A Darker Form of Magic, book three: Dementors

Chapter ten

The first thing that Harry does upon finding his way to the North Tower for his first divination class of the year is curse. 

"Fuck," Harry says, the word falling easily from his lips even as the Ravenclaws around him look dissapointed at him for his lack of vocabulary and the one or two Hufflepuffs look at him in bafflement. The Gryffindors only grin widely for a moment, used to hearing such vulgar language, before most of the almost savage looks drop when they seem to remember who spoke it.

Harry was the only Slytherin among them.

But at that moment Harry couldn't care less if he was the only Slytherin, hated by most around him simply for the colors on his robes, or if he was in a room filled to the brim with snakes because his knee was throbbing from climbing the stairs just to get here, and based on the fact that their professor's plaque was on a circular trapdoor on the ceiling of all things, Harry could safely assume that there would be a ladder in his future. 

The pain in his knee increased at the thought alone.

"Snake," Ron says, his tone a greeting one as he peels bravely away from the gangle of lions that were watching them both with suspicious gazes, as if they thought that Harry had cast some sort of compulsion charm on the youngest Weasley boy to make him like him.

"Weasel," Harry greets in turn as if they hadn't seen one another only twenty or so minutes ago when their large group had divided so that they could all grab their books for the day.

"Are the two of you still fighting even after all of these years?" A familiar voice asks, which Harry thinks is a bit unfair since one of the first fights he had with the goner boy was in part defending the girl's honor (one of the few Gryffindor things that he's done, and yet also entirely Slytherin since he'd thought back then that they'd still be friends now and snakes protect their friends with sharp teeth and poison in their veins, not the other way around).

"I wasn't made aware that we're fighting," Harry says, popping his knuckles for show, as the last thing that he wasn't to do right then is brawl.

"If someone had bothered to tell me then I would have brought a bigger book," Ron says, holding up his slightly worn copy of Unfogging the Future, a rather thin looking book that would only sting instead of doing real damage if you were to hit one with it.

"Hello Granger," Harry says, his face unchanging even as he notices the downward tilt of the other's lips when he calls her by her last name instead of first as he had for a time. He wasn't going to be friends with someone that was mean to someone as sweet as Luna Lovegood, he certainly wasn't going to call them by their first name when they didn't even realize - smart as they are - that the now second year was the reason for the change. "Boot," Harry says next, letting his gaze shift to the boy that had come with the only other Ravenclaw taking the class.

"Terry," the boy says as he holds out his hand for Harry to take, something that Harry does under the too watchful gaze of those around him. The other Slytherins in his year and a few of those outside of the snake den might know about his adversion to touch, but it isn't something that he particularly wants to broadcast, not when so many of his friends were already beginning to understand that such a thing isn't normal. That it has a cause. "I hate when people call me by my last name."