Nothing is mine.

Harry learns to vanish things and Trelawney gets fired (entirely unrelated, I promise).

The Day is Ending...

Great waves smashed against the bleak, dark rocks beneath his bare feet, breaking loud as thunder in the silence of the night. The full moon turned the heaving sea black, black as the ink that had bled from Tom Riddle's diary, but bleached the swirling foam white as bone. From that tumult, Azkaban rose, a blade of enchanted granite stabbing from the waves, and the ragged shadows of the dementors drifted about it in slow circles, like a lazy swarm of flies about a dead squirrel at the roadside.

'A sword rising from the water.' Voldemort's whisper was near lost beneath the sound of the crashing sea. 'Whomsoever holds it…'

Harry drifted up, over the rocks and the hammering waves, the cold spray stinging his bare toes, and alighted upon the bare stone before the tall bronze doors; he drew his long, pale wand from within his robes and levelled it at them.

The thick metal crumpled like an eggshell in the grip of Voldemort's magic and a shudder ran through Azkaban, shaking loose a cascade of dust. Cries rang out through the tower and dementors poured from the narrow windows, swooping from the sky to circle around him, a storm of tattered, dark robes and hoarse rattling breath.

'I do not know fear.' Voldemort's murmur left Harry's lips as he floated forward. 'Step aside. I come not for you, but for those loyal to the Old Ways. Those loyal to me. Those who dream of being free.'

They let him pass, staring after him, their hooded faces veiled in by the shadow of night. Wizards and witches in grime-encrusted rags staggered barefoot from within, stumbling over the fallen doors into the light of the moon.

'Come.' He gestured them forward with a long-fingered, pale hand. 'Come. I have returned for you, as you knew that I would.'

'My lord.' A half-starved, gaunt figure strode forward through the rest, her grey eyes full of fire. 'My Lord Reborn in Death.'

Voldemort ran a long slender finger over his crooked yew wand. 'Bella.'

The dementors drifted forward, reaching out with their twisted, misshapen fingers, clutching at the air.

'No,' he murmured, extending one arm to bar their path. 'They are mine. You cannot have them. Be gone.'

They drew back, circling about him like crows as they drifted away into the night sky.

Bella fell to her knees. 'And Those Who Dream in Death shall recognise his coming,' she whispered. 'Is it time, my lord?'

'It is time. Stand, Bella.'

She rose in one fluid motion. 'Pendragon's aurors will be coming.'

'They will find nothing here but fear.' He raised his wand and ripped the wards away. 'Go. Leave. Gather at the grounds of Lucius Malfoy. Bella, see to it that none stray from the confines of that manor. There is no room for missteps. Our war begins. I will show you the way.'

They disappeared in a deafening crack of apparition.

'I can feel you watching,' Voldemort whispered. 'You laugh at Lord Voldemort. Defiant as the moment I first saw you.' A cold grin curved Harry's lips. 'Even as babe, you had no fear of me, Harry Potter. I watched myself die in your eyes; you laughed as I was ripped from the world and cast adrift at my own hand.'

Harry's amusement swelled at the thought of baby him giggling at Voldemort like a cheap Muggle magician pulling a rabbit from a hat.

'You were a scared child when we crossed paths again, but defiant still. And now here you are to laugh at me again. But if you knew; if you had seen; you would not be laughing. And I have seen, Harry; I have seen further than any other.' The tip of Voldemort's pale, crooked yew wand rose up toward the moon. 'Morsmordre.'

And Harry opened his eyes to stare up at the gold and red hangings above his bed and grinned, trying and failing to imagine just how Fudge was going to explain this, but very sure, no matter what it turned out to be, that it would make for amusing reading.

'Three sickles says Umbridge tries to blame vampires, or werewolves, or dark magic and old superstitions again.' He laughed to himself in the quiet of the morning. 'But first, breakfast and then transfiguration, and then watching Umbridge melt into a flabby puddle of rage.'

Harry hauled on his clothes, brimming with bright cheer as he bounded out and down the stairs to the common room.

'Mate.' Ron stumbled after him, one arm through his inside-out jumper, rubbing the sleep from his eyes on the back of his free hand. 'Wait up.'

'Not gonna,' Harry called over his shoulder and ducked out through the passage. 'Hi Fat Lady. Bye Fat Lady.'

The Fat Lady snored on.

'Or not.'

A lone first year, halfway to tears, yanked at his ankle where it had sunk into the trick step. 'Please help!'

Harry paused over the step. 'Let's try this.' He slid his wand from his sleeve. 'Confundo.'

The firstie tugged his foot free and scrambled back up a few stairs, sinking both feet into the trick step just above. 'Oh no,' he moaned.

'Yeah, there's a few of these,' Harry said, freeing him with a wordless flick of his wand. 'Wait—' he glanced between his wand and the step '—oh well, I guess it's not that hard a spell.'

'But which ones are the trap ones?'

'Don't stand on the ones that are really clean and unworn,' he replied. 'There's a reason not as many people have been walking on those ones and that reason is they grab your leg.'

'Ohhhhh.' The firstie picked his way down to the ground floor after Harry, placing his feet in Harry's footsteps. 'Thank you.'

'You're welcome, tiny helpless first year.' Harry strolled through into the Great Hall.

'Harry!' Hermione waved at him from the table. 'Over here!'

He joined her about halfway to the door and snagged a croissant from the middle of the table. 'Wait, they still do these? I thought they'd stop now Fleur's gone.'

'Now Beauxbatons' students are gone, Harry. They weren't just for Fleur.'

'Weren't they, though?' He laughed as she rolled her eyes at him, and pulled it apart into pieces. 'Well, I'm not complaining, I quite like them.'

Hermione spooned a mouthful of yoghurt and granola into her mouth and mumbled something.

'What?' Harry devoured the pieces of his croissant with a grin.

'I said Umbridge is smiling.' She shot a rather sharp look past his shoulder toward the high table and the teachers. 'She looks horribly smug.'

'She probably did something awful.' He chuckled. 'And speaking of awful, I found that firstie you stuck in the trick step. Hermione. He was very upset.'

'I did not.'

'We all know it was you. Only you could be so villainous.'

'Oh, just eat another croissant,' Hermione muttered. 'Go daydream about Fleur feeding you them or Daphne Greengrass.'

'Just Greengrass,' Harry corrected. 'Let's see how she likes it when I'm the snooty one who just stares at her and randomly appears to see her but doesn't actually want to talk to her except to very deliberately tell her he doesn't want to be seen with her.'

'I don't think that even made sense. And is that really your best idea of flirting, Harry?'

'No.' He thought about it. 'Actually, maybe yes, but only because I have no idea what flirting should be. How would you flirt with her?'

'I wouldn't,' she said. 'Daphne's a girl.'

'But if you were me.'

'I don't know, just talk to her like a normal person, Harry.'

'I tried that,' he protested. 'She's not very talkative.'

'Did you let her get a word in?'

'What?' Harry laughed. 'Yes, Hermione. She's not you. I don't have to distract her by talking to make sure she doesn't fly into a blind rage and murder the nearest Muggle-born.'

Hermione threw a croissant at him; it missed him and bounced off Ron's hip, rolling away under the Hufflepuff table.

'Why?' Ron asked.

'You were collateral damage in Hermione's quest to deny her murderous impulses,' Harry informed him. 'Sorry you have to find out this way.'

'Oh.' Ron got stuck into the nearest toast rack, covering his yawn with his arm as he buttered and devoured slice after slice. 'We didn't have anything to do for Transfiguration, did we?'

'No.' Hermione shook her head. 'It's our first lesson on vanishing. Vanishing is hard, it's one of the toughest things you can be asked to do for OWLs, so you both need to pay attention.'

Harry grinned. 'How hard can it be?'

'Well, let's go and find out,' she retorted, standing up. 'Come on, Ron.'

Ron juggled his last three slices of toast as Hermione dragged him after her by the sleeve, shooting a mournful look at the boiled eggs. Harry collected Ron's bag and wandered after them, laughing as Ron made one desperate attempt to swipe a croissant off the end of the table, but missed.

Hermione released him just outside the Great Hall, stalking toward Transfiguration with an aura of serious purpose.

'What did you do, mate?' Ron groused. 'Barely got breakfast, didn't I?'

'You did cut it a bit fine,' Harry said, returning Ron's bag to him. 'Here. You forgot this.'

'Cheers.' Ron munched his last pieces of toast with a rather crestfallen expression, trudging after Hermione. 'She's going to be horrible and make me work now,' he said between bites. 'OWLs aren't even for another ten months or something, but look at her go anyway.'

'Imagine what she's going to be like at the end of the year.'

A low groan escaped Ron as he brushed crumbs off his robes.

Professor McGonagall stood at the front of the class while everyone filtered in, sketching the title across the blackboard with her wand, one hand on her hip.

Hermione swept past the first two seats on the front row and took the third.

'Do you think we'd get away with it if we vanished for this class?' Harry mused. 'We'd be demonstrating an understanding of the principles of the piece of magic, right?'

'No, Mr Potter,' Professor McGonagall called. 'You would find yourself in detention, and woe betide you if you thought you could vanish from that.'

'Damn,' he said. 'Well, fair enough, I guess.'

The Slytherins drifted in.

'Out of the way, Potter,' Malfoy drawled. 'Surely your head hasn't grown so big you need to take up the entire aisle.'

Harry laughed. 'No, there's plenty of room for you to slither on by to the back, Draco.' He caught a flash of anger in Malfoy's eyes. 'How's your aunt, by the way? Not doing too much falling to her knees and whispering my lord reborn in death, I hope?'

The anger drained out of his face. 'How—'

'Just bugger off, Malfoy,' Ron growled.

'I believe I shall,' Malfoy retorted. 'No need to sully myself with the company of two Blood-Traitors and… her.'

'Look, Hermione,' Harry said. 'Draco shares your hatred of Muggle-borns. Maybe you should ask him out on a date and bond with him over it?' He paused. 'Draco, do you, by chance, happen to have leather trousers somewhere? Think carefully, it's very important.'

Malfoy scoffed and stalked off.

'I think that was a no, Hermione,' Harry said, consoling her with gentle pats on the head. 'But it's okay, one day, you'll learn to love again.'

'If you don't stop that, you're going to need to learn to grow your hand back,' she snapped. 'Honestly, Harry, me and Malfoy?!'

He nodded, steepling his fingers like Professor Dumbledore. 'Enemies to lovers.'

Hermione coloured scarlet, looking faintly like she wanted to be sick. 'Just no. On every level no.'

'Not even in your deepest, darkest, most secret romantic fantasies?'

'No!'

'Ouch.' Harry laughed. 'Guess that's a pretty sharp rejection for Malfoy. Sucks to be him. He's got to keep dating Crabbe and Goyle now.'

Daphne slipped in, catching his eye as he turned to offer his least sincere reassuring smile to Malfoy.

Harry beamed at her and stuck his nose in the air, mustering up every bit as much of Malfoy's posh condescension as he could mimic. 'Greengrass.'

Hermione groaned and buried her face in her hands.

Greengrass's cool blue eyes swept over him, and she tucked the rogue lock of blonde hair hanging over her face back behind her ear. 'Potter.' The corner of her mouth twitched in the faintest hint of a smile, and the bottom of Harry's stomach burst into butterflies. 'Get out of my way.'

He side-stepped.

'Thank you,' she murmured as she passed and took a seat at the back on the opposite side of the class to Malfoy.

'Wow, Harry.' Hermione's scathing tone absolutely failed to make it through that light flutter and swirl inside him. 'You sure showed her.'

Ron sniggered.

'Shut up, Ronald,' Harry said. 'You sleep-talk. Remember the dorm non-aggression pact. It's mutually assured destruction.'

A bright red flush climbed up Ron's neck and the tips of his ears near glowed.

'Yeah, exactly.'

'Are you quite done, Mr Potter?' Professor McGonagall asked; a strange soft gleam hovered in her eyes despite her pursed lips. 'I do have a lesson to teach…'

Harry dropped down into his seat with a smile. 'Sorry, professor.'

'Thank you.' She pointed over her shoulder. 'Today, we will start work on vanishing; as one of the toughest parts of your OWL, I like to get into it now. All the rest seems much easier afterward.'

Hermione prodded Harry's bag.

'Do I have to?' he whispered.

'Yes, Mr Potter,' Professor McGonagall replied, rather tartly, Harry thought. 'Fortunately, we start with a practical exercise for this particular piece of magic. Find a piece of parchment, not one with anything important on it, and attempt to vanish it. Try and think about the best way to make it disappear.' She pointed at the blackboard again. 'The incantation is on the board, broken down so you all know how to pronounce it.'

Harry dug out Umbridge's textbook and placed it on the desk. 'Perfect.'

A snort of laughter escaped Hermione and Ron broke down into sniggers.

Professor McGonagall pursed her lips, but turned away to close the door.

'Right, evanesco, wasn't it?' Harry stuck two fingers up his sleeve and drew his wand out. 'I cannot imagine anything less useful than this book, so…' He gave it a firm poke and imagined it winking out of existence, snuffed out and swallowed like a distant silver star by the darkness beyond them. 'Evanesco.'

Slinkhard's Tome of Absolutely Useless Waffle disappeared.

'Well, it works.' Harry tucked his wand back away. 'I sure hope I won't need that book for anything important, like, I don't know, I guess emergency toilet paper, or maybe an unconventional missile.'

Hermione stared. 'Did you just… did you do it first time?!'

'It does seem that way.' Harry made a great show of patting around on his desk for the book as if it might have turned invisible. 'Yeah, I think it's gone.'

'How did you do it?' she asked. 'Seriously, that's not an easy spell. I was reading about this, and there's all sorts of extra bits to it. We're not supposed to really intuitively like the idea of things just vanishing, so it's really hard to vanish things and especially things that we instinctively think have value, like books.'

'Maybe I don't think books are valuable,' Harry mused. 'Honestly, I just imagined it disappearing. Like something just swallowed it.'

Hermione puffed her cheeks out, a small frown creasing her brow. 'Do it again.'

He held out his hand. 'Give me your textbook. It's not like it's actually useful.'

Ron paused in jabbing his piece of parchment to stare.

Hermione shook her head. 'No, you'll just get in trouble with Umbridge for no reason again.'

'Fine.' Harry glanced around for something to vanish. 'Malfoy, can I borrow you for a moment? I need a victim.'

Malfoy scowled and turned his back.

'Well, it was worth a try,' Harry reckoned. 'Can you un-vanish things, professor? And by things, I mean students you don't like.'

Professor McGonagall shook her head. 'When you vanish something, Mr Potter, you are willing it out of existence. You're not moving it, changing it, or anything like that; you have unmade it. There are, within the Ministry of Magic, and those various other institutions that study magic, theories that you are actually turning the item into magic, so that a piece of reality is not just gone, but nothing has ever been firmly proven.'

Hermione perked up and raised her hand. 'What are the theories, professor? Do you turn it into energy? It can't actually be destroyed. You can't do that.'

Malfoy tutted at the back of the class. 'It passes from this world—'

'Mr Malfoy,' Professor McGonagall snapped. 'You have a piece of parchment to vanish.' She turned back to Hermione. 'The exact mechanics of the spell are not firmly defined, Miss Granger; the spell and its concept of vanishing things predates the sort of analytical study of magic the last few centuries have produced. What I can say, from my reading and my own knowledge of the subject, is that it is not changed to a form of energy we can detect, as there's no release of heat or light or anything like that. I would be inclined to agree with those who believe it is changed into magic. Transfiguration is all about changing, after all. There are—' Professor McGonagall pursed her lips '—other theories, more rooted in superstition and faith than any credible study of magic, and no doubt some members of this class know what I am talking about. Such beliefs are not recognised by the ICW or the Ministry, particularly not this year.'

Harry leant across and drew his wand back from his sleeve, tapping Hermione's defence textbook. Something in him called to mind one of his nightmares from the summer, and that slim crack snaking across thin ice; the dark water swelling beneath it swallowed the book like he'd slipped it through that crack and let it sink.

The bright cartoonish picture of the vampire vanished and so did every page of the rest.

'Harry!' Hermione hissed.

Professor McGonagall frowned. 'I think in this case, Miss Granger, as loath as I am to suggest sullying a school-recommended textbook, Mr Potter may have done you a favour. There is absolutely nothing in… that worth reading.' A faint smile flashed across her face. 'Well done, Mr Potter. How did you accomplish it?'

'I imagined it disappearing,' he said.

'Just disappearing?'

'Not quite,' Harry admitted with a slight grin. 'Disappearing like a candle being snuffed out in the dark, or a star being swallowed by the night sky.' Stares prickled on the back of his neck as he spoke. 'But maybe I just really hate that book.'

'Unconventional.' Professor McGonagall swept her gaze across the class. 'A little longer on this, then we'll talk about all the ways in which we were trying and think about which were effective and why.'

Harry twisted around.

Daphne stared back from the last row in the class, a strange little gleam in her pale blue eyes as she wound that rogue lock of blond hair around her finger. Harry gave her a smile and a grin, and watched that small glimmer smoulder into something sharper, something wild and almost hungry that tugged the bottom out of his stomach and sent butterflies swirling through his chest.

'I'm going to go and talk to her,' he said.

'What? Who?' Hermione tracked his line of sight across the class. 'Oh. Her. You're on your own, Harry. I'm not getting involved in that.'

Harry laughed and drifted out of his seat to the back of the room. 'Greengrass.'

'Potter,' she murmured; flipping her hair over her shoulders.

The faint, sweet scent of spearmint sent his heart squirming about beneath his ribs. 'Would you like a hand? It's easier to stare if I'm closer, right?' Harry glanced at the empty desk. 'Or are you just trying about as hard as I do to listen to Umbridge?'

'I do not have a wand.'

He blinked. 'You forgot your wand? You can borrow mine if you want?'

Daphne's gaze drifted to the wand in his hand. 'No, thank you.' Something flickered through her cool blue eyes; a little spark as bright and cold as distant starlight. 'You should not offer to lend your wand to people, Potter. Your wand is part of you. It is sacred. To offer it to someone else carries… connotations.'

'I mean…' Harry rubbed some of the fingerprints off it on his sleeve with a rueful grin. 'It's certainly special and I am rather fond of it, but I don't know about sacred.'

'You do not know anything,' Daphne said. 'Now go away and leave me be. I do not wish to associate with a Blood-Traitor.'

He stared at her. 'You know, I thought you were different because you don't act like Malfoy or Parkinson.' A little grin spread across his face. 'But you're really not, are you? You're just like them, only prettier and probably a bit weirder because you don't talk to anyone much.'

'Just because I have a… different manner, does not mean I condone the betrayal of our ancestors any more than that idiot.' Daphne folded her arms across her chest. 'For a thousand years, your blood lived and believed like mine, and you have turned your back on what they held dear.' The gleam that welled up in her cool blue eyes was wild, wild and free and fey; it burnt like some spark of that dying sun he'd dreamt of, a sputter of its last light trapped in her gaze like a fly snared in amber. 'Blood is precious.'

'Well, I have no idea about anything my family did. Except dying, of course.' Harry chuckled to himself. 'And I seem to be bad at that, despite Trelawney's many many predictions of it, so I guess my Blood-Traitor title is just inescapable.'

Daphne's rose-pink lips crooked.

'That's a smile,' he accused. 'Malfoy will never forgive you for this betrayal of House Slytherin.' He offered her a bright grin. 'Of course, if Malfoy wasn't so annoying, I'd have let the Sorting Hat put me in Slytherin like it wanted to, then you would have competition for who betrayed Slytherin the most.'

Malfoy's head snapped up, his face colouring.

'I could be great, you know,' Harry joked, ignoring Malfoy's stare. 'It said some other stuff too, but I can't remember what it was now. Much like all those predictions of my death Trelawney made. I don't know why her inner eye is so obsessed with death; it's like every time she sees me, she tries to come up with some new and horrible omen.'

'Umbridge threw Trelawney out of the castle this morning, so you need not worry about her any longer,' Daphne said. 'The Ministry does not like prophecies; it collects them and records them, but only to make sure very few people can hear them. They consider them… very dangerous.'

'Well, I won't miss her all that much.' Harry scratched the back of his head. 'I'd prefer it if Umbridge was thrown out instead, though. Then I don't have to listen to her try and tell everyone shouldn't trust me because someone hit me in the face with a really dark spell and anyone touched by dark magic is evil or whatever it is she was saying last time.'

'She said those who hold to superstitions and the old ways are backwards people who worship Death, the end of the world, and dark things, and that undermining the Ministry with false rumours stops them from protecting us against those people.' The faintest trace of contempt coloured Daphne's tone as she wrinkled her cute little nose at him. 'As if the puppet establishment of the ICW did anything but try to control us all.'

'At least they're bad at it?' Harry suggested. 'Fudge and Umbridge can't even find a useful textbook. I can only imagine how bad they are at running a country.'

The look Daphne gave him was part-pitying and part-contemptuous, but sent a cloud of countless butterflies swirling through his stomach just the same. 'They are supposed to be useless, Potter. Their endless bureaucracy and bumbling and all the elections are just a circus for the masses. The Minister for Magic is elected to enact the laws made by the ICW, which I can promise you we all have no say in whatsoever, all the rest is just… theatre.'

AN: You know where to go to find more, support me, etc etc etc. Let's not type out a huge paragraph about it xD

linktr . ee / mjbradley