"I can help you there." Draco said holding out his hand to shake Harry's like he was doing him some sort of favor. Harry didn't take it.
"I think I can tell who the wrong sort are for myself, thanks," he said coolly before a pink tinge appeared in Draco's pale cheeks.
"I'd be careful if I were you, Potter," Draco threatened. "Unless you're a bit politer you'll go the same way as your parents."
"There's not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn't in Slytherin," Hagrid said darkly over their ice cream. "You-Know-Who was one."
Back on the Hogwarts Express, Draco hadn't finished.
"-They didn't know what was good for them, either. You hang around with riff-raff like the Weasleys and that Hagrid, and it'll rub off on you."
Both Harry and Ron stood up, determined to teach this Malfoy a lesson - until the whole world just collapsed.
With a head full of wibbly-wobbly things and not able to move his charms or leave the bear, Larry was finning it shark to drink. What was he supposed to September? Something about a bone, he sought.
"Quirrell!" someone behind him cried, and he felt himself lurch off again.
Back at Hogwarts, Quirrell gave a cold sharp laugh, so unlike his usual quivering treble. It made Harry's stomach lurch.
"Severus? Yes, Severus does seem the type, doesn't he?" he mused amused.
From high up in the branches, Harry peered through the leaves and straining to hear what Quirrell was mumbling until Snape interrupted him.
"Have you found out how to get past that beast of Hagrid's yet?"
"B-b-b Severus, I-"
"You don't want me as your enemy, Quirrell," said Snape, taking a step toward him.
"So useful to have him swooping around like an overgrown bat," the turban-headed professor smiled mockingly, his back to the large mirror. "Next to him, who would suspect p-p-poor, st-stuttering P-Professor Quirrell?"
Harry couldn't take it in. This couldn't be true; it didn't make sense - even though a part of him seemed to already know this.
"But Snape tried to kill me!" he said.
"No, no, no, I tried to kill you. Your friend Miss Granger-"
Her serious demeanor finally cracked as she started to chuckle in the middle of the pet shop; Harry was glad to join in. The exchange really had been ridiculous. When they were done she smiled at him like she used to. Yeah, her teeth were a little big, but who cared?
"-accidentally knocked me over as she rushed to set fire to Snape at that Quidditch match. She broke my eye contact with you. Another few seconds and I'd have got you off that broom."
Zigzagging through the air hundreds of feet in the sky, his broom was completely out of his control. He couldn't turn it. He couldn't direct it at all. Harry gripped it tightly as every now and then it made a violent swishing movement that almost knocked him off.
"The Stone!" Barchoke called from behind him.
Quirrell snapped his fingers and ropes sprang out of thin air and wrapped themselves tightly around Harry. He had to concentrate.
"You're too nosy to live, Potter. Scurrying around the school on Halloween like that, for all I knew you'd seen me coming to look at what was guarding the Stone."
"You let the troll in?"
"Come on, run, run !" Harry yelled at Hermione, trying to pull her toward the bathroom door, but she couldn't move, she was still flat against the wall, her mouth open with terror.
The shouting and the echoes seemed to be driving the troll berserk. It roared again and started toward Ron, who had no way to escape.
Harry took a great running leap and managed to fasten his arms around the troll's neck from behind. It howled in pain as his wand lodged up its nose and it started twisting around and flailing about with its club. Harry hung on for dear life; any second, the troll was going to rip him off or flatten him.
It was somewhat of a relief to find himself standing back with Quirrell.
"Now, wait quietly, Potter. I need to examine this interesting mirror," he said as he turned to study the Mirror of Erised. "This mirror is the key to finding the Stone," Quirrell murmured, tapping his way around the frame. "Trust Dumbledore to come up with something like this… but he's in London… I'll be far away by the time he gets back…"
All Harry could think of doing was to keep Quirrell talking and stop him from concentrating on the mirror. Even tied up as he was, Harry felt like he was sitting down somehow. He had to focus.
Quirrell blurred his way around the mirror and stared hungrily into it.
"I see the Stone… I'm presenting it to my master… but where is it?"
Harry felt oddly disconnected from his struggle against the ropes that were binding him. What had Dumbledore said about the mirror?
"It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts," the old headmaster said sagely in the deserted classroom deep in the dead of night.
Quirrell cursed under his breath.
"I don't understand," he said, starting to get frustrated. "Is the Stone inside the mirror? Should I break it?"
"Ah, now, I'm glad you asked me that," Dumbledore said as he smiled at him in the hospital wing. "It was one of my more brilliant ideas, and between you and me, that's saying something. You see, only one who wanted to find the Stone - find it, but not use it - would be able to get it, otherwise they'd just see themselves making gold or drinking Elixir of Life. My brain surprises even me sometimes…"
"What does this mirror do? How does it work? Help me, Master!" Quirrell cried.
"Use the boy… Use the boy… ," came the voice Harry had known would answer.
"Who's that?" a goblin wheezed.
In a blink he and Quirrell had changed positions; Harry thought he could almost see it happen.
"I met him when I traveled around the world," Professor Quirrell said, a pale ghost of what he once had been. "A foolish young man I was then, full of ridiculous ideas about good and evil. Lord Voldemort showed me how wrong I was."
"Impossible," a human said in the background. Harry didn't pay it any mind.
"There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too week to seek it… Since then, I have served him faithfully, although I have let him down many times. He has had to be very hard on me." Quirrell shivered suddenly. "He does not forgive mistakes easily. When I failed to steal the Stone from Gringotts-"
"Run by goblins," Hagrid told him as they sat in the cold, sea blown shack.
"Goblins?" Harry asked, dropping the bit of sausage he was holding.
"Yeah - so yeh'd be mad ter try an' rob it, I'll tell yeh that. Never mess with goblins, Harry. Gringotts is the safest place in the world fer anything yeh want ter keep safe - 'cept maybe Hogwarts."
.....
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