Chapter 68: Hungry Like the Wolf

The week crept on, and the students seemed to stop fearing the magical failings around the school. Perhaps it was because they were reassured that the happenings weren't a threat, or they thought that the professors knew perfectly well how to fix them, but it had become a sort of joke. It was not uncommon to hear students say things like, "you'd best work harder on your homework—it's essays as poor as that that made the ceiling go out," and "where did you even get those horrible robes? I bet that's what made the paintings stop moving."

The professors, on the other hand, were all stressed and terse. Albus held an emergency faculty meeting on Thursday at lunch during which they discussed everything that had happened.

"Is there anything else that any of you have noticed?" asked Albus, after listing the things that were going wrong.

Pomona shyly raised her hand and Albus nodded at her.

"Some of the plants are dying," she said. "Poppy, I know you asked for Lunar Fly Trap cuttings and Lizardroot and…well…that list, but almost all of them are dying suddenly. I don't think you would be able to make any potions out of them."

"I can go buy some tomorrow," responded Poppy Pomfrey, who was a year or two younger than Minerva, and just as beautiful. Many of the older students had faked sickness or injury in order to be in her care. They only ever did it once, though, and Harry had heard rumors that she she made them drink vile-tasting and not entirely necessary vitamin potions.

"And I," Pomfrey continued, "am having trouble implementing some of our potions. Some of them need a magical catalyst in the air to brew properly, and our air right now is just not up to snuff! At this rate, I will have to buy fully made potions."

Albus nodded. "As soon as you can, please."

"Ms. Berry needs regular attending today, but tomorrow I may have time."

"Thank you," said Albus. "Anyone else?" he asked. When the room stayed quiet, he continued. "I must repeat myself—if any one of you has any ideas pertaining to why this might be happening, please share them. If there is nothing, the meeting may adjourn."

Most of the professors left their seats, and Albus sat back down into his chair, almost visibly discouraged. Harry put his hand on Albus's and they sat there until everyone had left.

"I can go ask the house elves about the food," said Harry. "You know, see how many meals they could provide if the food stopped coming."

"I'd better come with you."

Harry nodded, and the two of them went down to the basement.

Inside the kitchen was the normal post-lunch cleaning of the table and scrubbing of the pots and pans, but there was also a good deal more noise than usual…a horrible collective wailing that seemed to come from everywhere.

Harry snagged the arm of the nearest elf who wasn't carrying anything.

"Why are all of you….making that noise?" he asked.

"We is in punishment, sirs! We's been very bad elves, very bad indeed! We has all stepped on the bottoms of hot pans, sirs, to make our feets burned in punishment."

Harry's eyes widened in horror. "What's wrong? What happened?"

"We's not receiving food, sirs, we's not keeping the lockers stocked," the elf cried, and started violently twisting his ears.

"No, no, stop that!" said Harry. He was frustrated that the elves hadn't told anyone about the food not coming, but didn't want to say anything lest they all punish themselves for that, too. He sighed.

"Albus, we have to heal all of their feet…This is terrible," he said, watching an elf as his knees buckled in pain, and he fell to the floor.

Albus nodded. "While you do that," he said, "I will attempt to find out how long the remaining food will last. If need be, we can use magic to make it last longer."

"Wait…Hang on. You said earlier that we pay for the food?" asked Harry.

"Yes," said Albus. "I would assume so."

"How much do we pay? Have you ever actually seen a bill?"

"I have not," said Albus. "There is a goblin at Gringotts who handles all of Hogwarts's money."

"Then how do you know we pay for the food?"

"Hogwarts does not steal food, Harry, and Gamp's law prevents us from creating it."

Harry frowned. Something wasn't adding up somewhere in this mess, and eventually they were going to find what it was.

In the meantime, Harry called to all of the House Elves. "Excuse me…er…can I have your attention? I need…maybe ten of you at a time to line up here, sitting on the ground, please."

Ten house elves immediately stepped forward and sat themselves on the ground in a line in front of Harry. It was always astounding to Harry how the elves didn't need to confer about what the most efficient way to do this was or who should go; they just knew.

"Great. Thanks. Er…could you all please stick out your feet."

Twenty grubby, blistered feet with knobby, hairy toes presented themselves to Harry in a row.

Harry went down the line, and quickly healed each one.

"Good. Er. Don't hurt yourselves again." Then he said louder, "Can ten more come up? Actually, when one's done, another elf can come up…"

And due mostly to the house elves' efficiency, Harry was done healing all of the elves in the entire kitchen in under five minutes. When he was done, he said loudly, "And, er…from now on, no Hogwarts elves are ever allowed to hurt themselves. It's not allowed. If you do something wrong, you can try better next time or something, but don't hurt yourselves."

Harry turned to see Albus was smiling at him.

"What?" asked Harry.

"Just…you," said Albus. "Saving everybody."

Harry rolled his eyes, but bit his lip and smiled when Albus's back was turned.

"What did you find out?" Harry asked, when they were back out in the hall.

"They have some dinner food, and some breakfast food. Neither meal would be as large as what they would like to serve, but no one will starve in the next day. The lockers stopped working yesterday, but I get the impression they thought they would fix it themselves before they ran out of food. I've instructed them to go out and buy more food for tonight and the upcoming days."

Harry nodded.

That afternoon, Harry taught his NEWT students, and then it was time to try and teach Moody wandless magic. Moody, as usual, had taken the lesson with the NEWT students, and stayed behind when they all left. Harry had checked the Room of Requirement earlier, but shockingly it had once again turned into a howling abyss, dysfunctional like everything else magical in the school. In light of this, they stayed in the classroom.

"So," said Harry, "when you were young, did you ever create any accidental magic?"

Moody nodded curtly.

"Can you…tell me about that?" Harry was flying by the seat of his pants. He hadn't thought at all about how to teach wandless magic. He'd been too busy thinking about Albus going into a coma, and then thinking a lot about how the Peverells used to live in the Hogwarts Castle, and then, recently, about all the things going wrong.

"Er…there was once when I was three," said Moody. "My mum says someone was sneaking into our house and I sent a dish flying at his head. I don't remember that, though."

Harry chuckled. "That sounds like you, but I need you to find something you remember," he said.

Harry, of course, had never actually learned wandless magic the traditional way (if there was such a thing—he'd never heard of anyone but Albus doing any wandless magic). When he'd gotten out of the crystal, he'd needed his wand; it just didn't have to be in his hand. Of course, since he broke his wand, he'd been using magic completely wandlessly, but he suspected he was still different from normal people; normal people used their wands to channel their magical part away from the rest of them, whereas Harry's magical part was already a whole separate aura, even if it was technically in his body again. He could feel that his soul was still in seven parts, even if four of them were now in his body.

"Er I…I had a friend when I was seven. He used to eat spiders to show off, you know. Disgusting. One day he found a wolf spider—I knew what it was, because a wolf spider killed my dog—and said he was going to eat it. That dog was pretty big, and we were only seven, so I figured he was about the same size as that dog, so I was afraid the spider would kill him. I told him not to eat it, but he was going to do it anyway. I blew up the spider."

"You…you blew the spider up?"

"Yes. It exploded in his hand. Gave him a nasty burn and he nearly lost a few fingers, but he lived."

Harry blinked a few times. "Alright. That would do, I suppose."

"Alright…now…er…here's a spider." Harry transfigured a piece of chalk into a spider and levitated it over to a desktop.

"Now…with your wand, I want you to look at the spider, and try and remember exactly how you felt when you blew up that spider to save your friend. Don't use any incantation, but if you feel angry or whatever, just let it bottle up and explode…and then the spider might explode too." He made a mental note to not be full of shit in the future. "But use your wand. I think it'll be easier to start that way. And don't use an incantation, 'cause incantations make it easier to bring out intention, but you need to be able to have specific intention without using your wand. Does…does that make sense."

Moody nodded once, and glared at the spider. He glared at the spider, frowned at the spider, and finally waved his wand and the spider exploded.

"Good," said Harry. "How was that?"

"It wasn't difficult," said Moody. "It was like a silent spell, except that I couldn't think the word either, only what the spell was supposed to be."

Harry smiled and thought about how there was no way he would have gotten that on the first try in his fifth year.

"Good. Sounds about right. Want to try without your wand?"

"Yeah," said Moody.

"I don't expect this to work, necessarily," said Harry, transfiguring another spider out of a ball of dust on the floor. "You might need a different kind of provocation or something to be able to do it without a wand…well. I'm sure if anyone could do it, you could. Go ahead."

Moody put his wand in the back pocket of his trousers and glared at the new spider.

Nothing happened for a while, and Moody let out a breath. He sighed in frustration, and turned back to the spider.

At some point, Harry found himself getting a little bored of watching Moody's face turn red, and he went back to his office. "I'll be right back. Let me know if it works."

He cleaned up a few things, and quickly ran out of things to do, so he went back into the classroom. Moody had his back to Harry and was concentrating on the spider, his wand sticking out of his back trouser pocket. Harry watched for a moment—but… hadn't Moody once told Harry to never put his wand…

BOOM!

Blood and bone and fire flew in all directions, and Moody didn't so much as scream as sort of hiccup the wind out of his lungs in shock.

Harry immediately raced to catch Moody before he collapsed to the floor. Moody's leg was gone. Harry and his robes were immediately soaked in Moody's blood, and the only thing Harry could think to do was to teleport directly to the Hospital Wing.

"Somebody, Madame Pomfrey, HELP!" he yell, as soon as they hit the floor.

Madame Pomfrey crashed out of her office—very different from her elderly sweep—and darted across the room immediately. She didn't ask any questions, but started working. She swept her wand over Moody's mangled, burned stump of a leg, muttering, chanting.

"Can I help?" Harry asked.

"Dittany," said Madame Pomfrey.

"Accio Dittany!" said Harry, and a green bottle flew across the room.

"Pour that whole bottle over his leg. Quickly!"

"Wait," said Harry. "Won't this just…close the skin? What about his leg?"

"Too late, too late! He will bleed out if we try to take him to St. Mungos."

"But…can't you use Skele-Gro?"

"No," she said simply.

"Why not? Is it one of the ones that's effected by the magic in the air or whatever?"

"No—I've never heard of it. If I knew what that was, maybe I could use it," she snapped. "Pour the Dittany!"

Harry's eyes opened wide in realization—Skele-Gro had not been invented. Moody was going to become one-legged. Harry knew it would happen one day, as old Mad Eye had one wooden leg, but he didn't think it would be on his watch, or while Moody was so young.

He uncorked the bottle of Dittany and poured it all over the mangled piece of flesh where Moody's leg used to be. Immediately, skin started to grow and stretch itself all over the wound making it look days—weeks old. Meanwhile, Moody was still conscious. His eyes were rolling back in his head and his teeth were gnashing, but he didn't say a word.

Pomfrey kept chanting, and somewhere in the middle she muttered "Accio Ferrasis!" and another bottle of potion came zooming to her waiting hand.

"What's that for?" asked Harry.

"Replenishes the blood," she said. "Please go get the headmaster. I think he will want to know about this."

Harry nodded and vanished immediately.

When he and Albus got back, Moody was sleeping. There was a mug still clutched in his hands, so Harry suspected that Pomfrey had given him a dreamless sleep potion. Harry wished Moody was still awake so that he could apologize for…not watching well enough. He couldn't believe how useless he'd been; at the height of his power, he could have grown a new leg with his own magic.

He sighed bitterly and explained what happened to Albus and Pomfrey. Madame Pomfrey gave Harry a look of mild distain, and went about bandaging Moody's leg. Albus went up close to Harry and put an arm around his waist.

"It wasn't your fault," he said.

"I know," said Harry, "but it was on my watch."

"It happens to the best of us," said Albus. "A transfiguration student of mine lost an eye in class. Instead of changing his porcupine into a pig, he made the porcupine grow, and quite a few needles went…Well, he's still a lovely pianist."

After a while, Madame Pomfrey kicked Harry and Albus out of the Hospital Wing, and the two of them went down to dinner.

As soon as they got into the great hall, they knew that something was off; the tables were noticeably emptier than they usually were. Frankly, it was sad compared to the usual Hogwarts nightly feast. There was enough food for everyone if nobody was greedy, but here and there they saw empty serving platters—there were never empty platters. There was always tons of each dish—enough so that if the whole school wanted to eat just mashed potatoes, everyone could eat just mashed potatoes.

Albus frowned. "Something's wrong. The elves didn't buy more food. What's here should be enough, but…something's wrong. Please—enjoy your dinner. I will be back in a moment."

Harry would have argued, but he was starving, so he took his place at the staff table and ate.

Albus returned ten minutes later, his frown set even more firmly on his face.

"Several elves were sent to buy food four hours ago, but none of them have returned."

"Oh," said Harry, frowning.

"I…am going to attempt to find them and bring them back. I hope they're okay," said Albus.

"Do you want me to come with you?" Harry asked.

"Thank you, but I don't think that will be necessary."

Harry shrugged. He was pretty sure Albus could handle finding a few house elves, and Harry wouldn't be able to do much that Albus couldn't in the case of trouble.

He walked Albus out of the Great Hall to the empty Entrance Hall.

"Good luck," Harry said, and they kissed goodbye.

That night, Harry went back to his tower. He paced around his room for several minutes trying to think about what could possibly be going wrong with the castle, but what his mind kept returning to instead was Moody and his leg. Harry knew that it was a freak accident, but knowing that it could have been fixed in the future, or if his powers were up to snuff, or if he'd been a healer and knew how to brew Skele-Gro made him feel responsible.

So he got to work on making Moody a prosthetic leg. It was simple, really. He could do it even with his powers.

After several hours of hard work, he ended up with a piece of wood that looked like a leg (but not like the claw-footed leg that Moody had in the future), but he'd also enchanted it to sort of move about how you wanted it to. Harry bent one of his legs out of the way tried strapping the prosthetic to his hip, and it worked much better than he'd hoped for as a leg. He was satisfied, and went to bed.

He overslept Friday morning, and awoke to his record player blasting "Hungry Like the Wolf" until he got out of bed.

He skipped breakfast and headed straight to class to teach a double period of fourth years. Some of his students asked him to stay in his classroom after class to help with that day's jinxes, and that's where Minerva found him half way through lunch.

"Crockett! May I please have a word."

"Course," said Harry. They hurried into his office and Minerva shut the door behind him with a snap.

"Have you seen—well, I suppose you haven't. Lunch today is meager. What is happening? Where is Albus? I just spent the last half hour casting engorgement and duplication charms on sandwiches just so that the students are fed!"

"He's not back?"

"He wasn't at lunch, and he wasn't at breakfast. I thought the two of you might be…you know, off somewhere together, but…"

"Does that work? Engorgement charms and stuff?"

"Well, for a while," said Minerva, "but the food's almost gone completely, and engorgement charms won't stop the food from going bad."

"In the muggle world, there's this thing called a refrigerator. You just plug it in and it keeps everything cool," said Harry.

"Electormonics don't work at Hogwarts," said Minerva.

"Well…what about an ice box? Fill something with water and freeze it with magic. That should work."

"Yes, well, it isn't permanent," said Minerva. "The fact is, we need more food."

"I'm sure Albus will be back soon," said Harry.

"We should damn well hope so."

Harry actually found himself relatively unconcerned about Albus's immediate safety. Albus was unmatched in dueling (since Harry was still recovering—and who knew if Harry would ever regain his former magical prowess?), and the smartest person Harry had ever met. Harry knew he could take care of himself and that he'd bring home the bacon, so to speak.

No, what Harry was worried about was his date with Tom Riddle, for it was set for that very evening. A few times, he considered standing Riddle up, but Harry found that he was was grateful for Riddle's help and for that alone he decided to go.

His afternoon classes passed with uncomfortable speed, and soon Harry found himself in his tower trying to figure out what to wear.

What clothing could he wear that would say "I hate you, but thanks for helping me kill part of your soul in order to save my boyfriend who you probably want dead."

Harry shivered. He'd used the word "boyfriend."

He ended up deciding on plain black robes, even though they made him feel like Snape (He may have been a hero in the end, but that didn't mean he dressed well). At the last minute, he grabbed his record, bowling ball, and hat and put them in a bag to carry with him. He didn't think he could win a duel with Voldemort in his current state, and the objects would help him stay alert for trouble.

With that bag in hand, he teleported out and reappeared in front of Hogsmeade's very own Cheshire Cat Restaurant.