Truth, Seether
If I gave you the truth would it keep you alive?
Though I'm closer to wrong, I'm no further from right
And now I'm convinced on the inside
Something's wrong with me
He'd crept out that night, after performing his usual trick, pretending to go to bed early and waiting for his housemates to go to sleep. He'd seen Malfoy on the map in the Slytherin Common Room, accompanied by Zabini and Parkinson. He figured he'd have to sneak right in. He knew that the password was null and void in the face of a simple Parseltongue command. Something he'd learned from the dreams.
So, he headed to the dungeons under his cloak, holding his breath as he passed Filch and McGonagall, who were hurrying out of the lower level of the castle.
He commanded the door open and descended the stone stairs to the darkened Common Room, ripples of the moonlight through the lake were scattering on the floor, making him pause to watch. Malfoy, Zabini, and Parkinson were still sat up, surrounding a brazier on green leather couches, the only ones left at nearly one in the morning.
"…And you can't open it?" Pansy asked.
"No, I've already told you. He made it pretty clear." Malfoy said.
"And you can't ask," Zabini stated.
"No. I shouldn't even be telling you two. Tell anyone and I'll know," the blonde snapped.
"Yeah, you'll know cuz you'll be dead, Draco." The dark-skinned Slytherin snorted, then he said, "We wouldn't do that to him, would we, Pansy?" He looked at her, tone suddenly serious.
She shook her head looking scandalized, "Of course not."
Harry waited for them to say something more, but the group fell silent. He gave it another minute before he tapped the blonde on the shoulder, making him yelp and slide off the leather couch.
"Jumpy," Harry said. Pansy squawked and then covered her mouth.
"Potter." Malfoy spat, standing, and straightening his robes, "How long have you been in here?" His eyes searched the empty air, the Boy Who Lived not bothering to take off the cloak.
"A better question is why am I in here?" Harry asked.
Malfoy scowled and started towards the waterfall near the staircase, and Harry followed him, still invisible.
"I've been told to give you this," the Slytherin said, his back to his friends. He took an envelope out of his robes and extended it in front of himself, unsure of Harry's location.
Harry took it, stomach dropping as he tucked it under the cloak. The Slytherin eyed the space in front of him in confusion, though the Chosen One was already ascending the stairs. He looked down at it once he was outside in the corridor, alone. A plain white envelope. There was something though, lingering in the paper. Probably a privacy ward. His stomach lurched as he slowly pried it open. He recognized the handwriting.
May 3, 11 PM, Borgin and Burkes.
A week away.
He'd gone to Hogsmeade the next day with only Ginny, both Ron and Hermione staying at the castle after a particularly sour fight that had left Hermione in tears and Ron sat in his bed behind the curtains, not answering to anyone. So, he'd happily left the grounds without them. He'd hardly spoken two words to Hermione, unable to force his teeth apart to get them out.
A week felt simultaneously too close and too far away. He wanted it over and done with, but he wanted more time to prepare. He didn't know what exactly these meetings would entail, just that he was sure he would hate it.
Ginny was quiet as they walked, frowning at the village as it came into view like it had done something to insult her. The village, of course, was beautiful at that time of year. Wildflowers had begun bursting out of the earth, smattering the road with colour.
"You okay?" Harry asked.
"Oh. Yeah, sorry. Just thinking."
Harry squinted at her but didn't ask. As they approached the town, Ginny sat down on a stone bench and tapped the space beside her, instead of continuing into the village. He sat down as he was bid, watching her warily.
"You know, Harry… I-" She began, "I know that things have been… Hard." She nodded and looked away from him, as though she was done. The Boy Who Lived swallowed, knowing she wasn't. His tongue suddenly felt like lead as he fixed his eyes on a chimney puffing smoke in the distance.
"But I also know you're not being honest with us." She said after she collected herself. "I understand why you won't speak to Hermione… She-" Ginny couldn't find the words for Hermione, "And I know things with you and Ron have been… They've been different. But if you want someone to talk to, I can listen. I won't tell them anything if you don't want."
Harry could tell she'd been planning her speech for a while. He decided that if he could, he would probably tell her, above all the others. She was right about that. He had to fight a lump in his throat and the thing in his head while he tried to formulate a sentence worth saying. A sentence he could say.
"If I could explain anything to anyone, it would be you, Ginny." He said what he'd been thinking, his mouth dry as he continued, "I need you to keep the fact that I even said that to yourself. Please don't press." Harry put his knuckles into his eyes and cried, then, unable to stop it.
A week. And a fucking Unbreakable Vow.
"Harry…" He felt her hand on his back, and then she leaned into him, "Okay."
Ginny had helped him pull himself back together, apologizing profusely while she dragged him to the pub around half an hour later, keen not to ruin a Hogsmeade day. She'd asked him to order the drinks, maybe as a distraction, and so he was waiting in line while the voice whispered to him.
'Legilimency is not as difficult as it's claimed to be,'
Harry hadn't been thinking about it at that moment, he'd been lost in what Ginny had been saying while staring dumbly at the base of a stool, but he had been thinking about it. It would likely be something considered both useful and in his power, and so he was likely bound by the Vow to at least make an attempt. Or at least, that was what the voice had told him several times.
'It merely requires a good grasp of the theory and practice…' It said as Harry walked up to the bar, his turn to order.
'Failing that brute force should do,' it grabbed the thread of his magic and propelled it into the barkeeper's mind like a lasso when Harry locked eyes with his.
"That's Harry Potter then probably wanting butterbeer… With the Weasley girl, two then, damn I wish Malcolm would get an owl out about that-"
'Good. Don't pay attention to the drivel, find a memory. Any memory. Move Carefully. He's not paying you any attention, but he'll notice you. And talk. Order your butterbeers.'
"Hi, uhm, can I get uh… Two butterbeers?" Harry had whiplash and a vague sense of motion sickness from the sensation of his magic in someone else's head.
A flooded room, water quickly rising while a woman squawked in alarm.
"Alright, alright, Meg, it's just a bloody busted pipe no need to-"
Harry's magic was pulled back by the thing as the bartender passed Harry the drinks.
'Sufficient, against someone with no Occlumency protection.'
Harry didn't like the way it had just thrown his magic from his head without permission.
'Not yours, and you'd decided.'
He took the mugs to where Ginny was sitting, frowning deeply.
By the next night, the thing in his head was requesting the spell. Five days. He was ashamed to feel both relief and desire when it had roused him from his sleep.
He lit the end of his wand and checked the map, scanning the Common Room, then the dormitories. He once again noticed that the Weasley siblings weren't in the tower. Harry frowned, searching the map. He couldn't find them in the castle. Either they were completely off the grounds or in the Room of Requirement. Ron's curtains were closed, and when Harry tried to open them, they refused, charmed closed.
He decided he didn't have time for their particular mystery, that he'd missed them in the act. He opened his trunk to grab his cloak, but it wasn't where he left it. Baffled, he searched under his spare clothes and abandoned textbooks. He checked his bag; in case he'd forgotten to remove it. He briefly panicked at the thought that the Slytherins had gotten greedy at the sight of it, but then he thought of Ron. And Ginny.
"What?" He hissed the question at no one.
He took the map and instead made his way to an empty storeroom, closer to the tower, not his usual. Avoiding detection by keeping his eyes glued to the paper. He felt incredibly vulnerable. He wasn't comfortable with the fact that, in the minutes or hours after he cast the spell, he didn't remember or understand what happened to him. How he returned himself to the tower. Surely, he used the cloak. He hadn't been caught.
'You'll be fine,' the voice seemed certain, which served to make Harry suspicious.
'How do you know?' He questioned.
'You may not remember. I do.'
Harry didn't like the implications of that, and so he'd asked it to elaborate. It didn't.
The next morning, he did indeed awake in his bed, fine. Ron and Ginny were also back in the tower, and a quick check of his trunk showed that his cloak had been returned.
The spell dulled the alarm and betrayal he felt at their weird theft, as well as the anxiety he had about May third. He was glad for the light reprieve, though he was sick of the guilt and shame that came with it. The knowledge that if someone saw him doing what he was doing, he would be shredded alive by the collective Wizarding World. If they saw it, if somehow, they understood it, his fall from grace would be legendary.
But casting Liquida Tenebris was a warm bath on a mid-winter day. It was a deep sleep after a week of insomnia. It was his favourite meal after starving near to death. It was also unfortunately nurturing some strange piece of the Dark Lord. A trace left by dark magic, fed by it. And he was sworn to keep it secret.
The thought always took his breath away, and so he was once again glad for the numbing properties of the spell. He shook off the loop and got up, looking at Ron as he did so, debating what he was going to do.
At this point, he felt confrontation was best.
"Ron," he said, shaking him awake. His eyes snapped open immediately.
"You took my cloak," Harry said, and Ron sat up.
"Oh." He was looking at the Boy Who Lived with wide eyes.
Harry felt the thread of magic that was allegedly not his offered to him, and he took it, parroting the lasso feeling the thing had shown him without much hesitation.
Harry figured he must have gotten some nuance of the craft wrong because what he found in Ron's head was not anything close to what he'd seen in the bartenders. A vast, seemingly limitless white expanse, with nothing as far as his mind's eye could see. At the centre of it, a silvery, pulsing orb, thrumming like a heart. He quickly pulled his magic back.
"I really am sorry, Harry. I needed it for a prank." Ron was saying, snapping him out of the daze.
"A prank?" Harry repeated, brain swimming.
"You'll forgive me, right? I'd never take it, you know, permanently," Ron looked sheepish and was trying to get out of bed.
"A prank on who?" The Boy Who Lived pressed.
"Er, Dean Thomas. Ginny and I. She was upset, it was my idea. I told her you said we could borrow it."
'I have never seen anything like that before,' the voice told him.
'I didn't do it wrong? Is it Occlumency?'
'You did… Fine. No, not Occlumency.'
Harry, confused, let Ron go after it was clear he was going to get no real answers from him.
Two days later, Harry was all at once aware that whenever he had a question, particularly a magic-related one, he asked the thing in his head. And it readily answered him, sometimes at length.
In Defence:
"Potter, what is the protection against a Lethifold?" Snape drawled. Harry made a question mark in his head.
'Patronus,'
"The Patronus Charm, Sir."
Snape had put his chin in the air and turned away in disgust.
In Potions:
"Can anyone tell me the properties of Ashwinder eggs? Maybe you, Harry?" Slughorn asked, grinning at him.
'Love potions. The eggs swallowed whole cure ague.' It told him when he asked.
"They can be used in love potions, Sir. And the eggs cure ague, if you swallow them whole." Harry said, hoping no one asked what ague was. The Potions textbook belonging to the Half-Blood Prince had remained in his trunk for three days.
"Very good, very good, ten points to Gryffindor."
In Care of Magical Creatures, it described the history of the Horned Serpent.
'They're most common in North America. Incredibly intelligent, but uncommonly violent in nature. One of my ancestors, Isolt Sayre, she befriended one. She was one of the co-founders of the Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. A Parselmouth, of course. She named one of the four houses after the Horned Serpent. She used two shards of its horns to create both the first American made wands, and the first with cores made from serpent horn. For her sons.'
'Did you know her?'
'Isolt co-founded Ilvermorny in the year sixteen-twenty.' It deadpanned.
He'd been sitting at lunch while it told him about Runespoors, giant three-headed snakes that often killed their third head -in doing so killing themselves- out of frustration when he locked eyes with Hermione. All at once it stopped talking and passed Harry the thread. He took the opportunity, seeing how he wouldn't have to talk across the table and work inside her head over the din of the Great Hall. He threw his magic over the distance.
"-Thinks it is. As if I can't tell somethings not right. He lied about the Slytherins he's been in their Common Room twice, and I saw him with Malfoy then he lied about seeing the headmaster. The spell keeps tracking him to empty rooms after hours Dumbledore doesn't believe me even though I've never lied to him doesn't make any sense…"
Harry felt ill as he watched Hermione list all the ways he'd lied and acted strangely, while he grappled with the fact that she'd been tracking him. Watching him.
'Find out when. Find out when she put the tracking spell in place.'
His heart hammered as he dug for the memory associated with her thoughts. He found it, neatly attached.
The morning after he'd been returned to the castle by Narcissa and the Dark Lord. The relief the thing in his head felt was palpable and shared. He didn't know what 'everything in his power' would mean if Hermione had known something she shouldn't have. It was already bad enough; he was glad not to have to find out. He pulled his eyes away from hers, having found it all in less than twenty seconds. He'd have to remove her spell when he left the school, but that would likely arouse her suspicion. So would confronting her. He glared at his sandwich, no longer hungry.
She knew he was stealing away at night, but she didn't know why. Hermione wasn't the type to leave something undiscovered.
By the first of March Harry noticed that Ginny was actively avoiding him, choosing not to be alone with the Boy Who Lived and seldom showing up besides. He hadn't had the chance to mention the cloak to her, though he wasn't sure if he was going to. He wondered how true it was that Ron told her Harry said they could borrow it. He was even less sold on the fact that they'd been pulling a prank. So, Harry had to consider adding Ginny's name to the long list of people he didn't feel like he could trust. He'd known she'd been hiding something, but it had seemed like none of his business, curious as he'd been. Now she'd stolen the cloak with Ron and was avoiding Harry after her brother had lied to him. Making it his business.
Not to mention the weird white void he'd found in Ron's head. It gave him chills every time he thought about it, but he couldn't put his finger on why. The voice was very keen to examine the youngest Weasley's thoughts now that Harry had given up all pretence of resistance to Legilimency. It wanted him to use the map and hunt her down. While Harry had been keeping tabs on her using the map, he wasn't quite at that point.
It also wanted him to cast Liquida Tenebris before they left for Borgin and Burkes. That brought with it the issue of Hermione's tracking spell. She could, any time he snuck away to cast, bring the headmaster along to unlock the door. Breaking the tracker presented its own problem, she would notice. The voice had found the tracking spell, after they'd discovered it existed, floating along behind him like a semi-deflated balloon. Without the weird Legilimency induced by the thing in his head, without it seeking out Hermione's magical trace, he wouldn't know about it. They'd debated removing it straight away. There was a concern that she would just replace it, but worse than that, she might take the fact that he'd removed the tracker to the headmaster as irrevocable proof that he was up to something. With no real and believable way to know it was there, he'd be asked several questions at a minimum.
The sudden and seemingly collective betrayal of his friends had shocked him. Ron was more withdrawn than usual, despite his begging for forgiveness. Harry had begun locking his trunk when he wasn't carrying the map or the cloak, and looking over his shoulder whenever Hermione wasn't standing right next to him. Ginny was in the wind after her speech that he could trust her above the others. Harry didn't know why she'd done it, but it suddenly felt untrue.
'What do we do?' Harry had asked it that night.
'I have one idea. It doesn't solve everything, but it might work for Saturday. I break the tracking spell in the Room of Requirement as we leave. I hope it will lead her to believe the magic of the room broke it, not us. We cast Liquida Tenebris there after the spell is broken.'