Best Served Cold

Chapter 3

It took two weeks before the uproar of a Slytherin-Boy-Who-Lived to die down. Hermione, armed with the knowledge she could make the purebloods dance to her tune resulted in a much happier girl.

Diving into magical law books, Hermione hated the hypocrisy of the purebloods. Knowing a friend in the Auditor's department opened a lot of doors that would have been closed to her...because Harry had no issues going after the purebloods. None at all.

Case in point, the short lived attempt by Draco to rule Slytherin. A single talk with Harry had the boy avoiding him like the black plague.

What most didn't know was that Draco verified the badge as authentic...and that Harry was experienced enough to know exactly how to hit Lucius in a way that he wouldn't be able to retaliate for. Not with the fact that their vaults had taken such a massive hit. He was barely making payments to the Minister. It was just luck that Draco had gotten his school things before the hit.

Knowing Potter had the power to initiate a full audit (something Lucius had made a point to comment on to his wife within hearing of their son) meant Draco was put in his place discreetly.

In short, Harry Potter was now the 'Prince' of Slytherin.

Something that worried Dumbledore greatly, as he remembered Tom Riddle vividly.

About the only consolation was that Potter seemed to dislike purebloods, rather than muggles. Considering he had spent far too many hours protecting the status quo from being tipped too quickly in the favor of one party or another, it was still worrying.

The thing that baffled Dumbledore was that Potter didn't rule with charisma, power, or overt threats against students. No, he seemed to hold power over the parents. Families not known to be cowed even by Dumbledore himself!

They went out of their way to avoid angering Potter, to the point that the word 'mudblood' was scarcely heard from the Slytherins, and the amount of hazing from the older, darker families to the muggleborns was so low that he knew something was going on.

He had no idea how Potter had done it, but past failures with another Slytherin had him watching the boy very closely.

~

Harry was in a rather good mood. He had managed to do the one thing Dumbledore could have never accomplished.

He forced the Slytherins to be civil to the other houses.

They didn't respect his lineage, his 'moniker' as the Boy-Who-Lived, and thanks to the mismanagement of Dumbledore, any political power the Potter family might have had was almost nonexistent for him.

No, Harry learned the hard way that purebloods would never truly respect a half-blood. Especially from the darker families.

However they could learn to fear.

If power, charisma and blood wouldn't work, then the only option left was money.

And if they couldn't take him seriously because everyone thought he was to become Dumbledore's protégé, they would believe the very real threat to their gold.

Especially when Harry demonstrated that yes, he did have the power to rob them of any financial freedom they had for a minimum of four months by going after a very popular dark family legally.

Word of a junior Auditor that knew how to fill all the right forms and had enough pull to have it go through was something they could recognize as a threat.

The Goldwin family would be in for a rough five months.

He had to admit, tweaking Dumbledore's nose was equally fun. He let the old goat see him manipulating the Slytherins with only a few words. He never allowed the old man to learn of his Auditor's badge...simply placing it on the inside of his shirt and charming the back of the pin was child's play.