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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.

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Chapter Fourteen—Learning Things
“You can see that there was a reason for wizards to remain secret from Muggles once they started to hunt them down. Even if we still wanted to be around Muggles on a day-to-day basis—and there are some wizards who do—we couldn’t, because they might want to hurt us.”
Dolores nodded a little. She was outside the door of the study where Lupin was teaching Harry, and she had created a small hole in it long before and shielded it with illusions that would make it look like the same heavy wood as the rest of the door. But the illusions could be pierced by her eyes.
So far, she had found nothing exceptionable in the lesson. Lupin used less forceful terms than Dolores would have when talking about Muggles, and he paced back and forth instead of sitting at the desk Dolores had provided in solitary splendor.
But he still wore better robes than he had when he first arrived, robes that he had bought with his first payment from Dolores, and Harry wore the bright green ones that he always did for formal lessons and took notes on parchment with quill and ink. Dolores was glad that Narcissa Malfoy had taken over the chore of teaching him to do that, too. Dolores could think of little more boring.
“Were Muggles and wizards always enemies?”
“It depends on what you mean by ‘enemies,’ Harry. Most of them nowadays don’t know a thing about us, so it’s hard to say.”
“But you think they would want to hurt us if they found out?”
Dolores shifted her position a little, to keep her ankles from tiring. Her peephole was at eye-height for her, but it was still tiring to stand still for so long. Right now, though, she wouldn’t have walked away from the lesson for a thousand Galleons.
Lupin hesitated, his worn face contorting for a second. “It depends on what you mean by ‘hurt,’ too.”
“Do a lot of them hate the children who grow up with magic around them?” Harry had laid down his quill, and his hands were twisting together. Lupin looked baffled. Dolores wondered why. Sirius certainly seemed to trust him, and would have told him about Harry’s past with the Dursleys. “Do Muggleborn children come to Hogwarts and have—they have bruises and broken bones, and they’re starved, and they don’t trust anyone?”
“Well,” said Lupin as if he had never considered such a thing. Perhaps he hadn’t, Dolores admitted with a small curl of his lip. He seemed innocent in the way Sirius had once been, before Dolores had pointed out what Dumbledore had done to him. “I suppose some of them did. I never knew many Muggleborns.”
“Why not? Didn’t you like them?”
Good boy, Harry. Make him see that he can’t get away with fobbing you off.
“No. It was simply that my friends were pure-bloods like Sirius and your father.” Lupin smiled at Harry. “And I’m a half-blood myself. I grew up in a family that was fully aware of the magical world and never tried to take me away from it.”
He sounded as though he expected that to placate Harry. Dolores could only conclude that he didn’t know his pupil very well yet, as Harry bent the quill until it almost broke and stared stubbornly at Lupin. “But what do you think?”
“I think that situations like the one you encountered with your family happen. But not often. And it would be wrong to go to Hogwarts and look at every Muggleborn there as a victim of abuse. Many of them would have loving families.”
“How can I tell?”
“There are—ways to tell if someone is being abused.” Lupin sounded like someone picking his way over broken rock. “Is that what you mean?”
“Yes. I want to know what they are. I want to make sure that I never leave any Muggleborn to be abused like that ever again.” Harry sat up, and there was a look of confidence and sureness on his face that Dolores had never seen before. “Miss Dolores says I have power. I have to learn how to use it. I have to make them safe. Like me.”
Dolores gaped a little, and then checked hastily over her shoulder to make sure Sirius wasn’t there. He had the annoying habit of showing up from nowhere to point and laugh the moment she showed her uncertainty.
But truly, she had never thought in these terms. That Harry would want to use his power to make sure no one abused him again, of course, that made sense. But that he would want to use it to rescue other Muggleborns and Muggle-raised…
I suppose that could be a source of power, Dolores decided slowly. Finding people who have no one else to stand up for them and removing them from intolerable situations. I have never cared for that, but then, is that not how I gained my influence with Harry?
Pursuing her own thoughts, she had missed part of the conversation Harry was having with Lupin. She leaned back when she heard her own name come up again, though.
“—just want you to know that what Miss Dolores says is not the end of the conversation,” Lupin was saying, with a piercing, clear, articulate tone that made Dolores distrust him instantly. He was leaning forwards, balancing like a hummingbird on a branch, and staring avidly into Harry’s eyes. “You can question what anyone says. You should, in fact. We don’t learn by simply repeating platitudes.”
Nor do we retain our jobs by going against our employers.
But Harry only studied Lupin as if he had no idea what he was talking about. “That would mean questioning you and Sirius.”
“Yes, it would.”
“That would mean questioning what you say about questioning. Which means that sometimes, I should blindly believe something, just to make up for the other times when I question. Right?”
Lupin paused, and then chuckled. Dolores was surprised he could, after hearing Harry make such an alarming statement as that he would he would blindly believe something. Perhaps he thought Harry was joking.
But Harry never tilted his chin up like that when he was joking.
“If you want to do that, that’s up to you,” Lupin said, and ruffled Harry’s hair. Sirius did it all the time and Harry had learned to accept it, but with a man who was still partially a stranger, Dolores saw the way he stiffened and flinched and mastered the temptation to pull back at the last minute. “But we were covering ancient history. The Statute of Secrecy came into being when…”
The rest of the lesson went normally for a time, and Dolores almost left. But then Harry asked a question that didn’t follow the normal flow of the lesson. “You said there were wizards who wanted to spend time around Muggles.”
“I did.”
“Is Albus Dumbledore one of them?”
Lupin paused. Then he said, “I don’t—he speaks up for Muggles, certainly. But I don’t know if he’s Muggleborn or not. Isn’t that something,” he went on, speaking mostly to himself, Dolores was certain. “All of those years working with him in the Order of the Phoenix, where you had to know most people’s blood status as a matter of course. But I never knew. I can’t remember asking.”
“He’s a Muggle-lover?”
“That’s a term you need to be careful how you use, Harry. It would usually imply the wizard thinks Muggles are superior to wizards and wants to sacrifice everything for the Muggles’ comfort.”
Dolores raised her eyebrows. Where is the lie in that statement?
“But doesn’t Dumbledore think that? I mean, he thought it was important for me to spend time with my Muggle relatives even though they hate me and I hate them. So that means he thinks they’re more important than I am.”
“No—Harry, no, I’m sure that’s not what he thought—”
Dolores tightened her hold on the doorknob. She would forgive Lupin many things, but not trying to excuse Dumbledore’s actions to Harry.
“He thought I should go back there. He tried to justify that. He must think the Dursleys are more important than I am.”
“I don’t think he thought they were important. Except as the guardians of the Boy-Who-Lived. I know—Dumbledore explained his decision to me—that he thought it was very important that you didn’t grow up in the wizarding world.”
Dolores narrowed her eyes. It sounded as though Lupin had been closer to Dumbledore than Sirius had told her about. Not even Sirius had got an explanation as to what Dumbledore had thought he was doing until after he was released from prison.
“But why?”
Lupin answered with a question. “If Dumbledore had let you be adopted in the wizarding world, or if the Ministry had taken custody of you and let that happen, what do you think the pure-blood families would have done?”
“Tried to kill me? Not all of them can be Death Eaters, though.” Harry twiddled his quill between his fingers. Dolores hoped he was remembering now how many times she’d told him not to throw around accusations of working on You-Know-Who’s side. There were people, like Lucius Malfoy, who had been tried for the crime, but for most of them it was only rumors and suspicions.
“No, there would have been a war to adopt you.” Harry jerked his head up, eyes wide, and Lupin hasted to reassure him. “I’m sure it wouldn’t have been a literal war. But everyone would have thought you belonged with them. They would have competed to raise you. If one family got to do it, then all the others would drop in with gifts and try to curry favor. You would have grown up with a swollen head.”
“How do you know that? Miss Dolores told me the truth about what I am, but I don’t think my head is swollen.”
“But you would have been proud, and arrogant,” Lupin said gently. “Think about it. Our world has never had a celebrity like you before. It’s not like the Muggle world where so many of them are famous and people get to see them and gossip about them all the time. You wouldn’t have been able to help becoming proud.”
“I wanted to be.”
The words were so choked Dolores could hardly hear them. She shuffled a little closer to the door, and Lupin gave it a suspicious glance. Dolores ducked her head and concentrated on her breathing. She still managed to look up in time to see Lupin kneel down in front of Harry. “What did you say?” he asked.
“I wanted to be,” Harry whispered. “I wanted presents like my cousin Dudley, and I wanted to be given food and told I was special and I didn’t have to worry about anything.” He stared at Lupin. “I hate Dudley, but I wanted to be him. And Dumbledore didn’t want me to be.”
Dolores held back a sharp chuckle. Lupin might have tried to make the old man’s reasoning palatable to Harry, but he’d succeeded in doing quite the opposite.
“I—that’s not right,” said Lupin. “Your cousin Dudley sounds spoiled. I think Dumbledore just didn’t want you to be spoiled.”
“Why not?”
“Your cousin Dudley wasn’t a nice person,” Lupin said, evading the question, as far as Dolores was concerned. “Sirius told me about him, what you said about him. So you shouldn’t want to be spoiled, right?” He ended on a bright, desperate note that Harry ignored.
“But I didn’t want to be starved,” he whispered. “I didn’t want to be—” He stopped. Then he said, “I hate them.”
“Not all Muggles are like them, Harry.”
“But I hate them,” Harry insisted, with what Dolores thought approvingly was proper fervor. “And I hate Dumbledore for just deciding like that that I would grow up arrogant and spoiled, and he had to leave me there. I could have died. But he didn’t care. He cares more about the Dursleys than me.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” was the only, hopeless thing that Lupin could say. Dolores rolled her eyes. She wondered if Lupin had once been a more impressive person.
Then again, he had seemed knowledgeable and polite when she spoke to him, and those were really the only things Dolores had demanded of a tutor. Perhaps he simply didn’t know what to do when someone questioned his old allegiances.
And they had better stay old.
“But I do.” Harry sat up, and he looked into Lupin’s eyes. “So I want to know more things about magical history that have to do with Muggles and don’t have to do with Dumbledore. And I want to know if people abuse Muggleborn children. Okay?”
“I don’t know much about the second one,” Lupin said, scooting backwards as if he was literally moving away from the cliff that Harry’s words had opened up in front of him. “But I can tell you all about the first one.”
Harry watched him the way Dolores had once seen an eagle-owl watching someone who was attempting to steal it. That thief had ended up with a talon in his throat, and for a moment, it seemed Lupin might, too.
But then Harry relaxed and nodded. “Okay.”
Lupin again started to explain about some important laws that separated Muggles and wizards and guided their interactions. Dolores pulled back and went thoughtfully down the corridor.
It seemed she might not have to worry about Harry even when he inevitably went to Hogwarts and got exposed to other viewpoints. He had the right ideas and he was tenacious about defending them.
I suppose I must give thanks to the Dursleys and the way they reared him that left him more open to a pureblood education.
But after some consideration, Dolores decided the thanks were unnecessary. She didn’t owe those monsters anything except torment.
*
Dolores sat back in the chair in the small café just off Diagon Alley and sipped the tea that she’d bought. She had agreed to serve as lookout for Harry and Sirius’s clandestine meeting with Draco mainly because she wanted to see how the boys interacted without Draco’s parents there to restrain him.
Draco had bolted towards Harry the instant he saw him, and thrown his arms around him. Dolores smiled faintly. It seemed that Sirius’s story of “wanting to reconnect with his cousins” had swayed Narcissa enough to allow him to bring the boy to Diagon Alley.
Of course, it meant Sirius had been required to spend some days metaphorically kissing the hem of Narcissa’s robe first, something he was complaining about in a low voice to Dolores, under the impression that she was listening.
“And she told me all these names of distant cousins of ours that I didn’t care about what I was sixteen, never mind now when I’ve been in Azkaban and through a war and she just sits there smiling as though her greatest concern is how thin her porcelain is…”
“Do not underestimate her,” Dolores took the time to warn as she cast an Eavesdropping Charm on Harry and Draco. “She can be a dangerous enemy.”
“Yeah, and I don’t want to bite her arse.”
Dolores didn’t shoot him a disgusted glance because there would be no point. She nibbled a biscuit and listened as Harry, who had plopped down at a table with Draco, told him intently about his lessons with Lupin.
“…he’s a really good teacher. Most of the time. There are times that he wants to tell me about Dumbledore and Muggles, and I have to tell him that I don’t want to hear how good they are. But I know all sorts of things about history now.”
“Lupin. I’ve never heard the name.”
“Before my mum, no one had ever heard the name Evans before, either.”
Before Harry’s intense, scornful gaze, Draco dropped his eyes. “You’re right, of course, Harry.”
Dolores licked at some crumbs with a smile. She had a feeling that phrase was going to become increasingly common between Draco and Harry over the next few years.
“And I’m also learning recent history from Miss Dolores, and it’s fascinating. There’s so much to know about who I am! I used to think I was nothing special, but now I know I am, and I know I have to learn all about it so no one can use it against me…”
“And then Cissy said, How long has it been since you ate a proper meal, Cousin Sirius? And I had to look like I appreciated the monstrosities she had her house-elves make. Do you know how many ways you can ruin a perfectly good roast if you just tell them to cook it until it’s completely dry?”
I think many conversations in the next few years will be like this, and I can live with it, Dolores thought, and crunched decidedly into her biscuit.
*
Biigoh: He does play a part, but it's mostly only impervious with fans. Notw how quickly he disgusts people in canon when he starts teaching at Hogwarts.
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The Daring Win