Chapter Twelve

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"Potter," Zabini said, looking Harry up and down with a grimace. "So it's true then, you really are living together?"

"Got a problem with that?" Harry asked. If Zabini was going to cause trouble, he could leave now. Stuff Malfoy.

But Zabini only smirked and said, "amazed you haven't killed each other yet." Then he held out his arm as if he were escorting Harry instead of the other way around.

Harry apparated them both to the empty plot of land that marked number twelve and a half Grimmauld place and told Zabini the address. Zabini's eyes widened in surprise as the house materialized in front of him.

"Neat," he said, and stepped up to the door.

Malfoy opened the door before he reached it. "Welcome to Potter's humble abode," he said, his lip curling. "And believe me, it is humble."

Zabini laughed and stepped through the door. Harry followed, rolling his eyes at Malfoy.

"If you two crazy kids need me, I'll be in my room," he said, taking his new Seeker's handbook and heading up the stairs. Malfoy led Zabini into the living room with barely a nod in Harry's direction.

Harry went up to his bedroom and settled down on the bed to read his training manual.

A Seeker should never rely on only one of their five senses, he read. But should use all five simultaneously, and be able to instantly adjust to the sudden loss of one or more senses, such as can be caused by severe weather conditions. To prepare for this, Seekers should build up to the ability to perform a Seekers' Run blindfold.

Harry raised his eyebrows at that, wondering how difficult it would be, and read on. The book outlined several ways to prepare for a blindfold Seekers' Run, but Harry found that none of them really appealed to him. It seemed a strange way to learn how to practice for bad weather, since you were flooded with visual information during a storm. Flying in a storm wasn't about learning how to fly and seek without visual information, it was about learning how to filter all the suddenly useless visual information that your body automatically wanted to prioritize.

He frowned and wondered if there were some localized weather spell he could use that would be better to learn with. But then that would make Malfoy fly equally as poorly, so they couldn't really push each other to fly better if they both had the same handicap.

Then it hit him: the cloak. If the leader wore the cloak, the follower would have to match their movements while having no idea visually where they were, while simultaneously telling their brain to ignore the visual information that was insisting there was no one next to them. He grinned. Suddenly he was eager to go flying and try it out.

Since Zabini was downstairs, he contented himself for reading the first three chapters of the manual instead. The book was perfect; he felt an overwhelming urge to send Krum flowers.

He decided to savor the experience and set his book down. He moved over to his quidditch model, but found he was having trouble focusing on the strategy in play. Thinking about the cloak had got him wondering about the Hallows again. As much as he would be happy if he never had to read another history book again, he badly wanted to find out more about the stone of wisdom. It certainly seemed that Dumbledore hadn't known that was the true purpose of the stone, which made Harry desperate to know if the other Hallows were also more than Dumbledore had thought they were. He knew it didn't matter anymore, but what if someone was still after the Hallows? He had two of them after all; someone could come after him.

He wondered if Grindelwald had known more than Dumbledore had. It was more than likely, since they had traveled such different paths at the end. Which meant that whatever Grindelwald had known, Voldemort had known as well.

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