told anything about that until just before the ritual started. No one knows the true location now except him.'
They continued their futile work.
Aftermath, Blaise Zabini:
The Slytherin common room could be accurately and precisely described as a remilitarized zone; the moment you stepped through the portrait hole you would see that the left half of the room was Definitely Not Talking to the right half and vice versa. It was very clear, it did not need to be explained to anyone, that you did not have the option of not taking sides.
At a table in the exact middle of the room, Blaise Zabini sat by himself, smirking as he did his homework. He had a reputation now, and meant to keep it.
Aftermath, Daphne Greengrass and Tracey Davis:
'You doing anything interesting today?' said Tracey.
'Nope,' said Daphne.
Aftermath, Harry Potter:
If you went high enough in Hogwarts, you didn't see many other people around, just corridors and windows and staircases and the occasional portrait, and now and then some interesting sight, such as a bronze statue of a furry creature like a small child, holding a peculiar flat spear...
If you went high enough in Hogwarts, you didn't see many other people around, which suited Harry.
There were much worse places to be trapped, Harry supposed. In fact you probably couldn't think of anywhere better to be trapped than an ancient castle with a fractal ever-changing structure that meant you couldn't ever run out of places to explore, full of interesting people and interesting books and incredibly important knowledge unknown to Muggle science.
If Harry hadn't been told that he couldn't leave, he probably would've jumped at the chance to spend more time in Hogwarts, he would've plotted and connived to get it. Hogwarts was literally optimal, not in all the realms of possibility maybe, but certainly on the real planet Earth, it was the Maximum Fun Location.
How could the castle and its grounds seem so much smaller, so much more confining, how could the rest of the world become so much more interesting and important, the instant Harry had been told that he wasn't allowed to leave? He'd spent months here and hadn't felt claustrophobic then.
You know the research on this, observed some part of himself, it's just standard scarcity effects, like that time where as soon as a county outlawed phosphate detergents, people who'd never cared before drove to the next county in order to buy huge loads of phosphate detergent, and surveys showed that they rated phosphate detergents as gentler and more effective and even easier-pouring... and if you give two-year-olds a choice between a toy in the open and one protected by a barrier they can go around, they'll ignore the toy in the open and go for the one behind the barrier... salespeople know that they can sell things just by telling the customer it might not be available... it was all in Cialdini's book Influence, everything you're feeling right now, the grass is always greener on the side that's not allowed.
If Harry hadn't been told that he couldn't leave, he probably would've jumped at the chance to stay at Hogwarts over the summer...
...but not the rest of his life.
That was sort of the problem, really.
Who knew whether there was still a Dark Lord Voldemort for him to defeat?
Who knew whether He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named still existed outside of the imagination of a possibly-not-just- pretending-to-be-crazy old wizard?
Lord Voldemort's body had been found burned to a crisp, there couldn't really be such things as souls. How could Lord Voldemort still be alive? How did Dumbledore know that he was alive?
And if there wasn't a Dark Lord, Harry couldn't defeat him, and he would be trapped in Hogwarts forever.
...maybe he would be legally allowed to escape after he graduated his seventh year, six years and four months and three weeks from now. It wasn't that long as lengths of time went, it only seemed like long enough for protons to decay.
Only it wasn't just that.
It wasn't just Harry's freedom that was at stake.
The Headmaster of Hogwarts, the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, the Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards, was quietly sounding the alarm.
A false alarm.
A false alarm which Harry had triggered.
You know, said the part of him that refined his skills, didn't you sort of ponder, once, how every different profession has a different way to be excellent, how an excellent teacher isn't like an excellent plumber; but they all have in common certain methods of not being stupid; and that one of the most important such techniques is to face up to your little mistakes before they turn into BIG mistakes?
...although this already seemed to qualify as a BIG mistake, actually...
The point being, said his inner monitor, it's getting worse literally by the minute. The way spies turn people is, they get them to commit a little sin, and then they use the little sin to blackmail them into a bigger sin, and then they use THAT sin to make them do even bigger things and then the blackmailer owns their soul.
Didn't you once think about how the person being blackmailed, if they could foresee the whole path, would just decide to take the punch on the first step, take the hit of exposing that first sin? Didn't you decide that you would do that, if anyone ever tried to blackmail you into doing something major in order to conceal something little? Do you see the similarity here, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres?
