Author's note: Thanks everybody. Glad you seemed to like the therapy... I'm counting on 'patient confidentiality' to keep Harry's secrets safe. Maybe I'm naïve...
Just a word to duj : I hadn't really got going on Luna in the last chapter. Hope this one redresses the balance. And I've done so much Harry anxst in my earlier stories (esp SNAPE'S CONFESSION) that I've backed off a bit here. So, maybe Harry does come across as slightly brainless; I think he is a pretty self-absorbed guy though.
Also to duj: shall I turn this into a slushy SS/HG fic just to annoy you? !! (I've not done one of those yet, but who's to say I won't???????)
To Tina: if Harry got what he deserved he'd have been expelled ages ago, so I'm a bit stuck there. Who do you think I am - Umbridge? I think that's part of the problem: no one knows what to do about him (including me!)
Be patient - you will find out what happened to Harry - it's in chapter 9, I think...
LOST PERSPECTIVE III : REPERCUSSIONS
By Bellegeste
CHAPTER 7: LUNA'S PROPOSAL
Harry slouched along the corridor, his bag slung loosely by one strap over his dipped shoulder, scuffing his feet on the stone floor as he kicked a pebble in front of him a short distance, caught up with it and kicked again. It was repetitively mindless; it was Ron's head...
"I wouldn't do that to pebbles if I were you, young Sir - you never know when Peeves may have replaced them with Puff Pods or Dung Bombs..."
The ghost of Sir Nicholas Mimsy-Porpington appeared through the right-hand wall, slightly ahead of Harry, and crossed his path in front of him, doffing his hat with a chivalrous bow and a careful nod of his partially severed head.
"Hi Nick; bye Nick," said Harry, as the ghost vanished into the opposite wall, taking the most direct route to his destination.
Harry aimed a particularly vicious swipe at the pebble and booted it hard. It sailed into the air and hit one of the antique oil paintings with a resounding clang. Harry mooched over to see what damage he'd done - knowing his luck today, the picture would be beyond repair. The armour-clad figure of a Knight was examining a new dent in his breast-plate.
"Zounds!" he exclaimed on seeing Harry. "Prithee, Sir, vouchsafe me this: in what wise have I engendered thy displeasure? Go to! young Squire, Go to! I say! Avaunt!"
"Oh, shut it!" snapped Harry, hardly in the mood for Elizabethan derring-do.
It had been a totally rotten day, and just when Harry thought it couldn't get any worse, he had remembered that he was due to go to his third session with that lump of Muggle marbling, Mr Lardon. The therapy sessions were to be daily for the first week, and weekly thereafter - after only two, Harry was already sick of the sight of those piggy, water-retentive features, the incessant slobbery sucking as the man persevered with the Every Flavour Beans (even the toe-jam flavoured one), and the burgeoning symptoms of panic as he strove to maintain the pretence that counselling psychotic, adolescent wizards was all in a day's work.
That afternoon the Charms test, about which Hermione had, in all fairness, warned Harry had, nevertheless, taken him completely by surprise. He had turned up in class, wand in hand, confidently expecting to do magic - a Growth charm or two, some advanced Hovering or Cheering; he was quite happy to Engorge the odd Flobberworm or demonstrate NEWT level skill with the Colour Change charm by camouflaging a Parrot fish so that it remained undetectable amidst a shoal of Zebra guppies. It had never occurred to him that the test would be theoretical.
"Wand away, Mr Potter," squeaked Professor Flitwick. The echo of Professor Umbridge's killjoy catchphrase tolled like a death knoll. Harry turned over the question sheet:
Question 1: Explain how the Protean Charm was used by both Goblins and Dwarves in the 1891 assault on Gringotts' vault.
Question 2: How would you take a Puffskein, a Chimaera and a Fire Crab across a river in a small boat capable of carrying only yourself and one creature, using only Densaugeo, Ricktusempra and Waddiwasi. Each Charm may be used only once.
Question 3: Explain the differences between Quietus and Silencio. Give three examples of the use of each Charm to illustrate your answer.
Harry picked up his quill and turned his attention to the first question. He was sure the answer had something to do with gremlins or custard, but he couldn't remember the exact context. As he half-heartedly scoured his memory, he started to doodle a floppy-eared goblin, but the scribble somehow turned into a Snitch flying towards a goal hoop, which turned into a tunnel...
That Thursday had got off to a bad start. Harry had had his Snitch dream again, only this time he was also being hounded by a Bludger which kept shouting at him, "What do you really want?" in Luna Lovegood's voice. Then he had woken with a shock to find Pig, Ron's owl, trapped inside his bed-curtains, cannoning from side to side like a feathery squash ball in a red velvet squash court.
When he pulled one curtain aside to make a gap for Pig to escape, Harry could see Ron sitting on his own bed, a letter on the covers beside him. From the way the parchment flickered and changed colour and grunted occasional animal noises, Harry guessed it came from Ron's brothers, Fred and George.
"Since when has Pig been moon-lighting as an alarm clock?" Harry grumbled, his sense of humour still only half-awake.
Ron stared at him sullenly.
"When were you going to tell me?" he asked in a wounded voice, throbbing with accusation.
"Tell you?"
"Yeah, when were you going to mention the tiny, oh so insignificant, minor detail that that slimy, sleaze-bag, grease-ball git is your father? Hermione obviously knows. How come you told her and not me?"
The 'Extendable Ears' must have been working overtime in the Weasley household.
"Oh." Harry was mentally unprepared to mount a cogent defence so early in the morning.
"Did you think I wouldn't find out? Who else knows? Am I the only one that doesn't? Is that why you were getting so buddy with Malfoy all of a sudden. Next thing you'll be saying that Lucius is your long-lost uncle. What else haven't you been telling me? I thought we were friends, Harry."
"I'll tell you something Hermione doesn't know," Harry offered, hoping to placate Ron with a trade off. "Draco was right - I wasn't kidnapped."
Ron listened coldly, but this belated information didn't produce the desired effect. Ron was deeply offended that Harry had not seen fit to enlist his help in despatching Snape.
"How come you trusted that Slytherin shit-head and not me? I'd 've helped you. Grass up Snape? Just try and stop me! But, oh no, you'd rather trust that mingin' Malfoy... I don't get you, Harry."
How could Harry explain to Ron that it was because he, Ron, hated Snape so much that he had not been told? ...because Ron would have been too keen, too eager to help; he would have egged Harry on, treated the whole plan like the ultimate Zonko's joke, spurred Harry to rash action - whereas Harry's plot had needed to thicken in cold blood, to mature over time like a fine wine in a cool, dark cellar. ...because Ron might not, at the last minute, have had the nerve to go through with it... If Harry's crystal ball had an irony detector, it would at this point have been flashing like a Belisha Beacon.
How could he convince Ron that he had enlisted Draco purely for the sake of his Death Eater contacts?
How could he explain that he had needed Hermione's compassion to reinforce his alibi - she had done a good job too, persuading people that Snape had rushed to Harry's rescue, only to be taken prisoner himself. But there was more to it than that. She had concentrated on Snape's qualities, accentuated the advantages of having a parent - even a parent like Snape. In the days when it had felt as though acknowledging Snape as his father would be like welcoming the Apocalypse, Hermione's had been the voice of redemption. At those times when the choking undergrowth was set to strangle Harry, she had helped him to see beyond the horror to a stream of acceptance, a navigable escape route out of the jungle.
X X X
Ron had pointedly shunned him at breakfast, so Harry sat with Hermione, even though he had already heard her epic monologue about the Shampooing of Crookshanks. His dream and the voice of the Luna/Bludger were waltzing in his mind: 'What do you really want, Harry?'
"Hermione," he asked suddenly, spoiling her punch-line which, if he remembered correctly, was something about a flea-market and a circus. "Where do you think Dumbledore keeps the mirror now - you know, the Mirror of Erised? Didn't he say something about putting it in the Chamber of Secrets?"
She glared at him, miffed at the interruption.
"He told you to keep away from it, Harry. And you're not going down there again."
"I know, but..." It would be the easiest way to answer Luna's insistent question. An easy life was an appealing thought.
"He'll have moved it again by now," Hermione said sensibly. "It turns up all over the place, doesn't it, when you least expect it. A bit like Kubrick's Slab?"
"Who's what?"
"The slab of stone that keeps appearing across time and space for no apparent reason in Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'. No one knows if it symbolises the dawn of self-awareness, or creativity, or divine inspiration or Gnosis..."
Harry wished he had never asked.
"Do you know something, Hermione? You have been spending way too much time with Ron," said Harry, unable to stomach metaphysics before breakfast.
X X X
Session 3 ?
And now, thought Harry as he approached the Room of Requirement, which had a 'Quiet: Meeting in Progress' sign hanging from the door handle, for my daily dose of ritual humiliation. He wasn't feeling as cocky and subversive as he had yesterday - he suspected that Mr Lardon, if he played his psyche right, might just get to witness a real life manifestation of Harry's 'anger'.
He pushed open the door to find, not Lardon, but Snape. The Professor was standing silhouetted with the lamp behind him and, back-lit, he looked forbidding - taller, blacker and more menacing than ever. Harry felt his insides tear and twist as another several thousand courage cells committed Hari Kiri. He should know better by now, but he still felt nervous: he had a finely-honed instinct for self-preservation, and fear was still his first phobic response to an unexpected encounter with his father.
Harry need not have worried about how he was going to cope with spending time with Snape at school - the situation simply had not yet arisen. Hermione had not been exaggerating when she had said the teachers were busy: there were constant staff meetings, and Harry had also seen several parents being guided through the corridors by self-important prefects. That in itself was unusual at this stage of the term. Harry wondered, idly, if there might be some kind of mini-epidemic which the teachers were trying to hush up - he had noticed several empty seats at the tables in Hall at lunchtime. But surely it would be irresponsible not to inform all the students, or evacuate them or confine them to quarantine. No, there had to be another explanation. Whatever it was, he had not had a chance to see Snape alone - either Dumbledore was with him, or Hermione had been there, or Snape had been otherwise engaged, or else - and Harry strongly suspected this last possibility - Snape was avoiding a solo interview with his son.
Now Snape was holding a letter, tapping it impatiently against his left hand. When he addressed Harry, he curtailed the tapping and let the sharp, folded edge of the envelope slice down onto his palm like the dropping blade of a guillotine.
"Professor Dumbledore has received a communication from the Ministry..." He spoke with the studied, grey impartiality of a judge passing a life sentence. "...which is writing at the behest of the Chairman of the Muggle Association of Psychotherapists, which is acting on behalf of one of their members, a Mr Algenon Lardon, who will, they regret to inform us, be unable to fulfil his commitment to the WHIIMP programme, owing to absence resulting from occupational stress..."
Snape stopped and drilled the full, penetrating force of his dark eyes into the young defendant in the dock before him. Then he flashed Harry a rare, and very precious, smile.
"Good work, Harry! Nicely done!"
It was the best thing that had happened to Harry all day.
X X X
In all his six years at Hogwarts, Harry had never been in the Ravenclaw Common room. If he hadn't known differently, he might have mistaken it for a library. The room was a blue honeycomb of study alcoves, partitioned off from each other by chest-high wooden screens, each cell inhabited by a diligent drone, busy with homework. The air hummed with application. Hermione would have been in her element.
"I'm looking for Luna."
Without lifting his eyes from the pages of 'The Golden Proportion: Sacred Geometry and Nature's Blue-print', Michael Corner gestured behind him with his thumb and said,
"In the bin."
Harry initially wondered if this were some recondite Ravenclaw password, but then caught sight of a hand-written sign tacked onto a bead curtain which screened-off a far corner of the room: 'Loony Bin'. Evidently Ron was not the only one who used this nickname.
The shapeless red garment that Remus had handed to Harry had, for three days, lain forgotten and unclaimed under a pile of Harry's unused Quidditch robes. He had an inkling to whom it belonged, but it was only when he actually fished it out and checked the labels for a name tag that his suspicions were confirmed. There was no name as such, but the manufacturers' logo - a kind of deer embossed over the unmistakable yellow cross and blue ground of the Swedish flag - was a dead giveaway.
The bamboo curtain swayed and clicked and clattered as Harry pushed through it, narrowly avoiding the feathered noose of a dream-catcher suspended a little too low from the ceiling. Luna was sitting cross-legged on the floor rearranging a pile of small stones.
"Hello Harry. Glogg?"
Thinking she was addressing a house elf, or somebody behind him, Harry deftly side-stepped, knocking his head on some wind-chimes which set up a tinny jangling, too close to his ear for comfort. He realised that she was offering him an earthenware beaker.
"It's Glogg. It's a Swedish drink made of red wine and brandy and flavoured with orange peel, almonds and raisins. I'm afraid I haven't got any wine or brandy, but it still tastes nice, don't you think?"
Harry made a polite "Mmm." The 'bin' was a triangular oasis of spiritual mysticism in the desert of Ravenclaw rationality. The two walls, meeting at the apex, were shelved from floor to ceiling. On the bowing shelves, candles, crystals and shells stood side by side with glass pebbles, pine cones and a selection of incense sticks. One shelf groaned with receptacles: a scrying bowl, goblets, a tiny cauldron, glass jars, miniature coloured tubes, bowls and plates. On another queued rows of bottles containing herbs, oils, dried berries, seeds, salts and powders. A tattered corn dolly jostled for space with a forked hazel dowsing rod, a star-shaped mirror, a 'Tom-tom' drum, and a set of rusty horseshoes, with acorns and stones in various shades of purple and blue wedged in the crannies in between. There was a crystal ball, two censers, charcoal discs, a silver amulet, a small spinning wheel, a compass and a stack of sheets of white paper. There was no wall space, but taped on the ceiling was a star chart, a diagram depicting the phases of the moon and several pictures of owls. The air wheezed with the scents of sandalwood and patchouli.
"Look here. Is this yours?" Harry asked, thrusting the tunic forwards, anxious to establish that he had a reason for his visit, that it was not a social call. It would be difficult enough to live it down as it was. The viral news that Potter had been chatting up Lovegood would soon be spreading like a plague, its gossipy blue buboes popping up in infected conversations all round the school.
"I was wondering when that would turn up," she answered vaguely, not questioning where it had been or how it came to be in Harry's possession. "I got it in Sweden in the summer. It's the traditional costume of the peasants of Dalarna - that's up in the north, you know."
She stood up and held the scarlet sack against her.
"Picturesque, isn't it?"
Harry agreed that that was one word for it.
"We had three days in Stockholm, then we went up to Lapland. We actually flew in a Muggle aeroplane - that is such a strange experience. Have you ever? No? You feel completely vulnerable; everything is out of your control. Not like on a broomstick."
More like a Thestral, thought Harry with a wry smile.
"Reindeers pee on the snow and then eat it. Did you know that?" Luna asked, startling Harry with the abruptness of the question and its subject matter. "They grub up some plant or fungus that gets them stoned when they eat it - and it's like, hello! I'm a reindeer! I can fly...! - and whatever drug it is passes straight through, so if they eat their pee they can start tripping all over again. You wouldn't think they were brainy enough to work that out. That's where the story about Santa's flying reindeer all started."
"Can they talk as well then?" asked Harry, getting drawn in, in spite if himself. "I mean, how do people know that the reindeer think they're flying? They don't actually do it, after all."
"Who knows. Maybe they do," she said mysteriously, open to the possibility of flying or talking reindeer, or both. "My Dad's researching an article for the bumper Christmas Special issue of The Quibbler - all about how the Santa Claus myth evolved out of pagan traditions. For instance, did you know that in winter the only way to get into a Siberian yurt is through the chimney?"
Harry had never seriously considered the problem.
"And of course, all the herder tribes use reindeer sleighs for transport..."
There was a pause while she topped up their Glogg. Harry was beginning to wish that the tunic had belonged to Ginny or Padma or even Milicent Bulstrode - anybody sane.
"Hey! I bought a great knife - do you want to see it? Hand-made by the Lapps. And I got that wooden drum - the one on the shelf over there. I had a hand-carved spoon too, but I've lost it. It'll turn up sooner or later."
She rummaged in a cardboard box, pulling out a pack of cards, a clay chalice, several pieces of rope, a large, round, wooden platter and, eventually, an attractive, bone-handled knife, its pommel intricately carved.
"The signs represent the original Norse gods," she explained, turning the blade over reverentially. "That one's Odin, and the others are Thor and Frey. It'll make a great athame, don't you think?"
"A what?"
"For channelling energy. I used to have a really nice black-handled dagger, but that disappeared too."
Harry eyed her dubiously. Were all girls walking encyclopaedias of useless information? At least Hermione's knowledge was occasionally relevant, whereas Luna's selection of oddball trivia was just, to use one of Uncle Vernon's phrases, 'downright doo-lally'.
"Luna, I came to ask you something." Harry tried again.
"About Lapland?" She had folded herself down onto the floor once more and was packing away her stones into a small, soft, brown leather pouch. She held it out to him,
"Take three. Any three," she instructed, as though offering a bag of Giggling Gobstoppers, "but think about the question as you choose them."
Confused and exasperated, Harry exclaimed:
"Luna! I can't think about anything else! It's driving me crazy. I want to know what you meant - what you mean. I keep thinking about the stupid question, but I don't know the answer. I don't know what I really want."
"Yes you do," she said in a quiet, no-nonsense way. "Now, put the rune stones down on this hankie - here, and here and here..." She leaned forward, her long hair falling as a lank, blond veil across her face. One by one she picked up the shiny, black stones, examining the angular, scratched markings, chanting to herself, "Hagalaz, Raido, Dagaz...", inviting the names to yield up their symbolic, ancient secrets.
To Harry it was all meaningless mumbo-jumbo - for all he knew or cared the words could have been early Norse, Swedish or demotic reindeer.
"Well?" he asked.
"The fields of meaning are fluid and individual," she said, obscurely. "It's good. These are good, propitious. It's a good time to do it."
"TO DO WHAT?" Harry was so infuriated he felt like strangling her. Perhaps someone already has - that's why her eyes stick out, he thought.
"You tell me..." she said serenely.
It was ridiculous. Harry wanted so many things. He wanted to be allowed to play Quidditch. He wanted to get Os in all his NEWTs or, failing that, at least to scrape an Acceptable in his Charms test. He wanted Ron to stop being such a miserable gimp. He wanted Snape to stop being such an uptight bastard. He wanted to be able to 'connect' with someone. He wanted to ... No, that was impossible.
Luna was watching him with an expression of mild interest.
"Go on, say it," she encouraged him, waving her hands as though to waft a confession from him. "Verbalising the thought actualises its potentiality."
Harry agonised.
"I want to talk to Sirius," Harry said at last, "but he's dead."
"The Stubby Boardman guy?" Luna was unphased by minor technicalities such as life or death. "So, Harry, the next question is, do you go to meet him, or do you get him to come to you?"
END OF CHAPTER. Next chapter: MILKING THE RUNESPOOR. Hermione expresses her doubts about Luna... And we get a flashback... to the end of that week at Snape Cottage... (Well, in 'Snape's Confession' I only managed to describe the first few days before the anxst got to me...)
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