Chapter 12
Try-outs for the Slytherin Quidditch team were held on Saturday afternoon. The captain, a sixth year named Marcus Flint, spent much of the morning grumpily complaining about the Gryffindor team who'd secured the Quidditch pitch for the whole morning.
Although the team was only in need of two Chasers and a Beater, Flint still tested out people for all positions, rigorously pitting the previous year's Seeker Terrence Higgs, Keeper Miles Bletchley, and remaining Beater Lucian Bole against the hopeful try outs. Harry preferred to be a Seeker, but he would be happy to settle for playing as Chaser. After several hours of darting around the pitch, catching Quaffles and practice Snitches, Flint called them all down and surprised everyone with his decisions.
"Bletch, you're still Keeper. Montague, Pucey, you're the new Chasers with me," he told a couple of fourth years, who high-fived each other. "Warrington, Michaels, Finn, on reserve. Derrick, you're a Beater with Bole; Bowden and Tanner are reserves." Everyone else's shoulders slumped with disappointment, but then Flint added: "Potter-Valentine, you're Seeker. Higgs, reserve."
Harry gaped. Higgs looked furious.
"You're replacing me?"
"Yeah, I'm replacing you. Potter-Valentine flew better than you up there."
"That's bullshit!" Higgs yelled, tossing down his broom and stepping up to Flint so they stood nose to nose. "He's a second year; you can't kick me off the team for that little snot."
"I can and I am. Back off before I pull you from the reserve team as well!"
Higgs glared at him for a few moments more, fingers twitching like he wanted to go for his wand, but he apparently decided it wasn't worth it and turned away with a snort, snatching up his broom.
"Practice is Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and Saturday afternoons," Flint told the team. "Miss one and you get knocked to the reserves. Miss two and you get kicked entirely."
They nodded and traipsed off. Higgs purposely knocked into Harry as he stalked off the pitch and Harry made a mental note to keep an eye on him in future, just in case Higgs decided to sabotage Harry to get his spot back. He rubbed at his shoulder and glowered as the boy walked away, but he felt too pleased with himself to really let the older boy's attitude bother him. Even his detention that night—cleaning the outside panes of the greenhouses—couldn't squash his pride, though he was trembling and antsy by the time it was over because it was several hours past the usual time he took his evening dose of pain reliever.
Unofficial Defence clubs were once again being held in the common room in the evening. Even Lockhart's fans had to admit that when it came to actually teaching them anything, he was utterly useless. All the classes were being subject to the same curriculum of 'learning from my experiences'—which basically meant listening to Lockhart go on and on about his various adventures, or reading his books. Harry had taken up his usual task of studying his own stuff, something he was only able to get away with because Lockhart seemed to be doing his best to pretend that Harry didn't exist. Harry didn't mind this in the slightest; the advanced theory that he was now learning seemed a lot more difficult than what he'd been on the year before and he was glad to be able to just get on with things.
Tori's enthusiasm for the man had dropped considerably. She still thought he was very handsome and his adventures very exciting (with the exception of his attack on Dagr Wolff), but her Ravenclaw sensibilities and desire for a proper education overrode much of her crush on the man. Anita, by contrast, had absolutely nothing kind to say about him and complained to Harry regularly that if Hermione continued to crush on Lockhart then Anita would have to reconsider being friends with her.
Hallowe'en fell on a Saturday that year, and Harry was very grateful for it. The third years and up had a Hogsmeade weekend, so most of them were out of the castle for the day, but Harry had another reason for being glad it was a Saturday. A week earlier he wrote home to get his parents to request permission for his annual trip to Godric's Hollow, which they did, but a few days beforehand Harry went to Gareth's office to ask him about something he'd been thinking about for several months now.
"Harry, come in. What can I do for you?"
He sat in one of the chairs before Gareth's desk, picking at the knee of his robe. "I was wondering," he said hesitantly, "if you would take me somewhere on Saturday."
Gareth's eyebrows rose. "Somewhere other than Godric's Hollow? Where?" he asked when Harry nodded.
"Um… the Black Prison."
Gareth leant his arms on the desk, folded one over the other, and frowned at Harry. "Why?"
"To see Remus Lupin."
"There isn't much to see. He's comatose."
"I know. But he's my godfather, professor. I've spent pretty much forever hating him because everyone said he betrayed my birth parents to the Dark Lord, but now I know he didn't and I want to see him."
"Have you asked your parents about this?"
Harry shook his head before Gareth even finished asking. "He's a werewolf, professor. They would never want me to see him."
"Then what makes you think I'll take you? I don't have their permission to take you anywhere other than Godric's Hollow."
"They don't have to know," Harry told him. "They won't know if we visit it before going to see my parents' grave. I won't tell them and if you don't then they'll never have reason to suspect I ever went. It's not like I want Lupin to wake up. Even if he did, I'd never want to live with him or anything. I don't want him being an actual godfather to me because he's a werewolf, but I just… I want to see him."
"You know if I did that and your parents found out, they'd have me for dinner. Literally."
"We just have to make sure they never find out."
Gareth was still frowning. "I don't know, Harry. Let me think on it. I'm the one that'd get in trouble for it—not just from your parents, but from Dumbledore, too; I could get fired for something like this—but I'll consider it, alright?"
Realising it was the best he would get, Harry nodded and left. He didn't have high hopes, however, and he started wondering if it'd be possible for him to sneak away and visit the prison himself. He probably couldn't do it from home—he couldn't even sneak into the village to visit the park without his parents finding out—but there were ways to get out of Hogwarts undetected, secret passages and the like. Getting into the prison itself would be harder. He'd definitely have to take an Aging Potion or something, because they'd never let a child inside, but visitation was probably restricted to law enforcement and inmate friends and family, and he had no idea how to get past that.
But fortunately he didn't have to. On Saturday afternoon, when Gareth had him touch the portkey that took them out of the castle, it didn't drop them at the usual spot at the edge of Godric's Hollow. Instead, they were dropped at the entrance of a two-storey, red brick building with a twelve-foot wall surrounding it. They were just in front of a gate set into the wall, beside which leant Sirius Black. He straightened up when they appeared, approaching.
"Martin," he greeted curtly, then a little more warmly: "Harry. This way."
They followed him through the gate and down a path to the red-brick building, heavy wire fencing on either side that stretched up to create an arch over their heads. It took them to a double door that was opened from the inside by a guard in white robes who greeted Sirius politely and stared suspiciously at Gareth and Harry. Another guard sat behind a glass partition and they had to give their wands to her before they were allowed to follow Sirius through a barred door and further into the building.
It looked more like a hospital than a prison to Harry, with long white corridors, thick metal doors set into the walls, small windows set into each one. At a few, he saw faces peering out, some human in appearance, some decidedly not. Even the electric lights, which Harry was surprised by, gave it a sense of being in hospital. They passed though a few more barred doors before Sirius eventually stopped at one of the metal doors.
"You sure about this, kid?" he asked Harry.
"He can't hurt me, can he?"
"No, but he wouldn't anyway."
"He's a werewolf."
"He wouldn't hurt you as long as he's human," Sirius amended. "I was an idiot for ever thinking he would. Remus is a good man—a better man than me, that's for sure. If our positions had been reversed he'd have found out the truth before attacking me."
Harry wasn't sure he believed that, but he said he was certain about his decision and Sirius opened the door. The inside seemed much like a hospital room, too, with its white walls and electric ceiling light. In the middle of the room was a bed with side railings and a monitor beside it, and in it was Harry's godfather.
Harry had seen pictures of Remus Lupin as a teenager, standing alongside his father. He'd been a mild-looking boy, thin and wiry, with light-brown hair and amber eyes. All in all, he looked distinctly unthreatening and not someone who anyone would look at and immediately think werewolf. Despite this, in Harry's mind's eye he had developed an image of adult-Lupin as a big, hairy, and beastly—someone rather like Fenrir Greyback, in fact—so he was a little surprised by the sickly-thin man lying on the bed. His hair was almost entirely grey, although neatly trimmed, as was the shadow of a beard on his jaw, and he looked as if he'd be knocked over by a strong wind. He didn't look anything like a werewolf and Harry approached the bed without fear.
He didn't know what to make of the man. For years he disowned Lupin as a godfather, refusing to accept that a traitorous werewolf could be anything like that to him, but looking at the man in the bed he couldn't help but think of him as just an unfortunate victim. This was someone that his birth parents had trusted to look after him, had trusted even over Sirius Black the Auror, and when they were killed Lupin had been wrongly accused, assaulted by someone he'd thought a friend, and locked in a prison for over a decade, completely comatose. If he'd woken up before Peter Pettigrew was discovered, he probably would have been given the Dementor's Kiss without ever getting the chance to clear his name. How could Harry not feel sorry for him?
But even as he considered that, even as he looked at the man lying utterly motionless save for the slight rise and fall of his chest, he still felt a surge of hate and fear just knowing what he was. Snape had stirred in Harry a distrust and dislike of werewolves, Fenrir Greyback had enhanced that to genuine fear, and his parents had stoked it to fully fledged hate. No matter how much he pitied the man or understood Lupin's circumstances, Harry didn't think he'd ever be able to like him. He'd never accept Lupin as a godfather, not unless someone found a miracle cure for werewolves.
Little Hangleton was an unremarkable English village inhabited primarily by Muggles. Only one wizarding family lived in the area—the Gaunts, all dead except for a man by the name of Morfin, who was a resident in Azkaban. The cottage of the Gaunt family was a rundown shack of a place that should have been of no interest to Lucius, except that it was covered with so many powerful protective charms that it practically shimmered in the dull autumn daylight.
With the knowledge of Voldemort's true name, he went looking into the Dark Lord's background. 'Riddle' was not any wizarding family that Lucius knew of, and 'Tom' was a painfully common Muggle name, so with a sick feeling of suspicion Lucius had checked Hogwarts year books, Ministry records, and private genealogy trees. Nowhere had he found evidence of Tom Riddle being a pureblood, so he had hired someone to look into Muggle records. (He might be willing to kill the Dark Lord, but that didn't mean he was willing to figure out how to deal with Muggles. That's what lackeys were for.) Riddle was fortunately a rare enough surname that he found only a couple of families in England, and it only took inspecting the various birth and death dates to figure out which of two Tom Riddles was Voldemort. Discovering that the elder Tom Riddle happened to live in the same village as one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight pureblood families—the Gaunts, who were also some of the few Parseltongue speakers in Britain—was enough to make Lucius almost certain that the Tom Riddle born at a London orphanage in 1926 was Lord Voldemort.
He looked further into the history of both families, and it didn't take him long to discover the murder of Tom Riddle Senior and his two Muggle parents in 1943. Another trip to Azkaban to speak with Morfin Gaunt, the man arrested for the murder, was enough to confirm Lucius' suspicions—Tom Riddle, aka Lord Voldemort, was the half-blood child of Tom Riddle Senior and Merope Gaunt, now deceased.
So Lucius visited the village hoping to find some kind of clue as to another Horcrux Voldemort might have made. He didn't expect to find an actual Horcrux, but he was almost certain that's what the ring buried in the remains of the heavily enchanted Gaunt cottage was. He didn't dare touch it with his bare hands—but it was close. The enchantments on it were enough to make him grimace just determining them, but there was also a compulsion on it that he very nearly didn't notice until he was a hair's breadth from picking it up. He just barely stopped himself, wrapped the blasted thing in a handkerchief, and left to go investigate the long abandoned Riddle Manor on the other side of the village.
The first Quidditch match of the season was held a week after Hallowe'en. Harry walked onto the pitch with the rest of the Slytherin team with a stomach full of nerves, but once he was in the air it all fell away. It simply wasn't possible for him to be nervous when the wind was whipping though his hair and the ground was fifty feet below. He just focused on hunting down the Snitch and keeping an eye on Nick Coleman, the Gryffindor Seeker, in case he saw it first.
He did, and to Harry's despair Coleman was also much closer to the Snitch than he was. Even with his much superior broom, Harry had no chance of reaching it before Coleman did, but Lucian Bole also noticed this and sent a Bludger tearing across the field towards Coleman's head. The Seeker dodged it, but the delay was enough time for Harry to catch up with him, for all the good it did—the Snitch also darted away when the Bludger came flying past and vanished from both Seekers' sight.
It was another hour before they saw it again and the score was 120-90 to Gryffindor. Harry noticed the Snitch fluttering about just above the head of Gilderoy Lockhart and he flattened himself to his broom as he flew towards it. He heard Lee Jordan, the commentator, cry something about Harry going mad and attacking teachers, saw Lockhart and the people sitting around him throw themselves out the way, and then he snatched the little gold ball from the air, his broomstick tail just brushing the top of Professor Dumbledore's white hair, who hadn't so much as flinched away from Harry's incoming broom.
"He was trying to kill me!" Lockhart was still yelling half an hour later, but the only people who'd listen to him were his own portraits. Harry, meanwhile, was settled in the Slytherin common room enjoying the praise of his housemates and listening to several of them lament the fact that he hadn't crashed into Lockhart.
"Useless wanker could do with a good knock 'round the head," remarked Cid Villiers.
Ginny Weasley gasped. "You can't call him that. He's a teacher."
There were several scoffs and snorts of objection and Ginny flushed, but snapped, "Well he is, even if he is useless."
"Justification enough to call him a wanker," Flint told her. "If you're a prig like your brother, Weasley, your life in Slytherin is going to be very difficult."
"If you mean Percy—"
"Well I don't mean the twins, do I? And you'd best not take after them, either. We're not big fans of them down here."
Ginny stood up, glaring at Flint with her fists clenched by her sides, unperturbed by the fact that Flint was a full foot taller than her and almost twice as wide. Harry supposed she was used to standing up to bigger and older boys, coming from a family of six brothers; she'd certainly stood up to them when they tried to demand she be resorted. The whole school heard her yelling at them in the Entrance Hall.
"I don't take after any of my brothers, I'm my own person, but they're still my family and if you're rude about them then your life in Slytherin is going to be very difficult."
This elicited laughs from several of the older students, but although Flint was smiling it wasn't mocking.
"You've got spunk, Weasley, I'll give you that."
The term went on. Harry and Lockhart continued to pretend the other didn't exist, pupil-run defence lessons were still held every evening in the Slytherin common room, and Harry made no attempt to hide his smug satisfaction when Tori finally admitted that Lockhart was a completely useless teacher. They both went home for the winter holiday and Harry celebrated Saturnalia with twice as much enthusiasm to make up for missing it the year before. Slytherin's second Quidditch match was the second weekend of the spring term, against Hufflepuff, and they won it 230-20, almost guaranteeing that they would win the Quidditch Cup even if they lost their last match against Ravenclaw in May.
On the fourteenth of February, Lockhart held schoolwide Valentine's Day celebrations, which included decorating the Great Hall in lurid pink flowers and heart-shaped confetti, whilst hiring a bunch of dwarfs to dress up as cupids to deliver valentines to people throughout the day. Harry thought the whole thing was utterly ridiculous, an opinion he was not alone in, but a large number of people thought it was delightful. Including Tori and Hermione Granger.
"Hermione sent That Idiot a card," Anita told Harry at morning break. "Can you believe it?"
"Unfortunately, yes." He wasn't sure he wanted to ask Tori if she had, too; she might not approve of Lockhart's teaching methods, but she still thought he was dreadfully handsome and daring.
To Harry's surprise and humiliation, one of the cupids hunted him down in the corridor in the afternoon and very loudly sung a poem that compared his eyes to toads. He tried to laugh it off, but he could feel his face burning with embarrassment and had to endure Theo's sniggering all through History of Magic. He sat at the Ravenclaw table with Tori at dinner just to get away from it, but that wasn't ideal, either.
"Heard you got a valentine," she said, grinning slyly at him while he scowled.
"Don't you start."
"Start what?" she said innocently. "You should be flattered. No one sent me any valentines."
"Why would you want one? They just stupid cards or teddies or roses or something."
"Because it means someone fancies you!" she said as if him not realising this was like not knowing that the earth revolved around the sun.
"So?"
"So… so it's nice. It means someone thinks you're special. Don't you want someone to fancy you?"
"Not if it means they send me stupid poems," he said earnestly.
"Don't you fancy anyone?"
"No. Why, do you?"
She looked down at her dinner. "Maybe," she mumbled.
"Who? Oh come on, you have to tell me now," he insisted when she shrugged. "I won't laugh, I promise."
She squirmed a little, looking embarrassed, but leant in and said in a low voice, "Ernie Macmillan."
"The Hufflepuff?" Harry asked, looking over to the next table. Slytherin didn't share any classes with the Hufflepuffs so he didn't know them very well, but he thought Ernie was a pompous-looking blond boy. "Did you send him a valentine?"
Tori nodded, looking very embarrassed now. "But I didn't put my name or anything. I don't want him knowing it's from me."
Harry looked at her, bemused. "But if you fancy him, don't you want to go out with him? You can't do that if he doesn't know you fancy him."
"I know that!" she snapped. "I just… it's… I mean, he might not fancy me, and if he doesn't then he'd probably laugh at me or something. It doesn't matter anyway, it's just a crush, and you'd better not make fun of me or tell him about it."
Harry affected a solemn expression. "I shan't say a word," he promised. "Besides, I never really speak to the Hufflepuffs anyway."
"Well. Good."
Kreacher, the Black family house elf, was Lucius' next port of call, and he did not enjoy it. For one, it meant interacting with a house elf; secondly, it was Sirius Black's house elf, and the last thing Lucius needed was Dumbledore's pet Auror sticking his nose into Lucius' business.
Fortunately he was able to go direct to the source. It wasn't unheard of to send one's house elf to deal with another family's house elf on matters of little importance. The destruction of Lord Voldemort was hardly that, but Lucius wasn't about to ask Sirius if he could speak to his house elf about the circumstances surrounding Regulus' disappearance.
It was a bit of a stretch, in truth. No one really knew what happened to Regulus Black, but he'd disappeared in 1979 and Lucius knew for a fact that the boy had been hesitant in his duties as a Death Eater. Bellatrix, who before had talked greatly about how wonderful her youngest cousin was and how he was such a proper pureblood with the right ideals, had stopped being quite so vocal about Regulus after he actually joined the Death Eaters. Then the winter after Orion Black died, whilst Regulus was home with his newly widowed mother, he vanished. The Death Eaters assumed foul play on the part of Dumbledore and his lot, or the Ministry, but Lucius later discovered that the Ministry assumed the Death Eaters had killed Regulus.
But a house elf knew all the family secrets and some weeks before Regulus' disappearance, Voldemort had asked a favour of Regulus. Given how Sirius turned out, Lucius didn't think it impossible that Regulus had balked at whatever Voldemort asked of him and turned traitor, perhaps while still in possession of another Horcrux, or the knowledge of where one was. Maybe he'd even pulled a Pettigrew and was hiding somewhere in plain sight.
He sent Dobby to Kreacher with a message that Lucius had a number of Black family heirlooms that had belonged to Narcissa and which Lucius wished to return to the proper family, only for Dobby to return with the message that Kreacher wasn't the Black family elf anymore. He'd been set free by Sirius several years earlier, after Walburga Black's death. This didn't surprise Lucius much; what did surprise him was that the elf was still alive. It was quite common for dismissed house elves to die from shock or despair, and it was a surprise that Kreacher, who'd been old in the 70s and served the Blacks his entire life, hadn't had a fatal heart attack on the spot.
But it worked in Lucius' favour. With Kreacher free, he was no longer obliged to keep the Black family's secrets. Of course, he was also not obligated to tell them, either—at least not until Lucius sent Dobby back with an offer of a position and then bound Kreacher into his own service. Then the whole story came out, albeit not easily as Kreacher, apparently still with some lingering loyalty, struggled not to speak.
But Lucius got every detail out of him—Voldemort's request for a house elf, taking Kreacher to a cave and force feeding him some potion before hiding a locket in a basin, Kreacher returning to Regulus on his master's orders, and then Regulus venturing to the same cave and succumbing to watery monsters (inferi, Lucius suspected from the elf's descriptions) after giving one final order that Kreacher destroy the locket taken from the basin.
"So it's destroyed," Lucius said when the elf finished talking, but Kreacher shook his head. "No? You disobeyed your master?"
"Kreacher tried!" the elf wailed, thoroughly distressed at the mere idea of disobeying Regulus. "Kreacher tried everything, everything he knew, but nothing, nothing would work… so many powerful spells upon the casing, Kreacher was sure the way to destroy it was to get inside it, but it would not open… Kreacher punished himself, he tried again, he punished himself, he tried again. Kreacher failed to obey orders, Kreacher could not destroy the locket!"
"Then where is it?" Lucius demanded. "What did you do with it?"
Wet-eyed and snotty-nosed, the elf still managed to look recalcitrant and he fought not to answer, lips trembling with the effort to hold them shut, but Lucius ordered him again and the elf blurted out, "Kreacher stole it. When Kreacher was dismissed by rotten blood traitor Sirius, Kreacher stole the locket so Kreacher could keep trying."
God bless overly loyal house elves, Lucius thought with a grim smile, and ordered the elf to bring him the locket immediately.
Shortly after the spring holiday, the Ravenclaws started a petition to have Lockhart fired and passed it around the school from house to house. With the exams looming, even the staunchest Lockhart fans were less than pleased with his teaching methods, and the fifth and seventh years absolutely hated him. The rest of the students only had to take Lockhart's self-written end of year test, after all; they, on the other hand, had official exams that were not going to have questions like How much hair gel does Gilderoy Lockhart use in a month?
Harry barely looked away from his own books to scribble his name on the petition when it reached him. He felt a lot more pressured by three NEWT exams than he had by three OWLs, and he spent every spare minute with his nose in a book, snapping at anyone who distracted him. His work in other classes was slipping, he knew, but he didn't care. He wasn't so far behind in anything that he'd fail his end of year tests and he only needed to pass those, not excel in them, to not get held back a year. He wanted to get at least an 'Exceeds Expectations' in his NEWTs, but preferably 'Outstanding', and he definitely didn't want to fail and have to try again next year. If he passed the NEWTs now, he wouldn't take Transfiguration, Defence, or Charms at all next year, which meant he could take all five of the optional third year classes instead of just two or three like everyone else took.
Quidditch was about the only time Harry relaxed that term. With the Quidditch Cup practically in their grasp already, they slacked a bit in their training and they only beat Hufflepuff 180-90, after Harry caught the Snitch, but celebrated the win of match and cup long into the night.
The NEWTs were carried out exactly as they had been the year before, right down to the day on which each exam was held. The only difference was that Harry, instead of being called in last, was called in after the seventh years but before the fifth years, presumably so that the examiners didn't go from testing NEWT students to OWLs and then back again.
He was incredibly grateful when they were all over. He was a little less confident about his answers on the theory exams than he had been the year before, but he had no doubts about his practical work and was sure that any failings in the written would be made up by his perfect spell work.
As expected, he didn't do great in his other end of year exams, but he passed everything and not too terribly, so that was alright. He paid a little more attention to what was happening around him, too, and learnt that the petition against Lockhart was successful—or at least, presumed successful. Lockhart was leaving at the end of the year, but he proclaimed that it was to write another book and get back to adventuring. It was generally agreed upon that this was an utter lie and his attempt to save face, but as long as he left no one really cared. They were all just crossing their fingers for a competent new teacher in September.
"You could teach us now," Theo said to Harry at the end of year feast. "You're practically a fully-qualified wizard already."
"Only in Transfiguration, Charms, and Defence," Harry pointed out, somewhat amused by the suggestion. "I don't think I'd be a very good teacher anyway. I don't like helping other people that much and I'd hate marking homework."
"You'd be better than what we've had so far, especially if you didn't give us homework."
"That's not a hard bar to pass, Theo," he said dryly.
Despite the Slytherin win of the Quidditch Cup, Gryffindor took the House Cup that year. The noise of their cheers almost raised the roof; Slytherin had held it for the past eight years, so even Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff were glad to see it go to someone else for a change.
The summer passed unremarkably. They went to Italy this year, which was Harry's favourite of their three summer homes. His NEWT results came and he was pleased to get an 'O' in his Charms and Defence and an 'E' in Transfiguration, and surprised to get an accompanying letter saying that because he'd passed all his spell-work NEWTs, the Ministry was making a special exception to let him use magic outside of school. As he'd been doing this for years anyway, it wasn't as exciting as it might have been.
Their book lists arrived earlier than the summer before and Harry wrote to Anita and Theo about meeting up in Diagon Alley again, as Tori wrote to her friends. Theo refused without giving a reason and making Harry wonder if he thought more of their friendship than Theo did, but Anita agreed and so a few days after the Valentines returned from Italy, Harry and Tori headed to Diagon Alley with Jennifer, briefly met their friends' parents, and then went off by themselves.
The very first thing to catch their attention was Quality Quidditch Supplies, which had a display model of the brand new Firebolt. Lisa and Padma had little interest in Quidditch and had no appreciation at all for the broomstick, but while Tori and Anita certainly admired it they didn't have the same level of fascination as Harry did. He was practically drooling as he battled the crowd to stare at the slick design and was incredibly tempted to ask his parents for one. It didn't have a price tag, but Gabriel and Lorna had never flinched at the price of anything before so he was sure they could afford it. But there was nothing wrong with his Nimbus 2001 and while it might not have been up to the Firebolt's standards, it was hardly a bad broom and just over a year old, so they probably wouldn't agree to get him a Firebolt yet. Maybe at Saturnalia or his next birthday he thought hopefully as the girls finally dragged him away.
Initially, Harry and Anita stuck with Tori, Lisa, and Padma, but they separated after a while when Anita asked Harry quietly, "Have you ever been down Knockturn Alley?"
Harry nodded, standing in line at the apothecary. "Loads of times."
"I haven't. What's it like?"
"Um… kind of unpleasant? I mean, the shops sell dark magic items, and some of the street vendors are dodgy, also it's pretty dark and dinghy, but it's not like you'll shrivel up and die just stepping down there."
"Can we go visit?" she asked as they reached the counter and dumped their purchases down for the cashier to ring up. "I want to see it, but Mum never let me before."
Harry hesitated. Gabriel and Lorna always warned him and Tori against going down there on their own, but he was thirteen now and the youngest person to ever earn a NEWT, so he didn't see why he shouldn't be able to go down a shopping alley alone.
"Sure, but we'll leave them behind," he said with a nod of his head at his sister and her friends. Tori probably wouldn't mind coming, but he didn't think Lisa and Padma would come down Knockturn Alley with them.
So when the three Ravenclaws said they were going to Fortescue's for ice cream, Harry and Anita said they didn't want any and slipped off on their own, glancing around before darting down the entrance to Knockturn Alley.
"You were right about dark and dinghy," Anita muttered as they wandered down it, sticking close to him. "But lets look in some of the shops."
Harry obliged, keeping one hand on the wand at his hip. In Borgin and Burkes, a general pawnshop, they peered around at a Hand of Glory, cursed jewellery, and a broken vanishing cabinet until the owner's suspicious glare scared them off. There was another apothecary here, but instead of selling hayfever relief, general painkillers, and cures for simple maladies like colds and indigestion, they had sleeping potions that caused nightmares, draughts that gave the drinker indigestion or headaches, and straight up poisons. Even the ingredients were dangerous, with poisonous plants locked in boxes and live creatures crawling around in glass cages to be milked of venom as necessary.
Only when they went into a bookshop did it occur to Harry that a visit to Knockturn Alley without his parents was just the thing he needed. He stood before an entire shelf of books dedicated to demonology and felt a sick twist in his gut as he realised that for two years he'd completely forgotten—or, more truthfully, ignored—what he'd learnt his first term at Hogwarts. Now, two weeks after his thirteenth birthday and staring at books with titles like Dealing with Demons: A Summoner's Guide, he was suddenly, painfully aware that there were only five and a half years left before his ten years were up.
He had a flick through them, checked the price tags and then how much money he had on him, tried to guess how much his school books would cost, then went up to the counter and asked, "Do you do owl orders?"
They did, so he took note of the books that looked most helpful and their prices. He got plenty of pocket money from his parents, but he hadn't brought a great deal of it with him today, mostly only thinking about his school things; the rest sat in his money bank back home.
"What's that place?" Anita asked when they were back out on the street, pointing to an unmarked building next to a pub, its ground floor windows blocked by thick curtains and only a red lamp hanging by the front door.
"Oh that's a brothel," Harry answered simply, and then flushed bright red. He hadn't thought much of it when Gabriel and Lorna first explained what a brothel was, when he was nine years old and asked about the building on a trip to London, but now he was old enough to really understand what went on in such a place. Sex had never been a taboo thing in the Valentine household; his parents had never lied or used euphemisms about how babies were made and, in a place with a bunch of creatures physically incapable of procreating, Harry had always known that sex was not just for making babies. But it was also utterly uninteresting to Harry so he'd never given it much thought.
But after two years at Hogwarts, overhearing older students make lewd comments and generally developing the kind of knowledge that was unavoidable when five hundred teenagers all lived in the same building, Harry couldn't help feeling embarrassed about so casually mentioning brothels to his friend—and not just any friend, at that, but a girl.
Fortunately, although Anita looked flustered, all she said was, "Oh," and then suggested that they return to Diagon Alley. The rest of the trip passed normally, although Harry found himself unable to make eye contact with Anita quite as often as normal.
A couple of weeks later, he was heading back to Hogwarts. He spent most of the train journey in a compartment with Theo, Blaise, Tracey, and Millicent. They discussed their holidays, the new classes they'd be taking, and Hogsmeade village, which they were now allowed to visit on certain weekends. At least, most of them did. Theo, as always, said nothing of his time at home and whilst the rest of them spoke he sat back in his seat with his eyes half closed, looking as if he'd like nothing more than to sleep for a week. He had a massive bruise on his face that he said was from a Bludger, flinched away when anyone tried to touch him, and only when the trolley witch came by did he perk up, buying three pumpkin pasties and two bottles of water, scarfing down the pasties so fast the rest of them stared at him.
"Hungry are you?" Tracey remarked.
"Miffed breakfas'," Theo mumbled around a mouthful of half-chewed pasty. He slowed down a bit on his second and was almost leisurely with his third, and washed them all down with both bottles of water. The food and drink made him look a bit more lively although his eyes still had a haunted look to them, but an hour later he was fast asleep with his head on Harry's shoulder. Tracey, for some reason, looked annoyed by this, but when Harry tried to shift the other boy—his mouth was open and he was drooling on Harry's shirt—she hissed and flapped her hands.
"Don't, you'll wake him up!" she said in a half-whisper.
"I'm getting a wet shoulder."
"It won't kill you. Look at him, he obviously needs the sleep. Let him be."
Sighing, Harry did. He couldn't really argue with Tracey. Theo was very pale, with deep shadows beneath his eyes, his brown hair in need of a cut, and he looked as if he'd lost weight, although that could just have been his extra couple of inches height making him look skinnier.
Theo woke up about ten minutes before they reached Hogsmeade, which Harry was grateful for because he desperately needed to use the bathroom by then. He got back to the compartment to find Tracey and Millicent had thrown the boys out so they could change into their school robes, and Harry joined them. He and Theo were already in their robes; Theo had been in his since they got on the train and Harry had fetched his from his trunk—left in a different compartment with Tori's—on the way to the toilet and changed there.
At Hogsmeade, it was pelting down with icy rain and they half-ran for the Thestral-drawn carriages that would take them up to the castle, eager to get out of the wet but wary of slipping in the mud. Once up at the castle, they dried themselves off with a simple spell and made their way to the Great Hall. As they sat waiting for the sorting to begin, Harry's attention was drawn to the staff table by Pansy Parkinson's loud whisper of, "Is that Lucius Malfoy?"
It was, sitting stiffly in a chair beside Gareth. Harry's first thought was that he looked old. He wasn't sure how old the man was, but he looked older than Harry expected from a man whose son had been the same age as Harry. Perhaps that was the result of losing his wife and son in the space of a week.
"Is he our new Defence teacher?" Pansy wondered.
"Must be," Daphne Greengrass answered. "But wait, hang on, who's that at the end?"
Harry looked to where she meant. Another new teacher sat at the end of the staff table nearest the Gryffindors, an elderly witch with closely cropped grey hair and a prominent chin.
"One of them must be the new Magical Creatures teacher," remarked Logan Sparrow, a fourth year sitting near the group of third years. "There were rumours Professor Kettleburn was going to retire last year and he's not up there."
"That must be her," Pansy said. "Lucius Malfoy would never teach something like Care of Magical Creatures."
She was right, though they had to wait until after the sorting and feast to find out, when Dumbledore stood to introduce Lucius as the new Defence teacher and the woman, Professor Grubbly-Plank, as the new Care of Magical Creatures teacher.
They started some of their new classes the next day, Harry especially. While his housemates went off to Charms straight after breakfast, Harry made his way up to the North Tower to join the Gryffindors in Divination. Inspecting his timetable, he was a little surprised to find a few free periods in it, but he figured out why. Although he was taking Divination with the Gryffindors and Ancient Runes with the Hufflepuffs, he took the regular Slytherin Arithmancy, Care of Magical Creatures, and Muggle Studies classes. They shared Arithmancy with the Ravenclaws, Magical Creatures with the Gryffindors, and in Muggle Studies all four houses were put together. As such, even taking five optional subject didn't fill up his timetable, though there was a note on it saying he was expected to spend those free periods studying in the library.
He was one of the first people to reach the North Tower and ended up having to explain his presence several times as the Gryffindors gradually turned up, all of whom appeared to be taking the class. He wasn't surprised that Seamus and Ron eyed him distastefully and shoved him back when the ladder up to the classroom came down, forcing him to come up last.
For the first time in any daytime lesson at Hogwarts, Harry had to remove the Shades Spell he wore almost constantly throughout the day. The tower room was so dimly lit that it was no bother on his sensitive eyes—although the excess of incense was thick enough to bother his eyes as much as his nose. Harry settled in an armchair around a table with Anita and Hermione, peering around the dim room in search of the teacher. When she stepped out of the shadows and into the firelight, Harry thought that she looked remarkably like an insect.
"Welcome to Divination," she greeted, settling herself in a winged armchair in front of the fire. "My name is Professor Trelawney. You may not have seen me before. I find that descending too often into the hustle and bustle of the main school clouds my Inner Eye."
Harry wondered that all this incense didn't cloud the inner eye, but Trelawney went on, mentioning that Divination was primarily a natural talent and not something that could be learnt out of books. Across from Harry, Hermione looked thoroughly startled at this proclamation.
After an ominously vague comment about Neville Longbottom's grandmother, a warning to Parvati Patil about red-headed men, and a prediction that one of them would leave around Easter, she set them all to reading their tea leaves. Harry drank his quickly, upturned it on the saucer, then passed his cup to Hermione while taking Anita's; his presence made an odd number of students, so they were working as a trio rather than in pairs like everyone else.
"Okay," Harry said, peering into Anita's cup and then checking Unfogging the Future. "This looks like a pot-plant tree… oh, that one, a cypress tree. That means you'll face a difficulty but overcome it."
"Cool."
"And that looks like a crown—'attainment and honour'—and… an elf, I think. That's… oh. It says you should be on your guard and you might be victim of a practical joke."
"I'll make sure to avoid Fred and George Weasley then," Anita said and looked into Hermione's cup. "Okay, this looks like a bookcase to me… 'success through perseverance and study'—well that's not a surprise, you live with your nose in a book. That looks like a bracelet; does it have bracelets?"
" 'A discovery made too late'," Hermione read, book open on her lap, frowning. "How do they get that from a bracelet?"
"No idea. What about a hand?"
"Hands should be read in conjunction with other symbols, so that must mean I'm going to make a discovery too late that's connected to my success in studying." She scoffed audibly. "Well as long as I succeed from studying then I don't see how any discovery I make there will be too late. This all seems like guesswork to me."
"Well guess mine," Harry said. "What do you see?"
She picked the cup up, still frowning, turning it this way and that. "Soggy tea leaves, mostly, but I guess that could be a box."
"Open or closed?" Anita asked, consulting her book.
"Open, or maybe it's a house…"
"Well if it's a box, that means a troubled love affair—" Harry felt his cheeks flush "—but if it's a house that means… hang on… 'successful transaction, a visit, or a new home'."
Hermione wasn't really paying attention, still frowning down at the cup. "Ridiculous. That could be an egg, but it's just tea leaves, it can't really tell you anything…"
She went on muttering while Anita, who seemed to be enjoying herself, flicked through the book.
"Egg, egg, where's egg… aha: 'New plans or ideas, or a birth'. Maybe your parents will have a baby."
"Vampires can't have babies," Harry told her.
"Maybe you'll have a baby."
Harry blanched and Hermione snorted aloud, finally looking away from the cup. "Don't be ridiculous, he can't have a baby. He's thirteen, that's not even legal, and he would need a girlfriend anyway."
"Exactly!" Harry cried, gesturing emphatically. "I don't even want a girlfriend!"
Their commotion drew Trelawney's attention and she swept over with a scowl, unimpressed by their antics. "Let me see that," she insisted, taking the cup from Hermione. Everyone else went quiet to watch.
"Hmm… bats, sorrow in the household…"
Harry frowned. There was nothing wrong at home, so far as he knew.
"The cross, trouble and delay… not a happy cup, not at all… the sword, oh dear…"
Everyone was staring, transfixed, at Professor Trelawney, who gave the cup a final turn, gasped, and then screamed. There was a tinkle of breaking china as Neville broke his cup—the second that morning—and Professor Trelawney sank into a vacant armchair, her glittering hand at her heart and her eyes closed.
"My dear boy—my poor dear boy—no—it is kinder not to say—no—don't ask me…"
"What is it, Professor?" said Dean Thomas at once. Everyone had got to their feet, and slowly they crowded around Harry, Hermione, and Anita's table, pressing close to Professor Trelawney's chair to get a good look at Harry's cup.
"My dear," Professor Trelawney's huge eyes opened dramatically, "you have the shark."
Harry's frown deepened. "So… I need to avoid swimming in the ocean?"
Trelawney sat up in her chair, staring at Harry through her large glasses. "There are sharks on land, too, my dear boy, and it is an omen as dark as the Grim. You cup could not be clearer—all the signs together—you are destined… for death!"
"Oh," Harry said, and tried to sound shocked and afraid, because this was clearly what she expected and the Gryffindors, all except Hermione and Anita, had gasped in horror. Given that Harry had known since he was eleven that he was destined to die, he didn't have quite the same outraged reaction. Anita shot him a wary look and snatched her own cup from in front of him to see if her own upcoming death was foretold in the tea leaves. Hermione, meanwhile, got up from her chair and peered into Harry's cup again.
"I don't think it looks like a shark."
Professor Trelawney surveyed Hermione with mounting dislike.
"You'll forgive me for saying so, my dear, but I perceive very little aura around you. Very little receptivity to the resonances of the future."
"It does sort of," Seamus Finnigan remarked, tilting his head to one side and squinting, then shrugging and looking at Harry with his usual dislike. "Rotten luck, Potter."
He didn't sound the least bit concerned.
"It's not that big of a deal," Harry said. "Everyone dies eventually. It's a fact of life."
This made them all pause to consider it, but then Trelawney, looking at Harry pityingly, shook her head and reached over to pat his hand sympathetically. "That is true, but when the signs show up in the cup of one so young… I think we will leave the lesson here for today. Yes… please pack away your things…"
Silently the class took their teacups back to Professor Trelawney, packed away their books and closed their bags. Most of them avoided looking at Harry as they filed out and he walked ahead, having a History class to get to and not wanting to listen to the Gryffindors talking about his predicted death. As blasé as he'd tried to be about it all, he couldn't help being a little concerned. He didn't like the idea of other people knowing he was going to die before adulthood. He wanted to believe the signs Trelawney saw were mere coincidence, but he couldn't quite convince himself of it. Instead, he silently promised himself he'd try to prevent his death. He hadn't contacted the Knockturn Alley book store yet, not wanting them to deliver books to his home that would draw questions from his parents, but he decided he'd write to them that very night for the books on demonology.
After History was lunch, and then he and the Slytherins went out onto the grounds for double Care of Magical Creatures, which they shared with the Gryffindors. In a clearing by the forest, Professor Grubbly-Plank introduced them to clabberts, tree-dwelling creatures that were like a cross between a monkey and a frog, with big glowing pustules on their foreheads which glowed in warning whenever danger approached. They were not the most exciting creatures to study, but Harry guessed they probably wouldn't move onto the really interesting stuff until later classes.
At dinner, Harry and the other third years asked the Slytherin second years about Lucius; they had been one of the first classes to have a lesson with him and everyone was eager to find out if they were stuck with yet another incompetent teacher.
"He's definitely not incompetent," Tyler Swift said, waving a potato around on a fork, "but it's like… I don't know…"
"It's like he wants to teach Dark Arts instead of Defence Against," Cid Villiers explained.
"No surprise there," Ginny Weasley muttered darkly. "I don't like him at all."
"Your family and his have always had a bit of a rivalry, though, haven't they?" Tyler asked, to which Ginny nodded.
"My dad reckons Lucius Malfoy was a Death Eater back when You Know Who was in power, but he got out of it by giving the Ministry loads of money and pretending he was forced to do it. It's outrageous that Dumbledore hired someone like that."
Given that Dumbledore had hired Quirrell, who'd been possessed by Voldemort himself, Harry thought hiring a Death Eater was a step up.
"Did he give you any trouble?" he asked Ginny. "For being a Weasley?"
She looked startled that he spoke to her, but shook her head even as her face went red. Cid snorted.
"Too fucking surprised, it looked," he said. "Didn't seem to know what the fuck to do with a Weasley in Slytherin."
"About the only thing him and my parents have in common," Ginny admitted. "They don't know what to do with me either."
"Do they disapprove?" Harry asked, remembering how vehemently her brothers had objected to where she ended up.
"Yeah, but they've at least given up on trying to get me resorted. They still seem to think you're all going to attack me in the middle of the night or something, but I think they'll get over it eventually."
Logan Sparrow scoffed. Harry was starting to think he liked eavesdropping on other people's conversations; he never seemed to spend much time hanging out with his own year mates.
"We'd never attack you in the middle of the night, Weasley," he said. "What kind of idiots do your parents thing we are? We'd attack you in mid-day—then we can make it look like someone else did it."
"Thanks for the honesty, Sparrow," Ginny said dryly.
Getting hired to teach at Hogwarts solely so he could search the castle at leisure was, Lucius had to admit, a little excessive, but it was the only way he could get unimpeded access to the castle since his dismissal from the board of governors. He couldn't even be sure there was a Horcrux at Hogwarts, but he strongly suspected it. Voldemort had always had something of an obsessed fascination with the castle and he would probably think it great to hide an object of such powerful dark magic right under Dumbledore's nose.
And there were only two places to really hide things in Hogwarts: the forest and the Room of Requirement. Lucius' money was on the latter. The forest was risky—so many creature that could come along and accidentally move or trample hidden objects—but the Room of Requirement wasn't commonly known about. Lucius' father had told him about it, as he'd told Draco, and Lucius had used it primarily to conjure an extravagant private bathroom for the four years before he became a prefect. He hated communal bathrooms.
Finding the thing was shockingly easy. He asked the Room to become somewhere he could hide a Horcrux, it conjured up a cathedral-sized room stuffed with what must have a been a thousand years of hidden objects, and then it was just a matter of dark magic detection charms, which he was perfectly competent at. Just because he preferred to use the dark arts didn't mean he didn't know how to defend against them. His father had been unforgiving of poor performance in any subjects at school (and Lucius had the scars to prove it) and when one worked for a maniac who liked to assault his Death Eaters at least half as often as he attacked Muggles, it inspired a man to learn how to defend himself.
He wasn't surprised to find a number of dark magic objects tucked among the junk—it was the kind of thing a student needed to hide urgently, after all—but the darkest and most powerful he found was a tarnished diadem. A few extra charms just to make sure, and he wrapped it in a cloth and took it out with him. His task was already done before the term even began. He was half tempted to tell Dumbledore he could stuff the Defence job, but magical contracts weren't to be taken lightly, even ones as simple as employment contracts, and it might draw a little too much attention as to why he was quitting. The interview for the job had been awkward enough as it was.
But now he was stumped. He knew of five Horcruxes—the diary, Bellatrix's cup, Regulus' locket, the Gaunt ring, the Hogwarts diadem—but he hadn't the faintest idea where to look for the sixth (and final, he hoped). He was certain there had to be a sixth; Voldemort's obsession with things of magical importance was too big. He wouldn't have been able to resist splitting his soul into seven pieces—six Horcruxes and the part that remained in his body.
But Lucius found nothing in the Riddle Manor in Little Hangleton—no surprise; it was a purely Muggle residence and Voldemort wouldn't want it hidden in something like that, not given how obvious it now was to Lucius that the Dark Lord utterly loathed half his own heritage—and he knew of nowhere else to look. Voldemort was not the kind of man who'd shared his favourite locations. The best he could hope for was that one of the other Death Eaters had been given it to secure, like he and Bellatrix. There were a handful of people Lucius suspected of being trusted with such things, some in Azkaban and some not, but none of them would be easy to search and all would be suspicious of questions about their past activities, even from him.
With only one Horcrux left, Lucius had to start thinking about how he would kill the actual Voldemort. Not Tom Riddle, who still sat in Azkaban and who Lucius had every intention of personally murdering, but the vanished form of whatever had been left behind on Hallowe'en night in 1981. He was the true Voldemort and as such it was him that was subject to the prophecy. If it was true, and Lucius was inclined to believe it was, then Harry Potter-Valentine was the only person that could kill the true Voldemort, but that didn't mean he was willing to commit murder. He should be—Voldemort had killed his parents, the boy was being raised by vampires, and he'd ended up in Slytherin instead of Gryffindor, all of which suggested much more openness to ideas like this than his birth parents probably were—but Lucius couldn't be certain, so he needed to get close and figure out just what kind of person Harry Potter-Valentine was.
