บท 53: Chapter 50: What Cerberus?
For all intents and purposes, things had been going rather well for Harry Evans in recent times. Having received private instructions and promises of such from very talented individuals indeed, all evidence pointed to his future development as a very powerful and skilled wizard. However, a new moon followed shortly after his discussion with Flitwick, and with this moon had come a disaster which had shaken Hogwarts to the core.
"A moment of silence, please," Dumbledore bade into the Great Hall, of which the colourful house banners had for the day been replaced by black. Harry, alongside his neighbours at the Hufflepuff table, lowered his head and closed his eyes, following the headmaster's direction to think of the dead.
He hadn't known the family that had been ruthlessly slaughtered by the werewolf in Hogsmeade, he hadn't even ever been to Hogsmeade. But it was a tragic fate indeed to hear once a howl from inside one's house and then to watch your loved ones be ripped apart while you tried desperately to prevent the slaughter and fail.
By all accounts, those had been the last moments of Edgar Huntley, an American wizard who'd moved to Britain for his wife and his three children. It wasn't information that Harry had known before, but considering how tightly the Daily Prophet had bit into this story, it was hard to escape from the ever-escalating focus put on this rogue werewolf apparently intent on haunting the British isles and who was moving closer and closer to Hogwarts as it did so.
Sharing a disquieted look with Penny after the respectful silence ended, they both sat and stared listlessly at the food delivered upon the tables as dinner. Cedric made some abortive gestures to load a few cuts of veal onto his plate, mumbling about training but stopped once he remembered that training had been cancelled for the day.
Harry's eyes kept wandering to the second page of the Daily Prophet, one of many littering the table, open on various stages.
'Minister Crouch: "A new bill to more tightly constrain the movement of Britain's werewolf population is becoming more necessity than a possibility,"' the man said, before promising to catch the werewolf with the help of senior Aurors and the Department of Magical Creatures.
In a very callous manner, perhaps, Harry considered that he should pay attention to reveal his patronus in the newspaper when the moon cycle was further away from the full moon. If another attack were to occur, then surely his exposition would be found on one of the latter pages.
Disgusted with the direction his thoughts were heading, Harry abruptly stood up from the table. For all that, this werewolf business did not concern him and he did not want to get involved, and for all that he was perfectly happy to remain in the castle indefinitely, unlike those already complaining about the cancelled Hogsmeade trips, the discourse still worried him.
In a way he was beginning to understand the distaste the magical population had on lycanthropes. It was scary to consider the existence of a person, who might under the light of the full moon turn into a ravenous beast, intent only on ruining his fellows and devouring their flesh.
"You coming?" he muttered to Penny, who was staring listlessly into her silver plate, seemingly gazing at her reflection.
"Dinner?" she queried weakly.
"Do you have an appetite?" Harry retorted, at which the girl nodded and stood up.
"Cedric?" Harry asked, but the boy preempted the question by beginning to force food into his mouth in a mechanical and unnatural manner more befitting a robot.
"The atmosphere is like a funeral, and it is a funeral. I can't believe they still haven't caught the beast," Harry muttered to Penny as they left the great hall.
"It's not as easy as it seems," the girl replied sullenly. "You can't detect a werewolf once it reverts back to a human. It could be anyone. This whole thing feels like a children's story. Like one big warning not to open the door to anyone on the full moon, or even to leave the house."
"It makes me worried about my family, despite the fact that they're all the way south in London and knowing they're more likely to die in a car crash," Harry admitted.
"This is horrible, I don't have the words," Penny murmured and they aptly stopped speaking. Her great sense of empathy now being a detriment as everyone around them grieved and suffered.
"We can only distract ourselves and wait for this to be over. We're only second-years. There's literally nothing we can do."
"You said you wanted to try to brew some potions," Penny suggested lethargically. "I thought you didn't want to anymore. Now that your grade is a comfortable A in the subject."
"Not much to write home about, but yes, there is some stuff I want to brew," Harry muttered. The both of them silently struck the way to the room in which Penny, currently, was mostly doing her potion experiments and whatnot. For all that the castle was cut of the same stone everywhere, it was always possible to orient oneself on the paintings.
For example, Harry knew the exact position of the painting of a snake devouring the world which was hanging on one of the walls they passed, and through this knowledge, he could find his way to where he needed to go.
"The Draught of the Living Dead is supposed to be difficult," Penny worried as they walked.
"The instructions passed on by the half-blood prince should be helpful," Harry reassured her. "I'll do the Wiggenweld then, and help you in the incubation phases."
They walked in silence after that, knowing that the requisite ingredients had already been gathered with the assistance of Slughorn. Harry was curious about the fact that Penny didn't at all seem interested in why he wanted to brew again, after so long a hiatus, but decided that it was best not to ask. It was perhaps due to the subduedness of their steps, in light of recent events, that they managed to sneak up on a conversation around the corner, on the fourth floor, without the speakers having noticed their approach.
"I told you I'd find some sort of work in Britain if only you didn't!" a male voice exclaimed.
"It's the only thing I ever wanted to do! Why do I have to sacrifice my dream, when it doesn't even involve having to leave the country!" a female voice, that of Tonks, responded.
"Because I want us to be alive. Aurors are currently out and about seeking deadly beasts. Professor Potter looks like he hasn't slept in days," the other voice replied, more calmly. Not having talked to the boy much, Harry still suspected it belonged to Charlie Weasley, Tonk's current boyfriend.
"Someone has to do it," Tonks said.
"Why you, you're not Potter or Black, you might-"
"So I'm not good enough, is that it!?" Tonks screamed. "Why would I be? Untalented clumsy Tonks, she'd trip right into a werewolf's mouth if you let her," she said angrily.
"I didn't mean to-," Charlie began, but was cut off again.
"I don't care what you meant," Tonks sobbed. The conversation stopped before quick footsteps left the corner at which the conversation had occurred behind.
"Wait!" Charlie shouted, before similarly running off.
Harry shared an awkward glance with Penny.
"Young love, am I right?" he asked, as they waited for the footsteps to disappear completely.
"Well, I hope whoever I end up dating supports my dreams. Being a Potions Mistress is also dangerous," Penny muttered with a red face as they started walking again.
"There's no point to life if you're not chasing your dreams. Just a bunch of regrets and laments," Harry said. He thought about how the only years of his life that he'd ever truly regretted, had been those he'd spent not pursuing a goal close to his heart. So introspective was he, that he did not notice the hopeful look Penny gave him after he uttered those words.
"What's your dream then?" the girl asked eventually, as they entered the room that she used for her brewing.
Harry considered while he put down his satchel. He hadn't really thought much about what dream he had in this world, but beyond simply surviving the answer was actually quite clear. Magic was wonderful and the one thing he didn't think he could ever live without again. It brought immediate gratification to pursuits related to its discovery and strengthening, which was a rare pleasure indeed when one was doing something actually meaningful.
"Magic is my dream. I want to continue exploring it for the rest of my life," he answered.
"A family?" Penny asked, as she set up her workplace, and made an additional one for Harry to make his potion in.
Harry had indeed wanted a family, back in his old life. Now, he wasn't so sure anymore. It wasn't something he wanted to think about. He wasn't even sure if he ever wanted to be in a long-term committed relationship again.
"I'm twelve, Penny. I have a family," he thus answered. "You?"
"I'm thirteen already," she said, avoiding the topic. They put the personal matters aside and started working. Penny on the draught of the living dead, which was a potion that could put whoever drank it into an eternal sleep. It was a poison, essentially, and it would do Harry good to try and sense it in contrast to the regenerative draught he was creating. He wanted to see if he could distinguish the two brews into good and bad, dark and light, essentially. His time frame for clearing the Room of Requirement remained tight. He wanted to help his friends by next year, use it to further themselves, like he had. Also, he wanted to off-load the responsibility of his meta-knowledge, and for that, he needed the Diadem Horcrux, if it did indeed exist in this world. He would start with Potions, but hopefully, by the end of the year, he could manage what he needed to do.
They brewed in silence for a while, Penny reading extensively from her notes and those of the half-blood prince, while Harry stubbornly stuck to the instructions of the textbook. He'd been improving his brewing recently, to acceptable levels, but every time he went off script it just messed him up further, even if it had technically been supposed to help the potion be more potent.
"Book says I can test potency by dropping in a leaf," Penny murmured at some point.
Harry dropped the Murlock Sap into his cauldron unceremoniously, letting the disgusting green sludge sink to the bottom of the cauldron. Then he turned off the flame and walked over to the window of the room that was already open. They were quite high up in the castle, but he thought it would be possible, he mused as he looked out the window and stretched out his right arm, wand in hand, to point at the forbidden forest.
"What are you doing?" Penny asked in a worried tone and came over to hold onto Harry by the robes, seemingly afraid that he would plummet to his death.
"Getting you a leaf," Harry replied, before concentrating on the spell he wanted to cast. "Accio leaf," he cast and looked expectantly at the big green blot that was the forest. Naturally, a leaf would have been too small and too green to really see against such a background at first, so he patiently waited. But it never arrived.
He turned his head to Penny, "I don't think-," he started to say, before something flew violently into his ear, causing him to fall into the room, tumbling to the floor in a pile with the other Hufflepuff. Lying thus atop Penny, looking her in the eyes as he did so, while she struggled for breath, he plucked the mysterious object out of his ear and held it up for both of them to see.
"It worked," he exclaimed happily as he waved around the oak leaf.
"Get off," Penny forced out, tears coming to her eyes as she tried to shove him off her.
Noticing the compromising position they were in, Harry rolled to the side and handed the leaf to Penny. "Sorry about that," he said.
She looked at him warily as she backed off towards her simmering cauldron filled with pink liquid. "Don't worry about it," she muttered, before curiously dropping the leaf into her potion. They both watched as it landed for a second on the surface before it disintegrated into little flakes which drifted upwards alongside the fumes of the potion.
"Maybe you should try to advance a year in Potions, that was a sixth-year brew," Harry mused.
Penny blushed and glanced at his potion, which had finished dissolving the sap and now rested at an acceptable level of light green. Muddy green, in this case. "You also did well," she praised.
Harry rolled his eyes and they both bottled their potions, getting about a dozen vials of each. "No, really," he insisted.
"It's mostly due to the half-blood prince, he inspired me to start to make changes to the process and to think more critically about the instructions," she deflected. "It's also because of you, your work ethic rubbed off on me. I didn't even realise that you could spend so much of your free time on extra-curricular projects and have so much fun doing it until I saw you go through it."
"Well, most spells I've learned have also been in thanks to the person who created them. Does show-casing those spells to advance grades make me undeserving somehow?" Harry teased.
"What would I even need to do to advance?" Penn asked, seemingly opening up to the idea.
"Well, in my experience you'd need to be able to do this year's curriculum to an Outstanding level, next year's to a level that Exceeds Expectations and then showcase two or three things completely beyond your years, such as the Drought of the Living Dead, or any other NEWT-level potion," Harry said.
Penny blinked in surprise. "That doesn't sound that hard," she exclaimed. "I can already do most of that."
Harry could only shrug. "It isn't that hard. I mean, look at it this way. If you count classes plus homework, we spend about four hours every week on Potions. That means that in a school year, we work on the subject for about 120 hours. You, I know, do at least an additional nine hours of experimentation a week. Essentially, you've had as much practice in making potions as a fourth-year already."
"I also make them at home," Penny mused.
"It would probably help you get a good apprenticeship if you manage to skip a class."
"You're right, I'll think about it. I don't really mind brewing a potion I already know in class since it allows me to experiment on it, but maybe it would be a good idea," she said. Then she turned her attention to their collection of vials.
"Now. Wanna tell me what you want with these potions?" she asked.
Harry shrugged and stepped up to the table with the vials. He closed his eyes and hovered a hand over the two different sets of potions. He grinned as he felt a small difference in the magic between the two. One was safe, the other one wasn't. It made sense that his ability distinguished the two sets by safety, that was what he was mostly concerned about, after all.
"Well, it's always good to have some healing potions on hand," Harry said. "And if we ever have to break into a corridor guarded by a Cerberus, I think we should be able to make it fall asleep by giving it a steak laced with the drought of the living dead. In case the music doesn't work," he said as he took the vials and put them into his satchel, leaving Penny some of them as well.
"Harry, what Cerberus?" the girl asked, clear exasperation in her tone.
Harry only laughed and made to leave the room. "You should practise your potions, miss overachiever," he said.
"Harry! What Cerberus?" Penny screamed after him as he exited the room and shut the door.
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