Second chances *ੈ✩‧₊˚ (harry potter x reader)

Trials and Tribulations

For or the rest of the week's Potions lessons Harry continued to follow the Half-Blood Prince's instructions, with the result that by our fourth lesson Slughorn was raving about Harry's abilities, saying that he had rarely taught anyone so talented.

Neither Ron nor Hermione were delighted by this. I, frankly, could not care less. It didn't affect me, so why bother? It's just a bloody textbook.

Although Harry had offered to share his book with all of us, I declined, Ron had more difficulty deciphering the handwriting than Harry did and could not keep asking Harry to read aloud or it might look suspicious, and Hermione, meanwhile, was resolutely plowing on with what she called the "official" instructions, but becoming increasingly bad-tempered as they yielded poorer results than the Prince's.

I had wondered very vaguely who the Half-Blood Prince had been. Although the amount of homework we had been given prevented me from giving it too much thought.

There was hardly a page that didn't have any of the Prince's writing on it. Here and there were directions for what looked like spells that the Prince had made up himself.

"Or herself!" said Hermione irritably, overhearing Harry pointing some of these out to Ron and I in the common room on Saturday evening. "It might have been a girl. I think the handwriting looks more like a girl's than a boy's."

Harry's hopes of keeping the whole 'Half-Blood Prince' thing had gone down the drain after Hermione had flipped through the book herself and seen the name.

"The Half-Blood Prince, he was called," Harry said. "How many girls have been Princes?"

Hermione seemed to have no answer to this. She merely scowled and twitched her essay on The Principles of Rematerialization away from Ron, who was trying to read it upside down.

Harry looked at his watch and hurriedly put the old copy of Advanced Potion-Making back into his bag.

"It's five to eight, I'd better go, I'll be late for Dumbledore," he said quickly and kissed the top of my head as he stood up.

"Ooooh!" gasped Hermione, looking up at once. "Good luck!"

I nodded, "Yeah, hope it goes okay."

"If it's anything like the Occlumency—" said Ron before Hermione whacked his arm, and the three of us watched Harry leave through the portrait hole.

After a few moments silence, Hermione asked, without having looked up from her essay, "Quidditch, Y/n?"

Ron laughed slightly as I groaned, "I really don't want to."

"I figured you only wanted to do it for him. He did seem pretty excited about it," Ron said.

"Yeah..." I sighed deeply. "He did."

"You still remember how to ride a broom?" he added, grinning.

"Surely," Hermione said, "it's like riding a bike. Can't forget how to even if you wanted to."

"I could give you pointers?" Ron said to me, ignoring Hermione, "I know I'm far from the best but it's something?"

I shook my head, "I'd rather not waste yours and my time. I most probably won't pitch to trials anyway."

"Well, best decide quickly... They're 'round the corner," Ron said as he stood up and stretched. Honey, who had been laying next to me on the couch, immediately jumped up and ran off.

"She's a bit dramatic, don't you think?" Ron said.

"Well," Hermione chimes in, "considering you did turn her pink...?"