Chapter Text
Harry leaves the castle with Ron and Hermione on a breezy afternoon.
They take the longer, more desolated, route into Hogsmeade. The village has that old scent of something sweet, like vanilla or old parchment, stale and familiar, that lingers around the village and hangs in the air. It smells similar to Hogwarts, but only the slightest bit different. As they walk towards the village they pass through the center where popular stores like Tomes and Scrolls or Ceridwen’s Cauldrons beckons visitors inside. A few people linger around the town, but most of the residents seem to flee on Hogwarts weekends, so it’s mostly students they pass. Harry, Hermione, and Ron don’t walk down the main road of the village like they usually would, and instead they cut towards the edge of the village, where the roads are less lively and far quieter. Less traversed stores and inns with fewer customers pass them by. Small storefronts with niche catalogues, restaurants selling all kinds of food, small shops that are starting up.
On the very outskirts of the village, so far out that it could hardly be considered part of Hogsmeade village, Hogs Head Inn stands in shambles with a dodgy, suspicious look to it.
“Let’s go,” Hermione drags Harry and Ron inside by their wrists.
The usually empty pub is strangely crowded, for perhaps its first and only time. Dozens of Hogwarts students with red, and blue, and yellow, uniforms populate the pub. There are a bit more people than Harry had expected. A few friends or friends-of-friends, was his expectation. And while everyone inside is vaguely familiar, enough so that he had to have seen them on the Quidditch pitch at some point, or shared an elective with them, he can’t assign names to everyone inside. A couple dozen faces stare at him with wide, suspicious stares, as the trio make their way through the pub.
“Over here,” Neville waves from a table he has near the center. His voice is only a tad bit awkward— which is to say, he has grown less awkward overall. A subtle change.
“Thank you Neville.” Hermione sniffs. She sets her school bag down onto the chair and ruffles around a bit, looking for something specific.
“A lot of people here, yeah?” Neville asks Harry.
“Yeah.” Harry agrees disheartenedly. Far more people than he expected or agreed to.
Hermione takes things out of her bag as she reaches around, digging deep. A moment later she pulls out a thick piece of parchment and a quill, and sets it carefully down onto the table.
“Took you that long to find a plain old piece of parchment?” Ron teases.
Before Hermione could chastise him, a voice calls out, “Hey! What’s this all about?” from somewhere in the inn. Harry thinks it might’ve been one of the twins heckling, but it’s hard to confirm with the cacophony of other voices suddenly chiming in and agreeing. “Yeah! Why are we here?” “What’s the hold up?”
“Right.” Hermione clears her throat loudly. She stands up on her stool, and projects her voice across the pub with a quick charm. The chatter quiets down immediately, into something more tame. “We’ve all noticed that Defense class this year is quite bad.”
“That’s putting it lightly,” Ron mutters under his breath.
Hermione silences him with her signature look. She presses on, “With the return of you-know-who—“
A whisper crosses the bar, a mixture of shock and disbelief and fear. Someone drops their drink in fright, and a shatter is heard. The barkeep shuffles over with a mop and broom.
Harry clenches his teeth and bites the inside of his cheek.
Hermione bulldozes onward, “Well, it’s best we learn how to defend ourselves properly. This is an unofficial study group for us to learn Defense. Harry will help teach us everything he knows.”
Another whisper crosses the bar. Harry chances a look around and sees a few of his classmates staring back at him, either in suspicion or worship, or a weird mixture of the two. Luna gives him a kind look from where she stands in the corner, big radish earrings dangling from the sides of her face. Ginny nods her head in acknowledgement. His Quidditch team gives him a thumbs up and supportive looks.
He straightens his back. “Erm. Yeah. It’s important for us to be able to protect ourselves from Voldemort.”
“What makes you qualified?” Someone calls out. He squints to see who, but he can’t tell with all the faces surrounding him, dozens others agreeing and joining in asking. “Why should we trust you?”
“Harry killed a basilisk in Dumbledore’s office.” Neville says from beside him. There’s an edge to his voice, daring someone to disagree.
“I heard you could do a Patronus charm!” A voice calls out from the crowd. Luna, with her dangly earrings, says. “Is that true?”
“Really?” Dean Thomas looks impressed. “Bravo, mate.”
“It’s true, I’ve seen it.” Hermione agrees for him, when he does not. His heart drops and he finds himself struggling for words. Teaching the Patronus charm is exactly what he was scared of, with this defense group. He couldn’t do it without revealing his own warped stag.
“Third year, he fought off about a hundred dementors at once.” Ron boasts.
“And last year, he really did fight You-know-who.” Hermione says with a steeliness to her voice.
“Look,” Harry says with a small amount of hesitation. Hearing about his so-called accomplishments makes his heart drop and his palms sweat. They don’t feel like accomplishments to him. They feel like little failures. “It all sounds great, but it was just luck, and I didn’t know what I was doing, and I had help–”
“He’s being modest,” Hermione cuts in.
“No. I’m not.” Harry says. “Facing this in real life is not like school. In school, if you make a mistake, you try again tomorrow. Out there? When your a second away from being murdered, or,” He swallows a gulp in his throat, “Watching a friend die right before your eyes. You don’t know what that’s like.”
He sits down, deflated.
“You’re right Harry, we don’t.” Hermione says. Her voice is kind and empathetic. “But if we have any chance of beating… Voldemort... we have to prepare”
“So, he’s really back?” Somebody asks solemnly.
“Yes.” Harry says, trying to quell the bitterness in his voice. “He is.”
The room quiets down, into an anxious murmur.
“Well, I’m ready to put my name down.” Dean interrupts the silence with. He grins towards his roommates across the pub.
A few more voices pop up: Me too. What are we going to learn first? Can we also cover Transfiguration? Will we be dueling each other? When are we starting?
Hermione interrupts the chatter smoothly, projecting her voice loudly. “Everyone who is interested, sign this parchment with your name please. I’ll contact you for the first meeting, and we’ll answer everything then. If you’re not interested, please keep this to yourself. Thank you, everyone.”
Fortunately, most of the crowd, if not everyone appears to be interested, whether it be genuine or not. A queue forms for Hermione’s parchment, and Harry watches idly as students one by one sign their names. Luna flourishes the pen grandly, and takes up twice as much space on the paper with a large signature that loops endlessly. Neville, on the other hand, scratches it out so quickly it’s near unreadable. Cho has the kind of neat, bubbly handwriting Harry has always associated with girls.
As the crowd begins to thin out and only a few students remain, Harry finds Blaise, who must’ve been hiding in a corner somewhere in the back, emerge and walk up to sign his name. He isn’t wearing his Slytherin uniform, Harry realizes. The other boy is wearing a nondescript black sweater, with some plain slacks. His shoes are sleek leather, brand new. Harry has never seen a Slytherin in anything besides Wizarding robes, the pretentious bunch of them, and it’s no surprise that he hadn’t seen Blaise earlier, with the unfamiliar choice of wardrobe hiding him.
“You made it.” Harry acknowledges. He hadn’t expected the Slytherin to show up, truthfully.
Hermione is nodding beside him and handing the boy a quill, “Welcome. Thanks for coming. Sign right here, please and thank you.”
“I was surprised you invited me.” Zabini says. He adds his name to the very bottom of Hermione’s parchment. “Didn’t see any other Slytherins in here.”
“Why would we invite Slytherins?” Ron asks incredulously.
“You invited me?” Zabini replies, raising his eyebrow.
“Right, well,” Ron shrugs unimpressively.
Hermione collects her parchment with due diligence, and nods at him, “I did try to make this study group as fair as possible. While most of us are Gryffindors, I tried my best to include students from every house, to make it even.”
Hermione, despite being targeted more from the snakes than the rest of them combined, is still an incredibly kind and fair person at heart. Equality, above all else, is important to her. After her deep dive in social justice through S.P.E.W. the year prior, Hermione spent time explaining to them the importance of representation and inclusion. Even if she may have been suspicious of Zabini, Harry is sure when she heard him and Ron explain his tentative politeness to them, she saw a way to include everyone, without endangering themselves.
“And yet I’m the only Slytherin?” Zabini asks dryly.
“Well,” Ron draws out. “You’re the only one who hasn’t hexed us on the spot.”
Zabini snorts. “I highly doubt you’ve encountered most of my house, excluding Malfoy and his lot. Listen, I’m not trying to defend the nasty ones, but what about the half-bloods in Slytherin? Would they not also be a target for the Dark Lord? Shouldn’t they learn to protect themselves?”
“There’s half-bloods in Slytherin?” Harry asks incredulously. He had thought everyone in the snake house was a pureblood along the likes of Malfoy: wealthy, obnoxious, privileged and willing to use their privilege against others. Crabbe, Goyle, and Parkinson certainly fit that image, and they were the loudest Slytherins they encountered.
“Of course there is,” Zabini rolls his eyes. “Half-bloods are the majority of the Wizarding Population. And I do hate to break the news to you, but you lot,” he gestures to Harry, Ron, and Neville, “have more power than most Hogwarts students. Even if you are,” he holds up finger quotes with his hands, “blood-traitors.”
“What are you saying?” Ron huffs angrily. “I’m not some kind of pure-blood swot–”
Neville, who had been sitting there shyly throughout the conversation, cuts in abruptly, “He’s right, Ron. We’re still purebloods, first and foremost, even if our families were considered blood-traitors in the last war. Plus, my family has a seat on the Wizengamot, and so does your mother’s family. We both have voting power. Hermione, for example, doesn’t have any voting power whatsoever.”
Hermione looks thoughtful at that. “Muggleborns can’t vote?!”
“Voting doesn’t work in the British Wizarding World the same way it does for muggles. We have a committee, the Wizengamot, who votes on every matter for the country. Individuals have no say. Only the wealthiest and oldest British families can ‘vote’.” Zabini says. “Not only does it exclude Muggleborns, but it also excludes any immigrants, or wizards from smaller families.”
“That’s so corrupt!” Hermione exclaims. Harry can see gears churning in her head. “No wonder the Wizarding World is so backwards, if only the oldest and most powerful get to vote.”
“And those people aren’t exclusively Slytherins,” Zabini says. “Believe it or not. As much as Hogwarts makes us forget– blood, race, wealth, status, these things are the real dividers, not a little Hogwarts house.”
Hermione hums thoughtfully. Harry expects to find her in the library tonight, pulling up everything she could on the Wizengamot. He wonders how she hadn’t already known about this– but with the lack of introductory texts for Muggleborns to their culture or government, he isn’t surprised. Hermione is smart, but not all-knowing. He gives her a week to become an expert in the field.
“Well,” Hermione says with a thoughtful look on her face, “If there’s any others you know who’d want to join, do let me know.”
That night, Harry tries to do some research of his own. He casts the privacy charm around his bed curtains, and lights a little Lumos as he flips through the books he’s checked out a few days prior.
He was exhausted from dealing with the whole Hog’s Head meeting, but with the curiosity people had over the Patronus charm, he knew he had to figure this thing out sooner than later.
The working theory was that Harry’s soul has been fundamentally… changed? Corrupted? Spoiled? To the point of affecting the Patronus charm. The spell uses a happy memory from the conjurer to create what is essentially a reflection of the conjurer’s soul to protect them. That is the concept behind the Patronus charm, and why it functions the way it does.
So, Harry thinks, if his Patronus, his soul reflection, has become twisted, dark, corrupted— then it has to mean something about Harry himself has become corrupt. His soul has to be spoiled. This makes the most sense.
He abandons the book he had read the other night on the Patronus charm after the books devolves into tips for learning the charm. He finds the book on magical theory he deemed interesting, and switches to that. The book focuses specifically on changes in charms and spells, and why they may occur. Why has his soul reflection become so twisted? Was it something to do with the ritual Voldemort performed? How could he fix this?
He begins skimming the passage, glasses sinking down on his nose as he reads.
The author quickly begins to explain in regards to some charms which are emotion or mental based, that a change in perspective can affect the outcome of the spell. Example: the Patronus charm changing when a caster has fallen in love. This is the most common example of a permanent change of a charm, the author explains, as many adult witches and wizards have their Patronus switch forms based on their partner’s.
Harry takes that information in. It isn’t so unusual then, for a Patronus to change. The issue was his hadn’t changed from animal to animal— Prongs was still Prongs. The species was the same. The form remained a stag. The issue was the materiality, the essence, of the charm changing. From light, to darkness.
He groans in frustration. This is so complicated. Perhaps he should ask someone… But who? Thinking of his shadowy companion gives him a sense of shame that balls up tight in his stomach. This is so embarrassing. He surely can’t ask any of his friends, none of his professors, forget Sirius…
Perhaps Lupin, then?
Professor Lupin, although he is no longer his professor, is an objective third party in Harry’s life. Despite the man’s helpfulness in his third year, and his claims to be a close friend of his parents, the man held Harry at a distance and made it clear to him that he was not to play an active role in his life. It stings him, a little, to think about the hesitation the man shows Harry.
Harry understands it a bit: werewolf and unemployed. But Sirius was an escaped felon, and he still somehow managed to write Harry first. Lupin never took the initiative, never even tried to take the initiative. Now that he spent more time with Sirius, in the last few months, he seemed to have remembered Harry’s existence, but… it just seemed very lackluster to Harry.
And he knows, he knows, that he can’t expect everyone around him to care. He can’t expect strangers to be anything besides that.
Still, though, it stung. Especially since Lupin had been so very thoughtful in third year. His lack of existence in fourth year had felt particularly painful, particularly neglectful.
He decides, hesitatingly, that yes, he will write to Lupin with a very vague description of the situation. Perhaps ask him for some advice, while he’s at it. He prays the man won’t share the letter with Sirius, for Sirius will surely bombard him with a million questions all without any subtlety at all.
After making that plan mentally, his eyes begin to droop a little, and a little more, before he calls it quits and hides the books on his nightstand, under an old sweater, so none of his roommates see it. He extinguishes the light charm and shuts his eye for rest, falling into a deep but unrestful slumber.
Harry puts the letter he drafted up to Lupin in his school bag, with plans to send it along between classes.
Over breakfast, Harry spies some of their classmates who’d been at the meeting staring in their direction— Justin Finch-Fletchely keeps spilling his food, with how often he breaks his neck to catch a glimpse of them, and Anthony Goldstein seems to be anxiously waiting for something to occur right away, like the lessons would start during breakfast.
Hermione shoots them a warning look that says Stop being so obvious.
“I’m working out some details, don’t worry,” Hermione tells him and Ron, and she quickly shoves a few bites of her breakfast down the hatch before running off to the library.
Harry, meanwhile, hardly notices any of this: he is busy staring at Cho over breakfast.
His long term crush. She’s been the object of his affection for almost two years now. She’s pretty, probably the prettiest girl in school. Her face is soft and feminine, her eyes gentle and playful, her hair beautiful. And she’s nice, too. She’s sweet, very soft spoken, but her face is very expressive. And she’s a seeker, like him. They could talk about quidditch together. He fantasizes about a date to Spintwitches Sporting Needs with butterbeer after. Maybe they’d hold hands as they walked around. It would be so lovely.
Cho catches Harry staring at her, and sends him a gentle smile from across the hall. He ducks away flustered.
He forcibly reminds himself that Cho is too good for him. He’s Harry, and Harry will never be good enough for a girl like Cho. Or any girl, if he really thinks about it. As he and his classmates have gotten older the idea of dating scares him. To allow someone to see his vulnerabilities was unnerving. He can’t imagine anyone who’d stay if they really knew who he was, deep down. They would see how he was a freak. Good for nothing.
It’d be better for everyone involved if he simply never allowed anyone to get in close enough to see that far, to see him for the freak he had always been, and will always be.
Cho is pretty, but she is far, far too good for plain old Harry, so he ducks away flustered and proceeds to eat his breakfast without looking her way again. What makes you think you deserve her? What makes you think you deserve anybody?
“Not over her, huh?” Ron teases him with an elbow.
Classes are boring as ever that day, but fortunately, Ron and Hermione have Prefect patrols that afternoon. It leaves Harry half an hour or so of free time before he has another detention.
He drops by the Owlery, to give his letter to Remus.
Dear Professor Lupin,
I hope you’re doing well. Tell Padfoot I say hi.
If it isn’t too much trouble, I have a couple questions. We’re putting together a study group, you see. Umbridge is a horrible teacher, so we’re staying on our toes. I was wondering if you had any tips for teaching? Hermione appointed me tutor.
Also, have you heard of any Wizarding museums? Are researchers popular?
Also also, have you heard of someone’s Patronus changing? I was reading up on the charm, in case anyone wanted to learn it, and one of the textbooks mentioned the possibility of it changing. That sounded very curious to me.
Write me back when you can,
thanks
Harry
Harry gives Hedwig a couple treats, before sending her off to deliver the letter to Lupin. He hopes the letter was written casually enough, so as to not beg questions.
With time ticking down, Harry begrudgingly makes his way to detention with Umbridge.
The scariest thing about detention with Umbridge, Harry realizes halfway through the session, is that it’s working.
As he puts cursed quill to parchment, and scratches out the words over and over again, I must not tell lies, I must not tell lies, I must not tell lies, he slowly begins to consider himself a sinner begging repentance. The pain becomes familiar, and eventually, he finds himself welcoming it.
Earlier today, at the meeting in Hog’s Head inn, Neville, Ron, and Hermione all boasted about his skill and talent, but he doesn’t consider himself to be all that talented. He meant what he had said. He only survived out of pure luck. It wasn’t fair that he managed to survive, keep surviving, when others did not. It wasn’t fair. Cedric deserved to live. Not him.
The pain, repetitive, puts him into a meditative trance. It isn’t fair, who magic deems a survivor or not. How magic seemed to only bring violence, and destruction. Magic brought out the worst in people. It was clear, to him, that Petunia perhaps made the slightest bit of sense.
The hour ticks by, and Umbridge croons sweetly at the blood filled parchment on his way out. “You were such a good boy today,” She says, with eyes full of hatred.
Feeling pent-up and angry (Why is he always so angry, nowadays?) he makes his way towards the Room of Requirement, and before he even drops his schoolbag into the eccentric chair sitting in the corner, he has his wand out and is casting the Patronus charm.
“Hi,” Harry says, to the corrupted stag. The entity, as spoiled as it is, seems to understand him like no one else does. “You get me, don’t you?”
The stag bobs its head as if in reply.