Chapter 1

She had been watching him for five years. Five long years and never once had he looked at her before this year. It was interesting, really. She was the kind of girl who faded into the background. It was sort of a defence mechanism; in Muggle primary school she had been picked on, and she developed the habit of being inconspicuous. She was neither a good student nor a bad one, she simply did her best and was somewhere in the middle, which is why she was in Hufflepuff. 'Puffs did their best, but generally weren't interested in the spotlight. Unless you were somebody like Cedric Diggory, may he rest in peace. Although, Cedric deserved all the attention he got. He was genuinely a good guy, and Hufflepuff House needed something to make it stand out from the other houses, who thought the 'Puffs were the rubbish heap of the school. Of course, pompous blowhards like Ernie Macmillan and Justin Finch-Fletchley didn't help their reputation either. And stupid idiots like Zacharias Smith ... Ugh.

She had, of course, purchased a number of modern history books when she found out she was a witch, wanting to know all about this strange new world she found herself in. In them, she read all about Harry Potter, the fabled Boy-Who-Lived. She had bought a few of the books which detailed his supposed adventures and scoffed at them. Honestly, marrying a veela at the age of five? Hogwash.

Still, it had been rather a shock when she saw him for the first time on the Hogwarts Express. He was scrawny, underfed looking and had the general air of someone who hadn't seen much sunlight. Also, he was dressed in little better than rags. Hardly the image of what a saviour was supposed to look like. His green eyes had briefly met hers, though, and something called to her heart in them. Some indefinable quality of loss which she couldn't clearly articulate at the tender age of eleven.

It was hard to approach him. Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley did their best to discourage anyone from socializing with him. It was sort of understandable. Too many people wanted to capitalize on his fame, even though anyone with half a brain could see he didn't want it at all.

Another puzzling thing was his clothes. Anybody at all familiar with the wizarding world knew that the Potters were one of the wealthiest families out there. So why was the last scion of the house dressed worse than a London street urchin?

During the first year, she had watched him only sporadically, and observed some interesting things. He hated bullies like Malfoy, he wouldn't stand for them. He was a superb flyer. But what most interested her was the fact that he held back in classes.

Being shunted mostly to the sidelines of social life, she had developed a keen observational talent. People watching was by far her best skill, and it was this that made her decide to become some sort of diplomat after school. And it was this talent that had helped her to notice that Harry wasn't living up to his potential. After observing Hermione Granger, she understood why: he didn't want to be better than her. Further contemplation made her realize that Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger had to be his first ever friends, if he was deliberately slowing his learning down to stay with them. Granger's Achilles heel was her intelligence, and having anyone do better than her would be a deliberate insult to her. She was sad that Harry had to do this, but understood where he was coming from. And this revelation, more than anything, totally killed the Boy-Who-Lived mystique for her; he was just another lost, scared first year. She quit caring about the legend then, and he was forever just Harry afterward.

Rumours abounded at the end of the first year that he had once again faced and vanquished the Dark Lord, and his three day stay in the hospital wing certainly lent credence to the story. And then the whole mess in second year...

She had scoffed internally at her house mates' insistence, led by that pompous idiot, Macmillan, that Harry was the heir of Slytherin, just because he could speak Parseltongue. If you took a narrow minded view on things, it made sense (sort of), but when you looked at the big picture, it was utterly ludicrous. One of his best friends was Muggleborn, along with his mother, so it made absolutely no sense whatsoever that he was attacking Muggleborns in the school. To her shame though, she didn't speak out in his defence. She didn't want to bring attention on herself. Nobody would've listened to her anyway.

To her disgust, everybody once again believed him innocent at the end of the year. It held a pattern. Over the past five years, she had watched him go from being admired by the school, to hated, back to being admired again. It was bloody ridiculous.

Everybody once again turned on him in fourth year, thinking he was trying to steal glory from Hufflepuff by cheating and illegally entering himself into the Triwizard Tournament. Again, if you only looked at the surface of things, it made sense. For someone like her who had made a habit of watching Harry Potter, however, it was ridiculous. Harry hated his fame and wanted nothing to do with it.

When the Yule Ball had come, she had hoped deep within her heart of hearts that Harry might ask her to go with him. It was stupid though; she never had spoken a word to him, not once. But still, she hoped. He hadn't of course, and had gone with Parvati Patil, but to her secret relief, he didn't seem to enjoy it much, even though Parvati was one of the prettiest girls in the year. She had, however, seen him mooning after Cho Chang, which was slightly disappointing.

She had been sad as anyone when Harry had returned from the third task, clutching the dead body of Cedric Diggory. And then all summer, the papers were printing that Harry was a lying, attention-seeking brat and delusional, and that Albus Dumbledore was senile and losing his touch, when both had publicly announced the return of Voldemort. It made her furious, why would Harry lie about such a thing?