[From Litha to Lammas]: Creatures of Strength, Creatures series, gen, 2/5

[lomonaaeren]

“Welcome to my class. You will not be fools here.”

Harry blinked. He had heard stories about how stern Professor Babbling was, but he hadn’t had any contact with her, since she wasn’t a Head of House and Ancient Runes could only be taken by third-years and up. She was standing in the middle of the classroom, her face locked in a frown as she surveyed them.

She was the oldest professor Harry had seen at the school, he thought, except for Dumbledore. Her hair was a shining silver, and so were her eyebrows, which seemed to project out further over her eyes than anyone else’s. She flicked her wand down at a pair of whispering Hufflepuffs, and the sound of a whip striking stone filled the room. The Hufflepuffs jumped and shrieked.

“You will pay attention.”

Harry smiled. He liked her. She was a bit like Professor Greengrass, his History tutor, who was always in despair over the state of people’s ignorance.

“Now.” Professor Babbling stared around, her eyes as wide and unblinking as Hedwig’s. “What do you know about Runes?”

A few people raised their hands and talked about ancient languages and how runes could be used to enchant objects. Harry listened and scribbled down a few notes. Professor Babbling was nodding in response to the people who talked, but she also looked a little bored and impatient. Harry suspected that she was waiting for an answer she hadn’t heard yet.

“Mr. Potter.”

Harry sat back and looked up. It seemed that Professor Babbling had decided it was his turn to speak. “Yes, Professor?”

“Can you tell me why the study of Ancient Runes is restricted to third-years and up?”

Harry considered her. He had some ideas, things he had learned while reading other books and talking with Michael, but he didn’t know that he wanted to expose them. That he knew those things would speak certain truths about him.

But in the face of Babbling’s implacable stare, Harry found himself wanting to impress her. He nodded. “Ancient Runes is one of the most dangerous classes at Hogwarts, so it makes sense that students need to be older to practice it.”

Babbling smiled like a cat with prey. “Explain to me why it is dangerous, Mr. Potter.”

Harry scanned the question mentally for traps, but he couldn’t detect any. And he had begun this discussion, so he might as well go on.

“Runes can be deployed in non-dangerous ways,” he said, just in case she, or someone else, was wondering whether he knew anything non-violent about the subject. “For example, most runes on clothing and doorways are of that kind. They merely strengthen an enchanted object and prolong its lifespan.”

“But the dangerous ones?”

“Those are the ones that are used together, in arrays, Professor, instead of singly. And they are typically framed by secondary runes that—”

“What the hell is a secondary rune?”

Harry rolled his eyes internally. That was Ernie Macmillan, a pompous Hufflepuff Zacharias didn’t get along with, and Harry had no reason to like, either. Macmillan reminded Harry of what Granger would probably have been like if death hadn’t softened her.

“Do not interrupt, Macmillan, or I will remove you.”

Harry half-smiled. Yes, he liked Professor Babbling.

“You were saying, Mr. Potter?”

“Secondary runes are the ones that are only half-sketched, rather than completed, so that the intent and some of the magic is there, but they aren’t whole themselves and can’t interfere with the enchantment the primary runes are creating. It’s more likely that the array won’t explode that way.”

“Tell me why runes explode.”

“Because the practitioners of Ancient Runes need to understand know themselves,” Harry said softly, eyes locked on Professor Babbling. “They infuse the runes with their intent. If they are divided in their mind, or have less than utter purity in creating the array—for example, if they are making a gift for someone they secretly despise or are jealous of—then the runes will try to act singly, instead of together. They will all do different things, and the result is usually an explosion.”

Professor Babbling watched him in silence for a long moment. Harry simply looked back. He wasn’t sure if she was going to get upset with him, or if she just wanted to absorb the phenomenon of a student who knew what he was talking about.

“Correct,” Professor Babbling said at last. “Twenty points to Ravenclaw for a correct and detailed explanation.”

Absorbing the student phenomenon it is.

Someone muttered behind Harry, “That’s not fair, she never gives points to Houses, and twenty points—”

“I give points to intelligent students,” Professor Babbling said, her owl-eyes seeking them out. “For example, ones who do not mutter in the back of classrooms.”

There was absolute silence. Professor Babbling turned to the chalkboard and moved one hand. Runes buried along the sides of it flared to life, and Harry watched in admiration as words slid into sight, as smoothly as a Muggle machine.

“You will have noticed that your textbook speaks first about the Elder Futhark…”

Harry went back to taking notes, smiling a little. He thought he could probably use runes this year to create enchanted objects that might help protect him from Sirius Black. That was more immediately useful than some of the lessons he had learned in Charms or Transfiguration the first year he’d taken them.

*

“See? What did I tell you about Runes? Aren’t they fantastic?”

Harry laughed a little as he sat down next to Michael in Defense Against the Dark Arts. “You were right. I was reading about other things, but I really should have taken more time to work with that wax tablet that you gave me for Christmas last year.”

Michael beamed and opened his mouth to say something else, but a pleasant voice said, “Books away and wands out, please.”

Harry looked up to curiously study Remus Lupin, who was standing in the front of the classroom. He had scars on his face and a worn look in his eyes, but he was smiling. As he introduced himself, Harry waited to see if Lupin would signal to him somehow, but there was nothing.

“Our practical lesson this morning is in this wardrobe.” Lupin nodded to a large piece of furniture behind him just as it bucked and rocked. Harry wasn’t the only one to jump.

“Who can tell me what you think is in this wardrobe?”

Harry stared at it. He had an idea, based on the book about Dark creatures that Lupin had sent him last year, but—surely he wouldn’t be that stupid?

“Perhaps you, Harry?”

Harry snapped his head up. Lupin was watching him with a slight smile and an encouraging nod, as if they knew each other, but exactly how did he think that Harry was supposed to react when he hadn’t said it?

“Mr. Potter.” Harry’s voice was thin. He hated it.

“I’m sorry, Harry?”

“Please call me Mr. Potter.”

Lupin blinked as if he didn’t know how to react to that, but then he nodded. “Very well. I’m sorry to have addressed you by the name that you don’t prefer. Can you tell me what is in the wardrobe, Mr. Potter?”

“It’s likely a boggart, sir.”

“Three points to Gryff—Ravenclaw,” Lupin said, confirming some of the rumors that Harry had heard from Theo. Apparently Lupin was prejudiced towards Gryffindor. He’d probably been in that House, like Harry’s parents and Sirius Black. “And what clues led you to determine that?”

“They like to hide in dark and enclosed spaces, and they are liable to cause a great deal of noise if someone comes near them.”

For some reason, Lupin’s smile was unhappy now. Harry went back over his answer in his mind, and couldn’t see what was wrong with it.

“Yes, it is indeed a boggart,” Lupin said, and finally turned his sad amber eyes from Harry to someone else. “Miss—”

“Lisa Turpin, sir.”

“How do you a defeat a boggart? Do you know?”

Harry didn’t bother to listen to Turpin’s answer. He already knew it, and his head was swimming with anger and terror.

Was Lupin really going to have them face their boggarts in front of everyone else? Was Harry going to have his fear exposed to the others? He didn’t mind seeing theirs, because it was a means of gaining some control over them, but he didn’t want them to see his.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Mr. Potter?”

That sad smile again. Harry ignored it and lowered his voice. “I—I would value the ability to face my boggart in private after everyone else, sir. Given what it’s likely to be.” He actually didn’t think it was going to be Voldemort, but then, everyone else would assume it was.

Lupin started and nodded. “A very good point, Mr. Potter. Now, Mr. Smith, would you like to volunteer?”

Harry watched intently as the others confronted the boggart. Zacharias’s fear was a pair of floating scissors, which he finally managed to turn into a floating balloon with the spell, Riddikulus, that Lupin had shown them. Michael’s was a version of himself whimpering and waving his wand desperately—himself as a Squib. It took Michael forever to turn it into a doll. Macmillan feared Dumbledore telling him that he wasn’t going to be a prefect, which made Harry have to bite back scornful laughter.

The others feared magical creatures, rabid dogs, figures from nightmares, a set of steps that they’d apparently fallen down at some point. Harry watched them, noted them, but mostly, he thought they were pallid. These people hadn’t faced anything as dangerous as a basilisk or even as Vernon Dursley.

“Five points for everyone who faced the boggart,” Lupin said when they were done. He had banished his own boggart before Harry could get a good look at it. “Harry, will you—”

“Mr. Potter, sir.”

Harry made sure to wince as he spoke, as if he didn’t like correcting the professor. He saw Zacharias laughing behind his hand.

“Of course, of course. Well, please stay after, while the others go to their next class. I will write a note for—Professor Flitwick, was it?—if it turns out that you are late to Charms.”

The other students left, Michael glancing over his shoulder once. Zacharias’s eyes moved from Harry to Lupin, and he nodded, face stern. Harry caught a glimpse of him mouthing Be wary before the door closed.

As if Harry was ever anything else with a stranger.

“Can I ask why you don’t want me to call you by your first name?”

Harry turned back to Lupin. “Well, we haven’t even been formally introduced, sir. I saw your name on that book you sent me for Christmas last year, but you didn’t write a letter to me before this or even contact me before school to tell me you were going to be the Defense professor. I don’t know how well you knew my parents. Lots of people want to say they’re friends with them now who wouldn’t have spat on them before.”

Lupin’s face twisted into an expression so uncomfortable that Harry almost laughed. He gave the professor his best amiable smile, and waited.

“Yes, well, I—I was actually very close with your father. Not as close with your mother, but they didn’t start dating until our seventh year.” Lupin relaxed and smiled, obviously thinking about some memory. “And I was also friends with Peter Pettigrew, of course, who died a war hero.”

“And Sirius Black?”

Lupin jumped, which Harry thought was funny. He was obviously leaving something out. Maybe other people wouldn’t have known it was about Black if they didn’t have the advantage of Madam Marchbanks’s stories, but still.

“I, ah. Where did you hear that?”

“Madam Griselda Marchbanks, who has custody of me now? She told me that she trained Black as a duelist during the war. His betrayal really surprised her.”

Harry watched Lupin closely as he spoke those words, to see if he also thought there was something odd about Black betraying his supposed brother, but Lupin only looked sad. “Yes, it was a surprise to all of us. But he was the Secret-Keeper, and it’s no wonder that James and Lily chose him for that. After all, Sirius was so close to them that they trusted him implicitly.”

“You really didn’t have a clue that he was a traitor?”

Lupin swallowed. “You must understand, Harry, with the chaos of the war—”

“I believe I expressed my discomfort at your addressing me that way, sir.”

Lupin turned his head away a little. “I’m sorry. I held you when you were a baby. I’ve thought of you often since then. It’s hard for me to think of you by your last name when I didn’t think of James that way for years.”

“You’ve thought of me often, but you never came to see me?”

Lupin hesitated. Then he turned back to Harry and said, “I can make no excuses, only apologies. Your existence reminded me so much of the war that it was too painful for me to see you.”

Harry narrowed his eyes and said nothing. He recognized an excuse when he heard one.

“Why did you think that Black was the traitor? Or didn’t you?” Harry was more interested in having his question answered at the moment than in serving as Lupin’s confessor.

Lupin sighed and ran his hand down his face. “The chaos of the war was such that everyone suspected everyone,” he said quietly. “Sirius—suspected me. I was doing secret tasks for the Or—for a group we were involved in that I couldn’t tell him about. It was one reason that James and Lily didn’t choose me as the Secret-Keeper.”

There are still fifty things that he’s not telling me.

But Harry nodded and pretended to grudgingly accept that explanation. “All right. And you think that you can step back into my life and pick up where you left off?”

“I’d like to try.”

Lupin was smiling at him. Harry bit his lip and looked down. It was a trick that had often fooled his other professors, and some of the Muggles in his life before the Dursleys talked to them.

Of course I won’t let you. But you could be useful.

“Okay,” Harry whispered.

Lupin gave him a wider smile. “Excellent! Now, do you want to show me your boggart? There’s no one else around to watch.”

Harry swallowed. He would have preferred to face it alone, but that was stupid. First of all, there was a chance that Riddikulus wouldn’t work, and he would need an experienced professor who knew how to drive a boggart back. Secondly, he thought it unlikely Lupin would spill the secret of what Harry’s greatest fear was. He was too pathetic for that.

Harry gripped his wand and nodded.

“Very good! If you would step back a little…”

Harry willingly backed away from the wardrobe. Lupin flung the door open with a spell, the way he had for the other students in the class, and dark smoke swirled just inside the space, before forming with a crack.

Harry didn’t actually know what he’d expected. Voldemort? Sirius Black? The Dursleys? All of those would have made sense.

But it wasn’t what sprawled on the floor in front of him. It was himself, his corpse, his eyes wide open and his limbs a tangled wreck. From the look of his neck, he had fallen down stairs, or maybe been hit with a spell that had made him fall that way.

“Harry—Harry!”

Right. Lupin was there. Harry kept his gaze locked on the boggart even as he raised his wand. He had to make this count, had to work past his own seething hatred of the creature to make it into something funny.

“Riddikulus!”

The shape wavered and danced back and forth. Harry repeated the spell, forcing more power into it. He ignored the way that he could see Lupin raising his wand from the corner of his eye. Maybe if it was necessary, Harry would use Lupin’s help. But he should be able to manage this.

The boggart did change shape, at last. It was still broken as if from a fall, but it was now clearly Sirius Black, as Harry had seen him in the papers.

Harry backed up, his chest heaving. Lupin stared back and forth between him and the boggart with an open mouth.

“Harry—”

Harry turned around and ran from the classroom. He ignored Lupin calling after him, about the promised note for Flitwick. Let Lupin think Harry was just upset and in shock at what he’d done to the boggart.

Harry took a sharp turn and came to a halt in a little corner within the wall where he had sometimes met with Michael and Theo to practice spells that needed to work on stone. No one came here, and no one would notice loose stone. Harry buried his fingers in his hair and closed his eyes.

Then he screamed with rage.

How could—how could he have died from something so stupid as falling down the stairs? And if that was meant to be a sign that someone had cursed him, how he could have lost the situational awareness or the magic that would have let him deal with his killer or the spell?

He feared that fate, but it also made him want to scratch his eyes out with self-loathing.

Gradually, Harry calmed down and shook his head. He lowered his hands to his sides and stared for a moment at the wall.

The best thing to prevent that fear from coming true was to get better. Stronger, faster, more knowledgeable. He was still continuing some of the lessons from his tutors, writing essays and letters to send back and forth, but he needed something else.

Something stronger.

*

“Professor Vector, I had a question for you about Arithmancy, please.”

The professor turned around with a solemn nod. She had made it clear on the first day of class that she had merfolk heritage, which was why she had a blue tint to her skin and a green one to her hair. Her eyes were large and dark and without pupils. She always moved slowly, as if swaying with invisible currents.

“Yes, Mr. Potter?”

Harry gave her his best eager student expression. He had so far been doing fine in Arithmancy, but he hadn’t been as interested in it as he was in Ancient Runes. After all, runes could be used for many purposes and were dangerous, while Arithmancy was mostly used to predict the future and was slow and intellectual.

But Theo had told him something at dueling practice yesterday that had made Harry think it would be worth talking to Professor Vector.

“I wondered if you had a copy of The Fire Equations that you would be willing to lend to me?”

Vector transformed. One moment she was a middle-aged woman blinking at Harry, and the next, she was a predator, leaning forwards with a wand clasped in her hand. The tip poked Harry in the throat.

He swallowed and stood still. It was the best way to avoid provoking an attack anyway, and he didn’t really think that Vector would slaughter him.

(Not really).

“Where did you hear about that book?” she whispered to him, a harsh sibilance on the edges of her words. It reminded Harry a little of what he could do when he spoke Parseltongue, but it didn’t transform her words.

“One of my friends mentioned it.”

Vector watched him unblinkingly for long enough that Harry began to wonder if he had to worry about a Memory Charm. Then she pulled back with a shake of her head.

“That book is powerful and dangerous and banned in Britain,” she said. “Even if I had a copy, I would hardly lend it to a third-year student.”

Harry didn’t think he held many cards, but there was one that he would chance. “Even if it meant that I would go out and get a copy from someone else? Someone who might be willing to indulge me and wouldn’t care about the danger?”

“Who would have a copy of this book, Mr. Potter?”

“Kalder Nott.”

Vector’s eyes were wide and bottomless. Harry felt as if he could fall into them and keep going down into fathoms.

“You know what he was.”

“Oh, yes, a Death Eater. But he was Imperiused.”

Vector’s fingers played back and forth on her wand for a moment. “You have a connection to this—man? Or would he lend you that book out of consideration for your fame?”

“I’m friends with his son. Theo? You must have seen us sitting together in class.”

Vector made a low spitting sound. Harry continued to maintain his calm, friendly, polite expression. He was proud that it hadn’t wavered even when Vector had threatened him with her wand. Maybe he stood a chance of surviving the kind of attack that his boggart had hinted at after all.

“Yes. Yes, I have seen you.” The hissing sibilance was still at the edge of some of Vector’s words, but at least she didn’t seem to be trying to chase him away any longer. She settled back against the wall of the classroom. “You will truly go to beg this book from him?”

“Yes, Professor.”

Vector considered him for long enough that Harry was sure his gamble had failed. It didn’t bother him that much. He would ask Kalder for the book, and watch carefully to make sure that the request wasn’t putting him into danger.

Vector made another spitting sound. Then she said, “If you betray me to anyone, including the Headmaster or your guardian, I will deny all knowledge and lay on you the kind of equation that you can never escape. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Professor.”

Harry took The Fire Equations with reverent hands. Theo had told him that Arithmantic equations could be used, in certain contexts, to make a future result happen instead of only predict one. That meant he could, for example, inscribe a crystal globe with the equations that would create a fire, and fling it at his enemies, and watch them burn.

And he didn’t intend to betray Vector to anyone. Theo already had guessed that she might have the book, and showing it to Theo wouldn’t be the same as telling anyone else.

“Get out of my sight.”

Harry bobbed his head to Vector, keeping his polite student expression in place, and hurried out of the classroom. His heart was a thrumming wonder in his chest.

He had succeeded. He had won again.

He would always win, if he had anything to say about it.

*

“This is amazing, Harry.”

“Isn’t it?” Harry paged gently through The Fire Equations, which was lying on a desk that he had dragged into an alcove on the first floor. Hermione hovered behind him, reading over his shoulder. She read as fast as he did, ghost or no ghost, so Harry hadn’t had to slow down yet. And he hadn’t broken his promise to Vector by showing her the book, either. She had floated up behind him while he was studying it with Theo, and seen it, and managed to grasp just from looking what kind of book it was.

“Yes! Do you think you can use some of these against Sirius Black?”

Harry leaned back in his chair. “You heard about that, then?”

“Yes. Some of the girls came into my bathroom, and they were talking about his escape from Azkaban, and how he was hunting you.” Hermione twined a transparent curl of her hair around her finger, anxious eyes on him. “You won’t let him kill you, right?”

Harry gave her a thin smile. Hermione was loyal to him in a desperate way that was unlike the others. She knew that Harry could walk away and leave her alone again, and so she would do anything to keep their friendship alive.

It said a lot that Hermione knew it was a matter of Harry letting Black kill or not letting him, not just luck.

“No. I won’t let him.”

Hermione relaxed in a rush and beamed at him. “That’s great. Which of the equations are you going to use first?”

Harry flipped back to the first equation in the book, and nodded at the glowing letters on the page. “It’s called The Fire Equations, isn’t it? That means that I should honor the title, and use a fire one first.”

He had to admit, he would be interested to see if he could get close to a Dementor, and burn even one of Azkaban’s soulless creatures. It would certainly be more effective than practicing for weeks or months to master the Patronus Charm.

Harry smiled, and Hermione floated a short distance away from him. But she didn’t flinch back, and that was all Harry wanted right now.

Humming, he began to copy down the first equation.

*

“What’s that?”

Harry shrugged, concentrating on the parchment in front of him and not the distant commotion that must have been what Theo had heard. “Let’s ignore it. You know that we need to practice our Copying Charms some more, to get you your own pages of The Fire Equations.”

“I don’t know why I can’t just borrow the book from you. It’s not like I would show it to Professor Vector.”

Harry looked at Theo.

Theo turned pale, but for a long moment, he tried to hold Harry’s gaze. Then he turned his head to the side, a bitter smile making its way across his lips. “Yeah, fine. We’ll copy the pages for me.”

Harry nodded and looked at the book again. It was Halloween, and they had both skipped the feast to hide in a distant corner of the dungeons and work on The Fire Equations. Lupin had tried to talk to Harry earlier that day about attending the feast—or whether he would—but Harry had stared at the professor until he went away.

It took a lot of practice, more than usual, to use the Copying Charms on the book, but Harry thought that was probably due to its nature as a highly magical tome. At last they managed to achieve what they wanted, and he and Theo made their way back to the Great Hall with a contentment humming between them that Harry didn’t want to disrupt.

So, of course, the first thing that happened when they arrived at the staircase Harry would have to take back to Ravenclaw Tower was something disrupting it.

“Mr. Potter!”

Harry turned around and smoothed a calm expression into place. Professor McGonagall wasn’t one of the ones he liked that much, but she was one of the quickest to sense disrespect. “Professor?”

“Thank Merlin you’re here!” McGonagall’s pointy hat was askew on her head. “You must come back to Ravenclaw Tower at once!” She flicked a glance at Theo. “Mr. Nott, to your common room.”

It reminded Harry of their first year, when the professors had run around talking about the troll. That had been on Halloween, too, come to think of it.

“What is it, Professor? What happened?”

McGonagall looked down at Harry with a pinched mouth. “Sirius Black has broken into the castle.” And she grasped Harry’s shoulder and hustled him along up the staircase, while Harry turned matters over in his head.

It seemed that he might have to do something about Black sooner than he’d thought.