Harry Potter and the Prince of Slytherin

Chapter 40: Endgame (Pt 1)

The astonishing revelations from earlier that afternoon – that Gilderoy Lockhart (a) was a dark wizard (b) who confessed before witnesses to engineering both the petrifications and the locker room prank on the Slytherins (c) before dramatically fleeing Hogwarts – sent shockwaves through the school. At the evening meal, Acting-Headmistress McGonagall made all the relevant announcements, most importantly that the school was no longer in danger of being shut down since the person responsible had been removed for good. Naturally, this led to uproarious applause from the student body and especially from the Gryffindors when it was announced that Fred Weasley would be returning the following morning.

Dinner was followed by one of Gryffindor's legendary parties. Oliver Wood was in high spirits over the news that the Gryffindor-Hufflepuff match had been rescheduled for later in the month. Several of the Gryffindors who had openly accused Jim of being the Heir of Slytherin came to apologize, albeit grudgingly, and Jim thanked them politely but tersely in a way that suggested that the matter was forgiven but decidedly not forgotten. And he wasn't even that magnanimous to House-mates like Cormac McLaggen who he'd overhead saying "At least his brother Harry was out there trying to do something helpful even if he got into trouble for it. I still say they got Sorted wrong."

Unfortunately, Jim didn't even have the choice of whether to forgive Ron or not. His former friend just gave him a quick glare from across the Common Room before running upstairs without a word. And the saddest part was that after everything, Jim thought he probably would forgive Ron in an instant if only the boy would show the common decency to just apologize for the way he'd been acting.

Much later, after everyone else had gone to bed. Ron sat in his bed with the diary of Tom Marvolo Riddle clenched his hands.

"Let me go. Let me go. Let me go." He whispered over and over to himself for hours, but no one ever responded.

There had also been a rather more subdued party in the Slytherin dungeons that night. Once the twin threats of petrification and school closure had apparently been dealt with, Harry's rivals in the House turned their attention to loudly blaming him and Theo for the late term loss of fifty House points. Harry, of course, couldn't care less about the lost House points and withdrew from the Common Room to the Lair with barely a glance towards Cassius Warrington and Miranda Bonneville, who had both recently moved up the rankings on Harry's personal To-Do list.

Later, after the startling discovery that Harry had intentionally allowed Gilderoy Lockhart to block almost four-and-a-half minutes of their conversation from his memories, the three young Slytherins spent another hour in Harry's pensieve reviewing the scene to find the gap. On the fourth repetition, Blaise spotted it. Just before James Potter blasted the door off its hinges and while Lockhart was laughing maniacally, there was the very slightest hiccup in the playback. During one of Lockhart's demented laughs, his body position changed fractionally but instantaneously. Equally telling was when Theo looked out the window and noticed a bird flying by some distance away. At the exact instant of the hiccup, the bird instantly jumped a distance of what looked to be at least a mile.

Unfortunately, knowing where the gap was provided no knowledge of what took place during it. According to Blaise (who had spent most of the year studying Memory Charms in Team Recall), it was absolutely impossible to recover memories sealed with a Memory Lock unless the one who placed it somehow arranged for the recipient to receive the unlock code. Harry remembered the code he picked for Mr. X (the one about Voldemort that he hoped he'd never need to use). Presumably, Lockhart would communicate the code to him at some point, but he wasn't required to, and he might well choose to keep his secret forever. Indeed, if the aurors got to him before he sent Harry the code, the memory might be lost forever regardless of what he wanted.