Disclaimer: all the ideas and characters and pieces of magical theory that you don't recognise are most likely mine. If you need to borrow any of this, please ask first. The canon-verse belongs to Rowling.
Parings: HPTMR, HPOMC, SBSS, RLFG, RWHG, and many others, some important, others – not so much.
Summary: When James kicks Harry (16) out, a school in a different dimension lures him in with the promise of knowledge. Weird magical abilities resurface, Minister Riddle schemes, Grindelwald spectacularly vanishes, and oh, did you know how tricky creature politics are?
Political, intelligent, dark(ish) Harry.
Warnings: SLASH, AU, OOC, OCs, later will be filled with blood and torture and death (not so graphic though, I don't really like puke-worthy stuff), mentions and attempts of non-con (again - no graphic things), sex (but this will be mostly cut out of this site and moved to different ones, where MA is actually allowed). VERY long fic.
To Clear Things Up: Tom Riddle is a Minister of Magic. No, he hasn't been a Dark Lord officially, but who knows what's boiling under the surface? Lily dies giving birth to Harry, for which James blames the boy. After Lily's death, James's parents force him into a marriage of convenience with the Browns to boost up family fortune, and a year later it bears fruit – a baby girl Lavender, who thus becomes Harry's half-sister. Harry's stepmother dies a little while before the story starts. Regulus is alive, lives along with Sirius and Sirius's boyfriend Snape, who doesn't get along with Harry.
Design Your Universe
By Forgotten Juliett
Chapter 1. Something is Still Missing
It all started with a lost key.
At first, Harry didn't pay any attention.
His stepsister had run off with the crush of her life. His father was letting out some steam on an Auror mission and would probably return only to rave or drown his sorrows about the loss of his second wife in whatever alcoholic liquid he could find. His friends, Hermione and Terry Boot, were suddenly needed elsewhere, and Luna behaved as far-off as a star on the nightly shore. And Harry himself had to receive an Order of Circe, First Class from the Minister himself in a month's time.
All in all, life was busy.
"Hmm... Here it says to stir clockwise until the potion acquires a bluish tint," Harry read aloud, a huge, old, leather-bound potions volume in one hand and a stirring stick in the other. He frowned. Something didn't add up. He turned the page. Caught a short, inconspicuous paragraph at the end of it. Read it.
"But how can it be, when too many clockwise stirs lean the damn thing towards the pinkish side of the spectrum?"
Ah, out-dated Potions tomes. Ever the conundrum.
He couldn't begin to comprehend how people had fared with even less knowledge than Harry could access now.
Harry swept his private laboratory with a cursory glance. It landed on the wide storeroom filled with numerous vials, bottles and small pouches, all filled with healing herbs, extracts of venomous plants, pickled animal bits, and powders so mysterious to his father or Lavender but ordinary for Harry.
Distractedly whipping out his wand to direct it at the cauldron and charm the stirring stick to continue stirring, Harry walked over to the storeroom and rummaged through the top shelf.
Should be somewhere in this direction... This? Oh no, these are harpy's feathers... Cat's eyes... Acromantula silk... Weird. I thought I'd run out of this stuff- Here!
Like a victorious war general, Harry drew his hand out of the storeroom and raised it to the dim candlelight, inspecting the findings.
"Not first class, of course, but it will do," he decided loudly. Talking to himself helped him. It might be an annoying habit to some, but to Harry, who had been mostly ignored in his life, hearing his own voice was a blade-sharp reminder that he was still alive, still there, still a normal human, living, breathing, walking, talking.
He clutched the phoenix feather tighter.
Harry wished... He wished to make his father proud. He wished his father to sincerely hug him and praise him, not with those drawn-out, tired half-smiles and crooked grins, but ones filled with warmth and affection and love. The sort of tenderness James generously gifted Harry's half-sister, Lavender, with, the fruit of their shared father's second marriage with Acacia Brown.
Some wishes are meant to remain wishes, Harry told himself sternly even as he set the phoenix feather on the miniature table and diced a mandrake root. Precise movements. Level cuts. Perfect. This man will never know pride in his own son even if that comes to bite him in his bony arse.
That's James Potter for you. Always the stubborn ass.
The cauldron bubbled and Harry rushed to it just in time to soothe the seething liquid with the smooth dices of the mandrake root, the last one in his stock.
Need to buy some more, a thought coursed through Harry's mind as he watched the potion in process devour the plant, quickly drowning it in its depths and depleting, and the root vanished in mere moments of Harry's silence.
He fingered the locket lying placidly on his collarbones, barely hidden by the black fabric of the collar of his black shirt.
When Lily Potter, Harry's mother and one true love of his father, had died, sweaty and panting and exhausted after giving birth to him, her only parting words had been to gift him with that locket, that it was a matter of utter importance and he must never part with it, because only that small crystal butterfly with the words Crystal Spire engraved on one of its exquisite wings in a silver delicate scribble could protect him.
Protect from what? Harry wanted to ask now, after the years had vanished into dust and all questions bumped right into the insurmountable barrier of the afterlife.
Alas, Lily Potter was long dead and all Harry could do was heed her words and wear the chain and the locket daily, no matter how girly it used to make him feel in the beginning, ages ago.
As lost in brooding as Harry was, when he raised his hand, the phoenix feather clutched tight in it and about to touch upon the surface of the potion, his fingers faltered and the bright red feather slipped out and fell, down, down, down, and all Harry could do was stare in paralyzed fear as the ingredient dropped, and the gooey mass engulfed it as it had the mandrake root minutes ago.
"Protego!" Harry cried out, bright green eyes wide with horror and urgency.
The wand swooshed in his hands to protect him from the impending doom of a potion mistake.
An explosion and a rash of mist – and Harry fell to the ground. His eyes closed.
At least, his shielding-charms knowledge ensured he would wake up.
{Design Your Universe}
When he woke up, it wasn't pretty.
Harry cracked his eyes open, and white ceiling loomed into view, taunting him with its highness when Harry found out he had problems pushing himself off the floor. And speaking about floors...
Defeated, Harry propped his weight onto his elbows and surveyed his home potions lab.
A sticky substance of bright purple stuck to all the objects of furniture it could reach, from a spindly chair Harry used to sit on while stirring an experiment of his, to the lower half of the ingredients cabinet. The floorboards were covered with the disgusting slime as well as with the splinters of the table that had collapsed when the potion had consumed its legs. And that's not even starting on some glass shards from the vials with animal bits and small bottles of venoms and bloods, and the ingredients themselves: a wide range of intermingling flowers, powdered horns, feathers, and liquids, which had been precariously resting on the table.
Harry could understand Snape for once. Nothing could deal more damage than a fucked-up potion, especially when you mixed mandrake roots and phoenix feathers and slimeball's slime – the aggressive goo ate up even enchanted metal and only the safety spells Harry had cast on the floor, the walls and the doors of the cabinet prevented it from doing away with those, too, and burning to the lower floors, spreading right into James's room.
Now, how do I fix it?
When Harry moved upwards, determined to get on his feet, a strand of long black hair fell into his eye. Irritably, he blew it away from his face. Usually he tied the ebony black, long locks with a hair tie, but it had snapped, probably sometime during his fall or when he had lain unconscious.
His eyes swept the disaster with another long look.
Charming. Just wait for James to see this. Tonight, I fear, will be full of spittle and splutter. He's going to be incensed-
"Harry?" a voice shouted and a veneer of ice coated Harry's insides. Terror, shock, trepidation – the emotions burst and bubbled just under the surface of his outwardly calm countenance.
He isn't supposed to be here! Just my luck. If this slime bucket Snape now comes too, I'll eat a galleon and choke to death.
"I heard an explosion. Are you all righ-"
It trailed off.
Harry pivoted on his heels and, like he would a particularly curious potions ingredient, observed his father.
"Yes, father," he murmured dutifully as he eyed the thinking process reflecting in the man's eyes while James was taking in the depressing wretch Harry had made out of his potions lab. "I'm all right. Thanks for asking, even though you look like you have fallen in love with this wrecked table – and no, a Reparo won't make it – and don't seem to care much for my injuries."
James's face went red in blotches, the blush not spreading evenly like on someone else's face.
Harry's comment tore the man's face away from the splinters and the shards and onto his son's grimace of apology. It was not accepted.
James choked, but no noise escaped him. He pushed the sounds through his vocal cords, and yet the words refused to form, and he remained like this: standing in his ridiculous Auror outfit, hair nested on his head in a wild mess, and glasses askew from the running he must have done.
The man needed to calm down.
"Gobbledegook helps," Harry supplied quickly, helpfully. "If you know the numbers, that is. If you don't, this is a perfect opportunity to visit our home library – and yes, father, our house does have a library; has had it for years – and learn while I take care of-"
"Harry Potter." The deadly whisper could mean nothing good, Harry was certain of it. The certainty drummed in his chest with a fast-paced melody of doom.
He didn't hear his father's low voice often.
Now, he didn't want to, either.
"What. Has. Happened. Here," James forced out through clenched teeth, and Harry flinched, because the barely suppressed rage hurt him, grazed his forced calm and obliterated his wobbly self-esteem, and for a second he imagined himself as that lost little child, once more filled with longing for a meagre scrape of his father's attentions and affection, yet yielding under the disapproving sneer of his stepmother's and a smug smirk of his half-sister's.
"It was a potion," Harry explained simply. The truth was his best assistant here. "A searching potion. I lost my vault key a few days back, which gave me the idea. Besides, I wanted to best Snape and invent something mind-boggling, something... unique. There are no searching potions invented yet."
James's eyes turned cold.
"Unique..." He tasted the word on his tongue, then spat, as if spewing out something distasteful, "It's your experiments again! How long are you planning to pursue those silly child's dreams instead of preparing for the adult life?"
Harry's lips thinned as he balled his fists and chanced a step forward. This conversation was neither the first nor the last. They had been going at it ever since Harry had expressed his desire to follow in his mother's footsteps and don on the Unspeakables' grey robes and sacrifice his private life to the wonders of modern research and furthering the horizons of magic, and stretch the boundaries of wizarding possibilities – all worth it, in the end.
"Explain 'adult life' for me, father dearest," Harry demanded. Occasionally, anger and bloodlust dominated his misted view of his father; betrayal, hurt – those he felt always. "Do you call 'adult life' running away to Egypt with a handsome boyfriend, like Lavender has done?"
A vein popped on the man's forehead as he stormed up to Harry to grab the teen's collar and hiss, "Your sister deserves your respect-"
Harry blathered on, undaunted.
"-Or, maybe, you prefer to define 'adult life' as the life your school mate Peter leads; a quaint existence in the arse of the Ministry – no friends, no wife, no progeny – although that last one is a life-saver; imagine if there were two such Peters roaming the grounds of Wizarding Britain.-"
"Stop it here, Harry," James growled dangerously, hazel eyes burning into Harry's emerald green ones, but the flood of the small grudges swamped unstoppable.
"Or is it drinking yourself into oblivion, like you have been doing lately?"
He earned a slap for this.
Harry shut up.
Raising a hand to his cheek – Merlin, why does it tremble? It has no reason to. Absolutely no reason – Harry touched the smooth skin, right the very spot where he could feel the heat spreading.
A slap.
His father had done it.
Harry knew he was not the favoured child, but this was pushing it too much.
"You slapped me," Harry said dumbly, unable to think of anything else to say. His mouth dried and hung open, and with fingers still lingering at the tender, rosy spot, he stared up at James's
The man solemnly nodded, his lips just as fine a line as Harry's own in reluctance or anger: a rare trait the parent and the child shared.
"You deserved it, Harry." The man threw the words like stones. His voice was hoarse and tired, as was his entire appearance: long hours of drinking alcohol interlinking with equally long missions had worsened James's condition. "You have no right to say such things of your family and family friends."
"If you knew me better, you would have noticed that I consider only yourself my family." Harry's gaze sharpened as he bit out, "And this might be reconsidered." The neglected child in him kicked and screamed in hysterics, reflected in the verdant eyes. "After Acacia's death, you are hardly a human, let alone a parent."
James exhaled. Slowly, as if about to make a difficult decision.
Harry scoffed and the sneer on his face deepened.
I feel another punishment coming. I wonder if it's going to be another errands-boy quest to find him an alcoholic beverage or I should spend hours 'mending bridges' with the Weasleatte. Or clean the staircase without magic, which actually sounds more engaging than that last option. You'd think that after all these years a bout of creativity finally drops on him.
"I disown you."
At first, Harry's mind couldn't grasp all the implications, all the meanings the words had.
He blinked. He faltered.
James held out a hand to prevent Harry from speaking, and, for the first time, the teen obliged.
"You've let me down with your attitude, Harry," James started, heaving a sigh. He ran a hand through his hair and seemingly ignored the way Harry's body tensed. "I- I don't know how to act around you anymore. You used to be such a darling in your childhood, always playing with Lavender and Ron and Ginny-"
"That was before, father," Harry whispered. His entire body was stiff, especially the back, and only fingers shook. Before Ginny started to hit on me. Before Ron lashed out at me. Before you showed your preference of Lavender so clearly it blinded me.
James nodded at his words and went on, "-You looked up to Acacia, too-"
Of course. She seemed so... motherly. Up until the time she realised I was better than her daughter and started ridicule and humiliate me.
"-and you took pride in visiting the Ministry with me when I had to drop in the Auror Department-"
And of course I enjoyed the longing glances you threw every time we passed the Department of Mysteries where mother used to work. It was so exciting hearing you sigh and seeing you glare at me, blaming me for something I had no desire to do and had no control over.
All those thoughts running through his mind clogged in his throat.
"-yet now... Now, I don't feel a connection to you anymore," James exhaled the words earnestly, the emotions shining over the bags around his eyes and the exhaustion covering every inch of his body.
"And so you have decided to throw me to the wolves, figuratively speaking – or, speaking normal language, kick me out into streets," Harry commented scathingly. His fingernails dug into the palms and left half-moon-shaped marks.
James blanched, as if dealt a mortal blow. Then, the expression cleared, and the tired demeanour returned with vengeance and bled into the man's hunched posture.
"Not in the streets," he mumbled, escaping Harry's condemning eyes. "You can live at Sirius's-"
"Tell this to his boyfriend," Harry spat as he felt the earlier confusion merge and amplify with rage. "I'd love to see you telling Snape I'm going to disrupt their lovers' nest. I am bad at poisons. He is not."
James stepped back. "I- Well- There are other people, too, right? Hermione and Terry Boot, your friends-"
"Small house."
"Luna Lovegood?"
Harry sneered and, flinging out his wand in irritation, threw a blasting curse on the goo of the failed potion which had crept to his polished boots and had been about to lick them with its acidic tongue.
"Why don't you propose the Malfoys for a good measure?"
James's face spotted with red once again, to Harry's surge of vindictive pleasure, before the hazel gaze steeled with resolve and the hunched back straightened into an ideally level line.
"You will find a way," he stated in a simple fashion and surveyed the lab. The acidic gunk had gobbled up most of the ingredients lying around and was placidly unmoving, probably satisfied with the amount of destruction it had caused. "You are resourceful, Harry. Aren't you going to receive an Order of Circe on September, 1st? The reward for the most intelligent and record-breaking students?"
Harry didn't reply to James's shy grin, which died down at the unwelcoming reaction.
"So what do you expect me to do? Just take it as inevitability and flee?" Harry asked in anger. He directed his wand at James. "If you push me, I will never forgive you, father. I'm good at holding grudges. Even Snape envies me sometimes." He sneered. "Although you are not that far behind him in childishness."
"You have no other choice. You are too... different. Your experiments, your stand-offish attitude, your animosity..." James shot him a look of reproach. "I don't know what has gone wrong while I was raising you-"
"You didn't raise me," Harry hissed and cast an exploding spell on the wall just behind James. A huge fragment of it blew up. James fearfully cringed before extinguishing the small fire that the hemline of his Auror robe had caught. "I raised myself. You were never there."
"And this is another proof why you need a lesson in humility." James shook his head. "You are unstable, Harry. You lack both respect and common sense. You criticise your sister and Headmaster, spit on the memories of your step-mother, backchat me-"
Harry steeled himself, feeling that a final blow was coming.
"-Lily would have been disappointed in you."
"Or perhaps she would be disappointed in you. I would have loved to hear my mother's opinion on how you have just disposed of the annoying child by kicking him out into the streets. She would feel so honoured to be your wife."
With those words, Harry stamped out of the lab.
"Remember: you have two hours to pack up, until I go on the mission and lock you out of the wards!" the warning haunted him.
He couldn't bear being here anymore.
{Design Your Universe}
Harry had never felt as alone as now. He utterly lacked any available options to choose from; the streets were literally his only refuge now.
As he walked through the crowd in Diagon Alley – did all those people live there? Whenever he visited the place, the mob of wizards was enormous – Harry ran through all the potential candidates to host him.
Terry Boot and Hermione, the Boots' adopted muggleborn daughter, one of the many child muggleborns who had been taken from their muggle families and adopted into the wizarding ones, all thanks to Minister Riddle's orders, were Harry's closest friends, but lived in a family of bookworms who were perfectly satisfied with a small house and lack of riches.
No, those two were out.
Luna Lovegood?
Indeed, the girl was a semi-friend of his, one of the few people whom his snaps and scowls didn't deter and who had insisted on socialising with him until Harry's mind recognised her as a friend.
But they weren't close enough for her to let him in.
Another one – out.
Regulus and Sirius?
Both lived in a spacious house, but, unfortunately, as an unwanted bonus, came with Snape in tow. Harry honestly couldn't submit himself to the constant torture of lemony grimaces, cutting insults, crude power games, and the like.
Out of question.
And Harry couldn't afford even renting a room of his own, not even for the month it took before Hogwarts.
All Harry really wanted was research, but somehow-
He had a hunch it wasn't going to work out.
What did that leave him with?
{Design Your Universe}
Gringotts Goblin Bank emerged through the haze of Harry's wondering melancholy.
Harry halted in his footsteps, then shrugged and neared the bank: he needed a new vault key for his empty vault anyway, so why not take care of the business now?
His robe now clean instead of the potions-covered one he had thrown away after the experiment gone awry, his hair somewhat combed and tied into a low ponytail, and the face impassive, Harry walked into Gringotts.
"What can we do for you, sir?" the goblin at the counter spewed out the 'sir' as if it were a curse.
Polite smiles didn't work with goblins, so Harry didn't bother.
Not that he ever bothered with those anyway.
"I've lost the key to my vault," Harry said bluntly even though his eyes were trained on the neat piles of rubies on the goblin's scale. If only he could reach his hand... "I wish to remake it."
The goblin looked up from his heavy office book to eye Harry with mistrust.
"Name? And no funny business, boy," the creature warned him. A grimace of distaste flickered across Harry's face.
Goblins. Ever the paranoid.
"Harry Potter. The vault is number-"
"The blood test will show what the number of your vault is," the goblin interrupted with as much disgust as he could manage as he grabbed the scale – the rubies still gleamed attractively – and the office book and tucked them into the space under the counter. "What, did you think we would believe your word?"
"Blood test is pushing it a bit," Harry said fake-nonchalantly, a frown begging to form on the forehead. "Blood can be used in many rituals. How do I know you are going to use it only for the purpose of making the key?"
If possibly, the goblin's sneer intensified. The creature's beady eyes glowered at the human as the mutilated face with a scar running down the cheek screwed up in a grimace.
"Humans. Always with the idiotism. Boy, if you believe we use the blood we are given from wizards – and believe me, there is a plenty of butterfingers like you stumbling in here every day – you think we are staying in this servitude out of pleasure?"
"Who knows, perhaps you are a race of latent masochists?" Harry shot back, fingering his locket.
The goblin stared at him with a startled frown marring his face. When Harry raised an eyebrow and prompted, "Key? Now?", the creature shook his head and scorned him.
"Not so fast, wizard boy." He extended a tiny hand with wrinkled skin and blackened fingers and fingernails, the latter twisted in an unnatural form at unnatural angles. "One galleon."
"What for?" Harry demanded, although his mind supplied him with an answer. Well, needless mulishness was another trait of his; James's, too. "You will be taking my blood. You will be prodding my finger with a needle and drawing blood. Don't I get some sort of a moral compensation?"
"No gold, no key."
Harry fulminated the goblin with a glare but didn't dare talk back this time.
Greedy old farts. Would it kill you to leave a single galleon to a boy? Obviously.
Whipping a pouch out of his charmed bag that contained his matchstick-charmed trunk among other things, Harry fingered the scant coins through the thin fabric and pulled one of them out, handing it to the goblin with a sour frown.
"Here you are." When Harry saw the goblin inspecting it with masterful hands and spells, he added, "Don't insult me; it is real. I'm not as suicidal as to trick a goblin."
"As long as you know this, good for you," the goblin approved before spinning and with an irritated jerk motioning for Harry to follow. "The Blood Chamber, now."
Doesn't it sound ominous? Harry mused, strutting after the creature to the entrance of a tunnel he had never noticed.
Unlike the tunnel with the carts and the vaults deep down, this one hosted doors. Many, many of them. Gold plaques announced the residence of this or that Department or Chamber, and for the first time Harry was hit with a thought that the way the bank functioned was a complete mystery to him and to the rest of the wizarding population.
Was there a Head of all this brilliance, a ruler, or any kind of hierarchy at all? Where did the goblins eat and sleep? Harry had never heard of the existence of some goblin quarters or goblin restaurants and cafeterias... Did they have females? Again, he had never caught sight of a goblin female or a goblin child.
A mystery. Harry loved mysteries.
The short journey they spent in silence.
It was broken with a snap only when they arrived to a door which didn't differ at all from the others, and the goblin made a sign for Harry to step inside. With only a touch of uncertainty marring his otherwise resolved palette of feelings, Harry did as told.
{Design Your Universe}
The Chamber was empty.
It also didn't differ much from the vaults – a cavern of a kind, small, cold, and dark, albeit clean, with no animal waste or dirt inside.
The only object of furniture was a wooden chair proudly standing on three legs, with the fourth one half-broken and dangling. Harry's upper lip curled. He was supposed to sit on that?
"What did you expect?" the goblin entered after him and saw the degrading look Harry tossed the chair and the general lack of furniture. "Marble and gold? Humans are so presumptuous. It is a small ritual, for which nothing serves but the parchment and the blood. This room provides privacy only and nothing more."
"I can believe this," Harry muttered before demanding, "So? The key? I didn't pay you the money for talking."
"This." The goblin conjured up a piece of parchment and held it out for Harry to clutch. The parchment was empty. "Here you will drop the blood and then there will appear the words pertaining to the heritage you have and all the benefits that come with it. And all the property and vaults you own, of course."
"So, this is the proof that one owns this or that vault," Harry needlessly surmised, tapping his chin with a finger. "It helps detect the impostors and anyone who claims to own something they don't."
Harry took out his wand and cast a mild cutting hex on his finger, shoving the parchment beneath the blood that trickled down. The red of the drops contrasted beautifully with the yellowish material.
The blood staining the parchment started twisting and expanding, taking on another shape. Moments later Harry found himself staring down at the basic facts of his biography.
Name: Harry Aliah Potter
Mother: Lily Maeve Potter nee Evans (deceased)
Father: James Charlus Potter
Race: [can't be read]
Currently Owned Vaults: Harry Potter Vault 375; Evans Vault 522.
Lordship: heir to the House of Potter, [can't be read]
Two things discomfited Harry about this entire matter.
First, why the hell couldn't half the information be read? Wasn't goblin magic supposed to be like elfish – alien to wizards but truthful, one which couldn't be meddled with?
"Seems like someone has toyed with your blood, wizard boy. Didn't you insist on never being so careless as to give someone a sample? It shouldn't have been possible otherwise."
Okay, that one was answered. And Harry's brain would pick apart the implications later, when this bizarre ordeal was over with.
And secondly...
"Evans vault..." he whispered. The goblin eyed him with a sneer as the teen fiddled with the locket dangling from his neck. Suddenly, Harry drew up and ordered sharply, "Take me to it. I want to see."
The goblin scoffed. "I want to do many things, too, but you don't see me wandering around throwing orders, wizard boy."
The creature didn't move an inch.
Not in the mood for such games, Harry crouched to be on the same eye-level with the goblin and pitched his voice dangerously low as he spoke, "You will take me there. Right now." He brought a hand up to the creature's receding hair and pulled. "If not, I can already tell you that a Sun Amulet and my own skills protect me from whatever you dish out immediately and my godfather is Lord Black, so it will protect me from anything you throw at me in the long run. Oh, and I'm good with curses."
"You foolish wizards fear this place called Azkaban," the goblin stated after a long pause.
A deceptively gentle smile bloomed on Harry's face.
"My father doesn't hate me enough to actually send me there. Besides, do you think people would rather believe a sub-human or a prefect with perfect marks and who is about to receive a reward from the Minister himself for trumping half the OWL records?"
{Design Your Universe}
"Vault 522," the goblin announced in a monotone.
Harry nodded and stepped out of the card, for the first time feeling hesitance embrace him. When he was paces away from the door, he halted and raised his hand to touch the necklace. Its smooth, cool surface gave him energy and power to amble forward.
Harry twisted the key and pushed the door open.
The vault was dark.
Even darker than the Blood Chamber before. No torches, no any other sources of light.
A shudder rushed up Harry's spine.
His eyes swept through the vault and caught sight of the only object: a moderately large wooden box in the very centre of the room. Harry marched up to it and dropped on the cold stony ground to reverently bring his shaking hands to touch the coarse surface of the box.
Cradling it to his chest for a second, as if feeling memories and warmth and love speeding up into him from the plain object, Harry was forced to break his reverie at the dry deriding cough of the goblin behind.
The spell shattered.
"Leave me," he ordered coldly.
"Gladly." The smile the creature flashed was full of teeth. "We come check the place for thieves once every twenty years. I hope we won't forget this corner of bank this time."
"You know what I mean and must obey." There was an oath binding goblins to their customers and Harry used it.
"Unfortunately," the goblin spat and strode out of the vault, closing the door behind him. Harry was alone.
Slowly and carefully, Harry set the box on the ground and lifted the lid.
He did a double-take.
Well, this certainly isn't what I was expecting.
Lily had been an Unspeakable fiercely devoted to her job, so Harry had expected to find a sheaf of parchment and muggle paper, all filled with notes on various inventions, instructions on potions-making and spell creation, tables of properties, maybe even hints on the whereabouts of hidden treasures-
Never this.
The array of objects was as diverse as they came.
The largest of them was a leather-bound journal. When Harry cautiously untied the coarse bows, he opened the journal and flipped through the pages, but to his bitter disappointment, the entire thing was covered with a string of incomprehensible scribbles in a language Harry hadn't heard of.
Should research this one. These are not runes, at least, so nothing nasty like blindness or mutilation will happen if I read it.
Harry set it back into the box and pulled out the next object: a... cup. Yes, a wooden cup.
Harry stared at it for a second. The cup stared back.
Perhaps mother needed it for a DoM experiment?
Then, out of the corner of his eye, while placing the cup into the box, he spied an elegant velvet box of rich blue colour.
He opened it and found a set of earrings made of something looking suspiciously like diamonds. They sparkled at him.
Harry inspected the jewellery.
Now, at which price do I sell them?
The recollection that these had once belonged to his mother tore Harry out of the clutches of his stupor and the teen shook his head in self-disgust, strands of black hair falling into his face.
I can't. I will wear them as a remembrance of her. They are going to make a nice set with the locket, hmm? Besides, they shine prettily...
And speaking of shiny things...
Harry's gaze fell on a ritual knife with a ragged blade. It was very simple, with a black handle, and the teen had seen this sort of knives in a book on obscure arts he had snitched in the Restricted Section of the Hogwarts library.
Harry shied away from touching it.
He had read that if a ritual knife didn't accept you as its master, then the person who dared place their hands on it would be butchered into pieces. Magic didn't take kindly to thieves, real or presumed.
The teen diverted his attention to the other objects in the box but was disappointed: a few shards of glass, a bottle of indigo mist, five rainbow-coloured leaves which somewhat resembled maple ones, a full bottle of Felix Felicis, two bottles of unknown content (one of them mostly empty and the other of a rich red colour), a diamond, and an amethyst.
No money, no truly personal things like photos or letters or even pieces of parchments with Lily's handwriting on them...
And yet, Harry's day had brightened, his findings of today chasing away the uncertainty and fear of the future, energising him, lending him the force to move on and seek ways out of the situation his father had thrown him in.
Those were the things that had once belonged to his mother, however puzzling they were.
But... What do I do next?