"We're sorry, Harry." Susan seemed to be the spokesperson for the group right now. The other four didn't speak, none of them were even capable of it. Hannah and Lisa were sniffling, and Neville and Terry looked physically ill. "We promise, if something dangerous like this happens again and you tell us to do something, we'll put our trust in you."
"Well, hopefully nothing like this will happen again," Harry said, grimacing. "And I'm... I'm also sorry. I didn't mean to be so harsh. It's just, aside from Lisa, you guys are the only friends I have. I don't want any of you to get hurt."
"We feel the same way, Harry," Neville told him. Everyone else agreed, and Harry felt whatever anger left from their actions fade away. He just couldn't stay mad at them. He didn't want to stay mad at them. "You're our friend. That's why we couldn't leave you to face that thing alone."
"Thank you." Harry couldn't quite contain his smile. Despite seeing him gruesomely kill a troll, in spite of him throwing harsh—and admittedly hypocritical—words in their face, they still wanted to be his friend.
A strange warmth spread through his body, a feeling he normally only associated with Lisa Crawft.
He really did find a great group of people here at Hogwarts.
XoX
Harry Potter waited until everyone else had gone to bed. To his left he could, Neville lay curled in a ball. Seamus and Dean had also entered dream land, and he could hear the black boy mumbling football plays in his sleep while the Irish child snored away.
Sitting up as slowly as possible so as not to make the bed squeak and possibly awaken the other three boys in his dormitory, Harry carefully brought his legs over the edge of the bed and slid off.
His bare feet touched warm, fuzzy carpet, and the raven-haired child crept over to the foot of his bed with light, silent footsteps.
Kneeling down next to his trunk, he hissed the word that would allow him to unlock it.
"Open."
There was a soft click as the lock on the trunk undid itself. The small dial began to rotate until it reached the number one, where some of his most important items were stored.
He pushed the trunk open, revealing a ladder attached to the rim closest to him. Stepping onto the first set of rungs, Harry began his journey into his trunk.
The small tunnel of space in his trunk soon expanded as he reached the halfway mark. The barely two by three feet of space was now large enough to fit the entire wardrobe of most famous actresses. Or a large library of books. For that was what Harry had turned this particular compartment of his trunk into. Lining all four walls from top to bottom were large bookshelves filled with books.
Ok, so there were not as many books as he would like to have. Currently he only had 250 books that he had bought from Flourish and Blotts, enough to keep him occupied for a good while, but nowhere near the amount he wanted. That was fine, though. He planned on filling this entire compartment with books in due time.
While the library itself was not very big, it was incredibly well organized. All of his books were divided thematically, that is to say, they were divided by subject, by what branch of magic they were. History. Transfiguration. Charms. Defense Against the Dark Arts. Etc. etc. And those categories were further divided by the level of knowledge they contained; beginner, intermediate, advanced, and so on.
As Harry's bare feet hit the tiled floor on the bottom, he set off toward the left of the small library, where he kept all the books he picked up on combat magic. Technically, it was not called combat magic by anyone but him. He had coined the term when organizing his library. Any book that spoke of using offensive and defensive spells to either defend yourself from attack, or attack your enemy, he considered combat magic because it held similarities to his martial arts: attacking and defending oneself and others from someone or something that was trying to hurt or kill.
His fingers trailed along the spines of the books, eyes scanning their titles. Basic Hexes for the Busy and Vexed. A Compendium of Common Curses and Their Counter-Actions. Confronting the Faceless. Curses and Counter-Curses. Dark Arts Defense: Basics for Beginners. Defensive Magical Theory. And many, many more. All together he had around twenty books on combat magic alone. It wasn't very extensive, not by a long shot, but it was more than enough to get started and that was what mattered.
He stopped walking when his finger landed on A Beginner's Guide to Dueling. It was one of four books he had on Dueling, one of the subbranches of combat magic, along with The Intermediate Duelist, Advanced Dueling Tactics, and Spells for Dueling; a Compilation of Curses, Jinxes, and Hexes.
Grabbing the book's spine, he pulled the beginner's dueling book off the shelf. It would not help if another troll decided to attack, but that was ok. He highly doubted that another troll would come rampaging through the castle again. Not when the first one obviously failed at doing whatever it was supposed to do.
For the rest of the night, Harry Potter would spend his time reading up on dueling. He would need to know, just in case he ran into the person who decided to set the troll lose.
He would also need to know about what was on the third floor corridor, because he was sure that whatever Dumbledore was hiding there was the reason the troll had been let lose in the first place.
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