A/N: I could not remember what happened to Mrs. Black's portrait, if anything happened to it, so I came up with this. I'm a little unsure on it, cause it doesn't really flow right and I'm not quite satisfied with the ending, but I couldn't figure out how to change it to what I wanted so here it is.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.
Sitting with his family in the afterlife and listening to their funny stories was one of the best feelings in the world, Harry thought, as he listened to his father.
"—and his head swelled up like a balloon and stayed like that for three days! It was bloody brilliant!" James was saying about a prank they had pulled on one of their classmates. "He should have known better than to have messed with us Marauders."
"James! That was a horribly cruel thing to do," admonished Lily.
"Lily, calm down. We know that now, but it was really funny at the time!" said Sirius. He said this all very quickly, because Lily had taken her wand out and was threatening to hex them both. "Anyway, what about you, Harry? What did you do with Grimmauld Place after the war?"
"Well, for one thing, I got rid of your mother's portrait," answered Harry.
"How in Merlin's name did you manage that?" asked Sirius, astonished.
Thinking back, Harry said, "It all started one day when Hermione, Ron, and I were just walking in through the front door..."
Tiptoeing through the hall, the Golden Trio tried desperately to stay silent and not wake up the sleeping portrait. However, this stopped when Ron accidentally knocked over the troll-leg umbrella stand.
"MUDBLOODS! BLOOD-TRAITORS! FILTH IN THE NOBLE HOUSE OF BLACK!" shrieked the portrait of Walburga Black.
"Shut up, you old hag!" Harry yelled back to the portrait. "Where did that stand even come from, anyway? I thought we got rid of it ages ago!"
"I thought so too," Ron answered, looking slightly shocked. "Kreacher must have brought it back."
"You know what? I've had it with her. Every day, whenever we walk in, it's always 'mudblood this, blood-traitor that'. " Harry snapped. "Hermione, conjure an ax, would you?"
She obliged quickly and asked warily, "What are you going to do with it?"
Harry simply answered with, "You'll see."
With those parting words, he ran with the ax and swung it into the wall surrounding the portrait. With each swing, the wall splintered and chunks flew everywhere. Mrs. Black screeched, "What the devil are you doing?"
"If I can't get you out with magic, I'll get you out of here the muggle way!" Harry screamed back and kept swinging while Ron and Hermione watched, frozen with shock.
Eventually, the section of wall around the portrait had been completely torn down and the portrait was screaming into the floor. Harry stood over it, panting with exhaustion. He glanced up at his friends and burst out laughing at the expressions on their faces.
"What...what was that?" asked Hermione, looking a little pale.
"That was me, taking control of this house and getting rid of one very annoying painting," answered Harry. He then lifted up the portrait and took it to the living room, where Kreacher was keeping a fire going. He tossed the portrait into the fireplace and cast an extra incendio, stoking up the fire even more.
"Well, at least we won't have to listen to her screeching anymore," said Ron, and when Hermione glared at him, he exclaimed, "What?"
"And that was the end of that," said Harry, feeling very satisfied and laughing a little at the expression on Sirius's face. "Of course, Hermione gave me quite the lecture later about doing something so ridiculous, but even she had to agree that it was totally worth it."
"That was awesome!" yelled Sirius, beaming.
"No, it was traumatizing," said the spirit of Walburga Black, who had come in sometime during the story and had been listening at the door.
Harry only smirked at her, fingering the wand up his sleeve. She squeaked and ran, and Harry laughed with his family.
A note on the portraits and the spirits: my reasoning is, the portraits kind of act like windows for the spirits to view the world of the living. They can speak, but they can't cross from the portrait into, say, Hogwarts, and that's also why they're able to move from portrait to portrait. If someone doesn't have a portrait, they can't speak or move to different places, and that's why Harry couldn't speak to James and Lily, or to Sirius.
That's just my theory, and it might have more than a few holes. Oh well. :)
