Eliezer Yudkowsky - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

There was a pause.

Then -

"Yeah," said Draco. "I understand."

Harry didn't smile. It might have been the most difficult nonsmile of his life.

Draco looked at the edge of the roof, and made a face. "This is going to be a lot harder to do on purpose than by accident, isn't it."

Harry's other hand held the roof in a reflexively terrified grip, his fingers white on the cold, cold stone.

You could know with your conscious mind that you'd drunk the Feather-Falling Potion. Knowing it with your unconscious mind was another matter entirely.

It was every bit as scary as Harry had thought it might have been for Hermione, which was justice.

"Draco," said Harry, controlling his voice wasn't easy, but the Ravenclaw girls had given them a script, "You've got to let me go!"

"Okay!" said Draco, and let go of Harry's arm.

Harry's other hand scrabbled at the edge, and then, without any decision being made, his fingers failed, and Harry fell.

There was a brief moment when Harry's stomach tried to leap up into his throat, and his body tried desperately to orient itself in the absence of any possible way to do so.

There was a brief moment when Harry could feel the Feather-Falling Potion kicking in, starting to slow him, a sort of lurching, cushioning feeling.

And then something pulled on Harry and he accelerated downward again faster than gravity -

Harry's mouth had already opened and begun screaming while part of his brain tried to think of something creative he could do, part of his brain tried to calculate how much time he had left to be creative, and a tiny rump part of his brain noticed that he wasn't even going to finish the remaining-time calculation before he hit the ground -

Harry was desperately trying to control his hyperventilating, and it wasn't helping him to hear the shrieking of all the girls, now lying in heaps on the ground and each other.

"Good heavens," said the unfamiliar man, he of the old-looking clothes and faintly scarred face, who was holding Harry in his arms. "Of all the ways I imagined we might meet again someday, I didn't expect it to be you falling out of the sky."

Harry remembered the last thing he'd seen, the falling body, and managed to gasp, "Professor... Quirrell..."

"He'll be all right after a few hours," said the unfamiliar man holding Harry. "He's just exhausted. I wouldn't have thought it possible... he must have knocked down two hundred students just to make sure he got whoever was jinxing you..."

Gently, the man set Harry upright on the ground, supporting him the while.

Harry carefully balanced himself, and nodded to the man.

He let go, and Harry promptly fell over.

The man helped him rise again. Making sure, at all times, to stand between Harry and the girls now picking themselves up from the ground, his head constantly glancing in that direction.

"Harry," the man said quietly, and very seriously, "do you have any idea which of these girls might have wanted to kill you?"

"Not murder," said a strained voice. "Just stupidity."

This time it was the unfamiliar man who seemed to almost fall over, utter shock on his face.

Professor Quirrell was already sitting up from where he'd fallen on the grass.

"Good heavens!" gasped the man. "You shouldn't be -"

"Mr. Lupin, your concerns are misplaced. No wizard, no matter how powerful, casts such a Charm by strength alone. You must do it by being efficient. "

Professor Quirrell didn't stand up, though.

"Thank you," Harry whispered. And then, "Thank you," to the man standing beside him as well.

"What happened?" said the man.

"I should have foreseen it myself," Professor Quirrell said, his voice crisp with disapproval. "Some number of girls tried to summon Mr. Potter to their own, particular arms. Individually, I suppose, they all thought they were being gentle."

Oh.

"Consider it a lesson in preparedness, Mr. Potter," said Professor Quirrell. "Had I not insisted that there be more than one adult witness to this little event, and that both of us have our wands out, Mr. Lupin would not have been available to slow your fall afterward, and you would have been gravely injured."

" Sir! " said the man - Mr. Lupin, apparently. "You should not say such things to the boy!"

"Who is -" Harry started to say.

"The only other person who was available to watch, besides myself," said Professor Quirrell. "I introduce you to Remus Lupin, who is here temporarily to instruct students in the Patronus Charm. Though I am told that the two of you have already met."

Harry studied the man, puzzled. He should have remembered that faintly scarred face, that strange, gentle smile.

"Where did we meet?" said Harry.

"In Godric's Hollow," said the man. "I changed a number of your nappies."

Mr. Lupin's temporary office was a small stone room with a small wooden desk, and Harry couldn't see anything of what Mr. Lupin was sitting on, suggesting that it was a small stool just like the one in front of his desk. Harry guessed that Mr. Lupin wouldn't be at Hogwarts for long, or use this office much, and so he'd told the house elves not to waste the effort. It said something about a person that he tried not to bother house elves. Specifically, it said that he'd been Sorted into Hufflepuff, since, to the best of Harry's knowledge, Hermione was the only non-Hufflepuff who worried about bothering house elves. (Harry himself thought her qualms rather silly. Whoever had created house elves in the first place had been unspeakably evil, obviously; but that didn't mean Hermione was doing the right thing now by denying sentient beings the drudgery they had been shaped to enjoy.)

"Please sit down, Harry," the man said quietly. His formal robes were of low quality, not quite tattered, but visibly worn by the passage of time in a way that simple Repair Charms couldn't fix; shabby was the word that came to mind. And despite that, somehow, there was a dignity about him that couldn't have been obtained by fine and expensive robes, that wouldn't have fit with fine robes, that was the exclusive property of the shabby. Harry had heard of humility, but he'd never seen the real thing before - only the satisfied modesty of people who thought it was part of their style and wanted you to notice.

Harry took a seat on the small wooden stool in front of Mr. Lupin's short desk.

"Thank you for coming," the man said.

"No, thank you for saving me," said Harry. "Let me know if you ever need something impossible done."

The man seemed to hesitate. "Harry, may I... ask a personal question?"

"You can ask, certainly," Harry said. "I have a lot of questions for you, too."

Mr. Lupin nodded. "Harry, are your stepparents treating you well?"

"My parents ," Harry said. "I have four. Michael, James, Petunia, and Lily."

"Ah," said Mr. Lupin. And then, "Ah" again. He seemed to be blinking rather hard. "I... that is good to hear, Harry, Dumbledore would tell none of us where you were... I was afraid he might think you ought to have wicked stepparents, or some such... "

Harry wasn't sure Mr. Lupin's concern had been misplaced, considering his own first encounter with Dumbledore; but it had all turned out well enough, so he said nothing. "What about my..." Harry searched for a word that didn't raise them higher or put them lower... " other parents? I want to know, well, everything."

"A tall order," Mr. Lupin said. He wiped a hand across his forehead. "Well, let us begin at the beginning. When you were born, James was so happy that he couldn't touch his wand without it glowing gold, for a whole week. And even after that, whenever he held you, or saw Lily holding you, or just thought of you, it would happen again -"