Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Five: Thicker
The unfortunate thing was that, in the wake of all of Umbridge's revolution, and everything else he had had on his mind, from occlumency to prophecy, Harry had quite forgot that Dumbledore was avoiding him. He and Kreacher had spent a perilous few hours camped out in something like hiding by the entrance to Dumbledore's Office, with Harry occasionally leaping up as he thought of the name of another sort of candy.
He was suspecting that Dumbledore knew that Harry understood his tendencies, and had switched the passwords to something ordinary, just to shut Harry out. Was that paranoid? Perhaps. But, it couldn't be denied that Dumbledore had been…scarce, all this year. And, Harry did not trust McGonagall or Professor Snape enough try to send word by way of them. McGonagall, experience dictated, was liable to listen to him, and then disregard his words anyway. Professor Snape was inherently suspicious, even if he were on their side, and utterly beholden to Harry's Mum's goodwill.
Hagrid he trusted rather more than either of them—or rather, he trusted him in the sense that he believed that Hagrid was well-intentioned, fighting for the good, and a loyal member of the Order of the Phoenix. He could not, however, be trusted out-of-sight with a secret of any consequence, as he'd proven time and again. And, after Hagrid, Harry's regard for the other members of staff at this school abruptly took a nosedive. He had greater regard for Mrs. Figg than many of them, with whom he had exchanged not more than fifty or so spoken words during his entire stay in Hogwarts thus far.
At length, Harry conceded defeat, and sought for Hermione and Ron. It was the wrong day of the week for Stephen's weekly visits, which was a shame, but you couldn't have everything. Harry had productively stared at the locket as he'd shoved aside his mind's frantic efforts to think of untested names of candies.
He knew the feeling of the locket, or, more accurately, the feel of what hid within. A book was a world of its own, even a diary, and the entity or fragment of soul that had hidden itself within might have scuttled off into whatever between place a book naturally held within.
The locket had no such luxury. That space within, where a picture was meant to rest, was small and cramped, and there was little room for the fragment to fold itself down. Little room for it to hide. He wouldn't open the locket (but he suspected that he could, if he dared to spring whatever traps had been laid on it, which he did not, yet). He stared at it, trying to understand the nature of the malicious intent, from the vantage point of an outsider.
He understood progressively more as time passed, waiting for the absent Dumbledore. He would know the feel of the magic, what made it what it was, if he encounter it a third time. Something within him seemed to call out for the strange magic, and that unsettled him. He didn't know what to make of it, if it were the byproducts of a fit of madness, or an innate weakness of his character. He saw a burgeoning threat, and knew that he'd need Ron's help with this. Bother.
But, he understood the magic, founded as it was on blood, shot through with the unwilling lifeforce of a victim. He would know it on sight if ever he see it again, regardless of whether or not it was foolish enough to try to hide from him.
When he'd done with waiting for Dumbledore, and had decided to go back to Gryffindor Tower, or something, to find Ron (wishing as he did that he even knew whether or not it was within his abilities to learn that spell that had guided Ron to him before. Somehow, he suspected not), he pushed off the wall by the gargoyle, and, motioning for silence, led Kreacher through the halls of Hogwarts.
It had been hard enough sneaking to Dumbledore's Office, but it wasn't as if he'd known that he'd need to set up an appointment before. Kreacher had, begrudgingly, used house-elf magic to bring them back to Hogwarts. Perhaps, he visited often. If they could just find Ron, Kreacher already had a failsafe way to return to Grimmauld Place.
If that was what apparation felt like, then it was Harry's new favourite mode of transportation. Portkeys and floo powder were both horrendous. All the same, he thought it might not be prudent to provide someone like him with a painless means of instant transport.
They resorted to sneaking through Hogwarts together. It was lucky for both of them that they were each, independently, rather skilled at skulking about and diverting attention from themselves. Harry had a lifetime at the Dursleys as practice (and some experience from before, too). Kreacher, perhaps, had his time spent as a servant to the House of Black. Or, at the very least, he had the time spent over the past two years, avoiding Sirius's eyes as he strove to collect and preserve what he could of the family heirlooms.
Still, perhaps this would be an eye-opening experience for Kreacher—that those outside of his beloved twisted masters could be worthwhile individuals, that Sirius was not so bad of a master. Could Kreacher be brought 'round?
Kreacher seemed to have a certain amount of respect for Harry, already, perhaps on account of their shared ability to hide from those to whom they wished to remain unseen.
They made it to Gryffindor Tower, and picked up Hermione (and the basilisk fang) on their way to find Ron. Harry remembered that he'd left Ron, Fred, and George as guards outside Umbridge's Office. Surely, they couldn't still be there?
They had the sense to have left in the hours that Harry had been gone. Harry fished out the false galleon that was their message board for the Defence Association, and wished that it could single out individuals. They needed, as he realised only now, a means of contacting one another from afar. One not reliant on those galleons, or two-way mirrors. At least, for his inner circle of wizard (and pseudo-wizard) friends.
His fist clenched tight over it, and he, with a certain amount of apathetic ruthlessness, tracked down the spells Hermione had placed upon it. What he learnt was that he had the master key. His false galleon functioned differently from all of the others, was different down on a fundamental level. He was almost inclined to demand that Hermione hand hers over, but knew that it would be no more help than his. They were all keys into him, and not the other way around. He frowned.
"We are going to have call signs, and I am going to come up with a way to keep in touch with the members of the Defence Association in my inner circle," he announced to Hermione. Her eyes widened, and she seemed to be struggling to find some way of talking him out of it.
He ignored her, to work on how such a spell could be made, and just who warranted inclusion. He, Hermione, Ron, and Ginny, certainly. Most likely Neville and Luna, as well. There were few other candidates as promising.
He put those thoughts and plans off, for now, as they finally stumbled upon Ron, who took one look at Harry, and seemed to realise that Harry was full of Purpose. Or, perhaps, that also had something to do with the unexplained presence of Kreacher.
"This locket that Kreacher lent us is an artefact of malicious intent, just the same as Riddle's diary," Harry announced to him without preamble. "I think I've figured out how to destroy it during my long wait for Dumbledore, who never appeared, by the way. But, I'll need your help. I don't like the way it seems to be speaking to me."
Ron looked thrice alarmed by this. Unlike Kreacher, he was readily able to snatch it from Harry's grasp. But, to Harry's shock, Ron seemed to sense something, too. Perhaps the locket was also trying to speak to him. Kreacher looked back and forth between them with narrowed eyes.
"Kreacher, if you weren't listening, we're going to find a deserted classroom, or something, and destroy this thing," said Harry, rolling his eyes. Ron staggered back, just then, leaning against a wall.
"Yes. Even I can feel the malicious intent," Ron said, seeming astonished by this fact. He fell back against the wall, as if under assault. Harry snatched the locket back, rolling his eyes. He'd been less affected than that. Just what was it trying to do to Ron?
He remembered that the diary, with prolonged exposure, had been able to possess people, and clamped a fist tight around the locket. He was not risking the security of his brother's mind for anything.
"The Room of Requirement," Ron said, with a level stare in Harry's direction now the assault had passed. He was at his most earnestly inscrutable. But, that was a good idea. The Room had hidden far bigger workings than Harry's plan to rid the world of this locket.
Hermione tugged on Ron's arm in a futile attempt to pull him down to her level, on the verge of tears, begging to know what had happened, and if he were alright. Ron was sensible for once, and declined to say anything with the locket in earshot. Hermione nodded her understanding, but stood there with tears quivering in her eyes.
Harry led the way to the Room, with some misgiving, but, for all he knew, house-elves had ways of finding things that wizards lacked. Hadn't Dobby mentioned finding that room last year, to look after Winky?
They reached the room before Harry had planned thoroughly for what he was going to do. He'd figured out that the safest thing to do would be to open the locket, and attempt to isolate whatever force lurked hidden within, and to murder it with the Sword of Gryffindor. But, he found that he didn't quite trust himself to do that, either. All he knew about the previous artefact was that it was insidious, and dangerous, and had somehow won Ginny over by its semblance of innocence.
He handed over the Sword of Gryffindor to Ron, for the first time in years, in complete silence. Ron stopped in the halls to stare, until Harry glared at him, and, although he'd just opened his mouth to ask a question, he closed it again, and they set back off.
Harry had chosen an empty hallway to accomplish this trade, thinking that it was best to be prepared and not to delay the moment they came to the Room. But, he should have realised that Ron would be too distracted by the thought of Harry freely giving up one of his few weapons.
"Did you hear it speak to you, too?" Harry asked, with a rueful glance away, and then back around at Hermione. He knew that Kreacher would never let the locket leave his sight. There was no point in ensuring he kept caught up.
Ron shifted on his feet. "I could feel it," he said, frowning. "It felt the way it does when someone tries to invade your mind."
Harry frowned, eyes narrowing. He remembered the Imperius Curse lesson of last year, in which fake-Moody had declared Ron immune to mind magic, but this sounded as if Ron had more background than that. Surely not experience with the Mind Stone—Harry would have known.
Unless it fell into that gap in his knowledge. The one he'd learnt of, first.
"Wanda Maximoff had similar abilities," Ron explained, in a voice that suggested that that explained everything.
"Who?" asked Harry, at a loss. The name sounded vaguely familiar. He thought he might have heard it before, from Ron himself.
Ron seemed to realise that Harry had no reason to know the name, but Harry waived the offer of an explanation until after this particular hurdle was crossed. They needed to fulfil Regulus's last request, and destroy that locket. Until then, Kreacher was an ambivalent presence, at the very best. Perhaps, however, with the locket gone, and his promise fulfilled by these three, Kreacher would think differently on them. That remained to be seen.
Until then, learning who Wanda Maximoff was would have to wait.
They arrived at the empty space of the seventh floor corridor. Kreacher suffered himself to be turned away from the wall by Hermione, to Harry's lasting surprise. He and Ron walked the space before the wall. With the Sword of Gryffindor, and Harry's ability to speak parseltongue, Harry could think of little else that they required, save for security, privacy, and the assurance that no one could burst in on them. Such as, for instance, Umbridge.
Harry thought that he could perhaps be forgiven, particularly given what had happened to him third year, if he had forgotten just what he'd used to destroy Riddle's diary, particularly since he'd kept the Sword of Gryffindor with him in his dormitory, as the more important of the two objects. Perhaps, he'd accidentally attributed to it properties that it in fact possessed.
Regardless, he'd brought the basilisk fang with him, as well. And, there was nothing to say (at that moment in time) that a Sword might not be sufficient for destroying the locket—particularly not a magical silver sword, of goblin-make, and many unknown qualities. That was why he'd happened to give the Sword to Ron.
Harry pushed open the door. No one was to know that he had brought the basilisk fang along, unless it prove necessary (if the Sword of Gryffindor somehow didn't work).
The door vanished almost as soon as they'd entered. Harry had wanted a lock, to ensure that they not be disturbed. He'd barely given Hermione and Kreacher the opportunity to enter.
This time, the room was square and small, and not in a cosy way. It put him in mind of dungeon cell. Perhaps, subconsciously, he'd thought such a location necessary. Maybe he'd been thinking that the locket was in a sense a prison for the evil within, one he was about to release into a greater prison.
"The moment it coalesces into a coherent mass, cut it down," Harry said, turning to Ron. Somehow, despite Harry's wordiness, Ron understood what he meant. Perhaps, he'd had far too much experience interpreting such.
Harry shrugged, and held out the locket, hanging it over a hook almost hidden in the dingy, sooty brick of the back wall. He'd made sure to request one, and the room was small enough that it was easy to find. If the locket affected only those whom it touched—
—Then perhaps the way to defeat it was not to touch it. Harry took a moment to dredge up the somehow unsullied pattern of how parseltongue was made. (He had known it would be intact, of course, because he had spoken with a dragon last year.) "Open," he said.
Hermione being Hermione, she interposed herself as a living barricade between the evil of the locket and Kreacher, protecting him against the unknown (but smart enough to ensure that he could still see what was going on).
The locket clicked open, and a black fog billowed out, thin and vaporous, difficult to make out against the grime. Suppose it didn't coalesce? Harry did the next best thing, thinking quickly, on his feet (his specialty, as it seemed), and made it a little box out of solid ice. And then, began to fill that in, forcing it to compress.
Ron stared. "Don't look so surprised," Harry snapped. He'd done this before, but not, he thought, while anyone else was there to witness it. But, he didn't think it had anything to do with Loki's place of origin. It was just that elemental magic was amongst the least magically taxing of the spheres of magic he knew. He wasn't here to put on a show. The simplest spell that would work, would do.
The locket, in another infuriating moment of anticlimax, had no opportunity to do anything (it seemed to be attempting to speak, and to take on a particular form, but it was encased in a huge ice cube). Ron cut through the whole affair of ice-and-locket-mist in a single thrust. Although it had been isolated from the locket, and the evil Regulus had truly sought to defeat had been destroyed, they had promised Kreacher that the locket would be destroyed. Harry might even have promised that he would destroy it personally.
Ron handed back over the Sword of Gryffindor without needing to be asked, as the mist evaporated in its cage. Harry impaled the locket, where it hung on the wall. There was a familiar, terrible scream, which had Hermione shivering in her personal corner, pale and shaking. But she stayed where she was, and did not seem frozen on the spot with fear, as she had in previous encounters. Progress. Ron abandoned all thought of what was to become of the locket next, to reassure her.
Harry took a step towards the locket, where it hung on the wall, and opened his seventh sense, seeing that everything that had bound the malicious entity to the locket had been destroyed as well. He took it off the wall, holding it out for Kreacher.
"Here, Kreacher. We have no more need of it, if you wish a memento of your Master Regulus. But, we must also someday go to that cave wherein you first found this locket. For now, if you wish to keep this one…."
He glanced at the hole in the locket, how it was burnt, as if by acid, around the edges. Hmm. If Dumbledore ever decided that they were on speaking terms, again, he would need to ask.
Kreacher darted forwards from behind Hermione, snatched the locket out of his hands, a look of humbled awe spreading over his features as he realised what Harry already knew.
"Kreacher is forever in the debts of Masters Potter and Weasley, sir!" said Kreacher. Harry sighed. He almost sounded like Dobby, like that. He hoped it stopped.
And, of course, Kreacher should be thanking Sirius, and Hermione….
Compared to the latest battle against Riddle (which in no uncertain terms could not be considered as standing in for the usual life-or-death confrontation that would perforce end the year), the adventure into the Forbidden Forest to meet Hagrid's younger half-brother was just that: an adventure.
Life was still laughing at Harry, which was sufficient explanation for him for why Grawp even existed. It was a pity Ron wasn't here.
Apparently, what wasn't working was teaching Grawp English. But, Harry and Hermione each spoke some French, to varying degrees. Ron, too. Hagrid, however, did not. Accordingly, Harry stepped forwards, before Hagrid could do something stupid, and blocked Grawp reaching for Hermione, spreading his arms wide.
"Stop!" he cried, in quite informal French. "What are you doing? That's quite rude, you know."
Grawp narrowed his eyes, staring down at Harry, and Harry folded his arms. He didn't like being put into a position where he had to keep on the defensive, but he knew that he could scarce overpower Grawp without drawing attention to himself.
Hermione, meanwhile, regained some of her wits.
"Hagrid, what is he doing here?" she sobbed. "You said that none of them wanted to come!"
And, of course, it was another of those "but he's family" things, that life would insist upon throwing back into Harry's face. Ron really should have been here.
"How did it never occur to you that he might speak French, Hagrid?" asked Harry. "Didn't you say they were staying in the Alps? Didn't Madame Maxime make herself understood to them in French?"
He kept a cautious eye on Grawp, ready to intervene if he reached for Hermione again.
"What do you want us to do with him?" asked Hermione, who was still overcome by Grawp's sheer presence.
Still, it seemed sufficient proof that giants weren't evil.