OK, this is the third or fourth storyline that's gotten stuck in my head since the last time I sat down to seriously try to write anything. I recently read Potterlad81's enjoyable Me Without My Tardis and his idea of throwing some of the core characters fifty years or so back in time appealed so much that I just had to borrow it (adding my own twist on things, of course, 'cause I canna write as others do ;^).
It begins just after Sirius flew off on Buckbeak at the end of their Third Year.
Usual disclaimers, all rights to the HP story and characters belong to JKR and the fifty year back step concept belongs to Potterlad.
Harry and Hermione were just getting back to the infirmary when Harry remembered that he had to return the Nimbus 2001 he'd… Borrowed… For Sirius to use to escape on before Hermione came up with the better idea for him to leave with Buckbeak to the broom shed before it was missed. He also decided that, as they'd have to go back in time again to return the broom, they should grab the chance to capture the rat and use him to get Sirius exonerated.
Hermione agreed, and she'd just looped the chain of the time turner over his neck and started to turn it to send them back when a group of people came around the corner, arguing furiously… Or at least Professor Dumbledore was berating Snape…
"You fool! You knew that I needed Black to give me access to his House's assets before we got him kissed but you had to let your infantile grudges rule you! We're just lucky that the Mudblood somehow managed to avoid Squibbing herself by overusing that faulty time turner like those Unspeakables did before they discovered that the governing runes weren't working, so I was able to send her and Potter back to free Black. If they fail in that task, rest assured that I will destroy you, you cretin!…"
Dumbledore stopped abruptly at that point, because he'd seen the same thing the others with him (Snape, Professors McGonagall and Flitwick and a hideously scarred man with a peg leg, staff and what appeared to be a magical false eye held on with straps) had, Harry and Hermione in the process of going back in time again. The group immediately whipped out their wands and started casting at the pair. (Harry couldn't tell what Dumbledore was casting at them, but while the Professors seemed to be casting stunners, what Snape and the scarred man were casting was a lot more serious.) Hermione immediately threw up the strongest shield she could while Harry cast a powerful "Expelliarmus!" at the group, immediately followed by "Accio wands and anything else useful!"… He and Hermione were busy trying to catch half a dozen wands, the scarred man's mage staff and magical eye, Dumbledore's enchanted spectacles and watch and an assortment of daggers and mokeskin and coin pouches when they were hit with the torrent of magical energy and memories from their attackers.
The protections against spells cast with hostile intent that Harry's parents had placed over him reacted the same way they had when Voldemort attacked him on that fateful Halloween, by sucking all of their magical energy and memories out of them and feeding them into Harry, or in this case Harry and Hermione because the magic recognised their bond. Having all that magical energy slamming into the temporal field being created by the time turner in the process of activating sent it totally out of control however, and Harry screamed "Hedwig!" as he realised that he probably wouldn't get to see his closest and most unfailing companion ever again because he couldn't see any chance of them being able to return from whatever point in time the raging temporal maelstrom around them was about to send them to… That is, if it was still moving them through time instead of just reducing them to a pile of ash like their attackers.
Just before they winked out of existence, something slammed into Harry's legs, knocking him on his arse when they came out of the rather long time transfer. He was bringing his wand around to hex his attacker until he realised that it was Dobby, who had one arm wrapped around his legs and the other around Hedwig. Dobby slurred out that he had heard the Great Harry Potter Sir being upset and calling for his Hedwigy, so he popped to the owlery and grabbed her to bring her to him… He was looking worse and worse as he went on to say that getting through all the wild magic around the Great Harry Potter Sir and his Grangy had been very hard, and then keeled over.
Harry was immediately on his knees beside him, desperately asking him what was wrong and what could he do to help him. Dobby started saying that there was nothing the Great Harry Potter Sir could do, but he stopped, and looking hopeful croaked out… "If the Great Harry Potter Sir and his Grangy were making Dobby their Elf, Dobby is sure he would be being much better…"
Harry shot a look up at Hermione, conflicted, he desperately wanted to help Dobby, but he knew how much she abhorred the very idea of House Elves being enslaved by anyone. Hermione had no trouble reading his look, and she only hesitated for a moment before she nodded. She certainly hated the idea of House Elves being enslaved, but Dobby really looked like he was dying, and that was far more important at this point than her principles on slavery… And even if it didn't manage to save him, just being made Harry's Elf before he died would obviously make Dobby happy and give him comfort, and she could accept that as a good enough reason to do it too.
Neither of them were really expecting this to work, so they were quite shocked when Dobby was on his feet and looking better than ever the moment they finished the bonding ritual…
With that they moved onto the next problem, working out where the hell they were…
Well they initially thought that was the question, because at first glance this didn't look anything like the spot near the infirmary that they'd come from… But when Hermione looked closer, a lot of what they could see did took sort of familiar, except for the rather glaring fact that where the infirmary had been appeared to be a classroom now…
That was rather worrying, but Dobby started bouncing excitedly when Harry muttered that they needed to find somewhere out of sight where they could sit down and work out what the hell was going on. "Dobby knows where we's can go! The Come and Go Room!"
Harry shared a look with Hermione and at her nod said. "Alright Dobby, can you take us to this Come and Go Room?"
Dobby's answer to that was to grab their hands and pop them away, only to pop back, grab Hedwig and everything else they'd left behind and disappear again about ten seconds later.
The room Dobby took them to looked remarkably like the Gryffindor Common Room, and when he returned he explained that Wizards called it the Room of Requirement, because it could create whatever they needed, the only caveat being that things conjured by the room couldn't be taken out of the room. By this time, Hermione had had a chance to stop and think the matter through and, applying the principles of Occam's Razor because they were apparently still at Hogwarts even if everything looked rather different, cast a spell to show the current date. That's when she started using the type of language that she normally admonished Harry for, because the date was now early June 1943, so they'd been thrown over fifty years into the past. (A quick mental calculation confirmed that that correlated to something like seven to the power of seven turns of the time turner they'd been in the process of using when they were hit with all those spells from the Professors and the scarred man, whom they now knew to be Alastor Moody.)
As it was a fair bet that Harry's panicked thought just before they were transported through time was correct, and there would be no way of getting back to 1994 other than living through the next fifty odd years, they started making plans for how they would do that. When they took a step back to look at their situation objectively though, they realised that they weren't in anywhere near as bad a shape as they'd initially thought.
For a start, the bonding process that the rapidly fading Dobby had dredged up from his inherited memories was the traditional Druid Familiar bonding, rather than the corrupted Elf Slave bonding which had been created in the Late Middle Ages, this meant that Dobby was now bound to the two of them as their familiar rather than a limited slave, so he was far more intelligent, powerful, independent and knowledgeable than most House Elves and they could both communicate with him and each other mentally. One of Dobby's first suggestions, which they quickly adopted, was to perform the same Familiar bonding with Hedwig, to unlock her intelligence and abilities as well.
Luckily, Harry had gotten into the practice of carrying everything of value he had with him in the mokeskin pouch he'd bought in Diagon Alley when he was staying there over the previous summer to carry the potions and other things he'd need through the day... Because someone in his dorm room (he was pretty sure it was Ron) had kept trying to get into his trunk, without any success because on advice from the people he'd been talking to over summer, he'd bought himself a high end multi-compartment trunk with significantly more and much better security and other features. (Two of the most important of these for Harry being the room sized compartments that he'd paid extra to have set up as a fully equiped study/living space with fresh air and heating charms, magically expanded and organised storage for his books, clothes, equipment etc, a small but well equiped potions lab cum kitchen (because as someone pointed out, potions ingredients and food had much the same storage and processing requirements), plus furniture, sofa beds and a full bath that could be accessed separately, so that he'd have a bathroom and somewhere comfortable and secure to study and hide out when he was sent back to the Dursleys, because he knew he would be... And the other two room sized compartments where he was storing half of what he and Hermione had harvested from the basilisk carcass through the year and its cast off skins under stasis (Hermione had the other half), because the Goblins had advised him that Dumbledore had apparently 'forgotten' to mention that the basilisk's remains belonged to him as its slayer, and just about everything from a basilisk was valuable.)… He'd also followed their advice to get himself checked by a healer and start a treatment plan to correct his obvious health and growth issues. Which worked so well that he'd been forced to purchase a whole new wardrobe in Arcomantula silk, because that was the only material capable of taking the greatly extended resizing and other charms needed to cater for his revised growth expectations for the next few years (though the Arcomantula silk's capacity to hold charms did mean that it lasted far longer and fewer pieces were needed because the style and colour could be magically altered and comfort and cleaning charms worked much better), along with the potions he'd need to take over the coming year and a half or so... Plus auto correcting spectacles with extra features which would hopefully end up as little more than sunglasses and reading glasses to reduce eye strain while studying if the potions worked as they should... And buy himself a few wand holsters, a wide range of new equipment that was much better than the standard student kit and a pile of books to read up on any subject that caught his eye or he was advised to look into over the summer… For some reason he wasn't willing to share, Dumbledore had refused to let him replace the Divination elective with Arithmancy and Ancient Runes, but the Arithmancy and Runes professors had shared Harry's anger about that arbitrary ruling… So while he wasn't allowed to officially take their classes, they were accepting and grading his assignments and promised that they'd find a way to let him sit the exams... The point was that as well as his Firebolt and the Nimbus 2001 he'd 'borrowed' from the broom shed, he had his father's invisibility cloak, the Marauders' Map, his photo album, all his books, clothes and equipment, most of the gold from his vault (because when he went to Gingotts to get some gold out over summer, he'd also discovered that his vault was being automatically topped up to six thousand Galleons on his birthday each year from the family vaults, but some unknown party had been using his key to all but empty it each September), his parents' special trunks which held their books, journals, notes and mementos and everything else inside his shrunken trunk in the mokeskin pouch.
While Hermione hadn't had anyone trying to break into her trunk like Harry did, she'd spent the last three weeks of the summer holidays with him in Diagon Alley after she ran into him while she was buying her school books, and they'd grown close enough in those three weeks for Harry to finally get the courage up to tell her that she was his very best friend... He'd wanted to say girlfriend, but wasn't sure what that entailed at the time, so that didn't happen until Christmas when Ron started going off at Hermione for telling McGonagall about his Firebolt and Harry shouted at him not to talk to his girlfriend like that... And she'd been so excited about that and all the extra features they had that she gave in to his argument that he was getting significant discounts for multiple purchases among other things (The trunk maker had been feeling guilty about charging Harry full price for his top of the line trunk with every possible extra when he just paid the asking price without haggling, so when he came back to buy his little friend something similar, he sold him the other one he had in the shop, which he'd set up with the same additions as his because they did a good job of showcasing the trunk's capacity and impressive features, for less than half the price. This act of contrition hadn't really cost him that much, because he normally let people haggle him down by up to a quarter of the asking price on something at that level so they'd think that they got the best of the deal... Not that he'd ever sold two of those in one year before... And he could honestly tell people that the Boy-Who-Lived had liked that trunk so much that he'd bought two, which would seal the deal with many people.), and let him buy her extra books and a mokeskin purse, trunk and equipment, wand holster, sun/reading glasses and Arcomantula silk clothes and robes like his… So she had gotten into the habit of always carrying her shrunken trunk in her mokeskin purse too, because that meant that she had access to all her books and everything else whenever she needed them.
They'd gotten quite a haul from their attackers too… On top of the enchanted spectacles which allowed Dumbledore to see almost as much as Moody's magical false eye, the enchanted watch that did many more things than they'd managed to work out so far and the fact that the wand Harry took off him turned out to be the fabled Elder Wand, the Deathstick… He'd been carrying a shrunken trunk which held quite a number of enchanted objects, rare magical reference books and journals, the Philosopher's Stone that he claimed he'd destroyed at the end of their First Year and tens of thousands of Galleons in his mokeskin pouch. Moody was also carrying a shrunken seven compartment trunk which held numerous arcane spell books, enchanted devices, invisibility cloaks, brooms and weapons (including firearms) and what appeared to be most of his gold (which was a lot!), while the other three were carrying spell books, potions, weapons, enchanted devices and coin purses holding thousands of Galleons in their pouches (and Harry was delighted to find his reportedly destroyed Nimbus 2000 in perfect condition in the shrunken trunk inside Snape's pouch).
The massive surge of energy they'd received had also served to break most of the illicit bindings and blocks that had been placed on the two of them, by Dumbledore for the most part.
Dumbledore had believed that Voldemort had left a shard of his soul embedded in Harry's famous scar on that fateful Halloween, but he was determined to leave it there so that he would be able to use Harry as bait when Voldemort returned, as he was sure he would. While the protections Harry's parents left over him had prevented that happening however, Dumbledore had also placed numerous bindings, blocks and compulsions on him and not all of them had been destroyed by the incoming surge of magical energy, so Harry and Hermione had to use what they learned from his memories to remove the rest of them from each other.
They'd both been learning Occlumency since the summer and they'd had five experts in the subject between their attackers and Harry's parents. The information gleaned from their memories improved their grasp of the subject enough to organise the rest of their collected memories so that they could access information efficiently. What they discovered made them grimly determined to get rid of Dumbledore, Voldemort and several others as soon as possible, as Harry and Hermione agreed that they needed to die in order to put a stop to all the horror and suffering that they would bring down on the world over the next half Century.
While they had some sympathy for McGonagall, Moody, Flitwick, Hagrid and Snape, because like Harry's parents, in every case Dumbledore had used trickery, pressure and coercion to blood adopt them when they came to Hogwarts so that he would be able to use the oaths of fealty he'd made them swear to him as the head of the family to force their unfailing obedience… The fact that they were bound to obey him for as long as he lived, and may even be forced to continue following his orders after he died, meant that they would have to be watched and possibly dealt with.
The upside of all this though was the fact that they now had access to over four Centuries of magical knowledge and expertise from eight powerful and by magical standards at least brilliant Witches and Wizards. This meant that with a little practice, they would be sure to pass the international equivalent of their OWLs with flying colours within a matter of weeks in real time, and when Dobby said that the Room of Requirements could supply anything they needed, he meant anything, even time! They had the Room of Requirements become a Runic Time Chamber, which gave them years if necessary to assimilate and master all the knowledge and skills they'd acquired from Harry's parents and their attackers and ace the ICW's equivalent of Wizarding Britain's OWLs… And align their physical ages to the identities they were creating for themselves.
The Marauders' Map had confirmed the fact that Albus Dumbledore, Minerva McGonagall and Tom Riddle were all currently at Hogwarts in the roles the books said they'd had in June 1943, and even if their mental shields were strong enough to keep all of them out, they didn't want to have anything to do with Hogwarts when it was so badly infested with Dumbledore's evil and the Pure-Bloods' bigotry. Given the fact that not even the Elves could detect their presence inside the Room of Requirements though, after reviewing Hermione's copy of An Appraisal of Magical Education in Europe… They'd agreed use the Runic Time Chamber function of the Room of Requirements to allow them to get enough practice with the French language and magic to make sure that they would be able to ace the ICW's OWL equivalents, and they'd complete the last year of their formal Magical Education at Beauxbatons.
Of course they'd need money to support their plans, but another version of the room of requirements was helping them with that… The Room of Lost Things… Ever since Hogwarts was founded, the Elves had been dumping everything that was lost or abandoned in the castle in the Room of Lost Things, and quite a bit had accumulated in there over nigh on a millennium. While the majority of it was junk, there were still quite a lot of value in there… For a start, Dobby and the seven other Elves he had selected as being worthy of bonding with and serving his Master and Mistress recovered well over half a million Galleons in coins from the room (there was usually two to three times as many students at Hogwarts than there'd been when they were there and all but the poorest of students would shrug off losing one or two Galleons a year as nothing), plus the equivalent of well over a hundred thousand Pounds in assorted Mundane currencies. The recovered jewellery was also quite valuable, with over a hundred and fifty thousand Galleons worth of intact pieces and sets and another seventy or eighty thousand Galleons worth of precious metals and jewels extracted from incomplete, broken or cursed jewellery pieces and sets when they were rendered down.
There were also umpteen thousands of books on contemporary and forgotten magic subjects, several hundred viable enchanted trunks and wands, over a hundred working brooms… Up to and including the latest top of the line models… Plus magical tents, a wide array of flying carpets, weapons and armour and what would be several million Pounds' worth of fine antique furniture once all the enchantments were stripped off them and they were restored.
Their visit to Gringotts a few days later to sell some of what they'd harvested from the basilisk, open accounts and establish identities in the Magical and Mundane Worlds proved rather… Interesting… Though, because while Harry had been planning to use his Mum's Magical bloodlines as the basis for his new identity, the Goblins had insisted that they complete proper inheritance tests to confirm their identities before they would allow them to open accounts… And as soon as the results of those tests were seen, the current Head and Heir Primary of the Most Noble and Most Ancient Houses of Potter and Peverell and Their Associated Houses and Clans, Earl Charlus Fleamont Potter-Peverell and his son and Baron Fleamont Henry Potter, were notified that there was something very screwy going on with the Potter-Peverell bloodlines… Needless to say, the not quite fourteen year old Henry James Potter's Great Grandparents and Grandparents were demanding a damned good explanation for how the Hell he could be the son of James Fleamont Potter, who was in turn the son of Fleamont Potter, when according to Harry's own inheritance test, this James Potter wouldn't be born for another seventeen years!
It took several hours of explanations and viewing memories, but in the end everyone was satisfied that Harry and Hermione were who they said they were, and that they were from over fifty years in the future. With the Goblins' help, back dated bulletproof identities and accounts were established in both the Wizarding and Mundane Worlds for the soon to be seventeen year old Baron Hardwin Charlus (Harry) Peverell, younger son of Earl Charlus Potter-Peverell and Heir Primary of the Most Noble and Most Ancient House of Peverell and Heir Secondary for the Most Noble and Most Ancient House of Potter and Their Associated Houses and Clans… And his slightly older Betrothed/Intended, Baroness Hermione Jean (Jeannie) Dagworth-Granger, Head of the Noble and Ancient Houses of Dagworth and Granger and Their Associated Houses and Clans (using family names was common in the Wizarding World, so they'd use that when Hermione was born in 1979). It wasn't too difficult to create a believable storyline to explain that the Heir Primary for the House of Peverell/Heir Secondary for the House of Potter had been hidden away from the Wizarding World and home schooled to protect their Houses in case Grindelwald kept going after their Head and other Heir… And the Houses of Dagworth and Granger were secretly allied with the Houses of Potter and Peverell, so their Heiress being hidden away with him until she was forced to declare herself and take control of her Houses, was believable too...
But something else took priority over their personal plans for the future, putting a stop to the events that brought the Wizarding World to the brink of disaster… For a start, Myrtle Warren was due to be killed by Slytherin's basilisk a week after they arrived in this time and they had no intention of allowing that to occur again, but the question of whether to deal with Tom Riddle before or after that and whether to sort out any other problem people while they were at it was something that they had to look into.
Dumbledore's memories gave them the key information they needed to start making plans, because he had attended a meeting of the Hogwarts Board of Governors to set Hogwarts' direction for the coming school year on the day before Myrtle was due to die, this meant that the twelve most powerful and vindictive Pure-Blood bigots in Wizarding Britain, accompanied by their heirs and/or principal allies/associates (they were trying to prove to their peers who held the most power) would be all together in one room, along with Hogwarts' boot licking Headmaster Armando Dippet and would be Dark Lord and Deputy Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, and the equally spineless Head of the Department of Magical Education Jedidiah Smith to bring the total up to thirty four… (The fact that the new Head of the Wizarding Examination Authority wasn't included was further proof that the purpose of this meeting was purely to ensure that Hogwarts would serve the Pure-Blood Bigots' agenda, because Madam Marchbanks would have almost certainly tried to block most of the changes they agreed on and implemented)… And the Marauders' Map showed that the conference room they were meeting in could be directly accessed from a secret passage which was big enough for Slytherin's basilisk to move through... If Harry and Hermione believed in Divination, they would have sworn that Dippet, Dumbledore, the Board and their associates meeting their deaths in that room was destined to happen.
They obviously didn't want Riddle to escape justice, but it turned out that if the secret passage was followed right to the end, it exited the castle at a point close to the Forbidden Forest. It would be a simple matter to extend Riddle's instructions under the Imperius curse (After everything he'd made people do under the Imperius, they had no compunctions about using it on him, and there was no way he could resist Harry's power and force of will.) to include leading the basilisk out of the castle and into the Forbidden Forest after it had killed everyone in the conference room, and for him to turn and look it straight in the eye once they reached the Forbidden Forest. They'd have Harry, Hermione and a team of Goblin warriors in place, ready to kill the basilisk as soon as it killed Riddle, and the laws of the Wizarding World were quite clear on the fact that any Witch or Wizard who manages to kill an XXXXX beast has full rights to its remains.
While they weren't happy about Harry and Hermione putting themselves in harms way like that, Charlus and Fleamont had to concede that there was no better way to 'out' them to Magical Britain and the rest of the Wizarding World. Harry had had a fun time successfully haggling with the Goblin Elders to raise his and Hermione's share of what they earned by selling the basilisk's remains from half to two thirds of the profit… And truth be told, the look in several of the Elders' eyes said that they had enjoyed the haggling almost as much as him.
Harry's Great Grandparents and Grandparents and the Goblin Elders were quite impressed with the plan that Harry and Hermione laid out for them. With the twelve strongest of the Pure-Blood Supremacy Houses in the Wizengamot taken out of contention and another eight or nine powerful houses removed or seriously weakened, their hold over Wizarding Britain would be effectively broken, which would create the perfect opportunity for them to make their move.
With the plan in place, Charlus and Fleamont went into action, organising their allies to take control of the Wizengamot when word of the tragic deaths of the leaders of the leading 'Traditional' Pure-Blood Houses came to light. They all had a good laugh when Harry told them how he planned to explain away how they'd known something big was going to happen… Because apparently the average British Witch or Wizard believing everything they were told was nothing new, so they could expect at least ninety percent of the population to swallow the lie about a seer telling them that something bad was about to happen without question, just as they did fifty years later.
Between the memories from Voldemort, Dumbledore and the others and the records that the Room of Requirements had supplied upon request, they had ample proof that every one of the ones slated to die in that conference room was already actively involved in promoting the death, destruction and degradation of anyone they decided wasn't worthy of having a place in their Magical Britain. Even the youngest was already guilty of rape, torture and murder, though most of them regarded their victims as less than Human and therefore in their minds they had done nothing wrong… So it was clearly in the interest of the Greater Good that they die before they were responsible for thousands more rapes and murders and the destruction of hundreds of families…
That reminded Harry that they also needed to get moving on eradicating Gellert Grindelwald and his organisation as soon as they could, because if they were correct in their belief that Grindelwald was the driving force behind Hitler's war machine, that would potentially to save even more lives than their current order of business.
Charlus showed that he was the consummate politician when he laid out his plan… To claim a reward for avenging the deaths of the Heads and Heirs killed by the basilisk from each of their Houses, along with the titles and holdings of any Houses that had been rendered extinct in the attack… In the name of his younger son and Heir, Baron Hardwin Charlus Peverell, and his son's Betrothed, Baroness Hermione Jean Dagworth-Granger, who at great risk to themselves had brought the news of the seer's warning from Egypt and defeated the basilisk. He was also planning to claim compensation for putting a stop to the foul deeds of the bastard Half-Blood Thomas Marvolo Riddle from the Wizarding Family of his Squib mother who had run off with and gotten pregnant to a common Muggle, Merope Gaunt… The primary purpose of making Riddle's origins public was to destroy any support from the Pure-Blood Houses for his plans, but reclaiming the Peverell Ring from Morfin Gaunt would certainly be a bonus for the House of Peverell (even more so for Harry, because it would bring together all three of the Hallows).
Harry had no trouble catching Tom Riddle alone in a corridor where there weren't any portraits, using the Elder Wand to put him under the Imperius and giving him detailed instructions about what he was going to do before, during and after the Hogwarts' Board meeting. Everything played out exactly as planned, the basilisk killed everyone in the conference room and then Riddle led it out of the castle and into the Forbidden Forest, where it killed him. Harry and Hermione killed the basilisk with assistance from the Goblin warriors and by the time anyone else had plucked up the courage to go and see what the enormous snake they saw headed into the Forbidden Forest was doing, Charlus was there with them and the Goblins had begun harvesting the basilisk's carcass.
Charlus spun the story that Harry (who, like Hermione, was glamoured to look around 16 or 17) had used Potter family magic to send him a message, telling him where he was and that he and Hermione needed someone to render down the basilisk that they'd just killed, so he went straight to Gringotts to contract for a team to render the carcass down and went with them to the Forbidden Forest. Harry added that the boy who was somehow killed when he turned to look at the snake had been talking to it in Parseltongue as he led it out of the castle over there (waving vaguely towards where the hidden entrance to the secret passage was), across the lawn and into the forest, and he had obviously been controlling it.
Between them, they quickly established that 1) Harry was Charlus' younger son and heir and Hermione was his Betrothed. 2) They'd killed the basilisk after it killed the boy who had led it into the forest, and therefore had full rights to its carcass. 3) The boy had been speaking to the basilisk in Parseltongue and controlling it up to the point where he turned to look at it and dropped dead… And 4) Given that the boy and the basilisk had come out of the castle, there could well be more people dead inside.
They had to repeat the stories several times over the next couple of hours while the Goblins were harvesting the carcass and sending everything off the Gringotts. Charlus had to reiterate Harry and Hermione's rights of harvest to both Horace Slughorn, who tried to claim the carcass as Hogwarts' Potions Master, and the Ministry officials who tried to claim it for the Ministry… He also had to rebuff the DMLE officers and Aurors who tried to arrest Harry and Hermione for killing Tom Riddle and everyone in the Board Meeting and generally support them as he fleshed out the story of why they were there…
Harry was just glad that "A seer told me" was as good as a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card in Wizarding Britain. They established the story line that they had returned to Britain to tell his father about the warning they had been given by a respected seer about something terrible happening there, and the way the warning was worded made them think it could have something to do with Hogwarts. Charlus could prove that he'd repeatedly tried to contact both Dippet and Torquil Travers, the Head of the DMLE, but neither of them would meet with him to discuss the warning. He stated that he hadn't realised until Harry contacted him that his son and his Betrothed had been so worried about the fact that no-one was taking the warning seriously that they went to Hogwarts themselves in hope that they would be able to do something to help if something did happen, but the Forbidden Forest was as close as they could get to Hogwarts without being enrolled as students. They also had to explain that the reason Harry and Hermione weren't enrolled at Hogwarts was because Harry had been hidden away in their family's out of the way holdings on the Continent, Northern Africa and the Middle East since the Mid-Thirties and home schooled in Magic to keep him out of the public eye because of the serious threat Grindelwald represented to the House of Potter… And his childhood friend and now Betrothed Hermione had been sent with him for her own protection after her parents had been killed by Grindelwald's people because they had uncovered the fact that the Houses of Dagworth and Granger were allied with the House of Potter.
The next morning, the Emergency Session of the Wizengamot that Charlus had organised on the sly through friends achieved everything he'd been hoping for… More in fact, because Travers was thrown out of and banned from the Ministry for refusing the meeting that Lord Potter-Peverell had repeatedly asked for, as having that meeting may well have saved the lives of nearly three dozen of 'Magical Britain's Finest'. Making sure that everyone knew the truth about the origins of the boy who had been claiming to be the Heir of Slytherin had also borne fruit... Because Charlus could see the so-called Pure-Bloods' palpable anger and disgust at hearing that the one their children had been espousing as the true champion of Pure-Blood beliefs had in fact been born out of wedlock in a Muggle orphanage to a common Muggle and the Squib daughter of the most embarrassingly pathetic of Britain's Pure-Blood families. After that, he had no trouble getting the vote passed for the Wizarding Family of Gaunt to forfeit everything they owned to Harry… He didn't bother bringing up the fact the Riddle Family was actually worth far more than the Gaunts, because he knew that the Wizengamot would never dirty its hands with Muggle affairs.
By throwing down the gauntlet while everyone was reeling from his revelations, Charlus had gained Harry and Hermione quite a lot of gold and a big enough block of titles and holdings to swing the balance of power in the Wizengamot from the 'Traditional' Pure-Blood Houses to the Albion Alliance. Some of the gold, titles and holdings had been unsolicited gifts actually, because many families were aghast when they heard what had been roaming around Hogwarts petrifying students and had offered gifts to the pair unasked in gratitude for their removing the threat to the children. (These gifts grew over the years, because quite a few people left everything to Harry and Hermione if they didn't have anyone to leave it to.)
This shift made it relatively easy to unseat the 'Traditional Houses' bought and paid for Chief Warlock and get him replaced by someone who had the seniority, qualifications and integrity to do the job properly. They also gained a strong ally in Madam Marchbanks by pushing through the proposal to have the Department of Magical Education made part of her domain, because she was Magical Britain's foremost authority on Magical Education. Charlus further sweetened the deal by using the same argument to have one of the seats on the now vacant Hogwarts Board of Governors allocated to her, personally, because she knew better than anyone else how to ensure that their children's education was headed in the right direction.
While Hogwarts' prospects were looking up with Dumbledore, Dippet and Abbott out of the picture and for the sake of appearances, Harry and Hermione did sit their OWL examinations at Hogwarts with Hogwarts' Fifth years… They had no intention of changing their plans because it would be years before Hogwarts managed to clean out enough of the rot that had set in to have any chance of living up to the hype about it being 'the Wizarding World's premier school of magic' again, so they headed to Egypt at the end of June to complete the ICW's equivalent of the OWL exams in the Library of Alexandria. (The ICW had moved its headquarters out of Europe after they found out the hard way that Magical structures didn't escape Mundane carpet bombing unscathed, and the Library was a great place for the students to cram for their exams.) Luckily one of the first properties they'd acquired and repaired was a small apartment building in a nice area near the Library of Alexandria and they had retained the top floor of the building to serve as their residence in Alexandria (after getting it warded up the wazoo and hidden under a Fidelius, of course) and give them easy access to the Library, so they just moved in there for the two weeks of the examinations.
The ICW's OWL equivalent included far more subjects and they were being held to much higher standards than that of the dumbed down Hogwarts curriculum, but this was what they had been studying and training for in the Runic Time Chamber, so it wasn't any harder than the Hogwarts exams had been… It was actually easier half the time, because they didn't have to make a conscious effort not to give the correct answers, instead of the shite they were teaching at Hogwarts. That meant that they had time to sit down with Charlus and his Baker Street Irregulars and plan the imminent demise of Gellert Grindelwald and his key lieutenants.
Harry's Great, Great Grandfather and namesake Henry Potter hadn't just fought the Wizengamot about reducing the death toll of World War One by helping end it early, he'd gone to the Continent and fought alongside the Mundane and Squib soldiers and other Wizards who stepped in to help, blocking the attempts of opposing Wizards to swing the tide of battle in their side's favour. Charlus had joined the fight as soon as he came of age and both he and Henry had stayed in contact with the Wizards and Squibs they'd been comrades in arms with after the War.
When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Charlus, Fleamont and everyone else in the group (Henry and some of the others had been killed, incapacitated or died by then, but they had been replaced by Fleamont and others of his generation) took up the fight again, just as they had in World War One... In fact most of them were in the Independent Companies that took part in the Norwegian Campaign. From there, they moved into the Commandos, and then the Special Operations Executive when it was founded in Forty One, because the SOE gave them the best chance to take the fight to Grindelwald and the other Axis Witches and Wizards.
While they had gained access to useful tools like the German MP40 submachine guns, MP43 machine carbines and MG34 machineguns, Russian Simonov anti-tank rifles, Browning Hi-Power pistols and the suppressed De Lisle carbines and Welrod pistols through the SOE and greatly improved them through magical enhancements though… They hadn't had much success in cornering and eliminating Grindelwald and his key people, as they'd always seemed to be one step ahead of them… Needless to say, Charlus was furious when Harry and Hermione told him exactly why they'd been failing…
Among what they'd dredged up out of Dumbledore's memories was the fact that Dumbledore and the rest of the Pure-Blood supremacy bigots had been keeping a close eye on the Potters since Henry thwarted their efforts to destabilise and weaken the Mundane World in World War One… So when Britain declared war on Germany in Thirty Nine and Charlus and the others stepped up to fight again, the Pure-Bloods inserted some of their own people into the same units and began working to coerce or corrupt the weakest of Charlus' group into betraying them.
Dumbledore's supposed split with Grindelwald over the death of his unstable sister had been nothing but smoke and mirrors, they had agreed that they would be best served by taking a two pronged approach and used the fiction that they opposed each other to cover up most of their plans and activities. Gellert Grindelwald had remained Dumbledore's lover and partner in all things right up to his death, so Dumbledore had made sure that Gellert was warned whenever their spies reported that Potter and his rabble were getting close to catching him.
The first casualties arising from these revelations were the spies and traitors. Dumbledore had had most of them reporting directly to him to ensure that he could warn his dear Gellert in time, so it would be a while before the others realised that they weren't sending through reports any more. The ones who were proven not to be willing traitors were allowed to live, though some had to be sidelined because they were still under the thrall of enduring compulsions, but any who had chosen to turn on their comrades for gold or favours died, because more than a few of their friends and family had been killed in ambushes that their betrayals had been responsible for.
Charlus took Harry and Hermione's next news much better, because Dumbledore's memories had also shown them when and where Grindelwald and his key people could be found…
And even better, Moody's memories had given them all the information needed to create shield and ward breaking bullets using magically charged brass and runes. The runes needed to be activated by a Witch or Wizard, but the bullets could be made and the runes carved into them by anyone, so it should be a simple matter to hire Goblins or Squibs to create the bullets (or compete rounds for that matter) and carve the runes, then have Witches and Wizards empower the runes when they were ready to be used.
That news brought a feral grin to Charlus' face, because apparently it was the Goblin artisans who had created and added the runic enchantments which improved their weapons' accuracy, power and reliability, reduced their weight and recoil and increased magazine capacity, and the Goblins were always happy to take on work at the right price… Even more so when they could make use of this new development themselves if the day ever came where they had to go to war with the Wizards again.
One thing they made Charlus swear an oath to keep a secret from everyone, including Fleamont and Dorea, was the reason Harry and Hermione were insisting on being present when they took Grindelwald down, the Elder Wand. Charlus was sceptical about the myth of the Deathly Hallows, but he knew first hand that no other invisibility cloak had ever come anywhere near the capabilities of the Peverell Family's Heirloom Invisibility Cloak… Of which there were two now because Harry had brought his back with him and proved that it was identical to Charlus' in form and function, or at least it was after they removed Dumbledore's additions to it... And Harry had shown him enough of the Elder Wand's capabilities to believe the stories about its power too, so he agreed that they didn't want that getting into anyone else's hands… And further agreed that Hermione was the best person to hold the second Elder Wand, as they'd already seen that it accepted her as Harry's mate and she would never turn against him… He shuddered at the thought of the power those two would hold between them though, because the magic of ten powerful Witches and Wizards they shared would be enhanced by the two Elder Wands and backed up by over four Centuries worth of arcane Magical Knowledge… Yes, his Heir and his mate would surely be a force to be reckoned with.
Charlus was heartened by Harry's honesty when he assured him that he was in no hurry to get the Peverell Ring, which from the impressions he got whenever he was near Harry and the other two Hallows was indeed the third Deathly Hallow… Partly because the ring wouldn't become Harry's until he died and Harry became Lord Peverell, but more because none of them really wanted to find out what would happen if the legends were true and combining the three Hallows did indeed make him the Master of Death…
The Goblins were indeed quite happy to manufacture the ward breaking ammunition for them, so they had received and tested the ammunition and were ready for action by the next occasion where Dumbledore's memories had given them a firm time and place for Grindelwald to appear. Charlus' information sources had been proven reliable enough for him to get the green light from the top brass of the SOE to launch an operation when he told them he had solid intel, so in the middle of July a crack team of Commandos (plus Harry and Hermione under glamours) tumbled out of a broken down JU 52 transport that had been running on fumes by the time it landed at Mannheim Airport with one working engine… They were all wearing stained Fallschirmjäger field uniforms and jump smocks and carrying Browning Hi-Power Pistols, flare pistols and MP40 submachine guns that had obviously seen a lot of use, and a few of them were towing drop canisters which held MP43 machine carbines, MG34 machineguns and the rest of their gear...
The point of this charade was that by portraying themselves as battle worn paratroopers who were ready to blow because they'd only just managed to escape the Allied forces by the skin of their teeth in a broken down deathtrap of a plane, it would be much easier for them to commandeer a lorry from the airport and get past checkpoints without having to answer too many questions… It also laid the groundwork for a believable cover story for why they were there, because most people were willing to accept that their frayed nerves and anger explained why they were being so vocal about the way their cowardly commanding officers had abandoned them and everyone else in their unit to die in the desert when the British and American forces overran their defences… And the identification numbers on the now dead JU 52 (which they told everyone had been the only thing left in camp that could get off the ground at all) belonged to one several planes that had been destroyed in Egypt five days ago when the Allied forces captured the Fallschirmjäger camp the names and ranks they gave were allocated to. The men whose names they used had all died in the attack, but it would be months before the records were officially passed on to the Germans, and even longer before they were confirmed, so it was safe to use the names for now.
Their plan was for some of the men to start shouting out the names of the unit commanders and swearing at them as they shot Grindelwald and whoever was with him, then someone else calling them idiots because they weren't the officers who had left them to die, and everyone piling into the lorry and taking off. If everything went to plan, by the time anyone thought to follow them and found the lorry, they would have been extracted via Elf express.
Luckily, everything did go as planned… When they reached the square where Grindelwald was due to appear, they pulled enough MP43s and MG34s to arm everyone in the group out of the drop canisters and got them ready for action. The moment Grindelwald was seen, everyone but the driver quietly exited the lorry, which he restarted under a silencing charm so they would be able to get out of there as soon as Grindelwald was dead. Once Grindelwald reached a spot where he couldn't duck behind cover, some of the men started shouting out the names of Fallschirmjäger officers from the unit they were supposedly part of and shouting in German that they were cowards and traitors for running off with the only airworthy planes in their camp the moment the Allied forces started coming through their defences. When they got to the point that they were the only ones left in camp who had managed to escape and everyone else had been killed or captured, they opened fire, and everyone else in the group joined in.
At that point, Harry carried out the plan that he and Charlus had been keeping hidden from Hermione, because he knew that she'd never agree to it... He stepped forward and raised the Elder Wand to catch Grindelwald's attention. That triggered the expected reaction from Grindelwald and he started throwing curses at Harry with his Elder Wand, which in turn resulted in Grindelwald being turned to ash as his magical energy and Memories were sucked out of his body and fed into Harry. Harry repeated his actions at Hogwarts in 1994, casting a powerful "Expelliarmus!" and "Accio wands and anything else useful!" at the group around Grindelwald as Charlus used his flare gun to fire a Wurfkörper 361 grenade into the middle of the group around Grindelwald to destroy the evidence. By that point Grindelwald's Lieutenants, the Army and SS officers in charge of the defences in Mannheim and their regional commanders and the officers of the elite Waffen-SS company assigned to protect Grindelwald who made up the group around him had all been shot to pieces and were dead or dying... So as Harry and Hermione were busy snatching Grindelwald's Elder Wand and everything else flying to them out of the air, Charlus shouted (in German).
"Stop you fools! They're all SS and regular Wehrmacht officers, not Fallschirmjäger! Oh Shite! We'll all be shot for killing them, quick, get in the truck! We need to get out of here right now!"
They all piled into the lorry and it roared out of the square before the last ones were all the way in. Harry called for Dobby and House Elves began popping in and extracting the Commandos with their weapons and gear (Harry and Hermione were always going to be the first to be extracted so they even didn't bother trying to argue the point with Dobby). When the driver was the only one left in the lorry, Dobby told him to pull into a side alley and popped him away with his weapons and gear the moment the lorry stopped. By the time someone found the lorry about fifteen minutes later, they were all safe and sound in England and all that was left in the lorry were the drop canisters, jump smocks and other things that identified them as Fallschirmjäger, so everyone just presumed that they'd split up and were trying to get out of the city as ordinary soldiers.
A/N: I think this is a good point to wind up the first chapter. Before anyone starts arguing that this isn't canon, they wouldn't behave like that etc… Well duh, Harry and Hermione were thrown back in time fifty years with memories of all Dumbledore's and the others' evil deeds and saw a way to stop the unnecessary suffering and death of millions of innocent people so this is automatically AU… If Dumbledore was happy for an innocent toddler and thousands of other innocents to suffer and die to ensure his plans to to gain riches and glory came about, I don't see how anyone can argue the ethics of a small number of incontrovertibly evil characters being killed off to protect countless innocents…
And showing Dumbledore as being manipulative and evil is actually portraying him in the best possible light, because he's intentionally evil.
The only possible options for Dumbledore, based on what we were shown in canon, were that he was... 1) Ruthless, manipulative and evil. 2) Delusional, manipulative and so off his tree that he actually believed that facilitating the rape, torture and slaughter of countless innocents was right… or 3) A senile old fool with a god complex who's lost the plot so much that he blithely sentences innocents to their senseless deaths and suffering because somewhere in his tiny, twisted mind, that's somehow acceptable…
So portraying him as a ruthless, manipulative evil bastard at least makes him logical and powerful, the other two options just make him pathetic and destructive, doing evil things because he doesn't bother considering other options and won't listen to anyone else.