Basilisk Eyes

Chapter 66: Nothing

Harry stopped in the corridor. There was something ominous about the way Aminah had said it. It kind of reminded him of how he sometimes talked about Uncle Vernon, but worse somehow.

"What do you mean, get to you?" Harry asked, his stomach clenching, sweat coating his palms and prickling the back of his neck.

Aminah hadn't realized that he had stopped and had walked a few paces beyond him. She turned and came back, no doubt using her staff to find him.

She stood quietly in front of him. It was a heavy silence and Harry felt like he could hear her heart pounding, even though he knew it had to be his heart that was hammering. He wished someone would come along the corridor and break up the awkwardness and at the same time he hoped that no one would come. He felt a little trapped.

Finally, he heard her lick her lips. "I'll tell you about it later."

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked," Harry said.

"No, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said anything. It's really... it's not something I can talk about here. I'm sorry. I... I dunno." She was quiet for so long that Harry thought she wasn't going to say anything else, but he didn't have anything to offer to fill up the space.

"It's weird. I... I feel like I can trust you... like maybe you understand... " Her voice was tight as she said it.

"Oh. Well. Yeah. I get it... and... it's okay... to talk about it later," Harry said. And then softly added a weighty, "I'm sorry." He reached out and clumsily found her arm and squeezed it. He was thinking about the comfort of Gemma's squeezes and how it made him feel a little more connected, a little less isolated, when he could no longer look into someone's eyes and feel that understanding and try to gauge what they were thinking. These long pauses were hard to interpret.

"Yeah, thanks." She turned and started walking again, her arm easing out of his grasp and he let her go. They continued down the corridor in silence.

After a bit, Harry thought of something he could say and hastily threw it out like a little life raft. "Hey, how's your shoulder doing? Did Healer Jordan heal it completely yesterday or is it still sore?"

"Oh, yeah. It is still a little sore, but way better than it would have been, I'm sure, if Healer Jordan hadn't looked at it right away... Thank you." she answered.

And then a second later, in a completely different tone, she said, "Oh, Harry, I forgot to give you back your school robes that you lent me yesterday when it was cold. It's in the dorm. I put it in the laundry and it should be coming back soon."

"Yeah, right. I forgot about those. Thanks. I'll ask Gemma and Mei, too. How do you put your clothes in the school laundry?" Harry asked, remembering all his wet clothes from yesterday.

"There's a laundry chute in the bathroom—just put them in there. I guess they are laundered and returned within a day."

"Wow. How do they do that?"

"Probably magic—I'm pretty sure they know who put it in the chute," answered Aminah.

As they approached the dining hall, Harry's nose detected something spicy in the air. "It kind of smells like Toad in a Hole," he said.

"Mmm. I hope so."

"Mmm. Oh! We still have braille before dinner!"

"Um, yeah. Your ana-thing that reads. It's really cool how it reads in the voice of the person who wrote it... where did you get it?" Aminah asked.

"Um, yeah, it is cool. Dumbledore gave it to me. He said it was Homer's," Harry said.

"Oh wow. Like the poet, right? I guess that's cool. I heard that you and him were close. . ." Harry made a surprised noise at this while Aminah kept speaking, "... that probably means that there aren't more like it."

"I wouldn't say that we're close," Harry protested, remembering the last meeting in Dumbledore's office. "I mean I respect him and everything, but it's not like he's taken me fishing or anything."

Harry wondered if Fawkes would swoop in now with a howler. In the Chamber, he had been so fiercely loyal to Dumbledore when Tom Riddle was threatening him and now... now something had shifted.

"Oh, it's just what people say."

"Isn't it possible to duplicate things magically? Maybe we can make copies?"

"Yeah, I think that's kind of advanced magic, but maybe someone here knows how to do it. That would be super cool." Aminah cheered a little.

"Did we get out early? It seems pretty quiet out here," he observed, wondering where Adam, Fitz, and Martha went—and Godric for that matter—they had all been in the class together.

"I think I hear a group of people up ahead," Aminah said.

"Oh, yeah. I think I hear them, too. Maybe we're missing something."

"Navigant group of people," Aminah said to her staff and Harry followed her.

Harry was trying to remember everything on his schedule today.

"Was there something on our schedule for this time of day?" he asked Aminah as they walked over.

"I don't think so, but I haven't checked it since we got the schedules. Maybe they updated it?"

"Oh, yeah. I forgot about that... " Harry trailed off, realizing that someone was talking to the group. They were definitely missing something.

By the time they reached the edge of the group, it was apparent that this was an impromptu gathering. He and Aminah edged around the group so that they were more at the back. Harry was really grateful for the lesson they had just had about how to use their staff to greater advantage. He realized that he would have been tapping people's feet if this had happened before his lesson with Godric.

He wished he had been around Gemma this morning so that he could have added her to his staff's memory of people, but he guessed that she'd find him soon.

It took Harry a while to figure out who was speaking at first. He finally placed the voice. It was Ms. Midgeon who was speaking about how she'd had lost a limb during the last wixen war... and it dawned on him that this was the war that ended when his parents died.

She had to be about the same age as they would have been. I wonder if she knew them? Were they at Hogwarts together? She sounded really young... for an old person. My parents must have been teenagers when they started fighting Voldemort... when they had me, he realized.

He had never really thought about it before and it made him want to go through the photo album that Hagrid had made him last year and really look at them again.

His throat closed.

There was a wetness on his cheeks.

His chest constricted and suddenly everything around him was being pushed away.

The world went black in a way that was more final than the darkness he'd experienced since he lost his sight.

As he drifted down, he thought the quality of darkness for the meerest second and then...

Nothing.