Alright, so here's Chapter 5. It's kind of a boring chapter, but it has vital info in it. Chap 6 & 7 will come rather quickly, since I know exactly what will happen in them. I hope you like this chapter and be sure to review! Oh yeah, here's shameless plug: www23.brinkster.com/notuslethe is my Alexei Yagudin site and www28.brinkster.com/severussnape is my, well Shrine to Severus Snape.Visit!
And Above all: read this story and ENJOY!
Harry Potter and the
Liberi Fatali _____________________________ Surgite. Ardente veritate Valete, liberi, They found Ron first, and he was stunned but excited. The four of them would have to go to the library after class! Hermione appeared at breakfast, but she shook her head when asked to come with them. "I have Quidditch practice! Our first game is next Saturday and Angelina would kill me if I missed practice." Her eyes dropped down to her plate. "You guys go ahead without me. Tell me what you find." Despite Bryn's obvious approval of that situation, she didn't say a word. Harry sat down beside Hermione, nudging her with a smile. "What we would find would be absolutely nothing. Ron and me have already shown we can't find a bloody thing in the library. Bryn can barely speak English, I don't think she'll be that great at reading it." "Hey!" Ron clamped a hand over the blonde's mouth and watched Hermione for any sign. Slowly, her head came back up, her eyes glittering. "We can go first thing Sunday. Angelina said we would have that day off." From the glint in her eye, Hermione was already calculating. "Once I show you guys how to look for things with a simple spell, you'll be experts in the library." Judging by the looks on Ron and Bryn's faces, they were as thrilled as he was. *** He'd left an argument between Ron and Hermione about what exactly a Chocolate Frog was made out of. Bryn had wisely stayed out of the conversation and, with a waggle from Harry's eyebrow, had not followed Harry back to the Common Room. Class would be starting soon, which one Harry wasn't sure, but he did not feel like attending. Sleeping on stairs would do that to you. The hallway that turned into the long rows of portraits was just around the corner when voices stopped Harry's feet.
Oh God, not Snape again. The next time to see Snape was Friday, and he never wanted to see him besides class ever again. Thankfully, the voices were revealed to not be Snape or any other teacher, for that matter. "You haven't told them anything, have you?" At once, Harry turned on his heel and was prepared to march right back down the hall. Too many blasted things were going on already, he didn't need to get involved in any thing else. "I haven't said a word Cho." And abruptly, he stopped. It had to be Cho, didn't it? It had to be his all-time crush that he'd had so little time for this year. Harry peeked around the corner to see Cho standing with her back against a wall, her brother across the way, arms folded over his chest. He sure did look old for an eleven-year-old. Cho nodded, mostly to herself, and started pacing in front of her brother, folding her arms across her chest. Her face looked closed in, as if some heavy weight was pressing down on her. It made Harry's chest constrict and he frowned, regretting that he didn't have his invisibility clock with him. "That's good. That's good Li. I couldn't handle if if they found out" Abruptly, she glanced up, searching the halls. Harry froze; he hadn't made a sound but it seemed as if Cho was being extra paranoid. The little boy stepped forward, drawing his older, taller sister into a hug. "Don't worry about it Cho." She knelt and wrapped her arms around him, taking more comfort than the little boy was willing to offer. Suddenly, a hand clamped down on his shoulder and Harry whirled around. "Such a touching scene, isn't it?" And it could only have been the sneer retort of Draco Malfoy, devoid of his gangly bodyguards. He looked more vulnerable, hair so blonde it mocked white and stance not as tall as Harry, who'd grown over the summer. "What do you want?" He didn't feel like dealing with Malfoy. In fact, he felt like calling up Hermione and having her use some ancient hex on the boy. And Harry would never ever use one of the Forbidden Curses on any living being but Malfoy almost deserved it A look of mock surprise filled the other's face. "Can I not speak with a fellow classmate? Or are you above me Harry Potter'?" The name was shredded through that voice. "Even Crabbe and Goyle are above you' Malfoy." So tired of fighting, of bickering. Something flashed through steel grey eyes, something hard and hurt, something Harry didn't see in Malfoy. "Things aren't always as they seem Potter," Malfoy uttered darkly, turning away and vanishing into the shadows. "No," Harry said to the darkness, pointing a finger in the general direction of the now gone Malfoy. "No. You aren't going to add to my problems!" But the blonde boy was gone. Cho and her brother seemed to have Disapperated although that was impossible in Hogwarts, and Harry was alone. Alone. That was rare. He couldn't ever be alone again. Ghosts, ones he couldn't see, flitted about Hogwarts constantly; the portraits watched him. There were more students in the school than he could count, a bit less than a fourth living only a few handbreadths away. Harry considered that he would be contacted about not attending class; McGonagall might actually come personally with everything that had happened. But that didn't really matter. Everything was fading into a black whirlpool. People could deal with their own damn problems. He had enough. That attitude lasted long enough to get him to the fat lady. She was dozing off, her pink dress glittering with the gleam of the yearly cleaning. There was something about her that he never noticed before. Not anything that Harry could actually put his finger on, but a sort of respect. The thought turned in his mind until it actually became a coherent idea. Of course, why hadn't he thought of it before? "Excuse me," he poked the picture and the fat lady abruptly woke up, startled out of her sleep. She was elder, distinguished. She stared at him, looking a bit nervous. There was a long pause. "I'm familiar with the older children dear, but I really can't let you in without the password." "I don't want to be let in." She quivered, hands clasping in front of her. "Then what do you want?" Harry felt his knees bend as he sat down in front of the painting. "Who painted you?" There was surprise on the distinctively blurry face, but the fat lady soon settled into a sort of pleased bounce. "Alexei Hufelpuf. He was the only offspring of the Great Four who built Hogwarts. Helga Hufflepuff's son." Harry frowned. Hadn't someone along the line said Voldemort was related to Salazar Slytherin? Was that a lie? "Who are you a portrait of?" The fat lady smoothed her dress out, smiling an old lady smile. That was probably the smile a grandmother would give, but Harry didn't have any grandmothers, so he didn't know. "Helga Hufflepuff, in her elder years." The answer floored him. People in photographs were the real people, so did that mean that people in paintings "So are you Helga Hufflepuff?" The fat lady laughed, a large hand coming up to her throat. Harry stood, confused. "Goodness no! Paintings aren't the same as photographs dearie. Photographs are a perfect duplicate of a real person. Paintings always have some minor imperfection. Thus, I am myself, a version of Helga Hufflepuff, but not the woman herself." The fat lady looked positively delighted. Obviously, no one had thought much of talking to the portrait, merely using her as the entrance to the Gryffindor Common Room. "When did you become the entrance to the Gryffindor Common Room? And why?" It would have made more sense for her to be the entrance to the Hufflepuff Common Room, wouldn't it? Harry tried to direct his questioning a bit more, determined to go somewhere with the mini-interrogation. "The House Wars, called Inter-House Championship nowadays, were started four years after the beginning of Hogwarts. At first, there was only one Common Room. It was the back half of the Great Hall, which wasn't the Great Hall back then. But there became tension among the Houses. Fights broke out in the middle of the night. It was Rowena, Rowena Ravenclaw that is, who contrived the idea of separate Common Rooms. Salazar, Salazar Slytherin, suggested to hide all the entrances. In the older days, there were many problems that turned into the things you see today. Why, the staircases never moved, but Salazar again suggested that they did, for a Treasure Hunt that had been part of the yearly Games." Harry tried to be polite. "That's well and good, but what does that have to do with you becoming the entrance for Gryffindor?" The fat lady seemed a little perturbed by Harry's interruption, straightening out her dress. "I was coming to that. You see; all Common Rooms were to be secret, so they needed a secret entrance. By this time, Alexei, Helga's son, was twelve and painted a picture of his mother in her elder days. Me. Helga did not approve and hated the picture. But Godric, Gryffindor you know, loved it and decided to make me his secret entrance. That is how I became your Common Room entrance." She seemed proud, but Harry didn't know what for. It didn't seem like a thing to be especially proud of. "That's very interesting." Polite, must be polite Harry. If this one painting knew so much, what did the others know? The others who had been there longer perhaps he could find out about Voldemort's time at school, or the strange thing that was happening to him or a phoenix named Fawkes or— Harry cut himself off. He'd go into or' overdrive if he didn't stop. Why hadn't he thought of it before? Come to think of it, why hadn't Hermione thought of it before? She was the brains, wasn't she? The fat lady cleared her throat. Oops, lost in inner dialogue. "Oh. Uhm, are there any paintings as old or older than you?" Should he call her something? Helga-Clone? Perhaps avoiding a name was the best thing to do. "I believe there is one older. Yes, only one older. It was the first painting every put in Hogwarts. Godric had gotten it into his head that the Four should do a self-portrait. The painting is a full length of all four of them together. They weren't the best of artists, but it is truly a wonderful painting." Harry's heart pounded in his chest. If he could find a painting of the Founding Four and they talked like the fat lady talked then he could find out so much "Oh thank you! Thank you so much!" Tempted to hug the painting, but that would have been a fairly odd thing to do. Instead, Harry contented with putting his hand to the painting's hand. The fat lady smiled, the grandmother smile again. Maybe the fat lady wouldn't be just a source of information. There was a noise and it was three Aurors, prowling around the corner. They found Harry and apprehended him, demanding to know why he wasn't in class. Harry felt a little queasy being around them, too reminiscent of dementors, but he swallowed and merely said, "I got lost." Surprisingly, the Aurors didn't argue. Hermione was pale faced and frozen when she entered the Common Room and found Harry nestled in one of the armchairs. But she was quickly pushed aside by an impatient Ron and a meek Bryn. Ron looked positively thrilled, as if Harry's cutting class had just paved way for a year of cutting classes. Hermione remained motionless at the entrance, mouth slightly ajar. "What did I miss?" His voice betrayed his uneasiness and Ron's smile faded. In truth, Harry was about as willing to cut classes as Hermione was. There were too many things in his life that were hectic; he didn't need bad grades on top of that. "History of Magic at its worst. I think Binnes has gotten more boring than last year, if that's even possible!" With the talk of school, Hermione was reanimated and marched over to Harry's chair, nearly knocking Bryn off her perch. "Harold James Potter, how can you possibly miss class?!" It wasn't as if Hermione, missing the first two weeks of school, had any room to talk, but Harry conceded to her scolding. It felt good. Normal. "We've got a project due at the end of the semester. It's going to be half our grade Harry! Professor Binnes gave out assignments today." Ron flopped on the couch next to Harry, frowning a bit. "Research on the Founding Four. I got blasted Slytherin. Hermione's already got a researching schedule around her Quidditch, doncha?" Based on the reddish tint to Hermione's cheeks, Ron was correct. Harry grinned. Haughtily, Hermione reared back into the conversation. "I do, and that means I'll be getting a good grade, unlike you. You've got Gryffindor Harry; only two other people were assigned him." "Yeah, Seamus and-" "Me." The white haired girl who had previously been quiet ruined the blessed silence with that single word. Harry slowly rolled his eyes over to her and fighting futilely to suppress the sigh threatening to escape. Bryn looked ill, her pale skin bordering on translucent and blue eyes so large in her face, the whites of her eyes were almost gone. Broaching that subject, he didn't feel a hundred percent either. When was the last time he had eaten? Hermione bristled, catching the time and pulled Harry up out of the chair. "Come on Harry, if we don't hurry, we're going to miss our next class." Not all that reluctantly, Harry allowed himself to be dragged along, Ron moping behind them. Sunday didn't come quickly enough. All week, his teachers had been complaining about his lack of concentration and much to his chagrin, Bryn and himself had each had twenty-five points taken away by Snape. Apparently, he'd reconsidered his mercy for Bryn barging into his office and took it out on the both of them. How the man had deduced that Harry had been involved was beyond him, but Harry had purposely acted out in Potions class. Albeit ten points later, Harry felt more than a little smug. Not to mention the fact that Bryn had turned into a mute, glumly following Harry and his friends around the school. Neither Hermione nor Ron paid much mind, and Harry wished he could ignore her too. She didn't fit into their trio; she was an outsider, the one who didn't belong. Perhaps it was that Harry had had that feeling too many times himself to willingly foist it onto another. Besides, wasn't it Bryn who had braved the dark evil caverns of Snape and gotten permission to check out the Restricted Section? Speaking of Bryn, the tiny white-haired girl was waiting in the Common Room, swinging that gold necklace of hers. It had a tiny teardrop shaped opal that slid along the chain and she often fiddled with it. She seemed enraptured and Harry really wasn't up for conversation. Deciding it was against his better health to head downstairs without backup, Harry snuck back into the dorm and roused Ron. The boy sat straight up and knocked heads with Harry. "Ow!" The bed sunk beneath his weight as Harry flopped next to Ron. "Ow." "Sorry." A strange lilt in Ron's voice made Harry sit back up, staring intently at his friend. Ruddy freckles in sharp relief against his pallid face, the pupil of his eyes so big there was only a ring of green and a fine trembling ran through his body. Harry stiffened, alarmed. "What is it? What's wrong?" Ron pulled back into himself, loosing the galaxies he was away. With a quick shake of his head, everything disappeared. The familiar quirky grin flashed over his face. "I love Sundays Harry. Let's to the library." The last was said with deflating enthusiasm. Façade back in place, Ron got dressed and headed downstairs, but Harry was slow to follow. What was happening to everyone? With a loud thud, Hermione set three more books down in front of Bryn, Ron, and Harry. All three groaned in protest. A mischievous grin spread over Hermione's face as she said the spell to find the word phoenix in the book. She was enjoying the library outing no doubt, as well as the discomfort of those around her. "Anyone find anything?" Ron whined, obviously wanting to do anything other than the task at hand. "Nope." "Ikke." The other three decided to ignore Bryn's Norwegian slip and continue pouring over the monstrous pile of books Hermione had managed to find. It was truly amazing how that girl could find a book in the library. She should grow up to be a librarian, if she wasn't so smart. With an almost squeak, Ron jumped up from his book. "I think I found something!" The others quickly moved next to him, limbs akimbo. Once the group was settled, Ron began reading aloud. " The life span of a phoenix is determined by its familiar. Phoenixes are much too powerful to live in their complete form their entire life. To counteract the extreme deterioration that accompanies the vast amount of power, phoenixes develop (over time) a familiar. This familiar, which appears in a variety of forms, absorbs excess power and stores it until there is use. Then, the phoenix and familiar will reunite and the familiar, not being an actual creature, will disappear. A phoenix's life span depends on how well the familiar is developed and how much power it contains.'" There was a long dead silence. Finally, Hermione, who had been rustling around, spoke up. She was always the one who provided little quirks of insight. "So your phoenix might still be around Harry. If it has a well-developed familiar, that is." Harry traced the drawing in the book with his finger. There was something he wasn't getting, something that was tugging at the back of his mind. He voiced his concerns. Ron pretty much managed to sum it up. "It's Hogwarts, Harry. I'd get worried if things were making sense." The next Saturday arrived without any major accidents. Actually, Hermione alone had managed to glean fifty points for Gryffindor. Ron had grumbled about it only being because she was McGonagall's favorite but he didn't really mean it. The points that Harry and Bryn had lost were going to be hard to earn back. Although, that new Gryffindor, Emma MacNeill, had been earning points like crazy with Professor Flitwick. Bryn knocking over a vial of some purplish liquid and not being punished for it was the only weird incident involving Snape. Harry climbed down the stairs to the Common Room, stretching stiff back muscles. He was used to getting up early on Saturdays. Of course, that was a rather moot point now, considering that he wasn't on the Quidditch team anymore. He didn't need to get up early. To his surprise, there was already someone up and sitting in the Common Room, facing the fireplace. As he walked closer, he saw long bushy hair that gleamed a familiar ochroid sheen. Harry felt a grin play over his face as he tip-toed closer and put his hands around her eyes. She stiffened, before relaxing when realizing who it was. "Hmm the Ghost from Christmas Past?" He grinned and sat down next to her, facing her equally smiling face. "Ah, you caught me. Nervous?" Hermione's eyes went wide for a second before she glanced down at her hands, nervously knitting in her lap. "Only a little bit." There was a commotion upstairs and Angelina came out, sliding down the banister. Following in the more conservative fashion of the stairs was the rest of the Quidditch team, including the Q.I.T. members. Hermione stood, and Harry realized that she was wearing her Quidditch uniform, despite it's high discomfort. He should have been jealous, considering that this had been his team, he'd been the star Seeker. But he wasn't jealous, not in the least. In fact, he was insanely proud of Hermione. "Morning Harry! Hermione! You ready for a fantastic game today? We'll beat Ravenclaw, I know we will!" Angelina's enthusiasm was infectious and the grins reappeared on the two's faces. "Alright everybody: move out!" The team disappeared and only Harry and Hermione remained, staring at each other still. The rest of the House would be rising soon. "Are you coming?" Harry grimaced. Just the thought of seeing anyone anymore than two feet above ground made his head swim and his stomach ache. But Hermione looked so pleadingly at him "I'll try." She nodded, smile forming again, this time with teeth. Then, she turned and started climbing out into the hallway. Harry frowned when he caught a glimpse of blue in Hermione's hair, but it must have just been the light, for when he looked again it was the same as always. He called out to her again. "Good luck!" To be continued... Stay tuned for Chapter 6 and 7 coming very soon! And don't be afraid to
comment! And look for a new chapter to Sorting (ron's!) and a new HP fic coming from me
that's a littler darker than normal... |