Chapter 187 - 187

Night, street, lamp, chemist's... Beautiful lines, but the only part relevant here is the night. It was night now — after helping around the house, unpacking the shopping, the other small domestic rhythms of the day, and most importantly a late and thoroughly satisfying dinner — when I shut myself in my room, cast a silencing charm, and got to work on my nefarious business: smithing.

What was I making? Miscellaneous nonsense, to begin with. I sat on the floor in front of my portable anvil, shaped various hammer heads, and struck random blanks, throwing sparks into the half-dark room. The problem, as ever, was gifts — my approach to the whole business was too pragmatic, and I couldn't bring myself to make something purely decorative. Only something useful. Which created its own difficulty, because almost anything could be useful, right down to self-tying shoelaces.

After an hour of this, well past midnight, I arrived at something more or less interesting — while stopping short of completely shattering local wizards' assumptions about what enchanted objects could do.

For Daphne, I made a levitating iron sphere the size of a large orange. Idiotic? Yes, unless you knew what it did — which was function as a near-complete holographic projector. Though that sounds more impressive than it actually is. In practice, the sphere was composed of about fifteen smaller spheres nested inside one another, matryoshka-style, each forged with a separate hammer head. The innermost, smallest sphere served as the core that activated all the enchanted layers as a system, and the outermost provided protection against damage. The artifact could do one very simple but genuinely useful thing that would translate directly into three-dimensional Rune modelling: you could change colours, shapes, with considerable precision and detail. The one limitation — it couldn't hold multiple projects simultaneously. It retained only sequential memory. Whatever you'd last worked on was what would appear on activation.

I turned the sphere over in my hands and ran a test. A slightly grainy sphere of space about a metre in radius appeared around it — within that area you could draw glowing lines of any thickness, form, and colour using your finger, a wand, or really anything at all. A good result. Daphne would only need to perform the blood-binding to prevent anyone else from playing with it. The same functionality is theoretically achievable through three-dimensional modelling software, but screens remain two-dimensional — and that's not sufficient.

I got somewhat absorbed in drawing, and before I noticed, I'd built a model of our Quidditch pitch. A shame the match against Ravenclaw had been pushed back at Slytherin's request — something important had come up in February for two of their players, a family matter, preventing them from being at Hogwarts that particular Saturday and Sunday. Our match was now nearly two months away. It wasn't that I was desperate to play Keeper, but the others were training regardless, even if without the fanatical intensity the Gryffindors were known for.

Setting the sphere aside, I moved on to Parkinson's gift. We spent a fair amount of time in each other's company and got on reasonably well. My first instinct was a bracelet, but bracelets make for poor single-handed activation — and mental activation under pressure was out of the question, the failure rate too high. A ring, then. You could activate it one-handed, simply by touching it with the thumb.

The concept was straightforward. Pansy had an exceptional fondness for gathering information — analysing it, summarising it, drawing conclusions, and sending selected portions to her parents. Selected, thankfully, not everything. For anyone in that line of interest, the ability to go unnoticed was paramount, so: a ring providing full invisibility and general concealment. The unavoidable drawbacks remained — footprints in snow or mud, displaced objects, distortion in heavy rain. Inevitable, all of it. A notice-me-not charm would help somewhat, but deliberate searching would still detect an obvious enough presence. You had to accept that.

Hermione. The best gift for her was a book. I didn't have one as such, but I could make a copy of the collection Snape had given me. Nothing restricted or questionable in it — all the information was publicly available; it simply happened to be compiled in one place already. That would do.

My parents. One of those cases where their best gift was simply our wellbeing — good marks, keeping out of trouble, all that. And knowing them, they'd complain about anything else: you'll give everyone wonderful presents when you're grown, for now they go to you. Though I had picked up a couple of practical things for them, and beyond that I intended to improve the wards on the house. When I'd originally set them, I hadn't accounted for Dark Magic specifically — hadn't checked whether it was blocked — which was why the phoenix-self had to intervene during Greyback's attack. That needed addressing. Possibly tomorrow evening.

I looked over the pile of assorted trinkets I'd produced — dubious in value and function, but undeniably charming. Simple glowing pendants, but genuinely lovely; more functional ones capable of tidying a room, albeit requiring a specific activation sequence. Useful in any case. Those would go to the others.

I drafted quick letters, slipped the relevant artifacts in, and in the middle of the night left the house for the postal office on Diagon Alley to dispatch the lot. The post was one of the few establishments that operated through the night — along with the Leaky Cauldron, the Hog's Head, Gringotts, and doubtless a few others in Knockturn, where late hours were practically a professional requirement.

Apparating directly into the back yard of the Leaky Cauldron — if the rather cramped dead end behind it deserved that name — I opened the passage to Diagon Alley and slipped through promptly, not waiting for the barman to appear and catch me treating a long-established tradition with such disregard.

Diagon Alley was empty. No witches or wizards, no noise — just silence and stillness, the magical signs and decorations continuing their business in the dark, which at this hour produced not wonder but a vague unease, the sense that something was about to emerge from an alleyway and relieve you of limbs you hadn't considered surplus. Not the most pleasant time for a stroll.

I moved quickly, not crunching the snow, concealed behind a notice-me-not rather than full invisibility, and reached the post office, its lit windows a clear indication it was open.

Inside, I pushed back my hood and made my way through the rows of owls on their perches toward the counter. The woman on duty was bored, and my arrival did nothing to improve her mood — she appeared to be bored in a general, constitutional sense.

"Good evening," I said, with a smile.

"Good evening, young man," she replied, without visible enthusiasm. "Sending gifts, I suppose?"

"You're remarkably perceptive."

"You'd be perceptive too. You're not the first and you won't be the last," she said, waving a hand. "Everyone leaves it to the last moment. How many?"

I pulled the prepared, sealed letters from my rucksack and counted — though I already knew. The woman produced a form, which I filled in quickly, then named a sum that was not small — a night surcharge, she said. Not small only relative to the standard rate; in absolute terms, negligible. Having paid, I loaded the owls myself — one could, if a degree of paranoia made it preferable.

With a clear conscience, I left the post office and made my way back toward the Leaky Cauldron, to Apparate shamelessly from the same back yard without presenting myself to the barman. Otherwise he'd be off again about not going through there, terrible Muggles on their dreadful iron machines, dreadful all round. So no — I wouldn't be going in. Though at this hour there'd be few enough customers inside, and they wouldn't have spoilt the genuinely good, simple, filling food whose smell permanently occupied that unprepossessing establishment.

Back home, I found no one still awake, and went quietly up to my room. Now I could sleep.

. . . . .

What do children and teenagers do on Christmas morning? They run to the tree to see the presents, of course. That singular, unrepeatable, almost magical feeling that comes only on this one day of the year — and the smells drifting from the kitchen, preparations having begun the evening before... Extraordinary. Knowing what had been bought yesterday and what was already in the fridge, I was confident the table would be well-stocked. What I was personally looking forward to was the Wellington — wonderful beef, especially when you're cooking not strictly by the recipe but with genuine understanding, and allow yourself to depart slightly from the classic in the direction of better flavour. Perhaps a few suggestions were in order. Christmas warranted certain amendments to the Wellington.

My thoughts had drifted toward food for a reason — everything follows its own training and conditioning. The thing was, normal children and teenagers begin Christmas morning with a visit to the tree. I begin it according to my personal schedule, which meant training. And training made one think about food.

Done with the session, washed, hair sorted and so forth, I returned to my room, spent approximately one minute on narcissism — taking stock of the rather decent-looking dark-haired figure in the near-full-length mirror on the wardrobe door — and then got dressed and went downstairs. Dad was doing what the head of household was supposed to do: drinking tea and reading the newspaper with an air of importance. Hermione sat at the table looking deeply offended — I was fairly sure Mum hadn't let her help with breakfast, which was her way of showing parental care.

"Good morning," I said, with a nod to everyone present.

"Morning," Mum smiled, glancing up briefly from the stove. "Sleep well?"

"Very much so. Mione."

"Hi," she said, nodding, still sulking — arms folded across her chest in protest. "I wanted to help Mum and she won't let me."

"Well," I said, taking a seat at the table with Dad and my sister, joining them in waiting for breakfast, "let the parents show some care for us."

"But I was only trying to help."

"They haven't seen us for ten months. And don't expect to ever stop being their beloved daughter."

"Very aptly put," said Dad, setting the newspaper aside.

Breakfast passed with conversation about the weather and local news — what was happening with people our age in the neighbourhood, which was mainly directed at Hermione, since my acquaintances of that age group were, for obvious reasons, exclusively wizards. We didn't go to church — our parents had no particular religious tradition to speak of — and we spent as much of the day together as possible, the activities being entirely family-oriented. The finishing touches to the Christmas preparations around the house, for instance — Mum and Dad had deliberately left some work undone so we could all do it together.

By tradition, this was when we exchanged gifts. My parents, like me, hadn't been entirely sure what to get me, and so had fallen back on a well-worn approach — books. A lot of them. They'd clearly remembered various conversations, because among them were contemporary titles across several areas of physics and medicine, including genetics. Genetics — a remarkable field, changing at a ferocious pace, the definition of a gene itself shifting every decade or so.

My gifts went down well. Hermione was genuinely delighted. Small wonder — she wouldn't need to excavate the Hogwarts library or the Room of Requirement. Everything was in one volume, thick and assembled from various sheets and papers, but a single book nonetheless. She had a moment of doubt about whether the contents would be substantial enough, which vanished the moment she opened it to a couple of pages.

Were there gifts from my other friends and acquaintances? Quite a few — owls tapped at the window with some regularity, and Hermione and I had to take in the parcels, which I then checked for harmful magic. My sister had a firm policy against using magic in the house. Opening them was set aside for late evening — safer that way, in Hermione's view.

As the afternoon moved toward evening, and the long-haul preparations that had spent hours filling the house with their aromas reached their final stages, it was time to prepare the things that needed an hour at most. This time Hermione was quite pleased — she was trusted with a couple of salads, and approached the task with full seriousness. I also contributed, though in an advisory capacity.

"What if we added chestnuts to the mushrooms for the Wellington?"

Mum actually paused in her preparation of the beef.

"Hm," she said, thoughtfully. "They're less fatty than most other nuts, and the flavour..."

"Exactly. Christmas without chestnuts?"

Here in England it was roughly the same association as tangerines and New Year had been in my previous life.

"And as they dry slightly they'll release a little oil and change the character of the mushrooms," Mum said, with a smile. "You do know what you want to eat."

"I do! And the beef itself — you could wrap it in cured ham with a bit of fat through it. Not bacon, though—"

"Of course not bacon!" Mum said, laughing despite herself. "Completely wrong flavour for this. What if I do one piece that way?"

"Perfect."

"So you're a cook as well," Hermione said, looking up from her salads.

"Every man is, at heart, something of a cook. The main thing is understanding — knowing what you want, and how to get it."

Dinner, conversation, the warmth of the hearth — all of it did something good. I simply let myself relax, and stepped back from the constant preoccupations of daily life. Somewhere beneath the surface was the wish that evenings like this came more often, though the rational part of me understood perfectly well that perpetual leisure didn't lead anywhere good. But right now, in this specific moment, one could simply enjoy it.

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