My dear reviewers, your thoughtfulness lifts my day. Really. I love everyone who's taken time to give some input, and I even love all you little lurkers who are too busy--hell, we've all been there, haven't we? Sadly, school starts tomorrow, bright and early, but I don't really think that'll affect this story much because I have about thirty more chapters written up, and the latest ones are quite long compared to the beginning.

Compared to this chapter too, sorry it's so short. Oh, and in other news, I got my first sort of flame! It's delightful--an author I like very much once wrote that a story isn't good till it gets its first flame. It was only half a flame, so I can be satisfied that the story's at least half-good so far.

Oh, and Ward, my good fellow, if you ever come around again, um, I guess I should defend my viewpoint? Harry's not much of a nice person in this. He's not busy avenging his dead parents. He's not the focus of the entire school/wizarding world. His life, as far as he knows, is not in any special danger. He can act like a regular sneaky little teenager. (No matter how I put this sort of thing, it always sounds like excuses.)

There we are. Enjoy the chapter! Wish for my school to flood or something...

Chapter Twenty-Three: Hurting Flies

Harry checked the time on the wall clock. Ten minutes till midnight. Malfoy was already nodding off in the hard, green armchair in front of him. Harry frowned: this wouldn't do. He gave a loud cough, and the other boy jerked awake.

"Hrm?" Malfoy murmured. "What…oh…nlffg."

Harry grinned. "Sleepy?"

"Ye..yeah." Malfoy yawned and stretched. "Guess I dozed off, then. I'm going to bed. You coming?" he asked Harry as he stood and headed for the dormitory. Harry shook his head.

"Going to work a little more on this Potions essay," Harry said with a smoothness in his voice that he found came easier and easier as time went by. Malfoy shrugged and turned, closing the door behind him, and Harry suppressed the guilt he felt for lying to his friend and for not feeling too badly about it afterwards. In place of this, elation filled him at finally having the Common Room, cold and unwelcome as it was, to himself.

Harry pulled the shabby black diary out of his bag. "Hello, Tom," he wrote.

"Hello, Harry. How are you?"

This was the part that astounded Harry: despite this memory—this person?—being trapped in a diary for fifty years, it never seemed to be concerned with itself, hadn't yet bombarded him with questions of the present. Instead it asked, nice as you please, how he was doing.

Harry couldn't help but be charmed.

"I'm fine. It's late though, I just managed to send my friend off to bed."

"He doesn't know about me, then?"

"I told him you didn't work. I don't think he'd trust a talking book."

The diary gave off an impression of light laughter. "I'm only bits of paper. I don't think I could hurt a fly."

Harry smirked slightly. "Not unless I clapped you shut, no."

"It seems more like you'd be the one to blame, then."

Harry paused. This line from Tom niggled at his mind, as if he were talking of something much more important than hurting flies. In this pause, he received something the diary had never given him: an order.

"Tell me more about your friends."

Harry thought, and finally wrote down, "My best friend—he's the one I was talking about before—his name's Draco."

"Strange name. He isn't from an English family, is he?" Tom asked.

Harry pondered. "Er, I don't know much about the Malfoys. They might be French."

"Malfoys? Your best friend is a Malfoy?"

"Yes."

"I heard of them when I was at school; very old wizarding family, aren't they?"

At this Harry frowned. From what Riddle had told him that first, long night, he'd been an orphan and had no knowledge of the magical world before he'd been chosen for Hogwarts (how strange that must have felt, Harry wondered). It didn't seem like he'd had much access to wizarding ancestries. But Tom was no fool, Harry decided, and could probably soak in information around him like a sponge. Not to mention that the diary had been sent by Malfoy's own father who may well have known its secret…but then, why would Tom even bother to ask?

Confused, he simply wrote, "Yes, they go pretty far back."

"Well, go on, Harry, don't deprive me. Tell me more."

And so Harry easily lost himself in the diary's charming, if obscure, allure, proceeding to tell Tom all about his friendship with Malfoy and the other boys in Slytherin. The topic branched onto Quidditch, then prefect duty, before Harry decided to call it a night.

Still, even as he lay with his cheek pressed to his pillow, guilt for keeping things from Malfoy and an inexplicable fear of what Tom had said about the fly hung about him like a heavy mist.

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