Circular Reasoning

by Swimdraconian

Torn from a desolate future, Harry awakens in his teenage body with a hefty debt on his soul. Entangled in his lies and unable to trust even his own fraying sanity, he struggles to stay ahead of his enemies. Desperation is the new anthem of violence.

21. Bad Moon Rising

Disclaimer: Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

A/N: Thanks goes to Palindrome, Tenages, VotN, Garden, T3t and Hashasheen for their insight and commentary.

Andro, you're a fucking lifesaver for talking me through my stumbling points at the beginning of this chapter - I cannot begin to express how grateful I am for your careful analysis of Circular Reasoning and my work in general. Your brain is the Hope Diamond of minds.

A special thank you also goes to 13thadaption, who was there every step of the way. Cheers, your assistance is worth its weight in gold. Especially considering how long it took to get this chapter off the ground.

The descriptions of Death, and the bells were referenced from Garth Nix's Sabriel, which you should already know from my notes in the prologue. i.e. See above disclaimer.

Chapter Twenty

Bad Moon Rising

Violence as a solution is woven through human nature like a damning red thread.

-Stephen King

The door swung shut behind Harry's fleeing figure.

It was the second time in so many hours that Remus watched Harry sow untold amounts of chaos and disappear with little more than a cursory nod of acknowledgement to the mess he'd created.

"You're letting him go?" Severus murmured, his voice hitting low notes on the dangerous side of angry.

The lines around Dumbledore's sharp blue eyes deepened with strain. "What would you have me do?" Despite the man's seemingly impenetrable calm, Remus could sense the faint tremble of exhaustion running through Dumbledore's arms, the subtle shush of fabric brushing against itself.

"I can tell him that what he has done is wrong," Dumbledore continued, meeting Severus' eyes and then Remus' own, his voice never changing from the soft compelling tone that was almost resonant in the hush of the office. "I can even give him help if he so chooses to accept it. But in the end, only Harry can decide that it is morally reprehensible to act in such a manner and that he cannot continue like this."

Severus made a sharp, one-handed gesture to the wreckage of Dumbledore's office around them. "It is not a matter of doing the right thing, Headmaster," he bit out. "You've laid out his dire lack of preferable alternatives, handed him an ultimatum with little room for error and have, in essence, pinned him into a corner like a rat. What do you think he will do?"

'He's going to run.' The words zipped across Remus' thoughts, leaving him light-headed in their wake.

"My own options are just as limited, Severus," replied the headmaster, perhaps deliberately misunderstanding Severus' question.

Dumbledore unfolded his hands, fingers splayed outwards like the wings of a bird. "Could I chain Harry to obedience?"

The answer wanted to leap off Remus' tongue.

Of course you could.

But...what good would it do?

Remus cast a sidelong look at the Potions Master.

There was a measure of resignation in Severus' expression, lips pinched white and bloodless around stifled words of anger and disappointment.

The truth of the matter was that it was never about capability or even willingness. Morality was a far heavier weight to carry and required a great deal more patience and care.

"No," Remus said aloud in response to the headmaster's question.

"Precisely that. Yes, I could enforce my will over his own," the headmaster declared with unflinching honesty. "But by doing so, I would accomplish little more than teaching Harry that there is yet another person in his life who seeks to manipulate him and subvert his free will for their own agenda."

Rain pattered against the windowpanes, the water flowing molasses-slow in sluggish circles over the glass as if it couldn't decide whose call to follow: gravity or the siren's song of dark magic. Severus stood stiff and unyielding over the chair where Harry had sat. With his arms crossed and shoulders hunched, the dark folds of Severus' robes hung heavy and austere, making the man into yet another flat shadow in the strange ashy lighting of the office.

"And with him bound in such a manner," postulated Dumbledore, the thoughtful hum of his voice lulling against the sound of the rain on the sill. "Could I delude myself into believing that Harry has changed? That he will now do the right thing of his own accord?"

Dumbledore shook his head and replied to his own question, "I cannot in good conscience bind Harry in what would amount to illegal slavery. This contract must go both ways."

"You're offering him an apprenticeship," said Remus, the words almost startled out of him.

Severus looked away, shoulders lowering from their defensive position. "He will disappoint you, Albus." He gave one last cold-eyed stare to Dumbledore's seated form and straightened, a hand griping the back of Harry's chair. "I cannot passively sit by while you indulge in such wilful blindness," he said flatly.

Severus vanished out the office door much the same as Harry.

Remus' skin prickled with unease as he clutched at the armrests of the chair. He was out of his depth and sinking fast and worse yet, he couldn't see the situation getting any better.

Ghostly light glinted off of Dumbledore's hair as he bent his head over his hands.

There was a staccato rattle against the windowpane, the sound breaking the weighted hush of the office. An owl rapped its beak once more on the glass, its brown and gold-speckled feathers dishevelled and dripping with water. It took Dumbledore four tries to open the warped frame of the window. And when the headmaster brought the bird inside, Remus saw shards of ice flake off the barn owl's pinions and melt against the sill.

He wondered if the owl had flown through the storm of Harry's anger.

Perhaps it had.

Remus caught sight of the wax seal on the heavy parchment, recognizing the rearing griffon of the Bletchley coat of arms.

'I cannot passively sit by while you indulge in such wilful blindness.'

The words Severus said rankled within him and Remus followed his path out the door just as the Headmaster deposited the windswept bird onto Fawkes' empty perch.

Around and around spun the headmaster's staircase until it spat him back out in the corridor.

"Severus!" said Remus, raising his voice before the dour man could disappear in a swirl of dark robes around the corner. The stone gargoyle ground to a close behind him as the empty hall caught his words, bouncing the last syllable of the Potions Master's name back at Remus in a short, clipped echo.

Severus' tall form stilled, his head cocked to the side as to listen to Remus without having to look at him. "Lupin," he intoned, his words rent through with dry, mocking sarcasm. "I don't suppose it's within your ability to grasp how superfluous your assistance is to me."

"You're just looking for a convenient target to take your anger out on," Remus growled, unable to keep the caustic scorn out of his voice.

The thin corners of Severus' mouth turned upwards. "Is that what you think this is? Unlike you, Lupin, I've never had the luxury of shirking my responsibilities," he murmured, echoing Harry's earlier remarks.

"What are you going to do with Harry?" said Remus, ignoring the Potions Master's pointed barb.

"Whatever it takes," Snape replied flatly. His lips curled back into a alligator's yellow sneer."Some of this mess could have been avoided if we had taken prompt action instead of dithering about the brat's fragile state of mind."

"Prompt action?" said Remus, appalled at Severus' brutal statement. "I wonder, Severus, if you've ever heard of a man called Hitler."

Severus smiled a thin, mean sort of grin, amusement glittering in his black eyes. "I wonder, Lupin, if you've ever heard of a man called Dr. Kevorkian."

"What?"

"He intends to cull the herd, Lupin. Or did it escape your notice how quickly the brat has begun to pick off the sick and the slow?" said Severus over his shoulder as he turned away.

"You cold-hearted prick," Remus snarled at Severus' back. "You have got to be mad. How else could you justify starting a vendetta against a boy who hasn't personally done anything to you? You've been looking for an excuse to go after Harry all this time and now that you have it, you're going to do your damnedest to destroy his life."

That got his attention.

Severus whirled around, white lines of anger carved into the sides of his mouth. "No matter how badly you wish to make me the villain of the piece, there are certain truths that you would be a fool to deny," the Potions Master hissed. "Potter has undergone great changes since last school year, the most disturbing of which are not even readily apparent. Think, Lupin, think."

Remus crossed his arms in an attempt to keep from wrapping his hands around the skinny column of Snape's throat.

"Not ten minutes ago," murmured Severus, eyes fervent and staring into Remus' own. "Potter nearly brought down the walls of the Headmaster's office in response to a simple assessment of his mindset. You cannot tell me that is the rational reaction of somebody in their right mind. And despite your pigheaded refusal to acknowledge it, I know you saw the results of his little breakdown – " The man almost spat the word. "– on the train. No sane individual would do something as stupid as to run towards a threat that is actively preying on them."

Remus fixed a flat stare on the Potions Master, the roots of his teeth beginning to ache from being ground together. "What are you getting at?"

The alligator's smile was back. "Would you like to place a wager?"

The wolf paced restless and hungry in the back of Remus' mind. 'Damn you, Severus.'

Severus' expression turned smooth and smug. "Should he be questioned under Veratiserum, how likely would it be that his reaction to the dementors was merely a performance for our benefit?"

Remus rubbed a weary hand over his face. "I am… struggling to follow your craziness," he replied. "How exactly –" what came unglued in that twisted mind of yours for you to believe the absolute shite dribbling out of your mouth? "Why would his terror be anything close to play-acting? How could that kind of fear be feigned?"

"It is a logical response," Severus purred, crossing his arms and drawing his robes around him. "One well formulated to provoke the most sympathetic emotions toward him as possible. A clever bit of misdirection, wasn't it? And while we are all so worried about Potter's delicate emotional balance, nobody questions his use of dark magic – or how a thirteen-year-old boy was able to do something that even fully trained Aurors cannot achieve.

"He's manipulated you." Severus straightened, head held high and his eyes glittering with triumph. "And you're too busy looking for James Potter to see the monster underneath. It says a certain something about blindness towards your own condition, doesn't it?"

"You know what Severus?" Remus looked up, the wolf's snarl echoing in his voice. "In the end, you've still lost."

The Potions Master's lips thinned with annoyance. "What are you on about?"

It was Remus' turn to smile; wide and sharp, it was the wolf's grin, teeth ready to rip into the soft flesh of his prey's belly. Little pig, little pig, won't you let me in by the hair of your chinny-chin-chin? "James Potter is twelve years dead and rotting in the ground. And yet here you are - "

Remus leaned forward and watched as Snape took an involuntary step back.

"All these years later," the wolf continued, fingers beginning to grow claws the colour of old bone – the same colour as Severus' steadily paling face. "And you're still feuding with him. You're fighting with a dead man, Severus. As far as I'm concerned? He won. That's his wife he's buried next to, the same wife he died defending, the mother of his son whom you hate enough to condemn as a lunatic addicted to dark magic because he represents everything that slipped through your fingers before he was even a gleam in his father's eye.

"If there was any sort of competition between you and James," Remus said lowly, fury subsiding into exhaustion. "You lost it long ago. Do us all a favour and move on."

Severus' nostrils flared with anger, red spots of indignation sitting high on his cheeks. "You think James Potter won something?" he hissed. "His progeny is drowning in dark magic, his wife – his prized possession – is dead, and come to think of it, he's come down with a bad case of dead himself. If anything, that bastard lost worse than I have. If the dead are capable at all of judgement, I bet he's regretting that thing that calls himself his son most of all."

---

The storm of Potter's fury had grown into a deluge, the ozone tang of dark magic lingering in the air about the grounds.

Severus crossed his arms and leaned against the iron brace of the enormous clock window, twin to the one overlooking Hogwarts' Entry Hall. He had finally found the boy after the absurd tête-à-tête with Lupin and an hour's search of the surrounding grounds and secret passages. And of course Potter would have sequestered himself into one of the many obscure areas of the castle that were as difficult to access as they were to find.

The wooden slats of the covered footbridge were slick with mildew and damp from the rain blowing in under the eaves. Beneath it, the small ravine dividing the castle and the old carriage house was beginning to fill with water, a gurgling brook growing out of the overflow from the lake. Severus watched Potter the Younger pace back and forth across the rain-wet boards, the boy already taller and broader than his father ever had been at this age.

Dumbledore was a fool if he thought Harry Potter needed magic to harm another student.

Potter's fellow students were already suffering from collateral damage alone. Two of Bletchley's cohorts had ended up with enough minor injuries from spell backlash between them to keep Poppy busy for hours. Not to mention the harm done to Potter's own yearmate – upon snipping the threads holding the Gryffindor third-year's mouth closed, Poppy discovered that his tongue was sewn to the roof of his mouth as well.

Dumbledore was also delusional if he thought that Potter would capitulate to the Headmaster's contract without an unacceptable degree of leeway. The boy was far more canny than he alluded to and was turning into a regular con artist. Severus was coming to understand that playing mind games with Potter was less of an exercise in manipulation and more of an effort in wagering how much could be sacrificed without totally losing the bet.

The rain outside deepened in intensity and Potter's trainers slid across a wet patch on the footbridge as he spun around to stalk back in the other direction. Somewhere, Severus noticed, Potter had picked up a nervous tic of running the knuckles of his hand over the curve of his lower lip.

"I need for you to keep an eye on Harry," Albus had asked before the mess of earlier that afternoon. "You have the objectivity I find myself lacking in this situation, and you will recognize the signs far easier than I."

Severus had until ten o'clock that night to make a decision.

'How kind of you, Headmaster, to actually offer me a choice in this matter.'

The north face of Severus' office looked like something out of a surrealist's painting. Over a hundred galleons worth of potion's ingredients had been hurled at that wall, the end result warping the stone, the shelves and the floor underneath into something that looked a lot like dripping clocks and melted cheese.

He let out a mirthless chuckle, folding the heavy black canvas of his work robes tighter about his thin frame.

As if Severus was some kind of patron saint for the lost, misguided little souls of budding dark wizards. As if Severus could stand against the stubborn might of a teenage wizard who believed that he, and he alone, was right and righteous. As if Severus was some kind of bulwark against self-inflicted stupidity.

As if he could reverse the spell of influence a powerful sorcerer of the Old World held over a needy young Gryffindor.

"Who was it that came out of the boggart's closet, Potter? Some nightmare interpretation of the Dark Lord?" Severus muttered to the rain-blurred image of Potter pacing over the ravine, the reflection of his own visage appearing like a dark-eyed ghost on the windowpane. "Or was it Hadrian Sharr?"

How many of his students had fought this battle and lost? How many times had he worked at showing his Slytherins that there were more options available than merely the paths they were bound to by family association? How many times had communication trailed off after the student in question returned to their parents' control for the summer? And after tasting the corrupting influence of dark magic... After feeling that black, intoxicating rush in their veins... How many times had that same student returned to Hogwarts holding little resemblance to the teen whom he'd last spoken to not three months before?

Just one more Slytherin. Just one more son or daughter of a dark legacy.

Just one more child who'd slipped through his fingers because of people like Archer Bletchley, Lucius Malfoy... and Hadrian Sharr.

Now to see this same destructive behaviour mirrored in the son of James Potter.

Now to see his own behaviour mirrored in the son of James Potter.

In Lily's son.

Severus laughed.

A hoarse, hacking echo ricocheted off of the silent landscape portraits and crumbling statues of the dusty corridor. His fingers itched to seize upon the antique statuary and further pulverize it against the immutable stone of Hogwarts' walls.

His own behaviour mirrored in the son of Lily Sharr.

'You fool,' Severus thought to himself. 'How badly you have floundered this time.'

And he'd like to blame it on the fact that he didn't know Lily was a blueblood – didn't know that what he was giving up wasn't a mudblood Gryffindor with an opposing moral philosophy or some mere childhood friendship, but a person who held more power to their name than the Dark Lord would ever gain. Because when it came down to it, Severus joined the Death Eaters of his own accord, craving that greedy, elusive power he'd struggled for all his life. Was that Potter's motivation for joining Sharr?

Had he too, succumbed?

Albus Dumbledore wanted to believe that Potter's problem was a matter of influence.

On the footbridge, Potter reached out, his fingers just brushing the door back to the castle before his face twisted in a grimace. Robes flaring out behind him like rain-sodden raven's wings, the boy spun around to pace back towards the carriage house. Severus only caught a bare sliver of Potter's expression, but a chill settled over his skin at the savage snarl that looked more at place on a rabid animal than on a teenage boy.

A mere matter of influence?

What a farcical load of bullshit.

One Faerie Queen with a malicious agenda did not a dark wizard make. Neither did whatever "teachings" Hadrian Sharr had inflicted upon the boy.

Further discrediting Albus' theory, the manner in which Potter assaulted Bletchley was something only gained through self-discipline, experience, and massive amounts of control over one's own mind.

Potter had deliberately chosen to attack Bletchley.

The boy may have had some powerful players tugging at his strings, but that didn't change the fact that he had made his own choices – his own bad decisions – from the options offered to him.

Severus sneered, upper lip curled and teeth grinding together. He knew this insidious dance, just the same as he knew all of its precarious steps, one right after the other.

When Severus Snape was nine years old, he stumbled across an old 1950s back issue of Esquire in the local Muggle public library. It didn't matter that it was foreign, or that it was an adult magazine – full of skin in old-fashioned lingerie and other fruit too ripe for his young eyes – or that it was clearly Not Supposed To Be There. His father would have tanned his hide if he had found little Severus reading dirty magazines, but that didn't matter because his father would tan his hide anyway and from that perspective, Severus had very little to lose.

It was curiosity that made him look at it, flipping through pages of flesh that wouldn't hold his interest for another few years yet. But the stories... the stories held him enthralled.

Over twenty years later and the words held the same gut-punch awe as they did the day he'd devoured them. Sense-memory left the smell of crushed grass and wildflowers from where he had lain, sprawled across the ground under the old beech tree in the park, with the word's of Bradbury's stitched tattoo-witch wheezing into his ears: 'I know the Deep Past and the Clear Present and the even Deeper Future,' she whispered, eyes knotted into blindness, face lifted to this unseen man. 'It is on my flesh. I will paint it on yours, too.'

It wasn't inked into the boy's skin –

'Not yet,' Severus' traitorous mind murmured, the memory of burnt flesh and the night-black lines of the Dark Mark rising just as strong as that sunny day in the park, that moment of yesteryear.

It wasn't inked into the boy's flesh, no, but the Deep Past and the Clear Present and the even Deeper Future was etched as deeply into Harry Potter's actions as it was in Severus' own history, a mirror image made out of harsh reality and bitter irony.

The rainwater sloshing through the rocky crevasses of the ravine built into a thundering torrent; the storm sparked by Potter's turbulent dark magic becoming a howling beast of magic-fuelled might.

"You should have been one of mine," Severus told Lily's son as the figure pacing the bridge took shelter in the alcove in front of the carriage house. "Slytherin would have stripped the stupid from you long before the end of your first year."

---

Water cascaded down the eaves and splattered the handrail, visibility diminishing under the roar of water falling from the sky. In the cool bluing of dusk, it felt like Harry was swimming underwater, the candlelit windows of the Main Hall becoming orange sparks in the distance.

Fuck, it was almost as if the headmaster was daring him to run.

'Do I want to run?' Harry thought. The fear and panic still jangling about his nerves screamed YES, but the slow reawakening of common sense told him to carefully consider his options.

How much longer could he justify hiding behind Dumbledore's skirts like the child he no longer was? And what would happen if he left? How much trouble, and what manner thereof, would he stir up by disappearing from Hogwarts? With the confirmation that Wormtail was no longer in England, Harry had little tying him to the castle save for nostalgia and boyhood friendships. Obligation and debt said that he had better places to be.

But to bail out on Dumbledore... Could he live with himself after disappointing the old man yet again? After how many second chances his old mentor had tried to give him?

Just how many resources would the headmaster waste trying to find him if he disappeared? Dumbledore would not be able to live with himself for what he perceived as failure to help Harry, not when he cared so fervently about his students and especially not when it was Harry himself in peril. Harry was neither dumb nor oblivious; somewhere along the line, he'd become the closest the old man had ever come to having a grandson and it was as evident now as it was when he was twenty years old.

From the limited point of view the headmaster was working with, Harry could almost understand his worry.

Three months ago, he'd left Hogwarts a troubled boy who'd just survived the sort of shitstorm most twelve-year-olds never encountered. And then he'd returned so completely different that Dumbledore was well within his rights to suspect Polyjuice, kidnapping, or any other manner of foul play. Harry was surprised that the headmaster's canny intellect hadn't drawn a much different conclusion in the end: Him being trained by a mysterious relative, even one who held a very dark agenda in mind, seemed almost too easy, too obvious.

'Shame on you, Albus Dumbledore,' Harry thought to himself as he dodged a stream of water trickling from a hole in the eaves. 'Shame on you for falling victim to Occam's Razor.'

In a way, Harry almost wanted Dumbledore to figure it out, to be able to share the burden of knowledge with the headmaster, someone far better equipped to deal with what was to come. But he couldn't shake the notion that telling him would be ill-advised. If the headmaster was horrified by him removing Bletchley's psychosis, what else then, what other actions of Harry's would he condemn?

The entrance to the castle loomed before him in the growing gloom. Spinning on the ball of his foot, Harry paced back towards the carriage house, damp robes flapping about his ankles.

"I am offering you a safe haven, Harry," said Dumbledore, spreading his hands palm up over the top of the desk like a benevolent deity as he beseeched him to stay.

The contract...

Harry shook his head, bitter mirth twisting his mouth into a strained smile.

The contract was far too stifling. Which was yet another black mark against staying. The headmaster could not possibly believe that Harry would consent to such folly. If there was a threat to his person, Harry would take steps to remove it and he was under no such delusion that he was somehow safe at Hogwarts.

Harry paused mid-way across the bridge.

'Is this a test?'

If so, then to whom did the test belong to? Mab? Dumbledore? Some other yet unknown player?

'What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?' murmured the mantra inside his head as he resumed his walk across the footbridge. It wasn't like someone had handed him a map of what to do or where to go as soon as he'd woken up in his childhood home. The path set before him was as rocky as a mountain range and the only thing shittier than his current options were the decisions that had led him there.

The stinging spray of water blowing in under the eaves hit his face in an ice-cold rush and Harry took shelter in the protected alcove of the carriage house.

Was this the point where everything fell apart? Where all of the lies he'd been juggling came tumbling down? At what point could he stop lying to cover up all of his previous lies? And at what point had it become so bad that Harry almost believed Hadrian Sharr to be a separate person from himself?

In truth, Harry was Harry, no matter what 'face' he wore. In truth, he was what Dumbledore dreaded, the one who had led 'Harry' astray, the one that Sirius feared. He knew Dumbledore and he knew his godfather. Dumbledore wasn't hiding his concern for Harry nor did the headmaster bother to mask his worry over the damage done to 'Young Harry Potter' by Hadrian Sharr. And Sirius, no matter how hard he tried to cover it up, wanted nothing to do with the dark wizard his godson had become. Somewhere, somehow, Dumbledore had learned about what he'd done over the summer. Worse yet, Sirius had been there, had witnessed one of the more violent parts of it.

In truth, it was Harry Potter that they despised, his fractured personalities, heritage, dark magic and all.

Sometimes...

Sometimes there were no obvious answers, no logical fix-its. In a choice between what was right and what was easy, sometimes nothing was right and nothing was easy.

"What am I doing?" he murmured, the words lost amidst the sound of the rain, his long-familiar baritone rumble becoming something he felt in the bones of his chest, more so than he could hear with his ears. "What am I doing?"

There were no answers, his mind numb and blank as he watched frothy white water rush through the ravine beneath his feet.

He held a hand out from the eaves. Chill rainwater splashed across his palm causing his skin to prickle with goosebumps. Shivering, Harry wiped his hand on his jeans, drawing his hood and tucking the thin folds of his Gryffindor robes tighter around himself.

It was already late and he didn't have much time to spare. He'd already started this day over once, the skin-warm metal of the time-turner resting against his chest.

Harry stopped before the entrance to the carriage house.

This was not an area of the castle that saw a lot of human traffic. Or house-elves for that matter. A much newer carriage house had been built closer to the Gamekeeper's cottage where it was easier to access – where it wasn't on the far side of the castle and tucked into a pocket of the Forbidden Forest. The old stone building of the original carriage house had fallen into disuse and the walkway was warded off for the safety of the student population.

Rusted hinges squealed in protest as Harry tugged on the great black ring of the handle, muscles straining to budge the iron-banded oak. The wooden planks of the door were rotted at the bottom and swollen with moisture, warping snug against the crooked frame of the stone doorway. A gust of stale air wafted across his face as the door gave up a reluctant inch of gap between frame and barrier. Harry waited a moment in case there was something in the carriage house that might have wandered in from the forest behind it.

Nothing.

Reaching out to the deluge beyond the rails, Harry allowed water to pool in his cupped palm. The hinges weren't hexed shut, merely frozen with age. He muttered an old hedge-witch charm as he dripped the rainwater over the gnarled metal hinges, patchy streaks of rust running down the stone.

The next time he tugged on the ring, the hinges gave way with ease, impact shuddering down the handrails of the bridge where the door slammed against them.

A child's giggle drifted out of the carriage house, the sound almost lost amongst the loud gurgle of water running through the ravine.

"Elly!" Harry called out, stepping inside. "Elly, are you there?"

It was dark inside the carriage house, low windows smudged and dirty with dust, half-covered by the overgrown ivy crawling out of the Forbidden Forest. Harry rubbed away a small circle of grime from the windowpane and watched the tiny, sharp-toothed mouths hidden under the too-green leaves work like suckerfish against the outside of the glass as it warmed with the heat from his skin. Trainers leaving clear prints in the grit on the floor, Harry turned away from the window and faced the little ghost perched on a rusting iron carriage wheel.

Her outline was so faint that Harry could see a dusting of cobwebs through the child's bare, filmy arms. Six-year-old Elly Boll wrinkled her little snub nose as she grinned at him from under a short mop of curls, pale eyes glittering with mischief.

Harry wasn't fooled by her appearance. He'd seen her jaw yawn wide into a howl, tiny hands becoming skeletal claws, nails long and hooked like a cat's. Given half a chance, she'd tear him apart – same as all of the unlucky rodents who'd wandered in over the years, small, clean-picked bones piled up in the corners of the carriage house. Elly was more of a malevolent geist than the ghost of an unlucky little girl. Sometimes, just like animals, ghosts went feral.

"Hello Elly," Harry murmured crouching down before her. "My name's Harry."

The ghost's smile turned shy, head turning to the side to show the dimples in the round curve of her cheek. "Hi," she replied, voice high and whisper-soft. Her hands fiddled with the iron spokes of the wheel, nervous energy running through Elly's tiny frame. "Did ya come to see me?"

Harry nodded. "I did." He met her small smile with one of his own, trying not to scare her off. Elly's tendency towards violence usually came out of her skittish nature and since Harry hadn't had months to lure her out of her shell this time around, he wasn't going to take any chances. "Does anybody else visit you?"

Elly picked at the lace ruffle on her pinafore and shook her head, shoulders slumped, the iron carriage wheel ringing as she kicked it with the heels of her hobnailed boots.

"It must get lonely in here," Harry replied quietly. "Who do you play with, then?"

The pile of animal bones near one of the windows shuddered, wispy shadows curling about under the damp haze of twilight coming through the dusty windowpane. Dirt shifted beneath his feet, putting him off balance as his left foot sank lower than the right. A half-rotted wooden footlocker for storing tack and grooming supplies scraped across the floor from its place near the old horse stalls. It smashed against the far wall hard enough to pop the top off, scattering little white maggots over the floor, pale bodies writhing where their home had been upset by Elly's moodiness.

The matted fur of an unfortunate cat peeked out of the crumpled mess, translucent worms seething out of the hole in its belly, teeth bared in a stiff yowl. Its nose was half-gone and a small bone-coloured worm crawled over the tattered remnants of its ear and disappeared into the hollows of the cat's eye sockets.

There was a frayed red collar around the cat's neck, the tag too rusted to read.

"So you like bones," Harry murmured, his skin going cold enough that he could feel it in his teeth, breath misting in the chill air of the carriage house.

The little ghost tilted her head, curls rustling and sounding more like sandpaper than hair.

A large group of ghosts could cause the air to drop down to wintry temperatures. When he'd visited Nearly Headless Nick's deathday party years ago, Harry remembered that it had been so cold in the chamber that his fingernails had remained blue for almost an hour afterwards.

Elly was strong enough to wreck havoc all by her lonesome when she manifested. There was a very good reason why spectres like Elly Boll were quarantined or banished if they couldn't be controlled. Few knew the real reason why the ghosts of Hogwarts were so amicable: their consciousness was anchored into the wards and bound to their actual bodies preserved in the catacombs below the old chapel that was now used as Professor Sprout's office by the greenhouses. That awareness and constant influx of magic afforded them their 'spark' of humanity.

Elly was different. Before Dumbledore's predecessor introduced the thestrals, the carriages were pulled by actual horses and one night, the caretaker had gotten careless. His daughter paid the price. Part of her remains were ground into the dirt of the carriage house where she'd been trampled to death; the rest of her body was scattered out into the Forbidden Forest where she had been dragged away by the tangled reins, sharp hooves pulverizing Elly's mangled remains into the soft loam of the forest floor.

Elly was dangerous, because only part of her was bound to the carriage house. She could come and go as she pleased.

There were wards in place to keep her contained, but they were old and frayed. And on the anniversary of her death, Elly was quite capable of slipping through the holes and running amok through the Forbidden Forest.

"Would you like to go out and play?" asked Harry, careful to keep his tone light and even.

The two-hundred-year-old ghost bit her lip and ducked her head away. "'M not supposed to go outside," she muttered sullenly, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her pinafore, feet kicking against the carriage wheel hard enough to knock some of the rust off.

Harry smiled, reeling the little ghost in. "What if I gave you permission to?"

Elly's lip curled, showing a mouthful of ragged teeth. "Don't matter." She had enough of an accent that it sounded like doan matta with a heavy, rolling -arr at the end. "Can't go anyway."

"Why not?"

The bones of her face popped as she yawned, licking at the corner of her silver-stained mouth with a long, pointed tongue. "Stuck." Her lips turned down into a sulky pout. "Bored and stuck," she said as if he'd just tried to feed her an entire plate of vegetables.

Harry tilted his head and nodded thoughtfully, affecting a pensive look. "What if I could help?" he said, looking directly at Elly.

A pair of baleful silver eyes stared into his own, something not quite right lighting up the shape of her face. "Why?" she demanded.

"Well, Miss Elly," Harry replied. "I'm looking for an extra pair of eyes and I was hoping you'd help me."

Few things stood out from the murky red haze of his sixth year, but Elly was one of the most memorable. He'd stumbled onto her home one morning, covered in blood and far too late to sneak back into Hogwarts from a late night appointment with the latest Death Eater. After a brief discussion on whether or not he was edible, Harry had passed out on a pile of mouldering straw and slept until it was night again. The shy little spectre had taken a real shine to him after that.

"What do I get out of it?" asked Elly, a pint-sized haggler with the teeth to back up her prices.

Harry's mouth curled up into a smile that was no less sharp than the ghost's own maw full of sawblades and knives. "The opportunity for mischief and mayhem."

Elly spit into her hand, a gloopy glob of viscous silver shining on her palm and held the appendage out for Harry to shake. "Deal?" she said, raising an eyebrow and tilting her head in a rather snide expression, daring him to back out.

Following her lead, Harry spat into his hand and grasped her own. Holding her hand was like gripping an ice cube – a rather slimy one in this case – but Elly's tiny mitt was as solid as his own.

"Deal," he agreed.

Elly smiled, sweet and angelic. Then she was off, spinning around the carriage-house like a whirling dervish, her bell-clear laughter abundant and overflowing.

Looking down at his palm, Harry saw no sign of dampness, neither his own spit or the ghost's.

Despite what Ministry propaganda would have the masses believe, basic necromancy was quick, cheap, and easy and required almost no esoteric ingredients to work.

All you needed was to bleed a little.

Really, saliva or any other body fluid worked just as well; it all depended on who or what was being bound.

But in Elly's case, Harry wasn't merely pressing the little ghost into his service, he was removing her previous bindings and the wards preventing her from leaving the carriage house. It would take more than just spit to let her walk free.

Shucking his wet robes off and draping them over the rusty carriage wheel, Harry knelt in the grit of the floor. From one oversized pocket of his hand-me-down jeans, Harry pulled a tiny waxed canvas pouch of goodies. Chalk, sage, a folded hand-mirror made of smoked, gunmetal-grey glass with worn leather hinges, a pair of white feathers, a gleaming silver reliquary and a bone-handled knife clinked together inside.

Harry dug the first two fingers of his left hand into the dirt and dragged them around himself, stopping just short of closing the circle.

"Elly," Harry murmured, patting the ground before him. "I need you to stand right here."

Wary, but curious, Elly edged through the small opening. Her doleful silver eyes followed Harry as he reached around Elly's cold little form to close the circle. Coarse grit built up under his fingernails as he scratched the marks for breaking bindings and containment wards into the floor, a crooked line of runes scrawled in the dirt. Power rippled through the circle, his magic liming the contours with a faint bruised hue. It was a poor substitute for real cloaking wards, but it would mask the majority of his spellwork.

Harry picked up the bone-handled knife.

Hunger glittered on Elly's eyes, the same muted violet glow of power lighting up the pale edges of her frame.

Blood splattered the dirt at her feet.

The knife was so sharp, it was only after Harry slashed his right palm open that he could feel the sting of the blade. And despite being gauze sheer and diaphanous, Elly was beginning to look solid.

The little ghost held her hands out. Slow enough to hear each joint crackle like a sheet of ice over a deep lake in mid-winter, Elly curled her tiny fingers into her palms.

Window glass shattered. Glints of amethyst light sparked where the shards pelted the unseen barrier of Harry's circle. The toothy ivy that had covered the windows lay in twisted green shreds over the sill, tiny mouths drying to a desiccated crisp as the plant died.

Harry smiled.

"Fun, isn't it?" he said, amused by the joyous wonder painted across Elly's face. "It's only temporary though."

Mouth splitting at the seams, Elly snarled at him. Thousands of tiny, needle-like teeth gleamed in the fading light, her breath ice-cold against his face.

Unflinching, Harry felt his smile pull tight against the skin of his face in satisfaction. "How would you like to have this forever?"

"Yes!" Elly screamed at him, shrill as a bird's cry. The glass on the floor trilled back in such a high resonance that Harry struggled not to wince.

"But I can't do it all by myself," Harry replied, remaining calm and implacable as she started to blur around the edges, fingers growing into ragged claws as she reached for him. "You have to help me."

Elly paused and cocked her head. "What?" she spat, her voice still warped out of proportion.

Harry raised his still bleeding hand and tapped his palm.

The angry cry that came out of her mouth sounded like sheet metal being torn in half. Elly's eyes flashed incandescent bright. Sinking a jaw full of piranha's teeth into her hand, the little ghost tore a chunk of flesh from the heel of her palm. Quicksilver globs of ghost blood ran down her arm as she spat the flesh at Harry.

He caught it before it hit the ground.

If Elly's spit had been cold, then her blood felt like pouring liquid nitrogen over his hand. "Mother of shitting hell!" he swore over the sound of Elly's tinkling laughter.

Shaking the pouch's contents out over his lap, Harry fished the reliquary out from the mess, its delicate chain almost slithering out of his grasp.

Shaped like an augury's skull in miniature, the silver reliquary showed an unnatural lack of tarnish considering its age. The minuscule clasp at the base of the skull was hard to flip open with shivering hands, but Harry managed to stuff the bit of Elly's ghost-flesh into the smoked glass vial inside. There was an odd slurping sound as the glass began to bulge out into the eye sockets of the augury's skull. A buzz-saw screech vibrated up his arm as Elly reached out and scratched a talon against the side of the vessel, lightning-bright sparks flaring up as she gouged a line in the side of a powerful necromantic tool.

Harry refused to think of this as a bad omen.

"Pretty," she said, humming an old sing-song ditty under her breath. "Can I go play now?"

"Not yet, Elly," said Harry, shaking his head. "We have to go collect your bones."

'Or, at least as many as I can find,' he amended to himself, Elly's chill blood stinging the inside of his wrist where it had dripped onto the cuff of his shirt.

A thestral wandered in and drank from an ancient water trough bolted to the side of the carriage house, its sleek black hide glistening with rainwater. Harry didn't know if the thestral herd was part of Hogwarts' defences or if they were merely oddities unto their own, but...

It would probably be a good idea to perform the majority of his necromancy off school grounds and away from the wards.

Using the side of his unmarked palm as a shovel, Harry scraped away part of the warding circle.

Elly's edges blurred into wispy pewter light.

And then she streaked away like a comet into the Forbidden Forest.

"Goddamnit, Elly!" Harry shouted after her, stumbling to his feet as pins and needles of sensation rushed back into his legs. Foot catching on a pile of animal bones half-melded to the hard-packed dirt, Harry lurched to the side, bracing himself against the stone frame of the back door. Elly's eerie light sparked in the distance, vanishing further into the encroaching dusk.

The cool silver surface of the reliquary bumped against his wrist, the delicate chain still tangled around his fingers.

Harry glanced down at the tiny augury's skull, the last light of day glinting along the scratch Elly had left on its curved beak.

He raised an eyebrow.

"Okay, you little imp," Harry murmured. "Hide and Seek it is."

He gathered up the rest of his tools, startling when his shoulder brushed against the thestral who was now nosing through the animal bones on the floor at Harry feet. The animal's hooves ground the brittle bones into ivory dust as it picked its way through Elly's haphazard piles.

"Sorry, love," Harry said as he collected a stray hair from the thestral's coarse black mane. "But I need this."

Casting a warming charm over his robes, he darted out into the rain.

About a hundred feet from the carriage house, Harry felt the zip-tingle of Hogwarts' wards brush over his skin as he left the boundaries of the school. The Forbidden Forest proper loomed before him, an ancient behemoth whose crown swallowed the cloudy night.

Water streamed from the branches above, turning the leaf mulch and pebbles of the overgrown path beneath his feet into a slick, slippery mess. The brush grew high around here. On his left, the path rose up into a thick wall of rock streaming with rainwater, tree roots gouging holes into the jagged stone arching far up over Harry's head. Clusters of small, luminescent mushrooms grew in the leaf mulch under the brush, their broad heads gleaming with pale green light by the path.

Signs of human existence still lingered near the path. A stone wall jutted out of the brush, deep green moss crawling up its sides. There was a pull his wrist as the reliquary swung to his right, the link between Elly and her blood acting as a dowsing rod.

Stepping over the low wall, Harry started down the sloping side of the hill. Dead leaves, damp with the rain, shifted underfoot as he half-jogged, half-slid down the hill. The gentle tugging of the reliquary guided him downhill where it ended in a shallow, swift-moving stream.

Though the pull of the alembic lessened the closer he drew to the stream, there was still a faint tug at his wrist going downstream. Not for the first time on this rapid hike through the woods, Harry wished he'd worn his boots with their heavy tread on the bottom as he slipped on the verdant lichen covering the rocks rising out of the stream.

And despite being charmed dry, the hems of his robes were soaked by the time the stream tipped over the edge of a deep basin worn into the rock of the hillside.

But there was Elly, perched on a fallen tree trunk lying across the the cold water of the cauldron.

"Why did you run off?" asked Harry, coming to a halt at the rim of the depression, bits of sticks, soil and leaf mulch showering down into the darkness below.

The ground dropped away at the rim of the basin, its sides as smooth as glass from years of water erosion. In the faint light of the reliquary, the churning water looked black as tar and oil-slick, viscous and roiling as the rain agitated its surface. Water from the stream trickled down the sides of the basin. A healthy crop of wormwood hung down from the broad curve of the old oak like a tattered green curtain over surface of the water.

"I remembered," Elly whispered, her voice almost inaudible over the sound of the rain and the swirling water beneath her.

Finding that the oak was lodged firm, Harry picked his way out to Elly's perch and sat down beside her spectral form.

"Remembered what?" he replied, tucking his rain-speckled glasses into his pocket.

Elly looked down into the deep waters below. "Me."

Harry glanced down. Somewhere in the depths below them lay Elly's bones.

"The stream used to go further than this," she said, nervous fingers shredding the eyelet lace of her shirtsleeves. "It went almost all the way to the sea. When the horses drug me over, the ground fell away and... an..."

Elly stopped, lips clamping tight around the words struggling to come out, tears welling up in her eyes.

"...it became very hard to breathe," she finished in a small voice, folding her trembling hands in her lap.

Harry felt a jolt of horror. Elly had still been alive when she'd been dragged out into the Forbidden Forest, surviving just long enough to drown for her troubles.

"The laces from the horses' reins held me against the far side," she said, pointing at an irregularity in the side of the basin, a dip in the rim he hadn't paid much attention to before.

"Is this all of them?" asked Harry, nodding to the deep cauldron full of cold, dark water.

"No." The little ghost shook her head, silver glow dimming. "I don't know. I... I don't think I want to remember anymore. May I stop now?"

"Yes, Elly, you may. You did very well." Not thinking, Harry ran his hand through Elly's curls, the sensation of frosty cobwebs clinging to his fingers.

Elly sucked in a gasping breath and flinched away, almost dislodging herself from the tree trunk. Wild-eyed, she lifted a taloned hand and snarled.

Cursing his impulsive behaviour, Harry lifted his hands, palm up, the pale blue veins of his wrists exposed and vulnerable. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you."

The little ghost made an aborted motion, head twitching away to stare at him from the corner of her eye, shoulders hiked up around her tiny ears.

He'd forgotten how much coaxing it had taken last around to pull her out of her shell. But touch had always been iffy. There were days when she'd craved it. And then there were days when she'd been little more than a skittish animal, baring her teeth if he came too close, human words beyond her grasp after all the years of isolation.

"Elly," Harry continued in that same low murmur. "Elly, do you still want me to free you?"

Talons picking at the skin of her lips, Elly nodded, the thin tissue splitting and oozing a thread of quicksilver down her chin.

"Then I will need your help." Harry met her baleful stare and held it. "Can you do that?"

She curled her lip, but nodded.

"Use your words, Elly," replied Harry, the spell needing verbal consent before he could bind her bones.

"Yes."

There was the sound of rushing water in his ears as the magic took hold, darker and deeper than the pool beneath his feet. The bitter flavour of ozone broke over his tongue. Feeling boneless and almost buoyant, skin shivering with adrenaline, Harry jumped.

His feet touched the water without a splash, ripples rolling away from his worn trainers where the spell held him aloft. The reliquary pulled at his wrist, pointing square at the spot where Elly's remains lay beneath the murky water. Between it and Elly's ambient glow, the basin was lit as if in broad daylight.

The words burnt his tongue as he spoke them. Rolling the numb spot against the roof of his mouth, Harry watched as the murk released Elly's bones from captivity. The white gleam under the surface growing stronger as the tiny bones of a child's hand floated into view followed by Elly's petite skull and collarbones. The hand twitched, fingers opening and closing as if grasping for something. High above, Elly stared from her perch, expression rapturous.

Her bones shivered, a ripple of magic flaring out around them. Then, limned in violet light, the hand rose out of the water. Ivory finger-bones grabbed the trailing wormwood tight, crushing the green leaves in its grip. It hauled Elly's skeleton out of the water, the other hand dragging in the water behind it, too crushed to be useful. Elly exhaled, mouth falling open in astonishment. The blank curve of the skull's eye sockets stared back as a leg assembled itself underwater, a diminutive foot rising out of the water for a support on the wormwood.

Harry watched as Elly's half-finished remains made their sinuous way up to the little ghost, the chain-length ivory of her spinal column gleaming in the light of the reliquary. Clicking its teeth together as if it were laughing, the skeleton crawled up to the little girl and reached out its good hand.

Wide-eyed, Elly skittered back on her hands and knees.

"Go on," Harry murmured, looking up at the tableau through heavy lids. "It's only animated, it won't bite."

Summoning charms might not work, but damned if animating the bones to follow his command didn't do the trick. Add in a daub of necromancy and Elly's remains obeyed his every whim. Humanity left more of themselves behind than they could guess.

Gritting her teeth, Elly reached out and grabbed the skeleton's proffered limb like she was going to shake its hand.

The left side of Elly's skeleton had been put through the wringer. Most of her ribs were missing on that side as well as one of the major bones in her forearms. Her left femur ended in a jagged stump a few inches away from where the rounded cap of the bone joined with her pelvis.

Harry frowned. Reaching down, he stirred the icy water of the basin with his fingers. No more bones rose out of the depths at his call. And when he lifted his hand from the pool, there was the curious sensation that his fingers were still submerged in chill liquid.

"What are you doing?" asked Elly from above him, the wormwood rustling as she shifted to peer over the edge of the tree trunk.

Harry shook the tingling from his fingers to no avail. "I'm missing the rest," he replied. The wound across his palm broke open again and began to seep blood through his fingers. He cursed under his breath, pressing the hem of his shirt against the cut.

Elly made a pinched-lipped moue. "Well, yes," she said in rebuttal, not a little snide.

"Don't be a brat, Elly," Harry warned, spelling a series of temporary handholds into the smooth side of the basin.

The climb up was a bit more precarious than he liked, buzz-numb fingers refusing to grip with their usual strength.

"What's a brat?" asked Elly when his head lifted out of the hole in the ground.

Harry grunted in reply as he reached for a firmer handhold to haul the rest of his bulk free. A tiny silver hand closed around his wrist and yanked him away from the rim, leaf mulch piling up wet and uncomfortable against his front.

"What's a brat?" Elly repeated, her eyes narrowed and suspicious. Elly's skeleton tipped its head in curiosity and clicked its teeth, already moving under the little ghost's own control instead of Harry's.

He bit back a laugh as he climbed to his feet, the knees of his jeans sodden with mud. "Definitely not you."

The smirky little expression crossing the child-spirit's mouth didn't help his feeling of surreality as Elly linked hands with her own bones and began to climb away from the basin. And despite her skeleton's shambling, one-legged gait, they made good time up the steep line of the hillside.

He scrambled up the side of the hill before he lost Elly again.

The ghost's glow lit up a series of stepping stones worn flat in the wake of the swift-running brook. The Dead weren't all that fond of moving water, but Elly's new lease on 'life' must have emboldened her curious side.

Weaving the single strand of thestral hair into a tiny circle as he walked over to her, Harry rubbed it in the drying trails of silver haemoglobin on the side of the reliquary. "What did you find?" he asked Elly.

"A frog. But she ate it," said Elly, voice taking on a mournful tinge as she pointed at her skeleton.

Sure enough, there was a bumpy, mud-coloured toad with a mangled toe peering through the slats of the skeleton's ribs. Elly's bones clicked its teeth in dismay, poking at the source of the croaking.

"I see," Harry intoned as he reached up inside of the skeleton's rib-cage with his free hand and plucked the unhappy toad from its perch.

"Froggy!" Elly crowed with a gleeful smile, snatching the toad from Harry's hand. Twisting the toad's bent limb completely off, she threw it at her skeleton, crying, "You stole my frog!"

The still twitching leg bounced off of the skeleton's left eye-socket and fell to the ground. Elly's bones patted at its skull, then at its leg before finding the toad's missing limb, putting it into its mouth and biting down.

Click, click, crunch, crunch. Mmm, yum. Toad leg.

The little brown limb kicked at the air from where it was caught in the gaps of the skeleton's teeth, nerve endings still firing off frantic signals to run.

"Blergh," Elly stated flatly, sticking her tongue out.

"Well," Harry muttered over her head as he trapped one of the skeleton's hands against his knee and forced the thestral hair ring down over its wrist. "At least I don't have to teach you not to put your toys in your mouth."

He felt odd not using his wand, despite the fact that most necromantic spells never called for one. It was an unsettling sensation to keep reaching for the old holly wand, which felt like a mere wooden rod compared to the resonant strength of his yew wand. His fingers brushed against the holly wand again and Harry shivered, skin growing cold as the warming charms on his robes faded. Murmuring the incantation, Harry watched the thestral hair ring begin to emit a faint luminescence.

It was like he'd stuffed his ears with cotton; the sound of the rain-swollen brook drowning out the storm overhead.

Elly's skeleton picked at the fragile bracelet, tiny finger-bones tugging at the strands. Almost too quick to see, a tremor went through the bones, prompting it to clamber to its knees with short, jerking movements like a puppet on a string, quite unlike its human mannerisms of before. Head swivelling sideways to stare at a rockfall near the bend of the stream, Elly's skeleton lurched away from the stepping stones.

Harry raised a hand when Elly stepped forward to follow. "Not yet."

"What did you do to her?" she asked, hands still wrapped around her hapless prisoner. Elly's voice was barely audible over the rushing water; Harry only able to pick out what she was saying by the shapes her mouth made around the words.

"Just watch," Harry said in her ear, his own voice lost to the sounds of the waterway as well.

Stumbling over the rocky ground on its hands and single good leg, the skeleton stretched an arm out as if it were grasping for something just out of sight. The mud of the brook began to slither upstream like a snake, dark muck birthing cracked rib bones pitted with tooth marks. Bubbling mire disgorged the broken end of a yellowing femur and a trail of metatarsals wriggled free of a willow tree's roots where it fed from the stream. A heavy old oak a few yards back shook off its blanket of toothy ivy, Elly's missing ulna fighting free of the tangled greenery.

The numbness in Harry's hands intensified, building to the point where he felt like he was swimming upriver against an arctic current, as if something had grabbed hold of all of his edges and tugged sideways.

It was then that he realized that the roar of water in his ears had very little to do with the physical world.

...and everything to do with the clinging chill of death tainting the ozone-spark of his magic, frigid water lapping at the shores of his mind.

Ice crackled in his lungs.

The world went grey.

---

Harry woke damp and cold, the smell of leaf-rot thick in his sinuses and throat. Rolling clouds the colour of soot sped across the sky above him, icy raindrops stinging the exposed skin of his face and hands.

"Stupid," said Elly, her frowning face appearing over him where she was crouched by his head. "You're supposed to put me back together, not tear yourself apart."

But over the lulling patter of rain on the ground, Harry could hear the skeleton's footsteps. Triumph flared inside him and Harry felt his lips peel back into a diamond-edged grin. "But I did put you back together," he said, voice as slow and deep as the cold river flowing through the back of his thoughts.

He rolled his head to face Elly, fingers still numb, the chill beginning to travel up his arms. "That was... easier than I remembered it being," he slurred, the words almost dredged out of him.

"That didn't look very easy," was Elly's mulish reply. For the ghost of a five-year-old, she had an uncomfortably deft grasp of sarcasm.

Harry didn't bother asking how long he was out, there were bigger things to worry about.

Like how he was going to bind Elly's bones to the alembic without a necromancer's bells, panpipes, or any other be-spelled instrument. He supposed he could just whistle the spells, but he had very little experience manipulating the finer aspects of necromancy with such an uncertain tool. Hell, he was already playing with shit well above his pay-grade. He hadn't realized it at the time, but the phantom waterway in the back of his mind wasn't in his head at all. What he was hearing was the dank rift of Death with a capital D.

Which was something he shouldn't have been able to do without years of experience or at least a solid education under a Master-class necromancer. Before coming back, Harry had been lucky to be able to craft a sturdy enough barrier to keep La Muerte's undead spies out.

And his knowledge was spotty at best – what little he knew was the result of cleaning up the necromancer's messes.

One of the most basic rules of magic was that like must counter like. Because La Muerte favoured the bells, Harry needed to know sound-based necromancy in order to counter his spells. He was nobody's idea of a musician, but he could carry a tune and hit the proper notes. Which was a good thing, because the ability to sing, hum, and whistle was the only thing that gave him an edge over La Muerte's nastier creations.

But it was also a bad thing, because it limited the ways he could approach this problem.

There were seven bells, and they sat with their clappers muffled in a bandolier slung crosswise over the shoulder. The bells didn't each have an individual note on the musical scale, so much as each an individual song for their purpose.

The first and smallest was Ranna, called the sleepbringer or 'Sleeper'; its low tones soothed the ear bringing silence to the restless and rest to the Dead. Harry had used Ranna often, whistling her sweet song while walking down a dark alley and banishing the revenants that crept along behind him.

Mosrael, the Waker, was a raucous bell with a harsh song that abraded the ears. La Muerte had once used the Waker to try and claim a pyrrhic victory, flinging both himself and Harry into Death. But Harry's will to live had proven stronger than the bell's power. The Waker had the ability to cast the listener into Death, while simultaneously bringing an army of the Lesser Dead into Life. He hadn't forgotten this bell's song, but Harry had never practised the note. Its sound was a dangerous balancing act, taking as much power from the wielder as it gave to the listener deep in Death.

The third was a contrary bell of several sounds, capable of making the wielder walk where he did not want to go. Kibeth was a obstinate bell. But Harry had long ago bent the Walker to his will, finding that the third bell's cantankerous nature was well-matched by his own stubborn personality. This bell gave freedom of movement back to the Dead. It could also force the Dead to walk where the wielder desired, further into Death or closer to Life.

Dyrim, the Speaker, had a melodious sound and could grant speech to the Dead who'd long forgotten how communicate in Life. The fourth bell was also capable of silencing a wagging tongue, but all of this was conjecture to Harry. He'd never heard the fourth bell and therefore could not mimic its song.

Belgaer was another slippery bell, which sought to sing clear of its own accord. Wily and troublesome, the Thinker could erase the minds of the listeners as easily as it could restore independent thought. It was another bell that Harry had never heard. Which was probably a good thing, because in an inexperienced hand this bell could also wipe clean the mind of its wielder.

The sixth bell held the strongest voice; deep and commanding, Saraneth was the Binder who shackled the Dead to the wielder's will. Harry knew this bell's song well and had used it often.

The last bell left Harry feeling cold at the mere thought of it. Astarael the Sorrowful. The seventh bell was the banisher, and properly rung it cast everyone who heard it too far into Death to ever return to Life. Everyone, including the ringer. Whistling was only a pale imitation of the bells' song, but Harry had no intentions of learning this bell's tune. He had never heard it and did not wish to.

Though only a necromancer could hear the bells' true song, their effects were felt by both the living and the Dead. In the hands of an experienced mage, the bells – and their songs – were a very dangerous tool.

He pushed himself up from his sprawl on the ground, a damp shiver running up his back as the fabric of his wet robes met the crisp snap of Autumn's chill. Elly's skeleton knelt beside the little ghost, head tilted at a thoughtful angle, hollow eye-sockets fixed on her spectral half.

Harry sighed.

Ghosts, even ones as strong as Elly, were nothing more than imprints – remnants of self, of magic, mimicking the personality they had once held in life. To truly bind Elly to Life, Harry needed to bring all of her back from Death. He may not have been able to give her a body, but he could give her power. He could give her the ability to manipulate her environment the way she would have if she had lived to grow into her own as a witch.

"We're almost done, Elly," Harry told the fidgety little ghost. "Just have one last thing to do. I'm going to draw a circle around us again and I need you to stay very still. Can you do that?"

Elly nodded, taking her skeleton's hand once more.

Entering Death was a lot easier than leaving it. Since Elly was already a ghost, the other part of her 'self' would be close to the barrier of Life. He'd never consciously travelled through Death, but apparently he was supposed to … feel it and reach out to it. The echoing roar of dark water in his mind helped a bit. A vivid memory of green light hid behind the thundering rush of the river, but Harry stomped it down before it could form across his mind's eye.

He took a moment to marvel at how foolhardy an endeavour this was – to catapult himself into Death with his greatest weapon being the ability to whistle a happy tune.

Settling onto his knees inside another warding circle – this one drawn in the wet muck by the stream – Harry closed his eyes and reached out to the frigid river flowing through his psyche.

Cold pressure built into a wafer-thin crust of ice across his clothes. The gentle eddy of the disembodied river at his knees turned into a rapacious current that would drag him under if he faltered. Then there was the bright sting of icy meltwater against the sensitive skin of his face and Harry opened his eyes to a wide, shallow river. Tar-black and opaque, the chill waterway of Death stretched as far as the eye could see; its flat breadth met the distant grey horizon with nary a landmark to break up the monotony.

Little ripples marred the surface as the current drifted past Harry's shins, tugging the edge of his robes downstream. A patchy framework of grey-tinged frost crawled up the fabric, alarming him with how quickly it grew. Heavy as lead and stuck fast, the ice seemed almost sentient, leaving Harry with the shuddering impression that something other was watching him.

Harry glanced up at the ashy sky above.

Nothing.

At his back, the heartbeat of Life bloomed warm and strong. It was hard to feel fear this close to that living heat and Harry felt reassured by how easy it would be to drop out of Death's cold domain.

One shuffling footstep forward told him that the river-bed was just as flat as its surface. There was no way of telling what kind of silt or other things he'd stirred up in the black water though, so Harry stopped moving as much as he could against the pull of the river.

He also didn't know who or what was listening so closely. Keeping his voice to a low hum, barely audible over the river, Harry spoke:

"Elly."

The water around him shuddered. There were odd whispering notes in his voice, an after-echo of sound that shouldn't have been there – a stone-throated rasp that reminded Harry of Grimaulkin's Daughter and her savage sub-vocal wrawl.

Kibeth's slippery song leapt to his lips, the whistle piercing Death's hushed realm. The river stilled, the current becoming as calm as a frozen mid-winter lake. Just under the river's placid surface, an incandescent glow the colour of old cobwebs raced towards Harry; it came from beyond the horizon, leaving a slow, viscous ripple in its wake.

Harry hoped this was Elly's spirit and not something else that had heard his call as he had neither bells nor spell-crafted sword to drive the thing back into Death. Wishing that he had at least brought his wakizashi, Harry whistled Saraneth's low, magisterial notes.

The glow trembled, stopping short of crashing against Harry's shins. Water splashed as a pair of tiny hands latched onto the front of his robes, pulling Elly – the real girl, not just her fading imprint – gasping and wild-eyed from the water, her ashy curls damp and dripping. Scooping her up into his arms, Harry made to back out of Death.

There was a dark smudge on the horizon.

Something else had heard his call.

A howl split the air; broken-glass resonant and much closer than the tenebrous spot marring the sky appeared, it sounded as if it had been torn from the rotting jaws of a furious horde. Pounding pulsed in his ears, ghostly drumbeats of a long-dead army. The black river around him began to run backwards, like water draining off the sandy beach and back into the ocean's grasp. Beneath Harry's feet the riverbed shifted, slimy muck creeping up over the toes of his trainers.

Elly whimpered, burying her cold face in Harry's neck.

Stumbling back against the current of the river, Harry tightened his grip on Elly and flung himself and his precious cargo towards Life's warmth.

His knees hit the mud of the brook, striking little pebbles hidden in the soft earth. The sudden inversion from grey daylight to the black cover of night left Harry blind and disoriented. Light still radiated from the reliquary, but it was a pale star in the darkness.

"Elly!" he called, but her ghostly form was gone.

Harry inhaled, coughing a bit on how heavy and hot the air felt after the bone-chilling cold of Death. And if his voice still carried the strange susurrant reverberation from Death, he very carefully ignored it. "ELLY!"

No sign of either Elly's ghost or her skeleton.

On the other side of the brook was a crooked circle gouged into the spongy mire by the shore.

"Oh shit," Harry breathed. Somehow, just by taking a couple shuffling steps through the black water of the river, he'd moved almost fifteen feet away from where he'd entered Death.

Had he done it wrong? Harry knew fuck-all about necromancy beyond basic banishing spells – had he accidentally stranded Elly somewhere between Life and Death? Was that even possible?

His sight beginning to adjust to the darkness, Harry spun in a slow circle looking for Elly's telltale glow amongst the cluster of saplings along the edges of the brook.

Eyes stared straight back at him.

Harry jerked backwards, sucking in an involuntary breath of surprise.

Half-hidden beside a spindly young beech, the drab brown of Elly's dress and boots were almost indistinguishable from the damp autumn foliage. Limp and slicked to her skull, Elly's blond curls faded into the dull beige and grey bark of the trees. Her eyes shone impossibly pale, pupils flashing like a cat's in the faint light of the alembic.

Elly smiled, plum-dark mouth splitting too wide at the corners around straight, white teeth – perfectly normal, perfectly ordinary.

"Hi," she said, her voice bell-clear and sweet. Elly ducked her head, a soot-stain blush darkening her bone-white skin as she peered through damp, spiky lashes at him. "...thank you."

In the time it took to blink, Elly was across the brook and perched next to him on a deadfall of sun-bleached tree trunks near the water.

Harry swallowed, wondering what he'd unleashed on Life. Even as shallow a waterway as the stream running past them should have prevented her from crossing. Hell, how had she gotten across it in the first place?

Was it because Elly was bound to him and not a stationary location? Would it fade the further away she got from Harry, causing her to fall victim to the usual rules that bound the Dead?

Whatever Elly had become, it was not one of the Lesser Dead. If she suddenly belched flame and ate living flesh...

'Fuck me running,' Harry thought. 'What am I doing? What if I made her into something that preys on people?'

"Harry?" Elly's wistful face stared up at him as she reached out and tugged on his robes. "Are you angry? I didn't mean to. Really, I didn't."

Cautious and careful, Harry reached out and smoothed back the cold, damp silk of her curls. And instead of flinching away, Elly closed her eyes, sighed and leant into the touch. Something dark rubbed off onto his hands when he touched her, as if dirt or ash was smeared on her skin.

"No Elly," he murmured, not wanting to scare her again. "I'm not angry. You didn't do anything wrong."

The consequences of giving her such permanent power would be immense – both for himself and for those who would have to deal with Elly after he released her from her contract. But he hadn't known how to do this last time around. Otherwise, he'd have acquired the little ghost years ago.

Even without the extra power, Elly had always possessed an uncanny strength of will. It was unusual to see in a ghost not bound to wards or a servitude contract. Though with each of them having shed an equal amount of blood, he wasn't sure their arrangement even counted as a servitude contract.

"Elly," Harry made sure she was looking him in the eye before he said anything else, wanting her full attention. "I need you to do something for me. It's not very hard – I just need you to watch somebody for a bit and tell me what they do, okay?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Why?"

"Because he's a very bad man who has been hurting young girls." Harry held the little spook's unblinking stare. "He hurts them and then he kills them and their families never find out why they disappeared."

Something shifted in Elly's stare, a hollow light shining through the bones of her face. She tilted her chin up. "Okay," she whispered.

"Good girl," said Harry, pressing a kiss to the chill bone of Elly's forehead.

Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, Harry unfolded the corners and spread it out over his palm. Droplets of Bletchley's blood stained the white cotton from where Harry had hit the Death Eater, painstakingly collected from his knuckles during those tense moments he'd spent waiting in Dumbledore's antechamber.

He held it out to Elly. "Find him. Watch him. Tell me everything he does."

Her fingers closed over the scrap. The skin of her mouth was beginning to split, her teeth hanging over her lips like a lanternfish, brackish drool sliding down her chin. "May I play with him?" Elly asked as she stroked the stained cotton.

Her voice was just as sweet and lovely as before, but there was a subtle note running through it that reminded Harry of dried leaves crinkling underfoot.

Ten points to Elly for taking the initiative, Harry thought. "Yes, but only when he's alone. I don't think the others would understand."

Elly nodded, though her eagerness wilted a bit.

"I have to go now. But I'm counting on you to help me."

"I will," she said, her determined personality surfacing once more.

"Remember, I need him alive for this to work." Harry nodded to the eastern edge of the Forbidden Forest, away from the castle. "Go."

Elly smiled, a pale flicker of fire sparking in the back of her throat. And then she was gone. No lights, no after-image, just gone.

The reliquary dimmed to a mere glimmer of phosphorescence within the glass vial.

Harry looped the chain around his neck, tucking it inside his shirt. It was cold against his skin. Somewhere in the back of his psyche, the sound of dark water gurgled hungry and deep under an endless grey horizon.

Turning, Harry began the long trek back to the castle. Without the light of the alembic to guide him, the darkness pressed much closer. Off in the distance, Harry could hear the hunting cries of the Forbidden Forest's various night-dwelling predators. A chittering amongst the branches above him said that he had at least two of Hagrid's pet spiders following him, but the lingering chill of Death held them off.

Odd things happened when he used necromancy, but never had the after-effects lasted so long.

If he was going to use Elly as his eyes and ears, then he damn well needed to fix the gap in his knowledge. He'd gotten lucky – again. Hogwarts herself was heavily shielded and the Forbidden Forest was conductive to magic; the next time he played around with necromancy, Harry might not be so fortunate.

Harry didn't want to imagine what could have happened if he'd tried that next to an area like the Dead Zones; he might have been permanently stranded in Death, his physical body left behind like a victim of the Dementor's Kiss.

And he must have gotten turned around in the dark, because the forest thinned to reveal the open grounds of Hogwarts and her east-facing courtyards.

Much, much further away from the carriage house than he was expecting.

Nothing for it then.

Harry jogged up the winding stone walk, passing by Sprout's carefully tended gardens. The heavy downpour earlier had tamped down the ornamental grasses and delicate blooms; even the hardier plants had broken stems and other damage. Stepping around a puddle in the middle of the walkway where a small fish-pond had overflowed, he ducked through the side-door out of the misty rain.

Heat hit him in an almost physical wave.

Amber-orange flames burned merry and warm in brass sconces hanging overhead, the hall painfully bright to Harry's night-dilated pupils. Disoriented, he pressed a hand against the wall as he shuffled out of the doorway.

The hall split into a Y; one side dark, the other light. Regaining his balance, Harry took the hallway to the right, knowing the candlelit route would lead him back to Gryffindor Tower.

The corridor exited in an old solarium of sorts. During the day, sunlight would shine in from the tall windows and skylights lining the far side of the room. Now it was merely empty and dim.

From across the solarium came a cheerful drinking tune. The Fat Friar, drunk as he so frequently was when not around the students, was tone-deaf at best and clearly not paying attention to his surroundings. Tipsy and staggering, he meandered along the wall, sopping a great deal of wine onto the floor when he stopped to drink. Shinning puddles of ectoplasm littered the floor behind the friar, showing that this wasn't his first misstep.

Unthinking, Harry swerved around the portly ghost.

Who lurched to the side just in time to bump into Harry.

The Fat Friar's cup dropped to the ground with the clank of rough cast pewter.

Harry stumbled back, the ghost's cold weight enough to throw him off his stride.

The Fat Friar looked up from the wine spilt on his vestments with the sobering knowledge that something not quite right had just occurred.

Using necromancy made the intangible realm of phantasma something he could physically manipulate – all of it. Every ghost, ghoul and ghlim. If it was Dead, he could touch it.

Maybe the use of such powerful necromancy was still affecting his magic, causing these lingering side effects. Maybe he'd made his soul start to slip its bounds, begin sliding half-way into death. Maybe Elly had always been so powerful as to make herself into semi-solid matter that he had taken it for granted.

Whatever it was, Harry had fucked up.

Only the dead could touch the dead. Anything else was an aberration of the natural order of life.

Harry bent and picked up the cup. It was cool, but not cold. Lines of ghostlight shone through his fingers as he held it out to the wide-eyed ghost. "I'm sorry," he said hoping to dissipate the situation a bit. "Are you all right?"

Something in the Friar's face changed, his visage becoming remote as stone. He raised a hand towards Harry, palm glowing with the same power he'd once seen blast Death Eaters off the ramparts of the castle. The school ghosts could sense the touch of Death on him.

He'd activated Hogwarts' defences.

Shit.

The words of necromancy didn't burn his tongue like before. No, this time they rolled free without a thought, Kibeth's song painting the air with an afterburn of sound. The Fat Friar's mouth dropped wide in a silent, bug-eyed wail before he fritzed out into a dark wisp of smoke that stank of ozone.

The ghost was gone.

"Well, fuck," Harry said, his voice echoing off the walls of the solarium.

Somehow, it felt as if Hogwarts herself stared back in silent accusation.

---

Warm, golden-green light shone through the pattern of stained-glass leaves on the lamp nestled into Hermione's secluded corner. Wedged in-between two tall bookshelves, her tiny wooden table overflowed with crumpled parchment and tilting piles of books. Above it hung a tapestry with a busy print of a wizarding hunt in gold, burgundy and forest greens – the clever eyes of a fox blinking at her from the brush before disappearing from the mute gallop of horses' hooves and the silent baying of the hounds.

The Library was quiet this late in the evening; most of Hogwarts' inhabitants had finished their studies for the day and were enjoying dinner in the Great Hall. Stilling her hands from plucking at the loose threads of her skirt, Hermione picked up the crinkled bit of parchment that had once been an origami frog.

Pink glitter shone off the scrap of parchment, Lavender's latest bit of gossip scrawled in enchanted wizarding ink. Hermione never really paid attention to rumour and idle speculation, but this...

This seemed real in a way that the silly gossip about who dated who rarely did.

Harry had gotten into a scuffle with a Slytherin upper year and it wasn't the older student who had come out on top.

Hermione folded her hands and pressed them against the sharp ache beneath her breastbone. Nervous energy caused her legs start bouncing where they were pressed together, ankle-to-ankle under the table, her spine ramrod straight despite the comfortable tweed cushions of the chair. She remembered what Harry was like the last time she'd talked to him.

Not the easy, gregarious joking that he'd adopted over the summer, but their conversation in the abandoned classroom on the second floor. How cold and wrong Harry had felt to her just after the dementors, wearing the face of her friend, but none of his familiarity.

And nobody, it seemed, had seen either boy since the incident in question. Each hour that passed by without any sign of her friend had twisted the pinched knot of tension in her stomach tighter and tighter with worry.

Hermione shoved a tall stack of books on the desk aside, the Library's innate magic picking up the discarded pile and whisking it away before it could topple to the floor.

She'd long since concluded that the pale-haired, green-eyed woman that had appeared in the classroom was not a manifestation of the boggart. But nothing Hermione had read came close to fitting the woman. Veela seemed similar – appearance-wise at least – until she realized that they were creatures of fire. The lovely Wight that had interrupted the lesson was very obviously a being of ice and snow, the air of the classroom plunging into wintry temperatures, frost beginning to crawl up the windows.

But looking up Winterfell beasts and their kin had led her off into old wives' tales and horror stories; fairy tales told in metaphor and simile, rather than records documenting any sort of hard knowledge.

"Er, Hermione?"

Startled, she flinched in her chair. The book in her hands nearly tumbled from her grasp, a small puddle of black spreading from the tipped-over inkwell.

Colin blinked, brown eyes large and docile. "I thought you ought to know it's almost curfew," he said while tugging the strap of his Muggle backpack over his skinny shoulder, his ever-present camera already looped around his neck. "We'll be late if we don't leave now."

Hermione froze, her free hand outstretched over the leaking inkwell. "I – yes, of course. I'm..." She righted the inkstand and swished her wand over the whole mess, books flying off to their proper shelves, black ink rolling off the wood and back into its tray. "I'm ready," she declared in as steady a voice as she could mange.

Colin bobbed his head. "All right then."

Grabbing her bag, Hermione shifted the heavy tomes inside so they wouldn't poke her in the hip. The stairs were murder to climb without being jabbed in the side as well.

Why wouldn't Harry tell her what was going so wrong inside his head – what had him coiled so tight inside himself that he would had to vent his ire through violence rather than through more productive outlets? Wasn't that what Quidditch was supposed to be? A logical avenue to physically work out his frustrations?

But Harry hadn't had any interest in Quidditch or flying this year. In fact, he hadn't shown much interest in anything outside of attending class and working on a few half-hearted essays.

Harry had never been very social, but she keenly felt the absence of his dry wit and mellow disposition. This new creature with the gregarious personality couldn't be more stilted if he tried. It was like he was trying to put up a front of being okay, but didn't know the part he was playing well enough to be convincing.

Hermione grimaced, swinging her bag over her other shoulder to relieve the added weight biting into her collarbone.

Didn't he know they were all better off together instead of fighting off monsters by themselves?

She wasn't a fool. Hermione knew that there wasn't some miracle spell that would make him trust easier, make Harry want to confide in her. But hadn't she always been there? Hadn't she proved herself by following him into danger, heedless of warnings otherwise? He'd saved her and the school twice over now. Was it really so wrong to want to repay his selfless courage?

Just this once, why couldn't she slay his dragons for him?

Colin held the portrait door for her as she clambered through. "Thank you!" she gasped, still puffing a bit from the mad dash up the stairs.

Shrugging in reply, the blond second year disappeared into the unusually crowded common room.

Despite being so full, the common room was caught in a hush. Huddled clumps of students murmured in low, vehement tones; every time someone started to get loud, they found themselves under the collective scrutiny of the Gryffindor hoi polloi.

Hermione was starting to getting the uncomfortable feeling she had been in this same position last year, during the parseltongue debacle.

She shouldered her way through the press of students to the overstuffed armchairs by the fire. Her lanky red-headed friend sat cross-legged and hunched over, hands tucked into the pockets of his worn Chudley Cannons jumper.

"No sign?" she asked, dropping her books beside the armchair opposite Ron's.

He shook his head, firelight gleaming amber-orange on the long mop of hair poking out from his hood. "Not since class." Ron snorted, sharing a knowing look with her. "And we all know how well that ended."

"Nothing at all?" Hermione persisted, feeling desperate.

Ron lifted his shoulder in a half-hearted shrug, going back to contemplating his shoelaces. "Katie Bell was one of the last to see him, I think. Said that she saw Snape drag him off to Dumbledore's office."

Hermione pulled her fingers away from her mouth before she could start chewing on her nails. "Oh no! How much trouble do you think he's in?"

A new voice interjected itself into the conversation.

"A lot." Fred's grim countenance appeared over his brother's chair. "Whenever Wood's gotten in a tussle with Flint, he's always been handed off to McGonagall – Never much had a reason to be sent to the Headmaster."

George slung an arm around Ron's shoulder. "'Course, that's probably because Wood's never tried to yank Flint's brain out via his nostrils." He ruffled Ron's hair. "Feet off the chair, little brother. BigHead Boy's on a warpath tonight."

Flint's brain?

"What happened?" Hermione breathed, aghast.

"Rumour and hearsay," replied Fred in a dark voice, stormy expression building into a full-on scowl. "That's what happened."

George nudged his twin with an elbow. "We know that Bletchley threw the first curse and that's about it."

Fred snorted. "Lobotomy Lollipops: Buy one, Get one free."

Hermione tipped her head to the side, struggling to place the name. "Bletchley? I'm afraid I don't know him."

"Good." Wood dropped to one knee beside the fireplace chairs, bracing a forearm across his thigh. "Keep it that way. Bletchley is the twisted sort who needs very little provocation to attack another student." His mouth thinned into a mere slash of an expression. "If it weren't for his family and their money, I wouldn't be surprised to see his name come up in a murder case after he leaves Hogwarts."

Ron gaped at the Quidditch captain. "Mur – "

Wood cut him off. "Yes. I'm not much fond of talking behind people's backs, but you all need to be aware and stay safe."

Funny, she thought as her hands began to shake, how easily that could also describe Ha –

There was a little voice in the back of her mind saying, 'It's not him, it's not him, it's not him, it's not Harry, they took him and left this in his place.'

She straightened in her chair, shaking off that moment of oddness. Too many fairy tales and not enough dinner. Strange things were bound to happen.

"What should we do?" Hermione asked, folding her hands together.

"Keep an eye on the younger years," said Wood as he inclined his head at the tiny first and second years watching the tableau from the edges of the room. "The upper years intimidate them, but you're one of them. Or close to it at least. They'll be more likely to talk to you than – "

The portrait door swung open.

Harry slithered through the entrance to Gryffindor tower.

Conversation in the common room cut off so abruptly, Hermione swore she felt her ears pop.

Something was very, very wrong.

Soaked to the bone, his hair tangled with leaves and still seeping water down his face, Harry didn't seem to notice them at first. There was something wild lurking in his visage, green eyes heavy-lidded and feverish in his milk-pale face. Frost flaked off the sopping cotton of his robes and melted into the carpet as he glided through the room, the crowd edging away from the sharp chill coming off him. It was like something had fashioned itself a body from the debris of the Forbidden Forest and put Harry's face on like a carnival mask.

Hermione wondered whose bright idea it was to let this thing loose in Hogwarts.

"Harry Potter!" Percy barked, his voice ringing through the silent common room.

Harry paused. He rolled his head to the side and stared over his shoulder with one malefic green eye. Not even a flicker of recognition. The whole movement was so sinuous that it seemed like he'd forgotten how to move in human ways, his bones no longer lining up where they should be.

"Where were you?" the Head Boy demanded. "McGonagall wants to see you in her office."

Harry smiled. There was a damp smear of dirt over the corner of his jaw, a dark contrast to the white flash of his teeth.

Sliding his hands into his pockets, Harry shifted to face the older Weasley, that sly smile never wavering. "Out," he replied, his voice a low, honeyed croon. "It was such a beautiful evening; thought I'd take a walk and enjoy it."

Percy swayed back on his feet for a moment, eyes going unfocused. But then he straightened, his obstinate temperament shaking off whatever strange spell Harry's voice had woven. "You're lying," Percy stated flatly.

"Am I?" said Harry. His clear amusement aggravated the Head Boy, who obviously had no idea how to deal with Harry's brazen disregard.

"I don't appreciate you telling stories when half the school's resources are tied up in keeping you safe," replied Percy.

Harry laughed.

Hermione gritted her teeth, cringing away from the sound. A secondary echo resonated underneath his false cheer and the harsh sibilance felt like sandpaper against her eardrums. It was a sound that should never have been made with a human throat.

She wasn't the only one who could hear it. Others in the common room had recoiled from the strange vocals in Harry's laugh.

"Goodness, Perce, how would you know if I'm telling stories? I haven't seen you around at all. It's almost as if you weren't even looking for me."

Percy's nostrils flared with anger. "You disappeared for half the day after you started a fight with an upper year. What am I supposed to think?"

"That I know the secret passages of this school better than you do, and I didn't want to be found?" Harry replied, making the mocking statement into a prod at Percy's intelligence.

The Head Boy grimaced, trying for another tactic. "We're doing this for your benefit – "

"Bullshit," Harry drawled, the word coming out half-slurred with laughter. This time there was no echo. Just Harry and a laugh that sounded as if it had been scraped up off the bottom of the ocean floor.

"Ten points from Gryffindor!" Percy snapped. "Don't ever use that kind of –"

He continued on over Percy's indignant rant. "I know for a fact you're only doing this to kiss the right asses. You never lifted a finger to look for me – you didn't even know I was missing until you got out of class, which..."

Harry made a show of looking at a non-existent watch. "...was about an hour ago. I – "

"I was pulled out of class three hours ago to help look for you," said Percy, real anger beginning to spark in his expression, his voice nearly shaking with emotion. "As was Wood and most of the other seventh year Gryffindors. The least you could do is get rid of your foul attitude."

"Oh Percy! You and your noble suffering on my behalf," Harry said with a derisive smile. "Don't make yourself out to be a fucking martyr here. You don't actually care about me – you're only doing this to prop yourself up for recognition. Because really, it's not like you've got anything else going for you."

"Twenty points from Gryffindor," Percy grit out, face almost as red as his hair.

"Head Boy? Pshh." Harry waved a dismissive hand. "You were last pick on the candidate list for a job nobody wanted. Dumbledore never liked the idea of you as Head Boy; said you were too rigid, too prideful to know your own limitations – to realize that you haven't the first fucking clue about being a leader. And let's be honest, Dumbledore's right."

Wood stood up. "That's enough," he said, the command ringing out over the common room.

"This?" Harry spread his arms and gestured to the common room at large. "This is the shit hitting the fan! And you? Smack dab in the middle of all this? You have no idea what you're doing. You're just a cog in the machine playing at being one of the big boys," said Harry, lip curling with disgust. "Some days? You wish you'd never accepted that badge. Hell, if Ollie hadn't turned down Dumbledore's offer, you wouldn't even have been in the running."

"Enough!" The Quidditch captain yelled as he pushed through the crowd of students.

Harry didn't even look at him. "How's it feel, Perce? To have won by default? To know everything you value so dearly is little better than an accident of happenstance?"

This was all wrong.

"I promise you," said Harry, voice ringing clear throughout the common room. "One day that pride of yours will trip you up so badly you'll betray your family for a cause you don't even believe in." He leaned forward, almost nose to nose with Percy's shell-shocked countenance. "Because you couldn't admit you were wrong. You'll destroy your own life – just to save face. What's worse? You'll damage the lives of everyone around you as well."

Harry leaned back on his heels and stuck his hands in his pockets. "I have to say, as far as self-destructive behaviour goes? That's nigh fucking talented of you, Perce."

"Harry stop!"

Oliver Wood forced his way in between the two, raising a hand when Percy opened his mouth to protest.

"Stop," Oliver repeated to Harry, soft enough that Hermione struggled to hear him. "Before you do something you regret."

"No, I really don't think I'm regretting any of this," said Harry, not bothering to modulate his reply.

"Harry," Oliver began.

"Ollie – "

Wood's lips had gone white with anger around the edges. "I would hate to have to suspend you from the team for fighting – "

"I'm not fighting," Harry drawled, unrepentant and dismissive.

The lie fell so easily from his mouth, Hermione knew he believed it to be true.

"And I'm supposed to believe that with what you just said and the way you're acting? This is the second fight today."

All traces of amusement left Harry's face. "I didn't start that."

Wood looked skeptical. "I want to believe you, but I'm having a hard time – "

"He attacked me! End of story!" Harry snarled in voice that rattled the windows.

"Go to bed, Harry," said Wood, shaking his head. "I'll speak with you in a moment."

An unfamiliar sneer crossed Harry's face. "What?"

"Go to bed."

"Why?" Harry asked incredulously. "How am I wrong? Just because he's too much of a bumbling idiot to figure out the obvious – "

Even Oliver Wood's patience had a stalling point. "Harry! Obvious or not, your behaviour is not accep – "

Harry threw his head back and laughed, interrupting his captain. "I note you're not contradicting me. No wonder nobody listens to him. Even you don't respect him."

"Listen to me!" Wood shouted. "I get that you're going through something. I get that you're angry about the dementors. I get that you've got a massive chip on your shoulder about Black betraying your parents. But that doesn't mean you get to take it out on everyone else!"

Harry's smirk got wider and wider as Wood talked until it was a full on grin again. "Not a bad guess," said Harry, voice filled with idle amusement. "Close, but no cigar."

Strain began to appear on Wood's face. "Which is why I'm suspending you for the next game. This is too many fights in one day. Do you even realize what you're doing?"

Shrugging, Harry spread his hands wide and stared back at his captain, insolence writ in every gesture. "And I care, why?"

"I'm also confiscating your broom," Wood said in lieu of an actual reply.

There was a distinct lack of concern on Harry's face. "No."

"That wasn't me asking, Harry."

"Actually, you can't," Harry said with a smile, schoolboy bright and fake.. "See, I own my broom outright, I'm not borrowing it from the school. McGonagall can ground me, preventing me from using the Pitch. But you can't actually confiscate my broom – it's private property."

Wood nodded as if coming to some internal decision. "Make that two games you're suspended from."

"Harry, please," begged Alicia, standing near Oliver's side. "Don't make it worse for yourself."

Harry's smile changed, something cold and hard entering his expression. "Why don't you make it all of them, Ollie?"

"What?" Oliver blinked as if he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing. "Are you – ?"

"Find a replacement Seeker while you're at it," added Harry, his tone almost absent of inflection.

Wood looked like he'd just been blindsided. "Harry, will this really fix – "

"This was your doing, Ollie." Harry held his hands up. "I'm done here."

In a whirl of damp robes, Harry turned to push his way through the crowd of students, who didn't so much fall back as ooze away in surprise and shock at what they'd witnessed.

And suddenly, Hermione wasn't the only one who could see that something was terribly wrong with Harry. Looking at Wood's devastated face, she knew she wasn't the only one who had no idea what to do.

Hermione was just gathering her courage to go talk to Harry when Snape stormed through the portrait entrance.

---

Rain trickled over the windows in the third year boys' dormitory. And despite the darkness beyond, ambient light washed kaleidoscope patterns across the wooden floor of the tower.

Mess accumulated around the beds, each boy collecting their own personal orbit of junk. Severus stepped over a pile of dirty laundry the house elves had yet to collect. Pictures of family, team banners, trinkets of little worth and other personal talismans were piled up on bedside tables and spread across walls. Clothes spilled out of wardrobes. Parchment and books sat in crumpled heaps inside open trunks. It seemed that the Gryffindor third years had turned their allotted share of space into a microcosm of themselves.

There was a bed under the far window that didn't fit this profile.

Military neat with sharp corners and sheets pulled tight enough to bounce a coin on, Potter's bed and surrounding space held no signs of his personality.

Potter's wardrobe was open.

Potter's wardrobe was also empty.

A clean birdcage rested on the floor next to the trunk. A polished Nimbus 2000 leaned against the bed frame. A photo album and a letter lay on top of the trunk.

Picking up the album, Severus flipped open the cover. Though the rest of the pages were quite full, the front folio was missing its picture. James, Lily and baby Harry read the hand-written caption underneath.

The cover of the letter was blank. But inside the painstakingly folded parchment was the headmaster's name written in a mature hand, the half-cursive letters fluid and well-formed. There was but one line written underneath it.

Thank you.

Flipping open the trunk, Severus found where Potter's school robes and clothes had disappeared.

And atop of the folded garments sat a pair of spectacles and a holly wand.