Chapter 102
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To: Spencer Reid
From: Harry Potter
Saturday 11/8/92 5:54pm (GMT)
Mrs Finnegan says her friend knows or has found something to protect Dean and Seamus but she wants to come and talk to us about it herself so I won't know what it is until tomorrow (5 days from now, since Dean and I are spending Sunday at school to give Mr and Mrs Finnegan time to cool down, Seamus says he wished he could join us. There are times that this time dilation is incredibly frustrating). Mrs Finnegan still looks really upset about the whole thing so whatever her friend's solution is, I already know it can't be easy or there will be complications or something. She kind of apologised for her attitude this morning and she says she isn't exactly angry with me and that she's grateful that I told her what was happening at Hogwarts, but seeing me reminds her that she's angry about the situation which feels a whole lot like I make her angry. I'm trying to stay away from her as much as possible but she's insisting on supervising the Occlumency lessons. I wish she wouldn't, I'm sure that Seamus would be able to learn more without her there watching even if he did muck about more as well. You were right Dean's not the sort to hold grudges and has already forgiven me for making him learn Occlumency though I don't think he's learnt enough to see any benefit in it yet. It helps that it's not his mum watching the lessons. Seamus is still pretty upset about it which I can't blame him, the lessons are really stressful with his mother there nagging about it. If this solution his mother's friend has found doesn't protect them without learning occlumency I'm going to push for him to have some lessons while we're at school as well. I'm sure he could learn it better on our own. I suggested it already but he said he doesn't even want to think about occlumency at school, which means he isn't practicing either, I hope Dean is, he hasn't said but maybe he just doesn't want to get in between me and Seamus about this. Dean certainly seems to be better at sitting still meditating or thinking or whatever he's doing but as an artist he's probably used to picturing things in his mind.
Thanks for warning me about the spider thing, I was so irritated by him that I didn't think my reaction through properly. I think I've convinced Dean and Seamus to let it go as well unless we find out that he and Hermione are receiving some sort of benefit for being such lousy friends. If I find out that either of them are being paid and haven't been cursed then Ron's going to wake up with spiders all over his pillow and in his shoes and schoolbag every morning until he stops being scared of them and I'll curse Hermione half-blind if it's the only way I can stop her from being able to read. Seamus said that he thinks Ron genuinely does want to be friends or at least he wants people to see him as my best friend, the-boy-who-lived's best friend I mean not me just plain Harry for the sake of my personality. I think he's right and part of me doesn't even blame him, five older brothers who are all really good at something and then after him the only girl born into the Weasley family in generations. It would be natural for him to feel overlooked and want something that made him stand out and he's too bloody lazy to achieve anything on his own, not to mention that there isn't much he could do that one of his brothers haven't already done no matter how hard he tried. Bill was head boy and top of his class Charlie was a quidditch star and is a dragon tamer, Percy the Prat is prefect and top of his year level, the twins are very inventive pranksters who seem very popular and have been on the quidditch team since second year which is pretty rare, what's left? I just wish that if he's decided that being my best friend would be the way he wanted to stand out from the other Weasleys he did it properly and put the effort into being a decent and genuine friend.
To: Harry Potter
From: Spencer Reid
Saturday 8/11/92 09:59am (PST)
Using the idea of Occlumency to improve his art may be a way to motivate Dean. I always had an eidetic memory but you said your memory improved with occlumency, is it for details you see as well? If so, it would be a very useful skill for an artist to be able to remember a picture or scene more clearly or with more details, or to be able to match colours from memory. Not to mention it will help them with their exams so they don't have to revise as much to get good marks.
You almost made me feel sorry for Ron but then I thought about it, there are hundreds of different jobs he could do ways he could excel and if he has decided to befriend the most famous British wizard of his generation as a way too stand out from his brothers, he's still be using you and not be a true friend though your right he could at least choose to treat you like a decent friend would and maybe you would have ended up genuinely being friends. The problem was even if he genuinely wanted to be your friend without any ulterior motive, he's setting himself up for the same sort of situation and resentment, instead of being compared to his brothers he's going to be compared to you or worse compared to your fake persona which he has no hope of living up to. With the type of self esteem issues he has he won't see that you also don't measure up to your image and how horrible it is for people to have all those false expectations of you. He'd would have been better off keeping his distance from you and making friends with the others.
Good luck with Mrs Donahue, I hope she has a way to protect all three of you from being manipulated. I wonder though, if it is that easy to manipulate someone's thoughts and personality as well as their memories, why would they bother manipulating Ron and Hermione. Why not just use magic to influence you to want to do the things they want you to do? It would be much more likely to produce the result they want, or at least results they could predict and fine tune into being the person they want you to be. It would be more reliable and it'd have to be easier too since they're only having to manipulate one person. Unless they person doing it wants you to notice and their real motivation isn't so much to stop you from learning but is to make you feel that you don't have any real friends. The other alternative is that they did try to manipulate you before they bothered with Ron and Hermione and your occlumency works and they had to turn to manipulating the people they think you're close to because they aren't able to manipulate you directly. I refuse to let you feel guilty about this possibility. You have every right to learn to protect yourself from magical manipulation just as much as having your memories altered or your thoughts read by someone you wouldn't choose to share them with. It isn't your fault that Ron's family haven't noticed that he's being manipulated and tried to teach him to protect himself, he does have three older brothers at school who should be able to notice any differences in his habits or personality, and it's not your fault that Hermione hasn't read about Occlumency in her quest to know everything about magic. If you feel that guilty you can help her find a book about it in the library or buy Dean or Seamus an occlumency guide and ask them to leave it in the common room where she'll find it. Just make sure she doesn't have a reason to report back to whoever is doing this that you know Occlumency. Whether she's telling someone willingly or they're influencing her or even just reading her mind you can't trust her to know anything you don't want your enemy knowing.
To: Spencer Reid
From: Harry Potter
Sunday 12/8/92 7: 51pm (GMT)
Mrs Donahue came tonight and told us about protection runes and personal wards. There are some that are designed to protect free will, she said they're normally found on the rings worn by heads of house and some people put them on their wedding rings to protect their wives. They sound like just the thing we need. The problem is that they are fairly expensive because they need to be anchored in pure goblin wrought gold to last. Any pure gold would do for a year or so she said but it's too soft and wearing it against your skin would rub away the runes that make the ward making it potentially unstable and dangerous if the wrong rune rubbed away. I told her that I didn't care too much about the cost I wanted one for myself if she could make it and I would check my vault and if I could afford it, I would get one made for Dean and for Seamus as well. Mrs Donahue suggested that since the Potters were an old wizarding family then I should check the vault to see if I already have some items that are warded to protect me and my vassals.
Mrs Finnegan got a really funny look on her face when Mrs Donahue said that, like she didn't want to agree to me looking in my vault or didn't want me protecting Seamus like that which I didn't understand. She started to argue something but Mrs Donahue said that even if I bought something new and had it warded for Seamus, people and perhaps magic would still think that he was my vassal to be protected that way and wouldn't it be better for magic to think he was a vassal than a consort, and vassal charms made with family magic activating the runes would be a lot stronger protection and Seamus couldn't be made to remove it by anyone, which could be a problem if it's the headmaster or a professor he's using it to protect against. She also said that there were lots of different vassal oaths that could be used and most of them weren't as restrictive as the traditional ones. She promised to hunt up a book about it for Mrs Finnegan and I to read.
Mrs Finnegan agreed to take me to my vault next Sunday to look to see if I have anything like that, she seems to think that the Potter family has been noble for long enough to have had vassals in the past. I didn't even know they were considered a noble family now. I've written to Gringotts to ask about being allowed to take protective amulets out of my family vault and to make an appointment to speak with my manager. Mrs Donahue seemed to think that amulets for my sworn vassals would be exempt from the not taking stuff out of the vault rules, though she also said that the swearing oaths to become a vassal and the accepting vassal oaths of allegiance were both normally something that wizards didn't do until they were adults. Mrs Finnegan is also going to take me to see Mr and Mrs Thomas so I can tell them everything that I've told her about the possibility that somebody is magically manipulating my friends and that Dean might be at risk if he's openly friends with me and about possibilities of this vassal thing, because they deserve to know too and to be able to decide about Dean becoming my vassal for protection. Dean is a bit worried about how they'll react after seeing how angry Mrs Finnegan has been about the whole thing, and I am too but I did tell her about someone being out to control me when I went there at the start of the summer so at least it won't come as such a huge surprise to her as it did to the Finnegans and Mrs Thomas did say it was worth the risk before.
Spencer, I asked Mrs Donahue if there was an amulet or some sort of protective runes or ward that could protect a person with schizophrenia from the voices they hear in their heads. Mrs Donahue said no that it was impossible because the voices were coming from your mum's mind itself. She did say that there was a protective bracelet designed for people who are at risk of harming themselves either deliberately or accidentally that would protect them from their actions but that it wouldn't protect those around them. I'm sorry, I don't have better news for you. I will ask about having an amulet made for your mother to stop her from harming herself, at least that would be one less thing for you to worry about. I asked her about potions too but like everyone else I've mentioned it to she said that she'd never heard of a witch or wizard with Schizophrenia and even if there was one it would take the person's own magic to make it work so it wouldn't be any good unless your mum was a squib. She said that if she was a squib then protective runes on a protective amulet combined with runes in your home would be the best way to manage her but she wasn't sure it would work for muggles. I'll look into something that holds the runes for the house if you want me to. I didn't ask about whether there was a way to protect you from her episodes. I read that there are protection runes that will protect from physical assaults but from what I read they're either like a force field around you that would hurt your mother if she kept trying to attack you or they're intent based like a notice-me-not charm stopping people who would want to hurt you from noticing you're there. I'm not sure that would be a good thing if you're trying to look after your mum if she couldn't take in what you were trying to do, and I'm not sure if they'd work because your mum isn't trying to hurt you. She lashes out against unseen enemies to protect herself and you. She just doesn't always know that you are you and I don't know whether the amulet would work like that. I don't think that I can ask an adult about that in case they thought they needed to do something about you being hurt because from here the only thing I think they could do would be contacting the authorities and have you taken into foster care which I know you think would be worse than anything else they could do, and you might be right now that you're at college most of the year.
To: Harry Potter
From: Spencer Reid
Sunday 8/12/92 12:02pm (PST)
Thank you for thinking about trying to protect Mom, or to protect me from Mom's outbursts. It was very considerate considering the huge problem you're trying to protect your friends from. I would like to purchase one of these bracelets if I could, but I don't think that Mom would agree to wear it.
What does becoming a vassal involve in the magical world. In nonmagical Britain vassalage was a feudal term that started to die out with the onset of mechanised farming and was abolished in 1789, which meant a subject, subordinate, follower, servant, slave or a tenant was granted the use of land/ housing, in return for swearing yourself into some sort of service of the owner. In feudal times that usually included making war for their lord, so I can understand why Mrs Finnegan wouldn't be happy for Seamus to become one, especially to you who already has both known and unknown enemies. And what does consort mean, in the historical texts I've read it can mean anything from husband to a higher ranked person ie the Queen's husband is the Prince Consort not the king, to a sort of male version of a mistress or even a sex slave, I could certainly see why Mrs Finnegan would be upset about that.
One other thing I hate to bring this up and potentially deprive you of the support you need at Hogwarts but I think you need to take into consideration is if not being able to be manipulated will actually put Dean and Seamus in danger if they're spending most of their time with you and seem to have taken over Ron and Hermione's roles as your best friends. If they can't have their thoughts and memories easily altered to be used against you, then will whoever is manipulating Ron and Hermione come up with some other way to make sure they won't want to or aren't available to support you. While it isn't in your best interests not to know if they've been manipulated it might not be in their best interests to be protected from manipulation. That depends on what extremes the people manipulating Ron and Hermione are willing to go to and perhaps it won't be a problem, as you've said the two of them would be fairly easy to manipulate, so whoever's doing it wouldn't have had to put much effort into it. But there's a cumulative effect or a desensitisation to the wrongness of long term mistreatment like I warned you before with the Dursleys. The longer they get away with manipulating those around you the more they will feel they have the right to do so and the more they will manipulate them for their own agenda without caring about the effects their actions have on you or the people they're manipulating or cursing in order to manipulate you.
For that matter if being protected from manipulation like that is possible then why were your professors all so susceptible to it at the end of last year? Surely at least some of them can either afford to purchase that type of protection or belong to families that protect their members? Is this protection really rare? Was it abandoned at the same time as taking vassals fell out of acceptable behaviour? Or has someone specifically banned it in Britain? Or are they just naïve enough to think that nobody would try to manipulate them that way, or that they're strong minded enough to fight off any compulsions. It has to be fairly difficult to compel someone otherwise it would be easy for students to compel a teacher into giving them straight A's for essays they haven't written and if that was happening surely they'd do something to stop it.
A/N: Thank you to all those who reviewed followed or favourited this story for your support.
Stay safe everyone.