[From Litha to Lammas]: Forget-Me-Not, Harry/Theodore Nott, R, 2/7
Part One.
Title: Forget-Me-Not (2/7)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: AU (Harry is not the Boy-Who-Lived), socially awkward Harry, angst, present tense, violence
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 5500
Summary: AU. Harry isn’t the Boy-Who-Lived, but his parents still died, and Albus Dumbledore, concerned that Death Eaters might seek the boy’s death, cast a powerful charm on him to make wizards ignore him before Harry was left with the Dursleys. Except, with the Elder Wand in play, the charm was far too powerful, and made others essentially forget Harry existed when not directly interacting with him. Sorted into Ravenclaw at Hogwarts, Harry lives a contented life with no one either loving or hating him…until the charm breaks on his seventeenth birthday, and he’s suddenly plunged directly into the middle of a living world at war.
Author’s Notes: This is obviously a major AU, as you can see from the summary, and also one of my “From Litha to Lammas” fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This will have seven parts, to be posted over the next seven days.
Thanks for the reviews!
Part Two
During fourth year, Arithmancy gets a lot harder, and Harry starts spending more time in the library. That’s when he first notices that there are some interesting students in Slytherin House in his year.
Most of the time, Harry doesn’t pay attention to the Slytherins. They can’t bully him the way they do some of the Ravenclaws because they can’t focus on him, and he doesn’t attend Quidditch games, where he would have become familiar with some of them. He doesn’t have that many classes with them, either. He knows names and that’s about it.
Honestly, the only one he pays attention to on a regular basis is Malfoy, and that’s because Malfoy is always antagonizing Longbottom, and everyone is always glancing in Longbottom’s direction anyway.
But this time, Harry notices Theodore Nott because he always has the books Harry needs on Arithmancy already on his table when Harry goes looking for them. It doesn’t bother Harry that much. He can pick up a book from the edge of the table, look through it to get the information he needs, and put it back, and the minute the book is in his hands, Nott forgets about it until it returns again.
But it’s not just Arithmancy Nott is researching, or even Runes, although they share that class, too. Harry picks up a book that has a rune on the cover at one point and discovers that the whole book is about runes and brands placed on someone’s skin that channel magic through them. Fascinated, Harry takes the book back to his own table and reads for half an hour before Nott starts to make grumbling noises under his breath. It seems that book was important to him after all-important enough that he overcame the protection spell’s ability to make him forget. Harry doesn’t want to be caught, so he sneaks the book back under another one and makes Nott think he just didn’t see it at first.
But in the meantime, Harry is thinking. What could be so important about that topic? Nott is so quiet most of the time in class that Harry’s barely given him a thought except to approve of him when other people are shouting out the answers or taunting each other. But to be interested in brand runes…
Does he want to carve runes on his skin? For what? Nott has never seemed that invested in anything except making good marks and staying out of the conflicts that Malfoy causes on a regular basis. Last year, Harry did notice that Nott seemed to walk in company with the Slytherin prefects on a regular basis, even though he should have been old enough to know his way around the school.
Was he afraid of Lestrange? Did he not want to get caught by him?
Harry starts his own private research project, when he can spare his attention from Arithmancy and Ancient Runes and all the other things he has to do, and that’s how he discovers a picture of the Dark Mark and the information that Voldemort branded his followers that way. Oh, Harry peripherally knew something about that before. He remembers hearing that someone raised the Dark Mark at the Quidditch World Cup this summer, which of course he did not attend. But he never understood what the Mark really was until he read an old newspaper article talking about how all the tried and arrested Death Eaters had the Mark, and speculating that the thing lets Voldemort communicate with and punish his followers.
Which, of course, leads to Harry wondering why Nott would worry about it, until he connects it to Nott’s fear of Lestrange, and finds another newspaper article that names Terynon Nott as a suspected Death Eater. Apparently he got away with claiming to be under the Imperius Curse, which Mad-Eye Moody talks about on a regular basis in their Defense classes.
So is Nott afraid of being branded a Death Eater because his father was one? And being hurt by escaped Death Eaters because his father managed not to go Azkaban?
Thoughtfully, Harry tucks away that knowledge in the back of his mind, and continues his private research.
*
“The Goblet of Fire has chosen Neville Longbottom.”
Harry steps into the Great Hall long hours after Dumbledore has made that announcement and all the good little students are supposed to be in their good little beds, and eyes the Goblet of Fire in curiosity. It’s sitting, dark and cold now, of course, on a little podium in the front of the hall. Harry walks towards it, skirting the edge of the Hufflepuff table. He wants a chance to study such a renowned and rune-covered artifact up close.
He bends down near the Goblet and examines the base of it, and then finds, to his annoyance, that the faint light of the moon and stars coming from the Great Hall’s ceiling isn’t sufficient for him to see the runes. He casts Lumos and keeps his wand in his hand. No one else will really notice it if they come in, but they would if he laid the wand aside.
And he does need the light to work his way slowly around the Goblet, studying every rune. It’s really fascinating. The runes for fire are interwoven with the ones for containment of fire in a way that Professor Babbling told them couldn’t be done. Harry wonders if he can bring up the fact that it could be done in an essay without getting marked down for it.
Probably not, unfortunately. She’d want to know how he knew that, and Harry can’t admit this kind of thing, even though he does it all the time.
He works his way to the back of the Goblet, and studies the bowl of the cup. This is the side that no students saw from the other direction, and Harry isn’t that surprised when he discovers new runes here. He is a little surprised that there’s a single huge rune here, one that he doesn’t know, instead of the maze of them that there is around the foot.
Harry tries and tries to make sense of the rune, but there’s really nothing like it in any of his books. It resembles a jagged mountain range in silhouette more than anything else, with a small diamond shape scratched in the hollow middle, and then lines sticking out from the edges of the silhouette that connect to eight crown-like shapes.
In the end, Harry draws as exact a copy of the rune as he can on a piece of parchment, and leaves the Great Hall with a new research quest. He suspects this rune has something to do with the Goblet’s ability to choose a “worthy Champion,” but knowing that and knowing how the rune works are different things. And he wants to know exactly how it works.
Taking Professor Babbling’s class really was the best choice he ever made.
*
“What is that?”
Harry starts and glances over his shoulder. No one should have been able to sneak up behind him and study the rune that he’s drawn, huge, on the parchment in front of him, because no one should know he’s there in the first place, or see the parchment or the books he’s using as long as he touches them.
But Theodore Nott is standing there, his eyes fastened on the rune.
Harry lays a hand back on the parchment, which ought to make it disappear from Nott’s awareness, but he only shakes his head and blinks a little, and then goes on staring. Harry swallows. He hates that he’s apparently discovered a flaw in his protection spell, but he answers. He can figure it out later.
“It’s a drawing I saw in Knockturn Alley this summer. I’m trying to figure out what it means.”
“A drawing? Not a rune.”
“Maybe a rune?” Harry hedges, and shrugs. “I don’t really know.”
Nott sighs, and then blinks and squints the way Lupin did after he tried to talk to Harry at the end of last year. He shuffles away towards the shelves in the next instant, muttering something about “weird daydream.”
Harry relaxes. He supposes there’s not a new flaw in the protection spell. It can be overcome if someone is interested enough in him or something he’s doing. Lupin was interested enough-at least, for a while-to seek out Harry and try to talk to him, and Nott is searching desperately for some way to get out of taking the Dark Mark. It makes sense that this unusual rune, whatever it is, would have caught his attention.
Harry goes peacefully back to his research.
*
Harry walks thoughtfully through the corridors towards the Defense classroom. It’s the Christmas hols, less than a month after he watched Longbottom fight a dragon and miraculously win with a Summoning Charm that dropped a huge blanket over the dragon’s eyes as a blindfold, and Harry is going to use the Floo that the mad professor has established for some reason.
It occurred to Harry a few days ago that he’d never seen his parents’ graves, and that’s wrong, somehow.
It took him a little while to research where they were probably likely to be, but the newspaper articles about the attack on his parents mentioned Godric’s Hollow, so Harry is at least going to Floo to the Ministry and then take the Knight Bus to Godric’s Hollow. It shouldn’t be that difficult, and if he’s wrong, then he has another week when he can make some investigations and probably find them.
He pauses when he hears someone moving around the Defense classroom. Harry frowns and leans back against the wall. He deliberately waited until the afternoon when Professor Moody said that he would be in his quarters all day, marking. He growled that in response to Professor Sprout asking him what he was doing with his holidays, and it didn’t occur to Harry until now that he might have been lying, Or joking.
When he peers through the door, he sees Moody standing there with his wand clutched in his hand. He’s looking back and forth between a few mirrors that Harry remembers being set up for the last class before the holidays. Foe-Glasses.
“Who are you?” Moody growls. “I can see you in the glass! Where are you?” He makes a slashing motion with his wand.
Harry frowns. Shit. He didn’t think of that. Of course, even if he showed up in a Foe-Glass before this, it would have just been as one of many people walking down a corridor or coming into the classroom, so there would have been no reason for Moody to single him out.
Then something else makes him tilt his head. Why would he show up as an enemy in the Foe-Glasses that Moody has up? Harry’s not been an enemy of any of his Defense professors, even if he thought Lupin was creepy and Lockhart ridiculous.
Harry draws his own wand, still craning his head a little so that he can see. Moody’s magical eye is rotating back and forth wildly, but Harry knows from experience that it can’t pierce his protection spell. Harry was the only student never subjected to the Imperius Curse, and Moody isn’t any more aware of him at meals or when handing essays in than the other professors are.
“Come out, traitor!” Moody gestures sharply with his wand, and Harry feels a slight tug at his robes, but whatever curse it was slides past him without any more trace than that. “I know you’re there, Snape!”
Harry falls back a step. Yes, something is wrong here, maybe even more wrong than him never having seen his parents’ graves. The only person who would be calling Snape a traitor is someone like Lestrange-
A Death Eater.
Harry is showing up in the Foe-Glasses, but all they really show is a blurry black impression of him, which is probably why Moody thinks it’s Snape. That still gives Harry an advantage. He bends down and begins sketching three of the runes he learned this last term on the floor in front of him. Runes aren’t usually used in battle unless they can be prepared ahead of time. Battles move too quickly. But Harry is going to use every advantage he can.
He’s just finished the last of the runes when Moody comes stumping into the corridor. “I’m going to hunt you down, Snape,” he huffs. “Traitor to the cause of Hogwarts that you are!”
Harry hesitates. Maybe Moody isn’t a Death Eater. Maybe he just thinks of Snape as someone who should be in Azkaban because he used to be one.
But then Moody casts a wild curse that tears above Harry’s head and explodes a stone in the wall to his left, and Harry decides that it doesn’t matter. Moody is acting mad just like his nickname now, and he really has to be stopped.
Harry erases most of the last rune with a twist of his wand. It’s one of the fire containment runes that he saw on the base of the Goblet. That means the fire rune right behind it is now free is work.
Flames spring up in front of Harry, held back from Harry by the last bit of the containment rune that Harry left from touching him, and roar towards Moody. Moody springs back with a clatter, and loses his balance, the wooden leg not able to find purchase. He goes down, but he’s casting as he goes, and the flames hover over him, held back by a bubble of what seems to be conjured air.
That’s fine with Harry. He taps the last rune with his wand, a dormant uruz that always stays that way until activated by someone, and leaps back out of the way.
Moody has just started to rise to his feet, or his foot and pegleg, batting back the flames, when giant horns lift out of the corridor floor on either side of him. They snap shut on either side of him, shimmering so wildly that it’s hard to tell if they’re actually the horns of an aurochs or flowing streams of water. The only important part is that they’re good at creating a prison.
Moody casts a spell that breaks one of the horns, and Harry turns and runs away. He has to give up on his idea of using the Defense classroom Floo to visit his parents’ grave, it seems. This is too much danger.
But he still has to do something. And that means sending another owl to Professor Dumbledore, the way he did when he saw the red-haired girl jumping down the tunnel in the bathroom. It isn’t perfect, but Harry can still tell what he saw and hope that something happens as a result.
*
Nothing happens as a result.
Harry watches and waits, after the owl he sent to Professor Dumbledore saying that he showed up in Professor Moody’s Foe-Glass as an enemy and he doesn’t understand why when he’s a student. But Moody keeps teaching Defense classes, and sitting at the high table, and growling jokes or lies at the other teachers, and subjecting the students to Unforgivable Curses.
There’s also a rumor that Harry overhears because the Weasley twins were talking about it, a rumor that the man gave Longbottom gillyweed to let him succeed in the Second Task. Frankly, Harry can’t square that with the bloke seeing students as enemies. But he shrugs it off and turns away in the end. He’s safe, and that’s the only thing that he can say.
Besides, he has more fascinating things to work on, like the great rune inscribed on the back of the Goblet.
Harry’s finally started locating books that talk about runes that are like it, even if, annoyingly, he often has to take them from Theodore Nott’s table. Nott seems to be on the track of runes that judge a worthy individual, too, although he probably didn’t think of looking at the back of the Goblet before the judges took it away.
Sometimes Harry looks at Nott’s pale, tense, sweating face, and wonders about sharing the secret with him. But he honestly has no answers yet, and no guarantee that Nott would find it faster than Harry would. Harry’s impression of Nott is that he does well in the Ancient Runes class, but not spectacularly, not like Granger.
So Harry keeps working on his own, and on the night before the Third Task, he finally turns the page of an obscure book on King Arthur and sees the rune inscribed on the page before him.
Or half of it. A silhouette like half the mountain range, with the eight tendrils reaching out of it, but missing the crowns on their ends and the diamond in the middle of this one.
Harry sits bolt upright, staring. Then he frantically grabs for the parchment with the original rune drawn on it.
It’s the same as half of this one, yes. Harry doesn’t understand where the other shapes would have come in, but it’s similar. Heart pounding with joy, he reads what the book has to say about it.
This rune, whose name has been lost to time, is a symbol constantly carved on wands and staffs found in wizarding graves from King Arthur’s time. There is disagreement as to whether it is a rune at all, or a sign meant to invoke forgotten powers for protection. But that it works seems undeniable. The protection of the staffs and wands keeps the graves inviolate, punishing robbers, and also aids and protects the rare wizard or witch who manages to win the allegiance of one of the wands or staffs.
Harry sits back, a little baffled. Protection? That isn’t what he thought the book would say. Why would the Goblet need protection? It was open for anyone to throw their name in, which was why they needed that Age Line in the first place.
Unless…
What if it keeps an unworthy person from being chosen? The Goblet from paying attention to someone who shouldn’t have their name in there at all?
It didn’t keep poor Longbottom from being chosen. But the protection part still makes sense.
So…
Harry’s gaze goes to the diamond shape, the second half of the mountain range, the crowns at the end of the tendrils.
So this other half must be what actually makes the Goblet capable of sensing and choosing a worthy person.
But how? Harry will find out.
*
People are discussing the fact in soft, hushed voices the next night that Longbottom and Diggory and the other two Champions went into the maze, and Longbottom came back with the Tri-Wizard Cup clutched in his hand and Diggory’s body in his arms, screaming about Voldemort being back. They’re deciding whether to believe Longbottom.
Harry doesn’t have to decide that. He believes Longbottom, of course he does. No one could look like that unless they’d seen something horrific. And he doesn’t think Longbottom has the imagination to make something like that up.
No, Harry is thinking about the fact that Professor Moody came up to drag Longbottom away, instead of escorting him to the infirmary or even the Aurors, and Harry followed because he still doesn’t really trust Moody, and then Moody ignored the black blurry shape in his Foe-Glass and locked-he thought-the door to his office while he ranted at Longbottom and then revealed himself to be an insane Death Eater.
He didn’t kill Longbottom, who’s traumatized, because Harry Stunned him in the back, and then left the room and let Dumbledore and McGonagall and Snape come in and take credit for it. Or question Longbottom, or whatever they did after that. Harry went back to Ravenclaw Tower.
He’s mostly exasperated. Why does he have to be the one to keep doing things like this? He’s not a professor, not an adult, not even the Boy-Who-Lived! Someone else should be bloody well handling them!
But after a while, when he’s lying in his bed in Ravenclaw Tower and thinking about how much the future is going to suck, Harry decides something. He knows he’s safe because he’s protected by his spell. That’s not something most other people can know. Those people have to sneak around under Invisibility Cloaks, or Disillusionment Charms, or something else that’s a lot less perfect than Harry’s spell.
So, because he can do those kinds of things, Harry sort of has to do them. It’s not a perfect compromise, but it’s close.
And this way, at least it means that Longbottom survived, and Lestrange didn’t resurrect Voldemort last year. So that’s something.
*
Harry spends the summer before his fifth year in Diagon Alley, the same way he has all the other summers. Ollivander is the only person in the alley who reacts to him, giving him disappointed looks now and then and shaking his head. Harry ignores him. It only proves that Ollivander doesn’t really sense anything about the wands he sells after he sells them, or he would have known that Harry stopped two Death Eaters already.
Harry can be a great person if he wants. It’s just that right now he would much rather figure out this rune.
It takes him until the middle of July, nearly his own fifteenth birthday, before he manages. Then he sits back and stares and wants to curse himself. It’s so simple. Of course he was looking in the wrong direction.
The “rune” is a combination of the rune-drawing that he found in the one book about King Arthur’s time, and other symbols. Harry only discovered the truth when he started looking at books that weren’t about Ancient Runes, which is probably why poor Nott hasn’t made any progress.
The mountain range is reduplicated, to provide extra protection. That can happen even with ordinary runes sometimes, although Professor Babbling cautioned them to be careful about what they were doing with that, since it’s easy to link together runes that can’t actually be duplicated and blow up the whole matrix in your face.
The diamond is taken from another symbol, this one from the Founders’ time, found engraved on the tombs of Rowena Ravenclaw and Helga Hufflepuff. It means worthiness, integrity, character.
The crowns are a symbol of royal power-or great power. Harry learned that from one of his History books, of all places. Wizards used to have “Lords and Ladies” who weren’t nobility, but were powerful magically, and they were the ones who earned titles like the one “Lord” Voldemort has taken up for himself. They received crowns in communications to represent not royalty, but the weight that rested on their heads.
Harry sits back with a long sigh of exultation the first time he figures it out. He glances through the window of the Leaky Cauldron room he’s in, and for once ignores the shuttered shop windows he can see and the scorch marks on a wall where a more violent duel than usual took place a few nights ago.
He has to figure out how the rune works, first, but at least he knows what it means. To find the answer to a research question is always so satisfying.
Maybe the Hat had more than one reason for placing me in Ravenclaw after all.
*
It’s almost the end of August before Harry figures out what the rune does, and then he wants to smack himself on the head. He had the knowledge of what the Goblet of Fire did as a clue, how did it take him this long?
But now he knows.
The rune judges people, and keeps them safe if they’re worthy. The duplicated mountain range doubles the protection, which in the Goblet’s case must mean that people won’t be selected for the Tournament if they’re really unable to compete. The diamond shape in the center focuses the rune on detecting the integrity in the first place. The tendrils are an aspect of the rune that Harry actually didn’t figure out right at first; the shapes on the Arthurian-age wands and staffs had tendrils shorter than this one.
This rune positions the crowns at the ends of those tendrils further away from the diamond shape in the center, meaning that the rune actually does two things. First, it protects the person who’s worthy. Second, it extends that protection outwards, which is probably why the Headmasters and Headmistress of their various schools were so sure none of the Champions would die in the Tasks. It keeps people safer in the future, and the longer tendrils, if Harry understands the Arithmantic equations he basically worked to test the rune by plugging in various numbers until they made sense, extend the protection much further than they would manage if they were as short as in the original symbol from King Arthur’s time.
Harry remembers listening to conversations among other students about why Longbottom would have managed to grab the Tri-Wizard Cup and have it function as a Portkey the second time. That’s a little mad, isn’t it? Giving your enemy the means to escape?
Personally, Harry thought Voldemort meant to send Longbottom’s body back that way and terrify the spectators. But now he wonders if the Goblet made that protection possible, or made Voldemort or whoever enchanted the Portkey overlook the matter, or convinced them it would be all right.
Harry smiles. Now he just needs to test it.
*
Now that he’s not working with stubborn equations or a rune that no one else has ever heard of, Harry is startled at how much easier it is to actually test the rune’s protection. Harry inscribes the drawing-by now, he could draw it in his sleep-on a crystal cup, and watches it sparkle at him. Then he tosses the cup out the window of his room in the Leaky Cauldron.
It startles people when it lands and bounces, sparkling, on the street. Harry leans over and grins, and manages to Summon it back before people can touch it. There’s so much magic going on in Diagon Alley that no one has ever picked up the Trace from his wand.
Then Harry erases the rune and makes another test, carefully cracking the cup in such a way that it won’t fracture completely, and really only one panel of the crystal is affected. Then he inscribes the rune on the other side.
He holds his breath, and-
Yes. The crack heals before his eyes, sewing itself quietly up the way a healing spell sews someone’s skin.
It protects against harm in the past, too.
Harry wonders for a second how the rune can judge a worthy object to protect given that the cup is, well, a cup, and not a person, but he has two theories when he really thinks about it. First, objects don’t do harm in and of themselves, so maybe the rune reads them as innocent, and worthy of being defended. Second, maybe the person who’s drawing the rune or handling the object is considered worthy.
It humbles Harry, for a second.
But not long, because then he’s scribbling furiously at another piece of parchment, recording all his notes and conclusions and experiments and equations, and the rune drawing itself, as carefully as he can.
He also has to include an explanation of what he doesn’t know about this rune, because the last thing he wants is to be responsible for someone trying this and hurting themselves. But the person he’s going to send it to might be ready to take that risk.
He finishes the letter, adds an even shorter postscript of how he came to believe that the rune would help, and then sends everything to Theodore Nott, hoping that he’ll read a letter without a name on it-something Harry is certainly not going to provide.
*
The reply doesn’t come until after Harry is back at Hogwarts, and is delivered by a school owl, the same kind of anonymous system that Harry used to contact Dumbledore the two times he had things to say that he thought the man ought to hear. Nott probably just told the owl to take it to “the person who sent me this letter,” which is the kind of vague direction that amazingly often works with owls.
Thank you. It works.
Harry beams, a sunburst of gladness in his chest. He thinks that that’s the whole of the message until he flips the parchment over and sees more words on the back.
I don’t know why you wanted to keep your name concealed, unless you’re worried about coming to the notice of my father or the Dark Lord. But be reassured, I do not forget.
Harry smiles a little. Maybe someday he’ll send another message to Nott, if there’s ever something that the boy can help him with, and reclaim the debt.
But he doesn’t have to. It’s enough to know that someone isn’t going to be subjected to Voldemort.
*
Not that Voldemort is the only lurking evil in the school, as Harry discovers that term.
It’s fairly easy not to notice at first. Professor Umbridge is annoying, but she can’t bother Harry when she doesn’t know he exists other than the essays that he submits in class. Harry does frown when he sees the way that she’s targeting Longbottom for the crime of doing nothing more than telling the truth. Voldemort is back. Harry doesn’t doubt that for a second.
But he might have just gone on thinking it was unfair if he hadn’t happened to see the bandage wrapped around Longbottom’s hand one day after Harry knew he had detention with the woman. And there’s something off about the wound, too. Of course Longbottom might have just cut himself with his Potions knife or a misaimed spell; that’s certainly what Snape would think. But Harry doesn’t bother with Snape’s opinion on much.
There’s a feeling around the bandage like leaking oil. That’s the only way Harry can put it. He doesn’t understand it, but he wants to. And he doesn’t like it.
Harry actually makes himself visible to Longbottom in the library where he’s gone to find books on what turns out to be Healing. That does nothing to soothe Harry’s suspicions, of course. He reaches out and takes hold of Longbottom’s wrist, turning it around so that he can see his hand.
Gryffindor or not, Longbottom jumps a meter when Harry takes his hand. But to him, Harry would have seemed to materialize from thin air. “P-Potter?” he asks after a second, staring and blinking as Harry’s protection spell interferes with his perceptions. People can always remember who Harry is after a minute if he really wants them to or he touches them. He just sort of fills a hole in their world sometimes and not other times.
Harry nods. “I wanted to ask what happened there.” This time, he nods at the bandage clumsily wrapped around Longbottom’s hand, and watches him flush and stare at the floor.
Maybe it really was an accident. But there’s still that wrongness.
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” Longbottom whispers. “I already talked to Professor McGonagall, and she just told me to keep my head down.”
“Well, I’m not her,” Harry says, and Longbottom squints at him as if he’s trying to decide whether that’s a joke. “And this might affect me, too. Can you let me see, Longbottom? It feels as if it’s a cursed wound.” That’s the closest approximation Harry can come up with, although he doesn’t know for sure as he’s never felt a cursed wound to know it.
Maybe it’s the strangeness of who’s asking or Longbottom’s subconscious desire to share the truth with someone or even just lack of will, but Longbottom unwinds the bandage. Harry catches his breath when he sees the bloody words slashed across the back of Longbottom’s hand. I must not tell lies.
Harry stares and then looks up at Longbottom, whose lips are trembling. “What did she make you do?” he whispers.
“Just lines.” Longbottom sounds like he’s said that a thousand times already. It doesn’t keep Harry from staring at him in disbelief. Finally, Longbottom looks down and covers up the lines with a hand, and speaks one more truth. “With a quill that uses my own blood.”
Harry steps back, struggling not to vomit. He’s heard of those, but the book he read about them in said that they were highly restricted by the Ministry, and in fact speculated that they only existed any more in the Department of Mysteries to be studied in experiments, since it had been so long since one was used.
“I’ll-thanks for telling me, Longbottom,” Harry says. He wants to say that he’ll stop it, but the last thing he wants is Longbottom being hopeful enough about his words to tell someone else, maybe someone who could find out about Harry’s existence.
Longbottom just looks vaguely around and then rewraps his hand and goes back to scanning the shelves for books on Healing.
Harry swallows down his outrage and turns to stalk away. He doesn’t know, at the moment, how he can stop Umbridge, if things even work against the blood quill she’s using, or what he can do against the might of the Ministry. But he knows that he wants to try.
It’s wrong.
Part Three.