FBaWtFT 5
Chapter 5: Vampires
Posted on ff.net a few days ago, forgot to post it here. Enjoy!
The day of the Hogsmeade trip, Harry didn’t even manage to keep his nutritive potion down, though he got away from the hospital wing and into an empty bathroom before he threw up.
He was going to have to tell Madame Pomfrey this evening. It wasn’t going to be pleasant at all when she realized he’d been keeping it from her, but it was worth it. Hogsmeade…
The air was brisk, but the day was sunny- almost too sunny, in Harry’s opinion- and Harry walked cheerfully to Hogsmeade with Ron and Hermione.
“We should go to Honeyduke’s,” Ron said. “They have the best chocolate- and all sorts of other things, too.” Then he stopped suddenly, and glanced at Harry as though he had said something wrong.
“You can talk about food,” Harry said, a little annoyed. “I’m having trouble eating it, not talking about it. And I do want to go to Honeyduke’s. I can get some more chocolate- I’m almost out, and I haven’t had any problems eating it.”
Then he realized that Ron didn’t know about his secret chocolate supply.
“Oh,” Ron said. “Your secret chocolate supply. Restocking, eh?”
“You know about it?” Harry asked.
“Yeah. We all did, after Seamus tried to take one and it nearly bit his hand off.”
“What?” Harry asked. “Are you saying my chocolate is cursed?”
“Well- yeah. You didn’t know?”
“It never tried to bite me.”
“Where did you say you got it, Harry?” Hermione asked.
“In Diagon Alley. When we were shopping for our school things.”
“But- which shop?”
“Er-“ There was a long pause. “I don’t remember.” In fact, now that he was pressed, he couldn’t quite remember buying them.
“You don’t remember,” Hermione repeated.
Desperately, Harry tried to recall any detail about buying the chocolate. What day had it been? Where had Ron and Hermione been? He’d hardly been separated from them the whole time he’d shopped, and surely they would remember if they’d been with him. Some part of his brain was thinking, very insistently, that he’d bought them in Diagon Alley. The rest of it was insisting that he couldn’t have- and besides, hadn’t they been in his trunk when he got to the Leaky Cauldron, before he’d done any shopping at all? He’d had one then.
“I don’t…” Harry said. “I might have bought them before that. I can’t… It was in Diagon Alley. I know it was.”
Hermione gave him a sharp look. “Harry,” she said. “Can you tell me everything that happened to you, from- oh, a day or so before Diagon Alley?”
“I stayed in my room every day at the Dursleys. I went to Diagon Alley. I got a room at the Leaky Cauldron…”
“How did you get to Diagon Alley?”
“I- I don’t know.”
They stopped walking.
“What’s the last thing you can remember at the Dursleys, Harry?”
“I… Aunt Marge was going to come over. With her dog. But I… I never saw her.”
“Why didn’t you see her?”
“I don’t know. I was in my room every day for the whole summer, until I went to Diagon Alley.” But he couldn’t remember doing that, really.
Hermione’s eyes had gone very wide.
“Something’s the matter with me, isn’t it?” Harry asked.
“I think you’ve been memory charmed,” Hermione said. “I looked up what the effects are, over the summer. I thought it might be useful to know about, after I saw the damage Lockhart could do. What was the date, when your aunt was going to come?”
“July 31,” he said. “On my birthday…”
“We have to tell Dumbledore,” Ron said. “That’s a lot of time to be missing.”
“Let’s go to Hogsmeade first,” Harry said, a bit desperately. “I’m not going to die of a memory charm.” He’d withheld information from Pomfrey for days in order to come here. He wasn’t about to give it up.
“If you’re sure,” Hermione said, looking worried. “But when we get back, we’ll go straight to his office.”
“Of course,” Harry said.
But with one more mystery hanging over his head, the day’s activities became much less enjoyable. The joy of getting more chocolate was dampened by the thought of the remaining two chocolate bars in his trunk- chocolate bars that had taken on bizarrely sinister implications.
Who would memory charm Harry? What had happened to him over the summer? It had to do with why he was ill, he knew. There was no way the events were unconnected. But he had no idea what had been done to him, or how to fix it.
Still, he was determined to ignore the events going on. He was tired of being treated like an invalid, of having things go wrong. He was going to have fun for once even if it killed him.
So he loaded his arms with almost every sort of sweet, even the strange ones like cockroach cluster and blood-flavored lollipops. He probably wouldn’t eat most of it (would eat almost none of it, to be honest), but he could share. He bought galleons worth of jokes from Zonko’s, too.
“We do get to come back sometime,” Ron said, looking at the bags Harry was holding with amusement. “You don’t have to buy a whole year’s worth in one day.”
Harry shrugged, and grinned. “Well, if you don’t want me to share…”
Ron mock-punched him, and Harry mock-punched him back (hampered slightly by the huge bag in his hand). Soon they were engaged in an elaborate food fight, throwing bits of cockroach cluster at each other while Hermione looked on with an irritated expression.
Really, nothing could be wrong, Harry decided as he spat out a bit of disgusting candy that Ron had tossed at him. The memory charm and being ill would all turn out to be some plot- that was obvious- but they’d work it out and fix it and everything would be alright again.
After all- really bad news couldn’t come on a day when you had a food-fight with your best friend.
--
“What?” Madame Pomfrey asked, after Hermione started to explain. Harry, Ron, and Hermione had decided it was a better idea to tell her first, and let her tell Dumbledore.
“A memory charm. Over nearly half his summer.”
“You didn’t notice that you were missing over a month of memories?” Madame Pomfrey said, her tone disbelieving.
“Well- it isn’t as through my summers are eventful,” Harry pointed out. “All I do is my homework and chores. And it isn’t as if it’s just a blank for those months…”
“And he can’t remember where he bought the chocolate bars he’s been eating all year,” Hermione interrupted eagerly. “I grabbed one- here.”
She handed it to Madame Pomfrey, whose face was slowly taking on a look of comprehension. “The chocolate-“
“Which he hasn’t had any problems at all eating,” Hermione said. “Unlike about everything else.”
Madame Pomfrey turned the chocolate bar over in her hands. “There are a very limited number of curses and poisons that could be put in chocolate,” she said. “It has its own very specific magical properties. But I’ll run some tests on it. It could be helpful.”
Hermione nodded quickly.
“And of course,” Madame Pomfrey added, “You shouldn’t have any more of it until we’re sure it’s safe, Harry, dear.
“Now- you two run along. I need to speak with Harry alone for a while.”
They left.
Madame Pomfrey handed Harry his usual potion, and he took a sip with a grimace.
“What do you remember about your summer?” she asked.
Harry repeated what he had told Ron and Hermione, about Aunt Marge’s plan to visit.
“… and that was on the 31st, and I can’t really remember anything specific after that, not until I was already at Diagon Alley, at the Leaky Cauldron. But it’s strange- if I don’t think really hard, it’s like bit of my brain keeps saying ‘Oh, yes, I was at the Dursleys all summer, and I bought the chocolates when I went shopping at Diagon Alley.’”
Madame Pomfrey nodded. “Well, that does sound like a memory charm. It’s possible to put a substitute memory in the place of the one you erase, but they often don’t stand up to close inspection. It sounds like whoever did this to you wasn’t very experienced. They didn’t add much detail. It’s lucky that they didn’t do any damage to your mind.”
“But- we can fix it, right? Get the memories back?”
“No,” Madame Pomfrey said gently. “Most likely not, not without damaging the rest of your mind.”
“So- I’m never going to know what happened?”
“We’ll just have to find out by detective work.”
“That isn’t the same.”
“No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I wish I could make it all better, but healing isn’t perfect. Sometimes there is no way to fix things.”
Harry took another sip of his potion, and could feel his stomach protesting.
“I can’t drink any more of this,” he said.
She gave him a sharp look. “Why not?”
“I think I’m going to-“
Then it was time for a mad rush to the toilet, where he was promptly sick.
Madame Pomfrey stood in the doorway as he stood, wiped his mouth, and rinsed it out at the sink.
“This isn’t the first time,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t want to mention, because… Well, Hogsmeade was only a few days away, and I thought…”
“I’m disappointed,” she said. “But I doubt it makes much of a difference now. The curse specialist is coming in a few days. If anything can be done, she’ll do it.”
“If? You mean-“
“Don’t worry yet. Wait until Wednesday. But if I find that you’ve been hiding anything else, you won’t be leaving the infirmary until you’re better.”
Harry shrugged, his mind still stuck on the “if.”
“What if she doesn’t have a solution?”
“She will. Don’t worry.”
“You said ‘If anything can be done…’”
“I misspoke.” Her jaw set.
Harry frowned, unconvinced, but nodded. “I have homework,” he said. “I’d better get back to Gryffindor Tower.”
Madame Pomfrey nodded, and her expression softened. “Everything is going to be fine. I’ll start looking at that chocolate bar, and see if I can find anything in it.”
He nodded again, and left.
If. He didn’t like the sound of “if.”
He’d never really thought that there was an if to this situation. He’d assumed that he’d get better, that nothing bad could really happen to him. And what was the other option? That he’d get thinner and thinner until he- no. He wasn’t going to die. He wouldn’t let himself die. Madame Pomfrey wouldn’t, either. It wasn’t going to happen.
He actually did have homework. Snape had give their vampire essays back a few days ago, proclaimed that they were nearly universally abysmal, and told them all to redo it, and to make it twice as long.
Harry glanced through his essay. “Not enough detail,” one note said. Another: “Wrong- as usual.”
With a sigh, he pulled out the book he had been using before, to double-check his facts.
The vampire never eats, being made violently ill by any food other than blood.
Harry gave a little start at that. No, he thought. I’m just being paranoid.
He turned the page.
The making of new vampires from humans usually takes place on a time span of hours or days. While longer times are not unheard of, there is no practical benefit to this, and more danger to the new vampire, as during the transitional period a vampire is unable to nourish itself from blood or food with any degree of efficiency.
In most countries, the making of new vampires is outlawed, and while vampires are extremely long-lived, they are not immortal. Thus, vampire populations have been steadily declining since the early 17th century. It is estimated that by the year 2200, vampires will be all but eradicated, with only a few remaining. Opinions on this are divided; many feel that vampirism is a curse, akin to lycanthropy, which ought to be eliminated as soon as possible. Others feel that vampires are a species in their own right, and do not deserve to be driven to extinction. In lawmaking bodies worldwide, however, policy has thus far been clear. Vampirism is defined as a disease, and vampires are subject to special restrictions in travel, wand usage, and interactions with others.
There is no cure for vampirism.
Harry looked away from his essay, and stared into the fire on the other side of the room.
I’m not turning into a vampire, he thought. That’s ridiculous.
But the idea wouldn’t go away. He was being made violently ill by food, and the book said it was possible for it to take a long time- though they didn’t say how long, exactly.
It was utterly ridiculous. But he had a blood-flavored lollipop in his trunk. He could try it, and when it made him feel as ill as everything else, he’d know he was just grasping at straws.
No one was around. They were all at dinner. If he was going to do it, now was the time.
He went up the stairs, opened his trunk, and fished through the giant bag of sweets until he found the lollipop. There it was, bright red with a wrapper that proclaimed that it was a “Blood Sucker!” with a stylized cartoon vampire.
He opened it, and put it in his mouth.
Really, it wasn’t disgusting at all. It was blood flavored, that was certain- it had the distinctive coppery taste- but at the same time it actually tasted pretty good. Better than anything else had since all of this started.
After that he must have lost focus for a minute, because suddenly the lollipop was gone.
Oh, he thought, too surprised to even think coherently. Then: Oh, hell, no.
Despite Madame Pomfrey’s dire warnings about what would happen if he withheld any more information, he didn’t think this was something he’d be sharing.
I’m still not sure, he thought, a bit desperately. I could be wrong.
He needed a different book. This one wasn’t about figuring out if you were a vampire. It was a textbook about magical creatures.
Well, Hermione could always be relied upon to take far too many books from the library for any assignment. There was a whole pile of them in the corner of the common room. He pulled a few out. Vampire Myths and Legends- no. Creatures of the Night- Common Misconceptions about Our Friend the Vampire- no, definitely not.
None looked especially useful. If only there were one called “Vampire or Not? A Guide to Identifying the Undead.” He finally picked a random one from the pile, which turned out to be a medical text about future possible vaccines against vampirism and lycanthropy. It had a listing for a potion to identify vampire blood, “Which is most often used in a hospital setting to screen for vampirism within days of possible slow infection, but which we have adapted to test samples for our vaccines.” The potion was horribly complicated, though, and there was no way Harry could brew it on his own.
And however much he wanted to deny it, he was already sure of what the result would be. It wasn’t so much the blood lollipop, although certainly that was good evidence. It was just that, now that the idea had occurred to him, it seemed obvious, as if he were remembering something instead of thinking it through.
Maybe I am, he realized. I’m missing over a month. I must have learned things then that I’ve forgotten. Maybe things seem familiar the second time you learn them…
So fine, he was probably turning into a vampire. He felt a sort of dead weight settle in his stomach at the thought, but another one lifted; he wasn’t going to starve to death. He wasn’t ill. He was going to be fine.
It was at that moment that the first few people starting trickling into the common room from dinner, Ron and Hermione among them.
“Are you alright?” Hermione asked.
“Yeah. Fine. I need to talk to you…”
They went to the corner, and in hushed tones, Harry said to the two of them: “I think I might be turning into a vampire.”
There was a moment of shocked silence.
“You can’t be,” Ron said. “You’ve been ill for ages. Vampires don’t take that long to change. Everyone knows that.”
Hermione’s mouth was still open. “Liquids,” she said.
“What?” Ron turned to her with a bewildered look.
“He’s only been having liquids to eat- or drink, I suppose- this year. Soup. His potions. Pumpkin juice.”
“You’ve been keeping track?”
“Yes. Is that how you figured it out?”
“No,” Harry said. “It was like this…” He explained about eating the blood lollipop, and how it had actually tasted good.
“But you’ve been eating chocolate,” Hermione pointed out. “Maybe it’s just because the lollipop was a sweet.”
“It wasn’t sweet at all,” Harry said. “Not really. It tasted like blood.”
Ron and Hermione both started to look very uncomfortable.
“I think you should talk to Madame Pomfrey about this,” Hermione said after a moment. “She could… test that theory.”
“No,” Ron said. “That’s not a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Because if he is one, then telling anyone is that last thing he wants to do. It’s not something you want getting out, a thing like that.”
“She’s a healer, Ron. She’s not going to tell anyone. It would be confidential.”
“It’s vampirism, Hermione. You got all of those books from the library. Didn’t you see anything useful in there?”
Hermione looked annoyed. “Apparently not. Why don’t you educate me?”
“Vampires aren’t human. They’re like house-elves, or merpeople. They don’t get wands, they have special laws to regulate them- and they certainly don’t get to go to Hogwarts.”
The weight in Harry’s stomach suddenly became much heavier.
“No,” he said. “That can’t be.”
“Harry could be wrong, though,” Hermione said. She turned to Harry. “I mean- about what’s happening to you. You could-“
“I think I would know best what’s happening to me,” Harry said.
“But-“
“I’m sure,” Harry said in a forceful whisper, thumping the table with his fist.
Hermione stopped arguing. In fact, she stopped looking at his face at all. He followed her line of sight downward, as did Ron.
The table had splintered under his hand.
I guess that would be the super-strength, finally, he thought with an equal sense of satisfaction and panic. The common room was full of people! He glanced around, and saw that, luckily, none of them happened to be looking towards their corner of the room.
Hermione seemed to have reached her quota of shocked pauses for the day. She performed a hasty reparo on the table.
“You could have just said,” she said irritably. “You didn’t need to give us a demonstration.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Harry said. “It was- that’s never happened before.” He stared at his hand for a minute. It didn’t hurt. He’d smashed a table with his fist and hadn’t even noticed.
“We need to go to the library,” Hermione said. “Now.”
“Don’t we already have the entire section on vampires right here?” Harry joked, gesturing towards the table across the room, stacked with books.
“Those aren’t the right sort of books for this,” Hermione said. “We need law books. You don’t think we’re going to let you get kicked out of here because of something like this, do you?”
Harry felt a great sense of relief. Everything was very strange, and bad things might happen to him, but at least he wasn’t alone.
The next hour was spent in the library.
“This is horrid,” Hermione said as she flipped through a book of wizarding law.
“What?”
“All these laws. Not just for vampires. For house-elves, and banshees, and- oh, all sorts of beings. I thought the ones for werewolves were bad, but these-“
“Hermione, what laws are you talking about?”
She passed over the book.
“Ban of wand use for sentient magical creatures?” Harry said.
“I told you,” Ron said.
“But… That can’t be right,” Harry said. “Why would there be a law like that? It doesn’t make sense.”
“I don’t know,” Hermione said. “It doesn’t seem fair, does it? And look- it’s been a law since 1823.”
“People used to be really scared of vampires,” Ron said. “A lot still are.”
“And here’s another,” Hermione said with disgust. “Not allowed to live near muggles. Not allowed to live near wizards unless they report to all of their neighbors what they are and get permission- and I expect that’s a bit difficult. Honestly, where are they supposed to live? A cave?”
Ron looked up suddenly. “Or a forest,” he said.
“What?” Harry said. But then he realized what Ron meant. “The werewolves in the forest- they aren’t werewolves at all, are they? They’re vampires.”
Hermione’s eyes widened. “That makes sense.”
“What are the chances,” Harry asked, “of vampires moving into the forest right after one of them bites me?”
“It has to be connected,” Hermione said.
They tried for the next few minutes to come up with theories on why anyone would want to turn Harry into a vampire, but every possibility was more ludicrous than the last.
“Maybe You-Know-You paid them to do it,” Ron suggested.
“With what money? And why? I mean, if they were close enough to bite me, wouldn’t it be a lot easier to just kill me, instead of going through some elaborate plot?”
“Well, yes. But maybe there’s some other reason, too.”
“Like what?”
And of course, that brought them right back to the original problem: they just didn’t have enough information to speculate.
But still, Harry kept up a determined stream of talk. As long as he was talking and joking, he wasn’t thinking about what was happening to him. Wasn’t thinking about how the curse specialist was going to come on Wednesday to diagnose him- and would almost certainly figure everything out.
These could very well be his last days at Hogwarts, and he wasn’t going to think about that yet. If he did, it would crush him. Hogwarts was the only real home he’d ever known. If he had to leave, what would he do? Live with the Dursleys? No- that, at least, wouldn’t happen. Vampires couldn’t live near muggles.
Soon enough, the library closed, and the three of them returned to Gryffindor Tower.
“I’m tired,” Harry said. “I think I’m going to bed.”
“Weren’t you going to finish up that essay for Snape?”
“Finished already,” Harry said. “While you were at dinner.”
“Oh,” Hermione said. “Well- goodnight, then.”
Harry went up, and sank into his covers.
It was Sunday night. He had Monday and Tuesday to stay at Hogwarts. Wednesday morning, the healer would come.
Would they kick him out right away? One of the books he’d been looking through had a potion in it that could identify vampires. If some had been brewed already, then it wouldn’t take long at all for the healer to confirm what he was.
Why hadn’t Madame Pomfrey realized? Was it the amount of time this was taking? The book had said vampires usually took only a few hours or days. But still- she knew that there were vampires in the forest, didn’t she? She’d treated Lupin. She would have to know. So she ought to have been on the alert. She ought to have known, and told him.
He felt a wave of anger, but it quickly petered out. Even if she had, she couldn’t do anything. There was no cure.
Two full days of Hogwarts left.
He fell into an anxious sleep eventually, and dreamed that he was in the forbidden forest, walking quickly.
“I don’t know why you keep trying to get away,” a voice behind him commented.
Harry didn’t slow down, or even turn around.
“I don’t see why you stay,” he said.
“I haven’t got anywhere better to go, have I? Besides, I wouldn’t leave you here alone. You might end up as a snack.”
“My friends are going to notice that I’m not answering their letters. They’ll find a way to get to me and rescue me.”
A/N:
Sinister chocolate bars! Vampires! Memory loss! Overestimates of Voldemort’s intelligence!
If anyone wants to beta and/or Brit-pick this, let me know. I fix everything I notice, but I'm sure I'm 75 of the Brit-picking, at least. (Thus "sick" instead of "ill" in previous chapters, which I'll be going back and fixing...)
Please review!