The Purge
Okay, this is the REAL Halloween chapter. The last was just an opener, I suppose.
TW: Magics, murder, mayhem, and miscellaneous mischief. Also, when did this become a crack fic?
Trick or Treat
Harry started up his Halloween morning by ransacking the headmaster's office. He wasn't worried about Umbridge barging in on him as the castle had barred her from entering. It was a good thing she wasn't very bright as it had only taken Harry about ten seconds to get Dobby to pop him over and magically freeze all the portraits so they wouldn't be able to tell anyone what Harry was up to.
It was a jolly time having the freedom to properly poke around Dumbledore's belongings as he'd only been in there for a few minutes at a time during the summer when he was pulling those tasteless pranks on the headmaster. Oh, how he wished he'd gotten in more pranking when he'd had the chance!
Still, it was nice to have free rein in uncovering the old man's dirty secrets.
"Copies of Wizards' Wizards Monthly, photos of Dumbledore with his best friend Grindelwald, nude photos of Dumbledore with his best friend Grindelwald in compromising positions – well, that's gonna scar me for life. Hmm, a map marked with the locations of various sheep farms, the Philosopher's Stone which Dumbledore said he destroyed, and some sort of letter written in German from what looks like an art school addressed to someone named A. Schicklgruber."
While learning deep, personal information about his headmaster that he wasn't sure he actually wanted to know was all well and good, it didn't answer Harry's questions regarding Halloween night of fourteen years ago. Harry looked up from his digging and saw the corner where Dumbledore's pensieve was stored. He came very close to slapping himself upside the head.
"Duh, Potter," he muttered. "The old man wouldn't keep stuff like that written down."
However, when he checked the closet where the pensieve was, he found it was missing. A note was pinned up inside it.
Memo to me,
Get pensieve back from Severus at first opportunity.
Also, buy some more sherbet lemons.
"That prick! I go to all the trouble of breaking into his office and he's loaned out his pensieve to Snape. That is just typical."
As he said the last sentence, he kicked the side of Dumbledore's desk in frustration, causing a hidden compartment to open in the side. In it, Harry found Dumbledore's diary, a file labeled 'Top Secret Plans,' and a box full of memory vials. Why Dumbledore thought hiding information like this in his desk without any sort of magical protection was a good idea was anyone's guess; of course, this was the same man who hid the Philosopher's Stone behind traps that three first years could get past, so who really understood how his mind worked?
"I'm just curious why he didn't hide all that other personal information in the secret compartment," Harry thought aloud as he stowed his finds in his bottomless bag.
His current mission accomplished, he called for Dobby to help get him into Snape's office to search for the pensieve.
Harry was shaking slightly when he sat down by Hermione and Ron at dinner. At first he couldn't decide if it was from horror or rage; he ended up defaulting it to rage. It was Tuesday, so his day had been pretty full, but he'd managed to squeeze in a few hours before the feast so he could go over some of what he'd discovered during his early morning pillaging.
Seeing Snape up at the professors' table was doing terrible things for Harry's nerves as he wanted nothing more than to gut the man right then and there. His hatred must have shown on his face, because his fellow Gryffindors were staring at him. Hermione looked the most worried.
"Are you all right, Harry?" she said.
"Not really," he said, knowing that she would never believe him if he said 'I'm fine.' "I'll tell you later."
He'd already wanted to kill Snape, Theo Nott had told him about the rumors (which were looking more and more like fact every second he thought about it). Unfortunately, Harry would have to wait as he and his team had already made plans for that evening. That didn't stop him from doing a mental notation of what he wanted to do to the bastard. Though it wasn't nearly as bad as what he wanted to do to Dumbledore.
"Hem, hem!"
Ah, another country heard from, Harry thought.
"Attention, students," said Umbridge. "I have an important announcement to make. As your headmistress and the Hogwarts High Inquisitor, I have devised some new rules and regulations to ensure the safety and security of you students as well as improving the sadly lacking educational standards within the school."
"Oh, this should be good for a laugh," Harry muttered.
As Umbridge began to rattle off the first few of her new educational decrees, there was a growing murmur of dissent coming from the students. Harry glanced down at his watch, if she didn't wrap it up then he and his team would be late. They had a couple jobs they needed to get done before they met up with Daphne for the ritual at midnight.
It was a good thing they were prepared in advance in case something held them up. With a slight nod to Sally-Anne, the distraction was initiated. Sally-Anne clutched a small object in her hand and discreetly pressed a small button on it. Pandemonium erupted as fire, fog, and lights blasted from all sides of the Great Hall. The students scattered and the staff tried desperately to maintain order.
In the confusion, Harry's team slipped out through on of the secret passageways. While it wasn't as spectacular a prank as the riot had been, they'd laced some spells around the exits that would cause the rest of the student body to flee the school grounds and hide. The spells they'd used had come from the book Daphne had given to Harry; it was a Greengrass spell designed to cause fear and paranoia, and was completely untraceable (if any aurors tried to search for a cause, they wouldn't find any sort of magical residue).
The staff would be busy for quite some time.
Mafalda Hopkirk was closing up at her office. She always stayed longer than anyone in her department, something which earned her respect as a hard-working ministry official. She felt it was praise well-deserved considering what she spent her time doing in the office when everyone else had gone home to their families.
Like many traditionalist purebloods, she'd been raised to hold a disdain for muggle-born and muggle-raised individuals, having been taught as much by her parents. While she never actively sought to kill them when she was younger, the rise of the Death Eaters forced her to pick a side. The thought of choosing to protect people she'd always been told she was better than over people who were just like her was too ridiculous for her mind to process and she began feeding information to the Death Eaters.
Even after the fall of the Dark Lord, when Leopold Avery offered to pay her for continuing the flow of information, she didn't think twice about it. It wasn't like she was running around in a mask murdering them, she often told herself, and they weren't even important, just outsiders who had no place in the wizarding world.
It became easy for her. Signing away the lives and futures of muggle-borns was just a part of her routine now. She couldn't see them, so why should she care what happened to them? It didn't affect her life, so it didn't matter that theirs were being taken away. And, in Mafalda's mind, it was as though they weren't even real people.
Mafalda was so caught up in her work, she didn't even notice as a long strip of wire descended in front of her until it was suddenly yanked back, catching her around the throat and choking her.
"Where are they?" Daphne said as she paced the ritual site. "They should be here by now."
"Patience is a virtue," Hermione replied.
"Not when you're in life or death circumstances. Besides, the longer we stay out here, the greater the risk of discovery."
"Why'd you choose this site in particular?" Hermione asked, looking around at the stone circle.
They were at one of the lesser-known henges of Britain, the prehistoric site of Arbor Low in Derbyshire. It was a simple circle of weathered stones on a large barrow, surrounded by a circular ditch in the middle of many miles of fields. In the distance, one could hear sheep.
"Because we needed a henge site for the ritual and I like Derbyshire," said Daphne.
"I would've thought something this important should take place at a more famous site, like Stonehenge."
"That tourist trap? Granger, one henge is just as good as any other. They're just magical summoning circles. We could've made our own in the Forbidden Forest if we had any powerful wizard or witch chieftains to bury in there."
"That's what the henges are for? Burials and magic rituals?"
"Duh, what did you think they were for, religious ceremonies? The pre-Celtic people of Britain who built the henges were ruled by the strongest and most powerful people in their communities, which just so happened to be witches and wizards. The henges weren't much good for anything else."
"Wait, if it's not a religious thing, why are we doing it on Halloween?"
"Halloween is the one night a year when we can unconditionally banish evil spirits and Dark magic. Some countries have it at different times of the year. I think the Italians still have it in May. But magical rituals have nothing to do with religion, Granger. It's all about destroying Dark magic or else helping send ghosts on to the afterlife. If anything, we're just doing a public service."
"We are also violating numerous laws concerning trespassing on private property," Hermione pointed out. "Not to mention breaking laws protecting English heritage sites."
"I think trespassing and some minor desecration of a historical site are the least of our concerns. What with being accessories to murder, after all."
They were disrupted from their debate by the arrival of the others.
"Sorry I'm late," said Sally-Anne. "I was just finishing my little talk with Ms. Hopkirk."
"Yeah, and we were a little caught up in collecting our final component for the ritual," said Tracey as she and Harry hoisted a bound man with a sack over his head and tossed him into the center of the gathering.
"Who'd you choose?" asked Daphne.
"Considering it's going to be a pretty quick death," said Harry, "I figured we should use a Death Eater who was less offensive than the others."
Harry whipped the sack off the man's head, though he was still restrained and gagged.
"Ladies, may I introduce you to Mr. Jugson?"
"Who?" said Daphne.
"He's from Accounting at the ministry," said Tracey. "Not very good at fighting; not very strong-willed, either. We didn't even have to use torture to get answers. He murdered a couple people and does deserve to die, but nothing so outrageously horrible as to deserve what we did and are going to do to the others."
They all looked down at the struggling fat man and decided that, as the most benign (or most useless) Death Eater, Jugson was just the man to use for their ritual.
"All right, let's get to it," said Harry.
It was a long night for the faculty of Hogwarts. Once they'd cleared away the smoke from the explosion and reassembled in the entrance hall, they'd then had to spend the rest of the night rounding up all the students who had spread out over a considerable distance. It was fairly late in the following morning when every student was accounted for, by which time the away team had returned, reconnoitered with Theo about what happened while they were gone, and promptly saw themselves to bed.
Classes were cancelled, so, after getting a decent rest (which he needed, since the ritual had resulted in him going into horrible convulsions as the horcruxes were destroyed; leading him to realize that he himself had been one), Harry finished going over the information he'd obtained from Dumbledore's and Snape's offices the previous day.
If he thought he was angry by what little he'd gotten through before, it had nothing on how angry he was when he finally emerged from the dormitory.
Author's Note: Yes, I know it's a little late for Halloween and the chapter's a bit short, but I gave you all the almost-Halloween chapter so I needed to have them actually do something on Halloween itself. The little jab I had about henges and rituals is related to my Halloween chapter for my fem!Harry oneshots. Just a bit of humor about a popular trope in the HP fandom.