Rating:
PG-13
House:
Schnoogle
Genres:
Action Drama
Era:
Multiple Eras
Spoilers:
Philosopher's Stone Chamber of Secrets Prizoner of Azkaban Goblet of Fire Order of the Phoenix Quidditch Through the Ages Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Stats:
Published: 01/08/2005
Updated: 06/29/2005
Words: 244,306
Chapters: 66
Hits: 89,703

The War of Shades

quintaped

Story Summary:
Seventh year - The scar connection becomes wide open, giving both Harry and Voldemort ever more detailed views into each other's mind. Harry works on practicing the message he gained in Egypt (Harry Potter and the Goblin Rebellion), but Voldemort launches the Second War to fill Harry with hatred and anger and to strip him of all who are loyal to him. Ever more desperately Harry trains himself and others to fight, but something is making all of his friends fight each other. Harry must find a way to stop the internal warfare or Voldemort will be able to launch an attack on Hogwarts that will destroy all who are capable of resisting him, including Harry. Through all this, Harry must learn for himself how he will finally vanquish Voldemort.

Chapter 39

Chapter Summary:
Harry, Ron, Hermione and Neville are anxious going to the Care of Magical Creatures lesson because Hagrid missed the DA meeting the night before. When they arrive at his hut, they learn why - the basilisk hatched and he has petrified himself. After they depetrify him, they discuss magical creatures and the fighting amongst the students. Hagrid suggests there is a curse making them fight and Harry accepts that as the most likely cause.
Posted:
03/27/2005
Hits:
1,022


Chapter 39 The Naked Truth

In mid-December, Harry, Ron, Hermione and Neville hurried out early to the last Care of Magical Creatures class before Christmas Break. They were concerned because Hagrid had not shown up for the DA meeting the evening before, as he usually did. As they approached Hagrid's cabin, they heard Fang whimpering. They knocked on the door, and only heard Fang's cries turn to howling. They tried the door and while the door was unlatched, the handle would not turn and they could not push the door open. Harry apparated into the cabin.

"Oh, no," he said, loudly enough for the others to hear.

"What is it? What's the matter?" called Hermione.

"I'll let you in the back door and you can see for yourselves," said Harry, less urgently.

What they found on coming in was Hagrid with his left hand on the front door knob with his coat on and looking down the shaft of a wand he was holding in his right hand. He also was standing so still that they knew at once that he was petrified.

"Well, I guess the basilisk hatched," said Ron.

"Yeah, he must have been heading out to tell us - but why did he look into the wand?" wondered Neville.

Hermione tapped her cheek as she said, "Hmm, he couldn't have looked at it in the nest box, but at some point he must have put a bit of meat in the feeding slot of the wand to lure it in there. I'll bet that even though the magical sensors said the basilisk was in there, he just couldn't resist trying to verify it himself. Well, first things first."

Hermione placed the cap on the wand so that none of the rest of them would be petrified. She tried to remove the wand from his hand but couldn't without breaking the wand, which would have been disastrous.

"Right, then, that's what we made the depetrifying potion for. I'm glad we made plenty. I'll get it ready and you three prepare Hagrid."

"Erm, okay," said Ron, puzzled. "Hey, Hagrid, open up, you're about to get a potion!"

"That doesn't seem to have done any good," said Harry, bemused.

"Well, of course not," said Hermione, pouring potion into an atomizer. "How could he possibly drink it - he's petrified. He has to be sprayed with it."

"Oh, right-o, I should have guessed," said Ron. "Hey, Hagrid, you're about to get sprayed! That didn't seem to prepare him either."

"Not that kind of preparation," said Hermione, exasperatedly. "I have to spray him."

"Hermione," said Neville. "Are you saying we have to remove his ... clothes?"

"Well, of course," she said. "His clothes aren't petrified. We have to spray his body."

"Erm, Hermione?" said Harry. "Isn't there some other way?"

"No," said Hermione. "Honestly, you three act like you've never seen a man's body before. Do you never look in the mirror!? Do you hide from each other when you take showers or change clothes in the dorm!?"

"Well, what about you?" asked Ron, with concern.

"I'm a second-year healer trainee. I've probably seen a quarter of the boys in this school without their clothes," replied Hermione impatiently.

Ron nodded sideways toward Harry, arching his eyebrows inquiringly.

"Yes, Harry, too," she said with an impatient sigh, "when he was in Hospital last year for the lethifold accident and later with his crushed leg. It's no big deal. He's my friend. It's like seeing my father when he's changing clothes - no big deal."

"Somehow I wish you weren't quite so emphatic about that, Hermione," said Harry.

"Oh, don't be insecure, Harry! You're handsome enough, but I don't even notice. You're a friend, and of course friends always have a pleasing aspect, but I'm no more titillated at seeing you naked than at seeing Fang."

Ron stroked his chin. "Well maybe the usual Tom, Dick or, well, Harry would be no big deal, but Hagrid's out of the ordinary in a lot of ways."

Hermione smirked. "Feeling inadequate, Ron? You really shouldn't - if what you're getting at is so, then it would have no more attraction for a normal girl than when we see Firenze around the castle - we noticed and most of us giggled at first, but it's just an impossible and unappealing notion in point of fact."

"So you're saying size really doesn't matter?" asked Harry.

"Of course it matters - normal is what is good, because I'm a normal-sized woman: extremes in either direction are a problem. If what you are thinking of him is true, that would probably be a reason Hagrid's been so lonesome all his life. Meeting Madame Maxime must have opened up a whole world of possibilities in his mind; it must have been heart-rending when she ran from him."

"Hey wait, Hermione," said Harry. "Did you have anything to do with those pictures of me?"

"Pictures? What pictures?" asked Ron.

Hermione blushed a bit and said, "Well, we need to get on about helping Hagrid. Time is wasting."

Harry peered at her, pretty sure he knew the answer to what he had asked. "Well, it's not a task I ever thought I'd volunteer for, but I'd do anything for Hagrid, so I'll get to it."

The others joined in as well. They had to remove the door knob, both so they could pull his coat and shirt over it after undoing the center seams, and so that Harry could levitate him while Ron and Neville pulled his shoes, socks, pants and underwear off.

"You know," said Neville, "he's liable to feel a bit ill at ease if he wakes up like this. Let's find a bathrobe or something to put on him after the potion is applied."

"I'm all for that on multiple grounds," said Ron.

They looked in Hagrid's closet and found a seven foot long lavender silk dressing gown with a butterfly brocade motif, a red sash, and an attached feather boa collar. That seemed to be the only thing in the nature of a dressing gown they could find.

"Well, it goes with his pink umbrella," said Harry, with a grin, "but I have a feeling that's only been here in the past few months."

"Good bet, Harry," said Ron, also grinning.

Hermione spritzed Hagrid all over. It would take about ten minutes for the potion to take effect throughout his body. They placed the bathrobe around him and tied the sash. Then they started making tea while they waited. Hermione had started from his feet, so his head was the last part to depetrify. Knowing that she might need to perform just this procedure, she had asked Madam Pomfrey about it, acting merely curious how her own depetrification had been done five years earlier. This way there would not be the confusion and panic of a mind reawakening to find the body petrified. Even so, when Hagrid woke up he was a bit disoriented.

He had been petrified looking at the end of the fake wand, so that's how he depetrified. Seeing the cap on the wand, he said, "Well, no wonder I haven't seen the little feller, the cap's on." He set down the doorknob and started to reach for the cap. The four students yelled for him to stop.

"Hello," he said startled, "what are you three doing here? And - wait, I was headed out the door. And it was dark."

"Hagrid," said Harry, "you looked at the basilisk through the crystal so it petrified you. Let's not do that again."

"Oh. So how long was I petrified?"

"Well," said Hermione, "you taught all of your classes yesterday, so if it was dark when you headed out, you must have been petrified for about 13 to 14 hours."

"Well, no wonder I feel so well-rested," yawned Hagrid as he stretched, then jumped. "What happened to me clothes? What am I doing in this?"

"We had to spray you with the potion - all over. The boys thought you'd prefer to have some sort of covering."

"Well, that's a bit embarrassing, being stood up naked in front of yeh's all like a statue of Cupid in a garden."

"Nothing we haven't all seen before, Hagrid," reassured Ron, "except a lot hairier than most."

"But why'd yeh put this frilly thing on me?"

They laughed.

"It's the only thing we could find that we could drape around you," said Neville. "Don't you think it's becoming?"

"Not exactly my style, you cheeky pup," said Hagrid, stepping around to the far side of the hearth to put his clothes on. "Harry, you could have summoned yer invisibility cloak."

"I gave that a little thought and figured it would upset you worse to wake up without a body than one in lavender silk. So I take it things have been going well with Madame Maxime."

"I don't know as that's your business, Harry," said Hagrid sullenly.

"Now, Hagrid, we're cheering you on, you know that. I'm only observing that if that bathrobe is not something you're accustomed to wearing, then it must belong to someone else - and who else could wear something that size?"

"Yer just brilliant," grumbled Hagrid. "Oh, well, I can't stay mad at you four, and you did depetrify me. Yeah, Olympe and me have been getting on pretty well. As much as I like you and the rest of the students here, it's awful nice to be with someone who's a lot closer to my age and has had some of the same challenges in life. Now let's have some of that tea and we'll talk magical creatures. This is a class session after all. Obviously you know what happens when you meet eyes with basilisks through glass or a mirror. And you also know how to depetrify someone if they try looking at basilisks through glass. If you meet eyes with them directly, it's immediate death. And their fangs are intensely poisonous. How long's the poison take to work, Harry?"

"Oh, let's see, when I got bitten, I was feeling myself get pretty weak and numb in less than half a minute. I could barely sit up when Fawkes's tears cured my wound and the venom."

"Well, there's another good thing to know - Phoenix tears are more powerful magic than basilisk venom."

"Just in case you happen to have a phoenix handy when you're playing with a basilisk," said Ron.

"Well, ya never know - it worked for Harry," said Hagrid, holding up the fake wand with the basilisk. "Hmm, I sure would like to see the little feller - Harry's probably the only one who's ever seen one alive."

"No, Voldemort has, too. And please don't get yourself petrified again, Hagrid; I hate hearing him call you an oaf," said Harry.

"An oaf? I haven't heard that name in over fifty years. I'm sure some have thought it or words like it, but only one person ever said it to me. Is that really the term he uses for me? I wouldn't have thought I attracted that much attention from him," asked Hagrid.

"Weren't you told who he is, Hagrid?" asked Hermione.

"You mean he's got some other name? I thought he was just - You-know-who," answered Hagrid.

"Well, tell us," said Neville to Hermione. "I haven't heard the story either."

"He was a student here at Hogwarts - Head Boy when Hagrid was expelled," said Harry.

"Tom Riddle!?" said Hagrid. "He's the one what accused me of lettin' a creature kill Myrtle. But all I had was my acromantula Aragog, and he wasn't big enough to kill yet. Besides, they would have found his poison in her body, or at least the bite marks. There wasn't a mark on her. But they believed Tom because he was such a 'smart boy,' a poor orphan who wouldn't do no wrong. He was a weaselly brown-nose is what he was! 'N' I was a orphan then, too, but nobody cut me no slack. Except Professor Dumbledore, o'course. That man's a saint."

"I reckon a lot of people were ready to blame a half-giant from the get-go," said Harry, "although it would be awfully surprising for the heir of Slytherin to be a half-breed. But then he's a half-blood anyway."

"Not that blood matters, anyway," said Ron, looking over toward Hermione.

"Thanks, Ron, but I know that no one here cares," said Hermione.

"So what happened to Riddle, Harry, since you know so much?" asked Hagrid.

"He had already conceived the dark lord persona while here. He found the Chamber of Secrets using clues from old notebooks kept by Salazar Slytherin. After he left Hogwarts, he killed all his muggle relatives and went on a quest to become immortal and develop unmatchable power. He came back as Lord Voldemort to begin his plan of purification of what he considers the 'race' of sorcerers. He wanted to start here because he had old allies from school who he knew thought the same way he did about 'purebloodedness."

"And he's not even a pureblood himself?" asked Neville.

"Nope. It freaked out Bellatrix LeStrange when I told her two years ago. He's convinced her that I was just lying - after all, I'm just a half-blood, I can't be trusted anyway."

"Half-blood?" said Hermione, "but both of your parents were sorcerers."

"But my mother was muggle-born, so to the people who care about purebloodedness, I'm just a half-blood."

"Oh, dear," said Hermione, and began weeping.

"Hermione?" said Ron. "What's wrong?"

"Oh, Ron, I could take the abuse myself. I'm just glad to have the chance to develop my skills and power: the nasty comments just make me more determined to prove myself. But I was hoping that any children I have would be treated like equals in the wizarding world. Now, oh, I just don't know. How could I subject children to such treatment?"

Hagrid patted her back in an attempt to comfort which half took her breath away. "Now Hermione, I've never seen you shrink from making a point - and how do you make the point that children of muggle-borns are worth as much as any other child but by having children. Take a page on that from Harry's mother. Lily Evans was a saint, as well. There wasn't nothing she wouldn't do to help someone in need, and she warn't afraid to have children. Harry, what's wrong?"

"It's just - a memory of Voldemort's about my mother that your comment triggered. I'm okay. Hermione, I've done alright as a half-blood. Seamus, too. The only ones who ever try to bother us are gits anyway. No one in the DA has said anything since joining."

"Don't the people you respect treat you like any other witch - well, smarter and more powerful than most, but you know what I mean?" asked Ron.

"Yes, mostly. Sometimes I get hints of suspicion."

Harry said, "Are you sure that's why they're suspicious - maybe it's because you're smart or you're friends with me? Sometimes when you look for a particular reaction, you see it even when it's not really there."

"Well, maybe. I was quite hurt when Mrs. Weasley treated me so harshly after Rita Skeeter's articles. I would've thought she would know better. She raised so many fine children, after all."

Ron blushed as Hermione smiled his direction. "She didn't know you well then. You know she thinks the world of you now, don't you?"

"I suppose, but it's always made me uncomfortable." Hermione gave one last sniff and reached under her sunglasses to wipe her eyes. "Enough of that, I'll get over it. So is there a way we can look at the basilisk safely?"

"Well, I had hoped Harry could talk to it in parseltongue," said Hagrid.

"I can talk to it, but I can't be too sure how obedient it would be. We'd have to do a lot of training before I felt comfortable with anyone looking at it. We could perhaps make a device to hold its head safely while we examined the rest."

"Let's give that some thought," said Hagrid. "You know me, I don't want to take no unnecessary risks with innerestin' creatures."

"Right!" they all agreed sarcastically, and even Hagrid had a laugh with them.

"Why is it," asked Harry, "that we all get along so well here, but I find you people getting into arguments and fights all over the place?"

"What, not me, Harry!" said Hagrid.

"No, not you, Hagrid, these three. And it's not just these three - it's the whole school when I'm not around."

"Oh, Harry," said Hermione, "you're just exaggerating, just like when you said I was looking for blaming things on people's reactions to a muggle-born."

"No, he's not, Hermione," said Hagrid. "I seen it too. Harry's right and it's real disquieting. People that I've never seen raising their voices are fighting this year."

"Thank you, Hagrid. I feel a little less crazy now. Have you noticed the other thing - it doesn't happen with me? You know, if it was Voldemort's influence, I would expect it to happen mostly near me. Instead, nobody argues with me, and rarely right near me: disagreements over stuff, but not actual arguments. But then a person I've been talking with will turn around and bite the head off the next person - for what seems to be nothing."

"So there's a little tension. We've been getting up at 4:30 every morning for over a year, we all have studies, we have families at risk, and we're preparing to fight as if it could happen any moment," said Ron. "What else would you expect?"

"It didn't happen last year, and all of those things were true except for the terror campaign. And that should make you work together, not fight. Most of the students here have had a family member saved by the response teams- that should reinforce the spirit of cooperation."

"Absolutely right, Harry!" exclaimed Hagrid. "It's downright eerie, like it's some sort of hex."

"A hex!" shouted Harry. "Somebody must have placed a hex on the school. Alright, Granger, you're the know-it-all: what kind of a hex could act like that, causing dissension, except when people are around one particular person?"

"Well, two," said Hagrid. "Nobody fights with me neither."

"I can't imagine why," said Neville sarcastically.

"Oh, yeh can't get away with that, Neville. I'm big and I can shrug off a spell, but all four of yeh are more dangerous than me in a duel but yer getting into arguments all the time. So, Hermione, what could it be?"

"I'm sure I don't know. I've never heard of such a hex."

"Oh, you're not trying!" said Harry. "It's because you refuse to take it seriously."

"Well you're really just seeing things that aren't there," she said. "Besides aren't you the one with the access to all the knowledge of Voldemort - shouldn't he know curses better than anyone."

Harry frowned. "I'm not that comfortable delving through all the furthest nooks and crannies of his mind - there are some hideous things there. I'd need supportive friends with me while I tried that - and right now I don't feel like that includes you. I'm feeling more isolated from everyone. Well, almost everyone."

"You know we all work with you as closely as ever in training," pled Hermione.

"I know. But you all deny that you fight, and then you turn around and do it."

Then Hagrid said, "Maybe you're on to somethin' there, Harry. Maybe there's a curse that makes those affected not realize that they're acting that way. So they keep denying it 'cause the curse won't let 'em see it!"

"That's a great idea. All right - that's my working hypothesis. Until I find an explanation, all my free time's going to be at the library, probably in the Restricted Section. I'm not going to rest until I solve this."

"Okay, Harry," said Ron dubiously, "but it seems to me you're wasting your time."

"Ahh," said Harry intently, "but that's the nature of the curse, remember. It's like a conspiracy curse, designed to drive me insane."

"I think it's working," said Neville.