- CHAPTER THIRTEEN -
The Window of Opportunity

"Children, children!" It was almost lunchtime when Dumbledore called for their attention again, and the smell of turkey dinners hung tantalisingly in the air. "Everybody, please gather around."

Harry realised that a strange, tall mirror like a sheet of flat glass had been set up in the middle of the Hall. At least, it looked like a mirror, but it didn't reflect - he could see right through it to the grinning teachers on the other side. Clearly they knew something about it that he didn't.

"I know that, as wonderful as this day has been, you are all missing your families and wishing you could be with them."

Not me, thought Harry.

"Alas, it pains me to say that this cannot be... but, nonetheless, no Christmas is truly Christmas without the gathering of family and distant friends. And that is why Professors Flitwick and McGonagall, and indeed I myself, have been labouring this past month to create for you, for one day only, a Window of Opportunity."

There was a gasp of delighted realisation from Hermione, though most of the Hall remained befuddled.

Dumbledore smiled, and gestured to a particularly confused looking Ravenclaw. "Mr. Ackerley - if you'd like to step forward, and look into the Window?"

Ackerley looked around at his friends for moral support, then cautious made his way through the thick snow towards the Window. When he was a few feet away, the image abruptly flickered and changed - to show a wizarding couple sitting on a brightly coloured sofa, both wearing party hats and looking rather anxious. They immediately lit up, and started waving. "Stewart! Stewart! Oh, sweetheart, we've been dying to see you..." they greeted their son delightedly.

"Wicked," said Ron, awed. Hermione was staring up at the gently chuckling Dumbledore.

"The number of connections they must have made," she gasped. "I've heard of these, but I've never heard of anybody using one to link to more than a dozen locations at the same time."

"He's Dumbledore," smirked Ron. "What d'you expect?"

Harry, with no desire to contact the Dursleys even if it was possible, was content to sit back and watch all his friends in their happiness, although he was dragged forward by Ron and Ginny when the Weasleys got their turn, and again to wave briefly at Hermione's mum and dad. He found that he didn't even feel any ache for what he was missing. It was enough just to see all his friends look so pleased, and to be able to sit back and be ignored by everyone for once.

As one of the few outside of the scrum to get a look into the Window, Harry was the first to spot a team of owls working together to carry in an enormous wrapped package. He smiled, wondering what else Dumbledore had planned for today.

And then he saw Snape stiffen, and reach for his wand...

Harry leapt to his feet as the package hit the fake snow and exploded. For a moment he thought that it literally had and the darkness spreading out from it was smoke - and then he realised that the black wave was in fact a huge mass of shiny-shelled insects, each almost the size of his fist.

There were screams of panic as people began to notice the invasion. The insects had wings, and wasted no time in latching on to people and rip and tear at their skin.

Harry raised his wand and sent up a spray of sparks, a signal that they'd practised with the DA. "Everybody! Come to me!" While the rest of the students were milling around helplessly or still trying to see what the commotion was, the DA gathered around Harry, wands at the ready.

"Use Exsolvere!" Hermione called to everybody. "Get them away from people before you cast any hexes on them!"

Hermione's choice of charm worked remarkably well at getting the biting bugs to loosen their hold on their victims, but figuring out what to do with them afterwards was more of a struggle. If you just charmed them away, they flew right back, or turned around and found another victim. A Scatter Hex would disperse a group of them, but that only created worse problems, as students, house elves and enchanted mini-reindeer ran through the fake snow in a collective panic.

"How can we kill them?" Ron demanded urgently.

"Just try everything you can think of until you find something that works!" Harry suggested, hitting one of the bugs with a Stupefying Charm. It fell out of the air, but seemed to be stunned for only a matter of seconds before it was flying again.

"Accendio!" Somebody - Ginny, he thought - crisped several of the bugs with a fire spell, but the flames spluttered out harmlessly as they hit the snow. Hermione and Ron were working as a team, Hermione yanking the bugs off people as Ron kept throwing different hexes in the hope that one would be more effective than the ones he'd tried so far. Dean appeared to have taken a more prosaic route and was stomping on the bugs whenever one landed near him, wearing a look of utter distaste.

Harry crushed a group of the bugs with an Incudis charm, but he couldn't cast that one where there were people. He struggled to remember more suitable hexes.

"Ow!" He yelped as one of bugs took a vicious bite out of his calf. He instinctively knocked it away with a hand before he remembered to use Hermione's releasing charm, tearing at his own flesh. "Frangere!" He grimaced as the bug exploded.

"Inclamare!" Ron yelled from beside him.

His spell deflected off the shell of the target bug and hit one of the Christmas tree baubles, which immediately began yelling insults about his performance.

"Bugger!" he added.

"Silencio!" Hermione gave him a look, and then pointed her wand at a bug. "Inflamare!" It burst into flames.

"Yeah. Er, that one," Ron said rather sheepishly.

Harry looked around and saw that, amazingly, they seemed to be making an impact on the swarming bugs. The success rate of spells was still erratic, but the bugs were small enough that even a weakened hex could knock them around if it was aimed well enough. The staff were at the other end of the Hall, dispatching still more of the creatures, but his own little group seemed to be just as successful in their efforts to repulse them.

What they needed was a really effective charm... Wait a minute. He called to mind the accidental combination of syllables that he'd used to create his over-powered Sweeping Charm. "Verrio Mundia!" This time, with a little more control than before, he swept up bugs and snow alike, but left the people standing. If he could only get all the bugs into one area... "Hermione, Ron! Verrio Mundia!"

They saw what he was doing and added their own spells to the effort. More members of the DA gathered round, using the Sweeping Charms they'd learned or trying to copy his more effective one.

"Point me!" That was Hermione, and for a moment he was baffled, wondering what use the Four-Point Spell could be right now. He saw her take note of the direction of north, then spin towards him, wand raised. "Potens Favonius!" All of a sudden there seemed to be a blizzard in the Hall as a powerful wind scooped up the invasion force of bugs and threw them towards the far wall.

"Nice one, Hermione!" Ron beamed.

With all the bugs quickly confined, it didn't take long to blast, toast or crush them all into submission. Harry sighed, and wiped sweat from his brow.

He became aware that quite a fair proportion of the student body was looking to him for their next orders. "Er... well, I think that's all of them. Um, nice work everybody."

"Indeed." Harry jumped as he realised McGonagall had come up behind him. She was looking at him slightly oddly, as if unsure whether to commend him or be appalled that half the school had turned to him instead of the teachers for their orders. He cringed slightly in embarrassment, and allowed her to take charge.

"Right." McGonagall's voice rang out over the Hall. "Everybody, please organize yourselves. If you are uninjured, return in an orderly manner to the house common rooms. Prefects, stay behind and help sort out the minor injuries from the more serious cases. Madam Pomfrey and Professor Snape will be on hand to tend the wounded - please be patient, and appreciate that there may be others more in need of immediate attention."

The Hall gradually began to empty out, Christmas cheer quite effectively dampened. Harry rubbed his bitten leg.

"Potter." He looked up into Snape's unimpressed sneer. The Potions master was holding a jar of salve as if the idea of applying it was vaguely offensive. "You're injured?"

"It's not serious," he said, and would have insisted so if his leg was only held on by a single flap of skin. "Save it for somebody worse off than me."

"An excellent idea." Snape stalked off without a word of acknowledgement for this mature self-sacrifice or the fact that he'd led the effort to fight off the bug invasion. Harry scowled at him, and headed back to Gryffindor Tower.

Eventually they were allowed to return to the Great Hall, and everything looked just as it had in the morning, but the Christmas spirit had well and truly fled. Everybody sat around rather grimly through the evening meal, and nobody was quite so excited about their presents any more. Harry went to bed early.

With the distractions of the day no longer present, he soon lived to regret rejecting Snape's help with the bite on his leg. The wound was only small but it stung like crazy, and itched in a way that was impossible to ignore. There was no way he was going to get to sleep like this.

Although not everyone had yet gone to bed, he tugged on his Invisibility Cloak anyway, preferring to move through the halls incognito. Neville and Ginny were playing a subdued game of Exploding Snap in the common room as he passed; he timed his exit to match an explosion to avoid alerting them.

Harry limped through the corridors, not really heading anywhere, and found himself at the base of the Owlery tower almost by accident. Despite his throbbing leg, he nearly started to ascend, but then told himself not to be so stupid. Gryffindor's study was all he could have asked for in a safe, solitary retreat - was he really going to stay away from it just because of a chance reminder of things he wasn't comfortable thinking about?

The fire was there to greet him when he opened the secret door, toasty warm after the frigid air of the passageway. Harry slipped out of the Invisibility Cloak, and sat down in the big chair. Doing so made him feel suddenly close to the long-ago Godric Gryffindor, and he closed his eyes and just sat for a while.

"I know they weren't perfect," he said softly, into the welcoming silence. "But you chose them for your house. They weren't perfect... but they were good. At heart, they were all good men." He swallowed hard against an unwelcome thought, but knew it was right to include it. "Maybe... maybe even Peter, for a while." It was easier to think it if you let Peter the boyhood friend and Wormtail the traitor be different people inside your head.

Nothing changed, but somehow he could believe there was something approving in the tenor of the silence. Harry opened the bottom drawer, and took out the box that had so disturbed him before.

'Confiscated from the Slytherins'. Which Slytherins? Maybe spitting, howling, hateful creatures like Malfoy. Or maybe just ordinary kids, victims of a group of Gryffindors too hung up on their personal image of the house to realise that they were the real bullies.

I know they weren't perfect. That doesn't mean I can't still love them anyway.

He popped open the box.

In the end, it turned out to be rather anticlimactic. Harry wasn't sure whether he felt like laughing or crying over the simple assortment of childhood clutter he'd been worrying over for weeks. More old Chocolate Frog cards. A chipped, solitary Gobstone. A bent quill that might or might not be enchanted. Several little gadgets that had doubtless been purchased in Zonko's.

And there, down in the bottom of the box...

He lifted out the little silver snake in wonder. It was clearly shivering, and for a moment he thought nonsensically that it might be a real live one. It felt like metal in his hand, however, and coiled far too neatly in his palm for even the tidiest of living creatures.

"You really don't belong here, do you?" he murmured softly. It was such an unmistakably Slytherin thing. It was probably ridiculous to believe it could have any feelings, but still Harry was convinced that being stashed away for years in a place so patently dedicated to Godric Gryffindor was surely miserable to it.

It didn't sound like he was speaking Parseltongue to him, though of course he never had been able to tell. The snake seemed to be conscious of the fact that he was speaking to it, raising its little silver head in response, but he couldn't tell if it understood.

"What are you?" he wondered aloud. "Can you show me what you do?"

In response, the snake suddenly wriggled across his palm, up towards his fingers. It wrapped itself tightly around the base of one finger - and abruptly transformed into a plain, featureless silver ring.

Harry laughed aloud in delight. He tugged experimentally at the silver band, but it wouldn't move past his knuckle. "Will you come off if I ask you to?" he queried, and the ring transformed back into a snake and lifted its head, apparently in assent.

He took the snake with him, in ring form, when he left the study. He wouldn't have felt right about leaving it there, and besides, it felt almost like the study had given him a gift in response to his earlier words. After all, the Sorting Hat had remained convinced that he could have been just as much a Slytherin as a Gryffindor. And though he knew full well he would have been horribly miserable in that house, perhaps it was time he acknowledged that it would have been down to the company he'd have been keeping, not the qualities of the house itself.

That was what he needed to remember - the line that made all the difference between refusing to tolerate Malfoy and his ilk, and an irrational prejudice that was just as bad as their own. Slytherin was a house full of rotten apples... but not a rotten house.

"I'll keep you with me," he whispered to the little snake when he was back up in the dorm, with everybody else long since asleep. "You can be a reminder."

His father had been a good man, and whatever his mistakes, he'd apparently eventually learned from them.

Maybe it was time Harry learned from them too.

Ron could not have been relied upon to notice if Harry had suddenly started sporting a purple Mohican, but Hermione spotted the ring almost as soon as they met the next day.

"Where did you get that from, Harry?"

"Get what?" Ron wondered, around a mouthful of Fizzing Whizzbee that was still trying to fly away.

"That ring." Harry held up his hand somewhat guiltily.

"I- it was a Christmas present." Not so much a lie as a drastic shortening of a story that would really be too complicated - and a little too personal - to tell.

Hermione frowned and looked ready to press for more details, but Ron jumped in before her. "Not another one of Mad-Eye Moody's protective charms? Harry, if you don't stop him soon, he's going to be sending you enchanted underpants!"

Harry was rather too distracted by that thought to deny this plausible suggestion and think up a different story. "I don't even want to know what they would do," he mused.

"You should see what Fred and George have been inventing - did I show you their last letter? They've been marketing Portpants - they're like a short-distance Portkey that triggers as soon as you put them on, so you get transported out in front of your house in your underwear."

"Well, really." Hermione looked so overtly scandalised that Harry suspected she was trying very hard not to let a faint flicker of amusement show.

"They sent me a box of their new Honey Bees for Christmas," Ron continued. "They're really cool, they fly around and if they sting you they vanish and reappear right in your mouth."

"That's dangerous, Ron, somebody could choke to death," she pointed out. "And what if they have an allergy or a medical reason not to eat honey? One of these days your brothers are going to seriously hurt someone. And they're not schoolboys now. They'll get taken to court!"

An argument swiftly developed, during which Hermione accused the twins - and by extension Ron - of having no sense of consequences, and Ron accused Hermione of having no sense of humour. Harry attempted to stay well out of it. At least it had the useful effect of putting off any more awkward questions about the ring.

The ring was not uncomfortable to wear, and he got into the habit of keeping it on, mostly because he didn't want anybody to see and remark over its transformation back into a snake. He'd quite forgotten he was wearing it by the time the start of the spring term rolled around, and Snape's sharp eyes spotted it in a Potions lesson.

"Potter. Pray tell us all why you seem to think yourself above the school rules on jewellery in lessons?"

Harry glanced across to the Slytherin side of the room, where Pansy Parkinson was quite obviously wearing earrings, and Blaise Zabini a signet ring considerably more ostentatious than his own simple silver band.

"It's enchanted, sir, I can't take it off."

Snape's eyes glittered cruelly. "Indeed? Enchanted to what purpose, Mr. Potter?"

Harry opened his mouth... and closed it again. With a sudden sick lurch in his stomach it occurred to him that a ring his father had taken off a Slytherin years ago could be enchanted to do just about anything. What if there was the ability to cast some dangerous curse secretly embedded in the thing?

Fortunately, Snape would have had no inclination to take his word for it anyway. He drew his wand, and pointed it at the ring. "Patefacere Actio!"

A cloud of whitish smoke surrounded the ring, but vanished into nothingness. "Your magic jewellery seems to be defective, Mr. Potter." Titters from the Slytherin gallery.

Hermione leaned over towards Harry's table as Snape stalked away. "Actually, that spell only reveals active hexes," she murmured, "so all it proves is that the ring can't be used to cast spells directly, but there could still be a protective charm embedded if it's a-"

"Five points from Gryffindor, Miss Granger, for attempting to lecture your woefully inadequate housemates on material they should have picked up in other classes." Snape turned back and smiled nastily. "And ten from Mr. Potter, for ignoring the rules about placing Non-Removable Charms on inappropriate items of jewellery."

Harry wouldn't have known how to cast one if he tried, and wasn't sure the rule against it even existed, but he wasn't stupid enough to speak up about it.

"Now, since you have clearly developed a desire to look pretty in class-" nasty snickers from the Slytherin side of the room, and a few smothered giggles elsewhere - "perhaps you would be kind enough to test Mr. Nott's Hair-Growth Solution? I have no doubt Miss Granger will be happy to show you how to braid it after class... assuming she has any experience with keeping hair under control."

Harry glowered to himself, and eyed Nott's potion warily. It was pale green - Hermione's was milky purple, and every other attempt in the class, including his own, was at least approaching that shade. No doubt Snape had deliberately scanned the classroom for the mixture that looked most likely to do him damage. He supposed he should be grateful Neville wasn't taking the class any more.

Amazingly, Nott's potion did actually work - after a fashion. His hair did grow. Everywhere. He ended up with a mass of dark tangles down to his waist, a beard that rivalled Dumbledore's, and a rather alarming all-over coating of inch thick dark fuzz.

"I hope you can fix this," he mumbled to Hermione as Snape sent him back to his seat with no more comment than a raised eyebrow.

"If all else fails, I can teach you a good charm for shaving your legs," she muttered back. Harry found that thought somewhat less than reassuring.

"Hey, Potter," Malfoy smirked at him as they left class. "Love that half-giant oaf of a groundskeeper so much you want to emulate his fashion sense? Probably an idea, it's a step up from yours."

"Oh, and you'd know all about what the well-dressed Death Eater is wearing this season, wouldn't you? Tell me, did you get a tattoo to match your dad's yet? What is the current fashion in Azkaban these days?"

Malfoy's eyes narrowed dangerously. "Watch your back, Potter," he said warningly. "My father won't be in prison for long." He stalked off.

Harry watched him go, and wondered whether that was just empty Malfoy posturing, or Draco knew something the rest of them didn't.