Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (172 page)

“It is not that straightforward,” said the Defense Professor. “You are not powerful enough to use the False Memory Charm, and even a simple Obliviation will stretch the edge of your current stamina. It is a dangerous art, illegal to use without Ministry authorization, and I would caution you not to use it under circumstances where it would be inconvenient to accidentally erase ten years of someone’s life. I wish I could promise you that I would obtain one of those highly guarded tomes from the Department of Mysteries, and pass it to you beneath a disguised cover. But what I must actually tell you is that you will find the standard introductory text in the north-northwest stacks of the main Hogwarts library, filed under M.”

“Seriously,” the boy said flatly.

“Indeed.”

“Thank you for your guidance, Professor.”

“Your creativity has become a great deal more practical, Mr. Potter, since I have known you.”

“Thank you for the compliment.” The boy did not look up from where he was again gazing down at the wand held between his hands. “I would like to go back to thinking now. Please explain to them on my behalf what happens if I am disturbed.”

The door to the storeroom clicked open, and Professor Quirrell stepped out. His face had a dead, emotionless look to it; she would have said that it reminded her of Severus, though Severus had never looked quite like that.

Even as the door clicked shut again, Minerva had thrown up a wordless Quieting barrier. The words spilled forth from her rapidly: “How did it go - you were in there for a while - is Harry talking now?”

Professor Quirrell paced swiftly across the room to the far wall near the entrance, looked back at her. The emotionlessness slid off his face, as though he were taking off a mask, leaving behind someone very grim. “I spoke to Mr. Potter as he expected me to speak, and avoided saying things that would annoy him. I do not think it consoled him. I do not think I have the knack.”

“Thank you - it is good that he spoke at all -” She hesitated. “What did Mr. Potter say?”

“I am afraid that I promised him not to speak of it. And now… I think that I must visit the Hogwarts library.”

“The
library?
”

“Yes,” Professor Quirrell said. An uncharacteristic tension had come into his voice. “I intend to strengthen the security upon the Restricted Section with certain precautions of my own devising. The current wards are a joke. And Mr. Potter must be kept out of the Restricted Section
at all costs.
”

She stared at the Defense Professor, her heart suddenly in her throat.

Professor Quirrell continued speaking. “You will
not
tell the boy that I have said this much to you. You will confirm to Flitwick and Vector that the boy is to be diverted by the usual evasions if he asks precocious questions about spell creation. And though it is not my own area of expertise, Deputy Headmistress, if there is any way you can imagine to convince the boy to stop sinking further into his grief and madness - any way at all to undo the resolutions he is coming to - then I suggest you resort to it
immediately
.”

A/N: This chapter does
not
contain a spoiler for any particular Orson Scott Card novel. It’s a metaphor.

Shortly after, there was another knock upon the storeroom door.

“If you actually care about my mental health,” the boy said without looking up, “you will go away, leave me alone, and wait for me to come down to dinner. This isn’t helping.”

The door opened, and the one who had waited outside stepped in.

“Seriously?” the boy said flatly.

The door closed and clicked behind Severus Snape.

The Potions Master of Hogwarts wore none of his customary arrogance, or even the dispassionate guise that he ordinarily took in the Headmaster’s office; his gaze was strange, as he looked down upon the boy guarding that door; his thoughts unfathomable.

“I also cannot imagine what the Deputy Headmistress is thinking,” said the Potions Master of Hogwarts. “Unless I am meant to serve as a warning of where it will lead you, if you decide to take the blame for her death upon yourself.”

The boy’s lips pressed together. “Fine. Let’s just skip ahead to the end of this conversation. You win, Professor Snape. I concede that you were more responsible for Lily Potter’s death than I was responsible for Hermione Granger’s death, and that my guilt can’t stack up to your guilt. And then I ask you to go, and you tell them that it would probably be best to let me alone for a while. Are we done?”

“Almost,” the Potions Master said. “I am the one who put the notes under Miss Granger’s pillow, telling her where to find the fights in which she intervened.”

The boy did not react to this at all. Finally he spoke. “Because you dislike bullying.”

“Not that alone.” There was a note of pain in the Potions Master’s voice that sounded alien to it; it was hard to imagine it being the same acid voice that instructed children not to stir one more time or they’d blow off their wrists. “I should have realized it… very much earlier, I suppose, and yet I did not see it at all, being entirely absorbed in myself. For me to be placed as Head of Slytherin… it means that Albus Dumbledore has entirely lost hope that Slytherin House can be helped. I am certain that Dumbledore must have tried, I cannot imagine that he did not try, when he first took trust of Hogwarts. It must have been a severe blow to him, when after that so much of Slytherin answered to the Dark Lord’s call… he would not have placed me in authority over that House, acting as I did, unless he had lost all hope.” The Potions Master’s shoulders fell, beneath his spotted and stained cloak. “But you and Miss Granger were trying to do something, and the two of you had even managed to bring over Mr. Malfoy and Miss Greengrass, and perhaps those two could have set a different example… I suppose it was foolish for me to believe. The Headmaster does not know of what I have done, and I ask you not to tell him.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Matters have become far too serious not to tell someone.” Severus Snape’s lips twisted. “I have seen enough disastrous plotting, in my tenure as Head of Slytherin, to know how that sometimes goes. If, in the future, all should come to light - then at least I have told you, and you may say as much.”

“Lovely,” the boy said. “Thank you for clearing that up. Is that all?”

“Do you intend to declare that your life is now a ruin and that there is nothing left for you but vengeance?”

“No. I still have -” The boy cut himself off.

“Then there is very little advice that I can give you,” said Severus Snape.

The boy nodded distantly. “On Hermione’s behalf, thank you for helping her with the bullies. She would tell you that it was the right thing to do. And now I would be much obliged if you could tell them to
leave me alone
.”

The Potions Master turned to the door, and when his face was unseen, his voice came in a whisper. “I truly am sorry for your loss.”

Severus Snape departed.

The boy stared after him, trying to remember, as best as he could at this distance, words which had been spoken some time earlier.

Your books betrayed you, Potter. They did not tell you the one thing you needed to know. You cannot learn from books what it is like to lose the one you love. That is something you could never know without experiencing it for yourself.

It had gone something like that, the boy thought, if he was remembering correctly.

Hours had passed now, in the infirmary section with its closed door and a body lying in state behind it.

Harry went on staring at his wand, as it lay in his lap. At the tiny scratches and smudges on the eleven inches of holly, flaws he’d never looked closely enough to notice before. A quick mental calculation said there was no reason to worry since if this was six or seven months’ accumulation of damage, then a standard lifetime wouldn’t wear away the wand entirely. At the time, he probably would’ve worried about his own Time-Turner being taken away if he’d just openly yelled out ‘Does anyone have a Time-Turner?’ into the Great Hall, but it would have been easy enough to precommit to, after lunch, finding someone to send Professor Flitwick a message two hours earlier and then Professor Flitwick could’ve just gone straight to Hermione, or sent her his raven Patronus, long before the troll was anywhere near her. Or might that alternate Harry have already learned it was too late - heard about Hermione’s death after lunch and before he could buy any messages sent backwards in time? Maybe a basic guideline of working with time-travel was to make sure you never risked learning you were too late, if you hadn’t yet gone backwards. There was a tiny chemical burn now on the end of his wand, presumably from contacting the acid he’d partially Transfigured the troll’s brain into, but the wand seemed robust against losses of small amounts of wood. Really the concept of a ‘magic wand’ being required just got stranger the more you thought about it. Though if spells were always being invented in some mysterious way, new rituals being carved as new levers upon the unknown machine, it might just be that people just kept inventing rituals that involved wands, just like they invented phrases like ‘Wingardium Leviosa’. It really seemed like magic ought to be, in some sense, almost arbitrarily powerful, and it certainly would be convenient if Harry could just bypass whatever conceptual limitation prevented people from inventing spells like ‘Just Fix Everything Forever’, but somehow nothing was ever that easy where magic was concerned. Harry looked at his mechanical watch again, but it still wasn’t time.

He’d attempted to cast the Patronus Charm, meaning to tell his Patronus to go to Hermione Granger. Just in case it was all a lie, a False Memory Charm or one of the who-knew-how-many-ways that wizards could be made to close their eyes and dream. Just in case the real Hermione was alive and being held somewhere, despite his feeling her life as it left her. Just in case there was an afterlife and the True Patronus could reach it.

The spell hadn’t worked though, so that particular test had failed to provide any evidence, leaving him with the previous, unfavorable prior.

Time passed, and yet more time. From the outside you would’ve just seen a boy, sitting, staring at his wand with an abstracted gaze, looking at his watch every two minutes or so.

The door to the infirmary section opened once
again
.

The boy sitting there looked up with a deadly, chilling glare.

Then the boy’s face cracked in dismay, and he scrambled to his feet.

“Harry,” said the man in the button-down formal shirt and a black vest thrown over it. His voice was hoarse. “Harry, what’s happening? The Headmaster of your school - he showed up in those ridiculous robes at my office and told me that Hermione Granger was dead!”

A moment later a woman followed the man into the room; she seemed less confused than the man, less bewildered and more frightened.

“Dad,” the boy said thinly. “Mum. Yes, she’s dead. They didn’t tell you anything else?”

“No! Harry, what’s happening?”

There was a pause.

The boy slumped back against the wall. “I c-can’t, I can’t, I can’t do this.”

“What?”

“I can’t pretend to be a little boy, I j-just don’t have the energy right now.”

“Harry,” the woman said falteringly. “Harry -”

“Dad, you know those fantasy books where the hero has to hide everything from his parents because they, they wouldn’t understand, they’d react stupidly and get in the hero’s way? It’s a plot device, right, so that the hero has to solve everything himself instead of telling his parents. P-please don’t be that plot device, Dad, or you either, Mum. Just… just don’t play that role. Don’t be the parents who won’t understand. D-don’t yell at me and give me parental demands I can’t follow. Because I’ve wandered into a bloody stupid fantasy novel and now Hermione’s - I j-just don’t have the energy to deal with it.”

Slowly, as though his limbs were only half-animated, the man in the black vest kneeled down to where Harry was standing, so that his eyes were level with his son’s. “Harry,” the man said. “I need you to tell me everything that has happened, right now.”

The boy took a deep breath, swallowed. “They t-tell me the Dark Lord I defeated may still be alive. Like that’s not the p-plot of a hundred sodding books, right? So, it could also be that the Headmaster of my school, who’s the most powerful wizard in the world, has gone insane. And, and Hermione was framed for an attempted murder just before this, not that anyone would’ve told her parents about it or anything. The student she was framed for attempted-murdering was the son of Lucius Malfoy, who’s the most powerful politician in magical Britain, and used to be the Dark Lord’s number two. The Defense Professor position at this school has a curse on it, nobody ever lasts more than a year, they have a saying that the Defense Professor is always a suspect. This year the Defense Professor is secretly a mysterious wizard who opposed the Dark Lord during the last war and may or may not be evil himself. Also the Potions Master has been pining after Lily Potter for years and might be behind this whole thing for some twisted psychological reason.” The boy’s lips pressed together bitterly. “I think that’s most of the bloody stupid plot.”

The man, who had listened to all this quietly, stood up. He put a gentle hand on the boy’s shoulder. “That’s enough, Harry,” he said. “I’ve heard enough. We’re leaving this school right now and taking you with us.”

The woman was looking at the boy, her face asking a question.

The boy gazed back at her and nodded.

The woman’s voice was thin when she spoke. “
They
won’t let us, Michael.”

“They have no legal right to stop us -”

“
Right?
You’re
Muggles,
” said the boy. He smiled twistedly. “You have as much standing in the magical British legal system as mice. No wizard is going to care about any arguments you make about
rights,
about
fairness
, they won’t even take the time to listen. You don’t have any
power,
see, so they don’t have to bother. No, Mum, I’m not smiling like this because I agree with their Muggle policies, I’m smiling because I disagree with your children policies.”

“Then,” Professor Michael Verres-Evans said firmly, “we shall see what the
real
government has to say about that. I know an MP or three -”

“They’ll say, you’re crazy, have a nice stay in this asylum. That’s assuming the Ministry Obliviators don’t get to you first and erase your memories. They do that to Muggles a lot, I hear. I figure the real higher-ups in our government have formed some cozy accomodations of their own. Maybe they get a few healing Charms now and then, if someone important manages to get cancer.” The boy gave that twisted smile again. “And that’s the situation, Dad, as Mum already knows. They’d never have brought you here or told you anything, if there was a single thing you could do about it.”

The man’s mouth opened but no words came out, as though he had been reading from a script which described what a concerned parent ought to do in this sort of situation, and this script had suddenly arrived at a blank spot.

“Harry,” the woman said falteringly.

The boy looked at her.

“Harry, did something happen to you? You seem… different…”

“Petunia!” the man said, his tongue apparently working once more. “Don’t say such things! He’s under stress, that’s all.”

“Well, Mum, you see -” The boy’s voice cracked. “Are you sure you want this all at once, Mum?”

The woman nodded, though she didn’t speak.

“I’ve got… you know how that school psychiatrist thought I had anger management problems? Well -” The boy stopped, and swallowed. “I don’t know how to explain this to you, Mum. It’s something magical instead. Probably something to do with whatever happened on the night my parents died. I have… well, I was calling it a mysterious dark side and I know it sounds like a joke and I
did
check with… with an ancient telepathic magical hat to make sure my scar wasn’t
actually
inhabited by the Dark Lord’s spirit and it said that there was only one person under its brim and I don’t think wizards have actual souls anyway since they can still suffer from brain damage, only -”

“Harry, slow down!” said the man.

“- only, only whatever it is, it’s still
real,
there’s something inside me, it gave me willpower when things were bad, I could face down anything so long as I was angry, Snape, Dumbledore, the entire Wizengamot, my dark side wasn’t afraid of anything but Dementors. And I wasn’t stupid, I knew that there might be a price for using my dark side and I kept on looking to see what the price might be. It didn’t change my magic, it didn’t seem to cause permanent alignment shift, it didn’t try to take me away from my friends or anything like that, so I kept on using it whenever I had to and I only figured out too late what the price really was -” The boy’s voice had become almost a whisper. “I only figured out today… every time I call on it… it uses up my childhood. I killed the thing that got Hermione. And it wasn’t my dark side that did it, it was me. Oh, Mum, Dad, I’m sorry.”

There was a long silence filled with the sound of broken masks.