"Are you alright?" she asked. Not the general question. The specific one.
"Better than I should be, probably," he said. "There was a — when Lockhart's spell backfired, it hit me too. Madam Pomfrey is going to want to check for side effects."
Her eyes sharpened. "What kind of side effects?"
"I'm thinking faster," he said. "Noticeably. It started as soon as I woke up in the tunnel. Everything's — clearer. Sharper. I don't know if it'll last."
He said this with the precise calibration of someone establishing a narrative early, while the events were fresh and the environment was chaotic enough that a thorough interrogation was impractical. Tell the truth where you can. Let the fabrication be minimal. A memory charm backfiring could plausibly do strange things to cognitive function. No one in this room has enough data to disprove it.
Madam Pomfrey, who had apparently been listening while she worked on Harry, pivoted back to him with her diagnostic wand already moving. The spells she ran were thorough. He let them be thorough. The Occlumency settled around his thoughts like a closed room — not aggressive, not effortful, simply present, the way a locked door is present. Whatever she was looking for, she wasn't going to find it in his surface thoughts.
"Cognitive enhancement as a side effect of a misfired memory charm," she said slowly, her wand still moving. "I've never seen it documented, but —" She paused. The wand's glow changed slightly. "There is something different in the neural magical pathways. I can't explain the mechanism." Another pause, longer. "I can't find anything harmful about it, either."
"So it's fine?" he asked.
She gave him the look she reserved for patients who used the word fine. "It's unexplained," she said. "Which is not the same thing. I'll be writing to St. Mungo's."
"Of course," he agreed, with the equanimity of someone who had no concerns about what St. Mungo's would find, because they would find nothing, because there was nothing to find, because whatever the divine machinery had done to him existed at a level that a diagnostic wand was not going to reach.
His mother was still watching him.
He met her eyes. "I'm alright, Mum," he said, and meant it, in the specific way that it was true — he was alright, he was functional, he was present and intact — while also being aware that it was not the complete picture. "I promise."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she sat down on the edge of his bed, carefully, as though suddenly unsure of things she'd previously taken for granted, and took his hand. Her hand was warm and work-roughened and entirely familiar from Ron's memory, and he let himself hold it properly, because whatever complicated truth existed underneath the surface, this was real and it was his now and there was nothing false about being glad she was here.
Dumbledore had been in the room throughout all of this, present but unobtrusive, the way very large things are sometimes unobtrusive — you were always aware of them, but they weren't demanding your attention. He had spoken quietly with McGonagall near the door. He had checked on Ginny with the careful gentleness of someone who understood what she'd been through without requiring her to explain it. He had sat with Lockhart for a few minutes, and whatever he'd observed in that conversation had settled into his expression as a kind of weary, complicated sorrow.
Now he pulled a chair to the foot of the beds where Harry and he lay, and he sat in it with the specific quality of someone who was tired in a way that went beyond the current evening.
"I think," Dumbledore said, "that I would like to hear what happened. If you're both willing."
Harry told it.
He told it well, actually — with the straightforward economy of someone who was used to explaining himself in situations where the full truth sounded less believable than a reasonable lie, and who had learned that the best approach was usually to just say what happened and let people adjust to it. He started from the moment they'd heard Ginny had been taken, moved through the pipe, through the tunnel, through Lockhart, through the Chamber itself.
He listened to Harry tell it and offered occasional details where Harry's perspective had gaps — Ron had been behind the cave-in for some of the critical moments, which meant he was filling in with things he'd technically learned differently, but the facts were the same facts and the narrative was sound.
Ginny's parents listened. McGonagall listened with the expression of someone maintaining professional composure through considerable effort. Dumbledore listened with his hands folded and his eyes half-closed, the way he listened when he was genuinely attending to something rather than simply waiting for his turn to speak.
When Harry finished, the room was quiet for a moment.
"You pulled the sword from the Sorting Hat," McGonagall said. This was not a question. It had the quality of someone repeating something back to confirm they'd understood it correctly.
"Yes," Harry said.
Another silence.
"The Sorting Hat," McGonagall said again.
"Minerva," Dumbledore said, with gentle finality, and she closed her mouth. He looked at Harry for a long moment with an expression that was warm and proud and quietly, deeply relieved, and also — he caught this, because he was watching for it — tired. The relief of a man who had been afraid and was glad the fear had been unnecessary, not the relief of someone who had been confident things would work out.
Not a chess player reviewing his pieces. Just an old man who was glad the children were alive.
He filed that away. The being had been right about Dumbledore. He thought it would matter, later.