How (Not) To Date a Gryffindor

Chapter 1

When he was fifteen, Tom decided that he was going to ask Harriet Potter out on a date to Hogsmeade. Being a Slytherin, Tom had learned from his housemates, aside from ‘better a cousin than a mudblood’, that every pureblood needed a suitable wife to bolster his reputation and provide him with an appropriate heir.

Now, Tom wasn’t a pureblood, and neither was Harriet, and Tom’s reputation was impeccable no matter what Dumbledore claimed about him, and he was quite sure he didn’t even want children, but all of those details aside, Tom still wanted to ask Harriet out on a date to Hogsmeade.

He wasn’t actually sure why.

Harriet Potter was a girl best described as ruffled and rumpled and dishevelled most of the time. Her eyes were green and rather attractive, and her hair was dark and curly and mostly kept in a untidy ponytail with strands escaping every which way. Her face wasn’t unattractive, though her nose was covered in freckles and her lips were rather thin and hid slightly uneven teeth. She was neither short nor tall and rather flat-chested, built like an athlete more than a voluptuous woman like her friend Hermione Granger was, who had a full bosom and much wider hips.

And yet, whenever Tom gave the idea of dating any thought, his mind always pulled up the image of Harriet Potter and no one else. Plenty of girls, and boys, Slytherins and Ravenclaws and even the occasional Hufflepuff or Gryffindor wanted to date Tom as he was well aware. Tom knew he was handsome and clever and he cultivated a friendly and helpful persona to the other students while in truth he couldn’t care less about almost anyone else on the entire planet.

But Harriet, for reasons that Tom had yet to figure out, was different.

Tom blamed the early exposure he suffered to her in his first years at Hogwarts and it was all his guardian’s fault.

Tom was an orphan, or so he thought for most of his life. His mother had died in childbirth at a muggle hospital and since no one knew if his father was still alive or not, or where to find him, Tom had ended up in foster care. He’d been put up for adoption as a baby but he had such active accidental magic that any potential parents ran screaming in the opposite direction the first time he made something fly. Eventually Tom had ended up in the system, marked as a ‘difficult case’ with ‘behavioural issues’, moving from foster home to foster home. Tom had given up on ever finding an actual adult who would genuinely care about him long before Remus Lupin walked through the door when he was eleven.

Remus Lupin was the Defence Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts and tasked with delivering a few Hogwarts letters to muggleborns. He was also the Head of Gryffindor House, and a werewolf to boot. But aside from all that, Remus was a caring man full of compassion and he’d apparently thought it unacceptable that an intelligent child like Tom was being shipped from muggle foster home to foster home every couple of months and figured he’d be much better off in the wizarding world with a guardian who at the very least could offer him a stable home.

And thus Remus had gone to the ministry of magic and applied for guardianship of Tom himself and was soundly rejected, because of the whole werewolf thing.

But Remus was in a relationship with Severus Snape and had been for many years. And while their relationship was best described as ‘living apart together’, they were devoted to each other and because he hated seeing his partner heartbroken, Severus had applied for guardianship instead and had been granted it without any issues.

So, on paper Severus was Tom’s guardian, but in practice it was Remus who mostly handled raising Tom while Severus observed from the side-lines.