Nothing is mine.

Harry has his first remedial potions lessons - they really ought to have a strong focus on health and safety.

I Am Not Gone

From the shining pewter cauldron sitting on the scorched, scratched desk before Harry rose a glimmering pale orange fog that ascended up across the window, obscuring the late autumn colours of the Forbidden Forest and the grey clouds above it.

'Mate, what have you made now?' Ron asked. 'It looks like lava.'

Harry beamed down at his concoction with no small measure of pride, watching the fierce, fiery orange liquid bubble and froth. 'This is another great work of genius, Ronald. Instead of Snape's… what was it I was meant to be doing, Hermione?'

'A flame-proofing potion.' She sighed. 'It's meant to be blue and still and… basically the complete opposite of whatever you've got in there.'

'Right, exactly,' he said. 'So, instead of making something boring, I have made the opposite of it. Something fun.'

'So instead of protecting you from getting burnt and feeling heat, it… burns you?'

Harry ruminated over that. 'I think it will make you feel like you're being burnt alive, but not actually burn you,' he said. 'Although… it's probably quite hot right now, so if you drank it, you'd definitely burn your tongue.'

'Okay,' Ron said, 'but, like, why would anyone want to drink that?'

'It's more fun than being all blue and still?'

Hermione shook her head. 'Don't encourage him, Ron. Professor Snape isn't going to be amused, Harry. All those salamander eggs you crushed are expensive.'

'Certainly not if he drinks some to test it,' Harry reckoned. 'Now… do I want to test it?'

'No!' Hermione cried. 'Don't you dare drink any of that, Harry!'

'Potter…' Snape rose from his desk at the front. 'If you've been misusing the lesson time to make other things again, you will stay behind after this period is finished for a remedial lesson.'

Harry gave him a thumbs up and a huge wink. 'Of course, professor. Remedial Potions. Yes. I get it.'

Snape sat back down with a small sneer.

'Anyway,' Harry said, dipping his ladle into the cauldron. 'I think just a tiny bit would be fine, right?'

Hermione confiscated it.

'Sabotage!' Harry declared. 'Hermione, why must you so cruelly but predictably betray me? Is it because my mother—'

'No.' She poured the potion back into his cauldron and put his ladle down on the far side of the bench. 'Now get rid of that before it spontaneously combusts or something.'

'But then I won't know if it works,' Harry grumbled. 'What's the point making it then?' He folded his arms. 'Greengrass would've let me drink it. My mum would've let me drink it.'

'Oh, just get rid of it. Honestly, Harry, your complete lack of common sense is really getting a bit worrying.'

'I picked a fight with a troll aged eleven,' he reminded her. 'Also the basilisk and—'

A light tug came at his sleeve and all the words were snatched off his tongue, swept away by a stream of tingling, tickling butterflies that settled into a tight, fluttering ball somewhere in his belly. He turned about, ignoring Hermione burying her face in her hands and Ron's treacherous sniggering.

Daphne leant away from the pale orange haze rising from Harry's cauldron, her arms crossed over her chest and all her blonde hair falling loose across the shoulders of her black robes and over the front of white summer-blouse beneath.

Harry adopted his snootiest face. 'Greengrass. What dost thou want… eth?'

She turned away, placing one slim foot after the other on the foot rest of the stool and pulling up her black summer knee-socks by the small green and silver bows on the front. 'You used all the salamander eggs, so I cannot work by myself. And you are the only person without a partner.'

Hermione sighed. 'There's a whole full jar at the back of the lab,' she said. 'You're as bad as Harry, Greengrass.'

Daphne turned her pretty nose up at that. 'I did not see them and now I have packed my things away.'

'There isn't even time to do it now,' Hermione muttered. 'You know what, whatever. Just do your weird flirting thing then.'

Ron snickered into his arm behind her. 'You going to get rid of your work of genius, mate?'

Harry glanced between his cauldron and Daphne's cool blue eyes, weighing it up. 'Absolutely not. I don't even want to work with Greengrass.'

A snort of laughter escaped Hermione. 'Really, Harry?'

'It—' Harry hunted around for something he felt was at least vaguely plausible '—her hair's not tied up; it wouldn't be safe.'

Daphne drew a slim red ribbon from the pocket of her robes; she swept all her blonde hair back into a neat ponytail and tied it up with a crimson bow, all but that one rogue lock — that delicate little cascade of gold slipped free to hang across her face, the tip of it brushing the corner of her mouth — baring the plum-red petals of the flower that hung beneath her right ear like a six-pointed star.

'You missed a bit, you're still not safe,' Harry said. 'I can't in good conscience accept you as my partner.'

'You are ridiculous,' Daphne murmured, but her blue eyes were full of bright, soaring spring-blue and she reached for the stray lock with a faint smile.

Harry caught her warm hand. 'No.' He flushed. 'I mean, it's probably safe, so you can, er, you can leave that bit. It would be more dangerous to untie the rest now anyway. What if this spontaneously combusted? Then you'd lose all your hair and that wouldn't be good.'

Hermione groaned and covered her face with her hand.

'Don't mind her, she's just upset that her devious line-theft plot has been foiled.'

'What is line-theft?' Daphne asked, tugging her fingers out of Harry's.

'When you steal someone else's family line by marrying them and having a family with them.'

'That does not make sense.'

'I didn't really spend very long thinking it through. Don't you have a fourth grandparent to find, anyway?'

Her lips twitched. 'I have four grandparents, thank you. Or I did.'

'I don't have any. They're all dead.' Harry frowned. 'I don't even know any of their names, actually. Oh well, it's not like I'm going to meet them. You would hate some of them, because they're Muggles.'

'I do not hate Muggles.' Daphne hooked that lock of hair back over her ear, measuring him with a cool stare as the plum-red petals of her earring trembled. 'Or Muggle-borns.'

'See, Hermione, why can't you be more like that?' Harry demanded. 'It's all Pride and Prejudice with you. Complete Nonsense and Non-sensibility.'

Ron chortled.

'You're an unhappy alternative,' Hermione grumbled. 'Leave me out of your weird thing with Greengrass. Why don't you ask her if she was really going to kiss you at the DA meeting before last, like you actually want to, or are you too much of a chicken?'

A touch of pink rose on Daphne's cheeks and Harry's heart leapt to hover somewhere around the tip of his tongue; strangely, it kept on hammering in his chest, too, pounding away faster and faster as he gazed into her blue eyes.

'Actually, she does bring up a good point. Why weren't you being all antisocial like normal?' Harry asked. 'You didn't even call me a Blood-Traitor, that's basically a declaration of friendship from you.'

'Nothing happened, Potter. Do not flatter yourself.' She cast a rather disdainful look at Lavender Brown a few benches across. 'As you can see, I have not rolled up the waist of my skirt by four inches or undone the top half of my blouse, so I am not interested.'

'Hey,' Ron objected. 'That's…'

Harry grinned at him. 'I mean… she's not wrong, is she?'

'No,' Ron admitted. 'But—' he raised his ladle '—but…'

'Lavender's butt, no doubt,' Hermione muttered. 'Or her boobs. No doubt you can draw them from memory with how much you stare.'

Ron wilted back down into his seat, bright red in the face, and Harry cackled with laughter.

'Potter,' Daphne murmured. 'We need to choose more salamander eggs.'

'We do?' He glanced at his roiling cauldron of bubbling, boiling orange. 'Why? My masterpiece is already complete.'

'Just go with her to the back of the lab, Harry,' Hermione said. 'Where there's nobody else to hear the two of you talking…'

'Okay…' Harry sidestepped Daphne and ambled to the back, peering into the large jar of marble-sized translucent eggs. 'How many do you want?'

'We do not hate Muggles,' Daphne said. 'Not all of us.'

'Just most of you?' He gave the jar a shake and watched all the eggs wobble. 'Why hate them at all? They're just people; they haven't hurt you.'

'But they do hurt us,' she whispered. 'They do not honour the Veiled World; they destroy what we revere like a swarm of locusts through a field of spring flowers. It is not their fault, just their nature.'

'Just because they don't worship what you do, doesn't mean—'

'Those who do not believe or revere cannot cross to the Veiled World and be reborn; they linger, like a haze; a fog of magic and faded souls that has separated our world from the other. And there are more and more of them who come from a world of mud and metal to treat magic as if it was just another tool.'

Harry shrugged. 'You said you don't hate them, though.'

'I do not,' Daphne murmured. 'It is not their fault they are not told. It is the Ministry who is responsible. And those from whose strings they dangle.'

'The ICW,' Harry said. 'Right?'

'They fear our ways. They fear true, high magic because it is a power they cannot control. Eternal autumn is what they want for us all; an endless time of sacrifice and blood, endless dwindling away until nothing true is left at all.' The fierce light burning in her blue eyes softened into a gleam of hope as soft and bright as spring skies. 'But O Cheñch a Deileinn—' the words whispered through him like some soft distant music drifting through the dark, shivering through that slim crack inside and echoing into bottomless black '—is not meant to last forever; leaves must fall, winter will come, and then… all must be Reborn in Death, Aileni yn Marvoleth.'

'What about ghosts? They don't go to the Veiled World.'

'They are not ready,' Daphne whispered. 'They dread it, or fear shame, or feel regret; they cannot cross to the Veiled World until they let go of this one.'

'And what about dementors? Or Umbridge's favourite cartoon vampires? And non-cartoon vampires too, I suppose?'

'All things that we consider undead are trapped outside the natural cycle of life, Harry.' She ran the tip of her tongue across her teeth; lingering upon the point of her right canine. 'Caught in winter. Death cannot take them as It would the living. But in the end, It will have them. It will have all the Veiled World and from It shall come a great and green spring the likes of which we cannot even imagine.'

'They can die,' Harry said. 'I watched two of them die.'

'Two what?' Daphne cocked her head, a touch of colour on her cheeks, and her eyes full of fierce yearning.

'Dementors.' He grinned. 'I patronused them and they just crumbled, like they were burnt away by something really hot.' Harry chuckled to himself. 'That or they can do some weird magic to escape. I don't know, I was kind of caught up in the fact my patronus had changed from a stag like my dad's animagus form to a phoenix; I had no idea it could change, actually, but I guess it doesn't matter what it does so long as it still does what it's meant to.'

'A phoenix,' she breathed. 'They say that when a wren has crossed to the Veiled World enough times and finally accepts the winter, it will be reborn and return a phoenix.'

'Sounds neat.' Harry scrabbled for something a little more sincere. 'It sounds… beautiful,' he whispered. 'That we're all still a part of it. That my parents are still here really, still part of the world, still full of magic, that they're not just… gone.'

'They are still here. Nothing is ever truly lost, Harry; it is just waiting for Spring.'

'Sounds too good to be true, though, doesn't it?' He grappled with that soft sense of longing. 'It's like a fairytale. Knights saving princesses. Heroes slaying dragons. Magical swords being given out by ladies in lakes. It's what we want, but it's not actually real. If it was, everything would be better, wouldn't it? Someone would… would fix all of this, would stop Voldemort, and help everyone. And fix your weird dying world thing, too.'

The corner of Daphne's mouth curved up. 'We believe someone will.'

Something in that small smile reminded him of her, smiling in all that snow, waiting with the same impatient unwavering faith that shone in Daphne's cool blue eyes, but not to be saved, not to be helped, not for Spring; to instead come at last from the chill dark beyond the stars and swallow everything that was. And he remembered how when he'd stood before her in his dream all those neat white little teeth had curved wider and wider and wider — sharper than any knife could ever hope to be, sharper than broken glass, than any blade at all — and for a moment, somewhere deep inside, he thought he felt that crack curve wider too, felt something precious he could not name sink away into its bottomless black just as he'd dreamt his cloak had slipped through his fingers like fading fog. But any part of him that might have screamed out in dread or felt that cold touch upon it only laughed instead, as if pure joy welled up from the darkness in strings of silver bubbles as bright and countless as the stars.

And he chuckled to himself at the strangeness of it, buoyed so far above the reach of fear that he could not entirely recall the touch of it, only that he'd felt it once and not liked it. 'You didn't find a really good invisibility cloak recently, did you?' Harry let his grin spread across his face. 'You keep creeping up on me and mine can't have just vanished. Things don't just vanish.'

'No.' Daphne shook her head. 'If I found something of yours, I would return it. I am no thief, Potter.'

'I didn't mean that,' he said. 'It's just, how would you know it was mine?'

'I would know.'

'Potter…' Snape drawled from the front. 'Leave whatever it is you've got in that cauldron to cool down and wait behind. Everyone else is free to go once their stations are tidy.'

The lab dissolved into a frenetic scramble.

'Goodbye, Potter,' Daphne murmured. 'If I find your cloak, I will give it back to you.'

'It was my dad's.' That strange hollow feel stole up on him, swallowing the butterflies one by one, turning them from light, fluttering thrills into little sparks of anger. 'I don't have many things from my parents.'

Her cool blue eyes lingered. 'Nothing is ever lost, Harry.'

'Thanks, Daphne,' he whispered. 'It's not so bad, really; I'm still here, still alive—' a little grin crept across his face '—and now I have a very exciting remedial potions lesson.'

'I think what you have is detention.' She turned away from him, lifting her bag from beneath her desk with two fingers and swinging it over her shoulder. 'Goodbye.'

Harry leant on the back bench, watching the hem of her skirt flutter about her knees and the small silver and green bows of the Slytherin summer-knee socks. Around him, in a clatter of ladles and with great hisses of steam, the class cleaned their things away, chattering and laughing among themselves.

Hermione drifted over, spooning three leftover salamander eggs back into the jar. 'We're headed back to the Common Room. Come find us after your Occlumency lesson is over.' She bent and tugged up her left sock, tugging a loose golden thread out of the ribbons ringing the hem of it. 'I hate summer uniform; it's so girly.'

'I like it,' Harry said.

She rolled her eyes. 'Yes, because half the girls roll the waists of the skirt up to show off as much leg as possible. Greengrass isn't wrong.'

'I like the socks more, I think.'

Hermione sighed. 'Well, maybe Voldemort will find it as stupid as me and just avoid your head because all you think about are Greengrass's socks.'

'I didn't say her socks.'

She snorted. 'And?'

'Go away, you're delaying my private lesson with Snape. I'm finally going to find out that he's a vampire.' Harry grinned. 'There are literally no reflective surfaces in the room here, even the windows are too high to really see anyone's reflection. It can't be a coincidence.'

'I'm going.' Hermione laughed, but the smile slid off her face and she chewed at her lip. 'Harry, make sure you take this seriously; you don't want Voldemort in your head.'

'There's not enough space for him and my genius in there,' he replied. 'Don't worry.'

Snape stood up, the legs of his chair scraping across the stone floor. 'Potter, your head has grown so large you could fit half the egos of the Wizengamot in there.' He surveyed the last few students still stacking their dripping-wet cauldrons on the racks at the side of the lab. 'Hurry up. Potter has some first year potions to review since he can't follow simple instructions on the board.'

'I could if they were less boring,' Harry asserted.

'Harry,' Hermione hissed. 'Don't antagonise him, you need him to teach you.'

He flashed her a bright smile as she left.

'Right.' Snape closed the door behind Pansy Parkinson and locked it. 'I do not expect you to have any aptitude for this sort of magic, Potter. It is not wand waving or flashy, showy spells; it requires intuition and a gift. The Dark Lord is a peerless master of such magic and I do not believe you have even the slightest chance of preventing him from shaking every childish thought out of your empty head if he wishes to.'

'He's not going to like them,' Harry replied. 'Most of it is me laughing at him.'

Snape's dark eyes flashed. 'It is very unwise to laugh at a wizard of such power.'

'He said I laughed at him when he obliterated himself off my forehead; it didn't really seem to make him all that angry, actually.'

'As fascinating as this insight into your delusions is,' Snape drawled. 'We have things to do and I do not particularly wish to spend all evening at it. Occlumency is the art of concealing your thoughts from another wizard or witch. There are many methods and a true master will discover the one that works best for them.'

'How do I even do it?' Harry asked. 'I assume there's no flashy spell after you said all that stuff about wand-waving.'

'The first exercise is for your teacher to attempt to brute force their way into your thoughts, but without much strength,' Snape said, his voice low and smooth. 'How you instinctively attempt to defend will give us some idea of how to proceed. Conceal your thoughts from me if you can.' He drew his dark wand from within his robes. 'Legilimens.'

For an instant, he found himself standing in the Room of Requirement, his gaze snared by Daphne's upturned, red-smeared lips, but Harry felt the list of all the people he wanted to know about that was very short, and Snape's name was absolutely not on it. He vanished it all, shoved it through that slim crack in the ice and down into the biting chill of the bottomless black where he knew it would vanish beyond anyone's reach, even Voldemort's.

And then he stood in the snow, staring up at the full face of a moon so bright and cold and pale it seemed to fill the whole sky between the two rising mountain peaks.

Something whispered in the dark waters beneath the thin ice under his feet; he felt it more than he heard it, stirring in the shadow beyond the stars, smiling her smile — sharp, much too sharp, and wide, too, far too wide for her face, and lit by all the dying light of the sun that burnt around the pupil of her sole, seeing eye.

Harry smiled back at it all, the mirth rising up through that slim crack like a string of silver bubbles bursting from the bottomless black; he closed his eyes and leant his head back to laugh.

'Bloody hell,' Snape whispered.

Opening his eyes, Harry found himself standing at the back of the Potions lab.

Snape trembled, his wand clutched in a white-knuckled fist and beads of glistening sweat clinging to his forehead. 'I have never felt anything like that before.' He took a long breath and drew himself up. 'The Dark Lord must have done something. That or your mind is somewhere so utterly unbearable to be that you ought to be taken to St Mungo's before the end of the day.'

'Voldemort did say he did something,' Harry admitted. 'So we could actually speak and it wasn't just me laughing at him.'

'That must be it.' A little shiver swept through Snape. 'The Dark Lord is a master of magic you cannot imagine, Potter; that all-consuming dread you felt is the fear he inspires in everyone.'

'It didn't seem so bad.'

Snape stared at him. 'Get out, Potter, before I tell the headmaster you need to be sent to St Mungo's to have that inflated head of yours checked out.'

Harry laughed and pulled his wand from his sleeve, opening the door with a flick of his wrist. 'Does that mean these lessons are over?'

'Yes…' Snape's gaze flicked to the door and small wrinkles creased his sallow forehead. 'If I cannot endure whatever the Dark Lord has done to your mind for even a couple of seconds, I cannot help. I will inform the headmaster of this and we must simply hope that you are so thick-witted he has as little luck with you as your professors do.'

'Well, I don't listen to him, either, so…' Harry shrugged and strolled out, smiling at Nearly-Headless-Nick as he floated down the stairs and zipped off in the opposite direction to Harry, holding his head to his neck with both hands. 'And how bad can it be?'

AN: More chapters and chat via Discord, about twenty more chapters for those supporting me and reading all my first drafts, and, of course, all my best, original stuff as well!

linktr . ee / mjbradley