Harry didn't get a chance to talk to Blaise until the train ride to Hogwarts a week later. A letter wouldn't solve this, after all. On the Express, it didn't take long for Harry to pull Blaise away from Pansy and Draco and into an empty compartment.
Harry gave Blaise a very determined stare, which Blaise responded to with a raised eyebrow.
"You were there the whole time," Blaise said, and Harry jerked his head in a nod.
"What was Ron going on about?" Harry asked. He didn't want to think Draco was hiding things from him, but he clearly was. Harry still had hope that Blaise would absolve Draco and his father of anything like what Ron had been suggesting.
Blaise was silent, frowning. "As much as I want to tell you, it's not my place to say," he eventually admitted.
Harry gaped at him. "Are you joking? What's Draco hiding? You know."
"I do," Blaise agreed, shrugging apologetically. "But I can't tell you. For one, Draco would kill me. And it really isn't my place. I've been trying to convince him to talk to you, though. Perhaps you should make the first move in this."
Harry grimaced. "What can you tell me?"
Blaise gave him a faint, sympathetic smile. "Draco has the best of intentions," he said. Harry stared, and Blaise shrugged. "Not good enough? Then ask Draco."
"Tell me something concrete," Harry said. "Anything."
Blaise shook his head at Harry and cuffed him on the arm. "Be a Slytherin about it, Harry. What's wrong with you?"
And with that, he turned around and walked out of the compartment. Harry watched him go, feeling the beginnings of a headache coming on.
He resolved to speak to Draco after the Welcome Feast. Answers were going to be had.
When they arrived in the Great Hall, dripping from the rain outside and Peeves' water balloons, Harry had decided to make his first Slytherin move in the attempt to discover Draco's secret. Spending the summer with Gryffindors had softened Harry, and Blaise was right. He'd been far too blunt in his questioning on the train. He was a shame to his House.
"Draco," Harry began, turning to look at him as they walked around the end of the Slytherin table to their usual seats. He faltered when he saw that Draco was walking on the other side of the table, with Blaise, and that Pansy had doubled back to sit on Harry's side, her face blank. Blaise was wearing an unreadable expression, and Draco was clearly trying to pretend everything was normal.
"Yes, Harry?"
Harry was drawing a blank, suddenly. Draco always sat next to him at meals, since their Sorting. "Er, never mind," he said. Blaise frowned at Draco, which he either didn't notice or pretended not to see. Pansy's face was still carefully impassive as Harry sat down next to her.
It was a very eventful meal, what with the new Defence teacher showing up halfway through Dumbledore's speech, looking all gnarled and sinister, and the news that Quidditch was cancelled for the year, to be replaced by the Triwizard Tournament. Draco managed to ignore Harry for the entire meal, with such material at his fingertips.
It was the same way in classes over the next couple weeks. Draco partnered with Pansy in classes they all had together, and talked to Harry rarely outside class, though he always acted like nothing was wrong when he did. It was during their second DADA class that Harry realised just how furious he was about the way Draco was acting.
The new Defense professor, Moody, had shown them the Unforgivables in the previous class. Now, he was planning to test them all for resistance to the Imperius curse. Something about this seemed off to Harry; maybe it was just that the professor had already made it pretty clear that performing the Imperius on humans was illegal. Who knew. Either way, any protests were quickly silenced by the professor's silent, dichromatic glare, and students began to reluctantly line up. Pansy made certain she was at the end of the line, and pulled Harry with her.
"I miss Lockhart," she muttered. When Harry stared at her, incredulous, she gestured vaguely at the new professor. "Did Lockhart ever do anything like this?" she asked, as Theo Nott hopped around the room like a frog. "No. He just sat around, looking pretty and babbling nonsense at us. This one shouts and stares at you with that eye. I bet anything he's looking through Daphne's skirt right now."
Daphne was next in line, it was true, and Moody was staring at her fiercely as he cast the curse. Harry hoped Moody wasn't looking through her skirt. He'd worn that same expression while staring at Harry a little while ago. It didn't bear thinking about.
They had this class with Ravenclaws, and the entertainment value was potentially high. No group of Harry's year mates were quite as uptight as a combined class of Slytherins and Ravenclaws, and Moody was sparing no expense as he thought up more and more ridiculous things for each of them to do. Harry got the idea that there would have been laughter, had everyone not been so worried about what they might end up doing.
Anthony sidled up next to Harry in line, having neared the front and realised his folly.
"Lisa is having a panic attack," he said under his breath, as one of the other Ravenclaw boys twirled around the room and sang the Hogwarts school song in a high pitched voice. The three of them winced in unison as he passed near them. "She absolutely does not want anything to do with this lesson."
Pansy frowned sympathetically, which Harry thought was something, considering that the last time she'd spoken to Anthony last year, she called him insane. They both had apparently forgotten though; Anthony because he was Anthony, and Pansy because it would be stupid of her to remind him.
"Tell her she has cramps," Pansy responded, almost inaudibly. "Terrible cramps. The spell is Adstringo volva. You end it with Finite."
Anthony nodded and disappeared again.
"Wish I could get out of things so easily," Harry said enviously.
Pansy glanced at him, amused. "No you don't," she said. Anthony reappeared a moment later, and it only took a few more minutes after that for Lisa Turpin to start moaning and asking to be excused.
Professor Moody allowed it, though he barked at her to come back quickly. Turpin bolted, and the expression on her face as she passed spoke very clearly to her intention of hiding in the loo for the rest of the hour.
Blaise was up next, and he clucked and strutted around the room for the next little while, pecking at people with his nose. He stopped in front of Harry and crowed like a rooster, and Harry pressed his lips together to hide his amusement, because it wasn't funny.
"Potter, you're up next,' Moody said, and Harry glanced up, surprised. There was a whole class in front of him in line. He could feel Pansy distancing herself from him, but he didn't look back at her. He walked into the centre of the room, where everyone else had begun their turn, and waited.
"Imperio," Moody said, and a feeling of incredible lightness fell over Harry like an Invisibility Cloak. It didn't matter what he did now. He could do anything.
"Do a handstand," a voice in his head suggested.
He could do a handstand. He raised his arms, then paused. Why though? He couldn't even do handstands. He always fell. He started to raise his arms again, and caught himself. Draco was standing not five feet away in line, looking elsewhere. Harry would probably fall, and land on Draco, which meant he'd probably end up kicking him in the face.
Harry raised his arms again. See if Draco could ignore Harry when he was kicking him in the face.
But then, Harry really didn't want to do a handstand, or kick Draco in the face, no matter how tempting it was. He ended up trying to do a handstand and trying to stop himself, and the result was that he threw himself on the ground, nearly headfirst. The lovely floaty feeling ended abruptly, and left Harry with a throbbing headache from where he'd landed. Moody was crowing something above him, and Harry stood, trying to block out the roar of the professor's voice and reorient himself.
Moody was going on about how Harry had nearly resisted the curse, and it occurred to Harry that he might have resisted altogether if Draco hadn't been standing there, practically begging to be kicked.
And that was when he realised just how upset he really was at Draco for ignoring him, just before Moody cast Imperio again, to test Harry's limits.
Blaise was glaring at Draco by the end of classes that Friday, and tugged Draco away just before dinner. Harry didn't mind. It wasn't as though Draco was going to talk to him, anyway.
The only reason Harry could come up with for Draco's abrupt change was that he knew Harry had heard Ron's accusations at the Cup, and that they had some basis in reality. Draco was trying to avoid questioning by avoiding Harry, and Harry decided that was answer enough. When Draco and Blaise showed up in the common room after dinner that night, Harry turned to Pansy and pretended they were in the middle of an in depth discussion about Ancient Runes, which Pansy was admittedly not taking. Because she was Harry's favourite person ever, she didn't allow that to deter her and played along like a champion. It didn't matter in the end, though, because Draco made a beeline for the dorm, never even glancing in their direction.
Blaise sat down with them, and they let the flimsy conversation drop.
"He's being stubborn," Blaise said to Harry, who was biting his tongue and trying very hard to keep his expression neutral, while wishing he had taken that opportunity to kick Draco during Defense.
"Draco is an idiot." Pansy put her hand on Harry's arm in a comforting gesture. "Remember second year? He was an idiot then and he's an idiot now."
Harry gave up on keeping his expression neutral, and allowed it to twist into the scowl he'd been fighting. "So this is the same thing, then?" he demanded. "He's still not over that pureblood supremacy shit?" He sneered. "And his father probably spent the summer encouraging it, if he really was levitating those muggles at the Cup."
Blaise looked uncomfortable. "It's not that he believes in it, Harry," he said. "It's just that he's got a lot of pressure on him at home."
Harry snorted. "I don't even care. I don't. If he wants to talk to me, fine. If he'd rather been a muggle-hating bigot, fine. I don't care."
"Harry," Pansy said, looking worried for the first time. Harry stood up.
'No. I don't care." And he left the common room.
Draco continued to distance himself from Harry, though he now had Harry's help. Harry sat as far away from Draco at meals as he could while still technically sitting with his friends. Draco's eagle owl was a frequent visitor to the table, sans the usual sweets, and he never finished his breakfast after his owl arrived, instead spending the rest of the meal perusing the letter with an anxious air about him.
Harry didn't notice this, because he didn't care. Draco was ignoring Harry, so Harry could ignore Draco just as easily. Harry's resolve only firmed when he realised Draco was spending most of his time with Vince and Greg, and with the older Slytherins that tended to sneer when they saw Harry with his Gryffindor friends. It was exactly the same as second year, and Harry already knew what they probably talked about, and why Draco was associating with them. He just didn't care.
Harry spent a lot more time with his Gryffindors during the first couple months of school than he usually did. Hermione didn't question it, and she looked a lot better than she had at the end of the school year. Greece had been good to her.
"Did you get rid of the Time Turner, then?" Harry asked, as they pulled out their homework. Hermione had less books than usual, at least.
"No," Hermione said, shrugging. "I dropped Divination, and suddenly it's all so much more bearable. It was that useless class pulling me down last year. And I've decided that, in Muggle Studies, all the reading assignments are optional."
Harry stared at her, his mouth open slightly. "Hermione Granger, slacking off?"
Hermione blushed a bit, and lifted her chin. "It's not as though I don't know most of it already. And I do the readings. Just not always on time."
Harry continued to gape at her. She leaned forward conspiratorially.
"Don't tell Ron or Dudley," she whispered. "Or Neville, for that matter. I don't want them thinking they can declare homework optional just because I did."
Harry finally found his voice again. "Why don't you just drop the class?"
Hermione shook her head. "Oh, I couldn't," she said earnestly. "It's fascinating, seeing the Muggle world from the wizarding perspective. And often, really, really funny. Wizards don't have a clue, sometimes. Now that I'm not so frantic over the homework, it's turning into my favourite class."
Harry stared at her some more. "Who are you, and what have you done with Hermione Granger?" he asked, after the staring yielded no answers. Hermione smiled fondly at him.
"Last year was a good lesson in limits," she explained. "I'm glad you figured out what was going on when you did, too, else I might have had a nervous breakdown. Now I know what I can and can't handle."
Harry nodded, and asked curiously, "So how many extra hours a week do you have?"
"Two or three," Hermione said, averting her eyes. Harry waited.
"I may have scheduled naps," she admitted sheepishly, and he grinned at her.
"Potter. I may have been careless in my explanation of nonverbal casting at the end of last term, but it is rather the point that you do not say the spell out loud. I apologise if I did not mention that vital detail. Or perhaps you are not clear. A whisper is still generally considered 'out loud'."
Harry rolled his eyes, but only because he was sure Snape couldn't see. His practice with Sirius and Remus during the summer had been enormously helpful, as long as Harry wasn't attempting any spells more complicated or long lasting than Incendio.
"Again," Snape said, and cast a nonverbal spell of his own, presumably to show Harry how. Harry raised his wand to retaliate, opened his mouth automatically, and realised the spell Snape had cast was Silencio.
Snape smirked at him as he attempted to end the spell.
"Anyone who removes that spell for you will have detention for a month," Snape told him, eyes glinting. "I will know."
Harry glared fruitlessly at Snape, which only caused the smirk on his professor's face to widen.
"A new tactic," Snape said, taking advantage of the silence. "Every night, before you fall asleep, you will clear your mind of all thoughts. Every night, Potter. It should become as routine as brushing your teeth."
When Harry nodded, Snape raised his wand and threw another spell at him. Harry very nearly dodged it, before considering that Snape might Petrify him in place. Instead, he grabbed a book from the shelf behind him and held it in the path of the curse. The book burned Harry's hands with the force of it.
The glower on Snape's face was worth burnt hands.
'Finite Incantatem,' Harry thought. It didn't work. Dudley grinned at him.
"So, Harry, can I borrow your Firebolt?" he asked. Harry's eyes widened. "Just go ahead and don't say anything. I'll take the silence as a yes."
Harry opened his mouth and began spouting furiously mouthed silence. There was a reason he was with his Gryffindor friends at the moment, and that was so that his Slytherin friends couldn't take advantage of his inability to speak. Just like Dudley was doing now, the git.
Ron and Neville laughed as Dudley's eyes lit up.
"Yes? Harry, you're such a good cousin. I'll bring it back eventually, don't worry."
Harry glared. 'Finite Incantatem,' he thought again, with more ferocity than ever. And then, when that didn't work, 'Densaugeo.'
Dudley's teeth didn't change. Harry hadn't really expected it to work, though it would have been a nice way to finally figure out nonverbal spells.
Hermione tutted at him. "Harry, Snape said you need to focus. Glaring isn't focusing."
Harry turned his glare on her instead, and she hid her smile a second too late.
"Some of the gardening spells Gran taught me are nonverbal," Neville said. "You've got to think it so clearly that it sounds to you like you've said it out loud, only you haven't."
Harry blinked at him, raised his palms up in the air, and adopted a confused expression.
"I'm with Harry," Ron said, mimicking Harry's posture, though he was grinning instead of furrowing his brow. "What are you talking about?"
"He means like the other day, Ron," said Dudley. "When you said, 'Hermione is such a know-it-all', and you thought you were just thinking it, but you really said it out loud."
Harry laughed soundlessly while Hermione glared at Ron. One good thing about being Silenced in the library was that he could laugh as much as he wanted, and Madame Pince wouldn't scold him.
"I think you're close, Dudley," Hermione said, giving Ron a very pointed look. "But what Neville is talking about is when Ron said, 'I'm so sorry Hermione, you're all that's keeping me from failing out of school, and I can only hope continued grovelling will make up for my incredibly crass comment,' and he thought he was saying it out loud, but he wasn't."
Harry waved her down, still grinning, and picked up his wand to try again. Hopefully laughter wouldn't impede the process.
'Finite Incantatem,' he thought.
"..." he said, and made a face when Dudley grinned at him with his perfectly normal teeth.
Harry did end up letting Dudley borrow his Firebolt, mostly because he wanted to go flying anyway. He was becoming restless without Quidditch practice, and it wasn't like he had anyone to fly with in Slytherin.
"So how's Sirius doing?" Dudley called as he shot past Harry like a gleeful bullet. Harry rolled his eyes. It wasn't like Dudley was going to get an answer out of Harry if he didn't stay still. Sign language and miming didn't work if the person you were trying to communicate with wasn't looking.
Dudley came swooping past again, and his voice was like a train speeding by, if train whistles went through puberty and cracked occasionally.
"Whitey hasn't had time to deliver a letter for me since we got back," he said, and Harry nearly missed the end of his statement as he veered away. As Dudley flew back toward him, Harry got a head start and tried to keep pace.
"I have letters to send to Dad, you know," Dudley told him, slowing down for a moment so they could talk. "Important letters."
Harry conveyed his scepticism with a glance. It was true that he had been monopolising Dudley's owl since they returned to school, but not much had happened outside of the announcement for the Tournament.
"They are important," Dudley said, and tried a few rolls. When he finally righted himself again, he blinked dazedly and shook himself. "And Whitey misses me."
Harry snickered soundlessly and flipped over on his old Nimbus, flying upside-down because he could. Dudley imitated him, and shot off into the sky. It looked like an accident, but Harry followed him anyway, turning it into an upside-down race for the goal posts.
They soared around for a while, until it occurred to Harry that he was usually very focused at Quidditch, and maybe he could try to think about nonverbal spells in the same way he thought about flying. It was worth a shot, anyway, and Harry really didn't want to be mute for more than a day. He was dreading what would happen if he showed up to Snape's Parseltongue lesson still under the spell.
Harry paused in midair, closed his eyes, and thought of the feeling he got when he saw the Snitch. He mentally replaced the Snitch with the words 'Finite Incantatem', floating in front of him, and then he reached out and grasped them.
"..." Harry said, and huffed. He narrowed his eyes and pulled out his wand, staring at it as though it was a Snitch he needed to capture, and thinking about what his own voice sounded like (not to mention how much he wanted to yell at Dudley for the stunt he had just pulled on Harry's broom a second ago). 'Finite Incantatem.'
"Er. ...hey!" Harry said, and realised he could speak. "Dudley!" he yelled, swooping through the air to where his cousin had righted himself and was winding his way between the goalposts. "Did you hear me?" he asked urgently.
Dudley frowned at him. "I hear you now," he said, rubbing his ear. "Just because you can talk again doesn't mean you have to yell at me."
Harry grinned. "It worked," he said, awed. "I can't believe it worked. I want to see what else works. Curse me."
"What?"
"Cast some curse," Harry said, diving a few feet and staring around at the grass below them. Dudley followed him, curious.
"Which curse?" he asked. Harry shrugged.
"Any curse, go on." He took a deep breath and, using the same method as before, summoned several pebbles. He grinned as they soared out of the grass and into his hand. Enlarging them was another matter altogether, and Harry spoke the words, dropping the Bludger-sized rocks as he grew them.
"Here?" Dudley asked, which was inane in Harry's opinion.
"Well, yes," he said, and waited. Dudley cast Petrifus, which was a dirty move for a first try, seeing as Harry would fall off his broom if he failed.
He didn't though, much to his own delight. He cast the counter nonverbally. It was like a barrier had broken, and where he had stared blankly at explanations before, he understood now. Dudley started to enjoy the mid-air duel after he realised Harry was going to let him attack without retaliation, and Harry was even able to use his mini-boulders. It was positively thrilling, and he began planning all the terrible, terrible pranks he would play on Blaise and blame on Draco, and vice versa.
And then he remembered that he and Draco were barely talking, and one of Dudley's spells got through. Tarantallegra was fortunately harmless in the air, though Harry's broom did swerve wildly for a moment before he was able to cast the counter.
It was just like Draco lately to put a damper on Harry's mood.