Dodging Prison and Stealing Witches

Chapter 18: Slytherin's Outcast

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text
Later next day, Dumbledore sat at his large polished oak desk in the headmaster's office and stared at a collection of parchments clutched in his hands. Lord Slytherin, it turned out, would go to great lengths to protect Miss Granger and Miss Greengrass.

Most of the Slytherin students had basic occlumency shields and he hadn't been able to see much of what happened in the Slytherin common room last night, but what he had been able to piece together painted a picture of a man who was unafraid to use fear and pain as a deterrent.

Three points in particular stood out as high emotion moments in the minds of the few students he'd explored. The first was shock when Miss Granger and Miss Greengrass performed wandless magic to stun one of their attackers. That was something to think about. The second was surprise turning slowly to fear and awe when Lord Slytherin flared his magic for over a full minute. He couldn't feel the magic through the memory, but if the looks of the other students were to go by, it was strong. And the third had been sheer terror when Slytherin tortured Romulus Volf with legilimency. That was extremely worrying, both for Slytherin's ruthlessness and for the nature of the method itself.

He'd long ago ruled out the possibility of Lord Slytherin being Lord Voldemort, but that didn't make the situation much more comforting. Slytherin's legilimency attack was exactly the kind of thing Voldemort would have done. Tom was almost certainly the foremost expert on the mind arts in the entire world, and, at least in that respect, Slytherin seemed closely moulded on the Dark Lord.

He couldn't let a dark lord of any kind rise. He mustn't allow it to happen. It was a fair blessing that Harry Potter hadn't been in the common room when the event transpired. At the moment, Harry Potter getting closer to the Gray seemed to be his worst case scenario for the boy. Lord Slytherin was powerful, amoral, ruthless, and protective — the perfect mentor and shield for a young boy, marked as his equal, to be raised into something terrible.

He would have to pay close attention to that danger, especially with Tom in the castle.

In the meantime, he had to speak with Lord Slytherin, at the very least to get a bead on the man and attempt to protect Severus from his attentions.

Dumbledore shuffled the parchments still held in his hands and smiled a grim smile.

Luckily, he'd now received just the thing to bring Slytherin in. If this didn't work, then Slytherin wasn't the man he thought he was.

"Floppy."

A house elf appeared at his side. "Yes, Headmaster Dumblydores?"

"Could you call for two owls, please, Floppy?"

Floppy bowed low to the ground. "Certainly, Headmaster Dumblydores." The elf vanished.

Dumbledore set the parchments down, pulled two blank sheets to him, inked his Phoenix feather quill, and started writing.

— DP & SW: TFoP —

Harry woke up on Friday of the first week of school to find himself drenched in sweat. It was a good kind of sweat though. He smiled and yawned. Ginny's dreamland duelling training kicked ass. Her pendant had been a one of a kind, once in a lifetime find, and snatching it when he did had been a master stroke. He wouldn't get to see her every night, but he looked forward to when he did.

He swung his legs off the bed, slipped on his slippers, and padded over to the bathroom. A few minutes of rinsing off later, he brushed up, left the bathroom, and slipped on his workout clothes.