Survivor

An amused smile grew on Harry’s face as he listened to his friend grumble on the hospital bed. She was getting out today, and he was here to witness her reintegration into the castle, mostly because he wanted to spend time in her company and partly because he wanted to make sure nothing happened. With Farley’s goons hanging around all the time, he was feeling pretty safe, but he was taking no chances with this shit. 

“Honestly, if they want to ban a charmed muggle artifact, maybe they should take a look at broomsticks. I know some might find it shocking, but brooms are muggle artifacts too!”

She’d been on this tirade for a day and a half now, and he understood her complaints, even if brooms were only leaving over his cold, dead body. Faced with navigating a giant school that was almost as vertically large as it was horizontally, Daphne needed a way to get around. A flying carpet was apparently the way to go, but that had been banned a few years ago because the Ministry deemed it a muggle artifact. 

So they had to improvise. 

Harry had teasingly offered to levitate her around with him, but she hadn't liked that joke, so he wisely chose to stay quiet and let her family figure it out. The answer they came up with was to enchant something that wasn't banned to do the exact same thing as a carpet, even if it didn’t provide as much utility. That was unfortunately easier said than done, especially considering that they didn't want the Ministry to eventually ban whatever they came up with.

In the end, the Greengrasses hired an enchanter to shove the exact same runes that came with a magical carpet onto a normal, wooden chair. Of course, the ministry could maybe ban that too, but they didn't think even their government would have the balls to do away with the enchanting of yet another essential piece of furniture. Just nixing carpets had already generated enough heat. If every chair with cushioning charms suddenly became illegal, there would be hell to pay. Even if he didn’t like Daphne’s dad, he could respect the middle finger for what it was.

For his best friend, however, that meant she had to sit in a chair all day instead of riding a fucking magical carpet, which was more than a disappointment for her if her attitude had anything to say about it. Personally, he thought he would've actually preferred the chair, but he wasn't a snobby pureblood either, so he assumed his opinions didn't really matter here.

That didn’t mean he would take any less enjoyment from her whining.

"Honestly, Daphne, you get to sit in a floating, cushioned chair all day. Do you know how many lazy people are going to be drooling over your portable throne?"

"Are both of your legs working, Potter?"

He answered with a long, dramatic sigh. "Obviously.”

"Then you can talk when they don't." Her waspish attitude was on point, but the subtle smirk adorning her face ruined it.

Oh, it was nonstop with that line since they'd made up a few days ago, and while he knew he probably deserved it, he quickly found out that it was damn hard to argue with a crippled Daphne, and she knew it too. He was honestly shocked by how well she was taking this, not that he was hoping she'd take it worse or anything. Despite her teasing and insufferable attitude though - and he realized how rich that was coming from him too - he hadn't been happier in a while. There were still some things he needed to do and a few more that he had to fix, but this was a gigantic weight that'd finally fallen from his shoulders. His best friend coming back was, to him, the definitive sign that things were looking up for him, even more so than Quirrell’s mentorship.

Seeing her struggle with moving from her bed to the levitating chair, he went to help, allowing her to use his arm as a support while she shuffled onto her seat and got into a comfortable position. A grateful smile was his reward, and he answered with a small nod. It was literally the least he could do.

Now situated and ready to go, they waited for Pomfrey to come out and officially release her. Luckily for them, it didn't take long.  

"Do you have the potions and the dosage instructions?" Madam Pomfrey asked.

"Yes, ma'am," was Daphne's answer. 

"Good, you need to follow them to the letter. You've retained an impressive amount of control over your legs, so don't be afraid to move them around as long as you don’t put any weight on them. As time goes on, it’s possible that your own magic might start overpowering the residue in your bones. If you keep up with them and don't let them wither away, you may just be able to walk again sometime in the future."

He could tell how determined Daphne was to achieve that goal, and he admired her resolve. In the face of how he'd handled his own hardships, her approach was only that much more impressive to him. Whereas he’d pulled into himself until Quirrell rescued him and gave him something to strive for, Daphne seemed to be rising to the challenge all on her own.

With Pomfrey’s blessing, Harry led the way out of the room, holding the door open so Daphne’s enchanted chair could float through unimpeded. As she passed by him, the various runes carved into the back of her chair lit and extinguished with no easily recognizable pattern. That was, of course, because Daphne was channeling magic through each of them when she needed to elicit a certain response.

Only one rune consistently glowed: the one that kept it levitating. Unlike a broomstick, this chair was for daily use, which meant controlling the chair’s height all of the time was extremely impractical. Instead, it kept itself a consistent height above the ground, and it simply went up and down based on how close the surface in front of it was to the bottom of its legs. The only stuff she had to consciously control was the forward boost, the backward boost, the strafing, and the turning. Her control was obviously flimsy, but that was to be expected for the first real day of use. 

She was just lucky that she didn’t have to invest her own magic into controlling it. Otherwise, she’d never be able to make it through a day, let alone all of her classes. Apparently, it was a thing for adults with very high levels of magic or time on their hands to fill up energy storage runes with their magic and then sell them for people to use for their own purposes. On the bottom of her chair, where it wasn’t easy for others to access while she was in it, there was a carved slot that held within it a stone with enough magic to power the thing for roughly half of an entire year. 

It was extremely, exorbitantly expensive, according to Daphne, and they had a lot of runes built into it to make sure that the batteries could only power things connected personally by the creator, but he was very miffed that he hadn’t known about it beforehand. He chose to believe that there had to be some kind of caveat for the Stranger to neglect mentioning the tool earlier, but he couldn't come up with one for the life of him right now, so it was possible that he was just trying to make himself feel better.

As they traveled together, Harry couldn’t help but check his corners and reach out a bit with his magic. Like he'd said, he wasn’t taking any chances. His paranoia, though, was unfortunately noticed by Daphne, and the confused quirk of her eyebrow drew him to a pause. 

He was getting ready to carefully present some sort of believable lie that nobody would think to question, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it despite how much he wanted to. His eyes drifted down to his friend’s legs, and he let out his hesitation with a small, light breath. He couldn’t lie like that, not if he wanted to keep the friend he’d almost lost for good. 

“When you were in the hospital wing, I didn’t really have anywhere to turn. All of the Ministry kids know just as much about the magic I used as you, and I ended up sitting next to Farley, the fifth-year Prefect,” Harry admitted, realizing that Daphne actually knew this person and was more than a little shocked by what he’d done. “When I left the hospital wing after checking on you again, three Slytherins threw me in a room with something called a boggart. Professor Quirrell got me out, but we don’t know who did it.”

"It was probably the other fifth year Prefect, Jeremiah Colt." There was a surprising and slightly flattering amount of fury simmering beneath her words. "And if I ever get my hands around his grubby little neck, I’ll strangle him until he forgets how to pronounce his precious uncle’s name.” 

Besides the fact that she was being rather vicious, which wasn’t a bad thing in his mind, he was floored that they'd somehow come to the same conclusion. The only reason he'd figured it out was because Quirrell gave him quite a few hints, and that didn’t count because his mentor was creepily in the know about everything. That she could figure it all out after knowing just a smidge of what’d happened to him meant that…

“Wait, wait, wait,” he said, waving a hand out in front of him. “I wasn’t the only one keeping secrets, was I!?”

The look on her face said everything he needed to know. “... I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, I think you do! Unbelievable! You knew all along about the stuff going on in our house, didn’t you? And you had the gall to go around acting like I was the only one being shady!”

“Okay, first of all, me not telling you about that was nothing like the secrets you kept from me. I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d want to compete for it, and half-bloods don’t last long here when they start getting in the way of the bigger families, especially not first-years. I didn’t expect you to accidentally convince people you were in with Farley. Why would she even let you sit next to her? She knows how that would look.”

“Well…” he whispered, subtly glancing to make sure none of the portraits were listening in. 

“Well, what?” she didn’t sound amused.

“Well, you know about the creature I can turn into?”

“Yes, I do.” 

“When I ended up in the hallway with Farley on Halloween night, I may have participated a little bit more in my own rescue than we suggested because I made her vow to keep it a secret.”

“Oh, Merlin,” she whispered, and Harry still didn’t like that phrase. It sounded purposefully cheesy to his uncultured, muggle-tainted ears. “You actually are in with Farley, aren’t you!?”

“Technically!” He threw his hands up in the air to dramatically shrug before letting them fall back to his sides. “I didn’t even know about any of that Slytherin shit because someone didn’t tell me about it! I just thought I was getting in with a Prefect!”

“But why do you care about ‘getting in’ with a Prefect anyway? Why did you even leave the Great Hall in the first place!?”

“Okay…” Good Lord, he was really doing this, wasn't he. “Okay, look, Dumbledore’s keeping something locked up in the third floor corridor; I’ve studied the door it’s locked behind, and I thought that getting someone on my side who had an in with the professors would be a good idea.”

“Harry, you don’t really think you can steal from Dumbledore in his own castle, right? You’d have to be suicidal!”

“Someone is already stealing from him, and all of them are playing around with us to do it.” Harry knew how opportunistic and clever Daphne was, and she was the one who wanted honesty. “Just think about it. Why else would somebody bring hounds like that into a school? I don’t have to steal it from Dumbledore; I just have to piggyback off of the guy who can.”

“Mother Magic, you’re actually serious. How do you even plan on doing any of this?”

That… was a very good question.

“I’m working on it, but I’ve already got an idea of what it is. I bugged Professor Snape’s office with a rune I made, and Dumbledore mentioned something about protecting a stone. I just need to figure out what stone it is.”

“I don’t even know where to start with all of this. You made your own rune? How did you figure out how to do that? Wait-” She stopped dead, her eyes widening as a slight haze that Harry identified as a tsunami of want worked its way through her. “Are you sure he mentioned a stone? Just a stone, nothing else?”

“Yeah, I’m certain.” He was, and he most definitely wasn’t going to look back through all of that to hear it again, so his current certainty would have to do.

“There are a few famous stones out there, but there’s only one that Dumbledore would have any personal experience with. Unless he decided to steal a different stone just to hide it away here, it’s probably the one belonging to his old mentor, Flamel, the Philosopher’s Stone.”

A grin split across his face, and he was suddenly very glad that he’d decided to give things straight after their reconciliation. The Philosopher’s Stone - it sounded fucking majestic. He didn't know why Quirrell wanted it so bad, but he already did too, and he'd only just heard its name

“What does it do?” Harry asked, and he would’ve been on the edge of his seat if he had a chair to sit in. 

“Nobody knows for certain except for the Flamels and maybe Dumbledore. They never published anything official, but there are tons of theories from people who have tried to accomplish the same thing before and failed. According to most, it's meant to act as a magical focus, like a wand. Apparently, it’s the only current way to cast permanent transfigurations. If you make something with the stone as your focus, it can literally break Gamp’s law. You could make food and eat it for real, or create an animal that actually lives.”

Harry was almost vibrating at the thought of it. For him specifically, that was practically a well of unlimited power. According to Quirrell, his natural stilt in favor of transfiguration could one day set him at the top of everyone, even masters like McGonagall and Dumbledore. If his transfigurations became permanent and real, then there was no telling what he could do.

“It’s not proven,” she continued slowly, almost as if she didn’t want to get her own hopes up. “B-but it’s said that if you use it right, you could permanently transfigure anything. Wounds, age, scars… curses.”

His heart almost stopped.

Her words echoed around his head as his eyes fell to his cloak, underneath of which sat what amounted to his uncle’s personal canvas. Everytime he took off his clothes, stepped into the shower, or looked into the mirror, it haunted him. Quirrell was helping him grow into something more than the shell he was, but this - this could erase everything they’d done to him in one fell swoop.

That was when his eyes went back up to Daphne. It could fix her too. He could tell how much she wanted it; he could see it in her eyes, and he understood. His desire to take whatever Dumbledore was hiding just grew into something more, something so much bigger than even himself. This was his key. He just needed to make sure that it was him who had it at the end of the school year. 

“But, Harry,” she almost whispered as her want slowly transformed into worry. “If Dumbledore really has the stone I think he does down there, he’s going to put anybody looking for it through hell. He’d rather us dead than in possession of that artifact.”

His eyes were stuck to her own as he considered what he was going to say. It was true that he could die; it was possibly even true that she could die too. At the same time, though, he felt so very alive. He’d never felt more free than he did in this moment, with a universe of opportunity sitting at his feet. He was so intensely sure that he wanted to be absolutely nowhere else right now that he almost didn’t want to ask what was on his mind, but he knew he had to all the same.

“Yeah, he probably would.” For once, he didn’t lie about his schemes or hide the risk behind it. He knew how much getting this decision meant to her, so he was giving it freely. If she was going to help him this time, it was going to be of her own free will, with all of the cards on the table. “Is it worth it to you anyway? Do you want it enough to go for it with me?”

He’d never seen more determination behind her pupils than he did after asking that question, and the girl had a startling amount of it already. She gave him a single nod that could move mountains with its strength, and a grin that transcended all facades appeared on his face. He didn’t know if she could tell the difference or how astronomically important those differences were, but he did, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it. That was why it was so unfortunate that, in the face of her agreement, he apparently didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. 

He just hoped everything didn’t crash and burn by the end of it.

A bead of sweat emerged from a pore on Harry's head, slid down past his brow, went over his cheek bone, and valiantly dangled from his chin before dropping to the training room floor. His green eyes were locked onto the dummy many yards away from him, the intent to destroy it and everything it stood for literally shining through the color of his irises. Marks and gashes littered the dummy as evidence of his relentless attacks. His strikes were getting more consistent, but he still couldn't make that decisive, finishing blow he needed so badly.

The whip was resting against the floor like a dog dozing after a day at the park. His wand was held loosely to his side, at an obtuse angle from his target, just like it was meant to be. Behind him, Quirrell paced a few steps, turned back around, and knelt so that he could gaze upon the target from the same angle as him. Harry's breaths were labored, but he kept them slow and deep to try and keep from ruining his aim. That was when a hand came around and rested on his forwardmost shoulder.

"You're hitting low, mostly around the stomach and lower chest." Yeah, he was thinking the same. "That would be a great target for a muggle, and you’re instinctively thinking like one because you grew up around them, but you're a wizard, Harry. You don't have to worry about missing, not like a normal whip, a gun, or even a curse. It's linked to your intent, so you don’t have to waste hits on a worse target just to make it more likely to land. Do not give it a choice; it hits where you want it to, nothing less. Focus on striking hard and striking fast. Allow your magic to decide how it will hit what you want it to, at least until you get a better handle on the spell."

Quirrell stepped back as he gave a firm nod in response, and he took a moment to get a grip on the way his magic was condensed into the weapon attached to his wand. Twisting his back foot against the ground, he torqued his body and swung his wand forward, dragging the whip with him. His focus on the dummy's head was so intense that he couldn't even bring himself to notice the way Quirrell was hovering behind him, waiting with a critical eye to see if he'd finally gotten it. 

The whip flashed across the room, and it reached for the dummy's head with demonic maliciousness, lopping off a chunk of its skull from about its ear to the center of its forehead. He looked back at his teacher with a grin, and Quirrell's was easily matching his own. So much practice had gone into controlling this damn thing, and at long last, he'd finally landed an instantly lethal blow. 

"Perfect," Quirrell told him almost gleefully. "Your focus was immaculate. Now, you must exert the same amount of control over your whip without putting so much focus into it. You can't fight properly if you need to tunnel in on your target every time you strike."

Harry gave a nod, and Quirrell repaired the dummy as he walked over to the corner of the room that Harry had recently dubbed the "break corner". He was exhausted. Thankfully, Quirrell apparently deemed his progress suitable for now as well because he walked over too after a few extra seconds. 

Quirrell conjured two chairs for them, and Harry collapsed in his cushioned seat without a word. Quirrell sat back on his own with one smooth, dignified motion. A twitch of his hand had a cup of water levitating into Harry's waiting hands, and he downed it without a second thought. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly once he was done and placed the cup on the floor next to his chair. 

The two of them sat in silence for a bit after that, presumably thinking about their own things. Harry wouldn't necessarily call it awkward because Quirrell was far too eloquent and purposeful to create such a thing. He might've decided it was tension, but that didn't quite fit it either. The man was intense, yes, and he could be scary too, but spending these weeks under his tutelage gave Harry a strange, tentative sort of comfortability with the person that both he and the stranger were reasonably so wary of. It was very odd for him to distrust someone so much while simultaneously putting such a large amount of trust into them. 

"Your friend got out of the hospital wing today, correct?" Quirrell asked out of nowhere, and Harry glanced up to meet his questioning gaze.

"Yeah," he responded. "She can't walk; she might not ever again, but she's out, and she has a floating chair too."

"Ah, yes, the Ministry's latest restrictions.” Quirrell’s distasteful sneer said more about what he thought about that than words ever could’ve. “You've been distracted. Will that finally stop with her release?"

"I don't know, maybe." He shrugged, not liking the slightly judgemental look on his mentor's face. "What, you've never been distracted like that before?"

Quirrell tilted his head to look down on him just a smidge, and he seemed particularly unimpressed. "No, I can't say I have."

"Really? You've never worried about anyone? You don't have even one friend?"

Something shifted in his mentor’s face at that question, something Harry couldn't identify. It seemed minutely softer, maybe, but it was too subtle for him to read. Harry wasn't sure what he was expecting his mentor to say or what he even wanted the answer to be in the first place. Quite frankly, he was expecting a firm dismissal. 

"... I suppose I've had some, after a sort," he slowly admitted after a great deal of consideration. "But none while I was your age, and I've certainly never crashed over them either."

"You did?"

"Yes," Quirrell paused, probably thinking about whether it was worth saying more. "... One of them was something like your little companion. 

"Really?"

"She was earnest, devoted, and devastatingly talented," he answered sort of wistfully. "She was passionate and smart, just like Miss Greengrass, though I don't think they would've gotten along. She reveled in acting however she pleased and despised forced decorum. She was unapologetically brazen despite her family's expectations and loved the fact that she was strong enough to get away with it."

"Was?" Harry asked, wondering if it was a bad idea to push for more. "What happened to her?"

"She got hurt following me; many did," he admitted, meeting Harry's eyes as understanding passed between them. Quirrell, even if it didn’t affect him in the exact same way, knew what he'd been going through while Daphne was in her medically induced coma. "But they won't be for much longer… not if I can help it."