Chapter 13: The Curse

Harry waved goodbye to his family from the bright red Hogwarts Express. They'd spent a nice week together after New Year's, in which Harry had made up for his melancholy in the first week of Christmas.

Oddly enough, no matter how much he enjoyed his academic and magical endeavours at Hogwarts and how much he loved his relative independence there, he was already looking forward to summer. He'd finally managed to convince his uncle to go to France and Harry hoped to enjoy some good food and a non-frigid sea for once.

"Wotcher, kiddo," someone said from behind him and Harry turned around from his family to look at the pink-haired girl greeting him from the inside of a compartment filled with upperclassmen.

"I see you're wearing my gift," Harry said instead of a greeting as he stepped forward to lean on the compartment door.

Tonks rolled her eyes and changed her hair to the colour blue, proving that she was not in fact wearing a wig. "I see you're not wearing mine," she said, causing Harry to laugh.

"My hair is so red I should have been sorted into Gryffindor. If I came onto the train with a blue wig people wouldn't have recognized me."

"Better in Hufflepuff I say, too much drama elsewhere!" An older boy.

"I'm pretty sure Evans is earning twice as many points as all the first-years in Hogwarts combined, I for one welcome our lost Gryff," a brunette with a prefects badge said, causing Harry to roll his eyes.

"I see, that's all I am to you then, a sack of house-points," he sniffed. Tonks elbowed the prefect.

"Look what you did, you made him cry!" she stage-whispered.

Harry twitched his finger and made a few water drops condense beneath his eyes. He'd practised his sorcery during the break, having figured out that it didn't trigger the trance. He'd done it far out of civilization though, so he didn't know how it worked closer to muggles. "I'm so hurt," he moaned and buried his head in his hands, "the only thing that could alleviate my pain…" he sniffled and broke off.

"What would alleviate your pain?" One of the boys said in a confused tone, as if unsure if Harry was acting or not.

"Only one thing could release me from this suffering…" Harry moaned and created more water that then spilt out from between his hands and dripped on the floor.

"What the he- '' The prefect muttered before being interrupted by Tonks.

"Hells, Harry, what's wrong!" Tonks shouted and shook him by the shoulder.

Harry put away his arms and looked up at the compartment with a literally watery face. "The only thing that would balm the wound you have inflicted on my heart would be touching a nice pair of honkers," he said softly while throwing a far-away look into the compartment window, idly noting that the train had started moving.

"You little prat!" Tonks cursed as her hand quickly transitioned from rubbing his shoulder to smacking the back of his head. The rest of the compartment burst into laughter as the prefect blushed and Tonks theatrically pushed Harry out into the corridor. "I swear I have no idea who that was," she tried to convince her laughing friends.

Harry meanwhile, uncaring for the chaos he'd caused, ran away in the search for Cedric and Penny.

It wasn't even a minute later that he was sidling up to his two friends, along with some other first-year Hufflepuffs as they recounted what they'd done over the Christmas holidays.

"I swear Harry here almost gave my mum a heart attack and almost got my dad killed," Cedric was saying as Harry finished sitting down, "he sent this box of muggle divination cookies and my dad opened one that told him that the love of his life might be sitting closer than he thought. The only problem was that he was on the couch with my mom's sister who's also married with kids," the boy said.

Everyone laughed, "Sorry about that, I guess." Harry said and shrugged.

"They're not real divination obviously, just thought it would be funny."

Cedric looked appalled. "Does that mean I won't be getting what my heart desires this February?" he asked.

"Don't worry Cedric, I'll send you a Valentine's card," one of the other boys jeered, causing everyone to laugh again.

It was a fun, if slightly immature ride to Hogwarts.

-/-

"The step-by-step intent looks good, if restrictive," Flitwick commented from his side of the table as he read through the new amendment to Harry's spell.

"If I'm not going to be specifying intent then a single uninflected word is the best choice. It might even limit the spell enough for its cost to become affordable." Harry said, causing Flitwick to hum, before pulling out a small piece of parchment and pushing it over the table to his pupil.

"I had an interesting thought, actually, during the break. It's a bit advanced, but maybe it could be incorporated into the spell even without full understanding," he began as he wrote something on the parchment from the other side of the table, upside down. 'Sympathetic properties,' Harry read.

"Have you heard about them?" Flitwick asked, to which Harry slowly nodded.

"To a very limited extent, I don't think I really have much to say on the topic," he admitted, at which Flitwick simply laughed.

"You shouldn't worry about that, you'd learn it in the context of transfiguration, maybe in your sixth year? I don't remember. There is some dark magic, very dark magic that uses it, so you might also look at that during your DADA courses one day. It's not introduced in charms at Hogwarts at all, however, not because it's not interesting, but because it's incredibly niche. Why don't you tell me what you know, or what you think you know, and then we can work from there."

Harry gathered his thoughts for a second. "Sympathetic properties are properties that make magic easier in cases in which they are present. For example, it's easier to switch two objects with the switching spell if they share some attributes, like size, or shape," he said, before shaking his head, "that's all I know."

"It's not wrong, just very incomplete," Flitwick muttered as he leaned back. "Let me explain, sympathetic property is a term to describe the things that two objects have in common. Now, here, with objects, I simply mean the goals of a spell. The spells that require two entities as a part of their fundamental effect are called transitive spells, an example is the switching spell. You can't switch something with nothing, thus casting a switching spell at a target requires you to focus on a second one as well. Sympathetic properties in this case simply mean that it will be easier to switch a wooden spoon with another wooden spoon than with a fork," Flitwick said as Harry nodded along, "The concept is used, to be perfectly frank, mostly in unsavoury magic. Some curses for example necessitate creating a doll with the real body parts of the intended victim. The sympathetic properties of the blood, the skin, or the hair make the spell work. These are the curses that curse-breakers at the ministry often work on with the Aurors, whereas Gringotts curse-breaks focus on buildings magically protected against intruders."

"Are non-material properties also important?" Harry asked, "For example a wooden spoon made by a male hermit living on top of a mountain for fun differing slightly in its sympathetic properties from a wooden spoon made by a city-dweller because they need to eat."

Flitwick beamed and nodded. "Unimportant for the most part, but yes, it does matter," he said, before pointing at the parchment that he'd given Harry. "That's why I was thinking that writing down the word one intends to search for with your spell might help. Previously we were going off the assumption that the spell could have two stages. Visualisation of the word leads to finding words written similarly to one's imagination. Then, after some practice, blurry visualisation might help us find the same word, even if written a bit differently, writing the word down ad-"

"adds another stage, therefore flattening the learning curve. A pre-visualization stage," Harry muttered, cutting the professor off.

Flitwick clapped happily, "Exactly, and seeing as you will be writing the word down on a piece of parchment, as most words that you will be searching for have been in the past. It should create a small amount of sympathetic resonance which might help the spell along!" He explained.

"Thank you, Professor Flitwick," Harry said, "this addition was very astute."

Flitwick blushed, glancing down at the spell proposal and seemed a bit jittery. "Why don't you try it?" The man said suggestively.

Harry blinked and looked up from where he had been stuck in thought. "Right now?" Harry asked dubiously, looking around the cluttered office. "Shouldn't we do it in an empty room with a single book so as not to put anything at risk?"

Flitwick's shoulders sagged, "You've been working on this thing for almost half a year, you introduced it to me almost a month ago," he whined.

Harry laughed. "Well then, it shouldn't be a problem to wait a bit more. How about trying the spell in two weeks, it will give me the time to condense the spell formula with the sympathetic properties in mind and recalculate everything. Then, you can bring a book I don't know and we will try it out in an empty room somewhere," he suggested, causing Flitwick to moan.

"All right, all right. It should be me advocating for more thoroughness, but it's a new spell! So exciting, I haven't made one since my duelling days!"

"You duelled professor?" Harry asked, surprised at the revelation that the short and kind old man had even stepped foot into what was essentially the wizarding version of boxing.

"Bah, so long ago nobody even remembers apparently. I was even the world champion at some point," Flitwick boasted.

"That's incredible!" Harry complimented with bright eyes. Being world-class in anything was an extremely difficult task, let alone becoming a world champion. "Maybe you can tell me more about it after we're done with this extracurricular project?" He asked, at which Flitwick nodded, seeming pleased with himself. Harry wondered for a moment if we had just signed up to be regaled with the tales of an old man's glory days, but decided that it was worth it for all the help he was getting.

"Thank you, thank you. Now, next Charms lesson we will be covering the animation charm, something you probably already practised and, dare I say, mastered, I assume?" Flitwick asked while peering at Harry over the rim of his glasses with his pale blue eyes.

Harry broke eye contact in case the man was attempting Legilimency and nodded, pulling out his wand and pointing it at an uneaten old orange on the professor's desk. "Animato," he enunciated and watched as the orange began at first rocking in place before breaking into a rhythmic back and forth that made it seem like it was banging its head at a metal concert.

Flitwick hummed and poked at the orange with his wand, making the movements stop, before simply vanishing the thing with a low mutter Harry couldn't quite get.

"Five points for Hufflepuff," Flitwick said, "seeing as you already mastered the charm I want to give you something else to work on," he said and pushed a small booklet over the table.

Curiously picking it up Harry saw that it was just 15 pages long. The title was 'Charms with sympathetic properties', flipping through it he saw that the booklet consisted of three spells. All of their arithmetic equations were written out. There were even personalised tips on how to cast them. Going back to the front, past an introduction of what they'd already discussed, Harry saw that the booklet had no author. He looked up with wide eyes. "Did you write this yourself professor?" he asked, surprised that the man would put in so much effort for him. Being a professor was already a time-intensive job.

Flitwick nodded. "Considering the path you are embarking on at the ripe age of eleven, I thought it was only fair to help as much as I can. Practise the first spell of the booklet and tell me once you've mastered it. It should give you an idea of sympathetic properties, hopefully to the point that you'll be able to apply it when we finally cast your creation sometime soon," he said, before glancing to the left at the small raven-shaped clock on his desk.

"My goodness, it's late." The man sighed. "So much to do yet so little time, huh, Harry?" he quipped before waving the boy off with a contemplative look on his face. "Go now, before you start infringing on curfew," he said and Harry took it as the dismissal that it was.

"Goodnight professor," he said and exited the door, clutching the booklet in his hands. He looked at it in the flickering torchlight of the grey corridor. He smirked ruefully. "He probably thinks I'm some sort of special talent. How funny that through this belief, I am getting access to private tutoring from a master and personalised tasks, which will actually push me ahead of the curve."

He walked like that for a bit, occasionally chuckling at his own fraudulence, before eventually remembering that there was something he could practise as he walked. Ejecting his wand from his wand holster he brought it up to tap himself on the head. "Sum Invisibilis", he incanted and felt a cold and sticky sensation run down his head.

Looking down at his arm and at the satchel he was carrying he saw that his colours now blended in with the surroundings to a certain extent. Not perfect by any means, not even close to real invisible.

Essentially speaking the spell was at Level 13/100. But he was greyish and dark and as long as he remained in the shadows he would stay unseen. It was something that probably any child could muster if they had the willpower and learning habits of an average adult.

"Genius indeed," he snorted, tilting his head at the echo the words produced and mentally noted down to also learn a sound-cancelling charm to combine with the disillusionment one. It was because of this that he was almost distracted enough to not notice the thin silhouette through the window, robes aflutter, walking confidently in the direction of the forbidden forest. He recognized the figure from how often he saw it skulking into the restricted section of the library. It was Professor Twix.