Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Seven: Teaching Romilda Vane

Other than Sirius's poor choice to show them those…"books" (was that the right term for them?), Christmas Break passed without incident. Life seemed oddly relaxed, running on oiled wheels as it was, along a smooth and level path. Harry didn't know what to make of it. Life could never stay so peaceful and tranquil, could it?

His Foe-Glass, as he saw almost straightaway after his return to Hogwarts, was crowded with enemies, but most of them were indistinct silhouettes. All except one, that seemed to have blond hair, slicked back and styled neatly. And that figure didn't seem as tall as those surrounding it.

That was as much as could be seen of it. Still, Harry had expected to encounter some sentiment of the coming trials that life was sure to thrust at him. But even Stephen seemed not to think anything too disastrous was coming.

This lack of clear and pressing danger meant that Harry could devote the time and opportunities he usually spent trying to figure out the year's threat to other things. He scarcely knew what to do with himself. He continued to teach Ron and Ginny Latin, and Ginny and Hermione were drawn into whatever manner of practice they chose to participate in. Hermione was always eager to learn more magic (as was Ginny, but she was still progressing well with nonverbal, wandless magic; Harry would have to arrange independent study with her, if they could stay on track). While they were staying at Grimmauld Place, Sirius, and sometimes even Remus, or, even more rarely, Tonks would get dragged into these training exercises.

Only magic study was a constant amongst everyone—and Hermione had no interest whatsoever in fighting using "muggle" weapons. Harry very nearly insisted that it would be something of a handicap if she bowed out, but Ron had shot him a level look, as if Ron understood something Harry didn't, which was infuriating.

The "something" was probably what Hermione had mentioned at the end of first year. She was not the sporty type, given to leaping into the fray, in true Gryffindor style. She was behind-the-scenes, the guide, the researcher, the "man in the chair". Ginny was eager to learn even how to fight with a sword, although it had taken some doing to find one for her. Sirius had raided a room somewhere in Grimmauld Place, slinking off on his own when no one was looking to ensure that no one got any Bright Ideas about ransacking it, or using it as an armoury.

It was all the same to Harry. Ron was disappointed at the missed opportunity. Ginny just wanted to learn how to defend herself, with physical weapons, if necessary.

"If my brother is the Crown Prince of another world, I think I should know a bit about their combat, in case I ever visit," she said, tapping a roundshield Harry had insisted upon her learning to use as well against her leg, very carefully, as it looked as decrepit as if it might have been made during the days of the Saxons.

It was probably a good thing that Ron was busy training Sirius and Remus, who were up to the challenge of a more difficult opponent, and who therefore didn't hear about Ginny, speaking of home.

He tended to go quiet whenever it was mentioned, as if he were trying not to think of it at all. Harry wondered, sometimes, if this were merely the normal course of things for heroes who had undergone Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey that they'd covered back in his muggle school. "Crossing the Return Threshold" only to find that home seems different, now. But, it was more likely to be that he was not as he had been, then, and feared that they wouldn't recognise him, and also….

Harry turned to face Ginny squarely, straightening up but only tilting his head in her direction rather than lifting it. "Hmm. I don't think he's eager to go home. Thor looks a bit different from Ron, and not just by virtue of being older, and not redheaded, and without all those freckles. I think he might be suffering from a case of divided loyalties. You're his family, and I'm his family, and I have seniority, but his mortal family matters to him, too. He's conflicted. It's probably related to what he saw in the Mirror of Desire."

Ginny set down the roundshield. "I don't think you've mentioned the 'Mirror of Desire' before," she began.

Harry shrugged. Truth be told, he didn't like thinking or talking about it, either. "It shows whatever is the deepest desire of your heart. I saw my family—both people I knew nothing about, like my grandparents, and James Potter—my dad, you know—but then, even though I'd spent the past few months trying to convince myself that none of it was real, I saw them, too. My mother and father and older brother. And, I didn't know at the time—"

"I wonder what I would have seen," Ginny said, leaning back to look at the ceiling, as if deep in thought, as if she hadn't just cut him off deliberately, to spare him from having to share such an embarrassing truth. Her way of showing that she understood that this was hard for him to speak of.

"When you were ten? Wouldn't it have been us, happily married and with a family, all grown up?" he asked her, with a smirk that was smothering a good-natured grin. She pouted.

"I know, I know! I was such a fangirl, and I had a ridiculous crush on you! But, you sure cured that quick enough. It's hard to imagine, now, how closeminded I was. I suppose I was just like all those other little girls who dream of a knight in shining armour, or a prince to sweep her off her feet. Heraldic nonsense."

"You do sort of have a prince to sweep you off your feet," he said, giving in and grinning at her. She laughed.

"Don't even try it," she said, and then started giggling uncontrollably. He wrapt his hand around the hilt of the shortsword he'd intended to give her some sort of lessons with, and gently prised her hands open. It fell from her hands into a metal gauntlet that encased his hand whose false metal flowed from his hand, down into a false leathern sheath for the blade.

Maybe they deserved to relax, a bit, especially since Stephen's latest visit, just before Christmas, had brought no dire warnings with it. At least, none regarding the immediate future. He'd just said that the spell the Death Eaters were working on wouldn't work after the new year, and they'd be safe, then. Harry could go back to Hogsmeade with Ginny, and build a sanctuary, in case the war spread to there. They'd have a safe haven.

Of course, with how much opportunity he'd lost, particularly with that canceled date, he'd have to sneak out of school a few times to build up that energy, and perhaps shake the latent magic of the land awake. And, Ginny would help.

No matter how the rest of the year went, no matter what the mysterious annual end-of-the-year threat turned out to be, he thought he'd trained enough in fourth year alone to be ready for it. The D.A. still seemed to consider themselves at his beck and call, so he could contact them if anything went extremely wrong. Didn't he deserve to relax a bit, to try to be a normal human teenager every once in a while?

"I'm sorry, Harry," Ginny said, looking down at her empty hand. Harry just gave her a smile. "Don't worry about it," he said. "You've learnt a lot. Nonverbal magic, and wandless magic…I've heard you're pretty good at those…and Runes and Latin…don't spread yourself too thin."

"You're being a hypocrite again," Ginny said, wrapping an arm around him, and pulling him down onto the floor. This room was completely devoid of furnishings, to reduce the chance that some manner of hidden dark creature or curse would be released by these attempts to help them practise staying alive. Counterintuitive, and rather ironic, if that happened. But, it meant that there was nowhere to sit.

She leant her head against his shoulder, and he wrapt his arms around her, as if they were by the Gryffindor fireplace instead of a cold, hard flagstone floor in the middle of winter. "Do you suppose I ever will get to go there?" she asked him, hesitant, in a low voice. "I want to know where you come from. And…and where Ron comes from. He almost feels like a stranger to me, now."

He resisted the urge to say that Ron felt like a stranger to just about everyone who knew him. Ron was…unusual. Instead, he said, "If you wish to go, and the way is ever open to me, I will bring you to Asgard. At the very least, I wish that you could meet Mother."

She gave him her best attempt at a cocky grin, but she was too adorable for it to work very well. "Oh. I didn't realise that we were that far along in our relationship. Meeting the parents, eh? You must be serious."

He might have, in other circumstances said that, no, this was Sirius's house, but it didn't belong to Harry. But, he understood something, perhaps, even underneath the surface of her words. She'd sworn to be there for him, through thick and thin.

It was almost like being married, not that he knew what that was like. Instead of mockery, he pulled at those hidden words beneath her lighthearted tone. "Of course I'm serious," he said. "Why would you doubt me, other than the obvious reasons?"

He saw her remember his epithet, and smiled at her.

There was a flicker of…something. Not doubt, not second-guessing, he thought. A sort of start, as if she'd noticed an incongruity in her own thoughts. Perhaps recognising how well she'd adjusted to her world being turned on its head. Before she could speak, perhaps to explain, he raised his forearm to gently push her aside, a bit.

"I meant it, you know. I don't…I mean, I don't think this is how it's supposed to be done, but…" He knew enough to kneel on one knee, even if he didn't have a ring. "Will you marry me?"

She stared at him. "Don't you think we're a bit young for that? Or that I am, anyway, and you are, legally speaking, too?"

Harry huffed, in exasperation. He was trying to be sweet and considerate and…well, Prince Charming, instead of the wicked uncle who conspires to steal the throne from the king's rightful heir. She could let him be chivalrous without making sarcastic comments, couldn't she?

"I'm not saying 'Let's elope right now'," he huffed, again. "Only…I don't want to think of a life without you, you know, and I wanted you to know how serious I was about all this. I mean, I don't have a ring, but you never struck me as the sort to value symbolism so highly…."

Her expression softened. She reached out both hands, and pulled him to his feet, and kissed him. "Someday," she said, when she pulled away at last. She rested her forehead against his, and reached down to grab his hands. "Someday, when this war is over. I know you have your priorities. I just don't want to be cast aside as if I'm some damsel in distress."

Harry wrapt his arms around her, and buried his hands in her hair, and said, "I know. You don't have to prove anything to me. You don't have to do any of this training. Just don't leave me, and I won't do something stupid like break up with you to protect you, when I'm pretty sure that by now, all the Death Eaters know we're dating. Far more suspicious if we suddenly split up, I should think."

Ginny smiled up at him. "Yeah," she said, as if she weren't quite listening, and squeezed his hand. "We'll go through this, together."


And, after Christmas Break had ended, there was Dumbledore. It had taken months to arrange it, but somehow he'd prevailed upon the goblins, found a "fair exchange" that would allow him to reclaim the cup, Hufflepuff's Cup.

Harry ran off a rapid tally at the news: diary, locket, ring, crown, cup, and then he and Nagini. They were over halfway there before. But, with the cup destroyed, there would be only two horcruxes remaining: the living horcruxes, the experimental ones, that it was more difficult to tell how to destroy them. The general rule that Harry had observed was that a horcrux could not be destroyed without destroying its vessel, but perhaps….

Nagini was, in and of herself, a bit of a hurdle to jump. Harry was hardly trustworthy enough to fight giant killer snakes (even if she were smaller than the basilisk, Nagini was still bigger than a man). Then, there were his prior experiences around snakes, the empathy which suggested that being in the same location as a snake, which was a horcrux, would be doubly damaging ot him, and was to be avoided at all costs. He would have to find a proxy, someone who could wield the Sword of Gryffindor, or, more likely, whom he trusted to return the basilisk fang illusioned to look like the Sword of Gryffindor, having slain the killer snake. This entire part of the ordeal required much consideration.

But not as much as the part where his own death was a prerequisite for the death of Riddle. He didn't know what to make of that. He was suspecting, perhaps, that this was some sort of special case amongst special cases, and that even if Nagini must die, Harry might yet live, possessed as he was of a human form, possessed as he was of wizarding magic, possessed as he was of the soul of a god, the blood of a goddess flowing in his veins. He was unique.

Soul magic—which horcruxes were—was not quite the same thing as wizarding magic, and seemed to follow its own set of rules. That made for fully four kinds of magic Harry knew of. He was keeping track; it seemed important. Wizarding magic, soul magic, the magic of home, and sorcery. Harry couldn't assume that soul magic would work the same as wizarding magic.

Dumbledore was forced to call Harry in to help to destroy The Cup, and Harry did not begrudge him, this. He could not be expected to fin a safe location to use Fiendfyre, after all.

(Harry took a moment to wonder; did merely killing the host of a horcrux—casting that sort of spell—necessarily destroy the horcrux, too? Were they tied together, host and horcrux? That wouldn't seem to be the case. But, did that mean that there were situations wherein the sturdier horcrux would survive, but its host did not? What prevailed, then? This had the strange effect of making the Killing Curse seem like the kindest solution, the way out. He didn't want to think about his soul moving on, but his body still being alive, after a fashion, but inhabited by the horcrux….)

When he had left Dumbledore's Office, a memory richer, and one more horcrux down, those two, living horcruxes were all that remained. A strong cord seemed to bind him and Nagini together, now, as the mutual last anchors of Riddles soul.

And, somehow, the order in which those horcruxes had been listed suggested to him that he was best left as the last horcrux. It was his burden to attempt to defeat Riddle. He could only humour the possibility of a way out when his death would mark a clear path to victory. Too much could still go wrong if he died with even one other horcrux still intact. Otherwise, it was tempting to know, once and for all, what his role was meant to be, what would happen, whether or not he would die.

But, the question must, perforce, be delayed again.


There was little more progress that could be made into the task of destroying the horcrux when only Nagini the snake and Harry remained, but Dumbledore did not know this, a fact which Harry had forgotten.

Apart from attempting to plan for the wars to come, and a bit of an effort made to discern how Nagini might be destroyed, if indeed it weren't possible to rescue her, somehow, Harry gave less heed than was usual to the War, which was a shocking reprieve. He was used to war, he realised. He didn't know what to do with himself without it.

That was one of the reasons he did what he did about Romilda Vane. But, mostly, it was because he was still leary and hyper-attuned to the idea that anyone might try to control him, and the thought of someone taking away his ability to choose something as fundamental to who he was as whom he found attractive?

Harry would never understand wizards, if they insisted that love potions were "no big deal". For his part, he'd touched the box of poisoned chocolates, and frowned. His sixth sense urged caution, a warning, for whatever reasons, and Harry analysed the box with his seventh sense, and found…a discrepancy.

Due to the mixed nature of their manufacture, it took him longer to figure out who had sent him these chocolates (to whom the spell of the love potion was bound) than it did to figure out which love potion had been used. It was a weak dose, "mild" love potion, but enough was enough.

Quite apart from preferring, if that were the right word, to retain control over all of his decision-making processes—not just free will, but he freedom to think and feel as he truly thought and felt, he could not help wondering where Romilda Vane, the girl to whom these chocolates belonged, had been last year, when he had been pariah to the entire wizarding world—or at least Wizarding Britain.

He recognised her when he saw her, and thus, he knew that she must have been here at Hogwarts. But, she was a vague sort of presence to Hogwarts, one of the nameless, faceless many, slinking out of the shadows to make a bad first impression before returning thither after. She hadn't been there when the school had turned its back on him, as it was wont to do, but now that he was popular, trendy, cool, again, and it was acceptable, she was all for dosing him with a love potion and giving him a whirl.

Absolutely not, was his first response. And then, he had an idea. A horrible idea, which he therefore warned no one of before the fact, but laid out clearly for Ginny after.

Ginny. The love of his life, whom he'd spent half of their first encounters at odds with, having said or done the wrong thing, somehow. Whose attention he had craved for so desperately (and without knowing it) that he had driven her to tears the first summer he'd spent at The Burrow. Ginny, who knew what it was for Harry to be in love with her, and that odd, between space where nothing seemed to go right for either of them.

Harry could use that. Vane thought to poison him? He would teach her a lesson, not to toy with people's emotions and souls. He'd give her what she thought she wanted, and see how long it took for her to cave.

No one claimed that he was kind, after all. No one should mess with a trickster.


Ginny had a large enough heart to pity Romilda Vane, when she came into the Great Hall, looking paranoid and frantic, and stumbled over to the Gryffindor table, looking very young and meek, indeed.

"I give up," she said. "Take him away. You can have him. Please, just keep him away from me. Keep your boyfriend! I don't know why I thought it was a good idea. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please, please, just help me get rid of him!"

Harry had gone too far, gone overboard, as was fairly usual for him. Ginny knew that Harry was teaching Romilda Vane a lesson about the importance of autonomy, and punishing her for trying to control him, but she seemed to have missed the crux of his message.

Perhaps, because he seemed to have accomplished this by pretending to fall for Vane, pretending to have succumbed to the love potion with which she'd infused her gift of chocolates, even if, Harry being Harry, he hadn't been able to help noticing that they'd been poisoned.

He'd barely even given Ginny a heads-up that he was doing what he was, but she understood that this was, at least in part, a preventive measure. He seemed to have pranked Vane until she was reduced to tears, and Ginny surprised herself by feeling a pang of wistful nostalgia for that first month Harry had spent at the Burrow, back before her first year.

She shook her head. She must be going mad.

Unfortunately, Vane was desperate enough to take Ginny's head-shake as being directed at her, grabbing onto the sleeves of Ginny's robes and getting down on her knees, beseeching, as if some sort of supplicant, before a queen. Ginny fairly squirmed with discomfort. She could feel herself turning red all over with shame. The situations Harry put her in!

Well, if Vane made any more of a scene, and spread the word, no one would dare to make a move on Harry. He'd well and truly cut himself off from any other takers, with an alarming amount of foresight and planning. If only any others of his plans worked this well!

"No, no," Ginny said, wincing as she realised that she was making things even worse. Someone just stun her, already. She was not cut out for dealing with this, or any situation in which taking direct action would not avail her.

"I mean, of course I'll…get him away from you. You should probably break up with him, officially. But, I must say," she said, regaining some of her mental faculties as Vane's grip on Ginny's sleeves lessened. "You have some nerve, coming here and demanding that I pull my ex-boyfriend away from you after you dosed him with love potion to make him break up with me. We were happy, damn it!"

She'd remembered that she was angry with Vane, which was why she hadn't taken steps to thwart Harry's dastardly designs. Vane looked up at her with snot running from her nose, eyes wide and full of tears, and attempted to make puppy-dog eyes. She beseeched.

"I said I'd get him to stop. Leave. Go on. Shoo. Go hide in the kitchens, or something. He'd never think to go there."

Dobby was there, and Harry was avoiding Dobby, she meant. But Vane, who in retrospect doubtless didn't even know where the kitchens were (Ginny didn't, either; all she knew was that there were a ton of house-elves, there), nodded, and scurried away before Ginny could change her mind.

Harry emerged from seemingly out of nowhere a few minutes later, insufferably smug. She knew it without having to turn to look at him. "I suppose you're pleased with yourself," she snapped, glaring down at the table. Why couldn't Vane have sent those chocolates at suppertime last night? Or tonight, even.

There were fewer people around in the morning, and…Ginny buried her head in her hands, fully aware that her thoughts were lacking any sort of logical progression to them. Last night hadn't been Valentine's Day. Chocolates and other gifts were distributed by house-elves in the middle of the night, if they didn't arrive in the morning post.

And Harry couldn't have taken Vane on a "date" in the middle of the night, regardless, assuming he'd straightaway fallen for the ruse, and eaten the chocolate for a midnight snack or something. Harry had arranged things in the way that made the most sense, which Ginny resented.

"What did you do?" she asked, her voice somewhat warbly from the stress this holiday had caused for her, stress she didn't deserve.

Harry took a seat next to her, and smiled. "Well…."


Gryffindor House's second match of the year was in early February, about a week before Valentine's Day. And, about a month after the destruction of Hufflepuff's Cup. Harry had had a month to try to come to terms with what he was trying to do, and to remember that he now could focus his attention more thoroughly on the question of Malfoy.

Not that he expected to make progress with that, at this point. He'd been watching the Map at regular intervals, at first, and then at random times during the day, as if luck would provide for him, when planning failed. But, he couldn't discover whither Malfoy disappeared. It did not seem to be off-campus, and he never was on the Map, and then off. There was no way to know from what point he vanished. It was never an observed phenomenon. Harry was left guessing.

Sirius, who knew to take Harry seriously whenever Harry had some deep, abiding suspicions (particularly after the Tournament!) suggested two scenarios. The first was that Malfoy had left Hogwarts grounds. The other was the Room of Requirement. The latter seemed quite promising, but, as before in second year, Harry's options were to either miss an unknown number of classes until Malfoy's next disappearance, staking out the Room, on the off chance that Malfoy were using the Room (in which case he might as well watch the Map incessantly), or to let the matter be.

It was also during February that Apparation lessons entered the curriculum. He, Hermione, and Ron all signed up, Ginny pouting and sarcastically wishing them the very best, sulky that she would have to wait until next year.

Harry added the existence of a period of time wherein the school became vulnerable to apparation and disapparation to his list of possible theories to explain Malfoy's disappearance. Had he, perhaps, found a gap in the age-old wards that protected the castle?

Harry took it upon himself to walk the castle, comparing the feel of that room around which cords of barbed wiry twine had temporarily been pulled away, clearing the room of that particular spell, to the rest of the castle. As he was taking the apparation classes, he had to rely on his memory to compare the two sentiments, but that barbed twine was distinctive enough that he had some confidence he'd recognise its absence, if he should encounter a bare patch, somewhere in the castle.

There was none, that he could find, although he also couldn't find the Hufflepuff commons, or survey the slytherin dorms. Perhaps…?

Well, if he were disapparating from the Slytherin dorms, Harry would never know it. It would be even more difficult to stake those out than it would the remote seventh floor corridor wherein lay the Room of Requirement.

With some misgiving, Harry gave up both strategies for lost causes, and set to researching traps as best he could in the library. A sort of tripwire would be ideal, and alert, if Malfoy try anything…even Harry wasn't sure what he was looking for, which made things more difficult to find.

And, he was also just trying to distract himself from the knowledge that Nagini the snake was next on Dumbledore's hit list. Someone else would have to kill the "queen of killers, with fangs of death". When Harry was out of range of her agony.

For the first time, he was powerless to handle the coming threat, unable to even find a way to build a means of guessing what it was. The only thing he might be able to do…was corner Malfoy, and force answers from him

After the Gryffindor versus Ravenclaw match, of course.

This was when Malfoy seemed to drop out of all sight. Harry had to wonder if it had something to do with the recent food poisoning Slughorn, Potions Master and former Head of Slytherin House, had suffered.

It was grasping at straws, but did Malfoy perhaps begrudge the removal of his favourite professor from his usual post (into the curst slot of Defence Professor)? Harry couldn't figure out the answer. He knew that there were clues he was missing, but they might be unimportant, minor details, and the right conclusion might still be the sort of thing that required a great leap of intellect. When Harry jumped to conclusions, he was either spot on, or far shy of the mark. There did not seem to be an occasion where he hit the outer rings of a target. It was all or nothing.

He contemplated the merits of recruiting other people to spy on Malfoy, and decided against it. He was lucky that Ron and Hermione had believed him. The members of Gryffindor House who knew him less well would never agree to such a pointless scheme. It was well known that there was no shortage of bad blood between him and Malfoy, having been drawn into the Malfoy-Weasley feud early on, as he had. Only the Ministry Six might believe him.

He'd tried convincing Krum, on the one day when he'd run into Krum as he was patrolling the halls. But, Krum'd given some sort of cryptic explanation, in hushed tones, of Dumbledore having it under control. Cedric, when Harry sent to him, was very upfront of being out of the loop, on an Order mission. Riddle had tried to kill Madam Bones three times over the course of the last year, apparently.

This left Harry with very few potions, as few as he had knowledge. And meanwhile, the images in the Foe-Glass grew ever clearer. One of them was Draco Malfoy.

One of them was Riddle.