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Chapter 30
"I'm still being possessed by Tom. He made me kill my father." Ginny's words hung in the air as both Harry and Hermione froze trying to process that information.
"How do you know?" Hermione asked, trying to hold on to a few threads of hope that Ginny was just mistaken.
Ginny shot Hermione a glare at being questioned like that, obviously disgusted by the idea of carrying around a bit of Voldemort's magic. "Let's see, I can feel him in my head, I keep having to talk to him in my dreams, and I keep having visions of what the real Tom is doing. Yeah, I'm pretty fucking sure he is still in my head."
For Harry, though, the situation sounded eerily familiar. He even remembered Ginny climbing into sleep with Ron after the chamber fiasco, he must have been the only family member she had at the time that she trusted. Ron had at least tried to go with Harry to save her. Harry crouched right in front of the seated Ginny and took her hands in his. "Ginny, I don't think you are possessed. No, hear me out." Harry said as she tried to protest. "I think it's something similar to my scar. We were both touched by the monster's dark magic and it has affected us. Up until last year I used to get visions in my sleep as well. I saw him, Wormtail, and LeStrange breaking into Barty Crouch's house."
"Where they tortured the poor elf," Ginny said, apparently having had the same vision.
Harry nodded. "I'm not sure what it is, but I'm pretty sure neither of us are possessed." He tried to reassure her.
"But he made me kill my father." Ginny was sobbing into Harry's shoulder by this pont.
Harry's mind quickly made the connection and guessed what really happened "No Ginny, I don't think so. When I watched them break into the Crouch home I saw it from the point of view of his snake. Voldemort-" Ginny flinched, "has put a lot of magic in his snake, so the magic in us can just as easily connect to the snake as him. So I think you had to see it, but I don't think you were involved." Harry tried to comfort the girl.
"But I felt it. I wanted to. I enjoyed the blood filling my mouth. I can still taste it when I think about it." The poor girl was distraught
"You felt what the snake was feeling, it wasn't you Gin," Hermione said, having realised what Harry was saying.
The three of them remained like that for a long time, the two fifth year prefects cuddling and comforting a distraught fourth year in a cubicle of an out of order girls toilet. Probably not the best place to handle an emotional breakdown, but it wasn't like you could plan when and where that was going to happen. It was probably an hour later when Ginny had pulled herself together somewhat and asked, "Harry, you said you used to have dreams, but that means they stopped. How did you stop them? Please help me." The desperation on her face was obvious and entirely too genuine to ignore.
Harry wanted to help, he really did, but it was impossible as far as he knew. "Ginny, before I explain, please understand I would help you if I could, but I don't think it's possible. Not that I won't do something, not that I'm not allowed, I just don't think it's magically possible." Ginny looked like he had just killed her puppy. "That Halloween night all those years ago, my mother did something. No one is sure what, or how. But when she died, her magic came to me with the purpose of protecting me. That's how I survived. At the end of last year when I was fighting Vol- when I was fighting Tom, his wand was forced to spit out fake ghosts of the people Tom had killed. My mum's magic absorbed my mum's fake ghost, and because of this mum's magic can now think like a magical painting can. It's smart enough to keep the piece of Tom's magic locked away. So not only do I not know how, I don't think you want to do that even if I could."
Seeing how crestfallen Ginny looked, Harry had to offer her hope though, and after a few moments to think said, "But think of it this way Gin, we have at least proven it possible, and as the muggle saying goes, 'there is more than one way to skin a cat.'"
Hermione groaned. "Really, Harry, you had to choose that turn of phrase?" Harry felt his girlfriend's fluffy tail thwap into the back of his head that then wrapped around and ended with Harry having a face full of fluff. He didn't know if it was Hermione's intention, but the sight of Harry brushing a tabby cat tail out of his face broke the tension for Ginny and got her to give off a little giggle. Seeing her opening, Hermione pulled Ginny to her feet and said, "Right, let's go get you a Calming Draught from Madam Pomfrey and get you into bed." Ginny didn't put up any fuss and went along with Hermione.
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Ginny seemed to improve a lot over the next week. It seemed that a mix of unburdening herself, discovering that Harry was in the same situation, and hearing people say she wasn't in any way responsible for what had happened to her father had really helped. She was even responding better to her brothers. Harry wished he could spend more time with her helping her through it, but he was too busy building the full sized version of his doorway. Building the frame was easy compared to carving the ever-present runes into the wooden panels that were part of the design that couldn't easily be removed and replaced if he miscarved something.
As tricky as the arrays were to carve, they were at least less fiddly than carving the model sized tests. The larger arrays were a lot more forgiving for most of the carving. Harry was also starting to wonder if mundane manufacturing techniques could make the process of mass production of enchanted items easier. More specifically, he was thinking about a tool he had once seen at a leatherworkers' shop. The shop also did things like cutting keys and engravings on everything from dog covers to zippo lighters. Harry had been dragged into the shop a few times over the years so his aunt could buy her whale of a husband new belts. The regular shops didn't stock belts large enough to fit him, so she had to get them custom made for him.
One of the tools let you put premade plates on one side, and as you moved a mechanical stylus across the plate it etched the exact same pattern into whatever you put on the other side of the machine. Harry thought he would need to make his own plates with custom arrays, but once the plate was made then transferring that array to another item should be easy enough. Sure, it was probable that he would need to do some detail work by hand after the engraving, but if he could make the majority of the work manufactured, he could save hours on every array he carved. It would be a big step towards selling his enchanted items in the future. One of the biggest barriers to making a living off of selling the stuff you make is being able to make them quick enough to make a profit, and with a system like he was imagining he could easily see Dobby or Sassy being able to operate the engraving machine while he did the detail work.
Of course, this was all predicated on the idea that Harry could come up with marketable designs. Sure, he was Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived, Triwizard champion, all around great guy who managed to get two beautiful and intelligent young women to fall in love with him. And even if he only counted the last of those as an achievement, the first two would get him a lot of free advertising. But even then Harry would still need a quality product, or people would be afraid they were just throwing their gold away. With all the other demands on his time like classes, homework, studying for exams, and taking Hermione on their regularly scheduled date nights where they could 'destress', it took Harry almost two weeks to finish carving the arrays into the panels for his doorframe.
Now that it was finished, most of Harry's friends were there to see the first test. Hermione, Daphne, and Tracy were incredibly interested in a new method of drying their hair instantly, and the boys were loving the fact that to test the frame they were getting to dump a bucket of ice water over Harry. When or why it had become a bucket of ice water instead of just hitting him with the Aguamenti charm for a few seconds, Harry had no idea. Yet his friends seemed excited by the idea, and what would it hurt him to be cold and wet for a few seconds?
"This is going to be funny as hell," Ron said with a wide grin on his face.
"Just remember Ron, Harry gets to do the same to you once he's done with his test. Probably the first shower you've taken in a week," Ginny teased her big brother.
"Hey! Take that back." Ron called after his sister, who just stuck her tongue out at her brother. Considering that this was the happiest he had seen the Weasleys since they got back to the castle after Christmas, Harry suddenly felt rather good about letting them dump a bucket of ice water on him.
The twins conjured a mundane paddling pool for Harry to stand in, then all the guys and Tracey decided that they wanted to be the one to upend the bucket of freezing cold water over his head. While they were all doing rock paper scissors to work out who got the honour, Daphne decided she would just cut in line, and with a quick swish and flick of her wand the bucket floated over Harry and upturned itself.
Unfortunately for Harry, he was watching the people trying to win the right to torture him and didn't see Daphne or the bucket until it was to late. "Oh fuuuuuuuck!...oh fuck thats cold. Holy shit." The shock made it ten times worse.
Everyone was laughing at Harry's reaction, and despite knowing that he would see the funny side himself in a moment, right now he was way too cold to care. The original plan was for Harry to walk through the doorway slowly, so that if something went wrong he could pull back. Harry, though, was too cold to stand it and practically ran through the device. For a split second, Harry felt fantastic as the freezing water was vanished from his skin, hair, and clothes. Then he tried to move, and felt his skin resistant to any movement. He just squeaked out one word.
"Help."
Hermione immediately came rushing around to look at him, and when she saw his skin her eyes went wide. "We need to get you to the hospital wing. Now!"
Harry had to suffer the indignity of being levitated to the hospital wing, as there just wasn't enough give in his skin for him to walk. On the plus side, the classroom they were doing their experimenting in was (without any coincidence) on the same floor as the hospital wing, and Hermione had taken it upon herself to inform the school mediwitch about the nature of Harry's experiment. This meant that not only was Harry at the hospital wing in record time, but Madam Pomfrey knew exactly what he needed with one look.
Harry was laid on a bed and his clothes were switched with the air in the little cupboard next to the hospital bed, resulting in him being naked as soon as the curtain was drawn around his bed. "Miss Granger, this lotion needs to be applied to his entire body immediately, and I'm sure Mr. Potter will be far more comfortable if you were to focus on certain areas while I start at the top." Harry let out a groan of agreement and settled in for what was going to be one of his most embarrassing visits to the hospital wing in his entire time at Hogwarts. However, It wasn't as bad as it could have been. Harry's magic had naturally resisted the effect of the doorway, and while the top layer of his skin was dried out it wasn't completely water free. The fast application of a highly hydrating skin lotion had him feeling a lot better within an hour.
Harry ended up spending the next twenty four hours in the hospital wing having lotion applied to all of his skin every four hours and drinking plenty of water. Luckily for him, Hermione was more than willing to stay with him and help with the application of the lotion. Unfortunately, it wasn't anywhere near as fun as most people would expect having a beautiful girl massaging lotion into his naked body would be. Hermione was far too concerned with him being alright to take any enjoyment from it, and Harry (wanting his skin to stop feeling tight and cracking) did little more than give his girlfriend a few half hearted lewd comments. It did, however, give them plenty of time to talk about what went wrong.
"So how did this happen? You tested it out on the model, that was fine and all you did was scale it up. It should have worked fine," Hermione asked.
"Honestly I'm not sure. Maybe with scaling up I need to adjust the targeting. I know the smaller version went a fraction deeper than was perfect. I left it that way on purpose thinking that it was fine, and that if it was any lower it would just leave a person uncomfortably damp. Maybe when it was scaled up that tiny margin grew as well. It shouldn't have, the arrays I used were supposed to be absolute measurements and not ratios, so they shouldn't have changed. But it fits what happened."
"Next time, we test the doorway properly before we do any stupid challenges. Why did you dive through the doorway? That wasn't the plan." Hermione asked.
"It was so cold, and I thought it was a quick and safe way to vanish the freezing cold water. I think the twins may have pranked the water to be extra cold without freezing," Harry said as Hermione worked lotion into his back where he had trouble reaching.
"I'm going to kill them." Hermione had an edge to her voice that told Harry she was seriously considering hurting the twins.
"Let's see what they do first. If the doorway hadn't malfunctioned then it would have been pretty funny. If they did it, I think it was all meant in the spirit of good fun," Harry replied.
Hermione reluctantly agreed, especially as all they had was a suspension. Though, she did promise that if they found evidence it was the twins and they didn't at least apologise of their own volition, then she would take great pleasure in teaching them a lesson.
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When Harry got out of the hospital wing, he gave his project a complete examination to find out what went wrong. It actually ended up being so simple that he could only blame himself for missing it. Runic languages didn't have a measurement like inches or centimetres, instead when creating a Runic array you had to define a distance This is usually done by just carving a line that is referenced as being the base unit distance. Harry had scaled the line because it was referred to about six times in his runic array, but when he had scaled that line he had failed to realise that he had increased how deep the magic tried to penetrate the skin. The only excuse Harry could come up with was exam stress. He was so focused on getting the project done and out of his way so that he would have more time to study for the O.W.L.s that he had made a dumb mistake.
One surprise was Susan Bones, who came to apologise to him for charming the water to be extra cold. She said she thought Harry had already checked the doorway and was only putting on a show to help cheer up the Weasleys. She thought that Harry's reaction to the extra cold water would have gotten the family enjoying themselves. Harry had quickly forgiven the witch. If he had been sensible he would have checked the equipment quietly before putting on a show, but he hadn't and had paid the price. He did also note however that the Hufflepuff had been right. The extra cold water had been hilarious to the Weasleys.
Harry had needed to scrap the panels in his door frame and carve new ones, which was annoying as it was going to take him a week or more. But he was reminded about the old saying 'haste makes waste.' However, he actually managed to finish the recarving in three days thanks to something that Fleur suggested that he was able to do to make it go quickly. Her suggestion was to use a very careful vanishing charm on the back of the bad panels, to remove the back layer by layer until he had a stencil of the runes and arrays that he could use as a guide for the majority of the array that was perfectly fine.
It was a simple idea that was a bit more complicated in practice, but soon Harry had a full plan that would work. The work was still so delicate that he had ended up needing to ask the twins to do the precision vanishing of the back half of the bad boards. Then, with a few quick Duro charms and a few sticking charms to hold the new stencils to the new boards, Harry was able to copy out the good parts of the array so much faster than needing to re-measure and double check every angle that he would need to do if he was recarving freehand.
Harry was far more cautious testing the new boards this time, first starting with apples, then conjured wet and dry rats, then a few real mice he was able to catch in his falcon form. Once had tried all that, only then did Harry try the tip of his finger. Once all of those tests had come out fine only then did Harry try again to walk through the doorway. This time he was perfectly fine. He asked his friends if they wanted to try the ice water again, as it had been going brilliantly before he had been injured. His friends, however, all said that after what happened they didn't feel like having fun with the archway any more.
Harry and Hermione did still do a lot of tests. Once Hermione tried it in the Room of Requirement after a shower, she was begging Harry to install one in the girls' dorms. Apparently as long as she brushed her hair before walking through, the instant vanishing of the water meant that she was able to effortlessly dry her hair and she didn't even need to worry about it making her hair extra frizzy like she did with the drying charm. Of course, he couldn't do that because men or boys older than five (Hogwarts had had enough teen mothers in its one thousand year history that exceptions were added to the wards for young boy children) weren't permitted in the girls' dorms. Harry suspected that there was also an exception for staff members. If there was an emergency in a girls' dorm in Ravenclaw, Professor Flitwick needed to be able to respond quickly and Snape would have needed the same power as the head of Slytherin.
While he could see Headmistress McGonagall granting Harry such access temporarily during the summer holidays to install something like this, there was no way she would do so while the dorms were in use. Also, it was unlikely that she would permit them to be installed until after they were assessed by Professor Babbling, especially after he had ended up in the hospital wing. So Harry had to tell Hermione there was nothing he could do at the moment and get to work on the written side of his project, because as much as he wished it was otherwise, the written part of the project was worth more to his grade than the practical demonstration.
-ϟϟϟ-
Minister Bones' new approach to the threat of Voldemort was being felt even in the castle. There were reports in the newspaper every week about a family being attacked by the terrorists or a Ministry raid on a suspected Death Eater's house. That led to there being a lot of teenagers on edge. The children of a first generation parent or from blood traitor families were worried that the next edition of the Prophet was going to feature their house with a dark mark hanging over it, while the children of Death Eaters were worried that they were going to see pictures of their parents being carted off by Aurors.
Still, despite everything, Harry's impression of the war was that it was going a lot better this time than it was last time. Apparently people just weren't as afraid of Voldemort, the guy who got his arm cut off by a teenager, as they were of Voldemort, the unbeatable dark lord. Harry had hurt him, not with some super powerful spell or secret magic, but with a simple cutting hex; a spell most adult witches and wizards knew or could easily look up. That, along with the Daily Prophet going out of their way to point out how Voldemort lost a duel to a teenager, had the public far more likely to fire back curses at the Death Eaters this time around.
The majority of people still froze, ran, or just screamed, but about one in four people now fought back. The one time the Death Eaters had tried to attack Diagon Alley exactly one week after Minister Bones was sworn in, they found that enough people turned and fought back that they were extremely outnumbered. Four Death Eaters had been killed before the rest retreated. There were eight confirmed civilian deaths in the attack, twice that of the Death Eaters, but apparently the terrorists couldn't afford to lose those kinds of numbers, as they had kept out of the heavily populated magical spaces after that.
Unfortunately, this meant that they were focusing on homes where they knew they could arrange to have the advantages of both numbers and surprise. Of course, this only led the Prophet to start calling them cowards. This again told everyone that this war was different. In the first blood war, the Prophet had been too afraid to write about Voldemort and his forces in anything but a tone of fearful respect. This time they had just appealed to the Ministry to pay for a security force for their office. Minister Bones had granted it almost right away.
The only problem Harry had with the new coverage was that while the Prophet never mentioned Harry by name, they alluded to him a lot with things like, "Why should we fear someone who almost lost his head to a teenager?" If Harry understood Voldemort at all, the newspaper was inadvertently painting a target on Harry's back. Voldemort probably saw it as Harry directly mocking him. However, he couldn't ask them to stop without risking the spirit and zeal to fight back against Voldemort. It was two difficult choices. He could demand the Prophet stop alluding to him and the war would probably get worse, putting Harry and his friends in danger if Voldemort targeted them or his friends being caught in a crossfire. Or he could let the Prophet continue as it had in the full knowledge that it was making a madman target him and mean that anyone near him was likely to still be caught in the crossfire. To be frank, his options sucked.
-ϟϟϟ-
It was just before the final half term of the school year that Harry submitted his doorway project to Professor Babbling, and she informed him that she would look over it during the week they had off from classes and that Harry should expect to make his presentation the Friday evening after they started lessons again. Apparently, the professors would prefer to get the process of his presentation out of the way as soon as they could, freeing them to concentrate on the end of year exams for every other student.
Harry also learned that Neville was going to be presenting the findings of his study into the behaviour of Whomping Willows. Harry was disappointed that he hadn't actually managed to help Neville with his project all that much. Luckily his dorm mate had waved him off, pointing out Harry's life was too full of dealing with his own issues for him to have the time to help, and Neville understood that and didn't hold it against him.
With the doorway project done, Harry was able to focus for a few days exclusively on Quidditch. The final match of the year had been swapped around after Ravenclaw had beaten both Hufflepuff and Slytherin, so instead of the Gryffindor-Ravenclaw match being the first game of the week the two teams competing for the Cup were going to be the final match.
As soon as the lessons were over, Angelina went Quidditch mad. She had the Gryffindor team out practising that night from an hour after lessons until an hour before curfew. She even arranged with the kitchen elves for them to deliver a large platter of sandwiches to the pitch for them at dinner time, so they could stay at the pitch talking about strategy without having to trudge back up to the castle. Angelina wanted to keep going later, but gave in when Harry reminded her he was a prefect and it was his night to patrol for curfew breakers.
A/N
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