Creatures of Truth

by Lomonaaeren

Summary:

Harry returns to Hogwarts for his fourth year more settled than he was last year when Sirius Black escaped, and even finds a mentor in the new Defense professor. However, his sense of security lasts only until he’s entered in the Tri-Wizard Tournament—the obstacle that might kill him at last.

Notes:

This is one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” chaptered stories being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. It’s part of my “Creatures” series, following “Creatures of Worth,” “Creatures of Pride,” and “Creatures of Strength,” which you should read first. This should be five or six chapters.

Chapter 1

“Why do you think Dark Lords keep rising all the time, Professor Greengrass?”

“What does history tell you?”

Harry leaned back in his seat and thought about it.

Professor Greengrass sat across the table from him, one hand beneath her chin, watching him. Her gaze was sharp and critical in a way that Harry wouldn’t have tolerated from many other people, but she saw him as a student in a way that most of his professors at Hogwarts didn’t. Babbling might come the closest there.

And Professor Greengrass taught History of Magic in a way that was worlds removed from the repetitive, boring teaching Binns preferred. She deserved an answer.

“I suppose Dark Lords come from tensions that aren’t resolved and perhaps can’t be resolved,” Harry said slowly. “It’s similar to the Muggle history I learned in primary schools that way. Wars that are settled but still present as simmering hatreds under the surface. Resentment from people who have lost their privileges, however little sense that resentment makes. And weak governments.”

“There is some of that in the magical world as well, but there is another factor in the rise of Dark Lords that separates us from Muggles.”

“Magical power?”

“Exactly. A Dark Lord has individual magical power in a way that no Muggle does. Even Muggles who are armed with powerful weapons can have those weapons taken away, or, if they are heads of governments who command weapons, can be controlled or influenced by others. Or removed from power. No one can take a Dark Lord’s magic away.” Professor Greengrass leaned forwards intently. “Given that, tell me how this factor influences the rise of Dark Lords in our world.”

Harry closed his eyes for a moment. It helped him order his thoughts, and he knew Professor Greengrass wouldn’t mind. She never thought he was lazy or inattentive when he did that.

Unlike so many other teachers.

But Harry put aside the memories of Muggle primary that had got stirred up by thinking of his Muggle history lessons. After a moment, he said, “A Dark Lord can exploit those simmering tensions a lot more easily than an individual Muggle can. And they can seem—like a good leader because Aurors and magical governments might not have the resources to take them down right away?”

“Yes. A Dark Lord can also escape custody or capture more easily than most Muggles, since they might be able to tear through the wards that would keep most of our kind from Apparating.”

Harry opened his eyes. “It’s beginning to seem more remarkable than not that no Dark Lord arose between Grindelwald and Voldemort.”

Professor Greengrass flinched a little at the name, then laughed softly. “Your next essay topic will be to tell me why.”

Harry smiled. He thought that would be an interesting essay to write.

And to see how she reacted to.

*

“Tell me what you see.”

“A snowy plain. No footprints. The snow glitters under the sun, which is weak. The sky is mostly cloudy. In the distance is a large castle that looks like Hogwarts.”

“Very good. Now begin moving towards the castle.”

Harry hesitated for a second. He didn’t think he was supposed to step into the snow, which was undisturbed for a reason, and which might hide traps, but he didn’t have a broom with him—

A sharp snapping sensation flooded his mind, and Harry gasped and opened his eyes. Erik Anderssen shook his head from where he sat opposite Harry, cross-legged, on a smooth cushion. “You must not try to bring too much logic into your mindscapes. It will simply break them apart.”

“I was thinking of how I could move towards the castle.”

“You must envision yourself differently in your mindscape than you do in the real world.” Erik shifted his weight and shook out a leg that must be cramped. “Not as flying on a broom or Apparating or walking. As a bodiless mind, flying and traveling without wings.”

Harry paused. It seemed obvious now that Erik had pointed it out, but—“Wouldn’t envisioning myself as flying still be a continuation of the broom problem?”

Erik shook his head again. His face was calm, and he picked up a goblet of water that stood beside him and took a large swallow before he said, “Legilimency and Occlumency are different realms. You will learn how to picture yourself in them over time. For now, though, you must think of yourself as a bodiless mind. Can you do that?”

Harry thought back to the rare glimpses of the telly he’d got at the Dursley house, and how a camera would swoop over a landscape or up to a person without any body visible beneath it. “I think I might know how.”

“Good. Then let us try again.”

Harry closed his eyes. He knew that Erik was going slowly, letting Harry look at his mindscape for as long as he needed to before he tried to do something to it, with Erik parting the curtains of his own Occlumency. It wouldn’t be this easy when Harry was fighting enemies in his own mind, or trying to keep them out.

It didn’t matter. However hard it was, however long it took, Harry would master it.

*

“BOLLOCKS!”

Harry blinked and looked at Madam Marchbanks, who was standing by the kitchen table and glaring down at the Prophet spread across it. She looked up, saw him, and pointed at the paper with her cane.

“Read that before we speak,” she snapped, and used her cane to cross over and stand scowling out a window.

Harry’s first thought, as he approached it, was that the paper had printed some story about him again that Madam Marchbanks didn’t like. Or maybe tried to question her custody of him.

But no. Instead, the front page detailed Death Eater activity at the Quidditch World Cup, complete with a photo of a hovering Dark Mark that had supposedly been cast by a house-elf. The same house-elf had apparently murdered her master to get her hands on the wand. The corpse of Bartemius Crouch had been found not far away, his throat slit.

“I didn’t know house-elves could use wands,” Harry remarked, laying down the paper.

Madam Marchbanks didn’t respond, and Harry looked up to see that she didn’t have her hearing charms on. He sighed and walked around in front of her. Madam Marchbanks snorted at him.

“Bollocks!”

Harry nodded and then gestured to his ears. Madam Marchbanks grunted and waved her wand. Crystalline seashells curled into being around her ears, and she sat down and scowled at Harry as if he would tell her that the attack was real and the truth as reported.

“House-elves can’t use wands without the bidding of their masters, if they’re bound to a family,” she snapped. “And why would Crouch tell the elf to raise the Mark? Why would she kill him? Bollocks!”

Harry nodded. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense. But I don’t know that any other explanation does, either.”

“Of course the truth does!”

“But do we know the truth?” Harry looked towards the paper on the table and considered some of the precautions he had taken to protect himself, which might be less than perfect if the Dark Lord was coming back. Or even just if the Death Eaters were active again.

He had one Death Eater who had passed on important information regarding Black’s supposed traitor status last year and might be accounted an ally—but might not. Harry respected Kalder Nott, and part of that was knowing how cruel and self-interested he was.

“No, we don’t.” Madam Marchbanks grunted and raised one hand to rub beneath her eye. “Between this and the rumors of the Ministry doing some stupid grand secret thing at Hogwarts this year…”

“What stupid grand secret thing?”

“Rumors, like I said,” Madam Marchbanks snapped irritably. “Heard it when I went to the Ministry this morning to discuss things with that stupid young woman who keeps thinking she can take your custody away from me. Would have told you earlier if you’d come down the stairs earlier. Rumors! Nothing of substance.”

“Something being planned at Hogwarts,” Harry repeated. He couldn’t remember hearing any rumors of that, either, and that was a bit disquieting, given that Zacharias and Theo at least probably had connections in the Ministry who wouldn’t keep things like that secret from Kalder Nott or Deborah Smith.

Unless Zacharias and Theo aren’t really your friends, and kept this from you on purpose.

Harry shook off the thought. He was getting better at rejecting the ones like that. They would just get in the way, and he thought he could trust Zacharias and Theo until something proved otherwise. And if he couldn’t trust them, he had methods prepared to take them down.

“Yes.” Madam Marchbanks leaned forwards, her hands clenched over the top of her cane. “You’re not to get mixed up in it.”

“Why would I want to?”

Madam Marchbanks cackled. “Good to know that I got the sensible ward,” she said. “Some of the things your lot get up to you, you would not believe.”

“I’m not like other teenagers,” Harry said, as politely as he could.

“No, you aren’t, so wipe that offended look off your face.”

Harry had to smile. Madam Marchbanks said things he disagreed with at times and things that upset him, like all parents if his friends could be believed, but she was also more sensible than those parents were at believing he could take care of himself.

“So what do we do about that?” he asked, and nodded to the Prophet and its story about the World Cup again.

“For now? Nothing. Stay out of it.” Madam Marchbanks scowled. “But I’m going to show you some of the more dubiously legal spells that I know. They would still get you in trouble if you had to use them to defend yourself, but I trust you to know when the circumstances warrant it.”

Harry nodded. That was another thing that made Madam Marchbanks superior to most guardians. She was dedicated to his survival, not to debates about morality.

Harry thought he got enough morality as it was, with the people who prattled at him at school.

*

“You’ll never be the most talented student at Potions. You don’t have the patience for it.”

Harry shrugged a little as he looked into his cauldron at the almost-perfect Calming Draught he’d just brewed. He’d asked Professor Plumeria to show him the most practical potions she could, which meant a lot of the ones that would help him recover from the aftermath of an attack, and also some healing ones. “Yes, Professor Plumeria.”

“You don’t care at all, do you?”

Harry looked up and held her eyes. His Potions Professor was looking at him with a curious, expectant gaze. Harry wasn’t sure exactly what she was expecting, though.

“I care about being able to brew the potions to your satisfaction,” he offered.

“Smart answer.”

Harry half-smiled. Professor Plumeria watched him for a moment more before she nodded and turned to the book on the lab table in front of her, flipping through a few pages.

“Let us begin with the modification to the Calming Draught that will also heighten your senses, as you requested to learn how to brew this…”

*

“Come here, Mr. Potter.”

Harry walked over to stand in front of the rocking chair where Deborah Smith, Zacharias’s grandmother, sat waiting. She considered him, as she had two summers ago, before his second year. Harry stood with his hands linked together behind his back.

He respected Madam Smith, just as he did Madam Marchbanks, but there was a center of hard morality at the core of Madam Smith that made Harry more cautious of her. He waited, and she finally nodded to him.

“I’ve heard that you’re interested in Arithmancy,” she said.

Harry didn’t blink. “Yes, Madam Smith. I picked it as one of my electives last year, and Professor Vector is an interesting teacher.”

“That says much while not saying much at all.”

Harry just smiled a little. “I’m getting old enough for politicians and the papers to notice, Madam Smith. I think it’s best to watch my language and not speak many words that I wouldn’t want to find on the front page of the Prophet.”

Madam Smith blinked at that, as if she hadn’t considered this angle. Then she said, “But you’re not interested in politics or looking to go into the Wizengamot.”

“Oh, no, Madam Smith. It’s only my fame as the Boy-Who-Lived, undeserved as it is, that makes people pay attention to me at all.” Harry ducked his head and made his voice and posture both small. The point wasn’t to fool Madam Smith, only to let her see that he didn’t intend to trade on his fame.

“Why would you say undeserved?”

“I was only a baby, Madam Smith. It’s probably my mother who did something to defeat You-Know-Who. I think she doesn’t get enough credit for it, because people are reluctant to say a Muggleborn was a heroine.” And Harry did think that. He also just didn’t care much if people credited his mother or not.

“You are wise beyond your years.”

“Thank you, Madam Smith.”

“I simply wonder how much of it is a front.”

Harry raised his head with a carefully crafted expression of surprise, so carefully crafted that he knew it would look natural. “Why is that, Madam Smith? I promise you that I don’t have any intentions to hurt your family or your grandson.”

Unless they hurt me first, and then I will defend myself with everything that’s in me.

In the room full of soft and brilliant yellows and golds, Madam Smith looked at him, and there was the unyielding morality in the center of her that Harry had sensed before. “Did you know that there is a magical ability called, somewhat sappily, Heart-Sensing?”

“No.” Harry felt as though his own heartbeat had picked up speed. If he hadn’t heard of it, if it could reveal the truth about him to someone who was virtually a stranger…

“It is a sappy name, but an accurate one. I can sense the general tendency of a person’s emotions—not what they feel on a day-to-day basis, but whether they are an anxious person, or whether they have problems with their tempers. Do you know what I sense from you, Mr. Potter?”

“Please tell me, Madam Smith.”

“Ice. Constant, unvarying. Granted, I’ve never been close to you when you were experiencing deep and unpleasant emotions. But I wouldn’t be surprised if you expressed even them in an icy way.”

True enough, Harry thought before he could stop himself. He had planned for Black’s imprisonment in St. Mungo’s and Lupin’s outing as a werewolf at the end of last Hogwarts term coldly enough, and he had plans in place to protect himself if even the people he most trusted turned on him.

He had planned out what things he would have to take if he had to hastily abandon Madam Marchbanks’s house, for that matter.

He looked up at Madam Smith and found her regarding him. He said softly, “It’s still the case that I have no plans to hurt your family or Zacharias.”

“But you don’t deny the charge of ice.”

“How could I, unless you had some reason to distrust your own magic?”

Madam Smith studied him with unreadable eyes. Then she nodded. “I am not inclined to report you, or torture you, or whatever you may be imagining. But that is true only as long as you don’t have intentions to hurt my family.”

“I don’t. But if one of them hurts me…” Harry dropped a few of the shields that he usually kept up on his own eyes and smile, and let his lips stretch enough to bare his teeth. “Tell them not to.”

Madam Smith shifted a little in her chair. “Good Merlin, child,” she said, in a different tone. “What happened to you?”

“You saw the Prophet stories about the ways my relatives treated me, I’m sure.”

“And that is all?”

“All?”

Harry couldn’t hold back the anger in his tone. Madam Smith raised one hand as if to shield from a flying spell with the power of her flesh and muscle alone. “Peace, child. Yes, I see. You are determined to make sure that it never happens again.”

“And hurt whoever I must, if they truy to hurt me.”

Madam Smith nodded. “It is better for our families to be allies than apart. Please go and spend time with Zacharias, with my blessing. His History marks have improved since you started sharing your History books with him.”

“Professor Greengrass makes the selections, Madam Smith. I just pass on the books she recommends. She’s pretty brilliant.”

“Mmm. Well, my gratitude in any case.”

That was carefully phrased. Harry nodded to her and said, “Thank you, Madam Smith. I consider Zacharias a good friend.”

She heard the threat in that, and the promise of protection. She gave a soft laugh and nodded. “And he considers you one, Mr. Potter. I promise, I see no reason why we should clash unless something drastically changes.”

Not on my end, Harry thought, and smiled at her before he went into the study room off Zacharias’s suite where his friend was waiting for him.

*

“Why didn’t you ask me about it?”

Harry had been staring at the Arithmancy equation in front of him with such frustration that he ignored Theo’s question for a minute. Then he blinked and leaned back in his chair. “What? What are you talking about?”

“Why didn’t you ask me about the incident at the Quidditch World Cup, when you know that my father’s a Death Eater?”

Harry stared at Theo in silence. They were sitting in Theo’s study room today, which was bigger than Zacharias’s and practically a miniature library with the shelves all over the walls and the books that lay on the several small tables and the niches crowded with bound scrolls. The predominant colors were grey and white, except for a mosaic of small stars in a dark blue sky on the ceiling. It was one of Harry’s favorite places, one of the most soothing.

“Why would I think he was there, just because he’s a Death Eater?”

“You know he was high up in the Dark Lord’s councils.” Theo’s voice was small, and his shoulders hunched as if he expected a blow. As if Dudley were going to show up any second, even though Theo had never met Dudley. The look made Harry want to cast a spell at someone, although he didn’t know who. “It makes sense that he would have participated in any planned Death Eater activity.”

“How planned was it to attack a bunch of Muggles and spin them through the air while making all sorts of noise in a public place?”

Theo paused. Then he said, “Not much.”

Harry nodded. “I think your father’s smarter than that. Or smarter than to let me find out about it, if he participated because he was drunk or something.” Theo’s jaw dropped a little, but Harry just went on. He found it hard to imagine Kalder Nott drunk, too, but one had to propose all sorts of hypotheses.

“And the Dark Mark and the house-elf?”

“Something else was going on there, unless Crouch Senior was suicidal, and none of the articles that have come out about it since are taking that angle.”

“No. No, I doubt he was. He was such a fanatic for law and order that he would have killed himself before he lifted the Dark Mark. His own son was a Death Eater, and Couch didn’t hesitate to sentence him to Azkaban.”

“Do you think someone could have cast Imperius on the house-elf or the like as vengeance for his son?”

“I doubt it. His son is twelve years dead. It would be odd to hold onto a grudge for that long.”

Harry nodded slowly, although he thought he could hold onto a grudge that long. It wasn’t a useful piece of information at the moment. “All right. But no, I didn’t think your father was there just because he was a Death Eater, and you don’t have to tell me if he was.”

“Some friends would be upset if I didn’t.”

“Your father gave me important information last year, and if he doesn’t consider me an ally, I don’t think he considers me a threat, either. It’s up to you to say what you want to say, Theo.”

Theo was giving Harry an odd look. Harry sighed. “What is it?”

“You really are what you say you are.” Theo gave a smile sharp enough to make someone bleed who hadn’t been through what Harry had, probably. “I almost wish you had Sorted Slytherin, to see how much you’d confuse all of them.”

Harry smiled a little. “They would have driven me mental. I don’t care about power except the power to defend myself.”

“That makes you unusual, too.”

Harry shrugged. “It doesn’t matter unless someone attacks me over thinking that I’m unusual. Are we going to finish this Arithmancy problem, or what?”

“Yes, of course.” Theo waited until they had turned back to the parchment, and then said, in a voice so soft that it was hard for Harry to hear it, “Thank you.”

Harry let the lifted corner of his mouth speak for him.

*

Harry hadn’t told anyone that he was still accessing the Grimmauld Place Floo.

Madam Marchbanks would probably have been all right with it, as long as she could check first for traps that Black and Lupin had left behind. And Theo and Michael would have thought it was cool. Zacharias and Parvati would have been more worried for him.

But Harry didn’t want any of them to know. This was his absolute last refuge, a place of his own that he could flee if even Madam Marchbanks turned against him. And it had benefited from Black going on a campaign against the Dark creatures and enchantments that his family had left behind.

He hadn’t touched the library, or if he had, it had been before Harry visited him. The library was full of books that Harry had a healthy respect for, but plenty he could read, too. And he would learn here about the spells and potions and curses that his professors might have hesitated to teach him.

He paged slowly through a large book that afternoon, when he had told Madam Marchbanks that he was going to Diagon Alley to wander around for a while in disguise. The book contained incantations that made Harry almost drool with the thought of being able to cast them and keep himself safe. Fiendfyre. The Curse of Living Death, which mimicked the potion of the same name. The Lobotomy Curse, which did exactly what it said. A way to block Heart-Sensing.

“Master Sirius’s filthy half-blood godson is here again.”

Harry peeked over the top of his book and snorted a little at the sight of Kreacher. “Kreacher is here, too,” he said, turning back to the book. “And as dirty as ever.”

“Kreacher is not being a half-blood!”

“No, but you’re walking around in encrusted dirt. And who knows what the age of that tea towel is?”

Kreacher gaped at him. Then he straightened up. “Kreacher can tell someone about Master Sirius’s filthy godson being here, yes!”

“Who?” Harry asked. It would be good to know the names of enemies.

Kreacher visibly fumbled for a second. Harry watched him, enjoying this. From the research he’d done on Black last year, he knew that a lot of his relatives were dead, one cousin was in Azkaban, another was disowned, and the Malfoys were probably the sort of people Black would have forbidden Kreacher from contacting.

Sure enough, Kreacher stomped a foot and said, “Someone!”

“Well, before you do it, clean yourself up,” Harry said. “Or they probably won’t believe the words of a dirty, raving house-elf.”

Kreacher spluttered wordlessly. Harry smiled and turned back to the book in front of him, pulling out a clean set of parchment and a new inkwell and quill to copy over some of the spells, just in case he did lose access to the library.

He didn’t think it would happen, though, or Kreacher would have made the threat before now.

*

The next time he went over to Grimmauld Place and saw Kreacher sparkling clean, in a white tea towel, Harry smiled into his book and didn’t mention it.

Chapter 2

Notes:

Thank you again for all the reviews!

“It’s amazing.”

Harry smiled up at Madam Marchbanks. She’d brought him to the train platform so he could catch the Express, but she hadn’t stopped exclaiming about Dumbledore’s unexpected good sense all through breakfast. “I suppose he had to make the right decision sometime.”

“Just wouldn’t have expected him to make it this soon, after only three years of bad ones.”

“Bad ones that you were paying attention to.”

Harry’s heart still kind of squeezed when he teased Madam Marchbanks like this, but she just cackled and prodded him with her cane. “Knew you wouldn’t let Ravenclaw make you soft. Good lad.”

Harry leaned in and hugged her. He had the charm she had given him to detect Dark creatures with him, one of the spiders that would weave a magical web that could block or hold someone as necessary, and a few other little surprises that Madam Marchbanks had found or devised over the summer. “I’m going to miss you.”

“You’ll be too busy learning to miss me.”

That was probably true, but Harry still knew it was polite to express sentiments like he had. And it made Madam Marchbanks look pleased, so Harry was pleased, too, as he stepped back. “I’ll see you at Christmas.”

“That you will.”

One final poke with her cane, and his guardian turned and stumped back towards the Floo that had brought them there. Harry watched her go, but still turned around quickly when someone moved behind him.

“It’s just me,” Parvati said, rolling her eyes a little. She hooked her arm through Harry’s without asking and hauled him towards the train. “Michael owled me this morning to say he would get a compartment for us.”

Harry looked down at her arm, but Parvati only gave him a hard, bright smile. Harry nodded with a little smile of his own. “Have you heard from Theo or Zacharias?”

“My mother said she didn’t want me associating with Theo after the incident at the World Cup.”

Harry rolled his eyes a little. “You’ll notice that’s not what I asked.”

“He has an owl that my mother doesn’t recognize. I just told her I made a new friend in Gryffindor, and she was too relieved to ask for details.”

“They don’t hate you in Gryffindor.”

“Of course not. There’s Lavender. But she thinks—well, it doesn’t matter what she thinks.”

“It does, if you want me to do something about it.”

They had just come aboard the train, and Parvati turned to face him, fingers digging into his arm for a second. Harry tensed, and she stopped. But Parvati shook her head and said, “Let me handle Lavender. Please. She’s just being silly.”

“All right. But you’ll tell me if you want me to handle it.”

“I’d only tell you if I wanted her terrorized.”

Harry had to smile a little as he and Parvati went to find the compartment Michael was holding for them. It was a comfort, in some ways, to know that his friends understood him so well. And in other ways, his skin crawled the way it had when Madam Smith had told him what Harry had felt like to her Heart-Sensing.

But it didn’t matter. He would learn the spell to block the Heart-Sensing soon. He had ways to handle his friends if they tried to hurt him.

He was going to be the victor in the battle for survival, no matter what odds he had to face and conquer.

*

“Dramatic entrance.”

“Yes,” Harry said, eyes locked on the new Defense professor. This was the one bit of sense Madam Marchbanks thought Dumbledore had shown in the past four years. Moody was a former Auror, one with a dazzling arrest record, and although his sense of morality might be rigid, Harry thought he could learn from him.

Moody was sniffing his food at the head table carefully, not drinking except from the flask at his hip. Harry cocked his head. Learning detection charms he could cast on his own meals wouldn’t be a bad idea.

He would learn all he could. And Moody had an impressive sense of paranoia. Harry couldn’t wait to see what Moody would teach them.

“There’s the Tri-Wizard Tournament, too,” Michael said that night as they walked into their dormitory.

Harry shrugged a little and began pulling on his robes. “A concern for the older students, not us.”

*

“I’m not going to be nice.”

Harry sat near the front of the Defense classroom, which he didn’t usually bother with, eyes locked on Professor Moody. The man was moving back and forth in a way that reminded him of Madam Marchbanks, but he stumped a little less heavily. Harry could see the remnants of a fine duelist in him, while Madam Marchbanks was old enough that the remnants were fading.

“Can’t have you getting soft when you might have to fight a war soon,” Moody said, his magical eye locking on Harry for a minute, and then spinning on to look at the rest of the classroom. “Those Death Eaters at the World Cup weren’t caught, you know. More could pop up any time. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!”

Harry jumped along with everyone else, and Moody smiled a little as he looked at him.

Harry stared back. Teach me what you can. Yell all you like. I won’t flinch when it comes down to it.

Maybe Moody saw that, because he asked for Harry to stay behind when he would have left. Harry stood waiting with his hands down loose at his sides, although his right one was resting near his wand holster.

Moody took a long sip from his flask and then studied Harry. “Albus said that you didn’t get along with your other Defense professors.”

“You could say that.”

“Tell me why.”

Harry raised his eyebrows a little, but Moody showed no sign of not wanting to order him around, and Harry could put up with a little rudeness if he could learn some of Moody’s battle tactics. “The last one, Lupin, was a friend of my parents, but he never tried to contact me when I was a kid.”

“And he was a werewolf.”

“That, too.”

“You hated him for that?”

“No. Just for not contacting me, and acting like it wasn’t a good idea for me to be living with my guardian.”

“Griselda Marchbanks,” Moody murmured. He seemed to be thinking deeply. “And your second year?”

“That was Gilderoy Lockhart. He tried to take advantage of my fame as the Boy-Who-Lived to end up on the front page the first time we met, so Madam Marchbanks shouted at him. He mostly left me alone after that, but I didn’t care for him.”

“And the year before that?” Moody leaned forwards a little, as if he expected Harry to say something more interesting than he had so far.

“Did you know Professor Quirrell, sir?”

“Not well.” Moody seemed amused for some reason. “He certainly wasn’t teaching here when I was a student, and he never tried to become an Auror trainee.”

Harry nodded. “Well, I didn’t like the way he stuttered or smelled like garlic. It made it hard to learn from him. But I don’t know exactly what happened when the curse on the Defense post took him. I suppose he wasn’t any worse than some of the other professors.”

“Hmmm.” Moody took one more sip from the flask, and then tucked it into a loop on his belt. “You might as well know that I’m only going to be here for one year, as a favor to Albus. Then back to my quiet retirement.” He cackled, a broken laugh that ended in a cough near the end. “So if you want me to teach you dueling and the like, ten months is all we have to do it in.”

“Did Professor Dumbledore ask you to do this, sir?” Harry did want to learn from Moody, but not if he was doing it on Dumbledore’s agenda. Then he probably wouldn’t tell Harry any of the most important stories or show him the most important spells.

Moody cackled again. “Not as such. He just hinted. It was another person who suggested that I might train you.”

“Madam Marchbanks?”

“Mmm.” Moody eyed Harry. “You’ll have to show me what you know already. If you didn’t get along with your Defense professors, I suppose that you didn’t show them your skills or try that hard in their classes, either.”

“I didn’t show them what I knew, sir.”

It was a challenge, a dangled bait, and from the way Moody smiled at him, he knew it. But he only nodded. “Then let’s begin. Tonight, my office, seven-o’clock.”

Harry was smiling as he stepped out of the classroom, and even the careful way Zacharias and Michael looked at him couldn’t dampen his spirits. Harry just shook his head. “He didn’t do anything to me.”

“All right.” Michael still looked a little dubious, but he turned away and began to lead them towards the Great Hall. “The stories about him don’t say he’s that sane.”

“Does that matter, as long as we can learn from him?”

Michael’s gaze said that it ought to, but Harry shrugged that off. He was smiling as he sat down at the Ravenclaw table, more than he usually did, and enough for some people to ease away from him. He didn’t care that much.

I’m going to learn from the best. I’m going to keep myself safe.

*

“I want you to shield.”

Harry nodded and cast Protego in front of him, then waited for the first of Moody’s spells. But nothing came. Harry looked up slowly at the man, wondering if Moody was studying the shield and deciding on the spells he should throw.

But instead, Moody was staring at him with undisguised shock and both eyes fixed in the same place for once. Harry stared back, feeling a frisson of unease, instead of just respect and fascination, around Moody for the first time.

“You cast that silently,” Moody whispered.

Harry grimaced a little. He had been practicing silent casting for most of the summer. Honestly, a lot of the spells Erik and some of his other tutors showed him were as likely to be silent as spoken aloud. Harry had adapted well to it, he thought because of the way that he had studied History and Potions and Arithmancy, all of which involved some silent magic. “Is that going to be a problem, sir?”

“No. But do you know how rare that is in students below sixth year, boy?”

“Please call me Mr. Potter. Or Potter, if you have to.”

Harry’s voice had gone thin, and he saw from the way Moody had cocked his head that he’d homed in on it. Moody grunted a little. “You ought to know that that’s the kind of vulnerability that enemies will take advantage of, boy.”

Harry heard Uncle Vernon in the tone. Saw him, too, in the way that Moody’s normal eye was piercing him.

He fought himself back under control. Part of him wanted to pin Moody to the wall with one of the spells he’d been studying in Grimmauld Place, but he shook his head and resumed control of himself. “But in a duel or the like, then I’ll already know they’re an enemy, sir. And if I’m going to learn from you, I need to not hear it.”

“Why not? What does it make you think I’m going to do?”

“Shut me in a cupboard.”

Moody paused. Then he said in a different tone of voice, different from all the others he’d been using so far, “Ah. This is about the Muggles.”

“It is.”

Moody studied him with both eyes again. Then he stepped back with a little grunt and a shake of his head. “You don’t need to worry about that. I won’t shut you in a cupboard. But you have to get used to words. Usually, those would be the least devastating weapons your enemies would use.”

Harry nodded slowly. He had the impression that Moody’s personality had changed somehow, not just his voice. But that was ridiculous. “What kind of spells are you going to cast at my shield, sir?”

“A simple Protego, eh?” Moody’s magical eye whirred into the back of his skull as he lifted his wand. “Let’s see if I can make it a challenge for you.”

*

By the time Harry left Moody’s office, he was panting and sweaty, far more so than he had been during his last session with Erik, but also exhilarated.

It was an odd sensation, one that Harry couldn’t remember feeling before. He walked along, thinking about it, feeling it, and nearly ran into Snape.

They both stopped, and Snape looked at Harry with hard, gleaming eyes. But he hadn’t pressed his luck with Harry since second year. He simply glanced away and said in a neutral tone, “It is nearly curfew, Mr. Potter.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll go back to the Tower.”

He could feel Snape staring at him as he walked away, but Harry didn’t understand why. He could keep up the pretense of respect if Snape could.

When he got into Ravenclaw Tower, all of his roommates were already in bed. Harry shook his head as he went to gather up his pyjamas. He didn’t think he would sleep half the night, given that his head was whirling with the stories and spells Moody had told him about.

“Harry.”

Harry turned around and saw that Michael was peeking between his bed-curtains. Harry walked over and sat down next to his friend’s bed. Michael darted his eyes back and forth as if checking to make sure none of their roommates were paying too much attention, and then whispered, “How was it?”

“Great,” Harry said, keeping his voice low, too. “He’s powerful and brilliant, and he knows a lot of spells that are legal but could really stop someone in their tracks.”

Michael smiled, but he looked a little worried. “You know we would defend you, too, right?”

“Of course. But you don’t know spells like that.”

“We could look them up.”

“Do you want to study together outside class, then?” Of course, they had been practicing some spells with each other like that since first year, but Harry hadn’t shown his friends the most powerful and devastating magic he was practicing. Even Theo only knew a few of the spells.

“Yes. I do.”

Michael had that stubborn look he got when he thought someone was being stupid about Runes or the like. Harry didn’t understand how it applied here, but he nodded amiably enough. He thought that Michael and Zacharias would probably get concerned and refuse to learn some of the magic, but Theo would want to know it. And maybe Parvati.

“All right, we’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

Michael reached out of his bedcurtains and gripped Harry’s hand hard. Harry gripped back, blinking, and got into his bed with a faint frown for his canopy.

Michael had acted worried about Harry when he stayed back with Moody, too. Did he think that Moody was going to be unhelpful to Harry because the last few Defense professors had been?

Harry supposed he could see that, but in reality, their Defense professors had all been different kinds of unhelpful. It was about time they had someone who could actually tutor them in powerful magic.

*

“Not the others. Only you.”

“Why, sir?”

Moody paused, leaning one hip against the desk as he watched Harry practice with a shield spell he hadn’t named. This one created a huge, spreading pool of black like a barrel of tar turned on its side in front of Harry, and it swallowed most hexes and curses without deflecting them. Harry found it tiring to hold, but he was determined to succeed, since Moody had said that even most Aurors couldn’t cast this kind of shield.

“You’re the one I think could benefit the most from my help,” Moody said at last.

“The others could, as well.”

“Why do you think they will?”

“Because if the Death Eaters attack, any of them could be at risk,” Harry said. He kept one eye on Moody while also watching the shield. It spread across the air in front of him, rippling, and then snapped into a dripping black curtain that cascaded down and across the floor. Harry tried to Vanish it, but Moody was the one who had to do that, with a cackle and a wave of his wand. Harry swallowed back the exhaustion and faced Moody again. “Michael’s a half-blood, Zacharias is the son of a rich family people might want to influence, Parvati has people who will hate her because they think she’s foreign, and Theo was supposedly the son of a Death Eater.”

“Supposedly.”

Moody hissed the word. Harry raised his eyebrows and stared Moody directly in the eye. “Yes, sir.”

“Kalder Nott was a Death Eater. Who should know that better than I?”

Odd. Theo hadn’t made a reference to Moody arresting his father or fighting him. Then again, Harry had the impression that Kalder did keep a lot from his son. He arranged his face in an expression of patience. “Under Imperius, sir.”

“You’re a fool if you believe that, boy.”

Harry had learned not to flinch at being called that, even if he still hated it. Now, he just held Moody’s eyes. “I know what the official story says, and I don’t have a reason to question it.”

“Why not?’

“He’s welcomed me into his house and not hurt me multiple times, sir.”

“He could be playing the long game. Waiting for a time when he could take you hostage or manipulate you to get concessions from the Ministry.”

Harry had to laugh a little at that. “Why would he? Everyone knows that Theo and I are friends. If I vanished or started acting strangely, Kalder is the first person everyone would turn to point their fingers at.”

“You call him by his first name?”

“Yes. Sir.”

Moody continued to stare intently at him. Harry stared back. He felt nothing of the push of Legilimency against his mind that Erik had taught him to recognize, and he wasn’t sure that Moody could use Legilimency with one magical eye instead of a real one anyway.

Moody grunted and looked away. “Fine. But the answer is still that I won’t teach your friends. I don’t have time. Teach them on your own if you want to.”

“Thank you, sir,” Harry said, keeping his voice carefully respectful. In truth, he had asked because Michael had asked and because he wanted to see what Moody would say. Not because he wanted his friends to learn everything he was learning.

“Go to it. Again.”

Harry lifted the tar shield again, and Moody began barking spells. Harry swallowed and deflected them all, ignoring the pull in his muscles from the exhaustion.

He had to get better, faster, stronger. And better to get exhausted in a situation like this, with a professor who wouldn’t hurt him, than on the battlefield.

*

“Who from Ravenclaw do you think is going to put their name in the Goblet?”

Harry ignored the chatter of his yearmates as he walked towards the Great Hall, much as he had ignored the arrival of Durmstrang and Beauxbatons the night before. To him, the Tournament just wasn’t that interesting. It was one more thing that would take up time he could be using to study when he had to go watch the Tasks.

“Harry?”

Harry glanced at Michael, slowing a little so he could catch up. “Yeah?”

“Who do you think is going to put their name in?”

“Uh.” Harry barely paid attention to the older, upper-level Ravenclaws, and so couldn’t have stated who was ambitious or stupid enough to think they’d survive the Tournament. “I don’t know. Cho Chang?”

“She’s not seventeen, Harry.”

“Then I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you care? It’s a chance for fame and eternal glory!”

“I have both, and it’s not that fun.”

Michael gaped at him. Harry looked back. Michael certainly knew he was the Boy-Who-Lived, even if Harry didn’t emphasize it a lot. Harry didn’t know why he was acting so taken aback now.

“Uh. Yeah, I suppose to you it wouldn’t be.”

In truth, Harry didn’t see why anyone would want to risk their lives for a thousand Galleons and some fleeting recognition, but he just nodded politely and let Michael assume this was another quirk of Harry’s. It was easier that way.

Sometimes being the only sensible one is exhausting.

Dinner was tense, although Harry mostly ignored it to read a book on the history of wards that Moody had recommended. Madam Pince had squinted suspiciously at him when he took it out of the library, but Harry hadn’t known why. It wasn’t like it had even been in the Restricted Section.

“Attention, students!”

Harry sighed and looked up. Apparently they were doing the drawing of the Champions’ names now, the flickering flames of the Goblet throwing odd, twisted shadows on the wall from the students and professors alike.

“The Champion for Durmstrang is…Viktor Krum!”

How surprising, Harry thought as he added his polite applause to that of the rest of the Hall. The Goblet seemed to be influenced by fame or what other people thought of the “Champions,” too. Krum stood up with a scowl and slouched over to the small room off the Great Hall that his Headmaster was herding him to.

“The Champion for Beauxbatons is…Fleur Delacour!”

Harry clapped limply. Delacour was pretty and got looks of jealousy or longing from half the Hall as she walked by. Harry thought the Goblet was probably influenced by that, too. It would be more impressive if it had chosen someone unpopular but skilled with spells.

“The Champion for Hogwarts is…Cedric Diggory!”

“Who?” Harry hissed under his breath to Michael as a boy stood up from the Hufflepuff table.

“Honestly, Harry. He’s the Hufflepuff Seeker.”

“Oh.” Harry shrugged. Yeah, the Goblet was functioning on popularity. He felt a moment’s fleeting curiosity about how other people’s expectations could influence a magical artifact, but it wasn’t anywhere near as pressing as his curiosity about the wards in the book Moody had recommended him.

Dumbledore started making another speech about the Tasks and inter-school unity. Harry turned and picked up his book again.

A startled murmur that ran around the Great Hall made him glance up. Even Dumbledore was staring in surprise at the Goblet, which spat out another piece of parchment.

Harry narrowed his eyes. Someone had made the Goblet pick a fourth Champion? That seemed so unlikely that it made him more interested in how people’s expectations influenced the thing.

“Harry Potter!”

For a moment, Harry thought Dumbledore had somehow sensed his desire to experiment with the Goblet and was scolding him for it. Then he realized the Headmaster was holding up the slip of parchment that had flown out of the flames and was waving it back and forth.

“No,” Harry said flatly.

Flat, but far underneath the surface, he could feel the fury rising.

“Harry Potter. The Goblet of Fire has chosen you as the second Hogwarts Champion. Please join the other Champions in the anteroom.”

“No.”

“Mr. Potter, you don’t have a choice. Entering your name in the Goblet constitutes a magically binding contract.”

“And I didn’t enter my name in the Goblet. Why would I do such a bloody stupid thing when I already have all the money and fame I’d want?”

People were gasping in what sounded like offense now, probably the people who had entered their names in the Goblet. Harry ignored them. His gaze was locked on Dumbledore, and Dumbledore was staring at him with a tight face and a pinched expression.

“Harry Potter.”

“No.”

“You will enter the room off the Great Hall,” Dumbledore said. “Otherwise, you stand a chance of losing your magic.”

He was trapped. Trapped. Someone was targeting him because of the Boy-Who-Lived thing or for a prank, and he would have to go through the Tasks.

He was going to die.

Harry’s magic surged out of him, and the Ravenclaw table cracked all the way down from where he was sitting to the end that was closest to the professors’ table. People cried out like the stupid, awful pigeons they were. Harry rose, still holding Dumbledore’s eyes, seeing his shock and something like fear.

“If I die in the Tasks,” Harry whispered, “I’m not going to forget that you didn’t prevent my name from going into the Goblet. I’ll come back as a ghost. I’ll follow you day and night. I will give you no rest.”

There was silence as he turned and walked towards the small room where the Champions stood, but it broke soon enough, and then people started arguing and yelling. Harry didn’t turn around, didn’t look at them. He knew they would call him a cheater and worse.

He didn’t care. He couldn’t care. He had to work out how to stay alive, in the middle of a terrible game that Madam Marchbanks couldn’t get him out of, and which he didn’t know enough magic to survive.

Freezing cold hammered in his veins. Whiteness covered his mind. He ignored the taunts of the Champions as he was “introduced” to them as well, and stepped away when Ludo Bagman would have put a hand on his shoulder.

He knew only one thing, one thing that pierced through the snowstorm falling inside him.

Survive.

Chapter 3

Notes:

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Harry lived the next several days in a snowstorm of hatred.

He heard the taunts from the older Ravenclaws that he had cheated to get into the Tournament, when he wanted nothing more than to be free of it, and he let his magic flow out from him in ways that tore their books and robes. When one of the older girls named Edgecombe snarled and reached for her wand, Harry looked her in the eye and broke her fingers. She wailed, and then she looked at him and shrank down.

She went to Madam Pomfrey to get her hand healed. Harry watched her with indifferent eyes, and when she came back, she avoided him.

The taunts in Ravenclaw Tower died down.

They didn’t from the other students, and Harry couldn’t handle them the same way, because he only saw people from other Houses in front of professors. He could look at them, and a few of the smarter ones shut up, but others just kept calling him a cheater.

On the third day after the Tournament, Dumbledore called Harry to his office.

Harry walked in and wasn’t surprised to find Madam Marchbanks there. Of course he’d sent her an owl the day he got “chosen” by the Goblet, and she had told him that she would be seeing him as soon as she’d had a conversation with the Headmaster.

From the expression on her face as she turned to him, Harry knew that she hadn’t managed to get him out of the Tournament. He took a deep breath and held it.

“THIS ABSOLUTE TOSSER!” Madam Marchbanks snapped, holding her cane out towards Dumbledore.

“Griselda, I must insist on some respect.”

“YOU DIDN’T EVEN PROTECT THE GOBLET AGAINST SOMEONE ELSE SUBMITTING SOMEONE’S NAME! What is wrong with you, Albus? Did you stuff all your courage up your shriveled arse? Or use it all up on hiring Alastor for the year?”

Harry felt a faint amusement. It couldn’t get through the blizzard in his head, not really, but it was there.

Madam Marchbanks turned to him, lowering her cane to rest in front of her. “Pity they made castration illegal with that Wizengamot law of 1653. I don’t fancy going to Azkaban, even though he deserves it.”

“Griselda—”

“He thinks that Age Line was enough of a precaution.” Madam Marchbanks shook her head in disgust. “He thinks that you really wanted to put your name in and risk your life for the sight of a few more people kissing your arse.”

“Griselda—”

Harry laughed. He thought some of the falling snow inside him came out in the sound. At least Dumbledore shut up, and stared at Harry as if seeing him for the first time.

You’d think my threat about haunting him would have made him pay attention, Harry thought, but he sat down and turned to focus on Madam Marchbanks. “So I have to compete in the Tournament or lose my magic.”

“Yes.”

“Even though I’m fucking fourteen and don’t have the age or the training that the older Champions do?’

“Harry—”

Madam Marchbanks pointed her cane at Dumbledore again. “He might be about to die. He can swear as much as he fucking wants.”

Dumbledore put his hand over his face. “I must insist on the answer to one question,” he said through gritted teeth. “Mr. Potter, did you ask someone older to put your name in? Or manage some way to do it yourself.”

“No. Neither. I did not.”

From the way that Dumbledore peered at him, face quiet and eyes sharp, Harry was abruptly sure that the Headmaster was a Legilimens. He focused on the middle distance between Dumbledore’s brow and his eyes, and the Headmaster made a frustrated little noise and leaned back in his seat.

“I had to be sure, my dear boy.”

“If the Age Line didn’t prevent anything, why cast it? Just enjoy some company in your foolishness, did you?”

“Griselda, that is enough.” Dumbledore didn’t raise his voice, but suddenly there was a sense of his power in the office, hovering and filling the air with invisible, silent lightning. “I understand you are upset, but that is no call for disrespect.”

“I think it is,” Harry said.

Dumbledore turned to him. “You have never exactly had the most normal of perceptions, have you, Harry?”

Normal.

The word rang in his head, and roused echoes of the Dursleys that he hadn’t had to think about in years, and this time, Dumbledore’s desk cracked in half.

Madam Marchbanks made a sound somewhere between a chuckle and a groan. She came up and stood beside Harry, probing with her cane at the carpet. Dumbledore stared back and forth between Harry and his desk, seeming to be in a state of shock.

“What an arse you are,” Madam Marchbanks said.

“He cracked my desk.”

“Yes, and from what I understand, he did the same thing to the Ravenclaw table the other day. You’d think you ought to have anticipated this.” Madam Marchbanks shook her head. “Where did the boy I examined with the highest NEWT scores in history go? Did you stuff him up your wrinkled arse along with everything else?”

Dumbledore raised his eyes to Harry’s. Harry stared back, not trying to shield or Occlude or anything like that, just let Dumbledore see who he was.

Dumbledore’s mouth tightened. “I see,” he said quietly.

“Do you?” Madam Marchbanks asked. “I don’t think so.” She put a hand on Harry’s shoulder and drew him to his feet. “Come on, now. We’ll discuss the course of action we should pursue next, since we can’t get you out of the Tournament.”

Harry felt Dumbledore’s eyes on his back as he left. He thought the Headmaster probably did see him for who he was now, and wasn’t enjoying the vision.

Should Harry have shown him the truth? Perhaps not.

But the hatred made it hard to think.

*

“Harry.”

Theo’s voice cut like a knife. Harry looked up. He’d been coming out of Defense, which wasn’t a class he shared with the Slytherins, so it was a bit of a surprise to see Theo here. “Theo.”

“Come with me,” Theo said, a snarl in the back of his voice, and then he turned and stalked away.

Harry paused, wondering if he really wanted to follow someone who was commanding him right now. He’d got enough of that from Dumbledore.

But Theo seemed serious, and it was true that they hadn’t really talked in the five days since Harry’s name had come out of the Goblet. Harry followed him. If Theo was going to call him a cheater like all the rest of the Ravenclaws except Michael and most of the people in other Houses, then better to know now, so Harry could chop off the end of their friendship and move on.

And since they would be alone, maybe he could take out his frustration in ways that wouldn’t be appropriate in front of the professors.

Theo whirled around to face him the instant they reached one of the dungeon classrooms where they had worked on powerful Arithmancy equations together last year. Harry’s hand snapped down to his wand.

But amazingly, annoyingly, Theo hadn’t drawn his. He stared at Harry and practically snarled, “Why the fuck haven’t you come to talk to me?”

Harry paused. Theo didn’t usually swear.

“Why the fuck?” Theo repeated, his eyes darting down from Harry’s face to his wand hand and back, over and over. “Did you really think I would behave like them and think you must have done it for the glory? Did you think I didn’t know you?”

Oh. Theo is—upset.

Harry slowly let his hand drop from his wand and rocked back on his heels. “I didn’t know if you would say that,” he said. “But I wanted to avoid drawing attention to you and having a confrontation with you if you did think that way. I might have hurt you if you called me a cheater, and I didn’t really want to hurt you.”

Theo stared at him. Then he closed his eyes. There were lines of weariness and bitterness carved deeply into his face that looked as if they’d always been there, but Harry had never seen them before.

“You don’t trust me,” Theo whispered. “Not really. After all this time, after all the demonstrations of loyalty I’ve given you and you lending me your Invisibility Cloak and telling me about the spells and the Arithmancy and the rest, you don’t trust me.”

Harry stood still. He looked at Theo, and saw that the bitterness and weariness were for him, not because Theo had a Death Eater father or had few friends in his House.

Something sharp and small lodged itself behind Harry’s heart, and the snowstorm in his head calmed for the first time in almost a week. He took a deep breath.

“I trust you.”

“Not enough.”

“I trusted you so much that the thought of your betraying me hurt me.”

“You never thought Corner would betray you—”

“Because he was there defending me to the other Ravenclaws who thought I cheated,” Harry snapped. “If he’d kept silent, or even just kept away from me? Or been in a different House, so I didn’t get to talk to him on a daily basis? I would have thought he’d betray me, too. Just like Zacharias. Just like Parvati.”

“They—haven’t.”

“I don’t know that.”

Theo stared at him, now with his eyes wide and so filled with surprise that they were blank of everything else and Harry couldn’t tell what he was feeling. Then Theo swallowed and whispered, “They wouldn’t.”

“But they might.”

“Harry.” Theo spoke in a soft voice, and moved towards him with his hand held out. Harry felt his muscles tighten all over his body, but he fought the snowstorm when it tried to come back. This was important, he knew it was. “None of us are going to betray you. You’re our friend. We won’t turn our backs on you. We know you. We know that you never would have put your name in that Goblet. You already have all the glory you want. It’s survival that’s most important to you.”

Harry still wanted to jerk away. Theo was saying that, but what if he turned his back? Harry would feel even more stupid, even smaller and weaker, if he trusted Theo and then Theo betrayed him after all.

He would die.

Theo came to a halt in front of him, hand still held out. Harry remained still, his breath scraping in and out of his lungs.

Theo didn’t come any closer.

After a moment, Harry realized that was due to a combination of things. Theo didn’t want to upset Harry, and he probably didn’t want to make himself any more vulnerable than he already had. He wanted some sign that Harry trusted him.

It was the hardest thing Harry had ever done, to lurch forwards and cross the flagstone separating them. His brain was swirling with white-edged, screaming panic as he touched Theo’s hand.

But Theo’s fingers curled around Harry’s, and he said softly, “We know you. I promise. We know you. And we’re going to help you survive this,” and Harry closed his eyes and shuddered and—relaxed.

He still didn’t know if he would really manage to survive. Theo was promising the kind of help that even Madam Marchbanks couldn’t, because ultimately, they couldn’t get him out of the Tournament.

But maybe there was some help in just standing there holding Theo’s hand. The way that both of their breathing steadied seemed to indicate it.

And when Harry walked to History of Magic, one of the classes that the Ravenclaws shared with Slytherin this year, Theo was by his side.

*

“Did you really think that I would believe you’d cheated to put your name in the Goblet?”

“The rest of your House are wearing those stupid badges.” Harry’s voice was tight, and he literally, physically couldn’t turn his head to look at Zacharias, concentrating as he was on the Runes project in front of him. “Forgive me for not being sure.”

“Not forgiven.”

Harry turned his head to glare at Zacharias. “You haven’t been this much of an arse since your first year.”

“Forgive me, too, for thinking that you should know me by now!”

Harry closed his eyes and breathed in and out. They were at their usual table in the library, but he knew that Madam Pince wouldn’t hesitate to throw them out if they made too much noise or had too obvious an argument. After all, she had been glaring especially hard at Harry lately, probably because Dumbledore had told her part of the truth about him.

Harry couldn’t think of anything else it would be, at least.

“I’m sorry,” he finally forced out.

“Accepted,” Zacharias said, calm and cool. “Now, do you want the news I tricked out of Diggory about the First Task or not?”

Harry blinked and turned to face Zacharias. “Is there a reason he would tell you the truth? After all, we’re known to be friends.”

“He thinks that my House loyalty is stronger than my loyalty to my friends.” Zacharias’s face bore an odd combination of smugness and outrage. “And apparently he found out because he saw the other Champions going into the Forest and followed them.”

“The Forest?”

“Where they’re keeping the beasts for the First Task. They’re dragons.”

Harry felt as though he were falling through the snowstorm this time, instead of containing it. His breath escaped him in an uneven whistle. His fingers flexed on the library table, and he wanted to stand and run. He wanted to—

Theo’s hand landed on his elbow, steadying him. At the same time, Michael was leaning over the table, concerned.

It is all right. You will survive. It is all right. You will survive.

Harry chanted the words to himself until he was sure that he was steady, and then nodded to Zacharias. “Thank you for telling me. I suppose that Diggory doesn’t trust you enough to share what he’s planning to do to oppose them?”

“No. Although I could try to get into his good graces?”

Harry cocked his head, considering it. On the one hand, it would be demanding a lot of Zacharias, and that might make him resentful. It might also make Harry more dependent on someone else than he wanted to be.

But Harry really needed a spy in Hufflepuff, and he had almost alienated Zacharias by believing the worst of him. Better to bind him to Harry’s side by giving him a task that he would feel important about.

So Harry smiled at Zacharias, and watched as he puffed up a little. “Thank you. If you can convince Diggory that you really do trust him and believe in him and want him to be Hogwarts Champion, I’d be grateful.”

“Think nothing of it.” Zacharias was practically fluffing his hair. “Diggory’s so friendly that he would never suspect another Hufflepuff of having stronger loyalties to someone else if they’re friendly to him, or lying about those loyalties.”

“Thank you,” Harry repeated, and turned back to his homework.

Michael was the one who spoke to him in a low voice as they left the library that day. “Did you really think that Zacharias would be wearing one of those badges?”

“I didn’t know.”

“You don’t trust anyone, do you? Even people who have been friends with you for years.”

Harry glanced around automatically. They were walking down one of the corridors that led back to Ravenclaw Tower, and no one was near them, but it didn’t mean that someone couldn’t come around the corner.

Michael gave what sounded like an angry huff of breath. “Don’t worry, Your Majesty, no one is around to hear you confessing to having human weaknesses.”

“People betrayed me last year,” Harry said. “I found out that someone who could have come and taken me away from the Muggles years ago didn’t do it because he was a coward. And Black would have forced me into St. Mungo’s if I hadn’t done it to him first. And before that, the Muggles who were my family spent years betraying me. Why do you think I am the way I am, Michael?”

Michael hesitated for a long moment, although he kept walking. Harry walked with him, not knowing whether to savor the silence or not.

Then Michael said, “We won’t do that.”

“I know that now. But it’s understandable that I thought about it, isn’t it?”

“Understandable. But wrong.”

Harry nodded and smiled and pretended to agree. By the time they reached the Tower again, Michael seemed to have accepted that Harry really did believe him, and was talking with more gentleness about what they should do so Harry could face the dragons.

Harry was a convincing liar, and he knew it. But at least he cared enough about his friends to lie to them and soothe their feelings.

While maintaining enough alertness to react quickly if they did betray him.

*

“Dragons, huh?”

Moody was leaning his hip against his desk in his customary posture, his eyes fastened on Harry again. He was stroking his chin, and a rusty chuckle came out of him a moment later.

Harry watched, silent, full of hatred. But the hatred wasn’t directed against Moody at the moment. He would only do that if it turned out to be justified.

“I can show you a shield that would work against dragonflame,” Moody said at last. “But it takes more magical power than I think you’ve got to hold it. And it needs something to power it that I don’t think you possess.”

“What is that?”

“Hatred.”

Harry let one of his real smiles well across his face, one of the ones that he hid most of the time because he knew not even Madam Marchbanks wanted to see them. Often, anyway. Moody paused and stared at him.

“I’m full of enough hatred to break someone’s fingers by looking at them,” Harry said softly. “Does that count?”

“The Edgecombe girl’s hand was you?” Moody flicked his fingers together for a moment. “I was in the hospital wing when she came in, and she said it was a dueling accident.”

“Mine. Wandless.”

Moody stared at Harry again, then cleared his throat. “Is it the wisest course to tell the people around you about that?”

“Are you going to go to the Headmaster about me, Professor Moody?”

Harry had striven to put the perfect tone in his voice: wondering, a little cautious, but not afraid. Moody cocked his head and twisted his neck back and forth as if considering Harry’s words from different angles.

“Albus would probably want me to,” Moody finally admitted.

“But are you going to?”

Moody gave one of his crazy cackles suddenly, so suddenly that Harry might have jumped if he hadn’t been braced to expect it. The Defense professor leaned back against his desk and laughed and laughed as though he was going to explode with it, while Harry watched him.

Harry thought he might know why Moody was acting this way. On the one hand, he probably thought Harry was Dark because of his actions and attitudes. On the other hand, Harry was the only one who could learn some of the more powerful spells Moody had to teach, one of the few rare students who wouldn’t betray him to the Headmaster.

The only true protégé Moody could have right now.

Moody straightened back up and gave Harry a ghastly grin. “No. Let’s see how you handle the dragonfire shield.”

*

They took small dragons from a drawstring bag, the three people who had been stupid enough to put their names in the Goblet of Fire, and Harry. Harry stared down at the miniature Hungarian Horntail crawling around on his palm and took a deep breath.

The shield he had practiced should work. He had demonstrated it to Moody so many times now that he had to prevent his hand from twitching his wand in those movements in other classes. And he had known, thanks to Zacharias’s information, that one of the dragons was a Horntail, one of the most dangerous magical creatures in existence.

But he had known that, and now he was facing that.

Harry tucked the small dragon in his robe pocket while he listened to the others. The commentary only revealed a little of what was happening. Curses, sleep spells, Transfiguration. Harry heard the whoosh of flames, but he didn’t know how badly burned the Champions got.

He hoped it was badly. They deserved it for being so stupid.

“Harry Potter!”

Harry stood. His brain was buzzing, not full of snow the way it had been in the first days after the Goblet “chose” him, but full of clear and focused loathing. He walked out onto the field and looked up for a moment.

Madam Marchbanks stared back at him, leaning forwards in her seat. Harry knew she would intervene if it looked like he was going to die. But only if it looked like he was going to die, because direct intervention might cost Harry his magic.

Maybe. He didn’t know. Nobody actually did.

The loathing sharpened into a blade that Harry knew could kill if he aimed it in the right direction. He turned and walked towards the Horntail with steps that didn’t drag, but that he wouldn’t have been ashamed to have look like that.

Because willingly and happily facing a dragon by himself was stupid.

Harry looked up. The dragon was curled around her eggs, staring at him. She rumbled a growl at him, and flames shot up from her nostrils. Harry knew he was dead if those flames touched him.

He could see the golden egg he had to retrieve next to one of her talons, but at the moment, all his attention was for her. This dragon he had to defeat. This dragon who hadn’t chosen to be here either, but would still do her level best to kill him if she got a chance.

And the loathing sharpened even more.

Harry raised his wand. The familiar movements made the shield spring up in front of him, a seemingly hollow circle of rotating silver light. As Harry spoke the full incantation, the circle filled in with spikes growing from the sides.

“Protego Odii!”

The dragon roared, and Harry heard more than one scream from the audience, too. He ignored that. He didn’t have time to care about what it meant, whether they had recognized the spell or something else.

And if they had recognized the spell, so what? None of them were down on the field with the dragon.

Harry began to walk forwards, the shield floating along in front of him. Through it, he could see the dragon’s head. The Horntail pulled back, her mouth opening, her claws digging into the ground as she began to breathe in.

I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.

The words beat in Harry’s head, as regularly as blood inside his temples. He clenched his fists and fed more power into the shield, until the spikes that rotated inside it spun as fast as the wheels on a Muggle car. He was going to survive. He didn’t care if that meant he hurt the dragon.

He would survive.

The dragon breathed out.

The flames rushed towards Harry and hit his shield. Harry could feel the strain at once, which Moody had warned him about. It grew rapidly worse than anything that Moody had cast at him.

It didn’t matter. Harry walked forwards, his hatred inexhaustible.

He hated the person who had put his name in the Goblet.

He hated the way that people stared at him and gaped and chattered and acted like he was a cheater, like he had wanted this.

He hated the way that Parvati had avoided his company since his name had come out of the Goblet.

He stepped up to the Horntail, who was still breathing out gusts of fire that splashed against his shield and died, and stared at her. Try it. Try me. Attack me.

The Horntail didn’t seem to know what to do now that her fire had failed. She scraped her claws on the ground and roared again. Harry stepped forwards, walking on, and then reached out, shield still aimed towards her, and scooped the golden egg out of the nest.

The crowd went mad.

Maybe that was what stung the Horntail into action. Harry supposed he would never know. He only knew that he saw her head twisting towards him, and he braced himself behind the shield again.

Die, he thought. Die.

She breathed fire longer this time, hotter this time. Harry still stood behind the shield, and his hatred flowed from him in waves. The shield spun and spun, and more spikes sprouted out of it, and the flames slammed towards him—

And turned back.

The Horntail gave a single coughing roar, and she was gone. Harry stared as flecks of black ash blew into the air and came flying back down towards him, borne on a hot wind.

He couldn’t have destroyed a dragon with her own fire, by simply willing her to die.

But he had.

He turned and stared up at the stands, the golden egg in the crook of his arm. Madam Marchbanks was on her feet, her cane pointed into the air as she viciously argued with Ludo Bagman, one of the judges. People were chattering among themselves but not raising their voices, as if Harry had scared them all.

Moody was staring at Harry as if he had never seen him before.

Shaking, Harry lowered his shield.

He wondered if he should have done that, the same way he wondered if he should have showed the truth of himself to Dumbledore. And then he saw the way that people in the stands, including some of the ones who had called him a cheater, were avoiding his eyes, and smiled.

If it kept him safe? If it meant they left him alone, the way they should have from the beginning?

He would take it, and more.

Chapter 4

Notes:

Thank you again for all the reviews!

“You killed a dragon.”

Harry stopped and turned around. The voice was one he hadn’t thought to hear again, honestly.

Parvati stood behind him with her arms folded. She shivered at the look on his face, but she licked her lips and stood her ground. “You killed a dragon,” she repeated.

“Yes. And you abandoned me.”

Parvati gave her head a quick shake. “I only stayed away from you because several members of my House said that they would make me stay away from you otherwise, and I—didn’t want to see what they would do.” She shut her eyes for a second. “And that included Lavender. I thought she was my friend.”

Harry studied her, wondering if he should believe her. She had deliberately followed him out of the library after sitting at a different table, and Harry had let her, shaking his head when Michael stood up to come with him. They were in a mostly deserted corridor now that led towards Ravenclaw Tower, and Harry didn’t think any other Gryffindors were likely to stumble on them here.

That didn’t mean Parvati was telling the truth, but it might make it slightly more likely.

“Why did you come to me now?” he asked. “I highly doubt killing a dragon impressed your fellow Gryffindors that much.”

A faint smile crossed Parvati’s face. “No, it didn’t. But they think that you taught me the kind of powerful Dark magic you used to kill her, and they’ve—decided that they shouldn’t prevent us from associating, in that case.”

“Ah. So they’ve decided that they don’t care about both of us, rather than caring about me.”

Parvati took a deep breath and threw her shoulders backwards. “Yeah. That’s what it means.”

“Explain to me why you think I should take you back. You did stay away from me and didn’t even attempt to send me a message to explain what was going on.”

“I was afraid someone would intercept it.”

Harry knew his face showed how much he doubted that, and Parvati swallowed and dug her nails into her palms for a second. “Look, not all of us know as much as you and Theo do about sneaking around.”

Harry supposed that was the case. But, “I still need some incentive to trust you, where before, I might have simply accepted that you couldn’t visit me.”

Parvati gave him a little nod, her eyes distant. She drew her wand, and Harry tensed. The only reason he didn’t pull his out was that he knew he could use his magic to break Parvati’s wand hand before she could curse him, just the way he’d done with Edgecombe’s.

Parvati said clearly, “I swear on this my wand that every word I speak in this conversation is the truth, no matter how tinged with shame it may be.”

It wasn’t a wording of an oath Harry had ever heard before, but it made a sharp tingle cascade through the air, and he felt a sensation like electricity gripping and shaking his skin. The small hair on his arms stood up. Harry blinked, and looked at Parvati.

Parvati lowered her wand, took a deep breath, and said, “I thought they were just concerned for me, and I thought they—were acting the way they thought friends should act, keeping me away from you. But now I know that they’re just fickle and even the girl I thought was my best friend in the whole world cares more about avoiding Dark Arts than staying at my side.”

There was a sheen in Parvati’s eyes that could become tears any second, and Harry winced at the sight of them. He didn’t know what he would do if she actually started crying. He would have to pretend that he cared, no matter how little he actually did, and he would be awful at that.

But Parvati luckily swallowed the tears and went on in a husky voice. “I know Lavender. She’ll come back in a little while and apologize and beg to be my friend again. But she’ll still think Dark magic is so awful that she would abandon me again if she needed to. You and Theo and Michael and Zacharias won’t.”

“And?”

“And, what?”

“Why are you so intent on this, Parvati? Why didn’t you just avoid me and beg the Gryffindors to take you back if you really cared about what they thought?”

Parvati stared at him in silence. Harry waited. Parvati finally bowed her head, hair sliding around her face, and whispered the truth Harry had been waiting for.

“Because that spell you used was impressive, and I want to know what it is. I want to learn Dark Arts, too. I want to kill a dragon if I have to. I want—that power, and I want it more than I want the good opinion of anyone in Gryffindor.”

Harry smiled. He could accept someone who hadn’t known her strongest desire until now coming back once she knew it. “All right. But you should know that you might not be powerful enough to maintain the shield that I used against the dragon.”

“As long as I can do magic like it.”

“That, I can teach you.”

*

Moody had been quiet since Harry had killed the dragon, looking at him in Defense as if he no longer knew quite what to make of him.

Harry decided he had to address it in their first private lesson after the Task. “Sir?”

Moody lowered his flask so that it dangled in one hand and stared at Harry. “Yeah, Potter?”

“Why have you been acting like you’re intimidated by me?”

Harry had chosen his words carefully. He was pretty sure that Moody would blow up at the idea of being intimidated by Harry, and they could act like normal people again once they got past this.

But instead, Moody stared at him and said softly, “Do you know what you did? Destroying a dragon like that is impossible, let alone doing it by turning the thing’s fire back against it.”

“But it’s not impossible. I did it. And you said that the shield was powered by hatred, and I was feeling a lot of hatred.”

Moody’s face was blank in a way Harry hadn’t known he could make it. Usually, the scars and the whizzing magical eye made it a lot more expressive than most people’s. “I thought that you would use the shield to deflect the dragonfire, sure. I never thought you would do anything more than that.”

“Why not?”

“I thought you wanted—magic. Knowledge. Survival. Not power.”

Harry blinked. Then he said, “I wasn’t specifically thinking about killing the dragon. I was thinking about surviving, and I wanted her to die if that meant she would stop breathing fire at me. But I didn’t think about turning her fire back on her specifically, and I didn’t think about turning her into ash.”

Moody gave a barking laugh that sounded almost desperate. “That’s worse.”

“Why?” Harry privately prepared to move if he had to.

Moody cocked his head and looked at him with that intent attention from both his eyes. “Because it means that you achieved an incredibly powerful magical result without specifically wishing for it. That’s—I don’t even know what to tell you about that. I’ve only seen one other person with power like that.”

“The Headmaster.”

Moody’s face did a weird dance of an expression, as if his scars were trying to rearrange themselves. “Maybe I should say two.”

“You-Know-Who.”

“I thought you would call him by his name, the way Albus does.”

Harry laughed a little, his attention still on Moody. This was somewhat strange behavior from a man who had previously only cared if Harry learned his lessons well, and Harry didn’t like it. “Why? I’m not close to the Headmaster.”

“Well, I did think you might have been raised with it…”

“I suppose you didn’t read the Daily Prophet three years ago, and didn’t see the stories about my being raised by abusive Muggles. I didn’t even know magic existed and I was a wizard until I was eleven.”

Even though I told him about the Muggles. Even though he was the one who insisted that I get over my reaction to the word “boy.”

Harry spun some of the same hatred and rage into a tornado in the center of his soul. If Moody thought he could just say whatever he wanted and behave differently without an explanation—

Moody seemed to sense the change in mood, because he straightened and considered Harry. “What do you think of—You-Know-Who?”

“He participated in making my life hell, but his influence since then has been pretty indirect,” Harry said. “He wasn’t the one who chose to place me with the Dursleys; Dumbledore did that. He wasn’t the one who tried to take me away from Madam Marchbanks last year because he thought she was an unfit guardian; Sirius Black did that. He didn’t owe me any responsibility to take care of me and abandon me like some people did.”

Moody nodded shallowly. “So you don’t spend much time thinking of him.”

“No.”

“What would you do if he appeared in front of you and offered you a place at his side or death if you didn’t take it?”

“I would do my best to kill him.”

Moody’s eyes widened a little. Harry wondered if he thought of killing a dragon as different than killing a human being, even one who had done the things Voldemort had. “Why? If he promised to spare you?”

“Because he would be trying to control me. And if he threatened me with death one time, what would keep him from doing it again, even if he promised not to? He could change his mind any time.”

“There might be promises he could make. Oaths.”

Harry cocked his head, studying Moody. Why did he care so much about this? Harry had explained that Voldemort was barely relevant to his life, and Moody was still pushing this?

Oh. Of course.

Moody was pushing to see just how Dark Harry was. Maybe Dumbledore hoped that even though Harry was willing to use Dark Arts, he wasn’t willing to actually join Voldemort.

“I wouldn’t trust him not to build some loophole into them.”

“Even if you could scan them for yourself, as carefully as possible?”

“I’m just a kid, sir. You-Know-Who has decades and decades of experience.” Harry ducked his head. “You said it yourself. I—willed the dragon to die. That’s not the same as knowing a spell that would actually destroy her, or going into battle with a plan. I’m just doing the best I can to survive this Tournament. You-Know-Who must know so much more, must have so much stronger control of his magic than I do.”

“Why was your rage and hatred against the dragon so powerful?”

“She threatened my life.”

“So you would do the same with—You-Know-Who.”

“If he threatened my life. If he just remained in the distance, I would only fight if he came for me. Or if Death Eaters did.”

“Any Death Eater?”

“Anyone who wanted my death,” Harry amended. He wondered if Moody was trying to trap him into some kind of confession about Theo’s father.

Moody studied him in silence for a long moment, then cleared his throat and seemed to relax. His magical eye whirred off to look out the back of his head again. “Albus didn’t describe you accurately. He said you were a quiet young man.”

“And what word would you use to describe me?”

“Intense.”

Harry laughed a little and pulled back on the tornado. The magic dissipated into a shower of sparks that Moody watched. “Sorry, sir. I can try to be less intense if you want.”

“Mm. No.” Moody’s face wore its own intense expression, but a pretty contemplative one. “I was having some doubts about what I ought to teach you next, what the ultimate goal of my training should be. But now I know.”

“What is it?”

“To teach you the magic you need to know, not what would make you a good Auror trainee or—recruit. You’re obviously never going to be that.”

“No,” Harry agreed softly. “I won’t be that.”

“And you won’t need to know the kind of diplomacy I had to learn to get along in the Auror Corps.”

“No, sir.”

“Because you would simply attack and kill anyone who threatened you.”

“If I had to,” Harry reassured him, wondering now if Moody might think he was suicidal. “I would try to run away first.”

“But if you couldn’t—”

“I would kill.”

Moody considered him for one moment more, then cackled and slapped his hands together. “Then you’re ready to learn the hardest version of the Confundus I know, one that only confuses people a little less than the Imperius…”

Harry happily paid attention.

*

Harry was always glad to see Madam Marchbanks, but he did wish that she hadn’t felt the need to come to Hogwarts because of the stupid demands Dumbledore was making. They were sitting in his office, along with a few other people, all of whom were also making the same stupid demands.

It must be catching.

“He destroyed a dragon belonging to the Romanian Preserve! When we brought the dragons here, it was with the understanding that none of the Tournament Champions would harm them!”

“Why did they put you in charge of the Romanian Preserve when you’re a moron?” Madam Marchbanks asked.

The man who had spoken bristled and shot her an angry look. He was a Weasley, Harry was pretty sure, because of his red hair and the freckles that crowded his face like they were staging an invasion. “We were told—”

“The Champions harmed them, too. The Conjunctivitis Curse—”

“We don’t count that as—”

“I can sympathize even with morons.” Madam Marchbanks’s cane slapped the floor. “After all, I trusted Dumbledore to put up precautions around the Goblet so that no one underage could enter it, and that didn’t happen.”

“My dear Griselda, I must insist on some respect.”

“Why? You don’t deserve any!”

Harry bit his lip and looked at the ceiling with the calm, semi-bashful expression on his face he had decided would be best for this exchange. At the moment, everyone was ignoring him, so he didn’t need to ruin it by speaking.

“No one knew he would be that powerful!”

“Then you should have kept him out of the Tournament, instead of sitting on your wrinkled old arse!”

The Weasley brother was staring back and forth between the Headmaster and Madam Marchbanks in bewilderment. Minister Fudge cleared his throat and decided that the world needed to hear from him. “It does seem as though the Romanian Preserve deserves some compensation for the loss of their dragon, Albus.”

“How could we have anticipated something like this?”

“That’s the same thing he said about my ward competing in the Tournament,” Madam Marchbanks told Fudge in a loud whisper that would have counted as a shout for most of the people in the school. “He doesn’t have a lot of sense.”

“I fail to see why you are talking to me about this, Minister.”

“Well, Hogwarts was the institution that hosted the creatures and signed the documentation that they would be safe—”

“It is not for us to pay the price,” Dumbledore said. He looked truly disturbed now, and he was smoothing his hand agitatedly down his beard. “The one who destroyed the beast—”

People turned to look at Harry for the first time, and he swallowed and lifted his chin, remembering how he had convinced the Healers in St. Mungo’s before his first year that he was a magically disturbed child who needed to be sheltered. He ought to be an even better actor now than then.

Hell, I convinced Black and Lupin that I liked them, for a while.

“I was so frightened,” Harry whispered. “Do you know how frightened I was? This Tournament is for people three years older than me! And we didn’t even have a competent Defense professor for the three years I’ve been here!” He shivered and wrapped his arms around himself. “I struck out with my magic. Accidental magic. I just wanted—I wanted her to go away. I didn’t know it would do—that.”

“It’s true that there’s no spell in existence that can do what that did,” Weasley muttered, “so it couldn’t have been a spell.”

“There’s no one powerful enough to do it with just wandless magic, either!” Fudge said.

Madam Marchbanks cackled suddenly and let her hand rest on Harry’s shoulder for a second. “Says the Minister for Magic about the boy who defeated You-Know-Who.”

“When I was one?” Harry said, peering up and around the room, making sure to keep his tone uncertain. “I mean, I don’t know how I did that, either. And I think some of it was my mum. But I wanted to live.”

“Yes,” Fudge muttered as if to himself, his head bobbing back and forth. Someone had fed him a thought, Harry decided, so he would chew on it. “Of course, it’s different when it’s the Boy-Who-Lived—when Hogwarts can’t even protect him—”

“Someone else put my name into the Goblet,” Harry told the Minister tremulously. “I just—I didn’t have anything to do with it, but I don’t want to lose my magic! So I had to compete. I just—that’s why I just walked up to the dragon and took the egg, and then made her vanish. I wasn’t trying to do anything fancy—it was—I didn’t know—I—”

He shuddered and put his hands over his face as if a minute away from a breakdown.

“We certainly don’t blame you, young man,” Fudge said hastily. “And we know that you didn’t mean to make the dragon vanish on purpose, because there’s no spell that does that! And accidental magic imitates the effect of spells, like when a baby Summons a biscuit their parents won’t give them, eh? Well-known fact.”

Harry had to swallow howling laughter. He just nodded and kept his hands over his face. Fudge didn’t even seem to notice that his statement was self-contradictory.

“So, Albus, about Hogwarts paying for this dragon…”

“We don’t have enough money in the budget to spend thousands of Galleons on that.”

“Oh, well, perhaps we can come to a compromise…”

The conversation went on long enough that Harry dropped his hands from his face, although he kept himself huddled in his seat. He cast a glance up at Madam Marchbanks that he hoped their unfriendly audience would read as needing reassurance.

Can we go now? was what he was really asking.

Madam Marchbanks cleared her throat, interrupting an argument about exactly how much a breeding mature female dragon who still hadn’t had any eggs hatch in years was worth. “Can my ward and I be excused now? After all, he has no other business here, and this is for heads far less wrinkled than mine.”

Harry bit back his laughter again.

“There was one another matter that I needed to discuss with young Harry.” Dumbledore turned and smiled at Harry. Or “smiled.” The expression was so cracked and ridden by weariness that Harry had to bite back more laughter. “It concerns the Yule Ball.”

After some effort, Harry remembered that some people had been talking about a Christmas dance. He shrugged. “What about it, sir? I wasn’t planning to attend, if you had a question about my dress robes.”

“You must attend. All Champions must bring a partner and open the lead dance. It’s traditional.”

“Oh, I hadn’t heard that. But I’m not a Champion, sir, so you don’t need to worry about me.”

“Harry—”

“It intimidates him when wrinkled old arses use his first name,” Madam Marchbanks said loudly.

“I must demand respect—”

“That didn’t work the last three times, why do you think it’ll work now? Minister! Has anyone evaluated Albus for the sense Merlin gave a peacock in the last five years?”

“There is a Muggle saying, you know,” Harry said, peering up at Dumbledore and then shrinking back again when the man glared at him, “about how the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over when it doesn’t work, and thinking it will this time.”

“Go and get yourself evaluated, Albus,” Madam Marchbanks told him, getting to her feet with the help of her cane. “And stop tormenting my ward.”

“He must attend the Yule Ball.”

“No.”

“It is part of the magically binding contract,” Dumbledore said, and slapped his hand flat on the desk, then looked mortified when everyone stared at him. “You must go through with it, or you could lose your magic.”

“Did you write that contract with the quill you had lodged up your arse?”

“Griselda—”

“Oh, but you couldn’t put the quill up there, because it wouldn’t FIT with EVERYTHING ELSE you have lodged up there!”

Weasley looked as if he wanted to duck and hide. Harry put a hand on Madam Marchbanks’s arm, and shook his head with a little sigh. “I don’t think we have a choice, Griselda. After all, everyone else is already paying for Hogwarts’s failures. We’ll just have to do it, too.” He turned wearily to Dumbledore. “I’ll attend the Yule Ball and lead the first dance, Headmaster.”

“With what partner?”

“It’s a surprise.”

Dumbledore looked suspicious, but Fudge winked at Harry, a sight so horrible he wished he could use the Memory Charm on himself. “That’s the spirit, that’s the spirit! Wouldn’t do to give too much advance notice and disappointment to those who want to partner the Boy-Who-Lived, eh?”

“Yes, sir,” Harry managed to say with a straight face, and escaped down the staircase with Madam Marchbanks.

She asked him to tell her his plan when they were beyond the range of eavesdropping spells and spying portraits, and spent so much time laughing about it that Harry felt in as good a mood as was possible when she left.

Even if he would have to take dancing lessons with Flitwick.

*

“You didn’t specifically want the dragon to vanish or turn to ash, then.”

“I wanted her to die.”

Theo watched Harry with his head on the side. They were practicing alone in their usual dungeon corridor again. Harry waited for him to continue.

Honestly, other than the discussion with Parvati, his friends hadn’t really tried to talk to him directly about the way he’d passed the First Task. Zacharias and Michael had alluded to it in hushed whispers. Hermione had just asked about the poor dragon, and accepted what Harry had said with no more questions. Theo had sometimes watched him with thoughtful, bright eyes, but also hadn’t tried to talk about it in detail.

Now, it appeared, about a week before the Yule Ball, they would.

“That was all.”

“It was a lot.”

“And the shield that you raised?”

“You heard the incantation.”

“Powered by hatred.” Theo said it in an odd, reverent voice. “I thought you were indifferent to most people, not that you hated them.”

“That’s true most of the time, but then again, someone who tries to hurt me is someone I hate.”

“Without exception?”

“Without exception.”

Harry held Theo’s gaze. He wondered if Theo was doing what Moody had done in that conversation they’d had right after he killed the dragon, trying to feel out whether something he’d wanted to recommend to Harry was even possible.

“You could destroy the Dark Lord, then. If you wanted to.”

Harry held his hands out and shrugged. “I don’t know exactly what my mother did to destroy him, and I don’t know, if he manages to come back, whether he would be in a form that could be affected by the accidental magic that I commanded, or the Hate Shield, or whatever actually destroyed the dragon. Hagrid told me before first year that he didn’t think the Dark Lord was human enough to die. I think that’s true.”

“You could—destroy the enemies of your friends.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. “I could,” he said. “But I would need to know exactly what they were doing, and why I should destroy them instead of you or your father doing it.”

Theo shifted his weight back and forth. “They’re—enemies who made threats, rather than ones who are doing something right now. People who implied that they could hurt us in the future.”

“Perhaps who could hurt your family because of certain unfounded accusations of willing Death Eater participation in the past?”

Theo half-smiled. “We understand each other well, I think.”

“I might have trouble raising that much hatred if they weren’t also people who were trying to kill me personally, or make me unsafe. But I could try.”

“And of course, you have the facility to use non-magical means to destroy your enemies, as well.” Theo’s half-smile grew. “I would be honored to stand by your side as you continued your career of destroying your enemies.”

“And I yours.”

“Of course, although I should speak to my father before I make any commitments on the behalf of the Nott family.”

Harry smiled at him, and they went back to practicing dueling spells.

*

“Who is your partner, Mr. Potter?”

“They’re shy, Professor. So they came invisibly.”

Professor McGonagall started and stared past Harry at the air in such a way that made Harry sure she knew about his Cloak. Maybe because it had belonged to his father in the past. But she obviously couldn’t see anything now.

“You do know that you will have to lead the first dance, Mr. Potter?”

“Oh, I know. I practiced with them a lot before we came down here.”

McGonagall looked at him in some disbelief, but short of actually waving her hand around in front of Harry and touching his invisible partner, she had to accept that there was someone there.

There wasn’t, of course. Harry walked up serenely to the idiots who had decided to risk their lives, and gave the same answer to them when they asked who his date was. He was a little surprised to see that Viktor Krum had decided to bring Pansy Parkinson, but it wasn’t his business. The Durmstrang students did usually sit at the Slytherin table, so that probably had something to do with it.

They went through the motions of dancing—or at least, Harry did—and he solicitously commandeered an empty chair and a meal for his “date.” He made sure to memorize the expressions on the faces of some of the people around the table. Madam Marchbanks would want to hear about them when Harry wrote the owl to her.

Just before he left, Dumbledore stopped him. His look was grave, pointed, but also uncertain, as if he were trying to see the long-term implications of Harry’s decision to attend the Ball unaccompanied.

“Yes, Headmaster?”

Dumbledore sighed. “I find it hard to believe that you have so much hatred in you, Harry.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t have left me with the Muggles, sir.”

“They were your only blood family…”

Harry just stood and nodded politely through the stupid justification, and then left the Great Hall with his arm around his “partner’s” shoulders. He looked back once, to catch both the unhappy gaze from Dumbledore and Theo’s bright smile and Parvati’s shaking shoulders and Michael’s and Zacharias’s sarcastic applause.

And a dark gaze from Moody, who was sipping from his flask as usual.

At least, if he decides to stop tutoring me because of the disrespect to the Headmaster or something, I can keep developing from my knowledge of the spells he did impart to me.

Chapter 5

Notes:

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Moody didn’t give up tutoring him.

“Figured out the clue to the Second Task, boy?”

Harry acknowledged how Moody was attempting to goad him with a flick of his eyebrow and just nodded. “Yes, sir.”

There was a little silence. Harry looked at Moody, wondering if he’d expected Harry to go in-depth with his answer, or if Moody was waiting for Harry to ask for help the way he had with the dragonfire shield.

“Well,” Moody grunted at last. “What is it?”

“The clue is in Mermish, sir. They’re going to take something from me and hide it. The fact that it’s Mermish does strongly suggest that it’s going to happen under the lake.”

“And you aren’t worried?”

“I’ve been studying spells that will let me breathe underwater and fight there, sir.”

“You didn’t ask me?”

“I wasn’t sure if you would want to tutor me anymore, sir. You looked pretty unhappy with me at the Yule Ball. I thought you might likewise be unhappy about me making a fool of Dumbledore.”

“Albus can handle it.” Moody folded his arms. “And you’ve said it often enough before. You’re in this to survive. Not to kill anyone unless they get in your way. Not to earn the glory and the money that the Tournament Champions are aiming for.”

His voice was heavy and almost clanged as he stared at Harry. Harry stared back, and then said evenly, “Yes, sir. My goals remain the same.”

“Then teaching you about how to survive the Tournament and not just regular Defense serves my goals, as well.”

“What are your goals, sir?”

“To find and train the best Defense students. And to see you survive to the end of the Tournament. I don’t believe—You-Know-Who is completely gone, either. We’ll need the Boy-Who-Lived to defeat him when he comes back.”

Harry just smiled without answering. He had the feeling Moody was lying, but he wouldn’t expect a professor, one of Dumbledore’s friends, to tell him the complete truth, any more than he would anyone else who wasn’t one of his friends or Madam Marchbanks. He raised his wand.

“Then should we start talking about the kinds of spells that will serve me underwater, sir?”

*

“There must be some exceptions and nuances in the magical contract. You led the dance at the Yule Ball, but you didn’t bring a partner, you just pretended to bring one, and you still have your magic.”

Harry nodded and leaned back in his seat. Hermione hovered in front of him, above the books that Harry had spread out to work on his Arithmancy. Normally, it was Hermione’s favorite subject and she paid a lot of attention, but today, she wanted to discuss the Tournament instead.

“I assume the Headmasters and Headmistress know what the contract says, and judges. But they haven’t shown me or anyone else a copy.”

“Can you demand one?”

“I’ve made myself so unfriendly to Dumbledore that he probably wouldn’t let me have one.”

“Well, get one from someone else. Professor Moody, maybe.” Hermione frowned. It had taken her a while to accept Moody helping Harry when professors weren’t supposed to help the Champions, but she’d come around given the essential unfairness of Harry being in the Tournament in the first place. “Do you think he would have one?”

“He could at least ask for one from Dumbledore without getting him suspicious. I don’t think Dumbledore knows how much he’s helping me.”

“Or he just thinks Moody is keeping an eye on you.”

Harry nodded and shrugged. He trusted Moody no more than he trusted anyone else, and he was prepared for the professor to betray him or be spying on him for Dumbledore or something similar. But that didn’t matter, as long as Harry kept the true extent of his abilities to himself and didn’t tell Moody anything he didn’t want the Headmaster to know, either.

Showing that he could destroy a dragon didn’t count, in Harry’s mind, because he hadn’t planned on that. He hadn’t known he could do it, so keeping it a secret hadn’t been possible.

“What do you think the Second Task will try to take from you?”

“It could be a lot of things. My wand. My trunk. A person.”

“They would put a person under the water?”

Sometimes Harry was—not glad, exactly, but accepting of the fact that the troll had killed Hermione. He certainly couldn’t have been friends with her if she were alive and this naïve. “Why not? They brought dragons for the First Task, and a lot more could have happened than me killing one of them.”

Hermione gave him a distracted smile, but her mind was obviously on what he’d just said. “Do you think they would take one of your friends? Or Madam Marchbanks?”

“Madam Marchbanks wouldn’t agree. And she could fight them off.”

“So one of your friends.”

“I would assume so.”

“Would they—would they try to take me?”

“I don’t think that even most of the professors understand what binds a ghost to a particular place. Do you, yourself?”

Hermione’s face went as blank as a stone tablet, the way it had the few other times Harry had asked her about being dead. Harry just watched her, interested, waiting. Hermione blinked, glanced away, and recovered.

“I know that I haunt the bathroom where I died because I died there. I know that I wanted to come back and—and resume my education as much as possible. But I don’t know why I became a ghost and that girl you told me about who was killed playing Quidditch a few years back didn’t.”

Harry nodded. He would have expected that girl to become a ghost, too, just because she’d apparently been a Slytherin really fanatical about Quidditch, and both her House and her love of the game would have predisposed her to it. “Well, no, I don’t think they would try to take you. I think Theo or Michael is more likely.”

“You share things with Theo that you don’t with anyone else. Don’t you?”

“I do.” Harry met her eyes without guilt, without shame. Just as death had cleared up some of Hermione’s naivete, it had made her less sentimental about some things.

“Why him, specifically?”

“He’s harder than the others.”

“Colder.”

Harry thought with a frown of Madam Smith’s Heart-Sensing. So far, he hadn’t mastered the spell from the Grimmauld Place library that was supposed to be protection against that, but he needed to work on that again. “Yes.”

“And—does that mean he doesn’t care about people?”

Harry spoke slowly, carefully. The last thing he wanted was to betray Theo’s secrets to someone Theo hadn’t said he could share them with, even if Hermione being Harry’s friend and a ghost would make it less likely for Theo to take offense. “No, he cares. He was upset that I was withdrawing from all of you after the Goblet of Fire and assumed that everyone would think I was a cheater.”

“You wouldn’t have cared enough to cheat.”

Harry laughed despite himself, drawn from the cold he’d been sinking into by Hermione’s tart tone. “No. I didn’t want anything that people were throwing their names into the Goblet for.”

“So he cares, but—not as much as you? Just as much as you?”

“I don’t know.”

In private, Harry thought Theo probably did care more about people. He’d grown up wishing for friends, whereas Harry had just thought it wasn’t possible, and Theo had had a father who had raised him with at least a modicum of attention.

But Harry wasn’t about to make comparisons that could be wrong, and that might offend Theo. He had learned to avoid doing that.

“So it’s probably Theo. You’ve told him?”

“No offense, Hermione, but I wouldn’t be having this conversation with you if I hadn’t.”

“I can provide an unbiased perspective.”

“Unbiased? You were a Gryffindor.”

“Unbiased by the needs of the flesh.”

That was probably true, Harry thought, and one of the reasons he was talking with Hermione now. That disappointed him a bit. He needed to know these things about himself ahead of time, not have them show up as a surprise.

“All right, then tell me more about which of these spells you think would work best when they take Theo.” Harry snapped open the scroll Moody had given him.

Hermione’s eyes brightened, and she moved to hover behind his shoulder so she could read over it. Harry watched her, and wondered who would be Hermione’s friend when he had finished his seventh year.

Then he dismissed it. It wasn’t the sort of thing he needed to worry about, except as an intellectual curiosity.

*

“I can teach you the spell you want to learn, but there is a price to it.”

“What is the price, sir?”

Moody took a long drink from his flask and then settled it on the desk in front of him with a rap. “This spell demands that you know yourself. Your mind, your spirit, your soul, inside and out. Because while it can do exactly what your book says it would, it can also open a passage back to you for your enemy.”

Harry narrowed his eyes. “A…passage.”

“Your enemy could try to possess you through the link that the spell would create between the two of you.”

“And there’s not another spell that would serve just as well?”

“Of course. Any of the ones on that scroll I gave you.”

Harry spun his wand around his fingers, while Moody watched him with cynical eyes. Harry supposed that he was used to hearing from various people that he shouldn’t use or teach the spells that had made the difference between his survival as an Auror and dying.

“But they wouldn’t be as effective.”

“What’s effective, boy? They would protect you while you were underwater dealing with the merfolk.”

“But they wouldn’t kill them.”

“How invested are you in the idea of killing?” Moody shook his head. “There are times that you should try to do that, of course, or you have to. But there are times that bringing in an enemy alive works just as well.”

“I won’t be trying to arrest the merfolk.”

A smile darted over Moody’s face and was gone. “True enough.”

Harry stared at his hands and thought about it. Then he looked up. “I want to learn it. I’m already studying Occlumency. I should know enough about myself to recognize if I suddenly start thinking about fish or how I want to stay underwater.”

“Excellent.”

“Wait, I thought you were trying to discourage me from studying it?”

Moody snorted, an odd sound with the damage already done to his nose. “No, I wanted to make sure you knew the consequences.”

“You seem fond of that.”

Moody gave a twisted smile. Harry thought it might have looked that way even without the scars. “Yes. I’ve had a—well, I’ve seen enough in the war that I think you should only cast spells when knowing their consequences.”

“Then teach me.”

*

“You promise that you’ll be there.”

“I will.”

“You’ll come for me, no matter what happens.”

“I will.”

Theo looked aside from him with a small frown. Harry let it happen. They were out near the lakeshore, not far from the place that Harry thought he would probably enter the water tomorrow with the Champions, and impatient winds whipped past them.

“You know that I’m trusting you more than I’ve ever trusted anyone,” Theo said in a low voice.

“With your safety.”

“Yes.” Theo turned back to him, and his eyes were wide and dark and showed more of himself than Harry thought he’d ever seen. “I don’t value it as much as you value yours, maybe, but it’s not far off.”

“I promise I will be there.”

Theo exhaled slowly, eyes locked on Harry. He reached out his hand, and Harry’s was there to take it.

“Well,” Theo said, with a small, sharp smile. “At least this experience has brought me something I never expected to have. Your sincere concern.”

Harry said nothing, but squeezed his hand once, and then they walked back up to the castle to wait for the morrow.

*

“And I wonder what our youngest Champion, Mr. Potter, will do? A Bubble-Head Charm? Transfiguration? Making the lake water vanish?”

Harry sneered to himself as he stood on the lakeshore and began to cast some of the complex of spells he had studied with Moody and Hermione. He wouldn’t even try to vanish the lake water unless it was posing some direct threat to him, and this didn’t count.

The loss of his friendship with Theo because Theo died was still not the same as a full-grown dragon breathing fire right in front of him.

Harry cast the Bubble-Head Charm first, and then a bubble of warmth and power around him that manifested as a red-gold glow in the air surrounding his body. There were a few murmurs from the audience when they saw that display. Harry ignored them. It wasn’t a Dark Arts spell, not even like the Hatred Shield that had defended him from the dragon, and if they were startled now by his power, they were too stupid for their opinion to be worth anything.

Harry then cast the Variable Weight Charm that Moody had shown him. It would make parts of his body as heavy as rocks when he willed it, and it was the best way to sink through the water, given that the bubble of warmth around him also contained air and he could just bob along otherwise.

The last spell Moody had taught him, the Soul-Drinker, sat in the back of his mind.

In truth, it wouldn’t mean that Harry had affected his enemies’ souls at all, and it had nothing in common with the Dementor’s Kiss. But Harry still thought it was well-named.

He was the last into the water, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t doing this for points or glory or money. He was doing this for his survival, and his friend’s.

Harry cast the Variable Weight Charm on his robes, which he had also waterproofed, and sank like the stone he resembled at the moment. He ended up in the middle of a patch of weed, the kind that could contain lurking grindylows. Harry snorted as he increased the heat of the bubble around him, so that it would burn any aquatic creature it came into contact with. Sometimes Lupin’s creature-obsessed lessons from last year were useful.

He struck out, adjusting the weight as he went, and transforming his feet into webbed ones after some thought. He left his hands alone, since he would need to wield his wand.

And undulating towards him was the first enemy he would need to defeat, a long, silvery serpent with bright blue eyes. Harry had no idea of its exact species, and he had no intention of waiting to find out whether it was venomous or had magic.

He slowed and watched the snake test around the edges of his bubble. It recoiled when it encountered the heat, but then began to follow him instead.

Harry rolled his eyes as he kept swimming. It made sense that a snake would be drawn to heat, but he didn’t have to like it. At least it shouldn’t be able to touch him.

The water abruptly began to churn in front of him, going from dark but manageable to so murky that Harry couldn’t see a thing. He promptly stopped and cast a Lumos modified to work underwater, meaning that it turned the liquid inside of it bright and golden, piercing through the murk like shafts of sunlight through a closed window.

For a moment, it seemed as though this particular churn of mud and particles might be the only kind that could resist the Lumos. But then it parted, and Harry saw a merman in front of him with a lifted trident.

There was no time for hesitation.

Harry cast the Soul-Drinker, the incantation feeling as if it ripped his throat on the way up. But wounds could be healed. Death could not.

“Mentem et corporem ligo!”

For a moment, the water wavered in front of him, and Harry feared that the spell was powerful enough to make him pass out. But he had cast it before, under Moody’s guidance. And it worked now, with his brain sharpened and clarified by the potential terror of death, lashing out and catching hard of the merman.

In seconds, Harry had the sensation of puppet strings extending away from his fingers to the merman. This wasn’t anything like the odd, floating sensation of the Imperius Curse Moody had cast on him (and which hadn’t worked, anyway, crackling like an egg and running off the stone of Harry’s mind). Harry took control of the merman’s body, and bound the other being’s mind inside his body, unable to affect it.

Turn and attack them.

Harry had to jerk his hand up to claim control of the merman. The sensation of a burden hanging off his fingers increased, like he’d covered his nails with stones. But he ground his objections and his fear down.

He was in control here. He was the master.

The merman turned and swam as fast as possible at the others of his folk hovering behind him, his trident aimed for the tall one in the middle. That one trilled something, but the attacker Harry commanded didn’t hesitate.

Harry lifted the trident.

The merfolk scattered, once they realized that the one approaching them wasn’t going to stop. Harry swam in his wake, and turned the merman back again when he realized the group was clustering behind him.

He could feel the merman fighting and bucking under the curse. This was different from the Imperius in being less Dark and not illegal, but also because the victim could reach back along the “passage” created by the curse and possibly possess Harry’s body, too.

Still worth learning a sort-of version of the Imperius that Harry wouldn’t go to Azkaban for and that didn’t take as much power to maintain as the Unforgivable.

The merman kept hurtling back and forth through the water, and Harry swam down and down. Now he could see a cluster of what appeared to be carved rocks ahead and were probably the merfolk’s village, and he put on a burst of speed.

Then another merman, snarling and armed with a trident that had gleaming red and purple enchantments along the tines, popped up in front of him.

Harry had no time to doubt. He yanked the Soul-Drinker away from the merman he’d been controlling and spun it like a net around his new attacker. And he whispered, Divide.

The merman’s body tore in half from his head, through his torso, all the way down through his tail. A cloud of spreading blood and guts and flesh made Harry have to duck underneath it, and then he was swimming free and clear, still heading towards the village.

He got some hate-filled glares as he reached the rocks and cut Theo free from a bond of seaweed with the modified Severing Charm Moody had taught him. But they didn’t interfere, and that meant he would live.

Harry turned and removed the Variable Weight Charm. He and Theo shot towards the surface, still surrounded by Harry’s bubble of light and warmth, and broke the surface a few minutes later.

Theo gasped and opened his eyes the minute his face left the water. He looked at Harry, and Harry smiled a little and dismissed the Bubble-Head Charm.

“You got me? It was that easy?”

“Not easy. But I wasn’t wounded.”

Theo was feeling his own arms, as if he didn’t think that he had escaped it. Harry curled an arm around his shoulders and swam towards the shore. People were shouting, but Madam Marchbanks’s laughter was the only thing that Harry thought it worthwhile to pay attention to.

“What did you use to free me?”

“A Severing Charm.”

“I meant—”

Harry cut his eyes towards the shore, and Theo blinked and shut up. They barely had a chance to get out of the water before Madam Pomfrey bustled up to them and practically forced potions down Theo’s throat. Harry had to smile, despite himself, at the way that steam started coming out of his ears with the Pepper-Up.

Pomfrey insisted on giving Harry the same potions and wrapping him in blankets after he’d undone the Transfiguration on his feet to remove the webs, even though he wasn’t wounded or cold. Madam Marchbanks stepped up beside Harry as he obediently swallowed his own Pepper-Up.

“The queen’s talking to Dumbledore,” Madam Marchbanks offered, nodding towards the edge of the water. Harry looked and saw a green-haired head floating in the water, with Dumbledore bent over near her.

“He doesn’t look happy with me.”

“No, but at least this time he doesn’t have to deal with the dragon he brought in vanishing because he couldn’t keep his head out of his arse.”

Madam Marchbanks wasn’t bothering to keep her voice down, and Harry saw Dumbledore’s shoulders twitch. He smiled.

Dumbledore abruptly straightened and stepped back from the lake. His face was ashen as he stared at Harry. Harry stared back, unimpressed. He reckoned that the queen must have told Dumbledore about the merman he had killed.

Or maybe more than one, given what might have happened to the one he’d been controlling at first.

“I must see you in my office when this is done, Harry.”

“At this point you might as well assign me a chair, Headmaster.”

Dumbledore closed his eyes, then opened them again. “I—wish that you would take matters more seriously, my boy.”

“And I wish you had kept me out of the Tournament.”

The Headmaster gave him one angry, sorrowful glance, and then turned and walked back towards the stands where the judges stood. One of the other Champions was with them, Delacour, but Harry saw she looked upset. He shrugged and turned back to face Madam Marchbanks.

“What happened down there?” she asked in her booming version of a whisper.

“There were a few mermen who came after me with tridents, and at least one of them had some kind of violent magic on it. So I killed one. Maybe the other one got torn apart, too.”

“You left an enemy at your back?” Madam Marchbanks peered at him. “Maybe I should have hoped for you to be Sorted into Slytherin after all, if Ravenclaw made you this soft.”

Harry let her see the way he rolled his eyes. “By that point, I was most of the way to the village, and the rest of them didn’t dare to attack me. They were too intimidated.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do.”

Theo turned towards him, since Madam Pomfrey had started to fuss over Diggory and his hostage, Cho Chang, who had just returned. “Why would they have been too intimidated?”

“I killed one.”

“You said that.”

“Bloodily.”

Theo considered him for a moment, and then a smile moved across his face like a sunrise over ice. “I see. Thank you.”

Harry smiled back, and settled back to wait until this particular farce of a Task was over. Moody was watching him, he thought, but the man could wait to hear how the modified spells had worked.

Chapter 6

Notes:

Thank you again for all the reviews!

“You murdered one of the queen’s subjects.”

“He was coming right at me with some kind of enchantment on his trident, sir. Yes, I killed him.”

“You tore him apart.”

“Why would you use a spell like that?” Madam Marchbanks demanded, spinning towards Harry in her chair and gripping the back of it. “Didn’t the mess get in the way of your seeing underwater?”

“Griselda, that is not the concern I would have raised—”

“Because you’re a fool, yes.”

Dumbledore stared at her repressively, then seemed to realize that wouldn’t work, and turned to face Harry. “Why did you tear him apart, Harry? Why not use a less violent spell, like a Stunner?”

Harry was glad that none of the merfolk had recognized the incantation for the Soul-Drinker. Then again, there was no particular reason they should. “Because he was in the way, about to strike me, and I didn’t have any chance for a less violent spell. I’d already been fighting them, and they hadn’t backed off.”

“You could have found an alternative.”

“And did you ask Krum about an alternative for his shark head? He was bragging about biting several of the merfolk. Did you ask him? Or am the only one who gets scolded?”

“More than you can know rides on your reputation as the Boy-Who-Lived,” Dumbledore said, in a way that involved him barely parting his lips.

“Maybe those people should be trying to save themselves, instead of relying on a teenager to do it?”

“No one could stand up against Voldemort. Only you.”

“Not true!” Madam Marchbanks stabbed her cane at Dumbledore as if she wanted to pierce his heart with it. Honestly, Harry would have paid good money to watch that. “You’re the only one he’s ever feared, he could—”

“I am the Headmaster, Griselda, and I hold other responsible positions. I cannot lead an army against Voldemort, or whatever you are thinking.”

“And I’m just a student, sir. A schoolboy who has to spend his time competing in a deadly Tournament and studying how to survive it because of your lax security around the Goblet of Fire. What do you think I should be doing?”

Dumbledore stared at him helplessly. Harry stared back, wishing he dared to use Legilimency, or that his Occlumency was good enough to detect some sudden intrusion. He really wanted to understand the Headmaster.

Was he one of the people who had wanted to lay the burden of defeating Voldemort on Harry? Did Dumbledore think that he should step back, or should have been able to step back, once Harry’s mum had done whatever she’d done? Was he tired, afraid?

At least that would make sense of some of his actions, including the way that he seemed to have an ill-defined sense of what he wanted Harry to do. He seemed to “recognize” when Harry strayed outside of whatever invisible boundaries he had laid down, but not much of what would be a positive thing to do.

Harry just watched him, not sympathizing, but wanting to understand.

“The mer-queen did not count on any of her subjects being damaged.”

“That was stupid. What was what Krum did acceptable, then?”

“He is not—who you are.”

“He could still get in trouble if someone decided that a Quidditch hero should be more moral. Or whatever the accusation is that you’re actually making against me, sir.”

“Where did you learn spells that rip people apart?”

“Books, sir.”

“Not ones that are in the Restricted Section.”

“No, sir.”

Dumbledore continued to stare at him, lost. Harry thought that being Headmaster for so long might also have limited what options he thought were possible for a student to learn such magic.

Harry continued to sit still with a pleasant smile on his face, and this time, Madam Marchbanks was the one who was stifling chuckles.

“You do not wish to tell me?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“You haven’t made yourself into someone I could trust, sir. Just someone who scolds and then sighs when I don’t behave like the hero that you appear to have set yourself and others up to expect.”

Dumbledore closed his eyes and seemed to spend a few minutes in meditation. That was all right. Harry could sit in silence for longer than he could. Madam Marchbanks made little chuckles and snorts under her breath and dug her cane into the floor, but said nothing.

Finally, Dumbledore opened his eyes again and said, “You do not know how much the fate of our world may depend on you.”

“Right, but it shouldn’t.”

“Will you say only that?”

“Yes. Because I’m fourteen.”

Dumbledore looked at him, then away. Finally he said, “I am going to be honest with you, my boy.”

“Did that hurt, Albus?”

Harry had nothing to add to Madam Marchbanks’s perfect retort, but Dumbledore only had a strained smile when he turned around again. “The war…it was so bad, so bloody, that by the end, a majority of magical people in Britain weren’t fighting. They simply hid or rolled over and bared their bellies to the Death Eaters. I was one of the few people who was leading a resistance force, called the Order of the Phoenix.”

Harry just nodded.

“If those times come back, the same thing will happen. Except it might happen faster this time, if people believe they cannot trust you, their Savior.”

“That’s hardly my fault, Headmaster. It sounds like they gave up anyway before my mother did whatever she did to save me. And if they give up now, just waiting for another miracle, that’s not my fault, either.”

“You want to deprive them of hope?”

“I want them to take some responsibility for saving themselves.”

“If they feel despair, how can they?”

“You really want me to some kind of savior, then? Some kind of sharp, witty, humble, heroic, wise, clever, bumbling, honest, deceptive-as-necessary symbol?”

Dumbledore paused. Then he said, “I hope you are not suggesting that I have attempted to mold you into this.”

Harry suspected that, actually, but he had no proof, so he said only, “No. I don’t think that anyone who wanted me to be able to behave that way would have left me with Muggles who hated magic.”

“Harry—”

“This is a waste of time,” Madam Marchbanks said, and jabbed her cane at Dumbledore. “Are you planning to say that Harry committed some kind of crime? Or are you only trying to drape shame all over him? Slimy, shame. I’ve never liked it.”

“Griselda—”

“It’s the shame route, then. I read up on the Tournament, Albus. No damage that the Champions cause in the course of defending themselves can be treated as a crime, or no one would participate. And you insist on treating Harry like a Champion who entered himself, so he’s exempt.” She stood up. “Let’s go, Harry.”

Harry shrugged and nodded as he stood. “I kind of reckoned when he wouldn’t talk about the damage Krum caused.”

“Harry. Would you truly doom the world?”

Harry looked over his shoulder. Dumbledore had clasped his hands in front of him and was leaning forwards as though he expected Harry to start squirming with shame and run right back to him to resume his destined role.

“A world that’s that easily doomed isn’t worth anything, Headmaster.”

“You live in that world, too.”

“Not according to a lot of people.”

“Harry—”

They turned and left, and Madam Marchbanks shook her head as she used her cane to prod the moving stairs and try to use sparks of magic to hurry the slow things along.

“Albus has a terrible habit of saying people’s names as if they substitute for a sentence. Tell me you won’t pick that up. Make you soft.”

“No, Madam Marchbanks,” Harry said, feeling his cheeks twitch under the pressure of a smile.

*

“I didn’t expect you to manage the Soul-Drinker underwater.”

“Then why work on it with me, sir?”

Moody grunted and sipped from his flask. Harry concentrated on the tar shield that he was spinning. Adding more power to it made it thinner and more transparent, so that he could see through it with only a film of black over his eyes.

“I thought you might be able to find a use for it in the future.”

“Oh.”

Harry kept his head bowed a little as he pretended to fidget with his wand. In reality, every sense was on high alert as he watched Moody put his flask down and look at something intently in the back of the room with his magical eye. Of course, the only things in Moody’s office were those he’d put there, like Dark Detectors and his huge old trunk.

His answer didn’t make sense.

Of course Harry had been focused on the Second Task. Everything that he’d practiced with Moody on for the last few months was based on trying to survive the Tournament. That he would say something like Harry should use the Soul-Drinker in other situations…

It made Harry wonder if this whole thing had been an elaborate trap, and Moody was really focused on trapping Harry into casting some serious Dark Arts so that he could turn him over to the Headmaster.

Moody’s magical eye came back to the front of the office, and he grinned a little at Harry. “Let that Tar Shield fade the minute I stop supervising you, boy?”

Harry pulled an eager, bashful smile to his face. If this was a trap, it would be stupid to show that he had suspected it. “I was just thinking I might be able to make it more transparent, but wouldn’t that come at a cost of how many spells it can stop? It seems like being thinner would make it less powerful in the center, even if more at the edges.”

“Not if you’re properly feeding it power, boy! You need to pay attention to what you’re doing with your magic, not the movement of your feet! CONSTANT VIGILANCE!”

And it seemed, for the next hour, that all was as it had been. Moody aimed his wand and moved as he always did, and cackled when Harry got the spell wrong and the backlash knocked him off his feet.

But Harry retained his suspicion. Just in case.

It had proven its worth so far.

*

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me, Mr. Potter.”

Harry could give a polite, polished smile by now to those who deserved it, among which he didn’t count Dumbledore. “You’re welcome, sir. I admit I was curious to hear what you wanted from me.”

Kalder Nott didn’t speak for long moments, only sat back and sipped from his tea while watching Harry. Harry waited, and waited, and waited. But he didn’t lose his smile, and Kalder didn’t speak up about what he wanted, either.

So they sat there some more. They were at Theo’s house, and Harry was wearing a Portkey that would take him back to Madam Marchbanks in instants if Kalder tried anything. She knew where he was, too, of course, and she would storm the wards if Harry was late in getting back home.

“Do you know why I summoned you here?”

“No.”

Kalder put down his teacup and leaned forwards. Harry didn’t let himself come too obviously to attention; he agreed with Moody that it could make people focus on him in ways he didn’t want. But he did shift so that he was facing his host more directly and altered his smile a little.

“I received a summons last night.”

Harry wondered for a moment who in the Ministry would have summoned Theo’s father, and then Kalder let his hand brush against his left arm, and—

Harry felt a different kind of prickling awareness dash up and down his spine. He’d seen no sign of Voldemort since he reentered the magical world, and from what Madam Marchbanks said, the Death Eaters at the World Cup were really the only sign. But if something had changed, then he would have to oppose Voldemort, too.

“Oh? Your old friend is well, I hope.”

“Wellness is relative.”

“Then I can hope that his situation will resolve to the well-being of everyone.”

“Perhaps it will not include everyone.”

“I take it that you have been following the news stories about the Tournament?”

Kalder gave him a look far less human than Theo’s. Harry did let his hand touch his wand, this time. This man would be a bad enemy. “I have. Although I do not see the relevance at the moment, I must admit.”

“Well, perhaps you have seen the stories about the power I demonstrated when I had to face the dragon and the mer-queen’s subjects. But perhaps you also know that I was forced into this Tournament through no fault of my own, and that I would prefer not to have attacked them or vanished a dragon at all. I need not attack anyone if they do not attack me.”

“Is that so.”

“It is.”

“That would seem—almost too reasonable to some people. They would expect you to hate the people who put you into this situation. For example, do you not hate Dumbledore for failing to keep you out of the Tournament?”

“To some extent. But he doesn’t present the kind of close threat that the dragon or the merfolk did. My hatred can lie slumbering for a long time, cold and waiting, if someone doesn’t do something direct to provoke it.”

“I might pass this word on.”

“You would be welcome to do so.”

Kalder smiled at him, and it warmed his harsh features a little. “It seems to me that I owe you a debt for protecting my son.”

“If not for me, he wouldn’t have been under the lake in the first place. I have no intention to claim a debt from Theo.”

“We Notts still pay our debts. I would appreciate it if you let me do so.”

Harry studied him. “All right.”

“I have a book that you might find interesting.” Kalder nudged a book across the table that wasn’t a traditional one, but what looked like a bound scroll wrapped in leather covers. “This contains some interesting history about someone who, as you say, is not a direct threat, but could be someday.”

Harry nodded and almost asked if the Dark Lord would like Kalder to release this information, but he reckoned that Theo’s father knew the risks, and it was up to him if he wanted to do this. “Thank you, sir.”

“You are—something incredible, Mr. Potter.”

“Because I made friends with Theo?”

“Because you do not hold the same grudges and hatreds that someone in your position might be expected to.”

“Please make no mistake, Mr. Nott. I am full of hatreds. But perhaps they go in different directions than one might expect.”

“Yes,” Kalder said slowly. “Perhaps that is the better way to describe it.”

*

The book turned out to be a series of scribbled notes in different hands about memories and stories, not a proper book.

And it wasn’t about Voldemort.

It was about Dumbledore.

Harry had sat in silence and stillness for a full minute after he had opened the “book,” staring down at it. Only Kreacher leaning forwards through the library door to look at him in suspicion had made him wake up and start copying down notes from the “book” in case it got stolen someday.

The scrolls recorded Dumbledore’s estrangement from his family. How his father had gone to Azkaban for Muggle-baiting, how his sister had been “strange” and his brother had blamed Dumbledore for their sister’s eventual death. That one seemed to be based on conversations with the brother, Aberforth, himself, so Harry trusted it a little more than he did the rest.

Especially the part that proclaimed Dumbledore had been friends with Gellert Grindelwald, and maybe more than friends.

Harry had wondered, as he’d stared blankly at that part, why Kalder hadn’t tried to use the information himself. Surely he should have, if he thought it had the potential to bring down someone as popular as Dumbledore?

But the answer had come to Harry as he read more about the speculations and rumors that had surrounded Dumbledore’s “friendship” and also his reluctance to go against Grindelwald later on. There were few names, few specifics. Just like it was plausible that Dumbledore hadn’t dueled Grindelwald and imprisoned him earlier because he hadn’t thought he would win, or because he was only one, not particularly politically prominent British wizard at the time, or because Grindelwald hadn’t actually invaded Britain, it was plausible that it had been friendship he'd shared with Grindelwald, and nothing more.

Kalder had had enough Galleons to escape Azkaban, but he’d still been under suspicion. And of course many people would see it as a former Death Eater attempting to discredit the man who had been almost alone in fighting Death Eaters.

In the hands of someone else, though, this information might make a real difference.

Harry tapped his quill against the parchment. He didn’t intend to move on this yet. Dumbledore was a threat, but not enough of one to be worth bringing down with the amount of effort this would take.

But later…and perhaps if he gave this to Madam Marchbanks…

No, it couldn’t be Madam Marchbanks. She was too opposed to Dumbledore in public, too. People would be entertained if she started making these accusations, but they wouldn’t take them any more seriously than her claims that Dumbledore really had a quill shoved up his arse.

Hmmm.

“What is Master Harry studying?”

Kreacher’s question was grudging, but less so than it had been in the past. Harry turned around to half-smile at the house-elf, who shifted back and forth from foot to foot.

“A collection of possible traps for my enemies,” Harry said. It was true enough. “But I need to find the right person to spring the trap.”

Kreacher stared at him with big eyes and was still. Harry wondered why. It wasn’t like what he’d said was all that interesting or articulate.

“Kreacher knows his way around traps,” the elf whispered.

“Do you?” Of course, maybe the elf only meant the kind of things that some of the mad Black ancestors would have left in Grimmauld Place, but maybe not. “What’s the best way to spread gossip about a popular person so that it hurts them, people take it seriously, but it can’t be traced back to you?”

Kreacher’s eyes went even wider, and his ears quivered. Then he said, “Kreacher will have to think,” and vanished.

Harry shrugged and turned back to copying down the notes from the scrolls Kalder had given him. It wasn’t the worst outcome, and in the meantime, Harry could think about whether he could use this information himself.

And continue to work on the other spells the library was teaching him, including Fiendfyre and that ability to block Heart-Sensing. Harry thought he was close to mastering it.

*

“The Third Task is going to be a maze.”

“Yes, Bagman mentioned that to me this morning.”

Moody paused as he was lifting his flask to his lips. Then he shook his head and completed the motion, but with a haste that Harry had never seen him use before. He turned a little to face Moody without being obvious about it, his hand resting lightly on his wand.

Moody put the flask down on his desk and demanded, “You’re getting help from Bagman, too?”

“In the form of spells? Of course not. But I’m fairly sure that he’s bet a large sum of money on me, and he keeps giving me hints that he wants me to win. Or else he just wants to make the Tournament look more exciting in the eyes of the spectators, by actually making it seem like the youngest competitor has a chance.”

In truth, Harry had investigated Bagman as subtly as he could, through Parvati’s gossip network and some things that Kalder and Madam Smith knew, to see if he could be the one who had slipped Harry’s name into the Goblet. He would at least have had a motive. But nothing showed that Bagman was a particularly wise or powerful wizard, and he would have had to be one or the other to not only make the plan but cause the Goblet to think there was a fourth school involved, which Madam Marchbanks believed had happened.

“The man’s a weakling.”

Harry blinked at Moody. It wasn’t a word that he could remember Moody spitting with that much venom before. “Yes. That’s one reason I don’t think he put my name in the Goblet of Fire.”

“And it’s a reason you shouldn’t take advice from him!”

“I didn’t say that it was advice? I don’t trust him to tell me the truth about everything in the maze. But he was right about it being one, which I know because you told me information that confirmed his, sir.”

Moody leaned forwards, staring. Harry looked back, and kept his voice and face subtle and cool. He didn’t understand this, either. Moody had shown that he had grudges against Karkaroff and Snape, but not Bagman.

Ludo Bagman was about as far from either a Dark wizard or a Death Eater as Harry could envision, actually.

“But you want to learn from him?”

“Only take advantage of what he might tell me.”

“You don’t have any principles, do you, boy?”

Harry considered Moody for a second. “I thought you had given up on me as a potential Auror trainee, sir. I know that you don’t agree with everything I do. But you have reasons for training me, even if I don’t have principles.”

Moody made that odd snorting sound that was affected by his nose being half-missing again. “Yeah, of course. But you should still—you should still admire strength. Want to learn from the strong. Not weaklings like Bagman.”

Harry shrugged. “I disagree that it’s learning so much as—using.”

“So you have no strong allegiances.”

“You know about a few.” And Moody was more than smart enough to name them, so Harry saw no need to do so himself.

Moody did some more staring. Harry did some more staring back.

Moody finally said, with the air of someone making one last push to educate a stubborn student, “Would have thought that you wanted to avoid people who were weak because you’re so strong yourself. Would have thought that you only wanted to learn from the best. Use the best, if you have to put it that way.”

“I’ll use whoever comes to hand.”

Moody wrinkled his brow, then waved a hand and picked up his wand. “Listen to me, nattering on about philosophy instead of making sure that you survive the Third Task. Take up your wand, boy, and let’s make sure that you’ve been keeping up your studies.”

Harry gave a small, tight smile, and lifted his own wand. He didn’t trust Moody as much as he once would have, but he trusted him to teach Harry the Dark Arts, and that was honestly more than enough.

*

“You don’t think they’ll take another hostage this time.” Parvati’s voice was meditative as she leaned across the table and studied the photographs of the maze Harry had taken from the outside. Madam Marchbanks hadn’t even questioned why he’d wanted a camera, only bought it for him.

“No. It would be boring. And repetitive.”

“They might have shown that they don’t care that much about repetition.”

“Yeah, but not in the nature of the Tasks. Although the audience won’t be able to see much of this one, either, with the hedge mazes in the way.”

Parvati laughed. “True.”

Zacharias and Michael studied the pictures, too. Theo had already looked as much as he’d thought he could stand, he’d said, and was busy now with a book of hexes that he thought might help Harry if he picked out the right ones. Hermione hovered behind them, anxiously, near the ceiling of the corridor, peering at Harry now and then as if she thought he might not notice it. Harry did his best to ignore her instead of snapping.

“I recognize this shrub,” Zacharias said abruptly. “And the vine. My grandmother has the same sort of thing along the boundary of her estate.”

“What does it do?” Harry asked, putting aside his own notes on some spells Moody had set him to studying. He couldn’t cast them yet.

He wasn’t making that much progress on the spells he studied in Grimmauld Place’s library, either. It was frustrating.

“It strangles those who get too close. Well, the vine does. The bush holds you immobile with poisoned thorns until the vine can do it.”

“Vicious,” Harry said appreciatively. He wondered if Madam Marchbanks would want to plant some of those at home, or maybe he could convince Kreacher to plant them at Grimmauld Place. Not that he’d been into the gardens.

“You sound as if you appreciate this instead of being worried about it!” Hermione burst out.

“I can appreciate it for the future. For the present, I’m doing my best to survive.”

“But you don’t sound worried!”

“What good will worrying do?” Harry leaned back and looked at her. Hermione scowled at him, folding her arms. “I don’t know what else to tell you, Hermione. I’m studying, and I have people like you lot to work with, and I’m casting new spells every day or studying ones that I haven’t mastered yet, and I’ll do my best to survive.”

“You should be more worried.”

Harry turned his back on her in silence. He did appreciate Hermione, but not when she acted as though everyone should feel exactly the way she did. She was far more concerned and open even as a ghost than he would ever be.

Theo lingered behind the others when they left and Hermione drifted off disconsolately in the direction of the bathroom where she’d died. “What is your plan?”

“To learn as many different spells as I can for the different dangers of the maze.”

“This Task isn’t going to have one major goal, then.”

“Not unless you count just reaching the Cup in the middle of the maze, no. You have to navigate the maze, and defeat the dangers and creatures that will be there, and maybe watch out for the Champions.”

Theo hesitated. Then he said, almost inaudibly, “You could give me your Cloak, and I could come with you.”

Harry was surprised by how much the idea tempted him, despite the fact that he knew he would spend too much time worrying about Theo for it to be a good one. But he shook his head. “There might be people casting spells to detect such things. I don’t want to put your life at risk in the way it was in the Second Task.”

“You don’t want to incur a debt towards my family the way we had a debt to you.”

Harry just nodded. Let Theo think that was all it was about.

“You know we wouldn’t place stringent terms on you for paying it back.”

“Your father gave me something incredibly valuable to pay yours. I don’t have anything of comparable value that I would be willing to give up.”

Theo swallowed once. Then he said, “I won’t echo Granger in saying you ought to be worried, because I don’t know that. But I will say that I am worried.”

“I’ll do my best to come back in one piece.”

Theo relaxed in a sudden rush. “Yes, all right, I can trust that you’ll do that much.”

Harry smiled at him, and they parted to go to their respective common rooms.

Harry watched the fire in the Ravenclaw common room later on with lazy eyes, aware of the way that the others stared at him and shifted and muttered and looked away and argued about his power and dared each other to approach him. Only Michael studied at his side and asked him questions in a normal tone of voice.

The others were afraid of him since he’d vanished the dragon, and more so since his exploits under the lake had come to light. Of course, Harry thought it wasn’t the violence of the spells they feared in that instance. It was his utter ruthlessness.

They couldn’t dismiss him as a willing competitor, but they also couldn’t argue that he was a frightened child wielding accidental magic the way some of them apparently had after the dragon.

Let them fear, Harry thought, as he stood and watched the way a few third-years scrambled to get out of his path as he walked up the staircase.

He wouldn’t want them to fear him hard enough to try and curse him in the back. But if they stayed far enough away to never curse him in the first place? Yes, that would suit Harry just fine.

*

“You know that there’s a curse on the Defense post.”

“Yes, sir,” Harry said, although this was the first time he’d ever heard Moody acknowledge it. Up until this point, he’d just kept insisting that he didn’t plan to stay for longer than a year because that was the limit of the favors he owed Dumbledore.

Moody squinted at him, both eyes darting back and forth restlessly this time. “Just in case something happens after the Third Task that means this is the last time we get to speak.”

Harry watched him, appreciative of the help and as distrustful as ever. In the end, Moody gave a rusty laugh and waved a hand at him.

“Don’t think I need to worry about you sobbing over my death.”

“I would miss you,” Harry said politely. But he’d known all along that he wouldn’t get to keep Moody beyond a year, so he wouldn’t pretend to sorrow about it.

“Nah, you won’t, boy. You’d miss the magic I can teach you.”

“I’d still like to learn more.”

And at least Moody got back to teaching after that, instead of expecting Harry to—sympathize, or whatever it was that he’d really been aiming for. Harry was just as glad to see it.

*

“As those tied for first place, Mr. Krum and Mr. Diggory will enter the maze first!”

Harry stood with his wand held loosely in his hand. He didn’t really care what order they entered the maze in, except that he would have to defend against the Champions when he went in himself. Delacour was shifting beside him, sometimes casting him hateful or doubtful glances.

Harry ignored her in return. Those who still believed that he’d put his name in the Goblet willingly weren’t worth his time.

“Now, Mr. Potter!”

A whistle blew, and people jeered or called out his name, and Harry walked into the maze with his head high. The night was cool around him, and the stars overhead seemed to grow brighter as Harry left the fires and the hovering Lumos Charms of the area around the front of the maze behind.

He walked with his wand out, and had to sever one of the strangling vines Zacharias had talked about and clip a Fwooper’s wing before he’d been in the maze five minutes. He grimaced. It was tempting to just find a shadowy corner and sit there, refusing to compete.

But that could cost him his magic.

And it would give one of the other Champions time to curse him, Harry thought as he stepped around a corner and nearly ran into Diggory.

“Potter? What are you doing here?”

“Trying to survive,” Harry said, and backed away with his wand held in front of him. He didn’t really care what Diggory did, but he didn’t want to fall victim to his wand.

“Not trying to win?”

“Wow, you’re an idiot if you believe I want to.”

Diggory gave him a frown and a shake of his head. “Don’t call me an idiot.”

“Then don’t act like one.”

“Hey, that’s not nice!”

Harry turned and walked away from Diggory. He suspected that Diggory wouldn’t curse him in the back. The greater mystery was how he had survived this far into the Tournament with as blinkered and naïve a worldview as he had.

*

Harry didn’t have good luck finding his shadowed corner where he could rest out of the way. Each time he found a likely place, a creature charged him—including some of the Blast-Ended Skrewts Parvati had complained about when talking of her Care of Magical Creatures class—or he heard the footsteps of another Champion. So he retreated towards the center, seeing red sparks going up at one point, and always waiting for one of the others to win so that he could come out.

He was more than surprised to step into a larger clearing than normal and see a golden cup waiting for him on a plinth. Harry backed up at once, although he didn’t put his back against the hedge walls since the ones here were ornamented with the strangling vine Zacharias had warned him about.

“You’re a clever one.”

Moody was suddenly standing in the entrance of one of the paths that led further into the maze. Harry stared at him and said nothing.

“It meant that I had to resort to some of the tactics I would have preferred to avoid.” Moody’s voice was deeper than the one that he had used to teach Harry all year, even though it sounded like his otherwise. He took a step forwards and then stopped. “In a way, it’s a shame. I did consider a different course for a while. I thought it possible, after you vanished the dragon…”

Harry kept silent, staring at Moody, studying him. He didn’t have the glazed eyes that were typical of someone under the Imperius, and Harry didn’t think he would stand here talking if he were under the Soul-Drinker.

“But it wasn’t to be. I thought you would be sympathetic to the Dark Lord’s goals because you desired power, and he could offer you the arena and the chance to exercise that power without being hampered by the kind of morality that Dumbledore is. But then you talked about survival and even using those weaker than you, and I realized that you just don’t care about any kind of higher principles.”

Harry cocked his head. The flask that Moody always drank out of, and the way that Snape had been raging, according to some of the older Ravenclaws, about someone stealing boomslang skin from him…

“Polyjuice?”

Moody, or whoever this was, stopped and looked at him, then gave a grunt that at least sounded like the ones that Harry had been hearing all year. Of course, now he doubted that he’d ever met the real Alastor Moody at all.

Or that it had been the Aurors Moody had really been talking about recruiting him into.

“You belong in Ravenclaw, that’s for certain.” Moody gave a smile that didn’t touch either his lips or his eyes. “And now, it’s time to come with me to the Dark Lord.”

“I’d rather not.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“I could make a bargain with him? I told you, he threatened me so long ago that he isn’t on my list of active enemies. There’s no reason that we couldn’t just agree to—stand apart from each other? Ignore each other?”

“No can do, kid. He needs your blood.”

“I could give it to you willingly.”

“No bargains,” Moody said, and now there was an iron snarl behind his voice. He moved his wand in one of those movements that had become so familiar to Harry over the past two terms, and the Soul-Drinker slammed into Harry.

Harry flung himself against it. He had a stronger will than the merman or the spiders he had controlled with the curse, and he would be able to step back and then destroy this man, this Death Eater, for hurting him—

It didn’t work. Harry’s body walked forwards, ignoring the screaming from his mind, and touched the Cup.

A Portkey came to life around him.

Chapter 7

Notes:

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Be aware that in this chapter, Harry crosses a moral event horizon, and it is the darkest chapter of the story so far.

They landed in a graveyard—or rather, Harry did, with “Moody” Apparating in a second later.

Moody directed him to walk towards a gravestone and tie himself to it with the strongest magic he could muster. Harry flung himself against the control, his head so filled with mental screaming that he could hardly tell if it was rage or hatred he felt. It was a special torment to feel Moody control his magic.

But that was what he did. Harry tightened the ropes around himself and then gave his wand to Moody.

Moody tucked it away and turned to face a large cauldron that was waiting near the edge of the graveyard. There was a bundle wrapped in black cloth on the ground beside it, and Harry could guess what it contained.

He heard Moody talking about the ritual, barely. He held out his arm when commanded, and Moody took his blood, as well as bone dust from a grave labeled TOM RIDDLE. Then he unwrapped the bundle, and Harry’s scar flared with pain that was another, added burden to the Soul-Drinker controlling him.

But Harry ignored all that, because what was driving him mad was being controlled. His mind. His body. His magic. His will.

He flung himself against the restraints, and flung himself, and flung himself. He remembered, vaguely, watching a cat that Dudley and Piers had captured doing the same thing. Harry had been contemptuous, thinking the cat should wait and find a way out later.

Now he knew why that hadn’t happened.

Harry couldn’t rest. He screamed and flung himself, and he flung himself, and he flung himself—

Calm down.

The command flooded Harry with artificial drowsiness, and his muscles, which had tightened a little, relaxed until he lolled sideways on the headstone. He hadn’t realized that he’d managed to tense even that much.

His thoughts seemed to swirl in slow circles. He stared at the tall, pale figure rising from the cauldron and watched Moody wrap black robes around it.

His scar burned.

I am going to die.

Harry forced himself past it. He’d been ordered to be calm. Fine. He would be.

He watched as the Dark Lord spoke to Moody, and Moody knelt, laughing, as he melted back into what must be his natural body. Blond hair, unscarred face, both legs naturally his. He looked at the Dark Lord with adoration that told Harry any road out of this by playing on Moody’s fondness for him was closed. And there was no one else here to help, probably because most of the Death Eaters were only superficially loyal and Pettigrew had been sentenced a year ago after Harry caught him.

His mind whispered, Why did he teach me the Soul-Drinker? It makes sense that he would use it to control me, when I can throw off the Imperius. But why teach it to me in the first place? Why give me a chance to resist?

Harry forced his thoughts on, on, between what seemed like heavy blinks as his mind turned slowly in place, a great maelstrom caged.

Because I was the one who brought it to him.

Yes. It had been in the books at Grimmauld Place, although Harry hadn’t spent as much time absorbing it or trying to master it as the other spells. And once he had brought it up to “Moody,” he had paused, but had agreed to teach it to Harry.

He hadn’t revealed all the aspects of it. He had never told Harry it could be used to control the magic and not just the body, for example.

But he hadn’t refused to teach it to Harry. Harry supposed that might have been because the refusal would seem suspicious, or perhaps Moody was still considering Harry for recruitment into the Death Eaters then and hadn’t believed he would ever need to cast it on Harry if he could persuade him.

Perhaps he’d wanted blackmail material.

It didn’t matter. He hadn’t told Harry everything about what it could do, about what he could do. But that didn’t matter. Not when Harry hadn’t told Moody everything, either.

He reached down deep. There was the command to be calm, and there was his motionless body. But they were lids on a swirling maelstrom. The spell’s control of his magic wasn’t perfect. Harry hadn’t conjured the most perfect ropes he could have.

And there was the weakness of the Soul-Drinker. Books had confirmed it.

Harry watched until he saw “Moody” leaning back on his heels and staring up at the Dark Lord like someone drunk, bobbing and bobbing his head.

Then Harry let his magic carry the force of his hatred.

It ripped down the bonds that connected him to the imposter. Harry had never hated anyone as much as he did this man, here and now, and he ripped and ripped and ripped, and the Soul-Drinker’s weakness opened—

A two-way road.

Harry surged along that road and possessed “Moody.”

He felt the horror, the surprise, the implacable will that rose against him.

Harry didn’t care. He had found his hatred, and he had found his vengeance. He had “Moody” take his wand from its holster, and he cast one of the spells Harry had been taught that he knew “Moody” knew.

It was a simple Severing Charm, for the most part, but with a twist to the wand that made it a curse, not a charm. And it flew straight for the Dark Lord, who was still musing aloud about calling the Death Eaters back to his side, and it severed his limbs from his body.

The Dark Lord howled in shock and fury as he fell. Harry didn’t bother to pay much attention to what he did next. He had only needed to make sure that one of the most powerful Dark wizards in the world didn’t get in the way of what he was doing, or figure out that his servant was possessed and try to free him.

Without a hand to hold a wand, he would find that considerably more difficult.

“Moody”—Barty, his name was Barty—was furiously fighting Harry. Harry turned inwards.

He could have commanded the man to be calm, the way that Barty had with him. But he didn’t need to. His hatred had fallen on Barty from above, like a collapsing mountain’s rubble, and it held his will prone easily enough.

Besides.

Harry wanted Barty to feel every inch of what was going to happen next.

He lifted his borrowed wand, with his borrowed arm. A huge snake was coming forth from behind one of the gravestones, but it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter at all. Barty’s magic and body were used to casting spells that Harry hadn’t mastered yet.

And one of them was an incantation from the Black library that he hadn’t dared to try.

But could now. His hatred made him as free as a bird. He could do everything now.

“Pestis incendium!”

There was a long moment when Harry thought it might not work after all, that he was going to have to struggle through with some other method of escape, but then he felt it. The spell leaped out of Barty’s wand and spread its wings across the graveyard.

Wings of flame. A great head yawned atop the leaping column of fire, and it became a rearing basilisk, neck lifted and fangs bared. The flame roared upright until it towered above some of the buildings Harry could dimly see in the distance.

Fiendfyre.

The snake lunged as if it thought it could get around the edge of the fire fast enough. Harry turned the flames towards it, as easy as breathing. There was a flicker and a snap of the basilisk’s jaws, and it swallowed the smaller snake whole.

A huge, blaring ripple of pain and horror and fury snapped around the graveyard, more than should have come from the death of a mere animal. Harry had no idea what it was. Had the snake been Voldemort’s familiar, and he was grieving its loss?

It didn’t matter. Harry turned his attention back to Barty, who was struggling harder against him than ever, and expressing his own horror over the death of the snake and the mutilation of his master’s body.

And you called others weak, Harry whispered to him.

He let Barty stand, as he’d been trying to do. But he didn’t let him regain any other control. Even with the Soul-Drinker being a two-way path, it didn’t matter. Barty couldn’t escape. Harry’s hatred was there, and this time, he didn’t want the threat to just vanish and leave him alone. He wanted to do some damage.

Harry—Harry, you can’t—

I hate you. I hate you more than I have ever hated anyone.

He couldn’t see the Dark Lord. Neither of them could. Maybe he was still writhing on the ground, alive, because not even the backlash of a Killing Curse could destroy him, but it didn’t matter.

Harry had Barty toss Harry’s wand back to his own body. He made his own hand move and clasp it.

Barty tried to break free again. Harry turned his attention to the man, and his hatred rose like a dragon and settled on Barty’s will, crushing his small struggles.

Harry—no—

Ah. So he could feel the intentions that danced and sparked through Harry’s mind, violent as summer lightning.

It didn’t matter. Harry took pleasure in speaking the words anyway, letting them leak into Barty’s mind along with everything else. Walk into the fire.

Barty screamed and screamed, but it didn’t matter. Harry forced him to stand and walk towards the Fiendfyre, which hadn’t spread very far from the point where it had begun. Harry had the impression that it was waiting on his will, since it had destroyed the snake, to see if he had more exciting things for it to do.

And now he did. Curls and tendrils of flame began to move ahead of the Fiendfyre, slinking towards Barty.

Death by burning is—is the most painful—

Yes, Harry said pleasantly, all his world consumed by and blazing with hatred. He had never felt like this. He had never known he could feel like this. Isn’t it?

I would have given you a painless death!

You would have killed me.

Barty walked closer and closer, and his will bucked and fought like a horse, trying again and again to seize control of Harry’s body and mind the way he had when he’d been brought here. Harry didn’t bother to calm him down. He wanted Barty to burn to death, and he wanted him to suffer for every second.

It seemed that the Fiendfyre wanted the same thing, maybe because Harry had ultimately been the one to will it into being. It snapped playfully at Barty’s boots as he entered it, and descended on him with gentleness that was nothing like the fury with which it had swallowed the Dark Lord’s snake.

Barty screamed.

There was nothing but pain in him, no will to fight. Harry still didn’t let him go. He held him there, and he felt him burning.

His hatred was hotter than the fire.

He only let Barty go when he felt the last of his consciousness disintegrate, flaring down to embers, and he reached out and made himself stand. He staggered over to the Cup, which Barty’s mind had told him was a Portkey that would take him back to Hogwarts. It had been meant to make it easy to leave Harry’s body in everyone’s sight.

“Potter.”

Harry turned his head, his neck painfully clicking, and stared at the Dark Lord. He was a burned torso and head, all his limbs piles of ash around him, his eyes deep-set and mad in little more than a skull, but he was still alive.

“I will remember.”

Harry didn’t think he could kill the Dark Lord if he had survived the Fiendfyre and all his limbs being cut off. He just stepped back and didn’t take his eyes off his enemy as he grasped the Portkey.

Inside him, his hatred whispered into silence.

*

“It was a Death Eater.”

Harry gasped and whimpered his way through the story, which said that it was a Death Eater in a disguise like the ones at the World Cup had worn. He never used the word “mask,” not when Dumbledore sat by listening with eyes like flint.

But he didn’t need to. “Disguise” was enough to slip past any Legilimency Dumbledore might try to use and leave Fudge babbling.

“But how did you escape, dear boy?” Fudge demanded, leaning forwards from the chair he had sat in beside Harry in the Headmaster’s office, listening enthralled to the tale. Harry shuddered and wrapped his arms around himself. “And who was this Death Eater?”

“He didn’t want to tell me his name,” Harry whispered. “And he was wearing Moody’s body via Polyjuice disguise.”

“You don’t have wards up against this kind of thing, Albus?” Fudge demanded, spinning around to look at Dumbledore.

“I think Harry’s story is more important than blaming each other right now, Cornelius.”

Harry kept his head down and stared at his hands. They were bone-pale where they clutched each other. So much of this wasn’t even a lie. He didn’t have to pretend to the horror and fear beating off him.

He hadn’t felt those things in the moment of killing Barty, but he had felt enough of them in the moments leading up to that.

Why didn’t I feel them right then?

But Harry put the matter aside to worry about later.

“I am most interested in how you escaped, my dear boy.”

Harry could just imagine Dumbledore was, although maybe not for the reasons that Fudge was. He braced himself and lifted his head, shivering as he stared over Dumbledore’s shoulder at the wall, never meeting the man’s eyes directly.

“The cup was a two-way Portkey,” Harry whispered. “It was how they got me to the graveyard. The Death Eater Apparated in, though. He was—spouting a lot of nonsense about how I was going to help resurrect the Dark Lord. I don’t know exactly what he did, what ritual he used. I was terrified out of my mind.”

“Of course!” Fudge patted clumsily at Harry’s shoulder. “Madman!”

“But I do know that—that there was fire.” Harry shivered and closed his eyes. He heard his voice emerging calm and flat, as though someone else were controlling his body with the Soul-Drinker again. “I don’t think the Death Eater could control it. I know there was a snake, too, and the fire killed it. I was tied to the gravestone, but I managed to get my wand back and severed the ropes. And then I ran for the cup.”

“You knew it was a Portkey?”

Harry ignored the heavy meaning in Dumbledore’s voice. He swallowed and opened his eyes, still staring at the wall. “I didn’t know—for sure. I just thought that maybe there was a chance it could help me get away.”

“Naturally, naturally! You demonstrated a cool head in battle, young man, and we are grateful to you! Imagine what would have happened if the Death Eater had succeeded in that insane ritual.” Fudge shook his head. “Of course it wouldn’t have resurrected You-Know-Who, he’s gone, but we never would have known what happened to wreck the Tournament.”

“Yes,” Harry said faintly.

Dumbledore started to say something, and then the wall behind Harry, the one that held the door that led to the moving staircase, blew apart. Harry dived and rolled beneath the desk, reaching for his wand.

“ALBUS!”

Madam Marchbanks.

Harry had known she would be there to watch the Third Task, but Dumbledore and Fudge had brought him so hastily to the Headmaster’s office that he hadn’t had the chance to wait for her. And it seemed that she’d had to blow up Dumbledore’s wards to get in.

“Griselda.”

Dumbledore’s voice was low and what Harry would describe as menacing. It didn’t matter. He stood up and walked around the desk into Madam Marchbanks’s arms, leaning against her and shuddering.

It was partially pretense, but partially not. He’d had to go from confronting Barty and the Dark Lord in the graveyard, fighting the Soul-Drinker, and casting Fiendfyre to dancing around the truth in Dumbledore’s presence.

“YOU TOOK HIM AWAY FROM ME!”

“We needed to question him about what had happened—”

“YOU TOOK HIM AND YOU LOCKED ME OUT!”

Madam Marchbanks was shaking. Harry wondered if some of it was fear and not anger, but he didn’t really have to care, he thought. He curled up and clung to her, and her hand came down and stroked his hair.

He was safe now.

“We needed to know—”

“WITHOUT MY PERMISSION! WITHOUT MY PRESENCE!”

Harry hid a smile—easy to do with his face pressed into his guardian’s robes—and curled closer still. Dumbledore would regret how eager he’d been to talk to Harry in the end, and that was all Harry wanted at the moment.

She would fight for him.

She always would.

*

“And what exactly happened in the graveyard?”

Harry sighed and leaned back at the table in the dungeon classroom his friends had dragged him to, looking around. Hermione hovered behind him, and Theo and Michael were sitting on either side of him. Zacharias and Parvati leaned forwards intently from the other side.

Harry had to decide what to tell them, now.

At least he didn’t think any of them had Legilimency training, and he didn’t have to be so careful with the words he spoke. He gave them a brief, true outline of how Barty had confronted him in Moody’s guise, and how he’d got to the graveyard and been controlled into tying himself up and giving his wand to Barty.

“But—”

“Yeah?”

“I thought you could resist the Imperius.” Parvati peered at him sternly.

Harry knew he didn’t imagine the way Theo’s gaze sharpened. He shrugged a little, limply, and said, “It wasn’t the Imperius.”

“Oh.”

Harry discussed fighting back against the mind control spell, and what little bits of the ritual he remembered. Everyone looked pale as he spoke of the Dark Lord coming back because of the potion. Hermione put her hands over her face.

Then Harry paused and said, “I was so horrified by the thought of getting killed that I was able to break free of the mental control the impostor had me under. He—he didn’t expect that. I—used some magic that would probably get me arrested.”

“What is it?” Theo’s voice was very soft and very sharp.

“I cut the Dark Lord’s arms and legs off—”

People either choked or tried to shout at the same time.

Harry leaned back in his chair and stared at them. They realized less than a moment later what was going on, and broke off. Then they exchanged glances that made Harry feel as if he sat on the outside, and they were a group of friends making their own decisions, exchanging their own silent ideas.

That was all right. Uncomfortable, but all right. Harry already knew that he would carry the full truth of what happened with him, into silence.

They seemed to have elected Theo spokesman. He clasped his hands in front of him on the table, and said, “No one here will judge you.”

Harry doubted that very much, but he ducked his head and nodded. “The other spell I used was Fiendfyre.”

Parvati looked as if she would faint. Zacharias pushed his chair back so that there was suddenly twice as much distance between him and Harry.

This is why I won’t tell you the full truth, Harry thought.

“What’s Fiendfyre?” Michael and Hermione asked at almost the same time.

Harry let Theo explain. He kept his eyes moving slowly and steadily between each of his friends’ faces. Parvati looked a little ashamed of her reaction, but Zacharias kept his chair pushed back, his gaze averted.

That is all right.

“That’s some of the most powerful Dark Arts you can cast,” Zacharias finally whispered, after Theo’s explanation had died into silence. “You can’t—you can’t cast that kind of spell unless you mean it.”

“Yes.”

“You’re Darker than I thought.”

“If you’re going to leave, then there are certain things I’ll have to remove from you with a Memory Charm, Zacharias.”

Zacharias started wildly. Harry kept his gaze on the boy who had been his friend, and his hand on his wand. He knew more than enough magic to trip Zacharias up and bind him if he tried to flee.

And if he had to cast the Memory Charm on the others?

He would do that. Hermione might be a problem, but Harry was sure that he would find the motivation. If he could vanish a dragon, he could make a ghost stop existing, if he couldn’t Obliviate her.

The winter wind of his hatred howled in him. It would be nothing to swing it to chill the next person who betrayed him.

Zacharias stared at him. So did the others. Well, Theo looked back and forth between Harry and Zacharias with a curious expression, as if wondering which one of them would strike first.

“I didn’t say,” Zacharias whispered between lips that sounded numb, “that I was going to leave.”

“You said I was Darker than you thought. You disapprove of the magic that I used to save my life.” Harry tilted his head. He felt calm, confident, strong, full of loathing. He would strike, and he would win, and if Zacharias insisted on challenging him, he would lose.

“I didn’t say that I was going to leave.” Zacharias cleared his throat and stared at the table. When he spoke again, his voice sounded different, small and nervous. “You look like you’re going to kill me.”

“I would prefer to just use the Memory Charm.”

“I’m not going to leave!”

“Then don’t scold me. I’m not going to tolerate scolding.”

Zacharias said nothing for long enough that Harry wondered if he was having trouble making up his mind. Harry ignored the temptation to look at his other friends. He didn’t want to see the disapproval, the scolding, on their faces, either. With as fragile as he felt right now, he would simply attack them if they wanted to wail about morality.

Fragile? No, I’m strong.

But he didn’t feel as strong as he’d thought, sitting there. He waited, and waited, and Zacharias finally leaned back in his chair and coughed.

“I’m glad that you survived,” he said. “And I just want to know—would you use Fiendfyre again? If that was the only spell that could save you?”

“Without hesitation,” Harry whispered.

“Would—you use it just to use it? To burn someone’s house to punish them, for example?”

“What would be the point of that?”

Zacharias’s hands flexed, and he muttered something under his breath that Harry couldn’t quite hear. Then he sighed and met Harry’s eyes again. “You would choose a different spell if you wanted to burn someone’s house to punish them.”

“Yes.”

Zacharias closed his eyes and gave a short, unhappy laugh that Harry didn’t really understand. But he shook his head and sat upright in his chair, too. “I can’t even imagine what you went through,” he said. “Being controlled like that. But I caught a glimpse of the power you can command when you vanished the dragon, and I didn’t turn away from you then. I won’t turn away now. Just—Harry, sheathe your claws, won’t you?”

Harry blinked and then leaned slowly back, nodding. He supposed that he shouldn’t try to make his friends afraid. They would truly leave not because they wanted to betray him, but because they would fear him.

And Harry—

Didn’t want to be alone because of his own fears. Only if it was necessary.

“We can accept what happened,” Theo said, looking steadily around the table, meeting the others’ eyes one by one. “We can say that you told us the true story and we’re satisfied with it.”

The others nodded. Parvati even looked up with a faint smile. “Maybe you can teach us all how to resist the Imperius.”

Hermione floated down and hugged Harry, even though it felt like nothing more than a brief brush of cold, wet mist along his robes. “I was so scared,” she whispered. “But for you. Not of you.”

Harry swallowed, took a deep breath, and nodded. And then he went on to tell them something that made them laugh, the confrontation in Dumbledore’s office with the Headmaster and Fudge.

Through it all, he could feel Theo’s eyes on him, but Harry did his best to ignore that.

*

“That’s not all that happened.”

Harry turned around to face Theo. They were near the place where they would have to part so they could return to their respective common rooms. The others had already gone, accepting without saying anything that Theo wanted to talk to Harry in private.

“No, it’s not,” Harry said softly.

“Why are you keeping it from me?”

“Because murder is one thing. And torture is another.”

Theo watched him, his face pale but his eyes a shining, light grey in the shifting shadows of the torches. Finally, he said, “I would never blame you for anything that you did to defend your own life.”

Harry blew out a short breath. Then he said, “I grabbed control of the Death Eater’s mind and made him walk into the Fiendfyre. I held him there while he died.”

Theo’s eyes widened. Then he smiled, a small, cold, cruel expression.

“He deserved it.”

And that was all that needed to be said between them.

*

Madam Marchbanks listened carefully as Harry told her the truth. Then she settled back in her chair and watched him bleakly.

Harry waited. He knew where to run to, how to get past the wards, if she turned on him. If she tried to have him arrested or detained.

But Madam Marchbanks only sighed and said, “You need a Mind-Healer.”

“Because I’m a torturer, a killer, I know—”

“No. For the trauma.”

Harry paused. Then he said, “Killing him didn’t traumatize me.”

“It made you jagged. The memory is lurking just beneath the surface. And there’s the fact that someone you trusted to teach you kidnapped you. The betrayal would be profound.” Madam Marchbanks spoke in a soft tone, without kindness, only sense, as if she were inside his head and could hear how Harry always spoke to himself. “The memory can be a source of strength to you, but only if we bind it so you remember what you did but your emotions aren’t part of it.”

“Mind-Healing can do that?”

“Yes, it can.” Madam Marchbanks thumped her cane once on the floor. “And without this, there’s a chance that you’ll break, clear through. You’re already making plans for what happens if I betray you, aren’t you?”

Harry swallowed. He wanted to deny it, but he knew that Madam Marchbanks would only give him an unimpressed stare. So he whispered, “Yes.”

Madam Marchbanks drew her wand. Harry tensed, the winter wind inside him rising, but Madam Marchbanks only pointed her wand at herself and said, “Let the Vow I take now kill me, suffering slowly, over the days of a month if I ever break it.” She tapped her wand, which glowed the bright green of the Killing Curse, against her knee and said, “I will not betray you.”

Harry shuddered, relaxing in a great rush. For the first time since the graveyard, he realized. Really for the first time since then.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

Madam Marchbanks stood and made her way over to him, moving obviously. She held out her arms, and Harry rushed into them and clung to her, for the first time since then.

“We’ll find a Mind-Healer tomorrow,” Madam Marchbanks whispered. “They’ll swear the same Vow at wandpoint if I have to make them do that. And then we’ll start subtracting the less useful emotions from your experience.”

“I never want to be helpless again,” Harry breathed, something he would only confess to her.

“And you won’t be.” Madam Marchbanks stepped back, meeting his eyes. “Voldemort is back, obviously, whether he still has a physical form after the Fiendfyre or not. We will find him. We will defeat him. And we’ll start seeking out news. Not the kind of gossip that rag reports on,” she said, sneering at the Prophet on the table. They hadn’t stopped reporting on Krum’s victory since it happened. “Ways to discover him, fight him, turn his allies from him.”

“Because he’ll come after me?”

“For what he’ll do in the future. For what he’s already done. No one touches my ward and gets away with it.”

Harry pressed closer to her, and felt her hand on his shoulder, heavy, protective. For a moment, he closed his eyes and let the tears rise in them the way they wanted to.

And then he pushed them away. Because tears wouldn’t help hm survive at the moment.

Hatred would.

And trust. And friendship.

Harry didn’t know if he was capable of love, but no one was demanding that he be.

He would survive.

The End.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 5 of From Samhain to the Solstice 2024
• Part 4 of These Creatures