Chapter 10: The Spark of Madness
The Hogwarts teachers' room was gray and damp, a perfect reflection of the October sky pounding the tall windows with incessant rain. The air smelled of cold tea and damp parchment. The atmosphere was tense.
"The situation is untenable, Filius," Professor McGonagall said, her voice as sharp as the tip of a needle. "The deal you made with Mr. Hunter is not working."
Flitwick, sitting on a stack of books to reach the height of the table, frowned. "You are keeping your word, Minerva. Their ratings are 'Exceeds Expectations,' as we agreed."
"Exceed expectations!" sneered a voice from the darkest corner of the room. Severus Snape stared at the fire, his pale face framed by his dark hair. "The boy is a dilettante. You're lucky. His potions are... Acceptable. But there is no art in them. There is no passion. It's a walking textbook."
"I wouldn't call it acceptable," Professor Sprout chimed in, clasping her dirt-covered hands together. "His work in Herbology is neglected. It keeps the plant alive, yes, but barely. And his last essay on the properties of the Mandrake was a single paragraph!"
"A paragraph that was more insightful than Miss Granger's six-foot essay!" replied Flitwick, his loyalty to his student shining through. "You are seeing the problem backwards! It's not that he lacks discipline, it's that he has plenty of talent!"
McGonagall sighed, massaging the bridge of his nose. "Filius, that's exactly what I'm worried about. His demonstration in my class last week... transfiguring a desk into a pig and back again in less than a second... without words...".
He paused, his stern face softened with a grudging astonishment. "It was a level of skill that I haven't seen in any other student. But his essay on the theory of cross-transfiguration was a disaster. Messy, brief, and clearly written in ten minutes."
"Because he finds it boring!" exclaimed Flitwick. "I spoke to him. I called him to my office, as we agreed. I asked him to show his control. And do you know what he did?"
The other professors looked at him. "He performed a nonverbal silence charm so powerful and precise that even I couldn't hear my own thoughts. And then he reversed it with a simple gesture. He's a prodigy!"
"He's arrogant," Snape hissed. "He confuses talent with achievement. It needs humility. A month of detention washing my cauldrons would suit him well."
"And that would quench his curiosity!" squealed Flitwick, standing on his stack of books, indignant. "I won't punish a student for being smarter than the curriculum!"
"Enough," McGonagall said, his voice drowning out the discussion. "Enough. We are at an impasse. Filius, your loyalty to your student is admirable. Severus, your desire for discipline is... understandable."
He stood up, his decision made. "But it is evident that this issue is above us. Mr. Hunter's talent, or lack of discipline, is no longer a matter for a Head of House to handle."
He looked at the other professors. "I will take the case of Timothy Hunter... before the Director".
…..
The Director's office was a sanctuary of orderly chaos. Strange, delicate silver instruments swirled, buzzed, and spewed small wisps of colored smoke on slender-legged tables. Every surface was covered with books and scrolls. On the wall, the chorus of portraits of previous directors dozed, their feigned breaths barely audible.
Fawkes, the phoenix, emitted a soft trill from his golden perch. His eyes, ancient and bright, watched with millenary intelligence the group of professors who had gathered in front of Albus Dumbledore's imposing desk.
Minerva was stiff, her back was a rod of iron. Snape stood in the shadows near the fireplace, his arms folded, his presence a stain of darkness and disdain. Flitwick, on the other hand, seemed to vibrate on the spot, his hands writhing with nervous energy.
"I understand your frustration, Minerva," Dumbledore said calmly, his blue eyes shining with genuine curiosity behind his half-moon glasses. "But from what I'm told, it seems to me that Mr. Hunter is not a case of delinquency, but of ... boredom."
"Boredom!" snorted Snape from his corner, his voice a silky hiss. "It's arrogance. Pure and shameless arrogance. The boy thinks that the rules of my class do not apply to him. His job, when he deigns to follow the instructions, is... acceptable".
This word, 'acceptable', spoken by Snape, was a compliment of such a high caliber that it raised McGonagall's eyebrow.
"But it's sloppy, Director," Snape continued, not noticing the irony. "There's no art in it. There is no passion. Just follow the steps as if you were reading an instruction manual for Muggle furniture. He is a dilettante. A fraud that hides behind a superficial talent."
"And in Transformations," McGonagall interjected, his voice strained with professional exasperation, "his lack of discipline is a dangerous influence. Yesterday, the lesson was simple: transform a beetle into a button."
She paused, as if the memory offended her. "Mr. Hunter, on his first attempt and without saying a word, transformed his beetle into a complete set of silver cufflinks, with the Ravenclaw shield engraved on them. And then," her voice dropped, incredulous, "she spent the rest of the class trying to teach them how to sing. It's infuriating!"
"He performs N.E.T.-level spells as if they were parlor tricks," he concluded, "but refuses to write more than ten inches in his essays on the ethics of transfiguration."
Dumbledore hid a smile behind his interlaced fingers. He looked at the last member of the group. "Filius, it's your student. You have been the quietest. What do you think of this situation?"
Flitwick stepped forward. The diminutive professor of Charms seemed to grow in stature, his nervousness replaced by a fierce passion he rarely showed outside of a duel.
"Albus, Minerva, Severus... You are making a terrible mistake," he said, his high-pitched voice vibrating with conviction. "You're not seeing the boy. You are looking at their ratings. You're not listening!"
"I have taught in this castle for over fifty years!" he continued, raising a thin hand. "I've seen thousands of students! I have seen born prodigies, I have seen tireless workers. I've seen brilliant minds who could recite theory and lucky fools who could cast powerful spells. I've seen everything..."
He stopped, taking a deep breath, knowing that what he was about to say was professional heresy.
"And I can say, without a doubt, that Timothy Hunter is the magician with the greatest, the purest, the most fundamental natural talent that has ever set foot in this castle."
The office fell into such a deep silence that the hum of silver instruments sounded like heavy machinery. Snape seemed to choke on his own disdain. McGonagall looked at him as if he had grown a second head, his mouth slightly open.
"I dare say," Flitwick whispered, his voice now low and filled with reverential awe, "that his innate understanding of magic... the way he feels it, the way he feels it... understand... rivals his own, Albus. Or maybe..."
He hesitated, but the conviction in his eyes did not waver. "Perhaps, in its pure potential, it even surpasses it."
The audacity of the claim left McGonagagll speechless. Snape, however, let out a mocking laugh, an ugly, cutting sound.
"Have you lost your mind, Filius? Are you senile? Do you compare that insolent and indifferent brat to Dumbledore?"
"It's not insolence!" replied Flitwick, his voice becoming high-pitched again. "It's obsession! An obsession that none of you have seen! Because he's not obsessed with notes, Severus! He's obsessed with magic itself!"
"He loves knowledge," he explained, his hands now gesturing. "He breathes it. It devours it. Our classes are... too slow for him. They are like asking a dragon to feed on bread crumbs. It is an insult to his intellect!"
Dumbledore, who had been listening with a calm and almost hungry smile, finally spoke. The sparkle in his eyes was intense.
"A dragon, you say," he repeated, savoring the word. "What an image... appropriate, Filius."
Flitwick, feeling vindicated for the first time, hastened to explain. "Albus, I spoke to him. We reached an agreement. A commitment. I demanded that he keep his grades above average, turn in his papers, demonstrate his competence."
"And in return?" McGonagall asked, his tone now more curious than angry.
"In return, I'll give him the freedom his mind needs," Flitwick said. "Freedom for your personal research, without being disturbed. I promised him that I would take care of the other teachers."
"A pragmatic compromise," McGonagall muttered, though his brow was still furrowed. It was a dangerous precedent, but given the situation...
"Nonsense," Snape hissed. "It's an indulgence. It will only feed your ego. He needs discipline, not freedom."
Dumbledore clasped his long fingertips together, looking over them. "Not at all, Severus. In fact, I believe that Professor Flitwick's agreement is the wisest possible solution."
He stood, his presence filling the room with quiet authority. He walked toward Fawkes, stroking the phoenix's head.
"A little chaos, my dear colleagues, is often the catalyst for true greatness," he said, his eyes shining with that familiar mischief. "You can't cage a dragon. It will only grow resentful and, eventually, burn the cage. It's much better to give it a forest to fly."
He looked at his teachers, his smile was friendly but his decision was final.
"If Mr. Hunter is so hungry for knowledge, who are we to stand in his way? Hogwarts will always help those who ask... a different way of learning".
"Let Professor Flitwick manage his student. I have a feeling," he concluded, "that Mr. Hunter will surprise us all."
…..
The agreement with Professor Flitwick, although a diplomatic victory, quickly became a form of exquisite torture. The freedom Timothy had won came at a high and mundane price: time.
His life, which had previously been lazy, self-directed exploration, morphed into a frantic routine, a race against the clock that pushed him to the edge of his mental endurance.
The daytime Timothy was a shadow of himself. He sat in the classrooms, his body physically present, but his mind a thousand leagues away, lost in the theories he had read the night before.
In Herbology, while Professor Sprout was explaining the healing properties of the Dittany, Timothy found himself muttering under his breath the seven variations of healing runes he had discovered in a Norse text.
"Mr. Hunter," said Sprout's gentle voice, jolting him out of his trance. "Would you mind joining us?"
He blinked, looked at the withered bud in his flowerpot, and with a sigh of annoyance, infused it with a pulse of intentional magic. The plant grew, flowered, and returned to its budding state in less than three seconds, a complete life cycle in an instant. The class looked at him in amazement. He looked at the plant, his duty accomplished.
His duties became a mockery. He wrote the "Exceed Expectations" essays that Flitwick had demanded of him, but he did so with cynical disdain. They were technically perfect, brilliant in their analysis, but utterly soulless. And always, painfully brief.
McGonagall returned his essay on Gamp's Law of Elemental Transformation with a note written in red ink: "Insightful, but incomplete. ' Exceeds Expectations'... hardly. Apply yourself, Mr. Hunter."
He crumpled up the scroll and put it away. It was a waste of his precious time.
The only light in his days was his brief, increasingly tense interactions in the main library.
"Tim," Hermione whispered to him on a Tuesday afternoon, finding him in the History section. "You've been... quiet. Is everything okay?"
He looked up from a map of the ley lines of Brittany. He saw the genuine concern in her brown eyes and felt a twinge of something he identified as guilt.
"All right, Hermione," he said, his voice a little rougher than he intended from lack of use. "Just... a lot of study."
"I know, isn't that wonderful?" she said, her face lighting up. "But I've realized that you don't go to the Restricted Section anymore. Have you given up? Because I'm already halfway through Secrets of the Dark Arts! I'm almost catching up with you!"
Timothy felt a bitter laugh rise up his throat. Reach? He was adorable. She was playing in a puddle while he tried to drink the ocean.
"That's great, Hermione," he said, forcing a smile. "Don't worry about me. I'm just... reorganizing my study method."
"Well, if you ever want to compare grades...," she offered.
"Sure," he lied. "I have to go."
He left the library before she could answer. He could not afford such conversations. They were a distraction. They were precious minutes that I could be using.
Their nights were a different story.
The Room of Requirements had been transformed. It was no longer a sanctuary of discovery. It had become a factory. A mine of knowledge where he was the only worker.
He sat on the floor, the Ravenclaw Common Room star map spinning uselessly over him. The room provided him with an endless stream of books, piling them up around him in precarious towers. And he devoured them.
He was reading at a speed that would have seemed impossible to anyone else. Page after page, book after book. His eyes scanned the text, his mind absorbed it, cataloged it, and moved on to the next one.
I slept, at most, three or four hours a night. He kept himself awake with stimulant potions he brewed in the same room and with an endless supply of conjured coffee. The pure joy of reading was gone, replaced by a desperate race against time.
The hunger to know everything was a fire that consumed him. And now, the deal with Flitwick was the cage that kept him away from his feast.
Exhaustion began to take its toll. His mind, though vast, was finite. He became irritable. His hands were shaking. But he couldn't stop.
There was too much to learn.
He was reading a text on Conceptual Transfiguration and his mind made an instant connection with a scroll on Greek Alchemy that he had read two nights earlier. The theory had the same principles! I could combine the two, create a new form of semi-permanent transfiguration!
He ran to a blackboard, but stopped. I couldn't. I didn't have time. He had to finish his two-foot essay on the uses of Moonstone for Snape.
Frustration hit him with physical force.
One night, after spending three hours writing a perfectly "Exceed Expectations" essay on wand movements in defensive charms—a task he considered as insultingly simple as breathing—he finally broke.
He found himself standing in the middle of the Hall of Requirements, surrounded by mountains of knowledge that he had not yet touched. And he realized the scale of his task.
There were tens of thousands of books in this library alone. And beyond that, there were libraries in France, in Egypt, all over the world.
And he was reading.
Book.
By.
Book.
It was like trying to empty an ocean with a spoon.
"It's not enough!" he shouted to the empty ceiling of the Room, his voice echoing in the stillness.
"It's too slow! Too slow!"
He slammed his fist on a stack of books, sending them flying across the room. The effort was futile. It was inefficient. His method, the same method that had made him feel so powerful, was now his greatest limitation.
He collapsed on the ground, surrounded by scrolls and tomes. His mind was racing, looking for a solution. I needed a network. I needed a system. Needed... a better way.
…..
Timothy stood on the floor of the Room of Requirements, in absolute silence. He was surrounded, almost buried, by towers of books he hadn't yet read.
The smell of old parchment and dust, which had once seemed to him the perfume of paradise, now smelled of failure. To inefficiency.
His mind, at its lowest point, searched the deepest and most forgotten archive: the memories of his past life. He remembered computers. Machines that could copy, process, and store information at impossible speeds.
And next to that memory, another one lit up. A fictional memory, of an anime I had seen. A story about a wizard guild... Fairy Tail.
He remembered a specific magic of that story. A magic called "Archive". The ability to store and access knowledge, spells, directly in the user's mind.
His first reaction was to dismiss it with a bitter laugh. "It's fiction. It's stupid. The rules don't apply." He looked at the thick tomes around him. "This is the reality. Reality has rules."
But the idea, once planted, refused to die. He clung to his mind with desperate tenacity.
He returned to it, again and again for hours, while the star map of the Hall rotated silently over him. 'What if it's not fiction?'he thought, his pulse racing.
'What if it's just a different dialect of magic? A system that has not yet been discovered?'
He began to think, to connect the dots, his mind racing at feverish speed.
He had just read about Occlumancy, that strange mental discipline that the Hall had given him.
Most used it as a shield. But what if it could be used as... a filing cabinet? A way of organizing the mind, of building internal "shelves"?
The magic of Hogwarts, the magic he felt in his veins, was based on pure intention, on will. Wasn't that a form of "power"? The power needed to move the information onto those shelves?
And the concept of "Archive" of that old story... that would be the function. The method.
It was not about reading. It was about copying.
He could use the Occlumency to build the library in his mind. He could use his innate magic, his intention, as the mechanism to take a book, deconstruct its essence, and store it directly.
He could create his own version. I could create Archive.
Understanding struck him with the force of lightning. It wasn't a stupid idea. It was a great idea. It was the solution to all their problems.
A laugh began to flow from his throat. It was not a laugh of joy. It was a hysterical, maniacal laugh, the laughter of a genius on the verge of madness and of a discovery that would change the world.
He leaned back on a pile of scrolls, laughing loudly in the empty room, tears streaming down his cheeks.
The universe had put a limit on him. And he had just found a way to break it. He was completely consumed by his glorious new obsession.
- - - - - - - - - -
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