4th September 1995, the Defence Against the Dark Arts office, evening
Umbridge had been immovable about the detentions.
A week, she'd decreed — every evening — and when Ron had screwed his courage up to suggest, with elaborate innocence, that perhaps Friday's could be shifted, seeing as Harry had Quidditch tryouts, which Harry didn't, but Ron had committed to the lie with admirable conviction, the pink toad had only smiled her 'small wide smile' and said that consequences, Mr Weasley, were rather the point of consequences, and that Mr Potter's recreational schedule was no concern of hers.
"Worth a try," Harry told him after, and meant it. "Thanks, Ron."
So Friday evening — and every evening — found Harry climbing to the Defence office.
The room itself was an assault. Harry stepped in and had to fight not to wince at it: every surface drowning in pink, lace doilies on every flat thing, and ranged across one whole wall a collection of ornamental plates, each painted with a different kitten, each kitten gambolling with a horrible relentless cuteness. 'It's a performance,' Harry thought, looking at it the way he'd taught himself to look at things — the way Ethan looked at a room, taking it apart for what it told you. He was nowhere near his father's level at it; his observation was still a clumsy, half-trained thing. But even clumsy, it read clear enough here.
Everything in this room is arranged to look soft and harmless. Which means the softness is the disguise, not the truth.
"Sit, Mr Potter." Umbridge handed him a long black quill and a single sheet of parchment, and settled herself behind her desk with the contented air of a woman about to enjoy her evening. "You're going to do some lines for me... I must not tell lies. Let us say... as many as it takes for the message to sink in."
"What do I write with, Professor? You haven't given me any ink."
"Oh," she said sweetly, "you won't need ink."
Harry set the quill to the parchment and wrote the line.
And as the words bloomed red across the page, the same words opened in fire across the back of his own hand — cut into the skin, raw and stinging, the quill writing in his own blood.
The pain came in a hot vicious line, and Harry felt, beneath it, the intent in the thing — a malice woven into the quill itself, deliberate and cruel. 'Cursed object,' he registered at once, even through the sting. 'An Artefact.' It was not life-threatening — nowhere near the white annihilation of the graveyard Cruciatus, and he had stood under that and not broken. So he set his jaw, found the cold still water under the pain, and wrote the next line, and the next, his face giving away absolutely nothing.
Umbridge watched, at first, with bright avid delight.
The delight curdled, slowly, into boredom. The boy wasn't flinching. Line after line, the quill carving him open, and he sat there with the blank composed face of someone copying out a recipe. She'd done this to a dozen children and watched every one of them crumple by the second page. This one only wrote, and wrote, and gave her nothing.
She did catch — and savour — the faint beads of sweat at his temple.
Something, at least. But it was small recompense, and her smile went thin and disappointed as the evening dragged.
It was, Harry thought distantly, somewhere near the close, not so very far below a Cruciatus, in its way. Smaller. Slower. But the same kind of thing — pain inflicted by someone who enjoyed the inflicting and called it correction.
When she finally dismissed him, the back of his hand was a livid stinging mess.
He got as far as the first empty corridor before he let himself stop, put his back to the cold stone, and breathe. He found the blue-moon stillness and poured it over the throbbing of his hand, easing the worst of it. Then he turned the hand over and looked: red, raw, the words risen in angry welts — but no scar. Already fading. Which told him the rest of it. A cursed quill that writes in your blood and leaves no proof. That's not a punishment. That's a tool built so the punishing can't be reported.
He'd write to Ethan tonight. His father had to know — because Harry had no illusions: if she'd do this to him, she'd do it to anyone she could get into that chair, and most of them weren't a graveyard survivor with four years of Cogitation.
Most of them were ordinary frightened children, and a thing like this would break some of them, and leave a mark on the inside where no Healer would think to look.
"Hah-ree?"
He turned, smile already snapping up into place — and it was Luna, coming up the corridor, her grey eyes fixed on him.
"I was coming to find you," she said. "I heard you had detention with her. I've heard things about that woman." A small frown. "I'd have been sooner, only Rolf caught me after Charms and we got to talking about — " she waved a hand " — anyway. It seems I've come at just the right time."
"Rolf," Harry muttered, under his breath, with great feeling.
Luna didn't hear it. But her gaze had narrowed — that searching, particular look she got, the disciple's look, the one that saw past the surface of things — and it travelled down from Harry's carefully cheerful face to his left hand.
Harry caught it and waved the hand breezily, smile widening, launching into a few choice words about the décor of Umbridge's office to pull her eyes back up —
It did not work. Because Luna was Luna.
She gave him a look — a flat, stern, entirely un-dreamy side-eye — and took the hand he'd tried to hide, gently, in both of her smaller ones, turning it over to the light.
And Harry, who had borne the quill all evening without a flicker, very nearly came undone over this — because he had only ever seen Luna look this upset, this worried, once before in his life, on the grass at Hogwarts the night the maze burned. Her whole face had gone tight with it. And some hopeless thrilled corner of his chest, the part that was fourteen and gone on her, lit up like a struck match, and he had to fight with everything he had not to grin like an idiot — settling instead for an expression he hoped read as brave wounded kitten — while a quieter part of him went, with enormous satisfaction: 'See that, Scamander?'
"Harry." Luna's voice was very quiet. "What is this... The truth."
So he told her. The quill. The blood. The lines. All of it.
And Harry witnessed, for the first time in his life, Luna Lovegood truly angry.
The air in the corridor stirred — then gusted — a sudden hard wind kicking up out of nothing, rattling the torches in their brackets and toppling a suit of armour clean off its plinth to clatter and roll the length of the hall — her magic loose, accidental, the way it never was for someone so controlled. "That's torture," she said, and her voice cracked on it, low and shaking. "I know what that quill is, Harry — a Black Quill, a curse quill and from what you've told me it doesn't even use ink, it writes with your own blood, it carves the cost out of the one being punished, and she put it in your hand and watched—"
"Luna—" Harry caught her shoulders, gentle, the armour still ringing somewhere down the corridor. "Luna. Hey. It's all right—"
"It is not—"
"It will be." He held her gaze until the wind began, slowly, to settle. "I'm reporting it. To Dad, tonight. You know what he is, Luna. You know what he can do. A cursed Artefact in a teacher's desk? That's practically his specialty. He built a whole company out of taking magic like that apart. If anyone alive can hang this round that woman's neck, it's him."
He managed a real smile. "Trust him. Trust me. All right?"
Luna looked at him a long moment, her eyes still wet. Then she nodded, stepped in, and hugged him.
Not her usual hug. A fierce one, both arms tight around him, her whole self pressed close, her face buried against his shoulder, holding on as though the wind might come back and take him if she let go.
Harry stood very still, every nerve he owned suddenly and acutely aware of every point of contact, the teenage furnace in him roaring to life with breathtaking inconvenience — and he closed his eyes, and breathed, and thought blue moon, calm water, calm as water, with a desperation that had nothing whatever to do with pain, and held her, and did not let the idiot smile reach his face.
Mostly.
He walked her back to Ravenclaw Tower, assuring her a second time that it would be handled. She wiped her eyes, and squeezed his good hand at the door, and went in.
And the moment she was gone, Harry let the idiot smile out in its full glory.
He floated back toward Gryffindor Tower on it — actually nearly skipping at one point, catching himself, not caring and somewhere on the third staircase he lifted his stinging left hand and, feeling tremendously foolish and not minding in the least, pressed a quick kiss to the welted skin where she'd held it.
Ron and the others were still up when he came in, sprawled around the dormitory waiting for him.
"Well?" Ron demanded. "What'd the Pink Toad do to you—" He stopped. Squinted. "...Why are you smiling like that?"
Neville's brow furrowed. "You look like you've been hit with a Cheering Charm."
"It's nothing," said Harry, the grin absolutely refusing to come down. He arranged his face into something approximating normal and gave them the evening's events — the quill, the blood, the lines, the cruelty of it — recounted flatly, almost lightly, as though it were a minor administrative annoyance.
Ron's ears went red with fury; Neville's jaw set hard.
Then Harry sat down at his trunk, took out parchment and quill — an ordinary one — found the still water under the last of the day's pain, and began to write to his father.
4th September 1995, Atid Stella Headquarters, late night
Ethan was still at his desk, deep in the warding requisitions for the overseas branches, when the office door opened and Remus Lupin came in, travel-worn and weary.
"How was it?" Ethan asked, not looking up from the parchment.
"Mixed." Lupin dropped into the chair across the desk with the particular exhaustion of a man who had spent a long day being careful. The Order had sent him out to make contact with the local werewolf communities — and that part, at least, had gone better than it would have a decade ago.
The years of Atid Stella's work had softened the ground: the new Wolfsbane, not the Belby's clumsy, half-finished brew, but the one perfected — and everyone in the room knew by whom; the company's open hiring, its visibly diverse workforce, the slow erosion of the old reflexive public hatred. The packs had grown, year on year, a little more willing to be spoken to.
"Getting in the door's the easy part now," Lupin said. "It's the asking that's hard. Convincing them not to take Voldemort's coin when he comes offering — and he will come offering, he always did; he promises them everything the rest of the world denies them."
He sighed. "Some of them heard me out. Genuinely. Hospitable, even. And some—" he rubbed his eyes "—some still look at me like I'm the enemy for trying. Years of being treated as a beast does that. You can't argue a man out of a wound."
"No," Ethan agreed quietly, setting down his quill at last. "You can't. And I wouldn't blame them for it, either. Hatred kept under the boot long enough curdles into distrust of anyone who offers a hand — because every hand they ever took before had a trap in it." He leaned back. "But it shifts. Slowly. With time, honest dealing, and people like you who keep going back."
A wry tilt of the head. "The only question is whether Voldemort gives us the time."
He tossed the evening's paper across the desk.
Lupin caught it, and read, and his brows rose. Sightings of Voldemort, Pettigrew, and Mordred Slythra — in Africa this time. Egypt.
"Egypt." Lupin's mouth twisted. "Marvellous. The old Egyptian curse-makers had a charming habit of seeding the tombs — there's enough buried dark magic out there to outfit an army." Then his eyes narrowed, going further down the column, and the dry humour drained out of his face. "There were Muggle casualties. Only a few. But—"
"But a few is a beginning," Ethan finished, his voice gone cold. "And it means the African Ministry of Magic is, at this moment, sitting on a fire and praying it doesn't spread." His amber eyes had sharpened. "He's not hiding any more, Remus. He's prospecting."
Lupin set the paper down, and got up, and put the kettle on — there was always a kettle, in any office Lupin spent time in — and a few minutes later pressed a cup of tea into Ethan's hand and told him, firmly, to drink it and think about sleep; it was late.
Ethan took the tea. And then, mid-sip, his head lifted — he'd felt something, the faint familiar tug of an approaching wingbeat, he rose and opened the window.
Hedwig swept in on the night air and landed on the desk in a settling of snowy feathers.
"That's Harry's," Lupin said, recognising her at once, already reaching for the biscuit tin. The owl accepted a biscuit and a scratch with regal condescension while Ethan unrolled the letter.
He read it.
Lupin, fussing happily over Hedwig, did not at first notice the change in the room. Then he glanced up and went still. Because Ethan's face had gone to a place Lupin had seen only a handful of times in twenty years: utterly without expression, the warmth simply gone, the amber eyes flat and cold as winter stone.
"Ethan?" Lupin said carefully. "What is it."
Ethan handed him the letter, wordless, and crossed back to the desk and drew a fresh sheet toward him.
Lupin read it — and the colour rose in his own face, and his hand tightened on the parchment until it crackled.
He knew Dolores Umbridge was cruel. He had not, even of her, imagined this. A Black Quill. On a child. And Remus Lupin, who knew curse-craft, knew the other thing too, the thing Harry's letter only half-grasped: that a Black Quill used often enough, long enough, did not fade. It scarred. Permanently. It carved its lie into the hand for life.
"She's branding them," Lupin said, very low. "She's branding children."
At the desk, Ethan finished his letter in a few swift lines, and folded into it a second small object Lupin couldn't see, and sealed it, and held it out to Hedwig. "To Harry. Fast as you can, girl."
The owl took it and was gone out the window into the dark.
"We have to do something," Lupin said, on his feet now. "Ethan—"
"We will." Ethan rose, and reached for his coat, the dark midnight blue, and his voice when he spoke was perfectly level, perfectly pleasant and left no room in it at all for any other idea. "Leave it to me, Remus."
It was not a request, and Lupin — who had known him a very long time — did not press it.
Ethan settled his hat. "Get some sleep. You've earned it."
"Where are you going?"
Ethan paused at the door, and there was the smallest cold smile on his face, the kind that never once touched the eyes.
"The Department of Mysteries," he said, and was gone.
5th September 1995, Gryffindor Tower, early morning
Harry was up before the dormitory, as he always was, and Hedwig was waiting at the window with the dawn.
He read his father's letter sitting on the sill in the grey early light, and a slow, fierce, delighted grin spread across his face.
Ethan had answered everything. There was a way, he wrote, to disrupt the quill — a small running thread of counter-magic Harry could hold while he wrote, nullifying the curse in the moment of its working, so that the thing carved nothing into him at all while still bleeding its red lines onto the page exactly as before. Umbridge would see her punishment proceeding precisely as intended, and it would do nothing. The instructions were precise, and well within what Harry could manage.
And folded into the letter was a second thing: a tiny disc of dark metal, etched with Runes so fine they were nearly invisible, no bigger than a button.
Harry turned it over in his fingers, and his grin widened, because he knew at once exactly what it was, and exactly what to do with it.
'Smile for the camera, Professor.'
The days that followed settled into a strange rhythm, and Harry, to his own private amusement, rather enjoyed them.
The detentions held no terror now. He'd sit in the pink room with the curse-thread humming quietly under his attention, write his lines in red, and feel nothing — while keeping his face arranged into the same stoic composure as before, so that Umbridge would think her cruelty was simply being borne. And the button-camera, pinned where no eye would find it, recorded every evening of it: the quill, the blood on the page, the small pink woman watching a child being carved open and enjoying it. Evidence that left no room for denial.
The lessons, meanwhile, became a quiet daily theatre. Harry had no trouble at all with the work — between Ethan's training and his Mind Palace, a true mind-magic Ethan had taught him, where a memorised page could be walked through and read off at will, he could recite whole dry passages of Umbridge's approved text verbatim, flawlessly, in a bored even tone that made the class snigger.
Better still, he'd taken to correcting her — gently, politely, citing her own assigned book against her own statements, page and line, until she contradicted herself in front of thirty students. Hermione, Ron, Draco, and Neville learned to chime in at exactly the right moments, innocent questions placed like knives, and Umbridge's temper rose by visible degrees lesson on lesson while she could find nothing whatever to actually punish.
On the other side, she was, Harry could see, growing genuinely unsettled by the detentions. The quill wasn't working — the boy never marked, never cracked, just sat there poker-faced through evening after evening. He once caught her, late in the week, testing the quill on the back of her own hand to check it wasn't broken — and it carved her line in obediently, and stung, and she looked baffled and furious. Harry held his face perfectly still and screamed with laughter on the inside.
Ron, that week, was losing a different war.
Between prefect rounds, Quidditch, and a tidal wave of O.W.L. homework, he had fallen comprehensively behind, and one afternoon in the library he could be found half-buried under unfinished essays, wearing the expression of a man watching the tide come in over his own head.
Rescue arrived in the form of Lavender Brown, who swooped down beside him, took one look at the carnage, and started quietly sorting it into something survivable.
Ron looked at her with the wet shining eyes of a man saved from drowning, and very nearly cried — and didn't, but only just, biting it back with heroic effort.
Across the table, Hermione who was studying and Viktor who was preparing a Charms lesson both fought losing battles with their composure. Harry, Draco, and Neville shook their heads in fond bemusement. And Luna, who'd drifted in to read, simply beamed at the whole tableau with uncomplicated delight.
It was Ron, though — recovered enough to remember he had friends — who turned the table's attention to Harry. "Here... what is she actually doing to you, in these detentions? You've gone all — cheerful about it, it's not natural."
The others had heard the bones of it by now, from Ron. And the reaction was immediate and considerable.
Hermione's face went white, then thunderous, and she was halfway to her feet — "a Black Quill, on a student, I'll — there are hexes, yes... hehe... I could leave something in her desk that—" — before Viktor's hand closed gently but immovably round her waist and drew her back down, his own dark face set in a quiet, dangerous disgust that said he'd have happily helped if it wouldn't have got her expelled.
Draco was up and round the table in an instant, taking Harry's left hand to inspect it with a Healer-in-training's brisk authority, his pale face tight. "Let me see — how many evenings — Potter, why didn't you—" His jaw worked. "I'll brew you something. A counter-balm, for the curse-residue, I know the family of curse it's from—"
"Draco." Harry gently reclaimed his hand and turned it palm-up. Unmarked. "Look. It's fine. Honestly."
They stared.
"Dad sorted it," Harry said simply. "There's a way to crack the quill — kills the curse while I'm using it. It hasn't touched me in days." He let the grin come, slow and sharp, and there was something in it that made even Draco blink. "And don't worry about the rest. The good professor—" he glanced, just briefly, toward the corridor that led up toward that pink room, and the button hidden in his pocket "—is going to get a proper taste of her own medicine very soon. I'd put money on it."
He didn't explain. He didn't need to. Something in the cold satisfaction of it settled the whole table, and Hermione sat back down, and Viktor's mouth curved, and Draco — after a long assessing look at his friend — allowed himself a small, vindicated smile.
'Soon,' Harry thought, and bent back to his homework, the button warm in his pocket and his father somewhere out in the dark already turning the wheels.