Chapter Text
It wasn’t that Harry had never noticed Blaine Anderson before The Troll. Even disregarding his distinctly American accent, Harry would have been hard-pressed not to notice the way Ron’s eyes rolled whenever Blaine so much as entered a room.
“Honestly, he’s even worse than Hermione,” Ron had muttered earlier that day. Harry had glanced over at Blaine, in his neatly pressed robes and perfectly knotted Ravenclaw tie, hand raised unabashedly high. Again. Harry could see the resemblance.
Still, “I don’t know if I’d go that far,” he muttered back.
After all, Blaine wasn’t the one currently bouncing up and down and waving so hard that poor Neville was in danger of getting an elbow to the nose.
Ron ignored that in favor of glaring at Blaine’s perfectly placid profile.
“He thinks he’s so slick,” he sneered.
Harry nodded vaguely, but otherwise didn’t respond. He didn’t entirely disagree – he just didn’t care enough about Blaine to summon up the energy. He wasn’t worth it, to Harry.
And that’s really what it was. Blaine Anderson mattered about as much to Harry as any other anonymous face in the crowd. He was a swotty Ravenclaw with an almost aggressively charming smile who ate his salad with a knife and fork. Nothing worth kicking up a fuss about.
In fact, Harry didn’t even notice that Blaine was missing from the Halloween feast until he and Ron threw open the door to the girls’ bathroom and found him standing between Hermione and the troll, holding a plate of what looked like tonight’s feast. They were caught so thoroughly by surprise that they could do no more than stand there and watch dumbly as Blaine threw it right into the troll’s befuddled face.
It landed with a splat, and then a tinkling crash as the china fell and shattered against the stone floor.
The troll blinked, slowly, shedding dollops of mashed potatoes from his eyelids like great blobby tears. He made a low, angry noise and lurched toward Blaine, knocking the sinks off the walls as he went. Blaine just stared in horror. Hermione screamed, clearly panicking. It was enough to snap Harry and Ron out of their stupor.
“Confuse it!” shouted Harry, picking up a broken-off tap and throwing with all his might against the wall. The troll stopped, baffled, and started to lumber in Harry’s direction.
“Oy, pea brain!” shouted Ron from the other side of the bathroom, throwing a metal pipe at the troll. The troll turned toward the source of the sound and changed direction once more.
From there, it was chaos. They took it in turns, kicking up enough noise and enough debris to keep the troll spinning in circles. Finally, it let out a dull roar and charged blindly, right at Hermione, who was backed up against the wall and frozen still, with no escape route in sight.
Which, of course, was how Harry ended up jumping onto the troll’s back, wand somehow getting stuck up the troll’s nose in the process, while Ron aimed his own wand at the thing and shouted what appeared to be the very first spell that popped into his head.
“Wingardium Leviosa!”
It was, as far as Harry could tell, the first time Ron had managed to work the spell properly on the first try.
The troll’s club flew out of his hand, rose swiftly above his head, and fell right back down with a dull thud. The troll swayed on the spot for a terrifying moment, then flopped gracelessly to the ground, taking Harry with him.
The sudden silence was stunning.
“Is it – dead?” asked Hermione tremulously.
“I don’t think so,” said Harry, pulling his wand free with a disgusting snick.
Blaine leaned in cautiously, right up next to the thing’s slack mouth.
“It’s just knocked out,” he said. He was pale, as obviously shaken up by the whole thing as Harry felt. His hair was starting to curl, just at the ends, and he had gravy stains dotting his collar.
It wasn’t long before Professors McGonagall, Snape, and Quirrell were bursting into the room. They had been alerted, no doubt, by the racket their scuffle had made.
Hermione spoke up before the rest of them could get a chance. She took the blame for the whole thing, to the shock of all, and even lied to a teacher in the process.
“I went looking for the troll because I – I thought I could deal with it on my own – you know, because I’ve read all about them.”
It was honestly the best show of gratitude she could have given them. McGonagall took five points from her for her “foolishness,” but awarded five points each to the rest of them, which honestly didn’t seem like enough considering that they’d nearly been killed.
They made the trip back to their dormitories nearly in silence. It was Ron who broke it, just before the turn that led to Ravenclaw Tower.
“What were you doing there, really?” he said, glancing at Blaine in a way that was actually more curious than suspicious.
“Oh,” said Blaine, biting his lip. “I was – well, I heard that Hermione was, um, indisposed,” he said diplomatically. “I thought it would be a shame for her to miss out on the feast.”
“He brought me a plate,” said Hermione, chin held high. “He was trying to make me feel better.”
Blaine smiled, but it looked more like a wince.
Ron looked at his feet, the tips of his ears starting to go red.
“That was really brave, what you did,” offered Blaine. “Coming to help us, I mean. We would have been dead without you, for sure.”
Harry didn’t mention that they’d been the ones that had locked the troll in the bathroom, or that they’d felt kind of responsible for Hermione, considering the reason she was in there in the first place. He figured Blaine probably knew that part anyway.
Ron didn’t say anything either. “Thanks,” he mumbled, and Harry followed suit.
Blaine smiled again. It looked more like a real smile this time, and not the dazzler he usually threw about, either. The three of them returned it.
Blaine waved an awkward goodbye when they reached his turn, and the rest of them lapsed into an even more awkward silence until they reached the portrait entrance to Gryffindor Tower. Hermione gave the password, and they entered.
The common room was loud and busy, their feast having been relocated here in the wake of the troll scare. The three of them stopped and looked at each other with no small measure of embarrassment.
“Thanks,” they muttered, and hurried to get fresh plates.
From then on, the four of them were friends. There were some things you couldn’t share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll was one of them.