"It was an accident!" Harry blurted as Professor Quirrell opened the door to his office. The man looked much better, almost well, a faint pinkish tinge to his skin and meat on his bones. "I'm sorry sir. I saw you disappear with your time machine—"
"Time turner," Professor Quirrell interjected.
"—and I didn't know that's what it was so I took it and tried it and then—"
"Potter," said Professor Quirrell, stepping out and ushering Harry inside. Harry stopped talking and wiped his sweaty palms on his robe. "What possessed you to just activate an unknown magical artefact?"
"I know it was really stupid," Harry admitted. "I was just curious. I wasn't thinking."
Professor Quirrell gave him a long, considering look. "Be more careful in the future," he finally said. "Anyway, that isn't what I—what my master wanted you here for."
"It isn't?" Given the note he'd been left, Harry had been quite afraid that that would be the focus of the meeting.
He glanced around. Where was the Dark Lord anyway? Not on Professor Quirrell's head, it seemed. He wasn't wearing his turban, and the skin on the back of his head was thankfully smooth and shiny.
"This way," said Professor Quirrell, ushering him towards the back door of his office, which Harry only now realised was already open.
He felt immediately a stirring of unease in his gut, like barely-subdued panic ready to spring into full force at the slightest provocation. The last time he had traversed that corridor, he had been beset by the body-stealing spirit of the Dark Lord.
Then again, how could it get any worse than that?
Steeling himself, he preceded Professor Quirrell inside. There was nowhere to run, and he wasn't a coward.
As he passed an open door to the side of the corridor, Professor Quirrell made a small, nasal sound and gestured for him to turn there, instead of towards the bedroom. Beyond the threshold was a cramped kitchenette of sorts, with only room for a sink, a little square table covered with a blue and green chequered cloth, and two high-backed wooden chairs. Harry took one of the chairs as Professor Quirrell bade him sit down.
"You haven't told Dumbledore about me," said Professor Quirrell, and by his level tone Harry was sure he meant it as a statement, and tried not to jump into panic.
"No," he agreed. Well, he'd told Dumbledore about the unicorn blood, but that had been ages ago, so it didn't count.
"Why not?" asked Professor Quirrell, sitting down and waving his wand at a nearby teakettle, which rumbled and promptly began to spout steam.
Harry blinked at him, perplexed. It honestly hadn't occurred to him, even, to involve Dumbledore again. He had considered asking Petri for about two seconds before he realised that Petri had already provided his advised course of action. If the Dark Lord makes himself known, cooperate with him no matter what.
"Why would I?" he finally said. "Sir?"
Professor Quirrell obviously had not expected the question to be turned around on him. He said nothing for a few seconds, taking the time to summon some cups and pour them both tea, before finally producing, "Well, yes, of course you wouldn't. Very good. Er, now to why you're here; my master is in need of a host again."
He said it sort of haltingly, like he wanted to be apologetic, but was too relieved to mean it. Harry supposed he too would object much more strongly to possession if the Dark Lord's face sprouted out of the back of his head every time.
"Okay," he said, adding a sugar cube from a nearby bowl to his tea. He found himself surprisingly apathetic to the entire prospect. "Not permanently, right? It's just, I think somebody would notice if I walked around with red eyes."
"Only until I recover my strength," Professor Quirrell reassured him.
Harry studied him again over his tea, and confirmed that he did look better than he had a few days ago. He frowned. "I thought unicorn blood cursed you permanently," he said.
"You know about that?" Professor Quirrell said, surprised. He shook his head, smiling wanly. "Well, I am infinitely fortunate to have Lord Voldemort on my side. You must understand, he is truly a great wizard. He's gone further than any other, and done things that weaker wizards have long considered impossible."
"You mean he has a cure? A countercurse?" Harry demanded, setting down his cup with rattling force. That... "That's incredible. That would make unicorn blood actually useful. It could save lives."
Professor Quirrell laughed bitterly after taking a long sip. "That's right," he said. "Perhaps I really was just exceedingly foolish. If even you, a child, find it so obvious..."
"What?"
"I used to think that it was evil to harm, let alone kill a unicorn," said Professor Quirrell, smiling without mirth, as if mocking himself.
"I think most people think that," Harry said, recalling all the books he'd read that had danced around the subject and used words like "reprehensible" or "irredeemable."
"Not you, and not Lord Voldemort," said Professor Quirrell. Harry was about to correct him on the former, but then decided it would be foolish. Also, he supposed Professor Quirrell might have a point. If it came down to it, he would choose his own life or the life of somebody he cared about over a unicorn's, every time. It followed that he didn't think killing one was an unforgivable sin. In fact, he'd done it, and forgiven himself, hadn't he?
"So?" Harry asked, not seeing the point.
"So you aren't blinded by weakness, like I was, for so long. You may have only just begun your studies, but you aren't afraid of what you don't know. Everything my master and I have shown you, you've attempted with enthusiasm."
Harry wasn't sure he would go quite as far as to call himself "enthusiastic," but Professor Quirrell sounded genuinely impressed by his paltry progress.
"I am a Ravenclaw," Harry said, a little jokingly.
"Quite the example of one," Professor Quirrell agreed. He sighed, almost wistfully, and pushed himself to his feet. "I suppose we can't delay any longer. I shall take you to him."
Harry stood to follow him, wondering why Professor Quirrell had gone to all the trouble of having tea with him beforehand, anyway. He frowned.
"Where is he? Not on you?" Harry asked, though he was fairly certain of that, given Professor Quirrell's lack of a second face.
"He is possessing a snake," Professor Quirrell explained. "But they degrade very quickly." He sounded nervous.
Degrade. It was sort of ominous to hear it said, even though Harry had already seen the effect possession had had on Professor Quirrell's health.
"Right," he muttered, and followed Professor Quirrell into his bedroom.
A small snake with red and black stripes slithered languidly across the floor and coiled up at Harry's feet, raising its tiny head somewhat and tasting the air with a flickering tongue.
"Hello Harry," said the snake. "So good of you to come. Now, give me your hand."
Harry bent down and held his hand out cautiously, halfway struck by the irrational fear that the snake would dart forward and bite him. No such thing happened, and it only moved forward to wind itself up his arm. Simultaneously, he felt a coiling, prickling sensation all over his body, which was clearly psychological, just as if somebody were watching him and judging him, only a thousand times stronger and on the edge of painful. The feeling tightened and his breath hitched unnecessarily, and then he saw a burning red gaze for a moment in his mind's eye before all the strange sensations disappeared in an instant.
There was the very physical feeling of the snake dropping off his arm. His head whipped around automatically to track it, but it seemed to evaporate into black smoke before it hit the ground.
"That was it?" he asked aloud, addressing Professor Quirrell for lack of any other visible interlocutor. The man flinched when Harry looked at him, and continued to remain very still.
"That was it," Harry said again, without intending it, and he felt his lips curl upward. "Quirinus."
"Master?" said Professor Quirrell in a very small voice.
"Get some rest," Harry said, and then laughed as if it were some kind of inside joke. He began walking in a tall way, his back stiffer and straighter than he ever remembered it being, and had stalked out of Professor Quirrell's office entirely by the time he managed to recollect his wits—that was, his own wits.
"Where are we going?" he asked himself.
"The library," said Lord Voldemort, still piloting his body with supreme confidence.
The library? How mundane. For some reason, this was the funniest thing Harry had heard all day. He laughed and regretted it immediately.
"Does that surprise you?" asked the Dark Lord. "Reading is a favourite pastime of mine. I'm sure you feel the same way."
"Well, yes, I suppose," Harry said, mystified at the thought of the Dark Lord having a pastime at all, besides terrorising the nation.
Thankfully, they met nobody Harry knew on the way to the library, and the Dark Lord slid into the stacks with purpose. He made his way straight to the end of the Divination shelf, trailed Harry's fingers across a few copies of Unfogging the Future, and then landed on The Fateful Word: Grammatica in the Past, whose dull green spine for some reason looked very familiar, even though Harry was sure he hadn't read it before.
As Lord Voldemort carefully lowered them into a chair and opened the book with what Harry could only describe as a caress, his eyes landed on the preface and Harry remembered that this was one of the books he had shown Vince in an attempt to test the other boy's magical reading abilities.
"Kindly relinquish control of your eyes," Lord Voldemort admonished, flipping to the middle of the book. Harry tried very hard not to look, and was rewarded with the distinctly creepy awareness of how his eyeballs were rotating in their sockets independently of his command. He soon discovered that it was pretty much impossible to actually read while possessed, because his gaze would jump around unexpectedly and generally too quickly for the text to make any sense. The Dark Lord apparently read at a monstrous speed.
It did not take long for boredom to overcome caution, and about a dozen pages in, Harry asked, "So what's it about? I can't follow."
Lord Voldemort stopped reading for a long moment without saying anything, before giving a surprisingly patient response: "It is about a magical phenomenon where writing down predictions about the future make those predictions more likely to happen. The so-called 'fateful word' effect. I am doing research for a personal project of mine."
Understanding from the finality of his tone that the next interruption would be far less welcome, Harry accepted this explanation and tried to entertain himself by guessing the content of each page from the words he saw most often. This chapter was dominated by "prophecy," and the Dark Lord seemed especially interested in "Retrospective Interpretation," whatever that meant, because he read that section twice. Then he skipped what must have been half the book and landed on a chapter titled, "Prophetic Risk Mitigation."
After what felt like an eternity, but probably hadn't been more than an hour, the Dark Lord closed the book and returned it to the shelf with a casual flick of Harry's wand. He sat awhile longer, twirling the wand between the tips of his fingers, and then stood abruptly, sweeping out of the library and heading up the stairs. Somehow, all the moving staircases slotted themselves into place right as they reached each landing, and they managed to attain a straight path up to the seventh floor. They took a right, spun around, and then proceeded down the trick hallway until they reached a very familiar tapestry.
It was the location of Elaine's study room and Draco's room of rubbish. The Dark Lord spun on the spot three times, summoning the door, and they entered, revealing the rubbish room again.
"You have been here before," said Lord Voldemort. It wasn't a question.
"Yeah," Harry admitted.
"Interesting. Colloportus. Silencio," the Dark Lord cast, sweeping the wand in a wide arc. "Protego horribilis." Harry wondered why he was protecting against dark magic in the middle of Hogwarts. Paranoia, perhaps? "Now that we won't be overheard, I have some things I wanted to discuss with you, Harry Potter," said Lord Voldemort, sitting down on the floor and twirling the wand between his fingers again. It seemed to be a habit of his.
"Okay," said Harry, when it was clear that he expected a response.
"I have been thinking, and some things do not add up. Clarify to me, Harry, how you came to be attacked by a vampire."
Of course the Dark Lord started right off treading at the edge of dangerous territory. Was Harry supposed to be honest about things? Petri had said to cooperate with the Dark Lord. He supposed it was logical that that extended to not lying to him.
"He's our landlord," Harry said. "It's, er, complicated. He wanted me in his company. That's like, a family, sort of."
"I am aware of what a company is," said Lord Voldemort, cutting him off. "Your landlord is a vampire. You must live in a magical settlement. With an uncle. But Harry Potter doesn't have a magical uncle. I know this for a fact."
"He's not my real uncle," Harry admitted before the Dark Lord could get carried away with speculation, or rather, this alarming pattern of deduction.
"Then who is he?"
"Er, his name is Joachim Petri. We're not related or anything," Harry said, wondering if he'd just doomed the man.
But the Dark Lord did not seem to recognise the name or pay it much mind. "How did you come into his care? Did Dumbledore send you to live with him?"
"Dumbledore?" Harry repeated. "No! Why would…"
"What is it?" Lord Voldemort pressed as Harry trailed off.
He had been about to say that the headmaster had had nothing to do with anything, but then remembered that it was Professor Dumbledore who had shown up to personally deliver his Hogwarts letter, along with some kind of cryptic threat for Petri. But the Dark Lord couldn't have known about that, so why would he ever jump to the conclusion that Professor Dumbledore had been involved?
He cleared his throat and tried again. "Why would Dumbledore be sending me anywhere?"
"An educated guess," Lord Voldemort said, dodging the question. Harry sighed.
"My uncle, I mean, you know, he does know Dumbledore, I suppose. He mentioned that Dumbledore pardoned him after a war, or something. But I think that's just a coincidence," Harry said.
"The war?" Lord Voldemort repeated, sitting up straighter. "What did you say your alleged uncle's name was again?"
"Joachim Petri," Harry mumbled. He felt his lips twist into a frown.
"He's foreign?" muttered the Dark Lord, testing the syllables of the name under his breath.
"German," said Harry, and then felt his head jerk up very suddenly so that he was staring at the vaulted ceiling for a dazed moment.
"And how old is he?" Lord Voldemort demanded, now gazing into the distance where the blindingly bright corner of a window peeked out over a tower of rubbish.
"Er, dunno," said Harry. "Fifty?" He remembered Mr Tibbles' alleged age. "No, wait, more than that. Seventy?"
"He must have served Grindelwald," Lord Voldemort concluded.
The name sounded quite familiar, but Harry couldn't put his finger on it. "Who?"
"Gellert Grindelwald, who fought to unite wizardkind and put muggles in their place? Have you learned nothing in History of Magic?"
"No," said Harry. "Binns is complete rubbish."
"Of course he is," the Dark Lord sighed. "So, Dumbledore has you living with a former follower of Grindelwald. That makes absolutely no sense unless… I expect he has renounced the dark arts, then?"
Harry snorted loudly. Petri, renounce the dark arts? The man lived and breathed them.
"I take that as a 'no.' Of course. Your aptitude for curses is impressive. It must have come from somewhere." The Dark Lord tapped Harry's wand against his knee in frustration. "Then why?"
"Why what?"
"Why would Dumbledore allow his precious Boy-Who-Lived to remain with a dark wizard?"
What a funny question. Harry rather thought that the Dark Lord had missed the point entirely.
"I really don't think Dumbledore has much to do with it," he said. "If you must know, I was sort of kidnapped."
That was what it was, wasn't it? It was embarrassing to look back on, but at the same time, if he hadn't taken Petri's hand in the park that night, he would still be stuck with muggles and likely getting his head shoved into a toilet by his stupid cousin. Then again, he was now sharing a body with a mass murderer who had killed his parents, and that was probably just as horrifying in a different way.
"Kidnapped. And yet you are here, attending Hogwarts," said Lord Voldemort.
"My master wanted me to go to school."
Harry realised his mistake just as the Dark Lord repeated, "Your master?"
"I'm actually his apprentice, yes," Harry said hurriedly, wresting control of his body away before the Dark Lord could say anything untoward.
"You are eleven," said Lord Voldemort, as if he had just realised this fact for the first time.
Reminded of Silviu's constant complaints about his being too young, Harry scowled. "If I'm old enough to be kidnapped and possessed, then I'm old enough to study whatever I want." He flinched as the burst of frustration ended, remembering just who his interlocutor was.
The Dark Lord smiled with his face, and all fear instantly melted from Harry's body. "Quite." He remained silent for a few moments, as if lost in thought, and then said, "I am pleased that you shared all this with me, Harry. It has been… enlightening. Regretfully, I need to rest to regain my strength, so I shall leave you to your day."
There was a strange shifting somewhere, perhaps off to the left, or in the back of his head, and then Harry felt that he was in complete control of his body. Cautiously, he stood up and tugged his glasses off his face. As he suspected would happen, his vision blurred only for a moment before sharpening to perfection, and the same thing happened again when he put his glasses back on. He looked around for something to check his reflection in. Venturing into one of the narrow pathways between the rubbish piles yielded a fist-sized shard from a broken mirror.
His irises were still red, though in the daylight it wasn't extremely evident that there was anything unnatural about them. That didn't mean his friends wouldn't notice if they got too close.
"Can you cast a colour-change charm on yourself?" he asked under his breath. There was no response. He decided that pointing his wand at his own eyes without confirmation that it was safe was probably a bad idea, and that perhaps he should charm his glasses into sunglasses instead.
He felt foolish after his charm had absolutely no effect, and remembered that his glasses were already enchanted.
"Vampires have red eyes, don't they?" Harry mumbled to himself. He could probably come up with some excuse related to his made-up vampiric heritage if anybody asked. Who spent time staring into other people's eyes, anyway?
Tossing the mirror shard away, he turned to leave, only to find that the door was locked. Right; Lord Voldemort had charmed it.
"Alohamora," he muttered, and exited into the corridor, only to stumble right into Neville.
"Oh, hello Harry," said the other boy with a small wave. "What are you doing up here?"
"Er, practising spells," Harry lied, staring at the ground.
"What spells?" Neville asked most unfortunately.
"Er, structure sight," Harry said. "You know, the one I've been working on for Professor Flitwick." He really ought to actually practise that spell. "What about you, what are you doing?"
"Just heading down to dinner," said Neville, surprising Harry with how late it apparently was already.
"Oh, right, er, me too," said Harry, and turned to begin walking towards the stairs.
Neville hurried to catch up and gave him a shy look from beneath his fringe. "Hey, do you want to practise the growth charm with me after dinner? I mean, if you have time. I asked Professor Sprout, and she didn't want us to go in the greenhouse without her, but she said Hagrid grows all sorts of food behind his hut, so I asked him, and he said we can practise there."
It was obvious that Neville had put quite a bit of thought and planning into this request, given he had even gone to ask Professor Sprout for permission. Harry felt guilty that he hadn't got around to learning any of the spells in the horticulture book that Neville had gifted him. They honestly did seem very interesting, especially with their food-production potential.
"Sure," he agreed. "I'm free all evening."
He paused for a moment, remembering his mental passenger, but there was no reaction at all from the Dark Lord. If he didn't know better, he would think himself entirely free of possession.
"Let's meet up after eating then?" Harry suggested as they approached the Great Hall.
"Oh, er, I was wondering, er, do you want to sit with me at the Gryffindor table?" mumbled Neville.
"Sure," Harry said. He knew Neville didn't really have many friends in his own house, and often sat alone at mealtimes. Harry supposed he wasn't that close to any of his dorm mates either, but they were all friendly with each other, which was funny, because he would have expected that sort of group socialisation from literally any other house besides Ravenclaw.
Neville chose a seat near the head table, somewhat removed from the rest of the Gryffindor first years. Harry sat down next to him and reached for a platter of chips. He had just grabbed a handful when Hermione Granger came sliding awkwardly down the bench across from him at speed and said, "Those have garlic on them, you know."
Harry hadn't known, and he dropped them immediately and went for a napkin to wipe his greasy hand on. Then he took out his wand a cast a small scouring charm on his palm, just in case.
"Er, thanks," he said. "I'm used to the garlic dishes running away from me. I guess they're only charmed to do that at the Ravenclaw table."
"Are they really?" said Hermione. "I suppose that makes sense. By the way, your eyes are red."
This declaration, of course, prompted Neville to finally make eye contact for the first time that evening, and then immediately flinch.
"I know," Harry said, since there was no point in prevaricating about it. "Er, don't worry about it."
"The eyes of part vampires turn red when they're angry or they haven't had enough blood," Hermione continued blithely. Neville paled fidgeted in his seat, food forgotten.
"I know," Harry emphasised, wishing that the girl could take a hint. "But it's nothing. I don't even need blood."
"That can't be true," Hermione maintained. "I read that blood is the central property of the vampire curse, so if you're hurt by garlic, it means you need blood too."
Harry wished he could tell her that not everything she read was true, but she was probably right. It wasn't as if he could admit that he had lied about his vampiric relations, and that was why she was wrong about the blood. He didn't know as much as he ought to about people who were born part-vampire, but he had pieced together from Silviu and Petri that as a living human in a vampire company, he wasn't expected to exhibit any physical changes.
Instead, he said, "Whatever. It's none of your business, you know," and grabbed a piece of bread, chewing on it with emphasis.
Hermione huffed, but did not move away, instead pulling her plate over to her. "Why are you at the Gryffindor table, anyway?" she asked.
"Neville invited me," Harry said. Wasn't that obvious?
"We're going to practise some spells after dinner," Neville said, evidently eager to move on from the topic of Harry's alleged vampirism. "Er, would you like to join us?"
Harry bit back a groan, hoping that Hermione would refuse, but of course she was the sort who would jump at any chance for extra studying.
"What sorts of spells?" she asked, leaning forward.
"Ones for growing plants," Neville told her. "Hagrid said we could practise on his garden. Did you know he was the one who grew all the pumpkins and turnips at Halloween?"
"Did he really?" said Hermione. "I didn't think there was that much space behind his hut."
Hermione was right. The hut, though scaled up to accommodate Hagrid's imposing stature, was still only as wide as the average suburban muggle home, and had a commensurately sized enclosed space behind it. Harry struggled to imagine how all those enormous pumpkins could have possibly fit inside.
It was still light outside when they arrived, though the sun remained concealed behind thick cloud cover. As they approached the hut, Harry heard a loud thump from inside, followed by barking and snarling and the unmistakable crash of shattering glass.
"Do you think everything's all right in there?" Hermione asked.
"Probably not," Harry said, and proceeded to knock on the door. More barking and snarling followed, allow with some muffled shouting, and then the door opened a tiny crack to reveal Hagrid's hairy face and single beady eye. He was pressed strategically against the door frame so that they could not peer inside.
"Oh, evenin' there. You lot can get down there to the gate. I'll meet yeh on the other side," Hagrid said, shutting the door with alacrity.
"That was odd," Hermione said as they walked around to the back of the hut. "Did it seem like he was hiding something?"
"He was definitely hiding something," Harry said.
"It's probably none of our business," Neville pointed out.
As promised, Hagrid met them by the back gate, grasping the top with a hand the size of a dustbin cover and pulling it open to reveal a wide cobblestone path that snaked through dense rows of vegetation. Harry's jaw almost dropped at the sight of dozens of cabbages taller than he was. They were packed tightly together, almost overlapping, and suddenly the idea of a hundred pumpkins growing in this modest space no longer seemed so unlikely.
"Come 'ere, this way," Hagrid said, beckoning for them to follow. He led them around the other side of the hut to a narrow strip of empty land. The soil looked freshly tilled, and there was a musty scent hanging in the air. Hagrid produced a large burlap sack and set it on the ground with a scritch, where it fell open and spilled a small rivulet of flat seeds.
"Pumpkin seeds," he explained. "Ye'r free ter practise on these."
"Thank you, Hagrid," said Hermione, and Harry and Neville murmured their thanks as well. Hagrid gave them a gruff nod and then shuffled away, darting almost furtively into his hut and slamming the door behind him in his haste to close it.
"He's usually friendlier," Neville said, sounding a little mystified.
"You er, talk with him often?" Harry asked.
"Professor Sprout invited me for tea with him a few times," Neville explained. "He's really nice. But er, he seems like he's in a rush today."
"He seems preoccupied with something inside," Hermione said. "Did you notice his right hand is all bandaged up? He was trying to hide that too."
"No," said Harry, frowning. He hadn't noticed. He glanced up at the side window of the hut, which was shuttered. Well, if they just wanted to know what was inside, there was a clear solution.
He tapped the side of his glasses and focused, and his vision surged forward through the wall and put him face to face with a gigantic, slit yellow eye. He yelped and stumbled back.
"What?" said Neville.
"Er, I'm trying to see what's inside," he said. "Hold on." More prepared this time, he took another look. The inside of the hut was cosy despite its size, crowded with furniture at Hagrid's scale. The space was dominated by a roughly cut wooden table, on top of which a winged lizard the size of Hagrid's dog was curled into a ball. Hagrid was standing by the blazing hearth, bent over a large bucket and sweating fiercely.
"What do you mean see inside?" Hermione was asking. "Is there a spell for that?"
"He's got a, I think it's a dragon," Harry said, cognisant of how ridiculous that sounded. "A really small dragon." It did resemble one of the animated figurines that Petri sold, only much larger and unmistakably alive.
"What?" she demanded. "Are you sure?"
"A d-dragon?" Neville repeated. "Isn't that illegal?"
"I have no idea," said Harry. "Probably." He thought about all the other illegal things he had seen, and decided that this one did not even deserve to make the list. "Let's just pretend I never saw that."
"What?" Hermione said again. "Dragons breathe fire. It's a wooden hut."
"He seems to have it under control," Harry said, though he did see her point. "Er, let's start on those pumpkin seeds."
Hermione looked like she was on the verge of storming up to the hut and pounding down the door, but with a glance at Neville, who was resolutely bending down to grab a handful of seeds and strew them across the ground, she deflated in favour of joining him. They kicked a thin layer of soil over the seeds.
"So, er, the incantation is engorgio. It can make things bigger, but it also makes non-magical plants grow faster," Neville explained. "For plants, you do this sort of wiggle, engorgio!"
He moved his wand in an "S" shape and a languid shower of pale blue sparks dribbled onto the ground, which glowed faintly.
"Look," said Neville, bending down and pointing. Harry squinted and saw some tiny green sprouts peeking out of the soil.
Hermione immediately began practising the wand movement, and Harry joined her belatedly. The motion reminded him somewhat of the fire-making charm, only in the reverse direction.
"Engorgio!" Harry tried, pointing to the sprouts. Motes of light streamed out of his wand like ethereal water and a tangle of vines sprang out of the ground, jagged leaves unfurling and slumping onto the soil. A single orange flower bloomed, and then wilted and fell onto the ground as the vines yellowed. "Er, well, it sort of worked. But it looks kind of dead."
"I think there are other charms you're supposed to use too," Neville said. He dropped his rucksack onto the ground and rummaged around inside for a bit before producing his own copy of Household Horticulture and flipping to a dog-eared page. "Yeah, er, the water-making charm, and the sunlight charm."
"Sounds straightforward," said Harry.
Except he was halfway wrong, because while the sunlight charm was just a variant of lumos, the water-making charm turned out to be a NEWT-level conjuration that was completely beyond any of them.
In the end, Hermione's powers of observation came to the rescue, and she found a large wooden bucket and a water pump near the back door of the hut.
"So how much water do we need?" Harry asked, cranking the pump.
"Er, says here ten gallons per minute of accelerated growth," Neville read off.
"You're kidding," said Harry. "Ten gallons?" He eyed the bucket, which was probably five gallons at best.
"We won't be able to carry it when it's full," Hermione said.
"Locomotor charm," Harry told her.
"Oh, right," she mumbled.
As far as Harry could tell, the actual weight of an object was irrelevant for the movement charm. Instead, it was only the size that mattered, so it was exactly as easy to lift the bucket of water as it would have been if it were empty. He delegated the work of pouring the water to Hermione. Neville cast the sunlight charm, lighting up the end of his wand with a brilliant beam, and Harry cast the growth charm again.
He counted to thirty in his head before stopping. The resulting vines were a vibrant green.
"It worked! They're healthy," Neville decreed after a minute of inspection, beaming. "Come on, again!"
Harry didn't think he had ever seen Neville this excited. He and Hermione dutifully refilled the water bucket, and this time he traded tasks with Neville.
Neville seemed to have some difficulty getting the spell to work at first, and they had to go back for water a few more times, but eventually orange flowers began to pop up like wildfire, before wilting and curling into hard green orbs which swelled and ripened into honest-to-goodness little pumpkins.
"One more," said Neville, a sheen of sweat coating his forehead.
"Let me try this time," said Hermione. "Engorgio!"
The pumpkins grew larger and larger, then began to swell to ridiculous proportions. A loud crack, and then they were showered with pumpkin guts. Neville laughed uproariously.
"Overdid it a bit," he said. Hermione coughed.
"Ugh, didn't realise that would happen," she muttered, peering up at the split pumpkin. It was taller than she was, and oozing juice from a long crack in its side.
They all froze as a muffled roar shook Hagrid's hut.
"Er, maybe we should leave. It's getting kind of late," Harry said. "Tergeo," he cast hurriedly, trying to siphon the sticky pumpkin juice out of their robes and hair.
"He'll be okay, right?" Hermione asked.
"I'm sure he, er, knows what he's doing," Harry said, just as another roar sounded behind them.
"Do you think we should get an adult?" asked Hermione, shifting nervously.
"Hagrid is an adult," Harry pointed out. Hermione pursed her lips, but did not object.
Instead, she said, "All right, let's put everything away. I think he got the seeds from over here."
Harry sighed, as he was eager to get out of the vicinity of a possibly angry dragon, however small, as soon as possible. Nonetheless, he obligingly tapped his wand to the seed bag and directed it into the alcove that Hermione indicated while she returned the bucket.
"Harry, can you check on Hagrid, please?" Hermione asked as they gathered by the gate. "I'm just worried."
"What?" said Harry, and then he remembered his glasses. "Right, yeah. One second."
He tapped the frames and peered into the hut. Hagrid was wrestling with the juvenile dragon, uninjured hand clamped over its narrow maw, and bandaged one smacking at its scrabbling wings and claws. He hugged it suddenly to his chest, squishing it, and then shoved it into the fireplace and threw a ragged teddy bear, of all things, on top. The teddy did not catch fire or get torn to pieces when the dragon began chewing on it, so Harry supposed it must be charmed.
"Er, yeah, looks like he's handling it," he told the others.
"Oh all right," Hermione said with a sigh. "Let's go back to the castle then."
The gate was too heavy for them to push, but Harry managed to crack it open with locomotor and they slipped out.
"That was fun," Hermione said. "Do you think we can get aguamenti, though?"
"Not really. It's a sixth-year spell," Neville pointed out.
"But what makes it so hard?" Hermione asked. "I still don't understand what makes some spells harder than others. Isn't it just wand movement and incantation?"
"Er, well, there's intent and focus too, and just the amount of magic something takes," Harry said. "I think physical conjurations use up quite a bit of magic, so we might literally not be able to do them yet."
"How do they measure how much magic something uses?" Hermione asked.
"Dunno, good question," Harry muttered.
"And does our magic grow with us then? I didn't even realise it was limited. But that makes sense. But then, can we use up all our magic? Is that bad?"
"No," Harry said, seeing an opportunity to halt the incessant stream of questions. "It's not that there's a limited amount of magic, it's that we can only use a certain amount at once." He scrunched up his face and tried to remember the diagram of magical flow. It had been a long time since he last helped make an inferius, and he was getting rusty. "We gather magic here," he patted his navel, "Then it goes up into our heads and then back down to our hands and kind of drains out. So we can only use as much as is coming out at once."
"I've never heard any of that before," Neville said.
"Er, my uncle told me that," Harry said, feeling a sudden surge of doubt. He had always trusted Petri's word when it came to the nature of magic. Could it be the case that Petri had actually told him some fringe theory that wasn't true? But no, he had literally painted the guide paths on an inferius with his own hands and seen Ulrich revived based on the same principles. There was at least some validity to the whole concept of magical flows.
"Let's check the library," said Hermione.
"It's almost curfew," Neville pointed out, and she sighed, as if in affront.
"Tomorrow, then," she said.
Harry split off from Neville and Hermione when they reached the fifth floor. As soon as they were out of earshot, he felt as if his whole body had seized up, except it hadn't and had instead kept moving without his input.
"Your master knows some rather esoteric magic theory," he murmured. Right. The Dark Lord was still possessing him. How could he have forgotten?
"Esoteric," he repeated, seizing the easy response of confusion.
"Theory that not many people have studied," the Dark Lord clarified.
"Oh. Yes, he does know quite a bit," Harry agreed. He had always assumed it was the purview of adult wizards to know these things, but perhaps there was something special about Petri's knowledge, too. "But it sounds like you know the same theories?"
"Of course," said the Dark Lord. "I have always been fascinated by the nature of magic. Why is it that some people are gifted with the ability to mould reality to their will, and others are not?"
Harry waited a moment, and then asked, "Well, why?"
The Dark Lord laughed, and Harry was disturbed to note that it wasn't quite his own laugh after all, but had a different, more sardonic cadence to it.
"It's destiny," the Dark Lord murmured, "Fate. That is the price of having magic."
Harry thought about the lines of fate that Petri always spoke of.
"But muggles have fates too. They die in the end. Everyone dies," he argued.
The Dark Lord laughed again, for some reason.
"No. Muggles live and die freely. No prophecy was ever made about a muggle," he said.
Harry wracked his brains trying to think of some counterexample, but it was true that all the divination he had ever done, mostly necromancy, had implicitly used some magical person or thing as the target.
"So, does that mean you can't do divination on muggles at all?" Harry asked.
"That is correct," said the Dark Lord.
They reached the Ravenclaw common room, and the Dark Lord proceeded to answer the knocker's question with alacrity and gain entrance. Once again, Harry wondered why they couldn't just have a password like the Gryffindors. That seemed much more efficacious for security.
Harry, finding himself abruptly back in control of his body, edged his way around the lively common room and up the stairs. Friday night was game night, and the prefects were very lax about curfew within the tower, but Harry felt that it would be awkward to play Exploding Snap while the Dark Lord was looking out of his eyes.
Instead, he prepared for bed. Was it weird to shower while possessed? Well, the Dark Lord was a man, wasn't he, so it was okay. Or was it? Harry recalled that he had little other choice, anyway.
The Dark Lord at least did not make his presence known again until Harry had climbed into bed. There he seized control and cast the silencing charm around the perimeter.
"Do you use my magical flow when you're doing magic with my body?" Harry wondered suddenly.
"Yes," Lord Voldemort confirmed.
"Does that mean I could cast the silencing charm, in theory?" Harry asked.
"Unlikely," said Lord Voldemort, quashing his hopes. "I am compensating for the lack of ready magic by collecting it in reserve while idle. It is a technique that takes many years to perfect."
"Oh," said Harry, disappointed.
"Magical volume will come in time. For now, there are many very powerful magics which hardly require much actual magic at all," Lord Voldemort said. "Divination, for instance, especially necromancy, as I am sure you know."
Seeing no point in denying it, but mystified nonetheless, Harry said, "Er, yes. But how did you know I know about that?"
"I mentioned fate, and you automatically connected it to death," Lord Voldemort pointed out. "Not a very obvious connection for anyone unfamiliar with necromancy. Also, if your master did serve Grindelwald, I cannot imagine that he could have come away from it without an intimate knowledge of the art."
That was right, Harry thought. He must have heard the name Grindelwald before because of something related to necromancy. But necromancy was just a sort of divination, wasn't it?
"Is divination really that useful?" Harry asked.
To Harry's surprise, the Dark Lord said, "Divination is quite possibly the most useful branch of magic there is. Knowledge is power, and divination is the power to know."
"But then why isn't it a school subject?" Harry asked, sceptical.
"It is two school subjects," the Dark Lord corrected him. "I forget that you are only a first year. In your third year, you will be able to take both a general Divination elective and Arithmancy."
Hearing the Dark Lord talk about his third year reassured Harry somewhat that he wasn't in imminent danger of being murdered.
"Why is Arithmancy separate?" Harry asked. He thought he remembered reading somewhere that arithmancy was especially accurate, but he had little idea of what it even was.
"Arithmancy is the only form of true divination that requires no innate talent," the Dark Lord explained. "As such, it is much more widely studied than any other method."
"Wait, so you need a special talent to do other kinds of divination? How can you tell if you have it?" Harry asked.
Suddenly, Petri's cryptic praise about Harry's knack for doing reconstruction came back to him in a new light.
"Extensive trial and error, mostly, which is largely why they have the general divination course at all. But it is not an uncommon talent. One in two wizards has some form of it. Alas, I am not so gifted."
Harry was rather surprised to hear that there was something the Dark Lord could not do. From the way Petri always spoke of him, mostly with a sense of fatalistic inferiority, Harry had conceived of him as some sort of godly, all-powerful figure.
He frowned. "But you were reading a divination book earlier. Was that Arithmancy, then?"
"Yes. More precisely, grammatica, the application of language to influencing others magically. Ironically, it was my best subject at Hogwarts."
The Dark Lord did not explain why it was ironic, so Harry said, "You went to Hogwarts?" It was hard to imagine the Dark Lord as a student like him, least of all because he had no idea what the man even looked like. Now that he thought about it, though, it was sort of common knowledge that the Dark Lord had been in Slytherin, so of course he had attended Hogwarts.
"A very long time ago," said Lord Voldemort, "but it has changed remarkably little. Dumbledore still has his hands all over everything and the instruction is still mediocre."
"You really don't like Dumbledore," Harry remarked.
"Dumbledore has not ceased to wrong me since the moment we met," said Lord Voldemort. "I do not forgive and I do not forget."
Harry felt suddenly frigid and empty, like all the emotion had drained out of him and the tap had run dry.
It seemed like a difficult way to live, Harry thought. He himself perhaps forgave and forgot too easily. What was the point of holding on to resentment he could not actualise?
Harry wasn't sure if it was he or the Dark Lord who laughed mirthlessly then.
"You intrigue me, Harry." Those, definitively, were the Dark Lord's words. And indeed, he felt, as the Dark Lord felt, the itch of curiosity, sharpened to a point. "I admit, I did not expect you to be anything like this. Perhaps I should have. How could you be ordinary when you exist in such extraordinary circumstances?"
Harry had no idea what the Dark Lord was talking about. Certainly, it was abnormal that he was apprenticed to a dark wizard who had kidnapped him, but all the same he did not feel any less ordinary as a person for it. He was, literally, just Harry, as he always had been.
"Just Harry, is that how you think of yourself?" asked Lord Voldemort, and Harry wondered with some discomfort just how many of his thoughts were privy to to the Dark Lord, and vice versa. He knew there was something there, with emotion, that they shared. How could he not, when the Dark Lord's emotions were so starkly alien?
"Yes," he said out loud.
"And you do not want to be more?" Lord Voldemort asked.
What did that even mean? How could he be more than himself?
"You do not desire power?"
"Well, yes, I do want to get stronger," Harry said. "There are so many spells I can't cast. I can't even properly defend myself. I'm literally weak."
"You want strength," said Lord Voldemort, "but you do not want power. To be powerful is to be feared, and revered. To be obeyed."
"No, I guess I don't care about that," Harry agreed. "But that's what you want then? For people to, er, do as you say?"
"Among other things," said Lord Voldemort. "Beyond obedience, I want loyalty. A simple thing, is it not? And yet, so elusive."
"You had followers, right?" Harry asked, trying to get his history straight.
"Yes, I thought I did," muttered Lord Voldemort. There was that cold feeling again, that horrible disregard that Harry realised was the Dark Lord's expression of anger. But it was not anger; Harry knew anger, hot and heady, ephemeral. The Dark Lord's facsimile of it was calm like the surface of a bottomless lake. "My Death Eaters, my supposedly faithful friends. They left me to spend a decade as a wraith. Ten years, alone, abandoned, and in the end I saved myself without their aid. They have much to answer for."
Harry supposed, when he put it that way, that the Dark Lord had a right to be furious.
And it wasn't as if they'd believed him truly dead, was it? Because Harry knew for a fact that Lucius Malfoy had known for almost two years that the Dark Lord was still out there. And why had he come to Petri in the first place? To bind the Dark Lord's spirit, to prevent him from rising.
Feeling a little vindictive, Harry murmured, "Lucius Malfoy was your follower, wasn't he?"
"Perhaps," said Lord Voldemort, curious again, and Harry pressed onwards.
"He came to my master's shop, asking us to find your spirit. He wasn't very happy to find out that you were still alive."
At this point, the strangest thing happened. He felt a sharp twinge behind his eyes, and then the whole memory was flashing before him, Malfoy's request, Petri's discovery, everything. And then Harry could almost feel, viscerally, how the Dark Lord demoted Lucius Malfoy from friend below even enemy, to simply… nothing in his eyes. Again, it was not anger; instead it was as if all human connection had been abruptly severed, and the man had become no more consequential than a fly.
"Thank you for showing me, Harry. I confess, I am hardly surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised. The few who were truly loyal were the ones who suffered with me. Likely they are in Azkaban, or dead," murmured Lord Voldemort.
And Harry sort of found himself feeling bad for the Dark Lord, for a tiny moment, before he remembered that the man was a mass murderer. Then he wasn't sure what to feel.
"I wonder, Harry, where your loyalties lie," said Lord Voldemort, and Harry really did not like this direction of speculation.
"I don't know," he said firmly, because it was true. "With myself, I suppose."
The Dark Lord chuckled, and Harry felt himself relax a little. "Always a good starting point. Make no mistake, Harry, you have my gratitude for your continued assistance. Lord Voldemort rewards those who help him."
Despite the fact that this third person declaration sounded objectively ridiculous, Harry felt a strange twinge of something in his chest as he heard it, almost like an electric shock had passed through his body.
"A lesson in grammatica for you, Harry. Names have power. A promise made on a name carries weight," Lord Voldemort explained.
Harry felt with strange certainty that he was welcome to ask more in this moment, whatever he wanted. This was his "reward," he supposed. Tutelage from the Dark Lord himself, in his self-professed best subject.
"People don't say your name," Harry said, after a pause. "They call you You-Know-Who, or the Dark Lord. That's important too, isn't it?"
"Yes. Avoidance of the name increases its power," said Lord Voldemort. "Taboos and euphemisms are one of the better-studied grammatological concepts. My name is not the clearest case, so let us consider a simpler example first. Take death. Perhaps half the time, people will use euphemisms for death, saying that someone passed away or crossed over. This lends the word enough power that it can be used in a malediction, an improvised curse that has an increased likelihood of coming to pass."
"You mean telling someone they're going to die actually makes them more likely to die?" Harry demanded.
"Yes, if it is said with serious intent," Lord Voldemort confirmed. "The effect is usually very slight."
"That's still horrifying," said Harry. "How can you defend against it?"
"Covering your ears is an adequate defence," said Lord Voldemort. "Maledictions fell out of common use centuries ago, anyway. They are hardly worth the effort when actual curses are available… I mention them only to demonstrate that fear of a particular word can give the thing itself magical significance."
"So when people don't say your name, because they're afraid, then when they do say it, it does something? What does it do?" Harry asked.
"When a wizard other than me says my name in my presence, even if they mean me disrespect, all who hear it will immediately be stricken with fear. It does amuse me when I hear my enemies effectively casting a malediction on themselves," Lord Voldemort said with a cruel smile.
Half sceptical and half morbidly curious, Harry asked, "Can I try it?"
"Go ahead," said Lord Voldemort magnanimously.
"Lord Voldemort," Harry whispered, and it felt taboo, even with permission. A thrill of terror seized his heart but he couldn't for the life of him tell whether it had been natural or not.
"It appears to still work," said Lord Voldemort. Harry suddenly became very aware that this conversation, and his continued partial control over his own body, was all at the Dark Lord's leisure. His heart sped up despite himself, and he shifted slightly, pulling his knees closer to his chest.
"Yeah," he said, a little breathless and struggling to remind himself that the Dark Lord was interested in him, as opposed to interested in offing him. "Er, it does seem like it."
"There are other advantages as well. It is possible to scry on instances of my name being spoken. I was occasionally able to locate my enemies by this method, and was in the process of systematising it, before… that night."
The fear was receding a little, and Harry managed not to think too hard on how the Dark Lord probably still considered him partially responsible for almost killing him, however unfair that was.
He opened his mouth to ask another question, but a yawn swallowed his words.
"Perhaps it is time for us both to rest," said Lord Voldemort. "I am, I admit, still weakened."
"What do you need to get better?" Harry asked.
"For now, your vitality is enough to sustain me," Lord Voldemort said. "Do not fret. I will return to Quirinus if you begin to fall ill."
But Harry did not fall ill, nor did he exhibit any symptoms besides the sleep deprivation that came with staying up too late talking to the Dark Lord, not even after two weeks of continuous possession. Despite himself, Harry was quickly becoming used to the Dark Lord's presence in his body, used to his peculiar, simultaneously dull and intense moods. The Dark Lord largely slept during the day, anyway, and during those times it was as if he wasn't there at all.
Interest sparked by the Dark Lord's high praise for arithmancy, especially grammatica, which could be used to increase the chances of things happening, Harry had checked out Numerology and Grammatica, which was one of the reference texts for the Arithmancy class, and had begun reading through it in his spare, or even not so spare, time. In fact, he was about to meet Hannah, Neville, and Vince to revise for Transfiguration, and instead of getting a head start while waiting, he was reading about the properties of the number six and how one could go about making an ostensibly fair die repeatedly roll the same number without technically tampering with it. He was itching to try it out, but had no idea where he was supposed to find a die.
Then Hannah and Neville showed up, and he had to guiltily put his book away and switch it out for their Transfiguration text.
"Hey," said Harry. "What did you lot want to work on?"
"Free transfiguration," said Neville immediately, just as Hannah said, "Animate to inanimate."
"So, everything," Harry concluded, and Neville sighed glumly.
"I can't believe we're going to have to cast a transfiguration we've never done before on the exam," Hannah complained. "That's just cruel."
"In theory, all animate to inanimate uses the same process," Harry pointed out.
"In theory," Hannah mumbled. "And how are we supposed to practise, anyway?"
Harry reached into his pocket and extracted a glass jar with three spiders inside. Hannah made an "Eep!" sound as he slammed it onto the desk.
"Two of us are going to have to share, when Vince gets here," Harry said. "I couldn't find a fourth one."
Vince entered the classroom just then, sweating slightly, as if he had been running.
"Alright," he muttered, sitting down heavily on one of the small chairs, and then jumping as he saw the spiders. "What're these for?"
"Animate to inanimate," Harry said. "I was thinking let's start with something simple, like spider to stone."
He consulted with his textbook briefly on what the incantation would be to turn something to stone. Then he immobilised a spider with the body-bind curse, levitated it out of the jar, and incanted, "Lapifors!" while moving his wand in the square spiral of the transfiguration "S." The spider seemed to curl in on itself, freezing into a pebble.
"See, I've never tried that specific one before but it worked," he said. "Do you all want to try? Arachnofors!" he cast, reversing the transfiguration, and held out the jar to the others.
They each took a spider. Hannah turned hers into a smooth pebble on her second try, but Neville and Vince were not so lucky. Neville's broke through his body-bind and skittered off somewhere around his fourth attempt, and Vince managed to accidentally smash his when he poked it too hard with his wand.
Harry sighed, watching carefully as Hannah reversed her transfiguration. He caught the spider with locomotor before it could try to escape and stuck it back in the jar.
"Okay so maybe we can do free transfiguration," Harry said. That was at least all inanimate, which meant no struggling with escaping or moving targets, though in his opinion, the transfiguration process itself was more difficult to manage. He looked around for something to transfigure.
"Here," said Hannah, producing some spare bits of yarn from her pocket.
He had just managed to turn a loop of yarn into a somewhat lumpy saucer when Hannah stood up abruptly, swivelling her head from side to side like an owl.
"What?" Harry demanded.
"Does it smell like smoke to you?" she asked, still sniffing at the air. Harry inhaled deeply and coughed, unable to tell if it was just dust or the alleged smoke.
"I think it's coming from outside," Hannah muttered, wandering over to the window. She opened it up and craned her neck to look out. "Er, yeah; I see smoke. Quite a bit of it."
They all stood up, transfiguration practice forgotten. Then loud, erratic footsteps reached their ears from the hallway.
A moment later, none other than Draco Malfoy burst into the room, wild strands of ordinarily slick hair drifting into his wide eyes. "You won't believe it!" he shouted, "The oaf's hut is on fire! Massively on fire!"
Goyle came lumbering in a few seconds after, just in time to break the confused silence that had descended with a mumbled, "Hey Vince. We're, er, supposed to go back to the common room."
Draco composed himself somewhat, pressing his fringe back up, and said, affecting an official tone, "Right. 'All students are to report back to their common rooms post haste.' The prefects are rounding everyone up. I figured I'd warn you lot since you're always up here."
"Oh. Thanks," said Vince.
"You think the prefects would've missed us?" Neville asked in alarm.
"Gryffindors," said Draco with a long-suffering sigh. "Come on, Vince," he muttered, before stalking off. Vince turned to look uncertainly at Harry, who waved his hand to tell him to go. The large boy hurried after his housemates.
Neville still looked confused, and vaguely offended.
"He meant to warn us, so we could sneak off," Harry translated helpfully.
"It's too late for that," said Neville, clenching his fists. "We should have done something, don't you think? I mean, Hermione even said it wasn't safe."
Harry stared at him in incomprehension for a few moments before he realised that of course, Neville was talking about Hagrid's dragon, which was probably the cause of the fire.
"Er, I don't think there's anything we could have done," he said. "But, er, we should probably get out of here."
"What are you two talking about?" Hannah asked, even as she made for the door. Harry and Neville hurried after her, explaining about the dragon.
"I don't know about you, but I don't like my chances against a dragon," she said. "I'm going to my common room."
"Probably a good idea," Neville agreed, and so they split up at the stairs. Harry and Neville went up one more flight together before heading in opposite directions.
The moment Neville disappeared around the corner, the Dark Lord seized control of Harry's body and turned the other way, leaping back onto the staircase just as it disconnected from the landing and swerved downwards.
"Do you have something to do with this fire?" Harry whispered as they reached the third floor and headed towards, presumably, the forbidden corridor.
"Fortunate happenstance," said the Dark Lord, which Harry took mean that liberal grammatica had been involved.
They rounded the corner to Professor Quirrell's office, where the man was already waiting. Harry stumbled as control of his body abruptly returned to him, and his scar exploded with pain.
"Stupefy!" cried Professor Quirrell, and everything went black.
Notes: If anybody prefers reading on AO3, I would just like to note that I have cross-posted this story there under the same pen name. Otherwise, thanks for reading.