Chapter 11

— Gilderoy Lockhart —

What Gilderoy needed, more than anything else in the world, was time.

The morning after his chat with the Headmaster, he had woken with a single purpose burning in him. He wanted to march down to the library, plant himself at a table, and not rise again until he understood exactly what that word from the message meant, this Legilimency, this reading of minds that had apparently been performed on him as easily as one might skim a newspaper. The thought had kept him up half the night, staring at the roof of his room and imagining the blue eyes sifting through his memories at their leisure.

Unfortunately, the reality of being an amazing teacher had other plans for him.

On the corner of his desk sat a stack of forty first-year essays, each one a foot of parchment on telling an imp apart from a pixie, and every last one of them needed grading by the end of the week. He had assigned them himself, in a fit of educational enthusiasm he was now sorely regretting, and the pile had sat there for three days, growing no smaller. He had stared at it over his morning tea and quietly despaired.

Then, at breakfast, Minerva had arrived with the solution to all his problems.

She approached his seat at the staff table with her hands folded, her voice pitched low enough that it carried no further than him. "Gilderoy. A word, if you have a moment."

"For you, Minerva, always," he said pleasantly, setting down his fork.

"It concerns Potter and Weasley," she said briskly. "Their detention from the start of term is well overdue, and I intend to have them serve it this evening. Filch will take one of them to the trophy room. I had hoped you might be willing to supervise the other."

Gilderoy blinked at her, and the stack of essays on his desk rose up before his mind's eye.

"Of course I don't mind," he said warmly, then raised a hand before she could continue. "Though I must ask, why stop at the one? Send them both to me and spare Argus the trouble entirely."

Minerva's eyebrows rose. "Both of them?" she asked, openly surprised.

"Truth be told, the workload of an educator has proven rather more than I anticipated," Gilderoy admitted, pressing a hand to his chest with a rueful air. "I have a small mountain of first-year essays in desperate need of grading, and two extra pairs of hands would be a mercy. Besides, it spares you the bother of arranging anything further. Consider it a favor between colleagues."

"Detention is meant to be a punishment, Gilderoy," she said dryly, "not an apprenticeship."

"Minerva." He fixed her with his gravest expression. "Have you ever read forty essays on the difference between an imp and a pixie in a single sitting? I assure you, punishment does not begin to cover it."

For a moment her mouth went thin, and he wondered if he had overstepped. Then the corner of it twitched, very slightly, in what might generously have been called amusement. "Very well," she said, turning to go. "Seven o'clock. I shall have them report to your classroom."

Gilderoy returned to his breakfast in far better spirits. He had told the two boys, on the night of the flying car, that they would be seeing a great deal of one another this year. He simply had not expected to be proven right quite so soon.

The last class of the day ended at four, and just ten minutes past that, Gilderoy was pushing open the doors of the library.

It was quiet inside, a scattering of students bent over their homework among the long shelves. Behind the front desk sat Madam Pince, thin and sharp-eyed, a feather duster in one hand, looking for all the world as though she had not moved an inch in the ten years since Gilderoy had last stood in front of her.

Her eyes narrowed the moment they found him. "Lockhart," she said flatly.

"Madam Pince," he replied, sweeping into a small bow. "As radiant as ever."

"I remember you," she said, in the tone of a woman recalling a crime. "You once attached a hand mirror against a two-hundred-year-old book to fix your hair,"

Gilderoy winced. "In my defense," he offered, sheepish, "I was seventeen, and the light by that window was excellent."

She sniffed. Then, to his mild alarm, her gaze traveled down the length of him and back up again, lingering somewhere around his shoulders. "Hmph. You've grown into yourself, at least," she said, and the look lasted a touch longer than he was strictly comfortable with.

His smile strained at the edges, though it held, because it was the same smile that had won Witch Weekly's Most Charming Smile Award five times, and it would take rather more than a librarian old enough to be his mother to knock it loose. "You are too kind," he managed graciously. "Now, I find myself in need of your expertise. I am looking for material on a rather specialized branch of magic, and I suspect the books I want are not on the open shelves."

"Teachers may use the Restricted Section," she said, setting down her duster with visible reluctance, as though the words cost her something. "Touch the books gently, mind. Some of them bite."

He glanced toward the back of the library. "There is one small difficulty. I am hunting a single word, and I would rather not open ten thousand books to find it."

Pince gave him a look that suggested she was reassessing his intelligence, then drew her wand. "There is a charm for it," she said curtly. "Most of the students use it every day. Hold the word firmly in your mind, and cast along the shelf. Any book containing it will glow." She turned to the nearest shelf, some word of her own held in mind. "Verbum Revelio," she said with a short flick, and a handful of spines shimmered silver before fading again. "Simple enough that even you should manage it."

"Madam Pince," Gilderoy said, laying a hand over his heart, "you are a treasure." She most certainly was not, but flattery got Gilderoy everywhere.

"Hmph," she said again, though the tips of her ears had gone slightly pink.

The Restricted Section sat at the very back of the library, behind a low rope, and Gilderoy stepped over it with the odd sense of trespassing somewhere he did not belong. He had never set foot back here as a student, having neither the required note from a teacher nor, if he was honest, the slightest interest. The shelves were older here, and from somewhere along the row came a low, papery whispering that he chose very firmly not to investigate.

He raised his wand, held the word from the message in his mind, Legilimency, and cast the charm along the shelves. Here and there down the row a scattered handful of spines took on a faint glow.

 Gilderoy pulled the first one down and opened it, and within three pages he wished he had not. It described, in calm and admiring detail, the art of slipping into another's mind, of sifting through memories as though through the pages of a diary, of reading intent and feeling and fear straight off the surface of a person's thoughts. The chapters further in went darker still, into the planting of notions and the twisting of recollection, and Gilderoy closed the book with a small shudder and slid it back into its place.

The worst of it was how much his younger self would have adored it. A man who had built an entire career out of a single well-practiced memory charm, handed all of this at seventeen. He stood there for a moment, cold at the thought, and found himself sincerely glad that he’d never been here.

The second glowing book was worse than the first, and the third worse than the second. He returned them both to their shelves without finishing a chapter of either. Near the end of the row, however, he found what he had actually come for. It was a slimmer volume titled, The Guarded Mind, and it concerned itself with the other side of the coin entirely, the sealing of one's thoughts against intrusion, an art its author called Occlumency. Gilderoy skimmed the opening pages, felt something in his chest unclench by a fraction, and tucked the book under his arm.

So that was Legilimency, then. Mind reading, just as he had guessed. And there was a defense against it, and the defense could be learned.

Madam Pince recorded the loan in her ledger with the air of a mother surrendering a child, and extracted from him a promise of no ink, no food, and no dog-eared pages before she would let him carry it away. Gilderoy swore to all three on his honor, flashed her one last award-winning smile, and made his escape.

By seven o'clock, his classroom was ready.

He had arranged two desks in the front row, each with its own stack of parchment, and beside each stack a neatly copied sheet of model answers in his own looping hand. The essay questions were simple enough, first-year fare through and through, and a pair of second-years checking against his marking guide could manage the first pass without difficulty. He would look over the lot himself afterward, naturally. There were limits to how much trust one placed in twelve-year-olds.

At seven sharp there came a knock, and the door swung open. Harry and Ron trooped in with the resigned look of prisoners reporting for sentencing, and behind them, hovering at the threshold with her hands twisting together, came a third and entirely unexpected figure.

"Miss Granger," Gilderoy said, looking up from his desk in mild surprise. "I don't recall you having earned a detention."

"Oh! No, I, I just came to walk them down, Professor," Hermione said quickly, a flush climbing her cheeks as she fidgeted with the strap of her bag. "And to see what they'd be doing. That's all."

Harry and Ron exchanged a bemused look.

And in Gilderoy's head, an idea went off like a well-cast Lumos.

"Well then," he said brightly, rising and spreading a hand toward the desks, "would you care to join them? I had planned to put these two gentlemen to work helping me grade first-year essays, and a third pair of hands would be most welcome."

Hermione's whole face lit up. "Really? I—y-yes! Thank you, Professor," she said happily, and hurried inside before anyone could suggest otherwise.

"She's volunteering for a detention," Ron muttered under his breath, sounding personally wounded. "Bloody hell."

Hermione elbowed him sharply in the ribs without so much as breaking stride. Harry laughed, then tried without much success to turn it into a cough when she rounded on him too.

Gilderoy flicked his wand at a spare desk along the wall, and it slid neatly into place beside the other two. "Sit, sit," he said, waving the three of them forward with great cheer. "The parchment awaits."

With the stacks divided anew among three sets of hands, the work went by far quicker than Gilderoy had planned. He had budgeted a good two and a half hours by his own estimate, and had settled in behind his desk with the older years' homework in the meantime. Instead, Miss Granger tore through her own pile in under an hour, dragged half of Ron's toward herself without a word of complaint, and by half past eight the last essay had been checked, marked, and squared away into three tidy stacks.

Gilderoy looked up at the three of them and found he did not quite know what to do.

"Well, I hadn't quite expected you to be done so quickly," he admitted, rising from behind his desk. "Give your thanks to Miss Granger, boys. But alas, as much as I would love to send you all on your way, I'm afraid I can't."

The detention had been set to run until half past nine, and Minerva would have questions if her charges came wandering back to the tower an hour early. Both boys groaned loudly.

"Still!" Gilderoy said brightly, clapping his hands together. "It needn't be boring. What say you to learning a bit of magic, eh?"

He did not mind bending the spirit of the thing. He had sat through enough dreaded detentions in his own school days to know exactly how those last hours crawled, and the boys had plenty more of these ahead of them for their start-of-year stunt. One pleasant evening would hardly ruin them.

Three heads came up at once, and Ron's groan died somewhere in his throat.

The question was what to teach them. He turned it over for a moment, and the answer arrived almost at once. The Summoning Charm. He had always found it a marvelously useful piece of magic, there was nothing in the classroom heavy enough for it to cause any real trouble, and best of all, it was fourth-year material. Three second-years wrestling with a spell two years above their level would stay thoroughly occupied, and thoroughly occupied children were exactly what he needed to get at the book waiting on his desk.

"Push your desks back and clear yourselves some room," he instructed, already sweeping out from behind his desk with his wand in hand. A flick sent the three graded stacks drifting safely onto his own desk, and the furniture scraped obligingly out of the way.

"The Summoning Charm," he announced, turning to face them with a flourish once they stood in the cleared space. "You'll not meet it in class until fourth year, so I shall not be offended by failure tonight. The incantation is Accio, spoken with the name of the thing you want, and the wandwork is nothing at all. What matters is up here." He tapped his temple with one finger. "Hold the object in your mind, clear as a photograph. The harder you hold it, the farther and truer it comes. Observe."

He pointed his wand toward his own desk. "Accio book!"

From inside the desk came a muffled thump, then another. The children stared, and Ron let out a snort before he could stop himself.

"You hear that?" Gilderoy said, entirely unbothered, holding up a finger. "The charm calls its object with great enthusiasm and absolutely no sense. It will not carry its prize through solid oak, so mind the path between yourself and the thing you call." He flicked his wand again, and across the room the lock clicked and the drawer slid open. "And again, Accio book."

The slim volume rose out of the drawer, sailed the length of the room, and smacked neatly into his waiting palm. Hermione made a small, delighted sound.

"A few more things it will not do," Gilderoy went on, setting the book down on the corner of his desk. "It will not summon a living creature, so do not waste your evening trying to call Mrs. Norris to you, tempting as that may be. It will not summon anything warded against it, which is why no wizard has ever retired by pointing his wand in the general direction of Gringotts. And it brings the object to you whether or not you are ready to catch it, so I would advise against calling anything heavier than your own two arms." He flicked his wand once more, and a bundle of spare quills and balled-up parchment scattered themselves across the pushed-back desks. "There. Targets. Off you go."

They went at it with far more enthusiasm than skill. Hermione had her quill trembling toward her within the first ten minutes, her face screwed up in furious concentration. Harry's parchment ball flopped over, rolled off the desk, and lay there. Ron bellowed the incantation as though volume were the missing ingredient, and one of his quills shot sideways off the desk and skittered under a cupboard, which Gilderoy chose to count as progress.

Satisfied, he retreated behind his desk, set his wand down beside him, and opened The Guarded Mind to the first page. With any luck, this would come to him the way everything else had. [Prodigal Sorcerer] had carried him through seven years of curriculum in a matter of weeks, and if any wizard alive had an affinity for the magic of the mind, surely it was the man who had spent a decade doing little else but casting one very particular charm at it.

A few pages in, he understood that luck would have nothing to do with it. This was going to take time.

The book was blunt on the essentials. The common practice of Legilimency required a wand, an incantation, and the eyes of the subject, but those truly skilled in the art needed neither wand nor word. For a master, the eyes alone were enough. Gilderoy read that line twice and felt it settle cold in his stomach. He had deduced as much on his own, sitting across that desk with those blue eyes fixed on his, and here it was in ink. Very well. Until he learned better, he simply would not meet the Headmaster's gaze. Let the old man think him shifty. Shifty was a fair sight better than open.

The first exercise was where his troubles truly began. Before a mind could be guarded, the book insisted, it must first be emptied, cleared of all thought and feeling, a stillness most practitioners built through long and patient meditation. Gilderoy read the passage with a sinking heart. He had grown self-aware enough this past year to admit that he dearly loved to talk, and that when he could not talk, he loved to think, usually about himself. Emptying his mind might well prove the single hardest piece of magic anyone had ever asked of him.

Still, there was no time like the present. He set the open book on his knee, settled back in his chair, closed his eyes, and breathed.

His mind promptly wandered to his lesson plans, then to his mother's last letter, then to whether navy or burgundy better suited Thursday's classes, and each time he hauled it back toward stillness it slipped off somewhere new. Around him the room carried on, cries of "Accio!" punctuated by laughter when a spell worked and groans when it very much did not, and to the three children, he supposed, their professor must have looked for all the world as though he had fallen asleep in his chair.

Then he felt a tug at his knee.

His eyes snapped open just as the book lifted clean off his leg and shot away through the air. He reached out with [Weak Attraction] without a thought, and the book jerked to a halt midway across the room, hung there for a heartbeat, and came sailing back into his open hand.

He found the guilty face without difficulty and raised an eyebrow. "Truly, Mr. Weasley?" he asked dryly.

"Wanted to see if it'd work on something bigger," Ron mumbled, his ears going scarlet.

It had worked, too, which was no small feat of casting for a second-year. Gilderoy opened his mouth to say as much, and only then noticed that the room had gone completely silent. All three of them were staring, and they were staring at his hands rather than the book. His wand, he realized, was lying on the desk in front of him, exactly where he had set it down to read.

Ah.

"Professor," Hermione burst out, taking an eager step toward him, her eyes very wide. "That was wandless! I've read that only tremendously powerful wizards can manage magic without a wand!"

Gilderoy let his smile spread, slow and easy, as though he had planned the entire thing. "Come now, children," he said warmly. "An adventurer needs a trick or two up his sleeve." He winked and pressed a finger to his lips. "Don't go spreading it about, aye?"

Three heads nodded with great solemnity.

Gilderoy settled back into his chair and hoped the nods would hold. If anyone could wrangle two twelve-year-old boys into keeping a secret, it was Miss Granger, though he suspected it was just as likely she would be the first to spread it herself, out of sheer excitement if nothing else. He could only hope it stayed between the four of them.

The days that followed slipped past him almost without his noticing.

He settled into a rhythm. Classes through the morning and afternoon, grading in the evening, and then an hour in his armchair with The Guarded Mind open on his knee, practicing the emptying of his thoughts. Progress came grudgingly at first. His mind had a lifetime's habit of wandering off to admire itself, and in those early sessions he could not hold the stillness for more than three breaths before some stray thought about lesson plans or the state of his hair came strolling through. But [Prodigal Sorcerer] had carried him through every other branch of magic he had turned his hand to, and it carried him through this one as well, though of everything it had ever helped him learn, he suspected this was the most difficult by far. Within a week or so, he could sit in perfect silence for a few minutes at a stretch, his head as quiet and empty as a classroom in summer.

And yet, underneath all of it, something nagged at him. It was a small, persistent itch at the back of his thoughts, the feeling of a name forgotten or an appointment missed, and every time he reached for it, it slid away. He blamed the essays, then the letter he owed his mother, then the seventh-years and their endless questions, and when none of that quieted it, he ignored it altogether, because the days were going well and he had no wish to go looking for trouble.

The Halloween feast was a marvel, even by the castle's standards. Hagrid's pumpkins had been carved into lanterns large enough for a grown man to sit inside, live bats swooped in black clouds beneath the enchanted ceiling, and the food kept arriving long after any sensible person would have stopped eating. Gilderoy did not stop eating. Somewhere between the roast and the treacle tart he noticed that Potter, Weasley, and Granger were missing from the Gryffindor table, which struck him as odd for three children with healthy appetites, and then the pudding arrived and the thought went the way of most idle thoughts.

He left the Great Hall in high spirits, warm and comfortably full, drifting up the marble staircase amid the tide of students bound for their common rooms. He had just reached the second floor when the tide stopped moving.

A crowd had jammed itself into the corridor ahead, students packed shoulder to shoulder, every one of them whispering and craning to see something further in. A teacher at the edge of the crush was trying to hold them back and having no luck whatsoever. Gilderoy frowned, straightened his robes, and began working his way through.

"Make way, please," he called over the heads. "Make way."

The students parted for him, and he stepped out of the press into a cleared stretch of corridor, and stopped where he stood.

A wide puddle of water lay across the stone floor, throwing the torchlight back at the ceiling. Harry, Ron, and Hermione stood in the middle of it all, pale and rooted to the spot. On the wall above them, between two windows, foot-high words had been daubed in something that glistened.

THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED. ENEMIES OF THE HEIR, BEWARE.

And hanging by her tail from the torch bracket beside the message, stiff as a plank with her eyes wide and staring, was Mrs. Norris.

For the first time in a month of trying, Gilderoy's mind emptied itself completely, all on its own, and into that perfect stillness rose a single thought.

Ah, fuck.

Then the rest of it came crashing back in. This was the thing he had been forgetting. This night, this wall, this cat. The petrified students who would follow her one by one through the winter, the fear that would strangle the school by spring, the red-haired girl carried down into the dark at the end of it all. And somewhere far beneath his feet, in a chamber he still saw in his nightmares, a monster he knew of without ever having laid eyes on it. A Basilisk. He had lived through this entire year once already with his head full of nothing but himself, and now it had begun again, right on schedule, while he had been busy congratulating himself on his meditation.

A drawling voice cut through the hush.

"Enemies of the Heir, beware! You'll be next, Mudbloods!"

Draco Malfoy had pushed his way to the front of the crowd, his pale face flushed and his eyes alive with delight as he grinned up at the hanging cat.

"That is quite enough, Mr. Malfoy," Gilderoy said sharply, and something in his voice wiped the grin clean off the boy's face.

Before he could say another word, a new commotion broke through the crowd. Argus Filch came shouldering his way to the front, demanding to know what was going on, and then he saw Mrs. Norris and fell back against the wall as though he had been struck, his hands clutching at his face.

"My cat!" he shrieked. "My cat! What's happened to Mrs. Norris?"

His bulging eyes swept the corridor and landed on Harry.

"You!" he screeched, lunging forward with his hands outstretched. "You! You've murdered my cat! You've killed her! I'll kill you! I'll..."

Gilderoy moved before the thought finished forming. He stepped squarely into the caretaker's path, one hand raised, and Filch pulled up short against it, shaking from head to foot.

"No one is killing anyone, Argus," Gilderoy said, his voice level and carrying to every corner of the corridor.

"Argus!"

Dumbledore had arrived, a knot of teachers sweeping along in his wake. The crowd pressed back to let him through, and in a matter of seconds he had crossed the corridor and detached Mrs. Norris from the torch bracket, cradling the stiff little body with a gravity that silenced even Filch for a moment.

"Come with me, Argus," he said quietly. "You too, Mr. Potter, Mr. Weasley, Miss Granger."

Filch was weeping openly now, dry, racking sounds that shook his whole frame. The three children exchanged a look of naked dread and shuffled forward.

And Gilderoy heard himself speak.

"Rest assured," he said, and his voice rang down the length of the corridor, reaching every straining ear in the crowd, "whoever has done this, whatever has done this, I will find them, and I will see justice done for it. You have my word."

A murmur rippled through the students. Filch stared at him through streaming eyes, and even Snape, arriving at McGonagall's shoulder, turned to look at him with one eyebrow raised.

He had said almost exactly these words once before, in another life, standing in very nearly this same spot. He remembered how much he had enjoyed the sound of them, how he had savored the crowd's eyes on him and then thought no more of the promise than he did of last week's fan mail. Tonight the words settled into him with a weight he had never felt in his life. He would find whoever this heir of Slytherin was. And when the end of it came, he would stand in front of that creature, that Basilisk, and he would finish it. Nobody else needed to know that he had sworn it. He knew.

"My office is nearest, Headmaster," he added, gesturing toward the stairs. "Just above us. Please, use it freely."

"Thank you, Gilderoy," Dumbledore said with a small nod, already moving.

"Prefects!" McGonagall's voice cracked across the corridor like a whip. "Escort your houses back to their dormitories. Now."

The crowd began to drain away in both directions. Gilderoy took one last look at the shining words on the wall, then turned and followed the Headmaster up the stairs.

AN: I think it's personally fair that Gilderoy might get swept up in everything and forget when the attacks started until it happens. Gilderoy has started to learn and even progress at Occlumency. This is because of his own natural affinity to mind magic, as well as the Prodigal Sorcerer Perk helping him out. Gilderoy is rapidly becoming the Golden Trio's favorite teacher so far. And at last, the events of the Chamber of Secrets have started!

The fun thing about this is that there are a lot of things that Gilderoy doesn't know because he was a fraud and his memories were wiped out before he could actually find them out. He knows that Ginny is kidnapped at the end of the semester, but he still doesn't know anything about the book.

So that'll be figured out, so that'll be fun to write as we figure things out.

A quick thanks to Eternal Yujin for checking the chapter over for some grammar mistakes. His Invincible and DxD stories are some of my favourites. Show him some love, if you can. 

That's about it. If you enjoyed this, then please leave a like and a comment with your thoughts. It helps out more than you can think. Thank you for your continued support here on Patreon. I can't put into words how much I really appreciate it. 

As usual, this is Spider-Lite swinging away.