Draco's Allegiance

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

God, I feel an idiot. When I was writing "Protean Charm" I looked very carefully at evidence for Draco's having started working against the Dark Lord. But I totally missed the biggest clue of all.



When the Trio, Dean, and Griphook were thrown into the basement of Malfoy Manor, Luna used a nail to untie the new prisoners.

And Draco fully expected her to.

When Draco was sent to fetch the goblin, he ordered the captives, "Stand back. Line up against the back wall. Don't try anything or I'll kill you!"

He expected them to be free, not tied together in a clump. And sure enough, they were; he was able to seize "the little goblin by the arm and back[] out again, dragging Griphook with him" without untying him first.

And he didn't warn his fellow Death Eaters that the prisoners were unbound, or cast Incarcereous on them to remedy the matter.

For that matter, how did Luna get hold of that conveniently large nail, anyhow? It's a weapon as well as a tool.

Comments

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

While I totally agree that Dumbles would want Severus cut off from any other source of support and information, and therefore want Sluggy away from him, I feel constrained to point out that there is also a practical consideration.

We all laud Sev for being a polymath near-genius, of course, but even he has his limits. He was evidently brilliant at both Potions and the Dark Arts/Defense, mastering the work taught and innovating in both fields. But at age 21, was even he established as good enough in yet a third field--Runes, Arithmancy, Transfiguration..?---to be seriously considered as a plausible replacement for a seasoned teacher?

Moreover, look at it from the other side: how many of Dumbledore's staff (most of whom were inherited from Dippet or whomever), could Albus expect to lean upon to retire at Twinkle's convenience? Slughorn, if he had started to suspect that Lord Thingy was really lost Tom Riddle, or spotted a disproportionate number of Slytherins supporting that upstart, was vulnerable. Who else would have been?

Tom sent Severus to apply for the perennially-vacant DADA post. Presumably he expected Severus to fulfill his REAL mission (the assassination of Albus, I imagine) and fall to the curse within a year. (Thus neatly ridding Tom of the following generation's most talented half-blood [potential rival] in the course of taking out the previous generation's ....)

But if Albus hoped to make the game play out longer, he'd hardly want to lose his shiny new double agent to Tom's curse, so the DADA position would be flat out.

Potions was Snape's other known area of expertise, and Slughorn was the professor whom we KNOW Albus had dirt on. (When DID Albus obtain that altered memory about Horcruxes, after all?)

So, there were pragmatic reasons to install Severus as Potions master.

[sunnyskywalker]

Well, going by Hogwarts Logic of 1 teacher per class, yes, that does make Potions pretty much the only slot. In the real world, he would just have two Potions professors, with Slughorn as department head. (My high school was smaller than Hogwarts, even the lowest-estimate Hogwarts, and even we had more than one teacher per department.)

Which makes you wonder... maybe the Hogwarts population was small enough in centuries past for that to be a practical faculty arrangement, but nowadays? Maybe having more than one teacher per department would lead to too much cooperation in general. If you only have one Potions professor, no one's going to question his lesson plans too much, because it isn't their area of expertise and they're too busy anyway. And the Potions professor is too busy to do much more than copy-paste old lesson plans, and probably doesn't have the time or energy to protest too many of the headmaster's requests about what to include or omit. If you had two Potions professors, they might start trying to innovate in the curriculum or have time to ask why (insert topic) is or isn't being taught.