Chapter 9: H
He couldn't sleep.
Even after the talks with Luna and Nearly Headless Nick back at Hogwarts, he had no closure.
Or rather he was struggling for closure.
In his heart of hearts he knew that he wasn't responsible for Sirius' death, but his mind still refused to accept it.
To him it all boiled down to the fact that he should have concentrated on his Occlumency better.
He should have listened to Hermione. She had never steered him wrong till date and yet he had ignored her.
Granted, he had followed her instructions and explored every possible avenue before setting off.
But he still felt that he could have done things better.
Hindsight was always perfect, wasn't it?
His thoughts came to dwell on Occlumency, and with that on the one person who was supposed to have helped him through it.
And yet it was the one person who in his opinion had only made it worse.
Now, more than ever, he hated Severus Snape.
To him, Snape had never qualified for the honorific of Professor. To him, a Professor was one who taught. Not one who treated his students with absolute contempt on the basis of an old school rivalry. Not one who was never going to let go of the past and see things as they were instead of viewing them through his own set of tinted glasses.
Snape could have told him something, anything really, that he would look into the problem.
But all that had been said by that vile excuse of a human being was that if he wanted gibberish spoken to him, he would ask it.
Not a reply to show that the message within had been understood and would be attended to.
And what had all that resulted in?
A bizarre plan to get rid of Umbridge, at least temporarily.
A half-baked plan to travel to the Ministry in London by Thestrals in the late evening.
And the silliest of them all - the plan of six school children taking on Voldemort and his finest.
It had very nearly been the end of them all.
He had seen how affected Ron had become when the brains attacked him.
He had had one heart-stopping moment as he saw Luna crumple and fall to the ground.
He had had an even bigger nerve racking moment when he saw Hermione go down to the silent purple curse cast by Dolohov.
And finally in the end, he had seen Sirius fall through the Veil.
Tears streamed down his eyes as he remembered how Remus had to restrain him from following Sirius through that archway. The reason that was conveyed to him later on. That a trip through the Veil meant instant death.
He shuddered involuntarily as he imagined each of his friends from that night's adventures not making it through the night. He wasn't naive enough to think that they would have survived for any longer and it caused a fresh round of shudders and tears. He knew that if he had lost even one of them, he would have gone pretty much insane.
His thoughts came to dwell on the archway itself. He didn't understand how a portal that stood in the middle of the dais could be death's agent. Was the Veil discovered? Was it invented? If it was the former, how did people know that falling through it meant that you ceased existing? If it was invented, then who would be vile enough to invent such a thing? And for what purpose was it invented?
In either case, why was it kept on the dais where there was a great possibility that anyone could fall through it accidentally.
It seemed that the wizarding world lacked basic common sense.
And that rerouted his thoughts in a different direction.
For one whole bloody year, the Ministry had slandered him and the Ministry had persecuted him. All because they did not want to face reality, when there were overwhelming signs that pointed to the very fact. When they should have taken action against Voldemort and should have nipped the problem in the bud, they gave him one whole year to organize his cause. They buried their heads in the sand like ostriches and wished the problem away, not doing a single thing about it.
That last statement wasn't strictly true, Harry thought. They did do something about it.
They went after the only two voices that kept repeating that Voldemort was back.
Idly Harry wondered if he could sue the Ministry for libel, defamation and assassination of character. Not that he wanted to profit off it, but to let the bloody idiots know that they had messed up big time.
Oh, how he wanted to go after Cornelius Fudge and make sure Fudge got his comeuppance.
He took a deep breath and let it out. The rational part of his brain, which spoke to him in Hermione's voice, told him that doing such a thing would only cause the faction against Voldemort to be splintered even further. It would hand an even bigger advantage to Voldemort, something that Harry wanted to avoid at all costs.
Harry had no doubts that Fudge's time in office was limited. Now that there was irrefutable proof that Voldemort was indeed back and that Dumbleddore and he had indeed been telling the truth, he had no doubt that the wizarding population would turn its collective ire on Fudge and would bay for his head, while proclaiming the Headmaster and himself to be the heroes and the champions of the light and all such drivel.
The Headmaster. Albus Dumbledore.
Harry felt a twinge of shame as he remembered his reactions in the Headmaster's office and his stoicism through the havoc that Harry caused. He really needed to have better control of his emotions. And it was something that he should have been doing for a while now, but didn't seem to have had any control over.
He remembered Dumbledore telling him about the prophecy and Harry's shock on hearing it and being told that he was destined to meet Voldemort in battle and possibly defeat him.
And the supposed power that he, Harry, had over Voldemort would be the power of love.
The shock of the events of the evening and that from the prophecy had caused him to sit still when the Headmaster had started mentioning the details. Knowing Harry, Dumbledore had urged him to not withhold the information from his closest friends, but to instead share the burden with them as he would need all the help and support that he could possibly get.
Harry had said nothing, but just nodded absent-mindedly.
And had been forced to return to the Dursleys.
That was another topic he did not want to think about.
Instead he concentrated on what Dumbledore had told him and wanted to examine the whole episode in greater detail.
He wished he had a pensieve like the Headmaster's. The first time Dumbledore had mentioned it, he hadn't been able to understand the feeling of having too many thoughts in his head and wanting to separate them out. But now he could understand, and now more than ever he wanted a pensieve and a couple of vials.
He would be able to relive the limited time he had with Sirius.
He would be able to look at things more objectively and make more sense of things.
Even as these new thoughts whirled about in his head, new questions also arose that he definitely wanted answers to.
But this time round he wanted to approach it in a more systematic manner.
The Dursleys had not locked up his trunk this time round. It wasn't out of compassion or anything, but more from a practical standpoint.
With the fifth year over, the Dursleys realized that the boy could now leave school and not have his wand snapped. While there was still some restriction on what he could and couldn't do, the punishment would be a lot less severe than the previous years.
And they knew if they pushed too far, the boy could use magic on them and they would be powerless.
The trunk, was in typical Harry style disorganized, with everything all over the place. He rummaged through the mess looking for one particular item. Something that he had never used, but had tried to keep as safe as possible knowing that a time might come in the future when it would prove to be useful.
He hand brushed against a rather sharp object and he jerked his hand out of the trunk, only to see a long cut on his forefinger. Thankfully though, the cut didn't seem to be too deep. While he could have used his wand to heal, Harry decided to do it the ordinary way (there was no point testing the boundaries of the restrictions on the usage of magic).
It took him some time, wanting to be as thorough as possible in cleaning and ensuring that nothing had gotten into the finger (while the trunk was disorganized, he always knew the kind of stuff that he had within and so knew that it was highly unlikely that there would be anything that could enter into his finger, but hey, the new Harry from the post Sirius episode was going to be more cautious than before), he returned to his search. Grabbing a pair of gloves from his trunk, he put them on this time round before plunging into the depths of his trunk in his search.
He managed to locate the item that had caused the cut and he very nearly dropped the very same object.
It was the communication mirror that Sirius had given him.
A fresh round of tears streamed down his face once again as he realized that had he remembered and used this in the first place, then the whole Ministry fiasco could have been avoided.
The flow of tears though was suddenly stopped as a rather outlandish idea crept into his brain.
Gripping the mirror extremely tightly, and bringing it as close as possible to his face, he whispered his godfather's name.
And waited.
He had heard Remus remark once that Sirius carried the mirror everywhere so that he would be reachable to Harry any time he needed.
And Harry needed him now more than ever before.
And waited.
He knew that those who were no longer in this plane of existence could not be reached by ordinary or conventional means. But then again, the mirrors had been developed by the Marauders and were unconventional themselves. There must be no reason for it to not work.
And waited.
Pain and gloom that had temporarily been kept at bay by hope now returned, at twice its original strength as hope was forced to acknowledge defeat and make a hasty retreat.
Anger joined the mix of emotions and Harry very nearly, in a moment of utter rage, threw the mirror against the wall. Only the rational part of his brain, which continued to speak in Hermione's voice, told him that doing such a thing would be stupid and it would be something he would regret later on.
And so he held on to the mirror. Still gripping it tightly as emotions that he had kept suppressed for a period of time came bursting out. Again, not wanting to take a chance with using magic (for the Silencio charm), he turned willed himself to not make a sound as he let the tears pour on to the floor.
A part of his mind warned him that his uncle and aunt wouldn't be too happy to see water stains on the floor, but the larger part of his brain simply overrode that. At the moment nothing mattered to him.
Finally, the tears subsided and Harry took a deep breath once again so that he could focus on what he had originally wanted to do.
He pulled out the planner, the one Hermione had given him a couple of years ago and the one that would magically shout "if you have dotted your i's and crossed your t's, then you are free to be". He had never felt the need to use it when it was first given to him, but he felt that now was as good a time as ever that he use it.
Opting for a conventional pen instead of that painful instrument that he had to use for school work, he opened the book to the first couple of pages and began to write his thoughts and the questions that he had.
He didn't filter them, just wrote them down as they came.
Actually, that wasn't true.
Among the list of questions that he had, the one on why the Chudley Cannons always managed to finish last in a season, while a good question and probably a difficult one as well, was perhaps not best suited to the task on hand.
And so focusing on pointers and questions relevant to what he had learned over the years, he began to write.
He contemplated writing down the prophecy, for he was sure that Hermione and Ron (well, Hermione mainly) would want to read it and analyse every single word. However, he also knew that Dumbledore had deliberately kept the knowledge of the prophecy and its contents in its entirety away from public eye in general and Voldemort in particular for a reason.
It would be sheer madness then to write it down some place where it could be easily discovered. But then again, if he could do something like the Marauders Map, then perhaps he could hide the whole thing up.
In fact, he was going to talk to Remus (while Hermione was around, definitely!) to find out how they managed to put those charms on the Map.
1. Why did Dumbledore not let me know beforehand about this connection till after the Department of Mysteries disaster?
2. How accurate are these prophecies? I know Trelawney got one spot on the day I met Sirius and when Wormtail escaped, but that was a rather straightforward one. This prophecy is vague.
3. Are we looking at the wording of the prophecy correctly? How did Dumbledore come to the conclusion that power of love was the one that I had and Voldemort did not?
4. How did I survive the Killing Curse? Since there was nobody but me at the site (as both Dumbledore and Hagrid claimed), then how did Dumbledore come to the conclusion that he did?
5. How did Voldemort get hold of his old wand?
6. Why does Dumbledore trust Snape so much?
On and on, Harry wrote till he had about two dozen questions, most of it focusing on the actions of Dumbledore, the character of Snape and the prowess of Voldemeort
That was the easy part. Now he had to get the answers.
And he knew that getting those, particularly from Dumbledore, was going to be an extremely hard task.
Perhaps Hermione would have a solution for the same. She always seemed to be the one who had practical and feasible ideas.
With a start, Harry realized that he had thought of Hermione a lot over the last couple of days. He realized that he depended on her intelligence to carry the trio through, especially when faced with difficult situations. Granted, she had a tendency to panic at times, but those had become fewer and fewer over the course of their adventures over the years.
Although he knew that Hermione would never abandon him, even if he did seem to be a marked man now, a part of him was absolutely terrified that she would and that he would be on his own. He knew that he wouldn't be able to survive without her (while it may have sounded cheesy to his ears, Harry was sure that he meant it in the literal sense and not in the romantic sense the line was often associated with) and it would take him a very long time for him to rebound from that loss.
His thoughts then shifted towards the third member of the trio, the one who he had often seen as his brother - Ron Weasley. The relationship between them had never really gone back to where they were before the start of the fourth year. While Ron might not have realized that, Harry had. In fact it was Harry who had been deliberately keeping Ron at an arm's length away from the original level of friendship that they had.
Ron's lack of trust in him when he refused to believe that Harry had not put his name into the Goblet had broken something within Harry, something that he wasn't sure would ever get healed properly. The pain that he had felt on being abandoned by the one he thought of his brother was too much to bear, and in order to prevent such a situation from ever happening again, Harry did the only thing he could think of - keeping Ron at a distance.
True, Ron had stood by his side this year the entire time and had tried to protect Harry as much as possible using his Prefect status. While Harry was extremely grateful to Ron for that, it still didn't dim the fear within - when Mount Weasley would erupt again and burn everything around him.
He knew it wasn't fair to Ron, but he reasoned to himself that Ron hadn't been fair to him as well. While it wasn't tit for tat, it was a defensive mechanism that had been ingrained into him from his younger days.
In contrast though, Hermione had always stood by him, come rain or sunshine. She had brushed aside insults and taunts and all the nonsense after the Skeeter article and had never once wavered in her support of Harry.
And though, till date Harry had ended up taking Ron's side in the arguments between Ron and Hermione, he knew that he wouldn't do that in the future.
Hermione had begun to mean too much to him.
Startled, he wondered where these feelings were coming from. The whole thing seemed new to him. He never seemed to have felt anything like this when he thought of Cho. He supposed he had had a crush on her, mainly because of her looks and the fact that she was a decent Quidditch player. But apart from theat he hardly knew her, not even the couple of times that he had gone out with her had yielded him any more common ground between the two of them.
No what he felt for Cho was quite simply just a crush.
What he felt for Hermione though was something stronger, though he had no idea what to label it as. And that scared him.
Wanting to change that line of thought, Harry shook his head hoping that the movement would dispel that thread. He thought about the other boys in his dorm, and posited the question on who he could trust.
Thankfully for him there were only a few guys in his year in Gryffindor and it hopefully wouldn't take too long to work through it. He was sure he had already made up his mind, but he still decided to go through the exercise to ensure that he didn't miss anything and it was something else that could occupy his mind and concentration for a bit.
Seamus, he had always liked the chap, but over the past year he had been disappointed in him. He trusted the articles in The Daily Prophet and what his mother told him, and didn't seem to be capable of thinking on his own. His open questioning the first night of term had been a major sore point for Harry and the cold war that followed was not one he would forget in a hurry.
No, while Seamus maybe a true Gryffindor, he still needed to be able to think for himself. Till then Harry doubted he would ever trust the boy more than as an acquaintance.
Dean followed Seamus' lead quite often. It didn't surprise Harry as Dean was muggle-born and just like how Harry had followed Ron for most of the time (at least in terms of information in the wizarding world), Dean had followed Seamus.
But he did have his own views and did look at things objectively, which to Harry was a good thing. In case he needed people to talk to, he would very much prefer to talk to ones that were capable of thinking clearly. He resolved to try and get to know Dean better though he sincerely hoped he wouldn't have to lean too much on Dean as it would probably make Dean and his family too a very big target.
That left for the last, but certainly not the least, especially after his fortitude at the Department of Mysteries, Mr. Neville Longbottom.
Correction, he should probably say Heir Longbottom or Scion Longbottom. For that was what Harry had learnt Neville's actual designation was.
In typical Neville fashion, he had not stated any of this, preferring to underplay his importance unlike some other person that Harry knew.
No, he would not go there. He knew where that thought would eventually lead him to.
And it was not something he was looking forward to.
He needed to focus on what he was doing now.
And that was analysing the change in Neville Longbottom.
From the timid and shy first year, to one of the most courageous and firm supporters of Harry, Neville had come a long way. He was more confident now, more assured in himself and with most of the people around him.
Granted, he still could fall back to the old Neville, especially if he encountered someone like Snape whose two favourite targets seemed to be Harry and Neville.
Other than that though, Neville had been dependable and could be trusted.
Harry sat up straighter. A new idea had just struck him, but he was unsure of how he could go about exploring it. Perhaps Hermione would know? He wasn't sure though. He knew that she knew about many things in the wizarding world, but he also knew that she didn't know many things in the wizarding world.
After all, she was a first generation witch and for her to know everything about literally another people in the short period of time that she had spent in their midst was pretty much impossible.
No, he would need to find some other source of information for this. Of course, he would bounce this idea off Hermione as well. He wanted to know her opinion and get her viewpoint and then use that to make further decisions.
He wanted to find out about his family tree and, as cliche and fantastical it may have sounded to him, he wanted to know if Potter was an old enough House that it had a list of evergreen allies as well.
He had a strong feeling that the Longbottoms and the Potters, assuming the Potters had roots stretching sufficiently far back, were often allied together.
He had no illusions that the two Houses were all the time totally for the light.
No, Harry Potter no longer believed that the world was divided into light and dark.
Or white and black.
It was all grey. The only question was, towards which side of grey did each family lean.
And he to find a way to find out.