1st November 1994, Hogwarts Library, 11:23 AM
Hermione, who had only seconds before been conducting a hushed and complicated negotiation between her ears and her composure, found that her ears were not prepared to comply with her composure on a reasonable timetable. She stood in the small wood-panelled alcove with her copy of Inter-School Trials in one hand and her dignity in the other, and discovered that the boy who had just caught her was, on closer inspection, not at all what she had been expecting.
She had expected, she now realised, the imposing Krum. The Krum of broadsheet cover-photographs, of stadium crowds, of the World Cup final dive that had ended with the Snitch in his fist. The Krum whose surname, when shouted at the top of one hundred thousand voices, had a particular weight.
What was actually standing in the alcove was a tall, slightly-stooped boy of eighteen with the dark beautiful eyes Hermione remembered, the heavy brows she remembered, but with a carriage she had not. Out of his Quidditch robes and out of his fur cloak, in the simple dark wool of his school uniform, Viktor Krum stood with his shoulders the small precise inch lower than perfect posture would have placed them—a stoop, almost, the slight habitual pulling-inward of a boy who had been very tall for several years and was very used to ducking under things and was, at some quiet level, embarrassed about his own visibility.
He was, she registered with a small surprised oh, shy.
"You're—" she started, and stopped, and tried again. "I mean—what brings you to the library, Viktor? At eleven o'clock on a Tuesday?"
It came out, she registered with horror, slightly more like an interrogation than she had intended.
Viktor's mouth twitched briefly, not in offence but in something that looked very close to a wry, weary smile. For a fraction of a second a small flicker of something blue and quiet went through his dark eyes—the colour, Hermione would later think, of relief in someone who had spent a long morning being looked at and had not, until this moment, been looked at as a person and his lips parted to answer.
The library doors at the far end of the long room opened.
A small, low, distinctly coordinated sound rolled in. Whispers. The whispers of a sizeable group of girls who had been told that Madam Pince would have all of them rusticated for the rest of their academic lives if they so much as raised their voices in this room, and who had therefore reduced their tactical communications to fervent low whispers conducted in a single moving formation.
Viktor went still.
His face did the precise small change of a wild animal hearing a hunter's footstep at the edge of a clearing. Calm. Recognition. Resignation. Speed.
"Ah," he said quietly, "they have found me."
Hermione—turning her head—saw what he saw. Approximately fifteen girls. From all five schools, by their robes—two Hogwarts Ravenclaws at the front, three Beauxbatons in pale blue, two Durmstrang girls in red-trimmed grey, four Hogwarts Hufflepuffs, an Ilvermorny in cranberry, a Uagadou girl in patterned rust, and two more Hogwarts students whose Houses were obscured. They were moving with the precise deliberation of a hunting party that had almost certainly already determined the direction of their target and were closing on it.
Viktor turned to Hermione.
"Please," he murmured, with a quality in his accented voice she had not heard on him in any newspaper photograph: pure, helpless, genuine desperation. "I beg of you. I am here for peace. I cannot—I have not had ten minutes today without..."
"Go," Hermione said, with the abrupt practical decisiveness of a girl who had abandoned her own internal disorder the moment a problem requiring solving had presented itself. "Behind that shelf. Now."
He went.
He moved, Hermione registered with a small approving observation, very quietly for a man of his build. Six feet of Bulgarian Seeker disappeared behind the eight-foot bookshelf with the soundlessness of a boy who had been ducking from photographers since he was fifteen.
Hermione turned. She picked up the first book that came to her hand—it was, by happy accident, an extremely large and impressive volume titled Patterns in Pre-Modern Continental Mage-Combat—and arranged her face into the precise studious detachment of a student deeply absorbed in research.
The hunting party arrived.
A fifth-year Hogwarts Ravenclaw—Penelope Boole, whom Hermione vaguely knew from Charms Club—made the diplomatic approach. "Hermione—did you see Viktor Krum come through here? We were certain we saw him from the corridor—"
"Mm?" Hermione said, looking up with the precise mild abstraction of a girl pulling her attention from a complex problem. "Krum? I—oh, yes. Just a moment ago. He went—" she paused, made a small show of remembering correctly, and raised her quill in a vague pointing direction, "—that way, I think? Toward the Restricted Section, perhaps? Or possibly the staff staircase. I wasn't really paying attention."
"Toward the Restricted Section?" Penelope's expression shifted with the focused calculation of a hunter recalibrating coordinates. "Right. Right. Thanks, Hermione."
"Don't mention it."
The hunting party reformed. With the precise low whispered coordination of a unit that had been operating for some hours, they pivoted forty degrees and moved in the direction Hermione had indicated. The library doors closed behind them.
A small precise silence reasserted itself.
After a long moment—long enough that Hermione had begun to wonder whether she had imagined the entire encounter—a head poked, with extreme caution, around the edge of the bookshelf.
Viktor's dark eyes scanned the alcove, then the visible aisles, then the doors. His expression was the expression of a man checking that the lions had genuinely left the watering hole.
"They have—" he said, in a low whisper, "—gone?"
Hermione, who had been holding herself together with rigid academic dignity, found herself making the small particular sound of a girl who had been suppressing laughter and was no longer succeeding.
"Yes," she said, behind her hand. "Yes. They have gone."
Viktor emerged. He stood in the alcove, scratched the back of his neck once with a rueful expression that was entirely at odds with the imposing cover-photograph version of him, and a slight—genuinely slight—blush rose along the line of his cheekbones.
"It is—" he began, "—it is embarrassing, yes? To hide in a library. From girls."
"It is not embarrassing at all," Hermione said firmly, with the particular firmness of a girl who had decided that this small kindness was the thing to do. "It is sensible. Some social situations are not improved by direct engagement."
A small startled smile broke across Viktor's serious face.
He was, Hermione realised with a small private interior turn, extremely enchanted by the smile she did not yet realise she was wearing. Some quality in his dark eyes had gone soft and attentive in a way she suspected she would later think about at length.
"You are," Viktor said carefully, with the deliberate care of a young man assembling English grammar he had clearly been polishing for the occasion, "doing some research, I think. There are many books." His head tilted toward her stack. "May I—help? I am not a librarian. But I read."
It took Hermione a fraction of a second to register the offer. Viktor Krum. The Bulgarian Seeker. Reading. Helping her with research on the very Tournament he was a Champion in. Her instinct to politely refuse engaged briefly, but a more practical voice in her, swift and tactical, intervened—he is a Champion. He may have insight no other source has. He is offering. Take it.
"I would," she said, "actually, very much appreciate that. Thank you."
"It is no trouble. Where—where do we go?"
"My table is.. just at the back."
She gathered the topmost three books. He gathered the heaviest five with the easy mechanical strength of a Quidditch Seeker who treated a book-stack the way other people treated a pillow. They walked together toward the small alcove table at the rear of the library.
They walked slowly.
It was not a deliberate slowness. It was simply the slowness that arrived when neither of two people, for their own private reasons, was particularly hurrying.
"It is a very fine library," Viktor said, after a moment, glancing up at the high vaulted ceilings with the particular attention of a person registering architecture. "Durmstrang's is colder. Smaller. Not so many windows."
Hermione, who had been carrying her three books with a settling internal composure, looked at him with surprise. "You—pay attention to libraries?"
"I read very much," Viktor said simply. "Quidditch is what I do. But it is not all of what I am."
She had not, she registered honestly, considered that a Quidditch star might also read. The realisation came with the small quiet shame of a girl who had—for once, made a precisely the kind of unexamined assumption she would have lectured Ron about at length.
"What sort of books?" she asked, after a beat.
"Many. History. Philosophy. Some—" he paused, and the small wry smile returned, "—what is the word in English. Romances. My mother. She tells me they are good for the heart. I read them, and I do not know if my heart is better, but I think I am calmer afterward."
Hermione laughed, helplessly, before she could decide whether to.
"My mother says the same," she admitted. "About Brontë."
"Brontë." Viktor's eyebrows rose with sudden warmth. "Wuthering Heights?"
"Jane Eyre, mostly. Though I read Wuthering Heights last summer."
"It is a... violent book."
"Very violent."
"Heathcliff is a—" he paused, searching, "—he is a terrible man."
"He really is."
"And yet."
"And yet," Hermione agreed, with the helpless small pleasure of a girl who had not, in any of her previous fourteen years, expected to encounter a sympathetic interlocutor on the question of Heathcliff in a Hogwarts library.
They walked another small distance. Viktor told her, in his careful patient English, about a Bulgarian writer whose name Hermione did not know and who, as it transpired, had written stories Viktor remembered reading as a boy that involved—Viktor laughed slightly at himself even as he said it—small fluffy domestic animals overcoming improbable obstacles, which Viktor had, embarrassingly, never quite outgrown. Hermione, who as a small child had once made her mother read her Watership Down eight nights running, found herself confessing to a similar private weakness.
They had, it turned out, more in common than either of them had had any reason to expect.
They arrived at the alcove table.
They both registered, simultaneously and silently, that they had arrived.
Viktor set down his five books, with great care, on the corner of the table. Hermione set down her three.
There was a small, distinct, mutual blush.
"Right," Hermione said briskly, with a tone she suspected was perhaps half a register too brisk. "Right. Yes. Research. Tournament records. I'm trying to identify the historical patterns of First Tasks—if I can find a pattern, it will help Harry."
"Harry," Viktor repeated, and his face changed, briefly, into the focused-Champion mode she had seen across the antechamber doorway last night. "Yes. The boy. He should not be in this. It is wrong."
"I know."
"My English is not—I am sorry, but I will say this. He is fourteen. I am eighteen. The Tasks are designed for seventeen and above. This is not fair to him."
"I know."
"I will help you," Viktor said, with the simple certainty of a young man who had decided. "If I can. It is—it does not break the rules of the Tournament for a Champion to share his own research. The rules forbid adults from helping us. They do not forbid us from helping each other. Or—" his mouth twitched, "—from helping a girl in a library, who is helping her friend."
"That is a generous reading of the rules."
"It is a Bulgarian reading."
Hermione laughed.
She was, she realised, sitting at her usual research table with Viktor Krum across from her, eight stacks of books between them, and the small absurd pleased private interior brightness of a girl whose morning had taken a turn she could not have predicted at breakfast.
She opened Inter-School Trials with mock briskness. "Right. Then. Pre-Tournament records of the late seventeenth century—"
"I have read this one," Viktor said, peering at the title. "It is mostly dull."
"It is entirely dull."
"But there is, in the appendix—page four hundred, perhaps, or four hundred and ten—a list of the First Tasks of the period. They are categorised. The category is what your friend will need."
Hermione turned to him slowly, with the precise particular admiring attention of a girl who had just received exactly the help she had been hoping for.
"Viktor," she said. "You are brilliant."
"It is," Viktor said gravely, "what my mother also tells me. About romances."
1st November 1994, Hogwarts Castle, the Seventh-Floor Corridor opposite the Tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy, 11:46 AM
"Past Barnabas," Ron muttered, for the third time in twelve minutes. "Just past Barnabas, she said. And here we are, past Barnabas, and there is no door. There has never been a door. We have walked past Barnabas twice now. We are now," he gestured, "walking past Barnabas a third time. My faith in Lovegood is boundless, mate, but at this particular juncture I am beginning to have questions."
"Ron," Harry said patiently, "walk."
The seventh-floor corridor opposite the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy was a long, dim, slightly draughty passage, lined on one side by the famous tapestry—in which Barnabas, in mediaeval robes, was patiently being beaten about the head by half a dozen trolls who had clearly grown bored with his attempts to teach them ballet—and on the other side by a long blank stretch of unbroken stone wall. The only things on the wall were two ordinary brackets for missing torches and a small chip in the stone where, presumably, a student had once thrown something with insufficient charm.
Draco walked beside Harry with his hands clasped behind his back and the precise interested attention of a boy who treated unsolved magical phenomena the way other people treated good crosswords. He had not yet expressed an opinion on whether the room was real. He had, Harry suspected, decided to suspend judgement until evidence presented itself.
"Past Barnabas," Ron said, for the fourth time, with feeling. "Past—"
"Ron," Harry said again, and this time his voice had changed.
His holly wand was already half out of his sleeve.
He had felt it, in the precise instant before it manifested—the small clear tingle at the strings of the air in front of him, the threadwork-vibration of a piece of magic about to assert itself. Harry had been trained to feel such things since he was nine. The recognition had been immediate.
He stopped walking. The other two stopped a half-pace behind him.
The blank stretch of stone wall, opposite Barnabas, opposite the place where the third pass past Barnabas concluded—
—was no longer blank.
A door had appeared.
It was, Harry registered, a door of considerable beauty. Heavy oak, dark with age, with iron bracings; a brass handle; small simple hinges; the kind of door that gave the impression of having always been there even though all three of them had, conclusively, just walked past the empty wall a moment earlier and could swear on their wands that the door had not.
Ron's mouth had opened. It hung open for some seconds.
"Right," he said finally. "Right. All right. Lovegood is a witch and I will hear nothing against her ever again, even if she tells me a Wrackspurt is eating my shoelaces."
Draco's grey eyes had gone very wide. He was, Harry registered with the small private affection he had developed for precisely this expression, doing the Healer-look he did when he encountered a magical phenomenon he did not understand and intended to learn it.
"Astonishing," Draco said, almost reverently.
Harry approached the door with his wand out. He did not touch the handle yet. He laid his palm, instead, very gently against the wood, and let his Cogitation feel along the threadwork beneath the surface.
The door felt—alive, in the particular way Hogwarts felt alive. It was not built. It was grown.
He was about to reach for the handle when—
CRACK.
A small distinct displacement of air. A small green-and-orange thing materialised at chest height directly to Harry's left.
Ron yelped. His back hit the wall. Draco, beside him, did not yelp—but his hand had gone with reflexive speed to where his wand was holstered inside his cloak, and the small hardly-perceptible flinch of his shoulder revealed that even the Malfoy composure had its limits when small green-and-orange things materialised an inch from one's elbow.
Harry, who had not flinched, looked at the small green-and-orange thing with the precise quiet pleasure of a boy meeting an old friend.
"Dobby."
Ron, recovering with great wounded dignity: "One day, Dobby. One day. I am going to walk into a room normally without a house-elf deciding it is the perfect moment to teleport into my elbow."
Draco, recovering more smoothly: "Hello, Dobby."
"Master Harry Potter, sir!" Dobby beamed, his enormous eyes brimming with the full unselfconscious affection that he had directed at Harry since his liberation. "And Young Master Draco! And Mr Weasley, sir! Dobby is most very sorry for the startle—Dobby was not meaning to materialise so close to Mr Weasley's elbow, but Dobby was excited, he is having a letter—"
"It's fine, Dobby," Harry said, smiling. "You look well."
This was not a polite formality. Dobby looked very well.
The small house-elf—who in Harry's first encounter with him had been wearing a filthy pillowcase, and whose ears had been the dragging shabby ears of a creature in chronic distress—stood now in a small, immaculate, tailored dark-green waistcoat over a crisp white shirt, with neat black trousers cut for his small frame, and a small leather satchel slung over one shoulder. His ears stood at the alert, neat angle of a content elf. His skin had the healthy colour of a creature who was eating regularly. Most strikingly, his enormous tennis-ball eyes carried the focused, intelligent, organisational attention of a being who was in charge of things.
"Dobby is very well, Master Harry, sir!" Dobby agreed enthusiastically. "Atid Stella is most very good to Dobby! Dobby is now—" he cleared his small throat with proper professional ceremony, "—Senior House-Elf Liaison and Internal Operations Coordinator, under Miss Rogeiros, sir."
"That's a very long title, Dobby," Ron observed.
"It is what Miss Rogeiros is calling Dobby, Mr Weasley sir!" Dobby explained brightly. "Dobby is helping Miss Rogeiros with her Human Resources management. Dobby is conducting intake interviews of new free house-elves wishing to work at Atid Stella. Dobby is helping write the Dobby Charter—which Miss Rogeiros has named after Dobby, sir, which Dobby is most very honoured by—of fair employment terms for elf-staff. Dobby is making sure house-elves are getting proper wages and proper rest days and clothes that fit, sir! And Dobby is—" his small chest puffed slightly, "—Dobby is being paid two Galleons and four Sickles per week, sir, and Dobby is saving, sir, and Dobby is having his own small flat in the Atid Stella staff residences!"
"Dobby," Harry said, with genuine warmth, "that is wonderful."
"It is, sir! It is most wonderful, sir!"
"Dobby," Draco said, with the particular small soft tone he reserved for the elf he had freed and to whom he privately owed a great deal, "I—am very glad."
"Young Master Draco is too kind to Dobby."
"I am not too kind to you, Dobby. You earned it."
Dobby's eyes filled, briefly, but he had grown beyond the wailing of his earlier years and now simply blinked rapidly and adjusted his satchel.
"The letter," Harry prompted gently.
"Oh!" Dobby's hand flew to his satchel. "Yes, sir! Master Ethan is writing this letter for Master Harry. Master Ethan is asking Dobby to deliver it personally because Hedwig is, at the moment, having some protection enchantments applied. Master Ethan is having Dobby bring it directly."
Harry took the letter and tucked it into his inner robe-pocket, against his ribs.
"Thank you, Dobby."
"Master Harry is most—" Dobby's eyes had drifted past Harry's shoulder, and they widened. He stopped mid-sentence. "Oh. Oh, sirs. Sirs, you have found the Room of Requirement."
The three of them turned.
"The what, Dobby?" Ron asked.
"The Room of Requirement, Mr Weasley sir!" Dobby's small face had gone alight with the enthusiasm of an expert encountering a favourite topic. "It is also called the Come-and-Go Room, sir! It is a most very clever room! It is only being there when it is needed, and it is being whatever it is needed to be, sir!"
"What does that mean, exactly?" Draco asked, with the precise scholarly attention of a boy who had detected useful information.
"It means, sirs, that you are walking past it three times, thinking of what you are needing," Dobby explained, his hands gesturing in small enthusiastic patterns, "and the Room is making itself into that thing, sirs. It is being a practice room for spell-work. It is being a library of the books one has wished one had. It is being a bathroom, sirs, in great emergencies! Dobby has heard of it being a broom-cupboard for Mr Filch in very specific moments! It has been being all sorts of things, sirs, for many many centuries! Hogwarts house-elves have been knowing about it for as long as there have been house-elves at Hogwarts, sirs!"
The three boys absorbed this in stages.
"Anything?" Ron repeated, faintly. "It can be anything?"
"Mostly anything, Mr Weasley sir! Within the Room's own large but not infinite limits. It cannot be making food, sirs—food is one of Gamp's Five Principal Exceptions, which Master Ethan would tell Master Harry about, sirs. But it can be making most other things."
Harry had gone very still. He was, Draco recognised, doing the Esther-thing of registering an enormously useful new tool and quietly cataloguing every implication.
"Dobby," Harry said. "Thank you. For telling us about it."
"Master Harry is very welcome, sir."
"Will you—" Harry paused. "Are you needing to return immediately?"
"Yes, sir. Miss Rogeiros has Dobby on a schedule, sir. Dobby is supposed to be back in twenty-four minutes for the quarterly performance review session with the Diagon Alley Hall elf-staff. But Dobby will tell Master Ethan that Master Harry has the letter, and that Master Harry and his friends are well."
"Tell him also," Harry said, "that we have just been introduced to the Room of Requirement, and that we are about to put it to use. He will—" Harry's mouth twitched slightly, "—he will appreciate the timing."
"Dobby will tell him exactly that, sir."
Dobby bowed properly. CRACK. He was gone.
Ron exhaled. "That elf," he said, "is doing better in life than I am."
"Considerably better," Draco agreed. "He has a flat."
"He has a flat and a job title."
"He has Galleons-and-Sickles wages."
"He has the Dobby Charter, Ron."
"The Dobby Charter, Draco."
The two of them were grinning at each other in a way that Harry, over the past year, had grown extremely fond of observing.
He turned to the door.
"Right," he said. "Let's see what it's made for us."
He closed his hand around the brass handle and pulled.
The Room opened.
The three of them stood in the doorway, briefly silent.
What lay before them was not the dim corridor stone they had just been standing in. It was a high, broad, vaulted hall of polished pale stone—perhaps fifty feet long and forty wide, with a domed ceiling at perhaps thirty feet, lit by a soft even daylight that came from no particular source. Along the long walls, in neat racks, hung practice-targets of three sizes: small snitch-sized targets in red and gold, mid-sized human-figure dummies in plain dull canvas, and large heavy training-dummies of the sort that Harry knew from Ethan's Atid Stella training-rooms in London, padded with reinforced charm-cloth and re-mendable. Three of the human-sized dummies stood in the centre of the floor on small wheeled casters; another three hovered at chest height, charmed to drift in slow random patterns. The far wall had a long arched window through which a beautiful—quite obviously unreal—autumn forest could be seen, complete with slow-falling leaves.
The floor beneath their feet was a single immense duelling mat, marked with the standard concentric circles Harry recognised from London.
Ron made a sound that was not, strictly, language.
Draco walked four paces into the room with his hands clasped behind his back, surveying the space with the precise admiring attention of a boy assessing a fine new piece of equipment. "Astonishing."
Harry stood in the doorway for a long moment. He looked at the dummies. He looked at the targets. He looked at the unreal forest beyond the unreal window. He thought, very briefly, of Ethan's training-rooms; of the long quiet years of Lumos, Nox, Reparo, Scourgify; of the years after of Stupefy, Protego, Expelliarmus, Diffindo; of the more recent years of Confringo, Reducto, Bombarda; of Ethan's voice patient and unhurried saying again, Harry, slower, intent before incantation.
He thought: This is going to be very useful indeed.
He stepped inside. The door closed behind them with a small soft click.
"We must," Harry said, almost to himself, "bring Luna here. And Hermione. And Astoria, and Daphne. This is—this is going to change what we can do."
"Yes," Draco said.
"Yes," Ron said, with feeling.
A quiet pause. They stood for a moment absorbing the room. Then Harry's hands moved with the brisk practicality he had learnt from long years of warming up with his father, and he shrugged out of his school robes—folding them neatly over the back of a small wooden bench that had appeared, helpfully, by the wall the moment he had thought of needing somewhere to put them—and pulled his comfortable black training-hoodie out from his satchel.
"That's the Esther kit," Ron observed.
"That's the Esther kit," Harry agreed.
He pulled the hoodie on. He stretched—a small unconscious series of arms-and-shoulder motions Ethan had taught him as a nine-year-old. His holly wand was already in his right hand.
He stepped onto the duelling mat.
When he turned to face Ron, something in him had changed.
Ron, who had been in the middle of pulling his Weasley jumper sleeves up his elbows, registered the change before he had named what it was. The boy on the mat was no longer—exactly—the Harry he had been talking to in the corridor. The shoulders had set. The chin had levelled. The green eyes behind the round glasses had gone quiet in a particular way that was less expression than stillness. He stood with his weight evenly balanced over both feet, his wand-hand loose at his side, his free hand at the small of his back.
Everything about his posture said he was following Ethan's style.
Ron's stomach did something cold and wonderful.
It was not quite fear. He had no reason to be afraid; he was about to be sparred with by his best friend in a school of magical adventures with three witnesses including a magical sentient room which had clearly been designed to keep the unfortunate from getting too injured. But it was the cold of a body recognising a capability that one had heard described many times and had never actually seen.
It was also, he registered with a small private wild thrill, exciting.
He had been, at fourteen, a Quidditch Seeker, a chess prodigy, a Defence Against the Dark Arts student capable of resisting the Imperius Curse for forty-eight seconds. He had been, throughout all of it, the best friend of a boy whom Ethan Esther had taken from age nine and built, day after day, into something Ron had never quite seen.
He was, in a moment, going to see it.
"Right then," Draco said, stepping into the role of referee with the precise diplomatic authority of a Healing-trial-trained Slytherin who had been waiting for exactly this assignment. "Standard duelling rules. No darker than fourth-year syllabus. Stop on yield or on referee-call. No permanent injuries, please—the Room is excellent but I would still prefer not to have to explain to Madam Pomfrey why. Combatants ready?"
"Ready," Harry said quietly.
"Ready," Ron said, with feeling.
"On three."
Ron rolled his shoulders. He had calculated, in the last three seconds, perhaps fourteen opening moves. He was going to use the two best of them in sequence and hope at least one of them caught Harry off-guard. He had been in training with Ethan on strength and conditioning, himself, for the last eighteen months. He was not, he reminded himself, the second-year Ron who had once tried to hex Malfoy with a broken wand and ended up vomiting slugs. He was the fourth-year Ron. The Captain-of-Chess, Seeker, Imperius-Resistant Ron.
His best friend, across the mat, was watching him with the composed unhurried attention of a boy who had been, in some quiet way, also looking forward to this for a very long time.
"One," Draco said.
Harry's wand-hand shifted, very slightly.
"Two."
Ron's grip closed firm on his own.
"Three."