This is just a short little chapterlet to tie up some threads that aren't going to get resolved in the next little while (as other things have to happen). Rather than have them take place completely offstage, I decided to put them here. There will still be a regular chapter posted today, and hopefully this isn't a course I'll have to take often, but I felt these scenes would feel awkward pasted into any of the main pieces of the story for quite a long time, as the chapters immediately ahead have unifying incidents and themes.

Intermission: Two Conversations and a Reflection

"Well, I did it."

Draco raised his head and glared over his shoulder at Blaise as he strolled into the fourth-year boys' room. Blaise paused and chuckled at the sight of him, then took a seat on his own bed and watched Draco with a small smile.

On the silence went, and on, and on, until Draco ground his teeth and snapped, "What did you do?" He'd wanted to be left alone here in silence to brood over Harry, but as long as Blaise was going to intrude, he might as well have something interesting to say.

"I asked my crush to the Yule Ball." Blaise examined one hand, as though trying to determine why he would ever had had any doubts on that score. It drove Draco mad. "And she said yes." He looked up and winked at Draco. "So at least one of us is going with the date he wanted to go with."

Draco threw his pillow at his head. Blaise went down beneath it, laughing, and sat up a moment later to throw it back. Draco hadn't been prepared. He grunted as it caught him in the face.

"Honestly," Blaise said, when Draco had clawed the cloth away from his face and could see again. Draco could feel his emotions, since Harry wasn't in the room to provide a buffer or a shield, and they were all cool, focused around cold glee and something that might almost have been pity. "You're making yourself agitated with not talking to him. And it's affecting other people now, too—including him, and I think we'd all agree that an angry Harry is something we'd prefer to avoid. I wish you'd do us all a favor and just ask him to the stupid Ball."

"He already has a date," said Draco. The words stung his mouth as though he were spitting bees. "He didn't want to go with me."

Blaise growled, and his emotions turned hot. "You didn't ask him, you prat! He can't very well read your mind and know that you want to go with him if you don't ask, can he?"

"The rest of you do well enough." Draco rolled back over and shut his eyes. He didn't want to hear, yet again, the note of pleasure in Harry's voice as he accepted Loony's invitation. It was plain enough that Harry really wanted to go with the crazy girl. He didn't seem to care that she was only a friend he sometimes talked with, rather than the person who'd been beside him since the day he was Sorted into Slytherin. "I don't know why he can't see it."

"Maybe because he's messed in the head?" Blaise asked. "Quite literally."

Draco sat up again. The note of scorn in Blaise's voice would have prompted that even if he'd said something nicer. "Shut up," he whispered, and the note in his own voice made Blaise pale, a bit. "You know nothing about what he went through."

"Not the specifics." Blaise lifted his chin. "But we can see the mark it left on his behavior, Draco, and yes, he is messed in the head. Not in the way his date is, I'll grant you that, but in a different way. And you claim to know more about that than any of us do. And yet you're still sitting here, waiting for Harry to act like a normal person. I think you're going to have a long wait." He abruptly shook his head and snorted. "And what the hell am I doing giving you romantic advice? It's not like you were a great fount of it with my date." He stood and made for the door of the room.

"I told you to stop drawing lions on your homework!" Draco yelled at his back, because he couldn't let that pass without some kind of insult. "She is a Gryffindor, isn't she?"

"None of your damn business until you see her on my arm at the Yule Ball," Blaise said over his shoulder. "Where, and I remind you of this, Harry will be dancing with Loony."

He shut the door before Draco managed to hit him yet again with the thrown pillow.

"It's no use," said Ron, and fell into one of the desks, panting. Harry saw it tilt dangerously and quickly performed a charm that would keep it upright. There was a reason that these classrooms had been abandoned, and filled with this kind of furniture. Ron, mopping sweat from his forehead with one hand, and then shifting his grip on his wand as that, too, became slimy, didn't notice. He blinked forlornly at Harry. "I'm never going to get it right."

"Sure you are." Harry kept his voice pitched low and soothing. He wouldn't get irritated with Ron. He'd spent the last few days in a haze of irritation, what with Draco being an impossible git prone to insulting everyone in sight and the pressure of Snape's approaching trial date. If he concentrated, it was actually easy to pour out his irritation into something like this—an action where he thought he could make a substantial advance. He liked doing things, accomplishing things, and today he was going to break the block on Ron's magic. "That's why I picked this spell to practice. I know that you can perform it more easily than most wizards can. Your family's been Light for at least a few generations. You can manage this."

Ron shook his head. "You don't understand," he said, with a leaden disquiet in his voice that Harry knew came from years of failure. "I've tried for a long time, and I can't break this block. I can't do it now."

Harry narrowed his eyes. He'd been trying to coax Ron up to a certain level of power before he tried what he thought would actually shatter the block, but perhaps he should try the shattering process first. "Right," he drawled. "I suppose I should have known better." He turned as if he would walk out of the classroom. Though it was the usual place where he held his lessons for the other students, it was empty now except for him and Ron.

Footsteps pounded on the floor, and then Ron's hand grabbed his shoulder. "What do you mean?" he demanded.

Harry glanced over his shoulder at him. Ron's freckles were standing out sharply on his pale face. Harry snorted. "Just that I should have known that you weren't really a Gryffindor," he said distantly. "A Gryffindor would keep right on going. Gryffindors don't give up. I thought you sat under the Sorting Hat for a long time. You should have been Hufflepuff, right?"

"I should not have!" Ron yelped, and his face flushed. "I'm a Gryffindor through and through! My family's always been! You take that back!"

"Why should I?" Harry wrenched his shoulder free with a motion that, though easy enough in itself, looked as if it took a lot more effort than it did. He stepped back and snorted at Ron. "You're not proving it. You might have argued the Sorting Hat into putting you in Godric's House, but when it comes to the test, you back off!"

"I do not!"

Harry gazed straight into Ron's eyes as he watched him get angrier and angrier. He made sure not to smile when he saw the block quaking. That would defeat his purpose. "Then show me," he sniffed. "Perform this spell, and I'll believe it. But otherwise, I think I should go to Headmaster Dumbledore and tell him that you didn't really deserve to be—"

"I can so do it!" Ron whipped around, drawing his wand outward. "Aurora Speculae!"

Harry felt Ron's magic rise up, roaring, foam for a moment like a wave at the block, and then splinter and sweep it aside. He had to shield his eyes as golden light filled the room, beaming from the end of Ron's room and inundating the walls. Magic came with it, roaring still, happy, and Harry felt the corresponding tug and lift in his heart that the spell was supposed to cause.

The light went on shining for a time. It was the Sunrise of Hope spell, meant to signal a leader's position to his troops on a battlefield and give them the continued strength to go on. Light Lords often used it to start a battle, too, with the invocation, "And so shines the Light against the Dark!"

Ron didn't make the cry, but Harry hadn't expected him to. When the light finally finished shining, he lowered his arm, and found Ron blinking. Part of that was surely afterimages, but another part was shock, expressed in his whispered words a moment later. "My block is gone."

Harry smiled at him. "When you told me about how it was created, when you were so angry, I thought rage was probably the key to breaking it." He shrugged lightly. "And it was."

Ron blinked at him some more, then said, "You prat. You did that on purpose!"

"Of course I did." Harry felt weightless, pleased, happy, ready even to go back to the Slytherin common room and face Draco sulking over his crush whom he wouldn't talk to. "I know you're a Gryffindor, Ron. It's pretty damn obvious all the damn time," he added, and walked towards the door.

He had to duck a spell aimed at his back—Ron was honorable, but he wasn't stupid—and spun around with a hex ready on his lips. They dueled for a short time. Ron's spells had a speed and power that Harry knew they'd never had, and Ron's face had a look of dazed happiness that wasn't common, either.

Harry finished the duel laughing. There was nothing else that made him so happy as helping people.

Albus settled back in his chair with a little sigh and looked out the window of his office. The first snowfall of December was sifting down, turning the sky and the grounds to one haze of white. Students trudged about in scarves and thick coats, when they ventured outside at all—except for the Durmstrang students, who went out in shirt sleeves, had snowball fights with each other, and laughed whenever someone else complained about the cold.

I do not know what I am going to do.

His project to test Harry, Albus had to admit, was not going well. He had tried to push Harry along two parallel tracks. One was to keep hidden, to stay further in the shadows, to make him used to the adulation going to other people. Harry's deep embarrassment when he did do something to attract attention should have made that one easy. Albus had felt confident enough in that scheme's success to take him to the Ministry during Fudge's hearing. The Wizengamot was sure to notice his power, but more than that, they would see how he sat behind Albus, and they would know who controlled him.

And then Scrimgeour had hauled Harry into the spotlight, and Griselda Marchbanks herself appeared to have taken notice of him.

Albus shook his head slowly. Bad as that had been, it was nothing compared to the fiasco of the First Task. Of course he was glad that the students had not been hurt, but did Harry have to save everyone in so noticeable a way? Dozens of photographs had shown up, snapped by the press ostensibly there to report on the First Task, of Harry looping on his broom around the dragons, staring into the dragons' eyes, protecting the Ravenclaw students with a Shield Charm that obviously came from him…

No, that part was not going well.

That meant the second part of the plan must pick up momentum. For a time, Albus considered, it had been more successful than the other. Harry had been busy, had been dashing about and trying to exhaust himself with taking care of everything, had come near the edge of emotional breakdown from the moment Connor's name emerged from the Goblet. He had nearly entered the state of mind where Albus believed he would be amenable to a few gentle suggestions that the Headmaster might make. For all his brilliance when he was thinking clearly, Harry tended to run headlong into traps when his emotions took control; it was the Gryffindor in him. Just one noose around his neck, just one offer of a comfortable place when he was breaking down, and Albus believed that he would have secured Harry's power from any unfortunate uses it might be turned to.

And then the Slytherins had intervened.

It had not escaped Albus's attention how closely his yearmates had stuck around Harry since the day of his mother's last letter. They spoke with him more often, and didn't let him withdraw into an isolated shell. And Harry, irritating miracle of miracles, responded to them more often than not, and throve on the trust they seemed to offer him. It was astonishing.

It was not at all what Albus had planned.

Albus half-closed his eyes and sighed. He hated having to make decisions like this, but if he did not make them, then no one would. And Harry needed some decision, some direction, some guide. If he had Declared for Dark or Light, Albus would not feel the need to interfere like this. But as it was, Harry appeared to understand almost nothing of how the world worked, and that other wizards simply could not cope with having a fourteen-year-old powerhouse running loose. Even his alliances with the Dark pureblood families, which Albus might have counted a restraining influence otherwise, were not enough, because they appeared content to leave leadership up to Harry. Albus could not imagine what wizards like Lucius Malfoy got out of that, other than a laugh at Harry's (and probably Albus's) expense, but there it was.

There was Severus's trial coming up on the solstice, where Harry would be expected to testify, but the emotional exhaustion that put him through would be made up for his guardian's reemergence into school life, since Albus fully expected the Wizengamot to exonerate Severus.

That meant…

Hm. Yes. Well, that might work.

Albus sighed again and opened his eyes. It will have to. Matters cannot go on as they have been. And I will send him warning. On his head be it if he chooses to ignore the warning.