Survivor

It was nighttime in the castle, and only a few students were out at times like these. Curfews at Hogwarts were odd, but Harry found them rather agreeable. As the afternoon turned to dusk, certain rooms would lose their availability. They didn’t want students doing any potentially dangerous magic without supervision, so things like the dueling club rooms, rune club rooms, and the like were all closed at 9. Classrooms were shut down at 10, and the Great Hall lost access at 11.

Of course, leaving the castle itself was banned past 10 along with the classrooms, but students weren’t forbidden from roaming the castle at nights. See, the library was open 24/7 for the students who preferred to do their work in isolation or with the comfort of the nighttime darkness surrounding their lamps and candles. At the same time, students also liked to explore at night, and this was viewed as a chance for students to learn a bit of self-sufficiency. If they wanted to roam the castle, they could. Supervision was handed over to the prefects, head-children, and a single professor who was exchanged every night just in case there was an emergency. 

Tonight, Harry was using that freedom to do something most definitely not allowed. He was sitting cross-legged before the door of the third-floor corridor, a book on counterspell tactics in hand and his back against the corridor wall. It took a good hour to get in here. The stranger said that Dumbledore put up a slew of detection spells that needed to be dealt with, and he also said that coming back later would probably make them worse off because the headmaster was sure to notice their intrusion eventually and increase the defenses on the door even further.

Unfortunately, Harry was stuck in his studies, and that meant he had been staring at a page with absolutely nothing registering in his mind for the past ten minutes. He was extraordinarily mature for a child of eleven, but that didn’t mean he wanted to sit around and do nothing if there was another option. He had enough of that when he was forced to learn the definition of patience while sitting in that damn cupboard for days on end.

“I’m bored."

“And what,” the stranger replied sarcastically. “Would the illustrious Harry Potter like me to do about that?”

Harry gave a shrug and relaxed further against the wall, placing his book to the side. It was a quiet night, peaceful. He felt surprisingly relaxed for a student who was currently attempting to defy the master of the castle he was slithering around in at such an ungodly hour. 

“I don’t know. How about you tell me what you’re doing?”

The stranger sneered at him with no small amount of condescending amusement. “You have an astounding amount of arrogance if you truly think that you could comprehend what I’m doing. Notice that the book on the floor next to you is a beginner’s guide to counterspells. I am attempting to bypass the wards set up by Albus Dumbledore.”

“Then dumb it down,” Harry suggested. “You were the one who wanted me to ask for your help more often. Do you want me to improve or not?”

The stranger sighed, but Harry knew that the man was convinced. “Of course, You would make use of my request at the most inopportune time. I'm attempting to find a hole in his scheme.”

“I thought you said that the spells on the door made it impossible to open because of the password sacrifice."

“It is, but that's the beauty of magic, Harry. I'm not trying to open the door. I wish to see beyond it.”

“Is that not protected too?”

“Of course, it is!” The stranger snapped, annoyed, but he calmed himself down with a breath. “As I said, you're too new to properly understand what we're dealing with here. You're attempting to apply your rudimentary knowledge of counterspells to real life as if it is as static and invariable as the book you read.”

“How so?” Harry grumbled, slightly offended that the stranger was bashing all of his diligent studying.

“You're looking at counterspells as a method to undo a specific effect, and you've misconstrued that into thinking of our situation as a linear battle, one where the door is locked, and we must counter that lock to open the door.”

“Is that not exactly what we’re doing?”

“It's one method to accomplish what we are trying to do,” the stranger said with a smirk. “But you're thinking like a beginner. Dig deeper, Harry, and tell me why you want to cast a counterspell in the first place!”

Harry thought about it for a moment, and he found himself thinking that the question was quite silly. Why would he want to cast a counterspell? Of course, he would cast it because he wanted to undo a spell’s effect, but that was the exact thing he was being criticized for thinking. What else could it be, though, if it wasn’t what he thought.

Unless...

He felt the stranger’s satisfaction with his line of thinking, and he knew he had it.

“That’s a trick question because the reason you cast a counterspell depends on what you want to achieve,” Harry answered, almost slapping himself in the head for being so dull.

“Yes! That's the secret. A counterspell does disable a specific bit of spellwork, but thinking of magic as spells and counters hinders strategy because the entire reason you use a counter in the first place is because you want to accomplish something that another wizard wants to stop!

“Imagine that you want to grab a rubber ball, but a wizard has warded the area around it. You cannot cross due to the spell he's placed. If you get the ball by breaking the ward, then that's good for you, but do you not also achieve your goal if you summon the ball to you? What if the ward scheme only stopsyou from crossing? Would you not also effectively counter the ward if you got a friend to get the ball for you? The answer is yes to both, and that's why many people who are actually quite powerful end up being mediocre at utilizing the magic they've mastered. It isn’t about power as much as it's about getting what you want by using the tools you have.”

Harry couldn’t believe just how brilliant the stranger was at teaching. He accomplished what multiple books on counterspelling and spell tactics failed to accomplish. Harry had been thinking of magic in a very straightforward way even after being told multiple times about his mistake. He should’ve realized after the stranger’s plan to get them out of the Great Hall that magic was something more. He had to think about magic as something organic and multi-dimensional, not flat and direct. 

Harry saw the problem of others unlocking his door and immediately searched for a method to lock it. What he needed to do was keep his goal in mind - protecting his space - and use all of the magic he had at his disposal to close off the options. Focusing on locking the door and keeping others from countering that one spell was ultimately hopeless because he wasn’t considering the bigger picture.

“Where does that leave us with this door?” Harry eventually asked.

“We've deduced that this door is protected from both opening it and damaging it, and both of these attributes are strengthened by the sacrifice of creating a password. If we want to get past the door, we'll either need to find out the password, spend a lot of time gathering power to counter the spells directly, or we'll need to find another way through that doesn't involve interacting with the door.”

Harry stayed quiet for a few seconds, pondering until he decided to simply ask someone more knowledgeable, “what're you considering?”

“There're a potentially infinite amount of solutions, and I've been going through but a few of them. I thought first to attempt transfiguring the door, but Dumbledore considered that already. Bursting through the outside wall would’ve been an option if we weren’t in a place like Hogwarts. The amount of fortification in this castle would make directly damaging it against its will even more difficult than breaking down the door. 

“Then, I thought of, perhaps, conjuring an ant to crawl beneath the crack in the door and have a look around with it, but there's a rune that kills any biological signature crossing the door's threshold so long as the main rune scheme, locking and sturdiness, remains active. I believe a house elf would be able to get us across, but convincing one of those things to bring us there against the Headmaster’s orders would be an impossible task, and foreign elves do not merely transport themselves into a place like Hogwarts.”

Harry’s mind was spinning back and forth. Of course, he realized upon hearing the stranger’s suggestion that such spells were technically possible, but he never even once considered attempting them to solve this problem. Once again, he was in awe of the stranger’s skill and finesse when it came to utilizing magic.

“How could someone possibly defend against so many options?”

The stranger mentally shrugged. “In the end, no protection is truly ironclad. A determined opponent will eventually find a hole. You simply need to accept that and attempt to funnel the options of the aggressor into something that's difficult to achieve. 

“You also have to keep in mind that you're once again thinking on too small of a scale. Remember the reason we want to get past this obstacle. Our goal isn’t to breach the door; it's to find the object it's protecting and to see if we're interested in procuring it for ourselves. Inside that door was a nest of acromantula and more. Protecting the things you desire hardly depends on one spelled object or warded area. Once we find the hole in this,we have to find the hole in whatever else we find too. While it is true that we'll eventually find our way through his defences, that doesn't mean it won’t be difficult.”

Harry leaned the top of his head back against the wall, staring at the ceiling with a contemplative look on his face. It was a complicated problem, but he also had a lot more avenues of attack than he initially thought as well. “So, for the moment, you think it would be best to find a way to see what’s inside of the room instead of attempting to find a hole to go through ourselves?”

“Almost certainly,” the stranger succinctly concluded. “It'll be lower risk and will grant us the same amount of utility. Getting past the door ourselves is hardly useful if we have to spend hours or more getting past the unknown threats behind it.”

“What if we bug this room with a listening charm or something? If the acromantula are gone, Dumbledore will be looking for a new option. They’ll have to walk through here, and we can listen to the passcode. Then, all we have to do is speak it and throw whatever we want on the inside. We can leave, find out what’s in store for us, and then break through the whole thing once we have all of the information.

The stranger’s smile was sharper than a dagger, and he was extraordinarily pleased, “Now, that is how you think like a real wizard, Harry, but the plan is not fully thought out. A charm like that will be detected by someone of Albus’s caliber, and your signature will be all over it. We would need to find a way to mask the magical output of a charm like that, and you won't be able to put enough power into a listening charm to keep it going for long enough. Both of those things will probably require runic magic. Unfortunately, you know very little about rune work. Perhaps it's time that you expand your study from those ridiculous counterspell books to something more productive.

“So we’re stuck?” Harry asked, slightly irritated.

“For now,” the stranger admitted. “Learn the basics of runes, and we'll come back here to ponder the defenses on this door until we come up with a plan. We have time on our side right now. Dumbledore’s defenses will have to hold up for almost an entire year. An opening will show itself soon enough. Expand your toolbox, and we'll worry about discovering the Prefect routes in the meantime. This will be a much faster journey when we don’t have to stay away from the prying eyes of your peers.”

Waking up in his room, Harry got dressed and allowed Jason to take his usual perch across his chest before walking to the door. He was up very early, like always, so he was surprised to find that Daphne was waiting on a couch for him. He got her attention with a vague noise of greeting, and he got a smile in return.

She had been much more agreeable since they had that talk after his quidditch game.

“Do you have Jason with you?” she asked him as she stood up.

Gesturing to his chest while Jason popped his head out of his collar was enough of an answer, and they walked out of the portrait door. There was no real point in hiding Jason within the common room now because someone on his team (cough, cough, Higgs) had a gigantic mouth. Everyone in the dungeon knew about Jason, so it would only be a matter of time before the rest of the school found out too.

Luckily, snakes weren’t inordinately uncommon as pets, and, while rarer, connecting with them on a magical level was seen occasionally too. Sure, it would make some people uncomfortable for him to have a snake as a familiar, but it wasn’t as if he was talking to it in front of them. Having a snake wasn't tantamount to being a parselmouth. Harry and the stranger were both confident that everyone would assume he simply made a bond with a snake. It was just as possible to do so with any other animal, so why not a boomslang? 

“Why’re you up so early?” Harry asked his friend, and that was her official designation now, decided upon a week ago.

“You’re the one who gets up early. I got up at this ungodly hour because I had no choice if I wanted to catch you before you ran off to wherever you go on the weekends.”

“And why did you need to catch me so urgently?”

She glanced at the ground, then the wall, and casually back to him while fiddling with her fingers. “I can’t get the new transfiguration spell, and the paper we have to do about it if we can’t master it is due on Monday.”

Harry laughed good-naturedly at her predicament and shook his head, “Oh, really? And what would I be getting in return for this kind gesture now that I know you have more skills than you let on?”

She looked at him for a moment or two, waiting to see if he would cave, before smirking at his request. “Choose a potion. If I know how to make it, I’ll make it for you, and I’ll let you watch when I do.”

“You’re sure it’s safe?” Harry asked her just to be certain. “Professor Snape told us how dangerous it is. If you think it would be a bad idea, you don’t have to show me anything. You’ll just owe me help on a potions essay or something in the future.”

“I’ve been making potions for a long time with my mother, and I made the two you downed a week ago. Did they work?” Harry knew what angle she was playing, and he granted her the truth in the form of a nod. “Of course, it worked. I know what I’m doing. If you choose a potion I’m not confident with, I’ll tell you to pick another.”

The Great Hall, unsurprisingly, was empty. One trait shared between all of the houses was the tendency to wake up late unless it was necessary to wake up early. On a Saturday, that was never the case, so the castle was empty, just like he preferred. The two of them sat at the Slytherin table, and he took a look at what she needed help with.

“We’re working on the switching spell right?”

He got his confirmation with a nod, and he closed his eyes to think about how he wanted to go about helping her. The switching spell was an odd one. Technically speaking, there were two versions of this spell with the transfiguration version being the less literal interpretation of the two. This version was less of a switching spell as it was a mimicry spell. It didn’t literally switch two items; that was what the charm version did. The transfiguration version was actually taking two objects and simultaneously transfiguring each one into the other, making use of the base forms already given.

Teaching Daphne this particular subject was always difficult for him. Professor McGonagall and all of her students made transfiguration out to be an extremely taxing, very complex, and truly technical field of study. Transfiguration was natural for Harry. It was instinctive, easy. Incantations made things easier, but he never had to do all of the shit that Professor McGonagall thought to be a requirement for using transfiguration in general. He just wanted something, and then he made it. If things took too much power, a simple look into a Latin dictionary gave him the words necessary. 

“Where are you in the spell? Show me,” was what he went with.

“Effingo,” she said with her cup and empty plate in front of her. 

Harry watched as the cup flattened into something akin to a bowl while the plate grew a single peg beneath it and curled at the edges to create something more cup-like. Luckily, he knew what her problem likely was despite the differences between their two strategies. Harry performed this spell like he did with every transfiguration. He wanted an item to look like the one he desired, and it changed. If he did that with two items at the same time, using each as the template for the other, they both changed into perfect replicas of what the other used to be. 

“Reverto,” he incanted, turning the two items back into what they used to be. “What're you visualizing?”

“What do you think?” she playfully bit back. “I’m thinking about turning the cup into the plate and the plate into the cup.”

He snapped his fingers and felt proud of himself for figuring out the problem in a process so disconnected from the way he did things. Even when he had a seemingly unique and superior way of doing things, he still had enough skill at the subject to understand their methodology and point out their mistakes. 

“But these aren’t just cups and plates. These are specific cups and plates. You aren’t turning one thing into the basic form of another; you're literally overlaying an object over the one you have. Think more specifically about the things you want to transfer. Use each item as a sort of stencil for the other. Look at the plate. It’s silver, and it has floral designs around the edge. Focus on those; focus on the metal, what it feels like to the touch, its cool temperature from staying in the kitchens all night. Don’t think about turning the cup into the plate, think about taking the plate as it is right now and transferring its qualities into the cup. Then, do the same the other way around.”

He delighted in the way her eyes widened just like his did when the stranger broke his understanding of magic in half. It felt as if he had just awakened her with his knowledge, and he could tell the exact moment that everything clicked in her head.

“Effingo,” she said again, aiming at the cup while focusing solely on the plate. 

The cup’s base shrank into nothing while the stem shortened until the cup was lying on nothing but the bottom of its bowl. He watched as it took on a silver sheen, and he smiled when it flattened out against the table and began to display that floral pattern he told her about. There were some differences, and she only switched the form of one item, but it was a passable copy of the item she chose, and that was a big leap from what she did before. 

“That was a very good attempt. Do a few more, and I think you should be ready to start changing two at the same time. You’ll have it mastered by the end of the day with a bit of practice.”

He received a smile in return for his help, and he could tell that her mood had improved even further due to her success with the spell. That was good. He liked it when he got to help her considering how much help she gave him. Speaking of Transfiguration, though, he had somewhere to be fairly soon. Once the time came, he bid adieu to Daphne and walked toward Professor McGonagall’s office.

Their session, like the few they had before, was okay. He loved getting to hear information about his parent’s past, but the magic he learned was simply not helpful to him. Professor McGonagall proved to him in their private sessions that she most definitely earned her mastery, but their methods were simply too different for him to glean anything from her. He could tell that she was far more experienced than he was in the field, and, even with his natural use of transfiguration, the skill gap between them was monumental. 

The fact that he was both astronomically better than most students his age yet simultaneously incapable of growing faster through the use of a proper teacher was somewhat aggravating. The stranger quelled his ire by telling him that this was the case for a lot of people like him and that he would begin to grow much faster once he became knowledgeable enough in his own style of transfiguration to start teaching himself. Of course, like always, Harry had no clue exactly what the stranger meant with all of his cryptically vague analyses of his strange connection and simultaneous disconnection with certain aspects of magic.

Either way, his real goal for the day was after his meeting with the Gryffindor Head of House, and his disappointment over his lack of professional help with his best subject would not be hampered when possibility was practically floating in the air. Walking to the library, he did exactly as the stranger recommended: he grabbed a book on runes that went with his own and started studying. Mastering magic was already aligned with his desires; if learning runes early would help him accomplish his goals, then that was all the better. 

… At least, that was his plan.

Apparently, forces beyond his will were telling him no that day. The second he actually entered the realm of Madam Pince, he noticed the muffled noise of annoying kids messing around at one of the tables in the back of the library. He could tell that Pince was just as annoyed as he was, but that didn’t stop them, and he wasn’t surprised in the slightest. Once he claimed his book on runes and walked to the back of the library himself, he was greeted with the sight of the usual suspects when it came to disrupting the peace: Gryffindors. 

Of course, it would be the first-year lions.

Unlike certain Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs, Harry had no serious disdain for most of the Gryffindors. He found Ronald Weasley to be immature and spoiled, but the boy was little more than a child, and Harry couldn’t really bring himself to hold hate for someone so obviously naïve. The Weasley twins must’ve gotten some sort of warning from Ginevra because they had yet to actually prank him despite the various members of his house having some rather… unfortunate experiences. Longbottom, of course, rubbed him in all of the wrong ways, but they kept away from each other, so Harry never had to suffer the boy’s presence. 

No, his problem with Gryffindors completely stemmed from the way they held themselves. It was simply bothersome how many of them mistook the bravery and the wild, chaotic, badass nature of their more admirable members and alumni for the immature and obviously desperate way that most of them acted in an attempt to emulate the people they looked up to. Slytherins and Gryffindors were alike in the way they both tended to shirk the rules, and Harry had to admit that the brazen, unapologetic way the Gryffindor’s more notable past members tended to do so had an appealing quality that the Slytherin’s more covert subversion of inconvenient or silly rules lacked, but the difference between the cool Gryffindors and the ones in front of him were when they decided that a rule was worth breaking and which rules they decided to ignore.

The Gryffindors during the first war who decided to act outside of the law to help civilians while giving a middle finger to the ministry who told them to sit back like good little boys and girls while the aurors took care of things were cool. Neville Longbottom and his posse of wannabees making a ruckus in the library just because the rules stated that people were to be quiet in a place for studying was decidedly less cool. They ended up annoying him so much that he was about ready to bring this book with him to his common room despite the inconvenience it was going to be when a harshly closed book at the table next to him drew his attention.

It was Granger, and she was sporting an absolutely vicious expression. Harry could understand her frustration. He was similarly invested in studies that he would much rather do in the library if only to keep his already checked out books in his own possession, but the disgust on her face made him feel dirty, and he wasn’t even the one she was looking at. The unfortunate owner of that position was Neville Longbottom.

This couldn’t be about some noise in the library. There had to be more to it than that, and he got his evidence when Longbottom noticed the intense amount of vitriolic loathing she was flinging across the room at him and decided to look up from his group of companions to the source of the hate. His expression, for just a second, said it all.

There was pain in the depths of his eyes. Harry could tell just by looking; his base-level skill with Legilimancy was unneeded. He could also see the way a bit of anger and righteous indignation slid in underneath the hurt, and he felt as if someone had punched him in the gut with all the force they could muster. 

He knew that face… 

He just didn’t think he’d ever see it in another person besides himself. It was the face he had when Iris almost left him after she discovered his parseltongue or the way that he looked when the worthless muggles he used to live around would grace him with their stupid opinions about how horrible he was. It was an exact replica, and he wasn’t sure how to handle that.

One second passed, and the face began to change. Two seconds, and a smile took the place of his frown. Three seconds, and his eyes lit with a charismatic sort of happiness, exactly like the one he wore in the bookstore so many months ago, one that Harry knew was fake. Four, and he leaned over to make a joke with his friends, forcing all of them to muffle their giddy laughs and drawing their presence around him like some sort of cloak. 

Granger scoffed beneath her breath, but little could escape Harry’s ears. She left bookless and in a whirlwind of emotion, and Harry found himself doing much the same just moments later. He was aggravated, and he hated himself for it. Longbottom was capable of feeling the same pain Harry knew so very well?

No, they couldn’t be more different. Longbottom didn’t know what it felt like to be alone. All the boy-who-lived had was people crowding around him. The very monicker Longbottom so proudly wore on his chest was proof of that very fact! The boy was as privileged as a person could get, yet he had the fucking gall to act as though he could possibly feel the emotions that haunted himself for his entire life? Did Longbottom even know how lucky he was?

What a fucking joke. 

Harry was alone for his entire life up until that very summer. He had nobody, and he spent every single second of his isolation begging to be exactly like what Neville Longbottom was by default: loved, adored, and cared for. What did that mean for him, then, if the person living the life that he used to dream of before he met Iris was seemingly just as fucked as he was? 

“Stop!” the stranger commanded.

Harry obeyed without question, stopping physically and mentally in his tracks, “What is it?”

“This corridor…” the stranger muttered. “It has been heavily warded.”

“What floor are we on? I wasn’t paying attention,” Harry admitted to his partner.

“Fourth Floor. Remain still. I am examining the intentions of the wards.”

This was just peachy, wasn’t it? He had a very simple plan for the day. Talk to Professor McGonagall, go to the library, and spend his time studying the magical art of runes. Instead, he was triggered by a spoiled brat and, without his knowledge, was sent on a journey to some mysterious, warded corridor. Of course, he would somehow wander close enough to somewhere supposedly important while off on a mental escapade. 

“Did you figure out what it is?”

“... It,” the stranger said, seemingly confused for a moment. “Seems to be a trap.”

“For me?” Harry asked, really feeling as though he were being bullied at this point by practically everyone in the damn castle. 

“No… this trap is set for Quirrel.”

“How do you figure that?” Harry questioned.

“There’s a subtle compulsion charm surrounding this place,” the stranger explained. “It’s set to attract Quirrel, and only Quirrel, to the room at the end of this corridor.”

“Really? Wouldn’t he just realize the intentions of the magic around him and break the compulsion?” Harry rather logically concluded.

“That would be the most expected outcome, but it’s always hard to say when it comes to Dumbledore. The man’s plans have plans,” the stranger said, obviously somewhat peeved. “Maybe he actually wants Quirrell to stay away from the area, so he made what seems to be an obvious trap to convince Quirrell that going there would be a bad idea. Then again, he could be attempting to play on that line of logic to taunt Quirrell into entering by hanging such an obvious barrier in his face.”

Harry made a face at the explanation. “He’s so many steps ahead that he looped right back around to being stupid.”

“Maybe,” the stranger said with a laugh. “But, Harry, riddle me this. Knowing what you know about how he designs his plans, do you have any idea about whether or not Quirrell should enter the room?”

Harry stopped for a moment and blinked a few times, thinking hard about what he would do in the man’s shoes.

“Huh,” he said eventually.

“Exactly,” the stranger said back. “Dumbledore enjoys these little mind games where only he knows exactly what the right steps are to take. He’s got so many tricks up his sleeve that you have no idea whether you’re taking him by surprise or playing into his hand. Who knows if entering that room is a good idea or not? I certainly don’t. There is a possibility that absolutely nothing is behind that door. At the same time, though, it could very well be everything. That’s just how Dumbledore operates.”

“Well, fuck that,” Harry said, turning around and departing from the unused classroom on the fourth floor. 

He had experience with no-win games where every step was just as likely to be a bad move as another. Vernon was fond of those. He learned that not participating was the best thing to do in a game where there were no good moves. Let Dumbledore and Quirrell have their stupid mental pissing contests. Harry had better things to do. 

That firm and sudden reaffirmation of his goals gave him the push needed to knock him from his temporary funk. Who gave a shit what Longbottom’s problems were or how they might’ve vaguely related to himself? He knew suffering, and Longbottom’s possible knowledge of the same was immaterial to him in the long run. He had his desires, and he had his plan. That was all that mattered. 

Or, at least, that was what he'd like to think.

With that in mind, he descended the staircase and decided to go back to the Slytherin common room to retrieve a few of his less required books he got from the library. He would return them and check out a few on runes. Then, he would continue his studies as planned, this time without Longbottom distracting him and ruining his perception of his own life goals. 

The stranger, unfortunately, was nowhere near as pleased with the situation as his partner. That trap seemed really suspicious. The question he had to ask was why. 

Why would Dumbledore care so much about attracting Voldemort to a place like this?