bess and me take a walk in the grass looking at tomorrow doing so much more defeating the storm a leaf don't offer a nest for birds false reward to men of song rivers lakes and streams brush the backdrop fallen arches domino student demonstration time turned back world greetings of doom train off a track ahead is seeming so far behind future's riddle heart hardened beyond belief how deep is the ocean to a broken man and baton floating out to sea promise lost for now bear the glow dissolved in the red and blue morning sun quicksilver moon fired rose light for the hope clearer stars heal the memory a changing style just in time i know i can cry touched by man all fed up with useless wars learned not to say nasty things earned a new degree and got some sandals new a job to fit my trade sweeping up some floors be cool reality's goal sew up the wounds reaching the spacious skies the very first lie in auld lang syne avocado*
Now where was I?
No, hang about, where am I?
Windows to the left of me, stacks to the right. Harry Potter in between sitting at a table reading a book. Library.
Something odd about that...
...no, doubly odd, triply, quadruply odd! Outside perspective on a black-haired Harry Potter, not the school library, and, above all Harry Potter reading a book? —Aha! Eureka!
"I'm inside my own unconscious!" said the Rupert.
Harry Potter whirled around, and his accidentally-flung book arced to the floor following standard gravitational acceleration for the rotating planet Earth.
"What attention to detail! Spiff avec spiff in a light spiff sauce with a side of order of spiff!" said the Rupert. He tried to stand up, and discovered he had nothing to stand up with. "Okay, hold the side of spiff, I can't move. That's rubbish, how can I check books out of me head if I can't move?"
"Rupert?" said Harry, raising his glasses.
"Harry!" cheered the Rupert. "You've been reading! And me with no arms, give yourself a hug." Legs, no, arms, hands, no and no, fingers, zero, ears and eyes, possibly, nose, apparently not, but in the absence of fingers that's just as well, chin, well, he was getting used to not having a chin...
"I can read, you know," said Harry, getting up and stepping closer like a mildly concerned deer. "And it's a library, there isn't much else to do. I'm up to chapter four in Moominland Midwinter.
"—Is that really you?" He dropped his glasses back in place and frowned through them.
"Don't know who else it could be," said the Rupert. "What a splendid mind I have! stained glass windows... chandelier... posh carpet, nice and squishy, I see you sinking in at every step. And piped-in music! No, no, wait, that's not spiff, this is a library, there's supposed to be —"
("...sunny beams, and silver streams, that's what I've lacked...")
"Hang about," he said, trying and failing to cock an ear, "is that the Beach Boys?"
"I don't know," said Harry, "but that album's been on repeat since I got here."
("...fantasy world, and Dittany Girls...")
"Blimey, it is. Surf's Up, 1971. The licensing implications are appalling. Don't rat me out."
"My lips are sealed," said Harry, continuing to squint and bob up and down.
A twining cluster of voices whispered by.
(...people aren't things, but the things are also people, ergo things are people and not-people, paradox, cross-reference Latin populus, cross-reference people comma the real subject of history, cross-reference human versus humane, cross-reference Tom Lehrer 'Silent E', cross-reference Silent M and Silent C, cross-reference alikazam...things can become people...)
The voices had trailed off between the stacks.
"So!" said the Rupert. "Is there a librarian?"
"No."
"Complaints department?"
"No."
"Suggestion box?"
"...Yes."
"Really?"
"Nah," said Harry. He extended a hand and waved it straight through the Rupert's point-of-view. Fleshy cross-section, fully detailed, very very nice, beautiful capillaries.
(...in the philosophical language of John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, dada would be the first species of heaven, cross-reference angels, cross-reference naughty and nice, cross-reference light elements, cross-reference levity. 'Aha' moment number 12,424,520,140,418: the porridge bird lays its egg in the air so it doesn't go cuckoo...)
"Er...Harry...is this nattering going on all the time?"
(...28.0855, 26.9815, 24.3050...)
"Pretty much."
(...22.9898, 20.1797, 18.9984...)
"Blimey. No wonder I never come here, it'd drive me mad. Would you like some earplugs? I think I can do you some earplugs."
(...15.9994, ignition sequence has started, 12.0107, 10.8110, 9.012...)
Harry shrugged. "It's just background after a while." He backed up to the table, still squinting. "You know, I can just about see you. Or at least something." (...6.941, 4.0026, 1.0079...)
"What do I look like?" (...zero, we have commit and we have liftoff at 2:13, 1.0079...mode one bravo, encore...)
"You're sort of an egg-shaped section of air."
"Ah, no wonder I can't move. Back to spiff! When I manage to decompose myself out of your holomimetic field I'll need a symbolically correct form to collapse into and an egg is definitely a start. Forget that last bit, I think it was gibberish. How are you getting on? Do I need a soup machine?"
"No, it's fine." Harry slid up onto the table into a pool of pink light from the stained-glass windows and looked around. "The chairs are way more comfortable than the school library's...I do sort of wonder about the actual books, though."
"How so?"
"Well," said Harry, "okay — like — look at this." He leaned across the table and grabbed at a thick book. The title read Gerber's New World Student Dictionary.
"Love a dictionary," said the Rupert. "Some of them are real page-turners."
"I was looking up some of the words you use," said Harry, flipping through the leaves. "Here. Abyss, right? see Canyon. And canyon—" he turned to C— "Canyon: a long, convoluted rut.."
"Sounds fair," said the Rupert. "Why were you looking up 'abyss'?"
"I started at 'lacuna'. You remember, you were talking to Myrtle and—"
"Remember, 'course I remember. Remember...table that thought, I'll come back to it. Does it give the derivation for canyon?"
"No."
"Yeah, that's the paradox of student dictionaries...not very educational, not very explicit, are they?"
(...secret, sēcernere to sift; interest, inter-esse, to exist between; cross-reference Maxwell's Demon...)
"Does lacuna even mean abyss?" asked Harry, closing the book.
"Degree of overlap. Try other dictionaries, you'll get there in the end. Circle around and then pounce."
Harry put down one thick book in favor of an even thicker one, volume Baa-Bor of the Encyclopaedia Cambria-Usonia. He opened it to the halfway point. "According to this," said Harry, flipping leaves again, "the Black Death—" he read from the article— "the Black Death was invented by Calvin Wells of Twickenham in 1976, and consists of one part vodka, one part paregoric and two parts Guinness, shaken and stirred." He looked up expectantly.
The Rupert said, "Have you got a better definition for the Black Death?"
Harry's face developed something of a crimp.
"Better?"
"I do," said the Rupert. "Add 2% butterscotch ripple. I'll put it like this — have you found anything that's actually-factually wrong, to your personal knowledge?"
"Well..." Harry thought a bit, brushed a hand through his hair, leaving it sticking up, and then pointed at the invisible speaker, which was still playing random songs from Surf's Up. "The last time I was down here, or up here — in here — there was a song that said Georges Bizet was born in Omaha. But I suppose that doesn't count."
"Last time...interesting. What's the last thing you remember before being here? Dreams have a tendency to be fire-walled, I'd like to nail down how dreamy this really is."
Harry looked at the ceiling and stuck his finger in his ear. "I was in bed, and...I think Ron's rat was crawling under my cover.
"And before that," he said, "I was looking at my photo album."
"...ah," said the Rupert. "Well, Harry, there are truths and then there are things that merely happen to be true. My library, I think, tends to soft-pedal its choice of happenstance. It's still under reconstruction, you know."
(Aluminate of beryllium! agreed a passing voice.)
Harry took up a cross-legged position on the table. "Is that why my photo album's not here? All the other books you look at show up here in New Arrivals, and I know you've seen it."
"It's your album, Harry." said the Rupert. "I consider it private."
Harry looked at him, or through him, or at least in his direction. "You don't have to."
"...All right," said the Rupert, and from somewhere in the library was the tiny sound of a book sliding onto a shelf.
Harry looked at him a bit more.
"You know that photo of Tom Riddle we found?" he said.
The music stopped with a complex *bworp of the type that old-school needle-off-the-record scratching merely aspires to.
"What was that?" said Harry.
"All of Surf's Up at once," said the Rupert. "The unconscious in a nutshell, really, everything at once. Churning possibilities, all those infinite sentences you could say — all the donkey work. Incapable of boredom, but you do get a bit of garble when you iterate all matrices."
The invisible speaker started up again. "Hey, Mercilla, hey-yay Mercilla, she's a bright girl—"
"Still with the Beach Boys?" said the Rupert. "That one's from Carl and the Passions, glad to know I've got more than one album in here, but — oi! come on, me, play the boy something more contemporaneous!"
The Beach Boys stopped, and something electronic started up in their place. It went ding-dinga-dinga, dinga-dinga-dinga.
"Ding-dong, there you go," said the Rupert happily. "That's proper British for 1991."
"I know that one!" said Harry, sitting up straighter. "It was on Top of the Pops last year. ...Uncle Vernon turned it off."
"Oh, did you miss out! The Orbital twins! First album came out two months ago. That's 'Chime' playing now, so 'Midnight' should be next — no, hang about, this is the American release from next year, so there's a pair of tracks in between...and no 'Steel Cube Idolatry'...how do you lot get to a rave at U Sagittarii, anyway? It's two thousand light years away...sorry, wrong M25, never mind..."
"But speaking of Tom Riddle," decided Harry.
"Yes?" said the Rupert guiltily.
"You know he looks...a tiny bit like me?"
"I don't take a cube of stock in that resemblance."
"No, I mean, yes, but that's just it, it's more than a tiny bit, really, but we're similar, but when I look at my pictures — my parents — it's — we have something in common." He paused to relisten to what he'd just said. "Only more so," he added. "Is this making any sense?"
Clouds shifted outside the window.
The Rupert said, "You know the saying about the apple falling not far from the tree?"
"Yeah."
"That's an idiom from a temporally-limited culture. The apple and the tree still are connected. Time is a direction, and distance is a number."
The library was silent.
"For what that's worth," he added.
Harry stared through him for a while.
Then he said, "Have you tried to remember your parents at all?"
"Parents...me? Don't know I have any. I may just be off the rack, who–"
#
I like to be in your library when you are out of it.
– Margaret Fuller
There is a reciprocal influence (action and reaction) between the planets, the earth, and animated nature.
The means of operating this action and reaction is a most fine, subtle fluid, which penetrates everything, and is capable of receiving and communicating all kinds of motions and impressions...indeed, it explains the action of the medicaments, and operates the crisis.
The physician can discover by magnetism the nature of the most complicated diseases.
– Franz Anton Mesmer
#
Thanksgiving (III: Susque Deque).
— knows? he thought, and looked up the canopy over the bed, and wondered what he had been thinking about.
Time-check: 5:02:04 AM. Everyone asleep. Neville ("Erysimum Barbarea, Hedge Mustard, Bank Cress...") seemed to be doing a ("Jack-by the-Hedge...") Herbology oral exam, which in anyone else's case would have been a nightmare. Ron's rat was curled between Harry's arm and his chest.
That's good. Keep warm. Or are you trying to keep Harry warm? No, that's an either-or fallacy. Though you're not doing a very good job of reciprocating...and why are you not pestering Ron? Is it the hair colour?
"Parents," said Harry, sleepily.
Pardon?
{ You were thinking about parents. }
When?
{ You don't remember? }
Remember what?
{ Never mind, } said Harry, and fell back to sleep.
#
And then suddenly it was quarter-to-rage.
Oh dear, what now? Harry moving very fast in slippers, thudding down the stairs into the common room, empty, still dark outside, nearly seven by the clock, everybody else must be at breakfast, what kind of blood chemistry do you call this?
What's happening?
"What's happening?!" said Harry. "This is what's happening!"
He held something up — a book, photo album, and pictures were sticking randomly out of it, rough-edged, chewed.
"That rat! Ron's rat! Scabbers! He crawls under my covers to spend the night, then he crawls out and eats my parents!"
The last thing you tell an angry human is to calm down.
Got it. Where are we going?
"To find Ron!"
To do what?
Muscles strained randomly. "I don't know!"
Ah. Well. In that case, take out your wand.
"What?"
Take out your wand.
"WHY?"
Because you're yelling at nobody visible and it's a good thing the room's empty. Take out your wand, Harry.
With great reluctance, Harry did.
What do you see?
"...my wand."
Who carries wands?
"...is this a trick question?"
No. Who carries wands?
"Wizards."
Right. Now take off your glasses and tell me what you see.
Harry set the album down on a table and took off his glasses.
"I see my glasses. What am I supposed to be looking for?"
Wand. Glasses. Do you see the connection?
"Sorry, not getting it," said Harry, looking from wand to glasses.
They were held together with gum for a while.
"Um," said Harry. "Oh. Yeah. Hermione..."
...Hermione had almost unexpectedly lunged across the table one morning at the beginning of September, snatched Harry's broken glasses off his face and repaired them with a word. And then was unapologetically sorry about it, because looking at that little blue blob of gum holding them together had been driving her mad.
Rather impressive how long she'd held out, really...
{ Okay, } thought Harry. { She fixed my glasses. What about it? }
Wand, Harry.
"I'm a wizard."
So don't jump to conclusions about things that are broken. Now let's work the problem, shall we? No point even having problems if you don't work them. Show me the damage.
Harry put his glasses back on, tucked away his wand and opened the album, allowing the Rupert to sort through the pictures.
There were three obvious groups: the intact, the damaged ones where a parent was missing by virtue of operating the camera, and the others.
Even the pile of others didn't seem to have suffered significant damage, since these were wizard photos and the subjects simply got out of the way of the holes.
Potter, Potter, Black, Lupin...see, Harry? You just need to find someone who can restore photographs.
It was a somewhat mollified Harry who tucked the pictures back in place.
It's interesting, isn't it? said the Rupert.You start out with a new pair of glasses, then little nicks and scratches pile up, and the bridge breaks, and you fix it with tape, and more little nicks and scratches pile up, and then the tape gives way, and I fix the bridge with gum, and then Hermione says reparo, and the break is undone but all the little nicks and scratches, before and after, stay behind.
Like whipping away the tablecloth and leaving the champagne glasses standing.
Cherry-picking away a single entropic change in a whole stack of entropic changes, it was a really clever git who invented reparo.
I don't know whether it'll work on photographs, but there's probably something that will.
Somewhat grudgingly, Harry closed the album.
"Why don't you teach me reparo, then?" he said. "Both my trainer soles are held on with gum, now."
Why haven't you asked Hermione to teach you? It'll cheer you both up. Besides, I'm vaguely planning to get you a new pair when we go out. You're going to need bigger ones soon anyway.
"We're going out? Out where?"
Didn't I tell you we're going on an adventure? Three solid months cooped up at Hogwarts, no, no, that won't do.
#
With sunrise at seven and sunset at four, the houses of Hogwarts are fast out the door...
Hufflepuff had already spilled outside to make use of the day by the time Harry made it down to breakfast. Most of Gryffindor was gone as well except for Lee Jordan, who was feeding his pet Lycosa rubiginosa, otherwise known as Tara the Tarantula. Harry had no desire to find out what she ate other than ("Ow! Tara, no! Bad!") fingers, and so he wandered over to Slytherin, which was missing its Beaconsfield.
The head seat of Slytherin was currently occupied by the boy the Rupert was trying to get Harry to call Tim the Enchanter, though his actual last name was something like O'Ryan.
"Where's...Beaconsfield?" asked Harry, switching his album from arm to arm. Scabbers being whereabouts-unknown, he'd brought it along for safe-keeping.
"In his tent sulking," said Tim. "He's had a , that's disgusting, stop it!"
"Setback of what nature?" asked the Rupert, filling Harry's pockets with assorted bagels.
"Don't know. He cast silencio. He always casts silencio when he's had a setback."
"Why?"
"So you can't hear him say anything he might regret. Anyway, he can't even explain what's wrong until he's onto stage two."
"Stage two," said Harry.
"Angst. Wizarding world doomed, all is lost, down in flames, that sort of thing. —Goyle, second warning!"
There was a tinkle from Slytherin's large jewel-filled hourglass...Slytherin's large now slightly less jewel-filled hourglass.
"Crabbe, did I tell you to hit him?" moaned Tim. He stood up. "That's it! Breakfast's over, everybody outside."
"Is there a stage three?" said the Rupert around a mouthful of bagel.
"Rearranging the furniture. After that he feels better."
#
Posted on the wall at the bottom of the dungeon stairs was an arrow-shaped sign saying WEEKEND SEMINAR PROGRAMME. It was pointing in the direction of the Potions classroom, and Professor Snape's dark-chocolate voice was insinuating its sugarless way up the hall.
I wondered what Professor Snape did on his days off, said the Rupert. Now I know: he works.
Harry wandered closer to make out the words.
"...the standard process," Professor Snape was saying, "yields red resin, seven parts in twelve, yellow resin, two parts in twelve, and white resin, one half part, the remainder being useless black ash.
"However, I have determined that if the susque-deque cycle is moderated by a charm to account for the hitherto unexplored asymmetry in heating and cooling rates, the yield improves to nine parts red and two parts yellow, with the amorphous dracoalban being entirely eliminated and the remainder being not ash, but a dark violet resin, with some most intriguing characteristics..."
The classroom door was open. All the seats inside were filled, and not with students.
Yowza! said the Rupert. Post-graduates!
{ Shh, } said Harry.
But I love doctoral candidates...
{ Penfold, shush! }
The Rupert shushed just as the lights in the classroom went out.
"First," said Snape, "you will note its phosphorescent character. Second, you will note its profound response to the lodestone."
The darkness filled with flickering electric purple light.
Harry unexpectedly stood there listening to the lecture for several minutes.
I thought you didn't like Potions, said the Rupert.
{ I like potions fine, it's Professor Snape I don't like! }
#
Most of the furniture in the seventh-year Slytherin dormitory was in the middle of the room, and the rest was moving around by remote control, under the direction of a silent Beaconsfield who was wearing an expression surpassing lemony.
"What's doing?" said the Rupert, emerging from the stairs.
"I'm cleaning house," said the prefect. "Or just rearranging the furniture." He made a slashing gesture with his peculiar-looking wand and the beds moved away from the wall, exposing patterns of scratches. "All I've ever done, really."
"Oooh, graffiti!" said the Rupert, and bounced past the beds, which were doing a sort of sort of duo-hemi-do-si-do in the center of the room. "And it's not just Greek to me, it's actual Greek!"
"Strange thing, graffiti," said Beaconsfield. "When you do it, they dock you points, but hide it for a couple of hundred years and the historical society'll want you expelled for removing it."
Ravenclaws wash in dust and ashes, translated the Rupert. Snakes are better dancers. And – erm.
{ It says something something Gryffindors... }
Yes, something grammatically incorrect. Well, probably.
After relocating the bookcases, Beaconsfield threw himself onto one of the beds, wrested a Weasley Hufflepuff plush toy out from under his back and clutched it to his chest. "Potter, may I be unusually frank?"
"Why not?" said Harry.
"Does Slytherin strike you as a house under a cloud?"
"Um...should it?"
"Exactly my point. We've been on our best behavior. Squeaky clean. Best disciplinary record in the school five out of the last seven years. House Cups a-plenty.
"It's been so sunny down here of late that I've seen Professor Snape teasing Professor MacGonagall about quidditch.
"Well!" Beaconsfield held Clive at arm's length. "Slytherin's like any other indoor plant. You've got to nurture and maintain it. I didn't start the sweetness and light program but I've been routing leaves from darkness to light almost as long as I've been here, Me and the rest of my coterie.
"And so the chap who chews my tail because I don't happen to have any enthusiasm for learning the proper technique for performing objurgation on a pot of slurk, and doesn't care that I have learnt it... He's sanguine!
"And now — kablooey. It's all coming undone. Woe. Doom." He pressed Clive against his face. "Pardon me while I weep, will you?"
"Okay."
"Ta."
"So what happened?" asked the Rupert.
"As I say, you have to keep up your maintenance. I leave next year, and so does Tim, but we had a whole line of chaps set to slot into place. And now almost overnight three of them are hors de combat.
"Two of them suddenly caught up in grade-destroying romantic moonery — no blame, I know what it's like to go googly — and my chosen replacement is now leaving at winter hols because his parents have inexplicably decided to forsake forever the pleasures of the Bloomsbury Triangle for Iceland and are taking him along.
"If I lose another failsafe it's within possibility that I won't have any suitable prefects in place for next year. And if anything goes wrong beyond that — can you imagine the class of 1999 being led downstairs their first night to find that the common room password is pureblood?"
"Wow," said Harry.
"Wow indeed," said Beaconsfield, adjusting Clive's tie. "Not that this is your problem. You're the only light in my darkness, in fact."
"Me?" said Harry. "How?"
"Malfoy's the lead of a crop of a potentially very naughty snakelets, and you...really do help mitigate him just by sitting on the other side of a table from him, even if it is only once a week.
"Spink I wish I'd nabbed Percy Weasley..."
"Percy?" said Harry. "Really? Don't you sort of hate him?"
"Emphasis on sort." Beaconsfield stared at the ceiling briefly. "Picture the scene, Potter. You're on Platform 9 3/4, recruiting for the house of ambition, and you spy a lad not just carrying his books in alphabetical order – that's a Ravenclaw, not just with an organiser on top of the stack – that's Hufflepuff, but with his own clipboard. Made for Slytherin, that Weasley. Weasels are just snakes with fur, you know.
"Oh well, dum vivimus vivamus and all that." He set Clive atop the night table. "So, Potter: what on earth happened to your picture album? Did you dream you were eating a picture album and wake to horror?"
Harry blinked. "You noticed?"
"'course I noticed. I like to keep things in order, I notice when they aren't."
"It was chewed on by a rat."
"Hah!" said Beaconsfield. "Give it here. It was a rat that cost me Percy Weasley, perhaps I shall have my symbolic revenge at last."
"What, you were attacked by Scabbers?" said Harry, and hesitantly allowed the prefect to take the album.
"I didn't get the rodent's name," said Beaconsfield, taking one of the pictures out of the album with one hand and silently flicking a lumos from his odd wand with the other. "I was introducing myself on the Hogwarts Express and the thing went straight for my tie. Matters escalated." He examined the back of the photo by the orangey-white light from his wand, and then began systematically checking the others. "Shame about that tie. I mean, reparo fixed the bite-marks but I from then on I knew it'd been peed on."
"What are you doing?" asked Harry, since the prefect was obviously more interested in small print on the back than the pictures themselves.
"Fun fact, Potter — as a toddler I chewed up my baby pictures. I assume because I have excellent taste.
"My parents are members of the Church of the Endlessly Repeated Anecdote, but the salient bit for the muggle-raised is, wizard photography captures character, and the character is in the whole picture. It's how the subjects can wander out of frame and back in."
He put the picture down and patted the album cover. "All these pictures are on standard Dr Lai's ink paper — a bit of multiplicative transfiguration to restore the missing section and the image should just fill in." He twirled his bamboo wand and peered at Harry over steel-rimmed spectacles. "Want me to give it a shot? I did an Outstanding on my Transfiguration O.W.L."
{ Rupert, I need a time-out, } said Harry urgently.
#
[freeze frame]
Very useful, time to think. A luxury for some people.
{ How do you do this? }
I don't know, magic? Overclocking? And in case you were wondering, you're watching machination with the sides off and labeled arrows on everything.
{ So I am being manipulated. }
But in the nicest possible way.
{ He'll fix my album, but only because he wants something in return. }
What he wants is you in his house making things better by your mere presence.
{ I don't want to be a pet. }
Mmm. Do you remember — of course you remember,let me start this over as a hypothetical: You're in a zoo, talking to a snake who's trapped behind safety glass, and the snake wants to escape. Do you help it escape?
{ Er. Probably not... }
But you actually did do, once.
{ Accidentally! }
Which is to say without considering everyone involved in the transaction. Snake happy, Dudley terrified, Harry happy, all good. Hungry snake heading straight for zoo's supply of runny-nosed lost children weeping at Information Desk, not so good.
Now don't take my word without doubting it, it's unscientific, but I think you're looking at someone who tries very hard to line up interests properly. And I'm pretty sure I know that if you don't go looking for the good you'll see only the bad.
It's your school — what kind of Slytherin prefects do you want it to have? What kind of prefect are you really looking at?
#
"Why do you have a bamboo wand?" asked Harry.
Beaconsfield stopped twirling it. "You've got an Ollivander, right?"
"How'd you guess?"
"Nobody seems to know what your wand core is. If you'd gone to Yards by the Yard they'd have spilled the beans by now—"
Yard's an old word for twig, supplied the Rupert. Probably wizardy slang.
"— and half the wizarding world would be blithering about why Potter's got a core of dragon fewmets or whatever, but Ollivander's discreet, Did he say something about the wand choosing the wizard?"
"Yeah."
"Well, not everybody has access to Ollivander's. Or even Yards by the Yard. So they grab a hazel branch, use an old family wand, or —" he flipped his wand and caught it — "take the D-I-Y approach.
"Sweetie here is a multicore screw-top. Made her myself. I like to explore alternatives, see what works. Diversity in combination, multum in parvo, e pluribus unum sort of thing. Bamboo because bamboo is hollow." He undid the wand's base end carefully and exposed a liquid-filled interior. "My wand core is currently apple and pear seeds in olive oil. Plus orange pips."
There was indeed one lone orange pip floating at the top.
Ha! said the Rupert. Oil for troubled waters, bamboo for building bridges, apples and pears meaning stairs as in there are no shortcuts to the top, plus planting seeds for the future.
"...Really?" said Harry, mostly to the Rupert.
Beaconsfield screwed the wand closed again. "Really." Beaconsfield pointed his lumos at Harry's tie. It was steady, bright, and orangey-white. (The lumos, not the tie — which, Harry simultaneously remembered and noticed, had its red-and-gold side out.)
"Won't win me any duels, Sweetie," said Beaconsfield, "but the trick is to avoid the duel in the first place."
"What was it before apple and pear seeds?" asked Harry.
"Technically," said Beaconsfield, staring into his lumos before switching it off, "hazelnut paste and chocolate syrup. That was Tim's idea of a joke, but it worked surprisingly well..."
Harry fought down a snort...
#
"Oh, that's interesting," said Beaconsfield a bit later. "Snape's in the background of this one."
"He is?"
"There, see? Lurking."
"Huh," said Harry. "Never noticed that before."
"He's a prize lurker, Snape. He was probably behind someone. Sneaks up on people. Even snuck up on me, yesterday. Not a symptom of him, then a sudden voice in my ear saying 'hallows, you young blot on the landscape'."
"...what's he got against you, exactly?"
"It's going to sound weird."
"Okay."
"Other than lack of enthusiasm, he hates people who sit around. He's a peripatetic, I'm a parker. Pay attention to him, he's always sweeping about. Whereas me, I wouldn't even be at Hogwarts if not for people sitting in chairs. It's probably genetic."
"Really?" said Harry. "How'd that happen?"
"Hundred and fifty years ago. Ish. Big fuss over whether Hogwarts should break up into separate schools — one witches, one wizards, and never the twain shall meet. Protests in the Ministry, fill up the lobby and get a group photo taken for the Daily Prophet type of thing.
"And great-grandma Rhianna —" he indicated Clive with his wand — "hooray for Hufflepuffs, she says, huh, this show up for a day with a thousand people stuff, that's not the way to do it. She got her thousand and divvied them up into groups of sixteen and tied up all the Ministry's public availability time for three months straight. Co-education continues to this day. And since there was a Beaconsfield sitting across the Ministry desk from her at the right time, eventually I made my indirect appearance."
He snapped his fingers. "—Oh, speaking of non-co-ed schools, you asked about the bust of Aristoxenus. The Ravenclaws pinched it from Beauxbatons in 1856, back when there was inter-school quidditch. It's been changing hands ever since. Ravenclaw stole it to show they were clever, we stole it from Ravenclaw because stealing is wrong and they're not as clever as they think, Gryffindor stole it from us because Gryffindor, Hufflepuff stole it from Gryffindor because nobody was expecting that, and so on.
"It's the kind of great and quiet school tradition that I worry about losing."
"Didn't Beauxbatons notice it missing?"
"I assume so, they stole it back twice." Beaconsfield repaired another picture, "Snape again? —Actually they may have stolen it from us to begin with, there's an empty pedestal off in a corner of the library with a pale spot of the right shape..."
He repaired the last picture. "There you go, all done."
"Thank you," said Harry.
The clock in the common room started to strike ten, echoed distantly by the bell in the clock tower.
"Spink!" said Beaconsfield. "My world may be going down in flames but I've still got quidditch pools to run. —Talking of quidditch, where will you be taking in the match? We've got Radio Free Malfoy now, you know. Flaunting their wealth but I don't care. Omniphonic, it's like being in the middle of the pitch."
Harry?
{ I don't mind. Anybody with a wand full of Nutella can't be all bad... }
The Rupert quietly reached up and turned the tie around to the green and silver side. "Who are we supporting?"
"Tewkesbury."
"If they win the coin toss I'll listen here."
"Fair enough," said Beaconsfield.
"Incidentally," said the Rupert, "why are there no inter-school playoffs any more?"
"Called off in the late Seventies — they weren't safe. Never reinstated."
"Why don't we start a petition to bring them back?"
{ That sounds good to me, } said Harry. { Everybody else went to Provence, I got stuck at Mrs Figg's. }
"Just to be pedantic," said Beaconfield, "and I was nearly a Ravenclaw — petitions in general aren't nearly as effective as filling up chairs, but there are rumblings about a new Potions-book series. Apparently the ubiquitous Professor Snape has been filling a file cabinet with notes for ten years, and someone's well-placed signature may have been instrumental in budging them loose..."
#
Eventually Harry eventually made his way upstairs and out into the sun to get some air.
And, he vaguely thought, if sun and air were the idea, why not get as much as possible? Six weeks of basic flying lessons had ended in October, with a written exam —
Q: What is the normal cruising altitude for a broom and why?
A: 300 meters, to allow five seconds to cast wingardium leviosa in the event your broom's flight charm fails.
(Harry'd gotten a bonus point for knowing the actual reason for this rule, which he'd picked up from the "Crashes We Have Crawled From" column in one of Q.C. Flint's Bludger newsletters: terminal velocity of a plummeting broomist was 56 meters per second.)
— but the school brooms were available on Saturday mornings for anyone who wanted to risk them for additional practice, and one brisk walk around the castle later Harry found them laid out in neat rows on the quidditch field, with Madam Hooch inspecting them for flight-worthiness. When she realised who was walking up she raised an eyebrow.
"Don't you get enough broom time already, Mr Potter?" she said.
"Quidditch practice is in the dark, Ma'am," said Harry. "I've never been on a broom before noon!"
#
Bluebottle Quick Summary
Acceleration: 2/10
Power: 3/10
Handling: 2/10
Braking: 10/10
Comfort: 11/10
Our View: Take the cardboard and string it comes wrapped in, transfigure them into a kite, and fly that.
Note: includes self-righting charm and sink-trap charm for small dropped objects.
— Which Broomstick, April 1985
#
It was an interesting broom, the Bluebottle; Harry rather liked it. It was a challenge.
Where the Cleansweep 6 went where you pointed it, the Bluebottle had to be pointed well ahead of where you wanted to go, and the difference between those two points was a complex variable, and if you needed to get there at speed you had to store energy in the bristles on the downswings well in advance of needing it, and you needed to know you would need it in advance well in advance of knowing because it leaked out if you didn't use it promptly...
...all of which came intuitively to a natural flier. You didn't do the formal math for it, it would take too long, you fobbed it off on your crunching unconscious.
And so Harry slalomed the quidditch hoops while the Rupert gibbered quietly in absolute terror because some things are scarier when you're just along for the ride.
Harry shot through the third hoop and into an upward spiral, goosed the bristles and the ground fell away like it had been dropped.
Up into the white and blue and past the low-hanging white until there was just blue.
He looked down.
Would you mind not doing that? said the Rupert.
Harry looked up again, and saw, far above, a little pink dot. That was interesting, so he aimed for it. It grew into a larger dot, and then he was arcing up and over it, and found that he had just passed a a pink helium balloon, free for the taking. He spiraled around to try for it...
...and totally whiffed his attempt at grabbing the string because unlike the Golden Snitch it made no attempt to escape. Different problems, different solutions.
So he did something different, and parked.
Once decelerated to a relative stop alongside the balloon all he had to do was reach out and take it.
He put on the broom's parking brake, wrapped the balloon string around his left hand, and looked down.
And down.
And down.
The castle didn't look like a play-set. The students on the grounds and in the Quad and courtyard didn't look like ants, They were all simply the correct size for being a chasmically long way down.
He read the Bluebottle's altimeter charm.
"Woo," said Harry Potter, almost under his breath.
Some people would have been scared, but flyers know heights aren't dangerous, it's the ground that can be a problem.
Harry sat back on the ample cushioning charm and took in a bit of bird's-eye existence.
Clouds below feet, sun above head, blue sky all around, pink helium balloon...
Yeah...
...this'll do.
He shifted his weight and leaned over for another look down at the very big, very far away castle.
Home...wasn't what he thought when he saw it, but he felt it, and when he did, something bubbled up, something else he hadn't strictly been thinking about, an unexpected idea.
The unexpected idea overbalanced him to the point that he did an inadvertent rotational 360, and then had to do another more advertent rotational 360 to retrieve the Slytherin Beanie of Shame, but when he was settled upright and solid again he found that he was, this time consciously, thinking something new.
"Hey, Rupert?"
(—Triangle, really?)
"What?"
Sorry — just doing some nattering, pay it no mind, thinking about love and monsters. what's up?
Harry rewound the balloon string around his fingers.
"I've got a wand," he said. "Cos I'm a wizard and that. And a wand's got an inside and an outside. Cos that's how you get the right fit to the wizard, with the right outside and the right inside...
"So...why doesn't Hogwarts work like that?
"There's majors and minors in uni, why can't Hogwarts have major and minor houses?
"I mean, Hermione's not getting on in her dormitory, but if she was a minor Ravenclaw she could go crash on their couch until things work out. Everybody would have somewhere to go if where they were wasn't working out. Home away from home."
Home away from home makes sense to me.
"So...you remember you told Professor Dumbledore you might write him a letter about something."
Left the door open for it. I think I've gotten a bead on things since then, though.
"Well, could you write him with my idea?"
I think you're qualified to write your own letters there. Home away from home, just write that, Harry, plain and simple, you don't need help from me.
"But you've got more words in your head. And he might be expecting something a bit more fizzy from me, since he's talked to you."
...yeah, going to need to do something about that...
...well, okay, you write the draft, I'll give it a polish. Something about the big picture and the detail work, and how they're both important. Major and minor arcana, that should go down well.
"Hah," said Harry. "Cool."
He reached up and flicked the propeller on the Beanie of Shame, and something else clicked.
A grin slowly bloomed on his face, the slightly evil grin of someone who had just remembered he knew wingardium leviosa.
"Um, what was that last bit, Rupert?" he said, and quietly checked the altimeter again.
...go down well?
"That's what I thought you said." He did a little calculation in his head. "Hey, um, Rupert?"
Yes?
"This hat of yours."
(Wand hand on broom...)
What about it?
"It's your hat, you know."
(Feet firmly on footrests...)
Yeah, my hat...okay...so...?
"So..." said Harry, "you'd..."
(Angle of descent ninety degrees...)
"...better hang on to it!"
(Cut broom's flight charm
and drop
like
a
r
o
c
k
.
.
.
)
GERONIMO!
– Harry Potter
