Chapter Text
He wakes in the Chamber, by the rotting remains of the Basilisk. The grief of it strikes him anew, seeing her reduced like this, dead, dead, the flesh peeling from the bones. Tom howls his impotent fury; he wastes the little magic he has recovered on smashing, breaking, shattering everything around him, wrecking his own Chamber of Secrets. The diary, torn and sodden, hauls him back when he nears exhaustion and he fades almost out of existence. His mind stills, blurs, and his awareness shrinks to pages and leather, the cold of the stagnant water.
When he wakes again, he is calmer. Deeper within the Chamber are basilisk eggs, kept by magic at hatching point. He brings one out of its stasis and waits, all the lonely length of the summer, while it grows. He is not planning anything, yet. But the diary was always a Horcrux and a weapon; half its purpose was always the Chamber.
The nightmares are worse, since she got back to Hogwarts. She feels like she barely sleeps, just closes her eyes long enough to flash through Cedric on the grass, the foggy shapes of her parents, the thing rising out of the cauldron, and then jolts awake with her throat raw and aching. On the third night back at Hogwarts, she took the Cloak and went down to the kitchens for tea with honey and since then she’s been spending most of every night in the kitchens, drinking strange-flavoured teas and talking to Dobby. Some nights she doesn’t even try to sleep, just waits to hear Hermione snoring and skirts out of the dormitory. Her sleepless nights are better than the nightmares but they leave her forgetful and short-tempered. She can’t hold her tongue with Umbridge, not in one single class so far. She manages to shut up in the detentions, because she knows her silence is her only win. Or at least her only Pyrrhic victory. Umbridge wants to see her break and Harry will die before she gives her the satisfaction. Still, she feels like she’s burning up like touchpaper, every second of the day. She’s burning up and she just wants to sear someone else. Umbridge makes it so easy; she’s so stupid, so spiteful and wrong, it’s like she was dropped into Hogwarts just so Harry could have someone to hate. Aside from the anger that makes her stupid in Defence, snappish all the time, and leads her into abortive fights with Ron and Hermione, the biggest problem is that Harry feels like she never sleeps and is never fully awake. The days are drifting by without her. Classes happen in a haze; she blinks and she’s moved from the greenhouses to the dungeons. Blink again, she’s in the Great Hall. Blink, she’s lying in her four-poster, waiting for her ghosts.
Her classwork is slipping; she’s flailing in Transfiguration, she’s doing worse than Neville in Potions and she clean forgot that they had an omen analysis to do for Divination, right up until she was sitting on one of the little puffed stools and Trelawney was standing over her, hand held out for her parchment.
It’s the third week of term, and the first, for Harry, without detention in Umbridge’s office. She has detention with Trelawney on Thursday and Friday, instead, which is honestly reassuring. She might be writing lines on Thursday and Friday, but she knows definitely that she won’t be writing lines in blood.
“I might take that as a strategy,” she says to Ron and Hermione, while the three of them occupying a little table in corner of the common room and Ron is helping her bullshit her way through her make-up omen analysis. “Avoid Umbridge by getting detention with other teachers.”
“Do it,” Ron says immediately. He was more horrified than Hermione about her hand. He keeps sneaking looks at it. Harry thinks, in general, boys are more squeamish about things like that.
“You’ll decimate our house points,” Hermione observes from behind her dictionary of Ancient Runes, not sounding concerned.
Harry just shrugs. “Everyone hates me anyway.”
They do. It’s bloody typical, after last year. Just when they’d got a bit of harmony in the dorm, just when Lavender and Parvati had started to become actual friends and not just vaguely annoying people she shared a room with. Now, Lavender sits on her bed reading the Prophet while Harry’s in the room, holding up headlines like THE DEATH OF CEDRIC DIGGORY: WHAT DUMBLEDORE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW and POTTER’S GONE POTTY: ST. MUNGO’S TOP MEDIWIZARD GIVES HIS VIEW ON THE GIRL-WHO-LIED. On the first night back, the first time Harry saw Lavender waving the Prophet around under her nose, she lost it, and Lavender shouted right back at her. Harry doesn’t even remember everything they said, just that she’d yelled, “You’ve known me for four years, do you think I’d lie about this?” and Lavender had yelled, “Yes!”
After that the whole thing spiralled, and Lavender brought up how Harry had treated Parvati at the Yule Ball last year and Harry shouted, “Parvati knew we were going as friends!” and Parvati shouted, “I bloody didn’t!” which Harry actually hadn’t known, and Hermione had gotten involved, too, and Lavender told her to shut up, she didn’t know what she was talking about, she probably didn’t even get the Prophet, her parents were muggles. So Harry called Lavender a bitch, an airhead and a slag all in the space of one breath, which was where they left it. There’s an ongoing cold war in the dormitory. Lavender and Parvati are pointedly not talking to Harry and Hermione, and Harry is happy to give it back to them. Hermione put up some complicated semi-permeable shield charm between Lavender and Parvati’s side of the dormitory and Hermione and Harry’s. The only space they share is the bathroom. Harry suspected Lavender of using her Sleekeazy’s out of spite for about a week, until she confided her suspicions to Hermione, who told her, snippily, that Harry’s shampoo wouldn’t work for Lavender’s hair texture any better than it would for Hermione’s.
Ron taps a blank spot in her essay. “You need another death omen here,” he says.
“I really don’t,” Harry says wryly, mouth crooking up on one side. The expression feels strange on her face. It’s not Harry’s normal smile and Ron is slow to grin back.
She puts the Grim in again, in honour of Padfoot, and finishes her essay, satisfied she’s got enough misery and death to keep Trelawney happy for a while. After that, Ron suggests they get Defence over with and Harry takes out Defensive Magical Theory and flips to the end of chapter questions.
“Put it in the middle of the table, will you?” Hermione says, pushing aside the thick heap of her Runes essay. “I might as well get it over with, too.”
The three of them pull out fresh sheets of parchment and start in on the questions. Harry doesn’t need to look for Hermione’s help. Mind-numbing as it is, it turns out spending four hours a week transcribing every word in the chapter is a pretty efficient method of memorisation. She writes that Collier’s model is founded on responding to your opponent with spells from within a single magical branch, thus limiting and controlling the range of the fight; she writes that the Douglas method insists that ‘a wizard must not fight simply to win; no holds barred is not the way, for the true duellist wins by the rules.’ She gets through the questions as briefly as she can, but it’s all so stupid and she can feel the anger she’s been carrying around with her everywhere waking up and stretching, expanding like steam, like Harry’s been turned from simmer to boil.
“Every word of this is bullshit,” she vents.
There’s a small space of silence.
“Yeah,” Ron says, “We know.”
Harry looks up in time to see Hermione shoot him a look. “We’re not pressuring you, Harry,” she says.
“But we think you should think about it,” Ron mutters, leaning back over his parchment.
Hermione whips her head round at him, but then turns back to Harry and says: “Well, yes.”
Harry leans her head back against her chair. She’s so tired, and after this she’s still got to write a report on the economic factors contributing to the outbreak of the Fifth Goblin Rebellion.
“I’ll think about it,” she says.
It’s not a hard promise to make. Harry already has been thinking about it; it’s hard not to, hard to think of anything else, when she’s sitting through Umbridge’s worse-than-useless classes. That evening in the common room is the first time Hermione has brought up her Defence training idea in two weeks, since Harry lost her cool and stormed off, but it’s been on Harry’s mind. Not all the time, but she finds herself thinking about it the following afternoon in Umbridge’s class, copying from Defensive Magical Theory. The last chapter, “Common Defensive Theories and their Derivation” was only dull and useless; the third chapter “The Case for Non-Offensive Responses to Magical Attacks”, is, in Harry’s opinion, not only stupid but actively harmful. She sits quietly in class, keeping her head down as instructed, and writes out: ‘…the witch or wizard’s first action, after establishing their Shield Charm, should be to open a dialogue with their aggressor. Make your opponent aware that you are vehemently opposed to violence as a solution to any disagreement.’ Harry snorts. Umbridge looks up from her desk.
“Is there a problem, Miss Potter?” She asks pleasantly, with her little simper.
“Frog in my throat, Professor.” Umbridge blinks her bulging eyes at Harry, slow and reptilian, but she turns back to the papers on her desk.
Vehemently opposed to violence, Harry thinks, looking down at the raw wound on the back of her hand. It’s almost funny. It would be funny, except when she thinks that this is the most self-defence training most of her classmates have had since Lockhart’s sad excuse for a duelling club, Harry doesn’t feel like laughing at all. She feels something darker, angrier, a slow-boiling fury that she just carries around under her heart. If it weren’t for the Triwizard, that would have been Harry, facing Voldemort with nothing, even more helpless and terrified than she had actually been. If not for the random chance that resurrected a long-cancelled tournament, if Crouch hadn’t decided to use it as an elaborate method of delivering Harry to his master, she’d be facing into a war with a bare handful of offensive spells and a half-mastered Protego. Her classmates are all facing into a war now, whether they believe they are or not, and most of them are going out there with less, even, than Expelliarmus and a Shield Charm. She still doesn’t feel qualified. She still believes everything she said to Hermione and Ron, that it was sheer bloody luck that brought her alive out of the graveyard, out of that mass of Dementors, out of the Chamber of Secrets, out of the rooms below the third floor corridor. But if there isn’t anyone better, then it will have to be Harry. She corrects herself: if no one else will do it, then it will have to be Harry. She flexes her wounded hand, thinking that someday, somehow, she’s going to make Fudge and Umbridge answer for this, above everything else. They both saw the first war, and whatever they want to believe, Harry thinks they both know what’s coming, maybe better than she does. They know than none of the students in Hogwarts will be safe because they can’t fight, or because they’re kids, and yet Umbridge is doing everything she can to make them all helpless and Fudge is the one who set her on. It’s evil, Harry thinks, it’s as bad as Voldemort…she’s as bad…it’s as good as murder, they’re sending us all out to die. And for what? So Fudge can be Minister for Magic? For a few more bloody months until Voldemort takes over the Ministry, or just crushes it.
The fact that Dumbledore let this happen. It’s sharp as a knife, another stab wound on top of his silence over the summer, during the trial, the way he wouldn’t even look at her. He should be the one running a duelling club. He should teach them, he could at least teach Harry, he could at least act like he remembers she’s alive. She’d thought, at the beginning of the summer, that Dumbledore would reach out to her. That he’d explain what happened in the graveyard, the ritual, how it was possible, what it means that he has her blood now. What the connection between their wands means really, how far she can rely on it, how she can use it. She thought – she’d imagined telling him how scared she was. Not that she dreamed, every night, of Cedric’s sightless eyes and that she woke screaming and lay awake playing over and over in her mind the sight of her parents, the ghostly feel of them almost-touching her, the sounds of their voices (the soft Northern accent she never knew her mother had; her father’s posh, round vowels and the lilt she’s been trying to place). None of that. Just that she’d felt so completely vulnerable, that she had been completely vulnerable, and that it had been worse than anything because it had left her with nothing but fear and the fear had consumed her like fire. Harry had never felt fear like that. The Dementors were a shadow of it. Not even at eleven, facing Quirrell in her bare feet and pyjamas, had she felt like prey. Voldemort turned her into a mouse in front of a snake.
If he’s coming for me, she’d imagined saying, then teach me how I can fight him.
Dumbledore could. He might be the only wizard who could. Harry had spent her summer marshalling arguments. Even after she realised he wasn’t going to write her, he wasn’t going to come, she’d still planned out how she would make him agree to teach her, agree that she had a right to know how to defend herself. What a joke. Harry knows she can’t make her classmates capable of fighting him, and maybe she can’t even give them enough to fight his Death Eaters. She’s not a duellist or a soldier, she’s fifteen and she crammed a few books worth of spells to help her through a tournament that was, in the end, just a game. There’s no sending up red sparks to get out of a real fight. But she’s all they have. It’s so unfair, she wants to scream, but there is no one except Harry to help them and no one to help Harry at all. If she can just teach them something. If she can scour the library and teach herself anything. If, if, if. It might not help anything. It’s better than doing nothing. It’s better than keeping her head down, not provoking Umbridge, be a good girl, Harry. That evening, in the dorm, she tells Hermione that she’ll do it.
That night, once Hermione’s asleep, she takes the Cloak to the Restricted Section and wanders through the section on magical combat. Defying the Dark, she remembers that from last year. One Hundred Curses – she takes that down from the shelf. She’d memorised a handful of the hundred curses last year; she wouldn’t mind getting a few more down. A Compendium of Common Curses and their Counter-Actions would probably also be useful. Self-Defensive Spellwork…she scans for something a little more practical, less about spells and more about…Harry doesn’t know, tactics, maybe. She’s not going to be able to cram more spells than Voldemort knows; she probably couldn’t even go up against most of his Death Eaters – well, maybe Wormtail. Merlin, what she’d give to her hands on Wormtail. There have to be books on strategies, about how to survive a fight where you’re outmatched. The Killing Curse is unblockable – what are you supposed to do if there isn’t a convenient gravestone to duck behind? Conjure something? Will anything block it or does it have to be dense like granite? She finds The Dark Arts Outsmarted and thinks it looks promising. Five books, that’s probably enough to start with. She settles in a leather-upholstered armchair, takes a sheaf of parchment, her quill and inkpot from her bag and lights her wand, propping it on one scrolled arm of the chair to light her parchment. In the morning, Hermione tells Harry she’ll find out who’s interested on joining a defence club and maybe organise a meeting on the first Hogsmeade weekend.
“Not too many people,” she reassures Harry hastily, “and not a proper lesson, to start with. Just an informal meeting to sort of gauge interest, see what kind of things people want to learn.”
“I don’t know if there’ll be any proper lessons, to be honest,” Harry tells her. “But that sounds great, Hermione, really.”
She doesn’t mention her nights at the library. Part of it is that she doesn’t want to own up to how little she’s sleeping; Harry has a strong feeling that Hermione would march her to the Hospital Wing, if she knew Harry was staying awake as long as she could manage and crashing during the day, during classes, when the teachers and the end of each class period can be trusted to wake her before she sinks too deep into her nightmares. The other part is that she’s sort of embarrassed. Harry reminds Hermione and Ron every time the defence club comes up that she’s not a teacher, she’s not some special talent, she’s just lucky. The defence club, she insists, will be about everyone helping each other. Except, she has actually pulled together something like a tentative lesson plan. Harry, who normally gets Hermione to make her study plans. But it’s true that she does have more experience with this kind of thing than any of her classmates and if Harry has learned anything from her last four years of dodging death and Voldemort, she wants to share that. She started with a list of all the defensive and offensive spells she learned during the Triwizard but she expands that now with a litany of other spells, more powerful, adaptable protective charms and curses that lurk in the darker spectrum of grey magic. She haunts the Restricted Section under her Cloak and finds a book called Tactics of Magical Warfare by Symeon Strongmount; it’s about two hundred years old and has nothing on Voldemort or even Grindelwald, but the writer strikes her as sensible, despite his flowery Georgian English. She takes notes on his deconstruction of the types of magical combat and wonders when she turned into Hermione. She can’t take it out without a pass, but she works her way through it at night and when she spots the first rays of sunrise creeping across the dusty shelves, Harry slides it into a half-hidden spot behind a cursed book on curses and it’s always there for her when she gets back the next night.
It helps a bit that she’s successfully avoided detention with Umbridge this week and has finally been able to catch up on her homework in the evenings. Hermione is strongarming Ron into hours-long study sessions, flinging quiz questions at him like hexes, jumping from subject to subject to catch him off-guard. Harry gets roped in occasionally, but mostly she ducks out of the portrait hole when she sees Hermione setting up her books and parchment at one of the tables in the common room. The result is that she wastes a lot of time wandering through the castle and grounds on her own. It’s odd, being in Hogwarts without Ron and Hermione, not really doing anything, just existing, just investigating ornate doors that lead to broom cupboards and staircases she’s never explored before. It makes her think of her dad, making the map. She thinks about writing to Sirius, but she remembers the Prophet article and thinks she can’t really justify it, not without a proper reason, not just to ask him about his Hogwarts days. The O.W.L.s are a vague, looming threat in the background and Voldemort is a threat in the background too, closer and more concrete. But they’re not right here, right now, and Harry’s solitary wanderings are a strange sort of peaceful. The sort of peaceful that she knows, in the back of her mind, she’ll pay for later.
On the first of October, it’s been a full month since the start of term and Hagrid is still not back. Harry gets her hopes up every time they head down the lawns to Care of Magical Creatures; his hut is a solid and familiar shape against the black-green of the forest and she expects to see a white curl of smoke, expects a hulking figure to duck out past the pumpkin patch, Fang at his heel. The hut is always still and silent. Harry goes down there that evening, after she escapes the common room. It looks sad and abandoned. The hut looks like it’s sagging, somehow, without Hagrid there to keep it tall. The windows are all dark and shuttered. There are animal skins hanging from a hook on the door, looking shrivelled and miserable, still damp from the rain a few nights before. The pumpkin patch is overgrown and there are fewer pumpkins than Harry expected, and she thinks they look smaller and less healthy than they normally do. There’s no Fang, no Buckbeak in the paddock - although he’d be at Grimmauld anyway, even if Hagrid was home - and even Hagrid’s chickens are all missing from the fenced yard. It’s not like he’s away, it’s like he’s gone. She doesn’t stay long. She halfheartedly pulls up some of the weeds around the pumpkins, but the hut feels eerie without Hagrid, the Forest closer, and Harry’s skin crawls. She heads back up to the castle after only a short while.
The first weekend in October is the first Hogsmeade weekend. The Monday of that week, Harry walks with Hermione and Ron back up to the castle after Herbology. It’s not raining but the skies look threatening, and the whole class hurries to get back under the castle roof.
“I spoke to Neville just now,” Hermione tells them. “He’ll definitely be there on Sunday. I think we have good numbers. It looks like it, anyway.”
“Fred and George and Ginny will all be there,” Ron says.
“That’s good.”
Neville and Ginny, at least, aren’t intimidating and Harry thinks, from the sound of things, it’ll mostly be the Gryffindors from their year and the younger years, the ones who don’t think Harry’s an attention-seeking pathological liar. The thought of trying to teach Fred and George is a bit more daunting; they’re older and Harry’s always thought of them as cleverer, more worldly-wise than she is. Also, she knows for a fact they won’t hesitate to laugh when she mucks up.
A month into term, and Harry spends her evenings alone in the castle, her days half-awake in classes and divides her nights between the library and the kitchens. Planning for Hermione’s defence club takes up most of her library time; Harry half-suspects herself of using it as an excuse to avoid her O.W.L. prep, but it’s also the only thing she’s felt…well, excited about in a long time. She does most of her sleeping in Divination where she can count on Trelawney to notice absolutely nothing and on Ron to kick her awake when she starts mumbling. A few times, she falls asleep in the library at night and wakes herself up by thrashing or screaming, or just wakes as soon as she’s reaching the door at the end of that bloody corridor. It’s not a routine Harry particularly likes but she seems to have settled into it. It’s horribly easy to see the rest of the year happening like this. She thinks her body is finally starting to adjust to the lack of sleep. She’s still tired, still dazed but she’s managing it now. The nightmares are as bad as ever, or worse, the predictable graveyard nightmares of the summer joined by the persistent and incredibly irritating corridor nightmares that began in August, and sometimes now something she’s not even sure can be called a nightmare, a weird, plotless dream where she walks through familiar Hogwarts corridors, retracing her daytime routes in an eerie, deserted twilight. She wouldn’t even call it a nightmare, except for the way she wakes up at the end of it, gasping, her heart pounding, choking on sourceless panic.