FicWad

Sure, Professor - now Headmistress - McGonagall had sworn that she would personally see to it that Hogwarts was made safe for Harry. But Cedric was the one who was really going to be with Harry while they were at school, the one who could get members of the sett to watch over Harry and keep him safe at all times and not have to worry about the thousand or so other students running about the castle grounds and teaching duties and house duties and the wards and all of the other things that McGonagall and the other faculty would all have to attend to, too, as a matter of course. Maybe he wasn't going to be in Harry's actual year, but he was pretty sure that, given the way Harry had reacted to learning about how the house system worked at Hogwarts and the undeserved but widespread poor opinion of Cedric's house, he knew which house Harry was going to end up in, and that meant that they were going to be together a good chunk of each day, regardless. Harry might be braver than any Gryffindor and smarter than any Ravenclaw Cedric had ever met in his time at Hogwarts, but he was also the most just and loyal soul that Cedric had ever met. Harry was a born Hufflepuff. He'd be in Cedric's house even if he had to argue with the Sorting Hat for it, the same as Cedric had when he'd been Sorted. Cedric was sure enough of it that he would have felt entirely comfortable placing money down on a bet to that effect, if he'd actually been a gambling type of person. Even if something happened and the Sorting Hat placed Harry into another house, Cedric was still the one who had contacts in those other houses (even in Slytherin, though the students involved likely wouldn't have wished to have the fact that they were on cordial terms with a Hufflepuff bandied about the castle), and so he was the one who'd still be able to coordinate teams of watchers, to make sure that Harry actually was always accounted for, safe, and getting along well within the school grounds.

The adults might be the ones who'd do whatever was necessary to make the wizarding world in general and Harry in specific safer, by getting Fudge out of the Minister's office. They might be the ones who'd figure out how to keep Harry safe from former Death Eaters like Lucius Malfoy and even from Dumbledore himself. But Cedric and his parents were the ones who were going to be Harry's family, who were going to see to it that he learned everything he needed to know about the wizarding world and could use his power to protect himself. And even though his parents were going to be the ones doing a lot of that teaching, at least over the summers and via books, Cedric was the one who was going to be doing the most to help Harry learn everything, since he was his blood brother and he was the one who would be around the most to answer any questions Harry might have. There were some hints, in Harry's memories of the Dursleys, that Harry was very smart indeed - the kind of smart that made people whisper about geniuses and prodigies and feel a bit unsettled by the sheer amount of intelligence the genius or prodigy in question had - and Cedric knew how that could be. His parents had both been Ravenclaws at heart, though only his father had been in the actual house, since his mother had only attended Hogwarts for her final three years and hadn't been Sorted but rather simply placed (rather against her will) in Slytherin, a house that her family was traditionally always Sorted into, and he loved to read as much as they did, not just for the sake of entertainment (though he loved novels and poetry and had a particular weakness for Muggle literature, which he approached with all of the enthusiasm and desire and curiosity of both a particularly devoted hobbyist and a truly interested researcher), but for the knowledge he could gain from books. Since Cedric had a knack for being able to remember things easily and he was a very quick reader who'd been taught how to read at a fairly early age, he'd read enough that he basically already knew all of the magical history and potion ingredients and plant uses and spells and even most of the theory behind the spells that was taught at Hogwarts, at least up through the first four or five years. It was generally only the practical aspect of casting that he still needed to learn, and he caught on fairly quickly and was strong enough that he'd been able to get excellent grades without ever really trying, so far.

Cedric was the one who was going to have the time to make sure Harry really understood everything he needed to know and didn't just memorize it all. He was the one who'd make sure that Harry learned enough basic history - including the history of the wizarding world, history in general as it was taught by Muggles, and the way the two intersected in strange and sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrifying way - and enough about the development of magic in general that he wouldn't suffer from Professor Binns' droning and frankly soporific lecturing. Binns might be dedicated - he had, after all, remained in Hogwarts as a ghost specifically in order to continue teaching - but he was the worst member of the permanent staff. Students learned not from his lectures in class, but from reading the texts and doing research on their own. If not for Dumbledore's insistence that Hogwarts needed its ghosts to help preserve its magic during the summers, when school was out of session and few wizards and witches actually resided within its walls, Cedric was quite certain that Binns would have been replaced by a more capable and dynamic professor a long time ago. While there was a certainly good chance that McGonagall would replace him (though perhaps not until the next year, considering how close to the start of term it already was) the fact that Harry had been raised without knowledge of the wizarding world meant that he'd need the extra tutoring to avoid feeling lost no matter who was teaching the subject when he got to Hogwarts. Similarly, Harry would need extra schooling in both Muggle and magical geography, law and customs in the wizarding world in general and the UK and Europe specifically, the various laws and customs governing other magical sentient beings, and all sorts of other subjects, too.

From a practical standpoint, Harry needed an entire lifetime's worth of knowledge of a wizarding-raised child old enough to attend Hogwarts, and Cedric was absolutely determined to make sure that he got it. It was probably a good thing that Harry did seem to be so smart, because Cedric was going to cram just as much information as he could into Harry in as short a period a time as possible, to try to get him up to speed and properly prepared for the reality of the magical world, once he started attending Hogwarts. It was a pity they had a little less than a month, now, to work in, but Cedric was going to make just as good a go at it as he could. For Harry's sake, he had to try to fit everything he possibly could into the limited time that they had. Cedric's parents would help as much as they could, of course - his mother, especially, would doubtlessly raid her own library to provide Harry with books on things like wizarding customs and etiquette and even the various old (and mostly pureblooded) rituals, to provide him with a proper grounding in the reality of what life among magical folk really meant - but his father had to work and his mother, it seemed, was going to be taking time out from her writing to help take charge of the new Order of the Phoenix, so Cedric was the one, again, who was going to have the most time to devote to this task. And he was the one who was determined to see it done correctly - and for Harry's sake, first and foremost, though he knew, objectively, that giving Harry knowledge was essentially the same as armoring him for the coming battle, a fact that could only be to the benefit of the greater wizarding world. The simple fact was that Harry was Cedric's blood brother, though, not the rest of the bloody magical world, and the fact that this was for Harry, in his mind, made him all that much more willing to work hard and fight for it, if necessary, to make absolutely certain that the task was done right. Harry had been exiled with Muggle relatives who hated him for almost a decade: he bloody well deserved this knowledge. The fact that he probably also needed a great deal of it to keep himself safe from the Dark Lord and his supporters only made it that much more imperative that Cedric be sure he got it all, and as quickly and efficiently as possible.

He needed a list. Eventually, he'd have to make an actual physical list that he could hold in his hands and check items off of, one by one, to make sure he didn't accidentally skip anything important. Among other things, Cedric was affectionately known, among the Hufflepuffs, as the reigning king of list-making, and it was the nickname that he minded probably the least of all of his nicknames. He'd been making lists all his life, and he knew just how immeasurably useful a good list could be, when it came to planning or studying or just trying to weigh the possible pros and cons of a given situation and so try to arrive at a decision as to the best possible course of action. Some things just needed to be written down and ordered, if a person really wanted to get a clear picture of whatever it was that happened to be going on or at stake, given a certain set of circumstances. But really good lists, like really good plans, weren't things that just sprang into existence, perfectly formed and ordered and complete in a way that couldn't be improved upon. Really good lists needed to be planned and rethought and reordered and re-planned and tinkered with and added to and taken away from and elaborated upon and re-planned again, and the more time a person spent on the planning and reordering and rethinking a possible list through in his or her head, the fewer written drafts were required to arrive at a final master list. The adults were all speculating about how Dumbledore might respond to news of Harry's adoption and the charges filed against the Dursleys, and what they might or might not be able to do if the wizard did or didn't respond in certain very specific ways - an exercise in pointless and therefore quite futile speculation, as far as Cedric was concerned, given that Dumbledore's unpredictability was one of the few predictable things about the man and it was therefore entirely likely that he wouldn't respond to the news in any kind of easily understood, much less predictable or logical, fashion. So really, he might as well get started on planning that list now, while he wasn't likely to miss out on anything important.

He'd already promised Harry to get him some books and help explain to him things like Floo travel, fire calling, the theory behind other forms of magical travel, and the various different kinds of elves. Add to that basic histories of the various forms of sentient magical beings besides those various kinds of elves - especially the goblins, who had a long and often difficult history with magical humans - as well as the history of magical development in Britain specifically and the wizarding world in general, as well as wizarding etiquette and customs. And then there were the basics of magic - magical theory for all of the basic fields, in addition to the history of the development of magic; Herbology and Potions and the study of magical creatures, including proper techniques of caring for (and occasionally harvesting the various useful cast-off bits of) said magical creatures; Transfiguration and Charms and Alchemy; Astronomy and Divination; Defense Against the Dark Arts and Medimagic for when such defenses failed; Ancient Runes and Arithmacy; flying (and Quidditch and other magical sports and games, which Harry would want to know about and should know about, if only so he'd be able to follow any conversations where such things became a topic of discussion); magical law and the ways in which it was and wasn't comparable to Muggle law; Muggle studies and Muggle history and the ways that the histories of the Muggle world and wizarding world differed, overlapped, and sometimes collided with each other head-on; Muggle and magical geography, which similarly to history, was often congruous but never quite entirely always the same; languages in general (especially Latin, Greek, Russian, German, Sanskrit, and Chinese, which tended to form the basis of most of the language of spell-work); magical art and music, and the ways in which such things could be used in place other forms of spell-work for the casting of certain kinds of enchantments on both inanimate objects and animals as well as sentient beings; more specific things, like Occlumency and Legilimency, basic hexes and jinxes and the counters for those curses, even the basics of nonmagical defense, so Harry should be able to defend himself if he were ever caught out without a wand.

As the meeting finally began breaking up, Cedric surveyed his mental list and tried not to frown or sigh. No matter how quickly Harry could read, he was going to have his work cut out for him, and not just for the coming month. Even if his father somehow managed to get a Time-Turner from the Ministry for them to use, unless they were willing to risk adding most of a year to both Harry's age and Cedric's (and nine months was the absolute limit, per year, that could be added via use of a Time-Turner, when dealing with a child under the age of seventeen and, thus, still considered to be a minor by wizarding law), there was no way they were going to be able to do much more than scratch the surface of most of these subjects. Still. A solid grounding in the basics was better than nothing, and they could always continue to add to that, in the evenings after classes and homework were finished and on the weekends, once they were at Hogwarts. Harry was going to need that knowledge - all of it, and probably more. There was nothing that could be dispensed with. Some of it could probably be safely put off until a little bit later, but Cedric was positive that it wouldn't be a very good idea to put too much of it off for too long. They were just going to have to do the best they could with however much time they had. That was just all there was to it. Harry was too important to the wizarding world (as a symbol and potential source of hope and continued triumph over the forces of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and others like that monster) and his safety was too important to Cedric and his parents for them to be taking any chances. Harry would surely understand. Or if he didn't understand immediately just how much he meant to so many people, then he would at least value the knowledge enough, in and of itself, to cooperate and try to learn just as much as he could, as quickly as possible. Cedric was sure of it.

Before he went to bed tonight, Cedric would ask his dad to see if it might be possible for them to get permission to borrow a Time-Turner from the Ministry, to help give Harry enough time both to really recover (mentally and emotionally, as well as physically) from nearly a decade of abuse and neglect and to help Harry catch up on everything that he'd missed out on learning during those years of exile among magical-hating Muggles. If they were lucky, the Ministry would give them permission to use a Time-Turner, his parents and Healer Sirona would agree that it was safe enough to let them add at least half of the nine-month limit for Time-Turners to their study time between now and September first, and the professors at Hogwarts who were able to travel and free for the rest of summer vacation would be willing to come and help tutor Harry in their individual subjects. If not, though, Cedric and his parents would do the best they could with the thirty days they had. Either way, they were going to need all the time they could get. So as soon as Harry was settled in properly and had been taken through the house and out around grounds tomorrow, they'd go ahead and get started on what they could.

For Harry's sake, they couldn't afford to waste any more time.

***

Severus Tobias Snape - Potions Master and Professor of Potions at Hogwarts, former Death Eater and spy for the Order of the Phoenix, and one of the few natively born UK wizards or witches under the age of one hundred to have suffered, while growing up, not just from neglect of one form or another but rather from outright abuse - sat alone in his chambers in the dungeons of Hogwarts, turning a tumbler of firewhiskey around and around between his pale, long-fingered hands, watching the heavy facets of the intricately carved crystal glass catch and reflect the light from the blazing fireplace and trying desperately to empty his heart and soul of the terrible agonies wracking them, even as a Master Occulmens might empty his mind of surface thought and so turn aside the advances of a Legilmens. But even though focusing on the random spray of miniature rainbows dancing off the facets of the tumbler might have helped him to empty his mind, it could not help him empty his heart or his soul of pain. He felt deceived, used, betrayed, and abused in a way that stripped him of every last bit of protection - all the armor of carefully built up and nurtured indifference and detachment, cynicism and sarcasm, darkly morbid humor and acerbic wit at the expense of others and jaded expectancy of the absolute worst - he'd managed to garner himself over the years, ever since he first came to Hogwarts as a child and eventually discovered that it was not normal for a child to be regularly beaten half to death by his father for every single little infraction and failure, be it real or only imagined, and that using whatever power or knowledge or advantage one had to ridicule, upstage, or simply physically hurt others less advantaged and so prove one's superiority and imperviousness to such attack was not the normal order of things. Terrible things were done to him, as a child and an adolescent, and he did awful and sometimes unutterably terrible things to others, as a child becoming an adolescent and later even as a young adult, before he finally understood just how wrong and utterly sick it was, for him to be perpetuating a cycle of violence learned at the hands of a vicious and sociopathic alcoholic Muggle. Despite a position of prestige and power amongst the highest ranks of the Dark Lord's Death Eaters, because of that eventual understanding, he turned traitor, agreeing to spy against both his former Master and compatriots for Dumbledore and his Order. He'd thought that Dumbledore was a good man, someone whose righteousness would be able to help erase the many dark stains on his heart and soul.

It was nothing short of agony, now, to learn just how wrong that assumption had been.

He had been so fully prepared to hate Harry Potter! Some of the more horrible things he'd done, as a preteen and teenager, had been against the boy's father, James Potter, and James' best friends, and, in retaliatory prank against him (not only for such actions but also his bitterly rude and sometimes frankly vicious attitude) that had nearly gone fatally wrong, James had responded not by letting him suffer or die but rather by saving his life, thereby incurring from Severus a life-debt that, instead of eventually repaying, he had compounded horribly by helping to directly lead to the deaths of both James and his wife, Lily. Lily, who'd been one of the pitifully few students at Hogwarts who'd been willing not only to see past his coldly stand-offish and sarcastic often to the point of outright malevolency attitude but to put up with his jaded cynicism enough to behave as an actual friend to him. Lily, whose good opinion he'd cherished so much that, when he finally succeeded in offending her to the point where her anger and her hurt was such that he thought it meant she would never forgive him, he'd felt so much pain that he'd done everything he possibly could to strip himself of his conscience and his heart and so destroy his ability to feel such pain, eventually even joining the Dark Lord. Lily, who he'd cared for the most in the world, and who had eventually been the catalyst that drove him to turn against the Dark Lord. Lily, who he would have done anything to save, who he would have even challenged the Dark Lord for, if only he'd known that the Dark Lord had found a way to get at her. Lily, for whom he would do murder, if ever he were allowed the chance to get his hands on, his wand trained upon, or one of his potions on or into that filthy traitor who betrayed one of his best friends (James) and so also betrayed her to her death. Lily, who in his heart of hearts he could not deny had been the first person he truly cared for and only woman he ever loved. He blamed her death on himself, on her husband, on her husband's traitorous friend, and on her and her husband's child, who'd been the main target that brought the Dark Lord to Lily's house, the fateful night of her murder. And he had been prepared to hate that child, irrationally and completely, even as he hated the boy's father and godfather.

Severus could see now, though, how he had been manipulated by Dumbledore, how he had been encouraged to hate the boy, to transfer all of the lingering shame he felt on account of his behavior towards the boy's father, James, and James' friends and even Lily, herself, and all of the anger and despair and hatefulness he felt for the way in which he'd incurred the life-debt he'd betrayed instead of fulfilling from those two proper targets - one of them untouchable, being in his grave, and the other unreachable, being in Azkaban - over to the boy, and so come to hate Lily's child. Dumbledore had spoken to him of Harry Potter in such a way as to imply that the boy was little more than a combination of James and his traitorous friend both - a high-spirited, mischievous, cosseted, rich, and frankly spoiled rotten child without a care in the world; a child so overindulged by his Muggle relatives that he didn't even seem to miss his real parents; a child so hungry for attention that he would do anything to get it, including creating a gang of followers for himself, just like his wretched father had - and Severus, trusting fool that he was, had simply believed the Headmaster. He'd discounted everything he knew about Lily's older sister, Petunia - who he knew, from his association with Lily, had long been bitterly jealous of her younger sister, as well as being mean, spiteful, nasty tempered, and magic-hating - in favor of Dumbledore's reports (which somehow never failed to compare the boy to James and his traitorous friend), and he had been so prepared to abhor Harry that, when Minerva came back from the Ministry calling for a meeting of the faculty, Severus had found instinctive rage and hatred rising in him just at the mention of the boy's name. When he's viewed the memories of Harry's supposed childhood, in the house of his Muggle relatives, Severus had been so sickened with himself, for his earlier response, that he'd wanted to vomit. And for the first time in years, he'd craved physical pain, as a distraction from his mental turmoil and emotional anguish, enough that his hand had strayed to the dagger than hung at his belt, for use in the gathering of plants and the making of potions.

Lily had been the one who'd broken him of that habit, before. She'd found him one day, methodically peeling the skin back on the soles of his feet, shaving it off in careful stripes that only occasionally bled very much and which, more importantly, left his feet so rawly tender that it pained him to walk, in a manner that reminded him of one of the few bedtime stories he could remember his mother ever telling him, about a mermaid who'd literally suffered to become a human, every step upon dry land feeling to her as if it had been a step taken onto a dagger. That had been the day he'd finally broken and told Lily the complete truth about his father, and it had also been the day when she'd made him swear that he would at least try to quite hurting himself, no matter how much the pain reminded him of his mother and of the fact that he was alive and had sacrificed to be where he was now. He'd slipped more than a few times, after he'd become a Death Eater, but he'd never forgotten his promise to /try/, and so he sat, now, before a raging fire, every single sharp object in his chambers carefully put away where he could not see or easily lay hands upon it, both of his hands wrapped determinedly (but not tightly enough to be in danger of shattering the crystal or of cutting himself on the facets) around a tumbler of firewhiskey so that one of those hands wouldn't idly begin to pick or scratch at himself until the skin parted and he began to bleed, trying and failing to push away the pain he felt through some other means than violence and more, purely physical pain. A particularly green sparkle off the edge of his tumbler reminded him of Harry, of the way the boy's eyes were so much like his mother's, and the urge to throw the glass rose in him, viciously swift. No child with eyes as green as Lily's should ever have had eyes as blankly empty as Severus Snape remembered his own eyes being, as a boy. Rage filled him, and he soon found himself on his feet, shattered fragments of crystal littering the edge of the fireplace, the flames roaring from the sudden influx of firewhiskey, teeth bared in a snarl that successfully challenged the fury of the blazing fire.

The urge to snatch the bottle of firewhiskey up off the low table in front of the armchair he'd been sitting in and hurl it after the tumbler was so great that he spun away from it, bottle, table, fireplace, and all, and strode rapidly from the room, all but running from the temptation to give in to violence of one kind or another. He kept a cabinet full of (mostly) medicinal potions in his bedroom, and his hands were shaking noticeably as he removed the blue glass flask full of Dreamless Sleep potion. Normally, Severus hated to use the stuff. Some of the ingredients tended to build up in the fatty tissues, and there was a risk of dangerous sickness, if that level of buildup became too high or if the traces of those ingredients reacted with other specific elements, once ingested. Moreover, he felt it was a form of weakness, to need a potion to be able to sleep. But he knew, without a doubt, that he either would not sleep or would do himself violence in his sleep, if he didn't take something that would keep him from dreaming, first. And Severus knew himself well enough to know that there was nothing more at all construction he was going to be able to accomplish this night, not with the urge for violence and physical pain riding him like the lash of an addiction. He desperately needed to keep himself from giving in to either one of those urges - after what he'd learned and the shame and self-loathing it had brought him, he knew it would damage him in a way that might keep him from ever being able to try to make up for what he had done and what he had felt, by finding a way to help protect Lily's boy - and he needed to protect himself from himself, when he slept. So he searched out the Dreamless Sleep, and he decided he would take the bottle to his bed and turn in for the evening, taking enough to put him out for the next eight hours. Hopefully, when the potion wore off, around dawn, he would either be able to control himself better, or else he would be free to seek out the company of the Headmistress or someone else who would be able to distract him from those temptations by engaging him in a discussion about the boy and the ways in which they could help him.

Perhaps it was weak of him, to turn to the potion. But he was determined that he would not only make good on the many debts he'd racked up against Lily and James and their friends by helping the boy but also somehow make up for the way he'd so blindly trusted Dumbledore and allowed himself to be manipulated into hating a blameless and badly used child like Harry, and Severus knew he could not do that if he allowed himself to either knowingly break the promise he'd made to Lily, all those years ago, or to slip back into the pattern of violence he'd originally adopted, after the abusive childhood he'd suffered through. And he needed to help Harry, to help keep Lily's child safe. For the sake of his soul, he needed it.

So he shrugged out of his robes, peeled off his boots and the clothes he wore under his wizarding robes, pulled on his sleeping pants, slipped beneath the covers of his king-sized bed, spelled the blue flask and its lid to move to bedside table when he let go of them, popped the top off, upended the flask and swallowed its contents, and hastily dropped both lid and flash. Severus had just enough time to lie down and position his right hand beneath the pillow where he kept his wand, when he slept, and to register the sound of the flask and its lid clinking down against the nightstand. Then the potion took effect, and darkness claimed him, wrapping him in its embrace and rendering him safe (at least for the next eight hours) from temptation and himself.

***

Harry surfaced momentarily twice before he finally woke up for good. The first time, it was to the feeling of an extremely long-fingered hand cupped carefully, protectively, around the crown of his hand. He doubted he was in danger, though the feeling of a hand upon him that so obviously had no intention of causing him pain was a distinctly strange sensation, but Harry was curious as to who it could be who was touching him so gently. So he carefully slitted his eyes open just enough to let him look up from under his eyelashes without it being obvious that he was awake and opening his eyes, peering up at the person standing over him. It was a tall man dressed in black robes with long, tight-fitting sleeves, black hair all of one length just barely brushing his shoulders, his pale face dominated by a proudly curved, hawk-like nose and a pair of jet black eyes that were smouldering with so many different strong emotions that Harry had to restrain himself, to keep from gasping and giving himself away. He didn't look old, exactly (he looked younger than Harry can ever remember Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon looking, actually), but that almost too white skin was marred by deep lines of worry, furrows bracketing his mouth and carved into his forehead, and there was something else at the back of those dark eyes, a weight of pain and knowledge that surprised Harry, because it looked like what he could see, sometimes, when he looked in the mirror, and he'd never thought he'd see something like that in the eyes of another person, unless it was someone old enough to have been through a war. Of course, as Harry now knew, more people who lived in England than he'd ever suspected were old enough to've lived through a war, and this man was almost doubtlessly one of them. So maybe that was where that shadowy weight came from - from the war against Voldemort - and he shouldn't be so surprised. Either way, the man was looking at him with the kind of fierce protectiveness that Harry had seen in his new blood brother's eyes, so Harry knew he was safe. So he gave a mental shrug, let his eyes close all the way again, and drifted back off to sleep.

The second time he really only half surfaced. He realized he was surrounded by warmth, lying on a wonderfully soft and yielding surface, and opened his eyes blearily, confused and a little distressed at the strange (however lovely) sensations, and blinked, momentarily more puzzled than ever, at the sight of what looked like a room-sized picture of the entire Milky Way galaxy, blazing away in splendor up above him. A part of his mind fuzzily wondered where the pointing arrow and the "You Are Here" sign were at, to complete the picture, while the rest wondered how it was that the stars and planets actually managed to look like they were actually twinkling and shining, just like real stars and planets did. When it finally occurred to him that he was tucked into a rather large, rather soft, rather comfortable bed, he remembered what Mrs. Diggory and Cedric had said about sharing a room with Cedric for the night, and, deciding that he must be staring at some kind of wizarding version of a projection on the ceiling, stopped squinting in puzzlement up at the galaxy. Letting his eyes fall shut, Harry curled over slightly on his right side, and let himself drift off again.

The third time, he woke to a large sunlight-filled room with what he eventually figured out was a peaked ceiling that was cleverly enchanted to resemble the sky, with a few fluffy white clouds scudding slowly across the cheerful bright blue. It took him a while to figure out that it wasn't the real sky, but he noticed after a few moments of startled gaping that the "sky" had no sun, only extended only so far as the walls (which were curved and appeared to be completely lined with shelves filled mostly with books, except for around half a dozen high-arched rainbow shapes that he thought were probably stained-glass windows, beneath which and to the sides of which were a desk, two armoires, two chests, two trunks, what looked like some kind of cabinet, and what turned out to be two good-sized, occupied beds), and that he could tell, by squinting very hard, that the "sky" was actually cone- shaped and ever so slightly ribbed from what he assumed were the beams of the ceiling. When he'd figured out the ceiling, he turned his attention downward, noticing that he was in a large bed - he thought it was what they called full-sized or queen-sized, but couldn't be for sure, since he'd never slept on anything other than his rickety old cot, that Harry could remember, except for a hospital bed, that one time a neighbor had been visiting when Dudley shoved him down the steps and he'd landed so badly that he'd shattered his left leg so badly that even over an hour later, when they'd taken X-rays at the hospital, it had been cleanly broken in three different places - with sheets the color of new spring leaves and a duvet the color of a twilight sky, and, when he continued to look down by peering over the edge of the bed, that the room was carpeted with an area rug that was enchanted to look exactly like what it looked like when a body was far up a tree and looking up at the bits of bright blue sky through a thick canopy of leaves and branches. He even recognized the tree as a hawthorn from its leaves, and wondered, idly, if the carpet bloomed with color in the autumn, dropped its leaves for the winter and had snow-covered branches like lace against the eggshell blue sky, and then blossomed and budded with new leaves in the spring. He was smiling at himself for him whimsy as he raised his gaze back up, tracking across the room to a second bed, which was filled with a still slumbering Cedric Diggory.

Harry wished he knew where his glasses were. It was impolite to stare at someone, but he didn't think that rule applied when the person in question was asleep, and he really was curious about this boy, who'd pretty much single-handedly proven to him that there were other people in the world who cared what happened to perfect strangers and would go out of the way and even fight to help those strangers, if possible. He just . . . he wondered what made a person like Cedric tick. Harry knew how his own mind worked, of course, so he knew why he, himself, would have been willing to fight the devil himself to help someone in a situation like Harry was, but Cedric was . . . well, not spoiled, exactly, but obviously well-loved and well taken care of by his family, and Harry couldn't help but be a little bit surprised that somebody so happy could be bothered to care about the unhappiness of a person he barely even knew. It was gratifying, to have somebody care so suddenly and so passionately about his safety and well-being, sure, but it was also kind of, well, odd/, now that he thought about it. Since he'd been left with the Dursleys, no one else had ever cared if Harry was happy or safe, especially not any of the people who were like Cedric - well off, well-loved, happy, popular, good-looking people, the people he'd always thought of, in the back of his mind, as the chosen ones, the ones marked out for all of the really good things in life - who normally couldn't even be bothered to look at Harry, much less see him. So why was it that Cedric was suddenly so dedicated to helping him and taking care of him? Harry could understand it in his parents better than he could in Cedric. The way Mrs. Diggory had spoken and looked at him, it was obvious that Cedric's parents had known and felt great affection for Harry's parents. It had obviously hurt her, to see James and Lily's child in such a state and to know how badly he'd been treated. And Mr. and Mrs. Diggory both quite patently doted on their son, Mr. Diggory especially. They were willing to do just about anything to make their son happy, and Cedric had made it very clear that he wanted Harry to be made a part of his family. But why had Cedric wanted Harry to be his blood brother and adopted brother? /That was the real question.

So Harry narrowed his eyes, so he could see more than just a vaguely human-shaped blur in the bed with grass-green sheets and a duvet like the sky, with what looked like strange little bright golden balls about the size of walnuts with madly fluttering silvery wings zipping about on it, and tried to figure his new blood brother out more than he'd bothered to yesterday. He knew it probably wouldn't do any good - after all, if a person like him could read another person's heart and soul just by looking at that other person hard enough, then surely Professor McGonagall or Hagrid would have realized right away just how bad the Dursleys really were, and protested so much that Dumbledore wouldn't've been able to convince them to let him leave Harry with the Dursleys after all - but if nothing else, it would at least help him become more familiar with the way Cedric looked, enough that he should always be able to recognize him in a crowd, and surely that couldn't hurt. So he squinted his eyes up until he could see Cedric pretty much as well as he could have, if he'd had his glasses on, and he looked at the boy, who somehow managed to look so happy and handsome and carefree, even in his sleep, that it was actually a little disconcerting. Cedric really was a handsome boy - the kind of boy that Dudley likely would've sneered at and called a pretty boy or worse, in an attempt to make himself feel better. If Cedric was going to be two years ahead of him when school started in September, then that meant he was just thirteen going on fourteen (though Harry got the feeling it was thirteen going on fourteen rather sooner than later in the coming year), but he'd obviously gotten a growth spurt earlier than some boys did, because Cedric was very tall for his age, with the kind of lean long-limbedness that hinted very strongly that he would still be quite tall, as an adult, when he reached his full height. Harry couldn't see too much of him, between the covers pulled up haphazardly around Cedric and his own lack of glasses, but he could see enough to know that Cedric had muscles in places that Harry couldn't even imagine himself ever having, and he wondered what kind of sports Cedric must play, to be so fit. If Quidditch was played on brooms, then could the players really build up all that much muscle-mass, playing it?

Shrugging, Harry filed the question away with the growing list of questions he had about wizarding life in general, and went back to looking at and analyzing Cedric. The older boy had a very British kind of complexion - the kind of fairness that would never tan much darker than a light sort of golden and which always had a bit of color in the cheeks, even when there was no particular reason for such color to be there - and hair that looked much darker than Harry could remember realizing yesterday, underneath that top layer of sun-bleached sandy golden-brown. It was overlong by some standards, too - wet, it would lose that bit of wave it had, and it would probably reach all the way down to the nape of his neck, in back, and fall all the way down over his eyes, in front - and seemed inclined towards a sort of wind-blown tousledness that reminded Harry a little bit of his own perpetually untidy hair, though to be perfectly fair that might have been because Cedric was still in bed and not because his hair really was all that untamable. He had a slightly odd nose - it was very straight, at the top, so that it seemed to disappear between Cedric's eyes instead of beginning there, like most people's noses did, but there was the slightest bit of a curve in it just below the bottom of his eyes, just barely visible if looked at in profile, and that kept his nose from fading into his face so completely that it didn't seem to exist above the nostrils (something that would have been very disconcerting indeed, Harry thought) - but it gave his face character, rather than distracting from the classically chiseled handsomeness of his high cheekbones, squared off jaw, and strong chin. And this was definitely the kind of boy Dudley would have called a pretty boy, and worse, because the longer Harry looked at Cedric, the more obviously handsome he was, and for some reason Harry started to wonder, in the back of his head, if maybe Cedric didn't use his face as a mask of sorts, to hide who he really was from other people, because he thought he remembered seeing a bit of surprise in McGonagall's face, when faced with Cedric as Harry's rescuer.

He didn't have a lot of time to ponder the question, though, because only a few moments later Cedric's sleep-slackened features abruptly scrunched themselves up into the kind of shape he'd generally only seen on other people's faces when caught off-guard by a violent sneeze or a tremendous yawn, and, with a long, lazy stretch, Cedric, yawning, came awake, his oddly warm gray eyes focusing on Harry and bringing a smile to his face. "Hey," he called, his voice a little foggy still with sleep. "Good morning, Harry. Up long?"

"Not really. Just enough to wake up most of the way."

"Good sleep?"

"Yeah. No dreams at all, that I can remember," Harry admitted, a little surprised to find himself smiling so easily at the other boy, even if he was happy to've slept so soundly.

"Good," Cedric nodded firmly, and then sat up in bed with another long yawn and stretch. "Wouldn't want you to've had nightmares, your first night in the house. Mum and dad are going to help me teach you Occlumency - ordering the mind enough to clear stray thoughts will usually keep a person from having bad dreams. And it'll protect your mind from any bad Legilmens who try to go poking about where they shouldn't, too, so that's two birds with one stone."

Frowning slightly and really wishing he knew where his glasses were, Harry scooted up on the bed until he felt the pillow behind him fetch up hard against the headboard. Squinting over at Cedric, he tentatively offered an, "Uhm, okay. Today?"

"Nah. Today I'm going to show you around the house and the grounds and introduce you to the other house-elves and such. Then I thought we'd sit and have a talk about what you want to try to learn first about our world before school starts next month. We need to get you caught up on all the things you've missed out on learning. Hufflepuff house may have a sort of crash course in the wizarding world for the Muggle-born or raised, but I really think you're going to need a lot more than that, Harry. I don't want you to be at risk because of what you don't know," Cedric replied, suddenly looking quite serious.

Harry blinked, a little surprised. "Why?" he asked before he could quite help himself, automatically wincing in expectation of an explosion of yelling.

Cedric, though, just blinked back at him, before asking, his voice surprisingly gentle, "Why what, Harry? Why do I think we should talk about what you want to learn first, or why do I not want you to be in danger because of what you don't know about our world?"

Hesitantly, Harry replied to the question with another question. "Erhm, both?"

"Harry . . . " Cedric trailed off with a bit of a sigh, a crease forming between his dark eyebrows. After a few moments of silence he seemed to reach a decision of some sort, because he started over again. "Harry, you remember how I told you that the blood brother ritual literally made you my brother?"

Harry couldn't quite hide his skepticism as to the truth of that. He frowned a little as he started to frame a protest to the effect that even a spell like the blood brother ritual shouldn't make Cedric and his parents really love him like a brother and a child. "Yes, but - "

"Harry," the voice was still gentle, but firm. "You really are my brother now. Brothers are supposed to take care of each other. They love each other and want each other to be happy and safe and so they look out for each other. That's what being family means. Or what it's supposed to mean, anyway. Your Muggle family's so screwed up that I expect it's hard for you to believe me, but you're part of the family now, and that means that my parents are your second parents now and that they really care about you and want you to be happy and safe, just like I do, and we'll all do everything we can to make sure that you are and that you'll stay that way. That means Mum and Dad will make sure that your Muggle relatives are put in jail and do their damnedest to make sure that neither the Dark Lord's followers nor Dumbledore can touch you or do anything to hurt you anymore. And that means Dad's also going to be asking the Ministry for permission to borrow a Time-Turner, to gain you a little bit more time between now and the start of school for you to adjust to being in our world again, and we're all going to be doing our best to cram everything you probably would've learned if Dumbledore had let you stay in our world plus all of the stuff we think might be useful or help keep you safe in between now and then, whether Dad can get the Time-Turner or not, because first of all we think you deserve to know these things and secondly we want you to be as safe as possible when you leave the house. Okay?"

"Erhm . . . okay?" Harry finally cautiously agreed, even though he wasn't all that sure.

The crease reappeared in Cedric's brow. He regarded Harry quietly for a few moments before something seemed to occur to him, as his expression immediately lightened, a small smile curving his lips upwards. "Harry. There's a spell that I think will help explain this to you better than I'm doing right now, if you want to give it a try."

Cedric's thoughtful frown reappeared on Harry's face, though he of course couldn't see his own expression to know it. "What kind of spell is that?"

"It's an empathy spell. They used to use it at Hogwarts, as part of the punishment if a student did something to badly hurt or shame another student, but in the time of Grindelwald people were afraid that the Dark Lord would somehow be able to use that spell to twist people around to his way of thinking and so join him, so the board of governors for the school made them stop using it. Dumbledore's been trying to get them to repeal that decision, but the rise of the new Dark Lord has stopped them from agreeing to do it. It's not at all a Dark spell, though - it's actually about as far from a Dark spell as you can get, because the spell was designed to help bring people together, to give them a way to understand each other's motivations and feelings and help them to sort of see the world through each other's eyes."

"Kind of like the old adage about walking a mile in another man's shoes, you mean?" Harry asked, intrigued almost in spite of himself.

"Pretty much so, yeah. So. You want to give it a try, then?"

Harry's curiosity ground to a sudden halt. "Wait a minute! Do I have to cast it?"

Cedric just grinned and shook his head, though. "Nah," he explained. "Unless you cast it reverse - 'Reverte empathos!' - I'd end up being the one doing the empathizing, because unless the spell's reversed like that, the person who does the casting isn't the one who'll end up doing the empathizing. So, what I'll need to do is give my wand a sort of circular movement and then point it at you and say 'Empathos!' to cast the spell, and then you'll do the empathizing with me, since I'm the caster and I'm not casting the spell with another person being indicated as the one to be empathized with. See?"

"Yeah. Erhm. Speaking of seeing, though, do you know where my glasses are, first?" Harry finally asked, a little plaintively. "I'd prefer to see you, when you're casting the spell."

"Oh! Sorry, Harry. I forgot you weren't awake when we brought you up here. Your bed has a headboard that's sort of a built-in miniature bookcase, like mine. Your glasses are up on top, down to your right if you're facing the headboard. You see them?" Cedric asked, as Harry automatically turned around and reach up to start feeling his way cautiously up along the top of the surprisingly tall and deep headboard.

His hand brushed against the familiar shape of a pair of black-rimmed round glasses just then, and he smiled, nodding as he picked them up and moved to put them on even as he was turning around. "Yeah. Thanks!" He'd almost managed to get them on when he noticed that he couldn't feel any of the abundant Scotch tape that should have been holding them together at the bridge and joints of the legs. "Hey - wait a minute! Are these mine?"

"Oh, Dad repaired them and added some charms to keep them clean and stop them from doing things like steam up or break if they get dropped. Mum says she's going to take you to a wizarding optometrist sometime before school starts, so we can get you an extra pair, just in case something happens to these that can't be easily fixed, and a pair of good charmed protective goggles, too, for when you fly. She doesn't trust that those Muggles would make sure you always got new glasses when you needed them, so I wouldn't try to talk her out of it, if I were you. She's worried that your prescription may not be as up to date as it needs to be," Cedric explained.

Harry found himself blinking up at Cedric again, startled. "Oh, the glasses seem to adjust themselves to my eyes. And my face. They've always done that. This is only the third pair the Dursleys ever bought me - Dudley broke the other two so badly that not even tape and glue would keep them together enough to wear - and they stopped taking me to the optometrist for any other reason that irreparable breakage, after the first optometrist noticed that the lenses in my glasses weren't the same as the ones he'd ordered the first time around anymore," he explained, shrugging slightly, nonchalantly, as he slid the repaired glasses onto his face and the room abruptly sprang into sharp focus, just in time for him to catch the brief flicker of dismay that flashed across Cedric's face at his words.

"You mean your magic has been changing your glasses so that you can see, too?" Cedric asked, his face carefully blank.

Harry tilted his head to the side, a little surprised by Cedric's sudden upset. "Well, yeah."

"Harry," Cedric asked, his voice carefully level, though his eyes gave away his concern, "is there anything else that your magic has been doing for you, like that?"

"You mean besides the healing and keeping me alive and all that?" Harry asked, frowning slightly. He'd never really thought about the things that happened around him in terms of what his power was causing, but then, he'd thought he was a freak of nature with a healing mutation and an ability to occasionally manipulate solid matter, not a wizard. When Cedric nodded, Harry cast his mind back, trying to remember if there was anything else that his magic had obviously done a lot of tampering with, to help him. "My hair," he slowly replied. "It's always like this. It never needs cut or anything - doesn't ever get any longer or shorter than this. I actually kind of like my hair, but my aunt hates it. She can't stand how untidy it is. She tried to cut it all off, once - chopped it all off until I was basically bald, except for my fringe, because she wanted to be able to hide my scar - but it all grew back overnight, so I looked like she'd never taken scissors to it at all. And I think - I'm not sure about this, mind, but I really do have a strong suspicion about it - that sometimes my body changes, to keep me from being so vulnerable when Dudley or Uncle Vernon or somebody hits me. Sometimes my body feels either a lot heavier or a lot lighter than normal, when I'm being beaten, like my bones have all either suddenly become a lot denser and harder to break or else gotten light and flexible, more like cartilage or elastic than bone."

"Great stars! Harry! I think you might be a Metamorphmagus!" Cedric exclaimed, looking half horrified by Harry's explanation and half thrilled by the notion.

"Metamorph-what?"

"A Metamorphmagus," Cedric excitedly explained. "It means someone who can change their appearance, just by thinking about and then willing it to happen. Metamorphmagi are really rare - they're born, not made - and the talent tends to run in families. The Blacks are about the only British family left who consistently produce any, and usually it's no more than one or two a generation. Andromeda Black Tonks is a Metamorphmagus, and so's her daughter, Nymphadora, but thank Merlin, Narcissa Black Malfoy didn't have the talent or pass it on to that horrible son of her hers, Draco. I think Andromeda and Nymphadora are the only Metamorphmagi in Britain who didn't move here from another country. We'll have to get you tested - you might be able to do something to hide your scar, or at least to change your appearance enough so that you're not obviously you, if you ever need to hide."

"Tested?" Harry recoiled a little before he could stop himself, not liking the sound of that.

"Oh, it won't hurt. And it's not hard. It's just like another diagnostic spell - Healer Sirona can do it, easily enough. We just have to ask," Cedric hastily assured him.

"Oh. Well. Alright, then. That shouldn't be difficult to arrange. Isn't she supposed to be coming by with nutrient potions or something for me, anyway?" Harry asked.

"Oh, she's probably going to be here for breakfast, if she isn't here already. She might be here already - she'll want to talk to Mum more about how best to help your body recover, especially if Dad manages to wrangle a Time-Turner out of the Ministry," Cedric explained.

"Oh. Shouldn't we be getting up, then?" Harry asked, suddenly nervous about being late to breakfast or making the Healer wait for him.

"Don't worry, Harry. We've got at least an hour before breakfast, or else Blinky would've come up to check on us already. We'll have missed Dad - he'll be at work already, doubtless. He probably went in early, today, to see about requesting a Time-Turner - but that's fairly normal, for summer holidays. The house-elves fix him breakfast early and he Floos in to work at a quarter to seven, but Mum and I eat together, and we don't have breakfast until a quarter to nine. Don't worry about missing Dad, though. He should be home before four, and he'll probably come find us and tell us how things are going, with the Dursleys and the Time-Turner and all."

"Cedric, what's a Time-Turner?"






TBC . . .