Chapter 12: The Scholar's Rhythm
The deal with Flitwick changed everything. The pressure of frustration, that feeling of running against a wall, disappeared. It was replaced by a rhythm. A ruthless efficiency routine.
Timothy became, to the amazement of the entire faculty, the model student.
In Transfiguration class, Professor McGonagall watched him with a mixture of bewildered pride and deep exasperation.
"Hunter, one point for Ravenclaw," he said, his voice strained, after Timothy transformed a hedgehog into a perfect pincushion on his first try, and speechless.
He simply nodded, his face impassive. His mind wasn't on the pincushion.
He was miles away, on the seventh floor, thinking about how to refine the conceptual paths of his mental library.
Their grades skyrocketed. "Extraordinary." "Extraordinary." "Extraordinary."
They appeared in all his essays and exams, as if by magic.
He had realized that the effort required to obtain an "Extraordinary" was not much greater than that of obtaining an "Exceeds Expectations".
It was simply a matter of allocating the right amount of attention for a few minutes, writing a brilliant and concise analysis, and then getting back to your real work.
His real work, of course, took place in the solitude of the Room of Requirements.
He no longer worked with the frenzy of an obsessed madman.
Now it was the work of a craftsman. He would sit quietly for hours, not reading, but refining.
I was polishing the structure of Archive. It made the "copy" faster, cleaner. He figured out how to improve "background analysis," allowing his mind to process information while his body was in class.
The Hogwarts library, once an ocean that threatened to drown him, was becoming a manageable pond.
This new balance also changed his relationship with the only person in the school who could start to keep up with him: Hermione Granger.
The old rivalry, the tension between the lazy genius and the tireless worker, had dissolved. Now, they were... Colleagues.
They were in the main library, no longer as competitors who counted points, but as fellow students who shared discoveries.
"Tim, did you see the way Flitwick explained the Summoning Array? It's fundamentally wrong if you apply runic correspondence theory," she said, pushing a book toward him.
He looked at her, surprised by her wit. "You're right," he replied. "But you're assuming that the runes are the cause. They are just the interface. It's the intention that bends reality, the rest is just... syntax".
They argued for hours, their minds colliding and sharpening. He pushed her to think beyond textbooks, to see the "history" of magic.
She, in turn, forced him to articulate his intuitive leaps, to put into words the logic he took for granted, to defend his theories.
And in the midst of those debates, Timothy began to feel something new. An attraction.
It wasn't the superficial attraction he'd felt for other girls at the orphanage. Era... respect. I admired his mind, his passion, his fierce loyalty to his friends.
He also noticed that every time Hermione talked to him she sometimes blushed, seemed happier, also somewhat shy.
He realized that he unintentionally made Hermione fall in love with him.
He watched her as she frowned on a scroll, biting her lower lip, and felt a strange warmth in her chest.
But almost as quickly as the feeling appeared, he crushed it. He cataloged it.
A relationship was a complication.
It took time.
It required an emotional energy that, at the time, was entirely dedicated to her true love: magic.
He filed his feelings for Hermione in a dark corner of his mental library, in a folder labeled simply "Later."
…..
The castle began to transform in early December. The usual Hogwarts magic, already impressive, was dressed in its festive finery.
Enchanted armor sang out-of-tune carols in the corridors. Garlands of holly and mistletoe materialized over the doors, provoking nervous laughter among the students.
The Great Hall was a sight in itself, with twelve gigantic Christmas trees that looked like they had been uprooted directly from the Forbidden Forest.
For most students, this environment meant one thing: home. The buzz of holiday excitement was palpable. The conversations were no longer about exams, but about gifts, parties, and the relief of two weeks without Snape.
For Timothy, the decision to stay at Hogwarts wasn't even a decision. It was a no-brainer.
St. Bridget's Orphanage in Liverpool was not a home. It was a gray building full of gray memories. There was nothing there for him. Go back to a squeaky cot and watery food when I had this?
This castle, with its infinite secrets and conceptual library, was the only home he had ever known in his two lives.
Timothy's real excitement for Christmas had nothing to do with the gifts or the food.
It was the opportunity to have the Room of Requirements to himself, without interruptions, for two full weeks.
That was the best Christmas present I could imagine.
On the day of departure, thick snow fell on the grounds. The air was cold and clean. Timothy, without luggage, accompanied Hermione to Hogsmeade Station.
The Hogwarts Express was throwing a cloud of white steam against the gray sky. The platform was full of students shouting and saying goodbye.
Timothy and Hermione stood in the middle of the chaos, in a strange bubble of silence. She pressed her books to her chest, her breath visible in the cold air.
"Are you sure you'll be okay here alone?" asked Hermione, her voice tinged with genuine concern that took him by surprise.
He looked at her. He saw the girl arguing with him about the theory of magic, not the stressed student. She saw her friend.
"I won't be alone," he replied, a quiet smile on his face. "I will have the best company in the world."
She looked at him, confused. "Who? Is Professor Flitwick staying?"
"No," he said, his gaze darting toward the distant castle. "Hundreds of dead authors. And we have a lot to talk about."
Hermione let out a small laugh, a mixture of exasperation and affection. "You're amazing, Tim. Even at Christmas you can't stop reading."
"Knowledge doesn't take a vacation, Hermione."
The train whistle blew, the last call. "Well...," she said, her voice suddenly a little shy. Write to me, okay? Yes... if you discover something interesting."
"I will," he promised. And, for the first time, he meant it.
She smiled at him, a bright, genuine smile that warmed him more than any fire. "Merry Christmas, Tim!"
"Merry Christmas, Hermione."
He watched her get on the train, find Harry and Ron, and wave to him from the window until the red train disappeared behind the curve. Timothy stood there for a moment, the feeling of his smile lingering.
The castle, without its hundreds of students, felt vast and silent. The Great Hall, normally noisy and chaotic, was now almost a cathedral.
The long Gryffindor table was occupied only by Harry Potter and the Weasley brothers. A couple of Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws were scattered across their own tables.
The silence was palpable. It was the calm before the real storm of his study. Timothy walked back to his common room, the echo of his footsteps echoing through the stone hallways.
This solitude was not the solitude of the orphanage. It was not cold or empty. She was full of potential. The entire castle was now his private library.
…..
The first dinner of the holiday was a strange experience. The Great Hall, normally a sea of noise and hundreds of students, was almost empty.
The four long tables looked like abandoned relics. At Ravenclaw's, Timothy sat with two other older students he didn't know.
At the Hufflepuff table was a lone student. And on the Gryffindor table, there was the only real-life point: Harry Potter and the Weasley brothers.
Timothy ate quietly, his mind already in the Hall of Requirement. But he felt that he was being watched.
She looked up and met Harry's gaze. Harry smiled shyly at him and, after a quick murmur to Ron, gestured to Timothy, inviting him to join them.
Timothy shrugged. Why not? The food tasted the same on all the tables.
He took his plate and moved. "Thank you for the invitation," he said, sitting across from Harry. "My table was a little... silent."
"No problem, dude!" said one of the Weasley twins. "The more, the merrier!"
"As long as you don't try to steal our sausages," the other added.
That simple invitation broke the ice. The next few days, which Timothy had planned to spend in complete academic solitude, took on a new routine.
He woke up, spent the morning in his seventh-floor shrine, but spent the afternoons with the Gryffindors.
Magic chess became a temporary obsession. Ron, delighted to have a new opponent, gave him a spectacular beating in his first ten games.
"My pieces don't do that!" complained Timothy when Ron's bishop pulverized his knight with a small explosion.
"It's strategy, Tim," Ron said smugly, feeling like a genius for the first time.
But Timothy was a quick learner. He observed, he analyzed not the logic of the game, but the behavior of the pieces.
He learned his personality. And in the eleventh game, his queen sacrificed a pawn in such a brutally creative way that it blew Ron's mind. The game ended in a draw.
But it was with Harry that she developed the most unexpected connection. Often, after the Weasleys went to bed, the two would stay up late in the Gryffindor common room.
Timothy, like Ravenclaw, was forbidden entry, but Harry taught him a trick about the Fat Lady: if you whispered a good enough riddle to him, he would sometimes let you pass.
One night, they were sitting by the fire, the silent castle around them. Harry was staring at the flames, his expression melancholy.
"It's strange, isn't it?" Harry said quietly, breaking a long silence. "Christmas. Everyone always talks about family."
Timothy knew exactly what he meant. He looked at the fire. "Tell me you."
"The Dursleys...," Harry began. They are not my family. Are... a punishment. I always hated this time of year."
"At least you had a place to call 'home,' even if it was awful," Timothy replied.
"It was a cupboard under the stairs."
"The orphanage is... just a building," Tim said. "A place where you wait for real life to begin. You're one of forty. An inventory number. You don't even have the privacy of a closet."
They looked at each other. And for the first time, they weren't "The Boy Who Lived" and "The Genie of Ravenclaw."
They were just two orphans.
Harry gave a small bitter smile. "So... what was worse? The closet or the inventory?"
"I think it's a draw," Timothy replied, and they both laughed, a low, shared sound in the empty room.
"I guess we were both waiting for something to happen," Harry said. "Someone tell us why we were different."
"And then we got the letter," Timothy finished.
"Yes," Harry said, his gaze getting brighter. "And here we are."
In that moment, in the stillness of the empty castle, a genuine friendship was forged. One based not on prophecies or magic, but on the shared understanding of two people who had grown up as strangers in their own world, until they found a new one.
…..
The morning of December 25 came with a special silence. The castle was covered by a thick layer of fresh snow, and the morning sun made everything shine.
At Gryffindor Tower, Harry and the Weasleys were eagerly opening presents. In the Hall of Requirements, Timothy was giving himself his.
He hadn't slept. He had spent the whole night in front of a blackboard, his hands covered in chalk, his eyes burning with a feverish light.
The friendship she had forged with Harry had given her a mental break, a respite from her obsession. And now, as he returned to his project, he saw the solution with blinding clarity.
The problem was not the copy. The problem was storage.
His prototype Archive attempted to copy, analyze, and store a book in a single step. It was inefficient. It was like trying to read one book while writing another.
"I need a waiting area," he whispered to the empty room. "A ... a buffer."
For hours, he had redesigned the architecture of his mental library. He had built a new "lobby," a large empty waiting room in his mind where information could be downloaded raw, unprocessed. Analysis and cataloguing would come later, as a separate process.
I was ready to try it. He stood in front of a shelf of a hundred books that he had not yet touched. He raised his hand, not to a single book, but to the entire shelf.
"Archive," he ordered.
The pull was instantaneous and violent. It wasn't the smooth flow of a single book. It was an avalanche.
He felt the books, one after another, being torn from the bookshelf and thrown into his mental "lobby." It was a rhythmic thump-thump-thump in his consciousness.
One. Two. Three. Four. A book every 10 seconds.
He held his breath, keeping his concentration. The flow of information was overwhelming, but his new Occlumency structure contained it.
In a single minute, ten books had been roughly copied. He stopped the spell, gasping, a maniacal grin on his face. He had succeeded.
Now, the second test. He sat down on the floor, closed his eyes, and concentrated. He opened one of the new "raw" books in his mind and activated the process of analysis.
It was like watching a movie in fast forward. Words became concepts, diagrams pure understanding.
The sentences were not read; they were absorbed. He saw the author's intent, the structure of the spells, the logic of the plot, all in a glorious torrent of information.
He opened his eyes. He looked at the wall clock he had conjured. Two minutes had passed. He had read, analyzed, and fully understood a three-hundred-page textbook.
He leaned back, laughing out loud. He had! His pace had increased exponentially.
But as he stared at the vast and infinite Hall of Requirements, filled with thousands upon thousands of books, his euphoria subsided, replaced by a new and vaster ambition.
This was fast, yes. A book every 10 seconds to copy, a book every 2 minutes to analyze. But it wasn't enough.
'I can copy the entire library in days. I can read it in months,' he thought. 'But I want to do it now.'
His ultimate goal crystallized in his mind. Do not copy a book every 10 seconds.
I wanted to copy the entire library in an instant.
And not analyze it in two minutes per book. I wanted to analyze it all at once.
He realized the immense gap between his current skill and that ultimate goal. His Archive software was brilliant, but his hardware—his mind, his magic core—was too weak.
I needed more power. I needed more control. I needed more time.
This, he realized, was no longer a year-long project. It would be the work of years. Perhaps decades.
And for the first time in his two lives, Timothy Hunter knew exactly what he was going to do with the rest of his.
- - - - - - - - - -
A/N
Hello everyone!
Sorry for not uploading a chapter yesterday, I've been very busy.
Today I will upload 2 chapters to make up for yesterday's.
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I would like to know what you think of the fic, what you would change, if it goes too fast, slow, etc. I read your comments.
Mike.
@Patreon/iLikeeMikee