Chapter 7.3 The second half of seventh year
Metaphorically speaking, Harry tightened his belt and resolved to destroy the rest of the legacy of Tom Riddle. He continued working with Stanbeny on the suspected curse on the Defence Against the Dark Arts professorship. While there were countless ways to curse a specific person, and a fair few that were based on familial relationship, the only magic that Stanbeny knew about that was based on a professional role were wards that forbade certain actions, but allowed for exceptions, such as the wards that prevented students from awarding house-points, but made an exception for the professors. Riddle must have taken such a ward and modified it to curse the defence professor. The problem was, such a ward should have been relatively easy to identify. Thus, the question became: had Riddle managed to mix in his ward with the many existing wards that protected Hogwarts, and thus hidden the curse, or was the curse active only sporadically and invisible the rest of the time? There were many possibilities, and Harry decided that while he was at Hogwarts anyway, and provided that the search continued to teach him new things, he would spend as much time on it as one of his classes.
Meanwhile, Harry had found a renewed love of quidditch. Not that he had ever stopped enjoying it, but it had no longer been much of a challenge. There were only so many seeker manoeuvres to learn, and in 12 school matches over 4 years, he had been beaten to the snitch only once, when it had appeared so much closer to the other seeker that no amount of superb flying had been able to negate that advantage. This year, however, was new. He had to coach the other positions, make sure that all the players performed as a team, and keep them focussed when revision, relationships and rivalries tried to distract team members. The drill-sergeant personality didn't really suit him, so he tried to be the facilitator who encouraged everybody to do the best they could, though he was not above playing the disappointed friend card if someone was slacking. The disadvantage of this strategy was that the 3 fangirls among the training team kept trying to use any opportunity to encroach into his personal space, so Harry had taken to only complimenting his team-mates while they were still on their brooms.
At least one positive thing about Professor Snape that Harry missed was his perfectionism. Harry's favourite professors, Babbling, Flitwick and Sprout, managed to encourage every student at their own level. Professors Vector and formerly professor McGonagall were more demanding, and tended to pay more attention to the talented students and to frustrate those with less innate ability. Professor Diggle went the other way. She spent most of their time making sure the struggling students were keeping up. Harry hoped that in part it was lack of experience in managing all the different students at their respective levels of competence, but while it lasted it was frustrating. Despite Snape's vendetta, Harry had never been as poor a potions student as he had been made out to be, but neither did he have the intuition that the best students had either been born with or acquired from private tutors; therefore, he still had to sit through more classes, remedial lessons and study sessions to slowly pick up the pieces he needed to learn here and there, rather than get tutoring at a personalised level, which would have saved a lot of time. Harry became sufficiently frustrated with the situation that he mentioned it in his conversation with Sirius. Days later Sirius had arranged a tutor for him. Harry was pleased at several levels. There was the fact that Sirius was being serious at a time that Harry needed him to be, which suggested Sirius' healing from his time in Azkaban was continuing. In addition, Sirius had acted as a supportive adult, something that had for too long been missing from Harry's youth. Then, Sirius explained he had initially arranged for only one session, leaving it up to Harry to judge whether it was helping and he wanted to continue.
It wasn't so much that the tutoring was going to make him better at potions; the tutor wasn't a better teacher than Professor Diggle. Nevertheless, Harry was pleased with the tutoring because it saved him hours every week. Instead of remedial lessons and lots of time with fellow students and in the library, he spent half an hour twice a week covering theory with the tutor, who would speed up or slow down solely based on what Harry needed, and rather than giving Harry homework, Harry could ask the tutor to find him which chapters or sometimes just paragraphs Harry needed to study to fill a gap in his knowledge. In addition, they would spend as much time as needed to make a potion if Harry felt that his previous lessons hadn't been enough. It saved lots of time, which was in short supply as the NEWT exams crept closer.
They almost lost the quidditch match to Gryffindor, but one of the whole team manoeuvres that Harry had had them practice saved them. Both Harry and Weasley, the Gryffindor seeker, had been circling above the level of the chaser game, when Harry had spotted the snitch. After years of experience, he had learned to keep a mental picture of where every player was. Unfortunately, the snitch was much closer to Weasley, so much closer that he didn't stand a chance, and the Ravenclaw beaters were in the process of disrupting an offense by the Gryffindor chasers. Therefore, he continued his present course, which would eventually bring him around, reversing the relative advantages of the two seekers. Before they got there, though, Weasley spotted the snitch and Harry set off for the spot where he would eventually be able to join the race after the snitch, while at the same time bellowing "deep fry". The beaters had at least managed to dislodge the quaffle from the Gryffindor chasers. They were still in a useless position to keep Weasley from the snitch, but the chasers were in possession of the quaffle. Chasers were not allowed to block the other team's seeker, but if a pass of the quaffle just 'happened' to bring them into the path of the seeker, well, that was just bad luck, wasn't it? There was a battering ram chaser formation that kept the chasers close enough that a seeker couldn't fly between the players, but far enough from each other that flying around them would delay the seeker. As it was against the rules, no-one called it the battering ram, but every captain made up their own name for it. Harry had gone for "deep fry" because of its use of batter. Harry loved this part of being a captain; as he sped along the line that would first avoid driving the snitch into the hands of Weasley's revised course and get him to the snitch along the second most direct route, he watched as the chasers 'fumbled' the quaffle just enough to make no progress towards the Gryffindor goals, and the beaters kept the Gryffindor chasers from regaining the quaffle. 'Sheer poetry', he though as his hand closed around the snitch.
Apparently, he had not been the only one to think so, because after the match the English quidditch coach came to talk to him.
"Mr Potter, that was some impressive flying in a well-practised manoeuvre."
"Thank you."
"I'm Brianna Overton, the coach of the English national team, and I was wondering whether you'd be interested to come to one of our practices."
"Oh," he did an impression of a fish out of water, until his brain managed to catch up and he stammered, "I'd love to, but I'm not sure I could make the time commitment."
"That's quite alright. That's a response I've gotten before from students in their NEWT year. We could initially agree on a single half-day session and then go from there? Unfortunately, the weekends are taken up with league games, so it will have to be on a week day. Maybe you'd like to have a look at your schedule and talk to any professors whose classes you would be missing and get permission from your par- … excuse me, guardian, and your head of house?"
"Err, yes," Harry was having trouble keeping up.
"Excellent. Any half-day will do. If you could give us at least a week's notice, please. Just owl me when you'll be coming, and on the day all you'll need is your broom. We'll get you your robes, and owl you a portkey."
The coach shook his hand, and Harry managed to choke out a "thank you," and then he just stood there, dazed. When he replayed his memory later, he would realise that Rebecca, the only fangirl who had made it onto the team, was about to pounce when Stephen came to congratulate him and lead him away to safety. Because Harry had been closer to the other muggle-raised students since before they had started at Hogwarts, Harry had never become very close to his wizard-raised roommates, but it was good to see that Stephen had his back when he was too distracted to maintain his non-magical touch-me-not space around himself. He made sure to thank Stephen for having his back while he was distracted. He had learned the damage one moment of distraction could do: once the other fangirls saw one of them use the slightest opening, the rest of them would circle for days trying to pounce. Sometimes, the only help for that was to be rude, but Harry had had to learn that that easily led to vicious rumours with most of the whole school hating him, so stopping those love-hate cycles before they got started made his life much easier. Compared to second year, things were better now, even if something managed to set off the rumour-mill. He had friends in all houses, who kept a lid on how much rumours could get out of hand. Still, preventing them was better.
One advantage of playing the sport that the whole wizarding population was crazy about was that everybody acted like it was the most natural thing that Harry would skip school. Initially, he had talked to Professor Vector, because Arithmancy was the class he could best afford to miss, but then he had been told that Hogwarts had a time-turner, so he would be able to have breakfast, go off and train with the national team, come back, turn back time, and have second breakfast before the day's classes. After a day like that he did need extra sleep, meaning he would have to do his homework on other days, so he couldn't make it work to go to every training session, but he still felt as if he was having his cake and eating it as well. Thanks to his early life-experiences, it also gave him a new appreciation for how magic could become an unearned privilege that human nature would all too easily turn into the kind of entitlement that gave rise to pureblood supremacy and dark lords. 'If we could beat that tendency, we'd have it made,' Harry reflected.
The training with the national team was great. Playing at a national level was a big step up relative to school games, so Harry had found a new challenge. What had previously been good enough to win the Hogwarts quidditch cup now was a good starting point that needed lots of refining. And when, after months of training, he managed to win his first game, they first congratulated him, but immediately after that warned him that if he kept at it he was on course to reach playing at a national level, but that winning at the international level would take another step up that was at least as big.
On Easter Monday there was another broom-making workshop. Arrow had agreed to send the same person as five years before to teach the assembly and testing of the brooms. The workshop covered more of the details than that first workshop, because the student organiser and some of the others who had attended previous workshops had spent the preceding months to teach the new students what had been covered in previous years. Still, Harry had by then learned enough enchanting in general and broom-making in particular that he didn't learn anything new from the workshop, not least because he didn't want to work on a broom with a magical core where others could see. Therefore, he made a broom for Hagrid, to thank him for the help he provided every year in collecting the materials for the brooms. Like everything else about Hagrid, the broom was twice as big as any other. Other than size, Harry thought the broom was quite basic, but Hagrid was nevertheless effusive in his thanks, emphasizing how useful it was to get around in the Forbidden Forest. Although Harry didn't say so to Hagrid, the broom was also in gratitude for Hagrid's treatment of Luna. Hagrid didn't believe in the creatures that Luna talked about, and, unlike Harry, was quite blunt about saying so, but that never translated into the disrespect that most of the rest of Hogwarts showed her. Although Hagrid, Luna and Harry all had their own extensive experiences with being treated for who people thought they were rather than for what they were really like, that in itself was not why they were close. It was the fact that they had learned not to make that mistake themselves, and expect the prejudice they got from the majority from any new people they met, that had allowed them to become friends.
Professor Sprout had convinced Harry to take the Herbology and Creatures NEWTs, arguing that even if he didn't revise for the exams, he would still know what he had learned in class, and a failing grade was better than no grade at all. However, classes continued right up to the day before exams started, so in the months leading up to his NEWTs, life progressively narrowed down. At first, Harry's fitness and defence training routines became shortened, quidditch training with the national team and meetings to talk about his runes mastery became less frequent, until after Easter they disappeared altogether. He was glad he wasn't Head Boy, since prefect duties were bad enough, and he cut them short whenever he could. Only the house-building club and school quidditch practice kept going, because others depended on Harry's contribution, and in the latter case also because it helped clear his mind. The extra attention that training with the national team required had actually been even better for giving him a break, but the disturbance to his diurnal rhythm from the time-travel was too high a price to make it worthwhile anymore, and he didn't want to skip arithmancy class either. Harry became like many other quidditch captains he'd seen pass through Hogwarts, a fanatic who paid minute detail to every detail of their tactics. Previously, Harry had thought this was a sign that those captains had prioritised careers in quidditch after graduation over doing well in their exams, but he was left wondering whether they had in fact suffered from the same effect that their brains tried to cope with the nastily exhausting exam preparation by displaying a total focus on a completely different activity just to give their brains a rest for a few hours.
The exams themselves were a relief. Harry had decided that being well rested and relaxed would help more than an hour or two of extra studying, and he thought he had done well on his five core subjects. To celebrate and say goodbye to Hogwarts, they had a party on the last night. Everybody went a bit crazy, though Harry had a quiet word with his friends that the children of Death Eaters would be at the party as well, so he suggested that they didn't want to get so blind drunk that they lost their awareness of their surroundings. Although Tom Riddle was dead, Harry thought he would never completely lose his wariness, not only about direct attack, but also about politics, shifts in public opinion, and what voices got disproportionately represented in the media. It would all require constant vigilance.
