The Boys Who Lived | The Philosopher's Stone | (Hermione X Male Reader)

Chapter 17: The Two-Faced Man

It was Quirrell.

"You!" Harry and Y/N gasped.

Quirrell smiled. Not a single muscle in his face twitched.

"Me," he said calmly, "I wondered whether I'd be meeting you two here, Potters."

"But we thought — Snape —"

"Severus?" instead of his customary quivering laugh, Quirrell's laugh was icy and harsh. "Yes, Severus does seem the type, doesn't he? So useful to have him swooping around like an overgrown bat. Next to him, who would suspect p-p-poor st-stuttering P-Professor Quirrell?"

Y/N struggled to process it. This simply couldn't be the case.

"But Snape tried to kill me!"

"No, no, no. I tried to kill you. Your friend Ms. Granger accidentally knocked me over as she rushed to set fire to Snape at that Quidditch match. She broke my eye contact with you. Another few seconds and I'd have got you off that broom. I'd have managed it before then if Snape hadn't been muttering a counter-curse, trying to save you."

"Snape was trying to save me?"

"Of course," Quirrell said. "Why do you think he wanted to referee your next match? He was trying to make sure I didn't do it again. Funny, really... he needn't have bothered. I couldn't do anything with Dumbledore watching. All the other teachers thought Snape was trying to stop Gryffindor winning, he did make himself unpopular... and what a waste of time, when after all that, I'm going to kill the both of you tonight."

Quirrell snapped his fingers. Ropes sprang out of nowhere and tightly wrapped themselves around Harry and Y/N.

"You're too nosy to live, Potters. Scurrying around the school at Halloween like that, for all I knew you'd seen me coming to look at what was guarding the Stone."

"You let the troll in?"

"Certainly. I have a special gift with trolls — you must have seen what I did to the one in the chamber back there. Unfortunately, while everyone else was running around looking for it, Snape, who already suspected me, went straight to the third floor to head me off — and not only did my troll fail to beat you to death, that three-headed dog didn't even manage to bite Snape's leg off properly.

"Now, wait quietly, Potters. I need to examine this interesting mirror."

Y/N didn't realise what was behind Quirrell until that point. It was the Mirror Of Erised.

"This mirror is the key to finding the Stone," Quirrell muttered, tapping his way around the frame. "Trust Dumbledore to come up with something like this... but he's in London... I'll be far away by the time he gets back..."

The only thing Harry and Y/N could think to do was to keep Quirrell talking and divert his attention away from the Mirror.

"I saw you and Snape in the Forest —" Y/N blurted out.

"Yes," Quirrell said, walking around to the other side of the Mirror. "He was on to me by that time, trying to find out how far I'd got. He suspected me all along. Tried to frighten me — as though he could, when I had Lord Voldemort on my side..."

Back in front of the Mirror, Quirrell peered hungrily into it.

"I see the Stone... I'm presenting it to my master... but where is it?"

Harry and Y/N fought the ropes holding them in place, but they didn't give. Quirrell needed to be stopped from focusing solely on the Mirror.

"But Snape always seemed to hate us so much."