you raise me up || harry potter

chapter 53

»»————-　song:　————-««

drown

★ by tyler joseph ★

❝ my crime is my sentence, 
repentance is taking commission,
it's taking a toll on my soul, 
i'm screaming submission and

i don't know if i am dying 
or living. ❞

♢ ♢ ♢

Exam week, to put it shortly, was absolute hell. 

There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly, Ron and Hermione were decidedly not speaking with each other again. This meant that Hermione spent most of her studying hours with Harry at the library, always close to tears and shrill voice on the edge of hysterics. Although he cared for Hermione deeply and was sorry his two friends were rowing, he too was in a constantly nervous state, and Hermione only grated on those nerves. Ron, on the other hand, liked to appear to complain about Hermione when most inconvenient for Harry, who was usually rushing to the library to claim a free seat or running back to the dungeons for a textbook or quill he'd inevitably forget. 

And secondly, Harry's number one choice for a study partner was no longer his friend. Draco was second only to Hermione when it came to academics, and was a much more patient teacher than the latter, surprisingly. Draco always used to double-check Harry's lecture notes and homework, and proof-read his essays. He liked coming up with creative insults for Harry while he was at it (something he unfortunately had very much in common with Snape), but at least Harry got a laugh out of it on most days. But now, with exams coming up and in need of help more than ever, Harry was pretty much on his own and no one to distract him with bad jokes.

Lamentably, Hermione seemed to have more on her plate than even two people could handle, let alone have time to aid Harry. So, in this grim predicament he found himself in, Harry decided it was time to stop depending on people so much, put in the elbow grease himself, and hit the books. And hit the books he did.

In fact, he hit the books so hard that all his waking hours felt like being trapped in a limbo, working to retain the required spells and charms and hexes to prevent them from flying out of his brain as he crammed more and more information upon the impending horizon of doom fast approaching. Balancing homework and studying became a precarious balancing act, and the occasional screams of frustration and cursing (the expletive kind, not the Unforgivable kind) became common throughout the Slytherin dungeon.

None of this was good for Harry's sleeping schedule. Gone were the nightmares of Sirius Black breaking into Hogwarts, replaced by arguably more horrifying ones; more than once Harry dreamed that he was late for McGonagall's Transfiguration exam, but the stairs would not cooperate. The more he ran, the further from the classroom he would get, until the exam was over and everyone gathered around him and asked him why he hadn't showed up. The worst dream entailed Harry brewing a Confusing Concoction for Snape's exam, but he became so muddled that instead of handing his solution to Snape, he drank it. 

(Funny in retrospect... but not really.)

Harry wasn't the most academic of people—he certainly was no Hermione, that was for sure. But he didn't particularly fancy the Slytherins snickering about him behind his back, either, or Snape thinking he hadn't tried. This was plenty motivation when Harry would tear his bleary gaze away from his textbooks to look out the window longingly at the empty fields and bright blue sky, before going back to studying with renewed vigor.