Chapter 24: The curse 3

If Harry thought that his headache after the Occlumency practice had been bad… Well, it was nothing in comparison to the gigantic pounding that his grey matter was taking right now. Sledgehammers knocking on his skull from the inside out was what woke Harry up from a comparably pleasant unconsciousness. He clearly opened his eyes, which were at a height level with a dusty floor and an abandoned book titled 'Flaying Your Foes.' Charming, he thought and failed at repressing a groan.

"Shut up, Evans, I'm almost in," a female voice hissed and Harry tried to right himself up to see where it was coming from, only to notice that he couldn't move from the spot. He spun his eyes as far up and to the right, where the voice had come from, as he could, but the only thing he could see was the lower end of a grey robe.

He nonetheless recognized where he was. It was the restricted section and if his guess was any good, he was at the same corner that he'd caught Twix in the last time he'd had the privilege of visiting the library with the woman.

"I'll show them," the crazy bitch murmured as a low buzzing of different frequencies filled the air. Harry recognized the sounds that different spells were wont to emit when clashing with other magic. "I'll be the first," The woman muttered and Harry began fearing for his life. What the fuck was this woman trying to do? He thought sluggishly through his headache. It was only after he finished formulating the thought that he realised he'd spoken aloud.

The feet of the former professor spun to him and he heard the woman stop casting. "I will prove," Twix hissed, "that I am the best curse-breaker in Britain. Those goblin brownnosing Gringotts serfs are nothing. I will dissolve the curse left by You-Know-Who, and then nobody will have the option of denying my brilliance," she finished, making Harry want to start crying.

What kind of fucking drugs was this bitch on? he wondered. For real this time. Why was she looking for the DADA curse in the library? She was completely off track, the curse was obviously bound to the diadem Horcrux in the Room of Requirements. He obviously wasn't going to tell her that, because the last thing the world needed was Twix getting possessed by Voldemort. But still, how did she come to the restricted section? "But why take me with you?" Harry asked weakly. "I can't imagine you need my help, I'm just a first-year," he said, causing Twix to snort disdainfully.

"Of course I don't need your help, I just need a hostage in case the professors come before I can clear my name with my deeds. Now be quiet and don't disturb me," she said threateningly and turned back around. Harry wiggled his toes, something he hadn't been able to do before. Good, his magic was fighting against what was probably the petrification curse.

"Alright, I'll be as quiet as a mouse and stay here in case you need me," Harry said as he started actively fighting against his paralysis by letting magic course through his body.

"Shut up!" Twix screamed and her legs moved erratically, as if she was repressing an urge to kick him. Harry wisely decided to shut up. Through the pain in his head, he started working completely and utterly against his restraints and hoped that he would be done fast enough to stun the woman before she opened whatever she was looking for. Because, while she hadn't necessarily found a Horcrux, which would have been very bad news, she had very likely found something. Probably not something nice which would pat them on the back and send them on their way with some lollipops either.

"Yes," Twix suddenly hissed and Harry heard a creaking and a squeaking as if someone was dragging a bookshelf across the floor. Fuck, Harry thought, still not done with the hex restricting his movement, but he was able to move enough to slightly tilt his head and to see what was going on. He didn't enjoy what he saw, a dark library filled with books on darker magics, in which a wall was slowly being pushed aside to reveal a dark chamber behind it. Twix, the stick-like figure representing insanity in this whole catastrophe of a play, with her unkempt hair and ragged grey robe, didn't at all add the sense of security that perhaps any other professor would have.

Although she wasn't really a professor anymore either. Harry's thought process was suddenly interrupted by a new voice breaking the ominous quiet.

"Alexandra." It began. "You were always a disappointment, I see that not much has changed," a deep baritone said from within the revealed chamber, out of which stepped a portly man with a bald head and an upwards pointed moustache. He looked at Twix with a disappointed gaze and the woman seemed unsure for the first time in this whole adventure. She looked to the left and to the right, her beak-like nose offering an interesting profile to Harry, who was still lying on the floor.

"Fa-father?" Twix asked meekly and started shaking slightly, something that Harry only noticed because he was right behind her.

The portly man shook his head and his beefy arms travelled down his form, which Harry just noticed was garbed in muggle attire. The man slowly undid his studded belt and pulled it out from its fastenings. "I wish I wasn't, Alex, I really wish I wasn't. You know that and you also know what this means."

Twix took a slow step back as the man advanced and as she did she opened enough of an angle for Harry to see that behind the woman's father, there was another, identical figure and behind it, another. All three of them had their belts in their hands and were slowly approaching, slapping them onto the palms of their hands.

"It's boggarts, cast a riddikulus!" Harry shouted, after analysing the situation. Twix needed to make a stand here, or she'd trip over his still form and run away, leaving him to the tender mercy of three non-beings. Harry didn't know what boggarts did to their incapacitated victims and he didn't really want to find out.

Thankfully his reminder was enough to get Twix out of her funk and the woman raised her wand threateningly at the creatures. "Laugh, Evans," she ordered before casting the spell, in a suddenly angry voice, "Riddikulus!" A bright light filled the restricted section and the closest boggart turned into what Harry assumed was still Twix's father, just that he was much older now. A man on the verge of death in a wheelchair and with an IV-Drip connected to his frail and bony arm, which wasn't holding a belt anymore, but a flower.

"Where are you, Mary? I can't see you," the old man croaked miserably and looked around. Harry noted that the pupils of the man were glassed over and that he was blind. Twix started laughing, the sound was reminiscent of its stereotype and Harry wished for nothing more than to be far, far away from this place and this situation. The boggart started vibrating in tune with the laughter and the shape of the old man became more panicked. It started twitching in its wheelchair and rolling its eyes, foam building at its mouth and blood running out of the insertion point of the IV drip. Twix's laughter became louder and Harry joined in as tears fell from his eyes and onto the dusty floor.

The boggart popped and disappeared, the other two thankfully going along with it instead of likely suffering the same fate. The corridor was silent, Twix had stopped laughing, and Harry was fighting against the mystical bindings burdening him. The chamber beckoned with a soft blue light and Harry glared at Twix with pity and anger. The woman turned around and re-cast her bindings at Harry silently before levitating him up and beginning to walk towards the blue light.

Harry's struggles reset and became more frantic than before. He pushed his magic against the bindings, tried casting a finite wandlessly, failed, promised to himself that he'd practise it if he got out alive, and struggled physically. "Why are you taking me there, it's dangerous," he complained through gritted teeth. Twix only laughed at his question.

"A second set of eyes is good, also, I can't have you running away now, can I?" she said without turning her head and entered the chamber, Harry's floating stiff body following closely behind. She levitated the boy into a corner and approached a blue crystal floating in the middle of the otherwise empty hexagonal room.

Harry bit back a scream as the woman dropped him onto the floor and an ache in his back popped up to accompany the one in his head. He looked around frantically to see if there was anything that could help him out in this situation and forlornly noted that his first impression of the room had been correct. It was empty of any objects besides the crystal. The crystal that Twix was approaching with her wand out and what he assumed was an inquiring face, was looking away from him. Harry accepted his new position of lying on the floor, with his face pointed in the direction of the former professor and renewed his struggles. Maybe if he managed to run out now he could somehow close the woman in here, go back to his dorm and forget that this whole thing had ever occurred. But for that, he would first need to get free.

"What are you?" Twix suddenly said, poking the crystal with her wand. Harry almost answered 'angry,' but stayed his tongue, looking anxiously as the crystal levitated backwards for a short distance after the poke, before returning to the original position. An itch developed in Harry's ears and he quickly concluded, fearfully, that it wasn't an itch, but a vibration weak enough that only his inner ear was currently picking up on it.

"A power source for the curse?" Twix asked again and waved her wand over the crystal casting some sort of spell, probably identification. The vibration intensified and now Harry could feel it in his chest.

"You reek of mind magic, is that how the curse affects the DADA professors? Makes them self-sabotage through unconscious actions?" she said and cast another spell. The vibrations started to reach Harry's bones.

"Stop! Don't you feel that it's building up to something?" Harry shouted at the woman from his prone position on the floor and watched as his scream distorted the dust particles near his mouth. They flew up into his nose and he started uncontrollably coughing and sneezing.

"Of course I know!" Twix cursed as she looked at Harry disparagingly over her shoulder. "You need to bring the construct into a state of activation before you can dispel anything with this sort of power source," she looked back at the crystal and started stalking around it. Harry stopped coughing and was glad the woman wasn't looking at him anymore, her eyes had reflected the blue crystal's light in an eerie way. "I didn't know You-Know-Who had such finesse," Twix began, again speaking to the crystal and raising her wand high in the air, "but the thing about fragile objects is that they break easily," she said as she brought down her wand and incanted out loud of the first time. "Confractus!" she cast it at the same time as Harry screamed.

"Don't!" He shouted, violently enough for spittle to fly from his mouth.

The spell hit the crystal and the crystal cracked straight down the middle, its lights suddenly dimmed and the two halves fell to the floor. Twix grinned triumphantly, "Did you really think a curse-breaker of my calibre would have been unabl-," she began before a blazing blue light suddenly flew from the crystal and straight into her. She froze in her position and fell to the ground. It would have been less horrifying had she started to scream, instead, Harry got to look into her horror-stricken face as her pupils vibrated violently in place, illuminated by a blue light shining straight out of the woman's eyes. He watched, terrified, as the blue light began dimming, at the same rate as Twix's eyes bled a puddle onto the floor. It was a slow, agonizing process to watch as more and more red liquid pooled in front of the woman's head and drenched her robe. Harry was almost thankful when it stopped, the blue light pulsing one last time and some grey goop being ejected from the woman's nose.

Harry was less thankful when the blue light left the now corpse and started wobbling in the air towards him with a weak shine. He tried to move, but couldn't, he tried shouting, but his voice was hoarse and there was nobody around to hear him. He laboriously formed a small fireball in front of his head and shot it at the light, but it just passed through. The only thing he could do, right before the blue light reached him was pull all the Occlumency knowledge and skill he could muster and hope to god that the reason Twix died was due to a mental attack, not a physical one.

In his mindscape a bright blue meteor trailing fire descended on the fields, Harry fought through his exhaustion with a picture-perfect clarity and energy that could only come right before death. He created barriers, he denied the meteor's existence, he doused it with water, he turned it into a metaphor and he rhymed it on leaveor to make it fuck off. Nothing helped, it kept coming. It strained against the rudimentary barrier that Harry had created over the field of his thoughts, before it broke through that as well, only losing some of its size and shine. However, just as it was about to crash into his mind and probably send through it a deadly tremor, a bright white stag, suddenly entered Harry's mind from a place he hadn't been paying attention to and crashed into the blue mental attack, destroying it and itself along with it.

Completely and utterly numb from what had transpired, still unsure if he was alive or not, Harry clenched his fists and brought his focus out of his own head and onto the outside world. The first thing he noticed was that he could move. His fingers bit painfully into the stone floor and he felt some of his fingernails break. The second thing he noticed was the cowled figure kneeling beside him. The person was average-sized for a male and his face was hidden by a shadowed hood. Not that Harry could have distinguished much anyway considering the only source of light was gone now, thankfully. Harry had a suspicion, however, who this mysterious figure was, because the stag symbolism had just clicked in his mind. Patronus, Animagus, the stag that had met Twix outside of the forbidden forest that one time and the male voice that he'd never heard again at the beginning of the year. Of course, who else but a marauder would be best equipped to enter the school even after one's graduation.

"How are you feeling?" James Potter asked as he brought up his wand and cast something with a soft green glow on Harry, who for his part, just stared at the man kneeling by his side, mind too tired to think of what he should do now, let alone an answer.

"I feel like shit," he eventually said, after a few more light shows from James, light shows that Harry assumed were diagnostic spells.

"I'd definitely suggest a visit to the mediwitch," James said, at which Harry nodded, "but can you tell me what happened first." Harry looked at the very suspiciously dressed man and wondered if James had forgotten to take off his cowl. While Harry knew that the man was an Auror, any other student wouldn't recognize the man through his disguise and would probably assume they were about to be kidnapped.

Hopefully, the fact that James wasn't bringing him to the mediwitch was an indication that he wasn't overly hurt by this misadventure and not that he was a witness who was about to disappear.

"Well, Twix over here, who used to be a professor," Harry said and flitted his eyes to the now corpse, "thought she had what it took to break Voldemort's curse on the defence position. Suffice it to say that she didn't have the necessary aptitude, not to break the curse, but also not even to find it in the first place. I don't know what this place is, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the defence position."

James looked around the room as Harry spoke and slowly nodded. "No, Hogwarts is big and there are more hidden rooms than any living person knows of. Headmasters, teachers and the founders themselves left behind chambers scattered throughout the castle. Some are dangerous, clearly. This one seems to be a chamber that hid a dangerous artefact. The defence curse probably led the former professor here and then the artefact did the rest."

Harry digested the information and tried to remember any special chambers or rooms besides the Room of Requirement and the Chamber of Secrets. There was nothing he could immediately think of, but it definitely made sense that there were more than just two places like this in the castle. The whole thing suddenly put his night wanderings into a different perspective. Hogwarts was not safe, he would need to remember that in the future and be more careful. He winced as a painful lance went through his brain.

"I can take you to the infirmary," the cowled James quickly offered, causing Harry to snort.

"Go for it, just hope I'm fine for exam week, can't imagine brewing a potion with my current headache," Harry replied and was promptly levitated upwards and led out of the chamber, which closed behind them, leaving behind no trace of what had occurred.

James, perhaps finally realising how suspicious the whole situation seemed, asked. "Do you not want to know who I am, or what I'm doing here?"

Harry looked at him as if he were an idiot, even if the gesture was difficult to pull off considering the stiff position in which he was being levitated in. "You're hiding your face, I thought asking would be pretty useless considering you're obviously unwilling to part with your identity. As to what you're doing here, it's not like I'm in any position to do anything about it if I don't like the answer. Mostly I assume you're an Auror who was trailing Twix for her obvious lunacy but failed to enter the castle as quickly as she did, which makes sense considering she used to be a professor. I don't know if Aurors are allowed here, but I guess it would explain why you're not showing your face." Harry rationalised, knowing in his heart, that the real reason he was letting a random stranger take him anywhere was the fact that he knew the man was James Potter, one of the good guys, hopefully.

Something he should rather keep to himself considering that obliviation existed for people who knew too much. "Also I mostly don't care, weird shit happens in the wizarding world and it's mostly best to keep one's nose out of it. I'm going to tell Pomfrey I fell down some stairs and forget tonight ever happened," he added, not sure if he was imagining the whisper of 'good,' that escaped James at his words.

"That's an interesting perspective," James said tentatively, "but I can't deny that the Wizarding World can be a very dangerous place. Are you at least enjoying quidditch?"

"I play with my friends sometimes, but I usually practise Charms in my free time, they're super fun. I'm even top of my class." Harry said, deciding that to avoid getting his memory wiped he should build up a rapport with the man. It seemed to work because despite the awkward situation that the meeting had occurred the two chatted away for a few minutes before James dropped him off in front of the hospital wing after asking for some reassurance that Harry really fell down some stairs.

After knocking on the doors persistently and weakly due to the state of his body Harry quickly found himself taken care of by the tyrannical mediwitch and got to sleep over in the infirmary next to Penny, who was due to be released the next day, most of her memories apparently having come back by now.

Harry himself had gotten a clean bill of health. His biggest issue was the debilitating stiffness that his body had developed due to being paralyzed in one position for too long, in addition to the tears in his muscles he'd created by fighting against his bindings. His head had been declared injury-free, so the mind battle hadn't damaged his brain physically at least. Mentally? Whatever steps it would require to fix something in his mind would probably involve seeing some things he would rather keep hidden. It was thus with a whole plethora of ache-reducing potions and spells and with a potential mind magic-related aneurysm coming up that Harry went to sleep, not at all worried about anything and completely optimistic about the future…