I am not J.K. Rowling, nor am I associated with Scholastic or anybody else who makes money off of Harry Potter. If I were, I'd make more money and there would be much less chance of OBHWF becoming a reality. Speaking of the Big Happy Weasley family, big time apologies for how much this chapter seems to shill for them. Everything will become Harmonian in time. Also, there's a shout out to Ahn Na Blue's "Here at the End" in here somewhere.
Chapter 2: The Emissary
Harry Potter traced his index finger over his own name, etched in the cornerstone of the tower along with the names of all the others who had lived here over the last few centuries. "Does this mean what I think it does?"
Headmistress McGonagall nodded her head solemnly. "I'm afraid so. The tower has chosen you, Potter."
Harry was instantly reminded of his fourth year, when his name had come out of the Goblet of Fire, forcing him to compete in the Triwizard Tournament, despite the fact that he hadn't entered himself in the contest. "This isn't fair. I didn't ask for this."
"No one ever asks to reside here. The tower names who it chooses to," McGonagall explained, seemingly indignant over the whole situation. "You're under no obligation to stay here, however. Magical or otherwise."
Harry looked up at her in curiosity. "Has anyone here," he gestured toward the list of names, "ever refused to live inside the tower?"
"No," the Headmistress answered honestly. "The temptation of knowing one's own future is a great one. There aren't many who could walk away from that and fewer still who could do so at the age of seventeen."
"Harry," Hermione exclaimed from behind him. She and Ron had jogged over to where he now crouched, looks of concern on both of their faces. "What's going on? Is something wrong?"
"Isn't it obvious?" Harry grumbled as he stared up at the tower.
"The only thing that's obvious," Ron said, "is that you're sitting on the ground, staring at nothing and looking like someone just stole your girlfriend and…" Realization hit Ron suddenly. "Oh."
"You can see the tower, can't you?" Hermione asked, her voice filled with anxiety. "Which means that…"
"I've been chosen," Harry finished for her. "My name's there on the cornerstone, right below Voldemort's and Dumbledore's."
"But that's a good thing, right?" Ron tried as he put on a nervous half-smile. "I mean, now you can get in and see if You-Know-Who left, er, something behind." When he had been about to say the word 'horcrux' again, Hermione had shot him with a scathing glare. "Besides, who wouldn't want to know the future?" His eyes widened. "Maybe I'll become a professional Quidditch player."
Hermione snorted derisively. "That's if the tower even really shows the future. I have a hard time believing that any magical object can truly see things that haven't happened yet." She then turned her attention briefly to Ron. "And I seriously doubt that you'll be a professional Quidditch player."
Headmistress McGonagall spoke up quickly. "Every student who has lived here has claimed to have experienced detailed visions depicting their lives after they left Hogwarts, Dumbledore among them. I was skeptical at first, too, Miss Granger, but the facts remain what they are. You would be wise to consider them."
Ron looked victorious. "Yeah, Hermione. Why don't you listen to someone else for a change?"
"Me?" Hermione yelled back incredulously. "You're the one who never listens! Not in class, not to Harry and certainly not to me."
"Oy," Ron replied with a roll of his eyes. "How could I not listen to you? You scream so loudly that everyone on Hogwarts grounds can hear you! There's probably centaurs in the forest thinking, 'Will that bird ever shut her gob?'"
Harry rose suddenly and began to walk towards the Forbidden Forest himself, as if to find out. "Why don't you two just snog and get it over with?" he muttered angrily under his breath.
Harry had very little patience left when it came to his best friends' incessant bickering. He had heard enough of it over their summer together to last him a lifetime. Something had changed between them at Dumbledore's funeral and somehow he was sure that each had finally discovered how the other felt, but they seemed reluctant to take that final step and become a couple. 'Why don't they just get together?' Harry asked himself bitterly. 'Everyone's been waiting for them to for ages.'
As Harry wandered to the edge of the Forbidden Forest, lost in his own thoughts, he did not hear Hermione come up behind him. "Harry," she called out to him in a pleading voice. "Please don't go away angry. I'm sorry that I yelled at Ron, but…well, you know how we get around each other." She approached him slowly. "Are you mad?"
"No," Harry answered her with a pout. Hermione gave him an intensely skeptical look. "Alright, maybe a little. I just wish that you two could lay off of each other once in a while. Especially when we're looking for the horcruxes. Remember the time that we were trying to steal Hufflepuff's cup and you nearly had a duel with Ron over whether he had fancied Susan Bones in fifth year?"
Hermione looked chagrined. "How could I forget?" Harry turned around to face her as she put on her most apologetic expression. "Although, in my defense, boys can be completely clueless as to who they fancy."
"Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one who's even focused on what we're doing," Harry groused grumpily. "You know, if you two didn't want to come along, you didn't have to. This isn't your fight."
"Oh Harry, of course it is," Hermione said. "All three of us are in this together." She put her hand on his shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze. "I'm sorry if we've made you feel differently."
Harry couldn't help but smile at her sincerity. The two of them began walking together in the general direction of the Quidditch pitch. "Apology accepted, but on one condition."
Hermione smiled herself and quirked an eyebrow in curiosity. "And what would that condition be, pray tell?"
Harry was now all business. "Do your thing on the tower. Find out if there's really a horcrux in there."
"I wish you'd stop calling it 'my thing'," Hermione told him, looking only slightly annoyed. "It's just a spell. Anyone can do it."
"I haven't been able to," Harry reminded her, "and neither has Ron."
The spell they were referring to was a dark magic detection spell used by people who searched old tombs for a living, usually either creepy necromancer types or fun-loving adventure seekers like Bill Weasley. Naturally, it was the latter who had provided the three of them with the spell. Only Hermione had proven adept at using it, however.
"That's because neither of you tried very hard after you saw that I could do it," Hermione countered knowingly. "If you want my opinion, you were both just trying to make me feel better."
Harry frowned in confusion. "Make you feel better? How do you mean?"
Hermione gave him her patented 'Oh, come on,' look. "There aren't any books on horcruxes, Harry. I'm afraid I wasn't very helpful to you this past summer."
"That's complete rubbish," Harry assured her. "We couldn't have done any of it without you. Honestly."
Hermione blushed at his words. "Thank you, Harry. That means a lot to me." Without truly realizing it, they had rejoined Headmistress McGonagall and Ron, who appeared to be discussing Gryffindor's chances of keeping the Quidditch cup this year.
"Ravenclaw and Slytherin are both down Seekers, now that Cho's graduated and Malfoy's well…you know…" Ron's sentence trailed off awkwardly. "Hey look, Harry's back!"
"Mr. Potter," Headmistress McGonagall began, her tone mildly reproving, "I do not begrudge you the right to take your time in making this decision, but I also do not know what the tower will do if it's kept waiting. Perhaps you should make up your mind quickly."
Harry and Hermione shared a look that said they were on exactly the same page. "I think I'd like to take a look inside the tower first. If you wouldn't mind showing me around, that is."
***
After ascending an unfortunate number of steps, Headmistress McGonagall and Harry Potter stood before an old oak door with a rusty handle. Harry looked back down the steps with contempt. "Were people's feet really that small in the Middle Ages?" he asked.
McGonagall gave the steps below an equally unpleasant glance. "Somehow I doubt it." She then looked at him very seriously. "Perhaps you should enter first, Potter. You are the one who the tower has invited, after all."
Harry tried his best not to seem nervous, but it didn't seem to be working all that well. "OK," he said, swallowing quickly and trying to shake the idea that Voldemort had somehow left a trap for him inside. "Here goes nothing." With a purposefully steady hand, he tugged gently on the door handle.
The large door opened with a slow groan, eventually allowing Harry access to a smallish room (it was maybe about three or four times the size of the cupboard under the stairs where he had spent much of his childhood) laden with layers of cobwebs and dust. As Harry lit his wand to examine the contents of the room more closely, he found a simple cot resting in one corner of the room, a table with one leg shorter than the rest sitting beside it and a large window overlooking Hogwarts grounds just above both of them. Mold, dirt and dust covered everything. "I see Voldemort wasn't much for housekeeping," he observed.
McGonagall did not smile. "This room does not fill me with happy memories, Potter. Your jokes are likely to be wasted on me."
Cautiously, Harry sat down on the bed. It groaned even louder than the door had under his negligible weight. "Is the cot as old as the tower?" Harry asked, deliberately keeping the sarcasm out of his voice.
"I'm told Albus had it replaced while he was here," the Headmistress answered him. "Something about a spring hitting him in a disadvantageous location."
Harry rose slightly to look out the grimy window. Hermione stood at the bottom of the tower and was giving him the 'OK' sign. Harry grinned back down at her widely, despite the fact that she could not see him. That was her signal that there was a horcrux in here somewhere, and it wouldn't exactly be hard to find in this tiny room. "Do you mind if I look around a bit?" he asked McGonagall.
"Not at all," she replied simply. "I'm neither stupid nor blind, Potter. I know that you and your friends think that You-Know-Who left something up here and I also know that none of you feel comfortable telling me what that might be."
Harry was taken aback. "I…I never thought you were…"
McGonagall waved her hand dismissively. "I'm not offended. I just thought you should know that I knew." Her expression remained prim, but her eyes twinkled with mild amusement. "However, if the object you're looking for is larger than an old crust of bread, you're not likely to find it in here."
Harry frowned. "Where else should I be looking?"
The Headmistress gestured to a door behind her. "The closet, of course."
With little hesitation, Harry moved deftly around his former Transfiguration teacher and opened the closet door. This time it was Harry who let out an enormous groan. "I don't believe this," he exclaimed.
The 'closet' was every bit as large as the Great Hall and was filled from top to bottom with shelves which were in turn filled with every magical and non-magical item you could imagine. There were candles and candle holders, thousands of quills and old ink pots, reams upon reams of parchment and more books than even Hermione could read in a lifetime. Since there was no room inside the tower for such an enormous closet, Harry could only assume that the same magic which made the Room of Requirement possible was at work here.
"I'm afraid the tower has become a repository for unwanted items over the years," McGonagall noted somewhat ruefully. "Books preparing students for vocations that they'll never undertake. Love letters from suitors who they know will jilt them. Precious objects that they know will be lost at some future point anyway. 'Going on' has a way of putting things in perspective."
"What do you mean by 'going on'?" Harry asked.
"It's a euphemism," the Headmistress informed him, "for experiencing the visions."
Harry looked a little shaken. "That makes it sound like death."
"Knowing everything that happens in your life is a little bit like death, too, wouldn't you say, Mr. Potter?" McGonagall asked rhetorically.
Harry sighed. As the three of them had searched for the horcruxes this summer, he had discovered that whenever he got close to one, his scar tingled slightly. Before long, he had also found out that when a horcrux touched his scar, it burned like mad. This had allowed the three of them to develop something of a routine in their search: Hermione would use the dark magical object detection spell; Harry would search through whatever items might fit the bill, waiting for his scar to tingle; Ron would make some thoughtless remark that Hermione would scold him for; and then finally Harry would find the horcrux, using his scar as a sort of Geiger counter for evil magic.
Clearly, if that method was going to work here, it would take time. More time than just the few hours he could reasonably ask Headmistress McGonagall to stay up here with him. "Headmistress," Harry began with an air of reluctance, "I believe I've made my decision."
"I'm aware of that, Potter," McGonagall retorted wryly, "and it seems the tower is, too." As Harry looked out from the closet, he saw that all of his belongings had been moved from the Gryffindor boys' dormitory to this room, as if it had known all along what would happen. 'Maybe it did,' Harry thought to himself. "With your personal belongings here, the only thing we truly have to concern ourselves with is your emissary. You will have to choose someone to visit you here each day and bring you your school assignments. Have you given the matter any thought?"
Harry nearly laughed at her question. How could he have, when only a moment ago he'd had no idea he would be staying here? "Does this mean that I won't be able to leave the tower?" Harry asked anxiously.
"You're free to leave at any time," Headmistress McGonagall reminded him. "Most of your predecessors have not done so regularly, however, as they feel their prolonged departure from the tower weakens their magical connection with it upon their return. The visions become fewer and less vivid." A winsome look passed over her face. "Albus himself never missed a Hogsmeade visit or a holiday feast. But he, too, stayed in the tower most of the time."
"I don't care about the visions," Harry told her half-heartedly. In fact, he was beginning to see the appeal of knowing the future. 'What if I can find out how I defeat Voldemort?' he thought to himself. Only a moment later, a darker thought came to mind. 'What if I find out how Voldemort defeats me?'
"Of course," McGonagall acknowledged with a humoring nod, "but I would imagine you'll have your hands full, searching for your mysterious item."
Harry couldn't disagree with her on that point. He would need an emissary. It was tempting to choose Ginny, who he longed to see again. She was not in his year, however, so that would make little practical sense. There was nobody better than Ron at cheering him up, but he cringed at copying the redhead's notes, or lack thereof. That only left one logical candidate. "Hermione. If she's willing, I'd like for her to be my emissary."
McGonagall's expression brightened. "A wise choice." When Harry gave her a questioning look, she elaborated. "Miss Granger is studious and hard-working. I'm sure she'll do a fine job of getting you your assignments." Harry could swear he saw the hint of a smile forming on her lips. "There will have to be a ceremony where the two of you are bound magically. I'll arrange for it to take place as soon as possible."
***
Unsurprisingly to both McGonagall and Harry, Hermione agreed to the task. In fact, she seemed practically giddy about it. The expression on her face reminded Harry of when she had thought the two of them would be prefects together, back in fifth year. "I'll pay even closer attention in class, just so you won't miss anything," she gushed.
This time it was Ron's turn to snort. "The only way you could pay closer attention in class is if your eyeballs were literally glued to the teacher."
Hermione ignored him. "I can even sneak you food from the kitchens if you want. I'm sure Dobby would be willing to help me. Oh Harry, this is going to be so much fun!"
Harry wasn't entirely certain of this himself, but he could hardly deny the necessity of finding the last horcrux or the allure of seeing into the future. He had only a little trouble mirroring Hermione's enthusiasm. "Yeah, it will be."
Ron shook his head. "Better you than me, mate. I'd go spare if I only had Hermione to keep me company."
This time, Hermione did not ignore him. "I'm sure you'd much rather spend your time with an air-headed bimbo like Lavender Brown," she said cattily.
"Lavender's not a bimbo," Ron refuted her. "She may not be that smart and she may be extremely easy to snog, but that doesn't make her a bimbo."
"Actually, Ron," Harry pointed out, "I'm fairly sure that it does." Before Ron could say anything else, Harry took Hermione gently by the arm. "Come on. We told McGonagall we'd meet her in her office in ten minutes."
Hermione fumed about Ron for a few minutes as Harry listened politely. Soon they were standing in front of the entrance to the Headmistress' office. "Are you sure you want to do this?" Harry asked her sincerely. "You can back out now if you want."
Hermione looked up at him proudly. "Are you kidding? I'm honored that you asked me to do this for you, Harry. Chocolate frog cards," she said in a louder voice. The stair leading up to the Headmistress' office began to open up slowly. Harry followed Hermione up the stairs and in only a moment the two of them were standing in front of the Headmistress.
McGonagall gave them both a pleased look as they entered. "There you two are. Stand directly in front of my desk, if you would." They did so without question. "Mr. Potter, would you be so kind as to take Miss Granger's left hand in your right one?" Without any awkwardness, Harry reached out and took Hermione's hand in his.
"It's almost like we're getting married, isn't it?" Harry joked. Hermione only blushed deeply in reply.
"Now take your wands and place the tip over the other's heart," the Headmistress instructed them.
"I suppose this makes it a wandpoint wedding," Hermione said with a laugh in her voice.
McGonagall was nonplussed. "Repeat after me. I swear that I will respect and honor the position of emissary so long as I remain a resident of the Oracular Tower, and I also vow that I will not take advantage of my special accommodations in order to partake in activities which are expressly forbidden by school rules." Both Harry and Hermione repeated what she had said verbatim.
Hermione looked at Headmistress McGonagall curiously. "Did Voldemort and Dumbledore have to take this vow, too?"
The Headmistress shook her head. "Albus didn't. And He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named didn't have to at first, either. It wasn't until I was named as his replacement emissary that we had to swear such an oath."
Harry looked puzzled. "Why was that?"
Hermione seemed to know the answer. "Because Dumbledore was his teacher."
McGonagall shook her head. "No, Miss Granger. It's because they weren't of the opposite gender." A look of realization and a blush of embarrassment came over both Harry and Hermione at the same time. "You may escort Mr. Potter to the tower if you like, Miss Granger. You'll be able to see it now, of course." She looked up at Hermione expectantly. "I trust this will not make you neglect your duties as Head Girl."
Hermione's demeanor sobered immediately. "Of course not, Headmistress."
"Very good," McGonagall replied dismissively. "Good luck to you both. You'll need it."
"What was that all about?" Harry asked Hermione as they exited. "Did she think that we…that we're…you know…"
"I don't think so," Hermione answered him, although her eyes didn't meet his own. "It must be standard procedure whenever two people of the opposite sex are involved."
"Maybe so," Harry conceded, but was not entirely convinced. There had been something in the way McGonagall was looking at them…
"If you're worried about staying in the tower, you shouldn't be," Hermione assured him. "You'll find the last horcrux in no time."
"Why would I be worried?" Harry asked her. In fact, he was a little worried, but he couldn't quite put his finger on why.
"Well, a few people have gone mad up there," Hermione pointed out, "and Voldemort lived there, so who knows what he may have left behind, besides the horcrux that is…" Harry's expression became ashen. 'There's why I should be worried,' he thought to himself. "Oh dear. I'm not doing a very good job of making you feel better, am I?"
"Not really," Harry said with a nervous laugh. "'O' for effort, though."
They chatted amicably for a few minutes as they made their way to the Quidditch pitch. Finally, Hermione's expression turned serious. "Harry," she began slowly. "Would you do something for me?"
"What?" Harry asked reflexively.
Hermione was chewing on her lower lip, clearly nervous over what she was about to say. "When you get to the future, look me up."
Harry smiled. "I thought you didn't believe that a magical object could see things that hadn't happened yet."
"I still have my doubts," Hermione admitted. "But I do know this: if anything like that has ever happened in that tower, it will happen to you." Harry couldn't disagree with that. "Here we are," she said, pointing to the tower above them. "It's beautiful."
"Yeah," Harry agreed. He didn't know how he had gotten so caught up in talking with Hermione that he had completely missed the large piece of Gothic architecture in front of him. "Would you like me to take you up there and show you around?" he asked her.
Hermione shook her head. "I still have rounds to do. Tomorrow, though, I wouldn't mind taking the grand tour."
"Tomorrow it is," Harry said happily. "I'll see you then." As he began to walk up the ridiculously short steps, Hermione called out to him.
"Harry?" He looked back at her and suddenly wished that she were coming with him. "Don't forget."
His green eyes shone brightly in the twilight as he smiled. "I won't. I promise."
No cliffhanger this time. The next chapter should feature Harry's first vision of the future. I hope you enjoy! Thanks for reading!
ITL