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

Suits of Armour

And so the following weekend, Ron joined Hermione and the rest of the sixth years who would turn seventeen in time to take the test in a fortnight.

I undeniably felt jealous watching them all get ready to go into the village; I missed making trips there, and it was a particularly fine spring day, one of the first clear skies we had seen in a long time. But, what can you do.

Harry, however, had decided to use the time to attempt another assault on the Room of Requirement.

"You'd do better," said Hermione, when he confided this plan to her, Ron and I in the entrance hall, "to go straight to Slughorn's office and try and get that memory from him."

"I've been trying!" said Harry crossly, which was perfectly true. He had lagged behind after every Potions lesson that week in an attempt to corner Slughorn, but the Potions master always left the dungeon so fast that Harry had not been able to catch him.

Twice, Harry had gone to his office and knocked, but received no reply, though on the second occasion he was sure he had heard the quickly stifled sounds of an old gramophone.

"He doesn't want to talk to me, Hermione! He can tell I've been trying to get him on his own again, and he's not going to let it happen!"

"Well, you've just got to keep at it, haven't you?"

The short queue of people waiting to file past Filch, who was doing his usual prodding act with the Secrecy Sensor, moved forward a few steps and Harry did not answer in case he was overheard by the caretaker.

We wished Ron and Hermione both luck, then turned and climbed the marble staircase again, determined, whatever Hermione said, to devote an hour or two to the Room of Requirement.

"Come with me?" Harry asks me. He'd been doing better with the whole time management thing, and was maybe a little too aware of it...

"It's so many stairs," I complain, when in reality, I would rather use this time to continue my futile research and perhaps make it less futile.

"I'll carry you if I have to I hope you know that," he presses. "Come onnnn. Who knows, maybe you'll be the luck I need to get it open."

Doubt it.

Nonetheless, though after much convincing, I agreed to accompany him.

Once out of sight of the entrance hall, Harry pulled the Marauder's Map and his Invisibility Cloak from his bag. Having concealed us, he tapped the map, murmured, "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good," and scanned it carefully.

As it was Sunday morning, nearly all the students were inside their various common rooms, the Gryffindors in one tower, the Ravenclaws in another, the Slytherins in the dungeons, and the Hufflepuffs in the basement near the kitchens.

Here and there a stray person meandered around the library or up a corridor. There were a few people out in the grounds, and there, alone in the seventh-floor corridor, was Gregory Goyle.

There was no sign of the Room of Requirement, but Harry was not worried about that; if Goyle was standing guard outside it, the room was open, whether the map was aware of it or not.

He therefore sprinted up the stairs — "Slow down! I'm under this thing too!" — slowing down only when he reached the corner into the corridor, when we began to creep, very slowly, toward the very same little girl, clutching her heavy brass scales, that Hermione had so kindly helped a fortnight before.

He waited until we were right behind her before bending very low and whispering, "Hello...you're very pretty, aren't you?"

Goyle gave a high-pitched scream of terror, threw the scales up into the air, and sprinted away, vanishing from sight long before the sound of the scales smashing had stopped echoing around the corridor.