Chapter 86
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or Criminal Minds or any of their characters. I do however own this story, I wrote it and I do NOTgive permission for anyone to post it anywhere else. If you want to share it post a link.
To: Spencer Reid email
From: Harry Potter email
Tuesday 30/6/92 6:01pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)
Hi Spencer
Are you there?
I have about an hour til dinner and it's not my turn to help with it, I'm on clean up tonight, so we can talk if you're available. I must admit I'm excited for almost immediate conversation.
Your friend always
Harry
To: Harry Potter email
From: Spencer Reid email
Tuesday 6/30/92 10:03 Pacific Standard Time (PST)
Hi Harry
It's so good to talk to you.
How is your summer going? Are things still going well between you and Dean and Seamus?
Spencer
To: Spencer Reid email
From: Harry Potter email
Tuesday 30/6/92 6:04pm (GMT)
Hi Spencer
It's going really well. I like the Thomas's, and Dean and Seamus and I are getting along well. I'm not sure why Seamus and I didn't seem to gel at school so much. But he doesn't like Ron or Hermione so that's probably why he keeps his distance. I hope Ron hasn't said anything nasty to keep him away, but I wouldn't be surprised if he did.
Dean and Seamus are best mates and sometimes I feel a bit left out of their friendship but I also appreciate the time on my own sometimes while they're doing best friend things. I wish I had a friend like that at school to hang out with but my best friend will always be you and I'm more than fine with that. It's nice to have someone completely out of the whole mess that I know cannot be being manipulated to be my friend or to try to persuade me to do things or act in a certain way.
How's your Mum? Is she having a good day? Have you found a new doctor that she'll like?
Harry
To: Harry Potter email
From: Spencer Reid email
Tuesday 6/30/92 10:07 (PST)
Hi Harry
Mom's having a good day. She took her medications for me and I really like the doctor I spoke to yesterday so I home Mom will. I only wish now that I could have got her in to see the him today instead of tomorrow but there was no way to know yesterday that today would be better, I'll just have to hope that tomorrow's a good day too.
I'm glad you're having a good summer.
Maybe you should ask Seamus and Dean if Ron or anyone else tried to warn them off hanging out with you at school, or if he's just so unpleasant when you're not there that they're actually avoiding him instead of you. I'm not sure why he would but from what you've said he does seem unusually possessive of your friendship sometimes, even if he does seem to throw it away over every slight disagreement.
To: Spencer Reid email
From: Harry Potter email
Tuesday 30/6/92 6:09pm (GMT)
Hi Spencer
I think Ron's lack of self-confidence and possessiveness issues come from being the sixth of seven children, never really having anything that was just his. He looks up to his brothers and doesn't think that he is as good as any of them except for Percy, the 5th year prefect, Ron says he's smart and gets good grades but he looks down on him for being a swot. That doesn't excuse his behaviour acting like he owns me though. I will be angry if he did say something to stop Seamus from wanting to be my friend before this, but I could see him doing it.
How is the cooking going? What are you planning to cook for dinner?
I'm sorry that the cookbook I made you hasn't helped and I wish I could give you some more advice on learning to cook but to be honest I barely remember learning. I was too young to read recipes and Aunt Petunia would bark orders at me and then punish me if the food wasn't perfect and the Dursleys liked their food as unhealthy as possible. The best thing I learned was to take my time and not be impatient it's better to have the heat a little lower even if you are in a rush to get it done, there's more room for errors even if the food does soak more fat that way, the Dursleys never cared about that. But if you want it to soak in less fat have the oil or fat hot before you put the food in. I choose the temperature from instinct so I can't really tell you what's right but you can buy cooking thermometers and some of the books you borrowed might be able to tell you what temperature you want.
To: Harry Potter email
From: Spencer Reid email
Tuesday 6/30/92 10:12 (PST)
Hi
The cookbook you made me is better than anything I borrowed from the library, I'm just nervous because I haven't really tried much yet since then. I was planning on broiled chicken and salad. I'm sure I can't get salad all that wrong it's just cutting and mixing, I'm going to make the dressing on the side so if it doesn't turn out any good we can skip it. Broiled chicken doesn't sound any harder than cheese toasties and I can do that.
To: Spencer Reid email
From: Harry Potter email
Tuesday 30/6/92 6:13pm (GMT)
Hi
Just had to look up broiled and I think it means what I call grilled. To cook or grill under a flame, that makes sense because I think I call what you call cheese toasties, grilled cheese sandwiches.
Grilling chicken is easy, the trick is to not use too high a heat and turn to cook the other side too, so it doesn't burn before it's cooked through the middle. You need to make sure you cook it until it isn't pink in the middle, or you'll make yourself sick. Are you going to crumb or season it first? That will help keep the chicken from getting too dry if you overcook it a bit.
To: Harry Potter email
From: Spencer Reid email
Tuesday 6/30/92 10:17 (PST)
I don't know, what should I season it with? I don't have the ingredients for the fried chicken coating in your book, and would that work if I was broiling instead of frying?
To: Spencer Reid email
From: Harry Potter email
Tuesday 30/6/92 6:18pm (GMT)
You can season chicken with almost any herb or spice that you like or just coat it lightly with some flour or breadcrumbs, you could use a little milk to wet the chicken to get things to stick to it if you done have an egg, and yeah it will work to grill it instead of frying it, the meat just ends up a bit drier and not as greasy. If I was cooking for just Petunia or here at the Thomas's I usually use salt and pepper, or a special seasoning mix but you could use any dried herbs as well if you use them sparingly. For Vernon and Dudley I'd use egg and then breadcrumbs or a mix of breadcrumbs and powdered parmesan cheese with herbs and fry the chicken. It would work to grill/broil as well but Dudley and Vernon didn't like grilled chicken.
What sort of salad? What ingredients do you have? I've never made salads for the Dursleys and Hogwarts doesn't serve them either so the only one's I know are the Italian ones from the restaurant, but we had a couple of nice ones Mrs Thomas made as well and I could ask her for help if we need it.
To: Harry Potter email
From: Spencer Reid email
Tuesday 6/30/92 10:20 (PST)
I don't know, salad, salad. I've got lettuce and tomato and baby beetroot and some cucumber and carrots and capsicum. The book says to make the dressing with oil, vinegar salt lemon juice and sugar. The restaurants have all these fancy salads but I don't know how to make any of them.
To: Spencer Reid email
From: Harry Potter email
Tuesday 30/6/92 6:22pm (GMT)
That sounds like a great meal for a hot day. Are you going to use bread as your carbohydrates? Otherwise you'll get hungry again too quickly without them.
To: Harry Potter email
From: Spencer Reid email
Tuesday 6/30/92 10:23 (PST)
We eat too much bread when I'm responsible for feeding us. What else could I use that's easy?
It's funny all the time I've emailed and imagined being able to email chat with you I never pictured using it to get you to help me cook dinner
To: Spencer Reid email
From: Harry Potter email
Tuesday 30/6/92 6:25pm (GMT)
No me either, but you've always helped me so much, it feels good being able to help you and know my advice isn't something you've already worked out for yourself by the time my letter arrives.
You could cook potatoes with the skin on in the microwave. Just scrub the potatoes well and stab them with a sharp knife every square inch or two then cook for about five minutes until they're easy to cut with a butter knife. The Dursleys used to have potatoes cooked like that with lashings of butter and chopped bacon and cheese, or a fancy sauce made of cream, mayo, Dijon mustard (though Petunia always made me peel the label off it as soon as she bought it so Vernon wouldn't realise it she'd brought a French food product), chives and shallots when they had guests, but I always had mine plain and they taste pretty good.
You could also use potato or pasta salads, I think most of them are a bit complicated for you to make at the moment and they're a bit time consuming because you need to precook the potato or pasta and let it cool before you make the salad, but the supermarket should have them premade.
To: Harry Potter email
From: Spencer Reid email
Tuesday 6/30/92 10:28 (PST)
You have a point there. I often worry that my advice so often will arrive too late to do you any good too. I wish that we could communicate like this when you're at school and need me more than you do while you're safely with the Thomas's. it seems ironic that now communication is easier when you need me less than you ever have and when you go back into danger we will have to go back to letters.
Speaking of advice though, I really don't know what to tell you about next year. I don't think that you're safe at Hogwarts, especially since I cannot work out the motivations behind whoever is trying to control the teachers with magic like that. At first, I thought that it would at least be comforting to know that they're not all in on controlling you or attacking the school and emotionally it might help to know they didn't all betray you, but from a practical point of view it doesn't really matter, willingly or not they are acting against your safety and the safety of every other student in the school. How could one of Voldemort's supporters get into the school and into a position where the professors would trust him enough to let him cast mind controlling spells on them to stop them from protecting the stone. Is there any way to find out whether Dumbledore has been spelled like that as well? The stone should never have been brought into the school and if it's too risky to keep it in the bank then it should've been destroyed.
I was worried that you thought Dumbledore had been watching you battle Professor Quirrell without trying to help. You said the memory is fuzzy and you weren't sure if it was real but there's no reason for Dumbledore to want you to think that he wouldn't help you, and I cant see it benefitting anyone else except Voldemort himself and he couldn't have altered your memory after you turned him into a black smoky ghost thing could he? I think that the memory is real and maybe the reason it is fuzzy is because Dumbledore tried to remove it because he didn't want you to know he was watching and your occlumency stopped him from getting rid of the memory properly. I wish there was a way to know for sure because I would feel a whole lot better about you being in that school if you could trust that nobody had wiped your memory of anything.
Do you mean scrub the potatoes with a scrubbing brush?
To: Spencer Reid email
From: Harry Potter email
Tuesday 30/6/92 6:30pm (GMT)
Use a scrubbing brush or clean kitchen scourer to clean the potatoes, just make sure you've got all the dirt off, dirt tastes really bad as well as being bad for you. Or you can buy potatoes that are already washed and just rinse them off.
You're right that I'm safe here so long as Dumbledore or whoever else is looking to control my life doesn't have a way of finding me, and I think they would have come for me by now if they did. Mrs Thomas looks after us well in spite of how hard she works. She asked me about you, making sure you weren't too old to be my friend or the type of person to get me in trouble or take advantage of me somehow. I think I convinced her that you're a good and sensible friend but she might try to contact you herself. Please don't take offence if she does.
It was comforting to know that I wasn't surrounded by enemies wanting to control me, or wanting to let Voldemort steal the Philosopher's stone but then I realised that it meant that anyone could be spelled at any time. I really can't trust anyone at all, even people I could otherwise trust and have trusted in the past might not be acting under their own control anymore and I won't know unless I find a way to tell whether they've been spelled to mask their normal reactions and choices. I can't even tell which actions of Ron and Hermione's aren't genuine, is the desire to be my friend manufactured or is the friendship real and is someone interfering with their personalities to make me think that I can't trust them to be real friends, or are their personalities altered by someone who thinks that I'm too thick to realise that they're not acting like true friends would? I think that Ron's being influenced to brush aside arguments and return to hanging out with me but I could be wrong. The twins and Percy aren't such ill-mannered hot heads and they're not lazy either, they're all clever with spells, which means study even if it doesn't mean handing in essays on time. Why is Ron so different from his brothers. I just end up going around in circles every time I think about it. Every time I determine that he isn't genuinely my friend and resolve to cut him out of my life, doubts creep in that perhaps he's been manipulated in ways other than I suspect and then I wonder if someone has influenced me to be loyal to him and keep forgiving him as well. I can't even trust my own reactions and feelings. The only one I can absolutely trust is you because you're so far away and it would be easier to prevent our correspondence all together than to intercept each letter and travel to America to alter your reactions.
I confess I'm a bit embarrassed that I didn't even think of it being Quirrell who'd spelled the teachers to stop them protecting the stone. When I saw McGonagall had been spelled to ignore my request for help, I jumped to the conclusion that that's what had happened to my letter about Hagrid and the dragon and that Dumbledore had done it. But it could easily have been Quirrell too, not wanting attention drawn to how Hagrid got the dragon's egg then too. They were colleagues so he probably would've had the opportunity and it makes sense that he'd want to avoid having to fight the other professors. Particularly Flitwick who is rumoured to be a champion in the international duelling competitions and McGonagall who was reputed to be brutal in the fight against the death eaters in the last war. It makes sense that it was Quirrell but I still think it could also have been Dumbledore, wanting me to have to act to solve the problem myself, I think he's trying to induce a feeling in me that it's my responsibility to protect and save the school but I'm not sure why he wants to do that.
There's no way to find out now if Dumbledore was spelled like the others, he'd never admit to being beaten like that. I don't know that he could've been though, he is too powerful to control like that. But it was highly suspicious that he was supposedly called away to London and returned at just the right time to watch the end of what happened, unless he'd been disillusioned and was watching us the whole time. If he was watching, I wonder what he was waiting for, would he have stepped in if Ron or Hermione were about to be seriously hurt? Did he step in to save my life or did I save myself while he stood there and watched to see if I would live? Did he even want me to live? I wish I knew what he was thinking that night.
To: Harry Potter email
From: Spencer Reid email
Tuesday 6/30/92 10:33 (PST)
Harry, I am in awe at your trust in me. You're correct in thinking that it would take far more effort for someone to change what we've said to each other than it would to stop one or both of us from writing at all. I certainly don't think anyone is mucking about with our letters and now that we're using email for the summer someone would have to be right here with me to influence what I've written and I swear to you that I'm alone in this part of the library this morning. Nobody is reading our email from my end and the people you think would try to interfere wouldn't let you stay at Dean's so you don't need to worry about it on your end either.
Don't worry about my feelings regarding Mrs Thomas. I think that I'm more relieved that someone is looking out for you than offended that she was questioning our friendship. It's a relief to know for the next few weeks at least you have an adult you can count on. It sounds like you trust her too. Is that because she is not a witch? Or because she's been passing letters along for us?
To: Spencer Reid email
From: Harry Potter email
Tuesday 30/6/92 6:35pm (GMT)
I doubt that any magical person could intercept our email, most of them wouldn't even believe that communication like this could possibly exist. Not only do they still use candles, parchment and owl post, their muggle studies class is more than fifty years behind the times and they refuse to believe non-magical technology is capable of doing anything that they couldn't do with magic. Even muggleborns with an aptitude for computer games before they turn eleven and completely removed from learning anything more than they'd been taught in primary school or managed to teach themselves over the summers. Dean and Seamus both knew how to use email and play the games on the computer but we needed Mr Thomas' help to set up my email address and he hasn't got any new games or learnt any other new computer skills this summer. Though part of that would be because computer games are expensive and the Thomas's already pay so much more for his education than they will for the girls and his birthday and Christmas presents were all things he could use at school.
I do trust Mrs Thomas and you're right that it helps to know that as a muggle who Dumbledore doesn't think that I know, she is outside his sphere of influence and she can't be a Voldemort supporter. I also want to think well of her because passing letters between worlds so we can stay in contact while I'm at Hogwarts is such a big thing for me, but more than that is that she's concerned about me, making sure we're eating and sleeping and finishing our homework, teaching us some new things in the kitchen and checking up on you like a proper guardian would.
I told her about the risks of having me stay here. I felt that I had to be honest with her and Mr Thomas about it all. She is worried but she hasn't given me any signs that she doesn't want me here, or regrets inviting me. She is a very generous woman but I'm not sure how much she truly understands the risks or whether she just thinks that I'm being paranoid. I told her that I was careful not to tell anyone where I was going and I hope that Dumbledore or whoever it is doesn't have the power to track me some other way but that I didn't know enough about magic to guarantee it.
A/N: Thank you to all those who reviewed followed or favourited this story for your support.
A/N2: I tried to give Harry and Spencer real email addresses but apparently Fanfic deletes even fake email accounts.