Harry read the proposal twice, then passed it to Hermione. Percy watched her turn the page over. She looked for the distance Pritchard had left out.
They were in the same meeting room as yesterday. Someone had replaced the uncomfortable chairs with different uncomfortable chairs, proving that Hogwarts possessed a deep commitment to consistency.
A witch in dark blue robes sat opposite Harry. She had introduced herself as Healer Iona Marsh, explained that she worked with curse injuries, and asked whether he wanted his friends present before opening her case.
The man beside her had introduced himself as Pritchard from the Ministry's research office. He had opened his folder first and asked about seating afterwards.
Percy looked at Marsh's closed case, then at the pages spread in front of Pritchard. He waited for Harry to speak.
"Observation at a controlled distance," Hermione read. She turned the page over. "What distance?"
"That would be determined from preliminary responses," Pritchard said. He adjusted the folder against the table edge. "We would begin conservatively."
"You haven't written what counts as a response."
Marsh held out a hand for the page. Pritchard hesitated before giving it to her, and Percy noticed McGonagall notice the hesitation.
Dorridge had brought the locket report. Pritchard added a proposal to compare it with Harry's scar connection. McGonagall asked him to put the proposed procedure in writing.
The locket remained at the canal building. Nobody had transported it to Hogwarts, a fact McGonagall had required him to state plainly before the meeting continued.
Harry sat still while Marsh read. His thumb pressed against the chair arm.
"Would it help?" he asked. He looked at the healer. "If I went near it?"
Marsh put the page down. She did not offer the comforting answer Percy had been hoping to hear.
"It might produce information. That is different from helping you."
Pritchard started to speak. McGonagall raised one finger and asked him to let the healer finish.
"The foreign presence in you may react to related magic," Marsh continued. She spoke slowly enough that Harry could interrupt. "We don't know whether such a reaction would cause pain, make communication easier, or change the attachment. This proposal doesn't establish a benefit sufficient to justify those uncertainties."
Harry looked back at the paper. Ron leaned forward until his elbows rested on the table.
"Then why bring it?"
"Because waiting also has costs," Pritchard said. He kept his voice even. "We have an unusually dangerous prisoner and an object that may explain how to keep him from returning."
"And a person sitting here," Harry said. He did not raise his voice. "I'm part of your costs too."
Dorridge wrote 'withdrawn' across the proposal. Pritchard asked for another copy, but she kept the marked one with the meeting record.
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Marsh asked Pritchard to leave while she discussed Harry's symptoms. He objected, then gathered his papers when McGonagall held the door open.
Ron watched him go. "He took more paper than he brought," he whispered. Percy looked at the marked proposal still on the table.
The healer moved her chair so she faced Harry directly. She left her wand inside its case.
"I'd like to ask about the scar and your recent symptoms. No spellwork today unless you ask a question that requires us to discuss it, and discussion won't count as permission."
Harry nodded. His hand loosened around the edge of the chair.
The questions were ordinary enough to become difficult. Marsh asked about sleep, pain, whether Harry sometimes felt an emotion before recognising that it did not belong to him, and what had changed after the gate closed.
Harry answered more than Percy expected. He described the difference Snape had taught him to notice, the moments when anger arrived without an event to explain it, and the relief of knowing he did not have to empty himself to resist something else.
Marsh wrote down his words without replacing them with grander ones. When Harry could not tell whether a headache had begun before or after a lesson, she recorded that he was unsure.
Harry did not know exactly when one headache had begun. Marsh recorded that and moved to the next question without asking him to guess.
"Can you take it out?" Harry asked. He waited until her quill stopped. "Not today. Eventually."
Marsh set down her quill before answering.
"I don't yet know. I can tell you that treating a living attachment is a different problem from destroying a cursed object, and we must not borrow the second problem's answer for the first."
Hermione looked at Percy. He nodded before she needed to explain why.
Percy remembered Harry walking toward Voldemort in the story. He could not explain which protections had let him survive. He kept that memory out of the healer's proposed checks.
Harry asked whether refusing the comparison meant delaying everyone else. Marsh shut her notebook halfway, keeping a finger inside it.
"There are examinations of the locket that do not involve you. Some take longer, and some require equipment the team doesn't have on site yet. Those are problems for the people arranging the equipment."
"Not reasons for me to be easier."
"Exactly."
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Dumbledore joined them after the medical discussion. He brought a report from Flitwick and a plain wooden box small enough to fit between his hands.
Ron looked at the box. Percy moved his cup farther from it.
"That one isn't going to talk, is it?"
"It contains chalk," Dumbledore said. He opened it on the table. "I am reasonably confident of its intentions."
Flitwick's report described the barriers around the locket. The voices had stopped carrying beyond the inner enclosure after the recovery team changed the arrangement, and the affected examiners were being monitored rather than sent back for another attempt.
One outer test had found an enchantment that restored damage to the chain. That was not enough to identify a Horcrux, Dumbledore said, since wealthy people had been protecting jewellery from ordinary wear for centuries.
A second test had found something more troubling in the locket itself. The hostile magic persisted when the decorative charms were isolated, behaving like an active occupant rather than an instruction attached to metal.
Percy thought of the gate, then looked at the separate readings in the report. He asked whether the examiners had found any link to the closed water routes. Dumbledore said they had not.
"Can it copy people like the gate did?" Hermione asked. She glanced at the report. "Or does it draw the voices from whoever approaches it?"
"We have evidence of the latter. We have none of the former."
Dumbledore made two circles in chalk on the slate beside the table. One represented the object, while the other represented a person capable of hearing it.
Dumbledore marked the barriers between the two circles. The team would examine the locket from outside them. Nobody would wear it or speak in reply to its voices.
"That's an improvement," Harry said. He looked at the circles without smiling. "Over quite a few things."
Dumbledore nodded and asked Harry whether the drawing answered his question.
"The examiners will compare the readings with documented soul anchors," Dumbledore said. "They have enough evidence to continue without bringing you to the object."
Percy felt his shoulders relax. Then Dorridge placed a separate envelope beside Dumbledore's chalk box.
"There is another matter. The prisoner has made an offer."
----------------------
Voldemort had learned that something had been recovered from the canal store. Dorridge did not conceal that fact or pretend she already knew how the information had reached him.
Dorridge had restricted access to the canal reports. She had also requested the prison log and the names of everyone who had entered Voldemort's room since the recovery.
"He says he can explain the boy's condition," Dorridge said. She left the envelope closed. "His requested price is a private meeting with Harry."
Ron swore. Hermione stopped writing and looked directly at Harry.
Harry looked at the envelope. For one awful second, Percy could see the calculation beginning.
Harry glanced at Marsh's notebook before asking whether Voldemort might know how to remove the attachment.
"Does he know how?"
"He has offered no verifiable explanation," Dorridge said. She drew the envelope away from Harry rather than towards him. "There will be no private meeting. You should know the offer exists because hiding it would let him use that against you later."
Percy sat back. He had been ready to argue against the meeting. Dorridge had already refused it.
Harry's eyes remained on the envelope. After a moment, he turned to Percy.
"Would the person in your memory have taken it?"
Percy looked at Harry's hand on the envelope, then at the information Marsh had recorded.
"I don't think that should decide what you do. He isn't sitting here with the information you have."
Harry looked at him for a long moment. Then he turned back to Dorridge.
"If he knows something, he can say it where other people can hear. If he needs me alone, that tells us something too."
Dorridge recorded Harry's answer and kept the envelope with the rejected proposal.
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Marsh closed her case at the end of the meeting. She arranged another conversation and told Harry to ask Pomfrey to contact her if the symptoms changed.
In the corridor, Hermione announced that she disliked Pritchard. Ron replied that this was an admirably restrained position, and they began discussing increasingly impractical ways to improve Ministry paperwork.
Harry lingered beside a window. Percy stopped with him, leaving enough space for Harry to choose whether the conversation continued.
"Part of me wanted to go," Harry said. He pressed his palm against the cool stone sill. "Even knowing it was probably a trick."
"You wanted an answer. That doesn't mean you owed him a meeting."
Harry watched two students trying to reach a kite caught in a tree. One had climbed onto the other's shoulders and was waving a broom beneath it.
"It's easier to say that when it's someone else."
"Yeah. I've noticed."
Harry smiled slightly. Percy stayed beside him until Ron called from the stairs.
They caught up with Ron and Hermione at the stairs. Ron had reached the conclusion that all proposals involving unnecessary danger should first be tested by making the proposer read them aloud to McGonagall.
Percy agreed. An owl swept through the high window before he could suggest which proposal McGonagall should hear first.
They did not chase it. They went to dinner, where Harry ate an entire plate before McGonagall came to their table.
The examination had identified a bound soul fragment within the locket. The finding rested on several independent results, and the report had been signed by people willing to explain each of them.
Harry set his fork down and asked who had signed the report. McGonagall named the examiners before he spoke again.
"So you found out without me."
"Yes," McGonagall said. She rested a hand on the back of an empty chair. "We did."
Harry picked up his fork and finished the last potatoes on his plate. Percy passed him the gravy.
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I'll be uploading a little less, exams are here! I abhor them, but I need them.
[SHAMELESS PLUG]
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