“Now go back to the common room and clean yourselves up. Mr Longbottom, I shall contact your grandmother this weekend to arrange a new wand.”
The three of them nodded and began to leave.
Professor Babbling’s voice stopped Harry at the doorway.
“Potter? Whenever you have a moment, come and see me. Nothing urgent—but I believe I may be able to help you, if you would like.”
Pride surged through Harry so strongly he nearly gaped.
He forced it down, nodded once, and followed his friends out of the ruined bathroom.
Harry, Hermione and Neville stepped through the portrait hole into a common room packed with worried faces.
“There you are!” Percy Weasley’s voice cut across the noise at once.
“Where have you three been? The troll—”
“Is dead,” Hermione said clearly.
“Harry killed it. Neville helped. They saved my life.”
Percy’s mouth fell open.
Silence dropped over the entire room like a sudden curtain.
“The professors already know,” Neville added quietly.
“Excuse us—we smell terrible, and I really need to lie down.”
Before Hermione could vanish up the stairs, Harry spoke.
“Hermione—are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Harry. Thank you.” She hugged him one last time, then started toward the girls’ dormitory.
At the foot of the steps she paused and looked back, voice soft and uncertain.
“See you tomorrow?”
Harry gave her the warmest smile he could manage. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“Yeah. Definitely.”
As he made his way toward the showers, a quiet chuckle escaped him.
For Halloween, the day had not, in the end, turned out so badly after all.
In the days that followed the Troll Incident, half the school seemed determined to corner Harry and extract every vivid detail of how a first-year had killed a twelve-foot mountain troll.
The attention nearly drove him into hiding; he spent most of the next week in the Gryffindor common room simply to avoid the constant questions.
The unexpected benefit was the time it gave him with Hermione and Neville.
Neville’s grandmother had first scolded him severely for breaking his father’s wand.
Once the full story emerged, however, her tone changed completely.
She swept into the common room, gathered both Harry and Hermione into a fierce embrace, and thanked them for “bringing her Neville’s lion to the surface.” Hermione blushed and insisted she had done nothing of real importance, while Harry simply nodded and offered a thumbs-up to the scarlet-faced Neville.
Hermione, for her part, barely left Harry’s side.
He found himself growing fond of the constant presence.
He had once thought Ron a friend, yet two days in Hermione’s company were enough to show him the difference.
She never mocked his research.
She listened when he tried to explain what he was seeking.
She helped with homework and patiently corrected his wand movements.
She also seemed to enjoy hugging him—an experience that always sent an unfamiliar, warm current through his chest.
He had known about hugs in theory, of course, but the reality proved far better.
Ron took to grumbling whenever the three of them passed and scurried out of Harry’s path the moment the green eyes turned his way.
The glares and muttered insults were still visible, but he moved quickly enough that Harry never had to repeat his earlier warning.
Fred and George, by contrast, cornered Harry with eager questions about his experiments and whether he planned to take them further.
When they showed him the intricate, half-finished plans for their latest pranks, Harry could only stare in astonishment.
He promised to design a few rune clusters that might simplify or combine certain elements—on the condition that they ease off pranking first-years of any house.
It was nearly a week before the excitement faded enough for Harry to seek out Professor Babbling. This story is hosted at g.com.
He approached her office practically bouncing with anticipation, a wide grin already on his face.
“Ah, Harry—come in, come in!” Babbling swept a few papers aside and waved him forward.
Harry dropped into a chair while she circled the desk and perched on its edge.
“Right then, let’s see what we’re working with.” She clapped her hands once, smiling.
“Look at that table. Can you identify these runes?”
Harry studied them and “Protection. Synchronisation. Quiet. That’s—”
snorted.
Light.
“All right, all right—far too easy. Try this one.” A flick of her wand replaced the table of prime runes with a board of complex clusters.
“Still fairly straightforward, Professor. That one would spark a small fire and extinguish itself the moment the object it was etched on burned away. That one should resize clothing. The cluster over there looks designed to work in a set of four as a barrier, but it has a flaw that would burn it out in less than a minute.”
“Really? What flaw?” Her voice remained carefully neutral.
Harry’s grin widened; he was enjoying the test.
“Absorption is inverted and intertwined with Protection. It ought to be integrated into Power instead—then any spell that strikes the barrier would actually reinforce it.”
Babbling leaned closer, squinting.
“Integrated into Power, you say? I deliberately flipped Absorption, yes, but I’ve never seen this particular cluster drawn with Absorption bound to Power. That should work… Merlin, it might double or even triple the damage the barrier could absorb.”
“Near-exponential, actually. The first few hits would still be dangerous while the structure was weak, but after that each successive impact would only make it stronger.” Harry filed the idea away for later improvement.
Four anchor points felt inefficient; there had to be a way to collapse the whole thing into a single central cluster.