Chapter Text
Still Friday, 14 July
Later that evening, in Longbottom Hall
Frank Longbottom wrote a letter, duplicated the letter, then sent the Longbottom owl out with both copies of the letter, to two addressees. The duplicated letter—
14 July 1995, Longbottom Hall
To Amelia Bones, Director, Department of Magical Law Enforcement,
To Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry,
Greetings from Auror First Class Frank Longbottom (also Frank Longbottom, Head of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Longbottom); and from my wife, who is Auror First Class Alice Longbottom (and Lady Alice Longbottom).
Alice and I no longer are in the Janus Thickey ward. We both are walking and talking, and are ready to go to work. Ah, but what work?
Both my son Neville and Harry Potter tell me that the “competency” of the latest bunch of Hogwarts DADA professors, with the exception of Remus Lupin, has become a sick joke. Hogwarts students desperately need Alice or me to be the DADA professor at Hogwarts during the 1995-1996 school year.
Harry Potter tells me, and his ghostly parents agree, that Lord Voldemort has resurrected himself and is now recruiting followers. The DMLE desperately needs two Aurors who have experience with fighting Voldemort and his Death Eaters.
Both of you desperately need either of us. The compromise that Alice and I came up with is that we jointly will teach DADA on a one-year contract, then we will probably return to the DMLE in July of 1996.
Albus Dumbledore, Alice and I each resign our membership in your “secret” organisation.
(signed) Frank Theseus Longbottom
(signed) Alice Antonia Longbottom
Amelia Bones wrote back with “This is great news, that you and Alice are back amongst us, and healthy! I’m sure Neville is overjoyed. I’ll talk with you soon.”
Albus Dumbledore replied to Frank’s letter with a teaching contract for both Frank and Alice. But Dumbledore also sent a long letter that—
a) tried to both guilt-trip and flatter, Frank and Alice into remaining in the Order of the Phoenix;
b) asked when and how Frank and Alice had talked to Harry Potter, and asked what Harry Potter and the ghostly Potters had told Frank and Alice; and
c) implied that Harry recently had gone through a quite traumatic experience, thus was a bit mad (as proven by him recently killing two wizards), thus Harry’s words should not be believed.
Frank and Alice each signed the teaching contract and they owled it back. Frank did not reply to Dumbledore’s letter.
****
The next morning (Saturday, 15 July)
At the Hogwarts front gate
Hagrid’s eyebrows shot up when he saw who was waiting for admittance. “Oi, Harry, didn’t expect ter see ya till September.”
Harry jerked a thumb over a shoulder. “This mob and I need to talk to Dumbledore about something important.”
Standing behind Harry were eighteen Unspeakables and eleven house-elves (including Dobby). Of the Unspeakables, only Director Saul Croaker had his hood pulled back and his mask off, so that an outsider could determine his age and gender.
“Whatcher doing that’s so important, Harry?” Hagrid asked, as he unlocked the gates.
Harry replied, “There’s something evil in the castle and they’re here to find it and to remove it, but we need Dumbledore’s permission.”
Once Hagrid opened the golden gates, the eighteen Unspeakables and Harry walked across the grounds to the entrance doors—because Harry did not know how to Apparate, and the Unspeakables were magically blocked from Apparation on Hogwarts grounds. The eleven house-elves were not stopped by this restriction and could have elf-popped directly into the castle; but instead, the house-elves walked with the Unspeakables and Harry.
Actually, the house-elves had to run, in order to keep pace with the human wizards and witches.
As the group walked on grass, Saul Croaker asked Harry, “Nervous?”
“Not nervous, I’m angry. When I get in the bearded idiot’s office, it’ll take all my self-control not to Stinging-Hex Dumbledore till I’ve worn my wand down to a stub.”
Then Harry sighed. “But he needs to be talked-to about the horcrux in Hogwarts, and I need to be with you when you and he talk. It’s for—”
Harry and Saul Croaker spoke the last three words in unison: “—the Greater Good.”
****
Harry, over a dozen Unspeakables plus Croaker, and almost a dozen house-elves rode the moving steps up to the door to the headmaster’s office. It was Croaker, not Harry, who knocked on the door, so that Dumbledore could not cast Harry in the role of “supplicant.”
“Come in, everyone,” Dumbledore’s voice said cheerfully from the other side of the door.
Croaker walked in, then Harry, then Unspeakable after Unspeakable, with the many house-elves bringing up the rear.
“Harry my boy,” Dumbledore said with a shark’s grin, “so good to see you. Did Saul tell you why I insisted that he bring you along?”
Harry walked up to the headmaster’s desk and put his fists on the wood. Harry snapped, “He told me only that you would let the Unspeakables search the castle for the thing that’s keeping Tommy alive only if I was part of this group. He also said that once I got here, you’d demand something of me that I would not want to do, but if we wanted your permission, I’d be obliged to agree to this thing.”
Dumbledore shot Saul Croaker his disappointed-grandfather look. “Saul, you were supposed to tell Harry ahead of time. He was supposed to know what was expected of him before he came here. Explaining to him now will take time, and I am a busy man.”
Harry rolled his eyes at Dumbledore’s attempted guilt-trip.
Now Saul Croaker walked up to the desk and put his own hands on the edge of the desk—though his hands were open, with his palms down, instead of his hands balled into fists. Croaker said, “Why did I not do what you wanted, the way you wanted it done? Because I don’t see you as anything more than a two-sickle Merlin, and I don’t take orders from you.”
“Fight, fight!” one of the Unspeakables murmured. Harry saw ten or twelve Unspeakables crowd in closer to where Dumbledore, his desk, Harry and Croaker were. Undoubtedly Dumbledore’s entire view was of Harry, Croaker and the pushier Unspeakables, with the less aggressive Unspeakables and all the house-elves hidden from the headmaster’s view.
Now Harry sneered at Dumbledore, “Well, whatever it was that was supposed to have been explained to me, but that you’re supposedly too busy for you to tell me now, I could always go to McGonagall’s office and have her explain it, hm? After all, she does all your other work, right? Whilst you sit here and suck on sherbet lemons all day.”
Croaker said, “I can’t believe your gall, Albus. When I told you that Voldemort made horcruxes, that they’re what will keep him alive when we kill him again, and that one of his horcruxes is right here in this castle, any reasonable headmaster would’ve said, ‘Hurry, get the horcrux out of my school right now!’ Instead, you say, ‘I’ll let you take it away only after I bugger Harry.’ ”
“Maybe literally,” Harry said. “After all, Albus old geezer, you do speak to me familiarly, you keep trying to get me alone in the headmaster’s office that is next to the headmaster’s suite, and you offer me candy. In primary school, we children were warned about men who do these things. Next, you’ll ask for my help to rescue the scared puppy that’s hiding under your bed.”
“Harry my boy, I am most disappointed that you would say that!” Dumbledore said.
Harry rolled his eyes. “Which isn’t the same as ‘I make oath I don’t molest young boys,’ everyone please note.”
Dumbledore’s face looked angry. “I think it’s time I told you, Harry, what the price is that you shall pay to have any hope of vanquishing the Dark Lord.”
Harry laughed scornfully. “Aren’t you assuming something, old man? That I’m so eager to defeat Tommy that I’ll put up with every sort of codswallop from you? The Prophecy that you still have not told me about, says I’m ‘the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord.’ Guess what—maybe I’ve the power to vanquish the Dark Lord, but with each day I spend in Wizarding Britain, I lose more and more, the desire to bother myself with Tommy. Wizarding Britain is an overflowing chamber pot, so how about I walk away and let Tommy have this place if he wants it so badly? Which is my long-winded way of saying ‘Tell me your terms, old man, but I’m sure I’ll say no.’ ”
Dumbledore looked shocked (but Harry did not for one second believe that Dumbledore actually was shocked). “Harry, you would abandon Wizarding Britain to its fate after Tom killed your parents?”
“Correction: after Tom killed my parents and you had promised to help them fight Tommy but then had stayed away when the fighting broke out. I’m just as angry with you as I am with Tommy, believe it! And let me remind you: Tommy plotted to get me made a Triwizard Champion, but you let his plot succeed.”
From the back of the mob of Unspeakables, a maybe-male, maybe-female voice asked, “What exactly does the headmaster want Harry Potter to do, as the price for us Unspeakables being allowed to search the castle for the horcrux?”
Dumbledore smiled. “Thank you for asking, whoever you are.”
Then Dumbledore looked at Harry. “I’m your sixteenth cousin, four times removed. For the Unspeakables to go search for the horcrux, first you must name me Potter Heir Primary, then you must abdicate so that I become Lord Potter, then I shall name you as Potter Heir Primary.”
“Is he barking mad?” an Unspeakable asked.
Croaker made the rocking-hand gesture.
To Dumbledore, Harry said sarcastically,“Suuuure, I’ll let you have the Lord Potter ring. But when do I supposedly become Lord Potter again? On my seventeenth birthday? On my twenty-first? Or do I again become Lord Potter only when you die of old age, except that you’ve a barrel of Elixir of Life that you hid away under Fidelius in 1992?”
Dumbledore said pompously, “When you would prove to me that you have sufficient maturity, I would abdicate and you would become Lord Potter again.”
“Yeah, right. Considering how you didn’t give me my trust-vault key till a few weeks ago at age fourteen, and you gave me the key only when I threatened you with goblin justice, it’s clear I wouldn’t be given the Lord Potter ring till your Lifestone went dark. No, nuh-uh, forget it, ain’t happening, I refuse to name you, Albus Dumbledore, as anything other than Rat Bastard of the Century.”
“Harry my boy, if you want the Hogwarts horcrux, you are really not in a position—”
Knock, knock.
Dumbledore looked at something on his desk that Harry could not see, then Dumbledore looked at Saul Croaker. “How is it that one of your Unspeakables is on the outside of the door when nobody left the room after you all arrived here?”
Croaker shrugged. “Maybe one of my people figured out a way to Apparate from your office to elsewhere in the castle, but the trick doesn’t work when someone tries to Apparate into your office?”
Dumbledore raised his voice: “Come in, late-arriving Unspeakable and visitor house-elf.”
Harry turned round to see what was happening, as the crowd of Unspeakables and of house-elves parted in front of Dumbledore’s desk. An Unspeakable walked in, with Dobby the house-elf at the Unspeakable’s knee. The enchanted grey robes that the Unspeakables wore, meant that Harry could not guess whether the newcomer’s shape was male or female, and the Unspeakable spoke with both a man’s voice and a woman’s voice, in unison. However, the newcomer’s two unison voices spoke with the same American accent—
“Hey guys, sorry I wasn’t here earlier. This castle is much bigger than Ilvermorny, and it has ghosts in it! Anyway, I got turned around, coming back from the bathroom. Sorry, Director Croaker.”
Saul Croaker said, “Just get in here, Thirty-Seven. We haven’t yet received permission to search the castle for the horcrux.”
“Nor will we get permission from Albus,” Harry snarled, “because the price of his permission is I agreeing to doing something I refuse to do.”
Harry then drew his wand and cast the Tempus spell. “It’s 8.26. Director Croaker, we’re wasted enough time with ‘the Leader of the Light.’ Let’s go.”
Dumbledore said, “Harry, if you walk out of here, my terms won’t be so generous next time.”
“I don’t see how they could be worse. Unless you’d also demand that I give up my Lord Malfoy ring, I suppose.”
Dumbledore nodded. “But I’d wear that ring only for a year before I’d abdicate as Lord Malfoy. The Leader of the Light has a reputation to uphold, after all.”
“Yeah, right,” said Harry. “Director Croaker, go now?”
****
As soon as the Unspeakables, the house-elves and Harry walked out into sunshine, Saul Croaker ordered both the Unspeakables and the house-elves to find and to destroy all listening charms.
Twenty-six listening charms were found. Nine of the twenty-six listening charms were on Harry.
When the zapping of listening charms had been completed to Croaker’s satisfaction, Croaker called Unspeakable Thirty-Seven forwards and asked him/her, “I gather you found the horcrux?”
“I did,” said Unspeakable Thirty-Seven—who now spoke with a British accent, not an American accent. The Unspeakable pulled a lead box out of a pocket of his/her robes. Shrunken down, the lead box was about the size of a man’s palm. As Unspeakable Thirty-Seven dropped the lead box back into his/her pocket, he/she said, “It’s the Diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw—and You-Know-Who ruined it.”
As the large group resumed their walk to the gold double gates, Harry praised Croaker: “It’s so clever how you planned this. A mob of Unspeakables and a mob of house-elves entered the Hogwarts grounds, and the Hogwarts wards told the headmaster how many magicals and how many house-elves were in the group—”
“Nineteen human magicals, including you, and eleven house-elves,” Croaker said.
Harry continued, “A mob of Unspeakables, a mob of house-elves and I walked into the headmaster’s office. He never noticed that the numbers did not quite match: that one Unspeakable and my house-elf friend Dobby entered the castle but they at first did not enter Dumbledore’s office.”
Unspeakable Thirty-Seven thumped his/her chest, then said, “Dobby and I didn’t enter his office, yes, until this former Hogwarts Muggle-born who knew the castle well, and who has watched way too many films made in the States, strolled in late and pretended to be a lost and confused American—all the while with the horcrux in my pocket. I deserve a BAFTA award.”
Croaker asked Unspeakable Thirty-Seven, “Where did you and Dobby find the horcrux?”
The Unspeakable answered, “In a giant room on the seventh floor that has a thousand years of junk in it. I was a student here for seven years and I never knew about that room! Mainly because you need to know a special trick, in order to get into the room.”
Harry clapped his hands together once. “This has been a good morning. We got the next-to-last horcrux, I didn’t get talked into giving up my Lord Potter ring, and—best of all—we tricked Dumbledore!”
****
A half-hour later
Harry sent a message-Patronus to Hermione: “I’ve no reason to attend Hogwarts now, so I’ve signed the student-transfer request for MMA. I expect to buy many, many stamps on my nineteenth birthday, because this will be the only way I complete my MMA education, but I’m still going to MMA. As many times as you’ve helped me in the last four years, it’s time I did something to help you. End.”
As Harry sent off his message-Patronus, he thought, I wonder if Dumbledore will come to MMA and try to make me serve detentions for my first week as an MMA student.
A minute later—
Pop. Dobby appeared next to Harry, but Harry had not summoned him. The house-elf looked worried. “Great Master Harry Potter’s Miss Grangy asked Dobby to brings you to her. Miss Grangy be owled a letter from nasty Dark Lord, and Miss Grangy be crying.”
****
Seconds later, in the Granger house
As soon as Dobby elf-popped Harry into the Grangers’ sitting room, sobbing Hermione ran to Harry and hugged him with all the strength she had.
“Oh, Harry, I’m so scared—for my parents, and for me! Voldemort sent me a letter, and he threatened my entire family!”
****
To Potter’s mudblood girlfriend—
If you don’t already know, your great-grandmother on your Muggle father’s side, Anne Granger, is dead. Your grandmother on your Muggle mother’s side, Connie Taylor, also is dead.
My Death Eaters killed them. Soon my Death Eaters will kill your Muggle parents, Daniel and Emma Granger. Be afraid, mudblood.
Soon after that, I will kill you. Be very afraid, mudblood.
Tell Potter that I decided to share the misery. Besides my people killing two people who are related to you, the Death Eaters killed Potter’s grandaunt, Violet Evans Resshert.
I am no “failure.” Soon I will be the greatest Dark Wizard that the world has ever known, famous as the Dark Merlin and the Magical King of Britain. Potter, before he dies, will regret having publicly insulted me, as he weeps over three Granger graves. He himself will die soon afterwards, I swear.
The Dark Lord Voldemort
****
Harry looked about the quiet sitting room. “Where are your parents?”
“It’s Saturday; they’re working. But they almost left work when I told them about Voldemort’s death threat.”
Then Harry said, “The first thing I’m doing is to hire Gringotts goblins to guard the Granger family at home and at work—don’t argue. The other thing I’m doing is—may I make a copy of this letter?”
“Why? Our three dead relatives are Muggles. The DMLE won’t do much more than to write three reports.”
Harry replied, “I want a copy of Voldemort’s letter so I can send it to the Daily Prophet. After I send the Prophet the copied letter, what will I do about the Death Eaters who killed members of both our families? I’m going to kill the killers. And I have the perfect plan how to do it.”
****
Hermione copied Voldemort’s letter. An hour later, Harry sent the copied letter to Barnabas Cuffe, who was the Editor-In-Chief at the Daily Prophet, along with a note—
To: Barnabas Cuffe
From: Harry Potter
This is a copy of a letter that Tom Marvolo Riddle (anagrams to “I am Lord Voldemort”) owled to my Muggle-born girlfriend, Hermione Granger.
The DMLE has confirmed to me that the three Muggle women whom Voldemort mentioned in his letter, indeed are dead. My girlfriend is frightened and my girlfriend’s parents are frightened. I was never told that I had a Grandaunt Violet, but she now also is dead; I’m upset.
You might decide not to print the Dark Lord’s letter. After all, Tom Marvolo Riddle is a Muggle-raised half-blood, and I know that proper Purebloods have no interest in reading what such a person has to say.
But if you decide not to print the letter tomorrow, hold on to the letter anyway. You’ll be glad you did.
What do I think about Riddle’s letter? The Dark Failure, Tom Marvolo Riddle, keeps threatening to kill me, but I’m still here!
****
After Harry owled the letter to the Daily Prophet, he owled another letter to his account manager at Gringotts.
This letter hired goblin warders to ward the Granger house, price was no object; and hired seven invisible goblin guards to protect Hermione’s parents at Granger & Granger Dental Clinic, during any hours that the parental Grangers were at work.
This was Harry’s expensive way of reacting to Voldemort’s threat.
But then Harry got clever, proactive and vengeful.
Harry was about to anger Tom Marvolo Riddle even worse than when Headmaster Dumbledore had refused to hire Tommy as the DADA professor.
