Sweet Revenge

The Promise

Now, Harry was not the promise-making type because he was not the promise-keeping type but, due to this being a prime opportunity, he felt the need to make one.

Slughorn's class had been very entertaining, namely, beating Granger in everything she tried to do, but it had not been particularly helpful in his learning. He had spent the majority of the class lounging around and displaying the bottle of Felix Felicis (that he had earned at the start) at different angles for Granger to see and envy. 

However, at the end of the class, Slughorn had admiringly approached Harry and invited him to attend the first Slug Club meeting. Harry, highly suspecting that Alex had also been invited if only for his name having been in the tabloids many times, had at first considered declining, but he found that he had to accept. Why? Well, it was just that: He didn't know.

He certainly had an idea, though. He thought that Tom thought that by inviting Harry to a Slug Club meeting, he might do a sneaky test run of getting some of the stupider Death Eaters into the Castle via the dungeons without disturbing anyone in particular and most of all, to see if Harry noticed. By already being in the dungeons for the Slug Club meeting, Tom could judge if Harry's reaction the next time he saw Tom (which, according to Harry's hypothesis, he would after the Slug Club meeting was over) indicated having seen or heard any bumbling Death Eaters.

This could indicate to Tom whether he had been successful or not: Harry was determined not to let Tom succeed, for the dungeons were not strategically a good way to infiltrate Hogwarts. Harry knew that the dungeons were the most heavily guarded by ancient ward stones and Magiks that had been imposed many centuries ago. The dungeon's heavy doors could be a barrier if they were all closed, for it would slow their army down.

Still, it bothered him greatly that Tom was not telling him these things.

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Tom liked to believe that what he was doing was not running around with the sole purpose of looking menacing to collect stupid Death Eaters. Unfortunately, it is necessary to mention that this was exactly what Tom was doing.

So far, he had collected Thicknesse, Gibbon, and Goyle Snr (Crabbe was too full of Sunday Roast and Bread and Butter Pudding to move very far, and Tom was also half-sure that Crabbe wouldn't be able to understand anything for a certain period of time). He needed two others, and he couldn't find any since it was Sunday and they had all gone to see their mothers in the various shires in which they lived.

Thicknesse, as his name indicated, had indeed very thick skull (He liked to take it as a compliment). It had honestly been an unfortunate mistake that he had become as stupid as he was. 

Pius Thicknesse had been an honest, hardworking Ministry employee who neither earned too much nor too little. However, Lucius had decided that Thicknesse was the perfect unassuming creature to test an Imperius curse on, and the sensation had been so addicting that Thicknesse had eventually become Lucius's little Imperius tester. Eventually, after having been Imperiused a few too many times, Thicknesse had lost half of his wits and now was an empty, order-following shell. His previous position in the Ministry was helpful, and nobody thought anything because "obedient" was how Thicknesse always had been. If he was a bit more obedient than usual, nobody remarked anything of it. Thus, he had been recruited fairly easily.

Gibbon was honestly a fine chap...to anyone who really, really liked to drink. He was often a bit red in the face, and his memory was dotted with gaps. Tom had, over the years, found that many of his orders fell into those memory holes, therefore making Gibbon particularly unreliable. He was also quite clumsy and impatient to "get on with it," even when he didn't know what "it" was. He exclaimed this phrase very often in a loud, warbled voice that he often heard as distorted through his drunken fog.