Harry was sitting down in a closed and thus dark broom cupboard. He'd been here for a few minutes but expected that his wait would end soon. As expected at some point he noticed a presence at the door and a tenuous knock resounded through the wood.
"Come in," he said, and the door opened outwardly, Tonks staring down at his crouched form without saying anything.
"Nothing to say?" Harry asked curiously, at which the pink-haired girl simply shrugged.
"You're the one who asked me to come here…" she muttered, before looking him up and down more thoroughly. "You don't look so good."
He didn't feel good either, his stomach hurt and his head was banging. Both issues were probably reflected in the pallor of his face.
"You don't look so good either," he noted.
Tonks had dark circles under her eyes and exuded a stressed energy. Harry wondered why she didn't simply metamorph to fix those things. Maybe her powers didn't work that well when she was under pressure.
"Exams," Tonks bit out.
"Hmm, yeah, I've had some of those as well in the past, very not fun," he started. "You look like you're having boy trouble though," he said with a grin, receiving a glare.
"Why did you call me here?"
"I'm going to do something stupid."
Tonks reared back at his admission and furrowed her brows. "You're not gonna, confess, or something, right?" she asked as she inched backwards, noticing the letter in his hands.
The boy scowled. "God, no, disgusting," he cursed. "Get in here so I can tell you in private, you never know when someone is listening in in this castle," he said and set up a muffling zone. Tonks warily entered the cupboard, at which point Harry threw the letter at her. She caught it, but in the low light, the room was only illuminated through slits, so she couldn't make out what it said on top.
"It's for Dumbledore, in case I don't come back within three hours," Harry explained, at which Tonks recoiled.
"What the hell are you doing?" she hissed.
Harry shrugged. "A bit of that, a bit of this, you know how it goes. Anyway, I'd suggest you wait in this cupboard for three hours. Then run to the headmaster's office if I don't come and pick you up."
Tonks crossed her arms. "And why would I do that? We may have had our differences, but I'm not going to let you run off and do something stupid."
"Who said I would be giving you a choice?" Harry asked with a smirk and before Tonks even had the chance to widen her eyes at the implied threat, and the much more real threat of Harry's wand pointing at her torso, a bright red light hit the girl, sending her into unconsciousness.
Stunning someone wasn't the best way to knock someone out for a very specific amount of time, Harry considered as he caught the limp girl telekinetically, but it sure did knock them out. He chuckled as he gently lowered Tonks to the ground and made sure that she was comfortable. He laid the letter in her lap and looked down at the girl, lamenting how easy it was to take advantage of someone with magic, before he exited the broom cupboard and warded and locked it to all hell.
While this wasn't the best warning system that he could have set up for Dumbledore in case he died during his greedy attempt, it still nonetheless was one.
And quite frankly, he found that he rather enjoyed being Tonks' enemy. She was so reactive, interesting and tense.
Harry's robes swished as he turned and started walking towards the room of requirement. The castle was empty, especially on the seventh floor, which had no dorms. A perfect time to move a bunch of money from one room to the other.
-/-
'I really should have put you into Gryffindor when I had the chance. You and Godric would have hit it off like a goblin and a vault full of gold,' the hat lamented in Harry's mind as the latter walked up and down the corridor in front of a tapestry of a man trying to teach trolls to dance.
"I don't know," Harry said out loud. "I think that I proved my hard work with the preparations I took for this particular bravery. Similarly, the attempt shows my ambition."
'And your greed,' the hat added. 'No amount of gold is going to help you if you're killed by whatever dark and powerful artefact you told me might be present in the room.'
"They can bury me with it, it'll be more gold for the next life," Harry bit out as a door materialised in the section of the wall he'd been pacing in front of. Breathing in deeply he reached for the door handle, only to stop and hover his hand over it as he reconsidered one last time.
The Horcrux had never really sought to hurt anyone in the books, so he would probably be fine. While he could simply move the Horcrux and give it to Dumbledore, it would be safer to just clean out the rest of the room.
Since he didn't want to give up access to the gold and other potentially valuable materials this was the order that things had to be done in.
"Anyway, if there is a powerful dark magical artefact in there, better to check so that I can tell someone, no?" Harry asked.
'You and Godric would really have gotten along. Brave to the point of stupidity, but also greedy to the point of death.'
"I'm finding more and more," Harry started. "That while risking one's life might have been difficult to conceive in the past, now that I'm doing it for very specific reasons, it's becoming much simpler to do so."
'All who gamble eventually lose,' Chanithachuah retorted.
"They do," Harry acknowledged, "but not now, and not like this. For now, until we die, we are invincible," he said and pressed down the knob, opening the door into the room of lost things.
It was a mess, visually, and magically. Towers of items, the odd and the magical stacked on top of each other. Little rows going through, so that one could walk. He could already tell just from what he saw and felt that there were few particularly powerful magical items here. However, it was only those who looked, who found and thus Harry started stumbling his way through the pile of refuse, which the room mostly consisted of. The first pile took him barely a few minutes to sort through.
In the middle of it all lay a gigantic taxidermied troll, brown, hairy, and decisively not castrated. Everything else was just leaned against it. Amongst those things was a seemingly functional trunk, out of which Harry dumped a pile of used female underwear of different sizes, shapes and colours. He scourgified the container and threw in the rest of the useful-looking stuff in it. A magical umbrella that didn't trigger any of his danger senses and two pouches of money, one filled with knuts, and one with pounds. The rest was non-magical magical stuff. Things he could find at any flea market, and which weren't worth carrying.
Harry's fear and anxiety lessened as he methodically moved through the piles of lost items. Most of them were trash, and he realised that if anyone were to possess something valuable, they were less likely to lose it. He threw aside the seventh Playboy magazine when he stumbled upon an actual little treasure. A wand, hidden beneath some statues that exuded a magic he would rather not touch. He wiggled it out of the pile telekinetically and looked at the light brown instrument of potential destruction in his hand. It wasn't necessarily that he had a use for a second wand, hell, he didn't even know if the thing would collaborate yet, or if it had the Trace. But, a wand was a mostly harmless magical item that cost up to nine galleons if one bought it new, so in the trunk, it went.
Moving through the piles of debris Harry slowly began developing an efficient strategy to get through it. He would pick up stuff he didn't want telekinetically and simply throw them behind himself, to the piles he'd already touched. The cursed objects that blipped up like dark shadows in his magic sense he would avoid completely, and the objects that he wanted, he wiggled out from underneath where they were trapped. This mostly consisted of coin pouches and more benign magic objects such as wands and enchanted bits and bobs. Occasionally he would stumble upon an interesting book, but it would inevitably be about either the Dark Arts or just straight-up pornography. He kept the former just so he could read more about the magic his foes were likely to use, but discarded the latter.
Considering how much Harry treasured little curiosities it was odd to see how many he was leaving behind. Robes, boots, paintings, globes and furniture. The issue was simply, that Harry was realising that non-magical things were useless to him because in the future he would just have enough money to buy whatever he wanted. And while he was interested in owning paintings in general, magical paintings struck him as a bit privacy-invasive.
There were dark artefacts all over his magical sense radius, but most were small and seemingly harmless. While he didn't want to touch any, he couldn't help but match some of them up with the curses described in the book he'd read. There was a necklace that probably caused the wearer's hair to grow uncontrollably and which refused to be taken off. A book which prevented the reader from stopping until they were done. A pair of shoes that would likely cause whoever was unfortunate enough to put them on, to dance themselves to death.
Mostly stuff one could deal with. It was however as Harry approached being halfway done with the room, and was coming closer to its back-end, that he felt something truly vile. Looking down the corridor created through the piles his gaze was first drawn to a large black cabinet. The vanishing one. He would have liked to have it perhaps. But considering that it was just a few metres away from a bust of an old woman with a tiara on her brow, he would rather not get anywhere close.
In a way, Harry felt completely and utterly disgusted by what he felt. A hole, in reality, an aberration against god. Sacrilege. A vile concoction of puke and shit would have been more palatable and he felt sullied just by being in the same room as the Horcrux.
'Harry,' the hat said seriously in his mind. 'Turn around and leave, don't get close to that thing.'
'You can feel it?' Harry responded.
'It's reaching out its tendrils towards us. I don't know if it wants to possess or to lead us away, but it's trying to set up a connection through which it can do something,' the hat warned.
Harry looked around, grabbed the largest thing he could justifiably want, an atlas of the magical world from 600 years ago and put it into his trunk.
"Trunk's full, have to go and clear it out," he muttered to himself, but mostly to the Horcrux before he promptly turned around and left the room. Even if he'd only held the diadem in his eyes for a second, not wanting to make it think that he'd perceived its existence in case it had eyes, the image was burned into his skull. A simple thing of perfect gleaming silver. Tarnished beyond comparison. As he rolled the trunk out of the room, not planning on coming back, Harry realised that even in the Dark Arts, there were some lines not to be crossed. The most interesting items he'd taken, had been a statue, an interesting dagger and a grimoire. All very dark. It was disgusting to feel the magic of, twisted human emotions used to harm others.
A Horcrux was something else though.
Harry hadn't previously considered the soul as anything sacrosanct, only having found out about its existence after his death. It was just there for him, for the most part. But now he knew that he wanted nothing to do with it. Its scarring was obviously the closest one could come to a crime against magic itself. If there was anything that would bar one's entrance into heaven, it would be having done something like this.
He exited the room and breathed out a breath he hadn't known that he'd been holding. The atmosphere in that particular part of the room had been stifling in hindsight.
In a way, he was also happy to have seen the Horcrux, because it proved that not all of his knowledge was useless.
But for the moment, he would be happy if he never had to see one again.
Casting a quick tempus he saw that he'd spent an hour and a half in the room. Enough time to stash away his ill-begotten gains behind a crevice on the seldom used seventh floor that he'd found through his nightly wandering, and make his way back to where he'd left Tonks.
'Are you planning on going back for the rest of the stuff?' the hat asked, to which Harry shook his head.
'I risked it because I thought I would find some powerful magical artefacts, but in the end, most of the things in there were provided by students. It's not worth a return trip and in the end, it doesn't matter that much if I have 200 instead of 100 galleons. The important thing is that I have them,' he replied.
'Tell the headmaster about the cursed diadem,' the hat said.
"I will," Harry muttered and made his way to the place he wanted to hide the now full trunk. After having done that he quickly made his way to where he'd left Tonks and after making sure there was nobody to see him, he slipped into the broom cupboard. She was lying there just like he'd left her. Defenceless, snoring, peaceful. He tilted his head as he looked down at her. He noted that she looked much better when she was unconscious. He hadn't noticed but he hadn't seen her face truly care-free for about a year now. There was always some stress, some worry.
Harry didn't quite know what he felt about Tonks. In a way, she was a girl closer to his level of maturity than most Hogwarts students, and if she were a bit older he would say that their personalities would click quite well. On the other level, she was a stupid child chasing after a dream, as stupid children were wont to do, by not doing anything to actually make the chances of accomplishing it any likelier.
Maybe she would grow up soon, he thought, and decided that in case she did, maybe they should spend more time together. If she wanted to after the fiasco that had been this year, though. He trained his wand at her and twitched the magical utensil after taking the letter back, waking the girl up. She woke with a gasp and before he knew it he found himself restrained in ropes, an angry metamorphmagus glaring down at him, in a reversal of their previous position.
He hadn't taken her wand to avoid this on purpose, she deserved to vent her frustrations for serving as his last will and testament for the short time she'd done so.
"What was that?" she bit out and started pacing, as much as one could pace in such small a place.
"I needed your assistance with something, so I secured it. Sorry for stunning you, but there was no other way. Anyone who I can trust to deliver the letter wouldn't let me do the thing I did, while anyone who I didn't, I also couldn't trust to deliver it."
"Why me?"
Harry smirked. "You were in the sweet spot of being responsible enough to deliver the letter, but also someone who I didn't mind stunning. You can be very annoying, you know."
Tonks snorted. "Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. What were you doing," she demanded.
Harry slowly shook his head. "I can't tell you, I'm afraid," he said with a sigh.
"I wasn't asking," Tonks retorted and aimed her wand at him. "You made me a part of this mess."
"The mess is already over, it doesn't involve you."
"You stunned me."
"And I'll do anything you desire to apologise."
"Except tell me what it is that you did?"
Harry looked into Tonk's eyes and perhaps, for the first time, spoke to her seriously.
"Tonks, I consider you a friend, perhaps the way I treat you doesn't fit in that understanding in your head, but one day you'll realise that my frustrations with you come from a place of love and that my japes are my way of expressing friendship. I'll let you in on a secret, which you probably would have only discovered when you became much older." He sighed and closed his eyes. "Sometimes, knowledge can be more dangerous than any spell and there are very few people you can trust in life. I am one of those people, so when I tell you that what you're asking isn't something you should get involved with, please believe me. You can trust me, and sometimes it is better not to know."
Tonks stared at him with slumped shoulders and a defeated look in her eyes. She lowered her wand and herself to the floor. "Everyone thinks I'm some stupid kid, even people younger than me. My mom, my dad, my uncle, they keep telling me to grow first before throwing myself against the challenges I know I'm ready for."
"It is because I think you are adult enough that I am telling you to trust me. Doing so requires a level of emotional intelligence that I don't think children are capable of. To them I would just lie," Harry said.
Tonks wiped at her face with a sleeve and it was too dark to see if she was crying, but Harry assumed so. "What would it take for people to actually believe I could manage what I want?" she whispered. Harry got the feeling they weren't talking about the letter anymore.
"I have a question for you, Tonks," Harry said, causing the girl to look up. She had chosen to not ask further questions, this was clear, so he could trust her with some more information. Maybe move her ass into gear. With her pace of learning, she'd just die against the first slightly competent Death Eater she faced.
Flitwick already knew anyway. So what was the point of hiding it?
He concentrated on a point between where his and Tonks' eyes met and created a small flame, a flicker, barely, but enough to light the room. He flexed his will into a wandless finite, and the ropes binding him disappeared.
"Do you think I'm a genius?" he asked, as the girl's eyes widened to an almost comical degree.
"But- this- even Dumbledore-" she stuttered as Harry slowly shook his head.
"I had my first bout of accidental magic when I was three years old," Harry lied. "It was the most amazing thing I've ever experienced and I did everything in my power to replicate it. Which I did. It wasn't accidental anymore, I could do wandless magic, or in other words, sorcery. It was fascinating, challenging, and interesting. I was hooked. Magic was like heroin and I was a hopeless addict. I practised almost every day for at least three hours. Doing the maths of multiplying 300 days a year with three hours a day and times seven years before I got my Hogwarts letter…" he trailed off as the metamorph's eyes glued themselves on him, as if in a trance.
"That's approximately 6300 hours of continuous, laborious practice. 260 days of learning. Almost a year. Almost 10% of my entire life until the age of 11 has been spent doing magic," he explained, and she saw in Tonks' eyes that she was beginning to understand. He wasn't done yet.
"You think I slowed down after Hogwarts? Of course not, there was more magic that I could learn in a lifetime and I wanted to have started yesterday. Three hours a day? That turned into the time I had free to eat, walk from class to class and spend time with my friends occasionally. I sleep for nine hours a day. The other twelve I spend attending classes and doing magic. This means that with the school year being 200 days long, I've spent 2400 hours of my 11th year of life just doing magic, focusing on magic, learning magical theory and doing magical homework. That's 100 days a year of nothing but magic." Harry paused here, and let his rough calculation set in.
"Talent has nothing to do with it, it's all just hard work. How many hours have you spent doing magic, exactly, and why do you think this commitment has set the foundation for to you become an amazing auror? Or maybe just someone who will be accepted into the program due to her innate ability?"
Tonks looked down at his question, and with the fire he could now clearly see that tears were slowly emerging from her eyes, travelling down her heart-shaped face, and landing on her robe.
"You think it's hard to excel in Hogwarts?" Harry asked, before shaking his head. "It's not, most students barely do enough to get by. With one extra hour a day, you belong to the fifth percentile. With two hours, you belong to the first. With three, you're on your way to being one of the best in your chosen field. With four, well, it's not really a competition anymore. I believe you can be the best auror that Britain has ever seen, Tonks. You just haven't given me a reason to think that you want to be."
"How do you do it?" Tonks asked with a shaky voice.
Harry shrugged. "By all accounts, I'm a shadow of a man. I have no real hobbies and I barely spend time with my friends and family. All I do in my free time is magic and if you took it away from me I would be nothing. I'd have to rebuild myself from scratch. Magic isn't a choice to me, it's a drug. My one and only obsession," he said gently.
"I can't be like you. I have friends, I have a boyfriend," Tonks said bitterly, causing Harry to laugh.
"You don't even need to be half of me to achieve your goals. I'm set to be the next Dumbledore at the pace I'm going. I've never told anyone this, as it would sound arrogant, but it's a bit hard to not make that comparison. You just want to be an auror, a good one, I presume, the best one, I hope. I think that's manageable," Harry said.
"Alright," Tonks said with a sniffle. "This is a bit pathetic. But in return for trusting you, I want your help."
"My help with what?" Harry asked. "I could help you learn a few spells that would get you an O+ in your DADA NEWTs next year. I could also help you create a schedule which would make you an eligible auror candidate by the end of your seventh year, or I could share some unfair advantages I've used to get where I am now."
Harry didn't particularly mind Tonks becoming a better witch, maybe it would prevent her from dying as she did in the original books. And also, he realised with a sigh, he would have to limit his access to the room of requirement for the foreseeable future if he told Dumbledore about the Horcrux. It would be awkward to meet the man while exiting the room.
"All of the above," Tonks said, interrupting his trains of thought. He couldn't help but laugh out loud.
"Well, you're learning at least," he said with a grin. "One can never have too many resources."
They parted after that, having determined when they would meet again, but while Tonks left in the direction of the Hufflepuff common room, Harry stayed where he was and turned himself invisible. While had not successfully looted the Room of Requirement for all that he was willing to loot, he now had a similarly complicated task in front of him.
He had to get the letter with his knowledge to Dumbledore in a way in which he could be sure that the man would read it. Perhaps he could simply use an owl, but that method would make him stressed about Dumbledore perhaps not having read the letter, or not having received it. He needed the man to get it and see him read it, for his own piece of mind. This was of course quite problematic, as he also wanted to remain anonymous during this. Suffice it to say that sneaking anything past Dumbledore while being in his sight was going to prove to be incredibly difficult. After all, the man likely had an infinitely more developed magic sense than Harry.
Not having really thought of a solution yet, considering that he hadn't been quite sure if he would return alive from the Room of Requirement until recently, he walked towards the great hall as he pondered the issue. He could float the letter to the headmaster as the former ate, but he was fairly sure that Dumbledore would be able to identify who was casting the magic. This also singled out being invisible in the man's vicinity and shoving it into his face.
Perhaps the only way to outsmart someone who could likely sense magic was to use magical means without them in the vicinity, or to not use them at all?
Getting an idea Harry ran into the library, which was mostly empty on the weekend, especially with exams being so far off. Once there he committed the ultimate sacrilege of telekinetically ripping out the last half-empty page of a book about magical pasta-making. Then he cast the copy-charm and created a replica of his letter on the desecrated book page, thus securing a version without any fingerprints or body oils or whatever. With a small flex of his magic the original burned, and the new version started floating beside him.
He turned himself invisible and made his way now to the great hall, which was currently empty for the most part, as dinner was only set to start in a few hours. Harry walked around the staff table at the top of the room, not sensing any wards that would prevent him from doing so. Of course, it would be a gamble to simply put the letter on the headmaster's chair, considering the man often wasn't present at all, however, Harry didn't necessarily have any other ideas. He did check out the cutlery which was already laid out, but noted a faint protective shimmer covering it, making it seem unwise to tamper with it. Harry didn't want to risk leaving the letter in the open, as it would risk someone else taking it.
He needed another idea. Looking around the great hall he saw a few Gryffindors sitting at the large table and joking around, but beyond that, the only thing of notice was the absolute lack of anything. It was the great hall. Four large tables, banners and floating candles that weren't lit yet. The enchanted ceiling showed some sun and shit, whatever.
What Harry needed was an invisible string. He could tie the letter to it, hook it over a floating candle and then mechanically, without any magic, drop the letter on top of the headmaster while he ate.
He obviously didn't have such a string, but that was the point when he realised that he could just transfigure it, and then cancel the transfiguration once the letter was delivered. He didn't want to cast any magic to deliver the letter, but cancelling the transfiguration was not casting magic, but simply stopping the supply of it. If there was a way to trace someone's magical signature from even the most minuscule spells that they cast, the copying charm would already screw him anyway, so there was no point in quibbling about this now.
Leaving the Great Hall behind him, Harry gathered some materials from the floor and started transforming them into long pieces of see-through string in an abandoned corner of the castle. It wasn't an easy task creating something so long. He eventually figured out that rather than a continuous change, it was easier to change the piece of wood he was working on piece by piece until he got a string that was long enough for the purpose. Having wasted more than an hour, Harry tied the letter to the string and ran back to the great hall, hoping that there was nobody there.
Thankfully the gods seemed to smile at his attempt and the Great Hall was empty when he arrived, dinner now being one hour away. Stretching his telekinesis to the limits Harry looped the invisible string around one of the floating candles, the letter sticking right by it. Moving the string showed him that he could lower and heighten the letter at will, and so he sat down for the most nerve-wracking part of the scheme. Sitting there before anyone had even arrived, holding the string telekinetically so it wouldn't just slap the letter into some unsuspecting student's face.
He sat there for half an hour, sweating before another student even entered the great hall. The Ravenclaw prefect gave Harry an odd look as he sat down at his own table, cracking open a book. This reminded Harry that he could do the same, and so he took out a book of his own and started pretending to read. Eventually, more and more people joined, upping the decibel level and taking the attention off Harry.
Thankfully the headmaster did arrive eventually, causing Harry to breathe a sigh of relief. However, just as he was about to relax, and was watching the head-master amble towards the staff table, someone clapped a hand on his shoulder.
"What're you doing here so early, Harry?" Cedric asked, scaring Harry into letting go of the string. The letter tumbled down on the Headmaster's plate before the latter had even sat down, drawing everyone's attention. The Transfiguration ended, and a stick fell on top of it with a clang as it landed on the plate, further increasing the silence that spread out through the hall.
For his part, Dumbledore walked unhurriedly to his seat with a gentle smile and slowly sat down as the student body watched him in anticipation.
"Oh, a letter? For me?" the old man asked cheerfully as he sat down and picked up the envelope. He inspected it briefly before opening it. The student body had lost interest at that point because if the letter didn't explode upon opening, it was obviously just a letter, not a prank.
Everyone's attention refocused on the upcoming meal. Except Harry, he watched as Dumbledore started reading, and could see in real-time as all the colour left the old man's face. In an action that many people decades younger than the man would find impossibly spry, the headmaster sprang up and rushed out of the hall, once again drawing the attention of the student body, as the other professors also started arriving for dinner.
Harry didn't quite know what to say about the odd way that everything had transpired, but having seen Dumbledore receive the information, he couldn't help but feel that he was finally free.