The Very Long Night Of Harry Potter

Chapter 4- 10:00 P.M.

Even though Harry had been expecting it, fearing it really, for him to hear that Voldemort had invaded his mind made him feel sick, unclean. He felt like he had two years previously, after eavesdropping on the elder members of the Order at St. Mungo's, when Moody had uttered those fateful words. He had been wrong in his assumptions then, of course. Harry had had absolutely no inkling of what it had meant to be possessed by Voldemort, at least not until the battle at the Ministry. The memory of that, the pain, the sensations, stirred in Harry's mind and he realized...

"This isn't the way he possessed me last time, at the Ministry..." Harry muttered quietly to himself, or so he thought.

"No, Harry, it isn't."

Harry looked up at the voice that had spoken. It was the Hermione-aspect. But how had she heard him...?

Oh, that's right; they're a part of me, extensions of my personality. Talking to myself has just been redefined in a rather impressive way. He smiled painfully.

"This is really going to take some getting used to..." he said.

Lupin broke in, clearly wanting to keep Harry on track. "Yes it will, Harry, but please, think about what you just said. You're quite right, this isn't the same way he possessed you last time. Now why would that be? Think! What was your last memory before waking up here?"

Concentrating, thinking back, Harry remembered flashes, scenes:

A magical repository. A basin full of potion. Drinking the poisonous potion. A cup at the bottom of the basin. Fighting their way out of the repository. Apparating to 12 Grimmauld Place. Destroying the cup. A flash, silence and blackness.

"The Horcrux," Harry said. "It was the Horcrux. Riddle cast some sort of spell on it, didn't he?"

Hermione spoke up. "He did. You see, the way he possessed you at the Ministry was crude, awkward. It was possible for you to throw him out of your body, as you did that time. No, this, this is much more elegant. The combination of that potion, which weakened your mind and body, and a highly complex charm on the cup enabled him to make the jump from the Horcrux to your body, traveling back along the very spell you had cast to destroy it. And now he's here, and you have to fight him directly."

"So how do I fight him?" Wait a moment here... "Hang on. How did you know all that, about the spell and the potion and how he got here? If you're part of me, I should have known that before for you to be able to tell me, but I didn't know about any of that. How could I have?" Harry said, eyes narrowed suspiciously.

He had expected the lot of them to have looked rather shifty when he had said that. Instead, they all looked extremely pleased with him. Cedric spoke first.

"Very good, Harry. We knew that you could figure it out," he said, beaming.

Harry, trying to get past the feeling of being caught completely flat-footed again, coughed, and, extricating himself from Ginny's embrace, went and sat down in one of the armchairs by the fire and waited for a few moments as everyone else did likewise.

When they were all seated, Harry said, in a tone as flat as paper, "Explain."

"The spell that Voldemort used was an ancient piece of magic used to protect the caster from death as a last resort," Hermione began. "When attacked by magic or weaponry that would fatally harm the caster, the caster's soul would be transferred to his attacker's mind, where they would then fight over the control of the body. Voldemort managed to modify the spell to protect his Horcruxes by using a potion that would weaken your resistance to the invasion of your mind by his diminished soul. The key to the spell, actually, is that the caster would have to be physically harmed for it to work, so when you blasted the cup, you activated the spell. Actually, that requirement was the primary reason that Avada Kedavra was developed in the first place, since it simply wipes away a person's life and soul, doing no physical damage in the process."

Harry, who had been massaging his temples with his fingertips to fight a headache he felt coming on, looked up and said, "But that still doesn't explain how you know all of that."

"I'm coming to that, Harry," Hermione said. "You see, another effect of the spell was that the attacker's mind- your mind, Harry - would fragment under the assault. Your mind would split along the lines of different facets of the mind, with the primary personality fragment retaining its memories and the personality of the person, with the rest of the fragments assuming the mental images of significant people in the person's life. Those other fragments," as she indicated the others seated around the fire, "would be bound by rules from the enchantment; however, they would also receive information concerning the enchantment that they could pass on to the primary personality fragment, provided that it could ask the correct questions."

Harry groaned. "So why didn't you answer my questions from before?" he asked grumpily.

This time Ron spoke up, "Believe us, mate, we wanted to, but we couldn't until you asked us who we were, which is the question that we were required to answer first before we could do anything to help you. Actually, the only thing that we were allowed to do at that point was lure you here in the first place, when you chased down Hermione."

Feeling rather irritable at this, Harry sank further into his chair.

"So? Are there any other rules that I should know about or any other information that would be helpful to know?" he asked crossly, deliberately phrasing his question as ambiguously as possible.

There were anxious glances all around him. Finally, one of the twins spoke up.

"Well, as for rules at this point, it's pretty much anything goes, except for that we can't be the ones to kill him."

Harry shot out of his chair at this. "WHAT!?" he shouted.

George winced and then continued where he, or maybe his brother, had left off.

"Well, you are the one who has to kill him in here. The only things we can do are assisting you or try to keep him from killing us, but you're the one who has to land the killing blow, Harry."

Neville spoke up, "and there's also no magic in here. We may have our wands, and he his, but charms, hexes, curses, and spells don't work in here, so they're really nothing more than thin strips of wood."

Ginny interjected, "Potions will work, and so will broomsticks and other magical items, just no wandwork allowed in here."

"And? Is there anything else?" Harry asked, feeling oddly relieved. At least I don't have to worry about being hit with the Unforgivable Curses inside my own skull.

Hermione looked mildly uncomfortable.

"Well, there is one thing, Harry," she said. "This castle is a metaphor for your mind, with different areas corresponding to different parts of your mind. The library represents your memory, for instance, the same way we represent aspects of your personality. But there are two things here that aren't metaphors - you and Voldemort. If he kills any of us before you get him, there's no problem. When you come out of the coma, you'll still have your personality intact. But if he manages to kill you, the prime fragment..."

"Game over," said Sirius.

"And then Tom will have a brand new body to wear, and the last hope of the wizarding world will be gone," Ginny said.

~*~*~*~*~

Ron had been on his way back from the loo, had been about to grasp the doorknob to Harry's ward, when it happened.

"RONALD BILIUS WEASLEY!"

Ron almost hit the ceiling in shock. Marching in his direction down the hall, fury etched in every feature and step, was Mrs. Weasley, followed closely by Mr. Weasley and Ginny, both of whom looked worried, although Ginny's face had a definite note of amusement on it. Walking almost unnoticed behind them was Healer Andrews, looking extremely cowed.

"...OUT OF MY MIND WITH WORRY... CLOCK HAND ON HOSPITAL... NOT A WORD OR A NOTE FOR HOURS..."

"Mum, please," Ron said quietly. She didn't hear him.

"...A HEALER APPARATING INTO THE BURROW IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT WITHOUT ANY WARNING... NEARLY HEXED HIM... NO EXPLAINATION AT ALL, JUST TOLD US TO COME AND BRING GINNY WITH US... SAID IT WAS AN EMERGENCY..."

Ron carefully took hold of the doorknob behind his back and pushed opened the door to Harry's ward.

"...SEEING YOU STANDING THERE, IN PERFECT HEALTH; YOU HAD BETTER HAVE A GOOD..."

Mrs. Weasley's voice trailed off. She had clearly spotted the still form lying on the bed in the small room. She then looked up at Ron, obviously dreading his response. Ron nodded, slowly and painfully, feeling like he had ground glass in-between the joints in his neck. He didn't have time to elaborate, though, before a very dismayed, and very feminine, gasp was heard coming from behind Mr. Weasley. His father had just reached the open door, worry clearly etched on his face at whatever could be horrible enough to stop one of his wife's angry rants dead in its tracks, when something redheaded and petite pushed past he and Ron both and ran into the room, going right to Harry's bedside.

After several moments of examining Harry's blank face, and softly pleading with him to tell her what was wrong, to wake up, she turned and faced her brother.

"Ron, what happened to him?" Ginny asked, barely holding back tears by sheer force of will.

Gesturing mutely because he didn't trust his own voice, Ron indicated to his parents that they should enter the room. After they and Healer Andrews came inside, Ron turned and shut the door behind him.

"Ron, what happened to Harry?" Ginny repeated.

Ron looked at his sister's face and saw that all of the anger that had been directed at Harry for making her stay behind, somewhat safe, for leaving her to cry herself to sleep each night since they had left, had disappeared, replaced by the love that had been pushed behind that anger for the last six months- what was I thinking, that I wasn't going to let her know about this...- and joined by new emotions; fear for Harry, lying in this bed from some unknown cause, and ...

Before he was able to identify the other emotions etched on his sister's face, the door swung back open, whacking him on the side of his upper thigh with the doorknob and his shoulder with the door edge. Ron nearly cursed out loud at the pain; he restrained himself with difficulty, not daring to do so with his mother in the room. Instead he watched the person who had just entered the ward, desperately wanting to throttle said person, until he realized who it was.

Healer Alexander was back, and in a right state, too. Clearly restraining panic by the thinnest of margins, she ran over to Harry's bedside, ignoring Ginny, and began rewinding half of the graphs recording above his head with her wand. As they were rewinding at a hundred times normal speed, she began to cast a half dozen or so spells on Harry's head. The sparkles from one spell barely had time to change color before she cast the next one, and each seemed to point towards her worst fears, if her expression was anything to go by. Then she turned her attention to the graphs of Harry's brain functions over the past two hours. What she saw there must have confirmed what she had found out from the cup, because her expression deepened to one of utmost horror.

It was only at this point that she realized there were other people in the room who had been waiting quietly for her to finish and share her prognosis. She somehow managed to school her features back into the medical professional expression of quiet confidence and cheer, but it was too late- the damage had already been done. Still, everyone was apparently waiting for her to drop the other shoe.

She did.

"I found the spell that You-Know-Who used," she said, briskly. "It's a very old spell, hasn't been used in centuries, but it..." She then proceeded to tell the four Weasleys, Hermione and Healer Andrews about the residue from the soul transference spell she had found on the cup and how she thought the potion had been used to modify it.

She then continued, "And see here?" indicating the graphs. "There are two sets of brain wave patterns, one relatively constant, the other weak and growing stronger over time. So You-Know-Who is in there," pointing to Harry's skull, "and they're fighting it out over his body."

The only sounds in the ward after she was finished were Harry's heartbeat and breathing. Then, as one, Molly, Arthur and Ginny turned towards Ron and Hermione, who were sitting next to each other. Ginny spoke up first.

"Ron, Hermione, I think the two of you had better start from the beginning."