Night, silence, stillness. I was on my evening patrol again, making my rounds through the corridors of Hogwarts. I encountered Aurors a couple of times, but they were under concealment charms and by rights I shouldn't have been able to see them — so I paid them no attention. Not that I actually saw them, strictly speaking. I sensed them.
As the hour drew close to midnight — or rather, it was already nearly midnight — the spider in the Room of Requirement began actively transmitting both image and sound. Settling onto a windowsill in the moonlight, I decided to give my full attention to what was happening. It wasn't strictly necessary for me to withdraw from my surroundings in order to receive a spider's feed, but it was easier that way.
Moving through the heaps of junk, illuminating their path with Lumos at the tips of their wands, were Harry and Ron.
Potter was holding a bundle of silvery fabric, and Weasley was simply following his friend — looking around with a mixture of enthusiasm and mild disgust at the dust and grime. The pair of adventurers eventually reached the bust, its pedestal almost entirely submerged in surrounding rubbish.
— "Harry, look," — Ron pointed at the diadem crowning the bust's head. — "Is that it?"
— "Looks like it," — Potter nodded and stepped forward boldly, examining it closely. — "Dobby was right. I'll have to thank him somehow."
— "Nah, he's fine," — Ron wasn't convinced. — "Honestly, between you and me, he's a bit odd."
— "He's perfectly normal, stop talking rubbish. Did you bring it?"
— "What?"
— "Ron, did you bring the special bag?"
— "Er..." — Ron scratched his ginger head, and in the bluish light of the Lumos spells it looked, for some reason, especially funny. — "Sorry, mate. But you woke me up so suddenly..."
— "McGonagall was quite clear — don't touch the diadem with bare hands, and if we find it, use the specially charmed bag. We agreed last night that you'd have it."
— "Yeah, well. It happens."
— "So what do we do now?" — Potter looked perplexed.
— "Let's just grab it and carry it to McGonagall, what's the big deal?"
— "No," — Potter appeared to take this rather seriously. — "McGonagall said the diadem could be extremely dangerous and categorically forbade touching it with bare hands. Don't forget, Ron — Voldemort had a hand in it."
— "What if one of us goes back to our room, gets the bag, and comes back? Or goes straight to McGonagall..."
— "No, we're definitely not going to McGonagall," — Potter shook his head. — "We'd have to show her the Room of Requirement. And you know how she feels about rules."
— "Yeah, just like Hermione."
— "Exactly. And a room like this breaks every rule going. So one of us goes back. You or me?"
— "I'll go. It's not exactly comfortable in here," — Ron looked around.
The Lumos light picked out the silhouettes of junk-mountains from the darkness, with no end to the room visible in any direction, and someone could have appeared from virtually any side. Not the most comfortable atmosphere — I understood the feeling.
— "Here," — Potter held out the silvery bundle to Weasley, who accepted it with some relief. — "You'll want this."
— "Right. I'm off then..."
The bundle turned out to be an Invisibility Cloak — and quite a quality one, at that. Moody's artificial-eye charm couldn't see through it perfectly; the silhouette appeared ghostly and semi-transparent. Ron, having thrown on the cloak, left the Room of Requirement at pace, and Potter sank down beside the bust with a rather dejected air.
He sat like that for five minutes or so. Then, unexpectedly — perhaps even for himself — Potter gave a sudden involuntary twitch of his head to one side, screwed up his face, and pressed his hand to his scar.
— "Tch..." — he hissed in pain. — "Again. What does Voldemort want now."
Hm. What did the Dark Lord have to do with it? Pain in Potter's scar... The scar, according to legend, had been left by Voldemort, who then died from a rebounding Avada. It sounded absurd, but this was magic — anything was possible here. Who knew what the boy's parents had done to protect him. All of it was interesting. I'd need to ask Hermione about it — she'd been close friends with them for long enough. Rather exclusively, if the talk of other students was to be believed — those two and no one else. If the scar problem — and he was clearly involved in it somehow — wasn't new, then Hermione would have some thoughts on the matter. The whole business of being "the Chosen One," the tales of England's hero, and now Horcruxes, scars, pain — and beyond all that, Potter was quite certain that the Dark Lord was restless. One had to hope the boy didn't turn out to be a time bomb in a school full of children.
Potter suffered for another minute or two, and then it passed. He might yet become the first "unprecedented case" in my medical practice. Except that I didn't even know the nature of his condition — or whether he needed help at all. Treating someone against their will... no, I had no appetite for that particular pleasure.
With nothing else to do, Potter began picking through the junk lying nearby, but like me, he found precisely nothing worthy of attention.
The solitude was ended by Weasley's sudden reappearance. Sudden for Potter, at least — not for me. The spider had been able to make out the ginger-haired figure under the cloak, if imperfectly.
— "Got it!" — Ron came over to Harry and held out the bag. — "The lads had apparently been meaning to nick it for their own purposes."
— "Good," — Potter drew his wand and levitated the diadem into the bag with a simple charm.
A moment later the bag was tied shut.
— "What now?" — Ron asked, checking that the knot was secure. — "Straight to McGonagall?"
— "And get a telling-off for wandering around at night?"
— "We're not wandering around for a laugh, mate. We were carrying out an important assignment — one she gave us herself, as it happens. Come on, let's go and hand it over and get at least that off our plate."
— "Didn't you want to sleep?"
— "I still do. And the sooner we get this done, the sooner I can go and have some decent dream."
— "Fair enough," — Potter nodded, and they moved off towards the exit from the Room of Requirement. — "I bet you'll be a super-Keeper in it, winning the House Cup, all the girls adoring you, and as a reward for your many achievements you'll receive a full thousand Galleons."
— "Oi, how did you guess?"
— "We looked in the mirror together, remember?"
— "True... You think my dreams haven't changed since then? They've changed quite a bit actually! These days I dream about..."
— "Go on then..."
The boys left the magical room, and silence settled over it once again.
Rising from the windowsill, I set off along the route from the Chamber of Secrets to the Headmistress's office, placing one of the little spiders on my shoulder as a "third eye" — that way I wouldn't lose track of these two. Why bother? I simply wanted to satisfy myself that they wouldn't find any trouble to get into and would deliver the diadem safely to McGonagall.
I eventually crossed paths with them in the Main Tower, on the stairs. They were walking together, both squeezed under the cloak, lighting their way with Lumos spells. An odd effect, incidentally — the light from the Lumos itself was invisible, yet the boys were holding their wands exactly as one does when using that particular spell. Another minor magical puzzle, connected to the cloak specifically and to magic in general.
They couldn't see me, and it seemed they weren't trying particularly hard to detect any possible ambushes or figures under concealment charms — not a single Homenum Revelio, nor any other charm from the Revelio family that might reveal "something."
At one point, all four of us converged in the same spot. Converged, and passed one another. An Auror under concealment charms — invisible. The boys under the cloak — invisible. Myself under an assortment of charms — completely undetectable. The result was a rather absurd tableau: four people passing one another in an empty corridor in complete silence, and only I was aware of it. One was hunting for rule-breakers; two were in the act of breaking rules whilst trying not to get caught; and the fourth was myself — and I couldn't quite formulate what I was doing there at all. This wasn't a school. It was a theatre of the absurd.
Potter and Weasley reached the Headmistress's office without incident — or rather, the alcove in the wall where a stone gargoyle stood guard over the passage.
— "Bergamot tart," — came Potter's voice.
The gargoyle reacted with something that looked almost like surprise. Nevertheless, despite detecting no one, it was obliged to respond to the correct password. This, incidentally, was a special password that McGonagall had given me so that I could deliver the diadem to her at any hour, should I find it. It appeared the same arrangement applied to Potter.
The boys headed up the spiral staircase, and I simply sent a spider after them.
In the Headmistress's office, McGonagall was already waiting — a thick, tightly-wrapped robe thrown over whatever she had been wearing beneath it. The Headmistress had clearly been asleep, or at least preparing for it. There was a brief exchange, the boys handed McGonagall the bag with the diadem, she inspected it, satisfied herself on whatever point she had in mind, and sent the boys off to do what any decent student ought to be doing at that hour — sleeping.
With a clear conscience, I turned and made my way briskly back towards the common room. Time for sleep. Tomorrow was the first exam — nothing especially demanding, but still. Perhaps tomorrow Delacour would write and arrange the next meeting between the Doctor and Dumbledore. Or perhaps not. Dumbledore was clearly the sort who preferred to work things out with his own mind rather than rely on others, and diagnosis and examination were precisely the sort of mental work that suited him.
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