Harry Potter
and the
Secret Prophecy

Alternate Universe Remix
fanfiction by Fox in the Stars

Chapter Sixteen
Finding Gaps

Harry didn't let on to his friends that he had gone to see the Headmaster, least of all that Dumbledore had actually requested to be told if Umbridge caused Harry any trouble. The next evening brought another of her detentions, and when he got back to the dorm and waded through the crowd of officious housemates to go up to bed, he was very tempted to let Hermione and Ginny spoonfeed him what they'd saved from dinner.

This time, by Monday morning he was still having trouble writing with his injured arm. Snape wouldn't let Hermione take notes for him, but potions notes seemed like an exercise in futility anyway as he fell further and further behind. Then in Thursday's lab, Snape wordlessly placed in front of Harry a bottle that turned out to be an Ambidextrous Draught. He tried it in detention with Umbridge the next day, but even when he wrote with his left arm, the quill still cut the message deeper and deeper into his right.

Also thanks to Umbridge, a look at the magical hourglasses that kept the House Points totals showed Gryffindor steadily declining, but everyone agreed that Ron's weekly rampages through the cloyingly fictional world of "Guided Practice" were well worth their cost. In fact, Ginny said her boyfriend Michael Corner had laughed so hard as she regaled him with the stories that he and several other Ravenclaws had begun following suit. A glance at the Ravenclaw hourglass proved that Ginny was most likely telling the truth, and indeed everyone's totals were suffering except the Slytherins, many of whom could often be seen hanging around the Trophy Room cum High Inquisitor's Office, endearing themselves to the new power at every opportunity.

House Points, however, were the least of anyone's worries. Not only did Ginny's jingly envelope not bring any delivery in response, but many letters that students had sent home in that first checks-inception flurry got either no response, or responses that seemed strangely spotty --- and the students found themselves with no reliable way to check whether any suspected tampering was real or imagined. Before long, Hermione received a Daily Prophet with a patch of one page obviously erased. It was nestled among advertisements and probably not even a story, but even so, she was so angry that she wrote a letter to the Prophet cancelling her subscription and telling them that she refused to take a censored paper. That didn't seem to make it through the mail checks either as her papers just kept coming, and she had to tell the Prophet's owl every day to take its bundle back unpaid for.

After several days of this, however, Harry got a glimpse of the headline, snapped up the paper before Hermione could refuse it, and paid the owl himself. "Ministry Says No Connection Among Disappearances," it read. According to the story there had been four of them now, most recently a witch named Hestia Jones who had worked in the Ministry's own owlery and mailroom. Hadn't "Hestia" been the name that Mr. Weasley said the morning of Harry's hearing, the person who had told him about the sudden change of schedule just in the nick of time...? At that, Hermione admitted that cancelling her Daily Prophet subscription had been overly hasty.

Even as she relented, further down the table Parvati gave an anguished cry at finding key pages missing from her latest Owl-Post OWLs-Prep parcel.

Despite the school's haunting by the ghosts of missing mail, weeks went by with a surreal element of normalcy. Most of the professors kept covering their material with clockwork regularity and all their usual skill --- except Professor Trelawney, who was suddenly mortified at any student who saw something mean-spirited in Dolores Umbridge's future. Even all the old clubs kept meeting, since that initial Emergency Measure had had to do only with "forming" organisations; the school chapter of Save Our Snidgets was still campaigning for magical wildlife, all the Quidditch teams held practice after practice for the first series games coming in November, and the Hogwarts Junior Thespian Society --- Harry found it much easier just to call it the drama club --- was gearing up for a winter performance that its members promised would make everyone laugh at their troubles. The school newspaper with Lee Jordan at the helm continued week by week, its energy only increasing. Lee had been forced to run Ginny's staff interview with Hagrid in the same issue as Marietta's with Professor Snape in order to head off a brewing fight between the two reporters. Freelance contributions --- stories both journalistic and literary, drawings, essays, puzzles, poetry --- poured in at such a rate that only a fraction could be printed in even the expanded paper, and Lee had little time left to join in Fred and George's hijinks as usual. Harry heard him wish he had a Time Turner just to juggle homework and newspaper submissions, and heard whispers that he had already been in trouble with McGonagall about the Exertincture.

But the paper's success, on closer inspection, was running counter to the calm facade --- in it, students could air their concerns with a good deal of freedom. Each week came Colin's photographs of Umbridge's latest Educational Emergency Measures posted on the announcement board, and the Letters to the Editor dissected and railed against every one, as well as the whole Emergency situation. Where was the emergency, asked one contributor, who identified themself only as a 6th-year Hufflepuff; there had been no declaration of emergency three years ago when the Chamber of Secrets was open, none two years ago when Sirius Black the convicted murderer stalked the school and Dementors patrolled the grounds, so why now that nothing was happening? Harry could even forgive the line about Sirius when he read their last sentence: "It all makes a scary amount of sense if you listen to Harry Potter." The mood of most of the letters may have been dark, but the freedom to express those feelings and the proof that no one was alone in them made the Hex beloved and enjoyed.

Only one person in the school was displeased. Practically every time Professor McGonagall was seen outside of class, Umbridge's tuneless shrill came nipping at her heels about what she had let into that week's paper. McGonagall simply said she had been instructed by the Headmaster to take a hands-off approach and that Umbridge should discuss with him whether her requests would be in keeping with that. When the High Inquisitor attempted to confront Dumbledore about it at the Head Table one day at lunch, he offered her a lemon sherbet in reply. She was having none of it, but he persisted undeterred, and Harry had to think that Umbridge would have gotten better results by just eating the candy than what she was doing, continuing to harangue against a solid barrier of "Really, I insist. They're very good."

But there was no such barrier standing between Harry and Umbridge's quill every Friday evening. Every week's healing of the cuts had been undone before he finished a single page of lines, and the wounds grew worse and worse. By mid-October they were still badly sore from the previous detention when he went in for the next. Ever since the first time, he had refused the confession Umbridge offered him without even looking at it more than recognising it as the same one, but this week he read it through. He had hit upon it as a way of stalling, but now he couldn't help but wonder, Would it hurt anything if I signed it? It would be a lie, but the Ministry was piled so high with those already, what would one more hurt? He remembered Hermione's concerns about the quill "brainwashing" him, which the quill certainly wasn't, but could the parchment? Could it be a magical contract of some kind, with an enchantment that would force him to abide by it? But still, he couldn't keep doing this forever, and it wouldn't stop until he gave in and signed. It would be so much easier... What could it really hurt, if I just...?

He mentally slapped himself. If he couldn't let Umbridge pick a fight with Dumbledore because that would be just what she wanted, then how could he, Harry Potter, sign off on the Ministry's lies, when she would surely want that too? He found the part about Cedric again:

"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."

He read it over and over to steel his determination, at least ten times, before he finally slid it back across the desk without a word.

"Am I to understand we will be writing lines again Mr. Potter?"

He nodded.

"We will have to speak up, I don't believe I heard that."

Harry took a deep breath. "Yes, I'll do the lines." It came out as a sigh, despite his intention.

Umbridge handed him the same implements as every week before, and the instant he put the quill tip to the parchment, it sent such a bolt of agony shooting up his arm that he couldn't suppress a cry of pain. He braced himself with deep breaths and threw himself into his task.

Umbridge kept him very late; the fastest he could write was a snail's pace now and she mentioned wanting ten tries from him --- Harry had quickly lost count of the lines in front of his face, let alone the pages. He bent low and curled around the parchment like a wounded animal. He tried desperately to hold back any outward expression of his pain, but it was more than he could do, and he wept aloud as he wrote --- Umbridge made no acknowledgement of the sound. Tears fell from his nose and smeared the blue ink; it hardly mattered as by now his writing was deteriorated beyond the nursery level into illegible scratches. And yet no matter how errant the quill's marks on the parchment, its incising shadow never deviated from the course laid down in his first detention:

I will not frighten my schoolmates with lies.

When Umbridge finally dismissed Harry, his arm was in such horrible pain that it gripped his entire body and he blundered around in search of Gryffindor Tower half-blind. Filch found him and took his hall pass, and Harry was too overcome to protest as the custodian led him back to his dorm commenting brightly that "Now that's a proper detention!" It occurred to Harry to pull back his sleeve and scream at Filch to take it back, but he didn't have the energy to risk it.

When they arrived at Gryffindor Tower, Harry let his housemates pull him into the common room. He screamed as someone bared his arm --- it ran blood at the slightest touch; his face streamed tears that fogged his glasses.

"Bli' me." He heard Ron's voice hollow with shock.

Hermione seized him by his good arm. "Dear God, Harry, this is crazy! I'm going to get Madam Pomfrey!"

"No!" he howled.

"Harry, please!"

"You promised!" he sobbed. "You said you wouldn't --- you pro-ho-mi-hi-hissed!"

"Come on, mate, let's get you to bed." Ron gently but firmly guided Harry across the dumbstruck crowd in the common room and, with Neville going ahead to lead the way, half-carried Harry up the stairs.

He was still crying when they lay him in his bed, and he squeezed his eyes shut. He was vaguely aware of a small crowd having followed him up the stairs now gathering around his bed. A girl's hands lifted his glasses off his face. The tip of a wand lightly touched his forehead.

"Morpheosa." It was Hermione's voice that cut him loose from the tether of the light and his friends' shadows and voices. Harry sank down into his bed, into thick, warm blackness, as the charm put him deeply to sleep.

The deep, restful dark imperceptibly gave way to fitful dreams. Harry walked through the strange library he had seen in his sleep before --- he now felt sure that it had been several times before and once quite recently --- where the shelves were full of crystal balls rather than books, and he found himself looking down all the rows in search of his own right arm, which he knew to be missing. A talking Thestral turned into a quetzicalle to flitter along the shelves and finally into Cedric Diggory to point him to a particular spot.

"Do you want it when I find it?" Harry asked Cedric. "I'd let you have it."

"No, that's all right," Cedric replied. "You might ask Cho, though."

Harry began sifting through the indicated shelf, which was rather cluttered. Again, every crystal ball had a parchment label. One said "Edgar Frastley," another "Hestia Jones," yet a third "Dedalus Diggle," and Harry carefully set those aside before he found the one that indeed had his own right arm floating inside. The pasted-on parchment was turned to the far side of the crystal, but "I will not frighten my schoolmates with lies" was all the label he needed, and he picked up the orb with both hands, oblivious to the paradox. But now that he had found what he was looking for, he realised that he had no idea how to get it open. He hardly dared shake it. He turned it this way and that until the parchment label swivelled to the fore and stared back at him:

VOLDEMORT
HARRY POTTER

He barely stopped himself from throwing it and smashing it, but then he'd never get his arm back... The label sent a chill through him, and more horrible yet, he saw the reflection in it again, of the Dark Lord's red snake-eyes looking over his shoulder...

Harry whipped around, but Voldemort wasn't there. Neither was Cedric. Even the orb-laden bookshelves were gone, and he found himself again in the Ministry's Thirteenth Floor, the Inquisition Hall.

"Hem-hem!" He looked up to find Umbridge a "High" Inquisitor quite literally; she looked down on him from the judges' box, which was full of Hogwarts teachers. Dumbledore sat impassively in a back corner, next to Professor Snape, who was wearing a canary-yellow hooded robe. McGonagall led the rest in chattering objections at Umbridge, but the High Inquisitor ignored them. The benches ringing the room were filled with students, but where were Harry's friends? He couldn't find Hermione, or any of the Weasleys at all...

"In order to get back your arm," Umbridge intoned from the judges' box, "You must complete this sentence correctly: 'The Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix is Located At: ...'"

"But I can't do that!" he cried.

"Until you complete the sentence correctly," Umbridge continued, "you will simply have to keep trying, and the defendant will write down every response you give."

Harry had thought he was the defendant, but now that he looked, Umbridge's desk was there in place of the chained chair, and in front of it sat his godfather, with Umbridge's parchment and quill in his hands.

"Sirius!" he cried. Sirius didn't say anything or look up.

"Begin, Mr. Potter!" Umbridge commanded. "'The Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix is Located At:'."

Harry gaped. He remembered being at the Headquarters, he remembered Tonks leading him there, and yet he blurted out the only address he could think of: "Number Four Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey." Sirius wrote it on the parchment in letters blue as a bruise.

"Incorrect! Again, Mr. Potter! 'The Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix is Located At:'!"

The answer was so torturously close to the surface, but he couldn't think of it --- and even if he did, what would happen if he told it to Umbridge!? He rummaged his brain for addresses that might satisfy her. He thought of Number Ten Downing Street. He thought of 221B Baker Street and even the second star to the right, but all that would come out of his mouth was "Number Four Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey!" Again and again he said it, and again and again Sirius wrote it down. He didn't make a sound; Harry didn't see the quill wound him, but as the Inquisition lurched on and on watched in horror as he grew pale and faint, and Harry finally ran to him and seized him to keep him from collapsing on Umbridge's desk.

Sirius's robes were damp. In a horrible flash Harry understood --- the quill had been cutting him everywhere that Harry couldn't see; the Privet Drive address was carved all over him, and only the color of his robes had been hiding the blood...

He squeezed Sirius tight against him. "Stop it! I can't do this!" he screamed. "Take the arm back --- I don't want it anymore!"

"Oh, that works out great!" a chipper voice announced. Harry looked up to find Colin Creevey hurrying up to him from behind, his camera bouncing on its neck-strap. "Ron and Hermione and Ginny, they figured out how to get an Owl-post order through and they found you a new one in the Quality Quidditch catalog. Wait 'til it comes in --- it'll be better than ever!"

"Oh." Harry felt strange, but the relief was undeniable. Sirius looked up at him; every problem seemed to melt away.

"Could you hold up the old one, though, for a picture?" Colin asked.

"Wha?"

"I want to get a picture of you with your old arm, for the Hex."

"Oh, sure," Harry said. "I bet that'll make Umbridge scream." Suddenly it was all surreally pleasant as he held up the orb with his inscribed arm inside and smiled for Colin to take the photo.

The flash of light outlasted the "snap!" of the camera. It wrenched Harry up so that he had to blink and squint his eyes open. His bedcurtains stood aside for a flood of morning sunlight, and Hermione leaned over him. "Oh, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to wake you up."

"'Sall right," he slurred.

"How do you feel?"

"Unngh... Don't ask..." His arm lay throbbing on the mattress beside him. Its pain was so intense that it was nauseating, too much so even for him to eat or stir from his bed. Especially the wound rested in a thick cushion of burning heat, but his entire body felt feverish. When he got a look at his arm, it was all red and swollen. The inscription itself still struggled even to scab over; the words were written heavy and deep in dark purplish red surrounded by a ghastly ridge of white. It was unbearable to move his fingers, let alone his arm.

"Hold still..." Hermione carefully put his glasses on for him and was plying him with poached eggs and dry toast when Ron and Ginny dashed in. It was earlier than he would have expected Quidditch players back from practice, but Angelina was with them. "I got you something," she said, and held out a tin of Ludmilla Healy's Salubrious Salve.

"Where did you get it?" Hermione asked.

"We told Madam Pomfrey we wanted it for the Quidditch Team's scrapes," Ginny replied. "She didn't bat an eye."

"I'm really sorry," Angelina said. "We should have thought of it weeks ago, but... Well, we had to do something."

Harry braced himself as Ginny took the tin from Angelina, scooped up a great dollop of medicine, and plopped down on one of the stools his housemates had placed around his bed. However, she paused, regarded his arm, and touched the salve to the wound just enough for it to stick, leaving a peak of it when she lifted away her hand. In that manner she worked her way delicately down the line, carefully covering every word.

"I'm so glad," Hermione said. "I had ordered some, but it can't hurt to have more."

"Not the way Ginny's using it," Ron remarked.

"She's doing a wonderful job," Harry said, lest Ron dissuade his sister. While it didn't ease his pain completely, the salve had a wonderfully cool, soothing sensation. He turned his head on his pillow and looked at Hermione. "How did you order some? I thought Ginny already tried that."

"Right, and nothing ever came back," she said distractedly, still dabbing salve. "Mail checks must have picked it up."

"So not only is Umbridge a Nazi," Ron remarked, "but she's also been stealing pocket money from my baby sister."

"I heard from some of the other people in Arithmancy that Professors' mail doesn't go through the checks," Hermione explained. "They said Professor Flitwick had sent letters home for them, so I asked him about making an Owl-post order, since I knew that had happened to Ginny. Don't worry, I didn't say what it was for."

"And he let you give him the money and ordered it for you?" Harry asked.

"When I told him Ginny's order hadn't gotten through, he said not to even bother with the money, that there was no sense in charging us twice. ---I can pay you back for that, by the way," she added to Ginny.

"Oh, we'll sort it out later," she said. "Michael said Kaana was sending letters for her students, too, but like everyone over there in Ravenclaw is in Runes and I don't think either of you boys are..."

"I could probably pass things for you, though. She likes me," Hermione said.

"There!" Ginny announced, putting the cover back on the salve-tin. "How does that feel?"

"Better," Harry sighed.

"I still think you should go to Madam Pomfrey this time," Hermione argued; she put a hand to his forehead. "It feels like you're running a fever. If it gets infected, it would be stupid to wait until it's even worse..."

"I can still manage," he declared. "I'm not going to anybody --- and remember, you promised me."

"You stupid baby," she grumbled. He was about to retort when it occurred to him that he had heard her "say" it without seeing her lips move. The next moment confirmed it: "Of course you 'can manage,'" Hermione thought with thick sarcasm, then she lifted her hand from his forehead and went back to spooning eggs onto his toast.

"Well, at least try to eat a little more," she said aloud and brandished the toast at his face.

He took it with his own left hand and nibbled gamely at it.

Professor Flitwick did indeed deliver Hermione's order of salve after his class on Tuesday, and it seemed that the two tins of medicine opened a gap in the dark clouds of the Educational Emergency. Few people could actually know about those two little acts of defiance, but the whole school seemed to brighten up; Harry noticed more and more people talking about which professors would or wouldn't forward mail; Flitwick was the most widely known and widely used, and indeed a first trickle of students could even be seen coming out of his class with parchments that they held tight to their chests and furtively looked at with smiles or even tears. Moreover, the students had plenty to look forward to: a Hogsmeade weekend was coming that Saturday, plus Halloween after that and then the first Quidditch game, Gryffindor vs. Slytherin.

Harry's housemates were optimistic about that most bitter rivalry game in the school; Ginny always came back from practice crowing about how much fun she'd had and how well the team was coming together, and when Seamus weighed the odds, he said that in the Slytherins' practices, their team was falling apart. Draco had never been a good Seeker --- "If he was any good, the spot wouldn't have cost his Dad so many brooms," --- but at least a poor Seeker kept out of the way for the most part and didn't hamper the rest of their team's efforts to compensate. Crabbe and Goyle as Beaters, however, were every bit as bad, and a lack of good Beaters left the Chasers in a difficult spot. Of course Harry himself was relying on second-hand reports of this, and thought that he may do so even for the game itself. He wasn't sure yet whether he could bear to watch Quidditch, grounded in the stands.

Of course, if his detentions with Umbridge continued as they had been, then doing anything on any Saturday morning had to be considered off the cards, although he thought that he still wanted to go to Hogsmeade even if that meant being carried out into the village and vomiting at the smell of Honeydukes.

In truth, however, he couldn't imagine even one more detention with Umbridge. Even with the salve, his arm was sore well into the school week. This past Friday night had been so terrible that it cast a shadow even over his memory of Voldemort's Cruciatus Curse, and the salve wouldn't help him while he was there writing with that cursed quill. The fact that he'd been tempted to sign the confession frightened him; would he do it if it just continued long enough? Surely he should go to Dumbledore rather than give in, but he couldn't do either of those things, and the only alternative was continuing to endure the pain, which was even more impossible.

Harry was trapped between those three barred doors and spent most of the week huddling in the middle, leaving Friday evening a horrifying hole in his mind. Nothing, not the Hogsmeade weekend or Halloween festivities or even his friends beating Draco at Quidditch, could reach across that abyss to cheer him. On Thursday he seriously considered going to Dumbledore, but discouraged himself recalling that last time he'd talked to the Headmaster it had taken him three tries to get in, so it was probably too late for this week. Besides, how could he explain having lied before? He'd come this far on his own; wouldn't running to the Headmaster now just prove that he'd been stupid, like Hermione said? He let Thursday night slip by, and across the black chasm of Friday nothing seemed to matter.

That morning in the Gryffindor Common Room, the nervous dread got in the way of any kind of homework he attempted, and his distress must have been visible. "Look, why not try just not showing up?" Ron asked. "Just come on to dinner with us. I mean, what more is she going to do to you anyway? May as well at least make her chase you."

"I don't know," Harry said, highly uncomforted by thoughts of what more Umbridge could do to him. "It's kind of nice still having one arm."

"Well, we'll get you down to the great hall, and we'll tell McGonagall you're cutting detention," Hermione suggested. "There won't be much Umbridge can do at that point except confirm it, and I'll bet you could get detention with McGonagall instead."

A strange day indeed when getting detention with Professor McGonagall sounded like such a blessing --- and had Hermione's recommendation --- but the risk was too great, of having to explain why he was cutting. "I said I wasn't going to drag her into it," he answered finally. "And you said you wouldn't either."

"I really wish I'd never promised you that," Hermione moaned.

That afternoon, Defense Against the Dark Arts inched by slow as torture. Everyone else in the room had seen the state she'd returned him in a week ago, and they all gave him strange questioning looks, but this time of a much different kind than they had in Umbridge's first lesson. Harry's impending doom made everyone so grave that Ron even followed the Guided Practice to its implicit pat conclusion.

At last the class ended. "Everyone is dismissed except Mr. Potter," Umbridge said. Only slowly, however, did Harry's housemates shuffle out of the room.

Not even that for Ron and Hermione. Ron stopped at Harry's desk and tugged at his arm as if to say "come on, come along with us," and even when Harry shook his head, his friend didn't move. Hermione lay her hand on his other shoulder and similarly stood like a bodyguard.

"Miss Granger, Mr. Weasley," Umbridge repeated, approaching them with a tight, poisonous smile on her painted lips. "You. are. dismissed."

Neither made a move. Harry was suddenly terrifed to see them both stiffen not bend---he hadn't wanted to force Dumbledore into confrontation with Umbridge, but he'd do that ten times before he would set her on Ron and Hermione!

"Go on, you'll be late for dinner," he told them.

"But Harry---" Hermione protested.

"Just go!" he snapped.

She made a strained whimper and dug her fingernails into his shoulder for a second before hurrying from the room. Ron watched after her for a moment.

"Go on, I said," Harry told him.

"Okay. I'll see you tonight," he said reluctantly, and left.

"Well," Umbridge said, still wearing that venomous smirk. "Of course --- hem-hem --- you could join them directly, Mr. Potter. It's really up to you."

"No it's not," he said flatly, getting up from his desk. Did she think he could just decide whether that confession was true or not? But then, apparently the Ministry thought they could do precisely that. They could decide that Voldemort wasn't back, they could decide that Cedric had been killed by an accident... When Umbridge led him into her office and offered him the confession to sign, he remembered that giving in to it was a very real danger, and he pushed it back toward her without even a glance at it.

"Now now really, Mr. Potter, I must insist that we refresh ourselves on it before we decide," Umbridge said, pushing it back to him.

Harry reluctantly picked it up, but as he ran his eyes over it, he found that his mind had now reached the black hole and had fallen into a state of blank resignation. For the moment, nothing outside this room existed, and nothing inside it could he afford to concern himself with. He scanned the document, absorbing nothing but providing an appearance, and handed it back to Umbridge. "I'll do the lines," he said, quiet but calm.

Uncharacteristically, she blinked at him several times before clearing her throat again --- "hem-hem" --- and reaching for the blank parchment and the same quill to pass to him. "Do you need me to repeat your line?" she asked him.

"No, I know it," he said almost casually.

"In that case... Hem-hem... Begin, Mr. Potter."

He picked up the quill took a deep breath, savoring a last moment of his artificial calm. As soon as the tip touched the page, he knew that it would shatter, but now as it lasted, his mind was saying "nothing for it"... He braced his hand and lowered the quill to the parchment...

Knock Knock Knock!

Harry lifted the quill again before making a single mark. He just looked over his shoulder, wondering who it could be at the door.

Umbridge, however, literally jumped up out of her chair. "Who is it?" she crooned.

"This is Professor McGonagall. May I come in? I am sorry to interrupt but this is quite urgent."

Before the interloper was even finished speaking, Umbridge plucked the quill and parchment from Harry's hands and whisked them into her desk. "Of course! Please do come right in!" she called as Harry heard her turn a key in a drawer-lock.

McGonagall stepped inside, more serious and severe than ever. "I need an answer for the students; I was asked how the Educational Emergency measures will apply during the Hogsmeade visit tomorrow. So sorry to barge in on you, Mr. Potter."

It took Harry half a second to realise that he was being addressed. "Oh, it's all right."

"How many more of these detentions are you serving? I understand this is your sixth, and they're still listed until further notice."

"An oversight on my part --- hem-hem! --- on the schedule," Umbridge cut in. "This is his last. More properly the last was his, ah --- hem-hem --- last, and this more a debriefing you could say, and I believe I had covered the important points. You are dismissed, Mr. Potter."

He could hardly believe it. "Dismissed? For good you mean? I'm not to be back next week?"

"Hem-hem! That is what I said, Mr. Potter. Dismissed!"

As Harry rose from his chair, Professor McGonagall produced a small tin from her pocket and flipped it open as she proffered it to her colleague. "Lozenge?"

Umbridge's face screwed up; Harry sensed that she was willfully holding back from clearing her throat again. "No. Thank you."

Harry left the Trophy Room Office still in that strange detached haze. As he went, he thought he heard footsteps behind him. When he turned around to look, he saw no one, but at the bottom of the first staircase he heard Ron laugh.

"That was so perfect with the actual tin of lozenges!" Ron said as he shrugged off Harry's Invisibility Cloak. "Sorry I nicked this on you; hope you don't mind."

"No," Harry said, accepting it back and putting it in his pocket. "You were there the whole time?"

"Just the last little bit. Can't believe McGonagall didn't catch me but I guess she had other things on her mind. Hermione must have gone back on her word after all."

That cut through Harry's defensive fog. "She told McGonagall...?"

"Somebody did," Ron said. "You don't think that was coincidence, do you? Did Umbridge get you at all this time?"

"No, I hadn't started yet." When he thought of it, Ron was right. The Hogsmeade visit provided the perfect cover, but surely McGonagall wouldn't have arrived with such perfect timing to rescue Harry if that hadn't been her real intention. Absentmindedly rubbing his arm, he couldn't deny being thankful, and it didn't seem that anything bad had come of the intervention---at least not yet---but the thought that Hermione had broken her promise did sting. The way she had dashed out of the Defense classroom close to tears, probably she had run straight to get a teacher despite her word... "So when you left after class you didn't catch up with her?"

"No, I went back to the dorm to borrow your cloak," Ron said, lowering his voice as they neared the great hall. "Even if you didn't want me doing anything, I wasn't going to just leave you alone this time."

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it. ---It'll be nice to have supper on a Friday, won't it?" he said. The warm smells and conversational buzz of the great hall at dinner swallowed them up, and they crossed to the Gryffindor table, where several people leapt up from their seats to greet Harry.

Hermione had not been seen in the great hall either, further confirming Harry and Ron's suspicions that she had gone straight to McGonagall instead. She was there in the tower when they all came back from dinner, and when she saw Harry she hugged him as if he had just come back from a war. He returned the gesture but was a bit perfunctory with it, and when the whole story was told again --- it would be retold numerous times before the end of the evening --- Harry gave her a few slightly-sharp looks, but he must have underplayed them, he thought, as she didn't seem to notice.

Harry had eaten for once, but Hermione had skipped it, and Ginny seized the excuse to drag both of them and Ron to the Transfiguration classroom where the presses had been set up for the Hogwarts X-Press. All had their share of pizza as Ginny offered a guided tour. Colin and Dean were doing paste-up and last-minute touchups with Susan Bones from Hufflepuff proofreading. Kelley Randall and Legantine Price were there whispering to each other and waiting for the actual printing to begin --- they were always in charge of collecting and collating the pages, Ginny said.

With nothing else to do yet, Kelley began following Harry around the room and asked him all the questions he would have expected from a Muggle-born first year just acquainted with the fame of "Harry Potter: The Boy Who Lived" --- but then she continued with unabashed curiosity into more questions that he wouldn't have expected and he found himself giving her an embarassing number of non-answers.

"So You-Know-Who's curse bounced back on him, right? So if it was going to kill you, why didn't it kill him?"

"I don't know," Harry shrugged. "I don't suppose anybody knows."

"Can we not talk about all that?" Susan called. Harry seemed to recall hearing that the Boneses had lost a lot of family in the war.

Legantine didn't seem so impressed with Harry, but she followed Kelley around after him. Perhaps not listening to the conversation freed her to notice other things such as the way he held his right arm, and at any rate she was regarding it too curiously for comfort when Lee finally rescued him by pushing several Letters to the Editor into his hands.

"Got this big last-minute thing from the Thespian Society, but it just has to go in. I can only fit one of these and I can't decide..." All were very good, but Harry picked the one about all the Guided Practices that had gone awry and the author's thoughts on what made them so funny.

Most weeks Harry might have been tempted to stay long into the night to see the papers actually produced, but tonight he and his friends all wanted to rest up for the Hogsmeade visit, so they took their leave and went back to the dorm and to bed. Looking forward to Hogsmeade tomorrow without the prospect of being sick with pain, Harry at last settled into his bed in a warm cushion of relief that the nightmare of his detentions with Umbridge was over. Maybe Hermione had broken her promise, but while getting McGonagall involved had been a gamble Harry hadn't wanted to take, he had to admit that it had gone their way.

to be continued in...
Chapter Seventeen: Umbridge Strikes Back

Author's Notes on Chapter Sixteen

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.

At this point I suspect Dumbledore is handling Umbridge by letting her have the rope to proverbially hang herself. Mail checks etc. couldn't be kept secret forever and were going to turn the public against her and Fudge, if Albus could just wait it out and make sure no one got hurt. (Physical abuse of a student would've made good copy, too, if Harry weren't being such a bloody secretive Stupid Stupid Boy.)

However, somewhat to my surprise, Umbridge actually showed a distant twinkle of humanity here, like she had really thought Harry would sign the statement now and actually didn't like having to injure him so badly. Don't worry, it's just a passing thing...

With the cutting quill, I had the "OMG! 0_0" realisation that Umbridge probably made Harry go over this inscription about a thousand times total. 20 lines per page, I'd say an average of 10 pages per detention (that's probably conservative if anything), and she did this for five weeks, so there it is: one thousand. I think he's going to have that scar for the rest of his life... The descriptions of his arm's condition were getting pretty squicky here, I know, but it's over with now.

While I am uncomfortable with letting any of these characters use the word "Nazi," I did think that was a great line on Ron's part and I just can't think of another word that would do the job in that sentence half so well.

Also, in my mind, if a seven-book series had started this year, it would be about Kelley and Legantine. Bad news, Harry, it's a couple of those things you were in book 1... (They won't be important to this story, I just have the sense that they're having their own on the side --- and Kelley's sharp enough to try to shake Harry down for plot points.)