Captivus
The forest was dark and Harri was tired. She hadn't been able to sleep well for weeks. The constant movement of camp, of Tom leaving for long stretches at a time, and the general disquiet of the forest had left her perpetually frightened.
There was a rustle in the treeline and Harri's heart began to raced with fear. Was it Tom come back? Had the spirit of Lord Voldemort come to kill her? Some sort of animal? She gripped her wand and tried to think of a spell to defend herself with.
A large black dog stepped out of the darkness.
They were at the Ministry in Tirana to meet one of Albus' contacts- again.
For a Dark Lord who was often said to be in Albania, no one seemed to know where exactly in Albania he was. It had been a long three weeks.
Leaving England had taken more time than Snape cared to admit. Albus thought it best to request a freeze on all international travel before they set out anywhere. A plan he begrudgingly agreed was a good one. International Appirition was very difficult, and using side-along would be near impossible. He couldn't imagine a situation where they went to Albania without a Portkey.
Basic Portkey's were easy enough for a witch or wizard to cast, but International Portkeys were strictly regulated. It would be simple to traffic dangerous goods and animals without regulation. A request had to be placed and evaluated with the Department of Travel and Imports; it could take weeks to process.
The freeze went into place and the International Portkey requests for the next week were investigated. However, it was Arthur Weasley's department that came to the conclusion that Harriet Potter was no longer in the country. A Harriet Evans was found to be traveling with a Thomas Gaunt to Greece via Muggle airplane. The money they tendered for their flight was conjured, altering Weasley's department that something was amiss at Heathrow.
How was Harriet traveling so docilely? Had there not been a chance to run? Or was Tom Riddle threatening to kill every Muggle in his path if he had to get her back?
Severus wanted to curse Albus for waiting. Ultimately Tom Riddle and Harriet Potter arrived in Greece four days before their travel was discovered. From there Snape imagined they could manage a bus or train to Albania. The Horcrux would be able to find the main part of its soul without any trouble; it would be like a beacon flashing in the night.
Was Harriet already there in the clutches of Voldemort? There could be no doubt.
They had an emergency Portkey approved within hours of Weasley's discovery and were taken directly to the Albanian Ministry in Tirana.
The Albanian Ministry of Magic was much smaller than Englands'. It was to be expected. In Britain, there were about 50,000 witches and wizards. Albania only had about 2,000. The Albanian Ministry was just a branch of the Balkan Alliance which included: Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Yugoslavia- though now the muggles were saying that Yugoslavia would be six separate countries! What a mess for the Ministry. Their combined strength equated to about 40,000 witches and wizards that were an underserved magical population if there had ever been one.
With the recent fall of the Soviet Union, Severus wondered how the Magical Education System would fare. There was a small Soviet Style school in Yugoslavia for Balkan students, The Pover (or was it now in Montenegro?). It was able to take on about five hundred students. The other five hundred had been split between Durmstrang in Germany and Koldovstoretz in the Soviet- no that wasn't right… Russian Federation.
Poland's school, Czaryszkola, had some eight hundred national students with various other Iron Curtain children filtered in from Hungary, Czechoslovakia- no that wasn't right either- Slokavia and the Czech Republic. Not to mention some 150,000 students dealing with the current upheaval at Koldovstoretz and the other former Soviet Union schools. Would the historic Baltic Magija Mokykla be reinstated? The Marya Institue in Ukraine return to being a local school? They had been flooded with ethnic Russian and Central Asian Students, with locals sent to the Sykirmekter in Kyrgyzstan.
The educator in him worried greatly for these students. What kind of education had they received over the last few years of political upheaval? Had the Muggle problems affected the Magical? The Ministry claimed that it didn't- but they had been known to exaggerate and lie. The Russian Dark Lord, The Moroz, was not known for transparency with his European neighbor. The Kupala, the Lady Light; had she even been heard from in the last decade? Why would Voldemort decide to hide here of all places? Muggle Wars were every which way and those Soviet types had always made Severus' skin crawl.
Yggdrasil's roots grew, certainly, but they were at the fringes of her border. Out beyond were the wilds of old Rus, it was the rushing of the rivers that gave power there, and it was a power that was not for Voldemort or Dumbledore to touch.
Things moved much slower than Severus liked in Albania. The Ministry was as helpful as they could manage, but they were short staffed and overworked. They had a general idea of where Voldemort might be hiding but had not further investigated.
"Dark Spirits should stay where they belong, in the Dark," one wizard had told them firmly.
"You do no good meddling with that kind of magic," said a witch.
"If the girl is gone, she is gone," one official had shrugged when Dumbledore tried for a fourth time to get the Ministry to approve travel in the country. Why couldn't they just say Bugger, and go out unsanctioned? Dumbledore was reluctant to force the issue.
"Now Severus, we can't cause an international incident. They're likely to turn back to the Russian Federation if we don't act appropriately. The magic here is wild, a mixture of the two territories. The International Community can't afford to blast through doors and alienate a country so… imbalanced."
"People might die if we don't put a stop to this" Severus had hissed as the second week had drawn to a close. They had been granted permission to travel south to look through several unplottable forests, but it was a specific forest to the northeast of the country that was the most promising. There had been several disappearances over the last decade.
"People might die if we lose the Balkan Alliance. Civil Unrest or a return to Old Rus could result in thousands of lives lost. The Magi Union of Europe will not stand for the loss of the Balkans again. It would mean war, Severus."
Bloody Supreme Mugwump. If there was one piece of advice he was going to give Harriet, it was to avoid any International titles. They made for a Lord of Light too cautious and unwilling to act. All of this could be avoided if Albus just threw his weight around more. Used his powers to make them listen…
That would make him more like the Dark Lord, Snape thought ruefully. Well, one thing he could say for the Dark Lord was that he got things done. Buerocracy was cut to ribbons in favor of efficiency.
If he returned maybe… but that was no good either. Lily, he reminded himself. Lily. The man killed Lily. It didn't matter that he was doing something as the Dark Lord, opposite of Albus' policy of doing very little. It didn't matter that the Dark Lord's call for change was overdue and that the bloated Ministry needed to be dealt with.
The Dark Lord had murdered Lily.
It was odd, he hadn't had a positive thought about the Dark Lord's policies in years… that was off.
The Dark Lord must be stronger. Or maybe Severus was closer and could feel that call on his magic. He felt repulsed by himself. He had claimed in the Chamber that he had no master, but it seemed that the pull of the Dark Lord's magic was still there.
Did that mean that Harri had already been used? He pulled up his sleeve to look at the Dark Mark. It wasn't the black it had been a decade ago. After the Dark Lord's fall, it had faded to look like a white scar. It didn't look like a scar anymore- it was a soft grey. Not returned, but gaining power.
Harriet… where was she? And when would this bureaucratic nonsense be over so that they could properly search for her?
In another life, Sirius Black would have crowed to his friends that he was the only known escaped convict from Azkaban. In a different world, he wouldn't have been in Azkaban to begin with, but he could image Jame's hazel eyes smirking in mischief at Sirius' achievement.
"The truest Marauder of them all," he would have said, thumping Sirius on the back.
James was dead. Lily was dead. Peter was a traitor. And he was innocent. It was a truth that could never be taken away from him by the rattling pull of the Dementors. Peter betrayed them. Peter was the one in league with the Dark Lord.
It had been known by many fellow inmates that it was Peter Pettigrew, not Sirus Black, who had been the one who had betrayed the Potters. They wanted Peter dead just as much as Sirius did, certain that Peter had led the Dark Lord into a trap that had lead to his downfall by little Harriet.
His pup.
The thing the dementors couldn't take were the miserable thoughts, and nothing made him more miserable than thinking of Harriet. She was all alone in the world. She wouldn't go to Remus, so that only left Petunia. Which meant that his little pup had grown up with the worst sort of Muggles.
He didn't know much about Lily's sister, but he did know that James had gotten into a fist fight with Vernon Dursley at the Evans' funeral. The man had called Lily a whore.
That's what he had always thought, but now he knew that it had been Snape to raise Harriet. Somehow a known Death Eater had gotten his hands on little Harriet. Snivellus. If he had thought a childhood with the Dursleys was bad, how much worse would a childhood with Snape be? Sure, he and Lily had been friends, but Snape hated James.
Sirius could picture with perfect clarity Harriet's small toddler face… all of fifteen months old with hazel eyes and Jame's rueful smile as she toddled along, grasping onto Pa'foo's fur.
Had she been treated to the same sorts of antics that he and James had inflicted on Snape at school? Was the girl regularly spelled upside down if she displeased him? Were her punishments to chop for endless hours in a potion's lab? Or were they more sinister? Who knew that revenge Severus Snape could inflict upon Harriet.
Snape had gone after her according to the paper… that was a promising thought. Snape wouldn't go after Harriet by himself into the Chamber of Secrets unless he cared for her at least a little. Severus Snape slaying a Basilisk, who would have thought.
But that wasn't the issue at hand. Harriet was missing now. Kidnapped by the Heir of Slytherin, whoever that was. And Sirius bet he was one of the few people in the world who could find her. He had a plan.
A four-step plan to be exact- and a Marauder with a plan would never fail.
Step 1- Go to Gringotts
If anyone noticed the black dog walking through Gringotts they didn't show it. Sirius had a letter in his mouth to give to a goblin. It would explain that he was Sirius Black and needed a private meeting with the Black Account manager.
Goblins didn't care about silly things like convicted criminals needing to make bank withdrawals. Or he could rely on the fact that the Black fortune had been slowly growing to a gargantuan size under Goblin Protection since the fall of Rome.
Either way, he was willing to bet the Goblin wouldn't be calling the Ministry.
Sure enough, once he got a Goblin to reluctantly take the letter, he was shown to a back room where he could transform.
Step 2- Get into Black Family Vault and get a wand
"Hello, Roc," Sirius said to the aged goblin who greeted him in the anti-chamber after a quarter of an hour.
"Mmmh, Young Mr. Black. We had heard that you were about," Roc replied.
"Had you? I thought I'd made good time from the Black Sea!"
The Goblin glared.
"Ah, um- yes. Well, I received word that my mother passed on while I was away," Sirius said.
"Yes… she was so pleased with you, you know. She had you written out of the will when your father passed in '79, but what with your incarceration, she was quite insistent that you had returned to the fold."
Sirius clenched his fists. "Yes, well my mother thought a great many things." Roc appraised him with a hard-edged look. He had served as Investment Manager to the Black family for five generations.
"To the ritual then?" the goblin asked with an evil grin. Sirius supposed this was the part that never got old for the Roc the Ruthless.
"Yes," he said, hoping that he had enough blood in his emaciated body to manage the Black Family Inheritance Rites.
Step 3- Enact the super special secret Godfather ritual
Lily had been surprised to learn that Godfather had more meaning in the Magical World than the Muggle one. Most Wizards and Witches weren't Anglican, so Sirius had suppressed a jeer when Lily though that so many Wizards took part in the practice for religious reasons.
"Don't be daft, Lily," he had scoffed instead. Her emerald green eyes had narrowed into a glare.
"Why would you do it then, if it's not religious?"
"For the protection," James had supplied hastily. He was used to Lily and Sirius bickering.
"Protection? Good Lord, is this another one of those exaggerated Wizarding rituals? My hand still hasn't healed from that ritual knife we used at our wedding, James."
"Yes, it's another one of those rituals. But this one really is a good one Lils. A Godfather, or Godmother for that matter, exchanges blood with the child. They swear to protect that child if they ever hear of harm coming to them before their age of majority. It's a safeguard."
"Doesn't that seem overblown? And what does harm even mean? If Harriet falls down a step is Sirius going to be honor bound to blow up the staircase?"
"Now who is overblowing it!" Sirius had laughed. "No, it's only for the big stuff. Like kidnapping for a ransom or something. Used to happen all the time. You have a Godparent to run after the kid and act as a non-paternal mediator. Or someone to blast in doors and take names. Whichever one is more appropriate."
"Is this a bit archaic?" Lily had asked nervously.
"Well it isn't exactly common," Sirius had explained. "But with a Dark Lord running around like this, don't you think it's for best? Shouldn't someone be able to find her no matter what?"
"Yes, I suppose so," Lily had said, looking down at her squirming daughter. "I just don't like to think-"
"I know, Lily," James had said, laying a hand on his wife's shoulder. "But it will turn out alright, you'll see."
Sirus was down in the Black Family Storage Vault. Now armed with a wand, he unfurled a map of Europe to see where Harriet had gotten off to. Quite a few changes, he noted looking at the updated countires of Eastern Europe.
He found the ceremonial dagger and pricked his finger to let a few droplets of blood dribble onto the map.
"Invenire, quae sunt amissa," he cast with his Aunt Lucretia's wand. He hadn't known that she had died, but had always liked her.
His blood glowed, coming together into a hardened bead. It began to roll away from London, where he had let the drops hit. Across the Channel, down and completely across Germany, over Austria, down into the Balkans until it came to rest…
Albania. Well, that certainly cleared things up. There were only so many wizards who ran around claiming to be the Heir of Slytherin.
It was Voldemort.
Step 4- Find Harriet. Kick-Ass. Take Names.
This step might be easier said than done.
Next update is planned for Friday, 6/7