Later that night, Harry lay face down on his bed, trying to sort out his whirling thoughts and feelings.
He passionately wished he could do a Memory Charm on himself. He wished he could go back to the way things were, when he didn't know who -- or what -- Dr. Reader and Lucy (for that is how he still thought of them) really were.
It wasn't that he was afraid of them harming him -- that wasn't the issue here. It was whether or not it was right for him to be with them, whether his continued residence at Offhand Manor would constitute a tacit approval of their pasts.
Harry sat up and grinned half-heartedly at that last thought. Before meeting Reader and Lucy, he would have phrased that thought in a much simpler fashion. Perhaps some of them is rubbing off onto me, he thought -- and then his face darkened again.
Why does Dumbledore trust them? he asked himself as he fell back down on his bed. Dumbledore trusted far, far too much for Harry's liking. He let Snape, an admitted Death Eater, teach at his school. He accepted Sirius' statements of innocence before anyone else would. He let Hagrid, a half-giant of the most despised type, stay on Hogwarts' staff. And he allowed Remus Lupin, a known werewolf, to teach at Hogwarts...
Harry suddenly realized that he was making arguments of behalf of Dumbledore's generosity with his trust.
Sirius was innocent, Hagrid was kind and honest, and Remus, werewolf that he was, was still the kindest, gentlest and wisest person Harry knew outside of Dumbledore himself. Even Snape, the worst of the lot, had gone out of his way to save Harry's life more than once, even though he hated Harry with a passion that the young wizard could scarcely understand.
Lecter and Starling most certainly did not hate Harry -- rather the reverse, he thought. They really did treat him as they would a beloved son. Not by coddling, the way the Dursleys coddled Dudley, but by challenging him to excel at whatever he turned his mind towards doing.
And he enjoyed it immensely; he worked harder during his summer "holiday" than he ever did at Hogwarts, and he loved every second of it. It helped that both the doctor and Clarice took an active interest in magic; they often studied alongside him, though Lecter had absolutely not a spark of magical talent himself. But they both were very able scholars, and their techniques, Muggle though they were, were still applicable to the study of magic. Now that Harry had begun building his own memory palace, he found himself able to organize and summon all the information in his head, even that from Professor Binns' supremely boring lectures.
The thought occurred to him that he might very well be Head Boy by the time he left school -- an astonishing prospect. But an even-more-astonishing thought occurred: that he really didn't care whether or not he became Head Boy. He was already learning to measure himself by his own standards, standards far higher than the official ones in either the mundane or the magical worlds.
What was it that Dr. Reader -- Dr. Lecter -- had said to him, a few weeks ago?
He searched through the corridors of his memory palace -- a place he intentionally modelled after Hogwarts, except that it was much brighter and airier, and the corridors stayed put -- went into the Hall of Taste and Reason, and heard Dr. Lecter himself, in white tie, say the words: "The first step in the development of taste and reason is to be willing to credit your own opinions." Not to accept them blindly, mind you, but to see them as being worthy of examination and scrutiny, and, if they passed muster, of eventual acceptance.
The acts of questioning and crediting one's own opinions were, in Harry's mind, inextricably linked.
The process sounded to him to be indistinguishable from growing up.
Harry was already learning to credit his own opinions in the field of taste. He found himself to be fond of early twentieth-century composers such as Gershwin and Sibelius and Prokofiev: music far different from the chamber music that was Lecter and Dumbledore's shared taste.
It was now time for him to credit his own opinions in the fields of reason and morality.
These opinions would, he knew, eventually diverge wildly from those held by Reader/Lecter -- if they didn't do so already. But, he also knew, that this divergence would not upset Dr. Reader in the least. It would please him, in fact -- so long as Harry would be willing to submit them to the intense and thorough examination that the doctor and Dumbledore could do so well. A peer review of one's psyche, Clarice called it.
Except that it was being done by people -- Dumbledore, Lecter, Clarice -- who were so advanced in their fields that they literally had no peers besides themselves.