The Potters v The Longbottoms – Rating M
Chapter 03 – Collecting The Stone
Warnings – Contains Weasley, Fudge, Dumbledore and Longbottom bashing. Contains occasional instances of swearing & Violence. May also contain scenes some readers may find disturbing. For the purposes of this story, Harry is 3 years older then canon.
-Potters v Longbottoms-
A/N – Following Feedback from Readers, I have revised the chapter with corrections to some of the grammatical errors and such. I thank those readers who have noticed them and am grateful for all of the advice. Hopefully this revised version of Chapter 3 is better than what it was.
-Potters v Longbottoms-
Third Floor Corridor, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Scotland
20th December 1991
The two brothers had come a long way since the Sorting Ceremony in which Adam was placed in Gryffindor. Despite the interruptions that Adam suffered from, thanks to Neville Longbottom and his 'bodyguard', Ron Weasley.
Adam had a quiet few months, albeit the events of Halloween. Adam had been in Charms class, sitting next to his friend, Hermione Granger, when she attempted to assist Ron Weasley in doing the 'Wingardium Leviosa' spell. Weasley insulted her, behind her back, claiming that she was a nightmare.
Because of that, and the bullying coming from Weasley and Longbottom, caused Hermione to spend the day hiding in the girls lavatory. Adam went to her and tried to talk her to come back into the Great Hall, in order to eat, and spend some time with Harry and his girlfriend, Daphne Greengrass. Instead, a troll came into the bathroom, which Adam defeated. Because of this, and how they were getting along with each other, Adam started to have a crush on the bushy haired girl, with her doing the same back.
Harry and Adam were on a mission to collect the Philosophers Stone, as they had suspicions that Professor Quirrel was after it. They had met up outside the Room of Requirements, which Harry had found when he stole the Marauders Map from the office of Mr Filch back in his Second Year. They had headed to the Third Floor Corridor where they suspected the stone would be.
Seeing the door, Adam and Harry knew what was facing them. They pushed it open when they heard low, rumbling growls coming from behind it. They saw three noses sniffing madly in their direction, even though it couldn't see them because of the nasal obstruction.
Conjuring a flute, Harry placed it to his lips so he could blow a tune. From the first note the beast's eyes began to droop. Slowly, the dog's growls ceased. Sinking on its paws, it fell to its knees, slumping to the ground, fast asleep.
"Keep playing," Adam warned his older brother, creeping towards the trap door. They could feel the dog's hot, smelly breath as they approached the giant heads.
"I think we'll be able to pull the door open," Harry said, peering over the dog's back. "Want to go first little bro?"
"All right." Adam gritted his teeth and stepped carefully over the dog's legs. He bent and pulled the ring of the trapdoor, which swung up and open.
"What can you see?" Harry said anxiously.
"Nothing - just black - there's no way of climbing down, we'll just have to drop." Adam replied. "I don't know how deep this thing goes." In the few seconds where there was no music, the dog growled and twitched. Harry noticed it and began to play again, sending the three headed dog back into its deep sleep.
Adam lowered himself through the hole until he was hanging on by his fingertips and, after a minute, let go. Cold, damp air rushed past him as he fell down. Eventually, with a funny, muffled sort of thump he landed on something soft. He sat up and felt around, his eyes not used to the gloom. It felt as though he was sitting on some sort of plant.
"It's okay!" he called up to the light the size of a postage stamp, which was the open trapdoor, "it's a soft landing, you can jump!"
Harry followed right away. He landed, sprawled next to Adam.
"What's this stuff?" Adam asked his brother, confused.
"Devil's Snare!" Harry replied. "I'm trying to remember how to kill it"
He had to struggle because the moment he had landed, the plant had started to twist snakelike tendrils around his ankles. As for Adam, his legs had already been bound tightly in long creepers without their noticing.
Harry had managed to free himself before the plant got a firm grip on her. Now she watched in horror as Adam fought to pull the plant off himself, but the more he strained against it, the tighter and faster the plant wound around him.
"Devil's Snare, Devil's Snare, It likes the dark and the damp, so light a fire!" Harry choked as he whipped out his wand, waving it.
Muttering something, he sent a jet of blue flames around the plant. After a matter of seconds, the two boys felt it loosening its grip as it cringed away from the light and warmth. Wriggling and flailing, it unraveled itself from their bodies, and they were able to pull free.
"This way," said Harry, pointing down a stone passageway, which was the only way forward. All they could hear apart from their footsteps was the gentle drip of water trickling down the walls. The passageway sloped downward, and Harry was reminded of Gringotts. With an unpleasant jolt of the heart, he remembered the dragons said to be guarding vaults in the wizards' bank.
"Can you hear something?" Adam whispered.
Harry listened. A soft rustling and clinking seemed to be coming from up ahead. "Do you think it's a ghost?"
"I don't know... sounds like wings to me."
"There's light ahead - I can see something moving."
They reached the end of the passageway and saw before them a brilliantly lit chamber, its ceiling arching high above them. It was full of small, jewel-bright birds, fluttering and tumbling all around the room. On the opposite side of the chamber was a heavy wooden door.
Heading to the door, Harry found himself under constant attack. 'It feels like they are stabbing me, the sharpness of these things.' Eventually he reached the other end of the room, and the door. He tried to pull the handle, but it was locked
His brother followed him to the door, getting attacked by the winged 'birds'. They tugged and heaved at the door, but it wouldn't budge, not even when Adam tried the Alohomora charm.
"Now what? These birds... they can't be here just for decoration," Adam replied. They watched the birds soaring overhead, glittering - glittering?
"They're not birds!" Harry said, noticing the shape of them. "They're winged keys. If you look carefully, we have got to catch the key to the door!"
"But there are hundreds of them!" Adam said, the lock on the door.
"We're looking for a big, old-fashioned one - probably silver, like the handle." Harry replied.
The two of them seized a broomstick and kicked off into the air, soaring into the midst of the cloud of keys. Adam grabbed and snatched, but the bewitched keys darted and dived so quickly it was almost impossible to catch one.
Not for nothing, though, was his brother, Harry, the youngest Slytherin Seeker in a century. He had a knack for spotting things other people didn't. After a minute's weaving about through the whirl of rainbow feathers, he noticed a large silver key that had a bent wing, as if it had already been caught before it was let loose initially.
"That one!" he called to the Adam. "That big one - there - no, there - with bright blue wings - the feathers are all crumpled on one side." Adam went speeding in the direction that Harry was pointing, crashed into the ceiling, and nearly fell off his broom.
"We've got to close in on it!" Harry called, not taking his eyes off the key with the damaged wing. "Adam, stay below and stop it from going down and I'll try and catch it. Right, NOW!"
Eventually the pair of them managed to get it. They landed quickly, and Harry ran to the door, the key struggling in his hand. He rammed it into the lock and turned - it worked. The moment the lock had clicked open, the key took flight again, looking very battered now that it had been caught twice.
"Ready?" Harry asked his younger brother, his hand on the door handle. They nodded. He pulled the door open.
The next chamber was so dark they couldn't see anything at all. But as they stepped into it, light suddenly flooded the room to reveal an astonishing sight.
They were standing on the edge of a huge chessboard, behind the black chessmen, which were all taller than they were and carved from what looked like black stone. Facing them, way across the chamber, were the white pieces. Harry and Adam shivered slightly - the towering white chessmen had no faces.
"Now what do we do?" Adam whispered.
"It's obvious, isn't it?" his brother replied, smiling. "We've got to play our way across the room." Behind the white pieces they could see another door. "I think we are going to have to be chessmen."
Adam walked up to a black knight and put his hand out to touch the knight's horse. At once, the stone sprang to life. The horse pawed the ground and the knight turned his helmeted head to look down at Adam.
"Do we - er - have to join you to get across the board?" The black knight nodded. Adam turned to his brother. "This needs thinking about. I suppose we've got to take the place of two of the black pieces..."
Harry stayed quiet, watching Adam think. Finally he said, "Now, don't be offended or anything, but neither of you are that good at chess -"
"No offence little brother," said Harry quickly. "Just tell me what to do."
"Well, Harry, you take the place of that bishop."
"What about you?"
"I'm going to be a castle!" Adam said, relying on his superior chess skills. The chessmen seemed to have been listening, because at these words a bishop and a castle turned their backs on the white pieces and walked off the board, leaving two empty squares that Harry and Adam took.
"White always plays first in chess," said Adam, peering across the board. "Yes... look..."
A white pawn had moved forward two squares. Adam started to direct the black pieces. They moved silently wherever he sent them. Harry's knees were trembling. What if they lost?
"Harry - move diagonally four squares to the right."
Their first real shock came when their other knight was taken. The white queen smashed him to the floor and dragged him off the board, where he lay quite still, facedown.
"Had to let that happen," said Adam, looking shaken. "Leaves you free to take that bishop, Harry, go on."
Every time one of their men was lost, the white pieces showed no mercy. Soon there was a huddle of limp black players slumped along the wall. Twice, Adam only just noticed in time that his brother was in danger. He himself darted around the board, taking almost as many white pieces as they had lost black ones.
"We're nearly there," he muttered suddenly. He turned to Harry, voicing his thoughts out loud. "Let me think let me think...lose the knight and then you can take the king!"
The white queen turned her blank face toward it. The knight stepped forward, and the white queen pounced. She struck it hard across the head with her stone arm, and it crashed to the floor, the Queen dragging it to one side.
Shaking, Harry moved three spaces to the left. The white king took off his crown and threw it at his feet. They had won.
The chessmen parted and bowed, leaving the door ahead clear. With one last desperate look back at the board, the two brothers charged through the door and up the next passageway.
"What do you think is next?" Adam asked, hoping it won't be long until they get the stone, intending to protect it from Voldemort. "We've had Sprout's, that was the Devil's Snare; Flitwick must've put a charm on the keys; McGonagall transfigured the chessmen to make them alive; that leaves just Snape's item left to do."
They had reached another door, to which Harry pushed it open. Both of them hardly dared to look at what came next - but there was nothing very frightening in here, just a table with seven differently shaped bottles standing on it in a line.
"Snape's," said Adam. "What do we have to do?"
They stepped over the threshold, and immediately a fire sprang up behind them in the doorway. It wasn't ordinary fire either; it was purple. At the same instant, black flames shot up in the doorway leading onward. They were trapped.
"Look!" Harry seized a roll of paper lying next to the bottles. Adam looked over the shoulder of his brother to read it:
'Danger lies before you, while safety lies behind. Two of us will help you, which ever you would find, one among us seven will let you move ahead, another will transport the drinker back instead two among our number hold only nettle wine, three of us are killers, waiting bidden in line.
Choose, unless you wish to stay here forevermore, to help you in your choice, we give you these clues four:
First, however slyly the poison tries to hide, you will always find some on nettle wine's left side; second, different are those who stand at either end, but if you would move onward, neither is your friend; third, as you see clearly, all are different size, neither dwarf nor giant holds death in their insides; fourth, the second left and the second on the right are twins once you taste them, though different at first sight, smiling, the very last thing he felt like doing.'
"Brilliant," Harry said. "This isn't magic - it's logic - a puzzle. A lot of the greatest wizards haven't got an ounce of logic, they'd be stuck in here forever."
"But so will we, won't we?"
"Of course not. Everything we need is here on this paper. Seven bottles: three are poison; two are wine; one will get us safely through the black fire, and one will get us back through the purple."
"But how do we know which to drink?"
"Give me a minute."
Harry read the paper several times. Then he walked up and down the line of bottles, muttering to herself and pointing at them. At last, he clapped his hands.
"Got it," he said. "The smallest bottle will get us through the black fire - toward the Stone." Adam looked at the tiny bottle.
"There's only enough there for one of us at a time," Adam told his older brother. "That's hardly one swallow."
Harry took a deep breath and picked up the smallest bottle. He turned to face the black flames. "Here I come," he said, and he drained the little bottle in one gulp.
It was indeed as though ice was flooding his body. He put the bottle down and walked forward; he braced himself, saw the black flames licking his body, but couldn't feel them - for a moment he could see nothing but dark fire - then he was on the other side, in the last chamber. Adam followed the procedure a minute later, noticing that the bottle had refilled itself.
"Now, wait quietly, Adam. I need to work out what important about this mirror." It was only then that Adam realized what was standing behind his older brother. It was the Mirror of Erised.
"The mirror is the key to finding the Stone," he murmured, tapping his way around the frame. "Trust Dumbledore to come up with something like this. He tries to stop people stealing it, so he puts Stone inside the mirror?"
Adam saw his reflection, pale at first. But a moment later, the reflection smiled at him. It put its hand into its pocket and pulled out a blood-red stone.
The reflection winked and put the Stone back in its pocket. While it did so, Adam felt something heavy drop into his real pocket. Somehow he had gotten the Stone. As he moved aside, he felt the Stone, rubbing against his leg.
"You have to want it but not use it big brother!" Adam said, smirking at the way Harry had tried to work it out his way. "Now let's get out of here!"
Between the two brothers, they had done it, they were able to protect the stone. Now to send it somewhere safe! Little did Adam expect an argument with Hermione over the stone a few days later!
-Potters v Longbottoms-
A/N – Story based on characters and storylines introduced in JK Rowling's Harry Potter series with text adapted from Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone by JK Rowling. All rights to their various owners/creators.
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Coming Up in Chapter 4 – A Time Skip as we head to Adam's Second Year and the Chamber of Secrets