FicWad

Chapter 14

End-of-term exams were over for us first-years, but still in progress for the older students. Fifth-years were madly cramming for their O.W.L.s and the seventh-years had a week or two before their N.E.W.T. exams.

We still had to attend our classes, but there was nothing to do, really, besides work on our summer assignments - something that most of us were reluctant to do. We were done with studying!

As the rest of the Gryffindors quickly headed for lunch after Defense class, Janie and I were held back by the professor.

"P-P-Potter! Granger! R-R-Remain," Quirrell stammered.

"Yes, sir?" Janie said as we approached his desk.

"S-Someone circumvented the protections on the third floor corridor," he told us. "They were looking for th-this."

He opened a drawer and took out a small red pebble. I identified it immediately as a piece of our fake Philosopher's Stone. I could feel the heat of my blush in my reddening face.

"Ah - you recognize it!" the professor smiled.

"Some Ravenclaws were responsible, sir," Janie thought quickly. "At least that was the rumor we heard..."

"Yes, but they were not the first, were they?" Quirrell stared directly into my eyes. "Someone else had already claimed the real Stone and left a broken fake behind."

Janie went for her wand but she wasn't fast enough. Neither was I.

"Immobulus! Incarcerous! " Quirrell's wand was in his hand instantly and Janie and I found ourselves bound where we stood.

So he'd realized that our stone was a fake. Perhaps I should have hidden the real Stone someplace more secure than my school trunk. It was safe from other students, but a professor could insist on searching a student's trunk.

"Well," the professor chuckled evilly to himself as he plucked our wands from our hands, "This will be easier than I'd hoped." He stared intently into my eyes for a long moment, then smiled. "So - the real Stone is hidden in your trunk, Potter!"

How he knew that, I had no idea. It was as if he could read my mind.

"At first I thought it was part of Dumbledore's clever deception - hide a shattered fake instead of the real Stone - but then I considered that you two might be involved. It's much safer to interrogate two students than to confront Dumbledore and possibly tip my hand."

Janie and I exchanged a frightened glance. Our eyeballs were the only things we could move.

"Thinking this was a piece of the Philosopher's Stone, I scanned it to determine what magic it still might contain," he informed us, holding up the tiny pebble. "Imagine my surprise when all I found was the remnants of a novice sticking charm! My suspicions aroused, I sent this off to have it analyzed. The report said it was ordinary garnet. That's why Dumbledore will never win," Quirrell chuckled to himself as he scrutinized the red pebble between his fingertips. "He believes he is infallible. He placed the real Stone in that room and it was inconceivable that some first-years could have removed it. He found the Ravenclaws with a shattered stone, assumed that they had broken the real one, and then he refused to consider any alternative explanations. His first conclusion could not be wrong, so he never even bothered to inspect the broken remains. Potter," Quirrell looked up from the pebble he'd been staring at, "You could do better, you know. Dumbledore is a fool! I could teach you things - about how to wield power! It's not enough to have power. You must also be able to control it. I can teach you, Potter. What do you say? Join with me?"

All I could move were my eyeballs, which stared back at Quirrell in fear.

"Ah!" he seemed to understand the problem. He reached over to tap the top of my head with his wand. "Now, Potter - what say you?"

"Never!" I blurted out without even thinking. Had it been Janie he'd asked, I'm sure she would have already come up with a plan to make him believe she'd go along with his offer.

"Your choice - Imperio! " Quirrell shrugged and cast another spell in my direction. "Go to your room and get the real Stone, Potter. Bring it directly back here. I will hold Miss Granger as insurance until you return. Speak to no one. Now go!" he ordered, fully releasing my bindings.

I picked up my bag and headed straight for Gryffindor Tower, fully intending to obey his command.

As I hurried along the corridors, however, a niggling voice in the back of my head asked a simple question: Why?

Quirrell was holding Janie hostage. He was the enemy. Why was I doing his bidding? The farther I walked, the less sense it made. Why help the enemy? This was stupid! I wouldn't do it! Would I? I wanted to - sort of. It was that spell Quirrell cast on me, I realized. I wouldn't obey!

"Well?" the Fat Lady's voice brought me out of my daze.

"Well what?" I asked, shaking my head to clear it.

"The password?" she frowned at me, crossing her arms stubbornly.

"Cheaters never win," I replied and the portrait opened for me. I hurried straight to my room, ignoring Longbottom and Finnigan, who offered to wait for me for lunch.

By the time I'd opened my trunk the effects of whatever Quirrell had done to me had completely worn off. I went straight for our little bag of extra garnet - the slightly off-color pieces that were left over from our successful caper. I hastily dumped them into my cupped palm and cast several weak sticking charms, forming the little reddish bits into a new fake stone. It wasn't nearly as good as the other one, but it didn't need to be perfect.

I wished I'd had The Book so I could quickly review exactly how to deal with Quirrell, but The Book was in Janie's bag. I had a general idea of what I was to do - go for his throat. I hoped that plan would be good enough.

As I hurried back down to the Defense classroom, I tried to recall my frame of mind from when I'd left. I didn't want Quirrell to realize that his spell had worn off. I slowed as I approached the classroom door and opened it very deliberately, closing it behind me after I'd entered.

"I-I brought it," I announced, trying to color my voice with the same confusion as I'd experienced when I left.

As I extended my hand to offer the 'stone' to Quirrell, I clumsily dropped it. My hastily-applied sticking charms let go and a hundred pieces of garnet scattered across the floor.

"You FOOL!" Quirrell screamed, gaping in shock at the little sparkly bits at his feet.

That was all the opening I needed - I lunged for the man's throat with both hands, just as The Book had suggested.

Quirrell's screams turned from anger to terror and then to silence as my hands burned into the skin of his neck, causing it to turn to stone, and then to chalky gray dust that crumbled between my blistering fingers. The professor slumped to the floor as my touch destroyed his blood vessels and windpipe.

"Bloody HELL!!" I shouted, holding my painfully throbbing hands in front of me.

"Ungh!" I heard Janie groan from beside Quirrell's desk.

Burnt hands or no, I picked up Quirrell's wand from the floor. "Finite Incantatem, "I waved it at Janie before dropping it again.

"Jamie!!" She rushed over and grabbed her wand from Quirrell's desk. "Aguamenti! " she cast the water spell. I thrust my hands into the cool stream. "Glacius! " she turned the water to ice.

Ahh... Sweet relief!

Janie turned and started scooping up the bits of garnet, returning every half minute or so to shoot more water at my hands and freeze it.

"I may not be Madam Pomfrey, but I do know that ice is as good as aloe vera juice for burns," she assured me. "Hopefully we can avoid the infirmary and all the questions that would raise."

Avoiding questions was always way up there on our priorities list.

"Have I got them all? Do you see any more garnet?" Janie asked as she surveyed the floor. "Here," she handed me my wand. "Can you perform a levitation spell on Quirrell? There are probably several pieces underneath him."

Despite the lingering pain in my fingers, I managed.

"Hmm... set him in his chair," Janie said, pulling the teacher's chair out from the desk. "We'll let him slump over the desk and make it look like he died sitting right there."

She used the edge of a piece of parchment to scoop up most of the gray dust from the floor and sprinkled it on the desk near Quirrell's ruined neck, then she used a Scourgify on the floor.

It was several more minutes before Janie pronounced the crime scene 'clean.' She gave my hands another ice-pack treatment before we hurried down to our third-floor classroom - the one in which we'd brewed our Animagus potion - and we paused to catch our breath.

And to get our story straight.

"We were never there," I offered.

"Several people saw Quirrell ask us to remain after class," Janie shot that idea down. "Aguamenti! Glacius! " she applied another ice-pack to my hands

"But I was seen going through the common room on my way to my dorm," I countered. "That puts us out of the Defense classroom before he died."

"No one knows for sure when he died, so the timing is irrelevant."

"Oh..." I said, my shoulders slumping in defeat.

"We'll just have to bluff our way through," she decided. "Quirrell warned us about our exam essays - the fact that they appeared very similar. He threatened us with zeroes and detention if it happened again and then shooed us off to lunch, stating that he would skip lunch because he wasn't feeling well. His face looked a little ashen to me," she grinned. "Did you notice that, too?"

"Yes! I did!" I nodded vigorously. "He smelled a little 'off,' too - even more than usual," I added.

"How are your hands feeling?" Janie gave them a concerned glance. "Do you think you can manage without a freezing charm until we get to your dorm room?"

"Yeah, I think so."

"Let's go, then," she said, slinging her bag over her shoulder.


Janie headed straight up to her room, then joined me a few minutes later in mine.

"Here's that burn salve that Hagrid gave me," she said, opening the jar. "There's plenty here, so use it liberally. Two applications - one now and one tomorrow," she instructed.

Thanks to Janie's quick thinking with the initial ice-packs, the magical salve would finish healing my hands by dinner time.


"Did you notice the dark form that left Quirrell just before he fell to the floor?" Janie whispered to me as we were eating our lunch a short while later.

"No - I had my eyes closed. I was in a lot of pain at the time and I was concentrating on squeezing his throat and not passing out," I whispered back with a slight shake of my head.

"Well, something shot straight out of Quirrell's head and disappeared through the window. It was a bit like a ghost, but not as well defined."

"Voldemort?" I asked almost silently.

"His spirit - the part of him that was possessing Quirrell, I figure. The part that remained after you killed him ten years ago."

"So he's still not dead, then?" I cringed.

"Probably not," Janie shook her head. "Not completely, but a least you set him back to where he was ten years ago."

"We set him back ten years," I corrected her.

She didn't protest - she merely grinned back at me and raised her goblet of pumpkin juice to mine in a toast.


-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-


Strangely, no one questioned us about Quirrell. Apparently, he had no more classes that afternoon and his body wasn't discovered until after dinner, which he obviously missed.

The Weasley twin terrors later claimed that they overheard Flitwick and McGonagall discussing Quirrell's demise. Madam Pomfrey had briefed the other professors on the details of her post mortem examination and she related that there was severe damage to Quirrell's neck and also to the back of his head, which looked as though a decayed face had been concealed under the man's turban.

Dumbledore concluded that the professor had been possessed and his body had died as a result of the evil spirit terminating its possession. No one had offered a dissenting explanation. The Headmaster never put a name to this 'evil spirit,' but we knew who he meant.


-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-


For the first time in over a decade, the Great Hall was adorned in yellow and black. Hufflepuff had won the House Cup!

Without Snape's cheating, Slytherin didn't stand a chance. Neither did Gryffindor without the benefit of my awesome skills as their Quidditch seeker. Ravenclaw, those usually close runners-up, had lost 400 points for Cho's attempt on the Stone.

That left Hufflepuff.

The Badgers were in high spirits, whooping it up in pairs and groups. Janie and I applauded for them when Dumbledore made the official presentation of the Cup.

We didn't really care about such trivial things. We'd had more pressing goals and we'd achieved them - well, all but one of them. Voldemort was still out there, somewhere, and for all we knew he was still gunning for me. Good luck with that! It took him ten years to find me this time. In ten more years I'd be an adult wizard and I'd be ready for him.

Well - Janie and I would be ready for him. We beat him as first years, maybe we could finish him off next time.

Thinking back to last September, I realized just how fortunate I was to have happened across The Book. Would I have chosen the Hermione Granger Strategy on my own? Not bloody likely! The old Harry Potter would have taken the path of least resistance. I would have allowed Missus Weasley to push her son's friendship on me. We would have ended up 'best mates' and we'd have been killed by Quirrell - both of us.

That was the most probable outcome of my Ron Weasley Strategy - the one where I let his initial dislike of Janie sway me and we didn't run off to rescue her from the troll. I guess all three of us would have been dead by now, wouldn't we? That would leave Neville Longbottom as the last hope as Savior of the Wizarding World.

Now there's a scary thought!