His love for Potions I ✔

Chapter 2: Malfoy and companion

Harry's friends cruelly abandoned him to talk to Draco, on the theory that it was his own stupid plan.

Traitors.

(A small voice inside his head pointed out he'd never had friends to be traitors before, and he should be grateful. The little voice that told him he was ungrateful for things always sounded like his Aunt. He tuned it out, with long practice.)

"Erm, Malfoy. Got a minute?"

"How could I not, for the hero of Gryffindor?"

"...that was sarcasm, right?"

"Yes, Potter, it was sarcasm. Good job."

Draco was a git. Harry attempted to smile, which made Draco eye him as if he was a mountain troll. Great.

"Look, you're, um." Argh. "Join my Potions study group."

Draco's expression turned complex.

"Why?"

"Because."

"Why, Potter."

"Because you're better at Potions than me," Harry said in one long miserable breath.

Draco smiled. Like a lizard.

"No, Potter. I think I can figure it out on my own, thanks."

And Draco walked off humming to himself.

Harry was halfway back to his dormitory before he figured it out, and so he was redfaced and sputtering with rage when he tried to explain why Draco Malfoy was the absolute worst to Ron and Neville.

"He's worse than my cousin Dudley," Harry said fervently. "I didn't think anyone could be that awful."

"You know we have half a foot due for Defense Against the Dark Arts tomorrow, don't you?" Hermione asked, from where she was studying for a class that wasn't Potions. (He really didn't understand Hermione sometimes.)

Morosely, Harry went to get his parchment.

#

Draco was still looking smug the next morning, the lizard. And in Potions the next week, while he was waiting for his own potion to stew, he wandered over to Harry's to peer at it.

"You're cutting your roots wrong," Draco said, with a blissful smile, and then wandered back to his potion, humming that dratted song under his breath again.

There were two different sets of roots on Harry's workbench. He eyed them with disfavor, because they were all already cut up, and he'd been sure it said to cut one lengthwise and the other widthwise, and they had to be added - half a minute ago, Draco had thrown off his timing entirely.

"A point from Gryffindor for inattention to detail, Potter," Snape said from behind his shoulder. Harry jumped, and dropped half his roots in his potion all at once.

The cauldron melted.

Draco Malfoy was the worst.

#

"Leave Draco alone."

Harry jumped, grabbing for his wand. He'd thought he was alone in the corridor, heading downstairs towards the statue that housed his precious Potions lab, but here was one of Draco's minions. Looming. Harry swallowed, and lifted his chin. He would not have a Dudley flashback. He wouldn't.

"I never talk to Draco," Harry said. "I mean, Malfoy."

Goyle seemed to process this. It took a long time.

"Leave Draco alone," he repeated.

"I'll leave Draco alone," Harry said, "If he leaves me alone. And helps me with Potions."

If he was being honest.

"No."

"No, what?"

"He's not going to help you with Potions."

"Why not?"

Another long, processing silence. Goyle took a couple steps forward, and loomed down at him. Harry glared up at him. He was a wizard now. Wizards weren't bullied, they dueled.

"Draco's too busy to help you," Goyle said, eventually. "And important."

"We're eleven."

Harry was really beginning to hate the long silences Goyle needed in between his thoughts.

"If you bother Draco, you'll be sorry."

Harry stared in puzzlement at Goyle's back, as he swept away down the stairs, trying to look portentous and menacing. It... really didn't work. Draco's friends, he thought to himself, were really weird. What did it say about Harry, that Draco had wanted to be friends with him?

Nothing good, probably.

#

"Professor Snape wouldn't try to steal anything, he's a teacher," argued Hermione, keeping her voice down because of the Sacred Library Rules.

Ron's rambling argument in reply boiled down to 'Greasy git's obviously up to something.'

"But, look, even if he was up to something," Harry said weakly, because he agreed that Professor Snape was pretty obviously evil, "Maybe Headmaster Dumbledore knows about it and, um, indulges it? Like Hagrid. Hagrid does stuff that's pretty, er."

The other kids sitting around the table nodded. Hagrid did do things that were er.

"But Professor Snape is wizard at potions, so maybe it's just one of those things you put up with, when you're Headmaster. The way Professor Binns is a ghost. I mean, being evil doesn't mean you can't be a good teacher, right?"

"But he's an awful teacher," pointed out Ron. "Really, really awful."

Neville just looked miserable, and glanced over his shoulder out of justified paranoia that speaking Professor Snape's name would summon him. (It happened more often than you would think.)

"I think," Hermione said slowly, "That there's a difference between doing evil and being evil. Even if Professor Snape is evil, which I don't think is true, someone needs to stop him from doing evil - oh, you're all ridiculous, I mean even if he were made of pure darkness, he still shouldn't be allowed to steal things. That's ethics."

"Cor, Hermione," Ron said admiringly. Harry had to agree. Hermione was pretty brilliant sometimes.

"What could we even do, though?" Neville asked.

The conversation turned towards what they could do, then, and Harry made a mental note to come back to the idea of evil. Maybe you could distill evil somehow, in a Potion? He'd ask Professor Snape after they thwarted his dire plot.