So Young, How Can You Sleep at Night?

Over the next week, Hogwarts settled back into its usual rhythm.

The excitement of Christmas had not quite worn off, and the students were still a little lax. They were generally less focused in class than they had been in the middle of the term.

Some were still savoring the presents they had received over the holidays. Others were already far too excited about the next Quidditch Match. Most had simply returned to that familiar Hogwarts reality: why was there homework again?

Gavin was no different.

At least, he looked no different.

He went to class and ate his meals as usual. He listened to Ernie deliver gossip at the Hufflepuff table like an official bulletin, and he continued coaching Cedric in flying.

The difference was that Cedric still had to ride one of the house's Cleansweep Series brooms. He could only take out the Nimbus 2000 and enjoy himself when no one else was around.

When the team captain, Herbert, first saw the Nimbus 2000, he was stunned. He kept asking Cedric where it had come from. Cedric only said it was a gift from a friend, which sent the entire team into an uproar. They all wanted to meet this wealthy friend at once.

Life looked perfectly normal.

For Gavin, the problem was Pipi—

Or rather, the fact that the House-elf had recently turned into a mobile school-rules enforcement officer.

Pipi watched him far too closely.

Whenever Gavin left the Common Room, Pipi would probably appear somewhere nearby. If he took a couple of extra turns down a corridor, a House-elf would likely be waiting around the next corner, pretending to pass by. And if he showed the slightest sign of wanting to do something alone, Pipi's huge eyes immediately filled with a complicated look: deep disapproval, reluctance to stop him, and readiness to report him in advance.

"You've been acting like my guardian lately."

One day, Gavin finally said it to Pipi, quite calmly.

Pipi's ears twitched, and the House-elf answered sheepishly:

"Pipi just wants to make sure Mr. Gu doesn't break himself and the school again."

That wording had Dumbledore written all over it.

It was also very hard to argue with.

So Gavin had to accept a fact: for the time being, he could no longer visit the Room of Requirement as freely as before.

That was a little irritating.

Not because he could do nothing without the Room of Requirement, but because it was so useful.

Quiet, private, convenient, and able to adjust to his needs. Better yet, no one would suddenly appear behind him halfway through a thought and ask, "Are you planning another dangerous experiment?"

Unfortunately, Pipi had effectively blocked that route.

Gavin did not want to reveal that he knew about the Room of Requirement, nor did he want anyone thinking he was still contemplating certain experiments.

Which meant he had to give serious thought to another problem—

The Disillusionment Charm.

He had known about the spell for a long time, of course.

And he knew how useful it was.

He simply had not put it on his immediate study list. The reason was simple: too much else had been going on. The Obscurus, Legilimency, the Super-Sensory Charm, Meditation, the Consciousness Space, Quidditch, the headmaster's bill—every one of them had seemed more urgent than "how to get past Pipi and reach the Room of Requirement."

Now, perhaps that skill deserved a higher priority.

At the very least, I need a way to shake off the surveillance, Gavin thought.

Of course, until he actually learned the Disillusionment Charm, there was only one time left for him to practice other magic.

After his roommates fell asleep.

It was not the worst arrangement.

Gavin did not need a full eight hours of sleep like an ordinary eleven-year-old. He had gradually worked out that Meditation could stabilize his emotions and restore his Magic, while also replacing some of the refreshment he would otherwise get from sleep.

In deep Meditation, the recovery was astonishingly efficient.

And so, on many recent nights, the Hufflepuff boys' dormitory looked like this:

Ernie slept neatly. Judging by his sleep-talking, he was probably still thinking about giving a speech in his dreams.

Justin slept sprawled out. Every time he rolled over, some random object on his bed went flying.

And Gavin sat beside his bed, watching them quietly.

Then, with perfect sincerity, he thought:

You're so young. How can you sleep at night?

As for his research into the Obscurus, that was still stuck.

More precisely, it was stuck in an awkward place.

Because the direction was clear.

The problem was clear, too.

He now knew for certain that he could enter Cordelia's Consciousness Space. But once inside, he could do nothing.

He could only watch.

He could only assess her condition.

He could only stare helplessly at that enormous black-hole eye and the little girl beside it who was almost being swallowed.

It resembled a Muggle computer problem involving insufficient permissions.

Gavin had even reduced it to a blunt description:

He had read permission.

He had no write permission.

And no execute permission.

That was awkward.

He could see the file.

He could even make a reasonable guess about which directory held the problem.

But he could not modify it, run it, call it, or go in and type a command to try something.

It was the sort of situation that could easily drive a person up the wall.

Over the past few days, Gavin had kept returning to the same question:

If I can't change Cordelia's consciousness itself, could I first find some medium through which to influence or control someone else's consciousness?

In theory, Hypnosis was one option.

And he had already used it once.

But that was precisely the problem—Hypnosis was too unpredictable.

He had succeeded not because Hypnosis was reliable, but because he knew himself well enough, had prepared extensively, and possessed exceptional emotional control and the ability to design Anchor Points. Only then had he managed to make it across that tightrope and back.

Trying the same thing with Cordelia was unrealistic.

She could not do it.

She had no experience, no preparation, and none of the almost obsessive composure needed to judge the situation.

Besides, her condition was far more complicated and dangerous.

Hypnotizing her directly would not be treatment. It would be murder.

"So it has to be me." Gavin wrote the words on a sheet of paper, then stopped.

The problem was—

How was he supposed to do it?

He could enter her Consciousness Space.

But once inside, he was only a spectator.

Merely "seeing" the structure of someone else's Inner Landscape meant nothing if he wanted to affect it.

So what was he missing?

For a while, Gavin suspected he might need a more advanced mind-related spell, or some technique for "manifesting himself" within a Consciousness Space. But those were only guesses. He had no existing knowledge to tell him what an outsider could actually do inside another person's Consciousness Space.

There was no control group to compare against.

No one could tell him what a "normal person's" Consciousness Space looked like, what an "Obscurus host's" looked like, or what permissions he ought to have after entering someone else's Consciousness Space—and what he should be able to do with them.

That was the trouble with an isolated case.

It might be astonishing, but it was still only one special case. No conclusion could be drawn from it.

"An isolated case without a control group proves absolutely nothing," Gavin murmured.

The fire in the Fireplace gave a soft crackle.

Beyond the bed curtains, everything was quiet.

Ernie and Justin were sleeping soundly, with no intention of getting up to help solve the problem. Given what they knew, waking them would probably only produce advice like, "Gu, could you please get some sleep first?" That would hardly advance the research.

So Gavin kept thinking on his own.

Then he thought once more of that "river."

Alaya Consciousness.

The fundamental cause shared by all people.

The repository of the seeds of all life.

If Jung was right, and everyone's unconscious mind was connected, could Alaya Consciousness be another way of describing that connection?

Or, to take the idea further—

Perhaps it was a kind of Collective Unconscious all along.

That thought had already cost him once.

The last time he had edged a little closer, he had nearly lost the boundary of his own "self" in that river. He could still remember the feeling of his identity coming apart.

But that was precisely why it seemed more like a genuine path into someone else's mind.

If there was anywhere one individual could reach toward another, it was probably there.

The question is how to get in—and how to come back, Gavin thought.

Clearly, he would not solve that tonight.

Nor was it an answer he could conjure out of thin air by sitting behind his bed curtains.

In the end, he wrote only one sentence in his notes:

Perhaps, rather than entering someone else's Consciousness Space directly, I could use a deeper shared structure to influence an individual Inner Landscape indirectly.

After writing it, he stared at the line for a while.

It still felt like a castle in the air.

There was no way to put it into practice.

At this stage, the most frustrating part of the research was no longer the various "unknown dangers." It was the feeling that the answer was probably right in front of him, but he was still missing the key.

"I still don't know enough," he said softly.

Having said that, Gavin felt he could take the research no further today.

He did not keep thinking about it.

If he did, he would only circle back to the same dead end: read permission, but no write permission.

So he slowly set down his quill, closed his eyes again, and prepared to ease himself into rest with a short Meditation.

He still had classes tomorrow, at least.

And professors, classmates, Pipi, and an endless stream of everyday nuisances to deal with.

His real obstacle was clearly not going to crack open just because he slept two hours less tonight.

The week passed without incident.

He went to class and ate his meals as usual, and under the extra attention all the professors seemed to be paying him, he maintained an air of "I've genuinely been behaving myself lately."

Hermione still appeared in the library from time to time, carrying a stack of books she claimed were "just for fun."

The twins still enjoyed expanding the "Astronomy Tower legend" into ever more outrageous versions. But whenever Professor McGonagall passed by, they instantly changed the part about "Gu grabbing a dragon by the throat with one hand" to "Gu conducting a somewhat unsuccessful academic exploration within reasonable bounds."

And amid all that lively, ordinary activity, Gavin gradually realized something:

He had probably come up against an obstacle he could not simply force his way past.

He had not found an opening yet.

Or at least, not now.

So when night fell again, and the late-night gloom set in, Gavin sat beside his bed and looked at his two roommates sleeping beyond the curtains without a care in the world. He had little else to say.

I'll just have to carry on like this for now, he told himself.

And work out a way forward bit by bit.

A little moonlight came through the window and fell across the foot of his bed.

The dormitory was quiet.

And in that quiet, the only thing still without a way out was the problem in his head, growing clearer by the day and ever harder to solve.

At noon that day, the atmosphere in the library was not particularly friendly.

More precisely, the atmosphere at the trio's table was not particularly friendly.

Ron snapped shut an absurdly thick old book, sending up a little cloud of dust. Madam Pince immediately looked up at him from nearby. He ducked his head and lowered his voice, but complained just as much.

"This makes no sense," he said. "We're supposed to be looking for Nicolas Flamel, but you've spent the last few days reading those Muggle books."

Hermione jerked her head up from the pile of books like a startled rabbit.

"I haven't 'spent the last few days reading those Muggle books,'" she said in a low voice, her tone already sharp. "I'm just reading them on the side! And they're useful!"

"Useful for what?" Ron shot back at once. "For finding Flamel? We've been looking since before Christmas, and we're still not completely sure he's even a person. Meanwhile, you've started studying psychology!"

Hermione's face flushed.

"So what? We can't spend every second looking for 'Nicolas'!" she said. "And even if I am reading those books, it's still better than someone who goes back to the Common Room and does nothing but play Wizard's Chess!"

"I don't 'just' play Wizard's Chess," Ron protested. "Yesterday I read—"

"Read what?" Hermione demanded.

Ron opened his mouth, then paused for two seconds.

"...Half of Modern Famous Wizards Biography," he said.

"Half?" Hermione gave a derisive laugh. "You didn't even finish the table of contents, did you?"

"That's still better than running off to read Muggle books!"

"At least I'm trying to fill the gaps in what I know!"

"But none of it is what we need to know right now!"

"How do you know it won't come in useful later?"

"Because we're looking for Nicolas Flamel, not writing some Muggle essay!"

They spoke faster and faster. Though they both kept their voices down, the hostility was unmistakable. Sitting between them, Harry had initially tried looking from one to the other, like a referee who wanted to push both arguing parties back into their seats but couldn't decide whom to start with.

"Stop arguing," he said.

Neither of them listened.

"Seriously, stop arguing," Harry repeated patiently.

Still, neither listened.

Ron had started turning over the books beside Hermione to look at their covers, determined to prove on the spot that she had "gone completely off track." Hermione snatched them back, moving as quickly as though she were protecting some precious spoils of war.

"You just don't understand!" she said.

"Of course I don't!" Ron said, suppressing his anger. "You won't even let me look!"

"Because every time you see a Muggle book, you get that look on your face!"

"What look?"

"That 'what's all this rubbish?' look!"

"Because that's exactly what they—"

"Enough!" Harry finally snapped.

He kept his voice very low, but it still made them both pause.

Harry was getting fed up.

His temples had begun to ache, the sort of headache he imagined came from being wedged between two human-shaped doors for too long.

Of course he knew they had both been taking this seriously lately, and they were both trying hard. But whenever they got together, they started bickering.

And the result was—

They still hadn't found anything.

Harry closed the book in his hands and leaned back, his slightly glazed eyes sweeping across the library.

He was beginning to suspect they might have been looking in the wrong places from the start. If only someone knowledgeable could help them.

At that thought, Harry instinctively glanced toward another row of shelves.

Then he spotted Gavin.

He was sitting in a corner by the window, a pile of books spread across the table, his expression as calm as ever. It was as though the entire library existed to serve those few pages before him. There was always something peculiar about his concentration when he read. He looked less like an ordinary student doing homework than someone conducting research.

As Harry watched him, a thought suddenly popped into his head:

Gu's so brilliant. Maybe he knows.

If there was anyone at Hogwarts who could point them in the right direction when they had no leads whatsoever, it was probably Gu.

Harry stared over at Gavin for a couple of seconds before finally speaking.

"Stop arguing."

Ron and Hermione both turned to him.

"Let's ask Gu."

For a moment, silence fell over the table.

"Good idea!" Ron's eyes lit up. He had admired Gu ever since Halloween. To him, Gu was an absolute genius, certainly far beyond the star student sitting beside him.

"No!"

Hermione objected at once, a distinctly conflicted look on her face.

"Why not?" Harry and Ron both gave her puzzled looks.

"Because... because we can't explain how we know that name." After a long struggle, Hermione came up with a reason she thought sounded convincing. "He might tell the other teachers... or Snape."

"Oh, come off it." Ron rolled his eyes. "Compared with the things he's done, us going into the forbidden area is nothing. Besides, Snape's taken nearly forty points off him this term. Do you really think he'd tell Snape?"

"I said no, and I mean it!" Hermione suddenly seemed angry. Gathering up her books, she strode out of the library under Madam Pince's terrifying glare.

Harry and Ron were left staring at each other, utterly baffled.