Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

The Daring Win	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 8178 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 12
- 13
- 14
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirteen—Introducing the Tutors
“But you haven’t told me what I’m supposed to learn from him yet, Miss Dolores.”
Dolores smiled down at Harry. She was particularly proud of this coup, although this wizard wasn’t one the less respectable families would have hired; he was welcome everywhere in their world. Dolores only intended that he stay one day, however. “When you meet him, I think you’ll understand,” she said smoothly, and opened the door of the drawing room.
“Miss Umbridge! Splendid of you to have read my books and remembered my favorite delicacy! And I’ll have to compliment your house-elves on how well they matched the tea to it. And the mirrors here, simply wonderful in how well they reflect…”
Dolores knew without looking that Harry’s jaw was dropping open next to her. She ignored him with a delicious feeling, other than to deliver a sharp poke to his back. That would get him to close his mouth.
“Enough with the sweet nothings, please, Mr. Lockhart,” she simpered, and no one knew how to simper better than she did. She dipped a curtsey, and came up squinting against the dazzle of the light on Lockhart’s teeth and robes. He had opened curtains that normally stayed shut all the time, since she rarely used this room to entertain. “You’re the one honoring our humble home.” This time, she looked back and gestured Harry forwards. “And here’s a young fan who’s thrilled to meet you.”
Lockhart beamed down on Harry and held out a hand to shake. Harry did it with all the grace Dolores had taught him and all the enthusiasm of someone handling a dead rat. “Delighted, delighted! Of course, some people would say that I shouldn’t take time out of my busy schedule, but I always find it so important to encourage the youth. Don’t you, Miss Umbridge?”
“Oh, yes!” Encourage him to be nothing like you. Dolores blinked her eyelashes and gave Lockhart a melting glance, and it seemed her information on him had been accurate. It didn’t matter what she looked like; in fact, he might like that better because then there was no competition. It mattered that she was an adoring witch. “You’re such an inspiration to everyone, Mr. Lockhart. Monster fighters, people who care about defeating the Dark Arts, and of course now teachers and parents. I simply couldn’t wait to have you meet Harry.”
“And how’s the young hero?” Lockhart bent down to look Harry in the eye, his hands on his knees. “Looking forward to more exploits? It’ll be a long time before you can match my heroics, of course, but I see your fame is already out there!”
Harry gave Dolores a patently begging look. Dolores gave him a merciless one back, and Harry composed himself and mumbled the sort of polite expression he’d been taught to use around the Malfoys. “You’re flattering me, Mr. Lockhart—”
“So formal! We’re not in Hogwarts or anything, Harry.” Lockhart laughed loudly enough that Dolores thought she heard the glass rattling in the mirrors (that she’d deliberately hung up around the room in more abundance than usual, because she knew it would encourage him not to go wandering, if he was so busy admiring himself). “Please, call me Gild.”
“Gild?”
Dolores turned slowly to stare at Harry, but luckily, she didn’t need to. Lockhart hadn’t noticed anything mocking in the response. He spread his arms and nodded. “I know. It’s kind of shocking that my parents gave me a name that so clearly looked forward to my future endeavors, right? Gild, like gold, which of course I am! True gold, all the way through!”
He posed, with another smile on his face. Harry cleared his throat with a violent cough. In that, he was admittedly doing better than Dolores had expected. “What am I going to learn from you, er, Gild?”
“Oh, my, a little bit of everything! Defense, curses, hexes, jinxes, battling Dark creatures, the Mind Arts, being a hero, styling your hair, handling small talk, curses…” Dolores wondered when Lockhart would realize that he’d said “curses” twice, but he appeared more concerned with having run out of fingers. “Well, you know, Harry! Being in the world as a famous person, I suppose you could call it. A unique course. Just like me.”
He winked, and whipped a winking photograph of himself from behind his back in the same moment and held it out to Harry. “Here, treasure it. This is one of the pictures included in my forthcoming book, Voyages with Vampires.”
Harry took the picture as if he thought its over-large smile would turn suddenly into vampire fangs. “I’ll always remember it.”
“That’s a good boy!” Lockhart cocked a finger at Harry, winked, and then turned and looked around vaguely. “There was going to be a blackboard, right? Or something I could write on?”
Dolores clapped her hands, and two of the house-elves who had attended the Potter properties popped into being, holding a board between them. It was already spelled to make sure that none of the words Lockhart wrote stayed there for long, but that didn’t matter. Any second, either Harry would come up with a way to get out of this or Dolores would have to cause a diversion because, well, Harry would come up with a way to get out of this.
“Now, where to begin…” Lockhart appeared to notice the chalk he was holding for the first time and smiled at it. “Poor thing. It wishes it was as white as my teeth!”
Harry opened his mouth, and the look of absolute disgust on his face was one that Dolores had only seen before when he was talking about the Dursleys. She coughed and said, “Mr. Lockhart, I don’t mean to intrude, but what’s that at the corner of your eye?” She flicked her wand at the same time, casting the wordless spell she’d been practicing for this day.
“Where?” Lockhart dropped the chalk and spun around to stare into a mirror, and at the pimple that Dolores had conjured. He gave a faint gasp, and clutched at his face. “W-what is that?”
“That’s what I was wondering, Mr. Lockhart,” said Dolores meekly. “See, Harry had one like it the other day, and by the middle of the day they were all over his face and making his nose swell up, and the mediwitch we took him to said that he was lucky he ever got it back to its normal shape—”
“I—I m-must go,” said Lockhart, and cleared his throat nosily. He was trying not to spend too much time staring at the spot, but he was as unsubtle as Harry when he was first in front of the Wizengamot. “I trust that you’ll excuse me? I—there are things I can teach him by letter!”
“Of course,” said Dolores, and opened the door of the drawing room. Lockhart immediately ran out, even though he’d arrived by Floo. Dolores supposed that he thought Apparition would be a quicker way to get to St. Mungo’s.
Then she turned to Harry and closed the curtains and turned the mirrors to the wall with a flick of her wand. “What was he meant to teach you?”
“I don’t know.”
Dolores waited, and when he said nothing, her eyebrows crept up, and she took a sliding step forwards. Harry went on staring at her with his lip out. He looked more like a child now than he had in a long time.
“Harry,” she said, and her voice was gentle. He knew her well enough to realize that was dangerous.
“Fine.” Harry lowered his head, although his hands were curling into tiny, dirty-nailed fists at his sides. “I think he was meant to teach me how fame can go to your head. You’re always talking about how pure-bloods like the Malfoys let their blood status go to their heads. He’s only one person, and maybe not a pure-blood, but the same thing’s happened to him.”
“He is someone powerful and famous,” said Dolores, and she made her voice gentle. “That means he could still have some things to teach you.”
“But you acted like there was only one. So there probably was only one.” Harry’s gaze rested on her, heavy.
“I will not tolerate disrespect.”
Harry swallowed in the way he usually only did when he was trying to get through vegetables on his plate. “Sorry, Miss Dolores.” Pardus wandered through the open door, and Harry spent a moment stroking his fur, head lowered so she couldn’t see his face. “I just—I really hated him.”
Dolores reminded herself, before she scolded Harry for a sentiment so extreme, that children didn’t always use their words correctly. He might say he hated Lockhart and mean something else. “Why?” she asked, and as a further thought, sent the copies of Lockhart’s books on the shelves and tables flying out of the room. She would find a storage cupboard to put them in, just in case she ever had to bring him back.
“Because he sounded so fake!” Harry looked up fast enough to startle Pardus and make the kitten spring away. “He chattered and he sounded like Uncle Vernon trying to make a sales pitch! How can people like him and buy his books? How can everyone not see right through him?”
Dolores paused, then let a faint smile come to her lips. It seemed she had raised Harry to take more advantage of his intelligence than she had realized. “You know he sells a lot of books.”
“Yes,” said Harry, lowering his head as he once again stroked Pardus.
“That means people must buy them. Maybe not always for themselves, but then as gifts for people who are his fans.”
“Yes,” said the boy with a faint sigh.
“What does that tell you about the people who buy them?”
“That they’re stupid?”
Dolores chuckled, despite her dislike of his vocabulary. “You won’t use such words in front of an audience like the Malfoys, Harry.”
Harry remained quiet for a second, then lifted his head. He was trying the sort of grin on her that he normally only used on Sirius. “But it’s okay if I use it in front of you?” Then he sounded as if he was holding his breath.
Dolores weighed some of the benefits of increasing informality, and ignored the way Harry had started to fidget in place. Let him sweat. If he couldn’t bear the possible consequences of asking impertinent questions, then he shouldn’t ask them.
On the one hand, she always wanted Harry to respect her. And signs that he didn’t would get pounced on right away by the Narcissa Malfoys of their world. It might even lead to another attempt to remove Harry from her custody.
On the other hand…
Harry was more at ease with Sirius. He joked with him, laughed with him, and made Sirius do things like smuggle sweets to him that Dolores had absolutely forbidden. Dolores had done her best to laugh instead of snap when she found out. She had to get along with both of them: Harry for the sake of her future power, and Sirius for the sake of not getting him angry enough to apply for custody on his own.
It wouldn’t be a bad thing for people to see him at his ease with her, too. That she didn’t have only one mood, and could laugh and joke with a child.
“Yes, you can use it around me,” she said, and meant to go on, to explain why she’d decided that, but Harry flung his head up and gave her such a dazzling smile that her words dried up. Dolores blinked a few times while Harry whooped and ran over to hug her arm.
“Thank you! Thank you! See, I told him he was wrong!”
“Who was wrong?” Dolores was trying to maintain her cool composure, but she hadn’t recovered from the impact of that smile.
“Sirius! He said you’d never allow it! He said he was the only one who could joke with me, and I better not even try with you!” Harry grinned at her. “He was wrong! He’s going to be so surprised when I tell him!”
“Were you—betting on this?” Dolores could have been in front of the Wizengamot and still been unable to temper the cold in her voice. She did not want Black encouraging Harry in needless wagers of the kind he had mentioned making in Diagon Alley and Knockturn Alley. Harry couldn’t afford to waste his time, his money, or his reputation.
“No. I just said that I thought you would let me use it, and he didn’t think so. It wasn’t a bet, just a guess.”
Although not convinced that Black would take it the same way, Dolores let herself be persuaded. “Why does it matter so much to you, being able to say this word in front of me, Harry?”
Harry shut down again, just like that, staring at Pardus, even though he was dozing on the floor with the tip of Harry’s sock clasped between his paws. But Dolores had become good at reading Harry, and she knew he wanted to answer. She stayed still.
“The Dursleys would never let me say anything like that,” Harry finally replied, in a murmur. “They were the ones who got to call me a freak and stupid and everything like that. I couldn’t use any words that were insults.”
“And did their son also insult you?”
“Yes. Dudley called me—lots of things, but mostly the same things Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia did.”
Dolores nodded. If Muggle children used more profanity than that, she neither needed nor wanted to know. “All right. You know that you don’t want to diminish your credit in the eyes of pure-bloods by saying the same kinds of things?”
“I know. But that’s why you said I could say them in front of you and Sirius. Just not out in public.”
“Good,” said Dolores. “I merely wanted to make sure that temptation would not overtake you if you saw, say, Lockhart in public.”
As often happened when she used more formal language, Harry looked puzzled, but then his face cleared. “I would never want to say anything like that to him,” he said. “He would understand it. I want to insult him and make sure that he doesn’t understand it. It’s more fun that way.”
Dolores smiled at him. She had sometimes wondered, given his unfortunate heritage, if Harry would be a Gryffindor when he went to Hogwarts, and one of those brash politicians who tried to make friends with every action he took. But she thought she recognized reality now. He would be a Slytherin, and while of course he still needed work on subtlety, he would be a credit to his name and her training at last.
“Good,” she said, and leaned out to lightly touch his shoulder. It was his godfather who would ruffle his hair or grab him and mess up his robes. Dolores preferred to keep their marks of affection separate in Harry’s mind. “And you’ve learned the lessons from Mr. Lockhart that I wanted you to learn.”
“Gild,” Harry muttered, and snickered.
Even that doesn’t sound too bad on him. “Yes. Go and play for now.”
Harry scooped up Pardus and left the room. Dolores leaned back in her chair and carefully considered the letter that had arrived that morning. There was a tutor Sirius had recommended for very basic dueling techniques—something Dolores wasn’t good at and Sirius didn’t have the patience for—and ancient magical history. Dolores wanted to teach Harry recent political history all on her own, but she had to admit she didn’t have the head for the ancient things, either.
Well. We’ll respond positively for now, and see whether this Mr. R. J. Lupin is really as good as Sirius thinks he is.
*
“Remus!”
Sirius went flying across the drawing room and into Mr. Lupin’s arms the moment he stepped out of the fireplace. Dolores sighed. Well, she supposed she had to put part of that down to Sirius’s general immaturity, as well as the fact that he wouldn’t have seen his old Gryffindor friend for at least seven years.
“Sirius.”
Lupin’s voice was thick as he held Sirius. When she studied him, Dolores thought she could understand the reason why. His robes were clean and of good material, but patched with household charms that no elf had cast. And his hair was greying before its time, and shaggy in a way that suggested he’d been cutting that himself, too.
Of course he would be grateful to his friend for getting him a good job, Dolores thought, and stood up to present herself.
Lupin turned towards her and held out a hand to shake. When Dolores did, she found him holding it with unexpected fervency. “Thank you for rescuing Harry from those awful Muggles,” he said. “Sirius has only told me a little about them, but that’s enough.”
Dolores studied the anger in his eyes, and nodded. “I think you’ll fit in well here, Mr. Lupin. For now, you’re not to teach Harry any history more recent than 1960, if you please. I want to cover recent political events myself.”
“Of course.” Lupin had the kind of smile that probably had once been bright, before hardship had worn it down. “I think that’s best, in any case. I’ve lived out of the world among my books for a while.”
Sirius laughed as if this was a grand joke and grabbed Lupin’s arm. “Come on, let me introduce you to our little prince!”
Dolores sighed as the two of them bounced out of the room, or bounce-dragged, given their combined motion. Well, she would probably get used to them in time, and she didn’t really think she needed to supervise Harry’s first meeting with Lupin.
From what she’d been able to learn about him, Lupin was a former Gryffindor, a half-blood, and a quiet man who had been a close friend of Harry’s parents, just as Sirius had. He’d gone into mourning and retreat from the world after Sirius went to prison. It seemed poverty had also been part of the cause of that.
As long as he doesn’t teach Harry any uncivilized manners, he’ll do. We already have Sirius for that.
*

Biigoh: Thank you! Dolores is hitting all the buttons so that I enjoy writing her.
- 12
- 13
- 14
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

The Daring Win