Of all the ways Severus Snape could imagine himself spending Christmas at Hogwarts, sneaking around the castle with Harry Potter for the purpose of destroying one of the Dark Lord's artefacts had never occurred to him. For obvious reasons. Were such a scenario proposed to him before, he'd denounce the proposer as the greatest fool alive.
Severus exited his private quarters that morning with a sense of great bemusement, feeling as if he was still half-dreaming. Lingering in his office, he stood for a while behind the door that would lead out to the common room. There was no reason for him to dither there, but he couldn't quite yet get himself to face the absurd situation he found himself in.
After a gusty sigh he only ever allowed himself to heave in private, Severus opened the door and walked out.
At this early hour during holidays — being only a quarter after six — the common room was entirely empty, save for a small figure seated near the crackling fireplace. Severus approached when the aforementioned small figure showed no sign of reacting to his presence.
It was Potter, of course.
The girl sat half-cross-legged, half-reclined in an armchair, her neck supported on one side by an arm-rest, bundled up in a long, grey skirt of wool and a light violet jumper of fleece. Her red hair (the same damned shade as Lily's) that she usually wore in plaits or up in two buns was down and loose save for a few insect pins keeping her fringe out of her eyes, draped and dangling over the arm-rest she was resting against. The aforementioned eyes were closed. Her palms were pressed together in front of her chest in a supplicating posture, and she sang softly in a language he didn't recognise. Chanting? Every once in a while, she would bow her head and lift her joined hands so that the tips of her first two fingers touched her forehead.
"Potter . . ." he said, frowning. "What. . . ?"
Potter's eyes flew open, and she sprang to her feet, yelping, "Sir!" Startled to see him, apparently, despite their appointment. She pressed her palms together in front of her and nodded sharply — in greeting? — before thinking better of it, tucking her hands behind her back, and bobbing in a curtsy. "I didn' hear you arrive. Good morning, sir — hope you slept well."
Severus eyed the girl without speaking, not knowing if there was anything for him to say. The Potters were well-known for being thoroughly mixed-race, but that damned James Potter had been a perfectly cultureless mongrel, and Lily had been solidly White British; Severus had never considered that whoever was raising the child would bring her up as anything other than the standard secular English.
It certainly couldn't be the Patils despite the fact that they were the first that came to Severus' mind. The gesture just now was reminiscent of the Hindu Patil twins, but Potter and the two barely interacted. The Gryffindor Patil was a noisy little show-off that didn't know how to keep a single thought to herself; if Potter had been raised with them, it would have been around the school before dinner the first night.
The Shafiqs, perhaps? A handful had managed to survive the war, and they'd run in the same circles as the Potters — they, the Potters, and the Shacklebolts were the most prominent mixed-ethnics Families of the British wizarding nation, and happened to all be Light-aligned as well. If it wasn't the Shacklebolts — who'd had Kingsley in Gryffindor in the same year as James and Severus — that had taken in the girl, then it must have been the Shafiqs. And Severus knew it couldn't have been the Shacklebolts, because they would have shamelessly boasted about it. So it must have been the much more low-key Shafiqs — it was the only thing that made sense.
It was odd, though — the girl seemed to never speak of her foster family. Not once in any of the blathering-on that Draco did about her did he ever mention anything said about those that raised her.
"Oh!" Potter exclaimed after a beat, looking down and digging in her pocket. She pulled out a rectangular package wrapped in light blue paper and a white ribbon. With wide, green eyes sparkling just as her mother's once had, she held it out to him with two hands. "I almost forgot. For you, sir! I dunno if you celebrate, but happy Yuletide to you. Merry Christmas, sir. I hope y'like it."
Blinking up at him, it was as if the image of a bright and earnest Lily was superimposed over the girl's face. She was a perfect mix of her parents' features when at rest, but her expressions were all Lily.
Severus mutely accepted the gift.
". . . Where is this room where the Dark Lord is hiding his artefact?" he asked in lieu of saying anything else. Potter was a discomfiting bundle of inconsistencies that he wasn't interested in puzzling out that day.
Potter took the hint and immediately got moving, leading the way out of the common room. They traversed the halls and corridors unspeakingly, the girl leading Severus out from the dungeons, up and up the Grand Staircase, and through lesser used corridors of Gryffindor territory.
Severus couldn't begin to articulate how absurd he felt walking towards certain danger beside a little girl. An actual, literal child. That had to be around two feet shorter than him and half his weight, at most. Wearing a hooded jumper with rabbit ears and . . . a pom-pom in the back as a tail. (Where had she even got such a ridiculous thing?) He was walking with a child in a pastel, animal-themed get-up towards an object likely cursed up to its ears and down to its toes, that kept the second magical coming of Hitler from dying a true death.
Upon the seventh floor, they eventually came to a long stretch of untraversed corridor. They stopped in front of a massive tapestry of a fool of a wizard trying to teach trolls to dance ballet, the wretched beasts dressed in ballerina outfits. Severus sneered reflexively.
"It's behind here?" Severus asked, naturally assuming this was a hidden entrance.
"No, sir," said Potter, tugging on his sleeve and pointing the other direction. "It's over on this wall."
He turned around to see the girl passing in front of a stretch of empty wall once before pausing.
"You do this, sir," she said. "Three passes in front of here — about the length of that tapestry, I reckon — while thinking to yourself that you need a place to hide somethin— well. . . ." Potter cut herself off and frowned thoughtfully. "Erm . . . Let me think on the mechanics for a minute. It's actually a lot more complicated than one would think."
"I thought you said you knew how to access this place?" said Severus, scowling at the girl. "Are you now saying you don't know?"
"Oh, I do, sir! It's just that the explaining of how it's accessed is a little tricky. Once you understand, it's easy as can be, but the concept of it requires a bit of exx-plaining. You see . . ." She pressed a forefinger to her lips for a moment. "Okay — This place can be seen as having a number of functions. The house-elves call it the Come and Go Room. Or the Room of Requirement. Y'pace in front of this space three times, thinking hard about — for example — how you need the loo, and it'll spawn as a place you can relieve yourself. Professor Dumbledore once used it to this effect, actually, but I'm not sure if that's already happened or hasn't happened yet. And I don't think he realised he'd used it before, either. He first found the Mirror of Erised here — back in . . . the 1920s, maybe? Late 192os, if I'm remembering correctly?"
Potter shook her head, catching on that she was stepping onto a tangent.
"Anyway — say you need a place to study. You imagine a room filled with books and comfy chairs and such, and poof! The Room spawns as exactly that 'n' more, satisfying your subconscious wants for the situation as well.
"So, it's happened in the past that people hav-have desperately needed a place to hide something. So the Room of Requirement spawned as a closet, or maybe a room filled with boxes to put things in, or whatever else that suits the seeker. However, most people would just assume i's just a room with a door that appears under random circumstance. An' so if they ever go looking for it again, they never find it again. And so most things hidden in the previously spawned rooms remain within its subspace."
"So the Dark Lord one hid his . . . artefacts within such an iteration of this room. And then lost it?" asked Severus, disbelief at such an idea dripping from his tongue.
"Oh, no, sir — he didn't lose it," Potter replied with a shake of her head. "He put it in such a room knowing full well how it functions and how to retrieve it. He simply believed that no one else would ever discover this place since it's so 'nuanced,'" — here she used her fingers to make air quotations and rolled her eyes — "never mind know that he hid 'is . . . hid the diadem here, or know how to take it. A conceited one, that fellow."
'A conceited fellow,' she said. As if she were describing an Elizabethan dandy putting on airs.
"Anyways, there's theoretically a number of ways to get at the thing," Potter continued. "And it would be fast an' easy if we could do it the way I'd like to. But still that's just theoretically. The sure-fire way I know of is to call for the room where all the things previously hidden are stored. An' so, I'll pace in front of this wall, thinking, 'I need the place where everything is hidden.'"
Saying so, she did just that, walking and turning on a dime, expression focused.
The stone of the wall churned and bubbled. What emerged was a tall oval set of double-doors, tall enough for an adolescent giant to pass through. With a satisfied 'uhn' and a bounce, Potter went to the doors and gave them a push.
"This way, sir," she said, entering.
What was revealed was a colossal hall of white marble, reminiscent of a Catholic cathedral, taller than the Sistine Chapel, and thrice as long as the Great Hall, at least. Stone pillars half sunken into the walls lined the hall and swooped high overhead, arching to frame ovular, faceted windows, from which poured in incandescent, midsummer afternoon light despite the fact it was currently a few days after the winter solstice. That was not the most notable part of the room, though. No, that honour went to the piles and towering mounds of objects littered through the hall like a miniature city made of knick-knacks — cairns and veritable karsts of curios.
Just from what he could pick out of this mother lode from immediately in front of him, Severus spotted chipped phials of congealed potions, hats of various designs and gaudiness, jewels of varying exquisiteness, and cloaks of numerous qualities and textiles. Scattered, sitting on chests of drawers, cabinets, and vanities, there were what looked like dragon eggshells, corked bottles whose contents still shimmered menacingly, several rusting swords, and more suspiciously blood-stained blunt instruments than Severus cared to count. As well, there were winged catapults and Fanged Frisbees, some still with enough life in them to hover half-heartedly over the mountains of other items.
The doors swung shut with a muted yet resound 'thwmp' behind him.
Severus' head turned this way and that as he slowly advanced.
Meandering paths led around the stacks. Broken and damaged furniture — chairs, tables, and various cabinets haphazardly stacked — no doubt hidden to hide the obviously mishandled magic. An enormous stuffed troll standing as if guarding a stack of cracked, decomposing frames. Cages in various sizes, including one with a 5-legged skeleton in it. Quite a few clunky, vintage broomsticks, half of which could not be salvaged. Various metalware, especially cauldrons, that caught Severus' eye. Trophies; portraits; textiles; books.
"Over here, sir!" the girl called.
Severus turned to see Potter standing by a massive vanity with a mirror that had a significant spiderwebbing crack, as if someone's head had been bashed into it. On the table of it, haphazardly, there was a chipped bust of an ugly warlock, a gramophone that looked like it would be worth a pretty penny with a warped record sitting in its platter, and an open box of gemstone dominoes. A banjo with two snapped strings leaned against it, as did a disassembled suit of armour.
"Surely this can't all be from those that misused this room," said Severus with a frown as he approached. "Not with this sheer quantity."
"I suspect it also contains things that have simply been lost around the castle as well," said Potter with a shrug. "Things left behind by those who're no longer students, y'know? Of course, the Room of Requirement's been around as long as Hogwarts has, so it's had around a thousand years so far of accumulation. If we suppose that anyone who happened to hide something here only hid a single thing, that would be. . . ."
She looked around the room critically.
"Oh, 'm terr'ble wi' numbers," she muttered to herself. "Maybe four to five people a year? Six to seven? Most of this isn't exactly small, after all. But, yeah, it's more likely people bring them in bulk. An' I s'ppose we can ask the house-elves if it acts as a lost 'n' found, if we really want to know."
Severus made a concurring sound, but in truth he had no interest in doing such a thing.
"Anyway, I found the thing," said Potter. She picked up a tarnished old tiara with a sizeable gem from a pile of jewels on the vanity and held it up for him to see.
Severus' heart almost stopped when his mind registered what the girl had said.
"This is—?" He snatched up a handkerchief from the side and grabbed the diadem from the girl's hands. "What do you think you're doing, you thoughtless child?!" he hissed, holding it away from his body instinctively. "Such things are not to be handled so lackadaisically!"
Potter blinked at him owlishly.
"I apologise for startling you, sir," she said, dipping her head like she was bowing. "However, you don't need to be concerned. The diadem is indeed cursed, but it only activates by someone wearing it in the way such an accessory is normally worn. Just touching it won't do anything. I mean . . . it'll cause excess-ssive aggression after prolonged contact, but tha's after several hours of direct and unending contact — a few minutes won't hurt at all."
"No amount of contact with any sort of Dark object should be dismissed, especially with something as foul as this!" Severus scolded the girl. "Especially for you, brat! Those who have suffered under the Unforgiveables end up more susceptible to Dark magic in general, suffering worse damages than others!"
A strange look crossed the girl's face at these words. The corners of her mouth and her eyebrows did a confusing dance as her eyes squinted in a way that could have been amusement but also displeasure.
"I'll get myself a nice pair of leather gloves, then," she said blandly, face settling. "For— On the off-chance I ever run into one of these with no one else around."
Her words sounded reasonable, but there was something off about them to Severus' ears.
Severus retracted his reach and inspected the piece of jewellery in his hold.
"This is the lost diadem. . . ?" he muttered to himself.
He had initially taken it as tarnished silver, but a closer look proved in actuality that it was bronze. A bronze circlet inlaid with a sapphire the size of a quail egg. Filigree that held the stone in its socket came together so that it looked as if two wings encased the sapphire. And dangling down from the main stone was a chain of two smaller sapphires like raindrops. Across the bottom of the band, faint words could be discerned: 'Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure.'
"The legendary treasure that is the lost diadem of Ravenclaw has been rediscovered in a disused storage room filled with discarded junk," Severus said, the irony almost choking him.
"To be fair," said the girl, hands clasped primly in front of her, "its true re-discovery was a lot more involved and momentous. He sought out and smooth-talked Helena Ravenclaw's ghost into eventually telling him where she left it, and then he scoured Albania in search of the random hollow tree she hid it in before she was killed. If it was just for the sake of finding it and bringing it home, it would have been commendable of him. But instead he went and got it . . . for that."
A wave of tiredness washed over Severus. He stared at the girl unblinkingly. He had so many questions, but he knew getting an answer for any one of them would take a long, dragging conversation. There just wasn't enough hours in the day for that.
There was nothing else to do but to accept that Potter was going to drop off-the-wall factoids onto him at random. That was a new facet of reality he had to live with now, until she would graduate.
Already quite done with the situation despite having just got there, Severus pulled from his pocket the satin pouch he had prepared to contain such an abomination. He dropped the diadem in anticlimactically.
"You will tell me when there is a such an occasion again where there is one of these horrid things to retrieve," he told her flatly.
Potter nodded amicably and said nothing as Severus made it obvious he had no plans to stay there any longer than necessary.
"You . . ." Severus started when he reached the door once more. He looked over at the girl who'd followed alongside him. Frustration kindled in his gut; he hated talking to children, the over-excited, nonsensical things. "What . . . will you occupy yourself with after this?"
He didn't want her getting up to any dangerous nonsense while he wasn't looking. He certainly didn't want her digging around in this room of broken and potentially-harmful things without supervision. But being the child of that damned James Potter, even if she hid it well with cunning, how could she not be one that made trouble?
"Ah?" Potter cocked her head. "Oh, erm . . . nothing in particular, sir. I already finished my assignments, so no worries on that front. I have a number of hobbies, so I'll just be amusing myself as usual, as I always do. I was thinking about taking my lyre to the covered bridge between the Quad and Long Gallery for a bit, to practice."
The answer was so innocent. So in-line with her typical behaviour. He was compelled to believe her, as much as he intuitively knew it couldn't be that simple. There were no words to refute her nor any feasible reason to scold her, though, so Severus could only give a jerky nod in farewell and leave, feeling unreasonably thwarted.
Harry watched Snape stalk off like the dramatic man-child he thought he wasn't, the customer-service smile evaporating from their face. As decent as he'd been to them and how downright pleasant he'd been that morning, he still reminded them of their previous mother at her absolute worst without any of her redeeming qualities. How Harry hated channelling harmless intentions and the desire for cooperation when facing such people; smothering down their dissatisfaction and irritation was always so suffocating in such instances.
But he was gone now! Harry watched him disappear down the hall and then waited a full Ave Maria before spinning gleefully on their toes. The one horcrux that could be dealt with presently was secured, so they could kick back with no worries until the start of the next school-year!
Harry pulled out their eruditionary, flipped to the section they locked that contained their plottings, and checked off Ravenclaw's diadem from the list. Nagini had not been made into a horcrux yet at this point, so there was only Riddle's diary, the Peverell ring, Slytherin's locket, and Hufflepuff's cup-chalice thingy left.
They put their book away again with a satisfied nod. All according to keikaku.
Harry turned back to the inert Room of Requirement with a gleam in their eyes they could feel. There were jewels, antiques, books, and instruments — they had definitely seen a pedal harp in there that looked like it could have been used to buy the first bungalow they'd lived in after graduating, as well as the surrounding land. Harry wasn't about to let a treasure trove that could house, feed, clothe, and entertain them for the rest of their wizardly life go un-looted.
Harry paced in front of the space, thinking, 'I need a room with all the hidden things organized neatly by category.'
A door much smaller and more subtle than the one before bled out of the wall.
A hum buzzing on their lips, Harry stepped in, already pulling out their bottom-less bag.
Contrary to what one might expect when reading the word 'looting,' Harry didn't actually start in on the traditional valuables until they were well done with the instruments and books. Well — the instruments. Taking care of the books came down to nothing more than shoving them into the eruditionary to be automatically contained and catalogued. It took a while to shove all nearly-12,000 of them in, but impatience-borne book-slamming revealed that Harry could just put their eruditionary face-down on a stack and push, and a whole tower of books could be subsumed in seconds.
A heart-breaking amount of instruments couldn't be salvaged (Harry teared up upon seeing a gorgeously detailed clavichord with most of its key levers smashed in), but there was still a solid haul dug out. The aforementioned extremely-valuable harp — which turned out just to have a few strings snapped; a nyckelharpa that had to have been stolen considering its pristine state; a few decent cellos; more violins and violin-adjacents than Harry knew what to do with; three cool as fuck bagpipes; assorted wind instruments that they couldn't identify; what they knew only as an African instrument favoured by Mansa Musa in the 14th-century; and a bowl lyre made from two antelope horns and an animal skull — metal as fuck.
The furniture, antiques, and decorations went ignored entirely; Harry decided to leave those for another day, when they had the leisure to care about things like that. Maybe after they lived long enough that furnishing a home actually qualified as important.
The pouches, wallets, suspicious briefcases of money were summarily snatched up before Harry went over to inspect the jewels. And Holy as well as Unholy Guacamole, were there jewels. The trunk filled with them was the largest container of them, but there were numerous personal jewellery boxes as well, on top of countless other individual pieces. Diamonds, emeralds, ruby, sapphires; gold, silver, bronze, platinum; rings, bracelets, necklaces, brooches, and hair pins.
As they had done with everything else they'd checked over so far, Harry slowly hovered a curse-detecting talisman over the assortment and tossed aside whatever pinged as dangerous. When only those that were free of danger remained, Harry gleefully picked through the pretty accessories, dreaming about the numbers that would add up in their bank account.
A flash of amazing blue caught Harry's eye.
Ooh, was that. . . ? Was that moonstone? It was! Merciful Mothers, contained within a wrapping of dark copper wire was the loveliest blue moonstone Harry had ever seen, the size of a lady's pocket-watch. It seemed to glow with moving inner light just sitting there.
Harry picked it carefully as they gaped.
Moonstone was semi-precious at best, but this one here was literally the most beautiful gem Harry had ever seen. It appeared to have a galaxy contained within it! Though, there was no chain around that they could see that could have been paired with it, despite the fact that the piece looked to be a pendant charm; perhaps that was why it was here.
Harry held it in two hands against their chest, half-imagining that they were Ursula from The Little Mermaid, the words of a tune that immediately jumped to their mind spilling from their lips.
"Moon drops dim the sun,/ halt what's meant to be,/ spur the sands of time,/ and set these spirits free,/" — a grand swirl of their skirt — "these spirits free./"
They twirled and stepped in circles in an exaggerated theatrical manner, having a grand old time. They hadn't watched the Rapunzel animated series Disney put out, but they'd fallen in love with the Decay Incantation when one of their favourite cover-artists released a small extended version with original lyrics. Enthralled, [REDACTED] had written their own extended version, which Harry now sang gleefully, imagining they were holding their own Moonstone Opal.
"Shatter every hope,/ drain away the light,/ crumble into dust,/ and linger in the night./ Wither and decay,/ end this destiny,/" — eyes that they hadn't noticed they'd squeezed shut cracked open — "break these earthly chains,/ and set these spirits free . . ./"
For a moment, images of Ursula's underwater cave overlapped with Rapunzel's tower swam in Harry's eyes. It took them a few seconds to take in that the table filled with jewels before them were disintegrating right in front of them.
" . . . these spir— AH!"
Harry leaped, nearly tripping over their feet.
"Ah-ah-aah! Wha?!"
The disintegrating stopped, but that didn't stop Harry from being thrown for a loop.
Harry looked down at the pendant charm in their hands.
. . . .
"What is this BULLSHIT?" they cried, dropping it into the dust of disintegrated gems.
They flicked through their eruditionary for the section where they kept spare talismans of their sigils. They pulled out one for detecting malicious magic — a more exacting talisman that included conditionally-malicious magic — and slapped it on the moonstone charm. They tapped out the activation sequence they'd keyed into it.
Nothing happened.
Harry stared at the moonstone charm with their arms crossed tightly, mind turning over and over like a taffy-pulling machine. The sequence of events seemed straight-forward and obvious, but . . . wasn't that just a bit too much to believe?
Now, despite Harry's propensity for fantastical leaps in logic and how they liked to wallow in wild daydreams, they weren't actually prone to believing that their imaginings and speculations were potentially factual. They had intrusive thoughts out the whazoo — they knew very well that what could occur to them wasn't guaranteed to be even close to reality. However. This reality they were now living in had very different fundamental laws than the reality where Harry had originally composed their paradigm. Absurdity like accidentally coming across a magic moonstone that could cause decay like Rapunzel's magic hair in that cartoon was straight out of a thirteen-year-old's poorly-written wish-fulfilment fic . . . but it was not completely outside the realm of possibility.
Harry reasoned with themselves, but still found themselves just . . . incredulous. A pretty rock and some singing, et voilà? An instrument of destruction worthy of a Sailor Moon villain? Why did this sound like a prop from Steven Universe?
Well . . . maybe they were thinking too sceptically about this? Magic stones weren't exactly commonplace in this reality, but they weren't anything surprising either. And Harry had long established that they could channel magic through their voice. And they were currently a protagonist who tended to stumble across unique artefacts — it was basically part of their character preset.
And there was another thing that niggled at Harry due to having read so many multi-transmigration c-novels in their past life — if this world was still functioning as a story that needed a plot and protagonist to drive it, Harry deconstructing the canon as they had been doing meant that there needed to be new revelations and plot devices to keep things functioning. And the way Harry was handling it, this bitch was turning into a different genre with a different demographic altogether — so why not a magic moonstone that made things disintegrate upon being sung at? If anyone in any reality was going to come across something like this, it would be a 'fem'-Harry like them.
Thinking like this, Harry was illogically guilty that they were ripping off Rapunzel's Tangled Adventures. They quickly smooshed that guilt, though. If they were to think like that, weren't they also ripping off Naruto with how their sigils and talismans worked like seals? And Danny Phantom as well, considering their compulsion worked similarly to Ember's powers? Ideas, tropes, and characteristics did not exist within a private vacuum; similarities were bound to happen. And it wasn't like Harry was the one designing how this world worked and what they encountered, right?
Ahem. Harry was quite right. It was just coincidental, not deliberately designed at all. This was all just funny happenstance.
Still, what was Harry going to do with this thing? They didn't really need a disintegrator. Well, it would be super helpful if it could work on horcruxes, but Harry sincerely doubted that it would — that would just be too damned OP, the story would only destroy itself if it threw something like that into Harry's lap.
. . . That is, if this was actually like one of those transmigration novels where the story's plot had to be maintained or re-established. There hadn't been anything to point to that conclusion in the years Harry had lived in this reality, though.
Still, considering one of the few ways to destroy a horcrux was the Killing Curse, it was highly unlikely whatever this moonstone was had the capability to destroy one.
Though. . . . Hmm. . . .
Harry decided to shelf that thought. The only way to test it out would be to get their hands on another horcrux and actually try it. They could experiment when they got Riddle's diary.
In the meantime—
Harry mournfully looked down at the dust remains of— Oh! It actually wasn't as bad as Harry had thought! Seeing the jewels turned to dust had panicked Harry, but looking now they could see that it was only a handful of jewels closest to them that had been destroyed. Most of the table was still perfectly intact.
Harry swept the remaining gems and jewellery into their bottom-less bag. They weren't going to give anything else the chance to diminish their financial situation.
Loot secured, Harry picked up the moonstone pendant charm again. It still was the prettiest stone they'd ever seen. Shame about the destruction thing.
Did it disintegrate things upon singing no matter what? Like, no matter what was sung? Harry had been singing an incantation of decay after all; would it do the same with, say . . . Rapunzel's healing incantation?
(Gods, this was so fucking dumb — they were literally using Disney music as spells.)
Harry walked over to the stack of already decaying portrait frames.
"Flower, gleam and glow,/ let your powers shine./"
Now that they were looking, Harry could see the moonstone reacting. It wasn't shining like they'd half-imagined, though — instead, the tiny galaxy within began to spin and churn, creating a tiny show of sparkles, as if someone was flipping around a bottle of glitter.
"Make the clock reverse,/ bring back what once was mine./"
Harry could discern a foreign warmth emanating from the pendant charm. The warmth seeped into them.
"Heal what has been hurt—/"
It didn't stay skin-deep — growing warmth and a feeling of . . . something sunk into their bones, moving up their wrist.
"—change the fates' design./ Save what has been lost,/ bring back what once was mine,/ what once was mine."
The portrait frames didn't disintegrate like the jewels before — what they did instead was evaporate. The pile of broken frames slowly vanished like someone gradually lowered their opacity scale from 100 percent to zero, starting from the side closest to Harry. As this happened, Harry was filled with a sense of . . . They didn't know what to call it. It was as if the lethargy they hadn't realised had been settled into their veins was forcefully shoved out and replace with vitality.
Harry felt like they could do something. Like, instead of wanting to chill, they wanted to run around the room and— okay, maybe not that. Umm-mm, they felt like they were in the middle of a strong fixation doubley fueled with inspiration, wherein they could crank out 15k words in a day? Yeah, that was it. They felt in The Zone™.
A hypothesis dawning on them, Harry went around the room for unsalvageable junk and sang at them with different songs. Songs that centred around healing or improving made objects evaporate; songs centred around anger or causing harm made objects disintegrate; songs centred around mourning made things melt; and songs centred around rejoicing or praising made things crack and then shatter. And no matter what, Harry was filled with an increasing supply of energy and sense of generally well-being they didn't know what to do with.
They were not going to call it 'power.' They didn't want to think about the implications of that; that way would only lead to a significant shift in genre that they didn't want to tempt.
Harry looked down at the moonstone charm in their hands. They really didn't know what they should do with it. On one hand, it had the means to make them feel active and high-functioning in a way they'd only ever heard other people talk about — and really some junk or miscellaneous non-essentials were a small price to pay for that. On the other hand, they didn't know if they could trust themself to not get drunk on the . . . energy . . . and make bad choices regarding it.
What would they even need that for? Like, plot-wise, what good would that do? Harry was canonically remarkably powerful — they already had the power to go up against Voldemort, they just didn't have the combat experience. Expanding their well of magical stamina wasn't necessary, and it wasn't even guaranteed to benefit them in any way. After all, if you didn't have the skill to hand-write something beautifully, having a more expensive pen wasn't going to improve anything.
But to be able to destroy things and consume the energy they produced. . . .
How environmentally-friendly! It was like recycling but better!
Concluding that the benefits out-weighed its sketchiness, Harry pocketed the moonstone charm with a nod.
A look around the room showed that Harry had cleaned out everything pressing already. Good — it was surely approaching lunch by now. Harry had to show their face in the Great Hall and then go to the bridge they told Snape about with their lyre, lest they prove a liar of themself.
Harry left the Room of Requirement with satisfaction. It had started as a rather unpleasant day, but things were certainly looking up right now.
Harry didn't actually think to look for Christmas presents at all — it gave them a shock to see gift boxes with their name under the tree in the Slytherin common room when they passed by it in the evening. The flash of their name caught their attention as they were reading and beginning to amble back down to their dorm for the night.
Crouching down to pick it up, it was then that Harry saw that it wasn't just the one box. One by one, Harry gathered them up. One, two, three . . . over a dozen! Harry couldn't believe their eyes. Who were the ones that had the time to bother sending Harry gifts for Christmas?
Well, no — maybe it wasn't surprising. They had a number of friends and friendly acquaintances that they knew in-person in this life, and all of them did Christmas. And Harry had their protagonist-ishness boosting them, so all the people that thought well of them really thought well of them. With all this, perhaps it was par for the course that Harry ended up with a pile of gifts for a holiday they didn't care for other than its food.
Harry ended up with the Invisibility Cloak they'd half-forgotten about, but they had to admit that it was the assorted books, sweets, and pretty trinkets that put on a smile that wouldn't leave on their face.
AN: I'm loosely planning on updating this fic once every two months until my backlog of written chapters hits the final chapter, and then I'll update bi-monthly until it's complete on AO3 and FFnet. My pace before was just TOO MUCH for me; it contributed to my burnout. I'm hoping at this new pace, I'll be able to handle writing and updating for my other posted fics as well. And also my fics I haven't posted yet.
If you want to know more about the specifics of my entire planned schedule or want to find out how to get chapters faster, find me on tumblr — high-pot-in-noose — and on desktop/mobile click 'FAQs & Schedule', but if you use the app, it'll be in my description box as [tumblr url]/schedule. I'm backlogged up to chapter 25 as of me writing this.