"Damn Dumbledore and his "Greater Good"!" Jareth the elder yelled as he threw one of the few breakable items in his throne room at the nearest wall the instant he had gotten back to his castle.
When he had gone back to have his promised "discussion" with Petunia Dursley about the care she had given his grandson, he had made a rather upsetting discovery and rather than tearing the family to pieces and scattering them to the four winds as he had planned, he had found himself helping them. It seemed that Dumbledore had tied a few extra goodies into the blood protection wards that Lily Potter had set up to protect her sister and all of her blood who lived under the roof of #4 Privet Drive. Without the influence of these unwanted extras, the Dursleys would've still been spiteful, bigoted, and selfish people, but they wouldn't have been those practically soulless caricatures of human beings that he had found. His grandson wouldn't have had the happiest of childhoods with them, but he would not have gone through the hell that he had been subjected to.
Thanks to Dumbledore and whatever games he was playing at, the child that Jareth had brought home was in roughly the same shape as some of the more pathetic cases that had been wished to him. Not some of the worst mind you, but he was in pretty bad shape mentally and emotionally.
He wondered what he would say to the boy when he was asked why he hadn't come to rescue him much earlier. He couldn't very well say "I'm sorry, but I had no idea you existed until you wandered into my bank and insulted me two weeks ago.", and he knew that any lies on his part would lose him any trust the boy had in him. The boy's parents were dead, and the parental figures the boy had in his life made it hard for him to trust any adults since just about every adult the boy had encountered had been less than helpful, and he'd shown that he was fully willing to mete out corporal punishment for even the slightest offense the moment he'd met him.
Upon fully realizing that since his grandson's parents were dead that meant his child was dead, he briefly wondered what he should feel about the death of his daughter. After all, he had never known the girl since he never really kept track of his "Aboveground" dalliances, and had only once had he been surprised by a previously unknown relative. That relative was the namesake that he had just rescued a few hours earlier.
What a fine surprise that had been, he thought sarcastically.
Two weeks earlier, he had gone into the bank with some important paperwork that he needed done and filed at that infernal ministry that delighted in creating new forms of paperwork as a sort of torture for those who were less than deserving in their eyes. On top of all that paperwork that had needed to be dealt with, he'd had ten hours left to tend to the latest child wished to him and needed to supervise the Labyrinth to make sure the girl running it didn't actually get herself killed in her stupidity. Because of the wish-away and her big sister who both needed constant supervision, he had been unable to do the paperwork himself. So, he'd decided to delegate that particularly onerous task to one of the supervisors at the bank.
Upon entering Goldpik's office, he had been greeted with an insult he hadn't heard in over a decade. Deciding to put the fear of whatever deity the little brat who insulted him worshiped into the boy who had uttered the insult and teach him some manners, he had picked the child up by the scruffy collar of his too large shirt and prepared to give him a yelling at he would never forget. He had immediately been stunned into silence by the sight of a pair of mismatched eyes under a rather familiar pair of eyebrows however. Startled by the sudden realization that the child he was holding was of his blood, and of his direct line no-less he had dropped him. He didn't let the child get away without punishment for long though. The boy had gotten the same punishment his own father had given him when he had been unbelievably rude when he commandeered Goldpik's desk, tossed the boy over his knee, and spanked him with his riding crop.
Since he had not been with a member of the Potter family in the last three centuries, he determined through the process of elimination that it was the boy's mother who was one of his offspring. Due to the fact that the boy in question was Harry Potter - The Boy-Who-Lived himself - it had been rather easy to discover who his mother was. Since knowledge of Harry Potter's place of residence was restricted in the magical world, he swiftly ended up hitting a brick wall at the Ministry. That brick wall wasn't an impassible barrier however. Being aware of the fact that the boy's mother was supposedly a muggleborn and having had dealings with the muggle world before, he set out to find the boy another way.
It had taken two weeks of searching, but in the end, he found the address of Lily's half-sister Petunia. Upon arriving at the Dursley home, he had found the small, unusually thin, and poorly dressed boy laying on his stomach on the carpet of a well appointed living-room watching that muggle film that made him out to be a tyrant and what the humans of this day and age considered to be a pedophile, as teenagers were considered off-limits now for some reason he couldn't quite grasp. The sight of how poorly dressed and cared for the boy had been had enraged him.
When he had seen the way the boy had been dressed at the bank, he had half expected the child to have been living in a run down flat somewhere, or a hovel in some extremely poor neighborhood. The last place he had expected to find the child was a scrupulously clean and expensively furnished home in an upper middle-class neighborhood. Realizing that the boy's condition wasn't because of situations beyond his family's control, he was beyond angry.
Deciding not to frighten the boy by murdering his aunt in front of him like he had dearly wished to do at that moment, he had told the boy to go pack since there was no way in hell that he would let his grandchild spend another minute in that place. Upon receiving his aunt's confirmation of the order, the boy had gone to a cupboard under the stairs and started to remove clothes that were equally as ratty as the ones he wore and a few other odds and ends. And, after carefully checking to see that his aunt wasn't looking, the boy reached into a mop bucket and pulled out one item that, had the King of the Goblins previously doubted their relationship to each-other would've proven it beyond all doubt. A crystal ball with a dream inside it.
As soon as the boy had packed the last of his belongings in the garbage bag that Petunia Dursley had provided, he had transported the boy to his castle and set him up in the guest quarters reserved for visiting dignitaries that he didn't particularly wish to impress with his wealth. Upon getting the boy situated, he'd turned around and headed back Aboveground to deal with the boy's relatives. It was when he had returned to the Dursley residence in order to give them a piece of his mind and then some that he had discovered that a great deal of his ire should be turned in a different direction after the wards had repulsed him when he had tried to enter the property for a second time.
In the instant that he was repelled, he noticed flashes of color that didn't belong to the standard set of blood wards or to the usual protection wards. Carefully moving his hand over the wards to maintain a steady barrier that he could get a good long look at, he noticed the little goodies that a secondary wardsetter had layered on top of and rather cleverly woven into the wards surrounding the Dursley residence. The blood protection ward which had undoubtedly been set at the birth of the Dursleys' son had been set up by the primary wardsetter. The secondary wardsetter had set up a general protection ward, a fire protection ward, an atypical and unusually strong notice me not, and an intruder alert keyed to a secondary location, as well as a rather malevolent mess that both the general protection wards that he or she had set up and the blood protection ward the primary wardsetter had set up were struggling against. He was surprised that the wards had repulsed him at all considering the strain they were under.
Suspicious, he began to examine the other items that had been keyed to the home wards, and swore viciously when he saw exactly what they were. The secondary wardsetter had layered a negative emotion enhancer - such things were often used by "Dark Lords" to enhance the fear felt by all who came under them - just underneath the blood protection ward, woven an infertility charm into the blood protection ward itself, tied a sort of general suspicion spell to the notice me not and keyed it to someone who currently wasn't home, added some sort of compulsion that had something to do with excess that he didn't have time to fully examine, layered on a woven bunch of other smaller negative goodies that were really going to make a mess of the inhabitants' lives in another seven years, and tossed a general protection ward over the mess before adding the standard fire protection and intruder alert. An eye less experienced than his own which had been honed over several centuries of ward smashing would've only seen a working set of wards and been satisfied thanks to one of the smaller goodies that had been woven in.
Much to the great misfortune of the family who had lived under these "wards" there was - as he knew from his research and the photographs he had seen scattered all over the home - another child in the house who had grown up under the influence of the wards that had been doing more visible harm than visible good. A child that, unless wished away, could not be taken by him. Considering the damage already done, who knew what further damage would be done to the child if he continued to live under the wards as they currently were for the rest of his childhood? Fixing the mess that was in front of him would take a long time however, and time was something he generally did not have. He would not have had much of today to tend to certain business either if he hadn't been forced to clear his schedule.
Sighing since he knew that this was a sort of job that he could only trust himself to competently do and there was no time like the present since there was no telling when he would get another free hour this century, he made himself invisible and got to work. Five long and grueling hours later, he had finally pulled every last little goodie from the wards, set another and much stronger ward up to prevent the goodies from being replaced and/or the wards from being altered, and reappeared under his human glamour. After his prodigious effort, the house before him now possessed a set of wards that would be envied by the owners of the most ancient and strongly fortified manors. While it would serve the Dursleys right to be re-enchanted, he wasn't about to let five hours of work be undone and further harm come to the child he had no power to remove from their home.
A long chat with Petunia Dursley revealed several things. Amongst them was the name of the secondary wardsetter, one Albus Dumbledore who had apparently claimed to have put up the blood protection ward as well, and who seemed to have made the blood ward out to be some sort of Big Deal, when it merely hadn't been in common use for a few centuries. When he had learned of this he had been stunned, and extremely angry with the Hogwarts headmaster who had once been a confidante of Grindlewald before he'd "defeated" the man and had him sent to Nuremberg with a number of other Nazi war criminals. When Petunia learned who had really placed the blood protection ward, she was stunned. When she learned what had been done to it and the rest of the wards around her home, she was beyond angry. As he listened to her tirade against Dumbledore, he found that he was almost tempted to turn her loose on the bastard just to see what would happen. In a head to head fight between the two, he had a sneaking suspicion that Mrs. Dursley would win.
Due to certain treaties that had been put in place and bound by magical oaths, he could not directly do anything to get his revenge on the meddlesome man who would sacrifice even children to achieve his vision of a perfect world however. This left him angry and feeling somewhat helpless - a feeling he wasn't used to and didn't like feeling for very long - as he wondered exactly what to say to his damaged grandchild, and how he was going to protect the child in the future since it appeared that Dumbledore had already sunk his claws into him.
Edited 3-27-13
