Harry has never, in all his years at Hogwarts, had an occasion to talk so much with a member of the staff. Even Remus he never spoke to for so long at a time, and it’s strange how comfortable he is. They talk about a lot of things – about Madam Rosmerta, about the staff at Hogwarts and the classes that’ve been taught here, and McGonagall even tells Harry stories about his father when he was at school.

They don’t speak about the funeral, or the looming threat of the Ministry’s declaration on the 5th, or about the war in general. Talking about the present or the future seems strangely off-limits, and Harry finds himself asking question after question about the past of Hogwarts, and of Hogsmeade. He even relates a few of the stories Sirius and Remus have told him, or fills in some of the gaps McGonagall doesn’t know, and hearing her laugh is calming, even though he cannot see her.

Madam Pomfrey returns to the hospital wing at noon. Harry and Professor McGonagall are just finishing their lunch as they talk about how Augusta Longbottom had exploded after receiving her O.W.L. results, considering them unacceptable and demanding a retake of her Charms examination.

“I’ll let you go in a minute, Mr Potter!” Pomfrey says quietly, somewhere to his left. “I’ll take those bandages off, and I’ll put a tint on your glasses, just for the rest of the day. That way your eyes can have a little extra rest, alright? They’ll be quite sensitive to light.”

“Yes, Madam Pomfrey,” Harry says, nodding his head in her vague direction, and he hears the regular clack of her shoes on the linoleum floor as she walks into her office. “Thank you for sitting with me, Professor McGonagall. For talking with me.”

“Oh, any of us would have done it, Mr Potter,” McGonagall says quietly. There’s a note to her voice Harry can’t quite identify – a sort of strange heaviness. He wishes he could see her face. “Even Severus is fond of you, boy, and he roundly despises most of the student body.” Harry laughs. “I merely thought I’d spare you Pomona’s ramblings about her greenhouse.” Harry feels a touch to his right hand, feels McGonagall clasp Harry’s hand between her own two: her skin is warm to the touch, and he feels the heavy lines on her palms and the wrinkled skin of her fingers.

“Why do I get the feeling I’m about to be told something very serious?” Harry asks softly.

“You can’t do that again, Potter,” McGonagall says, very quietly. “You could have been killed – and you very nearly were. If those Healers hadn’t been so close to you, and if the Aurors hadn’t managed to end the skirmish so quickly after that flare landed, you easily could have lost your life.” McGonagall sighs, her hands gripping tightly at his for a moment before she says, “You’re a very capable young wizard, Potter, astonishingly so – for your age. But you aren’t battling other Fifth Years: these are hardened wizards.”

Harry thinks of Mulciber pinning up against the wall of the barn, about the sheer luck that had let Harry stab him. He thinks about how he’d not even been able to transport Angelina Johnson’s limp body without a struggle, and not been able to carry it, even.

“You’re right,” Harry murmurs quietly. “Professor Snape was in the middle of telling me I wasn’t special, and I was agreeing with him as I left. But I couldn’t sit there and do nothing: if I’d stayed up here, I think I’d have gone mad.”

“We weren’t doing nothing,” McGonagall says simply. “Potter, we will soon be at war: I have no doubt about that. And what you have to understand is that war isn’t merely battles and blood. There are the children here: they must be protected, and comforted. There are classes to teach, gardens to grow, songs to sing, even.”

“What do you think of people who kill during war?” Harry asks. The question comes out in little more than a whisper, and he hears McGonagall’s slow inhalation.

“You won’t have to kill anyone, Potter,” McGonagall says, uttering her promise under her breath, as if more to herself than to Harry – too late. “You don’t think we’d force you to—”

“I don’t think that,” Harry interrupts her, and he squeezes her hand in his before drawing his hand back, clasping his over his stomach. He stares into the darkness of his bandages, and he sees the faces of Stan Shunpike and the skull-like mask of Rickard Mulciber, hovering in the blackness. “But if it comes to it. Professor Flitwick killed people in the last war, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” McGonagall says, after only a moment’s hesitation. “Yes, he did.”

“Thank you, Minerva,” comes Pomfrey’s voice. Harry hears her pick up something from the bedside table beside him – his glasses – and swish her wand, murmuring some spells that Harry can’t quite make out. They’re Greek, not Latin, and his Greek is awful.

“Goodbye, Potter,” McGonagall says, and he hears her swiftly leave.

“I need you to close your eyes, Potter,” Pomfrey murmurs, and under the bandages, Harry does. As she slowly unwinds them from around his face, Harry can feel the light of the infirmary even through his eyelids, and it’s so bright he cannot believe it. He lets out a short grunt of pain, gritting his teeth as the last of the bandages is pulled away: even with his eyes tightly shut, light seems to burn through his eyelids, and Pomfrey swiftly slides his glasses on over his nose. “Give it a moment. You’ll adjust.”

It takes more than a moment. Harry stays frozen in his place, his fingers fisted tightly in the fabric of his crisp bedsheets for a long few moments as the pain slowly recedes with prickly complaints, and he no longer has to screw up his entire face. He stays in his place for another twenty minutes or so, and finally he risks opening his eyes.

His vision is slightly blurry initially, and at the sting of bright light he feels tears come to his eyes, wetting the irises and mingling with the ointment lingering there.

“Professor Snape said you had to put ointment on the inside of my eyelids,” Harry manages to spit out through gritted teeth as he blinks furiously, trying to work his way through the pain. “But you had to do more than that, didn’t you?”

“Much of the right eye was gone, and the left was ruptured. We had to do rather a bit to grow them back, I’m afraid,” Pomfrey says lowly, and Harry feels the light get interrupted as she leans in front of him. He sees her through the haze of his own tears, making out the shape of her face and her silver hair.

“You’re not wearing your habit,” Harry says.

“It’s not a habit, Potter, it’s a nursing cap: I’m hardly a nun,” Pomfrey mutters, her left hand touching his cheek, and he tries not to wince as she waves her wand at his face. Non-verbally, this time – she probably knows the diagnostic charms backwards. “You need to learn silent casting, young man,” that Death Eater had said to him: non-verbal magic is on the syllabus in Sixth Year, but Harry doesn’t really feel he’s able to wait. He needs to begin studying now. 

As he looks at Pomfrey, the tears recede a little, and she comes more clearly into focus: there’s a little sensitivity in his eyes, particularly if he turns his head towards the light, but it’s manageable. He realizes now that Pomfrey has shut all the blinds in the infirmary, preventing the September sun from idling into the room, and he feels ridiculous for having thought it was so bright. The tints in his glasses leave the room tinged a dark red and devoid of any other colour, and he looks at Pomfrey for a few long moments. Her hair is loosely tied at the nape of her neck, but several curls run away and hang about her head, framing her face. Pomfrey’s eyes, he sees now, are puffy and slightly darker in colour than the rest of her face: she’s probably cried a lot today.

“Thank you,” he says quietly, as he tries not to think about how Madam Pomfrey and Madam Rosmerta went to school together. “For keeping me here, and not sending me to St Mungo’s.”

“Aye, well,” Pomfrey says quietly: she looks at Harry with a soft fondness on her face, a slight smile catching on her lips. “As I explained to the lovely healers from St Mungo’s, I have a rather special relationship with your medical history, Mr Potter – you’re in and out of my infirmary like a Jack in the Box. Now, I’ll leave you to get dressed.”

She closes the curtains behind her, and Harry pulls off the familiar blue pyjamas of the Hospital Wing, exchanging them for the clean set of robes the house elves must have pulled out of his trunk. If someone had his knife and Mulciber’s wand, surely they’d have told him? Surely someone would have confronted him about the murder already? Frowning, he takes up his wand from the side and pulls on his dragonhide ankle boots, coming out into the Hospital Wing proper.

“Come back up in three days,” Pomfrey says lightly, “And I’ll take the tint off your glasses.” Harry gives a nod of his head.

“Madam Pomfrey—” Harry hesitates, but Pomfrey looks at him seriously, her eyebrows raised. “Yesterday, on the field… I didn’t know anything. And most of all I was aware that I didn’t know how to heal a thing: I couldn’t even conjure a stretcher for Angelina Johnson. I brought her to the Hog’s Head on a piece of wood I’d conjured and levitated. I’m— I’m quite comfortable using magic creatively to solve problems, but I’d rather have the right spells in the first place.”

“You’re asking me to tutor you?” Pomfrey asks. Her tone is slightly stiff, her hands clasped in front of her: without her nurse’s cap, she seems half out-of-uniform, and he feels like he’s somehow caught her off-guard.

“I shouldn’t have asked,” Harry says immediately. “I’m sorry, Madam Pomfrey: you’re grieving, and I shouldn’t—”

“No,” Pomfrey says sharply, cutting through him. “No, Potter, no… You were right to ask. You want to know battlefield medicine? I can teach you.” Harry stares at her, surprised to have her say “yes” so easily, and she says, crisply, “Come along here on Sunday morning. Eight o’clock on the dot.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Harry says, giving a polite nod of his head, and he heads out of the infirmary. It is more difficult than he thought. There are wide windows in the fourth floor corridor, and Harry lets out a sharp sound of pain, screwing his eyes shut and grasping for the bannister of the stairs.

It is not feasible for him to go down the Hall of Staircases – he’ll dash himself on the floor doing that. Blindly, he feels his way down the hall and toward the passage that leads toward the Gryffindor tower.

“Potter? What on earth are you doing?” Harry frowns, turning his head. It’s a male voice, deep, with one of the clipped English accents Harry has come to accept as relatively ubiquitous amongst Purebloods.

“Sorry, I don’t recognize your voice,” he says, turning his head toward it. “Madam Pomfrey just grew me some new eyes, but they’re a bit more light-sensitive than I expected. I’m going down to the Slytherin Common Room.”

“Well, they would be, if they’re new, you dolt,” says the voice, and Harry feels the form of a taller man come closer to him. “Take my arm, I’ll lead you there.” Harry does, settling his hand on the other man’s proffered forearm, and he lets him lead him toward the stairs. “I’m Gideon Gibbon: I’m your new Defence Against The Dark Arts teacher.”

“Ah,” Harry says, lightly. He thinks of Gibbon in his mind: a large man with a thick sheaf of straw-blond hair receding on the top of his squared skull, small ears and rounded, red cheeks. “You were robbed last night, Professor Gibbon.”

“Sorry?”

“Professor Dumbledore likes to introduce his new staff with some panache. He might even have asked you to make a speech.”

“He didn’t mention my making a speech!”

“All the more reason to make you give one,” Harry says, and he chuckles. When Gibbon stops, Harry stops too, and it occurs to Harry how easy it would be for Gibbon to kill him like this, if the man were so inclined. Cecilia had said she didn’t think he was a Death Eater, but what does that mean, these days? Harry hadn’t thought a relative of Theodore’s could be a Death Eater, but Canton Nott had been an uncle of his. But then, what idiot would think to murder Harry in the middle of Hogwarts? “What house were you in, Professor?”

“I was in Ravenclaw, my boy,” Gibbon says. His voice is cheery and warm, and he reminds Harry a little of Horace Slughorn; something in the musical lilt to his voice. Harry feels the staircase move beneath them, and even as they shift, he feels the light eat a little less at his eyes. “And you’re a Slytherin?”

“That’s right. The Common Room is in the dungeons.”

“Oh, I know where it is,” Gibbon says cheerily.

“Had a lot of occasion to visit when you were at Hogwarts?”

“New professors are apprised of the locations of all the Common Rooms.”

“The Ravenclaw tower is nice, of course,” Harry says in a light tone intended to draw a response. “But your library doesn’t have the view ours does.”

“Library?” Gibbon repeats, and Harry hears the confusion in his voice. “Ravenclaw is the only house with its own library.” There’s a little defensiveness in his voice: strange, to think how house pride can linger so through the years. Harry wonders if he’ll be just as proud of Slytherin when he’s into his thirties.

“Not anymore.” They step onto another staircase, and Harry feels the smoothness of the marble beneath his feet; this is the staircase with the missing step. He steps nimbly over the gap as they make their way down. “Just three days left.”

“Three days?” Gibbon repeats.

“Before we declare a state of emergency,” Harry says. He speaks very casually, and as he takes to the landing at the base of the staircases, he forces his eyes open. His eyes flare with pain, but they adjust quickly, and Harry realizes that the tint to his glasses is dark enough that from this angle, Gibbon can’t see whether his eyes are open or not. Gibbon has a tight frown on his face, and Harry says, “Unless you think Voldemort will surrender himself, sir?” There’s the mildest of flinches, a momentary curl of Gibbon’s lip, but there’s no way he can judge if they’re due to fear or shock or anger.

“I hardly think so,” Gibbon says. “It would never be so easy.”

“No, never.” Gibbon leads Harry into the entrance hall, and toward the dungeons: as soon as they take the stairs into the sweet, blessed dank of the castle basement, Harry lets out a short sigh of relief. The torchlight is so dim in comparison to the sunlight outside, and he gently draws his hand away from Gibbon’s arm. “Thank you, sir, for the escort. Are you excited to begin teaching?”

“Oh, yes,” Gibbon says. “I have much to teach you, I think, Mr Potter.”

“Oh, Professor Gibbon,” Harry says mildly, grinning a little and facing the other man. “You should never underestimate the ability of your students to teach you things to.” Gibbon’s brows furrow, and Harry reaches out, pressing his palm to the dungeon wall and beginning to make his way deeper into the winding corridors. He walks for five minutes or so, taking the lesser used passages, when he freezes in his place, hearing a shift behind him.

“Who’s that?”

“Just me,” murmurs a soft voice in the darkness: his eyes aren’t hurting any more, but with the tints over his eyes Harry’s vision is hugely depleted, and he doesn’t want to risk taking them off or looking over them.

“Blaise,” Harry says, and he feels the other boy suddenly in his space, feels Blaise’s hands pin Harry’s wrists above his head: Harry is stuck back against the cool wall of the dungeon, and Blaise’s mouth is right up against Harry’s. The heat of Blaise’s body against his own makes Harry sigh despite himself, and he smells the familiar sweetness of Del Rio on the air. “I don’t think—”

“No, no, listen to me,” Blaise murmurs softly. Blaise has always been, as Harry has seen him, a nocturnal creature: much of the day and the early evening he dozes like a cat, even in his classes, but at night he tends to come to life. It’s barely one o’clock in the afternoon, and it’s strange to see him so active. “I’ve been thinking of what you said to me: you don’t want to be Elton John. I asked a Ravenclaw Half-blood, and I—”

“You researched Elton John for me? I’m flattered,” Harry says softly.

“Listen,” Blaise hisses, desperation in his voice, and Harry lets his mouth close. “I don’t wish to keep you back, or to make you ashamed. I only want to touch you, feel you… What you want, you won’t get at Hogwarts.”

Harry thinks of the Death Eaters, of Voldemort, of the war – isn’t it so strange, that Blaise is so concerned with petty things like this? Like sex, like love? “You don’t have the foggiest idea of what I want, Blaise.” Harry mutters.

“Don’t I?” Blaise surges at him, and Blaise’s mouth is on Harry’s own, his lips unusually dry and chapped, his tongue fighting its way against Harry’s own, and Blaise bites at Harry’s lower lip, hard enough to draw blood: Harry hears the moan five seconds before he realizes it came from his own mouth. “You want pain. You want blood, and bruises, and a distraction from war. Enter Blaise Zabini.” Blaise’s fingers are already making short work of Harry’s robes, undoing the fastenings with lightning-quick fingers, and Harry hates that the other boy is right.

Harry feels his blood run hot, feels the anger buried inside him bubble quick to the surface, and here is his opportunity to let it all unleash. Blaise’s teeth are on his neck and his nails are digging hard into Harry’s hips as Harry’s pushed back into an empty classroom, and Harry lets himself forget about everything, about everything, as the door slams shut.

b04; b02; b09; ~ a90; c1; a89; ~ THE LERNAEAN HYDRA ~ a90; c1; a89; ~ b09; b02; b04;

Harry returns to the Common Room on shaky legs, his robe collar buttoned up tightly to his neck. The Common Room is thankfully very dim, lit only by soft candlelight, and Harry walks in alone; Blaise is to follow in ten minutes or so, separately. The new First Years, who will be sorted this evening according to McGonagall, are absent, and it’s strange how empty the Common Room seems to be without new children in September.

Draco is lying on his bed, a book in his lap, when Harry enters their bedroom, but Harry doesn’t immediately greet him: he rushes to the freshly-laundered robes on his bed. They’ve been cleaned, but scorch marks are evident on their front: the robes are absolutely ruined, although Harry’s prefect badge is in perfect condition. Folded amongst the fabric is Mulciber’s wand and Harry’s knife and holster: he feels himself relax as he places them subtly into his bedside table, out of Draco’s sight.

There’s a charred envelope in amongst them – the letter Billy O’Neill had handed to him yesterday. He sets that in the drawer too.

Thinking of letters—

Harry throws the robes messily into the wastepaper bin in the corner of the room, reaching into his trunk and pulling out his letter organiser, an enchanted box that holds far more shelves than it ever could without magic.

“Busy?” Draco asks lazily.

“Mmm,” Harry replies, and he sorts through the labels for the name Malfoy, Lucius, pulling it out and beginning to page through the folder. Each page spread is the same: on the left is a copy of Harry’s letter, and on the right, the letter Lucius had sent him in return, neatly organised in chronological order. He has too many letters in his files to not organise them this way, and he searches for a particular letter.

12th October, 1994

Dear Harry,

I will, of course, pass on your regards to Narcissa; she had been rather delighted with the flowers for her birthday, of course, and assures me she will send you a thank-you note post-haste. For your Charms homework, if you haven’t already completed your essay, I might recommend you take in Gardenia Vesper’s book, Wardens And Guards, which examines in great detail not only the practical magic surrounding magical sentience, but also the philosophy and ethics. You will find that next year, with your O.W.L. in the subject, that you’ll need to think about these things more and more.

As for the Tournament, Narcissa and I have the greatest faith in your success, as do all of the trespassers in this chaotic new home of ours. I might recommend you take up some better exercise regime in the next few weeks, however, and keep to it – if you would only join the Quidditch team like Draco, you might not be so awfully thin and waifish. Even Molly Weasley agrees with me on the subject.

If you shall sidestep my advice and care once more, however, you might take up another form of exercise or sport. Draco is a gymnast, as I am sure you are aware, and although he practises little at Hogwarts, he could no doubt take you through some beginning moves and stretches; what I would recommend is that you take up a similar regime to my own.

Often at Malfoy Manor I would take bracing walks through the grounds and the surrounding area, often with my dogs at my heels, and Narcissa and I would sometimes take occasion to ride. Whilst there are no horses at Hogwarts, you might take to walking through the grounds with that flat-faced monster in miniature Ms Granger labels a cat, although I would advise you strongly to remain out of the Forbidden Forest. Your safety is paramount, even in the pursuit of better health.

A swim could do you no harm, but failing this and each of my other suggestions, I have attached diagrams of the exercises I myself perform to keep myself hale and hearty. Narcissa has (in very bad taste, I might add), appended an image of herself to one of the diagrams, but I assure you the exercise is quite useful even without a witch perched upon one’s shoulders.

I must end this letter, I fear, as I believe I hear the sound of Andromeda coming in through the front door – she announces herself so very loudly – and it is best I supervise, lest she and Narcissa quarrel, or worse, work together to some common goal.

With our love and affection,
Lucius & Narcissa Malfoy

Harry had never taken his advice about taking up any proper exercise. He’d gone for a few swims in the end, with Krum and on his own, and he still has the swimsuit in his trunk, ready to go.

Harry sets the letter aside, instead examining the attached diagrams, which Lucius had sketched out and lightly animated. He smiles a little at the drawing of a cross-legged Narcissa on the back of the diagram doing what Muggles would call a push-up: the self-portrait, drawn in green-ink and with a much more defined style than Lucius’ sketches, hides her mouth behind her hand and giggles as she’s lifted and dropped with each movement. The exercises are simple enough, and Harry recalls when he had first examined them how much leisure time Narcissa and Lucius could possibly have – Lucius had seemed to have at least a dozen hobbies for every day of the week, and even now, Harry finds himself wondering what Narcissa could possibly have done with all her time before she’d taken up Lucius’ mantel at the Ministry of Magic.

“Is that from my father?” Draco asks. There’s no light ease to his voice now: Draco is sat up straight on the bed, and staring at the spread of Harry’s folder, and at the pages in his hand, written on fancy letter paper.

“Yeah,” Harry says, and a freeze seems to spread across his chest, sinking down into his belly. How could he have been so selfish, passing so easily through Lucius’ letters in full view of Draco? A long silence passes between them: the monster inside Harry says, No, they’re yours, they’re private correspondence! He has no right to ask for them! But Draco would never ask for them, would he? Even to read his father’s words, hear his voice, one last time, he would never ask.

Harry breaks the sudden quiet to say, “Would you like to read them?” His voice sounds hoarse to his own ears.

“You needn’t to do that,” Draco says immediately. Harry can see that it pains him to say it, the force of upper class etiquette holding him back from doing something inappropriate, but Harry shakes his head slowly, making a duplicate of Lucius’ diagrams and sliding the original back into the folder.

“I don’t need to,” Harry agrees, and he closes the folder before holding it out to the other boy. Draco stands slowly from the bed, taking the folder and stroking over its green card surface. LUCIUS MALFOY is printed neatly at the top of the folder in block capitals, and in the bottom left hand corner Harry had printed his birthday and his address: Malfoy Manor, Bottlesford, Wiltshire. “I’d like them back, if it’s alright, but you have just as much right to read them as me, I—”

Draco’s arms are around Harry’s neck, the lightly muscled weight of his body hitting Harry hard in the chest and punching out a sharp exhalation; Harry doesn’t draw away or complain, though, settling his arms around Draco’s shoulders and hugging the other boy back. His grip is a little painful – Harry has new marks across his own shoulders from Blaise’s nails – but he needs this, Harry thinks, he needs it.

“Thank you,” Draco whispers. “I’m so— Harry, I’m very grateful to have you.” Harry thinks of Draco lying in his bed after Lucius’ funeral, barely dressed and staring blankly into space day after day; he thinks of the way the sight had made him ache.

“I’m grateful to have you too,” Harry murmurs back. Behind them, several people walk past the open door of their dormitory, heading toward the Common Room’s entrance, and Harry frowns as he and Draco break apart. “Where are they going?”

“To the funeral,” Draco says softly. As he says it, he clutches Lucius’ letters tightly to his chest. “Abraham Hamish is being buried down in the village.”

“I didn’t know there was a Jewish cemetery there,” Harry murmurs.

“The synagogue is a little way outside of the village, but there is a cemetery,” says Theodore from the doorway. He looks tired: there are dark circles tracked under his eyes, and Harry doubts he’s had any sleep since the night before last. He wears plain black robes, and pinned into his hair is a skullcap: a yarmulke, Theo had once told him.  “I just asked Blaise, and he readily acquiesced: I’m told there’ll be no classes tomorrow. Given that, I believe we four should spend the evening getting unwholesomely drunk.”

Harry glances to Draco, who shares the glance, and they look back to Theo.

“Yes, alright,” Draco says. Harry thinks of Blaise, who he’d left with bruises marking him from his neck down to his left hip, and he gives a short nod of his head.

“I know a stash of firewhiskey,” Harry says, thinking of his father’s cache up on the seventh floor.

“Very good,” Theo says softly, and he sweeps from the room. Draco closes his curtains when he returns with the letters. He already expects to cry, it seems, and Harry can’t really blame him. Setting aside the exercise instructions for now, he sits down on the edge of his bed, thinking. He’ll see Madam Pomfrey on Saturday, and he’ll start learning some mediwizardry from her; he’ll start doing Lucius’ exercises in the mornings, and he’ll get stronger; he needs to start learning how to do non-verbal magic now.

There’s so much to do that it’s daunting, and he kicks himself for not having started doing this earlier, for not having the bloody forethought. How much time has he wasted doing stupid, nonsense things, when he could have been getting ready?

He drops back onto the bed, sighing, and then reaches up into the drawer on his bedside table.

The envelope Billy O’Neill had given him is a little blackened at its edges, but Harry opens it up and sees that the letter within, at least, is undamaged. Harry looks at the familiar, looping handwriting and sets his jaw as he begins to read.

b04; b02; b09; ~ a90; c1; a89; ~ THE LERNAEAN HYDRA ~ a90; c1; a89; ~ b09; b02; b04;

Harry keeps to the back passages as he makes his way up to the seventh floor, using the barely used corridors that are thick with cobwebs or caked with dust: these are the halls with no windows to shine brightly into them, and they are the least painful to traverse. He had tried using Lumos at first, but the light from his wand had been much too bright to be comfortable with, even when he held his wand as far away from his face as possible.

So Harry holds the candlestick the Malfoys had sent him for Christmas in his first year, a candle lighting his way: he’d worry about looking ridiculous, but by the time he has climbed up to the attic corridors of the seventh floor, he hasn’t seen a single soul, and he’s only seen one or two cats.

The little round room in the Gryffindor tower is precisely as Harry had left it last year, and Harry is grateful for the red stained glass in place of the normal window panes. The stained glass is very thick, and despite the sun outside, the light that comes through and into the room is nowhere near as overpowering as Harry had expected it to be.

The crates of firewhiskey still rest in the corner of the room, and Harry kneels down despite the filthy floor, picking up three bottles and placing them gently into his bag. There are easily thirty bottles left, and Harry wonders why Sirius and his dad would have left them here after leaving Hogwarts, or the chess set.

Harry looks at the chess set for a long few moments: if Sirius had left it here, it must not have meant too much to him, especially not if his parents gave it to him, but still… Muttering a few cleaning spells, Harry siphons off the worst of the dust and filth and sets the pieces back into their case. The board clips into place upon the wooden box to form a lid, and Harry can’t help but admire the design.

Slinging his bag back over his shoulder and holding the chess board over his arm, he begins the slow journey back down to the dungeons – taking these winding passageways slows the journey considerably, and it had taken him well over an hour to reach the seventh floor.

The letter Lockhart had sent him had been short, but Harry had

Mr Harry J. Potter,

I need to speak with you, and urgently.

Of course, as a treacherous Azkaban escapee, former recipient of an Order of Merlin Third Class, et cetera, et cetera, I see why you might not wish to leave the safety of the castle and make yourself vulnerable, particularly not in these trying times: I would suggest that you send a letter to Billy O’Neill advising a time when you would be available to meet, and I will come into Hogwarts.

Do not ask after how I would do so, but I would meet you on the Hogwarts Astronomy Tower, and we might speak there.

Regards,

Gilderoy Lockhart

Meeting with Lockhart is positively suicidal, even within the bounds of Hogwarts, and Harry doesn’t know how the man could possibly get through the wards to meet him on the Astronomy Tower, and yet…

He knows he needs to.

When he gets back to the Common Room, he’ll pen a response.