Note: Apologies for the sudden silence. Now that I'm back at work, updates will slow down a bit, but I won't let the story go until it's finished or I am. I promise.
Even after he made it back into the castle and warmed up, Harry's mood did not improve. He was busy trying to organise his new purchase, which turned into a mission to organise his trunk compartments, and he had barely snuck back into the boys' dorm before he was pelted by owl after owls.
They hooted irritatingly every time he popped his head out of the trunk. They called out unceasingly and occasionally tried to fly into the opening of whichever compartment he happened to be in. At one of them had wicked-long claws.
Everything else aside, Harry did not want anything to damage or dirty his Pensieve, and the ongoing threats to its safety had him simmering in fond frustration. Malfoy was sending messages to pester him again, and he really didn't want to spare the time right now catering to his whims.
Admittedly, it would be fabulous weather for a midwinter quidditch game, but Harry had other priorities.
When the fifth owl flew into his face to peck at his glasses, Harry threw his arms up in frustration.
"Fine then," he scowled. "Young master Malfoy must be satisfied, apparently."
He took the letter off the latest messenger and told it to wait. He skimmed the letter.
"Hope you're not trying to avoid me...yada-yada-yada…better not have snuck out without inviting me, blahblah…whatever."
Harry summoned over a quill and scratched out a response to Draco on the other side of the parchment.
No particular thanks for waking me up, Harry scrawled messily. I'm not feeling great and am going to try sleeping all day today to get over it. He felt no particular guilt at the thought of lying to Draco. Selective truths were part and parcel of spending time with Slytherins, he'd discovered. Please pass on my apologies if I don't make it to dinner.
Harry
Having made his excuses, Harry returned to his task, finally positioning the Pensieve in pride of place in the centre of his library space.
Having done so, Harry stood back and stretched his spine. Something clicked softly and he felt his muscles ease.
"Not bad," he thought, a critical eye surveying the room. The two-foot-wide basin sat flat on the ground, not looking unlike a fancy firepit. "A little more left, perhaps?"
Returning to his knees, Harry dug his toes into the floor and thrust. Straining his muscles, Harry slowly pushed the heavy stone basin a little to the left side. When that seemed too far, he pushed it back right.
Clicking his neck, Harry rocked back on his heels to evaluate his work. The Pensieve was clean of dust and looked quite dignified, sitting there in the middle of the uncarpeted floor. Subtle runes edged the bowl, and shadows played over the delicate carvings. The whole effect was of dignity and sombreness.
Harry was filled with buoyancy and pride at the thought that he owned such a beautiful work of art, and he took the opportunity to pace around it slowly. In the dim lighting of his trunk compartment, the Pensieve was nevertheless magnificent from every angle he viewed it from.
He ran his hands through his hair. "Incredible."
He finally owned it. At last.
After brushing his hair and taking a moment to polish his wand to a gleaming finish, Harry felt he had proven that he wasn't stressed or worried about using the Pensieve at all. His hands were firm and steady, and if it was unusual that he put so much effort into his hair and wand-maintenance, well, it was about time, wasn't it?
He sat there cross-legged and comfy, on the floor of his compartment, until his hair stopped catching on the comb, and his wand stopped streaking brown marks on the pure white linen he finally wiped it with.
He was calm and collected.
Then he set his things aside and leaned forward over the Pensieve, rubbing his hands roughly against his knees.
The moment of truth.
Carefully, Harry took up his gleaming wand and turned it gently over in his hand. He could give it a go now, he encouraged himself. There was no reason to wait, he thought positively. After all, trying it out would only be natural.
Edging up towards the bowl, rising to his knees, Harry knelt, looking at the object before him blankly. Well, it looked right. There was the stone basin, looking functional. And the runes and things that would make it work. It was all very professional looking. Nice and enchanted.
Guaranteed quality.
And here he had his wand. Everything he needed for memory extraction! He'd seen this done so many times, by Snape, and by Slughorn. And…Dumbledore? He knew they had watched the memories together, but had they already been in the Pensieve? Harry couldn't remember.
But. Clearly it was easy.
He unclenched his fists slowly and raised his wand to ear-height and, after the merest of hesitations, pointed the tip towards his own head. He breathed out slowly but the tension didn't drain. Meticulously, Harry thought of a strong memory. That horrible moment when Cedric was killed in the graveyard, that would do. It was one of his worse memories still, after everything. He still had clashes of recollection in those moments between sleeping and waking. He couldn't wait to get rid of it…
His wand hovered just over his ear, and he started to concentrate…
Then Harry stopped. Hermione would try something less important first, just to be safe. It was the mature thing to do, really.
Harry cast his mind back for a few moments, eventually recalling the moment during Dudley's eleventh birthday where they all piled into the car. He remembered the heat, Dudley's superior look, the sour smell of Piers' exhalation and sneers. That flailing arm which somehow got his kidney. Harry's eyebrows crinkled even in remembrance. On the off-chance that something went wrong, he would never miss that.
He brought the wand back up to his skull and concentrated on moving the memory.
Harry closed his eyes. Opened them. Scrunched them once more.
As the pressure of his knees dug into the floor, Harry bit his lip with slightly more force than he had intended. No one had ever said anything when he watched them do this before. Perhaps a little intent, a magical push, might be all it took? He was half in an Occlumency trance and breathed slowly while his body worked.
Harry poked around in his mind for a bit, just to get the memory moving, then slowly and carefully began drawing his wand away from his head, concentrating all the while.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something silvery and bright stretch between his head and his wand tip. A dazzling, silver wire –
There was an almost audible snap.
The memory returned to his mind with force, bouncing around for a bit and Harry's eyes felt bruised. A headache. Strange colours danced in front of his eyes for a lurching moment.
On top of this morning's mistake, it was more than he could simply absorb. Harry felt himself reel with dizziness. A roar of pain crashed through his head, more indescribable colours flashed before his overused eyes and Harry felt a long moment of utter disorientation.
When he blinked, the realisation occurred to him that the room… wasn't precisely spinning. His ears were ringing, his balance was gone, and Harry realised from the painful pressure on his knees that he was, apparently, listing helplessly left. Tilting, toppling…His left arm snapped out to hit the floor and he righted himself with furious concentration.
Harry took a few deep breaths – mind over matter, and all that; a small thing like this couldn't get in his way – and then tried again. This time he was careful not to lose focus as he saw evidence of his success.
Wand to temple, eyes closed, mind still. With infinite patience, Harry focused and held his breath…
Slowly, slowly he pulled a trembling silver string from his skull. It stretched and shivered in the air. Then finally, his arm was extended fully from his body, and he could turn his head carefully to see a coil of silver curled loosely around his wand tip.
He'd done it! Next was to—
Harry stared at the tip of his wand in something like horror.
A momentary lapse of concentration and Harry was astonished to discover the little glowing coil dissipate into thin air like a wisp of fog. He dragged his wand futilely through the air a few times, near where it had disappeared. Nothing caught. No little string of mist and light reappeared on his wand tip.
Harry bent hurriedly to look into the bowl before him. Empty.
What about in his head? The memory's echo remained, a colourless blur of boys piling into the back seat of Vernon's car, but the memory itself – the charge of emotion, the detail, the colour was gone.
"Argh!"
Harry clutched his hair in frustration. Lucky he'd been careful, that he'd chosen something unimportant. He scanned the air in front of him hopefully, but it seemed to look totally normal.
Blood boiling, Harry had to take a moment to regulate his breaths. Breath in, breath out. Easy does it.
His concentration sharpened, his whirling thoughts slowed and Harry forced himself to sink into the familiar pool of calm and stillness.
On his third try – he chose another memory from the same day; he'd never regret it if he forgot what it was like watching Dudley unwrap his presents – Harry took his time. The world seemed to slow and still, and Harry managed his magic and focus with infinite patience. Just like this morning, he would have realised, if his attention hadn't been on the magic he was moving. Incredible control, precision of power: his mind and magic worked together to create the most delicate of actions.
From the meticulous control within Harry's mind, there blossomed a strange sense of resonance. Like sound waves travelling out and burgeoning, the whole world seemed to resonate in Harry's head for a moment. His tiny moment of control almost echoed in connection with everything. It felt a little like he held the whole universe within his mind.
Despite it all, Harry's stubbornness held out; his peculiarly balanced focus remained and with incredible care, he managed to remain still and sure. Smoothly, a little coil of memory wrapped neatly at the end of his wand, and Harry managed to hold it there long enough to tap it gently on the edge of the stone basin, where it slithered into the bowl.
Success.
He let himself huff out a huge, slow breath of relief, and the strange echoes of the previous moment faded from his mind. After staring at the Pensieve for a moment in sheer relief, Harry prodded it gently with his wand, and a swirling, revolving scene rose up like a ghost, circling the centre of the basin. A boisterous Dudley, eyes bright, talking loudly and excitably. His aunt and uncle, beaming and proud. A quiet, nervous little Harry, dressed in baggy hand-me-downs, hiding unobtrusively in a corner of the scene.
It felt weird looking at himself all young and uncertain like that. In his memory, he looked eight, not ten going on eleven.
Harry poked it quickly again with his wand, so that it transformed again into that little trickle of misty light, and then stuck it back carefully into his head with the same care as before, just to see if he could.
He didn't want to ascribe his success to luck, so he tried a few more times with unimportant memories before he started transferring the significant ones over into the bowl.
He had key…strategic events, perhaps he could call them? Key events that simply had to happen, those which would impact his plan. Which moments would those be? And study – Harry could suddenly streamline his research.
Ooh, and homework, he realised with enthusiasm that bloomed like heat from his stomach and made him forget his slowly numbing knees. He didn't need to wait for any instructions in class now. He could look ahead and anticipate homework and classwork to come! He wouldn't just copy Hermione's essays, he promised himself. He'd learn it all.
Plus, he remembered with unusual excitement, he could listen to lectures with time in fast-forward. What other theories had his missed last timeline just by being too slow to hang it all together?
What was going to happen this year, Harry wondered, leaning eagerly over the Pensieve? Had he stuffed anything up irredeemably already?
His wand loyally by his side, Harry barely noticed the hours slide on by.
"What's keeping you so busy that you can't see me anymore?" Draco asked over dinner three days later, making Harry choke on his jacket potato.
"Eh?" he managed, around a mouthful of carbohydrate. Clumsily, Harry groped around the table for the tankard of pumpkin juice and drank deeply.
"Oh, for Merlin's sake." Draco rolled his eyes. "Swallow, Potter. You should always remember to act cultured in public. Granger should have mentioned it to you, if no one else."
For some reason, Draco did some kind of weird thing with his fingers, waving his cutlery around, fluttering his hand in front of his mouth, before, very intentionally, taking a small sip from the tankard at his side.
Surprised again, Harry stared at Draco for a moment of baffled confusion. He was Potter in public, apparently. Even if Draco was, at the same time, giving him some kind of…etiquette lessons… in public, while simultaneously declaring their ongoing social distance.
Precisely, Harry placed his fork down thoughtfully. That fact explained rather a lot about Draco Malfoy, now that he thought about it. And about Narcissa too. Harry cast his mind back over his years of memories. In fact, this might explain their rather tightknit family group despite everything.
Malfoys in public were different from Malfoys in private, he abruptly realised.
Intentionally.
Harry was so blindsided by this sudden realisation that went back to swallowing his dinner in silence, completely missing the frustrated crinkles in Draco's brow.
"Well?"
Harry kept chewing in contemplative thought. "Hrrm?"
"Potter," the blond finally demanded again. "Swallow your food properly this time and then tell me. What are you doing these days that's more important than me?"
Harry hurried swallowed and turned to face his newest…friend. "Sorry, sorry," he blustered. "The food's just too good, you know? I didn't even think..."
Draco flashed him a very unimpressed look. "Naturally. Your time?"
"Well," Harry grinned. "It's, you know, the holidays and all."
He was rather unsurprised when Draco leaned towards him and said in a quiet, if clipped, voice. "I'm a Slytherin, Potter. I can see your tiny mind racing for excuses. What is it you're doing without me?"
Harry sagged. Of course what worked on Ron and Neville wouldn't work on, well, a sneaky Slytherin.
"Look," he admitted, "it's just a bit hard to say, you know, around here." He gestured subtly at Crabbe and Goyle, who were focussing single-mindedly on their food, and then also at the wider table.
"You're stalling."
"Not, not exactly," Harry murmured, an excuse – or idea, at this stage he'd grasp anything – finally coming to his mind. "The table really isn't the place to be discussing this."
Draco sat back sceptically. "After dinner then, if you don't escape."
"Sure."
"And it had better be good."
An hour later, they were both sitting in the same old charms room and Draco was peering at Harry sceptically from what had become his regular seat.
"Cursed presents? Really?" He snorted. "That's the best you can do?"
Actually into it now that the thought had occurred, Harry rocked forward to balance on the edge of his own seat. "No, no. You don't get it."
"Enlighten me."
Harry grinned. "Well, who in Hogwarts do you find most deserving of, um, let's call it karma." Harry leaned forward to will positive energy into Draco's critical form. "Who do you find most irritating? Most frustrating? Most undeserving?"
"Dumbledore," Malfoy said immediately.
Harry rolled his eyes. "Besides him."
Fortunately, Harry could see the gleam in Draco's eyes that proved he was getting interested despite himself.
"Well…there is this one Hufflepuff prefect…" Draco suggested.
"Not them either," Harry dismissed. "Come on, this should be easy."
Draco stared at his face appraisingly, his eyes flicking over Harry's features before he tentatively ventured. "I'm not quite sure where you're…"
"Come on!" Harry encouraged, "I have a whole lot of attention that I never wanted and a pile of presents that I can't keep, and somewhere in Hogwarts there's a person who's desperate for attention and the kind of collectables that would support their self-worth."
Draco paused. "Lockhart."
Harry threw his hands up into the air. "It only took you long enough!"
Intrigued, Draco sat a little straighter, but the tilt of his head was still sceptical. "But what does that have to do with, you know, you prioritising the gifts I helped you sort over me, the highly esteemed Malfoy scion?"
Harry lied through his teeth. "Well, you know how I feel about our, let's call him our mutual acquaintance, and how this opportunity has – quite literally – fallen into my lap. But I'm going to have to attempt some highly illegal charm work, and I didn't want to risk your reputation – I mean, you helped me with half the job, after all. I've been looking for spells that hide magical signatures, and, er, other magical identifiers that I don't really know about. I mean, surely some of these presents are dangerous and if they get traced back to me, I'm really risking quite a lot."
Harry took a deep breath in the face of Malfoy's thoughtful look and continued. "Because I need to send the owls so that no one can trace them back to me, but surely if that was, y'know, widespread knowledge, then the charms themselves would be highly illegal."
Draco made an unimpressed sound that Harry couldn't quite identify.
Harry rushed on. "So I've been doing some research, usually in Gryffindor Tower since there's practically no one there at the moment, and looking for spells in books and things. I'm just not having much luck, and I didn't want the castle to know what I was researching." He took a breath. "So. There you are."
"Harry Potter, you absolute pillock," Draco finally responded after three long heartbeats of judgemental silence. "You completely Gryffindor git. I can't believe…Well, I suppose you're muggle-raised, after all."
Harry's hackles rose. "Hey…"
"But I suppose your Gryffindorness is the worse of it," Draco continued. "Really, after everything I suppose I'm lucky you're so functional as you are."
"I…what?" Harry deflated.
Draco fixed him with a stern look and spoke slowly and clearly, as if speaking to a child or someone heading into senility. "You wanted to send someone cursed items in the mail, secretly, so you rattled around Gryffindor Tower for Merlin-knows-how-long, when you could have asked your resident, friendly Slytherin ally?"
"I…yes?" Harry deflated. It was a very good lie, to have made Draco buy into it so completely and it was exactly the kind of thing Harry would have done too, but somehow Draco's scorn was not sitting comfortably on him.
Draco seemed to be equally unhappy. "I'm not even any old Slytherin, Potter! I'm Draco Malfoy, my direct line of ancestry has been sorted unfailingly into Slytherin since we arrived in Britain in 1066!"
"…Of course," Harry mumbled, somehow torn.
Huffing and with a slightly flushed face, Draco settled back down in his seat – when had he stood up, anyway? – and smoothed his robes down fastidiously.
"I don't even need to research this," Draco exclaimed. "I've literally inherited a book…Look, never you mind the details; I've got the spell side of things all sorted. More importantly, how often are we going to do this thing? Once a week? Fortnightly? Do you have any idea what any of your cursed gifts do?"
The plan – the plan of Harry and Draco, no less – was organised very rapidly from thereon, and Harry was reduced to squeezing in time with his Pensieve during early mornings and late nights. It was incredibly helpful; particularly after he worked out a schedule of when he would use it for schoolwork versus private study versus, well, Voldemort killing.
It meant that when the Hogwarts Express returned at the end of the holidays, Harry could be found in the common room working on a pile of parchment. He'd been hoping to get a head start on his homework and was frantically scribbling out his research when the Fat Lady swung open and crowds from the train then clattered in.
He ignored them with the ease of long practice, but his focus was disturbed by a frazzled Hermione, who stalked angrily over to the table at which he was working.
"Harry Potter!" she demanded, gaining the two of them more attention from the room than she had anticipated. She repeated herself at a lower volume. "Harry James Potter – You knew that Professor Lockhart has been lying to us."
"What? Oh, yeah." Harry scratched his neck. "You've been doing more research over the holidays then? What did you find?"
If anything, Hermione looked even more furious at him as Ron and Neville came up behind her. She grabbed Harry's elbows firmly and dragged him out of his seat. Harry toppled gracelessly down onto one knee in the lee of the table. The two of them crouched there, shadowed by the tabletop, and Hermione stared furiously into Harry's face from less than a foot away. "You've been letting me run my mouth off about how heroic he is, how brave, how strong and ethical, and you knew this all the time?!"
"Uhh..."
"I can't believe you!" She turned to look up at the boys for support. "Well?" She demanded. "Aren't you too upset too?"
Neville wobbled his head around, somewhere between a nod and a shake.
Unfortunately for Ron, he used words instead. "Well, we couldn't just tell you," he blurted. "You wouldn't listen to criticism. You had to come to the conclusion yourself."
Harry flinched.
Hermione froze. Glanced around the trio from Harry, up to Neville, to Ron and back again.
"You…you all knew?" She demanded. "None of you told me?"
Realising what he'd started, Ron backed away rapidly, leaving Harry as the focus of her ire.
"Was this funny to you?" Hermione grabbed Harry's arms again with crippling force. He felt he was bruising. "Some kind of a joke?"
"No, no—"
"While everyone else knows, we'll keep secrets from the girl?" Her voice grew louder and louder again. Harry subtly cast a muffliato but it caught her attention.
"What was that spell, Harry?"
"Oh, uh, just a, um—"
She rolled her eyes. "Let's keep more things secret from Hermione, shall we? Cast spells without telling her. Speak up, Harry. Don't you know it's rude to keep secrets?"
Everything he was keeping secret flashed suddenly through Harry's mind, and he hoped he managed to successfully suppress his urge to flinch. Voldemort, prophecies, Horcruxes…
Harry begged Neville silently for help, but the traitor wouldn't meet his eyes.
"Aren't I your friend, Harry?" Hermione pleaded. "Can't you trust me? I…I thought we could talk about anything."
Harry stared, shocked, at her sudden change in attitude. Wasn't she angry with him? How come her eyes were so red now? Had he, Harry's heart dropped, had he hurt her feelings?
"Hermione," he began. "Hermione, I…"
"What now?"
"I'm sorry, Hermione," Harry blurted, with absolutely no clue what he was going to say next. "I…I'm sorry I couldn't just tell you. You were so happy to learn from Lockhart. So excited to talk about his, his…"
"What?" Hermione let go of Harry's arm, allowing the blood-flow to rush back into his forearm. She angrily scrubbed one palm over her eye. She wasn't crying, to Harry's relief, but her face had gone sort of splotchy and her eyebrows were quivering.
Harry shrugged helplessly. "…His references to Ministry treaties, and regulations, and that ground-breaking attitude towards creatures and beings that you said you liked so much." Awkwardly, Harry reached his free hand over to gently pat her frizzy head. "I didn't want to take that away from you. I'm sorry."
To Harry's bafflement, she drew in a long, rattling sniff. "You were, you were…indulging me?"
"I…yes?"
Hermione shot him a very peculiar look. "…That's really it?"
Harry's eyebrows rose. "Of course! I'd...I'd…" He crossed his fingers helplessly behind his back. "I'd never keep secrets from you, Hermione. We're best friends, aren't we? We share everything. I mean, I invited you into our little research group, didn't I? Even if I didn't quite say what the purpose was?" The tiny little voice in his mind that reminded him he was lying was easily pushed away by the urgency of the moment. This young Hermione was so cute when she was nervous, nothing near like the competent, commanding witch he was used to, and she needed encouragement. He continued, "I, uh, didn't tell Ron and Nev either – they figured it out for themselves."
She snuffled wetly. "What's the purpose then?"
"Oh." He looked up at Neville and Ron, who approached cautiously now that the worst was over. "We're, um, we're trying to get him fired?" Harry trailed off.
Hermione quirked a single forboding eyebrow.
Harry carefully detached his other arm from where she was still grabbing it and settled down more comfortably on the floor. "Well," he explained. "You know that rumour that the Defence position's cursed?"
"What about it?"
"We're just trying to help it along." Harry smiled sheepishly. "We figured if we went through his books and found which spells don't work, which timelines are contradictory, and what spells he can't actually perform, we could…" He breathed deeply before speaking very fast. "Link-up-with-a-reporter-and-expose-all-his-lies-to-public, uh, condemnation?"
She scowled, but at least some of it looked thoughtful. "You think that's enough?" To Harry's relief, she seemed to be putting her feelings behind her, now focusing on Lockhart's comeuppance.
Harry vacillated. "There's this reporter I know of, with incredible readership and a rather compelling sense for scandal," he admitted. "I think – I hope, at any rate – that I might be able to convince her to run a series of articles for us. Blow it up big, so it can't be ignored."
The plan had been percolating in Harry's mind for a while, even if the means seemed a little hypocritical.
Hermione's single raised eyebrow was joined by the other one, and she stared at Harry for a long moment in thoughtful silence.
"You're sure that'll be enough?" Neville queried where he stood hovering over the two.
"…Yeah?" Hopefully. "I think I've got a good chance."
Ron shrugged. "Works for me."
Hermione gathered herself and stood tall and uncompromising, with one last wipe of her eyes. "If you say you plan will work, Harry, then we'll leave that part to you. I'm going to research the hell out of this bastard. Imagine, publishing fake facts in school books! Who does he think he is?
"We'll need a different kind of comparative tables," she glared at the boys, "and we should probably improve our cross-referencing too if it's got to stand up to scrutiny. Harry." She shot him a look. "I can't believe you had us wasting so much time on the wrong kind of notes! You'll need to leave that bit to me; I'll get us sorted." She strode off. In her wake, the boys could hear furiously muttered phrases such as "educational fraud" and "false representation".
She left a startled silence in her wake as each of the boys processed her fury and wondered at the fact that they'd escaped it.
Then, "Wow," Ron muttered, wondrously. "Wonder what lit that fire under her bum?"
Neville and Harry met eyes. "You wonder?"
"Well, yeah?"
Neville kindly grabbed at Ron's arm and carefully forced him upstairs.
"Come on, mate. We'd better go get our notes so we can join her in the library."
"What, now?"
"Yes now. I'm not going to be the one to tell that witch 'no'."
Behind them, Harry tidied up his things to join them. He'd have to process his Pensieve gains another day. For now, an upset Hermione was the priority.
