Harry's eyes snapped open and he felt full of nervous energy, like he'd just woken from a nightmare after far too little sleep. Only, he wasn't lying down, it was too bright, and there was a horrible buzzing in his ears. Also, Professor Quirrell's wand was pointed right at him. Since he was conscious, rather than dead, Harry disregarded it as a threat and took a look around.
The buzzing turned out not to be an artefact of ill health, but an actual sound coming from above. He had been brought to a narrow room with a vaulted ceiling, beneath which a cloud of colourful, chattering insects flitted about constantly in a chaotic scramble around blindingly-bright spherical lanterns that hung suspended from thin chains. As several of them crashed into the side of a lantern and hung in the air for a moment, stunned, Harry saw that they were not insects, but appeared to be keys with feathery wings somehow attached to the bows and fully functional.
Harry finally looked back to Professor Quirrell. "Where are we?" he asked, and then couldn't resist, "Did you have to knock me out? What happened to asking nicely?"
"Plausible deniability," said a high, vaguely sibilant voice that definitely did not belong to Professor Quirrell, but nonetheless seemed to come from him. So the dark lord had returned to the back of the professor's head. Charming. Professor Quirrell looked suddenly rather nervous for a wizard with a wand.
Harry pressed his arm discreetly against his side to feel for the solid presence of his own wand. It was still there, in his robe pocket. As casually as he could, he scooted up the wall that he had been sat up on and pushed himself to his feet. Professor Quirrell's wand sort of followed him, but still failed to seem threatening. It was shaking a little—perhaps he was not quite recovered from his last possession yet.
"So, why exactly am I here?" Harry tried. He figured he was a hostage of some kind, but then why had he been woken up? Glancing around the chamber proper this time, he spotted a small rack in a shady corner, just beside an archway leading into a dark corridor, with three broomsticks propped up against it. He looked back up at the keys, and then across the room to a heavy iron door with a prominent lock. Well, that gave him an idea of what he was meant to do, but… "Have you tried alohamora?"
There was a low, shuddering hiss, and Harry realised a beat later that he'd made the Dark Lord laugh. He'd found in the past weeks that the man actually had a much more robust sense of humour than he would have expected from a mass murderer.
Professor Quirrell, for his part, did not seem at all amused, and got even paler, if that was even possible. "The door is stuck shut," he said. "Only the right key will work."
"Are you sure?" Harry asked. "If the door's stuck why don't you just make a hole in the wall next to it? How about the reductor curse to disintegrate one of the stones, and we crawl through?"
"Amusing ideas," said the Dark Lord, "but we must act … honourably … use the intended solution."
"Honourably," Harry repeated sceptically.
"What?" Professor Quirrell murmured, looked very unsettled and bemused. Harry gathered from this and the fact that his voice had not come out muffled that the Dark Lord had spoken in Parseltongue earlier, leaving his servant woefully out of the loop.
"We're just discussing strategy," Harry said, but this didn't seem to have the intended reassuring effect. "So you're saying," he continued, deciding to ignore Professor Quirrell for the moment, "that you want me to take one of those broomsticks, go up there, and find the right key? How am I supposed to know which one it is?"
He considered making some sort of jab at the Dark Lord's athleticism, or rather lack of thereof, but thought it might be in too poor taste since he was currently bodiless and inhabiting Professor Quirrell, who was literally falling apart.
Instead of answering, Professor Quirrell looked up and began to mutter under his breath. Harry followed his gaze and noticed how, one at time, the keys froze, shuddering and twitching as if captured in an invisible grip, and then were released and zoomed off again. Finally, a large silver key remained trapped for a long time, and Professor Quirrell made a sort of jerky motion with his hands, not breaking his gaze on the key.
Right. That was the one, Harry supposed. He sprinted over to the brooms, waved his hand with an encouraging shout of "Up!" and the closest one snapped into his hand and started to take off even before he'd properly mounted it. He swung himself onto it the rest of the way as it ascended and headed straight for the suspended key.
As he did so, the other keys whirred even more loudly and began to swarm around him, obscuring his vision and bouncing irritatingly off his arms and head. He let go of the broom to shield his face.
"Bloody hell!" he yelled as they beat at him from every direction with their rainbow wings. He used his knees to force the broom towards where he thought the right key was, and soon caught a glimpse of it still struggling behind a whirling cloud of colour. He reached forward blindly with one hand, and felt the other keys whizzing by, all suddenly swerving as if repelled by his grasping attempts. All but one. As soon as his fingers closed around the trapped key's bristly feathers, he pointed the nose of his broom downwards to escape the swarm, pulling up only at the last minute and leaping off his broom. Holding out the somewhat crumpled key, he used his other arm to wipe the sweat from his brow.
"Good work," said Professor Quirrell a little breathlessly, as if he'd been the one getting mobbed by hundreds of flying keys, and waved his hand towards the door. "Go open it."
Harry hoped that this really was the right key, after all that work. It struggled in his hand, and he had to scrunch up the wings and shove it into the lock, but it fit all the way, which was encouraging, and when he turned it the door clicked and swung open on its own.
"Capital," he said, peering through the crack. It was totally dark, but as soon as he took a cautious step inside, bright light streamed down from more lanterns above, and he did a double take at what it revealed—a tiled floor made of huge square slabs of alternating black and white stone, and on either side, massive stone statues of chessmen.
"Typical Minerva," said Professor Quirrell when he saw what was in the next room. "I suppose we'll have to play across. Potter, you be the king, and I shall be the queen."
As he spoke, the black king and queen left the board, stone moving fluidly and unnaturally as they stepped away, and Professor Quirrell gestured for Harry to take the king's place. The king piece handed him his stone crown, which Harry cradled awkwardly in his arms as it was far too heavy to put on his head.
He'd never really paid much attention to wizard's chess sets, but at this massive scale Harry couldn't help noticing how utterly uncanny living stone could be. Unlike real flesh, it bent and warped with an impossible sort of plasticity, not rippling or bulging with the motion but remaining perfectly smooth.
Professor Quirrell played chess very quickly and without much deliberation, calling out move after move that the black pieces were more than happy to obey. Soon the sides of the room were piled high with the rubble of destroyed pieces from both sides. Harry still had not had to move from his spot, though Professor Quirrell had already zigzagged his way around the board several times, and just now returned to the black side.
Harry, who was rather bored, chanced a question. "If Professor McGonagall set up this room, and Professor Flitwick, probably, did the previous one, did you set one up as well?"
"No," said Professor Quirrell. "I was still on sabbatical when Dumbledore orchestrated this whole farce."
"Why is it so complicated, anyway?" Harry asked. He had caught on by now that these… obstacles were the protections for the philosopher's stone, the things that came after the three-headed dog and before the fire that Petri had seen when scrying. The complexity didn't make sense. Dumbledore could've just buried the stone in some unidentifiable hole somewhere, and even scrying wouldn't have helped anybody find it.
Professor Quirrell didn't answer his question, as their turn came around and he ran across the board to take the remaining white rook.
"Check mate," he said after a few minutes, and sent a blasting curse at the white king, for good measure, reducing it to rubble and leaving its crown to clatter sadly to the floor. The surviving white pieces shuffled aside, leaving the path to the opposite door clear.
They stepped through and found what appeared to be a totally empty chamber.
"Dawlish," Professor Quirrell muttered. "His famous mines, I expect."
Professor Quirrell conjured a snake and sent it slithering across the room. It hardly made it five feet before a pillar of red light surged out of the ground and sent it flying, limp and somewhat singed.
"I expect flying across won't count?" Professor Quirrell muttered. He received no response, but instead began conjuring even more snakes. "Potter, don't just stand there," he said, gesturing to Harry. "Serpensortia is the incantation." He wiggled his wand in a tight "S" shape and a whole collection of snakes shot out the end.
"Er, are you sure I can—"
"Just try it," said Professor Quirrell with some exasperation. Harry shook his arm to slide his wand into his hand, still sceptical. Conjuring an animal seemed rather advanced.
"Serpensortia!" he cried. His arm jerked back as the end of his wand gave off a bright flash and a bang, and a small black snake flopped onto the ground. Harry gawped at it.
"It's one of the easiest conjurations," Professor Quirrell told him at the sight of his expression.
Upon closer inspection of the snake, an incredulous Harry was a little reassured that it wasn't so easy that he had mastered the spell on the first try—far from it. His snake had come out looking very snaky from far away, but actually it was completely smooth, like dull metal, instead of scaly. It still slithered with lifelike alacrity into the room, where it was promptly blasted by red light like the others.
"Mark where the mines are," said Professor Quirrell, casting flagrate to draw fiery lines where the red light had come out. Harry copied him, though it took him a few tries to get the fire to appear at a distance rather than from the tip of his wand.
Soon enough they had sketched a labyrinthine path through the room, piles of conjured snakes lying around the flaming perimeter. Professor Quirrell vanished them as they followed the safe path, stepping carefully.
When they reached the other side and crossed the threshold of the next room, a wall of purple fire erupted behind them and barred their way back. Fire and a mirror, Harry remembered. Those were the last guardians of the stone. So they were nearly there.
The chamber they had entered was empty except for a long table in the middle with a row of flasks in various sizes—obviously Professor Snape's work. The way ahead was obscured by black flame.
Professor Quirrell walked up to the table and picked up a piece of parchment, reading aloud a riddle. Apparently, the potions to make one impervious to the fire were somewhere on the table along with poison and nettle wine.
Harry frowned. "If it were me I'd just put poison in the whole lot of them," he said. "Actually, Professor Snape seems like exactly that sort of person."
"He does, doesn't he?" said Professor Quirrell, smiling a little. He seemed to have gained some colour back after their successful traversing of the previous obstacles. "Fortunately for us, the protection only works if there's a true solution."
"How's that?" Harry asked, perplexed.
"It's called the Hero's Gauntlet or Hero's Trial. It's completely impossible to reach the protected object, except by completing some designated trials, but the trials have to be fair. Typically three or seven, so I expect only one more after this," Professor Quirrell explained. "Now quiet. I need to figure this out."
Harry crept closer and peered at the parchment that Professor Quirrell had laid back on the table. After a few attempts at solving it, the positions began to swim together in his head and he he groaned.
"This one's not poison, and it's the same as this, so it must be wine. Therefore these two are poisons," Professor Quirrell muttered to himself. Harry tried to follow the logic.
"Neither dwarf nor giant holds death in their insides," he mouthed. Right. So the biggest flask, which was the second on the left, wasn't the poison, but the second on the left was the same as the second on the right, so they had to both be wines. That meant the first and fifth flasks were poison, as they were on the left of the wines. The seventh one wasn't poison since it had to be different from the first one, but it also wouldn't help them move forwards, so since there were only two wines, it had to be the potion for going back.
Finally, that left the third and fourth potions, one of which was the poison and the other the one for moving forwards. Since the smallest bottle wasn't poison, that one was the potion they were looking for.
Just as Harry came to that conclusion, Professor Quirrell picked up the smallest bottle and peered inside it.
"This one. There should be just enough for us both," he said, and took a careful sip. He handed the remainder to Harry and walked confidently through the black flames. Since there were no screams of pain, Harry supposed they really had found the right solution, so he swallowed the rest of the potion, which made him feel icy cold, and followed Professor Quirrell through.
Right when he made it past the black fire, it occurred to him that he had been by himself for a moment, and he could have taken the backwards potion and fled. It wasn't as if Professor Quirrell could easily get back through the fire and—
Well, that was a problem. The fire was still there and they hadn't any potion left.
"How are we going to get out after you get the stone?" Harry asked conversationally, looking around what was clearly the final room. It was small and dim, lit only by some torches, and held only a single object of interest, a tall mirror in a golden frame that stood on clawed feet.
"I'll figure it out," said Professor Quirrell, which did not inspire much confidence. Harry scowled and turned back to feel around the black fire carefully. The cold sensation from the potion was already wearing off. His skin reddened after a few moments of exposure, and he had to pull his hand away before it was burned.
"Don't look yet, you fool!" the Dark Lord hissed. Harry turned to see what was going on.
Professor Quirrell was cringing a little, but he had already looked in the mirror. Nothing awful seemed to be happening to him, and he apparently realised the same thing, and straightened out to look again.
"I see the stone," he muttered. "I'm presenting it to my master… that's all well and good but where is it?"
Professor Quirrell went and walked behind the mirror, but after a few evidently fruitless moments came back around.
"Harry… come take a look. Tell us what you see," said the Dark Lord in whispery, halting English.
Not particularly trusting the mirror, Harry cast structure sight on himself.
An explosion of blue and gold assaulted his vision, and Harry determined that the mirror had had some kind of extremely complicated transfiguration applied to it, and was also enchanted, perhaps to show different things to different people.
That was unhelpful.
He gave up and cancelled the spell. Then he walked closer to peer cautiously into the mirror and whirled around immediately, only to find that of course, nobody was there besides Professor Quirrell. He turned back slowly and confirmed that he still saw people behind him.
All right, he thought, it was just like a foe glass, and it showed people who weren't there.
But not just any people—he'd never seen these people before in his life (that he could remember) but he somehow knew exactly who they were.
"Mum," he mouthed, staring at the woman in the mirror. She reached out and put a hand on mirror-Harry's shoulder, and smiled. And on his other side, "Dad."
Only the Harry in the mirror wasn't Harry, not really. He was older, and there was some edge to his gaze that reminded Harry distinctly of Petri. He wore the invisibility cloak casually over his shoulder like a shimmering waterfall, and there was a stone in his hand, small and black, not the philosopher's stone surely—if he recalled correctly from Nic's book, that was red—which he was turning absently around and around.
And Harry knew, in the depths of his being, exactly what he was looking at, and felt a terrible, agonising hope kindle within him.
Did this mirror show the future? He knew mirrors could be used for divination, and necromancy in particular. But what it showed was impossible.
He didn't feel any of the crushing disappointment that he ought to at that thought, because the hope was too powerful. True resurrection was said to be impossible, but so, supposedly, was surviving the killing curse. He'd managed the latter, even if it had been a fluke, so why shouldn't he believe in the former?
"What do you see?" Professor Quirrell asked, rudely interrupting his reverie. Harry pulled back from the mirror, finding that he'd unconsciously stepped closer to it and even reached out a hand towards it. That was a little bit concerning.
"I see my parents," he said vaguely. Wasn't that ironic. Here he was, dreaming of bringing his parents back to life while he was aiding their murderer. But it wasn't as if he really had a choice. One did not refuse the Dark Lord lightly. Getting himself killed wasn't going to bring any of the man's victims back.
"Your parents…" said the Dark Lord, and Harry wondered for a beat if he was actually going to try to apologise or something, as if that were at all appropriate. But no, he said instead, "Yes, they were admirable people… very brave, to face me. Your father put up a courageous fight. Your mother… your mother needn't have died. She was trying to protect you."
"Me?" Harry blurted, perhaps inadvisably. "You were trying to kill me? Specifically?"
There was a long pause, and Harry wondered if he was about to regret opening his stupid big mouth, but then the Dark Lord actually answered him.
"Yes," he said. "A miscalculation. But let us set aside the past and consider the present. Look into the mirror… look again and think about the philosopher's stone. I am sure you are aware of what that is."
It was hardly the past Harry had been thinking of, but rather the future. Still, if it even was the future, it was some time far off, so he did as requested and thought about the philosopher's stone instead.
What he really wanted, right this instant, was just to get out of here, and preferably alive and in one piece. For that, he needed to find the stone, which was apparently somehow inside the mirror. He took another look. There he was, his learned, older self, fiddling with that black stone. But then something very odd happened. His reflection reached behind himself, and when his hand came back the black stone was gone, replaced with a ruby red one about the size of his fist, which he slipped into his pocket with a conspiratorial wink.
Harry felt a weight settle into his robe pocket momentarily before disappearing into the depths of the extension charm. Well then.
"I think I got it," he whispered, a little disbelieving at his luck. He had exactly zero idea of what had just happened, or how.
"What?" said Professor Quirrell.
"The stone," said Harry. "I've got it. Now let's get out of here."
"Where is it?" Professor Quirrell demanded.
"In my pocket," said Harry, deliberately not specifying which one. "I'll give it to you when we're out of here." Perhaps he was playing a dangerous game, but he absolutely did not put it past the man (or the Dark Lord) to just leave him behind, or even to kill or memory-charm him once he had what he wanted.
"Do you take me for a fool?" said Professor Quirrell incredulously.
"He speaks the truth," said the Dark Lord. Harry gave an internal sigh of relief at the unexpected help. That simplified things.
"But Master," Professor Quirrell began, and then obviously thought better of contradicting the Dark Lord. "Yes, fine, let's leave before Dumbledore returns."
Harry watched him walk over to the black fire and examine it. The somewhat dismayed expression on his face was not at all reassuring. When he didn't do anything but stare at it for the next minute, Harry decided to make a suggestion.
"This hero's protection thing," he said. "Does it mean we have to leave honourably too? Or can we go ahead and blast a hole in the wall?"
Professor Quirrell put his face in his hands.
"Again, Harry proves himself a better servant than you, Quirinus," said the Dark Lord. "A mere child. Do as he says."
"Yes Master," said Quirrell miserably. He drew his wand and shot a bolt of bright red light at the wall adjacent to the blocked archway, which exploded and left a nice meter-tall hole. The black fire, thankfully, did not spread, and they scrambled through the opening. Since there was plenty of the potion to pass through the purple flames, they each took a sip of that and went through properly.
Taking Harry's hand, Professor Quirrell jumped into the air and stayed there, before flying them across the room and thereby avoiding all the traps on the floor. In the next room, the chess set seemed to have rebuilt itself, but the pieces did nothing to bar them from going back. As they crossed beneath the colourful swarm of flying keys into a dark corridor, Professor Quirrell's wand lit up brilliantly and banished the gloom. To Harry's astonishment, the ceiling began to churn and writhe, and the sinuous bodies of a thousand snakes recoiled from the wandlight. But no, at second glance, he saw that he had been mistaken, and it was instead a mass of thick, meaty vines that parted above them.
Professor Quirrell conjured a small harp, and his wand went out, leaving them in pitch darkness. The vines rustled threateningly above them.
"Potter," Professor Quirrell began, but Harry had withdrawn his wand and cast lumos already. The encroaching vines sprang back, and the harp ascended until it passed through a square of light in the distance. A trap door.
Then Professor Quirrell held out his hand again, and Harry braced himself for the strange feeling of weightlessness that came with this mode of flight. They rose up, and as they got higher Harry could hear the soft, resonant melody of the harp playing above.
The three-headed dog! It had to be in the room above. He tensed, but there wasn't exactly anywhere to run, held aloft by Professor Quirrell as he was. They emerged from the trap door, and Harry breathed out a sigh of relief at the sight of the gigantic dog slumped to the side, fast asleep. They landed, and Professor Quirrell hurried him through the door.
Headmaster Dumbledore was waiting for them in the third floor corridor, Professors Snape and McGonagall in place behind him. His wand was out, and his eyes were hard.
"Tom," he said. Harry blinked, wondering who Tom was supposed to be. "Release the boy."
"Release the boy," echoed the Dark Lord a little mockingly, and Professor Quirrell let go of Harry's wrist, as if burned. And then, "Give me the stone." This last part was in Parseltongue, Harry thought, but nevertheless Dumbledore reacted instantly, his wand whirling through the air.
"Accio stone!"
The sheer force of his summoning charm dragged Harry forward a few paces, at least until the stone extricated itself from his pocket and shot towards Dumbledore's outstretched hand.
"Accio!" Professor Quirrell cast back, but it seemed to have no effect whatsoever.
"Harry, to me," Professor Dumbledore said urgently, but it was too late—shadow travelled as quickly as light.
Harry felt barely a moment of suffocating pain before he emerged from the grasping coils of the Dark Lord's soul and found himself staring out through scarlet eyes.
"Give me the stone, Dumbledore," he said. Then he raised his wand with incredibly alacrity and frigid, unrelenting apathy, sketching a vicious zigzag: "Avada Kedavra!" Sickly green light flashed down the corridor.
Dumbledore had already flicked his wand by the first syllable, materialising a pillar of stone in the killing curse's path, which cracked as it deflected the spell into the ceiling. He returned fire with the stunning spell, joined by the other professors, but the Dark Lord had no trouble jerking Harry's body out of the way of the first and blocking the other two with a silent shield charm.
"Tsk, tsk," the Dark Lord murmured. "Severus. Just where do your loyalties lie?"
He parried Professor McGonagall's disarming charm and incinerated a flock of conjured birds from Professor Dumbledore with a lazy slash of his wand.
"Don't answer that," he added, when Professor Snape froze with indecision.
"Harry, my boy, you must fight him," Professor Dumbledore entreated as spell after spell of his was countered with ease by the Dark Lord. The professors were sorely handicapped, Harry realised, by their unwillingness to cast anything truly harmful at him, while the Dark Lord replied with a quick succession of Unforgivables, and though none met their mark, they kept Professor Dumbledore on the defensive.
"It's no use!" Harry yelled. It was far too late for him to be considering rejecting the Dark Lord from his body. That window of opportunity had passed after the first ten seconds of the very first possession.
But he still had control of his body, he thought. What if he just gave it a conflicting order, hesitated slightly, right into the path of a stunning spell? Then...
Then the Dark Lord would know exactly what he had done, and would probably murder him at the next opportunity. A small problem with that plan.
A shield charm which was not the Dark Lord's own sprang up around them suddenly, and Harry belatedly realised that Professor Quirrell had recovered from the abrupt separation and was joining the duel.
The Dark Lord lowered Harry's wand and twirled it in his fingers as a shower of spells fell ineffectually against the shield.
"You will give me the stone, Dumbledore," he said, "or your... vanquisher," he put emphasis on this strange word, "will find himself quite vanquished."
And then he turned Harry's wand on himself, and cast, of all things, a stinging hex.
"Ouch," he said, grinning, and Harry felt a stinging line whip across his jaw.
Dumbledore turned very pale and, to Harry's infinite surprise, lowered his wand.
"Release the boy, Tom," said Dumbledore gravely, but there was no hiding the raw fear in his eyes. Fear of what, Harry couldn't fathom. Harry, for his part, was relieved that the man wasn't going to push the Dark Lord into actualising his threat.
"The stone," said the Dark Lord with waning patience.
Dumbledore produced the stone.
"Albus!" Professor McGonagall exclaimed, but he silenced her with a grave shake of his head.
"Would you be so kind as to escort me to the gate, Professor?" asked the Dark Lord. "Leave your... friends behind."
And Dumbledore gestured for the other professors to stay as he walked Harry and Professor Quirrell through Hogwarts, down three still, unchanging staircases, and out the double doors. They encountered no one, not even a ghost.
Harry could not hold back a gasp at the sight of the grounds. They were utterly ravaged, black and grey instead of green, and thick, cloying ash hung in the air, threatening to pitch him into a coughing fit.
The Dark Lord cast some sort of charm that put an almost visible bubble of clear air around his head, and they breathed more easily. Dumbledore did the same.
"See what your leniency has earned you?" the Dark Lord commented cryptically.
"It has earned me lifelong friends, while you have only flatterers and sworn enemies," Dumbledore said. Harry shuddered as he peered into the professor's cold eyes, and a needle of ice seemed to pierce his chest.
They said nothing more, walking only in silence that should have been tense, but which the Dark Lord bore with such calmness that Harry could not help sinking into it, lulled into a stupor by the rhythmic crunching of gravel and ruined grass beneath their feet.
They reached the towering iron gates, and the Dark Lord took one step outside with Quirrell before he turned on his heel and held Harry's hand out for the stone.
"Release him first," said Dumbledore.
"As you wish," said the Dark Lord, and Harry toppled backwards as his whole body went suddenly slack, his mind failing to pick up control in time. Quirrell screamed as the Dark Lord's wraith streamed into him, but recovered quickly enough to catch Harry and point his wand at him.
"Now give me the stone," said the Dark Lord from inside Quirrell's turban. "Or is your word as worthless as ever?"
When Dumbledore failed to move for a few seconds, Quirrell dug his wand into the back of Harry's neck.
"Having second thoughts, old man? So am I. Keep the stone. I'll take Harry instead," said the Dark Lord.
He's bluffing, Harry thought.
Dumbledore approached at that, but Quirrell's wand hand shot up in warning.
"Toss it over," he said, and let go of Harry, taking one step back.
Dumbledore threw the stone, making a sharp gesture with his other hand. Harry ran, almost pitching forward in his haste, and whirled around as soon as he made it past the halfway point between Dumbledore and the Dark Lord.
Professor Quirrell had reached out with his hand, and the stone was firmly in his grip. Harry glanced to Dumbledore, half hoping that the man had some kind of ingenious plan in mind, but when he looked back he saw only the tail end of Quirrell's robes as he was sucked away by disapparition.
"He's gone?" said Harry.
"I do believe so," Dumbledore confirmed. There was the crunching of gravel, and then a warm, rough hand landed on Harry's shoulder.
Perhaps it had been intended as a comforting gesture, but Harry's heart shot up into his throat. He reeled, tasting bile in the back of his mouth as all the anxiety that the Dark Lord's possession had somehow kept at bay returned in an instant, with interest. He flinched away.
He heard a deep sigh behind him. "You must be quite exhausted after your ordeal, my boy. Let's get you up to the hospital wing," Professor Dumbledore said.
"I'm fine," Harry said reflexively. "He didn't do anything, er, he didn't really hurt me."
"All the same, I insist that you allow Madam Pomfrey to have a look at you," Professor Dumbledore said, gesturing for him to return up the path to the castle. "Possession is not a matter to be taken lightly."
"Sorry," Harry muttered, staring at the gravel. "I couldn't resist him."
"My boy, you have nothing to apologise for," Professor Dumbledore told him firmly. "Older and wiser wizards have found themselves powerless before Lord Voldemort. You are the one who deserves an apology. Hogwarts has failed to keep you safe."
"You didn't know," Harry said, but then he remembered Petri's casual certainty that Professor Dumbledore had in fact been aware of the Dark Lord in his school. "You didn't know, did you? That the, that Lord Voldemort was possessing Professor Quirrell? Or me?"
He stared up at the Headmaster's blue eyes, remembered about the mind reading, and then decided that he did not care and maintained eye-contact. But then Dumbledore actually closed his eyes.
"I suspected Quirinus," he finally said, "but I had no proof. I never imagined that Voldemort would stoop to possessing a child."
Harry wondered for a confused moment whether Professor Dumbledore was trying to apply ethical assumptions to a mass murderer who had once attempted to kill a baby, but then realised that he was talking about power—he had not expected the Dark Lord to accept such limitations.
"He could cast the killing curse even with my magic," Harry pointed out. "He mentioned using some sort of magic gathering technique."
"He spoke to you?" Professor Dumbledore asked sharply, and Harry wondered if he perhaps should have kept that information to himself. Well, it was too late. He might as well go all the way and get his questions answered.
"Er, yeah. And earlier he said something to me without meaning to, I think. He said that he tried to kill me, specifically, when I was a baby. Not my parents—me. And that it was a miscalculation. Do you have any idea why, sir?"
Professor Dumbledore suddenly looked away, staring up into the sky. "The only baby Voldemort ever tried to kill was Harry Potter."
The fidelius charm, of course.
He looked back, and by the tightening of all the lines on his face and the lack of twinkle in his eye, Harry gathered that he did in fact know something.
"I do not wish to lie to you, my boy, so I must ask you to understand that this is something I cannot tell you about yet," Professor Dumbledore said at last.
Harry wanted to be indignant, but the grammatological concepts that the Dark Lord had shown him before gave him pause. The mere act of telling someone something could irreparably change the course of the future. Carefully, he asked, "Cannot, or should not?"
"Should not, at my best estimation," Dumbledore conceded, which confirmed Harry's suspicions that there was an arithmantic reason behind his reticence. That was a whole new level of horrifying, which served well to dampen his curiosity.
"Okay," Harry said. "Noted. Don't try to find out why the Dark Lord has it in for me. Or had. He didn't really seem interested in finishing the job, anyway. That's good, right? Or is it bad? Or is that a dangerous question too?"
He knew he was rambling, and that his voice was getting higher and higher, but he couldn't bring himself to care.
Professor Dumbledore sidestepped this topic and said instead, "Voldemort has always acted for his own gain, first and foremost."
"Well that worked out for him," Harry muttered. "He's got the philosopher's stone."
"There is yet hope that he will not be able to use it," said Professor Dumbledore calmly, turning back to Harry. "Brewing the elixir of life is not trivial, and the stone itself can prove hazardous to the user."
"He's a genius," Harry said, sceptical of this hope.
Professor Dumbledore shook his head. "There are secrets to the stone that cannot be discovered through reason alone."
The Dark Lord also still had Nic's book, Harry remembered, and he was willing to bet that some of those unreasonable secrets were alluded to in there. They were all doomed, and it was halfway his fault.
Then again, he wondered, "Sir, how did I get the stone out of that mirror? I still don't understand."
Professor Dumbledore sighed. "I may have outsmarted myself in this case. Only someone who wanted to get the stone, but did not want to use it, would have been able to retrieve it."
"Oh. And the mirror itself, is that, is what it shows…"
"The mirror shows neither truth nor reality, only the deepest and most desperate desire of our hearts. I am sorry you had to encounter it," said Professor Dumbledore, looking away.
Harry was not sorry. He had buried that desire until that moment, written it off as foolish and impossible. Perhaps it was, but that did not mean that he should give it up without even trying. He knew that all sorts of temporary resurrections were based in the darkest magic, and that even these could not restore true will. But why should he have to use those same methods? If they did not work, did that not suggest that they were wrong? There was a universe of things he did not yet know, and until he knew for a fact that it would be impossible, he could not relinquish hope.
The formidable castle doors loomed above them, jewel-encrusted metalwork gleaming harshly in the afternoon sunlight. Professor Dumbledore lifted his hand negligently, and the doors drew themselves open without a sound. The shadow of the entrance hall blinded them for a moment, but then they walked on, traversing the castle in grave silence.
"Albus!" Madam Pomfrey greeted as they finally stepped into the stale, peculiarly odourless environment of the hospital wing. "Another one from the fire? Bring them over." She bustled up to them, the sleeves of her pale green robes rolled up and wand held loosely in hand.
Professor Dumbledore shook his head every so slightly. "Not the fire, Poppy, I'm afraid. Could we take this to your office?"
Madam Pomfrey paused and peered first at Professor Dumbledore, then at Harry with concern, before nodding curtly. "Go ahead. I shall be right with you."
Professor Dumbledore ushered Harry towards the left side of the room, through a low, curtained archway that led into an alcove with a long wooden table opposite three low stools. He gestured for Harry to sit, but did not take a seat himself.
They were joined by Madam Pomfrey about a minute later. She leaned back against the edge of the table, wand still in hand.
"Well? What's the matter then?" she asked.
Professor Dumbledore waved his wand at the curtain in a compact but absurdly complex motion, never taking his eyes off Madam Pomfrey. Then he said, "This student was a victim of possession. Could you take a look?"
"Possession?" Madam Pomfrey repeated. "By what? For how long?"
"An hour at least, by Voldemort," said Professor Dumbledore, and Madam Pomfrey flinched visibly. Harry frowned. The headmaster had said the Dark Lord's name multiple times today, but Harry had not felt even a twinge of the terror that came from saying it in the man's presence. That confirmed that there really was some sort of magical effect. And despite his proven willingness to use the name, Harry realised that Professor Dumbledore had not spoken it even once in front of the Dark Lord himself, preferring instead to call him… 'Tom.' Harry wondered if that was the Dark Lord's actual, original name. It seemed so mundane.
Professor Dumbledore looked to Harry questioningly, and before he could really think it through, Harry nodded, and thus immediately landed himself in the awkward position of wondering whether he should bring up the previous two weeks of possession also. The window during which the omission could be taken for an accident rather than a lie slipped away quickly, and finally he was forced to remain silent as Madam Pomfrey drew near, wand already in motion.
She paused with its tip level with his eyebrows, frowning. "When was the last time you had blood?" she asked.
Harry stared at her in incomprehension for a long moment, finally understood what she was asking, and then fell into even deeper confusion. Unable to make heads or tails of what was going on, he finally just answered her question.
"Er, never. I don't need it," he said.
Madam Pomfrey tutted under her breath, and then flicked her wand in the telltale motion of the summoning charm.
Harry finally concluded that his eyes must still be red, however little sense that made. As surreptitiously as he could, he pushed his glasses a little to the side so that he could peer over the rims. He didn't know what he expected, but was somewhat reassured, if bewildered, to see that his uncorrected vision was as blurry as ever without the Dark Lord's aid.
The curtain in the archway billowed, and then gave way to a small object which zoomed into Madam Pomfrey's outstretched hand. It was a crystal phial, clearly filled with blood, which would not be out of place on the shelf in Petri's necromancy workshop. She drew the stopper out with her thumb and held the phial out to Harry.
"Bottoms up," she said.
"Er," he muttered, "I don't think—"
"Young man, you are hardly the first student I've treated for the vampire's curse, nor the first to be in denial about it. Trust me. It will be better for everybody if you learn to manage the symptoms rather than run away from them," Madam Pomfrey admonished. Harry instinctively wanted to protest that he wasn't in denial about anything, because there was nothing to deny, but he clamped down on the urge, knowing that it would only lead either to disbelief or awkward questions.
He took the phial and peered into its murky depths, swallowing thickly. This was his punishment for telling lies, he supposed—being believed a little too well. He brought the thin neck of the bottle to his lips and tipped it back, taking a hesitant sip.
It wasn't all that bad. Actually, the metallic, salty tang was almost satisfying, like nostalgia, soothing some hollow part of him that felt like homesickness for a place he had never known. He angled the phial up higher, savouring the smooth flow across his tongue and licking the edges in disappointment when it ran dry.
Then what he had just done hit him, and he lowered the phial with some shock. A glance at Madam Pomfrey told him she was smug, almost smirking. Bewilderment and horror jockeyed for first place in the pit of his stomach, before he finally settled on feeling supremely foolish. Had he been lying to himself all year? Had Petri lied to him? Why? How was this possible?
"Now that that's out of the way," said Madam Pomfrey, summoning the empty phial from his slack fingers, "How are you feeling? Any headache, nausea? General malaise?"
Harry took a moment to assess himself, forcing his whirling thoughts to the back of his mind, and decided that he felt physically great. "No, nothing like that," he said.
Madam Pomfrey waved her wand, passing it up and down his body like a baton, and finally said, "Well, you aren't injured or ill, and there doesn't seem to be any lingering magic from possession. If you begin to feel inexplicably tired and unable to focus, that's a sign that you should drink blood. A few ounces will do, and human blood only, if you do not wish to make yourself very sick. Come see me when you experience those symptoms."
Her tone brooked no argument, so Harry nodded jerkily, and then glanced over to the headmaster, who was twiddling his thumbs in the corner, looking all the world like he was paying absolutely no attention to the conversation. But when Madam Pomfrey turned to him, he sharpened up instantly, letting his hands fall to his sides.
"Albus, you said… You-Know-Who. Do you really mean that he was here?" she asked.
"I'm afraid so," Professor Dumbledore confirmed. "He was possessing Quirinus, likely all year long. You saw for yourself what it did to him."
Madam Pomfrey gasped, and then glanced back at Harry. "Small mercies, then that he wasn't exposed to it for long."
"Yes, small mercies, indeed," Professor Dumbledore agreed solemnly. "Thank you, Poppy. Harry, you'd best return to your common room. I'm sure your friends are worried about you."
Harry nodded at this dismissal, thanked the headmaster and Madam Pomfrey, and ducked past the curtain. Glancing around the hospital wing, he saw several students lying on beds, though he could not make out their identities. Madam Pomfrey had mentioned that people had got hurt in the fire, but he supposed the faculty must have been able to contain it eventually.
The details of the entire affair were plastered on the front page of the next morning's Daily Prophet, with an accompanying black-and-white photograph of a great vortex of fire. Hagrid's face appeared several lines later, set into a grimace that made him look like a hairy savage.
"HOGWARTS CONFLAGRATION RESULT OF ILLICIT DRAGON BREEDING," read the enormous headline.
Nobody had been seriously hurt, though the head girl and two prefects had passed out from inhaling too much smoke. Dragon fire was apparently not easily put out, and it had taken the combined strength of all the professors and a contingent of aurors to sink it into the ground. The dragon itself had been captured and was awaiting transport to a reserve, and Hagrid had been arrested.
There was no mention of Professor Quirrell or the philosopher's stone. No announcement had been made either about who was going to administer the Defence exam. Harry wasn't sure if any of the other students had even noticed his absence at the head table.
"This is mad brilliant," said Terry, folding up the front page of the Prophet. "My brother'll be so jealous."
"Jealous?" Lisa demanded.
"You know, that we got to see a dragon," Terry said.
"You mean that you got to hide in your dormitory while the professors dealt with the dragon," she corrected. "That's completely lame."
"I can't believe the groundskeeper was just keeping a class XXXXX creature in his hut. That's horrible," Morag said. "What if it had eaten a student?"
Harry doubted that the dog-sized baby dragon could have managed to actually eat a person, but Morag did have a point. He wondered a little regretfully if maybe they should have told someone about Hagrid's illegal pet after all, before it came to this.
Draco Malfoy, always eager to spread gossip, leaned over from the Slytherin table and told them, "My father says that this isn't the first time that oaf has done something like this. He was actually expelled from Hogwarts for keeping an acromantula that killed another student. I hope they give him the kiss."
That was a little extreme, Harry thought, especially coming from Draco, whose father probably also deserved the kiss by the same metrics. Sue and Morag nodded along, however. Lisa shrugged and said, "He'll probably get a fine and a couple years in Azkaban, I wager."
Nobody knew enough to contradict her, and talk moved on to exams, which were imminent.
"I'm going to fail Charms," Terry declared.
"I don't understand how you're good at Transfiguration but not Charms," said Lisa, shaking her head.
"They're totally different!" Terry protested unwisely. Lisa immediately began to expound upon the blurry line between the two subjects, and how convention was the only reason that the mending charm was not considered a transfiguration.
It was all so mundane. Harry felt as if he were an outsider looking in, despite the fact that he was sitting right in the middle of the pack of first years and by no means socially excluded. The problem was that there wasn't anybody he could talk to about his real concerns, which were as far away from exams as one could get. Even Professor Dumbledore didn't know the true extent of his interaction with the Dark Lord.
And what did that make him? He had been complicit, hadn't he? He had intentionally been complicit, even, in following Petri's advice. The Dark Lord had not even had to resort to any explicit threats.
Nonetheless, Harry could not imagine doing anything differently and achieving a better outcome. Perhaps if he had fought off the first round of possession, things would be different, but he wasn't sure if that was even a possible scenario. He had been blindsided, and his body had been compatible with the Dark Lord's spirit. That was all there was to it, wasn't it? After the possession, all that fighting would have earned him was unconsciousness while the Dark Lord traipsed about in full control.
"You look worried, mate," Anthony told him, startling him from his reverie. "I thought you were done studying?"
"Well, not done, but I feel ready," Harry confirmed, trying to smile. He was afraid it had come out as a grimace instead. "It's nothing."
"Imagine being ready for exams," Terry said with a long-suffering sigh, waving his arm wildly at Harry. "This bloke's going to be all by himself in lessons next year."
"Do they really make you repeat a year if you fail?" Oliver asked, looking a little green.
"I've never heard of anybody failing first year," Anthony assured him.
And he was right. Everybody passed, even Goyle. Vince later confessed that, though he had left the written portions of each exam blank on account of his illiteracy, he had actually done well enough on his practicals to scrape an Acceptable in every subject except for History of Magic, which of course had been entirely written. Harry privately suspected that the other boy's performance in Potions had also been bolstered by a liberal amount of house favouritism from Professor Snape.
Harry, for his part, found the exams surprisingly easy compared to everything he had practised while revising with Hannah, Neville, and Vince, with only Transfiguration providing a challenge. There, as promised, they had to demonstrate an animate to inanimate transfiguration that they had not cast before, which was mouse to snuffbox. The trick, which he caught on to easily after an entire year's practice searching for semantic similarities, was to relate mice to snuffling to snuffboxes. Professor McGonagall had deducted some points for his furry snuffbox, but he had managed an Exceeds Expectations anyway, which exceeded his expectations.
On the last day of term, just before breakfast, the names of the top seven students in each subject were posted on the bulletin board outside of the Great Hall, right next to the house point counters, where Slytherin's cool emeralds gleamed with the glory of the House Cup. Half the school was huddled around, fighting to get a look at the top marks.
"Terry, you absolute twit," Lisa yelled. "You're on all these, Mr Oh-No-I'm-Gonna-Fail-Everything."
"What? No way!" said Terry, elbowing some Hufflepuffs out of the way to get to the front. Harry followed in his wake, successfully getting close enough to read the lists.
Hermione Granger had finished at the top of every subject except Charms, where even her well-known pedantry when it came to essay-writing apparently could not match Harry's detailed understanding, and Potions, where Professor Snape would probably never suffer a Gryffindor to take the top spot. The honour there went to Stephen and Draco, as first and second, respectively.
Despite Ravenclaw's reputation as the house of bookworms, there were not noticeably more Ravenclaws than students of other houses in the top seven. Terry and Lisa were the only ones who showed up prominently across the board. Harry saw his own name in Charms and Defence only. He actually thought he had done very well in Defence, perhaps better than Hermione, but the exam had been administered by Professor Snape, who had spent half the practical distracted by his terminal inability to recognise Harry.
He searched for the names of his other friends. Neville was on the Herbology list, right after Hermione, and Hannah had made it to fifth in Charms.
Curiosity satisfied, he let himself be pushed to the side and towards the massive doors at the front of the entrance hall, where Filch was once again gleefully informing passing students that they would be prohibited from doing magic outside of Hogwarts all summer. He wondered if he should search for his friends, but gave it up as a bad job, with so many people milling about. They had said their goodbyes the previous evening at the leaving feast, anyway. Perhaps they would encounter each other on the train.
He hurried past Filch, trunk clunking along behind him, and sprinted across the courtyard, taking a great leap down the steps and onto the path to Hogsmeade where dozens of carriages waited under the dreary cover of grey clouds. The thestrals whickered softly at Harry as he approached, and he gave the nearest one a cautious pat on its snout. Its long tongue darted out and licked a strangely dry trail up the side of his hand. Harry had the feeling that it was smiling at him, from the twinkle in the depths of its dark eye, and he smiled back, finding himself looking forward to going home.