Harry Potter : Chapter 17: Summer's Prelude

Minerva had declined to face the return trip in my carriage, preferring to spend time with her Housemates, while Tom had decided to attend to some Slytherin power-play that I didn't care about with his fellow third years, leaving me pretty much on my own. Not that I cared. Not at all.

Fucking hell this train ride is boring. I thought bitterly as I lowered one of the books that I had unrepentantly nicked from the Library.

My large hands caressed the cover of the Standard Books of Spells, grade 1, that I had replaced the original tome's cover with. Diffindo, Reparo, Engorgio and Reducio. I sang to myself, recalling the sequence of events that allowed me to steal this particular kind of knowledge.

The Scottish Highlands flashed outside the window, letting inside of the compartment large swathes of summer sunlight, which never failed to bring me a smile, since it reminded me of the several brews that I had managed to turn some form of light into.

That, along with the creation of the Rùnda, our secret room, had largely been the reason why I hadn't simply blasted my way through the curriculum of the first five years of all of my subjects.

That, and Tom and Minerva's company. I reluctantly admitted to myself. While my initial purpose had been riding the talent of the Gryffindor witch and the Slytherin wizard, I had to admit that having someone that faced magic with the same ingenuity (if only occasionally), and the same spark of genius (more often than not).

Sure as hell the end-of-year exams hadn't been what pushed me to study. No, while obtaining among the highest marks of my years in DADA and Astronomy, while outright humiliating my 'peers' in Potions, Charms, Transfiguration, and Herbology, had been somewhat entertaining, I learned a wide array of stuff mostly because of my shared projects with Tom and Minerva.

In the end, to my insistence and delight, Minerva, Tom, and I agreed to call the corridor we coopted from the school 'Rúnda', which was Irish for 'Secret'.

The corridor on the fourth floor had disappeared overnight, and if a couple of tapestries were hung where some air-head remembered a passage, nobody mentioned it.

After all, it was known that Hogwarts could be quirky: moving stairs, secret passages, unused classrooms popping around as if to look for a purpose...

The whole length of the corridor had on one side an impressive sequence of leaded glass panels that I had not yet the time to enchant, and on the other side two doors.

One led to the bathroom, that I may or may not have gone overboard with. Surely it was just as good as the Prefects' bath, for instead of a bathtub I had placed a veritable pool that mimicked a beach.

There was no sand, but the floor was tilted in a way that allowed the user to simply walk inside of the pool, which reached five meters of depth after 20 or so meters spent moving in the same direction.

Minerva ended up helping with the mosaic on the floor, which depicted an ever-changing swirl of colors with its highly reflective tiles, over which I had painted a light coating of 'Bright-Ice'. Which I had obtained through a potion experiment geared towards capturing the reflection of the sun over the crest of the Black Lake's small waves.

Said coating was the magical equivalent of a hydro-repellent substance and it kept the water constantly moving. To be truthful, its specific workings were not what I had been aiming for, and so the whys were still to be understood.

The coating's main effect, however, besides circulating the cleaning potions that I had added to the water, was that the surface of the small pool was constantly covered by small waves.

Instead of taps to choose the temperature of the water, I had crafted a 5x5 square meters large shower nozzle, which recreated a raining effect that could go from light to tempest-like.

The toilets themselves had been easy enough to build, even if I had to raise a small wall between the 'pool-area' and the 'shitting-zone', which included silencing charms and ever-fresh-air enchantments placed over the stalls, the latter of which had been provided by a disdainful Tom Riddle.

Sinks were placed against the wall right under the mirror that stretched all the way from the entrance to the opposite wall, and I had gone all out with adding sets of my potions that, while still untested on normal human skin, should act as soap.

The walls were still bare, and mildly depressing with their stone-grey presence, but any further pimping-up of the room wasn't going to be carried out by me.

There was only so much interest that building a bathroom could hold for me. I'd keep tweaking it during my years at Hogwarts, because I never knew when a spark of inspiration could hit me, but that was for the future.

Instead, behind a 4 meters tall oaken double doors, which were eventually going to be engraved from top to bottom, there was the actual reason behind Minerva's, Tom's, and my slaving away at impossible hours of both the day and night for the entire length of the second two trimesters spent at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

The room was rather large, with a ceiling that stood comfortably at five meters of height, but that I had no doubt would one day be pushed further up in order to accommodate some sort of library.

For now, enchanted windows, courtesy of Tom, fad been placed flat against the ceiling, let the natural daylight climb in, even if the sight of a meadow that stretched towards the Forbidden Forest perpendicularly to our roof was quite jarring.

Three separate desks had been temporarily placed in the center of the room. Mine, which was quite large to accommodate for my size, faced towards the doors, while the other two, which were slowly being subtly transfigured and enchanted to better suit the tastes of their owners, were facing each other and were placed sideways between my position and the entrance to the room.

Directly from the stone walls had been transfigured stone shelves, to host both books and notes.

Tom, Minerva, and I agreed that each of us deserved his own smaller bookshelf, where we could place those tomes we were using for this or that project. Once those tomes had exhausted their usefulness, they would be returned to the main bookshelf with an added copy of our notes (if we felt like adding those).

On my insistence, and mostly because I was somewhat eager to have my brews tested, I added a selection of potions dedicated to personal entertainment.

Sure I should have done some testing before placing them down, but while I was one of his favorites, I still wasn't a 'pupil' of old Sluggy, and so I was reticent about showing the true extent of my understanding of his subject, nevermind my original brews.

It was hard to not recognize that Minerva and Tom were the only kinds of friends that I was going to be able to make in Hogwarts. The first because of her brilliance, which counterbalanced her unavoidable 'being a teen in the forties'-related issues.

The seconds... because even if you consciously knew that a dragon was dangerous and had the potential to kill you, there was no denying that it was fucking cool being chums with one.

I felt a soft smile turn my lips upwards, and I shook my head as I silently reprimanded me. What if...

What if I don't kill Tom. The option was obvious, thinking myself important and capable enough in order to keep Tom from going on a Power-Hungry rampage was surely flattering. But if I failed I would end up telling myself 'I told you so' in an extremely condescending tone.

While Tom's talent in all things magic-related was awe-inspiring, especially considering that he was actually 13 years old and had no idea whatsoever about the kind of examples of the magic that I had rolling in my head, he was extremely good at manipulating people.

Well, extremely good at playing Slytherin's tendency of pretending to be some sort of political training arena for the scions of the Pureblood traditionalists.

While I considered those thoughts, my hand slipped again over one of the several books that I had blatantly stolen from the Restricted Section of the Library, lifting the bright blue, mismatched hardcover in order to stare at the title.

Magic Most Evile. I whispered in my own mind, slowly but surely forcing myself to the page I had reached before my brief bout of introspection.

If Tom doesn't stumble on these texts, maybe he won't go mad. I tried to be an optimist. Maybe I'll actually be interesting enough to push him without having him turn to word domination.

It was a heady thought. For some reason, the idea of stopping Voldemort from existing gave me goosebumps much more than my half-baked idea of saving Hiroshima. Is it because I actually know him? Because interacting with him makes him real?

I needed to travel, I needed to see this world of mine without walls to keep me safe, without historians and interpreters to tell me in which direction the events should flow. This need was clear to my senses, if thanks to my attempts at Occlumency or only because I was simply aware of myself and my own desires I couldn't tell.

I still have time. I reassured myself. If Tom kills people with the Basilisk, I'll know for sure if I have to kill him or not. 

I finally compromised, and with Voldemort's fate pushed into the hands of my future self, I ineffectually tried to relax as my eyes roamed over Olde English words that described the best kind of sacrifice in order to power up rituals.

Finding the books had been a stroke of luck, finding them without the knowledge of Tom, with whom I often roamed the Restricted Section, thanks to Slughorn's greed, was almost a blessing.

Figuring out quickly that the wards that made stealing books from the Library impossible were tied to the covers of the books and not to the pages themselves had been instead a stroke of genius.

Deciding to take all the horcrux-related tomes I could in that manner, during the course of several weeks in order to not get caught, was undoubtedly the hardest decision I had taken this far in my new life as Rubeus Hagrid. It meant directly removing a piece that was instrumental to the creation of Voldemort.

For all of my boasting, for all of my interaction with Tom and Minerva, I never actively influenced pieces of their lives with the purpose of changing History. While what I did already was most certainly enough to butterfly its way into some heavy differences, there hadn't been a clear intent to do so on my part.

Maybe it's better that neither Tom nor Minerva shared my ride home. I thought as I slowly came to terms with my decision of postponing my murder of Riddle.

With a heavy breath, I repeated the words I read in the safe confines of my head: Life of the innocent, willingly given.

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