“Sleep well last night, Harry?” Hermione asked as Harry slid into his seat at the Gryffindor table on Monday morning.
“Yeah,” he nodded while piling eggs onto his plate. “Not one dream.”
“See, Hermione? It was a fluke,” Ron concluded. She shot him a withering look.
“Just because he didn’t have a nightmare again last night doesn’t mean that the one he had on Saturday night wasn’t real.”
“It wasn’t a nightmare,” Harry grumbled. “It was just a stupid dream. Besides, I already told you that Dumbledore said to talk to him at my next lesson unless it was an emergency.”
“But how do you know this isn’t an emergency?” Hermione asked.
“I think when Dumbledore said ‘emergency,’ he meant something concrete, Hermione,” Harry explained. “If I’d seen somebody getting attacked or something, then yeah, I’d have told him right away; but this was just the entrance to the Department of Mysteries, and it wasn’t even a vision; it was just a dream.”
“Harry,” Ginny said gently, “don’t you think he’d want to know if Voldemort’s obsessing over that place again?”
“Of course he will,” Harry answered. “But we don’t even know if he is obsessing over it. He might’ve just been having a random dream about wanting to find the Prophecy and it somehow leaked out and got into my head. Look, I’m planning to tell Dumbledore tomorrow during our lesson, so can we just drop this in the meantime?”
Ginny nodded, even though he could tell she didn’t agree with his decision. Hermione looked like she wanted to argue, but after a vigorous whispered conversation with Ron, she reluctantly let the subject drop. Much to Harry’s relief, the conversation for the rest of breakfast consisted mainly of topics directly relating to school.
When it was finally time to leave, Harry and Ginny bade Ron and Hermione goodbye and headed down the stairs to the dungeons. Ever since the end of the disastrous unit on Love Potions, they had been covering advanced poisons and their antidotes, which Harry had decided wasn’t much better. Fortunately, Snape hadn’t tried to poison or curse either of them, so he and Harry had been able to slip back into their old relationship of mutual loathing without actually trying to physically harm one another.
When Snape swept into the classroom, Harry could tell by the look on his face that he was already upset about something, and resolved to try extra hard to make himself as unnoticeable as possible. His effort was doomed from the start; Snape looked directly at him as he began the lesson.
“Continue working on your antidotes for the poisons I gave you,” he snapped. His lip curling into a nasty sneer, he added, “Gibbon, do not let me catch you trying to copy Miss Winters’ work again; as I explained before, I have given each of you a different poison to work with.”
Miles Gibbon nodded, wide-eyed, from where he sat near the back of the room.
“Begin,” said Snape. Immediately, everyone in the class began measuring and adding ingredients, stirring their cauldrons, or adjusting the height of their small fires. Harry began laying out the ingredients they might be needing - a vial of crocodile tears, three rats’ feet, a clump of knotgrass, several petals from a Purple Coneflower, and some Agrimony leaves, among other things - while Ginny slowly stirred their existing concoction and brought it up to the correct temperature.
“All right,” Ginny murmured, “once it gets up to the right temperature, if it turns blue we add the Agrimony, and if it turns green we add the knotgrass. How much of each was it?”
Harry consulted his notes before whispering, “Five blades of knotgrass; three Agrimony leaves.” He immediately set aside the correct amount of each plant before joining Ginny in watching their potion simmer.
“This isn’t so bad,” he whispered after several minutes of waiting in silence.
“Isn’t it, Potter?” Snape hissed from so close to Harry’s ear that he couldn’t help jumping in surprise.
“Er- No, sir,” Harry answered after a moment.
“I wonder if you would feel so at ease if you were preparing this potion for a fellow student who had been poisoned,” Snape remarked in an almost casual manner, although he was looking directly at Ginny as he said it.
Taking advantage of the fact that Snape was looking away from him at the moment, Harry used a silent Summoning Charm to pull a small jar filled with some kind of eyeballs off of the shelf at the back of the classroom. It fell to the floor with a crash, causing Snape to spin around and glare at the empty desk in front of the mess. Without a word, he turned back to Harry, whose wand was still in the pocket of his robes. Their eyes locked for a moment, and Harry felt himself sink into his memory of the blank flagstone for a moment before Snape stalked away to deal with the mess.
“Well, that was lucky,” Ginny observed, shooting Harry the briefest of winks.
“Yeah,” Harry agreed as he turned back to their potion. A few minutes later, it turned blue and he added three Agrimony leaves while Ginny reversed the direction of her stirring. They continued working in tandem, speaking only when necessary, until class was over and they were allowed to leave.
“He’s getting worse again,” Ginny observed as she and Harry reached the ground floor.
Harry nodded. “There’s not much we can do about it at the moment, though, other than hope that jars keep falling off the shelves at opportune moments.”
Ginny giggled softly and squeezed his hand in understanding as they continued chatting happily all the way to the Charms classroom. When they arrived, they found Professor Flitwick perched atop his desk, ready for the lesson to begin.
“Good morning, class,” he greeted when everyone had taken their seats. “Today we’re going to finish up our basic Healing Charms and then review the False Death Charm to see how you’re all doing with it. I hope you’ve been practicing.” Harry and Ginny shared a quick smile, as they had both been practicing with a decent amount of success on mice that Hermione frequently conjured for them.
After hopping down from his desk, Flitwick quickly made his way around the classroom passing out various broken bones to the students, which they were instructed to mend. As soon as everyone had successfully mended their bones, he collected them and passed out rather large pieces of raw meat, which the students were supposed to clean and disinfect. Harry thought this was a waste of perfectly good meat until he realized that it had probably been conjured for this specific purpose.
They continued reviewing the various Healing Charms they had learned over the course of the year until Flitwick passed out a live rabbit to each pair of students and ordered them to perform the False Death Charm.
“Ladies first,” Harry said with a wink while gesturing toward the rabbit he was sharing with Ginny.
“All right,” she replied as she drew her wand and pointed it at the rabbit. “Moreproba!” A bolt of red light jumped from her wand and connected with the rabbit, which toppled over sideways without even closing its eyes.
“Nice work,” Harry whispered as everyone paused to watch the professor examine her handiwork. Flitwick hurried over and waved his wand over the rabbit in several different complicated patterns before turning to Ginny with an uncharacteristically solemn expression on his face.
“Miss Weasley,” he said very seriously, “you have either done this charm perfectly, or you have killed this poor rabbit.” Ginny, along with several other students, gasped before Flitwick’s face broke into a grin and he added, “But since even an extremely poorly-cast False Death Charm won’t kill, I have to believe that you’ve done it correctly.” As if to prove his point, he cast the counter-charm and as soon as the jet of blue light made contact with its skin, the rabbit scrambled to its feet and hopped off the desk.
“Well done, Miss Weasley,” Flitwick exclaimed amid her classmates’ congratulations. “Twenty points to Gryffindor for being my first sixth-year student to master this very difficult charm.”
“Thank you, Professor,” Ginny breathed as she grinned broadly at her success. While the tiny professor moved on to check the other students’ work, Harry Summoned the rabbit and prepared to cast the charm himself.
“You know,” he commented as he tried to get the rabbit settled back on top of the desk, “I knew Flitwick had a sense of humor, but I never would’ve expected that sort of a joke to come from him.”
“Maybe he’s been hanging around with Moody,” Ginny suggested.
“Maybe,” Harry chuckled. Turning his full attention to the rabbit, he took a deep breath to clear his head and focused on the spell he was about to cast. “Moreproba,” he said firmly while doing the correct wand movement. Red light burst from the tip of his wand, and the rabbit fell over with a soft thud. A few moments later, Flitwick came to check his work and determined that Harry had performed the charm perfectly as well.
They continued practicing the False Death Charm for the rest of the class period. Harry, Ginny, and Colin - the only ones who had completely mastered the charm - spent the last few minutes of the lesson working on the counter-charm, but none of them met with any success.
The counter to the False Death Charm turned out to be so difficult, in fact, that everyone was still struggling with it at the beginning of May. By that time, Harry and most of the other sixth-years who were of age had already passed their Apparition tests and therefore, in Professor Moody’s opinion, had that much more time to work on his assignment of learning that particular counter-charm (or counter-curse, as he called it).
On the second Tuesday in May, Harry and Ginny arrived in Defense Against the Dark Arts reasonably confident that they would be able to reverse the False Death Curse. It had taken them both quite a lot of extra work to master it, though, and Harry wondered just how many students would be able to do it for the quiz Moody had planned.
“Everybody here?” Moody called out as soon as the bell had signaled the start of the lesson. No one answered, so he pressed on. “Good. We’re going to start out with mice. When I come around, I want everybody to take a mouse from my bag. Don’t worry; they’re not really dead.”
When everyone had a seemingly-dead mouse, Moody limped back to the front of the room. “Good. Now, each of you revive your mouse, and keep in mind that I can keep an eye on all of you at once, so don’t even think about trying to get one of your friends to do this for you. It won’t do you any good to have a friend who knows this counter-curse if your friend is the one who needs it performed.” There was a short pause before he said, “Well, what are you waiting for? Get to it!”
Harry drew his wand and concentrated hard on what he was about to do. When he thought his mind was sufficiently focused, he performed the wand motion while saying, “Alacrita.” His mouse immediately rolled to its feet and began looking around nervously. Glancing around, he saw that nearly everyone else had succeeded as well. Moody seemed rather pleased with the results, and quickly gave an extra assignment to the few students who hadn’t managed the spell before stumping back up to the front of the room and turning to address the class once more.
“Now for the more challenging part,” Moody announced. “Most of you can do the counter-curse for a mouse, but can you do it for a human being?” Harry nodded his head in thought, as he had just been wondering that very thing.
Colin Creevey volunteered to be the class’s test subject in exchange for some extra credit since he was one of the few who hadn’t managed the spell on his mouse. Moody put a Cushioning Charm on the floor and allowed him to lie down before hitting him with the False Death Curse and ordering Zacharias Smith to come wake him up.
Smith sauntered to the front of the room and pointed his wand confidently at Colin. “Alacrita!” he called, causing blue light to jump from his wand to Colin’s chest. Colin blinked and sat up, grinning.
“Good job, Smith!” he enthused. Moody just grunted and nodded for Smith to return to his seat before placing Colin under the False Death Curse once more and calling another student forward to remove it. It was slow going, but by the end of the lesson everyone who had managed to perform the counter-charm on a mouse had also proven able to perform it on Colin. Moody dismissed them with the admonition to continue practicing so they wouldn’t forget what to do in a pressure situation.
That evening, Harry arrived at Professor Dumbledore’s office eager for his Occlumency lesson. Not only did he have an important question he wanted to ask, but the Headmaster had also hinted at the end of his lesson the previous Thursday that Harry was ready to begin the third phase of his Occlumency training.
“Puking Pastilles,” Harry whispered the new password to the stone gargoyle. He thought it a bit odd that Dumbledore seemed so amused by Fred and George Weasley’s Skiving Snackboxes, which were designed and marketed as easy ways to get out of class, but he never saw a reason to bring it up.
Stepping onto the moving staircase, Harry took a deep breath and slowly let it out. When he arrived at the top, the Headmaster’s door was open, and he was greeted by Dumbledore saying, “Legilimens.”
Doing his best to ignore the mental invasion, Harry said, “Why yes, Professor; I’d love to come in,” and proceeded to let himself into the office. Before he had taken two steps, Dumbledore tried to view his memory of the prophecy and Harry felt his attention split between what he was doing and his memory of the flagstone, which he knew was all Dumbledore could see in his mind while he was looking for the prophecy.
“Would you like to have a seat, Harry?” Harry asked, continuing his mock-conversation with himself.
“Why yes, I’d love that; how thoughtful of you,” he answered himself as he sank into his usual chair. Dumbledore removed his spell just as Harry was beginning to sit, but Harry’s movement didn’t change and he sat down without faltering in the slightest when his full attention was returned to him.
“Excellent work, Harry,” Dumbledore congratulated him with a twinkle in his eye. “And I’m very glad to see that you feel comfortable enough to invite yourself in when the door is open.”
“Well, I figured Come in and Legilimens sound similar enough, right?” Harry joked.
“I suppose you’re right,” Dumbledore chuckled. He took a deep breath and his expression sobered before he continued. “I have a bit of intelligence for you, but first, do you have any questions for me?”
“Actually, I do have a couple of questions, sir,” Harry replied. “The first one is something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately. I was wondering how it is that Professor Snape is able to fool Voldemort with Occlumency. I mean, shouldn’t Voldemort be able to tell when he’s being blocked?”
“Ah,” said Dumbledore. “You’re wondering why Lord Voldemort does not see a flagstone or a blade of grass when he tries to view Professor Snape’s secret memories.”
“Yes, sir,” Harry answered.
“The answer to that is really quite simple,” Dumbledore replied. “Professor Snape has spent a great deal of time working on his Occlumency, and has a very large number of Protector Memories, similar to your memory of the flagstone. The difference is that he has used normal memories to mask his secret ones. For example, if Lord Voldemort were to try to see a memory of Professor Snape reporting confidential information to me, he might find a memory of him discussing a student’s detention with me instead. Does that make sense?”
“I think so,” said Harry. “But that still sounds like it’d be pretty easy for him to get caught.”
“I agree,” Dumbledore sighed. “However, he is quite good at what he does and his role in the Order of the Phoenix is strictly voluntary.” Against his will, Harry felt a bit of respect for Snape.
“Did you say you have another question?” Dumbledore asked after a moment.
“Oh, yeah,” Harry said as he shook himself a bit. “Er, I was just wondering if you’ve found out anything about the Department of Mysteries lately. I’ve been dreaming about it more and more often, and every time I wake up with my scar burning.”
“Actually, that’s the very news I was referring to a moment ago,” the Headmaster replied with a slight smile. “However, it’s painfully little information and it doesn’t really tell us anything new that we couldn’t have guessed. All we know is that Lord Voldemort is planning ‘something special’ that is to take place inside the Department of Mysteries. Unfortunately, we have no information about what this ‘something special’ is, nor about when it is to take place.”
Harry sighed heavily and ran his fingers through his hair. “So I guess all your information really tells us is that my dreams really do mean that Voldemort’s obsessing over that place again.”
“I’m afraid so,” said Dumbledore. “Minister Fudge assures me that security has been stepped up considerably since the events of two years ago-” Harry’s derisive snort caused him to pause and smile. “I couldn’t have said it better myself, Harry. However, all we can do at this point is wait and hope that the Ministry is better protected than we suspect.”
Harry nodded in understanding, although he felt extremely uneasy about the idea of the Ministry of Magic being the only thing between Voldemort and something he wanted.
“Well,” Dumbledore clapped his hands, “are you ready to begin the third phase of your Occlumency training?”
Harry grinned. “If you say I’m ready, then I’m ready.”
“Excellent. Now, here’s what we’re going to do: I’m going to try to view a memory that you’ve hidden with the Occultus Charm, and then I’m going to switch to try and view your current thoughts. I want you to try to keep your attention split between your normal thoughts and your flagstone when I make that change, all right?”
Harry nodded. “Ready when you are.”
“Very well,” said Dumbledore. “Legilimens.”
In an effort to keep his thoughts separate from the flagstone that was hiding his most secret memories, Harry began listing all of the dueling spells he could think of. Stupefy, Protego, Incarcerous, Impedimenta, Expelliarmus....
Suddenly, the memory of the flagstone was gone and he could feel Dumbledore inside his mind, watching and listening as he continued his list of spells and tried unsuccessfully to split his attention between the list and the flagstone. A moment later, he felt the Headmaster leave his mind as the spell ended.
“Sorry,” Harry said immediately.
“No need to apologize, Harry,” Dumbledore said easily. “This isn’t exactly easy to do. Just let me know when you’re ready to try again.”
“I’m ready now,” Harry responded.
Dumbledore nodded and repeated the process with similar results. Harry continued trying to consciously split his attention between the flagstone and something else for the next forty five minutes. When he left the Headmaster’s office, all he had to show for his efforts was a mild headache.