Harry Potter
and the
Secret Prophecy
Alternate Universe Remix
fanfiction by Fox in the Stars
Chapter Thirteen
Wastepaper
"Probably Dumbledore was just worried about you, things being the way they are," Hermione guessed over breakfast; Harry and his friends were still trying to wrap their minds around the Headmaster approving Harry's loss of flying priveleges. "I mean, every year you've played Quidditch, you've been attacked by something. First year there was that bucking broom..."
"Dobby's Bludger year two, aided and abetted by Lockhart," Ron recalled. Dobby had bewitched one of the bludgers to pummel Harry mercilessly in a misguided plan to keep him from getting hurt.
"And the Dementors that wandered onto the pitch third year," Ginny added.
"Okay, I get the point," Harry grumped as he pushed his scrambled eggs around on his plate.
The morning owls were fluttering in the windows with the students' mail, and a large brown horned owl plopped down in front of Hermione with her Daily Prophet subscription. As she opened it out, Harry saw Umbridge's toad-face smiling at him from a photo, under the title "Field Minister's Report Finds Cause for Concern at Hogwarts." As if the morning weren't horrible enough...
No sooner had he settled into a scowling silence than he felt the breeze from Hedwig's wings around his head and she alighted on his shoulder with a white paper envelope in her beak. He took it and fed her a strip of bacon.
Harry turned the envelope over a few times; he had never seen anything quite like it inside Hogwarts' walls. It was smooth white Muggle paper, rather than parchment. Several of the students got letters from home on Muggle stationery, but this wasn't of that kind--it was clearly from a business and even had a glassine window in the front showing through to the printed address: "Mr. Harold Potter; Hogwarts School; Hogsmeade, Scotland." The return address was printed as well, from a "Sweepstakes Awards Clearinghouse" in Berkshire. For the first time Harry had ever seen, a student at Hogwarts was getting Muggle junk mail. "Wonderful," he grumbled.
"What is it?" Ron asked, looking over his shoulder.
"Rubbish," Harry said. "Muggle houses always get this stuff, trying to sell things or promising prizes or whatever..."
"I'll take it if you don't want it. Dad loves that kind of thing."
"I've never seen anything like that come to Hogwarts, though," Hermione said. "My parents have to send things specially through the Ministry; I don't think they let business mail through."
"Well, here it is now," Harry said. "Maybe the Dursleys submitted the address, just to hassle me..."
"I suppose they must have," she said, and turned back to her eggs and ham. "It looks odd is what I mean," she added presently, in a hushed tone. "If I were you I'd open it and see what it's about."
Harry shrugged and slit the top flap of the envelope with a butter-knife as Hedwig took off back to the owlery with another piece of bacon. Inside were all the trappings he would have expected, including a freepost reply envelope with an entry form and labels, but the letter itself, printed on cold white stock, gave him a pleasant surprise:
" Dear Mr. Potter,
"Congratulations! Your cousin signed you up for our Inane Muggle Sweepstakes Mailing List. "
At the least, it was a letter from someone who knew the word "Muggle"! Flipping over the single leaf, Harry found the signature stamped in familiar handwriting:
" S. B. Paterson "
The "Paterson" was obviously a decoy appended to the "S. B." It was a letter from Sirius! He must have gotten hold of some Muggle junk mail and used a Protean Charm on it to conceal a letter to Harry! A quick glance at the postscript even promised that Hedwig would know where to deliver the reply envelope. Certainly the ploy would have been more effective if business letters of that sort weren't such a rarity at Hogwarts, but Harry decided to trust Sirius's own caution for now and looked at the letter with delight.
"What does it say?" Ron asked him.
"It... I was right about the Dursleys," Harry said through his smile. He folded the letter so as to conceal most of it and showed it quickly to Hermione and Ron, pointing out the first paragraph. "See, it says right there."
"I, ah... I keep forgetting how childish your cousin is," Hermione said, trying to cover up.
"I'll keep this for your Dad," Harry told Ron. He stuffed the papers back in the envelope and tucked it inside his robes before it drew any more attention. By then breakfast was nearly over and he had to wolf down his eggs.
All through History of Magic, Harry felt the envelope in his pocket too keenly to listen to Professor Binns' droning, and he just scratched doodles and snatches onto his parchment to make it look as if he were taking notes. Once class ended, he took Ron and Hermione and tried to think of a private place to read Sirius's letter during the morning break. Hermione led the way and slipped Harry and Ron into the toilet where Moaning Myrtle, the ghost of a Ravenclaw girl, was bawling so loudly as to safely cover any sound they might make.
"You don't think she'll tell, do you? Myrtle, I mean." Harry tried to whisper, but he had to use his voice to be heard above her wailing.
"Well, she didn't when we were brewing potions in here second year," Ron said.
Hermione shut them into a corner stall and pulled the boys conspiratorially close. "I don't think ghosts can snitch, at least not unless they're asked or they're responding to a living person somehow. Those are the rules or some such thing, like how they're not allowed to actually haunt people..."
She had tried to say it quietly, only to Harry and Ron, but Myrtle must have heard as she started howling louder still.
Reassured, Harry pulled Sirius's letter out of his robes and opened it up.
" Dear Mr. Potter,
"Congratulations! Your cousin has signed you up for our Inane Muggle Sweepstakes Mailing List. "
"So is that an inane list for Muggles or a list for Muggles who are inane?" Ron wondered.
" I understand it may be awkward for you to receive mail of this kind at your current address, but please bear with us as we try our best. As for myself, some of my associates were quite disturbed by comments made at the train station and I have since been unable to leave the office. Sadly, this means that I will be unable to meet you in person as discussed. "
"Lucius Malfoy," Harry surmised from Sirius's semi-enciphered message. "He must have recognised Sirius at the station, and they're keeping him laying low at the house..."
"I thought that guard dog' crack was fishy," Ron agreed.
"So no Hogsmeade visits," Harry translated further.
"That's probably better," Hermione said sadly.
" My dear friend is leaving on a business trip soon. I hope to accompany him as I am familiar to the clients he will be working with, and communication facilities at that location are more favorable. However, our supervisor seems resistant to the idea.
" In general, however, business remains good. The political climate for our work remains hostile, but we have managed to keep our full staff thus far. Our current major project, as you know, is classified, and thus let me simply say that it continues without incident. "
"Those are good things to hear," Hermione said. "The thing they're guarding is still safe, and no one's been hurt."
"That has to mean Lupin," Ron said, pointing to the words "my dear friend." "I wonder where he'll be off to?"
The final paragraph continued onto the back of the page:
" I will do my best to keep you informed about the status of your sweepstakes entry and other pertinent matters. Please use the enclosed envelope to contact me if you have any questions or concerns. Until then, good luck in your studies. I understand the political climate is problematic for you as well, but such things can change very rapidly as circumstances change, so please bear with the situation and do your best. Your efforts will pay off in due time.
" Yours sincerely,
" S. B. Paterson
" Enclosures
" P. S. : If you wish to send a reply, simply give the enclosed envelope to the courier who delivered it. She will know what to do. "
"I'll write him back tonight," Harry said, putting the letter back in his robe-pocket.
"We'd better get to class," Hermione said. She left the stall first and signaled Harry and Ron that the way was clear before the three of them hurried out of the bathroom and headed for Flitwick's class.
Thankfully it was Sirius's letter and not the meeting with Umbridge that set the tone for the week, although Harry certainly mourned the loss of his flying privelege and had trouble taking much joy in Potions being cancelled, despite it being his least favorite class. At least it was usually his least favorite class; this term Defense with Umbridge was making it a tight race for that title.
At the end of Charms, Hermione and Neville went to Prof. Flitwick as they had planned and broached the idea of reviving the school Duelling League. Flitwick seemed cautious, but the Gryffindors had Charms in that slot again both Wednesday and Thursday, and the two Prefects discussed it with him further. It turned out his hesitation was more due to regret over the old student league folding for lack of interest -- in its last two years it had only had four members, and them only a single clique of friends -- and concern about the students' seriousness, not unwillingness or fear of Umbridge taking offense. By Thursday Neville and Hermione were getting him nicely warmed to the idea, and had secured him space in that week's Hogwarts X-Press to write about his sport and gauge interest.
The comment about a clique of four students who were the last holdouts made Harry curious. Following Hermione's example, he grabbed only a quick lunch before hurrying to the Library. There he found the last school yearbook before the Student Duelling League's dissolution, looked up the club picture, and sure enough there were the Marauders. Tiny Professor Flitwick, who was already white-haired in the old photo, was holding a sword twice as tall as himself. Harry was a little surprised to see that it was Remus Lupin with the champion's trophy; James Potter teasingly tried to grab it from him, Sirius Black on his other side toyed with his ponytail when he turned to resist, and Peter Pettigrew beamed at the camera. Harry stared at Pettigrew, the traitor, for some time; the look on his chubby-yet-pointed face had the appearance of real vicarious pride, but Harry refused to read it that way and kept looking until Wormtail's smile began to seem appropriately false and smug. As time for class neared, he checked that Madam Pince wasn't watching and briefly considered removing the page from the yearbook with a Severing Charm and keeping it, but he decided not to and finally put it back on the shelf.
Above and to the right, yearbooks from more than thirty years before that one caught his eye. He stared at Nineteen Forty-Two for some time before taking it down, feeling as if under a strange compulsion, and he flipped to the Houses' sections of student portraits. In the Gryffindor pages he found a younger Hagrid, too young for whiskers but already so huge that he was squeezing himself into the frame. However, that itch in his mind had not yet been satisfied. Again he made sure no one was watching him, and he leafed through further to the Slytherin portraits. Smiling back at him from the bottom left corner of a page was Tom Riddle -- Lord Voldemort when he had been Harry's own age. The photo showed a handsome boy with shining black hair and dark, bright eyes. He clasped his musicianly hands and propped his chin engagingly on his knuckles; although his smile looked somehow insincere even within a matrix of camera-poses, it was nonetheless charming and lively. Even before his hideous new body, so Harry had heard, nearly no one had recognised this winsome face in Lord Voldemort when he appeared, and now not a trace of it was left in those horrible red eyes Harry had looked into, that serpentine skull of a face, the tall narrow frame draped thinly in waxy skin that was itself the color of bleached bones...
Picturing Voldemort now while looking at the photo of Tom Riddle gave Harry a chill and a sudden spasm in his arms that slammed the yearbook shut. Hurriedly he shoved it back onto the shelf, grabbed his bag, and left the library, rubbing at a slight irritation on his forehead.
Most of the time, however, passed more lightheartedly. During the same few days as the negotiations with Professor Flitwick, Professor Umbridge's guideline chalks informed a class of third-year Ravenclaws that they'd learn more about Defense by throwing parchment airplanes at each other than by heeding their teacher or textbook. Professor McGonagall couldn't venture to guess why that had happened. Ron discovered that predicting horrible fates for Dolores Umbridge pleased Professor Trelawney just as much as divining doom for himself. Mr. Filch turned five washrooms upside-down in search of fictitious mischief, by which time he was running out of places that could reasonably be called "the upstairs toilet." However, that seemed unlikely to stop him and certainly did nothing to improve his mood.
While it was a bitter confection for Harry, the silver lining of he and the Weasley twins' grounding was that the Gryffindor table came alive at mealtimes with talk about the Quidditch trials. Ron listened closely to all of it but wouldn't talk about any of his own intentions. Harry suspected that his friend was planning to try out but for whatever reason didn't care to say so, maybe to avoid looking like a vulture taking advantage of Harry's misfortune. Ginny wasn't at all shy, however, and her plans to try out as a reserve Chaser and Seeker took on added urgency. Seamus thought he might try his hand as a Beater. Harry knew already that he'd have to just wish his friends well before they left for the pitch, however; he couldn't bear to watch the team trials himself.
Late Thursday evening Angelina caught him in the common room where he was working on a letter for Sirius. Ginny sat beside him pasting the included stamps onto her notebook and onto the sweepstakes entry form which also had something to do with magazine subscriptions. Harry had decided to fill it in and send it back with his reply for the sake of the ruse.
"I really hate to ask you this, Harry," Angelina said, "and of course it's completely up to you, but... Since you're not allowed to fly, do you think maybe we could borrow your broom?"
"Wha?" Harry hastily covered up his parchment. Already he realised he should have anticipated this question, but he hadn't; he was totally unprepared.
"Well, you understand," Angelina said. "To the team captain it seems kind of silly just to leave a Firebolt sitting in a trunk in the dorm during games. Of course I know it's yours and I'd understand if you didn't want to lend it..."
"Well, no, I'd really rather not..." He fiddled with his quill; logically he agreed with Angelina, and he certainly didn't want to see the team come back from the first game of the year having lost to Slytherin while the Firebolt sat unused, but he couldn't bring himself to let it out of his hands.
"Yeah, I know Firebolts are super-expensive. I promise we'll be careful with it, though."
"It's not the money, just..." Just what? Harry wasn't sure.
But Ginny was. "Harry's broom was a present from somebody very special," she said. "I think it's sweet how he's so attached to it."
Angelina relented; she was the Quidditch Captain, but she was still a girl who seemed to understand things like that. "Okay. I just had to try. No hard feelings."
"No, none at all," Harry agreed.
"I'm putting you in for Delicious Meat Pies Quarterly' if that's okay," Ginny said, still fiddling with the sweepstakes stamps.
"Sure, I like meat pies." He uncovered the letter and started writing again as Angelina went up to her dorm.
Harry finished the letter that night; like Sirius, he tried to convey his news in vague and businesslike terms, couching his flying ban in talk of plane tickets before going on to hint about some friends' forays into the publishing industry and talks with a "charming" professor about a sports organisation that "Mr. Paterson" himself had once belonged to, if the sweepstakes entrant was not mistaken. Of course it frustrated him; he'd have loved to write openly about the Duelling League photo and ask if Lupin had really been the champion, but he held himself back. In the end Harry was terribly afraid both that he hadn't been sufficiently opaque and that Sirius wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it, but despite that he couldn't resist a postscript:
" P.S. : My friend Mr. W wants to know if yours is an Inane Sweepstakes for Muggles or a Sweepstakes for Inane Muggles. "
That night he slept with the sealed letter in the bottom of his pillowcase. The next morning after breakfast, being free from classes until lunch, he took the envelope to the owlery and gratefully fed Hedwig a few treats before sending her off with the bulging white envelope.
That afternoon contained one last pair of hurdles standing between Harry and the weekend. Even without Quidditch, a weekend was still a weekend, but first he had to get through Umbridge's class, and worse yet a detention with her.
The class itself was dull and would have been even duller if not for its constantly surprising pointlessness and stupidity, but this time the notion of reviving the Duelling League had given the students enough hope to simply stuff their objections and play along. Umbridge spent most of the double-length session padding up Slinkhard's first chapter with half-disguised yet heavyhanded reminders that casting unpleasant spells on other people was against the law under many circumstances.
Finally she made them all perform the humiliatingly ridiculous Guided Practice scene. Harry was paired up with Seamus and dully read off his lines expressing frustration with a rude shop clerk. According to the textbook, Seamus then tried to persuade him that hexing the offending employee would be a counterproductive response. Actually Seamus's pent-up mirth was constantly slipping and bursting through each line and leaving it in shreds. The script ended before resolution so that Harry was to make up his own final response, and despite the fact that none of Seamus's admonitions had been intelligible through his laughter, Harry thoughtfully decided not to jinx the clerk. Umbridge regarded him sharply with her beady little eyes, but at last seemed satisfied.
Ron, meanwhile, had rebuffed Lavender, gone on a murderous rampage, and blown up the shop. Upon overhearing that, Seamus lost control entirely. The teacher seemed to have very little idea how to respond to Ron's flight from the heavily-implied script, nor indeed how to deal with a student literally laughing his way through her class. She excused Seamus to use the bathroom, then faux-sweetly asked Ron and Lavender to do the Practice over again -- not even switching their roles -- and advised Ron to think more carefully this time.
On the second try he asked the clerk to marry him, and Umbridge accepted that as a successful exercise.
At last she dismissed the class for dinner, "Except for Mr. Potter; it's time for his detention." Harry remained seated as his friends filed out of the room. Ron gave him a firm pat on the shoulder, and Hermione encouragingly said "See you in the common room later." Then they left him alone with a very smug-looking Dolores Umbridge.
"Come along into the office Mr. Potter," she said in a happy sing-song voice. "I daresay we might finish our business rather quickly."
Harry hardly dared to hope for that, but he followed her into her office and again sat down in front of her meticulously neat desk.
"I at first thought that I would ask you to write lines, but since you have had a week to reflect, it would hardly be fair to punish you for something you might have thought better of already," she said, seating herself and producing a parchment from a desk drawer. She turned it right side to Harry and offered it across the desk. "If you will simply agree and sign this statement, then you can be on your way."
Harry took the parchment and read over it in silence; it was a combined retraction and confession, written in Umbridge's own mechanically regular hand. "The Undersigned" clearly stated that Voldemort's return was all a lie. Already Harry knew he couldn't sign it, but he kept reading for the sake of stalling and appearance.
... I also disavow any stated or implied challenge I may have made to the judgement of the Ministry of Magic regarding the evidence or conclusion in the death of Cedric Diggory'...
At that Harry had had quite enough, and he slapped the document down on the desk. "I'll do the lines," he said flatly.
"Well it's good to see that we haven't lost our voice, in any event," Umbridge said. She tucked the confession back into her drawer and took out a large blank parchment and a quill, which she proffered to him. "This page filled on one side will be sufficient."
It seemed too easy. He took the parchment and prepared to write, and in the moment as he awaited the teacher's instructions, he noticed the unusual design of Umbridge's quill. The upper shaft of the sheeny black feather had been cut so that the quill ended in a V shape; both the V and the wider side of the vane were edged in bright crimson, and the shaft had been dyed the same color. Since Umbridge had offered it without giving him an inkpot, he had to assume it was an Ever-Ink model.
"You will write... hem-hem!" she cleared her throat to announce it, "'I will not frighten my schoolmates with lies.'" Harry set his jaw defiantly but said nothing.
"You should be able to fit it twenty times on that parchment. Begin."
He put the nib to the parchment.
I
"--Aah!" At the very moment that he wrote the first letter, he felt a sharp twinge in his wrist beneath his writing hand. Umbridge ignored his cry. He decided that it must have been merely a shudder, and he began writing again.
will
--!!--
not
--What's going on!? Every word brought another pain, starting at his wrist and creeping up his arm. Three times couldn't just be flukes. He stared at the quill. It was writing on the parchment in blue, but there was that violent red feather shaft... The cuff of his robes fell back enough that he could see a hint of red peeking out of it, and he withdrew his other hand from the parchment and surreptitiously brushed his cuff back. There were the words in his own handwriting, scribed in fine red lines on the inside of his wrist:
I will not
"Do we have a problem, Mr. Potter?" Umbridge asked him, her voice full of poisoned honey.
"No, but..." He had said "No" reflexively, but he couldn't go on like this... He took a deep breath. "Can I use a different quill?"
"No, you may not, Mr. Potter," Umbridge said. "If you would like a different chair, however, please feel free."
His temper sparked at her sweet-voiced taunt. In that instant, he decided he wouldn't give Umbridge the slightest satisfaction. "No, this chair is just fine," he said, and began writing again with her red quill.
Harry scribbled his way across the assigned line over and over again:
I will not frighten my schoolmates with lies.
I will not frighten my schoolmates with lies.
He wrote with savage speed even as each line carved itself up from his wrist to his elbow, intent on getting through it quickly, like pulling off a plaster all at once. He paused only twice, when his arm threatened to seize up entirely. In his haste he wrote larger than he should have for the expected twenty lines, and by the time he realised it he had to squash the last few repeats rather badly, but then it was finished. With his left hand he slammed the parchment down in front of her. He lifted his bag from the floor, his right arm throbbing defiantly, and rose from his chair.
"We will remain seated until we are dismissed, Mr. Potter," Umbridge said without looking up. She was poring intently over his lines.
He flopped down in the chair with his bag in his lap.
The teacher clucked her tongue. "Tch-tch. No, no, Mr. Potter, I'm afraid this won't do at all." She turned the parchment over to show it to him, and pointed out various irregularities with the tip of her wand. "See, here the dot of the i' in lies' has wandered almost across the e', here it's much too high unless you intended a comma on the previous line, and here I can't find it at all. And those last few lines -- terribly sloppy! No, Mr. Potter, we will simply have to do better."
She was going to make him do it over?? "But you said that that one page would be enough..." he protested.
Her wand-tip twitched against the parchment. "Obliviate."
Harry jumped back from the magic word -- the same Memory Charm that Lockhart had once aimed at him -- in such a panic that he tipped over his chair. It landed with a bang, painfully knocking his head, and as he disentangled himself from it and scrambled to his feet, he desperately searched his mind for any damage between the spell and the impact. I'm Harry Potter -- my best friends are Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger -- Sirius Black is my godfather and he's innocent -- I'm in Professor Umbridge's office, she's the evil pink toad woman from the Ministry --
And then he noticed the parchment still there on the desk, still pinned under the tip of her wand. His memory of writing those lines, of the invisible knife-tip walking up his arm, was still there, fresh and intact, and indeed a quick glance told him that the marks on his arm were still there, but the lines themselves on the parchment were gone. Umbridge had cast "Obliviate" on the page, not Harry, and indeed its "memory," the information it had contained, was now gone without a trace.
Umbridge smiled broadly at him across the pristine parchment. "It would be sufficient Mr. Potter. Yes, it certainly would."
Harry looked at her smug face, then at the blank parchment. He took a deep breath, steeled himself with determination, then righted the chair and took Umbridge's quill again.
Again and again Harry filled the sheet of parchment with "I will not frighten my schoolmates with lies." With every iteration he felt himself more and more set on doing just as he was writing -- he was determined to frighten his schoolmates with the truth.
Now that he knew the game Umbridge was playing, he wrote slowly and carefully, and that invisible needle scribed its way up his arm with agonising slowness, but apparently she would settle for nothing less than her own precisely measured handwriting. No matter how hard he tried, Harry simply couldn't reproduce such a thing, and as the evening wore on and the sky outside the window blackened, he became even less able to do so. The knock on his head settled in as an intensely-aching lump. His arm throbbed, making his fingers feel swollen and clumsy around the quill. On the third line of one page, a spasm in his wrist streaked the g' in frighten' across two inches. Already that one was doomed, but already he knew better than to ask Umbridge to start the page over right away.
The week before, when Umbridge had assigned him this detention, she had said there would be no need for him to go to dinner, that he would take the meal in her office, but now she made no mention at all of food as the hours dragged by. Harry's stomach growled, but he determined that he would not under any circumstances plead with Umbridge to be fed. At least she didn't eat in front of him, and Harry vindictively thought, noting the way she filled her chair, that if she didn't eat as long as he didn't, then he was probably doing her a favor by abstaining.
The dark window was dotted with stars when Umbridge looked over one last attempt, erased it with a "tch-tch," and told Harry that "we" would simply have to try again next week at the same time. With cloying consideration, she gave him a note to show Mr. Filch in case he was caught in the hallway after hours on his way to bed. He took it, hefted his bag onto his shoulder, and left the Defense classroom at last.
As he walked back to Gryffindor Tower, he finally had a moment to himself to fully feel the misery the evening had produced. The blow against the floor drilled into his head. The lines chewed the tender underside of his forearm -- he scarcely dared to look at how bad the cuts were by now. His stomach growled so that his entire body ached with hunger. He did encounter Mrs. Norris in the hallway. By that time he was close enough to Gryffindor Tower that he crumpled Umbridge's note and threw it at her, but it missed. The old cat sniffed at it and carried it off in her mouth, every bit as condescendingly as Umbridge would have hoped.
At last he came to the portrait of the Fat Lady. "My goodness, you're looking in a state! Are you quite all right?" she asked.
"Fire or Flood or War or Strife," Harry recited, in no mood for chitchat.
"Oh, all right..." the Fat Lady sighed, and swung open.
"Harry!" Hermione called the instant he appeared in the Common Room.
"What happened? How'd it go?" Ron questioned, hurrying over to him.
Harry didn't pause, just crossed directly to the dormitory stairs. "I don't want to talk about it. I'm going on to bed."
"That bad, eh? What'd she have you do?" Ron persisted.
"I said I was going to bed, all right?? Leave me alone!" Harry snapped. He left Ron staring after him as he stormed up the stairs to his bed.
It wasn't that he really wanted to be alone, but he didn't want to answer questions, and he certainly didn't want anyone looking over his shoulder as he drew all the curtains on his bed, lit the magical lantern hanging under the canopy, and rolled back his sleeve.
I will not frighten my schoolmates with lies.
It didn't look as bad as it felt: still just red lines, although now they were darker and had an unsettling hint of glisten. The inscription didn't bleed, but in prodding experimentally he found that he could squeeze drops of blood out of it. What was he to do with it now? There weren't bandages or salve in the dormitories; for that kind of thing one went to the hospital wing, but although Madam Pomfrey was always discreet, he had no desire to show her his arm.
With nothing else to do, he put on a pair of pyjamas with long, close sleeves, climbed into bed, and put out the light. It was difficult to fall asleep, especially when the thought struck and subsequently tormented him that somewhere Lee Jordan's newspaper staff was eating mushroom pizza. He could go back downstairs and to the Transfiguration classroom to have some, but then Ron and Hermione would start interrogating him about his evening again, and he still didn't want to answer any questions.
Harry felt trapped in his bed, and he pressed his face into the pillow. He wasn't sure if he was waiting to fall asleep, or waiting for morning, or more likely waiting for the marks on his arm to disappear. He knew that they would still be there when he would somehow get up and embark on the day -- hopefully finding something to eat -- but even despite his gnawing hunger, for now he wanted to hide himself away here in bed and hide that arm until there was nothing left on it to be asked about.
to be continued in...
Chapter Fourteen: Hagrid Returns
Author's Notes on Chapter Thirteen
A request: if you like this chapter, please post a review and name one specific thing in it that you liked. If you want to say more or give your own crit, that?s great, but I realised that the "one specific thing" is a simple kind of comment I love to get, so I?d much appreciate if you would just do that.
Revisions: The version of Secret Prophecy I?m posting at this stage is open to change. Currently I?m polishing these chapters after they?ve cooled for awhile, but I don?t have a full draft of the entire story, so while this isn?t what I?d call a beta, I do foresee another round of revisions once I have a complete draft.
Nice to have worked in the fact that Myrtle exists. Still no sign of Peeves, though... ;
And I managed to briefly get lost in flashback land again with the old yearbooks, but firstly, both the pictures that were dwelt upon did do something I wanted to weave in (for use in book 6 maybe, but doesn't hurt to work it in), and also I do think that a certain fascination with the past -- particularly glimpses of loved ones in the past -- points up an important part of Harry's character (see notes on Chapter Eight for "your plot point!"). Somewhere in online fishing I stumbled across an embarassing revelation that yearbooks are generally not done in the UK, but they've been useful enough to me that they're staying here. After all just because British Muggles have better taste than that doesn't mean that British Wizards do.
I laughed myself silly writing Umbridge's class this time, particularly Ron "taking her junker" as my gamer friends might say. She really should have anticipated this...
And of course, the Cutting Quill. Kept it from canon!OotP; I've got some things I want to do with this situation. It is something I'm slightly uncomfortable with, tho, being that I'm trying to play Umbridge as evil, but evil in such a way as to at-least-maybe be a deluded attempt at heroism, so the introduction of the confession/retraction turned it into more something I could see my Umbridge doing. Saying that is ironic, though, because in ways I think my Umbridge is even more evil -- especially that bit about without warning turning "one page will be sufficient" into the Sisyphus Penmanship Test. That is just pure evil; I think Voldemort would look at that and decide that this woman is sick (a fun kind of sick, he might think, but yes, definitely sick).
Moving the impact area to Harry's forearm had a few reasons; I wanted to put it somewhere that could still adversely affect his writing hand but be more concealable was the main one, and also had to do with how my mind is understanding this magical device and what it's meant for and how it works -- how all of that relates doesn't totally make sense but it influenced the decision. While I have been known to facetiously refer to her as Dolores "Der Fuhrer" Umbridge, I swear to any and all available deities that I didn't realise the possible Nazi reference in inscribing someone's forearm until it was too late.
And a nice little angst-trip to tuck him into bed. ;;;