Four days earlier, Harry Potter had eyed the announcement hanging outside the Great Hall with disbelief.

By order of the Ministry, Hogwarts will henceforth comply to a dining regimen which will reform the health and fitness of the student body of the aforementioned school. This order is made in light of strong evidence that the rich foods heretofore provided by the school have achieved a deleterious effect upon the overall wellbeing and general girth of the school. Therefore, certain alterations should be expected in the dietary offerings of the school.”

In the Great Hall, to his horror, sausages, frizzled ham, potato scones and glorious scrambled eggs had been replaced by enormous troughs of bran flakes, vats of plain porridge and platters of halved grapefruits, sugarless of course. Even Snape, at the head table, had looked slightly appalled. Every meal that had followed was equally horrifying. Vegetables that, having been boiled into oblivion, lolled on the plate like deceased flobberworms; over-cooked slices of meat sat in stacks like hockey pucks waiting to be catapulted across the table; salt-shakers had been removed from the tables, as sodium was associated with hypertension.

 Harry had begun having flashbacks to his time at the Dursley’s; this was the sort of food he might have hoarded under a floorboard or in the corners of his cupboard, in case his aunt and uncle didn’t feel inclined to feed him that day. He’d begun to have dreams that he was back at the Dursley’s, eating his half grapefruit at the kitchen table, under one of Dudley’s latest diet schemes.

Well, Harry had tolerated this new dietary regime for days, but today, worse horrors still had awaited him—Meatless Monday!

And this was what had led up to Harry’s present actions: he was sneaking down to the kitchen at midnight. He had a contact. And he was going to get a bacon fix.

At the staircase to the Hufflepuff common room, Harry gently tickled the pear in the enormous painting, and giggling, it yielded a doorknob. He slipped off his invisibility cloak and slid through the door.

Instantly, Dobby appeared by his elbow, his enormous ears twitching with excitement. The house-elf squeaked, “Dobby has Harry Potter’s bacon! Dobby has made it all himself!” Dobby seized him by the wrist with surprisingly strong little hands, and Harry let himself be led across the great kitchen.

“Er, thanks, Dobby.”

“Dobby is happy to help his friends! Truth is,” Dobby said, turning his bulging tennis-ball colored eyes to Harry in what he imagined to be a confidential look, “We house-elves are not liking this new cooking at all. Is no good.”

“Yeah, well, I agree…Oh.” Harry trailed off. They had come to a stop in front of the largest plate of bacon he had ever seen in his life. It was probably enough to feed the entire Weasley family twice over, he thought. Dobby pushed a chair up behind him, knocking the back of his knees so that he dropped into a sitting position. Suddenly, Dobby’s face was inches from Harry’s own, and was crinkled into an expression of extreme concern.

“Is wrong? Harry Potter doesn’t like it? Is not enough bacon?” the creature squeaked, his voice jumping octaves with each additional question.

“No, it’s fine! It’s perfect, Dobby, thank you.” He hurried to reassure the elf. Picking up the first piece, he bit off one end. Oh, this is perfection, he thought. As someone who had spent years cooking rasher after rasher of bacon (almost all of which had descended into Dudley’s stomach, and nearly none of which he had ever eaten) he considered himself nearly an expert. And this was simply amazing. Perfectly crisp, just the right amount of saltiness, and sizzling hot. He couldn’t really ask for more in life, he thought… except, perhaps, Lord Voldemort’s head on a stick… He resisted the urge to cram as much as possible into his mouth, because he was going to savor this.

After the fourth strip, however, he was interrupted from his bacon reverie by the creak of hinges as the portrait hole swung open once again. Dobby led the way through the portrait-way, but was obviously being followed by someone whose voice preceded him into the room.

“…bran flakes,” the voice was saying, in a slow drawl. It was a man. Wait, Harry knew that voice. Why did he know that voice? “Really,” it continued, “If I had wanted my intestines to be scoured clean, I might use a simple scourgify spell, rather than taking the effort of ingesting tasteless bits of shredded twigs.” Oh, no, Harry thought as the man entered the kitchen. Harry felt his heart drop to somewhere in the region of his toes.

 He knew that voice.

And those swishing black robes, and that curtain of greasy hair.

And that abnormally large nose.

It was Severus Snape.

“And as for the dinners…” Snape continued, then stopped abruptly as he laid eyes on Harry. Dobby disapparated across the kitchen with a pop. “Mister Potter, out after curfew,” Snape said, striding across the room to where Harry sat, with a characteristically threatening snap of his robes. Harry was suddenly acutely aware of the half-eaten strip of bacon that was in his hand, frozen half way to his mouth, which he closed with a snap, hurriedly dropping the bacon to the table. “I wish I could say that I was surprised, but as we know, you make a habit of rule-breaking—”

Just as the professor reached the table, Dobby re-appeared at his elbow with another pop. “Dobby has Mister Professor Snape’s cake!” the elf announced in a joyous trill, hefting what appeared to be a quadruple-layered chocolate cake. “Is triple chocolate!”

It appeared that Severus Snape had been rendered momentarily speechless.

“Is not right?” Dobby squeaked, examining Snape’s face carefully. “Mister Professor Snape asked—”

“Ah,” Snape said, finding his tongue once again, “It is perfectly up to standard, Dobby. That will be all.” Jerkily, he sat down at the other end of the table, where the house-elf placed the cake, along with another plate, fork, serving spoon, and… a tall glass of milk.

“Harry Potter is all right?” asked Dobby, looking between the two.

“Yes,” said Harry, smiling at the house-elf. “Just fine.” Dobby’s face crinkled into a smile, ears quivering with joy, before he vanished across the kitchen once again. Harry turned to Snape, and  asked with a look of sincere interest, “I’m sorry, what was it that you were saying about rule-breaking?”

Snape simply stared at him. Harry smiled broadly, and asked,

“Want some bacon?”

THE END