Title: The Silent Spectre
Summary: A little too close for comfort. The next night Harry finds the gifts that the Hogwarts Professors left him.
Disclaimer: Do I have to keep doing this? It's getting frightfully dull. I don't freaking own Harry Potter, got it? Gods, how many times must I repeat myself? My name is Jay…not Joanne.
Cautious from his near miss the night before, Harry felt a little jittery at returning to the library. He felt downright dread at finding his way towards the Potions Master's…Dominick was his name? Office and stealing the supplies he needed. However, it needed to be done…and the only way he could get healed and home was to end this curse…whatever it was. So up he went. His Slytherin haven was in the deepest bowels of the castle, and he needed to go up two endless flights of stairs to reach the Potion Master's office.
Perhaps he should go to the student cupboard first, to get the armadillo bile he would need, as well as the ground puffer fish scales. That was easy enough to do; the supply cupboard was in the Potions Classroom, which was never locked.
Grimacing, Harry wrapped his bloody hands around the cupboard handle and eased it open slowly, waiting for it to squeak. When it didn't he breathed a sigh of relief and opened it all the way.
What he saw gave him a horrible shock. There, in the middle of the shelf, were several shining bottles and packages. Under the foremost bottle was a piece of parchment that unfolded when he opened the cupboard door, and written in a bold, elegant script was the words:
Hope this is a sufficient amount of each ingredient. If you need more you can either come to me or write me a note. If you need a better book than the student one, there is one on my desk. Good luck, Professor J. Dominick.
It could be for anyone, Harry tried to consol himself. It was not necessarily for him. But he knew he was avoiding it…he didn't know how, but he knew that letter was written for him to read…and those ingredients were there for him to take.
But why? He wondered, backing away a step. Why are they giving me ingredients when they're in the middle of a war and don't know who I am? Are they tricking me?
He couldn't answer himself…he didn't know the answers. But asking himself if it was worth it was answerable…no, he couldn't risk getting caught and questioned. It would cause the ultimate time paradox. In the end, Harry left without touching the ingredients.
He encountered a similar problem in the Infirmary…floating in front of him when he eased the door open was a group of tightly clustered bottles of potion, and a mass of fresh white bandages. He returned to the Slytherin passages without any work done that night, worried and tense.
"He didn't take the potion ingredients, Headmaster." Dominick said the next morning. "I know he was there, because there were blood marks on the handle…but nothing inside was touched. Madam Pomfrey discovered the same…the handle of the door was bloody, but nothing was touched."
"Hmmm." Dumbledore said slowly, tugging thoughtfully at his beard. For several long moments he simply stared quietly into space, until Dominick got impatient.
"Headmaster?" The tall man asked. "What shall we do?"
"The boy can't get his nutrients from potions for any longer than two days. He must eat sometimes." The old man said slowly.
"The House Elves, Albus?" Dominick asked.
"No, I don't think so…he would scare them out of their wits."
"Then how?"
"By the secret passages he seems to know so well."
"What do you mean?" Dominick was curious.
"The House Elves store food in a magically cooled storeroom under the kitchens, and as almost every room in Hogwarts has its own secret passage, I think that's where he will show up."
Dumbledore was right again. The next night Harry could avoid it no longer, and scampered to the Great Hall and into the Anti-chamber, where laid down on his stomach and wiggled like an eel through a hole at the base of the wall…invisible unless you knew it was there. House Elves had to crawl through it…when they knew it was there at all. For Harry, twice as tall as a House Elf and twice as wide, the going was cramped and claustrophobic, but he thought it worth it when he arrived in the cold storeroom and found it empty of elves.
Everything was frozen, but fortunately the stairs led upwards to the back room that the House Elves only entered when cooking, which would be over for the day. There would be food outside thawing for breakfast, and he hurried silently up the stairs and into the back room, scanning it with his eyes.
And there, on the counter, was a package of sliced roast beef and a cold loaf of bread. Dressings he found in a lightly cooled box above the extremely low counter, and if he blew on the beef for a while, he had the makings of a cold roast beef sandwich, which he promptly devoured hungrily, and then made two more, carefully covering his bloody hands with napkins to keep the sandwiches clean. He wrapped one up in a magically cool cloth, and he ate the other there. Then it was down to the storeroom and back up through the narrow chute, and into the anti-chamber off the Great Hall.
He couldn't bear to return to the Slytherin passages again…they made him almost physically ill from the dust and decay. So he crawled under one of the tables and simply sat, basking in the magic around him and the fact that he was comfortably full for the first time in five days.
Unfortunately, he dozed off. And doubly unfortunate was that he forgot to take any blood-pellets.
He woke dizzily to a kick in the ribs.
"Get out of my space, Avery." The voice said irritably, and Harry could just make out the wavering sounds. He couldn't seem to move, his limbs felt horrifically heavy as well as his eyelids.
"I'm not in your space, Nott." Another voice said, waspish.
"Yes you are, I'm kicking you!" Nott said, proving himself by kicking Harry's side again. He rustled irritably but still couldn't get his bearings or open his eyes. Even the pain of the kick seemed muted…on another plane of reality.
"You are not kicking me, Nott." Avery said. "You're kicking yourself and are too stupid to feel it." Nott swore under his breath and sneered at the other boy, before hunkering down and peering underneath the table. There was a horrific scream that nearly burst Harry's eardrums, and Nott shot away from the table.
"It's a body!" He shrieked at the top of his lungs. "There's a dead boy underneath the Slytherin table!"
There was an instant stampede to get away from the table, lots of shouting and screaming and several loud bangs.
Finally, Harry dimly heard someone rushing over to the table from the other side, kneeling beside him and cursing colorfully. Large, warm hands grasped him and pulled him out from under the table, supporting his lolling head.
"He needs a blood replenishing potion!" The person above him shouted, lowering him to the ground and supporting his head with their hands. "Quick, he's dying!"
There was a shuffle, a bang, and a rustle beside him as someone else knelt down.
"Here," They said, their voice much deeper than the first. There were noises in the back round…noises Harry didn't like. Someone was holding a bottle to his lips, and he recognized the sludge of the blood-replenishing potion and struggled to gulp it down. The person giving it to him stroked his throat gently, helping him swallow. He instantly felt better, and was able to open his eyes, but he still couldn't stand up or move much. Above him, darkened in the light of the candles, was that same face that he'd seen on his first day in the past…dark hair and flashing black eyes from a pale face.
"He needs another one!" Snape…for that was who it was, ordered urgently. "He's slipping…better get two." And he was right; Harry felt his eyes slipping closed again. But he couldn't fall asleep now, what was he thinking? He'd already disrupted the timeline, he bet, and he couldn't do it any more. Gulping deep breaths, he propped his elbows underneath him and struggled into a sitting position, fighting the hands that tried to keep him still. "No, wait." Snape said urgently. "You need another potion, you'll die if you don't get it." Harry shook his head weakly, mouthing the word 'no'. He plucked at the chain on his neck, and Snape took the hint, drawing out the tiny glass vial. Harry held up three fingers, momentarily awed by the colorhis handwas…a stained crimson.
Snape shook three pellets out and Harry held out his hand.
"Do you eat them?" He asked, and Harry nodded. Snape lifted his hand and pushed Harry's head back, dropping the pellets that dissolved instantly on his tongue. He instantly staggered to his feet, wells of energy running through him and making him dizzy. "Wait!" Snape gasped, and there was running feet. The teachers were drawing close around him, preventing him from leaving, blocking his way out. He shook his head again, pushing at the wall of bodies around him, fighting the arms that came around him from behind. He struggled hard, and the arms let go. Hands…Professors' hands, grasped at his bloody clothes, but the drying blood made a kind of slime on him that made it impossible for them to hold, and he slipped by them and into the mass of students, who screamed and backed away.
He could see his goal, the door to the dungeons only twenty feet in front of him. He glanced over his shoulder.
"Wait, child." Dumbledore said, stepping closer to him. Harry backed away. "We can help you, you're injured and need assistance…" Harry whirled and didn't give him time to continue, dashing for the door and launching himself through it and down the stairs. He sprinted madly until he reached his safe haven…that horrible, dark, dank place that was the only area that he couldn't be followed.
A/N: This chapter didn't satisfy me as much as The Library. I mean, I'm fairly happy with it, but even though there was a bit more action in this one, it didn't make me shiver as I wrote it, and that makes it not as good in my opinion. Tell me what you think. By the way, I revised The Library, as I had Harry speaking when he should have been mute. Thanks to Phoenix 5 for pointing that out.
