Two days later, Harry went to Dumbledore's office.
He went with him.
This required a small negotiation with his mother, who had views about his schedule that centered primarily on rest and recovery and did not initially include accompanying Harry Potter to the Headmaster's office. He made his case — Harry shouldn't have to handle the aftermath of all of this alone, they'd been through it together, he was fine — and she looked at him with that careful observing expression for a long moment before agreeing, in the specific way she agreed to things she wasn't certain about, which involved several additional instructions about not overdoing it and eating properly.
Dumbledore's office was circular and cluttered in the comfortable way of a space that had been occupied by an attentive mind for a very long time. Portraits of previous headmasters dozed in their frames. The pensive sat on its shelf. Fawkes was on his perch, regarding them both with the benevolent attention of something that had been present for a very long time and found most things mildly amusing.
Dumbledore was at his desk. He looked, in the specific angled light of his office, older than he looked in the hospital wing — not decrepit, but the kind of old that showed when the immediate emergency had passed and the body was allowed to admit what the last twelve hours had cost it.
He thought about what the being had told him. A hundred and twenty years old. Three of the most important positions in wizarding Britain. An old man doing his best with an impossible load.
Something in the room shifted slightly when he thought it, not physically but in the way that the atmosphere of a space shifts when someone in it decides to see it differently.
"Harry," Dumbledore said, warmly. "And Ron. I'm glad you came together." He gestured to the chairs across from his desk with the hospitality of someone for whom making people comfortable was natural rather than performed. "Please, sit."
They sat.
What followed was, for approximately ten minutes, the canonical conversation between Harry and Dumbledore — the recognition of Harry's qualities, the acknowledgment of what he'd done, the particular quality of praise that Dumbledore offered, which was specific and genuine and managed to make you feel seen rather than flattered.
He listened and observed and kept his own counsel, right up until a knock at the office door produced Dobby.
The house-elf arrived in the manner characteristic of Lucius Malfoy's things in general — expensive, aesthetically considered, and containing within it the specific misery of something that had been treated as an object for too long. Dobby's enormous eyes moved from Dumbledore to Harry to him with the speed of something that had learned to read rooms quickly as a survival skill.
He watched Harry work it out. Watched the moment Harry understood what had happened, understood who had been behind the diary and the opened Chamber and the entire year of attacks, and saw the specific expression that moved through Harry's face — the flash of fury, carefully controlled, redirected into something colder and more purposeful.
Harry gave Lucius Malfoy back the diary.
Lucius gave Dobby his sock.
Dobby was free.
The subsequent altercation in the corridor, with Lucius Malfoy's fury running up against the reality of a free house-elf who had decided Harry Potter was worth protecting, played out largely as expected. He stood slightly behind and to Harry's left, not intervening, watching Malfoy's face with the attention of someone cataloguing information for future use. Lucius Malfoy, up close, was a study in the specific kind of aristocratic entitlement that had calcified over generations into something that genuinely believed itself to be the natural order.
Interesting. Unpleasant. Useful to understand.
When Malfoy left, in the manner of someone who had decided to withdraw from a situation that was not developing as intended, he turned to find Harry crouching to Dobby's eye level with the unselfconscious directness that Harry had with people who were smaller or less powerful than him, which was to say he treated them the same as everyone else.
"You're free," Harry was saying. "You don't have to go back to them."
Dobby's eyes were enormous with something that might have been the beginning of tears, or might have been the elf equivalent of joy overwhelming itself. "Harry Potter freed Dobby," he said, in the reverential tone he generally reserved for Harry. "Harry Potter is greater than Dobby ever knew."
"I was wondering," Harry said, with the slight uncertainty of someone asking something they weren't sure they had the right to ask, "If you'd want work. Paid work. I can't really offer you a place to live yet, I'm at school, and in summers I'm at my — at my relatives'." The slight hesitation on relatives was the only tell. "But I could pay you, and it wouldn't be — it would be different from before."
He crouched down alongside Harry.
Dobby looked at him with the startled attention of someone who hadn't been expecting to be included.
"If you're going to work for Harry," he said, "you should know what you're agreeing to. Fair wages — I'd suggest two Galleons a week to start, with the possibility of more as Harry's circumstances change. One day off per week, your choice of which. You'd work from Hogwarts most of the time, since that's where Harry is for most of the year. When school ends, Harry goes to his relatives for the summer." He glanced at Harry. "We should talk about that, actually. But the point is — you'd have time off when Harry was with his relatives, unless called for something specific."
Dobby looked between them both with an expression that suggested this level of consideration was genuinely novel.
"Two Galleons a week," Harry confirmed, nodding. "And actual days off. And —" he appeared to be thinking about this as he said it "— actually make sure I eat properly this summer. That's the most important job."
He looked at Harry sideways.
Harry didn't look back, which told him everything.
We will be having that conversation, he thought, and sooner rather than later.
"Dobby accepts," the house-elf said, with a solemnity that was its own kind of moving. "Dobby will serve Harry Potter well."