Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

year and try to gain control of the entire Hogwarts rumor mill, remarking that this was a generally useful and amusing challenge for any true Slytherin attending Hogwarts.

"Nothing like that," Harry said quickly, "he just said in a general way that I should get influence over the people spreading rumors, and I decided that the nice version of that would be to just inform Padma directly about the meaning of what she was doing, and the possible consequences of her actions, instead of trying to threaten her or anything like that -"

"You call that not threatening someone?" Hermione's hands were pulling at her hair now.

"Um..." Harry said. "I guess she might've felt a little threatened, but Hermione, people will do whatever they think they can get away with, they don't care about how much it hurts other people if it doesn't hurt themselves, if Padma thinks there's no consequences to spreading lies about you then of course she'll just go on doing it -"

"And you think there's going to be no consequences to what you did?"

Harry got a sudden sick feeling to his stomach.

Hermione had the angriest look on her that he'd ever seen. "What do you think the other students think of you now, Harry? Of me? If Harry doesn't like the way you talk about Hermione, you'll get ghosts set on you, is that what you want them to think?"

Harry opened his mouth and no words came out, he just... hadn't thought about it that way, actually...

Hermione reached down to grab her books from the table where she'd slammed them. "I'm not talking to you for a week, and I'll tell everyone I'm not talking to you for a week, and I'll tell them why, and maybe that'll undo some of what you just did. And after that week, I'll - I'll decide then what to do, I guess -"

"Hermione!" Harry's own voice rose to a shriek of desperation. "I was trying to help!"

The girl turned back and looked at him as she opened the classroom door.

"Harry," she said, and her voice trembled a little beneath the anger, "Professor Quirrell is sucking you into the darkness, he really is, I mean it, Harry."

"This... wasn't him, this wasn't what he said to do, this was just me -"

Hermione's voice was almost a whisper now. "Someday you're going to go out to lunch with him, and it will be your dark side that comes back, or maybe even you won't come back at all."

"I promise you," Harry said, "that I will come back from lunch."

He wasn't even thinking as he said it.

And Hermione just turned around and strode out and slammed the door behind her.

Way to invoke the laws of dramatic irony, moron, observed Harry's Internal Critic. Now you're going to die this Saturday, your last words will be 'I'm sorry, Hermione', and she'll always regret that the last thing she did was slam the door -

Oh, shut up.

When Padma sat down with Hermione for breakfast, and said in a voice loud enough for others to hear that the ghost had just told her things that were important for her to hear, and Harry Potter had been right to do it, there were some people who were less frightened afterward, and some who were frightened more.

And afterward people did say fewer nasty things about Hermione, at least in the first year, at least in public where Harry Potter might hear about it.

When Professor Flitwick asked Harry if he was responsible for what had happened to Padma, and Harry said yes, Professor Flitwick told him that he was to serve two days' detention. Even if it had only been a ghost and Padma hadn't been hurt, still, that wasn't acceptable behavior for a Ravenclaw student. Harry nodded and said that he understood why the Professor had to do that, and wouldn't protest; but considering that it did seem to have turned Padma around, did Professor Flitwick really think, off the record, that he'd done the wrong thing? And Professor Flitwick paused, seeming to actually think about it, and then said to Harry, in a solemnly squeaky voice, that he needed to learn how to relate to other students the normal way.

And Harry couldn't help but think that this was advice that Professor Quirrell would never give him.

Harry couldn't help but think that if he'd done it Professor Quirrell's way, the normal Slytherin way, a mixture of positive and negative incentives to bring Padma and the other rumor-mongers under his explicit control, then Padma wouldn't have talked about it, and Hermione would have never found out...

...in which case Padma wouldn't have been redeemed, she would have stayed on the wrong path, and she herself would have suffered from that eventually. It wasn't as if Harry had lied to Padma in any way, when he was Time-Turned and invisible and using the Ventriloquism Charm.

Harry still wasn't sure whether he'd done the right thing, or a right thing, and Hermione hadn't relented on not talking to him - though she was talking a lot with Padma. It hurt more than Harry had expected, going back to studying by himself; like his brain had already started to forget its long-honed skill of being alone.

The days until Saturday's lunch with Professor Quirrell seemed to go by very, very slowly.

Chapter 51: Title Redacted, Pt 1

Saturday.

Harry had run into trouble falling asleep Friday night, which he had anticipated might happen, and so he had decided to take the obvious advance precaution of buying a sleeping potion; and to prevent it from constituting a visible sign that he was nervous, he had decided to buy it off Fred and George a couple of months earlier. (Be prepared, that's the Boy Scout's marching song...)