Chapter 116 — Somewhere to Begin

Harry straightened in his chair, then stopped with one hand gripping the seat. Lupin waited for him to settle before drawing his own chair closer. The trunk remained behind him, firmly shut.

‘You needn’t sit as though this is an examination,’ he said. ‘We’re trying to find out what will help.’

‘I thought you’d finished telling Oswald what he did wrong.’ Harry glanced at me, and I held up my notebook to show how much space remained. That earned the beginning of a smile.

Lupin asked whether Harry had been able to find the memory of the broom when the cold reached him. Harry looked down at his wand and said he knew what he was supposed to think about. When Lupin waited, he began turning it between his fingers.

‘I could see myself flying,’ he said. ‘Then I heard her again, and I couldn’t make it matter.’

He sounded angry with himself. I recognised the grip on the wand from the hospital wing, where his blanket had suffered much the same treatment. Lupin didn’t ask him to describe the screaming again; he asked Harry to put the wand on the desk.

‘The flight was a happy memory,’ he said. ‘This attempt hasn’t proved you chose badly. It has shown us how difficult that happiness becomes to reach when something else is demanding all your attention.’

‘So what do I do when it happens?’ Harry released the wand slowly. ‘I can’t ask a Dementor to wait while I find a better bit.’

‘No, you can’t. But we can practise reaching it before you’re frightened, and see whether another memory helps you more.’ Lupin turned towards me. ‘You can leave your remaining paper where it is, Oswald. This part won’t need it.’

I took my hand away from my pouch. Watching Harry fail had made me want another attempt of my own, as though I could settle both our problems by throwing a sufficiently impressive piece of paper. Apparently, my newly identified fault had survived being written down.

Harry noticed. ‘You were going to try again, weren’t you?’ he asked, looking more like himself.

‘I was hoping it would turn out to be an easily removable habit.’ I closed the pouch flap. ‘Something I could leave in a drawer over the holidays.’

He laughed, and Lupin allowed the interruption before bringing us back to the exercise. Harry described his first flight, stopping when the memory reached Malfoy. Instead of asking what happened next, Lupin returned him to the moment when the broom had first carried him clear of the ground.

‘I wasn’t thinking about falling,’ Harry said. His hands had loosened on his knees, and he was looking at the space above the desk.

‘What were you thinking about?’ Lupin asked. Harry took his time, finding something I couldn’t see.

‘Going further.’ He sounded faintly surprised by the answer. For a few seconds, the trunk seemed to have lost its claim on his attention.

When my turn came, I discovered that I didn’t want to describe Luna beside the window in quite that much detail. Harry saw me hesitate and immediately became interested. I was considering how much information I could bury beneath a description of the curtains when Lupin rescued me.

‘You don’t have to tell us everything,’ he said. ‘Find the feeling first. We can work with as much of the occasion as you’re comfortable sharing.’

I tried another memory: asking Luna to be my girlfriend on the terrace overlooking the river. Her answer came back clearly, followed by an absurdly vivid recollection of how difficult I had found the question. Even sitting in Lupin’s office, I could feel the pause before I had managed to say it.

‘I keep bringing the difficult bits with me,’ I admitted. ‘I know how it turned out, but I still remember being nervous.’

‘You aren’t required to have lived a perfect minute,’ Lupin replied. ‘Begin with the part you want to return to.’

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That gave me something I could actually do. I stayed with her answer instead of reconstructing my entire performance, and gradually stopped checking whether it was working. Harry watched without making the joke I had expected from him.

We practised until he could stand steadily and I no longer felt as though the room was moving a little ahead of me. Lupin gave us the same time the following Saturday. We were to stop if we felt unwell, and Harry was to tell an adult promptly if the voices returned outside an exercise.

At the door, Harry looked back at the trunk. ‘You really think I’ll be able to do it?’ he asked, with none of the impatience he had brought into the office.

‘I think you have work you can do this week,’ Lupin said. ‘And I’ll be here to help with the next part.’

Harry nodded and came out beside me. Halfway up the stairs, he said he had always thought I knew exactly what I was doing with the paper. I reminded him that he had witnessed enough failures to write a fairly discouraging book about it.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘You usually looked as though that was the paper’s fault.’

I had to stop climbing until I finished laughing. Harry waited on the next step with a hand on the rail, pleased with himself. By the time we reached the portrait hole, I was ready for a chair and a conversation about absolutely nothing difficult.

Ron and Hermione had occupied opposite ends of the seating by the fire. Between them, an abandoned chessboard stood on a table, its pieces arguing in whispers. Neville approached us with a book clamped between his hands and the expression of someone who had spent far too long hoping matters would improve.

‘They started again,’ he told us quietly. Ron heard him and leaned forward before either of us could answer.

‘We didn’t start anything. Hermione came over to explain it all again.’ He rubbed his palms along his knees. ‘Apparently, if she says there’s no evidence enough times, I’ll forget he’s gone.’

‘That isn’t what I said,’ Hermione replied. ‘I said you couldn’t accuse Crookshanks just because he’s a cat.’

‘And Scabbers is only a rat, so it doesn’t matter.’ Ron’s voice rose on the last words. A boy at the far table gathered his parchment and retreated upstairs.

I sat on the arm of an empty chair before they could repeat the argument for our benefit. ‘Has anyone found anything since we left?’ I asked. Neither answered, but Neville shook his head.

‘We asked in the other dormitories. And looked behind the trunks again.’ He shifted his book under one arm, leaving a thumb trapped between the pages. I thanked him, and he finally sat down.

Ron stared at the rug. ‘Twelve years,’ he said. ‘That’s how long we’ve had him. He doesn’t just disappear because it would be more convenient for Hermione.’

Her face tightened, but I spoke before she could answer. ‘I believe you want Scabbers back, Ron. And I believe Hermione doesn’t know what happened to him. We can start there.’

‘It doesn’t mean her cat couldn’t have done it.’ He looked up at me, waiting for me to dismiss that too.

‘No. It doesn’t mean he did, either.’ I turned towards Hermione. ‘Can you keep Crookshanks away while we search?’

‘I already have,’ she said. Her arms folded across her chest, then dropped again when I asked her to keep doing it. Neither of them looked pleased with me, but the room stayed quiet.

Ron rubbed his eyes. ‘You couldn’t find him on the map this morning,’ he said, sounding tired now.

‘I couldn’t find a name I could identify as him. We can go through it together tonight, somewhere we can actually read it properly.’ I thought of the list we had begun. ‘Bring your notes too. We’ll mark the places you’ve checked.’

He nodded, and Harry pulled a chair over beside him. Hermione noticed how carefully Harry lowered himself into it. Her next question came without the sharpness of the argument: she wanted to know what had happened in the lesson.

‘It was hard,’ Harry said. ‘Oswald got light twice. The second one stayed in front of the boggart for a bit.’

Ron looked at me with sudden interest. ‘An animal?’ he asked, sitting up as though I might produce one there.

‘Mist,’ I said. ‘Then I lost it by trying to make it win the lesson for me.’

Hermione asked about the paper and how much I had used. Four prepared, two spent, two still covered in my pouch: those answers were easier than describing the feeling that had escaped me. Harry told them about his own attempts, and nobody tried to turn his fall into a joke.

We were still talking when Ginny came through the portrait hole. She stopped beside my chair and said Luna was waiting near the Great Hall whenever I was ready. I checked my watch, then got up quickly enough for Hermione to give me a warning look.

‘I’m all right,’ I said, slowing down. ‘We’re going to feed the thestrals. I’d rather reach her before the food has to count as supper.’

Harry glanced towards the window. ‘Would she mind if we came for a little while?’ he asked. Ron looked up too, and Hermione began putting her notes together.

‘I’ll ask her.’ I found a clean scrap and wrote a short note before giving it to Ginny. She read the first line upside down and grinned.

‘You could come and say it,’ she pointed out, folding the paper. I told her I would; I just wanted Luna to know why I was bringing a small crowd before the crowd arrived.

Ginny went ahead, leaving us to collect coats and scarves. Ron moved a forgotten chessman aside so Hermione could set her books down. She thanked him without looking for a second meaning, and I decided to leave them to that small improvement while I fetched my coat.