snape could be such polar opposites of the man who taught him his subject.
The man smiled at each face as he took silent roll; like McGonagall, he had been at his post for years and knew each student in his class. Harry felt a tiny thrill as Slughorn looked up at him and checked him as being present. He made no comment about Harry and continued on to look Hermione's way. As he watched Slughorn introduce the potions they would be learning over the course of term and set them to brewing, he noted the man's pleasant and easy smiles, quickness to praise and eagerness to get students interacting and interested in his subject.
No part of his teaching style had rubbed off on Snape.
As if sensing Harry's thoughts, the greasy Slytherin turned and glared at him.
"Bloody Slughorn's bloody set of bloody Slytherins," Sirius muttered under his breath. "Bloody Snivellus." He turned his anger toward his potions ingredients, chopping the fidgety newt eyes in half with worrying disregard for the safety of his own fingers.
"Sirius, calm down," Harry hissed. "It's just Snape."
Sirius looked hard at Harry and replied in a low voice only he could hear. "He's not just Snape. He's Snivellus. He's a git and I hate him." His abrupt shift to anger did not fit at all with the light and teasing attitude he had shown out in the corridor. The insults Snape had thrown at him had simply rolled off his back, but now he was clearly affected. "Don't you defend him!"
"I'm not defending him," Harry protested quietly. "I don't know him well enough to defend him."
He did know Snape well enough to hate him. The man had tormented Harry since he first stepped foot into the Potions classroom and had nearly forced him from his chosen career path because of his dislike of Harry's father. But he remembered what he had seen in the Pensieve on the last night of his Occlumency lessons – James and Sirius and Peter gleefully tormenting Snape, attacking without provocation and humiliating the boy. Yes, he had insulted Lily Evans, but that happened after he had been harassed and hurt publicly; he lashed out at whatever and whoever he could, and it happened to be Harry's mother. Would he have called her a Mudblood if they hadn't angered him first?
"I think," Harry said calmly, "that you should just let him be."
"Where's the fun in life if I can't torment Snivelly?" James chimed in from the table in front, not bothering to lower his voice. Snape raised his head enough to glare through a curtain of dark hair.
Even after viewing Snape's memory in the Pensieve, part of Harry still held onto the hope that his father was not as Snape had made him out; that the memory was flawed or skewed against him. What he had seen of James Potter since arriving in 1976 had been nothing like the boy in the memory. He had seemed very nice to Harry, if slightly over-confident and overshadowing. Seeing him interact with the Slytherins, however, in was clear that the memory had not been altered.
James really was as bad as Snape had always told him, he realised with a sickening twist in his gut.
Harry looked at the boy that would become his father and found it hard to believe the girl he saw in the Pensieve would ever agree to date and marry him. Remus and Sirius had each explained to him that this boy was not who he really was; this was the incomplete James Potter before he had added the compassion and dedication that would make him worthy of Lily's attention and Dumbledore's respect. Even knowing that, Harry couldn't believe people could look past his cruelty. He was fine and pleasant and funny to most people, but he quite clearly could be horrible if he decided he did not like a person.
Worse still, that decision was as seemingly arbitrary and impulsive as anything else he did; James Potter didn't need a reason to dislike someone, the dislike was reason enough. His arrogance didn't sit well with Harry.
"Harry? … Harry!" Sirius poked his arm, making him jump at the unexpected contact. "You were staring. Mind wander off on you?"
"Sometimes," he said apologetically.
"Can't say I blame you, having to listen to James go on," he smirked, all animosity gone from his system.
"Oi! I resent that! I'm perfectly charming in every way except where a certain Slytherin is concerned," James protested and threw a fistful of newt eyes at them.
"Behave, you two!" Remus chided sharply.
"Oh, no! He's pulling out his Prefect voice," James moaned and held his fingers to make a cross at arms' length, warding off the boy's authority.
Sirius grabbed Harry and ducked behind him. "Protect me!"
Harry glared over his shoulder and saw his young Godfather staring up at him with enormous puppy dog eyes. He had to blink several times to figure out if Sirius had actually transfigured his eyes into those of his Animagus form, but they were just normal, very round, very adorable human eyes.
'Adorable?' Harry snorted. That was probably the last description he would have ever thought to apply to Sirius Black.
He might have spent the rest of class looking at the eyes of his playful Potions partner, but he was saved that awkwardness by the sizzling coming from their cauldron.
"The potion!" Harry said and hurried to lower the flame and stir the concoction. "Enough playing for now, alright? I'd like to not get on Slughorn's bad side my first class."
"Yes, sir, Harry James Granger, sir," Sirius barked and returned to readying the newt eyes, this time with considerably more care for the placement of his fingers in relation to the blade.
Sirius, Harry found, was a far better potioneer than he had imagined, not that he ever really thought much on his Godfather's abilities to brew a healing salve. But he worked with as much speed and efficiency as young Severus Snape, while leaning on the table in casual conversation. Snape, by contrast, remained hunched over his table working with silent and furious diligence for the entire class.
Harry wondered if their comparative skills in Snape's best subject was part of their dislike for one another. Given the comments about Regulus Black, he suspected there was much more to it than just classroom competition.
As he considered the possibilities, he grabbed a handful of dried leeches and aimed them at the simmering cauldron. A large hand closed around his wrist and pulled him back.
"Careful," Sirius warned. "It's still got five minute of low simmering before we can add those safely. Unless you're so keen to escape that you're willing to destroy half the classroom to do it." He smirked and held Harry's wrist firmly in his hand, thumb brushing lightly over his pulse.
He jerked his hand away and threw the leeches back onto the table top.
'Useless Potter,' Harry thought angrily, glaring his frustration down at the shrivelled little worms. 'What the hell kind of Chosen One can't even brew a bloody potion? If Voldemort really wanted to kill me all he'd have to do is lock me in a room with potions ingredients and tell me to brew something as simple as a goddamn healing salve. I'd blow myself up inside of an hour.'
"Don't," Sirius whispered so close to his ear that Harry jumped.
"I wasn't doing anything."
He smirked at the quickness of the boy's denial. "You were thinking you're useless. That you should be perfect, capable of doing everything asked of you the first time without any trials or errors, that you'll never be as good as the rest, that you can't possibly compete... Stop me if I'm getting close." He said it with such certainty that Harry began to wonder if he was a Legilimens.
"No, I—Why would you think that?"
"Experience," the boy said darkly and tended the potion for a moment before turning those familiar grey eyes back to Harry, a strange, tense look on his face.
Harry did not have to feign confusion. He knew some of Sirius's history, but, as the summer had taught him, there was so much more to Sirius Orion Black than he could ever hope to know. That he could ever feel useless was an impossibility; the Sirius he knew had been full of confidence. Even as he died, Harry could see it in his posture.
He blinked back tears at the memory and bit back consoling words. He wasn't supposed to know about Sirius's mad family or that he had only just moved in with the Potters after finally running away from home. Thankfully he was spared Sirius noticing any of this as it played across his face. The boy had turned away to throw in the leeches and stir vigorously until they dissolved and thickened the brew to the consistency of chilled honey as per Slughorn's directions.
For lack of anything better to do, Harry cast a charm on the vials to make them unbreakable and labelled them just as Slughorn called their time to an end, requesting samples of their work.
"Shortest takes the samples up," Sirius said quickly.
Harry stared at him and his abrupt mood shifts. In the space of a single Double Potions class, Sirius had run from taunting to violently angry, playful to depressingly sombre. He was back at playful again, which suited Harry just fine. "Are you going to pull that every class?"
"Probably," he smiled and thrust the vials into Harry's hands. "Now go on, I'm hungry and won't risk you getting lost in the dungeons."
"I think I know how to climb stairs, thanks," Harry retorted and walked away.
His world took an unexpected turn and he felt his feet fall out from under him. He tumbled to the stone floor, landing hard and knocking himself cross-eyed in the process.
"Oops," a familiar deep voice said in a sarcastically innocent tone, earning a chuckle of appreciation from the Slytherin side of the room.
"What the hell was that for, Snape?" Harry spat as he rose.
The Slytherin stepped closer, "I thought a blood-traitor like you should get accustomed to the view, since you've so lowered yourself by the company you keep."
"That 'company' is my family, you git," he sneered as he had only ever seen Malfoy manage.
"Now, now, Mr Granger, Severus," Slughorn called to them. "What seems to be the trouble?"
"Granger fell and blames me, Professor," Snape said as his housemates snickered. "Can't imagine why."
"Perhaps because you tripped him, Snape."
Harry's defence came not from his left where Sirius stood but from his right; the boy had to grip the table to keep from falling again as his defender stepped up beside him. Lily Evans, his mother, glared past him, directing all her venom at Snape. "You should apologise."
Snape's confident and hateful smirk fell momentarily as he looked at the girl. It had to be Harry's imagination that he saw pleading in those black eyes. A murmur from the Slytherins behind him set Snape's features back to anger and he spoke again. "I'm so sorry you've chosen to turn your back on your heritage, Granger," Snape told Harry before turning his seemingly emotionless eyes back to Evans. "There, is everything all better?"
"Mr Snape," Slughorn said, his joviality considerably diminished. "Twenty points from Slytherin for your disregard for classroom rules, and I don't think I'll be extending that dinner invitation to you tonight."
Snape's smirk fell and his eyes narrowed at Harry. He sneered, "You still lost your samples."
"Fuck," Sirius cursed and kicked a table leg. "I already cleaned out the cauldron."
"Accio Black-Granger vials!" Harry called with a wave of his wand. The two unbroken glass vessels rolled from their place beneath a far table and flew into his waiting hand.
"Unbreakable glass. Learned that one a while back." He grinned sarcastically at Snape and strolled up to place the vials on Slughorn's desk.
The professor smiled. "Very clever, Harry," he said. "Ten points to Gryffindor. And I wonder… are you free for dinner? I'm holding a small gathering tonight, nothing fancy, just dinner and talk among friends. Lily will be joining us, of course." He looked at Harry expectantly, his moustache quivering excitedly.
Harry remembered from summer that Slughorn had a 'collection' of students from years of teaching at Hogwarts. Dumbledore had used his love of acquiring bright and talented witches and wizards to bring the old man back to teaching; Slughorn had been eager to collect the famous Harry Potter. Harry didn't like the sound of being collected, like he was just a bug that Slughorn was anxiously waiting to pin into a frame and hang on a wall.
"I'm still getting settled in, Professor," Harry replied quietly. "Maybe next time."
"Nonsense, my boy," the rotund man proclaimed. "You have the entire weekend to settle yourself in. Besides, who better to educate you about Hogwarts that its most promising students?"
After two more excuses failed, Harry was forced to accept the invitation; it seemed that he would end up as part of Slughorn's collection regardless of the decade.