Just as Harry had suspected, Ron was now drowning in regret, deep, suffocating regret.
He furrowed his brow in frustration, his hands balled into fists so tight that his knuckles had gone white. His heart felt as though a stone had been pressed against it, heavy and leaden.
He never should have forced Harry to come to Divination with him. Harry had said plainly that he hated the class, and yet Ron had dragged him along anyway, all because he couldn't bear to face Professor Trelawney alone.
The image of Harry crumpling to the floor in agony made Ron's chest clench with guilt.
I'm absolutely terrible, he thought.
He crouched down carefully, his voice coming out in a trembling whisper: "Harry, are you all right? Are you hurt?"
"Of course he's not all right!"
Before Harry could answer, Professor Trelawney cut in with a sharp cry. Something in her expression shifted, as though she had stumbled upon a great secret.
Her enormous, magnified eyes glittered with unsettling excitement; her usual languor swept away entirely. She moved quickly toward Harry and began firing questions at him,
"My dear, what happened? An omen? A vision? What did you see? Was it... a dark prophecy?"
The questions poured from her mouth in a breathless rush. Those strangely large eyes fixed on Harry with unblinking intensity, there was no warmth in her voice, only a probing, almost predatory hunger.
"Nothing," Harry lied. He noticed that his own voice came out dry and rough.
Pressing his palm against the floorboards, he slowly pushed himself upright. Even now, he could feel his body trembling beyond his control. His gaze darted around the room, scanning the shadowed corners of the classroom with wary eyes.
That nightmare had shaken him more than he wanted to admit. Even now, Voldemort's high, cold voice seemed to echo just behind his ear, close enough that it might slip out from the shadows at any moment.
"But you were clutching your scar!"
Professor Trelawney fixed her piercing gaze on Harry's forehead and declared: "I saw it clearly, you clutched your scar and writhed on the floor in pain! Come here, Potter, come to me! I have experience with these things. This is a genuine manifestation of Seer's sight!"
Harry looked up at the near-fanatical gleam in her eyes, and a powerful sense of unease rose in his chest. The last thing he wanted was to stay here and serve as Professor Trelawney's test subject. He wanted to leave immediately.
"I think I need to go to the hospital wing," he said, gritting his teeth and keeping his voice as steady as he could. "My head is killing me."
"The hospital wing? My dear, you have clearly been affected by the extraordinary vibrational energies of my classroom!" Professor Trelawney rattled off a string of obscure terms that no one else could make heads or tails of, and reached out to touch his scar. "If you leave now, you will miss something you have never seen before—"
"I just want something for a headache."
Harry cut her off.
He rose to his feet with Ron's help, his movements were still unsteady, cold sweat continuing to bead at his temples. As he stood, the rest of the class instinctively shuffled back a few steps, their faces etched with an unease that mixed genuine worry with poorly concealed fear.
Because everyone knew, the lightning-bolt scar on Harry's forehead was the mark Voldemort had left on him as an infant.
And Harry had just clutched that scar and collapsed to the floor in agony.
What did that mean? No one dared think too deeply about it.
A chill crept down every spine in the room.
"See you in a bit," Harry murmured quietly to Ron, who was still frozen in place. Then he picked up his bag and walked toward the trapdoor without looking back.
Professor Trelawney watched Harry ignore her interpretation of the omen entirely, and disappointment flooded her face. But there was nothing she could do to stop him, Dumbledore had spoken with her specifically about Harry's situation.
And so, with no small amount of resentment, she sank back into her armchair.
Harry, however, did not head toward the hospital wing once he climbed down the ladder. In truth, he had never intended to go there at all.
Both Sherlock and Sirius had told him in earnest: the moment his scar began to hurt again, he was to go straight to Dumbledore, no delays, no detours. These were the two people he trusted most in the world, so Harry didn't hesitate. He set off at a brisk pace.
He walked quickly through sun-drenched corridors, the scenes from the dream replaying themselves over and over in his mind.
He had been through this before, and he knew what to do this time. The key was to hold onto the main thread of the dream, its story, its shape. The blurrier details he must not chase. If he strained too hard to recall them, the very thing Sherlock had warned him about would happen, the critical images would slip through his fingers like sand, dissolving into fog.
Lost in thought, Harry nearly walked straight past the stone gargoyle guarding the entrance to the headmaster's office. He was several steps beyond it before he noticed.
He stopped, blinked, and hurried back.
Then he stood there, staring at the gargoyle, and his stomach sank.
"Damn it," he muttered, slapping himself on the forehead.
He had completely forgotten: he didn't know the password.
Maybe he should go wait for Sherlock in the Arithmancy classroom? He should have paid more attention on those occasions when Sherlock had brought him here at the very least, he should have memorized the password.
Still, since he had come this far, Harry decided to try his luck. He spoke quietly to the gargoyle:
"Iced lemonade?"
Unsurprisingly, the gargoyle didn't budge as still as if it truly were made of stone.
"Right, then..."
Harry let out a long sigh, and began running through every sweet he could think of:
"Pear drops? Liquorice wand? Fizzing Whizzbees? Drooble's Best Blowing Gum?"
He paused, thinking. "Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans... no, that's wrong Professor Dumbledore wouldn't like those. He can't stand the strange flavours..."
Harry remembered clearly that the old Headmaster preferred purely sweet things, nothing peculiar about them. After several more confections yielded nothing, he raised his voice in exasperation:
"I really do need to see him, it's urgent! Abracadabra!"
He had heard that phrase from Cho Chang which a story from Asia about some thieves that sounded like killing curse. The fact that Harry had resorted to that was a reliable measure of just how thoroughly he had lost his head.
The gargoyle still didn't move. It seemed almost to be mocking his futile efforts.
Harry was fully worked up now, all thoughts of finding Sherlock completely gone. In a fit of blind frustration, he drew back his foot and gave the gargoyle a kick.
A bolt of pain shot through his toes, and he hopped away hissing through his teeth.
"Bloody hell..." He gritted his teeth and tried again, still hopping on one foot: "Chocolate Frogs! Sugar Quills! Cockroach Clusters!"
The moment the last words left his mouth, the stone gargoyle stirred to life. It hopped slowly to one side, revealing the passageway behind it.
Harry, still clutching his foot, stared in disbelief.
"Cockroach Clusters?" he repeated faintly. "I only said that as a joke..."
Then again, he reflected, he and Sherlock really had once seen that exact sweet on Dumbledore's desk. So perhaps it made a strange kind of sense.
"Fair enough," he murmured. "Who else but Dumbledore would actually enjoy those things?"
Without wasting another second, he slipped through the gap in the wall and stepped onto the spiral stone staircase, which began to carry him smoothly up until it deposited him before a gleaming oak door, its surface set with an ornate brass knocker.
Harry took a slow, steadying breath. He reached out, grasped the knocker, and gave it a firm rap.
"Come in!"
Dumbledore's warm, unhurried voice drifted through the door.
When Harry pushed it open and stepped inside, he found the headmaster with his hand plunged into a glass jar, a jar filled with slowly crawling Cockroach Clusters.
Harry knew full well that they were only sweets made of sugar, but watching Dumbledore fish them out one by one and pop them cheerfully into his mouth still made his stomach turn. He quickly looked away.
Even Ron, who was famously unadventurous when it came to food, had always given Cockroach Clusters a wide berth.
Maybe Dudley would get along famously with Professor Dumbledore, Harry thought, in a moment of surreal absurdity.
"Care for one?" Dumbledore asked, glancing up with a smile, a fleck of sugar at the corner of his mouth.
"Er, no, thank you," Harry said, shaking his head politely.
"Then please, sit down."
Dumbledore gave his wand a small wave, and an armchair glided across the room from the far wall, settling steadily before Harry. The headmaster took his own seat behind the desk and regarded Harry with kind, attentive eyes.
"Something urgent has brought you here at this hour, I take it?"
"Yes, Professor." Harry nodded and sat down, clasping his hands on his knees. "I was in Divination just now, and I--- I fell asleep."
He hesitated slightly and dropped his gaze. Falling asleep in a teacher's class was, after all, not a thing to be proud of.
But Dumbledore only smiled warmly and said, "Perfectly understandable. Professor Trelawney's lessons can be rather... Do go on, Harry."
Harry exhaled in relief. "I had a dream. I dreamt of Voldemort. And then my scar started hurting, worse than it ever has before."
He organized his thoughts carefully before continuing: "Sherlock and Sirius both told me that the moment my scar hurt again, I had to come to you straight away, without any delay."
"I am grateful for their confidence in me," Dumbledore said, nodding slowly, his expression shifting to something more measured and serious. "But before you tell me the details of the dream, I must ask someone else to join us. Stay here, and please don't go anywhere."
He rose, crossed the room at a brisk pace, and slipped out the door closing it quietly behind him.
Harry was left alone in the office, slightly bewildered.
You can read more than 40 chapters on:
patreon.com/MikeyMuse