Warning: Just a little more planning.
The Time Travel Crew
Chapter 4: Severus gets things straight
"WHAT!?" Minerva screeched standing up, her tea, now probably cold, spilt on the table.
"Calm down, Minerva." Severus said as Pomona pulled her back onto her seat.
"I will not calm down!" Minerva said fiercely. She rounded on Harry. "This is ridiculous, Potter! You tell us about this now? Forget it! I'm not putting his life in danger for anything! Have any of you the faintest idea of what -"
"Quiet down, Minerva." Filius squeaked, interrupting her in mid rant. "Harry, tell us what happened."
Harry sighed. "There's nothing much to tell. Voldemort committed the evil deeds of killing an innocent and defenseless baby which resulted in him leaving behind his body and a piece of his soul that latched itself to the only living being in the room.
"That was why I could feel his presence and his emotions...that was why we could see each other's minds...that was why I was a Parseltongue...that was why I had many of Slytherin's qualities in me and that was why the Sorting Hat nearly put me in Slytherin.
"Remember I said Voldemort made a mistake by taking my blood? My blood in which Mum's sacrifice lived? It created a stronger bond between Voldemort and me, much stronger than the bond that was formed with the piece of Voldemort's soul in me. As long as Voldemort lived, I was, as Dumbledore said, tethered to life..."
Severus rubbed his face, "That complicates matters."
"No it doesn't!" Harry said firmly. "We just have to allow him to use my blood and get his body back, then he can cast the Avada Kedavra on me and then we can destroy his snake and then him! We will just have to..."
"ARE YOU MAD!?" Minerva said standing up again. "We are NOT going to allow him to kill you!" Minerva said standing up again.
Severus groaned in exasperation at the same time as Minerva's outburst.
Harry frowned at them with his one eye.
"Didn't I say I wouldn't die?"
"You did, Harry." Pomona said. "But just imagine if it all goes wrong. Your story seems quite wobbly, it's foundation itself is luck...one wrong move and everything is done for. Take for example that Basilisk, instead of simply getting petrified, the poor Muggle-borns could be killed! We're going to need more information."
"I was just getting there." Harry said sounding exasperated. "I was just giving you a grounding. There's lot's of stuff left, you know, as to why the graveyard incident must happen or how I survived the killing curse for the second time in my life, and how I survived it the first time, what exactly happened in Barty Crouch's house -"
"Why don't we get to the finer points." Severus said, effectively distracting Harry from those depressing thoughts for the moment. "Such as, what were the enchantments that Voldemort put on the House of Gaunt. We only know that we shouldn't touch that ring no matter what."
"We will have to ask Dumbledore's portrait that." Harry said. "And while we're at it we should ask him what will happen if, while Voldemort is still in his spirit-like state, all his Horcruxes are destroyed. Will he just disappear or not?"
"Your not planning on killing yourself, now are you?" Severus asked him suspiciously. That boy was unpredictable.
"Of course not!" Harry said indignantly. "I was just thinking that if I don't become a Horcrux, could Voldemort be destroyed before he gets his body back."
"Then, how will we open up the chamber of secrets?" Luna said.
"We could use a snake." Justin said almost immediately.
"How?" Harry said.
"We could imperius it and ask it to open the chamber."
"Of course!" Neville said, beaming. "Good thinking, Justin."
But Harry shook his head solemnly, "Sorry, Justin, that will not work."
"Why not?" Neville and Justin asked at once.
"That's because we need a human to speak parseltongue. A snake speaks it differently, almost delicately... Their hisses aren't as horrible as parselmouths... Well, there is a huge difference between Snake talk and human Parselmouth."
"That id a problem." Pomona said equally as solemn.
Severus said when they remained silent for a while, "And how do we procure the diary?"
"We could ask my father." Draco said. "I mean in this time, I could just go to him and tell him that I have something important to hide and I want to know the exact enchantments with which he hid the diary..."
"You do that, Draco." Filius said. "Try squeezing out the smallest details. Does he know that you're here?"
"I don't think so." Draco said.
"Does he know that you know of the diary?" Filius said.
"Yes, he does."
"Neville, do you know exactly where your parents were tortured? Or where they were kidnapped from for that matter?" Severus said.
"N-no." Neville admitted. "But could just ask Gran. She enjoys telling me those stories..." he broke off with a shudder, earning looks of sympathy from all around.
"And Professor," Harry said turning to Filius. "Could you please teach me the time-freezing charm that you will use on the ink?"
"Of course. On what do you want to use it?"
"Basilisk venom."
"Why?"
"I am just playing on a haunch. Just in case I reach at the time Voldemort tries to kill me, I could, well somehow allow the venom to form a sort of a wandless protection around me, so as the soul piece approaches, it can just get destroyed before it reaches me.
"You will have to be careful." Pomona cautioned. "Basilisk venom isn't something you should be playing with."
"I know." Harry said and after a moment, he sat up straight in his chair.
"I've got it!" he exclaimed. "I will put my memory of my adventure in the Secret Chamber in the pensieve. From there, if any of you have a tape-recorder, or something like that, that you possessed in eighty one, we could record those few important phrases in parseltongue and we can practice saying them...
"I know that a non-parselmouth can open the Chamber because Ron did it during the war...All we need to learn is to say open in Parseltongue and a few praises to Salazar Slytherin to release the Basilisk from Slytherin's statue's mouth...There is a huge statue of him down there...sickening really...Er, which of you have an old a recorder?"
"I do." Severus said immediately. The voice recorder belonged to his father and Severus found it at Spinners end towards the end of nineteen ninety five.
"We can put that time freezing charm on it and take it back...right Professor?" Harry turned to Filius.
Filius nodded and said, "Now that that's done, where do you want to contain the Basilisk's venom?"
"On a blanket that was on my cot on that Halloween...Dudley found it and gave it to me yesterday, when I visited him at his new home..." Looking at everyone's shocked face Harry added, "We've decided to put our differences aside. My aunt and uncle won't here of it, but we're doing it anyway."
"That's nice of you, Harry." Minerva said, "Now, won't the blanket get destroyed?"
"I will have to search a protection charm for that blanket, then after the deed is done, I'll just vanish it and conjure another one in its place. Then we could destroy the first."
"Can you perform, wandless magic?" Severus asked surprised.
"No." Harry admitted. "But I was planning on learning it before we went back in time."
"I would like to learn it too." Luna said. "Like that, I could convince my mother to give up experimenting on potions and take up experimenting on food."
"We could all learn it." Neville said.
"And I could teach it to you." Filius said. "I'm fairly good at wandless magic."
"How long will it take to learn it?" Severus said.
"If we work on it dedicatedly, then we will complete it in two months. The students aren't here now, so I say you all start learning immediately."
"Good. And I am going to teach you all Occlumency." Severus said. "We will need it and Draco already knows it. Both Voldemort and Dumbledore were a accomplished Occlumens, so were Bellatrix and a few other Death Eaters."
"Alright." Harry said getting up. "I'll just go to the chamber and get some of the Basilisk's fangs. We'll have to extract the venom later. I think there's a spell that can do that...have to look it up in the library...we will also need another spell that will protect the venom's container from getting corroded...I will have to look that up too..."
"Wait!" Minerva said. "Before any of us go, I want to know what the Horcruxes look like. Harry, you have always been good at drawing..."
Harry slapped his forehead. He opened the velvet bag on the table and emptied it's contents on the table top. Severus saw what he thought was junk land on the table. He blinked and looked again and saw a diary with a hole right through it, a very ugly cracked ring with a white spherical marblestone loosely attached to it, a locket whose insides were cracked, a goblet with a hole in its side.
Harry said, "These are some of the Horcruxes. When I cast a glamour on them..." Harry made some impressive, very well practiced movements with his wand and the artifacts were restored. "... This is what they look like. I can't fix them for the Basilisk venom just prevents them from being fixed...the stone in this ring is a fake, the actual one is a black stone, also known as the Resurrection stone...The Ravenclaw Diadem couldn't be saved. It got destroyed in the Fiendfyre... Well you know what Nagini and Voldemort looked like and then there's me."
"What happens to these artifacts after the Horcruxes are destroyed?" Filius said almost hopefully.
"They don't work anymore. If they did, the soul piece would live too..." Harry trailed off apologetically.
"I see..." Filius said.
Justin sputtered with indignation, "He's used the best of the things around, things that don't even belong to him, and there's absolutely nothing anyone can do to restore them! That's absolutely selfish! Completely self-centered! That's -"
"Voldemort to you." Harry finished for him.
Severus wasn't paying attention to these outbursts, he was more interested in the reason Harry was so good at the glamour charms.
"Harry..." he said carefully, "have you used glamour charms before?"
Harry breathed in deeply, "Yes."
There was silence all around.
"Why?" Severus said.
Harry said hesitantly "Well, just let's say my uncle isn't someone you would like to meet."
"Would you elaborate?"
"I'd rather not." Harry snapped. Severus wasn't annoyed.
Minerva said her lips pursed, "Your relatives are something else we will need to see too when we go back."
Harry simply looked down at his now empty cup and said nothing.
Severus felt sorry for him and decided to get back to the topic at hand, "Alright everyone, we meet the day after tomorrow, here itself at four o'clock. We've got a lot of work to do. Twenty four hours should do it, I think.
"Now, let's see... Neville, you will find out as much of information about the encounter between the Death Eaters and your parents as possible, if not all... get an account about the location at which they were captured... find out where they were taken to... Ask the Minister to have the Lestrange Brothers under Veritaserum and get them to tell you if they had set up any sort of enchantments around the place they took your parents to.
"Justin, I want you to find out the exact place and time Sirius Black confronted Pettigrew...I want you to get an idea about their positions and if possible, all the locations Pettigrew arrived at before pretending to confront Black, though I doubt it will be possible. I want every angle properly described so we can apparate to the spot and manipulate the situation once we go back...
"Luna, I want you to find out the exact igredients and their quantity used in the potion your mother made. I ask for every detail, so we do not make a blunder when we go back. You can use the pensive in my office if you wish, but get me accurate particulars.
"Draco find out the exact place the diary was hidden and all the spells that were placed on it. When we go back, it will be up to you to retrieve the diary and replace the original with a copy to prevent your father from getting suspicious...
"Harry bring that blanket, find that protective charm you wanted to search and I'll help you extract some venom from the Basilisk later, no offense, but you may find it difficult climbing out of the chamber...
"Minerva, Pomona, Filius and I will be speaking to Dumbledore. Let's get going."
To be continued...
Hello Everyone,
Yes, this chapter is a bit short, and I know how annoying it is when you want to see action but all you get is some riscussions...I'm sorry, but I will make up for it in the next chapter.
And I will try and upload every week until I get too busy.
Take care!