(You wouldn't download a car, would you?)
Voldemort tried to speak through Harry during breakfast. Harry dropped his spoon, pressed both feet against the floor, and said no with enough force to make Ron spill tea over the table.
Snape reached him before Dumbledore did. He asked Harry to describe the room, then waited through three uneven breaths while Harry named the window, the blue plate, and the toast Ron was trying to rescue from the puddle.
Harry opened his eyes and pushed the spoon away from the spill. "He is trying to speak," he said.
"He wants you," Harry told Dumbledore. "He doesn't get to borrow my mouth to ask."
"Agreed," Dumbledore said. He moved the untouched breakfast closer without asking Harry what else he might have heard.
Percy could feel Aequor shifting the current across the gate. Each shift left a brief tremor in the pipes beneath the room.
The rescued villagers had slept. Ada had asked for news of her shop when she woke, Jonah had complained about the healer's wrist brace, and Venn had sent a brief message thanking the people who had hauled him out of a road.
Percy kept Venn's message beside the rescue notes. He read the thanks again before turning to the pumping-station plan.
Ron put the wet toast on a spare plate. "Can we tell him to use the post like everyone else?"
"We can provide a controlled means of speaking," Dumbledore said. "We need not provide the passage he wants."
Hermione looked at the dismantled frame beneath its cloth. The vial was empty, but Kingsley's report described a groove at the pumping station that still held water, and its connection had survived the removal of the apparatus.
"From his own entrance," she said. "With nobody answering through the three locks here."
Dumbledore nodded. He sent Kingsley instructions to examine whether sound crossed the boundary without anything else following it, then turned to Harry before anyone could suggest another use for the scar.
"You will not serve as our messenger. If he presses again, Severus will help you close the contact."
Harry picked up his spoon. His hand shook, but he managed to keep the spoon on the plate this time.
----------------------
The first attempt at conversation produced Dumbledore's voice in three places. It emerged from the northern inlet, the blocked channel beneath Hogwarts, and a washbasin in a disused classroom before Flitwick isolated the last route.
Dumbledore returned with Kingsley's measurements. He marked the extra routes on the school map before asking Flitwick to isolate them.
They tried again with a speaking trumpet, a plain tube, and no spell carrying the words. Percy thought the resulting arrangement looked like an elderly wizard attempting to complain to his own drains.
"An observation you may keep to yourself," McGonagall said. Her eyes settled on Percy.
Percy shut his mouth. Ron's expression suggested he had already made the same observation and was grateful somebody else had been caught preparing it.
Only the pumping station answered this time. The sound took several seconds to arrive, and Dumbledore made Kingsley record the delay before replying.
Voldemort demanded that Dumbledore open the Hogwarts passage. He called it a matter of mutual interest, then threatened the school if Dumbledore delayed.
Dumbledore told him that the three captives had been recovered. Percy watched Snape closely when the headmaster repeated Voldemort's response, but the man's face revealed nothing beyond his usual disapproval of everyone involved.
"He asked which route we used," Dumbledore said. "I declined to provide the details."
Harry leaned forward. "Did he ask whether they were alive?"
"No."
Ron set his cup down and looked at Harry.
Voldemort claimed that he could withdraw his blood from the old inlet whenever he chose. He also insisted that the false figure waiting near his exit was merely a crude distraction, entirely beneath his concern.
"He has not left," Percy said. "What happens when he tries?"
Dumbledore spread the measurements on the table. Each time Voldemort approached his entrance, the grey light at the pumping station strengthened, but nothing resembling a living person had reached the outer line.
The man could move within the boundary. What he could not do was complete a return without the thing wearing his face moving with him.
----------------------
Hermione underlined 'until' in Snape's record of the bargain. She placed the condition beside the line about releasing a claim.
"He stays until the return is complete," she said. "He keeps trying to complete it on his terms. That still acknowledges the agreement."
Snape looked at the sentence she'd copied. He read it twice before asking whether the old inscriptions distinguished finishing a passage from refusing one.
They did. Hermione had seen the distinction in the mind hollow every time she stopped herself answering, but the agreement around Voldemort's entrance had been written for a different claimant and a different purpose.
"He doesn't need to prove the imitation is wrong," she said. "He needs to stop asking for what it offered him."
Harry laughed once without amusement. He looked towards the lake before he answered.
"Good luck with that."
Dumbledore didn't argue. He asked Hermione what happened to the blood claim if its owner withdrew the request while remaining alive inside the boundary.
She pointed to the holding ledge on the drawing. "We brought Ada and Jonah through a continuous route. Could we hold him there while he withdraws the other claim? He would return himself instead of asking it to supply another body."
The tally recorded no name. Its plates aligned openings, and the scratches Venn had made counted people for the rescuers rather than commanding the ancient stone.
Ron pulled his instruction card from his pocket. "So we give him somewhere to wait that isn't the middle of the doorway."
"If the holding place can receive him from that side," Hermione said. "And if he gives up the claim keeping his other entrance open."
Percy looked at Dumbledore. "And if he doesn't murder everyone the instant he's back, which feels like something we should put on the list."
"He will return disarmed into Ministry custody," Dumbledore said. "Or he will refuse the arrangement. Neither option requires us to give him access to Hogwarts."
Harry asked where the Aurors would stand. Dumbledore marked their positions on the map before continuing.
----------------------[THE RETURN OF THE PURRSONALITY BROKEN BREAKING BREAK LIKE FRIGGING WHAT???] -----------------------
Percy went to the lake before the next message was sent.
The bank smelled of wet grass and cold earth. Percy knelt where he had spoken to Aequor before, put his fingers in the shallows, and waited without calling more loudly than he needed to.
The guardian answered with an image of the holding ledge. It was empty now, the iron grille bent but the stone beneath it intact, and a narrow channel connected it to the line occupied by Voldemort.
Percy felt that the route could work. Aequor followed it with an image of the gate still under strain.
The full repair still required the three locks to release what they had borrowed. Their small offerings had opened local routes, but the main seal would not close while sea, blood, and mind continued answering competing claims.
Percy would have to let the seal carry his connection to the water without holding part of it back as an emergency weapon. Harry would have to refuse the foreign name even when it arrived wearing his own fear, and Hermione would have to release the undertaking that made the old language demand an answer.
Aequor showed three figures beyond the threshold. The fourth stood beside the return path, holding nothing magical and waiting for them to come back.
Ron watched Percy's face. "That's my bit again, isn't it?"
Percy nodded. He tried to make the movement casual, but his throat had tightened around the part he hadn't yet said.
The next image showed a return current breaking when one figure held back. Percy described it and asked what would keep the return steady. Aequor showed the fourth person waiting beside the channel.
McGonagall listened to the whole report. Then she asked Percy whether he wanted her to take the proposal upstairs or accompany him while he gave it himself.
Percy asked her to come with him. He wanted to give the report himself, but he did not want to cross the corridor alone while the image stayed in his head.
----------------------
Harry found him in the corridor after the meeting. Hermione and Ron were still with Flitwick, examining the return mechanism, and for once nobody followed them when Harry asked Percy to walk a little farther from the stair.
They stopped beside a window overlooking the courtyard. Students crossed below with books under their arms, arguing about something that had no visible connection to ancient water or the end of the world.
"The place it showed you," Harry said. "Was somebody waiting there?"
Percy watched the students leave the courtyard. He had avoided this question since the chamber showed him the kitchen.
"My mum," he said. "Not the way you're thinking. It was a memory of somewhere I lived before."
Harry stayed beside him. Percy rested his hands on the sill before continuing.
Percy told him about blue food and a small kitchen. He described the way his mother could look at a ridiculous situation and find the one ordinary thing that would let him breathe again, leaving the larger explanation for another day.
"It didn't give her back," he said. "It just knew which direction I'd want to walk."
Harry rested his elbows on the sill. His eyes stayed on the empty courtyard when he answered.
"Professor Lupin told me to check where a voice came from before I trusted it," Harry said. "I heard him call from the stairs and wanted to go anyway."
Percy laughed quietly. He told Harry one more detail about the kitchen before they moved away from the window.
"If it tries again, I might still want to look."
"Then tell us when it does. Wanting isn't the same as going."
They stayed by the window until Ron came to find them. He announced that Flitwick had rejected three of his proposed improvements, which apparently meant the fourth was either excellent or too alarming to discuss before lunch.
----------------------
Voldemort refused custody. He called the offer an insult, threatened Dumbledore by name, and ordered Snape to present himself at the pumping station without further delay.
Snape remained in the office. He watched the written report arrive, then folded it once and placed it beside the drawing of the holding ledge.
"He is running out of instructions that anyone can obey," he said. He left the report on the table.
Dumbledore sent a second message. It stated the same conditions, adding that no person would be sacrificed or exchanged to secure Voldemort's return, and that Harry would not be part of the negotiation.
Aequor's strain had stopped shifting. Percy could feel one steady pressure beneath the castle. He called Flitwick over to check whether the fragment showed the same change.
The next reply took twenty minutes. Kingsley wrote down the words exactly, and Dumbledore read them without changing his expression.
Voldemort asked whether the holding place required him to surrender his name. Hermione answered that withdrawal of a claim was not erasure of the person making it, then insisted that her explanation be sent without any ancient words attached.
Another silence followed. Ron ate an apple, Harry watched the floor, and Percy kept his hands away from the bowl on the desk.
Kingsley sent the next reply from the pumping station: four words spoken through the plain tube.
"Show me the path."
Dumbledore asked Flitwick to prepare the tally. Then he sent Voldemort the conditions again and asked him to confirm them before anyone opened the route.
===========================
Why the hell is my writing looking more and more like AI???? What the hell is happen.. ing... to.. me....
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[SHAMELESS PLUG]
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