Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter in any way, shape or form.
Presenting to you the prologue! Future chapters shall be considerably longer, but this is vital for setting the scene, and gauging the readers' interests. The pairings are currently undecided but I'm leaning towards Harry/Bellatrix. Romance will not be the driving theme of the story though.
Welcome to what promises to be a ride wilder than a Knight Bus driven by Dobby. Without further ado...
"You shall not harm Harry Potter!"
Harry Potter had lost count of how many times he had heard the aforementioned cry. Despite that, he never failed to contemplate the absurdity of the context. Not when it was shouted out, not when someone ended up disemboweled, dismembered or utterly annihilated right after it, and definitely not when its source landed on their feet in front of their victim. So it was no surprise that Harry breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of Dobby the Battle Elf cleaving the wand arm of the masked figure who had dared take aim at his master. Just as the separated limb fell to the ground, a torrent of fire incinerated its former owner as an unrestrained blaze flowed from Harry's own wand.
"A bit too extreme, don't you think?" the high-pitched elf piped up in a dignified accent that itself had been the cause of many a victory, catching enemies who expected a bumbling house-elf who could only attempt to attack with a frying pan off-guard.
"Seems like your time at Oxford made you soft, Dobby," Harry commented over the screams of two Death Eaters as they too fell to bursts of flame. Tapping the little bracelet that one of the Death Eaters had latched onto his wrist, he finished, "I think that covers all of them. Now how do I get this thing off?"
Surveying the seven charred bodies around him, Harry licked his lips. He had missed this and quite enjoyed whenever he and his friend ended up in these situations. Six years of being in hiding tended to make one a bit paranoid, a tad intense even.
Six years. Six years since that fateful battle at Hogwarts. If you could call it a battle. If anything, it was closer to a massacre, the combined forces of Hogwarts and what remained of the Order of the Phoenix put down in a mixture of bludgeonings at the hands of the Dark Lord Voldemort's brutal attack dogs in the form of giants and werewolves, and incisive strikes dealt by the Death Eaters, in particular the Inner Circle. How could we have been so foolish? The question had haunted many a nightly dream for Harry. A ragtag group of school teachers and vigilantes battling violent extremists. He pondered this question as he stroked the berry carvings along his wand lovingly.
Even with Voldemort's Horcruxes gone and the Elder Wand's true loyalty lying with Harry, the Dark Lord had proved too much, avoiding the rebounding Killing Curse from the Elder Wand before launching a counterattack against Harry, who had seized the Elder Wand as it flew across, his catching skills honed as a Seeker not failing him. It had not been until Dobby, the house-elf who had almost lost his life in rescuing Harry before from Malfoy Manor, interfered with the battle, apparating and disapparating in the blink of an eye, pulling Harry away from the path of a descending Killing Curse from Voldemort, who had taken up his older wand again.
They had appeared in the middle of a forest somewhere far from Hogwarts. Harry, whose ears rang in the sudden silence, a violent break from the brutal screams that had polluted the air at the battleground just moments earlier, had broken down, screaming every obscenity he could think of at everything he could find. They were gone - he had seen Ron and Hermione fall, the former succumbing to Nagini's fatal bite as he attempted to free the latter, whose life had been squeezed out of her body by the snake. Neville had lived long enough to avenge them when he beheaded the snake in one fell swoop of Gryffindor's sword but the boy - no, man - had barely a second to relish his triumph before Voldemort's green light struck him, the Dark Lord enraged that the closest thing he'd had to a companion was destroyed. And this was before Harry had had time to ponder over the losses of the countless other Hogwarts students and Order members he had seen lose their lives in a lost cause.
Dobby had knocked him out after that, putting him to sleep for at least two days so that he hadn't had the chance to go back and be his brash self again. When Harry returned to consciousness in a tent that the house-elf had conjured, he had received news of Voldemort's victory from Dobby. The battle at Hogwarts had been complete and utter destruction, a carnage unlike any before wrought upon those who opposed the Death Eaters. Of course, Hogwarts had remained standing - Voldemort being true to his promise of not wanting to spill precious magical blood if he could avoid. The castle would be needed to raise future generations of "the right sort" of magicals, after all.
The duo of wizard and elf and retreated into obscurity after that, knowing that they were not in a position to take up arms against the oncoming darkness, and sought refuge in the muggle world. In one final stab at his enemy, Harry had had Dobby vanish every object in the Headmaster's Office at Hogwarts, clearing up centuries, if not millennia, of knowledge that Dumbledore and his predecessors had accumulated, and saving it all from falling into Voldemort's blood-stained hands. Severus Snape, the final holder of the office before one of the minor Death Eaters had ascended to the role, had not made many additions of his own to the collections. The failure of the castle's wards because of the battle had assisted Dobby's endeavour, which would have been nigh impossible otherwise.
Just as Harry had predicted when going into hiding, Voldemort had not deigned to break the Statute of Secrecy. Why bother revealing the Wizarding World to the muggles when you could just keep them away, letting them wallow in their own helpless miseries. Helpless was correct, indeed, because muggle authorities had remained without an inkling of knowledge over why strange happenings manifested themselves all over Britain. Strange weather patterns with unusual bouts of cold and fog were just as inexplicable as the increase in murders where the criminals left not a single trace - or sometimes, mutilation to the point that it rendered the victims completely unrecognizable - if there was anything left of them.
Throughout the past six years, Harry Potter had remained the proud owner of the title "Undesirable No. 1", top of the Ministry hit list, yet not as big a target as he had once been. Over time, it appeared, Voldemort had decided that he did not merit much attention at all, since he had obviously not been any threat in the half-decade. But that was purely speculation on Harry's part. The Dark Lord had receded after the establishment of the new order. Why, it had been unclear. The young wizard posited it had something to do with the destruction of his Horcruxes. The paranoid Slytherin would certainly have removed himself from the public sphere until he had other ways to ensure his immortality, lest someone catch him unawares.
Of course, the new Ministry, under the reconvened Wizengamot, which was under the influence of the Inner Circle of the Death Eaters, was very much a manifestation of the will of Voldemort. There had not been a single muggleborn admitted into Hogwarts in that time. Which by itself did not sound as bad as most would have thought of, except for the fact that every potential muggleborn student was put down by the Ministry. A form of euthanasia, they called it. These children would die anyway as their untrained magic consumed them. So why not give them a "merciful" end? At least they would not ruin the Statute of Secrecy.
And so, Harry and Dobby had lived out their lives in the British countryside, moving only when they happened upon the chance Death Eater that they would put down and pack up shop, not wanting to take the risk that they had been found out. Dumbledore's resources which Dobby had brought from the Headmaster's Office had been nothing short of a godsend for Harry - the more he had perused them, the more he realised the foolishness of the cause that he had fought for, the foolishness of the former Headmaster, who had believed that a boy wizard would triumph over one of the greatest students to have passed through Hogwarts. Living off of his parents' wealth that he had cleared out from Gringotts before it too was taken over by the Ministry, coupled with the odd jobs that Harry worked wherever he moved, had given him a tad too much time. And too much time meant there was lots of room to immerse himself in the countless tomes over the Dark Arts, Defence, Arithmancy, Runes, all sorts of wild arcane magic that Harry had never even dreamed of. Or perhaps had dreamed of before he came to Hogwarts, where his imagination and desire to hurt Dudley with magic had been quashed, replaced with the joys of floating feathers and turning matchsticks into needles.
But alas, all that time and knowledge of magic that could be used to hurt him, coupled with the awareness that he was still technically wanted, also meant that there was a tad too much room for paranoia. For better or worse, Harry had developed a tendency to be constantly vigilant. He was not Mad-Eye Moody by a long shot, but he had become rather trigger-happy, having developed a proclivity for destructive magic, with a particular affinity for fire. After all, better a Death Eater burnt to a crisp than him being dead. When Dobby had realised that The Great Wizard Harry Potter Sir was becoming adept at protecting himself, he had decided that it was time for him to take a well-deserved break as well. And that was when he had piped up with perhaps his most unusual wish of all.
"So let me get this straight, Dobby," Harry groaned, rubbing his temple as he looked up from the Muggle newspaper he had been reading. "You want to go to university?"
Bouncing up and down on his soles, the elf exclaimed, "Not just any university, Harry Potter, sir! Dobby is wanting to go to Oxford!"
It was with that that he had thrust a letter at Harry, which had caused the wizard's jaw to drop as far down as it was humanly possible.
"How in the world did you get accepted there?!"
"Dobby is working a little bit of magic. Dobby is studying maths when he is being at Hogwarts, sir! He is not able to go to wizarding schools so Dobby is deciding, he is going to muggle schools!"
"That's all well and good, Dobby," Harry said, knowing that everything was well and good with the elf since nothing ever was normal around him. "But how did you get in? You know they need A-Levels, right? What magic did you work here?"
"Dobby is taking his A-Levels, Harry Potter, sir! Great Headmaster Dumblydore help Dobby take exams. Dobby has A's in maths, physicsies, chemistry and economies! Dobby is disguising as human and taking his exams! Dobby is going to be doing that at Oxfords."
"I- hmm."
It took Harry a moment to collect himself from that, but all he could add was, "So how do you intend to finance this endeavour?"
"Dobby is going to use magicsies to make sure professor muggles don't ask Dobby for money!"
Well, Harry thought, the elf certainly had no shortage of a lack of ethics.
It had turned out that having a house-elf who had a degree in mathematics was the best thing that had happened to Harry. He finally had an instructor for Arithmancy, something that Dobby had turned out to be, for lack of better word, a wizard at. Elf magic could be quantified in the same way as for wizards, and Dobby had turned out to be somewhat of a pioneer in the field, considering not a single elf in the past had embarked on the bizarre journey of unifying muggle mathematics and magic. Not to mention, his newly acquired received pronunciation made Dobby a more commanding personality than before, convincing Harry - whether true or not - that the elf knew his stuff.
And so, that was how Harry Potter and Dobby the elf found themselves in their current situation. They had been attempting to peacefully pass through a little town on their way to London when they realised that they had the splendid luck of going through a muggle settlement that had caught Death Eater eyes that night. One thing led to another and their interference resulted in a melee of sorts, Harry going at the Death Eaters, the Death Eaters at Harry, Dobby at the Eaters, the Death Eaters at Dobby, and whether on purpose or not, the Death Eaters at other Death Eaters.
"I still say it was your Expelliarmus that identified us," Dobby said matter-of-factually.
Harry, who would never get over the fact that Dobby could say things matter-of-factually, shook his head cheekily.
"You'd think they'd stop associating that spell with me after six years. But really, do we know what this is?"
Harry was still fiddling with the bracelet that was around his wrist. One of the Death Eaters had tossed it at him right before Harry had cut him down with a Sectumsempra, and it had wasted no time in wrapping itself around his wrist. Dobby walked up to have a closer look at it, tracing his long fingers over the lines carved along the curve of the bronze metal. There didn't seem to be any unlocking mechanism on it. The metal formed a continuous loop, not a single line along it that could have indicated where it opened or closed.
"You can't get a reading on it either, huh?" asked Harry.
Dobby shook his head.
"No, not a single pulse of magic. I've never heard of anything like this. Have you tried running some diagnostic charms on it? Don't try to split it open though."
Harry nodded, pulling out Elder Wand and tapping the bracelet. His blood ran cold.
"I felt that, Harry Potter," Dobby spoke hastily, alarm clear in his voice. "There's magic in it!"
And that was certainly the case. And what magic it was, Harry couldn't help but feel amazed, as the metal started to glow, the carved lines flashing every shade of colour between white and black. But that wasn't all there was to it. The magic emanating from the bracelet tugged at Harry's own magic. It tugged at Harry's very being itself, as if trying to drag him somewhere. By now, Harry was racing through every spell he knew in an effort to cast off the cursed object.
"Relashio! Dobby, it's pulling me away!" he growled.
A tug of war waged between his own magic and that of the bracelet, each trying to pull the other into itself. With each passing second, Harry felt his hold on his magic loosen, the tendrils of the opposing force wrapping themselves around him. He couldn't tell if he was imagining it or not but at that moment, the wizard could have sworn that his vision was blurring. No, it wasn't his vision, it was-
"Harry Potter, sir, you're disappearing!" Dobby leaped forward.
And he was right, Harry knew. It wasn't his vision that was fading, but only what he could see of himself. While his own body started to blur and fade, the surroundings remained crystal clear. At least until he felt a tug around himself, not so different from that of a portkey activating, but much stronger, enveloping his whole body. And just as Dobby the Battle Elf wrapped his limbs around Harry Potter, there was a blinding flash of light.
And with that, the duo vanished.
And that's Chapter 0, the prologue. Future chapters, as mentioned before, will be longer in length. Any and all questions will be answered as the story goes.
Please leave a review. All sorts of praise and constructive criticism is welcome and helps in improving this work.